China on Tuesday handed back to the United States an underwater drone whose seizure raised tensions in a relationship that has been tested by President-elect Donald Trump’s signals of a tougher policy toward Beijing.
And
The Chinese navy vessel that seized the drone returned it near where it had been taken, and it was received by the USS Mustin about 80 kilometers (50 miles) northwest of Subic Bay in the Philippines[.]
The PRC just did.
When the House Intelligence Committee called intel community directors—the CIA’s management, for instance—before them to testify about alleged Russian hacks and leaked CIA claims that the hacks were intended to sway the election toward the President-Elect, they refused to appear. They also refused at the last moment, forcing the committee to cancel an already scheduled hearing into the matter.
This is unacceptable. The committee should subpoena these men and women, and the subpoenas should be delivered by the House’s Sergeant at Arms. If these men and women ignore the subpoenas, the House should find them in contempt (and do so again after 3 January so the contempt finding will be in effect, allowing the new DoJ which will appear after 20 January to enforce the citations). Were it up to me, I would have held the hearing anyway, with questions addressed to the empty chairs in which those personnel would have been seated for their testimony.
On top of that, since these men and women are refusing to do their jobs, which includes testifying before the House committees with oversight of their organizations, the new budget should zero out budgets for intel community personnel in paygrades of GS-14 and above and equivalent levels—with effect from 14 December, clawbacks required. We don’t need to spend taxpayer money on paying people who refuse to work.
Nearly as bad as this is the silence surrounding the matter. Of the television sources, only Fox News is reporting the intel community’s refusal to testify and the House committee’s hearing cancelation. Not CNN, not NBC, or CBS, or ABC or their online news arms are touching this. Further, only Republican Congressmen are up in arms about this insubordination. Not even the Democrats who insisted that hearings be held are upset over this.
That speaks volumes about bias.
Residents of the town of Totolapan in the state of Guerrero, Mexico, have taken a situation into their own hands: in response to a drug cartel’s kidnapping of family members of some of those residents, the residents have kidnapped the mother of the cartel’s leader. They’re willing to work a trade.
On the other hand,
The government of…Guerrero said Tuesday it dispatched 220 soldiers and police in hopes of defusing the situation….
A better move, one that would more permanently defuse the situation, would be to send those soldiers into the area to eliminate the cartels that infest the town and others like it.
…from my wife, especially appropriate in these times of threats to our nation from without and from within.
San Francisco has held itself out as a sanctuary city—a city that will take in and protect illegal aliens from Federal law and Federal law enforcers. Aside from the legal aspects of violating Federal law, this is in keeping with federalism and the 9th and 10th Amendments, and it does not run afoul of Article I, Section 10. Even were such a thing legal, though, it’s a foolish move, but as the motorboat skipper who currently sits in the Secretary of State’s chair has said, in the United States folks have the right to be stupid.
It’s a bit of a reach, however, for the city to demand taxpayer money to pay the legal expenses of illegal aliens as they’re haled into court to answer for their illegal entry or for deportation proceedings. San Francisco Supervisor David Campos:
We are proud to be a sanctuary city. And we’re not only proud to stand up for that, but we’re going to invest the resources needed to make sure that the 44,000 undocumented people who live in the city and county of San Francisco have, at a minimum, legal representation if they’re taken into immigration court.
Leaving aside the…misunderstanding…Campos illustrates—the reason these folks are undocumented is because they’re here illegally—this is a demand for taxpayers to pay for these illegal aliens’ legal costs. If there’s truly a belief on the part of the (legal) residents of the city that such costs should be covered, there’d be no problem raising the fund out of private donations.
Surely, too, a city that insists on subsidizing housing costs in a limited supply market has better use for the taxpayers’ money. Beyond that, as any high school student learns in his economics class, when something gets subsidized—when the cost of that thing gets artificially lowered from the perspective of potential customers—demand for that thing rises. This move by San Francisco isn’t going to make life easier for the existing illegal aliens, it’s only going to get the city even more illegal aliens—adding to the strain on that already limited housing supply and thinning, among other city facilities, the available housing subsidies.
“Former detainees” claim that their “lack of access to an immigration lawyer turned their lives upside down.” This is inaccurate. What turned their lives upside down were two things: their decision to pull up stakes and come to the United States—a courageous move and often well done—and their decision to enter our country illegally. The consequences of that second decision only flow from that decision, they do not at all turn upside down lives that already were so.
In some respects, the concerns of the illegal aliens and those who support them are valid: it should be much easier to enter our nation legally, and our immigration system desperately wants reform in this area. Such reform, far from contradicting our need to secure our borders, complements such border reform quite nicely. These, though, are reforms that only the Federal government can achieve. If the sanctuary cities want meaningful help for their illegal aliens, they should consider spending the funds they want to allocate to “legal representation” on efforts to move the Federal government to effect those two reforms.
That would reduce the number of illegal aliens in the cities’ “sanctuaries” quite nicely.