If Rahm Emanuel were a Republican...

...he would be on the street by now.

Emanuel is a multimillionaire, but lived for the last five years for free in the tony Capitol Hill townhouse owned by De Lauro and her husband, Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg.

During that time, he also served as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee - which gave Greenberg huge polling contracts. It paid Greenberg's firm $239,996 in 2006 and $317,775 in 2008. (Emanuel's own campaign committee has also paid Greenberg more than $50,000 since 2004.)

To be fair, Greenberg had polling contracts with the DCCC before - but each new election cycle brings its own set of consultants. And Emanuel was certainly generous with his roommate.

Emanuel never declared the substantial gift of free rent on any of his financial-disclosure forms. He and De Lauro claim that it was just allowable "hospitality" between colleagues. Hospitality - for five years?

Some experts suggest that it was also taxable income: Over five years, the free rent could easily add up to more than $100,000.

Personally I don't care that he lived rent free. What bugs me is the fact that not a word of this has appeared on the major news outlets. If a Republican did this it would be the lead story on every major network.

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This is fishy.

Why would someone kill them self with a shotgun during a routine traffic stop?

It's not clear why 17-year-old Billey Joe Johnson was stopped in Lucedale, but authorities say the junior tailback shot himself with a shotgun after the deputy walked back to the patrol car to run a license check.
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Authorities would not immediately say whether they believed the shooting was a suicide or an accident.

So it's possible that Billey Joe was going to attack the officer?

"The deputy was sitting in his patrol vehicle ... when he heard a gunshot and saw the victim laying on the ground by the driver's side door of the vehicle that Johnson was driving. A shotgun was lying on the victim," according to a statement from the George County Sheriff's Department.

How can that be? What was the deputy looking at while Billey was getting out of the car with a shotgun?

Is there a camera in the patrol car? Who owned the shotgun?

Update: The NAACP is doing independent investigation.

Link

It's alway "Global Warming"

Even a cooling trend is evidence of global warming.

2008 is on pace to be a slightly cooler year in a steadily rising temperature trend line. Experts say it's thanks to a La Nina weather variation. While skeptics are already using it as evidence of some kind of cooling trend, it actually illustrates how fast the world is warming.

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Hello

If you read this leave a comment.

How to Learn

Does anyone disagree with this statement?

Attainment of higher level learning objectives will not be achieved with relative ease through discovery learning; instead, it will require considerable instruction by a skilled teacher, following thorough mastery of basic knowledge and skills that must be integrated and applied in the process of 'higher level' performance.
"Teacher Influences on Student Achievement," American Psychologist (Oct. 1986): 1069-1077:

Where Have I Been?

Nowhere really. Just got tired of blogging to a site that gets no hits.

Later,

A Space in Time

Despite current predictions of a protracted global war between the West and the Islamic world, I believe that war is over. There may be intermittent battles in the decades to come, with many innocent victims. But the number of supporters of armed Islamism is unlikely to grow, its support throughout the Arab Muslim world will likely decline, and the opposition by other Muslim groups will surely grow. 9/11 signaled the last gasp of Islamism rather than the beginnings of its global challenge.

Link

Glowing Pigs

Just in case it's dark and you can't find your pig. Glowing pigs.

Goldwater Presidency ?

Ted (the swimmer) Kennedy makes reference to the Goldwater Presidency in this article. I guess that's what 50 years of hard drinking can do.

For all you victims of public education, Goldwater was never president.

Saddam trained terrorist

The Weekly Standard has a story by Stephen F. Hayes detailing Saddam's terrorist training camps.

THE FORMER IRAQI REGIME OF Saddam Hussein trained thousands of radical Islamic terrorists from the region at camps in Iraq over the four years immediately preceding the U.S. invasion, according to documents and photographs recovered by the U.S. military in postwar Iraq. The existence and character of these documents has been confirmed to THE WEEKLY STANDARD by eleven U.S. government officials.

Pat Robertson

What?

Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson, who yesterday told viewers that God’s wrath spurred Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s massive stroke, today said his own “ignorant remarks are another manifestation of God’s anger.”

2005 Review or LA Times

Patterico's Pontifications has an excellent review of the LA Times performance for the past year.

There are links to the Times rebuttal here.

60 Days for Child Rapist!

This makes me sick.

The Samaritans

This is how we defeat terrorism.

Power

The essence of power, in the political sense, is the ability to do as you please without regard for others. A nation controlled and dominated, without check, by one person or by a small group is a despotic tyranny; regardless of whether you call it a monarchy, aristocracy or democracy. The opposite situation is every person claiming to be his own governing authority. This is anarchy and anarchies always lead to tyranny or oligarchy by those who are smarter and/or stronger.

The goal should be to balance power so that tyranny can not manifest itself. That was the goal of the framers of the US Constitution. Unfortunately there is a ceaseless endeavor to upset this balance usually for some perceived altruistic idea. The compulsive utopian considers power to always be a force for good as long as the power is in his hand. It was in the name of liberty that the Russian revolutionaries destroyed the old political system. But like a natural force in the physical world, power in the political world does not vanish. Instead it seeks the path of least resistance. And the path of least resistance became the tyrannical hands of the radicals. The cost was sixty million lives.

History clearly shows that we can not put our trust in mere benevolence. Constitutional restrictions, political checks and balances and adequate enforcement of the laws must be in place to restrain human natures appetite for power. A just government maintains a healthy tension between the claims of authority and the claims of liberty.

Teen sex -> Teen suicide

But there was another statistic that should have gotten parents' attention but which was similarly ignored, namely, that there seems to be a direct link between teen sexuality and teen depression. A study by the Heritage Foundation, in-turn based on the government-funded National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health, found that about 25 percent of sexually active girls say they are depressed all, most or a lot of the time, while only 8 percent of girls who are not sexually active feel the same.

While 14 percent of girls who have had intercourse have attempted suicide, only 5 percent of sexually inactive girls have. And whereas 6 percent of sexually active boys have tried suicide, less than 1 percent of sexually inactive boys have. The report challenges the previously held notion that teens become sexually active in order to self-medicate their own depression.

The rest of the story.

Buckley vs Vidal

From a 1968 debate between Bill Buckley and Gore Vidal.

Buckley snapped: "Now listen, you queer," he said, "stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered."

And you thought the debate was rude these days.

Children of Crises

From Robert Coles' Children of Crises.

They came telling us not to have children, and not to have children, and sweep up, and all that. They tell you you're bad, and worse than others, and you're lazy, and you don't know how to get along like others do. . . . Then they say we should look different, and eat different -- use more of the protein. I tell them about the prices, but they reply about 'planning' -- planning, planning, that's all they tell you. The worst of it is that they try to get you to plan your kids, by the year, except they mean by the ten-year plan, one every ten years. The truth is, they don't want you to have any, if they could help it.

To me, having a baby inside me is the only time I'm really alive. I know I can make something, do something, no matter what color my skin is, and what names people call me. When the baby gets born I see him, and he's full of life, or she is; and I think to myself that it doesn't make any difference what happens later, at least now we've got a chance, or the baby does. You can see the little one grow and get larger and start doing things, and you feel there must be some hope, some chance that things will get better; because there it is, right before you, a real, live growing baby. The children and their father feel it, too, just like I do. They feel the baby is a good sign, or at least he's some sign. If we didn't have that, what would be the difference from death?

Even without children, my life would still be bad -- they're not going to give us what they have, the birth control people. They just want us to be a poor version of them, only without our children and our faith in God and our tasty fried food, or anything.

Da Vinci clue for heart surgeon

It appears that Leonardo Da Vinci is helping with modern heart surgery.

Leonardo worked out in the 1500s that the opening phase of the mitral valve was extremely important - this can be compromised with conventional surgery because the opening is made narrower than normal.

Mr Wells says he can now repair the floppy mitral valve in such a way that it does not alter the normal diameter of the valve when it is open which means that the individual can return to more vigorous exercise without any problems.

He said Leonardo had a depth of appreciation of the anatomy and physiology of the body - its structure and function - that perhaps has been overlooked by some.

Hamastan

As predicted.

The worst fear of politicians, military officials and Israeli civilians regarding Israel's withdrawal from Gaza has become a reality - the volatile coastal strip is now the private domain of Islamic terrorism, led by the infamous Hamas organization.

The rest of the story is here.