Kinde Durkee, once a trusted treasurer to dozens of California Democrats, pleaded guilty in the biggest campaign embezzlement case ever to hit U.S. politics.
In a federal court in Sacramento, Durkee admitted to stealing more than $7 million from roughly 50 clients during an 11-year period from Jan. 2000 to Sept. 2011. . . .
Federal officials said Durkee’s motivation was simply “greed.” Durkee used the millions she stole from lawmakers such as Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) to pay for a variety of personal expenses, including mortgage payments, American Express bills, her mother’s retirement home, payroll for her company, even tickets to the Los Angeles Dodgers and Disneyland. Due toher excellent reputation among California Democrats, Durkee had easy access to as many as 700 campaign bank accounts. When California state election monitors began looking into funds missing from the campaign account of a local politician, Durkee simply moved money from other lawmakers’ campaigns to cover up her theft.
Feinstein and other California Democrats — including Reps. Loretta and Linda Sanchez and Rep. Susan Davis — have sued her for millions in lost campaign donations.
Are we shocked to learn that having an “excellent reputation among California Democrats” is not a recommendation of good character?
Honest people are despised by California Democrats.
‘Gentleman’ Jim Moran, tanned, rested, and fresh from stickin’ it to the man while working out at his arrest with George Clooney, couldn’t muster the vigor to support his party leader’s budget:
Exhaustion, or closeted raaaaaacism? You be the judge.
“Following a front-page Wall Street Journal article Thursday reporting that employees at Bain Capital, Romney’s former private-equity firm, were allowed to invest their retirement money in companies the firm acquired through a special share class, the Obama camp is seeking Romney’s old tax returns to see if they contain information about the investment arrangement…
Look, until we have a full vetting of #OccupyResoluteDesk, we should not want to hear one more godforsaken thing about any records for, well, anyone else.
Huffy self-righteous liberalism is not a rare commodity, and the supply greatly exceeds the demand, so Keith Olbermann’s belief that he had cornered the market on progressive bombast was bound to lead him to a sorry end sooner or later:
For nearly a year now, Al Gore and Joel Hyatt have been building their liberal cable news channel, Current TV, with the mercurial television anchorman Keith Olbermann at its center.
This week, the center collapsed. Current said on Friday afternoon that it had fired Mr. Olbermann — one of the nation’s most prominent progressive speakers — just a year into his five-year, $50 million contract. It was the culmination of months of murky disputes between Mr. Olbermann and the channel that he was supposed to save from the throes of ratings oblivion. . . .
(Ten million a year!)
In his 40 weeks on Current TV, he had an average of 177,000 viewers at 8 p.m., down from the roughly one million that he had each night on MSNBC.
Quick math: $10 million divided by 177,000 = $56 per viewer! Nice work if you can get it. Fortunately, Olby intends to sue the bastards:
Nevertheless, Mr. Gore and Mr. Hyatt, instead of abiding by their promises and obligations and investing in a quality news program, finally thought it was more economical to try to get out of my contract. It goes almost without saying that the claims against me implied in Current’s statement are untrue and will be proved so in the legal actions I will be filing against them presently.
Good on ya, Keith. We’ve always thought of Al Gore as a greedy, dishonest two-faced swindler, and look forward to you proving this in court. We are also comforted to know that (a) no other network will want to hire a demanding prima donna with a reputation for suing his erstwhile employers, and (b) you’ll be spending your own money paying lawyers to pursue a tort claim against your fellow liberals.
A win-win.
What shall we say of Keith Olbermann’s embarrassing self-destruction? He flourished at MSNBC during the Bush years, his verbose lectures channeling the rage felt by disempowered leftists who had previously only seen their sentiments expressed in Daily Kos rants, C-SPAN fulminations from congressional Democrats, and anti-war chants at A.N.S.W.E.R. rallies. As soon as the “outs” became the “ins” — after Democrats won Congress in 2006 and Obama took the White House in 2008 — the militant rhetoric of progressive resistance lost its focus and, to some extent, its audience.
If dissent is the highest form of patriotism, as liberals so often told us during the Bush years, then Olbermann’s claim to “patriotism” expired as soon as Obama took the oath of office. Dissent became the property of the Tea Party movement, and Olbermann’s denunciation of Tea Partiers lacked the prestige of “courage” he had enjoyed when he was posturing as the Last Honest Man, standing up to the Military-Industrial Complex and punctuating his sermons to the President of the United States with sarcastically contemptuous “sirs.”
By the time Olbermann left MSNBC in January 2011, his act had been obsolete for two years, as I observed then:
By moving left in 2006 — becoming the raging liberal doppelganger of Fox News — MSNBC pushed CNN into third place. But then what? Where was the audience-growth strategy? They couldn’t go farther left, and the steady diet of liberal indignation had reached its saturation point.
Olbermann didn’t understand this, and neither did the executives at Current TV, a network that isn’t carried by enough cable systems to reach an audience nearly as large as that of MSNBC which (although it is available everywhere) still gets just 1 million a night in primetime. For Olbermann to become the franchise player at a minor-league MSNBC wannabe never made sense as an economic proposition: Was Olby so much better than Lawrence O’Donnell that lefties would seek out his show on the What’s-It’s-Name Network?
There is, of course, a massive Memeorandum aggregation about this news, with commentary by Hot Air, Outside the Beltway, PJ Tatler, Weasel Zippers, National Review, Ann Althouse, and Jammie Wearing Fool among others. Of course, the question now is, what next for Olbermann? Now that he’s been fired by a low-rent operation like Current TV, it’s hard to imagine he has any future in “news.” I can’t see him pitching cubic zirconia jewelry on HSN, but maybe he’ll turn up next season on A&E, bidding for lockers on Storage Wars.
You may remember that, when Olbermann blamed the Tea Party for the Tucson massacre, he prompted a Very Special Comment in reply:
“Good night, Mr. Olbermann. Good night, and good riddance.”
Over at the Daily Caller, I think somebody’s abject, utter, despicable incompetence may be showing:What a gross dereliction of duty. But if you poo-poo the possibility that the Congressional Affordable Care Act (CACA) was a 2,801-page dump taken due to hating a black man in the White House, then you, too, might be a raaaaacist. What other possible explanation could there be for such a failure of due diligence?
Unexpectedly, Nancy’s famous emission takes on an aromatic character:Poor #OccupyResoluteDesk, surrounded by sphincters and abused by the hand of his northern hemisphere oppressors, with no toilet tissue at hand to catch the flood of tears.
“They could have been honest with us. They could have come to us as men and women and talked with us, sought our counsel. They could have tried to convince us that the good of their ideas was worth all we would have to give up to get it. They did not. They lied and lied and lied some more. They called us ignorant and vicious and heartless and stupid. They pushed a bill none of them had read in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve. They fudged numbers so badly they ended up counting whole piles of money twice. They accused anyone who disagreed with them of wanting to kill old people and innocent children. They built a law their own lawyers can not ably defend.”
— Jimmie Bise Jr., “They’re Always Shocked When We’re Not Stupid”
Update: OK, dad will part with the secret (Not Safe For Aetheists): hymns.
Update II: Here is a parody post reacting to the video that is stunning both in its depth and nearly Sonic Youth levels of distortion. Bravo, Bob! And thanks!
Via American Power and The Lonely Conservative near the pinnacle, Karl Rove’s American Crossing outfit treats #OccupyResoluteDesk’s recent open mic moment with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev to a little light Bond-age:
Lefty drool-bucket Rachel Maddow works real hard, and achieves a pose of studied confusion:
I still don’t see what all the fuss is about. Obama, in Seoul for a nuclear security summit, told Russian President Dmitri Medvedev he’s willing to work on missile defense, but the U.S. will need “space” and “flexibility” outside of an election season. Obama was quietly confirming what we already knew — political environments sometimes restrict foreign policy talks.
So what is it, exactly, Republicans are worked up about? The gist of the argument seems to be that Obama will effectively scuttle Western missile-defense policy once freed from re-election concerns.
What is happening is that the president is coming across more and more as a trimmer, as an operator who’s not operating in good faith. This is hardening positions and leading to increased political bitterness. And it’s his fault, too. As an increase in polarization is a bad thing, it’s a big fault.
We all understand that political promises are like the wind. You can’t sail straight into it. Politicians are forced to tack and jibe to move in the desired policy direction. The ones that don’t completely suck actually accomplish some motion in the direction the politician campaigned to move.
#OccupyResoluteDesk has piled disaster upon disappointment. My Lefty friend asked my thoughts of the election in November 2008, and I tried not to sound too panicked: “Well, it depends upon who shows up in January 2009,” I replied. “If it’s the moderate who ran in the general campaign, we may be OK. If it’s the left-wing radical he’s rumored to be, not so much.”
And, as the blogs have recorded in excruciating, nearly hourly detail sing January 2009, we have been thoroughly baked. What I say about BHO in mixed company is that he is the fruit of a century of decline in this country. That is, if not beset by Barack right now, it would be somebody like him. The hot mic moment is indicative of the creepy affinity Obama has for authoritarian strongmen. The equally creepy “NTTAWWT” reaction of the Maddow set underscores what a long, strange trip it will be to recover the country from these jackwagons.
Honestly, raise your hand if you would find yourself utterly flabbergasted to see Obama, at his next press conference, blaming his failures on a duo he keeps calling “Moose and Squirrel.” Anyone? Hell, it might even be a welcome relief from his normal list of scapegoats, which has, till now, included: George W. Bush, the weather, the GOP, George W. Bush, the Tea Party, Europe, George W. Bush, the Arab Spring, Congress, George W. Bush, airline kiosks, ATMs, and George W. Bush.
You know, if we could just trim the Bush in the previous sentence, we might have a clearer view of who’s at fault.
