Greets and saluts from the NYC metro area.

The good news for the day is that Maurice Clemmons was killed by a Seattle area police officer after the officer spotted him in the vicinity of a stolen vehicle. Clemmons refused to obey the officer’s directives, and the officer shot and killed Clemmons. Clemmons was found to possess a weapon from one of the four police officers he murdered. He also had a gunshot wound from that encounter.

Huckabee’s record continues to take a justified beating, and while he claimed on O’Reilly that he wouldn’t have made the decision to commute his sentence had he known what he knows now, his PAC site continues to blame others for the decision to commute.

Today is also when President Obama is scheduled to announce a troop surge. He’s doing so at West Point, and it’s expected that the US Marines are the first wave of the troop increase. Most critical is how Obama couches the exit strategy. If he gives any signals to a cut and run even with a troop increase, he should rightfully catch flak for his inability to grasp the seriousness of the situation and 3 months of “thoughtful consideration” will be shown to be little more than dithering and contemplating the political fallout off the decision rather than improving US national security.

But in between all that, here’s a nature photo to bring things into balance.