Tag Archives: responsibilities

May’s Brexit Surrender

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The terms include these, via Deutsche Welle:

  • The rights of EU citizens in the UK and UK citizens in the EU will be protected
  • EU citizens living in the UK can be joined by close family members…who live in a different country at any point in the future.
  • Workers and self-employed people will be broadly guaranteed the same rights they currently enjoy

All of which negate one of the motives for leaving the European Union. EU citizens resident in the UK will be magnets for drawing in others for the UK’s generous welfare system—and EU citizens still will be able to seek work in the UK preferentially, availing themselves both of the UK’s higher wage rates and that welfare system.

  • There will be a 21-month transition period ending December 31, 2020
  • EU rules would continue to apply in the UK subject to the terms set out in the Brexit agreement
  • After the transition period, a joint committee co-chaired by the EU and the UK would police the final withdrawal agreement, taking decisions by mutual consent and whose verdicts would be binding

Meaning that the UK would remain unable to enter into separate, independent trade agreements during this “transition” period EU laws would remain in effect inside allegedly sovereign Great Britain, and the EU will retain veto power, via that mutual consent requirement, on post-transition moves—including those independent trade agreements and moves to supplant EU laws with domestic, UK, laws.

  • If appropriate customs arrangements are not agreed to, a backstop arrangement would kick in. A joint “single customs territory” between the EU and UK would apply from the end of the transition period…
  • Under the backstop arrangement, the UK must observe “level playing field” commitments on competition, state aid, taxes and employment and environment standards

Are not agreed to means the agreement will be in accordance with EU diktat or there will be the backstop arrangement. This is what the EU wants, so there will be no agreed customs arrangement.  The EU wants the backstop because those terms require the UK to keep its Northern Ireland inside the EU’s competition, state aid, taxes and employment, and environment laws in perpetuity. This is the beginning of prising Northern Ireland out of the UK—the beginning of dismantling the UK.  This is part of the EU’s demonstration to restive members of the EU and a warning of their fate if they become impertinent, too.

The bottom line for the UK here is that, under this “agreement,” these terms of surrender, the nation will become a speechless, toothless satrap of the EU, and its dismantling will be begun.

May, with her abject surrender to Brussels, has betrayed her nation’s referendum.  And she has betrayed other members of the EU similarly dismayed with Brussels’ interference in their domestic affairs.

It’s no wonder that members of her Cabinet are resigning in droves, her coalition government is falling apart, and her own party is in (sub rosa, for now) revolt.

A False Dichotomy

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In an address near the Arc de Triomphe in Paris to mark the end of WWI, French President Emmanuel Macron made a pitch for globalism.  In the course of that, Macron let slip his true feelings.

Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism. Nationalism is a betrayal of it.  By saying our interests first—who cares about the others—we erase what a nation holds dearest, what gives it life, what makes it great and what is essential: its moral values.

This is a typically false dichotomy offered by a man of the Left. The situation also could be, as a man of the US has said repeatedly, “Our interests first, but not at all alone.”

Moreover, patriotism is the love of nation and the desire to preserve that which unifies the people of a geographic area into a nation—including especially that people’s moral values.  The best way to preserve those values is to protect a nation’s borders, to get immigrants—freely allowed in, so long as their entry is legal—to assimilate, to embrace the values of the nation they’re joining, rather than hold themselves apart.

There’s nothing in there that says “who cares about the others.”  There’s nothing in there that says one nation of patriotic people who believe in their own nation won’t work with or help the peoples of other nations.

Macron knows all this.

Jail Works

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Liberal shenanigans in New York during the week before this week’s midterm elections:

Laura Ebert, an economics professor at the State University of New York (SUNY) at New Paltz, was charged with misdemeanor larceny for stealing signs supporting Republican candidates….

She’s making excuses and spinning her misbehavior.

Ebert said she was caught in a moment of weakness and high emotion and meant no harm to McGovern nor did she know she lived there.
“I have family I love that support Trump, so I was after the sign, not the person.  I have apologized and feel bad, but clearly the GOP is putting a big deal [of] spin on this.”

Caught up in the emotion of the moment?  Republicans are doing the spinning?  This is typical Liberal excuse making and blame shifting.  This woman is a professor at a college.  She’s a highly intelligent, well-educated, fully rational woman; she knew full well what she was doing at the time she did it.  She knew what she was doing when she formulated her plan and stopped her pickup to do the theft.

She apologized.  Nonsense; her words are empty rhetoric.  She spoke from the heart at the time she did her stealing.  Her “apology,” now, is solely because she’s in trouble and hoping to get out of it. Will she argue at her court date next week that had Willie Sutton only apologized, he should have been excused?

This looks like a Class A misdemeanor under New York law, for which the maximum penalty is a $1,000 fine and a year in jail.  That works, for someone as talented and rational as a college professor, a woman who plainly knows better.

CNN Strikes Again

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That’s fairly literal, this time.  CNN‘s “star” reporter on the White House beat, Jim Acosta, struck a White House intern who was trying to do her job.  Since then, CNN has denied—and it’s actually serious about it—that the strike ever occurred.

“She [White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders] provided fraudulent accusations and cited an incident that never happened,” CNN said.

The blow was delivered during a presser President Donald Trump was holding and near the end of a contentious exchange between Trump and Acosta.  During such pressers and as a normal part of presser procedure, reporters wishing to ask questions are called on by the President and handed a microphone so that the President, all the other reporters in the room, and especially all of us in TV-land watching can hear the reporter’s question.  The intern, as was her job, had approached Acosta to take the microphone that had been handed him on being called on so that, his turn having ended, she could pass it to the next reporter, that person having just been called on.

Acosta refused to give up the microphone, and when the intern tried to grab it anyway, he chopped down on her arm with his free hand.  That’s clear in the video Fox News has included in its piece (the link above) on the incident.  The intern’s approach and Acosta’s hitting her begins at about 0:22 of the video.

That video clearly shows Acosta striking the intern as she tried to do her job. Not a hard blow, certainly, but Acosta striking the woman at all is unacceptable. Bad as that is, though, CNN‘s pride in and open lie about Acosta’s misbehavior is worse—CNN seems to be validating its reporters getting physical with anyone who gets in their way, including others trying to do their job.