Category Archives: Scapegoat

It’s done, verdict announced

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The Ferguson verdict was announced last night. To no one’s great surprise, Darren Wilson was not charged. In fact, the prosecutor released all the evidence collected, much more than normal, to the media. The evidence was overwhelming. Michael Brown attacked Wilson, not once but twice. Wilson defended himself and shot Brown.

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Violence erupts in Ferguson: Fire, looting, arrests

But that doesn’t make any difference to those who are determined to riot regardless of the verdict. Before the night was over, thirty-one people had been arrested, numerous businesses were looted, a dozen buildings, along with at least two police cars, were burned, and shots were fired. None of those shots were fired by police. All were fired by members of the mob.

Missouri Govenor Jay Nixon sent members, upwards of 1,000, of the National Guard to St. Louis. However, he didn’t release them to quiet the rioting until almost midnight, well after much of the damage had been done.

I should not be but I’m continually amazed at Nixon’s incompetence and stupidity. What Nixon should have done was to deploy those Guard troops around the expected hotspots well before the announcement. With them in place, with orders to stop any looting and burning at first sight. And, if they were fired upon by the mob, to return fire.

For those of you too young to remember the LA riots of the ’60s, rioters and snipers fired upon National Guardsmen from the roofs and upper stories of buildings. The Guard returned fire with vehicle-mounted machine guns. In some cases turning the buildings into sieves. The sniping and rioting quickly stopped.

(I tried to find some links for the Guard responding to the Watts riots, but couldn’t find any that reported the events accurately. I remember those 1965 riots quite well. I was in college at the time taking a modern history class. We analyzed the riots closely. Now, some fifty years later, little can be found on the internet about the riots in Los Angles, the Watts Riots, that hasn’t been tainted with liberal viewpoints. The use of National Guardsmen has been painted as a counter-riot when it was not.

I remember watching live TV when a Guard jeep driving slowly down a street on patrol was taken under fire by several snipers on rooftops. The Guardsmen returned fire using their personal arms and the jeep-mounted machine gun. The sniping quickly ended with the snipers dead or having fled. The rioting ended soon after the arrival of the National Guard. Many of the Guardsmen were also combat veterans.

That real story can’t be found today. It’s been censored by the left.)

The bottom line is that the liberal government of St. Louis and Ferguson, abetted by Governor Jay Nixon, allowed the rioting to happen. Most of the damage was to locally-owned residents of Ferguson, minority owners. The liberal politicians of St. Louis and Jeff City, the leaders who were obligated to act and prevent violence, did nothing.

Al Sharpton and other thugs are on the way to Ferguson. They have no intention of quieting the situation. They will do anything and everything to cause the situation to get worse. The greater the disturbance the more their agenda will be enhanced. If Nixon and the St. Louis Police Chief were smart, they’d meet these thugs at the airport gate and put them on the next plane out from St. Louis to any destination.

But, they won’t. The trouble in Ferguson will continue until someone in authority gets fed up and deals with the situation. In the end, Ferguson will be a burned-out hole in St. Louis County. It will be area where no business will come, where insurance companies will not insure existing businesses and without insurance, no business can survive. Jobs will be lost, more than have already been lost, and Ferguson will turn into another blighted area, with no jobs and no hope of jobs.

In the coming months and years, residents will leave. None of them will return. Ferguson and the surrounding area will turn into another Detroit littered with abandoned buildings amid weeds, debris and crumbling infrastructure.

Why did this happen? Because there exists a culture of self-destruction that is dependent on the largess of government, governments, local, state and federal that really does not care what happens to the residents as long as they vote for democrats, a party that keeps them enslaved. Just look at the history of Detroit for the last fifty years and you will see the future of Ferguson and probably St Louis.

The Ferguson situation isn’t whites oppressing blacks. There are more blacks in Ferguson, by a large majority, than whites. No, the residents of Ferguson chose their government, did it to themselves. There is a lesson there in full display. Few in Ferguson and elsewhere, will learn from it. It isn’t politically correct.

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Sacrificial Scapegoat

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The ‘Court has been busy.  Very busy in fact. I’ve been asked to build a new website. It’s coming along nicely but it is eating into my blogging time. I expect that to continue for the next several weeks.

This is a heads-up. Blogging may be light until the new website, WMSA, is finished.

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VA Secretary Eric Shinseki January 2009 – May 2014

Obama and the dems in jeopardy are blaming the situation in the VA on retired General Eric  Shinseki. He’s a relative newcomer as VA Secretary. As retired military, they’ve decided to make him the whipping boy for the institutional failings of the VA.

Obama wants someone to blame for his own failings in leadership. The dems in jeopardy want someone to blame and say, “See! We fired him. All is fixed,” and then proceed with business as usual. They want a scapegoat and Shinseki is the one they have picked. Shinseki has been VA Secretary since January, 2009 and is himself a wounded combat veteran having lost part of one foot to a landmine while in combat as a Forward Artillery Controller.

As I was writing the paragraph above, this news item dropped into my Inbox.

Eric Shinseki is out! Obama sacks Veterans Affairs secretary

By Dave Boyer and Jacqueline Klimas, The Washington Times

Updated: 11:33 a.m. on Friday, May 30, 2014

President Obama accepted the resignation Friday of Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki, amid a burgeoning scandal over delayed care for veterans at VA hospitals.

In a hastily arranged statement after meeting with Mr. Shinseki at the White House, the president said he accepted the resignation “with considerable regret.”

The president said VA Deputy Secretary Sloan Gibson will take over on an interim basis.

Mr. Obama said Mr. Shinseki presented him with preliminary findings that showed the delayed care has affected veterans at “many” facilities across the country. The president said it was “totally unacceptable.”

The president also said Mr. Shinseki had begun to fire several VA officials deemed responsible for the problems.

Asked if he’s responsible for the problems, Mr. Obama said, “I always take responsibility for whatever happens” in his administration. But he also said the VA’s problem “predates my presidency.”

“The VA is a big organization that has had problems for a very long time,” he said.

The scandal began last month when a whistleblower revealed that veterans were being placed on a “secret wait list” at the Phoenix VA facility that almost guaranteed they would not receive timely care. The initial report caused a handful of GOP lawmakers to call for Mr. Shinseki to step down.

A preliminary investigator general report released Wednesday, however, substantiated many of the claims and opened the floodgates, with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle demanding the retired four-star general step down immediately.

The report found that 1,700 veterans at the Phoenix facility had never been placed on the official electronic wait list, meaning their wait time couldn’t be tracked and they likely would not see a doctor. This delay in care and manipulation of data was systemic, stretching across the entire VA system, according to the report. More than 40 facilities across the country are under investigation, the report said.

Prior to his resignation, almost 120 lawmakers — 38 of whom were Democrats — had called for Mr. Shinseki to step down.

While the president was initially supportive of his Cabinet chief, Mr. Obama’s faith in Mr. Shinseki appeared to wane after the report was released. In a press conference Thursday, White House spokesman Jay Carney said Mr. Obama was anxiously awaiting results of an internal VA audit due early next month that will give a sense for how widespread the problems are at the embattled department.

“When he receives the internal audit, he’ll be able to evaluate those findings,” Mr. Carney told reporters at the White House, backing away from previous expressions of support. “I’m just not going to speculate more about personnel.”
Mr. Shinseki was sworn in as the secretary of veterans affairs in 2009. Prior to that, he served as the Army Chief of Staff and leader of the Army during Operations Iraqi and Enduring Freedom, according to his VA bio. The West Point Graduate was awarded two Purple Hearts and three Bronze Stars with valor during his almost 40-year military career.

Military veterans have a proprietary view of the VA. VA Hospitals are THEIR hospitals. Wounded veterans were, until the VA was turned into a bureaucracy, guaranteed free healthcare for the rest of their lives. They earned that guarantee with their service and bodies.

Some politicians think privatizing would help restore confidence in the VA and return it to the level of service veterans want and expect. Many veterans also oppose this idea, believing privatization is a refutation of those guarantees. The VA is not, and has not delivered those guarantees for a long time.

I’m a veteran. I’ve been fortunate to not have needed the VA, except to guarantee the mortgage on my first home in the 1970s. I have no service related documented injuries that would require using the VA. I don’t have that proprietary view that so many veterans have. I believe privatization would help and help is desperately needed.

Perhaps, like so many needed changes in the FedGov, it is time to make one more change—not a new VA Secretary, but moving the VA out of the incompetent hands of the government.

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Parade of the scapegoats

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The Obama administration had a parade, a parade of scapegoats. First in the IRS scandal, Obama announced that Acting IRS Director Steven Miller had resigned. The problem is that statement? Miller was the Acting Director.

According to the IRS website, he assumed the position of Acting Director in November, 2012, six months ago. He told his staff previously that his term was ending in June, 2013. In other words, he was leaving that position anyway. Obama used that previously scheduled departure to appear to be doing something while actually doing nothing.

Then they blamed the low-level employees at the Cincinnati IRS office. First, it was just a single employee who was processing the Tax Exempt applications. Then, it was more than one, it was several, a number who acted on their own.  What do those low-level IRS employees have to say? “sources went on say that these four IRS workers claim ‘they simply did what their bosses ordered.’ (FOX News)“

FOX19 EXCLUSIVE: Four local IRS workers allegedly connected to scandal

Posted: May 15, 2013 9:50 PM CDT Updated: May 16, 2013 5:33 AM CDT By Ben Swann

CINCINNATI, OH (FOX19) –

FOX19 has exclusively learned that as many as four people may be the first Cincinnati Internal Revenue Service (IRS) employees to face disciplinary action, and possibly even criminal charges, for allegedly targeting Tea Party and Liberty groups applying for non-profit status.

On Wednesday, the IRS announced that it had pinpointed two employees at the agency’s Cincinnati office for being ‘primarily’ responsible.

In addition, acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller resigned his position, revealed by President Obama on Wednesday.

“Secretary Lew took the first step by requesting and accepting the resignation of the acting commissioner of the IRS, because given the controversy surrounding this audit, it’s important to institute new leadership that can help restore confidence going forward,” said President Obama in a statement on Wednesday evening.

Prior to his resignation, Steven Miller called the two Cincinnati employees ‘rogue’ and ‘off the reservation,’ adding that they were ‘overly aggressive’ in handling the requests from those conservative groups over the past two years.

Miller also added that those two employees have already been ‘disciplined’ by the agency.

However, despite the claim of just two employees being involved, FOX19 has exclusively learned from two separate sources that there could be at least four Cincinnati employees involved.

Those four employees, whose names we have chosen to withhold until they have been officially confirmed, have each worked in the IRS Exempt Organizations Department.

This is the same department that has admitted publicly to sending letters to Tea Party and other conservative organizations.

In the DoJ investigation of “national security” leaks to the press, Att’y General Eric Holder said he had recused himself of that investigation. When asked about the AP wiretaps and subpoenas, his repeated mantra was, “I don’t know.” In Holder’s session before congress, he appeared to be proud of his ignorance of the investigation.

Eric Holder Says He’s ‘Not Sure’ How Many Times DOJ Sought Journalists’ Records

The Huffington Post  |  By

Posted: 05/15/2013 10:40 am EDT  |  Updated: 05/15/2013 12:26 pm EDT

…Attorney General Eric Holder on Tuesday said he was unsure how many times he’d signed off on subpoenas to seize reporter records.

“I’m not sure how many of those cases that I have actually signed off on,” Holder told NPR’s Carrie Johnson. “I take them very seriously. I know that I have refused to sign a few, pushed a few back for modifications.”

The comments from Holder are bound to stir up additional criticism of the Obama administration’s approach to First Amendment protections for reporters. The president and his staff are already under intense scrutiny over the Department of Justice’s decision to subpoena the phone records for more than 100 journalists at the Associated Press. That Holder could not recall how many times he has done something similar in the past will only fan those flames.

Holder revealed Tuesday that he had recused himself from an FBI investigation into the alleged leak of classified intelligence to the AP. The leak revealed a would-be suicide bomber who was also a CIA undercover agent. The department seized records for more than 20 phone lines from AP offices in Washington, New York and Hartford, Conn., from April 2012 and May 2012.

Holder, in his press conference, remained vague about the scope of the subpoenas. “The people who are involved in this investigation who I’ve known for a great many years and who I’ve worked with for a great many years followed all the appropriate Justice Department regulations and did things according to DOJ rules,” he said. “Based on the people that I know — I don’t know about the facts — but based on the people that I know, I think that subpoena was done in accordance with DOJ regs.”

And what about the subordinate who was in charge of the AP investigation? It’s a classified matter and he can’t talk about it. Nice quandary isn’t it? Holder doesn’t know and the one who does, isn’t allowed to talk.

I don’t know who Holder assigned the AP investigation, but if I were him, I’d get my resume in order and be careful not to turn my back on Holder, lest a knife slips through my ribs.

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