Kangaroo Court

Interesting news nuance: If Nancy Pelosi does not cause a full House of Representatives vote on the Trump impeachment inquiry, then, of course, she protects all those Democrats who have been recently elected from districts that Trump won in 2016. But there are two other more important reasons for this sham. Without a full House vote, the Republicans have no subpoena powers nor can witnesses have White House counsel present in this possibleTV spectacle. Thus, Republicans cannot call any witnesses or influence the agenda of this kangaroo court. As a consequence, the Trump administration has refused to honor any of Pencil Neck’s subpoenas until a full house vote is held ... which refusal obviously will also be trumpeted as more obstruction by the president.

Now, dear reader, you know the rest of the story ...

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The

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez blames pipeline that hasn’t been built yet for oil spill ... see: Watt’s Up With That. This woman is not only an embarrassment to Boston University (cum laude graduate), the NYC district she represents in Congress, the House of Representatives in general ... but all millennial snowflakes.

If she does not realize what a laughable fool she has become, she will also be the dullard typifying our country to the rest of the world. Either that, or she well might win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Musk Oxen

One unique characteristics of Musk oxen is how they protect their young from wolves. When under attack the adult Musk oxen form a protective circle around their calves  facing outward. Thus the wolves can’t enjoy Musk veal for dinner.

There is a perfect analogy between the current Democrat House of Representatives and this Musk-ox defense mechanism. Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer and the rest of the Democrat senior leadership have formed a protective circle around their rebellious freshman Reps ... Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanana Pressley and Rashida Tlaib ... and are making faux excuses for their socialistic or anti-Semitic diatribes.

Admittedly, the wolves in this case, our left-wing media, are not very ferocious ... but, nevertheless, these tyro firebrands are well protected.

Connection?

Is there possibly a connection between the extremely generous yet lax IT employment requirements that the Pakistani Awan family enjoyed under Debbie Wasserman Schultz and other House Democrats? For details on this weird and suspicious relationship, see: NY Post Article. And the fact that the Awans likely knew, because of their access to congressional Democrat and Democrat Narional Committee computers, all about the multi-million dollar shinanigans that the DNC was engaging in with Fusion GPS ... regarding the fakeTrump-Russian dossier? Was this stunning Congressional laxity and generosity to the Awan family connected to the fact that they knew all about this dossier dirt ... and maybe even the more explosive Uranium One scandal?

If so, I think they might have been involved in their own shinanigins ... sometimes known to law enforcement as blackmail ...

French Kiss

Over the weekend Bill Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard, had most talking heads aflutter by saying that he had persuaded an "impressive" person to run for president on the Independent ticket. Who was it ... Mitt Romney ... Paul Ryan ... Ben Sasse ... Tom Cotton ... Rick Perry ... Scott Walker ... Rick Santorum? Whether this end run was to insure that Hellery Clinton would win in November ... or that this band of desperadoes were just trying to cause no candidate to get enough Electoral College votes to win outright ... and thus the House of Representatives would then decide the election ... was the unclear motive. But Bill Kristol clearly has had a hair across his somewhere about Donald Trump winning the Republican nomination.

However, after a few days media tease, we just learned who this dark horse was ... David French, a conservative National Review writer, former Iraqi soldier and Tennessee lawyer... see: Daily Caller Article ... not exactly a household name. Matter of fact I strongly suspect that the person Kristol had in mind over the weekend got cold feet and Mr. French was a last minute substitute to save face. Now since any candidate needs to have a 15% national poll showing to get in the final debate programs, I suspect that Mr. French may have just had his fifteen minutes of fame ... ala Andy Warhol. This bit of snidery on my part is not meant to sully Mr. French, but I can't say the same for Bill Kristol who, to me, has finally stepped over the line into kookdom.

And he calls Donald Trump a "roaring jackass" ...

Gridlock

President Obama’s job approval numbers are not very good at 43% … see: Gallup Polling. But the American public thinks even less of Congress … at 15% … see: More Gallup Polling. Clearly, this disparity has something to do with the president's and the media’s meme that Congress is in gridlock and can’t get anything done. (There are a few of us who actually think that might be a good thing.)

The complaints that underlie these low Congressional approval ratings center around our legislative body’s inability to solve and resolve such issues as immigration reform, infrastructure upgrades, tax reform, economic growth, administration scandal investigations, income inequality, entitlement reform, Obamacare fixes, etc. All very pressing issues and ones whose failures President Obama constantly and consistently blames on the Republicans … particularly those in the House of Representatives.

But, to me, I believe that this Congressional gridlock is a function of four things that are pretty much invisible to the American public:

1)     The dictatorial manner in which Harry Reid runs the Senate … wherein longstanding rules are flaunted, House bills never see the light of day on the Senate floor, Republican amendments to Senate bills are seldom brought up for debate or a vote, and the partisan divide of the Senate in constantly being inflamed by Harry Reid’s biased and malicious rhetoric. Legislative comity here has all but disappeared.

2)     The Republicans in the House have lost faith in the Conference Committee process wherein different versions of the laws passed in both houses of Congress are resolved. As a result, now, often resolutions passed in the Democrat Senate are not brought up for a vote in the House … even with amendments, which somehow always seem to get lost in conference.

3)     President Obama has gone a long way toward establishing an imperial presidency … often ignoring key provisions in laws passed by Congress … or using "his pen and his phone" to effectively establish his own laws. Congress is therefore understandably reluctant to provide our fearless leader with more platforms on which he can construct his mini-tyranny … and again blame any failings therefrom on Congress.

4)     The fact that President Obama has horrendous interpersonal relations with much of Congress … even many Democrats. This clearly is based upon his untrustworthiness and aloofness. Yes, every so often, Obama will make a media show of sitting down with Congressional leaders. But these events are always for conning and not for consequence. This grandstanding on the president’s part further drives a wedge between these two branches of government.

In truth, one wonders why these Gallup polling numbers for the president and Congress are not reversed ... they clearly should be.

Test Pattern

I was just listening to the House of Representatives testimony from the contractors who built the Obamacare website (HealthCare.gov) that has had myriad user problems. The statement that cause me to sit up and take notice was that full system testing for this site began only two weeks before it was supposed to go live on this past October 1^st ... see: CNN Story.  Two weeks!?!

Having run two system software companies that built user interfaces far less complicated than this Obamacare one, I can categorically state that this level of a testing is ludicrously inadequate.  Such a complicated system should have at least three months of extensive inside (Alpha) testing of the totally integrated software … after an equivalent amount of module testing (which I also doubt really happened).

Then, in order to have the slightest chance of working smoothly, this system should be turned over for six more months of end-user (Beta) and insurance company testing with at least an additional month or two under a simulated full load.  If this were done, then one might have a reasonable chance (fingers crossed) of a system launch that would not bring embarrassment to Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and the Department of Health and Human Services.

Thus, instead of almost a year of testing after the modules had been fully checked out and debugged (pants on fire!), this system had two weeks!  Yikes!  And we taxpayers spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the development of this piece of dreck.  To launch a software product without the level of testing described above is a criminal act propagated by charlatans of the first order.

This surely will bring seas of shame on Secretary Sebelius and the Obama administration … humility I doubt.

Afterthought: Little noticed (but probably more important) in this debacle about the Obamacare website failures are the security problems that abound around it. Much of the testing that was apparently not done should also have been directed at protecting all the confidential information being collected there ... and also insuring that cyber-squatters could not take advantage of this internet disarray to misdirect naive medical insurance seekers onto bogus websites ... see: Newsmax Story. 

These cyber-security issues, in the end, may be the real straw that eventually breaks Obamacare's back.

A Good Read

Click on to enlarge to the full op-ed.  For more about this very sensible thinker, Thomas Sowell, see his CV at: Wikipedia. Entry.  (And if you believe the latest polls on the shutdown and debt ceiling extension, you need to fathom how desperately the liberal press is trying to hold onto its sinecure ... see: Breitbart Story)

Blink

There are oodles of pundits who think they know how the current U.S. federal financial impasse will turn out.  Right now it does look as though this year’s government funding (aka the “continuing resolution”) and the raising of our government’s debt ceiling on October 17^th are going to be rolled together into one gigantic fiscal conundrum.  Both the Republicans and the Democrats are vying for media headlines in order to force their opponents to capitulate.  It’s kinda like that old children’s game of fake-slapping of another’s face ... trying to get the other to blink.

The Republicans’ feints involve the House of Representatives passing a series of funding resolutions and then pointing out how the Senate won’t even consider them … even if this means helping to cure a child with cancer or the opening of the World War II Memorial to returning veterans.  The Democrats’ ploys include bellicose statements on their refusal to negotiate, attempts to talk down the stock market, and the use of their allies in the media to smear Republicans with playground taunts.  Both sides also keep pointing to polling surveys, however skewed, that support their positions.

Who’s going to flinch first?  I’ll be damned if I know.  If I could extrapolate President Obama’s behavior when dealing with international adversaries, I would easily expect him to back down first.  But for some strange reason, he is much more resolute here at home than he is on the world stage.  Maybe if Speaker Boehner could get Iran’s new President, Hassan Rouhani, to make the Republicans' fiscal case for him?

Oh the Humiliation!

Part of the justification that John Kerry offered in his House of Representatives hearings yesterday for United States’s military actions in Syria was that the Arab States (read Saudi Arabia) would pay for the entire “unseating of Bashar al-Assad.”  Notice he didn’t just talk about a “shot across the bows” (President Obama’s term) but he clearly implied a full scale invasion “the way we’ve done it previously in other places” … see: Washington Post Story.  In other words, that dove of doves, Secretary of State Kerry, is suggesting that the youth of America should now become the expendable mercenaries in that bloody centuries-old war between the Shia and Sunni Muslims.  Oh the humiliation!

As long as we are then slatterns, perhaps we might also go, hat in hand, to the Al Saud dynasty there and ask for recompense for our past efforts on their behalf in Iraq and throughout the Middle East?

Skating

Bespeckled in her horn-rimmed glasses and looking very much like she did when she attended Wellesley College over forty years earlier, Hillary Clinton testified for five hours yesterday in front of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.  She pretty much skated through what was supposed to be a grueling cross examination and got away without having to answer many hard questions about the circumstances surrounding the killing of four Americans at the American Consulate in Benghazi last September 11^th (see: Weekly Standard Story).

I say testified for five hours, but for only half that time was she interrogated by Republicans.  The Democrats in both Houses asked her either softball questions or queries that were so off the subject as to cause one to doubt the purpose of this inquiry.  So that was really a two and one half hour “grilling” by Republicans, each limited to five minutes apiece (another strategic win for Hillary).  And she started each session with about a five minute statement (choking up in the Senate about meeting the next-of-kin of those killed) which cut out another 10 minutes of questioning.  Now most of the questioners prefaced their queries with effusive praise for Ms. Clinton’s service as Secretary of State and her round-the-world  travels.  With her demurred thanks, this tete-a-tete usually took at least one minute or 20% of each questioner’s time. 

Then, being politicians, each Republican invariably prefaced his or her questions with about a two-minute soliloquy pontificating about the tragedy of the Benghazi  massacre … another 40% of misspent time.  So now, reduce this 2 hours and twenty minutes of questioning by 60% which leaves just 56 minutes of true grilling … usually working out to one or two questions per Congress-person.  Now, Hillary being loquacious, would generally answer each question with long-winded explanations of some State-Department process irrelevant to the question … eating up most of the few precious minutes left.  And, if  the questioner did, for some strange reason, stumble onto a good question, Hillary either went on the attack (a fearsome sight) or claimed no knowledge (quite likely a lie).

So Hillary Clinton skated through what was supposed to be her Waterloo … not telling us who were the survivors of this massacre; why have they been held incognito for five months; when and where can they be interrogated; how could Hillary have not seen the requests for more security from Ambassador Stevens; what conversations has she had with the President before, during, and after this affair; did she tell the father of one of the dead Americans that “we will get that video maker;” and many other follow-up questions to her many evasive answers. 

Perhaps next time (and there surely needs to be a next time) these Congressional panels should hire a cross-examiner (Mark Levin?) like what was had in the Watergate hearings and he/she might find out “what difference [Benghazi], in fact, makes”?  And then maybe network television might also just deem to broadcast such hearings?  Or will the American people rise up in protest and protect their next President?  I think I know the answer.

The Debt Ceiling

Now that going over the fiscal cliff has been avoided through a tax rate increase on big earners, the next national financial crises are two-fold.  First Congress must address the increase of the debt ceiling sometime over the short term … and secondly, there is a massive mandated sequestration of government spending that was originally attached to the fiscal cliff legislation and has only been postponed by two months … see: CNN/Money Story.  It seems that the Republicans, with their typical political tone-deafness, have decided that they will stand and fight their spending-cuts battle on the field of the debt-ceiling increase.  Stupid them!

Why would conservatives fight such a battle over the debt ceiling when they know that they will be forced to surrender for no other reason than to maintain the bond rating of the United States?  In such a fight Republicans are obviously at a strategic disadvantage.  However, in a fight over spending sequestration, the Republicans hold the high ground.  This is because, by doing nothing, the administration will be forced into significant spending cuts because it no longer has the leverage of threatened tax rate increases.  Yes, these spending cuts are also very painful for the Defense Department … but I am reasonably certain that the Obama Administration will politically find a way to ameliorate those particular spending cuts … with the happy assistance of the Republican House of Representatives.

So the Tea Party members in Congress need to acquire some more political savvy and choose their pugilistic arenas somewhat more carefully ... and it should not be the debt-ceiling fight.

Taking Your Marbles ...

and going home.  Apparently the new Democrat strategy for dealing with defeat is petulance (see: Black Caucus Walkout).  The Democrats did it to respond to Governor Scott Walker's reforms by fleeing to the adjoining state.  Now they are going to try it in the House of Representatives in Washington, DC to protest the Eric Holder Contempt of Congress vote.  How did such childishness work out for you in Wisconsin?