Are military members just props for politicians?

While I was watching the State of the Union, I was thinking what I could post about today on the blog. I was all set to write about presidents and their desire/ability to bypass congress and change laws with signing statements and executive orders.  This has been the norm for the last five presidents however, the current president was the one who campaigned on breaking the chain of executive orders and signing statements.  But this topic will have to wait for another day.

Just another prop?

Just as I started to outline the blog post on executive orders I saw something that just upset and bewildered me. The use of Army Ranger Sergeant Cory Remsburg as a political prop is one of the most disgraceful parts of this SOTU address. All presidents have pointed to the hero in the balcony for the last 30 years, but I find it most terrible that this is done with not only a uniformed service member but also one that was terribly injured and maimed by fighting in a war.

The SOTU is not an annual report on the state of the Union as a whole. It has become a platform for the President to put forth his partisan plan for the year and then attack the opposition for not helping and for being a villain. The State of the Union has turned into a partisan campaign tool for the party that has control of the executive branch.  For those who do not know military members are not allowed to attend or participate in any partisan political rally and they are not allowed to go to any type of political rally in uniform. Yet the President has this member attend in his uniform and uses him as a political prop. Don’t get me wrong I appreciate the attention that this soldier is receiving and he deserves every single bit of it for the sacrifices that he has made on behalf of his country.  However, this does not change the fact that presidents have for many years have allowed members to break this rule when it is in the president’s best interest to do so. If in the next election cycle a military member attends a political rally in uniform or volunteers to work for a campaign and it gets back to his superiors I can guarantee that that member will be punished and possibly kicked out of the military.  Military members have their freedom of speech silenced in order to maintain good order and discipline within the military it is not right to then use service members to propel the presidents partisan message.

I'm Back

      I know I have been gone for a long time and for that please accept my most sincere apologizes. A few of the reasons why I have been away for so long is I recently decided to leave my job of 16 years and I have been placing most of my energy in finishing up my master’s degree, and developing new skill sets.

But boy have I missed a lot of things in the news lately; we missed the entire fiasco with the government shutdown. Did the Repubs, and the TEA Party shut down the government or was it due to the fact that the President refused to negotiate on any of his policies.  We are now having record cold snaps here in the United States and I know that this has renewed the talk of global warming and that no matter how cold it is it is because the earth is warming by man made carbon usage, this is one topic that I do not want to get into on this blog.

I chose today to come back, and I have been debating it for a very long time, I needed to find a good point in which to come back. The State of the Union seems to me to be the most logical spot to start writing again; a new political year and a new year on the blog.

Things that I am looking for tonight:

1.     Will the president tout the withdraw of troops from Afghanistan as a victory or is he just sticking with his own timeline. Are we abandoning the citizens of Afghanistan and improving the conditions for the Taliban to take back control of the country? How is the state of the female in Afghanistan?

2.     As we have seen in the last few weeks, there is going to be a big push to talk about income inequality and how everyone should all get the same results from the same amount of efforts. This is what he calls “leveling the playing filed.”

3.     The third big issue he will cover is his actions that he took today, because that is the only reason he would sign and executive order on the day of the SOTU, the raising of the federal minimum wage for federal employees. I believe he will try to explain why he took this action and blaming it on the Republicans in the House. ( I will have much more to say about this in the future.)

So please watch and enjoy the SOTU address and it will surely bring about many new topics of discussion for the year to come.

How does the AG STILL have a Job?

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Did this man lie under oath?

So what does it take to get fired in Big Government today? If you run the IRS, at least temporarily, and you are set to leave your post in a month, then you may be asked to resign when your organization targets people based on political and religious beliefs that run counter to that of the ruling party.  Oh yeah, and all of this started before you took office, then you might get fired. Or maybe if your firing helps out the ruling party as was the case with the IRS and its former acting director Steven Miller, by firing Mr. Miller and effectively ending his public service career the ruling party can be seen to somewhat distance themselves from the IRS scandal.  Because, as Americans, we are too dumb to see through this blatant political attempt of deflection of blame.

However, if you are the Attorney General, you can continue a program that runs guns illegally into Mexico, lose track of the guns, and eventually those guns kill an American border guard. Then you target a reporter with a subpoena of his phone records during an investigation of a security leak and to skirt any First Amendment issues, you know the one that says something about a free press, you label the reporter as a co-conspirator but this is ok because he works for Fox News. Then, once again, you target reporters, this time from the AP, in another security leak investigation.

Then you can go into Congress and not give accurate testimony and refuse Congressional attempts to have your office produce documents, as is required by the Constitution. You then call a the behavior of a sitting member of Congress “unacceptable and it is shameful” because he is trying to pin down your story 

Eric Holder will be brought back in front of Congress in the next couple of weeks to account for not only his roles in these scandals but to account for his previous accounting before Congress. This man MUST lose his job and should be indicted for perjury to Congress if it can be proven that he mislead or lied while under oath.

This will not happen because he has some strange type of hold on the President. I wonder just what dirt he has that is keeping him from losing his job. Lord knows that if this were a Republican administration the AG would be out on the street i.e. Alberto Gonzales and there would be cries from the media for impeachment for willful violation of the First Amendment rights of all Americans as well as the use of a federal agency to intimidate your opponents.  I guess Anita Dunn’s isn’t the only person in the Presidents circle who admires Mao.

A Pyrrhic Victory on Benghazi

Republicans in Congress need to ensure they do not win the battle at the cost of the overall good of their party. Let’s look at things realistically; most Americans, and almost all the media, don’t care about the semantics and the deceit that the Administration put forth in the days and months after the September 11^th 2012 attacks in Benghazi.  Outside of the conservative echo chamber, very few people care, it is sad but true. People that I have discussions with believe that the President and his administration tried to hide the true nature of the attacks in order to keep the President looking strong on terrorism for the November election. Most are willing to forgive and forget as long as security has been raised and these mistakes don’t happen again.

Thanks in a large part to the whistleblowers and Sharyl Attkisson, @sharylattkisson, we have learned the Administration did indeed try to convince the American people that the attacks were not based on Islamic extremists’ intentions to destroy the US but to pass it off as a spontaneous reaction to an internet based movie trailer. Attkisson published a story earlier that detailed the changes made to the talking points to soften the blow of four dead Americans. This is a huge story but unfortunately the narrative has already been written on this point, and the truth has lost out. It’s time to move on.

It’s only time to move on because there are bigger and more important issues that have come to light in the last few days. The IRS story keeps getting bigger and bigger every day. What were initially reports of a few low level employees in Cincinnati has now turned to higher level players in Washington. Conservative groups, Jewish groups and several others have come forward to state that they have been harassed by the IRS. Now even a liberal group,  ProPublica, has come forward saying that the IRS gave them unapproved applications which are not legally available until they have been approved for tax-exempt status. This is the story that has legs and which could potentially bring the most discredit to the Obama Administration.

Yes the facts must come out of Benghazi and they will in time but the IRS and possible the AP scandals are where the Republicans in Congress must center their efforts if they wish to win this war. The American people will forgive someone who was trying to mislead them but they are not willing to allow elected members of government to use their positions and the powers of their offices to torment their political opponents. Just ask Nixon.

Will it be this man that turns the Media against his boss?

Fun Times Friday, IRS Drops a Bombshell.

WOW is all that I can say.

An enforcement branch of the United States government, admitting that it was persecuting citizens and organizations based solely on their political beliefs. This is very unsettling news that just so happened to come out on a Friday, anyone out there think that was an accident? The IRS admits it was targeting conservative groups who had used the names of “tea party” or “patriot” in their applicants for tax-exempt status.

This does not come as a shock to me, and I would assume that it wouldn’t to anyone else either. I would imagine that the IRS would use its abilities to find out dirt on people and give that information then to the ruling party. Oh wait that should never happen in a free country. The federal government is listening to your phone calls, reading your emails (don’t mention Jihad, Muslim, terrorist, Christian, God, tea party or patriot, Benghazi cover-up, NRA, or that you may be a combat veteran), but now the government actually admitted to applying undue pressure to groups who are opposed to the sitting Administration. WOW

However, what should anger everyone is the response that we received today (Friday). The head of the IRS branch that deals with tax exempt status-Really we couldn’t bring someone with a little more prestige out in front of the media like the HEAD of the IRS??- tells everyone that it was an isolated incident from the Cincinnati IRS branch office. Low level career officials were the ones who made the decisions to use the terms “tea party” and “patriot” to request more information on applications that contained those terms. How can a few low level employees have that much power? And here is the kicker, the use of those two terms was not considered to have a political motive.  I understand that “high level” officials don’t have a whole lot of respect for the American people, or apparently the Constitution, and laws of the land, but how dumb do they think we are, this was 100% percent politically motivated.  Cause a few less ads, to come out against your political views and you may stop a few votes here or there. Was this enough to change the outcome of the election; probably not but there is no way of proving either side of that argument. This is a story you would think you would see come out of China or the former Soviet Union the not United States. I can’t wait to see what comes out of this during the congressional investigations. Do these emails and communications fall under executive privilege, like the ones from Fast and Furious? There should be some lengthy prison time in the future for someone.

Also in an organization as large as the IRS isn’t the head of the Tax Exempt Branch considered a low level employee? Just saying.

The head of the IRS Tax Exempt Branch??

The Thick Red Line

On August 20^th 2012, the President of the United States stood up and gave the following stern warning to the Syrian regime: "A red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus."

Now let’s fast-forward eight months and six days to today. The Obama administration now says that there is proof that Syria has used the chemical weapon sarin on its own people. British and American officials have confirmed that there were at least two incidents of civilians being gassed.  Although the SECDEF minimized the use of the weapons by the use of the following statement: "The Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale in Syria, specifically the chemical agent sarin." The use of the words “on a small scale” is carefully crafted to not only minimize the deaths of many, but it allows the Administration to drag their feet on any type of military response. The official response so far, is that there are varying degrees of confidence on whether or not there were weapons used and if they were, who used those weapons.  Therefore the “red line” has not been crossed.

The administration is using the miscalculation of GWB and the WMDs to invade Iraq as an excuse not to take some sort of action against Syria. On Thursday the US said that we would not take our allies reports and that we must do our own. Then less than a day later, Hagel states that we have evidence of the weapons being used, as well as Israel, France, and Great Britain have all concluded the same via there own investigations. So, how is it that four allies have all conducted their own investigations and have come to the same conclusion but we are still not sure whether or not these weapons have been used? So I ask, what does it take to cross the “red line?”

The President of the United States made a promise to the people of Syria that if the Syrian government were to attack the rebels or civilians with chemical weapons, then the United States must take some sort of action. Now that is has been confirmed that the same weapons have been used, the US is now backtracking on promises made.

Keep in mind, I do not advocate for an invasion of Syria, but there are other options that could be used to ensure that more chemical weapons are not used. Put up a no fly zone over the areas where the weapons could be launched. Place an aircraft carrier group or two in the area and ensure Syria knows that there are several thousand US Marines ready at a moments notice to stop any further use of chemical weapons. Or even make a public statement about the use of Chemical Weapons (as of this writing Obama has made no such statement instead he is speaking at a Planned Parenthood event. I guess abortion rights are more important than people being gassed in their own homes).

No action by Obama is just more proof that Obama has yet again weakened the world’s view of the United States.  

For Further reading:

http://news.yahoo.com/chemical-weapons-syria-obamas-high-bar-proof-could-232636199.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2315102/Syrian-government-using-chemical-weapons-people-crosses-red-line-Britain-David-Cameron-warns.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505263_162-57581556/white-house-obamas-red-line-not-crossed-on-syria-chemical-weapons/

The General Assembly

In the coming week the UN General Assembly will be meeting in New York. The UN will be meeting just two weeks after the 9/11 attacks on the US embassies and during the session they will be having a meeting on religious freedom. With the uproar caused throughout the Middle East over a supposed video that cast Mohammed in a bad light, will the UN look to ban all speech against Islam? Islam forbids anyone to make an image of any prophet, so this video offends the masses and the Muslim extremist use it as cover to spread their anti-western hate and violence.

Now back to the UN. On the 27 of September the UN will hold a high level meeting on religious freedom. I am concerned that the freedom of religion the UN is likely to side with is the right of the Muslims to be offended by someone's right to free speech. I look to see the UN try to outlaw any speech that is designed to inflame Muslims. So what does it matter to the US what the UN does? If the US doesn't sign then there is no problem however lets look at this logically because I believe the President will sign as a move of goodwill to appease the Muslim world.

- The US would sign it as the President knows the Senate would never ratify a treaty that limits freedom of speech. Once the treaty is rejected by the Senate, the US would not be bound by it within the US. However the rest of the world would treat US citizens as if it had been ratified because the US signed it. This would allow Muslims to hold Americans accountable for exercising their freedom of speech. So what sounds like a goodwill gesture will eventually limit our freedom of speech as Americans.

I know I sound very conspiracy theorist but that is my concern.