REGARDING the Q "Follow the pens" post:

First, I was fairly certain that it wasn't about the pen pic Q sent us that I reposted yesterday but possibly about the EO following It? I STILL felt there was another meaning he was pointing towards as so often is the case with his posts. Secondly, it reminded me of the first two events that led me to believe HUSSEIN was not acting in America's best interests as the new President! The first event occurred immediately after he was sworn into office & addressed a middle eastern country via radio instead of addressing the American people first. The second was when his administration had our biggest ally, the U.K. as the first visiting foreign dignitaries and not only was ages old traditional protocol completely ignored, he was the personification of a rude, arrogant ass! They weren't met when they landed at Andrew's AFB by the President or ANY official at all, there was no greeting upon their arrival, there was no lavish welcoming ceremony or reception at the White House, there was no joint press conference planned, no side by side photo op with both flags in the background, no official state dinner, no trip to Camp David, and the one tradition upheld of exchanging gifts was a complete debacle! Our new U.S. President had also already insisted on giving the most famous Churchill bust back & the British diplomatically stated it was a gift of a symbol of solidarity over 9/11 & not a loan & even suggested that perhaps it could be donated to a museum that might appreciate it if he didn't want it displayed in the White House, HUSSEIN objected adamantly in his steadfast intention on returning it though. As all of this wasn't bad enough, the exchanging of gifts was the worst by far in the treatment of our first foreign dignitary visitors, who were touted as our closest allies! Obama's excuse, he was facing exhaustion over America's economic crisis and is unable to focus on foreign affairs! The real views of many in the Obama administration were reflected by a State Department official involved in planning the Brown visit, who reacted with fury when questioned by The Sunday Telegraph about the controversy. The official dismissed any notion of the special relationship, saying: "There's nothing special about Britain. You're just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. You shouldn't expect special treatment."

For his part, PM Brown gave two symbolic gifts and one that expressed national pride.

There was a first edition of Sir Martin Gilbert’s authorized biography of Churchill, all seven volumes of it. There was a framed commissioning paper for HMS Resolute, rescued by an American whaler in 1856; part of HMS Resolute was later made into the desk presented by Queen Victoria to President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880, and used by American presidents to this day.

And then there was the third present. As Reuters reports it, the gift was:

a pen holder fashioned from the timber of HMS Gannet, a sister ship of the Resolute that also served for a time on anti-slavery missions off Africa.

So, what did President Obama give the British PM? 25 movies on DVD. Obama responds by sending a staffer to WalMart to pick up a few quick movies. Worse, they were American DVDs, created in the "Region One" format while those in Europe play in "Region Two" format. A U.S. DVD just won't play on a machine made for the English market.

But HMS Gannet (briefly named HMS President) was not, as a casual reader might guess, employed against the trade of slaves from Africa to the New World, and since it was built in 1878, it has nothing to do with Lincoln or slavery in the United States. It sailed the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, patrolling against Islamist slavers. In the Red Sea, the Africans it saved would have come, among other places, from Kenya. Obama has made mention of his grandfather’s antipathy to Britain, stemming from his experiences in colonial Kenya. It is quite possible that grandfather’s ancestors would, had it not been for the Royal Navy, have been carried away to slavery in Arabia.

The British campaign against the slave trade is instructive for another, more important, reason. By volume of business, it was the Foreign Office’s most important concern for much of the 19th century. In the courts of Europe and the New World, Britain sought to negotiate effective treaties against the trade. But Britain did not restrict itself to diplomacy. Far too often, treaties were negotiated and then not enforced. Britain’s first response to this was usually to negotiate again, but its patience was not infinite.

Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is rewriting the history of the Iraq War

by Tom Rogan

| November 15, 2017 02:56 PM

Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has released a new book in which he claims the U.S. mislead Britain prior to the 2003 Iraq War.

"We were misled by the Pentagon," Brown told a television show earlier this week.

https:// www.washingtonexaminer.com/former-british-prime-minister-gordon-brown-is-rewriting-the-history-of-the-iraq-war/article/2640801

The real reason President Obama loathes the British… his grandfather was tortured in a Kenyan prison

The Kenyan bowed his head as his captors opened the prison cell door to deliver another brutal whipping - a punishment meted out after he was accused of taking part in the independence movement against the British colonial authorities.

The man had been working as a cook for a British Army officer. And his name? Hussein Onyango Obama - President Barack Obama's paternal grandfather.

He had been arrested in 1949 and jailed for two years in a high-security prison. There, according to his family, he was subjected to horrific violence. They say British soldiers used torture in an effort to get him to reveal rebel secrets

The African warders were instructed by the white soldiers to whip him every morning and evening till he repented,' says Sarah Onyango, Hussein Onyango's third wife, and the woman President Obama calls 'Granny Sarah'.

Mrs Onyango, now 89, says 'white soldiers' visited the prison every two or three days to carry out 'disciplinary action' on the inmates in, what she terms, 'the British torture chambers'.

She details awful abuse. 'They would squeeze his private parts (testicles) with parallel metallic rods. They also pierced his nails and buttocks with a sharp pin, with his hands and legs tied together with his head facing down,' she says.

'There were beatings and torture. That was the time we realised that the British were actually not friends but, instead, enemies. My husband had worked so diligently for them, only to be arrested and detained. He called the British "beasts and traitors in human skin".'

This week, she told the Mail in an exclusive interview that she believes that learning of the torture meted out to his grandfather turned her grandson, the U.S. President, against Britain. Sitting under a mango tree in the garden of her modest home in Kogelo village, Kenya, surrounded by the family's chickens, cows and goat, she recalls telling Barack Obama his family history on his first visit to Kenya in 1988.

'I narrated the whole story to Barack one evening to help him understand our family's past. He wasn't amused at all. He expressed quite a lot of concern about why the British had to punish his grandfather "on his own soil".