I’m not flying commercial while Mr. Obama is President. On Friday, December 25, 2009, on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, Michigan, a 23-year-old Nigerian, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to blow up the airliner with the explosive PETN strapped to his leg. He was stopped, not by a federal security officer, but by a passenger who was alert enough to know something was wrong. Terrorists are slipping through the cracks. Not just on commercial air flights, but right into the officer’s lounge in military bases. At Fort Hood, a Texas army base, 12 people were killed and 32 injured when Major Nidal Malik Hasan, an army psychiatrist, opened fire on the Army personnel at the processing center. The State Department was swift in issuing a news release saying that they did not believe this was a terrorist attack. Mr. Obama needs to get off of the glamour train and take care of his number one responsibility as Commander-In-Chief of our military - protecting American citizens.
A great big start to securing the nation is to put someone responsible in charge of Homeland Security. That agency at the moment is like a ship without a sail, adrift at sea. Waiting a year to appoint someone shows an attitude of complacency toward national security.
One of Mr. Obama’s campaign pitches was that the security community was too aggressive and needed to be toned down and that he was the man to do it. Once in office he has gone back and tried to make felons out of our intelligence officers and charge them with crimes for carrying out the wishes of past Presidents who actually took the safety of Americans seriously.
And what ever happened to personal responsibility? “Systemic Failure” is saying, “I’m not responsible, the system did it.” Under Mr. Obama’s watch, an airliner full of Americans was nearly blown up on Christmas by a terrorist whose own father had contacted a U.S. embassy and gave them full details of his son’s suspected terrorist activities. Under Mr. Obama’s watchful eye another terrorist under investigation by the FBI opened fire inside a U.S. military base. Even the military is not safe inside a guarded base.
And we have to be careful not to violate the terrorists’ civil rights which they have secured under the Obama administration. The closing of Guantanamo Bay, a state of the art detention facility for terrorists, signals weakness to Al Qaeda and the rest of the wackos who want to destroy America and keep us all in fear.
We’ve seen this before. Bill Clinton went on a mission to weaken the power of the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community. He succeeded. During the Clinton years, the 9-11 attack against the Twin Towers in New York was successfully planned right out in the open without any resistance from a weakened CIA or FBI. Under Bill Clinton’s watch, the Twin Towers were bombed in 1993 and Clinton treated it as a crime, not an act of terrorism. President Clinton never visited the bombing site or paid it much attention, he was too busy attacking the CIA. This past year they took some of the melted down steel from the Twin Towers and built a battle ship from it. The special speaker at the commissioning of our new ship, The USS New York LPD-21 on November 7, 2009 was none other than Hillary Clinton. I watched it on cable TV and I couldn’t believe the hypocrisy of what I was seeing!
So for now, and the forseeable future, I will not be flying on commercial airline flights. I don’t care how many gadgets we get that can sniff out a bomb. That doesn’t protect us from a missile launcher on the ground. I have zero confidence in our President, our Secretary of State, The State Department, and a demoralized and weakened intelligence community to keep me safe. I pray for all of them that they will wake up and realize the seriousness of the safety of the citizens of the United States Of America.
There has been a bit of unrest lately over Obama’s performance, as his first year in office comes to a close. This DailyKos diary sums up my feelings about his performance. Essentially, he falls short of idealist progressive changes and of his campaign promises. But progressives constitute a minority of the American public; the rest of the country is moderate or conservative. Their voices mean we have to compromise. The Democratic majority is not completely progressive and does not give 100% support to Obama. So he is a dealbreaker, a pragmatist, that wants to work with everyone in order to move forward. This means our ideal progressive values must remain ideals for now, and only bits and pieces of progressive legislation will find themselves in his policies. Through a conservative lens, Obama is essentially a fascist for having progressive/socialist leanings. Conservatives also have the ability to take over next term. We don’t want Obama to make progressivism look so terrible to moderates and conservatives that they take over. His job is to keep their anger and irritation at bay so that he can continue to serve as President.
A professor on the Democratic scorecard program on KPFK put it well: Our leaders are only as progressive as its people are able to mobilize and assemble to keep leaders in check.
While the rest of the nation stagnates and one out of five Americans is out of a job, President Obama, in the still of the night, approved UNLIMITED FUNDING for mortgage giants Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac. The two entities that are probably singularly most responsible for the crash of the sub-prime housing loan market.
Although they were successful in lining the pockets of many Democratic operatives along the way, in 2008 Fanny and Freddie exploded, taking Bear Stearns with them and leading to the failure of many other smaller entities, as we have seen. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Christopher Dodd were all beholden to Fanny and Freddie for substantial contributions. The US government has bailed Fanny and Freddie out to the tune of ONE POINT FIVE TRILLION DOLLARS in direct and indirect aid. Those are TAXPAYER dollars, it should be noted.
What was going on was these two quasi-government backed Corporations, being major purchasers of SUB-PRIME mortgage paper, were BUNDLING these dubious assets and selling them as bonds. This precarious process worked as long as housing prices continued to rise. As early as 2003, regulators were warning of looming catastrophe “in the unlikely event that the two giants failed”.
Republican efforts to regulate Fanny and Freddie were defeated BY DEMOCRATS, IN PARTY-LINE VOTES. Since their failure in 2008, the two mortgage giants have consumed 1.1 trillion dollars in Fed backing and thus far this year have lost 124.4 billion dollars which has had to be picked up by the Federal Reserve.
Now the treasury has removed the 400 BILLION dollar cap on funding losses AT THE DIRECTION OF THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION, replacing it with an UNLIMITED FUNDING CAP! That’s like handing a chronic alcoholic a half gallon of booze and telling him to knock himself out.
THIS is Obama’s much vaunted fiscal responsibility?
Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac are headed down the same road as before and we have the SAME Democrats running interference for them. Wonder who they’ll blame it on this time?
It took a tough question from Matt Lauer, but after having laughably claimed that “the system worked,” DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano has now conceded the obvious: that the security system that permitted Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to board NWA 253 with explosives “failed miserably.”
On Today and in other interviews this morning, Napolitano attempted to use her own ignorance as a shield. Each time she was hit with a hard question, her response was to the effect “yeah, we’re wondering about that ourselves.” She also continued to point the finger back at George Bush, repeatedly mentioning that the security procedures in place were formulated under the Bush administration. Whatever happened to “change you can believe in“?
But back to Today, where Lauer laudably asked Napolitano the necessary question: how could she possibly have claimed, as she did yesterday, that the “system worked”?
MATT LAUER: You made a comment over the weekend and I want to call attention to that because a lot of people are disagreeing with it this morning. You talked about this incident aboard this Northwest flight and you said “when it came right down to it, the system worked.” A lot of people don’t think the system worked at all, that the only thing that prevented outright disaster was luck. Can you respond to that?
JANET NAPOLITANO: Sure, I think the comment is being taken out of context. What I’m saying is that once the incident occurred, moving forward, we were immediately able to notify the 128 flights in the air of protective measures to take, immediately able to notify law enforcement on the ground, airports both domestically, internationally, all carriers, all of that happening within 60 to 90 minutes, so –
LAUER: So you’re only talking about what happened after this man tried to ignite this explosive device on the plane.
NAPOLITANO: Indeed.
LAUER: You would then concede that the system prior to that, the system that’s supposed to prevent something like this from happening, failed miserably?
NAPOLITANO: It did. And that’s why we are asking a lot of the same questions I heard you asking before this interview. How did this individual get on the plane? Why wasn’t the explosive material detected? What do we need to do to change perhaps the rules that have been in place since 2006 for moving somebody from the generic database to more elevated status. All of that under review right now.
LAUER: So many man-hours, so much money, Madam Secretary, has gone into securing fliers in this country and around the world, and so let’s talk about it: how does a guy who’s on this general terror list, who then buys a one-way, trans-Atlantic ticket with cash, checks no luggage, a man whose own father has written a letter to authorities both in his own country and U.S. embassy authorities, saying he’s worried that his son has become more radicalized and might attempt some kind of a suicide mission. How is this guy not the perfect candidate for a strip search or a full-body scan?
NAPOLITANO: I’ve asked the same questions.
We’ve got another question: what is Janet Napolitano, head of a department that she now admits “failed miserably,” still doing in office?
Note: As part of her “it’s Bush’s fault” defense, on Morning Joe Napolitano mentioned that young Umar had been issued his US visa “in June, 2008,” i.e., during the Bush administration. OK, but that would have been before his father was frantically trying to alert the Obama admin that his son had apparently turned into a terrorist.
Wouter Bos heeft hem gebeld om hem namens de Nederlandse regering te feliciteren, hij was te zien op alle belangrijke tv zenders in de Verenigde Staten, en misschien mag hij nog wel op audientie bij Obama. En terecht.
Jasper Schuringa deed wat je moet doen, maar bijna niemand doet, in dit soort situaties: handelen op instinct, om te overleven.
The Climategate revelations and the snowstorm that swept through Europe gave the Copenhagen global warming meetings an air of unreality. The spectacle of politicians gathering in Denmark with the goal of impoverishing their own societies provided that others do the same sets a new historical standard for idiocy. It isn’t just Climategate and snowstorms. Icecap reviews the evidence (HT: PowerLine):
• The most effective greenhouse gas is water vapor, comprising approximately 95 percent of the total greenhouse effect.
• Carbon dioxide concentration has been continually rising for nearly 100 years. It continues to rise, but carbon dioxide concentrations at present are near the lowest in geologic history.
• Temperature change correlation with carbon dioxide levels is not statistically significant.
• There are no data that definitively relate carbon dioxide levels to temperature changes.
• The greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide logarithmically declines with increasing concentration. At present levels, any additional carbon dioxide can have very little effect.
We also know a lot about Earth temperature changes:
• Global temperature changes naturally all of the time, in both directions and at many scales of intensity.
• The warmest year in the U.S. in the last century was 1934, not 1998. The U.S. has the best and most extensive temperature records in the world.
• Global temperature peaked in 1998 on the current 60-80 year cycle, and has been episodically declining ever since. This cooling absolutely falsifies claims that human carbon dioxide emissions are a controlling factor in Earth temperature.
• Voluminous historic records demonstrate the Medieval Climate Optimum (MCO) was real and that the “hockey stick” graphic that attempted to deny that fact was at best bad science. The MCO was considerably warmer than the end of the 20th century.
• During the last 100 years, temperature has both risen and fallen, including the present cooling. All the changes in temperature of the last 100 years are in normal historic ranges, both in absolute value and, most importantly, rate of change.
In short, there is no global warming crisis. There is no health crisis, either. These things are manufactured by politicians, for politicians, with utter disregard for the common good.
Reports of what happened in Copenhagen further increase the sense of unreality. Did the talks succeed? Fail? And what was Obama’s role? Some startling reports have emerged that help to answer the last question, even if they raise further questions. Richard Fernandez reprints the translation of a German article that portrays Obama in an extremely unflattering light (smart diplomacy, indeed!), and reflects:
The fundamental article of faith among the lowlife is that it doesn’t matter if the world runs out of money as long as you don’t run out of it. A grifter’s optimization algorithm is to be the last man to die; the last guy to run out. Economists might argue that it is “more rational” to create an orderly society where the tide lifts all boats. But they forget that it isn’t called the Prisoner’s Dilemma for nothing.
If politicians are fundamentally controlled by the societies to which they are accountable, then they will act as rational agents of that society. Once control is lost, they’ll act like grifters. Copenhagen is a preview of what happens when a lump of money is up for grabs. Every bluebottle on the planet — dictators from Africa, professional mourners, court jesters and fast-buck artists — converged on the Copenhagen because it was, to a large extent, unaccountable. But this also limited its ill-effects. The players were too busy knifing each other to turn against the publics of the world.
The fascination of Copenhagen lies in the juxtaposition of is purported high-mindedness with the brutality in the streets, the lunacy of the public theater and the tawdriness of the proceedings. And at the conclusion everyone leaves by private jet in the middle of the night.
I think this explains a lot of what we’re seeing around us. As Glenn Reynolds repeatedly observes, we have the worst political class in our history. (Maybe the guys in Congress in the years immediately preceding the Civil War beat them out. Maybe. But I doubt it. I think they actually believed in something other than themselves, however wrong it might have been.) Why are our politicians so terrible? They’re acting as grifters. They no longer represent us. We’ve lost control of them. I think Rousseau foresaw this possibility when he worried that mass communication could split the will of the people as expressed in elections from the general will. (As Homer Simpson put it, “The problem is communication. Too much communication.”) If the people can be massively misled, then politicians can avoid accountability, and the people have no vehicle for expressing their true preferences. This lies behind much of the frustration that has found expression in tea parties. Hence, as well, health care reform, cap-and-trade, Copenhagen, and a seemingly pro-Islamist, pro-Communist foreign policy. Our politicians seek out graft instead of the common good.
Fernandez nevertheless expresses a limited optimism:
We are coming to the end a phase and should be glad of it. The sooner the charade ends the sooner things can be fixed. And since there’s a lot of real wealth and talent in the world, and because technology is powerful, I have no doubt that we have the power not only to put things right but to build an incomparably better world….
If we have a crisis in 2010 it could lead to greater democracy, a world in which we develop real energy sources and build things. The year 2015 could be the finest year on the planet. But to get there a huge almost glacially immovable mass of bureaucracy and faux aristocracy has to be moved out of the way. And I think they will largely do it to themselves. The trick is to harness the discontent which I think is inevitably coming in positive and nonviolent ways. That’s not to say unfortunate things might happen unintentionally here and there. But that’s the friction of history. The important thing is to transition to a better world in democratic and political ways rather than in dysfunctional ones.
The generation of the 1920s and 1930s failed to find an orderly way into the new world and fell prey to demagogues. In any given crisis, new demagogues will rise and many will be tempted to follow them. Let’s hope we’ve learned enough, or read enough about the last 70 years to realize that demagogues often take one from bad to worse.
I think 2010 may be both a good and a bad year. Bad in that it will be full of bad news. Good in that it will give the world a chance to truly fix things. All they really need is faith in common sense and a little bit of common decency. This, plus an extraordinary slug of uncommon daring and extraordinary luck.
I sincerely hope he’s right. But I don’t see the mechanisms by which they’ll do it to themselves. The people may utterly lose faith in Obama and company, the mandarins of the EU, et al. But they have been constructing insulation between themselves and public opinion, and I expect the coming year to witness much more insulation in the form of immigration “reform,” allowing felons to vote, blatant voter fraud, legal challenges to elections (as in Minnesota), and the like.
The real Obama in his own words. Listen closely.Obama makes it very clear in these videos who he really is. This isn’t made up. This is real folks.http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=tCAffMSWSzY#t=28
Gordon Kuhn “The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government” Thomas Jefferson www.Cloudweavers.com
