The Rod Blagojevich trial is under way.  This is going to be a real circus.  The first witness, Alonzo Monk,  on the first day was bad for Blagojevich.  But, this witness may be even worse for Obama:

http://www.newsmax.com/InsideCover/US-Blagojevich-Trial/2010/06/09/id/361562

The problem with this testimony is that it clearly reveals who Tony Rezko is and how he operated.   That is devastating for Obama, because he had a close personal relationship with Rezko.  Rezko even lived next door and cut a sweetheart deal so Obama could get his pretty new house.  Recall that he is now serving time for corruption.  Nice neighbor!

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=4315880&page=1

It seems pretty obvious that Blagojevich is guilty as sin.  There are, after all, all those tape recordings.  But, Blagojevich’s attorney is arguing that this is just typical Illinois politics and since they can’t prove that he got any actual money, it was not illegal.  In other words:  “this kind of quid pro quo is ok, as long as there no actual dough received as part of the quo.”  There is the problem for Obama.  In effect the Blagojevich defense is that he didn’t do anything different that what was done by and for Obama.  He has a point! 

So far the main stream media has taken the position that none of the allegations about Obama matter because this is just politics.  But, the testimony by Blagojevich’s aide shows that with Rezko involved, it is hard to imagine Illinois politics without corruption.  In order to believe that Obama is not personally corrupt, you have to believe that Rezko treated him differently than he did anyone else.   

At some point the odor of corruption emanating from Obama has to be somewhat noticeable even by the olfactory challenged main stream media.

TDM

St Thomas:

 “To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.”

I have heard this quote used many times, frequently by politicians who find themselves in trouble.  They respond by saying that:  “to people who know me, no explanation is necessary, and to those who hate me, no explanation could possibly be acceptable.”

Obama began handling this with his normal method of just doing nothing and blaming everything on Bush, Republicans, big oil, or just business in general.  But this time finger pointing isn’t going to work.  Even his supporters are not satisfied with this approach.  Ok, we get it that BP is responsible for the problem, now we want to know what you are going to do to fix it.  Unfortunately for Obama, he has never had to manage anything in his life, so he doesn’t have a clue with regard to how to handle this.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/Spill-reveals-Obama_s-lack-of-executive-experience-95819074.html

In all fairness, I doubt that any President would be able to fix this problem.  But, the liberal left really believed that Obama was the answer and they are bitterly disappointed to find out he not only doesn’t have the answer, he is having trouble figuring out the question.

Every day Obama tries another way to explain why he is doing a good job in handling the BP oil leak.  But, that in itself is indicative of the problem.  If Obama really was doing a good job, he would not need to explain.  His leadership would be obvious to everyone.  My past experience is that anyone who has to explain why he or she is in charge isn’t really in charge at all.  Real leaders don’t talk about taking charge, they take charge.    

All Obama is doing now is focusing more and more focus on his failure.  Today he literally tried to show he was in charge by saying “kick ass” as if this would somehow really impress people with his anger.  It was pathetic.  In the meantime, BP is out there trying to seal the leak.  We may not like them, but two things are really clear.  BP will continue working on finding a way to fix this problem and Obama will continue to focus on fixing the blame. 

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article7145866.ece

There is one thing that is quite obvious.  I looked at the pictures of the oil leak when they first became available.  Maybe it’s just me, but it looks to me like there is more oil leaking now than before.  Perhaps that is just an optical illusion, but that’s the way it looks.   This is unfortunately consistent with some of the export reports.  They said that cutting the pipe would increase oil flow by 20%.   Dr. Steven Werely, PHD from Purdue, analyzed the video using a technique called “particle image velocimetry” and estimated the oil flow, before cutting the pipe, to be 95,000 barrels of oil per day or approximately 5,225,000 gallons per day.  Everyone hoped he was wrong.

http://oilprice.com/Environment/Oil-Spills/Just-How-Much-Oil-is-Leaking-into-the-Gulf.html

BP is now sucking up 500,000 gallons of oil every day.  They estimate they are getting about 1/3 of the oil.  However, if Werely is right, they are getting less than 10% of the oil.  In any event, this is far from over.  

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/06/07/95467/bp-well-may-be-spewing.html

Boone Pickens was on CNN and he said the earliest they are going to get this fixed is late August and that will be only if they are lucky.  The last previous time this happened, in 200 ft of water, it took them three relief wells before they finally got one that worked.  If that happens this time, we could still be talking about this leak in December.

He also said something very important.  He said that only a fool would think that BP wasn’t doing everything possible to stop that leak.  He said the government blame game only makes the problem worse, because the BP executives now have to worry about endless lawsuits and claims, when they should be concentrating on fixing the problem.

Several things are now certain.  First, we are going to be getting more and more angry speeches from Obama trying to show he is in charge.  Second, the oil leak will not only continue, it will get worse.  Third, while Obama is concentrating full time on fixing the blame for the oil leak, he is ignoring serious problems elsewhere.  Ultimately, we will all pay a price for that.

But, I can see November from my house.

TDM

The ultimate irony is that the same President who is seriously considering a military award for courageous restraint, shows no limitations with regard to his own conduct.  He has authorized wide spread use of drone attacks, far in excess of what Bush approved.  Ultimately this is going to result in some really embarrassing and deadly accidents.  There are already UN reports condemning this.  Normally one should ignore UN reports, but in this case, they seem to have a point:

 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/03/world/03drones.html

 There is a difference between using a drone in Iraq, Afghanistan and the disputed border region of Pakistan.  However, it appears that Obama does not understand that.  Suppose there was someone in the United States that Russia considered to be a terrorist.  Suppose that Russia launched a drone that destroyed this guy’s home also killing his wife and children along with some other people in the neighborhood.  How would we respond?   That is exactly the same way that people in other countries are responding.  This is why prior administrations have been extremely reluctant to cross this line.  There is no doubt that some of these targets are nasty people.  But we can’t expect people to respect our territorial integrity if we ignore theirs.

 In addition the Obama administration is allegedly sending out Special Forces teams to carry out attacks (think assassinations) in over 75 countries:

 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article7144445.ece

 This has even more potential for disaster.  While every President has probably done this, it has been rare and very discrete.  If this report is accurate, we are going to see one of these units captured, which will result in extreme embarrassment for the United States.  Again, suppose that France had a terrorist that they had wanted for some time.  They sent over a Special Forces element into the United States to capture this person.  These people get into a shoot out with the local police, resulting in casualties on both sides and some of the French operatives being captured.  The outrage would be thundering.

 While it is encouraging to see that Obama is doing “something” about stopping terrorism, he apparently has very little regard for the rule of law.  At the same time he is asking our troops to show courageous restraint by risking death in order to avoid killing civilians, he apparently is more than willing to show no restraints at all with regard to his own decisions.  Obama not only considers himself above the law in the United States (Think Sestak, Romanoff, Blagojevich, etc) he apparently is equally willing to ignore international law.

The real problem with the Sestak case is that it is reflective of how the Obama administration handles everything.  President Obama could probably have brushed off the Sestak affair, except that he chose to cover it up first.  But this time the cover-up is just too obvious.  This is particularly galling from someone who brags about transparency in government.  Actually, he is very transparent, we see right through him.  This is hardly an isolated case.  We know have an e-mail showing exactly what jobs were offered to Romanof to drop out of the Colorado Senate race.  Does anyone see a pattern here?

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20006689-503544.html

The joker in this case may be Rod Blagojevich.

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2010-06-02/news/ct-met-blagojevich-trial-politics-20100602_1_blagojevich-trial-political-culture-rod-blagojevich

He is on trial for trying to sell the Illinois Senate seat surrendered by Obama when he was elected President.  Here is the irony of the case.  Blagojevich is arguing that the people who allegedly discussed a bribe with him regarding this seat are telling a different story than told by Obama.  Blagojevich wants to call Obama as a rebuttal witness, to prove that these guys are lying.  That, of course, would be a huge perjury trap for Obama, which is why the Chicago political machine is working overtime to get Blagojevich safely convicted before even more damage is done.

Anyone of these cases:  Sestak, Romanof and Burris would be damaging, but the combination of all three cases is lethal.  In each case, the Obama administration followed an identical pattern of denial, and stonewalling, followed by a limp wristed pathetic cover story that wouldn’t fool the average eight grade student.   Then, of course, they just refuse to answer any more questions, pretending the issue has been resolved.

For a long time this strategy worked.  It worked on his birth certificate.  It worked on his lack of academic records at Occidental, Columbia and Harvard.  It worked on his missing Illinois Senate records.  It worked regarding his relationship with Louis Farrakhan, Reverend Wright, William Ayers and a cast of thousands.  It even worked on his bizarre land deal with Rezko.  It worked because although this was all very obvious to anyone paying attention, Democrats did not care because he brought them to power.  They were willing to ignore the problems in exchange for participating in the power.  Obama probably thought this would work forever.  He was wrong.  There are signs that this is going to all come cascading down on him.  This may be the ultimate cost of the mishandling of the BP oil spill.  The problem is that Obama’s lies about the BP oil spill are so blatant and the horrendous reality of the situation is impossible to ignore.     

On a daily basis we see more Democrats backing away from Obama.  He is becoming more and more isolated.  Democrats are well aware that Obama is a failed President.  In addition, they fear that the worst is yet to come.  At the same time our debt is escalating, our economy is collapsing, the Gulf of Mexico is being turned into a gigantic oil slick, Obama faces even more serious problems as a result of his naïve and irresponsible foreign policy.  Afghanistan is deteriorating on a daily basis.  The war that Obama said he had to win has probably already been lost.  Iran now has enough fuel for nuclear weapons and in an act of desperation Special Forces units are being sent in illegally to try and identify potential targets. 

http://afghanistan.blogs.cnn.com/

North Korea sank a South Korean sub.  Hillary pouted, Obama pointed and China punted.  The end result is that we look more and more like a paper tiger, rather than a super power.  We will be fortunate if this does not end up in a war.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/06/02/weighs-sending-carrier-korean-peninsula/

Now there is the flotilla fiasco.  Islam Terrorists are trying sneak weapons into Gaza under the pretence of peace missions and the Obama administration is responding in the worst way possible.  I wonder if the msm even noticed that Obama’s BFF William Ayers and Bernardine Dorn are heavily involved in this flotilla?  We are paying a terrible price for Obama’s total failure to understand the reality of Middle East politics.  It appears that the Obama foreign policy for the Middle East is to throw Israel under the bus on a daily basis, then complain that Israel is making it difficult for the bus to operate.  For years Israel has been relatively safe because everyone knew the U.S. ultimately had Israel’s back.  Right now, Obama doesn’t even have his own back.  The Arab world has been dreaming of destroying Israel for decades.  Now, they apparently believe that opportunity is in their grasp, but they must move fast before Obama is replaced by someone with a spine. 

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/so-peace-flotilla-wasnt-actually-about-aid-shipments

Notice that we haven’t even mentioned the daily increase with regard to terrorist activity in this country. 

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_crime/2010/05/30/2010-05-30_why_faisal_bombed_trained_in_taliban_cities_but_didnt_get_full_course_sez_pro.html

Illegal immigrants are staging violent protests, with the support of the President of the United States, because we presume to enforce our own laws.  The President of Mexico slams the Arizonia immigration law, during a speech to the United States Congress and he is rewarded with a standing ovation from Democrats in congress and a State dinner from the Obama administration.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/05/20/mexico.president.congress/index.html

In the meantime China and Russia aren’t even pretending to respect Obama.  They are literally laughing in our face. 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/02/china-robert-gates_n_597356.html

Nice work when you think of it.  Never in the history of the U.S. has one President made so many mistakes in such a short period of time and learned so little.  It is hard to be an optimist when our President thinks suing BP is somehow going to stop oil from leaking 5,000 feet below the surface and he thinks good intentions will somehow protect our shoreline.

TDM

President Obama accepted full responsibility for the BP oil spill, by pointing his finger at everyone else and threatening to hold them accountable.  What is pathetic is that so many members of the main stream media bought it.  I almost puke when people say:  “At least we finally have a President that accepts responsibility.”  Really!  Threatening to hold other people accountable is not exactly my definition of accepting responsibility.  When, exactly, has Obama ever admitted error?  If this wasn’t so awful, it would be hysterical. 

This reminds me of General Braxton Bragg.  The General was notorious for a very bad temper.  He had a reputation of not getting along with anyone.  Since he was in charge of a small frontier base, he acted as both Quartermaster and Commanding Officer.  As Commanding Officer, he demanded that the Quartermaster prove him with essential supplies.  As Quartermaster, he denied the request as being excessive.  Then, as Commanding Officer, he filed a complaint against the Quartermaster.  Finally, in desperation, his Commanding General wrote him that he had managed to get into some kind of quarrel with everyone in the U.S. Army, and now was even  quarreling with himself.

This is remarkably similar to the Obama administration’s game plan for handling the BP oil spill.  There is no one in the administration with any leadership ability and certainly no one with actual experience.  They are not out of ideas, they never had any ideas.  So, they must rely on BP to do everything, and they have no clue as to how to deal with this problem.   So, they will demand action by BP and then complain that whatever action is taken is inadequate.  At the same time, they will ask the FBI to conduct a full scale criminal investigation of BP.  In the meantime, the leak goes on.  Sadly, some people in the main stream media really think this is leadership.