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

Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden

  • Those rational actors in Iran

    So, we’re being told that we can trust what those folks over in Iran tell us. I’m beginning to think not. NBC News, in a link sent to us by Pinto Nag, they report that Iranian President Hassan Rouhani told a crowd that the West “surrendered” to Iranian power in Geneva;

    Speaking to a crowd gathered in the oil-rich province of Khuzestan on Tuesday, Rouhani said: “Do you know what the Geneva agreement means? It means the big powers have surrendered before the great Iranian nation.”

    The remarks, which were filmed and reported by the state-run Islamic Republic of Iran News Network, were echoed on Rouhani’s English-language Twitter feed.

    “Our relationship w/ the world is based on Iranian nation’s interests. In #Geneva agreement world powers surrendered to Iranian nation’s will,” the Tweet said.

    Of course, as it’s been said here countless times, any negotiation between anyone in that region and the West is perceived as a great victory by those goat herders. Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports that the government media organ in Iran is reporting the totally legit news that the US is secretly run by Nazi Space Aliens;

    On Sunday, the hard-line semi-official Fars News dropped one of its biggest bombshells yet: The United States government has been secretly run by a “shadow government” of space aliens since 1945. Yes, space aliens. The alien government is based out of Nevada and had previously run Nazi Germany. It adds, for timeliness, that the controversial NSA programs are actually a tool for the aliens to hide their presence on Earth and their secret agenda for global domination. This is all asserted as incontrovertible fact with no caveats.

    Um, where have we heard that before? Oh, yeah, those whackjobs at Veterans Today, which coincidentally, gets much of it’s funding from PressTV, the Iran government’s news organization for the slick-looking website largely bereft of serious intellect.

    But, yeah, let’s lift sanctions against the mullahs, because they seem harmless and completely rational. And, everything this administration, generally, and John Kerry specifically, touch turns to gold, right?

  • Law Enforcement’s Legit Gripe with the Latest DOJ Nominee

    The last few days, I’ve been watching the debate over Debo Adegbile’s nomination as the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division. I’m glad I waited to write something about it, because our buddy, John Bruhns, an Iraq veteran who used to protest the war but grew out of that to be a good conservative and an advocate for national security, sent us this piece he wrote, since he was pretty sure that his editors at the Huffington Post wouldn’t touch it.

    Over the past few days, the nomination of Debo Adegbile to a powerful post in the Department of Justice – assistant attorney general for the civil rights division – has been gaining a groundswell of support from civil rights advocates, union leaders, politicians, and even a top corporate executive. On the face of it, the popularity of this choice makes sense: the 12-year veteran of the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Education Fund appears to check every box for leading an office that enforces anti-discrimination laws, having argued twice in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in cases about voting rights. Born to an Irish mother and Nigerian father, Adegbile, who grew up poor in New York City, seems to be every progressive’s dream. He was even a child actor on “Sesame Street.”

    But there is one huge factor that disqualifies him for the job: decades after Mumiu Abu-Jamal was tried and convicted of the heinous murder of a police officer on the streets of Philadelphia, Adegbile stepped in and took up his cause, finding a legal technicality to get his death sentence commuted to life in prison.

    According to The Hill:

    Abu Jamal was sentenced to death, but appeals of the sentencing kept his case in the courts for much of the next three decades.

    In 2011, Abu Jamal avoided the death penalty, after the courts ordered that he should be resentenced after flaws during his original 1982 trial. Prosecutors then announced they would no longer seek the death penalty against him.

    The NAACP legal defense fund represented Abu Jamal during the resentencing. From 2001-2013, Adegbile held various leadership roles in the fund.

    Showing poor judgment at best, Adegbile jumped on the bandwagon of Hollywood actors, writers, news authors and commentators who hold up the radical Black Panther supporter as some kind of innocent martyr. This cold-blooded murderer shot the young police officer Daniel Faulkner at close range, including once in the face from 12-inches away. He was later overheard saying, “I shot the mother_cker and I hope he dies.” The evidence of his guilt was overwhelming. And yet this brutal execution of Faulkner has somehow turned Abu-Jamal into an international cause celebre. Stephen Vittoria’s documentary,
    (more…)

  • The Holder Effect

    In spite of the best efforts of the liberal media to first suppress news reports about the Knockout Game phenomenon, and then, when that failed, to poo-poo the idea that any such thing as this violent and obviously race-based crime even existed, the truth will out. Thanks to the internet, the liberal elites who censor the output of the major news organizations can no longer cover up events that fail to depict contemporary life as they wish it to be. But even if you don’t hear about it or read about it from one of their publications or networks, your chances of learning about these crimes are much better today than just a few years ago when the so-called mainstream media could effectively bury what was unfavorable to their vision of fit to print.

    This inability to totally control the dissemination of news now causes the media establishment to put even more than their normal amount of spin on their output when they are forced to cover an issue or risk looking foolish for the outright denial of an ongoing crime wave that everyone knows is growing. For instance, when they are forced to cover this offense, they still will not use the actual name of Polar Bear Hunting because of its all too obvious racial implications. Unable to ignore it any longer, they play it down — especially the racial aspects of it, because that may put our black president, his black attorney general, and all those black and liberal white lawyers in Holder’s civil rights division in a bad light because they aren’t investigating what appears to be serial hate crime.

    Which of course is true; our president is silent on what is a matter of growing public concern primarily among white Americans, who constitute, to date, all but one of the victims of this criminal game. That he remains silent when it is a particularly supportive and primarily Democrat demographic, white Jewish Americans, who appear to be the most at-risk group, offers even greater testament that the Obama administration and the Holder justice department are deliberately disinclined to prosecute hate crimes where blacks are the perpetrators and whites are the victims. Jewish Democrats should take heed of this policy where race trumps ideological loyalty.

    Liberals who do acknowledge the existence of the Knockout Game and who its perpetrators are, trot out all the old chestnuts about racist white America being responsible for troubled black youth. I’d like to see Obama, Holder, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and other so-called black leaders and all their white liberal defenders watch this truly disgusting video and then tell us that we, white America, are responsible for such pathologies of black youth as the Knockout Game.

    The latest example of a Knockout Game attack is going to make this head-in-the-sand policy a bit difficult to maintain but they are trying their best. The Daily Caller’s lead article from that day has the goods on a young black thug who assaulted an elderly white woman in Rochester, NY recently — and I do mean the goods, with Facebook videos, photos, and audio boasting that should enable the Rochester Police Department to put him away for a stretch on charges of harassment. Harassment? Yep — according to the RPD spokesperson, Sgt. Elena Correia, the crime committed by the appropriately self-styled True Goon Tocool Sneekey, appears to be harassment, not felony assault, even though True Goon allegedly struck the woman full in the face with his fist at the end of a roundhouse left. That’s some fairly serious harassment by anyone’s definition. And this is not RPD’s first attempt to play down this despicable crime. I’d dearly love to see that portion of the New York criminal code that Sgt. Correia claims to define such an act of felonious assault as harassment, wouldn’t you? Makes you wonder that if some white gun-loving male punched his wife in the face with his fist if that would be handled by the politically correct Rochester Police Department as a case of domestic harassment, hmmm? Any bets?

    Update: New York Teen Arrested In Connection With Videotaped “Knockout Game” Attack On Elderly Woman

    It is becoming increasingly disturbing that it is not just the Obama administration and the brown-nosed media that have attempted to sweep this new criminal activity under the rug but these local police departments. It’s happening all over the country, and not just in the major urban centers. I call this racialization of the law and criminality the Holder Effect, for it was the relatively new attorney general who famously announced that his justice department would side with his people.

    Of course, the Holder justice department has not ignored the Knockout Game entirely. A recent such attack in Houston has been charged as a federal hate crime, and the perp is going to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Anyone care to guess the races of the perp and the victim? Mind you, I’m not defending the despicable behavior of this racist and probably mentally unbalanced jerk — just making the observation that out of the hundreds of these crimes that have occurred, the first Knockout Game perp to be charged by the justice department with a hate crime, and done so with great swiftness, is white.

    Holder Effect, indeed…

    Crossposted at American Thinker

  • White House defends Bite Me

    The other day we read that former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, in his book, “Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War”, charged that Vice President Joe Bite Me has been wrong on every single foreign policy issue of the last four decades. Really, that’s nothing new. You can probably scroll through these pages and find where I wrote the same thing, because it’s true. Well, the White House felt that they needed to defend Bite Me from the glaringly obvious. McClatchy reports;

    Carney said the White House disagrees with Gates’ assessment.

    “As a senator and as a vice president, Joe Biden has been one of the leading statesmen of his time and he has been an excellent counselor and adviser to the president for the past five years,” Carney said, adding that Biden has played a “key role” in every major national security and foreign policy debate in the White House, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    During White House policy debates on Afghanistan, Biden was often portrayed as playing the role of devil’s advocate and reportedly pressed for a more rapid withdrawal of troops from the country than Gates and the military had proposed, citing concerns about the strain of the war on the federal budget and growing opposition to the decade-old conflict.

    Yeah, that’s it, he was just playing “Devil’s Advocate”, it couldn’t be that he’s an empty-headed Bozo, could it? it would be funny, except that the Obama Administration actually followed his advice on Afghanistan and it has cost lives of troops following his zombie ninja robot strategy there. The only thing that Biden ever supported that worked was when he voted for the use of force against Saddam Hussein, and he regrets that vote, so why would anyone listen to him when he convinced the President to half-ass the surge in Afghanistan in favor of the use of special forces and drones instead of real, good old infantry force of arms? And then he opposed the SEALs taking out Osama bin Laden – so he didn’t really believe in his own strategy.

    Of course, the Obama Administration wants Biden to be the presidential candidate in 2016 as proof that Obama Administration has legs. I hope he runs, too, because that will put an end to this madness that we’ve experienced the last few years. Biden is an incompetent boob, and there’s no way around it.

  • Cutting pension growth; The lazy way out

    In the 90s, we all remember how the Clinton Administration “balanced the budget” by slashing military spending. By the end of the decade, soldiers were enduring turnstile deployments to hand out sandwiches around the world. Retirees were forced out of Tricare and into Medicare when they turned 65. There was a training ammo shortfall. All training dollars were spent on the “Meals on Wheels” operations. Troops and their families were on food stamps. What few troops there were left after the manpower cuts. After a decade of turning that around, it seems that we’re headed back in the same direction.

    Last month, Congress decided to cut the rate of growth of military pensions. They explained that personnel costs are eating up half of the Defense budget. The Military Officers’ Association of America (MOAA) explains how that is not exactly true;

    This may sound alarming, especially in light of the Pentagon stating in April of this year that military personnel costs consumed about a third of the budget.

    But the fact is it does consume nearly half the budget if you include all personnel costs — military and civilian personnel, delivery of military health care, and in-kind compensation (DoD schools, commissaries, etcetera).

    What’s difficult to find is what goes into in-kind compensation, because these figures and facts are imbedded in several accounts and only DoD knows how it’s defined.

    But when analyzing the first three budget items — military personnel (MilPers account), civilian personnel (CivPers account), and defense health program (DHP) — history shows in the chart below that these personnel costs over the past 30 years have gone from a high in 1980 and 1991 of half of the defense budget share to now less than 40 percent.

    So, basically, the Pentagon is using personnel costs as an excuse, and not a very valid excuse. And, oh, they’re lying about it all. In Stars & Stripes, the VSOs warn that this is just the beginning for Defense to begin shouldering the political load of cuts;

    “This is what happens when you have an unengaged population whose focus starts to shift away,” said Tom Tarantino, chief policy officer for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. “When times get tough, people say everyone has to sacrifice. But not everyone has been sacrificing for the last 10 years.”

    Yeah, see, that’s the problem. The troops shouldered the burden of war, so the rest of the country could head to the mall, now that the economy has made the average American uncomfortable, the troops and the casualties of the war are expected to to shoulder the burden of correcting economical woes.

    In the last week, editorial boards at USA Today and the Washington Post have called the veterans’ opposition out of touch, noting that the military’s generous retirement benefits aren’t comparable to any private sector pensions. The Post called it a “dishonor” not to change a military retirement system long overdue for an update.

    Yeah, when veterans resist cuts to what we’re owed, it’s dishonorable. What’s dishonorable are the lies that are being told in order to screw the true 1% so the 99% can be more comfortable. I don’t see the Washington Post, USAToday or Congress making any sacrifices, or recommending sacrifice from any other sector of the population, including criminals and illegal aliens who are owed nothing.

    Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno tried to defend the cuts;

    Though he would not directly address the cuts to military retirement pay contained in the budget signed in late December, Odierno said the Joint Chiefs of Staff are not looking to cut pay and benefits. Rather, they are trying to reduce rate of growth of pay and benefits.

    Odierno said the military had closed the gap in pay disparity and, in some cases, even exceeded it. Now the service leaders need to look at pay and benefits to ensure the package is accurate and sustainable. Otherwise, the growing cost will force the services to reduce end strength.

    “We have to look at this as a total package,” he said. But as the Pentagon looks to reduce future cost, it has “to be very careful because we don’t want to undercut the foundation of an all-volunteer Army.”

    Yeah, well, Congress should look at the “total package” that they’re dealing with, rather than focus on the Defense Department for their cuts. I’ll remind the reader that sequestration happened because the White House proposed it and implemented it when Congress couldn’t summon the testicular fortitude to cut government across the board.

    Thanks to PavePusher and Chief Tango for the links.

  • Gates snipes at Obama

    Country Singer sends us a link from the Washington Post wherein they report that former Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates has written a book that says what we’ve been saying around this blog for years;

    In a new memoir, former defense secretary Robert Gates unleashes harsh judgments about President Obama’s leadership and his commitment to the Afghanistan war, writing that by early 2010 he had concluded the president “doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.”

    Leveling one of the more serious charges that a defense secretary could make against a commander in chief sending forces into combat, Gates asserts that Obama had more than doubts about the course he had charted in Afghanistan. The president was “skeptical if not outright convinced it would fail,” Gates writes in “Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War.”

    Obama, after months of contentious discussion with Gates and other top advisers, deployed 30,000 more troops in a final push to stabilize Afghanistan before a phased withdrawal beginning in mid-2011. “I never doubted Obama’s support for the troops, only his support for their mission,” Gates writes.

    Well, f’n duh. I don’t like Gates – I didn’t like him when he was the SecDef and I don’t like him now, and it’s mostly for exactly these reasons. Gates was in the position where he could shape policy and convince the president that he was 8TFU, instead he was Good Time Charlie, glad-handing the culprits who sent troops to their deaths, and he waits until now to speak out. Gates enabled this administration to undermine our success in Afghanistan and he was the architect of the current race for the exits.

    And then on the way out the door, Gates took shots at the troops’ pay and benefits as well as those of retirees. Sorry, Gates, but you own this failure in Afghanistan right along with Obama, Panetta and Hagel. Live with it and quit making like it’s not your fault. Peddle that shit elsewhere.

  • White House proposes rules for gun owners

    This Friday afternoon, Vice president Bite Me’s office announced that the president will propose two new rules in regards to mental health and gun ownership, according to Fox News;

    One proposal would formally give permission to states to submit “the limited information necessary to help keep guns out of potentially dangerous hands,” without having to worry about the privacy provisions in a law known as HIPAA.

    “The proposed rule will not change the fact that seeking help for mental health problems or getting treatment does not make someone legally prohibited from having a firearm,” the statement said. “Furthermore, nothing in the proposed rule would require reporting on general mental health visits or other routine mental health care, or would exempt providers solely performing these treatment services from existing privacy rules.”

    The other proposal would clarify that those who are involuntarily committed to a mental institution — both inpatient and outpatient — count under the law as “committed to a mental institution.” According to the administration, this change will help clarify for states what information to provide to the background check system, as well as who is barred from having guns.

    On it’s face, I see no problem with these proposals, in light of the fact that all of the headline-producing multiple-victim shootings in the last couple of years were perpetrated by folks who should not have guns because of their history of mental health issues. That seems to be the biggest problem – normal gun owners aren’t killing people, it’s the not-so-normals. Holmes, Loughner and Lanza were all being treated but they weren’t entered into the national background checks system. Maybe this will help, but it worries me that government will do like it always does and abuse the new authority. I’ll wait to read the new Proposed Rule when it publishes in the Federal Register before passing judgement.

    Meanwhile, the White House/Obama Administration is passing the buck on gun control to Congress according to the Washington Post;

    “The administration’s two new executive actions will help ensure that better and more reliable information makes its way into the background check system,” the White House said in a statement. “The administration also continues to call on Congress to pass common-sense gun safety legislation and to expand funding to increase access to mental health services.

    Yeah, well, if the White House can close the “lunatic loophole”, that ought to be all of the gun control we need. And why isn’t the Washington Post asking why, if the President can do this now, didn’t he do it before? Was he hoping for another mass shooting he could blame on Congress?

    The Washington Times quotes the White House;

    “While the vast majority of Americans who experience a mental illness are not violent, in some cases when persons with a mental illness do not receive the treatment they need, the result can be tragedies such as homicide or suicide,” the White House said in a memo outlining the actions.

    Yeah, well an even more vast majority of gun owners are not violent either, they don’t commit suicide or homicides – but they’re the ones who are punished by the government every time there’s a shooting. Colorado, New York, Maryland, Connecticut.

  • Americans want out of Afghanistan

    The Washington Times reports that a new CNN/ORC poll finds that 82% of Americans want us out of Afghanistan before the arbitrary December 14, 2014 withdrawal date set by the Obama administration.

    The numbers show that the 12-year operation has become one of America’s most unpopular military conflicts CNN reported, and most Americans want U.S. troops to withdraw before the December 2014 deadline date.

    “Those numbers show the war in Afghanistan with far less support than other conflicts,” CNN polling director Keating Holland said. “Opposition to the Iraq was never got higher than 69 percent in CNN polling while U.S. troops were in that country, and while the Vietnam War was in progress, no more than six in 10 ever told Gallup’s interviewers that war was a mistake,”

    Only a quarter of poll respondents said the United States should maintain a military presence in the country after the December 2014 deadline for withdrawal. Fifty-seven percent, meanwhile, said the conflict isn’t going well for the United States — and only a third think America is winning.

    Yeah, I’m part of that 82%, but not because I don’t think what we’re doing in Afghanistan is important, quite the contrary. I think that the more of those Islamists that we kill, the better place is this planet. I supported the war when we first sent CIA and Special Forces troops to help the Northern Alliance boot out the Taliban who had been supporting al Qaeda terrorists. I supported the war in Afghanistan while our goal was to eradicate the area of people who had no respect for basic human dignity. I would still support the war in Afghanistan is our mission there was to kill the human filth there in copious numbers.

    I publicly supported the current administration’s efforts there until the Fall of 2009 when this administration decided that their only mission in Afghanistan was abandoning the country and withdrawing our forces there. This President had the opportunity to show the world that we were serious about our commitment to Afghanistan when the generals asked for 60,000 troops. The CIA and the Defense Department correctly predicted that our operations in Afghanistan would eventually fail if Obama didn’t commit the numbers of troops to the conflict for which the generals were asking. But Obama compromised on the numbers by half to placate politicians long enough for him to be reelected.

    The Obama Administration made the mission in Afghanistan a mere vengeful operation when bin Laden was killed and they farmed the meme that the war was over because the terror master was dead. The war should have been about changing the course of human history, not about the death of one man.

    The Obama Administration’s inability to deal with chief Taliban spokesman, Hamid Karzai, has also poisoned Americans’ opinions regarding the future of Afghanistan. Karzai blames the US for all of Afghanistan’s problems while virtually ignoring the effect the actual enemies of his people are having in the country. Who wants to back an ingrate like Karzai?

    Yes, Americans want out of Afghanistan, but it’s the politicians who are to blame, not the troops or the job they’re trying to do with the half-assed support of their government.