Say Anything Blog

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/oct/20/justice-dept-blocks-ncs-nonpartisan-vote/

A small town in North Carolina overwhelmingly voted to do away with party affiliations in local elections. Eric Holder and the Department of Justice have overruled the electorate and determined that,

"partisan elections are needed so that black voters can elect their "candidates of choice" - identified by the department as those who are Democrats and almost exclusively black. The department ruled that white voters in Kinston will vote for blacks only if they are Democrats and that therefore the city cannot get rid of party affiliations for local elections because that would violate black voters' right to elect the candidates they want. "

This isn't setting well with the locals.

The decision, made by the same Justice official who ordered the dismissal of a voting rights case against members of the New Black Panther Party in Philadelphia, has irritated other locals as well. They bristle at federal interference in this city of nearly 23,000 people, two-thirds of whom are black.

This decision was voted for by white and black North Carolinian's. They decided to eliminate party affiliations in local elections. What business does the federal government in overturning this decision. What business does the Justice Department have in insuring the election of Democrats?

The really insulting thing about this decision is that the DOJ is presuming that local blacks are to stupid to know which candidate they wish to elect unless they have a large (D) behind their names.

Today my son nearly choked on a marsh mellow.  He turned blue and was out cold in less than thirty seconds.  Thankfully YOU, the US taxpayer paid to send me to San Antionio in 1989 to attend Combat Medic School.  There I learned the Heimlich.  As I listened to my wife talking to 911 and watched my son’s eyes roll back into his head I knew he would be dead before 911 could respond.  Three abdominal thrusts later, the marsh mellow was dislodged and he was breathing normally.  Thank you, Mr and Mrs taxpayer for paying to send me to medic school.

Finally, as a PSA, learn the Heimlich maneuver people.  The life you save may mean a lot to you.

Thank you Drill SGTS Jones, Graham and Thomas and all my instructors at in the 232nd Medical Battalion.  You’re good instruction came in handy today.

You have to type them in.  Put < followed by b for bold, i for italics, and block quote > then type what you want bolded, in italics or blockquoted

See

For a link you have to type < a then href="your link" >Description < / a >

 < x >Example< / x >

Where x is either b, i, u or blockquote.

 < x href="http://www.sayanythingblog.com">Sayanything

Where x is substituted for a.

This will give you an embedded, click able link that will look like this…

Sayanything.

You can type these commands in manually or you can do like Bob suggested and keep a readers blog open and copy and paste the commands.

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/best-and-brightest-millenial-edition-by.html

Democrats spent most of 2007 and 2008 telling us that we had to pull out of Iraq or that we had taken our eye off of the ball in Afghanistan. 

Obama himself told us that Afghanistan was the “good war”. Now, that he’s in power, Democrats are beginning to admit that all of that “good war” rhetoric was to enhance their macho image as they called for withdrawals from Iraq.

Escalation is a bad idea. The Democrats backed themselves into defending the idea of Afghanistan being The Good War because they felt they needed to prove their macho bonafides when they called for withdrawal from Iraq. Nobody asked too many questions sat the time, including me. But none of us should forget that it was a political strategy, not a serious foreign policy.

There have been many campaign promises “adjusted” since the election. There is no reason that the administration should feel any more bound to what they said about this than all the other committments it has blithely turned aside in the interest of “pragmatism.”

I find it interesting that they are coming out and admitting it.  I find it hilarious that he basically called Obama a liar.

It makes me sick that Democrats were willing to us this and slurs like “chicken hawk” to score political points considering they weren’t signing up in droves to fight the “good war.”

Like most people in the service, I give the Air Force hell.  That’s just inter-service rivalry.  Here’s a group of men that do a tough job, 24/7.  They deserve all the respect we can give them.  Hats off to the men of the Combat Rescue Squadrons.  You never want to see them because if you do things have gone to hell.  If you need to see them you really want to see them.

The 129th Rescue flew 1500 Combat hours in four months and had 397 combat saves during that time.

Various squadrons have saved over two hundred lives so far this year.

Did you ever wonder how we got in the mess we’re in?  Pete Stark-D Wonderland, is the prime example of the attitude of our “representatives”.  Watch him in the embedded video.  He has the gall to tell us that that the national debt is good, because the more we borrow, the wealthier we are!  The interviewer calls him on it several times and he asks, “Where did you go to school.”  When he hears the answer, the University of Puerto Rico he laughs.  Later in the interview he tells him that he should have went to a good school.  The arrogance of the man is astounding.  It boils down to, “You plebes should listen to your betters because we went to good schools and are smarter than you are”.

I’m not doing the video justice so go watch it for yourself.

The CIA Report

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203706604574375012840827276.html

The report shows us two things…

1) Nancy Pelosi LIED about not being briefed on Enhanced Interrogation Techniques.

2) The program was well thought out, briefed to Congress and provided valuable information.

Whoever advised people to be skeptical of what they read in the papers must have had in mind this week’s coverage of the documents about CIA interrogations. Now that we’ve had a chance to read the reports, it’s clear the real story isn’t the few cases of abuse played up by the media. The news is that the program was thoughtfully developed, carefully circumscribed, briefed to Congress, and yielded information crucial to disrupting Al Qaeda.

That’s the essential judgment offered by former CIA Inspector General John Helgerson in his 2004 report. Some mild criticism aside, the report says the CIA “invested immense time and effort to implement the [program] quickly, effectively, and within the law”; that the agency “generally provided good guidance and support”; and that agency personnel largely “followed guidance and procedures and documented their activities well.”

Isn’t that a kick in the teeth.  After years of hearing how “torture” doesn’t work we find out that indeed, it does. 

Congress also knew about it. The IG report belies House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s claims that she wasn’t told about all this. “In the fall of 2002, the Agency briefed the leadership of the Congressional Intelligence Oversight Committees on the use of both standard techniques and EITs. . . . Representatives . . . continued to brief the leadership of the Intelligence Oversight Committees on the use of EITs and detentions in February and March 2003. The [CIA] General Counsel says that none of the participants expressed any concern about the techniques or the Program . . .” Ditto in September 2003.

So Nancy Pelosi lied.  She was briefed and used the CIA as a pawn to further her own career.  Shocking!

The most revealing portion of the IG report documents the program’s results. The CIA’s “detention and interrogation of terrorists has provided intelligence that has enabled the identification and apprehension of other terrorists and warned of terrorist plots planned for the United States and around the world.” That included the identification of Jose Padilla and Binyam Muhammed, who planned to detonate a dirty bomb, and the arrest of previously unknown members of an al Qaeda cell in Karachi, Pakistan, designated to pilot an aircraft attack in the U.S. The information also made the CIA aware of plots to attack the U.S. consulate in Karachi, hijack aircraft to fly into Heathrow, loosen track spikes to derail a U.S. train, blow up U.S. gas stations, fly an airplane into a California building, and cut the lines of suspension bridges in New York….This conclusion is buttressed by two other CIA documents released this week, one from 2004 and another from 2005, that outline interrogation results.

So we now have three reports that tell us the tangible results of the EIT program.  The CIA agents work hard to protect America and this is how they get repaid.  The thing is, they knew this was going to happen and accepted the risk to protect their fellow Americans.

CIA officials well understood that they might be second-guessed years later by politicians. “During the course of this review, a number of Agency officers expressed unsolicited concern about the possibility of recrimination or legal action resulting from their participation. . . . officers expressed concern that a human rights group might pursue them for activities . . . they feared that the Agency would not stand behind them.” Another said, “Ten years from now we’re going to be sorry we’re doing this . . . [but] it has to be done.”

This is how we are going to repay men and women that put it on the line to protect the US?  By prosecuting them for using techniques that worked?  To those that call water boarding torture, we use it in SERE School on our own people.  I can’t conclude my article any better than the WSJ did so I’ll just use their conclusion.

The outrage here isn’t that government officials used sometimes rough interrogation methods to break our enemies. The outrage is that, years later, when the political winds have shifted and there hasn’t been another attack, our politicians would punish the men and women who did their best to protect Americans in a time of peril.

I love the military sense of humor.  Go watch this it will make you want to be a Ranger.  NSFW language.



You’ll fight Tigers!

Note, I am not a Ranger.

http://wildammo.com/2009/07/27/unusual-paintings-of-obama-naked-with-unicorns/

Go look at them, they are different…I will warn you, what has been seen, can’t be unseen.

Just to give you a taste…Enjoy a picture of Obama, Joe Stalin, a unicorn and House!

Hello Everyone!  Soldiers Angels are raffling a new GI Expert entry-level 1911 to raise money for Valour-IT.  For those of you that don’t know, Valour-IT gives voice activated laptops to soldiers wounded in Iraq so they can stay in contact with their family and friends.  Go on over and buy a raffle ticket, maybe you’ll win a nice pistol!

http://soldiersangels.org/index.php?page=valour-it-fundraising-raffle

On a related note, you used to be able to use Pay Pal to contribute to Valour-IT but Pay Pal has pulled the Soldier’s Angels account over the raffle.  Paypal’s PR department can be reached at (408) 376-7458. Be polite!  You’ll catch more flies with honey!

You lie!

One of the biggest problems for Democrats with health care so far has reports by the Congressional Budget Office detailing the true costs.  How do you stop that?  You include a provision in the bill to stop the CBO from counting money spent in its reports.

http://energycommerce.house.gov/Press_111/20090714/aahca.pdf

“Amounts appropriated under this section, and outlays flowing from such appropriations, shall not be taken into account for purposes of any budget enforcement procedures including allocations under section 302(a) and (b) of the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act and budget resolutions for fiscal years during which appropriations are made from the Fund,”

How do we know if Health Care Reform is going to save money if we don’t know the true costs.  Answer, we don’t and we won’t. 

Hope and Change you can believe in!

http://blog.heritage.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/7-7-09-housing-crisis-report.pdf

The housing bubble that burst in 2007 and led to a financial crisis can be traced back to federal government intervention in the U.S. housing market intended to help provide homeownership opportunities for more Americans. This intervention began with two government-backed corporations, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which privatized their profits but socialized their risks, creating powerful incentives for them to act recklessly and exposing taxpayers to tremendous losses.

What were those advantages?

1)  Fannie and Freddie were charged by Congress with keeping the secondary mortgage market liquid
and increasing the availability of affordable housing. They enjoyed a $2.25 billion line of
credit from the U.S. Treasury.

2)As a business model, Fannie and Freddie would sell bonds in the debt markets at a relatively low cost and use the borrowed money to turn around and purchase mortgages from primary lenders like Countrywide Financial that dealt directly with customers seeking home loans. Oftentimes, they would then bundle many of these mortgages into securities and either sell them to investors, who paid Fannie and Freddie a fee to
guarantee payment in the event the mortgages defaulted.

3)  The Federal Government encouraged regulated banks to purchase GSE preferred stock by allowing them to hold 80 percent less capital against it compared to similar assets, providing a major subsidy to their purchase of what amounted to cheap borrowing by Fannie and Freddie.

4)Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were also exempt from key regulatory and market oversight. For example, their congressional charters exempted them from oversight by the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”): the GSEs are the only publicly-traded corporations exempt from SEC oversight.  The GSEs were also exempt from
market oversight of the quality of their mortgage-backed security issuances.

Why?

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac answered
in a very direct way to the federal government and elected officials in a manner
reminiscent of the “crony capitalism” of countries such as Russia or China, which
preserve a large state-owned enterprise sector. Fannie and Freddie answered to the
Department of Housing and Urban Development (“HUD”), which set quotas for GSE
investment in affordable housing, as well as to Congress and the White House, which
sought to use them as vehicles to advance the politically popular goal of increasing the
national homeownership rate. This was done directly through legislation and regulation which mandated affordable housing lending and indirectly through political pressure
from politicians and advocacy groups.  This created incentives for Fannie and Freddie to
curry political favor with Congress and necessitated a massive lobbying effort which
GSE executives termed “political risk management.” As the New York Times
summarized it:
Fannie Mae, the nation’s biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits. 

In 1992, Congress passed the Federal Housing Enterprises Financial Safety and
Soundness Act, which created an “affordable housing mission” for Fannie Mae and
Freddie Mac. This legislation directed HUD to establish three separate quotas requiring
the GSEs to set aside a certain percentage of their yearly mortgage purchases to loans
with affordable characteristics. These quotas were expressed as the minimum share of
mortgages that Fannie and Freddie purchased every year which had to be made to “low and moderate-income families … low-income families in low-income areas and very low-income families,” as well as borrowers in “central cities, rural areas, and other underserved areas.”

In 1994, Fannie Mae CEO Jim Johnson announced the company’s first affordable
housing initiative, the $1 trillion “Opening the Doors to Affordable Housing” program.
Johnson, a long-time friend of both President Clinton and Treasury Secretary Robert
Rubin, took the helm of Fannie in 1991 after a stint at Lehman Brothers. In an article
entitled “Fannie Mae’s Trillion-Dollar Giveaway,” written about this initial affordable
housing initiative, the Los Angeles-based Family Savings Bank criticized Fannie Mae’s
past practices for relying too heavily on borrowers’ income and debt levels when
underwriting loans. Although some would consider using such metrics to be prudent, the
article stated that these guidelines “must have been written sometime in the 1800s.” It
praised Mr. Johnson’s $1 trillion commitment because it would introduce “qualifying
flexibility,” for low-income borrowers, allowing them to reduce their down payments to
as little as 3 percent. The article cited “pressure from President Clinton’s administration,” as the primary influence on Fannie Mae’s decision to lower its lending
standards.

In 1995, Johnson seeded the Fannie Mae Foundation with $350 million of Fannie stock. The company used this foundation to spread millions of dollars around to politicallyconnected organizations like the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute.14 It also hired well-known academics to write papers that gave an aura of academic rigor to policy positions favorable to Fannie Mae.

Government actions distorted the housing market, yet advocates of affordable housing
policies, such as Congressman Barney Frank (D-MA), have asserted that those who criticize these policies seek to place blame for the financial crisis solely on borrowers of modest means. This misses the mark entirely. In fact, responsibility for the erosion of mortgage lending standards, which began with government affordable housing policy, rests squarely on the policy makers who advocated these ill-conceived policies in the first place.

Go read the whole thing.  Those are just the interesting quotes I found up until page 12.  There are 14 more pages. I wonder why I haven't seen this report anywhere?

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2009/07/michelle-obama-polls.html

In other numerical revelations, just 4% of Americans say that Wall Street or credit card companies are honest or trustworthy. A majority of young people still approve of Obama’s job performance, but a majority of seniors over 64 now don’t (54%). Maybe they’ll die before the next election.

Ah,the tolerant and caring left!  Seniors vote,  young people don’t.  Now that they’ve lost the Seniors they want them to die!  The Healthcare Program suddenly makes sense!

When I got back from Desert Shield/Desert Storm the good people of Bangor, Maine were there to greet our plane.  It was 10:00PM at night and well over three hundred people were there to cheer for us, call us hero’s and welcome us back to the States.  I was treated to free drinks, asked for my autograph, hugged, kissed and generally treated as a hero.  They still do it today.  Every flight that comes back from the war is greeted and the troops are provided with snacks, cell phones to call their loved ones and a hero’s welcome.  I just wanted to say thank you to those good people.  I’m glad they are there providing the same service to our men and women as the come back to America.  I know you provided me with a special greeting and EARNED as special place in my heart until I die.

Iran’s Guardian Council has suggested that the number of votes collected in 50 cities surpass the number of people eligible to cast ballot in those areas.

The council’s Spokesman Abbas-Ali Kadkhodaei, who was speaking on the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) Channel 2 on Sunday, made the remarks in response to complaints filed by Mohsen Rezaei—a defeated candidate in the June 12 Presidential election.

“Statistics provided by the candidates, who claim more than 100% of those eligible have cast their ballot in 80-170 cities are not accurate—the incident has happened in only 50 cities,” Kadkhodaei said.

Kadkhodaei further explained that the voter turnout of above 100% in some cities is a normal phenomenon because there is no legal limitation for people to vote for the presidential elections in another city or province to which people often travel or commute.