Category Archives: morality

Leak Hypocrisy

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Recall the zeal with which President Barack Obama’s DoJ is attacking leakers, to the point of a broad-band raid on AP reporters’ and editors’ (with its collateral raid on Congressmen) telephone records and an accusation of a specific reporter having criminal culpability in order to get a search warrant to obtain his personal emails (with its collateral raid on the reporter’s parents’ email).

A (draft) Defense Inspector General report on ex-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta’s leaks had some interesting things to say.

The first instance [of a leak] was a July 15, 2011, interview of the Pentagon’s top intelligence official, Michael Vickers, by the [Osama bin Laden raid] film’s director, Kathryn Bigelow, and screenwriter Mark Boal.  In that session Vickers gave them the name of a special operations planner whose identity was supposed to be protected from public release.

And

The second instance was a June 24, 2011, awards ceremony at CIA headquarters in which Panetta identified the ground commander of the SEALs raid, with Boal in attendance.  The report did not say whether Panetta knew Boal was present.

Of course Panetta knew, though.  Such gatherings at such a level in the government hierarchy are highly prestigious, if nothing else; additionally, the permissions/invites to attend are tightly controlled.  And what was a Hollywood screenwriter doing in a classified gathering, as this one had to be, with classified information like SEAL team identities being bandied about?

The IG report said the ground commander’s name was supposed to be protected from public release, under federal law.

Panetta then gave up the Pakistani doctor’s identity in a January ’12 60 Minutes interview:

[Afridi] was an individual, in fact that helped provide intelligence, that was very helpful in regards to this operation….

As a result of this report, Pakistan’s version of the 9/11 Commission concluded that the doctor was acting as an American agent.

Many of the SEAL team members have since been killed, and the Pakistani doctor is now in a Pakistani jail.

Where’s the administration’s hue and cry over these leaks?  Or is it that when the SecDef does it, it’s not illegal?

A Bit of Climate

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What’s up with this?  Is it getting warmer?  Well, yes, maybe, depending on the time scale and the baseline of comparison.  It’s warmer today than during the last Ice Age.  It’s warmer today than during the Little Ice Age of some 3-4 hundred years ago and that ended around 1 hundred years ago.  It’s hard to say, though, how today’s temperature compares with the Medieval Warm Period of some 1,000 years ago, since data sets like NASA’s have been falsified to plus up the claimed warming of today.  We aren’t warmer than we were a decade and a half ago.

The claims of warming and of disastrous continued warming get their force in large part from climate models—more than 70 of them—all of which have been predicting warming rates ranging from worrisome to disastrous.  There’s nothing like actual observation, empirical data, to see what’s up, though.  Anthony Watts, of Watts Up With That, has reprinted a graph from Dr Roy Spencer [“doctor” from his PhD in Meteorology, and currently Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama] that compares the year-by-year predictions of those models with satellite and balloon observational data.  The graph has been adjusted by Spencer to produce an artificial agreement between the models and reality in 1979, and then lets the predictions and the empirical data flow from there.

The squares and circles represent the satellite and balloon, respectively, actual observations; the various lines the predictions of the models; and the heavy black line the simple average of the models.  For the climate-worriers’ concerns of the dangerous effects of a 1.5ºC increase in temperature, the overstatement of the models compared to reality of nearly 1ºC lends incredulity to their claims.

Hmm….

A Death Panel Overruled

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A Death Panel of One, consisting of the woman who’ll be in charge of the death panel that will come into being with the full implementation of Obamacare.  HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius refused to intervene to overrule her own Department’s rule that would have left a 10-year-old girl to die because her chronological age left her too young to be eligible to compete for a lung transplant that could save her life.

Sebelius insisted she had no authority to waive the rule and so to allow the girl to compete with adults for an organ donor’s lung, never minding that the Congress that authorized her Department to have the rule assured her she did.

Sebelius insisted she didn’t want to play God and tear-jerkingly assured the House Committee on Education and the Workforce that she “can’t imagine anything more difficult” and that she “can’t imagine anything worse than one individual getting to pick who lives and who dies” while cynically ignoring the fact that by refusing to act, she was taking the “difficult” step of choosing “who lives and who dies.”

This Death Panel of One further justified her refusal by claiming

[T]there are about 40 seriously ill Pennsylvanians over the age of 12 also waiting for a lung transplant[.]

Never mind that the girl is at the top of the children’s list, so the other children’s status wouldn’t be affected, except through a slight improvement in their chances for getting a pediatric lung.  And that the girl wouldn’t go to the top of the adult’s list as a result of the rule’s waiver—she’d only be eligible to compete for a place in the list.

Fortunately, Federal District Judge Michael Baylson has overruled the Death Panel of One, at least temporarily, ordering Sebelius to waive the rule at least until 14 June, when he’ll have a full hearing on the rule.

But this is temporary, both for the 10-year-old and for Americans generally.  This is the sort of thing we can expect out of Obamacare’s more formal Death Panel, and too few Americans will have the resources to fight that one’s…decisions.

It Doesn’t Get Much More Naked Than This

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Recall Connecticut’s recently passed extensive gun ban law, a bill passed in the emotional aftermath of the Newtown shootings.  Essentially, it banned firearms the State’s government has defined as “assault” weapons.

Last Monday, the legislature “tweaked” that bill to “clear up confusion;” Governor Dannel Malloy (D) is expected to sign it.  One of the tweaks cleared up confusion surrounding the legal possession of these weapons that had been on order before the original legislation was signed into law but not received until after enactment.  Such firearms can now be legally possessed.

It’s another tweak that’s of interest here, though: this one expanded the list of those who can legally acquire these “assault” weapons, now that the gun ban law has been enacted:

  • sworn and certified officers at the department of motor vehicles
  • the chief state’s attorney office
  • the department of energy and environmental protection
  • some constables with police certification

Additionally, the tweak

  • exempts [the above] officers from the certificate requirement for long gun ownership
  • allows them to [retain their “assault”] weapons and large capacity magazines after their service ends by registering them.

Notice that: the citizenry are being denied the ability to possess weapons adequate for their own purposes (an inalienable right and a right acknowledged by the 2nd Amendment), but a broadened list of government officials is granted the ability to possess “assault” weapons.

State Senator Joe Markley (R) is on the right track, but he was a lone voice in the Connecticut wilderness:

I think if we acknowledge that we are putting law enforcement officers at risk by limiting their ability to defend themselves [thus, the allowed expansion of weapons possessions], I think we have to acknowledge that we’re putting homeowners at risk by limiting their ability to defend themselves.

Now why would a government seek to disarm the citizenry while expanding its own arsenal?

Hmm….

The Left’s Racism

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…is getting ever more blatant.

Karen Carter Peterson, Chairman of the Louisiana Democratic Party and Louisiana State Senator, had this to say last week about the ongoing opposition to Obamacare:

I have talked to so many members both in the House and the Senate, and you know what?  You ready?  You ready?  What it comes down to?  It’s not about how many federal dollars we can receive, it’s not about that.  You ready?  It’s about race.  I know nobody wants to talk about that.  It’s about the race of this African-American president.

It’s not possible, you see, to criticize a policy when its proponent is black—that must be racism.  It’s not possible to criticize the man who constantly proposes such policies when the man is black.  That must be a racist criticism.

Peterson then defended her remarks:

To be clear, I didn’t call any person “racist.”  Rather, I was simply relaying the truth about conversations I’ve had with my colleagues and the factors they considered on the expansion of Medicaid.

Saying a criticism is only about race isn’t to say the criticism is racist.  No, not at all.

This from the Party of Jim Crow.