THE OTHER SHOE DROPS: Updates To Previous Posts
† 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 she had fired the pistol. Note that Jones 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:
-- this quote was brought to you by quoteurl
MikeWiseguy Roethlisberger will get five games, I'm told.
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):
-- this quote was brought to you by quoteurl
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]
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