Perspective . . .

THANK-YOU, Mound of Sound.

That $90,000 cheque . . .

WE SHOULD BE

This could cause more damage than all of the Stevie gaffes to date, because it won't play in the beer parlors aka "sports bars", where the politically unaware and ignorant hang out. These people are unsophisticated, and things like Global Warming and the Tar Sands pipelines confuse. BC should be a reminder; all of the "Progressive" Canuck poliblogs were pronouncing Christie Clark toast. So, what happened? Simple, the ignorant voted for what they could understand. People can understand greed when they look at Duffy.

 — Sen. Maximus Avaritius —

Sociopaths are people, too, and as long as you're not one of their targets, hail, fellow well met, just don't get in their way, by doing stupid things like asking for accountability. It costs to live well, socially. As we see from Nigel's largesse, these sociopaths can afford to be gracious when it suits them — or when they are sufficiently shamed by publicity, or are on the wrong end of a 12-gauge.

Yon Duffy has a porky aspect, to bash the Bard, that plays so obscenely well. To Duffy, the Senate was an All-You-Can-Eat buffet of expensed perks: the Porkarama of Patronage. T-t-that's all, folks.

The hole gets deeper . . .

AND THE D.E.A. JUST KEEPS ON DIGGING. The US Drug Enforcement Administration has grown from its creation by Nixon on July 1, 1973. According to Wiki,

DEA's headquarters is located in Arlington, Virginia across from the Pentagon. It maintains its own DEA Academy located on the United States Marine Corps base at Quantico, Virginia along with the FBI Academy. It maintains 21 domestic field divisions with 227 field offices and 86 foreign offices in 62 countries. With a budget exceeding 2.415 billion dollars, DEA employs over 10,800 people, including over 5,500 Special Agents.

That's one hell of a bureaucratic empire, employing a lot of people who have a stake in keeping things the way they are.

And that's the problem, because the War on Drugs just isn't working. Not only is it a failure, but it is causing incalculable damage to America, but also to the supplier countries.

HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH follows these abuses, noting that the Mexican government is unconcerned with the violation of its citizens' civil rights:Through in-depth research in five of Mexico’s most violent states, Human Rights Watch found evidence that strongly suggests the participation of security forces in more than 170 cases of torture, 39 “disappearances,” and 24 extrajudicial killings since Calderón took office in December 2006.

“Instead of reducing violence, Mexico’s ‘war on drugs’ has resulted in a dramatic increase in killings, torture, and other appalling abuses by security forces, which only make the climate of lawlessness and fear worse in many parts of the country,” said José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch.

No shit, Sherlock — it's getting really, really brutal, and there are no signs of the violence levelling-off, according to The New Statesman's article by Malcolm Beith, "Mexico's drug war: the battle without hope", 

The horrors of Mexico’s drug war, which has raged since December 2006 and the start of President Felipe Calderón’s administration, know no bounds. More than 50,000 people have died in drug-related violence since, and there is no sign of the bloodshed diminishing. In 2006, shortly before Calderón deployed tens of thousands of soldiers to combat the violence, a group of armed thugs rolled five heads on to the dance floor of a nightclub in central Mexico as a warning; by 2007 and 2008, beheadings had become commonplace.

In 2009, a man nicknamed El Pozolero – “the stew-maker” – was arrested and confessed to dissolving the remains of more than 300 people in vats of caustic soda for a drug kingpin. Later that year, a man working for rivals of the powerful Sinaloa cartel was found; he had been beheaded and his face had been carved off and delicately stitched on to a football. Dozens of mass graves were discovered throughout the Latin American nation last year, many of them in Tamaulipas, a north-eastern state notorious for its hazy fug of lawlessness and for the terror tactics of Los Zetas, a group of former paramilitaries who now run their own drug trafficking syndicate.

Videos of some of the atrocities have been disseminated over the internet. In the most recent one, described above, members of the Sinaloa cartel are put to death.


El Pozolero — YIKES! Makes Jeffrey Dahmer look like an amateur. But the "stew-maker" is just one of a whole horde of monsters. You can find out more at El Blog del Narco, and the translation service of choice, if your Spanish is NFG.  The New Statesman opines that it pulls no punches: "Blog del Narco: madness, mutilation and murder in Mexico".

Twenty-eight thousand people have been killed since President Felipe Calderón launched his crackdown on the drug cartels in 2006. "Lost cities", such as Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez, are practically run by the leading drug cartels.


Here's the scary part: the Mexican cartels may be too big to take down. They are now part of the US financial system.

The Sinaloa cartel – led by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera, son of an opium farmer from the mountains in the north-western state of Sinaloa – has expanded in recent years to become the most powerful drug trafficking organisation in the world. 


The Sinaloa cartel produces its own marijuana, heroin and methamphetamine; it imports chemical precursors used to make methamphetamine from Asian nations such as India, Thailand and China. The authorities have spotted Sinaloa cartel operatives and scouts (conejos, or rabbits, in Spanish) on every continent; the Australian authorities believe the cartel is responsible for delivering as much as 500 kilogrammes of cocaine a month on to their shores.

In the spirit of globalisation, it is thought, El Chapo has bought properties in eastern Europe and throughout Latin America in an effort to launder his dirty money. In 2010 the US-based Wachovia Bank admitted to having handled $378bn for Mexican currency-exchange houses between 2004 and 2007, roughly $13bn of which was confirmed to belong to the Sinaloa cartel. (The US department of justice slapped sanctions of $160m on the bank for “wilfully failing to maintain an anti-money laundering programme”.)


378 BILLION DOLLARS! You can buy a lot of American politicians with that kind of money.

Societies and corruption . . .

CORRUPTION IS ETERNAL — and it comes in many different guises. According to Fred Reed's article, "The Receding Tide: Becoming Uzbekistan", 


Several things characterize countries of the Third Word, whatever precisely "Third World" means. 

The first is corruption. America is rotten with it, but American corruption is distinct from corruption in, say, Guatemala or Thailand, being less visible and better organized.

Several major differences exist between the usual corruption in the Third World and that in America. In most of the Third World, corruption exists from top to bottom. Everyone and everything is for sale. Bribery amounts to an economic system, like capitalism or socialism. By contrast, in the United States, graft flourishes mostly at the level of government and commerce.

• • •

Second, unaccountable and often intrusive police not subject to control by the public. In America formal police departments rapidly grow more militarized, jack-booted, swatted-out, and their powers grow. A law-abiding citizen should never be afraid of the police, and a misbehaving cop should worry intensely when said law-abiding citizen records his badge number with intent to call the chief. Those days are over. Today the cops can bully, threaten, and harass, and there is precious little you can do about it. The proliferating laws against filming the police can have only one purpose, to prevent exposure of misbehavior. 

Check out the rest of the article. Makes me wonder what kind of deals Stevie and the Weasels have made with the Tar Sands Tyrants.

How very conservative of you

This just blows it all out of the water:

A former B.C. Liberal MLA now working as a director at Simon Fraser University has been giving public dollars from his university expense account to the B.C. Liberal Party.

Documents obtained by The Vancouver Sun show that in just over one month earlier this year, Wilf Hurd expensed $2,045 to attend seven B.C. Liberal Party fundraisers.

The payments included $1,000 for six tickets to an event put on by Liberal MLA and former cabinet minister Harry Bloy, $350 to attend an event by Liberal MLA and deputy Speaker Linda Reid as well as various others from mid-January to late February.

Hurd, who is the university’s director of government relations, paid for the events with personal cheques and then submitted the charges to the university for reimbursement.

He filed most under the expense category “entertainment — catered meals,” though he appears to have identified the $1,000 for Bloy as “advertising and promotional fees.” Hurd attached copies of invites or flyers for all the events, and copies of his cheques to the B.C. Liberals, with his expense claim.

Well, at least he attached the political crap to his claim. That would suggest that SFU was OK with it. 

On Tuesday, university spokesman Don MacLachlan said the school had no official policy but has allowed the practice for years. He said SFU has now decided such donations will no longer be allowed.

“For many years we have attended events of both parties, NDP and Liberal, to further the university’s interests,” MacLachlan said Tuesday, adding questions from The Sun have sparked an abrupt change in policy.

“It certainly brought it to light and caused some quick thought,” he said. “Let me be clear, the practice is not going to continue.”

Ah... the old "Let me be clear" strategy.

Well. Everything is just fine then. 

Tricky Dicky . . .

BLOOMBERG has an interesting report, "Nigeria Files Charges Against Dick Cheney, Halliburton Over Bribery Case". I wonder what will happen . . .

The Sea to Sky highway, the 2010 Olympics and the BC Rail link up

Ever wonder why there are no tolls put on the Olympic legacy known as the Sea to Sky highway?

There are tolls. Campbell promised them to his big business buddies. And we're paying them. But what you may not know is that at least one journalist reported back in the early days of the Sea to Sky project that the BC Ministry of Transportation was spending money, ($166 million), gained from the sale of BC Rail to fund phase 1 of the highway project.

Think about that for a minute.

Campbell promises that he won't sell BC Rail, then, suddenly, while falsely claiming that BC Rail was a money-losing proposition, puts it on the chopping block. Ideology of a fanatic bottom-liner or was there something more sinister at work here?

Here's some meat to chew on. The Vancouver/Whistler Olympic bid was not a sure thing. In the first round Pyeongchang, South Korea led the short list with 51 votes to Vancouver's 40. Salzberg, Austria received only 16 votes which effectively eliminated that city. What that meant was that virtually all of those who had voted for Salzberg would have to shift their votes to Vancouver if the Vancouver bid was to succeed in the second round of voting.

Problem. Money. Campbell, who had a bevy of pals wrapped up in the Olympic bid process, was made fully aware that the greatest stumbling block to a successful bid was a highway between Vancouver and Whistler that was too long, too dangerous and subject to road-blocking slides. The only way to overcome that massive obstacle would be to commit to IOC officials that the thoroughfare would be totally rebuilt in time to host an Olympic party. But where would the money come from?

Sell an asset... and sell it fast. BC Rail.

On 28 August, 2002, Vancouver makes the short list of four cities bidding on the 2010 Winter Olympics. The IOC cites the Sea to Sky Highway as a problem. The Vancouver Olympic bid committee has until 10 January, 2003 to submit a bid book, complete with the proposed plan to solve the one problem cited by the IOC. * 

On 13 May, 2003, Gordon Campbell broke an election promise and announced that BC Rail would be sold.

On 2 July, 2003, the IOC announced that Vancouver would host the 2010 Winter Olympics and Paralympics.

On 25 November, 2003, Campbell announced that the government had accepted the bid from CN to purchase BC Rail. (OK... a 990 year lease.) More than one of the other bidders complained that the deal had been rigged in favour of CN.

On 10 January, 2004, flush with money from the sale of BC Rail, the Campbell government releases a Capital Project Plan known as the Sea to Sky highway improvement project.

If you don't smell something there your nose isn't working.

Over to Laila Yule.

* Paragraph added as update.

Corruption around the world . . .

TRANSPARENCY INTERNATIONAL has released its 2010 world corruption index. Denmark, New Zealand and Singapore are the least corrupt, with Finland, Sweden and Canada right behind.  At the other end, there's Somalia and Myanmar.

War is a racket villa in Dubai

Der Spiegel :
"Billions of dollars are being secreted out of Kabul to help well-connected Afghans buy luxury villas in Dubai. Amid concerns that the money could be the result of corruption, American politicians have temporarily cut off [$3.9-billion in] aid to the Afghan government."

Proud new owners of villas in Dubai:
"a brother and a cousin of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, one of Karzai's former vice presidents and the brother one of the country's two current vice presidents."

Properties are registered under the names of the individuals issuing the loans, such as Sherkhan Farnood, the founder and chairman of Kabul Bank, Afghanistan's largest private bank.
Farnood : "What I'm doing is not proper, not exactly what I should do. But this is Afghanistan."

Kabul Bank's executives helped finance President Hamid Karzai's reelection campaign last year, and the bank is partly owned by Mahmoud Karzai, the Afghan president's older brother, and by Haseen Fahim, the brother of Karzai's vice presidential running mate.
Karzai's brother has "an informal home-loan agreement with Kabul Bank and pays $7,000 a month in interest".

Khalilullah Fruzi, chief executive of the bank, says "Kabul Bank is so flush that it is building a $30 million headquarters, a cluster of shimmering towers of bulletproof glass."
The bank is also spending millions to hire gunmen from a company called Khurasan Security Services, which, according to registration documents, used to be controlled by Fruzi and is now run by his brother.

Meanwhile, a new survey finds that corruption in Afghanistan has doubled since 2007, with one in seven Afghans paying nearly $1 billion in bribes last year, and US contractors are leaving the country without paying Afghan construction companies hundreds of thousands, even millions, of dollars owed, but McCain says winning Kandahar is the key to winning the war.

And so it goes....



Canada's aid in Afghanistan will amount to $1.9B over the ten-year period ending in 2011, making Canada one of Afghanistan's largest donors. In the 2008/2009 fiscal year, Canada disbursed approximately $224M.
And I'll bet you never expected to be part owner of a villa in Dubai.

Boys and their toys

As mentioned below, the Canadian government is spending over a billion dollars on security for the upcoming Group of Eight and Group of Twenty summit dog-and-pony shows. This is more than five times the original estimate and dwarfs the amounts spent on similar summits in London (April 2009 $30 million) and Pittsburgh (Sept. 2009 -$18 million) both of which dealt with more protesters than can probably be expected in "Toronto the Good" 
Some of the money has gone on shiny new toys for the RCMP, OPP and Toronto Police riot squads, crowd control units and motorcade cops as well as the usual close protection bodyguard types, though naturally all the world leaders will be bringing their own sizable security details. 
About a million dollars has been spent to buy the Toronto Police four "sound notifiers" aka sonic cannons capable of producing sound pressure/ decibel levels about the same as standing behind a 747 when it revs its jets. This isn't just a loud public address system, it is a weapon that causes extreme pain and permanent hearing damage. 
Of course that leaves about another $1,099,000,000 for police y, new horses and motorcycles, riot gear, pepper spray, tasers, and lots and lots of "consulting fees" for "security experts" and plenty of contracts for private security firms. I bet this guy doesn't get any of it. 
In fact, it is so much money that they could have simply paid every man, woman and child in the entire province of Ontario about $95 just to stay home for those two weekends and still have had enough to provide a similar level of security to the Pittsburgh summit. Or they could have paid everyone in the Greater Toronto Area about $200 to spend the weekend out of town. If that seems like overkill, we could strictly limit it to Metro Toronto, give all 2.48 million residents $400 and still have more than three times as much as they spent on the London summit to buy coffee and donuts for the Toronto cops. 
In addition to the gratuitous skimming and graft bookkeeping problems, my real worry is that you can't give the boys their toys and not expect them to play with them. As we've seen numerous times since the needless pepper-spraying of demonstrators at the 1997 APEC summit to the over-reaction of police at Queen's Park in Toronto in 2000, in New York at the 2004 Republican Convention and at the Minnesota 2008 Republican Convention, if you bring in enough riot cops, you are going to have a riot. Even if the cops have to try to start it themselves.

Weaselry

HELLACIOUS HELENA'S HUBBY has beat the rap! The egregious Rahim Jaffer is the mysterious beneficiary of a get-out-of-jail-free card issued by some weasel.

According to the G&M:

He was initially charged with driving while having more than 80 milligrams in one hundred millilitres of blood, speeding and possession of cocaine.

The former MP was sentenced to a $500 fine. He had already agreed to make a $500 charitable donation to the Canadian Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.

“I'm sorry. I know this was a serious matter,” Mr. Jaffer said afterward outside the court. “I know I should have been more careful and I took full responsibility for my careless driving.”

So, for one of the Harper elite, a coke possession charge, a +.08 impaired charge and a 43kph over-limit speeding offence all resolves to "careless driving"?

Time to show Stevie how much we care about "careless". Grrrrrrr.

Palin running for cover...

As Cathie says, the excuses provided for Sarah Palin's sudden and unexpected departure from the governor's chair in Alaska stinks like a three-day-old Alaska King Crab.

Apparently Palin was simply bugged by "bloggers and activists".

Hmmm. What were they blogging about?

Ohhh! They went a little farther than calling her Cariboo Barbie. They might actually have some heavy duty dirt.

Start corrupt...

Stay corrupt.

The Harper party has a new way of counting ballots. (Emphasis mine)

Federal Conservative party president Don Plett rejects criticism that the new system used to determine whether sitting MPs should face a nomination challenge was undemocratic.

Plett said 94,000 ballots were mailed nationally to party members in ridings with an incumbent, asking them whether they wanted a nomination race in their constituency. The mail-out included Calgary West, where lawyer Donna Kennedy-Glans wanted to challenge longtime MP Rob Anders.

Two-thirds approval was required to trigger a battle, while an unreturned ballot was counted as a no under new rules adopted by the Conservative party's national council in March. In the past, if people wanted to challenge a nomination, they generally could after an interview, Plett said.

"I find it very, very strange that somebody would even suggest that that is not democratic," Plett said.

Of course Plett would find that strange, particularly since the two-thirds approval requirement is hoisted out of Robert's Rules of Order and then promptly corrupted to favour the incumbent.

A two-thirds vote means two-thirds of the votes cast, ignoring blanks which should never be counted.

A mail out ballot, not returned in time for the tellers to count it, is considered a blank.

Starting the process in a corrupted manner simply means they'll continue to try it further on up the line, when it has a more direct impact on more than card-carrying Harperites.

Update: Fairness dictates that I point out that the Liberals aren't better than the Harperites on this issue. From comments over at Canadian Cynic we get the word from a Liberal party member.

... we were told that Liberal incumbents would also be protected. Sure, they had to meet some minimal requirements as outlined here but it was anticipated that every incumbent could easily pass the test.

In the case of the Liberal Party it's not just sitting members who are protected, it's everyone who stood in the last election and still wants to be the party nominee.

Sure enough, the Hill Times has the details.

The difference, (and there is one), is that the Conservatives call themselves a "grassroots" party, and that is patently untrue. They're a party of "inners" - if you ain't one of the good ole boys, you ain't gettin' in.

What is more heinous however, is the attempt to demonstrate a democratic process which truly is no such thing. For Plett, or any other Conservative, to suggest that using a two-thirds majority rule and then assigning unreturned ballots (blanks) to any part of the question is not a corrupted process is demonstrably dishonest.

Why not just announce that incumbents would go unchallenged and be done with it? Going through a public exercise in corruption shows just how stupid they actually are.

H/T Accidental Deliberations

When The Geneva Conventions Were Thought to be "Quaint"

Just when you thought we'd hit the bottom of the barrel on the revelations of torture, abuse and crime under the Bush regime, you realize that buried under this barrel is a whole other barrel of festering evil.

"Third, the Nelly account shows that health professionals are right in the thick of the torture and abuse of the prisoners—suggesting a systematic collapse of professional ethics driven by the Pentagon itself. He describes body searches undertaken for no legitimate security purpose, simply to sexually invade and humiliate the prisoners. This was a standardized Bush Administration tactic–the importance of which became apparent to me when I participated in some Capitol Hill negotiations with White House representatives relating to legislation creating criminal law accountability for contractors. The Bush White House vehemently objected to provisions of the law dealing with rape by instrumentality. When House negotiators pressed to know why, they were met first with silence and then an embarrassed acknowledgement that a key part of the Bush program included invasion of the bodies of prisoners in a way that might be deemed rape by instrumentality under existing federal and state criminal statutes. While these techniques have long been known, the role of health care professionals in implementing them is shocking. " (emphasis mine)

Meanwhile, back in Iraq, it hasn't just been the big companies like Haliburton and Blackwater that have made a fortune shafting the taxpayer and the Iraqi people. It appears some of America's Shiny Perfect Heroes in Uniform aren't so shiny after all.

In one case of graft from that period, Maj. John L. Cockerham of the Army pleaded guilty to accepting nearly $10 million in bribes as a contracting officer for the Iraq war and other military efforts from 2004 to 2007, when he was arrested. Major Cockerham’s wife has also pleaded guilty, as have several other contracting officers. (emphasis mine again)

What the heck is Obama waiting for? He won the election. He has the votes he needs in the House and Senate even if every Republican decides to walk out on the vote. He has the public support. Is he afraid the truth will make bipartisan baby Jebus cry or something? Bring on the trials!

Crossposted from the Woodshed

Palin buys the silence of her National Guard adjutant

The issue is whether Sarah Palin has any national security experience at all. The answer, of course would be NO. State governors do not control the national guards of their states in relation to national defense. To clarify, the Adjutant General of Alaska's National Guard pointed out that neither Palin nor he had command authority over the state national guard in a national defense scenario. Palin's authority was restricted to domestic situations which Major General Craig Campbell described as fighting wildfires and rescuing stranded residents.

It all started on August 31st, 2008 when Campbell stated, without denigrating Palin, that her role was limited: (all emphasis mine)

Maj. Gen. Craig Campbell, adjutant general of the Alaska National Guard, considers Palin "extremely responsive and smart" and says she is in charge when it comes to in-state services, such as emergencies and natural disasters where the National Guard is the first responder.

But, in an interview with The Associated Press on Sunday, he said he and Palin play no role in national defense activities, even when they involve the Alaska National Guard. The entire operation is under federal control, and the governor is not briefed on situations.

That's pretty clear, isn't it? Campbell has even clarified his role in relation to national guard command and control.

By September 5th, however, Campbell had changed his tune.

Governor Palin is in charge, the commander-in-chief for the Alaska National Guard, and she plays the same role that all governors in all 54 states and territories play, running and managing and operating the Guard day to day for the states that they're responsible for. I'll tell you, in the last few days, I've been watching the press, and I've not been very pleased with what I've been seeing about the chastising of the National Guard by having it diminished by the insinuation that a commander-in-chief of the National Guard doesn't really control the military. The National Guard has 500,000 people in it around this great country, serving in states and overseas. National Guards are state military forces run by governors, and Sarah Palin does it great.

Wherein Campbell, who previously issued an honest and accurate description of both his and the governor's role, suddenly conflates the authority of the US commander-in-chief with that of a governor whose authority over a state national guard remains limited to domestic emergencies. National Guards are indeed state military forces, but their national security role is run by the Pentagon.

Smoke and mirrors.

By September 8th, Major General Campbell is promoted to Lieutenant General by Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.

Surprised?!

Then get this. Campbell's promotion is only good in the State of Alaska. His substantive rank in the US military is still Major General since all such promotions come from the Pentagon and require US Senate approval. Campbell's third star is a state rank.

VetVoice has the entire timeline and is a must read.

They didn't even try to hide this one.

Hat tip Crooks and Liars.

============

Bonus! This last February Sarah Palin was informed, not consulted, on a deployment which took away a military air ambulance service which had been providing services into Alaska's interior. She certainly exercised her commander-in-chief's authority then, didn't she?

I have this handful of nails...

And I'm not sure what to do with them.

1. A long nail with a big head. A duffy spike;

2. A short nail that's going to require a good aim;

3. A crooked nail that's going to need some straightening;

4. A finishing nail that matches the colour of the wood;

5. An extra nail which can help support the load.

Get me two pieces of wood.

Is this what Bush has been trying to "spread"?

It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.

George W. Bush
2nd Term Inaugural Speech
January 20, 2005

Lofty words from an administration which couldn't find democracy in a dictionary even if you tore out all the pages not containing the word.





Shouldn't Karl Rove be in prison by now? Although, I guess if you were in northern Alabama last night, you watched something else. WHNT-TV the CBS affiliate which broadcasts into northern Alabama censored that part of the program and then lied about it. Yes, they have strong ties to the Republican party.

Impolitical and Crooks and Liars has much more.

Giuliani's world is shrinking

Maybe he was suffering from shock. Republican US presidential contender Rudy Giuliani, the self-styled hero of 9/11 seemed to think that, even in the wake of attacks on his city, that he could abuse the money of New York City taxpayers.

In the fall of 2001, city cops chauffeured Rudy Giuliani's then-mistress, Judith Nathan, to her parents' Pennsylvania home 130 miles away on the taxpayers' dime.

Records show that city cops refueled at an ExxonMobil station down the road from Nathan's childhood home in Hazleton on Oct. 20, 2001, while Giuliani stayed behind in New York attending 9/11 funerals.

A similar receipt pops up at a different Hazleton gas station two months later, when Nathan apparently went home for a pre-Christmas visit with her parents.

The records show that - in addition to using City Hall funds to take Giuliani and Nathan to 11 secret trysts in the Hamptons, as has been previously reported - taxpayers were paying to ferry Nathan on long-distance trips without Giuliani, now a Republican contender for President.

Keep in mind, it was his mistress; not his wife. Despite attempts by some to obfuscate this point, Nathan possessed no status in New York's official life and was entitled to no more than any other New Yorker.

So, you're not surprized. OK. But this is bursting all over the place. The traditional media is jumping all over this, and quite rightly so. But, as John Cole points out, the super-sleuths of the citizen media seem to be a little quiet right now.

Malkin? Total silence. Ace of Spades? Nada. Kathryn Jean Lopez? Too busy trying to get Dana Perino a raise. Mark Steyn? Nope, too involved making things up for a future column. Jonah Goldberg? Hard at work on a book about.... well, never mind.

– When a 12 year old kid had the nerve to state that he benefited from a government program and thinks other kids should too, a massive orgy of ‘Truth detecting’ took place. Counters were examined. Houses were visited. Property records were scrutinized. Statements were parsed.

– When a private in the army wrote some tales with a few anecdotes about what he had experienced in the war in Iraq, and a few disagreed, no grain of sand was left unturned. Scale models of armored vehicles were built. Experts were called, emailed, and interrogated. Myspace accounts were looked up. Entire fields of Cray Supercomputers had to be brought online just to handle all the “debunking” and commentary from the wingnuts.

But now, a Republican front-runner FOR THE OFFICE OF PRESIDENT has clearly played fast and loose with the public’s money to hide/finance his extramarital dalliances, and the truth detectors on the right are silent. When an NRO columnist admits straight-up to making shit up to radically overstate a military threat to a key ally, perhaps to agitate for American military involvement, our fact-checkers snooze. The sum total of the response can be summed up as a giant yawn.

Crickets. Not even a “heh, indeed” can be found on these topics from our brave and intrepid citizen journalists. Hell, they are lagging FAR behind all the traditional media, who are cranking out tons of stories about Giuliani. Greater Wingnuttia should change their motto from “We’ll fact check your ass” to “We’ll fact check your ass, if you aren’t a Republican.” At least that would be honest.

OK. So someone else can do the fact checking. Oh! What's this? Why, look at what Josh Marshall found.

Giuliani's administration sent a check for $400,000 to American Express. Though it was billed to the Assigned Counsel Administrative Office, an office that provides lawyers for indigent defendants, the money served as an advance against future travel and other expenses later incurred by the mayor's office and his security detail.

The unusually large prepayment, as yet unreported, adds weight to the theory that the Giuliani administration was using accounting gimmicks to obscure his office's travel expenditures.

With $400,000 prepaid on the Amex account, the mayor and his staff drew down on the credit card for a number of trips, including a handful out to the Hamptons, where Judith Nathan had her condo. Giuliani's administration ultimately spent approximately $100,000 of the $400,000 before leaving office in January, 2001.

Stu Loeser, a spokesman for Mayor Bloomberg, confirmed to us that his administration put a stop to the practice of putting funds for future travel in bulk on a credit card. Shortly after Bloomberg took office, American Express refunded $298,000, the remaining unused balance on the account. The move came shortly after the city comptroller sent the mayor a letter critical of the Giuliani adminsitration's practice of billing obscure city agencies for mayoral travel expenses.

And you can find more here.

But you won't find anything at National Review Online.

It's called murder... unless Blackwater is involved

America's mercenary army is going to eventually bite the hand that keeps them rolling in juicy government contracts and unprecedented layers of protection from prosecution. This should get interesting:

Federal agents investigating the Sept. 16 episode in which Blackwater security personnel shot and killed 17 Iraqi civilians have found that at least 14 of the shootings were unjustified and violated deadly-force rules in effect for security contractors in Iraq, according to civilian and military officials briefed on the case.

Now, any civilized country employing mercenaries (Yeah! Doesn't that sound special?!) would:

A) Immediately cease doing business with such a company of soldiers of fortune until an investigation completely cleared the company of wrongdoing;
B) Prosecute those directly responsible for any and all criminal acts.

Prosecutors have yet to decide whether to seek indictments, and some officials have expressed pessimism that adequate criminal laws exist to enable them to charge any Blackwater employee with criminal wrongdoing. Spokesmen for the Justice Department and the F.B.I. declined to discuss the matter.

Well, it is still being investigated, so a civilized government would wait until all the facts are in before indicting their mercenaries.

The case could be one of the first thorny issues to be decided by Michael B. Mukasey, who was sworn in as attorney general last week. He may be faced with a decision to turn down a prosecution on legal grounds at a time when a furor has erupted in Congress about the administration’s failure to hold security contractors accountable for their misdeeds.

Ummm... any civilized country employing mercenaries would have a homegrown law which allowed prosecution of people who, you know, kill other people without justification. Hell, the US did it for "unlawful enemy combatants". If they can find a way to ignore the Geneva conventions, you'd think they could find a way to prosecute murder by their hired guns overseas.

Investigators have concluded that as many as five of the company’s guards opened fire during the shootings, at least some with automatic weapons. Investigators have focused on one guard, identified as “turret gunner No. 3,” who fired a large number of rounds and was responsible for several fatalities.

Yes, turret gunner No. 3 sounds like a real piece of work. Any civilized country employing this kind of mercenary would react by making sure that particular mercenary army, which obviously doesn't screen its recruits very well, was no longer allowed to take the field.

It gets better. You'll want to read the whole thing. Then you'll probably want to take a shower.

Oh yeah. Just case you missed the subtle hints. Civilized countries don't employ mercenaries. The US Declaration of Independence is just one document which says so.

Musharraf is going to pull another fast one

Pakistan's military dictator, General Pervez Musharraf has promised an early January election, restoring Pakistan to democratic civilian rule. Sort of.

Pakistan was set on a course for troubled elections yesterday after President Pervez Musharraf promised polls by early January but said they may be held under emergency rule.

In his first press conference since he suspended the constitution and assumed sweeping powers eight days ago, Musharraf said a general election would take place by January 9. But he refused to give a date for lifting emergency rule, under which thousands of opponents have been detained and some beaten, and suggested it would remain in place until polling day.

"It will ensure absolutely fair and transparent elections," he said.

Yeah, that'll work. Here's a list of rights which are suspended under Musharraf's "emergency rule".

• Protection of life and liberty.

The right to free movement.

The right of detainees to be informed of their offense and given access to lawyers.

Protection of property rights.

The right to assemble in public.

The right to free speech.

Equal rights for all citizens before law and equal legal protection.

Media coverage of suicide bombings and militant activity is curtailed by new rules. Broadcasters also face a three-year jail term if they "ridicule" members of the government or armed forces.

Yup! You can really have an open election campaign with rules like those. This is the guy the Bush administration just can't help themselves from heaping praise upon.