A Near-Miss and WAY the Hell Off Target...

Blog-Bud Lou writes about the wild fires in southwest Oklahoma last evening... and one of her commenters drove me to the newspapers covering Oklahoma City and its environs. I lived in Choctaw, a suburb of OKC, for about a year and a half while I was stationed at Tinker AFB in my final USAF assignment. Choctaw and Midwest City were the locations of some of the worst fires to hit the area in quite some time, and those fires appeared to be quite close to the Old Pennington Homestead at 1277 South Indian Meridian Road, pictured below.

The top picture is a bird's eye view (heh) of the general neighborhood where I lived; the bottom pic is the house I owned... which sat on a little over two acres. I worried about tornadoes when I lived on Indian Meridian Road and never thought much about wildfire. I hope my used-to-be neighbors are OK...

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Your political commentary for the day comes from one of my favorite pundits... Charles Krauthammer, writing at Townhall.com. The lede grafs:

WASHINGTON -- In his major foreign policy address in Prague committing the United States to a world without nuclear weapons, President Obama took note of North Korea's missile launch just hours earlier and then grandiloquently proclaimed:

"Rules must be binding. Violations must be punished. Words must mean something. The world must stand together to prevent the spread of these weapons. Now is the time for a strong international response."

A more fatuous presidential call to arms is hard to conceive. What "strong international response" did Obama muster to North Korea's brazen defiance of a Chapter 7 --"binding," as it were -- U.N. resolution prohibiting such a launch?

The obligatory emergency Security Council session produced nothing. No sanctions. No resolution. Not even a statement. China and Russia professed to find no violation whatsoever. They would not even permit a U.N. statement that dared express "concern," let alone condemnation.

Having thus bravely rallied the international community and summoned the U.N. -- a fiction and a farce, respectively -- what was Obama's further response? The very next day, his defense secretary announced drastic cuts in missile defense, including halting further deployment of Alaska-based interceptors designed precisely to shoot down North Korean ICBMs. Such is the "realism" Obama promised to restore to U.S. foreign policy.

Read the whole thing... coz the paragraphs above were just a shot across The One's bow. It gets a LOT better.