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January 19, 2010
Exclusive: You Can’t Make This Stuff Up! (1/19/10)
Whenever you think general incompetence by those who purport to serve by the consent of the governed can’t get any worse, think again:
“Review of Jet Bomb Plot Shows More Missed Clues” (New York Times, 1/17/10)
WASHINGTON — Worried about possible terrorist attacks over the Christmas holiday, President Obama met on Dec. 22 with top officials of the C.I.A., F.B.I. and Department of Homeland Security, who ticked off a list of possible plots against the United States and how their agencies were working to disrupt them.
In a separate White House meeting that day, Mr. Obama’s homeland security adviser, John O. Brennan, led talks on Yemen, where a stream of disturbing intelligence had suggested that Qaeda operatives were preparing for some action, perhaps a strike on an American target, on Christmas Day.
Yet in those sessions, government officials never considered or connected links that, with the benefit of hindsight, now seem so evident and indicated that the gathering threat in Yemen would reach into the United States.
Just as lower-level counterterrorism analysts failed to stitch together the pieces of information that would have alerted them to the possibility of a suicide bomber aboard a Detroit-bound jetliner on Christmas, top national security officials failed to fully appreciate mounting evidence of the dangers beyond the Arabian Peninsula posed by extremists linked to Yemen.
(read entire article here)
Admissions of failure are all well and good, because it shows that the government realizes there is a severe problem. But we wonder: what exactly is being done to fix the failure to “connect the dots” regarding the “gathering threat in Yemen” and elsewhere where jihadists plot our downfall?
“What Washington Post Story Did Not Say about Its Own Poll: Most Americans Say They Want a Smaller Government” (CNSNews.com, 1/18/10)
A large majority of Americans say they want a smaller government that provides them with fewer services, according to a new poll from the Washington Post and ABC News. But the Washington Post story about the poll makes no mention of this fact.
The poll asked: “Generally speaking, would you say you favor smaller government with fewer services, or larger government with more services?”
Fifty-eight percent said they favor a smaller government with fewer services, and only 38 percent said they favor a larger government with more services.
The Post did not mention the results from this poll question in its news story about the poll.
The poll surveyed a random sample of 1,083 American adults from Jan. 12-15, 2010.
[Correction: Although the Washington Post’s Sunday story that focused primarily on a new Washington Post-ABC News poll – “Poll Shows Growing Disappointment, Polarization Over Obama’s Performance” by Jon Cohen and Jennifer Agiesta – made no mention of the fact that the poll found that 58 percent of Americans say they favor a smaller government that provides fewer services, another story in Sunday’s Post –“One Year Later Assessing Obama; Testing the Promise of Pragmatism” by Dan Balz – did mention that finding.
The tenth paragraph of Balz’s story said: “The poll also shows how much ground Obama has lost during his first year of trying to convince the public that more government is the answer to the country's problems. By 58 percent to 38 percent, Americans said they prefer smaller government and fewer services to larger government with more services. Since he won the Democratic nomination in June 2008, the margin between those favoring smaller over larger government has moved in Post-ABC polls from five points to 20 points.”]
(original article here)
The so-called mainstream media ignored the Tea Party movement for as long as they could – and then when they couldn’t ignore it any longer, they denigrated it by calling Tea Partiers “teabaggers,” an offensive pornographic term that can’t be defined on a family website. So we shouldn’t really be too surprised that some WaPo reporters would ignore the findings of a poll commissioned by their own paper – and when one did mention it, it was 10 paragraphs down.
“EU plays down talk of Haiti rift with US” (Financial Times, 1/17/10)
[…]
As Ban Ki-moon, UN Secretary-General, headed for Haiti to see for himself the extent of the worst humanitarian disaster that the world body has had to cope with in decades, concern grew over delays in the airlift to the capital’s airport, which is under US control.
Alain Joyandet, French co-operation minister, told reporters at the airport he had protested to Washington via the US ambassador about the US military’s management of the airport where he said a French medical aid flight had been turned away.
In Paris, the foreign ministry tried to quash a looming diplomatic spat by insisting Franco-American co-operation was proceeding as well as possible in view of the extent of the disaster.
(read entire post here)
It just goes to show you that it doesn’t matter who’s sitting in the Oval Office – America has long been, and likely will continue to be, the world’s whipping boy. Either we don’t move fast enough with our generous aid packages or we take too much upon ourselves when it comes to our sovereignty and security. Yet the world continues to expect us to pony up with money and troops when they need us, no matter how much they think we “screw up.” Nice.
Brought to you by the editors and research staff of FamilySecurityMatters.org.
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