Deja view

Dear frothing-at-the-piehole-wingnuts,

I see that you are worried about President Barack Hussien Obamullah Lenin X giving a speech to the nation's schoolchildren in which he is expected to urge them to study hard and do their homework murder their parents in their sleep. Where were you the last time this happened?

Why don't you guys just stop stepping on the garden rakes for a while and sit this one out?

Sincerely

Rev.Paperboy

P.S. Yeah, and that too. Also.

(crossposted from the Woodshed)

Here come de Judge

"My life, the lives of my fellow passengers and crew, depends entirely on other people--invisible people--doing their jobs right. And who among us always does his job right?"

-Judge Alex Kozinski
Slate Magazine
July 19, 1996

More on His Honor from Slate this week:

"The problem with being a judge who loves to shock is that you're a flashy barracuda in a school of plain tuna, and you risk careening off into the high seas that are the province of public officials who are just too out there for their own good. Such is my thought after reading that Judge Alex Kozinksi posted porn on a web site he thought was private, but wasn't. The material included "a photo of naked women on all fours painted to look like cows and a video of a half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal," we learn from the LA Times. We can't judge for ourselves anymore, because the site has been wiped clean, but if Judge Kozinski says that he found the porn funny, I bet he did--and it was probably offensive, too. Herein lies the Kozinski challenge. "

Glass houses, stones, yadda yadda yadda. Not surprisingly, this was a "conservative" Reagan appointee.

(crossposted from the woodshed, where we have no photos of aroused barnyard animals, unless you count this)

Giuliani's world is shrinking

Maybe he was suffering from shock. Republican US presidential contender Rudy Giuliani, the self-styled hero of 9/11 seemed to think that, even in the wake of attacks on his city, that he could abuse the money of New York City taxpayers.

In the fall of 2001, city cops chauffeured Rudy Giuliani's then-mistress, Judith Nathan, to her parents' Pennsylvania home 130 miles away on the taxpayers' dime.

Records show that city cops refueled at an ExxonMobil station down the road from Nathan's childhood home in Hazleton on Oct. 20, 2001, while Giuliani stayed behind in New York attending 9/11 funerals.

A similar receipt pops up at a different Hazleton gas station two months later, when Nathan apparently went home for a pre-Christmas visit with her parents.

The records show that - in addition to using City Hall funds to take Giuliani and Nathan to 11 secret trysts in the Hamptons, as has been previously reported - taxpayers were paying to ferry Nathan on long-distance trips without Giuliani, now a Republican contender for President.

Keep in mind, it was his mistress; not his wife. Despite attempts by some to obfuscate this point, Nathan possessed no status in New York's official life and was entitled to no more than any other New Yorker.

So, you're not surprized. OK. But this is bursting all over the place. The traditional media is jumping all over this, and quite rightly so. But, as John Cole points out, the super-sleuths of the citizen media seem to be a little quiet right now.

Malkin? Total silence. Ace of Spades? Nada. Kathryn Jean Lopez? Too busy trying to get Dana Perino a raise. Mark Steyn? Nope, too involved making things up for a future column. Jonah Goldberg? Hard at work on a book about.... well, never mind.

– When a 12 year old kid had the nerve to state that he benefited from a government program and thinks other kids should too, a massive orgy of ‘Truth detecting’ took place. Counters were examined. Houses were visited. Property records were scrutinized. Statements were parsed.

– When a private in the army wrote some tales with a few anecdotes about what he had experienced in the war in Iraq, and a few disagreed, no grain of sand was left unturned. Scale models of armored vehicles were built. Experts were called, emailed, and interrogated. Myspace accounts were looked up. Entire fields of Cray Supercomputers had to be brought online just to handle all the “debunking” and commentary from the wingnuts.

But now, a Republican front-runner FOR THE OFFICE OF PRESIDENT has clearly played fast and loose with the public’s money to hide/finance his extramarital dalliances, and the truth detectors on the right are silent. When an NRO columnist admits straight-up to making shit up to radically overstate a military threat to a key ally, perhaps to agitate for American military involvement, our fact-checkers snooze. The sum total of the response can be summed up as a giant yawn.

Crickets. Not even a “heh, indeed” can be found on these topics from our brave and intrepid citizen journalists. Hell, they are lagging FAR behind all the traditional media, who are cranking out tons of stories about Giuliani. Greater Wingnuttia should change their motto from “We’ll fact check your ass” to “We’ll fact check your ass, if you aren’t a Republican.” At least that would be honest.

OK. So someone else can do the fact checking. Oh! What's this? Why, look at what Josh Marshall found.

Giuliani's administration sent a check for $400,000 to American Express. Though it was billed to the Assigned Counsel Administrative Office, an office that provides lawyers for indigent defendants, the money served as an advance against future travel and other expenses later incurred by the mayor's office and his security detail.

The unusually large prepayment, as yet unreported, adds weight to the theory that the Giuliani administration was using accounting gimmicks to obscure his office's travel expenditures.

With $400,000 prepaid on the Amex account, the mayor and his staff drew down on the credit card for a number of trips, including a handful out to the Hamptons, where Judith Nathan had her condo. Giuliani's administration ultimately spent approximately $100,000 of the $400,000 before leaving office in January, 2001.

Stu Loeser, a spokesman for Mayor Bloomberg, confirmed to us that his administration put a stop to the practice of putting funds for future travel in bulk on a credit card. Shortly after Bloomberg took office, American Express refunded $298,000, the remaining unused balance on the account. The move came shortly after the city comptroller sent the mayor a letter critical of the Giuliani adminsitration's practice of billing obscure city agencies for mayoral travel expenses.

And you can find more here.

But you won't find anything at National Review Online.

A little more from the Reform Heartland

Let's pour a little more fuel into this fire. You know that "sense of entitlement" we hear about when the conservative/reformers yap on about liberals or anybody else that doesn't worship their doctrine. Well...

Alberta's auditor general has revealed a case of runaway credit card debt by a former aide to Mark Norris when he was Alberta's minister of economic development.

The report says Sasha Angus, who was executive assistant to Norris for three years beginning in 2002, resisted repeated attempts to collect $30,000 in personal expenses that he charged to his credit card.

Angus eventually repaid the money, but the auditor says taxpayers were forced to cover the credit card interest charges. Angus is no longer with the government and has left the province. He could not be reached for comment.

Yeah. I wonder? If you're the kind of person who uses a credit card but pays it off completely with the arrival of each statement you don't pay interest - on your own credit card. How would you feel knowing that you're paying the interest on somebody else's?

Using a government-issued credit card for anything than its intended purpose is a clear breach of public trust even if the intention is to pay back the money.

H/T reader Cat

Arrogant Prick

Paul Wolfowitz, architect of the Iraq war, president of the World Bank, (after being appointed by George W Bush) and general all around slimebag has refused to resign from his position according to his lawyer.

World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz will not resign under the current "cloud" and would rather push the matter to a vote of the bank's board to clear his name, his lawyer said on Wednesday.

"Mr. Wolfowitz will not resign under this cloud and he will rather put this matter to a full vote," Wolfowitz's lawyer, Robert Bennett, told Reuters.

The "cloud" Wolfowitz doesn't like being under and cannot seem to grasp is that he played favourites with his pelvic affiliate.

OK. Let's have the right-wingers start spouting the atmosphere of entitlement line. I've got the example right here.

So, it goes to a full vote. The Europeans have had their fill of this turkey. Hopefully Wolfowitz's next job won't involve any more responsibility than asking, "Would you like anything to drink with your McMeal?"

If Thompson runs for president, his running mate will be the one to watch.

You may remember this post where you were directed to a wingnut who got all excited about former Republican senator Fred Thompson running for president of the US in 2008. You may recall the excitement wasn't over Thompson's qualifications, but over a possible campaign poster.

It turns out Fred Thompson has had cancer for three years in the form of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. He disclosed the fact because, if he wants to be president, people have the right to know there could be a problem carrying out the duties of that office sometime in the future.

Jill puts the situation right out there and pushes the button on the way-back machine to bring up the decade old debate about the health of candidates seeking the presidency. She also points a finger at Katie Couric who did a hack-job on Democratic presidential contender, John Edwards, for continuing his campaign even though his wife has cancer.