I think that Huckabee has been tacking a bit against Bush, he unfavorably compared Bush and Musharraf, but his latest statement, calling for an investigation of Bush on the Plame affair, is kind of stunning.
I think that Huckabee believes that he can win by tacking against Bush. There is a significant enough plurality of Republicans who are sick of Bush to put him over the top in a multi candidate field.
There has been a bit of nastiness going on in the Republican Presidential Primaries in Iowa. Someone has been push polling* in Iowa and New Hampshire:
Among the questions asked during the 20-minute calls placed last week were whether the person polled knew Romney received Vietnam-era military deferments while serving in the Mormon missionary in France, that none of his sons served in the military and that the Mormon religion didn’t accept blacks as bishops until the 1970s.
Needless to say, push polling is sleazy, and when one adds the despicable pandering to religious bigotry, it gets worse.
Here, however, is where it gets weird, the calls are believed to have been made by Western Wats, a Utah-based firm closely tied to the BYU, the preeminent Mormon University in the world, and it’s hard to believe that they would do this, and threaten many existing business contacts.
The National Review‡ looks into all of this, and mentions their pet theory that Romney did it so that he could play the victim.
I don’t think so. The downside of getting caught is just too much.
However, the number two theory makes sense:
According to another source at a rival campaign who wished to remain anonymous, there’s speculation that Romney may have push polled himself because his campaign wanted polling data regarding the negative perception of his Mormon faith for internal use. But since they couldn’t do so without causing controversy, they took steps to make it look like McCain.
*A push poll is a phony poll, in which the goal is not to get information, but to place a bit of slander in the voter’s head, so they might ask something like, “Did you know that Matthew Saroff has a guilty plea for disturbing the Peace?”†
†Actually, I do, it was pled down from the traffic infraction of an “improperly fastened load” so that it would not bump my insurance rates.
‡They are professional liars. You need to confirm every period and comma.
They are using the same method as Comcast, though they are more honest about it, as evidenced by this response from the company:
To ensure the best possible online experience for our customers, Cox actively manages network traffic through a variety of methods including traffic prioritization and protocol filtering. Cox does not prohibit the use of file-sharing services for uploads or downloads, or discriminate against any specific services in any way. To help our customers make the most out of their Internet experience, we take proactive measures to ensure that bandwidth intensive applications do not negatively impact their service. These network management practices are outlined in our subscriber agreement and Acceptable Use Policy.
Certainly, I can see how, during periods of high bandwidth, one might want to drop priority on bit-torrent or similar applications (full disclosure, I use bit-torrent), but this is basically blocking:
According to Topolski, Cox is in fact using traffic shaping to degrade p2p traffic. In analyzing a user log, he has concluded that Cox is using traffic shaping hardware to send forged TCP/IP packets with the RST (reset) flag set — with the goal of disrupting eDonkey traffic. He’s been unable to tell precisely what hardware Cox is using, but he notes that the technique being used is very similar to Comcast’s treatment of BitTorrent.
It raises two questions: what is it about cable companies that make them so inclined to bull this bull$#@!, and why are they going through a backdoor block, as opposed to simply lowering the priority of the packets on their own internal network.
This would be the Wall Street pukes who have engineered the housing bubble, and are now NOT reaping the consequences of its deflation.
Wall Street firms are planning record bonuses of $34 Billion this year.
That money, split among about 186,000 workers at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch & Co., Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and Bear Stearns Cos., equates to an average of $201,500 per person, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The five biggest U.S. securities firms paid $36 billion to employees last year.
What happened to pay for performance?
Oxfam complaining about this. It appears that in addition to not spending enough money, $4.4 billion in Afghanistan since 2002, as versus $35 billion in 2007 alone for military efforts, too much is spent on, “profits of companies and subcontractors, on non-Afghan resources and on high expatriate salaries and living costs,” (up to ½ million/year for each contractor).
Additionally, “Some two-thirds of U.S. foreign assistance bypasses the Afghan government that officials say they want to strengthen”.
It’s almost as if there were a conscious decision among Bush and His Evil Minions™ to treat this as an opportunity for political payback to incompetent contractors who are political allies.
Alaska…They have a cases in Alaska???? What’s next? Antarctica?
Satan on spaghetti!!!!!! When we travel to the stars, we will discover that Catholic Church abuse cases have preceded us by decades!!!
Yep, once again, it’s those fun loving pedophiles in the Catholic church, and the people to timid, or too encompetent to do anything but enable them.
100 people, all Alaskan Natives, my guess would be that they were Indian, not Eskimo from the location.
But still, how does this organization function?
She is back in Washington, back at what amounts to her old job, though she is still being looked at by the Office of Special Counsel discrimination and mishandling classified documents.
Eric Back has what amounts to the definitive description of the staff response, “The mood in the office is described as a combination of relief and euphoria.”, but I imagine that they were dancing and singing, “Ding, Dong, the Witch is Dead.”
Just to be clear, corruption is not a uniquely Republican activity, as is shown by way of Congressman William Jerfferson, who has two more allegations against him:
The allegations, detailed in a seven-page document filed in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, will not result in new charges, prosecutors said, but they plan to present them during Jefferson’s federal bribery trial as evidence of a pattern of intentional wrongdoing.
In 2002, the government alleges, Jefferson asked a lobbyist of a U.S. oil service company for $10,000 a month for a family member in exchange for Jefferson’s assisting the company in promoting business in Africa. The lobbyist turned down Jefferson’s request, the document said.
Three years later, according to the filing, Jefferson allegedly agreed to urge NASA in a letter to consider doing business with a U.S. rocket technology and rocket launch services company. In exchange, the company allegedly agreed to pay Jefferson’s family business and a relative.
Of course, when one looks at Cunningham, Ted Stevens, etc. this one guy does not seem to be all that much.
There are two reasons for the disparity:
Jefferson was found with thousands of dollars in his freezer.
Frank Rich dedicates a column in this Sunday’s times to this matter.
He covers the same ground that I have, but I don’t have a column in the Sunday New York times.
I would imagine that this will mean that there will be more mainstream coverage. At least I hope so.
Oh Dear!!! Some Wall Street pukes at the center of the mortgage debacle may find their bonuses cut in half.
The hardest hit will be the salespeople dealing with mortgage-backed securities, according to Options Group director Eric Moskowitz. Their average bonus will be about $1 million compared with $2 million last year.
Only a million dollar bonus???? Cry me a river.
*This is sarcastic. I feel no sympathy.
†This means “thief” in Yiddish, which is largely archaic German. It is from the Hebrew ganov, and you find the term “gnof” in Chaucer, meaning “churl” or “peasant” generally, which probably has the same Hebrew roots.
Un-dirtyword-believeable. During the audience questions at the last debate, Maria Luisa, a UNLV student asked Hillary Clinton “whether she preferred “diamonds or pearls”. Now it turns out that CNN planted the question and forced her to ask it.
Wolf Blitzer, and the CNN corresponds, are a human stain.
I want Keith Olbermann to moderate a debate. Heck, I’d settle for Homer Simpson moderating the debate.
Of course my fantasy would be for Jon Stewart to moderate, but that is too much to ask.
A 19 year old woman is gang raped. The court’s solution is 200 lashes and a six-month prison sentence for her.
The House of Saud has created a backward and evil society, and bribed most of the Arab and Islamic world int following their twisted view of the world and divine using found money in the form of oil revenues.
Most of the 911 hijackers were subjects of the House of Saud.
If there is a bright and shining center to the Arab or Islamic world, the House of Saud is at the place farthest from it.
Since he died while appealing, he is technically, though clearly not morally, innocent of any criminal offense, a judge has said that he can go after his assets in a civil proceeding where the standard of proof is far lower.
As a matter of principle, I am opposed to taking a second bite at the apple this way, but nonetheless, I do feel a bit of glee at this.
And I’m not referring to the former President of Mexico. I am referring to Rupert Murdoch’s broadcast and cable empire.
It’s a story of payback to political friends, lawbreaking with the management of the New York cable system, and lucrative cable consulting gigs for Giuliani after he left office.
It’s why Fox is playing touch on his use of their debate footage, and that Fox has been so supportive of him, even when compared to other Republican candidates.
Un-dirtyword-bleievable.
Merrill Lunch had a new CEO selected, but they chose someone else because he wanted a full accounting of the subprime losses.
This says something about the general level of ethics in US financial markets, and it is not good.
I sense the Ghost of John Mitchell.
My heart bleeds at the thoughtthat Gonzales is facing serious legal costs in response to a DoJ investigation of potential perjury and witness tampering.
You know, telling the truth and being honorable might be cheaper in the long run.
The FBI taped calls between him and Don Smith, President of Veco, which apparently bribed half of the Republicans in the state.
Of note, Young participated in informal “Golf tournaments” with political supporters, with 10-15 people playing, and the winner keeping the $100 contributed by everyone, and his record would make Tiger Woods envious.
Howard “Cookie” Krongard is the inspector general for the State Department. This guy is a political hack, with a record of stonwalling DoJ investigations and threatening whistleblowers.
Needless to say, since Democrats are running things, it has meant a trip before the House Oversight Committee. It did not go well, as “Cookie” had to recuse himself from investigations of Blackwater because his brother, A.B. “Buzzy” Krongard,* is on one of its advisory panels at an annual pay of $10-15K. He said that he had only become aware of it that day.
The problem is that his Brother just gave an interview where he says that he told his brother in October that he was joining the board.
Oops. It appears that handcuffs may be the Republican fashion statement in 2009.
*Yeah, it’s the stupid nickname crime family. You have Cookie, Buzzy, Turdblossom, Shrub, and the Human Stain (Cheney).
Fannie Mae has changed the way it computes credit loss ratio, a measure of the quality of its loans.
Bigger numbers are bad, and under the new scheme, the number is 4 basis points, but under the old scheme, it would have been 7½ basis points.
I believe that Fannie is the 2nd biggest issuer of debt in the world, and the fact that the quality of their loan portfolio is almost twice as bad as their numbers suggest is scary.
The meat packers got permission to use Carbon Monoxide to keep meat looking fresh (it makes hemoglobin very red). It should be noted that they approved it as “generally recognized as safe,” or GRAS, which meant that there was no public review.
FWIW, this technology is banned by banned by the European Union, Japan and Canada.
Here are some pictures:
God bless the George W. Bush Agricultural department.