Hillary Clinton suggests $5,000 savings bond for every U.S. baby

WASHINGTON - Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton said Friday that every child born in the United States should get a $5,000 "baby bond" from the government to help pay for future costs of college or buying a home.

...

"I like the idea of giving every baby born in America a $5,000 account that will grow over time, so that when that young person turns 18 if they have finished high school they will be able to access it to go to college or maybe they will be able to make that down payment on their first home," she said.

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"I think it's a wonderful idea," said Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones, an Ohio Democrat who attended the event and has already endorsed Clinton. "Every child born in the United States today owes $27,000 on the national debt, why not let them come get $5,000 to grow until their 18?"

Hell, why not give each kid an additional $27,000 on top of the $5,000 when they are born and then they will not owe anything.

A few minor issues I have with this idea after the jump

Personal Bleg:
I will now violate the first rule of blogging, know your audience.
If anyone has any personal experiance dealing with issues associated with gifted children, I would love to hear.
andrews-dad AT hotmail DOT com more...

Posted by: Open Blog at 10:24 AM | Comments (50)
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Scandi hooker blows lutefisk all over the stage. Lol.

Can we get an official translation? I think it goes something like this:
*ring*
"Yes, hello?"
"Hello."
"How are you?
"Meatloaf."
"DId you see the Democratic debate?"
"Yes, I thought Edwards looked presidential."
*BLEARGH*

Posted by: Open Blog at 09:56 AM | Comments (18)
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At the University of Illinois.

“Capitalism and limited government at a public university? How can that be?“
asked Robert Novak, conservative commentator and University of Illinois graduate.

A conservative group of alumni has decided that if the University won't pay for courses about such core American and conservative principles, they would do it themselves.

Funny thing, higher education: there's all this money floating around to hire some hippy-dippy professor to teach young people about the social impact of The Muppet Show, but nobody could scrape up a few shekels to teach kids about capitalism?

How it actually works, I mean. Not how it destroys native villages in the Andes.

Be sure to click the link to the article over at Innocent Bystanders. It's unintentionally hilarious.

Posted by: LauraW. at 08:45 AM | Comments (21)
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for videotaping defensive signals in the 38-14 season opener.

$184MM.

Heh.

Indeed.

Posted by: Dave In Texas at 06:31 AM | Comments (30)
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A federal judge refused to dismiss the case against the congressman, brought by a Marine Corps Sergeant, over his despicable and uninformed remarks about the Haditha case.

Most of us have seen the video, where he was confronted by Jason Mattera on his way to the elevator and asked if he would apologize for those remarks now that charges against two Marines were dropped. The jackass mumbled "the trial is still going on".

He was dead wrong, ignorant of the facts, and still wouldn't budge. Bryan Preston asks the question, if most Americans can't get away with slander, why should he?

He shouldn't, and I'm glad to see the judge agreed.

Posted by: Dave In Texas at 05:06 AM | Comments (32)
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Golfer Woody Austin, playing for the US in the PresidentÂ’s Cup (a poor man's Ryder Cup) went for an unexpected dip during his round on Friday.

Posted by: DrewM. at 08:07 PM | Comments (11)
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On Tuesday I noted (external link) that the Supreme Court has accepted a lethal injection case for its coming term.

It looks like the Court will be putting a halt to all lethal injection executions until that case is resolved. A Texas inmate set to be executed last night asked for a stay until the Kentucky lethal injection case is resolved. The Court, by at least five members, agreed.

Although the court gave no reason for its decision, the inmate, Carlton Turner Jr., had appealed to the court after it agreed on Tuesday to consider the constitutionality of lethal injection, the most commonly used method of execution in the United States. The decision suggests that until it issues a ruling on lethal injection, the court may be receptive to requests to delay such executions, at least for defendants whose cases raise no procedural issues.

Expect all death penalty inmates who have exhausted their appeals to petition the Court for stays. This won't be a setback for many states who already have placed moratoriums on capital punishment until the courts have resolved the question. But Texas had intended to go on with its scheduled executions.

One interesting thing I hadn't heard before was that states are finally getting creative with plans to continue with capital punishment:

In Alabama, where politicians rarely challenge the death penalty, the state is developing a “consciousness awareness test” for inmates being executed, but state officials maintained that the action was unconnected to the Supreme Court decision.

“Somebody would come in and do something to assess consciousness, after the anesthesia is delivered,” Assistant Attorney General Clay Crenshaw said. For now, he said, "the consciousness-awareness is being done visually by the warden.”

The idea is that an inmate who is unconscious cannot suffer a terrifying, excruciating death.

As ever, I remain opposed to the use of capital punishment in this country at this time, but not for what are almost certainly bogus "cruel and unusual punishment" reasons.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 07:00 PM | Comments (97)
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You might want to consider using an abacus for a while until Microsoft gets this bug fixed...

...Yesterday evening we were alerted to an issue in Excel 2007 (and Excel Services 2007) involving calculation of numbers around 65,535. The first example that we heard about was =77.1*850, but it became clear from our testing as well as additional reports that this was just one instance where Excel 2007 would return a value of 100,000 instead of 65,535...

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 05:37 PM | Comments (53)
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Video: Now at Hot Air.

I'll just bulletpoint:

Last May, Iraqi terrorists kidnapped three American soldiers.

American intelligence officials searched for cyber-signals about the kidnapping... and actually found them. They found the kidnappers talking to each other on-line.

However, they had to stop listening because the signals were passing through an American-based server and under the law that meant there could be no eavesdropping without a warrant.

So they stopped listening in on foreign terrorists holding kidnapped American soldiers.

For ten hours, officials worked to get "emergency authorization" to resume eavesdropping.

This then required the personal okay of AG Gonzales, who couldn't be reached for two hours.

So a 12 hour gap after the kidnappers had been discovered.

The law has been changed to expressly permit eavesdropping in this situation, and some Democrats such as Rep. Reyes (D) are arguing for a rollback to the previous rule.

One of those kidnapped soldiers, I'm told, was later found dead and mutilated. Whether the gap in eavesdropping may have averted this I don't know, and perhaps no one will ever know.

Two of the kidnapped soldiers, Larwyn tells me, are still unaccounted for. Again: What might have been said in that 12 hour gap that could have tipped off US forces to their location? We don't know.

Confronted with the bad outcomes caused by their ridiculous laws, Democrats always seem to argue, basically, that people should ignore the law when necessary. They insinuated that when the DoJ determined it did not have legal cause to examine Zaccharias Moussaui's laptop without a warrant, for example: They should have just had the foresight to know they should ignore the law and search for 9/11 plots on that laptop.

This is not a tolerable view of the law nor how the law should function. True enough, there will be cases where any sane man will ignore the law when life hangs in the balance. But the Democrats just continue to pander to their paranoid BDS MoveOn voters with very restrictive and impractical laws, and then just parry criticisms of these laws away with vague insinuations that soldiers and CIA operatives ought to be brave enough to risk their careers in ignoring the laws they've made when "appropriate." "Appropriate" being defined as when it turns out, in the perfect clarity of hindsight, that their laws cost human lives.

Perhaps they should strive to craft more realistic laws that don't rely on benign lawbreaking to make them function properly.

More: From Powerline.

Seattle Slough claims that FISA allows eavesdropping to happen with a warrant applied for 72 hours later. So that should take care of it, then, he asserts.

Wrong. And when I say wrong, understand I am not 100% sure of this, but I'm pretty sure he's wrong. The old law permits the AG and the AG only (well, I guess the President too) to authorize this "emergency authorization" to permit eavedropping without court-issued warrant. However, the law requires the eavesdropping stop until this emergency authorization is approved, and furthermore, the law requires those seeking the authorization to determine all necessary facts to the extent possible (that these are foreigners not entitled to full Constitutional protections, that time is of the essence, etc.) and make a detailed case with a fully supported paper trail for later review.

So no, Seattle, I don't think it's the case you can just continue eavesdropping and take all the time you like to apply for that warrant 72 hours later. I believe the law requires extensive and time-consuming pseudo-warrant-applications just to get the emergency authorization in order to continue the eavesdropping until the warrant is actually secured.

If I'm wrong, I'll eat it with an admission, as I usually do. But I don't think I am.

Correction: They didn't start eavesdropping and then stop; they never started at all while they filled out the paperwork for an "emergency authorization."

If something is of an "emergency" nature, is paperwork really what you want people doing?

Another print story from USAToday.

It took time (to begin the tap)," McConnell said, because the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) required intelligence agents to first demonstrate to the U.S. attorney general that the target was likely an agent of a foreign power.

Surveillance of foreigners overseas does not always require such an assurance. However, many foreign calls pass through U.S. telecommunications networks, requiring the attorney general's approval.

McConnell called the requirement, which has been temporarily eliminated, "burdensome."

Thanks to Drew for putting me some fucking information.

Posted by: Ace at 05:27 PM | Comments (99)
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That’s the scoop from BlackFive.

For the full story, see Purple Avenger's post.

The short version is two Army snipers offed a terrorist in Afghanistan and an initial investigation showed they acted within the rules of engagement. But further up the chain of command, a Marine General and a Navy Lt. Commander got an Army Sergeant, who had no independent knowledge of the case, to press murder charges against the snipers.

Now that these two brave Special Ops Soldiers have been cleared, it’s time to go after the lawyers who wanted to hang murder charges on them.

Posted by: DrewM. at 04:51 PM | Comments (13)
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