Displaying posts published in

2016

Think Flint’s Water Is Bad? Your Tap Could Be Poisoned Next By Rod Kackley See note please

How is it that this appalling story came to the authorities and government so late? rsk In case you missed it.

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2016/01/15/political-poison-how-many-flints-until-we-learn-our-lesson-by-kevin-d-williamson/
Political Poison How many Flints until we learn our lesson? By Kevin D. Williamson
http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2016/01/11/appalling-breakdown-of-infrastructure-in-michigan/

Snyder Apologizes, Blames Dirty Water on Michigan Environmental Department Breakdown By Rod Kackley
For years, the people of Flint, Mich., and state inspectors were waving red flags that the water people were drinking was not safe. Their warnings were ignored or covered up. So for several years, people in Flint were cooking with, drinking and bathing in water that contained too much lead.

There are many layers of responsibility for the poisoning of the city’s municipal water supply.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) wants Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder’s (R) resignation. Hillary Clinton told a Martin Luther King event audience in Charleston, S.C.,“We would be outraged if this happened to white kids, and we should be outraged that it’s happening right now to black kids.”

Although he failed to remind Clinton that white kids live in Flint, too, Snyder did accuse her of “politicizing” the problems of the people in that community.

But Snyder apologized to Flint residents in his State of the State address Tuesday, and said they deserved better.

Snyder didn’t fall on his sword alone. He also blamed the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for their lack of response to the first alarms of bad water in one of the state’s most economically depressed cities.

The Academic War on Facts By E. M. Cadwaladr

When I was in college back in the 1980s, a couple of new degree programs, Women’s Studies and Afro-American Studies, were starting to gain in popularity. The purpose of these programs, everyone knew perfectly well, was to advance the cause of political activism for these two demographic groups. Activism isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Without a doubt, there really had been barriers to women’s advancement, more social than legal, but by the 1980s these were clearly fading — more as the result of the huge number of women advancing themselves than as the result of the efforts of radical feminists. Similarly, there had also been genuinely oppressive Jim Crow laws constraining black Americans, but those laws had been almost entirely knocked down in the 1950s and 60s. America of the 1980s was not a perfectly gender-blind or color-blind society, but we were clearly on the right track. True sexism and racism were well on the decline. But along with the real progress there came a class of professional progressive activists. Their more courageous predecessors having all but won the war, this new generation of reformers established permanent institutions in academia to refight it. Never mind the notable lack of sexist or racist stalwarts in authority to oppose. If an activist runs out of enemies, it is no great challenge to reinvent them.

An institution of reform has the same core priority as any other institution. That priority is to survive and grow. Institutions provide good jobs for the people who make the decisions, promote the cause, and shuffle the paper. I have often suspected that if a scientist arrived in the lobby of the American Cancer Society with a cure for all forms of cancer, the managing director’s first impulse would be to jump for joy – but a moment’s reflection would reveal the need to take the wretched troublemaker to the basement and beat him to death. What’s the American Cancer Society without cancer? And what’s an activist without a cause?

Israel Foils Attack Allegedly Plotted by Son of Hezbollah Leader Jawad Nasrallah used social media to recruit and form a cell of would-be Palestinian attackers, Israeli security officials say By Rory Jones

TEL AVIV—Israeli authorities said they had foiled a suicide-bomb plot allegedly led by the son of Hassan Nasrallah, leader of the Lebanese militia and political movement Hezbollah.

Jawad Nasrallah used social media to recruit and form a cell of would-be Palestinian attackers, Israeli security officials said on Wednesday. Another Hezbollah operative then instructed the recruits to carry out suicide bombings and shootings against Israeli civilians, they said.

An Israeli military court in the occupied West Bank indicted five Palestinians after an investigation into the cell’s activities, charging them with crimes including conspiracy to manslaughter and contact with an enemy organization.

A senior Hezbollah operative was killed in Syria in December, allegedly by an Israeli airstrike, raising tensions between the longtime foes. Hezbollah retaliated by bombing an Israeli convoy on the Lebanese border this month.

Israeli officials said Hezbollah was “working diligently to stir up trouble” in Israel and take advantage of a four-month wave of violence between Israelis and Palestinians. Jawad Nasrallah is a member of the Shiite Muslim group, which is backed by Iran.

“This incident was highly unusual in that a mature terrorist cell was directed by Hezbollah and planned to carry out an attack,” the Israeli statement said, adding that the militant group was “exploiting the Palestinian population and seducing young people to carry out attacks.”

Meet the Friends of Iran’s Military Pardoned by Obama What the president called a ‘one-time gesture’ will make prosecuting similar offenders less likely. By David Locke Hall

The release Saturday during a prisoner swap of four Americans held by Iran, including the reporter Jason Rezaian and Christian pastor Saeed Abedini, is certainly welcome news. But the details of this deal, arranged after a year of secret negotiations, are troubling.

In exchange the U.S. freed seven Iranian men, six with dual American citizenship—though they seem to have decided against returning to Iran. Most were charged with export violations: in other words, smuggling goods and technology, including those with military applications, from the U.S. to Iran. By making this deal, which traded law-abiding U.S. citizens for Iranian defendants charged with or convicted of federal crimes that jeopardize U.S. national security, the administration has stooped to Iran’s level. That’s a high price to pay, and it sets a dangerous precedent for federal law enforcement.

I served as an assistant U.S. attorney for 23 years, working with counter-proliferation agents from Homeland Security Investigations to investigate and prosecute unlawful arms procurement by Iran. The reason for our focus on Iran was its sustained effort over decades to obtain munitions from the U.S.
One of the defendants I helped to prosecute was Amir Ardebili, an agent operating from Shiraz, Iran, who attempted to buy weapons components from American companies. Starting in 2004 Mr. Ardebili dealt with Cross International, a Pennsylvania-based front company run by undercover agents. Among the components he agreed to buy from Cross were microchips used in phased-array radar (for missile tracking and target acquisition) and a digital air-data computer for the F-4 Phantom fighter aircraft.

Hillary’s ‘Special Access’ Server More evidence that she mishandled highly classified information.

When Team Clinton warns of a vast right-wing conspiracy, it’s a sure sign of political distress. Hillary Clinton’s accusation that even an independent federal watchdog is conspiring against her is another sign that her email problems are escalating.

The Clinton attack is a response to a Jan. 14 letter from the intelligence community’s inspector general, Charles McCullough, to Congress’s intelligence committees. Mr. McCullough said he has received sworn declarations from the intelligence community that former Secretary of State Clinton’s private email server contained intelligence about the government’s most important secrets. Reviewers have found “several dozen emails” containing information deemed to be at “confidential, secret, and top secret/sap” levels.

The SAP—special access program—reference in particular is ringing Washington alarms. A SAP usually refers to a highly covert technology program, often weaponry. Knowledge of these programs is usually restricted to small groups of people on a need-to-know basis.

NBC News first reported that the SAP reference on Mrs. Clinton’s server is so sensitive that Mr. McCullough had to get special clearance before he could even view the intelligence-community declarations. Later on Wednesday NBC quoted “senior U.S. officials” as saying that the information was “innocuous” chatter about U.S. military drone strikes.

This quote looks like an attempt at political damage control because the SAP news undermines Mrs. Clinton’s previous claim that the emails on her server weren’t classified “at the time.” The fact of drone strikes may have generally been known to the public, but classification levels often involve specific details—such as targets and timing. Mrs. Clinton would surely have recognized the sensitive nature of such a program—the details of which were sitting on her unsecured email server, affording “special access” to any quality Chinese hacker.

Hillary’s Stumbling Cakewalk Nothing’s working, so now Clinton has come up with a four-step Beat Bernie strategy. Karl Rove

This isn’t the cakewalk she expected. While not mentioning his name often, Hillary Clinton has tried marginalizing Bernie Sanders by moving left, narrowing the distance between them on income inequality and Wall Street regulation, then whacking him occasionally for opposing increased gun control. It hasn’t worked.

Last month Mrs. Clinton won all eight of the polls taken in Iowa, beating Bernie by an average of 16 points. But now her edge has fallen to only four points in the Real Clear Politics average for the state. Even that number is bolstered by an outlier, a poll that put her ahead by 21 points; remove it and Mrs. Clinton’s advantage all but disappears. In New Hampshire three polls were taken in December, two of which Mr. Sanders won, putting him ahead by 5.8 points in the Real Clear Politics average. With five fresh polls in January, his average lead has doubled to 11.4 points.

That’s why in Sunday’s Democratic debate, Mrs. Clinton deployed a new strategy with four components:

• Attack Mr. Sanders as a socialist. Mrs. Clinton now argues that her opponent would raise taxes on the middle class to pay for his socialist schemes. An unlikely attack dog, daughter Chelsea Clinton, even went so far as to assail Mr. Sanders for supporting single-payer health care—“Medicare for all,” as he described it in the debate. It is strange to see the Democratic front-runner trash another Democratic hopeful for backing the expansion of a health-care entitlement.

• Hug President Obama as tightly as possible . During the debate, Mrs. Clinton frequently invoked Mr. Obama’s name and legacy. She depicted Mr. Sanders’s single-payer plan as an attack on ObamaCare, flipped a question on Wall Street regulation to hit Mr. Sanders for criticizing the president, and even defended Mr. Obama’s widely criticized failure to order military action after Syrian President Bashar Assad crossed the “red line” by using chemical weapons.

• Lock up the nomination by locking in African-American and Hispanic support. Sunday’s debate was held in South Carolina, where more than half of Democratic primary voters in 2008 were black. “There needs to be a concerted effort to address the systemic racism in our criminal justice system,” Mrs. Clinton said. “One out of three African-American men may well end up going to prison.”

‘13 Hours’: It’s Political Hillary Clinton was complicit in Barack Obama’s Benghazi tale. By Daniel Henninger

It is possible to identify how far down the mountain American politics has fallen in one word—Benghazi.

Benghazi is no longer the place in Libya where U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens was killed by Islamist militias. “Benghazi” is now just another neutralized buzzword in the bad-mouthing wars of American politics. As a professional cynic aptly noted to Congress, “What difference, at this point, does it make?”

Forget Benghazi. It’s time to move on to more important matters.

Such as what?

The movie “13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi” opened last week, and the cold-water machines have been hosing it. No one cares about Benghazi anymore, the conventional sniffing goes, because the box-office is tepid. At 144 minutes, “13 Hours” is too long and, really, it’s just too political.

I sat through it, and these political faces and names appear nowhere in the movie: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice. But for the last 75 minutes, I could think of only one thing: the Obama administration’s YouTube coverup, the story—or “talking points”—about how an obscure anti-Islamic video made in California caused Benghazi to happen.

“13 Hours” is a graphic, reasonably accurate depiction of the events on Sept. 11, 2012: the consular assault, Chris Stevens’s death, an escape under heavy fire to the CIA annex a mile away, and the successful, nightlong defense of the annex. With apologies to the politically delicate, “13 Hours” makes the memory of the government’s tall tale, which it insisted on repeating for more than a week, hard to stomach.

Why Were Euroskeptics Ignored? Walter Laqueur

Walter Laqueur is the author of, among other books, Weimar, A History of Terrorism, Fascism: Past, Present, Future, and The Dream that Failed: Reflections on the Soviet Union. His newest book, Putinism: Russia and Its Future with the West, has just been released by Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s.

For the sake of Europe’s future, it would pay to revisit the many warning signs that, though pointed out at the time, were mocked, dismissed, or denied.

According to Daniel Johnson, Europe is in grave trouble. These days, few would disagree. To the many longstanding and unsolved problems facing the continent over the last decades, several new ones have recently been added: the economic disaster in Greece and similar economic straits elsewhere, the mass invasion of refugees from the Middle East and Africa, and the looming prospect of a British exit (“Brexit,” for short). Among the latest books about the condition of Europe, none bears the confident title of Mark Leonard’s Why Europe will Run the 21st Century, published only a short decade ago.

Does Europe have a future? That’s the question Johnson asks, and it’s the right question. But there are other questions, one of which is whether today’s crisis came as a total surprise or whether unmistakable warning signs existed that were systematically ignored or denied. This is not a matter of historical interest alone; there might well be lessons to be gleaned for, yes, the future of Europe.

Palestinians: Western Media’s Ignorance and Bias by Khaled Abu Toameh

Foreign journalists based in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv have for years refused to report on the financial corruption and human rights violations that are rife under the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas regimes. Palestinian “suffering” and the “evil” of the Israeli “occupation” are the only admissible topics.

Another Ramallah-based colleague shared that a few years ago he received a request from a cub correspondent to help arrange an interview with Yasser Arafat. Except at that point, Arafat had been dead for several years. Fresh out of journalism school and unknowledgeable about the Middle East, the journalist was apparently considered by his editors a fine candidate for covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Western reporters would do well to remember that journalism in this region is not about being pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian. Rather, it is about being “pro” the truth, even when the truth runs straight up against what they would prefer to believe.

Two Western journalists recently asked to be accompanied to the Gaza Strip to interview Jewish settlers living there.

No, this is not the opening line of a joke. These journalists were in Israel at the end of 2015, and they were deadly serious.

Imagine their embarrassment when it was pointed out to them that Israel had completely pulled out of the Gaza Strip ten years ago.

You have to have some pity for them. These foreign colleagues were rookies who aimed to make an impression by traveling to a “dangerous” place such as the Gaza Strip to report on the “settlers” living there. Their request, however, did not take anyone, even my local colleagues, by surprise.

Hillary Clinton emails held info beyond top secret: IG Ken Dilanian

Emails from Hillary Clinton’s home server contained information classified at levels higher than previously known, including a level meant to protect some of the most sensitive U.S. intelligence, according to a document obtained by NBC News.
In a letter to lawmakers, the intelligence community’s internal watchdog says some of Clinton’s emails contained information classified Top Secret/Special Access Program, a secrecy designation that includes some of the most closely held U.S. intelligence matters.Two American intelligence officials tell NBC News these are not the same two emails from Clinton’s server that have long been reported as containing information deemed Top Secret.
The letter doesn’t make clear whether Clinton sent or received the emails in question, but in the past, emails containing classified information have tended to have been sent to Clinton, not written by her.
The new revelation underscores the extent to which the email classification issue could continue to dog Clinton, as State Department and intelligence officials review sensitive information within messages that were blacked out before being released to the public.
Clinton, who tops national primary polling as a Democratic presidential candidate, has repeatedly said that none of the information she sent or received while secretary of state was marked classified, and nothing has emerged to contradict that. But it’s become clear that classified information bled into the emails, which were sent over unencrypted channels open to interception by foreign intelligence agencies.