Tag Archives: politics

Flip-Flop or Copycat?

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Here’s Democratic Party Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton on international trade.

As Secretary of State, Mrs. Clinton helped negotiate the yet-to-be-ratified Trans-Pacific Partnership and gave some 45 public speeches for TPP [TransPacific Partnership].

Then

…to fend off the Sanders challenge, she renounced the final TPP text in October 2015….

This isn’t new.  When Bill Clinton was pushing NAFTA, so did Hillary Clinton, and she repeated that in her memoir.  Then in her first Presidential campaign, she vowed to “renegotiate” NAFTA.

In that campaign, she assured her hoped-for union voters that she’d not conclude the sort of trade deals then in the offing with Cambodia and the Republic of Korea.  Once safely ensconced in the State Department, though, she put all of that Cabinet’s influence to work pushing for passage of exactly those deals (and tried to delete from her official State Department business personal email server NAFTA-related emails).

Here’s her chosen nominee, Senator Time Kaine (D, VA) on international trade, with the proposed TPP as his vehicle.

I am having discussions with a lot of groups around Virginia about the treaty itself. I see much in it to like.  I think it’s an upgrade of labor standards, I think it’s an upgrade of environmental standards. I think it’s an upgrade of intellectual property protections.

That was just prior to the Democratic Party Convention.  Here he is, now that he’s running for Vice President.

Kaine said he agreed with Clinton—who had helped negotiate the trade deal as secretary of state but now opposes as the Democratic presidential nominee—that the TPP did not meet certain standards on wages and national security.

Either way, this doesn’t predict a very stable administration, rather it suggests that Clinton and Kaine would change course with the winds of convenient politics.

The DNC “Apologizes”

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[T]he DNC finally apologized for “inexcusable remarks made over email,” saying it “does not—and will not—tolerate disrespectful language exhibited toward our candidates.”

Sure.  But—carefully—there’s not a syllable of apology for the Party’s actual bias toward a disfavored candidate, nor is there a minim of an apologetic word about the Party’s overt behavior toward a disfavored candidate in acting on that bias.  There’s only this expression of regret for some words.

Do We Really Need Four More Years?

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Here’s what nearly eight years of Progressivism, accomplished by President Barack Obama (D) and his Progressive-Democrat acolytes in the Democratic Party, have done.  As The Wall Street Journal put it:

  • largest stimulus spending bill in decades
  • Obamacare
  • nationalized the student-loan industry
  • turned the banks into public utilities answerable first to government

All of these have created the slowest recession recovery since WWII.  The nominally low unemployment rate that has been achieved is measured against the backdrop of the lowest labor participation rate in 40 years—in two generations.  Banks as government-managed public utilities, no longer responsive exclusive to the banks’ owners and creditors—which includes us individual savings and checking account holders?  That’s just another means for government to collect revenue.

Progressivism has been bypassing our republican democracy form of representative government for the last several years, too.  Obama has ruled by Executive diktat Executive Order, Executive Action, Department/Agency rulemaking to achieve

  • climate change
  • organizing

Then there’s foreign affairs.

  • deals with adversaries—the nuclear weapons deal with Iran, for instance, and acceptance of Russian partitions of Georgia and Ukraine
  • distanced us from our allies—denigrating Israel over their efforts to defend themselves against Palestinian terrorism, for instance
  • with Progressivism’s cynical budget maneuvering there’s less ability to support military spending—to the tune of defense spending falling to 3% of GDP and less—down from 4.6% those eight years ago

All of this is Progressivism’s pell-mell retreat from our responsibilities on the global stage, and that world is far more unstable and dangerous to us and to those friends and allies than it was eight years ago.

Then there’s Progressivism’s attitude toward us plebeian Americans.  They’ve plied the politics of identity to divide us by ideology, age, race, class, gender, and any other cleverly defined separation they could create, and then they’ve played these artificial distinctions (we used to be all Americans, after all, who happened to be of one gender or the other, have one skin color or another, one ethnic heritage or another) against each other in Progressives’ cynical effort to maximize their personal power.

Do we really need—can our nation really afford—four more years of the same?

YGTBSM

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This is how out of touch the Democratic Party and this administration is.

Secretary of State John Kerry said in Vienna on Friday that air conditioners and refrigerators are as big of a threat to life as the threat of terrorism posed by groups like the Islamic State.

That’s just breathtaking.

Of course, it’s also true that a man said that in America a man has the right to be stupid if he wants to be.