Monthly Archives: July 2016

Leadership

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That’s the subject of a Friday Wall Street Journal op-ed of a similar name.  The piece recounted the recent history of anti-cop violence and murders of cops in the performance of their duties—including protecting an hours-long anti-cop protest by the Black Lives Matter movement in Dallas, for which the police were rewarded with the murder of five of their own and the wounding of several more.

The WSJ also decried, correctly, the lack of support our police get from our political leadership from the President on down—until after those cops have been wounded or murdered, and then official condolences flow like snake oil from a salesman.

President Barack Obama (D) was cited as saying that it’s possible to decry the abuses of our justice system while expressing support for the police, and he’s right.  But Obama has demonstrated his stout belief in the sewage of moral relativism, in the wake of the Dallas police murders, by spouting carefully unbalanced statistics—unbalanced because Obama chose not to mention things like black on black murder statistics—and by carefully ignoring the racism of the Black Lives Movement and the self-serving racism of the Al Sharptons of the nation who aren’t even sincere in their racism but spout it only for their personal aggrandizement.

The piece also quoted Minnesota’s Democrat Governor Mark Dayton saying this about the shooting of Philando Castile in suburban Minneapolis:

Would this have happened if the driver were white, if the passengers were white? I don’t think it would have.

That this is a deliberately racist statement made solely for Dayton’s personal political gain is demonstrated by his careful elision of the fact the cop involved was…brown.

These things illustrate a part of what lies beneath Obama’s and his party’s divisiveness over the last few years: they’ve cynically played the race card in order to increase their political power.

Democrats represent the ideology of victimhood with Democrats as the Protectors.  And this only traps Democrat protectees in dependency on their protectors.  Liberals know this full well.

Two Mistakes

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…are made in a recent The Diplomat piece about the British referendum to leave the EU and our own Founders’ view of popular (direct) democracy.

One is the conflation of a single referendum with direct democracy.

[I]he whole spectacle of a referendum—a “device of dictators and demagogues,” in the words of Margaret Thatcher—underlined a salient point: our soundbite culture, combined with political populism, renders direct democracy in the form of a referendum entirely unsuitable as a tool for deciding complex policy issues.

Or any other culture, apparently.  Notice that, though: a referendum.  Not routine referenda for making all national decisions, which would be popular democracy governance.  No, this was a single referendum to make a single decision; it was no pattern, it set no precedent, and it was entirely appropriate.

This referendum was entirely appropriate because the representative democracy government was itself divided on the matter.

The referendum was especially appropriate for a much larger reason, though.  It’s entirely appropriate, necessary even, for the a representative government to go back to the people as a whole on occasion to get their instruction because that’s how the representatives as a whole (re)calibrate their ties to the people they claim to represent.

The other mistake is claiming that the people are just too stupid to make their own decisions; they need to listen to their Betters and otherwise be quiet.

The voices of reason were further drowned out….

And

T[he Brexit referendum illustrates as much the failure of the experts and elected politicians as it shows that relying on the masses and populism can lead to suspect and potentially damaging decisions. In that sense, we have to guard ourselves against direct democracy being hijacked by demagogues and populists lest we have to endure the “tyranny of the majority” at the expense of wiser policies.

This would be true of a direct democracy; however, see above: a single referendum does not make for a direct democracy means of governance.  The Diplomat‘s piece illustrates, on the contrary, the need for the occasional national referendum.  Experts are in a tizzy because the masses rejected their wisdom and made that damaging decision—at least in the minds of those Betters.  What a representative democracy must especially guard against, though, is being hijacked by demagogues and elitists lest we have to endure the tyranny of the Betters at the expense of the people.

State Department Insecurity

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Regardless of what one might think about the FBI’s decision to let ex-Secretary of State and Democratic Party Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton escape prosecution over her handling of State Department emails on her unsecured personal email server, you’d think the hoo-raw over the matter for all this time at least would prompt State to take seriously Department handling of emails.

You’d think wrong.

State’s Inspector General has issued a report that, in its totality, shows that the State Department just doesn’t care about national secrets, to the point of not even troubling itself to shut down unused email accounts.  This despite repeated “suggestions” that they do just that.

The report, titled Management Assistance Report: Inactive Accounts Within the Department of State’s Active Directory, has this in its opening paragraphs.

Acting on behalf of the Office of Inspector General (OIG), Office of Audits, Williams, Adley & Company-DC, LLP (Williams Adley), an independent public accounting firm, evaluated whether the Department disabled inactive AD user accounts in accordance with its internal policies.  …  The Department’s AD account policy states that Department officials should disable inactive user accounts after 90 or more days.

Nope.

Of the 40,794 domestic AD accounts tested for this audit, Williams Adley found 2,601 (6.4%) had not been disabled after 90 days of inactivity. Of the 2,601 inactive accounts, 1,932 (74%) accounts were inactive for more than 1 year….

This has been an ongoing passive-aggressive resistance problem [SBU means “Sensitive but Unclassified;” its line-out in the original means the indicated paragraph has been completely declassified so the public can see it].

(SBU) OIG reported a similar deficiency in its FY 2015 Federal Information Security Management Act audit report.

And

(SBU) In its 2014 report on AD, OIG stated that the deficiencies it identified with AD Rights Management primarily occurred because IRM had not established a governance structure or strategy to ensure that AD Rights Management was implemented and managed consistently.

The report concludes with these two tidbits tied back to an earlier recommendation [Emphasis within the paragraphs added by me.]

Recommendation 1: (SBU) OIG recommends that the Bureau of Information Resource Management amend the “Program Management Plan for PIV Login to OpenNet Deployment” to address the identification and removal process of mailbox, service, and terminated user accounts.

Management Response (April 2016): (SBU) IRM non-concurs with this recommendation. The Program Management Plan for PIV Login was created to deploy and implement PIV domestically and overseas. Now that IRM has completed that goal, the plan has been completed and does not lend itself to amendment.

In other words, State considers complying—to set out instructions for complete removal of these accounts—to be too much like work.

Recommendation 2: (SBU) OIG recommends that the Bureau of Information Resource Management implement the new guidance from the “Program Management Plan for PIV Login to OpenNet Deployment,” once amended in response to Recommendation 1 of this report.

Management Response (April 2016): (SBU) IRM non-concurs with this recommendation. The Program Management Plan for PIV Login was created to deploy and implement PIV domestically and overseas. Now that IRM has completed that goal, the plan has been completed and does not lend itself to amendment.

Again, that’s just too much like work.

The State Department needs a complete housecleaning, including a complete turnover of non-Foreign Service personnel.

Elections have consequences.

Clinton, Comey, and the Law

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Jacob Gershman wrote in a recent Wall Street Journal Law Blog,

[FBI Director] Comey also referenced a more obscure provision of the Espionage Act that has little to do with intent or state of mind, but rather makes it a crime to disclose classified information through “gross negligence.”

That provision of the Espionage Act, the primary law governing the handling of classified information, could require at least proof that the offender knew the classified information disclosed could harm the United States or benefit a foreign power if it got into the wrong hands.

But the crime of “gross negligence” in the Espionage Act doesn’t appear to require proof of any intentional mishandling of documents….

But what behavior would rise to the level of gross negligence that is a felony under the Espionage Act?

Perhaps the setup, maintenance, and use of an unsecured email on which State Department official business was, by design, conducted.

Perhaps the receipt and relay of emails containing Top Secret Special Access information without sequestering those emails and pointing out the failures to State’s security facility.

Perhaps the receipt and relay of emails with classification markings in them without sequestering those emails and….

Perhaps receipt and relay of 1,000+ emails originating as classified because of their content without sequestering….

Those sorts of behaviors also would seem to aggregate to the guilty knowledge that is intent.  Yet Comey said of some of the cases the FBI had previously prosecuted that they involved

…some combination of: clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information; or vast quantities of materials exposed in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct; or indications of disloyalty to the United States; or efforts to obstruct justice.

And then he said

We do not see those things here.

Unfortunately, Admiral Nelson-like, Comey put his spyglass to his bad eye, albeit with a far different purpose.  And chose not even to recommend a gross negligence prosecution, apparently because his bad eye didn’t reveal any of that to him, either.

His decision to not see is made manifest with his own words in that same statement:

This is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences. To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions.

Lawless Democrats

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This time, in the Senate.  The Senate tried to consider a bill that would have, among other things, denied Federal funds for sanctuary cities—cities that openly and blatantly not only accept illegal aliens but actively interfere with Federal actions taken to deal with them.

Sanctuary cities like San Francisco, where an illegal alien was protected from Federal action and who repaid the city’s forbearance by murdering a young woman.  Sanctuary cities like Alexandria, VA, where illegal aliens connected to the M-13 drug cartel murdered two young men.  Sanctuary cities like Los Angeles whose protected illegal alien murdered a high school boy in an LA suburb.  The list goes on.

But Senate Democrats ran screaming for the hills, blocking a cloture vote on that bill: these Democrats were afraid to allow the bill to be debated on the Senate floor, in public and in front of their own constituents.

No, these Democrats want to keep those funds coming, want to reward cities that flout the law and allow illegal aliens—including the small but violent minority of them—to roam free.