Pentagon Confirms: Iran Fired on U.S. Drone Last Week

Earlier today, the Pentagon confirmed that, just five days before the U.S. presidential election, Iranian forces fired on a U.S. Air Force Predator drone in the Persian Gulf. This shocking report comes as America’s tensions with the Middle Eastern nation run high.

The incident occurred on Thursday, November 1 at 4:50 a.m. ET, according to spokesperson George Little. The unmanned drone, which was conducting what Little called “routine maintenance” at the time, was “intercepted.”

The action is particularly aggressive, considering that the drone was in international airspace east of Kuwait at the time. According to CNN, the unit was not hit, but the Pentagon, nonetheless, is concerned. The Iranian jets involved in the incident were part of the nation’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, an especially-confrontational subset of Iran’s military forces.

“President Barack Obama and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta were both advised early on about the unprecedented incident,” MSNBC reports, going on to note that Little claims that relevant Congressional officials were made aware of the situation at the time.

Initially, the Obama administration did not disclose the information to the public — an act that some may question, especially considering the proximity of the event to the 2012 presidential election. However, prior to the Pentagon’s confirmation, two officials went off-the-record to describe the Iranian action to CNN.

Considering the ongoing friction between the U.S. and Iran, these actions are anything but encouraging, especially if the two nations are, indeed, poised to negotiate peaceful terms.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/pentagon-confirms-iran-fired-on-u-s-drone-last-week/

Elections Have Consequences

As countless amounts of current workers in this economy are going to find out when they receive pink slips in the next few months. Whether the company be small or large, the decision to gear up for the new American expansion or hunker down in cost-cutting survival mode for at least another four years is being made in boardrooms and offices all over the country.

A majority of voters decided on Tuesday they do not perceive the coming debt crisis and our short and long term economic health to be as big a concern as whether gays can marry, whether abortion on demand is in jeopardy, whether condoms should be free (and whether male porn stars should be forced to wear them), and whether pot should be legalized. But business owners, being the successfully-demonized, greedy capitalists they are, their election season begins now.

And their vote is really the one that people are going to feel in the months ahead.

http://hotair.com/greenroom/archives/2012/11/08/elections-have-consequences/

Boeing Announces Big Layoffs in Defense Division

Boeing announced a major restructuring of its defense division on Wednesday that will cut 30 percent of management jobs from 2010 levels, close facilities in California and consolidate several business units to cut costs.

Boeing, the Pentagon's second-largest supplier, said the changes were the latest step in an affordability drive that has already reduced the company's costs by $2.2 billion since 2010, according to the memo.

The measures come as U.S. weapons makers are under pressure to cut costs and preserve profit margins amid dwindling defense spending in the U.S.

In a message to employees, Dennis Muilenburg, chief executive of Boeing Defense, Space & Security, said the company aimed to cut costs by an additional $1.6 billion from 2013 through 2015.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/49729998

Finita La Commedia

We’ve lost when we were the incumbent party and the economy was perceived to be doing badly; we’ve lost when we were the challenger party when the economy was doing even worse.

In future, our elections will be like those in Britain or New York. We will be presented with a choice between a statist liberal and an out-there uber-liberal. And with the uber-liberal enjoying the full backing of the media and Hollywood, it’ll by no means be an easy win for the ordinary Mike Bloomberg or David Cameron-style liberal, who will be portrayed as a heartless plutocrat if he happens to come from money, or as a hopeless rube if he happens to come from nowhere.

Liberalism multiplies and reinforces its own mistakes. As liberalism’s failures pile up, they will inevitably inspire more liberalism as solutions. As Jason Riley of the Wall Street Journal points out, blacks have not only suffered in absolute terms under Barack Obama, with unemployment rising and incomes declining, but they have suffered relative to whites, with the gap between white unemployment and black unemployment actually widening. Recognizing all this causes the black voter not to take an interest in the mighty wealth and job-creating abilities of the free market, but to wish even more fervently for more government programs to alleviate the pain. Today 95 percent of blacks, it appears, believe the federal government should provide them with a job if they are otherwise unable to secure one. (At least that’s how I read this NAACP press release, but it’s vague.) Calling for the federal government to serve as the employer of last resort strikes me as a pretty radical idea, but just as yesterday’s luxuries become today’s necessities, yesterday’s radicalism is today’s progressivism is tomorrow’s legislation.

To take merely one measure of the catastrophe: The Supreme Court is now permanently liberal. Roe v. Wade will never be overturned, a right to have your gay marriage recognized in every state will be discovered in the due process clause, and so on, but these are relatively minor issues. The progressive project can never be satisfied, so the Supreme Court will start behaving like courts in places like New Jersey and New York, where completely routine questions of budgeting and hiring get yanked out of voters’ hands and resolved to the satisfaction of liberal judges. The federal courts will fill up with Harvard Law School-type professors who will pour gasoline on the fire of liberal legislation, but if legislation stalls the bench will simply grant liberal presidents the power to do whatever they want with no input from Congress. If somehow a conservative policy slips through, judges will reverse it. No dispute will ever be over until the left has won.

Just as a for instance: After George Zimmerman walks, there will be riots and he will then be railroaded on federal civil rights charges. The school choice movement will be killed off as “draining resources from public education,” which really means it harms a core Democratic interest group, the teachers’ unions. The simple matter of requiring voters to supply I.D. will be forbidden, not because it doesn’t make sense, the voters don’t want it or because it’s unconstitutional, but because it harms Democratic party interests. The two parties will fall all over each other in their efforts to mollify illegal immigrants. The new health-care entitlement will become increasingly onerous and costly, with all discussion limited to how best to “save” it, until one day employers’ efforts to work around it cause a frustrated government to convert it to a full-on single-payer Socialist scheme.

I didn’t expect this would ever happen to my country, and certainly not so fast, but we are now a decadent European social welfare state, sure to be accompanied by European levels of economic stagnation, taxation, welfare rolls, unemployment and perpetually misallocated resources such as subsidies to favored companies. Military irrelevance will soon follow as the staggering costs of the cradle-to-grave socialist state grow exponentially. Iran will soon have nuclear capability, to be followed in short order by its Middle Eastern neighbors, folllowed shortly by widespread proliferation of nuclear arms to terrorist groups.

I do not think Americans fully educated by the media on the pros and cons would have voted to turn into declinist Britain (where even working class people pay 40 percent income tax and where thanks in part to hidden value-added taxes everything costs double what it does here, except gasoline which costs triple). But Americans have chosen to allow themselves to be fooled by irrelevant chatter about caring or birth control or the DREAM act or gay marriage or “investing in our children” or whatever shibboleths were necessary to cover up the fact that we’re taking in $2.5 trillion while spending $3.6 trillion, with millions of Baby Boomers set to retire and all forms of entitlement spending set to skyrocket. The president has said repeatedly that middle class taxes won’t have to go up to pay for all this government, but even at the level of government we have today, this is a gigantic lie. And today’s government is tiny compared to what it’ll be in a decade.

There is no good news. Yesterday was a dark day in American history. As dark as I’ve ever seen.

http://kylesmithonline.com/?p=9860