Tag Archives: government

55,000 Emails

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…on the wall, 55,000 emails.

Take one down, and read it out loud….

(Sorry)

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said that, with those 55,000 emails, she’s released all the relevant ones.

Couple things about that. 55,000 emails over a four year tour of duty works out to less than 40 emails per day. Split that in half (naively), and say 20 were from Clinton—or sent for her over her signature block—and 20 were to her. We’re supposed to believe that the Secretary of State of the United States only did 20 emailed conversations per day? Really? My wife, who works for a large-ish networking company, gets over 100 per day. Inbound.

The second thing is this: whose definition of “relevant?” These emails’ relevance were determined by Hillary “What difference, at this point, does it make” Clinton.

Hmm….

A Conservative’s View of American Domestic Policy: Some Thoughts

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It’s out.

This is the first of a pair of publications on American policy; the other is concerned with National Policy, which consists of foreign and defense policy.

Domestic Policy both is necessary in its own right and must come before National Policy since a sound policy domestically is absolutely required both for the health of the nation within our borders and to facilitate—indeed, to enable—any form of outward-facing policy at the national level.

Domestic Policy is a combination of social and economic policies. Social Policy consists of these things: the concept of the American nation; American citizenship; the role of faith in our society; the role of immigration and its importance to our society; the importance of consensus; and the role of education.

Economic Policy consists of these things: the nature of a free market and its condition as the most moral system and the one most conducive to generating prosperity for all (even though there always will be some more or less prosperous than others), the role of the Federal government in protecting and enhancing our economy, and the role of Federal regulation in facilitating our economy.

Of course, these two major divisions of Domestic Policy are not truly separate from each other any more than biology, chemistry, and physics are separate from each other within science. Just as we divide scientific disciplines from each other to facilitate inquiry and discussion, I’m separating domestic policy into these divisions to facilitate a similar inquiry and discussion—while remaining fully aware and making occasional use of their very large areas of overlap.

The book is available in eBook form from amazon.com () and

National Security and Terrorists

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More than a dozen Islamic State fighters from Iraq and Syria—some with direct ties to the group’s leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi—are now in Libya, according to US and European sources.

And the US has no authority to take them out.

And

The nation’s most senior intelligence officer, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, recently testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee that Libya is not only a safe haven for ISIS but at least six other terror groups, including Ansar al-Sharia, which paraded police vehicles through Benghazi last month.

State’s Deputy Spokeswoman Marie Harf repeated State’s (and so President Barack Obama’s) position on the matter, insisting that this is not the fault of our foreign policy.

Are we happy with the situation in Libya from a governance and security perspective? No. Absolutely not. At the end of the day, though, this is not just a line, it’s true. This is ultimately up to the Libyan people, leaders in Libya to take the security of their country into their own hands and try to move it in a better direction with our help, the UN and others’ help as well.

This is a misreading of the situation. These Daesh members (and with direct ties to…Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, they’re Daesh leaders themselves) also are threats to our own national security, as are those other terrorist groups present—and not only to us, but to our friends and allies, also. From that, two consequences result directly.

The first is that, most assuredly, the situation in Libya is Libya’s to answer first, and we should do all we can to help Libya in that regard if they ask.

The second consequence, and from our national safety perspective the more important one, is that if Libya is unable or unwilling to handle the situation to our satisfaction—that is to the satisfaction of our own national security interest—then we have an obligation to ourselves, to American security, to enter and to handle the situation ourselves.

A foreign policy that is in the way of that, whether actively so or passively, very definitely is at fault, and it’s at odds with our national security.

Senate Democrats and a DHS Shutdown

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The House has passed a bill fully finding the Department of Homeland Security while canceling President Barack Obama’s unconstitutional “Executive Actions” regarding immigration. The Senate Democrats have successfully filibustered the Senate version of that bill.

The Senate Democrats thus have shown themselves entirely willing to shut down the DHS, severely damaging our nation’s ability to defend itself against terrorist attack—or any man-caused disaster. These Democrats are holding American citizens hostage against their ability to impose their minority position on all of us.

Let Senator Mark Kirk (R, IL) say this about that.

If we have a successful terrorist attack—all the dead Americans from that should be laid at the feet of the Democratic caucus.…

In the end, they have to defend the country. They have sworn the allegiance to do that. They need to live up to their oaths of office. In the Democratic mind, politics is everything. I would say to them, politics is not everything. If you don’t have a country to defend, what is the purpose of politics?

What he said.

NYSE Auctions

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In the bad old days of stock auction markets [sic], owners of shares of companies—companies nominally public by their status as a shareholder company—would meet in a crowd, face to face, and offer their shares for sale at a price or offer to buy another’s shares at a price. Bid prices and asking prices would converge, and sales would be executed.

Only the rich could play this game, though; Middle America (and Middle Netherlands where such auctions got an early start some hundreds of years ago, and Middle You-Pick-the-Nation) couldn’t afford to play. To be sure, Middle America (and the others) in those early days had little interest in playing, and the matter was a no harm, no foul situation. Then the broker industry developed, and brokers would act as middle men in these auctions, doing the mixing and matching of buys and sells—for a small remuneration, of course—and the shareholders didn’t need to meet in person. But those remunerations—commissions—kept Middle America priced out of the game.

Then discount brokers developed (think Charles Schwab), and Middle America (and Middle xyz) could play. The broader breadth of participation both increased stock prices themselves, and they gave companies all across the economy access to tons of additional money, from us little people, with which to do R&D, sales, production, etc. After all, little peoples’ nickels and dimes add up—it’s how the earlier Five and Dime stores prospered and how today’s deep discount stores prosper. It also gave us little people additional ways to save and to build our nest eggs.

Today, there are even brokerages that operate entirely online, for a song: typical remunerations for effecting a buy or sell today range from $5 to $10 per some number of thousands of shares traded (when Schwab was starting out, they charged $35 per hundred shares traded).

Now the New York Stock Exchange wants to

introduce a midday auction

ostensibly to

draw trading away from private venues such as dark pools….

Never mind that those dark pools are capitalist, free market responses to excessive interference in today’s financial industry (of which stock markets are only a part) by the Security & Exchange Commission and the myriad mechanisms spawned by Dodd-Frank.

The new NYSE auction would take place in the middle of the day, when trading is at its slowest. One draw of such auctions is they allow big investors to put in large orders without immediately moving the price of a stock[.]

Auctions work differently than continuous trading on markets, which match orders as they come in at an ultrafast pace. In an auction, buyers put in a maximum price and quantity they are seeking to fill and sellers put in a minimum price and size they are willing to sell over a period of time. At the end of the period, orders are filled at a price set by supply and demand for shares.

Just like those original bad, old days.

I’m not sure this isn’t a return to those bad old days when only the rich could play. I’m not sure it is, either; it’s something that needs to be watched very carefully—even by the SEC.