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

Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden

  • US spends $70k for ad to apologize for video in Pakistan

    Even though the Obama Administration admitted yesterday that the YouTube video about Mohammad was a red herring for the attacks on our embassies across the Arab cresent, they’ve paid $70,000 for an ad to run in Pakistan apologizing for the video, which most Americans had nothing to do with in the filming or production to mollify the Muslim world, according to BBC;

    The adverts seek to emphasise the message reiterated by US officials throughout the crisis: that the “disgusting” film was not made by the US government, but that there is never any justification for violence.

    The embassy described the advert as a “public service announcement” and repeated the statements from Mr Obama and Ms Clinton on its Twitter feed.

    A caption on the advert, which ends with the seal of the US embassy in Islamabad, reads “Paid Content”, the Associated Press reports.

    State department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland confirmed the US spent $70,000 (£43,220) to air the clip on seven Pakistani TV stations.

    The video is at the BBC link if you’re interested in watching our President and Hillary in full dhimmi mode.

    A better use of the ad time would have been to tell the Islamic world to grow-the-hell up and to stop being tools of the Islamists.

    Thanks to ROS for the link.

    ADDED: The ad doesn’t seem to be mollifying the Pakistanis. After Friday prayers, 5,000 of them took to the streets and terrified their own country. Obama burned in effigy – good show, ya buncha racists.

  • Sleep Well, Eric…

    It was no more than what we should have expected, this Department of Justice, in-house investigation of Operation Fast and Furious. Did any of us truly expect a DoJ inspector general to find against his boss? Or worse, against his boss’s boss? Are any among us surprised that lesser figures in the DoJ warren of agencies have been designated to take the fall? The apparent answer is no. But there is a more obvious response to this attempted whitewash that the Obama administration had best pay heed to.

    There are millions upon millions of us out here who understand one simple basic truth, that there was no reason for those now-blamed federal underlings in Arizona and elsewhere to undertake such an operation. Regional offices of the federal government do not take it upon themselves to construct and implement criminal incursions into foreign countries. They do not do it. If you think they do you are either totally and ineptly unaware of how federal bureaucracies operate or you are so far in the bag for Obama and Holder that reason and truth matter not.

    From the first glimmer of exposure to this Obama directed run against our Second Amendment, I have been pointing out that there was no credible rationale for Operation Fast and Furious except that it was designed by politicos high in the administration to use the statistics generated by Mexican drug cartel violence implementing American-supplied weaponry to justify stricter gun control, not in Mexico, but here in the United States. This rationale was ballyhooed by everyone from Obama, Hillary and Holder to lesser figures in the administration.

    There is one simple reason for my very firm belief that we skeptics are dead-right on this issue: the feds have willingly admitted they had no plan, no operation nor any structure in place to track those weapons once they crossed the border; and since the Mexican authorities had been kept totally in the dark about the entire operation, the Federales were also unprepared to track these deadly implements that would be used subsequently to kill hundreds of Mexican nationals and some American agents. It was typical Democrat under-the-radar politics being masked and implemented by federal agents, ordered to do so from the very highest levels of the Obama administration, which I will wager we will sometime in the future discover to be an impeachable offense.

    Eric Holder is whistling past the graveyard at this very moment, loudly declaring himself to be vindicated of all charges, all while the 900 pound gorilla of executive privilege to block the congressional committee’s investigation looms as a huge, hairy question mark. If you, Mr. Holder, and your boss, were simply the innocent victims of malfeasance by underlings, why that fallback to executive privilege. Two questions, Eric:
    1. If there was no way to track the weapons once they crossed south of the border, what was the rationale of the plan?
    2. If you and your boss aren’t in this up to your ears, why invoke executive privilege?

    You’re hiding the true origins and motivations of Fast and Furious. You know it and we out here damned well know it. The IG’s bogus report is but temporary cover. You may think that you have bought off all your scape-goated federal employees, but one or more will turn on you, sooner or later, because among all those career bureaucrats are some honorable agents who mistakenly believed they could follow your orders and serve their country with a dignity you took from them. And if the good guys won’t expose you, there are schemers among them, like you and your boss, who will file a law suit with an eye to the book, television and movie rights.

    Sleep well, Eric…

  • Let’s release another terrorist into the streets

    You remember that blind sheik dude, Omar Abdel-Rahman, the one who was the spiritual adviser for the crowd who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, right? Well, as a goodwill gesture this administration is contemplating releasing him to Egypt according to the New York Post;

    The Egyptian government “asked for his release,” an administration source told The Post — and Rep. Peter King (R-LI) confirmed the request is being considered.

    The White House, State Department and Justice Department each issued statements denying any deal is in the works, but, “There’s no way to believe anything they say,” said Andrew McCarthy, the former assistant US attorney who prosecuted Abdel-Rahman. “I believe there may already be a nod-and-wink agreement in place.”

    It makes perfect sense to me. We give Libya back one of their terrorists, they release him and he kills four Americans in Benghazi. No one was killed in the Libya attacks, so they need Rahman to fix that shortcoming.

    So if the Obama Administration doesn’t release him and they’re not lying about their plans for him (they say he’ll serve out his sentence) it will be the first time they did what they said they’ll do. So excuse me if I don’t place any bets on this one.

    Michelle Malkin lists the reasons we shouldn’t believe the Obama Administration.

  • White House: Benghazi was “self-evident” terrorist attack

    So after a week of denying that the attack on our consulate in Benghazi was a terrorist attack, but rather some impromptu demonstration against a poorly-made video that got out of hand, Baghdad Jay Carney admitted that it was self-evident that it was a terrorist attack, says Fox News;

    The administration is still sticking by its claim that they don’t have evidence the assault was pre-planned. But Carney for the first time Thursday called it terrorism — while downplaying the fact that he was doing so.

    “It is, I think, self evident that what happened in Benghazi was a terrorist attack,” Carney said. “Our embassy was attacked violently and the result was four deaths of American officials. That is self evident.”

    If it was so “self-evident” why have they been denying what was obvious to the whole rest of the planet right up until it became untenable? But the State Department won’t say the words;

    “I don’t think we know enough. I don’t think we know enough,” [State Department spokeswoman Victoria] Nuland said. “And we’re going to continue to assess. She gave our preliminary assessment. We’re going to have a full investigation now, and then we’ll be in a better position to put labels on things, okay?”

    Matt Olsen, director of the NCTC, put a label on it during a Senate hearing Wednesday.

    “Yes, they were killed in the course of a terrorist attack on our embassy,” Olsen said.

    And this is on the heels of Susan Rice’s blatant lie about the situation this last week on ABC News on Sunday;

    U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice said the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi was not premeditated, directly contradicting top Libyan officials who say the attack was planned in advance.

    And then they wonder why we don’t believe a thing that comes out of the crooked-ass mouths of this administration.

  • White House pros

    Remember when the media breathlessly reported to us that the Secret Service had *gasp* involved themselves in procuring prostitutes before the President’s visit to Colombia? And how they just couldn’t shut up about it for weeks? Well, it’s a different story when the Inspector General’s report that there were White House staffers who also engaged themselves in the practice. The only reports are in Fox News, the UK’s Daily Mail and our buddy Susan Katz Keating;

    While much of the attention in the case has focused on the actions of Secret Service personnel, multiple law enforcement and congressional sources tell FoxNews.com that investigators also discovered two White House advance team members checked in prostitutes as overnight guests at a Cartagena hotel in the days before President Obama’s April 13 visit.

    “Three U.S. delegation members that stayed at the Hilton brought prostitutes back as overnight guests. One of them was ours (Secret Service) and the other two were White House staffers,” a high-ranking Secret Service official told FoxNews.com. “We knew very early that White House staffers were involved.”

    As I’ve stated, from first hand experience, anyone who feels the need to buy prostitutes in Colombia are just too lazy to go through the motions of dating for a few minutes. Or too ugly.

    But I’m wondering why the majority of the media feels the need to ignore this little bit of news given the overblown coverage of the Secret Service scandal. Well, unless they think that somehow they’re protecting this administration from scandal.

  • Smoke and Mirrors at Veterans’ Affairs

    So we’ve heard from our friends at the Department of Veterans’ Affairs about the great work they’re doing over there, about how this is the best administration in history on veterans’ healthcare. Well, let’s take a closer look at the numbers, shall we?

    During the years 2008-2012, the VA hired THREE TIMES more administrative staff than medical doctors. This news won’t be a surprise to any veteran who has been told to wait for an appointment.

    The VA added 3,100 medical doctors since 2008, and to “manage” their work, the VA added more than 9,000 new administration employees.

    Barack Obama is more interested in hiring paper-pushers than doctors. But paperwork doesn’t treat patients. Maybe that’s why the VA Inspector General told Congress the VA was gaming the numbers so it looks like 94% of veterans can be seen within 14 days.

    The actual number, according to the VA Inspector General, is less than 50%. How many veteran suicides occurred during the delays in reaching care? Those new administrator positions must have been mighty valuable. Barack Obama knows the VA is not getting the job done. But he doesn’t care. Maybe that’s why the VA’s so-called Performance and Accountability Report claimed 95% of veterans who asked for a mental health evaluation were seen within 14 days. The VA Inspector General called FOUL on that report and gave the real figure: 64%.

    In the Obama administration, the VA’s proverbial suicide hotline is putting veterans on hold.

    Delays in mental health care were so bad that in July 2011, Democratic Senator Patty Murray told the VA about complaints from her constituents. She asked the VA to interview their own employees about delays in receiving care. The interviews showed more than 70% of respondents said their hospital or clinic lacked sufficient mental health staff. In an April 2012 hearing, Senator Murray said the VA’s own investigation showed clinicians were “delaying follow up for months, not because of the veterans’ needs but because their schedules were too full. VA is failing to meet its own mandates for timeliness and instead is finding ways to make the data look like they are complying.”

    Senator Murray, remember, is a Democrat.

    Even more damning is the IG’s statement that the VA’s performance measure for measuring access to mental health care is utterly useless because it “measured how long it took to conduct the mental health evaluation, not how long the patient waited to receive that evaluation.”

    Senator Bernie Sanders, another Senator far friendlier to Democrats than Republicans, asked if VA administrators could explain why the VA can’t follow its own rules for scheduling appointments. The IG replied that at two different VA facilities, the clinic staff were told by supervisors to first check for an available appointment date, back out of the computerized scheduling system, then re-enter the system and indicate that the first available date was the date when the veteran wanted to return. This method makes the VA appear to have all the appointment times it needs.

    Senior VA administrators receive bonuses when veteran appointments are scheduled within the VA-mandated time frames. These instructions to the scheduling staff look like senior VA executives were gaming the system for executive bonuses.

    Every month, 950 veterans treated by VA attempt suicide. 18 veterans die every day by suicide, and about 12 of those 18 are not receiving VA care. That’s about 30 suicide attempts per day, every day, every month, and 12 deaths of veterans who are not seen at a VA. But Barack Obama doesn’t want to spend money on hiring mental health care employees, so what’s a delay of a few weeks until the next appointment. Veterans and military usually vote Republican. Maybe the White House told the VA to put a busy signal on veteran attempts to get help. We’ve all heard elected leaders complain about the Wall Street douchebags and their corporate bonuses. Wall Street’s negligence didn’t contribute to daily suicide. The same can’t be said for Obama’s VA. It’s Obama’s budget that claimed to have all the VA funding it needed.

    Under the Obama administration, the VA also fattened up their Washington headquarters, adding 885 new bureaucrats at a cost of $91 million dollars. What do these new Washington bureaucrats do for veterans? They spend taxpayer dollars on bonuses for a select few VA employees. The VA Inspector General investigated these bonuses paid to a few selected bureaucrats at VA headquarters and found 79% of the bonuses could not be justified.

    Barack Obama’s hand-picked VA Secretary defended these bonuses. A VA fact sheet explained how Obama’s chosen VA leader started a “corporate approach to executive management,” including a new human resources office exclusively for top VA executives. The VA sure got what it was looking for: special treatment for only the top VA executives, nice financial bonuses for those who are more special than VA employees whose pay has been frozen for two years, and more administrator jobs.

    Perhaps one of the new 356 employees in human resources at VA headquarters will fix this issue. Do the math: for every 10 new medical doctors hired by VA, the headquarters staff fattened by another HR employee. The VA hospitals have their own HR people; they’re included above in the 9,000 new administrative employees.

    Secretary Shinseki sure does need HR help if he added 356 new human resources employees for only 529 other new headquarters jobs. What could 356 new HR employees do all day? Evaluate each other on how well they completed yet another required training course? How many more psychologists and social workers could have been hired with that money?

    Let’s ask some of the 30 veterans who attempt suicide each day.

    Who’s losing? The veterans waiting in line at their local VA.

    Who already lost? The surviving family members of the veterans who died by suicide.

    Sources:
    (more…)

  • Hell Hath No Fury Like…

    Perhaps an Israeli prime minister scorned? Following close on the heels of Barack Obama’s refusal to find time in his busy schedule to meet with the Israeli PM, Benjamin Netanyahu, to discuss issues relating to the very survival of the State of Israel, World Net Daily has published an article citing some prominent Israeli scientific authorities who state unequivocally that Obama’s long form birth certificate released in 2011 is a fake.

    The link posted by WND to the Israel Science and Technology homepage no longer works. However the WND article by Dr. Jerome Corsi covers most of the points made by the original article. Here’s how Corsi introduces the author of the original scientific article:

    The website was created by a former science adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel Hanukoglu, Ph.D.
    Hanukoglu, an award-winning researcher, is a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology in the Department of Molecular Biology at Ariel University Center of Samaria in Ariel, Israel.

    The professor established the first version of his website during his tenure as Netanyahu’s science adviser. The site has evolved into “the premier science and technology portal for Israel.”

    I’m not going into all the technical forensic details that led the Israeli investigators to conclude that the document is a forgery as earlier claimed by several authors here at American Thinker but for those who might be skeptical about this being a quid pro quo for Netanyahu’s shabby treatment, here’s another quote:

    Israel Science and Technology explains why, as a site of science and technology, it dedicated “a page to expose forgery about a document related to Mr. Barack Hussein Obama.”

    “Mr. Obama is the president of the USA that is currently the leader of the Free World, and the most powerful country in the Western hemisphere,” the site says. “In his position as the President, the policies pursued by Mr. Obama affects the whole world and not just the USA.”

    Moreover, inaction by members of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate, as well as U.S. courts, despite many appeals, also was seen to “raise a concern about how the governmental institutions of the reputedly best, and certainly the most important democracy in the Free World have avoided the issue.”

    Of course, the American media will turn a blind eye and deaf ear to the fact that the former scientific advisor to the Israeli prime minister has leveled such a serious charge against the leader of the world’s most powerful sovereign nation. Nor will they investigate the probable connection to the Obama snub of Netanyahu with the release of the Israeli article.

    To fail to make that connection requires, in the words of our esteemed Secretary of State, in reference to another Middle East matter, “a willing suspension of disbelief.”

  • Damn the Stupidoes, Full Speed Ahead*

    Completely clueless or devilishly devious are two possible descriptions for the Obama campaign with this latest revelation of Soviet naval vessels being used as a backdrop while a liberal, former admiral was addressing the Democrat convention. Navy Times is reporting that while retired Admiral John Nathman, a rare liberal among the retired, multistar-wearing military, spoke to the delegates in Charlotte, the Democrat campaign operatives showed their true colors by providing him a backdrop of Russian warships.

    Was it a screw-up or was it by design and symbolically significant? Democrats have such a lack of real understanding of our military that it could just be attributed to their intrinsic stupidity. On the other hand, one can imagine that some too-clever mind in the campaign structure saw it entirely fitting for a left-wing admiral to be backed up by a Soviet fleet as he supported a party and a platform that betray the very forces he once led. Whatever, I’m sure the Democrats, now that they’ve been outted by Navy Times, will want to hide behind the excuse of it being nothing more than an oversight. Regardless of whether it was ineptitude or exceeding political cleverness, it was, indeed, a stupid mistake.

    While admittedly requiring a stretch of the imagination, it could be possible that, in a political party that has become increasingly left-wing and hostile to traditional American values, a deliberate use of Soviet vessels was meant to be a subliminal, message to the far-left faithful. Surely the Democrat Party can’t possibly believe they can sell a low key hard left message to America at large. The majority of this country rejects such left-wing sentimentality. Ronald Reagan is remembered and lionized primarily for bringing the Soviet bear, including its burgeoning navy, to its knees. Yet the leftists at the core of the Democrat party believe they can get away with such imagery? Hope must indeed spring eternal in the breasts of those so politically demented.
    As for John Nathman, if he knowingly stood before those Soviet ships, the only honorable action available to this turncoat to the United States Navy and all its history and traditions, is to figuratively fall on his officer’s sword by sinking into retirement, to forever run silent and run deep. Entire careers were spent by American sailors to confront and defeat the Soviet navy during the multiple decades of the Cold War.

    Ronald Reagan’s rebuilding of our own Navy, and the sailors who manned all those new American vessels in countless confrontations around the world’s oceans, played an overlarge part in the collapse of the Soviet Union. For those seamen, that war was not cold at all but carried with it the very real peril of imminent death on a daily basis. This lefty admiral has betrayed those naval warriors’ honorable heritage by defending a party friendly to Soviet principles and relentlessly hostile to our military.

    And doing so before a scrim featuring their former foes.
    *http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Mobile_Bay#Damn_the_torpedoes