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

Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden

  • Security guy killed in Yemen at US embassy

    The Associated Press reports that a Yemeni security official was killed in a drive by shooting at the US embassy there this morning. But I guess the real story is that the Associated press is still clinging to the “offensive video” explanation for renewed violence (or continuing violence, rather) in the region;

    Anti-American violence in the Middle East has spiked over the past month, most of it triggered by an anti-Islam video made privately in the United States. On September 11 in the Libyan city of Benghazi, U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans – including two former Navy SEALs – were killed in what U.S. administration officials now describe as an act of terrorism. There is some debate about whether the attack was related to protests about the film or whether it was a premeditated attack unrelated to the film.

    I’m tempted to screen shoot the passage because it will probably disappear the minute some AP editor reads the news anywhere and discovers that the White House has been calling the attack in Benghazi a pre-planned attack since the first day, according to Jay Carney in an exchange with Jake Tapper yesterday.

    You’d think the Obama/Biden campaign could coordinate their lies a little better with their propagandists.

    While we’re on the subject of media and lies, ROS sent us a link to The Conservative Treehouse which writes about CNN journalist (probably the only time you’ll see me use those words together) Amber Lyon who exposes her own network being bought by governments to broadcast lies. Not the first time it’s happened certainly, nor the last, and I don’t see any shock on your faces from here. but you should read the whole post.

  • State Department’s fairy dust fails on Congress

    I guess that the State Department thought they could could sprinkle their magic fairy dust on Congress like they can on the media and get everyone to ignore the facts of the Benghazi terrorist attack on September 11th this year. Fox News reports that Congressman Issa claims that the State Department turned aside pleas from the embassy in Libya for increased security;

    One witness Wednesday, Eric Nordstrom, is the former chief security officer for U.S. diplomats in Libya, who told the committee his pleas for more security were ignored.

    Nordstrom addressed the diplomatic security issue in an Oct. 1 email to a congressional investigator. He said his requests for more security were blocked by a department policy to “normalize operations and reduce security resources.”

    Nordstrom, though, also said in written testimony that he felt most of his resource requests were considered “seriously and fastidiously” by the State Department.

    Then seriously and fastidiously rejected.

    He stated that Charlene Lamb, the deputy assistant secretary for international programs, wanted to keep the number of U.S. security personnel in Benghazi artificially low. He said Lamb believed the Benghazi facilities did not need any diplomatic security special agents because there was a residential safe haven to fall back to in an emergency.

    Lamb defended her assessment during the hearing, claiming that the team believed it had the “correct number of assets” in Benghazi at the time of the attack.

    And yet, they didn’t. Funny, now, I’m no security expert, but when I planned combat operations, I always factored in more than what I thought I needed. More men, more ammo, more food. I never figured there was a minimum that I’d accept when we’re talking about people’s lives. But, that’s just me.

    “No good is done to the security of the United States to politicize this tragedy,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va.

    That goes both ways, Gerry.

    So, Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum is busy trying to cover for the Administration by blaming Republican budget cuts to the State Department for the attack, quoting Dana Milbank;

    Ryan, Issa and other House Republicans voted for an amendment in 2009 to cut $1.2 billion from State operations, including funds for 300 more diplomatic security positions. Under Ryan’s budget, non-defense discretionary spending, which includes State Department funding, would be slashed nearly 20 percent in 2014, which would translate to more than $400 million in additional cuts to embassy security.

    The problem is that the State Department pulled Army personnel out of Libya, not diplomatic security folks. So, cuts to the diplomatic security force had no impact in Benghazi. See how doing your reading on a subject changes the whole story?

  • How the Affordable Healthcare Act doesn’t help veterans

    TSO sent us this link with his question “Remember when Vote Vets said that the health care law would help military retirees and their families?” Why, yes, I do. I also remember asking the crew at the now-defunct VetsVoice blog a slew of questions they couldn’t answer about how the Affordable Healthcare Act wouldn’t adversely affect veterans on Tricare. VoteVets was tooting Obama’s horn and telling us that we’d all be taken care of under the AHA. Well, it seems that the AHA isn’t beneficial to us at all.

    First, let me explain how I arrived at the decision to continue my military career until I retired. I knew my pay would be low, but I accepted that because I knew that my family and I would have that low pay offset by having no healthcare expenses. My son had just been born before my first reenlistment and I realized how much I had saved by having him in a military hospital. So, yes, the free healthcare had played largely into my decision.

    As my kids moved out of the house, I knew that they would have Tricare to help them through their transition years into their own healthcare plans and I had prepaid for it with my service.

    Well, it seems that the AHA is changing all of that, according to the Wall Street Journal. Their article is behind a paywall, so here are some excerpts;

    Families covered by Tricare, the health program for active and retired members of the military, must pay as much as $200 a month to let an adult child stay on their plan until age 26. Most families in private plans now pay no fee to extend such coverage. Military families are starting to complain about the disparity, saying they can’t afford those premiums and have let their children go uninsured.

    […]

    Initially, Tricare wasn’t affected by the health law, which meant it which was focused on traditional private insurance plans that didn’t have to allow children to stay on their parents’ plans past age 21, or 23 if they were full-time college students. Once the provision became popular with consumers, lawmakers passed separate legislation requiring Tricare to adopt it.

    The final legislation directed the Department of Defense to charge families for the full cost of the additional coverage. Sen. Mark Udall (D., Colo.), an author of the legislation, said the fee was included because legislators wouldn’t support providing the coverage free of charge. Looming defense cuts have put pressure on Tricare and overall military spending.

    That fee is either $176 or $201 a month for each young-adult dependent who wants to be covered through a parent’s insurance, depending on the type of plan. Tricare says the premiums are based on data for medical costs incurred by similar dependents and administrative expenses. Next year, premiums will fall to $152 or $176 a month.

    Nick Papas, a White House spokesman, and Cynthia Smith, a Defense spokeswoman, both said Tricare differed from private insurance plans because it didn’t charge members a premium that could absorb the additional costs of covering the young adults. They pointed to Congress’s role in including the fee in the legislation.

    So, like I’ve said before, the Affordable Healthcare Act was supposed to bring down health care costs for all Americans, well, except veterans. It’s a good thing they’re not balancing the budget on veterans’ backs, huh?

  • That election thing

    H1 sends us a link to the Military Times poll that purports to prove that 2/3 of their subscribers support Romney in the upcoming election. I doubt that their poll proves anything, really, but I’ll let them explain;

    This population is older and more senior than the military population at large, but it is representative of the professional core of the all-volunteer force.

    The 3,100 respondents — roughly two-thirds active-duty and one-third reserve component members — are about 80 percent white and 91 percent male. Forty percent are in paygrades E-5 through E-8, while more than 35 percent are in paygrades O-3 through O-5.

    Almost 80 percent of respondents have a college degree — including 27 percent with a graduate degree and more than 11 percent with a post-graduate degree — while an additional 18.5 percent have some college under their belts.

    And they are battle-hardened; almost 29 percent have spent more than two cumulative years deployed since 9/11, while a similar percentage has spent one to two cumulative years deployed.

    All it really proves is that the staff of the Military Times is out of step with their readership, since they generally write stories about Rangers who support Obama and they give Paul Rieckhoff a handjob under the table to defend him against puny military blogs who point out that he wears stuff on his uniform he shouldn’t.

    I’ve read the Army Times more since I got out than I did when I was in uniform. The only time I ever bought single issues was when I was competing for E-5 and E-6 and wanted to see the cut-off scores. And there was the time they ran an article about us during the Gulf War, so I’m not sure how representative their readership is of the entire military population. But that’s me.

    If it’s true, and I kind of hope it is, it just means that most of the military isn’t being bluffed by the Obama Administration and their blather about increasing access to the VA, their commitment to fighting the war in Afghanistan, and their campaign slogan about bin Laden being killed by this administration instead of crediting the soldiers who’ve been fighting this war for 11 years.

    On a similar note, The Washington Times reports that Romney is giving a foreign policy speech at VMI today;

    And after delaying for nearly a month, the Republican presidential nominee will sharpen his attack about the way Mr. Obama handled the assault on American diplomatic posts in Egypt and Libya.

    According to excerpts, he will say the president’s first reaction was to blame an Internet video mocking Islam, and only belatedly to spot “the deliberate work of terrorists who use violence to impose their dark ideology on others.”

    “Hope is not a strategy,” Mr. Romney will say. “We cannot support our friends and defeat our enemies in the Middle East when our words are not backed up by deeds, when our defense spending is being arbitrarily and deeply cut, when we have no trade agenda to speak of, and the perception of our strategy is not one of partnership, but of passivity.”

    There’s more about his speech by Mr. Hanson. While I agree with Mr Romney on his characterization of this administration’s handling of the events in the Near East, I think the Obama Administration is most vulnerable on foreign policy if Romney summons the gonads to mention the war in Afghanistan.

    The White House took the advice of the biggest boob on the planet in regards to foreign policy, Joe Biden, and subscribed to his “robot ninja zombie strategy” while they ignored the commanders in 2009. The troops did the best they could with what they had, but they weren’t given enough. And the Taliban only had to wait out the half-assed surge. Am I the only one to notice that the green-on-blue attacks peaked the same week that the administration was celebrating the well-publicized end of the “surge”? The same green-on-blue attacks that they were warned were going to increase this year more than a year ago? And it was a scant few weeks ago that Big Army decided that the troops should be armed while they’re in their bases.

    Obama reticence to admit that there’s a war going on got troops killed. Like I’ve said ad nauseum, I’m in my living room in West Virginia and I have a loaded gun next to me, why weren’t our troops allowed to be armed in a war zone?

    The Obama Administration thinks their drone strategy can win the war, like the Johnson Administration thought their bombing strategy could win the war in Vietnam. It takes troops on the ground to win wars and for purely political reasons this administration was unwilling to commit to giving the commanders the troops they needed. Mostly because victory isn’t in the Obama Administration’s vocabulary.

    Romney should be making these points and take that “I killed bin laden” thing out of Obama’s quiver. Any of us would have made the same decision given the opportunity. Killing bin Laden didn’t win the war and neither did anything this administration did in that regard. In fact, everything they’ve done has strengthened the Taliban.

    Folks in the military know that, if Military Times’ poll is to be believed, but we can’t win this election for Romney. He needs to say it out loud and often.

  • FBI arrives at Benghazi consulate (UPDATED)

    Just three weeks since it was raided by terrorists and the day after a Washington Post reporter picked through the evidence, the FBI has finally made their way to the US Consulate in Benghazi to begin their investigation of the evidence that might be left, says the New York Post;

    US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton vowed on Wednesday to answer lingering questions about the assault in a bid to counter a barrage of Republican criticism in the lead-up to the November 6 presidential election.

    “There are continuing questions about what exactly happened in Benghazi on that night three weeks ago and we will not rest until we answer those questions and until we track down the terrorists who killed our people,” Clinton said.

    “The men and women who serve this country as diplomats deserve no less than a full and accurate accounting, wherever that leads.”

    Yeah, I hope they’ve hired script writers from CSI to make this at least a little credible.

    UPDATE: Dan Riehl says that the FBI has already packed up and left Libya. I’m sure they got oodles of investigating done.

  • Documents at Benghazi consulate still unsecured

    The Washington Post gained entrance to the ruins of the US consulate in Benghazi yesterday and was surprised to find documents related to our diplomatic operations there strewn about the floor as if it was a teenager’s bedroom;

    The discovery further complicates efforts by the Obama administration to respond to what has rapidly become a major foreign-policy issue just weeks before the election. Republicans have accused Obama of having left U.S. diplomatic compounds in Muslim-majority nations insufficiently protected on the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and have questioned the security preparations ahead of assaults on embassies in Egypt, Yemen, Tunisia and Sudan. Capitol Hill critics have also pressed for an explanation for the slow pace of the investigation that has followed the attack in Benghazi.

    Although the gates to the Benghazi compound were locked several days after the attacks, looters and curiosity-seekers were free to roam in the initial chaotic aftermath, and many documents may have disappeared.

    No government-provided security forces are guarding the compound, and Libyan investigators have visited just once, according to a member of the family who owns the compound and who allowed the journalists to enter Wednesday.

    Yeah, well, it’s just secret documents, it’s not like anyone lost their lives or anything…oh, wait.

  • Nobel Prize winner won’t punish countries that use child soldiers

    If I could single out one of the most odious practices in war, I guess it would be the use of children as soldiers like many African countries do to augment their dwindling male populations. And probably the most liberal way to end the scourge would probably be to cut off US taxpayer dollars to countries who subscribe to the practice. But, our Nobel peace prize winning president won’t even take that simple measure according to Foreign Policy Magazine;

    Last week Obama issued a presidential memorandum waiving penalties under the Child Soldiers Protection Act of 2008 for Libya, South Sudan and Yemen, penalties that Congress put in place to prevent U.S. arms sales to countries determined by the State Department to be the worst abusers of child soldiers in their militaries. The president also partially waived sanctions against the Democratic Republic of Congo to allow some military training and arms sales to that country.

    Human rights advocates saw the waivers as harmful to the goal of using U.S. influence to urge countries that receive military assistance to move away from using child soldiers and contradictory to the rhetoric Obama used in his speech.

    “After such a strong statement against the exploitation of children, it seems bizarre that Obama would give a pass to countries using children in their armed forces and using U.S. tax money to do that,” said Jesse Eaves, the senior policy advisor for child protection at World Vision.

    Of course, that’s more of that “smart diplomacy” we heard so much about during the 2008 campaign, and we’ve seen it in practice around the world while we become an international punchline for being softies and push-overs. Somehow, this administration thinks that by continuing to pay these rogue countries for continuing the vile practice, it will change their behavior. Think about how well that has worked out in our recent history.

  • Obama tax hikes loom

    Remember those “Bush tax cuts for the rich” we heard so much about for eight years? Well, it seems that now that they’re about to expire in the New Year, it’s the poorest working Americans who will suffer the most, according to the Washington Post;

    For most taxpayers, the bulk of the increase would be triggered by the expiration of tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003 during the George W. Bush administration. The expiration of President Obama’s payroll tax holiday, which shaved two percentage points off the 6.2 percent Social Security tax, comes in a close second.

    But the lowest earners would be hit hardest by the expiration of tax breaks enacted as part of Obama’s 2009 economic stimulus package, the study found. The stimulus includes a temporary expansion of the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit for working families. And it temporarily bumps up a two-year, $1,800 tax credit for college tuition to four years and $2,500.

    “The fiscal cliff turns out to be quite complicated,” said Donald Marron, director of the Tax Policy Center, the result of “an accumulating snowball of temporary tax provisions.”

    Yeah, not complicated at all by calling them “tax cuts for the rich” when they were really tax cuts for working Americans. Some people who were exempted from paying taxes because of their low wages will have to pay taxes for the first time.

    Just like those stupid Obama ads I see that say that Romney will raise taxes on the middle class while cutting taxes for the richest Americans. There’s not a bit truth in that, either, but you can use the the Bush “tax cuts for the rich” catch phrase as an example of how truthful the Democrats are when they talk about taxes. Like Clinton’s middle class tax cut which became the tax hike on all Americans, even Social Security recipients. Yeah, it turns out that we’re all rich according to Democrats.