Tag Archives: politics

Convenience and the FBI

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Stewart Whitson, late of the FBI and currently Foundation for Government Accountability Legal Director, decried in his Tuesday Wall Street Journal op-ed, a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau effort to completely eliminate the ability of credit-reporting companies to sell credit-header data to law enforcement agencies, including to the FBI. Those header data include a variety of identifying material but, as Whitson was careful to emphasize, no financial information.

This, actually, is one of the few things the CFPB would get right were it to follow through.

In support of his plaint, Whitson related an 8-year-old incident in which he and a partner were conducting surveillance on a suspect and observing his contact with a third individual. Whitson bragged about being able to use credit-header data—but no financial data, mind you—to contact that third individual, arrange a meeting, and through that, foil the suspect’s planned terrorist attack.

Without the credit-header data, we might not have been able to contact the occupant for a while, giving [the suspect] more time to carry out his attack.

Whitson bragged about FBI success with such purchases and then put his disingenuous question.

I worked on hundreds of terrorism-related investigations at the FBI, all of which relied on credit-header data. Why doesn’t the CFPB want law enforcement to have quick access to this information?

Perhaps because the purchases are, at bottom, violations of our Constitution’s inconvenient 4th Amendment, regardless of their convenient-to-government speed.

How inconvenient it is, after all, to follow the Constitution’s requirement for warrants before searches occur. That the FBI got lucky—or even that purchasing personally identifying data (the lack of financial data being a cynically offered red herring here) materially helped—in no way legitimizes the FBI’s bypassing Constitutional requirements.

Get the warrants. If it often takes too long to get them, and that’s a legitimate beef, work on streamlining the process through the political branches of our government: the House and Senate. The Executive Branch does not get to skip the hard work or usurp political branch authorities.

Not even when its FBI claims that anxious and enthusiastic mothers at school boards are akin to domestic terrorists or that traditional Catholics are behaving suspiciously.

I Have a Thought

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(Yeah, yeah)

The Energy Department’s Office of the Inspector General says that the Department

faces major management challenges ranging from hacking vulnerabilities to foreign espionage and could create “massive new risks to the taxpayer” as it spends tens of billions of dollars in new spending from President Joe Biden’s signature infrastructure initiative[.]

The OIG goes on to say that the fraud risk is similar to the realized fraud from the Federal government’s Wuhan Virus Situation (my term, not OIG’s) spending, where taxpayers now lost an estimated $200 billion government wide.

The OIG also noted that

Fast money must be balanced against the need for thoughtful and effective internal controls and independent audits[.]

In truth, this sort of thing isn’t limited to DoE’s current plan or to the government’s Wuhan Virus response. It’s all too typical of government spending programs.

Here’s my thought. Balancing fast money with thoughtful and effective internal controls and independent audits is necessary, but insufficient. There must be attention-getting sanctions applied, also, for failure to perform, both ante facto and especially post facto.

Congress should, under its dozen allocation bills, proceed with allocations to DoE—and to the other Departments and Agencies—but with these requirements: the funds allocated will be withheld from actual disbursement to the Departments and Agencies until they certify that they have instituted controls that will greatly mitigate the ability for fraud to occur.

Then, if after the allocated funds are disbursed, fraud is discovered greater than, say $5 million dollars in any Department or Agency, that facility will have its subsequent year’s operating budget reduced by the amount of the fraud. If fraud is again discovered in the second year, that facility will have its operating and its personnel budgets each reduced by the accumulated amount of fraud, less any that was recovered from the prior year. In each subsequent year, the facility will have its operating and personnel budgets—again each of them—reduced by the amount of accumulated net fraud.

The facility must either shape up or disappear. The only facilities that can’t actually disappear, though they can be substantially reduced, are the constitutionally implied Departments of State, Defense, and Treasury. The rest of the Departments and all of the Agencies in the Executive Branch are later creations of Congress in conjunction with the President, and they can be eliminated by Congress if they prove unable to control their own fraud.

That will be hard to effect politically, but it’s a Critical Item fiscally.

Chickens….

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This move by Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden and his FLOTUS Jill Biden really sinks low.

Recall the utter immorality of the Bidens’ so-long refusal to acknowledge their granddaughter Navy Joan, daughter of the Bidens’ son Hunter. Recall further, how they made that refusal explicit during last year’s Christmas season hanging of stockings from the State Dining Room fireplace mantle—stockings carefully labeled with the names of their other grandchildren, but no stocking for Navy.

Now, despite finally having acknowledged their little granddaughter—Jill and I only want what is best for all of our grandchildren, including Navy—apparently that best doesn’t include a place on the mantle. In fact, Jill and I‘s disdain for their granddaughter extends to the point that they’ve chosen not to hang Christmas stockings at all, so they can continue to deny Navy a place.

That really is a chickenshit move by Joe and Jill. (For those of you pedants who squawk that Christmas decorations are a FLOTUS task, you know full well that POTUS, at the very least, has serious input into such things. Especially where his granddaughter is concerned.)

Talking a Good Game

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Javier Milei, the newly elected Argentine President, is, indeed, talking a good game. It’ll be well worth watching to see if he can deliver—and he has many large obstacles in his way, including (this is far from an exhaustive list) opposition to his wish to get rid of the nation’s central bank (and the economic pitfalls associated with it, both near term as Argentina’s economy adjusts, and longer term with currency controls devolved to the provincial banks or to individual banks (some of which may already be too big to control without stern measures aimed at them in particular)), opposition parties bent on restoring/maintaining their own political power, general resistance—both political and popular—to any change of such magnitude, and his own political inexperience and naivete.

With that rambling lede, here’s an excerpt, via RealClear Politics, from an interview that that Milei had with Argentine TV host Alejandro Fantino just before Thanksgiving:

We aren’t above the ones we represent. In financial terms, “The derivative is never worth more than the underlying asset.” The derivative exists because the underlying asset exists. We exist as representatives of the people because the people exist. It is madness, it is delusional, to think that a representative of the people is above the people he represents themselves. It is a delusion in which the political caste exists.

The full hour-and-a-quarter interview, in Spanish, can be seen at the link at the bottom of the linked-to article. That YouTube link also is this.

“Emergency Powers”

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Progressive-Democratic President Joe Biden has invoked the Defense Production Act of 1950 as an excuse to pour more of our tax dollars into his global warming foolishness. He’s using the Act to pump $169 million into nine projects across 15 sites nationwide in an effort to accelerate electric heat pump manufacturing. There are some serious problems with this. In no particular order:

Biden claims that heat pumps only use electricity; they don’t burn coal or oil or natural gas. That’s a disingenuously narrow view of the situation. Heat pumps do use only electricity at their point of use. However, that electricity comes from somewhere—primarily coal- and natural gas-fired electricity generating stations. At the times the heat pumps are needed the most—in the depths of heating and cooling seasons—”green” energy sources generally aren’t available: at night, when the sun doesn’t shine; when the sky is overcast, and sunlight is limited; when the wind isn’t blowing enough or is blowing too strongly. This is a shortfall that’s disastrously exacerbated by Biden’s open effort to destroy our hydrocarbon-sourced energy industry. Oil-, natural gas-, and coal-fired power plants are reliable, efficient, and don’t care about sun or wind.

Further, heat pumps get increasingly inefficient where temperatures are routinely cold and where temperatures are routinely hot. They work, after all, by trying to pump heat (hence the name of the devices) from inside the house to the hot outside for cooling, or by trying to pump heat from the cold outside into the house for heating.

Another problem is that the Defense Production Act was passed to support government-managed manufacturing (for good or ill) during times of conflict. We’re not at war with anybody now, and haven’t been for a few years—not since the fight against terrorists in Afghanistan, when Biden made his panic-ridden exit from that. Using the Act as an excuse for funding global warming-related matters is an abuse of the Act that warrants its heavy modification, if not outright rescission.

Yet another problem flows from Biden’s claim that his invocation is to boost domestic production of these heat pumps, especially by domestic manufacturers.

These awards will grow domestic manufacturing, create good-paying jobs, and boost American competitiveness in industries of the future.

Yet he’s pouring those millions into companies like Copeland, Honeywell International, Mitsubishi Electric, and York International Corporation.

Mitsubishi is a Japanese company, headquartered in Tokyo. York is wholly owned by Johnson Controls, and Johnson, while claiming to be an American company, is headquartered and domiciled in Cork, Ireland. That’s a lot of “domestic” manufacturing money—our tax dollars—going to foreign companies. Even if they do the actual manufacturing in the US, they’ll be taking off their (significant) cuts in Tokyo and Cork on the way by.