June 25th, 2009 by xformed
To the left of the “Vote Obama/Biden 2008” bumper sticker:
“Blindly Following Bad Leadership is Not Patriotism”
How soon before his mid-2008 bumper sticker becomes some of that crow to eat?
(As he pulled into a MacDonald’s to get some dangerous, fast food that will either be taxed or outlawed in the name of “spreading the health” by the WON)
Category: Political | Comments Off on Sighted: 6/24/2009
June 17th, 2009 by xformed
Obama’s comments were mushy, yes, but at least he said the most important thing, according to AP:
He said it’s up to Iran to determine its own leaders but that the country must respect voters’ choice.
Why then have reputable people continued to pass harsh judgment? And why would AP paraphrase what would have been Obama’s key statement?
Turns out Obama said no such thing. What he actually said is that the VOICES of the Iranian people should be heard and respected, not their votes:
And particularly to the youth of Iran, I want them to know that we in the United States do not want to make any decisions for the Iranians, but we do believe that the Iranian people and their voices should be heard and respected.
This is consistent with the rest of Obama’s remarks. He never said a word about respecting votes. Obama did mention “the democratic process,” but far from saying anything about this process having to meet any standards of integrity, he instead implied strongly that he will accept whatever result the “process” followed by the Mullahs produces:
I want to start off by being very clear that it is up to Iranians to make decisions about who Iran’s leaders will be; that we respect Iranian sovereignty and want to avoid the United States being the issue inside of Iran, which sometimes the United States can be a handy political football…
Democracy means that Iranian sovereignty lies with the Iranian people and that a regime that rigs an election is NOT sovereign. Yet Obama is explicit that he will continue to treat the mullahs as the Iranian sovereign no matter how they judge the election. He even goes so far as to suggest that the only reason he is bothering to comment on the competing claim to sovereignty at all is because it would be unseemly for him not to:
We will continue to pursue a tough, direct dialogue between our two countries, and we’ll see where it takes us. But even as we do so, I think it would be wrong for me to be silent about what we’ve seen on the television over the last few days.
The only operative concerns that he mentions are for: “free speech, the ability of people to peacefully dissent.” When he talks about the “democratic process” going forward, all he urges is that the process be peaceful and that dissent be allowed. He says nothing about the process being honest:
…there appears to be a sense on the part of people who were so hopeful and so engaged and so committed to democracy who now feel betrayed. And I think it’s important that, moving forward, whatever investigations take place are done in a way that is not resulting in bloodshed and is not resulting in people being stifled in expressing their views.
It is no accident that Obama ended with the statement that AP paraphrased so egregiously (equating his call for bloodless suppression with a demand for legitimate elections). This was his theme throughout. He views the honesty of Iran’s democratic process as something to be judged by the mullahs, who he clearly accepts to be the sovereign power, regardless of the merits of competing claims.
AP covers its tracks, just like they did with the Flight 93 memorial
AP’s fraudulent report about Obama demanding respect for voters’ choice was the primary print report on Obama’s comments. Now that it has already misled millions of people, AP has covered its tracks by filing an update that overwrites the errant statement. This is what AP does when it gets caught putting out misinformation. To avoid issuing a correction, they flush the misleading story down the memory hole by using the same url for a completely different story. (Google only finds AP’s original article still posted at Fox News.)
AP did the same thing last year after it was taken to task for failing to check the most basic facts in a story about the controversy over possible Islamic symbolism in the Flight 93 memorial. Ramesh Santanam reported a number of conflicting factual assertions, like the 44 blocks:
download My Blue Heaven Opponents also claim there is a plan to have 44 glass blocks, for the 40 victims and four hijackers, in the design.
“That’s an absolute, unequivocal fabrication that is being portrayed as fact,” said Edward Felt’s brother, Gordon Felt, president of Families of Flight 93. “It’s misleading and helps drive the conspiracy theory.”
When it was pointed out that Santanam could have found the four extra blocks just by opening up the design drawings and counting, AP quickly filed a completely different story (about fundraising for the memorial), under the same url.
It’s not that there is anything inherently wrong with AP using subject feeds that automatically update with their latest offering. It is that AP is systematically using this system to dodge corrections. This is actually their official policy:
For corrections on live, online stories, we overwrite the previous version. We send separate corrective stories online as warranted.
Except AP virtually never issue corrective stories, for the simple reason that AP has no established correction procedure. They just do the overwrite thing and say “too bad.”
Well this time the overwrite thing is not good enough.
Demand a corrective story about AP’s false paraphrase of Obama’s words
Associated Press obviously understands the importance of Obama saying that Iran must respect voters’ choice or they wouldn’t have bothered to pretend that he said it when he didn’t. They don’t just fail to mention Obama’s glaring omission on this crucial point, but actually tell the public via false paraphrase that he did say what he glaringly omitted. This cannot stand. Faced with our new president’s key statement on a historic crisis, AP reports a photo negative of what Obama actually said.
There may be no established procedure for AP corrections, but anyone can still send a pre-written email to AP CEO Tom Curley, Chairman Burl Osborne, Editor Kathleen Carroll, the reporters who worked on the story (the egregious Jennifer Loven, along with Anne Gearan and Robert Burns), plus a smattering of other AP editors and bureaucrats. Who knows. There may even be a limit to how disingenuous some of these people are willing to be.
Error Theory extra: Obama implies that he will let the mullahs get nuclear weapons
Obama is king of the weasel words. At first blush, his statement about Iranian nukes seems to suggest that he will try to stop Ahmadinijad from getting nukes:
…tough, hard-headed diplomacy — diplomacy with no illusions about Iran and the nature of the differences between our two countries — is critical when it comes to pursuing a core set of our national security interests, specifically, making sure that we are not seeing a nuclear arms race in the Middle East triggered by Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon…
But wait a minute. If he meant to say that we need to make sure Iran doesn’t get a nuclear weapon, how come he said this other thing? How come he said we need to make sure that there is not an arms race triggered by Iran getting a nuclear weapon? Is he actually saying that what we need to insure is that when Iran does get nukes, it does not trigger and arms race?
Yes. Absolutely. With 100% certainty. Otherwise he would not have used weasel words. The only reason to use weasel words was to find a way NOT to commit to stopping Iran from getting nukes.
Seeing Obama use weasel words for the simple objective of stopping Iran from acquiring the most powerful weapons is like seeing AP use paraphrase for what would have been Obama’s key remark. There has to be a reason for going the long way around, so you look at the actual words and you see the actual meaning.
Obama evades the simple goal of stopping Iran from acquiring the most powerful weapons because he does not share that goal. He either positively wants Iran to have nukes, or he is determined to accept it. Since these views shared by very few of his countrymen, Obama uses weasel words.
This nixes any possibility that Obama accomodation of Islamofascist election-stealing is because he thinks he can negotiate Ahmadinijad and the mullahs out of their nuclear ambitions. He has no intention of keeping the Islamofascists from acquiring nuclear weapons. If there is any interplay between Obama’s tolerance for election-stealing and his tolerance for Islamofascist nukes it can only be that one reason he wants the mullahs in power is so that his plan to accommodate their nuclear ambitions will not go unfulfilled.
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Category: Public Service | Comments Off on Stop the Murdoch (Flt 93) Memorial Blogburst: False AP report: Obama did NOT say that Iran must respect voters' choice"
June 6th, 2009 by xformed
June 6th, 1944.
Young men did what was asked of them.
The odds were against them.
The enemy prepared for this event, and even if the moment caught them off guard, they responded with the viciousness of combatants under siege.
What lives were ended, what future family lines were extinguished that day, specifically that day?
Of those who have come home to tell the stories, they are now leaving us.
When their voices are silenced in death, only the historians remain to craft the stories untold.
I was very fortunate to have met and become a friend of Jim, Sr. He was the one person in my life, who had actually been across the beaches, albeit in the air, but without the benefit of a throttle of his own. He had lift and gravity to work to succeed. At his funeral, I found out his unit suffered an 87% casualty rate. Over all, I knew the WWII glider pilots had a 60% death rate. His unit, the 442nd Troop Carrying Group, took more than the “average” share of loss.
He departed this world peacefully 5/4/2009 Oliver & Company Merlin and the War of the Dragons trailer Dark Honeymoon
Garden State movie download , but not before he had shared some of his experiences that day.
Please take time to capture any memories of these men, who most often do not consider themselves barve, but ones who just followed their orders…to the end. The Library of Congress has a Veteran’s History Project Hard Ball dvd . Please help get the stories and pictures to this set of archives, so future generations of historians can tell of the bravery at a place called Normandy on the maps.
Category: Navy | Comments Off on A Day That Changed the Course of History
June 6th, 2009 by xformed
Bizarre amicus brief totally demolishes the Second Circuit’s dismissal of the families’ suit, then replaces it with the most mendacious stupidity imaginable. Now the Supreme Court will HAVE to hear the case, just to avoid the implication that it accepted this garbage.
9/11 families were stunned this week to learn that President Obama is asking the Supreme Court NOT to review their effort to recover damages from the government of Saudia Arabia and from several Saudi princes for funding al Qaeda’s 9/11 attack on America. That the defendants did funnel vast sums of money to al Qaeda was accepted as a given by the appellate court, as was the fact that al Qaeda was known to be dedicated to and engaged in violent attacks against America. So what was the Obama administration’s reason for siding with the Saudis?
Solicitor General Elena Kagan’s amicus brief to the Supreme Court had to admit that the Second Circuit Court of Appeals erred in its grounds for denying the suit against the Saudi princes. No, the fact that the princes did not actually direct the al Qaeda attack on the United States does not relieve them of liability for attacks that they funded. The precedent on this is clear. As long as the defendant knew “that the brunt of the injury†from his tortious act would be felt in America, then:
… he must ‘reasonably anticipate being haled into court there’ to answer for his actions. [Calder v. Jones, 465 U.S. 783, 790. Cited on Kagan’s p. 18.]
Nevertheless, said Kagan, she could think of a way around the appellate court’s utter failure to get the heart of the case right. The families’ suit falls under the 1976 FSIA law that establishes exceptions to the principle of sovereign immunity. This law does not allow jury trials. Thus while the appellate court was clearly wrong to say that the suit should not be heard, Kagan suggests that there are snippets in the ruling that can be read as the appellate court acting in its role of trier of fact, and thus ruling against the families for providing insufficient evidence.
In other words, instead of seeing the Second Circuit as rejecting the basis of the suit, we should see them as accepting the suit, and ruling against it on the substance. To make her argument that the appellate court actually did try the facts, she quotes the Second Circuit’s statement that:
Conclusory allegations that [Prince Turki] donated money to charities, without specific factual allegations that he knew they were funneling money to terrorists, do not suffice.
But of course the families DID marshal reasons why Turki could be expected to know that his donations were going to al Qaeda, as indicated by the appellate court’s further statements that there was no personal jurisdiction even if the defendants did “know that their money would be diverted to al Qaeda,†or were “aware of Osama bin Laden’s public announcements of jihad against the United States.†(Cited in the families’ reply brief, p.8, and in Kagan’s brief, p. 19, respectively.)
For Kagan to pretend that the Second Circuit acted as a sufficient trier of fact, when it explicitly asserted that the facts don’t matter, is just an attempt to mislead the Court. The evidence that the Saudi Princes knew they were funding al Qaeda has yet to be considered by U.S. courts, even though Kagan herself admits that if they did know, they should be held liable.
The families respond
Of course the families are angry that Obama is blocking their access to the courts, despite their legitimate claims under U.S. law:
The Administration’s filing mocks our system of justice and strikes a blow against the public’s right to know the facts about who financed and supported the murder of 3,000 innocent people. It undermines our fight against terrorism and suggests a green light to terrorist sympathizers the world over that they can send money to al Qaeda without having to worry that they will be held accountable in the U.S. Courts for the atrocities that result. …
The Administration’s filing is all the more troubling in that it expressly acknowledges that the courts below applied incorrect legal standards in dismissing the Saudi defendants, but nonetheless argues that the case — one that seeks to account for the terrorist attacks against America and the murder of our family members — does not warrant the Supreme Court’s time.
This at the same time as Obama insists that al Qaeda operatives held at Guantanamo Bay must be granted access to U.S. courts. Concocted rights for terrorists, yes. Following the law for the victims of terrorism, no.
On Saudi state liability, Kagan again misleads to the point of outright dishonesty
Here too, Kagan is forced to start out by noting that the grounds on which the Second Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the families’ claims is not valid. The circuit court held that damages for terrorist acts have to be brought under the FSIA law’s special exception for terrorist acts, which requires that the state defendant be designated by the State Department as a terror supporting state. Since Saudi Arabia has not been so designated, suit cannot be brought under this provision, end of case.
Wrong, as Kagan herself explains:
Congress’s concern was not to impose new limits on the domestic tort exception, but instead to expand jurisdiction to cover a narrow class of claims based on conduct abroad. See, e.g.
, H.R. Rep. No. 702, 103d Cong., 2d Sess. 3, 5 (1994) (explaining that the bill would “expand†jurisdiction to include claims by an American who is grievously mistreated abroad by a foreign governmentâ€).
This was necessary because the domestic tort exception only applies to injuries that occur on U.S. territory. Specifically, the domestic exception allows suit when:
1605(a)(5) – money damages are sought against a foreign state for personal injury or death, or damage to or loss of property, occurring in the United States and caused by the tortious act or omission of that foreign state.
In the wake of the Iranian hostage taking in Tehran, Congress wanted designated terror-supporting states to be liable for harms that they inflict on Americans even on their own territory, but this in no way was supposed to limit suit over harms that occur within the United States, such as the 9/11 murders.
Confronted with this obviously wrong ruling by the Second Circuit, Kagan again tries to cobble together an alternative grounds for granting Saudi immunity. To fullfill this improbable command from above, she decides to flat-out lie about precedent, big bald astounding lies.
Torturing “tortious”
Notice that the language of the domestic tort exception is perfectly clear that what has to occur inside the United States is the personal injury or death, not the decision that leads to the personal injury or death. Suppose that the home office of a state owned shipping company decides to scrimp on safety equipment for its cargo vessels, leading to loss of American lives when cargo is offloaded in an American port. This is exactly the kind of thing that FSIA was intended to cover, but Kagan pretends otherwise, arguing that not only the tort (the harm), but also the “tortious act or omission†that creates the harm, have to take place inside the United States.
In many cases there is no separation between the harm and the act that creates it. They both occupy the same time and place. Neither does the language of torts typically distinguish between the tort and the tortious act. Instead, the tortious act is seen as being realized when the tort (the harm) actually occurs. Kagan’s ploy is to try to make a distinction between the tort and the “tortious act” that leads to it, and she is able to come up with some out-of-context references to make it sound as if precedent demands that both the harm and the decision-making that leads to the harm have to occur here in America.
She claims, for instance, that:
In Amerada Hess, the Court considered and rejected the argument that domestic effects of a foreign state’s conduct abroad satisfy the exception. 488 U.S. at 441.
Applied to the current case, she is clearly suggesting that the “domestic effect†corresponds to the 9/11 attacks, and that the “conduct abroad†corresponds to the statutorily required “tortuous act or omission†that in both cases took place outside of U.S. territory. A look at the actual Supreme Court ruling, however, shows this to be a gross misrepresentation of Ameranda Hess.
Looking up Argentine Republic v. Amerada Hess Shipping Corp. and turning to p. 441 we find what the case was actually about:
In this case, the injury to respondents’ ship occurred on the high seas some 5,000 miles off the nearest shores of the United States. Despite these telling facts, respondents nonetheless claim that the tortious attack on the Hercules occurred “in the United States.”
In other words, it was the harm itself that in this case did not occur within U.S. territory. Contrary to Kagan’s representation, the Court was NOT making a distinction between the harm and decision that led to it and claiming that both had to occur within the United States.
This kind of blatant misrepresentation of precedent is lawlessness! Is this how the Obama administration treats precedent? As fodder for utterly dishonest word games? YES.
To preserve its own reputation, SCOTUS will have to hear the families’ case
The Supreme Court asked the Obama administration to submit this brief. It cannot be ignored. If SCOTUS accepts guidance from this contemptuous document, then it is implicated in the Obama administration’s contempt for the law.
If the sheer perversity of Kagan’s filing does force the Court to hear the families’ case, that would be a great outcome, but the downside risk is equally amplified. If the Court DOES accept Kagan’s guidance, it is a black black day for America.
Meretricious cites and arguments dominate every paragraph of Kagan’s brief, except in two place: where she shoots down the Second Circuit’s patently errant grounds for dismissal. It almost seems like she started with a brief in support of the families’ suit before getting the order from Obama to side with the Saudis. Apparently she decided that it was fruitless to try to support the Second Circuit’s reasoning, so she let the demolition of the Second Circuit’s ruling stand, then supplied her own just as bad case for Saudi immunity.
However it came about, Kagan’s destruction of the Second Circuit ruling is so competent, and her substitute arguments for immunity so in
competent, that the whole almost seems designed to force a Supreme Court hearing. Could she have intentionally sabotaged her own brief? Doubtful, given that the Obama DOJ just overruled its own career lawyers in order to drop an already won case against three New Black Panthers who were caught on tape using weapons to intimidate voters. Apparently the Obama administration just really is this stupid and malicious.
In any case, it seems unlikely that Kagan’s shenanigans will get past the justices. Antonin Scalia is unlikely to forget the FISA case opinion he wrote in 1992, addressing the very question of harms resulting in the United States from decisions made by foreign entities in their home countries. His conclusion? In a breach of contract case where the only tie to the United States was the option of receiving payment in dollars in New York City, the Court denied immunity. Only the harm itself had to take place on U.S. territory, not the decisions that led to the harm, and the opinion was unanimous
.
Obama’s imperial presidency: he does not want to be bound by the 1976 Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act, and says so
The family group states directly that:
The filing was political in nature and stands as a betrayal of everyone who lost a loved one or was injured on September 11, 2001.
Indeed, the entire first section of Kagan’s brief is replete with claims that exceptions to sovereign immunity should be determined politically.
That is the way it used to be, before Congress passed the FSIA act specifically in order to take these determinations out of the political realm. The United States only started granting any exceptions to the legal tradition of sovereign immunity in the 1950’s, after some nation-states started getting heavily involved in commerce. If state enterprises could not be held liable in U.S. courts, they would have a competitive advantage over private industry. Not smart policy during the cold-war contest between capitalism and communism.
Exceptions were at first made on a case by case basis by the executive, but such arbitrariness does not suit the needs of commerce, so Congress made an explicit decision to take this power away from the executive. Even so, Kagan’s brief hints over and over (p. 4-10) that executive prerogative should still hold sway, but without ever making an explicit case that FSIA intrudes on the inherent powers of the presidency, and without ever stating what the president would want to do with those powers in the present case if the court were to recognize them as pre-eminent.
The reason Kagan doesn’t make these things explicit is because they are damning. Obama knows that the Saudi’s are liable under U.S. law, but for his own political reasons he does not want them to be held liable, but neither does want the nation to understand that he considers currying favor with the people who attacked us on 9/11 to be more important than justice for his own murdered countrymen.
The president does indeed have some inherent power here, just as President Bush had inherent power to wiretap conversations with al Qaeda operatives both at home and abroad, regardless of what Congress put in the FISA wiretapping law. Bush did abide by FISA, but he didn’t have to.*
Obama is going further. He does not want to abide by FSIA, but is unwilling to make the case that the particular exemption from FSIA that he is asking for is a legitimate exercise of his inherent powers, or even assert what he would do with that power. He just wants the courts to do his dirty work for him, asking them to grant immunity to the Saudis based on bogus claims about FSIA law and precedent.
Conservative justices might be tempted to recognize the president’s inherent powers in the area of foreign policy, but they should not let him exercise this power on false pretenses. If he wants to claim that he has the inherent power to grant immunity to the Saudis and that this is how he wants to exercise that power, he can do it publicly, but he should not be allowed to overrule Congress on the pretense that he is doing the will of Congress.
To allow this subterfuge would destroy fundamental FSIA precedents while failing to attain the virtue of the pre-FSIA regime, where the president had to stand or fall by his explicitly political decision-making. If Obama wants to invoke the inherent power of the presidency here, he at the very least has to be willing to admit it.
* FISA court precedent on inherent powers
The powers of Congress to regulate in an area where the president has his own inherent authority was addressed by the FISA court in September 2002:
The Truong Donald’s Cousin Gus rip court, as did all the other courts to have decided the issue, held that the President did have inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence information. It was incumbent upon the court, therefore, to determine the boundaries of that constitutional authority in the case before it. We take for granted that the President does have that authority and, assuming that is so, FISA could not encroach on the President’s constitutional power.
The contrast to the present case is instructive. Bush’s Solicitor General Ted Olson did not hide the fact that President Bush wanted the court to recognize his inherent authority to conduct signals intelligence. With that power duly recognized, Bush still went the last mile to conform to the law as enacted by Congress. That is what it means to “uphold our fundamental principles and values,†while Obama, who keeps accusing President Bush of failing to uphold our values, engages in legal subterfuge, showing as much contempt for the law as for our 9/11 families.
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Category: Political | Comments Off on Stop The Murdoch (Flt 93) Memorial Blogburst: Obama’s filing against 9/11 families: so bad it's good
June 3rd, 2009 by xformed
When sci-fi becomes reality. Stallone had it first…
Yes, I want one. Did you have to ask?
Note to bad guys: “air bursts” of small grenades right over your head will hurt…badly.
The Goonies movie
Photo: Defense Update
The Batman vs Dracula: The Animated Movie ipod Sin: The Movie dvdrip
Shanghaied Illegal Tender Primeval full movie
Category: Technology Tuesday | Comments Off on Technology Tuesday
June 1st, 2009 by xformed
The Hollywood Sign rip Just a short one today.
This is about the sea, but in a different way. Neptunus Lex went to sea with a “Band of Bloggers.” He flew in the back of a C-2 Greyhound ‘COD’, as their guide around a very foreign environment…to them.
But that’s not the point.
The Batman vs Dracula: The Animated Movie movie full
When he returned, he put up a one line post. In the comments, FbL wondered how his return “home” was. Response from others, those who has spent a life at sea, flowed, not even from Lex. The most pertinent one, in my opinion, was from “Mongo:”
12 Mongo says:
May 30, 2009 at 10:07 pmRooted ever so deeply in amongst the heart strings, never to be extricated from the depths of the soul, are the memories of such a large portion of one’s lifetime.
Juice However gray the hair atop one’s head, the memories remain as black and white as they ever were…
Yeah, Tim, someone else has the watch now. But let them turn their head for even a second and we’d be back in the game. Forever in the blood…
Well said.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix move The longing doesn’t leave, that of a vocation that became an avocation and later, a passion, somewhere along the way, and the thought of sailing no more, on a ship, across the wide oceans, while heading somewhere with deadly purpose, or returning from a mission to the home ashore, is something many prefer to pretend it doesn’t have to come…for them…or me, as was the case. And once that time comes, many will also stand ready, to answer a call to return, for it is a longing that is a pull unlike many others.
Category: Navy | Comments Off on Monday Maritime Matters
June 1st, 2009 by xformed
That time again, boys and girls.
I will say, this year has not been hype filled screeching from the “news” channels as it was the season following Katrina.
But…Since we have reached that human designated calendar date, maybe, just maybe, Gaia shall deem it necessary to show us she has a schedule that we can manipulate.
Yes, I jest, but it pays not to be completely stupid.
Category: Public Service | Comments Off on A Public Service Announcment