Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review are pleased to see the jury convicted Kermit Gosnell for four deaths and many other crimes. They also rip the Justice Department for secretly snooping on reporters’ phone calls. And they react strongly to President Obama’s latest indignation over the lingering questions on Benghazi.
‘Bigger than Benghazi’
The families of three fallen Navy SEAL Team VI members say President Obama and Vice President Biden are culpable for the deaths of their sons for publicly identifying the unit that killed Osama Bin Laden and pursuing policies that coddle Muslims and put our own troops at a tactical disadvantage.
SEAL Team VI carried out the daring raid in Pakistan in early May 2011. Three months later, three members of the unit were among 38 killed in a Chinook helicopter crash in Afghanistan. Twenty-five of the dead were special operations forces. Larry Klayman is founder of Freedom Watch and is the attorney representing three of the families who lost their sons. He says the Obama administration carelessly and illegally revealed the role of SEAL Team VI shortly after announcing the successful mission to kill Bin Laden.
“Shortly after that successful raid on Bin Laden, the president – through the vice president for political purposes – released the name of SEAL Team VI. That’s classified information that even (then) Defense Secretary Robert Gateswas critical of that. So that was like putting a target on the backs of the sons of my clients,” said Klayman, who says the helicopter may have been infiltrated by the Taliban before the crash because the Afghans on board were last-minute changes from the names on the original flight manifest.
Klayman says Vice President Biden deserves special blame for these deaths.
“Biden did something which was more than irresponsible. He served on foreign relations committees, intelligence committees. He knew or should have known what he was doing. He should be held accountable. Frankly, he should even be held criminally accountable for doing that,” said Klayman.
In addition to the identification of the the team, Klayman says the Obama administration is culpable for these deaths due to a policy of coddling Muslims and putting tremendous restrictions on U.S. forces.
“This president has set a tone that Muslim outreach…is more important than protecting the lives of our servicemen and that’s crept into the military brass to the point where they can’t engage in preemptive fire,. They can’t engage in return fire until they’re fired upon once. They’re sent into battle without adequate equipment,” said Klayman.
Perhaps the greatest insult to the families was at the funeral for their sons in Afghanistan. The military refused to allow a Christian minister or chaplain at the service and instead brought in a Muslim cleric who proceeded to slander the fallen.
“For some bizarre reason, probably this Muslim outreach again of Barack Obama, they had a Muslim cleric give a prayer. Why the heck you would have a Muslim prayer and the servicemen are Christian is beyond imagination. So it has to come from the top down. And this cleric then proceeded in Arabic. No one understood it at the time, but we have a video of it and it was translated by certified translators. It proceeded to damn my clients’ sons, and others who died, as infidels and that they should go to Hell under Allah, the Muslim god,” said Klayman.
“That’s unbelievable. We’ve never even gotten an apology from the military that they did that,” said Klayman, who is demanding a congressional investigation and says an announcement of litigation will be coming soon.
“This is a major scandal. This is as big if not bigger than Benghazi because it concerns all of the military,” said Klayman. “The mid-level military brass are not serving the interests of the brave fighting men that serve behind them. But the problem is that the tone and substance of these policies come from Barack Obama himself.”
Three Martini Lunch 5/13/13
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review are pleased to see the media not only covering the IRS scandal and the Benghazi investigation but being much more critical than usual of the Obama administration. They also discuss how much deeper and wider the IRS scandal is than the agency admitted last week. They scold Amb. Pickering for investigating Benghazi without ever interviewing Hillary Clinton. And they welcome the news that ’24’ will be back on the air next year.
Don’t Cry, I’m in Argentina
Former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford scored an unlikely political comeback this week, as he rebounded from a major sex scandal to win an open Congressional seat in South Carolina. The Capitol Steps observe his victory with the parody they recorded in the wake of his scandal, “Don’t Cry, I’m in Argentina.”
‘The Dam Has Burst Here’
Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton says the courage of three Benghazi whistleblowers may well trigger more critical revelations about what happened before, during and after the terrorist attack. He also says Democrats are unified at the moment in defending President Obama and former Secretary of State Clinton but are getting increasingly worried.
At the end of a week focused on Benghazi, including dramatic testimony Wednesday on Capitol Hill, new revelations are calling the Obama administration’s actions into question. ABC News reports the CIA talking points drafted in the wake of the attack were changed 12 times before UN Ambassador Susan Rice appeared on five Sunday morning talk shows. According to ABC’s Jonathan Karl, all references to Al Qaeda and terrorist attacks were scrubbed. Karl says the order came from State Department Spokeswoman Victoria Nuland, who did not want congressional critics to “abuse” the information in the original talking points.
Bolton says this latest news further confirms the critical testimony offered by former Libya Deputy Chief of Mission Gregory Hicks.
“This is what happens when you finally allow people who actually were involved in the events of 9/11 to testify,” said Bolton. “I think the most dramatic aspect of the testimony on Wednesday was the repeated assertion by Gregory Hicks and the others that this was never believed by anybody on the ground in Libya to be anything other than a terrorist attack.
“As Mr. Hicks said, the YouTube video was a non-event for us in Libya. He said all the embassies reporting from the get-go was that it was a terrorist attack. He said that he had said this to Secretary Clinton when she called him at 2 a.m. his time,” said Bolton. ” So there was no question here of conflicting intelligence, no question here of what the White House calls the fog of war. You don’t need intelligence reports when you can talk to your own employees in the State Department and other agencies who were right there on the ground. That’s why I think not just the re-writing of the talking points but the entire administration approach, including what Secretary of State Clinton said and including what the president said at the United Nations about the Mohammed video, were false and known to be false right from the outset.”
Bolton says it seems increasingly clear that the story of the YouTube video was a political concoction designed to minimize the damage of Benghazi during the final stretches of a presidential campaign. He says as bad as that sounds, the only other plausible explanation would be far worse.
“It was either a political cover-up or it was a demonstration of willful ideological blindness, the refusal to see facts that contradicted their theology that the war on terror was over,” said Bolton. “For the security and safety of our country, I hope that the explanation is that it was a political cover-up, because that you can expose and fix. But if it’s an ideological blindness and an unwillingness to see terrorism for what it is, we’ve got four more years of it in front of us.”
Bolton says the retaliation of the State Department against Hicks is nothing new in terms of how the government responds to whistleblowers. However, he says the fact that Hicks, Mark Thompson and Eric Nordstrom came forward to tell their stories means that this investigation is only beginning to ramp up.
“I’m hoping their courage will inspire others to come forward. Within the bureaucracy, once people start talking and pointing fingers it’s amazing what comes out, and the effort to maintain message discipline, which the Obama White House and Hillary Clinton’s State Department have been so good at, I think will just blow up in their faces,” said Bolton.
On Friday, congressional Republicans announced they are working to bring CIA operatives to Capitol Hill for testimony or to arrange media interviews for them. Bolton says there are still some critical questions that remain unanswered.
“There are a lot of questions, why there was a consulate in Benghazi to begin with that didn’t meet State Department security standards, why after two years of turmoil in the Arab world there weren’t more pre-positioned assets to protect against exactly what happened in Benghazi,” said Bolton.
He also says we need answers as to why Clinton was still publicly condemning the video at the ceremony to receive the bodies of the murdered Americans.
Bolton suggested earlier this week that Benghazi could be the downfall for the entire Obama administration. With Democrats unified in defending Obama and Clinton, that seems unlikely at the moment. But Bolton says Obama is quickly losing credibility as a result of his handling of Syria and Benghazi and the Democratic solidarity on this issue is getting substantially weaker.
“The behind-the-scenes conversation among Democrats on the hill is while they’ve still got the the front up because they’re trying to protect Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, they are very worried. They could see the dramatic, emotional effect that that testimony on Wednesday had on anybody who watched it. I think the more the American people hear from these three witnesses and others that might come forward, the more profound the effect will be,” said Bolton.
The mainstream media is spending more time covering the Benghazi investigation, and Bolton contends that will weaken the Democratic instinct to protect the administration even more.
“They see Jonathan Karl of ABC News, a major network, coming out and reporting and Sharyl Attkisson of CBS, who’s been on this and I think now finally vindicated, that they’ve failed to contain this in the blogosphere and on Fox News. With the mainstream media now having their competitive juices unleashed, I really do think the dam has burst here,” said Bolton.
Three Martini Lunch 5/10/13
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Daniel Foster of National Review are glad ABC News is revealing even more about how many changes were made to the Benghazi talking points for Susan Rice. They also rip Democrats and Gang of Eight Republicans for voting down amendments to the immigration bill that would have significantly strengthened border security. And they react to the big government uproar over a gun manufactured by a 3-D printer.
Hope, Frustration in Cancer Fight
Rapid progress continues on oral chemotherapy treatments that are far more effective and far less toxic than conventional alternatives, but the inability of Medicare and insurance companies to offer comparable coverage is draining the resources of many patients and leaving others unable to pursue treatment.
The mapping of the human genome has allowed doctors to determine which parts of cells are compromised by cancer and responsible for spreading it. As a result, oral chemotherapy allows for much more effective treatment against killers like myeloma, breast cancer and pancreatic cancer. It’s also far less toxic than traditional chemotherapy because the targeting of the medication requires far smaller dosages that wreak far less havoc on the immune system.
“What we’re seeing as a result of the new oral medicines is what we saw with HIV when you give a combination of treatments that’s matched to the way your genes respond to the disease and drug and you’re saving lives of people who otherwise would be dying early,” said Robert Goldberg, founder and vice president of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest, who wrote on the promise and financial frustration of these advancements in the May 8 edition of the New York Post.
So why are Medicare and insurance companies content to cover virtually the entire tab for conventional chemotherapy but not for the more effective and less harrowing oral drugs? Goldberg says it mostly comes down to money.
“There’s this disconnect between medical innovation and how insurance and Medicare are paying for things. First, it’s easier to get more payment for injections than it is to get for oral medications. Also physicians tend to get reimbursed more for injections than they do for dispensing a pill. They actually get paid for infusing, whereas for running a prescription there’s no extra fee that they can collect,” said Goldberg. “The second reason is, unfortunately, an obvious one. If you can shift the cost to the consumer, you see just how much you can get away with paying.
“It’s been hurting many, many patients. Twenty-five percent of all patients don’t even fill their prescriptions for these products at the first crack. Many doctors are putting people on less effective and less personalized medicine because it’s not affordable. Because these medicines keep people out of the hospital and extend their lives with less toxicity, they’re actually saving money. So in effect, the oral medicines are being subsidized by consumers and they’re saving insurers money,” said Goldberg.
While Goldberg is frustrated by the lack of coverage for oral chemotherapy, he strongly rejects assertions by The New York Times and others that the real problem is how much drug companies are charging for the medicine in the first place. In a May 2 editorial, the Times points out many oral chemotherapy drugs cost upwards of $100,000 per year. The editorial references a group of oncologists that considers those costs as “profiteering, like jacking up the price of necessities after a natural disaster.”
Goldberg says that blame is wrongly placed.
“I’m hoping that over the next few months and into the campaign season that we will have a discussion about what the value of medical innovation really is and we get off this silly attack on prices from The New York Times and from physicians and focus on the value,” said Goldberg. “The value of people living longer and added income and better health and less disability is about $4.2 trillion over the life of an individual, collective lives. Drug spending is about one percent of all that. So it’s a great great investment that goes to the bottom line which matters most, which is having more time on the planet to do the things you love and be with the people you care for.”
Goldberg is also hopeful that a solution to the coverage problems on oral chemotherapy drugs is near. He is strongly supportive of The Cancer Drug Coverage Party Act sponsored by Democratic New York Rep. Brian Higgins.
“You’re not telling the companies what to use but at least give the insurance companies and consumers a choice based upon what’s best for them. I think that’s a pretty straightforward proposition,” said Goldberg. “This is a smart 21st century way to reform health care and I’m hoping that this is just the beginning of reforming health care around what people want and what people can do rather than what the government wants the rest of us to do.”
Goldberg says the bill has bipartisan support and he says the Congressional Budget Office has recently alleviated concerns that this legislation would result in additional federal spending through Medicare and other programs.
“To spend something in Washington, in theory you’re supposed to cut somewhere else. Well the Congressional Budget Office has finally realized that if you spend money on these new medications, you’re going to save money by what you don’t spend in hospitalizations and having to deal with hospice and so on which are also very very expensive,” said Goldberg.
The Cancer Drug Coverage Parity Act of 2013 was introduced April 26. It has been referred to the House Energy & Commerce, Ways & Means and Education & Workforce Committees for consideration. The bill is officially known as H.R. 1801.
Administration Threats, Democratic Apathy
The chief witness in Wednesday’s congressional hearings into the Benghazi terrorist attack was threatened and ostracized by the State Department for protesting the White House narrative on the deadly strike and largely ignored and disrespected by Democrats in the hearing, according to his attorney.
Former Deputy Chief of Mission Greg Hicks told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that the attack on the consulate in Benghazi was a terrorist attack and had nothing to do with a YouTube video as suggested by President Obama, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice. Hicks further testified that his superiors rejected all efforts to launch a rescue mission during the attack and effectively ruined his career when he objected to the official explanation behind the strike.
“He was not a team player. He protested about Susan Rice’s talking points being false…and he had a reason for being upset about it. Not only were they false so our government was speaking with forked tongue, but it was causing problems with the Libyan government. The president of Libya had been on one of the same shows with Ambassador Rice and he had been humiliated in that he said it was a terrorist attack and she said no, it’s a video. Can you believe that lack of decorum?” said Hicks’ attorney Victoria Toensing.
Toensing says the next great frustration for Hicks came through State Department restrictions on his visit with Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz, when the congressman came to Libya to investigate the attack. She says the administration refused to allow Hicks to meet with Chaffetz without a State Department “minder” who was there to monitor and potentially object to the conversation, but the private discussion happened anyway.
“The lawyer minder was kicked out of a meeting, a classified meeting, because he didn’t have the right clearances. So my client then got a nasty phone call from Cheryl Mills, who was the chief staff person for Hillary Clinton, and she just chewed him out,” said Toensing. “Then he’s told by another superior after that nobody likes him in Libya and nobody wants him to come back. With that in mind, plus the fact he couldn’t bring his family over there now because conditions had changed, he would not go back there but he was assured by the then-ambassador there that he would not be punished. He has been in an office in Siberia ever since November.
“He does not have meaningful work. He cannot get an assignment abroad, and if he doesn’t by September 30, they want to shove him out,” said Toensing, who says Hicks was never given a reason for any of the unusual restrictions imposed on him by the State Department. She says it’s clear the treatment of Hicks is designed to send a clear message to others who might consider coming forward.
“He, because he wasn’t a team player and because he did all these things about letting Congress know about the security problems, was made an example of to the rest of the people. ‘Here’s what’s going to happen to you. You’re going to go back and sit in a desk in Siberia if you cross us so don’t cross us. That’s the threat. That’s the threat for government integrity because it’s keeping all these people back,” said Toensing.
Congressional investigators say there are at least two other State Department employees being heavily pressured not to come forward. Toensing also says the Accountability Review Board did not bring a stenographer when interviewing Hicks and investigators only took notes. Hicks was subsequently blocked from reviewing those notes or the unclassified version of the ARB’s report.
“That’s just a sloppy way to do an investigation,” said Toensing.
Toensing sat behind Hicks throughout his testimony on Wednesday and was taken aback at the very different approaches of the two parties.
“I had wished that there had been a photographer from my viewpoint because as I looked up at the hearing, all the Democrats were gone, except whoever was on the podium next to ask questions. It was empty on the left-hand side and all the Republican members were there,” said Toensing, who contends the Democrats had a strategy for the hearing. It just wasn’t to learn what happened in Benghazi.
“They had a theme. They would always open up by saying we really respect you guys but you guys are being used, which I thought was insulting,” she said.
Toensing says House Republicans should be prepared to issue subpoenas as the investigation moves forward, specifically for the chairman of the Accountability Review Board and Ambassador Rice.
Three Martini Lunch 5/9/13
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review are glad more of the troubling truth about Benghazi was revealed on Wednesday. They also criticize Democrats for trying to diminish and distract from the facts of the case. And they rip the media for their insane amount of coverage of the Jodi Arias trial and for covering that verdict instead of the Benghazi hearings.
Benghazi ‘Will Make Watergate Look Like Kindergarten’
Revelations in Wednesday’s Congressional hearings on the Benghazi terrorist attacks prove it is a massive scandal that will carry significant consequences for those involved in the cover-up, according to retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Tom McInerney.
McInerney served at the highest levels in the Air Force, including time as assistant vice chief of staff and vice commander-in-chief of U.S. Air Forces Europe. He believes the Obama administration deliberately misled the American people on the motivation for the attack and is now covering its tracks on decisions to prevent a military rescue in Benghazi. He says that is more clear than ever following Wednesday’s testimony of former Deputy Chief of Mission Gregory Hicks and two others before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
“This is going to be the biggest scandal. It is going to make Watergate look like kindergarten because Watergate was primarily limited to the Oval Office. This cuts across the whole national security apparatus, where people were lying and covering up,” said McInerney. “It is a dereliction of duty that this nation has never seen before.”
So type of consequences could that mean for the highest levels of the administration?
“Well, just see what the consequences were in Watergate. If it’s far worse than Watergate, the consequences will go right into the Oval Office,” said McInerney.
McInerney says the tell-tale sign of Obama’s dereliction of duty can be determined in the admitted White House narrative of the president’s actions as the terrorist attack played out the night of September 11. 2012.
“When is the exact minute he knew? We don’t have the timeline and it was well before the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff went over there. He only talked to the secretary of defense one time, so it’s obvious he knew that he had given the stand-down order and did not need to talk to the secretary of defense or anybody else after that,” said McInerney. “Then he goes the next day out on a fundraising campaign to Las Vegas. That is a low for the Commander-in-Chief of this great nation.”
He also insists the stand-down order could only come from one source – the president.
“The only person who could have given it was the president and he had to give it through the secretary of defense, secretary of state. The word came out so it came from the combatant commands and other unites below, but nobody could have given that except the President of the United States and that is very clear,” said McInerney, who notes the State Department’s own Accountability Review Board likely reached a similar conclusion in its report, which is why so few have seen it and the leaders of that study refuse to appear before Congress. McInerney believes they should be subpoenaed.
While he believes Obama has a lot to answer for, McInerney makes it clear that many top-level subordinates deserve a lot of the blame too and that’s what makes the scandal so troubling.
“It’s going to have significant consequences because it impacts two CIA directors, two secretaries of state, two chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, two secretaries of defense that are all involved now with the cover-up,” he said.
The general also singled out former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for her comment at congressional hearings in January in which she bristled severely at accusations the administration concocted a plan to blame the attack on a spontaneous demonstration over an anti-Islam YouTube video that got out of hand. Clinton slammed Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, saying, “What difference, at this point, does it make?” McInerney sees that as a low point in American history.
“That is one of the most despicable statements that any American has said about such a tragic incident when you lose people like that. It makes a huge difference that our troops know that they will always be protected as much as they can and we’ll do anything to protect them,” said McInerney. “She says what difference does it make? That will live with her til the day she dies. I can tell you, all the people I know, both active and retired, think that is one of the most despicable statements we have ever heard a civilian leader say in our country’s history,” said McInerney.
McInerney says the administration’s story is full of holes on a number of fronts, including the narrative about the supposed video protests. But the general says his own experience serving in that theater convinces him there was plenty of time and opportunity to deploy U.S. forces to protect Americans in Benghazi.
“We have never done that, that I know, in our military history, where we just abandoned and did not try to send in rescue forces. They could have gotten there from Aviano (Air Base in Italy) the F-16s. I used to fly F-16s out of Aviano when I was vice commander-in-chief of U.S. Air Forces in Europe. I know that scene very well. They could have made it. They said they didn’t have tankers. They could have dropped their tanks. They could have recovered at a nearby Italian air base on an island,” said McInerney.
“So it is unacceptable to me that we didn’t send those forces from Tripoli that we had there. We didn’t send F-16s and the FEST team to go in and to try to rescue those people. That was unacceptable, but from the get-go they had a narrative that they wanted to stick with that was a political narrative that the war was over, they had defeated Al Qaeda,” he said.