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

Category: Media

  • dicksmith and Wikileaks

    Over at VetVoice, dicksmith uses the arrest of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange as an excuse to call former Lieutenant Colonel Allen West a war criminal again when West expresses a concern that certain US media releases classified documents to the public endangering our national security;

    It never ceases to amaze me how much these people, these teabaggers, who claim such ardent support for the Constitution, actually can’t stand the protections offered by the document. Of course, Allen West is also an admitted torturer, so I shouldn’t be surprised at his lack of principle.

    But unfortunately, Allen West has some institutional support for his position. None other than the United States Air Force is blocking access to, not just Wikileaks, but sites that reported on the news of Wikileaks:

    dicksmith goes on to write about the Air Force blocking certain websites, including the US media which are publishing Wikileaks material despite the danger that the material poses to national security. Maybe if dicksmith had been awake for the last week or so, he’d know that every government agency has warned their employees that accessing, linking and posting that leaked material, which is still considered classified, continues to be a crime.

    Most agencies haven’t gone to the extreme that the Air Force has, but the Air Force is protecting their employees. Whether they “look silly” or not.

    What looks silly is an organization which is supposed to be focused on getting recent war veterans elected to public office bashing a recent war veteran who urges the government to arrest for espionage a foreign citizen and block access to sensitive material irresponsibly posted in the public domain by an irresponsible media.

    Is it any wonder that his parents named him “Richard”?

  • US guns vacationing in Mexico

    ROS sent us a link to a series in the Washington Post, “The Hidden Life of Guns” that I’ve been following the last few months about US guns purchased legally from gun shops ending up in the Mexican drug wars and nationwide crimes. I’ll admit that the Post did a lot of work uncovering the trails of gun ownership, but it’s all just wheel-spinning.

    Their articles all begin the same way – ominous hints at some nefarious activity by legal gun dealers, tons of firearms making their way to the drug gangs that all lead to the same conclusion. The gun dealers were following all of the laws and doing their due diligence in gun transfers. For example;

    Carter, 76, has operated four Carter’s Country stores in the Houston metropolitan area over the past half-century. In the past two years, more than 115 guns from his stores have been seized by the police and military in Mexico.

    And as you read further into the story;

    A high number of traces does not necessarily signal wrongdoing. It could be the result of sales volume, geography or clientele. Carter’s Country, for instance, is the largest independent gun retailer in the region. Most experts and ATF officials agree that the majority of dealers are law-abiding.

    So, the only conclusion a reader can arrive at is that gun laws need to be tightened. Only a few of the gun dealers who the Post profiles are accused of actual wrong-doing, so like I said, the Post is making the point that laws need to be changed. But, if a gun dealer sells a gun to a qualified buyer, what could possibly be changed? The gun dealer would have to shadow every purchaser to make sure that he doesn’t transfer ownership to an unqualified buyer, wouldn’t he?

    I’m sure the Post would just rather end gun sales and disarm us all, because that has worked so well every where it’s tried. Washington, DC, Detroit, Chicago, the UK, Canada.

    Just wishing guns away doesn’t work.

    Every once in a while, the DC police will have a gun buy-back program and more than thirty years after their hand gun ban, they’ll still collect a couple of thousand guns.

    The Post is committing journalistic jackassery. I don’t think the national Democrats are foolish enough to try to take our guns – but they’re welcome to try.

  • Joe Klein: Empty vessel

    ROS sent me a link to Joe Klein’s review of George W. Bush’s book “Decision Points” and it shows what an empty head sits on Joe Klein’s shoulders. First you must remember that Joe Klein was the “Anonymous” who wrote “Primary Colors”, the vacant worship of Bill Clinton during his 1992 campaign. The Clinton administration was merely a bookmark in history. He accomplished nothing and the only challenges the President Clinton faced were those of his own failings.

    Klein writes in this supposed book review;

    I was surprised by how angry I didn’t become. For me, at least, weariness has replaced anger. Bush’s was an exhausting presidency that will, I suspect, be remembered more for its waste — of time, lives, money, moral standing and economic strength — than for anything else. We have survived nearly a decade now since Sept. 11, and the cataclysmic events of that day have receded, not just in memory but in importance, compared with the global economic changes and Wall Street sociopathy that together challenge America’s future pre-eminence. We have not been successfully attacked since, a matter of luck and skill. We do have Bush to thank, in part, for that — but far too much testosterone was spent kicking irrelevant butts and landing, breathless with self-regard, on carrier decks to celebrate victories that were Pyrrhic at best. We struggle to recover from the thoughtless carnage of his tenure.

    The only reason it was exhausting was because people like Klein wouldn’t give a moments credit to the accomplishments of that administration. It’s as if Hussein was just another poor victim of the Bush machine. As if Desert Storm never happened, as if we didn’t deploy US troops to Kuwait border no less than three times in response to Hussein’s saber rattling during the ’90s. As if Iraq’s air defense facilities hadn’t fired on our pilots flying to enforce the UN mandate. As if Iraq had complied completely with the UN weapons inspectors. As if Iraq hadn’t attempted to assassinate a former US president. As if Bush hadn’t given Hussein countless chances to avoid war for more than a year before the invasion of Hussein’s Iraq.

    It’s as if the Left spent eight years blinded by their own partisan hatred to have noticed what was going on around them.

  • Why the ignorant and forgetful should just shut up

    I don’t know why I keep reading his column, but I clicked on Eugene Robinson’s verbal diarrhea this morning at the Washington Post entitled “Trimming a bloated defense budget” in which Robinson, unsurprisingly, takes the Administration’s position that the way to balance the budget is to freeze military pay and cut spending on weapons systems. Why?

    The United States accounts for 46.5 percent of the world’s total defense spending, according to a widely accepted recent estimate. The next-biggest spender is China, which has undertaken an immense buildup to become a military as well as economic superpower – yet accounts for just 6.6 percent of the world’s total.

    Yeah, because China is the next largest military economy. The same China that paralyzed the young Bush Administration by knocking our plane out of the sky and capturing it’s crew. The same China that protects Iran’s and North Korea’s nuclear programs in the Security Council. Basically, no one needs a military as large as ours because the countries arrayed against us get to use the whole rest of the world against us. Because of complete idiots like Robinson.

    The Democrats keep going back to the same solutions to “reduce the size government”. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton both dismantled the military and slashed spending. Their successors, in turn, had to rebuild that which had been destroyed and left us vulnerable.

    Bowles and Simpson properly classify defense spending as discretionary, meaning we are able to make choices. This should be axiomatic. But it has been Republican Party orthodoxy to inveigh against “big government” and its out-of-control spending while blithely ignoring the nearly $700 billion we’re lavishing annually on the Pentagon, as if every penny were somehow preordained and inviolate.

    Robinson neglects to mention the waste of Defense money on unnecessary contracts for planes and tanks the military didn’t want during the last two Congressional sessions to prop up certain members’ district employment numbers. Nor does he mention Nancy Pelosi’s personal military transport to and from her district every week.

    Robinson claims that withdrawing from Afghanistan will save lives and money – not in the long term. It just kicks the can down the road. I just wish that morons like Robinson would recognize the fact that their anti-intellectual blather only extends the war against terrorists. And causes more defense spending.

  • The worst persons in the world

    Jon Soltz tells Keith Olbermann why he won’t be living in Keith’s studio broom closet any longer. Soltz milks the sympathy of the four people in Olbermann’s audience and has a real hang-dog expression like he’s been sentenced to death instead of called to serve his country;

    Soltz claims in the video that he’s always separated his military service from his activism. When was that? If you go back over the countless videos in which Soltz appears, every other word out of his mouth mentions his four months in Iraq as a member of the military until recently, a picture of Soltz in a desert landscape and in a combat pogue uniform (no LBE, no helmet, only a weapon) appeared on VoteVets. How is that separating service with political activism?

    Soltz continues that his four months in Iraq led him to oppose the war. HTF did that happen? Four months dispatching vehicles and supervising motor pool police call disillusioned him?

    Soltz’ temporary replacement will be J. Ashwin Madia;

    Interim Chairman of VoteVets.org, J. Ashwin Madia, joined the U.S. Marine Corps and moved to Quantico, Virginia for 6 months of basic training, after Law School. He served in Iraq from September 2005 to March 2006. Madia was lead attorney in over one hundred trials, including thirteen jury trials. He is most proud of his work successfully defending a gay Marine from administrative discharge in 2005, when it was clear that commanders were using disparate standards in their treatment of this Marine compared to other Marines. Madia was a long-time Republican, who supported Bob Dole for President in 1996, and Senator John McCain in 2000, before running as a Democrat for Congress in Minnesota in 2008.

    Yeah, I was a long-time Democrat until VoteVets came along and I switched parties, you doofuses. It’s as if they don’t even hear how stupid they sound when they say stupid shit like that.

    I wish Jon Soltz luck and I hope he comes back safely. At least he’s not a complete pussy and avoiding the call. But I also hope he appreciates that he gets to reap the benefits of the surge which he so adamantly opposed.

    The word is that IAVA’s Paul Reickhof is taking advantage of the new space in the MSNBC broom closet that he and Soltz shared over the last several years and buying a new beanbag chair.

  • Vets for hire

    The good folks at the PBS station KCET in Los Angeles asked me to show you this video about some of the problems returning veterans are having finding and keeping their jobs. The resources and employers mentioned in the video are listed at the SoCal Connected web page related to this video.

    I’m glad to see that some in the media are taking this subject seriously and not piling on veterans to make them look like wild-eyed lunatics as they’ve done in the past. I think it’s encouraging that the media is also reaching out to the blogs to get their message out. Thank you KCET and SoCal Connected for the excellent report and for including us in your audience.

  • What’s different now about DADT?

    I think it’s funny that the New York Times and dicksmith are pulling their hair out because Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell might not get passed this year. First, the NYT;

    Prospects for Congress to authorize repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy face new uncertainties as time runs out for the Senate to act and strong objections remain among Republicans and the most senior ranks of the military.

    Do you know what I just realized? DADT was still in force as a policy last year and the year before…and the year before. So what’s the rush? Dicksmith says;

    Let’s be realistic. Repeal of DADT has to be accomplished before the end of the year. Otherwise, there will not be enough vertebrates in Congress, once the new session takes over, to get the repeal through. If we don’t want our force weakened and unit cohesion inhibited for another undetermined amount of time before a new Congress with testicular fortitude is elected, the harmful policy has got to go in this Congress.

    I think testicular fortitude is probably the wrong simile to use in a DADT discussion. Well, unless, ya know, it’s the most important aspect of the discussion to dicksmith. But at least he’s honest about what he thinks of us “invertebrates”.

    I don’t think waiting on DADT to be repealed is having much effect on our forces. Not as much as dicksmith would like us to think. There are a whole lot of dead terrorists who would take exception with dicksmith’s contention.

    Besides, the gay crowd put their hopes in the Obama rhetoric for the last two years and nothing has happened, what has changed that makes them think anything will change in the next couple of weeks?

  • The Return of the Olbermann

    According to a bunch of places, Keith Olbermann is returning to whatever network he’s been on. I’m sure hundreds of conservative bloggers are ecstatic that they once again have fodder to keep their blogs alive another few months. Yeah, in the world of no consequences, Olbermann is suspended indefinitely which translates into “forever, unless your replacement brings in fewer viewers than even you”. So Olbermann misses two broadcasts…his wounded ego. I guess Phil Griffin really does work for Olbermann.

    Now, whatever network has a contract with Olbermann can get down to the business of firing his stupid ass for actual reasons. Like keeping Jon Soltz (VoteVets executive director) and Paul Reickhof (Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America’s executive director) in Olbermann’s studio broom closet…rent free!

    Or maybe they can fire him because his viewership is lower than Rachel Maddow’s. How he can pull in less than one viewer is beyond my understanding of math and biology, but he does.

    So, welcome back to the airways, Keith, however briefly the return might be.