Erick Erickson is Naming Names...UPDATED!!

...In the Nikki Haley "inappropriate relationship" scandal. See, "Naming Names," which is just a teaser for the drip, drip, drip of information he's rolling out today. I'll update later.

HuffPo's reporting as well. See, "Nikki Haley, Will Folks Phone Records: Pair Had Long, Late-Night, Convsersations."

Sorry for the delay in getting back to this one ... I've been on the road getting ready for tomorrow's Arizona SB 1070 protests.

Anyway, I wonder what's up with Erick Erickson? Does the guy have the goods on Will Folks or not? I guess not. See, "Letting the Chips Fall Where They May."

Allahpundit says no: "Red State: On second thought, we’re not sure if anyone’s paying Haley’s accuser."

And then Dan Riehl goes after the "pseudonymous boyo":

Yeah, maybe Erick screwed up on this one. But he basically admitted it, so why pile on? Because it was getting a lot of comments? How weak can you freaking get, dude?

Also, Eric's out here every day fighting the good fight without the need to hide behind some punk-assed pseudonym. And I'd rather have him in the fox hole next to me any day of the week, as opposed to some perpetual adolescent, half-baked conservative who cried out a whiny-assed alas and adieu before running away from the blogosphere because not enough people were paying attention to him before he was hired by Michelle Malkin as a snarky headline aggregator. Some of us do have memories, boyo.

Said punk should man up and lose the mask if he wants to directly criticize people with the balls to put their names and careers on the line every day as, you know, actual people; or maybe he should just stick to pics of McCain Blaghett's breasts and Palin winks before his comments drop even more and Salem Communications realizes just how easy it is to replace a pseudonymous Internet addict without a life whose big trick is slobbering over anything with breasts when he isn't comment trolling.

Say what you want about Erick. At least he isn't a punk and a cheap shot artist afraid to put his name on his posts.

Now that's a scandal!

Anyway, more at R.S. McCain, "Background to the Carolina Scandal: Will Folks, Jake Knotts and the ‘Hit List’; UPDATE: Who Is Rod Shealy?" (Also at Memeorandum.)

70th Anniversary of Dunkirk Evacuation

Theo Spark has a brief news clip, but see Jules Crittenden, "Miracle of Deliverance":

Under heavy attack by the Luftwaffe, an estimated 5,000 were killed in the evacuation and more than 200 vessels, one in four, were lost. Total allied casualties in the battle of Dunkirk, an estimated 30,000 killed or wounded and 34,000 missing or captured, according to Wikipedia. Another 338,000 were saved to fight another day. Hitler had ordered a three-day halt, and a number of top German brass considered the failure to launch an assault a critical error.

Plus, at Guardian UK, "Dunkirk spirit revived as Little Ships head back: More than 50 of the ships that took part in the Dunkirk evacuation returned to France today on the 70th anniversary," and Times of London, "Dunkirk veterans return to France to celebrate ‘Operation Dynamo’ 70th anniversary."

I Am Israel

"I Am Israel," via Right Truth:

RELATED: At Blazing Cat Fur: "Dykes Against Israel Apartheid." And, DoubleTapper, "IDF Women."

EXTRA: In the news, at Foreign Policy, "Reframing the debate about disarming Hizbullah."

KrisAnne Hall, Florida Assistant State Attorney, Fired for Speaking at Local Tea Party

From Right Scoop, "Florida Assistant State Attorney Fired for Speaking at Tea Party":

And at Miami Herald, "Prosecutor Fired After Free Speech Dispute."

Gov. Chris Christie Town Hall Meeting in Bergen County, N.J.

This has been going viral a bit, via BitsBlog, "Chris Christie Tells Teacher She Doesn't Have to Teach":

RELATED: At New Jersey Star-Ledger, "Gov. Chris Christie, N.J. residents argue during town hall meeting in Bergen County."

Obama's Katrina: Blame Where it Belongs

From Charles Krauthammer, at WaPo, "A Disaster With Many Fathers":

Here's my question: Why were we drilling in 5,000 feet of water in the first place?

Many reasons, but this one goes unmentioned: Environmental chic has driven us out there. As production from the shallower Gulf of Mexico wells declines, we go deep (1,000 feet and more) and ultra deep (5,000 feet and more), in part because environmentalists have succeeded in rendering the Pacific and nearly all the Atlantic coast off-limits to oil production. (President Obama's tentative, selective opening of some Atlantic and offshore Alaska sites is now dead.) And of course, in the safest of all places, on land, we've had a 30-year ban on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

So we go deep, ultra deep -- to such a technological frontier that no precedent exists for the April 20 blowout in the Gulf of Mexico.

There will always be catastrophic oil spills. You make them as rare as humanly possible, but where would you rather have one: in the Gulf of Mexico, upon which thousands depend for their livelihood, or in the Arctic, where there are practically no people? All spills seriously damage wildlife. That's a given. But why have we pushed the drilling from the barren to the populated, from the remote wilderness to a center of fishing, shipping, tourism and recreation?

Not that the environmentalists are the only ones to blame. Not by far. But it is odd that they've escaped any mention at all.

The other culprits are pretty obvious. It starts with BP, which seems not only to have had an amazing string of perfect-storm engineering lapses but no contingencies to deal with a catastrophic system failure ....

Obama didn't help much with his finger-pointing Rose Garden speech in which he denounced finger-pointing, then proceeded to blame everyone but himself. Even the grace note of admitting some federal responsibility turned sour when he reflexively added that these problems have been going on "for a decade or more" -- translation: Bush did it -- while, in contrast, his own interior secretary had worked diligently to solve the problem "from the day he took office."

Really? Why hadn't we heard a thing about this? What about the September 2009 letter from Obama's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration accusing Interior's Minerals Management Service of understating the "risk and impacts" of a major oil spill? When you get a blowout 15 months into your administration, and your own Interior Department had given BP a "categorical" environmental exemption in April 2009, the buck stops.

In the end, speeches will make no difference. If BP can cap the well in time to prevent an absolute calamity in the gulf, the president will escape politically. If it doesn't -- if the gusher isn't stopped before the relief wells are completed in August -- it will become Obama's Katrina.

Plus, at Financial Times, "Spill Risks Turning Into Obama's Katrina‎." Also The Hill, "The Big Question: Is Obama to Blame for Gulf Coast Disaster?" (via Memeorandum). And from Damon N. Spiegel The Hill link, " The oil spill in the gulf might end up being one of the worst if not the worst environmental disaster this country has even seen. Katrina pales in comparison and the media put on a witch hunt over the former administration."

CARTOON CREDIT: Michael Ramirez at IBD.

Tiptoeing in Search of a National Security Strategy

I think the two videos below provide a striking --- if not frightening --- contrast between top-level thinking at the White House and the realities of the terrorist threat inside America's borders. At the first clip, John Brennan, President Obama's counterterrorism adviser, announced yesterday "that the term 'jihadists' should not be used to describe America's enemies." And below is a Fox News report on "a suspected member of the Somalia-based Al Shabaab terrorist group who might be attempting to travel to the U.S. through Mexico."

It just keeps coming, the news of increasing suspected terrorist activity in the U.S. And this is after the recent bombing attempts on Christmas Day and in Times Square. Something's going to happen, that's for sure. We've been lucky so far that no one's been killed during the recent attempts. Of course, it's not reassuring that as we see increasing signs of violent jihad at home, the administration continues to downgrade the threat and neuter our ability to respond. See Steve Schippert, "No Islamists, No Jihad: New Obama National Security Strategy 'Focuses' On Domestic Terror."

Plus at LAT, "U.S. Looks at Ways to Head Off Home-Grown Extremism":

After more than a dozen home-grown terrorist plots involving American Muslims since President Obama took office, the administration is moving to step up its scattershot efforts to counter domestic radicalism, prompting a debate over the proper role of government in addressing ideological threats.

Unlike Britain and other countries in Europe, the U.S. government does not have a national strategy to combat Islamic extremism, and no single agency in the vast American national security and intelligence bureaucracy is in charge of understanding and addressing the home-grown threat.

But since the Times Square bombing attempt this month, officials have begun to plan ways to ramp up.

On May 13, an advisory commission led by former FBI and CIA Director William Webster presented Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano with recommendations designed to boost her department's efforts against domestic violent extremism of all sorts. The recommendations are carefully worded and do not specify Muslims or Islam. They focus on community-based policing, under which the Homeland Security Department would step up training and information-sharing programs with local law enforcement.

Administration officials said other responses also were being discussed, including drawing lessons from Britain and other countries in Europe.

The National Security Council six months ago convened a policy committee to examine what some call "counter-radicalization" efforts. The council has met twice with the president on the issue, according to a senior administration official involved in the effort.

Still, the idea of the government playing a role in countering radicalization provokes uneasiness among both U.S. officials and civil liberties activists, who recall a legacy of abuses in the 1950s and '60s in the pursuit of communists and leftists.

Much of the government's counter-terrorism apparatus consists of law enforcement agencies that now see their mission as investigating threats, crimes and conspiracies — not radical ideas that, however loathsome, are protected by the Constitution.

Well, we wouldn't want to alienate our "moderate" Muslim citizens, you know, the ones who're constantly demonstrating in protest of creeping Islamization in the Western democracies. (Not!)

More at the link (FWIW).

Added: Linked at Astute Bloggers, "OBAMA'S NEW NATIONAL SECURITY DOCTRINE: RETREAT!"