Daily Archives: 17 October 2012

Lies of the Democrats, Part 3

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This is Part 3 of my series on the lies told by Democrats during the present administration’s term in office.  As I said earlier, I’m not concerned with his broken campaign promises so much as I am with the dishonesty while in office.

Today, it’s the Democratic Party’s war on women, which they’re mischaracterizing and dishonestly attempting to attribute to the Republicans.  Last March, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee blast emailed these missives:

First we learned that Mitt Romney wanted to “get rid of” Planned Parenthood.

Now, there are news reports that Republicans in Congress will oppose re-authorizing the Violence Against Women Act.

…
Americans deserve to know that Mitt Romney and Republicans in Congress are willing to put women’s lives in danger

And this:

Here’s Mitt Romney’s proposal for reducing the deficit, according to an interview he gave yesterday:

“Planned Parenthood, we’re going to get rid of that.”

That’s right, he said he’d get rid of Planned Parenthood….

…

Mitt Romney’s actually willing to cut off women’s access to health care to help fund tax benefits for millionaires and billionaires.

They’ve continued in this vein, but those are the core.  Let’s look at some actual facts.

Regarding the VAWA, there’s this:

On March 12, 2012, the Judiciary Committee voted on the reauthorization of S1925, the Violence Against Women Act, introduced by Senator Leahy [D, VT].  [This time,] S1925 contained provisions that had never appeared in past authorizations of VAWA.

This Leahy version, though, contained a number of immigration amendments, wholly unrelated to violence against women, cynically inserted specifically to blow up the bill and score talking points for the coming campaign, or to backdoor Democratic Party immigration “reform” measures which the Congress already had explicitly rejected.  In a clear break from long-standing criminal law precedent, Leahy’s version also transferred criminal jurisdiction over non-Indian individuals on reservations to Indian Tribes, and it allowed the Tribes to expel non-Indians from their own privately held land.

Of course, with these poison pills in the bill—carefully inserted, as I said, for this election year—of course Republicans refused to swallow.  Indeed, Senator Chuck Grassley (R, IA) offered his own amendment, which essentially stripped the Leahy amendments and offered VAWA in its original, and intact, form.  Neither version actually made to the floor in Senator Harry Reid’s (D, NV) Senate for open debate and an actual vote.

On Planned Parenthood, there are two lies in that short email, and they’re even more obvious.  The first lie is that a President Romney will “get rid of” Planned Parenthood. No.  What Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney has proposed is that the Federal government has no business spending taxpayer dollars on Planned Parenthood, or any other women’s health counseling and aid organization—these are better left handled by the individual states for the needs of their specific citizenry.  The second lie is that “Mitt Romney’s actually willing to cut off women’s access to health care to help fund tax benefits for millionaires and billionaires.”  So removing Federal funding from Planned Parenthood is cutting off women’s access to health care.  How amusing.  How Democratic.

Our Computers, Our National Security

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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 Iranian effort culminated in a series of recent attacks against US banks as well as electronic assaults this year on energy companies in the Persian Gulf.  The attacks bore “signatures” that allowed US investigators to trace them to the Iranian government, [US government] officials said.

Here are some of the battles waged in this war since the start of the year:

  • January 2012: Potent but smaller-scale denial-of-service attacks against US banks
  • July 2012: Cyberattack at Saudi Arabian Oil Co. unleashes a virus called ‘Shamoon,’ destroying data on 30,000 computers
  • August 2012: Cyberattack at Rasgas, a Qatari natural gas company, disabled websites and email system
  • September 2012: A group called “Qassam Cyber Fighters” announced plans for cyberattacks on US banks.  Powerful denial of service strikes hit Bank of America Corp, JP Morgan Chase & Co., US Bancorp, PNC Financial Services Corp. and Wells Fargo & Co
  • October 2012: The Qassam Cyber Fighters issued announcements, followed by cyber strikes, involving other US banks, slowing or interrupting consumer websites

A “senior defense official” said,

They have been going after everyone—financial services, Wall Street.  Is there a cyberwar going on?  It depends on how you define “war.”

How very Clintonesque of him.

My own speculation is that these relatively small attacks are just probes, both to test us and to test Iran’s developing cybersystems.

How well prepared are we to defeat a serious, concerted cyberattack, and how well prepared are we to go over to the offense and crush our attacker?  Apparently not very well.  Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said this:

An aggressor nation or extremist group could gain control of critical switches and derail passenger trains, or trains loaded with lethal chemicals.
They could contaminate the water supply in major cities, or shut down the power grid across large parts of the country.
The most destructive scenarios involve cyber actors launching several attacks on our critical infrastructure at once, in combination with a physical attack on our country.  Attackers could also seek to disable or degrade critical military systems and communications networks.
The collective result of these kinds of attacks could be “cyber Pearl Harbor:” an attack that would cause physical destruction and loss of life, paralyze and shock the nation[.]

Panetta says the US is putting in place systems to defeat such cyberattacks, but I have to ask: how does that work in the face of Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama’s trillion dollar cuts to our defense establishment from the combination of his spending cuts for Defense and his sequestration of further Defense funds scheduled for the turn of the year?