Monthly Archives: February 2018

Mid-Term Elections

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At their retreat last week, Republicans indicated that they intend to run heavily on the tax reform they got through at the end of last year.  It’s good to have something positive on which to run, especially since, at least for the near term, the Progressive-Democratic Party has nothing on which to campaign other than its #NeverTrump and #NothingRepublicanNoWay platform and its standard disparagement of ordinary Americans like House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s (D, CA) claim that the tax reform’s aftermath of bonuses and pay raises are just crumbs.

As an aside, it must be good to be as rich as Pelosi, that a $1,000 bonus or an increase in take-home pay of some $2,000 per year is just chump change.  President Donald Trump is stinking rich, Vstly more so than Pelosi, and he doesn’t think this added money is trivial.  I’m not stinking rich; I’m not even as rich as Pelosi—not by a long shot—those $1,000 matter to me, as do the added $2,000/yr take-home.

Back to my point.  Republicans can’t only run on their tax reform, though.  They need to add three things to their campaign.  The first addresses, preemptively, the fact that the personal income tax rate cuts—that increase in take-home—expire in about eight years.  Republicans need to emphasize that the only way that rate cut expiration actually would occur would be if Progressive-Democrats in Congress (especially in the Senate where they can filibuster) block those cuts from being extended or made permanent.

The second thing is to go on the offensive regarding DACA.  Most Americans, and it’s pretty much evenly spread across party and independent lines, want the children who were brought by their parents into the US illegally dealt with compassionately and with finality: no more doubt hanging over these folks’ heads.  A couple of Republican proposals for achieving this are on offer. The Republicans currently in office need to push heavily and loudly one or the other or both of them this year, even though—even because—it’s an election year.  Demonstrate that they’re not the ones too timid to do something major and concrete in an election year.

Republicans also need to hammer on Progressive-Democrat Congressmen constantly saying “No.”  Republicans need to be asking loudly, both in their own districts, in their neighboring Progressive-Democrat incumbents’ districts, and in neighboring open districts why Progressive-Democrats so vociferously oppose any plan on offer that takes care of the DACA children—and that does so largely on Progressive-Democrat terms.  Or do the Progressive-Democrats see these folks only as a talking point and not as a group of human beings?

It would have been good if President Donald Trump, during his SOTU speech last week, had pointed to the Dreamers (not the same group as DACA, but there’s tremendous overlap) in the gallery as guests of Progressive-Democrat Congressmen and said to them, “I have a proposal put before Congress that addresses your needs, including a path to citizenship.  Why are the Democrats so opposed to that?”  But that’s water under the bridge, and he still has time to ask that.  Often.

The third thing Republicans need to add to their campaign is their plan for the future.  What do these guys want to do to make American lives better, and how—concretely, an aspect Republicans never have done well—will those things actually make our lives better?

He’s Missed the Point

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John Downs, President and CEO of the National Confectioners Association, wrote a Wall Street Journal Letter to the Editor objecting to Maine Governor Paul LePage’s (R) effort to get junk food off the list of foods for which Maine’s food stamps can be used.

Downs supplied a lot of numbers indicating that everyone, food stamp recipient or other, eats junk food and touting the limits of sugar in the junk food consumed.  But he missed the point.

As long as folks are going to use OPM to buy their food (and for the most part, us OP are perfectly willing to have our funds used for a hand up for those having even an extended rough patch), us OP get to say how our M will be spent in such matters.  And the fact is, food stamps should be used to buy staples only.  Everything else is a luxury, and luxuries should be outside any welfare program.

Like anyone else, of course food stamp recipients want to enjoy some of luxury, including junk food.  In that case, they should get a job so they can afford to spend their own money on their luxuries.  I sympathize with those who can’t find a job (perhaps they’ve been priced out of one by minimum wage laws), but that doesn’t legitimize luxury in a welfare program.

Downs missed the point of the proposed restriction.  But he has a vested interested in missing it.

A New Category

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There is a need for a discussion of how to handle terrorism and terrorists.  Before that discussion can be useful, though, we need to understand the relationship among terrorism, crime, and war.  This is a beginning of that discussion.

We currently have two categories of conflict participants which I’ll term—my layman’s terms, understand, not any legal or legalistic ones—criminal and soldier or combatant.  The one is a domestic (usually) question involving the violation of a nation’s domestic criminal laws.  The other is an international question involving a nation’s soldiers or combat arms engaging in more or less declared war and during the conduct of which the nation and its soldiers are subject, together and individually, to national laws and generally agreed international laws of war (for instance, the Geneva Conventions).

As we have seen at least since the turn of the century, though, there is a third category of conflict, and those who perpetrate this third kind—both the polity and its individuals—need a different form of response when encountered on the battlefield or after capture.  It’s important to understand, too, that the battlefield in this third category isn’t limited to classic set-piece force on force encounter on a field or over a beach, nor is it the hit and run battlefield of a guerrilla effort.  This new battlefield includes those, certainly, but it also includes our theaters, concert venues, shopping malls, subways, airports, airplanes—anywhere groups of people are gathered.

This third category already exists in the public’s mind, but it needs a third category of legal handling.  This third category is terrorism and its participants are terrorists.  Examples of these include polities like al Qaeda and the Daesh and gangs like Boko Haram and their individual members.

These are entities and individuals who are intent on killing innocents, not soldiers, and they’re intent on the killing for its own end.  The resulting terror is their goal and their tool for destroying the body politic of their target.

Mere criminal laws are inadequate for handling such mass murderers, whose killing does not rise from insanity, but from a desire for creating the terror that is their tool for larger ends.  Nor can these entities and individuals be handled adequately with laws of war governing how soldiers are to be encountered and killed or treated after capture; their behavior, their targets, place them outside such laws.

For the individual terrorists of a polity or a gang, we need new laws, laws of terror war, both domestic and international, with which to govern our encounters with them in battle and our handling of them should any be captured.  Simply putting them on trial and locking them up on conviction is useless; they’ll just return to their battles upon release (nor are they worth the effort, expense, or resources of maintaining in confinement).  Dealing with them on the battlefield under existing laws of (ordinary) war is unsuitable, too: in far too many cases, to take just one example, their shields are not building walls or bunkers, but innocent, helpless women and children.

Similarly, we need a new Convention with which to deal with a terrorist polity or gang.  Simply crushing these in a series of battles is insufficient.  Their existence as non-nation-state entities, as network entities, makes any battle victory, any war-level victory a chimera.  Their goal of wanton destruction for the terror to be caused make any defeat, or appearance of one, an empty gesture.  Sterner, more permanent measures and the rules governing those measures are needed.

What Are They Trying to Hide?

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The House of Representatives has voted to release a 4-pg memo delineating various misbehaviors of the FBI during its “investigation” of Trump campaign behaviors during the 2016 election campaign.  The FBI publicly demurs.

…the FBI [has] “grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy.”

This is rich, coming from an FBI that had to be threatened with contempt of Congress before it would end its year-long stonewall and turn over material (some of which is summarized in the memo) that had been long subpoenaed.  As House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R, CA) said in response to this particular ludicrosity,

The FBI is intimately familiar with “material omissions” with respect to their presentations to both Congress and the courts….

Nunes added

they are welcome to make public, to the greatest extent possible, all the information they have on these abuses[.]

The FBI also is claiming concerns about giving up methods and sources with the memo’s exposure.  They conveniently forget that the memo has been vetted for that sort of thing by the Intelligence Committee and is being so vetted by the White House, where the memo now sits being checked by the National Security Advisor.  Both of these agencies are fully capable of such vetting, and no less so than the FBI.

Hence my question.

Update: The memo was released, and the evidence is damning.  We hear from the hysteria in the Progressive-Democrats and the NLMSM their desperation after they failed to block the memo’s release.  And this bit of emphasis and clarification from Nunes on FoxNews‘ Special Report Friday afternoon after the memo’s release (via Richard Fernandez and a commenter):

(excerpt) “Just step back for a moment,” Nunes explained. “This is not trying to go after some terrorist. This is about — they opened, the FBI opened a counter-intelligence investigation into the Trump campaign in the summer of 2016. That’s what happened.”

He continued: “And then they got a warrant on someone in the Trump campaign using opposition research paid for by the Democratic Party and the Hillary Clinton campaign. That’s what this is about. And it’s wrong and it should never be done.” (end excerpt)

Why is that important?

The significance of the warrant against Carter Page, was made October 21st, 2016, under Title I of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. [Meaning the surveillance application was specifically stating, to the court, the U.S. individual was likely an actual agent of a foreign government, ie. “a spy.”] (by sundance, Conservative Tree House) And renewed every 90 day period three times.

Why is it significant?
(1) as explained, designating Carter Page as foreign agent (spy), intelligence committee can spy on ANYBODY in contact with Page, even after he’s no longer part of the Trump team;

(2) the FISA warrant continued well into the first year of Trump presidency. Let both points sink in for a bit.

The Obama administration manufactured an espionage beef against Page instead of getting an “ordinary” FISA warrant that would have limited the scope and duration of its own spying.  Keep in mind, too, that no evidence has been turned up to indicate Page really is, or was, a Russian spy.  He was approached, certainly.  Nearly any American with even the most minimal set of connections is going to be approached by an apparatus of the Russian government.  That’s who the Russians are.  The available evidence, though, indicates he either ignored the approach or rebuffed it.

 

A Thought on American Women’s Gymnastics

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Unless you’ve been vacationing unplugged under a rock for the last several months, you’re aware of the atrocities committed by Larry Nassar, the ex-pseudo-doctor for the US’ women’s gymnastics team.  Now we find out that

The US Olympic Committee didn’t intervene in USA Gymnastics’ handling of sexual-abuse allegations against longtime national-team doctor Larry Nassar in 2015, even after USA Gymnastics’ then-president told two top USOC executives that an internal investigation had uncovered possible criminal behavior by the doctor against Olympic athletes.

And pursuant to a lawsuit,

the organization [USOC] said it was “first made aware of the possibility that a USA Gymnastics physician had sexually abused USA Gymnastics athletes in the summer of 2015, when we were informed by USA Gymnastics.”

Gymnastics is a physically dangerous and mentally stressful sport, as are most competitive sports.  Our women, and our girls, who participate in this game don’t need the added stress, much less the added damage, of sexual misbehaviors, sexual harassment, sexual assault inflicted on them by those placed in positions of power or authority over them—trainers, coaches, doctors, anyone.

I think it has become necessary to shut down women’s gymnastics as a formal sport in the US for a significant period of time, perhaps 2-5 years.  The time is necessary to completely revamp the sport and purge the criminals and the merely misbehaving personnel, folks like the imitation doctor Nassar, just convicted of harassments and of assaults against our girls; folks like the Karolyis, whose “training” techniques at best don’t align with American values; others who mistreat our girl and woman athletes while pretending merely to “toughen up the buttercups” or who get their jollies from molestations.

USA Gymnastics and the women’s side of the United States Olympic Committee must cease to exist.  When the time comes, replacements for USAG and that portion of USOC must be created from the ground up.  Anyone associated with USAG and USOC and anyone associated with those personnel out to and including the second degree of association must be banned from participation also.

Full stop.

One more item: the boys and men’s side of this needs a full, deep, and independent investigation, too, on general principles.  What deeply nefarious affairs are going on there that we don’t know about?  Hopefully none, but it’s time to look closely.