Tag Archives: United States Coast Guard

Dealing With The Entire Problem

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On Wednesday, Legal Insurrection posted an article about America’s seizure of a tanker on the coasts of Venezuela. The article explains some of the reasons behind the taking of the tanker.

The article reports:

Today, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Homeland Security Investigations, and the United States Coast Guard, with support from the Department of War, executed a seizure warrant for a crude oil tanker used to transport sanctioned oil from Venezuela and Iran. For multiple years, the oil tanker has been sanctioned by the United States due to its involvement in an illicit oil shipping network supporting foreign terrorist organizations. This seizure, completed off the coast of Venezuela, was conducted safely and securely—and our investigation alongside the Department of Homeland Security to prevent the transport of sanctioned oil continues.

The article quotes Axios:

Zoom in: The U.S. has sanctioned Venezuela’s oil company for years, but this vessel was seized because it was on the U.S. Treasury Department’s “Specially Designated Nationals” list for allegedly violating other sanctions, providing the justification for it to be seized.

    • The vessel is known as a VLCC, or Very Large Crude Carrier, capable of transporting as much as 320,000 deadweight tons of crude, two sources with direct knowledge said.
    • The exact details of the seizure, first reported by Bloomberg, are unclear and administration officials could not be reached for comment.

The article concludes:

Then there’s Cuba, the home of the oil on the tanker.

As Marc Caputo at Axios pointed out, Cuba is an ally of Venezuela and a U.S. adversary.

The system in place is corrupt because of course:

Havana sells Venezuelan crude on the black market, chiefly to Asian markets that ultimately feed China.

    • The crude oil is handled by a grandson of Raul Castro, the former leader of Cuba and brother of longtime dictator Fidel Castro, the insiders say.
    • In addition to splitting the profits with Venezuela, Cuba supplies intelligence services and agents who protect Maduro.
    • “This is a twofer: we’re going after Maduro’s bank account and the Cubans that keep him in power,” one of the sources said.

According to the National Archives:

While the Monroe Doctrine’s message was designed to keep European powers out of the Western Hemisphere, Roosevelt would strengthen its meaning to justify sending the United States into other countries of the Western Hemisphere. As a result, U.S. Marines were sent into Santo Domingo in 1904, Nicaragua in 1911, and Haiti in 1915, ostensibly to keep the Europeans out. Other Latin American nations viewed these interventions with misgiving, and relations between the “great Colossus of the North” and its southern neighbors remained strained for many years.

In 1962, the Monroe Doctrine was invoked symbolically when the Soviet Union began to build missile-launching sites in Cuba. With the support of the Organization of American States, President John F. Kennedy threw a naval and air quarantine around the island. After several tense days, the Soviet Union agreed to withdraw the missiles and dismantle the sites. Subsequently, the United States dismantled several of its obsolete air and missile bases in Turkey.

The Monroe Doctrine needs to be enforced, both for America’s safety and for the protection of other free nations in our hemisphere.

Believing The Lie

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Last night the protests continued. Some protesters were college students who were upset that their feminist heroine did not get elected. Some protesters were paid agitators who answered Craig’s List ads because they needed the money. Some protesters were illegal aliens who somehow were convinced that they would be deported and their families the day after Donald Trump became President. Protests are fully acceptable in a representative republic (America is not a democracy). However, destruction of property is not. Anyone who smashed a car window or assaulted a person needs to be put in jail and fined. However, let’s look at the idea that families are going to be separated and people deported.

Below is a picture of Elian Gonzalez in 2000 as he was seized and deported by the Clinton Administration (Janet Reno was Attorney General). His mother fled Cuba in 1999 and died trying to escape. Elian was picked up by the U.S. Coast Guard (he was six years old). The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) released Elian to his paternal great-uncle, Lázaro, in Miami. Meanwhile, Elian’s father contacted Lazaro, asking him to be on alert for Elian. Elian’s grandmothers came to Washington to ask that Elian be returned to Cuba, and Elian’s father requested that Elian return.

Wikipedia reports what happened next:

In the pre-dawn hours of Easter eve, Saturday, April 22, pursuant to an order issued by a federal magistrate, eight agents of the Border Patrol‘s elite BORTAC unit as part of an operation in which more than 130 INS personnel took part[20] approached the house, knocked on the door, and identified themselves. When no one responded from within, they entered the house. Pepper-spray and mace were employed against those outside the house who attempted to interfere. Nonetheless, a stool, rocks, and bottles were thrown at the agents.[21] In the confusion, Armando Gutierrez called in Alan Diaz, of the Associated Press, to enter the house and entered a room with González, his great uncle’s wife Angela Lázaro, her niece, the niece’s young son, and Donato Dalrymple (one of the two men who had rescued him from the ocean). They waited in the room listening to agents searching the house. Diaz took a widely publicized photograph of a border patrol agent confronting Dalrymple and the boy.

INS also stated in the days after the raid that they had identified as many as two dozen persons who were “prepared to thwart any government operation”, some of whom had concealed weapons while others had criminal records.[22][23]

This is the picture:

eliangonsolezIt wasn’t a Republican administration that pointed a gun at a six-year-old child and sent him back to a Communist country. Before you scream that Donald Trump as President will separate families and deport children, look at the history of the Democratic Party. Whether you believe Elian should have been allowed to stay or not, who points a gun at a six-year-old child?

The United States Coast Guard Comes To The Rescue

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One of the dramas that we ended last year with was the group of scientists and tourists that went to the Antarctica to document the shrinking ice caps that were the result of global warming. Someone should have mentioned to them that when you travel thousands of miles to document the consequences of a theory, it is a good idea to make sure the theory was valid in the first place.

The ship they were traveling on to research and document the shrinking Antarctic ice got stuck in the ice,

On Thursday, Ed Morrissey at Hot Air reported:

The team attempted to recreate the 1911-13 Antarctic journey of Douglas Mawson, only to get stuck in a surprisingly expanded polar ice sheet. A video report leading CNN’s World page claims that they have been rescued and boarded onto an Australian ship that will leave shortly.

…The nine-day crisis unfolded a bit like a Monty Python sketch. A Chinese ship attempted to rescue the MV Akademik Shokalskiy, only to get stopped by the ice as well. A third ship arrived, but could not reach the stranded researchers, either. The rescuers finally used a helicopter when researchers were able to build a crude heliport on the ice that surrounded them, but a barge brought in to move them outside the ice couldn’t reach the Chinese vessel intended for their transport — so the helicopter landed on another ice floe near an Australian ship that arrived.

Somehow, most of the media that reported that story left out the fact that the people on the ship were there to document global warming.

The website wattsupwiththat posted a press release from the Australian government that stated the following:

US Coast Guard ice breaker to assist ships beset in ice in Antarctica

The Australian Maritime Safety Authority’s Rescue Coordination Centre (RCC Australia) has requested the US Coast Guard’s Polar Star icebreaker to assist the vessels MV Akademik Shokalskiy and Xue Long which are beset by ice in Commonwealth Bay.

 The US Coast Guard has accepted this request and will make Polar Star available to assist. The Polar Star has been en route to Antarctica since 3 December, 2013 – weeks prior to the MV Akademik Shokalskiy being beset by ice in Commonwealth Bay. The intended mission of the Polar Star is to clear a navigable shipping channel in McMurdo Sound to the National Science Foundation’s Scientific Research Station. Resupply ships use the channel to bring food, fuel and other goods to the station. The Polar Star will go on to undertake its mission once the search and rescue incident is resolved.

I just wonder who is paying for the research and the continuing folly.

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One Reason Government Spending Is Out Of Control

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On Saturday the Washington Post posted an article about some of the end-of-the-year spending done by government agencies. The spending is a result of one of the side effects of baseline budgeting, which is something our government needs to get rid of. Baseline budgeting is the concept that a department’s budget is based on how much money they spent in the previous year. If they spend 90 thousand dollars and their budget was 100 thousand dollars, the department budget will be 90 thousand dollars in the following year. If they don’t spend all of the money in their budget, their budget is cut. This creates a mad rush to spend their entire budget by September 30, the end of the fiscal year. If they spend the full amount and ask for a 10 percent increase and get a 5 percent increase, that is considered a 5 percent budget cut. That is how Congress can claim they are cutting the budget while the spending continues to increase. These two concepts explain some of the rather interesting end-of-the-year spending done in the past few weeks by the government. As you read this, remember that this is under sequestration when Democrats are complaining that there is no money.

The article posts some examples of spending in recent weeks:

On Monday, VA paid $27,000 for an order of photographs showing sunsets, mountain peaks and country roads. They would go into a new center serving homeless veterans in Los Angeles; a spokeswoman described the art as “motivational and calming, professionally designed to enhance clinical operations.”

On Tuesday, the USDA bought $127,000 worth of toner cartridges (“end of year,” the order explained). VA spent another $220,000 on artwork for its hospitals.

On Wednesday, the Coast Guard paid $178,000 for cubicle furniture, replacing high-walled cubes with low-walled ones to improve the air flow in a large office area.

“Other higher-priority projects were not able to be executed, so they moved [money] to this lower-priority project” before the year’s end, said Coast Guard spokesman Carlos Diaz. “The money was going to be spent anyway.”

On Thursday, VA was buying art again. It spent $216,000 on artwork for a facility in Florida. In all, preliminary data showed that the agency made at least 18 percent of all its art purchases for the year in this one week. One-sixth of the buying in one-52nd of the year.

This is not a reasonable system. There is a spreadsheet at adelphi.edu that shows the federal deficit over the years. When President Obama took office, the deficit was approximately 12 million dollars. The deficit is now approaching 17 million dollars. That’s a pretty hefty increase in five years. However, the really interesting part of the spreadsheet is the relationship between the deficit and which party controls the House of Representatives. Remember, the House controls the spending. Please follow the link to the spreadsheet and take a look at the history of the federal deficit.

At any rate–baseline budgeting needs to go.

 

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