North Korea made headlines again. Reports have it that North Korea performs a routine ritual of saber rattling every spring. It’s definitely “saber spring” in “Kim world”. Trump thinks the Great Successor is a naughty boy, behaving very “badly”.
China’s answer is to educate the US on calmness and diplomacy, while continuing to build weaponized islands in the South Sea. The US is certainly paying attention. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson just made a pit stop in China. While the US won’t take anything off the table, including pit stops and naming that “military action” won’t be taken off the table, the stronger, less visible, and probably more important response from the US is money. The Fed is raising interest rates and China appears to be in some kind of economic cross-hairs.Read More
The upcoming Supreme Court nomination approval will certainly prove important. SCOTUS should likely hear any number of cases involving whether Republican and Democratic presidents must abide by the same laws, immigration and spying not the least.
The cat is out of the bag and it looks like it’s about to have kittens. Obamagate is here.
Multiple sources claim Obama used British Intelligence to spy on Donald Trump. While British surveillance is certainly ahead—with their soon-to-be-released drone ‘robo-cops’—why does the US president need British help? He’s not just attempting to flatter James Bond fans. When a president enters through the back door, too many questions come up. Why would the most powerful politician in the world need to have someone else do his work? Is he not allowed to? Does he want to keep his fingerprints off a smoking gun? Does Obama know something we don’t?
Trump supporters and Trump dissidents will both honker down on their positions. Some former Trump dissidents will flip to support him when they see what he was up against. Obama fans will view Obama as having been in such a desperate predicament that drastic means were necessary. Trump fans will view Trump just the same, in a desperate predicament. No arguments will persuade anyone. Only events will sway a few late bloomers.Read More
Forget Japanese waters, headlines worry about North Korea and Hawaii. South Korea has their own two cents to add over the assassination of Kim Jong-un’s half brother at Kuala Lumpur International. China says that North Korea and the US are like two trains headed on a collision course. China has a kind of “plan” to bring the US and North Korea together, but the US won’t make concessions for obeying a UN resolution and there is no mention of China cutting off its supply. It seems China wants to be the “great reconciler”, but the rift is too far between East and West. Japan’s answer is to strike first.
Taiwan may be able to make its own response. This week, the US handed off two Perry-class frigates to Taiwan. Taiwanese naval officers will learn how to operate the frigates from the US Navy and the ships should set sail in May. This is a very interesting development since President-elect Trump received a phone call from President Tsai, and since the US still has yet to deliver on several military sales, especially F-16s, that closed during the terms of former Presidents Obama and Ma.
China’s response to events this week is two-fold. An editorial with a persuasive tone appeared in China’s state-run Global Times, arguing that India would help itself more if it cooperated with Chinese strategies rather than Japanese and US strategies. Xi Jinping also underlined and emphasized China’s great need to catch up on technology. This comes in the wake of the coming American Lockheed Martin F-35 “Lightning II” fighter jet and the US Navy’s new electromagnetically trajected railgun. China’s response is both telling and predicting.
While China has made advances, both in approaching Tomahawk cruise missile technology and in nearing the completion of its first home made aircraft carrier (reverse engineered from a Soviet era carrier), China still feels claustrophobic. Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and India, not to mention the distant-yet-present US are all naval forces too close to China’s back yard. Xi feels the “squeeze”. China is in a tight spot.
President Xi also revisited his long-standing mission of countering squander and corruption within the Communist Party. By underlining the points he did, he seems to be vying for equity and credit. Doesn’t China’s leader have enough credibility or does Xi know something the West doesn’t? Regardlessly, the greater wild card is India. China believes that India is on the fence and is open to persuasion—and China is correct. Soon, India will feel its own squeeze. The question, then, will be whether India feels inclined to side with China rather than forces farther to its east or if India will decide to reverse engineer Western technology write persuasive editorials of its own.
After the rains, flowers in the Southwest are in full bloom. One highlight is purple, the color for The People’s Party. As for the east coast, things are frozen, both in weather and in politics. Lowering taxes could take time. Getting health care laws to lower health care prices and unshackle employers could take more time. The leading political party’s interests are divided and their opposition has no tactic beneath them. Democrats are filibustering every political appointee as Obama appointees persist; Trump fired 46 Obama-appointed prosecutors. Of course, opposition filibusters and firing federal prosecutors for any new, incoming president are both standard practice. Conservatives expected as much and don’t demonstrate any shock, yet Liberals usually think their loss deserves exception. Everything suggests that Republicans will gain ground in the Senate come 2018, thanks to the Democrats refusal on cloture. Therein lies the real danger: supermajority.
A group of professors had a wild idea: What if Trump had been a woman and Hillary had been a man? Surely that would have flipped election results. Actually, after a carefully-rehearsed reenactment of the presidential debates by one skilled actor and one skilled actress, Liberal supporters were in for another surprise. Hillary supporters adored Trump’s words when they came from a woman and hated Hillary’s words when they came from a man. After learning the truth, they didn’t change their political preferences, of course.
People rarely change their opinions, given new information, no matter what political party they are from. While Conservatives will tout the results of this little theatrical-political experiment, they reacted with much of the same blindness over news about Bush family dealings. Note, the term “Trump dissident” is important in describing this presidential term. Most of the people who voted for Hillary didn’t like her, supported Bernie Sanders, and liked Trump least of all, to say the least.
Hillary’s team met with the Russians before the election, according to the Kremlin. That will make the upcoming hearings even more interesting. The game of chairs keeps revolving. No political victory is final. No enemy is ultimate. And no pettiness evades anyone.
China took the bait once again. Whether independence for Hong Kong and Taiwan would be better or worse, that independence becomes more likely every time the topic even comes up, no matter how much dissent the idea receives. Within China’s borders, the “all press is good press” principle may seem to work differently, but when China makes statements to the world beyond China’s press control, gravity and tides operate in a way that may seem foreign to Beijing. This week, China’s premiere stated the intention of having Taiwan return to Chinese control.
For better or worse, if China hopes to acquire Taiwan and keep Hong Kong, the most likely path to success is to never even mention, respond to, or otherwise acknowledge the subject in public—not ever. But, Chinese officials just can’t stop talking about it. So, for better or worse, while Taiwanese independence has seemed a likelihood with the US involved—and now all the more with Trump—the near impossibility of Hong Kong breaking away from China is being made less of an impossibility… for better or worse.
It’s not as if East Asia has a lack of problems. North Korea made its own headlines this week. It fired a missile into Japanese waters. Tokyo wasn’t happy. And, after Kim Jong-un’s half-brother was murdered at Kuala Lumpur International Airport, North Korea’s ambassador made some statements, Malaysia objected, and now the visa-exempt program with North Korea has been given the boot, along with North Korea’s ambassador.
The US aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson is making a tour sail with some Philippines cabinet members. Though everyone and his cat claims this is not a show of force, a show of force would not be without arguable reason. The largest active military in the world, which has neither declared victory nor defeat in any war, will soon have two aircraft carries. As China’s second aircraft carrier nears completion, videos have been released diagramming its basic construction. From the video, this first Chinese-made carrier was seemingly “reverse engineered” from China’s Soviet-made diesel-powered Liaoning, initially purchased to become a “floating casino”. Irony often accompanies poetry.
Any victory or defeat of China would be a first. So, logically, China’s stated ambition for change in the South Sea is, by definition, a gamble. Without history to calculate, with stepped-up rhetoric foreseeably backfiring, the Liaoning and its soon-to-be christened copy did become metaphoric casinos after all, for better or worse.
Corruption reports are in and still coming. Some include the EPA functioning as a laundering screen and Obama organizing post-presidential politics. It’s a machine, as much as reports go.
Now the public has multiple reports, just coming in, that six agencies under presidential control wire tapped Donald Trump as a candidate and president-elect. This has two important ramifications, among others. Firstly, with so many court orders that Obama’s subordinates pushed for even after warrant requests were rejected, few stones have been left unturned, still with no evidence of fowl play and clearly that Russians did not decide America’s election outcome. While this begs the question as to why six agencies went after the president’s political opposition leader without finding any inditing evidence, the stronger implication is vindicating: the accused is best proven innocent when proven innocent by his own accusers. The second ramification is that Obama must have either known what was going on or was too incompetent to know what every president should know—six agencies under his control were going after the same political opponent.
Now, we have reports of the Obama administration continuing to grasp for political influence, something that ex-presidents just don’t do.
Weigh the game of powers. If Obama didn’t have the controls to remain in office, efforts to control after leaving office won’t work either. Supporters secretly adore the idea of an Obama coup. But, it can’t happen. History’s uprisings favor the small and new, not the old and retired. Take Hillary for example. Making her Secretary of State was the perfect way to make sure she would tire and fumble and make herself susceptible, whether Obama intended that or not.
Like Jesse Jackson and those who trailed Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., once a movement peaks it can’t return. Obama’s best days in America are over. But, he’s still kicking and squirming. He didn’t quit while he was ahead. People will tire of him as they did of Napoleon. And, that means more political power will shift to the Republican establishment; then, pray that Heaven may help us all. Few things are more dangerous than one-party power. While we may not get there, the country is headed for Republican tyranny, thanks to the Obama years of over-reach.
For the first time since 2012, Chicago went six days without a shooting that results in a death. Shootings continue, but almost a week with no “homicides” is a record. Some people will care; other people won’t.
