Governor Mario Cuomo (D, NY) has demanded we “end the madness now” and surrender control of our firearms to government.
No one hunts with an assault rifle. No one needs 10 bullets to kill a deer.
The tragic events of just the last few weeks in Newtown, CT, and West Webster, NY, have indelibly taught us guns can cut down small children, firefighters, and policemen in a moment[.]
A couple of things about this.
China recently announced guidelines, effective January 1, for its maritime “police” to board and seize foreign vessels in waters around the Paracel Islands, which are also claimed by Vietnam.
And
Chinese fishing boats ha[ve] cut the cables of [Vietnam’s] seismic survey ship last week.
And
Philippines Foreign Minister Albert del Rosario revealed…that China had communicated its intention to station ships permanently at the Scarborough Shoal….
Never mind that the Republic of the Philippines, with the support of international law, claims this area.
Indeed, the PRC claims, with a straight face, fully two-thirds of the South China Sea as its sovereign territory.
Fox News had this little tidbit buried in an article about a related matter—the fact that we knew who one of the Benghazi terrorists was in time to have him detained in mid-escape at a Turkish airport, and we let him get away. The tidbit is this:
[T]he two Predator drones deployed over Benghazi the night of the attack were both unarmed. The first Predator was redirected from Darnah in eastern Libya, where Al Qaeda has active training camps that the US military has been watching for some time…. It arrived in Benghazi about an hour after the attack began, suggesting the first hour of the attack was not fed back to officials in Washington.
It’s important to note that the last two Americans to die in the terrorist attack on our Benghazi consulate weren’t killed until several hours after the attack started. Gary Bernsten, retired CIA officer, had this on our real-time response to the attack (i.e., while our State Department officials were listening to the attack-in-progress*) and this administration’s decision to take no meaningful response during the several hours it was going in:
You find a way to make this happen. There isn’t a plan for every single engagement. Sometimes you have to be able to make adjustments. They made zero adjustments; they just stood and they watched, and our people died.
First it was Russia and the People’s Republic of China. Now it’s…Iran? How far behind are we falling in cyberspace, the core of a modern society? Now we’re hearing from The Wall Street Journal that Iran has been conducting an active cyberwar against us for some months. (Notice that: we didn’t hear about this war voluntarily from our government, but from a newspaper which had to tease it out of our government.)
Iranian hackers with government ties have mounted cyberattacks against American targets in recent months, escalating a low-grade cyberwar[.]
The Wall Street Journal confirmed what’s been widely predicted: the Governor of the People’s Republic of China’s central bank has announced he won’t attend this month’s annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund because it’s being hosted by Japan. Instead, the PRC will be represented by Zhou Xiaochuan’s seconds, neither of whom will have the authority—or the contacts or trust—necessary to conclude any substantive agreements. Not that the PRC is interested.
The PRC’s cancellation is just an escalation of its protest over another territorial dispute: Japan refuses to acknowledge that its Senkaku Islands in the southern part of the East China Sea belong to the PRC. Eswar Prasad, late of the IMF with the PRC portfolio and now with the Brookings Institution, has the right of it:
…this time against the White House’s computers.
White House sources partly confirmed an alarming report that US government computers were breached by Chinese hackers.
“This was a spear phishing attack against an unclassified network,” a White House official told FoxNews.com.
Spear phishing consists of attempts directed at specific individuals. Sure enough, “This [White House Communications Agency] guy opened an email he wasn’t supposed to open,” according to a law enforcement official investigating the attack.
Most likely, this was a preliminary, probing attack, in preparation for a later, more fully developed assault. Or a demonstration of things to come if we don’t step back.
President Obama, speaking before the VFW the other day, had some interesting words to say about defense, and cuts to our defense capability that are looming. Naturally, I have a few words to say about what he said.
People in Congress ought to be able to come together and agree on a plan, a balanced approach that reduces the deficit and keeps our military strong[.]
President Obama finds it offensive that anyone would accuse him of leaking classified information for personal political gain.
The notion that my White House would purposely release national security information is offensive[.]
Of course it is. And President Nixon had some remarks along these lines, too.
Yet here is a partial list of the White House’s leaks:
An “advocacy group” calling its self, not at all pretentiously, Global Zero, has begun arguing that the US only needs 900 nuclear weapons: 450 deployed and another 450 “stored.”
The group also wants the reductions to occur over the next ten years
with Russia in unison through reciprocal presidential directives, negotiated in another round of bilateral arms reduction talks, or implemented unilaterally.
and the reductions should include
a de-alerted operational posture requiring 24-72 hours to generate the capacity for offensive nuclear strikes, thereby relieving the intense pressure on nuclear decision-making that currently exists[.]