This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: 2012 election

  • More Belatedly Come Home

    DPAA has identified and accounted for the following formerly-missing US military personnel.

    From World War II

    • CPL Frederick G. Collins, Jr., 263rd Quartermaster Company, US Army, US Army, was lost in the Philippines on 19 November 1942. He was accounted-for on 7 June 2016.

    From Korea

    • CPL Charles B. Crofts, Headquarters Company, 1st Battalion, 32nd Infantry Regiment, 7th Infantry Division, US Army, was lost on 2 December 1950 in North Korea. He was accounted-for on 7 June 2016.

    • SGT Harold L. Curtis, I Company, 3rd Battalion, 31st Infantry Regiment, US Army, was lost on 12 December 1950 in North Korea. He was accounted-for on 8 June 2016.

    • PFC William R. Butz, K Company, 3rd Battalion, 31st Infantry Regiment, 7th Infantry Division, US Army, was lost on 12 December 1950 in North Korea. He was accounted-for on 8 June 2016.

    Welcome back, elder brothers-in-arms. Our apologies that your return took so long.

    Rest in peace.  You’re home now.

    . . .

    Over 73,000 US personnel remain unaccounted for from World War II; over 7,800 US personnel remain unaccounted for from the Korean War; and over 1,600 remain unaccounted for in Southeast Asia (SEA). Comparison of DNA from recovered remains against DNA from some (but not all) blood relatives can assist in making a positive ID for unidentified remains that have already been recovered, or which may be recovered in the future.

    On their web site’s “Contact Us” page, DPAA now has FAQs. The answer to one of those FAQs describes who can and cannot submit DNA samples useful in identifying recovered remains. The chart giving the answer can be viewed here. The text associated with the chart is short and can be viewed in DPAA’s FAQs.

    If your family lost someone in one of these conflicts and you qualify to submit a DNA sample, please arrange to submit one. By doing that you just might help identify the remains of a US service member who’s been repatriated but not yet been identified – as well as a relative of yours, however distant. Or you may help to identify remains to be recovered in the future.

    Everybody deserves a proper burial. That’s especially true for those who gave their all while serving this nation.

     

    (Note: hat-tip to TAH reader chindonya for links to DPAA’s FAQ page and the chart of eligible DNA donors.)

  • This Could Be Interesting

    Can you say, “Lois Lerner”? Sure. I knew you could. (smile)

    For those who’ve forgotten: Lois Lerner was the former head of the IRS division that rules on nonprofit groups’ applications for tax-exempt status. That division was caught apparently blatantly playing politics with nonprofit applications – e.g., fast-tracking those of leftist groups, while slow-rolling and otherwise obstructing those of conservatives.

    Lerner later resigned, and has “taken the Fifth” when asked to testify in Congress. Conveniently, tens of thousands of her official IRS emails from the period greatest interest for the scandal were “lost”. The same happened to emails of some of her closest associates who were also believed to have been hip-deep in the scandal.

    Jonn and I have written numerous times about this and other instances of missing IRS email. Use the site’s search features if you want to see them.

    Lerner’s emails were initially held to be “lost permanently” – until very recently, that is. Now, it appears that the IRS has now magically “found” some “disaster recovery tapes” from the period in question that contain many if not all of Lerner’s missing emails.

    Now, maybe it’s just me. But if I had a bunch of, you know, missing email – and I had a disaster recovery system in-place that stored stuff like, say, copies of email traffic or email databases/transaction records – those records would probably be one of the first places I’d look for a bunch of missing emails to/from a high-ranking official. But apparently the IRS doesn’t do things that way.

    Or maybe it took so long because of, well, some little thing like an “upcoming Congressional election”. Nah – that can’t be it. The “most transparent administration in history” would never pull such an underhanded trick. Besides, that would require blatantly lying to Federal investigators and Congress multiple times. They’d NEVER stoop that low!

    In any case, it will still take a while to recover Lerner’s emails from those tapes. But you might want to follow this one for a while.  It looks like this just might get even more interesting.

    That just breaks my heart. (smile)

  • If You Needed Another Reason to Be Leery of Early Voting by Mail . . . .

    . . . here it is.

    An interesting thing happened last year in the Miami area during last year’s primary elections.  Over 2,500 fraudulent absentee ballot requests were submitted by unknown on-line actors during a 2 1/2 week period before the elections.

    The scam requested that absentee ballots be sent to roughly 2000 voters who had not requested an absentee ballot (about 500 were duplicate requests).  Making such a bogus third-party request is a felony violation of Florida election laws.

    The timing and sources of the on-line requests were what initially tipped off authorities of the problem.   At times, the bogus requests appeared to have been submitted entirely too fast to be from humans.  Further, the 2500+ requests appear to have originated from only 15 IP addresses – 12 of which were located outside the US.

    The perpetrators of this scam targeted 3 voting districts.  In one Congressional district, the scam overwhelmingly requested ballots for voters who were registered Democrats.  In contrast, two Florida state House districts showed requests for bogus ballots overwhelmingly for registered Republicans.

    Yeah, the “system” caught this because someone noticed an obvious pattern.  But that was only because the scam’s perpetrators were stupid enough to be obvious.  If they’d been more subtle, they might have gotten away with it.

    Voting is a right.  But attempting to make it too “convenient” has the unintended consequence of also making it easier for someone to scam the system.  And where someone thinks the system can be scammed – someone will try.

    I used to be a fan of the idea of early voting via absentee ballot.  Not any more.  Allowing unrestricted absentee early voting simply introduces too many opportunities for fraud.  Personal convenience is nice, but fair and honest elections are far more important than personal convenience.

  • Albany pokes the bear again

    Yeah, so the mayor of Ilion, New York has invited the Governor of New York to visit his town, the home of Remington Arms for nearly two hundred years to see the impact that gun control would have the thousands of Ilion residents who depend on Remington Arms for their livelihood;

    But, of course, the legacy governor won’t bother gazing into the eyes of the people who are affected by his ramming through ill-considered gun control measures. In fact, New York Assemblyman Felix Ortiz, introduced legislation today which would cost New Yorkers thousands of dollars a year to buy liability insurance as a condition for gun ownership according to the Washington Times;

    Any person who has not purchased insurance in compliance with the law within 30 days of its passing would be in violation of the law.

    Such an occurrence “shall result in the immediate revocation of such owner’s registration, license and any other privilege to own such firearm.”

    The bill also states that if a gun is stolen, the legal owner of that gun is responsible for any damage incurred until a loss or theft is reported to the police department.

    Of course, a portion of the premium goes into the state’s coffers as yet another tax. it seems to me that Assemblyman Ortiz, who seems to be barely literate, after watching the video of him urging that minimum wage be raised in New York on his webpage, wants to disarm the poor and make them more vulnerable to criminals. Because, clearly, law abiding minimum wage New Yorkers won’t be able to afford the insurance. And, of course, criminals won’t bother buying the insurance. Win-win, huh? New York needs a bunch of recall elections – oops, no recall election laws in New York.

  • 6 votes for Obama

    Fox News reports that one woman, Melowese Richardson, in Cincinnati may have voted six times and she’s one of 19 people being investigated, but don’t worry, she says while admitting the six votes, that she did so without meaning to defraud anyone;

    Richardson claimed she had submitted an absentee ballot, but was afraid her vote would not count so she also voted in person. She also said she voted in the name of her granddaughter and yet another person.

    “There was absolutely no intent on my part to commit any voter fraud,” she insisted.

    So she was worried that her vote wouldn’t count so she made sure that five other people’s votes didn’t count, either. Nice.

    “I’ll fight it for Mr. Obama and for Mr. Obama’s right to sit as president of the United States,” Richardson vowed when asked about the voter fraud investigation that is now under way.

    So, Obama’s right to be president (looking for that right in the Bill of Rights now) supersedes the right of the rest of us to have a vote. Ok, thanks, Melowese.

  • Congress wants investigation into Benghazi

    Despite what Harry Reid says, at least one Democrat Senator wants answers into why this administration changed the intelligence from the CIA to fit their story. From the Associated Press;

    Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who heads the Senate Intelligence Committee, said she too has lingering concerns about how the talking points were created when it was clear early on that the military-style assault wasn’t a simple protest gone awry.

    She said Congress has asked the administration to provide an explanation.

    “We gave the direction yesterday that this whole process is going to be checked out,” said Feinstein, D-Calif. “We’re going to find out who made changes in the original statement. Until, we do I really think it’s unwarranted to make accusations.”

    Meanwhile, on Twitter, the administration wishes that Republicans would just get over it. They don’t understand why Republicans are so concerned about Benghazi now that the election is over;

    It was just over a month ago when Obama deputy campaign manager and lying liar Stephanie Cutter got the ball rolling, declaring that the Sept. 11 terrorist attack in Libya was only an issue because Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan insisted on politicizing it — a claim that seems even more outrageous in light of the “French kiss” of a third presidential debate.

    Confronted yesterday with a question about Benghazi, Democratic Party Communications Director Brad Woodhouse replied by tweeting simply, “We won.” And yet the hearings continue, even though Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid yesterday smacked down the proposal of a Senate select committee. His reasoning? “The elections are over; it is time to put aside the partisan politicization of national security.”

    Yeah, “We won” worked so well for the Obama Administration in the last term…so, please try to hide behind it again. “Americans died, Obama lied” will look so good on bumper stickers during the mid-terms. Maybe most of us didn’t really give a rat’s ass about the campaign and were more concerned that four good Americans (three of them veterans) lost their lives and we want answers about how that could happen in this day and age. Especially in light of the warnings to Washington from the consulate that this might happen.

    And I don’t remember the Left shutting up about Abu Ghraib after the 2004 election. Or Scooter Libby, or Valerie Plame, or how much other crap did they try to use against Bush that election.

    John McCain, a day late and a dollar short as usual, came to the conclusion that the Benghazi thing hurt the Obama campaign’s narrative;

    “The narrative of the president is ‘I got Bin Laden, and al-Qaida is [o]n the run,’ but al-Qaida is not on the run, and is making a strong comeback all over the Middle East,” McCain said on CBS’s Face the Nation. “This may interfere with that narrative.”

    McCain said he would allow any nominee to lead the State Department “the benefit of the hearing process,” including top contender U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice. Rice has come under fire for initially saying the Benghazi attack was the result of a spontaneous protests, rather than a planned terrorist attack.

    So, it’s a cover-up on par with the Watergate cover-up. Well, except in this case they’re covering up the circumstances surrounding the deaths of four good Americans (three of whom were veterans). And just because the administration covered it up for political reasons doesn’t mean that we want answers for political reasons. We want answers because those three veterans and their families deserve answers.

  • “I’m so glad we had that storm last week”

    ROS sends us a video of Chris Matthews expressing his pleasure that there are more dead people in the world and we had that storm last week, because it catapulted Obama into the lead;

    You can see Rachel Maddow try to stop him from making his blunt point, although he’s not that far off. Not only did Obama get to strut around and act presidential but the Romney camp went virtually silent while he did it. And maybe those dead people in NY and NJ would have voted for Romney anyway, though not likely.

  • Election Night Live Blog

    All are welcome, come on in after 8:00pm

    Here is a list of poll closing times across the nation on Nov. 6, 2012. All times are ET.

    7:00 pm: Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, South Carolina, Vermont, Virginia
    7:30 pm: North Carolina, Ohio, West Virginia
    8:00 pm: Alabama, Connecticut, Delaware, DC, Florida, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee.
    8:30 pm: Arkansas
    9:00 pm: Arizona, Colorado, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, South Dakota, Texas, Wisconsin, Wyoming
    10:00 pm: Iowa, Montana, Nevada, Utah
    11:00 pm: California, Hawaii, Idaho, Oregon, Washington
    1:00 am: Alaska

    Thanks to the 280 of you who spent time with us tonight.