“HOW DO YOU KNOW THEY’LL PRINT IT?”

TOM LIPSCOMB: “HOW DO YOU KNOW THEY’LL PRINT IT?”

Scott Johnson, Powerline

Investigative reporter/editor Tom Lipscomb is a Senior Fellow at the Annenberg Center for the Digital Future (USC) and the founder of Times Books. He broke stories on questions about the military records of both John Kerry and George W. Bush in the 2004 election in the Chicago Sun-Times and the New York Sun. Tom argues that the media’s allegiance to the Democratic Party is suppressing news:

In one of the most egregious violations of American pretensions to an independent press, John Kerry conspired with the Boston Globe, Associated Press, and the Los Angeles Times organizations to set the ground rules for the long awaited release of his papers after his defeat in 2004.

No one has revealed what the agreement was, but there had been eager anticipation by the public and news media punctuated by lies and promises by Kerry to release them for years before.

When they were finally “released,” the receiving news organizations, none of which had shown any ability or interest in pursuing the numerous discrepancies in Kerry’s claimed war experiences as shown by other records and witnesses, preferring to characterize them as “not proven,” proceeded to put out one to two days’ brief extracts from the papers which contained little of note besides Kerry’s inferior (to George Bush’s) college grades.

When I pressed those news organizations, and others for access, they refused. I reminded them I had run the book publishing company that published The Pentagon Papers in their entirety and at considerable expense, and that today with internet publishing, it would cost practically nothing to put them entirely on line in the interest of answering the public’s many questions about Kerry. And I asked, as with the Pentagon Papers, wasn’t it in the public interest to do so?

They still refused to give access to anyone.

It seems highly likely to me, from what I had already learned about the many fraudulent statements in the material I had been able to see, that had they done so, Kerry would never have become our Secretary of State.

It was the first case I know of showing the press as an outrageously partisan player in American politics, far less interested in its traditional role of informing the public what it wished to know and ought to be aware of than protecting their political allies. And interestingly, circulation and advertising in newspapers and magazines suffered a catastrophic drop about the same time from which it is not recovering.

The strange case of the invisible Hillary Clinton-Sid Blumenthal correspondence might well be in that tradition. Only this time it is worse.

The coverup on Benghazi is one of the most disgraceful episodes in the history of the American Presidency. There can be little doubt that the details of that scandal which may well have affected a Presidential election, were carefully left in doubt by mainstream media journalists, more than 80 percent of whom were in support of the Obama administration.

We don’t know which members of the American press are refusing to publish or even reveal what they know about the copies of the Clinton-Blumenthal e-mails “Guccifer” claims to have supplied them, but if there is one thing we do know now it is that we can no longer trust the mainstream media to report in the tradition of Adolph Ochs’s instruction to his New York Times: “without fear or favor.”

“Guccifer” should be smart enough to give them directly to “Thesmokinggun” or other investigative internet media, if he wants to get these emails to the public.

As Forbes points out in a fine and well-balanced account, left hanging by their own mainstream media, Americans only have access to what is claimed in the “Guccifer” material are Russian sources like Pravda, Moscow Times, and RT. Those are hardly sources without major political spin games of their own.

Some may remember the question hanging in the air at the end of the of Sydney Pollack’s film Three Days of the Condor. A CIA agent challenges whistleblower Robert Redford who has just given classified material on a scandal to the New York Times. “How do you know they’ll print it?” he asked.

It seemed a ridiculous question back in 1975, still a year before America’s bicentennial celebration. Of course they would publish it. As Abe Rosenthal said to me one day about some hot manuscript: “If I get my hands on it, it is going in the paper.”

Now, it is a valid question. News media are no longer media. They are active partisan players in American politics. And it appears they decide what the “news” is according to what fits their scenario, rather than what’s fit to print.

MISSILE DEFENSE, THEN AND NOW

MISSILE DEFENSE, THEN AND NOW

John Hinderacker, Powerline

Readers of a certain age will recall the battles over missile defense that raged during the Reagan administration. Virtually all Democrats opposed all forms of missile defense, deeming the concept not only unfeasible–”like hitting a bullet with a bullet,” as though that were impossible–but destabilizing as well. John Kerry’s denunciations of missile defense were typical: “a dream based on illusion, but one which could have real and terrible consequences,” As recently as 2008, Barack Obama said that he didn’t “agree with a missile defense system” and promised to slash funding for development of such systems. He did, too.

I was reminded of all of this by a low-key, matter of fact story in today’s newspapers:

The Obama administration will add 14 interceptors to a West Coast-based missile defense system, reflecting concern about North Korea’s focus on developing nuclear weapons and its advances in long-range missile technology, officials said Friday. …

The Pentagon intends to add the 14 interceptors to 30 already in place in California and Alaska. That will expand the system’s ability to shoot down long-range missiles in flight before they could reach U.S. territory. …

“As we think about our homeland missile-defense posture, we do not have a ‘just-in-time’ policy,” [James Miller, defense undersecretary for policy] said. “Our policy is to stay ahead of the threat — and to continue to ensure that we are ahead of any potential future Iranian or North Korean ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) capability.”

Well, that is good news. Still, one wonders: has anyone ever asked Secretary of State John Kerry whether he now admits that he was wrong about missile defense being a “dream based on an illusion,” with “real and terrible consequences?” Or how about the Democratic Senators and Congressmen, many of them still in office, who bitterly attacked President Reagan for wanting to develop missile defense systems, and President Bush for wanting to deploy such systems? Does anyone ever ask whether they have changed their minds, or how they now feel about our ability to defend against North Korean missiles?

Being a Democrat means never being reminded of the times when you were wrong.

Oh yeah, stay on his good side!

Why North Korean “Reality” Is Important

Important word from Mike Walker, Col. USMC (retired)

All,

The fear of war in East Asia is not based on a reality that the region's nations are edging towards conflict because of state supported terrorism or religious hatred or over some other irresolvable problem.

China, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Russia and the United States all want peace and work quite well together in promoting regional stability and economic progress.

The threat to peace comes from a North Korean leadership that has such a poor grasp of reality that it might actually think it would be logical to start a war because they truly believe they will win it.

I base this conclusion, in part, on my experiences as a former Marine intelligence officer that included duty with Combined Intelligence Section, Combined Marine Forces Command in Korea.

To better understand my point visit the link below, a short video for North Koreans to “educate” them about the United States.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/alleged-north-korean-propaganda-video-americans-live-today-215322616.html

Before you dismiss it as silliness, remember that there is no freedom of the press in North Korea. That video is the “real world” for all but a fraction of a percent of the population. It is NOT superficial propaganda or America-bashing.

The video represents the “truth” for the vast majority of the North Korean people, to include many in the highest ranks of the military and communist party -- the leaders who will decide if a new war against South Korea and the United States is “winnable.”

That is what scares people. After watching the video, if I were a North Korean army general, I would be more than confident that North Korea could defeat such a crippled nation so I would approve of an attack if the Supreme Leader, Kim Jong-un, asked my opinion.

North Koreans have watched over million of their fellows starve to death over the last twenty years (the typical North Korean is several inches shorter than their South Korean counterpart due to poor diet), there is only one car or truck for every one hundred citizens and most of those are owned by the military, their GPD standard of living is under $2,000 per capita and most homes are without electricity.

The idea that the United States has a $15 trillion GPD, the largest in the world, a land were there are eight vehicles for every ten people, where obesity from overeating is a major health concern, where the average home is valued above $200,000 and the GPD standard of living is $48,000 per capita is pure science fiction to North Korea’s leaders.

For someone living in North Korea, the real strength of the United States is beyond anything in their experience and is unimaginable. The video, however, represents a life every North Korean can relate to and BELIEVE.

That is why so many serious people in the rest of world worry over what North Korea will do or not do.

The final layer of uncertainty is that the radical socialist-dynastic regime in North Korea has a frighteningly wrong view of the 1950-1953 Korean War and that influences how they see the prospects of another war.

They not only grossly underestimate the military and economic power of the United States and the Republic of Korea today as compared to sixty years ago, they also badly underestimate the critical role played by the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China in saving the North from complete destruction during the 1950-1953 war.

Most senior North Korean officials feel they could have won that war and that they will surely win the next round now that they have nuclear weapons and what they think are "modern" arms.

Those are the types of miscalculation that start wars.

Mike

OBAMA FLAILS AS REPUBLICANS STAND FIRM ON SEQUESTER

OBAMA FLAILS AS REPUBLICANS STAND FIRM ON SEQUESTER

By: Michael Barone

They’re flailing. That’s the impression I get from watching Barack Obama and his White House over the past week.

Things haven’t gone as they expected. The House Republicans were supposed to cave in on the sequester, as they did on the fiscal cliff at the beginning of the year.

They would be so desperate to avoid the sequester’s mandatory defense cuts, the theory went, that they would agree to higher taxes (through closing loopholes) on high earners.

But the Republicans didn’t deal. They decided to take the sequester cuts and make them the basis for a continuing resolution funding the government for the rest of the fiscal year.

Obama responded by threatening all sorts of dire consequences — Head Start kids left out in the snow, airline security lines as far as the eye can see.

Republicans would take the blame, the Obama folks believed. Polls showed they were far less popular than the president.

Then on Tuesday it was announced that White House tours were cancelled. The sequester meant there wasn’t enough money to host those high school kids from Waverly, Iowa.

Suddenly, it became apparent that it was Obama’s poll numbers that were falling. Not to the level of congressional Republicans’ admittedly dreadful numbers. But enough that the Quinnipiac poll — whose 2012 numbers tilted a bit toward Democrats — showed him with only 45 percent approval and 46 percent disapproval.

Then the president who doesn’t like spending much time with even Democratic members of Congress suddenly invited 12 Republican senators to dinner at the Jefferson Hotel. He even paid out of his own pocket!

And on Thursday, he invited House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan and ranking Democrat Chris Van Hollen to lunch at the White House.

This is the same Paul Ryan whom Obama insulted after inviting him to a presidential speech at George Washington University. Presumably the lunch was insult-free.

Meanwhile, a top White House aide was dispatched to make Obama’s case to a heavily Republican audience.

The message coming from the White House seems to be that Obama has made concessions, including spending cuts, and is really, sincerely interested in a grand bargain with Republicans on entitlements.

He has already, the argument goes, agreed to using the chained CPI — an inflation measure that produces lower cost-of-living adjustments to entitlement and other programs.

For this, he’s taken some heat from Democrats. So Republicans should understand that he is dealing in good faith and should be willing to agree to increased revenues by removing tax preferences for high earners.

The Obama folks are correct in saying that Speaker John Boehner was willing to do that during the summer 2011 grand bargain negotiations.

But that proposed deal did not include tax rate increases. Now that Obama extracted higher tax rates on earners over $400,000 in the fiscal cliff deal, Boehner and other Republicans insist that’s all the revenue increases they’ll agree to.

This comes amid stories that Obama’s chief political goal is helping his fellow Democrats win a House majority in 2014 and as his Organizing for Action (formerly Obama for America) is still cranking out press releases about the dire effects of the sequester.

It’s not unheard of for a politician to make public threats and private blandishments at the opposing party at the same time.

But it is sometimes awkward. Especially if the threats and blandishments are not entirely credible.

Democrats have some chance of winning the 17 seats they need for a House majority. But it’s an uphill climb. Even though Obama won 51 percent of the vote in 2012, he did not carry a majority of House districts.

And there is some chance Republicans will capture the six seats they need for a Senate majority. Seven Democratic incumbents are running in states Mitt Romney carried.

And the retirements of incumbent Democrats in West Virginia, Iowa and, as announced Friday, Michigan may put those seats in play.

As for blandishments, Boehner is not the only Republican who has concluded that Obama is not capable of good-faith negotiating.

Republicans argue that revenues are approaching the norm of 19 percent of gross domestic product and that spending needs to come down more from its historic high of 25 percent of GDP.

They’re making a little bit of headway on that by accepting the sequester. Obama’s flailing seems unlikely to persuade them to change course.

Michael Barone, senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner, is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Fox News Channel contributor and a co-author of The Almanac of American Politics

PJ O'Rourke... enough said!

P.J O’WOW!

Steven Hayward in Conservatism, Powerline

Churchill used to say somewhere that only someone with a sense of humor could understand the most serious things in life.  That’s one reason I’ve always told people that they should take the political humorist P.J. O’Rourke more seriously—deep down inside, his political humor is anchored in a grasp of some fundamental political truths.  Like Will Rogers, or Mark Twain, his work conveys a serious teaching, and, like Jon Stewart and comics on the left, he can reach younger voters in ways that straight up commentary from old fogies likes me can’t.

This is preface to bringing your attention to a bracing article O’Rourke wrote at the Weekly Standard right after the 2008 election and which recently surfaced again on several blogs.  It is even more salient today than it was in 2008: “We Blew It.”  It is a thoroughgoing self-criticism of the complacency and mistakes of the conservative movement going back to the Reagan years.  We had the left cornered in a box canyon, he says, and let them escape.  And in recent years we’ve failed to perceive how the political landscape was shifting beneath our feet.  There’s some of the usual O’Rourkian wit here and there, but on the whole this is a deeply serious article.  It is very much worth reading the whole thing, but herewith samples from the beginning and the end of the piece:

An entire generation has been born, grown up, and had families of its own since Ronald Reagan was elected. And where is the world we promised these children of the Conservative Age? Where is this land of freedom and responsibility, knowledge, opportunity, accomplishment, honor, truth, trust, and one boring hour each week spent in itchy clothes at church, synagogue, or mosque? It lies in ruins at our feet, as well it might, since we ourselves kicked the shining city upon a hill into dust and rubble. The progeny of the Reagan Revolution will live instead in the universe that revolves around Hyde Park. . .

We, the conservatives, who do understand the free market, had the responsibility to–as it were–foreclose upon this mess. The market is a measurement, but that measuring does not work to the advantage of a nation or its citizens unless the assessments of volume, circumference, and weight are conducted with transparency and under the rule of law. We’ve had the rule of law largely in our hands since 1980. Where is the transparency? It’s one more job we botched.

Although I must say we’re doing good work on our final task–attaching the garden hose to our car’s exhaust pipe and running it in through a vent window. Barack and Michelle will be by in a moment with some subsidized ethanol to top up our gas tank. And then we can turn the key.

I don’t agree with every particular of P.J.’s piece, but I agree with its self-critical spirit.  (And in fact the chapter on the 1984 election in my Age of Reagan book makes the point that the Reagan campaign made a huge strategic blunder by not seeking to finish off liberalism and the Democratic Party in that election—that “morning in America” was a bad strategy for the long-run.)  Here’s part of how I put the matter in a memo I wrote and circulated to some conservative leaders a couple of years ago (before, needless to say, the re-election of Obama):

How did the Left get the drop on us?  In the early- to mid-1990s we thought we had won on the major premises of politics and policy—Francis Fukuyama told us so!—such that what was needed from the likes of us was the technical work of unraveling piece-by-piece the architecture of the administrative-welfare state.  The reasons for thinking this way were all around us, from the spectacular fall of the Berlin Wall to the market liberalizations proceeding apace in nearly every corner of the world to the spectacular rout of Hillarycare and the noticeable acceptance of market logic within Clintonite & Blairist liberalism.  These encouraging signs were profoundly misleading.  The problem with thinking you are riding a “wave of history” is that the wave might leave you stranded on a sandbar far from shore.  Just ask Newt.

I have a field theory for this that is simple but hopefully not simplistic.  We should not repair behind exogenous excuses about the surprise of the housing bubble/financial collapse and the extraordinary phenomenon of Obamamania.  The seeds of decay and regress should have been evident long before these events.  We should be honest: we—our cause, our movement—became complacent.   We became too narrowly focused on policy studies to the exclusion of the sustained public argument about the principles and practices of a free society that were the predicate of policy reforms.  We forgot the “public” part of “public policy” studies. . .

I don’t think we ever fully appreciated, as Hayek did as far back as the 1960s, that the nature of the challenge from the Left would change profoundly going forward from that point, and become much more difficult.  Instead I think the conservative intellectual movement, and its institutions, became entirely too self-congratulatory (which was one of the mistakes the Left made starting in the 1960s).

In some ways we have become a mirror image of the very problem we are set against: we are bogged down in petty details instead of broad principles.

Now, one obvious consequence of the loss of the conservative intellectual movement’s focus on the broader public argument part of “public policy studies” is that we have a crop of presidential candidates who speak almost entirely in technocratic tones.  And so we get a crop of candidates who promulgate 59-point jobs plans.  Why not?  That tends to be what they see from us [think tankers] most of the time.  Conservatives who talk incessantly of finding “the next Reagan” are missing the point in looking for that particular skill set and style (though those are not unimportant things); a large part of what made Reagan effective was that he represented the culmination of a generation of patient public argument to change public opinion on general principles.  For a variety of reasons I do not put much stock in the public opinion poll data that shows the public is “with us” on a variety of discrete questions.

Well, it was a long memo, and this is enough.  But it does explain part of why I decided to leave Washington last year, and try something else.  P.J.—let’s party!

Cutting Budgets in Government

Mike Walker, Col. USMC (retired) and Superintendent of Business Services for a California school district.

All,

 

Sequestration has come to pass and now the real work begins. In California, the school district where I worked saw its funding cut by over 25% in a few short years, a decrease that surpassed the cuts made during the Great Depression.

We had to constantly keep before us the truth that our core responsibility was to teach kids the 3 R’s (for simplicity’s sake) and we did it.

How: Looking at every possible aspect of how we educated kids to see where we could cut spending.

First and foremost, you have to be able to distinguish what services you must provide versus what services you want to provide. In other words, you have to have crystal clear picture of why your organizations exists – what is your fundamental purpose and accomplish that mission and that mission only.

Once you have done that then you protect the core and start cutting the rest. In the case of a school district, all the initial cuts needed to be as far away from the classroom as possible.

That also meant looking at the little things as well as the big things.

For big-ticket examples, put off capital improvements. Reduce travel to a minimum and eliminate almost all conferences. When staff leave, (except essential employees, your equivalent of classroom teachers) do not fill their positions.

Before we had to go the route of furloughs, we carefully asked for input/ideas/thoughts for saving money from the employees that were going to suffer from the furloughs. We were amazed at how many great ideas they came up with which proves once again that managers do not have all the answers. We still eventually had to go the furlough route, but the actual number of days turned out to be less than half of the initial plan.

Please note the use of the phrase “carefully asked.” If not then all the ideas will devolve into cutting the other guys budget i.e. the high school staff says cut the elementary schools and vice versa. They need to offer up ideas on how to cut their part of the pie.

For small examples, you can save a lot of money by reducing the number of printers, microwaves, copiers, office refrigerators, coffee pots, etc. You can extend the service life of computers, turn off the lights and regulate thermostat settings.

 

One last point, you may have noticed during the above discussion there was an emphasis on student education and not about school employees. That is because schools exist for the kids, not the adults.

The U.S. Government exists for the benefit of the citizens not the employees. Never forget that.

Mike

Quantitative Easing (QE): The Beginning of the Federal Spending Death Spiral?

Mike Walker, Col. USMC (retired)

All,

Sorry for the long post and if you do not economics then delete but do not say you were not warned later.

If we are looking for early indicators of the collapse of Federal deficit spending, the Fed’s QE policy is the proverbial “Canary in the coal mine.”

So far it is breathing easily. Hurray! No worries, Mate, at least for today. But do not look away for a moment as Uncle Sam’s days as a spendthrift drunken sailor are coming to and end.

Fortunately, the Federal Government is still a small part of the American economy. Most state and local governments, with notable exceptions such as Illinois (California is on the “watch list”), have made the tough decisions to put them on a sustainable fiscal path and we must never forget that the private sector economy is still the overwhelming engine for economic good.

Nonetheless, the Federal Government is on schedule for a tragic financial meltdown and the Fed is blazing the path to ruin. Here is our reality: the stock market and precious metals are rising in value because we are seeing flight of capital from US Treasuries, once the sine qua non of safe investments.

Of course, the virtual zero interest rate policy of the Fed has dammed up bank deposits (not to mention masking the real cost of future deficit spending). What reasonably informed average Joe would keep money in a bank savings account and what above-average Jane would invest in bank CD’s or other financial instruments?

The rise in the stock market is not as beneficial as we think as we are witnessing investors chasing a return on invest based on an abnormally high taste for risk. The obvious problem being that when you take on risk, you enter the realm of big winners and big losers. No one wants to be the loser, but there you have it.

So what has this to do with QE and a “death spiral”?

Across-the-board “chasing risk for return” is very bad news. Think back to the housing bubble where your family home was increasing in value regardless of what you did to improve (or even lower) its real value. The increases made no sense except as warning that what is too good to be true is not and chasing risk sends the same message. 

That is what QE is doing. China is no longer increasing the size of its US Treasury portfolio, a policy that is being followed by many former Treasury investors. The message is: do not buy US Treasuries if you have a choice.

Enter the Fed and exit hope for a good outcome.

Here is ugly cycle that is being created: the Treasury issues debt to keep the trillion dollars of overspending intact and the Fed is now buying up the debt at a rate that has never occurred in the entire history of America since 1776, which means its balance sheet is larger than ever before and its assets are overwhelmingly US Treasuries (and do not forget that the Fed also gets to print money, aye, there’s the rub!).

So what will eventually happen is that US Government is going to want to borrow and the Fed will become the buyer of last resort. But the Fed will only have two options: liquidate it assets to get the money to buy more Federal debt or print money like Weimar Germany. Since the Fed’s assets will be primarily US Treasuries, cashing them in to buy more US Treasuries is meaningless.

If the USG needs $300B to pay the bills, it is an exercise in futility to have the Fed buy the $300B in Treasuries if it has to cash in $300B in old Treasuries to buy the new Treasuries, as at the end of the day, the USG gets no new money to spend (+$300B - $300B = $0) and has to make $300B in immediate cuts (that makes the sequestration cuts look tame in comparison).

The alternative is to have the Fed simply print $300B in paper money (or some ugly combination of ever more borrowing and printing). That causes an inflationary death spiral as the paper money gradually becomes worthless as the Fed prints a trillion or so US dollars and the end is at hand.

We are now in sailing unchartered and dangerously treacherous waters. There are two truths the will become apparent when the Treasury/Fed Boat sinks: you cannot survive very long is a stormy ocean with only a life vest and there will be a great many casualties.

Mike

John McNaughton's painting... Empower!

From Jim DeMint,

I’ve spent the past 14 years on Capitol Hill. I first ran for Congress because I know conservative ideas work. But I realized our ideas don’t resonate with all Americans.
That’s why I chose to leave the Senate and serve the American people at The Heritage Foundation.
For too long, we conservatives have sat back and relied on lawmakers and politicos to deliver the message of limited government and individual liberty -- the message of the American Founding.
But it’s time to wake up and realize we cannot continue to fight today’s battles with yesterday’s tactics.
We need a leader who can powerfully and positively communicate proven conservative solutions directly to the American people. And Heritage is uniquely poised to take on the challenge.
Will you help Heritage lead this conservative charge? We must reenergize the conservative movement in such a way that Americans can’t help but be drawn in.
Heritage plans to launch bold initiatives that will revive conservative ideas -- American ideas -- with a hopeful, optimistic message. But we can’t do it alone. Find out more about our bold revival and watch a video about how you can lead the charge.
None of what we do at Heritage would be possible without your support.
Sincerely,

Jim DeMint
President-Elect

Sequester Shenanigans

Sequester Shenanigans

Mike Walker, Col. USMC (retired)

All,

 

When the Federal Government gets cut, please be ready for the same type of shenanigans that occurred in California.

 

The California State Government, like Washington DC, has a lot of agencies. When the recession hit, those agencies had their budgets cut and we had a lot of examples of profiles in courage and cowardice, of high ethical behavior and disgusting selfishness.

 

Expect the same from Washington DC.

 

How to spot the unethical lowlifes from the good people? Watch how they manage the cuts. 

California agencies took different paths and, eventually, benefited or were crucified for how they enacted the cuts.

 

The bottom line is that governmental employees have one duty: Provide the best service possible to the citizens. That ethical and moral imperative is especially critical when budgets get trimmed.

 

In California, for example, the DMV prioritized what to cut and then cut everything they could that had the LEAST impact on the services that they provided to the citizens of the State. Nonetheless, once the cuts passed 20% they had to close offices as the furloughs hit. They published the dates in advance and got out ahead of the problem and earned a lot of sympathy and support from across the State (which is hard for the DMV to do).

 

They behaved like professionals who earned the public trust.

 

Then there are the immoral and unethical governmental employees who believe that citizens exist to serve them and meet their needs.

 

California also saw those folks at work as well.

 

The leadership of the California Department of Parks and Recreation decided to become “bureaucratic terrorists.” They closed down the most popular and widely used parks in the State resulting in an immediate backlash from the people. Everyone demanded that the legislators and governor reopen the parks. 

 

The Park & Rec bubbas thought they had won but then came the questions from the lawmakers and the press. They discovered the truth: The bureaucrats had not focused the cuts to protect the parks, but to accomplish the exact opposite.

 

The “bureaucratic terrorists” deliberately avoided closing the parks that had the lowest attendance. They kept parks open during off-season so they could close them during the busy season. They intentionally kept them open during slow hours so they could close them during peak hours.

 

They did everything in their power to make the disruption far worse than it had to be. 

 

It was a disgusting abuse of governmental power.

 

Every governmental agency can and must prioritize their operations (Park & Rec certainly did for all the wrong reasons) and start cutting the least important things first.

 

Ethical governmental agencies will be able to say: "Here is what we cut first..." then "after that, we had to cut..." and finally "Now we have no choice but to cut these really important operations..."

 

Governmental agencies, especially the Defense Department, cannot afford to take the road of the "bureaucratic terrorists."

 

It will be a Pyrrhic victory where you lose your credibility, alienate your allies and strengthen your enemies who want to cut spending even further.

 

Forewarned is forearmed. Protect the heroes and fire the bums.

 

Mike

Barak’s Really Bad Idea? The Water is Fine....

A word from Mike Walker, Col USMC (retired)

All,

Sequestration is the new “boogey man” in “drama central,” AKA Washington D.C. (I actually like Sequestration, but today that is a very unpopular position in D.C.).

Yet, Sequestration starts at home, Barak Obama’s home, to be specific.

Given a fawning Washington press corps that allows the President to dissemble about the facts without challenge, no one can blame him for disowning his own bad idea.

As Washington often resembles a circus that never leaves town then the President can be seen as the lion tamer while the press can be seen as the clowns who flit around the big top while broom brigade sweeps up the mess.

Here is the truth: The White House created the Sequestration. The problem is that Barak no longer loves his creation, as it seems the White House wonks were too clever by half when they created it.

The President demanded Sequestration as part of the negotiations that led to the Budget Control Act of 2011. The poor Republicans had never seen anything like it and it took them several days to even figure out what the heck President Obama was putting forward.

The President remained adamant that Sequestration be part of any final deal, however (and we all know how inflexible he gets when really wants something). So in the end, the Republicans gave in and agreed to President Obama’s demand. 

The rest, as they say is history. The Budget Control Act of 2011 became a major bipartisan agreement:

It passed the House with 95 Democratic and 174 Republican votes.

It passed the Senate with 45 Democratic and 28 Republican votes.

The President signed it onto law on 3 August 2011.

Now, amongst all the smart people in the Beltway, it has turned out to be an ugly and unwanted monster created in the White House.

No wonder Barak Obama is desperately seeking to blame anyone but himself for a highly unpopular policy he created.

ONLY “SMART” BUDGET CUT IS A FAKE BUDGET CUT

IN WASHINGTON, THE ONLY “SMART” BUDGET CUT IS A FAKE BUDGET CUT

PAUL MIRENGOFF  (Powerline)

Critics of sequestration complain that it is a blunderbuss approach to cutting spending. They argue that “targeted cuts” — which operate line-by-line, program-by-program — are the smart way to rein in the budget without doing harm.

But, as the Washington Post demonstrates, in practice “targeted cuts” frequently prove to be no cuts at all. Instead, they are a method through which legislators can claim to be slashing the budget while continuing to spend at the same levels as before.

Consider the $37.8 billion in “cuts” agreed to in 2011, proclaimed by President Obama as “the largest annual spending cut in our history.” The Post finds that package to be “an epic kind of Washington illusion, stuffed with gimmicks that made the cuts seem far bigger — and the politicians far bolder — than they actually were.”

For example, the Transportation Department took credit for “cutting” a $280 million tunnel that had been cancelled six months earlier and a $375,000 road project that had been created due to a typo on a road that didn’t exist.

Meanwhile, the Census Department took a $6 billion “cut” for not conducting the 2010 census in 2011. And Congress agreed, in the spirit of shared sacrifice, to “cut” $14.6 million by not spending money on a visitors center that had already been built.

These aren’t “smart” cuts, they are smart-ass ones.

Going beyond the anecdotal evidence, Post reporter David Fahrenthold analyzed the 16 largest cuts in the 2011 deal, each of which was supposed to trim at least $500 millions from the federal budget. Collectively, the 16 were to account for two-thirds of the total reduction.

In four instances, the agency involved simply stonewalled the Post, making it impossible to tell whether the cuts were real. Under these circumstances, I think we should presume they were not.

In seven of the remaining 12 cases, the Post found that the cuts had minimal or no real-world impact. Instead, they involved the kind of sleight-of-hand described in the examples cited above.

This track record obviously militates in favor of using a sequester, rather than the 2011 approach, this time around. The White House claims that things are different now because the “low-hanging fruit” from 2011 has been cut. But there are always recently expired projects, or non-existent ones, that can be claimed as cuts. Anyone who believes the government has run out of budgetary gimmicks hasn’t been paying attention, and would rather not.

The real question, I think, is not whether alternatives to sequestration can be undermined, but whether sequestration can be as well. The answer is probably “yes,” but not to the degree that past cuts have bee

Women in Combat: The Marine Infantry and Playing “You Bet Your Life” for Real

Contributed by Mike Walker, Col USMC (retired)

All,

Let me begin by arguing that I support opening combat arms to anyone, and I mean anyone, who can lead, win, and protect the Marines (as best possible given the mission) under their charge. Special Operations seems particularly inviting. One of their strengths is not playing by the rules. In many parts of the world, women as a threat are immediately dismissed as part of a cultural prejudice. Women in Special Operations could add an additional layer of complexity to confound and defeat the enemy.

Opening up the combat arms to women is an appropriate and positive decision. When I went through Marine Corps OCS the goal was to weed out those who could not handle the inseparable combination of physical and mental rigor demanded by those who are placed in the position of leading Marines in combat.

One test was to conduct a “fireman’s carry” at a sprint of a “wounded’ Marine fifty yards to safety. Being 5’10” and 150 lbs I was not quite a “Feather Merchant” but neither was I “Muscles McGurk.” My DI picked some 6’3’’ 200 lb candidate who played college ball in Georgia as my “wounded” fellow. The decision was not based on harassment but in driving home the reality that you cannot control who is “fit” and who is “hit” in combat.

Women candidates at that time did not have to meet male goals. It was dismaying to see a male candidate dismissed for failing to meet physical requirements that were waived for a female candidate. We knew there was two sets of sets of standards and males were held to higher level of performance.

I understood why when I applied for the infantry combat arm.

I can only write as a Marine infantry officer. That narrows but does not negate my argument. In the Marine infantry there was a common refrain, “Life’s a bitch and then you die.” Life in the infantry is harsh. The reason for this mentality is simple. In peacetime, infantry life is defined by:

Mission

Terrain

Weather

In combat, your life, for what it is worth, is defined by:

Enemy

Mission

Terrain

Weather

Those are the Leviathans that face an infantry commander day in and day out.

You either cut it or you do not. It is a Hobbesian existence. Either the “System” removes those who are incapable of leading Marines under those constraints or Darwin will. In combat, Darwin uses death and dismemberment as his primary tools.

Washington wonks, despite their attempts at ascendancy to omnipotence, can change neither the face of the earth nor the world’s weather to suit their domestic socio-political agenda or fantasies. They will never, through some muddled combination of legislative and/or judicial acumen, be able to alter the determined effort of an enemy to kill and maim on a battlefield. That is reality.

In the infantry, a leader has to thrive, not simply survive, under cruelly harsh physical and mental pressures. Even in the “Gung Ho” Marine Corps, the majority male officers opt out of a life in the “grunts.” There is no doubt that females will make the same choice.

Let me expand on the harsh life. Officers eat after everyone else. That can mean going without. Sometimes that is not missing much if the chow is served in subzero weather where everything hot is icy cold before it enters your mouth or in the rain where the food is tastelessly floating in water or where the insects are so thick that eating a few bugs during their migration from a nearby shit pile to your spoon is taken in stride.

Your home is on your back and, as you carry it with you, it seems to weigh a ton. If you are on the march and the machine gunner needs a rest then you pick the gun up off the shoulder and carry it for the next several miles. There is not a shred of privacy in the infantry in the field. If you want to change your clothes, you do so in the open. The same goes for washing, shitting and pissing. 

Grunts develop a peculiarly odd sense of humor to deal with the harshness. Never having to had to experience a “menstrual” period” after a few weeks without bathing, I can only guess the outcome, but it must be nicely crusty. In Panama while undergoing jungle warfare training, I remember smelling the Marines a good ten yards before I could see them. What is that stench? It is I! I also recall getting the “running shits” in the desert and loosing my balance while squatting for the umpteenth time and falling ass first into a steaming pile of diarrhea and cutting my skivve shorts off to extract myself (not to mention having to use a badly needed canteen of water to wash with).

There is no need to go into the details of seeing wounded Marines. One lesson is important. A Marine infantry officer leads in combat. Corpsmen treat the wounded. There is also no need to go into the insect bites, stings, body lice, ticks, chiggers, rashes, puss-filled sores, etc. Life is a bitch and then you die. You get the point.

Women should be allowed to go into the infantry. Just enter with your eyes wide open. The enemy certainly does and will kill you if you expose the least weakness.

Semper Fi,

Mike