Category Archives: politics

A UN Vote

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Recall that the UN voted strongly to condemn the Trump administration’s decision to move our Embassy to Israel to Israel’s capital, Jerusalem.  In a Letter to the Editor of The Wall Street Journal, one letter writer objected to our response to the vote.

America should support other countries’ right to vote their conscience as the US does, whether or not we agree with them.

America does support other countries’ right to vote their conscience, whether or not we agree with them. It’s a two-way street, however. Others, including our letter-writer, need to support America’s right to act in accordance with our conscience—to object to those votes and their outcome, and to act accordingly.

No one—most especially America—moved to prevent those votes from occurring.  Others, though, including our letter-writer, are acting, it seems, to deny our right to respond.

We Can Help

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And we should.

Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen has pledged to step up defense spending to defend the self-ruled island’s sovereignty in the face of China’s growing military assertiveness in the region.

A good start would be to sell missile defense systems to the Republic of China along with modern aircraft—both air defense, like updated F-16s and F-15s, and ground attack, like F-16s and A-10s.

We also should resume sea and air patrols of the Taiwan Strait, something we’ve not done for far too long.

Prove They’re Serious

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Russian President Vladimir Putin and his satrap, Bashar al Assad, want to hold peace talks in Sochi with a view to ending the fighting in Syria.  At least 40 groups in the al Assad opposition demur and are refusing Putin’s attempt.

“We reject this, and we affirm that Russia is an aggressor that has committed war crimes against Syrians,” the statement signed by 40 rebel groups said. “Russia has not contributed with a single move to alleviate the suffering of the Syrian people and it has not pressured the regime it claims it guarantees to move an inch toward any real path toward a resolution.”

These groups would rather continue the UN’s efforts to mediate, even though the UN has been useless futile since its mediation attempt began in 2014.

My suggestion: don’t go running off to the comfort of a resort town as many as 800 miles away from the theater. Putin and his satrap should offer to hold the talks in Idlib or Kobane or Ghouta.  Ghouta even is convenient to al Assad’s capital.

So should the UN’s “negotiators,” come to that, prove they’re serious.

A Thought on Student Loans

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Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is taking steps to redress the Obama administration travesty of a student loan program, but these can only be interim steps and by themselves are entirely insufficient.

Unfortunately, the student loan programs are entirely dysfunctional and want complete revamping. My high-level suggestions:

  1. student loan discharge only via bankruptcy, no special treatment of these loans
  2. let schools and students write their own loan agreements, including interest rates and payback provisions, without Government interference
  3. hold those schools and students to those agreements
  4. if Government guarantees any student loans, do so IAW the following:
  • interest rates charged must be commensurate with the employability and median first-five-year pay of the major being pursued; higher rates for lower employability and median pay. Higher risk loans should pay higher rates
  • in the event of bankruptcy discharge of a loan, the school floating the loan must completely reimburse the government, NLT the following fiscal quarter, for the taxpayer loss from the bankruptcy discharge.

The EPA Failed Again

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Quite apart from the pseudo-science that the Environmental Protection Agency’s previous Administrator, Gina McCarthy, so cynically used to rationalize her agency’s rules, and the frequent eschewing of the cost effectiveness analysis that’s supposed to underwrite or block Agency rules, the Obama administration personnel in management positions in that facility have routinely and for the duration ignored basic security rules and practices.  According to the EPA’s Inspector General,

Hundreds of contractors holding important information security jobs at the US Environmental Protection Agency have for years been working as high-level operators of its computer systems without the appropriate security background checks—a situation the agency is still scrambling to correct.

During all that time, the agency apparently did not even have a complete list of all the “high-risk” positions where detailed background investigations of outside contractors were required.

Among the IG’s findings:

As recently as last February,

nearly 70% of 484 contractors carrying a special, embedded-chip card allowing “elevated access” to EPA computer systems for their work still had not gotten their higher-level background checks.

In one sample,

five of nine contractor personnel were given sensitive access to EPA computer systems without strict background checks, even though they had worked for the EPA “for over five years.”

And

  • “a lack of oversight by responsible offices” within EPA to confirm that background investigations were initiated and eventually completed when contractors got the supposedly temporary right to special access cards
  • conflicting totals among various EPA offices about how many working contractors would require high-level background checks
  • a “breakdown in communication” among various EPA computer system managers and oversight personnel over verification of the checks
  • a refusal on the part of one EPA bureau to provide a listing of personnel who did not even have the special computer access cards but nonetheless still had privileged access to EPA computers.

Note to the IG: offices don’t do anything; the personnel manning those offices do things.  Name names.

Regarding that fourth bullet, it’s a mystery to me why the management personnel running that bureau, blatantly insubordinate as they are, haven’t been fired for cause.

Come to that, the management personnel in those other bullets also should have been fired long ago for their failure to perform, whether deliberate or not.

It’s also a mystery to me why those without the required background checks or clearances haven’t had their accesses canceled.

This is one more reason to abolish the EPA altogether.