Incompetence at the LAPD

Unbelievable.

From Jack Dunphy:

On Thursday morning, several hundred LAPD officers and FBI agents conducted raids intended to curtail the activities of the Rollin’ 40s Crips street gang. The raids came after a sixteen-month investigation that resulted in arrest warrants for 74 of the gang’s members. When the operation had concluded Thursday morning, 47 of the suspects had been arrested. Not a bad haul, as these things go, but I think I know why so many got away. This is where that chasm comes in.

As is understood by cops on the street (but not, apparently, by some of their bosses), maintaining a level of secrecy is crucial in mounting an operation such as this one, and officers often go to extraordinary lengths to conceal their preparations from anyone who might tip off the intended targets. For a recent gang sweep near downtown Los Angeles, for example, the command post was set up in the Dodger Stadium parking lot, well away from the neighborhoods where the warrants were served. So it came as something of a surprise to officers assigned to the operation Thursday morning to find that the command post had been set up in a parking lot at the corner of two of the busiest thoroughfares in South Los Angeles, Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Figueroa Street. Worse, this intersection marks the northeast boundary of the area claimed by the very gang the operation was targeting. Assembled there for all the world to see was an array of command post vehicles from the LAPD and the FBI, added to which throughout the night were hundreds of marked and unmarked police cars as well as SWAT trucks and armored cars. Any fool could have driven by and known at a glance that something big was about to go down in the neighborhood.

Incredibly, it got even worse. At around three in the morning, the supervisors for the operation gathered for a briefing from one of the captains in charge. Using a P.A. system that could be heard for blocks, most assuredly in the apartment complex that overlooks the parking lot, an apartment complex in which members of the Rollin’ 40 Crips happen to reside, the captain gave an outline of the operation, even naming the targeted gang and the exact time officers would be serving the warrants. As the incredulous supervisors gaped in amazement, two deputy chiefs, both of whom have applied to succeed Bratton, stood there in blithe ignorance that their officers had been placed in jeopardy and the entire operation compromised. Fortunately, many of the wanted suspects chose to absent themselves from home rather than stick around and shoot it out when the police showed up. Given the warning that had been broadcast to the neighborhood, it’s surprising that even one of them was found at home.

So now perhaps you can understand why LAPD officers are anxious about who Mayor Villaraigosa might select to succeed William Bratton. May he choose wisely. Their are lives depending on it.

Another Failed Presidency

Something someone sent me in an email.

Just as prescient now as it was when it was written in August.

Another Failed Presidency

By Geoffrey P. Hunt

Barack Obama is on track to have the most spectacularly failed presidency since Woodrow Wilson.

In the modern era, we've seen several failed presidencies--led by Jimmy Carter and LBJ. Failed presidents have one strong common trait-- they are repudiated, in the vernacular, spat out. Of course, LBJ wisely took the exit ramp early, avoiding a shove into oncoming traffic by his own party. Richard Nixon indeed resigned in disgrace, yet his reputation as a statesman has been partially restored by his triumphant overture to China.

George Bush Jr didn't fail so much as he was perceived to have been too much of a patrician while being uncomfortable with his more conservative allies. Yet George Bush Sr is still perceived as a man of uncommon decency, loyal to the enduring American character of rugged self-determination, free markets, and generosity. George W will eventually be treated more kindly by historians as one whose potential was squashed by his own compromise of conservative principles, in some ways repeating the mistakes of his father, while ignoring many lessons in executive leadership he should have learned at Harvard Business School. Of course George W could never quite overcome being dogged from the outset by half of the nation convinced he was electorally illegitimate -- thus aiding the resurgence of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party.

But, Barack Obama is failing. Failing big. Failing fast. And failing everywhere: foreign policy, domestic initiatives, and most importantly, in forging connections with the American people. The incomparable Dorothy Rabinowitz in the Wall Street Journal put her finger on it: He is failing because he has no understanding of the American people, and may indeed loathe them. Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard says he is failing because he has lost control of his message, and is overexposed. Clarice Feldman of American Thinker produced a dispositive commentary showing that Obama is failing because fundamentally he is neither smart nor articulate; his intellectual dishonesty is conspicuous by its audacity and lack of shame.

But, there is something more seriously wrong: How could a new president riding in on a wave of unprecedented promise and goodwill have forfeited his tenure and become a lame duck in six months? His poll ratings are in free fall. In generic balloting, the Republicans have now seized a five point advantage. This truly is unbelievable. What's going on?

No narrative. Obama doesn't have a narrative. No, not a narrative about himself. He has a self-narrative, much of it fabricated, cleverly disguised or written by someone else. But this self-narrative is isolated and doesn't connect with us. He doesn't have an American narrative that draws upon the rest of us. All successful presidents have a narrative about the American character that intersects with their own where they display a command of history and reveal an authenticity at the core of their personality that resonates in a positive endearing way with the majority of Americans. We admire those presidents whose narratives not only touch our own, but who seem stronger, wiser, and smarter than we are. Presidents we admire are aspirational peers, even those whose politics don't align exactly with our own: Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, Harry Truman, Ike, Reagan.

But not this president. It's not so much that he's a phony, knows nothing about economics, is historically illiterate, and woefully small minded for the size of the task-- all contributory of course. It's that he's not one of us. And whatever he is, his profile is fuzzy and devoid of content, like a cardboard cutout made from delaminated corrugated paper. Moreover, he doesn't command our respect and is unable to appeal to our own common sense. His notions of right and wrong are repugnant and how things work just don't add up. They are not existential. His descriptions of the world we live in don't make sense and don't correspond with our experience.

In the meantime, while we've been struggling to take a measurement of this man, he's dissed just about every one of us--financiers, energy producers, banks, insurance executives, police officers, doctors, nurses, hospital administrators, post office workers, and anybody else who has a non-green job. Expect Obama to lament at his last press conference in 2012: "For those of you I offended, I apologize. For those of you who were not offended, you just didn't give me enough time; if only I'd had a second term, I could have offended you too."

Mercifully, the Founders at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 devised a useful remedy for such a desperate state--staggered terms for both houses of the legislature and the executive. An equally abominable Congress can get voted out next year. With a new Congress, there's always hope of legislative gridlock until we vote for president again two short years after that.

Yes, small presidents do fail, Barack Obama among them. The coyotes howl but the wagon train keeps rolling along.

Ofc. Emily Jewett Morgenroth #322

12 years ago, tonight...

Emily J. Morgenroth
Date of Birth: December 5, 1970
Date Appointed: January 20, 1996
End of Watch: October 17, 1997

12 years ago tonight, Sacramento Police Officer Emily J. Morgenroth was killed in the line of duty.  She was 26 years old.

Emily and I were best friends in the academy.   She was a phenomenal person and a great cop. She didn't get nearly enough time on this Earth to do the great things that she would have done, but she made a pretty big impact during her short stay here.

Her death had a profound impact on me.

I remember that night like it was yesterday.  My good friend Mike called me to give me the news and I immediately went to the hospital, but she was already gone.  I got to spend a few minutes with her, which I'm very thankful for.

It's been 12 years and I still miss her beyond words.

Reverberating Loss of a Promising Cop
by Diana Griego Erwin

Day in and day out, it is easy to forget that police work is so fraught with danger. All over the city, patrol officers and their sergeants go about the business of keeping the rest of us safe, and much of what they get in return amounts to lip and attitude.

With the proliferation of guns on the streets and the continuing breakdown of civil accord, it's amazing police officers aren't hurt more often. And yet there's still a painful, disbelieving shock when an officer in your own town is killed in the line of duty. It is worse yet that Officer Emily Morgenroth was so young.

I have met many of our town's finest, but I did not know Morgenroth, who died in an alcohol-related collision Friday at age 26. And yet there is a profound respect in the air when those who knew her speak her name. Respect begets respect.

"She loved people. She knew how to treat them," said a homeless man who claimed to run into her frequently.

Morgenroth's friends and colleagues at the William J. Kinney police substation in North Sacramento were too broken up to share their thoughts Monday, but Lt. Tom Sweeney said the city has lost a gem.

"She cared about other people and gave them her concern and time even when it might have seemed inconvenient to someone else," he said.

Recently, for example, she shooed a colleague home when an arrest at the end of his shift meant he'd do overtime handling the booking. She did it for him.

In fact, she was always encouraging others to spend more time with friends and family, Sweeney said. "She knew what was important."

Her gift of "connecting" with others made her a superior officer. "People talked to her; they trusted her because she really listened to them. She didn't trivialize their problems," Sweeney said. "The citizens of Sacramento have truly lost an officer who was there for them."

Sacramento Police Chief Arturo Venegas Jr. said her father told him Morgenroth died doing what she really loved.

"They felt really at peace that she was fulfilling her dreams," Venegas said. "You know, sometimes people say, 'Oh, this wouldn't have happened if she hadn't been an officer,' but that is not the case here. She hadn't achieved all her dreams, but she was doing what she loved."

In many ways, Morgenroth represented the modern officer Venegas has often described as the future of police departments: professionals who bring a diversity of life experiences and skills to a career that, these days, calls for more brains than brawn.

She joined the Sacramento police force with her sights set on a FBI career, but some think she decided that maybe local policing suited her best. She spoke Japanese and German, held a political science degree from UCLA and taught English in Japan for two years before returning home to Northern California. Two years ago, she graduated from the police academy; she's worked the 9 p.m. to 7 a.m. graveyard shift in North Sacramento since January. Her boyfriend was a fellow officer.

Morgenroth was northbound on Marysville Boulevard on Friday night when her police cruiser broadsided a truck making a left turn into a liquor store parking lot. The driver of the pickup, whose blood-alcohol level was more than twice the legal limit, has been charged with drunken driving; vehicular manslaughter charges could be added. The California Highway Patrol is investigating.

Meanwhile, flowers commemorating the fallen officer have appeared at the base of the flag pole outside the police substation and at the crash site.

The collision occurred near Bill's Liquor at the corner of Marysville and Del Paso boulevards where a steady stream of passersby paused Monday to look at colorful bouquets left on a telephone pole heavily splintered in the crash.

A woman stopped with two small children to explain, in Spanish, the tragedy that had occurred there. While not absolutely sure, she said she believed Morgenroth was the officer who once helped calm the family when her nephew was hit by a car.

Ten minutes later, a man with torn pants and a shirt stained with grease bowed his head as if praying.

Indeed, he was.

"I just think we don't appreciate how the police risk their lives and how dangerous it is, 'tis all," said Edward Tooley, an unemployed mechanic. "From what I've read, the officer was very young. My prayers to her family."

Emily's ODMP Memorial Page

The Monument

I never dreamed it would be me
My name for all eternity
Recorded here at this hallowed place
Alas, my name, no more my face

"In the line of duty" I hear them say
My family now the price will pay
My folded flag stained with their tears
We only had those few short years

The badge no longer on my chest
I sleep now in eternal rest
My sword I pass to those behind
And pray they keep this thought in mind

I never dreamed it would be me
And with heavy heart and bended knee
I ask for here and all the past
Dear God, let my name be the last

Det. George Hanh
LAPD (Ret.)

I miss you Em...
.

I heard this song on the radio the other day. Since the first time I heard it, it always makes me think of you...

The Won

What a complete and utter JOKE!

Here are the Second Place runner-ups:

Chinese Human Rights Activist Hu Jia - imprisoned for campaigning for human rights in the PRC, not as worthy as Barack Hussein Obama.

Wei Jingsheng, who spent 17 years in Chinese prisons for urging reforms of China's communist system. -- not as worthy as Barack Hussein Obama. (Not to mention the symbolic value of awarding a Chinese dissident on the 20th Anniversary of the Tianenmen Square Massacre.)

Greg Mortenson, founder of the Central Asia Institute has built nearly 80 schools, especially for girls, in remote areas of northern Pakistan and Afghanistan over the past 15 years - not as worthy as Barack Hussein Obama.

Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad, a philosophy professor in Jordan who risks his life by advocating interfaith dialogue between Jews and Muslims, also not as worthy as Barack Hussein Obama.

Afghan human rights activist Sima Samar. She currently leads the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission and serves as the U.N. special envoy to Darfur and also is apparently not as worthy as Barack Hussein Obama.

H/T: Ace

Hope and Change

Continues to amaze!

H/T: Innocent Bystanders via Don Surber

Where do we get such men?

Blackfive has a link to a story about SGT Josh Brennan (173rd ABN), from Tanker Babe.

Josh was KIA in Afghanistan two years ago.  Josh's cousin, Joseph, is also in the Army and just graduated from Airborne School. Joseph was pinned with Josh's Jump Wings and he'll be going to Josh's old unit.

This is what Josh's Commander said during his speech to the graduates and their friends and families:

"Distinguished guests, family, friends, and graduates of Airborne Class 43-09 – I am honored and humbled to be asked to speak to this class. I graduated on this field nearly 26 years ago; little has changed – and that’s a good thing.

Prior to beginning these short remarks, I’d ask all veterans in the audience to stand. I’d like to THANK YOU for your service and for not only doing your part for FREEDOM and DEMOCRACY but for also inspiring another OR others to do their part. Shortly, Airborne School will ask previous PARATROOPERs to pin their protégé’s wings – in front of the formation, which is truly inspiring.

I was privileged to begin my career as an enlisted Airborne Ranger, which means I was trained by the best; in my latter years I was privileged to command PARATROOPERs in combat, which means I led the best our services and nation have to offer. PARATROOPERs of any service and any specialty are perfectly suited to be incredible trainers and incredible combat warriors. Our most elite – Army Rangers, Special Forces, Delta Operators, Navy SEALs, Air Force Para-Rescue and Combat Control Teams, and Marine Force Recon and Special Operators are Airborne qualified – PARATROOPERs first and foremost. The attention to detail required to exit an aircraft, with combat equipment, at night, into an ambiguous situation is instructive to say the least. It takes moxy.

Our Nation’s elite are expected to move quickly, with limited information, and accomplish the intent – always. Many times this means LGOPs – or little groups of PARATROOPERs – are figuring “it” out as they go along. They may not have everything they need and won’t have everything they want but they’ll do their very best and make our nation and allies more secure – always.

Since World War II our military history is replete with tens of thousands of stories of PARATROOPERS in action – heroically and selflessly bringing the fight to the enemy, to the enemies’ homeland and backyard, and living their lives for their fellow PARATROOPERs. I led such an organization that selflessly fought for a population that had never benefited from a central government and had historically aligned with the tyrant that did them the least harm.

The PARATROOPERS I led in Afghanistan consistently amazed friendly forces and enemy forces alike as they tenaciously conducted 9500 missions for the population and fought 1100 contacts with the enemy earning over 300 valor awards to include 3 Medal of Honor nominations a Distinguished Service Cross, 26 Silver Stars, and 90 Bronze Stars for Valor.

One young leader had earned a Bronze Star on a previous Afghanistan tour; as a Sergeant Team Leader on his second Afghan tour he was shot through the calf in a close fight on the Abas Ghar Mountain in the Korengal Valley – this team leader refused MEDEVAC and led his team off of an 8,400 foot mountain through the valley floor, back to his base camp at 5,000 feet. On the night of 25 October 2007, just six weeks later, this team leader was the point man leading his platoon through the mountains and back to his combat outpost after a very intense five day operation that in effect transformed the Korengal Valley. The platoon was ambushed by numerous enemy arrayed in a close ambush – some within meters of the lead squad. The lead team leader was shot six times – the squad leader was knocked to the ground – three others were wounded, and the platoon medic was killed moving to treat his wounded comrades. The trail team leader moved through the ambush to secure his squad leader only to see his peer team leader being carried off by two Taliban. The trail team leader attempted to suppress the enemy with grenades and rifle fire as he fearlessly moved through the fire, killed one of the Taliban carrying off his peer and wounded the other then he secured his wounded peer and brought him to safety. The trail team leader was nominated for the Medal of Honor – the lead team leader was evacuated and died hours later.

The trail Team Leader in this vignette is SGT Sal Giunta – he still serves in BATTLE Company, 2-503, 173rd ABCT in Vicenza, Italy. The lead team leader was SGT Josh Brennan a handsome, fit, proficient, heroic PARATROOPER. His dad, Mike, Uncle Joe, Aunt Lori, Uncle Terry, and Cousin Michael are present today. PVT Joe Brennan is one of the 365 graduating members of the class; I jumped with him Monday, and “cousin Joe” is enroute to BATTLE Company– to join SGT Brennan’s former unit, to include SGT Giunta and many other outstanding Paratroopers.

I tell this story to our new PARATROOPERs – and more importantly to the Parents and Loved ones of our newest PARATROOPERs – as your PARATROOPER selflessly and courageously joined an elite fraternity. With this graduation they expand their family – and join men like SGT Giunta and SGT Brennan. Regardless of unit, service, or duration of service, they will leave this field a better service member and citizen. Like the thousands of PARATROOPERS that are currently deployed, they will be asked and tasked to do serious business for our nation – to do more with less – to figure it out in rugged, austere, contested terrain, in the dead of night, and they will do it with like minded warriors. Your PARATROOPER will need your continued support as you are also part of this new and expanded family. Whether they accept their service as a career or return to school or the family business, you can expect more from them and they can expect more from themselves – as they have faced the OPEN DOOR where one of three things can happen upon exit – they can get killed, they can get hurt, or they can land OK… These same three things go through our head when we roll outside the wire, move out on patrol, maneuver on the enemy, or face any other unknown hazard or challenge – which is why PARATROOPERS are well suited for the challenges of combat and the challenges of life.

Parents, mentors, and inspirational others – you did good. Your investment is on the field to your front – and I’d venture your return is much higher than you could have ever hoped.

To the PARATROOPERS of Class 43-09 – I’m proud to stand amongst you – congratulations – see you on the DROP ZONE!

Thank you for your time – make Good Luck – Rangers Lead the Way!"

Go read the whole thing, there's some great pics there.

I'll bet they're REALLY scared....

U.N. Ambassador: U.S. Considering Sanctions Against Iran

The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations says Washington and other veto-holding members in the U.N. Security Council are studying sanction options if Iran does not prove its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes.

The U.S. official, Susan Rice, also says the so-called P-5 + 1 is in a period of "intense negotiations" with Tehran but that Iran had a "finite period" to completely open its nuclear program to international inspections. She refused to set a deadline.

Rice said the United States had three options: to push sanctions through the U.N., to work with European allies to punish Iran, or to take unilateral action in conjunction with the other possible courses of action.

Rice spoke Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press."

The IOC is obviously RAAAAAACIST!!!!

Congratulations Rio!

Once again,Barry shows how terrifically awesome he is!

33 years ago today...

My father took his own life.  He was 29.  I was 10.

I've missed him ever since and I constantly wonder how different things might've been.


Mom, me and Dad (circa 1978 1968)



Dad and I