Winning the War with the PRC

Retired US Navy Captain and current Telemus Group Vice President Jerry Hendrix expresses considerable dismay over our Navy’s shrinking air combat reach, and it’s entirely justified.

In 1996 the range of the carrier’s air wing was about 800 nautical miles. By 2006 that figure had dropped to 500 miles. Meanwhile, China has developed antiship missiles like the Dong Feng-21, the “carrier killer,” with a range of 1,000 miles.

He concluded his op-ed with this:

[Absent] long-range, penetrating strike aircraft…carriers will be unable to make a meaningful contribution to deterring and, if necessary, winning a conventional conflict with China…. To avoid that unfortunate outcome, civilian leaders, including lawmakers and the Navy secretary, will need to step in to get naval aviation back on target.

He’s right up to a point. That’s a necessary step, but it’s not sufficient. The Navy needs also to expand and increase its capability with ship-launched land attack missiles (along with expanding its arsenal of air-launched land attack missiles and their range).

The PRC aims to overwhelm ship defenses with raw numbers of anti-ship missiles. We need to overwhelm PRC defenses with numbers of accurate, maneuvering, penetrating missiles to destroy PRC facilities. We have the core of this, already—as we do for an expanded naval aviation facility. That core is in the ship-launched anti-ship missile weapons in inventory and in the submarine-launched cruise missiles in inventory. Those need, badly, to be expanded: the anti-ship weapons on board augmented with long-range land-attack missiles, and the SLCMs on board augmented with long-range cruise missiles. Along with getting long-range air-launched land attack missiles into the inventory.

Absent these, the outcome of a war with the PRC will be catastrophic: we’ll be swept from the Western Pacific, and there’s no reason to believe the PRC wouldn’t follow up that success in the way Japan could not 80 years ago.

Progressive-Democrat Strikes Again

Austria is locking up down into their homes all Austrian citizens who remain unvaccinated against the Wuhan Virus.

World renowned epidemiologist and Progressive-Democrat Arne Duncan, late Secretary of ex-President Barack Obama’s (D) Education Department, says that’s a good idea.

If you [sic] a danger to yourself and others, you must remain at home. If you aren’t, you are free to roam around the country. Austria is onto something…

Then he closed his deal with this:

I look forward to the day when we Americans value the health, safety, and well-being of our neighbors at least as much as we value our personal freedom.

Those pesky freedoms. How they do get in the way of our Know Betters telling us how to live our lives. For our own good, of course.

Duncan’s position, the core ideology of the Progressive-Democratic Party, is a clear illustration that our safety and well-being, along with those of our neighbors, are at greatest risk when we lose those personal freedoms.

The Left and their Party know this full well, which is why they’re at such pains to disparage our personal freedoms.

Not Government Overreach

Biden-Harris and zir’s Merrick Garland-led Department of Justice’s FBI executed a pre-dawn raid on Project Veritas‘ founder and boss James O’Keefe’s home, searched it, and seized his phones and began searching through the phones. This is separate from the FBI’s raid on the homes of reporters working for Project Veritas.

A federal judge ordered the Department of Justice to stop extracting data from the phones of Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe days after his home was raided….

According to the order, the DOJ must confirm to the court by Friday that it has paused its review of O’Keefe’s phones.

Days after. The FBI has had those days to extract, copy, and paw through the data.

A special master has been appointed by the court to oversee this and to cull the data that the Privacy Protection Act, along with DoJ regulations, explicitly bar Government from seizing from reporters. However, on what basis do we believe the FBI has actually “paused” its review? Even were the phones physically transferred to the possession of this special master, on what basis do we believe that agents this government have stopped pawing through the data they’ve seized? On what basis do we believe those agents of this government have destroyed—or even sequestered—their copies?

Among those data are

confidential and privileged information…of our reporters, including legal, donor, and confidential source communications

And

reporters’ notes. A lot of…sources unrelated to this story and a lot of confidential donor information to our news organization.

This is not overreach. This is naked abuse of raw power and a deliberate, considered disregard for law, for the liberties and rights of American citizens.

It’s going to be a long three years.

(Aside: what was this stuff doing on a cell phone, anyway? This is taking convenience too far at the expense of security.)

Biden-Harris Diktat

The 5th Circuit has affirmed its stay of OSHA’s mandate that employers must require—be deputiz[ed] their participation in OSHA’s regulatory scheme as the court acknowledged—employee vaccines, testing, or termination, or face deliberately destructive fines for not doing so.

An array of petitioners seeks a stay barring OSHA from enforcing the Mandate during the pendency of judicial review. On November 6, 2021, we agreed to stay the Mandate pending briefing and expedited judicial review. Having conducted that expedited review, we reaffirm our initial stay.

The appellate court went on:

[T]he Mandate…exposes them [the covered businesses] to severe financial risk if they refuse or fail to comply, and threatens to decimate their workforces (and business prospects) by forcing unwilling employees to take their shots, take their tests, or hit the road.

And [citation omitted, emphasis added]:

Under the traditional stay standard, a court considers four factors: “(1) whether the stay applicant has made a strong showing that he is likely to succeed on the merits; (2) whether the applicant will be irreparably injured absent a stay; (3) whether issuance of the stay will substantially injure the other parties interested in the proceeding; and (4) where the public interest lies.”
Each of these factors favors a stay here.

Regarding that first criterion, whether the stay applicant is likely to succeed on merit:

[T]he Mandate’s strained prescriptions combine to make it the rare government pronouncement that is both overinclusive (applying to employers and employees in virtually all industries and workplaces in America, with little attempt to account for the obvious differences between the risks facing, say, a security guard on a lonely night shift, and a meatpacker working shoulder to shoulder in a cramped warehouse) and underinclusive (purporting to save employees with 99 or more coworkers from a “grave danger” in the workplace, while making no attempt to shield employees with 98 or fewer coworkers from the very same threat).

And [emphasis in the original]:

The Mandate’s stated impetus—a purported “emergency” that the entire globe has now endured for nearly two years, and which OSHA itself spent nearly two months responding to—is unavailing as well.

And:

OSHA’s attempt to shoehorn an airborne virus that is both widely present in society (and thus not particular to any workplace) and non-life-threatening to a vast majority of employees into a neighboring phrase connoting toxicity and poisonousness is yet another transparent stretch.

Any argument OSHA may make that COVID-19 is a “new hazard[]” would directly contradict OSHA’s prior representation to the D.C. Circuit that “[t]here can be no dispute that COVID-19 is a recognized hazard.”

And [citation omitted, emphasis added]:

It is thus critical to note that the Mandate makes no serious attempt to explain why OSHA and the President himself were against vaccine mandates before they were for one here.

Because it is generally “arbitrary or capricious” to “depart from a prior policy sub silentio,” agencies must typically provide a “detailed explanation” for contradicting a prior policy, particularly when the “prior policy has engendered serious reliance interests.” OSHA’s reversal here strains credulity, as does its pretextual basis. Such shortcomings are all hallmarks of unlawful agency actions.

The ruling goes on in similar veins regarding the other three factors of consideration for issuing a stay.

Here is an example of the Progressive-Democrat administration’s penchant for ruling by diktat and its utter disregard for pesky laws, our Constitution, and We the People—our government’s employers—when any of them, or us, become inconvenient to any Progressive-Democrat wish.

Especially in this regard, as the court noted in its assessment of the degree of harm to us individual citizens were a stay of this OSHA rule not granted, is this [citation retained]:

For the individual petitioners, the loss of constitutional freedoms “for even minimal periods of time…unquestionably constitutes irreparable injury.” Elrod v Burns, 427 U.S. 347, 373 (1976) (“The loss of First Amendment freedoms, for even minimal periods of time, unquestionably constitutes irreparable injury.”).

The court’s ruling can be read here.

Government Controls

Here’s the latest version of the Biden-Harris administration’s attempt to expand government control over our economy, this time using Medicare drug pricing as their venue. This example also is the latest inclusion in the Progressive-Democratic Party’s reconciliation bill.

The Health and Human Services Secretary will “negotiate” 10 to 20 of the drugs that Medicare spends most on, starting in 2025. Drug makers will get socked with a 95% excise tax on gross sales if they don’t agree to the government’s price.

This is a textbook example of the fascism version of socialism. Companies are free to produce and sell whatever they want, so long as it fits within Government requirements directing what is produced, the volume of production, and the prices to be charged.

Yet, Biden can’t make the trucks run on time.