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

Category: Politics

  • Post, O’Donnell and Maddow advance “wag the dog” theory

    Post, O’Donnell and Maddow advance “wag the dog” theory

    Chief Tango sends us a link to the Washington Post in which they republish the whack-a-doodle theory that Lawrence O’Donnell discussed with recently-disgraced Rachel Maddow on O’Donnell’s MSNBC show “The Last Word”;

    “Wouldn’t it be nice,” O’Donnell asked a nodding, smiling Rachel Maddow, “if it was just completely, totally, absolutely impossible to suspect that Vladimir Putin orchestrated what happened in Syria this week — so that his friend in the White House could have a big night with missiles and all the praises he’s picked up over the past 24 hours?”

    The theory was impossible to rule out, O’Donnell said, because of the Trump campaign’s ties to the Russian government.

    A few minutes later, the host elaborated on his theory under banner text: “Wag The Dog?” — recalling a similar conspiracy theory that President Bill Clinton launched missiles in 1998 to distract from his own scandal.

    “It changes the conventional wisdom about the dynamic between President Trump and Vladimir Putin,” O’Donnell said. “President Trump has finally dared to do something Vladimir Putin doesn’t like. It changes everything.”

    O’Donnell didn’t offer any evidence on his theory, promising only that “you won’t hear … proof that the scenario I’ve just outlined is impossible.”

    The Washington Post makes a show of disparaging O’Donnell’s and Maddow’s lunacy, but it falls flat. Actually they’re just adding legs to the story – a fact not lost on WaPo readers in the comments.

  • Navy says T-45 jets grounded indefinitely.

    Instead of a three day stand down, The U.S. Navy has decided to ground all 197 training jets indefinitely.

    “The pause is extended as long as our experts need as they diligently work to determine the root cause of the physiological episodes and solutions to fix the issue,” said Lt. Leslie Hubbell, a Navy spokesperson told Fox News Saturday.

    Yeah sorry, a three day pause won’t fix the problem, and Big Navy has decided to listen to the pilots and act, instead of paying lip service to their concerns and carrying on as usual. I am pleasantly surprised by this decision. It’s the right call.

    More Here

     

  • The world Obama made

    The world Obama made

    Most of the media is focused on the missile strike that the president launched against the Syrian government’s capability to use chemical weapons in their civil war while ignoring completely the fact that the Obama Administration had promised us that they had negotiated away those chemical weapons without firing a shot. The New York Times reports “Syria Strike Puts U.S. Relationship With Russia at Risk“;

    President Vladimir V. Putin’s office called the Tomahawk cruise missile strike on Syria a violation of international law and a “significant blow” to the Russian-American relationship, while Prime Minister Dmitri A. Medvedev said it had “completely ruined” it.

    Yeah, well, the Russians “completely ruined” any relationship when they allowed the Syrian government to maintain some chemical weapons.

    In the pages of the Washington Post, Margaret Sullivan complains that “The media loved Trump’s show of military might. Are we really doing this again?”

    Missile strikes may seem thrilling, and retaliation righteous.

    But journalists and commentators ought to remember the duller virtues, too, like skepticism, depth and context.

    And keep their eyes fixed firmly there, not on the spectacular images in the sky.

    Anyway, the Fox & Friends folks discuss the deceitful Obama Administration this morning with our buddy Jim Hanson;

  • A new sheriff in town

    The world now knows that when it comes to America, it is dealing no longer with an indecisive community organizer, but with a proved business leader who will not dither when bad guys act badly whither. Our new president just put those bad guys in Syria, North Korea, and Iran on notice that they are definitely screwing around with a different brand of cat from that puss in shorts who played games with little white balls while the real world turned and too frequently burned.

    To say that Donald Trump hammered home his message is a bit inadequate when one considers the hammering of several dozen cruise missiles upon the very site from which the Syrian government stores and launches (in crude fashion) the chemical weapons it uses upon its own populace. Bashar Assad thought he was dealing with a new American president beset with many domestic problems, and likely Bashar felt he could test the limits of chemical warfare without too much fear of serious blowback.

    But blowback he got, in the form of several thousand pounds of high explosives directed at his means of inflicting chemical attacks on his own people. This writing is an early response, so I have no idea as to the extent of damage inflicted on the targeted airbase, but that is immaterial. What matters is that President Donald Trump reminded the world that America is once again a geopolitical force to be factored into all military planning and all political treachery, especially within the hotbed of religious and political upheaval that is the current Middle East.

    What is particularly courageous in Trump’s action is his willingness to accept the risk of Russian casualties from the missile attacks and the consequences that could devolve from that hazardous probability. Yet he was not deterred by that possibility, as was his pusillanimous predecessor, whose skill set was geared more to drawing meaningless red lines than actually being a world leader.

    The libs will no doubt scream that this was a reckless endangerment of our place in the world. Let them scream; let them whimper; let them finally collapse in tears when they see the rest of the world respond positively to an actual American leader, a true world leader, who has that singular quality to lead that their guy was lacking in spades: balls.

    There’s a new sheriff in town.

    Crossposted at American Thinker

  • New Marine CH-53K King Stallion

    The Senior Official Performing the Duties of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics (USD(AT&L)) approved the Navy’s request for the CH-53K King Stallion heavy lift helicopter program to enter into the Production and Deployment April 4.

    “We have just successfully launched the production of the most powerful helicopter our nation has ever designed. This incredible positive step function in capability is going to revolutionize the way our nation conducts business in the battlespace by ensuring a substantial increase in logistical throughput into that battlespace. I could not be prouder of our government-contractor team for making this happen,” said Col Hank Vanderborght, U.S. Marine Corps program manager for the Naval Air Systems Command’s Heavy Lift Helicopters program, PMA-261.

    Production is expected to begin in June 2017 at Sikorsky’s facility in Stratford, Conn. The recurring flyaway cost for the CH-53K is $87.1M. Recurring flyaway costs are the average cost for all production lots of aircraft, engines, contract/government furnished equipment, and engineering change orders.

    I started out in Navy helos, and always had soft spot for them. Son #1 is Air Force (said he spent enough time in the Navy growing up) and wrenched on their H-53 Pave Low helos in Iraq and several places whose name ends in -stan.  He’s glad to see the big birds are still in production.  

    More Here

     

     

  • Susan Rice and unmasking

    So, the news broke yesterday in Bloomberg View in a piece by Eli Lake that the Obama Administration’s national security adviser Susan Rice solicited the identities of American citizens who were swept up in intelligence gathering of foreign communications;

    The pattern of Rice’s requests was discovered in a National Security Council review of the government’s policy on “unmasking” the identities of individuals in the U.S. who are not targets of electronic eavesdropping, but whose communications are collected incidentally. Normally those names are redacted from summaries of monitored conversations and appear in reports as something like “U.S. Person One.”

    […]

    In February Cohen-Watnick discovered Rice’s multiple requests to unmask U.S. persons in intelligence reports that related to Trump transition activities. He brought this to the attention of the White House General Counsel’s office, who reviewed more of Rice’s requests and instructed him to end his own research into the unmasking policy.

    The intelligence reports were summaries of monitored conversations — primarily between foreign officials discussing the Trump transition, but also in some cases direct contact between members of the Trump team and monitored foreign officials.

    Technically, it’s legal, but, it is not ethical. Senator Rand Paul is calling for Rice to testify to Congress according to The Hill;

    The Kentucky senator, while acknowledging he has little information about the matter beyond the news report, called the unmasking an “enormous deal” and indicated that it should be illegal.

    “I don’t think we should discount how big a deal it was that Susan Rice was looking at these, and she needs to be asked, did President Obama ask her to do this? Was this a directive from President Obama?” Paul told reporters.

    “I think she ought to testify under oath on this. I think she should be asked under oath, did she reveal it to The Washington Post.”

    “I think they were illegally basically using an espionage tool to eavesdrop or wiretap — if you want to use the word generally — on the Trump campaign,” Paul said.

    From Fox News;

    Rice was asked on “PBS NewsHour” in March about the possibility of incidental intelligence gathering and she responded, “I know nothing about this.”

    Meanwhile, the Washington Post and the New York Times are doing their level best to ignore this controversy.

  • Fake Vietnam vet and fake news

    Fake Vietnam vet and fake news

    That fake Vietnam veteran, Connecticut Senator dick Blumenthal says he won’t vote to confirm Neil Gorsuch because of some imagined “looming” constitutional crisis, according to Raw Story.

    “I am still angry about the treatment of [President Barack Obama’s nominee] Merrick Garland,” Blumenthal noted. “My Republican colleagues have said if the shoe were on the other foot, we would have done the same. It would have been as wrong if we had [refused to give Garland a hearing] as it was when they did.”

    “But my vote is not about Merrick Garland,” he continued. “It is about Neil Gorsuch and it is about the constitutional crisis that may well be looming as a potential threat to our democracy.”

    Blumenthal pointed out that FBI Director James Comey has testified that the agency is investigating ties between President Trump’s associates and the Russian interference in the U.S. elections.

    “The independence of our judicial branch has never been more threatened or more important,” the senator declared, citing impeachment proceedings against President Richard Nixon. “The possibility of a Supreme Court needing to enforce a subpoena against the president of the United States is far from idle speculation. It has happened before in United States vs. Nixon.”

    I’m not aware of any evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians to interfere in the US elections. I am, however, aware of emails that were made available to the public which made voters turn against the Democrats because of the conduct of candidates and members of their staff.

    I’d also consider calling oneself a Vietnam veteran when oneself never stepped outside the United States during the Vietnam War as interfering in an election or two. I guess when you can’t find a real reason to vote against a Supreme Court nominee, you can just make shit up – especially when you already have a reputation of being a worthless lying sack of shit.

  • Gorsuch nomination

    I was pretty shocked when President Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. Gorsuch seems to be the most qualified person to replace Antonin Scalia. From what I’ve read about him, Gorsuch seems to be a reasonable jurist who actually reads the law. Even USAToday‘s editorial board supports his confirmation;

    Gorsuch’s credentials are impeccable: Columbia, Harvard, Oxford, federal and Supreme Court clerkships and a decade on the federal appeals bench. He received a “well-qualified” rating, the highest available, from the American Bar Association. On principles and independence, he has gotten an array of glowing references, including from some Democrats and liberals. Extensive vetting has unearthed no hint of personal scandal.

    As for his judicial philosophy, the 49-year-old judge from Colorado would not be on our short list for the high court. While in the broad mainstream, he veers too close to the right bank for our taste, particularly on issues involving discrimination, government protection of the powerless and, presumably, reproductive rights. But he is no fire-breathing extremist.

    But, of course, the Democrats are massive crybabies. Led by hyper-whiner Chuck Schumer, who told NBC News that “Trump should gather with Senate Democrats and Republicans to “try to come up with a mainstream nominee.”” Translated that statement means that Democrats are still mad that Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, didn’t get the nod, so they’re going to stomp their feet and screech.

    Three Democrats have said they’ll cross the aisle to vote for Gorsuch’s confirmation; Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Joe Donnelly of Indiana and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota. Of course, Manchin has an election next year in a state that vote 65% for Trump last year, so we can probably get him to vote for anything these days.

    Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell claims that, one way or the other, Gorsuch will be confirmed this week.