Archive for 2017
April 5, 2017
UPDATE ON LATEST NORTH KOREAN MISSILE TEST: South Korea suspects North Korea’s latest missile launch tested “new technology.”
The South Korean military said the missile was fired from land near the east coast city of Sinpo and flew about 60 kilometers (40 miles). The earlier one in February flew about 500 kilometers (310 miles). Analysts were trying to determine if the shorter distance meant Wednesday’s launch was a failure.
One expert said it could have been a test of a new missile intended as a stepping stone toward developing a solid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missile that could reach the U.S. mainland. Kim Dong-yub, an analyst at Seoul’s Institute for Far Eastern Studies, questioned why North Korea would do a shorter launch of the KN-15.
More:
Ralph Cossa, president of the Pacific Forum CSIS think tank in Honolulu, said he was expecting North Korea would do something to coincide with the Trump-Xi summit, perhaps conduct a nuclear test. The missile launch may be a precursor, with more to come as the summit starts Thursday, he said.
“I’ve joked before that they don’t mind being hated but they definitely hate to be ignored,” Cossa said.
Recent satellite imagery shows possible preparations for a test at North Korea’s main nuclear test site, including the laying of communication cables used to initiate a test and collect data.
Diplomatic dealings, U.S.-China:
U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson acknowledged the launch in a brief statement but said the U.S. had spoken enough about North Korea and would not comment further.
Trump has said China must do more to pressure North Korea to halt its nuclear program. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said Wednesday that all sides needed to be involved.
“If we are serious about solving this issue, we need to tackle the root of it,” she said at a regular news briefing. “We need to balance the interest of each side. China wants to make efforts with all sides involved, to make denuclearization a reality, and ensure peace in the region.”
SecState Tillerson said a lot in March when he said strategic patience with North Korea is over. This essay has a long section discussing the Trump Administration’s policy change vis a vis North Korea. I’ve linked to it several times but it’s history-rich and does help readers understand current events on the Korean peninsula.
AS RANDY BARNETT SAYS, you know what Republicans didn’t do to Merrick Garland? This: “Surprise, surprise. Another desperate 11th-hour smear, something that appears to have become a rite of passage for Republican Supreme Court nominees. Someone (David Brock, call your office?) is shopping around to news outlets baseless claims that Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch committed acts of plagiarism in four passages in his 2006 book The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia. Multiple academics who have reviewed the charges—including one of Gorsuch’s imagined victims—have rejected those claims, which, they explain, rest on a misunderstanding of academic citation standards and don’t involve misappropriation of anyone’s ideas, theories, or creative expressions.”
Well, I didn’t write the book on plagiarism, but I did (with bigshot DC lawyer Peter Morgan) write a chapter on it, and specifically on how bogus charges of plagiarism are abused to create a false ethical cloud. You can read it here.
ANDREW MCCARTHY: A Watergate-style Scandal.
In general, it is the FBI that conducts investigations that bear on American citizens suspected of committing crimes or of acting as agents of foreign powers. In the matter of alleged Russian meddling, the investigative camp also includes the CIA and the NSA. All three agencies conducted a probe and issued a joint report in January. That was after Obama, despite having previously acknowledged that the Russian activity was inconsequential, suddenly made a great show of ordering an inquiry and issuing sanctions.
Consequently, if unmasking was relevant to the Russia investigation, it would have been done by those three agencies. And if it had been critical to know the identities of Americans caught up in other foreign intelligence efforts, the agencies that collect the information and conduct investigations would have unmasked it. Because they are the agencies that collect and refine intelligence “products” for the rest of the “intelligence community,” they are responsible for any unmasking; and they do it under “minimization” standards that FBI Director James Comey, in recent congressional testimony, described as “obsessive” in their determination to protect the identities and privacy of Americans.
Understand: There would have been no intelligence need for Susan Rice to ask for identities to be unmasked. If there had been a real need to reveal the identities — an intelligence need based on American interests — the unmasking would have been done by the investigating agencies.
The national-security adviser is not an investigator. She is a White House staffer. The president’s staff is a consumer of intelligence, not a generator or collector of it. If Susan Rice was unmasking Americans, it was not to fulfill an intelligence need based on American interests; it was to fulfill a political desire based on Democratic-party interests.
I’m so old I can remember when the Obama Administration was “amazingly scandal-free.”
OUT: ONLY A PARANOID WACKJOB WOULD THINK OBAMA WAS SPYING ON TRUMP. In: Of course Obama was spying on Trump — it was Obama’s job! “I love the way the messaging turns on a dime. One minute it’s ridiculous to think that the Obama administration was doing surveillance on the Trump campaign. The next minute the Obama administration was doing the right thing if it did surveillance on the Trump campaign.”
Same playbook every time.
IT’S HARD KEEPING YOUR STORY STRAIGHT, ESPECIALLY WHEN YOU’RE NOT OVERLY BRIGHT: Susan Rice gets tangled up in her own statements about ‘unmasking’ Trump officials.
First, Susan Rice denied any knowledge of unmasking the identities of Trump officials named in intelligence reports linked to the president’s transition team. Then, the former national security adviser admitted that unmasking occurred, while insisting it wasn’t for political purposes.
What will the Obama administration official say next? If her Tuesday interview with MSNBC offers any answer, it’s that Rice appears to shift her story in direct proportion to political pressure. . . .
Two weeks ago during a PBS interview, Rice denied having any knowledge of unmasked information. “I know nothing about this,” she told Judy Woodruff. “I was surprised to see reports from Chairman Nunes on that count today.”
Back then Rice responded to allegations that the Obama administration was surveilling members of Trump’s camp for strategic gain by pleading ignorance. Hedging her bets after new reports from Bloomberg and the Daily Caller, Rice now says that any unmasking of identities was “absolutely not for any political purposes, to spy, to expose or anything.”
Still, after contradicting her own statements, that distinction will do little to placate Republicans gunning for her head. And she’ll find little sympathy after failing to categorically deny that she was responsible for any of the unmasking. Already, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul has called for Rice to appear before Congress to testify.
We need a lot of people under oath. Also, as Ron Fournier illustrates, it’s not just Republicans who don’t trust Rice after her Benghazi lies.
QUESTION ASKED: How Is Syria Still Using Chemical Weapons?
Perhaps because Bashar Assad and Vladimir Putin lied about getting rid of all the chemical weapons, and President Obama didn’t want to ruffle any feathers while Assad and Putin were providing cover for his failed Syria policy?
FLYING COVER FOR SUSAN RICE — AND, ULTIMATELY, BARACK OBAMA: Tom Shattuck: Establishment media wants to distract us from unmasking scandal. “President Barack Obama’s former national security adviser, Susan Rice, is caught like a rat in a glue trap and there is nothing that the establishment media can do but try to block your view. It’s not their best look, but it’s all they’ve got. Naturally, The New York Times and CNN led the pack.”
What did President Obama know, and when did he know it?
FASTER, PLEASE: Jeff Sessions Presses Shift at Justice Department.
As the new administration struggles to repeal the Affordable Care Act and ban travelers from some Muslim-majority countries due to terrorism concerns, the former attorney general and prosecutor from Alabama, who has been immersed in justice-related issues for decades, has swiftly implemented a series of crime-fighting provisions while relaxing civil-rights initiatives.
In two months, Mr. Sessions has reversed the department’s withdrawal from for-profit prisons; pulled out from part of a major voting rights case in Texas; nixed federal guidance allowing transgender students to use the public bathrooms of their choice; threatened to withhold Justice Department funding from “sanctuary cities” that thwart cooperation with federal immigration officials; and ordered a crackdown on violent crime, potentially including attacks against police officers.
There’s also a purely federal matter which might require his attention.
I THOUGHT REPUBLICANS WERE AGAINST UNILATERAL DISARMAMENT: McConnell Pledges Legislative Filibuster Is Here to Stay.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell guaranteed Tuesday that there will not be an effort to change the debate rules surrounding legislation, even as senators are hurtling towards a rule change on Supreme Court nominees.
“There’s no sentiment to change the legislative filibuster,” the Kentucky Republican told reporters at his weekly press conference. Asked if he was committing to not changing the rules to end debate on legislation while he is the GOP leader, McConnell said, “Correct.”
Requiring 60 votes to invoke cloture, or end debate, on legislation is a unique characteristic of the Senate, which has the effect of requiring some bipartisan support or agreement to move legislation forward. Senators often argue that changing the protocol for cutting off debate — the cloture rule — would fundamentally alter the nature of the chamber.
McConnell has signaled he is prepared to change the cloture rule relating to Supreme Court nominations so that President Donald Trump’s high court nominee, Judge Neil Gorsuch, can advance by a simple majority vote. This week McConnell is expected to employ the so-called nuclear option and effectively change the Senate rules by a majority vote, rather than two-thirds of the senators who are present and voting.
But Sen. John McCain, who had pushed against previous uses of the nuclear option, was not terribly optimistic about the legislative filibuster’s future.
“I can’t say with confidence, and I’m afraid we’re on a slippery slope,” the Arizona Republican said. “Benjamin Franklin somewhere is turning over because he’s the one that advocated for the role of the Senate.”
Franklin wasn’t talking about the filibuster. And I’m positive that our next Senate Majority Leader, Kamala Harris, won’t be so generous. We no longer have the trust, thanks to Harry Reid, to believe that Democrats won’t undo the filibuster the next time they’re in the majority. So the main question is, are the Republicans suckers?
Also, if McCain believes that eliminating the filibuster means we effectively have a unicameral legislature, well . . . he’s just as dumb as I think he is.
CAUCUS CO-CHAIR: Blue Collar Workers ‘Feel More Disconnected’ to Dems Than Ever Before.
Deplorable.
ILLICIT LICIT BANKING: The IRS took millions from innocent people because of how they managed their bank accounts, Inspector General finds.
The report covers IRS cash seizures against businesses and individuals suspected of deliberately trying to avoid federal reporting requirements for large bank deposits.
In order to combat criminal activity, individuals and businesses are required to report all bank deposits greater than $10,000 to federal authorities. Intentionally splitting up large sums of cash into sub-$10,000 amounts to avoid that reporting requirement is known as “structuring,” and is illegal under the federal Bank Secrecy Act.
But many business owners engaged in perfectly legal activities may be unaware of the law. Others are covered by insurance policies that don’t cover cash losses greater than $10,000. Still others simply want to avoid extra paperwork, and keep their deposits less than $10,000 on the advice of bank employees or colleagues.
While structuring is technically a crime, it’s something of a secondary one.
The “crime” is handling your cash the way a drug dealer might, even if your business is nothing but legitimate.
THE HILL: DHS: Immigration agents can make courthouse arrests.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) says immigration agents are authorized to arrest crime victims and witnesses at courthouses, amid scrutiny of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement tactics.
“Just because they’re a victim in a certain case does not mean there’s not something in their background that could cause them to be a removable alien,” DHS spokesman David Lapan said Tuesday, according to The Washington Post.
“Just because they’re a witness doesn’t mean they might not pose a security threat for other reasons,” he told reporters.
Lapan said the factors inspiring Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials to make an arrest “could be any number of things.”
“I can’t give a blanket statement that says every witness and victim is somehow untouchable, because they may have circumstances in their own case that would make them again subject to arrest,” he said.
“Again, the categories that we’ve talked about that make them subject to arrest or potential removal still apply to somebody who might him or herself be a victim.”
Court officials have complained that ICE agents going to local courthouses could scare potential witnesses and victims from reporting crimes, the Post noted.
Well, that’s a concern, but it’s not the law. And besides, this is mostly just concern-trolling aimed at establishing “sanctuary courthouses.”
KILL YOUR TELEVISION: Are We About to O.D. on Late-Night Trump Jokes?
I SPOKE AT A ROTARY CLUB ONCE OR TWICE. I GUESS I WON’T BE DOING THAT AGAIN: Rotary International Gives The Boot To Gun Owners, Cites “Reputation Risk” In New Firearms Ban.
At least their reputation is no longer “at risk.” Now it’s toxic.
A FOR EFFORT? Susan Rice somehow manages to make Benghazi cover-up seem minor.
What is so astonishing about the revelation that Ms. Rice was the one unmasking Donald Trump and his campaign before, during and after he won the presidency is that it doesn’t get any closer to Barack Obama himself.
Ms. Rice was Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, one of his closest aides. They spoke all the time. She worked directly for him. Here she was spying on Mr. Obama’s political enemies while in daily contact with him at the very height of the most contentious presidential election in memory. You don’t think she and the president discussed this?
The revelation that Ms. Rice was the operator behind the spying answers just one question. But it raises a thousand more.
When, exactly, did Ms. Rice start using the U.S. government’s spy operation as a weapon against Mr. Obama’s political opponents?
What conversations did she have with the president about the intel gleaned about Mr. Trump and other political enemies of Mr. Obama?
As was asked of an earlier president amid far smaller crimes: What did the president know, and when did he know it?
WAIT UNTIL THEY FIND OUT IT’S ABOUT SOCIALISM: Ignorance is Strength: Left to Screen 1984 in Protest of Trump.
April 4, 2017
JOHN HINDERAKER: One More Sign That Liberals Have Lost Their Minds.
GALLUP: Sharply Fewer Democrats Say They Are Proud to Be Americans. Well, to be fair, fewer Americans are proud to be Democrats, too.
NORTH KOREA FIRES ANOTHER BALLISTIC MISSILE: Pyongyang’s nuclear destruction threat crap won’t stop until it’s stopped. (Intentionally crude paraphrase of the classic Instapundit paraphrase of Herb Stein’s Law, to whit, “if something can’t go on forever, it won’t.”)
North Korea launched a ballistic missile Wednesday into the East Sea, South Korea’s military said, just two days ahead of summit talks between US President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping.
“North Korea fired a ballistic missile into the East Sea from a site in the vicinity of Sinpo, South Hamgyong Province, at around 6:42 a.m.,” the Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement. “The flight distance is about 60 kilometers.”
The projectile is estimated to be “a type of KN-15 medium-range ballistic missile,” also known as Pukguksong-2, and the maximum altitude of its flight was 189 km, a senior JCS official later told reporters.
“It’s still premature to conclude whether the test-firing was a success or failure,” he added. “It was detected by South Korean Navy’s Aegis ship operating in the East Sea and the Air Force’s ballistic missile warning system.”
He said the North seems to have aimed to test the technology of its ballistic missile technology and also considered the timing just before the U.S.-China summit.
Citing an initial assessment, the US Pacific Command also said the projectile seems to be a KN-15 ballistic missile fired from a land-based facility.
It flew nine minutes, added the Hawaii-based command.
More:
In an interview with the Financial Times, Trump warned that the US will take unilateral action to get rid of the North’s military threats unless China does its part.
Yes. Here’s some deep context which will help readers understand current events on the Korean peninsula.
JOHN KASS: Susan Rice: Stuck In The Rabbit Hole.
JUST LIKE WHEN THEY SAY “IT’S NOT ABOUT THE MONEY,” IT’S ABOUT THE MONEY, WHEN 20 HOUSE DEMOCRATS SAY “THIS IS ABOUT COUNTRY, NOT PARTY,” you know their party is in trouble.