Monday, November 19, 2012

Quick Hits - November 17-19, 2012

Through the weekend, Islamic terrorists in Gaza - members of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad - fired over 840 missiles into Israel targeting Israeli cities and towns.  In response, the Israeli Defense Reports conducted dozens of precision strikes against not only the launching sites for these missiles, but against leading members of these terror organizations.  Unfortunately, as is common place, the anti-Israeli / anti-Western elements of the mainstream media are quick to push the terrorist propaganda and blame Israel for the conflict and the civilian casualties.

This propaganda ranges from pushing the meme that the multitude of missiles being fired into Israel are just in 'retaliation' for the Israeli strikes into Gaza targeting the missile launch points and terrorist leaders to parading the bodies of children before the jackals in the media claiming that their deaths were the result of Israeli war crimes and aggression.  Here in the US, the leading media elements pushing these lines of crap include the NY Times - which focused on an Israeli strike against a senior Hamas terrorist that killed 11 - including 4 children, to ABC News - which breathlessly touted the false meme that the Hamas missile fire was provoked by Israeli attacks, to Mistress Death, Christiane Amanpour who castigates the Israeli Defense Forces for their 'history' of indiscriminately targeting / killing civilians during the last major Gaza conflict, to CNN and the BBC hyping Hamas faking dead children for propaganda purposes - all in the embracing of the standard media justification, 'Fake but accurate'.

Lost within this flood of anti-Israeli propaganda is the truth.

The truth around the fact that for virtually every day of this year 5 to 10 missiles are fired from Gaza into Israeli cities and towns.  We're told by the media bigots that this is 'inconsequential' - that the warheads of the missiles are small (only the size of 500 pound bombs) and the number of casualties are 'uneven' - reducing Israeli civilian dead and wounded to being immaterial in the rush to embrace a moral equivalency argument.

The truth that, in violation of international law, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the other terrorists launch their missiles from locations that are using civilian structures - apartments, schools, and mosques - as shields.  That the terrorist leaders also have no compulsion to use their own families, including children, as human shields in order to try to gain additional protection from Israeli retaliatory strikes.  That the terrorist thugs where civilian clothing and when killed are called civilians despite the fact that they were carrying arms and actively engaged in illegal hostilities against the state of Israel.

In the above link where the media breathlessly touts a dead child as 'proof' of Israeli 'aggression' - none apply any skepticism around the stories that are spun by the terrorists - or the fact that when the child was killed, no Israeli airstrikes took place - and  that the damage is far more consistent with a missile fired from Gaza that malfunctioned and exploded into that Gaza home.  As the NY Times states in their own report - contradicting their own breathless report...
It is unclear who was responsible for the strike on Annazla: the damage was nowhere near severe enough to have come from an Israeli F-16, raising the possibility that an errant missile fired by Palestinian militants was responsible for the deaths. What seems clear is that expectations for a pause in the fighting, for at least one family, were tragically misplaced.


Where is the outrage of the Islamic terrorists in Gaza using civilians, schools, and mosques as shields?  International law holds that the guilty party for the death of non-combatants in this situation is not the attacker but the one's who use civilians as shields.   In the majority of the cases, precision munitions now allow pinpoint strikes on the military targets while limiting the damage to non-military sites and personnel.  But in a number of cases, the human shields are held so close that it is impossible to avoid 'collateral' damage.

One of the attacks over the weekend by the IDF that raised the ire of the righteous mainstream media was a strike on the tower in Gaza that housed the area's media center.  But what these media nimrods didn't report is that on the second floor of the building, a top terrorist leader of the Islamic Jihad hid - believing he was safe using those same useful idiot journalists as human shields.  The IDF launched a precision strike on that floor - and successfully killed the terror leader - without killing any of the anti-Israeli media that were apparently quite happy to be used as a shield.

I know I shouldn't be surprised by the fecklessness of so much of the media - putting their hatred and bias against Israel before any semblance of journalistic integrity.  But it continues to shock me as they are spurring the carnage with their bias and hate.  Even former 'allies' of Israel, like the reprehensible Charles Johnson of LittleGreenFootballs, puts ideology and hate before any semblance of integrity and intellectual honesty. LFG has now started to out 'DU' the vile Democratic Underground commentators.

One of the most common aspects of creating and pushing a 'successful' lie is to have buried within the lie something that is true / factually accurate.  Whenever one is called on the lie, one only has to point to the minor aspect that is true and then declare that since that point is true, the entire statement has to be true.  It's one of the most common fallacies that we see tossed at us in debates with the progressives (the others are simple projection and the moral equivalency fallacy).

This is now standard operating procedure of the Obama Administration when it comes to their deflection of the lies they told in the name of political expediency regarding the Benghazi terror attack which killed 4 Americans.  In the wake of former CIA Director David Petraeus's closed door testimony Friday where he stated that the CIA briefing to the White House identified the 9/11/12 attack as a terrorist attack launched by an al-Qaeda surrogate - and that this was subsequently scrubbed by someone outside of the CIA - the White House has decided to push the big lie that they were not responsible for altering the intelligence and continue to obfuscate and cover-up their culpability...
What we also said yesterday, though — because this question came up as to whether the White House had edited Susan Rice’s points and the points that were provided to Congress and the administration — the only edit that was made to those points by the White House, and was also made by the State Department, was to change the word “consulate” to “diplomatic facility” since the facility in Benghazi had not — was not formally a consulate. Other than that, we worked off of the points that were provided by the intelligence community. So I can’t speak to any other edits that may have been made within the intelligence community.
Only edit?  I don't doubt that some pinhead in the WH changed the word 'consulate' to 'diplomatic facility' - that's the type of edit that someone embarking down a path of marginalization and CYA would undertake.  But only?  That is the part that stretches believability.  This isn't a complex issue - and it should be pretty easy to identify who within the WH / National Security Office who has the authority to make edits to CIA reports.  The problem is - with few exceptions - there is little interest to get to the truth or hold the Obama Administration accountable for their callous and arrogant behavior.  The mainstream media isn't interested in finding out the truth - with the possible exception of Fox News which doesn't have it's lips locked onto Obama's rear end.

To the MSM, this scandal is as newsworthy as the politicization of the DoJ, the dropping of racism / voter intimidation charges against the New Black Panther Party, the massive election financing and fundraising fraud of the Obama campaign, the crony capitalism of Solyndra, A123 Systems, and Fisker, the EPA's war on fossil fuel and coal, the failures of FEMA to assist the victims of Sandy, and Fast and Furious.  It doesn't matter that 4 are dead - just as it doesn't matter that the Obama Administration is directly culpable in the death of hundreds in Mexico.  There is a 'D' after the name of the President - not a 'R'.  [Which is also why Vice President Joe Biden can get a complete pass for calling his boss a 'Homeboy'.]

At least key members of the House and Senate are not going to let the Benghazi lies disappear...


Has Senator Chambliss notes in the above video, 'Everybody there was asked do you know who made these changes; and nobody knew. The only entity that reviewed the talking points that was not there was the White House.'

Today, we are now learning that in the Presidential Daily Brief - the daily intelligence and security brief provided to the President - 72 hours after the attack (that Friday - and 2 days before Ambassador Susan Rice's dog and pony show across the Sunday news programs) directly referenced the Benghazi attack as being an act of terrorism by an al-Qaeda surrogate timed for the 9/11 anniversary.  Yet, despite this specific information, the President and his surrogates spent another 10 days saying that this was not a terror attack and was the result of an obscure three month old internet video that allegedly insulted Muslims.

Given that the President has only participated in about half of the daily security briefs - perhaps the latest effort to extend the President's 'plausible deniability' will be to say that the President missed this brief because of the demands of his campaign?

What is the media focusing on besides their anti-Israel agenda?  They're busy trying to tell the GOP just what they need to do in order to win the hearts and minds of the majority of Americans - become more like the Democrats.

Across almost all of the Sunday morning talking head shows, 'experts' told us that the GOP has become too 'conservative' and needs to compete with the Democrats on the basis of expanding government and becoming progressivism / liberalism light.  We're also being told that since the mainstream media dislikes conservatives - and will continue to run their propaganda against us - we need to counter this by being nice to the mainstream media, move to the center-left, and then the media will not hammer us incessantly.

What a load of ________!

None of these 'experts' or 'brilliant' and 'non-partisan' media nimrods have the best interests of the country or the GOP in their advice.  These are the same idiots who not only routinely ignore the hypocrisy of the left - but embrace that hypocrisy.  As Powerline noted last week...
In The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama criticized President Bush for being a partisan and running a permanent political campaign following his re-election in 2004:


Maybe peace would have broken out with a different kind of White House, one less committed to waging a perpetual campaign–a White House that would see a 51-48 victory as a call to humility and compromise rather than an irrefutable mandate.

The ironies are thick. Obama, too, was re-elected by a 51-48 margin, but certainly hasn’t seen that fact as a “call to humility and compromise,” nor has the Democratic Party. Moreover, Bush genuinely sought bipartisanship, and it is Obama who knows no higher calling than extreme partisanship...
This hypocrisy is fully embraced by not only President Barack Obama as he seeks to interact with the GOP in Congress, but also by the mainstream media who sees their primary responsibility is to 'influence and change the world' as opposed to dispassionately report on facts.

We see this plainly in the 'negotiations' over the first major fiscal cliff that we face about 40 days from now.

The President remains locked on demanding $1.6 trillion in new taxes over the next decade - on top of the nearly $3 trillion in new taxes from the 10% across the board tax increase that will take place on January 1, the near tripling of dividend taxes, the increase in capital gains and corporate taxes, and the collection of taxes being imposed to fund part of the Obamacare health insurance boondoggle.  It doesn't matter that these steps will plummet the country back into a recession (just like the Eurozone), or cost 700,000 to 1.5 million jobs.

No, we're hearing that Congressional Democrats are perfectly fine with running the country off this first major cliff.


We've got mental midgets like the Marxist thug in charge of the AFL-CIO, Richard Trumka, who believe that the fiscal cliff is overstated.  Then there are the ideologues in Congress like Harry Reid, Patty Murray, Chuck Schumer, Dick Durbin - who see the only solution is higher taxes because only the government can adequately determine how and where to spend money and control the economy.

One has to wonder if we are watching the latest example of  'not letting a crisis go to waste' - even when one has to create a crisis.  Are they making the cold Alinsky-ite calculation that killing the national economy is just a necessary step in order to expand their agenda?  They obviously know quite well that their allies in the media will be writing incessant stories blaming the GOP for their stubbornness in 'compromising' which will be the 'official' reason we plummet off that cliff.

The Obama Administration, the Obama campaign, and the mainstream media worked overtime during this past political campaign to hide and diffuse the grim economic statistics brought on by the failure of the Obama / Progressive economic agenda.  They shamelessly cooked the books.  Minions of progressivism argued that Bush, who left office 4 years ago, was to blame for the dismal economy we now have - and that an 'evil capitalist' Mitt Romney would unleash such horrors on the American people as not having the government provide women with free contraceptives or taxpayer funded abortions on demand.

Investor's Business Daily lists out just some of the grim economic news that was withheld by the Obama Administration until after Election Day...
** Real average hourly earnings dropped again in October
** The number of poor people in America climbed 712,000 in 2011.
** Food stamp enrollment exploded by more than 420,000 in August.
** The number of new jobless claims shot up to 439,000 last week, up 78,000 from the week before
** We also learned that the annual inflation rate climbed to 2.2%
** Coal plants are closing
** Small banks are shutting down
Shamelessly, the WaPoo this weekend published their look at the Obama 'recovery' compared to the average recovery from a recession since the end of the Second World War...


That's a record that deserves reelection... doesn't it?

The Department of Homeland Security's US Citizenship and Immigration Services now has a new mission - being the primary gateway for new immigrants to access government benefit programs like food stamps, welfare, disability, Medicaid, etc....

Well, if they do as well as this mission as they do on their old primary mission of enforcing US immigration laws - perhaps the damage will not be that bad...

Speaking of mental midget union leaders, Frank Hurt, the President of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers union whose arrogance just cost 18,500 employees of Hostess Brands, Inc their jobs as he drove the company off a cliff, is now embracing the delusional wish that whomever purchases the assets of Hostess Brands, Inc will hire his members and put them to work so they can drive another company off a cliff....
Frank Hurt, president of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers union, told the WSJ he was comforted by the rush of consumers to purchase Twinkies and other products for fear the popular brands will go away.

“People are going crazy because they think they’re not going to be able to get any Twinkies or Ho Hos or Wonder Bread,” he told the WSJ. “They’ll be produced somewhere, some time and by our members.”
Would you rehire the same nimrods who forced their previous company into insolvency and liquidation?  I didn't think so.

The World Bank is now confirming that they are yet another multi-national non-government entity that has moved into the 'utterly irrelevant' category - joining other feckless entities like the United Nations and the Obama Jobs Council as they tout their latest fearmongering climate change report.

This 'report' warns that a simple 4 degree Celsius increase in global temperatures would likely trigger widespread crop failures and massive famine.  The only solution to prevent this catastrophe?  The immediate adoption of far left socialism / statism / progressivism that replaces capitalism - combined with massive government spending to 'fix' the climate and therefore 'end' climate change.

Not referenced in the report is that global warming / temperatures have not increased since 1997 or that the total temperature increase in the last century / 125 years has been a whopping 0.8 degrees Celsius.  Also not referenced is how embracing a political ideology will effect climate change, how wealth redistribution from Western nations to everyone else will effect climate change, or the effects of solar cycles on climate change.

Why let a few facts stand in the way, eh?  Can't let a crisis go to waste - even if the crisis has to be created.


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