Plugging the Leaks, One Finger At a Time.

Jeff Quinton over at Inside Charm City:

A former MVA worker from Beltsville was sentenced to 40 months today for selling identification to illegals.

From the DoJ press release:

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT
AUSA VICKIE E. LEDUC or
MARCIA MURPHY at 410-209-4885
JANUARY 7, 2008
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/md

FORMER MVA EMPLOYEE SENTENCED FOR UNLAWFULLY ISSUING OVER 150 MARYLAND IDENTIFICATION CARDS TO ILLEGAL ALIENS

Greenbelt, Maryland – U.S. District Judge Peter J. Messitte sentenced former Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration (MVA) employee James Edwin Harrell, age 51, of Beltsville, Maryland today to 40 months in prison followed by three years of supervised release for producing and transferring unlawfully produced identification documents, in particular Maryland Identification Cards issued by the MVA, announced United States Attorney for the District of Maryland Rod J. Rosenstein.

U.S. Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein stated, “James Harrell sold his government job at the MVA for profit when he unlawfully issued Maryland identification documents on over 150 occasions during the course of many months. His actions betrayed the trust the MVA placed in his hands.”

“Today’s sentencing demonstrates our resolve to pursue those individuals who produce and distribute fraudulent identity and employment documents,” said James A. Dinkins, Special Agent in Charge for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Baltimore. “ICE will continue working with our law enforcement partners to address criminal actions that pose a threat to our public safety.”

According to the plea agreement and evidence presented at today’s hearing, Harrell worked at the Beltsville Branch of the MVA where he issued driver’s licenses and identification cards. From May 2004 to February 2005, Harrell used his position at MVA to meet with applicants, many of whom were illegal aliens, who wanted to obtain Maryland Identification Cards, learner’s permits or driver’s licenses, but did not have the necessary documentation to legally obtain such identity documents. In return for payment, Harrell assisted these applicants in obtaining over 150 unlawfully produced identification cards.

United States Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein commended U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Internal Investigations Section of the Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration Investigation and Security Services Division, for their investigative work. Mr. Rosenstein thanked Assistant U.S. Attorney Harry M. Gruber, who prosecuted the case.

Yes Virginia, there are those who love money more than their country.

Tim Blair, probably the only sane person from Austraila on the web I know, has major abdominal surgery next week.  Its cancer.  He plans to have his remaining non-cancerous body parts home by early-to-mid February.

Head on over and wish him the best.

Sam Stein at HuffPo:

Obama’s presidential campaign has prepared a detailed memo listing various instances in which it perceived Sen. Hillary Clinton’s campaign to have deliberately played the race card in the Democratic primary.

Yeah, no shock for that. But notice, please, that Obama’s camp doesn’t mention hi’s just as guilty of it…. and possibly guilty of sexism, as well.

It’s almost amusing, this business of watching the Democrts beat up on themselves and the MSM doing what it canto avoid all these issues. As Surber says:

40 years of victimhood politics comes home to roost in the Hill vs. Obama race, er, battle.

They have found the enemy, and they is… err them. Or something.

Now the big thing is how to blame all this in George Bush, if they can. That’s the big escape valve, if anyone figures out exactly how to do that. But it’ll happen… wait and see.

Did anyone notice the President was making a tour of the Middle East?

Don’t you wonder why you’re not hearing much about it?

Eric Lipton, New York Times, argues the Clintons continue to miscontrue the facts regarding Mrs. Clnton’s vote which authorized the liberation of Iraq:

In interviews and at a recent campaign event, they[the Clintons] have said that Mr. Hagel, Republican of Nebraska, helped draft the resolution, which they said was proof that the measure was more about urging Saddam Hussein to comply with weapons inspections, instead of authorizing combat.

[…]

But the talking point appears to misconstrue the facts

Mrs. Clinton continues to miscontrue the facts.   Either Mrs. Clinton is lying about the facts, not exactly news, or she is too stupid to know what the actual facts are, not exactly shocking.

Hat Tip:  Memeorandum.

Noted in passing: The “Vets as Murderers” meme as pushed by the NYT being reacted to by Phil Carter:

 So, basically, the reporters went trolling on Lexis-Nexis and other databases to find “murder” within the same paragraph as “veteran” or “soldier,” and built a front-page story around that research. They compared the pre-war numbers to the post-war numbers and found that, voila!, there’s a difference. And then it looks like they cherry-picked the best anecdotes out of that research (including the ones where they could get interviews and photos) to craft a narrative which fit the data.

The article makes no attempt to produce a statistically valid comparison of homicide rates among vets to rates among the general population. Nor does it rely at all on Pentagon data about post-deployment incidents of violence among veterans. It basically just generalizes from this small sample (121 out of 1.7 million Iraq and Afghanistan vets, not including civilians and contractors) to conclude that today’s generation of veterans are coming home full of rage and ready to kill.

This would be about typical for the New York Times.  As a matter of fact, if there’s anything in surprises me about this, it’s that anybody is surprised about this. The liberal press in this country… as led by the New York Times… has long been trying to root against the United States, and those willing to place their lives in the line in her defense.

As Carter points out, it’s true; veterans face many challenges when they come home.  It is in fact one of the costs of war, I’m afraid.  But that cost is minimal in comparison to what we would have suffered as a nation and as a world, had we not responded.

However, bad as the plight of some of the returning veterans has been, it is made worse by the kind of rhetoric being engaged in by the New York Times.  The kind of nonsense that they are engaging in serves to do nothing but push such veterans away from mainstream America.  Frankly, I cannot help but think that that is exactly what they’re aiming at, given the rhetoric that they’ve been engaging in since Vietnam.

And I suspect and suppose that there are other types of government service which give rise to murders faster than the Army. Do you suppose, for example we mightg see an article on post office workers sometime soon? Or would that annoy the postal workers union, whence the  left and thereby the NYT gets a lot of it’s support?

Yes, I see the bug in the way the categories are displayed at the bottom of each post; Usually, in the header of the following post.

The problem apparently has to do with a plugin I added over the weekend, involving automated generation of Technorati tags. Didn’t notice it before now, because of the variable way the bug manifests itself.  Annoying, but I can’t fix it from here. I’ll have to repair it tonight.

Update: Got it. Return to your lives, citizens. Nothing to see here.

Jon Henke:

At his blog, Paul Krugman presents some employment-population, labor force participation and wage charts and writes

The point of these charts is not to say that Clinton deserves credit for all good things and Bush deserves blame for everything bad. The point is, instead, to show how crazy it is when Republicans claim that a return to Clinton-era levels of taxes will destroy the economy. The fact is that the economy did a lot better in an era when we had a 39.6% tax rate on dividends and a 28% rate on capital gains than it has in an era with both rates down to 15%.

To some extent, I agree that some relatively minor changes in tax rates aren’t going to have an enormous negative effect on the US economy at current tax levels. They didn’t exactly crater our economy in the 80s and 90s when Reagan, Bush and Clinton raised taxes.

But it’s one thing to say that they won’t have a significant effect, and it’s another to say that the economy did better when tax rates were higher and to suggest that it might be true again. Can somebody explain the transmission mechanism here? What is the causal relationship between higher tax rates and improved economic growth?

Well, first of all it’s not crazy, and the amounts involved are significant. The issue here is not where Clinton’s tax raising had us standing, it’s the direction they had us MOVING in…. a slower economy. There’s no denying that Clinton’s tax policy were what had us slowing down, economy wise, toward the end of the Clinton years; it’s why Bush 43 inherited major economic issues…. issues he solved to the exact degree he lowered taxes… over the large objections of the Democrats in Congress.

And to compare the tax raising by Bush and Reagan, to what Clinton did IS flat out crazy.  Reagan raised taxes only by lowering the marginal percentages and, thereby raising the amount of income to the government. Since the economy took off as a result of the marginals being lowered from the stratosphere, the economy benefited… as it always does when taxes are lowered. Bush raised taxes by compromising with a Democrat Congress, who wanted those marginals back in line with their own myopic, Socialist driven view of the world. Same thing with Clinton. “Fairness”, you know.

That Krugman cannot differentiate the two tells me all I need know about his prowess as a financial guru. The bottom line is, there isn’t a comparison between the two, unless and until you consider the size of government to be directly linked to our overall economic state. Krugman, like any good liberal thinks that when the government takes more from us we as a nation do better in the overall. His politics tends to overcome his logic.

The argument Krugman, (and by extension, Henke) is trying to make is that tax hikes don’t prevent economic growth… which is pure nonsense. I would argue that such taxes always prevent economic growth to some extent.  That there have been tax hikes under which economic growth occurred in response to other stimuli is unquestionable. But the question Krugman and Henke dare not answer is what kind of economic growth beyond what growth we saw in those cases, did our tax policy cost us?

John Hawkins calls my attention via mail to two vids I’ve not seen, yet.

The subject of both: Fred Thompson.

Addendum: (David L) While I very much enjoy John Hawkins’, Tom Clancyized version of Fred, I have have no need for such fantasy.  The real life version of Fred does quite well.  Jay, Stop the ACLU, puts up a video of Fred on Wolf Blitzer.  It doesn’t say for CNN to have talent the caliber of Blitzer.

.

Michelle Malkin :

Uh-huh. Let’s face it. Nanny Bloomberg’s unmistakable message is this: “Cheez-Its for me, but not for thee.”

So says Michelle. You’re going to have to go there to figure what the heck she’s talking about.

But when you come back, ask yourself the question: How is this not Democrat Party politics as usual? And why should anyone consider Bloomberg a Republican?

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USATODAY.com  SURFSIDE BEACH, S.C. — White House hopeful Fred Thompson continued his debate-night criticism of rival Mike Huckabee on Friday, calling the primary contest a fight between the ideals of Ronald Reagan and populist appeals that blame others for problems.”This is about the heart and soul of the Republican Party and where the Republican Party is going to go over the next several years,” Thompson said during a meeting attended by more than 100 people and also broadcast on AM radio. Huckabee’s campaign dismissed the attacks as issued by a candidate who is on the ropes.

Lame, of course, but what else is Huck going to say?
The bottom line here is Fred’s right. Huckabee is a RINO.

Technorati Tags: HUckabee, Thompson, Republicans, Rinos

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Ross Douthat at The Atlantic

Here is some free advice for liberals who don’t care much for Jonah Goldberg or his (bestselling) new volume: Either confine yourself to dismissive snark, of the sort perfected by my colleague Matt, or buckle down and actually read the damn thing. The “definitive critiques” by people who admit that they haven’t yet cracked the covers are not helpful to your cause.

And yes, I’ll have something to say about the book myself, I promise – but only once I’ve finished reading it.

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A STUDY that claimed 650,000 people were killed as a result of the invasion of Iraq was partly funded by the antiwar billionaire George Soros.

Soros, 77, provided almost half the £50,000 cost of the research, which appeared in The Lancet, the medical journal. Its claim was 10 times higher than consensus estimates of the number of war dead.

The study, published in 2006, was hailed by antiwar campaigners as evidence of the scale of the disaster caused by the invasion, but Downing Street and President George Bush challenged its methodology.

New research published by The New England Journal of Medicine estimates that 151,000 people – less than a quarter of The Lancet estimate – have died since the invasion in 2003.

That’s from the London Times.

So, Soros lied to promote his narrow ‘peace at any cost’ view? Gee, like there’s not been a pattern of that before, huh?

Technorati Tags: soros, iraq

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McQ, over at Q&O, notes progress in Iraq… progress tha very few in the MSM will ever notice:

Another real indication of progress in Iraq:

Iraq’s western province of Anbar, hotbed of the Sunni Arab insurgency for the first four years of the war, will be returned to Iraqi control in March, a senior U.S. general said Thursday.

In terms of pacification and the reestablishment of the rule of law, it doesn’t get much better than this. And Anbar makes the 9th of 18 provinces returned to Iraqi control.

Quite right. Meanwhile, The mainstream media is sitting at a green light on this, apparently it’s not green enough for them.

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Scott Johnson, Powerline, has “The case against John McCain.” I’ll go beyond Rick Santorum, and I don’t trust McCain on foreign or defense policy either. McCain has the problem of letting extraordinary temper get the better of his rather ordinary judgement.

Sure John McCain is a genuine war hero, he flew flighters on and off or carriers into battle. Then to, George McGovern was real war hero. He flew Liberators in the ETO. Neither man could be trusted as to be president.

Addendum I: (Bit) By way of RWN, Rick Santorum makes his own case against McCain

Also, John quotes Rush Limbaugh who talks about this one as well:

McCain-Feingold alone. This isn’t Republican, to limit free speech. This is the Incumbent Protection Act, and, of course, the amnesty program, McCain loves to say (McCain impression), “It’s not amnesty! You hear me, sailor? It’s not…amnesty!” But it’s amnesty. It was amnesty, and that’s why it went down to a scorching, blazing defeat. It’s not amnesty? McCain’s “stated opposition to Bush’s tax cuts in 2001-2003, largely based on…class warfare rhetoric.” He said (McCain impression), “We can’t do this, it’s tax cuts for the rich. I’m not going to do tax cuts for the rich!” “The public record is full of statements like these. Today he recalls only his insistence on accompanying spending cuts,” and they didn’t want any spending cuts in there so he wouldn’t support tax cuts. But people have forgotten, in 2001 McCain was still steaming over 2000 and the South Carolina primary after the contretemps regarding Bob Jones University, the religion and so forth. He had it in for Bush. In 2003, his anger hadn’t dwindled much. So he was opposing Bush’s tax cut, using class warfare rhetoric. “As chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation…” I know people are asking, “Rush, why are you doing this?”I’ll tell you why I’m doing it — because no Republican in the debate last night did it. Somebody has to do it! “As chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, McCain was consistently hostile to American enterprise, from media and pharmaceutical companies to technology and energy companies.” How many of us can forget the Gang of 14 debacle? Remember that, ladies and gentlemen? The Gang of 14 “prevented the Republican leadership in the Senate from mounting a rule change that would have ended the systematic use (actual and threatened) of the filibuster to prevent majority approval of judicial nominees.” You never had to have 60 votes to get a judicial nominee approved. The Democrats started filibustering, you needed 60 votes. We were going to pull the trigger on the nuclear option to get rid of this once and for all and McCain rides in with Senator Lindsey Grahamnesty and others, to form the Gang of 14 — which, by the way, has expired, ladies and gentlemen. The Gang of 14 deal has expired now.

In short, the Republicans would be better off with a Democrat in the White House, than a John McCain.

It’s really that simple, that direct, and the evidence against McCain that damning.

Addendum II:  While we on the subject of what is wrong with John McCain, Mark R. Levin scores five points;  McCain-Feingold, McCain-Kennedy, McCain-Lieberman, McCain-Kennedy-Edwards and McCain-Reimportation of Drugs   Read Mark here.

That is all.