I’ve Written It Before

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House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer (R, KY) says there’ll be no special treatment of Hunter Biden; if he ignores the Committee’s subpoena, Comer will take him to court to force his appearance.

“We’re going to treat this investigation like every congressional investigation in recent memory has been treated: you come in for a deposition, then you do the public hearing. All of our depositions are transparent. We released the transcripts. … He is the key witness to all of the Biden crimes. So the subpoena called for him to show up in this office on December 13 for a deposition. I expect to see Hunter Biden in this office for a deposition.”
Asked if he was prepared to go to court if the first son does not show up, Comer answered. “Absolutely.”

And I’ll write it again. Comer shouldn’t waste time on going to court to enforce the Committee subpoena of Son Biden. The Father Biden/Garland DoJ won’t push the matter at all. Instead, per Jurney v MacCracken, Comer should put the matter before the House for a contempt vote first thing in the morning of the 14th, and then the House Sergeant at Arms, by noon on the 14th, should be sent to arrest Biden and haul him before the Committee for a closed-door deposition on the 15th.

There’s no need for any more stalling by either Biden.

Healthcare Systems On Edge

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They’re on edge from a plethora of cyber attacks against them.

According to the Institute for Security and Technology, about 300 hospitals have suffered ransomware attacks this year alone. Cyber experts say hackers typically see health care organizations as a prime target because hospitals are likely to pay ransom to keep critical health services up and running.

Two problems are buried in that simple characterization. One is the continued vulnerability of the hospital systems’ IT systems. Why does this vulnerability continue to exist? Charlie Regan, Nerds On Site CEO:

Cyber criminals trying to get into any network or system are incredibly well-funded and incredibly well-orchestrated, and they have a never-ending source of more creative and effective tools to breach systems[.]

Yes, countering, much less preempting, such attacks is hard. But “hard” means “possible,” and the hospital system IT managers don’t appear to be making much effort to get on top of their companies’ vulnerability—those 300 attacks in just the last several months seem to demonstrate this.

But the larger problem in that characterization is that hospitals are likely to pay ransom. Paying the ransom is nothing other than paying the hackers wages for their labor, aiding and abetting the hackers’ crimes, and increasing the vulnerability of others to hackers’ crimes by guaranteeing that their crimes don’t just pay; they’re lucrative.

Given that, I’m having a hard time summoning any sympathy for the hospital systems. They need to start taking their cyber vulnerabilities seriously.

A Curmudgeon’s Take on the Gifting Season

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The headline on Jason Gay’s op-ed on Christmas gifts in Friday’s The Wall Street Journal actually reads,

The Elusive Challenge of De-Escalating Gifts

That’s the point, though. In Gay’s piece, the season isn’t about Christmas, it’s about whether to incur the expense of profligately scattering presents about, with the Christmas season serving merely as backdrop and an excuse for the ostentation, or as a device for crying about the money—and intrafamilial competition—involved.

Gay pretended to considerable angst about trying to tamp down the gifts (with nary a word about Christmas itself), and he offered a number of excuses [sic] for the failure to tamp. A couple were these:

Complete multilateral de-escalation is essential. You cannot have a situation where five people give no gifts, or tiny gifts, and then someone shows up with a wheelbarrow full of Johnnie Walker Blue and PlayStation 5s. If this means impromptu site visits to make sure a relative isn’t secretly stockpiling an illicit stash of Ugg boots, so be it.

No, it isn’t, yes, you can. And no, you don’t have to be intimidated into any spying-on-relatives visits; that’s just cowardice. Instead, it would be easy enough to shame the wheelbarrow-er for his naked attempt to abuse the season to curry favor, or to show off his own ostentatious wealth, or both. If the wheelbarrow-er, in the end, shows himself to lack the grace to be shamed, then he needn’t be invited back the next year.

Ditto grandparents. It’s easier to talk a squirrel off a bird feeder than it is to convince a grandparent not to give gifts to grandchildren. Gifts are what grandparents are for.

Hard means possible, full stop. And no, gifts are not what grandparents are for, no more than wives are baby making machines for those same grandparents. If they’re unwilling to follow the parents’ strictures, then ditto the misbehaving grandparents. They don’t need to be invited back the next year.

Timidity like Jason Gay’s are why it’s so difficult for so many to have a sane Christmas that’s in keeping with the actual meaning of the season, and of the year surrounding it.

Limits

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Progressive-Democrat Joe Biden, through his Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, is busily trying to tie Israel’s hands (plural) behind its back as it fights its war of survival against the terrorist organizations of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other terrorists ensconced in Gaza Strip. Blinken’s words:

“…the imperative to the United States that the massive loss of civilian life and displacement of the scale we saw in northern Gaza not be repeated in the south.” He said Israel must take “more effective steps to protect the lives of civilians.”

This is Biden and Blinken continuing to be cowed by the mullahs of Iran, who want Israel defeated to the point of destruction.

If these two had any morals at all, they’d take up that “massive loss of civilian life and displacement” with the Hamas, et al., terrorists (excuse the redundancy) who are butchering those civilians through their use of them as shields and of their residences, schools, and hospitals as weapons caches, rocket launch sites, and command centers.

If these two had any sense at all, they’d recognize that Israel already is taking the most “effective steps to protect the lives of civilians:” Israel is killing the terrorist Hamas, PIJ, et al., so they can never inflict those butcheries again.

Instead, these two…politicians…are bent on betraying Israel, and intended or not, they’re betraying the United States in consequence.

Evidence Tampering

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It seems that the House January 6 Committee videos of witness depositions have…disappeared. Congressman Barry Loudermilk (R, GA), House Administration Oversight Subcommittee Chairman:

All of the videotapes of all depositions are gone[.]

This is a problem because such videos, being the products of official House proceedings, are records that are required to be preserved, stored, and available. These videotapes in particular, having been created by the last Congress’ House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack in its pursuit of its investigation into the events of January 6, 2021, constitute Congressional evidence and especially are required to be preserved. Yet that committee’s Chairman, Mississippi Progressive-Democratic Party Congressman Bennie Thompson (D, MS), now claims (in his best Johnny Carson impression), “I did not know that.”

Imagine that.

The tampering spreads to Committee documents, also.

[T]he Democrat-led House committee sent certain evidence such as transcripts to the Biden White House and Homeland Security Department and now the transcripts have been returned to Loudermilk’s GOP-led subcommittee nearly fully redacted so their contents can’t be read.

This is Thompson evidence-tampering by destroying the videotapes and Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden aiding and abetting in the crime by allowing his staff to tamper with those documents. Party will protect their members, though, so it’s up to us ordinary Americans to rid ourselves of them next November.