Monthly Archives: March 2015

An Open Letter

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Senator Tom Cotton (R, AR) is the lead signatory, among 47 Republican Senators, to an open letter to the Iranian government regarding how the American government works.

An Open Letter to the Leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran:

It has come to our attention while observing your nuclear negotiations with our government that you may not fully understand our constitutional system. Thus, we are writing to bring to your attention two features of our Constitution-the power to make binding international agreements and the different character of federal offices-which you should seriously consider as negotiations progress.

First, under our Constitution, while the president negotiates international agreements, Congress plays the significant role of ratifying them. In the case of a treaty, the Senate must ratify it by a two-thirds vote. A so-called congressional-executive agreement requires a majority vote in both the House and the Senate (which, because of procedural rules, effectively means a three-fifths vote in the Senate). Anything not approved by Congress is a mere executive agreement.

Second, the offices of our Constitution have different characteristics. For example, the president may serve only two 4-year terms, whereas senators may serve an unlimited number of 6-year terms. As applied today, for instance, President Obama will leave office in January 2017, while most of us will remain in office well beyond then-perhaps decades.

What these two constitutional provisions mean is that we will consider any agreement regarding your nuclear-weapons program that is not approved by the Congress as nothing more than an executive agreement between President Obama and Ayatollah Khamenei. The next president could revoke such an executive agreement with the stroke of a pen and future Congresses could modify the terms of the agreement at any time.

We hope this letter enriches your knowledge of our constitutional system and promotes mutual understanding and clarity as nuclear negotiations progress.

Unfortunately, the letter isn’t only addressed to the Iranians, it’s also, of necessity, aimed at President Barack Obama.

The letter can be seen here and here.

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….

Another Installment in Sea Grabs

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The People’s Republic of China Foreign Minister Wang Yi had this to say, according to The Wall Street Journal:

This construction does not target or affect anyone.

We are not like some countries who engage in illegal construction in another person’s house, and we do not accept criticism from others when we are merely building facilities in our own yard. We have every right to do things that are lawful and justified.

The satellite imagery at the WSJ link is remarkable.

Of course, Wang is lying. What the PRC is doing affects all the nations on the South China Sea rim: being international waters, the Sea is theirs as much as it is the PRC’s, which is to say it’s owned by no one.

As far as construction in another person’s house is concerned, the Spratly Islands (the site of the present construction), if not in anyone’s house, most assuredly are in the jointly held front yards of Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, and the Philippines. These islands are nowhere near the PRC, and like the South China Sea in general, they are not at all PRC territory.

Unthinking Dishonesty

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President Barack Obama’s dissembling is legendary. Recall his claim, oft repeated, that if you like your health insurance policy or your doctor, you can keep them. Recall his oft repeated claims that Presidents don’t have the authority to act unilaterally on immigration in exactly the way he acted last November.

Here’s a couple more things he said.

The pattern overall is that the climate is getting warmer. That’s undeniable[.]

Except that the data are unclear on this, in the way that Obama means. It’s indisputable that the climate has not gotten warmer over the last 18 years. It’s indisputable that orbital mechanics and the sun’s cycles play a major role in Earth’s climate change. It’s indisputable that, over Earth’s existence, the sun is heating up. It’s indisputable that, over geologic time frames, Earth is warming. It’s entirely disputable that human activity is having a major effect on climate.

Obama also said,

Our homicide rates are so much larger than other industrialized countries, by like a mile.

Most of that is attributable to the easy, ready availability of firearms, particularly handguns.

No. Today’s homicide rate is half that of the Clinton administration’ time frame, yet handgun ownership has vastly increased since then. In general, gun ownership, and lack of gun control laws are correlated with fewer murders. For instance, in 2011, California, with the most stringent gun control laws in the US (according to the Brady Campaign), had a gun murder rate of 3.25 murders per 100,000 people. Texas, with pretty loose gun control laws, had a gun murder rate of 2.91 per 100,000. Utah, with the loosest gun control laws in the US, had a gun murder rate of 0.97.

Of course, Obama knows these things. He’s too smart, too well educated, too widely read, and too current on the events in the world not to know these things. But lying to get his way is so habitual in him that he just says these things of convenience without the slightest thought.

What could be worse than that? His Democratic Party has said not a word to correct his errors. These men and women also are too smart, too well educated, too widely read, and too current on the events in the world not to know these things. Their silence on the matter demonstrates that they agree with his behavior as much as with his claims.

See, too, the Democratic Party’s silence on Hillary Clinton’s misbehaviors in violating Federal law with her Secretary of State private email accounts and her accepting—quite sizeable—donations from foreign governments while she was sitting in the Secretary of State’s chair, even if the money was washed through her Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation‎.

Remember this in 2016.

Typical

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In an ambitious first budget plan, Governor Tom Wolf on Tuesday proposed more than $4 billion in higher taxes on income, sales and natural gas drilling to support new spending on schools and to cut property taxes as part of an effort to overhaul the way public education is funded.

Wolf, a Democrat, is also asking the Republican-controlled Legislature to cut corporate taxes by hundreds of millions of dollars, borrow more than $4 billion to refinance pension debt and inject new money into business loans, clean energy subsidies and water and sewer system projects.

Pennsylvania already is in the hole by some $2 billion, and it’s getting an increase in allegedly mandatory spending, for the upcoming fiscal year, of $1.6 billion.

So he wants to raise taxes overall and to borrow more. Because money grows on trees in the Democratic Orchard.

Wolf’s spending plan would increase overall state spending through the state’s main bank account by about 3% to $29.9 billion from the current year’s approved budget. Counting $1.75 billion in pension obligation payments to the Public School Employees Retirement System and $2.1 billion in school property tax relief receipts, the increase is about 16%….

“Pay” for tax cuts here by raising taxes there. Borrow to cover increased spending. But raise taxes overall, and increase spending. Mandatory spending? No. There is no such thing. Some spending is harder to cut, whether fiscally or morally, than other spending, but none of it is mandatory beyond the bare minimum needed to fund what the state’s constitution—the people’s instructions—mandates is the government’s purpose.

Covering the budget shortfall by cutting spending is anathema. Covering the budget shortfall by also cutting taxes and watching the economy grow from that increase in private sector money, yielding a net increase in revenue to the government, is utterly inconceivable.

How Democratic.