Another name for Pocahontas, Weepy Warren (See 1 and 1a below.)
I would love to see Warren become the Demwit's candidate. We would have more "plain" spoken massive unemployed turning back to hunting bison and their like and that way we would be able to reduce methane gas. as she stops all drilling.
Meanwhile, the government could charge the wealthy more for beef, since hunting would be on government lands, and the income would be used for health care for all. The long term problem is the wealthy would die prematurely from a diet of beef so tax revenue would decline precipitously.
GO WEEPY!
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It is a good thing Beto dropped out because anyone who goes to Texas and tells Texans they need to stop drilling and give up their guns is too dumb to enter the White House.
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Being a hawk, in the vein of John Bolton, I would level Gaza.
If every few weeks rockets rained down from Mexico on Texas etc., I daresay they/we would not tolerate it.(See 2 below.)
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Dick
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1) Europe Goes Right As Democrats Try Their Failed Ideas
By BENNY AVNI, Special to the Sun
As America’s Democratic presidential candidates promote programs borrowed from Europe’s traditional left, Europeans are increasingly pushing back against them.
Following an election last Sunday in Germany’s Thuringia state, members of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic party accused the chancellor (in power since 2005) of dragging the party too far leftward, blaming her for the loss to the far-right Alternative for Germany party. A top contender for the Christian Democratic leadership, Friedrich Merz, called on Frau Merkel to resign now, rather than wait for 2021, when she plans to retire.
In the European Parliament election in May, France’s National Rally party handsomely beat President Macron’s centrist faction. Formerly known as the National Front, the current right-most French party is dominated by Marine Le Pen, whose father and party founder, Jean-Marie, was a Holocaust denier. Now Madame Le Pen’s party concentrates on conservatism and retail politics, and its increasingly seen as a formidable challenger to Monsieur Macron, whose poll numbers, despite a recent uptick, remain low.
In Poland, Hungary and Italy, to name a few, politicians of various right-wing parties are now in power, while anti-leftists, including some ugly and racist ones, are on the rise. Meanwhile, in Canada, another perceived utopia among progressives, a former golden boy, Prime Minister Trudeau, is striving to stay in power after his Liberal party suffered parliamentary seat losses in the October 21 election.
One of the major reasons for Mr. Trudeau’s setback was his environment-friendly campaign, highlighting strategies to combat climate change. While restricting reliance on fossil fuels is popular in Canada’s urban east, its oil-drilling Western provinces voted against the Liberals in droves, opting for the right instead.
Then there’s the United Kingdom, which this week decided to conduct a national election on December 12. Britons have had it up to their stiff upper lips with Brexit talk. Yet, while smart Londoners belittle the flamboyant Conservative prime minister, Boris Johnson, polls show that even Euro-remainers may hold their noses and vote to keep him in power.
Why? Mr. Johnson’s top rival, Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, is widely seen as the Ghost of Leftwings Past, a throwback to an era when British intellectuals idolized the Soviet Union and other enemies of the West. If Mr. Corbyn wins, it won’t be on the strength of his socialist ideas or his obsession with Jews and Israel, but despite them.
So what drives Europe’s right turn? A pushback against the continent’s migration policies is a common explanation and it certainly is a reason — but far from the only one. It’s the economy, stupid.
While the newly minted front-runner for the Democratic Party, Elizabeth Warren, says wealth taxes will finance all her “I have a plan for that” ideas, Europe has tried, and largely dismissed, that scheme. Of the dozen countries that have levied taxes on the ultra-rich, all but three repealed them: Promised government revenues never materialized, and the well-to-do found ways to exploit loopholes or, worse, moved out of the country to escape confiscatory taxes.
Meanwhile, in March, our former United Nations ambassador, Nikki Haley, took to Twitter to challenge another Democratic front-runner, Senator Sanders, for lavishing praise on Finland’s health-care system. “Comparing us to Finland is ridiculous,” Governor Haley wrote, as a chorus of fact-checkers — and Finland’s ambassador to the United Nations, Kai Sauer — rushed to Bernie’s defense.
Yet, in the same week, Finland’s government resigned en masse after a plan to overhaul the national health-care system collapsed, aptly demonstrating the nation’s inability to meet universal health care’s high costs.
In debates, top Democratic candidates typically explore ideas that would steer America leftward, as in the European Union. In that same European Union, though, 33,000 people became unemployed in September. Unemployment rates there hover around 7.5%, while America enjoys its lowest unemployment numbers in half a century. America’s gross domestic product, according to the latest numbers available, grows at an annualized rate of almost 2%, while the Eurozone’s growth remains sluggish at under 1%.
Yes, Europe’s left is trying new things: The Dutch, for one, want to shorten the workweek to four days to raise productivity. These ideas are yet to be tested. But if America’s contenders want to beat President Trump next year, they better develop new ideas of their own — or at least reexamine their stalest, oldest European ones.
Like, you know, the Europeans are doing.
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1a) Elizabeth Warren Wants to Lose Your Vote
A decade ago, it was conventional wisdom that the world would soon start running low on oil and that the United States would henceforth be at the mercy of the inexorable trend. Then the fracking revolution came about, and the U.S. resumed its long-lost place as the world’s No. 1 oil and natural gas producer.
The result: lower oil prices for American consumers, less dependence on petrodespots, a dramatic shift from coal to natural gas for electricity generation (with concomitant benefits in carbon emissions), and hundreds of thousands of working-class jobs, including tens of thousands in swing states like Colorado and Pennsylvania.
Elizabeth Warren wants to kill all this.
You don’t have to think that fracking is an unalloyed blessing — much less deny that tough safety standards are necessary — to acknowledge its benefits. You might also argue that curbs on oil and gas production are needed both to preserve the environment and accelerate a transition to renewables. Fine.
Yet it takes a peculiar sort of political audacity to pledge, as the Massachusetts senator did last month, to “ban fracking — everywhere.” Warren also favors a ban on fossil-fuel exports — another U.S. industry that has seen dramatic growth in recent years — and a “total moratorium” on new fossil fuel leases on federal lands, which generate billions every year in federal and state tax revenue.
American Indian tribes also got about $1 billion from those leases in 2018. Isn’t the Warren campaign supposed to be about sticking it to richer Americans instead of poorer ones?
That’s a question that would-be Warren supporters might ask a little more insistently as she approaches front-runner status.
Take health care. As an ethical matter, it may be defensible for Warren to argue that Medicare for All is fairer than the current system. As an economic matter, she could be right that overall costs will come down under her scheme. And as a political matter, it isn’t surprising that she has been less than forthright about the middle-class tax increases her plan will require.
But what about the fact that Warren isn’t merely proposing a dramatic change in the way 170 million or so Americans obtain health insurance? She is advocating the abolition of an entire industry, one that employs approximately 550,000 people. Whatever one thinks of health-insurance companies (and most Americans seem satisfied with the coverage they have), isn’t it worth wondering what these half-million workers might do with themselves after being put out of work — or, as voters, what they might think of Warren’s designs for their future?
Then there’s big tech, another industry Warren doesn’t like and promises to “break up” by turning Facebook, Amazon and Google into regulated utilities. For this task, involving some 800,000 workers and companies with about $500 billion in revenues, she has … a 1,700-word plan.
One wonders what Warren thinks might happen when things don’t work out. Industries aren’t assemblages of Lego blocks that can be taken apart and reassembled according to a clever new design. They are complex and evolving ecosystems, organized around scores of institutions, hundreds of laws, thousands of personalities, millions of relationships, and a potentially limitless number of ideas.
What will happen to the real human beings whose lives and careers will be upended or derailed while the mandarins of the Warren administration try to figure things out? Will President Warren have contingency plans for her ever-proliferating plans when — as they inevitably will — things don’t go according to plan?
Of course she won’t. She won’t because she can’t; she can’t because the central flaw of every economic plan is the plan itself. That’s the lesson of the 20th century, and it’s why Warren’s critics aren’t totally off the mark in accusing her of being a socialist — not in intent, but in mentality. Those with plans for everything prove only that they can’t be trusted to plan for anything.
Voters may not yet see this, which is why Warren has risen in the polls. But they will, eventually, especially when they notice what the senator’s plans entail for them. It’s one thing for a Democratic politician to promise, as Barack Obama once did, to “spread the wealth around” — but only when “wealth” and “wealthy” mean the same thing. The Warren standard is to spread your wealth around whether you’re wealthy or not.
In a recent column, my colleague David Brooks posed a difficult and necessary question: If the choice is Trump or Warren, what then? David’s answer is that one would have to choose Warren, for the sake of democracy. Maybe he’s right. But voters tend to place their personal interests ahead of their political ideals. And, other than Bernie Sanders, no Democratic candidate would more richly tempt Americans to vote the former than Elizabeth Warren.
For the sake of democracy, let’s hope Democrats give America a better, safe, easier choice.
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2) Israeli aircraft retaliate after terrorists launch 10 rockets on southern communities
Friday night attack on Israel saw eight rockets intercepted by the Iron Dome system. One projectile hit a house in Sderot, a town near the border, causing damage but no casualties, police said.
Following a barrage of rockets from the Gaza Strip on Friday, the Israel Defense Forces responded with a wave of pre-dawn airstrikes on the Hamas-ruled enclave.
The Israeli army said it targeted sites belonging to Hamas after Palestinians fired 10 rockets into Israel late on Friday.
Eight of them were reportedly intercepted by the Iron Dome system. One projectile hit a house in Sderot, a town near the border, causing damage but no casualties, police said.
In southern Gaza, medical officials and locals said a small cabin was hit, killing a 27-year-old civilian and wounding two others.
None of the terrorist groups in Gaza claimed responsibility for firing the rockets. The Israeli military said Hamas was ultimately responsible for the attack.
Israel and Hamas have fought three wars over the past decade and tensions are high.
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