Blog Post: Grande Style

This hiatus is killing me. I picked the worst week ever to take it, right when Petraeus was giving his report, and I’ve bookmarked a ton of things that could have been potentially great stories. Ah well, that’s why I have a blog. Let’s go story by story through the things I bookmarked.

Clinton giving back $850,000 of Hsu Money
Remember that scam artist democrat fundraiser Norman Hsu I talked about on the last episode. Well more and more evidence was pilled on about how he was bundling money and evading the police, so Hillary Clinton, being the clean campaign runner she is, gave most of what he’d donated to her, back.

“In light of recent events and allegations that Mr. Norman Hsu engaged in an illegal investment scheme, we have decided out of an abundance of caution to return the money he raised for our campaign,” Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson said in a statement Monday night. “An estimated 260 donors this week will receive refunds totaling approximately $850,000 from the campaign.”

Come on. You’re telling me the Clinton camp didn’t know about Norman Hsu, didn’t see the obvious pattern of donations and the poor people they came from. There’s no way. Campaigns run such a tight ship with these kinds of things, so it doesn’t bite them in the butt down the road.

Clinton knew about Hsu, she knew about the bundling, and she knew he had skipped out on jail. And you can bet that the Clinton campaign did everything in their power, and that’s a large power, to keep this under wraps. And then once the media got a hold of it they just plead ignorance and went on their way. They’re safe because they had a fall back, give it all back. They could afford it.

Then of course the Clintons had to think of something, and quick. That’s something Bill was always able to do, mostly because he was lying through his teeth all of the time. The campaign says a faulty background check was to blame for the donations.

Please. A presidential or senate campaign does not rely solely on background checks to determine the validity of a donation. I could have gone to the FEC website and noticed a weird pattern.

But it doesn’t even have to be that hard. The Washington Post reports this…

Irvine, Calif., businessman Jack Cassidy told the FBI that he sent at least three e-mails to a Clinton campaign official on the West Coast this summer, specifically raising concerns that Hsu was engaged in a risky investment scheme and was using Hillary Clinton’s name “in vain” to solicit people for his business proposition, according to a person directly familiar with the matter.

You’d think that if a businessman is emailing you, telling you that this guy is scum and is doing something fishy, you might look into it more. But hey, we can’t bag on the Clinton’s because they run “a respectable campaign.”

Ha, Moving on…

According to Keith Olbermann Fox News is worse than Al Qaeda
The ignorance of the liberals are evident, via Keith Olbermann. Probably the dumbest and most ill informed person on television today, Olbermann said in Playboy Magazine, what a top notch journalist he is, that Al Qaeda is not as bad as Fox News.

Al Qaeda really hurt us, but not as much as Rupert Murdoch has hurt us, particularly in the case of Fox News. Fox News is worse than Al Qaeda — worse for our society. It’s as dangerous as the Ku Klux Klan ever was.

Why? Because they deviate from the liberal trite that’s spewed on every other news network. Because they might have a slight bias towards “the other guy.” Because they kick your ass in the ratings every night.

Olbermann’s real vendetta against Fox News stems from his belief that they “lie.” Much like any other news outlet. I’m not going to deny the fact that Fox News has spun stories in a certain way in the past, but the rest of the media does it. The difference is the only conservative based news agencies out there anymore, are run by Murdoch. That isn’t to say that spinning news is right or justified for anybody because everyone does it, it just shows that Olbermann is issuing a double standard. I mean this is the guy who reported, seriously, on a news story from a website that publishes fake news.

And mind you, I could be reading this wrong. This is written, Olbermann is a sarcastic guy, and I don’t want to take his comments out of context. But being a “journalist” you should know that anything you say in text, shouldn’t be assumed to be read in any other way than how it’s written, if that makes sense. Basically what I’m saying is if you mean for something to be sarcastic, I’d lay it on thick. A lot of people don’t pick up on sarcasm and will read literally into your writing.

But then again this could just be an open window into the thought process of the far left. I would hope that not many of them believe this is true, but there are some out there that, sadly, hold that thought.

And a quick end note on this story, the whole “Worst Person in the World” thing…needs to go. When I was first starting out in internet media I always tried to come up with catchy phrases and names that I thought sounded good, but were lame. “Worst Person in the World” is one of those. Olbermann might chuckle at it, but the rest of us are thinking, “This guy is making a total ass of himself”

Reporter who mocked Bush for falling off segway, falls off himself
I love this story. Piers Morgan, a British writer and judge on America’s Got Talent, mocked President Bush in 2003 for falling off a segway. He said…

“You would have to be an idiot to fall off, wouldn’t you Mr. President…if anyone can make a pig’s ear of riding a sophisticated, self-balancing machine like this, Dubya can.”

Well this story just exemplifies ‘what goes around comes around.’ Four years after those comments, Morgan fell off a segway himself. What’s worse? He broke three ribs in the act.

Ahh, justice.

Don’t get me wrong, I feel for the guy, I felt for the President when it happened to him. But come on, anybody should laugh at this. It just makes it better that he was going a whopping 12 miles per hour.

Woohoo, crusin’

But there is humility within Morgan. He wrote in Live Magainze…

“Since only he and I appear to have ever fallen off one,” he said, “I think the makers of the Segway can probably still justifiably claim the machines are ‘idiot-proof.’”

Ahh, remorse.

There is an underlying theme in all of this. Don’t be an asshole and make fun of people when something happens to them. Of course now you know I’m going to call someone out on something and then make the same fault myself. That’s life.

Chinese Military Hacked into the Pentagon
So this is just a lovely headline to read. It turns out the Chinese Military executed the most successful cyber attack on the US defense deparment. The attack took place in June, and is quite disturbing. I guess China is really after us, with the lead in our toys and all.

The article goes on to point out that this might not be the first time the Chinese have snooped on other countries…

Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, raised reports of Chinese infiltration of German government computers with Wen Jiabao, China’s premier, in a visit to Beijing, after which the Chinese foreign ministry said the government opposed and forbade “any criminal acts undermining computer systems, including hacking”.

Luckily the US said nothing that was hacked into was classified or important in any nature. The thing that disturbs me is that a government would, a.) do this, and b.) do it successfully. This just opens the gates to someone who really doesn’t like us (i.e. Al Qaeda) to launch a cyber attack on our country. And I’m not saying that’s going to happen or will happen, all I’m saying is it’s scary to think about.

And the last thing we need right now is to get in a tussle with China. They control too much of our products. This whole lead scare has hurt sales, plain and simple. So long as we let China continue to cheat us on importing and exporting, we’re screwed.

And finally…

Giuliani says Clinton was spewing ‘political venom’ on the War
I love this story for one reason and one reason only. The way Giuliani said it. I love politicians that speak to the American people like they would speak to their next door neighbors. My favorite Bush quote on the war? “We’re kicking their ass.”

Love it.

Anyway, so Giuliani, being the fiery New Yorker that he is, said that during the Petraeus hearings Clinton was spewing “political vemon.” He went on to say…

“I don’t know what she’s trying to say when she’s accusing a general of the ‘willing suspension of disbelief”

You also have to understand the context in which this was used. She said that some of what he had said and his slides, were causing “willing suspension of disbelief.” This coming from the person who approved him for the job.

The thing that bugs me, is not that she has no proof for the accusation, but rather that she’s just calling him a liar. And only because he didn’t say what she wanted him to say. The democrats are Americans, as much as they don’t act like Americans, so naturally they should be trilled the surge is working. They should be thrilled violence is down. But rather they’re mad that it is. They call into skepticism the slides that he showed with military stats, proving the violence was down. When they used the same source, the military, not too long ago to prove that violence was up.

Then we’ve got Harry Reid who called Petraeus a “great man” when he was approved for the job. And now Reid’s talking about his past of untruthfulness. I mean come on. The democrats just can’t be happy that we might be successful. They won’t settle for anything but failure.

And if Clinton needs any proof that the surge is working she should talk to Carl Levin (D-MI), who said himself the surge was working when he came back from Iraq. I commend Levin for being one of the few democrats to say that. But then again, Harry Reid hinted at it a couple of weeks ago.

I’ll end with the rest of what Giuliani said…

“I really do think to accuse a general of the ‘willing suspension of disbelief,’ particular in the atmosphere that Moveon.org has created with these terrible attacks, I don’t know, I mean I think that’s not the way in a responsible way to go about , you know, forging the foreign policy of the United States and the military policy of the United States,” said Giuliani. “I think this name calling, you know, saying to people, ‘willing suspension of disbelief,’ and then saying the horrible thing they said about betrayal — that is the last thing we need right now.”

So that does it for my “Grande” post. Hope you enjoyed it. Remember The Current podcast comes back on September 21. The following Sunday, September 23, you’ll hear our first episode of “Politics 101.” We’ll take the top two stories of the week and explain them to you bipartisan. Giving you what both sides are saying so you can make a valid choice as to what you believe.

Also on our next episode of “The Current” we’re going to start our “The Presidents” series. Every week we’ll take about 10 minutes and outline one of the presidents. Making it a rather large 43 part series, that will lead up to the 2008 presidential election.

Our new website should be up sometime this weekend or early next week. That includes our new online store, where you can buy “The Current” t-shirts, bags, and others.

–jb

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