Category Archives: national news

national news

Rudy wraps himself in 9/11 tragedy

Rudy Guiliani is becoming more shameless by the hour.

After saying that President Barack Obama doesn’t love America, the former New York City mayor has essentially doubled down on that criticism by telling right-wing talk show host Sean Hannity that Obama “didn’t live through 9/11; I did.”

http://mediamatters.org/video/2015/02/19/rudy-giuliani-invokes-911-to-reinforce-his-clai/202583

So, what is the former mayor suggesting? It might be that he’s glorifying his involvement in a crisis that was thrust upon him by those terrorists who flew the planes into the World Trade Center.

No one with any memory of that terrible day would begrudge the mayor for the role he played in rallying his city and, thus, the country in the wake of horrifying tragedy. I certainly get it. His Honor stood tall, along with President Bush.

But why bring that up now as he criticizes President Obama — wrongly, in my view?

He’s suggesting the president doesn’t take international terrorism seriously enough. He posited the ridiculous notion that Obama doesn’t love the country.

Now he says he’s justified in criticizing the president because he was mayor of New York on the morning that the terrorists stunned the world with their brazen attack on the United States of America.

No, Mr. Mayor. You were in the wrong place at the right time. That’s all. Yes, you responded heroically — but your actions — by themselves — don’t give you the right to question the president’s love of country.

 

International news, national news

'Bloviator' O'Reilly's war coverage challenged

Bill O’Reilly’s brand on TV news is one of confrontation and — some would suggest — self-serving excess.

OK, I’ll suggest it, too. O’Reilly is full of himself at times.

He’s been all over the Brian Williams story and the now-admitted “misremembering” about the NBC News anchor being shot down in Iraq in 2003.

Well, the self-proclaimed bloviator is now facing a challenge of his own, from Mother Jones magazine, over whether O’Reilly actually witnessed combat during the brief war in the remote Falkland Islands in 1982, when Great Britain sent a flotilla to its territorial possession to rid the place of Argentine troops who had taken the island illegally.

“I was there,” O’Reilly has contended all along. Mother Jones disputes O’Reilly’s assertion.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/news/bill-o%E2%80%99reilly%E2%80%99s-falklands-war-coverage-challenged-in-explosive-new-report/ar-BBhLZxs?ocid=ansWrap11

This story is still developing, but as MSN reported, O’Reilly has been quick — imagine that — to respond to the allegations that Mother Jones has made that the correspondent did not face hostile fire, as he has reported for more than three decades.

MSN reports: “The (Mother Jones) website’s David Corn highlights several instances where the Fox News primetime host claimed to have covered the 1982 fighting in the Falklands War between Argentina and England up close–the issue is few reporters were able to cover the conflict up close due to the remote location of the war zone.”

I’m not going to make an assessment here of whether O’Reilly fibbed about his war coverage. I will, however, suggest that the Fox News TV talk show star’s aggressive reporting of others’ troubles — such as Brian Williams — exposes him to careful scrutiny by other watchdogs to ensure that he’s as righteous as he claims to be.

Here’s the Mother Jones article that O’Reilly asserts is “bulls***.” It’s lengthy. It’s also quite interesting and carefully detailed.

Bill O’Reilly Has His Own Brian Williams Problem

See for yourself. Is David Corn merely a “left-wing assassin,” as O’Reilly asserts, or is he an aggressive reporter?

As for O’Reilly, it appears he has to explain himself — without resorting to name-calling.

 

national news

Obama echoes Bush on Islam

This video is worth watching as the nation debates whether the 44th president of the United States harbors some sort of bias that gives terrorists a pass just because they purport to be of the Islamic faith.

Listen to the words spoken here by the 43rd president, George W. Bush, just six days after the 9/11 attacks.

He quotes the Quran, noting that acts of evil will be the end of those who commit those acts.

President Bush refers to Islam as a great religion, that its tenets condemn violence committed against innocent victims.

Where was the outcry then as the president sought to inform the nation that our anger should not be directed at peaceful Muslims, those who pay their taxes and who go about their business daily without regard to harming other human beings?

Yet we keep hearing from those who suggest that President Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, harbors sympathies to those who have done us harm.

Listen carefully to the words spoken on the video.

 

national news, political news

Guiliani makes zero sense

So help me, I never thought Rudy Guiliani was capable of going around the bend.

That is, until I read about his remarks delivered last night at a dinner honoring Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.

The former New York mayor, the hero of the 9/11 response and Time magazine’s Person of the Year in 2001 actually said that President Barack Obama doesn’t love America.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/giuliani-obama-doesnt-love-america/ar-BBhKLyD

What on God’s Earth has the mayor been drinking, smoking, eating or taking intravenously?

Has the man not heard the president speak of his love of a country where only his “story can happen”? How the mixed-race son of an immigrant and a young woman from Kansas could graduate from college, earn a law degree, become elected to a state legislature, to the U.S. Senate and then become elected — twice — to the presidency of the United States? How about how that son could be raised by a single mother after his father abandoned his family and how he spent time growing up overseas and then grew up listening to his maternal grandparents tell of their struggles while living in Middle America?

The president proclaims his love of country damn near every time I hear him speak in public. Doesn’t he wish God’s blessings on the United States of America at the end of every speech he ever gives?

Isn’t the former mayor paying attention?

And yet Guiliani said last night that he believes the president is a patriot. What? Which is it, Mr. Mayor? Is he a patriot or does he detest the country of his birth?

 

 

national news

Ted Cruz: Exaggerator in chief

Ted Cruz’s mother must have told him when he was a boy: “If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a million times, don’t exaggerate.”

Or perhaps words to that effect.

Well, the Texas Republican freshman U.S. senator, is exaggerating in the extreme — once again — while criticizing the Obama administration’s approach to fighting the war on terror.

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/02/ted-cruz-obama-radical-islamic-terrorists-115312.html?hp=l2_4

He can’t stop blasting President Obama for declining to use the words “Islamic terrorism.” He also ripped Obama a new one for the White House’s failure to acknowledge that the 21 Egyptians who were beheaded by Islamic State terrorists were Christians.

Oh, and then he was critical — naturally — for State Department flack Marie Harf’s statement that we need to work toward ending poverty in the nations that breed the terrorists. Cruz said this: “Now, with respect, that is idiocy. The solution here is not expanded Medicaid. The solution is the full force of U.S. military power to destroy the leaders of ISIS. They have declared war … jihad on the United States. Jihad is another word the president doesn’t say.”

I understand what the young man is seeking to do here. He’s trying to make a point by embellishing what Harf said, or meant. Medicaid? Come on.

As for the president being an “apologist for radical Islamic terrorists,” Sen. Cruz needs — once again — to examine the record. We’re killing these individuals every single day. We’re doing precisely what we’ve been doing since President George W. Bush sent us to war right after 9/11.

No, I don’t expect this kind of rhetoric to stop. After all, we’ve got a presidential campaign to wage and I expect fully to hear a lot more of it from other potential candidates for the White House. I’m just spewing my own frustration at what I keep hearing.

Bear with me, please. I’ll get over it — eventually.

 

International news, national news

Let's stop quibbling over branding of war

President Obama went on offense today in declaring that the enemy in our current war against terror doesn’t comprise “religious leaders.”

We are fighting terrorists, pure and simple, he said.

So, the president will continue to resist referring to the enemy as “Islamic terrorists,” or “Islamist terrorists,” or some such derivation of the use of a word describing a great religion.

Obama: ISIS ‘aren’t religious leaders, they’re terrorists’

While some of us — including yours truly — disagree with the president’s decision to avoid using the term “Islamic terrorist” in describing our enemy, I am willing to drop the argument.

We’re now quibbling over semantics.

“We are not at war with Islam. We are at war with people who have perverted Islam,” he said.  “No religion is responsible for terrorism. People are responsible for violence and terrorism.”

Obama sounds just like his immediate predecessor, former President George W. Bush, on this matter. President Bush made precisely the same point when we went to war in Afghanistan immediately after the 9/11 attacks. Was there an outcry then about how we defined the enemy? If there was, well, it’s gotten lost on me.

Yet the outcry continues to this day about the current president’s use of language to describe the war that is on-going.

What difference does any of this make? What ought to matter is what we’re doing on the field of battle. We’re bombing Islamic State targets, along with aircraft being flown by our allies. I’m certain we’re killing terrorists; we’re even killing some of their leaders. We’re seeking to disrupt the terrorists’ command and control operations. We’re attempting to blast them into oblivion. We are deploying special operations units to hunt them down on the ground. We’re putting men and women at supreme risk of being captured.

OK, so we’re not calling them Islamic terrorists. The bad guys know who they are and what they represent. So do the good guys — and we’re acting accordingly.

Let’s stick to the mission in the field and quit arguing over what to call it.

 

business news, national news

What about consumers of oil?

The media and others keep reporting about the impact that the collapsing price of oil is having on the oil industry and those who work in it.

I feel for them, with their jobs on the line. It’s getting less cost-effective to explore for oil and produce it when the price falls from $100-plus per barrel to less than $50.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/oil-rally-seen-reversing-as-rising-us-supply-deepens-glut/ar-BBhHhF7

But what about the consumer? What about the family that is now spending considerably less for gasoline then it was a year or two ago? How about those folks who suddenly find themselves with more disposable income, money to spend on other essentials — such as, oh, food and clothing?

The recent uptick in fuel prices is now expected to revert to recent trends as the nation’s oil glut continues to grow. It’s been an amazing spectacle to watch as street-corner gasoline dealers drop prices as many as three times daily.

I’ve talked here about the “new normal” in gas pricing being elevated to heights none of us imagined when we were much younger and were spending about four bits for a gallon of gas. I remember my parents pulling up to the gas pump and telling the attendant, “I’ll take a dollar’s worth of regular.” We won’t return to those days, but we’re a lot closer to them today than we were in 2013.

It’s that result that prevents me from crying too heavily over the fortunes of those who work on the oil field pipelines or at the refineries that turn crude oil into gasoline or diesel.

My wife and I will keep driving our hybrid motor vehicle — just like millions of other Americans — and will keep working to build up that supply of fossil fuel that contributes to the plummeting price of gasoline.

 

International news, national news

That's the ticket: Find jobs for ISIL terrorists

What in the world is the State Department thinking?

State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf told Chris Matthews on MSBNC’s “Hardball” talk show that the United States cannot win the war against the Islamic State by killing them, that we need to help them find jobs.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/02/17/state-department-spokeswoman-floats-jobs-as-answer-to-isis/

Holy crap!

Here’s how FoxNews.com reported it: “‘We’re killing a lot of them, and we’re going to keep killing more of them. … But we cannot win this war by killing them,’ department spokeswoman Marie Harf said on MSNBC’s “Hardball.” “We need … to go after the root causes that leads people to join these groups, whether it’s lack of opportunity for jobs, whether –‘

“At that point, Harf was interrupted by host Chris Matthews, who pointed out, ‘There’s always going to be poor people. There’s always going to be poor Muslims.'”

I’m not going to buy the notion that some critics of the Obama administration say about the president going soft on terrorists.

However …

This idea that we need to focus on job creation while waging war against these monsters is nuts in the extreme.

Harf did add that there’s “no easy solution.” She said American military operations would continue to kill ISIL leaders. But she said, “If we can help countries work at the root causes of this — what makes these 17-year-old kids pick up an AK-47 instead of trying to start a business?”

How about, Ms. Harf, we soft-pedal the job creation and push the pedal to the metal on our efforts at killing the bad guys?

War is a supremely unpleasant endeavor, but we’d better continue fighting it as if we intend to win it.

 

legal news, national news

Let's try to define AG's 'independence'

U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley wants the next attorney general to show some “independent” thought if she’s confirmed to run the Justice Department.

So far, Attorney General-designate Loretta Lynch isn’t demonstrating the requisite independence to suit Chairman Grassley’s taste.

GOP cools on Loretta Lynch

The committee, which has to sign off on her nomination before the full Senate votes on her confirmation, delayed the vote for a couple of weeks. The reason? Lynch hasn’t put sufficient distance between herself and President Obama on the issue of immigration and the president’s executive actions that delays deportation of some 5 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States.

I’ll admit to being a bit slow on the uptake at times, so I don’t quite understand this “independence” concern being expressed.

The president nominates Cabinet officers because he wants them to be on the same page as the person who nominates them. How can a member of a president’s Cabinet exhibit sufficient independence without undermining the overall goals that the administration seeks to achieve?

As The Hill reported: “I think [Attorney General Eric] Holder is running the Justice Department like a wing of the White House,” (Grassley) added. “That’s not right, and I want her to show us that she can be independent.”

So, is the chairman asking Lynch to buck the president on an issue he deems critical enough to take executive action?

How does, say, a defense secretary demonstrate independence when he or she assumes command of the Pentagon, which falls under the ultimate purview of the commander in chief? How does a treasury secretary oversee fiscal policy independent of the president who might have a clear set of economic principles he wants the country to follow?

Maybe there’s some kind of middle ground that Grassley and other Senate Republicans are seeking from the next attorney general.

I stand by my belief that the president’s prerogative should carry greater weight if he nominates someone who’s qualified to do a job.

Accordingly, Loretta Lynch is supremely qualified to be the next attorney general — even if she happens to support the policies of the president who appoints her.

 

national news, political news

GOP plays with fire over DHS funding

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Congressional Republicans — and Democrats, for that matter — keep insisting that national security should be above partisan politics.

What, then, is going on with GOP threats to shut down the Department of Homeland Security because its congressional caucus is so upset with President Obama’s executive order on immigration?

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/02/15/us-usa-congress-homeland-idUSKBN0LJ0P520150215

Good bleeping grief, people! The Homeland Security department, as its very name says, is charged with protecting the United States against internal and external threats. The 9/11 terrorist onslaught produced the agency, correct?

Now, though, it’s becoming a political football, being kicked around Capitol Hill by congressional Republicans who just cannot get over the notion that the president acted within his constitutional authority to delay the deportation of several million undocumented immigrants.

They are threatening to sue Obama over his action. They want to repeal it. They are insisting that he acted unlawfully. Yet no one has produced a shred of evidence to suggest that the president acted outside of the authority granted him by federal statute and the Constitution of the United States of America.

DHS money is going to run out on Feb. 27 unless Congress approves money to pay for it.

The House of Representatives has approved money for DHS, but have added some amendments stripping the president’s executive action of its authorization. Senate Democrats object to the GOP amendments and have held up the appropriation, drawing criticism — quite naturally — from House Republicans. Speaker John Boehner said the GOP has done its job; now it’s up to Senate Democrats.

That’s all fine, except Senate Democrats object to GOP complaints about the executive actions on immigration, which were legal and constitutional.

Thus, the gamesmanship.

What in the world has happened to good government?