Career Congressman Paul Kanjorski (22-year incumbent) from Pennsylvania:

I’ll tell you my impression. We really in this last election, when I say we…the Democrats, I think pushed it as far as we can to the end of the fleet, didn’t say it, but we implied it. That if we won the Congressional elections, we could stop the war. Now anybody was a good student of Government would know that wasn’t true. But you know, the temptation to want to win back the Congress, we sort of stretched the facts…and people ate it up.

Wizbang has more, including the video. But the bottom line is a Democrat admitted that the official strategy of the Democrat party was to lie to the American voters in order to win congress so they could push their own agenda.

Un-freaking-believable.

Jay Grodner, the Chicago lawyer who keyed a Marine’s car in anger because the car had military plates and a Marine insignia, finally got his day in court last week.

Grodner pleaded guilty in a Chicago courtroom packed with former Marines. Some had Marine pins on their coats, or baseball jackets with the Marine insignia. They didn’t yellor call him names. They came to support Marine Sgt. Michael McNulty, whose car Grodner defaced in December, but who couldn’t attend because he’s preparing for his second tour in Iraq.

Journalist John Kass does an excellent job of covering this story. Read it all.

The Center for Consumer Freedom is allowing you to vote for the winner of the 2007 Nanny Awards. There are some real bastards this year, but my favorite is from the left wing Humane Society:

Wayne Pacelle, “If You Can’t Beat Them, Kill Them” Award – It was a pretty rough year for the president of the $152 million Humane Society of the United States. In May, Pacelle got battered during a Congressional hearing for his claims about mad cow disease. In the wake of the Michael Vick dog fighting scandal, HSUS promised to care for the disgraced NFL star’s pit bulls. When it was later revealed that HSUS was doing nothing of the sort, Pacelle publicly recommended that government officials kill the dogs.

Go vote for your favorite.

Last May, according to The Smoking Gun website, U.S. troops unearthed an even more grisly site, an al Qaeda torture chamber in Baghdad itself. When they entered, the soldiers found an Iraqi man suspended from the ceiling by chains. The room contained torture implements including hammers, whips, meat cleavers and wire cutters as well as a crude torture manual, displaying various methods of inflicting unbearable pain. These included using a blowtorch on the skin, gouging out eyes, using an electric drill to cut through a hand, and many more.

It’s useful to be reminded of what real torture looks like when the Democrats in Washington are working themselves into a characteristic froth about the CIA and the destroyed interrogation tapes. Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., declared that for "the past six years, the Bush administration has run roughshod over our ideals and the rule of law." It reminded him of nothing so much as the "18-and-a-half-minute gap on the tapes of Richard Nixon." Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., smells "obstruction of justice."

So now we will have an inquiry into whether the CIA has violated the law by destroying tapes it was under no obligation to make in the first place; concerning an interrogation technique that at the very worst (according to most reliable reports) involved making three notorious terrorists think, for a few seconds, that they were drowning.

Mona Charen, in Torture and the Democrats.

According to a state-by-state, district-by-district comparison of wealth concentrations based on IRS income data:

• More than half of the wealthiest households are concentrated in the 18 states where Democrats hold both Senate seats
• Democrats represent about 58 percent of the wealthiest one-third of the 435 congressional districts
• A slight majority of the 167 House districts where the median annual income was higher than the national median of $48,201 are represented by Democrats
• "The vast majority of unabashed conservative House members hail from profoundly middle-class districts."

I’ve long said that Democrats are the party of extremes: the super rich and the poor. Now, it seems, they are expanding their hold on the upper class. It’s the working man in the middle that gets screwed by the Democrats.

WaPo’s Robert Novak tells us that next year’s tax refunds will go out late. At issue is the alternative minimum tax (AMT) which could affect 23 million people.

The underlying reason is a 38-year-old congressional tax blunder that has never been corrected. In 1969, Congress passed the alternative minimum tax (AMT) to collect from 155 tax-avoiding millionaires. But because the scheme was not indexed for inflation, this year alone it would hit 23 million extra people with higher taxes. The AMT will be "patched" to provide relief, as it has been in every Congress, but not in time this year. Refunds totaling more than $75 billion will arrive many weeks late not only for taxpayers earning $100,000 to $200,000 who are unintentionally affected by the AMT but also for lower-income persons because the IRS refund procedure will be disrupted by the delay.

But the real reason that tax refunds will be late is Charles Rangel (D-NY), chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. Rangel swore that instead of patching the AMT, the "mother of all tax reforms" would be passed which would eliminate the AMT and implement a massive tax on the "rich", thus taking a trillion dollars over the next ten years from working, successful people and giving it to those who, uh, aren’t.

Although Rangel’s tax bill was trimmed down even before it got out of the House (where it passed on a party line vote), everyone knew that it had no chance of gaining the necessary supermajority of 60 votes in the Senate to pass. But expecting a Democrat to abandon a foolish path without all the fluff and fanfare of a peacock spreading his tail to garner attention is naive and a little downright foolish.

Grave philosophical differences between Republicans and Democrats prevented passage. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell proposed permitting Republicans to offer four floor amendments to the bill. Reid did not want to subject his Democrats to voting against tax cuts, including repeal of the estate tax. So the two party leaders mutually refused to grant the unanimous consent needed for the Senate to take up the bill, and the senators left Washington with another piece of work undone.

The AMT patch will, Novak tells us, almost certainly pass in December. The IRS has already said that it will take 10 weeks to make the necessary adjustments to computer programs once the details of the patch are known.

And that is the reason your tax refund will be late next year. When it is, feel free to write Congressman Rangel thank him, or maybe to ask for a personal loan to cover your commitments until the government can meet its commitment to you. But then again, by then you probably won’t remember who is responsible. After all, the NY Times and its MSM cohorts will have no doubt already spent weeks telling you that it is all Bush’s fault.

190 federal nominations (including 23 judges, secretaries of agriculture and veterans affairs, three members of the Federal Reserve, two members of the Council of Economic Advisers and the surgeon general) are sidelined because Senate Democrats won’t deal with them. In the past, Bush would take advantage of Senate absences to make recess appointments (for instance, his appointment of John Bolton as ambassador to the UN).

Recess appointments are not new — they are provided for in the constitution whenever both houses are in recess (Article II Section 2) and "intrasession" recess (like holiday breaks) appointments have been upheld by federal courts — although a firm number of days has not been established nor has the Supreme Court ever addressed the issue.

President Washington used the recess clause to appoint South Carolina judge John Rutledge as the second Chief Justice of the United States (replacing John Jay) during a congressional recess in 1795. More recently, President Kennedy appointed Thurgood Marshall (the first African-American to serve on the Supreme Court) during a recess because he feared opposition from Southern senators. President Clinton made 140 recess appointments, including making James Hormel the ambassador to Luxembourg, the nation’s first openly gay ambassador.

But Democrats don’t want Bush to take advantage of a Senate recess to make such appointments, so they are implementing a new tactic: pro forma sessions (meaning that although there won’t be an official recess, there also won’t be any formal proceedings):

Sen. Jim Webb (D) of Virginia, the designated presiding officer, called the [otherwise empty] chamber to order. "Under the previous order, the Senate stands in recess until Friday," he said. He banged the gavel, and then he left. It took 22 seconds.

A single Senator, calling an empty chamber into session. Ah, Democrats. Faux politicians holding faux sessions.

This is the first time in history that pro forma sessions have been used to stop recess appointments. In other words, Democrats are implementing a new weapon in their war of obstructionism.

Said Senator Webb:

I’d much rather be doing this than allow the president to skirt the confirmation process in the Senate. This is an exercise in protecting the Constitution and our constitutional process.

Hmmm. As I recall, the constitution calls for the Senate to give "advice and consent", not stonewall for months on end. What constitution does Webb think he’s protecting?

Ohio representative Matthew Barrett (D – Dist. 58) was giving a lecture to seniors at Norwalk High School about how a bill become law. When he inserted a memory stick into the computer he expected to see the presentation he had downloaded. Instead, the image of a topless woman was projected onto the screen. Hearing "snickers", he immediately pulled the memory stick out.

Later examination of the memory stick by the principal and "technology staff" (the nerd squad?) revealed that it contained a directory of nude images (in Ohio, that would be "porn").

Barrett swears he doesn’t know where the directory of images came from and that he received the memory stick from a legislative liaison from the state Library of Ohio about three weeks earlier. So did Barrett put the images on there or is the source the state library? Either way …

Still, I can’t believe Barrett didn’t know what was on a stick he was using. He can’t be an idiot. This is a man with a BS in Aeronautical Studies and a law degree. He even has a blog. Of course, there are exactly zero entries on it, so maybe he is a moron — or perhaps just a technophobe. Moron or technophobe, either way I wouldn’t want him to be representing me.

But perhaps he was really fishing for future votes. "Dude, you gotta vote for that Barrett guy. Back when I was in high school he spoke to my class and showed us porn. For real!"

The Investor’s Business Daily throws a little light on the secretive organizations that George Soros funds:

That’s right, (James "NASA whistleblower") Hansen was packaged for the media by Soros’ flagship "philanthropy," by as much as $720,000, most likely under the OSI’s "politicization of science" program.

That may have meant that Hansen had media flacks help him get on the evening news to push his agenda and lawyers pressuring officials to let him spout his supposedly "censored" spiel for weeks in the name of advancing the global warming agenda. . . .

The IBD goes on to list other projects financed by Soros: the "spontaneous uprising of 2 million angry Mexican-flag waving illegal immigrants demanding U.S. citizenship in Los Angeles" and financial backing for the lawyers that got the Supreme Court to abolish special military commissions for terrorists at Guantanamo. There’s more:

OSI also gave cash to other radicals who pressured the Transportation Security Administration to scrap a program called "Secure Flight," which matched flight passenger lists with terrorist names. It gave more cash to other left-wing lawyers who persuaded a Texas judge to block cell phone tracking of terrorists.

They trumpeted this as a victory for civil liberties. Feel safer?

I don’t.

via Lucianne.com

Professional writer and admitted lefty, Dr. John Barnes, took a look at the writings of the New Republic pseudonymous “Scott Thomas”. His expertise leads him to conclude:

Based on a mix of semiotic analysis and my seat of the pants experience as a frequent reader of professional and near-professional writing by new writers, my guess is this: I think “Scott Thomas” is actually an MFA writing student, or a recent graduate of such a program, probably with some military experience – he may be serving in some non-combat specialty in Iraq – probably from one of the elite MFA programs, the twenty or so from which college creative writing faculty and small-press staff come disproportionately.  I also think I know how his piece came to be published in New Republic, in outline if not in detail, and that story will also be somewhat instructive and revealing.

The entire article is a little long but surprisingly interesting as Barnes deconstructs the writing style. Then he takes a look at the editor that chose to publish the unknown author. Dr. Barnes is a straight shooter.

HT to non-blogging Advised by Wolves.