Reflections From a Murky Pond

“God Bless Elections!” is exactly what the Romeike family should be proclaiming unto the Heavens because it was solely the fact that the Obama Regime fears the upcoming midterm elections that has allowed the stay in America.

The Happy Romeike Family

The Romeikes are devout Christians from Germany who wanted to homeschool their children because of what they perceived as the secularist agenda in German public schools. This is illegal is Germany and the parents faced both persecution and possible prosecution by the German authorities.

In 2008, after enduring two years of ever-increasing persecution and threats by the German government, they fled to America where they applied for asylum after settling in Tennessee. In 2010 Immigration Judge Lawrence O. Burman granted this request for asylum. This should have been the happy end of it. It wasn’t.

Obama’s and Holders’ Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) almost immediately appealed Judge Burman’s decision and got their appeal on docket of the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in California, who were quick to over the immigration judges grant of asylum to the Romeike family.

Finally, in 2014 the US Supreme Court refused to hear Romeiki’s further appeal. Legally this doomed the family to deportation and the likely destruction of their family as a unit upon their return to Germany. In theory this should have been the sad end of it. It wasn’t.

The whole case made the national news and the public outcry over the Obama Regime’s behavior was fairly intense – to intense for Obama and other Democrats in a midterm election year, especially one where they’re weakened by the failure of ObamaCare and the retirement of many of the politicians. Hence, they granted the Romeike family “indefinite deferred status,” which will allow them to stay in the US.

God Bless Elections!

In almost every generation a leader emerges among the nations, quasi-nations, and pseudo-nations of the world. In our time that leader is Russia’s Vladimir Putin. As an American, this is both hard for me to admit and something that I cannot find to be a positive thing for my nation. That, however, doesn’t make it any less true and refusing to accept that truth would be even worse for America.

Vladimir Putin – The World’s Leader

The one thing that truly sets President Vladimir Putin apart from the rest of world’s, and especially America’s, politicians is that he is a leader of men and they, especially Obama, are merely politicians. Putin commands respect and gets it, they do neither.

Putin decides what he wants to do and he does it in half a day, right? He decided he had to go to their parliament. He went to their parliament. He got permission in 15 minutes … but he makes a decision and he executes it quickly. Then everybody reacts. That’s what you call a leader. President Obama, he’s got to think about it. He’s got to go over it again. He’s got to talk to more people about it.

— Rudy Giuliani

Mr. Giuliani is, quite sadly, completely correct. Of all the people on the world’s stage Putin is the man who is most the leader and who is most worthy of respect in that role. The key words in this are “Leader” and “Respect.” Those do not respectively equate to “Friend” or “Approval.”

Putin is neither friend nor ally to America and is, at a bare minimum, an adversary of Europe. There is little of his foreign policy that is not contrary to the West’s perceived best interests and even less of his domestic policies that the majority of the West’s peoples find acceptable.

Therein lies the problem. The greatest and most worthy of respect leader of this time is one that is not on our side. Nor do we have, singularly or collectively, such leaders as can effectively balk him with anything resembling ease. As the victors write the history books, this could well end up with us “on the wrong side of history.”

As legislated by Congress in the 1997 NDAA, the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) is a study by the United States Department of Defense (DoD that analyzes strategic objectives of- and potential military threats to the US. The Quadrennial Defense Review Report is the main public document describing the United States’ military doctrine, strategies, and capabilities.

For the first time since its inception the QDR report has been rejected. Rep. Howard McKeon (R-CA) Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee found that Secretary of Defense, Charles Hagel’s 2014 report to not meet the legal requirements for such documents.

I appreciate the work that has gone into this QDR. A rigorous analysis and debate that takes place every four years as the review is put together should be immensely valuable to planners and senior commanders. Unfortunately, the product the process produced this time has more to do with politics than policy and is of little value to decision makers. For that reason, I will require the Department to re-write and re-submit a compliant report. In defiance of the law, this QDR provides no insight into what a moderate-to-low risk strategy would be, is clearly budget driven, and is shortsighted. It allows the President to duck the consequences of the deep defense cuts he has advocated and leaves us all wondering what the true future costs of those cuts will be.

— Rep. Howard McKeon (R-CA)
Chairman, House Armed Services Committee

Chairman McKeon’s issues with the 2014 QDR were three-fold: the law requires the QDR to identify resources not included in the Pentagon’s 5 year spending plan yet the report didn’t do so; the 2014 QDR was too shortsighted, looking out only 5 years, instead of the 20 years required by law; and this QDR accepts additional and elevated risks when the law requires the QDR to offer a low-to-moderate risk plan.

Essentially, while the QDR should have been an opportunity for Defense Secretary Charles Hagel to lay out his vision to refine defense strategy and to tell how the Defense Department will adapt the joint force to support that vision, it was instead a political document and, therefor, the House Armed Services Committee rejected it as fundamentally not meeting the legal requirements placed upon this accounting.

Personally, I think this was the right course of action and one that was overdue but not at all surprising in the need for it. As Chairman McKeon has noted, the QDR has become less and less compliant as time goes has gone by. It was past time to fix this issue.

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There’s at lot hot air being blown about by politicians and their pet talking heads about Russia’s supposed invasion of Ukraine. All across the globe there’s a chorus complaints and threats set to the disharmonious twin beats of statecraft and sabre rattling.

But politically awkward reality is that Russian military forces have occupied only the peninsula of Crimea and have not imposed themselves upon mainland Ukraine. They’ve done this under the political pretext of protecting Russians and/or Russian speakers in Ukraine from violent reprisals from anti-Russian Ukrainian militants. Yet the best estimate at this time is that Putin is only really interested in maintaining control of- and providing security for Russia’s Black Sea naval base in Sevastopol, which is their Navy’s only access to the Mediterranean.

This is not to say that, given the right foreign impetus, this Crimean Not-War couldn’t turn into the next Crimean War. The Crimean Peninsula is more formally called the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and is only somewhat part of Ukraine – how a part much having been a point of contention for some time. It’s also more pro-Russia than pro-European, though there’s a strong antagonism between its two majority demographics, Muslim Tartars and Russian Christians. In other words, as it has always been, it’s ripe for conflict.

Every morning presents one with the same hard choices. Every morning we’re forced to choose between, not two bad choices, but two very good choices. That’s what makes it difficult.

Stay in Bed or Get Up And Stretch

 
There’s a lot to be said for staying in bed but there’s also a lot to be said for getting up and stretching.
 

Yes, as odd as it sounds, sometimes having nothing but good choices still places on in the quandary of which fine choice to make. 😉