Monthly Archives: 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?

Twelve More Agents

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The State Department has posted a transcript of their press conference by conference call from Tuesday a week ago (9 Oct).  Here are a couple of excerpts, beginning with the rough timeline of events (study it, the live description can get confusing, and perhaps I’ve over-excerpted it, but careful reading brings out the important parts).  The basic narrative is provided by Senior State Department Official Number One.  Heads up; this is a long post, even for me.

A few minutes later—we’re talking about 9 o’clock at night—the Ambassador retires to his room, the others are still at Building C, and the one agent in the [Tactical Operations Center].  At 9:40 p.m., the agent in the TOC and the agents in Building C hear loud noises coming from the front gate.  They also hear gunfire and an explosion.  The agent in the TOC looks at his cameras—these are cameras that have pictures of the perimeter—and the camera on the main gate reveals a large number of people—a large number of men, armed men, flowing into the compound.

…

They [two armed security agents responding to Building C]…encounter a large group of armed men between them and Building C. … The agents that encounter the armed group make a tactical decision to turn around and go back to their Building B and barricade themselves in there [ed note: this is no act of timidity.  Those two had tactically plausible means of penetrating that armed group].  So we have people in three locations right now.

And I neglected to mention—I should have mentioned from the top that the attackers, when they came through the gate, immediately torched the barracks.  It is aflame, the barracks that was occupied by the 17th February Brigade armed host country security team. I should also have mentioned that at the very first moment when the agent in the TOC seized  the people flowing through the gate, he immediately hits an alarm, and so there is a loud alarm.  He gets on the public address system as well, yelling, “Attack, attack.”  Having said that, the agents—the other agents had heard the noise and were already reacting.

…

All—Building C is—attackers penetrate in Building C.  They walk around inside the building into a living area, not the safe haven area.  The building is dark.  They look through the grill, they see nothing.  They try the grill, the locks on the grill; they can’t get through.  The agent is, in fact, watching them from the darkness.  He has his long gun trained on them and he is ready to shoot if they come any further.  They do not go any further.

They have jerry cans.  They have jerry cans full of diesel fuel that they’ve picked up at the entrance when they torched the barracks.  They have sprinkled the diesel fuel around.  They light the furniture in the living room—this big, puffy, Middle Eastern furniture.  They light it all on fire, and they have also lit part of the exterior of the building on fire.  At the same time, there are other attackers that have penetrated Building B.  The two agents in Building B are barricaded in an inner room there. The attackers circulate in Building B but do not get to the agents and eventually leave.

A third group of attackers tried to break into the TOC.  They pound away at the door, they throw themselves at the door, they kick the door, they really treat it pretty rough; they are unable to get in, and they withdraw.  Back in Building C, where the Ambassador is, the building is rapidly filling with smoke.  The attackers have exited.  The smoke is extremely thick.  It’s diesel smoke, and also, obviously, smoke from—fumes from the furniture that’s burning.

…

And I am sitting about three feet away from Senior Official Number Two, and the agent I talked to said he could not see that far away in the smoke and the darkness.

…

Okay. We’ve got the agent. He’s opening the—he is suffering severely from smoke inhalation at this point.  He can barely breathe.  He can barely see.  He’s got the grill open [to a bedroom window, through which the party has determined it must evacuate Building C] and he flops out of the window onto a little patio that’s been enclosed by sandbags.  He determines that he’s under fire, but he also looks back and sees he doesn’t have his two companions.  He goes back in to get them.  He can’t find them.  He goes in and out several times before smoke overcomes him completely, and he has to stagger up a small ladder to the roof of the building and collapse.  He collapses.

…

The other agents [in Building B and the TOC], at this time, can see that there is some smoke, or at least the agents in the TOC….

The agent in the TOC, who is in full gear, opens the door, throws a smoke grenade, which lands between the two buildings, to obscure what he is doing, and he moves to Building B, enters Building B.  He un-barricades the two agents that are in there, and the three of them emerge and head for Building C.  There are, however, plenty of bad guys and plenty of firing still on the compound, and they decide that the safest way for them to move is to go into an armored vehicle, which is parked right there.  They get into the armored vehicle and they drive to Building C.

…

[T]he special security team, the quick reaction security team from the other compound, arrive on this compound.  They came from what we call the annex.  With them—there are six of them—with them are about 16 members of the Libyan February 17th Brigade, the same militia that was—whose—some members of which were on our compound to begin with in the barracks.

As those guys attempt to secure a perimeter around Building C, they also move to the TOC, where one agent has been manning the phone.  I neglected to mention from the top that that agent from the top of this incident, or the very beginning of this incident, has been on the phone.  He had called the quick reaction security team, he had called the Libyan authorities, he had called the Embassy in Tripoli, and he had called Washington.  He had them all going to ask for help.  And he remained in the TOC.

So at this point in the evening, the members of the quick reaction team, some parts of it, go to the TOC with the Libyan 17th Brigade—17th February Brigade.  They get him out of the TOC.  He moves with them to join their colleagues outside of Building C.  All the agents at this point are suffering from smoke inhalation.

…

At this point, the quick reaction security team and the Libyans, especially the Libyan forces, are saying, “We cannot stay here.  It’s time to leave.  We’ve got to leave.  We can’t hold the perimeter.”  So at that point, they make the decision to evacuate the compound and to head for the annex.  The annex is about two kilometers away.  My agents pile into an armored vehicle with the body of Sean, and they exit the main gate.

…

[T]hey take fire almost as soon as they emerge from the compound.  They go a couple of—they go in one direction toward the annex.  They don’t like what they’re seeing ahead of them.  There are crowds.  There are groups of men.  They turn around and go the other direction. They don’t like what they’re seeing in that direction either.  They make another U-turn.  They’re going at a steady pace.  There is traffic in the roads around there.  This is in Benghazi, after all.  Now, they’re going at a steady pace and they’re trying not to attract too much attention, so they’re going maybe 15 miles an hour down the street.

They come up to a knot of men in an adjacent compound, and one of the men signals them to turn into that compound.  They agents at that point smell a rat, and they step on it.  They have taken some fire already.  At this point, they take very heavy fire as they go by this group of men.  They take direct fire from AK-47s from about two feet away.  The men also throw hand grenades or gelignite bombs under—at the vehicle and under it.  At this point, the armored vehicle is extremely heavily impacted, but it’s still holding.  There are two flat tires, but they’re still rolling. …

As the night goes on…[t]he reinforcements from Tripoli are at the compound—at the annex.  They take up their positions.  And somewhere around 5:45 in the morning—sorry, somewhere around 4 o’clock in the morning—I have my timeline wrong—somewhere around 4 o’clock in the morning the annex takes mortar fire.  It is precise and some of the mortar fire lands on the roof of the annex.  It immediately killed two security personnel that are there, severely wounds one of the agents that’s come from the compound.

At that point, a decision is made at the annex that they are going to have to evacuate the whole enterprise.

….

And there’s this question and answer at that presser:

Brad Klapper, AP: Hi, yes.  You described several incidents you had with groups of men, armed men.  What in all of these events that you’ve described led officials to believe for the first several days that this was prompted by protests against the video?

Senior State Department Official Two: That is a question that you would have to ask others. That was not our conclusion.  I’m not saying that we had a conclusion, but we outlined what happened.  The Ambassador walked guests out around 8:30 or so, there was no one on the street at approximately 9:40, then there was the noise and then we saw on the cameras the—a large number of armed men assaulting the compound.

I have a couple of questions that rise from this.  Keep in mind that this is what State knew in the hours after the terrorist attack on our Consulate in Benghazi, five days before our Ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, went on television and insisted this terrorism was just a spontaneous response to a YouTube movie short.  This was six days before Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama repeated the misinformation on his hustings.

First, who are we to believe—State, or a President and Vice President with vested interests in downplaying the magnitude of this foreign policy failure for their own re-election benefit and who have a history of lying to us on a broad range of subjects throughout their term?  But—doesn’t State do foreign policy, isn’t this their failure as much as the President’s?  Think about that, think about who’s in charge of the Executive Branch.

The other question is this: what would the dozen additional personnel that had been requested by the security leadership in-country and denied by State (State isn’t pure in this fiasco) been able to accomplish  had they been approved and sent those months prior?

Quite a lot, I think.  At minimum, I strongly believe that our Ambassador would be alive today, albeit likely with a different set of casualties, from the more active defense that large increase in numbers would have made possible.  They might have been enough to successfully resist the invasion; although this supposition is a lot more speculative.

Bearing on that second question is this exchange at the end of the presser.  The answer is both evasive and pertinent.

Shaun Waterman, Washington Times: Oh, hey. Okay. Thanks, man. So could—I mean, just in view of what you are now saying about the attack and the intensity of it and the numbers of people involved, what—can you say what kind of security presence might have been needed to repel an attack like that? I mean, what—I mean, if the criticism is there wasn’t enough security, how much would you have needed to protect the compound from this attack?

Senior State Department Official Number Two: It is difficult to answer hypothetical questions, but let me just put it this way. The lethality and the number of armed people is unprecedented. There had been no attacks like that anywhere in Libya—Tripoli, Benghazi, or elsewhere—in the time that we had been there. And so it is unprecedented. In fact, it would be very, very hard to find a precedent for an attack like that in recent diplomatic history.

 

h/t Power Line

Lies of the Democrats, Part 2

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This is Part 2 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.

In this post, I’ll mention a few more economic lies.

The Democrats insist that their “Stimulus” spending and their diversion of part of the TARP funding “saved the American automobile manufacturing industry,” the latter itself of questionable legality, given the legislated purpose of the TARP funding.

This is nonsense.  In fact, only two car companies were at risk out of the seven major car companies that comprised, and still comprise, the American automobile manufacturing industry.  Those seven?  In no particular order, they are Ford, Honda, Hyundai, Toyota, Nissan, GM, and Chrysler.  But wait, you say, Ford, GM, and Chrysler are the only American car manufacturers; the other four are foreign—and two of those three were threatened with bankruptcy.  How is saving those two not saving the American automobile manufacturing industry?

The fact is, none of those seven car manufacturers manufacture anything in the US, including the American three.  All seven of those companies do have major plant complexes in the US whose function is to produce cars for sale in the US.  That production, though, is limited to final assembly.  Every plant, for every car manufacturer, imports all of their cars’ parts—chassis, body panels, engines, batteries, even tires and wheels—from other countries: Mexico, Taiwan, the People’s Republic of China, India, wherever the costs of parts production is lowest.  Thus, every automobile manufacturer in that American industry is on an even footing with every other auto manufacturer: they all do final assembly (and only final assembly), of imported parts, in the US, for sale to American customers.  Those seven, not only the American three, are the American automobile manufacturing industry.

Now, of those two car companies that were saved, what was the nature of the rescue?  Normal bankruptcy procedures were bypassed, and the Obama administration forced senior creditors to the back of the line—the funds went first to the auto manufacturing unions (vis., the United Auto Workers and the Canadian Auto Workers Unions), while those senior creditors wound up getting nothing.  This stood bankruptcy law and order of precedence for creditors on their collective head.

And the bailout of the two American car companies went so well that one of them—Chrysler—is now an Italian car company.

Lies of the Democrats, Part 1

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Last week I concluded a series of posts on Lies of my President, the first post of which is here.  Starting this week, I’m running a series of posts identifying a number of lies from the Democratic Party and its supporters.  As with the first series, I’m not concerned with broken campaign promises.  Instead, I’m going to write about the outright lies that the Democrats and their supporters have made since Democratic Party Presidential Candidate Barack Obama took office, taking them in no particular order, but with some rough grouping by general topic.  With that, this is the first in a series of posts about the lies of the Democrats.

Last March, Democrats attacked Republican Party Vice Presidential Candidate Paul Ryan and his budget (proposed by Ryan in his capacity as Chairman of the House Committee on the Budget, passed by the House, and ignored by the Democrat-controlled Senate) as reneging on a bipartisan budget deal capping Federal expenditures.

Ryan’s budget set spending at $1.028 trillion, less than the agreed-with-Democrats (as part of the debt ceiling negotiations) cap of $1.047 trillion.  Senator Patty Murray (D, WA) accused “Republicans” of

reneging on a deal their own Speaker shook on less than eight months ago

to spend $1.047 trillion.  Never mind that the $1.047 trillion was, that prior August, an agreed cap on spending, not a floor or guaranteed amount.

She added to this, insisting that Republicans

are threatening families across America yet again with the prospect of a government shutdown.

This, too is a lie: the only ones talking about a government shutdown at the time were the Democrats.

Last April the Democrats demonstrated their dishonesty again, this time shamefully joined by some RINOs.  The Senate voted for cloture, 62-37, to take up a bill that would violate that August budget control act by increasing deficit spending to the tune of $34 billion for the Post Office.

Oh, wait—that’s roughly the difference between the agreed spending cap and the Ryan budget.