Now this is a repeat Rule 5. You may have noticed how I write Robert Stacey Stacy McCain; that’s because my sister Stacey spells her name correctly, so I have to have some fun with Mr McCain. As it happens, Stacey and my other sister, Lisa, are visiting the Keystone State this weekend, and I don’t have much free time for blogging; I haven’t seen either of them for over ten years. So, you get a quick rerun of one of our best Rule 5s for this weekend.

Face of Defense: Woman Soldier Receives Silver Star

By SPC Micah E. Clare’ 82nd Airborne Division’s 4th Brigade Combat Team Public Affairs Office.

Army Spc. Monica Brown, a medic from the 782nd Brigade Support Battalion, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division, stands over Forward Operating Base Salerno in Khowst province, Afghanistan. Brown is the second woman since World War II to earn a Silver Star for gallantry in combat.

Brown, recognized for her gallant actions during combat in Afghanistan in 2007, is the second woman soldier since World War II to be awarded a Silver Star. She received the medal from Vice President Richard B. Cheney during a ceremony here March 20.

It was dusk on April 25, 2007, when Brown, a medic from the 82nd Airborne Division’s 782nd Brigade Support Battalion, 4th Brigade Combat Team, was on a routine security patrol along the rolling, rocky plains of the isolated Jani Khail district in Afghanistan’s Paktika province when insurgents attacked her convoy.

“We’d been out on the mission for a couple of days,” said Brown, who at the time was attached to the brigade’s 4th Squadron, 73rd Cavalry Regiment’s Troop C. “We had just turned into a wadi (empty river bed) when our gunner yelled at us that the vehicle behind us had hit an (improvised explosive device).”

The soldiers looked out of their windows in time to see one of the struck vehicle’s tires flying through the field next to them. Brown had just opened her door to see what was going on when the attack began.

“I only saw the smoke from the vehicle when suddenly we started taking small-arms fire from all around us,” she said. “Our gunner starting firing back, and my platoon sergeant yelled, ‘Doc! Let’s go.’”

Brown and her platoon sergeant, Staff Sgt. Jose Santos, exited their vehicle, and while under fire, ran the few hundred meters to the site of the downed Humvee.

“Everyone was already out of the burning vehicle,” she said. “But even before I got there, I could tell that two of them were injured very seriously.”

In fact, all five of the passengers who had stumbled out were burned and cut. Two soldiers, Spcs. Stanson Smith and Larry Spray, suffered life-threatening injuries.

With help from two less-injured vehicle crewmen, Sgt. Zachary Tellier and Spc. Jack Bodani, Brown moved the immobile soldiers to a relatively safe distance from the burning Humvee.

“There was pretty heavy incoming fire at this point,” she said.

More at the link.

Soldier Earns Silver Star for Her Role in Defeating Ambush

By Ann Scott Tyson, Washington Post Staff Writer | Friday, June 17, 2005

Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester fought her way through an enemy ambush south of Baghdad, killing three insurgents with her M-4 rifle to save fellow soldiers’ lives — and yesterday became the first woman since World War II to win the Silver Star medal for valor in combat.

The 23-year-old retail store manager from Bowling Green, Ky., won the award for skillfully leading her team of military police soldiers in a counterattack after about 50 insurgents ambushed a supply convoy they were guarding near Salman Pak on March 20.

The medal, rare for any soldier, underscores the growing role in combat of U.S. female troops in Iraq’s guerrilla war, where tens of thousands of American women have served, 36 have been killed and 285 wounded, according to Pentagon figures.

After insurgents hit the convoy with a barrage of fire from machine guns, AK-47 assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, Hester “maneuvered her team through the kill zone into a flanking position where she assaulted a trench line with grenades and M203 rounds,” according to the Army citation accompanying the Silver Star.

“She then cleared two trenches with her squad leader where she engaged and eliminated three AIF [anti-Iraqi forces] with her M4 rifle. Her actions saved the lives of numerous convoy members,” the citation stated.

Hester, a varsity softball and basketball player in high school, joined the Army in 2001 and was assigned to the Kentucky National Guard’s 617th Military Police Company, based in Richmond, Ky.

A female driver with the unit, Spec. Ashley J. Pullen of Danville, Ky., also won the Bronze Star for her bravery. Pullen laid down fire to suppress insurgents and then “exposed herself to heavy AIF fires in order to provide medical assistance to her critically injured comrades,” saving several lives, her citation said.

Six other soldiers with Hester’s unit won awards for defeating the ambush, leaving 27 insurgents dead, six wounded and one captured. They include Hester’s squad leader, Staff. Sgt. Timothy F. Nein, who also won the Silver Star.

It’s simple: they were soldiers, and they did their duty.

WSJ Blogs

Code Pink Co-Founder Interrupts Obama Speech

May 23, 2013, 4:38 PM
By Julian E. Barnes

President Barack Obama’s big speech Thursday at the National Defense University was interrupted – loudly – by Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Code Pink, a group that has long protested the U.S. wars and counterterrorism policies.

While Code Pink members are regularly thrown out of congressional hearings, the security personnel at the speech allowed her to remain for a while. She used the opportunity to repeatedly criticize the U.S. policy on Guantanamo and drones. Code Pink also held a 50-person rally outside NDU, said Alli McCracken, a Code Pink organizer, who confirmed Ms. Benjamin was the protester.

Read More Here: http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2013/05/23/code-pink-founder-interrupts-obama-speech/

This is a replica of the Engine that traveled on the North Central Railroad in New Freedom, PA that Lincoln traveled on to his way to Gettysburg to deliver his famous Address about the Battle there. First time fired up. Deliverd yesterday.

Check this: http://www.steamintohistory.com/

Director of IRS Unit Says She Won’t Testify

Head of Unit at Center of Controversy Involving Conservative Groups Won’t Answer Congress’s Questions
By John D McKinnon, Siobhan Hughes and Damian Paletta | Updated May 21, 2013, 12:59 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON—Lois Lerner, the head of the Internal Revenue Service office that targeted conservative groups, intends to invoke her constitutional right against self-incrimination and decline to answer questions about the matter when questioned by a congressional committee Wednesday.

Ms. Lerner, director of the tax-exempt-organizations division at the IRS, notified the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform through her attorney that she wouldn’t answer questions on the matter, according to a committee spokesman.

Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) will require her to appear at the hearing anyway, a spokesman said Tuesday.

“Chairman Issa remains hopeful that she will ultimately decide to testify tomorrow about her knowledge of outrageous IRS targeting of Americans for their political beliefs,” said the spokesman, Ali Ahmad.

More at the link.

Your Editor suspects that Mrs Lerner’s attorney will be angling for immunity from prosecution¹; such immunity would require her to testify, whether she wished to do so or not, or be held in contempt of Congress. Your Editor also suspects that the Obama Administration’s people will, quietly, of course, be telling Mrs Lerner to do everything she possibly can to not testify.

How much do I trust the Obama Administration? Is less than zero a possible answer?

IRIS

Hint:  Ever watch Everyone Loves Raymond?

Bombshell: Govt Official Says Hillary Spearheaded Benghazi Review, Not Independent Board

One of the four State Department employees, who was recently disciplined by their former boss Hillary Clinton, has broken his silence concerning Benghazi and has leveled some very big charges at the former Secretary of State. He is now indicating that the former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her staff were the ones that led the review of the Benghazi attacks, not an independent board.

The Daily Beast reports,

Raymond Maxwell was placed on forced “administrative leave” after the State Department’s own internal investigation, conducted by an Administrative Review Board (ARB) led by former State Department official Tom Pickering. Five months after he was told to clean out his desk and leave the building, Maxwell remains in professional and legal limbo, having been associated publicly with the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other American for reasons that remain unclear.

Maxwell, who served as deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs from August 2011 until his removal last December, following tours in Iraq and Syria, spoke publicly for the first time in an exclusive interview with The Daily Beast.

“The overall goal is to restore my honor,” said Maxwell, who has filed grievances regarding his treatment with the State Department’s Human Resources Bureau and the American Foreign Service Association, which represents the interests of foreign-service officers. The other three officials placed on leave were in the Diplomatic Security Bureau, leaving Maxwell as the only official in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs (NEA), which had responsibility for Libya, to lose his job.

“I had no involvement to any degree with decisions on security and the funding of security at our diplomatic mission in Benghazi,” he said.

Read more: http://freedomoutpost.com/2013/05/bombshell-govt-official-says-hillary-spearheaded-benghazi-review-not-independent-board/#ixzz2TyNxLFnk

Hamburgers on the back patio this evening; life is good.

— Dana Pico (@Dana_TFSJ) May 21, 2013

Obviously, you see a tweet like that when there is such a terrible tragedy unfolding, and you have to wonder about it. But, for me, life is good. We’re not broke, we both have good jobs, and my sisters, whom I have not seen for several years, are coming to visit this weekend. The tragedy in Oklahoma is something I see on my television screen; the tragedy in Oklahoma happened to other people.

Now, we could become “other people” at any time; you just never know when something like that will happen to you. The bombing at the Boston Marathon was an act of terrorism, but for the people killed and injured, it is a tragedy in the same sense as the Oklahoma tornado: for someone who lost a leg in Boston, there is no real difference between having been injured by terrorists than having been injured by nature.

It wasn’t too long after we moved to Virginia in the mid-1980s that there was a local news story: a woman, minding her own business, driving home from work on Oceana Boulevard in Virginia Beach was alive one second and dead the next, when an A-6 from Oceana Naval Air Station had a problem on take-off, and fell right on top of her car. It was a tragedy, completely unexpected, a bolt out of the blue, and it could have happened just as easily to someone else, including to me, as it did to the woman who was killed.

We all have sympathy for the people who lost their loved ones, who lost their homes, who lost their livelihoods, and somehow, we all know, that it could have been us. For me, and for the vast majority of Americans, life is just as good now as it was before the tornado struck. That’s a heck of a difference when you think about it.

Treasury Knew IRS Was Planning Apology

By Damian Paletta, Peter Nicholas and John McKinnon

The Internal Revenue Service briefed the Treasury Department extensively last month about a looming inspector general’s report that would find the agency had inappropriately targeted for extra scrutiny applications from conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status, a new timeline of events shows.

The IRS consulted Treasury in late April about its plans to pre-emptively apologize for its actions, and a flurry of conversations transpired that included White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough and senior Treasury officials, Obama administration officials said Monday.

Two people kept out of the loop, according to administration officials, were President Barack Obama and Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew. Neither was consulted, administration officials said, because their staff wanted to ensure that it didn’t appear they had interfered in any way in the process.

Secretary of the Treasury Jacob Lew

Just who the heck is in charge in the Obama Administration?

There are only two possible interpretations on this:

1. Either the President really isn’t in charge, in which case he is unfit to be President; or
2. The Administration has been lying to us — again — on a significant story, and President Obama is unfit to be President.

If it is the latter, why lie? Anybody with any sense at all understands that, these days, secrets don’t stay secrets, and once the first part comes out, way too many people start looking and digging for more details, until the whole sordid mess emerges. This is the kind of story in which it would have been better to tell the complete truth, from the beginning.

That assumes, of course, that the President and Secretary Lew weren’t in on the story much, much earlier. It’s one thing to say that White House officials knew a month ago, and something else to say that they knew last year, before the election.

If it’s the former, just who the heck has the authority to decide that no one is going to tell the President of the United States and the Secretary of the Treasury about a problem of this magnitude?