US officials confirmed yesterday that Bin Laden, was killed during a raid by US forces on a mansion and compound in Pakistan yesterday where Bin Laden had been staying for an unspecified period of time.

President Barack Obama spoke to the nation last night and said that Osama bin Laden was killed by “a small team of Americans” during a raid on a safe house in Abbottabad, Pakistan. “After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body,” Obama said. No US personnel were killed during the operation.  According to multiple sources, “senior US officials” have said the operation was conducted by US NAVY SEALs inserted by multiple helicopters, one of which crashed due to mechanical failure. At least 3 other people, including one of bin Laden’s sons, were also killed in the firefight.

Obama, the humble, took full credit for the kill, of course.  Notice the use of “I” in pretty much every place he could use it.  I kept waiting for him to say he called play by play instructions in while the hit was going down.  I found it distasteful and slightly offensive that he would imply that it was only after he became President that our forces were directed to actually find Bin Laden…as if Bush never had the idea and we haven’t spent the last ten years looking for him.  And then Obama implies that it was because of his leadership that we somehow managed to find Bin Laden.  Listen, Mickey Mouse could be President right now and we still would have found Bin Laden in exactly the same way.  Obama didn’t do anything to find Bin Laden that Bush didn’t do and he didn’t do anything that John McCain or any other President would have done.

My wife is the one who told me about the news and she lead by saying “Obama just got reelected.”  She had a good point and one which I was inclined to agree with in the moments after learning about Bin Laden’s death.  After some careful thought, however, I’ve decided his reelection might not be a foregone conclusion.

One thing that leads me to believe this is the groundswell of voices already calling for us to pull out and end the war.  Thinking people know, of course, that the war doesn’t just end when one person dies…especially this war that probably wasn’t being led by Bin Laden in the first place.  However, that won’t stop people from wishing an end to all of this and for Obama to bring our troops home.  It’s very unlikely that Obama is capable of doing so or will do so.  We’ll have to keep fighting and this could definitely hurt Obama in the long run.  Someone like Donald Trump could come out, guns blazing, demanding that Obama bring our troops home and Obama would have little to counter with except common sense which seldom wins in a war of words.  Obama will have to play President and this could result in some blowback from the public.  Conversely, Obama could immediately start pulling troops back.  Of course, if he did that he would then be attacked for giving up the fight before it’s finished.  Neither position is enviable for Obama.

At any rate, our long national nightmare is over (sort of) and Bin Laden is dead.  Crowds outside of the Whitehouse chanted “USA” long into the night.  President Bush posted this on his Facebook page:

Earlier this evening, President Obama called to inform me that American forces killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of the al Qaeda network that attacked America on September 11, 2001. I congratulated him and the men and women of our military and intelligence communities who devoted their lives to this mission. They have our everlasting gratitude. This momentous achievement marks a victory for America, for people who seek peace around the world, and for all those who lost loved ones on September 11, 2001. The fight against terror goes on, but tonight America has sent an unmistakable message: No matter how long it takes, justice will be done.

I wish Bush could have found Bin Laden on his watch but it is what it is.  At least Bin Laden is dead, buried at sea, and will not be planning any other attacks.  Americans are celebrating but it remains to be seen if al Qaeda has the strength to retaliate.

I think Charles Krauthammer might have summed it up best:

It’s a great day, and it’s a great moment for America, and I think the principal effect, and there will be many, but the most important is to demonstrate the reach, the power and the efficiency of the United States Military.

That I think is going to reverberate around the world.

We have suffered over the last decade or so, and longer…we were attacked in 1998 by al-Qaeda for the first time in a major way, and after a indecisive war in Iraq and Afghanistan, it looks like we are losing, or at least sliding backwards with the operation in Libya, and I think the world had this fantasy that the United States didn’t have the power, did not have the efficiency, it did not have the might.

The way the world saw us right after Iraq, the Gulf War, the war in 1991 where there was this awe about what America could do, and this tells the world, that it could take a decade, you could be hiding anywhere in the world, we will stay on the trail, we will find you, and we will kill you.

And it’s like the Entebbe raid the Israeli’s pulled off in 1976 where they reached all the way into Uganda and extracted all the hostages and killed the hostage takers, the demonstrations of strength is the most important effect.

…it reinforces the symbolism here because al-Qaeda attacked all those different countries but the only one that could do, the only one that had the power, the reach, the global scope, the wherewithal to do it is the United States, and in a way acting in the name of the world in a way only we can do, which is how we have been seen since the fall of the soviet union, early on in that period, again after the gulf way, as the only one who could do it easily and with great triumph, lately people have been thinking America has slipped, I think this is a great restoration of that image.

The Houston Chronicle is reporting the Netherlands, a experienced oil producing nation, offered the United States help in dealing with the British Petroleum spill very quickly after it started, but the Obama Administration turned them down, opting instead to coordinate with BP to stop the spill and contain the damage.

If this article from Redstate is true it’s another great example of Obama driving nails into his own coffin.  Why wouldn’t you take all the help you can get?

The article from the Houston Chronicle says the administration is now reconsidering the offer of help.

Now, almost seven weeks later, as the oil spewing from the battered well spreads across the Gulf and soils pristine beaches and coastline, BP and our government have reconsidered.

U.S. ships are being outfitted this week with four pairs of the skimming booms airlifted from the Netherlands and should be deployed within days. Each pair can process 5 million gallons of water a day, removing 20,000 tons of oil and sludge.

Unfortunately, waiting a month to accept the offer wasn’t exactly the smartest thing to do.  The Houston Chronicle also had this to say:

The uncoordinated response to an offer of assistance has become characteristic of this disaster’s response. Too often, BP and the government don’t seem to know what the other is doing, and the response has seemed too slow and too confused.

This ignorance (arrogance?) has now created one of the worst environmental disasters in the history of this nation.

BP Fuels the Netherlands

From The Patriot Post:

Arizona prosecutors have decided not to pursue the death penalty in the case of Faleh Al-Maleki, the Iraqi immigrant who struck his 20-year-old daughter Noor — and the woman who was protecting her — with his vehicle. Noor, whom Al-Maleki had accused of being too “Westernized,” died of her injuries, and her father has been charged with first-degree murder, attempted murder, and two counts of leaving the scene of a serious accident.

Public defender Billy Little asked the judge to take “special precautions” that the D.A. wouldn’t seek death because Al-Maleki is a Muslim. The irony is that Al-Maleki committed his crimes because by his own reckoning, his daughter was not true to her Muslim faith.

In addition, Little’s bias is apparently acceptable. Little, in reference to the religious beliefs of County Attorney Andrew Thomas, asked for “An open process [that] provides some level of assurance that there is no appearance that a Christian is seeking to execute a Muslim for racial, political, religious or cultural beliefs.”

This murder was based on the centuries-old tradition — still adhered to in some parts of the world — of murdering female relatives who don’t obey Islamic rules. It is, arguably, even more disturbing when the crime happens in the United States and political correctness affords special protection for her murderer.

You can also read more about this story here.

Now a muslim murderer is escaping a justifiable punishment because they are afraid of it looking like he’s being executed by a Christian…?  This is what our legal system and our political correctness has led us to and will continue to lead us to if we do not take notice.

It seems now that not only have our arguments been vindicated, there is strong evidence that the global warming “pushers” have actually been perpetrating a hoax on the entire world.

I’ll let Nigel Lawson from the London Times tell you about the CRU emails which have damaged, perhaps fatally, the theory of man-made global warming:

…the scientific basis for global warming projections is now under scrutiny as never before. The principal source of these projections is produced by a small group of scientists at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), affiliated to the University of East Anglia.

Last week an apparent hacker obtained access to their computers and published in the blogosphere part of their internal e-mail traffic. And the CRU has conceded that the at least some of the published e-mails are genuine.

Astonishingly, what appears, at least at first blush, to have emerged is that (a) the scientists have been manipulating the raw temperature figures to show a relentlessly rising global warming trend; (b) they have consistently refused outsiders access to the raw data; (c) the scientists have been trying to avoid freedom of information requests; and (d) they have been discussing ways to prevent papers by dissenting scientists being published in learned journals.

There may be a perfectly innocent explanation. But what is clear is that the integrity of the scientific evidence on which not merely the British Government, but other countries, too, through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, claim to base far-reaching and hugely expensive policy decisions, has been called into question. And the reputation of British science has been seriously tarnished.

Perhaps now we can finally get to the truth concerning global warming.  Instead of stifling dissent on the issue, perhaps the scientists can release the real temperature data and face the detractors whom they seem to fear so much…

Don’t get me wrong, I liked a lot of Michael Jackson’s music and there’s no denying the impact he’s had on the music world in general.  But has everyone completely forgotten that a couple of weeks ago he was widely believed to be a child molester?  Now I’m not saying that he was a child molester…just that most people believed him to be.  I mean, the guy couldn’t catch a break anywhere in America.  He had to go to Europe in order to make his comeback.

It defies logic that we should now honor Michael Jackson like he was some sort of statesman or saint.  At best he was a strange, confused, drug addicted, former pop star.  At worst he’s a strange, confused, drug addicted, former pop star who molested/molests children in the circus like atmosphere of a place he called “Neverland.”  While one of those scenarios might have won him legions of fans, it hardly qualifies him to be honored by our Congress or our nation.

Still, it’s good to know that our “representatives” are working on such important endeavors.  I mean, it’s not like our nation is in need of anything at the moment…

Below are a few snippets from the resolution.  You can read the whole resolution here if you can stomach it.

Whereas Michael Jackson was labeled `The King of Pop’, Jackson’s music is internationally recognized and critically acclaimed;

Whereas Michael Jackson was one of the few artists to have been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice;

Whereas in the early 1980s, Michael Jackson became a dominant figure in popular music and the first African-American entertainer to amass a strong crossover following on MTV. The popularity of his music videos airing on MTV, such as `Beat It’, `Billie Jean’ and `Thriller’–widely credited with transforming the music video from a promotional tool into an art form–helped bring the relatively new channel to fame;

Whereas, on January 10, 1984, Michael Jackson visited the unit for burn victims at Brotman-Memorial Hospital in Los Angeles, and demonstrated his concern with people suffering from grievous injuries;

Whereas, on April 9, 1984, David Smithee, a 14-year-old boy suffering from cystic fibroses was invited to Michael’s home, in response to a dying request to meet Michael. David passed away 7 weeks later;

Whereas, on April 14, 1984, Michael Jackson was single handedly responsible for equipping a 19-bed-unit at Mount Sinai New York Medical Center. This center is now a critical part of the T.J. Martell Foundation for leukemia and cancer research;

Whereas, on July 5, 1984, during the Jackson’s press conference at Tavern On The Green, Michael announced that his portion of the earnings from the Victory Tour would be donated to three charitable organizations: The United Negro College Fund, Camp Good Times, and the T.J. Martell Foundation;

Whereas, on July 14, 1984, after the first concert of the Victory Tour, Michael met 8 terminally ill children backstage;

Whereas, on December 13, 1984, Michael visited the Brotman Memorial Hospital, where he had been treated when he was burned during the producing of a Pepsi commercial. He subsequently donated all the money he received from Pepsi, $1.5 million, to the Michael Jackson Burn Center for Children;