What U.S. government official is currently facing jail time after his involvment in illegal activities, including dealing improperly with top-secret intelligence and lying to investigators about it?

(more…)

Let’s see how smart you Fishkiteers are.

Translate the following phrase:

u;n ibw anER XIIJUW

Previous quizzes here and here.

It’s an honor… I think.

Let’s see… nope, no skeletons in Karl Rove’s garage…

Well, Democrats, I guess you’ll have to keep hope alive that Fitzgerald will continue his investigation and perhaps find something in the closet.

Happy Halloween, and happy continued hunting.

On Thursday, Paul A. Volcker and the Independent Inquiry Committee announced that “more than 2,400 businesses… paid nearly $1.8 billion in illegal kickbacks to the former Iraqi government through the U.N. oil-for-food program.”

According to the report, via the Washington Post, “Iraq used its oil wealth to influence some countries’ policies at the United Nations, rewarding Russia $19 billion in oil contracts and France $4.4 billion in deals.”

My thoughts and prayers are with the people of Iraq who suffered under Saddam Hussein’s murderous regime far longer due to the corruption and incompetence of U.N. officials who facilitated their oppression.

Out of respect for all the service men and women who have paid the ultimate price while defending the United States and its allies, liberating Iraq of Saddam’s regime, hunting down terrorists and fanning the great flame of democracy, comments will be closed on this post. We owe them a moment of silence, and our gratitude.

UPDATE: A cartoon by Chip Bok

wow

Elrod has a post on Harding University Democrats getting organized, or rather, a post on the Democrat club’s splash in local and national media.

According to Searcy’s Daily Citizen, “Harding’s newest political club held their first social event” last week, drawing 10 people, including three students who identified themselves as Democrats. The club isn’t actually new, the Citizen continues, explaining that the club charter had been filed years ago and that the membership had simply lapsed at some point along the way.

Isn’t it great how the Citizen has become head cheerleader for every Democrat and liberal in town, from Jack Shock, to the anti-Coulter crowd, to Mike Beebe, and now this. I fully expect each of these ten people to be given a weekly column by year’s end.

USA Today adds this: “Some of those attending the weekend event said they attended because they wanted to hear an alternate political voice, not because they were actually Democrats.”

Quoted in the Citizen, Elrod opines, “The best [the club] can aspire to accomplish is to be the voice of a loyal opposition. What they can do is say ‘here we are.’”

Loyal opposition, you say? Fat chance. Says Wikipedia:

In the United States, the most common application of the term is to refer to the major political party (Democratic or Republican) which does not hold the office of President during time of war (most notably the Republican Party during World War II), implying an obligation for said party to cooperate fully and without reservation in the war effort. It is rarely if ever used in that country during peacetime.

It should come as no surprise, however, that Elrod’s two blog entries immediately preceding and following this one include such reservations (the second being implied by his observance of a rounded number of American causalties of the war, bad news which is being celebrated by his fellow liberal bloggers, the liberal news media and of course Al Qaida).

So who came to the function?

For one, there was junior Karyn Kiser, our old friend who was last found writing in the student newspaper about walking into chapel “wearing a shirt [she] had made, which read “I love my country, not my president.”

The Citizen describes Kiser as an “English major who is often a dissenting voice at Harding,” then dedicates the entire second half of the article to her. Here’s a clip:

Kiser’s views have in the past drawn the attention of both the university’s administration and her peers.

During her freshman year, Kiser said that she removed from her window an “Impeach Bush” sign and an American flag which she had hung upside down, following a request from her dorm mother. Her political statements have also, at times, been more subtle. In a speech she once asked students to refrain from saying “pro-choice” instead of “pro-death” when describing those who believe a woman has a right to an abortion.

I could quote even more interesting things from her blog, but that’s just too easy, and her blog is basically a personal journal anyway. If you’re really that interested, you won’t have a hard time finding it on your own.

I wouldn’t have wanted people to judge me now based on what I said and did while I was a (relatively liberal) English major at Harding.

Kiser complains about her car being “covered in college republican club fliers” (probably a result of the fact that, as she writes in her column, “I have a few bumper stickers on my car” - and we can imagine what that means); hey Karyn, try having your mock “Harding Young Communists” poster defaced and ripped off the wall, then get back to me.

Actually, the more I think about it, the more I feel a kinship with young Karyn. I was never involved in politics at Harding, but I did write for the Bison, and I was generally unhappy about the administration’s overly-conservative attitude. True, I obtained a Harding Young Republicans t-shirt while I was there, but I bought it because it was cold and I needed something that was clean and had long sleeves. For all I know, it was probably James Wiser who knocked on my door and sold it to me for $10. I rarely wore it anywhere around campus without another t-shirt on top to cover the idiotic message on the back: “HU Republicans — we’re not snobs, we’re just right.”

A few years later I was walking to the cafeteria when a group of guys started yelling at me because of another t-shirt I got, this one as a gift from my mom: it was Bill Clinton as James Dean with the words, “Rebel Without a Congress.”

I yelled back, “what’s wrong with being a rebel?”

Pretty clever, I thought, but the dodge didn’t work. They kept yelling at me.

So, we do have some things in common, and if I’ve pulled out the world’s tiniest violin for Karyn and her two oppressed liberal friends, now you know why.

Perhaps one reason why the Democrats only attract a crowd of 10 and a true membership of three is that so many of their spokesmen and allies are bitter, flag-burning, elitist, Christian-bashing insult machines.

Or some mixture of those.

Here’s Hermit Greg, writing about the temporary retreat of the Kendall-Ball blog (last discussed here):

guessing what our readers want or expect is part of what writing is about. Writers will choose to fulfill, challenge but confirm, or reject outright readers’ expectations for what they produce. What they choose will please some readers and it will alienate others, and that is one of the few certainties there is about writing.

But sometimes writers forget that this is the case. I wondered today if something of the sort is happening to Greg Kendall-Ball, whose blog has this year attracted a pretty remarkable readership among wired a capella-ist Christians. To be sure, that he is a graduate student doesn’t help his focus as a blogger, but I wonder if perhaps he hasn’t met an angst that is at root writerly: where Greg wishes to be a voice of conciliation, he nevertheless found himself cast as a polemicist too often to be comfortable. He’s discovered another certainty about writing: there is no such thing as nuance in polemics, and while not naturally a polemicist himself, many of his newfound readers (or “readers,” with apropos scare quotes, as the peanut gallery may be) couldn’t discover subtlety even with a map, a compass, and a good New England fisherman sitting shotgun saying, “Yawp. It’s just around dat bend over dere.”

You see, GK-B merely “found himself cast” in a role he found uncomfortable, probably forced into it by all (three?) of the ignorant, conservative fools who dared question his eminence. GK-B had no choice in the matter — it was either write shrill, anti-American screeds or stop writing altogether.

And just when I start to feel guilty for my part in his self-mandated silence, here’s Kendall-Ball writing in Elrod’s comments:

Now, most “conservatives” I know think that disrupting the status quo is tantamount to denying the existence of God. You aren’t supposed to question. You merely learn what those good and intelligent teachers hand down to you. You absorb it uncritically because they realyl have your best interests at heart, and wouldn’t want you to stray from the beaten path.

Now, to hear someone decry the number of liberals at institutions of higher ed is like someone saying it’s unfair that all the people at the bank are so numbers-oriented. Or saying that all the baseball players on a team are too athletic.

The reason there aren’t more conservatives in most (again, notice I did not say all) higher ed. institutions is that they feel out of place in that context.

Me no understand big words. Me best leave it to stad-is-ko. Me not be-long here, with all these word books. Me not understand “subtlety.”

*

Let’s end on a funny note, and there’s so much to work with here, but this has to be among the best.

This is Kile, explaining how he entered Harding as a dumb conservative dittohead and left an enlightened liberal.

But then second semester rolled around and Prof. Elrod got a hold of my fragile little brain (it was crazy fragile after that first semester). Then I took every class offered by Prof. Elrod. Now I am a liberal.

I blame the drugs.

I blame the subtlety-blind, status quo-bound rightwingers.

Here’s a project in which political junkies from several parts of the spectrum can participate without (hopefully) resorting to ad hominem attacks, mudslinging, verbal abuse, death threats… you know, all the fun stuff.

I’ve decided to host the blogosphere’s first-ever Cartoon Presidential Election.

Stage one: an open call for nominations.

Nominees must be cartoon characters. Both animated and non-animated nominees are eligible, but characters must be nationally-available, appearing or having-appeared in a newspaper strip, print advertisement, television program, television commercial, film, etc.

Nominations will be accepted in the comments below or by email (mick -at- fishkite.com). You may nominate as many characters as you like, but please only one at a time. Include the name of the character, where the character appears/appeared (if necessary, for somewhat obscure characters), and briefly why you think this character would make a good cartoon president.

Once all the nominations are in, we will begin Stage Two, the voting process. Nominations will be accepted through Friday, Nov. 4.

I appreciate CBS News’ sensitivity to the Mike Wallace thing, but this is the wrong solution. Let’s face it: people have opinions, even TV newsmen. Ok, especially TV newsmen. You don’t take someone off a story every time he is discovered to have an opinion on the topic. What you can do is disclose the reporter’s bias and force him to cover the topic in a way that is as impartial and objective as possible — include all the facts, interview both sides, and don’t give an unfair advantage to either one in the piece. CBS News execs probably think they’re doing the right thing here, but this is actually more disturbing than doing nothing at all. It shows they would prefer to keep a reporter’s bias secret as long as he doesn’t get caught with his hand in the cookie jar, rather than just come clean with the audience and play it straight to the extent possible.

The Miers-O-Meter is entirely unscientific; it is simply my semi-informed reading of the nominee’s chances in the Senate. With this first update, Miers suffers a 9 point drop, to 51% from 65% on Oct 5, just after the nomination was first introduced.

Factoring into the drop: Senators Specter and Schumer say she lacks the votes, Tradesports’ over-50 vote contract bids start at 51, Newsfutures currently stands at 42%, the Miers-X-Meter allows the nominee only a 31% chance of confirmation. Links via Drudge and Occasional Outbursts.

I believe it’s still too early to say the nomination will fail; no Republican Senators have gone on record saying they would vote against her, the President typically gets his party to fall in line, Miers enjoyed some initial Democratic support, and Miers still hasn’t had her day before the Judicial Committee.

That said, I fully expect the Miers-O-Meter to continue falling.

The Note has a comprehensive roundup of stories that seem to agree:

(more…)