Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula claims responsibility for attempted Christmas airline attack in U.S.

Of course they do.

CAIRO – Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula has claimed responsibility for the attempted attack on a U.S. airliner on Christmas day, saying it was retaliation for a U.S. operation against the group in Yemen.

In a statement posted on the Internet, the group said 23-year-old Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab coordinated with members of the group.

Yemeni forces, helped by U.S. intelligence, carried out two airstrikes against al-Qaida operatives in the country this month. The second one was a day before the attempted bombing of the plane.

The group said the would-be bomber used explosives manufactured by al-Qaida members.

Consequences

By GottaLaff

What's wrong with this picture:

CNN Poll: Palin's popularity on the rise

Obama Approval Hits New Low

Oh noes! What mischief the wingies shall make of this. What fun they'll have! How could this happen?

Oh that's right...

Barbie McLipSchmutz has no professional responsibilities (because she quit), doesn't hold public office (because she quit) spends her days letting her ghostwriter do her fancy Facebook pageant talkin' for her (because she can't), boasts about her Big Book Tour but abandons her fans mid-event (because she quit), makes outlandish Word Cole Slaw speeches (because she's paid), and poses for pretty pictures (because she can).

President Obama holds the highest office in the land and must make monumental -- sometimes unpopular-- decisions that affect the whole world (because he won the election by a landslide).

I bet the Obama haters will forget to mention all that.

No immediate gratifciation from Not-Yet-President Obama

By GottaLaff

Some of you may think much of the excerpt below sounds awfully familiar... reminiscent of a few of our own Comments, f'rinstance? Please read the entire piece, though, since these excerpts don't get Millner's whole point across:

The favored response, at least among a large swath of Americans, has been to demand that President-elect Barack Obama play Santa Claus. I have lost track of how many groups have been squalling like babies over every move Obama makes - the economists, the environmentalists, the food reformers, the gays, the Latinos, the state legislatures, the consumer groups - no one he appoints, no policy he sets forth, and no one he talks to is "change they can believe in." They want an immediate economic recovery, an organic garden on the White House lawn, subsidized green jobs in every sector, bailouts for every state and every family, people of color running every federal department, trade tariffs, all the troops back home on Jan. 21, a dramatically new health care system, and for the Rev. Rick Warren to just lie down and die. They want it all and they want it right now. It doesn't matter that Obama is not yet our president.

The outpouring of demand and emotion is poignant, because it speaks to the starvation Americans have suffered when it comes to public life for at least the last eight years. The demands are loud and urgent because they have been neglected so willfully for so long. Things have gone so badly, and those in power have been so unmoved by the needs of so many average people, that we feel it makes sense to greet someone who appears to listen not with applause but with the howls like those of the peasants storming the gates of the Forbidden City. But here is where we need to pull back, and to realize that Obama didn't create the Forbidden City. We did.

Then she cautions us about our own responsibilities, focusing on issues of morality:

To put it another way: Obama will be busy enough tackling the political rot in this country. We will have to tackle the moral rot ourselves. [...]

Too bad. Many of the problems we face right now have their root causes in poor moral choices we made some time ago, and to view them in any other light is dangerous, delusional and doomed to failure.

Food for thought.

Big h/t: Vicki Cana

Frank Rich: Two Cheers for Rod Blagojevich

By GottaLaff

Barry Blitt

Frank Rich:

What went down in the Land of Lincoln is just the reductio ad absurdum of an American era where both entitlement and corruption have been the calling cards of power. Blagojevich’s alleged crimes pale next to the larger scandals of Washington and Wall Street. Yet those who promoted and condoned the twin national catastrophes of reckless war in Iraq and reckless gambling in our markets have largely escaped the accountability that now seems to await the Chicago punk nabbed by the United States attorney, Patrick Fitzgerald. [...]

Bush had arrived in Washington vowing to inaugurate a new, post-Clinton era of “personal responsibility” in which “people are accountable for their actions.” Eight years later he holds himself accountable for nothing. [...]

[W]hile some perpetrators of fraud at Enron would ultimately pay a price, any lessons from its demise, including a need for safeguards, were promptly forgotten by one and all in the power centers of both federal and corporate governance. [...]

Despite Bush’s post-Enron call for “a new ethic of personal responsibility in the business community,” the exact opposite has happened in the six years since. [...]

It’s a sad snapshot of our century’s establishment that Rubin has been an economic adviser to Barack Obama and Gramm to John McCain. And that both captains of finance remain unapologetic, unaccountable and still at their banks, which have each lost more than 70 percent of their shareholders’ value this year and have collectively announced more than 90,000 layoffs so far.

The Times calls its chilling investigative series on the financial failures “The Reckoning,” but the reckoning is largely for the rest of us — taxpayers, shareholders, the countless laid-off employees — not the corporate and political leaders who led us into the quagmire. It’s a replay of the Iraq equation: the troops, the Iraqi people and American taxpayers have borne the harshest costs while Bush and company retire to their McMansions. [...]

After a while they all start to sound like O. J. Simpson, who when at last held accountable for some of his behavior told a Las Vegas judge this month, “In no way did I mean to hurt anybody.” Or perhaps they are channeling Donald Rumsfeld, whose famous excuse for his failure to secure post-invasion Iraq, “Stuff happens,” could be the epitaph of our age.

Our next president, like his predecessor, is promising “a new era of responsibility and accountability.” We must hope he means it. Meanwhile, we have the governor he leaves behind in Illinois to serve as our national whipping boy, the one betrayer of the public trust who could actually end up paying for his behavior. The surveillance tapes of Blagojevich are so fabulous it seems a tragedy we don’t have similar audio records of the bigger fish who have wrecked the country. But in these hard times we’ll take what we can get.