Monthly Archives: April 2013

Benghazi and Clinton

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From the House GOP Interim Progress Report…on the Terrorist Attacks in Benghazi Libya:

During 2012, in numerous communications with the State Department, officials from the U.S. Mission in Libya stress both the inadequacy of security as well as the need for additional personnel. Two critical cables warrant specific mention:

March 28, 2012, Ambassador Cretz sends a cable to Secretary Clinton requesting additional security assets.

April 19, 2012, the response cable from the Department of State to Embassy Tripoli, bearing Secretary Clinton’s signature, acknowledges Ambassador Cretz’s request for additional security but instead articulates a plan to scale back security assets for the U.S. Mission in Libya, including the Benghazi Mission.

In her testimony before Congress in January, Clinton said,

With specific security requests they didn’t come to me.  I had no knowledge of them.

It’s true enough that the boss’ signature is routinely added to correspondence that has been prepared by subordinates and then sent out.  This, of course, does not absolve the boss of responsibility for the content or outcome of that correspondence.  The addition of the boss’ signature is solely at the discretion of that boss.  Secretary of State Clinton had, to coin a phrase, constructive knowledge of her cable acknowledging the deteriorating security conditions at her Benghazi Consulate, and she ordered the continued withdrawal of security from that Consulate, anyway.  Furthermore, by her position and her decision to delegate the application of her signature to her correspondence, she had imputed knowledge of the situation and of her decision to proceed with her security drawdown.  She simply lied in her testimony before Congress.

The Interim Report can be seen here and here.

Remember this in 2016.

The President’s Powers of Persuasion

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Peter Nicholas and Kristina Peterson have an article on this in The Wall Street Journal.

Democratic strategists, lobbyists and some Capitol Hill aides see last week’s defeat of the gun-bill amendments as a worrisome sign that Mr Obama hasn’t found a way to bridge the partisan divide in Congress….

Except for the part about he hasn’t tried.  Instead, he’s worked hard to exacerbate a natural difference between the two parties.  He routinely insults and denigrates those who disagree with him: those bitter clingers to guns and religion, for instance.  His DHS, at the start of Obama’s administration characterizing returning veterans as right wing extremists.  During his sequester “negotiations” he said

[Republicans] will not collect a ransom in exchange for not crashing the American economy.

That they were not arguing for any such thing is beside the point.  And in response to his gun control legislation being defeated in his Democrat-controlled Senate,

The gun lobby and its allies willfully lied about the bill[.]

Nicholas and Peterson also write, rather naively in my opinion,

While the White House is renewing its outreach to lawmakers, including Republicans, some believe the overtures feel thin—driven by pressing legislative deadlines.

And they quote a carefully unnamed “White House official” as saying that Obama

has used every tool in his toolbox to try to advance his agenda. And that includes meeting with, talking with, dining with and negotiating with lawmakers of both parties[]

while carefully ignoring two things: this “outreach” has only begun in the last few months of his now five-year-old administration.  Up to now—and continuing coincident with this…outreach—he’s only been willing to talk about how evil Republicans are.

The other thing being ignored is Obama’s fundamental dishonesty: on “balanced” spending and tax reform, Obama got from the fiscal cliff negotiations $600 billion in tax increases and $60 billion in spending cuts.  Some balance.  His budget proposal extends this: he demands another trillion in tax increases in the name of “balance.”  The sequester, which he proposed and now denies proposing, would bring economic Armageddon according to the campaign he ran in lieu of actual negotiation—it didn’t.  This is coupled with Republican legislative proposals to give him the authority to spread the cuts according to his priorities and so lessen his predicted pain, but which he threatened to veto.  And there’s that dishonesty of calling those who disagree with him liars.

It’s no wonder his overtures “feel thin.”  They are; they’re for show only.  If Obama has used every tool in his toolbox, it’s because respect for the views of others, a willingness to negotiate or to compromise, are not tools in that box.

Taxes, Again

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The Tax Policy Center of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution has had time to go over President Barack Obama’s budget “proposal,” and they’ve

found that the budget plan would raise roughly $1.1 trillion over 10 years….

Their graph below illustrates from where those trillion dollars would come.

Notice that.  Those at the bottom of the economic totem pole—a strait contributed to in no small way by Obama’s rather cynical wealth redistribution policies—will see a larger drop in their take home pay from Obama’s tax increase than will his highly touted middle class.

So much for Obama’s promise of not raising taxes on those making less than $250k.  But that promise went by the boards long ago.

Then there’s the sin tax bump on tobacco:

The White House proposes raising the federal tax on a pack of cigarettes to $1.95 from $1.05.  It estimates this would raise $78 billion over 10 years, and it plans to use the proceeds for expanded preschool education.

The White House has defended the proposal by saying it would both discourage smoking and fund an education initiative that low-income families would benefit from the most.

But apparently the sin tax shouldn’t be used to deal with the health-related outcomes of this particular sin.  Never mind that “low-income families would benefit most” from this alternate use.  This is one of the contradictions inherent in Progressive attempts to use our tax code to achieve their social goals.

There’s more; RTWT.

2014 (and 2016) aren’t coming soon enough.

Some Remarks on Terrorism

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Congressman Tom Cotton (R, AR) had some on the House floor earlier this week.

I rise today to express grave doubts about the Obama Administration’s counterterrorism policies and programs.  Counterterrorism is often shrouded in secrecy, as it should be, so let us judge by the results.  In barely four years in office, five jihadists have reached their targets in the United States under Barack Obama: the Boston Marathon bomber, the underwear bomber, the Times Square Bomber, the Fort Hood shooter, and in my own state—the Little Rock recruiting office shooter.  In the over seven years after 9/11 under George W Bush, how many terrorists reached their target in the United States?  Zero!  We need to ask, “Why is the Obama Administration failing in its mission to stop terrorism before it reaches its targets in the United States?”

Indeed.

Now couple this with Obama’s decision on Thursday, through his Attorney General, Eric Holder, to intervene in an FBI terrorist investigation by marching a Federal Magistrate into the surviving Boston Marathon terrorist’s hospital room, mid-questioning by the FBI, to Mirandize that terrorist.  Which terminated the FBI’s questioning of the terrorist.

More Obama Sequester Games

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As The Wall Street Journal reports,

This week the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) began furloughing each of its air-traffic controllers for one day out of every 10 to achieve roughly $600 million in savings this fiscal year.  The White House dubiously claims that the furloughs are required by the sequester spending cuts enacted in 2011.

President Barack Obama’s hoped for result is

to force airline flight delays until enough travelers stuck on tarmacs browbeat enough Republicans to raise taxes again.

Once again, Obama is blowing smoke.  Leaving aside the fact that furloughing ATC Controllers is not the only way in which the FAA could have found the sequester-mandated pocket change savings (FAA Administer Michael Huerta’s “difficult choices” don’t include crossing his boss and making those savings elsewhere), the threatenedhoped forpredicted widespread delays don’t seem to be developing, as the FAA’s own Web site indicates, four days into the furlough program.