Osama bin Laden Is Dead UPDATE: He Died In A Mansion? UPDATE: He Died Today In A Firefight UPDATE: GWB Congratulates BHO, Troops UPDATE: Dies On Holocaust Memorial Day

And has been dead for a week.

From FOX News:

Sources said bin Laden was killed by a U.S. bomb a week ago. The U.S. had been waiting for the results of a DNA test to confirm his identity.

The news is still breaking. Rumors say US Military Bases have gone to Condition Bravo as a result; however, I have no idea what that really means, other than they’re on higher alert than they were.

UPDATE: From Daily Caller:

Sources indicate that Osama bin Laden was killed in a mansion, outside of Islamabad, Pakistan. It seems that Pakistan has some explaining to do….

UPDATE: Allahpundit is all over this.

Reuters says US Special Forces killed him.

The report is bin Laden was killed in a firefight deep inside Pakistan today, and not by a bomb last week. There are reports that members of bin Laden’s family were killed with him. If this is true, Pakistani officials have a lot of explaining to do in regards to how bin Laden could be in a city deep inside Pakistan without getting caught until now.

UPDATE: He was killed in Abbottabad, 75 miles northeast of the Capital City of Islamabad, and outside the “tribal areas” — where the Pakistani government has little sway — and in an area where the Pakistani government does have control. This little bit from Allahpundit is rather striking:

A telling aside from O’s speech: He said that he called Pakistan’s president after the incident to let him know — which, presumably, means there wasn’t Pakistani cooperation after all. As I said earlier, relations between us will never be the same.

UPDATE: George W Bush congratulates Obama and our troops.

May 1, 2011

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.

UPDATE: Jim Hoft reports Abbottabad, where bin Laden was killed, is the home of the Pakistani Military Academy. More questions the Pakistani government needs to answer.

UPDATE: ABC News reports bin Laden was in a million-dollar mansion many times larger than the surrounding residences, that the mansion was built like a fortress to hide someone, that women and children were present inside the mansion and that among those killed was a woman who had been used as a human shield.

According to U.S. officials, two U.S. helicopters swept into the compound at 1:30 and 2:00 a.m. Sunday morning. Twenty to 25 U.S. Navy Seals under the command of the Joint Special Operations Command in cooperation with the CIA stormed the compound and engaged Bin Laden and his men in a firefight, killed Bin Laden and all those with him.

Two Bin Laden couriers were killed, as was one of Osama Bin Laden’s son, as was a woman reportedly used as a shield by one of the men. Other women and children were present in the compound, according to Pakistani officials, but were not harmed. U.S. officials said that Bin Laden himself did fire his weapon during the fight.
…
According to Pakistani officials, the operation was a joint U.S.-Pakistani operation, but U.S. officials said only U.S. personnel were involved in the raid.

UPDATE: Sarah Palin speaks out.

Americans tonight are united in celebration and gratitude. God bless all the brave men and women in our military and our intelligence services who contributed to carrying out the successful mission to bring bin Laden to justice and who laid the groundwork over the years to make this victory possible. It’s a testament to the hard work and dedication of these brave Americans who relentlessly hunted down our enemy.

This is a victory for the American people, for the victims who were heartlessly murdered on September 11 and in Al Qaeda’s other numerous attacks, and for all the peace-loving people of the world.

May God bless our troops and our intelligence services, and God bless America!

– Sarah Palin

UPDATE: Osama bin Laden dies on Holocaust Memorial Day. Now, that’s poetic justice.

UPDATE: Key information was obtained from GITMO detainees four years ago. From Allahpundit’s updates:

Update: An Al-Arabiya correspondent claims that two of Bin Laden’s wives and four of his sons were captured during the raid. Apparently, the key to the whole operation was finding and tracking Bin Laden’s most trusted courier, a process that took years — and involved info given by Guantanamo detainees:

Some time after Sept. 11, detainees held by the U.S. told interrogators about a man believed to work as a courier for bin Laden, senior administration officials said. The man was described by detainees as a protégé of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and “one of the few Al Qaeda couriers trusted by bin laden.”

Initially, intelligence officials only had the man’s nickname, but they discovered his real name four years ago.

Two years ago, intelligence officials began to identify areas of Pakistan where the courier and his brother operated, and the great security precautions the two men took aroused U.S. suspicions.

Last August, intelligence officials tracked the men to their residence in Abbottabad, Pakistan, a relatively wealthy town 35 miles north of Islamabad where many retired military officers live.

So, while we’re busy thanking Obama, the troops, the Intelligence community, don’t forget to thank Bush and the GITMO policy for getting Osama.
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Cross-Post

Ann Barnhardt Utterly Shreds Lindsey Grahamnesty

Ann Barnhardt has big brass ones, and she’ll be the first to admit that. Wait, strike that. She doesn’t admit it. She proudly proclaims it. Watching the first video, my jaw hit the floor. After I picked my jaw back up, I found myself cheering her on. She absolutely annihilates Senator Lindsey Graham (RINO/DIABLO — SC). And South Carolinians, will you please Primary this quivering flesh of simpering foolishness into retirement? For the good of our country?

Reading parts of the wholly evil Koran, then burning it.

And she lets people know how to “get in touch” with her.

HT GrayRider

“Gov. Kasich responds to President Obama on SB 5”

Now, that’s how it’s done, ladies and gentlemen.
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Cross-Post

Paradigm Shift: Thank Your Enemies

Throughout Israel’s history, the Israelites have suffered from repression, suppression, enslavement, and even multiple occasions of attempted genocide. And, throughout Israel’s history, those who initiated such events were instrumental in righting Israel’s ship, constituting the land of Israel, or reconstituting the land of Israel. So, in a very clear way, Israel has had her enemies to thank for her status as a nation. Yes, Israel can thank the Assyrians, the Philistines, the Persians, the Russians, the Germans for her existence.

In much the same way, American Conservatives can thank the Liberals, Progressives, Socialists for our resurgency.

Without the absolute disaster of the Carter Presidency, there would never have been a Reagan Presidency as we had. Perhaps the Berlin Wall would still be standing. The Warsaw Pact may still be in effect. Hundreds of millions of Europeans living in freedom today may still be living under Communism if not for the failures of Carter.

Bush the Elder’s “no new taxes” renege combined with Ross Perot’s siphoning off Conservative and Libertarian votes from the nominally right-leaning Bush caused the Clinton Presidency and a leftward jump in American policy. And Clinton’s big government agenda in combination with his immoral behavior and his perjury (among other things) caused the nation to almost wake up.

The Republican Machine saw the sleeping giant start to stir, so the Machine swung into action in 1994, before the giant fully awoke. The Republican Machine created a top-down “Contract with America” movement to pacify the public, and it worked, creating the largest Republican wave victory in 50 years. Then We the People rolled over and went back to sleep. And the Republican Machine and Democrat Machine slapped each other on the backs for escaping that disaster. (Can’t have the people awake and alert, can we?) So we had six years of Clinton hijacking Moderate Republican positions for his own and taking credit for Republican blood, sweat and guts.

In 2000, Bush the Younger came along and, with the help of Karl “Tokyo” Rove, sold out the Conservative base for eight years of a weak, center-right Presidency and the loss of the Majority in both Houses of Congress. The Conservative base entered a melancholy funk for those eight years, resulting in the disastrous 2008 elections and all the resultant massive world-wide damage.

In came the light-weight, empty platitude TelePrompter reader (who cannot speak contemporaneously without screwing the pooch) Barack Obama. His Alinskyite, thin-skinned, narcissistic personal attacks of practically everyone who stood against him woke a lot of people up. His leadership-free “present” Presidency, along with his and the Congress’ radical socialist agenda drove normally politics-free multitudes to protests nation-wide.

The refusal of the Democrats to listen to We the People caused We the People to rise up and drive them out of office in numbers not seen since the 1930s (since the 1860s in some parts). The refusal of the Republican Machine to listen to We the People caused many Republicans to be driven out as well. This time, the Republican Machine did not get out front. This time, the Republican Machine fought the Conservative base harder than the Machine fought the Democrats.

Had the Republican Machine actually gotten out front, perhaps the TEA Party movement could have been tamped down. But instead, the Statist Moderate talking heads chose to slap the face of the newly-awakened giant, awakening her even further and enraging her that much more. The Democrats and the media, already an enemy of the people, just kept the people’s blood racing by heaping lie upon insult upon defamatory statement against the regular people. And this time, Obama has chosen to keep up his attacks against We the People and against the Republicans, instead of trying to triangulate and co-opt parts of the Republican agenda.

Add all that together, combine it with obvious massive Liberal Media agenda-driven “news”, and add in the new news outlets of the blogosphere and internet social networking, such as FaceBook and Twitter, and suddenly the Liberal Media no longer has a monopoly on the news. The Liberal Media no longer gets to filter and sterilize the news before the people see it.

The TEA Party lives now because of its roots in the past, going back of course to America’s origins, but more currently back to Carter and his re-energizing of the Conservative base of America.

The TEA Party lives now because Statist Republicans started tearing down the country.

The TEA Party lives now because Obama and the Socialist Democrats put the country’s destruction squarely in their sights.

The TEA Party lives now because the Liberal Media’s agenda was so flagrantly foul that new media came in and did its job for it, allowing the people of this largely Conservative nation to see the truth, unfiltered by the heavily Liberal Media.

This is a huge paradigm shift that has been decades in the making. And we can directly thank our enemies for it. The Republican Machine hasn’t figured it out, the Democrats won’t figure it out, and the Liberal Media can’t figure it out. And that is, indeed, leading to skewed polling, wrong-headed speeches by all three aforementioned factions, and continued rotten news-making. Which will only serve to deepen the rift between the “country class” and the “political class” and lengthen the life-span of the Conservative movement beyond its natural life expectancy.

So yes, thank the Statists, the Liberals, the Socialists for creating the TEA Party and keeping it alive and well. The future health of our nation will owe her thanks to her domestic enemies.

UPDATE: The Australian Conservatives are thanking their Liberals as well. HT Jim Treacher
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Cross-Post

Media Bias? What Media Bias?

Karl over at Hot Air takes the Washington Post’s “fact-checker,” Glenn Kessler, to task in a big way. You cannot “fact-check” differences of opinion. You cannot “fact-check” estimates in exactitude. You cannot “fact-check” analytical forecasts as if they were histo-facts.* You cannot explain “how it should be” as opposed to “how it is” and call that a “fact-check.” But this is what Glenn Kessler does as he “fact-checks” Paul Ryan’s Medicare proposal and statements. And Karl absolutely skewers Glenn Kessler’s hit piece.

But Karl buries my lede. And now, so have I. From Karl’s article:

Of course, the entire Democratic establishment, from Pres. Obama on down, plus most of the media did pretend ObamaCare would reduce the deficit… and many still do. If you’re wondering whether the WaPo fact-checker addressed Democrats’ claims about ObamaCare before it was passed, wonder no longer: the WaPo fact-checker blog was on hiatus from the last day of the 2008 election campaign through January 9, 2011. Apparently, when the federal government is run entirely by a supermajority of Democrats, there is no need for fact-checking.

The Washington Post didn’t bother with a “fact-checker” blog post from the day Obama got elected and both Houses of Congress had super-majorities until the day Republicans took back majority position in the House of Representatives, covering an entire 26 months. There wasn’t anything to “fact-check” because the Democrats had the run of the roost. They could pass anything they wanted without Republican help. “Fact-checking” would only get in the way.

It’s the same through the decades, dating back to the early 1960s at the very least.

When a Republican is President, we see all the starving people of the US paraded in front of us on the lamestream media broadcasts. When a Democrat is President, those starving people disappear.

When George W Bush was President, there were the daily body counts for Iraq and Afghanistan. Now Barack H Obama is President, those daily body counts have vanished.

With the Hurricane Katrina natural disaster, Bush was railed against for not making a personal appearance fast enough, not getting FEMA moving fast enough or efficiently enough (despite the need for FEMA to get Governor’s requests and cooperation in order), while ignoring a black Democrat’s statement that New Orleans needs to be more “chocolate” after the disaster. Under Obama, the Tennessee flooding, the fly-over-country huge ice storm, the Texas wild-fires have been practically ignored by Obama, with a free pass from the lamestream media. The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico got a lot of hate for “Big Oil” out of the lamestream media but Obama’s refusal to allow businesses and Gulf State Governors to take actions to prevent greater ecological disasters was wholly ignored in the lamestream media. As was the rule of law stating business liability had a federally mandated cap wholly ignored by the biased lamestream media.

Lamestream media has called the TEA Party a racist, white, violent mob despite the fact that the TEA Party has a higher percentage of minority supporters than does the Republican Party, the TEA Party has shown no signs of being violent, and a large number of racists were Left-Wing plants. Lamestream media claims that the TEA Party hurled racist insults at members of the Congressional Black Caucus are all without any evidence whatsoever — despite all the camera-phones recording the protest, some carried by members of the Congressional Black Caucus themselves, and despite a $100,000 reward for the evidence being offered up.

Lamestream media has called the anti-Walker mobs in Wisconsin “peaceful,” “law-abiding,” and “grass-roots” when in fact the opposite is true. They have issued death threats against Republicans and their supporters. They broke into and vandalized the Capitol. They bussed in large numbers of “protesters” from out of state — and not a few of those “protesters” were Union-paid. They threatened and intimidated businesses if those businesses chose not to have signs supporting the Unions. The businesses weren’t even allowed to remain neutral without having repercussions. And, yes, businesses were vandalized.

When Jared Loughner murdered a federal judge, a 9-year-old girl, several other people, and put a bullet in the head of Democrat Representative Giffords, lamestream media immediately started issuing blood libels against the TEA Party, Sarah Palin and others. The fact Loughner never paid attention to Conservative politics and was noted by his acquaintances as being more left-wing never got the lamestream media to issue a mea culpa. The fact Loughner was a loon never entered into the lamestream media’s collective brains as they sallied forth with their vitriol.

When that shooting in Huntsville, Alabama took place, killing all those professors, the lamestream media immediately looked at a racism angle and a “killer right-winger” angle because, after all, it was on a college campus, professors were killed, and some of them weren’t white, and a gun was used. When it turned out Amy Bishop was a radical Left-Winger, Harvard-educated, a professor, and a strong Obama supporter, suddenly the lamestream media grew silent about it. No mea culpa.

I could go on ad infinitum with link after link after link of incident after incident after incident. They’re everywhere. Shootings and killings where lamestream media immediately accuses the “dangerous right-wing” only to find out it was a left-winger or merely a flat-out loon, then goes silent, refusing to issue any retractions or corrections to Teh Narrative.

But there’s no real need. By now, anyone with any awareness at all will know beyond a shadow o a doubt that the lamestream media is heavily biased in favor of Liberals, in fact agenda-driven in favor of Liberals. It’s common knowledge by now.

*I coined “histo-facts,” meaning historical facts or factual history or ideas within that topical genre. Reading my material, you will from time to time see “histo-facts,” because they put the lie to many Leftists’ claims.