Monthly Archives: November 2008

November 24, 2008 — Scott Johnson

Holy Land Foundation: Guilty, guilty, guilty

The jury returned with verdict against the Holy Land Foundation and its principals today in the retrial of the government’s case that ended the first time around in a mistrial. We have written frequently and at length about the case here. I also took a look at the case for NRO during the first trial in “Coming clean about CAIR.” Here is how I described the case in that column: »
November 24, 2008 — John Hinderaker

Change? Not Much

Barack Obama has now announced his economic team, and the consistent theme is continuity with the policies of the Bush administration. Tim Geithner will be the new Secretary of the Treasury. He is so well respected on Wall Street that the market jumped five percent in an hour when his nomination was announced. It’s come out since that Geithner, as head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, has already »
November 24, 2008 — John Hinderaker

Minnesota Senate Recount, Update V

A correspondent writes: Just returned [from Crystal]. We counted the last three precincts without incident. Then the City Clerk made the announcement that she had found some absentee ballots that had not been processed yet from another previously closed precinct, Ward 4 Precinct 2. Apparently Friday afternoon she was given the order by SOS [the Secretary of State] to release the names of voters who had their ballots rejected. While »
November 24, 2008 — Paul Mirengoff

The Clintonista fallacy

It seems to me that some conservatives are misconstruing the meaning of Barack Obama’s willingness to offer key posts to veterans of the Clinton administration. These conservatives apparently see the selection of Clintonistas as strong evidence that Obama was not serious about “change” and that his administration is unlikely to veer far left of center. It is true that the Clinton administration can, in many important ways, be viewed as »
November 24, 2008 — Scott Johnson

Remembering the Rich pardon

George Lardner, Jr. is the former Washington Post reporter who covered the story of the Clinton pardon of Marc Rich. He now works as an associate at the Center for the Study of the Presidency. In a New York Times op-ed column this past Saturday, Lardner drily recalled the facts leading to the pardon of Marc Rich and Eric Holder’s role in it. Lardner concludes: “[Holder] had the last word »
November 24, 2008 — Scott Johnson

From Mogadishu to Minneapolis

The Twin Cities is home to the largest population of Somali immigrants in the United States. In her latest Washington Times column, Diana West reports the discovery of immigration fraud involving the P-3 family designation in the current United States Refugee Admissions Program: Within the last week…the State Department confirmed that massive immigration fraud has been perpetrated overwhelmingly by Africans claimed as close kin (parent, spouse, minor child) by legal »
November 24, 2008 — Scott Johnson

Minnesota Senate Recount: A prediction

Our former law partner Norm Carpenter writes with a prediction concerning the Minnesota Senate recount: Here’s what will happen. The count will come down to rejected absentee ballots. These ballots will have been rejected in many cases on “procedural” grounds: no check in the box on why an absentee ballot was requested, no signature, etc. The person who submitted these ballots is known and can be contacted (we have already »
November 23, 2008 — Paul Mirengoff

Google this

Did you know that Secretary of State Rice held a “free-wheeling question and answer session” with employees of Google earlier this year? So reports Bart Gellman in his book on the Cheney vice presidency. It’s common knowledge that Google is a left-leaning outfit. Not surprisingly, then, Rice was called on to defend, among things, the administration’s terrorist detainee interrogation policy. According to Gellman, she did so in her characteristically mushy »
November 23, 2008 — Paul Mirengoff

Obama to propose “the works”

The Washington Post reports that Barack Obama is developing a plan that he hopes will “create or preserve” 2.5 million jobs over the next two years. The plan would consist of sprending billions of dollars to rebuid roads and bridges, modernize public schools, and construct wind farms and other alternative sources of energy. It’s difficult to see how new public works programs will “preserve” existing jobs. “Job preservation” is thrown »
November 23, 2008 — John Hinderaker

Minnesota Senate Recount, Update IV

There’s not much news from the weekend. With 73 percent of ballots recounted, the Minnesota Secretary of State’s office shows Norm Coleman with a 25,384-vote lead over former comedian Al Franken. That doesn’t mean much, since the precincts that haven’t finished recounting yet are mostly in Minneapolis. The »
November 23, 2008 — Scott Johnson

The presidential nomination mess

I didn’t get around to reading Professor James Ceaser’s essay on the presidential nomination mess in the current issue of the Claremont Review of Books until I was on vacation earlier this month. It’s a long essay that covers a lot of ground. I was particularly interested in Professor Ceaser’s discussion of the electoral college: The Constitution, contrary to popular impression, created not three but four national institutions: the presidency, »
November 23, 2008 — Scott Johnson

Vero possumus

Victor Davis Hanson formulates ten random, politically incorrect thoughts. As a one-time Latin teacher, I relish this one: Four years of high-school Latin would dramatically arrest the decline in American education. In particular, such instruction would do more for minority youths than all the “role model” diversity sermons on Harriet Tubman, Malcolm X, Montezuma, and Caesar Chavez put together. Nothing so enriches the vocabulary, so instructs about English grammar and »
November 23, 2008 — John Hinderaker

Obama to Delay Tax Increase?

That’s how Reuters interprets David Axelrod’s appearance on Fox News Sunday this morning, although it dutifully refers to the proposed tax increase as a “high-income tax-cut repeal.” Here is the exchange; you can judge for yourself: WALLACE: It’s been suggested that one way that Mr. Obama could reassure the markets is to announce that he is not going to raise any taxes, even on the wealthy and corporations, during a »
November 23, 2008 — Scott Johnson

Nick Coleman’s collapse

Star Tribune metro columnist Nick Coleman regularly disgraces the newspaper that pays his salary. Less than twelve hours after the Highway 35W Mississippi River bridge collapsed last year, the Star Tribune ran Coleman’s column blaming the collapse on Governor Tim Pawlenty and others who had opposed tax increases. We wrote about the column (now unavailable online) here. The column made no sense. It was also false and defamatory. As Mitch »
November 22, 2008 — Paul Mirengoff

It’s a good thing no one is watching

Ramesh Ponnuru takes a depressing look at the feuds that have broken out within the Republican party following the grim results of November 4. He calls them “an overlapping series of civil wars,” which I think is an apt description. As was to be expected, the civil wars are driven less by an effort to figure out what ails the Party than by the quest to use its ailing condition »
November 22, 2008 — John Hinderaker

Oh, That Resolution!

The New York Times explains the foreign policy differences between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton: During the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination, Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton went out of their way to point out their foreign policy differences, with Mrs. Clinton portraying herself as a hawkish Democrat and defending her decision to vote in favor of the 2002 resolution that Mr. Bush later considered an authorization to use »
November 22, 2008 — John Hinderaker

Hatton-Malignaggi

Tonight at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Ricky Hatton will take on Paulie Malignaggi, with Hatton’s IBO light-welterweight title at stake. Here are the fighters at yesterday’s weigh-in; Hatton is on the left: I asked my son to comment on the fight; here is his response: Tonight two of the top 140-pounders square off in Las Vegas. Paulie Malignaggi, the slick New Yorker, will take on Englishman Ricky “The »