Tag Archives: political parties

Gillibrand Declares

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Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D, NY) has entered the Progressive-Democratic Party’s primary contest for President.  Her statement of entering can only show her campaign to be satirical rather than serious.

We need a leader who makes big, bold, brave choices. Someone who isn’t afraid of progress. That’s why I’m running for president.

Bold choices.  Like the one she made during the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings in which she rejected the American legal position of innocent until proven guilty and replaced it with her own legal theology of guilty by woman’s accusation.

Progress: to boldly run before the wind—wherever it blows.  She was for the 2nd Amendment, even getting an A rating from the National Rifle Association, before she was against it.  Indeed, the political winds changed her course so sharply that an ardent anti-gun Progressive-Democrat, then-Congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy (D, NY) advised her

Don’t change your mind so fast—learn the issue first[.]

But Gillibrand had learned the issue quite clearly: the issue that her political fortune depended on her new position, whatever “new” might work out to.

She was against same-sex marriage as a Representative—insisting on having civil unions—before she was for them as a Senator.

On immigration, she was against amnesty for illegal immigrants as a Representative—in any of its many forms—before she was for it—in any of its many forms—as a Senator. As a Representative, she favored deputizing local policemen to act as immigration agents before, as a Senator, she was for abolishing ICE.

She was staunchly pro-Israel, even as a Senator, insisting there should be no daylight between the US and Israel on matters related to Iran, before she moved away from Israel, supporting ex-President Barack Obama’s (D) and Motorboat Skipper and part-time Secretary of State John Kerry’s (D) nuclear weapons deal with Iran.  She’s become an ardent supporter of Tamika Mallory, Bob Bland, Carmen Perez, and Linda Sarsour—all of whom are themselves public and ardent supporters of Louis Farrakhan.

She even took money from the Clintons to support her various campaign expenses—and then she said Bill Clinton should have resigned over his…affair…with Lewinski.

Regardless of one’s own position on any of those questions and others, Gillibrand will take the one that benefits herself politically, and she’ll take it the moment the wind shifts.

Who can trust such a one?

A Thought on Ol’ Beto

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The Wall Street Journal had one, and so do I.

The question now that he’s running for President is whether his elusive idealism can triumph in 2020 over the Democratic Party’s socialist and identity politics vanguard.

And he seems to be good at fund-raising; although I’m not convinced one way or the other based solely on his Senate campaign in 2018.

While he lost to Mr Cruz by three points, he won 59% of voters under 44, 51% of college graduates, 65% of moderates, and 62% of single women.

He got these numbers because Cruz was not all that popular in those demographics, not because ol’ Beto was attractive to them.  Besides that, he’s earned the frustration and ire of his fellow Progressive-Democrats with his refusal to share his remaining campaign millions with those fellows.

But the remark that drew my attention was the one with which the WSJ opened its piece, this subheadline:

He’s the fresh, elusive outsider like Carter, Clinton, and Obama.

No, Hamlet on the Rio Grande is just an attention whore like Joe Biden, only less smooth.

Robert Francis O’Rourke has little chance of surviving the primaries, especially once Party’s identity politics starts taking him to task over his Hispanic cultural appropriation.

Still, Republicans need to take him seriously, especially were he to survive the primaries.  That’s the path to easily despatch him, as he should be over his vague (because they’re not thought out, not because they’re tactically vague) ideology that contrasts with his thoughtless concretenesses like tearing down barriers that channel illegal aliens, drug smugglers, human traffickers.

It’s dangerous to underestimate even agonizing Hamlets.

A Governor Misrepresents

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New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo (D), has provided another example of the dishonesty of Progressive-Democrats as he continues to whine about his State’s excessive State and local taxes no longer being deductible above a high maximum on Federal income tax forms.

He said Trump intentionally targeted states whose populations oppose him by a majority.

And

You pay your state income tax, they then tax your state income tax payment. First time ever.

No, the first is misleading.  The SALT cap was aimed at capping Federal tax deductions generally in order to level tax requirements, at least a little, across all income levels.  That only a few States have SALT set so high that their rich residents routinely exceed the $10,000 threshold is an outcome of those few States having such excessively high taxes; it has nothing to do with where the deductibility limit is set.

The second is an outright lie.  Only New York, et al., are taxing their citizens’ State income; the Feds are simply not allowing wealthiest to deduct all of their State and local taxes from their Federal income tax bill.  Not allowing a deduction is not the same as taxing.

On the other hand, if there is double taxation; it’s the States applying the second income tax on the same income.  It’s their choice to come in behind the Feds’ income tax and apply a second—their own—income tax to that same income.

The States as double-taxers is demonstrated in two ways. One is the seven States that don’t have—don’t need and don’t want—an income tax on their citizens’ income, with an eighth State kicking its State income tax to the curb as of 2021, and the two that only tax dividends and interest payments.

The other is the number of States whose income tax requirements require submission of the Federal income tax data (not income data) as the basis for the States’ application of their own income tax.

And a double-taxation mitigating factor: most of those States that do apply their second income tax to the Feds’ income tax don’t have their SALT set so high that the payments aren’t fully deductible from the Federal income tax.  Only a few States have their SALT set usuriously high—and that’s the deliberate choice of the men of those States’ governments.

A No-Deal Brexit

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The Wall Street Journal opined earlier this week that, in the words of the piece’s subheadline,

A no-deal crash out of the EU may be the best outcome now.

The rest of the thing was a string of rationalizations of why this is true, but the heart of the matter is that subhead.

In fact, though, a no-deal departure always has been the best outcome.

A priori because that’s what the Brits voted for in their referendum—they wanted their sovereignty and control of their own borders back. Full stop.

In retrospect because Brussels has acted in bad faith, solely to punish the Brits for their effrontery, ever since. EU leadership, lately in the person of Donald Tusk, has acted in echo of Jacques Chirac’s slam on eastern European nations:

It is not really responsible behavior. It is not well brought-up behavior. They missed a good opportunity to keep quiet.

There’s no reason at all for the Brits to talk further with the EU regarding the terms of Great Britain’s departure for freedom.

Update: Yesterday, the British Parliament voted against a no-deal Brexit and in favor of going to Brussels and beg for more time to negotiate. What happened to the courage that led Great Britain to build a globe-spanning empire?

Fortunately, Parliament’s move is non-binding. We’ll see whether Prime Minister Theresa May has the courage required to stay with the scheduled date for British departure, currently 29 March.

Joe Biden, Candidate for President

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Bill McGurn thinks ex-Vice President and ex-Senator Joe Biden (D) would make a formidable candidate for President on the 2020 Progressive-Democratic Party ticket.  After all, he has all that Presidential campaign experience from 1988 and 2008. And he presents as an everyman with whom ordinary Americans can identify.

But McGurn also listed these two items as Biden’s rationalizations for not running in 2016 (the sheer number of rationalizations McGurn came up with also is an indicator of Biden’s viability).

…efforts of President Obama and his team to persuade him he couldn’t win the Democratic primary and therefore shouldn’t run, and what he apparently took as a veiled threat from Mrs Clinton that if he did challenge her for the nomination, her team would go dirty.

The former shows how gullible he is. The latter shows what a coward he is. We don’t need someone whom our enemies can both sucker and cow in the White House.