90 Miles From Tyranny

Thursday, April 23, 2015

Ramadi and Obama’s Phony Air War Against ISIS

The Obama Administration continues to show complete

incompetence in dealing with ISIS. Case in point: It’s decided that Ramadi, the capital of Anbar Province in western Iraq, is expendable—thereby showing it understands nothing about the value of the city or even its own capacity to defend it.

The reason? According to Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Martin Dempsey, Obama is emphasizing defending a refinery in the same province to protect the oil supplies. As if we couldn’t do both—and then some.

For the past eight months, the Administration has settled for little more than jabs when it could have landed flurries of punishing roundhouse blows. According to the latest 24-hour report Defense Department report, the U.S. launched just 36 airstrikes against ISIS in both Iraq and Syria. That’s actually much higher than normal. But nevertheless equals about one per fighter-bomber aboard the U.S. carrier normally stationed in the Persian Gulf, each of which can fly several sorties daily.

Now add in the vast numbers of area ground-based F-16s, F-15s, F-22s, A-10s, B-1 heavy bombers, helicopters, and Reaper and Predator drones among U.S. forces, plus aircraft of 11 other coalition nations. The day before there were only 13 airstrikes,fewer than a single Reaper can perform on one mission.

Cruise missiles are also in theater, and the U.S. can hit with heavy B-52 and B-2 bombers from anywhere in the world. Yet with this massive armada and with assets on the ground to help identify targets, the administration seems unable to find and strike more than a handful of targets daily. A machine gun here, a truck there. There’s been little effort to translate success in pinpoint assassination efforts,such as that which at least temporarily has knocked ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi out of the fight, into a war-fighting effort.

Which brings us back to Ramadi—a city that’s no big deal, says Dempsey. “It has no symbolic meaning.” That’s an incredible statement: The city’s meaning is both...

As the war in the Middle East against ISIS drags on, the fighters seem to be getting younger and younger. A couple of weeks ago, we showed you the latest ISIS terrorist school for Jihadist that is training the next generation to hate Christians and how to behead them. Here is the other side of the story.

This little girl looks about six or seven years old. She chats away with an off-camera adult, who asks her how many Islamic State fighters she has killed. “Four hundred!” she says, speaking in a Kurdish dialect local to Sulaymaniyah in northern Iraq. Then the little girl leans over a machine gun bigger than she is, and using both hands, she fires away into the distance. As the shots echo across the desert, the man behind the camera eggs her on: “Kill! Kill!”

The footage this picture is taken from appears to have first surfaced in mid-January on a Facebook page devoted to pro-Kurdish videos, and shortly thereafter it cropped up on a YouTube channel called “Kurdish YPG”. The YPG, or People’s Protection Units, are the armed wing of the...

Insiders Detail Culture of Secrecy at California’s Obamacare Exchange

This is part 2 of this article, read part 1 HERE

Aiden Hill’s introduction to the secretive culture at Covered California came in his first days on the job. He had just been hired to head up the agency’s $120 million call center effort when he emailed a superior April 18, 2013, and got a text message in reply:

Please refrain from writing a lot of draft contract language in government email … And don’t clarify via email … No email.

Later, concerned about contractor performance, Hill conducted an Internet search for “best practices” information to forward a superior. Afterward he got this text:

Aiden—Please stop using government email for your searches.

Hill saw the text messages as a deliberate effort to avoid a paper trail subject to public disclosure. And he says some higher-ups grew increasingly upset by his efforts to flag alleged incompetence and waste.

“They stuck their head in the sand and pretended the contractors could fix things by the launch date, which they couldn’t and didn’t,” says a former Covered California call center manager who worked under Hill and asked not to be named to protect his status at a different state job. “It was always say that everything was fine and we’re going to make it through the process.”

The officials allege it was conflicts of interest that led...

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Former airman, Playboy model plans demonstration for US flag

VALDOSTA (Tribune News Service) — An Air Force veteran and former Playboy model who was banned from Valdosta State University last week after taking an American flag from a group of demonstrators is now organizing her own demonstration that she said is to show support for the military and the flag.

Michelle Manhart was detained but not arrested by VSU police after she took the flag from a group of protesters. She said she was not planning to take the flag from the protestors, but she had heard about the group’s recent campus demonstrations and wanted to take action.

“I did not want anything like this, but I got a call from a student who told me that the flag was on the ground, and they were walking on it,” said Manhart. “I was just going over there to pick up the flag off the ground. I don’t know what their cause is, but I went to pick it up because it doesn’t deserve to be on the ground.” The group reportedly elected not to press charges against Manhart, and campus police issued her a criminal trespass warning, effectively banning her from the school. She told The Valdosta Daily Times that she resisted arrest after seeing the flag being...