Rep. Jesse Jackson resigned from Congress Wednesday, saying in a letter that he is cooperating with a federal investigation “into my activities” but blaming his health problems for his decision to step down just two weeks after his re-election. . . .
Despite his admission of “my share of mistakes,” Jackson said his deteriorating health was the reason he was quitting. He has been on medical leave since June while receiving treatment for bipolar depression. . . .
Jackson, 47, won election this month while being treated at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. . . .
He has not appeared in the House since June 8. Nor did he stage a campaign event — or even run a TV ad. Jackson advanced to the general election after defeating a one-term member of Congress, Debbie Halvorson, in a March primary. . . .
Under Illinois law, Gov. Pat Quinn, a fellow Democrat, would call a special election to fill Jackson’s 2nd District congressional seat, which extends from Chicago’s South Side to Kankakee. . . .
Jackson has been under investigation by the House Ethics Committee for alleged improprieties related to his bid to win appointment in 2008 to the Senate seat that had been held by President Barack Obama. A Jackson emissary is alleged to have offered to raise up to $6 million in campaign funds for disgraced former Gov. Rod Blagojevich in exchange for the governor appointing Jackson to the Senate seat.
Blagojevich is serving a prison term for corruption convictions including trying to sell or trade the Senate seat.
There is no such thing as an honest Illinois Democrat, so we can trust that voters of the 2nd District will elect another corrupt buffoon to replace the crook who just resigned. Happy Thanksgiving!
TAMPA, Florida
Gotta run real quick, but not before I introduce you to a longtime reader of The Other McCain, John Henry Decker, now running for Congress in Connecticut’s First District:
How government became a deviant subculture is a story of good intentions gone awry. We tried to avoid government abuse by replacing individual responsibility with detailed rules and objective legal proceedings. Never again would officials play favorites or indulge personal prejudices. Government would be an efficient assembly line.
I assert that there is nothing particularly deviant about civil servants. Indeed, on an individual level, my experience has been that people who are risk-averse enjoy the tenure-like comfort of a public-sector job, swapping some gross pay for benefits. Our descent into Orwellian hell has not been about trading responsibility for rules. Rather, it is that, given time, budget, staff, and word processors, our government has reached critical morass.
Which operating system has more systems deployed: Microsoft’s Win*, or the various Unix flavors (with Apple’s line standing far closer to Unix)? Linux, in particular, is wrecking all non-desktop comers (supercomputers, routers, servers) because Linus Torvalds is ruthlessly anti-bloat. The U.S. Code is far more like Windows, with its tendency to add more layers of noise atop the existing crap, without insufficient trimming of legacy crap.
And why is this? Howard’s article misses the crucial point: $
The collapse of everything into DC has been driven by the fact that DC is where the loot is. There will be no significant reform of any sort until there is (a) a come-to-Beavis meeting on the Federal Reserve, and its role as the chief cancer of the world, and (b) a commitment to de-scoping Leviathan.
We’ll get there, by hook or by crook. Stein’s Law seems thoroughly played out.
Update: What’s up with Bill Quick? In the first place, Ubuntu is a full distribution; kernel, Debian apt package manager, X11 windowing environment, desktop, and sundry apps. Linus Torvalds controls the Linux kernel. To say that Linux is Ubuntu is to say Congress is the United States.
Secondly,
the whole move to DC is not driven by the fact that DC is where the money is. That puts the cart before the horse. The reason that DC is where the money is, is DC’s ability to steal money collect nationwide taxes and regulatory fees, as well as do unlimited borrowing (states and municipalities have to actually balance budgets, sort of) which lets it siphon floods of money from locales and regions to Rome on the Potomac.
I really don’t see the importance of the cart/horse distinction here. I’ll give you coroutines. How ’bout that? However you’re slicing it, it had better end up in major reform and decentralization.
More at The Lonely Conservative and Legal Insurrection. What strikes me about this ad is how it is coordinated with President Obama’s message: It is no longer enough to say that Republicans advocate “tax cuts for the rich.” Now the Democrats actually accuse the GOP of wishing to raise taxes on the middle class. The Democrats’ blatant indifference to truth is frightening, as is the evidence that their lies are actually working.
Has it really come to this? Are the Democrats — who have spent the past four years telling us that every possible criticism of Obama is some kind of racist “dog whistle” — going to get away with portraying war hero Allen West as a violent thief?
“Keep in mind policy intel for 700+ Congressional staffers runs through a system I built and I back up the natsec editor. I hear stuff average bear does not.“
Bayne interprets the phrase “policy intel” to include sensitive national-security information, which would be extremely troubling given Rauhauser’s clear connections to Anonymous, the international computer hacking conspiracy. However, leaving aside that potentially scary implication, and stipulating that this text message is authentic — that Rauhauser did indeed send it, and that his claim is not just more of Neal’s habitual bragging — Bayne still has produced evidence worthy of serious investigation. Some questions that investigators might wish to ask:
What is this “system” that Rauhauser built? Is it an official system, paid for with taxpayer dollars?
Have these staffers been authorized by members of Congress to access the system Rauhauser built?
What are the names of the staffers participating in this “policy intel” system, and which members of Congress do they work for?
Who is the “natsec” (i.e., national security) editor of the system Rauhauser built? What sort of “stuff,” unknown to the “average bear,” does Rauhauser access through this system?
Neal Rauhauser isn’t just some random crazy guy on the Internet. He is a well-connected Democrat operative who has worked for numerous candidates and campaigns, who was a featured speaker at the 2010 Netroots Nation conference, a consultant who represents a direct link between his client, convicted terrorist Brett Kimberlin, and the official Democratic Party political apparatus.
Of course, the administrator of such an operation could probably use his access in nefarious ways (and Rauhauser is a distinctly hinky character) but PCN itself doesn’t seem all that important.
Could we get Fox News to bring back Glenn Beck and his chalkboard for a two-hour special? Because what began with a seemingly minor item Friday in the Washington Examiner has exposed a direct connection between congressional Democrats and the radical network Beck so vividly described, involving George Soros, ACORN, SEIU and, yes, the notorious “Cloward-Piven Strategy.”
Operating in “file-and-forget” mode, I moved on to other stories until last night, when I was having fun on Twitter with the #ObamaBedtimeStories meme, and one of my jokes got re-Tweeted by my friend, investigative reporter Matthew Vadum. Because Matthew is perhaps the nation’s leading expert on the ACORN/SEIU/Soros connection, it occurred to me he might be able to get some data on the Soros connection to what Gehrke had reported. So I sent him a couple of Tweets about it. By the time I got up about 7 a.m. today, Vadum had sent me a spreadsheet listing foundation contributions to Wiley’s outfit. Quickly adding up the numbers and doing additional research online, within two-and-a-half hours I’d filed this brief report for The American Spectator:
A non-profit organization that provided training last week to House Democrats, portraying Republican opponents as racially motivated, has received significant funding from foundations linked to controversial left-wing multibillionaire George Soros.
Soros’s Open Society Institute has given $75,000 to the Center for Social Inclusion, which has also received more than $850,000 from the Soros-connectedTides Foundation/Tides Center since 2005, according to documents obtained by The American Spectator.
In a training session for House Democrats and their congressional staffers last week, Center for Social Inclusion founder and president Maya Wiley described “conservative messages” as being “racially coded,” and suggested that Democrats “raise racial disparities” in public policy discussions, Joel Gerhke of the Washington Examiner reported. . . .
The Soros-Wiley connection was noted by Matthew Vadum of the Capital Research Center. Vadum, an investigative reporter and American Spectatorcontributor, is author of the widely-praised recent book Subversion, Inc., an exhaustive exposé of ACORN. Wiley’s background also drew attention from Michelle Horstman of PJ Media, who noted that Maya Wiley is the daughter of 1960s radical George Wiley, founder of the National Welfare Rights Organization.
Please read the whole thing. Connecting the dots to the National Welfare Rights Organization links the Center for Social Inclusion to the “Cloward-Piven Strategy,” a 1960s left-wing effort to foment economic crisis and social revolution. This direct connection between the Soros-funded radical network and congressional Democrats could prove to be a major story, if Gerhke follows up on his original scoop and other reporters begin asking questions about why Democrats are getting election-year advice from such a controversial source.
ACORN is the face of vote fraud, but its intellectual foundation is the Cloward Piven Strategy. Sociology professors Richard Cloward (Columbia University) and Frances Fox Piven (CUNY) were founding members of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Cloward died in 2001 but Piven lives on.
In 1966 Cloward and Piven penned an article for The Nation magazine titled “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty.” They posited that if the poor were organized into street armies to demand all welfare benefits available to them, they could overwhelm and crash the system.
It became known as the “Cloward-Piven Strategy,” and is credited with expanding welfare rolls 151 percent between 1965 and 1974 and bringing New York City to the brink of bankruptcy in 1975.
Professor Frances Fox Piven is an active supporter of the movement and told a public-radio interviewer: “I think we desperately need a popular uprising in the United States.” Piven also denounced the financial industry at a Sept. 29 rally in New York where, in a bizarre call-and-response speech, she told the crowd: “You’ve heard people say they’re greedy, and they are greedy. You’ve heard people say that they are thieves, and they are thieves. But they’re also cannibals, because they are eating their own.”
Here’s the video of Pivens’s “mike check” with the Occupiers:
UPDATE III: Why would Democrats be willing to resort to such desperate — indeed, dangerous — tactics as smearing Republicans as racist, as this Maya Wiley training session would seem to suggest?
Well, when Obama became America’s “first gay president” (thanks, Newsweek!), some polls indicated a sharp shift toward Mitt Romney. We can expect a dirty, desperate and deeply divisive campaign from Democrats this year.
The House on Tuesday passed legislation giving hunters and fishing enthusiasts access to certain public lands to pursue their sport and also blocked the Environmental Protection Agency from banning lead for use in ammunition and fishing tackle.
This is one of those laws that people with common sense might think would be unnecessary. Why would anyone want to prohibit hunters from having access to public land? After all, hunting is an essential (and cheap) method of wildlife managment, to prevent herds from breeding out of control, as has happened with whitetail deer in many parts of the country. But the Obama administration isn’t staffed by people with common sense:
[Sponsors of the House bill] cited an article in U.S. News and World Report stating the proposal to ban hunting on BLM land was in response to urbanites that “freak out” when they hear gunfire, and that the decision was an effort to reduce “social conflict.”
Gun owners who have historically been able to use public lands for target practice would be barred from potentially millions of acres under new rules drafted by the Interior Department, the first major move by the Obama administration to impose limits on firearms.
Officials say the administration is concerned about the potential clash between gun owners and encroaching urban populations who like to use same land for hiking and dog walking. “It’s not so much a safety issue. It’s a social conflict issue,” said Frank Jenks, a natural resource specialist with Interior’s Bureau of Land Management, which oversees 245 million acres. He adds that urbanites “freak out” when they hear shooting on public lands.
If the Interior Department would consider prohibiting firearms from public land for such absurd reasons, what could be next?
Federal law already bans the EPA from regulating lead ammunition, however, more than 100 environmental groups petitioned the agency last month to ban it claiming the lead can poison those who eat wild game shot with the ammunition, or other animals that accidentally ingest the metal in dead carcasses.
“There is no scientific evidence for their position,” [Republican Rep. Doc] Hastings said. “So this (bill) makes it crystal clear Congress has primacy on this issue and it should be respected.”
Read the whole thing. Ask yourself: What economically feasible alternative is there to lead ammunition? Answer: There is none.
The perpetrator is Lidia Aguirre, also known as Lidia Chavez.
Carter’s Social Security number has allegedly been used by Lidia Aguirre, who is unlawfully in the United States to illegally obtain jobs with a series of employers including T.J. Maxx and the Zermatt resort in Midway, Utah.
Ms. Aguirre faces three charges of identity fraud and two forgery charges for a total of five, third degree felony counts. . . .
Identity fraud and forgery are serious felonies that are committed by the vast majority of illegal aliens working in the United States. According to the Actuary of the Social Security Administration, three quarters of illegal aliens pay payroll taxes. Since they cannot legally obtain a valid Social Security number, they use forged documents and when the information on the document belongs to another person that is identity fraud under Utah law. . . .
In Utah, two high profile law enforcement officials, Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff and Salt Lake Police Chief, Chris Burbank, both tend to justify and downplay the seriousness of these crimes. . . .
Chief Burbank justified the use of fraudulent documents by illegal aliens and found it humorous when audience members shouted out locations where fraudulent documents could be purchased. Chief Burbank’s office reportedly refuses to even log-in identity theft cases and simply refers individuals to the Attorney General’s website for identity theft victims. Burbank then reports that there are no recorded instances of illegal alien driven identity theft in Salt Lake City.
With only limited exceptions, Attorney General Shurtleff, pursues policies that ensure that illegal aliens are able to obtain and use fraudulent documents without fear of arrest and prosecution.
Congress needs to pass and the president needs to sign into law the Legal Workforce Act immediately. The Legal Workforce Act would make it mandatory for all employers to use E-Verify – an easy-to-use, accurate, computer-based, employee verification system that ensures employees have a legal right to work in the United States. It will open millions of jobs for American workers while removing counterfeiting and fraud from the hiring process.
