Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico has withdrawn his name from consideration as Obama’s Commerce Secretary. Richardson is involved in a grand jury investigation into how some people who donated money to him received a state contract.

Richardson says that he is sure that once everything is investigated he will be exonerated but that the lengthy process will detract from responsibilities at Commerce. He has vowed to serve Obama in any way helpful once this is all said and done.

Unless, of course, he is dirty.

First there was Governor Blagojevich and his pay to play scam with Obama’s Senate seat and now Richardson is caught up in a pay to play game in his home state. This one does not involve Obama in any way but it might demonstrate that his vetting process is not as complete as he believed.

The withdrawal will put a bit of a damper on the Obama Restructuring (stimulus) plan because now he will have to find a new Commerce Secretary.

This might be a blessing in disguise because Obama and the Democrats plan to spend around a TRILLION dollars on this recovery plan. It is estimated that the plan will be about 850 billion and the rest will be “goodies” attached to the bill. As if we are not already in dire straights, the Democrats plan on wasting more money on the stimulus and the pork that will surely be attached to it.

Obama is not in office yet and already two scandals have hit. One does not involve him and the other does but only in a peripheral sense.

I guess it is hard for Obama to associate with people who are clean when he has spent his entire political career dirty.

We are in for a long four years.

Sources:
Breitbart
FT.com

When the Democrats were engaged in their drawn out primary they discussed the war on terror in Iraq quite frequently. Obama claimed that he had the best judgment because he opposed the war though no one knows how he would have voted because he was not in the Senate. In his 143 days of work (yep that is how many he has in 4 years) he has not done much to show his strong opposition or immense wisdom.

The war was supposed to be the big issue. The Democrats were going to club Republicans to death over Bush’s mismanagement of the war. Obama said the surge did not work, Reid said we lost and many other Democrats talked about how we were doing poorly.

Ever since the general election campaign started there is little news about the war. In three debates the issue was barely discussed other than some foreign policy discussion and Obama’s refusal to acknowledge the success of the surge. He also had the opportunity to lie about what he “has said all along” (when Obama uses those words he is lying and it is not what he said all along).

Perhaps the war is not discussed because the Democrats can get no traction out of it. When things were going rough they were going to ride anti war sentiment into the White House. The problem for the Democrats is, despite their best efforts, we are winning. The US has suffered the lowest number of casualties since the war began with 13 in October and 61 since the beginning of August. The number of Iraqi deaths has also fallen.

Our heroes are doing a great job and we are winning the war. George Bush has been beaten up pretty badly over the war but we are making real progress. It is not time to pull our troops out. We need an exit strategy that includes winning as a precondition of coming home.

It is hard to tell what Obama will do because he told people during the primaries that he would take them out immediately. Then he started changing his tune and now he calls for responsible withdraw. Responsible withdraw is when we win.

John McCain will not allow our troops to be defeated and will do a much better job with the military. Obama can claim he is better suited to be the Commander in Chief but those claims are from a fantasy world. John McCain had forgotten more about the military that Obama will ever know.

Source:
My Way News

I am the Big Dog and I approve this blog post.

Jesse Jackson said it was a redemptive campaign. Obama’s foreign policy wisdom has caused great joy in moonbat-ville tonight. Only problem, it is all predicated upon a mistake.

The MSM and the Internet are all atwitter as liberals frolic at the news that Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has agreed with the Messiah, Barry Obama. A German publication quoted Maliki as agreeing with the Messiah on a 16 month withdraw plan for US forces. I have been reading the reports of this at ABC’s Political Punch and the liberals are having multiple orgasms. They are thanking Obama and attributing all this to his vast foreign policy experience. The only problem in all this is that Maliki never said that he agreed with Obama. He was either misquoted or his statement was mistranslated.

A little while after the convenient translation error (I think it was intentional to help Obama) Maliki said that he agreed with the plan that he and the President (the real one, not the guy pretending to be president) agreed to the previous day. That plan agreed to include a general time frame in which our troops could start drawing down but it was all contingent upon the Iraqis being able to step up and take more responsibility for their own security. It might be 6 months, 16 months or 60 months, but whatever it is, it will depend upon Iraq’s ability to provide for itself.

All of this probably will not matter. No one will pay attention to the correction and even if they do they will continue to say that Maliki agrees with Obama. They are still saying that John McCain wants to have a 100 year war which is an absolute lie and deliberate distortion of what he actually said so don’t be surprised if sometime in the near future you see a TV ad with the Obama team claiming that Maliki agrees with him.

Obama is a lightweight who has no foreign policy experience. His only claim to experience is as a child roaming around different countries like a nomad. He does not understand the world and this latest fact finding mission (which is really one big campaign trip disguised as work) will do little to change his mind. If Allah himself appeared in the desert over there and told Obama to let the war continue Obama would say the buck stops with him and he is going to bring the troops home. Then he would say “Maliki wants it that way.” Democrats always want to withdraw. That is what got Bill Clinton in trouble. If he had stayed in and finished the job there would have been no blue dress evidence.

Barry O Bam Bam has this rock star status and people are cult like in their behavior around him. He is trying to boost his foreign policy creds by going overseas (he left his wife home so she would not be tempted to tell any phony sniper stories on the campaign trail) and this “error” conveniently allows his people to take credit for the plan (even though the reporting is wrong). He has the top news anchors from the big three networks and a huge contingent of reporters following him on this trip. If this is not a campaigning mission why are all the network heavy hitters going along? None of them go on any other Congressional Fact Finding Mission. They usually ignore those things but all of the sudden they need to accompany Obama on his? Right. These people are in the tank for the man and they are going to give him great coverage to help build him up.

It would be kind of funny if some major news event (it could be a positive event) took place this week and overshadowed the Messiah’s campaign trip. What would be even greater would be for him to make a monumental gaffe that the entire world would see. The liberals in the American media could not cover up a mistake from the world stage. Man that would be great.

I do have a serious question that is a little off the topic of this post. McCain has said that he wants to secure the border first and then tackle immigration. There are a lot of Americans who think we should be securing all our borders and that we should do it quickly. So the question is:

Is there any chance we could lock the place down while Obama is out of the country?

Iraq is in need of leadership so Obama could just stay there and help them. He has the name and upbringing for it…

Allah Pundit at Hot Air shows how the Maliki response was changed by Der Spiegel
Macranger is following the story
Marc Ambinder has an interesting take

There is an indication that Mitt Romney will drop out of the Presidential race. It is expected he will make the announcement during his speech at the CPAC meeting.

Source:
Time