Author Archives: eehines

Bad Deal

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As I write on 12 December, Hamas appears to have agreed to a deal, put together by the Egyptians and supported by the Biden administration, that would see a 60-day cease-fire in Gaza, Israeli troops remain in Gaza “temporarily,” and that would release 30 hostages, including some Americans. In addition, Israel would release an unspecified number of Palestinian prisoners and allow greater humanitarian aid to flow into Gaza. Israel has not agreed, so far.

That last bit regarding humanitarian aid is a clear red flag regarding this…proposal. Any agreement by Israel to this condition would be an Israeli admission that they are the ones doing the restricting. Israel isn’t the one restricting aid flow, though; the terrorists are stealing the aid and deliberately endangering aid deliverers by using them as shields against IDF responses. Hamas is restricting aid flow.

There’s also this bit of Hamas disingenuosity:

Hostages could be freed shortly after signing the deal, and more time would be given to Hamas to establish the names of remaining hostages, their whereabouts, and their state of health[.]

The terrorists don’t need any time for that: they know full well where they’re holding all of the hostages and all of the murdered hostage bodies: the terrorists are the ones who grabbed them, and the terrorists are the ones who’ve been moving them around.

This is a bad deal. Any “cease-fire” must include Israeli forces remaining in Gaza for as long as the Israelis deem necessary along with the release of all of the hostages, including the bodies of the dead hostages. Anything less than all of the hostages, by itself, must be a deal breaker. Beyond that, while there might be a cease fire, the war Hamas has been inflicting on Israel cannot end short of the utter destruction of the terrorist entity. As long as Hamas exists, it will be a terrorist threat to Israel.

Blame Someone Else

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Safeway is closing one of its San Francisco stores due to concerns about high crime rates and employee and customer safety in that store’s neighborhood. Oh, the hue and cry.

The Reverand Erris Edgerly, for instance, is crying foul.

It’s obvious the community has been struggling, but to just up and leave without calling a meeting, with no alternative for groceries, is upsetting. There was no community outreach at all.

It’s obvious that the crime rate in Edgerly’s community has been out of control for quite some time and the safety of his community members has been in the wind for all that time. From that, it’s just as obvious that community “leaders,” like the good Reverand, have contributed nothing useful to mitigating the situation (in truth, the city has done nothing, also, but that doesn’t excuse the community’s “leaders”).

Outreach would have been just more chit-chat and worse than pointless: advance notice of the store’s closing would have been too likely to trigger an accelerated spate of break-ins and lootings, exposing the store’s employees and customers to even more danger in that end game.

Maybe the Edgerlys of the neighborhood should look in a mirror to find some of the folks with whom to…outreach.

Not Entirely Alone

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Recall the Macy’s case where an employee succeeded in covering up, for a long time, more than $150 million in bookkeeping mistakes. Now Macy’s has finished its internal investigation and decided that the employee had been acting alone, making all those mistakes all by himself.

The employee told investigators about having mistakenly understated the amount of small parcel delivery expenses in late 2021, the person briefed on the probe said. Macy’s has said that the employee had responsibility for small package delivery expense accounting….
To hide the error, the employee continued to intentionally make erroneous accounting entries and falsify underlying documentation until the misstatement was discovered this fall….

Furthermore [emphasis added],

Macy’s didn’t say how it uncovered the erroneous entries or how they went undetected by the company’s auditor, KPMG.

Maybe the employee wasn’t acting entirely alone. He had the functionally ineffective assistance of too-inattentive supervisors, too-inattentive checkers of his work, and that auditor which maybe was just rubberstamping company books and collecting fees.

Macy’s management might want to expand its investigation and address those inadequacies.

I Have Questions

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Under subpoena, the far Left fundraiser ActBlue gave up documents to the House Administration Committee that showed that ActBlue did not begin automatically rejecting foreign donations (which I take to mean the organization made no serious effort at all) until last September.

Committee Chairman Bryan Steil (R, WI):

The documents provided to the Committee also confirm that ActBlue still accepted these concerning payment methods in July, a period when Democrats raised a record number of campaign money before implementing these safeguards.

My questions: to which Progressive-Democrats did ActBlue forward the money?

How much of those illegally accepted and then forwarded funds have those Progressive-Democrats returned to the donors, either directly or through ActBlue?

Not Necessarily

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The Supreme Court has the case of Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v Eagle County, which concerns an 88-mile railway bringing oil and farm goods out of rural Utah. It’s wholly contained within Utah. Colorado’s Eagle County is suing to block the Utah railway on the claim that the National Environmental Policy Act required the Surface Transportation Board to

analyze possible impacts as far away as the Gulf Coast, where the exported oil might be refined, and the environmental effects of “long-term employment and commercial activity” resulting from the railway.

The DC Circuit (! not the 10th Circuit, which includes both Utah and Colorado) agreed with Eagle County, which is why the case now is in front of the Supreme Court.

The Seven County argument is that

it shouldn’t have to analyze the environmental impact of anything not directly associated with railroads. It should be responsible only for the “proximate effects” of development over which it has regulatory authority.

The WSJ editors went on at length about why and how circuit ruling should be reversed, but they began with this:

[E]stablishing a predictable principle to guide future decisions about infrastructure development and prevent further litigation will be difficult. Litigants will have to parry a barrage of unpredictable hypotheticals….

Not necessarily. The guiding principle is clearly laid out by the Seven Counties: if the alleged environmental impact of a thing isn’t directly associated with that thing, there’s no analysis needed of that allegation. Full stop.

Regarding those “unpredictables,” there already is case law barring speculative lawsuits. Indeed, the Supreme Court already has repeatedly held that agencies needn’t consider indirect and unpredictable impact, most recently in Department of Transportation v Public Citizen. If litigation still gets out of hand, SLAP sanctions are available.

Eagle County’s case is just another of those quibbles for interference’s sake that the Court needs to stoutly chastise along with reversing the DC Circuit’s ruling.