RUTHFULLY YOURS

On November 22, while the world watched, the U.S. Navy’s newest, most complex warship ground to a stop in middle of the Panama Canal, both propellers seized, leaving the ship dead in the water. The warship, the USS Zumwalt, DDG-1000, had to be towed out of the canal. While not as embarrassing as watching our sailors being taken hostage by Iran and then publicly humiliated, nonetheless it was pretty embarrassing. Yes, all new classes of ships have teething problems, but this is at least the third major “engineering casualty” that the USS Zumwalt has experienced over the last few months, and it is emblematic of a defense-procurement system that is rapidly losing its ability to meet our national-security needs.

The Zumwalt was going to be the United States’ 21st-century, cruiser-sized, super destroyer that would allow us to dominate the world’s oceans and littorals for the next 50 years. The Navy made big promises: The two overarching goals for the program were that the ship would be very stealthy and that it would set new standards in reducing crew size. Another major element of its raison d’être, was that it would be able supply the Naval Surface Fire Support (NSFS) capability the Navy has been promising the Marines since it retired the last of the modernized Iowa-class battleships in 1992.

This really big warship was going to anchor the Navy’s ability to project power into the littorals. Its 15,000 to 16,000 tons of displacement would be crammed full of new and revolutionary technologies such as the Integrated Power System, the Linux-powered Total Ship Computing Environment Infrastructure (TSCEI), and, of course, the Advanced Gun System. Its massive generating capacity would allow it to power the energy-hungry lasers and railguns of the future. Its defining glory, its stealth, would allow the Zumwalt to undertake missions that other less stealthy ships could not.

Skyrocketing Costs, No Accountability

The Zumwalt destroyer program grew out of the 1994 SC-21 program, the goal of which was to develop the Navy’s surface-combatant warships of the 21st century. This destroyer program, PMS 500, went through several name changes, the DD-21, the DD(X), before finally, in 2006, the program was renamed to DDG-1000, the Zumwalt class.

Based on the Navy’s 1999 assurances that each ship would cost just $1.34 billion and that the whole 32-ship program would come in at $46 billion, Congress committed to fund the program. But by 2001, cost growth prompted the Navy to lower the projected class size to only 16 ships. And by 2005, with the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimating costs of well over $3 billion per ship, the Navy decided to drop the number of ships to be built to just seven. Flash-forward to today and the Navy has capped production at just three ships, with each costing over $4.2 billion in construction costs alone. Toss in over $10 billion for development costs, and you end up at more than $7 billion per ship. Amazingly, this is actually more than the $6.2 billion we paid for our last Nimitz-class aircraft carrier.

To make matters worse, this cost is still rising — the Navy actually took delivery of, and commissioned, a ship that is far from complete and years away from being ready for combat. To obfuscate this fact, many future “modernization costs,” new threat upgrades, and the like will appear, all funded under new programs with the goal of pumping more money into to Zumwalt to get it to where it should have been when it was commissioned. Unsurprisingly, as of May of 2016, the GAO reports that only three of eleven critical technologies the Zumwalt relies upon were considered mature.

Adding insult to injury, absolutely no one has been held accountable for this budget-busting debacle. In fact, every one of the Navy’s four original project managers were almost immediately promoted from captain to admiral upon completing their stint in charge. And the lead contractors for the Zumwalt program — Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics — have received additional hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of defense contracts — even as costs soared, schedules slipped, and capabilities declined.

Unsurprisingly, the chief of naval operations, the Navy’s senior uniformed naval officer, who played a major role in getting initial support and funding for new destroyer program, went on to become CEO and chairman of General Dynamics, which during his tenure secured billions of dollars directly related to the Zumwalt program. Of course, none of the congressional representatives who carried water for these same defense contractors have paid any price whatsoever for continuing to support funding the Zumwalt — despite overwhelming evidence the project was a loser.

Loretta Lynch ‘Regrets’ Meeting with Bill Clinton
Remember that infamous tarmac meeting between attorney general Loretta Lynch and the former president of the United States, Bill Clinton, whose wife just so happened be under the threat of a federal indictment as she ran for president? So does Lynch:

Attorney General Loretta Lynch said Sunday that the fallout from her tarmac meeting with former President Bill Clinton was “painful” for her.

“I do regret sitting down and having a conversation with him, because it did give people concern. And as I said, my greatest concern has always been making sure that people understand that the Department of Justice works in a way that is independent and looks at everybody equally,” Lynch said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“And when you do something that gives people a reason to think differently, that’s a problem. It was a problem for me. It was painful for me, and so I felt it was important to clarify it as quickly and as clearly and as cleanly as possible.”

Some have criticized the meeting, which came as the FBI was investigating Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email server while serving as secretary of State.

Losing’s a wonderful thing, isn’t it? Lynch — who’s also defended the FBI in the so-called Russian “hacking” fantasy — is busily trying to salvage what’s left of her reputation now that she’s on the way out the door and into the dustbin of history. But the fact remains that her meeting with the man who first appointed her as a U.S. attorney was a disgraceful and blatant conflict of interest and borderline corruption, made worse by the fact that the security people tried to prevent reporters from witnessing it.

Trump’s new broom in Washington can’t come soon enough.

Who would ever have predicted that the Electoral College would attract so much public discussion, let alone the last-ditch hope of the anti-Trump fanatics? Given so many misstatements about it, let me briefly set the record straight.

Begin with the argument that the Founders intended the Electoral College to act as a final quality control review board to weed out unfit demagogues – that is, Donald Trump. This is a complete lie, though some pundits quote Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist 68 in support of this “final judge,” argument, an argument lacking any legal standing. The Constitution stipulates only a single qualification – electors cannot at the time of their vote hold federal office (Article II, Section 1). Nothing is said about age, experience, background, or any other trait implying an ability to reject the unworthy. Especially relevant, there has never been any effort to enshrine this talent into laws. Picking judicious, independent-minded electors is a non-issue. The opposite is true – electors overwhelmingly tend to be party stalwarts.

Equally dubious is the oft heard claim from Hillary’s fans that the College is inherently undemocratic, and since Clinton won the popular vote, the only true measure of democracy, she “really” won the election, and Trump’s electors ought to honor “democracy” by stepping aside for Hillary. Totally false.

Prior to the Constitution’s final form, the mechanism to choose our chief executive went through multiple versions and direct election was considered and then rejected. Opponents believed that such a mechanism in a vast nation lacking decent communications would cede power to only a few wealthy notables whose resources permitted a nationwide campaign. Rather than being the authentic voice of the people, this plebiscite would, in the words of South Carolina delegate Charles Pinckney (1757-1824), be led by “a few active and designing men.” In other words, the staggering cost of a “national” campaign guaranteed plutocracy, not popular rule. By comparison, appealing to a hundred or so legislatively selected electors, though hardly easy, was at least possible for candidates lacking wealth and a towering nationwide reputation.

Moreover, in the context of the day, allowing state legislatures – not the voters acting directly – to choose electors was widely viewed as a democratic mechanism since state legislatures were dominated by farmers, tradesmen, small merchants, and other “ordinary” people. Nor is there anything undemocratic about legislatures’ delegate power, including the power to choose a president. To further avoid “a dangerous tendency to aristocracy,” the Constitution also authorized the directly elected House, not the Senate, to elect the president if no candidate secured a majority of the Electoral College vote. On balance, the Electoral College is a democratic element of the Constitution.

What about candidates winning the Electoral College vote but losing the popular vote, as occurred with Trump and Clinton plus the past elections of 1824, 1876, 1888, and 2000? Surely, this is smoking-gun proof of the Electoral College’s anti-democratic nature. Not quite. The Constitution is silent about how state legislatures choose electors, and in the Republic’s early years, states used a district system where the state was divided into districts where each district picked a single elector. In fact, a similar system is currently used by Maine and Nebraska (four electors each) – you get a single electoral vote by winning a congressional district and then two for winning the state overall.

Democrats are creating a big brouhaha over the possibility that Russia
tried to influence the American presidential election by
leaking information to WikiLeaks. The argument is that it wasn’t a fair
election if a foreign power influenced it.

That is true only if the foreign power deceived American voters. If the
information was true, then that foreign power did us a favor in
informing our voters. The better informed our voters, the fairer the
election.

Catholics and Evangelicals who were considering voting for Hillary could
make a decision that was more in their own interest once they knew that
her campaign advisers and liberal allies mocked them. Likewise,
Southerners, Latinos, and other victims of Clinton campaign vitriol were
better off knowing the true attitude of members of the Clinton campaign
toward them. The email revelations exposing corruption of the Clinton
Foundation and the unethical tilting of the primary election playing
field against Bernie Sanders are revelations that helped voters make
informed choices.

The Democrats would have us believe that the blame lies with the
Russians, but the Russians are not to blame for the corruption of the
Democrats. The Democrats are.

Democrat outrage that an outside country may have influenced the recent
American election is hypocritical when one considers the steps Obama’s
and Hillary’s State Department took to influence the Israeli election
against Netanyahu, including supporting an Organizing for America-type
campaign with digital ads, billboards, and phone calls.

Democrat hypocrisy becomes even more apparent when one remembers Mr.
Obama’s admission to Russian president Dmitri Medvedev that he’d be more
flexible in meeting Russian demands after the 2012 American election.
Obama was willing to withhold information about his plans to make
concessions to Russia from the American people in order to get elected.
An American president hiding the truth from the American people in order
to sway an election is much worse than a foreign leader revealing the
truth to the American people.

Donald Trump hasn’t wasted time moving to revive America’s economic growth, with an emphasis on manufacturing. Critics may say the recent Carrier deal, which will save 800 American jobs, is small potatoes, but Mr. Trump’s pledge to reduce regulation is decidedly not. A new analysis confirms that the average industry’s regulatory risk has increased nearly 80% from 2010—and that this burden particularly hurts manufacturing and heavy industry.

The analysis was developed by a small group of quantitative hotshots under the guidance of Alex Vogel, an old Washington hand, and Jeff Hood, a 30-year finance veteran. Instead of considering the question of regulatory risk like D.C. think tankers, they approached it like Wall Street analysts.

Their most inventive technique involved natural-language processing, an essential tool of the big-data era that has been used to analyze Shakespeare and fight spam email. Messrs. Vogel and Hood used the technology to analyze the language in the 10K reports that companies file with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Every 10K report includes a formal assessment of the company’s vulnerabilities. Messrs. Vogel and Hood flagged any words and phrases that signaled regulatory exposure. They included general terms like “regulation” and “Congress” as well as specific ones like “fraud,” “inversions” and “Dodd-Frank.” They did something similar with the Federal Register to capture economically significant rule-making.

Then, firing up a suite of algorithms and formulas, they generated a regulatory-risk score for every company in the Fortune 500. Hedge funds are using the findings to gauge how potential investments could be affected by new regulations, court filings and other breaking events.

But the news here is in the next steps. The Vogel and Hood team analyzed corporate lobbying and turned out company-by-company ratings of its effectiveness. They put into the calculations the amounts that firms spend on government relations, the size of government-relations staffs, the expertise of the outside lobbyists hired, and the number of lobbying registration reports filed. Each company can then be ranked in the hierarchy of Washington influence.

Messrs. Vogel and Hood say their method is like a capital asset pricing model with one exception: In place of the standard measure for market risk, they substituted their metrics for regulatory risk and corporate response. What were the results?

Russian hackers tried to breach the computer networks of the Republican National Committee but failed to get past their security defenses, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday evening. According to U.S. officials briefed on the intrusion, the hackers used the same techniques that allowed them to successfully infiltrate the Democratic National Committee, suggesting that they had intended to compromise Republicans, too. People close to the investigation said that only one email account linked to a long-departed RNC staffer was targeted, indicating a less aggressive effort, however.

The disclosures came as a political furor grows over suspected Russian hacking of U.S. political organizations. The Central Intelligence Agency has concluded that Russian hackers, whom analysts say work for that country’s military and intelligence apparatus, stole emails from the DNC, as well as another Democratic organization and the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, to harm her candidacy and boost Republican Donald Trump’s chances of winning. Russia has denied the allegations.

The possibility that Russians tried and failed to infiltrate the RNC doesn’t necessarily conflict with the CIA’s conclusion. A senior U.S. official said analysts now believe what started as an information-gathering campaign aimed at both parties later took on a focus of leaked emails about Mrs. Clinton and Democrats.

This news contradicts what the the New York Times reported last week — namely, that senior administration officials had concluded with “high confidence” that the RNC systems had been penetrated by the Russians but they didn’t release any of their information because they only wanted to burn Hillary Clinton.

President Barack Obama said in an NPR interview Thursday that the U.S. is considering retaliatory moves against Russia. “I think there is no doubt that when any foreign government tries to impact the integrity of our elections, that we need to take action, and we will,” he said. “At a time and a place of our own choosing. Some of it may be explicit and publicized; some of it may not be.”

The WSJ continues:

Until now, few details had been disclosed about the nature of the targeting of Republican organizations, especially the flagship Republican National Committee, where hackers sent so-called phishing emails last spring to an email address there. Those emails were quarantined by a filter meant to detect spam as well as potentially malicious traffic that may carry viruses or trick recipients into divulging passwords, two officials said.

A third person familiar with the investigation said RNC staff members didn’t realize they had been the target of spies until June, after Democratic committee leaders revealed that hackers had successfully gained a foothold inside their networks. Once inside, they reportedly were able to access a trove of DNC opposition research on Mr. Trump, then a candidate. CONTINUE AT SITE