This past week gave us an interesting insight in how the Obama Administration is politicizing terror; ironically, something they accused the Bush Administration of regularly during the campaign.
This week, the intelligence services told the White House and Congress that Christmas bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmuttallab is now speaking to interrogators…a full 5 weeks after his initial arrest. The information was given to Congress in closed door meetings. However, the White House, primarily their political and communication wings (led by Robert Gibbs and David Axelrod), immediately went on the attack in public forums, exclaiming how well their strategy worked in obtaining intelligence in this matter.
Robert Gibbs, less than 48 hours after the bombing attempt, told numerous news networks that the FBI, after a strenuous 50 minute interview with the bomber, had obtained all the information necessary.
On “Fox News Sunday,” host Chris Wallace asked White House spokesman Robert Gibbs whether President Obama was informed of the decision to read Abdulmutallab his Miranda rights before or after it was done. Gibbs avoided the question, saying, “That decision was made by the Justice Department and the FBI, with experienced FBI interrogators.” Gibbs stressed that “Abdulmutallab was interrogated and valuable intelligence was gotten as a result of that interrogation.”
Wallace pressed. “But we now find out he was interrogated for 50 minutes,” he said to Gibbs. “When they came back, he was read his Miranda rights and he clammed up.”
“No,” Gibbs answered. “Again, he was interrogated. Valuable intelligence was gotten based on those interrogations. And I think the Department of Justice and the — made the right decision, as did those FBI agents.”
“Let me just press one last question,” Wallace said. “You really don’t think that if you’d interrogated him longer that you might have gotten more information, since we now know that Al Qaeda in Yemen — ”
“Well, FBI interrogators believe they got valuable intelligence and were able to get all that they could out of him,” Gibbs said.
“All they could?” Wallace asked.
“Yeah,” Gibbs said.
David Axelrod has been repeating those talking points for weeks, as the Obama Administration has been pounded from both the left and right for failure to obtain valuable intelligence from this critical source.
Which is all fine and dandy…except Gibbs and Axelrod are directing contradicting themselves now. Both claim the Obama policy is a success primarily because Abdulmuttallab is talking now. However, both implied that the FBI obtained all the intelligence necessary in their initial 50 minute interview. The two stories, obviously, do not jibe.
“The attorney general said, ‘I’m going to charge him tomorrow,’ ” and “there were questions raised about whether or not he should in fact go to law of war detention status,” according to the transcript of a White House background briefing for reporters last Tuesday by two senior administration officials.
In the discussion, it was pointed out that the FBI was working the case, that it had interrogators ready and that two counterterrorism agents were already in Nigeria, beginning a background investigation of Abdulmutallab and his large family.
Another point: has anyone in the intelligence agencies thought that maybe the new information given up by the terrorist was planned by Al Qaeda all along? Al Qaeda is many things…but they are not stupid. They pay close attention to American politics, and likely could have predicted that the Obama Administration would Mirandize Abdulmuttallab. Could it be that they planned to leak old information when the time was right? I hope someone has actually thought of this scneario.
Two clear facts (not arguments) come out of this. First, that clearly Abdulmuttallab had information at the time of the attack that he did not have the chance to provide federal investigators because he was read his Miranda rights. That now clearly has to be admitted by the administration. Second is that we could have obtained that information quite easily. This terrorist was a low level member who was willing to talk. The simple act of not Mirandizing the man could have demonstrably added to our intelligence gathering weeks ago, without any ‘harsh interrogations’ whatsoever.
One has to truly question why the administration is so blind on this issue.
A former Vietnam veteran and longtime Democrat Congressman John Murtha died this morning from complications from gallbladder surgery. He was 77.
Murtha was a strong defender of the military, while at the same time always under the scrutiny of the Feds, as he was suspected to be one of the more corrupt politicians in Washington, although that was never proven. I believe he sullied his reputation by attacking the Marines involved in the Haditha Iraq incident before trial…they were later proclaimed not guilty. But far be it from me not to honor a man who served valiantly in the military, once upon a time.
First, congratulations to the Who Dats…the New Orleans Saints, Super Bowl Champions? Maybe I am living in an alternate reality like those guys on Lost…
Anyway, more importantly, what were the best ads on Super Bowl Night? My personal list…
1. Letterman, Oprah, and Leno?
What?
First, amazing that this did not leak. Oprah is one of the best known personalities in the world, Leno has been under a firestorm, and Letterman, is, well, Letterman. The only thing missing is Conan. But I doubt NBC would have o.k.’d that. The behind-the-scenes story is on ew.com. But really, for a 10 second ad, this was priceless, and memorable.
2. Betty White Gets Tackled
Maybe I must like elder abuse. I don’t know. But watching Betty White get tackled was one of the few times all night that I burst out laughing.
3. Google Simplicity
Long term…this may be my favorite ad. This was a purely simple, but elegant, story line that got to the heart of what Google is all about. The two above ads are funny…but I think this one is by far the most effective.
4. Kia and Toys
I don’t know if this would get me to buy a Kia…but there is something simply playful about this ad. And it certainly got my 4 year old excited. “Yo Gabba Gabba!!!”
5. Budweiser Gets Lost
Um, I am a Lost fanatic, so this hit me perfectly. Maybe a little too goofy. But I still enjoyed it.
And bonus….worst ad….The U.S. Census?
Um, you do realize you, the taxpayer spent almost $3 million for this ad…and even though I knew it was coming, when I saw it I still didn’t understand what it was trying to achieve? A nice waste of your hard earned tax dollars…and another FAIL from the Obama Administration. Geez.
P.S. -- By the way, runner up for worst…the Audi ‘Environmental police’ ad. With Obama in office, that ad just hit a little too close to home. Who couldn’t see an Obama police force arresting you for using the wrong light bulb?
UPDATE #2 -- Rush Limbaugh loved the Audi ad as a satire…I still think it hits too close to the reality the wacko left is proposing…but I can see the comedy in it…from a distance.
It is pretty funny how time changes things. Think back to 1990…and imagine the Colts playing the Saints for the Super Bowl. It would be like the Lions and Rams in the Super Bowl now.
But that is exactly what we have, and for most NFL fans, what we have wanted all season. The two most prolific quarterbacks with the two most dynamic offenses in the league. Sure, this not going to be a defensive struggle…but who wants to see that?
Drew Brees has been fantastic all season. And how can you not root for the guy? He is undersized, people questioned his arm strength, he was an afterthought. He then got injured while playing for San Diego, and many thought his career was over…and then, to compound the misery, he landed in New Orleans!
Of course, timing is everything. With Hurricane Katrina, Brees exemplified the return of normalcy to the city. And he has brought about a level excitement not seen there ever.
Peyton Manning, on the other hand, is the golden child. Son of former Saint Archie Manning, top recruit in his high school class, the #1 pick coming out of Tennessee. And Manning, aiming for his second ring, is already in the upper echelon of NFL All-time quarterbacks, and is aiming for the GOAT moniker…Greatest of All Time.
I have not looked forward to several of the last few Super Bowls. I always watch, mind you…but my level of excitement for this one is bubbling. I hope this is one of those offensive shootouts you can tell your grandchildren about.
Prediction: I suck at this, and have been wrong 3 out of the last 4 years…but what the hell.
Al Franken has become the voice of the progressive left in the Senate. Yup, Stuart Smiley himself.
Franken this week led the Democrat charge against the Obama Administration. Sen. Al Franken ripped into White House senior adviser David Axelrod this week during a tense, closed-door session with Senate Democrats. Sources said Franken was the most outspoken senator in the meeting, which followed President Barack Obama’s question-and-answer session with Senate Democrats at the Newseum on Wednesday. But they also said the Minnesotan wasn’t the only angry Democrat in the room, although he certainly seems to be the leader.
A Democratic source said that Franken directed his criticism solely at Axelrod. “It was all about leadership and health care and what the plan was going to be,” the source said.
Why all the anger? Simple. Franken’s importance in national left wing politics took a major hit with the swearing in of the 41st Republican Senator, Scott Brown. Franken came in as the all-too-valuable 60th vote, and as such, was integral to the Obama legislative push last year. Now…Franken is just another member of the less-than-super majority.
Now, the irony is that Obama nor David Axelrod care all that much. Without 60 votes…Franken becomes another irrelevant senatorial voice.
Of course, Franken is a hot head by nature. Last November, after Tennessee Republican Sens. Bob Corker and Lamar Alexander authored an op-ed in a local paper defending their opposition to a Franken amendment, Franken confronted both men on the floor — and grew particularly irritated with Corker. He lashed out at Corker and a staff member in a follow-up meeting about the matter, several people said. Franken also clashed with South Dakota Sen. John Thune, No. 4 in GOP leadership, last month in a scathing speech during the health care debate, and staffers have reported other run-ins.
From left wing blogs, this has served Franken well. In a recent poll, he was among the favorite liberal politicians among the political left. He is growing his financial war chest that will serve him well in 6 years.
So as the voice of progressives, we have a former comedian who doesn’t know how the Senate works, who has little interest in real policy, and is quick to blame everyone but himself for the reality of the political landscape.
What a perfect leader for the progressive movement.
I should just recycle my previous month’s post on the same subject…it is always the same. More jobs lost. None really created. Obama claims to have created millions and millions of jobs. No one believes him. Onward and forward.
The number of new claims of unemployment benefits increased to 480,000 last month. Why this was ‘unexpected’ is beyond me…it should be expected after a year of failing to produce any jobs.
And a new PPP poll tells us what we already know…the public has lost faith in the Democrats on this issue:
If you want a prism into why Democrats are struggling so much right now, this may sum it up: only 11% of voters across the country say that their economic situation has improved over the last year compared to42% who think it has become worse. 47% say it’s about the same as it was.
Well, why the loss of confidence? Maybe because the President keeps trying to tell us this story:
“Now, if you hear some of the critics, they’ll say, well, the Recovery Act, I don’t know if that’s really worked, because we still have high unemployment,” the president said. “But what they fail to understand is that every economist, from the left and the right, has said, because of the Recovery Act, what we’ve started to see is at least a couple of million jobs that have either been created or would have been lost. The problem is, 7 million jobs were lost during the course of this recession.”
The irony, as Ed Morrissey of Hot Air points out, via Jake Tapper, is that the White House’s own economists don’t agree with this statement:
At the end of November, Congressional Budget office Director Douglas Elmendorf wrote that because of the stimulus bill “in the third quarter of calendar year 2009, an additional 600,000 to 1.6 million people were employed in the United States..”
But clearly other economists are much more skeptical, including Dan Mitchell at the libertarian Cato Institute, and J.D. Foster at The Heritage Foundation.
Some economists say the whole notion of counting “saved or created” jobs is impossible. Harvard University labor economist Lawrence Katz told ProPublica that trying to count how many jobs have been saved or created is “a silly exercise.”
And in fact, in December the Office of Management and Budget director Peter Orszag issued a directive scrapping the whole “saved or created” construct.
Yeah, when your own budget director is discrediting you, it is time to stop talking.
No one with any credibility believes that the Obama Stimulus plan created any jobs. It may have saved some jobs, most of which were government jobs to begin with. But private sector jobs? There is no calculation or formula that will convince the public that it was successful in creating new jobs in the real world. And Obama simply makes himself look foolish by repeating what is at the very least a gross distortion of reality.
Jon Stewart, the host of Comedy Central’s The who is ultraliberal and funny as hell, visits Bill O’Reilly’s show tonight at 8 P.M. on Fox News.
That, my friends, is must see TV.
I watch little to no new on television. Frankly, it is pretty boring. My Dad is a devout O’Reilly fan, and I have to say, even as a conservative I watch Jon Stewart more than Fox News. That said…I am going to watch tonight.
Now, prior cross appearances have not really worked so well. Stephen Colbert, for example, had O’Reilly on a couple years ago. It was fine, but nothing amazingly unusual. And the irony of this appearance is that it was Stewart’s people that asked to be on, not O’Reilly’s. As Spock would say, ‘Fascinating.’
Though, Bill and Jon are two of the best at what they do. O’Reilly is a great angry, opinionated newsman who makes sure to show how he feels about an issue. And Stewart is the best in the business at getting to the heart of the ridiculousness in politics. If both are at their peak level of talent tonight, the interview should be immense fun.
Quietly, without much fanfare, the U.S. intelligence community started raising numerous red flags on Tuesday of potential imminent terrorists attacks.
Instead of the now infamous ‘orange alerts’ that made Tom Ridge a laughingstock, current CIA director Leon Panetta quietly presented his assessment to numerous Senators behind closed doors.
The terrorist organization is deploying operatives to the United States to carry out new attacks from inside the country, including “clean” recruits with a negligible trail of terrorist contacts, CIA Director Leon Panetta said. Al-Qaida is also inspiring homegrown extremists to trigger violence on their own, Panetta added.
The annual assessment of the nation’s terror threats provided no startling new terror trends, but amplified growing concerns since the Christmas Day airline attack in Detroit that militants are growing harder to detect and moving more quickly in their plots.
“The biggest threat is not so much that we face an attack like 9/11. It is that al-Qaida is adapting its methods in ways that oftentimes make it difficult to detect,” Panetta told the Senate Intelligence Committee.
This further raises the question of how the Obama Administration and the Eric Holder Justice Department reacted to the attempted Christmas bombing over the skies of Detroit. We will never know how much, if any, actionable intelligence that the Christmas attack suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutullab would have given up if not for his lawyer. Apparently, Abdulmuttalab is cooperating with federal investigators, a federal law enforcement official said Tuesday. However, this cooperation is going to come with a give and take approach over leniency, while being placed in military hands would have allowed more freedom of intelligence gathering.
FBI Director Robert Mueller said that in “case after case,” terrorists have provided actionable intelligence even after they were given their rights and charged with crimes. Mueller said they know such cooperation can result in shorter sentences or other consideration from the government.
Maybe he is right. But until that is proven by independent analysis, I am highly suspicious. What is Mueller supposed to say, that the Justice Dept. screwed up royally? And who is to say that we wouldn’t have gotten more information, earlier, without a lawyer present?
Maybe it wasn’t vital in this case. But it is now 6 weeks since the Christmas day attempt…and that is simply too long in this era. Waiting 6 weeks to get intelligence might as well as be 6 years. For example, 6 week old intelligence on the location of Osama Bin Laden is simply NOT actionable intelligence.
The Obama Administration is living in an alternate universe. Give the terrorists the protections demanded under the Geneva Convention. That is something I have supported from the beginning. But in this time, with intelligence agencies screaming about the potential of a new threat on the horizon, we need to be on a defensive stance. No one is saying we need to waterboard these guys (well, almost no one), but Obama has swung the pendulum to the other extreme. This is careless beyond measure.
I love ABC’s Lost. It is by far my favorite TV show of the last decade.
Unfortunately for new viewers, it is one of those shows that is virtually impossible to come into halfway. Either you watch all five previous seasons (which, if you are an ultimate couch potato like me is quite possible), or you need someone who has watched the seasons to kind of brief you in. I recommend Entertainment Weekly, which has a nice review of all episodes of the show.
But to be frank, no review will allow you to catch up in any real way. There are such subtle story lines going on, it is very difficult to understand these underlying currents, without watching the episodes I frankly don’t know how you catch up; that, actually, is the biggest weakness of the show.
But for those of us devoted to Lost for the past 5 seasons, this is the penultimate television joy: a engaging series that has mystery layered upon mystery, with so many questions unanswered and left for disclosure during this final season.
This is one of those series that upon reflection has so many layers of story lines. Each time I watch an episode, I find a new subtle hint, hidden in a throw away line, in the background, in the small print of a book or magazine seen on a table. The level of detail the show entails is a geek’s dream.
So let the final season begin…and I am begging the TV gods that the season lives up to expectations.
Remember when Barack Obama was going to transform American politics, ala Reagan and FDR?
Well, he is succeeding. Just not in the way the liberal intelligensia thought he would.
Obama is singlehandedly making America a small government conservative nation. Even states that were trending more liberal over the past decade have stopped that slide on the slippery slope, and are reversing course.
Virginia this week is attempting to pass a state law that would give its citizens the right…not to buy health care insurance. And if you simply think this is just Republican high jinx, think again:
With five Democrats defecting, the Virginia Senate today passed a Republican measure that says Virginians don’t have to buy health insurance.
Voting 23-17, the Democratic-controlled Senate kicked to the House a bill by Sen. Frederick Quayle, R-Suffolk, that supporters say will send a message to Washington about its efforts to overhaul the health-care system.
The GOP does control the House of Delegates, so this bill will pass, and Gov. McDonnell will sign the bill.
Ultimately, if Democrats ever were somehow to pass Obamacare, it would be an interesting Constitutional question. Does the Federal Government have the right, outside of passing a Constitutional Amendment, to force citizens to buy insurance? Or is it a states right? An interesting constitutional legal argument, to say the least.
So Virginia is the leader in opposing the keystone of Obama’s legislative goals. This is the same state which Obama was going to turn into a Blue state like New Jersey and Massachusetts…oh, yeah. That is Obama’s transformation in a nutshell.
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