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Operation Fast and Furious: The ATF gunrunning scandal

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From the Heritage Foundation think tank, the latest on the Obama administration’s facilitation of assault weapon sales to Mexican drug cartels. (I.e. – “gun control”)

Excerpt:

The U.S. government intentionally sells assault weapons to Mexican drug cartels. Those cartels use those weapons to kill, among others, a U.S. law enforcement officer. The White House deflects questions on the subject. The director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), who watched the gun sales on video in his office, stonewalls Congress. So does the Justice Department. The whistleblower that exposed it all is fired.

Paperback novel or real-life Obama Administration scandal? Time’s up.

Just last week, Vince Cefalu, a special agent in the ATF for 24 years, was dismissed from his job after helping expose an operation code named “Operation Fast and Furious,” which was designed to purposefully put assault weapons into the hands of Mexican drug cartels so they could then be tracked to collect intelligence.

The operation itself is an exhausting series of unbelievable mistakes and lapses of judgment, but the Administration’s response is even more disturbing, as is the subdued media reaction.

According to the written testimony of Supervisory Special Agent Peter Forcelli: “ATF agents assigned to the Phoenix Field Division, with the concurrence of their local chain of command, ‘walked’ guns. ATF agents allowed weapons to be provided to individuals whom they knew would traffic them to members of Mexican drug trafficking organizations.”

The goal was to uncover larger criminal conspiracies across the border. Without informing Mexican authorities, the ATF facilitated over 2,500 assault weapons entering Mexico illegally. The only modern “tracking” method was a rigged-up GPS from Radio Shack that Forcelli took it upon himself to install, since the only other tracking method would be serial numbers on the guns. That device failed.

ATF agent John Dodson, who feared that this operation would cost lives, was told to stand down and “fall in line” by supervisors. Dodson testified to Congress: “Although my instincts made me want to intervene and interdict these weapons, my supervisors directed me and my colleagues not to make any stop or arrest.”

ATF agent Olindo James Casa agreed. Casa testified:

On several occasions I personally requested to interdict or seize firearms, but I was always ordered to stand down and not to seize the firearms.

Later, guns sold in this operation were discovered at the scene of a shootout in Arizona in December 2010 in which Customs and Border Protection agent Brian Terry was killed. As Forcelli testified: “To allow a gun to walk is idiotic.… This was a catastrophic disaster.”

Since then, we have learned that this operation had support in Washington and that its tactics were not a secret. Forcelli testified that Assistant U.S. Attorney Emory Hurley helped orchestrate the operation and that U.S. Attorney Dennis Burk “agreed with the direction of the case.” E-mails show that Deputy Assistant Director for ATF Field Operations William McMahon was “so excited about Fast and Furious that he received a special briefing on the program in Phoenix.”

Acting ATF director Kenneth Melson actually watched—yes, watched—live video surveillance of the operations from his office in Washington. He and his deputy were briefed weekly on the operation.

[…]As of today, the only person punished for Operation Fast and Furious has been someone who helped expose the details. Accountability for this massive operational failure is essential, and it will come only with more media attention.

It’s a mighty peculiar kind of gun control, isn’t it? But I could see how it would help the Obama administration to lobby the public to support increased gun control laws. All it cost was the lives of a few law enforcement agents. I’m sure that their families will understand.

Obama had the reputation for being soft on crime and criminals going as far back as his days as a state senator.

Excerpt:

As a state senator, Obama has been no defender of the unalienable right to life. He twice voted against bills prohibiting tax funding of abortions. In April 2002, he voted against a bill to protect babies born alive after a failed abortion procedure. A similar federal law passed later that year. In 1997, Obama twice voted “present” on an Illinois partial-birth abortion ban. He absented himself from a third vote on the measure. In 2001, he voted “present” on a bill to notify parents when their minor children seek an abortion. He also voted against a cloning ban in 2000, although he voted for it in 2001. In 1999, Obama voted against requiring school boards to put Internet pornography filters on school computers meant for students’ use. In 2001, he voted “present” on a bill to keep pornographic book and video stores and strip clubs from setting up within 1,000 feet of schools and churches. In 2003, he voted in the Health and Human Services Committee for a bill requiring “age appropriate” sex-education for students in kindergarten through fifth grade.

Despite his talk of promoting reading among inner-city youth, Obama has repeatedly opposed bills designed to promote discipline in public schools. In 2001, he twice voted “no” on a bill to let school districts require unruly students to complete suspensions before they can be shuffled into a new school district. He voted “present” on an almost unanimously passed bill requiring adult prosecution for students who fire guns on school grounds. Obama has been markedly soft on crime. In 2001, he voted against a bill that added extra penalties for crimes committed in furtherance of gang activities. He also voted against a bill making it a criminal offense for accused gang members, free on bond or on probation, to associate with known gang members. In 1999, he was the only state senator to vote against a bill prohibiting early prison release for criminal sexual abusers.

That article was written in 2004. If only we had looked at Obama’s record before we elected him.

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Recent college graduates realizing that Obama’s rhetoric doesn’t produce jobs

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From the Daily Caller. (H/T Right Wing News)

Excerpt:

A very large proportion of recent university graduates have soured on President Barack Obama, and many will vote GOP or stay at home in the 2012 election, according to two new surveys of younger voters.

“These rock-solid Obama constituents are free-agents,” said Kellyanne Conway, president of The Polling Company, based in Washington, D.C. She recently completed a large survey of college grads, and “they’re shopping around, considering their options, [and] a fair number will stay at home and sit it out,” she said.

The scope of this disengagement from Obama is suggested by an informal survey of 500 post-grads by Joe Maddalone, founder of Maddalone Global Strategies. Of his sample, 93 percent are aged between 22 and 28, 67 percent are male and 83 percent voted for Obama in 2008. But only 27 percent are committed to voting for Obama again, and 80 percent said they would consider voting for a Republican, said New York-based Maddalone.

That’s a drop of almost 60 points in support for Obama among this influential class of younger post-grad voters, who Maddalone recruited at conferences held at New York University and Thomson-Reuters’ New York headquarters.

The bad news for Obama was underlined May 19 with a report by a job-firm Adecco that roughly 60 percent of recent college-grads have not been able to find a full-time job in their preferred area. One-in-five graduates have taken jobs far from their training, one-in-six are dependent on their parents, and one-in-four say they’re in debt, according to the firm’s data.

Let’s see. These graduates voted for Obama during college, and now they’ve just finished going through many years of indoctrination from teachers who are typically isolated from real life, i.e. – isolated from private sector employment, military service, entrepreneurship, stay-at-home motherhood, and so forth. They parroted all of the secular left-wing views of their indoctrinators, got their diplomas in social work or English or peace studies, and now they are out on their own for the first time, looking for jobs from the people they have been taught to hate and despise. Imagine their surprise to find out that the world is nothing like they were led to believe, their non-quantitative degrees are useless, and that they are now $60,000 in debt, and they will never collect a dime from entitlement programs from Social Security.

Not to mention the $534,000 dollars that each household in the US owes because of  Nancy Pelosi’s $5.34 TRILLION dollar addition to the national debt. (H/T Doug Ross)

Obama Unemployment Stimulus Graph
Obama Unemployment Stimulus Graph

Image from Conservative Compendium.

Here’s another interesting article from the Washington Examiner, by political guru Michael Barone.

Excerpt:

Barack Obama and the Democratic congressional supermajorities of 2009-10 raised federal spending from 21 to 25 percent of gross domestic product. Their stimulus package stopped layoffs of public employees for a while, even as private sector payrolls plummeted.

And the Obama Democrats piled further burdens on would-be employers in the private sector. Obamacare and the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill are scheduled to be followed by thousands of regulations that will impose impossible-to-estimate costs on the economy.

[…]It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the threat of tax increases and increased regulatory burdens have produced something in the nature of a hiring strike.

And then there is the political posturing. On April 13 Obama delivered a ballyhooed speech at George Washington University. The man who conservatives as well as liberal pundits told us was a combination of Edmund Burke and Reinhold Niebuhr was widely expected to present a serious plan to address the budget deficits and entitlement spending.

Instead the man who can call on talented career professionals at the Office of Management and Budget to produce detailed blueprints gave us something in the nature of a few numbers scrawled on a paper napkin.

The man depicted as pragmatic and free of ideological cant indulged in cheap political rhetoric, accusing Republicans, including House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan who was in the audience, of pushing old ladies in wheelchairs down the hill and starving autistic children.

The signal was clear. Obama had already ignored his own deficit reduction commission in preparing his annual budget, which was later rejected 97-0 in the Senate. Now he was signaling that the time for governing was over and that he was entering campaign mode 19 months before the November 2012 election. People took notice, especially those people who decide whether to hire or not. Goldman Sachs’s Current Activity Indicator stood at 4.2 percent in March. In April — in the middle of which came Obama’s GW speech — it was 1.6 percent. For May it is 1 percent.

“That is a major drop in no time at all,” wrote Business Insider’s Joe Weisenthal.

After April 13 Obama Democrats went into campaign mode. They staged a poll-driven Senate vote to increase taxes on oil companies.

They began a Mediscare campaign against Ryan’s budget resolution that all but four House Republicans had voted for. That seemed to pay off with a special election victory in New York’s 26th Congressional District.

The message to job creators was clear. Hire at your own risk. Higher taxes, more burdensome regulation and crony capitalism may be here for some time to come.

Corporations do not hire workers or expand their businesses when there is uncertainty and looming tax increases.

News

The post-abortion trauma of famous musician Steven Tyler

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Here’s an article in National Review. (H/T Mary)

Excerpt:

Long before he won accolades as an American Idol judge, Steven Tyler was a bona-fide rock star, with all that that implied. In 1975, when he was in his late 20s and the lead singer for the band Aerosmith, Tyler persuaded the parents of his 14-year-old girlfriend, Julia Holcomb, to make him her legal guardian so that they could live together in Boston.

When Miss Holcomb and Tyler conceived a child, his longtime friend Ray Tabano convinced Tyler that abortion was the only solution. In the Aerosmith “autobiography,” Walk This Way (in which recollections by all the band members, and their friends and lovers, were assembled by the author Stephen Davis), Tabano says: “So they had the abortion, and it really messed Steven up because it was a boy. He . . . saw the whole thing and it [messed] him up big time.”

Tyler also reflects on his abortion experience in the autobiography. “It was a big crisis. It’s a major thing when you’re growing something with a woman, but they convinced us that it would never work out and would ruin our lives. . . . You go to the doctor and they put the needle in her belly and they squeeze the stuff in and you watch. And it comes out dead. I was pretty devastated. In my mind, I’m going, Jesus, what have I done?”

[…]After the abortion, Tyler began a torrid affair with Playboy model Bebe Buell while still seeing Julia, the mother of his aborted son. If you were wondering what happened to Julia (who is referred to as Diana Hall in the book) after this purportedly psychologically safe procedure, Bebe tells us: “There were many suicidal calls from poor Diana as they were breaking up. It was actually a pretty sad time.”

And how was Steven coping?

He went on a European concert tour, accompanied by Bebe, who tells us: “He was crazy . . . totally drunk, really out of it. . . . Steven destroyed his dressing room at Hammersmith . . . when we got back from Europe. . . . One night I found him on the floor of his bathroom having a drug seizure. He was writhing in pain.”

This was followed by Steven’s “Tuinal days” — a period he spent stoned on massive doses of the barbiturate. He says: “I would eat four or five a day . . . and be good for a couple of months . . . which is why that period is blackout stuff.”

This is the dysfunctional recipe for dealing with post-traumatic stress: Take heavy doses of drugs to numb the memories and feelings — and throw in a portion of toxic rage at bandmates and hotel rooms. Anger, especially in men, is often an undiagnosed sign of depression and repressed grief that needs a healthy expression and healing. Many post-abortive fathers tell us that anger management was a major problem for them after their abortions.

[…]For many post-abortive men and women, the anxiety associated with an abortion can surface at unexpected times, triggered by events such as a subsequent pregnancy, the death of a pet or a loved one, or some other person, place, or thing that in some way connects with the traumatic memory. Years later, when Tyler married, and he and his wife were expecting their first child, he was still haunted by the abortion: “It affected me later. . . . I was afraid. I thought we’d give birth to a six-headed cow because of what I’d done with other women. The real-life guilt was very traumatic for me. Still hurts.”

There are so many interesting things about this post:

  • how some men at a certain age have difficulty in making commitments and being responsible
  • how men at a certain age never think that anything bad will happen to them
  • how parents need to be more careful about standing up to their children and saying NO
  • how statistics do matter – the more you use something risky, the greater chance it will fail
  • how the rock-and-roll lifestyle that people seem to venerate can be destructive
  • how abortion really does harm men

In my next post, I will be writing about a different kind of behavior by a real hero. I find it very strange that so many people celebrate rock-and-roll musicians who merely entertain us. That doesn’t necessarily qualify them for being good husbands and fathers, though. I think women need to realize that some young men can be very dangerous and destructive because of their foolhardiness and irresponsibility. But sometimes a lack of fear can be a good thing in responsible young men, as we shall see in the next post.