Now, apparently going to Pakistan on a school break during college counts, or living in Indonesia for 4 years while a child counts, but not living next door to a major world power.

Alert No Quarter reader, BMC, presented information yesterday about the Alaska National Guard, and the responsibilities of the Governor of Alaska. I’ll bottom line it for you - since Alaska IS next to Russia (Obama does know that much - he said he saw it on a map - I kid you not, that’s what he said), the Alaska National Guard’s 49th Missile Defense Battalion is on duty ALL THE TIME:

Eleven ground-based interceptor missiles buried in underground silos here represent a key part of a multi-layered defense system designed to protect the United States from a ballistic missile attack. These interceptors, and two more at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., would destroy incoming missiles at the “midcourse phase,” outside the earth’s atmosphere.

In the event of an attack, members of the Alaska Army National Guard’s 49th Missile Defense Battalion based here would use sophisticated surveillance and radar systems to track the missile through its initial boost phase, explained Maj. Joe Miley, the unit’s operations officer. If the missile reached the mid course phase, the Alaska Guardsmen would await the order to engage it.

On order, they would fire an interceptor at the incoming missile. The force of the collision –the equivalent of two refrigerators slamming into each other at 15,000 mph — would destroy the target before it reentered the atmosphere, Miley said.

Miley noted that the National Guard is perfectly suited to perform such an important mission.

Wowie zowie. So, there is a battalion on full alert all the time, keeping its eye on Russia. But Governor Palin has no foreign policy experience. Yeah, okay, Obama. Just because YOU don’t doesn’t mean others don’t, either. Just sayin’.

Well, how about Homeland Security, then? Major Joe Miley says this:

“The National Guard has traditionally done homeland defense,” he said, citing National Guard history dating back 370 years to the Minutemen in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. “And this is the epitome of homeland defense.”

Here at what Miley called the “strategic sweet spot” for missile defense, almost 200 Alaska Guardsmen who came from around the country to serve in the 49th Missile Defense Battalion take that calling pretty seriously.

The unit is a cross-section of America, at one time representing 46 states and territories, and all its members applied for three-year, Active Guard and Reserve assignments with the program, Miley explained.

Getting accepted into the program is tough, but passing the extensive training required is even tougher, Miley said. Applicants go through nine to 14 weeks of air defense training at Fort Bliss, Texas; a nine-week Ground Missile Defense operator course in Colorado Springs, Colo., then four more weeks of unit training in Colorado Springs before taking a certification test.

“We hire the best and put them through a rigorous training program,” Miley said. To pass the GMD operator course, for example, students have to score 90 percent or better.

“You have to be an A student or you can’t do GMD,” Miley said. “The way we conduct our training, you basically have to get everything right to progress to the next level, so there’s no room for error. We have very high standards.”

That’s a good thing, he said, in light of the responsibility they shoulder every day. Whether they’re providing security at the 800-acre missile defense complex here or manning fire direction center in what Miley called “the tank turret of missile defense,” they’re on the front lines of homeland defense.

There is more to this interesting article, and if you can, take a look at it. For anyone to claim that Governor Palin, as Commander in Chief of the Alaska National Guard is merely serving as a figurehead is just plain inaccurate. I can sure see why Obama, who has not been an executive of ANYTHING would try to frame it that way, but - SURPRISE - he’s incorrect. (By the way, there is an email going around that speaks even more to Palin’s day-to-day oversight regarding the Alaska National Guard, but I have not been able to obtain independent verification of it beyond blogs, so I am not including it here.)

And can I just add, for Obama to claim PALIN is just “making stuff up” (funny - he said the exact same thing about Dobson) is laughable. Here is a man who hasn’t met a fact he couldn’t twist, or deny, or exacerbate. His books are proof enough of that, but if you need more, there are plenty out there. Here’s a fun game. How many half-truths, truth manipulations, and flat out lies have come from Obama? I’ll start you off with just two - there are so many, I don’t want to monopolize them. The first is one of my favorites mainly because of the letter Senator McCain wrote to him regarding it. I’ve written about this before several times, and so has Larry Johnson. It’s the one about Obama and Campaign Finance Reform. He brought it up again at Saddleback, all his work on it, and “quotes” from conversations he had. If only he had actually DONE any work on that committee, but he did not. McCain slammed him in his letter to him (which you can read HERE). Then there was his claim while in Israel that he was on the Banking Committee. He is not, never has been. You can watch the video HERE. And he has the “AUDACITY” to talk about anyone else’s claims? What a joke. (I might add, from all reports, Palin is pretty much “what you see is what you get.” Her open government and life, about which we know FAR more than Obama’s in just a week, is far more transparent than Obama has ever been. He still refuses to release ANY pertinent information about himself or his records.) So, go to it - what are YOUR favorite Obama-manufactured statements?

Here’s another astonishing example:

Never once, no matter how exhausted or stressed she was — or how little sleep she’d had — did Hillary Clinton ever display such troubling inability to speak coherently. Furthermore, had Hillary spoken like that, the media coverage would be nearly non-stop! But Barack “The One” goes untouched …

We’ve all analyzed the number of Obamaisms — the gaffes he makes regularly. I’ve sensed that part of it is that, besides the lack of sleep, he is stressed far more than Hillary because he has to pretend — every minute of every day — to be someone he is not. He is doing an “act.” He’s an actor on a stage. He is playing a role. He is not himself.

We could ask any professional actor how he or she would feel if they had to remain “in character” for 18 hours each day, and I’d expect they’d tell us that they’d reach a breaking point, when they couldn’t concentrate any longer and that they’d flub their lines.

Check out these earlier No Quarter stories for more Obama “gaffes” — which is too light a term to explain what we saw in the above videos:

• “Barack’s Sixth Sense?” (by Larry Johnson)
• “An Obamaism Remix“
• “WE DECLARE the Birth of the Term “Obamaisms”: Obama’s Embarrassing Gaffes Continue“
• “Is Barack Obama Mentally Fatigued?” (by Larry Johnson)
• “[Citizen Alert Update] “My Name Is Barack, and I Am — Where, Who, What Did I Just Say?”“

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Special thanks to Andy for e-mailing me the new videos.

By NintendoVampire, via V.

Give NintendoVampire SOME LOVE, PEOPLE!

EARLIER NO QUARTER STORIES on Obamaisms:

• “WE DECLARE the Birth of the Term “Obamaisms”: Obama’s Embarrassing Gaffes Continue“
• “Is Barack Obama Mentally Fatigued?” (by LARRY JOHNSON)
• “[Citizen Alert Update] “My Name Is Barack, and I Am — Where, Who, What Did I Just Say?”“

(1 OBAMAISM) The Illinois Senator incorrectly says Arabic translators deployed in Iraq are needed in Afghanistan (but Afghans don’t speak Arabic). Later corrected mistake.

(2 OBAMAISM) Obama also stressed need for agricultural specialists in Afghanistan to help develop other crops than heroin poppies (but oil fields not poppy fields are a major source of U.S. technical assistance).

The full stories are below the fold. But, first, let’s recall his other recent gaffes — which call into question his mental state AND his mental acuity — which we wrote on May 10, and which Larry updated on May 11 with “Is Barack Obama Mentally Fatigued?“:

(PREVIOUS OBAMAISM #1) “I am a patriotic citizen of the United States — all 57 of them!”

(PREVIOUS OBAMAISM #2) “Timmuh, er, Matt, er Timmuh, er Matt” (he repeatedly confused Matt Lauer with Tim Russert — which is impossible, even if one only considers the dramatic physical differences!)

(PREVIOUS OBAMAISM #3) In early May, he talked to 30 supporters and told them the story of the “modest” background of himself and his wife — 10 minutes later, he told the same story all over again to the same people.

(PREVIOUS OBAMAISM #4) In a speech, he poignantly referred to his “father’s” flag-draped coffin — except that he really meant his grandfather’s, who was a WWII veteran, and not his father, who died a Kenyan. (Even Howie Kurtz noted the oddity.)

From the ABC News report:

[I]n Rush Limbaugh’s hometown, Sen. Barack Obama came up with some novel reasons why the U.S. may be struggling in the war in Afghanistan.

"We don’t have enough capacity right now to deal with it — and it’s not just the troops," Obama, D-Ill., told a crowd in Cape Girardeau, Missouri.

Obama posited — incorrectly — that Arabic translators deployed in Iraq are needed in Afghanistan — forgetting, momentarily, that Afghans don’t speak Arabic.

"We only have a certain number of them and if they are all in Iraq, then its harder for us to use them in Afghanistan," Obama said.

The vast majority of military translators in both war zones are drawn from the local population.
Naturally they speak the local language. In Iraq, that’s Arabic or Kurdish. In Afghanistan, it’s any of a half dozen other languages — including Pashtu, Dari, and Farsi.

No sooner did Obama realize his mistake — and correct himself — but he immediately made another.

"We need agricultural specialists in Afghanistan, people who can help them develop other crops than heroin poppies, because the drug trade in Afghanistan is what is driving and financing these terrorist networks. So we need agricultural specialists," he said.

So far, so good.

"But if we are sending them to Baghdad, they’re not in Afghanistan," Obama said.

Iraq has many problems, but encouraging farmers to grow food instead of opium poppies isn’t one of them. In Iraq, oil fields not poppy fields are a major source of U.S. technical assistance.

There are other infrastructure problems both countries share that U.S. advisors have struggled to address — a lack of safe roads, schools, adequate electricity, etc. — but Obama did not mention these.

Obama’s overall point may well be true: that U.S. efforts in Iraq have come at the expense of the battle against al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

Still it’s not asking too much to expect the man many say will soon be the Democratic nominee to cite the right facts to back up his thesis. …

DO NOT MISS THESE VERY RECENT ARTICLES HERE:

(1) “Is Barack Obama Mentally Fatigued?” — by LARRY JOHNSON

(2) [Citizen Alert Update] “My Name Is Barack, and I Am — Where, Who, What Did I Just Say?” — which included this update:

CITIZEN ALERT UPDATE: In the first comment below, WestPalm4Hillary noted, “Great, and THIS is the guy the Democrats want with control of ‘the button’.” Which reminded me of something we haven’t written about in a while — one of BO’s many (and they are countless) excuses for the votes he made, didn’t make, maybe made, or Planned Parenthood or the mob Chicago pols forced him to make, or was just “present” to make in the Illinois State Senate. Via the LA Times, January 8, 2008:

Obama said oops on 6 state Senate votes
     He pushed the wrong button, he asserted at the time. Two of the admitted flubs were on hotly contested issues.

Susan’s Note: You know, it’s one thing to go “oops” when you (yeah, right) push the wrong button in a state senate vote, but … in the White House?! God help us all! (And, um, dare I ask … what might have affected his brain so adversely??? Huh?)

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