So why isn't he charged?

Yes, a supporter made the bid; but come on, people do not offer $1 million on behalf of other people without being directed to.

A supporter of U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. told the Democratic congressman in 2008 that he would raise $1 million in return for then- Gov. Rod Blagojevich naming Jackson to the U.S. Senate, a federal prosecutor said Wednesday.

The allegation, made on a busy day at Blagojevich's federal corruption trial, was the first time authorities publicly suggested Jackson was aware of efforts by his allies to swap campaign cash for his appointment to the Senate seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama.

...

Jackson has not been charged and has long denied knowledge or involvement of the alleged scheme to buy the Senate seat, which surfaced almost as soon as Blagojevich's arrest on Dec. 9, 2008. Days later, the South Side congressman read a statement declaring: "I never sent a message or an emissary to the governor to make an offer, plead my case or propose a deal about a U.S. Senate seat, period."

Jackson did not return phone calls for comment Wednesday.

I know why he isn't being charged; so do you; so does everyone. It's because 1, he's Jesse Jackson Junior, and 2, the establishment isn't going to take down two of its beloved own. Blago is the sacrificial lamb into which the entire community's sins are poured and, with his immolation, are purged.

Heck, if you go after Jesse Jackson Junior, people just might start getting the idea that it's not Blago per se that was corrupt, but the entire whorehouse-at-low-tide city political culture, and that might cause problems for President Pitching Wedge.

Via Gabriel Malor.

Posted by: Ace at 07:58 AM | Comments (83)
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47-44 with a 3.2% margin of error? We'll call it a tie.

Boxer's slight numerical lead masks potentially serious problems for the senator, starting with how 52 percent of the respondents hold an unfavorable view of her.

At the same time, her job approval rating is among the lowest that Field has measured for her since she was first elected to the Senate in 1992: 43 percent of registered voters disapprove of her performance while 42 percent approve. Among likely voters, 48 percent disapprove and 42 percent approve.

While voters' responses to a pollster in July may change by the time they vote in November, the new poll shows that whether voters love or hate her, 93 percent hold an opinion about Boxer.

"She is vulnerable," Field Poll director Mark DiCamillo said. "This is very ominous for her."

If Fiorina is this close now, just wait until she unleashes the Demon Sheep on Boxer's ass!

Here's something I'd like to hear from Barbara Boxer next year: "I insist you call me Former Senator Boxer! Do you know how hard you have to work to be a Democrat and still lose in California?"

Posted by: DrewM at 07:03 AM | Comments (80)
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I'm tryna find the words to describe this girl without being disrespectful...

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 05:20 AM | Comments (120)
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Stocks had a huge rally yesterday (on no real news, good or bad). The Dow was up 2.82% to close at 10,018.05 and the S&P 500 rocketed up 3.13% to close at 1,060.24. Optimism about retail sales and improved outlooks on earnings for many firms led the surge. This will also vindicate some analysts who have been claiming that equities have been oversold in recent weeks. I confess, I have no idea what's going on -- the material situation isn't any better than it was last week, nor is the outlook going forward. Just more evidence that this market is entering a highly non-linear realm where trends and histogram analyses might not be of much help. And for those who like their doom with no leavening of good news: just check the 3-month chart for both indexes to put the rally into perspective. more...

Posted by: Monty at 02:56 AM | Comments (112)
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Hey Remember When NASA Wasn't All About Pleasing Muslims?

Yeah me too. So here's a little reminder of the days when they focused on getting Americans into space rather than fixing Islamic self-esteem.

Last month was the 45th anniversary of Ed White's space walk on June 3, 1965 when he became the first American to ever leave a space capsule. Here's a video of that space walk narrated by Ed White himself. Sadly he would be killed less than two years later in the 1967 Apollo 1 fire along with "Gus" Grissom and Roger Chaffee.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:38 PM | Comments (784)
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Hey. All I'm doin here is waiting on thunderstorms.

Waiting.

LOS ANGELES – An earthquake with a magnitude of 5.4 struck an area near Palm Springs, Calif., on Wednesday afternoon, and the shaking was felt more than 100 miles away, but there were no initial reports of damage or injuries.

Here in Texas we don't worry about earthquakes. We have dirt that swells when it's wet and shrinks when it dries (Bush lied, the dirt dried!), and it takes 27 years to bring a house down.

Well, I'm glad you Cahliforniyans are ok.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 05:32 PM | Comments (45)
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Hmm.

Is this a long-held belief I wasn't aware of?

Posted by: Ace at 02:56 PM | Comments (323)
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Yeah, we got that much.

It is clear, too, in the course of the two hours I spend with Greene that he has some pretty wacky ideas that, were he to win in November, would put him among the more unpredictable members of the senate. At one point, he lurches off on his big idea for how to create jobs in South Carolina.

"Another thing we can do for jobs is make toys of me, especially for the holidays. Little dolls. Me. Like maybe little action dolls. Me in an army uniform, air force uniform, and me in my suit. They can make toys of me and my vehicle, especially for the holidays and Christmas for the kids. That's something that would create jobs. So you see I think out of the box like that. It's not something a typical person would bring up. That's something that could happen, that makes sense. It's not a joke."

Reminds me of Woodrow.

Posted by: Ace at 12:26 PM | Comments (329)
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In a good column about the economy, he expresses an interesting political take:

The increasing consensus that we are entering a "double dip" recession is seeping into the conventional wisdom, posing a further obstacle to Obama's attempts to keep control of Congress. Even when the conventional wisdom was that the economy was slowly emerging from recession, the president was having his problems keeping Congress. But now that all indicators - from employment to housing to consumer confidence to the Dow - are trending downward, the task is likely to become even harder.

The days are fading when Bush could be blamed for the economic problems we are facing as a nation. The passage of time and, interestingly, the very perception that things had been getting better earlier in the year both make this second dip the Obama dip rather than just a continuation of the "Bush recession."

The facts are that we have likely never emerged from the recession at all. The Economic Conference Board has never declared the recession over since so much (or even all) of the anemic but still somewhat positive growth recorded in the past three quarters stems directly from public sector cash transfer payments. These transfusions may mask the symptoms of recession, but they are no indication of emerging prosperity.

As we predicted in Catastrophe and in our latest book: 2010: Take Back America - A Battle Plan, we are now coping with the damage, not of the original recession that started in 2007, but with the cures administered by Obama when he took office in 2009. It is his big spending, big borrowing, and his looming tax increases in 2011 are driving the economy down.

History will probably record the Obama Administration of 2009-2013 (hopefully his only time in office) as one long recession/depression just as we see the Hoover Administration of 1929-1933. We make no allowances for the "false dawn" of rising markets which engendered a great deal of hope in 1930-1931 before these expectations were crushed by the Hoover tax increases of late 1931 and the Federal Reserve Board's increase of interest rates that same year. In retrospect, we will see the slight uptick of the early months of 2010 as our own "false dawn" interrupting but not punctuating our four year recession.

He's right about history not making any distinction between the recessions, but he's also right about the usefulness of pinning the likely-coming second dip on Obama himself.

After all, it was he who allowed Nancy Pelosi to do his job and craft the stimulus package. And only $600 billion of that trillion was actual stimulus; the rest was pork and payoffs to Democrats that did nothing to help the economy.

Says me? No, says liberal Democrat economist Brad DeLong:

The good news is we have avoided another Great Depression. But it seems ill-advised for Barack Obama to stand up on a Friday morning in early July and say that the economy is "headed in the right direction" (even if, as he said, "we are not headed there fast enough") and to highlight "the sixth straight month of job growth in the private sector." The employment-to-population ratio has been flat since November. Over the past six months--since the downturn ended--the U.S. economy has not been recovering from its near-depression, and not been putting a greater and greater portion of its potential labor force to work. Rather, it has been bumping along the bottom. There is a big difference between the economy getting "better" and the economy "no longer getting worse rapidly."

...

Go back to December 16, 2008, when Ryan Lizza reported in The New Yorker on the Obama AdministrationÂ’s thinking. Council of Economic Advisors Chair-Designate Christina Romer believed the following: that the appropriate total value for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act fiscal stimulus was something more than $1.2 trillion, but that to ask for a stimulus that large would risk gridlock in the Senate. (The result was an ARRA of about $600 billion of real stimulus tax cuts and spending increases alongside ineffective ornaments dear to the hearts of legislators.)

And getting that $1.2 trillion would have been easy, by the way. DeLong himself is pushing for more stimulus, and he is quite catholic in his tastes in stimulus -- he urges either greater spending or tax cuts or both.

Tax cuts are Keynesian tools, too, of course.

So how could Obama have gotten the $1.2 trillion in stimulus he thought he needed?

Easy. Give the Democrats the $600 billion in stimulative spending, skip the "ornamental" pork, and give Republicans $600 billion in tax cuts. (My preference: A holiday in the payroll taxes for businesses to encourage hiring and employee retention.)

Not only would he have had his Shock and Awe stimulus, he would have gotten it with more than half of the GOP caucus voting for it, and thus would now have the useful political cover of bipartisan action (not the mention the unifying aspect of same -- if you coopt your opponents into joining you, they have skin in the game as far as scoring a victory, too.)

But he didn't. Because he decided he didn't need Republican votes, and would rather have a delectable partisan victory.

And so we spent a huge amount -- $1 trillion plus with interest -- to no discernible effect and in fact really can't shoot another stimulus bullet, even if our lives depended on it. (And, you know, they might.)

And this Bush's fault?

No, this is the Miserable Failure's fault.

Posted by: Ace at 12:07 PM | Comments (112)
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I had this in the sidebar yesterday, but seems worth a post.

Posted by: Ace at 11:13 AM | Comments (50)
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