In-A-Gadda-Levitre
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Posts posted by In-A-Gadda-Levitre
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Over 1,000 US servicemen/women have died in Afghanistan since the Emperor BO took over.
2009: 317
2010: 499
2011: 418
2012: 294
why would anyone quote this? Especially that the Iraq casualties were orders of magnitude higher during 2003-2008. This is just wrong, you should be ashamed of yourself.
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Sorry, had Portman's name on my mind, but was talking about Huntsman. Bottom line is that Huntsman is virtually a carbon copy of Romney, just younger. He would have had to do the same things Romney did and would have had the same tactics used against him.
As for what a Repub candidate needs to do, there's nothing they can do.
hehe, ok about Portman.
They're both rich, pro-life, Mormon republicans. On immigration, foreign policy, environment (esp cap-and-trade), gay rights, gov't spending to promote economic growth, financial reform, and others like oil subsidies, they're not even close. Huntsman is a true moderate, Romney not so much, but it was hard to tell sometimes. The point is he refused to do what Romney did, and it cost him dearly.
One of the things that most pundits and observers agree on is that Obama was able to define Romney as a vulture capitalist early on. Not that he was rich, but how he became rich. Huntsman's dad made his money by innovating food packaging and Junior is a career diplomat. Seems like a strategy that lionizes his wealth wouldn't have had nearly the same effect with Huntsman.
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You're saying Portman wouldn't have thrown red meat to get the nomination? Would the "war on women, gays, minorities, poor" not been used? Would Portman's family's $11B business not been used to portray him as an evil 1%er? Would the media have started telling the ugly truth about Barry's admin and given Portman fair treatment? The answers are all "no."
The discussion was about Huntsman, that he wasn't pandering to the republican base nearly enough to win or even stay competitive in the primaries, and you commented about "crazy Romney". So, now you rotate somehow to Portman? What does he have to do with this? Since he was never a candidate, I don't see how speculating over what might have happened has any relevance.
Maybe what we ought to have a dialog about is whether, if every GOP presidential candidate in the future has to espouse extreme right positions in the primary just to get the nomination, can they tack to the center in the general and win, ever?
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Yeah, that "crazy" Romney...
And a guy who was a Republican governor of a Dem state shouldn't have appealed to centrists and moderates?
crazy as in the amount of red meat that the candidate was willing to throw to the base during the primaries. Romney was right up there, depending on the issue. Later, he pivots towards the center, but didn't have enough in the message dep't to win over moderates.
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Speaking of Messina, he said that Jon Huntsman would have been a pretty tough candidate to beat in the general election. I know many Democrats and Moderates who liked him, including me.
Link to comments: http://www.politico....-candidate.html
He wasn't "crazy" enough for the Republican Party I know...
I agree on both points. He was attractive candidate to many centrists and moderates, but not crazy enough to make it past the primaries. It's very likely that the Obama camp knew he was a formidable candidate and put him in China to hamper his fundraising and campaign prep.
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Are you saying that lefties are informed? Have you ever seen a !@#$ing episode of Bill Maher? Most of the people on PPP are conservative. Even if you don't agree with their ideology ,would you label any of them "uninformed'?
no, I'm not saying that, but on the whole, the republican base exists in an information bubble, ignoring anything that conflicts with their beliefs. Sure, some on the left suffer in the same way, but there's more than enough anecdotal evidence that the former are consistently uniformed. To answer your question about PPP, I'd say, yeah, there's lots of PPP contributors that are uniformed, because they refuse to consider any possible alternative to their way of thinking, and don't bother getting other viewpoints.
Personally, I watch both sides news programs and read both side's pundits, and if someone makes a compelling argument, they can convince me or change my viewpoint.
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largely uniformed populace = Fox News watchers and/or those that get their information solely from right wing bloggers or talk radio hosts
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Ummm... I'm not sure I understand.
Do you actually think Obama's mouthpiece will say that the media was in the bag for him?
he isn't the mouthpiece, that would be Stephanie Cutter. He's the Campaign Manager and he listed the biggest reasons why he won. I have trouble believing that, if the media was a significant part of winning, he'd wouldn't find a way to mention it, even in an indirect way. I'm guessing he doesn't believe it, nor do most of the campaign. Actually, he went out of his way to say that knocking on doors and GOTV investments (aided by high tech) won. That flies in the face of media shifting the electorate.
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more gloating, beating a dead horse, and otherwise partisan hackmanship.
Jim Messina on why Obama won. Funny how media coverage wasn't mentioned, but he must be covering up how the leftist media won the day. Instead, it was mostly about good ole' grass roots campaigning.Messina didn’t cite the Romney campaign’s failure to answer the summer attack ads as the biggest mistake made by the Republican. Instead, he pointed to the television ad they ran in Ohio claiming Jeep was sending jobs to China."They ended up spending the last 14 days of the election on the defense, and day after day they had to answer for their ad,” Messina said.
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I vote c), a public that votes based on abortion, gay marriage, and immigration, instead of the economy.
Michael Gerson, former Bush speechwriter opines
Some of the most important intellectual groundwork is needed on the role of government. Mitt Romney had a five-part plan to encourage job creation. He lacked a public philosophy that explained government’s valid role in meeting human needs. Suburban women heard little about improved public education. Single women, particularly single mothers, heard little about their struggles, apart from an off-putting Republican critique of food stamps. Blue-collar workers in, say, Ohio heard little about the unique challenges that face declining industrial communities. Latinos heard little from Republicans about promoting equal opportunity and economic mobility.
Neither a vague, pro-business orientation nor tea party ideology speaks to these Americans — except perhaps to alienate them. Conservatives will need to define a role for government that addresses human needs in effective, market-oriented ways. Americans fear public debt, and they resent intrusive bureaucracies, but they do not hate government.
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I was catching up on some reading, and found this article in Newsweek, printed less than a week before the news came out....
thanks JJ, I'd never seen all these
#5 has been quoted a few times, but seems like #1 might've been a part of his decision as well
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Reports are that security was removed a month prior to the attack, despite Stevens' pleas to keep them there. And we know about the request for the plane that was denied. As for whether there was a stand down ordered, the CIA has every reason to lie, and there was no aid provided. Moreover Tyrone Woods' father has expressed frustration at the WH's stonewalling him, not to mention the evasiveness of the WH having Petraeus resign, Hillary down in Australia, etc. It doesn't take a lot of thought to put it all together.
the "security removed" reports seem to come only from bloggers, do you have any legit sources that confirm they removed security?
Not saying it didn't happen and I'll also be the first to admit that the pre-disaster planning was disgusting. They asked for more security, and didn't get it. Maybe it would've made a difference. The Libyan contracted security was a joke. The contingency planning seems to be non-existant, so there's a lot to be angry about.
Asked and refused for what plane?
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If there was a platoon of Marines, a few seals and CIA type operators along with an AC130 we would have about 100 dead terrorist scum banging their 72 virgins right now and minimal damage and casualties to American life and property. The surrounding neighborhood.... not so much.
And there is where the administration decided it wasnt worth risking collateral damage with the new Libya and further upsetting Muslim extremists who already hate us and want to kill us no matter what we do or do not do. It's a !@#$ing joke this isnt being called for what it is.
You're absolutely right, IF they had a C-130. The nearest airbase was Sigonella, Italy, 475 miles away and there were no C-130s there that night. So, a lot of if-onlys and things would have different.
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all due respect for the former Seals that were there, but check that
there were NO Marines there....
in this case, extra marines means if their request for more security WAS honored, there would have couple squads of marines assigned to the consulate and the safe house. Not that there were any there. My bad choice of words.
Extra marines may not have helped. But when someone asks for more security, doesn't get it, gets it taken away, and dies, someone needs to hang for that. Disallowing help (the CIA denies that? Whodathunkit?!) during the attack is even worse.
Got taken away? what do you mean?
Stand down, I'll just put this out there one more time... Fox News put out a story that said the GRS assets were told to stand down, and that went viral. There was no confirmation or evidence, just someone told Jennifer Griffin and she reported it. The CIA came back and said NFW, it didn't happen at any level, the Fox story was dead wrong, and they knew it for a fact. You can choose to ignore that, but it was a very strong condemnation by the CIA.
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Then I question the credentials of those so called "experts" since they obviously know nothing about Marine Corps history with regards to our Embassy duties.
I hear what you're saying, but if you have a situation where, you're in their hood, you've got finite firepower, and the timeline exposed how long it took for reinforcements to arrive, not anyone's fault, but more about dealing with Libyan authorities and stuff. Those militias can call in some serious hardware and manpower in minutes. Remember the CIA's primary mission in Benghazi was to find all those missing shoulder-fired rockets.
2 dozen marines or seals might just be outgunned for a few hours.
Air cover, nobody's talking much, except I read somewhere that they couldn't get AC130s or close cover for some reason.
So it's nothing against our freaking amazing fighting squads, just overwhelming manpower and firepower in a short time might be too much.
If we're talking about a more perfect world, where there's not only adequate feet in the compound, but reinforcements and other backup get there in time, then that's a different situation.
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Apparently they were sending messages to each other by saving drafts on their shared e-mail account, so that they didn't have to send them out over the internet to potentially be seen.
ya exactly, but it wasn't as secure as they thought it was. Everything was stored on Google's servers and sent over their network. This whole thing exposed the holes in that trick.
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The next stage in the scandal, the "official" denial;
White House Denies Editing Terrorism Reference Out Of CIA’s Benghazi Talking Points.
Senior officials from a number of agencies, including the National Security Council, the CIA, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the State Department, reviewed the classified reporting beginning on the afternoon of Sept. 14. They finished work on the unclassified talking points the next day, said two officials who participated in the process. They said the drafters were under no pressure to gloss over the fact that the assault was by definition a terrorist act
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Detailed article on how Broadwell got caught.
The funny thing is, Paula Broadwell and David Petraeus thought they knew what they were doing. They were careful, more careful than the average American fooling around outside the bounds of marriage tends to be. When Broadwell wanted to warn off the other woman she suspected of messing with her man, she set up an anonymous email account and only used it away from home, usually on the Wi-Fi networks of hotels she was staying in. Broadwell and Petraeus also thought they could avoid having their emails intercepted in transit by technically avoiding “sending” them at all. Instead, they saved their messages to each other as “drafts” in a Gmail account to which they both enjoyed access.Linked inside was an eye-opening piece from Reuters, Collateral damage from our surveillance state. This is some scary sh*t.
The FBI obliged ‑ apparently obtaining subpoenas for Internet Protocol logs, which allowed them to connect the sender’s anonymous Google Mail account to others accessed from the same computers, accounts that belonged to Petraeus biographer Paula Broadwell. The bureau could then subpoena guest records from hotels, tracking the WiFi networks, and confirm that they matched Broadwell’s travel history. None of this would have required judicial approval ‑ let alone a Fourth Amendment search warrant based on probable cause.
While we don’t know the investigators’ other methods, the FBI has an impressive arsenal of tools to track Broadwell’s digital footprints — all without a warrant. On a mere showing of “relevance,” they can obtain a court order for cell phone location records, providing a detailed history of her movements, as well as all people she called. Little wonder that law enforcement requests to cell providers have exploded — with a staggering 1.3 million demands for user data just last year, according to major carriers.
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Susan rice lied up a storm. Obama is trying to protect her because he had her slotted to replace hilary. McCain is saying he'll do everything possible to block her nomination. Rare instance I agree with him. I always thought she was a horrible ambassador.
umm, why don't you share, specifically, what she lied about
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Even if you buy that they were ok in not disclosing what happened (I don't doubt there was some stuff that I didn't need to know about) - it's just mind boggling they pushed the video angle so hard, with "no comment" and "we plan to bring those responsible to justice" as such readily available responses for the first few days. Just bypass those totally?
ya, that's a valid point.
IMO only, I think it was more about rigidly sticking to the original, unclassified talking points until they were sure what happened. No doubt that it created real problems for the administration.
EDIT: Obama did say "And make no mistake, we will work with the Libyan government to bring to justice the killers who attacked our people" in the Rose Garden on Sep 12
It's not enough, and they should've had a better response.
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We still don't know what happened with the request for additional security before the tragedy, but most of the experts have questioned whether a dozen or so more Marines would have made the difference. That question, who decided to decline the request, needs to be explained.
That whole Fox News report "stand down" thing was strongly denied by the CIA.
“We can say with confidence that the Agency reacted quickly to aid our colleagues during that terrible evening in Benghazi. Moreover, no one at any level in the CIA told anybody not to help those in need; claims to the contrary are simply inaccurate. In fact, it is important to remember how many lives were saved by courageous Americans who put their own safety at risk that night — and that some of those selfless Americans gave their lives in the effort to rescue their comrades.”I think you'd agree (or maybe not) that it's easy to have hindsight 20-20 when the early intelligence was all over the map and as insiders quoted in my post, there was no cover up, but rather initial unclassified vs. unconfirmed, classified analysis.
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Its hard to go back. As I stated earlier I am going to be unemployed soon (pending some news). I would rather sell crack than going back to making bread at minimum wage.
We very easily become spoiled.
I agree 100%, but if your bank said you could keep your job with (let's say) a 20% hit in salary, or maybe you'd no longer get medical benefits for life, maybe you'd have to think about that long and hard, if there were few options for a new job.
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When I was a kid growing up in Buffalo, most of my friends had 1 career goal - get into the Chevy plant or Bethlehem Steel and be set for life. Of course, we know now that the unions drove up the cost of labor so high that those plants shrunk or in some cases, were shuttered. Of course there were other reasons for the demise of manufacturing, but that was and still is, the conventional thinking.
Years later, around 2003, I came back to visit my mom, and I was reading an article in the News that the last running plant of Bethlehem in Lackawanna was shutting down. I think it was the specialty steel process, but someone can correct me if I'm wrong. The article said the plant was closing, and all the workers would be out of a job, BUT, there was a plant in Tonawanda that made similar products and the plant's owner offered to buy the Bethlehem operation and let everyone keep their jobs.
There was one catch: His plant had a different contract with the unions than the Bethlehem one and he wasn't going to be held hostage by either labor group. If the Bethlehem workers accepted the same contract as the Tonawanda plant, they could keep their jobs and life would go on as before.
The Bethlehem workers grumbled in public and said they'd worked too hard to get what they had now and they weren't going to compromise their current deal.
Ok, said the white knight, no deal. The plant closed and every single job was lost.
My thought at the time was, wow, haven't you guys learned anything since the 70s?
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In my earlier post, I said I'd get some links. It's interesting that no single article covers this thing as much as CNN did last night, but there's more than enough quotes to confirm the bulk of it...
there were initial classified reports that included the video.demonstration.gone.bad theory and that it was the work of a terrorist attack, maybe p/o Al Qaeda or maybe some other group. Nothing surprising about that.
This probably doesn't require any confirmation, and anyone paying attention realizes there were conflicting reports at the beginning. One thing I hadn't heard before was that there were at least 20 reports that the attack began out of a protest about the video, those were disproved of course, but not until after General Patreus gave his 1st briefing.
What this source says Petraeus told him is there were about 20 intelligence reports that began to come in blaming that video in -- that anti-Islamic video that sparked the riots in Cairo. That's the confusion -- was it that film or was it a terrorist attack?They got 20 intelligence reports blaming the film riot in Cairo. But -- and this is critical -- those reports were disproved over time, but disproved after Petraeus made his initial presentation to Congress.
some militia groups claimed responsibility, and a new source said it was a group affiliated with Al Qaeda, that the CIA hadn't confirmed the source's claim yet, and they felt, at least initially, that they needed to protect the new source.
ABC News quotes a senior intelligence official, who discusses why they didn't mention Al Qaeda at the beginning. CNN said it was a "new source", but "tenuous" seems be to the operative word.
Because the talking points were to be unclassified, the official said intelligence and legal issues had to be considered. For one, the official said the information about the attack involving individuals linked to al-Qaeda came from classified sources. Secondly, the official said those links were “so tenuous, as they still are, it makes sense to be cautious before pointing fingers to avoid setting off a chain of circular and self-reinforcing assumptions.”General Patreus seems to say that he, and maybe the CIA, thought it was a terrorist attack from the beginning. He didn't exactly push that theory when he made his earlier statement right after the attack, but he could have been overruled, he had been sticking to the unclassified talking points, or maybe the intelligence just wasn't solid yet. Unknown I guess.
The above link confirms that he was convinced it was a terrorist attack from the outset, and subsequent reports from his last briefing said the same thing. There's some disagreement whether he drove home made this point at the first briefing or not.
David Petraeus wants to tell Congress that he knew almost immediately after the September 11th attacks that the group Ansar Al- Sharia, that all Qaeda sympathizing group in Libya, was responsible for the attacks.the unclassified talking points were circulated amongst State, the WH, CIA, National Security, FBI, etc.
This Bloomberg report confirms the above.
Senior officials from a number of agencies, including the National Security Council, the CIA, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the State Department, reviewed the classified reporting beginning on the afternoon of Sept. 14. They finished work on the unclassified talking points the next day, said two officials who participated in the process. They said the drafters were under no pressure to gloss over the fact that the assault was by definition a terrorist act.the only WH change was from 'consulate' to 'annex'. They did not appear to remove terrorist references or that it had to say it was because of the video; that the unclassified report was written and approved by all those groups.
Ben Rhodes says the White House didn't edit the unclassified talking points.
"If there were adjustments made to them within the intelligence community, that's common, and that's something they would have done themselves," Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser, told reporters. "The only edit ... made by the White House was the factual edit as to how to refer to the facility."
Benghazi
in Politics, Polls, and Pundits
Posted
lots of threads are made of drivel. Ok, you don't like it, you think the media ought to be talking about casualties in Afghanistan. Fine, start a new thread about that, but don't twist a discussion about a diplomatic tragedy in Libya into your own personal vendetta. Talk about the african embassies, the marine barracks, things that relate to the deaths of innocent americans and diplomats in those countries, not our brothers and sisters in uniform that are fighting for democracy in your so-called god-forsaken lands.