Category Archives: culture

Democratic Party Lawfare

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The Missouri state legislature has a supermajority of Republicans in the House.  And legislator, of any party, can require a bill to be read aloud on the House floor prior to the House’s final vote on it.  Last spring, Democratic Party legislators initiated a filibuster by requiring each bill being brought up for its final vote to be read aloud.  So far, so good.  The Republican Speaker one-upped the Democrats by having the bills read by computer with the speed control dialed up.  Again, so far, so good.

But, since the Democrats lost their dispute from within the House, they’ve sued in open court.  They know they have no case, but they didn’t get their way, so they’re trying to go around the House rules—rules to which both parties agreed when the rules were developed and then adopted—to impose their way.

They have no case?  They have no case because legislatures set their own rules for how they’ll conduct their legislative business; courts have no jurisdiction here.  Even the Missouri Supreme Court seems to be recognizing that.

The court said weeks ago that justices…will quiz attorneys about how the Legislature conducts its own business, and they will consider whether the judicial branch has any say in settling a dispute among lawmakers.

This is what we can look forward to in the Federal government, too, as demonstrated by the recent Democratic Party’s calculated cancelation of democracy in the Federal House of Representatives by preventing the people’s business from being done in the People’s House because they couldn’t get their way.  This was demonstrated earlier, too, as Democrats left Wisconsin and Indiana explicitly to prevent those legislatures from conducting the people’s business because the Democrats couldn’t impose their will.  It’ll only get worse under a third Democratic Party-controlled White House and Democratic Party-controlled Congress.

If we Democrats can’t get our way, there’ll be no democracy for you.

Why is this even a Question?

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Republicans officially petitioned the administration Thursday to deny Hillary Clinton access to secret information as Democrats’ presidential nominee, and some GOP lawmakers said if the intelligence community won’t do it, they’ll pass a bill to do it themselves.

Oh, wait—it’s a question because

The White House has said it won’t deny Mrs Clinton access….

On the excuse of tradition, don’t you know.

Never mind the tradition, and the requirement in most serious security régimes—like in a government—of revoking existing security clearances and denying further access to those who’ve committed security violations as egregious as even FBI Director James Comey has documented Clinton having done.

Some rules, some traditions, just don’t apply.  Not when they’re inconvenient.

A Liberal Justice Talked out of Turn

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Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg now is in the business of publicly bashing politicians who don’t think like she does.

I can’t imagine what this place would be—I can’t imagine what the country would be—with Donald Trump as our president.  For the country, it could be four years.  For the court, it could be—I don’t even want to contemplate that.

We can also turn her remarks around.

I can’t imagine what this place would be—I can’t imagine what the country would be—with Hillary Clinton as our president.  For the country, it could be four years—or a dozen, with her insistence on extending Obama even further, and even farther left.  For the court, it could be—I don’t even want to contemplate that.

And Ginsburg had these gems:

I don’t expect that we’re going to see another affirmative action case [regarding Fisher v University of Texas, wherein Justice Anthony Kennedy gutted his own prior ruling in the case].  I think [Justice Kennedy] comes out as the great hero of this term.

And

It would be an impossible dream.  But I’d love to see Citizens United overruled[.]

The problem here isn’t that she’s engaging in political speech, though.  It’s that her political speech, because of her position and role in our Federal government—a Supreme Court Justice—means that whatever she says in the political arena can only prejudice all of her subsequent rulings.  With such political bashing, she’s predetermining her position on any case that comes before the Court, and not only those that might be brought under or by a Trump administration.

On the other hand, it’s good to know her prejudices—as well as those pre-written opinions on cases yet to come—beforehand, rather than discovering them in her opinions after the rulings have been announced.  Which emphasizes the importance of a question asked by a tweeter and quoted in The Washington Post piece at the first link above:

If there’s a redo of Bush v Gore, how does Ginsburg not recuse herself, given her Trump comments?

How, indeed?  Worse, how could we expect her to?

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.

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.