Drone strikes—secret—against Americans

The media are right on this, of course.

Drone strikes secret

DOJ White Paper

Planes will start flying again; stupidy will linger

The same people who were hysterical over the cost of "Bush's Wars" are oddly silent on the cost of "Obama's Wars," both the ones in the middle east and the one on our economy. These are often the same people who believe passionately in anthropogenic global warming (AGW), even though they've just had a brilliant display of how little we control and how commerce and climate can both cool with just a few burps of a volcano through a glacier. For some reason they are willing to spend mega-trillions attempting to control the climate at some unknown future date by a degree or two, when a few hundred million could insure every African would have safe water and control malaria in this decade.

Obama Tries to Turn Focus to Jobs, if Other Events Allow

IF OTHER EVENTS ALLOW? (Headline in NYT)

There was zero urgency to tackle health care; zero urgency to raise our taxes with cap and trade; zero urgency to insult the Cambridge police department; zero need to appoint all those czars and tax cheats who were clueless; zero, zero, zero. That's his score for his first year, not a B+ as he thinks. He should have tackled the economy as his number one priority. He was a Senator in a Democratic controlled Congress when unemployment started to rise a bit. It has soared on his watch with his absolutely ineffective "stimulus" and his threats to "fundamentally transform" our country while he's dawdled over the troop surge, played golf more than any other president in recent history, and refused to see terrorism as a necessary war we need to fight with determination and leadership.

"Anita Dunn [the gal who admires Mao so much], until recently Mr. Obama’s communications director, said that when the health care bill was completed, “that will give the administration more space to really communicate to the American people about those things that have been done and that the president continues to push forward on to make the economy work for middle-class families.”"

When Rush Limbaugh announced that he hoped Obama failed, he meant fail in his plan to destroy our economy. However, it looks like he has succeeded in proving Rush wrong--which is hard to do. His most egregious and grandiose plan is working!

Napolitano claims the system works?

If you include a sharp eyed, very brave Dutch vacationer as part of your "system." Nothing worked, lady, including the terrorist's parents alerting authorities that their son had disappeared and been radicalized, his name, Umar farouk Abdulmutallab, being in a watch database, the Netherlands not agreeing to use our information (wasn't our president going to use his charm on the European nations, not clout?), his side trips to Yemen, his paying cash for his ticket, and his smuggling explosives aboard when the rest of us can't even get a water bottle or shampoo smuggled in. Now she wants to inconvenience the rest of us with a final one hour proscription against bathroom use (no one will want to sit next to me since I've had vomiting and diarrhea on my last two international flights). I hope she's retracted this ridiculous statement that no one, not even her boss, believes.
Link. Now he'll get a pro-bono lawyer and sue the airlines for his burns, I'm guessing.

Update from all sides of the political spectrum: Hell No, it didn't work! And she has now admitted it didn't, but her words on CNN Sunday were "taken out of context."

Update 2: This administration's backpeddling is just amazing. A day after his fourth day wimp-out that sounded like a weather report followed by a game of golf, Obama comes out with "new information" trying to pretend a little fire in his belly, but he's hopeless. Either he was hopelessly uninformed yesterday for that speech, or he doesn't care, never has, never will. Obama's second speech link. Never mind, couldn't find one except Tadjikistan.

How to screw up the language

I could swear President Roosevelt declared war after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, but apparently not--he declared a discussion or negotiation, as Bush should have done, but didn't. Congress must have misunderstood him. And it was his words, and not Japan's actions, that propelled us into war.

"I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire." FDR, December 8, 1941

Yet that's what this article in Scientific American Mind implies. We have terrorists because of the words we use. Reminds me of the mothers of pre-schoolers, "Now sweet dumpling, use your words not your fists. Johnny's nose is bloody." It's not their fault--we're inflaming them with our choice of words. We should have treated the attack like street crime. Declaring war is for a country, and this was just a world wide movement. And apparently Obama read the article!

"The Bush administration’s framing of terrorism as an act of war is a departure from past administrations’ ways of thinking. Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan, for example, preferred a disease metaphor. President Bill Clinton’s general themes were the pursuit of justice, law enforcement and international cooperation. Clinton wanted to deny “victory” to terrorists, but he and other previous presidents stopped short of the word “war.”

President George W. Bush adopted the war construct immediately. On the morning of September 12, 2001, after a meeting of the National Security Council, the president told reporters: “The deliberate and deadly attacks which were carried out yesterday against our country were more than acts of terror. They were acts of war.”

Refresh my memory. Did Nixon or Reagan or Clinton field any attacks on US soil the way FDR and GWB did? Must have missed that in the news.

The author is hoping now that there are more academics in counterterrorism, we can develop more successful strategies. Must be working. We haven't had any attacks for 7 years, thanks to Bush and Cheny. Article here. I wonder if these are the guys who gave us "enhanced interrogation techniques."