Monthly Archives: July 2017

Warning Signs of Impending Dictatorship

Posted on by
Reply

Stephen Malt, in Foreign Policy, thinks he has some, and he’s concerned about many of them.

1. Systematic efforts to intimidate the media: Check

There’s little doubt that Trump and his associates have repeatedly tried to intimidate mainstream media organizations, whether through tweets deriding the supposedly “failing” New York Times, the repeated references to the “Amazon Washington Post,” or White House chief strategist and former Breitbart head Stephen Bannon’s referring to media organizations as “the opposition party.”

If these worthies and their colleagues really are intimidated by being held in contempt, they’re hardly worthy of being “media.”  On the other hand, President Donald Trump has not arrested any reporters, or attempt to seize their communications records, or attempted to ban whole news organizations from White House press briefings.  That was ex-President Barack Obama (D).

2. Building an official pro-Trump media network: Partial check

Back in November, I speculated that Trump might “use the presidency to bolster media that offer him consistent support” or even try to create a government-funded media agency to disseminate pro-Trump propaganda.  …the White House gave press credentials to the right-wing blog Gateway Pundit and has given the reliably wacky and pro-Trump Breitbart privileged access. And as one might expect, the Trump administration has backed the expansion plans of the conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group.

So, Sinclair should be blocked from its expansion execution because it’s a press outlet?  Or is it because it looks like it supports the administration?  No free enterprise, when that’s inconvenient, is it?  Breitbart has privileged access?  How?  Because an ex-employee is on the White House staff?  In addition to Gate Pundit, other bloggers also were given access to the daily White House briefings, as were Skypers.  And—gasp!—they were allowed to ask questions!  Apparently this expansion of the public’s news sources isn’t to be allowed.  Oh, yeah—Obama didn’t need any of this—he already had the NLMSM in a symbiotic relationship with the Progressive-Democratic Party.

3. Politicizing the civil service, military, National Guard, or the domestic security agencies: Partial check

Trump has tried to put his stamp on key government agencies by demanding that senior officials resign or by firing people who declined to do his bidding….

Of course he has.  As Executive Branch offices and officers, they work for him.  All Presidents, quite appropriately, do this.

4. Using government surveillance against domestic political opponents: Nothing yet

There certainly was a lot under Obama.  It was his NSA who began surveilling Americans directly, and not as an accident of surveilling foreign nationals.  It was his staff who exposed those Americans publicly, and deliberately, because they wanted to know who these Americans were, regardless of need.

5. Using state power to reward corporate backers and punish opponents: Worrisome, but not a big problem so far

No reason to believe it will be a problem, either.  Unlike under Obama, where crony “green” enterprises, for instance, got lots of rewards.

6. Stacking the Supreme Court: Partial check

….  We don’t yet know what sort of justice Neil Gorsuch will turn out to be or whom Trump might appoint down the road, but it’s a safe bet they won’t be progressives

Not appointing Progressives to the courts is somehow “stacking?”  Naturally, Malt chose not to supply any logic for that claim.  What we can be sure of with Gorsuch and further Trump appointees is that they won’t be activists judges; they’ll hew to the Constitution and to the statutes that come before them.  That’s not stacking, that’s honoring the rule of law and judges’ oaths of office.

7. Enforcing the law for only one side: Blinking red.

Not even close.  It hasn’t been Trump who routinely called cops stupid, and it’s not been his DoJ who routinely portrayed—and acted on the portrayal—of cops as overall racist.  Instead, unlike Obama and the Holder/Lynch DoJ, Trump has pushed enforcement of the law, and supported rule of law instead of rule by law and those Obama administration men and women.

8. Really rigging the system: Blinking red

Malt’s rationale for this one is the Kris Kobach-headed voter fraud commission.  Never mind that voter fraud exists; it’s only the breadth and depth of it that’s unknown.  What better way to put this question to rest, and to show up Trump—as Malt and so many of his fellows think would be the case—than to carry through the commission’s inquiry enthusiastically and thoroughly by showing that there is no serious voter fraud?  Unless Malt and his are terrified that something else might be shown, instead.

9. Fearmongering: Check

As he did during the campaign, Trump has continued to issue dark warnings about various dangers from which he supposedly needs to protect us.

Because recognizing the dangers around us so planning can be carried out in less than a vacuum is fearmongering.  This is just idiotic.

10. Demonizing the opposition: Check (but he’s not alone)

No American president has been as prone to treat his opponents with contempt, disregard, and blatant hostility.

This is so plainly untrue that it’s almost a dishonest claim.  It was Obama who showed his contempt for every American between the east and west coasts by dismissing us all as Bible-clinging, gun-toting inmates of flyover country.  It was Obama who called everyone—Republicans in particular—unpatriotic for not supporting his policies.  It was Obama’s Congressmen who called Republicans terrorists and hostage takers for opposing Obama’s policies.  It was Obama’s protégé and Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton who called all Americans who disagreed with her irredeemably deplorable racists, sexists, xenophobes, homophobes, Islamophobes.

The Left will be hard pressed to get any more…foolish…than this.

YGTBSM

Posted on by
Reply

Yet again.  This one is from Watts Up With That.

A bloke bought a sheep property of half a million acres in western Queensland for $2.0 million. Instead of running sheep on it, he now gets $350,000 per annum under the federal government’s Direct Action scheme for not using the grass on his property. The idea being that the grass locks up carbon and reduces Australia’s carbon emissions. A neighbouring property gets $600,000 per annum.

I have no idea what the second guy paid for his property, but the first guy will have recouped his investment in three years of doing nothing.  I’m torn between the waste of taxpayer money and wishing I could beat feet to Australia so I could get in on this kind of deal.

Asset Forfeiture

Posted on by
Reply

Attorney General Jeff Sessions has withdrawn President Barack Obama’s (D) blanket hold on asset seizure, but with safeguards.  I think those safeguards need improvement.

Stop sharing seized assets with local law enforcement.  Each State has its own laws regarding asset seizure by local law enforcement; these laws should be respected and not bypassed.

Also:

Sessions’ new guidelines say that state or local agencies seeking forfeiture under federal law must demonstrate probable cause within 15 days of the seizure. The sponsoring federal agency must notify the property’s owner within 45 days, so he can challenge it, including by going to court.

This is much too slow.  These agencies already have probable cause, or they couldn’t have conducted the raids and seizures in the first place.  Where a seizure is made pursuant to an unwarranted but otherwise legitimate stop or arrest, the seizure has its probable cause in the same process with which the police after the fact justify their stop/arrest.

The sponsoring agency knows at the moment of the seizure what it’s seized and what it intends to do with it; there’s no reason for a 45-day delay in notification other than to make the seizure as irrevocable as possible and, in the case of financial asset seizure, to make as great as possible the cost to the owner of his property’s recovery.

Finally, absent an actual conviction, there shouldn’t be any asset seizure outside the strictures of the already existing civil and criminal sections of the RICO statute.  That law provides sufficient grounds for seizure prior to conviction, when the seizure is made solely on the basis of an accusation.

What Do Teachers Unions and the NAACP Have Against Poor Children?

Posted on by
Reply

Richard Whitmire, a contributor to The 74, offered some information that might bear on the question in his piece in The Wall Street Journal.  The National Education Association and the NAACP both oppose charter schools, the one because they don’t use union teachers and the other because they attract poor kids to charters and away from inner city public schools in which the NAACP is so politically invested.  In other words, because as Whitmire put it, charters upset the comfortable status quo of these adults.

Now some hard data via Whitmire’s piece; these are in addition to the rising test scores that charter school students are achieving (especially compared to comparable schools—which is to say public schools in poor districts).

Graduates from the top charter networks—those with enough high school alumni to measure college success accurately—earn four-year degrees at rates that range up to five times as high as their counterparts in traditional public schools.

Those traditional counterparts are low-income, minority students in public school systems in cities like Eric Garcetti’s United Teachers Los Angeles-run LA and Rahm Emanuel’s Chicago Teachers Union-run city, cities where the NAACP also is highly influential.

There’s this datum, too:

Roughly half the graduates of Uncommon, YES Prep and the KIPP New York schools…earn bachelor’s degrees within six years. About a quarter of the graduates of the lower-performing charter networks earn degrees within six years.

This compares with 9% of “graduates” of low-income public schools.

One more: charters help their graduates succeed in college with active advice on course to take, how to manage the credit amounts within and across semesters, even such things as how to perform while being the only minority student, or one of a very few, in what used to be an all-white class.  Those public schools just shove their students out onto the street.

Actually, the teachers unions and the NAACP don’t have anything in particular against these charter children of low-income families.  The kids are just tools to be used for the benefit of union leadership and NAACP virtue signaling.

Sanctions and Wariness

Posted on by
Reply

Congress has passed and sent to President Donald Trump a bill that increases sanctions against Russia, particularly its energy sector, and against Iran and northern Korea.  It also adds limits Trump’s ability (and State’s) to ratchet those sanctions up or down in real time in response to Russian—or Iranian or northern Korean—behavior, a fillip that adds a question to whether he’ll sign it (his veto likely would only delay the thing; the bill was passed with veto-proof majorities in both houses).

Germany is “wary” of those sanctions.

The German Committee on East European Economic Relations said US plans for tighter sanctions against Russia had the potential of harming EU firms with energy interests in their giant eastern neighbor.

It went as far as to say that the latest US move appeared designed to stimulate US energy exports to Europe.

Because nothing Evil United States does is good for anyone else.  It couldn’t possibly be that any offers to sell liquified natural gas, for instance, to Europe (a small target of our global market for LNG, and for oil) might be to free Europe—and Germany in particular—from Russian extortion.  It couldn’t possibly be, either, that our increasing exports of hydrocarbons—having as they do a depressing impact on the global price of energy—would be good for Germany or for Europe as a whole.

And this bit of nefariousness:

The committee said it expected German exports to Russia to grow by 20% this year…despite all the EU and US sanctions in place right now over Russia’s perceived role in the Ukraine and Syria conflicts.

And this threat from the German government:

[German Economics Minister Brigitte] Zypries warned against a trade war over this latest round of US sanctions against Russia, saying such a situation would be “very bad.”

Nice piece you got there.  Be too bad if something happened to it.

That’s OK, though.  We’re wary of German timidity in the face of Russian energy blackmail capability, or of their active collusion with Russia.  At least there is symmetry.