Monthly Archives: May 2017

“Full Responsibility”

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Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has said, regarding leaks to the New York Times tabloid and others,

We take full responsibility for that and we obviously regret that that happened.  With respect to the release of information inappropriately…certainly we condemn that.

The same sort of questions I’ve put to Hillary Clinton applies here: what are you going to do with that “responsibility” you’ve taken?  What concrete actions will you take?

How’re the criminal and civil investigations into the leaks going; what progress are you making in identifying the criminals and the miscreants?

Assuming you find any, what will you do with them?

Department of YGTBSM

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Amtrak has decided to refurbish New York City’s Penn Station, which will involve unavoidable disruption through the summer.  New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (D) doesn’t think Amtrak is up to the task, so he’s bringing New York to the rescue.

The state will step up and do it.  We don’t own Penn Station but we will step up and we’ll take over construction and we’ll do it with a private construction company or let the Port Authority do it.

So generous.  Here’s how the Democrat will execute his generosity.

As long as New York City steps up to the plate with funding, I will step up to the plate with leadership and management responsibility,

Let’s you and him get to work.  Bring your wallet and safety boots; I’ll bring my clipboard.

The Rise of the PRC

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Graham Allison, Director of the Kennedy School Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, had some thoughts in The Boston Globe.  Here’s one that’s not in the usual political or military race discussion.

In STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics)…[the PRC] annually graduates four times as many students as the United States (1.3 million vs 300,000).

A better measure would compare the quality of those graduates and their programs so as to arrive at similarly qualified graduates.

Still, numbers have a quality all their own.  Let’s play a bit with these two.  Suppose, for instance, that 80% or American STEM graduates actually know their material, i.e., the graduates didn’t just sleep-walk their way through a mediocre program; they actually got and understood a good, solid STEM education.  That works out to 240k solid STEM grads.

Suppose that of the PRC’s graduates only 50% measure up to that standard.  That still works out to 650k solid STEM grads, or for you non-STEM folks, 2.7 times more quality grads than we’re producing.  That’s something to take seriously.

This is a long-term, generational, race that we can’t afford to lose.

I’m Looking Forward

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…to Carter Page’s testimony—in whatever venue.

Former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page has asked House lawmakers to let him testify in an open session to offer his side in the ongoing probe of Russian meddling in the 2016 race….

Page made his offer in a long letter to Congressmen Adam Schiff (D, CA) and Michael Conaway (R, TX), Ranking Member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence  and acting lead on the committee’s investigation into Russian interference in our 2016 elections in place of the committee chairman Devin Nunes (R,CA), respectively.

So far, he’s received no response.

No matter.

He should feel free to write some op-eds if Congress declines to hear him formally.  Either way—Congressional testimony or opinion pieces, the public then could evaluate the usefulness of his words.

Trump Gifted Francis

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During his visit to the Vatican, President Donald Trump gave gifts to Pope Francis, a normal exchange of gifts between heads of state.

Trump gifted Pope Francis a first-edition set of writings from Martin Luther King, Jr. The White House said the set includes the five books King wrote in his lifetime. Each one is custom-bound and the books are in a custom display case. It also included a piece of granite from the Martin Luther King, Jr, Memorial in Washington.

Maybe Trump should have included, in addition to those, a copy of Martin Luther King, Jr’s, Letter from a Birmingham Jail, along with a section of the bar of the cell in which MLK was imprisoned while he wrote his Letter.  A copy of Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses would have been a good gift, too.