The Navy Seals conducted their raid on Osama Bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan at about 4 p.m. Eastern Time in the U.S. on the afternoon of Sunday, May 1, 2011. President Obama’s White House speech came late that evening, but before midnight.

Although it happened to be 1 a.m. in Pakistan when the raid was carried out, it’s reasonable to ask why we should be celebrating the anniversary of his death one year and one day after it was carried out (per our time zones) and one year and one day after we were informed of it.

The only justification I can see for this is that the Obama administration wants to keep future May 1sts clear for May Day demonstrations. If that’s the case, it still doesn’t fly; V-J Day after World War II was celebrated on August 14, 1945 day the U.S., on U.S. time, learned that the Japanese were surrendering — not August 15, the day Japan surrendered per Japan time. The same should go for OBL’s demise.

They do seem quite determined, even dating the president’s speech at the White House’s web site May 2 even though the speech was delivered on May 1, and even though the time stamp on the same page says May 1:

Here’s a far more fascinating question: Obama, informed of the strategy for taking Osama out, told his advisers and military folk that he would have to sleep on it before deciding whether to approve it. That 16-hour delay pushed the operation in May 2 Pakistan time. Was the real motivation behind sleeping on it to push the operation past May Day? Would you really put it past Barack Obama to do that?

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UPDATE, May 2: Now May 1 is “Loyalty Day,” according to a White House press release (HT Reason) supported by a Congressional resolution. I predict that a few years from now any attempt by a Republican or conservative administration to invoke “Loyalty Day” will be characterized as some kind of fascist or similar plot, and that its origins and the related presidential proclamation will be ignored.

Excellent, and very sad:

Key conclusions:

Power, once granted, will be used.

… Slowly, slowly, people of both parties have gained the kind of power the Constitution was designed to protect us from.

They have the ring.

And both our incumbent President (who, as explained in the video, pretended in a “signing statement” not to want the powers to detain American citizens without cause included in the National Defense Authorization Act — but who in reality made sure his apparatchiks shepherded the bill through Congress with those powers intact) and his perceived leading challenger aren’t troubled … because, well, they would never, ever use it.

As Whittle notes, “Power, once granted, will be used.”

Guess it’s just a matter of how much time it will take.

It’s here (mobile) and here on the White House’s website.

Its title is “NATIONAL DEFENSE RESOURCES PREPAREDNESS.”

It hardly seems inconsequential, but it has received no media coverage.

The White House clearly wants it to get minimal attention. It was issued on a Friday. There is no related White House blog entry or statement or release (pages will change with additional entries) since its issuance.

Though it demands rigorous analysis, it looks like a plan for taking control of the economy in case of some arbitrarily determined state of emergency or difficulty. Quoting just one item concerning a “finding required under section 101(b) of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2071(b)” (bold is mine):

… the Secretary of the resource department that made the finding may use the authority of section 101(a) of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2071(a), to control the general distribution of any material (including applicable services) in the civilian market.

Similar language is in previous EO 12919, but the paragraph in question in the new EO changes how findings are handled:

From — “This finding shall be submitted for the President’s approval through the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs.”

To — “This finding shall be submitted for the President’s approval through the Assistant to the President and National Security Advisor and the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism.”

So is this a bureaucratic update, or does this now-dual submission of “findings” create more opportunity for mischief (or, perhaps, paralysis)?

This demands a review for which I lack time at the moment — and yes, I know that Hot Air and Legal Insurrection have opined that it’s merely an update.

Any thoughts from readers about the EO and links to others’ analysis are welcome.

What follows are the first and last paragraphs from an editorial this evening:

The president’s shredding of the Constitution began at the Preamble’s provision for the common defense. He gave away our missile defense to appease Moscow and betray our allies.

… From betrayal of our allies to betrayal of our missile defense secrets, Obama has systematically shredded Reagan’s dream of a nuclear umbrella sufficient to deter or even defeat a nuclear missile attack. For some reason, apologizing to and appeasing our enemies has been more important than defending the American people.

Read everything in between.

You don’t appreciate the damage until you see its history laid out. It’s ugly — and has left us unconscionably vulnerable.

From his latest column, as carried at Investor’s Business Daily:

… the most basic issue here is not religious morality, individual liberty, or fiscal responsibility. It’s that a society in which middle-aged children of privilege testify before the most powerful figures in the land to demand state-enforced funding for their sex lives at a time when their government owes more money than anyone has ever owed in the history of the planet is quite simply nuts.

… Insane as this scenario is, the Democrat-media complex insists that everyone take it seriously. When it emerged the other day that Amanda Clayton, a 24-year-old Michigan million-dollar lottery winner, still receives $200 of food stamps every month, even the press and the bureaucrats were obliged to acknowledge the ridiculousness.

Yet the same people are determined that Sandra Fluke be treated with respect as a pioneering spokesperson for the rights of the horizontally challenged.

Sorry, I pass.

“Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom,” wrote Benjamin Franklin in 1784. In the absence of religious virtue, sexual virtue, and fiscal virtue, one might trust to the people’s sense of sheer preposterousness to reject the official narrative of the Fluke charade. Yet even that is not to be permitted.

… Almost every matter of the moment boils down to the same story:

The left’s urge to narrow the bounds of public discourse and insist that “conventional wisdom” unknown to the world the day before yesterday is now as unquestionable as the Laws of Physics.

Nothing that Rush said is as weird or as degrading as what Sandra Fluke and the Obama administration are demanding. And any freeborn citizen should reserve the right to point that out as loudly and as often as possible.

Today, the government is expected to make official what the Congressional Budget Office predicted last week, namely that the federal government ran a February deficit of $229 billion, the largest single-month deficit in U.S. history.

The Obama administration, in addition to demanding that religious employers sell out their cherished beliefs to in the name of state-enforced funding of their employees’ and students’ sex lives, also insists that it can’t and won’t cut spending meaningfully anywhere not involving the military.

There are quite a few things which need to be pointed out “as loudly and as often as possible.” And they will be — at least around here.

From Daryn Kagan’s latest column:

Updated: 5:06 p.m. Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Posted: 4:49 p.m. Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Lucky.

It’s a word you hear a lot when you talk to Irwin Stovroff.

“I’m so lucky.”

“I’m such a lucky guy.”

“I can’t believe how lucky I am to be in the right place at the right time.”

He says stuff like that a lot.

Which is pretty remarkable when you look at all that has happened to him in his 89 years. His plane was shot down during World War II. There he was: an American Jew, behind German lines. Certainly doesn’t seem like the right place to be.

“I was so lucky,” he told me the other day. “Somehow I was smart enough to throw away my dog tags that would’ve tipped off the Germans. Spent a year in a POW camp instead of concentration camp. How lucky is that?”

OK, pretty lucky, I guess, since it saved his life and meant he made it back to America, married, raised kids and worked for a furniture company for 45 years.

In the years since, he has buried his wife and one of his daughters. There have been sorrows. Yet, more than anything, he’ll tell you there has been luck.

Lucky that once he retired he was terrible at golf.

“You know you’re bad when the golf pro tells you to quit the game,” he laughed.

And he didn’t want to spend his days playing bridge.

“I just knew I wanted to get involved and make a difference,” he told me.

That’s how he found his way to his right place – the VA Medical Center in Riviera Beach .

He met other POWs who needed help getting their claims filed. As a national service officer, he helped more than 400 POWs get full pensions.

It turned out just to be his warm-up act.

One day at the VA, he met a young blind veteran, newly home from Iraq.

“This young man sure could use a guide dog,” the VA director told him. “Sadly, there are no government funds for guide dogs.”

Stovroff found his true purpose.

“I called up a few other former POWs,” he told me. “And we got busy. Within three months, we raised $100,000!”

And that’s how Vets Helping Heroes was born. Irwin runs it from his home in Boca Raton with a board of fellow veterans.

Together they’ve raised more than $3 million and provided 65 dogs to veterans across the country. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

This post is a Washington’s Birthday BizzyBlog tradition.

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Few know that George Washington singlehandedly prevented a soldiers’ revolt in 1783.

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(from historyplace.com)

At the close of the Revolutionary War in America, a perilous moment in the life of the fledgling American democracy occurred as officers of the Continental Army met in Newburgh, New York, to discuss grievances and consider a possible insurrection against the rule of Congress.

They were angry over the failure of Congress to honor its promises to the army regarding salary, bounties and life pensions. The officers had heard from Philadelphia that the American government was going broke and that they might not be compensated at all.

On March 10, 1783, an anonymous letter was circulated among the officers of General Washington’s main camp at Newburgh. It addressed those complaints and called for an unauthorized meeting of officers to be held the next day to consider possible military solutions to the problems of the civilian government and its financial woes.

General Washington stopped that meeting from happening by forbidding the officers to meet at the unauthorized meeting. Instead, he suggested they meet a few days later, on March 15th, at the regular meeting of his officers.

Meanwhile, another anonymous letter was circulated, this time suggesting Washington himself was sympathetic to the claims of the malcontent officers.

And so on March 15, 1783, Washington’s officers gathered in a church building in Newburgh, effectively holding the fate of democracy in America in their hands.

Unexpectedly, General Washington himself showed up. He was not entirely welcomed by his men, but nevertheless, personally addressed them…
(more…)

It’s here.

It will go up here at BizzyBlog on Thursday (link won’t work until then) after the blackout expires.

Also, see this item from yesterday: “Explaining Santorumentum.”

On Monday, Calvin Woodward, with help from Martin Crutsinger and Pete Yost, produced a “Fact Check” on the budget proposal the White House released earlier that day.

After properly criticizing the administration’s plan to use “about $850 billion in savings from ending the wars and steers some $230 billion of that to highways” (and actually quoting someone knowledgeable, who pointed out that “Drawing down spending on wars that were already set to wind down and that were deficit-financed in the first place should not be considered savings”), Woodward went off the rails:

President George W. Bush kept the cost of the wars out of his budgets, a contentious accounting maneuver that may have papered over the impact on spending projections but deepened the national debt as surely as if the price tag had been shown transparently. Taken together, the Bush and Obama budget tricks seem to suggest war costs nothing but ending it frees a ton of money.

Horse manure.

(more…)

In his pre-Super Bowl interview with Matt Lauer on Sunday, President Obama was asked the following question about Iran in light of the heightening tensions over its nuclear program and the possibility of an Israeli air strike: “(In repsonse) Do you fear that they will wage attacks within the United States on American soil?” Obama responded as follows: “We don’t see any evidence that they have those intentions or capabilities right now.”

Really? The President’s statement directly goes against statements made recently by other government officials, up to and including Attorney General Eric Holder. Lauer, who is paid to look good while delivering the news and conducting interviews but not necessarily to deliver on substance, especially if it might disturb the American people before the Big Game, totally missed the contradiction. Fortunately, Ed Lasky at American Thinker didn’t (internal links added by me):

President Obama has a very serious short-term memory problem

As Josh Gerstein writes in Politico, “Obama’s statement was a curious one, since an intelligence community assessment that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper presented to Congress last week said that some Iranian leaders “are now more willing to conduct an attack in the United States in response to real or perceived U.S. actions that threaten the regime.”

Gerstein notes only one problem behind Obama’s cheery assessment. “There is one more significant issue that reveals a great deal about Obama’s mindset. America just a few months ago was subject to an Iranian plot to kill the Saudi Ambassador and attack the Israeli Embassy here in America. The attack on the Saudi Ambassador was to take place in a public spot, killing Americans along side the Ambassador. Yet, Obama says “we don’t see any evidence that they have those intentions or capabilities right now.” Obama’s own officials believe that Iran was behind this plot.

CNN reported back in November, for example (that) “U.S. agents disrupted an Iranian assassination-for-hire scheme targeting Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States, U.S. officials said Tuesday. Elements of the Iranian government directed the alleged plan, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said.”

… Perhaps if one lived in Barack Obama’s fantasy land there are no problems with Iran.

… What exactly does he do all day? Does he read the news? Or does he just sit around all day checking off boxes on memos sent to the Oval Office?

The rest of the media has, as expected, been completely incurious. Just two examples:

• An unbylined Associated Press report only dealt with Obama’s views on the upcoming game.
• At USA Today, Aamer Madhani mentioned other Iran-related questions Obama answered, but not the one about possible attacks on U.S. soil.

Matt Lauer had a chance to follow up on Obama’s (take your pick) memory lapse, frighteningly uninformed naivete, or flat-out falsehood and failed, leaving Lasky’s disturbing questions wide open. It’s virtually unthinkable to imagine that he would have let a contradiction like Obama’s slide had he been interviewing a Republican or conservative president.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Would someone please buy the Washington Post’s Josh White a clue? He can’t seem to get a handle on the “motive” for the actions of Yonathan Melaku (actually, I think White is pretending).

Melaku has just pleaded guilty and will be sentenced to 25 years in jail. Authorities say he vandalized military grave markers, shot at the Pentagon and military museums, and was working on an improvised explosive device. But the headline to White’s story (HT Atlas Shrugs) and the reporter’s content act as if no one has the foggiest idea what drop Melaku to do what he did (words which betray motivation are bolded):

(more…)

From Derry, New Hampshire (video at link; HT Daryn Kagan):

POSTED: 8:38 pm EST January 21, 2012
UPDATED: 10:10 am EST January 23, 2012

Fresh off a flight from overseas where she was recently deployed in Afghanistan, U.S. Air Force Tech. Sgt. Amanda Dawdy didn’t tell her dad she was coming home.

Instead, Dawdy’s sister picked her up Friday.

“I haven’t seen my dad in about 2 1/2 years, and my sister in about 2 1/2 to 3 years,” Dawdy said.

The two sisters beat their father to Mary Ann’s Diner in Derry on Saturday.

Dawdy put on a waitress uniform, and when her dad came to meet her sister and niece, Dawdy appeared at their table.

“She asked if we had been served, and I’m like, ‘I don’t see any food,” Philip D’Acunto Sr. said. “I looked at my other daughter, and I looked back, and I’m like, ‘Boy, she looks like my daughter,’ and she’s like, ‘Daddy,’ and I’m like, ‘Wow.’ It’s like, ‘What are you doing here?’”

There was a pause, surprise, a deep hug and tears.

”After that, it was just tears and just glad to see my dad and spend time with family again,” Dawdy said.

Go here for the rest of the story.