†Obama’s Family Values: Part V (second item): The “October Surprise” in the 2008 election was that Barack Hussein Obama had an aunt, Zeituni Onyango, who was in the U.S. illegally and was living in a taxpayer subsidized apartment to which she was not entitled, while a financially struggling American family somewhere in the Boston metropolitan area remained homeless or in a shelter waiting to move into an affordable apartment. Not that you’d know it from Obama’s ungrateful Bush-bashing since, but President George W. Bush diffused that bomb, virtually ensuring the defeat of his own party’s chosen candidate at the polls.

Here are the relevant bits from an interview that Onyango gave to The Associated Press, in which she complains bitterly about Obama shunning her since she became a political liability – and expresses gratitude to the former president, which her nephew can not or will not do:

Onyango helped care for the president's half brothers and sister while living with Barack Obama Sr. in Kenya. She moved to the United States in 2000 and applied for asylum in 2002, but her request was rejected and she was ordered deported in 2004.

However, she did not leave the country and continued to live in public housing in Boston. She had been a health care volunteer but not since her status became public. She refused to discuss how she affords to live now or who is paying for her attorney. …

Her attorney, Margaret Wong, said Onyango first applied for asylum because of violence in Kenya, an East African nation fractured by cycles of electoral violence every five years. …

Onyango reserved special words of kindness for former President George W. Bush for a directive he put in place days before the election requiring federal agents get high-level approval to arrest fugitive immigrants, which directly affected Onyango. The directive made clear that U.S. officials worried about possible election implications of arresting Onyango.

She said she wants to thank Bush in person for the order, which gave her a measure of peace but was lifted weeks later.

"I loved President Bush," Onyango said while moving toward a framed photo of Bush and his wife standing with Barack and Michelle Obama at the White House on inauguration day. "He is my No. 1 man in my life because he helped me when I really needed that help."

† Obama Administration’s Tactless Diplomatic Debut: Desirée Rogers, the crackerjack White House Social Secretary, screws up again. It is becoming increasingly apparent that she was derelict in her duties – preferring the role of partygoer to gatekeeper at last week’s state dinner, which VA social climbers Tareq and Michaele Salahi attended (or allegedly crashed) and now Republican members of the House Homeland Security committee want answers, reports The Washington Post:

Rogers acknowledged to the Associated Press last week that no one from her office was at a security checkpoint Nov. 24 to assist Secret Service agents in determining whether partygoers should be admitted to the mansion. …

Newsweek reported Sunday the account of the White House staff member who, until this February, typically had stood at the security checkpoint to clear invitees. Cathy Hargraves said she was essentially demoted by Rogers, telling her, "We don't feel we have a need for that anymore." Hargraves quit four months later.

If she had been on the job last Tuesday night, Hargraves told the newsweekly, the Salahis "would not have made it past the East Gate portico."

The WaPo’s style and fashion reporter, Robin Givhan, adds more detail about what Rogers was doing that night instead of doing what she should have been doing:

On the night of the Obamas' first state dinner, White House social secretary Desirée Rogers glided past the rope line of press and photographers at 6:53 p.m., pausing to boast, “We are very excited … everything looks great.” Little did she know that the evening would end up tarnishing her vaunted reputation as an overachieving perfectionist. …

[Q]uestions have been raised over whether Rogers, whose office drew up the guest list, was so busy basking in the limelight that she failed to notice what was unfolding in the shadows. …

[H]er managerial style is under scrutiny. And her Hollywood persona, fairly or unfairly, could prove to be the most damning evidence of all. …

“Just because she has this job, it's not going to make her a worker bee," says a friend who did not want to be identified in order not to offend. "She's glamorous.”

Although the state dinner was Rogers's responsibility, with its myriad moving parts, she was on the official guest list, along with other Obama intimates from Chicago, such as her ex-husband John Rogers, Marty Nesbitt and his wife, Anita Blanchard. Instead of remaining behind the scenes, like a discreet stage director, Desirée Rogers had a seat at the most exclusive dinner in town. She was not the first social secretary to be seated at a state dinner, although others typically pulled up a chair only after they'd mastered the role. [Emphasis, The Stiletto.]

Camille Johnston, Michelle Obama’s communication director tells The Associated Press that the White House social office will resume the practice of having one of its staff members manning the checkpoints to help the Secret Service verify whether a guest is on the official list of invitees.

† Breasts Are Not Udders (last item): The “consensus” on global warming, the “data” on which it is based and the demonizing of heretics who do not buy into a secular article of faith is eerily familiar to any woman who has been bullied by pediatricians, ob-gyns and other La Leche League minions wielding shoddy epidemiologic studies that “prove” breastfeeding is best. Count The Stiletto amongst those women who are not convinced that bottle feeding is bad mothering and will doom a child to intellectual deficits, health problems and a life of crime, no matter how strenuously the lacto-Nazis insist otherwise. This article from The Daily Mail (London) details one danger of breastfeeding – “overlying,” which occurs when a baby is pressed against his mother in a position that obstructs the airway:

A mother accidentally smothered her baby daughter to death on a flight after she fell asleep while breastfeeding.

The four-week-old girl was travelling with her Egyptian mother from Washington DC to Kuwait when the tragedy occurred on November 24. …

In 2004, Briton Lisa Briggs smothered her baby as they slept less than three years after losing another child to a similar tragedy [emphasis, The Stiletto].

Miss Briggs, 23, fell asleep while feeding five-week-old Keitha and woke in the morning to find her lifeless by her side.

† Why Scooter Libby Is Not Guilty Beyond A Reasonable Doubt: Scooter Libby, call your lawyers. The New York Times reports on new research published in the journal Psychological Science that people have a “tendency to blank on who-I-told-what” – and that it’s completely normal:

“You hear people of all ages, not just elderly people, say, ‘Stop me if I’ve told you this before,’ ” said Nigel Gopie, a postdoctoral fellow at the Rotman Research Institute, in Toronto, who has a paper in the current issue of the journal on these memory lapses.

“We often have a hard time remembering who we told things to, and clearly it starts early.”

In their long study of memory, psychologists have made important distinctions between the short-term and long-term varieties. They have documented crucial differences between explicit memories, like for faces and vocabulary, and the implicit kind, like for driving skills. They have published hundreds of studies on autobiographical memory, false memories and so-called source memory - the ability to recall where a fact was learned, whether from the radio or a book, from a work colleague or the neighborhood gossip.

Yet they have paid little, if any, attention to what Dr. Gopie and his co-author, Colin M. MacLeod of the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, call destination memory: about whose ears information has landed on.

† Updates To Previous Posts (second item, Global Warming Is In The Eye Of The Beholder): Phil Jones, director of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit Climatic Research Unit – a central figure in “Climategate,” has stepped aside while the university investigates whether any academic or scientific misconduct has occurred, reports The Washington Post. Penn State University is conducting a similar investigation, and will review “every E-mail” to and from Prof. Michael Mann, reports the Daily Collegian.

† Updates To Previous Posts (eighth item, Why We Need Gitmo): Now that his case has been transferred to the Federal District Court in Manhattan, attorneys Peter E. Quijano, Michael K. Bachrach and Gregory Cooper have filed a motion for dismissal of conspiracy charges against Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani in the 1998 bombings of the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania on the grounds that constitutional right to a speedy trial was violated, reports The New York Times:

Ghailani … was captured in Pakistan in 2004, held for two years in secret prisons run by the Central Intelligence Agency and moved to the naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in 2006.

During his detention, he has said, he was subjected to cruel interrogation techniques and was denied a lawyer. …

Although Mr. Ghailani faces charges stemming from a terrorist act that predated the Sept. 11 attacks, his motion could foreshadow a key issue in the prosecution of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the professed organizer of the 9/11 plot, and four other Guantánamo detainees who were recently ordered sent to New York for trial. …

The defense lawyers … said in the document that they expected the government to “rely on national security to excuse its conduct.”

But, they said, the delays in bringing him to trial and the treatment he underwent were so harmful to him and his ability to defend himself that the charges should be dismissed. …

The embassy bombings, carried out by Al Qaeda, killed 224 people. Mr. Ghailani, a Tanzanian who is believed to be in his mid-30s, has pleaded not guilty. After the attacks, the military authorities have said, he was a cook and a bodyguard for Mr. bin Laden.

† Updates To Previous Posts (second item, Depends What The Meaning Of The Word “Liar” Is): Both the House and Senate healthcare “reform” bills put the onus on employers to extend healthcare coverage “all employees” – but do not include “exemptions to screen out illegal immigrants, who usually obtain jobs by using false identities and are indistinguishable from legal workers,” reports The Washington Times:

A rough estimate by the Center for Immigration Studies suggests that the practical effect of the mandates would be that about 1 million illegal immigrants could obtain health insurance coverage through their employers.

Democrats who wrote the House bill said that employer coverage for illegal immigrants is not intentional, but rather the outcome of people breaking the law. …

Republicans said that loopholes in the bill could allow coverage to just about any illegal immigrant who wants to cheat the system.

"This is a complete cover-all-the-gaps federal health insurance for illegals, whether it be under Medicaid, the refundable tax credit or whether it be under their employers who would not be able to verify their employers unless we fix E-Verify," said Rep. Steve King of Iowa, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee's immigration subcommittee.

† Updates To Previous Posts (last item, Globetrotting Tort Lawyer Exposes Airline Passengers, Crews To Rare Form Of TB): Andrew Speaker was unable to show that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention violated the federal Privacy Act, 5 U.S.C. § 552a, when it disclosed information about his identity and medical history to the press, and his suit against the agency has been dismissed by Judge William S. Duffey Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, reports Fulton County Daily Report:

The language in Duffey's opinion is drawn directly from two recent U.S. Supreme Court cases. The first is Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, 127 S.Ct. 1955 (2007); the second - a case decided just a month after Speaker filed his action against the CDC - is Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 129 S. Ct. 1937 (2009). …

[T]he Twombly/Iqbal duo, which altered the old standard established in 1957 by Conley v. Gibson, 355 U.S. 41, has come under attack. Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pa., earlier this year introduced the Notice Pleading Restoration Act of 2009 (S.1504), seeking to reverse Twombly and Iqbal, presumably by returning to the Conley standard, which holds that a complaint shouldn't be dismissed for failure to state a claim unless it appears "beyond doubt" that the plaintiff can prove "no set of facts" entitling him to relief. …

But according to Duffey's opinion, Speaker's allegations about the CDC's allegedly unlawful disclosures are not specific enough to withstand dismissal.

The Privacy Act's prohibition on disclosure of records, Duffey writes, defines a record, among other things, as a medical history containing a person's "name, or the identifying number, symbol, or other identifying particular assigned to the individual, such as a finger or voice print or a photograph."

Duffey writes that although Speaker listed a number of CDC press conferences where information was allegedly unlawfully disclosed, he doesn't identify what information was disclosed, and that "such vague and summary pleading fails to provide the Court with the factual content required to determine whether the alleged disclosure was a 'record' … subject to the protections of the Privacy Act."

Editorial Note: Wall Street Journal columnist William McGurn offers another perspective on the Iqbal ruling - which established that “before you can sue someone, you have to have a plausible claim they did something wrong” - and what Specter’s proposed legislation means to those of us who are not trial lawyers:

[T]he original Supreme Court ruling … involved Javaid Iqbal, a Pakistani Muslim who was arrested in the days after Sept. 11, 2001, designated a person of "high interest," and detained under restrictive conditions. After pleading guilty to criminal charges and serving time, he was released and sent back to Pakistan.

Once free, Mr. Iqbal filed a lawsuit against more than three dozen federal officials and corrections officers. That included everyone from the warden and the guards outside his cell to former Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller. …

The Supreme Court limited itself to the charges against Messrs. Ashcroft and Mueller. The ruling came down to this: While Mr. Iqbal was free to sue those who he says abused him, he needed to show his allegations were plausible. Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy defined a plausible claim as "factual content that allows the court to draw the reasonable inference that the defendant is liable for the misconduct alleged."

That may not sound like much, but consider the alternative. We know that al Qaeda operatives are trained to claim abuse when they are captured. If Mr. Specter's legislation succeeds, what is to prevent them from alleging all sorts of violations so they can go on discovery expeditions against, say, Gen. David Petraeus or Defense Secretary Robert Gates? And how would that affect the ability of these men to prosecute the war?