Category Archives: politics

They Won’t Sign

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The lede has it.

Major media outlets including the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and CNN have said they won’t agree to a new Defense Department policy restricting journalists’ communication with military sources.
Those who don’t sign on to the new policy must forfeit their Pentagon press badges and won’t be issued new ones.

Among the restrictions being applied by DoD internally is

military personnel need approval before sharing information with the media, even if it isn’t classified. It says members of the media should be aware that agency “personnel may face adverse consequences for unauthorized disclosures.”

That should always have been the case. For far too long, there has been inconsistent, even contradictory, messaging coming out of DoD as a result of leaks, to say nothing of security failures in too many of those leaks. The journalism guild, of course, is spilling its collective ink pots over this.

The policy drew rebukes from press-rights organizations, which have highlighted the role journalists have played in revealing wasteful spending, conflicts of interest and misconduct.

This is self-serving and disingenuous. Pressmen should go back to doing original reporting instead of repeating each other’s rumors and printing leaked “information.” Pressmen surely understand—as the rest of us do—that leaks and their leakers are unreliable sources, and pressmen should rely instead on whistleblowers and other sources with the integrity of speaking on the record.

Their disingenuousness extends: the news outlets aren’t even being required to signify their agreement with the policy limiting DoD personnel’s interactions with the press; their signatures would merely indicate their understanding of the policy and the implications for DoD personnel.

News outlets don’t have an intrinsic right to wander the halls and poke into rooms in the Pentagon, nor do they have any need to do so, accosting any DoD personnel they happen on. Not even their self-proclaimed specialness gives them that.

It’s entirely appropriate, since the outlets won’t sign, to confine their writers to the various services’ public affairs offices, and it’s entirely appropriate to require all DoD personnel, military and civilian, who are encountered by a news writer, to refer those pressmen to the PAO and to refuse further interaction with the pressmen.

There are far too many leaks from government agencies, and those from DoD can have particularly dangerous national security implications. There are, also, far too many pressmen who don’t care a fig about national security, only about their personal bylines and notoriety.

Invitations

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Ex-Russian President and current Russian Security Council Deputy Chair Dmitry Medvedev now is making not so veiled threats of nuclear war and of assassination of our President. On the matter of supplying Ukraine with Tomahawk cruise missiles, weapons with an 1,800 mile reach, he said,

that “could end badly for everyone…most of all, for Trump himself,” according to a Google translation of his Russian-language Telegram post.
“It’s been said a hundred times, in a manner understandable even to the star-spangled man, that it’s impossible to distinguish a nuclear Tomahawk missile from a conventional one in flight[.]”

Is Medvedev inviting a nuclear response every time the Russians fire a nuclear capable ballistic missile at Ukraine, every time one (or more) of their nuclear capable bombers launches and flies headlong at Ukraine before launching its nuclear capable cruise missiles, every time one (or more) of its nuclear capable fighter-bomber aircraft invade Baltic State airspace?

Is he threatening the murder of President Donald Trump (R)?

Of course not on the former. The barbarian underboss is simply demonstrating Russian dishonesty. On the latter? Russia does have a history of murdering politicians they don’t like, including murdering them on foreign soil.

Medvedev’s threats, though, are reason enough to double up on the number of Tomahawks originally under discussion, and to authorize their transfer with no strings attached regarding Ukraine’s target lists for them.

A Misconception

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The headline and subheadline say it all.

Funding Freeze Threatens an Economic Lifeline in Chicago
Washington’s move halts plan to extend a train line into a depressed pocket of the city

Except that Washington’s move needn’t halt anything. Chicago could reallocate its spending priorities and fund the extension itself.

There’s no political will to do so, though; too many politicians in the city are addicted to Federal dollars, and apart from that, they benefit personally politically from bringing in the pork rather than spending city money.

Too, relying on Federal dollars—the taxes paid in by citizens from elsewhere in the State and especially by citizens of other States—lets city politicians avoid the drudgery of worrying about, and doing something about, the costs of such a project. And that benefits the politicians’ union employers donors.

A major factor in those costs is labor, which is driven by Federal construction dollar strings mandating union wage rates whether the builders are union shops or not. Allowing non-union wages would greatly reduce the cost of any construction project, including this train line extension.

One small example of the city officials’ shortsightedness on the revenue side is this from Wendy Jones, who runs a nonprofit that mentors young men:

The Red Line would have been a huge improvement, and it probably would have increased the property value here[.]

That increase in property value would have increased property tax revenues for the city. There would be sequelae, too, were the city managers ever to get serious about solving its crime problem: an influx of businesses, with attendant jobs, into the area fed by the train line extension, with an associated increase in income and business tax revenue to the city.

All of that would be in addition to all the construction jobs that building the extension would entail, and would still be available were the city to spend its own money on the construction.

As a bonus, the city spending its own money on the project would reduce the city’s dependency on the Federal government and reduce the latter’s leverage over the former.

That it’s a widespread and longstanding misconception that halting Federal construction funds transfers must perforce halt construction projects only demonstrates the knee-jerk response to and dependency on Federal funding that too many on both sides—politicians and citizens—have settled into.

The Federal government isn’t the only level of governing where spending discipline and reallocations are necessary.

Free Speech vs “Free Speech”

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California’s Progressive-Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom pretends to favor free speech even as he attacks it and seeks to limit it. Under Newsom,

California law requires companies with more than $500 million in annual revenue that “do business” in the state—which can mean having a single employee or contractor in the state—to detail how speculative climate-related risks could affect their businesses.
Companies with more than $1 billion in annual revenue will also have to report their CO2 emissions, including those from suppliers, customers, and contractors. Some 10,000 companies will have to comply with the first rule, and more than 5,000 with the second.

This is nothing but government-mandated speech, which is antithetical to speech freedom

Activist Federal judges are playing their role in this limitation [emphasis added].

A lawsuit by the US Chamber of Commerce and other business groups argues that the mandated climate disclosures violate the First Amendment by compelling business to speak on an intensely controversial subject. The state claimed in response that it is regulating business conduct, not speech—ergo, the First Amendment doesn’t apply.
Federal Judge Otis Wright in August rejected this defense, but he agreed with the state that the climate disclosures are constitutionally kosher because they implicate commercial speech, which merits a lower level of scrutiny under the First Amendment. This blurs a crucial distinction between commercial and non-commercial business speech.

This is even worse. Wright demonstrated his activist judicial bent by directly tying in our 1st Amendment and then saying it doesn’t apply to some (government disfavored) speech. Wright has directly attacked, with this position, the freedom Americans are explicitly allowed under that Amendment’s speech clause.

Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech….

There’s nothing in that clause that segregates speech into categories of speakers or of types of speech. No law abridging, means exactly that, neither more nor less.

At bottom, free speech is like the longstanding saw about pregnancy: either we have free speech, or we do not. There is no such thing as “a little free speech” or speech that is “somewhat free.” Most Americans understand that. It’s instructive that Progressive-Democratic Party politicians and activist judges do not. We can fix the one promptly through our elections. Fixing the other will take longer, but we can fix it, too, through our elections as we choose Congressmen and Presidents who will nominate and then confirm judges who adhere to the text of our Constitution and our statutes rather than to their personal views of “social needs.”

The Editors Miss Again

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This time, the editors of The Wall Street Journal waxed excited over President Donald Trump’s (R) responses to the People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping’s export blocks controls on rare earths and related materials aimed at the United States.

First things first.

None of this [trade war] is good for the US and global economies.

The editors appear to be writing from a fantasy garret office. In what war do they imagine that one side suffers no harm at all? In the real world, wars damage all participants.

Then there’s this from the editors’ swampish imaginations.

Mr Trump started the fun by announcing on social media midday Friday that “some very strange things are happening in China!” He said Beijing has turned “very hostile” and is sending letters to the world announcing tighter controls on the export of “every element of production having to do with” rare-earth minerals.

There’s that fantastical editorial garret world again. This latest round was begun by the PRC’s Xi when he imposed those controls on rare-earths, processed rare earths, and any product from wherever exported that contains rare earth materials comprising 0.1% or more of the product’s value. Trump is merely responding to that attack rather than meekly lying down and forcing us to accept it.

But back up a bit, too, to a time of which the long-term memories of the editors seem broadly deficient. The PRC has been inflicting its trade war on us for years and years. It has been stealing our technologies through espionage and hacking.

It has been forcing technology transfers from private enterprises as a condition of their doing business in the PRC, a condition only slightly eased over the ensuing years.

It has been forcing private enterprises to accept as partners PRC-domiciled companies as a condition of those foreign enterprises doing business in the PRC, a condition only slightly eased over the ensuing years.

It has demanded PRC government-approved back doors into foreign companies’ operating software as a condition of those foreign enterprises doing business in the PRC, a condition only slightly eased over the ensuing years.

It has demanded PRC apparatchiks in foreign companies’ management teams operating PRC-domiciled arms, a requirement only slightly eased over the ensuing years.

The PRC has begun dumping its industrial output on the international market at below production cost pricing nominally to shore up the economic malaise of its own overproduction, but in truth to bankrupt other nations’ domestic industrial producers—including in the US—and so gain market share to the point of other nations’ dependency, especially ours, on PRC output.

Trade wars aren’t easy, as the editors noted in their headline. But trade wars are made the harder when folks who should know better don’t even understand the war actually progress.