Category Archives: ethics

Distraction

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Top Democrats are calling on Facebook and Twitter to investigate and release information behind potential Russian-linked accounts pushing for the release of a sealed congressional memo allegedly containing details on US government surveillance abuses.

It couldn’t possibly be that there really is a broad public hue and cry to that information released.  Us uninformed voters, denizens of fly-over country, couldn’t possibly know enough to demand the release on our own.

No, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D, CA) and Congressman Adam Schiff (D, CA), the two “top Democrats” in the quote, are desperate to have a distraction.  Us uninformed might find out too much.

It’s rich coming from a Senator who released to the public, unethically, a Senate Judiciary Committee report concerning Fusion GPS and then blamed her unethical behavior on having taken cold medicines and so she wasn’t thinking clearly.  Feinstein and I are of an age, and I’ve taken cold medicines, too.  They’ve never addled my brain.

It’s also a bit much coming from a Congressman who’s not the least bit curious about the Steele dossier; he just wants that matter dropped.

PRC Economic Opening

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Liu He, head of the People’s Republic of China’s Office of the Central Leading Group for Financial and Economic Affairs, says,

We’ll open wider to the world across the board[.]

Liu promised that the PRC would

  • “substantially” open up the services industry, particularly the financial sector
  • let foreign securities firms own majority stakes in their Chinese ventures and…scrap foreign ownership limits on Chinese banks
  • reiterated past promises to relax restrictions on foreign companies in manufacturing, including in railway equipment, and to gradually lower tariffs on imported products such as automobiles

Even if they do these things (and that’s no certain thing: notice those past, unkept, promises), Liu’s—and Xi’s—rhetoric is just wind in the trees as long as the PRC demands that

  • foreign companies partner with domestic companies as a condition of doing business in the PRC
  • foreign companies are required to “share” technology and other intellectual property
  • foreign companies are required to give backdoors to the PRC government for the latter’s entry into those companies’ critical software and other proprietary information.

This not only is “legalized” theft, it’s backdoor protectionism.

Federal Funds Redistributions

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The Department of Justice says it’s going to issue subpoenas, if necessary, to get sanctuary-related documents from cities who have proclaimed themselves sanctuary cities.  Sarah Isgur Flores, DoJ Public Affairs Director:

These are the jurisdictions that have politicians that release criminal aliens back onto the street.

In conjunction with that, she says that, if further necessary, DoJ will redirect Byrne Grant* funds to other jurisdictions that actively support law enforcement rather than picking and choosing those laws that are convenient to them and ignoring others.

Strange bedfellows: this sort of thing should get the Progressive-Democrats fronting for sanctuary jurisdictions on board with many of us Conservatives working to end Federal funds redistribution of one State’s citizens’ tax monies to another State’s government.  That would reduce the ability of the Federal government to push around any of the States on domestic matters.

 

*Byrne Grant: Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant Program, a major source of funding for state and local (and tribal) jurisdictions in their fight against crime.  Ironically, it’s named for NYPD Officer Edward Byrne, who was killed 40 years ago protecting an immigrant witness who was to testify against drug dealers.  Two things that sound mighty familiar today.

It’s Somebody Else’s Fault

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Recall the 50,000 “missing” FBI text messages between FBI agents Lisa Page and Peter Strzok that just by coincidence happen to have been exchanged in the most critical period of interest to Congressional investigations.

It turns out that not only has the FBI “lost” these emails, they tried to cover it up [emphasis added].

[A] pair of Republican senators [Senators Ron Johnson (R, WI) and Chuck Grassley (R, IA)] pressed the Justice Department’s watchdog [Inspector General Michael Horowitz] to explain why he did not inform them last month that the FBI “failed to preserve” five months of text messages between Strzok and Page.

It gets better: the FBI now is claiming that

the Samsung 5 mobile phones it provided to employees “did not capture or store text messages due to misconfiguration issues related to rollouts, provisioning, and software upgrades that conflicted with the FBI’s collection capabilities.”

Right.  That must be it.  On the other hand, there’s still that beachfront property north of Santa Fe….

No, this smacks of evidence tampering to me.  Especially since what those emails might have shed some light on concerned things exposed by the emails that have been turned over, things like FBI agents’ “secret society” and the “secret meetings off-site” that they were holding, and the “back up plan” and “insurance” that Strzok and Page in particular seem to have been hatching.

Or, it really is all Samsung’s fault; their bug must have been produced while writing software in the distracting environment north of Santa Fe.

A Grasping EU

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French President Emmanuel Macron has repeated the EU’s diktat that Great Britain, after leaving the European Union, cannot have full trade relations with the EU unless the British open their borders to anyone in the EU who wants in and accept the dominance of EU courts over the British government and laws.  In addition to that, the Brits must make a “contribution to the budget.”

This is just a naked power grab by the EU, and national sovereignty be damned.  What the EU is doing here is just a kinder, gentler western Europe version of what Russian President Vladimir Putin is trying against Ukraine and threatening the Baltics, Poland, and Moldova with.

Not even Putin is demanding tribute, though.

Great Britain can’t get out of the EU soon enough.