ABC’s Ann Compton 5/2/11:

“Clinton’s hand covers her mouth in gesture of astonishment.”

UK Telegraph: what did Hillary Clinton see?

The image captures Hillary Clinton’s expression of horror: the Secretary of State’s eyes are wide with fright and she holds a hand to her mouth, as if to stifle a gasp.

Seattle Times: A riveting photo, a moment still undefined

President Barack Obama leans forward, deadly serious. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton holds her right hand over her mouth, a worried look on her face.

The Washington Post goes beyond sanity in a full breakdown of the picture. No, seriously, they analyzed every pixel. Over-analyzed every pixel. They focus tightly on Hillary Clinton:

It is Hillary Clinton who seizes the audience. With the gesture of the hand to the mouth, as if masking a gasp, she is expressive, emotional and human, a Cassandra who stands out amid the lockjawed, impassive ensemble. The photo depicts a pas de deux between the president and his secretary of state, former competitors now moving in sync to take down an off-stage enemy. -Sarah Kaufman, Dance Critic

Yeah, WaPo got a dance critic to cement the moment for their readers. I have had a few discussions with colleagues, friends and family about the photo. Some were steadfast that she was gasping with a shocked look on her face. I think some went really far to make this picture mean more than what was there.

Hillary Clinton finally commented on the famous photo:

I am somewhat sheepishly concerned that it was my preventing one of my early spring allergic coughs. So it may have no great meaning whatsoever.

I’m thinking whoever put that photo up picked it because they wanted to narrate shock, gasp and anxiety from the Secretary of State. What’s more puzzling than that photo is the one distributed from Obama’s speech on Osama bin Laden’s death. While the one I snapped is a screenshot from the White House YouTube channel, the one distributed of him at the podium was taken from a re-enactment for photographers after he went off the air.

I don’t know how this band of White House officials is botching photography these days. For a group highly critical of Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” photo, you’d think they would get their photo-ops down.

[Read the ORIGINAL at AJ Federation's Blog]

It didn’t take long – in fact, some would say it was immediate – for the politics to pour over Osama bin Laden’s death. Primarily, the concern of “who gets credit?“

Without shadow of a doubt, President Obama deserves credit for ordering the operation against Osama bin Laden. But he does not get to take the credit alone. This is something that no one man can claim responsibility over. There is more to give credit to than just Obama or the intelligence services and U.S. forces who launched the actual assault.

Undoubtedly, the news reports coming out about this operation have some interesting intelligence behind it. Primarily, something about a courier service Osama bin Laden was using. One of the couriers was captured, and kept in Guantanamo Bay. The infamous Gitmo prison, host of the out of use controversial waterboarding. The very one President Obama said he would shutdown in his first 100 days as President and never did. You know, the one the left cried and exclaimed about and all but forgot once their guy was President. That one.

The Obama administration reluctantly said they could not close it down. Eric Holder, who tried to prosecute Khalied Shiek Muhammed in New York City, had to send him back to Gitmo. It is in Guantanamo Bay that crucial information about the couriers came out in the last year:

While it’s not publicly known which detainees gave CIA or Guantánamo interrogators the nom de guerre of one of the few al Qaeda couriers trusted by bin Laden, a senior U.S. official confirmed that crucial piece of intelligence was gathered from “detainees in the post-9/11 period.”

A second U.S. official with knowledge of the situationconfirmed that some of the information used to track down the courier was given by Guantánamo detainees. Both officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the details involved.

This ultimately lead to Osama’s Abbottabad compound. New York Time’s gives a distinct detail in how this service was even found:

By 2005, many inside the C.I.A. had reached the conclusion that the Bin Laden hunt had grown cold, and the agency’s top clandestine officer ordered an overhaul of the agency’s counterterrorism operations. The result was Operation Cannonball, a bureaucratic reshuffling that placed more C.I.A. case officers on the ground in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

With more agents in the field, the C.I.A. finally got the courier’s family name. With that, they turned to one of their greatest investigative tools — the National Security Agency began intercepting telephone calls and e-mail messages between the man’s family and anyone inside Pakistan. From there they got his full name.

Last July, Pakistani agents working for the C.I.A. spotted him driving his vehicle near Peshawar. When, after weeks of surveillance, he drove to the sprawling compound in Abbottabad, American intelligence operatives felt they were onto something big, perhaps even Bin Laden himself.

The intelligence that got agents to look in Abbottabad came from the most unsavory place for the Obama administration. Had President Obama got his way, we would not have had Guantanamo Bay intelligence. We still might be looking, and might be trusting that Pakistan is telling us the truth. Intel used from Gitmo follows George W. Bush’s lead.

It is in Bush’s administration that CIA agents and decent operatives from Pakistan were looking in Pakistan. President Obama did not retract them or take them off the ball. In short, he kept with Bush’s lead.

Early on in Obama’s campaign for President, he said he would launch missile strikes in Pakistan, especially if there was solid evidence that Osama bin Laden was there. Many Republicans, including myself at the time, condemned attacking an “ally” in the war on terror. Inside his first 100 days, he actually did launch a missile strike over the mountainous border in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Primarily striking and killing targets in Pakistan in 2009!

But back in 2008, President Musharraf supposedly gave President Bush a “hunting license” to search and strike inside Pakistan for Osama bin Laden. President Obama simply kept using the license. This license entailed the following:

The U.S. has options for sending special operations teams into Pakistan if bin Laden’s exact location is determined, but military officials said it would be a flying drone, not boots on the ground, that would be dispatched to kill the al Qaeda leader.

We know, now, that boots were on the ground. Officials with Obama urged him to use predator drones to attack the compound and bomb away the compound. Aside from the concerns for collateral damage, civilian casualties that could have been (like Sohaib Athar @ReallyVirtual), President Obama went for the best alternative: take him dead or alive with U.S. forces.

Obama followed the previous administration’s lead. Everything he tried to counter about Bush’s administration, he kept. He didn’t close Gitmo. He didn’t move or change intelligence services. President Obama did not increase pressure in the hunt for Osama bin Laden. He kept on Bush’s track.

The hunt for Osama bin Laden that ultimately led to his death is clear as day. Obama didn’t do anything different or new to former President Bush. But that’s not what the politics are going to say.

The left is set in the single mindset that President Bush abandoned the hunt for Osama bin Laden. They believe he did not care to find him, and was unfocused. They are steadfast in the belief that Iraq was a distraction to get away from capturing the elusive bin Laden. They believe Bush dropped the ball on the mission, and Obama picked it up. Because predator drones totally found out bin Laden!

Now, to disparage and cut away any credit to the Bush administration, the Left is sifting through the facts with baited breath to find if Bush knew bin Laden was in that compound during his second term. Some are still certain that Osama was used as the constant fear to keep Bush and other Republicans in office. Only because they can’t fathom the country re-electing him in 2004.

In the end, like I said earlier, no single person can take or deserves credit. No single President, Obama or Bush, should take credit. Both of them had the ground work and got it done.

This is no election or re-election item for anyone to take up. This isn’t an item that gains anyone presidency. The debate about “giving credit where credit is due” by the left is about legitimizing President Obama’s foreign policy. Which is a carbon copy of Bush’s foreign policy.

This is a victory for the American psyche. The face of terrorism is dead. I can’t say it enough: Osama bin Laden is dead! I know this isn’t the end of the war on terror. I know Al Qaeda isn’t out, but they are certainly down. Those guys are into symbolism, and this is a massive gut check.

There are a lot of interesting facts and details coming out about this operation. One thing that is just absolutely fascinating is that the attack was tweeted by an unwitting civilian in Abbottabad. Sohaib Athar heard and saw some strange activity in Abbottabad early Monday morning local time and tweeted it:

Athar is a little comedic over…

[Read the rest Here]

$2.5 trillion? Let me put trillion in context to see all those zeros and commas: $2,500,000,000,000.00. That’s how much the House GOP wanted to cut at the start of the year. Clearly, the House did not cut that much.

$60 billion?! Late February, the House passed their spending cut plan and sent it to the Senate. From here, the House complained that Senate Democrats were stalling. For over a month, Congress dithered and whined about how much should be cut. Early March, there were murmurs of a government shutdown. By the end of the month, a shutdown seemed imminent! Democrats were willing to hold military pay hostage to save the drastic cuts against Planned Parenthood.

$40 billion?!? Crisis averted! There won’t be a government shutdown after D.C. reached towards the midnight hour. House Speaker John Boehner met with Senate Majority leader Harry Reid at the White House with President Obama to whittle down the extravagant amount of cuts; tabling the debate about Planned Parenthood funding for another day. But that final amount is but a blurted figure. What’s the real amount?

[Read the rest at AJ Federation's blog]

On Monday I was gladly cheering on statements made by Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell. He put up some fighting words about the Senate Democrats. They are still cutting, in my view. Albeit, the blade has been dulled thanks to Senator McConnell’s wimpy attitude to stop the filibustering and concede to Reid. This is the political equivalent of bending over and grabbing one’s ankles. If it’s going to happen, why fight it? That’s at least the attitude McConnell gave to Senator Reid the other day.

Tack on Senator McCain’s statements on FOX News Sunday and it seems as if the Senate Republicans are fighting for nothing.

WALLACE: Is there anything that Republican senators can do to stop the Senate from passing health care reform by Christmas eve?

MCCAIN: Probably not. But what we can do is continue winning the battle of American public opinion.

As though all of this is just an effort to save their skins in the next election cycles to prove to their constituents that they tried. They are hoping to get that tea party campaign money, after all. So the fight’s over, right? If they’re not really trying, then why bother? It’s important to note that McCain has been failing the party for years. He still believes there is a reach across the aisle policy; though he’s growing tired of being stabbed by both parties for reaching first.

As these two knuckleheads ready the trumpets of defeat, Senators Jim DeMint (R-South Carolina) and John Ensign (R-Nevada) rip it from their purple lips with this very important document… called the Constitution!

Today, U.S. Senators Jim DeMint (R-South Carolina) and John Ensign (R-Nevada), raised a Constitutional Point of Order on the Senate floor against the Democrat health care takeover bill on behalf of the Steering Committee, a caucus of conservative senators. The Senate will vote tomorrow on the bill’s constitutionality.

Thanks to the good folks at the Heritage Foundation, DeMint and Ensign will be armed on the Senate floor with things called the law on their side. It may be easy to snicker and sneer that Congress has trampled on and shredded the US Constitution ever since the New Deal or maybe even well before Lincoln. One can hardly blame anyone for thinking that. But I can’t hold to that sentiment. I can hardly abide it. So long as that defeatist thought is in a person’s head Congress might as well fulfill the idea.

At the Tea Parties I saw and heard hundreds and thousands of people who believed and thought the Constitution meant something. Some folks all too familiar with the political world continue to fill their heads with, “pft, they do this all the time.” Not any more! A rhetorical question for those politico’s: when was the last time a member of Congress raised a Constitutional question that wasn’t about our rights in the Bill of Rights? This isn’t a question about a flag burning, a religious symbol, owning guns, habeas corpus, wire tapping, or affirmative action.

The challenge DeMint and Ensign are issuing against the Senate Democrats is that their bill absolutely contrasts the foundation of this nation. They are standing up for a document that the President would like to declare a mutating, if not outdated document. Where do you think this backbone move came from? It certainly didn’t arrive from the lackluster Republican Party. For once, they are doing something that all people at the Tea Parties have been exclaiming this year. It’s the Constitution!

Harry Reid and his fellow Democrats are going to have a wake up call from this move. Could it kill the bill? I would love to believe that’s the possibility. That would be the best Christmas gift any Republican has ever given to the people in years! I won’t count that possibility out, but I won’t be holding my breath, either. Everyone who opposes these health care plans have been hoping for a fight. They have been hoping for a fight to the end. Where McConnell and McCain failed for the tea parties is where DeMint and Ensign will succeed.

In every single one of her boohoo episodes with the media – namely CNN – little McCain keeps up the moderate wimp attitude her father upheld throughout the ’08 and ’00 elections. “Moderates” believe the rest of whatever party they leech off of is too exclusive and doesn’t allow enough of their people in. Rather than leading by example she does exactly what her and her ilk do, whine.

Her principles that she demands the party takes on and allows to be included are hardly principles. She claims the GOP rejects her form of Liberalism. It would be all too easy for anyone taking in each of her articles that it’s simply the GOP versus Liberalism. That would be the mainstream media’s objective in pursuit of her statements. That’s an oversimplification to the matter at hand.

In this supposed effort to make the Republican Party “inclusive” is the underlying assault on Conservatism. Meghan McCain wants Republicans to forget their principles. Her comments are drive-by attacks on individuals and their independent opinions and political conclusions. In saying that the GOP is being exclusive to her ilk she is saying Conservatism fails the Republican Party. Miss McCain goes so far as to say Conservatism is narrow minded and bigoted.

I still should give credit where credit is due as the McCain’s say the Republican Party has a problem communicating their message. I can most certainly agree with that. It is hard to understand what the GOP stands for when it gets muddled with all the Lindsey Graham’s, John McCain’s, and Meghan McCain’s twisting what it should and should not be. Miss McCain, just stop it. The Republican Party gave you and your father’s approach a chance. It failed, and it wasn’t the rightwing of the GOP that made your preferred middle of the road approach do it in.