Cop Watch

You might think that the main character of the classic children's nursery rhyme “Humpty Dumpty” is an egg. However, historical evidence actually suggests that Humpty Dumpty was actually a cannon used by the Royalists during the English Civil War.

A previous version of this article misidentified the people to whom Paul Manafort wanted a Russian associate to send polling data. Mr. Manafort wanted the data sent to two Ukrainian oligarchs, Serhiy Lyovochkin and Rinat Akhmetov, not Oleg V. Deripaska, a Russian oligarch close to the Kremlin.

Donald Trump campaigned and was elected on rolling back the regulatory state. He has made a good start on that Herculean project. He campaigned and was elected on taming illegal immigration. He is hard at work attempting to achieve that. He campaigned and was elected on cutting taxes. He managed that last year. He campaigned and was elected on rolling back political correctness. He has done that through Betsy DeVos’s department of education and in other ways. He campaigned and was elected on populating the judiciary with judges who were Constitutionalists after the pattern of Antonin Scalia. He has made astonishing progress in doing just that. He campaigned and was elected on rebuilding the United States military and, with a military budget of some $716 billion, he is well on the way to accomplishing that. He campaigned and was elected on making America energy independent. We are now the world’s largest energy producer. He campaigned and was elected on helping black and hispanic minorities, who now enjoy the lowest unemployment in history. He campaigned and was elected on a promise to challenge the spread of radical Islamic terrorism. During his first year in office, he obliterated ISIS as a fighting force. He campaigned and was elected on challenging North Korea’s nuclear program and has made historic progress on that front. He campaigned and was elected on reversing China’s unfair trade practices and expansionist policies. He has made significant progress on that front as well. He campaigned and was elected on moving our Israeli embassy to Jerusalem. He did it. Mitt Romney thinks that Donald Trump has not risen to the ‘mantle of the office.’ I’d say, on the contrary, that he has lifted the bar and then vaulted over it. I voted for Mitt Romney in 2012. Doubtless he is a nice man. Possibly, Donald Trump is not as nice. But he won in 2016, as Mitt Romney failed to do in 2012. And his tenure has been a litany of achievement in the light of which Mitt Romney’s complaints appear not just churlish and beside the point but slightly rancid and pathetic, not unlike the establishment he embodies.

The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee blasted President Obama Thursday evening for undercutting members of the military by suggesting a 1.6 percent annual pay raise, which falls below the 2.1 percent figure mandated by law. Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, said federal workers and the military have historically received 2 to 3 percent raises, but the Obama administration has cut those annual bumps in recent years. "Few people are more deserving of a full pay raise than our men and women in uniform," Thornberry said. "Yet, at the same time President Obama is proposing significant increases in military deployments and expanding existing missions, he is cutting the pay raise for our troops for the fourth year in a row." Thornberry pointed at the House-passed National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 2017, which mandates the 2.1 percent increase and would block the president's ability to reduce troop pay in the future. He said that giving military individuals and families only a 1.6 percent bump would hurt them in the long haul. "The lower pay increase mandated by the president means a young military family would receive about $336 less this year than the law provides. Over four years of a lower rate, the family will have lost between $1,500 and $2,000," Thornberry said. Obama informed House Speaker Paul Ryan on Wednesday of his plan to propose a 1 percent increase in federal workers' base pay. He added he would later decide on the exact pay increases for localities, but said it would not exceed 0.6 percent. Federal workers have previously been given 2 or 3 percent annual raises.

President Obama on Wednesday confirmed plans to cap the military pay raise at 1.6 percent next year, a move which lawmakers and military advocates have already warned will hurt military families' personal finances. In a letter to Congress, Obama invoked his executive powers to set the pay level at 0.5 percent below the expected increase in private sector wages, which would mark the fourth year in a row troops' pay hikes failed to keep pace with their civilian peers. The president called the move unfortunate but necessary.

The most problematic part of what Trump said is that he was in fact mistaken in his first statement. The military has received pay raises annually. For six of the eight years that Obama was president they received a paltry 1-1.7% raise per year. Even when you factor in the first two years' raises under Obama of 3%+, Obama’s average raise for the military was 1.9% per year. In President Trump’s first three years he has averaged 2.4%. He also conflated the “not getting a raise” to the bill he signed in September of this year, which for the first time in a decade, did not tie raises and spending for the military to a “continuing resolution” but rather became a hardened budgetary item. This sense of permanence in where the funding comes from is a more secure reality for the military men and women who serve for it is not served up on the whim of things like whether or not the Congress will choose to shut down, as opposed to funding the voter’s priorities of border security.

What he did imply is that he had given them a raise of roughly 10%. At 2.4% per year times 4 years he will have overseen a raise of 9.6% for the troops in his first term. Comparatively over Obama’s last 4 years that administration served up a whopping 1.25% pay raise per year equalling roughly half of Trump’s raise over an equally comparable period of time.

Trump’s decisions on Syria and Afghanistan will lay bare the real distinctions in American politics. Political power in this country is not divided between right and left, and not even between rich and poor. The real line is between a war party, and everyone else.

There have been some intriguing developments related to Syria that are now being reported in the wake of President Trump’s announcement of the withdrawal of U.S. troops. To begin with, it appears that the Kurds will be getting support from America’s regional allies. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have sent military forces to areas controlled by the Kurdish YPG group in north-east Syria, Turkey’s Yenisafak newspaper reported. The paper said the forces will be stationed with US-led coalition troops and will support its tasks with huge military enforcements as well as heavy and light weapons. Quoting the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the newspaper reported that a convoy of troops belonging to an Arab Gulf state recently arrived in the contact area between the Kurdish PKK/YPG and Daesh in the Deir Ez-Zor countryside. This comes at a time when Ankara is preparing to launch an expanded military operation with the Free Syrian Army against the Kurdish PKK group in the northeast of Syria. Furthermore, a Jordanian official reports that Russian forces currently in Syria will take action to restrain Hezbollah and Iranian activity there, according to understandings reached by the U.S., Israel, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The understandings are the product of behind-the-scenes diplomatic talks that were underway prior to U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision this week to withdraw American forces from Syria. According to the terms of the understanding, Russia will continue to give Israel the freedom to strike Hezbollah and Iranian targets and weaponry that threaten the “balance of power” in Syria. According to the Jordanian official, it was these understandings between Trump and Putin that paved the way for the U.S. decision to pull its forces from Syria. Other high-ranking Jordanian officials have confirmed that Jordan, Israel and Saudi Arabia are working together to contain the threat posed by Iran and Hezbollah’s presence in Syria. Several of them emphasized that U.S. officials had made it clear that U.S. intelligence agencies would increase cooperation with Israel, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, particularly on sharing intelligence, in a joint attempt to counter Iran’s attempt to create a contiguous Shi’ite corridor from Tehran to Beirut. Finally, Saudi Arabia is hosting Afghan peace talks, which are slated to take place next month. US special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad on Wednesday arrived in Kabul from three days of meetings in Abu Dhabi, including the fourth round of a quadrilateral meeting among the US, Afghanistan, the UAE and Saudi Arabia. The meetings were part of efforts by the US and international partners to promote an intra-Afghan dialogue aimed at ending the conflict in the landlocked country. Meanwhile, reliable sources said decisions in the UAE centered on an amicable Afghan settlement and the next meeting would take place on January 15, 2019 in Saudi Arabia. Perhaps we will see if this regional-power approach is a better match for long-term success in 2019.

“Reminder: 151 House Dems voted against the waiver that was required to make Mattis the SECDEF in the first place. Now Dems pretend the military can’t run without him.”