“You can check out any time you like
But you can never leave.”
It turns out the Democrats aren’t soft on crime at all
Forget these Soros DAs. Forget “defund the police” – you must have imagined it. Forget the Floyd riots and the open borders.
Forget it all, because of Biden’s proposed new budget:
The plan sent to Congress allocates more than $32 billion to fighting crime, especially violent crime, with $20.6 billion going to the Department of Justice and $3.2 billion in discretionary resources for funding local and state law enforcement, much of it in the form of grants to hire more police officers. About $30 billion in mandatory resources will be funneled to “support law enforcement, crime prevention, and community violence intervention.”
The proposal directs $17.4 billion, an increase of $1.7 billion above the 2021 amount, for DOJ law enforcement. That sum includes $1.7 billion for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) to crack-down on gun-trafficking. U.S. Attorneys will be given $72.1 million to prosecute violent crimes.
What could possibly go wrong? Well, for starters, increased federal government involvement for any policing that is done on the local level is worrisome. Federal money equals federal control.
Here’s an indication of the sort of thing going on:
While the budget appears to be aimed at boosting police numbers and resources to tackle crime, it does so while treating national gun proliferation as a primary culprit, promising to “increase regulation of the firearms industry, enhance ATF’s National Integrated Ballistic Information Network, and modernize the National Tracing Center.” The plan also emphasizes police accountability, acquiescing to progressive pressure after the wave of social justice riots during the summer of 2020 that alleged widespread police brutality.
There’s also this little tidbit:
The White House is also requesting funds for the Department of Justice for police reform, prosecuting hate crimes, and enforcing voting rights. The proposal is for $367 million, an increase of $101 million from fiscal 2021.
That would include $18 million for the FBI to investigate civil rights violations, $8 million for the U.S. attorneys’ offices to prosecute civil rights violations, and $1 million for the Criminal Division to expand its investigations of election related crimes, such as voter suppression.
I’d love to hear their definition of “voter suppression.” Could it possibly include things like voter IDs and other requirements the GOP is trying to protect in order to prevent voting fraud? And then there are those hate crimes. “Hate crime” is a category of crime that doesn’t add much to the criminal code except the opportunity to place people in double jeopardy by prosecuting them at the federal level if the state hasn’t managed to convict them.
Open thread 3/29/22
Why was the intelligence community wrong about Putin?
I’ve not been impressed by the intelligence community’s take on much of anything Russian (or maybe anything in general), and that’s not just lately. I’ve written before about how the intelligence community failed to accurately foresee and predict the collapse of the USSR (see this post, for example).
So this observation about the intelligence community, from former CIA officer Mike Baker, is unsurprising as well:
Putin has been “pretty damn consistent over the years.”
“If you look at what he did in Chechnya, if you look at what he did helping Assad in Syria, if you look at what he did annexing Crimea, if you look at Georgia, Abkhazia, South Ossetia. Every step of the way he’s been following in his mind this stated desire, that he’s made very public over the years, to rebuild his sphere of influence.”
Baker also says that “intelligence on what Putin actually wants is hard because his inner circle keeps getting smaller and smaller.” I have little doubt that’s the case, but as Baker said in the featured quote above, Putin’s actions indicated he would attack Ukraine at some point.
The Biden administration seemed an opportune time.
I think what should have been the biggest surprise was the scope and furor of the attack on Ukraine. But even that was apparently foretold in Chechnya, where apparently tons of civilians were killed. Russia’s actions in Syria, likewise. However, I suppose those were distinguished from Ukraine by being mostly Moslem populations, whereas Ukrainians are fellow Russian Orthodox. Perhaps our intelligence community didn’t think that Putin would unleash so much ferocity on a population that he claimed was a brother population to that of Russia.
But unleash it he did. Those who claim “well, he might have been even more ferocious than he has been” are mounting an argument that makes little to no sense to me. Hey, he might done any number of even more awful things. But the things he did have been awful enough.
[NOTE: Of course, all of this assumes that the intelligence community actually was wrong about Putin. I’m going to assume it was.]
Oscar Fight Night
I used to watch the Oscars every year for the fashions. That was fun. And I even liked some of the movies.
Then it became way too annoying to watch the Oscars. I didn’t care for the new movies themselves, the fashions were mostly ugly, so many of the actors and actresses were self-congratulatory and ridiculously full of themselves, and leftist politics was an almost constant drumbeat.
So I wasn’t watching it this year when actor Will Smith sucker-slapped comedian and presenter Chris Rock, cursed at him after returning to his seat, and then went on to win Best Actor and continue to shame himself with a maudlin and over-the-top thank-you speech in which he apologized to just about everyone except Chris Rock and somehow made himself out to be both victim and hero, quite the combination. And quite the performance, as well. Ugh.
Authorities – bouncers? – should have escorted Smith out of the building after he slapped Rock, but of course that didn’t happen.
If you’re interested – and you might not be; I’m only marginally interested myself – you can find video about it on YouTube and elsewhere. For example, here’s Smith’s acceptance speech. But perhaps the most fitting commentary might be from good old Ozzy Man, no stranger to the F-word himself:
Biden then, Biden now
Commenter “Yawrate” writes:
But judging by what the president has said throughout his career in the senate when he was in complete control of himself he wouldn’t have bought into the wholesale destruction of our country. Which tells us that he really isn’t in charge.
Well, it depends what one means by “in charge.” He’s certainly not fully in charge, but as I’ve said before I think he’s significantly in charge of foreign policy and at least partly in charge of much of the rest. There are also plenty of advisors, both known and unknown, who have input. Their input is probably somewhat greater than in previous administrations, but not all that much greater.
But what’s more – and probably more relevant to what Yawrate wrote – although it’s true that when Biden was a senator, he “wouldn’t have bought into the wholesale destruction of our country,” that was a long time ago. The last time he was a senator was in 2008, wasn’t it? At that time, I would have said that Democratic officeholders in general “wouldn’t have bought into the wholesale destruction of our country.”
But the times they have a-changed. What happened between 2008 and now?
Why, first eight years of Obama and then four of Trump and Trump Derangement Syndrome. During the Obama administration the country “fundamentally changed” and many people grew to accept a leftward slide and a foreign policy that rewarded enemies and punished friends. In fact, to many of us on the right, the Obama administration seemed purposely destructive of our country.
And who was vice president then, going along just about every step of the way? Why, none other than a non-demented Joe Biden, that’s who.
My read on Biden is that he never had any principles save “what’s in it for Joe Biden” (and, at times, his relatives), and he was highly adaptable along the way. He was always willing to lie. He was always willing to do what was necessary, and his adaptation to the left happened during the Obama administration. He still is adaptable, even though his cognitive challenges are now greater. But his cognitive challenges were always substantial.
It is amazing and depressing – as well as dangerous – that someone like that managed to become president. But that’s the situation we’re in.
I’ll add that it seems ironic to me that whatever it was that people initially feared from a Trump presidency – chaos, stupidity, world crisis, economic crisis – has actually happened under Joe Biden and mostly as a direct result of Biden’s policies. Trump himself was quite the opposite, and his administration would have been very successful in most realms had it not been for the forces on the left (that includes the Democratic Party and the GOP NeverTrumpers) relentlessly trying to destroy him. Those same forces are mostly still trying to prop up and make excuses for his successor, Joe Biden.
Open thread 3/28/22
A number of people on Saturday’s Fogelberg thread said they didn’t like his music because it was too “sweet.” I hereby offer you the following unsweet Fogelberg song – one of my favorites:
Same Old Lang Syne
It’s not the season for it, but oh well – I’ve always liked this song of Dan Fogelberg’s. Turns out it has an interesting story behind it, too:
Remember that reset with Russia?
A little stroll down memory lane:
The appeasement policy began in February 2009. Russia had invaded its neighbor and former client state, Georgia, six months earlier. The lame-duck George W. Bush administration planned to put missile defense structures in Eastern Europe to deter Russian aggression against its neighbors.
But one of the Obama-Biden administration’s first foreign policy maneuvers was to cancel that plan via a “secret letter” to Putin’s placeholder, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. Why? U.S. leaders apparently wanted to make deals with Russia, and giant missile silos in Putin’s backyard were a nonstarter for Moscow.
But the canceled missile defense in Eastern Europe was only the beginning in a long line of concessions to Russia that not only emboldened Putin, but advanced Russian military capabilities in ways that are now having deadly consequences for Ukrainian civilians (think hypersonic missiles) while threatening the global economy.
Please read the whole thing. You probably remember a lot of the events it describes, but it’s really quite extraordinary when put all together in one article like that.
And now, in 2022, those events take on even more significance in retrospect.
Are the Democrats getting ready to eject Joe and Kamala?
Why do you suppose that the New York Times has decided, finally, at this late date, to acknowledge that the story that the New York Post broke about Hunter’s laptop was true?…
The issue is never the issue. I suspect that Joe Biden is being prepped for ejection. Exactly how it will happen I do not yet know. But he is on the threshold, or possibly has even passed the threshold, where he could appear to govern. His minders understand this. They must be the ones to replace him, otherwise they themselves risk being replaced, which would be intolerable. As I say, it’s not entirely clear yet how the defenestration will take place. Obviously, Kamala will have to be dealt with first, and she will be. Look for some ground softening stories such as the Times just served up about the laptop. They won’t be long in coming.
When Biden was first elected I remember that a lot of people on the right said he’d be removed from the presidency and replaced by June of 2021. I didn’t think so, for one reason: who would replace him? It was pretty clear from the start that Kamala wouldn’t do, either, and if they both were removed then we’d have Nancy Pelosi, who’s even older than Biden and also somewhat “challenged” at this point.
And although it’s also pretty clear that Joe could be removed with the excuse of health (that is, cognitive) problems if the Cabinet wanted to do so, on what grounds would Kamala be dumped? Her difficulties would be harder to frame as a consequence of age, and in fact they’re not. Harris’ being the first person-of-color female vice president makes her removal even more difficult in terms of angering the Democrat base, which is the left. As Kimball points out in his piece, there doesn’t seem to be any corruption of the usual kind in her resume.
And even if Kamala could be removed, who would replace her? Some have said Hillary, but I think the Democrats know that would be a highly unpopular gambit, too.
I think they’re stuck. Deeply stuck. Which is not to say they won’t somehow find a solution. But like Kimball, I don’t see what it would be. Unlike Kimball, I’m not at all certain they’ll come up with one.
In the meantime, we limp along with Biden in charge if only nominally. He continues to speak extemporaneously in ways that cause big problems for his apologists such as Psaki, and much much bigger problems for the nation. Incidents such as this happen frequently, and the world is presently involved in so many crises – not unrelated to Biden’s being an incompetent president – that his bizarre utterances could ignite a powder keg.
Simply put, the man is potentially very very dangerous. He’s already caused major problems, but the potential is there for much greater ones:
But here’s the bad thing he said that could blow back on us big time and he needs to explain what the heck he is talking about here. He appeared to tell the members of the 82nd Airborne what they could expect when they arrived in Ukraine. What?
“You’re going to see when you’re there — some of you have been there — you’re going to see women, young people standing in the middle, in the front of a damn tank saying ‘I’m not leaving,’” Biden declared.
So they’re going to Ukraine and some have already been there? Or where else is he talking where they would be sent with people standing in front of tanks? Big problem. Biden has previously said he would not be sending any troops to Ukraine because it could set off World War III.
Andrew Feinberg of the Independent caught Biden’s comments and asked the White House what was going on…
The White House tried to clean it up, claiming he had been clear that we were not sending troops.
And these bizarre and unsettling ad libs are separate from all the destructive things he’s already done and plans to do purposely, as a matter of official policy.
The Democrats knew who he was and what he was, and yet they nominated him and propped him up and dragged him across the finish line. And they knew who Harris was, too; it was obvious even during the primaries. Even if you think the left doesn’t care if the nation goes down the tubes (or even considers that a consummation devoutly to be wished), they should have known that this debacle wouldn’t be helping their party any, either.
And yet they did it. Defeating Donald Trump was just that big a deal to them. A big f***ing deal, as Joe Biden would have put it in his somewhat more coherent days.
More on the Russian military
This is basically an addendum to yesterday’s post on the Russian military.
I came across some interesting articles: on graft and corruption, on logistical problems, and on organizational problems. There is also evidence that some of Russia’s newer weapons designs have been mostly for show:
In fact, many of Russia’s high profile technological leaps in military prowess have since proven to be little more than publicity stunts. The Su-57, Russia’s 5th-generation stealth fighter, exists in too few numbers to matter even if it were as capable as they claim. Expert assessments place their premier stealth fighter’s radar cross-section as about comparable to that of America’s 4th generation F/A-18 Super Hornet, and their recently unveiled Checkmate fighter, if it ever flies at all, will almost certainly be even less stealthy.
Likewise, Russia’s T-14 Armata main battle tank may also prove to be among the best in the world, if only Russia could afford to build any.
That entire article is well worth reading.
I have just about zero knowledge about any of these topics, but I know that some of you have quite a bit.