More Uncounted Ballots in Minneapolis Lose Franken 46 Votes

Oops!

More ballots found in the Senate Race in Minnesota.

This time, those ballots… this time from Minneapolis, leaves Fraken with a net loss of 46 votes.

Franken’s reaction? predictable as steam off the street in a summer shower:Denial.

DFLer Al Franken’s campaign lodged a protest over 133 votes that it said could not be accounted for during the recount, at a possible cost to him of as many as 46 net votes in his race against Republican Sen. Norm Coleman.

Franken officials sent a letter to the secretary of state’s office and Minneapolis elections director Cindy Reichert demanding that the votes from the northeast Minneapolis precinct not be officially reported until a search is conducted for the ballots.

The reaction is understandable. They thought they had this one bagged. A story posted at TPM yesterday

In a briefing going on right now with reporters, Al Franken’s lead recount lawyer Marc Elias made a stunning announcement: According to the campaign’s methodology of tracking the recount results, they believe Al Franken now leads Norm Coleman by a margin of 22 votes.

This would be the first time that Franken has claimed a lead in this drawn-out process, and was clearly made possible by the discovery yesterday of ballots in the suburban St. Paul town of Maplewood, which gave him a net gain of 37 votes.

Well, my guess is you’re not getting this one Al.

Put me down as a cynical skeptic   While the death of Jdimytai Damour was a tragic accident, it does not fit into a larger pattern.

(CNSNews.com) – A pro-union group is suggesting that the death of a temporary worker at a Long Island Wal-Mart on Black Friday stems partly from the fact that Wal-Mart workers are not unionized.

Wal-Mart Watch, a group that includes a union leader on its board of directors, issued a press release on Tuesday responding to the death of the worker who was trampled when the store opened and the crowd surged in.

While Jdimytai Damour’s death was a “tragic accident,” it also reflects Wal-Mart’s “blatant disregard for the concern and safety of its workers and customers,” said David Nassar, executive director of Wal-Mart Watch.

The bottom line is that working in retail, is pretty safe.   In 2000, there were 5,915 fatal on the job accidents. of which of which 386 were in sales occupations.    This is union posturing, and no more.   If Wal-Mart Watch wants to establish a “blatant disregard for the concern and safety of its workers and customers”, it needs to show a pattern of deaths and not just one.

Addendum:(Bit)

On it’s face, this is a laughable situation. Gee, the union’s been trying to break Wal-Mart for years. Does anyone not understand their using everyy tool at their disposal to that end?  This strikes me as a singularly cynical attack on the part of the Unions, and says far more about their vaccuous nature, than it says about any guilt this particular Wal-Mart may… or more likely, may not have had.

Welcome, dear reader, to the most intense nightly read anywhere on the ‘sphere…BitsBlog’s Nightly Ramble

Tonight, we ramble back through time a bit.

This pic to the right… (no, the OTHER right…) was the first BitsBlog World Headquarters. A  little sparse, but it was home. And a technological triumph, too. Our twin XT-10’s equipped with 20mb ST225’s were the envy of every operator in the day, but that was nothing compared to our super-fast 300 baud modem. The wire, of course ran uphill both ways…. and we LIKED it. We ran GT version 14, and Compaq DOS 3.31 and Lantastic with ARCNet cards.  Internet? What’s THAT?

• I mentioned the other night that it must be the Christmas season, since the lights went up. I was wrong. Ed Rasimus over at Thunder Tales tells us his season’s first card is in. Good stuff, and Ed’s place is always worthwhile, anyway.
• Reader Matt87 forwards me a post from IntellectualConservative…a site I wish I’d known about a few days ago when Joyner started asking about Intellectual Conservatives.  Anyway; Patrick Mulligan  has a great post on the subject of the bailouts, you should pay attention to:
  

  Government officials lecturing anyone on ethics, greed or financial responsibility is as laden with irony as the latest appropriations bill is with pork barrel spending.With the collapse of several of America’s financial institutions along with the impending doom of Detroit’s “Big Three” automakers, and the subsequent taxpayer bailouts, buyouts, loans and “stimulus packages” being pushed by both Congress and the President, renewed blame and outrage have been directed towards “corporate greed”, and corporate executives in particular. Businessmen are being served up as the very personification of avarice; the proverbial golden parachute being the ubiquitous symbol of the evils of capitalism run amok. Raging lawmakers have called for these evil fat cats to take massive pay and benefit cuts, if not lose their jobs altogether

  …
  If the government were a private company it would be too broke and uncreditworthy to continue operating. Consider: during the just-completed 2008 fiscal year, the government ran a record annual budget deficit of about 450 billion dollars; the total national debt is over 10 trillion dollars; the national debt has not declined since 1969; both the Government Accountability Office and the Office of Management and Budget have stated that the current fiscal position of the United States government is “unsustainable.” Yet who among the political class – the very managers who remorselessly oversee the financial train wreck in their own institution – has called for a pay or benefit cut for the President or Congress, let alone actually taken one? Which officials have curtailed travel by private jet, forgone their annual salary, or cancelled scheduled retreats and vacations? Certainly not Nancy Pelosi, who upon becoming Speaker of the House was granted, ostensibly for security purposes, a military C-40 “flying office” jumbo jet in which to commute back and forth from San Francisco to Washington, D.C. Certainly not Senator Chris Dodd, who received a privileged loan from now-defunct lender Countrywide Financial even as he was pontificating about Wall Street greed from his seat on the Senate banking committee.

  Welll, yes, no question on any of this. But it goes deeper than this on two levels.

  • The first; The companies in question are in a bad way to the exact degree government has been overseeing their operations… forcing them by way of ‘safety’ and ‘environmental’ regulation, to make cars people won’t buy, and forcing them to accept Union contracts they can’t pay for.
  • The second; By accepting these loans, the auto companies are allowing even greater govenmental instrusion into their operations.

  The results here are as predictable as a bad film script. As always it bottom lines at government. And lest we forget, we’re paying for all this. When this ‘bailout fever’ started, a while ago, I suggested that the government helping the banks it had regulated into their problems (Forcing loans to people who couldn’t pay the interest on them, much less the loans themselves) might not be a bad idea, assuming the government was admitting its’s culpability in the matter, paying to fix the problem and then stepping back. The government, being government, decided admitting guilt wasn’t the answer. Certainly relinquishing their chokehold on American busienss wasn’t the way to go, either, by their lights…. and that the way out was to double down on the idiocy that got us into this mess in the first place. Exactly the wrong way to go, people.  And by the way, Bruce McQuain posted a vid you want to see from Fred Thompson on all of this. We’d have done well with Fred. I wonder if all this noise is indication he palns a 2012 run?

  As it is, I’ll tell you this; I’m disgusted.  We see the woman in charge of oversight on these bailouts is annoyed because by even HER lights, there doesn’t seem to be a coherent strategy to all these payouts. It kinda makes me wonder if actually fixing the problem is the goal of the bailouts.   When you bail out a boat it’s a stopgap measure at best; water continues to leak into the thing until you actually get around to stopping the leak. What government looks to do here is to bail the boat out while making the hole… governmental involvement in the company… bigger. Forgive me, but I’m not impressed with this…. Hehe… I was about to call it a plan, but it doesn’t even qualify as that. Oh, well, you know what I mean, anyway.
  Kudlow, today offers what I think a reasonable response:

  And I still believe the ultimate solution for all these problems — be it the carmakers, the banks, mortgages, foreclosures, or all the rest — is a significant pro-growth jolt for the economy. Economic growth will solve our problems. And the best way to move to a growth agenda is to lower tax rates across-the-board, including corporate taxes and individual taxes if at all possible.
  Lower tax rates will boost asset values and reward successful producers and investors. That’s what we need. A $700 billion big-spending package merely moves money from the private sector to the government and then to a government-targeted bailout. That’s not growth. That won’t create new factories or new technologies or new risk-taking. Permanently lower tax rates will.

  It would. But given who it is we have controlling Congress and the WH, we both know that ain’t gonna happen… they’re simply not disposed to gve up their power that easily. Even better,certainly, is the idea Boortz laid out yesterday about not taking taxes at the federal level would end up being cheaper and more effective and would certainly get things moving again. I covered this briefly in last night’s Ramble. But that’s not going to happen, either.

  Frankly, I deeply fear for our country. My thought is yes, we’ve always recovered from these big government screwups and power grabs before. Reagan got us back from Carter’s idiocy, for example. What we’re seeing now, though, is record- level idiocy. Nothing in our history even comes close; even Nixon’s wage and price freezes.  I worry, because I wonder what the non-recoverabilty threshold is. Why do I get the feeling that edge is about to be tested? And what form will the inevitable backlash, take?

• Ya know, Senator Reid, we might not be interested in smelling you anymore, either. If there’s another statement of yours that gives us a picture of the contempt you hold the American people in, I don’t know what it might be. Did we really pay $621MUSD so you didn’t have to smell us? You and your horse, too, pal.
• Oil’s down again.  Gas is down to a buck eighty five or so average. Gee… remember when the left was accusing Bush of arranging huge profits for ‘big oil’? Has anyone seen a story on the profit margins they’re making now? I’m willing to bet that on a percentage basis, they’ve not substantially changed.  Which of course is why the Dinosaur media hasn’t made a mention of it.  Such things would expose the charges that the run up in price was all oil company profits as a lie. And Obama is quietly shelving the idea of a supertax on oil companies, because pumpt prices are going down… without ever mentioning that their profits haven’t gone down.
• Look, let’s establish this on the opening bell, shall we? Ron Howard has turned himself into a first level twit. Wanna help the environment in one fell swoop, Ronnie? Stop wasting our air.
• OK, now that, as David mentioned last night,  Chambliss has won, I wonder… the Franken thing will continue to play out, I think… but not with the same intensity. At least, that would be my guess. As I remarked earlier today, I find the 175 new ballots, and the timing of their discovery suspicious at best. The smell of Democrat Party fraud is all over this thing.
• Remember how we were told the internet wouldn’t be regulated? Yeah, right. Here again, comes a government agency looking to expand it’s power.
• I commented yesterday on Plaxico Burris. Since then I’ve begun to detect a lot of idiocy on all of this, mostly being driven by gun phobia. Look, gang, the issue here isn’t the gun. The issue is the guy got stoopid.

From Radio Buddy Scott Fybush, we get news about the passing of one of the key players in Radio duing my time in that business:

Bill Drake spent most of his career out west, but the wizard of streamlined top-40 radio had a huge influence on the sound of the MASSACHUSETTS airwaves, where his corporate consulting work for RKO General made the early WRKO-FM (98.5 Boston) a mid-sixties cult favorite before the company pulled the trigger in 1967 and put Drake’s top-40 format on WRKO (680), creating one of the Hub’s legendary radio stations.

Drake, who died Saturday in California at 71, was criticized almost as often as he was imitated – his creation, a format that emphasized tight segues and shotgun jingles over lengthy DJ patter, was viewed at the time (and is still seen by some) as removing personality from the airwaves

…

But in other venues, including WRKO in its heyday, Drake’s tight formatics allowed talented “Boss Jocks” to shine in a fast-paced environment of hit music, killer jingles, and must-listen specials such as Drake’s masterpiece, “The History of Rock & Roll,” setting a standard for music radio that remains unmatched forty years later.

And even if the northeast was never as fertile a territory for Drake as were the midwest (CKLW) and the west (KHJ, KFRC, and the list goes on), there’s still no question that Drake’s influence lives on here, as close as the nearest oldies station, where the Drake sound lived on (thanks, in part, to his Drake-Chenault music automation systems) long after its inventor had retreated to California, where he all but disappeared from public view in the decades before his death.

Yes, indeed; I learned a lot about handing a control board by simply listening to tapes of those operations… KHJ, particularly on tape, and back in the day before CJBQ’s power increase, listening directly to CKLW. at night. CKLW was one of the stations I listened to with regularity.  “The Big 8” was ‘the sound’ back in the day, and was representitive of the only kind of radio I ever realy wanted to do.  I happened to hear CKLW a few nights ago when I was well west of CJBQ’s night patterm. How the mighty have fallen, is all I can say.

(Sigh)

By the way, if you want to keep up on Radio happenings in the Northeast… along with a load of great station tours from all over the country, Scott’s NERW and Site Of the Week postings are a great way to do that.

We see by way of the Halifax Chronicle-Herald that Ted Rodgers has died.

Ted’s father was a radio pioneer at CFRB. As a result of Ted’s leadership, and some luck of course, the company now owns most of the big voices on the Candian radio and TV dials, as well as a wireless and internet company, and the BlueJays.

Rodgers was 75.

From Fox, we get this important news:

The chairman of the British Lap Dancing Association, speaking at a legislative hearing Tuesday, made an odd assertion, given his livelihood — a lap dance is “not sexually stimulating,” he said, the Guardian reported.

Simon Warr made the seemingly contrary statement to a British parliamentary committee as part of a hearing on the country’s Licensing Act.

“You are saying that the purpose of a lap dancing club is not to be sexually stimulating?” asked one member of Parliament.

Warr responded: “All right, the entertainment may be in the form of nude or semi-nude performers, but it’s not sexually stimulating.”

The reason for Warr’s strange stance on the effects of his industry may have something to do with new regulations proposed for such establishments.

Gee, ya think?

Lap dancing clubs are currently licensed the same way as other pubs and clubs, but some argue they should instead fall under the licensing of sex encounter establishments.

This is the kind of nonsense that occurs when government gets involved in every aspect of life. The first victim of government is truth, and the knife gets weilded by those simply trying to survive in the shadow of that government. Now of course this is a fairly extreme example. But consider the lies that need be told surrounding, say, Healthcare. Or anything else the government has it’s hands in…

BBCT: Hot Air

And as if by magic, or perhaps more correctly by way of some evil curse, 175 ballots show up in the Franken Coleman race, giving Franken a net gain of 37.  Total difference, ~50 or so.

Forgive me, but I smell a fish.

WordPress v2.7RC1 is up at the WordPress and looking pretty good.

If you’re a blogger, and want a peek here’s where to look behind the scenes.

It’s quite a change from the interface WP has had for the last few versions, but it looks worth it.  From the user’s perspective it supports threaded comments, which will be a nice addition to BitsBlog.

Likely before the end of the year, this will be here at BitsBlog.

Curses, foiled again.   Republican Saxby Chambliss defends his Senate seat in Georgia, Associated Press:

ATLANTA – Georgia Sen. Saxby Chambliss won re-election Tuesday in a runoff, dashing Democrats’ hopes of capturing enough seats in the U.S. Senate to thwart Republican filibusters.

Chambliss’ election to a second term gives the GOP a firewall against Democrats eager to flex their newfound political muscle in Washington.

Dirty Harry Reid will not get his sixty vote majority.   Bad news for the ‘rats.   Good news for America.

Mr. President-elect, reporters we hope are going to ask you a lot of annoying questions over the next four years. Get used to it.

Via fellow Swamp Stomper, Sister Toldjah.  

BO’s halo becomes a choke collar.

Mike Allen, Politico, is reporting that NBC News is set to name David Gregory as Tim Russert’s replacement as host for Meet the Depressed:

NBC News plans to name David Gregory as moderator of “Meet the Press,” infusing one of television’s most prized franchises with a sharp edge leavened by a youthful style and versatility, according to network executives.

Perspective by, Michael Goldfarb, Weekly Standard:

Ben Smith says it’s a “safe choice.” Sure, but the right won’t respect Gregory they way they respected Russert, and this will do nothing to repair the damage Olberman, Shuster, and company have done to the NBC brand in the eyes of conservatives. That word of Gregory’s selection broke on the Huffington Post only adds to the sense that this is a news organization that has decided to drop the pretense of objectivity. Of course, it could have been much, much worse.

Questions by Tom Maquire, Just One Minute:

David Gregory To Host Meet The Press (While Hiding From It)

David Gregory’s ascension to the throne vacated by Tim Russert may be announced today, according to the Politico. David Gregory took a pass on his role in the Valerie Plame case back in 2007 and will no doubt continue to do so. But with the possibility that a Scooter Libby pardon will make news, please indulge me while I publicly puzzle on a couple of points:

Given the lack of talent at the Peacock, I quess NBC could have done worse than Gregory, but then I suppose they could not afford Helen Thomas.

Greetings, and welcome to the most intense nightly read anywhere on the ‘sphere… BitsBlog’s Nightly Ramble.

• December the second, already. That means only 22 shopping days left until Christmas. Always assuming the war on Christmas doesn’t succeed. I’ll get to that.
• I note with interest that by a fluke of the calendar, our gift buying season is remarkably shorter than in most years.  Not many people making mention of how the season is doing, saes-wise, make mention of that point.  On the other hand, we have two other factors; Most people are nearly half-done with their gift buying, already. More of them are doing so online. Oh, and we’re already about 3% to 10% over last year’s numbers, depending on who is doing the estimating.
• And who is doing the estimating seems a point not many want to address. An example of how the baises of the estimators can alter the narrative, comes in the form of a post from Ed Driscoll. Ed looks, today, at the deal at a WalMart out on Long Island, and the reaction of the New York Times to that incident.  Says Ed:?
  

  Responding to the incident on Black Friday when one of their employees died when the doors were opened to allow the first mob of shoppers into the Long Island store at 5:00 AM, a New York Times went out with the following absurd headline: “A Shopping Guernica Captures the Moment.”Evidently, New York Times economics reporter Peter Goodman (or perhaps his editor, depending upon who wrote the headline) fancies himself as the next Picasso. So who are the Nazis in his mind? The management at Wal-Mart who, somewhat like Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium 30 years ago failed to have adequate security and preparations for the onslaught of a crowd, or the shoppers who crushed the unfortunate sales clerk? The article, found via Newsbusters doesn’t say….

  …if the New York Times and its writers and editors can’t see the difference between an unfortunate shopping incident and the Spanish Civil War, one wonders what what value the newspaper has as an information source to be trusted by their readers.

  Well, yeah, there is that.  Of course, now, that’s ALWAYS been the question with them, hasn’t it?… and I mean regardless of topic….  their overtly skewed perspective? They’re simply not trustworthy. I’m convinced that the story wouldn’t have been nearly so loud had it happened at a Macy’s or Lord and Taylor or Belk, or something. (Belk? Yes, that’s a name that’s come up in my searches, recently for other reasons.)  In any event; Can anyone deny that there has been, and continues to be, an anti-Wal-Mart bias in the liberal press? Granted that it’s a bit less pronounced than in previous years. But then again, at the moment, it’s starting to look like most of the Christmas shopping money is going there… and with the spectre of an Obama presidency, the liberal press can’t be seen as talking down the economy as they did while Bush occupied the WH. And trust me, that’s the difference in their reactions.

• An Honorable Mention at OTB’s Caption Contest
• With HIllary Clinton going to State… assuming the constitutional hurdles are crossed… there comes the question of who gets her Senate Seat here in NY.  Bubba’s name has been mentioned. I gather Elliot Spitzer is free. (And worth every dime of it)
• One really does have to pause and question what the bleep Obama is thinking with this appointment. I suppose having her on the team tends to limit her ability to be publicly critical. Or at least it would if she wasn’t Hillary Clinton. Still, Powell shows us how damaging to a foreign policy and the overall perception of a presdient, a rouge secretary of state can be. And let’s also keep in mind the lifers in that particular cesspool, may of whom have views that are even more leftist than Obama’s.  And what was Hillary Clinton thinking, for that matter? There wasn’t a Secretary of State that was elected presdient all through the last century. Not exactly priming her power pump, seems to me. So, it seems fairly safe to say there was a lot of negotiation behind the scenes, here… and the Clintons you may recall have a tendency to ignore agreements once they’re no longer beneficial to their political power. We’ll find out in about three years. Sooner, if he proves to be the screwup I think him to be.
• Oil’s at under $50/BBL Since the economy is energy based, I can’t help but think that this will be the real stimulus package. At the same time, though I can’t help but wonder if  our economic troubles weren’t intentionally made much worse by the price spiking… Soros, anyone?
• Venice is flooding. No, really.
• The reality of the New Deal. And remember, gang, we now have both houses of congress and the WH occupied by people who think the New Deal saved us.
• I see Fred Thompson is still writing to Fredpac.Com, which makes me wonder if we’re not going to see him running again in four years.
• Yeah, I’d like to see it happen… taxes go away for a few months to get the economy going. … But see also, Snowball,Hell. Still the numbers Boortz put up here, tell a story:
  

  Gohmert proposes a two-month tax holiday where the federal government would not collect any taxes from individual Americans.  No income taxes.  No payroll taxes.  You would keep all the money that you earn for two months.

  Now this is a statistic that should shock you … Americans pay over $101 billion in income taxes and $66 billion in FICA taxes every single month.  That means that if Gohmert’s plan went into effect, there would be over $330 billion in American pockets.  That is money that you have earned and money that you can decide where it is spent or saved.  You pick the economic winners and losers with your money – the government doesn’t get to do the choosing for you.  The government can’t use it to pay executive salaries for failing companies or subsidize failing UAW contracts.  The government won’t spend $50 million just to send every American a letter saying that their pithy “stimulus” check is on the way.  That’s it … you just stop all federal taxes for two months.

  Will it cost us anything?  Well, no more than has already been pledged in the bailout bill.  There’s $350 billion left there … this would eat up most of it. 

  Do you begin to understand the burden the taxpayers have imposed on them? Worse, we’re not paying on all they’re spending.  Still, what is proposed here would lose us less money that the bailouts would… and likely far less. So what would be lost with such a plan?  Government power only. Which is why the Democrats would never go for it. That alone should tell you something.

• That’s right enough, Billy, as I said yesterday.   The thing is so flippin’ obvious it’s a wonder they’ve been able to argue against it for as long as they have. And what would we lose with an armed citizenry, over what we’re losing now?  Again, the answer is government power, only. Which, given the lack of response from the police there, they’re going to lose, anyway.
•  The War on Christmas continues apace.  I see Toby Keith has got a song up about this one. And via Hume, we learn:
  

  Visitors to the Washington State capitol this month will be greeted with an extra piece of seasonal flare in addition to what they call the “holiday tree” and a Nativity scene. The Freedom From Religion Foundation was given permission to erect a 4.5 foot-tall sign declaring there is no God and “religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds.”The foundation’s co-president says the sign is a reminder of the “real reason for the season, the winter solstice.”The Spokesman Review newspaper reports that because of past lawsuits over holiday displays, Washington state officials now say they will honor virtually any request for a religious or political display at their Capitol building.

  You’ll want to check this out, too.  You really have to wonder just what it is those attacking Christmas, are afraid of. What drives this fxation? Certainly, a spirit of self-justification for starters, but I can’t help but think that there’s a creeping fear that they might just be wrong about God, that leaks into the ferocity of their battle against Public displays of religion …even ones not government funded.  I see Goldberg dabbling here.

• I’m starting to collect pictures of local Christmas displays that I’ll be sharing with you between now and New Years as I can.  Call it part of my speaking out for Christmas, and rubbing it in the face of those who would remove it from our society, and our world. Sure… It’s a small thing, but avalanches, as I gather it, are usually started by small happenings.

Fox’s SPECIAL REPORT last night:

Six members of the Congressional Black Caucus may have violated House ethics rules by attending a three-day conference paid for by a number of powerful corporations early last month on the Caribbean island of Saint Martin.

The New York Post reports House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charlie Rangel and others enjoyed free airfare, meals, and hotel rooms — at the Sonesta Maho Beach Resort and Casino — funded by donations from corporations such as IBM, AT&T, and recently bailed out CitiGroup.

House ethics rules state members of Congress cannot accept multi-day trips from a corporation that employs or retains a registered lobbyist. Members are also required to seek prior written permission to take free multi-day trips and file reports listing all financial sponsors within two weeks of each trip.

The Post writes that it could only find filings for New Jersey Democrat Donald Payne. However, Payne failed to list any of the corporations that funded the trip. A spokeswoman for Payne told the Post, “It was our understanding that the trip was sponsored by the Carib News Foundation. We are unaware of any corporate sponsors.”

Carib News is listed as the conference organizer, but the group pays for the event through corporate donations and The Post reports officials with the sponsoring companies not only attended all of the conference events, but some were featured speakers at daily seminars.

Coutesy The Buffalo Bean

Rangel could have been working on his beach body for that Caribbean conference by exercising in his semi-secret personal gym inside the Capitol. The Post says Rangel’s workout room holds a flat-screen TV, exercise machine, mirror, mini-fridge and a telephone. He was seen locking up the room one afternoon this fall when Congress was in session to address the financial crisis. The makeshift gym is steps away from Rangel’s suite of offices.

The room is officially listed as belonging to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Rangel’s spokesman told the Post he couldn’t shed any light on the situation saying, “I don’t know anything about how he uses that room.”

So, instead of draining the swamp, Democrats just made it larger. Good job, Nancy. And one can;t help the feeling this isn’t the only example… or even the worst of it.
(Cartoon from The Buffalo Bean, just down the road from me here.)

Finally… There is, occasionally, justice.

BAGHDAD -Fox- A special Iraqi court sentenced Saddam Hussein’s notorious cousin, “Chemical Ali” Hassan al-Majid, to death Tuesday after convicting him of crimes against humanity for his part in crushing the 1991 Shiite uprising in southern Iraq.
Al-Majid already faces death by hanging after being convicted last year for his role in the killing of tens of thousands of Kurds in a crackdown in the late 1980s. But that execution has been delayed by legal wrangling.

Former Baath party official Abdul-Ghani Abdul-Ghafur also received a death sentence at the end of the trial, which began in August 2007. He shouted, “Down with the Persian-U.S. occupation!” as the sentence was read.

“Shut up, you dirty Baathist,” snapped chief judge Mohammed Oreibi al-Khalifa, referring to Saddam’s mostly Sunni Baath party.

About time.  Not that I mind him waiting for the noose…. The waiting, as Tom Petty remakred… is the hardest part. Let him stew for a while.

Mark Whitaker, NBC Newss Washington Bureau Chief, via Noel Sheppard, News Busters:

I think it goes beyond the Middle East, and I think it’s a bigger phenomenon which is the leader of the biggest democracy in the world is now a person of color and that is going to give him what political scientists would call a legitimacy in the street around the world that I don’t think an American leader has had, ever perhaps.

It appears that Whitaker is ignorent of both of India and Dr. Martin Luther King::

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

Then that Whitaker’s comments were made on Chrissy Matthews’ show, bone dumb ignornant seems somehow fitting.

Hat tip:  Tigerhawk

Addendum:

No not racist, just stupid, NBC day time anchorette Alex [Nit]Witt:

ALEX WITT: You know, John, and it’s interesting because there are many who had such an optimstic and hopeful opinion of things, and you certainly can’t expect things to change [snaps fingers] on a dime overnight, but there are many who suggested that with the outgoing Bush administration and the incoming Obama administration there would be something of a lull in terrorism attacks. There had been such a global outpouring of affection, respect, hope, with the new administration coming in, that precisely these kinds of attacks, it was thought — at least hoped — would be dampered down. But in this case it looks like Barack Obama is getting a preview of things to come. 

Via Rich Noyes, News Busters.

Hat tip:  Allah Pundit, Hot Air.