First, President Obama moves to gut our Federal defense establishment, including among other moves reducing the size of our Army to 1940 levels.
Now he wants to gut our state militias, in particular the States’ Army National Guards, also—and reduce thereby their ability to deal with internal matters ranging from disorder to disaster recovery. And, oh by the way, severely restrict the States’ ability to reinforce that drastically curtailed Federal defense capacity.
Hmm….
President Barack Obama has threatened to consult with allies to see about beginning to think of what might be done vis-à-vis the Russian attack on Ukraine. He even spent 90 minutes over the weekend on the phone with Russian President Vladimir Putin being chastised by Putin for his effrontery in demurring from that invasion.
Secretary of State John Kerry has decried Putin’s “unopposed entry” into Ukraine as a 19th century move in the 21st century—as though that means that Russia’s invasion hasn’t actually occurred. On Tuesday, he was enroute to Kiev while, as the Fox News headline put it, our “policy to counter Putin still is evolving.”
Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel hasn’t said anything at all. That may be the wisest move of the three: remaining silent and being thought a fool, rather than speaking and removing all doubt. Even if he is silent only because he doesn’t make policy.
How is it, after this administration’s five years in power, the last 14 months with the current crowd, that we’re only now getting around to start to begin developing some sort of policy to deal with Russian behavior?
Could it be because the grade school amateurism of a community organizer, a motor boat skipper, and a guy who won’t be making defense policy is unequal to the task of facing the world?
In the meantime, keep an eye on the Senkaku, Spratly and Paracel Islands.
…government is. Or so says Czar of all the Russias President Vladimir Putin.
Of course people wanted change. But [people] cannot impose illegal change…you need to use only constitutional means.
Never mind that the will of the people is what gives “constitutional means” legitimacy, since those means are the will of the people given concrete effect. But not in Putin’s world. In his world view, “constitutional means” are what government says they are, and government is constituted the way the men populating the organs of government say it is. No people, no citizens, are involved.
Putin also insisted that [Interim President] Oleksandr Turchynov was
not legitimate. From the legal perspective it is Mr. Yanukovych who is president.
No. Plainly no. From the legal perspective, Yanukovich had lost all legitimacy the moment he lost the consent of the Ukrainian people to be their President. That he had lost that consent is amply demonstrated by all those months in the streets—and not only in Kiev—by the people protesting, at first his actions, and ultimately his political status. The firmness of their will is corroborated by the violence against and the murders of the protestors sanctioned by that government, and the people’s continued protests despite those atrocities.
Putin also has announced that he has no obligation to respect the wishes of the Ukrainian people as expressed in the upcoming May governmental elections, if he doesn’t get the results he wants.
Never mind that exactly those elections are what will express the will of the people, if the elections are allowed to go forward freely and fairly. The only interference there will be “such terror as we see now” in the form of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The only “terror as [Putin] see[s] now” is his own terror of the will of the people—perhaps of the will of the Russian people, as well.
Finally, this:
Putin said Tuesday that Moscow reserved the right to protect ethnic Russians in Ukraine by any means necessary….
This was Hitler’s excuse for Sudetenland. However, the “ethnic Russians” are Ukrainian citizens, not Russian citizens, and it is the responsibility of the Ukrainian government to protect its citizens. If Putin is claiming a right (oddly, not a duty) to protect the badly abused citizens of another sovereign nation, than we have to ask: where is his duty in Syria, in northern Korea? Oh, wait….
And we don’t care about its security.
Security experts worried that 35 state health exchange websites were vulnerable to hackers and were rated as “high risk” for security problems before ObamaCare’s launch….
Fears that the health law’s websites could put consumers at risk have plagued the program’s rollout from the beginning, but the administration told The Associated Press that the documents offer only a partial and “outdated” snapshot of an improving situation.
Never mind that “improving” now doesn’t alter the fact that the security failures existed at the time of the rollout. And HHS rolled out their ObamaMart, anyway. For example:
In order to connect to Federal computers, state and other outside systems must undergo a security review and receive an “authority to connect.”
With [Obamacare], states needed approval to connect to a new Federal data hub, an electronic back room that pings Social Security, the Internal Revenue Service, Homeland Security to verify personal details…. The hub handles sensitive information, including income, immigration status and Social Security numbers.
[In an] email from Sept 29, a Sunday two days before the launch, Teresa Fryer, chief information security officer for the Federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, wrote of the state security approvals, “The front office is signing them whether or not they are a high risk.”
…CMS administrator Marilyn Tavenner approved nine states to connect although the approval document noted that “CMS views the October 1 connections to the nine states as a risk due to the fact that their documentation may not be submitted completely nor reviewed…by Oct. 1.”
The Obama view of citizens’ personal security: “Hey, we got away with it; nothing bad happened. We think. It’s all good.”
The Congressional Budget Office had some remarks last Thursday.
More than four and a half years after the end of the recession, employment has risen sluggishly—much more slowly than it grew, on average, during the four previous recoveries that lasted more than one year. At the same time, the unemployment rate has fallen only partway back to its prerecession level…and a significant part of that improvement is attributable to a decline in labor force participation that has occurred as an unusually large number of people have stopped looking for work…. Moreover, the rate of long-term unemployment—the percentage of the labor force that has been out of work for more than 26 consecutive weeks—remains extraordinarily high.
And
CBO estimates that GDP was 7½% smaller than potential (maximum sustainable) GDP at the end of the recession; by the end of 2013, less than one-half of that gap had been closed. With output growing so slowly, payrolls have increased slowly as well—and the slack in the labor market that can be seen in the elevated unemployment rate and in part of the reduction in the rate of labor force participation mirrors the gap between actual and potential GDP.
And [emphasis in the original]
Employment at the end of 2013 was about 6 million jobs short of where it would be if the unemployment rate had returned to its prerecession level and if the participation rate had risen to the level it would have attained without the current cyclical weakness. Those factors account roughly equally for the shortfall.
Any questions about the effectiveness of the Obama administration’s economic policies?