I JUST LOVE THIS FIRST LADY!

Michelle Obama shows off her dance moves

First Lady Michelle Obama made a surprise appearance at a D.C. middle school on Tuesday - and showed off some of her dance moves ("The Dougie" included) in a flash workout to Beyonce's "Move Your Body."



During the appearance, which was in conjunction with her anti-obesity "Let's Move" campaign, Obama joined 500 students in the national simulcast of a choreographed dance routine to the pop song, a Beyonce song that she rewrote expressly for the initiative.



(Beyonce also took part in the flash workout: about 85 students were in the middle of performing the routine at a Harlem, New York school when the pop star dropped in and joined them.)



"Beyoncé is one of my favorite performers on the planet. And when she agreed to remake her video and do this 'Let's Move' flash workout, I was so excited, because this is what we've been talking about -- that exercise and moving can be fun," Obama said in her remarks at D.C.'s Alice Deal Middle School. "It's about dancing, it's about moving."


Watch Beyonce's video for the workout song below.

Star Couples With Big Age Gaps

by The Daily Beast Info

The Daily Beast is dedicated to news and commentary, culture, and entertainment. We carefully curate the web’s most essential stories and bring you original must-reads from our talented contributors.

After weeks of rumors, Sean Penn, 50, and Scarlett Johansson, 26, were seen holding hands at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. But they’re hardly the only May-December celebrity couple. See 11 more famous pairs with the biggest age differences.

Gallery: Famous Couples with Big Age Differences

GOD loves poor people most, that is why HE makes so many of them(us)!

World Population to Hit 10B by 2100

Don't tell Jonathan Franzen. The population of the world, rather than stabilizing around nine billion in the middle of the century as previously expected, is now projected by the United Nations to hit 10.1 billion by century's end.
 The world population is expected to pass seven billion in late October of this year, just a dozen years after passing six billion. The high projection is due partly to the fact that fertility isn't declining as fast as expected in some poor countries, and has increased slightly in many wealthier ones, like the United States, Britain, and Denmark
. The director of the U.N. Population division, Hania Zlotnik, said the world's fastest-growing countries and the wealthy Western nations that finance their development face a choice about whether to renew their emphasis on family planning programs. The projection assumes that food and water will be available for the billions of future people, and that climate change or epidemics won't slow growth.
That assumption might not be accurate in all cases—Yemen, whose population has quintupled since 1950 and is expected to quadruple again to 100 million by 2100, already depends on food imports and faces critical water shortages. “It is quite possible for several of these countries that are smallish and have fewer resources, these numbers are just not sustainable,” says Zlotnik.

Read it at The New York Times

RELEASE DEAD BIN LADEN PICTURES?

 

Should the White House release the Bin Laden death photo?

Yes - 78% (423 votes)

No - 22% (116 votes)

Total Votes: 539

Percentages may not add up to 100% due to rounding

View ResultsOnline Survey Software SurveyGizmo

This is a non-scientific user poll. Results are not statistically valid and cannot be assumed to reflect the views of Washington Post users as a group or the general population.

Cool Hand Barack By MAUREEN DOWD

No wonder the president’s top generals call him “a Cool Hand Luke.”

After giving the order for members of a Navy Seals team to execute a fantastically daring plan to, let’s be honest, execute Osama bin Laden, Barack Obama put on a tuxedo and gave a comedy speech Saturday night in a Washington ballroom of tippling journalists and Hollywood stars.

If we could have seen everything unfolding in real time, it would have had the same dramatic effect as the intercutting in the president’s favorite movie, “The Godfather,” when Michael Corleone calmly acts as godfather at his nephew’s baptism at church, even as his lieutenants carry out the gory hits he has ordered on rival mobsters.
Just substitute “Leave the copter, take the corpse” for “Leave the gun, take the cannoli.”

The president’s studied cool and unreadable mien have sometimes distanced him from the public at moments of boiling crisis. But in the long-delayed showdown with Public Enemy No. 1, these qualities served him perfectly.
The timing was good, blunting the infelicitous  remarks made recently to The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza by an Obama adviser, who described the president as the un-John Wayne ushering a reviled and chastened America away from the head of the global table. The unnamed adviser described the Obama doctrine on display in Libya as “leading from behind,” which sounds rather pathetic.

But now the president has shown he can lead straight-on and that, unlike Jimmy Carter, he knows how to order up that all-important backup helicopter. He has said that those who call him a wimp are mistaken, that there is often muscular purpose beneath his diffident surface.
Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin, who was so tacky that she didn’t mention Obama’s name in her congratulations, tried to draw credit to the Bush administration.

But there can be no doubt that justice for the families of the 9/11 victims was agonizingly delayed because the Bush team took a megalomaniacal detour to Baghdad.
A pigheaded Donald Rumsfeld, overly obsessed with a light footprint, didn’t have the forces needed at Tora Bora to capture Osama after the invasion of Afghanistan. To justify the switch to Saddam and the redeployment of troops to Iraq, W. and his circle stopped mentioning Osama’s name and downplayed his importance. When the White House ceases to concentrate on something, so does the C.I.A. 
The hunt got so cold by 2005 that the Bin Laden unit at the C.I.A. was disbanded and overhauled. Four years after the monster felled the twin towers, the Bush team finally put more officers on the ground in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In his East Room address Sunday night, President Obama made it clear that he had shooed away the distracting Oedipal ghosts.
“Shortly after taking office,” he said, “I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the C.I.A., to make the killing or capture of  Bin Laden the top priority of our war against Al Qaeda.”

Many famous invaders throughout history, from Genghis Khan to Tamerlane to Babur, have marched along the same route the Navy Seals took on their moonless flight, going from Kabul to Jalalabad to Peshawar.
The mesmerizing narrative stitched together by The Times’s Mark Mazzetti, Helene Cooper and Peter Baker begins with C.I.A. agents getting the license plate of Bin Laden’s most trusted courier in Peshawar. Peshawar is the ultimate mystery town, famous for secrets and falsehoods. It’s known for its bazaars, especially the Story Tellers Bazaar.

And that is exactly where President Obama now finds himself. He will now have to sort through the bazaar of Pakistan’s deceptive stories and deal with lawmakers angry about giving $20 billion since 9/11 to a country where Osama was comfortably ensconced. For years, top Pakistanis have said that Osama was dead or in Afghanistan.

Even Condi Rice proclaimed she was shocked to find “Geronimo” settled in Abbottabad for six years, living in plain sight in a million-dollar house in an affluent suburb near a military base and the Pakistani version of West Point. As one of Osama’s neighbors put it: “It’s the closest you can be to Britain.”
 At a House homeland security subcommittee hearing on Tuesday, Representative Patrick Meehan asked the question about Pakistan that is ricocheting through Washington: “Does it reflect to some extent some kind of divided loyalty or complicity in some part, or incompetence or both?”

Seth Jones of the RAND Corporation, who used to advise the U.S. military in Afghanistan on Al Qaeda, replied with equal bluntness: “Whether there was complicity, or incompetence, at the very least there has not been a high priority in targeting the senior Al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan. Based on the threat streams coming from this area, those interests have to change.”

The Big Lie: Torture Got Bin Laden

Dave Weigel predicts Republican spin:

Expect to hear more about this report that the information that led to the tailing of bin Laden's courier, and eventually to his death, was acquired in interrogations that Obama ended once he took office. It may not be Republican candidates pointing this out. They don't need to. George W. Bush has a considerable amen chorus in the press, with former staffers like Marc Thiessen, Michael Gerson, and John Yoo writing regular columns about how the 43rd president was right.

Predict it? It's already become a meme. Last night, O'Reilly simply said "What about the waterboarding?" before moving on to other issues. A military reader writes how Fox is leading with the torture lie:

Driving right now - flipped on Fox News Channel out of curiosity on Sirius.  Since 07h30, they have been openly encouraging waterboarding and have at least 6 times that I've noticed said that the reason we got OBL is directly attributable to what had been revealed during waterboarding sessions.  I am, in two words, fucking disgusted.

Here's Andrew Malcolm:

That previous president authorized enhanced interrogation techniques which convinced folks like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to give up, among many other things, the name of their top-secret courier, now deceased.

Leave aside the horrifying fact that Republicans, seeking to score some ownership of this triumph, would look to torture as their contribution. Why not the beefed up on-the-ground intelligence from 2005 on? That's Bush's legacy that Obama built on. Besides, there is no evidence that it played any part whatsoever. From the NYT:

Prisoners in American custody told stories of a trusted courier. When the Americans ran the man’s pseudonym past two top-level detainees — the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed; and Al Qaeda’s operational chief, Abu Faraj al-Libi — the men claimed never to have heard his name. That raised suspicions among interrogators that the two detainees were lying and that the courier probably was an important figure.

My italics. So in torturing these two men, interrogators got nothing of substance. In fact, it was only by assuming that these men were lying under torture that the investigation continued. It was subsequently, during normal interrogations that KSM gave us a central clue:

Mohammed did not reveal the names while being subjected to the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding, former officials said. He identified them many months later under standard interrogation, they said, leaving it once again up for debate as to whether the harsh technique was a valuable tool or an unnecessarily violent tactic.

To repeat: in the one instance we now clearly know about, the CIA is telling us that torture gave them lies. Which they were. Only when traditional interrogation was used did we get the actual names of the couriers. Marcy Wheeler looks at the current data set:

We can conclude that either KSM shielded the courier’s identity entirely until close to 2007, or he told his interrogators that there was a courier who might be protecting bin Laden early in his detention but they were never able to force him to give the courier’s true name or his location, at least not until three or four years after the waterboarding of KSM ended. That’s either a sign of the rank incompetence of KSM’s interrogators (that is, that they missed the significance of a courier protecting OBL), or a sign he was able to withstand whatever treatment they used with him.

Follow up here. Jane Mayer's thoughts. Brian Beutler focuses on the flaws in the AP story torture apologists latched onto. Meanwhile, Rumsfeld himself has denied that torture played any role in finding bin Laden:

“It is true that some information that came from normal interrogation approaches at Guantanamo did lead to information that was beneficial in this instance. But it was not harsh treatment and it was not waterboarding.”

What really broke the case? From the NYT:

Operation Cannonball, a [2005] bureaucratic reshuffling ... placed more C.I.A. case officers on the ground in Pakistan and Afghanistan. With more agents in the field, the C.I.A. finally got the courier’s family name. With that, they turned to one of their greatest investigative tools — the National Security Agency began intercepting telephone calls and e-mail messages between the man’s family and anyone inside Pakistan. From there they got his full name. Last July, Pakistani agents working for the C.I.A. spotted him driving his vehicle near Peshawar.

Old-fashioned, painstaking, labor-intensive intelligence work. The American way. We never needed to stoop to bin Laden's standards to get bin Laden. We needed merely to follow our long-tested humane procedures.

Obama ratings boost

Osama bin Laden killing gives Obama quick but limited ratings boost

In the immediate aftermath of the targeted killing of Osama bin Laden, President Obama’s approval rating has jumped higher, with big increases in the number of Americans giving him high marks on dealing with terrorism and the situation in Afghanistan.
But the new poll, conducted Monday evening by The Washington Post and the Pew Research Center, also finds virtually no movement in Obama’s numbers when it comes to handling the economy. That suggests that success on one front — even one as important as the death of the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks — might not translate easily to other areas.
Overall, 56 percent of those polled say they approve of the way Obama is handling his job as president, an increase of nine percentage points over April polls by Post-ABC News and Pew. That is the highest approval rating for the president in either poll since 2009.
There’s also been a clear increase in public satisfaction with the way things are going in the United States, although by a margin of nearly 2-1, Americans are still dissatisfied with the direction of the country.
The president gets big bounces on dealing with Afghanistan, with his approval rating soaring to 60 percent, and on handling the threat of terrorism, where he recorded a career high of 69 percent.
More than three-quarters of all Americans say the president deserves credit for the killing of the bin Laden in Pakistan on Sunday. Among Republicans, 61 percent say Obama deserves at least some credit for the move. But just 17 percent of them say he deserves a “great deal” of credit for bringing bin Laden to justice after a nearly 10-year pursuit by U.S. intelligence and military forces.
Republicans are more apt to give former president George W. Bush acclaim for killing bin Laden, with 81 percent saying he deserves at least some of the credit for what happened Sunday. Only 35 percent of Democrats share that view, however, with a slender 4 percent giving the former president a lot of credit.
There is more bipartisan agreement that the U.S. military and intelligence deserve a great deal of credit for the killing.
For the president, the nine-point increase in his overall approval rating is on par with the six-point increase in Bush’s numbers in the weeks following the capture of Saddam Hussein in Iraq in December 2003. Then, as now, political independents moved the most.
Compared with the mid-April Post-ABC poll, Obama’s approval rating among independents is now 10 points higher, at 52 percent. Bush got an identical 10-point boost among independents in December 2003. For Bush, that lift proved short-lived, with the entire increase gone within six weeks.
How long Obama’s improved ratings will last is, of course, an open question. The fact that there was no movement in Obama’s approval on the economy — still the top issue by far in the country — offers a reminder of the challenges that remain for the White House. Obama’s 40 percent approval on the economy in this one-night poll is the lowest of his presidency in Washington Post polls, though it has been numerically lower in Pew surveys.
The Post-Pew poll was conducted by conventional landline and cellular telephone Monday evening, and included interviews with 654 randomly selected adults. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 4.5 percentage points.

I'm so happy I have not watched a second of FOX News for over 4 years and still the best informed person I know, me!

Palin calls van Susteren 'most influential journalist'

 

Janine Brady, social media editor at NBC Universal, went around asking guests at the MSNBC afterparty for the White House Correspondents Dinner who they thought the most influential journalist was, and got some pretty interesting results.
Sarah Palin stalled for a minute, with the weight of that question’s similar predecessor hanging in the air, before settling on her host for the evening, Greta van Susteren.

RUSH continues to be anal!

POLL: Was Rush Limbaugh's Praise of President Obama All Sarcasm?

Rush Limbaugh and President Obama

President Barack Obama received bipartisan praise for his handling of the operation to kill Osama bin Laden – but was there one high-profile exception?

Rush Limbaugh opened his radio show Monday with effusive – and highly uncharacteristic – praise, ending with, "Thank God for President Obama."

But later in the show, Limbaugh broke into laughter while reading aloud a publication that appeared to take his earlier comments literally.

1. Tell us what you think?
   • Pure sarcasm
     85%
   • Unexpected praise
     15%

 

Canada Federal election results:

*  CONSERVATIVE 167 NDP 102 LIBERAL 34 BLOC QUEBECOIS 4 GREEN 1

    155 TO FORM MAJORITY Prime Minister Brain Harper

Harper captures his majority with NDP forming historic Opposition

Published On Tue May 3 2011

"Whether or not you cast a vote for us today our government must and will stand on guard for all regions, and we will do so faithfully,” Stephen Harper said last night.

GEOFF ROBINS/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Richard J. Brennan and Bruce Campion-Smith

Click for full results

The Conservatives have finally captured their coveted majority government in an historic election that vaulted the NDP to a stunning second-place finish, making them the official Opposition, pushing aside the Liberals to a humiliating third.
At the Telus Convention Centre in Calgary, Conservative Leader Stephen Harper expressed elation at his huge win. "What a great night," Harper told more than 1,500 cheering Conservative supporters.
"A strong, stable, national Conservative government," he said.
Harper said Canadians "can now turn the page from uncertainties" with a majority government.
"They chose hope and unity of purpose," he said.
"We must be the government of all Canadians including those who didn't vote for us."
It is the first time in Canadian history that the Liberal party did not finish either first or second.
“It’s tough to lose like this,” said Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff, who lost his own riding of Etobicoke-Lakeshore.
The Liberals have never suffered a crushing defeat, either in popular support or seat.
“Defeat is a teacher and now we have to learn the lesson of defeat and look at ourselves in the mirror,” Ignatieff said.
The night was full of surprises, but in the end Stephen Harper got what he has so long sought after – a healthy majority. The Tories won 167 seats, earning 40 per cent of the vote.
The NDP nearly tripled the 36 seats the party held at dissolution, winning 102 seats while the Liberals took 34
A triumphant NDP Leader Jack Layton strode through the crowd to speak to his supporters.
“I let Mr. Harper know that I look forward to working with his party and in fact with all parties to get things done for our families. And I shared with him my desire to bring a more positive and respectful tone to Parliament,” Layton said.
Bloc Quebecois Leader Gilles Duceppe lost his Montreal riding after a 21-year run. The 63-year-old Duceppe proved to be just another Bloc pushover on Monday as the NDP steamrolled to a crushing victory in Quebec.
Duceppe, who became the Bloc's first MP in 1990, was defeated by the NDP's Helene Laverdiere in Laurier-Sainte-Marie. He announced he would be officially resigning in the next couple of days but will continue to fight for Quebec sovereignty.
The Liberals were pounded in Ontario with the Conservatives making gains in Toronto. In the 905 belt around Toronto long-time Liberals MPs were falling, including Ruby Dhalla in Brampton-Springdale and Mark Holland in Ajax-Pickering where he conceded to political novice Chris Alexander, former ambassador to Afghanistan.
Of the 46 seats in GTA, the Conservatives won 31, at the expense the Liberals.
One of the stories of the night was the orange wave across Quebec, the NDP reducing the Bloc to single digits.
And for the first time the Green Party won a seat in the House of Commons after party leader Elizabeth May defeated Conservative incumbent Gary Lunn in the B.C. riding of Saanich-Gulf Islands.
“Today we proved the Canadians want change in politics … I stand here today as the first elected Green member of Parliament in Canadian history,” May said after her victory.
In Atlantic Canada, the Conservatives led for the first time in 23 years.
It appears the much-talked-about surge by the NDP — it picked up two new seats in Atlantic Canada at the expense of the Liberals — has contributed mostly to vote splitting, allowing the Tories to come up the centre. The Conservatives picked up three new seats, up nearly seven per cent in support.
Former journalist Ryan Cleary easily won the riding of St. John's South-Mount Pearl in Newfoundland in what was expected to be a tight race. He defeated Liberal incumbent Siobhan Coady and Tory candidate Loyola Sullivan, a former provincial cabinet minister.
“We did it, Jack! We did it!” Cleary yelled at a rally.
“Can you feel the winds of political change sweeping across Newfoundland and Labrador?
“Those winds are stirring a sea change in Canadian politics —a sea change that begins here.”
In Nova Scotia, where the first NDP government in Atlantic Canada was elected two years ago, star NDP candidate Robert Chisholm won Dartmouth-Cole Harbour, unseating Liberal Mike Savage. Savage, the son of a former Nova Scotia premier, held the riding since 2004.
Early rumours that Conservative heavyweight Peter MacKay, who was defence minister in the last government, could go down in Central Nova turned out to be just that —rumours. In fact, he won handily.
The NDP’s historic success came about as result of a strong performance by Layton, who defied political predictions and naysayers who questioned whether he would have the stamina for a tiring campaign just weeks after surgery to repair a broken hip. Yet as he hit the trail with cane in hand, voters, especially those in Quebec, embraced Layton as the “new” guy, a surprising twist for a politician who has led the NDP in Ottawa for the last eight years and campaigned in three previous elections.
As Harper and Ignatieff traded partisan shots, Layton seemed to engage voters with his folksy relaxed style and upbeat messages. He came into the campaign as the most popular leader and thanks in part to two solid debate performances, transformed that popularity into a surge of support for the NDP.
Harper made plain his election ambition from the start, when he stood on the front steps of Rideau Hall on the campaign’s first day. After falling short three times before —2004, 2006 and 2008 —he declared that he was going all-out this time to win a majority and put an end to the cycle of minority governments.
And he darkly warned that another minority Conservative would never get a chance to govern, toppled by opposition rivals who would seek to form government themselves.