Sunday, January 03, 2010

Damn, a lot came out while I was at the show

Let's start off with the current display of ineptitude from the Obama Administration:
He then told people to remember that "our adversaries are those who would attack our country, not our fellow Americans", before decrying "fear and cynicism" and "partisanship and division" - the code phrases for horrid Republicans used during his 2008 election campaign.

Complacency, faux moralising and partisan shots at Republicans. It was a neat summary of where Obama is going wrong after the Christmas Day debacle when the Nigerian knicker bomber managed to waltz onto a Detroit-bound flight.

For a man who campaigned denouncing the politicisation of national security under President George W Bush, it is worth noting how intensely political Obama's treatment of what might henceforth be known as Underpantsgate has been.

His White House recognised its political vulnerability more readily than it comprehended the level of danger faced by Americans
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Interesting, isn't it, how we're having to see reporting on this crap from British papers for the most part?


Now, from a Canadian paper on Time's man of the year(this crap doesn't deserve caps):
I suspect Time knew just as well as everybody else that the real person of the year, whether you worshipped him or were a critic, was – how could it be anyone else? – Barack Obama. Was not Barack Obama sworn in as President in 2009? Was he not – the descriptors are now bonded to his name – “the first black man to occupy the White House?” Was this not a “historic milestone?” Did he not, almost immediately, also win the Nobel Peace Prize? Was he not the predominant politico-celebrity figure of the entire world this year?

What was Time waiting for before it would name him as person of the year? Did he have to win Wimbledon with one hand tied behind his back while simultaneously directing repairs to the Large Hadron Collider?

I think Time went to the relatively faceless functionary Bernanke mainly not to name Barack Obama. Time, like a lot of its fellows in the wild world of the contemporary U.S. media, is in an awkward place with regards to Mr. Obama. Having devoted so much incense to his remarkable ascendancy, a great swath of his country's press is looking for a convenient and not too noticeable off-ramp while it – shall we say – recalibrates its enthusiasm.

It's an uncomfortable pivot from the audacity of hope to buyer's remorse. Very uncomfortable for those in the media who played the cheerleader for Mr. Obama, who skated by controversies that would have sunk other candidates or abandoned the ruthless investigations they would have pressed on less congenial candidates.

The ferocity they applied to the Republican vice-presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, in contrast with the timidity they brought to his campaign, will in time come to be seen as one of the most shameful episodes in American journalism. Not so much for what they did to Ms. Palin, but for what they neglected to do in examining the candidate for the office that really counted. In some curious way, the U.S. media's bulldogging of Ms. Palin was kind of an inverted compensation for what they weren't doing to him
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Just exactly: they saw Palin as a threat to Obama's Ascension and did everything they could to her, AFTER having done everything they could to ignore anything questionable about Obama. Which an awful lot of them continue to do.


Back to the subject of the Underwear Bomber, and terrorism in general,
It speaks eloquently to the Obama administration’s priorities that it took the White House four days to acknowledge the “catastrophic breach of security” that led to the failed bombing of a US-bound jet on Christmas Day — but a scant four hours to accuse Dick Cheney of coddling terrorists.

The former vice president Wednesday harshly criticized the administration’s efforts — or non-efforts — against terrorism. Whereupon, Team Obama went ballistic
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And, for one of the best parts of this mess,
n response, White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer actually claimed that Cheney was “more focused on criticizing the administration than condemning the attackers.”

That’s a laugh.

Dick Cheney — the man who, as one blogger put it, would waterboard terrorists until their lungs qualify for federal wetlands status — soft on terrorism?



Have you seen the picture over at Insty? If you haven't, go take a look; what's your first thought? Have to tell you, even if I liked him that pose would piss me off unless it was directed at a terrorist, Chavez or a Saudi bigshot. Over at Althouse she notes that some True Believer says he looks like James Bond, which is freaking laughable: Bond might have looked confident, watchful, dangerous or a few other things but he wouldn't have had an expression like that unless, well, looking at a terrorist(just before shooting him), Chavez or a Saudi bigshot(again, just before shooting him). This is a guy who took days to make a personal statement about a terrorist attack that came way too damn close to downing an airplane but made a sirens screaming run from the beach over a friend's kid banging his chin; that's contempt on his face, whether for Biden(I know, I know, shut up) or someone else(us?) I don't know, but Bond it isn't.


Damn, I wonder just how much Pachauri is making? Go here and start scrolling down.


Over in Britain, 'Cold of a variety not seen in over 25 years in a large scale is about to engulf the major energy-consuming areas of the northern hemisphere. The first 15 days of the opening of the New Year will be the coldest, population weighted, north of 30 [degrees] north worldwide in over 25 years.'

That is the chilling (quite literally) verdict of Joe Bastardi, a weather forecaster on the American TV channel AccuWeather.

Yet, while many months ago he and several of his rivals correctly forecast a pre-Christmas freeze, the organisation that told us last year to prepare for a 'barbecue summer' was getting it wrong again
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They rip the Met a new one, and throw in this point:
The data collection system is far from perfect, designed primarily for weather recording, not long-term climate prediction. Reflecting the military origins of the Met Office, many weather stations are situated on airfields. They are there to provide real-time observations for aviators and to provide the basis for short-term forecasts. They are not climate monitoring stations and arguably should not be used as such.
"But they're so convenient! And they show Warming!(ignore the runways and machinery and such)"



Right.

No "smoking gun." Just, basically, three or eight foreign intelligence services with dossiers on this guy thicker than a Stephen King book all saying "hey, this guy says he wants to get on a plane wearing a bomb."

Oh -- and yeah, the guy's own father called up and said he's a dangerous jihadist.

But no smoking gun. I mean, not even Sherlock Holmes could put these paltry clues together
.


Snork. Hehe. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
Iranian legislators on Sunday decided to not allow a visit from Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry (D-Mass.), according to Iranian media.

"Members of the Iranian parliament's Foreign Relations Committee (a subcommittee of the parliament's National Security and Foreign Policy Commission) voiced opposition to the request after studying the issue," Hassan Ebrahimi, head of the committee, told the semi-official Fars News Agency.

Several Iranian news outlets reported last week that Kerry had submitted an official request to visit Tehran in an emissary role
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But, of course, the Pepe le Pew of the Senate wasn't actually going at all!
When asked Sunday if Kerry had filed a travel request as claimed or if Iran had taken pre-emptive action against talk of a visit, Jones told The Hill, "John Kerry has no plans to travel to Iran."
Especially since they told him to keep his sorry, treacherous ass out of the country, eh, Pepe?


Words from Blackfive ref the TSA blog attacks:
Hint to any who have had their computers or other com gear taken TSA/CID/Other: get new. You don't know what's been done or added to those devices. If you think they wouldn't add, just look at what they did to you to get it in the first place. Bugs, bad porn, you name it -- if it shows up after an incident like this, the so-called investigative agencies should not be given any benefit of doubt. Yes, I am saying I think them capable and willing to do such. While I would normally give any LE the benefit of the doubt, the circumstances and actions of LE in these cases negates that. Turn anything seized over to your lawyer and don't let it back in your home. As Insty has noted, you have already been found guilty of the worst thing in the world -- you made a bureaucrat(s) look bad. There is little or nothing that such will not do to make you pay for that crime. I love my country, but I fear the bureaucracy. So should you.


To close I'm going to point you to a Mark Steyn piece:
Whom should the traveling public thank for these impositions? The 9/11 killers were mostly Saudi. But the Shoebomber was a British subject. So were the Heathrow plotters. And the Pantybomber was educated in British schools - first in Togo; then at University College, London - and there is plenty of evidence he was radicalized while in the UK. So three of the four circles of homeland security hell with which the public are tortured are British in origin.

That ought to prompt astonishment - and great shame in Britons. Yet Timothy Garton Ash, Hoover panjandrum and eminent British complacenik, wrote in The Guardian only three weeks ago:

Not all Muslims, all of the time, will be able to support all these minimum essentials of a modern free society. There is a real tension between some of the essentials (for instance, the equal rights and dignity of homosexuals) and what is habitually taught even in mainstream, conservative Muslim communities. But most British Muslims, most of the time, will support most of them.

Even if that's true (and it's by no means clear that it is), is that enough? I said a few years back that Britain had been so hollowed out by Islamic radicals that it was becoming Somalia with chip shops. Mr Abdulmuttalab supposedly got the ol' jihad fever while at university. I see The New York Times reports the remarkable statistic that one-fifth of students at British universities are Muslim. As Professor Garton Ash would say, most British Muslims most of the time will be most unlikely to self-detonate over most American cities. So that's okay, right? Up to a point. A poll by the Centre for Social Cohesion found that one-third of Muslim students in Britain believe killing in the name of religion is justified and are in favor of a global caliphate. That's a lot of potential airline tickets.

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