This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Society

  • More Clinton stock shenanigans

    We all remember the greatest stock trade in history when Hillary Clinton raked in a cool 100 grand from a $10,000 investment when she and her husband were in Arkansas. Well the Washington Times’s Jim McElhatton reports this morning that Bill Clinton made have made an equally fortunate deal;

    The spring before his wife began her White House campaign, former President Bill Clinton earned $700,000 for his foundation by selling stock that he had been given from an Internet search company that was co-founded by a convicted felon and backed by the Chinese government, public records show.

    Mr. Clinton had gotten the nonpublicly traded stock from Accoona Corp. back in 2004 as a gift for giving a speech at a company event. He landed the windfall by selling the 200,000 shares to an undisclosed buyer in May 2006, commanding $3.50 a share at a time when the company was reporting millions of dollars of losses, according to interviews.

    A spokesman for the William J. Clinton Foundation declined to identify the buyer who was willing to pay so much for a struggling company’s stock, saying only that the transaction was handled by a securities broker.

    Funny how the Chinese always seem to be behind everything that casts a bit of shade over the Clintons, isn’t it?

  • Bush/McCain lunch today

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    Photo from Associated Press

    From Wall Street Journal’s Washington Wire;

    Perino said Bush thanked the former candidates for setting a good tone for the race and raising interest in the Republican field. She said Bush has a “very favorable view” of McCain and plans to campaign on his behalf. “President Bush has never forgotten how hard Sen. McCain worked to re-elect him in 2004,” Perino said.

    Still, the men fought bitterly for the Republican nomination in 2000 and have disagreed on a number of high-profile issues, including the administration’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, climate change and interrogation tactics used in the war on terror.

    “I’m not going to argue that they haven’t had their disagreements,” Perino said, noting that they agree on basic national security principles and the need for “pro-growth” economic policies.

    We all remember the bitter Bush vs. McCain campaigns in 2000. John McCain lost me as a supporter when in South Carolina he called the proposed Bush tax-cuts “tax cuts for the rich”. True to his character, John McCain continued to oppose President George W. Bush’s tax cuts in 2001 and 2003. But John McCain stood by the President in the 2004 campaign against John Kerry and he’s stood by the President on nearly every aspect of the war against terror.

    John McCain has disappointed nearly every Conservative at some point in his career, as I’ve written already, I include myself in that number. I’ve read through out the Conservative blogs how “we’re screwed” because John McCain is our candidate. Some have said that they’ll support Hillary or Obama before they’d vote for McCain. Many people I otherwise respect and admire have declared that they’ll stay home before they vote for John McCain – I probably said the same thing about your candidate at some point, too.

    Well, that’s just silly, actually. It’s called cutting off your nose to spite your face. No candidate can be completely everything every voter wants. John McCain has an 80% conservative rating compared to two candidates that have 98% leftist ratings. Four years or even two years of Democrats on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue could impact this country in ways that we’ll never be able to repair.

    Jimmy Carter walked the length of Pennsylvania Avenue as every President before him had – after four years of Jimmy Carter’s weak-kneed foreign policy, no President has been able to make that one-mile walk safely since.

    We have an extraordinary advantage here. Given that we’re battling against the media as well as the Democrats here, we need every advantage we can grasp. While Clinton and Obama are still battering each other with verbal sledgehammers and dirty politics (as illustrated by Invincible Armor), John McCain can stay above it all and get his message out – our message.

    To borrow a quote from my battle buddy Crotchety Old Bastard; I love my country more than I dislike John McCain.

    If President Bush and Senator McCain can set aside their differences for the party and the country, so should we.

    Back to the Washington Wire;

    Awaiting McCain, who was scheduled to arrive at noon, Bush walked out on the White House’s North Portico at around 11:35 a.m. After joking with reporters and performing an impromptu dance similar to his footwork in Ghana last month, the president returned to the White House only to reappear a moment later as McCain’s Cadillac pulled into the driveway.

  • No Mas FARC (Updated 3x)

    The same folks who organized the “No Mas FARC” protest last month sent me an email yesterday asking that I get the word out that they ask everyone to step outside their homes tonight at 6 PM (Colombian time – apparently it’s also Eastern Time) and light a candle for “a Latin America without FARC” then post a picture if you can on your blog, in Facebook or some other electronic medium.

    UPDATE: There’s a spontaneous rally at 17th and Constitution (in front of the Organization of American States) in DC at 5:30 pm today.

    UPDATE: Kate sends a link to pictures of the rally at the OAS, 3-4-08, and a narrative at her blog.

    Kate at A Colombo-Americana’s Perspective has posted the Spanish language email, I just translated the gist of it for you, though.

    Speaking of FARC, Gateway Pundit writes that the computer that Colombia liberated from the pieces of Raul Reyes this last weekend shows evidence that FARC is in the process of making “dirty bomb”;

    Colombian officials on Tuesday said that FARC rebels are working on a radioactive bomb and that they had purchased 50 kilograms of uranium this month. The information was discovered after Colombian forces ambushed a FARC base and captured a top terrorist’s computer this weekend.
    Reuters reported:

    Colombia said on Tuesday that FARC rebels had been planning to make a “dirty bomb” with radioactive material, threatening the entire Latin American region.

    The charges by Vice-President Francisco Santos, at the United Nations-sponsored Conference on Disarmament, marked a dramatic turn in a regional crisis that has seen Venezuela and Ecuador cut diplomatic ties with Colombia.

    Bogota has already accused Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez of funding the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas, after Colombian forces crossed into Ecuador and killed a senior rebel commander on Saturday, sparking troop movements and warnings of war.

    I find it hard to believe that FARC can continue this facade of being an Army of Liberation when the news of this dirty bomb gets around. A dirty bomb is purely a weapon of mass casualties, there is virtually no strategic use for it – except to deny an enemy use of a couple of city blocks for a few hundred years.

    When the evidence of this gets out, Ortiz, Chavez and Correa have some explaining to do. I’ve noticed that Evo Morales, the Moe character of Los Tres Chiflados of South America, has kept out of it so far.

    UPDATE: Babalu Blog writes that Colombia’s President Uribe has decided to take Chavez to The Hague on charges of genocide. But OAS, weak sisters that they are, are busy deciding what to do about Colombia violating Ecuador’s sovereignty.

  • The third world comes to the US

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    Photo by John VanBeekhum/Miami Herald

    Although there’s not much in the media about it, Miami Herald reports that Haitian students started brawling with police and school officials in Miami yesterday;

    The disturbance followed a sit-in demonstration during the school’s first lunch period, at about 11:30 a.m., schools spokesman Quintin Taylor said. Students said the sit-in was intended to be peaceful.

    The students were protesting a confrontation Thursday between Assistant Principal Javier Perez and a student who had been arrested at the school. District officials did not name the student, but classmates identified him as senior Wadson Sagaille, 17.

    Miami-Dade Schools Detective Ed Torrens said administrators had told Edison’s school resource police officer a walkout was rumored for about 9:15 a.m. Friday. The walkout didn’t happen, he said.

    Three or four officers attended lunch to monitor and answer questions about Thursday’s arrest, Torrens said. Students began throwing chairs at officers and spitting at them, he said, and some chairs hit other students. ”Then those students wanted to fight back, and it went south fast,” Torrens said.

    The fights spilled into the courtyard. Officers began radioing for ”315s” — code for officers needing assistance.

    Of course, it’s not the students’ fault, they claim;

    Junior Sabrina Francois, 16, said the violence began when police showed up: Police “hit a pregnant girl with a stick. Even if they were just standing by, they hit so many girls.”

    Senior Jenson Dolce, 18, said students were throwing milk and yogurt at the officers. The police ”pushed me into a fire extinguisher trying to contain the crowd,” said Dolce, who needed stitches for a cut to the hand.

    Although students alleged Tasers were used, Miami-Dade Schools spokesman John Schuster said schools police don’t carry stun guns and Miami-Dade Police Union President John Rivera and Miami Police spokesman Delrish Moss said they did not believe their officers used Tasers.

    And they shouldn’t be punished;

    Dozens of angry students, parents and activists packed the area outside Edison’s main entrance. Students who saw the ruckus and activists from the Power U Center for Social Change and the Miami Workers Center shouted out demands of police and school officials.

    ”We want them to drop all charges against students and release all that were arrested,” senior Chris Ford Green told television crews.

    From CBS4;

    A student named Julia said police officers appeared to be upset about students documenting the fight.

    “And then when the students were there standing by trying to take pictures, of what was happening, you know what happened? You know what the police did? They started taking them and throwing them to the floor, because they didn’t want us as students to voice our opinions, like we’re nothing, like we’re nobody,” she said.

    Um, Julia, you are nothing. You’re a student and your sole job is to learn – your opinions don’t matter outside of your family. You have no right to free speech – you get free schooling, free clothes, free food, but no free speech, sorry. In a few years you’ll get all of the perks and responsibilities of being an adult, but right now, just sit down, shut up and learn something.

    There’s a YouTube video that, for some reason, won’t embed.

  • Race baiting from the Dems

    Patterico’s Pontifications and Protein Wisdom are both running pieces from the leftist blogosphere alleging, without a shred of evidence, that John McCain is going to run a racist campaign. From Patterico;

    Josh Marshall:

    Hopefully, everyone can now see the McCain strategy for running against Barack Obama. Yes, we have some general points on taxes, culture wars and McCain as war hero who can protect us in ways that flash-in-the-pan pretty boy Barack Obama can’t.

    But that’s not the core. The core is to drill a handful of key adjectives into the public mind about Barack Obama: Muslim, anti-American, BLACK, terrorist, Arab. Maybe a little hustler and shifty thrown in, but we’ll have to see.

    Yes. Because McCain denouncing such tactics is clear proof that his strategy is to engage in such tactics.

    That’s exactly it – when McCain denounced the comments by some no-name radio talk fellow, he was trying to set the tone of his campaign – that it’s going to be about the issues and not this identity politics game the Democrats played through their primaries. But that’s all their candidate has – what he is and not who he is. Democrats can’t allow this campaign to be about substance – their guy is an empty suit.

    Karl at Protein Wisdom boils Marshall’s rant down to it’s essence;

    Josh Marshall’s effort to impose a double-standard on the campaign, under which John McCain must repudiate any person or any comment about Barack Obama deemed to be inappropriately racial or ethnic, while Obama is excused from discussing his less savory associations, has been taken up by a number of left-liberal bloggers during the course of the day.

    While the Leftist blogs were stirring up the troops, Li’l Howie Dean was whipping up the crowd at Georgetown U;

    The Chairman of the Democratic National Committee and former Governor of Vermont contrasted the two parties’ presidential candidates, saying that with a woman and an African-American as the two front-runners, the Democratic field “looks like America,” while the all-white male Republican field “looks like the 1950s and talks like the 1850s.”

    Funny how Dean mentioned those two decades. The 1950s was when the Democrats were siccing their dogs and turning the fire hoses on Blacks in the South while Republicans were crafting the Civil Rights Act of 1957. The 1850s was when the Republican Party was formed to oppose the Democrat Party’s stalwart opposition to the emancipation of Black slaves.

    Bookworm at Webloggin found an article from the San Francisco Chronicle that paints Conservatives with a broad brush as racists one-and-all. Bookworm nails the reason the press and the Democrats have to do that;

    It’s a lousy story and it’s a hit piece on the Right. More than that, it sets up a straw man that allows the media, again, to avoid actually looking at the real Obama:

    The reason they lose this election has to be about race, otherwise they have to admit that no one wants their big worthless government programs. They have to shame Americans into voting for their candidate.

  • Taxation Without Mindless Drivel

    When I lived in DC, I had to buy a bracket for my license plate to cover up the idiot “Taxation Without Representation” motto that the morons of the city government thought so clever. The first plate was given to President Bush for his limosine just after his inauguration. Now the nimnils of city government tried to inflict their intellectually vacant joke on the entire country (Washington Examiner link);

    The U.S. Mint on Wednesday rejected the District of Columbia’s proposal to include the phrase “Taxation Without Representation” on its quarter, deeming the slogan too political to be put on the country’s currency.

    The denial came less than a week after the District submitted three ideas for the commemorative quarter, all using the District’s protest of its lack of representation in Congress.

    The U.S. Mint informed city officials that the inscription failed to comply with the law prohibiting controversial subjects on the 25-cent piece.

    The city’s struggle to change how the District is represented in Congress is a political issue that the nation cannot agree on and is obviously political, U.S. Mint officials said.

    “The proposed inscription is clearly controversial and, therefore, inappropriate as an element of design for United States coinage,” U.S. Mint spokesman Greg Hernandez said.

    Mayor Adrian Fenty said the city was asked to submit ideas that were “emblematic of the District of Columbia.”

    “I can think of nothing more unique and characteristic than our status as the only American citizens without full voting rights in Congress,” Fenty said.

    Well, actually, DC residents have the opportunity to vote – with their feet. Five miles from anywhere in the city, anybody can be a resident of either Maryland or Virginia and have all of the representation they want. So DC residents CHOOSE to have no vote in Congress. The only people who really don’t have a choice are the DC politicians – and they’re the only people who should be upset they don’t have a vote. In fact they are the only people who are upset, and they’re trying to influence the rest of DC residents with the intellectually vacant motto.

    When the District politicians were so certain that a Democrat Congress and a Democrat President would give them the vote back in 1992, they voted for three straw politicians awaiting the magic vote from Congress – Jesse Jackson, a Chicagoan who’d never been a resident of the District was one of those straw Senators. People that stupid shouldn’t be represented in Congress.

    Since DC is mainly Democrat (the city council has two Republicans and one of them is gay and the district voted 90% for Kerry in the Presidential election of 2004), it’s just a ploy to get two Democrat Senators in Congress and one Democrat representative in the House.

    Oh, and I’m pretty sure the District gets way more money from the federal government than it’s residents pay in federal taxes. The ONLY thing that would change for the District is that there’d be more jobs for the political elite.

  • Government crucified for our sins

    You may or may not have heard of the welfare mother squatting in an abandoned building in southeast DC who eventually murdered her four daughters. By the time the police found the drug addict’s children’s bodies four months later, they were so badly decomposed that no cause of death could be determined. Rightly, the citizens of DC are outraged – outraged that it could happen under their noses, so to speak. Outraged that the city government failed to follow up despite calls from school officials and neighbors. Outraged that the city won’t hold anyone responsible.

    Well, the city finally fired six welfare workers – yesterday an administrative judge returned three of them to work (Washington Examiner link);

    An administrative hearing officer has ordered three fired child welfare bureaucrats put back on the job, overturning a decision by Mayor Adrian Fenty who blamed them for failing to help four sisters whose bodies were discovered last month.

    The employees, whose names were withheld, were ordered back on the job because Fenty had violated their due-process rights by summarily sacking them amid the Banita Jacks scandal, the hearing officer ruled.

    Jacks is charged with murdering her four daughters. She and her family were reported to welfare agencies for years, but nothing was done to help them. In late April 2007, a school social worker begged a child welfare hot-line worker to take action, saying Jacks was holding her daughters “hostage.”

    But the case was closed because no one answered the door of the row house in which Jacks and the girls had been squatting.

    Now, relatives of the four victims are filing charges against the city (Washington Post link);

    Relatives of the four girls whose decomposed bodies were found last month in a Southeast Washington rowhouse have hired lawyers to pursue claims against the D.C. government for failing to prevent months of neglect and abuse.

    The lawyers served the city notice as the children’s mother, Banita Jacks, remains jailed without bond on murder charges. In letters to Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D), two lawyers used the mayor’s public statements to make a case that city agencies had warnings that the children were in trouble but failed to act aggressively to get the girls away from their mother.

    Lawyers formally set the groundwork for legal claims on behalf of Jacks’s mother, Mamie Jacks, and Jessie Fogle, grandmother of the two youngest children. In addition, a lawyer for the estate of the second-oldest daughter was retained by her father, Kevin J. Stoddard. The lawyer said yesterday that he plans to sue the city on behalf of the estate.

    The bodies remain at the D.C. medical examiner’s office, yet to be buried after their discovery Jan. 9 by deputy marshals serving an eviction notice at Jacks’s Sixth Street SE address. The medical examiner’s office was unable to say what led to the deaths of the girls — ages 5, 6, 11 and 16 — but the case was ruled homicide. Jacks, 33, has told police that the children were possessed by demons and that they died in their sleep, authorities have said.

    Where is the shame? If a relative of mine lived in an abandoned building with her four daughters and a crack habit and I didn’t do anything about it, I’d expect someone to bring charges against me for neglecting my familial responsibilities. In my family, we take care of each other – we don’t expect an unfeeling and broken bureaucracy to care for our family.

    For one thing, the whole welfare department should be fired, because there’s apparently a culture within that fostered the whole situation from the beginning. Secondly, the family should have done something long before the lawyers came along and convinced them that it wasn’t their fault (the whole court process is the family’s way of washing their hands of responsibility).

    We hear constantly that government fails the people that it claims to represent, yet we continue to think of government as a solution to all of our problems. But all government has become is a scapegoat for absolving us of our personal responsibility for all of our bad choices. The judge that lets this case go forward is only perpetuating that illusion.

  • The Oscars are BORING

    The Oscars, Sunday were the lowest rated ever. Gee, maybe, because they are BORING. They always have been boring, they try to spice them up with “witty” hosts but, no amount of Billy, Whoopi or Steve can change the fact that the show is too long, there are too many awards no one outside the business gives two craps about. That so many have watched every year for so long has always amazed me.