Ouch, that's going to leave a mark.

...Onyango reserved special words of kindness for former President George W. Bush for a directive he put in place days before the election requiring federal agents get high-level approval to arrest fugitive immigrants, which directly affected Onyango. The directive made clear that U.S. officials worried about possible election implications of arresting Onyango.

She said she wants to thank Bush in person for the order, which gave her a measure of peace but was lifted weeks later.

"I loved President Bush," Onyango said while moving toward a framed photo of Bush and his wife standing with Barack and Michelle Obama at the White House on inauguration day. "He is my No. 1 man in my life because he helped me when I really needed that help."

Does President Present offer her any help like Bush did? Well, not so much it seems...

...Onyango, the half sister of Obama's late father, said she has exiled herself from the family after attending Obama's inauguration because she didn't want to become fodder for his foes. Obama and his family have not reached out to her either, she said.

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 10:19 AM | Comments (90)
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Holding onto your pissed off fringe left base requires a hefty dose of "Blame Bush (Cheney, Rumsfeld, et.al)".

Senator Lurch obliges with a handy committee report claiming "that none of this would be necessary if former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had only deployed more troops eight years ago. Yes, he really said more troops."

In 2001, readers may recall, the Washington establishment that included Mr. Kerry was fretting about the danger in Afghanistan from committing too many troops. The New York Times made the "quagmire" point explicitly in a famous page-one analysis, and Seymour Hersh fed the cliche at The New Yorker.

On CNN with Larry King on Dec. 15, 2001, a viewer called in to say the U.S. should "smoke [bin Laden] out" of the Tora Bora caves. Mr. Kerry responded: "For the moment what we are doing, I think, is having its impact and it is the best way to protect our troops and sort of minimalize the proximity, if you will. I think we have been doing this pretty effectively and we should continue to do it that way."

To understand the reasoning of a really smart guy like John Kerry, you just have to figure out the magic number between "more troops" and "too many troops".

I think that number is 12.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 09:20 AM | Comments (135)
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Not kidding:

My quick transcript:

Q: Mr. Gibbs, good morning. Why did it take so long to make this decision?

GIBBS: Well look, Harry, I think that what's been done in this process is somewhat unprecedented on the issue of Afghanistan. I think everybody involved really worked hard with the President to make policy better than it would have been had we announced it after only a week. I think everybody involved made this policy stronger. And I think the American people can be proud of both the process and the decision that the President will announce tonight.

[...]

Q: Al Qaida really isn't much of a presence in Afghanistan anymore anyhow, so why not chase them into Pakistan or into the Horn of Africa?

GIBBS: Well, look. I think this Administration has taken the fight to Al Qaida unlike any that we've ever seen.

Oy.

Thanks to @jaspernv.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 08:35 AM | Comments (155)
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Tom Brady hardest hit.

This week's standings, compiled by Big Ben:

buzzion 108
Superfly TNT 105
Monkey Sleeping 102
Red State NY 101
Peoples Republic of Baltimore 101
Svenster61 100
Jay in Ames 100
Aewl 99
Nam Grunt 99
Paranoid Polly 99

You can't help it. It's science.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 08:28 AM | Comments (15)
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Charles Krauthammer kicks Andrew Sullivan up one side of the street and down the other. Sully whined about Krauthammer's "latest" column because in Sully's fevered mind, Krauthammer failed to mention his gas tax scheme because he is "more invested in obstructing and thereby neutering Obama and the Democrats than in solving any actual problems in front of us."

In other words, Sully accused Krauthammer of the type of partisan hit-jobs he's used to writing (and reading over at DKos, I'm sure). For Sully, Krauthammer's omission was all about Obama.

Krauthammer politely explains to Sullivan that he should just fuck off:

If you click on the column of mine that he cites, which he calls my "latest" and which betrays my anti-Obama fanaticism, you will find that it begins with the following headline:

Carbon Chastity
The First Commandment of the Church of the Environment
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, May 30, 2008

Note the date: May 30, 2008. A year and a half ago. At the time, George Bush was president. Barack Obama hadnÂ’t even won the Democratic nomination, let alone become president of the United States. The column has absolutely nothing to do with Barack Obama.

Sullivan's entire ad hominem conclusion -- that my views are animated by nothing but the basest, most corrupt partisan motives -- turned out to be a complete invention based on his inability to read dates.

It gets better.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 07:42 AM | Comments (79)
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They keep using this word 'settled'. I do not think it means what they think it means.

What does all this have to do with climate catastrophe? The answer brings us to a scandal that is, in my opinion, considerably greater than that implied in the hacked emails from the Climate Research Unit (though perhaps not as bad as their destruction of raw data): namely the suggestion that the very existence of warming or of the greenhouse effect is tantamount to catastrophe. This is the grossest of "bait and switch" scams. It is only such a scam that lends importance to the machinations in the emails designed to nudge temperatures a few tenths of a degree.

The notion that complex climate "catastrophes" are simply a matter of the response of a single number, GATA,(globally averaged temperature anomaly) to a single forcing, CO2 (or solar forcing for that matter), represents a gigantic step backward in the science of climate. Many disasters associated with warming are simply normal occurrences whose existence is falsely claimed to be evidence of warming. And all these examples involve phenomena that are dependent on the confluence of many factors.

Our perceptions of nature are similarly dragged back centuries so that the normal occasional occurrences of open water in summer over the North Pole, droughts, floods, hurricanes, sea-level variations, etc. are all taken as omens, portending doom due to our sinful ways (as epitomized by our carbon footprint). All of these phenomena depend on the confluence of multiple factors as well.

Consider the following example. Suppose that I leave a box on the floor, and my wife trips on it, falling against my son, who is carrying a carton of eggs, which then fall and break. Our present approach to emissions would be analogous to deciding that the best way to prevent the breakage of eggs would be to outlaw leaving boxes on the floor. The chief difference is that in the case of atmospheric CO2 and climate catastrophe, the chain of inference is longer and less plausible than in my example.

I love his jab at the Warmers for pushing science back hundreds of years. That's what these Gaia worshipers are...anti-science cultists. Well, that at and con-men running the biggest and most dangerous scam in human history.

That's just the wrap up to the piece. This is one of those pieces where it's almost and injustice to pull something from it because it's all good. Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing. It's devastating.

In related ClimateScam News....

The Australian Liberal Party (conservative in our understanding) in Australia has dumped its leader over his support for the Aussie version of Cap and Ruin.

And Al Gore wants to shake your hand. You just have to have about $1,200 in yours to palm off to the this fool. Personally, if I'm spending that kind of money on a hand-job, I ain't giving it to Al "He Betrayed Us!" Gore.

Posted by: DrewM at 07:20 AM | Comments (95)
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Yes, the Left is so in love with the idea of a second Vietnam War that the President cannot be dissuaded from announcing dates for the end-game in Afghanistan in his speech tonight.

And don't even bother trying to ask Robert "Baghdad Bob" Gibbs about whether it might not be such a good idea for the President to alert our enemies as to the moment he's decided it will be politically feasible to retreat. He doesn't get it:

Q Can I ask, Robert, just two Afghanistan questions? One, what's your answer to the people who say by stressing over and over again that this won't be open-ended, you're basically telling our enemies just wait us out, and our -- or as well, allies, hedge your bets, because we're going to be leaving?

MR. GIBBS: That to me doesn't make any logical sense. I mean, if you -- if you're to believe that a certain insurgency has the momentum and they're increasingly occupying and attacking and gathering more space, are you saying that all we have to do is say we're going to leave at a certain date and they'll stop their -- they'll stop their pursuit or their momentum? If that's the case, then, maybe the President should just say that. I mean, it doesn't actually make any -- I mean, it's a great talking point. It doesnÂ’t actually make any logical -- it doesnÂ’t make any logical sense.

This foot-half-in-the-door thing the President is doing is going to get more people killed. He either needs to commit wholeheartedly, or he needs to say "fuckit" and pull our troops out. As it is, he's putting our troops and the mission at risk by leaving them hanging out over there without the support they've asked for.

It's his inexperience again that's the root of the problem. Everyone knows that we're not going to be in Afghanistan forever; that our commitment cannot be open-ended. But there's no reason he has to tell our enemies ever freakin' detail of the plan. The only reason he's announcing withdrawal dates now is because his political advisors are telling him he has to throw a bone to Michael Moore and the Far Left.

Obama does not have the courage or the will to put winning the war above Rahm Emanuel's political ambitions.

Let's See What the Big Dick Thinks About All This: Cheney speaks:

In a 90-minute interview at his suburban Washington house, Cheney said the president’s “agonizing” about Afghanistan strategy “has consequences for your forces in the field.”

“I begin to get nervous when I see the commander in chief making decisions apparently for what I would describe as small ‘p’ political reasons, where he’s trying to balance off different competing groups in society,” Cheney said.

“Every time he delays, defers, debates, changes his position, it begins to raise questions: Is the commander in chief really behind what they’ve been asked to do?”

Yup.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 06:56 AM | Comments (92)
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The President's preferred dictator-for-life, Chavista thug Zelaya, didn't get his way so Obama's going to keep punishing Honduras by refusing to recognize President Lobo and refusing to allow visas for Hondurans to resume.

"It's a significant step for Honduras to go back to order but it's just that. It's only a step and it's not the last step... It's not sufficient," said US assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere Affairs, Arturo Valenzuela.

More here of Obama's demands before he'll recognize the sovereign right of Hondurans to choose their leader:

"For the countries of the Hemisphere and for the United States, to work towards the restoration of Honduras to the Organization of American States [OAS] later on, Honduras must do more than just this election," said Arturo Valenzuela. "It must follow a process of national reconciliation through a government of national unity, and that's what we're urging the Honduran leadership to engage in. The people of Honduras want nothing less."

Valenzuela said the Obama administration seeks implementation of an OAS-backed settlement plan, including the creation of a truth commission on the circumstances of the coup and a congressional vote set for Wednesday on whether Mr. Zelaya will be returned to office to complete his term, which was to end in late-January.

The senior diplomat said the United States wants to see Mr. Zelaya restored to office.

Of course, Zelaya has already stated that he will refuse reinstatement following the "fraudulent" election. Which means Obama is placing impossible conditions on Honduras.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 05:36 AM | Comments (131)
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December? Never heard of it.

Oh, scroll down. Once again, lotsa new stuff overnight.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 05:14 AM | Comments (51)
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Found in a stolen car by a lone officer, ordered to stop and refused. Shot and killed by a lone officer.

Assistant Police Chief Jim Pugel says 37-year-old Maurice Clemmons was killed about 2:45 a.m. Tuesday. Pugel says the officer found the car, which had been recently stolen, recognized Clemmons and ordered him to show his hands and stop. Pugel says Clemmons wouldn't stop, and the officer fired several rounds.

New link, more info: Police detaining several they believe helped him and/or tried to mislead them about his wherebouts.

And there's this too:

Pulaski County Prosecutor Larry Jegley, whose office opposed Clemmons' parole in 2000 and 2004, said Huckabee's comments were "red herrings."

"My word to Mr. Huckabee is man up and own what you did," Jegley said.

I believe he has some doubts regarding Huckabee's expressed concerns over the "broken justice system".

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 04:38 AM | Comments (129)
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