1115.org

WTF?

A rapid fire TPM investigation revealed that while McCain and Sen. Lindsay Graham were standing in front of “Schmidt’s Fudge Haus” there is a nearby “Sausage Haus”. So possibly he and Graham went to ‘Sausage Haus’ before stopping over for some post sausage fudge.

Packing fudge with sausages. What, where they going after the Log Cabin Republican vote today?

(Without adult supervision - Sarabeth away from her computer - I can really get into trouble it seems.)

On Tuesday I pointed to Color of Change’s 600,000 strong petition to Fox News demanding that they stop their racist smears of Barack Obama. I was a bit dismissive of their choice to have Nas deliver the petition, and it still seems like an odd choice. But rather than push back and point to Nas’ lyrics, Fox News just decided to not accept the petition and pretend that the whole thing never happened. In light of that, Nasty Nas is actually not a bad spokesman (insert ‘he speaks so well’ joke here):

Apparently they’re all going to be on the Colbert Report tonight where Falafel Bill’s alter ego will accept the petition.

Anyway, listening to Nas talk about Obama in reverential tones of course reminded me of DMX’s (rather divergent) views on the man. And speaking of Nas and DMX at the same time, it would be the height of irresponsibility to not mention the fact that they starred together in the finest cinematic achievement in the history of moving pictures, Belly.

Odd that in 1998, Nas’ star was on the wane while DMX seemed to be destined to rule the game for years. Fast forward to present day and Nas is firmly lodged (nullus?) in the all-time top five list, and DMX has been reduced to impersonating random dudes to avoid emergency room bills:

Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas said Tuesday a grand jury has charged DMX, whose real name is Earl Simmons, with one count of theft and one count of taking someone else’s identity.

Authorities say the 37-year-old Simmons went to Scottsdale’s Mayo Clinic in April and told staff his name was “Troy Jones” and received care with the intent of not paying.

I imagine that unless someone gets Earl/DMX/Troy into rehab pretty soon, he’s not going to make his 40th birthday. Maybe then Belly will find it’s audience…

I think Jon Stewart has referred to Bob Novak for years only as a douchebag.

If you do a google for “bob novak” douchebag, it pulls up 2,310 references.

And today Bob Novak proved to the world exactly how right Stewart (and everybody else) has been all along:

In an exclusive interview with ABC 7 News, Novak, 77, said felt “terrible” about striking a pedestrian Wednesday morning while on his way to work in downtown D.C.

Metropolitan police cited Novak with failure to yield to a pedestrian about 10:07 a.m. at 18th and K streets NW, Novak confirmed to ABC 7 News.

Novak spoke to ABC 7 News as he emerged from a police car at the scene. Novak said he did not know he had struck anyone. Novak said he didn’t know anything was wrong until a bicyclist rode ahead of him and blocked traffic. The bicyclist, attorney David Bono, informed Novak he had hit a pedestrian.

“I see something of an older gentleman in the crosswalk get hit. The black Corvette convertible take a right turn onto the K Street service road; the pedestrian rolls off to the left and the car speeds away,” he said.

Bono dismissed Novak’s assertion that he never saw the struck pedestrian.

“There was a pedestrian splayed on his windshield — I don’t think there is anyway you can miss that,” Bono said.

Bono also said that the pedestrian was in a crosswalk and had the right of way.

Maybe I’m in denial, but I can’t believe that a lousy $50 citation for failure to yield to a pedestrian is the end of the matter (except for a possible lawsuit by the victim). This douchebag pulls off an old-fashioned hit-and-run, and he gets a citation for the hit, and that’s it? People pay much bigger fines just for speeding, for crying out loud. (I guess it’s good to be the c*cksucker of the king!)

If you are the praying kind, please pray with me that Novak still somehow gets his just desserts.

And since we’re clinging to that vain hope, if you are a legal eagle, pray inform us what is the maximum sentence for a hit-and-run involving physical injury in Washington, D.C. And the minimum, too; I’m hoping to hear three magic words: “mandatory jail time”. You and I may think Novak stinks, but he might be very popular in jail.

If you think Novak is a supreme douchebag, you might enjoy Politico’s account of Novak’s douchebaggery:

Novak said he was a block away from 18th and K streets Northwest, where the accident occurred, when a bicyclist stopped him and said, “You hit someone.” He said he was cited for failing to yield the right of way.

The bicyclist was David Bono, a partner at Harkins Cunningham, who was on his usual bike commute to work at 1700 K St. N.W. when he witnessed the accident.

As he traveled east on K Street, crossing 18th, Bono said a “black Corvette convertible with top closed plowed into the guy. The guy is sort of splayed onto the windshield.”

Bono said that the pedestrian, who was crossing the street on a “Walk” signal and was in the crosswalk, rolled off the windshield and that Novak then made a right into the service lane of K Street. “The car is speeding away. What’s going through my mind is, you just can’t hit a pedestrian and drive away,” Bono said.

He said he chased Novak half a block down K Street., finally caught up with him and then put his bike in front of the car to block it and called 911. Traffic immediately backed up, horns blared and commuters finally went into reverse to allow Novak to pull over.

Bono said that throughout, Novak “keeps trying to get away. He keeps trying to go.” He said he vaguely recognized the longtime political reporter and columnist as a Washington celebrity but could not precisely place him.

Finally, Bono said, Novak put his head out the window of his car and motioned him over. Bono said he told him that you can’t hit a pedestrian and just drive away. He quoted Novak as responding: “I didn’t see him there.”

A concierge at 1700 K Street said that she saw a bicyclist yelling and walked outside to see what the commotion was about.

“This guy hit somebody and he won’t stop so I’m going to stay here until the police come,” Aleta Petty quoted Bono as saying, as he stood in K Street, blocking traffic.

D.C. police confirmed that there was an accident at 18th and K streets NW at approximately 10 a.m. involving a black Corvette convertible and that the driver was a white male.
[…]
Novak, 77, has earned a reputation around the capital as an aggressive driver, easily identified in his convertible sports car.

In 2001, he cursed at a pedestrian on the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and 13th streets Northwest for allegedly jaywalking.

“’Learn to read the signs, [bodily orifice]!’ Novak snapped before speeding away,” according to an item in The Washington Post’s Reliable Source column.

Novak explained to the paper: “He was crossing on the red light. I really hate jaywalkers. I despise them. Since I don’t run the country, all I can do is yell at ‘em. The other option is to run ‘em over, but as a compassionate conservative, I would never do that.”

Looks like he gave up on compassionate conservatism, just like George Bush did.

Meanwhile, please ponder that “I didn’t see him there.”

Novak didn’t say: “I hit somebody?” which is surely what you say if you didn’t know you had hit somebody. “I didn’t see him there” sounds very much like an admission that he knew he had hit somebody. Driving away after that is unconscionable. Still trying to get away after you’re physically overtaken and stopped by a cyclist is behavior that the English language does not anticipate, and therefore has no words for.

TPMMuckraker:

Karl Rove has categorically denied any involvement whatsoever, either directly or indirectly, in the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, in written responses to questions from the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, entered into the Congressional record today…

Of course, this doesn’t mean that Rove had nothing to do with Siegelman’s prosecution. It only means that George Bush still has the power to pardon anyone he chooses for any and all illegal acts, including perjury.

Hank Paulson (7/22/08):

“Obviously, it will go on beyond months with some of the issues in the housing market, but I believe we can get to the point within months where we turn the corner on housing,” Paulson said in a televised interview with Fox Business Network.

He said the corner would be turned at the point when home prices begin to stabilize and more buyers start to enter the market.

Here we go again. I guess Paulson’s limp attempt at honesty over the weekend was frowned upon by the boss. But here’s the thing: if housing even starts to look like it’s going to turn around in the next few months then many of the loans that look like they will go bad will start performing again because demand and prices would be rising. But all of the banks who have reported earnings in the last week have increased provisions for bad loans and have issued guidance that this is going to continue for a longer period of time than they can see right now, with a consensus guess for a bottom (nullus) in late 2010.

Past that, if a corner is in sight, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will not need the bailout that Paulson himself is currently trying to ram through (or around) Congress that is projected to cost taxpayers $25 billion or possibly much more.

Paulson watch has been a much bigger and hallucinogenic job than anticipated, but I think I may have finally arrived at a Grand Unified Theory of Hank Paulson, and it only took 15 months. The Bush administration started out with Paul O’Neill at Treasury. He was a capable man, but had a bad habit of thinking for himself and speaking the truth at inconvenient times, and of course he hung out with Bono so he had to go. In keeping with the great reductio ad absurdum exercise that is the Bush Presidency, they figured out that all they needed was some serious-looking guy who could read a balance sheet and read talking points generated by the political shop. So after everyone else figured out the game and passed, they hired John Snow. Snow tried really hard but just didn’t have the ability to really sell it, and was canned after a few years. In 2006 with the economic house of cards teetering, credibility was at a premium, so the administration lured Paulson away from his hugely lucrative perch at Goldman Sachs to take a government job that pays $183,500 and currently requires the holder to make statements that would flunk him out of a high school home economics class. Odd decision for someone with a then-decent reputation, and $700 million in the bank. If he wanted out of Goldman, he could have just left, purchased a nice-sized island in the Caribbean, and been fine. And as it happens, Paulson was apparently not jumping at the chance to sacrifice his legacy on the Bush altar:

“He should be begging me!”

– An exasperated President Bush to White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten on having to put on a hard sell to recruit Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson to become Treasury Secretary.

It seems to me the only way to have solved this situation so that Bush would have a credible agent to parrot his talking points without Paulson having to lie himself is the Multiplicity gambit:

Construction worker Doug Kinney finds that the pressures of his working life, combined with his duties to his wife Laura and daughter Jennifer leaves him with little time for himself. However, he is approached by geneticist Dr. Owen Leeds who offers him a rather unusual solution to his problems - cloning.

The only problem is that unlike Kinney who managed to acquire a couple of functional clones before the arrival of stumbling, bumbling #4, Bush and Paulson went straight to #4.

Granted we are lucky that the Paulson clone running the Treasury hasn’t taken to blowing up toilets or shaving his tongue in public, but neither has he displayed any understanding of anything related to economics.

Everybody knows that if you lie abroad for the sake of your country, that makes you a diplomat. But if you’re Nouri al-Maliki, and you lie abroad for the sake of George Bush (who invaded your country and is responsible for the deaths of untold hundreds of thousands of Iraqis) and John McCain (who has trouble keeping Afghanistan and Iraq straight in his head, and who — no matter what he hopes — will come to be remembered as the doddering old man who tried in vain to lie and flip-flop and free-barbecue his way to the presidency), then what does that make you?

Maliki, you will remember, on the eve of Obama’s arrival in Iraq, undiplomatically endorsed Obama’s Iraq policy at the expense of Bush-McCain’s.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki told a German magazine he supported prospective U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s proposal that U.S. troops should leave Iraq within 16 months.

In an interview with Der Spiegel released on Saturday, Maliki said he wanted U.S. troops to withdraw from Iraq as soon as possible.

“U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes.”
[…]
“The Americans have found it difficult to agree on a concrete timetable for the exit because it seems like an admission of defeat to them. But it isn’t,” Maliki told Der Spiegel.

Much arm-twisting later, a Maliki aide cme up with a half-hearted denial (which was improbably released by released by U.S. Central Command on the Iraqi government’s behalf):

The statement by an aide to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki calling his remarks in Der Spiegel “misinterpreted and mistranslated” followed a call to the prime minister’s office from U.S. government officials in Iraq.
[…]
But after the Spiegel interview was published and began generating headlines Saturday, officials at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad contacted Maliki’s office to express concern and seek clarification on the remarks, according to White House spokesman Scott Stanzel.

Later in the day, a Maliki aide released a statement saying the remarks had been misinterpreted, though without citing specific comments.

Nobody was fooled (but a lie that nobody buys is still a lie):

A number of media outlets likewise professed to being confused by the statement from Maliki’s office. The New York Times pointed out that al-Dabbagh’s statement “did not address a specific error.” CBS likewise expressed disbelief pointing out that Maliki mentions a timeframe for withdrawal three times in the interview and then asks, “how likely is it that SPIEGEL mistranslated three separate comments? Matthew Yglesias, a blogger for the Atlantic Monthly, was astonished by “how little effort was made” to make the Baghdad denial convincing. And the influential blog IraqSlogger also pointed out the lack of specifics in the government statement.

And now we learn that “Maliki actually got a copy of the interview before it was printed and had the option to make any changes.”

The reason (Der Spiegel) scores so many high level interviews is that the editors agree to allow the subjects to “authorize” the interviews before they go to press. It wasn’t just a slip of the tongue, in other words: Maliki not only endorsed Obama’s plans for withdrawing from Iraq, but his office then explicitly approved the endorsement before it was printed. The denials, then, were doubly facetious. Spiegel couldn’t say so, though, without revealing its embarrassing authorization policy.

So much for “misinterpreted and mistranslated”!

The rules of evidence are not the only thing which makes Guantanamo military tribunal trials so different from regular trials. There are also huge differences when it comes to jury selection:

The jurors include an Army colonel who said in court Monday she was “obviously upset” that her college roommate was in the Pentagon during the Sept. 11 attacks.

Despite that, “prosecutors said they are certain the panel will be fair”. And they are all honorable men, are they not (the prosecutors, I mean)?

“Y’all appointed me to bring rap justice
But I ain’t five-O, y’all know it’s Nas yo.” - Nas - “Made You Look“

Now I have to start by saying that Nas is one of my favorite rappers, and probably always will be. But is the man who tried to call his latest album N*gger (without the asterisk) the right person to lecture people on racism?

At 2 PM tomorrow, rap star Nas will deliver a petition — organized by Color of Change and Move On.org and signed by 600,000 people — to Fox News’s Manhattan headquarters, calling on the network to “stop its racist smears against the Obamas and other Black Americans.”

Nas can do whatever he wants, and CoC and Moveon can choose who does the deed, but Fox News is going to have no problem muddying the waters on this one.

The Huffington Post reported yesterday that the $52 million that the Obama campaign raised in June came largely without help from Hillary Clinton’s most ardent fundraisers

When comparing Obama’s full FEC filing for June with a list of 311 “Hillraisers” — or supporters who bundled more than $100,000 in contributions for Sen. Clinton — the Huffington Post found only eight names in common between the two lists. Not all of those donors maxed out, either, making for a relatively paltry figure of $19,250 in direct, hard-money contributions from Hillraisers for the month.

It’s probably just a coincidence that the NYT reported the previous day:

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton lent her campaign an additional $1 million at the end of June, underscoring the difficulty she is having staying ahead of creditors and retiring a mountain of campaign debt, filings with the Federal Election Commission show.

Even though the fight for the Democratic nomination came to a close in early June, with Senator Barack Obama emerging as the presumed nominee, Mrs. Clinton’s debts to vendors increased to $12 million at the end of the month from $10.4 million at the end of May. In addition, after her latest loan on June 30, Mrs. Clinton has now lent her campaign a total of $13.2 million.
[…]
Mrs. Clinton’s unpaid bills and the degree to which Mr. Obama is working to help her tackle them has been a sensitive spot in the efforts to bring their supporters and the party together. Mr. Obama himself presented a check of $2,300 to Mrs. Clinton at the end of June as a symbolic gesture, and her campaign has continued to send out e-mail asking for help tackling its debt. But the Clinton campaign took in just $2.7 million from donors in June, less than the $5.4 million it spent.

There’s interesting news out of Salim Hamdan’s trial. It’s nice to see that even if we admit as evidence statements extracted by coercion, we do draw the line somewhere.

Navy Capt. Keith J. Allred, the judge in Hamdan’s trial, threw out “some statements the defendant gave interrogators because they were obtained under “highly coercive” conditions while he was a captive in Afghanistan”.

On the other hand, there’s:

But the judge declined to suppress admissions made by Hamdan after he arrived at the U.S. military prison here, ruling that the Fifth Amendment did not apply to Hamdan and that “no coercive techniques influenced” what he said.

Which may be partly balanced by:

Allred ruled, however, that to use the admissions, prosecutors must produce Hamdan’s interrogators to explain the conditions under which the questioning took place.

The government couldn’t be too thrilled at this turn of events.

Allred’s willingness to throw out evidence in a proceeding against an accused al-Qaeda member could bode badly for cases the government expects to bring against planners of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, some of whom were subjected to far more coercive conditions. Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-confessed mastermind of those attacks, and other accused Sept. 11 conspirators are scheduled to be tried after Hamdan. Mohammed is one of three detainees the government has said was subjected to “waterboarding,” a form of simulated drowning.

They’re probably not looking forward to producing Hamdan’s interrogators in court either, to explain the conditions under which his questioning took place.

It’s heartening that even in the very first show trial, for which one has to assume they handpicked the friendliest judge possible — because that, unfortunately, is how the Bush administration characteristically operates — they weren’t able to come up with a judge who is willing to turn a blind eye to everything. And now he’s gone and set a precedent that is bound to be invoked frequently in subsequent military commission trials.

Of course, one has to wonder at the man of principle who says proudly to himself: “I will compromise my integrity only thus far, and no farther.”