Jim Abourezk, the South Dakota politician who died last weekend at 92, was among the most interesting and engaging people I’ve ever met.
We crossed paths in Wounded Knee during the American Indian Movement takeover in 1973 and later when he tried to get the United States and Cuba to resume diplomatic relations. But I spent a lot of time with him in Iran during the hostage crisis when he represented the Palestinian leadership, who were friendly with the ayatollah.
Later, while researching a book about South Dakota, I’d join him at his daily lunchtime gathering at his wife’s restaurant in downtown Sioux Falls. He even wrote a glowing review of the book.
Abourezk was the first Arab American to serve in the House of Representatives from 1970 to 1973 and then in the U. S. Senate from 1973 to 1979. He decided not to run again, mainly because of family reasons and a difficult campaign he always faced in South Dakota, which usually elected Republicans. Abourezk and his fellow senator, George McGovern, were the exceptions as populist Democrats.
In his 1989 memoir, Advise and Dissent, Abourezk wrote of the Senate: “Where else are your doors opened for you, is your travel all over the world provided free of charge, can you meet with world leaders who would otherwise never let you into their countries, have your bad jokes laughed at and your boring speeches applauded? It’s the ultimate place to have one’s ego massaged, over and over.”
A wonderful storyteller, Abourezk would regale people with stories of his colorful past.
He grew up on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota, where his Lebanese father ran a general store.
Abourezk served four years in the U.S. Navy following World War II. He worked a series of jobs, including as a rancher, blackjack dealer, and judo instructor, and then earned a degree in civil engineering from the South Dakota School of Mines.
His job as a civil engineer took him to California, then back to South Dakota, where he worked on the Minuteman missile silos in the western part of the state. He attended law school and opened a solo practice in Rapid City.
Abourezk ran for South Dakota attorney general in 1968 and lost. But he remained undeterred from entering politics and narrowly won a U.S. House seat in 1970. Two years later, he jumped to the Senate. During his term there, he was a seatmate to both former Sens. Joe Biden and Edward Kennedy.
In the Senate, he opposed U.S. policy in the Middle East, which favored Israel then, and pushed legislation to help Native Americans.
During the vote to give control of the Panama Canal to Panama, the Carter administration barely won the day. In fact, Abourezk joked about how he held back his vote until the administration promised him millions of dollars in aid for South Dakota.
After leaving the Senate, he created the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and had law offices in Washington and Sioux Falls, where he focused on legal matters for Native Americans.
For those of us who had the pleasure of knowing Jim, his presence at his lunchtime get-togethers will be sorely missed.
Deep down every wokester is weak. Just as most bullies are. You criticize a woke person and you are called a racist, a bigot, or some sort of “phobe” or another. They expect you to cower in shame afterwards.
And if you don’t?
Like the dystopia described in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, the editing of books deemed offensive has begun. The endgame in Bradbury’s storyline was the banning of all books.
Last week the publisher of Roald Dahl, Puffin, announced it was editing some of his works–which include the classics Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, and Matilda–to remove language they deem offensive. Augustus Gloop, the gluttonous German boy in the first book, will no longer be “fat,” he’ll be “enormous.” In Matilda, “mothers and fathers” become “parents.” The bald witches in The Witches will come with a disclaimer about baldness.
Next came the backlash.
But let’s talk about the author first.
Dahl, who died in 1990, had slight misanthropic and even more direct anti-Semitic sentiments. At the very least he was a beast of a person. Dahl’s marriage to Hollywood actress Patricia Neal–one of my late mother’s favorite performers by the way–was tumultuous. Neal suffered a stroke while pregnant, and as she recovered, she couldn’t remember the words of many things. Dahl, a serial adulterer throughout their marriage, refused to give his wife things she asked for, including food, until she used the correct word.
Neal’s nickname for her husband was “Roald the Rotten.”
Dahl’s publisher for much of his career was Alfred A. Knopf.
After asking Knopf that a person who was “competent and ravishing” should send him dozens of Dixon Ticonderoga pencils, Dahl was sent different ones, after his first request was laughed off. Dahl made more demands and then threatened to send his writings to a different publisher.
But instead, Knopf released the popular author. Employees of the publishing house cheered when they heard the news of Dahl’s dismissal. They fought back against a bully and won.
Salman Rushdie, who lost his sight in one eye after a recent attack, was one of the prominent writers who came to Dahl’s defense. “Roald Dahl was no angel but this is absurd censorship,” Rushdie Tweeted. “Puffin Books and the Dahl estate should be ashamed.”
Roald Dahl was no angel but this is absurd censorship. Puffin Books and the Dahl estate should be ashamed. https://t.co/sdjMfBr7WW
A few days later Puffin backed off. Oh, it will still publish the edited, make that censored, versions of Dahl’s books. But the original Dahl works will also be printed. Here’s my prediction: Woke Dahl, just like the New Coke debacle several decades ago, will go down as colossal failure. Vintage Dahl will win.
Heroes are hard to find in these complicated times. But the legacy of “Roald the Rotten” has been used to fight back against another bully, the woke movement, which deems itself morally correct and beyond reproach.
GULF OF OMAN (Feb. 20, 2023) The guided-missile destroyer USS Paul Hamilton (DDG 60) approaches the dry cargo and ammunition ship USNS Alan Shepard (T-AKE 3) in the Gulf of Oman, Feb. 20, 2023. Paul Hamilton is deployed to the U.S. 5th Fleet area of operations to help ensure maritime security and stability in the Middle East region. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Elliot Schaudt)
Surface Warfare Officers (SWOs) have been a part of the Navy since…always. Our Navy started out on surface ships, and surface warfare continues to be important, no matter what an Aviator, Submariner or SEAL will tell you. Yet increasingly I have to wonder, does the Navy understand why it is so hard to keep SWOs? You would think with hundreds of years of history this would be obvious, but given its latest actions, I’m not so sure, because the US Navy is facing a SWO manpower crisis, and is dealing with it in ways that simply won’t work.
Let’s go back to my original rules for Navy manpower. When times are good and we have too many Naval Officers, the Navy does the following:
Kick people out for failing physical fitness tests, even if they are otherwise good Sailors
Make it hard to get waivers for things like antidepressants and other medical issues
Begin nicely asking older Naval Officers to retire to make space for younger officers
Lower the number of Officer Candidate School admissions
Reduce bonuses
Make life increasingly difficult, so that more people naturally quit
Conduct a Reduction In Force (RIF) and simply remove people
This is a pretty good strategy to reduce numbers, slowly ratcheting up the pressure to ensure we don’t have too many officers hanging around. Naturally, if we have too few officers, the Navy turns this around by:
Not kicking people out for physical fitness test failures
Waiving darn near everything, from age to non-violent felonies
Asking people to pretty-please stay around a few more years
Opening OCS and other admissions
Raising bonuses
Make life better for officers
Reduce opportunities to leave early
Op-Hold people
In the past, the Navy has done everything on the first list to bring down numbers. Now, they are doing…almost everything on the second list, but it’s not working, and it’s becoming glaringly obvious in the SWO community. If you listen to Admirals speak (and I don’t recommend that), you would think we’re doing OK on SWO retention. But a brief glance at the Health of the Force survey shows that disaster looms around the corner:
Future force structure increases outside the future year defense plan (FYDP) require DH billet increases, requiring increased retention. This compares unfavorably with a declining billet base across the FYDP as the Navy divests legacy platforms. Year groups 2015-18 require an average retention rate of at least 37.3%, exceeding the 10-year average. If fleet size projections remain accurate, Surface Warfare requires a retention rate of 44% in YGs 19-22 to meet future afloat DH requirements.
Health of the Force Survey
So we’re not making the retention rate we need now, and we have to increase this by 10 percentage points in the future, but retention is plummeting.
All the Manpower people in the Navy right now…
The Navy is already overlooking physical fitness failures, waiving medical conditions and opening up OCS admissions…which are now having a higher-than-expected failure rate. I would think most people would understand that lowering admission standards will likely lead to more failures in a difficult program, but apparently “most people” doesn’t include Navy HR.
So what to do next? Raise bonuses. And boy did they raise them.
NAVADMIN 045/23 discusses continuation bonuses for SWO Lieutenant Commanders (LCDRs). SWO leave after their first Navy tour at a fairly high rate, and it’s hard to persuade them to stay in long enough to promote to LCDR around their 8-9 year mark. So why not pay them $22K a year IF they stay in after promoting to LCDR? It’s certainly worth a shot.
NAVADMIN 046/23 establishes a payment schedule for SWO Department Head bonuses. If a SWO screens for Department Head and agrees to stay for two Department Head tours, they can get bonuses up to $105K in total over 6 years. Conveniently, that would put them right at the point of getting a continuation bonus as outlined previously.
Now, normally this would work. Throw enough money at people, and you can normally get them to stay. But it’s not going to do that, and the reason is hinted at in the Health of the Force Survey:
Improving retention requires a multi-pronged approach. First, community managers are allowing more individuals to lateral transfer and re-designate. This will divest end strength in year groups with smaller DH requirements, freeing inventory for future accessions. Second, several monetary and non-monetary efforts are underway to improve Surface Warfare retention. Surface Warfare Officers now have a career-long continuum of monetary incentives with the introduction of the SWO Senior Officer Retention Bonus (SWOSORB) in FY22. Third, the community offers improved education opportunities including: postgraduate education opportunities, tours with industry, and fleet-up options for increased geographic stability. Fourth, Surface Warfare recently modified the career path to incorporate multiple family planning opportunities for career-minded SWOs. Finally, SWO released the junior officer survey, senior officer survey, and junior officer exit survey to solicit retention feedback.
Health of the Force Survey
Two things stick out:
Family Planning opportunities? I thought Navy was all about killing babies, or at least circumventing existing laws to do so? Guess that’s not so popular when retention is on the line?
The Junior Officer Exit Survey results.
I’ve read the JO Exit Surveys. They’ve existed for years, and they say the same things over and over:
We don’t train people enough
The job is thankless and people treat JOs like dirt
JOs find Navy life is incompatible with having any outside life or family time
That’s every survey, ever. Pay doesn’t make the top three retention issues in almost any survey. In the past though, enough money would make people overlook how bad the job is. But when truck drivers make over $100K a year, or companies pay project managers $150K or more a year, that $105K spread out over 6 years starts to look really small. The Navy caps officer bonuses at $330K over a career. Civilian companies don’t. Pay isn’t going to fix this crisis.
The ONLY hope for retaining SWOs is to increase quality of life. This would mean closing the sea duty billet gap, addressing the shipyard maintenance problems, and make driving a warship fun again. These are all inside the Navy’s wheelhouse, but it seems increasingly incapable of taking these actions. I suspect that the top SWOs are looking down thinking “You young officers are pathetic, back in my day we worked 16 hour days on shore duty and we BEGGED FOR MORE!!!”
Given that pay won’t fix it, and Navy won’t address quality of life issues, I predict we get operational holds on people leaving in the next 6-12 months. I’d like to be wrong, and maybe next year you can repost this and laugh at me, but I have a bad feeling I’m right about this.
This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency. If you like this post, why not donate to DaTechGuy, or purchase one of the authors books?
The latest move by the Biden Regime rises to the level of treason because they are planning on implementing a treaty that would surrender the sovereignty of the United States over to World Health Organization. To accomplish this they are doing an end run around the Constitution of the United States because they are implementing the treaty without the advice and consent of the Senate.
Here is the clause of the treaty that is designed to supposedly grant the United States, and all other nations, the authority to circumnavigate legislative approval.
The WHO CA+ may be applied provisionally, in whole or in part, by a signatory and/or Party that consents to its provisional application by so notifying the Depositary in writing at the time of signature of the instrument, or signature or deposit of its instrument of ratification, acceptance, approval, formal confirmation or accession. Such provisional application shall become effective from the date of receipt of the notification by the Secretary-General of the United Nations.
The despicable and corrupt process is documented in this article from The Epoch Times.
“Whoever drafted this clause knew as much about U.S. constitutional law and international law as I did, and deliberately drafted it to circumvent the power of the Senate to give its advice and consent to treaties, to provisionally bring it into force immediately upon signature,” Boyle said. In addition, “the Biden administration will take the position that this is an international executive agreement that the president can conclude of his own accord without approval by Congress and is binding on the United States of America, including all state and local democratically elected officials, governors, attorney generals, and health officials.”
There are several U.S. Supreme Court decisions that may support the Biden administration’s position. They include State of Missouri v. Holland, in which the Supreme Court ruled that treaties supersede state laws, while other decisions, such as United States v. Belmont, ruled that executive agreements without Senate consent can be legally binding, with the force of treaties.
According to the zero draft, signatories would agree to “strengthen the capacity and performance of national regulatory authorities and increase the harmonization of regulatory requirements at the international and regional level.” They will also implement a “whole-of-government and whole-of-society approach at the national level” that will include national governments, local governments, and private companies.
The author of the article is suffering from several common and dangerous delusions. The first is the belief that the Supreme Court issues rulings that are in any way based on the Constitution of the United States. Another is the belief that the Supreme Court has the authority to grant a branch of the federal government the power to completely disregard the plain text of the Constitution. The final delusion is the belief that only the Supreme Court has the authority to declare that a given law or treaty violates the Constitution.
301 U.S. 324 (1937), was a dispute between the federal executive branch and the State of New York over property rights to a deposit from a former Russian corporation with August Belmont & Company, a private New York City banking firm. Belmont established executive predominance over state laws and constitutions in the sphere of foreign policy, and allocated the constitutional power for initiating executive agreements solely to the president of the United States.[
By examining the actual text of Article 2 Section 2 Clause 2, it becomes obvious that the Supreme Court made a grave constitutional error with that ruling.
He shall have power, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to make treaties, provided two-thirds of the Senators present concur
From the text of the Supremacy Clause, which is Article 6 Section 2, you can see that only treaties passed through the formal constitutional process are the law of the land. Agreements signed by just the president are not listed therefore they are not the law of the land.
This constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, any thing in the constitution or laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding.
In Federalist Paper 75 Alexander Hamilton discusses the treaty making power granted in the Constitution. No president has the constitutional authority to enter into any form of treaty without the advice and consent of the Senate.
The president is to have power “by and with the advice and consent of the senate, to make treaties, provided two-thirds of the senators present concur.” Though this provision has been assailed on different grounds, with no small degree of vehemence, I scruple not to declare my firm persuasion, that it is one of the best digested and most unexceptionable parts of the plan. One ground of objection is, the trite topic of the intermixture of powers; some contending that the president ought alone to possess the power of making treaties; and others, that it ought to have been exclusively deposited in the senate. Another source of objection is derived from the small number of persons by whom a treaty may be made: Of those who espouse this objection, a part are of opinion that the house of representatives ought to have been associated in the business, while another part seem to think that nothing more was necessary than to have substituted two-thirds of all the members of the senate to two-thirds of the members present. As I flatter myself the observations made in a preceding number, upon this part of the plan, must have sufficed to place it to a discerning eye in a very favourable light, I shall here content myself with offering only some supplementary remarks, principally with a view to the objections which have been just stated.
With regard to the intermixture of powers, I shall rely upon the explanations already given, in other places of the true sense of the rule, upon which that objection is founded; and shall take it for granted, as an inference from them, that the union of the executive with the senate, in the article of treaties, is no infringement of that rule. I venture to add that the particular nature of the power of making treaties indicates a peculiar propriety in that union. Though several writers on the subject of government place that power in the class of executive authorities, yet this is evidently an arbitrary disposition: For if we attend carefully to its operation, it will be found to partake more of the legislative than of the executive character, though it does not seem strictly to fall within the definition of either of them. The essence of the legislative authority is to enact laws, or in other words to prescribe rules for the regulation of the society. While the execution of the laws and the employment of the common strength, either for this purpose or for the common defence, seem to comprise all the functions of the executive magistrate. The power of making treaties is plainly neither the one nor the other. It relates neither to the execution of the subsisting laws, nor to the enaction of new ones, and still less to an exertion of the common strength. Its objects are CONTRACTS with foreign nations, which have the force of law, but derive it from the obligations of good faith. They are not rules prescribed by the sovereign to the subject, but agreements between sovereign and sovereign. The power in question seems therefore to form a distinct department, and to belong properly neither to the legislative nor to the executive. The qualities elsewhere detailed, as indispensable in the management of foreign negotiations, point out the executive as the most fit agent in those transactions; while the vast importance of the trust, and the operation of treaties as laws, plead strongly for the participation of the whole or a part of the legislative body in the office of making them.
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