J's Cafe Nette

Archive for September 3rd, 2007

*Updated and bumped to include this video of President Bush’s remarks.

Good for him. At least he goes over there to see how things are going by talking to the commanders and troops on the ground.

AL-ASAD AIR BASE, Iraq (AP) – President Bush made a surprise visit to Iraq on Monday, using the war zone as a backdrop to argue his case that the buildup of U.S. troops is helping stabilizing the nation.

The president secretly flew 11 hours to Iraq as a showdown nears with Congress over whether his decision in January to order 30,000 more U.S. troops to Iraq is working.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates arrived ahead of Bush, and convened a meeting with the country’s top political leaders to highlight Bush administration hopes for prodding Iraq into a “bottom-up” approach to national reconciliation.

Gates conferred with senior U.S. officials, including Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, before opening a session with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, President Jalal Talabani, and other top Iraqi officials from Baghdad.

Bush and his national security team flew directly to this air base in a remote part of Anbar province, bypassing Baghdad in a symbolic expression of impatience with political paralysis in the nation’s capital. The gesture underscored the U.S. belief that the spark for progress may come at the local level.

Story here.

And from this source we get a little more information:

To a large degree, the setting was the message: Bringing al-Maliki, a Shiite, to the heart of mostly Sunni Anbar province was intended to show the administration’s war critics that the beleaguered Iraqi leader is capable of reaching out to Sunnis, who ran the country for years under Saddam Hussein.

Bush has held up Anbar as an example of recent progress, especially on the security front, although the province is still economically deprived and not yet stable enough to turn over to full Iraqi control.

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In light of the recent developments surrounding the Hillary Clinton Presidential campaign, the media appears to be digging further into campaign contributions she has received. The Washington Post is on the trail of another donor to the Senator.

Sant S. Chatwal, an Indian American businessman, has helped raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaigns, even as he battled governments on two continents to escape bankruptcy and millions of dollars in tax liens.

The founder of the Bombay Palace restaurant chain, Chatwal is one of a growing number of fundraisers in the 2008 presidential campaign whose backgrounds have prompted questions about how much screening the candidates devote to their “bundlers” while they press to raise record amounts.

Chatwal’s case reached from his native India to New York City. The IRS pursued him for approximately $4 million in unpaid business taxes, while New York state placed a lien seeking more than $5 million in taxes. He forfeited a building to New York City on which he was delinquent on property taxes and was sued by federal regulators seeking to recoup millions of dollars in loans from a failed bank where he served as a director.

What is particularly interesting here though, are the answers not only of a person on Mrs. Clintons staff but that of a friend of Mr. Chatwal. Pay close attention to the first sentence of the final paragraph in the blockquote below.

Asked whether anything in Chatwal’s background caused concerns about his activities on behalf of the campaign, Clinton spokesman Phil Singer answered, “No.” He declined last week to be more specific, saying only that major fundraisers are routinely vetted “through publicly available records.”

Rajen Anand, a longtime friend of Chatwal and another Clinton fundraiser, said the campaign encourages strict vetting for fundraisers. “They advise me to be very careful not to associate the campaign with people where there is something wrong,” he said.

Anand said, however, that Chatwal may have slid through any vetting, no matter how vigorous, because of his longtime friendship with the Clintons. The Clintons maintained a close association with Chatwal; both attended one of his sons’ weddings in 2002, and the former president attended another son’s wedding in 2006.

You must read the entire piece at the WaPo to understand why some might question the association of this man with any campaign in this country. It has also been discovered that Chatwal is a Trustee of the William J. Clinton Foundation and serves on the “Hillary Clinton for President Exploratory Committee”.

If Mrs. Clinton is questioned at any point about Mr. Chatwal I hope she is very forthcoming in her answers as there is already enough information out there for any obscure reply to be challenged.

In 1997, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. sued Chatwal over his role as a director and a guarantor of unpaid loans at the failed First New York Bank for Business. The government alleged that his loans had “resulted in losses to the bank in excess of $12 million,” and it questioned his claims that he could not repay the debts.

The regulators also questioned why Chatwal continued to rent a spacious penthouse apartment in New York in the midst of his financial turmoil. “The debtor has managed to continue living in luxurious style in the same penthouse apartment he resided in at a time he claimed a net worth of tens of millions of dollars without adequate explanation of how his family’s limited income is able to support such a lifestyle,” the government said in a 1997 filing.

In September 2000, Chatwal hosted a half-million dollar fundraiser at that Upper East Side penthouse for Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign.

A few months later the FDIC abruptly settled the case, agreeing on Dec. 18, 2000, to let Chatwal pay $125,000 for the loans that it had said caused at least $12 million in losses.

While the final paragraph may be speculative on the part of the WaPo writer (in the sense in implies the Clintons may have had a hand in this settlement), I believe anyone reading the entire piece might come away with the same thoughts. Friends in high places have been beneficial to many, but illegal activities are just that and it should make no difference who you “know.”

If Mrs. Clinton should win her party’s nomination and go on to be elected to the Presidency, I trust some of the individuals recently shown to have close ties to her will no longer be welcome to share her company.

HT: Macsmind

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I’m sorry I can’t give you a link to this story because it is in a subscription email I receive, but the facts are there as known now.

One of what I think is one of the most under-reported stories in recent memory is the strange saga of Norman Hsu (pronounced “shoe” of Daly City, Ca, and lately, New York.
Norman Hsu is a leading political fundraiser for Democratic causes, on a scale at least equal to that of disgraced former lobbyist Jack Abramoff, now doing time in a federal prison.

In political parlance, Norman Hsu is known as a ‘bundler’. He goes out and picks up small campaign contributions from individual donors, and then delivers them up to the intended candidate’s campaign fund — primarily Hillary Clinton’s.

So far this year, Norman Hsu has ‘bundled’ more than $1 million, — quite an accomplishment, given that the maximum individual donation is limited by law to only $4,600 per candidate and very few people ever donate the maximum.

It was recently disclosed that six members of the Paw family in Daly City, California, had donated a combined $45,000 to the Clinton campaign through Hsu since 2005, and a total of $200,000 overall to Democratic candidates since 2005.

Since the head of the Paw household, William Paw, earns about $49,000 a year as a US postal carrier and he recently refinanced is 1,200 square foot house, the donations raised some eyebrows at the FEC.

His wife is a homemaker. His grown children work at ordinary jobs making ordinary incomes. Like Norman Hsu, William and Alice Paw are of Chinese descent.

The entire family got their Social Security cards in California in 1982, according to state records. All but one of the Paws registered to vote as “nonpartisan.” A San Mateo County elections official said that members of the Paw family vote “sporadically.”

But between them, they donated four times’ William Paw’s annual income to Hillary Clinton and other Democratic candidates over the space of three years.

All through Norman Hsu, who rose from mediocrity to one of the DNC’s top bundlers in just three years.

Intrigued FEC investigators were even more intrigued an amazing coincidence unearthed by the Wall Street Journal.

“According to public documents, Hsu once listed his address at the Paw home in Daly City, though it isn’t clear if he ever lived there.

Until three years ago, Hsu never made a campaign contribution to a presidential candidate, according to federal election records. No one in the Paw family had ever given a campaign contribution before the 2004 presidential election, according to campaign-finance reports.

Then, in July 2004, five members of the family contributed a total of $3,600 to the presidential campaign of Sen. John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat. Five of the checks were dated July 27, 2004.

About the same time, Hsu made his first donations to a political candidate, contributing the maximum amount allowed by law to Kerry in two separate checks, on July 21, 2004, and on Aug. 6.

From then on, the correlation of campaign donations between . Hsu and the Paw family has continued. The first donations to Mrs. Clinton came Dec. 23, 2004, when Hsu and one Paw family member donated the then-maximum $4,000 to her Senate campaign in two $2,000 checks, campaign-finance records show.
In March 2005, the individuals gave a total of $17,500 to Mrs. Clinton.

Since then, Hsu, his New York associates and the Paw family have continued to donate to Democratic candidates. This year, Alice Paw and four of the Paw children have donated the maximum $4,600 to Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign.”

In summary, we have an immigrant Chinese family of apolitical background and ordinary means donating several times their annual income through immigrant Chinese fundraiser Norman Hsu, primarily to Hillary Clinton’s political action committees and campaign funds.

Does anybody else smell Kung Pao chicken here? And if that isn’t enough to make headlines, there’s more!

Norman Hsu, New York high-profile fundraiser for Hillary Clinton and the Democrats, is also Norman Hsu, convicted felon and fugitive from a three-year California prison sentence.

Assessment:
When the story broke on August 28, the Clinton campaign told the New York Times it saw no reason to return the suspicious donations. Even after it was discovered that Hsu was a fugitive from justice.

Hilliary’s campaign spokesman, Howard Wolfson, issued the following statement:

“Norman Hsu is a longtime and generous supporter of the Democratic party and its candidates, including Senator Clinton.

During Mr. Hsu’s many years of active participation in the political process, there has been no question about his integrity or his commitment to playing by the rules, and we have absolutely no reason to call his contributions into question or return them.”

It wasn’t until the next day that the Clinton campaign joined a flood of other Democratic recipients to divest themselves of the tainted contributions that Clinton reluctantly announced the campaign would donate some of the money ($23,000) to charity.

Noted the Boston Globe, “The decision came Wednesday as other Democrats began distancing themselves from Norman Hsu, whose legal encounters and links to other Democratic donors have drawn public scrutiny in the past two days.

Sens. Edward Kennedy and John Kerry, both of Massachusetts, also planned to turn over Hsu’s contributions to charity. Sens. Barbara Boxer and Diane Feinstein of California; Al Franken, a Senate candidate in Minnesota; Reps. Michael Honda and Doris Matsui of California; and Rep. Joe Sestak of Pennsylvania also said they would divest Hsu’s contributions.”

Before moving on, first, notice the list of frantic new charitable donors; John Kerry, Ted Kennedy, Barack Obama, Barbara Boxer, Diane Feinstein, Al Franken, and last, but not least Hillary Clinton.

Now let’s go back the other way, through Norman Hsu and William Paw and a whole lot of money that seemed to materialize out of nowhere. Go back to 1995 and we find Hillary Clinton up to her neck in “Chinagate” and names like Johnny Chung, James Riady, the People’s Liberation Army, and John Huang.

Huang ended up with a job at the Clinton Commerce Department, on Hillary’s recommendation, where he was embroiled in a ‘controversy’ over Patriot missile sales, F-15 and F-16 fighter jet sales, and bribes paid to the Indonesian dictator Suharto.

Huang later pled guilty to passing Chinese money into the coffers of the DNC for the Clintons. In fact, Huang cited his Fifth Amendment rights over 2,000 times when asked if he was an agent of the Chinese military.

This isn’t intended as a Clinton hit piece. It’s partly about China and Chinese efforts to influence US politics by purchasing US politicians.

Clinton just happens to be the longest-serving member at the top of the list. I didn’t put her there. She did.

I asked you to peruse the rest of the list of top Hsu beneficiaries. Consider what they all have in common, the political, personal and moral values that they share, and their common reputations.

But it isn’t about them, really, either. It’s about the perilous times they represent.

Where are the screaming headlines? Half of America’s top political leadership is evidently on the payroll of the People’s Democratic Republic of China, and the big political story of the week is Larry Craig?

At the time of this writing, a Google news search on the keywords, “Norman Hsu” returned a total of 603 hits. A Google news search on the keywords “Larry Craig arrest” yielded 3,364 separate hits.

Larry Craig may or may not be gay, and may or may not have been ‘cruising’ an airport bathroom for casual sex.

Norman Hsu may or may not be a foreign agent involved in manipulating a US presidential election on behalf of the Chinese government.

Near as I can tell, Larry Craig pleaded no contest to a charge that he touched another man’s foot in a bathroom stall and waved his hand under the divider. That is apparently a ’signal’ for gay sex.

(I have to tell you, if the same thing happened to me, I’d either move my foot or hand the guy a roll of toilet paper. I never got the memo on what constitutes gay hand signals)

But when one compares the Larry Craig scandal to a presidential fund-raising scandal that could conceivably reach from the Clintons to Beijing, they are separated in importance by several orders of magnitude.

Still, the airwaves have been jammed with news about whether or not Craig is gay and if that would require his stepping down from Congress.

The liberal editorials began demanding his ouster, the conservative editorials started musing the hypocrisy demonstrated by the Party of Gay Rights when it comes to gay Republicans, and both sides devoted hours of coverage to his eventual resignation.

The mainstream media’s concentrated focus on the question of whether or not Larry Craig is gay managed to shift public attention away from Hillary Clinton, the top-tier of the Democratic Left, $200,000 in Chinese-tainted money, and Norman Hsu’s surrender as a California fugitive.

Let’s revisit the Hsu list once more, shall we? Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Ted Kennedy, Barack Obama, Barbara Boxer, Diane Feinstein, Al Franken. . . the complete list is here.

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John Edwards wants medical care for every American, but it seems a bit of Big Brother is taking over his thinking.

Here’s the money quote from him on his program.

“It requires that everybody be covered. It requires that everybody get preventive care,” he told a crowd sitting in lawn chairs in front of the Cedar County Courthouse. “If you are going to be in the system, you can’t choose not to go to the doctor for 20 years. You have to go in and be checked and make sure that you are OK.”

I go to the doctor every three months for diabetes check-ups, but if I were in my twenties I doubt I’d be going just because some government agency told me I had to go. How much do you figure these mandatory doctor visits would add to our budget and your taxes?

It seems he now trusts all those doctors he made millions from saying they were guilty of malpractice.

Edwards said his mandatory health care plan would cover preventive, chronic and long-term health care. The plan would include mental health care as well as dental and vision coverage for all Americans.

“The whole idea is a continuum of care, basically from birth to death,” he said.

Ahh, the old cradle to grave nanny state.

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If I had to answer the question posed in the following headline from today’s NYT, I would have a great deal of difficulty doing so.

As 9/11 Draws Near, a Debate Rises: How Much Tribute Is Enough?

There are those who believe that enough time has passed that we should move away from formal ceremonies:

“I may sound callous, but doesn’t grieving have a shelf life?” said Charlene Correia, 57, a nursing supervisor from Acushnet, Mass. “We’re very sorry and mournful that people died, but there are living people. Let’s wind it down.”

Then, an opinion of someone who lost a relative on that dark day:

“The idea of scaling back just seems so offensive to me when you think of the monumental nature of that tragedy,” said Anita LaFond Korsonsky, whose sister Jeanette LaFond-Menichino died in the World Trade Center. “If you’re tired of it, don’t attend it; turn off your TV or leave town. To say six years is enough, it’s not. I don’t know what is enough.”

Or is Mr. Brosseau correct in his thinking?

Some people are troubled by what they see as others’ taking advantage of the event. “Six years later, we can see that a lot of people have used 9/11 for some gain,” said Matt Brosseau, 27, of Westfield, N.J. He sees the public tributes as “crassly corporatized and co-opted by false patriots.”

Does a professional in the mental health field have the correct attitude?

Mental health practitioners see a certain value in the growing fatigue.

“It’s a good sign when people don’t need an anniversary commemoration or demarcation,” said Charles R. Figley, the director of the Florida State University Traumatology Institute. “And it’s not disrespectful to those who died.”

There is a great deal of food for thought in this piece. Each of the opinions offered by those interviewed has an element of validity. After all, we all face tragedy in a different manner, with each person determining the path which best suits their needs.

Perhaps, the following says it best:

“Commemoration aims to simplify, but life as it’s lived and feelings as they’re felt are never simple,” said John Bodnar, a professor of history at Indiana University.

That’s for certain.

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Do you remember those Wassup commercials that captivated so many a while back? Here’s a take off on those that is just too funny.

I hope you have all enjoyed a wonderful Labor Day weekend and before heading back off to work or school this video gave you a bit of a chuckle.

HT: Evangelical Outpost.

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