A House Impeachment Vote

Posted on 18 October 2019 by eehines

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA), as soon as she returned from the House’s vacation this week, announced that she would not hold a floor vote on whether President Donald Trump should be impeached and the associated investigation should begin forthwith. Many pundits say Pelosi’s refusal flows from her desire to protect some number of Progressive-Democrats purported to be vulnerable in the 2020 elections. This is naïve.

Neither Pelosi nor the Progressive-Democrat House caucus that she leads are interested in the slightest in any actual impeachment. Nor does that disinterest have anything to do with whether there’s a realistic expectation of getting a conviction in the Senate, with the effort’s failure constituting vindication for Trump.

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Hearings

Posted on 16 October 2019 by eehines

As some of you are aware, there are three committees in the House of Representatives that are conducting…hearings…purporting to investigate President Donald Trump with a view to impeach him over this or that Progressive-Democrat-perceived peccadillo, or simply to keep the smear alive after the failure of the Mueller investigation in order to prejudice the 2020 Presidential and Congressional (and down ballot) elections.

As you also are aware, these committees are conducting their hearings in secret, behind closed doors, doors that are so tightly sealed that Republican members of one of the three committees are barred from any of the other committees’ hearings.

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In Which Zuckerberg is Right

Posted on 10 October 2019 by eehines

Attorney General William Barr has taken up ex-FBI Director James Comey’s battle for government backdoors into private citizens’ encrypted private messages. Apple MFWIC Tim Cook won a similar fight regarding iPhone passwords and a demand that government should be allowed backdoors into those, and Comey’s FBI was shown to have been dissembling about that difficulty by the speed with which a contractor the FBI hired successfully broke into an iPhone the FBI had confiscated.

Now Barr has broadened the fight, demanding Facebook give Government backdoors into Facebook’s planned rollout of encryption for its messaging services. He wants Facebook, too, to hold off on its rollout until Government is satisfied it has such backdoors. Barr’s cynically misleading plaint includes this tearjerker:

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Hong Kong Police out of Control?

Posted on 8 October 2019 by eehines

Or is it President Xi Jinping’s staff member, Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam, who’s out of control? Or has she simply lost control?

First, the police shot, at point blank range, an 18-yr-old student (and arrested him for his role in the shooting), during the then-latest round of violence that Lam’s police have been provoking with their approved-thug attacks, water cannon, pepper spray, cudgels, brandished firearms, and then shooting those firearms into the air.

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Strength of Consent

Posted on 17 September 2019 by eehines

The people of Hong Kong are in their 15^th straight week of protest against the People’s Republic of China’s moves to intervene in Hong Kong’s internal affairs, to impose yet more PRC controls over a nominally free, “two systems” city.

People of all ages, many unmasked and some carrying children, walked more than 2 miles from a shopping district, where usually busy stores were shuttered, to downtown Hong Kong. Many chanted, “Five demands! Not one less!,” “Fight for freedom!” and “Revolution of our times!”

Those five demands, which do not add up to freedom, but are a necessary early step on the path to freedom, are these:

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Brexit and Sovereignty

Posted on 9 September 2019 by eehines

This is amazing. And an utter betrayal.

Senior MPs opposing a no-deal Brexit sought assurances from the EU that their bid for a three-month delay would be granted, it has emerged.
European leaders were sounded out before MPs, including the “rebel alliance,” passed a bill…forcing Boris Johnson to ask for an extension.

For the EU to participate in such scruffy deal would seem to be a naked interference in sovereign British domestic politics.

Except that….

On the one hand, this is those MPs selling out British sovereignty.

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Carrie Lam and Hong Kong

Posted on 6 September 2019 by eehines

Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam has said she’ll fully and formally withdraw her/People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping’s extradition bill completely. She even issued a formal statement claiming that, among other things. Many are touting this, and the other things, as major concessions to the demonstrators that have been in the streets of Hong Kong in their hundreds of thousands, even millions, for the last several months.

Those protestors have been demanding the bill’s formal and irrevocable withdrawal, Lam’s resignation, and an independent investigation into police misbehaviors during those protest demonstrations, among others things.

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Countrymen

Posted on 5 September 2019 by eehines

Claudia Rosett, of the Independent Women’s Forum, had an excellent op-ed in Monday’s Wall Street Journal. In essence, Rosett compared the PRC of 1989’s Tiananmen Square (she was there) with Hong Kong’s situation today (she was in Hong Kong over the summer), and her essential conclusion is

that for all China’s economic advances, it remains a brutal, dehumanizing tyranny in which the ruling Communist Party would rather destroy people than give them a genuine say in their government.

After all, we’re getting the same thing, so far, in Hong Kong:

Rather than give in to their legitimate demands, the Communist Party is readying its guns.

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Humans or Votes?

Posted on 1 September 2019 by eehines

You’d think these terms wouldn’t be alternatives to each other, rather, one would describe a single attribute of the other having reached a requisite age and citizenship.

But no.

Jason Riley described, in his Tuesday The Wall Street Journal op-ed, how the New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio administration has chosen to work hard to eliminate all standards for entry into what used to be the city’s elite schools, schools that especially benefitted the city’s poorest students, most of whom happen to be minority children.

Riley closed his piece with this plaintive question:

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Obliviously Dishonest

Posted on 28 August 2019 by eehines

Portland’s city government ran a survey of the residents therein to see if the government folks could understand the major problem facing those residents in the eyes of the residents. Homelessness was the biggie, with 88% of respondents saying so.

Respondents also had decidedly mixed views of the city’s future.

…45% of respondents said they felt positively about the city’s future, while an equal number declaring [sic] their pessimism.

On the matter of race, there’s this:

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