Don’t believe the NIE … Iran will have a weapon far sooner, by following the South African model.

Iran most likely will develop a nuclear capability far sooner than the NIE timeline of around 2015 . They will do it because they likely already have the technology and they are in a hurry to close the window of vulnerability from an attack by the West. All they need is sufficient weapons grade uranium.

Iran will probably take the South African approach, where 25 years ago they developed a lightweight gun type weapon for the similar reasons. South Africa needed a weapon soon, not later because of a perceived threat from Soviet backed Cuban forces in nearby Angola. Much of the analysis both classified and from think tanks, mistakenly presupposes Iran will only pursue an implosion device. That’s what most nations would do and are doing. But most nations have different aims; deterrence and massive retaliation if attacked. Numbers of weapons are important. Iran on the other hand is more into terror and nuclear blackmail. For Iran numbers are less important than a credible threat.

There are two roads to nuclear explosives; one, highly enriched uranium (U-235), the other - plutonium. Uranium is the most difficult road, requiring massive centrifuge plants that use large amounts of electricity to concentrate the fissionable isotope U-235 to weapons grade (80-93%). The plants are difficult to hide from prying eyes.

Plutonium on the other hand is naturally produced in power and research reactors and can be extracted easily from spent fuel by simple chemical precipitation. Covert extraction of plutonium is far easier to hide than enriching uranium. Iran is pursuing the more difficult uranium road. North Korea is going for plutonium.

And there are also two roads for weapons design. One is an implosion device (used at Nagasaki) or a gun type (Hiroshima) where two subcritical masses are literally shot into each other to form a critical mass and a nuclear explosion. The former is more efficient and produces a bigger bang. For these reasons, most in the nuclear club have developed only implosion devices. On the other hand, the less efficient gun type device can be developed faster and is easier to design with a very high assurance of success even without testing (the Hiroshima device was never tested before it was used). A limiting factor for gun type weapons is they can not use more easily obtained plutonium, only uranium. But this limitation doesn’t affect Iran, which has begun enriching uranium on a massive scale.

The South African Experience

In the mid 1970’s feeling threatened by Soviet/Cuban intervention in Africa, the South African government started down the road to becoming a nuclear power. Similar to Iran today, they settled on the production of uranium as the fuel and developed a gun type of weapon. Between 1982 and 1989 they completed 6 lightweight (750 kg/1,650 lb) weapons with an estimated yield of 10-18 kt. (Hiroshima was 15 kt.). A seventh was partially completed when the South African government voluntarily made the decision to give up its nuclear aspirations. The weapons were deliverable by either their Buccaneer jet fighter-bombers or locally produced ballistic missiles.

There are serious parallels between Iranian and South African programs. Both use(d) uranium, giving the ability to make either implosion or gun devices. Iran sees time as the enemy, prolonging its window of vulnerability. The question is not whether they will develop the simpler gun type weapon, but why wouldn’t they? They can have their cake and eat it too. While it takes about three times as much uranium for a gun weapon, around 5 years down the road when they have an operational implosion system, they can use the fissile fuel from the earlier weapons for three of the new. It’s win, win.

In addition you can’t ignore the knowledge sharing going on between Iran and North Korea in both nuclear and missile technology. Iranian scientists were present at both N. Korean nuclear tests and most of their missile technology is N. Korean. The Koreans are doing the heavy lifting on implosion devices, but they are stumbling. Their first test was essentially a fizzle (less than 1 kt) and the second most likely only around 4 kt. That shouldn’t give the Iranians a lot of confidence.

No, they will pursue the low tech gun approach for an interim weapon and surprise us.

Fox News Special … Awesome Megyn Kelly takedown of Wade Rathke and Acorn

Out of habit I left the family room TV on after last night’s O’Reilly (hosted by Juan Williams) and moved to my den to catch up on happenings from the internet. I could hear but not see the next show which should have been Hannity. But it wasn’t. It was a Megyn Kelly interviewing Wade Rathke, founder and former and chief organizer of ACORN.

My initial impression was this was a very fair and objective interview by Kelly. She took him through his formative years of the radical 60s to the present. As the show went on Kelly, with the help of Stanley Kurtz and others, proceeded to eviscerate Rathke to the point he boiled over. It was devastating to ACORN because it exposed and documented visually their extortion techniques and the hard left political leanings of its founder. But the revelations were only half the story. The special was powerful because it relied heavily, very heavily, on the subtle audio and visual effects pioneered by CBS’s “60 Minutes.” So much so I thought I was listening to Leslie Stahl, not Megyn Kelly, on the voice-over of the historical video clips. Her voice-over had exactly the same cadence and remoteness, while the interview itself carried normal voice animation. The documenting clips started even handedly, but became more pointed as the special went on.

Someone at Fox did his/her homework analyzing the techniques that have made “60 Minutes” so powerful and authoritative. It isn’t just the subtle movement from even-handedness to pointed probing. It’s making the subject react. But the audio is the killer. Watch and listen to the whole show here. Congratulations Fox!

Did Obama bribe Brazil with $2 billion to help put Honduras’s Zelaya back into power?

SEE ADDENDUM BELOW.

Something smells fishy. First the Obama administration announces $2 billion of financial support for Brazil’s offshore drilling efforts. And a month later Brazil spirits legally deposed Honduran President Manuel Zelaya back into the country, granting him sanctuary in its embassy. Are these two stories related?

First from the Wall Street Journal, August 18, headlined Obama Underwrites Offshore Drilling: The U.S. is going to lend billions of dollars to Brazil's state-owned oil company, Petrobras, to finance exploration of the huge offshore discovery in Brazil's Tupi oil field in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro. Brazil's planning minister confirmed that White House National Security Adviser James Jones met this month with Brazilian officials to talk about the loan. 

The U.S. Export-Import Bank tells us it has issued a "preliminary commitment" letter to Petrobras in the amount of $2 billion and has discussed with Brazil the possibility of increasing that amount. Ex-Im Bank says it has not decided whether the money will come in the form of a direct loan or loan guarantees. Either way, this corporate foreign aid may strike some readers as odd, given that the U.S. Treasury seems desperate for cash and Petrobras is one of the largest corporations in the Americas

And from Reuters yesterday, headlined Lula faces criticism in Brazil over Honduras role: BRASILIA, Sept 29 (Reuters) -

Brazil's government is facing growing criticism at home over its handling of the Honduran crisis as senior lawmakers accuse it of allowing the ousted president to use its embassy as a political platform. Manuel Zelaya, who was toppled as Honduran president by a coup on June 28, has set up camp in the Brazilian embassy with dozens of supporters and has given numerous interviews to foreign and domestic media. His surprise return from exile a week ago triggered violent protests in the capital Tegucigalpa and placed Brazil at the center of the Honduran power struggle and an international diplomatic crisis. Government and opposition legislators in Brazil's Congress have urged President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to stop Zelaya from using the embassy as a political theater.

You may remember the leftist Zelaya was removed from power in late June after he ordered a referendum to extend his term beyond its mandated limits. This violated the country’s constitution according to Congress and the Supreme Court which ordered the referendum stopped and Zelaya’s removed from office. It appeared Zelaya was planning a move similar to his mentor, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, to lay the groundwork to be President for life.

President Obama refused to recognize the newly appointed President, urged the UN and OAS members to do the same, refused visas to Hondurans, cut off all foreign aid and would not allow Honduras to be represented at the UN’s opening session this month. It seems curious that just over a month after the $2 billion support for Petrobras offshore venture (Obama supporting offshore drilling???), Brazil spirited Zelaya back into the country (September 21) and its embassy.

Would Obama use $2 billion in bribes to destabilize Honduras and put this thug back in power? You figure.

Addendum:
I am attaching this response to this post from an individual who has been following the Honduran situation closely. The person is not a Honduran, but feels strongly an injustice has occurred at the instigation of the Obama White House and with the complicity of Brazil.

I read your excellent blog and I think there is a very good case to be made that the Obama administration and the Clinton State Department may well have conspired with Brazil to bring about the current crisis situation in Honduras, and they began their efforts before Zelaya was overthrown. I believe this supports your conclusions. The following is a note I wrote to myself on September 23: This article at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124619401378065339.html indicates to me that the State Department took Zelaya's side, when Thomas Shannon was still heading up the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs at the State Department, because the Honduran Congress refused to obey US orders to disregard their own Constitution. Shannon moved on to be Ambassador to Brazil. 

"The Obama administration and members of the Organization of American States had worked for weeks to try to avert any moves to overthrow President Zelaya, said senior U.S. officials. "Washington's ambassador to Honduras, Hugo Llorens, sought to facilitate a dialogue between the president's office, the Honduran parliament and the military. "The efforts accelerated over the weekend, as Washington grew increasingly alarmed. "The players decided, in the end, not to listen to our message," said one U.S. official involved in the diplomacy. On Sunday, the U.S. embassy here tried repeatedly to contact the Honduran military directly, but was rebuffed. Washington called the removal of President Zelaya a coup and said it wouldn't recognize any other leader.

"The U.S. stand was unpopular with Honduran deputies. One congressman, Toribio Aguilera, got prolonged applause from his colleagues when he urged the U.S. ambassador to reconsider. Mr. Aguilera said the U.S. didn't understand the danger that Mr. Zelaya and his friendships with Mr. Chavez and Cuba's Fidel Castro posed." Then, shortly after Zelaya was overthrown, you have a the usual suspects at work: Thomas Shannon, who had been nominated to be the U.S. Ambassador to Brazil, and Arturo Valenzuela, nominated to be the new head of the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs at the State Department, and late of Georgetown University, a native Chilean (who I believe holds dual citizenship) who has made it clear that he agrees with Hugo Chavez on many issues and has defended him and his policies publicly on many occasions. 

Shannon's nomination was held up because Senator Jim DeMint was unhappy with the way he had handled the Honduras situation. I think when he got to Brazil, he laid the groundwork for what is happening now, working hand in hand with Valenzuela. "DeMint also said that Shannon, in his State Department post, “has still failed to show a clear understanding of Honduras’s fight to defend democracy. "...When pressed by DeMint about whether Honduras’s military acted to defend the constitution against abuses by Zelaya, Valenzuela said “I don’t want to get into some of the details of this. I’m not familiar myself with all of the details.” 

"DeMint said Valenzuela’s responses were unsatisfactory. “Mr. Valenzuela told me he didn’t even know the facts in Honduras,” DeMint said in the statement today. “Yet, everyday Zelaya’s own statements reveal his true desire to be a Chavez- style dictator advocating violence in order to return to power.” http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601086&sid=admFvdOL9YY4 See also: http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/59515-obama-and-demint-locked-in-proxy-fight-over-chavez 

Now this is from Bloomberg news today, Tuesday: "Honduras’s deposed President Manuel Zelaya probably received help from a South American country to sneak back into Tegucigalpa yesterday, said Carlos Lopez Contreras, Honduras’s interim foreign minister. Zelaya, who appeared unexpectedly at the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa yesterday after he was overthrown and expelled in June, probably got into the country in a car that had diplomatic license plates, Contreras said today in a telephone interview. He declined to say which country provided assistance. “He couldn’t have gotten in without logistical and financial support, possibly from a South American country or various South American countries, and without a doubt the cooperation of a Central American country,” Contreras said.

Honduras’s acting President Roberto Micheletti had vowed that Zelaya would be arrested if he set foot in the country, and yesterday decided to no longer recognize the Brazilian mission in Honduras, stripping the building and its occupants of diplomatic protection. Even so, the order to enter the embassy building hasn’t been given, and the interim government is requesting that Brazil hand over Zelaya, Contreras said. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601086&sid=aa_wgg.Bl_LY 

Finally, tonight, during the September 23 local news program "Hoy Mismo" on Honduras Channel 3, a letter was read from the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa to the Brazilians asking the Brazilian Embassy to hand over Zelaya to them so he would have "more protection." Lula is in this up to his ears, but wouldn't have been without U.S. encouragement. 

Name withheld by request.

Clark Hoyt, NY Times Public Editor plays toady again … Times just “slow off the mark”

Clark Hoyt, the NY Times Public Editor, covers its lack of reporting of the O’Keefe/Giles Acorn exposé and blames it on being “slow off the mark.” Hoyt was kept on for a year after his two year term expired earlier this year, no doubt by endearing himself to editorial management with soft criticism. He didn't fail them today.

I wrote about Hoyt last year and called him a joke. In the column I pointed out the new bias of the Times is that of burying stories that don’t support the Democrat’s game plan. Read it, it covers some points others haven’t covered. I am sure Hoyt will have a very full inbox tomorrow, especially after saying part of the blame was “insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio.”

But still I sent him a short e-mail. Here it is:

Not convincing.

You failed to mention your paper being "slow off the mark" on the NEA/Sargent story. That's three in this month alone. Well that's not totally true, that broke in early August, but you didn't cover it until mid September. According to Andrew Breitbart, there will be more stories to be "slow off the mark" on. More apologies for you to make. Does the Times still consider itself the Newspaper of Record?

Sad!

Crosby Boyd

With the Times using the phrase “slow off the mark,” the Washington Post (Howard Kurtz) used “lamentably late” to describe the media’s response. Makes you wonder if both papers compared notes before writing their stories.

Smoking out the media --- Breitbart’s real aim is to expose coordinated media blackouts

When the Swiftboat story first surfaced in early August 2004, John Kerry ignored it on the advice of his staff. For that he blames his loss.

Why did his advisors take this tack? Most likely because they had confidence the story would be “ignored” by the old media. And it was. That is until talk radio and Fox news made it an issue. The rest is history.

The new bias of the established media is not the phony story or the coordinated regurgitation of DNC talking points. It is the blackout of major news stories that reflect badly on Democrats. But the curtain of obscurity is being peeled back by Andrew Breitbart. The NEA scandal was exposed by Breitbart’s Big Hollywood website and the more recent ACORN exposé was the blockbuster to launch his Big Government site. But he doesn’t stop there. Breitbart is challenging the old media. He challenged them on September 7, two days before the O’Keefe and Giles tapes were made public. He knew the media would jointly ignore the story. He was setting them up. And they took the bait.

Here is his challenge from the Sept 21 Washington Times (emphasis added), read it all:

Everything you needed to know about the unorthodox roll out of the now-notorious ACORN sting videos was hidden in plain sight in my Sept. 7 column, "Katie Couric, Look in the Mirror."

ACORN was not the only target of those videos; so were Katie, Brian, Charlie and every other mainstream media pooh-bah. They were not going to report this blockbuster unless they were forced to. And they were. What's more, it ain't over yet. Not every hint I dropped in that piece about what was to come has played itself out yet. Stay tuned.

He continues:

Thus was born a multimedia, multiplatform strategy designed to force the reluctant hands of ABC, CBS, NBC, the New York Times and The Washington Post. Videos of five different ACORN offices in five separate cities would be released on five consecutive weekdays over a full week - Baltimore, Washington, New York, San Bernadino and San Diego. By dripping the videos out, we exposed to anyone paying attention that ACORN was lying through its teeth and that the media would look imbecilic continuing to trot out their hapless spokespeople. 

If the media, as expected, pretended that the story didn't exist, they'd have another debacle on their hands comparable to the failure to report the shocking views of the White House's "green jobs czar," Van Jones. If they invested in the story, I told Mr. O'Keefe, they would do ACORN's defense work. I told him the focus needed to be on the message, not the messenger. Otherwise, the mainstream media would attempt to direct attention away from the damaging video evidence.

 The best example of this came from ABC's anchor, Charlie Gibson. "I don't even know about it. So you've got me at a loss," he told WLS radio when asked about it. "But my goodness, if it's got everything, including sleaziness in it, we should talk about it in the morning." But he also said that what was seen on these videos was best left for the "cables."

Is this not malevolent arrogance?

In his September 25 column at wsj.com ever delightful James Taranto takes direct aim at the New York Times for burying news that doesn’t suit its taste. It’s a humorous but stinging rebuke of the Times for its failure to report, entitled ‘Where’s Waldo?’ Journalism. Again, emphasis added.

If you're young enough to have read those "Where's Waldo?" books as a kid, you are well-prepared to read the New York Times. On Wednesday the Times finally took note of the NEA scandal, in a story of slightly over 350 words that appeared on page 21: “The White House on Tuesday instructed government agencies to keep politics away from the awarding of federal grants, a step taken as the administration sought to minimize the fallout after an official at the National Endowment for the Arts urged artists to advance President Obama's agenda.” 

“The new guidelines were issued at a meeting between White House officials and chiefs of staff across the executive branch, following the disclosure of a conference call last month in which artists were asked to work with the Corporation for Public Service to promote Mr. Obama's health care, education and environmental proposals.”

This is the first time the paper has mentioned the scandal, first reported 29 days earlier on Andrew Breitbart's Big Hollywood and 22 days earlier by Fox News Channel's Glenn Beck. This follows the same pattern as the Times's coverage of the Van Jones and Acorn scandals, both of which the paper did not mention at all until the Obama administration had taken some remedial action, and then reported only in brief stories on inside pages (though in fairness, a full-length front-page story about Jones's hypovehiculation appeared on the second day). Trying to find information about the Obama scandals in the Times can be a fun challenge, just like the "Where's Waldo?" books. But if your taste in puzzles runs more to crosswords or sudoku and you want the news delivered straight, there are plenty of better sources.

Howard Kurtz, media critic at the Washington Post attempts to marginalize the O’Keefe/Giles ACORN story by questioning whether it is journalism. In a column called Guerrilla Journalism he demeans the piece, calling it unbalanced. What he misses is the fact it was news and the Post failed to report it for over a week. Sorry Howard, that won’t work. I responded with a comment which I will share here (minor corrections made):

Whether the O'Keefe/Giles ACORN story was journalism or not, it was valid news. And most of the media ignored it. The Post ignored it, the NY Times ignored it, the LA Times ignored it, the Chicago Tribune ignored it. And Breitbart knew all of you would ignore it. That was the setup. In a Washington Times column he said the media was also the target and that’s why the tapes ran on 5 consecutive weekdays. He knew the story would be red hot before the media (other than Fox) would touch it. The first tape ran Wednesday, 9/9, and the last Tuesday 9/15. By Saturday 9/12, the Senate had defunded ACORN in one appropriations bill. Now that was in your backyard and it WAS news. The Post didn’t touch the story until it was 9 days old. Now that’s not good journalism.

Why did he think you wouldn’t cover it? Well, you didn’t cover the NEA/Sargent story which was and still is valid news. You didn’t cover the Edwards/Rielle Hunter story last year. Not even a mention of it until the National Enquirer blew it wide open and he dropped out of the race. He was a legitimate contender for the VP slot according to the pundits and the Vegas odds at the time. Non-liberals question why stories embarrassing to Democrats seem to be blacked out in the old media. I wonder too. Breitbart wondered but structured a blockbuster story to smoke the media out. He succeeded. That’s the real story.

It’s time for the old media to mend their ways. They have alienated half their audience, yet they wonder why Fox News ratings are skyrocketing and network news is tanking. They wonder why they can’t sell papers.

Integrity sells papers.

White House Counsel Greg Craig to get the axe --- for his ineptness on Guantanamo

The Washington Post reports today that Greg Craig has been replaced as the point man on Guantanamo and will likely leave the White House. The story places the blame for crafting the Guantanamo strategy for a date certain shutdown, of convincing The One of its wisdom and the failure to follow through, squarely on Craig’s shoulders. It hinted that Obama may now, not be able to meet his January 22 deadline.

With four months left to meet its self-imposed deadline for closing the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the Obama administration is working to recover from missteps that have put officials behind schedule and left them struggling to win the cooperation of Congress. Even before the inauguration, President Obama's top advisers settled on a course of action they were counseled against: announcing that they would close the facility within one year. Today, officials are acknowledging that they will be hard-pressed to meet that goal.

After blaming the Bush administration in March for not having detainee files in one place (a normal procedure so codeword intelligence files at CIA or NSA are not comingled with unclassified files at Justice and accessible to uncleared personnel), the White House added more cooks to stir the pot.

In May, one of the senior officials said, Obama tapped Pete Rouse -- a top adviser and former congressional aide who is not an expert on national security but is often called in to fix significant problems -- to oversee the process. Senior adviser David Axelrod and deputy communications director Dan Pfeiffer were brought in to craft a more effective message around detainee policy, the official said.

After publicly playing the blame game on the files six months ago, it appears the dysfunctional White House is just getting around to reviewing them. The Post drops this little gem at the end of the story

In coming weeks, officials say, they expect to complete the initial review of all the files of those held at Guantanamo Bay.

Buh-bye Greg.

A damaging poll confirms the obvious … 8 out of 10 don’t want taxpayers bailing out newspapers

Editor and Publisher reported on a study conducted by Sacred Heart University that came to that conclusion.

Nearly 8 out of 10 Americans would oppose any plan to spend tax dollars to aid failing newspapers, according to a poll on news media trustworthiness released Wednesday. That reluctance might have something to do with the fact that 38.1% of respondents to the poll by Sacred Heart University said they are reading newspapers less often than five years ago. Or the fact that nearly half, 45%, said they think the Internet is "adequately covering for failing newspapers." Just 35.6% disagreed with that statement.

It continues:

[T]he poll found Americans do not believe they are getting "good journalism." Just under 68% of respondents agreement with this statement: "Old-style, traditionally objective and fair journalism is dead." Just 26.5% disagreed, while 5.6% were unsure. Much of Sacred Heart poll concerns mainstream television news, which respondents clearly view with jaundiced eyes. Fully 83.6% said national news media organizations were very or somewhat biased while just 14.1% viewed them as somewhat unbiased or not at all biased.

President Obama in a recent statement said he might support efforts to help bailout newspapers. While the comment to the Pittsburgh Post Gazette may be more about relaxing anti-trust enforcement of newspapers in their attempts to come up with a common policy to charge for internet access, it raises the specter of direct government support for failing newspapers. A new buzz word is developing in Washington and it is “Public Media.”

It is being promoted by the liberal Free Press organization and mentioned also by Michael Copps, a long term Democrat FCC Commissioner. The thought of the NY Times converting itself into a non-profit National Public Newspaper, living off the public dole with Pinch Sulzberger in control, is enough to send chills down my spine.

Addendum: The Sacred Heart poll story was one of three featured stories on E&P’s home page as I began writing this post. Normally as new stories replace the old ones on the E&P site, the linked headline drops into box entitled “More Headlines.”

All references to this story have now been scrubbed from the homepage. If you read the entire story you will see why. It is extremely damaging. The story is still available through a search of E&P’s site, but in case it is scrubbed or altered, I have saved a copy.

Gates fails to mention one little fact … by killing the Missile Shield, he makes the US vulnerable

Last Sunday SecDef Robert Gates wrote an Op-Ed in the NY Times that was not only deceptive, but avoided the main point. What he missed telling us is the European Missile Shield (Ground-based Mid-course Defense - GMD) is primarily a system to defend the US from ICBMs, with a secondary capability to defend the northern and central portions of Europe. By killing it he has killed our ability to stop US bound missiles from Iran.

Early in his article Gates makes a statement that is totally misleading. In it he claims the original system would not be ready until 2015. That’s simply not true.

In December 2006, just days after becoming secretary of defense, I recommended to President George W. Bush that the United States place 10 ground-based interceptors in Poland and an advanced radar in the Czech Republic....

That plan would have put the radar and interceptors in Central Europe by 2015 at the earliest. Delays in the Polish and Czech ratification process extended that schedule by at least two years. Which is to say, under the previous program, there would have been no missile-defense system able to protect against Iranian missiles until at least 2017 — and likely much later. ( emphasis added)

This is deceptively parsed wording. While true in 2006, shortly after, the original plan was superseded by a well funded accelerated one that moved the date up by two years to 2013. This from a recent Congressional Research Study of June 2009: The system would include 10 interceptors in Poland, a radar in the Czech Republic, and another radar deployed in a country closer to Iran, all to be completed by 2013 at a reported cost of at least $4 billion. ( emphasis added)  

He goes on to put up a straw man, implying this is only about defending Europe.

Those who say we are scrapping missile defense in Europe are either misinformed or misrepresenting what we are doing.

 From a look at the graphic, you can see why the Polish missile base is sited where it is. It is almost on a direct line (white line) between the Iranian missile test site (and likely operational site) near Semnan and prime targets Washington DC or New York. It also demonstrates graphically that the interceptors are more about downing missiles aimed at the US than Europe.

Ground-based Mid-course Defense has always been a strategic system, designed from the start to destroy reentry vehicles of high speed, high altitude intercontinental missiles. But it does have a capability to defend major portions of Europe. The Aegis/SM-3 is a wonderful system and a proven one. But it has a limited footprint. And it can’t defend the US from Europe. What is maddening, is after spending hundreds of billions on R&D for GMD, we are killing it in Europe because we don’t want to spend the final 4 billion. It’s like stopping ten feet short of the finish line. What also bothers me is Gates has always been a straight shooter. But he has learned the Democratic Party’s Doublethink. “Less is more” just doesn’t cut it for the rest of us.

Addendum: My next post will be about is how and why Iran will surprise us by developing a lightweight nuclear missile warhead that the North Koreans can’t. And it won’t be a fizzle.

Deep Question

Overturning Cuba Travel Ban May Pass House This Year, Farr Says From a Bloomberg News story. If we drop our ban on travel, will the Cubans do the same?

Some thoughts on James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles

To me there have been three defining moments in the fight against the incredible leftist bias of the old media. They are the Tailwind (Vietnam War, nerve gas) story by Peter Arnett, Rathergate, and the recent ACORN exposé. Looking at the past twenty years, media bias has revealed itself as blatantly one sided coverage and often, outright false stories. It has now morphed into the blackout of stories that challenge their leftist ideals and idols.

It is inconceivable that the ACORN sting could have been totally ignored by the old media without some sort of coordination. It was too hot a story. Likewise it is inconceivable that the Van Jones story could have gone unreported for the same reasons. The old media has egg on its face, but instead of conducting introspection, they minimize the stories and call them smear jobs.

The first defining moment in exposong media corruption was the Tailwind scandal (June 1998) that was perpetrated by CNN correspondent Peter Arnett, a hard anti-war leftist, who gained his reputation in the Vietnam War and the first Gulf War. His contention was, during an operation into Laos in 1970, sarin nerve gas was used to kill a group of US defectors. The story ran on CNN and in Time magazine and was strongly challenged by the Pentagon which determined the nerve gas claims were false.

CNN conducted its own after the fact investigation and found the story flawed. They publicly retracted it less than a month after it ran. Two producers were fired, one resigned and Peter Arnett stayed on until his contract expired a year and a half later, but never appeared on the air for CNN after the investigation.

Much of the internal pressure for a review came from the Time folks who had felt pressured into carrying the CNN produced story. It was a victory for openness and the few journalists at Time Warner with integrity.

Significance: Tailwind was the first major left wing agenda story that was publicly debunked and had consequences for the participants. Most of the prior journalism scandals were by writers falsifying stories to enhance their own reputations such as Janet Cooke - Washington Post, Stephen Glass - New Republic and Mike Barnicle - Boston Globe.

The second defining moment was Rathergate. Most are familiar with Rathergate, a story designed to damage George W. Bush during his 2004 reelection campaign. It ended as a victory for citizen journalists, an outcome totally unexpected by the media establishment. The old media gave the controversy scant attention. The NY Times covered this, the greatest American media scandal, as if New York based CBS News was in another country. They used primarily wire service copy and an occasional story by art critic Frank Rich.

The Washington Post used media critic Howard Kurtz and of all the networks, only ABC gave reasonable coverage. The rest ignored it. For over two weeks Dan Rather stood by his story, including the demonstrably false claim of an unbroken chain of custody of the Killian documents.

Finally CBS set up an independent review panel which declared the story shouldn’t have run. Dan Rather was pulled out of his anchor chair precisely 26 weeks after his phony report and then put out to pasture as a 60 Minutes correspondent for the remaining year on his contract. His contract wasn’t renewed.

Significance: Rathergate was the first time bloggers, exhibiting far more expertise than the network’s “fact checkers,” were able document the falsehoods of a major story and see the perpetrators suffer the consequences. They did it by giving the story legs in the established media and engendered a need by Viacom/CBS to clear its reputation.

Now come James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles, “twentysomething” college students whose conservative principles led them to conduct an audacious sting operation against ACORN. This organization has avoided scrutiny for years despite voter fraud allegations, intimidation of financial institutions and participating in race hustling. They are protected by a willing media and the Democrat establishment who want to see no evil.

Last year, during the Presidential campaign, the NY Times dragged its feet when they were handed incriminating evidence of the Obama campaign working with ACORN on a money laundering scheme to funnel contributions of maxed out Democrats back to the campaign. THey never ran the story. That’s how well protected the Democrats' surrogates are.

The result of O'Keefe's and Giles' efforts: 5 video tapes showing ACORN employees aiding and abetting underage prostitution, tax cheating, and attempting to aid in illegal immigration of underage prostitutes. The story burned up the internet, but for a week there was nothing from the old media. Charles Gibson of ABC News claimed to know nothing of the story and the vaunted Times had printed nothing by the time the Census Department severed its ties with ACORN and the Senate had voted to defund them. In 7 days of new media reporting (Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government blog and Fox/Glenn Beck), the world knew more about the corruption of ACORN than from years of old media reporting.

The significance of O’Keefe and Giles was their story and its influence reached the highest levels of government without any old media support. These amateur videographers did what no others had done, expose the corruption of ACORN through investigative journalism. And they revealed the utter corruption of the old media in their attempt to hide the story.

Congratulations James and Hannah.

Jimmy Carter, this is what people think of you.

It took 12 years for the Democrat party to recover from your 4 years. The map is what people think of you. Race baiting won't improve this picture.

Can we believe Democrats are severing ties with ACORN? … It’s a sham, ACORN isn’t ACORN anymore

Over the weekend the White House announced the Census Department is severing all ties with ACORN, the discredited organization that is under investigation for voter fraud in 14 states and recently the subject of a media sting by Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government blog and reported by Glenn Beck. Additionally The Senate has voted to drop all funding to ACORN from the Transportation Appropriations bill. All but 6 Democrats and one Republican supported the measure.

It all seems too good to be true. And when it comes to Democrats reaching across the aisle, it probably is. You have to understand ACORN is where President Obama got his start. He represented them in court. He is joined at the hip to them. They have been the recipients of mega dollars of government largesse, courtesy of Democrats. It is simply out of character for them to cave so easily. The dirty little secret is ACORN is changing its name. In a June 21 Washington Examiner interview with Marcel Reid, a dissident ACORN whistle blower, the name is being changed to Community Organizations International.

“We’ve known for many months now that the name ACORN is going to be retired,” [Marcel] Reid said. “The name has been so damaged to the point where the leadership knows it simply can’t go on as it has with the ACORN label out front and center, especially after all of the reporting.” In fact, the process has already begun, she noted. Wade Rathke, who founded the organization, announced on his blog that ACORN International has officially changed its name to “Community Organizations International.”

 So all the posturing by the White House and Senate Democrats is a sham. Republicans, make sure you add the term “and successor organizations” to any restrictions against ACORN. You’ve been had!

Impossible Sailboats 2

Following our visit to Maine, Julie and I visited another Sanibel friend who has a “camp” in the Adirondacks (NY) on St. Regis and Spitfire Lakes. Sailboat racing is the central focus of the St. Regis YC and its premiere class is the Idem. Idems are gaff rigged lightweight 32 foot centerboarders. There are only 12 of them and all, except one, were built between 1900 and 1902. Class rules allow only cotton sails. Idem is the Latin word for same and used to describe this one-design class. They bear a faint resemblance to the later inland scow classes popular primarily in Wisconsin and Minnesota. A dedicated group of owners keeps this class alive despite the exorbitant costs and difficulties of maintaining a hundred year old wood boat in racing condition. Here are some photos of the race last Thursday. Nine of the twelve boats participated.

Impossible Sailboats 1

During my “vacation” travels Julie and I visited with our Sanibel friends who summer in Maine. They live in a coastal community just north of Camden and and are active sailors. The coastal area of Maine produces some of the finest and most unusual sailboats in the world. These include the 155 foot Scheherazade, and the 124 foot Antonisa.

But what caught my attention was a daysailer tied to a floating dock in Rockport harbor. It evoked the same emotions as my first close up look at a Ferrari when I was 17 years old. Here was a sailboat designed for high performance and built to impeccable yacht standards. It is a boat that would turn heads at any yacht club in the world. It is the Ginger, a 50 footer designed to be handled by as many as 3, but easily sailed singlehanded. Just as the Ferrari of my youth had no heater or roll down windows, Ginger has no lifelines to clutter its sleek lines nor does it have roller furling, just a racing foil on its forestay. Compromises to performance are only to improve its “yachtiness,” such as the teak decks. Ginger is the product of its imaginative owner and the Brooklin Boat Yard, Brooklin Maine.

Dueling GPSs

I have been on a trip visiting friends my wife Julie and I have wanted to see, but never had the time. Our previous retirement “vacations” have been to see things or do things. Some of the friends are long lost school mates, friends from the Washington, DC area where we lived for many years, relatives and our dispersed children and their families. It will be an 18 day, 4,700 mile trip by the time we finish next Thursday.

To ensure we arrived where we wanted to go, when we wanted to be there, we equipped ourselves with two GPSs (one a built-in, another, a portable Magellan), as well as Mapquest printouts for each leg. A bit of overkill, but we have been very, very lost on past trips.

The multiple voices guiding us often have given conflicting instructions with one more insistent than the other. Julie named the shrillest Maggie Magellan, but as the trip progressed she became Naggy Maggie. Generally we used Mapquest as the tie breaker, but the calmer sultry voice of the built-in often had me giving preference to her. To counter that, Julie turned the volume down from Naggy Maggie and substituted her own even more sultry voice. Calm, sultry, reassuring female voices always win. In general the Magellan gave the best directions for routes we are familiar with. It, like Mapquest, can be adjusted in advance to follow a preferred route or freeway exits. Possibly there is a way to do it with the built-in (Toyota Prius) but I couldn’t find it. It would give 3 choices (two fastest and the shortest). Estimated Time Enroute also is vastly different for the three systems, with the Prius’s giving the highest time allowance for “pit stops.” The Magellan has been closest to uninterrupted driving time and Mapquest in between, but closer to the Magellan.

As our travels went on, we adjusted to the difference. In one case, the Prius system did not have the ten miles of public roads plotted leading to a community on Albemarle Sound in North Carolina. Fortunately both of the others did. But with freeway driving, it has extremely helpful split screen displays to aid in making the correct turn at the right time. So it is upward and onward with three young ladies guiding me. Life can’t get any better.

Mystery Art

Seen at Niagara Falls, Ontario in front of a Korean restaurant.

The Huey … another time, another war

Early today Sanibel sounded a bit like Vietnam in the late sixties. It was the nostalgic lub-dup-dup-dup sound of a Huey maneuvering at low altitude. Nothing else makes that noise. The Lee County Mosquito Control District has five Hueys (UH-1E) in its inventory, as well as 5 ancient C-47s to now wage war against mosquitoes, not Charlie. While the LCMCD has a number of quiet, vibration free and air conditioned Jet Rangers, the preferred delivery system remains the Huey. It can carry 300 gallons of liquids, the Jet Ranger only 90. The greatest saving is the time and fuel spent ferrying back and forth to replenish the delivery tanks. The Huey was a breakthrough helicopter with its lightweight gas turbine engine when it entered service in the late ‘50s. It’s great to see it still in operation.

Swine flu vaccine allocations will stiff seniors … Misleading figures from CDC at work.

The Center for Disease Control (CDC) is using misleading figures to rationalize the denial of life saving H1N1 flu vaccine to seniors and other older age groups. In a study in which they give infection rates and hospitalization rates for different age groups, the CDC uses meaningless share data for deaths from the flu in an attempt to give the appearance of lower (non-threatening) death rates for older age groups. Size differences of groups affects results because larger groups such as 5-24 (83 million) and 25-49 (106 million) show higher numbers of almost anything than the smaller 65+ (39 million) group. They simply have a higher share of the population. This gives the impression the younger larger groups have a higher death rate and have a higher need for the vaccine. In reality the over 65 group has a higher death rate than the 5-24 group but they are allocated no vaccine. From the Wall Street Journal: People ages 65 and over, who are normally among the first to get seasonal flu shots, would be last in line for the new H1N1 shot, because their rates of infection have been far lower Seniors get shortchanged because of their low infection rate, but they die at a far higher rate than other groups once infected (see the bottom graph for the explanation). The older you are the worse you are affected. And the difference isn’t miniscule. A 50 to 65 year old has nearly a 15 times the chance of dying once infected than a 5 to 24 year old. And 65 and over 34 times, giving a higher mortality rate.

The use of spurious data this way is particularly disingenuous for an organization that lives by statistics. And it affects peoples’ lives.

President Jimmy Carter planned to provide sufficient dosages for the entire population of the US in 1976 when face with another influenza epidemic. There was no rationing then! The current administration should do no less.

Mr. President, it’s time for openness on your birth certificate

I am not a birther. There is ample evidence President Obama was born in the US, and his mother was a US citizen. Either qualifies him as a US citizen. But it is beyond me why he doesn’t authorize the release of a photocopy of the original certificate of live birth, and put this issue to rest. But rather than resolve it, he has his minions attack the birthers as nutcases. That is irresponsible.

But what information on the certificate is so damaging he would allow a goodly portion of the nation challenge his legitimacy as President? The sample shown is from 1964, about 3 years after Obama’s birth and probably similar to, if not identical in format to Obama’s. There is not a lot of information on the form: Name of the father (correctly named in the birth announcement in the Honolulu Advertiser, and presumably on the certificate), name of the mother (not in dispute). The only possible area of concern could be in the race boxes, and in particular for the father. The term used in that era and also used in official census reports for race was Negro. That shouldn’t cause embarrassment, tens of millions of African descent were categorized as that for nearly two hundred years. Even if someone fibbed and called the father Caucasian, it shouldn’t be a major issue. There is no box for religion, another contentious issue, nor anything regarding citizenship.

For President Obama, it’s time to put the country at ease. Release the certificate.

British combat ineffectiveness is more than offset by its chutzpah.

In a report made public over the weekend, Britain’s House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee chastised the US for “the absence of a unified vision and strategy” in conducting the war in Afghanistan. It warns of “considerable cultural indifference” by coalition partners (translation: Americans). And it blames the US for its use of UAV rocket attacks. It goes on to berate other NATO members for not contributing to the coalition effort. It blames everyone but the British themselves. Yet it is the British who have exhibited the lack of a unified strategy often by defying coalition policies and negotiating its own truces with the Taliban in its area of responsibility. In one case, after the truce had been signed, the Taliban quickly occupied a city that had been in coalition hands and subsequently the Taliban had to be removed by force. But worse than this duplicity is the deep seated defeatism of the senior British military leadership in Afghanistan that is the problem. It became so bad last October, US SecDef Gates found it necessary to give a blistering rebuttal of a newspaper interview given by the senior British commander. From the Telegraph (10/07/2008): “While we face significant challenges in Afghanistan, there certainly is no reason to be defeatist or to underestimate the opportunities to be successful in the long run,” Mr Gates said on board a military aircraft flying to Europe for Nato meetings. He was speaking in reaction to comments from Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith, who said in a newspaper that the war against the Taliban could not be won, and the ambassador, Sherard Cowper-Coles, who said an "acceptable dictator" would be the best political solution for Afghanistan. Any US commander would be relieved on the spot for such a statement. This not the first time the British have exhibited such a shameful lack of backbone. In Iraq, they negotiated a truce with al Sadr’s Shia militias in Basra, ceding total control of the city to them. They moved their base of operations out of the city to a safer area near the airport. They simply took themselves out of combat. The Telegraph again reports (10/28/2007): Rather than fight on, they have struck a deal – or accommodation, as they describe it – with the Shia militias that dominate the city, promising to stay out in return for assurances that they will not be attacked. Since withdrawing, the British have not set foot in the city and even have to ask for permission if they want to skirt the edges to get to the Iranian border on the other side. When 6 months later, after Prime Minister Maliki had taken control of the Shia areas of Baghdad, he then set his sights on the militias in Basra in the British area of responsibility. Where were the British? They were no place to be found. So using what the press called an ill trained force, the Iraqi army took on the militias and cleaned house in three days. The militia thugs threw down their arms and people, for the first time in years, walked the streets without fear. There is no love lost between Maliki and the British. They had confined themselves to barracks and stayed out of the fray when they were needed most. If they had only the courage to simply pack their bags and leave, he might have respected them. So in December 2008, when it came time to set withdrawal deadlines under the UN mandate, he threw the insult back. Unlike the US forces which were given until the end of July 2010, roughly a year and a half to leave, the British were told to pack and be gone a year earlier, barely enough time to get all the equipment and men out. Yet after completing their humiliating departure last Friday, the British now have the gall to tell Americans we don’t know how to fight and win a war. But the latest pontifications from the Foreign Affairs Committee are no different from those espoused four years earlier by British Brigadier, Nigel Aylwin-Foster when he blasted the US counter insurgency strategy as overly harsh in an article in a British military journal. He even used similar terms such as “cultural ignorance” and “institutional racism.” As it turned out the British model failed in Iraq and the US succeeded. You don’t take a city like Fallujah by giving jelly beans to the kids. It takes going in, and staying, and living there, the Marine model. And, yes a lot of hard and dirty fighting too. Perhaps the British Ministry of Defense should concentrate on bigger and better jelly beans. The liberal politicians would love it, and also apparently the generals. But it won’t win wars. Update: One of the best recaps of the British failure in Iraq was put together by Greyhawk at The Mudville Gazette. From published articles, he traces the British involvement from the early days in April 2003 until the fall of Basra at the hands of the Iraqi Army. It is good read for history buffs and scholars. Read it here. Also, Richard North, publisher of the blog EU Referendum has written a book Ministry of Defeat 2003-2009. I haven’t read it yet, but his writings on his blog have been superlative.