I have received a number of e-mails questioning why I am not posting testimony that is subject to the publication ban. I have explained this in previous posts, but the number of these e-mailed queries appears to be increasing, which demonstrates pretty clearly that Canadians have reached a high level of frustration with Justice Gomery’s blackouts.
I am not in Canada, and I am not attending the hearings. I do not have firsthand access to the testimony. I did have a source for that kind of access during the Jean Brault testimony, but that source has since stopped sending that material. I do not know whether he/she feels as though the Canadian government had tracked them down and need to be much more discreet, or whether they just don’t have access to the testimony any more. I have yet to find another source — but if I can find one who will provide me with reliable information, I will publish the information on this site.
Just to be clear, I have never been threatened or even approached by law enformencement agencies regarding this testimony, either Canadian or American. I apologize for the disappointment of my Canadian readers; I assure you that I am disappointed as well.
Month: May 2005
House Ethics Violations: Not Just For GOP Any More
The attempt to ensnare House Majority Whip Tom DeLay in ethics violations may be backfiring on House Democrats, whose own ethical closets have a skeleton or two making an appearance. Two Democratic Congressmen have accepted travel money from the same lobbyist that involved one of DeLay’s aides, and now Democratic outrage has given way to a series of rationalizations:
At least two aides to House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and two Democratic congressmen received travel expenses initially paid by lobbyist Jack Abramoff on his credit card or by his firm, internal records of the lobbying firm show.
Longtime House ethics rules that applied to the 1996 and 1997 trips to the Northern Mariana Islands have strictly prohibited lawmakers and their staffs from accepting any congressional trips from lobbyists or their firms.
DeLay’s office and one of the lawmakers, Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., said they had no knowledge that Abramoff or his firm paid the expenses. The office of Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., did not return several calls seeking comment.
Abramoff, whose lobbying is under criminal investigation, pressed his clients, the Northern Marianas government, to reimburse him for the travel because of concerns the payments might draw scrutiny from the House committee that investigates lawmakers’ conduct, the documents obtained by The Associated Press show.
While the Abramoff violations involve only two of DeLay’s aides, they directly implicate Clyburn and Thompson, who accepted over five thousand dollars in travel expenses each for the trip. The delegation traveled to the Marianas with Abramoff eight years ago, and the lobbyist still has not been reimbursed for the money he laid out for airfare and hotel expenses. That makes everyone who accepted money guilty of ethics violations — which, curiously enough, does not appear to include DeLay personally.
Now that Democrats have opened this Pandora’s Box, they want to do their best to close it. Clyburn never heard of his benefactor, or so it seems:
The records state Preston Gates [Abramoff’s lobbying firm] paid hotel and airfare for Thompson and Clyburn for travel to the island in January 1997. The two lawmakers filed reports to Congress saying a private, nonprofit group, not Abramoff’s firm, paid the travel.
Clyburn said in an interview he had never heard of Abramoff at the time, and provided a copy of letter showing he was invited by the nonprofit foundation. “That’s all I know about it,” he said.
Ignorance of the law usually provides no defense, nor does ignorance of a violation — except in Congress, where ignorance is not only accepted, but practically revered. The AP quotes a legal expert in Congressional ethics that advises readers that ethics regulations only apply to those members who actually display competence:
Jan Baran, a Washington lawyer who specializes in ethics rules and campaign finance, said lawmakers and their aides probably would avoid any findings of wrongdoing by demonstrating they had no knowledge of the lobbyist payments.
“If a member generally doesn’t know what’s going on, it’s hard to see how the member would be held to violate ethics rules,” he said.
Of course, that’s the entire reason that DeLay finds himself in the middle of these allegations of unethical conduct. He has been a tremendously effective legislator and political infighter, and the Democrats want him sidelined. However, as DeLay himself warned, he has done nothing that Democrats haven’t also done, and in this case, apparently a few things less than that. Democrats tried to nail him for hiring his family as staff when many of their own members do the same thing, and spend the same amount of money doing so. Now they attack the travel records of his aides and in doing so, nail two of their own Congressmen in the process.
No wonder DeLay wanted the ethics probe to continue. At this rate, he may well neutralize ten or twenty representatives on the other side of the aisle before anyone lays a glove on him.
Harper: Tory No-Confidence Effort “Unanimous”
Stephen Harper came out of a Conservative caucus meeting tonight vowing to table a no-confidence motion as soon as possible, adding that the Tory caucus had unanimously backed his strategy:
Conservative Leader Stephen Harper emerged from a caucus meeting late Monday night, saying his party cannot support the government and that a vote of confidence should take place as soon as possible.
Harper called the decision “unanimous,” declaring that his party remains committed to defeating a Liberal government “mired” in corruption scandals.
“It is also apparent that the Liberal party does not today have the support of the majority of members of the House of Commons,” he said. “It should face the House of Commons in a vote at the earliest possible opportunity.”
Harper had a number of difficulties in getting to the point where a no-confidence vote could be introduced, and he’s not there yet. Earlier, of course, the NDP aligned itself with Paul Martin in order to block Harper’s momentum towards elections. Before that, the Liberals postponed all but one Opposition Day. Monday, Liberal MPs led by Tony Valeri apparently blocked an attempt for Harper to get one through to the floor, wanting to force Harper to use his only guaranteed Opposition Day to call the vote. That will create summer elections, which apparently all parties dislike and the electorate will likely resent, to the Tories’ disadvantage.
Harper has few options. Waiting for Gomery to finish his report will mean almost a year between now and the next election, and his own hesitation will amount to a tacit endorsement of the notion that the Adscam corruption did not rise to a level requiring the removal of the government. With the Liberals pulling out all stops to keep a no-confidence vote from being tabled despite the inevitability of the effort, he needs to take advantage of the limited openings he will get. A midsummer election may be the price he has to pay. It appears that his caucus understands this as well.
Exempt Media Attacks Bloggers … Again
The Exempt Media has decided to take another whack at bloggers and the exercise of free speech, this time in the Washington Post. Brian Faler writes in tomorrow’s edition about the upcoming Congressional action exempting bloggers from the FEC’s upcoming Internet regulations, and his article heavily emphasizes the notion that bloggers can serve as Trojan horses for political campaigns:
The FEC requires candidates to disclose their expenditures, including any payments to bloggers, in periodic reports to the government. Some bloggers also disclose their financial relationships with candidates, but they are not obliged to reveal those payments, and the agency recently said it is not proposing requiring them to do so.
Some election law experts want the FEC to reverse that policy, saying it gives campaigns the opportunity to use ostensibly independent blogs as fronts to create the illusion of grass-roots support, mount attacks on their opponents and disseminate information to which candidates do not want their names attached.
“The concern is that somebody is blogging at the behest of a campaign and nobody knows it,” said Richard L. Hasen, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who maintains a blog on election law.
“If, for example, you are a U.S. Senate candidate and you have a blogger who you’re paying to write good things about you and bad things about your opponent, it will eventually come out. But that may not come out until after the election,” Hasen said.
“But even if it comes out, there’s something to be said for having the information right there, so when you click on the Web site you see it says ‘Authorized by Smith for Congress,’ ” he added. “Voters rely on those pieces of information as cues in terms of how much stock they should put in what someone is saying.”
Of course, this is why I urge people to fight for complete and immediate disclosure of all contributions and disbursements as the only effective campaign-finance reform possible. If campaigns had to disclose that information as they went along — on a weekly or even a monthly basis — then we would know who got paid what money and for what reason almost immediately, not when it’s too late to make judgments about it. It would put an end to the necessity of 527s and such silly distinctions between “hard” and “soft” money, and the cash would flow directly to the candidate, who would then have no choice but to take responsibility for how it was raised and spent. Instead, we have politicians like John McCain who pass legislation supposedly taking the money out of politics while having his campaign staff remain at his beck and call through their employment at Reform Institute, funded by left-wing groups and individuals such as George Soros.
Funny that Brian Faler doesn’t write about that, or that Professor Hasen doesn’t appear terribly concerned about it either. McCain and RI took in over $100,000 from George Soros in 2004, and like amounts from other leftists groups, while Thune paid a couple of bloggers a few thousand as consultants. Which of the two poses a greater danger of corruption to the political process? I suppose we should feel flattered that the Post considers blogging to have such an impact on politics that merely hiring a couple of local bloggers made the difference in the campaign — even though they wrote the same type of posts before they were hired as afterwards.
This article wants to scare people, and Congress, into fighting the proposed exemption for bloggers by creating a strawman of rampant corruption in the blogosphere that doesn’t exist. Even if campaigns decided to start “buying” bloggers, it would only reflect their ignorance of the marketplace. After all, why buy what one can get for free? Most of us write for our own purposes, not that of a candidate or party, and what revenue we need to justify our expense and time we generate through advertising. Buying a blogger might be more arguable for disclosure simply as a sign of cluelessness.
The so-called reformers reveal themselves again as more frightened of the power of free speech and the inability of former media elites toe control the information flow. They want to regulate us into silence and clear the field for the Exempt Media to once again tell people what to believe. Fortunately for the rest of us, those days have long since gone by.
Gee, Thanks, Pat (Updated)
Proving that not all hyperbolic idiots occupy the left side of the political spectrum, Pat Robertson returned political stupidity to a fair and balanced position by proclaiming American federal justices as a greater danger to the US than the murderous terrorists who killed over 3,000 people on 9/11:
“Over 100 years, I think the gradual erosion of the consensus that’s held our country together is probably more serious than a few bearded terrorists who fly into buildings,” Robertson said on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.” …
Confronted by Stephanopoulos on his claims that an out-of-control liberal judiciary is the worst threat America has faced in 400 years – worse than Nazi Germany, Japan and the Civil War – Robertson didn’t back down.
“Yes, I really believe that,” he said. “I think they are destroying the fabric that holds our nation together.”
I don’t care what side Robertson supports — describing federal justices as worse than Nazis amounts to the same kind of irresponsible rhetoric as proclaiming Christianity to be the darkest threat in this nation’s history. Neither comments help resolve the debate, and neither can come close to rational thought.
Pat Robertson has long embarassed the Right, and this statement is yet another example of why many of us wish he’d shut up. For the delusional paranoids who gathered this weekend to obsess over an impending Christian theocracy, Robertson surely had to be Exhibit A for the conspiracy nuts.
Go away, little man.
UPDATE: Just to let the Exempt Media off the hook in this one instance, this does not appear to be a case of the NY Daily News twisting Robertson’s words. While ABC wants to charge $20 for a transcript of the show — uh, sure — Google’s new video transcript service shows quite clearly that the exchange took place just as the Daily News reported it:
GS: … Democrats will appoint judges who don’t share our values and the out-of-control Judiciary in “courting disaster” is the most serious threat America has faced In more than 400 years of history. More serious than Al qaeda and nazi Germany and Japan and more serious than the civil war?
PR: George, I really believe that. I [th]ink they are destroying the fabric that Holds our nation together. There is an assault on marriage. There’s an assault on human sexuality. As judge Scalia said, they’ve taken sides in the culture war, and on top of that, If we have a democracy, the democratic processes should be that we can elect representatives who will share our point of view And vote those things into Law.
As I stated above, Robertson continues to prove that his primary accomplishment in opening his mouth is usually a change of feet.
Italians To Present Rebuttal Today
Italian investigators working with Americans on the shooting that left commando Nicola Calipari dead and Giuliana Sgrena wounded will present a rebuttal to the American report that they released yesterday without proper redaction, which the BBC reports will challenge American conclusions about the nature of the incident. The Italians plan on disputing earlier contentions that Italy kept Calipari’s mission a secret and a key issue of the timing of the warnings:
Correspondents say the Italian report will reply point by point to the Pentagon inquiry, which recommended that no disciplinary action be taken against the soldiers involved in Calipari’s death. …
Italy says at least three troops opened fire on the car taking freed hostage Giuliana Sgrena to Baghdad airport with Calipari and a second Italian intelligent agent.
Italian newspapers say an Italian reconstruction of events show the US authorities were informed of the operation to release Sgrena several hours before the shooting, though the US denies that.
Reports say the experts who drafted the Italian report will also claim that a three-second warning given by the US troops was not enough time for the car to stop.
Readers who have followed this story closely will already see the holes developing in the Italian rebuttal, if the BBC report is accurate. First, the three-second warning does not reflect on American action nearly as much as it indicates the rate of speed that Calipari’s car approached the checkpoint. By acknowledging the three-second time span, Italy admits that the car traveled at much faster speeds towards the checkpoint than Sgrena first claimed, making the reason for shooting the car plain. Second, it demonstrates that the Americans did try to warn the driver to slow down and did not simply open fire, either out of malice or incompetence.
As far as whether the Americans knew about Calipari’s mission at all, Italian newspapers answered that question in March, when two of them reported that not only did Italian commander not tell the Americans about the hostage release, he may not have known about it himself. General Mario Marioli sent his report to Rome, where presumably investigators still have access to it. The reason for the secrecy emerged within days of Sgrena’s release and subsequent wounding, when Italy’s ransom payment to the terrorists became public knowledge. Under those circumstances, the notion that Americans had been informed of the progress of Sgrena and Calipari becomes very doubtful; Italian secrecy about the mission from its American partners becomes a likely explanation for the miscoordination.
The rebuttal will be out this morning, but it sounds like the same vacillating story we’ve heard from the Il Manifesto crowd all along.
DBD Coming Back To CQ
For those who have noticed that the daily Day by Day cartoon has stopped displaying on the site, this hiatus is only temporary. I am rearranging some elements of the site in order to improve load times and add a new sponsorship slot. DBD will likely appear at the top of the left column later tonight. In the meantime, please be sure to visit Chris Muir’s site to catch up to Damon, Jan, Sam, and Zed and their latest hilarious and timely commentary on current events.
The Smear Continues On Brown
Earlier today, alert CQ readers noted an exchange on Fox News Sunday between Juan Williams and Bill Kristol on the nomination of Janice Rogers Brown. A complete transcript is not yet available, but this partial Google Video transcript will demonstrate the ludicrous lengths to which the Left will go towards smearing respected jurists with false charges in order to convince people that they are “extremists”:
JW: The second point to be made here is, Bill, If they had a real debate about people like Priscilla Owen and Janice Rogers brown, the American people would say these folks are too extreme. Even republicans have said that in the case of Priscilla Owen and her rulings in Texas —
BK: Which Republican was that?
JW: In fact, a majority of —
BK: Wrong, wrong, dead wrong. His testimony, his recent testimony on the hill —
JW: He said he didn’t mean what he written but he wrote that she was an activist judge which is exactly what Republicans are complaining about, that these judges have become activists legislating from the bench. If you listen to Janice Rogers attitude about people with disabilities, affirmative action, if you go on and on, she —
BK: That doesn’t say anything about people with disabilities. When has she ever written about people with disabilities? She was reelected by the people of California with 75% of the vote. She’s highly rated by the A.B.A. And people are saying —
JW: This is a debate that we should have.
BK: Absolutely. The republicans want to have it. They offered 100 hours of debate on the floor of the senate on each of these nominees If the democrats would guarantee an up-or-down vote. The republicans to want debate these nominees.
Got that? Not only is she a religious extremist who wants to deny minorities access of affirmative action, now she’s hostile to people with disabilities. Can Juan Williams add any more Leftist bogeymen onto Brown? He certainly tried; according to one CQ reader, Williams conducted a mini-filibuster on Fox that left everyone else dumbfounded in the face of his hysteria about Brown.
The Left has no evidence of any extremism about Janice Rogers Brown or any of the other nominees. They talk in sound bites about extremism and “deeply held personal beliefs” and attempt to convince people that the nominees will attack minorities and the disabled — but they have absolutely no evidence of any such hostility. When they get challenged for specifics, they simply make up stories designed to scare people. Meanwhile, judicial ethics demand that the nominees refrain from defending themselves.
If the Left wants to make an argument for their continued marginalization, then Juan Williams is their perfect spokesman.
The Despicable Leak
Michelle Malkin is rightly outraged over a leak that has exposed the names of American servicemen in Iraq involved in the Giuliana Sgrena incident, and much more. The PDF file has been published by the Italian media, and lists not just the names of the men cleared in the accidental death of Nicola Calipari, but also the following strategic information:
* An itemization of IEDs and VBIEDs deployment techniques which have been most effective,
* An analysis of the tactical strengths and weaknesses of specific checkpoints along “Route Irish”,
* Combat readiness assesment of the units and soldiers involved,
* A detailed description of how the checkpoint is laid out,
* Exact grid locations of various assets.
* Details of how checkpoint searches are set up and executed
* Details of how checkpoints are expected to deal with approaching vehicles, including threat assesment methods.
* A statistical analysis of “normal” traffic approaching the checkpoint.
* It names the soldiers involved and details the specific actions taken by those soldiers. It names the soldier who killed Calipari.
In other words, its release likely will mean that Iraqi insurgents can now tailor their attacks to the American strategies for defense at our checkpoints, which will not only result in more Americans getting killed, but also more innocent people as a result of even further confusion as rules of engagement have to be changed. Idiots like Kevin Drum might find this a cause for celebration, but anyone with a brain should understand why this information was redacted in the first place — and why it should have remained so.
UPDATE: Austin Bay has an excellent analysis of the document.
Organizing The ‘Theocracy’ Witch Hunt In New York
As further evidence of the Left’s efforts to chase the religious from all public debate, a conclave of secular humanists and Leftists have gathered in New York to strategize on the further marginalization of religious belief, issuing dire warnings of the impending secular Apocalypse by theistic Anti-Christs. The Washington Post reports that Democratic politicians, People for the American Way, and assorted anti-religious groups have assembled to hiss at pictures of Bill Frist, among other activities:
Secular humanists and leftist activists convened here over the weekend to strategize how to counter what they contend is a growing political threat from Christian conservatives.
Understanding and answering the “religious far right” that propelled President Bush’s re-election is key to preventing a “theocracy” from governing the nation, speakers argued at a weekend conference.
“The religious right now has an unprecedented influence on American politics and policy,” said Ralph White, co-founder of the Open Center, a New York City institution focused on holistic learning. “It is incumbent upon all of us to understand as precisely as possible its aims, methods, beliefs, theology and psychology.”
The Open Center, founded 21 years ago, played host to the two-day conference at City College of New York called “Examining the Real Agenda of the Religious Far Right.”
People for the American Way, a liberal advocacy group that opposes religion in the public square, co-sponsored the conference, which drew about 500 participants.
“This may be the darkest time in our history,” said Bob Edgar, general secretary of the left-leaning National Council of Churches and former six-term Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania. “The religious right have been systematically working at this for 40 years. The question is, where is the religious left?”
PFAW has put itself in the center of the Democratic efforts to filibuster appellate nominees of George Bush over the past two years and more. It has raised funds for Democratic Senate candidates and staged protests all over the country. Now they openly endorse such hate-filled conferences such as this, where Bob Edgar talks about nominating a handful of people who believe in God to the appellate court as “the darkest time in our history” — as opposed to slavery, Civil War, Jim Crow, the Great Depression, the Sedition Acts, Watergate, and so on. It’s the Hysterics Conference, attempting to paint religious belief as the new witchcraft and church-going Americans as its new purveyors.
Edgar isn’t the only one spouting deranged and hyperbolic rhetoric in New York, either:
The United States is “not yet a theocracy,” Joan Bokaer, founder of TheocracyWatch.org, said Friday night, but she argued that “the United States is beginning to fit the model of a reconstructed America.”
Tax cuts combined with increased funding for faith-based social programs and decreases in welfare spending, Ms. Bokaer said, were examples of “the theological right … zealously setting up to establish their beliefs in all aspects of our society.”
She compared the Federal Communications Commission’s threatened crackdown on indecency on television with the Taliban, the repressive Islamic rulers of Afghanistan who harbored Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network until toppled by a U.S.-led invasion.
“Indecency police are a major part of theocratic states,” Ms. Bokaer said, flashing a picture of Islamic women covered head to foot under the title, “Taliban: Ministry for the Protection of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.”
This rant relates to the enforcement of existing FCC regulations keeping indecent material off of public broadcast airwaves, regulations which are hardly new or an indication of any recent political shift. The commissioner most vocal about enforcing them, Michael Powell, was a Democratic nominee to his post. Congress supported increasing fines for such violations in a bipartisan vote. So who are the extremists here? If such regulation offends the majority of Americans, the laws can easily be amended or struck down by Congress.
The use of the Taliban imagery sets up just another hysterical strawman, arguing that Christianity as practiced in America — or anywhere else, for that matter — winds up as extreme as Islamofascism, and that the current administration somehow exists as a Trojan horse for such efforts. Not only is such a charge ludicrous, it’s patently offensive, given the amount of effort expended and criticism received (from the same Leftists that make this comparison!) in Bush’s efforts to liberate people from Islamofascist rule. Nowhere in the world can they point to a single Christian ‘theocracy’, not even the Vatican which may be the only government that actually qualifies as such, where such traditions exist.
This orgy of namecalling and paranoid conspiracies gets its impetus from such politicians as Howard Dean, Al Gore, and Ken Salazar, who have green-lighted a war on religion from the Left, especially during this debate over judicial filibusters. They have rationalized the unprecedented obstruction of qualified judicial nominees for their religious beliefs by creating out of whole cloth a threat to the Republic from Christianity, which managed to co-exist with democracy and promote it for over 200 years up to now.
They have created a modern-day voodoo called Dominionism and smeared all church-going people as covert members of its conspiracy. Supposedly, all Christians have worked for centuries to transform America into an Old Testmant-based theocracy with high priests instead of elected officials — somehow forgetting that for Christians, the New Testament takes precedence over the Old. Otherwise, we’d live under the same precepts as Orthodox Jews, holding Saturday as the Sabbath, eschewing pork, and avoiding cheeseburgers.
The ignorant, bigoted, and the paranoid members of the Left, in this case, hold positions of power in the Democratic party. PFAW in particular has a central place in their electoral politics and strategies, especially when it comes to fighting judicial nominees. These people want to recreate Salem 1692, only they want to discredit faith in itself as a source of values. That’s what the modern Democrat Party has decided to endorse in 2005.
When Edgar asks what happened to the religious Left, he misses the point. Religious liberals — and there are many — have finally awoken to the fact that the Democrats don’t just oppose conservatives, they oppose faith and believers expressing their values in the public square. They want to impose a secular prerequisite on any political debate, where any argument that might come from faith-based values such as opposition to abortion have been predetermined to be invalid and therefore extremist. That cuts out not just conservatives, but a wide swath of the center-left as well from engaging in political debate.
These paranoid bigots have almost guaranteed the demise of the religious Left. The Democrats have made clear in their rhetoric that they hate faith, and they hate those who practice their faith.
BUMP: To top.