Blogging Supervisor

Mike McIntire, New York Times, reports that Compoents Ltd, existed only paper:

The records show that Components Ltd., a company controlled by Mr. Hsu that has no obvious business purpose and appears to exist only on paper, has paid a total of more than $100,000 to at least nine people who made campaign contributions to Mrs. Clinton

It appears that Components Ltd has no other purpose than funnel money to Mrs. Clinton’s campaign donors.

Jon at GOP BLOGGERS makes a case I’ve made often enough of late:

I can’t avoid the conclusion that this should be a fantastic political environment for Republicans. Before you think this sounds crazy, read on.

Only 22% of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing, which makes President Bush’s ratings seem stratospheric. Furthermore, only 14% of Americans express a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in Congress, which puts it dead last in Gallup’s poll on this topic (even below HMOs). In this context, shouldn’t it be easy to run against expanding government and, in fact, in favor of limiting government? After all, whether the issue is entitlements, health care or education, all supposedly strong Democratic issues, shouldn’t Republicans do well by simply ask voters “whom do you trust?”

Well, given the responses to recent polling of the democrats about the president, specifically that the republicans knew that the world trade center was going to be hit , etc., I wouldn’t put much of anything past te Democrats right now. Still, in terms of common sense, this argument seems to have a lot of weight behind it.

In the end, the message should be all about trust and empowerment. In this day and age, asking voters whether they trust a bunch of political hacks more than they trust themselves should yield an obvious answer. And it should be a winner to tell Americans that we want to empower them to take control and responsibility for their own lives, with government assitstance for those less priviledged directed towards individuals to use in the free market instead of towards bloated monopolistic bureacracies. In 2008, we need crisp differentiation from socialist-leaning Democrats rather than strategies aimed at confusing the public about those distinctions (see Schip). I believe it’s a winning message, especially in a time in which politicians are viewed so negatively.

Indeed; and that’s precisely why I’ve gotten behind Fred Thompson, even before he declared.  Those are precisely the noises he’s been making for some time, now. Frankly, he’s been making the case for exactly that kind of a campaign for himself, far more convincingly than anybody else on the campaign trail it the moment.  which, in turn, is precisely why he’s been such a dominant force even before he was running.  He’s already in control of the republican primary narrative just on the strength of those issues alone.    And I think Jon is right; it’s an idea that will sell very easily with the American people.

McGehee says Chuck Hagel is quitting.

Suits me…  The guy was a one man three ring circus years ago, and he hasn’t improved since.  All of the stuff about the anti-war nonsense that I directed at the Democrats goes doubly for Hagel. At least they have the excuse of pulling the party line. Hagel had no excuse. If there was someone more deserving of being removed forcibly from the office and the party than Hagel, past John McCain, I can’t think of one.

Moron.

NZ Bear… never one to doing things on a small scale, has put together a petition to declare support for General Petraeus and the Surge. You’ll find a display ad in the right column which says “Support our troops”. Click the graphic, and go to it.

Or, click here. 

Richard Munday, Times of London, asks, “Wouldn’t you feel safer with a gun?”

Despite the recent spate of shootings on our streets, we pride ourselves on our strict gun laws. Every time an American gunman goes on a killing spree, we shake our heads in righteous disbelief at our poor benighted colonial cousins. Why is it, even after the Virginia Tech massacre, that Americans still resist calls for more gun controls?

The short answer is that “gun controls” do not work: they are indeed generally perverse in their effects.

A free man, is able to carry arms when and whee he pleases.  A slave does so only with his master’s permission.  Do you wish to be free or a slave?

A story is up in The New York Post, just now, about how the blame game keeps going around for high gasoline prices…. but the real problems keep getting ignored. ONe of those real problems? The action by Congressional Democrats trying to push Ethanol.

As the story itself says:

 Not that these lessons are ever internalized: When prices were rising this spring, Sens. Schumer and Hillary Clinton issued – what else? – demands for investigations into Big Oil.

They seem to be following Hitler’s advice…If you tell a lie often enough, it gets accepted as truth.

Over at A Western Heart,  things are sweet, where John Ray says…

 Coming as I do from a big sugar-producing area (Far North Queensland), I always read carefully the little sachets that one gets with one’s coffee in coffee lounges. I make sure that I am putting real sugar in my coffee and not some substitute junk. So I should be in sympathy with the campaign against aspartame, right? Wrong! As far as I can see, the campaign is founded on little more than the usual self-glorifying belief that if something is popular it must be bad.

There is a list here of 13 recent anti-aspartame studies and, unless I have missed something, there is not one study of the type that would be decisive: A double-blind study in humans. There are plenty of in vitro (“test tube”) and in vivo (rats and mice) studies but that’s about it.

And even some of the studies listed there admit that some of the potentially bad byproducts of aspartame metabolism can be broken down rapidly by other food components or metabolites. So showing that rats on a rat diet cannot handle aspartame well tells us nothing about humans. What is needed are studies of humans on a human diet as it seems probable that the human metabolism CAN safely break down aspartame. One has to look at the bottom line, not intermediate processes in isolation.

Since a double blind study in humans should not pose any great difficulty, I think it is the absence of such a study which is most telling.

Therein, I think, lies the point of much of the “research” that we’ve been subject to lately, both on that topic and many others, including “global warming”.   When humans don’t know what they’re talking about, they tend to lean towards anecdotal information, as in the global warming scare.  And clearly, the question of global climate and our understanding of it is an open one… as it is with so many issues that the left has tied it’s star to, of late.

And John’s first point about it being popular, therefore it must be bad,  certainly seems to apply to the global warming myth… our transportation system as such is popular in that everybody uses it.  Most people in this country on automobiles.  Therefore it must be bad.  Or, so goes the non thought.

From the Seattle PI:

KIRKLAND — Are you still fans of Matt Hasselbeck and Mack Strong after they visited President Bush last week in Bellevue? Or have their political leanings turned you against them?

The Seahawks quarterback and fullback gave the 43rd president a No. 43 jersey with his name on it at a $1,000-a-plate fundraiser for Rep. Dave Reichert at the Hyatt.

At the time, Hasselbeck called it a thrill and said it was a win-win, this opportunity to meet the president and get out of a team meeting.

But as soon as he saw the picture of the two players with Bush, Gary Wright, the team’s vice president of administration, said he was concerned about negative reaction.

Maybe in really red Republican states, it would not have been a big deal. But Washington is a blue state, and deep, deep Democratic blue in King County. So objections were raised, and Hasselbeck heard them and read them. He got nasty voice mails, e-mails and text messages.

“I had no idea,” Hasselbeck said.

One guy told him: “I hate you, I’ll never wear your jersey, I’ll never like the Seahawks again.”

“Huh?” Hasselbeck thought. “Seriously?”

“Politics can be very mean and dirty,” he said. “The things politicians say about each other, and what activists say, I had a brief glimpse of that for a couple of days.

Bush Derangement Syndrome.

It’s OK. I wonder if we could get Hasselbeck and Strong to come to Buffalo?

The New York Times, this morning:

At the center of the ever-deepening mystery of Norman Hsu, the fugitive fund-raiser who was captured after a brief flight from the law last week, is the question of how he evolved from a bankrupt swindler in 1992 to a wealthy donor to many Democratic candidates, and a bundler of campaign contributions to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2007.

A review of financial records for one of Mr. Hsu’s companies begins to shed light on some of his recent activities, including his dealings with a circle of campaign contributors that has fallen under suspicion since news of Mr. Hsu’s criminal past, murky business interests and unexplained riches rocked the Democratic Party.

The records show that Components Ltd., a company controlled by Mr. Hsu that has no obvious business purpose and appears to exist only on paper, has paid a total of more than $100,000 to at least nine people who made campaign contributions to Mrs. Clinton and others through Mr. Hsu. The payments occurred in the spring of 2003, several months before Mr. Hsu emerged as a contributor to Democrats and more than a year before he started bundling checks from those same people for various campaigns. In all, he has raised more than $1 million for Democrats.

In short, Norman Hsu and his companies appear to have only one purpose: producing money for Democrats.

I think, more important than any of this, are points, which no one dares discuss;

1. This is only the group that’s been caught.  Given a long history of the criminality as regards fund raising within the democratic party, it is logical to question what else is going on that we don’t know about, and who else is illegally channeling funds into the Democratic party?
2. It is illogical to assume that the Democrat party didn’t know about this, particularly given a long history of criminality, and in this instance specifically, financial connections to the communist Chinese from the Clinton administration.
3. Given that previous connection, and he given Hsu’s background, it seems unlikely, that the original source of all of these dollars he’s coming up with, isn’t the same as the previous case of election fraud involving the PRC.
4. When it gets so bad that the DNC paper of record, the New York Times gets involved in a case of criminal behavior on the part of their party, it’s not only damn serious, it’s probably critical.

And by the way… why was Hsu traveling on Amtrak? Could it be that he knew if he was to try to fly on an airliner his location would have been found? Why is Amtrak not subject to the same security and scrutiny that our airlines are subject to?

Written by Fred Lucas, CNSNews.com Staff Writer

Barely a week after questions emerged about suspicious donations to Sen. Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, a three-judge panel in California will hear arguments Friday regarding an illegal fundraising event from her 2000 Senate campaign.

The California Court of Appeals, Second Appellate District, will hear arguments about whether Clinton, a New York senator and leading Democratic presidential candidate, should be a defendant in a lawsuit brought by Hollywood mogul Peter Paul.

Attorneys for each side will also debate the inclusion of a videotape as evidence — a video in which Clinton can be heard apparently agreeing to plan a fundraiser, which was later determined to be illegal by the Federal Elections Commission (FEC).

This goes to what I said the other day about the uselessness of the Federal election commission.  The illegality in question occurred seven years ago.   They’re still arguing about the place settings, these people.

PJM Groningen: Make no mistake: newly-elected conservative European leaders did not win their elections because they are pro-American, they won despite it, says PJM correspondent Michael van der Galien.

Yes, well, forgive me, but that sounds an awful lot like the nonsense we were fed from Chuckles the Clown Schumer the other day. There is an almost Orwellian quality to these claims of success despite our actions… an all out effort to set in stone the idea that what we see happening, is it really happening, and even if it is, it isn’t because of the dreaded right-wingers..

It’s quite clear to me, in light of this link, that what we’re dealing with here is yet another attempt to divert attention or at least divert blame, from the abject failure that leftism is.

Look, even in those situations where those European voters still holding Anti-American views, voted for rightist candidates, the fact of the matter is, that they voted against their fellow leftists, because of the failure that they represent.  In each case, France, the Netherlands, wherever… leftism is being rejected, on immigration and integration problems, on the absolutely horrendous state of the economy in each case, etc..

What we are dealing with here, is a European voting public that is being forced into dealing with reality.  van der Galien may very well be speaking the truth when he says that European voters to maintain an instinctive dislike of Americanism, but the fact is, in large number they have decided that it is less destructive to them and their interests, than is the leftism that they’ve been nursing for the last 50 years or so.

We’ve had a spot of bother with the website, here at BitsBlog.

Starting sometime on Friday night, we started getting attacked from somewhere in Argentina.  I’m not quite sure of all that was going on, but nobody, including DavldL and myself, were able to log in.

I spent most of Saturday trying to trace the trouble. I finally gave up and told the ISP to to a wipe and tape restore.  Once this was done I applied all the latest and greatest from WordPress, which supposedly will remove the security hole this guy got in through.

Oh… and yes, there appeared to be a political angle to it. Apparently, whoever it was, wasn’t too keen on my attitude toward Hugo Chavez.

(Shrug) I thought Chavez was running Venezuela, not Argentina….

My advice to you, is to change your passwords, and make sure your anti virus is up to date.  Particularly, as regards ActiveX. Not so much for any specifically known threat, but because I don’t know what code got inserted. Whatever it was, the complete wipe and restore (A week back plus manual write-ins) will have removed it, and the security patches should keep it out.

You’ll pardon me if my blogging is a little light today… it was a long night, last night sorting this stuff out.

(Post made Sticky until Monday AM)

Does Usama bin Laden sound like he had been reading democrat talking points?  John Gibson compares the words of bin Laden to those of Keith Olbermann, video.