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Sin City Sheriff


Last Updated: 7:33 PM, October 31, 2012
Posted: 11:25 PM, October 27, 2012
On a recent episode of “Vegas,” CBS’ new period drama, Sheriff Lamb, played by Dennis Quaid, punches out a Chicago hood, cuffs him and marches him out of a casino. The Post asked the honest-to-goodness Ralph Lamb, now 85, if that event really happened.
“Yes it did,” he says. “His name was Johnny Roselli.” Roselli was then an underling of Sam Giancana, who ran the Chicago mob. “We never meant to get him hurt,” says Lamb. “I just give him a whoopin’ right there in front of everybody.”
From 1961 to 1979 Lamb was the law in Sin City. “I was the youngest sheriff in the United States,” he says in a soft, Southwestern drawl. “And I was there longer than anybody’s ever been there by 12 years.”
Lamb, who’s a technical adviser on the series, can spout stories about the old Las Vegas like the fountains in front of the Bellagio.
He first met Sinatra in the 1950s. “He’d get full of whiskey and like everybody get a little tough sometimes,” Lamb says of Ol’ Blue Eyes. “But he was all right; he wasn’t hard to handle.” Lamb developed a particular fondness for Dean Martin. “Dean was the kind of guy that would sit down and have a cup of coffee and visit and talk in between shows,” he says. “Just an easy guy to get along with.”
But Lamb interacted with more than just mobsters and headliners. In September 1963, John Kennedy came to town to make a speech at the Las Vegas Convention Center.
“They were all in the Sahara Hotel, had a whole suite of rooms there, the Secret Service and him,” says Lamb, who was also in the suite. “Let’s get out of here,” Lamb remembered Kennedy saying to him. “You’re the boss,” Lamb replied. The president and the sheriff made their way down to the hotel bar and were gone several minutes before the Secret Service knew Kennedy was missing. “They found me first,” Lamb says, chuckling. “And he’s just sitting there. He was a great guy.”
Shot in a studio an hour or so north of Los Angeles, “Vegas” has an amazing re-creation of the strip on Fremont Street, including the fictional Savoy casino. The slot machines are real and made of cast iron. The chairs were salvaged from a defunct casino. Set designers also built an exterior of the iconic Golden Nugget.
Though the show’s producers have gone to great expense to replicate the glory days of Las Vegas, it’s Lamb who’s the real McCoy. And the idea of bringing his story to the screen has been kicking around for a long time. The director Sam Peckinpah was the first interested in doing it, back in the early 1980s, Lamb says. Peckinpah had Clint Eastwood slated to play the sheriff.
“We were up in Livingston, Montana, writing a book and a play [screenplay],” Lamb says. Peckinpah died, however, before the project could get off the ground.
Lamb’s story found its way to television courtesy of Arthur Sarkissian, an executive producer of “Vegas.” Sarkissian met Lamb about six years ago through then MGM chairman Kirk Kerkorian. Like Peckinpah, Sarkissian had visions of his story on the big screen. He reached out to Nick Pileggi (“Goodfellas”) to write the screenplay. While the project was in the early stages of development, MGM was sold and Sarkissian held on to the property. It was then agents from William Morris approached him about a television series based on Lamb.
“He was John Wayne and Clint Eastwood rolled into one,” Sarkissian says of Lamb. “He wasn’t trying to impress anyone. He was just real.”
Pileggi and Greg Walker (“Without a Trace”) are co-creators of the series.
Lamb especially gets a kick out of being portrayed as a tough guy on the show. “I don’t know where that originated,” he says. “I never hit a guy with nothing but my fists.” And Lamb thinks the part is right up Quaid’s alley. “He’s done a great job with it,” he says. “So far, you know.”
When Lamb found out that he and Quaid share the same birthday (April 9), the sheriff gave the actor a pair of his cowboy boots, which Quaid wears.
Lamb still lives in Las Vegas. “I have a little home out at the northwest part of town,” he says. “Always where I lived.” And he wears his television celebrity loosely. “I don’t get really excited about anything,” he says. Still, Lamb receives calls “out of the woodwork” from people he’s known over the years who’ve seen the show advertized. But not from any of the mobsters he’s known.
“I think I might have outlived all them guys,” he said.

Romney is what the country needs now

By Ann Coulter
http://www.anncoulter.com
October 31, 2012


The single most important issue in this election is ending the national nightmare of Obamacare.

If Obamacare is not stopped, it will permanently change the political culture of this country. There will be no going back. America will become a less productive, less wealthy nation. What wealth remains will have to be plowed into Obamacare -- to the delight only of the tens of thousands of government bureaucrats administering it.

There won't be one moment marking the end of America. Everything will just gradually get worse, like trains and the tax code, until a bustling, prosperous nation is as distant a memory as pleasurable train travel and one-page tax returns.

The reason we have Obamacare is not because the public was clamoring for the federal government to take over health care. It's because the Democrats had 60 senators. In the frozen ideology of the left, it doesn't matter if anyone wants government health care.

Democrats had been waiting around for 50 years to win huge majorities in the House and Senate and the presidency, so they could check off this box on "FDR's Unfinished Business."

Unlike all other major legislation in the nation's history, Obamacare was passed exclusively by one party that had just won an aberrationally large majority in Congress. Not a single Republican in either the House or Senate voted for it.

Republicans have passed legislation on such partisan votes, too, but never something that would fundamentally change the lives of every living American. Nationalizing one-sixth of the economy is not the kind of thing that should be passed by one party sneering, "Ha, ha -- we have 60 votes!"

As soon as all Americans have been thrown off their employer-provided insurance plans and are forced to start depending on the government for health care, Republicans will never be able to repeal it.

The private insurance market will be gone. Most Americans won't be able to conceive of getting health care that doesn't come from the government -- just as people in the Soviet Union couldn't imagine how they'd get bread if the government didn't provide it.

(Also similar to Communist systems, you'll have to know someone in power to get decent medical care.)

A powerful health care Leviathan will arise, composed of self-paced, well-pensioned, unionized government workers who will manage our health care from 10 a.m.-3 p.m., except federal holidays, sick days, mental health days and in bad weather. (The day after Hurricane Sandy, everything was open on the mostly unaffected Upper East Side of New York -- but not the post office.)

This new phalanx of government workers will spend the bulk of their time campaigning to ensure the election of more Democrats who promise to lessen their workload and increase their benefits. Even Republicans will have to run for office promising only to enlarge Obamacare. Newt Gingrich will be calling plans to alter Obamacare "right-wing social engineering."

The Democrats' idea for funding their endless government programs is always the same: Tax the rich, and just keep taxing them, no matter how high taxes have to be raised. One thing all such people have in common is that they've never had a real job, meaning a job from which you can be fired. Not Bernie Sanders, not Barack Obama, not Joe Biden, not Chuck Schumer and on and on.

Such people simply cannot grasp that doubling tax rates will not double government revenues because people won't work as hard for half the money. Their ideas about tax policy will put America on a high-speed train to government deficits rivaling Greece. We'll be a country with no military, no wealth and no hope.

Even before the train wreck of Obamacare, health care was half-a-disaster because that's the percentage of medical care in this country that was already provided by the government -- via Medicare, Medicaid, Veterans hospitals and other public hospitals.

In 2008, a single county in Florida -- Miami-Dade -- received more money in Medicare home health care payments than the entire rest of the country combined. This continued throughout the entire year and was finally noticed by our Department of Health and Human Services in December 2009.

Do you think it would take a private insurer two years to catch onto the fact that health care claims coming from a single county in Florida were larger than the rest of the country combined?

Lifelong politicians haven't the first idea what an efficient, operating system would even look like. If only we had a presidential candidate who had spent his life working in the private sector ...

The way to fix health care is to take as much as possible away from the government and give it to the private sector. It is a universal law of nature that everything run by the government gets worse and more expensive over time -- the postal service, airport security and Amtrak. Everything run by the private sector gets better and cheaper over time -- cellphones, computers, hair products, dishwashers, etc.

You know who specializes in rescuing failing enterprises and making things work? Mitt Romney.

Contrary to ignorant slanders about Romney's private sector work, his specialty was not buying thriving companies and stripping them for parts. Rather, the Bain Capital model was to take companies that were on the verge of collapse -- about to cut all jobs, pensions and health care for their workers -- and save the business.

Romney is the Red Adair of his profession. He's like a doctor who specializes in multiple gunshot wounds or an oncologist who takes only Stage 4 cancer patients. Yes, there were layoffs, but also lots and lots of jobs, profit, success, efficiency, saved businesses and saved lives.

Romney will be the most accomplished incoming president since Dwight Eisenhower.

Not only has Romney promised to issue a 50-state waiver from Obamacare on his first day in office and then seek a formal repeal and replacement, but he'll know how to do it. The savior of dying companies will fix health care in this country so that no Democrat will be able to wreck it again.

The only way to rid ourselves of this national poison pill, set to destroy both health care and the nation at large, is to elect Mitt Romney our next president.

COPYRIGHT 2012 ANN COULTER


White House silent as Benghazi questions mount

By Guy Benson
http://www.townhall.com
October 31, 2012


Last week, we alerted you to the infuriating, heart-wrenching revelation that at least three specific requests for military help from besieged Americans in Benghazi were rejected by someone in the chain of command.  This decision was made despite the established fact that US officials in Tripoli, the State Department, the Pentagon and the White House were watching the horror unfold in real time, via a video feed from an unmanned drone hovering over the city.  Democrats won't say if that drone was armed (and therefore capable of raining fire on the terrorists who were attacking our men and women).  Why were these reinforcements refused, who specifically did the refusing, and where was the president throughout this process?  These are questions being asked by US Senators, and political commentators from across the ideological spectrum.  We've gotten a few answers so far.  David Petraeus has emphatically denied that the CIA made this call.  President Obama's Defense Secretary has hinted that the Pentagon was involved in the decision.  The White House?  Silence:
 

So here's where we are: Petraeus has made clear the CIA wasn't responsible for the decision not to act. Panetta has tried to take the responsibility himself—and the White House has seemed to encourage this interpretation of events. But Panetta's position is untenable: The Defense Department doesn't get to unilaterally decide whether it's too risky or not to try to rescue CIA operators, or to violate another country's air space. In any case, it’s inconceivable Panetta didn't raise the question of what to do when he met with the national security adviser and the president at 5 p.m. on the evening of September 11 for an hour. And it's beyond inconceivable he didn't then stay in touch with the White House after he returned to the Pentagon. So the question remains: What did President Obama do that evening (apart from spending an hour on the phone with Prime Minister Netanyahu)? What did he know, and what did he decide, and what was the basis for his decisions? Petraeus has disclaimed responsibility for the decisions of September 11. Panetta has claimed responsibility for decisions that weren't his to make. Both Petraeus and Panetta have raised more questions than they've answered. The only person who can provide the answers the American people deserve is President Obama.  

The questions surrounding this preventable massacre still to outnumber the answers we've been given -- eight weeks after those four Americans were murdered.  There are now rumors floating around that damning audio and emails have been leaked to two major media organizations.  Here's New Gingrich sharing what he's hearing:



 


“There is a rumor — I want to be clear, it’s a rumor — that at least two networks have emails from the National Security Adviser’s office telling a counterterrorism group to stand down,” Gingrich said. “But they were a group in real-time trying to mobilize marines and C-130s and the fighter aircraft, and they were told explicitly by the White House stand down and do nothing. This is not a terrorist action. If that is true, and I’ve been told this by a fairly reliable U.S. senator, if that is true and comes out, I think it raises enormous questions about the president’s role, and Tom Donilon, the National Security Adviser’s role, the Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, who has taken it on his own shoulders, that he said don’t go. And that is, I think, very dubious, given that the president said he had instructions they are supposed to do everything they could to secure American personnel.”

We'll see if and how that plays out.  In any case, former Attorney General Michael Mukasey is appalledby the White House's lack of competence and transparency on Benghazi:
 

 

Asked about the White House's vague "fog of war" defense, Mukasey recoiled:
 

“That’s nonsense on stilts. There’s no evidence whatsoever that the intelligence community gave that kind of information, and there’s no basis for it. There were cameras outside that consulate. Those cameras showed an attack. There was never a demonstration. There was never anybody saying anything about a video. That was a fabrication from the start.”  

Meanwhile, The Hill reports that the Obama administration has significantly slashed intelligence spending.  That seems like a disastrously bad idea, all things considered.  Will voters get answers about what did (or perhaps more importantly did not) happen regarding Benghazi prior to November 6?  The administration's foot-drag strategy might be smart politics, but it's a national outrage and a slap in the face of people like Charlie Woods and Pat Smith.

Geert Wilders still going strong




Photo © Snaphanen http://snaphanen.dk
I paid a visit to southern Sweden on October 27, 2012. The occasion was a visit to Malmö by a fellow notorious Islamophobe, the Dutch politician Geert Wilders. He had been invited there to speak by Ingrid Carlqvist, the leader of the newly established Swedish Free Press Society. This is a brave but difficult initiative in a semi-totalitarian society, where the mass media are infamous for their crushing left-wing, multicultural and pro-Islamic consensus.
Malmö was historically one of the first Christian cities in what is today Sweden. It is currently set to become the first Muslim-majority city or town in the Nordic countries, but perhaps not the last. What once was a safe Scandinavian city has in recent years been plagued by a wave of armed robberies, rapes and bombs.
The performance of the Swedish police was a mixed bag. From my personal experience, they did a reasonably good job, but they apparently let through a few things that I didn’t seeKatrine Winkel Holmof the Danish Free Press Society reported about physical assaults on some of those who simply came peacefully to listen to Wilders’ speech. Holm criticized the police for giving violent left-wing thugs too much leeway to intimidate and attack people in the streets, trying to block them from entering, or bombarding them with eggs while calling them “Nazis.”
Upon arrival we noticed there was already a heavy police presence. To invite perhaps the most famous Islam-critical politician in Europe to speak in the most heavily Islamized city in Scandinavia was a slap in the face, not just to Muslims, but at least as much to their enablers on the far Left. Predictably, those leftists showed up in force. Not just from Sweden; they even imported violent left-wing thugs from neighboring Denmark to assault people.
They may unfortunately have managed to scare away a few potential listeners. For the most part, however, the heavy presence of the Swedish police, complete with horses, helicopters and armored vehicles, managed to keep the totalitarian thugs at bay. They were shouting slogans and carrying banners, as usual.  Most people paid little attention to them, since everyone already knew what they were going to say. These people haven’t substantially changed their slogans for the past 80 years, since the time of Stalin’s purges in the 1930s. Everybody who disagrees with them is a “Fascist.”
They can be very violent when they want to, and for years have physically attacked critics of Islam or mass immigration in Sweden while the authorities looked the other way. The AFA, or “Anti-fascists,” are remarkably similar to actual fascists, although that irony would be totally lost on them. They are what they claim to fight. These left-wing thugs seem to believe that we would be living in a socialist, multicultural paradise had it not been for the stubborn resistance of evil racists and Islamophobes, who must be stamped out at all costs. Sweden is expected to receive 50,000 asylum seekers in 2013, a very substantial number for a small Scandinavian nation, but for left-wing thugs, the natives cannot be turned into a minority in their own country fast enough.
All things considered, however, they were tamer this time around than might have been feared. The main reason for this lackluster performance was no doubt the heavy police presence, but partly also because it was a bit cold. These are revolutionaries of the PlayStation 3 era. Yes, they want to smash the capitalist system and beat up the fascists pigs who uphold it, but not today. It’s too cold, and mummy has some warm meatballs for them at home.
Once inside, I sat down in a room packed with TV cameras and journalists, and not just from Sweden. Norwegian TV2 and others have accused me of “hiding” from the press. They’ve wanted to interview me for more than a year. Well, this time I was sitting openly in a major Scandinavian city smack in the middle of a crowd full of members of the press. Even though my photo has been widely circulated in Norway, a team from Norwegian TV2 passed me by just a few meters away on multiple occasions and never noticed my presence.
Not too bright, these journalists.
To my great joy, I was allowed to meet Geert Wilders before he gave his speech. His security apparatus was very elaborate, as it should be for a person living with a constant threat of having his throat cut, but I’ve been told that it has been even more extensive in the past. Perhaps it varies according to specific credible threats. I knew that Wilders had heard of me even before the Breivik case, but we had never actually met before. I was delighted and honored that he wanted to meet me, and of course accepted immediately. Geert Wilders is a symbol of resistance, not just for the Dutch but for the whole of Europe and for Western Civilization.
Wilders found it very odd that I was forced to flee Norway, despite having never done anything criminal and never having met the perpetrator. We also talked a little bit about the losses suffered by his Party for Freedom (PVV) at the Dutch elections in September. He hoped that this setback would be temporary. In just a few years they had gone from zero to being the third-largest political party in the Netherlands, and had to train many inexperienced MPs. Wilders had also been personally harassed with a ridiculous show trial for racism and Islamophobia. Even so, he judged that the long-term prospects for the Party for Freedom were still very good, what with the problem of Islamization increasing year by year.
Geert Wilders is a forceful man, and one strongly feels his presence, not just because of the security guards who are always nearby, but also because of his personal character. He has real charisma, which is necessary for a successful politician. I noticed that some of the female members of the audience seemed quite enthralled by him. Yet he is also a powerful public speaker who addresses real and profound political issues.
He gave an eloquent and impassioned speech in Malmö about the threat of Islamization and the ongoing loss of freedom of speech in Europe. Wilders extended his focus beyond Islam alone and talked about limiting mass immigration in general, confronting cultural relativism and restoring a healthy pride in our civilization and our national cultures. He also emphasized that all of this is exceedingly difficult to achieve as long as the European Union, and not its member states, controls policies. The EU is thus at the heart of many of Europe’s problems.
Overall, it was a good meeting and a good speech. The event was met by the predictable outcry from hostile Swedish mass media, which refused to talk about the actual problems mentioned by Wilders, and merely focused on his alleged “hate.” Symptomatic of the response was an op-ed by the columnist OisĂ­n Cantwell, who was present at the speech, in the newspaperAftonbladet. He attempted to mock Geert Wilders and his audience without actually addressing any of the issues raised by Mr. Wilders. Mr. Cantwell apparently also thought it was funny that writer Ingrid Carlqvist no longer feels safe in her own home, in Sweden.
However, Wilders’ otherwise good speech repeated the claim that the Benghazi attacks in September 2012 on the US diplomatic mission to Libya were triggered by an anti-Islamic movie. It has now been well-established that this was merely a cover story. The CIA indicate that this was a regular and carefully planned Islamic terror attack, possibly by groups tied to al-Qaida, carried out on the anniversary of the September 11th attacks in the USA in 2001. It was not a spontaneous riot in response to some obscure movie. This claim is false.
It was later revealed that the administration of President Obama misinformed the public about this, and that Mr. Obama refused requests for more support and back-up to the US ambassador Christopher Stevens, who was murdered by Jihadist Muslims. This claim should not be repeated by Wilders or his staff in the future.
The “turbulent blond” Geert Wilders is the leader of the third-largest political party in the Netherlands, was once denied entry to Britain, and had his visit to Australia sabotaged by authorities who are more than willing to let militant Islamic preachers enter the country. He has to live with constant death threats due to his criticism of Islamic culture and around-the-clock police protection in Western Europe, possibly for the rest of his life. Wilders and others like him show great personal courage and integrity in standing up for what they believe in and confronting the forces of violent totalitarianism head-on. That stands to their credit.
The big question, however, is: Why should they have to?
Why should increasing numbers of politicians, artists and writers in Western Europe and elsewhere in the Western world have to live as virtual prisoners in their own homes, surviving only because of constant police protection, while we continue to import en masse members of the hostile tribes and backward cultures who are behind such threats?
It is criminal negligence by Western so-called “leaders” to promote open-border policies and continued mass immigration, including Muslim immigration, as sections of our cities sink increasingly into anarchy, our freedom of speech gradually vanishes and our cultural heritage is erased from our school curricula.
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Tyrone and Lena


POLITICAL HAY

Tyrone and Lena

The Two Americas of Tyrone Woods and Obama commercial's Lena Dunham.
Tyrone Woods.
Lena Dunham.
There are Two Americas out there.
One is represented by Tyrone Woods. 
Mr. Woods, recall, was one of two Navy Seals (Glen Doherty was the other) who rushed to the aid of Ambassador Chris Stevens, Foreign Service officer Sean Smith, and other Americans in the Benghazi consulate and were murdered by terrorists. Specifically, according to their own boastful claims, murdered by members of Ansar al-Sharia, an al Qaeda offshoot seeking the ultimate Islamic supremacist goal of imposing the totalitarianism that is Sharia everywhere around the globe. In this case, in eastern Libya.
The other America may be said to be represented by Lena Dunham. Ms. Dunham, recall, is the young actress from the HBO series Girls who is featured in this Obama commercial prattling on about
Your first time shouldn't be with just anybody. You want to do it with a great guy… somebody who really cares about and understands women.
She's talking about voting, (her voting "first time" was with Obama in 2008) but in the way of the progressive mind the idea is that she's discussing something else like….hmmmmm….oh, yes…sex. You got that, right? The cute bit is the idea of sex when she really means voting. I know, I know. What a knee-slapper.
Trying to relive the Baby Boom Generation, Ms. Dunham is clueless that she's decades late, laughably uncool and embarrassingly unhip. One amusing side effect of the Baby Boom generation is that having broken every rule in the book, not to mention inventing modern feminism, post the Baby Boomers younger generations have no rules left to break that weren't thoroughly trashed years ago. Sex? Drugs? Rock and roll? Protest? Outrage? Women's equality? Girls doing their own thing? Baby Boomers wrote the book. Dunham (and in fairness she's not the first) is simply the latest wannabe, a hilariously cheap knock-off.
Even more amusing are those who have rushed to Dunham's defense, as with this from Amanda Marcotte over at Slatein a surely unintentionally self-descriptive piece titled "Lena Dunham Ad Brings Out the Crazies." 
Sexy young white women are the rightful property of Republican men, and Obama is stealing them from you and filling their heads with this ridiculous notion that they own themselves.
Ah, but of course. It's all about race. What else would you expect from the latest heiress to the party of slavery, segregation, lynching, the Klan, racial quotas and illegal immigration?
The Nation proclaimed Dunham's ad to be "sexy, controversial and hip" -- a telling if inadvertent clue to just how far the standard for "sexy, controversial and hip" has plummeted since the 1960s.
Yet Dunham's ad, coming as it does more or less at the same time as the understanding of just how and most importantly why Tyrone Woods died is a telling slice of what John Edwards used to call the "Two Americas." Edwards, however, was talking about the eternal class warfare that rich liberals love to provoke once they've got their own millions and set about busily trying to keep the unwashed middle class eternally middle.
The "Two Americas" represented by Woods and Dunham are cultural.
Tyrone Woods was murdered by the disciples of Ansar al-Sharia. And what does Ansar al-Sharia want? They want the likes of Lena Dunham wrapped in veils, kept education-less and book-less not to mention video-less. If Ansar al-Sharia and their various allies around the globe have their way, Lena Dunham would be treated exactly as was Malala Yousufzai, the 14-year old Pakistani girl who was shot in the head by the Taliban for the crime of urging girls to read.
And it is the Tyrone Woods of the world who are out there every single day where their lives are literally on the line doing their damndest to protect a 26-year-old Lena Dunham's right to act like a "Girl" on HBO.
But where is Dunham politically? Oh right. She's with the guy who knew Tyrone Woods was trapped there in Benghazi determined to rescue his colleagues from some seriously deadly war-on-women types. She's with the guy who denied help to Tyrone Woods and his battle against Sharia-obsessed Islamic supremacists not once. Not twice. But three times. She's with the guy who thinks al Qaeda has been defeated because he killed Osama bin Laden -- yet is mystified that Tyrone Woods would come under attack in the first place.
Or why.
And Barack Obama is "somebody who really cares about and understands women"?
Really? Wow. Talk about clueless.
This is a guy who can't even bring himself to chastise his own grandmother for celebrating the joys of wife-beating. Because, don't you know, beating wives is OK with Granny Sarah and all those students whose Sharia educations she funds on the many dimes of Barack Obama's reputation with people exactly like Lena Dunham.
Over at PJ Media is a review of a book by Dr. Andrew Bostom, Sharia States: Totalitarian to the Core. The review is excellent -- and the book has a blurb, I should mention, by our friend Andrew McCarthy, the prosecutor of the Blind Sheikh. (Andy McCarthy was also kind enough to write this last week about our Obama Knew column.)
Among other points, the review notes that Sharia "prohibits political freedoms as well as freedoms of conscience, faith, and expression (both oral and written)."
Which is to say, Lena Dunham (not to mention HBO, Amanda Marcotte, or the Nation) would be flatly prohibited from writing a word. Much less allowed to take to a television camera to tape Girls or any other show, her Obama commercial included.
But there is a woman who was the subject of a video in the world Tyrone Woods was fighting.
This woman's video -- is quite unlike Lena Dunham's video where the subject wears a sleeveless T-shirt and sports a tattoo. No, this woman is shrouded in cloth from head to toe. She doesn't look at the camera. She looks the other way, waiting. Waiting for what? For her execution for committing adultery. Quickly, the moment arrives. She is shot -- nine times. Note: You Tube requires a password to view because of the graphic nature of the video.
Unlike Malala, this woman does not survive.
This is what Tyrone Woods gave his life fighting for on the streets of Benghazi. This is an American hero who did the ultimate in a real war on women that Lena Dunham (or Sandra Fluke or the head of Planned Parenthood) cannot begin to grasp. Or simply refuse to acknowledge. 
A war on women that, yes indeed, Barack Obama by design, incompetence, or an ideological soft spot has used the resources of the U.S. government to encourage.
A war on women that Lena Dunham clearly doesn't understand -- or she would be out there with her HBO friends making a television show about men who kill women in the name of Islam. If she -- and HBO -- had the courage.
The irony here?
The America that leftist women have such contempt for -- the America that believes in a moral obligation to respect women, to make sure they have an education, read books, and have the opportunity to make videos and television shows to their hearts content -- that America is sending its sons and daughters to protect those rights. To die for those rights.
It is exactly that America that sent Tyrone Woods to fight Ansar al-Sharia in Benghazi.
It is exactly that America that sent Tyrone Woods to fight Ansar al-Sharia in Benghazi so that Lena Dunham can sit at peace in Brooklyn with her tattoo and her sleeveless T-shirt and her wink-wink on-camera prattlings about first-times. So that Amanda Marcotte can play with her race cards at Slate.
It is exactly that America that sent Tyrone Woods to fight Ansar al-Sharia so Ms. Dunham can cut a commercial for a candidate who turned his back when an American son needed help fighting against deeply serious men who deeply hate women in ways that Lena Dunham clearly cannot begin to fathom.
Will HBO be doing a television show about Tyrone Woods? Will Lena Dunham be writing a TV show about Malala or the anonymous woman who was shot 9 times for allegedly committing adultery?
What do you think?
In the world of Two Americas, not likely. Unfortunately, it's not the first time.
Two Americas are going to vote on election day. Two names will be on the ballot: Romney and Obama.
But what's really on the ballot election day is a choice between the America of Tyrone Woods and the America of Lena Dunham.
Enough said.

About the Author

Jeffrey Lord is a former Reagan White House political director and author. He writes from Pennsylvania at jlpa1@aol.com.
http://spectator.org/archives/2012/10/30/tyrone-and-lena

Obama's fog of war


Oct 29, 2012 
By Bing West
http://www.nationalreview.com
Our ambassador to Libya was killed in our own consulate in Benghazi on the night of September 11. For the next six weeks, President Obama repeated the same talking point: The morning after the attack, he ordered increased security in our embassies in the region.

Suddenly, on the campaign trail in Denver on October 26, he changed his story. “The minute I found out what was happening . . . I gave the directive,” he said, “to make sure we are securing our personnel and doing whatever we need to do. I guarantee you everybody in the CIA and military knew the number-one priority was making sure our people are safe.”

Notice the repeated use of the present tense, implying that he gave the order during the attack. Mr. Obama met with his national-security team, including the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at 5:00 p.m.Washington time. For over an hour, the consulate staff had been constantly reporting that they were under assault by terrorists and Ambassador Chris Stevens was missing in action. In the White House, group-think leads to the mistaken assumption that the attackers are a spontaneous mob.

An hour after the attack has begun, the president orders the CIA and the military to do “whatever we need to do.” Yet the CIA and the military do nothing, except send drones overhead to watch the seven-hour battle. A CIA employee and former Navy SEAL, Tyrone Woods, twice calls for military help. He has a laser rangefinder and is pinpointing enemy targets, radioing the coordinates. The military send no aircraft to attack the designated targets. Special Operations forces standing by, 480 miles away — less than a two-hour plane ride — are not deployed.

Secretary of Defense Panetta later explained that this passivity was in keeping with a rule of warfare. “A basic principle,” he said on October 25, “is you don’t deploy forces into harm’s way without knowing what’s going on — without having some real-time information about what’s taking place.”
Rarely has a spontaneous mob so thoroughly intimidated our nation. And so much for sending our squads out every day in Afghanistan on patrol, when they don’t know what’s going on. The next time a platoon is told to take an objective, some corporal will say, “SecDef says we don’t have to go into harm’s way without knowing what’s going on.”

Apart from the questionable philosophy of turning battle into a poker game where all cards are face up before anyone places a bet, Mr. Panetta ignored the fact that the former SEAL on the ground was giving real-time information to everyone listening in at least eight operations centers (the embassy in Tripoli, State, White House, Pentagon, CIA, Special Operations Command, Africa Command, and the National Ops Center).

The SecDef and the president have issued contradictory explanations. Either Mr. Obama ordered the Secretary of Defense to “do whatever we need to do,” or he didn’t. And either the secretary obeyed that order, or he didn’t. And he didn’t.

It is also not clear whether the SecDef countermanded the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who is the direct military adviser to the president. Did the president as commander-in-chief issue an unequivocal order that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs received but chose not to execute? Or did the chairman reply that he would do nothing?

Yet the general in charge of the Africa region has allegedly said he received no directive from Washington to dispatch military aid. Members of the mutual protective society of generals are offering the bizarre defense that our Africa Command could do nothing because it has no military assets; it’s some sort of ghost command. Even if that is true, the most powerful nation in the world has sufficient forces and flexibility to send fighter aircraft over a consulate in flames, or to land some troops at the secure airport east of Benghazi. After all, our embassy in Tripoli, 400 miles away, sent an aircraft with six Americans to fight in Benghazi. But our base in Sigonella, 480 miles away, sent no help.

If General Dempsey had concluded that the U.S. military should do nothing, he would have reported his decision not to act back to his commander-in-chief before the latter went to bed to rest up for his campaign trip to Las Vegas the next day. After all, the ambassador was still missing. And brave Tyrone Woods was to die in a mortar attack five hours later. President Obama would naturally be more than a bit interested in why the military and the CIA did nothing after he explicitly ordered them “to make sure we are securing our personnel.”
Surely it is in the president’s best interests to release a copy of his order, which the military would have sent to hundreds in the chain of command. And if the president did not direct the NSC “to do whatever we need to do,” then who was in charge? When the American ambassador is attacked and remains out of American hands for over seven hours as a battle rages — and our military sends no aid — either the crisis-response system inside the White House is incompetent, or top officials are covering up. 
— Bing West, a former assistant secretary of defense, is co-author with Congressional Medal of Honor recipient Sgt. Dakota Meyer of Into the Fire: A First-Hand Account of the Most Extraordinary Battle of the Afghanistan War.

The real reason behind Benghazigate

Was Obama gun-walking arms to jihadists?

By Frank J. Gaffney
The Washington Times
http://www.washingtontimes.com
October 29, 2012


President Obama’s once seemingly unstoppable march toward re-election hit what he might call “bumps in the road” in Benghazi, Libya, late on Sept. 11, 2012. It might be more accurate to describe the effect of the well-planned and -executed, military-style attack on a diplomatic facility there as the political equivalent of a devastating improvised explosive device on the myth of the unassailability of the Obama record as commander in chief.

Thanks to intrepid investigative reporting — notably by Bret Baier and Catherine Herridge at Fox News, Aaron Klein at WND.com and Clare Lopez at RadicalIslam.org — and information developed by congressional investigators, the mystery is beginning to unravel with regard to what happened that night and the reason for the subsequent, clumsy official cover-up now known as Benghazigate.

The evidence suggests that the Obama administration has not simply been engaging, legitimating, enriching and emboldening Islamists who have taken over or are ascendant in much of the Middle East. Starting in March 2011, when American diplomat J. Christopher Stevens was designated the liaison to the “opposition” in Libya, the Obama administration has been arming them, including jihadists like Abdelhakim Belhadj, leader of the al Qaeda franchise known as the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group.

Once Moammar Gadhafi was overthrown, Stevens was appointed ambassador to the new Libya run by Mr. Belhadj and his friends. Not surprisingly, one of the most important priorities for someone in that position would be to try to find and secure the immense amount of armaments that had been cached by the dictator around the country and systematically looted during and after the revolution.

One of the places in Libya most awash with such weapons in the most dangerous of hands is Benghazi. It now appears that Stevens was there — on a particularly risky day, with no security to speak of and despite now copiously documented concerns about his own safety and that of his subordinates — for another priority mission: sending arms recovered from the former regime’s stocks to the “opposition” in Syria. As in Libya, the insurgents are known to include al Qaeda and other Shariah-supremacist groups, including none other than Abdelhakim Belhadj.

Fox News has chronicled how the Al Entisar, a Libyan-flagged vessel carrying 400 tons of cargo, docked on Sept. 6 in the Turkish port of Iskenderun. It reportedly supplied both humanitarian assistance and arms — including deadly SA-7 man-portable surface-to-air missiles — apparently destined for Islamists, again including al Qaeda elements, in Syria.

What cries out for further investigation — and debate in the remaining days of this presidential election — is whether this shipment was part of a larger covert Obama effort to transfer weapons to our enemies that could make the Iran-Contra scandal, to say nothing of Operation Fast and Furious, pale by comparison.

Investigative journalist Aaron Klein has reported that the “consulate in Benghazi” actually was no such thing. He observes that although administration officials have done nothing to correct that oft-repeated characterization of the facility where the murderous attack on Stevens and his colleagues was launched, they call it a “mission.” What Mr. Klein describes as a “shabby, nondescript building” that lacked any “major public security presence” was, according to an unnamed Middle Eastern security official, “routinely used by Stevens and others to coordinate with the Turkish, Saudi and Qatari governments on supporting the insurgencies in the Middle East, most prominently the rebels opposing Assad’s regime in Syria.”

We know that Stevens‘ last official act was to hold such a meeting with an unidentified “Turkish diplomat.” Presumably, the conversation involved additional arms shipments to al Qaeda and its allies in Syria. It also may have involved getting more jihadi fighters there. After all, Mr. Klein reported last month that, according to sources in Egyptian security, our ambassador was playing a “central role in recruiting jihadists to fight Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria.”
It gets worse. Last week, Center for Security Policy senior fellow and former career CIA officer Clare Lopez observed that there were two large warehouse-type buildings associated with the so-called “consulate” whose purpose has yet to be disclosed. As their contents were raided in the course of the attack, we may never know for sure whether they housed — and were known by the local jihadis to house — arms, perhaps administered by the two former Navy SEALs killed along with Stevens.
What we do know is that the New York Times — one of the most slavishly pro-Obama publications in the country — reported in an Oct. 14 article, “Most of the arms shipped at the behest of Saudi Arabia and Qatar to supply Syrian rebel groups fighting the government of Bashar Assad are going to hard-line Islamic jihadists, and not the more secular opposition groups that the West wants to bolster.”
In short, it seems President Obama has been engaged in gun-walking on a massive scale. The effect has been to equip America’s enemies to wage jihad not only against regimes it once claimed were our friends, but inevitably against us and our allies as well. That would explain his administration’s desperate and now failing bid to mislead the voters through the serial deflections of Benghazigate.