Marine Aviators at the Battle of Midway

Early June, 1942

The Japanese Empire was at the height of its expansion.  One last, insignificant possession of the United States remained to be cleared from the western Pacific Ocean.  A mighty Japanese fleet was steaming to do battle and capture Midway.  If things went truly well, the Japanese would lure the American fleet into a decisive naval engagement.  There was little doubt, at least in Tokyo, that the numerically superior, better-equipped, and much more experienced Japanese fleet would be triumphant.

The Japanese fleet included four of the aircraft carriers that had performed so ably at Pearl Harbor: the Akagi, the Hiryu, the Kaga, and the Soryu.  These were accompanied by two huge battleships: the Haruna and the Kirishima.  They proceeded as an integrated battle group, their speed constrained by the top speed of the battleships.  The time advantage conceded to the Americans would prove costly.

The Japanese had planned on all six carriers from the Pearl Harbor raid, but Shokaku had been badly damaged at the Battle of the Coral Sea in early May.  Zuikaku, while not damaged herself, had lost most of her planes and pilots and been forced to return to Japan for refitting.  The United States lost the carrier USS Lexington.  The Japanese were forced to turn back from their planned invasion of Port Moresby, so the Battle of the Coral Sea was a strategic victory for the Americans.  Material loses on both sides, while certainly not trivial, were not decisive.

The Japanese were seeking a decisive victory at Midway.

So were the Americans.

The U.S. forces were deployed in two Task Forces.  TF16, under Rear Admiral Spruance, had two carriers, the USS Hornet and the USS Enterprise.  TF17, under Rear Admiral Fletcher, had the carrier USS Yorktown.

The fleets were on converging courses to history.

Midway Defenses

The defenses at Midway were meager, cobbled together quickly at the outbreak of hostilities -- the perfect metaphor for the American lack of preparedness prior to WWII.

The defenses included:

• Ground Assets - Sixth Marine Defense Battalion (reinforced).
• Naval Assets - Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron 1 (MTBRon 1) with eight PT Boats.
• Air Assets - Army Air Force - Seventh Army Air Force Detachment with four B-26 Martin Marauders and 19 B-17 Flying Fortresses.
• Air Assets - Marine - Marine Fighting Squadron 221 (VMF-221 with 20 F2A-3 Brewster Buffalos and seven F4F-3 Grumman Wildcats) and Marine Scout Bombing Squadron 241 (VMSB-241 with 11 SB2U-3 Vought Vindicators and 16 SBD-2 Douglas Dauntlesses).

The Choice Ahead in November

Mitt Romney and Barack Obama are very different people; perhaps as different as two candidates for the Presidency have ever been.  They do share one similar trait; a desire for personal privacy. 
Romney's reticence derives from a self-deprecating, reserved form of shyness.

President Obama flaunts a sinister, in-your-face egotism; the self-gratifying arrogance of a narcissist that would issue an Executive Order sealing all of his personal records within 24 hours of taking office.

Romney

Romney is a decent, honorable, and proper man.  His reticence and modesty are the products of old school upbringing.  John Hinderaker of PowerLine put it this way in a posting titled Romney Impresses:

[A]s a person, Romney is hugely authentic.  His persona is no mystery: he is a Dad.  We have all known men like Mitt Romney.  We may think they are square and out of date; we may roll our eyes if they are occasionally goofy.  But when times are tough, in moments of crisis, everyone knows where to turn: we look to leaders of character, competence and decency, like Mitt Romney.

An example (see here and here):  In 1996 the teenage daughter of a friend of Romney went missing; ran off to New York.  The friend, a fellow executive from Bain Capital, asked Romney what he should do.  Romney said they should go and find her.

The Magic of Change, NOAA Style

Hope and change have been disappointing at best. Apparently hope was not a powerful enough tool. Mayhap magic might prevail.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), under the enlightened administration of environmental superstar Dr. Jane Lubchenco, is planning a leadership conference in June. The conference is to be held in a hotel near the NOAA Headquarters in Silver Spring, MD. No excessive travel for these parsimonious protectors of the purse strings. 

A couple of months ago, we were told of some high jinks at the GSA. That's the Government Services Administration (GSA) that is chartered with overseeing the careful spending of our money. They had a big conference with clowns and magic and mystics. Then they had a big scandal.
Maybe NOAA missed the memo.

One of the sessions at the NOAA conference was to have a motivational theme and had the working title of "The Magic of Change." NOAA placed an ad to find a magician and it caught the attention of Senator Scott Brown (R MA) among others. With the GSA conference fresh in the minds of people, the reaction was immediate; ridicule, objections, outrage, you name it. The results were viral with ABC, CNN, the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, the Gloucester Times, Politico, Boston.com, and the Belfast (that's right, Ireland) Telegraph and several others picking up the story.

Most of the media outlets that ran the story made the link to the GSA scandal but none made the link to the ongoing and unreported (other than the American Thinker) NOAA scandal.

I only wish that I were a fly on the wall and could have heard what Senator Brown said privately. He released the following official statement:

It's outrageous that NOAA is advertising to hire a magician for an upcoming government conference. This is taxpayer abuse, pure and simple, and I urge Commerce Secretary John Bryson to immediately cancel these frivolous plans. This is a low point even by Washington's standards and an insult to the fishing families that have been harmed by NOAA's over-regulation and attitude of indifference. The best magic that NOAA could perform would be to make this wasteful spending disappear.

NOAA listened (a strange phenomena in itself) to Senator Brown and withdrew the ad. There will be no magic at the upcoming conference.

The clowns will still be there; they are protected by privacy screens erected by their government employee unions. I don't think Dr. Lubchenco belongs to a union, but she's protected by the President.

This post originally appeared in the American Thinker on 5 May 2012.

Where Are the Rolling Heads from NOAA?

Scandals are shaking the Obama administration. Personnel with the highest of security clearances are being intimate, in the most basic definition of the word, with foreign nationals. Pillow talk, anyone? Other high-ranking officials cavort with clowns and psychics, all paid for on the government dime. Hot tub, anyone?

In the meantime, a human tragedy is occurring driven by a much more expensive if equally sordid scandal at NOAA that goes on under the radar of media attention. Steve Urbon of the New Bedford Standard-Times asks, "What about our scandal?"

Back in February 2011, CBS News did an exposé on the NOAA law enforcement scandal. As far as I know, this has been the only national coverage of the outrage other than what's appeared here at American Thinker (AT). AT has been reporting on the NOAA scandal for the past two years. Many of the citations and links in this essay are from AT's coverage. CBS showed a clip of Senator Grassley, who said, "I want to make sure that heads roll ... because in a bureaucracy, if heads don't roll, you don't change behavior."

Last week, a dozen or so Secret Service agents, including a couple of supervisors, did what boys do. Wham, bam, thank you, ma'am! Problem was, they were on duty in a foreign country, protecting the president. Not a good thing.

The first cut made for three heads: one supervisor gone, allowed to retire; another supervisor being discharged, with 30 days to mount a defense; a third non-supervisory person resigned. Three more were announced on 20 April, and there are probably more to come.

Six and counting! Secret Service behavior will be better in the future.

A couple of weeks earlier, we were told of some hijinks at the GSA. That's the GSA that is chartered with overseeing the spending of our money. The following is from the Washington Post on 2 April:

The chief of the General Services Administration resigned, two of her top deputies were fired and four managers were placed on leave Monday amid reports of lavish spending at a conference off the Las Vegas Strip[.]

That's three GSA heads gone and four other heads hovering above the block. A very definite message in the behavioral department.

Two scandals, two forceful responses, and two problems fixed.

And then there is NOAA. NOAA law enforcement was running essentially unsupervised for years, inflicting huge fines on fishermen for small infractions and putting the collected monies in a slush fund used for lavish trips and booze-cruise luxury boats.

NOAA's Party Boat

A boat is a hole in the water into which you pour money. An old cliché, and very, very true.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), while not yet reaching the level of cliché, has become a euphemism for inept management.

NOAA's Fisheries Service Office of Law Enforcement (OLE) in Seattle bought a boat -- a very fancy boat, a "luxurious" boat, a boat that cost $300,787. You can view a sales video of the boat here. Indulge yourself -- see how the 1% lives.

The boat was delivered in June 2008 and was used by OLE personnel for personal entertainment. The first operational patrol was in June 2009, a year after the boat had been delivered. It was taken out of service in September 2010 after a total of just nine operational patrols.

Much of the factual information in this essay comes from a response by the Department of Commerce to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts. The FOIA response is dated 16 February 2012, and Senator Brown gave a speech from the Senate floor on 17 February. You can view the eight-minute speech here, and you will see that it is not normal go-along-to-get-along Senate demagoguery. Brown is a breath of fresh air. He asked, "What does it take to get fired at NOAA?"

The IG report in the FOIA response is heavily redacted -- for privacy concerns, we are assured. We are familiar with redacted FOIAs, particularly from NOAA. The redactions are annoying, but one can interpret who is who at least in broad terms. There is a primary actor in the NOAA Party Boat saga. He is one of four supervisory OLE agents in the Seattle office. I will refer to him as the Redacted Rascal, or RR for short.

The IG's report includes the following:

1. [RR] violated agency policy and ethical standards by operating the UC [undercover] vessel with his wife and/or friends aboard on three known occasions (workdays) in the summer of 2008.

2. When contemporaneously questioned by [redacted], and later by OIG [Office of the Inspector General], [RR] was not candid about unauthorized persons aboard the UC vessel, in violation of agency policy and the Standards of Ethical Conduct.

4a. Inappropriate use of personal credit card for nearly $12,000 in vessel operating costs.

4b. Interference [by RR] with OIG investigation.

How serious are these charges? Well, #2 and #4b can get you lots of hard time in a federal slammer -- just ask Martha Stewart, Scooter Libby, and the bleeping golden Blago. How did RR make out? Much better than the other three. RR is under the protection of the benevolent Dr. Jane Lubchenco, administrator of NOAA. The following is also from the IG's report:

On May 31, 2011, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Maryland [serving NOAA Headquarters] declined criminal prosecution of [RR] in favor of administrative remedies. A USA [redacted] specifically recommended administrative action be pursued against [RR] and the Government be made whole for the cost of the fuel and time attributable to [RR's] reported misconduct involving the UC vessel.

No criminal prosecution -- only an administrative action recommended, and we don't know if the recommendation was followed.

The Bad Faith President

Say what you might about Jimmy Carter and the inept presidency, but at least Jimmy was acting in good faith.

President Obama is the personification of bad faith.

"[N]o president ever before has lied as frequently, as flagrantly or as foolishly as has Barack Obama" (Jack Kelly in Real Clear Politics).  "[T]he president is coming across more and more as a trimmer, as an operator who's not operating in good faith" (Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal).  "President Obama is too busy spewing falsehoods to support his ideological agenda than [sic] to take account of the facts" (Larry Kudlow in Real Clear Politics).  These essayists are neither lightweights nor ideologically rigid right-wingers.  Ms. Noonan was a recent supporter of Obama.

As citizens, we owe the office of the president respect and support, regardless of our individual feelings for the occupant of the office.  In return, the occupant of the office of the president owes us a good-faith custodianship -- a custodianship that we are being denied by President Obama.  Let us explore Obama's bad faith in three areas: energy policy and the economy, national defense and foreign policy, and personal freedom and liberty.

Energy Policy and the Economy

Obama is campaigning on the energy slogan of "all of the above" in bad faith.  See his website (ignore that "Donate" tab).  The funny thing about Obama's "all of the above" is the limited definition of the word "all."  Shades of what the meaning of is is. 

"All" does not include coal. 

Obama is campaigning on reducing the cost of gasoline and creating more jobs.  At the same time, he is putting virtually an entire industry out of business with an EPA regulation that limits the emissions from coal-fired plants to economically unachievable low levels.

Style, Substance, Perry, and the Media

Rick Perry gave a superb speech to NH Cornerstone, a New Hampshire conservative group.  The full speech is here and well worth the time to watch (about 25 minutes).  In fact, this partisan New Hampshire reporter considers the speech close to perfect for the audience. 

How did the left-leaning media react?  As could perhaps be anticipated, with ridicule and mockery.  For example, in a harsh piece by Brian Browdie of the NY Daily News titled "Rick Perry's unusually expressive 2012 speech in New Hampshire sparks rumors he was drunk," Mr. Browdie said:

During his remarks at the Cornerstone Action Dinner in Manchester, the Republican presidential candidate seemed to titter at his own jokes, gesticulate wildly, make odd facial expressions and go off on strange tangents.

A video, edited to about eight minutes, is included in a Politico posting by Alexander Burns titled "Rick Perry's Bizarre New Hampshire Speech."  There are several other similar edits.  A three-minute, forty-second version that appeared on the ABC News website was used to create a timeline for the comparisons that follow.  The edited versions went viral, but very few people took the time to watch the entire 25-minute speech.

Why did the media react this way?  Maybe because Perry is a conservative, and the media are liberal.   Maybe for Perry's exhibiting "unquestionably unpresidential behavior," as David Badash of the New Civil Rights Movement put it.  What is the current definition of presidential behavior during a speaking engagement?  The loud, monotonous rant we are witnessing so often of late?  The disingenuous or worse content of those rants?

Perry opened his remarks with the World Series.  He said that he had arrived in New Hampshire Thursday evening with the Rangers leading 7-4.  He gave an exuberant shout, with much arm-waving ("gesticulating wildly").  Texas was finally going to be a world champion after fifty years.  Then, in a much more subdued voice, Perry said that it was now Friday, and they were still playing.  This is where the edited version dropped out.  In the actual speech, Perry went on to say that Chris Carpenter was pitching, and he is from New Hampshire, implying that Texas had no chance.  Self-deprecating humor, timing that Jack Benny would envy, and audience involvement.  The crowd went wild -- cheers and applause.  He had them.

As an aside, President Obama snubbed the Cardinals (from the swing state of Missouri) by not giving the traditional presidential congratulations.  Presidential behavior, Mr. Badash?  Smart politics, Mr. Badash?