Category Archives: politics

Well, It’s About Time, Ollie

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Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has spoken up in a way contrary to his predecessors regarding our policy—our very attitude—toward northern Korea.

Let me be very clear: the policy of strategic patience has ended[.]

That’s not just on Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, though.  Our various administrations have tried for 20 years, or more, the idea of talking, cajoling, bribing (to the tune of $1.35 billion in “aid”) northern Korea’s various Kim dictators.  Baby Kim, in glad response, has only accelerated his drive for sticking nuclear warheads on ballistic missiles (he already has the warheads and the missiles).

Talking is nearly always a better first step than shooting, and we tried that.  Now, though, it’s become time—it’s way past time—to do something else, to stop repeating Einsteinian insanity.

Among the somethings else is taking a harder line vis-à-vis the People’s Republic of China.

Mr Tillerson noted that China has been punishing South Korea economically because Seoul is deploying America’s THAAD missile-defense system. “This is not the way for a regional power to help resolve what is a serious threat to everyone,” he said, referring to China. “We instead urge China to address the threat that makes THAAD necessary.”

(It’ll be interesting, too, to see the PRC’s reaction to being called a regional power rather than the global one to which the Warring State is aspiring.)

Other somethings else include increasing further the missile and other defense capabilities of the Republic of Korea, Japan, us, and other friendly and allied nations in the region or with interests in it and the relatively explicit possibility of military strikes ranging from shooting down northern Korean missile launches, whether test or otherwise, to striking northern Korea’s missile launch facilities, nuclear facilities, and long-range artillery facilities that might be used to try to retaliate against Seoul.

Other somethings else include more direct action against the PRC and its interests: barring PRC business enterprises that do business with or in northern Korea from the US financial system.

Partial Immigration Moratorium

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The irrationality of some Federal District judges is being made palpable by their rulings against the latest Executive Order involving a temporary moratorium on folks from six terrorist- and terrorism-supporting countries.  Here’s one example, from US District Judge Derrick Watson in Hawaii:

The illogic of the Government’s contentions is palpable.  The notion that one can demonstrate animus toward any group of people only by targeting all of them at once is fundamentally flawed.

Yet he chose not to explain his own logic, nor did he deign explain the limiting principle he holds underlying this claim.  Indeed, he explicitly refused to explain himself:

The Court declines to relegate its Establishment Clause analysis to a purely mathematical exercise.

Thus: the illogic of the judge’s contention is palpable.  The notion that one can demonstrate animus toward entire groups of people by only targeting some of them is fundamentally flawed.

How small a minority of the group can be targeted without the judge deeming the entire group targeted?  Is targeting only terrorists in a group a necessary targeting of the entire group?  Is targeting a single individual—rightly or wrongly; that’s what trials are for, after all—necessarily a targeting of the entire group to which he belongs?

And which group in which he has membership—Islam?  Sunni Muslim?  His fellow citizens of a nation?  The group comprised of fellow members of his gender?  All groups?

Where is the limiting threshold?  Watson chose not to say.

And this:

[P]lainly-worded statements, made in the months leading up to and contemporaneous with the signing of the Executive Order, and, in many cases, made by the Executive himself, betray the Executive Order’s stated secular purpose.

Here is the judge dragging into the case things that are not in the case at all.  The matters before the judge are the Executive Order and its constitutional legitimacy and nothing else.  Campaign rhetoric, marketing commentary, are not relevant.  What is relevant–all that is relevant–are the plain text of the EO, existing immigration law, and the Constitution.  Full stop.

This judge has ruled solely on personal ideological grounds and not at all on the legality of the matter.  Ideology, political matters–policy–are for the political branches of Government, not for the judicial–as Article III makes plain.

New PRC Policy

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Robert Blackwill, writing for The National Interest, has suggested we need one.  He’s not far wrong, because as he puts it,

there is no real prospect of building fundamental trust, a peaceful coexistence and mutual understanding, a strategic partnership or a new type of major country relations between the United States and China.

The core of his new policy is this:

  • revitalizing the US economy to nurture those disruptive innovations that bestow on the United States asymmetric economic advantages over others
  • substantially increasing the defense budget and consequently shifting US defense resources to Asia
  • creating new preferential trading arrangements among US allies and friends to increase their mutual gains through instruments that consciously exclude China
  • recreating a technology-control regime involving US allies that prevents China from acquiring military and strategic capabilities enabling it to inflict “high-leverage strategic harm” on the United States and its partners
  • concertedly building up the power-political capacities of US allies and friends on China’s periphery
  • improving the capability of US military forces and allies to effectively project power along the Asian rimlands despite any Chinese opposition
  • all while continuing to work with China in the diverse ways that befit its importance to US national interests.

Expect activities that satisfy that last bullet to be few and far between.  There are very few ways in which the modern incarnation of the Warring State would be willing to work with us.

Someone else <ahem> wrote much the same sort of thing a short while ago, too.

The Trump Tax Leak

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Host Rachel Maddow said the two-page summary of Trump’s federal return for that year was first obtained by journalist David Cay Johnston, who gave MSNBC a first look at the documents.

It is unclear who leaked them. Johnston, with the website DCReport.org, said only that he found the documents “in the mail.”

If you believe that the leaked return just sort of showed up like that, maybe you’ll believe that I have some beachfront property north of Santa Fe to sell you.

The question, though, is how did they get these tax files from the IRS?  How did the IRS come to leak them—which leak is a felony?  How did Johnston and Maddow obtain these files—which looks a lot like receiving stolen goods, if the stuff wasn’t, strictly speaking, leaked?

On the lesser matter, it turns out that Presidential Candidate Donald Trump wasn’t the one blowing smoke over his taxes—it was the mendacious NLMSM.  Trump, from those 2005 tax data, paid nearly 25% of his income in income taxes.  Which is considerably more than the Left’s other billionaire hero, Warren Buffet, who paid less income tax than his secretary and who wants billionaires to pay more (but he still refuses to make donations to the Treasury…).

However, don’t expect the mendacity of the Left and its Progressives to lessen on matters related to President Donald Trump.

Dismembering Government?

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If the advance word leaks about President Donald Trump’s upcoming budget proposal can be believed, it would appear that his swamp-draining and Government downsizing are about to get start.  And “news” outlets like CNN are getting their panties bunched over the prospect.  This is from this outlet’s piece, tellingly headlined Trump’s plan to dismember government:

It would codify an assault on regulatory regimes over the environment, business and education bequeathed by former President Barack Obama, and attempt to halt decades of steadily growing government reach.

And this:

Slicing up government power is part of a deeper antipathy towards institutions and the political establishment that runs deep in the Trump White House.

Yewbetcha. And among us poor, dumb, gun-toting, Bible-clinging, irredeemably deplorable denizens of flyover country, too.

And this from The Washington Post, albeit a bit less strident than CNN:

President Trump’s budget proposal this week would shake the federal government to its core if enacted, culling back numerous programs and expediting a historic contraction of the federal workforce.

And this from the Post‘s cite of Robert Reischauer, of an earlier time’s CBO:

These are not the kind of cuts that you can accommodate by tightening the belt one notch, by shaving a little bit off of a program, or by downsizing a few staff here or there.  These are cuts that would require a wholesale triage of a vast array of federal activities.

Dismember government: ’tis a consummation Devoutly to be wished.