The People Have Spoken

The tally is nearly completely in for Hong Kong’s Sunday vote for local offices.

Local broadcaster RTHK reported that pro-democracy parties took 390 out of 452 seats in the district council, or nearly 90%.
The polls closed with 71.2% of eligible voters casting a ballot, the election commission said, easily surpassing the figure of 47% in the last such vote in 2015.

Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Carrie Lam suggests

The government will certainly listen humbly to citizens’ opinions and reflect on them seriously[.]

Yeah. She’ll think about it.  But will it act accordingly? Keep in mind, as you cogitate on that question, that the Lam government is nothing but a Beijing satrap.

Gordon Chang, who often writes for The Wall Street Journal and contributes to Fox News, is optimistic:

This is political annihilation for Beijing and it’s going to have consequences that are going to reverberate not just in Hong Kong itself, but perhaps in China as well….

He has a warning, though:

Carrie Lam, the Hong Kong chief executive, she reports directly to Xi Jinping. She no longer has any freedom of action. If he tells her not to give ground, which is what he’s been doing for the last several months, then you’re going to see Hong Kong erupt because, you know, people have expressed their will.
If the political establishment doesn’t make concessions, then we don’t know where this will go, but we know that will become probably much more violent and the protests will become even larger[.]

Are Xi and his Communist Party of China government listening?  Yes, most carefully.  But they’ll likely draw the wrong lessons.  I think we do know where this will go, and it won’t be pleasant, although it will be brief. Tanks rolling against a fundamentally unarmed civilian population will see to that, as was demonstrated in Tiananmen Square a little bit ago.

The US and our putative allies need to become more overt in supporting the good people of Hong Kong.  The PRC has already welched on its handover commitment and its pretense of a one country, two systems policy.

The Republic of China is watching the degree of our resolve, too.

A Court Error

It seems the Hong Kong High Court messed up.  Recall that, last week, the court ruled Chief Executive Carrie Lam’s “emergency” rule barring Hong Kong citizens from wearing masks was illegal. Lam’s rule, the court ruled

infringed on fundamental rights more than was reasonably necessary.

Oops.

The court, having received its marching orders from Beijing, through Lam’s government corrected itself:

following an appeal from the government to freeze the ruling, the court agreed to grant a one-week suspension in view of the “highly exceptional circumstances that Hong Kong is currently facing,” local broadcaster RTHK reported.

Just in time for today’s nominally free local—district—elections (elections to the city’s legislature won’t be for another year).

The Coming End to the Crisis in Hong Kong

The Wall Street Journal, in its piece on the latest and bloodiest overreaction by the People’s Republic of China’s President Xi Jiping to the protests in Hong Kong, asked how “the Hong Kong crisis can be deescalated.”

It will be in the same way that the Tiananmen Square crisis was deescalated; this is made clear by Chinese Defense Ministry spokesman Colonel Wu Qian. The WSJ cited him as saying that [emphasis added]

[President Xi Jinping] gave “the highest direction of the central government” to end violence and restore order in Hong Kong. He called it the army’s most pressing task in Hong Kong.

Look for the tanks to roll in the not-to-distant future.

If You’ve Got Nothing to Hide

Congressman Eric “Nuke ’em” Swalwell (D, CA) has come up with yet another bit of his distortion of our Constitution.

If the president of the United States is innocent, he will send the firsthand witnesses, John Bolton and Mick Mulvaney, to Congress.  If he’s guilty, they’ll stop us from hearing it, hard stop.

Because Guilty. He’s accused.

This is precisely the sort of invasive, prurient, government arrogance against which our Founders, the authors of our Constitution, and us citizens led the fight against, wrote into our Constitution, and ratified—including the 4th Amendment:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Swalwell must get a warrant.  He doesn’t get to peek through our windows—even through an opposing politician’s or associates of an opposing politician’s windows—just because his prying mind wants to peek.  Nothing to hide? Our privacy is all we have to hide, and it’s sufficient that we choose to protect it.  If we’re innocent? We start out that way; it’s on Swalwell and his Government cronies to prove we’re not.

And this gem:

I wanted the American people to see that these [William Taylor and Gordon Kent]…share what they saw as far as wrongdoing….

Except by their own admission under oath during the Wednesday’s hearing they saw absolutely nothing as far as wrongdoing. All they could do was describe things they’d heard others say, through an often highly convoluted grapevine.

Even Congressman Nuke ’em knows this, or he wasn’t watching the hearing. This is a measure of the level of integrity that our Progressive-Democrat politicians hold.

What Do We Have So Far

Wednesday’s “impeachment” hearing is in the can, and here’s what we know from it.

All Acting Ambassador to Ukraine William Taylor and State Department’s Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs George Kent could offer throughout the entire 6-ish hours of testimony was hearsay and supposition.

Taylor repeatedly said he’d heard this, or someone reported to him that, or it came to him through a chain of tellings and retellings. “I heard it from a guy who heard it from a guy (who heard it from a guy).” He also insisted that Progressive-Democrat claims of wrongs done by President Donald Trump vis-à-vis Ukraine were his understanding, too, even his clear understanding.  Yet when directly asked how he arrived at his understandings, all he could say was, “Well, I heard it from a guy….” Even his in-hearing “revelation”—that Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland thought Trump, in the runup to and during the telecon, only cared about a Biden investigation—was nothing more than that Taylor had heard it from guy: Sondland reporting to Taylor Sondland’s own “understanding.”

Sondland’s understanding? Congressman Jim Jordan (R, OH) spelled out an example of Sondland’s…understandings:

Ambassador Taylor recalls that Mr [Tim] Morrison told Ambassador Taylor that I told Mr Morrison that I had conveyed this message to Mr [Andriy] Yermak on September 1, 2019, in connection with Vice President Pence’s visit to Warsaw and a meeting with President [Volodymyr] Zelensky[.]

When asked if either had talked to Zelenskiy or Trump or Trump associates themselves, both Kent and Taylor had nothing to say except that they had talked to none of the principles or associates of the principles.  All they had was their grapevines.

There were, though, some actual facts revealed in Wednesday’s hearing:

  • Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said—repeatedly and on the world stage during multiple press conferences that he held—there was no pressure, no influence attempted
  • Despite Progressive-Democrat Intelligence Committee members’ claims that Trump had intimidated Zelenskiy into beginning or publicly announcing the need for investigations under threat of aid cut-off, Zelenskiy began no investigations, made no such public averrals. The aid was released shortly after the telecon
  • Ukraine’s government didn’t know aid had been held up until long after the telecon
  • Ukrainian aid had been held up over skepticism about endemic Ukrainian corruption; it was released when the White House staff became satisfied that Zelenskiy and his staff were “the real deal”
  • Progressive-Democrats, having failed in their quid pro quo quest, now are turning to the even more difficult to prove extortion/bribery (they can’t decide which) charge
  • Intel Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D, CA) continues to refuse to allow the principle witness to this affair, the reputed whistleblower—whose own claim is based solely on hearsay—to be called to testify
  • By extension, Schiff also won’t allow the whistleblower’s reputed sources to be called to testify

This is the level to which the Progressive-Democratic Party has sunk.

Today’s hearing will be…interesting?