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  • Comparing the Memos

    George Rebane

    Well, there is a difference or two between the Nunes (here)and the Schiff (here) memos.  The main difference is the approach to disclose.  Nunes stated material facts of what was and was not in the FISA application – it was not comprehensive for a number of reasons that included it being a purposely sanitized version that precluded the FBI and DOJ objecting to it on legal grounds of releasing classified information to the public.  The Schiff memo was politically drafted to make it so that its release had to be delayed for national political gain that all turned out to be bullshit.  Proof of that is seen in the memo itself which was submitted to the DOJ and FBIl (as was the Nunes memo) who returned it full of redactions.

    (The memos issue has also been extensively discussed in these pages here and here.)

    Schiff’s responses can be seen in this point by point compare/contrast piece in the WSJ (here), and they mainly consisted of ‘No it wasn’t’, ‘Yes, it was’, ‘there was also other good stuff in the application’, ‘the court knew the Dems paid for the dossier’, …, but no material facts that would support their rebuts.

    The Democrats will all now vow that Schiff has completely destroyed the Republicans’ indictment of the Obama DoJ and FBI behaving badly in getting and renewing permission to spy on Americans.  The rest with critical thinking skills will see Schiff’s response as the successful smokescreen it is for a neurologically more diverse audience.  The whole dueling memo issue again comes down to declassifying and releasing the original DoJ and FBI applications so everyone can see what was the actual basis for the request to surveil.

    Don’t hold your breath that people in those two agencies will ever be investigated by Mueller, let alone be indicted for the rampant corruption and incompetence that was evident then and has since seen even more light of day.

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  • Sandbox – 24feb18

    [Please note the recent topic specific commentaries under which to collect your thoughts on those issues.  For all else, this is the place.  gjr]

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  • Legal guns in schools (updated 26feb18)

    George Rebane

    RR has always taken the position that keeping certain facilities (public and private) as ‘gun free zones’ has been and continues to be a terribly misguided policy.  There are millions of CCW permit holders in America who regularly carry, and keeping these folks out of ‘gun free zones’ has demonstrated that the only ones who then do take guns into such facilities are criminals, terrorists, the mentally disturbed, …, and occasionally LE officials when called.

    After the recent Parkland, Florida massacre the gun control debate has now expanded to doing something real to prevent and/or mitigate such future massacres by arming selected school staffers with concealed carry firearms.  President Trump has now indicated his backing for this sane policy which is already quietly practiced in multiple school districts across the land.  Giving credit where due, NPR this morning broadcast an interview with a Texas school superintendent about schools in his district which have practiced an armed staff policy for some time with the full support of parents and voters.  (The liberal interviewer did do his best to ask a couple of gotcha questions to which the superintendent had no problem supplying civil and utterly reasonable answers.)

    (more…)

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  • Government guilty until …

    George Rebane

    Henninger2018RR readers are familiar with the Rebane Doctrine maxim – ‘If something has gone wrong in society, government is guilty until proven innocent’.  The verity of this has been demonstrated countless times in any and every country, especially in America.  As our government has become the bloated leviathan that it is, the examples of major harm done by and through government tentacles (i.e. its bureaus, agencies, departments, commissions, …) to its citizens have literally grown without bound.  A recent and timely compilation that includes current events and government activities is presented by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and WSJ Deputy Editorial Page Director Daniel Henninger, whose thesis is that “the list of fatal mistakes by federal agencies in recent years is staggering.”

    After some toe-curling examples, Mr Henninger asks – “Why do these public-agency mistakes continue to happen? The reasons are complex, so an appeal to Occam’s Razor is in order. The simple answer is that the federal government has become too big to succeed. Its vastness ensures mistakes, and its public-safety responsibilities ensure that some of those mistakes will be fatal.” (more here)

    And the growth is fueled by our citizens’ carefully taught myopia about big government as the source of all of society’s blessings.  The only ones celebrating the federal bloat are our calcified collectivist elites and their reliably history-challenged constituents.  Today when anything goes wrong that passeth understanding, our carefully taught and hard-wired response is to face Washington and demand, “Do something!’

    Going through Henninger’s list of federal travesties should convince any reasonable person of the ongoing dangers to fundamental public safety that government presents.  In these pages, we understand that it’s difficult/impossible to centrally control a complex system whose behavior you don’t understand (i.e. whose transfer function that joins inputs and outputs is unknown and unknowable).  Henninger concludes his commentary with –

    It’s pertinent to ask, though, whether the federal government’s inexorable bloat has made it a clear and present danger to the American people. That’s a question for public safety. It’s also a question for our politics.

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  • Scattershots – 20feb18

    George Rebane

    Ever hear of the Office of Financial Research?  OFR was created by Obama’s Congress after the 2008 financial crisis, it’s mission was to bring brains to bear on avoiding the next one by developing new prediction methods.  It “was supposed to anticipate trouble and issue warnings”, but ten years and $500M later this new agency has turned out to be, let’s say, less than satisfactory (‘dud’ would have been shorter).  Part of their problem is government’s perennial epidemic of poor organization and morale.  The morale part resulted from losing battles with other government bureaus, and being called to account by Republicans for “squandering” its charter to “significantly improve regulatory oversight of financial risk”. (more here) So what else is new?  The feds could have saved a bundle and gotten some real information about pending crises in a whole slew of areas affecting global finances by subscribing to Didier Sornette’s work at the Financial Crisis Observatory of ETH Zürich (about which RR readers were last informed here).

    Among President Trump’s many denied accomplishments is the revamping of Obama’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, born of the Dodd-Frank mess, and given the goal of regulating fair markets and a stable financial system, all for protecting the consumer.  What the CFPB actually wound up doing is creating a quagmire in the consumer banking sector that primarily hurt the middle- and lower-class borrowers and seekers of other financial services.  ('We're from the government, and we're here to help')  It did all this by issuing a flood of “poorly designed regulations (to) choke off access to credit, drive up interest rates, and eliminate choices.”  Another harbinger of what America will be like when the socialist elites take total control of our country.  Trump put in Mick Mulvaney to turn around the CFPB which is now rolling back the stifling regulations and finally becoming the agency that it was advertised to be.  Mulvaney’s new guiding principles for CFPB focus on inclusion, innovation, choice, competition, and respect.  You can read more about this revamping here.

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  • Gun Confiscation – again on the march (updated 21feb18)

    “Over the last fifty years, it’s the Left that has assaulted every moral norm and disdained every religious and cultural restraint.”  Andrew Klavan

    George Rebane

    Student groups across the land are now forming to protest the ownership and availability of guns in America.  Their tearful yet uninformed emotions will supply more grist for grinding down the Second Amendment in the name of ‘saving the children’.  I don’t want to re-circle the barn on all the arguments that correctly point out that no new gun control law suggested by the Left would have prevented the Parkland massacre.

    Ramirez_180219

    I gave my views on a reasonable approach to preventing such shootings in ‘Stopping School Shooters’.  We know it works because it is successfully applied in Israel and at the schools to which the elites send their kids.  However, the peasant children can serve a far more useful role for the elites as pawns – to sacrifice in their schools, or parade for the press where they can influence the country’s neurochallenged, a new term to join ‘neurodiverse’, ‘neurotypical’, ‘neurodivergent’ … introduced by leftwing academicians (more here).

    The only thing that I’ve heard which merits discussion and possible immediate implementation are the so-called Red Flag laws.  Five states have these which allow a family member, who is almost always aware of a developing situation, to alert authorities who can then temporarily but immediately remove access to guns by the disturbed individual.  The removal of the guns is not permanent, and their return depends on how the case is subsequently diagnosed and adjudicated.  Bottom line, it is those close to the individual who can nip a developing situation in the bud, and thereby prevent a suicide or a tragic shooting like in Parkland.

    (more…)

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  • ‘Are We Free to Discuss America’s Real Problems?’

    “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.” John Stuart Mill

    George Rebane

    This is the title of a recent major essay by Dr Amy Wax that initially appeared (here) in the January 2018 issue of the Imprimis, and was also featured in the 17feb18 issue of WSJ.  I bring it to our attention because it asks and answers a question of great moment in today’s America, and it also totally reflects the Rebane Doctrine that I have promoted for years in these pages.  Her vitae abstract reads –

    Amy L. Wax is the Robert Mundheim Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where she has received the Harvey Levin Memorial Award for Teaching Excellence. She has a B.S. from Yale College, an M.D. from Harvard Medical School, and a J.D. from Columbia Law School. She is a former assistant to the United States Solicitor General, and her most recent book is Race, Wrongs, and Remedies: Group Justice in the 21st Century.

    Dr Wax sets the stage with – “Too few Americans are qualified for the jobs available. Male working-age labor-force participation is at Depression-era lows. Opioid abuse is widespread. Homicidal violence plagues inner cities. Almost half of all children are born out of wedlock, and even more are raised by single mothers. Many college students lack basic skills, and high school students rank below those from two dozen other countries.”

    (more…)

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  • Sandbox – 17feb18

    [I think I pushed all the liberal hot buttons in my 16feb18 post on school shootings.  So gather your continuing thoughts on the topic there.  And please use this fresh sand for dissecting Mueller's latest indictments and Trump's latest travails.  gjr]

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  • Stopping School Shooters

    George Rebane

    We’ve said it here before about stopping school shooters, only guns will stop killers with guns.  That’s why police and the military carry them.  Israel recognized a long time ago that their schools were inviting targets for terrorists, and their response was to arm the schools – teachers, administrators, maintenance workers, …  Not everyone has to always carry, but if enough always do, there is little chance that someone will come into the school, start shooting kids, and not be instantly engaged by defending guns.  As happened again in Parkland, teachers have always demonstrated their willingness to sacrifice themselves to save their students.  Today all they can do is stop bullets with their bodies, so we are assured, that when armed and trained, they will engage the killer.  It is always the story that when seconds count, police are minutes away.

    Given our cultural demise and that the threat spectrum has expanded noticeably over the last twenty years, it is a crime against ourselves that we don’t follow Israel’s sensible lead.  Why we don’t do that is not hard to understand given that the Left owns the schools, and it is the Left that wants to disarm America.  It is hard to think of a better way than to periodically sacrifice some kids so as to build public outrage to a level that in hopeless frustration they seat representatives who will then constructively remove the Second Amendment.  As Iosif Vissarionovich said some years back, ‘You have to crack a few eggs to make an omelet.’  Maybe then they will also adopt the Israeli solution after legal civilian ownership of guns is history.  Until then, please read this letter purportedly from a teacher written in 2012 after Sandy Hook.

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  • Our New Cannabis Ordinance – A Civil Approach

    George Rebane

    [This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 14 February 2018.]

    Yesterday afternoon Jo Ann and I were in the packed supervisors’ chamber at the Rood Center.  The supes were there to discuss the new county cannabis ordinance and give guidance to the county staff about what they wanted to see in the finished product.  The entire affair was presided over by Supervisor Scofield who is the current board chair.  The meeting began with a presentation by Community Development Agency head Sean Powers in which he outlined a bit of history, the state’s current and evolving cannabis regulations, and what our own Community Advisory Group had recommended.

    The gathering opened in a very orderly, businesslike, yet congenial manner.  Supervisor Scofield then allowed about 30 minutes of additional public input, even though this was not a public hearing.  Then the supes started their first real discussion among themselves about the ordinance.  The Brown Act prevents elected officials from discussing and deciding public affairs in private.  So the exchange that followed was interesting to witness as each supervisor asked questions of the staff and began expressing their own druthers about the complex details that the ordinance must contain and also make clear to our newly legalized cannabis industry and concerned citizens alike.

    The dimensions of the ordinance quickly revealed themselves to be byzantine as each layer of important factors was examined and peeled back.  The main points of contention were the nuisance of cannabis stench in residential neighborhoods vs the desire to allow legal, regulated, and taxed cannabis grows.  If the ordinance were to come out too draconian, then the growers and producers would return to their illegal ways, and we would be back where we started.

    Also important to note is that all these deliberations are taking place within the current political environment in which 18 California counties are also writing their ordinances, while the rest are preparing to do so, and in which everyone is attempting to resolve the same conundrums.  The factors that need to be sorted out involve existing zoning laws, parcel sizes, numbers of permitted indoor vs outdoor plants, setbacks from property lines in the attempt to staunch the stench, and on and on.  Our cannabis proponents want Nevada County to lead the way with our ordinance, a tactic that is not without its own chuckholes.

    It soon became clear which supervisors were more concerned about abating the nuisance issues, and who leaned more toward the cannabis growers.  Actually, only Supervisor Heidi Hall, representing District #1 that contains Nevada City, found herself alone advocating for more plants grown outside on smaller parcels with smaller setbacks from the neighbors.  Supervisors Miller, Anderson, Scofield and Weston all leaned toward smaller grows of only medicinal marijuana on larger parcels zoned for agriculture and having larger setbacks.  Nevertheless, all of them also understood that the growers needed some reasonable slack so that their commercial interests would also be served.

    The overall discussion was most civil, with a lot of understanding of each others’ concerns that at times was even leavened with humor.  My only criticism about the process was with Sean Powers’ preparation – he didn’t make enough slides that were needed to give everyone, including us in the audience, the definitions, charts, and data that would have made things go more smoothly with fewer repeated questions and misunderstandings that had to be cleared up. More specific details about the Supervisors’ guidance and next steps in the drafting process, that would include additional public input, can be found in the online (here) and print editions of today’s Union newspaper.

    We came away from the meeting in good spirits, having witnessed how local government can work in a reasoned and reasonable manner to consider difficult issues with divers advocates, and proceed visibly with an even-handed approach to making public policy.  In recent years I have become pessimistic about the outcome of our Founders’ legacy that left us the Great Experiment, which is based on the question, ‘Can common man govern himself?’  Witnessing our Board of Supervisors at work gave us new hope that maybe, just maybe, we could actually do that in today’s hyper-polarized America.

    My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

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