I remember watching an interview a few years ago of a former FBI agent who had infiltrated the Weather Underground back in the early 70s.  He described a meeting where the group had been discussing their plans to overthrow the U.S. government by creating uncontrollable chaos.  At the time, the agent asked what the group’s plans should be following said overthrow.  He recounted that, to his shock, the group didn’t have any plans at all.  The group wanted only to destroy the U.S. government, but had absolutely no plans to replace that government with anything.

Fast forward 40 years and I am beginning to understand the Obama administration’s policy in the Middle East.  Recall the 2008 presidential campaign when John McCain indicated that the U.S. should remain in Iraq for as long as it takes for that country to build a stabile government.  Then candidate Obama proposed the opposite, that we had accomplished our goal of eliminating Sadam Hussain and the Iraqis should be left to their own devices.

Again in Afganistan while it was the Republican stance that we should work to establish a legitimate pro-western government, Obama’s policy was that we had accomplished our goal of destroying Bin Laden and should now withdraw.

In Egypt, the Obama Administration proclaimed that it was time for Mubarik to go, and supported his overthrow, but apparently had not even considered what the future would hold for a post Mubarik Egypt.

Again, in Libya, we see the same result.  Assist in the removal of  Khadaffi, but offer little  in the way of follow through. 

Now, less than 5 years following President Obama’s infamous Apology Tour we are faced with a Middle East that is vastly different than it had been during the prior 50 years.  Iraq, Afganistan, Egypt, Libya, and now Syria, are all being infiltrated by Islamofacists.  Iran is marching full speed ahead toward nuclear weaponry, Christians are being slaughtered throughout the region, and there is no end in sight to the spread of instability.

President Obama’s policy seemingly has been derived from the leanings of the former Weather Underground…everything the U.S. does is bad.  Everything the U.S. stands for is bad.  Everything that the U.S. has supported in the past is bad.  Unfortunately, like the Weather Underground, this Administration seems to have no plans for follow through.  In the mean time Russia and Iran step up to the plate in Syria, while China is happily building the capability to fill the vacuum elsewhere in the world.

What I see in the President is not that he stands for the wrong things, but that he doesn’t stand for anything.

Interesting thoughts.

]]> http://radioviceonline.com/is-this-our-president/feed/ 2 http://radioviceonline.com/featured-post-elbert-guillory-from-louisiana-becomes-a-republican/ http://radioviceonline.com/featured-post-elbert-guillory-from-louisiana-becomes-a-republican/#comments Tue, 18 Jun 2013 14:15:50 +0000 Steve McGough http://radioviceonline.com/?p=41110 Read more »]]> This video should fire up a few people. State Sen. Elbert Guillory (D-La.) recently made the decision to switch his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican, and in this video he explains why. There is nothing here that conservatives have not embraced for years, but it’s still nice to see a politician switch and explain himself in this way.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_YQ8560E1w

In a statement, Guillory said…

Over the last couple years there’s just been increasing distance between me and the Democratic Party.  They’ve left Louisiana and American values.  Things that are part of my community, gun rights, family issues, there’s a lot of issues where that party has just left us behind. Most major decisions in Louisiana are made by Republicans in room filled with Republicans, I feel it’s best for my district that we have a presence in those rooms.

His video certainly seems genuine, but in his statement he implies he’s been locked-out of decisions because of his party affiliation. What say you?

The original ABC News report is all wrong, and they have not bothered to correct it. Many other bloggers picked up on the original ABC News story and when I first read it, I was thinking the computer-generated police report only told a small portion of the story. Sure enough, the DNC provided what looks to be an Excel spreadsheet with more than 800 individual missing items [PDF, 240kb] to the police department, and someone in the police department had to enter all that stuff in … who wants to do that?

Why the heck would the DNC need to have a stack of iPhones and MacBook Pros anyway? I really don’t get it. People come to these conventions – any conventions – with their own computers and phones, so why would the DNC need to have a huge stack of electronics sitting around? From what I can tell from the PDF document - sorry, you’ll have to magnify it when you open it up to see everything – is that the DNC packed up everything in trucks and sent it to Charlotte. When the stuff came back from Charlotte, they completed an inventory and stuff was missing. The stuff happens to include 77 flat-screen TVs, more than 100 Apple computers, 42 Apple iPads, 40 of the Apple Magic Mouse things, and even LED Cinema displays. Apple was not the only target, people took the HP and Blackberry stuff too. They took almost $100,000 worth of HP computers.

The Daily Caller is focused in on the ABC report that was totally wrong, but I think the real story here is what the heck was all this stuff doing there?

• Who paid for it in the first place?
• Why did the DNC need to have these items on hand? What were they going to be used for?
• Were they loaners for use during the convention that should have been returned?
• Why did it take so long for the DNC to realize the stuff was missing?
• Who was in-charge of the stuff on-site? Was it the DNC or did they hire some company to bring this stuff in?

This looks to be some sort of free-for-all after President Obama’s speech ended and people started packing up. That’s the only way to explain it … people just started taking stuff. I understand you need computers and such for registration, running displays and such … but what the heck? For registration you have a company come in and put in dummy terminals hooked up to the internet with cheap keyboards and corded mice … you don’t use MacBook Pros and a Magic Mouse or a Trackpad.

Look, big politics is big money … really BIG money. People make a living working on elections and that of course, is part of the problem if you don’t know already. For those of you who contributed to the DNC to help promote the Obama campaign, how do you feel about a half-million dollars worth of the stuff you paid for disappearing? There were people at that convention – either attending or working there – who thought they were entitled.

Sponsored by CBS Radio Hartford, WTIC News Talk 1080, and Johnson Brunetti, Retirement and Investment Specialists, the Connecticut branch of the Lupus Foundation of America is proud to announce the Mission Possible Lupus Event and Fundraiser at The Society Room in Hartford on Tuesday June 18, 2013 from 7 to 10pm.

Your mission should you choose to accept it: Help find the cure for Lupus.

Join us in our 2nd Annual Mission: Possible Event!

This year our Mission: Possible event will be held at The Society Room in Hartford, Conn. Join us from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. in our wine tasting and silent auction event. Come meet and greet Jim Vicevich at 6 p.m. by becoming a VIP. Only 250 people will be able to join us in this night of fun so purchase your tickets today!!

Event only: $75
Pre-event: $125 (includes event)

Click Here to purchase tickets!

About Lupus:

Lupus is a chronic autoimmune disease that affects an estimated 1.5 million people in the United States and 17,000 people in Connecticut. These numbers are extrapolated from the Census based on demographics since there is currently no lupus registry. More people have lupus than multiple sclerosis, muscular dystrophy and cystic fibrosis combined.

Ninety percent of all individuals diagnosed with lupus are women and People of Color, African-Americans, Hispanics/Latinos, Asians and Native Americans are two to three times more likely to develop lupus. As many as 1 in 250 African American women will develop lupus.

Only one in five Americans is aware of lupus symptoms and health effects. Young women ages 18-34 are least aware of lupus, yet they are the group most often affected.

Most people don’t realize they have a potentially disabling and life-threatening disease because symptoms , such as fatigue, skin rashes, joint pain and hair loss mimic other conditions, appear differently in different people, and can increase or decrease in severity from day to day.

There is no single test to diagnose lupus so it can take years to diagnose lupus. More than half of the people with lupus visited three or more doctors and suffered four or more years before being diagnosed.

Tickets for this special event are available online for $75, with a VIP option available for $125. VIPs will get the opportunity to attend a special Meet & Greet starting at 6 p.m. with Jim Vicevich. All proceeds go to funding a cure for Lupus.

Click Here to purchase tickets. If you are unable to attend, we encourage you to make a general donation of any amount you can.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_hwm5MSlIQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jitw0tZsEm0

From the Courant.

The latest round of state funding for stem cell research — totaling $9.8 million — will go to 23 research projects, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s office announced Thursday.

The Connecticut Stem Cell Research Advisory Committee chose the recipients from among 109 applicants.

The largest award, $1.49 million, went to Janice Naegele at Wesleyan University for a project titled “HESC-Derived GABAergic Neurons for Epilepsy Therapy,” followed by $1.13 million to Ren-He Xu at ImStem Biotechnology for “Developing a Potential Therapy for Multiple Sclerosis using hESC-derived MSCs.”

Supposedly we have state employees who know which applicants will provide the medical field the most bang for the taxpayer dollar, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Anyway, did you know …

• The Catholic Church is completely supportive of stem cell research. This is not a new position. But the church – unlike my first sentence in this paragraph and the Courant’s article – makes it clear they support adult stem cell research. They are against embryonic stem cell research because it involves the destruction of human embryos.
• When it comes to embryonic stem cells, the phrases could be, might provide, someday could, raises the possibility, and one day come up frequently in research documentation for the simple fact not one successful cure or treatment has been derived from embryonic stem cell research.
• Lots of treatments are available using adult stem cells and many are very promising.

That information alone is just a small portion of this discussion. The entire concept is so complex, researchers are being advised to “dumb down” their presentations, simplify their approach and completely avoid the entire embryonic verses adult stem cell discussion. The low-information voters out there should only hear about the awesome potential!! (Yes, I used the dreaded double-exclamation point.)

By the way, I’m willing to bet most people would answer “heck no” if you asked the simplified question “Does the Catholic Church support stem cell research?”

From the San Francisco Gate.

The best way to talk about stem cells may be to not talk about stem cells.

Instead, scientists are probably better off glossing over the details and avoiding terms like “embryonic” and “pluripotent” stem cells, and focusing instead on what they’re trying to accomplish and who they hope to help someday.

Stem cells, after all, are complicated stuff.

Yes, it is complicated, but why not just include my three bits of information in bullet format above? That should be pretty easy to understand right? A primer if you will.

When Alan Trounson, president of the stem cell agency, talks about the field, he skips discussing the difference between embryonic stem cells and induced pluripotent stem cells.

“That language is quite foreign to most people, and they often find it boring,” he said. Instead, “finding an interesting anchor is the most important thing.”

That may mean pulling on people’s heartstrings and talking about devastating diseases like Alzheimer’s or Huntington’s, neither of which has a cure, and both of which are being heavily studied by stem-cell scientists. Trounson and other stem cells experts draw people into their research by talking about real-life implications first, and the lab work later.

Wow. My emphasis is in bold above. Years ago people complained about the 30-second sound bite. We were not well-informed on topics because most people would loose interest in stuff – like politics – quickly. News stories had to be short and to the point or people would turn away from the TV news. Now teenagers, young adults and a lot of adults get their news from a small unsourced graphic – a photo with text on it – they see on Facebook. You think I’m kidding?

From the National Institute of Health’s website. Note the government won’t answer the question about embryonic stem cells.

Have human embryonic stem cells been used successfully to treat any human diseases yet?
Stem cell research offers hope for treating many human diseases. Click here to read a description of the current status of stem cells and human disease therapies.

For 14 years researchers have been working with embryonic stem cells, and some of the researcher involving human trials in the United States have stopped. There are only two human trials involving embryonic stem cells that I can find in the US, but there seems to be plenty of people actively being treated with adult stem cells.

I did find some information about embryonic stem cell research in Europe. The PISCES study Phase 1 was exclusively designed to check to see if different levels of embryonic stem cell therapy was safe, but that did not stop the University of Glasglow from claiming a few stroke patients showed signs of improvement in a press release that does not equate to a peer-reviewed complete study. Hint … they need funding to continue the research and have to sell the potential.

I’m not a scientist and have no clue about how stem cells work. What I’ve provided here is pretty basic information that the media, researchers and the government seem to gloss over; especially the part about destroying human embryos. Why do you think that is?

* I’m pretty certain none of the money from the state is being used for embryonic stem cell human trials, but I’m not sure if state dollars are being used for research on actual embryonic stem cells.

Is this what people in the 1940s and 1950s heard throughout Germany and behind the iron curtain? Let me get back to the headline of this article: An acceptable level of risk. Everyone has their own definition of acceptable when it comes to risk, but when you’re talking about government activity to reduce risk in a free society you can only go so far. We accept it is necessary to pass through a metal detector when entering a secure area like an airport terminal, but a full strip search and a complete hand search of your bags in view of the public would be unacceptable. But if we accept the standard is “to keep us safe” how do we respond? Certainly that additional search would keep us a little more safe right?

In what other ways can we keep ourselves more safe? Certainly if the government tied into every single phone and computer network and converted all voice communications into text, indexed those communications and searched for keywords or phrases, we may well could stop something as significant as the Boston Marathon bombing.

We’d be more safe, and the dollar cost to do something like this will be a lot less than you think in five to 10 years. We’d stop a terrorist attack.

If police officers had the right to detain or search you on a hunch, certainly more crimes would be solved faster and many crimes would be stopped. Why would you have a problem with that? If you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about. You’re just giving up a little more of your freedom in the name of safety. And it’s all about keeping us safe right? The inconvenience you might go through during a stop could be worthwhile if it stopped a drug dealer bringing crack to a 15 year-old kid … right?

If the government had an decryption key for the Internet, allowing them to read data passed through virtual private networks (VPNs), secure (SSL) connections, and open your documents and photos located on an encrypted drive would that go too far? In this example, you would not be inconvenienced at all, and their ability to monitor this traffic, index the content and search for keywords could certainly make us “more safe” and stop a terrorist attack bigger than Sept. 11. Certainly you can trust your own government with this data … right?

Passengers adapted their behavior and now we’re wrapping threats in duct tape.

Speaking of Sept. 11, I want to point out the public can, and quickly does, change their behavior based on past experiences when it comes to safety and risk. It’s not likely a terrorist attack involving taking over a cockpit and flying the plane into a building will happen again in the US. In just over one hour, the passengers on Flight 93 adapted their behavior based on events within the previous hour and they took the steps needed to save lives. God bless them all.

Did you lock your doors and windows after the Cheshire home invasion? Did you install an alarm system and commit to using it?

• Monitoring data and communications.
• Indexing and keyword searches of emails.
• Microphones listening conversations, converted to text, indexed and searched.
• The IRS targeting conservative or liberal groups based on politics for audits.
• Lying to the public for weeks claiming an Internet video started a riot in Benghazi, Libya.
• The government’s secret seizure of Associated Press phone records when they already knew who the leaker in the government was.
• The government’s seizure of a Fox News reporter’s – and his parent’s – emails, when they already knew who the leaker in the government was.

I’m sorry, but none of the above equates to a free society. None of it. It’s a simple truth, to live in a free society, legal residents and citizens must be willing to accept a certain level of risk and that means that bad things – God forbid – may happen on occasion.

We must not use individual tragic events to nip away at more and more of our freedom.

The United States Department of Homeland Security has always stated they have the right to inspect stuff you are bringing into the country. But imagine if you were hand-writing a book on paper and DHS not only picked up the papers and flipped through it, but they scanned every page for review later? That’s what Customs & Border Protection (CBP) is doing to a portion of the 2 percent of travelers coming into the country who are directed into secondary inspection. Here is the scanned PDF of the DHS document on the Border Searches of Electronic Devices. (Note that most news stories out there are not linking you to the actual document.) In part, it reads…

CBP and ICE do not target electronic devices alone; such devices are one of many types of items or containers that may be searched, usually during secondary inspection. And an electronic device may be subjected to one or more types of scmtiny. These include:

• A brief physical inspection by an officer, including the traveler opening a case, or perhaps turning a device on in order to demonstrate that the device is what it purports to be and not a container for tangible contraband (e.g., illegal drugs). This type of inspection is not considered to be an electronic device search for the purposes of the border search policy.
• Search of the device’s contents.
• Detention of a device, or of a copy of information contained on the device for the completion of forensic examination. ICE and CBP policies provide guidance on the length of time electronic devices may generally be detained. The guidance is flexible in light of operational requirements, and differs between the two Components based upon their differing missions. Minimizing the length of time a device is detained is a goal of both policies, but encryption, large volumes of documents password protections, and the need for computer forensic assistance may cause detention to last up to several months, and the policies deal with this delay in different ways, discussed immediately below.
• Seizure of a device as evidence of a crime, or for civil forfeiture under applicable law. A seized device is ordinarily retained through trial as evidence, subject to normal evidentiary handling rules. (If a device is subject to forfeiture, appropriate forfeitW’e proceedings are initiated as provided by law. See 19 U.S.C. §§ 1600-1617(2006).)
• Retention of a device, or of a copy of information contained on the device, for evidence of continued or future admissibility.

So that’s what they can do, but what standards are they using to direct those coming into the country – be them citizens, residents or visitors – into secondary inspection and possibly search device contents or copy the information contained on the device? From page 10 of the document linked above, partially which has been redacted, we read in the Legal and Policy Analysis section…

…as a result of our law and policy review, we reach the following conclusions about steps that we believe need not be taken:

• CBP and ICE need not institute a policy requirement of reasonable suspicion as a predicate for electronic device searches.
• CBP and ICE electronic border search policies do not violate travelers’ First Amendment rights as defined by the courts.

Makes you feel all warm and fuzzy huh? Look, I realize very few readers if any will ever run into this situation, but this is all about opening that door a crack and what can happen. If they are allowed to do this in a small scale what stops them on a medium or large scale when they write stuff like this. With my emphasis in bold.

The Department’s activities to enforce the laws and provide security necessarily involve detection and deterrence of crimes facilitated by electronic devices, and therefore require intrusion into aspects of people’s lives that would otherwise remain unscrutinized.

And they claim their policy does not violate the Forth or First Amendment?