October 29, 2012

Interesting reports from the military

Within days of the attack in Benghazi the U.S. military announced the replacement of two top commanders. One was General Carter Ham, head of Africa Command.  Rumor is that as the U.S. detachment at Benghazi was being attacked, Ham messaged the Pentagon stating he was ready to respond. 

He was reportedly ordered to take no action.

As a military man willing to sacrifice his career rather than abandon his brothers in arms, Ham defied those orders and took an action to at least get U.S. military forces headed toward Benghazi.  Minutes later his assistant, General David Rodriguez, reportedly told General Ham he was relieved of his command.

The second replacement was of the commander of a carrier strike group in the Middle East.  Its commander was ordered to fly back to the U.S.  No explanation was given.

As "Stars and Stripes" puts it, this is "highly unusual."  Amen.


KADUNA, Nigeria (AP) — A suicide bomber rammed an SUV loaded with explosives into a Catholic church holding Mass on Sunday in northern Nigeria, killing at least seven people and wounding more than 100... The attack happened during Sunday morning worship services.
The AP article does go on to say that the area is populated by "Christians and Muslims," but that's the only hint that the bomber may have been Muslim.

Cuz, y'know, Christians are so into that "suicide truck bomb" thing.  A copycat crime, prolly.  Yeah, dat's it.

Attacks on this scale of barbarity--on Christians, by Muslim extremists--are now happening a couple of times a week in Nigeria.  But the AP article doesn't say who carried out the attack.  It's a mystery.  And we wouldn't want to jump to any premature conclusions, eh? 

Kinda like the Obama administration and the attack on our consulate in Benghazi--it couldn't possibly have been a "terrorist act" because the official party line is that Islam is "the" religion of peace.  But Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice and Obama had no qualms at all about announcing the false but more reassuring conclusion that the attack was simply a "spontaneous demonstration" caused by (understandable!) outrage over a video on the internet.

Yeah, dat's it! 

It's a bit amusing watching the lengths people will go to to pretend that a potentially fatal problem isn't a problem.

October 14, 2012

Taliban target, shoot 14-year-old girl

Okay, I apologize for being a downer on a lovely morning but I really believe it needs to be done.

Last Tuesday in northwest Pakistan a man walked into a school courtyard and boarded a bus full of schoolgirls.  He asked one of the students which one was "Malala."  The girl pointed to a classmate.  The man then walked over to the seated 14-year-old girl and asked if she was Malala.  When she said she wasn't, he shot her in the face, along with the two girls sitting beside her, at point-blank range.

The attacker escaped, but a Taliban spokesman, Ehsanullah Ehsan, quickly claimed his group had shot the 14-year-old, saying the girl's work had been an "obscenity" that needed to be stopped.  He insisted the attack was justified because “she was promoting Western culture."  Most revealingly, he said his group would target the girl again if she survived.

And what did the Taliban spokesman claim the 14-year-old girl had done to warrant being shot in the face at point-blank range?  Dress in an un-Islamic way, perhaps?

Refuse to cover her face?

Perhaps she was seen listening to music--an act declared to be un-Islamic.

No, gentle leftists, her crime was to write and speak in favor of...are you ready?... education for girls.  Beginning at the age of eleven she'd started writing a blog about the need for Pakistani girls to attend school.  TIME magazine reported that in December she'd received an award from the Pakistani government for her work, and that she'd spoken publicly in the Swat valley about the rights of children.

Yes, truly offensive, anti-Islamic acts.

What's that?  Do I hear fans of Islam saying this ghastly shooting of an unarmed teenage girls isn't representative of that religion?  Ah.  Then we can expect to see hundreds of Muslims--in all nations--openly condemn the attack, and the group that carried it out, right?

I'll be watching.

Meanwhile a BBC correspondent in Pakistan reported on Twitter that he'd asked the Taliban to clarify their position on killing women, given that the Koran declares it forbidden for Muslims to kill other Muslims. A spokesman for the group replied that Malala “had harmed the mujahideen by her words. We held a shura and declared killing her was allowed in Islam.”

Ah, well...as long as they held a meeting and made it all legal and all.

Oh, by the way:  All this was from Fox News so you Leftists can safely dismiss it as "faux news."  (That is so precious.)

Just kidding--it's all from the New York Times.

So tell me once again, elite opinion-molders and Ivy-schooled cabinet members:  You claim we can co-exist with people like this because...why?  Will you claim the people who shot this girl aren't "real" Muslims?

And to American feminists:  Your national organizations support Democrats, and Democrats have consistently rationalized away all heinous, ghastly acts by Muslims.  How can you ignore this atrocity?  And how much longer will you rationalize?

A brave spirit, this one:





Obama claims drafting children is bad, but...

In the last week of September, Obozo gave yet another of his wonderful, inspiring speeches--this time on how terrible it was for some nasty governments to force young children to be soldiers.

Read the words of Chicago Jesus and rejoice in his brilliance, for verily he is the Lightworker:
When a little boy is kidnapped, turned into a child soldier, forced to kill or be killed -- that's slavery," Obama said in a speech at the Clinton Global Initiative. "It is barbaric, and it is evil, and it has no place in a civilized world. Now, as a nation, we've long rejected such cruelty. 
Dayum, that'sa really inspiring pair of sentences!  And congress got on board with that back in 2008 when it passed the "Child Soldiers Protection Act" that barred military assistance to countries that forced kids to fight.

But then just a few days after Obama's wunnerful speech (the last Friday afternoon in September--i.e. the usual day the administration announces news it wants to get as little coverage as possible), Obama issued a presidential memorandum waiving penalties under the Child Soldiers Protection Act of 2008 for Libya, South Sudan, and Yemen.  Obama also partially waived sanctions against the Democratic Republic of the Congo to allow some military training and arms sales to that country. 

Pretty neat maneuver:  Deliver the uplifting rhetoric about how conscription of kids is slavery (not to mention inhumane) but then nullify the sanctions congress provided to discourage such behavior. 

"Watch what I say, not what I do."  It's the Chicago way.

October 07, 2012

Job reports off by a factor of eight! MSM yawns.

If you're a Democrat you surely heard the wonderful news:  the unemployment figures released by the Labor Department on Friday showed the UE rate for September was lower than it had been for the past three years.

Specifically, it allegedly dropped from 8.1% all the way to 7.8%--which I understand is the figure when Obama took office.

If this were true it would be great news for Obama and all Democrats, as it would suggest the economy is indeed recovering nicely.  Which would greatly improve Obie's chance of winning that all-important second term.

But of course that number is a complete load of crap.  Here's the evidence, and you can decide for yourself.

Every month the Labor Dept. takes the pulse of the economy in two ways: it asks 410,000 businesses how many people they've hired in the last month; and it does a phone survey of 50,000 households, asking if anyone living there has been hired in the last month.

Now, both those numbers represent *very* large surveys.  In an honest, random sample of 50,000 respondents, the probability of any measurement missing the true average by more than a percent or so is extremely small.  A survey of 410,000 respondents would be expected to nail the true value of the whole population within half a percent or so.

And what did these two different surveys find?

The "household survey" allegedly found that about 873,000 new jobs had been created in September.  If true that would indeed cut unemployment by a significant amount.

But the much larger (and thus presumably more accurate) "business survey" found that just 114,000 new jobs had been created.

Oh, you say you never heard that second figure?  Wow, what a surprise.

That would be because all the members of the Lying Media reported the results like this:
The U.S. unemployment rate fell to 7.8 percent last month, dropping below 8 percent for the first time in nearly four years and giving President Barack Obama a potential boost with the election a month away.
The rate declined from 8.1 percent because the number of people who said they were employed soared by 873,000 - an encouraging sign for an economy that's been struggling to create enough jobs.

The number of unemployed Americans is now 12.1 million, the fewest since January 2009.
The Labor Department said employers added 114,000 jobs in September. 

See the trick?  Publishers know most people only read the first couple of paragraphs of most stories, so they put the far more favorable 873,000 figure near the top of the story, with lots of good words around it.  The contradictory number--a disaster for Obama--is only mentioned several 'grafs later.

The overwhelming majority of readers pick up on the favorable first number.  But because the 114,000 figure seems to (and does) contradict the first, the brain simply ignores it.

I have yet to find a single article in the Lying Media even raising the question of why the two numbers--supposedly measuring the same thing in different ways--disagree by a factor of almost eight.  Why would the MSM have no interest in calling attention to such a huge discrepancy in the alleged findings of the two surveys, when they're ostensibly measuring the same thing--let alone finding the explanation for it?

If a Republican were president, which figure do you think the media would tout, and publish in the first or second graf?