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

Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden

  • Samira Ibrahim; award down the memory hole

    ROS sent us a link today in regards to the First Lady and john Kerry rewarding anti-Semite and anti-American Samira Ibrahim with an “International Women of Courage Award” along with nine others. Well apparently Ibrahim is famous for this quote on Twitter; “Today is the anniversary of 9/11. May every year come with America burning.” I guess she felt bad about the Tweet because she deleted it, but not before someone screen shot the thing.

    Well, after the news about her hateful Tweets hit the internet, she told the world that her Twitter account had been hacked;

    The honoree, Samira Ibrahim, asserts that her Twitter account was hacked even though the tweets in question appeared over a period of months and were never deleted.

    Can anyone be stupid enough to buy that excuse?

    According to State Department reporter Nicole Gaouette, the answer to that question is “Yes.”

    Yes, really. “State officials tell me they’ve looked at 1000s of her tweets & believe her account was hacked,” she tweeted.

    I guess being hacked is now the last refuge of scoundrels.

    Anyway, I guess the White House had second thought about the award, perhaps she wasn’t quite as courageous as folks thought. But, according to Twitchy, her name has been removed from the list of honorees.

    It’s too bad that the staff at the State Department can’t do their own research on their awardees and have to rely on a bunch of bloggers to vet their awards system for them.

  • Brennan confirmed

    So, Senator Rand Paul spent thirteen hours filibustering the Senate confirmation of John Brennan yesterday. Today, the Attorney General, Eric Holder decided he’d answer Rand Paul’s questions;

    Dear Senator Paul:

    It has come to my attention that you have now asked an additional question: “Does the President have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?” The answer to that question is no.

    Sincerely,

    Eric Holder

    So Brennan was confirmed;

    Still, Brennan passed relatively easily on a bipartisan vote of 63 to 34.

    I guess the Obama Administration was thinking that Paul was getting too much good press from his theatrics yesterday and decided that they needed to nip it in the bud and finally answer the questions.

    Thanks to MCPO USN (Ret.) for think to the letter.

  • Holder admits drone strikes on US citizens in US possible

    Ex-PH2 sends us a link to NBC News in which they report that, in a letter to Rand Paul, Eric Holder admitted that it is possible that this administration could find justification for using drone aircraft against US citizens within our borders;

    “It is possible, I suppose, to imagine an extraordinary circumstance in which it would be necessary and appropriate under the Constitution and applicable laws of the United States for the president to authorize the military to use lethal force within the territory of the United States. For example, the president could conceivably have no choice but to authorize the military to use such force if necessary to protect the homeland in the circumstances of a catastrophic attack like the ones suffered on Dec. 7, 1941 and Sept. 11, 2001.”

    Paul calls it a “frightening” admission, and I sort of agree, although I’m not at all surprised. I’m more surprised that they’d admit it.

  • Obama’s Politics Put our Navy in Harm’s Way

    The Obama administration has held up the deployment of the nuclear carrier, U.S.S. Harry Truman to the Persian Gulf as a result of the sequester. Rather than cut fat from elsewhere in the federal budget, Obama chooses to play brinksmanship on the backs of our service men and women as this article from a month ago explains. Further, by keeping the Truman berthed at its homeport of Norfolk when it should be deployed, Obama is playing another very dangerous game. There’s a disturbing email circulating in the veteran community discussing this dangerous breach of strategic security that has occurred under this clueless commander-in-chief. The problem is a concentration of five aircraft carriers at Norfolk Navy base for a period that now extends to several months. These super-carriers are the heart of America’s ability to project immense naval air power forward to virtually anywhere on the globe.

    The presence of a carrier strike group throws a wide, cautioning shadow over such disruptive regimes as Iran and North Korea. Their offshore presence has long been America’s big stick in geopolitics. The problem is such strike groups are not in endless supply. We have but eleven and of that number some are always in the naval shipyards for refitting and nuclear refueling. So when five of the eleven are docked side-by-side in Norfolk that gets the antennae quivering among those who know what a hugely foolish strategic blunder this is. To have forty percent of your nuclear carrier displacement concentrated in one docking area where escape to the sea in the event of an impending threat is extremely limited, seems incredibly stupid to those vets aware of the situation. The emails are replete with references to the possibility of a second Pearl Harbor.

    Truly, those emails are not far off the mark. A single pleasure vessel, paid for by some Islamist millionaire, a sail boat or motor yacht, with a bootlegged Pakistani nuclear weapon aboard, or even a large enough, non-nuclear, high explosive dirty bomb, could easily maneuver within range to take these powerful but defenseless sea-fortresses off the board. A nuke could do that permanently-a dirty bomb for the many years decontamination would require. Losing five of eleven of these behemoths would cut our Navy to its knees and leave America scrambling to decide where, upon the globe, to project our now very limited power, a position the Chinese, the Russians and even the Islamists would relish.

    It would seem that while we possess colossal power, we also harbor colossal stupidity in our command structure. There are unprovable, as yet, rumors flying that this situation only came to be over the outraged protests of the upper Navy brass overruled by an always politics-first White House. We’re left to wonder if this is another one of those signals to the Islamist tyrants of the Middle East, and oppressors worldwide, that the U.S. will not be a looming threat to their ambitions. Looked at realistically, this is nothing more than a sheathing of our weapons, pulling them home to port, holstering our most potent projection of force, a signal to the world that at the first hint of budget constraint, Obama’s Navy is standing down, and you despots are free to pursue your despotism. Measured against everything else coming from this administration, it is difficult to believe that this is anything more than a calculated move to portray Republicans as culprits and America as a weakened force in the world, both typical Obama targets.

    Benedict Arnold was but a treacherous general who betrayed this country in a much more limited world and war; that the current commander-in-chief might engage in the undermining of the nation’s strategic strength to petulantly belittle his domestic political enemies, or worse, to level this great nation to parity with the lesser nations of this world, is a travesty that makes Benedict look like a patriot compared to Barack Obama. If the commander-in-chief overrode the wisdom of the admirals in this situation and has put this country’s strategic naval forces in peril, he has proved beyond doubt that he is a political posturer for whom the fortunes of the Democrat party come before those of the nation. He is, in truth doing precisely to our Navy what he has done to our economy: Sinking it.

    Crossposted at American Thinker

  • MRAPs for serving warrants

    I don’t want to get on anyone’s bad side, here, but, I’m thinking that an MRAP for serving warrants at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Bureau is a little excessive, unless of course, they serve warrants by driving though your wall and dropping the warrant off on your coffee table, then backing out. I wonder how many anti-armor mines ICE encounters in a year.

    And the military-style uniforms for domestic law enforcement don’t exactly inspire anything close to a warm & fuzzy feeling. Especially when the feds have bought up enough ammo to shoot each American five times and at the same time, they’re trying to disarm us. I’m no conspiracy nut, but stuff like this doesn’t seem rational to me.

    Thanks to Old trooper for the link, I guess.

  • Dingus: Sequester is Kennedy’s fault

    The standards for having an opinion piece in the Washington Post must’ve been lower3ed considerably, evidenced by the bit written today by Robert Samuelson who blames Kennedy’s 1964 tax cut for today’s sequester problem;

    It was a disaster.

    High inflation was the first shock. An initial boom (by 1969, unemployment was 3.5 percent) spawned a wage-price spiral. With government seeming to guarantee 4 percent unemployment, workers and businesses had little reason to restrain wages and prices. In 1960, inflation was 1 percent; by 1980, it was 13 percent. The economy became less stable. From 1969 to 1982, there were four recessions, as the Federal Reserve alternated between trying to push unemployment down and prevent inflation from going up. Only in the early 1980s did the Fed, under Paul Volcker and with Ronald Reagan’s support, crush inflationary psychology.

    […]

    Since Kennedy’s tax cut passed in 1964 — after his assassination — there have been 43 budget deficits and only five surpluses (1969, 1998, 1999, 2000 and 2001). Even the surpluses reflected luck more than policy. The last four resulted mostly from the 1990s economic boom, boosting tax revenue, and the end of the Cold War, lowering military spending.

    Nice try. But ya know what else happened in 1964? Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and the introduction of combat troops to Vietnam because of the manufactured Gulf of Tonkin incident. In January 1969, the lame duck Congress voted to dip into the Social Security trust fund to pay for the massive spending that welfare and the war were eating up. In 1971, Richard Nixon launched the Wage & Price freeze. In 1979, Jimmy Carter founded the Education and Energy Departments. If you’re looking for reasons to blame for federal deficits, I wouldn’t look at cutting taxes – I’d look at government spending instead and resolute adherence to liberal economic policies that just don’t work.

    But, then the Washington Post is trying to support the President’s policy of raising taxes, despite the fact that tax cuts result in increased revenue – evidenced most recently by the Bush tax cuts in the 2000s.

  • No mas pantalones

    no mas pantalones

    So now, in the big Woodward scandal, in which journalist Bob Woodward said that the White House wrote and endorsed the sequester they are now blaming on Republicans in Congress (um, lie number one) now they’re saying that they didn’t threaten Woodward (lie number two). But, another Liberal comes forward and says he was treated the same way by this White House. Lanny Davis, Clintonista and supporter of this administration says that they issued the same threat to him. From Fox News;

    In a radio interview on WMAL, Davis said that a “senior Obama White House official” once called his editor at the Times and said that if the paper continued to run his columns, “his reporters would lose their credentials.”

    Davis said he “couldn’t imagine why this call was made” since he’s an Obama supporter.

    The email exchange between Woodward and Gene Sperling is at the Washington Post.

    But to me, the biggest lie in all of this was during the debate between the President and Mitt Romney, when Romney mentioned the sequester, the President said, very clearly “The sequester is not going to happen”…yet here we are.

    Woodward on CNN;

  • White House claims they didn’t threaten Woodward

    The other day, Washington Post journalist, Bob Woodward, confirmed that the sequestration idea came from the White House. Soon after, he claims he was threatened in email by an administration aide that he would come to regret his comments. Now, the White House says that’s not true, that they didn’t threaten him, according to Fox News;

    After Politico reported tonight that Woodward was coming forward to claim he was threatened, a White House emailed Fox and other news organizations, denying Woodward was threatened.

    “Of course no threat was intended,” wrote the White House aide. “As Mr. Woodward noted, the email from the aide was sent to apologize for voices being raised in their previous conversation. The note suggested that Mr. Woodward would regret the observation he made regarding the sequester because that observation was inaccurate, nothing more. And Mr. Woodward responded to this aide’s email in a friendly manner.”

    Of course, given other White House comments recently, this confirms to me that they did indeed threaten Woodward. And since the Left told me that Woodward had to be believed throughout the Bush Administration, I have no choice but to believe Woodward now. Do I?