Tag Archives: government

There’s Containment, and There’s Containment

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Recall President Barack Obama’s claim, on the morning of the Daesh’s terrorist attacks in Paris, that Daesh was contained.

Now he’s saying he was right in that assessment:

[H]e insisted that the reason he said they’re contained, hours before terror teams launched deadly raids across Paris, is because “they control less territory than they did last year.”

That may be marginally true: the Kurds have successfully pushed toward Raqqa in Syria, and they’ve driven Daesh from Sinjar in Iraq.

How important is that bit of geography, though? Daesh has expanded from attacks within and at the periphery of the geography it holds to attacks in two different continents—the airliner bombing in Egypt and those Paris attacks.

Physically contained? Geographically contained, maybe. Maybe. But plainly not physically contained—Egypt and France. And plainly not contained as a practical matter.

It’s hard to believe that neither Obama’s echo chamber nor Obama don’t understand this.

EU Border Policy

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Jean-Claude Juncker, European Commission President, says the Paris attack won’t cause the EU to change its strategy for handling the flood of refugees from Syria, North Africa, and elsewhere.

Jean-Claude Juncker…urged citizens and politicians not to confuse the Paris perpetrators with those seeking shelter from war and terror.

It’s becoming apparent that one of the Islamic terrorists entered France legally, via Greece, on a Syrian passport. But that’s just one of the seven, or so, terrorists who butchered so many innocents. How, exactly, does Juncker propose that “citizens and politicians” sort out the terrorists from the refugees (and “ordinary” migrants, legal or otherwise) when they’re all so thoroughly mixed in among each other as the flood crosses the EU’s “borders?” The Paris butchery clearly demonstrates that the EU’s existing strategy is worse than unequal to the task, it’s a signal and tragic failure.

The Obama Administration and Racism

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[Ally Financial Inc] agreed to pay borrowers at least $80 million to settle allegations of racial or ethnic discrimination….

This is the settlement that Obama’s CFPB and DoJ browbeat Ally into accepting. There’s a catch, though:

the lender is prohibited by law from collecting data on the race or ethnicity of its borrowers.

But never mind. Obama and his Executive Branch minions cried racism, and so it must exist, regardless of actual data.

Unfortunately, though, Obama isn’t alone in this sorry charade. Ally management shares shame in this tragedy: they cravenly agreed to a penalty for something they didn’t do, or at least the government persecutors had no hope of demonstrating.

“Justice” Redux

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It turns out the Secret Service Director, Joseph Clancy, not only can’t keep his Secret Service straight, he can’t even keep his own stories about what he heard about his Secret Service’s misbehavior straight. The AP has reported, via Fox News, that Clancy’s claims of when he heard “rumors” of his agency’s illegal search of House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz’ personnel records keeps changing.

What’s interesting to me about this, though, is what the AP buried at the end of its article.

Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said Friday that his department will proceed “expeditiously” to determine whether any laws or policies were broken. To avoid a conflict of interest, Johnson said the determination about accountability will be made by him and not Clancy.

DHS will decide whether any laws were broken? Whatever happened to DoJ and its role in determining whether any laws were broken?

Oh, wait….

Government Responsibility

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At least one charity is figuring out the impediment that is government involvement in what is, at bottom, an individual responsibility.

Andrea Koppel, Mercy Corps’ Vice President of Global Engagement and Strategy, wants the UN’s involvement in the current Middle East refugee crisis severely downsized. Her focus is on the UN as a quasi-government, but she’s also moving further and wanting sovereign government roles downsized, too.

The better idea, Mercy argues, would be to sweep away the old institutions where they are not likely to be effective and place greater reliance on new combinations of private-sector organizations, civil society groups and different levels of government. This, the report says, would allow humanitarian organizations to take bigger risks to support local victims regardless of government response, and work faster and more easily with local communities when national governments are virtually non-existent.

It’s not an explicit call for government(s) to be the last resort rather than the first, but it’s a move in that direction.