Watchdogs are an endangered species in the Age of Obama. The latest government ombudsman to get the muzzle: Amtrak Inspector General Fred Weiderhold. The longtime veteran employee was abruptly retired this month just as the government-subsidized rail service faces mounting complaints about its meddling in financial audits and probes.
Question the timing? Hell, yes.
On June 18, Weiderhold met with Amtrak officials to discuss the results of an independent report by the Washington, D.C., law firm Willkie, Farr and Gallagher. The 94-page report has been made publicly available through the office of whistleblower advocate Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa. It concluded that the independence and effectiveness of the Amtrak inspector generals office are being substantially impaired by the agencys Law Department.
Amtrak bosses have effectively gagged their budgetary watchdogs from communicating with Congress without pre-approval.
Hat tip, No Passaran
Meet Barack Hussein Obama. The man who turned his own middle name into a no-go zone during the election, only to bring it out of the closet when he trotted down to a Muslim country. The man whose associates labeled talk about his Muslim background as racist, only to proclaim his Muslim background loudly and proudly from the podium of a Muslim country.
Meet Obama, the bright young Senator with a phony biography geared to playing up his biracial angst for the college campuses. Who promised his leftist volunteers an end to rendition, detentions, eavesdropping and a whole bundle of other things, only to pull a bait and switch on them.
After all tools like that come in handy, even if they're less likely to be used against Muslim terrorists, than they are against Tea Party protesters.
Meet Barack Obama, the man who was going to bring an end to the American coercion of other countries. No more would the White House tell the rest of the world what to do. Except of course to dictate where Jews can live in Israel, how the Honduran judiciary can operate and who can head the Muslim community in Greece.
Of course Obama has drawn the line somewhere. He has drawn the line against standing up to Ahmadinejad, Chavez or any Socialist or Muslim tyrant.
#2
"Obama cannot be held completely responsible for the ruthless crackdown that has followed, but some of the blood is certainly on his well manicured hands and sleeves."
Bullshit! This is the same kind of petty hyperbole that was hoisted upon President Obamas predecessor. This guys adolescent logic is simply a stealth version of Blame America First. Obamas tepid response was not tacit approval for the Mullahs to crack heads as the author suggests. Responsibility for the carnage in the aftermath of the Iranian elections rests exclusively with the Iranian regime.
#4
While the office of the President should be respected the man must earn respect. I don't think Obama has earned the respect of the author of this article. /s
#5
I guess Janeane Garofalo won't be subscribing to Sultan Knish. And ABC (NBC, CNN, CBS, NPR, etc, etc.) won't be publishing such a story. Although I recently did see Helen Thomas get very huffy about the scripted BO news(?) conference the other day.
#3
The man's self-chosen middle name is Hussein, what the hell do you think he is going to be like towards Israel? Any Jew that voted for Obama is self-deluding if they think he will do anything but sell Israel down the river.
#5
It is amazing that the Jews voted for Obama. Amazing. He told you his name was Hussein. You saw his friends. Did you just think he was lying to other people, and not to the Jews?
Maybe not in the sense of "never for the Juices in the first place" - otherwise, Dersh is blowing smoke (or smoking blow...)
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
07/02/2009 17:31 Comments ||
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#8
Dur, Derfowitz. Guess WWII didn't teach him anything about Detecting your enemies before they have you by the balls can be achieved on Gut instinct alone, it is apparent from a mile away that Obama is a sly marauder. Jewish communities, unfortunately, you need to calibrate your B.S. Detector tolerance settings ---this naïveté is self -inflicted.
Posted by: Titus Cruque5046 ||
07/02/2009 13:46 Comments ||
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#3
I don't follow links
Heh. Yeah, the Interwebs are fraught with danger. Not exactly Idiot of the Day material, but a good candidate for Low-Grade Buffoon of the Week. Inquiring minds will wonder how flash managed to end up on this page.
Jim Geraghty, "The Campaign Spot" @ National Review
...the seeming happiness of Palin's life is a 24-7 irritant because it challenges the way some liberals see the world.
Liberals believe their ideas, philosophy, worldview and policies liberate its believers and contend the conservative equivalents limit people. Liberals see themselves are rejecting outdated beliefs and obsolete ideas, overturning established orders and discarding traditions established by superstitious and ignorant forebears who weren't as enlightened as we are. Conservatives, in their minds, are runaway cultural super-egos, always wagging their fingers about individual responsibility, dismissing excuses, reminding people that they always can't do what they want because of the consequences to themselves and to others.
Conservatism, they suspect, will leave you in a marriage that doesn't satisfy you, burden you with children you don't want, repress your passions and trap you in a empty, boring and unfulfilled life, with no hand of government able to help.
Today almost everyone faces some sort of challenge in balancing work and family; I don't know too many people who believe there are sufficient hours in a day. And then along comes this woman who's made all of these "conservative" choices and now has an amazing career, a supportive husband, a beautiful family, great health and appearance, and she bears it all, including the inevitable hard times, with pluck and a smile, as far as we can tell. (For all we know, perhaps behind closed doors, Sarah Palin screams into a pillow when it all gets to be too much. But what we know about her suggests she relieves her stress by shooting moose.)
A short while back, Los Angeles Times columnist Meghan Daum suggested, only half-jokingly, that actress Angelina Jolie's "entire Oscar-winning, serial-adopting, Brad Pitt-snagging, plane-piloting, unattainably hot-looking existence makes women around the world feel hopelessly inadequate and therefore unhappy." Perhaps Sarah Palin is the Angelina Jolie of the political world.
In her opponents' minds, Palin's made all the wrong choices, and cannot, they insist, be very bright. Yet she's happy and successful. She is an anomaly that invalidates their worldview, and for that, they attempt to immiserate her regardless of whether she wishes to run for national office again.
Posted by: Mike ||
07/02/2009 13:16 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
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#1
"...always wagging their fingers about individual responsibility, dismissing excuses, reminding people that they always can't do what they want because of the consequences to themselves and to others."
Damn!! If this doesn't sound like a liberal I don't know what does. They are the ultimate Nannies. Don't eat meat, don't drive, don't make money (unless you give it to them). This is the sh** that makes me want to "water" the tree of Liberty.
#2
Conservatism will leave you in a marriage that doesn't satisfy you, burden you with children you don't want, repress your passions and trap you in a empty, boring and unfulfilled life, with no hand of government able to help.
Well, the only managed to get ONE point about conservatives right!
#3
Do not forget - ever - the role of anti-Christian bigotry in PDS. It is a huge chunk of the dynamic there.
Posted by: no mo uro ||
07/02/2009 20:36 Comments ||
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#4
of course clog wearing ugly lib chicks hate her...she was the popular bubbly hot chick in high school that could play sports well and every guy would want to take to prom and home to meet mom. Libs always claim conservatives as shallow I only see the opposite.
The Supreme Court's decision in Ricci v. DeStefano, the case of the New Haven firefighters, was a ringing endorsement of the Civil Rights Act of 1964's ban on racial discrimination and a repudiation of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor's decision in the Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. While five justices flatly rejected Sotomayor's ruling, even the four dissenters wouldn't have let stand her ruling allowing the results of a promotion exam to be set aside because no black firefighter had a top score.
Ricci is also something else: a riveting lesson in political sociology, thanks to the concurring opinion by Justice Samuel Alito. It shows how a combination of vote-hungry politicians and local political agitators -- you might call them community organizers -- worked with the approval of elite legal professionals like Sotomayor to employ racial quotas and preferences in defiance of the words of the Civil Rights Act.
One of the chief actors was the Rev. Boise Kimber, a supporter of Mayor John DeStefano. The mayor testified for him as a character witness in a 1996 trial in which he was convicted of stealing prepaid funeral expenses from an elderly woman. DeStefano later appointed Kimber the head of the board of fire commissioners, but Kimber resigned after saying he wouldn't hire certain recruits because "they just have too many vowels in their name."
After the results of the promotion test were announced, showing that 19 white and one Hispanic firefighter qualified for promotion, Kimber called the mayor's chief administrative officer opposing certification of the test results.
The record shows that DeStefano and his appointees went to work, holding secret meetings and concealing their motives, to get the Civil Service Board to decertify the test results. Kimber appeared at a board meeting and made "a loud, minutes-long outburst" and had to be ruled out of order three times.
City officials ignored the inconvenient fact that they had hired an independent and experienced firm -- this is a thriving business -- to draw up a bias-free test and paid a competing firm to draw up another test. Its head testified that the first firm's test was biased without seeing it. The board capitulated and decertified the test. DeStefano was prepared to overrule it if it had gone the other way.
Such is governance these days in a liberal university town. It may remind some of us old enough to remember of the machinations and contrivances of Southern white officials and agitators employed to prevent blacks from registering and voting.
This is the sort of thing Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg described in the text as just the workings of politics. Writing in Slate, Yale Law faculty member Emily Bazelon goes further. She laments that the promotion test rewarded memorization and that it favored "'fire buffs' -- guys who read fire suppression manuals on their down time."
She is outraged that a fire department might want to promote firefighters who know more about suppressing fires, rescuing victims and protecting their colleagues rather than simply promote a predetermined number of members of specific racial groups whose self-appointed political spokesmen back the politicians in office.
Bazelon and Sotomayor, who voted to uphold the city's decertification of the promotion test, are typical of liberal elites who are ready to ratify squalid political deals -- and blatant racial discrimination -- in return for the political support and the votes that can be rallied by the likes of Kimber. You supply the numbers on Election Day, and we'll supply the verbiage to put a pretty label on your shenanigans.
Usually the people who are hurt by this are not as sympathetic as Frank Ricci, the dyslexic firefighter who paid a friend $1,000 to read the training manuals and studied hard enough to get the highest score on the test.
But I think we ought to reserve some of our sympathy for the purported beneficiaries of this wretched discrimination, the black firefighters. Their champions -- Kimber and DeStefano, Bazelon and Sotomayor -- are telling them that their way up in life should not be determined by the content of their character or by mastery of their worthy craft, but by the color of their skin. Not by a fair and unbiased test, but by dishonest wire-pulling and threats of political retaliation.
Thanks to Justice Alito, for pulling back the curtain and showing the ugly reality of racial discrimination in America today.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
