If the movie Redacted had been made during World War II

 
I'm pretty sure FDR's reaction to Redacted director Brian DePalma would have been either this:

...or a firing squad.

Does this strike anyone else as odd?

 
So I get a text-message from my wife yesterday -- during a heavy rain -- that reads:

      i need new tires!!! i am hydroplaning!

Hmmm. Let me think about this for a moment. Something -- I can't quite put my finger on it -- strikes me as odd about that message.

Linda Bat-Boyd and Life at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer

 
The nuclear physicists who run the Seattle Post-Intelligencer have decided to accelerate their campaign for impeachment. It seems to be a strategic element of management's stewardship, which has resulted in the loss of 40% of the paper's subscribers in the last decade.


Illustration accompanying Linda Bat-Boyd's Seattle P-I Op-Ed
Actually, Linda Bat-Boyd lays out her case for impeachment brilliantly:

Impeachment is squarely on the table, and momentum is building. A year ago, almost no elected official breathed the word impeachment. Now impeachment has hit the House floor, and our electeds have gone on record. Millions of Americans are demanding an end to executive abuse of power.

After six years of state of emergency, the Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act, continual war and occupations, our Constitution is deeply in crisis. Americans are in danger of losing our system of government and civil rights if they do not roll back the Bush administration's assault on the rule of law.

Yes, momentum is building, only it's to have you forcibly committed to a local mental health facility, Linda.

Of course, Linda fails to describe a single instance of said abuses. Consider her "slamdunk" case:

The First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments are all now subject to the caprice of government officials. The Military Commissions Act allows U.S. citizens to be detained without due process if they are declared enemy combatants. Without our permission, this country has become an exporter of torture.

One teensy, weensy little problem, Linda: you've failed to mention even one real instance of abuse. That's because you can't. Even the so-called instances of "torture" by American troops -- the controversial cases of non-lethal waterboarding -- are actually practiced by our armed forces on themselves.

As ABC's News Blotter reported earlier this month:

For all the debate over waterboarding, it has been used on only three al Qaeda figures...

The most effective use of waterboarding, according to current and former CIA officials, was in breaking Khalid Sheikh Mohammed [KSM], who subsequently confessed to a number of ongoing plots against the United States... A senior CIA official said KSM later admitted it was only because of the waterboarding that he talked.

Ultimately, KSM took responsibility for the 9/ll attacks and virtually all other al Qaeda terror strikes, including the beheading of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl...

But Linda Moonboyd doesn't care about beheadings. After all... it's not torture, it's just murder. As for the Al-Qaeda Torture Manual, well, that doesn't count. They're misguided "minutemen," I suppose.

And as for "lying us into war" or "manipulating intelligence": Hillary Clinton saw the same intelligence that that the President and VP saw... and voted for war. Should we impeach Hillary as well?

Super Special Photo-Gallery Feature for Progressives Only! Don't recall what Madeline Albright, Nancy Pelosi, Robert Byrd, Ted Kennedy, Jay Rockefeller, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and John Kerry said before and after the invasion of Iraq? Our super-fantabulous stop-action photo gallery takes you into the way-back machine to revisit all of the Dems' hi-larious hi-jinks in glorious MoonbatVision™!

If anyone needed to be impeached, it was Bill Clinton and not for the reason he was actually impeached. The Progressive Review recaps the unbelievable track record of wrongdoing by the Clinton Regime:

- The only president ever impeached on grounds of personal malfeasance
- Most number of convictions and guilty pleas by friends and associates*
- Most number of cabinet officials to come under criminal investigation
- Most number of witnesses to flee country or refuse to testify
- Most number of witnesses to die suddenly
- First president sued for sexual harassment.
- First president accused of rape.
- First first lady to come under criminal investigation
- Largest criminal plea agreement in an illegal campaign contribution case
- First president to establish a legal defense fund.
- First president to be held in contempt of court
- Greatest amount of illegal campaign contributions
- Greatest amount of illegal campaign contributions from abroad
- First president disbarred from the US Supreme Court and a state court

- Number of individuals and businesses associated with the Clinton machine who have been convicted of or pleaded guilty to crimes: 47
- Number of these convictions during Clinton's presidency: 33
- Number of indictments/misdemeanor charges: 61
- Number of congressional witnesses who have pleaded the Fifth Amendment, fled the country to avoid testifying, or (in the case of foreign witnesses) refused to be interviewed: 122

The number of times that Clinton figures who testified in court or before Congress said that they didn't remember, didn't know, or something similar during the many, various investigations: Bill Kennedy 116, Harold Ickes 148, Ricki Seidman 160, Bruce Lindsey 161, Bill Burton 191, Mark Gearan 221, Mack McLarty 233, Neil Egglseston 250, Hillary Clinton 250, Bill Clinton 267, John Podesta 264, Jennifer O'Connor 343, Dwight Holton 348, Patsy Thomasson 420, Jeff Eller 697.

- FBI files misappropriated by the White House: c. 900
- Estimated number of witnesses quoted in FBI files misappropriated by the White House: 18,000
- Number of witnesses who developed medical problems at critical points in Clinton scandals investigation (Tucker, Hale, both McDougals, Lindsey): 5
- Problem areas listed in a memo by Clinton's own lawyer in preparation for the president's defense: 40
- Number of witnesses and critics of Clinton subjected to IRS audit: 45
- Number of names placed in a White House secret database without the knowledge of those named: c. 200,000
- Number of women involved with Clinton who claim to have been physically threatened (Sally Perdue, Gennifer Flowers, Kathleen Willey, Linda Tripp, Elizabeth Ward Gracen, Juantia Broaddrick): 6

Of course, let's not even delve into the Chinagate Missiles-for-Money Scandal, the still-redacted Barrett Report, and still-redacted Cox Report for other corruption (or perhaps even treason) investigations that were "stone-walled" and/or censored by the Clintons' lawyers.

Or Pardongate, in which Presidential pardons and commutations were seemingly traded like baseball cards... but for large sums of cash instead.

Or the litany of terrorist attacks sustained by US and Allied interests under the Clinton Regime without even a semblance of a plan to combat extremists and their state supporters.

Dear Linda, those are the sorts of thing that you can use for real grounds for impeachment. Not a demented fantasy world, for which you can point to no real instance of abuse of power. Now get back on your meds and stop bothering the working folks..

Postscript: Linda Bat-Boyd is allegedly a Washingon state senator and is director of Washingtonians For Impeachment: FlamingTreasonousWashingtonMoonbats.org; Citizens to Impeach George and Hillary Cheney: www.IAintPlayingWithAFullDeck.org; and Progressive Morons for a Better Seattle: moron.org.

Bonus Line o' the Day: Poet, Philosopher, First Lady

 
MVRWC asks (hat tip: Maggie's Farm):

At [what] point will a Clinton candidacy prompt the following question of Laura Bush “Do you feel qualified to run for President, after eight years as First Lady”?

[And] What would be the reaction if she said “being First Lady doesn’t qualify you to be President”?

The reaction? Anarchy. Cats and dogs, sleeping together. Truly, the end of the world.

Line o' the Day: Who is a refugee?

 

[Missing is the] scholarly article on why the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from Arab lands, who escaped to Israel leaving all their possessions behind, are no longer refugees, while the Arabs who became refugees as a result of their violent rejection of the U.N. partition plan for two states, one Jewish and one Arab, are still living in refugee camps supported by the U.N., even at a time when, as Mr. Robbins reminds us, Arab countries are awash with petrodollars.

The so called moderate Palestinian leadership, to this day, refuses to accept the fact that Israel was created as the only (tiny) Jewish state in the world, pursuant to the U.N. resolution of 1947 and Israel's war of survival and independence.

                  -- Professor Ezekiel Bahar, writing in the Wall Street Journal's Letters to the Editor

The Clinton Gambit: 'Protection money', 'fear of retribution' and 'pressure to give'

 
Yesterday's Washington Post exposed another odd donation bundler utilized by the Clinton Machine. Matthew Mosk -- with help from Alice Crites and Sarah Cohen -- examined the contributions of a Texas real-estate developer named Alonzo Cantu.

Operating out of the town of McAllen, Texas, Cantu has raised more than $640,000 for the Clinton campaign. In contrast, Barack Obama has raised less than $2,100. In this relatively poor border town, the Post was interested in how Cantu had raised the money -- and from whom it had been raised.

Because of his financial interests, Cantu's influence over potential donors is substantial. He has raised money from doctors who work at the hospital where he holds an ownership interest, from bankers who work at the bank he co-owns and from the scores of tradesmen who contract with his primary business, Cantu Construction and Development Co., one of the town's dominant residential and commercial builders. The Clinton donors included dozens who had never registered to vote, several who were Republicans and 10 who had previously made contributions to President Bush and former House majority leader Tom DeLay (R).

Even when Hillary ran for her New York Senate seat, Cantu was actively raising donations for her.

What does Cantu want? The Post states that Cantu has been lobbying his contacts for help in bringing an interstate highway to McAllen and described a significant "local opposition" to the construction of the U.S.-Mexico border fence that was authorized last year.

Some donors appear less than ecstatic with Cantu's methods of fundraising:

A longtime local surgeon who left the hospital said Cantu and the other hospital board members referred to the political contributions as "protection money."

"They said, 'We've got to give this money to Hillary so we can be exempt from the bill,' " said the surgeon, who asked that his name not be used...

The concept of "protection money" is not new for Clinton's donation bundlers. The Norman Hsu fundraising affair, for example, has some peculiar similarities.

When the Hsit hit the fan

In a previous post ("Hsit hits the fan"), a Human Events' summary of the Hsu debacle has some eerie parallels to the Cantu scenario.

GOP Bloggers' Matt Margolis and Mark Noonan posted their FEC complaint against the Hillary Clinton for President Committee in response to the reports of donors who felt pressure to give money for fear for retribution and a number of poor donors who donated thousands of dollars each to her campaign.

Townhall.com's Patrick Ruffini reports:

On the heels of the Norman Hsu scandal, the Clinton campaign was rocked by questions of even more Hsu-like shakedowns in connection with a $380,000 fundraiser in New York which saw contributions ranging from $1,000 to $2,500 from cooks and dishwashers. At least one donor admitted to being an illegal immigrant. Another said she was illegally reimbursed for her contributions. Others said they felt pressured to give.

Unlike the Hsu cash, Hillary's campaign has yet to return the bulk of this tainted money.

This complaint brings these charges into a formal FEC process. The Clinton campaign will have 15 days to respond and publicly defend itself from charges of illegal campaign fundraising.

'Protection money', 'fear of retribution' and a 'pressure to give'

The pattern is disturbing at best. Outsized donations are raised by some powerful, well-connected patrons of the Clintons and, when some of the money is tracked back, the actual parties who contributed are none-too-pleased. Or they are actually illegal aliens, prohibited from voting.

Either way, the Clinton Machine doesn't seem very good at scrubbing their donor lists, despite their bizarre ties to database marketer InfoUSA.

Hat tip: Mike and Patti

Line o' the Day: Debate Chaos

 
LGF Commenter US Beast, responding to accusations that CNN rigged debate questions in order to lob softballs at Hillary Clinton.

Now lets be fair here. You can't expect CNN or the Dems to allow ordinary citizens to question these candidates. Ordinary citizens just aren't intelligent enough to understand the mental gymnastics it takes to arrive at the positions held my these mighty intellects. The average Joe or Josephine cannot comprehend what kind of intellectual fortitude is required to ignore the world as it is and achieve the world they hallucinate envision.


And remember, it was a bunch of these ordinary citizens that voted for George W. Bush, not once but twice.

Can you imagine the embarrassment it would cause if an ordinary citizen asked a question like: "Each of you talks about 'ending the war in Iraq'. None of you ever mention the word 'victory'. Has 'victory' become a dirty word for the Democrats or are you all a bunch of candy-assed defeatists?"

Chaos. It would result in absolute chaos.