For some terrific pictures from Fallujah, Iraq, check out those posted by Bill Ardolino at INDC Journal. I attempted to select a favorite but it was impossible.

Also, Mike Yon has a new three part dispatch, “Hunting Al Qaeda Part I of III.”

A few months ago we called them terrorists. Today we call them Concerned Local Nationals. When we were in a good mood, we used to call them illegal or rogue militias. Now we call them Neighborhood Watches, or in this case, “Baqubah Guardians.” It’s truly working well. They do not have uniforms and most who wish to join have not been hired as policemen yet.

A fascinating read as always.

If you have been following the story on Norman Hsu, (heck, even if you haven’t), you must go to Captain’s Quarters and treat yourself to what may become a priceless work of art. Well done Captain Ed. (Oh, and the post was great too!)

For those who question why the Norman Hsu connection to Hillary Clinton has remained part of the news cycle, the following might help answer some questions. Writing at the Washington Post Peter Baker in one condensed article captures the essence of the Senate Investigation into illegal contributions to both Former President Clinton’s re-election campaign and the Clinton legal defense fund.

The case evokes the fundraising scandals born out of Bill Clinton’s reelection in 1996, which dominated Washington for more than a year after the vote as one unseemly tale after another emerged about White House fundraising tactics and the characters trying to buy access through questionable if not illegal methods.

The president used the White House to stroke donors in a more methodical way than any of his predecessors had ever done, inviting hundreds of top contributors and politically connected people to attend coffees with him in the executive mansion or even to stay in the Lincoln Bedroom. (”Ready to start overnights right away,” Clinton wrote on a fundraising memo.) Vice President Al Gore made fundraising calls from his office and attended a fundraiser at a Buddhist temple where nuns who had taken vows of poverty were illegally reimbursed for $2,500 contributions.

The Clinton team ended up sending back millions of dollars as the revelations widened. John Huang, a Democratic National Committee fundraiser, raised $3.4 million for the party and its campaign, but nearly half of it had to be returned because of questions about the donors, including some from overseas. Huang was the one who organized the Gore event at the Hsi Lai Temple outside Los Angeles that brought in $140,000, most of which had to be given back.

The DNC also returned $253,000 donated by businesswoman Pauline Kanchanalak after she said the money came from her mother-in-law and $366,000 to Johnny Chung, who told investigators a Chinese military officer had given him hundreds of thousands of dollars to funnel to the Democrats. The Clinton legal defense fund refunded or refused to accept at least $640,000 from Charlie Trie, a businessman who showed up one day with two manila envelopes filled with checks.

Hillary Clinton was caught up in the scandals to some degree. At one point, it emerged that Chung had delivered $50,000 directly to the first lady’s chief of staff, Maggie Williams, at the White House. Williams forwarded the check to the DNC, even though federal law bars officials from receiving political donations on government property.

As the story on Mr. Hsu has grown with the assistance of the LATimes more and more questions have surfaced as to what Senator Clinton and/or her staff knew and when exactly they were aware that Hsu was a man with a criminal record and a potential problem as a fundraiser?

Questions about Hsu were first raised in June by an Irvine businessman, Jack Cassidy, who contacted the Clinton campaign and party officials about his suspicions, which he had heard about through a friend.

“There is a significant probability that a man using the name of Norman Hsu is running a Ponzi scheme,” Cassidy wrote to a California Democratic Party official on June 18 in an e-mail obtained by The Times. Describing the deal he understood Hsu was offering to investors, he wrote: “The math does not work!”

The party official passed Cassidy’s concerns to Samantha Wolf, who rejected them.

On June 20, Cassidy sent an e-mail directly to Wolf.

“I am more than ever convinced that a man claiming to be a big fundraiser for Hillary Clinton is running a Ponzi scheme,” he wrote. He said he feared that an associate “may lose her home” because of her participation in the scheme and cautioned Wolf that Hsu may be “using your good name in vane.”

Cassidy said Wolf did not respond to the e-mail warning.

If you were a candidate for president and knew that in the past you were in any way associated with difficulties with campaign financing, would you just brush off a warning that there was a potential for more of the same? One would think being dismissive might not be the ideal tact to take.

Also, as of this writing, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign has refused to release the name of the 260 donors whose funds will be returned because they are linked to bundling by Hsu. This makes it most difficult for anyone to track these very same contributions if what they have announced materializes.

Although Clinton will return the money raised by Hsu, Wolfson said the individual contributors could make new donations.

“We will accept their contributions and ask them to confirm for our records that they are from their own personal funds,” he said in an e-mail.

I don’t know if I would contribute again to the Senator’s coffers while the FBI is in the throws of an investigation into this matter. It is a shame in some respects because there may be many individuals who get caught up in a matter which they never anticipated. I say may because though there seem to be signs pointing to more campaign finance shenanigans but until the official report by the investigative team is issued, no direct accusations can be made.

Now there is the matter of the Fred Thompson’s campaign jumping into the fray.

Hillary Clinton’s links to illegal fundraising by Asian-Americans in 1996 should have made her wary of accepting $850,000 from a fugitive Asian-American this year, a rival presidential campaign said Tuesday.

The criticism came from an adviser to former Republican Sen. Fred Thompson, who chaired a Senate investigation into illegal contributions by Asian-Americans to Bill Clinton’s re-election campaign and the couple’s legal defense fund in the 1996 election cycle.

Thompson adviser Rich Galen said Clinton’s 2008 campaign has become “the sequel” to her husband’s scandal-plagued 1996 campaign.

Sadly, the spokesman for the Clinton campaign rather than addressing the irregularities attributed to Hsu decided to reply in this manner to Mr. Galen:

Wolfson said, “We reject the suggestion that suspicion should be based on ethnicity in America.

Fact is, it was donations by Asian-Americans which caused the woes for the Presidential Campaign of Bill Clinton. All one has to do is read the transcript of the hearings linked above which is public knowledge.

We are still a long way from the home stretch in 2008 in the election of a new POTUS, however, as stories such as these emerge, I feel it’s imperative we get the word out. There are no accusations here. All of this information is publicly available and can be read for each individual to come to their own conclusions. What there are though, are a lot of unanswered questions surrounding Mr. Hsu and his association with both the DNC and Mrs.Clinton.

Hopefully whatever path the investigation which has begun takes, it will yield the answers.

Update: According to today’s Wall Street Journal Mrs. Clinton may not be able to return the funds to the donors for them to promise it’s theirs and return to her campaign.

New documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal may help point to an answer: A company controlled by Mr. Hsu recently received $40 million from a Madison Avenue investment fund run by Joel Rosenman, who was one of the creators of the Woodstock rock festival in 1969. That money, Mr. Rosenman told investors this week, is missing.

Mr. Hsu told Mr. Rosenman the money would be used to manufacture apparel in China for Gucci, Prada and other private labels, yielding a 40% profit on each deal, according to a business plan obtained by the Journal. Now the investment fund, Source Financing Investors, says Mr. Hsu’s company owes it the $40 million, which represents 37 separate deals with Mr. Hsu’s company. When Source Financing recently attempted to cash checks from the company, Components Ltd., the investors say they were told the account held insufficient funds. …

…Mr. Rosenberg, the attorney for Mr. Rosenman, asked politicians to hold on to the funds so that Source Financing and other investors can be made whole. “It appears that Source Financing Investors joins Hillary Clinton…and many others as his victims,” Mr. Rosenberg said in an interview. “We urge candidates who received contributions from Mr. Hsu to retain those funds so that they may be returned to victims of the scheme.”

How many innocent, regular Americans have been scammed by Hsu and their money gone into the Clinton and Democratic coffers instead of giving a return on their investment of hard-earned money?

We don’t know the answer to that question for certain yet, but if a judge rules the money cannot be distributed until this case is resolved it’s only going to put stronger legs on this story of deception.

Sweetness and Light quotes the New York Times talking about another shady contributor:

John R. Burgess makes for an improbable courtier of presidents, or of a senator who might become one.

A disbarred New York lawyer with a criminal record for attempted larceny and patronizing a 16-year-old prostitute, Mr. Burgess owns International Profit Associates, a management consulting company in Illinois.

Federal authorities are pressing a sexual harassment suit against the company on behalf of 113 former female employees.

The Illinois attorney general is investigating accusations of deceptive marketing tactics, officials say, and the company has been the subject of 470 complaints to the Better Business Bureau across the nation in the past three years.

But despite the trail of problems dating to the 1980’s, many prominent politicians have accepted campaign contributions and speaking fees from Mr. Burgess and his company, which offers organizational and financial advice, mostly to owners of small businesses, and claims annual revenues of more than $200 million.

Former President George Bush was paid $82,000 to speak at a company banquet in 1999, and former President Bill Clinton received $125,000 to appear in 2001.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has collected more than $150,000 in contributions from executives of International Profit Associates, some as recently as September, and spoke at a company event in 2004. As a group, company officials and their spouses are one of the largest sources of contributions to Mrs. Clinton’s re-election campaign.

Mr. Bush, Mr. Clinton and Mrs. Clinton all say they were not aware of problems with the company, known as I.P.A., or with Mr. Burgess when they took the money, though some problems were documented as early as 1997 in newspapers, magazines and on the Internet.

Mike McIntire of Sweetness and Light then wraps up his post with these words:

Boiling it down from the NYT’s opaque text, Hillary Clinton accepted at least $157,000 in donations from a company owned by John Burgess, a disbarred New York lawyer with a criminal record for attempted larceny and patronizing a sixteen-year-old prostitute.

And when informed of this, Mrs. Bill Clinton refused to return the money. Even though other pols, like the Cuomos, were shamed into doing so.

(Mind you, this is the same Hillary Clinton who demanded that Barack Obama return contributions from David Geffen because Mr. Geffen had the temerity to call the Clintons “liars.”)

The old saying is when you lie down with dogs you get up with fleas. It appears both Clintons have been sleeping with dogs for a long time and are covered with fleas they are trying to eliminate now. The problem is the damage has already been done.

In Tuesday’s Foreign Relations Committee hearing with Gen. Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker, it seems Senator Obama was more interested in speechifying than in asking or getting answers to questions.

The long-winded Obama, who bills himself as a consensus builder, wasted an opportunity to show how it could work.

Each member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had seven minutes to question Petraeus and Crocker about the Iraq War. Obama used about six minutes of his time to lecture Petraeus and Crocker that the surge is of modest success given the cost and the Iraq central government is ineffectual — points he has been making in speeches and debates. As Obama was wrapping up, he said, “That, of course, now leaves me very little time to ask questions, and that’s unfortunate.”

“That’s true, Senator,” piped up Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, the committee chairman and a rival for the Democratic nomination.

Petraeus never got to answer Obama’s 266-word question. Rushed at the end, Obama asked about benchmarks not met. Crocker said, “Senator, I described for Senator Sununu a little bit ago some of the things that I think are going to be very important as we move ahead.”

Obama tossed a softball: “Can you repeat those?

Biden asked Crocker to summarize and racing the clock, Crocker got in 215 words before Obama’s time was up.

One would think if this man has any substance at all he would have listened and learned from the general and the ambassador.

Instead, he must have been concentrating on his plan for Iraq which he was set to disclose today.

Obama said if he were president now, he would immediately begin pulling combat troops out of Iraq at the rate of two brigades — around 4,000 troops — a month, to be completed by the end of next year.

He would call a new constitutional convention in Iraq, convened with the United Nations, and not allow it to end until Iraq’s leaders had reached a new accord on reconciliation.

Then he would use “presidential leadership” to “surge” diplomacy with Iraq’s regional neighbors and take immediate steps to confront the “humanitarian disaster” in Iraq.

Obama scheduled his speech a day after war commander General David Petraeus and US ambassador to Baghdad Ryan Crocker wrapped up testimony to Congress.

So, not only does Obama want to be President of the United States, but it seems he wants to be the leader of Iraq as well.

He needs to learn to listen to someone other than his own voice if he is to achieve the presidency. His lack of experience is showing worse than John Edwards’.

The Anchoress is asking for prayers for her in-laws.

Both are suffering from medical problems, but her father-in-law has been taken to the hospital for emergency surgery. This is, naturally, difficult on his wife and the entire family.

Please pray for God’s Will to be done and, if it is His Will, to heal the father-in-law. Pray that the surgeon’s hands will be guided by those of God Himself as the surgeon operates on this man.

Thank you.

After having said, prior to the August Congressional recess, that the House would vote on a criminal contempt resolution against Harriet Miers and Joshua Bolton the Democratic leadership has come back and said “Not yet.”

Maybe while on recess they realized the hullaballoo about the U.S. Attorneys firings was much ado about nothing, which it is.

This doesn’t mean everyone is happy and singing Kumbaya around the Democratic caucus campground.

The decision delays any constitutional showdown, at least for the moment, between Congress and President Bush over the extent of executive privilege and the president’s ability to fend off congressional investigations.

But the slowdown, approved by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and her top lieutenants, is also stirring objections among Democrats.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) said he is uncomfortable with the delay and worries the House will be seen as toothless unless it moves quickly to hold top officials in contempt for failing to provide documents and testimony in congressional probes.

The House Judiciary Committee approved contempt citations against Bolten and Miers on July 25, after the two failed to comply with subpoenas as part of the committee’s investigation into the sacking of nine U.S. attorneys.

With the dismal record of the current Congress someone needs to inform Mr. Conyers it’s a bit late to worry about being called “toothless”. No significant legislation has been passed and the changes promised have not occurred.

This Congress has only been interested in two things since it took over in January: forcing the president to bring home the troops before the mission is completed, and investigating scandals that don’t exist.

Just before Congress changed hands Congressman Henry Waxman of California said the hardest part of his job would be to decide what to investigate first.

That statement shows exactly where the Democrats’ agenda is, and even that’s a failed agenda.

Tuesday the Speaker issued a press release actually acknowledging her hands are tied.

“The American people long ago rejected the President’s plan to stay in Iraq, which is why they voted for a New Direction in 2006. Yet, with his veto pen and the 60-vote hurdle in the Senate, the President is preventing the redeployment of our troops, the rebuilding of our military, and the refocusing of our nation’s efforts on fighting terrorism.”

How convenient to be concerned about our troops in the sense they want to rebuild the military when we’ve never seen anyone in Democratic leadership positions in the past fifty years who has wanted to rebuild our military.

The Democrats’ idea of fighting terrorism is to conduct a few bombing runs and blow up an aspirin factory and then claim they did everything possible to get rid of the terrorists.

Meanwhile, the terrorists attack us on our own soil, killing nearly 3,000 Americans and they’re worried about the “abuse” we meted out when we “tortured” people at Abu Ghraib.

The Speaker of the House and other Democrats, including Dennis Kucinich, are more worried about appeasing the terror-sponsoring regime of Assad in Syria than in getting the terrorists who still want to kill us or convert us whether or not we leave Iraq immediately.

Mary Winkler, the woman who killed her preacher husband, is now asking the court to grant her custody or, at least, more frequent visits to her three daughters.

A petition filed in Carroll County Chancery Court argues that Mary Winkler’s continued separation from the girls — ages 2, 8 and 10 — is “unconscionable and detrimental” to the children.

Carroll County Chancellor Ron Harmon set a hearing for next week on her motion.

Her former in-laws, Dan and Diane Winkler, who have had custody of the girls since their mother’s arrest, are seeking to terminate her parental rights and adopt the girls.

I believe what Mary Winkler said drove her to shoot her husband. I also believe she should be allowed to raise her daughters as she is their mother and is not a risk to anyone now.

Her father in law is a preacher or former preacher, and it seems maybe he and his wife need to practice a little Christian forgiveness. Yes, it would be hard to do, but that’s the instruction given by the Lord they claim to serve.

It has to be difficult to realize your child was a mean husband and father and that his actions finally put his wife over the edge when he tried to quiet his baby by putting his hand over her mouth.

It has to be difficult to realize you have raised a son who likes kinky sex and forced his wife to perform those acts or he would throw a tantrum and a lamp or two, but realizing and accepting it are what they need to do.