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Ouch! — Why Now?
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Ouch!

The Mittster has had unkind things said about him by the editors of the Local Puppy Trainer: Romney, Carter and Desert One

The Daily News isn’t interested in defending President Obama’s role in the killing of terrorist Osama bin Laden. The president reinvigorated the hunt for bin Laden after it had gone slack; he overruled advisers to launch the final raid; and he succeeded where his predecessor had failed. We don’t have to defend him. He doesn’t need our help.

“Even Jimmy Carter would have given that order,” Mr. Romney said with a sly smile.

His message was clear: The raid to kill bin Laden was such a high-reward, low-risk affair that even an indecisive fop like Carter would have OK’d it.

The Emerald Coast has never forgotten the sacrifices of those who died at Desert One.

Jimmy Carter is not our favorite former president, but implying that he was a doofus who took the easy way out shows that Mr. Romney either doesn’t know what happened on April 25, 1980, or doesn’t care.

Five airman stationed at Hurlburt Field died on the Desert One mission. Mr. Romney needs to find some competent people to advise him on national security and recent history, because he just ticked off the Special Ops people, and their supporters.

Cyrus Vance, Carter’s Secretary of State, opposed the mission, and resigned when Carter approved it, holding his resignation until after the mission took place to avoid giving any indication that something significant was about to happen. It definitely wasn’t a unanimous decision by Carter’s advisors, nor an easy decision to make.

5 comments

1 Steve Bates { 05.05.12 at 2:56 am }

OT, WordPress.com just (about 2 AM CT) axed my blog for an alleged TOS violation… but they didn’t tell me what it is.

As usual when I move, my generic forwarding address http://www.yellowdoggereldemocrat.org will take you wherever I’m blogging at the moment. Right now, while I try to resolve the WP conflict, I’m at my old Blogger blog. I may be stuck there forever; who knows.

2 Bryan { 05.05.12 at 12:18 pm }

OT: You are visible at WordPress this morning. My experience is that too much of what passes for administration these days is done by software, which isn’t always well written.

The only reason that I stay with my current spam filter on comments is that it occasionally lets something through to be moderated, and what it lets through isn’t always obvious until you look at the sites they reference in the name. Some of the others are just too restrictive.

Software is no smarter than the people who wrote the specifications that were coded.

3 Steve Bates { 05.05.12 at 4:45 pm }

I now have a post up on my Blogger blog (linked in Website above) about what apparently happened. WordPress.com … not the s/w but the company… seems to be serving as somebody’s censor. I had a link to something they didn’t like, so they deactivated my blog without so much as a mention to me of what the problem was. You are right that some sort of WordPress ‘bot did the deed, but the real question is why not only was the offending site (someone we all used to know online a few years back) eviscerated… no graphics or links… but also every link to it was a trigger for a blog death penalty, no trial, no notice.

I have removed the “offending” link on my WordPress.com blog… but I have been up for 24 hours dealing with this and I’m now giving serious thought about whether I will continue to trust WP or simply switch back to Blogger. At present I’m leaning toward the latter, though I do not like the Blogger interface nearly as well. I welcome your opinion.

4 Steve Bates { 05.05.12 at 4:52 pm }

Oh, and it occurs to me that CultureGhost knew the guy to whom links are now banned, and CG’s Blogger blog has disappeared in just the last couple of days. Hmmm…. maybe it’s not just WordPress. I don’t know if you can answer this question, but does DHS or FBI do crap like this, or force blog hosting companies to do it?

5 Bryan { 05.05.12 at 8:27 pm }

Actually, this may be the result of a problem I noticed a while back with Needlenose. Eset started blocking it as an ‘unsafe’ site out of the blue, and Needlenose has had to reset to a totally new system to get rid of whatever it was. Pharyngula had a similar problem for a while if you went beyond the front page.

In those cases it was probably caused by a trojan in an ad, but this is another way they are spreading viruses, by buying ads on sites.

Link farming is a major annoyance in the WP community, but this sounds more like the site was taken over and sending malicious code out. That would be dealt with by a bot looking for links to the site and take-downs on the link. As anyone who has complained about link-farming knows, the hosts can’t really do much about it officially unless there is a copyright violation. I get a feeling that the link was leading to malicious software.

CG and the crew he hung out with have been pretty bummed out lately with Area 51 being their last refuge on the ‘Net, so they may have just moved on to other things.

It is highly unlikely HSD or the FBI would go for the subpoenas required for take-down orders. They generally want to watch what happens at ‘sites of interest’ until an arrest is made. They would look at it as more evidence of whatever they think you are doing. People are under a bigger threat from corporate censorship than the government.