Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Diagram Ezra Klein's Brain!




Ahh, such loyal soldiers for Barack Obama!


Horrors! We can't have any of that, can we?




A Romney Landslide?


Is he right?


So how accurate is he?
















Hang On, Abigail, The Election's Almost Over

I think Abigail speaks for a lot of us. We want this thing over and done with. Actually, NPR actually apologized after someone (mom, probably) let them know that one of their reports made the little girl cry.

Don't worry sweetie. G-d willing, not just the election but 'bronco bamma' will be over soon too and NPR will have to start paying its own way instead of adding to the $180,000 worth of debt you were saddled with that you had nothing to say about.

The Muslim Brotherhood Has Its Own School For Training France's Imams











The French had better wake up, and soon.

Zut alors!














It's the Chicago way.


Watcher's Council Nominations - Scary Monsters Edition

Smart kid...he knows that with Obama, it's all tricks and no treats for him! Especially not with $180,000 worth of debt to pay off he had no say in incurring.


Council News:

First off, our condolences to those of our readers who got hit hard by Sandy.Some of our esteemed Council were caught in the storm as well, and here's hoping for a swift return to normal and a speedy recovery for everyone.

This week, Ask Marion, The Pirate's Cove, and Maggie's Notebook took advantage of my generous offer of link whorage and earned honorable mention status with some great pieces they submitted.





Council Submissions

Honorable Mentions

Non-Council Submissions


Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Israel's Two Major Parties On The Right Sign Unity Deal

Israel's two major parties on the right, Likud and Israel Beiteinu have agreed to a merger for the coming January elections:

The Likud Central Committee on Monday officially approved by a large majority the merger with Yisrael Beiteinu ahead of the coming Knesset election.

Before the open vote, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the committee delegates, who had gathered at the Tel Aviv Exhibition Grounds.

In his speech, Netanyahu referred to recent assertions that Yisrael Beiteinu head and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman had come to Likud to take Netanyahu's place in the future.

"I've heard all sorts of talk in recent days about heirs. I have news for you. I intend to lead for many more years," Netanyahu said. "I believe that at this time it is essential that the nationalist camp unite forces, and that is the reason that I asked Avigdor Lieberman to run on a single joint list with us. I want to be clear. The Likud will remain an independent party and will continue to be a nationalist and liberal party. It will continue to be a movement for all of Israel's citizens. The unity will not change Likud, but it will change the State of Israel."

The two parties will now sit down together and configure their joint lists to see which seats will be reserved for which party's candidates.

Natanyahu is setting up his governing coalition in advance because he wants a strong majority to confront Iran and other challenges in the region and to deal put Israel's new budget in place to avoid the country mimicking Europe.

It makes what was a probable win for what Netanyahu aptly called the nationalist camp victory into a certainty.

Gallup: Romney Leads In Early Voters 52-45

Remember all the Obama Media tooting about how the president was leading among early voters?

Ummm, no.

Gallup says that around 15% of all likely voters have already cast their ballots, and out of those voters, guess what? Mitt Romney is leading 52% to 45%, a full 7 points.

Or to quote Gallup, 'that is comparable to Romney's 51% to 46% lead among all likely voters in Gallup's Oct. 22-28 tracking polling.'

That is a 22 point drop from where President Obama stood at this point in the election back in 2008.

It's also worth recalling that Gallup's 2008 survey of early voters interviewed only 1,010 registered voters. Yesterday's early voter poll interviewed a huge survey of over 3,300, which makes the 2012 poll a lot more accurate.

Sandy Ain't No Nice Girl; 30 Dead,7 Million Without Power

Hurricane Sandy wreaked havoc throughout a major portion of the East coast, with New York City being particularly hard hit.

The Big Apple was hit with a record 13-foot wall of water that flooded lower Manhattan. The subways were flooded, including the Queens Midtown and the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel pictured above, and heavy rains and 90 mph winds took a toll on the city's power grid. A fifty foot strip was ripped out of Atlantic City's famous Boardwalk.In Maryland, at least 100 feet of a fishing pier at the beach resort of Ocean City was destroyed.

At least half a million people along the East Coast have been ordered to evacuate, including 375,000 from parts of New York City.

Might I add that if you've been ordered to evacuate, take it seriously and be safe.

All public transit has been shut down in most of the New York metro area and much of New Jersey, the schools and the NYSE are closed and damage is estimated to be as much as $20 billion.

Fires in New York City were also a problem in spite of the wet weather because firemen were unable to get to fire areas due to the unprecedented flooding. More than 50 homes were destroyed in Breezy Point, Queens.

The storm is now gradually lessening and moving inland.

Monday, October 29, 2012

Obama Agonistes: The Fiction Cracks On Benghazi

"The words of his mouth are trouble and deceit; he has ceased to act wisely and do good." - Psalms, 36:3

More and more of what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton farcically referred to as ' the fog of war' over the Benghazi debacle has dispersed...and what it reveals is sheer ugliness.

Even some of President Obama's loyal media lackeys aren't quite able to swallow what he's doling out, as this video clip from an MSNBC interview shows.

Here's a transcript, that mercifully leaves out the president's stammers, er-ahs and stutters:





Meanwhile, a number of members of Congress have been quite vocal over the fact that the administration hasn't told them anything or complied with even the most basic requests for information.

As Senator John McCain (R-AZ), the ranking Republican member of the Senate Armed Services Committee revealed today in an interview, not only are the recordings from the surveillance cameras that were all over the Benghazi compound now classified top secret so no one can view them, but repeated requests for information to James Clapper, the director of the National Intelligence, General Petraeus, the head of the CIA, or John Brennan, who is the White House head of counterterrorism.

I'll add to that by telling you that according to my sources, the videos sent from the drones overhead directly to the White House situation room in real time and the phone recordings of calls from the Benghazi consulate and the Benghazi CIA annex have suffered the same fate as the surveillance camera tapes. They're classified top secret so no one can get to them.A number of the e-mails that have been leaked were as well,but this president's wholesale blaming of the intelligence community for his own malfeasance has not gone without some blowback.

As for the information given to the American people, what we heard for days from this president, the Secretary of State, the White House spokesperson and our UN ambassador for days were outright lies about a video and a 'spontaneous protest' that got out of control. Because of the leaked e-mails, we know know that the State Department and the White House knew within hours that this was a planned terrorist attack by an al-Qaeda affiliate.

The other, unmistakeable fact that's leaked out is that there was no attempt made to save the trapped Americans in the consulate. When the men in the CIA annex in Benghazi, including two ex-Navy SEALS repeatedly asked for permission to put together an ad-hoc force to rescue the Ambassador and the other men trapped in the consulate, they were told to stand down three times.

There were helicopter gunships within easy range of the consulate, and F-18 fighters less than an hour away. One of those ex-Seals in the annex had a laser range finder and was actually radioing in coordinates of enemy targets. No U.S. aircraft were sent to attack.

There was even a Special OPs unit already deployed and ready to go at our airbase in Sigonella, Sicily, a little over a two-hour plane ride away from Benghazi.

This force, known as the Commander's In-extremis Force (CIF) is specifically designated and trained for exactly these kinds of missions, where Americans are endangered and quick, decisive action is called for. The CIF forces are designed to go in with a minimum of information and hit the ground running, and every military theater commander has access to one.

They never got the orders to move.

Instead, the fight was simply observed in real time for seven hours, by which time four Americans had been murdered - including the two heroic ex-SEALS who decided to disobey orders and do what their government lacked the stones to do, saddle up an ride out to try and save their fellow Americans.

Once all this intel leaked, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta had an astounding response to media inquiries on this. After accusing people who were justifiably angry at being lied to for weeks and were critical of the administration of 'Monday Morning quarterbacking', he said, on October 25th that this was somehow just business as usual.

“A basic principle,” he said, “is you don’t deploy forces into harm’s way without knowing what’s going on — without having some real-time information about what’s taking place.”

Let's look at that. You have drones overhead showing you what's going on in real time, you have phone contact with the consulate, and you have a Navy SEAL feeding you precise coordinates on enemy targets from less than a mile away. And this excuse for a Secretary of Defense has the nerve and the contempt for people with far more combat experience than he'll ever have to try to lie his way out of this by saying they lacked sufficient information?

Those of you who've had combat experience, tell me - how many times have you been given a mission to perform with a lot less intel than that going in? It happens all the time. Even police officers often go in to hairy situations with nothing more than a message like 'shots fired' or 'burglary in progress' and an address.

Leon Panetta obviously was told to walk the plank with the media to try and defuse this. It's amazing that the media didn't excoriate him for such a cynical, dishonest statement.

And President Obama? All of sudden, his story has changed.


According to the White House calender, President Obama met with his entire security team on September 11th,2012 5 PM DC time,including Secretary Panetta. By then the Benghazi attack had been going on for just under an hour.

The decision to send in the CIF or indeed any military forces would have been referred to the president as commander-in-chief.If the president gave that order, as he says, than either somebody countermanded it without telling him or the president never gave the order in the first place and he's simply lying again. He needs to clear the record by releasing the directive publicly.

Someone gave the orders to the men in the CIA annex to stand down, and knowing our military as I do, somebody specifically instructed them not to deploy when they checked back in and requested permission to go in and save American lives.

Who was it?

If SecDef Panetta or Commander of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dempsey countermanded the president's direct orders, they would have informed him directly.General David Petraeus, the head of the CIA has stated unequivocally that no such orders to stand down came from him.

On the other hand, if the president is simply lying and he never gave any such 'directive' then they were simply carrying out his orders while he rested up for his campaign fundraiser and celeb appearances in Las Vegas.

What Benghazi became for this president and his administration ultimately was a political problem that had to be handled to cover up far deeper questions that might be asked about his entire handling of foreign policy...especially his intervention in Libya and his insistence that al-Qaeda was 'on the run' after bin-Laden's assassination. So they lied. Repeatedly.

And the president's belated insistence that he 'gave a directive' which would have been transmitted directly to AFRICOM, the Defense Department, the CIA, and the State Department is either true or false. If it's true, it's in his interest to release and declassify the directive, the video recordings and everything else connected with this debacle so we can find out who disobeyed his orders. The fact that he isn't doing so tells us a great deal.

And as a signal as to where this might be going, I note that General Ham, the theater commander of AFRICOM whose responsibilities included Libya has suddenly been relieved of command. Is he being set up as yet another possible fall guy? We'll see.

After all the lies and the heavy handed attempt at a coverup, here's what's certain. Four Americans were left to die when they could have been saved, and all of the nonsense by the President and Secretary Clinton about how close Ambassador Stevens was to them while they were attending his funeral was some of the most cynical and self serving horse manure it's ever been my misfortune to observe.The fact they that could know what they knew, say those things and face these men's families beggars the imagination.

Either this president is either guilty of gross incompetence or he willfully deceived the American people.There's no other way to see this.

You pick whichever one you want, but either one shows why this president is unworthy of serving in any position of public responsibility, let alone as commander-in-chief.

This is not going to go away, in spite of the efforts of the president's lackeys in the media to bury it.

Giants Win Series As Tigers Fall Victim To The Obama Curse


The San Francisco Giants swept the World Series four straight to become World Champions, with the Detroit Tigers at the losing end, 4-3.

My pal Bookworm points out why. Barack Obama let the world know on Leno's show that he was rooting for Detroit:

On Wednesday night, Obama appeared on Jay Leno’s Tonight Show.  There, in response to Jay’s question about the World Series, Obama turned his back on the Golden State that has filled his campaign coffers and told America that he was rooting for Detroit’s team (keeping in mind that Michigan’s electoral votes are up for grabs):

You know, it seems like most of what President Barack Obama touches turns into a substance very different from gold - Fast and Furious, Egypt, a stimulus, green energy jobs, an Olympics bid, you name it.

Could it be that President Obama actually figured this out and had a side bet going on the Giants to win?

Reactions To Sandy Point Out A Key Difference Between Romney And Obama


Hurricane Sandy points out yet another key difference between President Obama and Governor Mitt Romney.

With the huge storm coming in, both candidates have suspended campaign events for the next few days.But that's where the similarity ends.

Unlike his reaction to the Benghazi debacle, President Obama has said he's canceled campaign appearances and is going to 'monitor the situation'.

Mitt Romney? He's not 'monitoring' anything. He's filled his campaign bus up with emergency supplies and having them delivered to storm relief centers for those in the path of the hurricane.And knowing his past performance in these kinds of circumstances, I'm sure it's more than one bus.

Barack Obama 'monitors' things, waits and calculates what's to his political advantage before doing anything. He's a talker, always concerned with saying what's right..for his political agenda.

Mitt Romney sees what's needed and makes it happen. He's a doer, more concerned with doing what's right.

A small thing, but it reveals a lot.

I know which  kind of neighbor I'd rather have living next door to me if I needed help. And what kind of man I'd rather have in the White House.

Forum: Is DOMA Unconstitutional?









whatever the currently sitting Supreme Court justices say is unconstitutional is








Well, there you have it.



Sunday, October 28, 2012

Friday, October 26, 2012

Iran Has Almost Finished Its Underground Fordo Nuclear Plant

Iran has reportedly almost finished moving most of its enrichment facilities to its underground Fordo facility, situated under a mountain near Qom.

The site now 3,000 of Iran's most advanced centrifuges, the IR-2's and IR-4's. The Iranians are reformatting the centrifuges to refine uranium up to the 60 percent level, a short step before the weapons grade of 90 percent:


The Fordo plant was a secret until September 2009.when the Obama Administration outed it with the bright idea that revealing its existence would somehow get the Iranians to stop building it,or at least ewliminate its use as a secret facility.

Surprise surprise...what it actually did was to cause them to rush to complete it so as to make their illegal nuclear weapons program as secure from possible military attacks as possible.

The Fordo plant is just within the edge of vulnerability to Israel's top of the line current bunker busters, the Israeli built 500-pound MPR-500. The MPR-5000 is not only capable of penetrating four reinforced concrete walls but has relatively low weight. This increases its utility for air strikes in contrast to the 5,000-pound U.S. made GBU-28, which the Israelis also have some of on hand.

The Israelis also have lots of U.S. made U.S. Mk82's, which can use JDAM kits or Paveway for target guidance, thus making multiple hits on the same area possible.

The Israelis also have ballistic missiles capable of being fired from land, drones. or its Dolphin class submarines, and they could even take the ultimate step of using tactical nukes and making the area around Fordo uninhabitable for quite some time.

The American GBU-28's and the new 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP)could certainly do the job much easier and cleaner, but the Obama Administration has so far held off.

White House spokeshole Jay Carney said President Obama is "open to considering bilateral talks with Iran" .


Well, that remains to be seen.So far, the Iranians have managed to do that quite nicely.

Fordo is expected to be fully up and running by late January, early February at the latest. This is yet another red line Iran has crossed far earlier than expected.




















The Council Has Spoken!! This Week's Watchers Council Winners


What did President Obama know about what happened in Benghazi and when did he know it?" The old Watergate question surfaces again.

This week's winner, Joshuapundit's Heart Of Darkness - The Real Benghazi Coverup   was written  before a new slew of e-mails leaked that  showed the White House knew that Benghazi was a terrorist attack launched by an al-Qaeda affiliated militia within 2 hours, before it was known that the staff in the besieged Benghazi consulate communicated with the White House directly by phone as soon as the attack was launched and that  the attack was watched in real time by the White House with a video signal relayed by an overhead drone. And as this week's Non-Council winner reveals, that the trapped men could very possibly have been rescued. 




The linked story, which is essentially an AP rewrite says 'It is unclear who, if anyone, saw the cable outside the CIA at that point and how high up in the agency the information went.'

'Unclear'? It obviously went to various places - to the head of the CIA General Petraeus, to Obama's NSC Tom Donilon, and to Hillary Clinton as head of the State Department at the very least. That's how these things are routinely handled. Are we to believe Joe Biden and President Obama that nobody told them, and the entire attempt to spin this for nine days as a 'protest' over a video was due to misinformation and intelligence failure?

Or Hillary Clinton's claim that she didn't know either and that the obscene spin put on this was due to ' the fog of war'?

The AP does their best to shield the Administration, like always. They even repeated the falsehood Obama told at the last debate (with an assist from 'moderator' Candy Crowley) that he referred to Benghazi as a terrorist attack during his speech the day after in the Rose Garden, something I debunked previously.


How does it explain the deliberate removal of special forces security teams from Libya and the denials of Ambassador Stevens' own repeated requests for more of it? Even his request for a barbed wire fence around the Benghazi consulate was denied.






Council Winners

Non-Council Winners

See you next week! Don't forget to tune in on Monday AM for this week's Watcher's Forum, as the Council takes apart one of the provocative issues of the day and weighs in...don't you dare miss it. And don't forget to like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter..'cause we're cool like that!

Thursday, October 25, 2012





















I hope they're aware it can work two ways.

State Of The Race, Two Weeks Out






















Ohio could go either way.









Michigan could be a big surprise election night.








Racism, Anyone? Colin Powell Endorses Obama


I note with some interest that former chairman of the Joint Chiefs and former secretary of state Colin Powell has endorsed President Obama for a second term.

What a surprise.



All very amusing coming from the man whom, along with Clinton holdover George Tenet was chiefly responsible for selling President Bush on the Iraq War and 'nation building'. I could say quite a bit, were I so inclined, about the hypocrisy of General Powell blaming President Bush, the man whom promoted him for policies he was instrumental in promoting just as soon as they went sour.

I suppose to Colin Powell, Libya doesn't count as a war and Little Rock, Fort Hood and Benghazi don't count as terrorist attacks.And a stagnant economy counts as 'starting to rise up'.

In another part of his charming little stand up routine, General Powell said: "I think I'm a Republican of a more moderate mold. That's something of a dying breed I'm sorry to say."

Now that's odd. We have a relatively moderate Republican running this year, and an extremely moderate Republican whom ran in 2008. And guess what? Colin Powell didn't endorse either of them and what they have in common is that they're both white and both ran against Barack Obama.

The truth of the matter is that Colin Powell rose to prominence as an affirmative action general under Republican presidents and found it convenient to proclaim himself a Republican back then. He did quite well out of it.

But at this point, he's retired and no longer needs to wear that facade anymore. So he's free to endorse someone who amounts to an affirmative action president based on racial solidarity.

He's certainly well within his rights to do so, but I'd much rather he take Samuel L. Jackson's stance and was honest about it.

It would be a refreshing change for him.