Gun walking, Obama vs Bush

Operation "Fast and furious" is quickly becoming Obama's "Watergate". In a desperate attempt to conduct damage control, the Whitehouse dragged up some dirt from the Bush era. this dirt is "Operation Wide Receiver" which was a plan to track firearms sold legally but falling in cartel hands. The plan involved guns  fitted with a RFID chips and tracking aircraft were equipped to pick up the signals. The plan was ok, but failed on the details, the RFID chips were not properly installed and the battery life was to short. The bad guys also found out the schedule for the aircraft and were able to to cross the border when the aircraft had to refuel. the intent of the operation was to roll up the network and retrieve the guns before they could disappear. The intent was good, but the execution was sloppy. Some more information can be found in this article by The outdoor wire. Approx 450 guns slipped into Mexico, at which point the operation was shut down.
In contrast "Operation Fast and Furious" ran at least 2000 weapons to the cartels, with no ability or intent to track them, when strawman could not come up with the money, agents gave them taxdollars to buy guns, dealers were ordered to sell the guns illegally to the strawman. the guns quickly disappeared only to resurface in Mexico and the US in crime scenes. It seems around 3 people in the US and possible 200 people in Mexico have been killed by these guns. There are rumours that up to 9 other operations like Fast & Furious have been conducted under Obama's watch, if each of those were similar in size and scope it could mean that Obama's administration has purposely given the cartels close to 20,000 firearms, using taxpayers money.
Meanwhile Obama's people are not being terribly honest when questioned. Seems even supporters of the Obama administration are worried and upset about this.

Keen observers will note I have linked several times to Pajama's Media. This is true mainly as they have done a significant job of tracking this scandal, while the MSM were busy examining their fingernails and hoping to avoid having to bring it up.

Politics and the Schizophrenic’s Language

I was going to do a post on the nutbar that shot Congresswoman Giffords, but this blogger summed it up better than I could.

It’s now a major secondary story in the Giffords shooting: who or what’s to blame for the carnage? It began almost as soon as the story broke, when fingers were pointed quite prominently even before anything was known about the shooter except that he was a young man, and that he had been taken into custody.

The anti-gun contingent sprang to action almost immediately, as did the anti-Palin faction and a particular loud-mouthed Democratic sheriff, in marked contrast to the pleas from the MSM and the left for verbal restraint in speculating about the motives of the Fort Hood killer.

Almost all the blaming in the Giffords shooting comes from the left against the right. And this despite the fact that Giffords, a Blue Dog Democrat, could just as likely have been a political target of either side, since she stands roughly in the middle.

It would be easier to judge the finger-pointers as impartial if they were equally incensed against rhetoric and images from the left as from the right. A display of evenhandedness would at least serve to establish some sort of arguable sincerity. For example, when campaigner Obama advised supporters to bring a gun to the fight if the opposition brought a knife, wouldn’t he have been to blame, too, for upping the ante?

Or do mere words lack the power to ignite acts such as Saturday’s shooting? (If one is to believe a friend of Loughner’s, the killer himself thought that “words mean nothing.”) And if mere words have no such power, what does?

Read the rest here