The View from Right Field

Cubs Are a Lock for the World Series

Any team with thirteen position players better than Kris Bryant is going to the World Series.  And apparently, that is the Cubs.

Are the Republicans Making Too Much Of Hillary Clinton’s Deleted Emails? Here’s One Answer.

Hillary Clinton’s lawyer has told the House Select Committee on Benghazi that her personal email server has been wiped clean and that all those personal emails she deleted (or had deleted) are gone.  Forever.  This was in response to a subpoena for these records by the House committee

Representative Elijah Cummings (D-Md), the committees’ top Democrat basically, said, okay, that’s fine.  No problem here.  Might as well move on.¹

With Republicans objecting to what former Secretary Clinton did, and Democrats saying there is no story, who are we to believe?  At least with respect to Representative Cummings’ response, let me ask what he might be saying if the situation was received.  What if it was Richard Nixon who said, I have given you all the relevant documents.  Everything else was personal and I destroyed it.  Would Representative Cummings be saying that everything was fine and that the president could be trusted?

Foreign Policy and Strategy: An Assessment of Jimmy Carter; A Perspective for Our Next President

James Jay Carafano writes at The National Interest on the foreign policy imperatives facing whoever wins the 2016 presidential election.  What I found particularly interesting were Mr. Carafano’s comments on Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy, which I will quote here without additional comment:

“Of course, just having a plan is not enough.  The enemy gets a vote, too. When Jimmy Carter came to office, there were also expectations that his presidency would be more than a little interested in defense and foreign policy.  He was, after all, an Annapolis graduate and a veteran naval officer.  But in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, Carter was much more interested in doing some nation-building right here at home.  Still, Carter went through the motions of having a plan for engaging with the world.  It was wildly unrealistic.  It assumed America’s enemies would be cooperative if the White House acted nice.  And it assumed that the United States could just walk away from complicated parts of the world – from South Korea and Latin America to the Middle East and Africa – if things got too messy.

Crisis after crisis quickly withered Carter’s optimism.  A recent official history of the relationship between the president and the Joint Chiefs of Staff by Steven Reardon and Kenneth Foulkes details how the president’s eagerness for his strategy diverged increasingly from the reality of U.S. policy failures.

Staying In Afghanistan. But Don’t Worry, We’ll Be Gone By January 20, 2017 No Matter What – Unless That Is the Reason To Worry

On Tuesday, President Obama announced, as had been expected, that he was going to delay the pullout of our troops from Afghanistan – by a little bit.  Instead of getting down to about 5,000 troops by the end of 2015, we will keep 9,800 troops in Afghanistan until the end of the year.  President Obama said this delay would be “well worth it.”  By extending the timeframe now, the President said, “we don’t have to go back. … [W]e don’t have to respond in an emergency because terrorist activities are being launched out of Afghanistan.”

This is all well and good, except that the President then rejected the logic of his own position by saying, even with this delay, we will still have everybody out, except for some relatively small number of troops at our embassy in Kabul, by the end of 2016 – or at least by the time he leaves office.  Which doesn’t make sense.

If, as The New York Times says, “[t]he resilience of Al Qaeda in the mountains that straddle the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan has surprised many American officials,” how can we be sure we won’t be surprised again this year?

Is President Obama Skipping a Meeting with NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg Because the President Doesn’t Like Photo Ops – Or Should We Worry?

President Obama is famous (infamous - ?) for his dislike of photo op meetings, etc.  (See, for example, here.)  That may have been one of the reasons he did not go to Paris for the march in support of Charlie Hebdo.  Unlike, for example, George H.W. Bush, who was famous for sending handwritten notes, etc., to people, both high and low, President Obama doesn’t think photo op meetings, etc., are important or something he needs to do.

One assumes this is the reason President Obama isn’t meeting with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who is in Washington this week.  Secretary General Stoltenberg’s staff requested a meeting with President Obama.  (Secretary General Stoltenberg was elected secretary general of NATO last fall and has not met President Obama in his new capacity.)  However, they never heard back.  Secretary General Stoltenberg met with Canadian Prime Minister Harper, to discuss ISIS and Ukraine, on the way to Washington, and he will meet with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, while they are both in town.  But, as I said, President Obama apparently didn’t think a meeting was necessary.

The GAO Weighs In on “Who Is Managing Our Government?”

A couple of times recently¹, I have asked, “Who Is managing our government?”  Today’s Wall Street Journal has an editorial on this question, and the answer is, whoever is doing it needs to step up their game.

Each year, the GAO, the Government Accountability Office (formerly, the Government Accounting Office) reports an estimate of the amount of “improper payments” made in a number of federal programs.  The estimate for 2014, which was released last week, was $124.7 billion (that’s right, billion, not million; we’re talking real money here).  The overall error rate increased from 4% in 2013 to 4.5% in 2014, according to the GAO.²

One of the programs with the highest rate of improper payments is the earned-income tax credit, or EITC.  The error rate in that program was 27.2%.  According to the Journal:

“That means nearly three of 10 dollars were in some way undeserved – and the Treasury Inspector General thinks the real share is closer to four or even five of 10.  The GAO says the causes are ‘inability to authenticate requirements, improper income reporting, and inability to verify income before processing returns.’”

Now It’s the Education Department: Who Is Managing Our Government?

Last week I wrote about the incredibly poor management of e-mail retention policies in the federal government.  After reviewing some of the policy and management inadequacies, and outright failures, I said it made you wonder who was running the federal government.  “Who is managing it?” I asked.

An article in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal on the federal government’s student loan program gives us the answer: Nobody.  They can’t be managing it because they don’t really know what is going on.  Here are some excerpts from the article:

“The Obama administration is unable to get basic details about student debt due to an archaic system of data collection on its $1.1 trillion student-loan portfolio, hampering the government’s ability to help distressed borrowers and protect taxpayers.

At issue is an Education Department computer system that contains data on most of the roughly 40 million Americans with student loans.  The system is unable to quickly produce basic details about student debt – including whether Americans are defaulting even after having their payments lowered.  It also lacks the ability to analyze data while making new loans, and officials say they don’t want to disrupt the flow of federal aid to current students.

Report from Cubs’ Spring Training

From what I can tell from media so far (no, I am not in Mesa myself), Javier Baez is still striking out too much, Starlin Castro is muffing routine ground balls, and Jon Lester has a “dead arm”.  Oh yes, and our leader in home runs in spring training is going to start the season in Iowa.

Sounds like it’s going to be a great year – somewhere.

President Obama Says It Would Be “Fun” to Change the First Amendment

A couple of days ago, President Obama, in a campaign stop in Cleveland¹, said, in response to a question on the Citizens United decision², that it would be “fun” to amend the First Amendment to let Congress, and states, limit political speech that they don’t like or think is unfair, etc.  Here is what he said:

“Now, here’s the problem.  Citizens United was a Supreme Court ruling based on the First Amendment, so it can’t be overturned by statute.  It could be overturned by a new Court, or it could be overturned by constitutional amendment.  And those are extraordinarily challenging processes.  So I think we have to think about what are other creative ways to reduce the influence of money, given that in the short term we not going to be able to overturn Citizens United. …

Long term, I think it would be fun to have a constitutional amendment process about how our financial system works.”

He thinks it would be “fun” to start letting Congress interfere with political speech.  Of course, how much “fun” that would be would depend on who is in power and how much their principles (or lack thereof) allow them to muck about with the rules on who can talk and who can’t during a political campaign, especially in a way that intentionally (or not) helps them and hurts their opponents.

Fascinating Graphic On the Israeli Election

After first telling us the Israeli election was too close to call (based on exit polls), the news media is now saying the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was the big winner in the election Tuesday.  It is interesting, though, to look at this graphic of the results of the election (from The Wall Street Journal):

Before I make any comments, let me say that I am not an expert on Israeli politics.  Take anything I might say with a grain of salt.