Searching For Josh Hamilton

By Marc Normandin

http://www.sportsonearth.com

June 27, 2013

It's been a rough year for Josh Hamilton, in both the seasonal and calendar senses. In his first year with the Angels after signing a five-year, $123 million free agent contract, Hamilton has hit .214/.269/.382. Sure, he's playing in a park we all knew would damage his numbers, but even adjusting for that doesn't tell a particularly pretty story: His OPS+, which adjusts for park and league difficulty, comes in at 82. Over a full season, Hamilton has never finished with an OPS+ below 130. Drastic doesn't even begin to describe that drop.

Hamilton's struggles have caused the Angels problems, as they invested a significant portion of their offseason moves and money into him, and they've come away with a player that is below replacement level according toBaseball Reference and Fangraphs, and one who is just ever so slightly above that level according to Baseball Prospectus. They're paying him to be a superstar, and he's performing like a generic scrub pulled out of Triple-A. It's not the reason, but it's one of the major reasons why the Angels find themselves 10.5 games out of first place in the AL West before the month of June has even finished.

Last year, Albert Pujols was the long-term disappointment, the player signed to a contract that even the Angels had to have known would eventually blow up in their face when he was old and expensive. The key, and the reason for blatantly disregarding that potentially awful future, was for the present: the Angels were so very close in 2011, and adding Pujols (along with starting pitcher C.J. Wilson) was supposed to help them now, when they were in a position to strike. Flags fly forever and all that, and when you looked at Pujols struggling in, say, 2020, you'd still have your banner from the last decade to console you.

That didn't work, as the Angels missed the playoffs after an 8-15 April essentially doomed them in the competitive AL West. This time around, they went with the same strategy, locking up another mega-free agent in his 30s. And while Hamilton didn't sign a decade-spanning deal like his predecessor, five years for $123 million is still a huge chunk of money and time, and quite the commitment to a player with plenty of question marks.

Those question marks are why it's hard to dismiss Hamilton's struggles from April through June as just a slump. Using the word "slump" implies that you're playing below your level. This is likely true to a degree -- Hamilton probably isn't quite this bad -- but as time passes, it becomes harder and harder to believe that he's significantly better than he's played this year.

No, three months of the season isn't a large sample … but that's not the only time frame in which Hamilton has struggled. The source of his troubles, oddly enough, might be his utter dominance of the league for the first two months of 2012. Hamilton hit .368/.420/.764 with 21 homers across April and May last season. He was the center of highlight reels almost continuously, for shot after shot, and he looked to have a real chance at the American League single-season home run record if he could keep up his outright silly pace. The league understandably stopped giving him pitches to hit, though, and pitchers started to tiptoe around him, throwing outside of the zone or on the outer portions of the plate where they could at least limit the damage.

Things didn't quite work out as pitchers expected, though. Instead of giving them a careful way around Hamilton, he kept swinging. And missing. It didn't take long to notice that Hamilton was hacking at pitches he couldn't do much with outside of the zone, and the league continued to pound him outside in order to turn this player who was an absolute giant for two months into a shadow of his former self. Hamilton hit .245/.322/.487 from June 1 onward, and he struck out 29 percent of the time in that stretch. Entering 2012, Hamilton had only struck out 18 percent of the time -- something was different, and the league had caught on.

He obviously still had his power, but he could be contained. So long as a pitcher didn't leave him a pitch he could crush, he was beatable. He struck out 51 percent of the time with two strikes on him, while the rest of the AL punched out just 39 percent of the time. The fear was gone, and pitchers knew they could get him if they just attacked the right way. His line still looked pretty solid, even considering that, but you have to remember, too, that he played in a park that inflates offense with the best of them: Hamilton hit .261/.340/.511 in Texas from June 1 through the season's end, but just .229/.304/.464 outside of it.

It's no surprise, then, that he's fallen even further now that he's just a little bit older, his bat just a little bit slower, and his home park that much more pitcher-friendly. Combine his play from June 1 last year up through his stats as of the start of Wednesday's game, and you get a hitter who has put up a .232/.300/.442 line. He's still got plenty of pop, as the .210 Isolated Power suggests, but his on-base percentage is well below where it needs to be, and that has more to do with his inability to collect hits than it does a lack of walks.

Since June 1 of last year, Hamilton has struck out 201 times in 737 plate appearances, or, 27 percent of the time. It only takes about 150 plate appearances for strikeout rate to stabilize for a batter, and at this point, Hamilton has rolled over that 150 plate appearance mark nearly five times in 13 months. It's probably safe to say that swinging and missing a lot is just part of what the 32-year-old outfielder does these days.

All those swings-and-misses put pressure on Hamilton's ability to post a high batting average on balls in play. He's only managed a .254 mark this year, and while that could and likely will rise with time -- again, he's probably not 650 OPS bad -- it's not necessarily going to be high enough to justify his contract, nor to save the Angels' season. What he's hit in the last year is probably a reasonable expectation: Inflated a bit by his old home park, but also dragged down by his current slump. Even if you toss him another 20 points in his slash line across the board, you're still talking about a .250/.320/.460 hitter making nearly $25 million a year, and that's in the first year of his deal. If you want to be really generous and add 30 points, $25 million still doesn't look great.

He's not a lost cause yet. He could still correct his course and alter his approach, going back to the good old days when a pitch outside or on the outer part of the plate wasn't necessarily something he'd take a hack at. David Ortiz had significant stretches just a few years back where his bat speed seemed to be betraying him as he aged, and he was swinging at pitches he never would have during his peak in an attempt to compensate. Hamilton is maybe unlikely to ever go back to those days fully, in terms of production -- not everyone can be David Ortiz, you know -- but recapturing as much of that old magic as possible would at least make him useful again, albeit overpaid. The fact that the Angels haven't been able to fix him in the time they've had him, though, suggests that that might not be in the cards. Let's not forget, the Rangers couldn't fix him either, and they let him walk away to their rivals.

It's not Hamilton's fault that the Angels offered him a contract that no one else seemed willing to give him -- remember the early days of the off-season market, when multiple clubs were interested, assuming they could get potentially damaged goods for a year or two? He will, however, become the face of their struggles, given his contract, and given the fact that his teammate Pujols has shaken off at least some of the cobwebs since his initial failures. He might not continue to struggle to the degree he has, but the way he has declined, and not steadily, over the last year suggests that the Angels and their fans are unlikely to be satisfied with whatever production he eventually settles into.

* * *

Marc Normandin writes and edits for Over the Monster, a Boston Red Sox blog, as well as SB Nation's baseball hub. He's one of many behind the e-book "The Hall of Nearly Great," and has written for BaseballProspectus, ESPN and others. You can follow him on Twitter at @Marc_Normandin.

What ‘Women’s Health’ Really Means

Abortion rights are the only "health-care choice" the Left concerns itself with. 

By Jonah Goldberg

http://www.nationalreview.com

June 28, 2013

When your grandmother gets some bad news, do you tell her: “Well, at least you have your abortion rights”?

Why not? Maybe it’s because whatever you think of abortion, the right to have one is not synonymous with a woman’s health.

But don’t tell that to the liberal group Think Progress. On Twitter, it recently teased some shocking news: “Why 2013 is shaping up to be the worst year for woman’s [sic] health in modern history.”

When I followed to the linked story, there was nothing about a spike in cervical- or breast-cancer rates. Nothing about occupational safety for female workers and no mention of female life expectancy either. Instead, the story was about how the ACLU says anti-abortion laws are on the rise across the country. 

Of course, this sort of thing is all over the place. Under the headline “Losing the Global Fight for Women’s Health,” Luisita Lopez Torregrosa, the “Female Factor” columnist for the international edition of the New York Times, writes of the allegedly horrific threat to women’s health posed by restrictive abortion laws in places like Africa, Asia, and Latin America. She makes no mention of the estimated 160 million women “missing” in Asia alone who were killed in gender-selective abortions.

Even the most ardent pro-life activist readily concedes that there are instances when an abortion is in the interest of the mother’s health. But it is bizarre to suggest that women’s health and abortion rights are interchangeable. The biggest killer of women is heart disease, followed by cancer, then stroke. I couldn’t find “lack of a timely abortion” on the CDC list.

And yet, President Obama — and nearly every other abortion-rights supporter — blithely accuses Republicans of wanting to make women’s “health-care choices” for them.

“You’ve got a state legislature up here that sometimes acts like it knows better than women when it comes to women’s own health-care decisions,” the president said at a typical rally in New Hampshire during the last campaign. “You know, my opponent’s got the same approach.”

How odd from the eponymous father of Obamacare, which will mandate that women (and men) pay for insurance coverage they don’t need. It will cause many women (and men) to lose their existing health-care plans. It will empower bureaucrats to decide what treatments for women (and men) the government will reimburse and which it won’t. Under Obamacare, women who smoke or are overweight can be charged 30 percent to 50 percent more for their health insurance.

These features are defensible from a liberal or statist point of view, but not if you actually believe that women have a special and unique right to make “health-care decisions” for themselves wholly unfettered by the government.

Which raises one irony to all this. By any objective measure, liberals are far more eager to use the government to make health-care decisions for women, because liberals want to make health-care decisions for all Americans — slightly more than half of whom are female. It’s Michelle Obama and Michael Bloomberg — not Michele Bachmann and Mitch McConnell — who want to tell women what they should eat and drink and how much they should exercise. 

Conservatives want to leave it to women to make their own choices: about what to eat, whether to smoke, how fast they can drive, whether they can own a gun, etc. Many conservatives would also like to see women live long enough to have the chance to make those decisions, rather than be snuffed out in utero.

Of course, this argument will be wholly unpersuasive to the folks shouting the loudest about “women’s health decisions.” Which raises an even greater irony. The basic conservative or pro-life view is that abortion is different from other health-care decisions because there’s a harmed party other than the mother. This fact, not sexism or traditionalism or theology, is what trumps the general conservative preference for individual freedom. You don’t have an unfettered right to harm someone else.

But once you get beyond abortion, conservative public policies treat women like autonomous human beings capable of making their own choices — about health care or anything else. It’s the abortion-rights extremists who boil down the vast range of issues and choices raised by the term “women’s health” to a single issue, sexual reproduction, as if women were nothing more than breeders. And yet conservatives are the ones who are called sexists.

— Jonah Goldberg is the author of The Tyranny of Clichés, now on sale in paperback. You can write to him by e-mail at goldbergcolumn@gmail.com, or via Twitter @JonahNRO. © 2013 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Jason Isbell, Happily Singing Sad Songs

Now sober and married to singer/fiddle player Amanda Shires, the former Drive-By Truckers star has a new outlook and a new album, "Southeastern."

By 
• STEVE DOUGHERTY

• http://online.wsj.com

May 30, 2013

After closing his set with a ditty about death, Jason Isbell wryly suggested that his listeners go out and see a feel-good movie, or catch a show by Cirque de Soleil.

"Yeah, I hoped they would do something happy to get that taste out of their mouth," says Mr. Isbell, a former mainstay of the alt-country rock band Drive-By Truckers. Now solo, he was performing a set at New York City's Rockwood Music Hall to showcase his new album of emotion-freighted story songs, "Southeastern," due June 11. "It's important not to bring everybody down too much, but I like to be up there playing those really sad songs."

Enlarge Image

Zuma Press

Jason Isbell grew up near Muscle Shoals, Ala.

Accompanied by his bride of three months, Amanda Shires, whose sweet mournful fiddle playing helped set the mood, Mr. Isbell, strumming a six-string and singing in a rich, clear-channel tenor, made death by cancer ("Elephant"), homicide ("Live Oak") and despair ("Stockholm") sound good. "Even when you're singing about miserable characters," he says, "there's a happiness in doing it right. If you tell a good story, there's a joy in that that transcends unhappy subject matter."

As much as he enjoys conjuring misery in song, Mr. Isbell says that he's never been happier. After a failed marriage (to former Drive-By Truckers bassist Shonna Tucker) and seeming bound for a booze-fueled fall, he turned his life around. In the space of a year, he quit drinking, finished a tour with fellow musician-in-recovery Ryan Adams, moved to Nashville to be with Ms. Shires, got engaged, recorded "Southeastern" on the eve of their February wedding and listened to final mixes while honeymooning in Costa Rica.

Amid all that whiplash life change, sobriety seems to have been the linchpin. "I wouldn't have gotten married if I hadn't quit drinking, I can tell you that for sure," Mr. Isbell says. "She wouldn't have put up with any more of that.

On stage, the rapport between the newlyweds is plainly evident. "I remember from my first marriage, being in a band with my first wife; it can be really, really difficult if things aren't going right," Mr. Isbell says. "A lot of people remember Linda kicking Richard Thompson in the shins when he's trying to play a solo. That's tough when that happens in front of an audience.

"But if things are going right as they are for me and Amanda, it's beautiful."

A gifted songwriter and performer in her own right, Ms. Shires, whose third solo album, "Down Fell the Doves," (Lightning Rod), is due Aug. 6, appears on one track of "Southeastern;" but she played a larger, impossible-to-credit role in birthing the album.

"We had just moved in together and got engaged," says Mr. Isbell. "We didn't want to spend a second apart from each other. But we needed to to get some work done. So we decided that two or three times a week we'll get up in the morning and you'll go to one part of the house and I'll go to another and we won't go to the movies or go out to dinner or watch Netflix or play Scrabble until we're each done writing a song. Then we'll play it for each other."

Mr. Isbell says that half the 12 tracks on "Southeastern" came from those writing sessions and "probably that many on her record too."

"It's a little intimidating," he says of the couple's head-to-head writing challenge. "She's got really good taste. I think there is [a sense of competition] but it's friendly competition; you don't want to get too competitive with your wife about anything. Like her grandfather says, you can either be happy or you can be right."

Raised in an extended musical family in one of the most music-rich sections of the south—his hometown of Greenhill, Ala. is a short drive from Muscle Shoals, Ala., home to FAME Studios, a soul music shrine—Mr. Isbell was taught to play and sing by his paternal grandfather, a Pentecostal preacher. "My first real exposure was a form of day care," he says. "My parents couldn't afford to send me anyplace they had to pay for so I stayed with my grandparents; my grand-dad would play music and teach me to play really early on. He did it to spend time with me and to bond, but also to keep my hands busy and keep me from breakin' stuff."

Schooled in his grandfather's gospel and "old country stuff," Mr. Isbell was sitting in "with the grown-ups" on bandstands as a 15-year-old high schooler. "My parents would drop me off on a Friday or Saturday night [at local restaurants that featured live music] and I would be there for three or four hours sitting in; some of those folks were David Hood [father of Drive-By Truckers co-founder Patterson Hood] and Spooner Oldham and other people who had worked on the Muscle Shoals [recordings] in the 1960s and '70s. As I got older, soul became my favorite kind of music and I listened and studied it. I went `Wow! David from the Mexican restaurant played on "I'll Take You There," by the Staples Singers!' "

After playing in local rock and country bar bands, Mr. Isbell was a junior at the University of Memphis when he was offered a 45-minute solo spot at a local coffee house. "I stayed up the night before the show and wrote 45 minutes worth of songs," he recalls. "Those were the songs that got me a publishing deal. Monthly money for writing songs!"

Back home in Alabama, Mr. Isbell's friendship with Mr. Hood led to an invitation to join the Drive-By Truckers in 2001. Six years later, Mr. Isbell launched his solo career following what may be the most congenial breakup in rock history.

As for his own story line, Mr. Isbell says the dramatics were kept to a minimum. When he quit drinking, he says, "there wasn't gunfire or anything. I just wanted to remember all this stuff. When it happened with the Truckers, I had a real good run but I don't really remember most of it.

"Most times you don't get two chances to find success in the music business. This time I want to remember all the little things, all the good shows and all the good days."

A version of this article appeared May 31, 2013, on page D4 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Jason Isbell, Happily Singing Sad Songs.

Today's Tune: Jason Isbell - Cover Me Up (Live)

Jason Isbell finds sobriety and his muse ... and a tour stop at Akron's Musica

By Chuck Yarborough, The Plain Dealer 

http://www.cleveland.com

June 24, 2013

Jason Isbell put down the bottle and picked up his muse, and now the former singer-songwriter with Drive-By Truckers is fronting his own band, Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, and writing some of the best music of his career. (Michael Wilson)

Jason Isbell, who first achieved notoriety singing and writing in Drive-By Truckers, had a problem and knew it.

The eighth-generation Alabamian with the sweet, plaintive voice and touching songs was headed down the same road as another 'Bama boy with a sweet, plaintive voice and touching songs -- a fellow named Hank Williams Sr.

Something was going to end for Isbell, either his life or his drinking. Fortunately for music fans, it was the booze. The result is that Isbell, who now fronts Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit (a name taken from the nickname of the psychiatric unit at an Alabama hospital), cleaned up his act. His singing and his songwriting are better than ever.

That's evident in "Southeastern," a poignant and sometimes painfully revealing album that hit stores earlier this month.

"The album is the culmination of a lot of hard work and a lot of changes in my life," said Isbell, who brings his band to Akron's Musica on Tuesday. "It's not the kind of album I could've written five or 10 years ago. I had to be a functioning adult to say a lot of things I wanted to say in this album."

Though it's not literally so, a lot of the disc sounds like a diary, with none of the ugly spots whitewashed. Facing up to your past, especially in such a public way as songwriting, can sometimes lead to a revisitation of it, but Isbell was able to avoid that.

"I really don't think that communicating is the kind of thing that makes me want to drink," said Isbell in a call to his Nashville home. "It's probably the opposite. Most of the time if I find myself wanting to fall back into my old ways, the best way to prevent it is to communicate that. That's what I'm doing in this record."

In no song is that more evident than in the haunting, "Live Oak."

There's a man who walks beside me 
It is who I used to be 
And I wonder if she sees him
And confuses him with me. 

It's not 100 percent autobiographical, since even in his boozing days, Isbell never robbed a Great Lakes freighter or bumped off a couple of enemies. But it's easy enough to read between the lines.

Some people might be wary of revealing that much of themselves. Not Isbell.

"All of my favorite writers do that," he said. "I grew up appreciating people like Neil Young and Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, who do that. They let people know who they are."

With just a smidge of poetic license, the man in Jason Isbell's songs IS Jason Isbell.

"You've got to give the audience pieces of yourself and as you go along, you allow them to see what you're really like," he said. "You're never going to reach a time when they turn their backs on you for saying something personal."

The result is a relationship of kindred spirits between artist and audience, Isbell said, and for that he's grateful.

"It's a strange thing to buy a ticket and go to a concert," Isbell said. "I do it a lot, and I appreciate people who do it, too. It doesn't put food on the table and it doesn't lead you to procreate (although sometimes it does). It's not helping your day to go home and have a life."

The fan doesn't buy just a ticket, then; he or she is also buying ownership in a relationship with the artist. And that's what the sober Isbell has realized.

Just in time.

G.K. Chesterton's Nightmare

By Philip Jenkins

http://www.realclearreligion.org

June 27, 2013

Thirty years ago, a British newspaper took an unscientific survey of current and former intelligence agents, asking them which fictional work best captured the realities of their profession. Would it be John Le Carré, Ian Fleming, Robert Ludlum? To the amazement of most readers, the book that won easily was G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, published in 1908.

This was so surprising because of the book's early date, but also its powerful mystical and Christian content: Chesterton subtitled it "a nightmare." But perhaps the choice was not so startling. Looking at the problems Western intelligence agencies confront fighting terrorism today, Chesterton's fantasy looks more relevant than ever, and more like a practical how-to guide.

Inevitably, my description has to give some spoilers, but they do not reveal any of the book's core revelations.

The book describes a Europe under threat from terrorists, from anarchists, dynamiters and assassins. To meet the threat, London's Metropolitan Police have formed an elite anti-anarchist squad, tasked to infiltrate the enemy. Following up a chance conversation, undercover detective Gabriel Syme attends a meeting of the General Council of the Anarchists of Europe, and is even elected to a vacancy in their leadership. This tight group has seven leaders, each of whom takes his codename from a day of the week. The mysterious overall boss is Sunday. Syme himself becomes Thursday.

Syme seems to have pulled off a major coup in the war against terror. But matters become more complicated, when he finds that he is not the only police infiltrator in the anarchist leadership. He discovers first another police spy, then another... could all the anarchist leaders really be detectives, or are all the detectives really anarchists? And who on earth is Sunday? Or is he not of this earth? As the detectives hunt the terrorists, and are themselves hunted, Chesterton creates a masterpiece of paranoia.

Chesterton himself was a bookish man with no real-world experience of police or intelligence. He did however have the dubious blessing of living in the first golden age of European terrorism, when issues of revolutionary subversion and counter-terrorism regularly filled the headlines. Since the 1880s, anarchist and revolutionary movements had carried out many violent acts across Europe and especially Russia, assassinating public figures and bombing trains and public meeting places. Scarcely less dangerous were nationalist and anti-imperial militants. Britain itself faced continuing threats from Irish and Indian activists.

Then as now, governments realized that the only way to defeat revolutionary terror was to penetrate and infiltrate the active groups, to gain intelligence about forthcoming attacks. Some agencies, though, carried this strategy to baroque extremes. The Russian secret police, the Okhrana, was notorious for the violence that it perpetrated itself in order to cast blame on revolutionaries, and also to establish the credentials of its own secret agents. When an agent infiltrated Russia's anarchist or Bolshevik underground, he naturally had to prove his credentials, to prove he was not a detective. And how better to do that than to carry out a vicious attack, by planting a bomb in a public place, even if that really did kill innocent civilians? Or imagine that police succeeded in converting and turning a terrorist to become one of their informants. If he was to remain in place to pass on priceless information, then naturally he had to be permitted to continue at least some violent acts, or his colleagues would immediately become suspicious.

Soon, even police agencies themselves had no idea whether a given attack was the work of real terrorists, or of agents and provocateurs notionally working for the regime. In this wilderness of mirrors, the only certain facts were provocation and deception. "Was anyone wearing a mask? Was anyone anything?" However fantastic The Man Who Was Thursday might appear, it was describing the stark realities of counter-subversion, with all their moral ambiguities. And that was what gave the book its appeal to latter day spooks.

Western intelligence agencies today operate under much stricter guidelines than their Russian Tsarist predecessors, but they still face similar dilemmas. Whether dealing with the IRA or Basque extremists, or today's Islamist militants, precisely the same issues recur. The only way to prevent terrorism is by gaining intelligence of what such groups are planning, before they launch attacks, and that means human intelligence. Despite recent advances in electronic surveillance, there is no substitute for either placing infiltrators in groups, or else winning over defectors. As the weary saying has it, "Everyone is an informant to somebody."

But it is not possible to run agents in those circumstances unless they are allowed to engage in at least some violent or criminal behavior. A host of European scandals in recent years have suggested the problems that result from such official tolerance. Sometimes, it seems as if the detectives really are all anarchists (or Islamists), and vice versa.

Just how far should agencies go to prevent terrorism? Chesterton's book includes another theme that agonizes today's security forces, namely the dilemma of knowing when radical thought and speech will translate into criminal action in the real world. A detective tells Syme of some radical innovations in counter-subversion: "The work of the philosophical policeman," he says, "is at once bolder and more subtle than that of the ordinary detective. ... The ordinary detective discovers from a ledger or a diary that a crime has been committed. We discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed. We have to trace the origin of those dreadful thoughts that drive men on at last to intellectual fanaticism and intellectual crime."

We might rephrase the problem in modern terms. If a bomb has been planted or a soldier murdered in the streets, then police agencies have failed in their duty, and should have intervened earlier. But does that mean that they should arrest or try someone for thoughts and writings that might someday lead to committing such actions? Or at least, should they keep potential subversives under surveillance? We think of the futuristic police units in the film Minority Report, in constant pursuit of "Pre-Crime." It's a nasty, Orwelllian idea. But might it be an ugly necessity?

These are unsettling questions. Reading Chesterton's "nightmare" reminds us that they are anything but new.

Philip Jenkins is a Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University and a columnist for RealClearReligion. His latest book is Laying Down the Sword.

Libyan Intelligence: Morsi, Muslim Brotherhood Involved in Benghazi

By Raymond Ibrahim 
http://frontpagemag.com
June 27, 2013


Egypt's president-elect Mohammed Morsi (AP)

According to a Libyan intelligence document, the Muslim Brotherhood, including Egyptian President Morsi, were involved in the September 11, 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, where several Americans, including U.S. ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, were killed.

On Wednesday, June 26, several Arabic websites, including Veto Gate, quoted the intelligence report, which apparently was first leaked to the Kuwaiti paper,Al Ra’i.  Prepared by Mahmoud Ibrahim Sharif, Director of National Security for Libya, the report is addressed to the nation’s Minister of Interior.

It discusses the preliminary findings of the investigation, specifically concerning an “Egyptian cell” which was involved in the consulate attack. “Based on confessions derived from some of those arrested at the scene” six people, “all of them Egyptians” from the jihad group Ansar al-Sharia (“Supporters of Islamic Law”), were arrested.

According to the report, during interrogations, these Egyptian jihadi cell members “confessed to very serious and important information concerning the financial sources of the group and the planners of the event and the storming and burning of the U.S. consulate in Benghazi…. And among the more prominent figures whose names were mentioned by cell members during confessions were: Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi; preacher Safwat Hegazi; Saudi businessman Mansour Kadasa, owner of the satellite station, Al-Nas; Egyptian Sheikh Muhammad Hassan; former presidential candidate, Hazim Salih Abu Isma’il…”

It should be noted that these findings are unsurprising: the supremacism of prominent Brotherhood figure Safwat Hegazi is such that he publicly declares the Brotherhood “will rule the world“;  Saudi Mansour’s hate-mongering, pro-Brotherhood TV station repeatedly aired footage of the YouTube Muhammad movie inciting violence around the Muslim world; popular Sheikh Muhammad Hassan holds that smiling to non-Muslims is forbidden, except when trying towin them over to Islam;  and Sheikh Hazim Abu Ismail is simply an openly anti-freedom, anti-infidel religious leader.

As for President Morsi, a video made during the consulate attack records people speaking in the Egyptian dialect: as they approach the beleaguered U.S. compound, one of them yells to the besiegers, “Don’t shoot—Dr. Morsi sent us!”

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Obama’s Climate Obsession

The radical ideologue in chief can no longer stand the heat, nor apparently his country.

By Ross Kaminsky

http://spectator.org

June 26, 2013

President Barack Obama wipes perspiration from his face as he speaks about climate change, Tuesday, June 25, 2013, at Georgetown University in Washington. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

The bond market suffered a mini-crash following President Obama’s ill-considered words all but firing Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke during a television interview with Charlie Rose.

Unemployment has been stuck over 7.5 percent for more than 50 months, the entirety of the Obama presidency.

The U.S. is being sucked into an ancient sectarian war in Syria, arming Sunni Muslims who will one day turn their weapons and training against us and Israel, our only true ally in the region.

And Barack Obama is focused on… climate change.

In a speech at Georgetown University on Tuesday, Obama laid out his new “climate action plan,” which regurgitates every radical and ridiculous environmentalist talking point of the past several years.

This despite the fact that while carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have continued to increase (to about 400 parts per million, or about 0.04 percent of the air we breathe), the global average temperature increase “over the last 15 years was just 0.06 degrees Celsius (0.11 degrees Fahrenheit) — a value very close to zero,” a trend that climate models have utterly failed to predict.

The fundamental flaw in the president’s thinking is shown by the 21 instances in his plan of the term “carbon pollution,” trying to confuse carbon dioxide, also known as plant food, with real pollutants and poisons such as mercury, arsenic, and lead — each of which the plan mentions as analogous to carbon in a hyperbole so obvious that nobody who doesn’t work for the Sierra Club could possibly buy it.

One wonders what planet Obama lives on when he says “climate change is no longer a distant threat — we are already feeling its impacts across the country and the world.”

Name one, Mr. President, at least one that is well supported by peer-reviewed science.

Does anybody actually believe that man-made climate change is responsible for “floods, heat waves, and droughts” or other severe weather events? Nobody who didn’t vote for Algore.

And does anybody really care? Not according to a Pew Research Center poll earlier this year in which
“dealing with global warming” came in last out of 21 policy priorities, even lower than “dealing with global trade.”

The White House put out a “tweet” on Saturday saying “We owe it to our kids to do something about climate change.” As Greg Pollowitz asks, based on paltry “retweets” and views of the video linked in the message, “Do Obamatons even care about the issue?”

But this isn’t actually about climate. Instead this is about the most radical of environmentalist attacks on coal and transportation in order to sacrifice the American economy, along with jobs and perhaps even lives, at the altar of “clean energy,” renewables, and ever-larger government.

As George Will put it memorably, “today’s ‘green left’ is the old ‘red left’ revised.”

Daniel Schrag, a key climate adviser to Obama, offered the true mindset behind the president’s new push: “The one thing the president really needs to do now is to begin the process of shutting down the conventional coal plants. Politically, the White House is hesitant to say they’re having a war on coal. On the other hand, a war on coal is exactly what’s needed.”

This war will involve directing the EPA to create federal standards for power plant emissions of carbon that will inevitably lead to the closure of low-cost power plants — in addition to the nearly 300 that have already closed this year.

To be sure, one reason that many coal-fired plants have closed is the development of massive domestic natural gas resources allowed by advances in drilling technology, particularly the combination of fracking and horizontal drilling. But this happened through market forces and rational asset allocation, not top-down government planning, which has never, in the United States, the former Soviet Union, or anywhere else, produced good results.

Not all parts of the country that have coal-fired plants also have easy access to natural gas pipelines. Therefore, the plants that Obama forces to close will result in substantially higher electricity bills — including for some of the poorest areas of Appalachia, which will also suffer increased unemployment from the shuttering of coal mines (offset somewhat by the export of coal to Asia).

In the meantime, coal state politicians, including Democrats, are fuming. Kentucky Senator Rand Paul (R) said that Obama’s war on coal is “a war on Kentucky jobs and our economy.” Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia says, “It’s unreasonable. What they’re doing has never been done.” But then, they’ve never before seen a president whose stated goal is to “fundamentally transform the United States of America.” He means it.

Other aspects of the president’s plan include:

• Infrastructure spending disguised as “preparation for climate change”
• Doubling renewable electricity generation
• $8 billion in loan guarantees for “advanced fossil energy projects”
• Increasing fuel economy standards
• “Reducing energy bills for American families and businesses”

Some thoughts on these:

Helping cities build infrastructure is not the role of the federal government. And even if it could be justified as such, the “stimulus” proved that “shovel-ready” jobs really aren’t. Rather billions of dollars get funneled to the administration’s political allies to allow them to buy votes with bike paths and buying cocaine for monkeys.

Utility-scale renewable electricity generation typically requires expensive conventional backup systems since the sun does not always shine and the wind does not always blow, except when President Obama is talking. That’s why, as the Energy Information Agency notes, “generation from renewable resources grows in response to federal tax credits, state-level policies, and federal requirements to use more biomass-based transportation fuels.” In short, nobody builds large-scale renewable systems because they want to, but because they are convinced (with other people’s money) or coerced to do so.

It takes a remarkably short memory (not to mention remarkable chutzpah) for the president who wasted billions of taxpayer dollars on “green” boondoggles such as Solyndra and Fisker to return with a proud offer to risk another $8 billion.

Calls for increasing CAFE standards even beyond the current improbable requirement of an average performance equivalent of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025 assume the availability of affordable technology that may be asked to repeal certain rules of chemistry and physics, or else cause car makers to produce lighter, less safe vehicles. Yes, Obama is willing to risk your life for his green agenda.

As for reducing energy bills, Obama’s plan will do exactly the opposite as he forces the nation away from efficient, high-density energy sources into inefficient, low-density sources invested in by Al Gore, George Kaiser, and other Democratic Obama-supporting associates. When it comes to crony capitalism, Republicans have nothing on these guys.

Other aspects of the plan include such feel-good (read “expensive, unaccountable, and probably permanent”) items as “supporting communities as they prepare for climate impacts” and promoting “resilience” in buildings, transportation, and health care.

No Obama plan would be complete without billions of dollars to fund “research” and agencies whose work product will be used to justify further spending, in a vicious cycle of junk science being used to incinerate Americans’ wealth and freedom. Thus, the president’s FY2014 budget includes nearly $3 billion for just those purposes.

And no Obama plan would be complete without aiming to subject U.S. sovereignty to competitors and rent-seekers in other countries and the United Nations: “As a key part of this effort, we are also working intensively to forge global responses to climate change through a number of important international negotiations, including the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.”

Combining the big-spending with the globalist, we have this gem: “We have fulfilled our joint developed country commitment from the Copenhagen Accord to provide approximately $30 billion of climate assistance to developing countries over FY 2010 — FY 2012. The United States contributed approximately $7.5 billion to this effort over the three year period. Going forward, we will seek to build on this progress…”

Yes, the United States of America is being run by a man who believes that transferring $25 from every man, woman, and child in America to third world countries in the name of “climate assistance” is progress — and is just the beginning. What could that money have bought in the U.S., particularly if left in the hands of the productive private sector? But then we have a leader (and I use that term very loosely for a man who has less leadership ability than any Little League coach) who believes that profits are inherently ill-gotten and serve only to facilitate redistribution of wealth.

It is one thing for a president to have an agenda, to try to sell it to the American people, to pass bills in Congress and act through the legislative process. It is another thing entirely — it is tyranny — to go around the lawmakers in order to implement massive, multi-billion-dollar-impact regulations through executive agency rule making.

But this is the crew that is willing to make recess appointments of union thugs to the NLRB when the Senate is not in recess. This is the crew that has subverted the integrity of the Department of Justice, the IRS, the EPA, even the FDA, and for whom its statist ends always and everywhere justify the means.

Policies designed to increase the price of the most efficient high-use fuels, particularly coal and diesel, will raise the cost of everything Americans buy. But that’s just the most obvious part of the damage new EPA regulations will cause.

As author Paul Driessen puts it, “Fuel, compliance and business costs will soar. Companies will be forced to outsource work to other countries, reduce workforces, shift people to part-time status or close their doors. Poor and minority families will be unable to heat and cool their homes properly, pay their rent or mortgage, buy clothing and medicine, take vacations, pay their bills, give to charity, and save for college and retirement.” Driessen argues further that by increasing unemployment, EPA rules and regulations actually harm the health of Americans, causing depression, heart attacks, suicides, and “declining overall life expectancy.”

Congress does have a tool to fight the coming draconian regulations through the Congressional Review Act, though it has historically had little success through this route. Much will depend on the results of the 2014 elections, which will take place before the EPA can finalize and implement new rules.

In his Tuesday speech, the president coughed up one morsel of alarmist gristle after another:

• “Our planet is changing in ways that will have profound impacts on all of humankind.” Of course, he has no idea whether that is true, or whether impacts would be positive or negative.
• “Ice in the Arctic shrank…faster than most models predicted it would.” Of course, he doesn’t mention that over the past six months, the Arctic sea ice extent has expanded rapidly and is now above the average for the past decade at this time of the year, nor that Antarctica — which holds 90 percent of the world’s ice (that is not a typo) — has been gaining ice for decades.
• “2012 was the warmest year in our history.” Of course, he doesn’t mention that that bit of data is an artifact of government data manipulation: the government added new weather stations that didn’t exist during the hotter years of the 1930s and in fact 2012 was likely not in the top 10 warmest years.
• “97 percent of scientists…have acknowledged that the planet is warming and human activity is contributing.” Of course, he doesn’t mention that the 97 percent number has been demonstrated to be afabrication: According to research into the study with the 97 percent claim, it is “obviously littered with falsely classified papers making its conclusions baseless and its promotion by those in the media misleading.”

The insightful (and very funny) Chris Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute suggests that “the word on the street… is that this is a rather clumsy, ham-fisted effort to give a sop to the green movement because (Obama) plans to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, which is of course a no-brainer.”

I disagree. This is a president who has said for years that he intended to bankrupt the coal power industry, and that his plan will cause electricity prices to “necessarily skyrocket.” He is a radical (environmentalist, socialist, you name it) in his heart, motivated far more by ideology than pragmatism or even politics. He is blissfully unfettered by concern for the rule of law or the Constitution.

During his Tuesday speech, Obama said, “The net effects of the pipeline’s impact on our climate will be absolutely critical to determining whether this project can go forward.” He will search the various reports that reach his desk to find one that agrees with his pre-determined conclusion to avoid permitting Keystone XL.

It comes down to this: Carbon generally, and carbon dioxide specifically, are not pollution. CO2 is plant food. It is a weak greenhouse gas with declining (logarithmic) impact on climate as concentrations increase. One study argues that the first 20 parts per million of atmospheric CO2 “accounts for over half of the heating effect to the pre-industrial level of 280 ppm, by which time carbon dioxide is tuckered out as a greenhouse gas.”

While Barack Obama may not know this, his advisers do. But when the alarmist cult’s goal is fundamental transformation of the country and the destruction of one of the most important fuel sources of the past century, who cares about the facts?

Even the Economist magazine, which had bought into climate alarmist hype, is now cooling its rhetoric. Yet Barack Obama, in his desire to leave what the suck-ups at Time magazine suggest would be an “impressive legacy on climate change,” is plowing ahead with his anti-capitalist, anti-consumer, anti-democratic crusade against the American economy, consumers and jobs.

But at least there’s nothing else important going on in the world.

Big Brother (Uncle Sam) Is Trying to Rewrite Our History -- Again

By Diana West

http://dianawest.net/

June 21, 2013

Former Florida Governor and Senator Bob Graham before speaking on national security at a presentation at the Hyatt Regency in Sarasota. (TIFFANY TOMPKINS-CONDIE)

Read more here: http://www.bradenton.com/2013/06/06/4556337/former-sen-graham-fbi-holding.html#storylink=cpy

The narrow boxes through which we find ourselves entering public debate over the rise of a totalitarian government surveillance infrastructure are driving me a little crazy.

“Edward Snowden: Hero or traitor?”

Pick one, now, the question demands, before we learn anything else, think anything more. In this way, our attention is focused onto Snowden, the man, not Uncle Sam, the secret megastate. We wade into a vortex of emotions whirling around loyalty to the republic: a republic with sovereign borders, or so we hope; that runs by rule of law, or so we think; where citizenship is precious, or so we imagine.

What Snowden’s revelations confirm, however, is that such a republic no longer exists – except as a mirage that powerful Surveillance State officials spin as reality.

Tap, tap – answer the question! “Hero or traitor?”

“Traitor!” some cry, never noticing that Snowden’s leak makes him a “traitor” to the Surveillance State, not the republic of memory. But such a gaffe is fine with our Big Brothers, from President Obama and FBI Director Robert Mueller to former Vice President Dick Cheney.

Listen the next time they insist that it is only the current state of mass surveillance that can preserve our folkloric republic, its residual form currently being liquidated by “immigration-reforming” U.S. senators, whose “hero” or “traitor” status we might also weigh. Listen the next time they argue that only PRISM, only stockpiling hundreds of millions of cellphone conversations, emails, texts and other personal records, can prevent a fiery cloud of new 9/11s.

Now they are even telling us that the first 9/11 could have been prevented altogether had the mass surveillance infrastructure been in place at the time.

This is a whopper too far, and with the gravest implications. Big Brother is rewriting our history again, after having withheld too many facts from We, the People, about 9/11 all along.

This new Big Lie about 9/11 is that the Snowden-leaked programs of data mining and cellphone collection might well have led authorities to identify two key Saudi hijackers in San Diego and roll up the whole al-Qaida plot. As former Florida Sen. Bob Graham, who served as co-chairman of the Congressional Joint 9/11 Inquiry, has made abundantly clear, this particular pair, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, was already well-known to U.S. intelligence authorities for ties to the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania and other hostile activities. Indeed, the CIA had even listened in on conversations at an al-Qaida safe house in Yemen that referenced the pair as far back as December 1999 – no PRISM necessary.

For reasons unknown, the CIA did not nominate them to any U.S. terror watch lists, and they were able to live and take flying lessons and consort with other Saudi nationals in the U.S. in plain sight up until the 9/11 attacks.

Why? Are we looking at government incompetence as usual? Or how about more special U.S. treatment for Saudis? In Graham’s excellent book Intelligence Matters, he recounts the instructive experience of U.S. immigration official Jose Melendez-Perez, who, following an alarming entry interview at Orlando airport with a Saudi man named Mohammed al-Qahtani, barred al-Qahtani’s entry into the country.

“Many of the other agents thought Melendez-Perez was risking his career because … it is made clear to customs officials in their training that Saudis are different,” Graham writes. “He told me he was taught that a Saudi … is to be treated with deference and special respect.” Graham continues: “Melendez-Perez’s instincts proved correct. Waiting outside the airport for al-Qahtani’s arrival was Mohamed Atta.”

Not a byte of data mining necessary.

Meanwhile, the information linking 9/11 hijackers to other Saudis in California is information congressional investigators developed themselves. The FBI, as Graham has long attested, withheld evidence from Congress’ Joint Inquiry – and, later, the 9/11 Commission. Why? More Saudi cover-up, it seems. It doesn’t stop. For example, the 28-page section of the inquiry's final report on “sources of foreign support for some of the Sept. 11 hijackers,” remains classified, another bone of Graham’s contention.

In 2011, reporters Anthony Summers and Dan Christiansen broke the news in BrowardBulldog.org that the FBI withheld more information from the Congress’ inquiry: its investigation into another Saudi 9/11 support network, this one in Sarasota, Fla. The FBI rejected the claim, insisting the agency had informed both the 9/11 Commission and Congress's inquiry about its investigation, which it also claimed had gone nowhere.

“This assertion by the FBI was not credible,” Graham writes in a sworn declaration dated May 31, 2013, attached to a Freedom of Information lawsuit brought by BrowardBulldog.org in federal court in Fort Lauderdale. Graham also writes that he contacted 9/11 Commission co-chairmen Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton and reports that neither of them had ever heard of an FBI investigation in Sarasota, either.

More important, as Graham states, the FBI’s failure to call attention to “documents finding ‘many connections’ between Saudis living in the United States and individuals associated with the terrorist (attacks) … interfered with the Inquiry’s ability to complete its mission.”

This stonewalling continues under the Obama administration. In his sworn declaration, Graham names names. These include presidential-adviser-turned-CIA Director John Brennan, who fobbed him off, and deputy FBI Deputy Director Sean Joyce, who has blocked Graham’s efforts to pursue the Sarasota story at every turn. Graham states that Joyce advised him that he, Joyce, had instructed the FBI agent in charge of the Sarasota investigation (since transferred to Honolulu!) not to speak to Graham.

“I am troubled by what appears to me to be a persistent effort by the FBI to conceal from the American people information concerning possible Saudi support of the Sept. 11 attacks,” Graham writes.

Also troubling is watching the U.S. government hide and twist history – the shocking subject of my new book, American Betrayal – in real time. We can’t let them do this to us again.

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