2011 year in pictures

Instead of doing a top 10 list, this year I thought I'd do a year in pictures. Below is the political year in pictures, but it's not without some context available. Click the images to read details on the scandalous stories.

Note that these are in no particular order.

Plain awful.

Coming  home to roost.

Hundreds of millions up in green smoke.

Weiner: Used to be a mouthpiece. Add your own punchline.

WTF?  Making Weiner look normal.

Boeing being beaten down by Obama.

Barney Frank retires, finally.

What?  Another Obama scandal?  Yep.

Democrats score biggest lie of 2011 - from a liberal organization.

And finally, there's complicity to consider.  That's probably the biggest scandal of the year - again.

Media bias isn't cool.

Obama scandal free since 2008. Are you kidding me?

Jonathon Alter is either as sharp as a tennis ball or as dishonest as the man he seeks to glorify.  Get this from his recent Bloomberg article;

Although it’s possible that the Solyndra LLC story will become a classic feeding frenzy, don’t bet on it. Providing $535 million in loan guarantees to a solar-panel maker that goes bankrupt was dumb, but so far not criminal or even unethical on the part of the administration. These kinds of stories are unlikely to derail Obama in 2012. If he loses, it will be because of the economy -- period.

Even so, the president’s Teflon is intriguing. How did we end up in such a scandal-less state? After investigating the question for a recent Washington Monthly article, I’ve been developing some theories.

Beyond Solyndra (which does have scandalous issues to be dealt with - improper vetting among them) there's Gunwalker, Van Jones, to name just a few.  If you are looking for a running total, there's a pretty good list here.  If you read Alter's article you'll either pull your hair out or laugh until your stomach muscles hurt.  You'd swear he was in 2008 happy unicorn magic mode. Alter is flat out wrong on this and it's so bad it's disgusting.

It got weird, didn't it?

Mexico has been at war with its various drug cartels for some time.  Perhaps as a consequence of that fight, or perhaps simply in parallel, Mexico has been making it harder and harder to obtain guns there.  Not surprisingly guns have been walking south from the U.S. to Mexico.  Clearly Mexican demand, not entirely legally has been fulfilled by American supply.  That's the free market, albeit grey in this case.  The sellers are legally selling guns to buyers who are misrepresenting themselves as being able to legally purchase them.  None of this should surprise anyone.  You don't need to believe in the laws of supply and demand to see them in effect.  Regardless of government style in effect, supply and demand  are real, tangible things.  You need food, you buy it from where it is being sold.  That's irrespective of where you have to go to get it, and of what the commodity is - it works for guns as well as food.

That the guns are being used by a criminal element - buying the guns illegally and using them to violent, illegal effect - is also to be expected.  There is a drug war between rival drug gangs and also the Mexican authorities who are in the dubious position of being almost no more than just another faction.  It makes sense that they would ban guns in Mexico - it gives them a competitive advantage in the violence that plagues that nation.   The government doesn't have a brake on it's authority so it's natural that it would just go ahead and do that.  The drug cartels response - go get guns where they are readily available.  So far, no surprise.  But wait, it gets weird.

Gunwalker scandal leads to ATF shakeup

In light of the Gunwalker scandal (aka Fast and Furious), it looks like some heads will roll. 

Via Fox:

The acting director of the Justice Department division caught up in a firearms trafficking scandal is being removed from his post, sources told Fox News on Tuesday. 

Kenneth Melson, who heads the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, will be reassigned elsewhere in the Justice Department. An announcement is expected late Tuesday morning.

Unfortunately, the wrong head was on the chopping block - is Attorney General Holder going to skate on this? Accountability only goes as high as it needs to in order to satiate the calls for justice.

Sunday Reading Linkage

Happy Father's Day to everyone.  As a special Father's Day edition, I'm linking to some new blogs (for me) in addition to a number of my regular reads.  It'll be a short set of linkage today, as I'm due to get served a coffee from my son momentarily.  It'll be his first brewing of coffee and making of a cup.  I'm sure it will taste great.

Maggie's Notebook covers Project Gun Runner (aka Gunwalker, aka Fast and Furious)with precision. My two cents as to whether Holder knew, which I strongly suspect he did, he will have some type of plausible deniability.

For more on Gunwalker, King Shamus frames the Eric Holder background and helps the 'why he knew' case with a plausible motive.  

Proof Positive has the Klaven comparison of Obama and Ryan on the economy.

Conservative Pup eloquently addresses the alarming, unabated effort to remove religion from the country in contravention of the founders' intent.

Rational Nation USA's Les Carpenter III looks at the nation's historical IQ, and the results are double plus ungood. Watch the video at the end if you want to be particularly taken aback.

Moonbattery has a quick note on Sheila Jackson Lee's reflexive ability to do no right.  This time it has to do with somehow confusing Islamic terrorists with Christian militants. (Hat Tip to Paul Mitchell aka Mean Ol' Meany).