…Progressive-Democrat style. Here’s Congresswoman Frederica Wilson (D, FL):
people who are “making fun of members of Congress” online “should be prosecuted”
Because, she went on, making fun of Congress intimidates Congressmen. In fact, she went on in that vein for more than 40 seconds, just in the recording.
Wow.
That’s how close Iran is to getting a nuclear weapon. The Wall Street Journal‘s subheadline tells the tale.
Tehran exceeded a key limit in the 2015 deal but experts say that it is only a small step and that it would take Tehran at least a year to make a weapon
That’s how far away from nuclear armament Iran would have been under the JCPOA on that deal’s expiration. After all,
The 2015 deal was structured to make sure that Iran would take a year to amass enough material for a weapon if it chose to break the accord.
A whole year.
And the People’s Republic of China threatens. Hong Kong citizens have been protesting a PRC-endorsed law proposal that would allow Hong Kongese and others resident in or visiting Hong Kong to be extradited to the mainland for trial in the PRC’s government-run court system.
[The PRC’s] government signaled its fraying patience with protesters in Hong Kong after they stormed the city’s legislature, calling the violent turn a direct challenge to Beijing’s authority and suggesting it would have to be answered.
Public statements from Beijing marked a shift in Chinese leaders’ attitude toward the crisis in the semiautonomous territory, indicating they may be forced to step in….
Consistent with that, the PLA’s Hong Kong garrison has begun “emergency handling” exercises.
And this:
The [PRC] government’s Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office called the protests a “blatant challenge to the bottom line of ‘one country, two systems’….”
Hardly. The PRC’s proposed extradition law for Hong Kong is a deliberate threat to the two systems part. Yet, here’s Zhang Jian, Associate Research Fellow at the Shanghai Institute of International Studies:
The suspension of the bill is tantamount to a withdrawal. There is no more room for backing down, no more ground for retreating.
This, of course, is nonsense. Suspension is not withdrawal, it’s a deliberate attempt to keep the extradition bill alive for later, quieter reconsideration and for enactment out of site of the peasantry. There’s plenty of room for continued action: the actual withdrawal of the bill.
Beijing has often appeared tolerant in the face of mass protests in mainland China and Hong Kong—and when passions and attention fade, authorities detain, attack, or otherwise punish ringleaders to prevent a recurrence.
To be sure, that’s a faux patience, and the tanks may well roll across the bridges, just as they rolled into Tiananmen Square not so very long ago when another bunch of uppity peasants demanded freedom.
This one regards the rescue of those escaping from northern Africa and their disposition on arrival on European shores. The particular case concerns Italy’s arrest of a German national who is the captain of an NGO ship that had rescued a number of refugees whose ship was in danger in international waters in the middle of the Mediterranean. Carola Rakete, captain of the Sea-Watch 3, was arrested after she docked her ship at Italy’s Lampedusa, an island in the southern Med—and closer to Tunisia than to any land of Italy’s.
UK [and UN Secretary General Antonio Gutteres] spokeswoman Stephane Dujarric said in a daily press briefing that “no vessel or ship master should be at risk of being fined for coming to the aid of boats in distress, where loss of life is imminent.”
“Sea rescue is a longstanding humanitarian imperative. It’s also an obligation under international law.”
Dujarric went on:
the UN was “concerned by the recent decree from the government regarding NGO vessels.”
She was referring to Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini’s successful implementation of legislation to fine ships that flout orders to stay out of Italian waters.
Dujarric is mischaracterizing the situation, and a part of the incident that matters has been omitted by Deutsche Welle in its piece at the link. Italy has not criminalized rescue on the high seas. Italy has only responded to the illegal entry into Italian waters, compounded by the illegal entry into an Italian port, by a captain and her vessel that not only had no permission to enter either, she had been explicitly denied that permission.
Furthermore, that denial had been enforced by an Italian police vessel that Rakete rammed and forced her way past as she docked at Lampedusa. That was elided by the DW article.
Foreign Minister Heiko Maas is upset over the arrest of the German national for her criminal act.
Haggling over refugee distribution is undignified and must stop. We urgently need a European solution—one that is also in line with our European values.
Indeed, the haggling must stop. The EU must respect the European value of territorial integrity of its member nations.
In the end, regardless of what we might think of Italian actions in the present incident, such…confusion…reduces the credibility of those favoring the transfer of rescuees from the rescuing ships to a nation’s shore regardless of that nation’s expressed wishes and of that nation’s laws. And of that nation’s sovereignty.
I posted this in 2012; it bears repeating.
On this day 235 and more years ago, a group of Americans got together and, pledging their Lives, their Fortunes and their sacred Honor to each other while relying on the protection of divine Providence, took our country free from tyranny and set us on a new, wholly experimental course.
These men openly acknowledged both our right and our duty to throw off any government that too badly violates its moral obligations to us sovereign citizens, that for too long abuses our liberties and our individual responsibilities. At the same time, though, they acknowledged that routinely rebelling at every small offense was equally wrong: Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes. Yet those light and transient offenses want correction along with those abuses and moral failures.
And so, while fighting (and some dying) for our newly born nation and during the immediately ensuing years of a troubled peace, these men, with others from the newly independent and united States joining them, in a second phase of our experiment invented a wholly new form of government. They created a government that would recognize the essential sovereignty of the members of a voluntarily formed social compact over our compact’s government, and they gave that government a structure and a strictly limited set of authorities designed to maximize our control of government and our ability to maintain that control.
They also invented a wholly new mechanism for throwing off an abusive government and replacing it with one more suited to our needs and to our control: a set of elections that would let us turn all the rascals out of one house of our legislative body every two years, that would let us depose the whole of the other house of our legislative body in sequential one-third increments every two years, and that would let us fire the chief executive of this government every four years—any and all whom we found wanting during their time in office. This invention was accompanied by another invention of these men: a judiciary that sat, neither above nor below our executive and legislative, but equal to and separate from them—a third powerful check that granted stability to the whole.
We are here today arguing amongst ourselves, usually with great passion, over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the Environmental Protection Agency, climate change, Benghazi, emails, immigration, and a host of other things, too, both momentous and trivial. And we could not be without the genius and the sacrifice of those men those 235 and more years ago.
As you sit around by your barbecue, or at the beach, or wherever you may be, hamburgers and hotdogs in hand, beer nearby, children screaming and yelling in their own happinesses, take a moment to think about that.