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“Sol Sanders”

Evaluation Of Elizabeth Warren As Potential Democratic Candidate For President: Francis Menton

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=8d26a74d9d

In the polls for the past several months, the top three among the contenders for the Democratic nomination for President have been Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders. I doubt that Biden will make it all the way to the end of this marathon; and I sense that Sanders’s shtick has started to wear thin and that he is fading. That would leave Elizabeth Warren as the most likely to get the nomination.

Heaven help us.

Warren has her own shtick. The basic idea is to claim that the U.S. economy is fundamentally not working for most people, and then to stir up resentment against anybody who has achieved any success, aka “the wealthy” or “the well-connected” or “the corporations.” These people are oppressing you, and you need Elizabeth to fight back. In her February 2019 speech announcing her candidacy, it was that “millions of American families are . . . struggling to survive in a system that has been rigged by the wealthy and well-connected.” Then there are the evil banks, who “steer [you] into overpriced credit products, risky sub-prime mortgages, and misleading insurance plans.”

But don’t worry — Warren has all the answers, in the form of some dozens of “plans,” each one a top-down directive from the federal government to get those evil exploiters to behave. Universal child care! 100% clean energy! Expanding social security! Hundreds of billions for housing! Trillions for free college and debt forgiveness! Wealth taxes on the rich! Tens of trillions for tackling the “climate crisis”! More tens of trillions for free health care for all! And those are just a small sample. It’s a good thing that the government’s resources are infinite. You name it, and there’s a “plan” and a new collection of regulations and orders and a few hundred billion or a few trillions or tens of trillions from the infinite free loot from above that will solve the problem instantly, at least once Elizabeth is in charge.

In the aggregate she is proposing a total transformation of the U.S. economy, from one fundamentally run by the people and their privately-owned organizations, to one fundamentally controlled and directed by the government. She doesn’t claim the mantle of “socialism” the way Bernie does, but it’s hard to see how there would be much left of the private economy if all — or even half — of Warren’s “plans” got implemented. Does she not perceive any down side here?

The Language of Losing by Mark Steyn

https://www.steynonline.com/9730/the-language-of-losing

The eighteenth anniversary of 9/11 was marked by the Administration inviting the Taliban to Camp David, and by the resignation and/or firing of John Bolton as National Security Advisor – which two events may not be unconnected. Because really, when the Taliban are running around Camp David, who needs national security?

For the fifteen years after the launch of SteynOnline in 2002, we re-posted every year on this date material of mine from September 11th 2001 and the days we followed. Two years ago, we ceased that policy, for reasons I discussed on Clubland Q&A:

If this is a war, there’s no agreement on what we’re up against: Terrorism? Islamic terrorism? Islamic extremism? Islam? Whatever it is, a president who, on the campaign trail, mocked his predecessor’s inability to use the words “radical Islam” himself eschewed all mention of the I-word today. September 11th 2001 was supposedly “the day everything changed” – if by “everything changed” you mean “the rate of mass Muslim immigration to the west doubled”. As that absurd statistic suggests, we are not where I thought we would be 16 years on: We run around fighting for worthless bits of barren sod like Helmand province in Afghanistan, while surrendering day by day some of the most valuable real estate on the planet, such as France and Sweden.

That last point may seem obvious. But, if it is, it’s a truth all but entirely unacknowledged by anyone who matters in the western world. I subsequently expanded on it, in a piece we called “The Language of Losing” and which appears to have been succeeded by “The Actions of Losers” – such as inviting the Taliban to Camp David. Hey, why not for the ceremonies in Lower Manhattan? On yet another wretched anniversary I mourn not only the dead of that grim day, but our loss of purpose. All that has changed two years on is that for “sixteenth anniversary” we substitute “eighteenth” – and on and on into the future:

In any war, you have to be able to prioritize: You can’t win everything, so where would you rather win? Raqqa or Rotterdam? Kandahar or Cannes? Yet, whenever some guy goes Allahu Akbar on the streets of a western city, the telly pundits generally fall into one of two groups: The left say it’s no big deal, and the right say this is why we need more boots on the ground in Syria or Afghanistan. Yesterday President Trump said he was committed to ensuring that terrorists “never again have a safe haven to launch attacks against our country”.

Warren Mimics Bernie’s Promotion Of Anti-Semite Linda Sarsour To Campaign Surrogate By Warren Henry

https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/11/warren-mimics-bernies-promotion-anti-semite-linda-sarsour-campaign-surrogate/

Given Linda Sarsour’s record, her claim that she supports Bernie Sanders because of rising anti-Semitism in America is irony thick enough to cut with a chainsaw.

Personnel is policy, or so the saying goes. So it is troubling that the two leading left-wing presidential candidates—Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren—are empowering people who at best hate Israel and support the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement intended to destroy the Jewish state.

Over the weekend, Sanders tweeted a video identifying Linda Sarsour as a campaign surrogate:

Bernie Sanders

✔ @BernieSanders

“I would be so proud to win, but also to make history and elect the first Jewish American president this country has ever seen and for his name to be Bernard Sanders.” –@lsarsour

Sarsour’s record on Israel and Jews is no secret. She supports a one-state solution to Palestinian attacks on Israel that would effectively destroy the Jewish state. In 2012, she tweeted that “Nothing is creepier than Zionism.” She has claimed Zionists cannot be feminists. Sarsour supports the BDS campaign which, as Anti-Defamation League director Jonathan Greenblatt notes, “encourages and spreads anti-Semitism.”

In 2017, she literally embraced Rasmea Odeh, a convicted terrorist who killed two Hebrew University students in 1969. At last year’s convention of the Islamic Society of North America, she accused the Israeli police and military of training American police to kill blacks, and opposed humanizing Israelis.

Elizabeth Warren’s Daft Fracking Scheme

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/elizabeth-warren-democrats-fracking-bans-bad-for-economy-bad-for-environment/

Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts promises that if she is elected president, she will issue an immediate unilateral prohibition — based on some presidential power that she’ll invent as soon as she gets around to it — on the method of natural-gas production known colloquially as “fracking.” Other Democratic contenders, including Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris of California, have made similar promises.

Another way of saying this is that the Democrats promise to induce artificial scarcity in the energy market. Yet another way of saying this is that the Democrats promise to create effective subsidies for such relatively high-pollution energy sources as coal and diesel at the expense of a relatively low-pollution energy source in the form of natural gas. And yet another way of saying this is that the Democrats propose to subsidize petroleum producers from Russia to Iran at the expense of small to midsize businesses in Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Mexico, Texas, and other energy-producing states.

Why?

What we call “fracking” relies on two relatively old technologies: hydraulic fracturing, which is used to break up underground shale formations to release oil and gas trapped therein, and horizontal drilling, which allows for the efficient recovery of that released oil and/or gas. Combining those two technologies with recent advances in everything from materials development to seismic imaging has revolutionized energy production in the United States — and that gets up the noses of certain people, prominent among them so-called environmentalists who are categorically opposed to all new development of conventional energy sources — even when that development comes with important environmental benefits. Their opposition is ideological and quasi-religious. It is based only very loosely on genuine environmental concerns.

Lies the Left Tells About Guns For starters, the “assault weapons” ban of 1994 had no meaningful effect on the homicide rate. Rachel Bovard

https://amgreatness.com/2019/09/07/lies-the-left-tells-about-guns/

Congress reconvenes this week after a summer fraught with multiple mass shootings. Reportedly, legislation implementing tighter gun control is on the table, with rumored support by some in the White House. The rhetoric surrounding guns continues to escalate.

Here’s the thing about guns. The Constitution—that handy little document—guarantees our rights to them, and that guarantee is a profound reflection of the nature and character of our freedoms. As Ben Domenech of The Federalist wrote recently, “the right to bear arms is not about hunting.” Rather:

It is a natural right of the deepest significance to the relationship between the citizen and the state. It is in the Constitution because the men who defeated the greatest empire in the world wanted us to be able to defend our freedom.

The simple fact that we have a right to own guns doesn’t mean individuals must own them, use them, or even like them. But what it does mean is that people advocating further regulation of firearms at least should have a baseline understanding of how firearms actually work, as well as the current statutory environment that regulates their purchase, handling, and use.

Unfortunately, the current rhetoric coming from Democrats betrays a deep misunderstanding about all of those things.

Here are some of the worst offenses.

The Competition Over How To Impoverish The American People Continues Among Democratic Candidates Francis Menton

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-9-4-the-competition-over-how-to

It was back on June 4 that I posed the eternal question, “Will The Democratic Candidates Ever Notice That The Climate Change Thing Is Over?” That post noted that the Democratic candidates for President had begun a kind of bidding war over who could put forth the most extreme proposal to shackle the American economy in the name of climate salvatio n, while at the same time “out in the rest of the world” they were “laugh[ing] at this spectacle.” Among the data points cited in that post were that China was seeking reductions in the price of coal in order to spur consumption of electricity, and that in Australia a national election had just been lost by the party that made a principal issue out of its opposition to a huge new coal mine in Queensland.

In the three months since early June, things have only gotten sillier.

The Statistical Review of World Energy 2019 from the BP oil company came out. A summary of it in Forbes on June 28 noted: “Coal consumption in most of the developing world continues to grow. Asia Pacific increased consumption [in 2018] by the most overall, but its 2.5% growth rate lagged Africa’s (+3.9%) and Central and South America (+3.7%).”

The annual Google billionaires’ climate summit was held in Sicily at the beginning of August. From euronews: “114 private jets flew into the Italian Verdura Resort, according to the Italian press, and many of the elite guest list arrived in multi-million pound yachts. With stars like Leonardo DiCaprio, Barack Obama and Prince Harry in attendance, reports Jim Dobson at Forbes, they were hardly going to be hitch-hiking. . . .”

With the Australian election won by pro-development forces, the giant ($16.5 billion) Carmichael/Adani coal mine project in Queensland resumed its march toward final regulatory approval.

In late August former President Barack Obama plunked down just under $15 million for a beachfront mansion in Martha’s Vineyard, maybe 10 feet above mean high tide, revealing just what the ex-Pres really thinks of his own rhetoric about impending climate-induced sea-level rise.

The Dystopian Democrats’ Authoritarian Town Hall — by Thomas McArdle

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/09/06/the-dystopian-democrats-authoritarian-town-hall/

Who would imagine that the Democrats’ hurtling to the far left would actually lead to an attack on one of their sacred precepts: “a woman’s right to choose.”

The right to choose not to have a baby is fine, reducing as it does your carbon footprint, and thus saving the earth. But choosing to have too many babies (on top of being so bourgeois and unseemly) is like selfishly choosing to burn oil instead of harnessing your energy from the sun or wind.

Get it straight: carbon is immoral, whether the polluting carbon you’re expelling into the atmosphere is fossil fuels or children.

At CNN’s “Climate Crisis Town Hall” on Wednesday, working class champion Sen. Bernie Sanders was asked a population control question by a longtime elementary teacher at a Montessori school where the tuition ranges from $11,000 to $27,000, in 96% white, $66,500 median family income Litchfield County in rural western Connecticut, the state’s most sparsely populated county.

“The planet cannot sustain this growth” in population, she contended. “Empowering women and educating everyone on the need to curb population growth seems a reasonable campaign to enact. Would you be courageous enough to discuss this issue and make it a key feature of a plan to address climate catastrophe?” she asked. Sanders responded in the positive and expressed a willingness to give U.S. “aid to those organizations around the world that allow women to have abortions” and provide contraception.

10 Craziest Things CNN Town Hall Revealed About Democrats’ Economy-Wrecking Climate Extremism By Chrissy Clark

https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/05/10-craziest-things-cnn-town-hall-revealed-democrats-economy-wrecking-climate-extremism/

Despite seven hours of conversations, there was no substantive talk. The majority of questions were asked by climate change activists tossing softball questions.

On Wednesday CNN hosted a town hall focused on environmentalism with the 10 Democratic presidential candidates qualified to stand on the September debate stage in Houston. These candidates are Joe Biden, Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Julián Castro, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Beto O’Rourke, Bernie Sanders, Andrew Yang, and Elizabeth Warren.

Despite seven hours of conversations, there was no substantive talk. The majority of questions were asked by climate change activists tossing softball questions at the candidates, or Sanders supporters who wanted to attack other candidates — cough, cough Joe Biden — and their climate platforms.

Among the dull questions and lackluster answers, several moments highlighted Democrats’ full-fledged dive into extremist policies that will wreck the American economy and scientific advancement.

Socialist Scenario May Pose Risk For Democrats By Ira Stoll see DPS note

DPS Note: 

Excellent analysis. But on a tactical level from where I sit. Whether it is Biden with a veneer of not-crazy-left, or flat out crazy left, the Democrat Party’s lurching leftward trajectory is as clear as clear can be. So whether a Democrat President’s agenda would be quickly or incrementally implemented shouldn’t provide high cover for you to vote that way if you kind of like and admire America the way it has evolved and has been since 1776. Scoop Jackson, Dan Inouye, Pat Moynihan, Joe Lieberman, where have you all gone? Heck. Jack Kennedy’d make a fine Republican candidate today. No matter how you slice the Democrat Party baloney, you’re gonna get a socialist sandwich. The only question is how much baloney (a/k/a socialism) will they pack into that first bite? Not saying there isn’t plenty to fix in our system. But the Democrat Party’s drivers don’t appear to think we are “fixable.” So I guess the question you gotta ask yourself (This is DPS3 plagerizing Dirty Harry) is, do you feel lucky? Because the “big structural change” promised by the Party’s animating forces are no different than Dirty Harry’s Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum. If you pull that trigger you may get a lot more than you bargained for.

PS: Here’s the real McCoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0lvp7a7pmk

https://www.nysun.com/national/socialist-scenario-may-pose-risk-for-the-democrats/90817/

Call it the socialist scenario — the risk that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren could combine forces to defeat Joseph Biden in the Democratic primary.

The RealClearPolitics polling averages have Biden leading Sanders and Warren nationally and in the early-voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire. These same polls, though, show the “not Biden” vote represented by Senators Sanders and Warren to be larger than the level of support for Vice President Biden.

If that vote were combined rather than split, the socialist scenario suggests, it could result in a Democratic presidential nominee who is either openly socialist, like Senator Sanders, or an ideological ally of Mr. Sanders, like Mrs. Warren, who says she is a capitalist but who is campaigning with a call for an annual wealth tax and for what she calls “big, structural change.”

The possibility is generating concern from Americans who are more cautious about “big, structural change.” The concern is heightened because Mr. Biden is old enough that he can seem vulnerable rather than inevitable.

As is often the case with socialism, however, the fantasy is some distance from reality. The primary campaigns of the previous presidential cycle are familiar precedents and somewhat reassuring ones, at least for those who aren’t enthusiasts of either Mr. Sanders or Mrs. Warren.

Socialism Is for the Incurious Human reality is drained of dignity and reduced to raw material for the schemes of utopian power. By Roger Kimball

https://www.wsj.com/articles/socialism-is-for-the-incurious-11567460002

I was struck by a news report this summer about Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. It has long been known that he and his wife chose to spend their honeymoon in the Soviet Union. But it was news that he never availed himself of the opportunity to visit Alexander Solzhenitsyn when the great writer and moral witness was living as a refugee in Cavendish, Vt., between 1976 and his death in 2008.

Some comments about that story attribute Mr. Sanders’s negligence to ideology, as if he, being a fan of the Soviet Union, made a silent protest by ignoring the famous anti-Soviet figure in his midst. But I think the deeper reason for his neglect was a quality of the socialist or communist or revolutionary sensibility that is too little remarked. I mean its ingrained, indeed its programmatic, lack of curiosity about other people.

The philosopher Sir Roger Scruton, in a thoughtful anatomy of the French Revolution, is one of the few people to underscore this feature of the totalitarian habit of mind. “This absence of curiosity,” Mr. Scruton notes, “is a permanent characteristic of the revolutionary consciousness.”

An important reason for this lack of curiosity is the prominent role that abstractions play in the mental and moral metabolism of the totalitarian sensibility. This feature was articulated with some poignancy by Rousseau, who, at the end of his life, sadly observed: “I think I know man, but as for men, I know them not.”