Monday, 12 April 2021

Daily Digest

Daily Digest

Link to Power LinePower Line

War In Ukraine?

Posted: 12 Apr 2021 05:01 PM PDT

(John Hinderaker)

America’s adversaries are on the march. China has suppressed Hong Kong and threatens Taiwan, along with Japan and other Asian allies of America. ISIS is rearing its head again in the Middle East. And Russia is once again threatening Ukraine.

Russia now has more troops along its border with Ukraine than at any time since 2014, and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky has little hope that war can be avoided. Moscow's demands are impossible to meet.

"A diplomatic solution…requires a radical change in the position of the Kyiv authorities," said Konstantin Sivkov, a Moscow-based military analyst. "If the Kyiv authorities agree to the recognition of the federal structure of Ukraine, if the authorities agree to the equal status of the Russian language in Ukraine along with the Ukrainian language, then the whole problem in [Donbas] will be removed," he said.

The Ukrainians fear that giving Russia further opportunity to undermine the government in Kyiv will only result in the slow erosion of their independence.

In the end, it seems that the Ukrainians will have to fight. CNN has a surprisingly intelligent report:

[A]mid growing tensions with the United States and its Western allies, Russian forces have again been spotted on the move across the border sparking concerns the war may be reignited.

Cell phone video has emerged of Russian armored columns driving towards the Ukrainian frontier. Tanks and artillery guns have been seen being transported by rail. There’s also been a build-up reported in Crimea.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was briefly famous in the U.S. because President Trump called to congratulate him on his election, the occasion for an insane impeachment effort by the Democrats. But Zelensky’s duties are ongoing:

Ankle-deep in thick black sludge, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky moves stealthily with his troops in single file through the warren of trenches and tunnels that form the tense front lines in the east of his country.

It feels more like the early 20th century than a modern conflict, with tired, nervous soldiers gripping their rifles around him as they reach open ground, scanning the area for movement across no-mans-land.

They know snipers, likely trained by Russians, say Ukrainian officials are looking for a chance to fire. More than 20 of their comrades have been gunned down already this year.

More at the link. Ukraine is trying to prevent being dismembered by Putin’s Russia. Putin, of course, will deny any such intent up until the moment when the dismemberment occurs. One fact you will not see reported by CNN or any “mainstream” news outlet is that the Russians, like the Chinese, are well aware that we have a senile president–and, worse, a president whose administration is anti-American. That means that there is no time like the present for aggressive actions. Sadly, we can expect more hostile moves by our enemies in the months and years to come.

Trump lashes out

Posted: 12 Apr 2021 04:46 PM PDT

(Paul Mirengoff)

On Saturday, Donald Trump spoke to a Republican National Committee event at Mar-a-Lago. From reports by some in attendance, it looks like the former president, in true Trumpian fashion, aired grievances and bitterly attacked former allies.

Most notably, Trump went after Mitch McConnell. Reportedly, he called the Minority Leader a “dumb son of a bitch” and claimed that Chuck Schumer would never have allowed the 2020 presidential results to be certified. Trump also claimed, again according to accounts, that he won the Kentucky Senate race for McConnell.

Such a claim would be absurd. McConnell crushed his opponent by nearly 20 percentage points in 2020. Kentucky has elected him to the Senate seven times.

We don’t know for sure what Chuck Schumer would have done regarding certification of the 2020 election had the shoe been on the other foot. We know that Schumer did not try to prevent Trump from being the certified winner in 2016 in a race that was about as close as the 2020 contest.

Presumably, Schumer didn’t try to block Trump for the same reason that McConnell didn’t try to block Biden. Neither believed that the results to be certified were invalid, and neither wanted a constitutional crisis or a pitched battle over presidential succession. In my view, Trump has never presented evidence that should have persuaded McConnell that Trump was the proper winner of the 2020 campaign.

We also know that Al Gore didn’t press Democrats not to certify the results of the 2000 election, even though he probably had a better claim than Trump of having obtained the votes needed to win. I don’t consider Gore’s decision dumb, I consider it patriotic.

My favorite line from Trump’s speech, as reported, is this statement about Republicans who voted to impeach him:

We can’t have these guys that like publicity.

If we can’t have politicians who like publicity, we’ll have to fire virtually the entire political class. If we can’t have ones who obsessively crave publicity, Trump will have to be among the first disqualified.

Republicans can talk all they want about divisions in the Democratic party, and they should. However, Trump’s speech reminds us that it’s Democrats who are likely to be passing the most popcorn in the coming years.

“Shit! I shot him.”

Posted: 12 Apr 2021 12:42 PM PDT

(John Hinderaker)

Bodycam footage has been released on the police shooting last night in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota. Three police officers, one black man, one white man and one woman, stopped a vehicle being driven by 20-year-old Daunte Wright. Wright was wanted on an arrest warrant.

Initially Wright got out of his car, but then apparently changed his mind, fought with police officers, climbed back into his car and drove away. As the officers were struggling with Wright, the police woman attempted to tase him. Evidently she accidentally pulled out her gun rather than her taser and shot Wright with it. I believe the Brooklyn Center Police Department has already fired her, or announced its intention to do so.


Wright had been charged with illegally carrying a weapon and with, on that occasion also, fleeing a police officer. He failed to appear for a hearing on April 2.


As shown in photos tweeted above by Andy Ngo, Wright’s Facebook page features a gun, wads of cash, gang signs and what looks like a joint.

This case is somewhat reminiscent of Mohammed Noor’s shooting of Justine Damond in Minneapolis a few years ago. That incident, too, involved almost incredible negligence on the part of the police officer. The difference, of course, is that Damond did nothing whatsoever wrong. Having called 911, she approached the squad car that responded to her call on the driver’s side and Noor, for no discernible reason, pulled his gun and shot her, firing across his partner’s body. In the current case, Wright was resisting arrest and attempting to flee. It was the confusion caused by his struggle that led to the police woman’s fatal error.

Minnesota’s Governor Tim Walz must be the most irresponsible governor in the U.S. Before anything was known about the circumstances of last night’s incident, Walz was already making it about race:


It doesn’t appear that there was any racial angle in last night’s fatal encounter at all.

A final observation: At this moment, Governor Walz and others are giving a press conference on last night’s shooting. They recited a list of victims of police shootings, but never mentioned Justine Damond–the one case that is actually analogous.

How Joe Biden created the border crisis

Posted: 12 Apr 2021 12:41 PM PDT

(Paul Mirengoff)

Byron York begins his article on the present border crisis this way:

Anyone paying attention to the news knows the situation on the U.S.-Mexico border is terrible. Anyone who actually visits the border discovers it is worse than that.

Byron bases this statement on his visit to the border, during which he accompanied a group of GOP House members. The observations in his report support his conclusion.

But why is there a border crisis? Byron persuasively argues that it’s the product of Joe Biden’s missteps:

[D]uring his first days in office. . .Biden blew up the foundation of the government’s handling of migrants. With a series of executive actions, Biden threw out key policies with nothing ready to replace them. And he did it using rhetoric that invited migrants to rush to the border — more than 172,000 in March alone, including nearly 19,000 unaccompanied children.

What policies did Biden throw out?

First, he did away with President Donald Trump’s Remain in Mexico policy, which required asylum-seekers to stay in Mexico, not in the U.S., while their asylum claims were adjudicated. Second, Biden ended Trump’s asylum agreements with the Northern Triangle countries, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, to steer would-be asylum-seekers from those nations into safe countries other than the U.S.

Third, Biden gutted Trump’s use of Title 42, the government’s authority to expel most migrants for the purpose of controlling the spread of COVID. Biden did not throw Title 42 away altogether but is by some accounts now letting most would-be migrants stay rather than be turned away because of the pandemic.

Biden could counter the surge by reinstating these policies, but he doesn’t want to. He’d rather hand the problem over to Kamala Harris, who can’t be bothered to visit the border.

Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, who did visit it as part of the group of GOP legislators, summarized things this way:

What I saw on this trip was chaos and disorder. What the Biden administration does not want you to know is simply that they have handed over the borders of our country to the cartels and smugglers.

Do any Democrats care? Maybe some from districts directly affected by the crisis. Rep. Steve Scalise told Byron that “Henry [Cuellar] is getting to a boiling point, and there a couple of others.” However,
Scalise added that “this is something that you can’t defend, so [Democrats] can only hope that they can keep everybody quiet.”

With the help of the mainstream media, the Democrats’ chances of fulfilling this hope aren’t bad.

What’s Going On In the World?

Posted: 12 Apr 2021 07:39 AM PDT

(Steven Hayward)

When we look out on the world scene and how the Biden Administration is positioning itself, everyone should keep in mind the summary statement of former Defense Secretary and CIA director Robert Gates (no one’s idea of a partisan firebrand, as he’s been serving presidents of both parties since the Carter Administration): Joe Biden, Gates said, “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

Why would Biden change now?

Two circumstances need close attention. The first is China, where the Chinese military is stepping up military exercises in close proximity to Taiwan. Is this a prelude to an invasion? Could be. It is reported that President Trump remarked a couple years back that if China invaded Taiwan, “there’s not a damn thing we could do about it.” Perhaps true, though if there happened to be some American warships in the Taiwan Strait that were fired upon, it would change the calculus for the Chinese.

I’m very doubtful that China will invade Taiwan at least in the next year or so, if for no other reason than that it would cause a mass international boycott of the Winter Olympics that China is hosting next year. They might not care about this, but it would be just as easy to wait until after. In addition, and more significantly, China can afford to be patient as the Biden Administration blunders along and the United States as a whole is convulsed with its present moral panic over racism (which the Chinese skillfully exploited in that recent mini-summit in Alaska).

It is significant that Secretary of State Anthony Blinken had been hedging about whether the U.S. will attend the Winter Olympics. This may be as tough as the Biden Administration can get in terms of trying to deter China from invading Taiwan. If so, pretty weak.

It is widely assumed that if China invaded Taiwan, it would so alarm other nations in the region (Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc) that real sanctions would be imposed. Perhaps. But another development bears watching. It is reported that China is trying to close a deal with Saudi Arabia and other oil states in the Persian Gulf to purchase their oil in the Chinese Yuan rather than the U.S. Dollar. Since the Yuan is typically pegged to the Dollar (unlike other currencies whose oil costs more when the Dollar strengthens), why is there any need or China to do this? In fact, if you think the Dollar might weaken amidst the spending and money-printing binge of the Biden regency, why would you bother? One reason is that China intends its currency to become a rival reserve currency to the Dollar, as well as an escape hatch should sanctions try to limit China’s assess to SWIFT and other international money exchange systems. That’s what a nation with a long-term strategic plan for economic supremacy would do.

Meanwhile, with the Biden Administration reviving the Obama Administration’s hostility to Israel, it is curious that the Israelis are so open about some of its current actions in its medium-intensity war with Iran. Everyone in the Middle East knows that the crash of Iran’s electrical grid at its nuclear processing facility a few days ago was an Israeli cyber operation, so there’s no real need to confirm it—unless the nation you’re trying to send a signal to is the United States. (Israel has also been more public about its attacks on Iranian ghost ships that are evading sanctions and/or transporting arms to Syria and Hezbollah.)

In other words, both our allies and our enemies have taken the measure of the Biden regency, and adjusted their actions accordingly.
at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

BREAKING: North Carolina automotive group acquires 7 Upstate dealerships

Breaking news from GSA Business Report Click here to view this message in a browser window. ...