Powerline has two take-downs of a proposed shield law.

Quoting the proposed law:

(iii) in a criminal investigation or prosecution of an unauthorized disclosure of properly classified information by a person with authorized access to such information, such unauthorized disclosure has caused or will cause significant and articulable harm to the national security;

A reader shoots back:

A really bad, totally unnecessary law. I ran a prosecutor’s office for many years, and I can count on the fingers of one hand (and still have one or two fingers left over) the number of times I authorized the issuance of a subpoena to a reporter, and I think in my own cases I only did it twice in 18 years

So what we have here is a law designed to protect Big Media and their lefty fellow travelers. The irony is that if Climate Gate had happened here, this law would have protected the hackers from penalties.

Someday a reporter or news outlet will hurt American troops, the government or expose us all to a terrorist attack. And since the average American knows little about the working of Government (military or civilian), a simple misunderstanding could be used by the left to make a mountain out of every molehill. (remember the “assassination program” that got no further than a paper study?). The tinfoil hat crowd will have a field day.

This law is a bone tossed to a lap dog press by the Democrats. They’re paying them back for getting their help in November. And I bet that a leak that hurts the current white house will be found to cause “significant and articulable harm” to the left’s poll numbers national security.

In other news, the anti-war crowd is burning out. A protest against Afghanistan only attracted 300 people. Not even the LA Times was impressed.

“People are burned out,” explained the rally’s organizer, Laurie Dobson. As she and other antiwar activists struggle to remake their movement, they also acknowledge there are obstacles.– La Times

Some media outlets are pumping up the numbers of protesters to 1500, but even on Matthis Chiroux’ Facebook page World Can’t Wait admits to only 300; –This Aint Hell

It was always about Bush, Anti-Americanism and communist propaganda. They were never intrested in the suffering of the people of Iraq, Afghanistan or the 3,000 Americans killed on 9/11.

The Al-Qaeda/Taliban death cult has killed or maimed more people than the US military has. We liberated two nations, despite the cut and run brigade. The left said that Afghanistan was the “good war”. They lied. They hate all wars started by the US or involving the US. Wars started by anti-western forces are just fine with them.

With no draft, the lazy jaded youth have no reason to cut class and hit the streets. While they try to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, the US Army goes rolling along….

President Obama has announced his strategy of sending 30,000 troops (short the 10,000 GEN McChrystal wanted).

But there have been many missteps. And the left is turning on the President, despite saying (during the Iraq War) that Afghanistan is the “just war.”

Outside West Point. On MSNBC.

And the biggest (and I mean biggest) political gadfly Michael Moore had this to say:

MOORE: No. That didn’t work in Vietnam. It’s not going to work in Iraq. It was interesting to hear him essentially praise the Bush policy in Iraq and how it succeeded. I mean, it was really bizarre to hear him say some of these things. And I have to tell you, Larry, I hate to be even saying these things because I honestly think Barack Obama is a good and decent man. He has a good heart. I believe he’s a man of peace. I was thrilled that he won the [Nobel] Peace Prize. So to see him make this mistake- I don’t think there’s any kind of evil or dark place in his heart that- where this is coming from. I just think that he’s listened to the generals.

Of course the President listened to the Generals. That’s what the generals are for! Only in the left’s fantasy land can troops magically be shifted to Afghanistan duringt he battels for Iraq (or magically come home in a few months with out the 100 mile long convoy of doom ‘cut and run’ would have required).

Now that the president is trying to fight the war, the left just turns on him.

“Obama’s escalation in Afghanistan is the last in a string of disappointments. His flip-flopping acceptance of the military coup in Honduras has squandered the trust of Latin America. His Wall Street bailout leaves the poor, the unemployed, minorities and college students on their own. And now comes the Afghanistan-Pakistan decision to escalate the stalemate, which risks his domestic agenda, his Democratic base, and possibly even his presidency.”
Granolakrieg!– Jules Crittenden quotes 60’s leftover Tom Hayden

They don’t hate war (the left was silent when Russia invaded Georgia and used ballistic missiles on their cities). They don’t hate killing (the left is silent on suicide bombers, some western profs even write poems to them*). they hate the US, the US military and for some reason seem to want to use their freedoms to take away ours.

The anti-war left was never about being anti-war. It was always about power. Now that the President is using his war powers to act, they turn on him.

*–Yes, Google the name of Ayat al-Akhras and you’ll find the sickening ode to her murders.

Charles Krauthammer on the Democrats health care proposal:

The United States has the best health care in the world — but because of its inefficiencies, also the most expensive. The fundamental problem with the 2,074-page Senate health-care bill (as with its 2,014-page House counterpart) is that it wildly compounds the complexity by adding hundreds of new provisions, regulations, mandates, committees, and other arbitrary bureaucratic inventions.
…
The bill is irredeemable. It should not only be defeated. It should be immolated, its ashes scattered over the Senate swimming pool.

Then do health care the right way — one reform at a time, each simple and simplifying, aimed at reducing complexity, arbitrariness, and inefficiency.

First, tort reform. This is money — the low-end estimate is about half a trillion per decade — wasted in two ways. Part is simply hemorrhaged into the legal system to benefit a few jackpot lawsuit winners and an army of extravagantly rich malpractice lawyers such as John Edwards.

The rest is wasted within the medical system in the millions of unnecessary tests, procedures, and referrals undertaken solely to fend off lawsuits — resources wasted on patients who don’t need them and which could be redirected to the uninsured who really do.

We hear the endless droning of the MSM on how the US healthcare system is so unfair. We must give insurance to everyone! We must make it fair! Universal coverage!

Of course ask how this will be paid for and when you get past the usually soak the rich argument (and counter that taxing the “rich” who even begin to pay for “universal coverage”) and be prepared to hear crickets chirping.

Even Howard Dean admist that Republicans are right to try and kill this bill. Polls show that most are happy with the current health care.

Great Britain tired “universal coverage” and they are reaping what they sowed: Lower standards, “Poor nursing care, filthy wards and lack of leadership”.

If conservatives are accused of being heartless, liberals seem to revile in how much they appear to care. Wages too low? Raise the minimum wage. Despite what that does to the poor Social problems? SPEND! and SPEND MORE! Until the bill comes due and your state’s credit rating takes a hit. And taxes won’t help.

Caring is isn’t half the battle, it’s barely the start of the battle (unless you’re fighting a villain from a Saturday morning cartoon). We’ve had to endure decades of “caring” and “social welfare” until we spend more on entitlements than anything else. We listen to lawyers who say they “care” and now our laws are a hopeless jumble. Bad case laws, junk administrative law and regulations and junk statutes that line the pockets of big law firms. All for huge cash rewards that barely trickle down to the injured parties.

It’s time for rational thinking to take over. It’s time for less caring and more problem solving. We can solve this mess with out taxes, with out employing armies of lawyers. Government is not your parent, your caretaker or you doctor. It is raw naked force. The ax, the jail cell, the audit. Once people realize that they’ll stop clamroing for universial health care pipe dreams and start working on solutions.

knowledge is power!

I’ve covered the M-16 and M-4 debate/issue/bone of contention here before but two news items came across my laptop and I’d thought I’d share my take:

• Defense Tech quotes and Army Times article that points to M-4 mods in the works Army wide.
• the civilian version of the HK-416 may NOT be crippled, that means it could be dropped into any M-4/M-16 style lower receiver.

From a new rail system to a gas-piston upgrade and a round counter, I hope the Army follows through. This would put a better rile in soldiers hands while the Army awaits for that “new technology” that’s on the horizon. (Color me skeptical, but when it does arrive I’ll be the first to cheer it on).

HK took a lot of flack for appearing to cave into the anti-gun lobby and modifying their HK-416 uppers to not work with any lower. The damn thing’s expensive enough as it is. If the rumor is true then black rile fans will P A R T Y!

Sophie Dahl (born Sophie Holloway, 15 September 1977 in London) is an English author and former model. She is the daughter of actor Julian Holloway and writer Tessa Dahl. Her maternal grandparents were the author Roald Dahl and the actress Patricia Neal. Her paternal grandfather was the Celebrated English Stage and film Actor Stanley Holloway.
…
Dahl achieved a degree of notoriety in 2000 after she appeared in an advertisement for the Yves Saint-Laurent perfume brand Opium. The ad featured a photograph of her posing nude on black satin….
–Wikipedia Article”Sophie Dahl”

DO WANT!

Both Hot Air and Confederate Yankee embed a video of the Summer Soldier and Sunshine Patriot Glenn Beck.
He states (after trying to kiss up to the active duty service members): “I Cannot in Good Conscience, Encourage My Nephew to Reenlist”

<rant>
O RLY? Mr. Beck you can @#% yourself with an E-tool. You made me queasy when I used to watch you and now I’ll never watch you. Ever.

Real soldiers re-enlist to help their team, their unit and their country, regardless who who is in office or the situation they find themselves in. Soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines are a team. But being a lone wolf ranting on the air (and paid more than I’ll ever see if I live to the age of 10 Million) you don’t get that do you? </rant>

I now go back to serving my country no matter who’s in office.

I had a friend who became an environmental engineer. It’s not the weak fluff-laden PC course you’d think. He took several semesters of physics, biology, chemistry and engineering. Just before he did his senior thesis he confided something to me:

“The Emperor has no clothes, global warming is a sham.“

He had seen the data, he (and a few others on campus) agreed. Global warming is made up, just like global cooling and toher supposed man-made disasters. I agreed but told him that he could never state that out loud becuase the campus enviro-nut and many professors would crush him.

He was right of course: (just a sample of the links out there)

1. Climatic Research Unit e-mail hacking incident.(Wikipeida)
2. “The world has stopped getting warmer, defying the complex models that predicted anthropogenic global warming to continue until it reached crisis proportions”(Neptunis Lex)
3. WaPo reports on East Anglia CRU e-mails, global-warming controversy(Hot Air)
4. Pajamas Media gies us an count of the code in the climate models. and Congress may probe the scientists to see if they misled the public. (h/t Neptunus Lex)
5. Some people don’t get it. (Newsbusters)
6. jules crittenden has a good roundup of reaction in the press. They were climate change and envior wacky cheerleaders for years, now what are they going to do?
7. Even a climate change believer thinks that the e-mails are bad news.(Guardian Online)

Well, guess what, the very powerful have acted very stupid. Altering the facts to fit your views is not science. Yet they would crush free enterprise and economic growth because of their agenda. The only winners so far seems to be the loony left and neo-marxists. Green is the new red.

No I realise that pollution is bad. Yes. I. Get. It. But change the climate? As if humans have the power. An open secret has been that the world is recovering from a mini-ice age in the middle ages. Their may be other causes to global warming if it is occurring. The debate is far from settled.

Tell that to the left. Warming of the planet and melting oceans fit their idea of a harmful west. Resources need to be redistributed, technology needs to be restricted (unless your a wealthy elite in New York, London or LA). Disagree and you’re just a wealthy white man who wants to oppress the planet.

Why is there no debate? Why is dissent not tolerated? The BBC got the climate gate files but refused to cover them. Did a White House science adviser ridicule scientists who did not agree with global warming?

I’ve known solar physicists Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon for a long time. I’ve published articles with Willie and enjoyed extensive communication. I was on advisory committees with them when Sallie suddenly and politely withdrew from the fray. I don’t know if the following events were contributing factors but it is likely.

Baliunas and Soon were authors of excellent work confirming the existence of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) from a multitude of sources. Their work challenged attempts to get rid of the MWP because it contradicted the claim by the proponents of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). Several scientists challenged the claim that the latter part of the 20th century was the warmest ever. They knew the claim was false, many warmer periods occurred in the past. Michael Mann ‘got rid’ of the MWP with his production of the hockey stick, but Soon and Baliunas were problematic. What better than have a powerful academic destroy their credibility for you? Sadly, there are always people who will do the dirty work.
– Newsbusters quotes Canada Free Press.

In law, the famous adage goes, “When the facts are on your side hammer the jury, when the law is on your side hammer the judge, if neither is on your side hammer the table.”. THe Left has been hammering the table over and over again but we are the ones getting nailed.

Tasty links and a busted phoney baloney “marine” :

• Fake Marine gets busted by a real one at his high school reunion. (The Smoking Gun).
• ” Pentagon Learning Lessons From MRAP Program” lessons written in fire and blood (Ares blog)
• Sikh officers get to keep their bears. and we slide down the slippery slope…(NRO)
• Liberal blogger gets it right on the Atomic Bomb. We dropped the bomb to end a war. PC revisionsit history be damned.
• The GOlden Arches vs. the Berlin Wall no contest (American Thinker).
• Eminent domain abused to serve developers, only to have the project fall apart. Way to go New London, Connecticut! (Flopping Aces)
• This Ain’t Hell gives us four examples that shows the left’s hatred of the military. Especially by those who’ve never served…
• …but even muggers show respect for a military ID. (military.com)
• MSM blasts Clinton for almost doing what our president just did. (Hot Air)
• China’s SecDef turns on the charm wants the US out of ther “Exclusive Economic Zone”, Problem, the zone they claim is over 3 million square kilometers, much of that in international waters.

Tacho Bell’s new menu (don’t tell the chow hall please!):

Ah, justice. A matter for the courts right? Well if you jaywalk, crash your car while drunk or murder your lover yes.
But if you are the mastermind of a plot to kill 3,000+ innocent people in another country thousands of miles away and you are a danger to that country still, the courts may be in over their heads.

Tell that to the left and their drool supporters in the press. (h/t: Michelle Malkin)

Self-proclaimed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other Guantanamo Bay detainees will be sent to New York to face trial in a civilian federal court, an Obama administration official said Friday.

The official said Attorney General Eric Holder plans to announce the decision later in the morning.

The official is not authorized to discuss the decision before the announcement, so spoke on condition of anonymity.

Terrorists hate our laws. They hide behind them to exploit the loopholes and clueless lefties that support them. Terrorism is NOT and never has been a criminal matter. It’s survival of the country, of the people. They want to kill as many Americans as possible.

If KSM is found innocent in the trial, does he go free? Why him? Others are getting military tribunals?

If the wacky anti-GITMO lefties are still not satisfied what then?

Are some in the administration playing politics with national security?
(h/t: Ace o’ Spades)

The continuing investigations of Bush-era counterterrorism policies (i.e., the policies that kept us safe from more domestic terror attacks), coupled with the Holder Justice Department’s obsession to disclose classified national-defense information from that period, enable Holder to give the hard Left the “reckoning” that he and Obama promised during the 2008 campaign. It would be too politically explosive for Obama/Holder to do the dirty work of charging Bush administration officials; but as new revelations from investigations and declassifications are churned out, Leftist lawyers use them to urge European and international tribunals to bring “torture” and “war crimes” indictments. Thus, administration cooperation gives Obama’s base the reckoning it demands but Obama gets to deny responsibility for any actual prosecutions.
….
Moreover, KSM has no defense. He was under American indictment for terrorism for years before there ever was a 9/11, and he can’t help himself but brag about the atrocities he and his fellow barbarians have carried out.

So: We are now going to have a trial that never had to happen for defendants who have no defense. And when defendants have no defense for their own actions, there is only one thing for their lawyers to do: put the government on trial in hopes of getting the jury (and the media) spun up over government errors, abuses and incompetence. That is what is going to happen in the trial of KSM et al. It will be a soapbox for al-Qaeda’s case against America. Since that will be their “defense,” the defendants will demand every bit of information they can get about interrogations, renditions, secret prisons, undercover operations targeting Muslims and mosques, etc.,

That’s the real danger. National secrets exposed to defendants who want to destroy America, an international left that wants to drag the US government into pointless court cases. Both want to “prove” that any US actions in defense of the country and American citizens are “war crimes.” The results may come back to bite us.

What most people don’t get is that the Geneva Conventions do not cover “enemy combatants” that:

• hide in the civilian population
• do not wear uniforms or carry ID cards
• “Where in occupied territory an individual protected person is detained as a spy or saboteur, or as a person under definite suspicion of activity hostile to the security of the Occupying Power, such person shall, in those cases where absolute military security so requires, be regarded as having forfeited rights of communication under the present Convention.” Article 5 of the Geneva Conventions</li>

We should have executed these clowns when we had the chance.

Via Wired comes another essay in the endless argument against our high tech force.

Taking the Measure of a Slam-Dunk Weapons System

Robot war. It just couldn’t be cooler, could it? Especially if the only blood you spill is the other guy’s, since our “pilots” are flying those planes from thousands of miles away. Soon, it seems, the world will be a drone fest. In his first nine months, President Obama has authorized more drone attacks in the Pakistani tribal borderlands than the Bush administration did in its last three years in office and is now considering upping their use in areas of rural Afghanistan where U.S. troops will be scarce.

In Washington, drones are even considered the “de-escalatory” option for the Afghan War by some critics, while CIA Director Leon Panetta, whose agency runs our drone war in Pakistan, has hailed them as “the only game in town in terms of confronting or trying to disrupt the al-Qaeda leadership.” Among the few people who don’t adore them here are hard-core war-fighters who don’t want an armada of robot planes standing in the way of sending in oodles more troops. The vice president, however, is a drone-atic. He loves ‘em to death and reportedly wants to up their missions, especially in Pakistan, rather than go the oodles route.

–Drone Race to a Known Future
Why Military Dreams Fail — and Why It Doesn’t Matter
By Tom Engelhardt

Mr. Engelhardt starts here then goes on to try and breathe life into some dead cliches.

The Wonder Weapons Succeed — at Home

So why am I not excited — other than the fact that the drones are also killing civilians in disputed but significant numbers in the Pakistani tribal borderlands, creating enemies and animosity wherever they strike, and turning us into a nation of 24/7 assassins beyond the law or accountability of any sort? Thought of another way, the drones put wings on the original Bush-era Guantanamo principle — that Americans have the inalienable right to act as global judge, jury, and executioner, and in doing so are beyond the reach of any court or law.

And here’s another factor that dulls my excitement just a tad — if the history of air warfare has shown one thing, it’s this: it never breaks populations. Rather, it only increases their sense of unity, as in London during the Blitz under Winston Churchill, in Germany under Adolf Hitler, Imperial Japan under Emperor Hirohito, North Korea under Kim Il Sung, North Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh, and of course (though we never put ourselves in such company, being the exceptions to all history), the United States after 9/11 under George W. Bush. Why should the peoples of rural Afghanistan and the Pakistani borderlands be any different?

Really? “round the clock” bombing hurt the Germans so bad their air force stopped flying. Not the morale but the INDUSTRY was destroyed. Towards the end of the war, their aircraft were made of wood and scraps. Same with Japan. It was the atomic bomb that forced them to end the war, their military was reduced to meeting the allies with sharpened bamboo sticks on the beaches of Japan.

The Viet Cong and North Vietnam were aided and abetted by the USSR. Without the flow of arms, technical know how, intelligence and surface to air missiles, North Vietnam would have folded. They LOST the Tet offensive. America lost the will to fight due to losses (fueled by Russian aid). Iraq both times did not have that aid. And got their brains beat out both times.

Of course, you know the results of this sort of magical thinking about wonder weapons (or technologies) and their properties just as well as I do. The atomic bomb ended nothing, but led to an almost half-century-long nuclear superpower standoff/nightmare, to nuclear proliferation, and so to the possibility that, someday, even terrorists might possess such weapons. The electronic battlefield was incapable of staving off defeat in Vietnam. That impermeable anti-missile shield never came even faintly close to making it into our skies. Those “smart bombs” of the Gulf War proved remarkably dumb, while the 50 “decapitation” strikes the Bush administration launched against Saddam Hussein’s regime on the first day of the 2003 invasion of Iraq took out not a single Iraqi leader, but “dozens” of civilians. And the history of the netcentric military in Iraq is well known. Its “success” sent Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld into retirement and ignominy.

Huh, MAD (mutually assured destruction) kept the Cold War cold. Would he have liked WWII to be come WWIII? Nuclear proliferation is the result of humans wanting to kill each other. India did their bomb on their own. North Korea may have had some help, Pakistan did theirs on their own. So did China. The USSR stole nuclear secrets. We killed the Rosenburgs for their crime in aiding the USSR and making the world a more dangerous place.

The GAO, in the report cited, liked to claim bombs carried by airplanes that didn’t fly (bad weather, mechanical problems etc.) as dropped. Donald Rumsfeld left as SecDef because of the insurgency after the war. We won that one not just with the surge, but by air power and our high tech advantage. The Sons Of Iraq would not have succeeded if it were not for US military might backing them up. Contrawise, the insurgets have had help from Iran, Al Queda and other evil doers. Not enough to save them, just enough to break our hearts.

True, Reagan’s impermeable shield was the purest of nuclear fantasies, but the “high frontiersmen” gathered and, taking a sizeable bite of the military budget, went on a decades-long binge of way-out research, space warfare plans and commands, and boondoggles of all sorts, including the staggeringly expensive, still not operational anti-missile system that the Bush and now Obama administrations have struggled to emplace somewhere in Europe. Similarly, ever newer generations of smart bombs and ever brighter missiles have been, and are being, developed ad infinitum.

Really? My career field is in missile defense. We do what you call impossible everyday. Critics keep insiting that the system wont work or that our enemies are too dumb to build missiles that can hit us. Or they argue that terrorists will sneak a bomb past our borders. Now they try to have it every which way but lose. They won’t lest us strengthen our borders, now will they lest us build anti-missile systems. Nor do they believe our intel.

Our weapons work. Not the way politicians want them to, but they do work. Civilian deaths? It’s called war for a reason. Sadly terrorists and other scum surround themselves with innocent people. We don’t attack we’re cowards. We hit them and we are cruel. Well, they want cruel, and they admit that they love death more than we love life.

Mr. Engelhardt goes on to lament the monies spent on drones. Classic hippe arguments that don’t hold water. Every dollar spent on our military brings back civlian returns and makes sure that people are free to read this blog and Mr. Engelhardt’s too. We must fight them. We care about innocent lives and grieve their loss. The enemy does not. Their bloodlust knows no bounds. Well our weapons have a longer reach and bigger punch. Too bad for them.

The last paragraph is a risible mention of the Terminator movies. *facepalms* In the real world American Soldiers, Marines, Sailors and Airmen risk their lives. Drones help save our people, innocent civilians and our allies.

To hell with the enemy.

Drones are tools nothing more.

“The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.”

General George S. Patton