Tag Archives: political parties

RFK Jr’s National Defense Plan

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Third party Presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy, Jr, now is promising to cut our national defense spending by 50% if he’s elected.

I will push for [a] 50% reduction in military expenditures in my first four years in office, with more cuts to come thereafter. A way to keep the dollar strong is to keep the country strong. We can do that by redirecting our bloated military budget toward infrastructure, education, and health, and building our economy and building small business.

Kennedy insists, instead, that the United States should

project strength through moral leadership and strong economics.

What would this Kennedy have us do, though, when our arming-up enemies—Russia, People’s Republic of China, Iran, among others—come with actual guns and bullets and destruction and killing. Does he expect our remaining armed forces to defend our nation by throwing copies of Aristotle’s Nicomachean or Eudemian Ethics at them? Or perhaps Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations? Maybe Summa Theologiae, the compendium of St Thomas Acquinas’ writings? All nine volumes—there’s some heavy artillery. Or something both older and more current, the Christian Bible, which contains—rapid fire, now—Judaism’s Torah.

How strong does Kennedy think our economy would be when moralizing in the face of bullets fails to persuade?

Does he really think our infrastructure, education, and health really will matter when they’re controlled by our conquerors? That our economy and small businesses will be for our benefit when they’re controlled by our conquerors? That our dollar will matter when the currency in effect is that of our conquerors?

Kennedy badly misunderstands the parable of the mouse and the owl: the mouse thinks the owl’s ways are wrong, while the owl thinks the mouse is lunch.

A Progressive-Democrat Governor and a Surtax

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New Jersey’s Progressive-Democrat Governor Phil Murphy once promised to let the State’s 2.5% surtax on businesses with incomes greater than $1 million expire and then, by implication, to leave it alone. He did the first part, and it did expire. But it turns out he dissembled on the second part.

Mr Murphy and his [Progressive-]Democratic Legislature are scrambling for money even though tax revenue has increased 35% over the past five years—faster than inflation.
…
Mr Murphy now wants to re-impose it on income above $10 million, retroactively to the start of this year.

Progressive-Democrats are so addicted to taxing Americans and our businesses that their promises to lower taxes or to leave alone existing taxes are worthless. Which calls into question the value of any other of their promises. Indeed, their addiction is so powerful that they’re not capable even of saying the words “cut spending,” much less actually doing so.

Maybe Murphy’s renewed surtax will hit only the wealthiest businesses, many based in other states, hard enough to persuade those in New Jersey to relocate to more business—and average American—friendly locations and persuade those based in other States to reduce or forgo doing business in New Jersey.

“How an Iranian-Backed Militia Ties Down US Naval Forces in the Red Sea”

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So read The Wall Street Journal‘s headline. The article went into it:

Since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, Iran-backed Houthi rebels have lobbed missiles, drones, and other weapons at commercial vessels and warships nearly every day. Although most of the weapons have been shot down, at least 77 cargo ships have been hit, and one British-owned ship carrying 20,000 tons of fertilizer aboard was sunk.
Though largely ineffective, the Houthi attacks have been able to disrupt shipping and keep the US and its allies tied down, frustrating the Navy’s decades-old mission of keeping open the region’s critical sea lanes.

And this:

Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, said in congressional testimony last month that the US-led effort has been insufficient to deter the militant group’s targeting of ships and that the threat will “remain active for some time.”

Yes, it has, but while the article’s news writers mentioned the cause, they don’t seem to understand that they have. They centered the article on the frustrations of the Navy’s continuing inability to reopen those shipping lanes.

The root cause:

The Biden administration has limited its military response to the Houthi attacks, hoping to avoid being drawn into a wider Middle East conflict. But that has meant the flotilla of US and allied warships has spent weeks and even months patrolling the Red Sea on alert—and the attacks have kept coming.

It’s as simple and straightforward as this: Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden is too timid to take serious action. He’s more interested in appeasement of the Houthis’ boss, Iran, and in a failed Vietnam-esque “measured response” tit-for-tat procedure.

What’s actually needed is a concerted effort to destroy Houthi bases, whether or not they’re launching facilities and whether or not any launching facilities are “preparing to launch.” What’s further needed is active interception or sinking, if interception isn’t feasible, of Iranian shipping bringing arms and ammunition—not limited to ballistic or cruise missiles or drones—to the Houthis. What’s further needed is recognition of the central role Saudi Arabia plays in Middle East security, along with (if not alongside) Israel and the US, and from that recognition active support of the Saudis in their attempts to restore legitimate government in Yemen and destruction of the Houthis.

None of that will happen, though, while Biden is in office, at the continued expense of shipping disruption, cost of lives lost by allowing the Houthis to continue their operations, and unpredictable (in detail, anyway) ripple effects of that continued timidity.

The Left’s Antisemitic Bigotry

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The blind hatred of the Left for America’s Jews, Israel’s Jews, and for Jews everywhere was on full display in New York City, and the hatred and bigotry is showing no signs of doing anything but growing.

On Monday anti-Israel protesters wouldn’t even let a tribute to Israelis murdered at the Nova Music Festival on October 7 be held in peace.
Hamas massacred some 260 people, mostly young, at that festival. Women were raped and their bodies mutilated before they were killed. The butchery and sadism were the point, inflicted out of hatred merely because the victims were Jews.
The protesters in New York didn’t kill anyone, at least not yet. But the hatred for Jews was on ugly display. The protest was part of a “Citywide Day of Rage” that targeted New York’s museums. The group Within Our Lifetime, which organized the protests, says cultural institutions are “drenched in the blood of Palestine’s martyrs.” They seem to mean the museums’ Jewish donors.
“Long live Intifada,” the crowd cheered, waving flares outside the exhibit commemorating the hundreds who were massacred at the Nova festival. “Israel, go to hell.”

This is the Left from which the Progressive-Democratic Party draws so much support. It’s instructive that, so far at least, the Progressive-Democratic Party as a whole is determinedly silent, choosing to not condemn their supporters’ bigotry, even as the dominant faction of Party, led by Congresswomen Ilhan Omar (MN) and Rashida Tlaib (MI) and by Congressman Jamaal Bowman (NY), actively celebrates Hamas’ terrorism and their own Jew-hatred.

Soft-on-Crime DAs…

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…and citizen’s arrest. I was…triggered, you might say…by an article describing a Connecticut neighborhood that has set up an evolution of the old Neighborhood Watch or New York City’s Guardian Angels groups. The good folks in the neighborhood have set up a “Self Defense Brigade,” a group 40-ish legally armed citizen volunteers, all living in the neighborhood, who do carry and who actively patrol their neighborhood or watch video feeds from drones that the residents have agreed to. Unsurprisingly, crime is way down in their neighborhood, from the Self Defense Brigade’s deterrent factor.

But what if there’s a need for an arrest? What if the brigade doesn’t only see evidence of a crime done, but see a criminal in the act? The cops, when called, will come fairly quickly (I don’t know the urban area’s defund the cops movement, or the level of staffing of the local police department), but in the meantime, the group would need either to track and maintain contact with the perp until the cops arrive, or actively detain the perp until the cops arrive.

That last amounts to a citizen’s arrest, which still is a thing in our nation, even if it has fallen into disuse.

Cop arrest or citizen’s arrest, though, to have useful effect there needs to be a couple of follow-on steps: prosecution and, if the case can be made—the neighborhood group has the evidence—conviction, followed by punishment serious enough to match the crime for which the neighborhood group made its move.

That brings me to the title of my post: DAs who are soft on crime, who have decided they’re not going to prosecute certain classes of crime that they’ve deemed not worth the trouble or not violent enough, without any regard for the damage done the victims of these crimes.

Such DAs, I claim, are not exercising prosecutorial discretion, even though those DAs claim they are. Prosecutorial discretion is a matter of assessing the specifics of a particular case and deciding to prosecute the instance at a lower level than initially charged or to not prosecute the instance at all. This must be done, further, on a case-by-case basis, treating each on de novo. Deciding a priori not to prosecute whole categories of crime has nothing to do with discretion; the DAs doing this are aiding and abetting the class of criminals they’re refusing to prosecute. This would seem to put them beyond the reach of any level of immunity, qualified or blanket, from civil suit, and the criminality of their action leaves them open, or should leave them open, to criminal prosecution.

Which brings me to the opening of my lede: citizen’s arrest. When the neighborhood group—Self Defense Brigade, or Guardian Angels, or an ad hoc collection of individuals—arrests or detains for police arrest a criminal, and the local prosecutor decides that the crime alleged falls within his predetermined class of no prosecution crimes, then it’s time for the neighborhood group, or others aligned with the group, to execute a citizen’s arrest of the DA and force his prosecution. And subsequently, if necessary, move politically against the judge who tosses the case rather than allowing it to go to trial and get him removed from the bench (this step will take some time, since it may involve electing a legislature willing to impeach and convict the judge, but it would be time well spent. If local judges are elected, the time could be as nearby as the next election cycle.)

Especially in cases stemming from citizen’s arrests, the matter should go to a jury, a collection of citizens drawn from the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed.

There’s one more factor in play here, and that is the DA’s oath of office. With his blanket decision to excuse whole classes of crime, he’s clearly violating his oath. There could be, if a bit more tenuous than the direct criminal prosecution, a case for criminal perjury to be made. At the very least, though, his oath violation is an impeachable event, and aside from that, if he’s an elected official, his removal could be as nearby as the next election cycle.