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Saturday, February 2, 2013
Humor: Secretary of Altered States
Americans to Washington: Don’t tread on me
----- Original Message -----
Americans to Washington: Don’t tread on me
By Aaron Blake ,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2013/02/01/americans-to-washington-dont-tread-on-me/
Americans have a very special message for the federal government: Don’t tread on me.
That’s the takeaway from a new poll from the Pew Research Center in which, for the first time in at least the last two decades, a majority of Americans say Washington actually poses a threat to their “personal rights and freedoms.”
And it’s not just tea party supporters, Republicans and gun owners.
Nearly two-fifths of Democrats (38 percent) say the government is a threat to them personally, as do 45 percent of non-gun owners.
Overall, the percentage of Americans who view the federal government as a threat has increased from 36 percent in May 1995 to 53 percent today. It rose late in the 1990s and then dropped again after 9/11, down to 30 percent.
Today, most Americans now feel at least somewhat scared of what the government could do to them, and 31 percent see Washington as a “major threat.”
This is an important piece of data to keep in mind as Congress debates new gun legislation. While polls show broad support for expanding background checks and limiting the manufacture and sale of certain types of so-called assault weapons, the flip side of that is that many Americans are wary of their government going too far in restricting their constitutional rights — be it on guns or anything else.
And if gun rights supporters can convince the public (and members of Congress) that the legislation creates a too-powerful federal government that impinges on people’s rights and freedoms, they may help reverse their early deficit in the polls.
The American public is very receptive to such a message.
Friday, February 1, 2013
Live-streamed report on EMP catastrophic threat
This is WND printer-friendly version of the article which follows.
To view this item online, visit
http://www.wnd.com/2013/01/see-live-streamed-report-on-emp-catastrophic-threat/
WASHINGTON – Even a tinpot dictator with access to a missile and a crude nuclear device could bring the U.S. to its knees, causing a multitude of deaths and shoving the nation back into the 19th century.
The threat of an Electromagnetic Pulse, or EMP, will be the topic when “A Nation Forsaken” author F. Michael Maloof speaks Feb. 5 at noon at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C.
WNDTV will live-stream his presentation on the EMP threat to the nation’s energy grid
Maloof also will address the federal government’s inaction in preparing for the threat, which could come from either a natural solar flare or an enemy’s crude nuclear device.
Sign up for the live-stream now.
Maloof’s “A Nation Forsaken – EMP: The Escalating Threat of an American Catastrophe” covers the issue in detail.
Maloof, a former senior security policy analyst in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and senior writer for WND, will discuss how leading scientists and other experts have warned for years that the nation’s electrical grid system and other critical infrastructures are vulnerable.
Yet, policymakers continue to delay taking preventative action against what could be the biggest threat to U.S. national and economic security in a lifetime.
In “A Nation Forsaken” Maloof breaks down the threat.
A few years ago, a congressional commission raised questions about the consequences to the nation’s electricity-dependent infrastructures. Not only would the power grid itself be threatened, but also telecommunications, the banking and finance system, the transportation system that delivers food and water and the fuel needed for homes as well as the military systems that maintain national security.
Congress, however, essentially has ignored its own commission report, wasting valuable time in confronting the threat.
Maloof will argue in his talk that while an EMP event on civilian infrastructure could be serious, it can be managed if government at the federal, state and local levels gives appropriate priority to preventative action. 
The event – at the Heritage Foundation’s Lehrman Auditorium at 214 Massachusetts Avenue, N.E. – is open to the general public along with being live-streamed by WNDTV.
Maloof has almost 30 years of federal service in the U.S. Defense Department and as a specialized trainer for border guards and Special Forces in countries of the Caucasus and Central Asia.
While with the Department of Defense, Maloof was director of technology security operations. He headed a 10-person team that halted the diversion of militarily critical technologies to countries of national security and proliferation concern and sponsors of terrorism.
His office was the liaison to the intelligence and enforcement community within the secretary of defense’s office in halting transfers and using cases that developed from them as early warnings to policy-makers.
Following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the United States, Maloof was detailed back to report directly to the undersecretary of defense for policy to prepare analysis of worldwide terrorist networks, determine their linkages worldwide and their relationship to state sponsors.
Maloof notes that the sun is entering a period of maximum solar flares, of which several significant events already have been reported. The other threat would be from a nuclear explosion in the atmosphere over the U.S., an event experts fear even a Third World dictator might accomplish given access to a military missile and a nuclear bomb.
Here’s the documentation of the danger: “A Nation Forsaken – EMP: The Escalating Threat of an American Catastrophe.”
Hillary's Little Helpers
Hillary’s Little Helpers
The late Christopher Hitchens was one of Hillary Clinton’s most bullish critics. When Clinton was nominated to be secretary of state, he noted a chasm of opinion: “It still divides us,” he said on Hardball, “as between those of us who think that a job must be found for Hillary Clinton, that the country would be somehow disgraced if she wasn’t in an important position, and those of us who could do without her.”
Hitchens’ main concern was that Clinton would use her leverage as secretary of state to benefit foreign friends and cronies. He was vindicated the next year when James Riady, the Indonesian businessman who’d been barred from the United States for illegal contributions to Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign, mysteriously obtained a waiver and returned to Arkansas. Say what you will about the Clintons, they don’t waste any time.
But Hitchens’ first point, that fealty to Hillary would divide us, was also prescient. That divide still exists today, albeit in a different form. In one camp are those who believe that Hillary should be judged on her merits and held accountable when necessary. In the other are those who admire her to the point of deification, who believe her critics are beneath her, and who scramble the fighter jets every time someone gives her a sour look.
After more than 20 years in the public eye, Clinton still has one of the most dedicated fan bases in American politics. And after she testified on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, they started fawning.
Clinton was “professional and authoritative for hours in the witness chair,” declared the New York Times. She “stood up to the raging bulls with grace and fire of her own,” gushed Joan Walsh. She “served up a potent brew of righteous outrage,” breathed Dana Milbank.
She was “steely but sometimes emotional” who began “with restraint” before she “choked up.” But her “anger boiled over” when she was questioned by the “rookie” and “intellectually underwhelming” Sen. Ron Johnson, along with other “unimpressive” critics who “don’t quite measure up to her and never will.” They like “nothing more than beating a dead horse” and revealed a “stature gap between Clinton and these possible 2016 rivals.”
Mercifully, Clinton “disarmed her critics,” including Sen. Rand Paul who “wasn’t intimidating but funny” and was “not worth wasting her breath.” She wore a “heavy green jacket, dark pants, and thick jacket.” At one point, she “wav[ed] her index finger.”
Oh, and her questioners were “angry men.” Angry white men, in fact. That alone should disqualify them from criticizing her.
Reading those quotes, it’s hard to escape the feeling of being vacuumed through a black hole into another solar system. Were these people watching the same hearing? Was another Hillary Clinton testifying before another Senate Foreign Relations Committee yesterday? Why are the walls starting to pulse and breathe?
Clinton was there to answer questions about an attack that left four Americans dead, embarrassed the United States, resulted in the dissemination of false information, destroyed the life of a now-imprisoned filmmaker, involved a suspicious cover-up of information, and called into question the Obama Administration’s ability to respond to foreign attacks.
She offered no answers, dodged questions, and blamed others. She claimed ignorance over cables from one of the most important ambassadors in the Middle East. She contradicted her own assistant secretary of state in blaming Republicans for security cuts. She stammered over America’s role in shipping weapons from Turkey to Libya. And when asked about the cause of the deadly attack, she shouted, “What difference, at this point, does it make?”
It was a shameless and unenlightening performance. And yet the press is obsessing over her theatrics and wardrobe choices. Anyone who disagrees is just, to dust off the 1990s term, a Clinton hater.
In fact, the opposite is true. Clinton’s Republican critics spent untold hours praising her. Sen. Marco Rubio was uncharacteristically cautious. Sen. John McCain, despite seeming angry, barreled through his questions and allowed Hillary to ignore them. There was no outbreak of Clinton hatred at the hearings. Instead there were skeptics trying, often feebly, to get answers.
But there was an outbreak of Clinton love among her supporters. What mattered wasn’t her substance or honesty, but the fact that she looked awesome. Her fans never seemed to consider that this attack was a failure of government and it was her responsibility to provide answers.
Then again, there’s a lot her fans never seem to consider. From Hillary lying about being attacked by snipers in Bosnia, to justifying remaining in the 2008 race by citing Bobby Kennedy’s assassination; from her involvement in her husband’s despicable pardon of Marc Rich and commutation of Puerto Rican terrorists, to her central role in Travelgate, commodities trading, and the numerous other scandals of the 1990s: none of it ever makes a dent in the Hillary love-fest. Her acolytes are unshakeable.
A colleague and I were talking about the Kennedys the other day, and we were both pondering how a political family with so many moral failings still had such star-struck fans. Hillary benefits from a similar phenomenon. Her fan club is smaller than the Kennedys, and more centralized in Washington. But it’s just as devout, and just as impervious to inconvenient facts.
It’s unhealthy to lionize any politician. But the Hillary love has become a matter of faith, and it’s time for her admirers to shake the spell. She needs to answer questions about Benghazi and her Republican critics have every right to hold her accountable.
Photo: UPI
Newtown Calls for Armed School Officers
Newtown School Shooting
27 killed, including 20 children, in the second deadliest school shooting in U.S. history
Newtown Calls for Armed School Officers
By George Colli
The Newtown Board of Education wants more armed police officers in the town's four elementary schools after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary.
Last night, they decided to ask the town to approve the request to include one additional full-time Newtown police at each of the elementary schools in next year's budget.
Members of the board will meet today with state and federal officials about obtaining additional funding for security.
“Our parents are demanding of us that things are made safe and secure and certain measures are put in place,” Chairwoman Debbie Leidlein said. “So we’re being very thoughtful.”
Several police officers have been stationed at all Newtown schools since the Dec. 14 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary, where 20 children and six staff members were killed.
Those officers will remain at the school through the remainder of the school year, but the budget for the next fiscal year funds only resource officers at middle and high schools.
Parents said security means more than a police presence.
“My main concern is with accessibility to these school, said Neil Johnson, a parent of two Newtown students. “On December 14th, that was the main bare-boned reason that occurred.”
“After what happened in our community, I just think we should go over and above and provide a shining example for the rest of the world and protect our kids,” said resident Donna Lorenz.
President Obama's "Queeg Moment"
His Queeg Moment
By Hal G.P. Colebatch on 1.29.13 @ 6:07AM
A perspective on our president from Down Under.
In Herman Wouk’s classic World War II novel, The Caine Mutiny, there is a moment when a group of the ship’s officers are getting away from the increasingly eccentric Captain Queeq by relaxing ashore.
Suddenly the malcontent Lieutenant Keefer asks the others: “Does it occur to you that Captain Queeg may be insane?
In fact Queeg is not insane, at least not at that time. He is simply grappling, more and more disastrously, with a job too big for him. Come the crisis of a typhoon, he becomes paralyzed and nearly sinks the ship by failing to give the obvious orders. At the subsequent court-martial he appears quite normal until he breaks down under the pressure of cross-examination. Before this, the officers have searched the regulations for guidance, but the regulations refer only to a captain who is clearly and unmistakably insane, not one who is merely guilty of eccentricity and bad judgment. At a lower level of responsibility, Queeg might have performed adequately, but with Keefer’s question, the remaining respect for Queeg’s office has gone.
Obama’s second inauguration speech may be his Queeg moment — an undeniable demonstration that, in an emergency, he is incapable of grappling with reality. For all his unceasing invocation of the word “change,” the outstanding thing about Obama has been his apparent inability to react, even to an imminent crisis. Like Queeg, he stands frozen on the bridge as the waves grow higher, or obsesses over issues like homosexuals and women in the military as the typhoon rises.
Faced with the worst looming fiscal cliff-fall in world history Obama, like Queeg in the typhoon, has done nothing at all, but has, increasingly, resorted to meaningless words. His pseudo-Keynesian fiscal notions and a mantra-like repetition of old and failed ideas, suggest a serious lack on mental versatility.
Economics is not an exact science, but some of its rules are now well-known, and one is that a government cannot spend its way out of a recession.
Yet Obama does not project any sense of urgency, merely a smug, radiating sense of his own greatness. The one fiscal measure to which he seems committed — taxing the rich — is infantile stuff, like Queeg’s obsession with who ate the wardroom strawberries. Any first-year politics or economics student knows that there are not enough rich, even in as wealthy a country as the United States, to have raising their taxes make any appreciable difference. President Reagan’s application of the Laffer Curve proved emphatically, and only a short while ago, that the way to both stimulate the economy and to increase government revenues is to lower taxes. And it is not hard to pick some areas as least where towering taxes would make no appreciable difference to public infrastructure.
Like Queeg, Obama shows an inability to change course when such a change is desperately needed. Giving 20 F-16 fighters and hundred of tanks to Egypt was never, in my opinion, a clever idea. Even when Egypt was an unequivocal friend its security required things like armored cars to put down street violence, not these hi-tech weapons whose only conceivable use would be against Israel. Indeed, Obama seems to show no awareness that Egypt and other major Islamic countries have changed from being friends to something like enemies in a few months. For a President of the United States there is a difference between making a bad policy choice and clinging to that policy when it is plainly completely wrong, like the Cainesteaming in a circle and cutting its own tow-line. Mistakes that cannot be ignored are always someone else’s fault (refer George Bush).
The dancing is still there, the golf, the celebs, the multi-million dollar holidays, but behind them it is possible to detect a desperate emptiness, a interconnected mosaic of failure. The one much-boasted triumph, the killing of Osama Bin Laden, was the work of other men. One of those most responsible, Dr. Shakil Afridi, rots in the hellhole of a Pakistani jail, abandoned. Obama’s oath to bring the Benghazi murderers to justice seems to have been forgotten as soon as it was made, something — I am not sure if there is a word for it — actually below the level of a campaign promise. Allies have been lost or slighted in almost every part of the world, the Afghan war has brought the U..S and NATO humiliation and Russia and China lead in Space. The defenses of the U.S.’s major allies, such as Britain, are in an even more dire situation. This does not even consider the exploding levels of domestic poverty. Restoring flexibility to the wage system, so as to give American industry a reasonable degree of competitiveness, seems out of the question.
The Western position in Mali seems to have suddenly collapsed without warning, or without preventative action being taken, and meanwhile, we have had the North Korean threat. I somehow doubt we would have had that if Reagan had been at the helm. What, exactly have things come to when a cockroach of a country, apparently run by real, certifiable lunatics, can threaten the United States with nuclear weapons? The typhoon waves are starting to break over the bridge.
Photo: UPI
Why we SHOULD upset the Germans - by reminding them of their Great War atrocities
"Moulding the Great War to suit contemporary sympathies is not just a case of historical inaccuracy. It is setting a dangerous precedent.For once you start allowing everyone on all sides to be winners, losers and victims as they see fit, then they will make the most of it".
Why we SHOULD upset the Germans - by reminding them of their Great War atrocities
PUBLISHED:| UPDATED:
Oh dear. I think we can already see how this one is going to play out: mud, futility of war, lions led by donkeys, a bit of poetry, a nod to the nurses and the munitions girls and a solemn conclusion that it must ‘never be allowed to happen again’.
As we approach the centenary of the Great War, we must strenuously avoid acknowledging that it actually achieved anything, let alone that we were vaguely on the side of right. For that would commit two sins.
First, it might upset the Germans. Second, it might suggest that there was actually a point to all that slaughter.
And that would never do.
Don't mention the V word: As we approach the centenary of the Great War, it seems we must strenuously avoid acknowledging that it actually achieved anything, let alone that we were vaguely on the side of right
‘There is an intent in government not to upset the Germans.’ So says a senior source on the Government’s centenary advisory committee, talking to the Sunday Times.
As usual, then, the villains will be those blimpish British generals and the hard-faced arms manufacturers.
Certainly, when I called yesterday, the Department of Culture (supervising the £50 million anniversary) was happy to confirm that the main focus of next year’s centenary is to be remembrance.
As for history? Well that seems to be secondary. But let no one mention the V word.
Indeed, you can scan the official blurb about the centenary and the word ‘victory’ is barely mentioned.
No one ‘won’ this war, is the subliminal message. It just stopped because everyone had had enough.
Little wonder some military historians on the committee are hopping.
‘For much of Europe, including Britain in 1918, Germany was a militarist and imperialist regime which had to be defeated and from that point of view, the victory is a serious victory,’ says Brigadier Sir Hew Strachan, Oxford University’s Chichele Professor of War History.
If the centenary is simply going to reassert the usual message that it was just a colossal waste of human life, he says, then it would be ‘sterile, a waste of both effort and resources’.
The Commonwealth cemeteries across France and Belgium are immaculately kept, and it is always profoundly moving to see the wreaths and messages left by those for whom this conflict is still personal and raw
Now, every child is taught, rightly, about the carnage on the Western Front. And the passage of time has done nothing to diminish our gratitude and respect for those who died. Indeed, visitor numbers to Great War cemeteries and Remembrance Sunday events are on the increase.
I have made numerous visits to those immaculately preserved Commonwealth cemeteries across France and Belgium and it is always profoundly moving to see the wreaths and messages left by those for whom this conflict is still personal and raw.
But now that the last of the veterans has passed away and a substantial anniversary looms, might it not also be time to look at the Great War in historical terms? Apparently not.
So, come August 2014, I doubt that we will hear much about the German massacres of August 1914 which appalled the world.
I doubt we will hear of Belgian towns like Dinant where hundreds of civilians, many women and children, were systematically gunned down by German forces marching through. Maurice Betemps and Nelly Pollet were both 11 months old. Like Gilda Genon, 18 months, and Gilda Marchot, aged two, they were shot in the arms of their mothers.
Brigadier Sir Hew Strachan said that 'Germany was a militarist and imperialist regime which had to be defeated' and so 'the victory is a serious victory'
No doubt, their deaths will be bracketed as ‘Allied propaganda’, along with those lurid tales of Germans bayonetting babies and roasting prisoners.
There’s the inconvenient fact that these names do not appear in some jingoistic pamphlet but in a U.S. state department report. But let us move on.
When it comes to the deployment of poison gas, of attacks on civilian shipping, of genocide on disobliging colonies and of general brutish expansionist aggression, it seems that the official line will be: ‘We were all guilty’.
Well, at the risk of sounding like Basil Fawlty — or the boy baffled by the Emperor’s new clothes, let me pose a quick thought: who started it?
This is not about gloating. It’s not about jingoism.
It’s about asking whether this epochal loss of life was completely devoid of cause and purpose.
And it’s about reapportioning a spot of blame, too. The modish Blackadder school of thought is now so entrenched among a generation of schoolchildren that there is no question where blame lies: with those horrid toff generals and their Establishment chums.
These students are more likely to know that Field Marshal Douglas Haig was ‘bad’ than that Germany introduced large-scale poison gas attacks in Ypres in 1915 or began the practice of sinking civilian ships.
Few will have any idea that the German fondness for ‘blitzing’ British civilian populations began in 1915, too — first by naval bombardment, then by Zeppelin and then biplane bomber.
It’s easier, of course, to read stories about rats and trench foot and poppies than to study the Schlieffen Plan and learn that Germany had been plotting its conquest of Europe and invasion of neutral countries like Holland and Belgium for years.
If it is pointed out that imperial Germany treated subjugated colonies like Namibia abominably, it will doubtless be suggested the British Empire was no better.
Except Britain, for all its imperial faults, did not set about wiping entire tribes off the face of the earth — as imperial Germany did with the Herero and other ethnic groups.
Our soldiers: Now that the last of the veterans has passed away and a substantial anniversary looms, might it not also be time to look at the Great War in historical terms?
Remembrance: Might not the families of the fallen actually like to know whether there was something more between 1914 and 1918 than futility and poems?
Thus far, the official committee, chaired by Culture Secretary Maria Miller, has singled out four key events for commemoration: the start of the war, the Battle of the Somme, the inconclusive maritime showdown at the Battle of Jutland and the end of the war.
But experts at the British Commission for Military History are arguing that it would be absurd to overlook the Battle of Amiens in August 1918.
General Erich Ludendorff called it: ‘the black day of the German army’.
From an Allied perspective, it was the day that the seemingly eternal horror of trench warfare was finally cracked. But it’s not on the list.
As the commission’s president, Major-General Mungo Melvin, put it this weekend: ‘We don’t want to be triumphalist about it [but] to ignore this is like looking at the Second World War and ignoring the battles of Stalingrad and El Alamein.’
There lies the problem.
Maria Miller has singled out four key events for commemoration: the start of the war, the Battle of the Somme, the inconclusive maritime showdown at the Battle of Jutland and the end of the war
Everyone is terrified of being called ‘triumphalist’ or, worse still, ‘jingoistic’.
There is a notion that it is somehow insulting to the millions who died to suggest that it wasn’t all a monstrous waste of blood. And, again, there’s the suggestion that it will offend people in Germany.
Yet might not the families of the fallen actually like to know whether there was something more between 1914 and 1918 than futility and poems?
And do modern Germans need to be shielded from 100-year-old home truths?
In the process, there is no need to overlook British atrocities, such as the summary execution of survivors from a sunken U-boat in 1915.
Many will want to revisit the executions of hundreds of shell-shocked British troops charged with ‘cowardice’. There will be no shortage of home-grown critics looking for cracks in the Tommy Atkins myth.
But for Heaven’s sake, let us not have a re-run of New Labour’s pathetic 2005 attempts to mark the bicentenary of the Battle of Trafalgar with a ‘blue fleet’ and a ‘red fleet’ — so as to avoid offending the French.
The French — who refuse to acknowledge Trafalgar as much of a battle anyway — thought the whole thing hilarious.
Moulding the Great War to suit contemporary sympathies is not just a case of historical inaccuracy. It is setting a dangerous precedent.
For once you start allowing everyone on all sides to be winners, losers and victims as they see fit, then they will make the most of it.
Just look at the way Argentina is rewriting the Falklands saga to suggest that Britain was the imperialist bad guy all along.
We might scoff and point to the 1982 invasion of the islands by a fascist junta. But Argentina’s victim narrative is taking root across South America.
Who knows? Give it long enough and we may find that we actually lost the Great War after all.
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