Monthly Archives: April 2024

Backwards

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The arrogance of the Biden-Garland DoJ is on full display with its continued refusal to provide the audio tapes of the Hur-Joe Biden interviews.

The Biden-Garland refusal, through Garland’s Assistant Attorney General Carlos Uriarte, in their letter to the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees that require the tapes:

We have repeatedly invited the Committees to identify how these audio recordings from law enforcement files would serve the purposes for which you say you want them[.]
We have also repeatedly urged the Committees to avoid unnecessary conflict and to respect the public interest in the Department’s ability to conduct effective investigations by protecting sensitive law enforcement files. The Committees have repeatedly failed to explain your needs or to demonstrate respect for the Department’s law enforcement functions[.]

Nor Congress nor any of its committees have any obligation to satisfy the demands of the DoJ. The obligation runs in the opposite direction: the DoJ must satisfy the Congress and its committees of the reasons why it cannot—not does not want to, but cannot—turn over the materials called for by the Congress or any of its committees.

If Biden-Garland are truly interested in avoiding unnecessary conflict, they will instruct the DoJ to stop forcing one and turn over the tapes. If they continue to refuse, then the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees must formally subpoena the tapes, if they have not already, promptly move to hold AG Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress over this refusal, and then withhold funding, including salaries, from the Office of the Attorney General and from the White House Office until the contempt is satisfied.

Regarding respect for the Department’s law enforcement functions, this is especially risible. If the Biden-Garland DoJ wants to be respected and wants its law enforcement functions to be respected, they must behave respectably. The former would begin by turning over the tapes without any further stalling. The latter cannot begin to behave respectably until there’s a complete replacement of those functions’ top managers, teams that variously lie to or condone lying to FISA courts, and who have accused traditional Catholics of dangerous extremism, accused mothers objecting to school board woke policies of being terrorists, and on and on.

Shared Responsibility

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A wide range of colleges and universities are suffering millions of dollars in damages done their facilities by pro-Hamas, pro-terrorist gangs masquerading themselves as pro-Palestinians in their destructive and antisemitic disruptions [link in the original].

California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, closed down its campus on Saturday “due to ongoing occupation of Siemens Hall and Nelson Hall, as well as continued challenges with individuals breaking laws in the area surrounding the buildings and the quad,” the northern California public university said. Classes were moved online and students who live on campus are allowed to remain in their residence halls and in dining facilities, but they are not allowed on any other parts of campus.
Students at Cal Poly Humboldt appear to have renamed one of the occupied buildings “Intifada Hall.” That building is littered with trash and debris, while the walls are covered with graffiti in support of Palestinians in Gaza, video shows.

And

“Free Palestine” and “Palestine” were graffitied on two buildings at the University of Portland, a private Catholic school in Oregon that is not facing a student occupation. Campus Safety and Emergency Management Director Michael McNerney told The Beacon, a student newspaper, that the clean-up cost is estimated to be in the thousands.

And

Protest encampments have sprung up at more than three dozen private and public schools across the United States since Columbia University students in New York City began a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” earlier this month.

It’s true enough that the schools’ pupils and no small number of interlopers are the ones proximately doing the vandalism.

However, the schools’ management teams bear at least equal responsibility for these costs—which will, most assuredly, be passed along to students, future students, and their families in increased tuition and fees charged. Those management teams, through their tacit condoning of these disruptions and attendant vandalism, through their outright cowardice in not confronting these disrupters and vandals, or both, allow and encourage the damages being done.

Those same teams could have prevented the vast bulk of these damages and costs had they confronted the disrupters at the start, permanently expelling the pupils involved and having arrested the pupils and interlopers doing the vandalism and bringing them to trial. Those teams—or better, their replacements—could prevent further damage by immediately permanently expelling the pupils involved and having arrested the pupils and interlopers doing the vandalism and bringing them to trial.

Biden would be Encouraged

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That’s what’s in the REPO Act, or Rebuilding Economic Prosperity and Opportunity for Ukrainians Act, which is included in the latest Ukrainian aid package.

It encourages Mr Biden to transfer frozen Russian reserves to a trust fund for Ukraine.

Those frozen assets amount to some $300 billion, globally. Count on Biden, though, to decline to be encouraged.

He won’t touch those frozen assets. He’s already been…encouraged…by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin to slow-walk delivery of the weapons Ukraine needs actually to defeat the barbarian and drive him back out of Ukraine. He’s already been…encouraged…by Putin to deny altogether other weapons that would facilitate a Ukrainian outright victory.

Biden has—supposedly—been working on lending money to Ukraine that’s based on the interest accruing on all those frozen Russian assets. As Robert Zoellick put it in his op-ed at the link above, though,

Washington, London, and Ottawa should instead transfer all the frozen Russian assets in their currencies worldwide to a trust fund for Ukraine while urging Europeans to act when they can agree. If Europeans won’t use Russian assets, they can’t expect others to keep paying. After all, the war is in Europe.

Indeed.

Berlin and Paris have been the principal obstacles. Washington can assuage their anxieties.

Don’t bother. If Germany and France wish to render themselves irrelevant to the barbarian’s annihilative war, honor their desire. Move on without them, and move on with those eastern Europe nations still fresh from under the barbarian’s jackboots, Poland and the Baltic States especially, along with newly alert Finland and Sweden.

Turn as much of those $300 billion as are in the direct or indirect jurisdiction of the US and others at least nominally interested in crushing the barbarian’s invasion (if not the barbarian himself) into that trust fund, or better, into a fund on which Ukraine can draw directly, at need. And make the weapons Ukraine might wish to buy or lend/lease available for immediate sale/borrow/lease and delivery in the numbers Ukraine needs.

Israel and Genocide

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In a WSJ article regarding the present explosion of Hamas terrorist pro-Palestinian protests and the demands of disruptors perpetrating these “protests” that the colleges and universities divest from Israel-related investments, there is the disruptors’ claims that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip (and, presumably in the West Bank). This claim is risible on its face.

Genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group. Even if we take the terrorists’ own claims of casualties in Gaza as accurate—30,000 casualties—this hardly constitutes genocide: those casualties are only a bit over 1% of the Gaza Strip population. If Israel is committing genocide, the nation is atrociously bad at it. At most, that casualty figure would constitute nothing more than Israeli carelessness in protecting civilians as Israel moves to defend itself against the terrorists who inflicted the rapes and child butcheries of October 7 (more on this below).

Regarding actual genocide, Nazi Germany attempted extermination of Jews.

The Hutus attempted, and nearly succeeded at, genocide against the Tutsis in the Rwandan “civil” war.

The People’s Republic of China is attempting genocide against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang.

Regarding Israeli responsibility vis-à-vis those Gazan casualties: what the disruptors carefully ignore is that Hamas uses Gaza Strip civilian residents as shields behind which the terrorists hide during firefights, and they use those civilian residents’ residential buildings, schools, hospitals, and mosques(!) as weapon storage sites, housing for their command centers, and as places from which to launch their weapons against Israel and against IDF forces in Gaza.

Further, the IDF is so careless in its handling of civilians in target zones that it’s at pains to warn those civilians of impending attacks so that the civilians can leave before the attack goes in—which gives the terrorists the same warnings and opportunities to leave, when the terrorists aren’t staying and forcing the warned civilians to stay also as shields for their terrorist captors, and to run up the civilian casualty count purely for terrorist propaganda.

No, the state of Israel is the victim of an ongoing genocide attempt, including the series of wars of extermination inflicted on the nation in the latter half of the 20th century, and as most recently and plainly announced by major Hamas leader Ghazi Hamad, who promised serial October 7s until Israel is destroyed.

Of course these disruptors—who insist they are so much better informed and so much smarter than us average Americans—know these things. Their genocide claim is nothing but an illustration of their dishonesty and of their support for the terrorists bent on exterminating Israel.

Just as despicable, though, is the cowardice of the schools’ managers who refuse even to address the lie of Israeli genocide. They’d rather bow down to the disruptors.

Nuclear Missile Defense

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In their Thursday missive to The Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section, Laura Grego and Lisbeth Gronlund, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, wrote correctly that defending against relatively low-flying and short-range rockets that Israel’s Iron Dome does so well is different from defending against long-range, fast, exoatmospheric missiles.

But then they segued to their strawman argument.

…potential adversaries will develop systems to counter a potential buildup or improvement in defenses.

Missiles and missile defense are in an arms race. Who knew?

Instructively, these two scientists offered no alternative solution to the national security problem of defending against nuclear attack.

Apparently, their position—implied by their careful silence on how actually to defend against nuclear attack—is that we should stop trying to defend ourselves; we should instead merely surrender when an enemy mentions its own nuclear capability.