Tag Archives: politics

A Good Move

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Attorney General Jeff Sessions has declined, for now, to appoint a special counselor to investigate DoJ and FBI handling of the Hillary Clinton email “investigation” and other matters.

Instead, Sessions has gone one better.  He’s appointed John Huber, US Attorney for the District of Utah, and so not a denizen of the Beltway (like Special Counselor Robert Mueller is) to investigate the nature of the FBI’s surveillance of Carter Page and connections, if any, between the Clinton Foundation and Uranium One, and to work with the DoJ IG to look into the FBI’s handling of Clinton’s email fiasco and the FBI’s interaction with the FISA star chamber court.

In essence, Huber’s appointment is equivalent to a special counselor appointment, but without the political baggage (although some will try to create baggage on the basis of his not being formally a special counselor).

While the IG has the expertise it needs to look into these matters, he can’t compel testimony, and he can’t prosecute, although his findings certainly can be used by an Attorney General to conduct prosecutions.  Huber, though, can compel testimony as part of his investigation and his work with the IG, and he can prosecute miscreants.  The two investigations—his own and his work with the IG—will produce all the results of a special counselor without serious political baggage.

The downside of special prosecutor assignments, whether explicit as with Robert Mueller, or tacit as with this appointment, is the lack of specificity of the assignment.  Sessions needs to lay out clearly the scope of Huber’s new assignment, including, especially, sharp boundaries for that scope, with no gray areas or penumbras surrounding it.

Warning Labels

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Never minding a number of studies that indicate that coffee intake ranges from harmless to net beneficial, California has decided to require coffee companies must put cancer warning labels on their coffee.  Even more ludicrous, the presiding judge, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Elihu Berle wrote in part,

Defendants failed to satisfy their burden of proving…that consumption of coffee confers a benefit to human health.

This is the wrong criterion and the wrong holder of the burden.  California alleged carcigenic risk; it’s on them to prove the risk.  Beyond that, it’s not the State’s function to demand proof of beneficial outcomes; it’s the State’s function to demand lack of material harm.

I’m waiting for California’s warning labels on grapes, since their fermentation carries empirically demonstrated DUI risks.

Readiness Capability

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There’s a dismaying graph in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal that illustrates the combat readiness of several of NATO nations’ forces.

In essence,

If Europe came into conflict with Russia, only several thousand of the more than one million troops in its armies would be ready for rapid deployment, military planners fear.

Plans to correct this (using the term loosely) don’t come close to the capability regularly exercised during the Cold War, when the US planned for moving 10 divisions into Europe within 10 days.  Current planning goal is to feed dribs and drabs into the furnace.

A US proposal would have the alliance commit to having 30 battalions, 30 fighter squadrons and 30 naval ships ready to deploy. That would translate to roughly 30,000 troops and more than 360 fighter planes.

Sadly, given Europe’s long history of free-loading off US nuclear and soldier commitments, and the EU’s current reluctance even to meet the nations’ 2% of GDP on defense commitment, that’s probably all we can expect out of that continent.

Feeding the furnace: 30 days was all that was necessary in WWII to overrun Poland once the Germans crossed the frontier, and it was all that was needed to knock France out of the war and push the remnants of British forces off the continent once Hitler moved west.  Only 60 days after Barbarossa went in, the Germans were approaching Leningrad, were over halfway to Moscow, and had overrun half of today’s Ukraine.  And that was against an allied contingent that, in retrospect, was better equipped and numerically superior, at least in the West.  The lack of political will then and now is the same, and Putin has shown the willingness to aggress as did Hitler, even if Putin is quite a bit more subtle about it.

And: the 30 days is from the decision to put the forces “on alert.”  Given the amount of warning available today, with the speed of modern communications, transportation, and so on—the ability to deliver tactical surprise—what is the time relationship between going on alert and having actually to launch the forces?  Thirty hours seems more like reality than does 30 days.

The graph, too, is misleading to an extent.  Italy currently can produce 5 combat-ready battalions in 10 days, while three other European nations can produce all of 3 combat-ready battalions apiece—in 30 days.  The rest, none at all in the time frame.  But what does that mean?  What is the actual combat capability of these nations’ units?  Until the term is normalized, the comparisons in the graph have only the coarsest of meanings.

The FBI’s Subpoena Response

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After Attorney General Jeff Sessions told FBI Director Christopher Wray to cut the stonewalling and deliver up, promptly, the documents Congress had requested and then subpoenaed, Wray doubled the number of agents he had assigned to the task.

Wray also assured Congress he’d mended his ways.

Mr Wray’s statement pledges the FBI will be “transparent and responsive to legitimate congressional requests.” If not, Mr [House Judiciary Chairman Bob (R, VA)] Goodlatte and the House leadership must be willing to use their powers of contempt and impeachment to impose consequences.

This is a cynical sham. The target of a “Congressional request” is in no position to judge the request’s legitimacy, whether the target is the FBI or a mafia soldier.  Goodlatte needs to prepare the impeachment case, even though the Progressive-Democrats in the Senate will not approve.

Suboptimal

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A Maryland gerrymandering case, this one brought by the Republican Party, after it lost an election in the newly gerrymandered district, was before the Supreme Court this week.

One of the plaintiffs’ arguments is that the redistricting “violated Republican voters’ free-expression and political-association rights.”

Justice Sam Alito had the correct response to that bit of nonsense:

[I]f understand it, I really don’t see how any legislature will ever be able to redistrict[]

If the Republicans don’t have anything more than whining about losing an election, how can their legitimate gerrymandering complaints be taken seriously?