Monthly Archives: March 2017

Misguided

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France’s soon-to-be-ex-President François Hollande is on the wrong track, and not just because of that soon-to-be part.  He’s now saying

My ultimate duty is to make sure that France is not won over by such a program [French Presidential candidate Marine Le Pen and her program], and that France does not bear such a heavy responsibility[.]

His ultimate duty, he says, is to prevent Le Pen’s election.

No.  Duty is to the safety and prosperity of the nation.  National level political goals should not be aimed at defeating a politician, a person.  Goals, to be durable after their achievement, need to be for something—policies good for the nation—not against something; that’s the fulfillment of duty.

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Looking for Excuses

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…to be offended, with lots of energy.  This time it’s PETA bellyaching about a professional hockey team’s use of penguins to entertain the crowd prior to a game.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) sent a letter to the [Pittsburgh] Penguins Thursday criticizing the team’s use of live penguins during its pregame entertainment for the Stadium Series game at Heinz Field February 25.

Never mind the experts’ perspective.

Tracy Gray, a spokeswoman for the Pittsburgh Zoo, said in a statement that the safety of its animals are a top priority and that the animals were accompanied by zoo keepers and a veterinarian during the appearance at Heinz Field.

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The Greenpeace Defense

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We can’t be sued because we deliberately lie engage in hyperbole.  That’s Greenpeace’s new story, and they’re sticking to it.  As cited by Watts Up With That, we get this from the Financial Post.  The proximate subject is Greenpeace’s accusations against Resolute Forest Products Inc, a Canadian forest-products company that’s suing Greenpeace over those, which Resolute holds are false claims and defamatory about the company’s forestry operations.

But now Greenpeace says it never intended people to take its words about Resolute’s logging practices as literal truth.

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Chuck Schumer’s Coarse Misbehavior

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Does Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) condone the sexual abuse of children?

A snowshoe racer from India whose entry into the US to compete was made possible by Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer was being held Friday in a New York jail on a sex charge.

It seems that after Indian snowshoe competitor, Tanveer Hussain, was denied a visa to come to the US to compete in the World Snowshoe Championship in upstate New York, Senators Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand (D, NY) intervened with the US embassy in India and got Hussain his entry visa.

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A Key Point

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…from George Friedman’s piece in RealClear World, Nationalism and Liberal Democracy.  Friedman was writing about a different, if related matter, the relationship between liberalism (in the classic sense) and nationalism.  The point I’m calling out bears on our own immigration debate.

A nation is a group of people who share history, culture, language, and other attributes. It is the existence of a common identity, a coherent sense of self and nationhood that make self-government possible, because it is that sense of self that permits self-government.

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One’s a Liar

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..but the other is not?

Attorney General Jeff Sessions is being accused of having lied to the Senate during his confirmation hearing about whether he’d had any campaign-related conversations with Russian government officials during the campaign.  Sessions said no, nothing related to the campaign, and then it came out that he had had a couple of conversations with the Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in Sessions’ capacity as Senator from Alabama.  Must be a lie.  Never mind that he answered truthfully.

Then we get Senator Claire McCaskill (D, MO) tweeting out

Then other McCaskill tweets surfaced.

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Misguided

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In light of whose DoJ it’s been doing this most recently, it’s easy to say it was nefarious.  But the whole thing could be eliminated with either of a couple of steps and a change in underlying procedure.

What is “it?”  It’s a secret (or merely secretive) slush fund fed by settlement proceeds from DoJ civil suits against large banks.

When big banks are sued by the government for discrimination or mortgage abuse, they can settle the cases by donating to third-party non-victims. The settlements do not specify how these third-party groups could use the windfall.

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Of Course They Did

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The US, France, and Great Britain presented to the UN Security Council earlier in the week a resolution to apply economic sanctions against all of 11 Syrian military commanders and officials, as well as on 10 government and related entities” for their roles in the Bashar al-Assad government of Syria’s use of chemical weapons against Syrians.  The sanctions also would have barred the sale or supply of helicopters to the regime.

Naturally, Russia and the People’s Republic of China vetoed the sanctions.  Both did it to oppose the US.  Russia did it for the additional reason that it would interfere with getting peace in Syria—by which Russian President Vladimir Putin meant, in issuing his instruction to Russia’s UN Ambassador, peace on Russian terms.

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Who Should Control American Foreign Policy?

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One answer is indicated by the Trump administration’s de-emphasis of the World Trade Organization as the primary arbiter of our international trade policy.  A draft policy document, if the leak of it is a legitimate one, and if it’s being accurately described in the NLMSM might represent a promising start.

The Trump administration is developing a national trade policy that would seek to diminish the influence of the World Trade Organization in the US and champion American law as a way to take on trading partners it blames for unfair practices, according to a draft document reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

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Equal or Not?

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Are Americans equal under law, or are we to be divided and categorized even further in order to apply even more special treatments to Government-favored special groups?  The Census Bureau is opting for the latter.

In a report suggesting changes to 2020 Census forms, the bureau called for adding a new “Middle Eastern or North African” category designed to count those in the US who identify as one of about 19 nationalities, including Iranian, Syrian, Lebanese, Egyptian, and Israeli. Currently such people declare themselves as “white” on the surveys.

And

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