Author Archives: eehines

“Dialog”

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Ex-Republic of China President Ma Ying-jeou, of the RoC’s pro-People’s Republic of China Kuomintang Party, was invited to and met with PRC President Xi Jinping, and they talked about the prospects for improved relations across the 100-mile-wide Taiwan Strait that separates Taiwan from mainland China.

Amanda Hsiao, a Taipei-based analyst with the Brussels-headquartered International Crisis Group, accurately characterized the meeting:

Beijing is trying to show for an international audience that they are open to dialogue with Taiwan—open to peaceful unification. All of which is an attempt to try to make China appear more reasonable.

Indeed. But it’s dialog within a PRC framework: Xi: “Stop resisting. Surrender and be assimilated into the body of the People’s Republic of China.” Ma: “Yes, Sir.”

In addition to Hsaio’s characterization, thought, the Xi-Ma meeting also was an in-your-face counter to our own Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s White House contemporaneous meeting with Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida (which Philippine’s President Ferdinand Marcos Jr later will join them) regarding PRC aggressiveness.

For each reason, and especially for both together, Biden’s response to the Xi-Ma meeting will be important for RoC security.

Another Example…

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…of the racist and sexist bigotry of the Biden administration.

The Biden administration’s Department of Agriculture has begun making disaster relief funding contingent on the race and sex of the disaster sufferer.

[T]he Biden administration has taken roughly $25 billion in disaster and pandemic aid approved by Congress for farmers in eight programs and devised a system to make awards based on race, gender, or other “socially disadvantaged” traits.

Texas farmers have filed suit to block this USDA move, noting that the

USDA does this by first defining farmers who are black/African-American, American Indian, Alaskan native, Hispanic, Asian-American, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, or a woman as “socially disadvantaged.” Then, it provides farmers who qualify as socially disadvantaged more money for the same loss than those it deems non-underserved, along with other preferential treatment[.]

An unbigoted Biden administration never would have done this in the first place. The farmer’s lawsuit shouldn’t be necessary, and it wouldn’t be, absent this administration’s naked racism and sexism.

Progressive-Democratic Party Selling Out Israel

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Progressive-Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren (MA) wants to deny Israel F-15 fighters—in the middle of Israel’s war for survival against a Hamas and Islamic Jihad of Palestine’s effort to exterminate that nation. She’s gaslighting Americans with her premise that Israel is somehow responsible for the destruction and death that the terrorists are inflicting through their use of Gazan civilians as shields for the terrorists, and the terrorists’ use of civilian residences, schools, mosques and churches, and hospitals as cover for the terrorists’ weapons caches, launching sites, and command centers.

Nor is Warren’s move an isolated incident. It’s typical of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s sellout.

House [Progressive-]Democrats called on President Joe Biden to stop sending weapons to Israel following the country’s drone strike that killed seven World Central Kitchen aid workers in Gaza.

These wonders are using the tragically mistaken strike by the IDF as their own excuse to betray Israel. They don’t care that one of the things that makes the mistaken strike so notable is the utter rarity of such mistakes by the IDF and the enormous pains they go to to minimize civilian casualties. Those pains include, but are far from limited to, warning everyone in the target zone—including, in consequence, the terrorists—of an impending strike so the civilians (and terrorists) could leave beforehand.

This is the depth of the perfidy of the Progressive-Democratic Party that they’ve become so protective of the Hamas and IJP terrorists.

Putting Mayorkas on Trial

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Republican Senators Ted Cruz (TX) and Mike Lee (UT) opined on the Senate’s duty to hold a trial of DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas when the House delivers the articles of impeachment and on the Senate’s Progressive-Democrat Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (NY) intent to block any such trial. Toward the end of their piece, they offered this assessment of Schumer’s move:

He [Schumer] also wants to insulate Democrats from having to vote guilty or not guilty.

On this aspect of Schumer’s block I disagree.

Those Progressive-Democrat Senators who vote to table the impeachment trial will be putting themselves clearly on the record in two ways. One is that their vote to table will be their confession that they know Mayorkas (and Biden) are guilty and don’t want to have to vote against one of their own and, by implication, against Party’s boss on the matter.

The other is that they’ll be putting themselves on the record as lacking either the political courage to hold the trial, or the moral courage to hold the trial, or both.

An Argument for Patronage

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James Freeman described Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s move to strengthen bureaucracy’s and bureaucrats’ control over our Federal government. Citing a CNN report, Freeman wrote:

Betsy Klein and Tami Luhby report for CNN:

The Biden administration has finalized a new rule bolstering protections for career federal workers, marking a move to preemptively halt or significantly slow any efforts by former President Donald Trump, should he win in November, to reduce or alter the federal workforce.

No swamp-draining allowed! The new Biden rule from the Office of Personnel Management is intended to impede Mr. Trump if he wins the presidency again and revives an executive order he issued in October of 2020. The Trump order created the option of converting thousands of senior bureaucrats into at-will employees. The CNN team has more:

Trump’s executive order created a new classification of federal employees titled “Schedule F” for employees serving in “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating positions” that typically do not change during a presidential transition.

Why shouldn’t a duly elected president have the authority to hire and fire policymakers in his own administration?

Indeed. While it’s certainly true that one administration’s agency or departmental rules or a President’s Executive Orders can be undone by a subsequent administration, Biden is illustrating the need for a return to statutory patronage in the Federal government’s bureaucracy. Statutes, after all, while undoable by a subsequent Congress, are much harder to undo.

With a patronage modification, this: civil servants and bureaucrats are hired on five-year contracts. Those contracts then are renewed, or not, in five-year increments at the sole discretion of the then sitting President or relevant Department/Agency head. And this additional fillip: upon leaving Federal government employ, whether through resignation/retirement/termination or through simple non-renewal, that now ex-employee has his security clearance automatically withdrawn.