Tag Archives: responsibilities

Ego and Job Avoidance

Posted on by
Reply

The Senate has before it some 50 nominees for various ambassadorships that still need floor confirmation votes. Senator Ted Cruz (R, TX) is holding them up by refusing to give unanimous consent to their confirmation unless and until he gets a floor vote on sanctioning constructors of the Russian Nordstream 2 pipeline. In response, Majority Chuck Schumer (D, NY) is…threatening.

Democrats are working to clear as much of the backlog as possible by consent. If we cannot make much progress, we may need to stay and hold votes on nominees this weekend and next week until we do[.]

That would really eat into Senators’ Christmas break. Oh, the angry sacrifice.

At 30 hours of debate per confirmation vote, though, those 50 nominations would require more than just a couple of weeks’ intrusion into playtime. Those 1,500 hours accumulate to a bit over two months to get all of them voted on, even were the Senate in session 24/7 for those two months.

Unanimous consent occasionally is an administrative convenience for getting minor matters done—post office and park namings, for instance—however, it’s far too often a mechanism for ducking being on the record on substantive issues. Nominee confirmation votes on controversial nominees, for instance.

Cruz is entirely correct to not give his unanimous consent, especially given his terms.

All Schumer has to do is allow a vote—a vote, mind you, not a guarantee of passage—on a Nordstream 2 sanction. The Progressive-Democrat Senators and the Progressive-Democrat Vice President would promptly vote down the sanction, and the nomination consents could proceed. Of course, this would put the Progressive-Democrat Senators on the record as opposing sanctioning Putin’s pet project, and that might not play well in Arizona, or Georgia, or Nevada, or….

Apart from any of that, this is just Schumer exercising his ego in trying to face down a Republican Senator.

It’s not all bad, though. If Schumer backs up his threat, at least the Senators would remain in session doing their jobs, which includes voting, explicitly on the record, on substantive matters so their constituents have material with which to evaluate them in the coming election.

Playing Chicken with Trains

Posted on by
Reply

Bob Brody wrote of playing chicken with railroad trains when he was a high schooler and of the thrill of running those risks. Until he and his buds who saw an animal corpse on the tracks, an unfortunate who had neither won nor lost its race with fate, but who had run to a tie.

Brody then went on regarding the need for analysis rather than blind risk-taking.

He’s right, to a point, but only to a point.

You can win, or you can lose, but you’ll die if it’s a draw. And the train won’t chicken out.

Take all the risks you deem useful, hopefully after a risk-reward analysis. Just don’t settle for breakeven.

Advice

Posted on by
Reply

Rebecca Grant, DC-based national security analyst, had some for President Joe Biden (D) vis-à-vis Russian President Vladimir Putin on the subject of the latter’s threatened invasion of Ukraine. The venue for that advice is the summit between the two men that occurred yesterday.

Grant is naively optimistic, though.

The 30-nation Euro-Atlantic alliance is primed to deter and counter rash Russian actions.

No, it’s not. Johnson is just posturing, and the UK, a signatory to the Budapest Memorandum (as is Russia), already has betrayed Ukraine by acquiescing to Russia’s occupation of Crimea and eastern Ukraine rather than enforcing the Memorandum. Beyond that, Germany is already in the bag for Russia, and France is carefully quiet.

America is already involved.

Indeed, we are. We’re also a signatory to the Budapest Memorandum, and under the Obama-Biden administration, we’ve also betrayed Ukraine by declining to enforce that memorandum. Beyond that, ships in the Black Sea are ducks in a pond for any force on the shores.

Biden and NATO can do more to deter Putin.  Start with immediate air exercises in Ukraine with US and NATO aircraft.

It’s a start, did Biden have the integrity and moral courage to do so, but more is needed, a yet sterner test of Biden’s…strength. Economic sanctions are insufficient and unlikely to be enacted, anyway. The more that’s actually needed is moving US (because we can’t count on a NATO whose European members won’t even honor their own commitments to fund and equip the alliance) troops into Poland, south toward Ukraine and north toward Kaliningrad, and moving US naval forces to within air strike range of Kaliningrad.

Grant closed her advice with this:

Heat up one tank engine and we’ll know about it.

Certainly. But what will Biden do about it? Grant opened her piece with this:

Ukraine’s borders are a parking lot for Russian tanks, trucks, and artillery ready for a three-pronged blitzkrieg.

Even after that first tank has lit off and crossed the border, that parking lot, for the next number of days, will remain a parking lot of targets. Von Moltke learned that problem in 1914, and even though Putin’s generals likely will have learned from that, the same or worse bottlenecks exist in western Russia and eastern Ukraine.

Biden is unlikely to do any of that, though. He got his marching orders from Putin via Colonial Pipeline, and he already has kowtowed to Putin via Nordstream 2.

Biden will only kowtow again.

In any event, we’ll be hearing, today and in the coming days, the claims of the two participants. We’ll learn empirically, in the coming weeks and months, the outcome of the summit.

Cowardice

Posted on by
Reply

Nadia Murad, sold into sex slavery by Daesh when she was 14, escaped that existence and wrote a book about it: The Last Girl: My Story Of Captivity (due out next February).

She was scheduled to speak with students from some of the 600 schools that are part of the Toronto District School Board about her book and the life it describes, but her presentation and discussion were canceled by Helen Fisher, one of the board’s Superintendents of Education.

But, according to Fisher’s concerns, the event might actually foster Islamophobia. Because Canadian schoolboys and girls are all a bunch of snowflakes who can’t understand such things. Of course, to the extent that’s actually true, that would be a coarse illustration of what Fisher’s Education facility is turning out.

Tanya Lee, proprietor of a book club for teenage girls, A Room Of Your Own—and mother—had a different take:

This is what Islamic State [Daesh] means. It is a terrorist organisation. It has nothing to do with ordinary Muslims. The TDSB should be aware of the difference.

But apparently Fisher’s terror has clouded her awareness. Indeed, even though a statement put out by the school board’s Director of Education, Colleen Russell-Rawlins, claimed to apologize to Murad (and to another, whose event was similarly canceled), the board has not un-canceled or rescheduled Murad’s speaking, even these two-plus weeks later.

Never mind that Murad also is a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, UN Goodwill Ambassador, and “a leading advocate for survivors of genocide and sexual violence.” And that she might know something of her subject and that subject’s implications outside of terrorism.

This isn’t just rank political correctness. This is raw cowardice by the Precious Ones of the Toronto school board.

These are not the Canadians who fought with such courage in WWII. Or only yesterday in Afghanistan.

In Which VP Harris Has It Right

Posted on by
Reply

Just not in the way she means. Following the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse of all charges in the Kenosha riot shooting case, the Kamala Harris (D) half of the Biden-Harris Presidency said this:

The verdict really speaks for itself[.]
As many of you know, I’ve spent the majority of my career working to make the criminal justice system more equitable, and clearly there’s a lot more to do[.]

She’s right, of course. The shootings wanted, as a matter of course, a careful and thorough investigation. Either that was not done—a lot more to do in our justice system—or the prosecutors ignored the results of a careful and thorough investigation and brought the case to trial, anyway—a lot more work to do in our justice system.

As the evidence brought to trial clearly showed, Rittenhouse was there in the middle of the riot to render first aid to those injured by the rioters; to fight fires set by the rioters; and to protect a business, at the behest of the business’ operators, from rioters bent on its physical destruction. As the evidence just as clearly showed, Rittenhouse was hounded, stalked, threatened with murder, chased, attacked, and threatened with a firearm aimed at him by his attackers. Ultimately, he was forced to defend himself, and sadly, lethally so regarding two of his attackers.

Yet the prosecutors brought their charges to trial anyway. And in the course of their presentation, they attacked Rittenhouse for daring to not speak publicly before the trial, to not answer their charges before the trial. In the course of their presentation, those prosecutors attempted to enter evidence that had been barred from entry by the judge. In the course of their presentation, those prosecutors withheld evidence from the defense until after the evidence presentation portion of the trial was closed and closing arguments begun.

The verdict really does speak for itself.

There really is a lot more work to do to make our criminal justice system more equitable.