Monthly Archives: July 2018

No Need to Waste the Time

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…arguing the matter.  In an opinion piece, The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board called out “Tricky Dick Schumer” (their appellation) for his stalling effort centered on his demand for millions of pages of documents from Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s past pursuant to evaluating Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court.  Schumer has said he’ll try to block any discussion of Kavanaugh’s fitness until he gets those millions of docs.  The WSJ also noted that

Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley [R, IA] is trying to work out a document deal with ranking Democrat Dianne Feinstein.

This against the backdrop of

The White House has said it is willing to produce some 80,000 document pages and 200,000 email pages from Mr Kavanaugh’s time in the White House counsel’s office.

The WSJ was too mild, though.  There’s no need for the Senate to go along with the Progressive-Democrats’ hysterical obstructionism.  Grassley should accept the White House’s offer—it’s already larger than what the Progressive-Democrats demanded of then-Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch—and then he should hold the hearings, regardless of Feinstein’s attempts to stall, and hold the committee vote.  After that, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY) should hold the floor vote on Kavanaugh while ignoring Schumer’s attempts to stall.

The Senate has actual work to do; it has no time for the Progressive-Democrats’ childish games or temper tantrums.

The Man Has a Point

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On the matter of revoking the security clearances of certain senior government officials after they’ve left office—the Trump administration’s thinking about doing that with former CIA Director John Brennan, former FBI Director James Comey, et al., and the associated flap come to mind—former Deputy State Department spokesman Adam Ereli has a point.  Such a move would ring alarm bells, and one alleged motive for doing so raises this problem identified by Ereli:

I think that we’re going down a slippery slope.  Who’s to decide what’s political and what’s not political?

He’s right.  However, the wrong motive does not make the move wrong.  These folks are no longer employees of the Federal government, and so they no longer have the need to know that is one of only two Critical Items in granting a security clearance.  Nor should they have access to classified material—the other Critical Item in granting a clearance.

The right answer here is a blanket one.  All persons, on leaving government employ, should have their security clearances completely revoked; they should not have any security clearance at all.  If government needs to consult a particular individual—a senior official, like an ex-CIA Director, for instance—on a particular matter, it’s perfectly straightforward to (re)vet such an individual and grant him the clearance regarding that item which he needs in order to advise effectively on it.  The vetting and granting process could streamlined further by putting in place protocols optimized for just such a situation with just such a set of ex-senior government persons.

Similarly, it would be easy enough to grant, under the same protocols, limited clearances of limited duration to ex-Presidents so they can assemble their Presidential libraries.

There Are Votes

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…and there are votes.  In a Letter to the Editor in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal, a writer notes that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez got only about 16,000 votes out of a population of around 700,000—let’s say, with a naïve guess, 175,000 voters and out of a skosh under 28,000 votes actually cast in her primary.

That’s true as far as it goes. However, now she’s getting much more important votes—and lots of them—in the Progressive-Democratic Party as more and more Party members enthusiastically embrace her ideas.  She’s well and truly succeeding in moving the Party toward an outright socialist platform.

Progress?

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Is northern Korea starting to fulfill the commitment Baby Kim supposedly made to begin denuclearizing?

An American research group [38 North website] on Monday claimed that North Korea has begun dismantling its main missile-engine test site [Sohae Satellite Launching Station], a possible sign that Pyongyang is fulfilling the promises North Korean leader Kim Jong-un made to President Trump at the summit in Singapore last month.

Or is it simply taking the site apart and moving it somewhere else?  A lot of engine tests, after all, can be done underground.  Only time will tell.

I wonder because of the big deal being made about northern Korea’s lack of missile launches and nuclear bomb tests over the last several months, beginning just prior to the US-northern Korea summit in Singapore, and the tear down of (one of?) northern Korea’s underground nuclear bomb test sites.

There are a couple of potential reasons (among several) for those latter items.  One reason for the lack of launches and tests is that the northern Korea nuclear weapons program has reached a milestone, and it’s simply been consolidating and studying the data collected before it begins anew, building on the outcomes of those analyses.  Another alternative is that

[t]he overall importance of the Sohae missile site has also likely diminished…since North Korea, apparently satisfied with its missile design, had shifted to mass production last year.

Or, they could be acting on that alleged commitment.

One reason for the underground test site dismantling seems rather obvious, albeit ignored in the MLMSM.  This is the same site that People’s Republic of China analyses say was ruined by northern Korea’s last bomb test and the subsequent earthquakes at the site and the collapse of the underground portions of the site.  The explosive dismantling of the surface portions of the site could have been just PR.  Or, northern Korea could have been acting on that alleged commitment.

Don’t attend to the chit-chat going back and forth between the two governments; watch instead the actions of northern Korea.  So far, the series of actions taken by northern Korea are indistinguishable from propaganda.

And all of it must be viewed against the backdrop of northern Korea’s parallel commitment to return the remains of our soldiers who are formally MIA in last century’s Korean War, a commitment that, so far, Baby Kim has chosen to not keep.

Serious or Not?

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European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker came to DC Wednesday, allegedly to talk about trade.  Juncker came with no offers, or even ideas, to propose concerning the European Union’s trade status with the US , and he was proud of that lack.  Apparently, he just came for some idle chit-chat and to see the sights.  EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom, though, had some concrete things to say before Juncker left to come over.

If the tariff dispute were to include cars that would be a “disaster,”

Deutsche Welle cited her as saying.  And this, as paraphrased by DW:

trade is between companies and people, not between states. The citizens, she says, would end up paying the price for the quarrel.

President Donald Trump has already proposed, both to the G-7 and to the G-20, a completely tariff-free trade regime.  There is already an offer on the table, agreed in principle between the US and German auto companies, to have completely tariff-free auto and auto parts trade between the US and the EU.

The EU, the other six members of the G-7, and the other nineteen members of the G-20 refuse even to acknowledge, much less discuss, those no-tariff offers.

If Malmstrom is serious, why will she not discuss these things in Brussels, especially the removal of tariffs from the auto and auto parts trade?  If Malmstrom is serious, why is she not working to get the EU’s governance out of the way so companies and people can conduct their trade without EU interference?

In the event, Trump and Juncker did reach an agreement to discuss a deal–and to work toward realization of Trump’s offer of a no-tariff trade regime, and to include in that discussion talks with a view to working toward a no-subsidy and no-trade non-tariff barrier regime.

We’ll see what comes to fruition–any EU agreement requires unanimity across all 28 wildly philosophically disparate nations, any one of which can veto an agreement.