And here we have the New York Attorney General, Eliot Spitzer, a man so full of ambition to build the resume he feels he needs to further his political career that he executes the duties of his position using a  jungle rules approach, attacking target companies through what amounts to browbeating them into “out of court” settlements, because he knows he wouldn’t win any of his dubious, weakly conceived cases against them before a jury.

An Op Ed in WSJ Opinion Journal’s Review & Outlook(Friday, 10 June), titled The Siphol Verdict   A jury instructs Eliot Spitzer on the rule of law, discusses a case in which Spitzer went after one Theodore C. Siphol for “late trading”, as the defendant had been helping Canary Capital trade mutual funds after 4:00 P.M., when the market closed for the day. The problem the Spitz encountered was that there is no law on the books that says “late trading” is illegal, only that trading after the NAV(net asset value) of a mutual fund is computed for the day is illegal, and that happens about an hour and a half after the close of trading of a mutual fund for that day.

Mr. Siphol is the exception to the usual Spitzer rule of using strong-arm tactics to coerce settlements out of business. The Attorney General has become famous for assailing a business practice that is either controversial or legally ambiguous, and then using leaks via the media and the threat of indictment or the destruction of an entire company to force his targets to surrender.

In the case of mutual fund “late trading,” that tactic worked with Bank of America and Canary Capital, the hedge fund whose trades Mr. Siphol had helped execute. But when Mr. Siphol, a mid-level functionary, refused a plea offer that included jail time, the Attorney General came down on him like J. Edgar Hoover on John Dillinger, with multiple counts and potential jail time of up to 30 years.

This led Mr. Spitzer into the terra incognita of a jury trial, where he’d have to prove that “late trading” was illegal….

Eliot, Eliot, Eliot….

What’s wrong with being a man of honor? If you want to feather your cap so badly, why not find some legitimate criminals to pursue rather than simple targets of opportunity?

I know, I know, you really don’t care all that much about your duty to those who elected you AG, it’s all about finding vulnerable shortcuts to glory and thereby(hopefully, to you) a platform from which to launch a campaign for governor. Did you serve in Vietnam? If so, be sure to include that in as many sentences as you can in your campaign speeches, it just might work this time. The last guy that tried it  nearly succeeded, but unfortunately(for him, not for the nation) many of those who knew him in Southeast Asia came out of the woodwork with accounts of his service that weren’t quite as heroic as his own version. Can you say “180 degrees?” 

I try so hard not to sound like an extremely right wing kind of guy, I really do, but sometimes it can’t be helped, because I am an American and I’m proud of my government and my country and my President. This, I think, is what causes me to digress. I promise to try not to do that.

Still….

But seriously, before you drag your next would-be victim before a jury, you should take a year off from work and study under John Edwards. He’ll teach you how to manipulate a jury to the point that they’d convict an armless, legless, blind, four year old deaf mute of strangulation to death of the Heavyweight Champion of the World. 

There I go again, dammit!    

Read the editorial.

In Jewish World Review today, Linda Chavez has a column on  the Detention Center at Guantanamo Bay that sums up, completely, totally, eloquently and thoroughly the whole story in a way that even the stooopidest liberal could not refute her without looking even more stooopid. 

Gitmo is a necessary evil

Senator Joe Biden, D-Del., thinks that the United States detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, “has become the greatest propaganda tool that exists for recruiting of terrorists around the world.”

Sure, Joe. Bubba Clinton’s policy of turning the other cheek no fewer than half a dozen times when terrorists attacked us during his administration worked a lot better, right? We should show these extremists that we feel their pain, reach out to them in the spirit of compassion and friendship, nurture them with tender loving care and then, because we’ve demonstrated our peaceful goodwill, those gentle spirits will throw away their explosives and smallarms and leave us alone as they go on to pursue productive, meaningful lives. Right.

Biden told ABC’s “This Week” that “we should end up shutting it down, moving those prisoners. Those that we have reason to keep, keep. And those that we don’t, let go.” Biden wants Congress to appoint a commission to study Guantanamo, but the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee seems to have no clue what the practical consequences of his suggestion would be.     

It’s not that he doesn’t have a clue, it’s that he doesn’t want one. Like most of the flaming leftists the Democratic Party has allowed to hijack it, he apparently believes that the consequences of something he sets in motion are just some picayune detail of little or no consequence, the main thing is to score some imagined political point in the LWOB(Liberals’ War On Bush). This has reached the point of ridiculousness, one of our primary political parties slavering with so much anger and hate towards our president that they’re willing to endanger the rest of us, get American troops and civilians killed, just to sling some mud on Mr. Bush and hope at least part of it sticks.

Can anyone say, treason?

Since January 2002, when the United States began detaining at Guantanamo Bay enemy combatants captured in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other fronts in the war on terror, critics have complained of human rights abuses. Last month the secretary general of Amnesty International compared Guantanamo to the Soviet gulags, a charge that can only be described as obscene. From 1929 to 1953, 18 million people were imprisoned in the Soviet slave labor camps. The gulags’ horrors have been documented by their most celebrated inmate, Nobel Prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and most recently by JWR columnist Anne Applebaum in her Pulitzer Prize winning book, “Gulag: A History.” Men, women, children guilty of nothing were sent to camps in Siberia where they wereworked often literally to death. Applebaum writes that “[p]risoners were also locked in punishment cells until they died of cold and starvation, left untreated in unheated hospitals, or simply shot at will for ‘attempted escape.”’ 

The men imprisoned at Guantanamo are members of an international terrorist organization that has killed thousands of innocent civilians. Most were captured while fighting U.S. and coalition troops. They have provided valuable intelligence about al Qaeda, including its recruitment efforts in Europe, its training methods, especially its use of suicide bombers, and its exploitation of charity fronts to raise money for its efforts. More than 200 men have been released from Guantanamo, some of whom have rejoined terrorist networks and are trying to kill Americans again.

Read the rest.

Jewish World Review today features an Op Ed by Sam Schulman that seems to me to be dead on, regarding the failure to pass of the EU constitution and what it means to Israel, Let’s congratulate the national peoples of Europe for their courage.

Don’t be disturbed by the stories from France and the Netherlands that a motley coalition of communists and neo-nazis have defeated the EU constitutional referenda. The restoration of the principle of self-government to the various European nations is the best news for the Jews to come out of Europe since  the acquittal of Dreyfus.

The fact is that the European “superstate” was founded on one idea: nationalities cannot be trusted with a state of their own. A majority of Frenchmen or Dutchmen must not be permitted to decide on their own economic and foreign policy— lest — well, lest the heavens fall. Under the new European constitution, a panel of unelected experts would take all decision-making power away from individual national groups. The Dutch, the Germans, the French, the Czechs would surrender their ability to govern themselves in the interest of something higher. What, exactly, that higher value might be was never explained— but if one opposed it, one was a “xenophobe” or a reactionary.

So the national peoples of Europe were about to surrender their states. Needless to say, the notion that, of all people, the Jews should be allowed alone to have a state in which they could govern themselves and choose their own leaders under the rule of law was an outrage to the “European Idea.” To the extent that the European Union continued its march against national self-determination, Israel’s legitimacy would be eroded.   

I agree. The Weasel States, who carry the most weight in the EU, pretty much call the shots at the U.N., and that unctuous, corrupt, anti-America, anti-Israel bureaucracy has, for as long as I can remember, opposed Israel at every turn, siding with the Palestinians and whatever other Arab countries have had issues with Israel.

Read the rest. 

Although I am pretty right wing by most people’s standards, there are a few issues upon which my views differ from those of many of my fellow conservatives, and in this instance I think the Supreme Court has given its blessing to the guv’mint to interfere in affairs that should be left to the discretion of individual states.

Court Rules Against Pot for Sick People

Washington (AP) - Federal authorities may prosecute sick people whose doctors prescribe marijuana to ease pain, the Supreme Court ruled Monday, concluding that state laws don’t protect users from a federal ban on the drug.

The decision is a stinging defeat for marijuana advocates who had successfully pushed 10 states to allow the drug’s use to treat various illnesses.

Justice John Paul Stevens, writing the 6-3 decision, said that Congress could change the law to allow medical use of marijuana.

In a dissent, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said that states should be allowed to set their own rules.

Interestingly enough, O’Connor was joined in her dissent by Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justice Clarence Thomas. Liberals take note: Medical marijuana is a liberal issue and there’s Clarence Thomas, the accomplished black man whom you demean, for his conservatism, as a traitor to his “people”, coming down on your side of the equation. Try and find some spin to put on that!

I am totally on the dissenters’ side in this.

Living in San Francisco and socializing with a lot of people here, I’ve gotten to know quite a few people who have medical marijuana prescriptions. These are people with severely painful, permanent internal disorders, AIDS and other ailments whose agonies are either relieved or minimized by smoking marijuana. It really, truly helps them and while it is profoundly less expensive than some of the pharmaceuticals they would otherwise have to take, many at the taxpayer’s expense, it also works better than many of those prescription drugs and doesn’t feature the harsh side effects that are associated with most pharmaceuticals.

I truly cannot understand why the folks on my side of the aisle are continuing to be so damned boneheaded about this.  

There is no interstate trafficking in California’s medical marijuana program, all the legal herb sold here is grown in California and it is illegal to transport it out of the state for commercial purposes. People can also grow plants at home for their personal medical use, and a great many do because it’s cheaper than buying by weight. Seeds and young marijuana plants are sold at many of the “weed shops”(my own term).

In short, as long as a state keeps its legal sweet leaf (think Black Sabbath here, with Ozzie on their album Master Of Reality) industry entirely within its borders, the federal government should allow that state to make its own determinations regarding marijuana laws and their enforcement.

That would leave a whole lot more ATF assets free to go after the heroin, crystal & crack cocaine, oxycontin and methamphetamine traffickers who constitute the real threats by purveying addictive products that destroy families, ruin lives and create violent street crime.

In my honest opinion, the government is wasting millions of dollars in man hours(ooops! This is San Francisco, so it’s person hours) and logistics fighting the sale, use and possession of a product that will inevitably be decriminalized, at the very least, within the next few years as members of more recent generations replace the older politicians in the Senate. 

“The states’ core police powers have always included authority to define criminal law and to protect the health, safety, and welfare of their citizens,” said O’Connor…. 

Right on!

On June 1st I posted about Amnesty International’s website posting about GITMO and other U.S. military detention centers where they keep captured terrorists and their associates.

Apparently, they were merely indulging in the by the book liberal strategy of hurling accusations in the general direction of G.W. Bush, accuracy not even a factor in their considerations, just another element of the nonstop leftist onslaught of idiocy in the liberals’ War On Bush.

According to an article in today’s Washington Times online by James G. Lakely, Amnesty International admits that they were talking from their touchas.

The head of Amnesty International’s American branch yesterday acknowledged that he “doesn’t know for sure” what is going on at Guantanamo Bay prison, although Amnesty International’s secretary-general has called the terrorist prison run at a U.S. military base in Cuba a “gulag.”

However, William F. Schulz defended the description made last week by Irene Khan, saying on “Fox News Sunday” yesterday that America’s “archipelago of prisons throughout the world” are “similar in character, if not in size” to the Soviet gulags, where millions of political prisoners were killed.

“I don’t believe [the charges] are irresponsible,” said Mr. Schulz, the executive director of Amnesty International U.S.A. “I’ve told you the ways in which I think that [there are] analogies between the Soviet prison system and the United States.”

Pressed to cite concrete evidence that Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales are the “architects” of “systematic torture” at the prison, Mr. Schulz could produce none.

“We don’t know for sure what all is happening at Guantanamo and our whole point is that the United States ought to allow independent human rights organizations to investigate,” Mr. Schulz said, adding that Amnesty International was careful to use the word “alleged” when accusing high level Bush administration officials.    

So, “we don’t know for sure what all is happening at Guantanamo,” but we’ll hurl accusations anyway since even though we may be misleading the public, we’ll maybe plant a few anti-Bush seeds in so doing and since the left has been working hard to establish ourselves as noncredible anyway, what could it hurt? We can always stumble foolishly through the heat we’ll have to take when the truth comes out, God knows we’re used to making asses out of ourselves in front of America and the world as it is, so here goes….

Read the entire article.

In September, I am moving from San Francisco to New York, from which I hail.

The thing I will miss most about today’s California is….

THIS!

I’m sure finding a lot of stuff to comment about from the “all the left that fits to print” newspaper these days. In todays New York Times there’s an article by Andrea Elliott entitled You Can’t Talk to an F.B.I. Agent that Way, or Can You?

Dressed in a navy suit and red tie, his hair parted neatly on the side, Special Agent Charles E. Frahm sat with practiced calm as Muslims rose, one after another, to hurl raw complaints at him. Mr. Frahm, who heads the counterterrorism division of the F.B.I. in New York, was at a banquet hall in the Midwood section of Brooklyn on Thursday night to listen, he had told hundreds of residents gathered there.

And they responded. They were tired of being held for hours at airports when their names resembled those of suspected terrorists, they said. They were tired of seeing Muslims arrested on immigration charges. They were tired of having their mosques watched, their businesses scrutinized.

….Since Mr. Frahm took over New York’s counterterrorism division in July 2004, he has impressed some skeptical Muslim leaders with his eagerness to make public appearances. “I think it helps the community to air their feelings,” he said during a break on Thursday night. “”This provides folks a forum for pent-up frustration. The emotion is real.”

….”I hear you, and I will continue to hear you,” he said. “I can also say we make no apologies for actions we must take to protect Americans.” 

And that last quote sums things up pretty well. “…. we make no apologies for actions we must take to protect Americans.”

What do these people expect? The overwhelming majority of today’s terrorists look just like them, have names like theirs and to go further, several mosques and places of business have been caught out as places for storing weapons and explosives, harboring wanted terrorists, indoctrinating and training terrorists and also in the case of the mosques, many are places where “holy men” preach hate against Jews and Christians with the intention of inciting lethal violence against innocent people in the name of Islam.

So we’re supposed to assume that all of these people are clean until something blows up and a lot of people are killed or maimed? Is that it? 

I have a much better idea: Stop whining, and police your own damn community! Your inaction sends out a message of approval to these murderous fanatics, and coupled with the adulation they receive from Arab media and millions of fellow Muslims this accellerates terrorism. If a Muslim community, here or elsewhere does not openly oppose terrorists and actively help local and federal law enforcement in taking them down(that includes fingering relatives who are involved in terrorism) then as far as I’m concerned that community is proterror and undeserving of U.S. citizenship or even a green card.

Terrorism travels with Islam; Wherever the Religion of Peace goes, so does violence. It’s your baggage, Muslims, so you need to deal with it. Until you do, don’t bitch about your “rights.” My right to live is more important to me than your right not to be inconvenienced.

So, in the article.…

In today’s N.Y. Times, the paper known 99% of the time or thereabouts for butt munching Old Europe while extolling their superiority to the U.S. under a GOP administration, there is a column by David Brooks titled Fear and Rejection that expresses the opinion that American liberals are, once again, being proved wrong. How? By failing to perceive that their goals for the United States have already been tested over time in Western Europe and found to be seriously lacking in favorable results.

Read the column here.

“The Western European standard of living is about a third lower than the American standard of living, and it’s sliding. European output per capita is less than 46 of the 50 American states and about on par with Arkansas. There is little prospect of robust growth returning any time soon.”

“Once it was plausible to argue that the European quality of life made up for the economic underperformance, but those arguments look more and more strained, in part because demographic trends make even the current conditions unsustainable. Europe’s population is aging and shrinking. By 2040, the European median age will be around 50. Nearly a third of the population will be over 65. Public spending on retirees will have to grow by a third, sending Europe into a spiral of higher taxes and less growth.”

And the above is what the liberals want for the rest of us? Our so-called ”cultural elite”, with all their self proclaimed intellectual superiority, are as dumb as the proverbial box of rocks. Even confronted with the truth glaring out of the reality that is the example set by today’s Western Europe, they are determined to lead us down their Utopian trail to economic and cultural disaster.

The references made by the columnist to the Western European median age, by 2040, of 50 with one third of the population being 65, while not cited in the piece, are a result of a severe decrease in child births in the last couple of decades. Younger generations are having less babies, and less babies means less future taxpayers to support them when they retire, and it stands to reason that this, in turn, means that in order to take care of the old folks a few short decades from now, the thinned down working generation of that time will have to be taxed almost to starvation.

Do we really need to be there tomorrow, just so a few “cultural elite” jackasses can score some political victories today?   

Yesterday I received my copy of Herb Meyer’s DVD, The Siege Of Western Civilization, and I just finished watching it.

It’s a 42 minute monologue that very reasonably defines the entire conservative point of view, and I can’t imagine a liberal watching more than the first fifteen minutes, since as we know, liberals are almost exclusively closed minded to the point that they’ll rarely even socialize with anyone whose political views are different.

The intro begins thusly:

“We all want to live in a healthy environment. So when our environment is threatened, we need to know about it so we can take steps to make things better. But in the last few years, we have become so obsessed by our physical environment that we have ignored threats to our cultural environment. And the truth is, in the long run the health of our cultural environment is just as important to us as the health of our physical environment- maybe even more important…

Our cultural environment is Western Civilization. This is who we are. And today, Western Civilization is under siege……..”

Herb Meyer really does cover all the bases in the conservative argument.

You can order it here.

I have added Amnesty International to my site links and aptly described them as an international version of the ACLU, whose site I won’t link to here because it is probably the most miserably bigoted, hate filled and hypocritical organization in America.

While Amnesty International is another org along the same lines, their site keeps us up with some of the rhetoric these asshats are spreading to a vast global audience.

Ever since its inception, Amnesty International has put a great deal of effort into anti-U.S. propaganda. Basically, they have taken the side of our enemies at any given time, whenever an opportunity has arisen to do so.

Currently on their website is yet another of their attacks on Guantanamo Bay and “other” prisoner of war camps. Read The Article.

These people we have in detention are not there for shop lifting, though some of them are associated with others who steal airplanes, then crash them into busy office buildings, murdering thousands of innocent human beings they don’t even know. They are not prisoners because they committed DUI, uttered forged instruments nor perpetrated insider trading.

These people are terrorists, or they are the former thugs of a fallen, oppressive, murderous theocratic regime that supported and harbored those terrorists, a Muslim Ton Ton Macoutre. They are POWs in the Global War On Terror, which is an ongoing military conflict and as such different(military) rules apply. These prisoners’ crimes, other than by association, were not committed on United States soil, and they are not being held on sovereign U.S. soil. Hell, the GITMO bunch are in Cuba! Rest assured, therefore, that considering how prisoners of the same status would be treated in Fidel Castro’s captivity they are living in the lap of luxury.