Special Counsel Appointed

Breaking news, Attorney General Merrick Garland has appointed David Weiss, the Delaware U.S. Attorney as a special counsel. This would, I believe, give him authority to bring charges in districts other than Delaware, presumably against Hunter Biden, without the consent of the U.S. attorneys in those districts. Garland said he did so at the request of Weiss. This may be important, or may not.

One way to interpret this move is that those trying to protect President Biden have concluded too much dirt has been revealed to be ignored. Thus, throwing Hunter under the bus is reluctantly necessary to save the president.

Another is to conclude that since Garland has stated publicly that he was willing to make Weiss a special counsel, Weiss figured he’d better ask for it to cover his own backside. This is probably the most likely of the various scenarios. 

It may still lead to nothing much, if the various co-conspirators think they can survive an intentionally failed effort. Bringing a weak case and losing could be the surest way to protect Joe’s bagman son, using the no-double-jeopardy rule. 

Later ... Many are claiming this step was taken to preclude Congress asking about Hunter Biden's business affairs, as the "special counsel" can reply "it's under investigation and we cannot comment." Then, if Congress continues to pry, special counsel can claim Congress contaminated the evidence such that prosecution became impossible.

Thursday Snark

Hunter as Joe's pimp ... that's cold.

Image courtesy of tomorrow's Lucianne.com.

Time to Stop Iran's Hostage Taking

Watching the news tonight and one story was about several Iranian-Americans held hostage in Iran being traded for some Iranians we were holding. Okay, prisoner swaps are fairly normal between nations that are not friendly with each other.

In addition, some huge sums of Iranian money that has been frozen in South Korea will be released for Iran to use. This I find obnoxious, the money will most likely go to fund troublemaking, violent NGOs around the Middle East and perhaps beyond - Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Yemeni rebels.

The time is long past for the U.S. to announce for all to hear that "As of this date, any American citizen who voluntarily goes to Iran and is arrested and held hostage is on his or her own. We have said don't go there and if you choose to go, it is on your head. If you disregard this warning, go and are arrested, plan to remain. We won't trade for your release." And, having said it, mean it.

After all, why should private individuals be able to put our government on the hook by taking stupid risks? The short answer is that such behavior should not be enabled, as it now is.

Inflation a Powerful Irritant

In his column. Ruy Teixeira quotes a comment by "liberal journalist David Dayen" worth pondering as we think about the political impact of unemployment versus inflation.

Changes in employment by definition affect a smaller number of people than the price of everything, which affects everyone.

Translation: a decline from 6% unemployment to 3% unemployment affects 3% of those who wish to work plus their dependents, if any. When prices go up, it is a matter of concern to everyone who is not wealthy. 

A Serious Critique

Jack Goldsmith, a former assistant attorney general in the George W. Bush administration and a Trump critic, has written an opinion for the New York Times highly critical of the current prosecution of Donald Trump. A Fox News reprise of the column is echoed on msn.com and I'd share some of his words with you.

It is important to understand Goldsmith does not defend Trump, but he argues the political-appearing prosecution establishes a very detrimental-to-our-nation precedent.

There is no getting around the fact the indictment comes from the Biden administration when Mr. Trump holds a formidable lead in the polls to secure the Republican Party nomination and is running neck and neck with Mr. Biden.

The deeply unfortunate timing looks political and has potent political implications even if it is not driven by partisan motivations. And it is the Biden administration's responsibility, as its Justice Department reportedly delayed the investigation of Mr. Trump for a year and then rushed to indict him well into GOP primary season.

Plus Goldsmith anticipates the prosecution "will likely inspire ever-more-aggressive tit-for-tat investigations of presidential actions in office by future Congresses and by administrations of the opposite party to the detriment of sound government." 

Count on it.

A Good Insight

As you are probably aware, the website BuzzFeed asks questions and publishes interesting answers people send in. I'm writing about one such they recently ran about the giveaways that tell you someone is an only child. A reader who posts as "u/ifnotmewh0" submitted the following:

6. "I can't tell for adults, but when it's one of my kids' friends, the kid who ends up trying to hang out with the adults and gets overwhelmed by being in a group of kids has been an only child 100% of the time, in my experience."

That certainly describes the long ago behavior of the "only" child with whom I am most acquainted ... myself. I've always preferred the company of adults. Eventually my age cohort became adults, a milestone I was really happy for us to reach.

Starving the Dragon

The Wall Street Journal reports (behind paywall) something quoted at length by Stephen Green, posted at Instapundit. Its title is instructive:

Chinese Exports Fall at Steepest Pace Since February 2020.

China’s exports to the rest of the world tumbled in July, adding to the challenges for the world’s second-largest economy and offering fresh evidence that a drying up of Western demand is hurting Beijing’s attempts to rekindle growth.

Worsening geopolitical tensions between Beijing and the U.S.-led West have also prompted some Western manufacturers to reduce their reliance on China’s supply chain, which in turn is expected to erode trade ties between the two sides.

Compared with those of a year earlier, China’s exports to the U.S. and European Union plunged by more than 20% each last month. There was a lone bright spot: Chinese shipments to Russia soared in July, calculations from the customs data show.

China thrives in direct proportion to how much we buy from them. Buying less is a non-belligerent way to starve the dragon. Keep up the good work.

On Ukraine

You’ve seen what I think the endgame in Ukraine will be, George Friedman writes that he sees another sort of negotiated endgame between the warring parties. I don’t always agree with Friedman but he is almost always worth reading, his views worth considering.

Two things became unlikely: that Russia would destroy the Ukrainian army and occupy Ukraine, and that Ukraine’s army would drive Russia out of Ukraine. The only logical step is a negotiated settlement. The question is what that settlement might consist of.

Putin used Wagner as a separate force because he understood the limits of his enemy. When that blew up in his face, he realized what I missed: that his military was in no position to launch a final assault, and that he was in no position to negotiate.

The Russians must decide whether to double down on the Black Sea strategy, seek another flank to hit or accept a settlement that gains them little but does not humiliate them. It is a question of how far Putin’s hubris goes and how secure he is.

If Putin feels insecure, then the battlefield stalemate continues until “the bear” tires and goes home. That’s my guess, but it is only a guess, one of several possibilities. 

Rorschach

I haven’t seen the Barbie film, though I probably will eventually. What I have seen is reactions to it by nearly every opinion writer and pundit. These are all over the block, from love to hate and more than a few somewhere in the middle. Liberals have loved it for reasons conservatives hated it, except others on the right liked it.

My conclusion from reading somewhere north of a dozen spoiler-laden reactions to the film is this. Barbie has much in common with a Rorschach ink blot test; reactions to it tell us more about the person reacting than about the film itself. Viewers seem to project onto it whatever is important in their own lives.

It apparently contains elements of a fairy tale, a morality play, a satire, and a confection, with coming-of-age elements. What the viewer sees in the film has much to do with what he or she brings with them to the theater. 

When comparison are made, expect The Wizard of Oz to feature prominently, Barbie has a similar mixture of fantasy and reality. Both films don’t clearly tell us how we are supposed to react, what our takeaway(s) should be.

Why No Negotiations?

The Moscow Times doesn’t live in Russia, is not controlled by the Russian government or Putin, but reports more-or-less honestly about life in Russia and its war on Ukraine. For it Konstantin Sonin, a prof at U. of Chicago writes about why no one is negotiating with Putin. Hat tip to RealClearWorld for the link.

Negotiations with Putin are currently pointless because he cannot make any meaningful commitments. … Over his 20-year rule, he has promised practically everything — his signature is on the border treaty with Ukraine, for example. And he violated all of it. Over the past two years, he has broken almost every promise he made. Again, Putin himself may not even know about this. I suspect it would be a terrible risk for his subordinates to remind him of what he said a month, a year, or even a week ago. But everyone else knows that he breaks all of his promises. No matter how pragmatic and cynical a negotiator might be, what is the point of such negotiations?

Even if he (Putin) does not want to violate them now and genuinely believes in them, nothing in Russia can compel him to keep those agreements. That is precisely why the current plan — no negotiations until the defeat of Russian forces on Ukrainian territory, and post-war guarantees of Ukraine's security through NATO membership — appears to be the only realistic option, even for the most hardened cynics.

I suspect the “defeat of Russian forces on Ukrainian territory” is not something Ukraine can accomplish, regardless of NATO arms shipments. What Ukraine can do is what the Afghans did to the Soviets - refuse to be defeated, keep fighting until the Russians get tired of the bloody stalemate and go home. 

“Going home” will probably involve an internal change in leadership reflecting popular dissatisfaction with both the war and Putin.

Sunday Snark

Image courtesy of the Washington Times.

Cities Are Obsolete and Dying

Don Feder writes opinion for the Washington Times, today about the decay and obsolescence of our large cities. Some key quotes:

Cities are drowning in a sea of lawlessness, homelessness, addiction, bloated budgets, failed schools, business flight and population decline. In response to the horror unfolding, big-city voters rush from dumb to dumber.

Woke” mayors are complemented by prosecutors supported by George Soros and police officers quitting or taking early retirement at a record rate, due to defunding and demoralization.

The crisis is exacerbated by judges who have ruled that the homeless have a right to turn the streets into their bedrooms and toilets and city officials who’ve overdosed on compassion.

Those willing to confront reality are leaving in droves. From 2020 to 2022, 2 million fled our largest cities. In the 10 biggest cities, half the offices are vacant.

Thanks to technology, cities are as obsolete as the horse and buggy was 100 years ago. Given what they’re become, their demise is inevitable.

Feder ends with a reference to the 1981 film Escape from New York, In it the city has become a super max prison into which criminals are dumped to fend for themselves or die.  In the rearview mirror of hindsight, the film is looking more prophetic than dystopian.

Saturday Snark

Not far away.

Images courtesy of Power Line's The Week in Pictures, 

and its Comments section.

Poland ... Getting Even

Writing at Spiked, a Polish journalist looks at the spat going on in the EU between Poland and Germany. About Poland's current leading party PiS, he writes: 

PiS dares to have its own ideas and dissents on key topics, clashing with well-established German positions. Since 2015, this has been particularly vivid in areas such as relations with Russia, securing energy supplies for Europe, and the pace (and costs) of the green transition.

Poland has been grilled and intimidated by Brussels ever since (Ursula von der Leyen became President of the European Commission), for allegedly breaking with ‘European values’, especially the rule of law. This is despite the fact that the recent judicial reforms in Poland, the very ones that have so enraged Brussels, are based on regulations that already exist in the German legal system.

In response to the reforms, von der Leyen has withheld Poland’s share of EU Covid recovery funds. And Warsaw has retaliated with its own ultimate weapon: it has made a formal reparations claim for the atrocities committed by Germany against Poland during the Second World War. Warsaw has even put a figure – $1.3 trillion – on it.

The Poles went 'nuclear,' as the saying goes. Polish courts tend to take. the view that Poland is sovereign and not compelled to do everything the EU way. Since the EU does most things unanimously, the Poles can basically grind everything in Brussels to a halt, if they so choose.

An Update

Last Tuesday I wrote about the Five Eyes organization and in passing made some remarks about New Zealand's defense posture that could be interpreted as patronizing. Those should be taken as referring to what its posture has been over the last three decades.

The pace of change has us editing our work "on the fly" as along comes an article at Responsible Statecraft that makes a pretty good case for a U-turn happening in NZ defense policy. Hat tip to RealClearWorld for the link. See author Geoffrey Miller's introduction.

New Zealand apparently wants to run with the pack now countering China — and may seek to join AUKUS, too.

Not just one, but three new reports were released simultaneously on Friday morning by the country’s Minister of Defence, Andrew Little.

These include New Zealand’s inaugural National Security Strategy, along with a military-focused Defence Policy and Strategy Statement. A third document, the “Future Force Design Principles,” spells out some further general recommendations for reconfiguring New Zealand’s military.

Collectively, the publicly released plans – which run to over 12,000 words on 82 pages — add up to the biggest shake-up for New Zealand’s foreign and defense policy in a generation.

The new plans are controversial in NZ, those with longtime attachments to the former "go it alone" policy are, as the Brits say,  not best pleased. File the above changes under "In progress, not yet the final word."

Class Solidarity

The website AMAC, aimed at senior citizens, takes another look at the New York Times/Siena College poll numbers. Hat tip to RealClearPolitics for the link. See what author Daniel Berman found.

There is one demographic breakdown that does provide a clear differentiation in Biden’s popularity. Among voters without a bachelor’s degree, Joe Biden was down 35%-60%. Among those who had received a bachelor’s degree, Joe Biden had a net positive approval rating, 47%-45%.

One thing which is relevant to the increasingly dominant role of education is that the new culture wars do not actually seem to be built around policy differences. While there is some correlation between degree attainment and “social issue” positions, it is small and seems to be more correlated with age.

The obvious conclusion is that what we are seeing is a new type of identity politics, whereby the Democrat Party is winning voters with bachelor’s degrees because it is messaging to those voters that their education means they should vote Democrat. It is a new type of class solidarity.

This may also explain the solidarity within the media and the federal civil service, including those at the DOJ and FBI, when it comes to Donald Trump and U.S. politics.

This is not the product of some “Deep State” conspiracy. The trouble is much simpler. Those positions draw almost entirely from a demographic on one side of the great cultural chasm which divides politics in the 2020s, and we should expect them to behave homogenously as a result.

As a conservative Ph.D. I am a "class traitor" and have been for decades. I do side with the working class on most policy issues. 

An Evil Idea

After doing the post below, a truly evil idea occurred to me. It involves the near-submersibles that drug smugglers use to evade coast guard scrutiny. Those have significant cargo capability.

Imagine one of those with Ukrainian remote steering and live TV installed, loaded with explosives. They are designed to sail awash, but not submerged and have almost no radar signature and little wake.

They are visible in daylight and can be easily sunk by naval gunfire, if lookouts are watching for them. One supposes by the standards of modern weapon systems, they'd be relatively cheap.

An enemy with those could largely "rule" the nighttime sea. I suppose their engine noise can be picked up on sonar but most ships probably don't have an all-night sonar watch.

I hope somebody in our Navy has thought about these; how to use and defend against them.

Battle Porn

I just watched some "battle pornography" you might or might not enjoy, at the Hot Air site. A video camera on a Ukraine drone suicide boat loaded with explosives shows the last half minute as it approaches a Russian warship and crashes into it. 

The camera was obviously transmitting live as it rammed the Olenegorsky Gornyak, a landing ship carrying and supporting amphibious forces. The still photo below shows that ship being towed, listing heavily to port.

I bet some Ukrainian remote boat driver is celebrating tonight.

Friday Snark

Images courtesy of Politico's Nation's Cartoonists on the Week in Politics.

Paradox

Of the U.S. politicians either in or running for office, Donald Trump is paradoxically the most popular  and also one of the most unpopular. You could search all day and not find an adult American who has no opinion of Donald J. Trump. 

Lots of people like Trump, lots of people don't. None of those running against him for the GOP nomination is anywhere near as popular. Joe Biden isn't popular, nor is his Veep, nor the two insignificant persons running against him.

It is also true than loads of people - maybe a majority - don't like Trump and a significant portion of those will vote for whoever runs against him, even if it is someone they don't like.

Ron Brownstein writes for CNN:

Forty of the 50 states, or 80% of them, have voted the same way in each of the past four presidential elections.

Which means, another race decided in the "battleground" states. And another "lesser of two evils" choice, barring some unforeseen cataclysm.