Norman Hsu, a bankrupt Hong Kong business, seems to have come to America and set up a shell corporation solely for the purpose of funneling large sums of money to democrat candidates, particularly Hillary.

New York Times story.

Gosh! Who do you suppose was supplying Mr. Hsu’s corporation with cash? Remember the Johnny Chung campaign contributions of the 1990s?

14:12 video

Much too much head-bobbing, but otherwise a pretty decent performance. I have never had the slightest temptation to support Rudolph Giuliani, a liberal Republican whose political career was founded on the abuse of prosecutorial power. Mitt Romney’s business career compels respect, and I have not been living in Massachusetts, so I was not terribly familiar with the detail of his liberal actions and policies as governor. I thought Romney was worth considering, until I observed his indecent haste in jettisoning ties to Larry Craig. That was a little too political for my taste. McCain is, of course, not only way too liberal, he’s also way too old. So, on the whole, I am leaning toward Thompson.

I suspect that Fred Thompson is the only GOP contender with a serious chance of defeating Lady Macbeth. Giuliani was afraid to run against her for the Senate from New York. Why would anyone think he can beat her nationally?

Fred08.Com

Appendix B (Footnote 1 – page 87) of the Final Report of the Independent Counsel In Re: Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan Association: Regarding Monica Lewinsky and Others describes alleged attempts by persons unknown to intimidate Kathleen Willey from testifying against President William Jefferson Clinton in the Paula Jones case.

Willey also alleged that in the period immediately preceding her January 1998 Jones deposition, her cat disappeared, her tires were punctured, and a male jogger whom she did not recognize approached her at her rural home, called her by her name, and asked about her tires, cat (which he named), children (whom he named), attorney, and her attorney’s children (whom he also named), saying “I hope you’re getting the message” or “You’re just not getting the message, are you?” Willey 3/6/98 Int. at 18; Willey 3/10/98 GJ at 123–27. At her Jones deposition, however, Willey testified no one had tried to discourage her from testifying. Willey 1/11/98 Depo. at 86–87.

Willey told the grand jury that even though she was “terrified for my safety” because of these incidents, “I did give consideration to maybe not—maybe not being very truthful in [her Jones v. Clinton] deposition because I thought that my—that people close to me were in jeopardy.”

WorldNetDaily reports today:

Kathleen Willey, the woman who says Bill Clinton groped her in the Oval Office, claims she was the target of an unusual house burglary over the weekend that nabbed a manuscript for her upcoming book, which promises explosive revelations that could damage Sen. Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

Willey told WND little else was taken from her rural Virginia home as she slept alone upstairs – electronics and jewelry were left behind – and she believes the Clintons were behind it.

The break-in, she said, reminded her of the widely reported incident 10 years ago in which she claimed she was threatened near the same Richmond-area home by a stranger just two days before she was to testify against President Clinton in the Paula Jones sexual harassment case.

The theft of the manuscript early Saturday morning was suspicious, she told WND, coming only days after the first mainstream media mention of her upcoming book, which is expected to include accusations of campaign finance violations and new revelations about harassment and threats by the Clintons and their associates.

“Here we go again; it’s the same thing that happened before,” Willey told WND. “They want you to know they were there. And they got what they wanted. They pretty much managed to terrorize me again. It scared me to death. It’s an awful feeling to know you’re sound asleep upstairs and someone is downstairs.”

The book, “Target: Caught in the Crosshairs of Bill and Hillary Clinton” by World Ahead Publishing, WND Books’ partner, is due for release in November. Willey said the stolen manuscript was not the book’s final copy.

Among its revelations is Willey’s identification of the person who threatened her just prior to her testimony against President Clinton – a man who turned out to be linked to the Clintons.

Willey believes the break-in and theft were prompted by teasers of the book’s contents published last week in U.S. News and World Report’s “Washington Whispers” column and the New York Daily News. …

Longtime Clinton lawyer David Kendall was not available for immediate response to Willey’s new claims, and Sen. Clinton’s presidential campaign has not responded.

Anne Reynolds, crime analyst for the Powhatan County Sheriff’s Department, told WND she could only confirm, due to department restrictions, that there was a break-in and entry reported Saturday in the vicinity of Willey’s address and that an officer responded and turned the case over to the criminal investigations department.

It certainly sounds like the Clintons have resumed active political careers again, doesn’t it?

Recently both ordinary people and rival candidate’s spouses have raised the question of whether a candidate’s less-than-edifying private life does not shed negative light upon his or her qualification for the highest office in the land.

———————————

WBZTV reports that an ordinary NH voter was able to put Rudy Giuliani visibly on the defensive:

Rudy Giuliani is the latest candidate to get caught off guard by a cut-to-the-chase question from a voter.

I spoke with the Derry, New Hampshire woman who brought him up short, and she’s feeling the heat for her question.

Katherine Prudhomme-O’Brien says she was just curious about the apparent lack of support for their father’s candidacy by Giuliani’s son and daughter from a previous marriage, but that query and Giuliani’s dismissive reply have been the buzz of the political world all weekend.

“I asked him how he’d expect the American people to give him loyal fellowship if he was having a hard time getting it from his own family.”

Giuliani’s response: “There are complexities in every family in America. The best thing I can say is kind of leave my family alone, just like I’ll leave your family alone.”

Keller: What did you think of his answer?

Katherine: I thought it was a little defensive. I guess he’s still not ready to talk about the whole thing because it’s very uncomfortable for him.

———————————

Meanwhile, on the campaign trail, Michelle Obama made a not-very-cryptic reference of the same kind.

Chicago Sun-Times:

At another stop, in Atlantic, Michelle said she travels with her husband in part “to model what it means to have family values,” adding “if you can’t run your own house, you can’t run the White House.” She didn’t elaborate, but it could be interpreted as a swipe at the Clintons.

Hillary can easily unify the democrat party, simply by giving Barack Obama second-place on her ticket. But Bob Novak says that democrat insiders think Hillary will need a non-conspicuously-liberal running mate from the South to have any chance of winning.

Anticipating that Sen. Hillary Clinton will clinch the Democratic presidential nomination, some supporters are beginning to argue against her choosing her principal rival — Sen. Barack Obama — for vice president.

They maintain Obama provides no general election help for Clinton. As an African-American from Illinois, he represents an ethnic group and a state already solidly in the Democratic column.

This school of thought advocates a Southerner as Clinton’s running mate. The last time Democrats won a national election without a Southerner on the ticket was 1944. Prominent Democrats from the South are in short supply today. The leading prospect: former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner.

Karl Rove’s recently announced intention of riding off into the sunset at the end of the month has provoked a veritable tsunami of reaction by the left, which has been going on for days.

Some of today’s funnier examples:

James Carville says that ok, so what if Rove won a lot of elections? Bush is down in the polls late in his second term, and that means Rove really lost a generation of Republicans to the democrats.

Harold Meyerson thinks that simpleton Rove overlooked the nation’s basic need for socialism.

Best of all, Monica Hesse fumes indignantly in the Washington Post on behalf of the mortally offended mass of Rove adversaries and opponents dismissed by the great man himself in a Wall Street Journal interview as “the mob.” How dare he use the language of social condescension? Doesn’t he realize how politically incorrect it is to use “the mob” as a pejorative?

Personally, I think it is all really very simple. George W. Bush isn’t running for anything in 2008, so he doesn’t really need his political strategist on daily call anymore. That makes it a good time for Karl Rove to take some time off, and go off and crank out a book and make a ton of cash, while quite possibly looking over the GOP field of candidates. I wouldn’t be surprised myself if old Karl reappears next year, refreshed by a nice vacation (and a considerably wealthier man), all ready to help kick some more democrat butt.

Dick Morris claims that Fred Thompson’s candidacy is in eclipse, and is bragging that nativists like himself got Thompson to fire Spencer Abraham because he was too pro-immigration.

Gosh, maybe there’s a moral here, could circumstance A possibly be related to circumstance B?

But Thompson’s problems go beyond fund raising. Yet to announce his candidacy, he has already fired two campaign managers. His first choice, Tom Collamore, former vice president of Altria, the new name for Phillip Morris, fell to pressure from Fred’s wife Jeri, a self-styled political consultant. Then, the luckless candidate turned to former Michigan Senator and Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham. But just as bloggers — including us — began to unload on Abraham for his exceedingly pro-immigration record and to cast doubts on his firmness as a backer of Israel, Fred got rid of him, too.

More than anything else, however, it is Fred’s indecision about running that, combined with speculation that he may not want it badly enough, is cooling GOP ardor. After tying with Rudy Giuliani in Scott Rasmussen’s daily tracking polls, he has now fallen seven points back.

Dick Morris thinks we should all support Newt Gingrich instead.

Lots of luck. Newt came out in support of Global Warming back in April. I doubt he is really stupid enough to believe in that kind of nonsense, so I expect it was just a cynical ploy to appeal to wider constituencies of the Great Unwashed. Politicians have to win elections, I know, but there are limits. Global Warming is an especially objectionable sort of popular delusion which intelligent people have a universal duty to oppose. Real conservatives (of which I am one) do not support candidates who truckle to stupidity and pander on such a scale in order to get votes. Newt can go jump in the lake.

After they made us lose in Vietnam, wrecked the US economy, and destroyed the nation’s cities, being identified as a “Liberal” came to be regarded as no longer a compliment. In the late 1960s, leftists like Hillary preferred calling themselves “Radicals.” But, as Jonah Goldberg observes, the favored term in pinko circles these days is “Progressive.”

At the recent CNN/YouTube debate, Hillary Clinton was asked to define what a liberal is and declare whether she was one.

“You know,” the New York senator said, “it is a word that originally meant that you were for freedom … that you were willing to stand against big power and on behalf of the individual. Unfortunately, in the last 30, 40 years, it has been turned up on its head, and it’s been made to seem as though it is a word that describes big government, totally contrary to what its meaning was in the 19th and early 20th century.”

I prefer the word ‘progressive,’ ” Clinton continued, “which has a real American meaning, going back to the progressive era at the beginning of the 20th century. I consider myself a modern progressive.”

Now, when the presumptive standard bearer of the Democratic Party and the political (and matrimonial) heir to the only Democratic president to be elected to two terms since Franklin Roosevelt says she’s not a liberal, it’s actually quite a big deal.

But first, do note how crafty Clinton is being. She makes it sound as though she’s lamenting the unfair transformation of the word “liberal” from lover of individual freedom to champion of big government.

How, exactly, does Clinton think liberal came to mean “big government?” Could it have had something to do with her attempt to nationalize one-seventh of the U.S. economy under her health care plan, or maybe with her book, It Takes a Village, which suggests that the government intrude itself into every nook and cranny of our lives?

Clinton’s answer taps into the common complaint on the left that the word “liberal” has fallen into disrepute not because of the policies of liberals, but thanks to the villainously cynical distortions of conservatives. “The greatest triumph that conservatives ever achieved,” liberal columnist Clarence Page recently complained, “is to make liberals embarrassed to call themselves ‘liberal.’ ”

Right. The failures of the Great Society, bussing, racial quotas, high taxes, the Vietnam War (both its beginning and end), Jimmy Carter’s “malaise,” the nuclear freeze movement, lax law enforcement, speech codes, abortion on demand, bilingual education and, of course, Michael Dukakis: We’re expected to believe none of these things can be weighed against liberalism. Liberalism, after all, is never wrong. It must be those mustache-twirling henchmen Lee Atwater and Karl Rove who are to blame.

One might also ask, if Clinton laments how liberalism has become identified with big government, why it is she wants to revive the progressive label. After all, if liberal is a misnomer for statists, progressive represents a long-overdue return to truth in labeling. In Europe, after all, liberals are the free-market, small-government types. But in America, the same people came to be called conservatives in no small part because they were trying to conserve liberal ideas of limited government amid the riot of social engineering during the Progressive Era that Clinton is so nostalgic for.

Indeed, she’s right that self-described liberals championed the sovereignty of the individual, which is why the authentic liberals were hated by progressives who believed that, in the words of progressive activist Jane Addams, “We must demand that the individual shall be willing to lose the sense of personal achievement, and shall be content to realize his activity only in the connection with the activity of the many.”

As late as 1951, Sen. Robert Taft, “Mr. Republican” to his fans, insisted he wasn’t so much a conservative as merely an “an old fashioned liberal.”

Even so, progressives were more desperate to seize the l-word for themselves because they needed it more. They so ruined the word “progressive” — particularly during the excesses of World War I — that they had to abandon it like a rider leaving an exhausted horse behind. By the late 1940s, “progressive” became little more than a euphemism for a Stalinist or at least a useful idiot for Moscow.

Read the whole thing.

People like Hillary don’t mean Progressive in the sense of free silver coinage and restraints on railroads. They mean Progressive in the Henry Wallace, only faintly concealed Marxist, sense of the late New Deal era.

I just refer to them as “commies” myself.

J.R. Dunn is not so pessimistic about next year.

So we’ve got a candidate who is among the most radical ever to stand for the presidency. One who was furthermore at the very center of the most corrupt administration in modern history. Who has a lengthy trail of dubious (to put it mildly) deals and arrangements behind her. Whose record as a senator is conspicuous for lack of any serious accomplishment. Who is, above all, one of the most unappealing personalities to run for president in this or any other era.

According to reputable polling, 52% of the voters have gone on record to declare that they will never, under any circumstances, cast their vote for Hillary Clinton. The last time I looked, 48% was a losing number in the presidential sweepstakes.

You’d think that, under those conditions, the GOP would be aching to come to grips with Hillary. But you’d be wrong. According to the conservative commentariat, the election is over, a year and more ahead of time, and Hillary has it in the bag.

It’s a similar case with Congress. The Democrats, in control of both the House and the Senate, have astonished the world by getting even less done than the recent GOP Congress. None of their electoral promises have been kept. (Apart from raising the minimum wage, which took eight months, and an “ethics” bill distinguished only by the fact that it’s emptier than most such exercises – I’m surprised they didn’t add an earmark or two before they passed it.) Their greatest effort was put into trying to pass – not once, but twice – the immigrant amnesty act, possibly the most actively detested bill of the new century. The boast of the new Congress, run by some of the most ghastly personalities on the national stage (Pelosi, Murtha, Schumer, and Reid) is that they’ve done their best to undermine the Iraq war effort – not, historically, a stance to gain much in the way of a public following. (Trust me on that; I’ve checked.)

The numbers concur here as well. Confidence in the Congress bottomed out at14%, one the worst levels (the worst, did I hear someone say?) on record. Fool all the people all the time? This crew can scarcely fool themselves.

But we get the same response from conservative pundits – the Congress is lost. Forget about 2008; head for high ground, the deluge is coming. …

Read the whole thing.

Steven Stark explains:

John Edwards’s campaign seems to have hit a roadblock that could seriously hurt his chances of securing the Democratic nomination. And it has nothing to do with any of his perceived screw-ups that have gotten their share of media attention, including his $400 haircut, his new compound in North Carolina, and his hedge-fund experiences.

There’s no doubt that Edwards made a mistake with the haircut, and that wealthy populist candidates are not easily forgiven for reminding people that they have money. But most candidates on the trail spend a lot on personal appearances — it’s part of the game. As for the value of Edwards’s house, it’s probably comparable to that of the Clintons or a lot of other Democratic candidates, including former Democratic nominees Al Gore and John Kerry. And the hedge fund? Please show me a major candidate whose family hasn’t raked in some cash from a few major investments or consulting. Most are pretty well-off.

No, Edwards’s problem is different, and it’s not even about his politics. It’s about a piece of paper that hangs — or doesn’t hang — on the wall of his office.

Edwards, you see, didn’t go to Harvard or Yale.

In the Democratic landscape of 2007, that doesn’t seem as if it should be a problem. But you’d have to go back to 1984 to find a Democratic nominee (Walter Mondale) who didn’t attend one of those elite universities for either college or graduate school. Before that, a number of Democratic also-rans, including Gary Hart, Paul Tsongas, and Jerry Brown, were also graduates of either Harvard or Yale. And the pattern will continue in 2008 if either Hillary Clinton (Yale Law) or Barack Obama (Harvard Law) wins the nomination.

It’s a trend that hearkens back to the old country, where it’s assumed all leaders belonged to the same debating club at Oxford. Even other Ivy League schools — such as Columbia, Princeton, and Penn — don’t seem to be good enough for the Democrats, much less the Atlantic Coast Conference schools of Clemson, North Carolina State, and the University of North Carolina, at which Edwards received his education.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Andrew Olson.

Marc Sheppard observes that good news concerning the success of US operations in Iraq and the continuation of British support under new Prime Minister Gordon Brown has made it a bad week for the democrat anti-war left, but the democrats and their media allies are fighting back.

Warfare is the Way of deception – Sun Tzu

The left’s anti-war forces sustained heavy casualties earlier this week. And, judging from both strategy shifts and painful screams heard throughout the liberal blogosphere, many of the fallen were high value propaganda targets.

It’s no secret that Democratic strategists see failure in Iraq as a blood-soaked red carpet leading them to the White House next year. So much so that even before the president officially announced the initial 20,000 troop surge in January, opposition party leaders were scrambling to denounce it as a doomed and desperate last-gasp effort to save a failing policy. …

(various positive news)

..the now fully implemented surge is working to expectation and the misinformed contrarians were wrong.

No problem – Dems and the MSM will simply toggle between denying and ignoring that fact. Just as they’ve denied the nature of Al Qaeda in Iraq and ignored its recent attempts to use chemical weapons against Iraqi civilians. Ditto requests for their plan to prevent the untold civilian casualties of anti-war associated with cutting and running, which may now include a repeat of what happened to the Kurds of Halabja.

Sure enough — with hopes of an unfavorable review quickly fading, a new stratagem has arisen, with anti-war disinformation brigades launching a surge of their own. Suddenly no longer concerned with military matters, today we are being barraged with statements like those from ABC News (“In the critical, political arena, the picture is bleak”) or from Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE), who in April declared “that the troop surge plan in Iraq has failed,” yet today quipped:

“We’ve made some progress in the surge, we’ve made some military progress. But I think [Petraeus will] be honest enough to say we’ve made no political progress.”

As is often said of its counterpart, it’s becoming abundantly clear that truth is the first casualty of anti-war.

Read the whole thing.

I don’t typically agree with Hendrik Hertzberg one little bit, but I think he has a pretty good argument about procedural unfairness in the case of California’s proposed Presidential Election Reform Act initiative.

I could not help smiling though, reading Hertzberg’s piece, since I know perfectly well what side he’d be arguing if the likely result was in the interests of the democrats.

At first glance, next year’s Presidential election looks like a blowout. But it might not be. Luckily for the incumbent party, neither George W. Bush nor Dick Cheney will be running; indeed, the election of 2008 will be the first since 1952 without a sitting President or Vice-President on the ballot. At the moment, survey research reflects a generic public preference for a Democratic victory next year. Still, despite everything, there are nearly as many polls showing particular Republicans beating particular Democrats as vice versa. So this election could be another close one. If it is, the winner may turn out to have been chosen not on November 4, 2008, but five months earlier, on June 3rd.

Two weeks ago, one of the most important Republican lawyers in Sacramento quietly filed a ballot initiative that would end the practice of granting all fifty-five of California’s electoral votes to the statewide winner. Instead, it would award two of them to the statewide winner and the rest, one by one, to the winner in each congressional district. Nineteen of the fifty-three districts are represented by Republicans, but Bush carried twenty-two districts in 2004. The bottom line is that the initiative, if passed, would spot the Republican ticket something in the neighborhood of twenty electoral votes—votes that it wouldn’t get under the rules prevailing in every other sizable state in the Union.

The Tuesday after the first Monday in June is California’s traditional Primary Day. But it’s not the one that everybody will be paying attention to. Five months ago, the legislature hastily moved the Presidential part up to February 5th, joining a stampede of states hoping to claim a piece of the early-state action previously reserved for Iowa and New Hampshire. June 3rd will be an altogether sleepier, low-turnout affair. There may be a few scattered contests for legislative nominations, but the only statewide items on the ballot will be initiatives. More than two dozen have been filed so far, ranging from a proposal to start a state-run Internet poker site to pay for filling potholes to a redundant slew of anti-gay-marriage measures. Few will make it to the ballot. Many are not even intended to; they’re a feint in some byzantine negotiation, or just a cheap attempt to get a little attention—for a two-hundred-dollar fee, anyone can file one. (Actually getting one on the ballot requires more than four hundred thousand signatures, and the outfits that collect them usually charge a dollar or two per signature.) Initiative No. 07-0032—the Presidential Election Reform Act—is different. It’s serious. Its backers have access to serious money. And it could pass.

Nominally, the sponsor of No. 07-0032 is Californians for Equal Representation. But that’s just a letterhead—there’s no such organization. Its address is the office suite of Bell, McAndrews & Hiltachk, the law firm for the California Republican Party, and its covering letter is signed by Thomas W. Hiltachk, the firm’s managing partner and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s personal lawyer for election matters. Hiltachk and his firm have been involved in many well-financed ballot initiatives before, including the recall that put Arnold in Sacramento. …

“Equal Representation” sounds good, too. And the winner-take-all rule, which is in force in all but two states, does seem unfair on the face of it. (The two are Maine and Nebraska, which use congressional-district allocation. But they are so small—only five districts between them—and so homogeneous that neither has ever split its electoral votes.) It would be obviously unjust for a state to give all its legislative seats to the party that gets the most votes statewide. So why should Party A get a hundred per cent of that state’s electoral votes if forty per cent of its voters support Party B? No wonder Democrats and Republicans alike initially react to this proposal in a strongly positive way. To most people, the electoral-college status quo feels intuitively wrong. …

If California does what No. 07-0032 calls for while everybody else is still going with winner take all by state, the real-world result will be to give Party B (in this case the Republicans) an unearned, Ohio-size gift of electoral votes. …

The California initiative flunks even the categorical-imperative test. Imagine, as a thought experiment, that all the states were to adopt this “reform” at once. Electoral votes would still be winner take all, only by congressional district rather than by state. Instead of ten battleground states and forty spectator states, we’d have thirty-five battleground districts and four hundred spectator districts. The red-blue map would be more mottled, and in some states more people might get to see campaign commercials, because media markets usually take in more than one district. But congressional districts are as gerrymandered as human ingenuity and computer power can make them. The electoral-vote result in ninety per cent of the country would still be a foregone conclusion, no matter how close the race.

California Initiative No. 07-0032 is an audacious power play packaged as a step forward for democratic fairness. It’s the lotusland equivalent of Tom DeLay’s 2003 midterm redistricting in Texas, except with a sweeter smell, a better disguise, and larger stakes. And the only way Californians will reject it is if they have a chance to think about it first.