UK Decides to Withdraw from European Union: U.S. Should Not Abandon Britain or Move It to a Rear Burner for Trade Deals

The United Kingdom held their referendum on whether to stay or leave the European Union yesterday, and the Leave movement won by around a million votes, which lead to Prime Minster Cameron’s resignation this morning. 

The markets are reacting negatively, which is not unexpected.  Scotland voted to remain, so now there’s a question of whether Scotland will remain in the United Kingdom.   Lot of unanswered questions.

On the U.S. side, President Obama’s ill-advised statement to the British public during his visit needs to be looked at.  We should not abandon Britain, nor should our government move it to the “back of the queue” for consideration for trade deals as President Obama told the British people would happen if the Leave side won.

The U.S.-British friendship and business relationship should get stronger, and not weaker as President Obama has suggested.  I hope he doesn’t take to the airwaves to issue more threats now that the Leave side has won.

Hopefully the UK and EU will come to an understanding that is fair to all parties involved.

Democrats Politicize Disaster in Florida: They Just Can’t Help Themselves

The Democrats just can’t stop politicizing everything, including a terrorist attack on a nightclub in Orlando which left forty-nine dead and fifty wounded.

ISIS called for terror attacks in the U.S. during Ramadan in the weeks before the start of the holiday, and that’s exactly what happened.   That should be the end of the story. 

I also noted that President Obama continued his policy of not naming what the problem is (Radical Islamic terrorism), which has itself become a political hot potato.   There’s nothing to be done there, but some things can be pointed out:

Naming the problem defines the problem, which leads to decisive action to deal with the named problem.  Putting one’s head in the sand doesn’t help matters any.  Nor is being the Observer-in-Chief.

The Democrats focused on the gun issue again.   Banning guns won’t stop terrorists. 

What’s to stop a terrorist (foreign or domestic) from taking a pressure cooker, loading it up with ball bearings and nails, packing it with low grade explosives, stick a blasting cap stolen from an industrial site into the top of it and simply carrying it into a minimum-security (soft target) nightclub like the one attacked in Orlando and detonating it?   Absolutely nothing.   The Boston bombers proved it.

ISIS and al-Qaeda love killing themselves and taking their enemies with them. They need to be stopped and their caliphate made into nothing but a memory. 

Guns are but one part of the problem.  Changing a radical’s heart so that he puts down his weapon and uses his voice (and in this case, his vote) to disagree with his government is something the Democrats and Republicans in federal government need to work on.

Getting guns away from the seriously mentally ill and violence-prone is also something that should be addressed too.  Both parties have declined to do anything about it—the Democrats because they don’t want to be labeled as less-than-liberal-minded, and the Republicans because the NRA doesn’t like the idea at all.  

There’s a solution out there, but they need to work to find it.  And NEVER pass anything immediately after an event like the Orlando catastrophe. That always leads to bad legislation that is very difficult to repeal or fix, especially in an election year.