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MARCH 25,  2015

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – at 11:55 P.M. ET: 

MYSTERY – The mystery of yesterday's plane crash in the French Alps, which killed 150 people, continues to deepen.  We now learn that one of the plane's two pilots was actually outside the cockpit as the plane began its fatal descent, and could not get back in.  Reports say that the cockpit voice recorder picked up sounds of this pilot trying to knock the door down to re-enter the cockpit.  This development has forced investigators to consider the possibility that foul play of some kind was at fault.

SAUDI MILITARY ACTION – When was the last time we saw the Saudi military in action?  From Fox:  "Saudi Arabia launched airstrikes against the Houthi rebels in Yemen early Friday, one day after the U.S.-backed Yemeni president was driven out of the country.  President Obama has authorized the provision of logistical and intelligence support to the military operations, National Security Council spokesperson Bernadette Meehan said late Wednesday night. She added that while U.S. forces were not taking direct military action in Yemen, Washington was establishing a Joint Planning Cell with Saudi Arabia to coordinate U.S. military and intelligence support."  Looks like the usual half-hearted Obama effort.  You can't win battles entirely from the air.  Notice, however, how many Mideast countries are in flames on Obama's watch, and we're not doing well in any of them.

RICE CAKES – Today's announcement that Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who was released by the Taliban in exchange for five of the most dangerous prisoners we held at Guantanamo, will be tried for desertion, brings to mind events surrounding his release.  Field Marshal Obama held a photo op on the White House lawn, with Bergdahl's rather weird mother and father.  Daddy spoke in Pashto, the Taliban language.  And serial liar Susan Rice was sent out to tell TV interviewers that Bergdahl "served the United States with honor and distinction."  You'll recall that Rice was also shipped to TV studios after Benghazi to assure us that the whole episode was caused by a YouTube video.  It is rumored that Rice chopped down a cherry tree last week and said, "I cannot tell a lie.  Bush did it."

CRIMINAL JUSTICE NEWS – From The Smoking Gun:  "A jury today found a Michigan woman guilty of firing a shot into a McDonald’s drive-thru window after employees failed to put bacon on a cheeseburger she ordered.  Shaneka Monique Torres, 30, was convicted of a felony firearms charge after only an hour of deliberations by the panel. Torres faces a minimum of two years in state prison when she is sentenced next month."  From what I hear, prison cheeseburgers are very good, especially if you order them cooked.

March 25, 2015       Permalink

FOURTEEN YEARS AFTER 9/11; PATHETIC – AT 10:46 A.M. ET:  A new, authoritative, report tells us that the FBI is not ready to fight terrorism in the United States.  From The New York Times: 

WASHINGTON — The F.B.I. urgently needs to improve its intelligence capabilities and hire more linguists to counter the rapidly evolving threats to the United States, according to a report released on Wednesday that examined the bureau’s progress since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The report by the F.B.I. 9/11 Review Commission said that the bureau had made great strides in its intelligence collection and sharing, but that its ability to gain information from people and to analyze it lags “behind marked advances in law enforcement capabilities.”

“This imbalance needs urgently to be addressed to meet growing and increasingly complex national security threats, from adaptive and increasingly tech-savvy terrorists, more brazen computer hackers, and more technically capable, global cyber syndicates,” the report said.

The F.B.I. has enough linguists in its large offices, but they are in “short supply” throughout the rest of the country. Often, linguists use a virtual system to communicate remotely with agents and analysts working on cases.

“Hiring additional linguists and integrating them should be a high priority,” the report said.

The review commission was created by Congress in 2014 to assess the bureau’s progress since the attacks. In particular, the panel examined how the F.B.I. put the put into effect the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, which released its report in 2004.

“Many of the findings and recommendations in this report will not be new to the F.B.I.,” the report said. “The bureau is already taking steps to address them. In 2015, however, the F.B.I. faces an increasingly complicated and dangerous global threat environment that will demand an accelerated commitment to reform. Everything is moving faster.”

COMMENT:  It is very easy to fall behind.  We are all familiar with the cliché about armies that are fighting the last war.

Hiring linguists is critical.  It is also problematical.  Intelligence and law-enforcement agencies have found that not all "linguists" can be trusted.  They are often from the very countries or cultures that we are fighting, and being assured of their loyalty is not easy.  A linguist can change a word here, a phrase there, and mislead an agency without the agency suspecting a thing.

Oh, but it doesn't matter, does it?  The war on terror is over.  I know, because Sherlock Obama told me.

March 25, 2015        Permalink

ANOTHER FAMOUS VICTORY – AT 10:21 A.M. ET:   Ah, let us praise the strategy of Field Marshal of the United States, including depressed neighborhoods in Chicago, Barack Obama.  Why, the man has victory written all over him.  Or maybe it's something else.  From Fox: 

SANAA, Yemen – Yemen's embattled president fled his palace in Aden for an undisclosed location Wednesday as Shiite rebels offered cash bounty for his capture and arrested his defense minister.

President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi left just hours after the rebels' own television station said they seized an air base where U.S. troops and Europeans advised the country in its fight against Al Qaeda militants. That air base is only 60 kilometers (35 miles) away from Aden, the port city where Hadi had established a temporary capital.

Witnesses said they saw a convoy of presidential vehicles Wednesday leaving Hadi's palace, located at the top of a hill in Aden overlooking the Arabian Sea.

Presidential officials said Hadi was in an operations room overseeing his forces' response. They declined to say where that facility was located. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity as they weren't authorized to brief journalists.

The advance of the Shiite rebels, known as Houthis, threatens to plunge the Arab world's poorest country into a civil war that could draw in its Gulf neighbors. Already, Hadi has asked the United Nations to authorize a foreign military intervention in the country.

COMMENT:  Obama shows little interest.  He's far more interested in making campaign trips around the country to boost his domestic agenda.

Compare our situation in the Mideast to the day Obama took office.  The situation wasn't perfect, but we had allies, the surge in Iraq had worked, our alliance with Egypt and Israel was strong.  Today the Mideast is in flames, we are losing everywhere, and the president's main target isn't Al Qaeda, but the freely elected government of Israel and the pro-American government of Egypt.

Change we can believe in.

March 25, 2015        Permalink

ANOTHER STUNNER – AT 9:22 A.M. ET:  We have been warned repeatedly that, as Iran gets closer and closer to nuclear weapons, other nations in the Mideast will seek their own nuclear programs as a precaution.  Now consider this, from the Jerusalem Post:   

The Jordanian government is set to sign a nuclear agreement with Russia later this month in order to build its first nuclear power plant, Jordanian media reported.

Russian state-owned Rosatom will build two nuclear power plants and the spent nuclear fuel could be sent back to Russia, which is what made the Russian offer attractive, said Khaled Toukan, chairman of the Jordan Atomic Energy Agency, Jordan’s Petra news agency reported Saturday.

Toukan said Rosatom agreed to supply the plant with nuclear fuel for 10 years for the station, which has an operational life of 60 years.

After 10 years, Jordan can choose another supplier.

Rosatom will be responsible for 49 percent of the plant’s $10 billion construction and operation costs while the Kingdom will maintain 51%.

Earlier this month, The Korea Herald reported that the leaders of Saudi Arabia and South Korea agreed to cooperate to build more than two small and medium-size nuclear reactors in projects worth as much as $2b.

COMMENT:  These are legitimate energy projects, but the knowledge gained, and facilities built, could be used to begin weapons programs.

Oh, by the way, notice that the United States isn't getting any of this business.  Yet, Jordan and Saudi Arabia are American allies.  I'd love to know the story behind that.  But, bottom line, it may well be true that the predictions of a Middle East nuclear arms race will be accurate.

Obama, though, will be out of office by then, probably campaigning to be secretary-general of the UN, and bashing his own country.

March 25, 2015        Permalink

APPALLING – AT 8:55 A.M. ET:  Obama does it again.  At the same time that he's bashing Israel, our closest ally in the Mideast, the great and powerful Oz, or Obama, is showing utter contempt for America's most important alliance.  From ace reporter Josh Rogin at Bloomberg: 

President Barack Obama has yet to meet with the new head of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and won't see Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg this week, even though he is in Washington for three days. Stoltenberg’s office requested a meeting with Obama well in advance of the visit, but never heard anything from the White House, two sources close to the NATO chief told me.

If only Stoltenberg was a rap star with a name like Jens Baby, he'd be at the White House in a minute.

The leaders of almost all the other 28 NATO member countries have made time for Stoltenberg since he took over the world's largest military alliance in October. Stoltenberg, twice the prime minister of Norway, met Monday with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper in Ottawa to discuss the threat of the Islamic State and the crisis in Ukraine, two issues near the top of Obama's agenda.

Kurt Volker, who served as the U.S. permanent representative to NATO under both President George W. Bush and Obama, said the president broke a long tradition. “The Bush administration held a firm line that if the NATO secretary general came to town, he would be seen by the president ... so as not to diminish his stature or authority,” he told me.

In other words, Obama broke protocol.  Didn't he accuse Netanyahu of that recently when Bibi addressed Congress?

America's commitment to defend its NATO allies is its biggest treaty obligation, said Volker, adding that European security is at its most perilous moment since the Cold War. Russia has moved troops and weapons into eastern Ukraine, annexed Crimea, placed nuclear-capable missiles in striking distance of NATO allies, flown strategic-bomber mock runs in the North Atlantic, practiced attack approaches on the UK and Sweden, and this week threatened to aim nuclear missiles at Denmark’s warships.

“It is hard for me to believe that the president of the United States has not found the time to meet with the current secretary general of NATO given the magnitude of what this implies, and the responsibilities of his office,” Volker said.

Bernadette Meehan, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, declined to say why Obama didn’t respond to Stoltenberg’s request. “We don’t have any meetings to announce at this time,” she told me in a statement. Sources told me that Stoltenberg was able to arrange a last-minute meeting with Defense Secretary Ashton Carter.

According to White House press releases, Obama didn’t exactly have a packed schedule. On Tuesday, he held important meetings and a press conference with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani at the White House (Ghani will meet with Stoltenberg while they are both in town). But the only event on Obama’s public schedule for Wednesday is a short speech to kick off a meeting related to the Affordable Care Act. On Thursday, he will head to Alabama to give a speech about the economy.

COMMENT:  Obama is the man the Free World depends on.  There must be genuine fear in the foreign ministries of many European countries as they contemplate their own fate in the time of Hussein Obama.

March 25,  2015     Permalink

MARCH 24,  2015

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – at 11:52 P.M. ET: 

LAPDOGS – From Breitbart:  "On Monday evening, mainstream media reporters reportedly gave Hillary Clinton a standing ovation after she joked about her private email scandal and took no questions from the press–at an event honoring excellence in journalism.  According to a National Journal report, Clinton took no questions after her 20-minute speech in Washington, D.C., which prompted the Washington Post‘s Dan Balz, who won this year’s Robin Toner award for excellence in political reporting, to reportedly make Clinton an offer: 'I am happy to yield my time back to you if you want to take some questions.'  Time reported that 'Clinton received a standing ovation' anyway 'from the journalist-heavy crowd.'"  I fear that we may see a repeat of the press performance we saw in 2008. 

CORRUPTION WATCH – From WaPo:  "Not long before he became governor of Virginia, Democrat Terry McAuliffe received special treatment on behalf of his electric-car company from a top official at the Department of Homeland Security, according to a new report from the department’s inspector general.  McAuliffe was among several politically powerful individuals from both parties, including Sen. Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), seeking special visas for foreign investors through a program administered by the department. But intervention on behalf of McAuliffe’s GreenTech Automotive company by Alejandro Mayorkas, now the department’s No. 2 official, 'was unprecedented,' according to the report."  McAuliffe is a Clinton retainer.  As Virginia governor, he can help Hillary move to the White House.  But if there's a cloud hanging over him, maybe not.

WHAT RECOVERY? – From Business Insider:  "Nearly half of American households don't save any of their money.  If it it isn't obvious, this has a broad range of implications. People who don't save won't have any buffer should the economy turn and they lose their jobs. Longer term, people who don't save won't have the capacity to retire.  It's not good."  No it's not, and it's a sign of a weak economy, where wages haven't grown.  But that's okay.  Our kids'll pay for it.

HE'LL BE BACK – From AP:  "PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — Former U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. will be released from a federal prison on Thursday and will serve out the remainder of his term in a Washington, D.C., halfway house, former U.S. Rep. Patrick Kennedy told The Associated Press after visiting Jackson.
Kennedy said he spoke with Jackson at the minimum security federal prison camp in Montgomery, Alabama, where the son of the civil rights leader has been serving a 2 ½-year sentence after pleading guilty to illegally spending $750,000 in campaign funds on personal items.  Jackson, an Illinois Democrat, began the sentence on Nov. 1, 2013."  I have no doubt that Jackson, a symbol of racial and Chicago politics, will be back in Congress as soon as the backroom boys can bump someone else out of the job.

March 24,  2015     Permalink

QUOTE OF THE DAY – AT 10:18 A.M. ET:  Thomas Sowell is a brave African-American writer who gets plenty of grief for telling the truth.  This is one of the best things he's written recently.  From Townhall.com: 

Hillary Clinton became an iconic figure by feeding the media and the left the kind of rhetoric they love. Barack Obama did the same and became president. Neither had any concrete accomplishments besides rhetoric beforehand, and both have had the opposite of accomplishments after taking office.

They have something else in common. They attract the votes of those people who vote for demographic symbolism -- "the first black president" to be followed by "the first woman president" -- and neither to be criticized, lest you be denounced for racism or sexism.

It is staggering that there are sane adults who can vote for someone to be President of the United States as if they are in school, just voting for "most popular boy" or "most popular girl" -- or, worse yet, voting for someone who will give them free stuff.

Whoever holds that office makes decisions involving the life and death of Americans and -- especially if Iran gets a nuclear arsenal -- the life and death of this nation. It took just two nuclear bombs -- neither of them as powerful as those available today -- to get a very tough nation like Japan to surrender.

Anyone familiar with World War II battles in the Pacific knows that it was not unusual for 90 percent of the Japanese troops defending Iwo Jima or other islands to fight to the death, even after it was clear that American troops had them beaten.

When people like that surrender after two nuclear bombs, do not imagine that today's soft Americans -- led by the likes of Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton -- will fight on after New York and Chicago have been reduced to radioactive ashes.

Meanwhile, ISIS and other terrorists are giving us a free demonstration of what surrender would mean. But perhaps we can kick the can down the road, and leave that as a legacy to our children and grandchildren, along with the national debt.

COMMENT:  The word "crisis" is substantially overused in the press.  We seem to have a crisis every minute.  But if there's one crisis we definitely face today it's the breathtaking immaturity that has come over this land.  We treat college students like babies, and they demand to be treated that way.  As Tom Sowell notes, we elect major officeholders as if they're running in a school election. 

And our president behaves like a petulant child.

We have growing up to do.  Electing Hillary Clinton will not help matters.

March 24, 2015       Permalink

BRILLIANT – AT 9:52 A.M. ET:  The distinguished commentator, Myron Magnet, has written one of the best pieces I've read on what we can learn from history about dealing with Iran.  This is really required reading, and provides some real gems.  From City Journal: 

For all their differences, President Barack Obama uncannily resembles his Democratic predecessor, President Jimmy Carter, in his stiff-necked, self-righteous inability to listen to others or to learn from experience or history. Against ferocious opposition at home and abroad, he is about to repeat the grievous mistake of appeasing Iran that Carter made over three decades ago and do even more geopolitical damage than the hapless peanut farmer wreaked in 1979.

Recall the history. On February 1, 1979, two weeks after the cancer-ridden Shah of Iran left his country in the hands of a caretaker as he wandered the world in search of treatment, his fanatical opponent, Islamist cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, returned from his 14-year Parisian exile and within a week had engineered the overthrow of the shah’s feeble substitute and installed his own puppet regime. Not only did Iran’s Islamists hail the ayatollah’s return; Carter’s United Nations ambassador, the painfully naïve Andrew Young, lauding Islam as “a vibrant cultural force in today’s world,” prophesied that the ayatollah himself—with ferocious indignation flashing from his eyes and bristling from his beard under his sharia-chic turban—would prove “somewhat of a saint.” On February 15, the saintly imam began murdering Iran’s officer corps, and on April Fool’s Day, which he called “the first day of a government of God,” he declared his nation an Islamic republic. In mid-May, the U.S. Senate condemned Iran’s systematic slaughter of its officers, a rebuke Iran met by recalling its ambassador from Washington. By July, mullahs began publicly taking control of the government.

Read the whole thing.  It's worth it, and contains examples from Churchill.  Magnet concludes this way:

So now President Obama wants to make an agreement that will ensure that Iran can produce an atom bomb essentially overnight. He has not seen fit to explain his reasoning to the American people, and it is hard to imagine what it might be. But all I can think of is Churchill’s rebuke to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain when he returned from his infamous appeasement of Hitler in Munch in 1938. “You were given the choice between war and dishonor,” Churchill thundered in Parliament. “You chose dishonor, and you will have war.” Certainly President Obama is choosing dishonor. What kind of war he might unleash, the world watches with dread.

COMMENT:  Many Americans do understand what's happening.  They just don't know what to do.

March 24, 2015       Permalink

US COUNTERINTELIGENCE STRATEGY COLLAPSING – AT 9:32 A.M. ET:  Julie Pace, an AP reporter I trust, tells it bluntly as Yemen descends into anarchy.  From AP: 

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Once hailed by President Barack Obama as a model for fighting extremism, the U.S. counterterrorism strategy in Yemen has all but collapsed as the country descends into chaos, according to U.S. and Yemeni officials.

Operations against militants have been scaled back dramatically amid the fall of the American-backed government and the evacuation of U.S. personnel. What had been consistent pressure on Yemen's dangerous al-Qaida affiliate has been relieved, the officials say, and a safe haven exists for the development of an offshoot of the Islamic State group.

It's a swift and striking transformation for an anti-terror campaign Obama heralded just six months ago as the template for efforts to fight the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. The shift has left Obama open to criticism that he failed to anticipate the risks of a light footprint strategy that aims to put fragile governments and beleaguered local security forces, not the U.S. military, at the forefront.

Barbara Bodine, a former U.S. ambassador to Yemen, said even the most optimistic regional experts did not share Obama's view that the Yemen campaign was a model of success.

"It was being defined in terms of what we were doing to develop local forces and use drones and counter the immediate and real security threat," said Bodine, now director of the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University. "But what we hadn't done, certainly had not done visibly enough, was get at the economic and governance issues that were driving the problem."

COMMENT:  Proof once again, as if we needed it, that Obama is running a student government, not a real government. 

March 24, 2015       Permalink

HUGE SCANDAL – ISRAEL GAVE IRAN INFORMATION TO CONGRESS!! – POSSIBLE END OF THE WORLD – AT 9:18 A.M. ET:  I am shocked, shocked, to find out that espionage is going on.  Not only that.  Israel stands accused of giving information to the rotten, miserable, right-wing, pro-American fascists in the Capitol Building!  From Hot Air: 

As it turns out, the speech by Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu wasn’t the communication to Congress that got the Obama administration most upset. Today’s Wall Street Journal reveals in a report from Adam Entous that Israel’s intelligence service had penetrated the talks with Iran, both through human intelligence and signals intelligence. That allowed Israel to make an international case against the emerging deal in an attempt to derail Barack Obama’s desperate desire to reach a rapprochement with Tehran.

And even that didn’t generate the most ire in the White House. No, that came when Israel had the temerity and the nerve to inform a group considered by the Obama administration as a dangerous gathering of subversives … right down Pennsylvania Avenue from the West Wing (via T. Becket Adams and Sonny Bunch):

The spying operation was part of a broader campaign by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to penetrate the negotiations and then help build a case against the emerging terms of the deal, current and former U.S. officials said. In addition to eavesdropping, Israel acquired information from confidential U.S. briefings, informants and diplomatic contacts in Europe, the officials said.

The espionage didn’t upset the White House as much as Israel’s sharing of inside information with U.S. lawmakers and others to drain support from a high-stakes deal intended to limit Iran’s nuclear program, current and former officials said.

“It is one thing for the U.S. and Israel to spy on each other. It is another thing for Israel to steal U.S. secrets and play them back to U.S. legislators to undermine U.S. diplomacy,” said a senior U.S. official briefed on the matter.

It is? As Entous notes, it’s hardly a secret that countries spy on each other, even allies, despite all the pearl-clutching that took place regarding Angela Merkel’s cell phone a while back. Countries use intelligence services for their own national security, and sometimes that means checking up on allies — especially when those allies seem intent on cutting deals with one’s own mortal enemy. The White House only found out about the penetration through the US’ own intel-gathering efforts on Israel, as it turns out.

COMMENT:  I think Congress ought to give Israel the Congressional Gold Medal for keeping the members so well informed, with information withheld by the White House. 

I'm not completely convinced, by the way, that Israel penetrated American communications.   Other reports this morning say that European nations have kept Israel far better briefed about the Iran talks than has Washington.  Also, Israel is known to have substantial intelligence assets inside Iran. 

But the hilarity here is that the White House is so upset that Congress is getting information on a matter that may well involve the lives of millions of Americans.

March 24,  2015     Permalink