I don’t recall any runs on ammunition.

Update: The original video has been edited with the following explanation: “Some of the SDA regulars thought I took Dear Leader’s words out of context from the Al Aribiya interview. While I don’t believe that you bring a knife to a gun fight, I found some of their objections well reasoned and deleted the “offending” passage.”

An exceptional video.
Update – The First Presidential News Conference is being broadcast at the moment… yowza. He simply has no clue what he’s talking about. Can this man ah string six words together ah without ah ….?
Expect the shaking to begin from teleprompter withdrawal at any moment…
Helen Thomas just asked “do you know of any countries in the Middle East that have nuclear weapons?” Meaning – here’s your chance to finally confirm the bloodthirsty Zionists have the Bomb, oh, One Who Makes My Thighs Quiver.
From the comments – “I watched as long as I could. O Man is as vapid and dumb as a rock. The guy chatters. There isn’t a linear line in his brain. He had more disconnected angles going on than Pythagoras. My husband kept muttering “what in the name of God is he saying”. And the press, of course, sat in awe. I finally changed channels to the Westminster Dog show.”
Me too!

Doug Giles’ cure for the Obama hangover.
A White House already in “damage-control mode”? .But they told us experience only matters if you’re vice-president!

Many women — not too surprisingly — were dreaming about sex with the president. In these dreams ….

“Not too surprisingly”.

$60 trillion.

Think about that number. That’s the real power of “we, the people.” It’s the shoulder behind our votes if we will only begin to believe again in our own might more than we do in a feckless, unproductive government that seeks to buy our faith with a piddling $925 billion they’ll have to borrow from us before they can get their pictures taken giving it away.

h/t Tenebris

Via Fox – Diane McDaniels, whose son Frank died in the terrorist attack on the USS Cole, is refusing to participate in window dressing…

Reuters;

U.S. President Barack Obama will likely order a military commission to withdraw charges against Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a suspect in the U.S.S. Cole bombing held at Guantanamo naval base, ABC News reported on Thursday.
The decision, likely to be announced on Friday, would end prosecution of al-Nashiri in the military court system that Obama has criticized and may ultimately dismantle, ABC News reported, citing unnamed sources

Word on the blog street has it that he plans to defend the decision in a photo op session after meeting with Cole bombing survivors and families of 911 victims – perhaps to remind them he “won”.
(The reason the 911 families were invited? Just guess.)
More on the rationale here, but the short form is “his order to close Gitmo made him do it.”
Meanwhile, over in the dead center of the universe…

Via Darcey.

President Obama needs you curbside – “Is this, like, some kind of karmic payback for all the Joe-the-plumber tax business?”.

Like his predecessor did during his visit;

The Obama visit, which will revolve around a meeting with Prime Minister Stephen Harper but include a courtesy chat with Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff in his capacity as Official Opposition leader, is expected to take roughly five hours from landing to the President’s return to Washington, D.C.

Five hours? That’s barely long enough to raise Heather Mallick’s respiration rate.

Meet Tom Daschle and Nancy Killefer and Bill Richardson and Reverand Wright and, oh, you know Grandma Dunham….
(Now, could all of you squeeze over and make room?)

California’s farms and vineyards could vanish by the end of the century, and its major cities could be in jeopardy, if Americans do not act to slow the advance of global warming […] Chu warned of water shortages plaguing the West and Upper Midwest and particularly dire consequences for California, his home state, the nation’s leading agricultural producer.
In a worst case, Chu said, up to 90% of the Sierra snowpack could disappear, all but eliminating a natural storage system for water vital to agriculture.
“I don’t think the American public has gripped in its gut what could happen,” he said. “We’re looking at a scenario where there’s no more agriculture in California.” And, he added, “I don’t actually see how they can keep their cities going” either.

A Sierra Club propagandist? A Gore trainee? Nope – joke’s on Chu, America. He’s Obama’s new energy secretary!
Whoops – better put a hold on those buggy whips…

[Obama’s regulatory czar] has made no secret of his devotion to the cause of establishing legal “rights” for livestock, wildlife, and pets. “[T]here should be extensive regulation of the use of animals in entertainment, scientific experiments, and agriculture,” Sunstein wrote in a 2002 working paper while at the University of Chicago Law school.
“Extensive regulation of the use of animals.” That’s PETA-speak for using government to get everything PETA and the Humane Society of the United States can’t get through gentle pressure or not-so-gentle coercion. Not exactly the kind of thing American ranchers, restaurateurs, hunters, and biomedical researchers (to say nothing of ordinary consumers) would like to hear from their next “regulatory czar.”

From tax evasion, to terrorist pardons, to granting your goldfish the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – is there nothing that an Obama cabinet can’t do?

Is there…

India has warned US President Barack Obama that he risks “barking up the wrong tree” if he seeks to broker a settlement between Pakistan and India over the disputed territory of Kashmir.
MK Narayanan, India’s national security advisor, said that the new US administration was in danger of dredging up out of date Clinton administration-era strategies in a bid to bring about improved ties between the two nuclear armed neighbours.

nothing that…

The European Union warned the US yesterday against plunging the world into depression by adopting a planned “Buy American” policy, intensifying fears of a trade war.
The EU threatened to retaliate if the US Congress went ahead with sweeping measures in its $800 billion (£554 billion) stimulus plan to restrict spending to American goods and services

Obama can’t do?

“The United States will use “all elements of our national power” to deal with Iran, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Tuesday after Tehran said it had launched a satellite into orbit.”

Sure he will.

On the rockiest day of his young administration, President Barack Obama did what surely made him happy for a while.
He left.

More – The Impending Obama Meltdown

Is there nothing that Obama can’t do!

“Under limited circumstances, there is a legitimate place” for renditions, said Tom Malinowski, the Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch.

“Limited circumstances include a Democrat in the White House,” he did not need to add.

“Under executive orders issued by Obama recently, the CIA still has
authority to carry out what are known as renditions, secret abductions and
transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States.
Current and former U.S. intelligence officials said that the rendition
program might be poised to play an expanded role going forward because it
was the main remaining mechanism — aside from Predator missile strikes —
for taking suspected terrorists off the street.”

h/t

“Obama Dozed, People Froze!”
Amid reports of storm stranded residents not resorting to cannibalism, Kentucky has
called up entire Army National Guard.

More than half a million homes and businesses, most of them in Kentucky, remained with out electricity from the Ozarks through Appalachia, though temperatures creeping into the 40s helped a swarm of utility workers make headway. Finding fuel – heating oil along with gas for cars and generators – was another struggle for those trying to tough it out at home, with hospitals and other essential services getting priority over members of the public.
The addition of 3,000 soldiers and airmen makes 4,600 Guardsmen pressed into service. It’s the largest call-up in Kentucky history, which Beshear called an appropriate response to a storm that cut power to more than 600,000 people, the state’s largest outage on record. Many people in rural areas cannot get out of their driveways due to debris and have no phone service, the governor said.
“With the length of this disaster and what we’re expecting to be a multi-day process here, we’re concerned about the lives and the safety of our people in their own homes,” Beshear said, “and we need the manpower in some of the rural areas to go door-to-door and do a door-to-door canvass … and make sure they’re OK.”

“PS: can I just add at this point — so far, no reports of looting!”
More – “Someone needs to go wake up President Oblivious, because he must be snoozing in that warm Oval Office after his big Wagyu Steak binge not to have noticed, mentioned a word, or taken any emergency actions to this days long debacle.”
At Instapundit – ““What Katrina taught the media was that they could hurt Bush by lying. What 2008 taught them was that they could help Obama by not reporting at all. What will 2009 teach them? I shudder to think.””

NYT;

The capital flew into a bit of a tizzy when, on his first full day in the White House, President Obama was photographed in the Oval Office without his suit jacket. There was, however, a logical explanation: Mr. Obama, who hates the cold, had cranked up the thermostat.
“He’s from Hawaii, O.K.?” said Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, David Axelrod, who occupies the small but strategically located office next door to his boss. “He likes it warm. You could grow orchids in there.”

*
h/t

The door!. Now, go to sleep.
Related – smell the bipartisanship! 11 Democrats cross floor to join Republicans in opposing Obama’s 800B bucks of pork.

I know you’ll find this hard to believe, but media reports may not be providing the full story on the Blagojevitch case;

I listened to much of day two of the Illinois Senate impeachment trial of Gov. Rod Blagojevich. This was the day when the smoking gun would be revealed, in the form of four audio tapes just released by U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald. Despite the claims in some of the television and print media, the tapes were no smoking gun.
The tapes purport to show Blagojevich extorting a campaign contribution from a horse race track owner in exchange for Blagojevich signing legislation favorable to the race track. But all the tapes actually show is Blagojevich’s chief of staff urging Blagojevich to pressure the race track owner to pay up on a previously promised campaign contribution, and Blagojevich trying to confirm that the payment will be made. Nothing on the tapes states that Blagojevich would refuse to sign the legislation, already passed by a substantial majority in the legislature (including many of the Senators voting on impeachment), if there were no payment. You may be able to make the connection, but these tapes don’t do it. We would need much more evidence to show extortion or even conspiracy to extort.
[…]
The other thing that jumped out when listening to the tapes and hearing [FBI agent] Cain’s testimony in response to questions from Senators, is how truncated are the excerpts. With an Assistant U.S. Attorney at his side, Cain repeatedly refused to answer questions as to how the excerpts were selected, what else was on the tapes, or who else (including Senators voting on impeachment) was on the tapes (Transcript, 292-293) When Cain refused to answer if any other Senators were on the tapes, the transcript indicates that an unidentified person at the Senate trial said “Thank God.” (Tr. 293) So we may have potential targets of, or witnesses in, Fitzgerald’s investigation voting on whether that most famous target, Blagojevich, stays in office. Great.

h/t

It’s going to be a Long. Four. Years.
More – “did anyone bother to check out the content on Al-Arabiya?”
Update: The end of “dictating” extends to Whitehouse press briefings;

It’s been four days since Press Secretary Robert Gibbs’ first (and widely panned) appearance before the White House press corps, but no transcript, summary, or video of the event has shown up on WhiteHouse.gov. The delay could be forgiven in a less tech-savvy bunch, but given the Obama team’s considerable online skill, the omission of the the transcript is clearly intentional.

h/t
Update – a pithy observation at Brutally Honest.

The Publisher

Obama Targets Muslims For Death