- Constitutional Crises and Other Outrages — Time to Get Back to Work January 26, 2024 by W. David Montgomery - David Montgomery As I sit here on a Friday morning, I have to make a list of the outrageous developments of the day: Texas defies Biden on protecting its borders, gaining the support of all Republican governorsDOE pauses approval of LNG export terminals in order to assess their climate riskDemocrats increase legal efforts to subvert election by taking Trump off ballotsAI generated fakes of policy statements could trigger war It appears the Chesapeake Observer must get back into action. I will be writing more on the incredible blunder of slowing down our capacity to export liquified natural gas, with just this simple point now: LNG exports are the lifeline we are giving Europe to replace Russian supplies. Those exports may be more important in confronting Russia than doling out inadequate military support to Ukraine. By supplying our cheap natural gas to Europe, we enable them to withstand the loss of Russian supplies and we simultaneously deprive Russia of large export revenues it needs to keep losing in Ukraine. The climate extremists once again demonstrate their control of their puppet President and Energy Secretary. Then there is the false choice between defending Ukraine and defending our own border. As a matter of policy and budget sanity, both should be fully funded. There…
- The Situation in Gaza October 17, 2023 by Guest Author - By Bilahari KausikanOctober 10, 2023 Last night my attention was drawn to the argument made by a Malaysian ex-diplomat that the ‘root cause’ of the current violence must be addressed. This is not a new argument — it inevitably surfaces when conflict over Gaza or Palestine generally — erupts, and unfortunately, is shared by too many Singaporeans. At a superficial level, it has a certain plausibility, but is nevertheless bullshit. Let me explain why.First some Southeast Asian context. Hamas has a long-standing relationship with Malaysia and receives training there which cannot happen unless the political authorities at least instruct the security agencies to look the other way. Former PM Najib visited Gaza in 2013 and met Hamas leaders. Hamas maintains an office in Malaysia under the innocuous sounding title of Palestinian Cultural Office Malaysia.The logic of the ‘root cause’ argument about Palestine or terrorism in general is fundamentally flawed. Just because one party commits injustices does not excuse injustice by another party and this is really just an excuse for terrorism masquerading as an ‘explanation’. The Palestinian issue is such a tangled mess of competing nationalisms wrapped up in too much imperfectly understood and deliberately distorted history in which ‘justice’ for one…
- September 12, 1861 – A Forgotten Date in Maryland History September 18, 2023 by Guest Author - Paul W. Callahan The following article is extracted from When Democracy Fell – The Subjugation of Maryland During the U.S. Civil War, by Paul W. Callahan, which comprehensively explores the constitutional crisis experienced by Maryland during the Civil War. September 12, 1861, began with the entire front page of the New York Herald dominated by a map that meticulously detailed the advance positions of the Confederate army along the Potomac in preparation for an attack upon the Nation’s Capitol. The headline read - Over Three Hundred Thousand Armed Men - Scene of the Coming Decisive Conflict. The Nation’s North was not caught off guard by this development, as they had been reading about the rebel forces' impending attacks for weeks. A series of internationally published articles had detailed how the Maryland Legislature was cooperating with Confederate forces in that they would issue an ordinance of secession and simultaneously Confederate Generals Johnston and Beauregard would cross the Potomac to “liberate” Maryland and attack Washington from the flank. These articles detailed how a rebel army had been amassing in Accomac on Virginia’s Eastern Shore and was to be led up the Delmarva by General Tench Tilghman of Talbot County who had been deposed from his commission by Governor Hicks that…
- Biden’s Border Policy After Two and A Half Years September 18, 2023 by Matthew Daley - September 19, 2022 Matt Daley President Biden’s border policy appears on the surface to have attained its original goals: be the antithesis of President Trump’s, treat migrants more humanely, and make the border porous and permeable. DHS Secretary Mayorkas repeatedly told the Congress and the American people that border was secure when live TV coverage dramatized the falsity of his statements as hundreds illegally crossed the border in broad daylight. That he has avoided impeachment or forced resignation testifies to the political success of his management. El Paso TX border: Washington Examiner March 30, 2023 A series of executive changes to immigration procedures have allowed migrants from the primary sending nations who wish to claim asylum to initiate claims in their home nations to enter the US and bypass the drama at the border. This reduced the negative imagery of chaos at the border without reducing the overall number of “asylum seekers.” In fact, August border crossings shot up to at least 91,000 surpassing the previous record for one month set in 2019; whether this is a one-off surge remains to be seen. There is, however, one boil growing on the backside of President Biden’s policies. Earlier this year, Governor Greg Abbott of…
- Reflections of a New Councilmember September 4, 2023 by W. David Montgomery - David Montgomery Since I last wrote here, I agreed to run for the Easton Town Council, campaigned and won in the period of just over one month – from the end of March to the second of May. Sworn in on May 15, I have served on the Council for 3½ months as of September 1. I did promise, when we took a summer break from publishing the Chesapeake Observer, that I would write an article for the Labor Day issue. Since I have spent most of my time this summer thinking about current and forthcoming issues before the Council, that is what I will write. Unacceptable Residential Development The major issue on which I campaigned and was elected was putting the brakes on growth in Easton. We are elected from Wards, and my Ward III is exclusively residential, with three of the four largest communities populated largely by seniors like us. The most pressing issue facing this Ward was a proposed development called Poplar Hill, that would have added 450 new housing units to an environmentally sensitive area with no ability to absorb the additional traffic. I won by a 60-40 margin with a record turnout. It was not my charming personality and razor-sharp…
- My Summer Reading September 4, 2023 by John DeQ. Briggs - John DeQ. Briggs We have been quiet since May and are now just reemerging after a long hot summer largely dominated by news of presidential legal matters. But below the fold over the summer were some interesting and noteworthy news peaks. 1. Last Spring the big threat was China. A significant segment of the Republican party was against providing further financial support to Ukraine because “we need to focus upon the extreme threat from China.” Apart from the fact that support for Ukraine is almost certainly the front line against the threat from China (the other front-line, Afghanistan, having been abandoned), it is fascinating now to see that the August stories are all about the coming multidimensional collapse of China.. Among the scores of stories along this line, the August 19 News Items by John Ellis curated a worthwhile collection of short takes from other publications. A few of the money quotes: The deep cause of China’s economic slowdown — and the strongest reason to believe it will be lasting — is its demographic collapse. Last year, the country’s population fell for the first time since 1961, a landmark that had not been expected until 2029 or later. From here on, China’s demographic decline will accelerate: The United Nations projects…
- Thinking about Things: The Rise of Rights, the Decline of Responsibilities, and the Transmogrification of the Social Compact May 8, 2023 by The Editors - John DeQ. Briggs Hard as one might try, it is increasingly difficult to be optimistic about the future of America. We are living through a time of systematic government actions designed to relieve preferred constituencies of their responsibilities and to grant preferred constituencies significant rights, often at the expense of non-preferred constituencies. The Social Compact, if one can be said still to exist, is barely recognizable. The Social Compact theory as a basis for government was birthed in Greece but much developed in the 17th and 18th centuries by philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean Jaques Rousseau. It was important for this country’s Founding Fathers inasmuch as it supplied a framework to limit government to function only with the consent of the governed. Under the hypothetical Social Compact, citizens give up some of their natural rights to the government in exchange for protection of certain individual rights and privileges. Citizens also undertook responsibilities to society generally in the nature of good citizenship. In other words, citizens agree to abide by the law and in return they can expect the government to do its part in protecting their freedoms and their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Implicit in…
- The Nord Stream Pipeline: Media and Importance March 7, 2023 by Matthew Daley - Matthew P. Daley For nearly a full week in February, much of the American population was busy hyperventilating over images of a Chinese surveillance balloon (CB) transiting the lower 48 while collecting intelligence. A great deal of ink and airtime was devoted to the subject which, at the time, was novel and curious but without great import. Admittedly, the CB gathered different types of intelligence, some of which may not have lent themselves to satellite collection. At a minimum, the Chinese learned that our radars were not tuned to detect that type of intrusion, a situation that reportedly has since been corrected. But it is unlikely that much of significance was gained Beijing and certainly compared to the full panoply of intelligence collection modalities, the CB amounted to precious little. The main impact was political: the Administration was embarrassed, but after the shootdown, the issue had a very short half-life despite a week of concentrated media attention. By contrast, in early February Sy Hersh, a well known and controversial journalist, published on Substack.com a story that asserts the United States conducted a secret operation that destroyed three of the four Nord Stream gas pipelines. The denials from various parts of the Administration were swift and unequivocal. If…
- Thinking About Things: Forward to the Past with the GOP March 7, 2023 by John DeQ. Briggs - John DeQ. Briggs Since shortly after the mid-term elections of last November, I have been ruminating about the Republican party, what it stands for, and whether it has or deserves to have a future in anything resembling its current form. But last month I stumbled across two very different reviews (one from the Wall Street Journal, the other from The New York Times) of a new book: The Ghost at the Feast, by Robert Kagan. These prompted me to peruse the book itself, although I have by no means ploughed through it all yet. But these modest readings did focus me on the eerie parallels between the GOP now and the GOP a century ago. Those parallels do not auger well for the future of the GOP. At the beginning of the 20th century, the United States kept largely to itself notwithstanding that it had become, over the prior century, the preeminent economic power in the world. It possessed the economic strength of several of its rivals combined. And while its rivals had huge standing armies numbering in the millions of soldiers, and very large navies, the United States had a standing army measuring in the tens of thousands and hardly any Navy at all. It stood apart as…
- Worth Reading March 7, 2023 March 7, 2023 by The Editors - JDQB writes: Last weekend’s Wall Street Journal Interview was really a highly favorable summary and review of Philip Howard’s new book Public Unions vs. The People. I had not appreciated that all presidents, even the sainted FDR, opposed public unions until JFK legislated them into existence supposedly “as a payback for union support.”. The book’s author, a lawyer, has concluded that the public union problem has become so entrenched that it cannot be solved politically, but must be attacked through the courts as an unconstitutional limitation on the executive power to terminate employees, a proposition that has strong constitutional precedent. A link is here (paywall). I was persuaded to buy the book. I am new to Mark Halperin, who puts out a daily email called Wide World of News. On Saturday he did a short piece on Trump’s nearly two hour stemwinder at the annual Conservative Political Action Committee CPAC conference. Then on Sunday he did an equally short piece critiquing DeSantis’ performance in his first “major” speech, which was at the Reagan Center. The former is The Trump Machine Hums at CPAC. and the latter is Is That All There Is?. Spoiler alert: he thinks Trump did way better than expected and that DeSantis did worse…
