Tag Archives: ethics

Who Does She Think We Are?

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Attorney General Loretta Lynch…regrets…her private meeting with Hillary Clinton’s husband right before her FBI Director whitewashed the FBI’s investigation of Clinton’s classified email transmittals via unsecured means.

I wish I had seen around that corner and not had that discussion with the former president, as innocuous as it was, because it did give people concern.  It did make people wonder, “Is it going to affect the investigation that’s going on?” and that’s not something that was an unreasonable question for anyone to ask.

Lynch is a highly experienced and talented Federal prosecutor.  That’s part of why she was nominated to the Attorney General post by President Barack Obama (D).

However, Lynch is a politically malleable lawyer, too, which is another part of why Obama wanted her for his AG.

Lynch knew what she was doing when she agreed to meet with Clinton’s husband.  All she regrets is the hoo-raw over her misbehavior; she doesn’t regret her misbehavior.  Her assumption that we’re dumb enough to buy this nonsense is offensive.

A Disingenuous EPA

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Talk about cost shifting.

The EPA is proposing a rule that will shift the cost of complying with its diktats—Superfund cleanups this time—onto private enterprise.  The rule

would cost the [mining industry] industry $171 million a year and save the EPA $527 million over 34 years

were the rule to be finalized.  Notice that: The EPA would save $527 million dollars over the 34 years–$15.5 million per year—while those $171 million per year inflicted on the industry works out to more than $5.8 billion over the 34 years.  And that’s per the EPA’s own Regulatory Impact Analysis.

Never mind that the EPA already has cost shifted at one environmental disaster that it caused, when it’s people blew out a closed mine in Colorado through their own idle carelessness and have yet to pay for the damage done and the cleanup.

Merry Christmas from the EPA.

Intelligence Community Refuses

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When the House Intelligence Committee called intel community directors—the CIA’s management, for instance—before them to testify about alleged Russian hacks and leaked CIA claims that the hacks were intended to sway the election toward the President-Elect, they refused to appear.  They also refused at the last moment, forcing the committee to cancel an already scheduled hearing into the matter.

This is unacceptable.  The committee should subpoena these men and women, and the subpoenas should be delivered by the House’s Sergeant at Arms.  If these men and women ignore the subpoenas, the House should find them in contempt (and do so again after 3 January so the contempt finding will be in effect, allowing the new DoJ which will appear after 20 January to enforce the citations).  Were it up to me, I would have held the hearing anyway, with questions addressed to the empty chairs in which those personnel would have been seated for their testimony.

On top of that, since these men and women are refusing to do their jobs, which includes testifying before the House committees with oversight of their organizations, the new budget should zero out budgets for intel community personnel in paygrades of GS-14 and above and equivalent levels—with effect from 14 December, clawbacks required.  We don’t need to spend taxpayer money on paying people who refuse to work.

Nearly as bad as this is the silence surrounding the matter.  Of the television sources, only Fox News is reporting the intel community’s refusal to testify and the House committee’s hearing cancelation.  Not CNN, not NBC, or CBS, or ABC or their online news arms are touching this.  Further, only Republican Congressmen are up in arms about this insubordination.  Not even the Democrats who insisted that hearings be held are upset over this.

That speaks volumes about bias.

Permissions of the PRC

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Tom Shorrock, who touts himself as having been raised in Japan and South Korea during the Cold War, has an interesting, if incoherent, piece in his Wednesday TomDispatch article.  He opened with a repeat of President-Elect Donald Trump’s tweet in response to the faux outrage of the NLMSM and the People’s Republic of China over his brief telecon with Republic of China President Tsai Ing-wen, a tweet that was concerned with whether the PRC had asked permission before building “a massive military complex in the middle of the South China Sea.”

Shorrock then supplied a series of potential PRC President Xi Jinping tweets.

“Did America ask us if it was OK to…maintain a massive military complex of more than 100 bases in nearby Japan? I don’t think so!”

“Did America ask us if it was OK to…rent space at the massive U-Tapao military complex in nearby Thailand? I don’t think so!”

“Did America ask us if it was OK to…use portions of the military complexes at Antonio Bautista Air Base, Basa Air Base, Fort Magsaysay, Lumbia Air Base, and Mactan-Benito Ebuen Air Base in the nearby Philippines? I don’t think so!”

And on and on, ad ridiculum; you get the idea.

What’s missed here, or ignored, you pick ’em, is that the PRC seized and occupied islands that are either sovereign territory of other nations rimming the South China Sea or are well within those nations’ Exclusive Economic Zone, and so the PRC is present—vandalizing those islands with its construction—wholly illegally.  On the other hand, the US did, indeed, ask permission and conclude formal, freely negotiated treaties with the owning nations to allow our presence in the named locales.

The comparisons are so inapt as to be risible.  Which may well be why Xi didn’t make those tweets.  Or make those responses in any milieu.

Defuse This

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Residents of the town of Totolapan in the state of Guerrero, Mexico, have taken a situation into their own hands: in response to a drug cartel’s kidnapping of family members of some of those residents, the residents have kidnapped the mother of the cartel’s leader.  They’re willing to work a trade.

On the other hand,

The government of…Guerrero said Tuesday it dispatched 220 soldiers and police in hopes of defusing the situation….

A better move, one that would more permanently defuse the situation, would be to send those soldiers into the area to eliminate the cartels that infest the town and others like it.