I was new to America during the Carter Administration and not really cognizant of the former Georgia governor’s blunders as president, though I used to hear quite a bit of belly-aching about them from the big, bad Wolf (my beloved hubby). The consensus among conservatives I knew then seemed to be that a president couldn’t get any worse than Carter was, though in hindsight, I think they were a little premature along that line. But then, they had never heard of Barack Obama, either. For that matter, neither had Barack Obama, at least in the context we now know him.

Every time I think the present administration has outdone itself where idiocy, too-far-leftism or simply complete failure to embrace reality is concerned, I read something like…

From the Washington Times:

Why did the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) let criminals buy firearms, smuggle them across the Mexican border and deliver them into the hands of vicious drug cartels? The ATF claims it launched its now-disgraced Operation Fast and Furious in 2009 to catch the “big fish.” Fast and Furious was designed to stem the “Iron River” flowing from American gun stores into the cartels’ arsenals. The bureau says it allowed gun smuggling so it could track the firearms and arrest the cartel members downstream. Not true.

During the course of Operation Fast and Furious, about 2,000 weapons moved from U.S. gun stores to Mexican drug cartels - exactly as intended.

In congressional testimony, William Newell, former ATF special agent in charge of the Phoenix Field Division, testified that the Internal Revenue Service, Drug Enforcement Administration and Immigration and Customs Enforcement were “full partners” in Operation Fast and Furious. Mr. Newell’s list left out the most important player: the CIA. According to a CIA insider, the agency had a strong hand in creating, orchestrating and exploiting Operation Fast and Furious.

Wasn’t it only a couple of decades ago that the liberals in media and government were attacking the CIA for taking what one might term “initiative” in their pursuit of projecting U.S. policy? Well, now an extremely liberal administration may be using what Wolf smilingly calls Christians In Action to intercede, albeit only semi-directly, in the internal political affairs of another country.

If, that is, this report is correct.

The CIA’s motive is clear enough: The U.S. government is afraid the Los Zetas drug cartel will mount a successful coup d’etat against the government of Felipe Calderon.

Founded by ex-Mexican special forces, the Zetas already control huge swaths of Mexican territory. They have the organization, arms and money needed to take over the entire country.

Former CIA pilot Robert Plumlee and former CIA operative and DEA Director Phil Jordan recently said the brutally efficient Mexican drug cartel has stockpiled thousands of weapons to disrupt and influence Mexico’s national elections in 2012. There’s a very real chance the Zetas cartel could subvert the political process completely, as it has throughout the regions it controls.

In an effort to prevent a Los Zetas takeover, Uncle Sam has gotten into bed with the rival Sinaloa cartel, which has close ties to the Mexican military. Recent court filings by former Sinaloa cartel member Jesus Vicente Zambada Niebla, currently in U.S. custody, reveal that the United States allowed the Sinaloas to fly a 747 cargo plane packed with cocaine into American airspace - unmolested.

The CIA made sure the trade wasn’t one-way. It persuaded the ATF to create Operation Fast and Furious - a “no strings attached” variation of the agency’s previous firearms sting. By design, the ATF operation armed the Mexican government’s preferred cartel on the street level near the American border, where the Zetas are most active.

Operation Fast and Furious may not have been the only way the CIA helped put lethal weapons into the hands of the Sinaloa cartel and its allies, but it certainly was an effective strategy. If drug thugs hadn’t murdered Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry with an ATF- provided weapon, who knows how many thousands more guns would have crossed the U.S. border?

This is beginning to sound more and more like the kind of thing the Democrats are always accusing Republican administrations of being up to, from Watergate to Contragate.

The ATF has never been an “approved agency” in our household, nor has the BATFE Gestapo been an object of respect or admiration here at Hard Astarboard. I wonder why…

To be sure, Operation Fast and Furious suited the ATF’s needs. It was all too willing to let guns walk to increase its power, prestige and budget in Washington. It actively recruited so-called straw purchasers and happily used American gun dealers as pawns. And it was only one agency in a mosaic of federal agencies helping the CIA actualize its covert plans.

The article in its entirety is here.

…couldn’t blame George W. Bush enough for the federal response to Katrina, expending so much hot air that one has to wonder if perhaps that’s where they discovered what they thought was evidence of global warming, yet here we learn that Osama Ooops, sorry, Mohammed Damn! Sorry again, wait, I got it…Saddam Whoops, okay, B. Hussein Obama, Janet Napolitano and their Khoir of Kommunism aren’t even bothering to adequately fund and staff what is arguably the most effective (when staffed and funded to the point of operational status) search & rescue/ maritime emergency response organization in this nation.

I’m talking about the U.S. Coast Guard.

The Coast Guard’s plans to cut 1,100 uniformed personnel in 2011 and reduce some of its missions at a time it must respond to an enormous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico certainly highlight the stark choices Coasties face over the next few years. Meanwhile, the Navy is moving into the littoral and increasing its focus on anti-drug and anti-piracy operations, raising questions about just what the Coastie’s future roles and missions will be. Robbin Laird, a defense consultant who has been working on Coast Guard issues, penned the following commentary about the Coast Guard and its future.

The Coast Guard is being starved of resources just when the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico seems to demonstrate again just how important the service’s expertise is in responding to such events.

The Obama administration is not fully funding for catastrophic spill equipment for the Coast Guard. And with elimination of the Coast Guard’s national strike fleet coordination center at Elizabeth City, North Carolina next year, the nation will lose a vital organization that manages all Coast Guard responses, and is also the key player for inter-agency coordination and leadership of scores of state and local, commercial and NGO responders.

Those groups play vital roles in preventing and responding to spills. Success requires the authorities possessed by the Coast Guard, highly competent people to run it and adequate equipment. The Coast Guard is the only maritime organization that can do these jobs on the vital waterways of our country and it does not have enough assets to do the job in the Gulf of Mexico, where a BP oil rig exploded last week, killing 11 and creating an enormous oil spill that threatens the Gulf Coast.

As a senior Coast Guard official commented in a New Orleans interview 10 days before the explosion that “we have not enough inspectors and inadequate numbers of ships and helos to secure the emerging deep water oil enterprise being built off of the Gulf Coast. This enterprise will be further and deeper than the current offshore oil drilling.

These facilitates will not only drill oil, but will process oil at sea. We must go further than we normally do to regulate and work with the private sector in this area.”

The Coast Guard has worked within its limits to deal with the crisis. The Department of Homeland Security’s leadership has not responded to the crisis by trying to get the USCG more deployed assets. Instead, the Administration has deployed Navy assets and has scurried to find private inspectors they can hire on a temporary basis to deal with the crisis.

The men and women of the Coast Guard are highly capable, brave and dedicated people, but like most services, they need to be properly equipped and their units realistically manned in order to do their job.

At this rate, it’ll be late January, 2013 before our government has its priorities straight!

…seems to have arisen, involving, among others, our good friends the TSA.

Federal security workers are now free to snoop through more than just your undergarments and luggage at the airport. Thanks to a recent series of federal court decisions, the digital belongings of international fliers are now open for inspection. This includes reading the saved e-mails on your laptop, scanning the address book on your iPhone or BlackBerry and closely scrutinizing your digital vacation snapshots.

Unlike the more common confiscations of dangerous Evian bottles and fingernail clippers, these searches are not being done in the name of safety. The digital seizures instead are part of a disturbing trend of federal agencies using legal gimmicks to sidestep Fourth Amendment constitutional protections. This became clear in an April 8 court ruling that found admissible the evidence obtained by officials who had peeped at a passenger’s laptop files at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston.

According to court documents, FBI agents had identified an individual suspected of downloading child pornography on an Internet chat room. The G-men, however, did not want to take their evidence before a judge to obtain a search warrant, as the Constitution requires. Instead, they flagged the suspect’s passport and asked officials at the Department of Homeland Security to seize and search his computer at the airport - without a warrant. Three incriminating images were found during the examination, but this case is not about whether a particular person is a scumbag. It’s about abusing a principle that applies to all Americans.

Well, with all the rhetoric that came out of B. Hussein Obama and the rest of the Democrats in their malevolent attacks criticisms of the Bush Administration in regard to what they termed callous invasions of the privacy of U.S. citizens (monitoring of certain suspect international telephone communications and accessing bank accounts believed to be part of terrorism financing networks), this one sure is a shocker, isn’t it?

I’ve heard the accusations that the “Bushies” were using the War on Terror as an excuse to allow Uncle Sam’s nose into our personal business, according to the political left, keeping an eye on how much our nine year olds have accumulated in their savings accounts and keeping track of whom we were taking out for dinner and a show on Friday night, but this one’s a taker of the proverbial cake!

The fun part is that Obama and his henchpersons do worse without even a grimace that they are doing exactly what they purported not long ago to be anathema to any semblance of decent humanity.

Can you say, “hypocrisy”?

Actually, coming from the leadership of the Obamanation, seeing how much more marxist-like and anti-Constitution they have proven themselves in the last 15 months, I would have to say that they are acting well within the parameters of their established character.

It’s interesting to note, however, that though 99.99999% of today’s terrorist threats come from Muslims of Southwest Asian and Middle Eastern decent, every increasingly oppressive anti-terrorism screening measure they take targets everyone but Muslims of aforementioned descents.

Obama philosophy: When the best odds on preventing a terrorist act can be found in the profiling of Muslims, we must make every effort to avoid profiling Muslims.

The Fourth Amendment guarantees the right of Americans to be “secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects” from unreasonable and unwarranted government intrusion. It is obvious that this right is meant to apply equally to papers that happen to be stored in digital form on a personal hard drive. Such protections do not disappear merely because one happens to be at a real - or imaginary - border.

Because the courts have been derelict in their duty to uphold this fundamental right, it is up to Congress to prohibit the thinly veiled attempts to create Constitution-free zones where Americans find their privacy invaded.

…of the ObamaCare vote, which at this point seems to be one of the few things that stand between what America was founded and then succeeded as, and its tragic transformation into a socialist state, I ran across this article by Robert F. Turner.

As a scholar who has studied and revered the Constitution for more than four decades, watching the behavior of our Congress in recent years has been all too often a depressing experience. One wonders whether some legislators have even bothered to read the Constitution, or if the problem is they simply don’t care about the oath they took to support it.

While doing research for my doctoral dissertation many years ago, I had the pleasure of reading extensively from the Annals of Congress, notes from Cabinet meetings of early presidents, and a great deal of other historical material while seeking to understand portions of our Constitution. In the process, I found myself marveling both at how remarkably well-read the Framers were - encountering frequent references to the writings of Locke, Montesquieu, Blackstone, Vattel, and other prominent 17th- and 18th-century thinkers - and also at the high principles repeatedly expressed by members of both political branches of our government when novel issues surfaced.

The pedigree of people we elect to Congress has evidently changed.

Sadly, the latest parliamentary shenanigans in the House, to pretend that the Senate health care bill has already been signed into law so that the (non)law can be “amended” immediately to secure enough House votes for passage, is but par for the course. It is no better than Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s attempt to use Congress’ rule-making power to deny future Congresses their constitutional right to repeal or amend a previous law by majority vote. Section 3403 of the bill passed by the Senate provides: “It shall not be in order in the Senate or the House of Representatives to consider any bill, resolution, amendment or conference report that would repeal or otherwise change this subsection.” The Constitution can’t be changed by statute, and it certainly can’t be changed by amending House or Senate rules.

Article I, Section 7 of the Constitution sets forth detailed requirements for the making or amending of a law, specifying that “Every order, resolution, or vote to which the concurrence of the Senate and House of Representatives may be necessary” shall be presented to and approved by the president (or enacted over his veto) - so as to prevent unprincipled legislators from bypassing the procedural necessities by the kind of semantical chicanery currently being contemplated by House leaders.

Mr. Turner finishes the column in spot-on fashion.

At some point, if we are to have any chance of preserving our magnificent Constitution, the American people are going to have to start saying “no” and holding legislators accountable at the polls for violating their oaths of office. The senators and representatives we elect were intended to be servants of the people, not a special class of aristocrats empowered to rule our lives while remaining aloof from the very laws they enact. Writing in Federalist No. 57, James Madison assured the American people that one of the checks against legislative abuse of power was that Congress could “make no law which will not have its full operation on themselves and their friends, as well as on the great mass of the society.” One can only wonder what the Obamacare vote would be if it applied to members of Congress and their staffs.

After nearly four decades of watching our elected representatives flout their solemn duty and evade the burdens they impose upon the rest of us, I have finally concluded that the time has come to start voting against incumbents who behave as if they are the rulers rather than the servants of the American people.

Me, I’d vote ‘em all out, Left, Right and Independent and elect all Senators and Representatives from among candidates who have never held political office before and impose term limits — one single 6 year term, thus eliminating any ambitions for reelection, leaving them focused solely on their duties as representatives of the will of their constituents, the folks who put them in office.

Chuck, back from the raucousness (until Thursday, 31 December, anyway) of my typical Christmas Eve through New Year’s Day festivities.

A belated Merry Christmas to many, Happy Hannukah to others. Sorry, we don’t do Atheism, Quansa or Ramadan (Ram-It-In?) here.

By “following up”, I refer to the aftermath of what’s his face, um, why do these murdering assholes have to have these tongue twisters for names, rather than just a simple “Abdul” or “Achmed”? Um, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, that’s it. One of Allah’s faithful, for sure.

Seth pretty well explained how we feel about Napolitano as Secretary of Homeland “Security” and about the way that passel of morons she commands runs the TSA.

And Barack Hussein, that guy a bunch of naive, anti-America or simply stupid people elected president.

Yeah, I know. I’m not what you’d call one of the politically correct, I just call it as I see it, though at this forum I endeavor to be considerably more sedate than I am elsewhere.

So, for this post I’ve brought with me a few links pertaining to the close call the folks aboard Flight 253 experienced and the state of our Homeland “Security” situation in general.

From CNS News:

President Barack Obama, in his first public comments on the attempted bombing of a U.S. airliner traveling from Amsterdam to Detroit, described the suspect as “an isolated extremist,” despite reports that the 23-year-old Nigerian had been trained in Yemen, a country he visited twice.

The Associated Press, quoting a Yemeni government official, said Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab lived in Yemen for two extended periods of time — a year, from 2004-2005 and again from August-December this year. He apparently was in Yemen a few weeks before the attempt to blow Flight 253 out of the sky over Michigan.

An isolated extremist, of course. There are only a handful of misguided followers of the Religion of Peace© who entertain any malevolent feelings toward America and we, the infidels herein.

More of our fearless leader’s PC and other assorted bullshit can be found in the linked article.

But we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves, aren’t we? Also from CNS News, Homeland Security Touts 2009 Accomplishments, Including ‘Secure Flight’ Program

Just days before a Nigerian man tried to blow up a U.S. airliner as it descended into Detroit, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security released its “2009 Accomplishments & Reforms” fact sheet, touting its “Secure Flight” passenger vetting program.

The Obama administration has confirmed that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was on the U.S. government terrorist watch list, but the 23-year-old man was still able to board a Northwest plane in Amsterdam bound for Michigan.

On the DHS fact sheet, issued on Dec. 15, the “Secure Flight” program is second on the list and is described as a program that “prescreens name, date of birth and gender against government watch lists for domestic and international flights.”

They sure did a great job in preventing Abdulmutallab, al-Qaeda’s newest celebrity, from getting aboard Flight 253, explosives and all, wouldn’t you agree?

From the Heritage Foundation’s Blog:

Pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN), the explosive Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to detonate aboard Northwest Airlines flight 253, is among the most powerful of explosives in the world and was widely used to blow up airplanes in the 1970s and 1980s. The only reason the passengers of Flight 253 are still alive today is because Mr. Abdulmutallab’s syringe detonator failed for still unknown reasons.

Yet despite the facts that PETN is easily detected and Mr. Abdulmutallab’s father warned the U.S. embassy in Nigeria about his son this November, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano had the audacity to go on television yesterday and say “the system worked” and that the suspect was properly screened. The “system worked?” The 278 passengers on flight 253 could be dead today but for a faulty syringe and the Obama administration considers that a success? That is pure idiocy. Idiocy that is a direct threat to the security of this country and that goes to the heart of the Obama administration’s approach to the war on terror.

What on earth could Secretary Napolitano possibly mean when she said the “system worked?”

Good question, read the rest of the linked post.

And then move on to what we’ll call a recap by Wesley Pruden, from today’s Jewish World Review:

Well, to paraphrase a famous president of a slightly earlier time, “you’re doing a heckuva job, Janet.” That goes for everybody at the White House.

If Barack Obama wants to reassure a nervous public that bureaucratic incompetence won’t be tolerated, he might look to the example of what happened to the director of FEMA in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. But no one expects the president to sack Janet Napolitano, the secretary of something the government insists on calling Homeland Security.

That’s not how an administration that regards words and deeds as equals actually works. The lessons in the latest Islamist attempt to bring down a Western airliner could be useful, but such lessons are too painful for the guvvies to think about.

Mzz Napolitano’s early assurance, since amended, that “the system worked” was either dopey beyond belief, or an unintended ringing endorsement of the ancient folk ethic that “G0d helps those who help themselves.” Better G0d than a guvvie, but not everyone can count on having as a fellow passenger a young Dutchman with quick instincts, athletic grace, a sharp eye and a full complement of bravery and courage. That’s not really a “system” for securing the homeland.

President Obama, interrupting a day at the beach, told reporters in Hawaii that he would pursue the plotters in Arabia and he would not rest until they are caught. This time he did not promise they would be executed, as he did of the Guantanamo plotters who are to be tried in New York City. But the attempt to bring down Northwest Airlines Flight 253 as it approached Detroit was “a serious reminder” of the dangers George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and other Republicans warned us about. (Of course, he couldn’t afford to say it quite that way.)

Mr. Obama’s tough-guy rhetoric, his words plain, pretty and well-parsed, is more reassuring than his deeds, or would be if there was evidence that he really understands what must be done. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the young jihadist from Nigeria by way of Yemen, was quickly indicted on federal charges of trying to destroy an aircraft, which means that he will have the full array of rights accorded to every defendant in an American court. Someone will have to read his Miranda rights, and he will have the right to a lawyer. This will please the civil rights radicals who imagine the Constitution to be a suicide pact, and who don’t, or can’t, understand that the most important civil right of all is the right not to be murdered. Murder, after all, is the surest way to deprive someone of his other civil rights.

If ever a system isn’t working, this is the one. Warning flags the size of bedsheets fluttered above checkpoints on two continents. The suspect’s father tried to warn the American government that his son had been radicalized and was looking for an opportunity to slaughter innocents. That should have been enough to interview the young man before revoking his visa. But such common sense, common nearly everywhere else, is rarely rewarded in the government precincts of the politically correct. Someone eager to scratch the itch to wound America might be offended.

Where were the intelligence services that soak up so many of the nation’s billions every year? Did the CIA talk to the FBI, or the DEA to DIA, or did considerations of protecting turf take precedence, as such considerations often do? The Obama administration promises an investigation, naturally, and of course it will be fair, thorough, hard-hitting, blah, blah and blah. Congress should be suspicious of bureaucrats investigating themselves, and conduct its own investigation. But Democrats in Congress will no doubt be more interested in protecting the administration than finding out what really happened. To find out might compel even a senator to actually do something.

The Detroit incident ought to persuade President Obama once and for all that making nice with those who are determined to kill as many of us as they can is a fool’s errand. He can go back to Cairo again and again to apologize as eloquently as he can, and when the apologies are over and he bumps the floor with his forehead in bowing to whomever, the Islamic jihadists will still despise us and will continue to plot to destroy us.

Janet Napolitano can conjure up more ways to harass air travelers, going after all those blue-eyed Scandinavian grannies in Minnesota again to avoid “profiling” the likely terrorists. She may require us to take off our pants as well as our shoes. But even with more harassment of the innocent, she still won’t have a “system” that works. We must pray for a Dutchman.

Amen!

…I could, in any kind of conscience, leave one of my few pet peeves, that being the incompetence of the Transportation Safety Administration, by the wayside, along comes this item.

The Transportation Security Administration inadvertently revealed closely guarded secrets related to airport passenger screening practices when it posted online this spring a document as part of a contract solicitation, the agency confirmed Tuesday.

The 93-page TSA operating manual details procedures for screening passengers and checked baggage, such as technical settings used by X-ray machines and explosives detectors. It also includes pictures of credentials used by members of Congress, CIA employees and federal air marshals, and it identifies 12 countries whose passport holders are automatically subjected to added scrutiny.

TSA officials said that the manual was posted online in a redacted form on a federal procurement Web site, but that the digital redactions were inadequate. They allowed computer users to recover blacked-out passages by copying and pasting them into a new document or an e-mail.

Okayyyyy….

Yeah, I know, in the past I posted quite a bit about TSA, about their incompetence and the dangers it poses, as a result, to the millions of people who fly out of U.S. airports annually.

The problem, as I’ve said before, is not that the rank and file employees of the TSA are lazy, don’t want to do their jobs or what have you, and not even that they, themselves, are as incompetent as their agency is, as a whole.

Like any government entity, the TSA is run not by people who should be running it, ie veteran industry professionals who have been around the block a few times, but by political appointees who, despite flowery resumes of administrative excellence and vast bureaucratic experience, don’t know diddly about the hands-on aspects of that which they purport to command.

This was true at TSA’s inception, and it’s true today.

It was true under the Bush Administration and it’s true under the Obama Administration, and it’ll probably still be the same under the next administration.

Why?

Because those who run your — our — government, Democrat and Republican alike, care more about the repayment of political favors than they do about your — our — lives. Period.

Stewart A. Baker, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, said that the manual will become a textbook for those seeking to penetrate aviation security and that its leaking was serious.

“It increases the risk that terrorists will find a way through the defenses,” Baker said. “The problem is there are so many different holes that while [the TSA] can fix any one of them by changing procedures and making adjustments in the process . . . they can’t change everything about the way they operate.”

Of course there are “so many different holes” — what do you expect when you entrust policies to people who shouldn’t even be managing a security agency?

Another former DHS official, however, called the loss a public relations blunder but not a major risk, because TSA manuals are shared widely with airlines and airports and are available in the aviation community.

“While it’s certainly a type of document you would not want to be released . . . it’s not something a determined expert couldn’t find another way,” the official said.

A “public relations blunder” is certainly of more worry to a government agency than a risk to the lives of those that depend upon them for security.

As for it’s not something a determined expert couldn’t find another way, well, to say that such a statement should earn the official who uttered it an immediate date with a firing squad would be completely accurate in my book. A dedicated security professional would be looking for methods of preventing “a determined expert” from “finding it another way”.

The “former DHS official”, in my professional estimate, is a piece of shit who has no business in the Protection Industry, not even emptying the waste baskets of the folks actively engaged in doing the job at hand. But then again, look who’s running the Department of Homeland Security — Janet Napolitano, no real, hands-on security experience, instead, an infinitely more relevant qualification, political relevance.

This is a measure of how cavalier, in the name of self and party serving politics, the government can be with the safety of we, the people, whom they are sworn to protect and defend.

Of course, there’s the usual bland, butt covering form letter style malarkey from the TSA.

“TSA takes this matter very seriously and took swift action when this was discovered. A full review is now underway,” the agency said in a statement. “TSA has many layers of security to keep the traveling public safe and to constantly adapt to evolving threats. TSA is confident that screening procedures currently in place remain strong.”

To be perfectly blunt, what’s needed is management, from top to bottom, of the Transportation Safety Administration by purely meritoriously appointed or hired, experienced security professionals who have no political or other debts to anyone in the administration or anyplace else in government.

Such people would ensure the proper training and, in effect, that those trained in each specialty area have completely absorbed all of said training before they are deployed. That these employees are properly motivated. That their supervisory personnel are both responsible people and are experts themselves at their subordinates’ duties, “been there, done that”.

The incompetence at hand, as such, makes for a rather grim joke.

Employees at the Transportation Security Administration inadvertently exposed classified information about the agency’s security procedures because, apparently, they don’t know how PDF documents work.

Read on…

No, they really don’t, these members of the current majority festering in Congress. Anytime any opportunity arises where they have the chance to sabotage our economy, our freedom of speech or our security in the name of liberal quagmirism, they’re wide awake and on it with a vengeance.

The Senate rejected a move Thursday to block the Obama administration from using ordinary federal courts to prosecute those alleged to have plotted the Sept. 11 attacks.

On a 54-45 vote, the Senate tabled an amendment from Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) that would have left military commissions as the only option for prosecuting Sept. 11 suspects.

All 40 Republicans supported the amendment, along with Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and four Democrats: Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.), Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) and Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.)

Graham said the measure, offered as an amendment to the annual appropriations bill for the Commerce and Justice Departments, was needed to head off what he said were plans by the Obama administration to send Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others allegedly involved in the Sept. 11 plot to trials before civilian courts in the U.S.

Of course, we were expecting something like that, the left having discussed it for a long time, often with comparisons of the gulag and Nazi death camps when referring to the Camp Delta incarceration facility at Guantanamo Bay, the feeble argument that these Butchers For Allah are mere felons, not captured prisoners in a war between civilizations we did not start, but to now see that they’ve actually done it, well, is nevertheless disconcerting.

The more sensible among our leaders, mostly Republicans, were, rightly, completely for the bill.

“These people are not criminals. They’re warriors — and they need to be dealt with in a legal system that recognizes that,” Graham said. “Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, did not rob a liquor store.”

“The attacks of 9/11 were not a crime. They were a war crime,” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said.

Some Democrats flatly disagreed, arguing that military trials could play into the Al Qaeda operatives’ claims that they are fighters in a holy war against America.

“They are criminals. They committed murder,” Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) said. “These are not holy warriors. They are criminals.”

Here, here!

Jim Webb, one of the few smart Democrats present:

“I have consistently argued that the appropriate venue for trying perpetrators of international terrorism who are in fact enemy combatants is a military tribunal,” Webb said. He said federal court procedures for turning over evidence to defense lawyers and for calling military and intelligence agency witnesses “could lead to the exposure of classified materials.”

My emphasis, there, and the man said a mouthful.

Regular court procedures would require the prosecution to produce evidence that might consist of disclosure of methods, means and personnel we can’t afford to have the enemy read about in the New York Times.

Then again, that precedent was already set back when the NYT was printing the details of Bush terrorist surveillance strategies, so I don’t suppose it would be anything new.

Webb also indicated he was concerned that a terror suspect sent to federal court could be released in the U.S. if he was found not guilty.

Fancy that!

The whole story is here.

…from today’s Washington Times Online. I’m somewhat pressed for time this morning, I have some people to meet, but figured I’d share them.

Here we have a fine example of the term, “haste makes waste” in action, in this case mongers of political agendas in such a hurry to blow our hard earned tax money that they misinformed the public, largely through failure to do their homework and largely to get their itinerary pushed through in a hurry, in an un-thought-out, unconstitutional, just plain stupid act, part of the idiotic and ill advised TARP program.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and former Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. misled the public about the financial weakness of Bank of America and other early recipients of the government’s $700 billion Wall Street bailout, creating “unrealistic expectations” about the companies and damaging the program’s credibility, according to a report by the program’s independent watchdog.

The federal government last October loaned Bank of America and eight other “healthy” financial institutions a total of $125 billion - the initial payout from the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP - in an attempt to avoid a series of major bank collapses that would push the sputtering economy into a free fall or depression.

The rationale for giving money to stable banks and not failing ones, regulators said, was that such institutions would be better able to lend money and thus unfreeze tight credit markets - a major factor in last year’s Wall Street losses.

Right. Now the American taxpayer gets to pay the price for the blatant miscalculations due to political agendas and faulty thinking of a number of general purpose assholes.

Moving right along, we have the messiah Barack Hussein, whose military expertise evidently outshines that of his generals, coming up with excuses as to why he’d rather allow U.S. servicemen and woman to die than to commit more troops where General McChrystal says they are needed. What does McChrystal know, anyway, right? He’s just a general, whereas Obama, the guy who once, for campaign reasons, said the war in Afghanistan is justified in order to compare it to Iraq (according to his excellency, unjustified) is so much more knowledgeable about warfare that, well,

One day after an attack in Afghanistan killed eight American soldiers, President Obama’s national security adviser downplayed both the importance of U.S. troop levels and the possibility of a Taliban return to power.

National security adviser James L. Jones suggested that Gen. McChrystal’s call for more troops must be tempered by diplomatic considerations as the president weighs how to deal with the 8-year-old war.

“Well, I think the end is much more complex than just about adding ‘X’ number of troops. Afghanistan is a country that’s quite large and that swallows up a lot of people,” the retired Marine general said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Right, let’s here more, Jones. What else did Obama instruct you to say, and being an ex-military man yourself, how does it feel to be a party to it?

The rest of the story can be found here.

…at the taxpayer’s expense, wherein the Democrats are misleading the American people (not a bad deal, bullshit people and make them pay for it!) about how the “Stimulus” is working.

They’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars to stimulate the economy, so Senate Democrats said Wednesday they might as well spend millions putting up signs to highlight where the money is being spent.

The road signs, which let motorists know the paving and construction projects they see are being paid for by the $787 billion economic stimulus program, have popped up across the country. In a 52-45 vote, the Senate decided the signs should stay.

Sure, why not? It’s just the taxpayer’s money, right? “Spend, spend, spend!” as the liberal credo goes.

“Why on earth would you want to hide from the American people the fact that the recovery package we passed is putting people to work?” asked Sen. Barbara Boxer, California Democrat, who took the lead in defending the expenditure. She said stimulus spending is beginning to improve the economy and charged that Republicans and Democrats who voted to strip out the funds are angry about that success.

“It’s my sense that there’s a frustration by the people who voted ‘no’ on the economic recovery act, the stimulus bill, there’s a frustration that it’s working. They predicted gloom and doom,” Mrs. Boxer said.

Campaigning at the expense of working Americans seems to be an institution that has really gained traction among Democrats of late, but then, it seems that the Obama Administration has set the stage for a new kind of government — kind of like one that can bill us for their spam and junk mail, a “we will like it!”

But Sen. Judd Gregg, the New Hampshire Republican who tried to excise the funds, called his amendment a no-brainer. He said it’s common sense to get rid of tens of millions of dollars in spending.

“These are self-congratulatory signs; they’re political signs. They’re so that lawmakers can pat themselves on the back,” he said. “But these signs cost money. Actually, when you add them all up, they cost a lot of money.”

Some localities have objected to the signs, arguing that they would rather spend the money on more projects. But Mr. Gregg said one community in New Hampshire was told no sign, no money for their original project.

Emphasis mine.

In the states’ rights department,

Also Wednesday, senators voted against allowing states to determine their own transportation funding priorities, such as repairing deficient bridges. A day earlier, the Senate voted against an effort by Sen. John McCain, Arizona Republican, to drop all of the pork-barrel earmark projects from the $67.7 billion transportation and housing spending bill and use the $1.7 billion slated for earmarks to modernize the nation’s air traffic control system instead.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, thanks largely to the liberals on the Hill, this country has come full circle, back to the same state of affairs good men died kicking out of here back in the 1770s.

Bummer.

Mr. Gregg acknowledged that this effort was as much a message as a cost-saving move. His amendment to the annual transportation spending bill would have banned putting up physical signs to tout stimulus transportation projects.

Five Democrats — Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and Charles E. Schumer of New York — voted with all 40 Republicans to try to strip the money, but their support was not enough.

With typical dumbass, idiotic, mares-eat-oats, shallowbrained, downright stupid, aimed-at-the-gullible liberal reasoning,

Mrs. Boxer called the effort “anti-jobs” and said the signs are an example of government transparency.

Methinks this is time, once again, to recall a quote by a commenter at a blog I used to visit about 6 years ago: “Arguing with a liberal is like standing in a bucket and trying to pick yourself up by the handle.”

It turned out that I’ve had to remain in New York (with a side trip to New England) for an extra couple of days, as certain materials I require to meet the challenge of an unexpected development in my current work project were available for purchase (and for rapid overseas shipping) in a town a couple of hundred miles north of here, but that’s another story entirely and unfortunately of a proprietary nature. I have to leave tonight (no further reprieves, sigh), hopefully to finish the job within a couple of weeks – with luck, no more than ten days.

On the bright side, while my time has been severely limited, I’ve managed to squeeze in a few hours here and there to visit several of my favorite blogs, which has made the delay in leaving even more worthwhile.

On the job, one of our (at least, we Yanks and the other westerners, right thinkers all) more prevalent topics of discussion has been Bush’s decision to treat the Olympics in China as though the Communist country were just another nation deserving of equal consideration in an international event of that magnitude.

Our own consensus proved unanimous – China is our enemy, in fact it is the enemy of free countries everywhere and should be both viewed and treated as such.

We have allowed our nation’s economy to become all but intertwined with this enemy, not only by saturating our retail industry with Chinese products, in many ways building a dependency on their affordability, the vast majority of which are inferior in nearly every way to items manufactured here in the United States and many of which present health hazards to Americans, in particular children as so many of those products are toys, but by selling the Chinese billions of dollars’ worth of treasury paper.

I wonder what would happen if China were to decide to take back Taiwan at this stage of the game, and their premier quietly told POTUS that “if you interfere, we will dump all our U.S. Treasury instruments on world markets at once”. The dollar’s already on the fritz and with gas prices up so dramatically (thank you, Democrats), effecting the prices of almost everything else, the kerfuffle in the real estate financial markets and throughout Wall Street, the impact of an assault on the U.S. dollar would be rather telling.

If we continue to treat China as “our friend and valued trading partner”, we will pay a heavy price in the not-too-distant future.

For me, there are mixed feelings here: Being the free and market-based country that we are, it is not in our make-up to tell the private sector who they can and can’t trade with, though in rendering this opinion, I would be amiss if I didn’t point out that we have done exactly that where Cuba is concerned, going on half a century now. After all, if Cuba is our enemy and our business concerns can’t trade with them (mmmmm, a Montecristo accompanying an after dinner cognac…), why in blazes are we trading with China? China is, after all, a hell of a lot more of a potential threat to us than Fidel’s (Raoul’s?) pitiful little regime, since their powerful main sponsor went Chapter 11 more than a decade and a half ago.

The U.S. and the PRC are like matter and anti-matter somehow managing to coexist on the same planet, but this cannot remain permanent; China is a territory-hungry country biding its time until conditions are right for move toward expansion, and by our very nature as the leader of both global democracy and capitalism, the United States is their anti-thesis and by extension, as the Soviets once referred to us, “the main enemy”.

As our leaders have been lulled by Muslim propaganda clouding the true intentions of fundamental Islam, both they and their profits-first-and-last counterparts in the marketplace have allowed our massive commerce with China to cloud their minds against the reality of the remaining communist world power’s ambitions. Daily, emailed bulletins from Internet investment touts sing the praises of private investors on all levels pulling our capital out of the U.S. economy and investing in China, preaching about the exponential gains we could realize by doing so.

President Bush, Congress and the major players in the marketplace need to wake up to the consequences we will eventually face as a result of our being too chummy with Beijing, profoundly bolstering the Chinese economy (and therefore the Chinese war machine) and in effect baring our proverbial neck to one of our two most dedicated and lethal enemies.