And Obama just now decides to visit? Its been weeks!
Now, if this had been Bush...people would be screaming!
Its about time he got there
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And Obama just now decides to visit? Its been weeks!
Now, if this had been Bush...people would be screaming!
Its about time he got there
He thought it was a great opportunity to appear like he cares about the people in the swing state, I am sure they were not fooled.Quote:
Originally Posted by cavmom
Colorado's 'Epic Firestorm' Reveals Danger of Air Force Cuts
Michael Auslin
June 27, 2012 12:10 PM
Colorado's wildfire has exploded into an "epic firestorm," in the words of Colorado Springs fire chief Richard Brown. Over 30,000 people have evacuated, and already hundreds of homes have been consumed. Ironically, the U.S. Air Force Academy has also been evacuated, at the very time that Colorado desperately needs more Air Force C-130s to fight the massive fire.
A C-130 fitted with the Modular Airborne FireFighting System (MAFFS) can drop 3,000 gallons of fire-retardant material in 5 seconds, and reload in just 15 minutes. This tempo is crucial to containing wildfires like the one devastating Colorado Springs. However, of a current fleet of nearly 380 C-130s, only eight can be fitted with the MAFFS—and four of them are already in the skies over Colorado. With another fire looming in the north of the state, there is no excess capacity to help protect civilian areas. That means thousands of exhausted firefighters on the ground are without enough of the crucial support they need to control the fires.
All this raises concerns about President Obama’s defense budget, which cuts 65 C-130s from the fleet over the next four years. While that will leave 318 C-130s, the demands on the fleet are not shrinking in Afghanistan or other places. Nor did the Air Force have much choice in the matter.
The Air Force took the brunt of Pentagon budget cuts in the 2013 budget, shrinking by 4 percent (or roughly $4 billion dollars), after having a flat budget since 2004. Since 2001, over 500 aircraft have been retired, and another 300 will be scrapped by 2017. All this is happening while demand for the Air Force increases: The service flew approximately 400 sorties per day in Afghanistan and Iraq during 2011, while also fighting in Libya and delivering thousands of tons of disaster relief aid to Japan after its earthquake and tsunami. C-130s have been central to all these operations, and the proposed cuts will reduce airlift capacity among all the Air Force's components: active, reserve, and guard. Sequestration would be even worse, mandating equal percentage cuts down to the program level across the service, with no flexibility for Air Force leadership to target the cuts.
But as the wildfire in Colorado shows, readiness and flexibility are sometimes needed at home as much as abroad. Cutting more C-130s puts a greater strain on the entire Air Force fleet. It means fewer planes will be available for possible conversion to the MAFFS configuration. And that means that as hundreds of houses burn in Colorado, only eight planes can be called upon to help the thousands of firefighters on the ground. America should not have to make such tradeoffs: We can fight both aggressors and fires smarter and better, but only if we do it increasingly from the sky.
Michael Auslin is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.
Colorado's 'Epic Firestorm' Reveals Danger of Air Force Cuts
The above article explains alot, the reason this fire turned into such a beast is because the fire started on Saturday and the needed retardant planes were reported as not in the air until Monday, with the wind and the heat and the needed air craft not in the air immediately, that is why there is so much devastation.....Obama not only knows how to take advantage of a disaster but how to make it worse.
The Colorado briefings streamed on the internet about the Waldo Canyon fire shows the government people in charge of fire fight are constantly deflecting questions about air craft and trying to divert the media from those questions. Makes sense now and I understand why there are so many furious people.
Democrats’ New Motto: Never Let a Wildfire Go to Waste
By Michelle Malkin • June 29, 2012 08:17 AM
Note: My column below deals with wildfire politics in advance of President Obama’s visit. But as you all know, this is also personal. My family and I are approaching a full week as Waldo Canyon Fire evacuees. As readers of this blog (archive here) and my Twitter feed have been reading, we were forced to leave our home Saturday afternoon. Some 32,000 were displaced by mid-week. Nearly 350 saw their homes burned to the ground, including many belonging to our friends and acquaintances. (Must-see before and after pics.) Last night, officials allowed many residents to return to their neighborhoods, but ours remains under mandatory evacuation. While light rain provided a little relief yesterday, the blaze is still burning. The night ended on a tragic note with officials revealing that a body had been discovered in the Mountain Shadows neighborhood at one of the scorched homes. Several others are still missing. Also last night: A new fire broke out near Grand Junction — the Pine Ridge Fire — that has already consumed 10,000 acres and closed I-70.
Democrats’ New Motto: Never Let a Wildfire Go to Waste
by Michelle Malkin
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — Did you know that President Obama has been incommunicado with Colorado’s governor for more than two weeks as the nation’s worst wildfires rage across the state? Maybe he thought we were all “doing fine.” After an embarrassing Beltway press briefing revelation about our out-of-touch White House, the administration finally decided to divert the campaigner in chief from his nationwide fundraising frenzy for a quick look-see at our devastated city on Friday. It’s “leadership from behind” you can count on.
On Wednesday, press secretary Jay Carney acknowledged that Obama hadn’t talked to Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper in 15 days. Holy smokes. The High Park fire, which has consumed nearly 90,000 acres and claimed nearly 257 homes west of Fort Collins, ignited on June 9 and is still active.
During a campaign swing just last week, first lady Michelle Obama made a brief mention of the High Park fire before launching into her standard GOP-bashing stump speeches.
On June 23, the Waldo Canyon fire in Colorado Springs erupted. An estimated 19,000 acres and nearly 350 homes burned down to the ground on Tuesday. More than 32,000 have been displaced so far. My family was forced to abandon our home on Saturday, and our neighborhood remains in a mandatory evacuation zone.
On June 27, Boulder’s Flagstaff fire broke out and has so far blazed through 300 acres. While he made no public statements prior to the announcement of his visit, an irritated Carney told reporters on Wednesday that Obama was being “updated regularly” on the wildfires in Colorado and across the West. He then rushed out a face-saving press release heralding the president’s hasty phone call that afternoon to Hickenlooper and Colorado Springs Mayor Steve Bach, in which he “expressed his concern about the extent of damage to homes in the Colorado Springs area, and informed both the governor and the mayor that he plans to travel to the area Friday to view the damage and thank the responders bravely battling the fire.”
As Obama sightsees overhead in this key swing state and surrounds himself with first responders for campaign-ready photo-ops, his supporters on the ground are busy spewing excuses, attacks and death wishes on their political opponents. I know. I’ve received countless numbers of them hoping that firefighters let my “mansion” burn down and gloating that God or karma is punishing Colorado’s conservative population. Liberals took to Twitter to bash local GOP officials and me as “fire retardants” who should be dropped over the blaze. And jokes about Colorado social conservatives like this proliferated: “If this Colorado fire takes out the Focus on the Family campus, then God really exists.”
The sniping isn’t limited to social media. Obama strategist Rahm Emanuel said in 2008: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” On cue, Hickenlooper mocked limited-government watchdogs who questioned the Obama administration’s decision to cancel a key aerial tanker contract last summer. (It was the topic of my June 20 column last week, “How Obama Bureaucrats Fueled Western Wildfires.”)
The Denver Post reported Wednesday: “Asked about criticism from the right over the Obama administration’s canceling of the contract, Hickenlooper offered an uncharacteristically strong defense of the president. ‘Were these the same conservatives that were so worried about the Obama administration spending too much money, or were these different conservatives?’ Hickenlooper said.
‘Quite honestly, in a situation like this where over 30,000 people have been evacuated, I don’t think that (criticism of Obama) is appropriate,’ the governor said. ‘We should be focusing our support on them and on the people out there risking their lives to fight these fires.’”
Spare us the sanctimony, and lay off the firefighter human shield strategy. The conservatives in Congress and libertarians at MonkeyWrenchingAmerica.com and elsewhere on the right who called attention to the U.S. Forest Service’s aging, neglected and undercapitalized aerial tanker fleet are the same conservatives who have doggedly called attention to the Obama administration’s serial squandering of taxpayer dollars on nonessential, ineffective, crony-driven spending. We are the conservatives worried about dumping billions of dollars into bankrupt federal green boondoggles like Solyndra, Abound Solar, Beacon Power, Ener1 and LightSquared at the expense of fundamental services — like fighting fires.
It is entirely appropriate and possible to question this administration’s policy decisions while supporting frontline emergency personnel at the same time. And it is entirely logical and rational to express gratitude for firefighters and police officers — while working to ensure the long-term financial viability of their departments through tough but necessary budget and public employee union reforms. But don’t look to Obama to put out the flames of politically expedient and inflammatory rhetoric. He may be slow on the uptake to respond to national crises, but when it comes to exploiting them, he’s an industrial-grade accelerant.
Michelle Malkin » Democrats’ New Motto: Never Let a Wildfire Go to Waste