Double post. [rdbrewer] more...

Posted by: Ace at 03:05 PM | Comments (19)
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Of course, she also worked on the legal issues/defenses of ObamaCare, and then lied about that in her confirmation testimony, so it's doubtful this plus-sized cheerleader for socialism will recuse herself from ruling on the issue, as the law demands.

The March 2010 email exchange between Kagan and Tribe raises new questions about whether Kagan must recuse herself from judging cases involving the health-care law that Obama signed--and which became the target of legal challenges--while Kagan was serving as Obama's solicitor general and was responsible for defending his administrationÂ’s positions in court disputes.

Posted by: Ace at 02:33 PM | Comments (105)
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The Occupy Wall Street folks dialed up their own special judge to get a restraining order, blocking the order to evict, a woman with a long history of working with the ACLU and whose own bio boasts of her imagining exciting new "solutions" to "problems." Rather than getting a randomly-chosen judge to take the petition (per the actual law), they somehow chose their own judge (or, perhaps: Their judge chose them).

After that the TRO was in a state of suspended animation as another judge took a look at the matter -- one less, say, bought and paid for.

He just ruled against Occupy. It turns out that in America, you actually don't have the right to live on other people's property just because you feel aggrieved.

And if you think it's suspicious that the national Democratic Party began distancing themselves from Occupy just as dozens of Democratic (or liberal-leaning, like Bloomberg) mayors made the decision to evict them -- yes, the Democratic mayors got on a party line to discuss their troublesome constituents.

Apparently they decided that if they all did it the lefties couldn't blame any single one of them, and they coordinated their moves to evict the Occupiers.

I Fear The Timing: JohnE. reports OWS had a big "street carnival" planned for Thursday, their dumb two month anniversary, and planned on shutting down Wall Street (again).

So they're rambunctious.

With this ruling, will they get violent?

I mean more violent, of course. Like 25% more rapes and 35% more assaults.

Posted by: Ace at 12:52 PM | Comments (369)
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Granny Rictus McBotoxImplants sure has swell friends.

Now Newsweek and The Daily Beast report that this stock purchase was made as Visa was engaged in a full-court press to lobby Pelosi to stop legislation to curb credit-card swipe fees to vendors.

In 2007, Visa used an army of lobbyists to try to influence Pelosi, including one of her former advisers, Dean Aguillen, Newsweek reports. Aguillen left Pelosi's office to work for the lobbying firm Ogilvy. By law, he could not lobby Pelosi's office directly, but he did lobby Congress on the credit card issue and offered advice to other lobbyists on that particular mission.

In addition to exploiting the revolving door between Congress and lobbying firms, Visa's political action committee made a $1,000 donation to Pelosi's re-election campaign, Newsweek reports (Visa headquarters is in Pelosi's home district). Two days after that donation was made, Pelosi met with Visa executives in her office. Aguillen also contributed $1,000 to Pelosi and another $1,000 to the campaign arm of the House Democratic caucusin the first half of 2008.

Don't worry about her husband Paul's investments, though.

Drew Hammill, a spokesman for Pelosi, said her husband Paul Pelosi's finances are kept distinctly separate from the congresswoman's legislative work, Newsweek reports.

Oh well no problem them. See, I didn't know that a married couple, whose money is, according to California marriage law, equally divisible between them, was keeping their finances "distinctly separate." Carry on carrying on.

No but seriously, why were the Pelosis offered this IPO? Again, as Mike Flynn keeps noting, IPOs are offered to big brokerage houses (in order, I think, to mostly resell them to the public, or, as Nancy and Paul Pelosi call them, "the trogs").

Imagine you're a huge company like Visa. You work with the big brokerage houses to place your stocks and make them available to the general public.

Why on earth would you think, "Oh right, in addition to Goldman Sachs, we probably want to make sure Nancy and Paul Pelosi get part of this initial public offering, too."

You see the problem?

Why would it occur to Visa at all to do this? Why would those names enter into its thinking?

Nevermind the other eight lucrative IPOs major corporations just happened to offer Nancy and Paul Pelosi the same sweet insider deal. (I shouldn't have linked them together like that, implying some kind of connection, because, you know, their finances are kept "distinctly separate.")

Related: Dave Weigel did a brief story about the 60 Minutes piece, Schweizer's book, and the "Breitbart Embassy" in DC.

He doesn't call it the Breitbart Embassy. That's what Breitbart and the other Bigs people call it. They want to get uniforms with epaulettes and stuff.

Posted by: Ace at 12:21 PM | Comments (114)
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Wait, what?

The beatings will continue until morale improves, or the country simply implodes. Whichever.

We have a lazy and incompetent government. The belief that piles of taxpayer money can solve any problem, by purchasing a first-class bureaucracy to generate a blizzard of official paperwork, is inherently lazy. The childish belief that America is pockmarked with problems only government can address, and only spending from Washington counts as “caring” about an issue, is the laziest belief a person could possibly have. Supplication is easy: just open your mouth and wait for it to be filled.

Obamanomics is based on the ironclad belief that government knows best, and has a sacred responsibility to strike down incorrect judgments from the free market. Of course someone who thinks that way won’t be much of a “cheerleader” for the economic liberty his hapless people cannot be entrusted with. On the other hand, someone who holds the health opposite of Obama’s beliefs can’t help but have stars in their eyes when they look upon their marvelous nation.

It will be great to shove Obama and his government out of the way next year, and teach him just how wrong he is about the United States of America.

Everyone knows that a populace gets lean and steely-hard when all of their troubles are taken care of by a Big Daddy when they don't work, and when Big Daddy takes their stuff when they do. I mean, that's just Economics 101.

Get your work on, slackers.

In related economic news, the economy slopes gently away to the right with some tricky hills just before the cup as you approach from the left.

Posted by: Ace at 11:47 AM | Comments (160)
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Is the right really "owning the narrative" on the Occupy movement?

Or is it not about "owning the narrative" at all, but about TB, lice, rape, murder, suicide, rampant drug use, public masturbation, and free-range bowel movements?

Dumb facts beat clever spin and "narratives" 99.9% of the time. It is a vanity and a delusion of the merely semi- clever to trust so much in their own greatly over-estimated power to persuade and manipulate.

Yes that is a dude crapping in the street.

Via @allahpundit.

Corrected: That's Capitol Hill in Seattle, not DC. Thanks to robtr for correcting me. more...

Posted by: Ace at 11:16 AM | Comments (188)
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Cattle futures ain't got nothin' on these people.

Feinstein, however, had good reason to feel that all her investment eggs were secure in the biotech basket, because just weeks after her seven-figure investment in Amyris, the company scored a $24 million grant from the Department of Energy (DOE) to build a pilot plant where altered yeast would turn sugar into hydrocarbons.

People complain that the House is filled with lawyers, and the Senate is filled with Millionaires.

What should bother people is that both are filled with psychics. Psychics, who refuse to use their psychical gifts to aid our military and CIA, but instead waste their psionic disciplines* doing crap that anyone could do.

Also bear in mind Mike Flynn's observation that IPO's are typically not offered to private investors, but instead to major brokerage houses.

* Ego Whip, Id Insinuation, you know, all the major attack and defense modes. I rolled an 00. Seriously. I know I also rolled an 00 for my exceptional strength but what can I say, the dice are just hot.

Posted by: Ace at 10:58 AM | Comments (113)
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Good catch by Matthew Boyle at the Daily Caller.

Usually a leak is a dog bites man story. Of course Holder would leak to his Praetorian guard in the partisan press.

But the man bites dog part of the story is that Grassley et al. actually specifically requested information about previous gun-tracking programs. (And note, Wide Receiver wasn't a gunwalker program like Fast and Furious was -- the guns had RFID tracking chips in them. But many of those chips failed.)

Holder ignored Grassley's request for additional information about Wide Receiver. You know, that constitutional power he has to ignore requests for information from Congress.

But then, on the eve of key Fast and Furious figure Lanny Breuer's testimony*, he decided the Timing Was Now Right, and that his friends in the press could do more with the story in his defense than Grassley would be likely to, so he leaked it to them.

Attorney General Eric HolderÂ’s Justice Department sought to manipulate reportersÂ’ coverage of Operation Fast and Furious during the days preceding a November 1 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, new emails obtained by The Daily Caller indicate.

Emails between senior Justice Department officials and investigators in the office of Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley show that congressional staffers leading the investigation into Operation Fast and Furious requested information about Operation Wide Receiver — a Bush administration program – and other similar cases, more than a full month before the DOJ leaked information to selected media outlets on October 31.

That Halloween document dump from the DOJ seemed calculated to depict GrassleyÂ’s investigation as partisan in nature.

The emails show Grassley staffers inquiring about the Bush administration program as early as mid-September.

Holder's attempt is to claim that "Bush did it," so the fact that the GOP is only asking about Holder proves this is all a partisan smear. Well, Bush didn't do it, actually, and further, the GOP was asking about the Bush era programs too.

So: Holder implicitly claims he can't release documents because they're too confidential, but then decides on his own to give them to the press when he thinks it might help them?

Or: Holder ignores a constitutional, lawful demand for information, but then releases information on his own initiative to bail his corrupt, Marc Rich pardon-purchasing ass out?

Either way. It's hard to say why Holder refused to comply, because he doesn't offer reasons -- he just ignores the requests entirely.

* This is not a mistake or a correction -- I'm actually getting this right. I'm just asterisking it so people know this leak came on the eve of Lanny Breuer's testimony, not Holder's (Holder would testify a week or so later).

People like to simplify in their heads, and I know when I first read this I kept reading, in my brain, that this occurred before Holder's testimony. I edited out the extra moving part here. Since I kept making that error, I wanted to make sure I wasn't aiding and abetting a similar error in others.

Especially because my headline elides over this detail. Well, look, the headline is already long and complicated.

Big Update: Via @williamamos on Twitter -- Why have the records of slain border agent Brian Terry been sealed?

The case against the alleged killers of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry has disappeared from federal court records, apparently sealed by a federal judge.

In May, federal prosecutors won an indictment against Manuel Osorio-Arellanes and others, and they announced it with a press release. Only Osorio-ArellanesÂ’ name was visible in the indictment, but there were blacked-out words where other defendantsÂ’ names go.

Osorio-Arellanes was charged with second-degree murder and was not considered the likely shooter. He had been wounded during the gunfight that left Terry dead.

The case has disappeared from court records -- which I guess means a judge sealed he records.

A spokesman for the US attorney's office handling the case (in San Diego) refuses comment.

Posted by: Ace at 10:19 AM | Comments (101)
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So many scandals today. This is actually a bad thing, because no one can keep up with all of this. So much big stuff dropping.

Rahm Emanuel previously claimed, in a radio interview, that he had no recollection of Solyndra. Solyndra? What's that?

Whitewater? Never heard of it. Are you making words up?

Released emails show he god-damned well did know about it, and was instrumental in pushing for the loans and getting the President to visit the factory.

Chicago Mayor and former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel may have forgotten Solyndra, but the ongoing scandal over the failed solar company and its $535 million Department of Energy loan guarantee hasnÂ’t forgotten him.

Good line.

...

“[Klain] has talked to Rahm about this and feels Rahm wants this too (barring any concerns)—POTUS’s involvement was Rahm’s idea,’ Aditya Kumar, a White House director of special projects, wrote in an August 2009 email to other officials.

This next email refers to the pressure exerted on career bureaucrats to approve the loans to Solyndra, despite their deep skepticism about the company's ability to repay them:

“Ron said this morning that the POTUS definitely wants to do this (or Rahm definitely wants the POTUS to do this?),” one White House staffer wrote to an Obama scheduler in August 2009, referring to Ron Klain, Vice President Joe Biden’s former chief of staff.

Do these newly released emails refresh the witness' recollection, then?

Why no, they do not. He still hasn't heard of it.

“Bill, ya know what I focus on? What I’m doing here today,” Emanuel said to Cameron who followed up with asking the mayor if this jogged his memory to which he responded by saying, “No, no.”

Gee, former Clinton aides claiming they don't remember large chunks of their working lives, and who claim they're too busy doing the business of the American (or Chicagoan) people to trouble their heads with talk of scandal?

Who saw that coming?

I'll tell you who saw that coming: Warren Buffet, and he made $50 million on it.

Posted by: Ace at 09:34 AM | Comments (127)
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Quick, let's raise taxes on other people to right this abuse.

According to Schweizer, after the bailout bill’s passage, Warren Buffett sat down and wrote then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson a four-page private letter laying out a plan to clean up the toxic assets plaguing numerous financial institutions. Buffett proposed something he called a “public-private partnership fund.” For every $10 billion the private sector invested, Buffett said the government should put up $40 billion.

After Paulson’s exit, incoming Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner tweaked the plan and rolled it out in March 2009. But according to quarterly reports from Buffett’s holdings company, Berkshire Hathaway, between the time the billionaire crafted his plan and Geithner adopted it, Buffett quietly purchased 12.4 million shares of Wells Fargo stock and 1.5 million shares of U.S. Bancorp. Once the government unveiled its “Public-Private Investment Program,” bank stocks jumped, resulting in large profits for Buffett.

How much Buffett profited is hard to calculate, since thereÂ’s no way to know what his purchase price was. But prior to the government adopting BuffettÂ’s plan, Wells Fargo had been trading at roughly $20 a share. In the weeks after GeithnerÂ’s announcement, the stock jumped to $30 a share. Likewise, U.S. Bancorp went from $8 in February 2009 to more than $20 a share by May.

Helping write the plan wasn't enough; he needed it to pass, too. So, having placed a large bet, he then lobbied Nancy Pelosi and other swell people to pass TARP, crying that without it, we'd have a financial armageddon.

Posted by: Ace at 09:06 AM | Comments (117)
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