Tag Archives: politics

Trump Wasn’t the First

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Since NATO’s creation, the European nations have, in the main, been shirking their obligations to the alliance and with that betraying their fellow alliance members. Then-President Jack Kennedy (D) was among the first American government officials to grow tired of that shirking and to object to it out loud.

John F Kennedy in 1963 told his National Security Council that “we cannot continue to pay for the military protection of Europe while the NATO states are not paying their fair share.”

Then it was then-Deputy Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci in 1981 in front of the Munich Security Conference:

[T]he United States cannot be expected to improve and strengthen US forces in Europe, unless other allies increase their own contribution to the combined defense effort.

With the end of the Cold War almost 35 years ago,

NATO asserts that almost half its members won’t spend 2% of their gross domestic product on defense this year, a decade after the alliance affirmed that baseline expectation.

But those were just a bunch of polite noises.

Nor is Trump the only one objecting to European NATO members’ sloth and perfidy today, although today’s Progressive-Democratic Party politicians are standing silently on the sidelines in a reversal (repudiation?) of their Democrat predecessors.

[I]ncreasingly prominent voices in the US think “the time has come for Europe to stand on its own feet,” as Senator JD Vance (R, OH) put it recently.

Trump still is right, and it’s been his sharp rhetoric as opposed to those 50 years of “pretty please” that has gotten more NATO members—but not all of them, shamefully—to start honoring their fiscal and equipment commitments to NATO.

US Is Even More Vulnerable

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The mostly unfettered inflow of “refugees” from—pick a source, but mostly the Middle East—into Europe is beginning to awaken Europe’s western and central nations to the terrorist risk they face from that flow (eastern Europe’s nations have long been well aware). That relatively uninhibited flow, with its sample that have been caught, should be clanging alarm bells for us, too.

Authorities in Europe say they have foiled several terror plots, some involving suspects posing as refugees, raising alarm about a growing array of threats from extremists.

Threats from terrorists, I’ll say, since The Wall Street Journal‘s news personalities are too timid to call the spade a spade. Examples of those terrorists’ plots—those that have been discovered—abound.

German and Dutch investigators…arrested four people for allegedly receiving the order from Hamas to open a secret cache of weapons and attack Jewish targets in Berlin and elsewhere in Western Europe.
German prosecutors said Hamas had buried the weapons underground in Europe years ago but that the suspects, all longstanding Hamas members involved in the group’s overseas operations, wouldn’t reveal where.
Investigators found pictures of Jewish and Israeli targets in Europe on some of the suspects’ mobile phones….

And

…arrest late last year of a group of Tajik nationals suspected of planning attacks on the Cologne Cathedral in Germany and St Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna around Christmas. Both churches fill with hundreds of visitors for the holiday season.

And

Italian authorities said they had detained three Palestinians suspected of being members of the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, designated as a terror group by the US and the European Union. The three were preparing to attack civilian and military targets in Europe, the Italian National Police said.

And on and on. That bit about pre-caching weapons for later retrieval and use is especially troubling, or should be, for us in the US and for our government. Europe doesn’t seem to be getting the large inflow of PRC military-age single men that we are, although Russia’s penchant for exporting little green men for sabotage and battlespace shaping is well enough known, as is the difficulty of detecting them before they go operational. Among those PRC young men flowing so freely into our nation could well be PLA special forces operators; an outcome of the PLA’s broad and rapid buildup, including its special operations units.

Nor can we in our nation say how many Iranian/Iranian-backed terrorists have come in over our borders, unchecked, unhindered in any way, perhaps at a time of their choosing to link up with the weapons other illegal aliens have secreted for them.

This is the risk—in spades—that Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden is creating for us with his deliberately opened borders policy and the associated wholly unfettered flood of illegal aliens. It’s the risk from the upwards of 1.5 million illegal aliens coming in every year whose entry would be codified in the shameful Border Insecurity bill which the Senate enacted.

The Forgotten Man

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A recent Wall Street Journal editorial correctly pointed out the costs to us ordinary Americans of a variety of Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden administration plans. The editors were particularly concerned with the administration’s plans for bank and credit card fees that these institutions charge individuals who overdraw their account or make late payments on their credit cards and that these institutions charge businesses for using the various ATM and credit card payment networks.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency proximately responsible for the latest round of regulations capping those fees at markedly lower levels,

acknowledges[] the lower penalty may cause more borrowers to pay late, and as a result incur higher “interest charges, penalty rates, credit reporting, and the loss of a grace period.” This would make it harder to qualify for an auto loan or mortgage.
The agency concedes that credit-card issuers may also raise interest rates, reduce rewards, “increase minimum payment amounts or adjust credit limits to reduce credit risk associated with consumers who make late payments.” Because some states cap credit-card interest rates, “some consumers’ access to credit could fall.”

The editors closed their piece with this bit of naivete, though:

The forgotten man always pays.

Who says they’re forgotten? These are the ones the Progressive-Democratic Party wants to trap into welfare, so Party can trade welfare payments for votes. Imperial Rome did bread and circuses; Party does welfare dolings.

Boeing Production Problems and Unions

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Yes, the two are related. This is from a Wall Street Journal article on Boeing’s production sloppiness (my term) in its airline assembly operations. “Traveled work” is work done on the production line at a later station on the line than it should have been done, and generally by the personnel at that later step rather than by those who should have done it moving to the next station to complete it. For instance,

…the plane [whose door had blown out on an Alaska Airlines flight] spent nearly three weeks shuffling down an assembly line with faulty rivets in need of repair.
Workers had spotted the bad parts almost immediately after the plane’s fuselage arrived at the factory. But they didn’t make the fix right away, and the 737 continued on to the next workstation. When crews completed the repair 19 days later….

Boeing’s fix [emphasis added]?

Boeing told staff it was changing how it determines pay for tens of thousands of nonunion employees—from mechanics in South Carolina to its top brass. Quality measures, such as reducing traveled work, will now determine 60% of the annual bonuses for those working on its commercial aircraft.

Boeing’s union employees apparently get to continue to skate. The move appears to single out Boeing’s right-to-work state employees for punishment while not addressing the problem itself.

Government Making Crime Pay

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Now the Progressive-Democratic Party reigning in the New York State government wants to reward felons for their crimes. After those felons have paid their debt to New York society through their jail time (and apparently before they’ve served out the rest of their penalty in the form of parole), the State wants to give them $2,600 for their trouble.

The legislation, introduced by State Senator Kevin Parker [D] and Assemblyman Eddie Gibbs [D], would allow inmates to collect around $400 each month over six months once they leave prison.
As the bill currently stands, there are no limitations on how or where the money can be spent, according to Fox 5 New York.

They’re looking at setting aside $25 million for this reward fund.

Instead of paying criminals for their crime, maybe this taxpayer money (the original $40 the felons routinely get on release came from their garnished wages from the jobs they held while in jail) would be better spent going to a victim rehab/make whole fund instead. Alternatively, maybe this taxpayer money would be better spent countering, if only a little, the State’s Defund the Police movement.

Alternatively alternatively, maybe this taxpayer money—evidently excess collections since it’s aimed at such foolishness—could be returned to the State’s citizens. After all, as Progressive-Democrat Gibbs complains,

In this economy that [the original $40] amount is barely enough to get groceries or purchase clothes for a job interview[.]

That’s also the case for the honest citizens of New York, both jobless and working poor.

It’s highly useful to help released felons readjust to life on the outside and start to recover (or begin) an honest life. Paying them for their crimes doesn’t accomplish that. Thus, and additional alternative: commit the $25 million to programs—not State-run!—jail house training in the trades, half-way house rehab and job prep, and the like. Gibbs and Parker like the idea of no strings attached for the felons’ spending their $2,600 each; they should have no trouble committing, unrestricted, their aggregated $25 mil to private enterprises to run these programs. Or—the horror—paying the $2,600 per to the employer who hires a newly released felon.

It’s instructive that of all the plethora of alternatives available, these Progressive-Democrats picked the absolute worst of the lot, the one that directly rewards the felon with free cash.