TOWNHALL
Allen West: "Bin Laden Being Dead is Not Foreign Policy"
by Daniel Doherty
September 23, 2012
This clip is a few days old but worth watching in its entirety. Appearing on “On the Record” with Greta Van Susteren Thursday night, Congressman Allen West (R-FL) explained why “it’s insane” for the Obama administration to base their entire foreign policy on the death of Osama bin Laden. Take a look:
Read more: http://goo.gl/9KZDI
Permanent Spin
by Stephen F. Hayes
September 24, 2012
For nine days, the Obama administration made a case that virtually everyone understood was untrue: that the killing of our ambassador and three other Americans in Benghazi, Libya, was a random, spontaneous act of individuals upset about an online video—an unpredictable attack on a well-protected compound that had nothing do to with the eleventh anniversary of 9/11.
These claims were wrong. Every one of them. But the White House pushed them hard.
Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, appeared on five Sunday talk shows on September 16. A “hateful video” triggered a “spontaneous protest . . . outside of our consulate in Benghazi” that “spun from there into something much, much more violent,” she said on Face the Nation. “We do not have information at present that leads us to conclude that this was premeditated or preplanned.”
On This Week, Rice said the consulate was well secured. “The security personnel that the State Department thought were required were in place,” she said, adding: “We had substantial presence with our personnel and the consulate in Benghazi. Tragically two of the four Americans who were killed were there providing security. That was their function, and indeed there were many other colleagues who were doing the same with them.”
White House press secretary Jay Carney not only denied that the attacks had anything to do with the anniversary of 9/11 but scolded reporters who, citing the administration’s own pre-9/11 boasts about its security preparations for the anniversary, made the connection. “I think that you’re conveniently conflating two things,” Carney snapped, “which is the anniversary of 9/11 and the incidents that took place, which are under investigation.”
Wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong. Intelligence officials understood immediately that the attacks took place on 9/11 for a reason. The ambassador, in a country that faces a growing al Qaeda threat, had virtually no security. The two contractors killed in the attacks were not part of the ambassador’s security detail, and there were not, in fact, “many other colleagues” working security with them.
The nature of the attack itself, a four-hour battle that took place in two waves, indicated some level of planning. “The idea that this criminal and cowardly act was a spontaneous protest that just spun out of control is completely unfounded and preposterous,” Libyan president Mohammad el-Megarif told National Public Radio. When a reporter asked Senator Carl Levin, one of the most partisan Democrats in the upper chamber, if the attack was planned, Levin said it was. “I think there’s evidence of that. There’s been evidence of that,” he responded, adding: “The attack looked like it was planned and premeditated, sure.” Levin made his comments after a briefing from Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta.
Read more: http://goo.gl/B4xp1
FORBES
A 'Mean Green' Obama Wages War Against Cheap Energy
by Mark Hendrickson
September 20, 2012
President Obama is a mean green. Indeed, he sounds like one of their leaders when he tells us there is something wrong with Americans living so comfortably when there are poor nations in the world. In his words: “We can’t drive our SUVs and, you know, eat as much as we want and keep our homes, you know, 72 degrees at all times … and then just expect that every other country is going to say OK … [when we] keep using 25 percent of the world’s energy.”
Given that Obama disapproves of Americans’ affluence, it isn’t surprising that he appointed one of the meanest greens of all to be his science advisor—John Holdren, who comes from the extreme branch of environmentalism that openly advocates the “de-development” of the United States.
Since abundant, relatively inexpensive energy has literally powered America’s unprecedented economic development, naturally, one of Obama’s principal goals as president has been to curtail Americans’ access to cheap energy. He seems to agree with Holdren’s some-time writing partner, Paul Ehrlich, who burnished his misanthropic reputation by fulminating, “Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.”
Obama’s preferred strategy has been to implement whatever policies increase the price of energy to American consumers. He proved this by striving mightily to impose a cap-and-trade program on fossil fuels so that “if somebody wants to build a coal-fired plant, the can, but it will bankrupt them, because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”
Obama’s animus against fossil fuels explains why he chose Dr. Steven Chu to be his Secretary of Energy. Chu’s most famous policy goal is encapsulated in his statement, “Somehow we have to figure out a way to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”
To help Chu achieve his goal of hammering Americans with much higher fuel prices, Obama appointed the like-minded former Colorado senator Ken Salazar to be his Secretary of the Interior.
In his first week as president, Obama rescinded a Bush executive order that permitted drilling on the continental shelf. A few weeks later, Salazar unilaterally canceled 77 oil and gas leases in Utah, expressing his dread that some poor soul might catch a glimpse of drilling equipment from a national park more than a mile away.
Team Obama continued the assault on domestic oil development, first by adding two million more acres to the 107 million acres of designated wilderness to block the extraction of fossil fuels from those tracts; then using the Deepwater Horizon explosion in the Gulf of Mexico as a pretext to block or delay the return of American oil rigs to the Gulf; then delaying the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline to transport Canadian oils sands to be refined in Oklahoma. Most recently, Salazar’s department disclosed a new plan to offer only 15 offshore drilling leases. That is a record low, and appears to be the absolute minimum that can be offered under existing law.
Read more: http://goo.gl/2OmRG
AMERICAN THINKER
Untold Loss: Media Blackout on Military Disaster on Obama's Watch
by Kim Zigfeld
September 24, 2012
It happened on September 14, 2011, northwest of the city of Lashkar Gah in southern Afghanistan. A team of fewer than two dozen Taliban fighters attacked the USMC's massive Camp Bastion base there, killing VMA-211 squadron commander Lt. Col. Christopher Raible and destroying or permanently disabling eight of the ten top-of-the-line harrier AV-8B attack aircraft stationed under him. Out of production for more than a decade, these aircraft can never be replaced.
By the time the smoke cleared, roughly 7% of the total harrier fleet operated by the USMC had been wiped out on a single day by a small force of ground combatants whose most potent weapon was the suicide vest, one of which was used to breach the camp's perimeter fence.
Under Obama, the U.S. has taken 1,491 casualties in Afghanistan, over 70% of the total 2,121 casualties sustained since the fighting there began. Helmland Province, where Camp Bastion is located, has been the grounds for the lion's share of them, twice as many as any other region of the country. Things have gotten so bad that, in the wake of the attack on Camp Bastion, the International Security Assistance Force, which trains Afghan citizens to defend their country against the Islamic fanatics of the Taliban, suspended operations.
Read more: http://goo.gl/mMZDu
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