In a world where stupid parent tricks happen all the time, this one takes the cake.

It’s a pathetic thing when the kid has more bloody common sense then the parent.

Mom arrested for DUI after boy calls 911 from car

An 8-year-old boy riding in a car with his mom called 911 several times to report that she wasn’t “acting normal,” leading to her arrest for investigation of drunken driving and other charges, authorities said.

Paulette Lynn Spears, 33, was arrested Saturday after she drove to a fire station and said she had a medical problem.

Gross stupidity is not a medical problem, otherwise they would cure it.

Guided by her son’s description of what he could see from the car, as well as by global positioning technology to track the phone calls, deputies arrived at the station less than a minute later.

“He said ’I don’t know where we are, and Mom’s not acting normal,’” sheriff’s Sgt. Randon M. Walker said.

At one point, Spears took a cellular telephone from the boy, told the dispatcher not to worry and hung up, Walker said. The boy called back, and again his mother cut short the call, Walker said.

“The mother kept interrupting the 8-year-old,” he said. “It happened at least twice.”

At one point, Walker said, Spears apparently bit the boy’s hand to get the telephone away from him.

Just lovely.  Will CPS be called and this woman lose her parental rights?

Four minutes before the boy’s first call, dispatchers had received a report of car that matched the description of Spears’ car being driven erratically.

The boy and a 5-year-old child, who was also inn the car, were placed with an aunt. As of Monday, Spears remained in jail for investigation of drunken driving, two counts of reckless endangerment and assault of a child. It was not clear if she had a lawyer to speak for her because she had not appeared in court.

  You have heard probably about Haditha.  Heard of the massacre.  Heard Sen Murtha accuse Marines of cold blooded deliberate murder.

But do you really know what happened?

Opinion Journal lays it out.

What Happened at Haditha: The massacre that wasn’t, and its political exploitation.

The incident at Haditha–or the massacre, as it is often called–is due for a wholesale rethinking. The allegations are that in 2005 U.S. Marines went on a killing spree and deliberately executed 24 Iraqi civilians. The casualties have drawn an extraordinary amount of political attention, becoming an emblem for everything critics say is wrong with the Iraq war–in the common telling, another My Lai.

Thus Congressman Jack Murtha, a decorated combat veteran, made accusations of war crimes and said the Marines had killed “in cold blood.” These are serious charges; and military justice continues to deal with them seriously, though thankfully at a slower pace than politics. Now the prosecutions have mostly unraveled. It seems Haditha, though tragic, was exploited politically, and the allegations were exaggerated, if not unfounded.

Here is what we know. On November 17, 2005, Kilo Company of the First Marine Regiment’s Third Battalion was returning from a routine logistics mission in Haditha, a town 140 miles northwest of Baghdad. Haditha is in Anbar province, a heart of the Sunni insurgency with one of the highest U.S. casualty rates in Iraq. The security situation at the time was treacherous.

Shortly after 7 a.m., an improvised explosive device detonated under the last vehicle in Company K’s four-Humvee convoy. It instantly killed Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas and wounded two others. Windows were shattered for 150 yards, and smoke and debris were everywhere.

Read the rest in detail at the link.

At Haditha, did  the Marines act reasonably and appropriately based on their training? They were in a hostile combat situation where deadly force was authorized against suspected triggermen for the IED, and were ordered to assault a suspected insurgent hideout. In retrospect, the men in the car had no weapons or explosives; in retrospect, the people in the house were not insurgents. No one knew at the time.

Valarie Plame tells her side of the story on the incredibly unbiased Huffington Post (yes that is sarcasm). 

Finally Telling My Story

I’m Valerie Plame Wilson and I’m excited to be here and blog about my book Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House, which goes on sale Monday, Oct 22. When my publisher sent me thee finished copy earlier this week, it was thrilling. It felt liker a new chapter (forgive the pun) has begun on the journey that has taken some incredible twists and turns since July 14, 2003, when my covert identity was exposed and ended a career that I loved. I’ve written honestly about my life: why I went to work for the CIA, my paramilitary training, the sort of operations we developed and ran to find intelligence on Iraq’s alleged WMD programs in the run up to the war, as well as  personal information, such as my battle with postpartum depression and the difficulties I had going from a private to a public persona literally overnight. My publisher, Simon and Schuster, decided to print the blacked out redactions demanded by the CIA and hopefully those passages (or lack thereof) speak for themselves and th he extent to which the CIA thought the material in  the book was classified.

I will stop here say only this.  If she says anyone outed her other then her husband, she is lying.

http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/archives/186975.php

Heh.

Tell us news, not history.

Here’s an MP3 of Richard Armitage telling Bob Woodward that Joe Wilson told everybody about Valerie Plame.

Also, read this interesting and valid point from protein wisdom commenter proudvastrightwingconspirator:

It’s interesting to ponder how this drama would have played out if instead of being a critic of the Bush Administration, Joe Wilson had written an editorial for the NYT that contained damning information about, say, Bill Clinton’s lack of interest in capturing Bin Laden during his tenure as POTUS, and was later proven to have lied by a bi-partisan Senate Intelligence Committee review of his allegations. Further assume that his wife, a CIA employee was “outed” by one of the many Clinton synchophants in the media.

Crystal clear words from Michael Yon.

Resistance is futile: You will be (mis)informed

A gulf.

A gap.

A chasm.

A parallel universe.

All describe the bizarro-world contrast between what most Americans seem to think is happening in Iraq versus what is really happening in Iraq. Knowing this disconnect exists and experiencing it directly are two separate matters. It’s like the difference between holding the remote control during the telecast of a volcanic  eruption on some distant island (and then flipping the channel), versus running for survival from a wretch of molten lava that just engulfed your car.

I was at home in the United States just one day before the magnitude hit me like vertigo: America seems to be under a glass dome which allows few hard facts from the field to filter in unless they are attached to a string of false assumptions. Considering that my trip home coincided with General Petraeus’ testimony before the US Congress, when media interest in the war was (I’m told) unusually concentrated, it’s a wonder my eardrums didn’t burst on the trip back to Iraq. In places like Singapore, Indonesia, and Britain people hardly seemed to notice that success is being achieved in Iraq, while in the United States, Britney was competing for airtime with O.J. in  one of the saddest sideshows on Earth.

 No thinking person would look at last year’s weather reports  to judge whether it will rain today, yet we do something similar with Iraq news. The situation in Iraq has drastically changed, but the inertia of bad news leaves many convinced that the mission has failed beyond recovery, that all Iraqis are engaged in sectarian violence, or are waiting for us to leave so they can crush their neighbors. This view allows our soldiers two possible roles: either “victim caught in the crossfire” or “referee between warring parties.” Neither, rightly, is tolerable to the American or British public.

The following links all show the same thing:  The need for money at any cost as Hillary begins her ascent to the Whitehouse.  I truly believe she is so driven there is no boundary she will not cross, and money is an easy one.  You will not, can not be elected President of the United States of America unless you have a ton of money.  Period.  End of debate.

And the Clintons have long since mastered this game.

But.  to keep perspective, it is certainly not limited to Hillary.  The gamers surrounding campaign donations crosses all stripes, parties and ideologies.  The ends justify the means to these politicians, because they can do so much better then anyone else, so they must be elected.

Campaign finance reform is a joke, a cruel slap in the face of hard working people.

That said, here is the latest ways she uses the poor to drive her ambition.  Others do it too, but the stories are all about her.

An unlikely treasure-trove of donors for Clinton

Something remarkable happened at 44 Henry St., a grimy Chinatown tenement with peeling walls. It also happened nearby at a dimly lighted apartment building with trash bins clustered by the front door.

And again not too far away, at 88 E. Broadway beneath the Manhattan bridge, where vendors chatter in Mandarin and Fujianese as they hawk rubber sandals and bargain-basement clothes.

All three locations, along with scores of others scattered throughout some of the poorest Chinese neighborhoods in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx, have been swept by an extraordinary impulse to shower money on one particular presidential candidate — Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Dishwashers, waiters and others whose jobs and dilapidated home addresses seem to make them unpromising targets for political fundraisers are pouring $1,000 and $2,000 contributions into Clinton’s campaign treasury. In April, a single fundraiser in an area long known for its gritty urban poverty yielded a whopping $380,000. When Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) ran for president in 2004, he received $24,000 from Chinatown.