Justice for Petty Officer McCabe

Via RealClearPolitics and Fox news - see the video of the interview with him here. Some backgrounder info from testimony here.

Diversity Thursday

OK, CNO and Diversity Bullies - what do you say to this America?

When the kids profiled below join up, do we just call them American or Navy Blue - or are we going to go by the Klan-like "one drop rule" like the Navy is now? ..... and a drop of what blood? By treating different ethnic groups differently now, like we do, do we encourage racial self-identification fraud?

Wait ... we already have that answer. Of course we do. On top of that, the Navy uses either a Klan-like "one drop rule" and/or encourages self-identification fraud.

How do I know? Simple, I saw it, I did it, and I see it - and every week I get emails with more examples from those still on active duty.

Why? Leadership demands it. Until it is illegal - that is what we do. Kind of makes you feel slimy, yes? In a way, forcing a bitter, retrograde attitude on these young kids - like those in this book - is mental child abuse, isn't it?

Ponder.

What I see below are great American kids with unlimited potential and the free will and ability to do what ever they want - just like my kids.

What does the Navy see? Race and ethnicity. That is sad as it is inaccurate. That is retrograde. That is a 1970's attitude we have, not a 2040 attitude we need.

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UPDATE: If you want to see where the sectarianism that the CNO and the Navy supports leads to - well - click here. And yes, I told you so.

The Kent State update: what many suspected

For what you have read, heard or were taught about the "Kent State Massacre" you would tend to nod your head that this,

Charlie Peppers said students learn to fire off one of the most important words in the human language: Why?

"We don't learn to fire guns, but we learn to question the people who do," the Plattsburgh State Student Association president said Tuesday at a college commemoration for the 40th anniversary of the shootings at Kent State.

"We're all here today because students from Kent State and Jackson State were gunned down for standing up," Peppers said. "Each of those students wanted to change the world before one bullet changed them all."

In the back of your mind though, if you are always suspect about the Left and their actions you always wondered if there was more to the story. After all, American soldiers, much less National Guardsmen, do not fire into their citizens without just cause. They just don't.

But .... as with many thing from that era - a story was told over and over enough - unchallenged - that is started to become truth. Well, truth changes now and then.

Now, it all makes sense, thanks to James Rosen.

We should all feel sorry for those who were killed or wounded at Kent State, and grieve with their loved ones. The anger, resentment, and cause of the deaths though are not the National Guardsmen, the military, or anyone BUT those who organized, led and enabled the riot - and specifically the person who first fired the shots at the Guardsmen. Somewhere out there someone knows who it was.

Some day we will know. For now though we know who is to blame. Again, the Left.

Now largely forgotten, the torching of the ROTC building was the true precursor to the killings at Kent State because it triggered the deployment of the National Guard to the fevered campus.

That deployment climaxed in bloodshed on the afternoon of May 4, 1970, with the guardsmen, clad in gas masks and confronted by angry, rock-throwing students, firing their M-1 rifles 67 times in 13 seconds, killing Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer and William Knox Schroeder.

A report submitted to Attorney General John Mitchell in June 1970 stated "there was no sniper" who could have fired at the guardsmen before the killings.

Forward to today.

... declassified FBI files show the FBI already had developed credible evidence suggesting that there was indeed a sniper and that one or more shots may have been fired at the guardsmen first.

Rumors of a sniper had circulated for at least a day before the fatal confrontation, the documents show. And a memorandum sent to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover on May 19, 1970, referred to bullet holes found in a tree and a statue — evidence, the report stated, that "indicated that at least two shots had been fired at the National Guard."

Another interviewee told agents that a guardsman had spoken of "a confirmed report of a sniper."

It also turned out that the FBI had its own informant and agent-provocateur roaming the crowd, a part-time Kent State student named Terry Norman, who had a camera. Mr. Norman also was armed with a snub-nosed revolver that FBI ballistics tests, first declassified in 1977, concluded had indeed been discharged on that day.

Then there was the testimony of an ROTC cadet whose identity remains unknown, one of the pervasive redactions concealing the names of all the FBI agents who conducted the interviews and of all those whom they interrogated. Although presumably angry over the demonstrators' destruction of the campus ROTC building, the cadet's calm, precise firsthand account nonetheless carries a credibility not easily dismissed.

Before the fatal volley, the ROTC cadet told the FBI, he "heard one round, a pause, two rounds, and then the M-1s opened up."

The report continued that the cadet "stated that the first three rounds were definitely not M-1s. He said they could possibly have been a .45 caliber. … [He] further stated that he heard confirmed reports of sniper fire coming in over both the National Guard radio and the state police radio."

The cadet also told the FBI he observed demonstrators carrying baseball bats, golf clubs and improvised weapons, including pieces of steel wire cut into footlong sections, along with radios and other electronic devices "used to monitor the police and Guard wavelengths."

Separately, a female student told the FBI she "recalled hearing what she thought was [the sound of] firecrackers and then a few seconds later [she] heard noise that to her sounded like a machine gun going off, but then later thought it may have been a volley of shots from the Guard."

Here is the question I want to know.

Absent the declassification of the FBI's entire investigative file, many questions remain unanswered — including why the documents quoted here were overlooked, or discounted, in the Justice Department's official findings.

At a minimum, the FBI documents strongly challenge the received narrative that the rioting in downtown Kent was spontaneous and unplanned, that the burning of the ROTC headquarters was similarly impulsive and that the guardsmen's fatal shootings were explicable only as unprovoked acts.

More answers are needed. How many lives were ruined. How many good men smeared. We can perhaps send some blame the FBI's way as well; for allowing smears to go forward - and for what?

Caption Contest: the CJCS version

So much here. So much. Have at it in comments - photoshop is welcome as well.


If you want to read the article (and see a more realistic "You ain't a WWII FADM Shipmate" pic), click here. If you want to see a perfect example of the Epic Fail that is/was Task Force Uniform WRT camo uniforms, click here. If you want to see what a major corporation's CEO schedule does NOT look like, but what is a retention issue - click here. Those who actually believe the Life-Work Balance FOD they are feeding you should read in detail.

Interesting reading, in a fashion. Towards the end - this caught my eye.

While one of his aides insists that Mullen would be the last person to use the word "legacy," Mullen himself says, "I'm not going to be here forever. I'm thinking of the young people who come after me."

Really? Really?

Funny - though I looked - I had a lot of trouble finding any reference to his time as CNO and his role in the Tiffany productions of LPD-17, DDG-1000, LCS, etc. Hmmmm.

Funny - I didn't see any discussion of how he fought a losing battle against the surge .... wrong there too. Hmmmm.

Yes, a tough job - but there is a major characteristic to superior leaders of major corporations - they do not hide their failures. They discuss them and learn from them. Hmmmmm.

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UPDATE: I knew something about that photo bothered me. It just screamed "40s and 50s Navy" to me, but I could not place it. Not the uniform per se; but the tone, saturation, and noir vibe of the photo itself. Additionally - the angle, lens distortion, F-stop and lack of glasses on ADM Mullen simply made him look like another person altogether. Thanks to Bullnav in comments, I can now place it.

The Chairman isn't supposed to look like a WWII FADM - no, the photographer isn't that obsequious as that - no, he has a lot more cheek.

Who is The Chairman supposed to look like? Humphrey Bogart's LCDR Queeg from The Caine Mutiny. Tell me we're wrong.

Someone needs to have his PAO and senior MA in an office about right now with the door closed .....

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Hat tip LBG.

CINC - explain the term to Malia and Sasha

Over at Tapper's place we find the point where - sadly - the CINC just dropped the veil - again - for those to see what he is.

If you don't see it - then you are blind.

Just to set the foundation here; her is not a local Chicago Assemblyman. He is not a State Senator. He is not even a Senator. He is the President of the United States.

George Washington; Abraham Lincoln; Ike Eisenhower. You know - that bunch.

In Jonathan Alter’s “The Promise: President Obama, Year One,” President Obama is quoted in an November 30, 2009, interview saying that the unanimous vote of House Republicans vote against the stimulus bills “set the tenor for the whole year ... That helped to create the tea-baggers and empowered that whole wing of the Republican Party to where it now controls the agenda for the Republicans.”

It is OK for Skippy to say it - but not the CINC. If Alter is incorrect - then publish a retraction and fire his editor. If not, then see it for what it is, and never make a comment about my blog not being professional.

Don't even try to suggest that the President doesn't know the term. Don't insult him like that.

Everyone else likes to talk around it - let me bring out my inner BM1 and talk directly.

Just to make Kristin happy if she is still out there - though it is fine for the CINC, the below text is NSFW, I guess.
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To tea bag is a slang term for the act of a man placing his scr0tum in the mouth of a s3xual partner. The practice resembles dipping a tea bag into a cup of tea when it is done in a repeated in-and-out motion. As a form of non-penetrative s3x, it can be done for its own enjoyment or as f0replay before other activities, such as oral s3x.

The practice has also been mimicked in online video games, as a practical joke, and in hazing incidents. The scr0tum only touches the face or head in some of these instances, though sometimes more activity is involved.

If you need more help - there is a picture here that might do.

Press "0"

CNO's zone inspection at Millington. Ick; and I ain't talking about the uniform.

All hail the Ehrenkreuz der Bundeswehr

We should all nod our heads to the Germans - thanks.

Fourteen members of the Army’s 12th Combat Aviation Brigade on Thursday became the first non-Germans to receive Germany’s Gold Cross, one of that nation’s highest honors for valor.

The soldiers, based at U.S. Army Garrison-Ansbach, Germany, were honored for medevac flights they performed April 2 involving German troops who had been ambushed by some 200 Taliban fighters while on patrol north of the city of Kunduz, Afghanistan.

The firefight was still going on when the Black Hawk evacuation helicopters — two medical transport helicopters and one heavily armed “chase” helicopter — arrived, according to what Army Capt. Robert McDonough, who piloted one of the medical helicopters, told his father, Jack McDonough.

“The two Black Hawks did a combined seven landings into the middle of this battle. My son told me that he could see rounds hitting the blades of his helicopter and there were bullet holes in the Blackhawks,” Jack McDonough wrote in an e-mail message. “He said the incoming fire was so bad that at one point he banked the helicopter real hard to avoid the incoming rounds. He told me he saw the Taliban celebrating, thinking they had downed them.”
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Lt. Col. Norbert Rahn, a spokesman for the German Federal Ministry of Defense, said in an e-mail message that this award to the 14 U.S. soldiers marks the first time that any citizen or soldier from outside Germany has been given The Gold Cross, or Ehrenkreuz der Bundeswehr, for “outstanding achievements under danger for life and limb.”

He wrote that at least 11 German soldiers were critically wounded when the 12th Combat Aviation Brigade soldiers arrived. Three did not survive due to the severity of their injuries, but the others were transported to safety.

He said that without the assistance from the U.S. helicopters, it would have been impossible to get the wounded to a field hospital and Germany would be lamenting the loss of additional soldiers. Even though the helicopters were under “steady, heavy fire. ... They completed their mission without hesitation, courageously and professionally,” Rahn wrote.

I did a backgrounder on the Gold Cross last year here. I would be remiss if I did not also recognize the efficiency of the German military's admin dept. Nice award timeline. Less than a month for an award of this level - from act to ceremony. I used to run one of the best Admin shops in the Navy, and we were lucky if we could do a FLOC in that time.

Oh, and the fact that almost a decade of war and no living MOH. Shame and pox on the senior leadership. Shame and pox.

Thanks Germany - we'll take it and will buy you a good beer some time.

Hat tip Argghhh!!!.