Year: 2011

LIVE AT FIVE – 06.16.11

Posted on 9 Comments

TOP NEWS

US/Pakistan Security Cooperation Worst Since 2001

Pakistan's Chief of Staff, Gen. Ashfaq Kayani

Pakistani army chief Gen. Kayani facing intense pressure from the ranks to reduce ties with the US after raid on bin Laden compound

Obama Report On Libya Stokes Bipartisan Anger Over War
Administration sophistry on War Powers Act unites antiwar Democrats, Republicans in opposition to Libyan operations

Representative Giffords Released From Hospital
Will continue therapy in Houston from husband’s home on outpatient basis


Parties Clash Over Muslim Radicalization Hearings
Democrats whine about “unfair targeting” of Muslims



POLITICS
Wisconsin Unions Sue Over New Collective Bargaining Law

Protesters return to Wisconsin capitol

Suit claims law causes unequal treatment of workers

Former Mass. Speaker DiMasi Convicted In Kickback Case

Gingrich Pounces On ABC, NBC Over Hit Piece


Bachmann: Obama Has Secret Plan To End Medicare

GOP Shifting On Anti-Tax Policy, Going After Deductions?

California Drought Drives Up Energy Costs



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Euro Falls To Three-Week Low On Greek Bank Concerns
Foreclosures Fall In May Due To Processing Delays
IBM Celebrates 100th Anniversary
Indian Central Bank Raises Rates For 10th Time In 15 Months As Inflation Fight Continues
US Stocks Fall As Evidence Of Weak Economy Continues
Pandora IPO Feeds Fear Of Another Dot-Com Bubble
Citigroup: 360,000 Accounts Hacked In May
LulzSec Hacks CIA, FBI, Other Government Sites
Yahoo Releases Search Tools For iPhone, Android Apps
Wired: The Nook Nails It



SPORTS
Bruins Bring Home Ice To Vancouver, Skate Away With Stanley Cup

A long series ends badly for the Canucks' Luongo

Boston wins Game 7 and the Cup 4-0; riots erupt in Vancouver

Dodgers Still Owe Manny Ramirez $25 Million

Red Sox Over Rays 3-0 On Beckett 1-Hitter, Youkilis Home Run



Pirates Top Astros, Move Above .500

Teixeira, Yankees Rout Rangers

Phillies Rally In Extra Innings To Sweep Marlins

Progress In NFL Talks Puts Deal Within Reach

Morse’s Homers & Livan’s Wiles Combine In Nats’ 10-0 Crushing Of Cardinals

FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
Adding Insult To Injury: Crystal Harris’ “Mrs. Hefner” Playboy Cover

Hef's runaway bride stars on July cover

Us magazine: “Well, this is embarrassing.”
Hugh Hefner’s Sad Breakup Tweets

Vanessa Hudgens Strips Down For Candie’s Ads

Christina Finds Her Voice

Russell Crowe Flies To “Man Of Steel”

Mavericks Guard Busted For Public Drunkenness

Ginger Lee’s Strip Show: Wieners Only

35 Million Reasons J-Lo Won’t Be Back On “American Idol”


Tobey Maguire The Unlikely New Spokesman For Prada

The Leann Rimes “Sex Tape” Doesn’t Have Any Sex In It

Charlie Sheen Case Won’t Go To Trial

Zooey Deschanel Covers “Self” July 2011



FOREIGNERS
Pakistan’s Military Chief Fighting For His Job
Syria Arrests Hundreds In Northwest Province
Mad Max’s Army: The DIY Weapons Libya’s Rebels Are Using To Defeat Qaddafi
Indonesian Cleric Jailed For 15 Years On Terrorism Charges
Fighting Flares Up In Abyei Region Of Sudan
US “Gunwalking” Operation Exacerbated Mexican Agony
Turkish Group May Quit Gaza Flotilla



BLOGS & STUFF
Atlas Shrugs: Lawmakers Sue Obama Over Libya
Don Surber: ATF = Gun Runners
Allahpundit: Dem Caucus Meeting Turns Angry Over Weiner
Victor Davis Hanson: A Curious Insularity
JammieWearingFool: Indeed, The Rich Are Getting Richer
American Digest: If She Keeps This Blather Up…
Stop Andrea Mitchell: Nothing More Impeachable Than War Without Congressional OK
Daily Mail: The Breast Cancer Patients Too Old To Save
Weasel Zippers: NC Third State To Defund Planned Parenthood
The Lonely Conservative: Get Ready For Stagflation

— compiled by Wombat-socho

CA-36: Hahn’s Bad Rap?

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The Torrance (Calif.) Daily Breeze has an article that would appear to exonerate Democrat Janice Hahn of accusations that her “gang-intervention specialist” program abetted violent felons. I say it “would appear to exonerate” her, because the article leaves unanswered several questions raised by previous reports about Hahn’s involvement in the program. In an attempt to clarify the issue, I sent an e-mail to the Daily Breeze reporter:

I just saw your story about the Ehlinger video and, having previously scanned the Breeze’s reporting about the Fox11 story from 2008, I am having trouble reconciling the two stories. In addition to convicted rapist Steven Myrick, Fox11 named three other individuals — Brandon “BL” Bullard, Marlon “Bow Wow” Jones and Demarco “DC” Chaffold — as having told police they were involved in the LA anti-gang program, specifically mentioning Janice Hahn’s name.
Is it now your contention that NONE of these individuals were actually paid through the program? That is to say, have the police reports been proven false?
Reading your own newspaper’s reporting from 2008, I gather that Bullard, Jones and Chaffold were all connected to Unity One, a non-profit anti-gang operation that received city money, and they had interacted with Hahn through her role in the anti-gang task force. So while the Fox11 report may have sensationalized the accusations, are we to doubt that Myrick, Bullard, Jones and Chaffold all viewed Hahn as a sort of political patron saint, and dropped her name when talking to police as a way of signaling that they were “connected” and/or “protected”?
More generally, there have been other examples (including Alex Sanchez and Hector Marroquin) of “gang intervention specialists” who evidently continued gang-banging while involved in these programs. Isn’t it fair to suspect that these programs are being exploited by the gangs as a sort of non-profit “legit” hustle, so as to access charitable contributions and government grants for their own benefit? And aren’t voters entitled to ask why, when it comes to fighting gang violence, the city is hiring gangsters instead of hiring cops?
Beyond the narrow matter of how this controversy affects the current congressional campaign, it seems to me that the efficacy of LA’s anti-gang programs is certainly a matter of dispute, and that further reporting on this subject is warranted. I write to you in the hope that you will clarify the facts, which your latest story does not seem adequately to address.

— Robert Stacy McCain
correspondent, The American Spectator

From a strictly common-sense perspective, there is an awful lot of smoke here for there to be no fire. I’m grateful to Richard McEnroe of Three Beers Later for calling my attention to this 2007 report about the arrest of Hector “Big Weasel” Marroquin:

FEDERAL ALCOHOL, TOBACCO AND FIREARMS AGENTS knocked first, then entered the Downey home of purported anti-gang activist Hector Marroquin on Wednesday, arresting him for selling silencers and weapons — including three assault rifles and a machine gun — to an undercover ATF agent.
The gun sales, some of which Marroquin, the founder of the gang-intervention group No Guns, transacted at his bar in the city of Cudahy, were captured on videotape and audiotape, said police officers present at his arrest.
Inside the house, the 51-year-old veteran of the 18th Street Gang surrendered as his daughter’s boyfriend, David Jimenez, a parolee at large, jumped out a window, tossed a gun into the backyard pool and climbed on the roof, authorities said. Officials said ATF agents then confronted him, he climbed back inside and was arrested and charged as a felon in possession of a gun.
Marroquin, an alleged associate of the prison-based Mexican Mafia, has grown accustomed to such intrusions, having been arrested many times over the years while at the same time being the founder and CEO of No Guns, which has received $1.5 million from Los Angeles City Hall via the much-criticized L.A. Bridges program designed by the Los Angeles City Council to keep youth out of gangs. . . .
Along with his wife, son and daughter, who police say is a member of the Hawthorne L’il Watts Gang, the Marroquins made more than $200,000 a year in salaries — public funds paid by L.A. taxpayers — to steer children away from gangs and help active gangsters escape the life.

You see what I’m talking about? The Daily Breeze seems to be quibbling over details in the KTTV report about Hahn and gangsters, and let’s grant that the KTTV (Fox11) report may have factual errors or a sensationalistic presentation. Yet the Breeze‘s approach to the story overlooks the much larger and general issue of whether LA’s “gang intervention” effort amounted to a taxpayer subsidy for thugs.

Meanwhile, Newsy had a video report about the controversy over the anti-Hahn ad by Ladd Ehlinger Jr.:

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Multisource political news, world news, and entertainment news analysis by Newsy.com

We have to distinguish between (a) criticism of Ehlinger’s ad, and (b) the significance of the facts about Hahn’s record on the LA City Council. Ladd’s ad has already passed the 125,000-views threshold, BTW.

PREVIOUSLY:

Weiner’s Teen Tweeter

Posted on 19 Comments

Today’s big story about embattled Rep. Anthony Weiner focuses on the fact that his wife, Huma Abedin, a top aide to Hillary Clinton, has returned home to deal with the scandal. (Also, the National Enquirer has published a photo of Weiner, as an 18-year-old college student, wearing a bra as part of some sort of dorm prank.) Some Democrats say Weiner could resign “in a couple of days.”

 

Meanwhile, another aspect of WeinerGate is long overdue for an in-depth examination: What kind of “fan” was the 17-year-old Delaware girl with whom the New York Democrat admits he exchanged private messages on Twitter? Prudence Paine writes a long post in which she observes:

Boy, can she cuss. She drops the F-bomb and the C-bomb and the S-bomb and all the other bombs. Sometimes that’s all a tweet is, just a single curse word; sometimes she strings it oooouuuuuuuutttttttt for emphasis on the frustration or agony or whatever inspired the unladylike blast. Some pages of her tweets are just F, F, F, F. F this, F that, i hate F-ing this, F, F, FFFFFF.

Read the whole thing. As Prudence says, it’s “troubling” that Weiner would be following this girl on Twitter even if, as the congressman says, his communications with her weren’t “indecent” or “explicit.”

CA-36: Anti-Hahn Video Draws More Than 75,000 Viewers in First 18 Hours

Posted on 54 Comments

Janice Hahn, Los Angeles City Council member and
Democrat candidate in CA-36 special election

An online attack ad highlighting a Democratic congressional candidate’s support for a controversial “gang intervention” program has generated more than 75,000 views at YouTube.com since its release Tuesday afternoon. 

“It will probably hit 100,000 [views] by the end of today,” video director Ladd Ehlinger Jr. said in a brief interview Wednesday morning. Ehlinger noted that the video now requires an 18-and-older age verification after it was repeatedly flagged as offensive by liberal blog readers. “I don’t see them going and flagging any other rap videos,” the director said.

Funded by a conservative political action committee, the rap-themed video focuses on the record of Los Angeles city council member Janice Hahn, a Democrat who faces Republican Craig Huey in a July 12 special election for California’s 36th District congressional seat, vacated by the retirement of Democrat Jane Harman.

The video has drawn almost universal condemnation, not only from Democrats, but also from California GOP officials and the Huey campaign. Ehlinger has refused to apologize for the online ad, which one leading liberal blog called “Willie Horton on steroids.”

As David Weigel of Slate reports, Ehlinger’s objective was to “create something so shocking that it would get people talking about a spot on the Hahn record that no one had paid attention to.”

Justin Elliott of Salon claimed that the ad relies on a “debunked” 2008 TV news report. However, the Torrance (Calif.) Daily Breeze article cited by Elliott did not address other evidence that the controversial “gang intervention” program aided criminals. 

Criticizing media he accused of being “too lazy to do research,” Ehlinger posted three further items about the scandal:

The indictment of Sanchez was also reported by the New York Times. In May 2008, Hahn urged a tax increase to expand funding for L.A.’s gang intervention program to $40 million. Here is the 2009 report by KTTV in Los Angeles about Crips gangster Steve Myrick, a career criminal who received a certificate of appreciation from Janice Hahn, and other gangsters who collected checks from the program:

And here is Ehlinger’s ad for the conservative Turn Right USA PAC:

As of 11 a.m. ET Wednesday, both the PAC’s main Web site and its “Hahn’s Homeboyz” site were non-operational due to unusually heavy Internet traffic.

Insty Breaks Out The ZZ Top Reference

Posted on 5 Comments

by Smitty

Showdown, you bet! And I haven’t even saddled my pony yet!

Deguello is my personal favorite ZZ Top release.
Oh yeah, Insty is on about an article on The Hill where Speaker Boehner is turning up the heat on the POTUS over Libya:

Boehner wrote: “Given the mission you have ordered to the U.S. Armed Forces with respect to Libya and the text of the War Powers Resolution, the House is left to conclude that you have made one of two determinations: either you have concluded the War Powers Resolution does not apply to the mission in Libya, or you have determined the War Powers Resolution is contrary to the Constitution.

“The House, and the American people whom we represent, deserve to know the determination you have made.”

Citing Obama’s oath of office and the Constitution, Boehner asks the president to provide the administration’s legal analysis regarding the War Powers Resolution and demands an answer by Friday. That is also the date by which the House-passed measure demands a response from the White House.

Boehner intensified his criticism of Obama’s handling of Libya and noted “the ongoing, deeply divisive debate originated with a lack of genuine consultation prior to commencement of operations and has been further exacerbated by the lack of visibility and leadership from you and your administration.”

The Speaker has suggested that if the White House does not respond adequately to the House-passed resolution, which is non-binding, the House could take further action, such as withholding funds for the mission.

Does Sprinklerman have the stones to go to the mat with BHO?
Wouldn’t touch it with a Ten Foot Pole.

Health Care or Aircraft Carriers?

Posted on 11 Comments

One of the problems with ObamaCare is that this massive new entitlement program will steadily drain away tax money from the federal budget — including the defense budget, so that the United States can no longer afford to defend its interests abroad. In fact, something similar is already happening to our allies:

The British military intervention in Libya is unsustainable, the head of the Navy has said.
Adml Sir Mark Stanhope said the campaign would have been more effective without the Government’s defence cuts.
The aircraft carrier and the Harrier jump-jets scrapped under last year’s strategic defence review would have made the mission more effective, faster and cheaper, he said.
Sir Mark warned that the Navy would not be able to sustain its operations in Libya for another three months without making cuts elsewhere.
The First Sea Lord’s comments will stir the debate over defence cuts that have left Britain without a working aircraft carrier and forced the Royal Navy’s Harrier jump jets to be mothballed.

William Katz comments: “Britain is a symbol of what’s happened all over Europe — defense cuts made to fuel the welfare state.” (Hat-tip: William Jacobson.)

Pointing Out the Obvious: They Don’t Teach Economics at Harvard Law School

Posted on 77 Comments

Conveniences you’ve enjoyed for decades have suddenly become a cause of long-term unemployment:

“There are some structural issues with our economy where a lot of businesses have learned to become much more efficient with a lot fewer workers. You see it when you go to a bank and you use an ATM, you don’t go to a bank teller, or you go to the airport and you’re using a kiosk instead of checking in at the gate.”
— Barack Obama

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The president is attempting here to offer a simplistic explanation of the difference between cyclical unemployment and structural unemployment. As important as that distinction is, however, it fails to explain many obvious things about this recession.

Unemployment isn’t at 9% because of out-of-work bank clerks and airline ticket agents. Unemployment is most severe in construction trades and other housing-related sectors. Whatever else Obama’s policies have done, they have not led to a meaningful recovery of the housing market and, one might easily argue, have made things much worse. Why? Because for two years, the administration and Democrats in Congress did everything possible to impede the foreclosure process, to keep deadbeats in homes they can’t afford. This has slowed re-sales, prevented mortgage lenders from cutting their losses on bad loans and, in general, hindered the kind of price “re-set” necessary to making the housing market efficient again.

Something else: The recession is not equally bad everywhere. Why is unemployment nearly 12% in California but less than 6% in Oklahoma? Don’t people in Oklahoma use ATMs and automated airline ticket kiosks?

Finally: ObamaCare places mandates on employers to provide health insurance to their employees. And by so doing, it increases the cost of hiring people. Whenever government policy makes something more expensive to do, people will do less of whatever that something is, and ObamaCare is a classic example of that. It’s like a good news/bad news joke: The good news is, your employer is now required to provide you health insurance. The bad news is, you ain’t got a job.

You don’t have to be a genius to figure out why Obamanomics doesn’t work. It’s one of those things that is so obvious that it takes a special kind of stupid not to see it.

And I guess they teach that special kind of stupid at Harvard.

UPDATE: Professor William Jacobson (who teaches at Cornell, not Harvard) explains that the President’s perspective “is a perfectly static view, which would have protected jobs in the buggy whip industry by preventing the creation and expansion of the auto industry; would have protected jobs at glass tube manufacturers against the advent of flat screen televisions; would have barred the creation of the cell phone industry because of all the jobs lost in the land line business, and so on and so on.”