J's Cafe Nette

Archive for August 3rd, 2007

The phrase “A picture is worth a thousand words,” is certainly synonymous with the one shown with this story:

An Arkansas couple had a baby daughter Thursday — their 17th child and seventh girl — and the pair say they’re still not ready to give it a rest.

This couple has been truly blessed and I wish them only the best of luck with this new arrival and the balance of their family.

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This is good news for the Tillman family. I can understand why in some cases the White House doesn’t want to turn over information to the Congress because any little discrepancies would be turned against them. I’m glad that they are at least granting interviews, in this case.

The White House has offered to let congressional investigators interview three former officials in an inquiry into what the administration knew about the friendly-fire death of Army Ranger Pat Tillman.

The aides are Dan Bartlett, former White House counselor; Scott McClellan, former press secretary; and Michael Gerson, former speechwriter. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee agreed to White House demands that initial interviews be conducted without a transcript and with White House attorneys present.

If investigators determine the aides have relevant information, they would be asked to return for transcribed interviews. The White House has reserved the right to oppose that by claiming executive privilege, according to a letter Thursday from the committee’s chairman and top Republican to White House counsel Fred Fielding.

A White House official confirmed the offer late Thursday, speaking on condition of anonymity because a final agreement has not yet been reached formally. “The White House made a proposal to the committee that would permit them to talk to the individuals they’ve identified in connection with the Tillman matter,” the official said.

Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., has been aiming to determine when and how the White House learned that Tillman’s April 22, 2004, death was by friendly fire, not at the hands of the enemy as the military claimed for five weeks.

A hearing Waxman presided over Wednesday shed little light as former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and several of his top generals denied any cover-up, rejected personal responsibility and could recall little about how and when they learned of Tillman’s death. Tillman family members say they believe officials at the highest levels of government hid facts to limit public-relations damage.

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I have heard of many dirty tactics and tricks used by Congress on both sides of the aisle but to remove the record of a legitimate vote goes well beyond the pale.

Via Captains Quarters:

The bitter partisanship in Congress will apparently get a lot worse after some shenanigans by Democratic leadership in the House last night. According to the Politico, the Democrats have not only attempted a revote after an embarrassing loss on an agriculture bill, but they’ve changed the records to expunge any mention of the vote they lost:

Follow the links at Ed Morrisey’s to read and hear more.

This is an absolute disgrace and those in the House who engaged in this behavior should be ashamed of themselves.

Again, the Captain:

The rules exist for a reason — to make sure that the House functions regardless of the rancor between its members. Once a vote has been gaveled closed, it becomes part of the record and should become official. Votes should not be changed after that point, nor should the entire record of the vote get expunged.

Also blogging this issue with links to articles and c-span video is Sister Toldjah.

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Talk about a hypocrite!

John Edwards, who yesterday demanded Democratic candidates return any campaign donations from Rupert Murdoch and News Corp., himself earned at least $800,000 for a book published by one of the media mogul’s companies.

The Edwards campaign said the multimillionaire trial lawyer would not return the hefty payout from Murdoch for the book titled “Home: The Blueprints of Our Lives.”

The campaign didn’t respond to a question from The Post about whether it was hypocritical for Edwards to take money from News Corp. while calling for other candidates not to.

In addition to a $500,000 advance from HarperCollins, which is owned by News Corp., Edwards also was cut a check for $300,000 for expenses.

Edwards claimed $333,334 in royalties from last year’s release of the book, according to media accounts. The campaign said last night that those funds were part of the advance.

He says he gave that amount to charity, which would also provide tax benefits for Edwards. “We’re more than happy to give even more of Murdoch’s money to Habitat for Humanity and other good causes,” spokesman Eric Schultz told The Post yesterday.

He declined to show proof, however, that Edwards had donated the $500,000 advance or $300,000 expense checks to charity.

Murdoch is good enough to publish his books but not good enough to debate on his cable channel, and everyone else should give Murdoch’s money back.

Source.

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The FBI violated the Constitution when agents raided U.S. Rep. William Jefferson’s office last year and viewed legislative documents, a federal appeals court ruled Friday.

The court ordered the Justice Department to return any privileged documents it seized from the Louisiana Democrat’s office on Capitol Hill. The court did not order the return of all the documents seized in the raid.

Jefferson argued that the raid trampled on congressional independence. The Justice Department said declaring the search unconstitutional would essentially prohibit the FBI from ever looking at a lawmaker’s documents.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit sided with Jefferson on the constitutional issue.

“The review of the Congressman’s paper files when the search was executed exposed legislative material to the Executive,” and violated the Constitution, the court wrote. “The Congressman is entitled to the return of documents that the court determines to be privileged.”

Source.

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Don’t let the door hit you. I would rather have a 50-50 Senate than have this phony on my side.

Maybe the 50 members of the Senate’s Democratic Caucus should just call the bluff of their 51st vote and of a and if he is the of the tell Joe Lieberman to take a hike.
The junior Senator from Connecticut, who was elected as an independent last year after losing the faith of his home state’s Democratic Party, continues to flaunt his tie-breaking status, all but calling his former partisan colleagues terrorist coddlers and daring them to do something – anything – about it.

It’s a bullying, childish game he’s playing. If Mr. Lieberman were to walk away from the Democrats completely and to caucus with Senate Republicans, he would hand the G.O.P. its magical 50th vote, which, along with Vice-President Cheney’s vote, would strip Democrats of the narrow majority they won in the chamber last November. And so he chooses to torment the Democrats, siding with them for organizational purposes only to amplify – at every pivotal turn in the four-plus-year evolution of the Iraq War – the White House’s most shrill and demagogic attacks on the party’s foreign policy credibility.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Do you own some shares?

With the avalanche of corporate accounting scandals that have rocked the markets recently, it’s getting hard to keep track of them all–but our Corporate Scandal Sheet does the job. Here we’ll follow accounting imbroglios only–avoiding insider-trading allegations like those plaguing ImClone, since chronicling every corporate transgression would be impractical–and our timeline starts with the Enron debacle.

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Seems to be a common thing nowadays. What has happened to our politicians? Are they committing more crimes or are they just getting caught more often?

After two years of firmly denying that he did anything illegal or improper, Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio, agreed Friday to plead guilty to two criminal charges in the congressional corruption scandal connected to former lobbyist Jack Abramoff and a lavish golf trip he took to Scotland in 2002.
Ney, a six-term congressman from Heath in Ohio’s 18th District, faces up to 10 years in prison and a fine of $500,000. Federal investigators, however, plan to ask that he be sentenced to 27 months.

The 52-year-old Ney, who this week checked himself into an alcoholism treatment center, is scheduled to appear in the U.S. District Court in Washington on Oct. 13 to admit his guilt.

He will be the first member of Congress to confess to crimes in the Abramoff case.

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It’s about time.
Women have always been harder workers than men. Men are always making a mess and women are always left to pick it up. They work all day, then come home and become waiters for the children and us and will never make what they are truly worth. On the other hand, Men do less and demand more.
Think about it. If it weren’t for your wife, mother or girlfriend, where would you be? Probably in a corner sucking your thumb.

According to an article in today’s New York Times, young women who live in New York and several of the nation’s other largest cities who work full time have forged ahead of men in wages.
The analysis was prepared by Andrew A. Beveridge, a demographer at Queens College, who first reported his findings in Gotham Gazette, published online by the Citizens Union Foundation. It shows that women of all educational levels from 21 to 30 living in New York City and working full time made 117 percent of men’s wages, and even more in Dallas, 120 percent. Nationwide, that group of women made much less: 89 percent of the average full-time pay for men.

This doesn’t apply to all men or women.

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Well, here we go. Conservatives crying social medicine Democrats crying for the poor children and we will fall for the bull the way we always do. Screaming at each other for either being for socialism or being against the children. What a bunch of crap. I’m going to stay out of this one.

The Senate defied President Bush on Thursday and passed a bipartisan bill that would provide health insurance for millions of children in low-income families.

The vote was 68 to 31. The majority was more than enough to overcome the veto repeatedly threatened by Mr. Bush. The White House said the bill “goes too far in federalizing health care.”

But Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana and chief sponsor of the bill, said, “Millions of American children have hope for a healthier future tonight.”

The bill would increase spending on the popular Children’s Health Insurance Program by $35 billion over the next five years.

“Covering these children is worth every cent,” said Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, who helped create the program 10 years ago.

The House passed a much larger bill on Wednesday, presenting negotiators with a formidable challenge in trying to work out differences between the two measures.

Still, the strong commitment to the issue by Democratic leaders virtually guarantees that they can work out a compromise before Sept. 30, when the program is set to expire. But that compromise is likely to be unacceptable to Mr. Bush.

If Mr. Bush vetoes the bill, the future of the program would quickly become an issue in 2008 campaigns for Congress and the White House, in the context of a broader debate about universal coverage for health care.

The House bill, which passed on a vote of 225 to 204, would increase spending by $50 billion over the next five years. The Senate rejected a proposal by Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, to match that increase — and to cover the extra cost by raising taxes on people with incomes exceeding $1 million a year.

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For those of us who are pro-life, this is a terrific explanation which any of us might use to support our position.

If the unborn is growing, it must be alive. And if it has human parents, it must be human. And living humans, or human beings like you and I, are valuable aren’t they? From conception, all that’s added to the unborn is a proper environment and adequate nutrition. But those are the same things all of us need. And not only that. There’s one quality all of us have equally that demands equal treatment: we all have a human nature. Racism and sexism are wrong because they pick out external differences and ignore the underlying similarity between men and women, blacks and whites. And my concern is for your rights as a woman,that you can vindicate them against the will of the majority, but you can only vindicate your rights if you base them on your human nature. But the unborn also has that same human nature, so shouldn’t we protect him from discrimination just like we protect minorities and
women?

Read the whole story on how this explanation came about and the amount of time in which it was given here. Sure wish I could think that fast on my feet.

HT: Evangelical Outpost

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