Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue:
1. Peace
2. Endgame
3. Galvin
4. Fires
5. China
1. Peace. From the world of Orange Man Bad, President Trump and his foreign policy team have just rendered the State Department and the attendant foreign affairs establishment irrelevant, perhaps even counterproductive with an announcement of a peace agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates. The significance of the deal is that the Palestinians were completely shut out of the process. American Presidents since Harry Truman have been trying to broker a deal between the warring parties in the Middle East. While many a piece of paper has been signed along with the occasional Arab nation leader assassinated, there has been no peace. The problem has always been the Palestinians who would rather continue to traffic on their victimhood than get anything done. Even Bill Clinton, who gave them every single thing demanded was turned down when Yasser Arafat walked away rather than signing a peace deal with Israel in 2000. Funniest part of the whole episode is a short video of American Traitor John Kerry pontificating in 2016 in front of some friendly crowd that there would never, ever be peace in the Middle East unless the Palestinians were part of it. So, what happened this time around? First of all, they cut the foreign policy establishment out of the pattern completely, turning the entire negotiation over to Jared Kushner. The second thing was to start to broker separate peace deals between Israel and individual Arab nations. Looks like the goal is to arrive at agreements with everyone in the region and surround the Palestinians with allies of Israel, not unlike building a wall brick by brick with the other party not being able to do a thing about it (see Poe’s Cask of Amontillado for an example). In response, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia both granted overflight rights for commercial airline traffic between Israel and the UAE, and more signatories to similar agreements are expected in the following weeks and months. Overflight rights cut the flight time in half, as Israeli airlines had to fly down the Red Sea and around the end of the peninsula to get to the Persian Gulf. The Palestinians pitched their best tantrum and demanded the Arab League endorse a resolution condemning the UAE for the agreement. The Arab League turned them down cold. Expect Bahrain and Oman and perhaps even Saudi Arabia to reach agreements in the not too distant future. Saudi Arabia is already working with Israel on military issues as a counter to Iran in the Middle East.
2. Endgame. Much has been made over the last year or so of the possible outcome should democrats and the political left win this national election. Some of the discussion on the political right has been particularly hair-raising, noting this is perhaps the most consequential election since Lincoln and McClellan faced off in 1864. I don’t think they are far wrong, as you don’t want insane people in charge. They have screwed up and it has made them nuts. Ginsburg could have retired under O’Bama gotten replaced. But she didn’t. Harry Reid could have never used the filibuster on judicial nominations or killed it off, handing the Republican majority the tool they needed to go to work on the courts under Trump. Democrats are already talking about completely repealing the filibuster in the Senate, statehood for Puerto Rico and DC, open borders, felons voting, vote by mail (including ballot harvesting), packing the SCOTUS like they did the DC Circuit, all with the goal of embracing the Erdogan view of governance: “Democracy is like a streetcar. When you come to your stop, you get off.” This is alternately stated as one man, one vote, one time. When they finally grab the levers of power, they don’t intend to relinquish them without bloodshed. We are the only ones standing in their way, and we will have to do that for a while. There is some pushback at the state level possible. For instance, when Texas entered the Union, there is a provision that allows it to split into up to 5 states. The other thing is that the democrat party is hemorrhaging minority voters – black and Latino. Their Brave New World may not last all that long, though they are capable of doing a lot of damage before they are ejected. I see a couple jobs in front of us. First would be the equivalent to Reconstruction, rigid Republican control for at least 3 presidential terms. Reconstruction lasted 12 years until Rutherford B Hayes ceded control of the south to democrats, something we may have to do to the Left Coast and NY. For my part, democrats need to be taught a brutal lesson by voters and learn that lesson for the next decade. Simultaneously, we need to fix the education establishment that is manufacturing economic illiterates, Marxists, and students well-schooled in the lesson that Race Uber Alles in this nation. Should that lesson not take place for whatever reason, we will see a different response to the democrat mobs. Bloody Kansas, anyone?
3. Galvin. One of the big games in AK is for democrats to run as independents. The democrat-dominated Walker administration encouraged this by allowing these self-identified liars to call themselves whatever they want to call themselves on the 2018 ballot regardless what party’s platform they make the ballot on. State law requires any independent to collect signatures to make it onto a ballot and running as the nominee of one of the political parties up here means you get to bypass that process. It’s a pretty neat scam, run as a democrat, win their nomination, and go on the ballot calling yourself an indy, something that Bill Walker’s democrats in the Division of Elections thought was just ducky. Alyse Galvin is one of these candidates, running for her second or third time against incumbent Don Young for US House of Representatives. Her claim to fame is leading a bunch of housewives for the last decade in a political operation called Great Alaskan Schools whose claim to fame was that we would all swell up, turn purple and die if one penny was cut from the state education budget. They were successful because nobody wanted to tell the ladies they were full of crap. This time around, Galvin won the nomination of the democrat party in the August primary and wanted to be identified as an Indy. Unfortunately for her (and other stealth democrats), Republicans control the Governor’s office and the ballot only includes the name of the nominating party, in Galvin’s case, democrat. After the Division of Elections announced the ballot, Galvin took the State to court to force them to stop printing ballots and revise the verbiage. In order to ensure the ballots make it to Alaskans overseas, generally military and oilies, State Law requires the ballots to be sent no later than a specific date. Galvin wanted the state courts to rewrite state election law, something they gleefully did in 2014 allowing the Walker – Mallott so-called Unity Ticket to run. State law at the time required all candidate changes be complete by a given date. Walker running as an indy and Mallott running as the democrat nominee made a deal brokered by state unions to merge the two tickets. Unfortunately, this happened some time after the drop dead date. The state judge rewrote that law on the fly noting that the voters of Alaska should not be deprived of candidates for office by an arbitrary deadline. Last Wednesday, a State Judge issued an injunction ordering the State to stop printing ballots. Too late, as the print run was complete two days earlier. The absolutely last date to mail the ballots to ensure they were going to be counted was last Friday. In pursuing a delay, Galvin was either disenfranchising 11,000 overseas Alaskans or trying to get the court to rewrite state election law once again. She went back to court demanding the ballots not be mailed and was turned down by the District Court Friday. The Alaska Supremes confirmed that opinion later in the day, apparently believing this was not a good year to turn Alaskan elections into yet another Calvinball game. Note how this democrat was ready, willing and able to use the courts to muck up state elections and disenfranchise 11,000 people who likely were not going to vote for her. She would have had a twofer should she have won. She has the nomination of the right political party. Not to be finished with all of this Galvin has promised yet another lawsuit should she lose to Young in November.
4. Fires. The Left Coast forest fires have triggered the expected political response. California Governor Gavin Newsom stood in an ash-strewn wildfire site and pontificated that “The debate is over around climate change” precisely the sort of “Shut up, he explained” response we have to come to know and love from the environmentalists and the political left. Not to be outdone, Joe Biden escaped from his basement for a little while with his teleprompter and gave a speech where he managed to pack more lies per sentence into any speech since O’Bama won that brass ring after the 2008 financial meltdown. The problem Cali has is that they do not allow logging, clearing undergrowth, or controlled burns. Their problem is the trees and undergrowth continue to grow, die and dry out. When you have a great precipitation year like they did a couple years ago, LOTS of stuff grows, mainly undergrowth. Foresters have been railing against this sort of mismanagement since Bill Clinton and his greens made it much more difficult to log, clear undergrowth, or conduct controlled burns on federal lands, so much of that ended. One of the great old rumors at the time was that this was done to placate marijuana farmers who used the National Forests for cropland. Forest management and fire mitigation isn’t all that difficult to do. You just have to want to do it. Add to the mix the action of BLM / AntiFa arsonists intentionally setting these fires and you have set the state for a real conflagration.
5. China. President Trump has been putting significant international pressure on China with the trade wars, disentangling from China, and fighting its electronics and software products with backdoors that allow the ChiComs to listen in (TikTok and Huawei). This is the first time anyone has pushed back against the ChiComs and they aren’t taking it very well. Last week, The Federalist ran a piece about an outfit named the Black Futures Lab, a venture by BLM founder Alicia Garza, being sponsored by the Chinese Progressive Association, an association that works with the Chinese communist government to push its agenda in the US. The Black Futures Lab donation page states they are “a fiscally sponsored project of the Chinese Progressive Association.” I had always thought that BLM was a combo terrorist org and democrat fundraising vehicle. Now we know it has ChiCom ties too. Nice. Real Clear Defense ran a piece last week entitled China as a Faltering Contender. This makes the case that China will become increasingly dangerous as the response to its heavy-handed belligerent and aggressive actions triggers the expected response. Its expansion into the South China Sea is pushing nations around that patch of water to start working together to deal with them. The Trump administration is on much friendlier terms with the government of Taiwan than we have had for decades. This includes multiple sales of US military equipment. Add to that the US commercial disengagement from China following the Wuhan Flu, and there is a lot of economic pressure being ratcheted up on China. This will make it increasingly difficult to keep its economic expansion under way and in turn really impact its plans for international dominance. This has happened a couple times the last century. There are some historians who believe that Germany started WWI because they feared being overtaken by Russia. The second example was Japan’s attack on the US in 1941. Some intel people believe the Russia had similar discussions after the First Gulf War when their equipment and training were turned into paperweights by Schwarzkopf and his army. In the end, Russia decided not to go that direction. But with 30+ million extra men who have no hope of finding a spouse, the CCP might.
More later –
– AG