James Jay Lee, who took three people hostages at the Discovery Channel headquarters in Silver Sprints, MD,while wearing "metalic canisters" strapped to his chest and back that he claimed were bombs, was shot dead by SWAT officers when he became agitated after four hours of negotiations and pulled out a handgun.

In addition to being from Hawaii, according to his manifesto - in which he took on the role of The Discovery Channel’s program director - Lee was:

† Pro-abortion, and wanted people sterilized to promote population control: “[P]eople can live WITHOUT giving birth to more filthy human children since those new additions continue pollution and are pollution” and wanted “all programs” on Discovery Health-TLC to “stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants” and instead “encourag[e] human sterilization.”

† Anti-war: “[T]alk about ways to disassemble civilization and … solving global military mechanized conflict."

† Against illegal immigration: “[F]ind solutions to stopping ALL immigration pollution and the anchor baby filth that follows that. … The first world is feeding the population growth of the Third World and those human families are going to where the food is! They must stop procreating new humans looking for nonexistant [sic] jobs!”

† A global warming zealot: “Find solutions for Global Warming, Automotive pollution, International Trade, factory pollution, and the whole blasted human economy.”

 
† Contemptuous of Creationism: “[M]ention the Malthusian sciences about how food production leads to the overpopulation of the Human race. Talk about Evolution. Talk about Malthus and Darwin until it sinks into the stupid people's brains until they get it!!”

† Anti-capitalism: “[C]orrect and dismantle the dangerous US world economy. Find solutions for their disasterous [sic] Ponzi-Casino economy before they take the world to another nuclear war.”

† Against the Obama administration’s stimulus package: “[F]ind solutions for unemployment and housing. All these unemployed people makes me think the US is headed toward more war.”

† A radical environmentalist: “Even one child born in the US will use 30 to a thousand times more resources than a Third World child. … Saving the environment and the remaning species diversity of the planet is now your mindset. Nothing is more important than saving them. The Lions, Tigers, Giraffes, Elephants, Froggies, Turtles, Apes, Raccoons, Beetles, Ants, Sharks, Bears, and, of course, the Squirrels. The humans? The planet does not need humans.”

Were it not for his views on illegal immigration and the stimulus package, he could’ve been one of President Barack Hussein Obama’s czars:

† Climate Czar Todd Stern and Energy and Environment Czar Carol Browner (both of whom support the Dems’ economy-killing cap-and-trade scheme);

† Regulatory Czar Cass Sunstein (he wants to ban hunting and advocates humans representing the rights of animals in court);

† Science Czar John Holdren (advocates greenhouse gas reduction; believes the U.S. should sign the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty; and co-authored a book in 1977, “Ecoscience: Population, Resources, and Environment,” that considered various population control strategies including “laws requiring compulsory abortion,” which the authors maintained “could be sustained under the existing Constitution";

† Medicare Czar Donald Berwick who supports healthcare rationing meant to send people to an early grave; and

† Former Green Jobs Czar Van Jones (a committed Marxist who believes capitalism exploits minorities, and was arrested while protesting against the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999).

If You Don’t Build It, They Will Go

A new analysis of census data by the Pew Hispanic Center finds that the number of illegal aliens has fallen by nearly a million between 2007 to 2009, reports The New York Times:

The number of illegal immigrants in the United States, after peaking at 12 million in 2007, fell to about 11.1 million in 2009, the first clear decline in two decades. … The reduction came primarily from decreases among illegal immigrants from Latin American countries other than Mexico, the report found. … Some 7 million Mexicans make up about 60 percent of all illegal immigrants, still by far the largest national group, the Pew Center said.

The report is based on census data from March 2009, the most recent census sample that is detailed enough for Pew demographers to estimate the statistically elusive population of illegal immigrants. …

[T]he figure that may be most sobering to all sides in the increasingly contentious immigration debate is the estimate that more than 11 million illegal immigrants remain here. The Pew report shows that despite myriad pressures, there was no mass exodus of those immigrants to their home countries, especially not to Mexico.

Instead, the report confirms earlier findings by American and Mexican demographers that the flow of Mexicans coming in to the United States illegally to look for work had slowed sharply.

Despite passing more than a dozen laws in the past couple of years to curb illegal immigration, the Pew report found that the largest drop in the number of illegal aliens did not occur in AZ. Instead, FL, NV and VA – all of which suffered real estate busts – saw significant declines in illegal immigration once new home construction dried up.

The Stiletto Scoops Ed Morrissey

Democrats have a conundrum.  If they agree to extend the Bush tax cuts - the heart of Bush’s economic policies, which only have an expiration date in the first place because Democrats threatened to filibuster them otherwise - they’re endorsing Bush’s economic policies.  If they don’t extend them, Barack Obama and the Democrats still left in Congress will almost certainly create a double-dip recession that will threaten to make their party radioactive for the next few election cycles.  Perhaps they should have thought their 2010 strategy of demonizing Bush through a little more.

- “How Can Dems Extend Bush Tax Cuts While Running Against Bush?,” Hot Air, August 30, 2010

† Another Day, Another Dem Ethics Scandal (second item): The Congressional Black Caucus Foundation will review past awards and toughen its scholarship guidelines after Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX) copped to steering 23 scholarships to her relatives and the children of a staff member, The Associated Press reports:

"I never dreamed such a thing would have occurred," said Amy Goldson, who represents the influential foundation. …

Johnson said Monday her actions were unintentional, but Goldson pointed out that the students, the lawmaker awarding the foundation scholarships or the lawmaker's designee must certify that the recipients are not related to the lawmaker.

Goldson said there were false certifications in Johnson's scholarships.

How serious a scandal is this? Depends whom you ask, The Dallas Morning News reports:

"That looks bad," said Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, a watchdog group. "This is just wrong. A member shouldn't do this." …

Jan Baran, a top Republican ethics lawyer in Washington whose clients have included former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, said the awards may amount to fraud, given that the applicants and those selecting the winners should have known about the eligibility rules.

"If you make factual misrepresentations to obtain money it's usually a form of fraud, either civil or criminal, where you're trying to take possession of money under false pretenses," Baran said. "The question is, who committed the fraud." …

But even without a specific legal violation, Baran noted that the House ethics committee can and has reprimanded or censured members for behavior that reflects poorly on the House. …

Sloan said it might be politically dicey for the ethics committee to target another black lawmaker, now that two – Reps. Charlie Rangel of New York and Maxine Waters of California – face rare ethics hearings in coming months. "There's just too many issues with African-American members," she said.

Baran disagreed. "If a member is committing fraud and getting money for relatives in improper ways, I don't think that's going to stop the ethics committee from taking a look as to what actually transpired," he said.

For her part, Johnson insists that she did not “intentionally mean to violate any rules in the process” and, having been caught red-handed, pledged “[t]o rectify this matter immediately, I will reimburse the funds by the end of this week.”

† Why We Need Gitmo: Terror suspect Mamdouh Mahmud Salim was sentenced to life in prison for spraying Corrections Officer Louis Pepe in the face with hot sauce and stabbing him in the eye with a sharpened comb on November 1, 2000 so he could escape from his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in NYC and attack lawyers Paul McAllister and Charles Adler to make them quit defending him against charges that he was involved in an al-Qaida conspiracy to bomb U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, reports New York Law Journal:

Southern District of New York Judge Deborah A. Batts found Tuesday that a terrorism enhancement under the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines applied to Salim. …

The enhancement and the longer sentence were the result of a 2008 opinion by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in United States v. Salim, 549 F.3d 67, which vacated the initial 32-year sentence Batts gave Salim in 2004. …

Judge Batts originally applied sentencing enhancements for obstruction of justice, attack on an official victim and restraining the victim. But she disagreed that the attack constituted a federal crime of terrorism.

The 2nd Circuit disagreed, with Judges John M. Walker, Jon O. Newman and Sonia Sotomayor saying Batts erred in finding that a terrorism crime requires conduct that transcends national conduct. Sotomayor has since been elevated to the U.S. Supreme Court.

When Pepe addressed Salim - who appeared by video-conference from the supermax prison at Florence, CO, where he has been held since 2004 – he said: "You want to be a martyr. You're not going to be a martyr. You know where you're going? You're going to hell." Salim’s response: "I don't know what you want from me. If he wants to take my eye, let him take my eye."

† The Right To Bear Arms Belongs To Us All: Part II: GA granny Ethel Jones, 69, who sleeps with the gun under a pillow next to her when she is home alone, shot 18-year-old Michael O’Neal Bynum, who broke into her home just before 3 a.m., The Decatur Daily reports:

“I hope this will make people have second thoughts before they break into a home in our neighborhood and stop some of the crime we’ve had around here,” Jones said. …

“I heard somebody at the back door and then around at the front door,” Jones said. “He started shaking it, and I said to myself, ‘Somebody is fixin’ to break in.’ ” …

Jones said she came out of the bathroom and met the suspect holding a pen light a few feet away in her bedroom.

“I shot three times,” Jones said, “and he ran away hollering.”

Jones said she then called 911.

“I was a nervous wreck,” Jones said. “The dispatcher kept telling me to put the gun down, but I was scared, and I didn’t know if he might be laying outside.” …

“I’m glad I had it,” she said. “I don’t know what he would have done when he didn’t find what he was looking for. He might have killed me. You can’t ever tell what people might do these days.”

Bynum was in stable condition in Huntsville Hospital, and will be transferred to Morgan County Jail on charges of second-degree burglary upon his release from the hospital. Bynum will be held without bail; his probation for a prior burglary conviction has been revoked. 

Editorial Note: Jones had once gone target-shooting years earlier, and this “very scary” incident was the first time Jones had fired the pistol. Note that she shot the intruder without accidentally shooting herself or having the gun taken away from her and used against her – two fairly tale scenarios that libs and gun-control advocates (sorry, The Stiletto is being redundant) invariably cite when they argue that people should not be allowed to keep guns in their homes for self-defense.

† Media Irrelevancy – A Self-Inflicted Wound: Washington Post sports columnist Mike Wise wanted to demonstrate that the media will rush to report news without verifying its accuracy, so he concocted a fake "scoop" and posted it on Twitter:
 

In his next tweet, Wise said his source was "a casino employee in Lake Tahoe" (a casino employee in Lake Tahoe has accused Roethlisberger of rape):  

On his radio show - during which he sent the tweets - he admitted the hoax, and said he wanted to prove that "anybody will print anything."

This analysis by Lead Blogger Michael David Smith of Fanhouse.com nicely sums up what many people – including Wise’s bosses at The WaPo, who suspended him for a month for his stunt – were thinking:

If Wise believes his own tweets qualify as "anything," then maybe he had a point about that. It's true that several media outlets, including the Miami Herald, Baltimore Sun, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and Pro Football Talk (where I also write) passed along Wise's tweet. Those outlets attributed the information about Roethlisberger to Wise, while also noting that the NFL had made no formal announcement of Roethlisberger's suspension, and no one else had confirmed the report.

And so what we're left with is Wise proving a point that everyone already knew: When a member of the media reports something noteworthy, other members of the media pass along that report to their readers. The only thing we know now that we didn't know before is that Mike Wise won't hesitate to fabricate a story if he thinks it will help him make some obvious point.

Wise seems to realize now that he made a mistake. In a tweet a few hours after he got the whole thing started, Wise offered his "apologies" while also declaring, "I'm an idiot." But he still seems to think he made some important point about "nobody checking facts or sourcing."

He's wrong about that: Everyone who passed along his Tweet sourced it properly, by attributing it to Mike Wise of the Washington Post. We just didn't know how unreliable a source that was.

† Never Mind Marxism. Will An Obama Administration Be Totalitarian?: Part II: Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius says that before the midterm elections almost exactly two months hence, the Obama administration needs to step up its “reeducation” efforts. Presumably waterboarding is out, but The Stiletto can’t begin to guess what coercive techniques were used to turn normal American into ObamaCare Automatons – or what happened to the white fellow in the orange shirt who, apparently, was able to withstand the mind control reeducation:
 

 

[Hat Tip: RedStateNews]

† Homelessness In The Time Of Obama: The latest annual survey by the New York City Department of Homeless Services to count the number of unsheltered homeless who are living on the streets or in subway stations and tunnels finds that over the past year – the period in which the Obama administration’s economic stimulus and mortgage affordability programs were enacted – there was a 50 percent increase in the street population (from 1,360 to 2.034) and an 11 percent increase in those who lived in the city’s subway system (from 968 to 1, 077).

 

† All The News That’s Fart To Print: If you thought it was weird that someone paid $45K for an X-Ray of then-28-year-old Marilyn Monroe’s chest and lungs, consider this: there is a market for celebrity crappers. Reuters reports that a toilet that belonged to John Lennon “fetched 9,500 pounds ($14,740) at auction”:

 

Lennon, who was murdered in New York in 1980, had the porcelain lavatory removed from Tittenhurst Park in Berkshire, southern England, where he lived from 1969 to 1971, and replaced with a new one. …

 

The toilet was among Beatles memorabilia sold at auction as part of the Beatle week festival in Liverpool, the group's native city in northwest England. The pre-auction estimate was 750 to 1,000 pounds.

 

But that’s chickenfeed compared to the asking price of J.D. Salinger’s toilet on eBay, reports The News & Observer (Raleigh, NC):

 

A well-known memorabilia and collectibles dealer based in Kernersville who has stalked Salinger items for years is asking the standard eBay hey-look-at-this-bizarre-thing-I've-got price of $1 million but said he's open to reasonable offers. 

 

"I bet it's worth $100,000," said Rick Kohl of www .webuytreasure .com , invoking the author's iconic tale of teen alienation. "Come on, it's J.D. Salinger's throne! We're talking 'Catcher in the Rye' here!" …

 

The toilet came not from his final home there but from another nearby that he moved out of in the mid-1980s. …

 

A simple, white Crane Oxford model, the toilet is stamped with a manufacturing date of October 1962, so Salinger didn't actually enjoy its comforts until after writing nearly all of his published work.

 

Kohl, though, noted that Salinger is believed to have left behind a substantial volume of unpublished writing, and that surely Salinger conceived some of it while sitting on the million-dollar thunder pot. …

 

The auction has about two and a half weeks left to run, unless someone hits the "Buy It Now" option and pays the full price.

 

If you decide that you must have this vital part of Salinger's life, be forewarned: The toilet does not come with a seat or lid.

 

And it hasn't been cleaned.

 

Meaning that the winning bidder end up with an unanticipated windfall: a Salinger stool sample. Wonder how much that could go for?

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (fifth item, Is This Any Way To Run A Transition?): Dave Poff of Hickpolitics has spend the past five weeks “watching iCasualties.Org daily” and saw something shocking that escaped the notice of the MSM (emphasis in the original):

 

In 86 months the total number of casualties in Afghanistan was 630 under the Bush command. Under Obama’s weak, waffling, hand-wringing and navel-gazing command, in just 19 months, the US casualty count as of August 30, 2010 now surpasses Bush’s numbers, sitting now at a total of 632…and counting. How can this be?

 

We’ve had 4,763 strategy reviews. We’ve made kissy-face with our enemies. We’ve announced to them that we have a date-certain withdrawal plan if only they could just quiet themselves and wait us out. We’ve changed leadership on the ground, modified the ROE, incorporated the Rahm Emanuel-style approach to winning friends and influencing people there, and we’ve even begun indirect negotiations with our enemy to help facilitate their return to power once we tuck tail and run.

 

In the last four days alone, 22 U.S. troops have been killed in Afghanistan. Against this backdrop, General David Petraeus says that the Taliban were expanding their footprint across the country even as foreign forces close in on their traditional southern strongholds, reports Agence France-Presse:

 

Petraeus acknowledged the spread of Taliban influence, especially to parts of the formerly peaceful north, but said the campaign to counter the insurgency was nearing its final stages.

 

"I don't think anyone disagrees that the footprint of the Taliban has spread," he said, adding the insurgents had "reconnected in various safe havens and sanctuaries outside and inside the country," a reference to Pakistan.

 

"The US and ISAF forces in Afghanistan have worked hard to try to get the inputs right, to establish the organisations that are necessary for the conduct of a civil-military counter-insurgency campaign with our Afghan partners.

 

"We are still in the final stages of getting the inputs right. It's very important to recognise that this was an economy of force effort for a number of years," he said.

 

It’s also important to note that the surge of additional troops will be meaningless if the rules of engagement force them to hold their fire against enemy insurgents instead of going for the kill. The only “inputs” that matter are to put bullets in the bodies of insurgents and their collaborators.

 

[Hat Tip: RedStateNews]

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (third item, A To Z Approach On Illegal Immigration In AZ): An appeal to lift U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton’s preliminary injunction against key provisions of SB 1070 by Snell & Wilmer’s John Bouma on the behalf of Gov. Jan Brewer (R-AZ) contends the district court erred in finding that the federal government would likely prevail on the merits of its challenge to the law and that the injunction was in the public interest, reports The National Law Journal:

"The fundamental premise of the United States' argument is that [the Department of Homeland Security] has exclusive authority to determine whether and to what extent it may receive assistance from state and local authorities in the enforcement of federal immigration laws," countered Bouma in the state's 9th Circuit brief. "The United States' position, however, is contradicted by express directives from Congress and well-established preemption law."

Congress, he argued, has repeatedly encouraged cooperation and assistance from state and local authorities in enforcing federal immigration laws. "And it is Congress' intent - not DHS's - that controls whether S.B. 1070 is preempted."

The district court misapplied the law, he added, by: misconstruing well-established principles of federal preemption law; disregarding its obligation to preserve the constitutionality of the act's provisions and to presume that Arizona will implement the provisions in a constitutional manner; and ignoring the United States' burden on a facial challenge to show that the provisions of S.B. 1070 are unconstitutional in all of their applications.

The Obama Administration, which has until Sept. 23 to file its response to Gov. Brewer's arguments in U.S. v. State of Arizona, has now launched another immigration-related suit against the state, this time against Maricopa Community Colleges - which operates 10 colleges and two vocational training centers in and around Phoenix – for requiring noncitizens to provide their green cards before they could be hired for jobs, reports The Washington Post:

 

The suit … was filed less than two months after the Justice Department sued Arizona and Gov. Jan Brewer (R) over the state's new immigration law. It also comes as the department is investigating Joe Arpaio, the sheriff in Maricopa County, who is known for tough immigration enforcement.

 

In Monday's lawsuit, Justice officials said the colleges discriminated against nearly 250 noncitizen job applicants by mandating that they fill out more documents than required by law to prove their eligibility to work. That violated the federal Immigration and Nationality Act, the department said.

 

The law's anti-discrimination provision "makes it unlawful to treat authorized workers differently during the hiring process based on their citizenship status," said Thomas E. Perez, assistant attorney general for Justice's Civil Rights Division. He said the government "is acting now to remedy this pattern or practice of discrimination." …

 

It is the latest example of stepped-up enforcement by the department's Civil Rights Division [emphasis, The Stiletto], which has been reshaping itself after an exodus of lawyers during the Bush administration. It filed a similiar lawsuit in April against John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. …

 

The government is asking a judge within the Justice Department unit to order the Maricopa colleges to pay a civil penalty of $1,100 for each of the 247 non-U.S.-citizen job applicants it says were required to produce the additional documents. It says the colleges ended the practice in January.

 

Note how Eric Holder’s Justice Department gets all worked up over the civil rights of non-citizens, while yawning at the thought of American citizens – civilians and soldiers alike - being deprived of their Constitutional right to vote.

 

Meanwhile, the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has posted signs along a 60-mile stretch of I-8 between Casa Grande and Gila Bend, AZ, warning travelers they are entering an "active drug and human smuggling area" and may encounter "armed criminals and smuggling vehicles traveling at high rates of speed." This is 100 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border on a major east-west corridor linking Tucson and Phoenix with San Diego, reports The Washignton Times:

 

Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu, whose county lies at the center of major drug and alien smuggling routes to Phoenix and cities east and west, attests to the violence. He said his deputies are outmanned and outgunned by drug traffickers in the rough-hewn desert stretches of his own county.

 

"Mexican drug cartels literally do control parts of Arizona," he said [emphasis, The Stiletto]. "They literally have scouts on the high points in the mountains and in the hills and they literally control movement. They have radios, they have optics, they have night-vision goggles as good as anything law enforcement has. …

 

He said he asked the Obama administration for 3,000 National Guard soldiers to patrol the border, but what he got were 15 signs. …

 

Michael W. Cutler, a retired 31-year U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) senior criminal investigator and intelligence specialist, said the BLM warning signs suggest the U.S. government is "ceding American territory to armed criminals and smugglers." …

 

"How much more land will our nation cede to drug dealers and terrorists? At what point will the administration understand its obligations to really secure our nation's borders and create an immigration system that has real integrity?" Mr. Cutler said.

 

"At the rate we are going, the 'Red, White and Blue' of the American flag will be replaced with a flag that is simply white - the flag of surrender."

 

It would appear that our Commander-in-Chief is applying the same rules of engagement on the Mexican border as he is in Afghanistan.

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (fourth item, Curves Make A Comeback): "Mad Men" star Christina Hendricks, who wears a size 14, complains that the samples high-end designers lend out to actresses for red carpet events are typically a size 0 or 2. The Daily Record (Glasgow) reports:

 

"People have been saying some nice, wonderful things about me. Yet not one designer in town will loan me a dress," Hendricks, 35, told the Scottish newspaper. …

 

She added: "This has always been my size. I've worked on other shows with this same size but 'Mad Men' celebrates it and that is nice." …

 

The 5ft 8in actress, whose measurements are 39D-30-39, has been named in the same breath as some of Hollywood's sexiest ever ladies, including Marilyn Monroe, Brigitte Bardot, Sophia Loren and Scarlett Johansson.
  

Hendricks wore a lavender Zac Posen gown to the Emmy Awards.

[Hat Tip: New York Daily News]

On March 11, Kyle Dubois, 18, and two classmates in his Dover High School electrical trades class tried an experiment: Kyle placed an alligator clamp on one of his nipples, a second student placed one on his other nipple and a third student plugged in the cord, sending an approximately three-second jolt through Dubois. It went badly, The New Hampshire Union Leader reports:

Dubois' heart stopped and paramedics had to restart it with a defibrillator. He was in critical condition and had to be taken to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, where doctors drilled a hole into his skull to check on brain swelling.

Now Kyle and his parents, Robert and Sandra Dubois, are suing the school district, the city and shop teacher Thomas Kelley, alleging 11 counts of negligence. The suit claims that Kelley did not warn students that electricity “could administer harmful or fatal shocks” and that the teacher offered Kyle a Mountain Dew if he shocked himself.

Authorities did not file charges in the case and while Kelley denied the soda allegation, he resigned a month after the incident.

Coping With Hives

3-D Television Is Useless If The Shows Are No Good

While high on meth Chance Kracke put his 7-month-old son in the freezer while he fixed himself a meal, because the "kitchen floor was too dirty," The Arizona Republic reports:

Kracke told police he … let him out after two or three minutes because the baby began crying. The child was fine, except for a cut and lump on the boy's forehead, possibly from the freezer door. …

Investigators asked the child's mother, Leann Kracke, why she didn't report the incident and "she said Chance threatened to harm her if she did," according to a probable cause statement by police. …

When police spoke with Chance and Leann Kracke, they admitted to smoking meth over the past month and a half, police said. …

[P]olice searched the Krache's home and were met with a "strong odor of feces and urine" and cockroaches "in the hundreds," according to the statement. …

The apartment was littered with broken glass from where Chance Kracke allegedly kicked the family dog into a glass door on the entertainment center, according to the statement. …

"Overall, the apartment was filthy with trash, dismantled electronics, sharp objects and alcohol within reach of the children."

Americans reached into their pockets and gave 40 times more to Haiti earthquake victims than to Pakistani flood victims. What gives? Aside from the still-sluggish U.S. economy and high rate of unemployment becoming entrenched, “[r]easons include the slow-motion nature of the calamity, relatively scant TV coverage, and - unmistakably - the fact that the strategic Muslim ally is viewed warily by many Americans,” The Associated Press reports:

No disasters are alike. Yet a month into Pakistan's flood catastrophe, with 8 million people in dire need and a fifth of its territory affected, the donation comparisons are startling.

InterAction, an umbrella group for U.S. relief agencies active abroad, says its affiliates have raised about $12 million thus far for Pakistan, compared to more than $500 million at the same stage of the Haiti earthquake relief effort earlier this year.

The American Red Cross, traditionally the biggest recipient of disaster relief donations, has collected about $2 million for Pakistan and is dipping into a contingency fund to support its work there. At the same stage, it had raised about $100 million in response to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, more than $670 million for Hurricane Katrina and about $230 million for the Haiti quake.

"People find it complicated to understand our relationship with Pakistan - how the government works, who to trust," said Stacy Palmer, editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy, which has been tracking the donations.

Maybe it’s compassion fatigue - there was also massive flooding in Nashville, TN, in May that caused $1 billion in damage  - but this time around, Americans are saying “we gave at the office” and are content to let President Barack Hussein Obama send government aid (after all, the $200 million in “public money” he has already committed still comes out of our wallets).

Zeeshan Suhail, a Pakistani-American who serves on the board of NYC's Muslim Consultative Network, tells Reuters that the controversy over the Ground Zero mosque is a factor: "The culture of hate and bigotry has robbed the Pakistanis of some much needed aid."

The Stiletto recalls that in 2004 American citizens and corporations donated $515 million to Indonesian tsunami victims – a rate of $100,000 per hour. The last she checked, Indonesia is a Muslim country so leaving aside Suhail’s staggering sense of entitlement to American money and compassion, the “Americans hate Muslims” accusation doesn’t cut it – particularly as those Americans who are most likely to donate to charity are also most likely to object to the Ground Zero mosque.

Perhaps Suhail should instead focus on the culture of hate and bigotry in Pakistan: A recent Pew Foundation poll found that 59 percent of called the U.S. an enemy. The same poll found that favorable opinion of al Qaeda doubled between last year and this year (from 9 percent to 18 percent). This goes a long way towards explaining why workaday Americans opened our hearts and wallets to Indonesian Muslims but not to Pakistanis.

Washington Post columnist David Ignatius argues that we should somehow move past our antipathy towards the duplicitous Pakistan because “[h]elping desperate Pakistanis in this catastrophe would be good for the American soul” and “would help get America past its recent traumas about Islamophobia”:

We all know in our personal lives the paradoxical truth about charity - that it helps the giver as much as the receiver. This would be especially true now, with a national mobilization to aid Pakistan. An America that remains closed and bitter toward the Muslim world is a nation still suffering the aftershocks of Sept. 11, 2001. An America that extends a helping hand is one that has surmounted this tragedy and regained its balance.

Clearly it has not occurred to Ignatius that the proposal to build the mosque in the vicinity of  Ground Zero has reopened the deep psychic wounds and that Americans have suffered a collective setback. If you cut out her gratuitous swipes at FOX News, Sarah Palin, and “neocons” this commentary by syndicated columnist Froma Harrop about “the American street” serves to explain to Ignatius why he’s moving too fast for the rest of us:

As Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, writes, the mosque debate could "take a toll on prospects for U.S. policies throughout the greater Middle East." The experts fear that the nastiness will antagonize what is sometimes called the "Arab street" - roughly defined as the frustrated, angry masses in much of the Mideast.

Well, here's the American street. Perhaps it is useful for our makers of foreign policy to understand these feelings, as well. Perhaps their military interventions to turn the Islamic cultures into Jeffersonian democracies have not … delivered the promised groundswell of affection from the people that Condoleezza Rice kept saying we were liberating. …

[P]olls taken nationwide show broad opposition to the Islamic center proposal. Clearly, many good people are against this also.

Perhaps they feel that the project to make common cause with very different cultures has been a one-way street. They've been told for years to tiptoe around Islamic sensitivities, while Islamists have provoked theirs. If a mosque two blocks from the site of outrage done in the name of Islam, albeit a twisted brand, bothers so many Americans - rightly or wrongly - why not just move it elsewhere? 

The American Street is talking. The Street sees its government's program to win hearts and minds delivering only contempt.

The Stiletto is amazed (though perhaps she shouldn’t be) that Suhail expects – demands, even - contempt to be rewarded with compassion.

Another Day, Another Dem Ethics Scandal

Between 2005 and 2008 Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX) steered roughly $20,000 in college scholarships from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation to her grandsons, Kirk and David Johnson, and great-nephews, Gregory and Preston Moore, as well as to the son and daughter of her district director, Rod Givens, The Dallas Morning News reports:

The recipients were ineligible under anti-nepotism rules … [a]nd all of the awards violated a foundation requirement that scholarship winners live or study in a caucus member's district. …

Her handling of the scholarships puts a rare spotlight on the program and how it is overseen. Caucus members have great leeway in how they pick winners and how aggressively they publicize the awards. Some lawmakers promote the program online, for instance, while Johnson does not.

Philanthropy experts said such lax oversight of scholarship money doesn't match the standards for charities.

The foundation - which is supported by private and corporate donations, not taxpayer money - provides $10,000 annually for each member of the Congressional Black Caucus to award in scholarships. Each gets to decide how many ways to split the money and whether to create a judging panel, choose personally or delegate the task.

Johnson, a former chairwoman of the caucus who has served on the board that oversees the foundation, said she wasn't fully aware of the program rules and emphasized that she didn't "personally benefit." …

"The most that any kid normally gets is from $1,000 to $1,200. ... If it was a secret or if I was trying to hide it, I wouldn't have done it," she said.

The foundation's general counsel, Amy Goldson, said Saturday that the scholarships Johnson awarded violated eligibility rules regarding relatives and residency and are "of great concern."

The program "operates on an honor system," so the foundation hadn't known that money went to Johnson's relatives, she said. But when a recipient fails to meet eligibility requirements or "misrepresents their eligibility, the scholarship funds must be returned."

The Stiletto Scoops Glenn Beck

[A]s black pastors go, how representative is Wright? … Not being a congregant of a black church – or of any church – The Stiletto is not in a position to determine … However, this doesn’t prevent her from taking issue with Wright's offensive, over-the-top sermons and speeches – he is reading from a different bible than most Americans, one that Jews and Christians would find unrecognizable.
- “The Gospel According To Jeremiah Wright,” The Stiletto Blog, May 2, 2008

You see, it's all about victims and victimhood; oppressors and the oppressed; reparations, not repentance; collectivism, not individual salvation. I don't know what that is, other than it's not Muslim, it's not Christian. It's a perversion of the gospel of Jesus Christ as most Christians know it.

- Glenn Beck, “Obama’s Faith,” FOX News, August 25, 2010

WALLACE: You said recently that the reason that a growing number of Americans don't think President Obama is a Christian is because they don't recognize the faith that he's practicing. And in fact, you even called it a perversion of the gospel of Jesus Christ. And I - you know I respect you, and I say this affectionately - but who made you the G-d squad?

BECK: Oh, nobody made me the G-d squad. The pope even said - this is Pope Benedict - that it is demonic, not divine, when theology crosses into the line of doing that which only the divine can do. He was speaking specifically about liberation theology. … It's Marxism disguised as religion. … [M]ost Christians would look at collective salvation, which is my salvation - my redemption is incumbent on what the collective does - so I can't be saved unless the collective is saved. Well, that is a direct opposite of what the gospel talks about. … What does the president believe? Four different speeches since he's been president, he has told - and mainly students - that your salvation is directly tied to the collective salvation. That -- that's not something that most Christians recognize. … People aren't recognizing his version of Christianity, just like - and 48 percent of the African American community doesn't recognize it either, by the way. They didn't recognize it with Jeremiah Wright. They don't recognize it now.

“Glenn Beck on 'Restoring Honor' Rally, America's future and His Critics,” FOX News Sunday, August 29, 2010

The Stiletto Scoops Ross Douthat And Daniel Larison (In 140 Characters Or Less) 

Here are a couple of related passages rebutting my recent comments regarding what non-Muslim Americans should expect from moderate Muslim leaders: 

[T]here is no way for Rauf to satisfy his critics in a way that will not destroy his credibility with most other Muslims, which I have to assume is the point. Anti-jihadists are always lamenting that moderate Muslims are too quiescent, passive and silent, but the moment that one of them says anything that they don’t like they dismiss him entirely. …

As far as I can tell, what Rauf’s critics want is not merely someone who is a moderate Muslim, which presumably means someone moderate in his interpretation of Islam as a religion. What they would apparently also like is someone who has no sympathy for the political causes or grievances of any other Muslims in the world. If moderation is defined in that unreasonable way, there probably aren’t very many moderate Muslims after all.
- Ross Douthat quoting Daniel Larison, “More on Rauf and Moderate Islam,” The New York Times, August 27, 2010

[W]ould Rauf really “destroy his credibility” with the world’s Muslims if, say, he didn’t bend over backward to avoid saying a negative word about Iran’s regime when it was in the midst of a brutal crackdown on dissent? Or if he hadn’t offered an inflammatory analogy - using the kind of rhetoric that fuels the poisonous “America’s at war with Muslims” narrative - between al Qaeda’s campaign of terror and the sanctions on Saddam Hussein’s regime? Or if he’d found a way to say something critical about Hamas when an interviewer put him on the spot - not about the Palestinian cause in general, but just about Hamas? …

Maybe his non-comments about Hamas were just an attempt to a duck a “gotcha” question. Certainly I don’t see the imam as a deeply sinister figure, or a brilliant machiavel with vast and dark designs. But he does seem like the kind of person who makes excuses for sinister figures, and curries favor with them, and bobs and weaves where their crimes are concerned, all in the name of dialogue and evenhandedness. And that seems like sufficient grounds for criticism and mistrust.

† Now Is Not The Time To Talk About Race: Well, it depends on the topic of the conversation because the sort of "conversation" Attorney General Eric Holder envisions is a complete waste of time. But Washington Post columnist George Will makes a compelling case for the topic we should be talking about – the plight of the 70 percent of inner city black children who are born out of wedlock, for whom "progress generally halted for those born around the mid-1960s, a time when landmark legislative victories heralded an end to racial discrimination," according to "The Black-White Achievement Gap, by Paul E. Barton and Richard J. Coley of Educational Testing Service:

After surveying much research concerning many possible explanations of why progress stopped, particularly in neighborhoods characterized by a "concentration of deprivation," the ETS report says: "It is very hard to imagine progress resuming in reducing the education attainment and achievement gap without turning these family trends around - i.e., increasing marriage rates, and getting fathers back into the business of nurturing children." And: "It is similarly difficult to envision direct policy levers" to effect that.

So, two final numbers: Two decades, five factors. Two decades have passed since Barton wrote "America's Smallest School: The Family." He has estimated that about 90 percent of the difference in schools' proficiencies can be explained by five factors: the number of days students are absent from school, the number of hours students spend watching television, the number of pages read for homework, the quantity and quality of reading material in the students' homes - and, much the most important, the presence of two parents in the home. Public policies can have little purchase on these five, and least of all on the fifth.

President Barack Hussein Obama’s “Race to the Top” educational reform initiative should start with a race to the altar for single mothers-to-be.

† Living In These Mad, Mad, Madoff Times: The Wall Street Journal reports that consumers are “stubbornly” cling to the "paycheck cycle" – timing shopping sprees to salary or government payments, then reeling in their wallets when the cash runs out:

"A lot of people are still truly living paycheck to paycheck," said Lisa Klauser, vice president for consumer and customer solutions at Unilever North America.

Consumers typically shop close to payday, but the paycheck cycle "heightened during the recession, and it's one of the behaviors we would now call the new normal," said Ms. Klauser. …

The persistence of a marked paycheck cycle suggests that some recessionary patterns will be hard to shake off - particularly among consumers with lower incomes. …

The exact cycle can be hard to predict as timings of paychecks and government payouts vary, but many companies notice a jump at the beginning of the month. The cycle has become more prominent in brands popular with shoppers on low incomes or getting government benefits. Food-stamp benefits, which more people are using, generally are received in the early days of the month in many states.

Spending what you have when you have it means not taking on personal or household debt to buy now and pay later – which, will hurt the economic recovery in the short run but will contribute to a stronger rebound as savings grow and consumers have more money to spend in between the first and middle weeks of the month.

† The Right To Bear Arms Belongs To Us All: Part II: The American Bird Conservancy and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility were amongst several green activists that petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency earlier this month to ban traditional lead ammunition as a "health risk," according to The Washington Times:

[T]hese activists asserted that bullets weighing less than half an ounce might hit the ground and somehow poison the planet. … The Clinton administration's EPA looked into the issue and found no cause for concern. …

This time, however, the EPA did not make its decision on the merits of the argument. The agency instead agreed with an Aug. 20 filing from the National Rifle Association that explained how Congress had specifically excluded ammunition from the Toxic Substances Control Act which governs potentially harmful materials such as lead.

Looks like the greens are shooting blanks.

† All The News That’s Fart To Print: Chemistry postdocs Shanwen Tao and Rong Lan at Heriot-Watt University's School of Engineering and Physical Sciences in Edinburgh have a $203K grant from the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council to develop the world's first urine-powered fuel cells, Asian News International reports:

While fuel cells usually rely on flammable hydrogen gas or toxic methanol to generate electricity, Tao and Lan's cheaper prototype relies instead on urea, an organic chemical compound produced as waste when the body metabolizes protein. …

The Carbamide Power System prototype can break urea or urine from humans or animals down into water, nitrogen and CO2, and also produce electricity at the same time.

Unlike existing fuel cells that require catalysts made from precious metals like platinum, the "Youtricity" research group's prototype uses a cheaper catalyst and less expensive membranes. …

The prototype's exact components aren't being publicized, but the team is planning to have a demonstration system ready next year.

† Breasts Are Not Udders (last item): Feminists and lacto-Nazis insist that breasts are not ornamental orbs, but utile udders that give sustenance to a mewling and puking baby in some mysterious way - no double-blind longitudinal clinical trials have ever been done - that formula cannot. Yet when former Sen. Alan Simpson (R-WY) referred to tits (AKA teats) exactly that way – comparing Social Security to "a milk cow with 310 million tits" – NOW and the Older Women's League demanded that Simpson resign from the bipartisan deficit commission or that President Barack Hussein Obama remove him. The Stiletto is confused.

† Updates To Previous Posts (seventh item, A To Z Approach On Illegal Immigration In AZ):

Gov. Jan Brewer (R-AZ) sent a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton demanding she remove a from a State Department report to the United Nations' human rights commissioner a statement that one of the ways the U.S. is protecting human rights is the Obama administration litigating the state's new immigration law, calling the reference "downright offensive," reports The Washington Times:

"The idea of our own American government submitting the duly enacted laws of a state of the United States to 'review' by the United Nations is internationalism run amok and unconstitutional," Brewer wrote. …

A State Department spokesman had no immediate comment on Brewer’s letter.

Brewer … is running for election in November. Her popularity in Arizona and her national profile have soared since she signed the immigration measure in April.

It’s not just offensive that a group of Americans and their state representatives are being judged on their human rights record by the likes of Camaroon, Saudi Arabia  and Cuba, but a case can be made that discouraging illegal immigration SB 1070 is a humanitarian act. Each year a couple of hundred illegals crossing the Sonoran desert die of thirst and exposure; they are preyed upon by Medican drug gangs who want to use them as drug mules or to extract ransom from their families; and are abused by Mexican authorities.

If Hillary Clinton doesn’t soon divorce herself from Obama’s “so-sorry” anti-American foreign affairs and national security policies by resigning her position she may find herself unelectable in 2012 or 2016.

† Updates To Previous Posts (last item, Say It Aint So Roger, Andy, Jason …): At his arraignment on perjury and related charges, Roger Clemens told U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton that it aint so, pleading "Not guilty.”

Piyawan Palasarn, 31, was arrested at Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi Airport when a drugged tiger cub was found hidden amongst plush toy tigers in her luggage, The Associated Press reports:

The woman, a Thai national, had checked in for her flight [to Iran] and her oversized bag was sent for an X-ray which showed what appeared to be a live animal inside, according to TRAFFIC, a wildlife trade monitoring group.

The woman was arrested at before boarding her Sunday flight. The cub, estimated to be about 3 months old, was sent to a wildlife conservation center in Bangkok. …

She denied the luggage with the cub belonged to her and said another passenger had asked her to carry it for them, said Adisorn Noochdumrong, head of an international wildlife division at the conservation center.

The cub could have fetched about $3,200 on the black market in Iran, where it is popular to have exotic pets, Mr. Adisorn said. He said he did not know what the woman purportedly intended to do with this particular cub.

Signs That You May Have Celiac Disease

For Obama, Steep Learning Curve As Chief In Time Of War

Toledo attorney Kristin Ann Stahlbush has been suspended for two years by the OH Supreme Court for inflating billable hours for her work as a court-appointed attorney in the juvenile and general division courts in Lucas County, billing more than 24 hours on at least three days and more than 20 hours a day on five other days. Legal Profession Blog reports:

In all, [she] invoiced the county for a total of 3,451 billable hours for work allegedly performed during [2006], a number that would require her to have worked almost 10 hours per day on all 365 days of the year. 

† How To Tell If You’re A Closet Racist (For Whites Only): Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer comments on the sudden pervasiveness of virulent racism in America:
 

[P]promiscuous charges of bigotry are precisely how our current rulers and their vast media auxiliary react to an obstreperous citizenry that insists on incorrect thinking.

‡ Resistance to the vast expansion of government power, intrusiveness and debt, as represented by the Tea Party movement? Why, racist resentment toward a black president.

‡ Disgust and alarm with the federal government's unwillingness to curb illegal immigration, as crystallized in the Arizona law? Nativism.

‡ Opposition to the most radical redefinition of marriage in human history, as expressed in Proposition 8 in California? Homophobia.

‡ Opposition to a 15-story Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero? Islamophobia.

Now we know why the country has become "ungovernable," last year's excuse for the Democrats' failure of governance: Who can possibly govern a nation of racist, nativist, homophobic Islamophobes?

Note what connects these issues. In every one, liberals have lost the argument in the court of public opinion. Majorities - often lopsided majorities - oppose President Obama's social-democratic agenda (e.g., the stimulus, Obamacare), support the Arizona law, oppose gay marriage and reject a mosque near Ground Zero.

What's a liberal to do? Pull out the bigotry charge, the trump that preempts debate and gives no credit to the seriousness and substance of the contrary argument.

† Living In These Mad, Mad, Madoff Times: Investor's Business Daily reports that in 2Q 2010 the number of U.S. subscribers to cable, satellite and telecom TV services fell for the first time ever:

The U.S. multichannel TV market lost 216,000 customers last quarter, vs. a gain of 378,000 a year ago. The total number of subscribers to cable, satellite and telecom video fell to 100.1 million in the second quarter, SNL Kagan says.

Cable TV firms lost 711,000 subscribers last quarter, while satellite and telecom TV services managed to add 81,000 and 414,000 subscribers, respectively.

"[W]e believe economic factors such as low housing formation and a high unemployment rate contributed to subscriber declines in the second quarter," said SNL Kagan analyst Mariam Rondeli.

† Now Is Not The Time To Talk About Race: When Congress passed the Nursing Home Reform Law to correct pervasive elder abuse at these facilities in 1987, lawmakers could not have envisioned that patients rights would collide with civil rights, The Associated Press reports:

Certified nursing assistant Brenda Chaney was on duty in an Indiana nursing home one day when she discovered a patient lying on the floor, unable to stand.

But Chaney couldn't help the woman up. She had to search for a white aide because the woman had left instructions that she did not want any black caregivers. And the nursing home insisted it was legally bound to honor the request. …

At nursing homes, tension over patient rights and race "comes up occasionally in virtually every state in the United States," said Steve Maag, director of assisted living and continuing care at the American Association of Homes and Services for the Aging. …

Under federal law, nursing home residents are free to choose their own physicians. Indiana's law is broader, saying patients can choose their "providers of services." Both laws say nursing homes must reasonably accommodate residents' "individual needs and preferences." …

Nursing homes can be hotbeds of racial friction, said David Smith, a Drexel University professor who has studied racial integration in hospitals and long-term care centers. In urban areas, staffs are often predominantly African-American while most patients are white. Some elderly people revert in dementia to the prejudices they grew up with. …

Courts have held that patients can refuse to be treated by a caregiver of the opposite sex, citing privacy issues. But the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, ruling in Chaney's case last month, said applying that accommodation to race goes too far.

† Fed Up With Farmers: The Washington Post notes that “the Obama administration was paying Brazil $147.3 million to settle its international trade lawsuit over U.S. cotton subsidies, thus freeing Washington to continue lavishing taxpayer money on wealthy farmers in Arkansas, home state of politically embattled Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln.” Apparently, that’s not enough for Lincoln, who chairs the Senate Agriculture Committee:

Ms. Lincoln, who, is now demanding $1.5 billion in "disaster aid" for already-subsidized farmers in Arkansas and other states, mostly in the South. Even the usually farm-friendly Senate balked; the extra spending threatened to sink a $20 billion small-business aid bill that President Obama supports. So White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel got her to relent in return for his promise to find the money elsewhere by the end of August. Officials are scouring the federal government for cash. …

[T]he 2008 farm bill, passed over Mr. Bush's veto, sought to end notoriously recurrent, and notoriously expansive, "relief" demands. It established a fund that farmers afflicted by truly epic events could tap if they bought federally subsidized crop insurance to cover more mundane losses. But most Southern farmers opted out, arguing that insurance was a bad deal for them. Ms. Lincoln, it seems, was their insurance policy.

† Mortgage Loan Modification Less Than Advertised: Dealerships that were teeming with customers while the Obama administration’s Cash For Clunkers program was in effect became ghost towns when the cash ran out. Unable to sell homes now that the $8,000 tax credit for first-time purchasers has expired, its real estate agents and sellers who are suffering now, reports The New York Times:

[T]he volume of single-family home sales [is] at the lowest level since 1995. …

Mortgage rates are the lowest in modern memory while affordability, because of price declines of 30 percent in many areas, is the highest in at least a decade. The government is allowing buyers to put only a token amount down, guarantees lenders against default and regularly issues proclamations that the worst is over.

Apparently, all of that is not enough to put a floor under housing. With unemployment steady for month upon month at more than 9 percent, and with millions heavily in debt or simply skittish, many potential buyers are lost to the market.

No region was immune in July, with sales in the Northeast dropping 30 percent, the Midwest falling by a third, the South down 20 percent and the West off 23 percent. …

Analysts had been expecting a drop in July home sales because the month was the first time in a year that buyers were ineligible for the government housing tax credit. But the consensus expectation was for a decline of about 13 percent. …

Economists said that just as the credit had artificially buoyed the market, the end of the credit was artificially depressing it. “If you pay them, they will come. But when ya stop paying them, they leave in droves,” the economist Tom Lawler wrote in an e-mail.

His conclusion: “People shouldn’t panic.”

Either Lawler has ice water running through his veins or he’s determined to ignore the effect the growing inventory of bank-owned homes will have on the market. Robert Ward, director of global forecasting at the Economist Intelligence Unit, tells The Washington Times that “Real estate problems will continue to weigh on growth” because “[t]here is still a large amount of housing likely to come into foreclosure, and many homes already held by banks as a result of foreclosures have not yet moved onto the market."

† Updates To Previous Posts (sixth item, Reality Check: Part IV): Two new Rasmussen Reports telephone surveys of likely voters finds that Republicans are trusted more than Democrats on all 10 of the important issues about which the company regularly conducts polling: the economy (47 percent to 39 percent); ethics (40 percent to 38 percent); health care (48 percent to 40 percent); immigration (44 percent to 35 percent); Afghan war (43 percent to 36 percent); Iraq war (43 percent to 40 percent); national security and the War on Terror (49 percent to 37 percent); taxes (52 percent to 36 percent); education (41 percent) to 40 (percent); and Social Security (44 percent to 38 percent). 

Note that President Barack Hussein Obama and his fellow Dems have demagogued every one of these issues: the economy (“we inherited the worst economy since the Great Depression”); ethics (during her first 100 hours as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi vowed to "drain the swamp" after more than a decade of Republican rule); immigration (without having read AZ’s SB1070, Attorney General Eric Holder opined “I think it has the possibility of leading to racial profiling and putting a wedge between law enforcement and a community that would, in fact, be profiled” and then sued the state to block its enforcement); Afghan war (AKA “the Good War”); Iraq war (“Bush lied and people died”); War on Terror (AKA “Overseas Contingency Operation”);  taxes (“end Bush’s tax cuts for the rich”); education (“No Child Left Behind is firmly cemented as President Bush’s failed education experiment”); and Social Security (Republicans trying to destroy Social Security).

Is this one big hot credibility gap or what?

† Updates To Previous Posts (seventh item, Is Hasan A Crazy Terrorist, Or A Terrorist Crazy?): The Washington Times slams the Department of Defense’s final report on the Fort Hood domestic terror attack by Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan (“The latest Fort Hood report fails to face the Islamic problem head-on. It reinforces the generally understood rule that Muslims are a privileged class in the American military who - figuratively speaking - can get away with murder.”). Aside from the report treating the Hasan incident as “merely a case of workplace violence,” there is one deeply troubling passage The Washington Times spotlights:

A vaguely worded passage recommends firming up the process whereby individuals act as "ecclesiastical endorsers of chaplains." … A majority of the Muslim chaplains in the U.S. military were validated by the Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences, part of Cordoba University in Leesburg, founded by Taha Jabir Al-Awani, president of the Fiqh Council of North America. A fatwa from this institution on Muslims serving in the U.S. military states, "We abide by every law of this country except those laws that are contradictory to Islamic law." In other words, Shariah is supreme to the officer's oath to the Constitution. An endorsement from this group should be considered a red flag, not qualification to serve.

† Updates To Previous Posts (fifth item, Depends Whose Ox Is Gored): Unless U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth’s injunction on using federal money to fund human embryonic stem cell research is overturned, the National Institutes of Health will halt experiments that were approved for funding or are already underway when they come up for renewal and has already stopped evaluating new proposals for funding, says NIH Director Francis Collins if a new court order is not overturned, The Washington Post reports:

[Fifty] requests for new funding that were being assessed by the NIH had been "pulled out of the stack" and will not be considered further, Collins said. About a dozen other requests for $15 million to $20 million that had gone through the full review and were likely to be approved were frozen, he said. In addition, 22 grants totalling about $54 million due for renewal in September will be cut off, he said. …

Another 199 grants for about $131 million that had already been awarded will be able to continue, Collins said. But those grants, including 143 worth about $95 million that are up for renewal within the next year, will be forced to stop if the situation is not resolved by the time they come up for review, Collins said.

The Obama administration intends to appeal Lamberth’s ruling.

New York Times reporter Susan Dominus recently trailed 34=year old lawyer Reshma Saujani while she practiced shoe-leather politics on the streets of Astoria, Queens in her bid to challenge Rep. Carolyn Maloney in the September 14^th Democratic primary, and was particularly struck by her shoes – not because they were stylish (they were), but because she wasn’t hobbled by the end of the day.  Saujani let her in on a little secret:

“They’re the Kate Spade wedges,” she said, sagging slightly, as if she had only just then been reminded that she had feet. “They’re these politician-woman shoes.”

She had gotten the tip from someone who worked for Hillary Rodham Clinton. They are apparently something of an “it” shoe right now for women in politics: Ms. Saujani said that Kathleen M. Rice, who is running for attorney general, also wore them (a photograph on Ms. Rice’s Facebook page bears that out). The chief of staff for a prominent woman in Congress told me that she, too, religiously relied on her Kate Spade wedge heels (though she spoke on the condition of anonymity because she preferred not to be known for her brand of footwear).

“They’re very comfy,” said Annie Mullaly, Ms. Saujani’s finance director. “They’re like Crocs. You’ll see them everywhere once you’ve identified them.”  

I know. We, the news media, are not supposed to ask female candidates about their hairstyle or their choice of pantsuits over skirts or their shoes. It is irrelevant. It is trivializing. It is sexist. “You would never write about Chuck Schumer’s shoes,” Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand said in a New York magazine article in response to a question about her flats.

But the Kate Spade wedge heels are not just one candidate’s shoes. They seem to be the shoes of a circle of younger women aspiring to power or already in it, women directly and indirectly passing on to one another ways of navigating the particular challenges of being a woman in the public eye. A woman must look put-together, but not as if she is a slave to fashion; she must look groomed, but never be spotted grooming.  …

The shoes: the Halle, which sells for around $300, has a round-toed front that speaks of 1970s-era barrier-breakers’ pumps, and a high wedged back that looks expensive and chic, appropriate for drinks at a new hotel lounge with tech entrepreneurs hungry to see their kind in politics.

As if descending into a fetid pit, standing on a crowded platform while on the lookout for an unattended-package-that-could-be-a-bomb and a nut job who’s waiting to shove you onto the tracks as a subway train is pulling into the station, and cramming yourself onto a train twice a day isn’t unpleasant enough, under a controversial proposal NYers could have been forced to stand on inter-borough commutes that can take up to 90 minutes. The New York Daily News reports: 

NYC Transit won't try to cram even more subway riders aboard trains by deploying cars without seats. …

A one-train pilot program, conceived more than a year ago, was expected to begin sometime this year so managers could evaluate a low-cost way of carrying more rush-hour passengers.

But with riders getting slammed with fare hikes and service cuts, the new NYC Transit administration saw trouble down the line.

"People are already feeling they're paying more for less," a transit official said.

Help Prevent Liver Spots

Glenn Beck Is Not Martin Luther King Jr.

Colondra Hamilton ‘s eyes were not on the road and her hands were not upon the wheel when Cincinnati police pulled her over for a traffic violation, reports The Smoking Gun:

[O]fficers noticed that Hamilton’s pants were unbuttoned. And she had a vibrator in her lap. Questioned by cops, Hamilton admitted to engaging in auto erotic manipulation, and revealed that she had also been watching a porno movie that was playing on the laptop of a friend in the passenger seat, according to an Elmwood Place Police Department report.

NY Archbishop Timothy Dolan says he is “just a little bit apprehensive” that the “noble values” of tolerance and unity in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks “may be a bit at risk in the way this conversation and debate about the site of the mosque is taking place," adding, "I sure don't have strong feelings on where the mosque should ultimately be.” 

It is difficult to say whether his caviling and quailing statement refers to the majority of Americans and NYers who have no objection to a mosque being built in lower Manhattan as long as it is outside the physical and psychological boundaries of Ground Zero – certainly not close enough to where the Twin Towers once stood so as to have had airplane parts raining down on its roof that day – or to the militant Islamists and lunatic fringe liberals who object to a mosque (which Jonah Goldberg calls “an Islamic Niketown”) being built unless it is built in close proximity to where human remains of terror victims continue to be recovered nearly a decade after the attack.

In any case, proponents of the Ground Zero mosque can no longer smear opponents as racist, since they include not only the usual targets of this tactic but also New York Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (D) - who represents the lower Manhattan district that includes Ground Zero - Gov. David Paterson (D-NY), Majority Leader Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) – as well as 68 percent of all voters, including 54 percents of Democrats, 70 percent of independents, 61 percent of moderates, 45 percent of liberals, and 58 percent of non-white minorities, according to a recent CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll.

What to do? What to do? Forget racism; equate Ground Zero mosque opponents with … terrorism! In the August 23^rd issue of New York magazine, Peter Maas writes (emphasis throughout, The Stiletto):

W.J.T. Mitchell, a visual theorist at the University of Chicago, has noted that monuments and images can gain power by being attacked. The World Trade Center is an example - a pair of ungainly and unloved office buildings acquired a tragic halo once they were destroyed. …

A similar dynamic occurred in Afghanistan when the Buddhas at Bamiyan were blown up in 2001, turning them into global symbols of Taliban extremism—though in Afghanistan itself, the Taliban proudly disseminated images of the desecration. Previously, only religious scholars had paid much attention to the Buddhas, chiseled into the side of a cliff.

The lesson, for those who would wish to destroy a worthy item that is embedded with religious, cultural, or political value, is that they’re playing a dangerous game.  …

The irony is that by trying to destroy the project, these opponents are making it all the more meaningful.

For her part, CBS News anchor Katie Couric (Is she still around?) commented (emphasis, The Stiletto):

There is a debate to be had about the sensitivity of building this center so close to Ground Zero.

But we can not let fear and rage tear down the towers of our core American values.

Maas and Couric are creating an equivalency between the physical destruction of the Twin Towers and the Buddhas and opposition to the construction of a mosque at Ground Zero that isn’t even in the blueprint phase yet. This rhetorical overreach is so desperate as to be beyond contempt.

There Ought Not To Be A (Sharia) Law

Applying Sharia law, a Saudi Arabian court has ruled that a man convicted of paralyzing a man in a fight should be rendered paralyzed himself by having his spinal cord severed, despite pleas from international human rights groups not to impose such a stunningly barbaric punishment. Saudi government officials are trying to broker a deal to forestall the sentence, reports The Washington Times:
 

According to reports from Saudi Arabia, the court in Tabuk, on the northwest coast of the kingdom, has approached a number of hospitals about the possibility of cutting the convicted man's spinal cord.

So far at least two hospitals have refused to carry out the procedure, citing ethical concerns.

In the Saudi justice system, the court establishes guilt and the family of the victim or the victim himself has the option of inflicting the same injury upon the guilty party, seeking blood money or offering a pardon.

"The sentence of 'an eye for an eye' has always been in conflict with medical ethics," said Christoph Wilcke, a senior researcher for Saudi Arabia at Human Rights Watch, adding, "This case is a new angle in the sense that doctors are speaking out." …

Other cases of retribution sentences, known in Arabic as "qisas," have included eye-gouging, tooth extraction, and death in cases involving murder. Under the Saudi justice system, people are flogged for some offenses, thieves have their limbs amputated and those found guilty of murder, rape, drug smuggling or blasphemy are beheaded in public.

Saudi officials, meanwhile, say they are trying to persuade the paralyzed man to drop the demand that the defendant's spinal cord be severed and instead accept compensation.

Editorial Note: Against this backdrop, The Obama Administration has submitted a report to the U.N. Human Rights Council admitting that there are human rights issues in the U.S.

The Definition of Chutzpah: Part XII

Washington Post food critic Tom Sietsema received an E-mail from reader Art Taylor who described a recent dining experience at a Panera in Fairfax, VA:  

[D]uring a busy lunchtime -- the woman beside us had commandeered a four-top for herself, her computer, her paperwork and a large rolling suitcase that blocked the area between her table and ours. (She didn't offer to move it as I tried to maneuver into our seat.) She was neither eating nor drinking anything from Panera, merely conducting phone calls and e-mails for her business as a wedding photographer. Soon after we sat down, she motioned to the busy barista to come over (she was seated right by the counter) and asked him to please plug in her laptop behind the counter, since her battery was running down, and spent several minutes trying to get the cord to reach properly! But the real kicker? Halfway through our meal she dug into the rolling suitcase and pulled out her lunch: a sandwich she'd made at home.

† Now Is Not The Time To Talk About Race: Des Moines police arrested several people for a series of racially-motivated attacks outside the Iowa State Fairgrounds this past weekend, reports The Des Moines Register:

There are indications that some of the fights - which appear to involve mostly teenagers and young adults - were racially motivated, police said.

"We don't know if this was juveniles fighting or a group of kids singling out white citizens leaving the fairgrounds," Sgt. Lori Lavorato said. "It's all under investigation, but it's very possible it has racial overtones." …

Sgt. David Murillo stated in a report on Friday night, "On-duty officers at the fairgrounds advise there was a group of 30 to 40 individuals roaming the fairgrounds openly calling it 'beat whitey night.' "

Jammie Carroll, 36, of Polk City, was seriously injured in the 3000 block of East Grand Avenue Friday night after a group of people beat him up, causing severe injuries to his eyes, cheekbones and nose, Murillo wrote. Carroll is white, and many of the suspects are black, police said.

State Rep. Ako Abdul-Samad, D-Des Moines, who has worked to fight gang-related violence, said he doesn't have enough information to decide if the fights were racially motivated. He said police comments that race was involved could miss other factors, such as nonracial taunting.

"Unfortunately, like any other city, you have certain parts of town that individuals congregate in," Abdul-Samad said. "You have those that go into that area with no problem, and those who cannot."

The Stiletto wonders whether Abdul-Samad would have been willing to give a group of white assailants who set upon a black man the same benefit of the doubt as regards their motives.

† Living In These Mad, Mad, Madoff Times: Hardship withdrawals from 401(k) retirement saving plans rose to the highest level in 10 years through 2Q 2010, according to Fidelity Investments said on Friday, suggesting that cash-strapped Americans are now looting their retirement accounts to make ends meet, reports CNNMoney.com:

As of the second quarter, 2.2% of all 401(k) participants had made a hardship withdrawal at some point over the preceding 12 months. That's up from 2% in the prior year, and was the highest level in 10 years.

At the same time, the percentage of 401(k) participants that had an outstanding loan from their account rose to a record high of 22% in the second quarter. The average loan amount was $8,650 at the end of the quarter. …

The top reasons people took loans and made withdrawals were to prevent foreclosure or eviction, pay for college, or purchase a home, according to the firm.

"The current economy has forced some workers to borrow from their 401(k) accounts in order to pay for critical living expenses, ultimately jeopardizing their future retirement," said James MacDonald, president of workplace investing for Fidelity Investments.

He added that for some investors "taking a loan or a hardship withdrawal from their 401(k) may be their only option because it's their only form of savings.

Such withdrawals made by people younger than 59½-years-old are not only taxed as income, but are also slapped with a 10% penalty.

† The Right To Bear Arms Belongs To Us All: Part II: John Howard Jr. (AKA “Killa”) and another man, William Omar Jacobs, threw a rock through a glass door at the home of Superior Court Judge Carlisle Overstreet, entered the premises and headed upstairs. Overstreet, 65, grabbed his gun and shot Howard in the chest when he saw him coming down the stairs with a bandana covering his face and socks on his hands. The 20-year-old, who has a history of break-ins and was abusing OTC cold medicine Coricidin, was pronounced dead at Medical College of Georgia Hospital. Sheriff Ronnie Strength, who “has known Overstreet for about 45 years and called him a ‘good marksman,’” tells The Augusta Chronicle that “[p]hysically, the judge is fine but upset”:

Strength said his office advocates that people be armed and follow the judge's example.

"We support that 100 percent," the sheriff said. "If somebody breaks into your home, we expect and hope that what Judge Overstreet did this morning would be done by any other citizen."

Jacobs, who had previously been arrested on criminal trespass, family violence battery and drug possession charges, escaped but later turned himself in.

† Negating The N-Word: The Washington Post’s Courtland Milloy ruminates on how to communicate the N-word without writing the N part:

[T]he N-word - the euphemism for that taboo sound, the racial curse: in eye, double g and … er, excuse me; I almost cast a spell. You can't spell it, either.

We can, however, play a game that linguists call circumlocution - where we speak or write around the word so that you don't actually see or hear it but still know what it means. That way, the idea of what's being referred to sinks imperceptibly into the subconscious and thus keeps the taboo strong. …

Some news organizations will relent and publish the actual word, but only if it is used in an innocuous quote about the word itself. On the other hand, if the quote about the word is not so innocuous - say, a white person like [Laura] Schlessinger is trying to tell a black caller not to be so sensitive about the word - then it's back to euphemisms.

Or, more accurately, our superstitions about "the one that must not be spoken." If race relations in America are so bad that we can't look at a word, then we are doomed.

In quoting some of what Schlessinger said on the show, the Huffington Post said: "Turn on HBO and listen to a black comic, and all you hear is n****, n*****, n*****."

Now we're spelling the word with snowflakes.

Some would say that's fitting 'cause snowflakes are, um, white.

† Updates To Previous Posts (The Uniter: Part III): President Barack Hussein Obama has not only alienated an important voting block in NYC, but has incurred the wrath of two high-ranking NY pols in his own party who, like him, are black. Gov. David Paterson remains resentful of Obama’s efforts to throw him under the bus by pressuring him to step aside to give Attorney General Andrew Cuomo a clear field in the 2010 gubernatorial primary race - and is holding a grudge over it. And commenting on Obama’s suggestion that he “end his career with dignity” instead of fighting ethics charges in the House, Rep. Charlie Rangel was dismissive: “Frankly, he has not been around long enough to determine what my dignity is. For the next two years, I will be more likely to protect his dignity” (translation: “Go away kid, you bother me”). Oh, and his fellow man doesn’t think much of Obama, either.

† Updates To Previous Posts (fifth item, Garbage In, Garbage Out: Part II): Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is backing off his pledge to use federal stimulus money to overhaul 1,000 schools a year, because “negotiations among federal regulators, state officials and local educators have led to delays and confusion,” reports The New York Times:

In this sprawling district east of Los Angeles, for example, the authorities announced plans earlier this year to use the program to convert Pacific High, one of California’s worst-performing schools, to a charter school, involving a comprehensive makeover.

But with time running short this summer, the San Bernardino district switched course, adopting only smaller changes - a crackdown on tardiness and extending the school day, among others - that officials said would be more manageable.

When students returned for classes on Aug. 3, even the plan for a longer school day was delayed because California had still not distributed the $5.2 million in federal money the district hopes to spend on the school. …

[E]xperts have been warning for months that the administration’s timetable was too tight, forcing schools and districts to create last-minute plans.

“To do this right, schools needed to know probably nine months ago that they’d be funded, but many are only finding out now,” said Robert Manwaring, an expert on school turnaround efforts at Education Sector, a nonprofit research center in Washington. …

But the program is financed with stimulus money that by law must be awarded this fall, so federal officials have rushed to inaugurate it this year.

Yet another unwieldy, ill-conceived rushed, government bailout that wastes taxpayer funds. Call it “Cash For Flunkers.”

Editorial Note: Coincidentally - or not – Barack Obama Elementary School, a new environmentally friendly "green" school just opened its doors in Upper Marlboro, MD.

While in town attending a wedding at the State Capitol in Madison, WI, John Myers wanted a family photo in front of the majestic structure so he set the timer on his new Canon G7 camera and ran over to join his wife, Katharine, and their children, Charlie and Matilda. Shortly afterward, they started to head to the reception when he realized he had forgatten his bag -  but when he went back to retrieve it the bag was nowhere to be found. As luck would have it, the family photograph happened to capture the theif in the background rummaging through Myers’ bag, reports Wisconsin State Journal:

The photo clearly shows in the background, behind the Myers family, a man dressed in hard-soled dark brown shoes, white socks, cut-off dark blue denim shorts and dark T-shirt and ball cap, going through the bag on the ground at the building entrance. …

It turns out the man in the photograph resembled a man who frequented the Capitol grounds.

“They were amazing,” Myers said. “They located the guy. He was still carrying the bag.”

When he was stopped by police, near the Capitol at West Washington Avenue, not only did the man have the bag with him, but it contained Myers’ wallet, cash, credit cards and other items.

The man, who was arrested and identified as Glenn R. Lambright, 59, no permanent address, told police he found the bag abandoned, and he also told them where he had trashed the rest of the bag’s contents.

Dealing With Lactose Intolerance

Sneezing Again? Avoid Ragweed

Alexander Everest, promised foreign medical school graduates that his company, Elite American Health Systems, could place them in residency training programs paying at leading U.S. hospitals – for a cool $100,000 fee. NY prosecutors allege that he submitted forged documents and bribed an employee who handled residency applications to get four candidates placed at Harlem Hospital, The Wall Street Journal reports:

Mr. Everest, 30 years old, of California, pleaded not guilty Thursday to charges of bribery, criminal possession of a forged instrument, offering a false instrument for filing, and giving unlawful gratuities. … George Vomvolakis, Mr. Everest's lawyer … said his client "is a very generous guy - and his generosity was mistaken for a bribe." …

Evelyn Hernandez, a spokeswoman for the New York City Health and Hospitals Corp., said Mr. Everett approached Harlem Hospital for slots for first-year residents. The slots required applicants to have been accepted already to a second-year specialty program in another hospital.

Mr. Everest allegedly provided an employee at the hospital with forged letters from a California hospital to show that the applicants had been accepted into a second-year program. And he gave her a check for $4,000, followed by another check for $2,000. She reported him to hospital officials, and later told him she knew the letters were forged. He then allegedly gave her $6,000 for time to get a letter from a different hospital - which was also forged - and gave her $3,000 more before he was arrested.

† The Uniter: Part III: Nearly 8 out of 10 Jews (78 percent ) voted for Barack Obama in 2008 (he wasn’t using his middle name back then; only “racists” were), but a survey conducted in April finds that fewer than half (42 percent) would vote to re-elect him. And in 2008, the ratio of Democrat Jews to Republican Jews was more than three to one vs. less than two to one today. The New York Times reports that “[t]his is no doubt a reaction, at least in part, to the Obama administration having taken a hard rhetorical stance with Israel” while courting the Muslim world:

Some of the president’s most ardent critics and some of Israel’s staunchest American defenders - two groups that are by no means mutually exclusive - have seized on what they see as the administration’s unfair and unbalanced treatment of Israel and have taken their denunciations to the extremes. …

Fair or not, these criticisms are crystallizing into a shared belief among many: Obama is burning bridges with the Jewish community in order to build bridges to the Muslim world.

† Now Is Not The Time To Talk About Race: Since April there have been 10 bias-related assaults on Mexicans in the Port Richmond section of Staten Island and all of these cases, blacks were the assailants, reports the Los Angeles Times:

"Why this is happening? If you ask 10 different people, you might get 10 different answers," said Ed Josey, president of the Staten Island branch of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, during a march Aug. 6 led by religious and civic leaders to condemn the violence.

[Ana Maria] Archila is a co-director of Make the Road New York, one of several groups involved in efforts to resolve the problem. "It's extremely insular and it's extremely isolated," she said of Staten Island, a mostly suburban island of 491,000. Best known for the orange ferry that carries commuters and tourists the five miles between Lower Manhattan and the borough, its population is overwhelmingly white - 75% - but it has a growing Latino population now estimated at about 15%.

Archila and Jacob Massaquoi, a leader in Staten Island's African immigrant community, said tensions had grown along with anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States, something they blame on Arizona's crackdown on undocumented residents and conservative commentators such as Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck [emphasis, The Stiletto]. "Their rhetoric is very personal, very inflammatory," Massaquoi said. …

[A]fter the Aug. 6 rally, Josey questioned why the Mexican consul general felt it necessary to weigh in on the situation. "Historically speaking, black-on-black crime has been something that happens and doesn't raise much attention. Now it's blacks attacking others, and a government representative from another country shows up," he said.

† Living In These Mad, Mad, Madoff Times: Rising operating costs that cannot be passed on to cash-strapped country club members who are increasingly balking at higher dues or giving up their memberships altogether, has left many private and public golf courses unable to bail out, reports The Associated Press:

Whether it's a $45,000 initiation fee for a private club or a $5 increase in the cost of a round at a public course, the price of a golf habit is giving some duffers pause. …

In 2009, about 140 of the 16,000 golf facilities in the country closed and 50 opened, said Greg Nathan, a vice president at the National Golf Foundation, which represents 4,000 courses nationwide. Mottola said that the industry has lost 100 clubs a year for the past four years. (The figures count nine-hole courses as half a facility.) …

In areas of the country where golf is played year-round, many courses were built to raise the prices of new houses around them, said Roger Garrett, a Phoenix real estate agent who has sold more than 150 golf courses nationwide.

Now, with the housing market depressed, a dozen or more golf properties in Arizona are in foreclosure or bankruptcy proceedings, he said. …

A dwindling in the ranks of golfers followed an oversupply of golf courses and then the great recession hit.

Since 2005, when it peaked at 30 million, Nathan said there's been "a slow leak" in the number of U.S. golfers, dropping to 27.1 million in 2009 (including anyone over age 6 who played a round).

† When Is A Church Not A Church? (second item): If there is any doubt about that Muslims have never respected the religious freedom of others, consider that they have treated Christian houses of worship as spoils of war. In Turkey, for instance many humble Armenian churches were either destroyed or repurposed as animal stables, mosques, prisons, sporting centers, granaries by the Ottomans. More spectacular or historically significant edifices, such as the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul and the Church of the Holy Cross the island of Akhtamar in Lake Van, Turkey. Recently a group of American-Armenian students visited the Church Museum of the Holy Cross to commune with their martyred ancestors. The Armenian Weekly describes what happened:

A group of Armenian children from Armenia were told to leave Sourp Khatch church [Church of the Holy Cross] on the island of Akhtamar for lighting candles, singing, and praying. …

Karin Tonoyan, founder and director of Hay Aspet [Armenian Knight, an educational program for Armenians in the Diaspora], told News.am that … the Children started singing [“Der Voghormya” (“Lord Have Mercy”)] and praying; but suddenly a policeman came and told us to leave the church.” 
 

Tonoyan said that the kids left the church, but continued to sing outside it.  They were not allowed to burn incense by the Khatchkars (cross-stones) or gravestones in the church’s surrounding area.

† Updates To Previous Posts (third item, Depends Whose Ox Is Gored): Federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research has been put on hold by Judge Royce Lamberth of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, who ruled that it involves the destruction of human embryos in a lawsuit against the National Institutes of Health, Reuters reports:

"(Embryonic stem cell) research is clearly research in which an embryo is destroyed," Lamberth wrote in a 15-page ruling. The Obama administration could appeal his decision or try to rewrite the guidelines to comply with U.S. law.

The plaintiffs and other critics of the Obama administration’s stem cell research policies argue that funding work using embryonic stem cells reduces the amount of government grant money available to researchers who work with adult stem cells.

† Updates To Previous Posts (third item, Chicago On The Potomac): The Washington Post calls upon U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald to “back off his vow to retry former governor Rod Blagojevich (D-Ill.)”:

Mr. Fitzgerald brought unlimited resources and the power of the federal government to the case against Mr. Blagojevich. …

Still, despite having extensively taped the expletive-loving governor as he discussed ways to secure campaign cash, the government failed to convince a jury that Mr. Blagojevich had crossed the fuzzy line between sleazy politics and outright corruption. Some jurors noted that Mr. Blagojevich's ability to secure the contributions he talked about didn't match his grandiose scheming. …

[T]he prosecutor took his shot and lost. He should stand down before crossing another fine line - the one that separates prosecution from persecution.

But, having successfully prosecuted persecuted Scooter Libby, it’s doubtful Fitzgerald – the closest thing we have to a real-life Inspecter Javert - will let go. In an interview with ABC News Chief Investigative Correspondent Brian Ross Blago sized Fitzgerald up as “a person determined to get his trophy.”

The WaPo also argues that taking a second crack at convicting Blago will be very costly to taxpayers:

The former Illinois governor, facing a retrial on corruption charges, has exhausted the $2.7 million from his campaign treasury that funded his defense. That may force him to rely on federal taxpayers to pay his attorneys - unless he can land more reality television or media gigs, his advisers say. …

It is unclear how much Blagojevich's seven-week trial cost. Dobbins said taxpayers shelled out $67,463 for the jury alone - which included transportation and meals - and Blagojevich's attorneys have speculated that the entire investigation cost between $25 million and $30 million.

But a new trial may yield an unexpected dividend: Blago also told Ross that investigators asked him to squeal on "folks in higher places" and hinted that one of them was then president-elect Obama: 

Ross: "Is it your impression they were thinking about Obama?"

Blagojevich: "I have my own personal opinion but from where I'm sitting right now it's probably better for me not to talk about it."

Cost to taxpayers to re-try Blago: $30 million. Testimony from jailed Obama crony Antoin (Tony) Rezko or WH Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel that reveals an impeachable offense: Priceless.

† Updates To Previous Posts (sixth item, Living In These Mad, Mad, Madoff Times): The Wall Street Journal reports that high-income taxpayers are scrambling to protect their income and assets in anticipation of looming income and capital gains tax increases:

More than four months before the expiration date, they are making plans to mitigate any impact. …

The maneuvering ahead of Dec. 31 has confounded traditional tax preparations and spawned feverish activity among higher earners, a trend reported by tax planners and financial advisers across the country. …

Greg Rosica, a tax partner with Ernst & Young's Personal Financial Services practice in Tampa, Fla., said the looming increases were turning tax planning around 180 degrees. The pattern is normally to defer income until the following year, ever in hopes of avoiding or lessening the tax on it. Now "with higher income and capital-gains taxes [in store], it's accelerating income," he said.

One thing upper income Americans are not doing: Spending money frivolously on high-priced frippery.

† Updates To Previous Posts to (fourth item, A To Z Approach On Illegal Immigration In AZ): The Obama administration’s lawsuit against AZ’s anti-illegal immigration law and a federal judge blocking enforcement of several of its key provisions  has not deterred 22 states - among them, AL, CO, FL, RI – from looking into adopting a similar measure, reports CNSNews.com:

Other states with proposals that mirror the Arizona law are Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Utah.

“We are very pleased to announce 22 states are now following Arizona’s lead to pass versions of a law that has the support of 60 percent to 81 percent of Americans according to polls,” said ALIPAC [Americans for Legal Immigration Political Action Committee] President William Gheen in a statement. “State and federal candidates are rushing to display their support for Arizona’s law and immigration enforcement. We will not stop until all American states are protected from this invasion as mandated by the Constitution of the United States.”

† Updates To Previous Posts (second item) Media Irrelevancy – A Self-Inflicted Wound: Lee Boyd Malvo refuses to elaborate on the bombshell he dropped during an interview with A&E's new cable TV series "Aftermath With William Shatner," reports The Washington Post:

[He] doesn't want to discuss with detectives his recent claim that he and his partner shot more than 40 people during their cross-country rampage eight years ago, a Montgomery County police official said. …

Malvo's claims - discredited by many investigators - were aired several weeks ago on In a phone interview with the former "Star Trek" star, Malvo had said he and his partner, John Allen Muhammad, shot 42 people in 2002. The pair previously had been linked to 27 shootings across the country, including 13 attacks, 10 of them fatal, in the Washington area in October 2002. …

On the television show, a psychiatrist said Malvo had told him about 42 shootings as well. Detectives contacted the doctor, who said he needs Malvo's permission to discuss the case with them.

Malvo is serving a life sentence, with no parole in VA. The state executed Muhammad last year.

Gizmodo’s Joel Johnson asks, “Why isn’t there a better solution to texting while driving?” makes this startling confession:

It’s deadly. It’s irresponsible. And we’ve all done it. …

I’ve done it. I suspect many of you have done it. Just last weekend, careening south through rural Missouri in a rented Pontiac, I sent and received a dozen text messages with my sister as we coordinated the logistics of a family emergency. I was upset, tired, and finding being a safe driver difficult enough without trying to peck out letters on a glowing touchscreen with my thumb.

But I did it because that’s what I had to do. I could have pulled over each time. But who does that really? …

My own strategy is to hold the phone at the top of the steering wheel while typing in the hope that my brain will still be able to recognize dangers in front of me, even if my vision is focused on a little screen on a much closer plane. It’s probably not a very sound theory and I’ve been fortunate to never have really had the opportunity to put it to the test. I have found myself wandering out of my own lane when I try to keep the phone in my lap to prevent anyone from seeing me texting while driving, swapping embarrassment for recklessness.

Um, there isn’t ever going to be a better solution to texting while driving because it’s a problem that does not require a solution other than to permanently yank the driver’s license of anyone caught doing it for criminal stupidity. And The Stiletto cannot fathom how Johnson can make the sweeping claim that “we’ve all done it” since she, for one, never has. It’s not just that your eyes are off the road; you’re splitting your mindshare between two very complex tasks, which compromises reaction time should something unexpected happen – like someone else who is texting while driving veering into your lane.

Eyestrain May Cause Headaches

- HealthDay News, August 11, 2010

Mosque Flap Tests Limits Of US Tolerance

- The Associated Press, August 21, 2010

Another educator has been caught sticking up banks. This time, it’s 47-year-old Damon K. Roberts Jr., a special education social worker with the D.C. public schools, who (allegedly) committed six bank robberies, reports The Washington Post:

[Roberts] was placed on administrative leave and was not assigned to a school. …

Police said Roberts was charged with six counts of robbery in connection with holdups in the Largo and Bowie areas between March 12 and July 8. …

No injuries occurred in any of the robberies, police said. It was not clear how much was taken.

† Homelessness In The Time Of Obama: The Union Rescue Mission in downtown Los Angeles plans to start charging $7 a bed “because of overwhelming demand triggered by the recession and an inability of some guests to stop their cycle of homelessness,” the Los Angeles Times reports:

From the fee, $5 a day will be used to pay for programs the mission runs, and $2 will be set aside as savings for the guest, he said. The mission will begin charging the fee next month, but several participants have already volunteered for the program.

Later this year, the shelter also plans to charge fees to the “working homeless,” who live in the shelter with their families.

† Living In These Mad, Mad, Madoff Times: The Wall Street Journal spotlights a new breed of worker, white-collar moonlighters:

Moonlighting traditionally has meant juggling two hourly jobs, or an hourly job plus freelancing. But waves of furloughs, pay cuts and layoffs among professionals and managers have driven many white-collar workers to start cramming a second job into the workweek, too. Some need the added income to make up for pay cuts; others want to avert the risk of losing their income in the event of a layoff.

Some 9% of 4,500 mostly white-collar workers surveyed recently for CareerBuilder.com, a career website, have taken a second job in the past year to make ends meet; no data are available from the past for comparison. Another 19% said they intended to take a second job sometime in 2010. …

The growth of freelance websites to higher-paid, white-collar occupations is making it easier to moonlight. Accountants, lawyers, marketers and other managers and professionals seeking work on PeoplePerHour.com have more than doubled in the past year to 58,000, says founder Xenios Thrasyvoulou.

† Mortgage Loan Modification Less Than Advertised: Fewer than half a million homeowners will have successfully avoided foreclosure under the Making Home Affordable Program – far fewer than the three million households the Obama administration said would benefit from its mortgage relief program, reports The New York Times:

Data released Friday showed the dropout rate from the Making Home Affordable Program was very high: 96,000 trial modifications were canceled by lenders in July. The number of canceled trials now exceeds 616,000. …

The high number of cancellations was attributed to the rush to set up the program, which encouraged lenders to enroll borrowers first and ask questions later [emphasis, The Stiletto].

When the paperwork was eventually reviewed, many modification seekers did not qualify for permanent status, either because their debt load was not heavy enough, they did not live in the house, their documents were incomplete or they simply failed to make the trial payments. …

About 422,000 mortgage modifications overseen by the government were considered permanent as of July, up from 389,000 in June. But the pool of candidates is shrinking rapidly. Only 17,000 trial modifications were started in July, down sharply from the 150,000 enrolled in September when the program was new. …

“These borrowers are still up to their eyeballs in debt after the modification,” and many will default again, Calculated Risk, a popular financial blog, wrote after reviewing the new data.

† Is Obama Already A Lame Duck?: The Boston Globe reports that between the Obama family’s first visit to Martha’s Vineyard last year and this year’s jaunt, “the excitement … seems to have ebbed like the tide”:

One barometer of the plunge in excitement has been the sale of Obama-themed T-shirts, which designers had been banking on after the craze of last year. Clothing labeled with the president’s name sold by the thousands, helping to salvage a tough economic year for the island.

But this year’s T-shirt sales are much less brisk, merchants say.

“Last year, Obama gave you goose bumps, but I don’t think you’re going to see that this year,’’ said Alex McCluskey, co-owner of the Locker Room, who sold more than 4,000 “I vacationed with Obama’’ T-shirts last year. But so far this year, he said, his hot item is T-shirts of former President Bush asking, “Miss me yet?’’

† All The News That’s Fart To Print: The Boston Herald reports that parts of a salt-water lagoon fronting the Obamas’ Martha’s Vineyard vacation estate Blue Heron Farm have been closed for several days because of “high levels of enterococci, an indicator that the water is contaminated with fecal coliform bacteria”: 

West Tisbury health agent John Powers said Long Cove Pond and Sepiessa Point Beach on Tisbury Great Pond were closed to swimming Tuesday after both failed water-quality testing. The two beaches are public and located not too far from the Obamas’ private beach. Because the beach on Blue Heron Farm is not accessible to the public, it is not subject to water-quality tests, Powers said. …

[W]hen we asked another town official whether or not it was safe for the prez to take a dip in the pond, he was a little more informative.

“Depends on whether or not he likes to swim in poop,” joked the longtime islander, who shall remain nameless.

[Hat Tip: Nick From NY, a regular reader of this blog.]

† Obama Is Just About Every U.S. President All Rolled Into One!: American Spectator editor-in-chief R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. has good news for President Jimmy Carter in this Washington Times op-ed,:

It is becoming apparent for all to see that a man who made his name as a community organizer does not have the skills to be president of these United States. Maybe he could develop the requisite skills as a governor. Possibly he could develop such skills were he to sit in the Senate for a couple of terms. Yet there are delicate sensitivities, the ability to listen, to stick by your guns, occasionally to remain reticent. These are the fundamentals of a leader, and President Obama has demonstrated that he lacks all of them, most notably reticence. I think it is clear even to official Washington that Mr. Obama is the worst president of modern times. President Jimmy Carter is redeemed. …

Increasingly, it is clear that the Democrats brought down on the country a community organizer as president. Maybe in the future they will consider experience a qualification for the presidency. Possibly, the age of charisma is behind us. Possibly, Mr. Obama even lacks that dubious quality.

† Never Mind Marxism. Will An Obama Administration Be Totalitarian?: Part II: Washington attorney Ray Hartwell makes the case in this Washington Times op-ed that it’s not President Barack Hussein’s incompetence that’s at issue, it’s his administration’s unparalleled skill in “pursu[ing] a razzle-dazzle offense so swift and relentless that the president and his regime have only begun to digest the spoils of their victories”:

[T]he president and his administration have come up with an approach that works very well for them. They meet behind closed doors with allies and favored constituents and craft massive, thousand-page bills whose sheer density effectively conceals many provisions that could not pass if exposed to the light of day. Rammed quickly through Congress on purely partisan votes, they become law before any public analysis is done of their contents. Discussion and disclosure, potentially so messy and inconvenient, are avoided almost entirely.

Although completely at odds with candidate Obama's promises about transparency, this hide-the-ball strategy has succeeded for Mr. Obama, who cares more about results than about campaign pledges. Indeed, for this administration, deception of the public about the content and effect of legislation - e.g., the repeated false claims that health care "reform" would save billions - has been very effective. Mr. Obama uses this tool skillfully, manipulating the ever-willing mainstream media, which have been complicit to the point of deliberately coordinating their stories and their attacks on the administration's critics (as the Journolist diaries make crystal-clear).

Where legislation seems uncertain of passage, our president's many appointees have stepped into the breech. Thus, although its comprehensive energy legislation is stalled for now, the Gulf oil spill provided the administration with an opportunity to shut down offshore drilling - albeit through orders twice found to be illegal by federal courts and still in litigation. Whatever the ultimate outcome, the president has succeeded in crippling a major industry he and his supporters don't like. And the several hundred thousand jobs killed in the process? Well, let's just say the victims weren't among the constituencies valued by our president. …

Mr. Obama is audacious and aggressive, willing to bend rules and twist arms to get things done, if not through Congress, then through czars and other worms in the woodwork or an activist judiciary. His administration is empowering and enriching a Washington ruling elite whose members will respect neither the liberty nor the property of American citizens. Incompetence would be preferable.

† Now Is Not The Time To Talk About Race: Claiming he was passed over for a promotion at a Tyson-owned chicken plant because he is black, John Hithon sued. In his complaint, he alleged that the white plant manager, Tom Hatley, called him “boy” on more than one occasion.

Over the course of the next 14 years, U.S. Magistrate Judge Robert R. Armstrong Jr. overruled a jury verdict awarding Hithon and another plaintiff  $250,000 each in compensatory damages and $1.5 million in punitive on the grounds that there wasn't enough evidence that they lost the promotions because they were black; a panel of the Eleventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal ruled that "[w]hile the use of 'boy' when modified by a racial classification like 'black' or 'white' is evidence of discriminatory intent ... the use of 'boy' alone is not evidence of discrimination"; the U.S. Supreme Court vacated the opinion in an unsigned ruling, finding fault with the appellate court’s reasoning; Armstrong again vacated a second jury award to Hithon of $35,000 back pay, $300,000 in compensatory damages for his mental anguish, and $1 million in punitives, though he let the verdict stand .

Both sides appealed to the Eleventh Circuit, and a new panel of judges reaffirmed the appellate court’s prior ruling that use of the term “boy” wasn’t enough to establish racial discrimination. The Fulton County Daily Report notes that the Eleventh Circuit “rarely grants a rehearing, and another opportunity at the Supreme Court is even less likely, so [the] decision may mark the end of the case.”

† Updates To Previous Posts (second item, Look Before You Leap: Part II): NE Attorney General Jon Bruning agreed to a permanent federal injunction against enforcement of a new state law requiring a pre-abortion screening to determine whether a woman is at risk for mental or physical problems arising from the procedure. "We will not squander the state's resources on a case that has very little probability of winning," spokesperson Shannon Kingery said.

† Updates To Previous Posts (fourth item, Say It Aint So Roger, Andy, Jason …): Legendary baseball pitcher  and seven-time Cy Young Award winner Roger Clemens has been indicted by a federal grand jury for allegedly lying to Congress about using steroids, reports The Associated Press:

Clemens was vehement when he testified before a congressional committee in 2008: "Let me be clear. I have never taken steroids or HGH."

The six-count indictment alleges that Clemens obstructed a congressional inquiry with 15 different statements made under oath, including denials that he had ever used steroids or human growth hormone. …

Clemens had been prominently mentioned in the Mitchell Report, Major League Baseball's own accounting of its steroid problem, and he went to Capitol Hill on his own to clear his name. …

"I never took HGH or Steroids. And I did not lie to Congress," Clemens said on Twitter. "I look forward to challenging the Governments accusations, and hope people will keep an open mind until trial. I appreciate all the support I have been getting. I am happy to finally have my day in court."

Clemens reportedly turned down a plea offer by federal prosecutors. If convicted on the charges, Clemens could be sentenced to as much as 30 years in prison and fined $1.5 million.

Athens-Clarke (GA) police officers responding to a burglar alarm the Howard B. Stroud Elementary School saw a man in the cafeteria, but he escaped through a back door. Unfortunately for him, he dropped his cell phone while fleeing and police were able to find his mother at the press of a programmed button, reports Athens Banner-Herald: "When an officer called the number, he spoke with the suspect's mother who said she didn't let him live with her anymore because he always steals."

Let A Stress Fracture Heal

- HealthDay News, August 10, 2010

Obama Faces Middle East 'Train Wreck' As Iran Builds Nuclear Program

- FOX News, August 20, 2010

North Dakota Insurance Commissioner Adam Hamm has accused Farah Mohamed Ibrahim,36, with falsely claiming his 8-year-old son died of malaria during a trip to Kenya so he could collect on a $50,000 life insurance policy, reports The Pioneer Press:

Ibrahim took out the policy in January 2009 and, in May, submitted a claim, along with what looked like a Kenyan death certificate and medical records documenting the death, according to Hamm.

Ibrahim told investigators his brother bribed an official to get the fake documents, Hamm said.

State Rep. John Mizuno (D-HI) “felt compelled” to introduce a symbolic resolution banning the N-word after he heard talk radio host Dr. Laura Schlessinger say it on air to “send a message that the word is hateful and offensive, The Associated Press reports.

Not only such a ban is unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds, but it is likely to have a disparate impact on minorities since - with the notable exception of Schlessinger (who used the word to make this very point, ironically) - black comendians and rappers are far likelier to use the N-word in public than are whites for reasons well known to Michael Richards, so the resolution is, ironically, racist as well.

In an interview with CNN's Larry King, Schlessinger announced that she will not renew the contract for her show when it expires at the end of the year, so that she can "regain my First Amendment rights":

I want to be able to say what's on my mind and in my heart and what I think is helpful and useful without somebody getting angry or some special-interest group deciding this is a time to silence a voice of dissent and attack affiliates and attack sponsors. …

When I started in radio if you said something somebody didn’t agree with or didn’t like they would argue with you. Now they try to silence you. They try to wipe out your ability to earn a living or to have your job. … My First Amendment rights have been usurped by angry, hateful groups who don’t want to debate. They want to eliminate.

Schlessinger reassured her fans, “I'm not retiring. I'm not quitting. I feel energized actually, stronger and freer to say the things that I believe need to be said for people in this country.”

Editorial Note: After pointing out that ethnic and gay comics often make fun of their own kind King asked Schlessinger: “It’s OK, isn’t it? But it’s not OK when the ‘non-N person’ uses it.” Since we all know what the “N” in the euphemism “N word” is, King’s reference to a “non-N” is racist, isn’t it? Just sayin’ …

Fatwa Fatigue

Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah has issued a royal decree forbidding anyone other than Islamic scholars he has appointed from handing down fatwas after some bizarre rulings by scholars vying for audiences on satellite TV and the Internet, reports The Washington Post:

"We have noticed some excesses that we cannot tolerate, and it is our legal duty to stand up to these with strength and resolve to preserve religion," the Saudi ruler said in his order, which was addressed to the kingdom's grand mufti, the most senior official pronouncing on religious matters. …

[T]he Saudi public was startled by a fatwa advocating that women breast-feed unrelated men to establish "maternal relations" and thus get around the Islamic prohibition on the mixing of the sexes. A few months earlier, another scholar had urged the killing of anyone who facilitated the mixing of men and women in workplaces and universities.

Sign The “Stop The Mosque At Ground Zero” Petition

Click here to sign this petition by Human Events and RedState.com.

† Is Obama Already A Lame Duck?: According to this Der Spiegel headline Obama is a capon: “The War in Afghanistan Reveals Obama's Impotence.”

† Never Mind Marxism. Will An Obama Administration Be Totalitarian?: Part II: In an interview with radio station KCBS (740 AM-San Francisco), House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, “There is no question that there is a concerted effort to make this a political issue by some. I join those who have called for looking into how is this opposition to the mosque being funded? How is this being ginned up?"

Debra Burlingame - whose brother Charles "Chic" Burlingame III was the pilot of American Airlines Flight 77, which was crashed into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, by al Qaeda terrorists - responds to Pelosi’s threat to shut down opposition to the Ground Zero mosque:

For the last four months, 9/11 families, first responders, survivors and concerned citizens have been asking where developers are getting funding for a $100-million dollar mosque and Islamic center planned for Ground Zero. The imam who is heading the project has refused to identify the source of the $5 million cash that was used to purchase the building, and told an Arab newspaper that he will get funding for the project from Arab and Muslim countries. …

Today we learn that instead of taking our concerns seriously, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi suggested that the opponents of the Ground Zero mosque should be investigated. This comment is clearly intended to intimidate those of us who are speaking out to preserve the sanctity of Ground Zero, where more than 20,000 human remains have been recovered, 1,845 in the last five years. We can assure Ms. Pelosi that whatever funds we have spent to get our message out, they pale in comparison to the price we have personally paid since that day, and continue to pay as a result of the mosque project.

This, folks, is what they mean by “San Francisco values.” For their part, NYers are overwhelmingly opposed to the mosque being built within eyeshot of Ground Zero, reports The Associated Press:

The Siena College poll showed 63% of New York voters surveyed oppose the project, with 27% supporting it. That compares with 64% opposed and 28% in favor two weeks earlier, results that are within the polls' sampling margins. …

In a new question, the latest poll found that many New Yorkers believe the project is protected by the Constitution, even if they oppose the plan.

Nearly two-thirds of voters, 64%, say the developers have a constitutional right to build the mosque. Twenty-eight% say they do not. …

Nearly a quarter of voters questioned said the issue will have a major effect on which candidate for governor they support. Thirty-seven% say it will have some effect, while about 40% of voters say it won't matter.

President Barack Hussein Obama demonstrated that he cannot hold two opposing thoughts in his mind at the same time when he stated something so obvious as to be platitudinous (“Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country”) yet could not rise to the occasion to explain to those Muslim community who don’t understand the controversy – not all of them are as willfully obtuse as imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, and his wife, Daisy Khan - that with that right comes the responsibility to compromise so as to co-exist with your fellow Americans when competing interests collide (“I will not comment on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there"). NYers clearly understand that the Constitution allows the building of the mosque, but that decency forbids it.

† Chicago On The Potomac: So, after nearly three months of testimony and two weeks of deliberations one holdout juror refused to convict former Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D-IL) of trying to sell Sen. Barack Obama’s (he wasn’t using his middle name back then; only “racists” were) seat for whatever the market would bear. Prosecutors are already planning a do-over, because they think they can get a conviction on the bribery, fraud, conspiracy, and racketeering charges with a different jury. Maybe so, but they have to make a better case, say the jurors. The Associated Press reports:

[T]he next round could also look different if prosecutors adjust their strategy after listening to jurors who deadlocked on all but one charge against Rod Blagojevich. And despite their defiance after the verdict, defense attorneys could offer a few surprises too - if they are still on the job. …

"They have to listen to what jurors are saying," said Jeff Cramer, a former federal prosecutor. "If they're saying it's not clear … prosecutors may need to lay out a clearer road map."

They may also want to simplify the overlapping, interlocking counts, Cramer said. Other prosecutorial changes may be more far-reaching, like calling witnesses who, like [White House Chief of Staff Rahm] Emanuel, were not summoned for the first trial.

Another witness who was not called in the first trial is convicted political fixer Tony Rezko, who prosecutors say was a key cog in Blagojevich's schemes. …

Cramer, for one, says he has little doubt prosecutors will prevail.

He notes that federal cases have more than 90 percent conviction rates - in part because the government is always prone to try someone again if a jury's hung. …

And if a Blagojevich jury is hung after a second trial?

Said Cramer: "There's a good chance they'd do it again - a third time."

Comments like that lend credence to Blago’s claim that the government is persecuting him (“This jury shows you that the government threw everything but the kitchen sink at me.”)

† Living In These Mad, Mad, Madoff Times: In his movie “Play It Again, Sam,” Woody Allen observed that “New York is full of people who are crazy till Labor Day.” That’s because shrinks traditionally take their vacations in August – except for this year, Thanks to the tough economy – no patient, no income - and instant gratification becoming the norm thanks to 24/7 access to online banking, shopping, and other services, “[t]his summer, it's actually possible to get a therapy appointment,” reports The Wall Street Journal. So if the script for "What About Bob?" was being written today, Bill Murray’s character would not feel compelled to follow his shrink to NH and ruin his family vacation.

† TSA (Thieving Security Agent): This time, the errant airport security agent is Randy Pepper, 50, a former supervisor who pleaded guilty to stealing $20,000 worth of jewelry and other items from checked luggage at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, reports The Associated Press: “Pepper was fired in July 2009 after another TSA worker saw him removing items from checked luggage. Surveillance video confirmed it, and investigators discovered Pepper had pawned the items.”

† The Right To Bear Arms Belongs To Us All: Part II: Reflecting Western sensibilities – which The Washington Post devotes several hundred words to explain to Easterners - Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Jon Tester (D-MT) proposed a law to loosen the overly restrictive regulations imposed by the D.C. Council after the Supreme Court struck down the city's 32-year ban on handguns:

In the District, a person who wants to obtain a handgun must file forms with the D.C. police, take a five-hour safety class, undergo two criminal background checks, pass a multiple-choice exam, endure a 10-day waiting period and take the newly registered handgun to police headquarters for a ballistics test. And that's just to keep the gun at home. Except for retired law enforcement officers, private residents cannot legally carry open or concealed weapons in the District. The ATF lists only nine federally licensed firearms dealers, and the nearest public shooting range is the Maryland Small Arms Range eight miles away. …

[G]un rights advocates say that the District's gun control laws - not to mention prohibitions against murder - did not prevent a drive-by shooting in March that involved illegal weapons. They also say that despite having nearly 158,000 people with concealed weapons in Arizona, their homicide rate of 6.3 per 100,000 is lower than the District's, 31.4. That's true of Phoenix, too, where the homicide rate is 10.5 per 100,000.

† Updates To Previous Posts (fourth item, A To Z Approach On Illegal Immigration In AZ): Gov. Jan Brewer's (R-AZ) suggestion that state lawmakers consider making “tweaks” to SB 1070 in response to U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton putting implementation of several provisions on hold is not going anywhere for now, reports The Associated Press:

Legislative aides said Tuesday the idea has been shelved, at least temporarily, mainly because of the state's pending appeal to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

"Everyone agreed … that it would have been acting in haste to act at this point," said Victor Riches, chief of staff for the House's Republican majority.

There's still a possibility that lawmakers could take up the issue in the future but nothing is in the works now, Riches added.

† Updates To Previous Posts (penultimate item, Obama’s Family Values: Part V): Thanks to a Freedom of Information request, The Boston Globe learned why Judge Leonard I. Shapiro decided to grant President Barack Hussein Obama’s 58-year-old aunt, Zeituni Onyango, asylum in May:

[A] federal law enforcement official’s public revelations about her confidential case catapulted Onyango into the spotlight in a “highly publicized and highly politicized manner’’ just days before Obama’s historic election in November 2008. The publicity and her status as Obama’s aunt are the crux of his 29-page decision.

Shapiro, a veteran immigration judge and Republican appointee, wrote harshly of the anonymous Bush administration official’s leak to the Associated Press for using confidential information for political purposes and said it was a “clear violation of federal regulations.’’

“Moreover,’’ he wrote, “the disclosure  … was a reckless and illegal violation of her right to privacy which has exposed her to great risk.’’ …

Shapiro agreed with Onyango’s assertion that she had been singled out for publicity and, unlike her relatives in Kenya, would be a “target.’’ He also outlined “serious interethnic conflict’’ that had consumed Kenya in recent years and resulted in hundreds of deaths. She belongs to the minority Luo ethnic group and said that she feared for her life if she had to return to Kenya. …

He also acknowledged Onyango’s illegal status but did not hold it against her because there was no evidence that the federal government had ever pursued her deportation.[Emphasis, The Stiletto]

Some disputed the basis of Shapiro’s decision yesterday, and reiterated calls to release the full case to the public.

“The fact that she is the aunt of the president of the United States does raise questions of whether she received any special treatment,’’ said Ira Mehlman, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform.

† Updates To Previous Posts (third item, Is This Why We Fight?): The Taliban sentenced a young couple who had eloped to be executed by stoning and instead of ignoring the order or running them out of town, several hundred of their male neighbors – and at least two family members - in a village in northern Kunduz Province (AKA “innocent Afghan civilians”) picked up stones and hurled them at a 25-year-old Khayyam and his 19-year-old wife Siddiqa until they were dead, reports The New York Times:

The stoning deaths, along with similarly brazen attacks in northern Afghanistan, were also a sign of growing Taliban strength in parts of the country where, until recently, they had been weak or absent. In their home regions in southern Afghanistan, Mr. Nadery said, the Taliban have already been cracking down. …

Perhaps most worrisome were signs of support for the action from mainstream religious authorities in Afghanistan. The head of the Ulema Council in Kunduz Province, Mawlawi Abdul Yaqub, interviewed by telephone, said Monday that stoning to death was the appropriate punishment for an illegal sexual relationship, although he declined to give his view on this particular case. An Ulema Council is a body of Islamic clerics with religious authority in a region.

And less than a week earlier, the national Ulema Council brought together 350 religious scholars in a meeting with government religious officials, who issued a joint statement on Aug. 10 calling for more punishment under Shariah law, apparently referring to stoning, amputations and lashings.

Failure to carry out such “Islamic provisions,” the council statement said, was hindering the peace process and encouraging crime.

In an interview with The Washington Times Lyric Thompson, senior policy analyst with Women for Women International points out that, “[a] lot of the discussion, particularly in Washington, has attempted to draw a line that in the south everything is Taliban-controlled and in the north we have made progress.” She adds that the stoning in Kunduz disproves the conventional wisdom: "It is basically Kabul, and then there is everything outside of Kabul."

The Consumerist reports that a Philadelphia Gas Works customer received a letter from the utility (below) threatening to turn his account over to a to a collection agency if he didn't immediately pay the past-due balance on his bill either by credit card, at one of their customer service centers or using its pay-by-phone service. The balance due: $0.00. 

The utility reminds him that “a good credit rating is a valuable asset, and we are sure that you wish to protect your rating.” The Stiletto would like to point out to Philadelphia Gas Works that goodwill is a valuable asset, and she hopes the utility wishes to protect its reputation and retain its customers.

The Consumerist advised sending in a check for $0. If he goes that route, The Stiletto suggests using invisible ink. However the stamp will cost more than the balance due so if the phone call costs less, he should use the automated phone service.

[Hat Tip: LegalBlogWatch]

When It's Time For A Tonsillectomy

- HealthDay News, August 5, 2010

In U.S., Confidence In Newspapers, TV News Remains A Rarity

- Gallup, August 13, 2010

A group of Russians running 38 daycare centers in Brooklyn and Staten Island calling itself “the Congregation” conspired with city employees at the Administration for Children’s Services, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and Human Resources Administration to siphon $18 million from a NYC program that pays child-care costs to enable low-income women to work outside the home. Four daycare operators and seven city workers, were charged with conspiring to pay or receive bribes; all but one were also charged with conspiracy to commit fraud, reports The New York Times:

Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, said at a news conference said that the bribes, which another official put at significantly more than $100,000, were paid to city workers to “essentially look the other way and grease the gravy train.”

The workers helped the day care centers bill the city for children who were not enrolled or for services never provided, and allowed them to remain open despite flouting rules on floor space, background checks of employees and teacher-child ratios, a criminal complaint said.

The complaint appears to suggest that more than the seven city workers took payments and that some of them cooperated with investigators, secretly recording meetings where bribes were made. …

The bribes ranged from $150 to several thousand dollars. The years-long scheme began to unravel when one of the daycare operators tried to bribe a city worker by “forgetting” a ring in her office and misinterpreted her protest as a complaint that the ring was too small. That worker filed a complaint that tipped investigators to the conspiracy.

† There’s Many A Slip ‘Twixt The Cup And Lip: Insurance commissioners in about half the states – including, CA, FL, HI, MI, NE, OK, TX, VA and WY - say they do not have the necessary legal authority to enforce consumer protections that take effect under ObamaCare next month, The New York Times reports:

Under the new federal standards, insurers generally must offer coverage to children under 19 and must allow adult children up to age 26 to stay on their parents’ policies. Insurers cannot charge co-payments for preventive services or impose a lifetime limit on benefits; must allow consumers to appeal a denial of benefits; and cannot rescind coverage, except in cases of fraud or intentional misrepresentation.

States have the primary role in enforcing many of the new standards. If a state fails to enforce a standard, the federal government will step in to do so — as it did in several states after passage of a health insurance law in 1996.

The federal government recently surveyed states to assess their enforcement capabilities, and the results suggest a patchwork of protections. …

Some state regulators said they would ask state legislators to expand their authority by putting the federal standards into state law next year. Others said they would rely on their powers of persuasion, the good will of insurers or general state laws that ban unfair or deceptive trade practices. …

The administration said its general approach was to have “states take a lead role in providing consumer protections, with federal enforcement only as a fallback measure.”

With insurers are already trying to sock it to consumers with hefty rate hikes before the new regs kick in, even officials in NJ, NY, OH and other states who that believe they have the authority to enforce the federal law are waiting for the Department of Health and Human Services to draw a bright line between increases that are “reasonable” and those that are “unreasonable.”

Editorial Note: For her part, Gov. Jan Brewer (R-AZ) says the state does not have the legal authority to compel insurers to follow the federal standards and she has “no plans” to pass the necessary legislation as the state is participating in a lawsuit challenging the Constitutionality of

the federal healthcare law.

† Woman Pretends She Was Kidnapped To Avoid Graduation Party: Nancy Salas, 22, who pretended she had been kidnapped to avoid telling her family she dropped out of UCLA, pleaded no contest to filing a false police report and was sentenced to three years’ probation and ordered to serve 100 hours of community service, The Associated Press reports.

† Updates To Previous Posts (sixth item, Is Obama Already A Lame Duck?): The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza frames the choice faced by Dem incumbents and challengers as a biological response triggered when survival is at stake:

Fight or flight? … Is the best course to distance oneself from a president whose job-approval rating has sunk below 50 percent and whose appeal to independents has gone missing? Or to embrace him and his policies - the majority of which remain quite popular with the Democratic base that will be essential to any victories that the party claims this fall?  …

Even some Democratic candidates who are being heavily touted by the White House appear determined to keep the president at arm's length. Shortly after Obama played a lead role in helping Sen. Michael Bennet defeat former state House speaker Andrew Romanoff in a Democratic primary fight last Tuesday, Bennet was asked whether he would want the president to campaign with him this fall. "We'll have to see," Bennet told ABC's George Stephanopoulos - a response well short of a ringing endorsement of Obama's political standing.

One senior Democratic consultant suggested that the distance candidates are seeking to put between themselves and Obama is reflective of the ascendance of economic issues in voters' minds. "Barack Obama's economic policy of spending our way out of recession is seen as a failure at best and harmful at worst," the source said. "That should tell candidates in competitive jurisdictions all they need to know about running with the president."  …

"Even if it made strategic sense, it is hard for Democratic incumbents with a voting record to literally distance themselves from the president," said Democratic pollster Fred Yang.

† Updates To Previous Posts (fifth item, How ACORN Got Buried By “Squirrelly Right-Wingers”): The Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the Constitutionality of Congress stripping ACORN of federal funding in reaction to an embezzlement and mismanagement scandal, ruling that it is not a bill of attainder, New York Law Journal reports:

The circuit vacated an injunction issued by Eastern District Judge Nina Gershon, who had found that Congress intended to punish ACORN by withholding appropriations to the activist group, the money that made up some 10 percent of the crippled organization's national budget. …

The panel remanded the case of ACORN v. United States, 09-5172, to Judge Gershon for further proceedings on plaintiffs' claims under the First Amendment and due process clause. …

Judge Gershon issued a preliminary injunction on Dec. 11, 2009, and a permanent injunction and declaratory judgment in favor of ACORN on March 10, finding various appropriations laws unconstitutional.

She found ACORN had standing, and that it was singled out by Congress in a way that (1) fell within the historical meaning of legislative punishment, (2) did not further a non-punitive legislative purpose, and (3) showed evidence of intent to punish. …

Writing for the 2nd Circuit, Judge [Roger] Miner agreed with Judge Gershon that ACORN had standing and that it had, indeed, been singled out by Congress.

But he said, "The withholding of appropriations, however, does not constitute a traditional form of punishment that is 'considered to be punishment per se.'

"Congress's decision to withhold funds from ACORN and its affiliates constitutes neither imprisonment, banishment, nor death," he said. "The withholding of funds may arguably constitute a punitive confiscation of property at some point, but the plaintiffs do not assert that they have property rights to federal funds that have yet to be disbursed at the agency's discretion."

While ACORN and its affiliates said some members of Congress tainted them "with a note of infamy" and encouraged others to shun ACORN, Judge Miner said, "the plaintiffs are not prohibited from any activities, they are only prohibited from receiving federal funds to continue their activities." 

† Updates To Previous Posts (fifth item, Is This Any Way To Run A Transition?): Gen. David Petraeus is doubling down on the losing hand that Gen. Stanley McChrystal has dealt our troops in Afghanistan with his ridiculous rules of engagement, but to what avail? Not only we are needlessly sacrificing troops, but we get no credit for our restraint. Instead, paradoxically, every time an insurgent kills an Afghan civilian U.S. and coalition forces are blamed,