Tag Archives: political parties

“Defense or Democracy?”

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That’s the question the Biden administration is worrying about in Chad.

The Biden administration is in a bind over whether to provide military aid to Chad, one of Africa’s most reliable bulwarks against the spread of Islamist militants and an opponent of Russia’s growing influence in the Sahel region.
Chad’s longtime president, Idriss Déby, was killed in battle two years ago and quickly replaced by his son, violating the line of succession laid out in the Central African country’s constitution. Now, the US government is struggling with the question of whether the ruling junta is too brutal and undemocratic to merit US assistance, or whether the country’s value as a military ally trumps those concerns.

There’s another interpretation of the situation, though, that seems more cogent to this ignorant Texan. That is that the question presents a false dichotomy. No, the reality is that without defense, there can be no democracy.

Without defense, the autocracy that currently reigns over Chad can become entrenched, or the nation can be overrun by the terrorists, whether Islamists like Boko Haram and Daesh-West Africa, or by elements of the Wagner Group. All of these are operating in the country.

With defense, though, Chad has a strong chance of both crushing the terrorists and making the current autocracy an aberration and returning Chad to democratic governance.

Cyber Voting

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New York State Progressive-Democrat Congressmen want to allow absentee voters to return their ballots over the Internet.

Those Congressmen want absentee voters to be able to [emphasis added]

submit ballots for federal, state and local elections using “electronic absentee ballots” submitted by email.

“Government watchdogs” object.

…Reinvent Albany and Common Cause New York said they have “grave concerns” about the proposed legislation. They warned the move would “put the security of New York’s elections at high risk for cyber incidents, and undermine public confidence in election results.”

However well-intentioned such a move might be, those watchdog groups are right about the security failure such a move would present to the sanctity of each voter’s ballot.

They don’t go far enough in their objection, though. Email, even supposedly encrypted email (and who seriously believes the State government is equipped to send and receive encrypted email?) can be hacked. But the real threat is in the enclosed (attached?) ballots. Ballots are too easily forged, and those forgeries, as images attached/enclosed in a putative absentee voter’s returned email, can have malware embedded in them, in a technique known by the cute name “steganography.” Indeed, stenography can embed the malware in the emails themselves.

That malware can contain code that does far more than just infest the ballot or the ballot-counting and -recording and voter registration processes. That malware can be designed—as any script kiddie knows—to spread itself across internal network connections from the voting/voter registration areas of the government’s software to much more lucrative areas of government software and only then execute its mission. That mission can range from a ransomware attack to a denial of service attack to theft of any government data deemed useful by the hacker.

This is an idea whose time should never be.

Hypocrisy

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The Progressive-Democratic mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, has provided a canonical example. Now he’s pretending to be upset by a graduation speech by a City University of New York School of Law graduate that was itself as bigoted as the anti-Semitic speaker.

We cannot allow words of negativity and divisiveness to be the only ones our students hear[.]

This from the man who deliberately, with conscious racism, accused a border State governor of racism for transporting illegal aliens—who volunteered for the trip—to sanctuary cities like the one over which he reigns.

His virtue-signaling is deeply offensive.

FBI Director Wray in Contempt of Congress

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FBI Director Chris Wray has said in so many words that he will not honor the House Oversight Committee’s subpoena for a document. Committee Chairman James Comer (R, KY) now says he’s

taking steps to hold…Wray in contempt of Congress….

The FBI Director in contempt of Congress? How about the FBI as an institution in contempt of Congress—and of us citizens?

In any event, good luck getting the Biden DoJ to prosecute the case, but it’s useful to go on the record, and further to demonstrate anew the protective cloak that the Biden administration throws around its own.

It also would be useful if the House, as part of its budget-setting, were to apply the Holman Rule to Wray and his Deputy Directors, and cut their salaries to $1.00 per year.

Hype that Deadline

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Even The Wall Street Journal is in on the artificial…excitement…act. Congress has just a few days to pass a bill before June 5 deadline goes the subheadline.

It’s not much of a deadline, with revenue flowing in under existing tax laws that’s more than sufficient to pay as scheduled the principal and interest on our nation’s debt, and then the scheduled payments for our soldiers and veterans, and then the scheduled payments for Social Security and Medicare along with the scheduled transfers to the States for Medicaid, and then the scheduled payments for HHS, then DoT (for good or ill), then DoEd (for good or ill), then….

You get the idea.

There are only a couple of things of note should a debt ceiling deal not be enacted by 5 June (or whatever becomes Yellen’s deadline du jour). One is that much of the Federal government would have to shut down. That amounts to a big so what.

The other is that a number of Federal government contracts with private businesses would have their payments HIAed, to the detriment of those businesses. The failure to pay on time also would strongly negatively affect our economy and to a large extent our reputation around the world.

That last is a consideration worth taking very seriously, but not at the expense of enacting a debt ceiling deal, any deal. Republicans and Conservatives in the House need to stand firm. The present deal isn’t all that, but, to coin a phrase, think of the (Progressive-Democratic Party’s) alternative.

The deal also shouldn’t be stand-alone.

Some conservatives in the House and Senate have said they would oppose the deal because it doesn’t go far enough to limit federal spending….

One way to show they’re serious about that is via the as yet undeveloped Federal budget for the next fiscal year. Beginning Thursday (assuming today’s vote is up rather than down), the House—which is to say, the Republican caucus, since they’ll get no cooperation from the Never-and-Nothing-Republican Progressive-Democratic Party caucus—needs to begin work on that next Federal budget, a budget that codifies reduced Federal spending, reduced Federal tax rates, and reformed Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid transfer payments, and have that budget passed and ready to send to the Senate the day after that body votes on the debt ceiling bill.

And then the House—the Republican caucus—needs to get to work on the dozen separate appropriations bills that are due by this fall.

There’s no need to wait on a President’s budget proposal (what President Joe Biden (D) tossed over the House’s transom this winter is not one that can be taken seriously) or to put up with Progressive-Democrat obstructionism and knee-jerk “No.”

Press ahead.