Blogs For Victory

The story:

CIA Director Leon Panetta challenged House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s accusations that the agency lied to her, writing a memo to his agents saying she received nothing but the truth.

Panetta said that “ultimately, it is up to Congress to evaluate all the evidence and reach its own conclusions about what happened.”

Pelosi (D-Calif.) infuriated Republicans this week when she said in a news conference that she was “misled” by CIA officials during a briefing in 2002 about whether the U.S. was waterboarding alleged terrorist detainees.

Panetta, President Obama’s pick to run the clandestine agency and President Clinton’s former chief of staff, wrote in a memo to CIA employees Friday that “CIA officers briefed truthfully on the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, describing ‘the enhanced techniques that had been employed,'” according to CIA records.

“We are an agency of high integrity, professionalism and dedication,” Panetta said in the memo. “Our task is to tell it like it is — even if that’s not what people always want to hear. Keep it up. Our national security depends on it.”

I’m glad that Panetta came to the defense of his troops on this – as I said when his appointment was announced, he is one of the few adults in the ranks of the Democrat leadership and he’s earned the gratitude of all Americans. It becomes ever more clear that Pelosi is caught in a trap of her own making – had she just told the truth from the beginning (ie, “I was ok with it back then, but I’ve changed my mind) then she wouldn’t have any trouble. But hatred of President Bush and pandering to the kook left outweighed any sense of honor on Pelosi’s part – Pelosi and Co wanted some sort of war crimes tribunal for President Bush and they could only sustain such insanity by pretending they weren’t living in America in 2002 and 2003 (you know, back when Democrats were attempting to out war-hawk the GOP).

It is clear that Pelosi must resign for the good of the nation – much as I’d like her to stick around as a millstone ’round the necks of Democrats it doesn’t serve America’s interests to have someone like Pelosi in charge of the people’s House.

UPDATE: Legal Insurrection asserts, correctly, that seeing as Pelosi has accused the CIA of criminal acts, its time for her to put up, or shut up.

Huh?

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Massachusetts directed employees earlier this month not to log onto the Drudge Report website with government-issued computers due to potential viruses on the site.

In an e-mail message sent May 4, Paul Harvey, an information-technology official for the Boston office, wrote that security specialists with the U.S. Attorney’s Office at the Department of Justice asked them “to reformat/reimage two computers because the user visited the drudgereport.com site.”

“Please avoid the Drudgereport website from the [United States Attorney’s Office] computers,” Harvey wrote.

Harvey said that if employees had a “work-related reason to visit the site,” access could be provided off the government network.

Asked why the conservative-leaning news aggregator and President Barack Obama critic was flagged by Internet security officials, Tracy Schmaler, a Department of Justice spokeswoman, said it was because “a malicious code was found contained in a Web ad on Drudge.”

Schmaler also said the request to stay off Drudge wasn’t politically motivated and said it was sent only to the office in Massachusetts. She also said other popular sites were later found to have potential viruses, including ESPN.com.

I smell some bull hooey here, folks…

That is the unfunded liability for Social Security:

Economists generally believe that the appropriate way of calculating the program’s long-term cost is to do so in perpetuity, adjusted for the rate of interest, something called discounting or present value.

Social Security’s actuaries make such a calculation on page 64. It says that Social Security’s unfunded liability in perpetuity is $17.5 trillion (treating the trust fund as meaningless). The program would need that much money today in a real trust fund outside the government earning a true return to pay for all the benefits that have been promised over and above future Social Security taxes. In effect, the capital stock of the nation would have to be $17.5 trillion larger than it is right now. Alternatively, the payroll tax rate would have to rise by 4%.

To put it another way, Social Security’s unfunded liability equals 1.3% of the gross domestic product. So if we were to fund its deficit with general revenues, income taxes would have to rise by 1.3% of GDP immediately and forever. With the personal income tax raising about 10% of GDP in coming years, according to the Congressional Budget Office, this means that every taxpayer would have to pay 13% more just to make sure that all Social Security benefits currently promised will be paid.

And if you think that’s bad, the unfunded liability of Medicare is $36,400,000,000,000.00 – putting the total SS/Medicare liability at $53,900,000,000,000.00. That’s quite a chunk of change, boys and girls; but not the end of it. The author of the linked piece points out that when you add in Medicare B and D you get $106,400,000,000,000.00, a figure a bit more than twice as large as the privately held wealth of the United States of America. And do keep in mind that this is just the Social Security/Medicare part of our government…doesn’t include national defense or law enforcement (you know, the two actual primary activities of government). Bottom line is that we’d need to increase income taxes by 81% to cover the shortfall. Or massively cut benefits – or do a terrible combination of both (everyone paying more for less).

It can’t be sustained – only an immediate and massive retrenchment of government can allow us to get out of this hole and permit us to set up a fully privatized SS system. I did a bit of tongue in cheek budget balancing the other day but in real terms, spending has to come down by at least 50% – and this means next year we should spend about $1.5 trillion dollars, without impairing national defense or law enforcement. DoD and Justice can do with some cuts, but the money is going to actually have to come out of Dept of Education, Transportation, Housing…all the liberal flapdoodle piled on over the past 75 years. It has to go. The whole thing was a massive vote-buying scam, and now the bill for those purchased votes has come due.

Been a while since we had one. Have at it, boys and girls.

From C. S. Lewis:

Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.

Given that I don’t watch much TV, I’ve entirely missed the Christopher West kerfuffle. The short story:

..For those who haven’t followed it, here’s a summary: Christopher West is a Catholic theologian who has popularized Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body. On ABC’s Nightline last week, he dared to try to understand the hypersexualization of America, as symbolized by Hugh Hefner. Can’t have that, said the blogosphere: The only appropriate response to the naming of Hefner is “boo, hiss,” or, to continue with Orwell, “doubleplus ungood.”…

…West, like John Paul II, is trying to cope with the results of original sin in a creative way. The brokenness of man is manifested in many ways, to be sure, but in our times the obsession with sex (both pro and anti) is surely one of the most conspicuous. The Theology of the Body, in its various articulations (including West’s), is a praiseworthy attempt to think outside this box.

Here is the news story that is taken out of, here is a longer sample of West’s philosophy (scroll down a bit in the linked article). Boiled down, West wishes to rescue sexuality from both the Puritan heresy and the Hefnerian degradation – to have people understand that sex is, indeed, a gift from God. Of course, it isn’t something to be just tossed in the gutter – it is for a married couple open to the gift of life. And there’s an end on it.

What is really good about this is the revival of the proper understanding of the human body and the sexual act – the human body isn’t a thing for personal gratification, but it is also not something dirty to be hidden away…it should be respected as in the image of God, used as God intended – as a means of expressing the love between a man and a woman. Some people are quibbling with West and some are downright angry with him for daring to show love even for Hefner…as if Hefner’s despicable philosophy makes him permanently outside the pale. West understands that Hefner just found the wrong cure for a real problem – the answer to the puritannical hatred of the body isn’t to lust after and objectify it, but to understand it in the context of inherent human dignity.

Mark Steyn – I’d quote it, but then you might be tempted to not read the whole thing.

And hopes that if she piles up the poop high enough, people will pay attention to the pile of poop rather than the lie at the bottom of it:

Under strong attack from Republicans, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused the CIA and Bush administration of misleading her about waterboarding detainees in the war on terror and sharply rebutted claims she was complicit in the method’s use.

“To the contrary … we were told explicitly that waterboarding was not being used,” she told reporters, referring to a formal CIA briefing she received in the fall of 2002.

Pelosi said she subsequently learned that other lawmakers were told several months later by the CIA about the use of waterboarding.

“I wasn’t briefed, I was informed that somebody else had been briefed about it,” she said.

Everyone else in the room remembers being advised about the waterboarding…Nancy says she was advised that waterboarding wasn’t happening. Ok, Nance – lets declassify the briefing and see what was said. If you are to accuse President Bush and the CIA of deliberately misleading a second-rank backbencher presumptively so that they could play “gotcha” 7 years later, then lets see the proof.

And, in passing, wonder just how such a man could get appointed to begin with:

Several Catholic leaders have issued a letter to President Obama calling for the ouster of Harry Knox, who has severely criticized Pope Benedict XVI and other Catholic Church leaders, from President Obama’s Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

Knox is the director of the religion and faith program at the Human Rights Campaign, a homosexual activist group.

Knox’s selection as one of the members of the advisory council stirred an angry response from Catholics, as Knox insisted he stood by previous comments calling Pope Benedict XVI “morally reprehensible” for not supporting the use of condoms…

…In 2007, Knox called it “immoral and insulting to Jesus” when the bishop of Cheyenne, Wyoming instructed that an activist lesbian couple not receive Communion.

The Bay Area Reporter in 2009 also quoted Knox calling the Knights of Columbus “foot soldiers of a discredited army of oppression,” and said they followed “discredited leaders,” including bishops and Pope Benedict.

Prominent Catholic figures including House Republican Leader John Boehner, Catholic League Presidnet Bill Donohue, American Life League’s Judie Brown, and members of the Family Research Council have expressed their concern to Obama, citing Knox’s remarks as proof he is “unfit to serve” on an advisory board billed as fostering interfaith cooperation.

Can’t get a lot of cooperation from people you not only hate, but demonstrate you hate on repeated occasions. Just how does a bigot like Knox even get considered for a position designed to foster cooperation? What’s next? The Grandmaster of the KKK to run the United Way?

Knox has to go – and Obama has to apologize for being within a country mile of such a person.

A word to the wise:

Slander is a poison which extinguishes charity, both in the slanderer and in the persons who listen to it. – St Bernard of Clairvaux