Tag Archives: politics

A USN Admiral Smeared the PRC?

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Really?

In Vice Admiral Harry Harris Jr’s (Commander, United States Pacific Command) testimony before Congress regarding needed Navy funding, he said among other things that the PRC’s terraforming islands in the Spratly and Paracel island groups and their building runways and radar installations on them followed by deploying fighter aircraft to them amounted to militarization of a region that’s key to ship-borne trade.

That got the PRC’s knickers twisted. Ministry of National Defense spokesperson Colonel Wu Qian fretted

I have noted that according to media reports, Adm. Harris made his remarks while seeking additional defense budget funds from Congress.

We don’t interfere in your seeking defense budget funds, but you can’t carelessly smear China while asking for more money.

What smear? The truth is never a smear.

Deliberate?

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…China has deployed fighter jets to a contested island in the South China Sea, the same island where China deployed surface-to-air missiles last week, two US officials tell Fox News.

The dramatic escalation came as Secretary of State John Kerry hosted his Chinese counterpart, Foreign Minister Wang Yi, at the State Department.

Was this deployment, timed as it was to coincide with our ineffectual Secretary of State’s hosting of Wang, a deliberate provocation, aimed at embarrassing him and our country? Or was it merely aimed at demonstrating to the nations around the South China Sea our present impotence?

Just to be sure the PRC’s message was clear, Wang added that

he hoped that “close up” military flights and patrols by US Navy ships over the contested islands would end.

“We don’t hope to see any more close-up military reconnaissance or the dispatch of missile destroyers or strategic bombers to the South China Sea.”

Hmm….

The 2nd Amendment and Campuses

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I confess to mixed feelings about mixing children, alcohol, and guns, and that’s the mix on college campuses that’s allowed under Texas’ new concealed carry law.

However.

UT Austin President Gregory Fenves is engaging in a naked, Obama-esque effort by to ignore the law through made-up excuses.

The law, passed by the Texas legislature in its latest session, allows individuals to carry a concealed handgun while on the campus of a public, private, or independent institution of higher education.

Fenves is manufacturing his very own safe space loophole: he’s trying to block handguns in the University of Texas Austin’s dorms. Because there’s a penumbra of a shadow of an exception for dorms in that while on the campus phrase.

Or maybe because Austin’s dormitories aren’t actually on campus.

Or something. Who knows what’s going on in Fenves’ fevered imagination?

He is wrong on this, though; he’s just engaging in another Liberal assault on our 2nd Amendment.

More Democrat Hypocrisy

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We’ve already heard from Senator Chuck Schumer (D, NY) about how there should be no end-of-term nominations to fill Supreme Court vacancies, unless it’s a Democrat President making the nomination.

Then, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D, MA) claimed with her usual polemics that not proceeding with a nomination and confirmation process

would threaten both the Constitution and our democracy itself.

It is, after all, a Democrat President whose nomination needs the confirmation, else the Republic will fall.

The Democratic Party’s Progressive Presidential candidate and Socialist Presidential candidate both have demanded that the present Democrat President, in his last year, should nominate and have favorably considered a Supreme Court Justice.

Now we get Vice President Joe Biden (D), when he was the Democratic Party Senator from Delaware and the Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman, saying in all seriousness (during the last year of a Republican President’s term)

should seriously consider not scheduling confirmation hearings on the nomination until after the political campaign season is over.

now insisting that a Democrat President should make his nomination in the current political season and

the current Senate has a constitutional duty to [consider Obama’s choices].

Forthwith.

More Foolishness

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The motorboat skipper who sits in our Secretary of State’s chair and his Russian counterpart, and some carefully selected “opposition and rebel groups,” have agreed to a cease-fire in Syria that is alleged to be effective Saturday next.

However.

The truce will not cover IS, the al-Qaida-linked Nusra Front, and any other militias designated as terrorist organizations by the UN Security Council. But where in Syria the fighting must stop and where counterterrorism operations can continue must still be addressed. And the five-page plan released by the US State Department leaves open how breaches of the cease-fire will be identified or punished.

In other words, there is no cease-fire. Only pretty words for the last months of a lame duck year in a lamed duck administration.