Category Archives: politics

A Plenty Good Enough Reason

Posted on by
Reply

President Donald Trump (R) is preparing a series of sanctions against the anti-Semitic International Criminal Court and the bigots populating it. Naturally, those…persons…are unhappy. One carefully anonymous official:

The concern is the sanctions will be used to shut the court down, to destroy it rather than just tie its hands[.]

After all, as Ellie Grant wrote at the link,

Such a move, they say, could bring the court to a standstill, severely hindering its access to the services it depends on to function.
One of the most significant risks posed by sanctions would be the disruption of the court’s ability to access banking and payment systems, IT infrastructure, and insurance providers. A complete block on these services, including US-based companies, would apparently cripple the court’s day-to-day operations.

Since this institution spends so much of its time, funding, IT work, and insurance proceeds attacking Israel and the men and women of the Israeli government on trumped up complaints, these are sufficient, and necessary, reasons for applying the sanctions and shutting off, and shutting down, the nakedly biased institution.

Bureaucratic Passive-Aggressive Resistance

Posted on by
Reply

It’s in progress, as Federal agency personnel pretend they don’t know how to do their jobs in light of President Donald Trump’s (R) directives to them.

The Transportation Department temporarily shut down a computer system for road projects. Health agencies stopped virtually all external communications in a directive that risked silencing timely updates on infectious diseases. A hiring freeze left agencies wondering how parts of the government could adapt to new demands. Confusion loomed over how agencies should disburse funds allocated by the previous administration.

Computers are confused about how to deal with existing and proposed road projects. Sure.

Health agencies personnel are holding their breath until they turn blue in the face—or get their way. These personnel are self-selecting for the coming RIF.

Managers who can’t figure out how to use the personnel they have—and have had all along, less retirements and resignations—to continue their statutory mission are demonstrating their unfitness to be managers.

Funds allocated by the Biden administration—allocated, mind you, not spent—should not be spent. It’s not that hard.

Then there’s this bit of resistance:

[S]ome longtime federal employees said the chaos seemed more extreme this week due in part to wide-spanning differences between the agendas of the previous administration and the incoming one.

This is an example of the failure of the current civil service system and why it needs to be replaced. There’s no reason for the chaos: the so-called wide-spanning differences don’t exist. The previous administration’s agenda no longer exists, so there’s nothing from which to differ.

To be sure, there is a new agenda and a new corporate culture in place; if those long-time Federal employees can’t adapt, and do so quickly, they need to be retired or RIFed. They’re just in the way, wasting us taxpayers’ payroll.

Folks, mostly on the Left and in the Progressive-Democratic Party, wonder why there’s so little confidence, much less trust, in Federal bureaucrats and the Bureaucratic State. We average Americans, who aren’t as dumb as the Left tries to make us out to be, understand full well why.

DOGE’s Mission

Posted on by
1

And the mission of the Republican majorities in both houses of Congress has cutting spending at the top of their lists. Fraud, waste, and abuse has been the empty word chants of politicians from both parties for far too many years.

Now there’s a concrete example of waste, and of waste of a magnitude that it could easily obscure double potsful of outright fraud and abuse.

The federal government reported net costs of $7.4 trillion in fiscal year 2024, but it couldn’t fully account for its spending. The US Government Accountability Office, which is Congress’s research arm, said that the federal government must address “serious deficiencies” in federal financial management and correct course on its “unsustainable” long-term fiscal path.

Absolutely. One way to light a fire under the behinds of the bureaucrats who manage these departments and agencies—from the political appointees nominally in charge on down through middle management—along with those entities and personnel required to report to the former is to cut those department and agency budgets by the amount of unaccounted for spending by each department and agency. In parallel with that, identify by name the personnel responsible for the tracking, and identify by name and entity those responsible for reporting to these trackers, and deal with them, publicly shaming where useful, firing for cause where necessary, and terminating contracts of those responsible for reporting and not doing so or not doing so accurately.

Yes, that includes DoD, which hasn’t bothered to track its own spending well enough to pass an audit in the last too many years. We’re not plussing up our military, we’re not building a combat force, when DoD is losing track of its money and so isn’t spending its money on training, equipment, and logistics.

The incompetence, laziness, and criminality of those responsible for actually spending—and tracking their spending—the monies allocated to them are threats to our national security regardless of the specific spender. So are those not bothering to report accurately and completely up the chain to those trackers. That alone should make the laziness and incompetence involved as felonious as the fraud itself.

There’s Clemency, and There’s Clemency

Posted on by
Reply

On his way, almost literally, out the door, now-ex-President Joe Biden (D) issued preemptive pardons to Congressional members of the J6 Committee and the committee’s staffers. Congressman Barry Loudermilk (R, GA), running the follow-on committee for the last two years, has the right of it:

You don’t forgive somebody of something unless they have potentially done something[.]
I mean, to me, this is basically, if not an actual admission, it’s truly the perception of admitting that there was wrongdoing done[.]

And, as Just the News put it at the link:

It was a stunning act…that begged a provocative question: what did an official panel of Congress do that was so bad it needed to be absolved by an act of presidential clemency?

It’s instructive that none of those preemptively pardoned—Congressmen and staffers alike—have rejected Biden’s pardon, not even on the grounds that they don’t need it and don’t want it, being innocent of wrong-doing in the first place. Not even Senator Adam Schiff (D, CA) who as Congressman was a member of that committee, declined the pardon, going no farther than to protest the lack of necessity for it.

Winning in court is a high financial price to pay for one’s innocence, to be sure, but those haled in have avenues for being made whole: malicious prosecution, for instance, and in civil cases, collecting costs from those who sued and lost. They’re not even settling in order to avoid costs; they’re ducking down behind their pardons.

How would they get their reputations back after going through trial? On the other hand, how will they get their reputations back after having been pardoned? At least with court outcomes, they’d have official declarations of no wrong-doing. Their acceptance of these pardons deny them even of that much, even as those acceptances do nothing to lend credibility to claims of having done nothing wrong.

I echo JtN’s question: what have they done that’s so bad they fear exposure in court?

Gore Both Oxes

Posted on by
Reply

In Matthew Mimnaugh’s (ex-Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Chief Counsel, among other such positions) Wall Street Journal op-ed, he decried the Republican Party’s lack of success, apparently due to lack of effort, in gerrymandering Red States compared to the Progressive-Democratic Party’s success at gerrymandering Blue States to gain Federal House of Representatives seats. After all, he noted,

In 2000, the House GOP earned its thin majority of 221 while outpolling Dick Gephardt’s Democrats nationwide by less than 0.05 percentage point. In 2024, despite a nearly 4-point popular-vote advantage, Speaker Mike Johnson has a majority of only 220.

Mimnaugh’s solution is for Republicans to become better gerrymanderers. Gerrymandering, he noted, is a tradition almost as old as our republic. It’s also, it seems to this average American denizen of flyover country, unconstitutional, for all its long-standing nature. Here’s Art I, Sect 2, of our Constitution on the matter of Congressional representation:

The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative….

There’s nothing in there about divvying up that sectioning in order to favor this or that party—or this or that race, come to that. It’s certainly the case that standing on ceremony and insisting on a maximum constituency of 30,000 per Representative, which with a national population of 340 million would result in a House of some 11,333 Representatives, would be politically and practically…impractical.

The gerrymandering bit, however, is easily corrected, and the correction better done than by competing gerrymander schemes every 10 years. The obvious solution is to divide each State by the number of Representatives to which it is apportioned every 10 years, thereby arriving at the number of Congressional districts into which the State would be divided. This is the current procedure. However, instead of drawing district boundaries explicitly to favor this or that party and this or that race, divide each State into substantially equally populated districts, and starting at the State’s geographic center, draw the districts as squares with the first four districts having one corner each anchored on that center. Then work in concentric “circles” around those four until the requisite numbers of districts are drawn.

For States with three Representatives, divide them into three substantially equally populated triangles anchored on that center with straight lines marking their mutual boundaries. For States with two representatives, divide each into two substantially equally populated districts with a straight line marking their mutual boundary. The reductionist case of one Representative is obvious.

In all cases, the only deviation from straight line district boundaries allowed would be at a State’s boundary with a neighboring State or neighboring nation, or in Hawaii’s case, the ocean shore line.

We are, after all, all Americans, all equal under law, and all voters, each with an equally valid and valued vote, without regard to party or race. Americans under law and as voters are as well party-blind and color-blind.