When is the 12/25 Commission Convening?

Seems to me it's fair to say we had more warning about the Holiday Christmas Bomber than we did about 9/11, don't you think?

US authorities have known for months that the al Qaeda-linked Nigerian who tried to blow up a passenger jet before it landed in Detroit had terrorist ties -- and his own father even alerted them to his extremist behavior, it was revealed yesterday.

Recall 36 days prior to 9/11, the alleged smoking gun memo was supposed to have tipped everyone off? For that everyone from the FBI Director to Secretary of State to the President was deemed accountable.

Well, in this case we had six months warning. Why was nothing done?

Several key details came to light yesterday:

* Al Qaeda operatives in Yemen sewed into Abdulmutallab's underwear a condom filled with three ounces of a nitroglycerin-like compound after he spent a month training with the terror organization, sources told ABC News.

"One flight attendant asked him what he had had in his pocket, and he replied, 'Explosive device,' " according to the Justice Department.

* Abdulmutallab was added to the 550,000 suspects on a watch list kept by the US National Counterterrorism Center in November and had been on government radar for months. Yet there wasn't enough negative information about him to put him on the no-fly list.

* His father, Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, a prominent Nigerian banker who retired recently, reportedly contacted the US Embassy there about six months ago to inform authorities about his son's increasingly extreme behavior.

* Michigan Rep. Peter Hoekstra, the senior Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said he believes Abdulmutallab is linked to radical US-born Yemeni cleric Anwar al-Aulaqi, a mentor to the US Army psychiatrist who gunned down 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, last month.

* Abdulmutallab -- who boarded a flight in Nigeria to Amsterdam, and then transferred to Northwest Flight 253 to Detroit -- did not go through full-body scans at either airport, and it's unclear how he was screened as a transferring passenger in Amsterdam.

Ironic how our fearless commander-in-chief spent the day after this near man-caused disaster golfing. But we're not supposed to even notice.

In his Farenheit 9/11, filmmaker Michael Moore juxtaposes images and words of a terrorist attack in Israel with President Bush's first words about the incident, spoken to a press pool on a golf course, with him leaning casually against a tree. Today, as the nation's law enforcement agencies respond to an attempted terrorist attack on U.S. soil, as the cable news channels and news websites pull in reinforcements to cover the incident from all angles, President Obama has been silent.

In fact, he's been golfing. He received a counterterrorism briefing early this morning, Hawaii time, and moments later, left for the gym. The president's vacation activities might have become the subject of a fierce partisan fight -- but really, the only carping is coming from the usual suspects on the right.

Yeah, we're just carping.

Leave poor Obama alone!

Recall the caterwauling from the left that these terrorists are led down their path only out of despair and poverty? Well, so much for that canard.

The son of a prominent Nigerian banker, who allegedly attempted to blow up a transatlantic flight over America, was barred from returning to Britain earlier this year.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, graduated from a university in London last year but his visa request was refused in May when he attempted to apply for a new course at a bogus college.

Abdulmutallab, described as a devout Muslim, was charged on Saturday with trying to destroy the plane flying from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day and placing a destructive device in the plane. He had attempted to ignite explosives after shouting about Afghanistan.Bomb materials had apparently been sewn into his underwear, an authoritative American report said.

I'm surprised they even used the "M-word" in this report.

Is it just me or would Bush have been blamed has this attack been successful? Meanwhile, repatriating all those Yemenis from Club Gitmo doesn't seem like such a good idea now, does it?