President Obama Crashes and Burns at West Point

Excerpt: President Obama was the commencement speaker at West Point’s graduation this past week, and while the administration hoped for a big win with the speech, they’ve received the exact opposite. His speech was vapid, dreary and even disdainful to the particular crowd he was speaking to. Even the President’s traditional allies at liberal media outlets could not muster up any support for his hollow rhetoric and terrible excuse making.

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Fa La La La Law to Protect Our Troops

(Hat tip: Jane Newton) - Long before "Duck Dynasty," other camouflaged Americans were being persecuted for their beliefs: U.S. service members. Now, thanks to Congress, our brave men and women will finally have the legislative armor they need. It took until almost midnight, but when the Senate passed the Defense Authorization bill, it was worth the wait. After a year-long struggle against the forces of political correctness, leaders stood together in defense of our troops' right to speak and act openly on their faith.

With overwhelming bipartisan support (84-15), the Senate approved the legislation with Sen. Mike Lee's (R-Utah) military conscience language -- handing FRC and its supporters one of the biggest victories yet in the battle for religious liberty. Under the bill (which still awaits the President's signature), Congress moves the current law from protecting religious beliefs to also protecting the expressions of those beliefs. For service members who've become increasingly afraid to even share their faith, this language is a game-changer. It frees our troops from the fear of retaliation, which so many have experienced under this administration.

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House Votes to Delay Obamacare, Repeal Medical Device Tax

Shortly after midnight, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to repeal Obamacare’s tax on medical devices and delay the unpopular law’s implementation by one year. ✧ The two amendments to the Senate-passed continuing resolution would fund the federal government through December 15. The measure returns to the Senate, with the fate of a government shutdown now resting with President Obama and Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV). In the event of a shutdown, the House approved a separate bill that would pay the U.S. military. Read more at Heritage/Foundry... Read More......

TWS: The President And The Generals

THE WEEKLY STANDARD, 12/3/2011 (12/12/2011 Vol. 17 No. 13), (Hat tip: John H. Detweiler) - The New York Times reported last week that President Obama decided not to apologize to Pakistan about the U.S. airstrikes that killed Pakistani soldiers near the Afghan border in part because he did not want to be seen to be overruling his military commanders yet again. How ironic that the president should feel the need to accept the advice of his military leaders on diplomatic matters while regularly disregarding their opinions on military matters. This most recent incident illuminates the ongoing confusion in the White House and among the American political elite generally about how the president should take advice from his senior military commanders. The situation has become very dangerous for an administration that has overruled its commanders dramatically and frequently and is reportedly considering doing so again by announcing accelerations of the withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan beyond what military commanders have recommended. Read more at The Weekly Standard... Read More......

Jaffe: Troops feel more pity than respect

The event was a Wall Street gala that raised millions of dollars for homeless veterans in New York City. ✧ Kid Rock sang a ballad about helplessness, frustration and loss. On cue, several hundred soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines strode into position around him. The black-tie crowd rose to its feet and cheered. ✧ “The servicemen and women were regarded as heroes,” said David Saltzman, who organized the spring fundraiser. ✧ A senior military officer at the gala, also attended by the Joint Chiefs then-chairman, Adm. Mike Mullen, saw the troops’ role differently. ✧ “They were rolled out like some sort of orphan kid,” the officer wrote in an e-mail. “I’m sure the organizers meant well. I know they did. But it wasn’t respect, really. It was pity.” Read more at the Washington Post...

(Hat tip: John H. Detweiler) Read More......

Ending racial segregation of the military was a Republican policy

By Michael Zak - Chris Matthews has accused Rush Limbaugh of wanting to reverse the racial integration of the U.S. military. Of course, that's nonsense. Rush Limbaugh defended himself well, pointing out that President Truman had to issue an executive order to get around opposition by racist congressional Democrats. Rush also cites the fact that racial segregation of the military had been imposed by a Democrat president, Woodrow Wilson. ✧ However, there is even more to the story. Ending racial segregation of the military was long-standing Republican policy. Read more at Grand Old Partisan... Read More......

U.S. House vote on U.S. Military action in Libya

VOICE OF AMERICA, 6/3/2011, US House Criticizes Obama on Libya - The Republican-controlled House of Representatives has adopted a resolution [Boehner] criticizing President Barack Obama for dispatching U.S. military forces to the NATO mission in Libya without first getting congressional approval. A separate resolution [Kucinich] that would have required an immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from the Libya mission was defeated. Read more at VOA...

How Oregon's U.S. Representatives voted:

• Kucinich resolution to remove US troops from Libya: Failed 148-265 (Blumenauer - no, Defazio - yes, Schrader - yes, Walden - no, Wu - no).
  
• Boehner resolution that Obama shall not deploy, maintain, etc., US troops on the ground in Libya (rebuke to Obama)[without congressional approval]: Passed: 268-145 (Blumenauer - no, DeFazio - yes, Schrader - yes, Walden - yes, Wu - yes). (Hat tip: D'Ann Matthews)

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Morning Bell: What is Obama President of Again?

HERITAGE FOUNDATION/FOUNDRY, 9/22/2010 - On December 1, 2009, when President Barack Obama announced his new Afghanistan policy after months of delay, Denise Young of Kokomo, Ind., who has a 22-year-old son serving in the war, told The Wall Street Journal what she wanted to hear from the commander in chief: "That he is going to let the generals make the decisions. They have asked for more troops. They should get them. There is safety in numbers." Today, we learned from a sneak preview of Bob Woodward's new book, Obama's War, that President Barack Obama completely failed Mrs. Young. Read more at Heritage...

Related: LA TIMES: Woodward Book Says Afghanistan Divided White House Read More......

Morning Bell: What is Obama President of Again?

HERITAGE FOUNDATION/FOUNDRY, 9/22/2010 - On December 1, 2009, when President Barack Obama announced his new Afghanistan policy after months of delay, Denise Young of Kokomo, Ind., who has a 22-year-old son serving in the war, told The Wall Street Journal what she wanted to hear from the commander in chief: "That he is going to let the generals make the decisions. They have asked for more troops. They should get them. There is safety in numbers." Today, we learned from a sneak preview of Bob Woodward's new book, Obama's War, that President Barack Obama completely failed Mrs. Young. Read more at Heritage... Read More......

UPI: Bush Praises Troops As They Leave Iraq

As the last U.S. combat troops leave Iraq, former President George W. Bush expressed thanks to the U.S. military for its service in Iraq. Read more at UPI... Read More......

Mullah Omar Captured?

Yesterday, Brad Thor at Andrew Breitbart's BIG GOVERNMENT.com broke an exclusive story that Mullah Omar had been captured by the Pakistani's in March and Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, was not been notified. Read more at Big Government... Read More......

The Hassan Show and Political Correctness Kills

CANADA FREE PRESS (via Brigitte Gabriel's Act! for America), 11/16/2009 by Daniel Greenfield - Nidal Hassan is the final and ultimate test case proving that political correctness does kill. In the weeks, months and years leading up his Fort Hood Massacre, Nidal Hassan did everything possible to let his superiors know that one day he was going to kill a whole bunch of Americans in the name of Allah. ∴ He posted praises for suicide bombers on the internet. He gave lectures in military facilities calling the War on Terror, a war against Muslims. He even put Soldier of Allah on his business card. ∴ It’s not clear what if anything else Hassan could have done that would have gotten him away from his position as a security risk. It appears that his superiors were willing to overlook anything and everything he was doing in the name of political correctness. ∴ Nidal Hassan is the final and ultimate test case proving that political correctness does kill. For all the complaints about profiling Muslims, not only was Hassan not profiled, he was anti-profiled with openly hostile behavior toward America and signs of Islamic fanaticism getting ignored in the name of accommodating Muslims in the military.

The politically correct cover up of Nidal Hassan continues. Read more at Act! for America... Read More......

Jihadists In Military Playing U.S. for Suckers

FOX NEWS, 11/10/2009 Jihadists In Military Playing U.S. for Suckers by Cal Thomas (via email from Brigitte Gabriel's Act For America!)- By now, the script should be disturbingly familiar. Whether in the Middle East, or increasingly in America, a fanatical Muslim blows up or goes on a shooting spree, killing many. This is quickly followed by "condemnations" from "Muslim civil rights groups," like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). We are then warned by the president and some newspaper editorials not to jump to conclusions, or to stereotype. Yasser Arafat wrote this script, which he used with great success throughout his bloody career as a terrorist. ∴ Suddenly, the issue of gays in the military doesn't seem as important as jihadists in the military. Read more at Fox News...

RELATED
BREAKING NEWS: MSNBC, 11/12/2009: Feds move to seize N.Y. skyscraper, 4 mosques - Prosecutors say building owners helping to illegally funnel money to Iran. Read more at MSNBC... Read More......

A War We Just Might Win

New York Times
July 30, 2007
By Michael E. O’Hanlon and Kenneth M. Pollack

Washington -- Viewed from Iraq, where we just spent eight days meeting with American and Iraqi military and civilian personnel, the political debate in Washington is surreal. The Bush administration has over four years lost essentially all credibility. Yet now the administration’s critics, in part as a result, seem unaware of the significant changes taking place.

Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.

After the furnace-like heat, the first thing you notice when you land in Baghdad is the morale of our troops. In previous trips to Iraq we often found American troops angry and frustrated — many sensed they had the wrong strategy, were using the wrong tactics and were risking their lives in pursuit of an approach that could not work.

Today, morale is high. The soldiers and marines told us they feel that they now have a superb commander in Gen. David Petraeus; they are confident in his strategy, they see real results, and they feel now they have the numbers needed to make a real difference.

Everywhere, Army and Marine units were focused on securing the Iraqi population, working with Iraqi security units, creating new political and economic arrangements at the local level and providing basic services — electricity, fuel, clean water and sanitation — to the people. Yet in each place, operations had been appropriately tailored to the specific needs of the community. As a result, civilian fatality rates are down roughly a third since the surge began — though they remain very high, underscoring how much more still needs to be done.

In Ramadi, for example, we talked with an outstanding Marine captain whose company was living in harmony in a complex with a (largely Sunni) Iraqi police company and a (largely Shiite) Iraqi Army unit. He and his men had built an Arab-style living room, where he met with the local Sunni sheiks — all formerly allies of Al Qaeda and other jihadist groups — who were now competing to secure his friendship.

In Baghdad’s Ghazaliya neighborhood, which has seen some of the worst sectarian combat, we walked a street slowly coming back to life with stores and shoppers. The Sunni residents were unhappy with the nearby police checkpoint, where Shiite officers reportedly abused them, but they seemed genuinely happy with the American soldiers and a mostly Kurdish Iraqi Army company patrolling the street. The local Sunni militia even had agreed to confine itself to its compound once the Americans and Iraqi units arrived.

We traveled to the northern cities of Tal Afar and Mosul. This is an ethnically rich area, with large numbers of Sunni Arabs, Kurds and Turkmens. American troop levels in both cities now number only in the hundreds because the Iraqis have stepped up to the plate. Reliable police officers man the checkpoints in the cities, while Iraqi Army troops cover the countryside. A local mayor told us his greatest fear was an overly rapid American departure from Iraq. All across the country, the dependability of Iraqi security forces over the long term remains a major question mark.

But for now, things look much better than before. American advisers told us that many of the corrupt and sectarian Iraqi commanders who once infested the force have been removed. The American high command assesses that more than three-quarters of the Iraqi Army battalion commanders in Baghdad are now reliable partners (at least for as long as American forces remain in Iraq).

In addition, far more Iraqi units are well integrated in terms of ethnicity and religion. The Iraqi Army’s highly effective Third Infantry Division started out as overwhelmingly Kurdish in 2005. Today, it is 45 percent Shiite, 28 percent Kurdish, and 27 percent Sunni Arab.

In the past, few Iraqi units could do more than provide a few “jundis” (soldiers) to put a thin Iraqi face on largely American operations. Today, in only a few sectors did we find American commanders complaining that their Iraqi formations were useless — something that was the rule, not the exception, on a previous trip to Iraq in late 2005.
The additional American military formations brought in as part of the surge, General Petraeus’s determination to hold areas until they are truly secure before redeploying units, and the increasing competence of the Iraqis has had another critical effect: no more whack-a-mole, with insurgents popping back up after the Americans leave.

In war, sometimes it’s important to pick the right adversary, and in Iraq we seem to have done so. A major factor in the sudden change in American fortunes has been the outpouring of popular animus against Al Qaeda and other Salafist groups, as well as (to a lesser extent) against Moktada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army.

These groups have tried to impose Shariah law, brutalized average Iraqis to keep them in line, killed important local leaders and seized young women to marry off to their loyalists. The result has been that in the last six months Iraqis have begun to turn on the extremists and turn to the Americans for security and help. The most important and best-known example of this is in Anbar Province, which in less than six months has gone from the worst part of Iraq to the best (outside the Kurdish areas). Today the Sunni sheiks there are close to crippling Al Qaeda and its Salafist allies. Just a few months ago, American marines were fighting for every yard of Ramadi; last week we strolled down its streets without body armor.

Another surprise was how well the coalition’s new Embedded Provincial Reconstruction Teams are working. Wherever we found a fully staffed team, we also found local Iraqi leaders and businessmen cooperating with it to revive the local economy and build new political structures. Although much more needs to be done to create jobs, a new emphasis on microloans and small-scale projects was having some success where the previous aid programs often built white elephants.

In some places where we have failed to provide the civilian manpower to fill out the reconstruction teams, the surge has still allowed the military to fashion its own advisory groups from battalion, brigade and division staffs. We talked to dozens of military officers who before the war had known little about governance or business but were now ably immersing themselves in projects to provide the average Iraqi with a decent life.

Outside Baghdad, one of the biggest factors in the progress so far has been the efforts to decentralize power to the provinces and local governments. But more must be done. For example, the Iraqi National Police, which are controlled by the Interior Ministry, remain mostly a disaster. In response, many towns and neighborhoods are standing up local police forces, which generally prove more effective, less corrupt and less sectarian. The coalition has to force the warlords in Baghdad to allow the creation of neutral security forces beyond their control.

In the end, the situation in Iraq remains grave. In particular, we still face huge hurdles on the political front. Iraqi politicians of all stripes continue to dawdle and maneuver for position against one another when major steps towards reconciliation — or at least accommodation — are needed. This cannot continue indefinitely. Otherwise, once we begin to downsize, important communities may not feel committed to the status quo, and Iraqi security forces may splinter along ethnic and religious lines.

How much longer should American troops keep fighting and dying to build a new Iraq while Iraqi leaders fail to do their part? And how much longer can we wear down our forces in this mission? These haunting questions underscore the reality that the surge cannot go on forever. But there is enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008.

Michael E. O’Hanlon is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Kenneth M. Pollack is the director of research at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings. Read More......

Pilot's war story told in book

Robin Brown was featured in the G-T's Community & Northwest section
Corvallis Gazette-Times, July 4, 2007 by Theresa Hogue, Gazette-Times Reporter

Author interviewed Robin Brown of Corvallis, who flew helicopters in Iraq

Robin Brown has finally started adjusting to civilian life. She and her husband, Jason, are working on renovating their third older home, they have a 10-month-old son, Henry, and she works in sales at Benson’s Interiors.

It’s a far cry from piloting a Kiowa Warrior scout attack helicopter for the 82nd Airborne.

Brown was a military brat who attended Fordham University in New York on an Army ROTC scholarship, and went straight into the Army after graduating in 1997. Her whole life has revolved in some way around the military, and having married a military man as well, the idea of life without the Army is a little bit odd.

Recently, Brown relived some of her most dramatic military moments when she read Kirsten Holmstedt’s new book, “Band of Sisters: American Women at War in Iraq.” Brown is one of the two dozen women soldiers interviewed in the book, which has just been released. Article continued here or here. More about Band of Sisters here and here.

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Jet Noise is the Sound of Freedom

Signal 94, June 18, 2007 - SIG₉₄ posted Way too Cool, in which he notes, "This was just too cool not to steal." So from Phred's World to Signal 94 to us, I say, enjoy this story from a U.S. Soldier somewhere in Afghanistan... (Photo: B-1 bomber breaking the sound barrier)

"So we are up in the mountains at about 0100 hrs looking for a bad guy that we thought was in the area. There are ten of us, pitch black, crystal clear night, about 25 degrees. We know there are bad guys in the area; a few shots have been fired but no big deal. We decide that we need air cover and the only thing in the area is a solo B-1 bomber. He flies around at about 20,000 feet and tells us there is nothing in the area. He then asks if we would like a low level show of force. Stupid question. Of course we tell him yes.

The controller who is attached to the team then is heard talking to the pilot. Pilot asks if we want it subsonic or supersonic. Very stupid question.

Pilot advises he is twenty miles out and stand by. The controller gets us all sitting down in a line and points out the proper location. You have to picture this. Pitch black, ten killers sitting down, dead quiet and overlooking this about 30 mile long valley. All of a sudden, way out (below our level) you see a set of four 200' white flames coming at us. The controller says, "Ah-- guys-- you might want to plug your ears".

Faster than you can think a B-1, supersonic, 1000' over our heads, blasts the sound barrier and it feels like God just hit you in the head with a hammer. He then stands it straight up with 4 white trails of flame coming out and disappears.

Cost of gas for that: Probably $50,000

Hearing damage: For certain.

Bunch of Taliban thinking twice about shooting at us: Priceless.

Have a nice day from the good 'ol USA!

SIG94 adds, I get chills just thinking about this. I love the sound of jets. It is indeed the sound of freedom.YEEEEEEEEEHHHAAAAAAAAAH!

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