So far what we have is a CIA base not a consulate; State blase about security because it was a CIA base; Libyan local security evaporated; attack motivation still up in the air — pre-arranged kidnapping for political milking far-fetched; Stanley Inc. video clearly incidental; Russian intervention to stop CIA's less than covert arms deliveries to Syria makes more sense. Seven hours — and instead of leveraging the multitude of assets within 1-2 hours of the site, the Secretary of Defense focused on relieving two flag officers. My gut says Romney wins big and Obama goes home. If Obama wins, he will need a new Secretary of Defense, not just a new Secretary of State.
EXTRACT: Another report today from Canada Free Presstell us it is likely Russians ordered Iranians to attack our consulate in Benghazi in order to stop the arming of Syrian rebels. … Speculation, buttressed by certain developments, indicates Stevens was being used by Obama to coordinate weapons shipments to the Syrian rebels via the Turks with the use of Libyan shipping. Read full article.
The nature of the Benghazi disaster is now clear. Ambassador Stevens was engaged in smuggling sizable quantities of Libyan arms from the destroyed Gaddafi regime to the Syrian rebels, to help overthrow the Assad regime in Syria. Smuggling arms to the so-called “Free Syrian Army” is itself a huge gamble, but Obama has been a gambler with human lives over the last four years, as shown by the tens of thousands of Arabs who have died in the so-called Arab Spring — which has brought nothing but disaster to the Arab world. Read full article.
As of now, the White House has disclosed that President Obama was informed about the attack on the diplomatic outpost in Benghazi at roughly 5pm by his National Security Adviser Tom Donilon as he was in a pre-scheduled meeting with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey. At that meeting, senior administration officials say, the President ordered that the U.S. begin moving military assets into the region to prepare for a range of contingencies. Read full article.
WASHINGTON October 10, 2012 – While the Navy’s aircraft carrier fleet is sized correctly to carry out its mission, land forces are facing “significant changes,” Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said here today.
“At this point in time, I believe we’ve got what we need,” Dempsey said in response to questions following his speech at a National Press Club luncheon.
After the Budget Control Act of 2011 imposed about $500 billion in defense spending cuts over 10 years, he said, the Defense Department had to examine its strategic positions.
“Strategy that's not sensitive to resources is nothing more than rhetoric,” he said. “There's always this balance between ends, ways and means. So the means changed. We had to take a look at the ends and the ways.”
Against all odds, former Italian prime minister Berlusconi was recently sentenced to one year in prison. This followed a long process where an Italian referendum had to be held to revoke his legal immunity, in order to indict him in the first place. We can learn a lot about the dangers of politically controlled media from how Berlusconi tried to defeat this referendum.
Phi Beta Iota: The headline does not reflect the real story: DESPITE “mainstream” media contamination, over 50% of the public participated in a vote on whether the Prime Minister's immunity should be revoked, and over 50% of those participating voted in favor of revoking his participation. What this really means is that alternative media has a greater reach than mainstream media and that the public may be illiterate, but it is not stupid and it does have values it can enforce when given the opportunity to do so.
And he’s not alone. The Post’s own Vivek Wadhwa recently predicted that all online education would be totally free within 10 years — and that includes an education from the same elite institutions who have joined Coursera. For a really mind-blowing scenario of how it all unfolds check out the EPIC 2020 video — it lays out a realistic route for free online education by the year 2020.
No Democracy without Sortition : the cause of the causes of our powerlessness is that we let the political professionals draw up and modify the Constitution
By Winslow T. Wheeler, director, Straus Military Reform Project at the Project On Government Oversight – 11/01/12 10:45 AM ET
Mitt Romney's proposal to boost defense spending until it reaches “a floor of four percent of GDP [gross domestic product],” as he proclaims at his official website, is an insult to history.
This graph [below] shows how unprecedented it is. It tracks spending for the Department of Defense (DOD) from 1948 to 2022, expressed in inflation-adjusted dollars normalized to 2012. The data up to 2012 are actual spending. The data for the years after 2012 show Romney's plan (in red), President Obama's (in blue), and the spending to be imposed by sequestration (in green) – the result of the Budget Control Act's automatic reductions now scheduled for January 2, 2013.
Click on Image to Enlarge
The Romney Plan shown assumes a gradual build up to his four percent goal, as calculated by Travis Sharp at the Center for a New American Security. Compared to other calculations of Romney’s declared intent, it is one of the more modest. The data for the Obama plan are from his 2013 budget, and the data for sequestration is from the Congressional Budget Office. In each, money has been included to accommodate a rapid drawdown from Afghanistan: all three data lines assume the Obama budget for overseas contingencies in 2013, $88.5 billion; an arbitrary assumption of $50 billion for 2014, $25 billion for 2015, and nothing after that. In other words, the spending levels shown are about as low as one might conceive.
Romney’s plan would boost the Pentagon’s budget more or less $300 billion above the previous post-World War Two highs, namely the Korea and Vietnam wars and the Reagan Cold War peak, and it would more than double the average amount of DOD spending during the Cold War: $440 billion compared to $900 billion.
