Barbara West, whose interview with Joe Biden prompted a meltdown and hissy fit from Biden and the rest of Camp Barry, had this to say to the Orlando Sentinel

In a call to me Friday evening, West (pictured) said of Biden: “I have a great deal of respect for him. I have a great deal of respect for Sen. Obama. We are given four minutes of a satellite window for these interviews. Four precious minutes. I got right down to it and, yes, I think I asked him some pointed questions. These are questions that are rolling about right now and questions that need to be asked. I don’t think I was rude or inconsiderate to him. I think I was probing and maybe tough. I can’t believe that in all of his years in politics, and all of his campaigning and such, that he hasn’t run into some tough questions before. He’s certainly up to it in giving good answers.”

In other words, suck it it, Team Lightweight. You’d think someone who has been in Congress since 1972, and That One, who wants to be president, could take some hardball politics. Those who want to take on America around the world must be LTAO.

Video below the fold, since I never got around to posting it Saturday

Barbara West with WFTV in Orlando decided that, unlike the majority of the Credentialed Media, she would, you know, be a journalist and ask the tough questions, and Joe Biden and the Obama campaign were not amused

West wondered about Sen. Barack Obama’s comment, to Joe the Plumber, about spreading the wealth. She quoted Karl Marx and asked how Obama isn’t being a Marxist with the “spreading the wealth” comment.

“Are you joking?” said Biden, who is Obama’s running mate. “No,” West said.

West later asked Biden about his comments that Obama could be tested early on as president. She wondered if the Delaware senator was saying America’s days as the world’s leading power were over.

“I don’t know who’s writing your questions,” Biden shot back.

Biden so disliked West’s line of questioning that the Obama campaign canceled a WFTV interview with Jill Biden, the candidate’s wife.

Meltdown ensued. God forbid the Obama camp allow tough questions. And God help Ms. West if Obama wins. $100 says she loses her job, and WFTV has lots of FCC issues.

WFTV news director Bob Jordan said, “When you get a shot to ask these candidates, you want to make the most of it. They usually give you five minutes.”

Jordan said political campaigns in general pick and choose the stations they like. And stations often pose softball questions during the satellite interviews.

“Mr. Biden didn’t like the questions,” Jordan said. “We choose not to ask softball questions.”

You can watch the video of the exchange here. It’s a bit slow on buffering, because it is getting hit hard by the DUmmies, who are not happy that anyone would question The One and his Left Hand Guy. Thug Thizzle.

In the comments, Dave points out that the crisis that Joe Biden was referring to will probably be Iran and an attack on Israel, and the “unpopular response” will be Barry ignoring the situation and doing nothing, except, perhaps, some strong words and a complaint to the the United Nations, which has been oh so sympathetic to Israel over the past 30 years, eh? He could well be right

Top officials in Iran are proposing a preemptive strike against Israel to avoid an assault on its nuclear reactors, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper reported Wednesday.

Senior Tehran official Dr. Seyed G. Safavi said at a recent briefing in London that the proposal followed threats by Israeli authorities, but a possible preemptive strike against Israel has not yet been incorporated into Iranian policy.

Israeli Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz said in June that Israel would be forced to strike Iran’s nuclear reactor if Tehran continues to pursue its controversial uranium enrichment program, Haaretz reported.

The question is, are these “just words?” So often within the Western World, we tend to think of these types of ultimatums and threats as school yard taunts, to be ignored, right up to the point that an actual physical attack occurs, then the media and Congress tries to fix blame after the fact, usually after saying, “they are just words, so don’t worry ’bout it.”

It’s like the whole August 6th PDB “Bin Laden determined to strike the US” issue. If Bush had tried to institute measures to search people at the airports, because the time was non-specific, he would have been skewered, and we would have been told the threats were mostly empty. What happened afterwards were typical blame games. When Arabs and Muslims and others in the Middle East make these types of threats, they should be take seriously.

And when you are dealing with paranoid nutjobs, you should be even more worried

Are America and Israel using specially-trained pigeons to spy on Iran?

That’s the question being raised by new reports out of Iran that its security services have arrested two suspected “spy pigeons” near its well-guarded Nantaz nuclear site.

One of the pigeons, security officials said, had a black-coated metal ring and invisible strings.

Ah-ha!

Clearly a spy pigeon.

This isn’t the first time, either. And they arrested spy squirrels last year. Paranoia and nuclear weapons are not the greatest of mixtures.

Of course, we have all heard the Obamazombies talking points: bad voter registrations are not voter fraud, because they haven’t voted yet. It’s not disenfranchisement, because no one is being stopped from voting. So, they see nothing wrong with all the fraud going on through ACORN. Perhaps we should just call it election fraud, to satisfy the Left’s sense of proper naming

A federal appeals court on Tuesday ordered Ohio’s top elections official to set up a system by the end of the week to verify new voters’ eligibility and make it available to Ohio’s 88 county election boards.

The full 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati upheld a lower court’s ruling that Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner must use other government records to check the thousands of new voters for registration fraud.

A three-judge panel of the 6th Circuit had disagreed last week, but the full court’s ruling trumped the panel’s decision.

Finally, some sanity. Of course, you know the Left will not like this very much, despite their constant calls for election reform since they lost in 2000.

Allahpundit has it covered, and has some video showing how the ACORN narrative has finally broken through to the regular MSM.

Related, Barry brings up the “D” word

“But this isn’t a situation where there’s actually people who are going to try to vote ’cause these are phony names,” Obama said. “And, it’s doubtful (Dallas Cowboys quarterback) Tony Romo (whose name has been fraudulently submitted) is gonna show up in Ohio to vote. So this is another one of these distractions that gets stirred up in the course of a campaign.

Uh huh. And, if this was a non-partisan group that happened to be registering primarily Republicans, would you be so blase’ about it, Barry? As Powerline points out, Barack is completely indifferent to the election fraud. And, sure, someone who registers as Mickey Mouse is not going to show up. But, the very fact that ACORN dupes are going there shows the lengths they will go to perpetrate other election fraud, such as registering people who aren’t legally eligible to vote, registering dead people, registering people in multiple states and voting precincts, and then the people do go and vote.

Joe Biden goes down the wacky distraction avenue, as well.

I guess it is all a distraction when out of state Obama activists are registered in Ohio in violation of the law, ie, they do not reside in Ohio. Who wants to bet that they have absentee ballots in for their home states, too?

Maybe there are actually some journalists with ethics out there, though, they still try to whitewash the issue a bit

The moment when Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. looked Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic in the eye and called him a “damned war criminal” has become the stuff of campaign legend.

The Democratic vice presidential nominee brings up the 1993 confrontation on the campaign trial to whoops of delight from supporters. Sen. Barack Obama(Ill.) mentioned it when he announced he had chosen Biden as his running mate.

During last week’s debate with his counterpart on the Republican ticket, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, Biden twice gave himself credit for shifting U.S. policy on Bosnia. The senator from Delaware declared that he “was the catalyst to change the circumstance in Bosnia led by President Clinton.” At another point he noted: “My recommendations on Bosnia — I admit I was the first one to recommend it. They saved tens of thousands of lives.”

But, despite the bravado, Biden was not a key player in