Part of the Task

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President-elect Donald Trump (R) is, supposedly, drafting an Executive Order that would create a warrior board whose purpose would be to review three- and four-star officers and to recommend removals of any deemed unfit for leadership. The board would consist of retired general and noncommissioned officers.

The draft order [if it’s actually being drafted] says it aims to establish a review that focuses “on leadership capability, strategic readiness, and commitment to military excellence.” The draft doesn’t specify what officers need to do or present to show if they meet those standards.

Such a review and removal has been needed for some time. Flag rank is a political rank as well as a military one, but for some years, now, the political has taken precedence over the military in the minds of too many flag-ranks. Nor do the officers need to do or present anything to show whether they meet those standards; the board, presumably, would have access to the officers’ personnel records, and the board would have in front of it those officers’ recent empirical performances in the staff and command positions they’ve been holding.

There are a couple of additional steps, though, that remain to be taken. One is that the board membership needs to be lined up, if less publicly than Trump’s Cabinet and staff picks, and ready to be appointed in the minutes after the EO is signed.

The other step is to set up a similar board to review the senior civilian posts and their incumbents with a view to removing those personages who fail to have the requisite leadership capability, strategic readiness, and commitment to military excellence. This board also should review all of the civilian positions with a view to identifying those positions not actually needed. Those incumbents should be returned to the private sector along with those civilians who failed the explicit leadership review. The latter, however, should be returned without opprobrium or stigma.

It’s time DoD was put back into the role of building, maintaining, and supporting a lethal military establishment capable of taking on our enemies in two and a half simultaneous wars and defeating those enemies so decisively they cannot attack us again for a long time. Two and a half simultaneous wars? That was the DOC of our military at the height of the Cold War, and Russia, the People’s Republic of China, and Iran are bent on another Cold War against us, with two of them already engaged in hot wars against a friend and an ally, and the third threatening and girding itself for a hot war against another of our friends.

Time’s a-wasting.

Terrorist Chimera

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Hamas and Hezbollah say they have reached a concord regarding governing Gaza once the war Hamas inflicted on Israel and in which Hezbollah enthusiastically joined with Hamas is at an end.

Palestinian officials from both factions, long bitter rivals, have reached a consensus to create an apolitical committee of Palestinian technocrats not affiliated with either of them to manage the sensitive and massive jobs of aid distribution and rebuilding, Palestinian and other Arab officials said.

Tariq Kenney-Shawa, of the Palestinian Policy Network:

They have a lot more room and urgency for common ground now and to avoid being sidelined[.]

There expressed is the chimera of the concord. Hamas and Hezbollah don’t want to be sidelined in setting up the governing body or in its operation.

Nor will they be, if their proposal is accepted; they’ll remain in complete control: keep in mind who would be selecting these technocrats, or at the least who would have the final say in their selection. It’s beyond naïve to believe that personnel selected by the terrorist entities wouldn’t be tied to those entities.

So Much for Bipartisanship

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In a Wall Street Journal piece on the difficulties of a slim Republican House majority, even with president-elect Donald Trump (R) in the White House, the news writer ended with this warning from Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal (D, WA):

Democrats will be united for a block and tackle, and let them [Republicans] figure out how they’re going to run[.]

This is the Progressive-Democratic Party continuing its refusal to work seriously on legislation, focusing only on knee-jerk obstruction of anything Republican, overlain with knee-jerk obstruction of anything Trumpian. This is Party refusing to be part of a two-party government.

Just one more reason to break with history and expand the number of Republicans in the House (and in the Senate, come to that) during the midterms in a couple of years.

Ending Racial Disparities in Education

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President-elect Donald Trump (R) has big plans for America’s education system, including expanding school choice opportunities and eliminating the Department of Education.

Good riddance to the DoEd, I say; it has fatally poisoned itself in two ways, either of which alone is fatal. One is with its emphasis on DEI claptrap at the expense of actual education. The other is with its moves to end due process regarding student sex offense allegations, insisting instead that the girl should be believed on the face of her allegations, attempting to deny the boy legal representation in what at bottom is an accusation of a crime, attempting to deny the boy the opportunity to bring his own witnesses and to cross examine the girl’s witnesses and the girl.

I strongly urge, should the effort to abolish DoEd succeed, that all DoEd personnel (that’s 100% of them for those following along at home) be returned to the private sector rather than reassigned elsewhere in the Federal government. Yes, yes, one proposal being considered is simply to consolidate DoEd with the Department of the Interior. This is unnecessary, and as a sidelight, would continue the bloat in the Federal Civil Service ranks. If it’s reasonable that Interior can do DoEd’s erstwhile job, it has plenty of otherwise excess personnel who can be repurposed to the function. There is no need to import from DoEd.

That’s at the top of our education system. The real progress, the real improvements, will come from addressing racial disparities from the bottom up—pre-school on up through the 12th grade. Those disparities range from excusing misbehaving minority students because students who happen to be white or Asian heritage misbehave at lower rates to grading minority students more leniently than their counterparts on the basis of “culture.”

Throwing money at teachers union-run public schools while maintaining their monopoly in some jurisdictions and near-monopoly in others has been an utter failure. It’s those schools that have the greatest racial disparity in education outcomes. Public schools do not provide the same quality education across the spread of the variety of majority and minority students; the economically poorer students are consigned to the poorer schools.

School choice programs, generally centered on committing public moneys to students rather than to the schools they attend, and getting bureaucracy out of the way of putting charter and voucher schools into operation, would allow those economically poorer students (who are primarily but not exclusively minority students) to be able to afford to leave the public school system in favor of one of those alternatives or to home schooling milieus. Each of these three have shown themselves to be, on the whole, superior in educational outcome to the public schools in their districts. That competition, too, has improved the outcomes at the public schools; although so far, that outcome improvement is only just measurable, it’s not as great as the improvements provided by those alternatives.

Too, discipline is stronger in the alternatives, and that discipline contributes to the improvements in student education: the misbehaving students either stop misbehaving and so do better academically or they are more easily suspended or expelled. Beyond that, the misbehavers don’t disrupt the other students’ learning opportunities and so their performance also improves.

Maybe Not the Best Choice

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President-elect Donald Trump (R) has chosen Congresswoman Elise Stefanik (R, NY) to be his Ambassador to the UN.

This is a mistake; although it’s no knock on Stefanik to say so. My problems with her selection are these.

With the Republicans retaining their House majority still up in the air a week after the election, even if they succeed, it’ll be a slim majority. Her departure from the House would trigger a special election, and while it’s unlikely that another Republican would lose that seat, that’s a non-zero probability.

More importantly, she’s too badly needed in the House, especially with the ability in this narrow majority environment of the Republicans’ Chaos Caucus to continue their foolishnesses. Stefanik is a skilled Congresswoman who could continue to tamp down (if not entirely successfully in the last Congress) those foolishesses.

Stefanik’s replacement is unlikely to be as effective as she has been as a Congresswoman, and especially neither that replacement nor an existing Congressman will be as successful as she has been in the House’s Republican caucus hierarchy or on her committee assignments.

The UN Ambassadorship’s role itself isn’t as important as her role in the House. Our UN Ambassador’s role, because the majority of the UN nations hate us or our allies and friends or both, is limited to calling out those nations’ misbehaviors and to vetoing their initiatives on the Security Council. There are a number of folks besides Stefanik who could fill that role.