Benghazi

Over half a year later, the truth continues to drip out:

Former Navy SEAL Tyrone Woods was part of a small team who was at the CIA annex about a mile from the U.S. consulate where Ambassador Chris Stevens and his team came under attack. When he and others heard the shots fired, they informed their higher-ups at the annex to tell them what they were hearing and requested permission to go to the consulate and help out. They were told to “stand down,” according to sources familiar with the exchange. Soon after, they were again told to “stand down.”

Woods and at least two others ignored those orders and made their way to the consulate which at that point was on fire. Shots were exchanged. The rescue team from the CIA annex evacuated those who remained at the consulate and Sean Smith, who had been killed in the initial attack. They could not find the ambassador and returned to the CIA annex at about midnight.

At that point, they called again for military support and help because they were taking fire at the CIA safe house, or annex. The request was denied. There were no communications problems at the annex, according those present at the compound. The team was in constant radio contact with their headquarters. In fact, at least one member of the team was on the roof of the annex manning a heavy machine gun when mortars were fired at the CIA compound. The security officer had a laser on the target that was firing and repeatedly requested back-up support from a Spectre gunship, which is commonly used by U.S. Special Operations forces to provide support to Special Operations teams on the ground involved in intense firefights.

CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Youngblood, though, denied the claims that requests for support were turned down.

Of course she did. That doesn’t make them untrue.

A Space Hacker Workshop

I’m busy preparing my presentation for this afternoon at Space Access, but Ed Wright is announcing a space hacker workshop up at Ames Research Center in Mountain View on May 4-5 for people who want to learn how to build cubesats that can fly suborbitally on XCOR’s Lynx.

[Update Friday morning]

I originally wrote this post in Phoenix last Saturday, but didn’t actually publish it until yesterday, in case it had anyone scratching their heads.

Gun Control

Why the president lost:

By spending time on an assault weapons ban, gun controllers hurt themselves in multiple ways. They energized the NRA’s base, who could probably have been persuaded to live with background checks. They wasted time, which had a huge cost: gun owners care about gun rights all the time, but the rest of the population mostly cares about gun control in the wake of a high-profile tragedy. And they made themselves look less like serious negotiators who were willing to come to a compromise that the other side could accept, and more like they were trying to reinstate the kind of gun laws that NRA members had spent two decades beating back.

In other words, by demanding more, they got less.

Bottom line — he’s as incompetent at negotiation as he is at most things. And of course, it doesn’t help when you accuse people of cowardice because they don’t share your opinion.

A Bad Gun-Control Law

What’s the rush?

Of course, gun-control laws are mostly bad. And mostly unconstitutional.

Disclosure: the authors are my legal counsel in the Mann lawsuit.

[Update a few minutes later]

Why Obama is losing on guns:

…Democrats could have threatened to primary these Democrats or withhold campaign funds, but that’s not very realistic in states in which these moderates may barely hang on in an election in which the Democrats could lose their majority. The White House can try to ply them with pork, although that’s a lot harder to do these days since it isn’t clear there will even be a budget. And the president’s not very popular in many states, so an offer to campaign with and for these Democrats isn’t very enticing. For now it seems the Democrats may try to water down the Toomey-Manchin amendment and try to wean away a few red-state Democrats. It is a sort of legislative limbo in which the bar gets lower and lower, but in this case it’s not clear the red-state Democrats want to play the game at all.

It is a misnomer, then, to blame the “gun lobby” for the difficulty in passing legislation. The red-state Democrats, like most of their Republican colleagues, are reflecting their own constituents’ views. If you polled specifically in the states where these Democrats come from, I bet you’d find gun regulation and bans a whole lot less popular than the nation at large. (I imagine some of them are in fact polling.) If the president were more popular in red states or more able to induce enthusiasm, then that might have made a difference.

And it is still possible that the needle can be threaded. Unfortunately for the president, whatever passes will bear scant resemblance to his desired legislation.

Of course, he’s losing on guns for the same reason that he loses on many things — his agenda is not that of the public. They continue to want real jobs, and he continues to ignore their wants.

The Wreck Of The Euro

It has already failed, and is a dead currency walking:

…we’re in an interesting situation. The crisis is crippling the south, but the south has no power to resolve the crisis. The crisis isn’t comfortable for the north but still looks less painful than the solution. So the north, which has the ability to resolve the crisis, doesn’t have the will to do it and the south, which has the will, lacks the ability.

And meanwhile everything in Europe gets worse. As we’ve said before, with the exception of communism itself, the euro has been the biggest economic catastrophe to befall the continent (and the world) since the 1930s. Politicians in Europe thought they were living in a post-historical period in which mistakes didn’t really matter all that much. They were horribly wrong, and the wreck of the euro is blighting lives and embittering spirits on a truly staggering scale.

An “interesting” situation in the same sense as the ancient Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.”

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!