Tag Archives: government

Checks, Balances, and Pardons

Posted on by
Reply

Alan Dershowitz made short work of this and of the objections to President Donald Trump’s recent small number of pardons.

The media is just wrong: President Trump understands better than previous presidents that the pardon power is part of the system of checks and balances. He understands when the executive and judicial branches get out of whack, it’s the job of the president to restore justice.

And

Not only is it not corrupt, it’s absolutely proper. The president feels very strongly that the Mueller commission acted improperly—and if that’s his belief and he believes that strongly, and he has a basis for it, he should be pardoning and commuting people who were the victims of an injustice.

What he said.

Another Rude Question

Posted on by
Reply

This one relates to Congressman Eric Swalwell’s (D, CA) apparent compromise by the reputed People’s Republic of China spy Fang Fang (Christine Fang).

It seems that Fang hooked up with Swalwell early on, when he was a local politician, and she helped him rise into Congress: fundraising, staff selections, and the like. My question doesn’t relate, directly, to this particular tale.

There is a stock investing technique that centers on gorilla investing. This is a technique that attempts to identify a bunch of companies that are likely to be highly successful while those companies are in their early stages of development. The gorilla investor then pumps money into the stocks of each of those early-identified companies. As some of the companies grow in the market place, and many of them flame out, the gorilla investor bails on the flameouts and adds the money withdrawn from their stocks into to remaining putative gorillas. The process is repeated until only a few gorillas remain, and are true gorillas.

My question is this: are the relevant intelligence and investigative authorities looking into whether the PRC’s intelligence community has been and/or is still engaging in gorilla politician compromise, even actively aiding those most…promising? If so, are those early ones being identified and their histories vetted, with responses for those who still fail vetting?

Couple Rude Questions

Posted on by
Reply

These arise from the SolarWinds hack attack that some experts claim doesn’t rise to an act of war (but that I think might do so*).

Why wasn’t it spotted sooner? This applies to SolarWind as much as it does the IT MFWICs and their staffs at the various government agency and private business recipients. Who inspected SolarWind’s “updates,” how were they tested both before SolarWind disseminated them, and how were they tested before the receiving entities implemented them? Were the recipients actually, with straight faces, allowing a remote entity to enter their systems and install software that was uninspected/untested by those recipients?

What’s being done about the hack now—both defensively and offensively?

On what basis would we be able to believe all of the proximately done SolarWind hackware has been rooted out?

What other software is broadly used in government and automatically updated from outside? What inspecting and testing is being done on that software?

What inspection/testing is being conducted on all the private economy cloud software extant?

More serious, though, are these questions:

Was this hack, which embedded spyware, among other things, all of it? Or was this hack intended to be found as a distraction from detecting other, more hidden, more nefarious software—software that could be triggered later to conduct sabotage of critical systems, insert misleading or outright false data into critical databases and imaging systems, cut off communications between critical government and military leadership entities and between those and their field-operational systems at critical moments of a more overt attack?

Was this hack conducted by Russia? Or perhaps by Iran, while framing Russia, the butcher of Chechnya? Or perhaps by northern Korea, while disguising its own culpability by framing Russia? Or by the People’s Republic of China, which still regards Russia as a foe and now recognizes Russia’s political and military impotence vis-à-vis the CCP and the PLA, and so harming two enemies with one exploit?

*Shameless plug

The Biden Cabinet, So Far

Posted on by
2

In Biden’s own words, as summarized by Howard Kurtz:

  • the first-ever openly gay nominee to lead a Cabinet department.
  • the first ever black secretary of Defense
  • the first ever Latino head of the DHS
  • the first ever Latino head of HHS
  • the first woman…of South Asian American descent to lead OMB
  • the first woman and Asian-American to lead [as] the United States trade representative
  • the first black woman to chair the president’s Council of Economic Advisers
  • the first ever woman to hold Alexander Hamilton’s position as Treasury Secretary

And that’s just for starters.

Notice what Biden is bragging about: the first identity square checked off.

Biden isn’t even picking these folks because they’re politically expedient, or because many of them reprise his BFF ex-President Barack Obama’s (D) administration, an indirect political expedience.

No, Biden is picking these folks in furtherance of his Progressive-Democratic Party’s identity politics imperative—a political expedience of an especially…prejudicial…nature.

Notice, too, what Biden isn’t bragging about: these prospective nominees’ qualifications for the job. In keeping with Party’s identity politics ideology, qualification is centered on identity; actual skill or experience is in the far reaches of the system—if present at all.

Even if these folks could be counted on to put in honest effort, their broad and aggregated lack of qualification, their intrinsic incompetence, will be disastrous for our nation.

Progressive-Democrats and Religious Freedom

Posted on by
Reply

Progressive-Democrats want to vastly curtail, if not eliminate altogether, religious freedoms. You recall those—the core part of our 1st Amendment.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….

The Secular Democrats of America PAC, an arm of the Progressive-Democrat movement, counts the Trump administration’s actions to advance religious freedom a national security threat. Moving radically beyond merely eliminating our national motto because it dares mention God, this crowd denounces our national heritage and our belief in ourselves as a Christian nation (which is a distortion of theirs; we actually hold ourselves to be a Judeo-Christian nation).

In a 28-page list of “recommendations” this crowd sent to Progressive-Democrat President-Elect Joe Biden, they included the following:

  • withhold federal funds from any faith-based organization perceived as discriminatory on the basis of religion
  • repeal non-medical exemptions based on religious grounds
  • mandate inclusion of non-religious advisors at all faith-based gatherings at the White House
  • Biden (apparently personally) should discourage politicians from using the words “God” and “country” while speaking

So, this part of the Progressive-Democratic Party wants Government to tell religious organizations they are not allowed to practice their religion and receive the same government funding other organizations get. Government must heavily deprecate religious practices.

This crowd also insists on dictating what speech an elected official might use and who he must have in his meetings: “elected official” because there’s no reason to believe this demand, once acceded to, won’t spread far from the White House.

Biden has chosen not to comment on these recommendations. His considered silence smacks of agreement with it. If Republicans don’t hold the Senate, it’ll be a long four years of destruction.