Obama’s Radical Legacy – Commutations and Pardons

Obama is letting some people out of their sentences that have ruined any vestige of a legacy, NEW YORK MAGAZINE:

In addition to freeing Chelsea Manning, President Obama granted 208 other commutations and 64 pardons Tuesday — among them General James Cartwright. The decorated general and former vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff pleaded guilty last year to lying to the FBI about leaking classified information to journalists about U.S. covert efforts against Iran’s nuclear program.

Cartwright’s pardon will spare him from sentencing next month. His defense team had asked for a year of probation and 600 hours of community service, but prosecutors were pushing for a two-year prison sentence.

Obama has now granted more commutations — a total of 1,385 individuals — than any other president in U.S. history….

YOUNG CONSERVATIVES notes who was lobbying for this killers release:

…But FALN bombs killed several people and wounded dozens more.

His sentence was compounded in 1988 when he tried to escape prison in a plot that included the plan to murder prison guards.

He has never renounced his declaration of being an enemy of the United States.

Freeing Lopez-Rivera became a cause celebre among leftists and celebrities, among them Lin Manuel Miranda, the star of the Broadway show, “Hamilton”.

Miranda personally lobbied Obama to free Lopez-Rivera.

Political Correctness Takes Hold In Veteran’s Health-Care* (*So-Called)

Political Correctness creeps its way into American life in the worst ways imaginable. With thanks to — of course — leftist ideology and management. For instance, a triple-amputee Iraq veteran struggles with VA bureaucracy, or the covering up veterans’ deaths at the now infamous Arizona VA hospital. And while the following is not an “American” story, it highlights the onerous decay of “government guided” healthcare:

Moonbattery notes that military criminals play into the above example with a truly unique American story that wreaks of tragedy.

A Democratic Administration has predictable priorities:

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has formally approved the request of Pvt. Bradley Manning, convicted for leaking classified documents to Wikileaks, to be temporarily transferred out of military custody in order to undergo expensive hormone therapy and surgery to become a woman.

Manning leaked the documents while in a snit because he wasn’t getting along with his boyfriend. Any number of Americans and their allies had their lives placed in danger as a result. A sane civilization would have promptly executed Manning for treason.

Instead, we are paying for a criminal’s sex change. A criminal that caused — directly — the deaths of U.S. military [and allies] deaths as well as intelligence operators deaths leading also to the shutting down of many undercover operations meant to protect the general public from future terrorist attacks.

Moonbat continues:

As the [supposed] medical needs of Manning, convicted in 2013 and sentenced to 35 years in prison for stealing 750,000 classified defense department documents in order to disseminate them to Wikileaks, were being assiduously attended to by America’s defense establishment, untold hundreds of American servicemen and women suffering from genuine life-threatening and acute medical conditions have allegedly been left to die on at least seven waiting lists managed by the US Veterans Administration. …

Phoenix VA doctor Dr. Sam Foote was the first to publicly expose the scandal when he claimed that up to 40 people in his jurisdiction alone had died preventable deaths while on VA waiting lists.

Sex change treatments can last several years and, in Manning’s case, will cost taxpayers up to $40,000. The 2014 published Medicaid reimbursement for a colonoscopy is $479.39.

It all makes perfect sense for an administration that honors IDAHOT Day instead of Armed Forces Day.

See my post on Obama ignoring “Armed Forces Day” but pandering instead to the LGBT community. I am sure the LGBT community is proud that its own Leftist have made “Chelsea” its honory parade marshall:

Today, the nation’s largest Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Pride Celebration Committee announced on its website that WikiLeaks whistle-blower Chelsea Manning has been chosen to represent the event as a 2014 Honorary Grand Marshal. (HotAir)

Nothing New: Iraq Body Count has been on this for years

The numbers of death in Iraq that the media used were primarily from the Lancet Surveys Of Iraq War Casualties,

The first survey published on 29 October 2004, estimated 98,000 excess Iraqi deaths (with a range of 8,000 to 194,000, using a 95% confidence interval (CI)) from the 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq to that time, or about 50% higher than the death rate prior to the invasion. The authors described this as a conservative estimate, because it excluded the extreme statistical outlier data from Fallujah. If the Fallujah cluster were included, the mortality estimate would increase to 150% over pre-invasion rates (95% CI: 1.6 to 4.2).

The second survey published on 11 October 2006, estimated 654,965 excess deaths related to the war, or 2.5% of the population, through the end of June 2006. The new study applied similar methods and involved surveys between May 20 and July 10, 2006. More households were surveyed, allowing for a 95% confidence interval of 392,979 to 942,636 excess Iraqi deaths. 601,027 deaths (range of 426,369 to 793,663 using a 95% confidence interval) were due to violence. 31% (186,318) of those were attributed to the US-led Coalition, 24% (144,246) to others, and 46% (276,472) unknown. The causes of violent deaths were gunshot (56% or 336,575), car bomb (13% or 78,133), other explosion/ordnance (14%), air strike (13% or 78,133), accident (2% or 12,020), and unknown (2%).

(WIKI)

National Geographic wrote about this as well:

War and occupation directly and indirectly claimed the lives of about a half-million Iraqis from 2003 to 2011, according to a groundbreaking survey of 1,960 Iraqi households. The violence peaked in 2006 and 2007, say public health experts who were part of the study.

On March 19, 2003, a U.S.-led coalition invaded Iraq, beginning a ground war that culminated in the rapid capture of Baghdad and overthrow of the regime led by Saddam Hussein. A coalition-led occupation of Iraq lasted until 2011, marked by repeated bombings, an al Qaeda-linked insurgency, militia warfare, and other bloodshed in the nation of 32.6 million people.

In the new PLOS Medicine journal survey, led by public health expert Amy Hagopian of the University of Washington in Seattle, an international research team polled heads of households and siblings across Iraq. The researchers, including some from the Iraqi Ministry of Health, aimed to update and improve past estimates of the human costs of the war and occupation….

(added in 2013)

HOWEVER, These WikiLeaks “deaths in Iraq” are about the same numbers IRAQ BODY COUNT have? Are people in the media idiots? I have been referencing these in debates with libs for years.

The whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks today released a trove of classified reports that it said documented at least 109,000 deaths in the Iraq war, more than the United States previously has acknowledged, as well as what it described as cases of torture and other abuses by Iraqi and coalition forces.

“The reports detail 109,032 deaths in Iraq, comprised of 66,081 ‘civilians’; 23,984 ‘enemy’ (those labeled as insurgents); 15,196 ‘host nation’ (Iraqi government forces) and 3,771 ‘friendly’ (coalition forces),” WikiLeaks said in a statement regarding the documents’ release. “The majority of the deaths (66,000, over 60 percent) of these are civilian deaths. That is 31 civilians dying every day during the six-year period.”

The new documents covered 2004 through 2009, WikiLeaks said, with the exception of May 2004 and March 2009.

A review of the documents by Iraq Body Count, an advocacy group that long has monitored civilian casualties in the war, found 15,000 previously unknown civilian deaths, according to WikiLeaks — a detail first reported in The Guardian newspaper, one of a handful of international news organizations that got an advance look at the documents.

The U.S. military long has maintained that it does not keep an official death tally, but earlier this month following a Freedom of Information Act request, the Pentagon said some 77,000 Iraqis had been killed from 2004 to mid-2008 — a shorter period than that covered by WikiLeaks…..

(ABC Story)