Tag Archives: politics

Dispositive Indication of Party’s Extremism

Posted on by
Reply

In an article concerning Maine’s Progressive-Democratic Party nominee for the US Senate, Graham Platner, and whether he should drop out of the fall election contest over an allegation of rape (coming on the heels of a number of women who’ve said he’d been abusive toward them), there is this statement:

Over the last 24 hours, some of Platner’s advisers have been guiding him on what a withdrawal from the race would look like and helping him figure out a way to get a candidate and a selection process he could support, according to a person familiar with the discussions.

[A] candidate and a selection process he [Platner] could support. That’s a pretty definitive statement of the control over the Progressive-Democratic Party that the socialists have, and it demonstrates pretty clearly how socialism has become the center of Party and how Party Establishment has been relegated to Party’s extremist right (even as Party’s Establishment remains plainly Left Wing relative to American politics and voters).

And, just to emphasize that point, which even includes those wanting Platner to drop out, here’s Joseph Geevarghese, who is the Executive Director of Our Revolution, the progressive organization that socialist, but nominally Independent, Senator Bernie Sanders (VT) generated:

To the Democratic establishment: this is not your opening. Mainers did not vote by an overwhelming margin against Janet Mills and the DSCC’s handpicked candidate just to be handed another status-quo candidate.

It’s hard to get any clearer than that.

Update: In the realization, Platner withdrew.

I intend to file my paperwork to withdraw,” he added. “The process needs to assure that what comes next is reflective of the Mainers, who on June 9 turned out and showed that they are desperate for a different kind of politics.

As Dana Loesch put it in her newsletter,

As the truth unraveled so did Platner’s polling. A recent NYT poll showed incumbent Susan Collins leading Platner with working class voters by 21 points, expanded more by narrowing it to white working class voters. Women, Hispanics, and other demos began sliding fast. Democrats couldn’t afford Platner hurting them in the midterms, too.

This is Party.

Revolution vs Evolution

Posted on by
1

The opening two paragraphs lay out the question regarding the nature of warfare:

The way wars are fought is changing fast, as new technologies upend military doctrines on everything from procurement to executing operations.
But just how radical will this transformation be in years to come? And are the hundreds of billions of dollars being invested by the US, its allies and rivals in new tanks, planes and warships going to become the equivalent of buying horses and arrows on the eve of machine guns and howitzers?

Germany’s Inspector General of the Bundeswehr, General Carsten Breuer, added to the question:

The character of warfare is changing fundamentally. Armed forces must be able to adapt faster, integrate new technologies, and learn at speed. If we fail to adapt, we will not be able to prevail.

And Michael Kofman of the Carnegie Endowment in Washington:

Revolutions in warfare are often declared but rarely arrive. Most military developments, like the current trends in the use of drones and precision strikes, are evolutionary. Nobody doubts the impact of gunpowder, but it was on the battlefield for hundreds of years, alongside knights and pikemen.

And this:

Military leaders, governments, and defense companies disagree on whether to call the current developments a revolution that warrants a complete overhaul of existing doctrines.

It’s a silly, time- and resource-wasting question. The situation neither demands nor holds unnecessary the idea of completely overhauling existing doctrines. It does, though, demonstrate—demand—the need to completely review, from the ground up de novo all existing doctrines and to do so periodically.

What matters, rather, is this constant: the need to manage and keep up with, even to drive, the pace of change, and that pace today is far faster than that prior rate of moving from pikes and trebuchets to rifles and cannons, far faster than the pace of weapons, logistics, tactics, and strategies during the world’s last major set-piece war, in the last century. The pace, rapidly accelerating, also is expanding into the constitution of warfare and the nature of war itself.

The question of whether we can make necessary changes across all dimensions of conflict, from political to information to economic to cyber to kinetic—and across the logistics and maintenance aspects of each of them—faster than our enemies can then becomes the Critical Item of national survival, as demonstrated from as far back as Alexander the Great and his weapons development and use and his tactics; the Roman way of war compared with that of the Greeks, Phoenicians, and Carthaginians; and the tactics change demonstrated by the Spanish tercio.

Each of these areas of pacing also has a Do Loop that must be capable of moving apace, from recognition of a situation; through decision regarding how to respond, or better, preempt; to acting on that decision. Our Do Loops—all of them—need to be capable of operating inside of—faster than—our enemies’. If they evolve and adapt faster than we do, then we lose, and they win.

Revolution vs evolution is an irrelevancy.

Radical Reform

Posted on by
Reply

Pennsylvania’s Progressive-Democrat Governor Josh Shapiro wants our judges and Justices to be bound by popular assent instead of being bound by law.

I think we need radical reform that’s actually going to ensure that the voices of the people are heard from, that the voices of the people are represented in the three branches of government. We don’t have that right now.

Shapiro wants to pack the Supreme Court to address that, and Jonathan Turley was properly worried in his piece about Shapiro’s sharp turn to the extreme left with that remark.

I add this to that concern. This is another reason we can’t trust the Progressive-Democratic Party with control of our government. It has nothing to do with patriotism or integrity. It’s that so many Party politicians simply do not understand at all our Federal government or its structure.

Only two of the three branches of our government are intended to represent “the voices of the people,” those are the two political branches, and the granularity of that representation itself varies broadly across their elected roles. The politicians in our Congress’ House of Representatives represent, first, the voices of their district’s constituents, and second the voices of the citizens of our nation, since our Congress has national responsibilities as well as to its members’ districts. The politicians in Congress’ Senate represent, first, the voices of their State’s citizens, and second the voices of the citizens of our nation. The politicians in the White House, the President and Vice President, represent the voices of the citizens of our nation.

The judges and Justices of the third branch, though, represent no citizens’ voices. They represent our Constitution and the statutes that come before them and are bound by oath apply those laws without respect to persons and by the Code of Conduct for United States Judges to do so without fear or favor in order to facilitate the necessary political independence of our Judicial Branch and the judges and Justices within it.

Party politicians demanding that the judiciary represent the voices of the people is their demand for the subordination of judges and Justices to the vagaries of politics at the expense of their binding to law.

An Insight into Agility

Posted on by
Reply

NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte isn’t stupid. He’s worried about how to absorb the increased military spending that some NATO members finally are doing and turning that money into modern hardware and men and women trained to employ them in combat.

He’s adept at a particular style of politics—that of sycophancy toward President Donald Trump (R), referring as he does to NATO’s increased spending as the “Trump Trillion.” That’s nothing but a recognition that it took Trump’s hard words and mean tweets to prod the nations into actually increasing their defense spending instead of perennially yapping about it.

Importantly, he stated out loud a critical insight into modern military preparedness. Regarding lessons available to be learned from Russia’s war on Ukraine, he had this, using drones as his example:

It’s not about producing drones, but having the production capacity to produce drones because the technology itself is constantly adapting and is changing every two or three weeks.

That production agility doesn’t only apply to drones or to weapons and weapons systems, though. It also applies to tactics, to campaign strategies, and to soldier, sailor, and airman training.

It requires, too, the political stones to support those agilities. And that requires NATO’s member nations to understand that parochiality inhibits, possibly fatally, any chance for success in any war against an experienced NATO enemy.

Countries seeking to protect domestic companies are…duplicating efforts, such as building too many different types of armored vehicles. That kind of fragmentation is inefficient. It also means less cash for things such as air defense and deep-strike missiles.
Large systems that need to integrate armed forces across the continent, like intelligence, communications, and reconnaissance capabilities, could also be at risk of losing out.

It also leads to the outright failure of nominally agreed joint weapons programs. In the latest case, France, Germany, and Spain spent the last eight years arguing over their defense companies’ priorities for producing a joint fighter, the core pillar of Europe’s largest ⁠defence project. That parochialism led, finally, to complete failure to produce anything.

The leaders of Germany and France have agreed to scrap a landmark project to ​develop and build a new-generation fighter jet, officials said on Monday, bowing to industrial rivalries over Europe’s most ambitious defence programme.

It’s on the military and its political masters alone, though, to develop and deliver the means of protecting the logistic lines of communication. It doesn’t matter how well trained and dedicated are the personnel or how combat capable the equipment if they and the consumables they need—food and fuel—cannot be delivered to the front. Private enterprise can’t build any of that without the military’s clear specifications and the politicians to override nationalist parochialism and to provide the funds for the development and production—and the fortitude to monitor and call out, with stern sanctions, failures to perform, whether politicians or favored companies.

NATO still is less of an alliance than it is a committee of rivals. Correcting that would be Rutte’s next project, if he can last long enough.

Eroding Foundational Checks and Balances

Posted on by
Reply

Greg Ip is worried that the checks and balances built into our Federal government by our Constitution are rapidly eroding due to President Donald Trump’s (R) unilateral actions. He’s badly mistaken. The erosion began long ago, and it accelerated starting in 2008. Trump has been resisting the erosion, for all the discomfort he’s causing a Leftist press too used to and too comfortable with that washing away.

FDR then tried to pack the Supreme Court; his own party revolted.

Ip ignored the rest of that story and its impact. Roosevelt didn’t get the additional Justices he wanted, but by 1943, he’d succeeded in getting appointed to the Court 8 Justices of his choice ou of the 9 comprising the Court. Our nation has been paying the price of that ever since, from Wickard which increased Federal economic power at the direct expense of the States, through Kelo, which increased Federal power at the direct expense of individual citizens and our property rights, and Chevron deference, which increased the power of Executive Branch agencies at the direct expense of both Congress and the President.

Shortly after taking office, he [Trump] fired the Democratic members of several independent agencies, including the FTC, effectively transforming them into executive departments.

On the contrary, this was Trump executing his constitutional authority as the head of the Executive Branch, and exercising his control over all of the Agencies and Departments of the Executive Branch. The Supreme Court, only recently restored to a body that adheres to what our Constitution actually says rather than what a Liberal, Roosevelt-esque-dominated Court want it to say, acknowledged that constitutional authority. The erosion here is from Congress, with its creation of an “independent” Federal Trade Commission in 1914 and subsequent further “independent” Agency creations. These creations were Congress’ unconstitutional attempt to create a fourth Branch of government by masquerading these creations as part of the Executive Branch.

The Supreme Court also took a step toward restoring Constitutional order in our Federal government by—finally—eliminating the knee-jerk deference to those so-called independent Agencies, and others properly constituted as subordinate to the President, when it rescinded that misbegotten Chevron deference and emphasized the importance of and constitutional requirement that Congress do its own legislative work, work it cannot pass off to those Agencies.

Regarding Trump’s unilaterality in particular, in one sense, he’s only following the examples set by ex-President Barack Obama (D), who infamously bragged about—and used—his pen and telephone to ignore or override Congress, and ex-President Joe Biden (D) who ignored so many of our nation’s laws in his attempt to virtually erase our southern border.

That unilaterality also is being reined in by a constitution-supporting and -applying Court. Trump can fire those Agency personnel. His unilateral application of taxing, via tariffs, has been severely curtailed. His efforts to cancel already-committed Federal grants have been successfully blocked.

Other of his unilateral actions, though, actually are moves back toward Constitutional order. His moves to greatly reduce Department of Education employment and to closely circumscribe DoEd authorities are aimed at getting rid of the Department altogether. This would be entirely appropriate, since the Department is a relatively recent Congressional creation done at the direct expense of the States, taking as it does, control over the education of our nation’s children away from the States, and in many ways away from the parents, and centralizing that control within the Federal government.

The erosion of our government’s checks and balances has been vast, but it’s not only due to a President overstepping his authorities or deliberately ignoring his duties. It’s also been due to Congress shirking its legislative duties and to a Court ignoring its own duties. At present, though, it appears as though the erosion is being slowed, and an increasing move back toward order is in progress.