News: September 2015 Archives
Scott Walker was my first choice for President out of the available candidates, so I'm sorry to read that he's withdrawn from the race. I agree with Byron York's assessment however -- Walker just didn't seem ready for the national stage. He's young, only 47, and I hope he regains his footing and has another opportunity to run for the presidency.
Walker was not a candidate prepared to deal with national policy in the context of a presidential campaign. In an interview, I asked him whether things had moved too quickly, whether the ground had shifted under his feet after the Iowa speech. His answer was instant: "Totally.""We thought all along if we got in, it would be kind of this slow and steady, don't worry about the other guys, just keep focused on moving forward, and as candidates chose not to get in or fell off, we'd be in a position to make a compelling case to them," Walker explained. "We had no idea that after that Iowa summit there would be that kind of acceleration to the race. But we're here, and we're not going to complain about it."
Still, many Walker supporters thought the problems were fixable. So did Walker. He could get those experts together, dive into the briefing books, and find his footing.
It didn't work. As the campaign went on, Walker made error after error, all based in the fact that he wasn't well versed in national issues.
The kid who was arrested for bringing a clock to school and his father -- are they hoaxing us?
Ahmed is a lovable kid who was victimized. Or was he? His father, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, has a lengthy history as a troll and publicity hound. But that's too negative. He is also a sophisticated and intelligent man.Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed is a self-made multi-millionaire. He started from the bottom and worked his way up to the top, ultimately selling his taxi cab company for millions of dollars. His success will somehow be used to show how unwelcoming America is to Muslim immigrants.
Yet that's not all Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed has done. Mr. Elhassan Mohamed is a political activist who also trolls for attention. He has made two unsuccessful runs for the president of the Sudan.
Also, Ahmed didn't build a clock -- he just took one apart and put the components in a box.
So I turned to eBay, searching for vintage alarm clocks. It only took a minute to locate Ahmed's clock. See this eBay listing, up at the time of this writing. Amhed's clock was invented, and built, by Micronta, a Radio Shack subsidary. Catalog number 63 765.The shape and design is a dead give away. The large screen. The buttons on the front laid out horizontally would have been on a separate board - a large snooze button, four control buttons, and two switches to turn the alarm on and off, and choose two brightness levels. A second board inside would have contained the actual "brains" of the unit. The clock features a 9v battery back-up, and a switch on the rear allows the owner to choose between 12 and 24 hour time. (Features like a battery back-up, and a 24 hour time selection seems awful superfluous for a hobby project, don't you think?) Oh, and about that "M" logo on the circuit board mentioned above? Micronta.
The Daily Beast reports some details on the investigation into dumbed-down intelligence reports on ISIS. The story accurately but incompletely attributes the alterations to the U.S. military. The "officials" mentioned are military officers, and high-ranking officers are not merely "military", they are also political. If, as alleged, senior military officials doctored intelligence reports to fit President Obama's desired message then the decision was a political one -- and the senior officers believed the alterations would aid their careers more than the truth would.
Senior intelligence officials at the U.S. military's Central Command demanded significant alterations to analysts' reports that questioned whether airstrikes against the so-called Islamic State widely known as ISIS were damaging the group's finances and its ability to launch attacks. But reports that showed the group being weakened by the U.S.-led air campaign received comparatively little scrutiny, The Daily Beast has learned.Senior CENTCOM intelligence officials who reviewed the critical reports sent them back to the analysts and ordered them to write new versions that included more footnotes and details to support their assessments, according to two officials familiar with a complaint levied by more than 50 analysts about intelligence manipulation by CENTCOM higher-ups.
In what should be no surprise to anyone, Hillary Clinton wrote and sent sent classified information through her private email server. This information was always classified, and if it wasn't properly marked by the originator (i.e., Hillary) then that isn't a defense, it's another misdeed.
While she was secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton wrote and sent at least six e-mails using her private server that contained what government officials now say is classified information, according to thousands of e-mails released by the State Department.Although government officials deemed the e-mails classified after Clinton left office, they could complicate her efforts to move beyond the political fallout from the controversy. They suggest that her role in distributing sensitive material via her private e-mail system went beyond receiving notes written by others, and appears to contradict earlier public statements in which she denied sending or receiving e-mails containing classified information.
