Shillgate

The Clinton campaign's planted shill at the CNN/Youtube debate is getting major right-blogospere coverage and a deafening silence on the left side so far. I don't expect that will change much. Isn't her campaign content with planting questions for her? "You know, many young people ask me about that…."

Assorted Babble: CNN did it again. Tonight in Florida, the CNN Republican debate had more than Youtube videos asking questions.

Ace: You have to hand it to them…the Hillary people are really good at planting questions. At least CNN didn't identify him as an undecided voter.

Oh, no, wait, here's The New Republic, no stranger to fraud: GOP Audience Boos Gay Veteran (Ed. Note:Or boos plant, who can say….)

Hot Air: …CNN not only approved a question from someone affiliated with the Clinton campaign without identifying the affiliation, they invited him to the debate so that he could ask a follow-up.

STACLU: Update by Jay: Just to be clear, this is the man who claimed to be a retired general who is gay and asked about gays in the military. Is he a Hillary shill? Here’s all the evidence one needs.

Flip: For the record, my guess is that not only did CNN genuinely not know about Kerr's affiliation, but that Team Hillary was unaware of his participation in the debate. 

Liberty Pundit: And CNN, there’s no way they didn’t know who this guy was or who he was connected to.

A Powerful Fraudulent Moment

Jonathan Martin at The Politico got pwned - badly - by a very badly rigged question - and question asker - at the CNN/YouTube debate.

A retired Army general, Keith Kerr, just listed all his military credentials and then left the crowd silent by saying at the end of his video that he is "an openly gay man" and wants to know why gays can't serve in the military.

Romney was hit by Anderson Cooper with a past statement (imagine that) saying that he "look[ed] forward" to the day gays could serve. Pressed hard by Cooper about whether he had changed his mind, Romney plainly looked displeased. "This isn’t that time," Romney first said, noting the national security threats.  He said the "don't ask, don't tell"  policy "seems to have worked" and, toward the end, even drew some boos (it was tough to discern exactly why).

Kerr, present in the audience, was then introduced by Cooper and said he didn't feel as though he got an answer.  Explaining why, he got his own boos (partially snuffed by some shushing).

Here's the problem. Kerr happens to be a consultant to the Hillary Clinton campaign. CNN either did not practice due diligence or rigged this question in an intentional fraud.

 On the eve of the 38th anniversary of Stonewall, Hillary for President announced the formation of "LGBT Americans for Hillary," a national steering committee of over 65 leaders in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community. Members of the steering committee include LGBT elected officials, activists from national LGBT and Democratic Party political groups as well as leaders from the worlds of business, entertainment and sports. This leadership committee will work with the campaign on several areas including political outreach, communications, policy advice and counsel, and fundraising.

The steering committee lists the following member:

Keith Kerr, retired Colonel., U.S. Army; retired Brigadier General, California National Reserve

This is a scam, not a "powerful" question. And the Clinton campaign should rightfully take serious heat for it. Plants are dirty tricks and should be called for what they are.

UPDATE: CNN claims it never knew.

UPDATE: CNN later learned that retired brigadier general Keith Kerr served on Clinton's lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender steering committee.

CNN Senior Vice President and Executive Producer of the debate, David Bohrman, says, "We regret this incident. CNN would not have used the General's question had we known that he was connected to any presidential candidate."

This is a basic matter of research that bloggers found in about three seconds on Google. This is not rocket surgery, for Pete's sake. Kerr was not "connected" HE WAS AN OPERATIVE. CNN either actively collaborated in a loaded scam question from a rival campaign or is too stupid to claim a mantle of professional journalism.

They’re Watching You

The Miami-Dade police will join the Houston police department as the first two operators of a new high-tech aerial surveillance drone system. The tiny vehicle, called the Micro Air Vehicle or MAV is built by Honeywell it is not armed but it looks pretty amazing.

MIAMI — The Miami-Dade police department will begin experimenting with high-tech drones as law enforcement tools beginning next year.

Although the military has been using unmanned aircraft systems for years, this will be the first time they are used in law enforcement.

"We are aware it is a great responsibility. The FAA is looking at us to see if we can professionally manage this program," said Lt. Cliff Nelson of the police department's aviation unit.
 
The flying camera is called a Micro Air Vehicle made by Honeywell. The MAV is remote controlled, unarmed and unmanned and can soar over 10,000 feet.

They have a video of the weird looking device here. They are not quite down to the flying mechanical insect level yet but they're getting closer. (We have a fleet of these puppies surrounding the Crabitat, just to keep an eye on things.)

Ultimate Speedbump

Bruce Webster over at And Still I Persist found this gem over at American Digest. I'll cheerfully glom onto it to - this amused heck out of my youngest boy and myself. (Spiffy new theme over at Bruce's place, incidentally.)

CNN/YouTube Debate

I did not get to watch all of it (life tends to intervene when you have children) but did get to see part of it. Surprise reaction: Mike Huckabee did very on those questions I got to see him answer. I am not sure whether sending Hillary to Mars constitutes interplanetary abuse or not, though.

Assassins

Earlier, I linked to an article that described (T)Hugo Chavez's escalation of a war of words with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe. I mentioned that it was just another attempt to distract Venezuelans from the upcoming referendum. Well, he must really be feeling the pressure of bad polls, because he has whipped out his old standby: claiming someone is out to assassinate him. Who, you ask?

Why CNN, of course. 

CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said on Wednesday CNN may have been instigating his murder when the U.S. TV network showed a photograph of him with a label underneath that read "Who killed him?"

The caption appeared to be a production mistake — confusing a Chavez news item with one on the death of a football star. The anchor said "take the image down" when he realized.

But Chavez called for a probe in an interview on state television, where he repeatedly reviewed a tape of the broadcast, questioning why the unconnected photograph and wording were left on screen for several seconds.

Oh, and that distraction stuff?

Some political analysts and Wall Street economists say the fights appear to be a tactic that burnishes his nationalist credentials and also helps distract voters from debating some of the unpopular details in his proposed reform package.

Don't worry, Hugo. CNN isn't out to kill you. But your own comedy routines aren't doing wonders for your image.

Obamamentum?

Mort Kondracke writing at Roll Call (via Real Clear Politics), looks at some numbers - and the quirkiness of the Iowa Caucus - and thinks there is a real possibility of Hillary Clinton losing the state and the nomination.

Yet, defeats in Iowa and New Hampshire could burn through the firewalls and re-create the dynamic of 1984, where the establishment candidate, former Vice President Walter Mondale, almost lost the nomination to fresh-face challenger Sen. Gary Hart (Colo.).

Mondale pulled it out only because his staff succeeded in convincing the media that Georgia and Alabama were the key contests on Super Tuesday. Mondale won them, though Hart won bigger states like Florida, Massachusetts and Washington, and even bigger primaries later in Ohio and California.

To the extent that polling is reliable in a caucus state like Iowa, indications are that Clinton is in deep trouble. The topline ABC/Washington Post poll results showing Obama with 30 percent, Clinton with 26 percent and former Sen. John Edwards (N.C.) with 22 mean less than other factors.

Specifically, the polls indicate that second-tier candidates like New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, Sens. Joe Biden (Del.) and Chris Dodd (Conn.) and Rep. Dennis Kucinich (Ohio) split up 25 percent of the vote among them.

The way the Iowa caucuses work, after a first round of balloting, candidates receiving less than 15 percent support get dropped on subsequent ballots, putting a premium on being the second choice of caucus-goers.

In early November, the CBS/New York Times poll indicated that Edwards was the second choice of 30 percent of supporters of second-tier candidates, while Obama was favored by 27 percent and Clinton by just 14 percent.

It is actually that second tier bear trap that makes the whole thing dicey for Clinton. Once the lower tier is cut off, who the votes go to makes a huge difference. And it does not look like the backers of the lower ranked candidates like Hillary Clinton all that much. If Obama goes into New Hampshire with momentum, the dynamics of the race change quite a bit.

Chavez Escalates Confrontation With Colombia

In what is likely an attempt to distract the public from the referendum to impose a dictatorship on themselves, (T)Hugo Chavez has escalated his rhetoric against the President of Colombia, Alvaro Uribe. He has done this sort of thing before, of course. He picked a fight with Vicenti Fox of Mexico in 2005.

The announcement came after a series of sharp exchanges between Chavez and Colombian President Alvaro Uribe over the Venezuelan's removal as a mediator between Colombia's government and rebels.

"While President Uribe is president of Colombia I will have no type of relationship with him or with the government in Colombia," Chavez said.

Speaking in the southwestern state of Tachira, Chavez said he will not have any relationship with a "president who is capable of such barefaced lies, disrespects another president that he has called a friend, one that he called on for help."

If he holds to that standard, will he stop talking to himself, too? Inquiring minds want to know.

If he holds to that standard, will he stop talking to himself, too? Inquiring minds want to know.

A New Low

Jim Hoft reports on a completely fabricated news story that has been busted wide open. Several media organizations and the group Reporters Without Borders were taken in by the shocking claim that 11 members of an Iraqi "journalist's" family had been brutally murdered. The problem?

Every, last one of them is alive. And they are mad as hell at the liar.

About that horrible slaughter…
It didn't happen!!
It was just a hoaxer that Reporters Without Borders failed to fact check.

** The Iraqi Interior Ministry emphatically said, "Kawwaz is lying."
** The police in Baghdad have not confirmed the attack.
** Talisman Gate reported that Al-Iraqiyya TV has "categorically dismissed reports over the murder of Dhia al-Kawwaz's family in Sha'ab City." (Thanks, BG!)
** The Multi-National Force Iraq wrote me and reported that they had found no evidence to back up the fantastic story:

And in fact, Reporters Without Borders is absolutely furious at being pwned like this:

Reporters Without Borders is astounded and angry to discover that a journalist’s claim that 11 of his close relatives were murdered last weekend is false. Amman-based Iraqi journalist Dia al-Kawwaz had claimed on 26 November that 11 members of his immediate family were shot by gunmen the previous day in Baghdad.

“We are obviously relieved to learn that the Kawwaz family is safe and sound but this journalist’s behaviour is unacceptable,” the press freedom organisation said. “We are appalled by this deceit, which is not only sordid but also dangerous as it obscures the fact that the families of dozens of journalists have been exposed to violence by Iraq’s armed groups.”

Not only is Dia al-Kawwaz a liar, he has damaged the credibility of Reporters Without Borders with his actions. The family has been shown on television, alive and kicking. This is pretty appalling.

Dead Man Voting Contributing

In USA Today, they report on a weird twist in Federal campaign laws that allows dead people to make political contributions. No, really. Dead people.

WASHINGTON — Harold Schooler died in 2003, but his political activism lives on.

The former piano salesman and musician is among more than 160 dead people who have given more than $540,000 to political committees and candidates for the White House and Congress over the past eight years, an analysis of political donations shows.

The estate of Schooler, who lived in Palm Springs, Calif., has donated $28,500 this year to the Democratic National Committee.

Federal rules allow such donations as long as contributions don't exceed legal limits and the intentions of the deceased were known, said Federal Election Commission spokesman Bob Biersack. Such gifts are fairly rare, he said.

Kent Cooper, a campaign-finance expert and former Federal Election Commission official, admits these contributions are "a little strange and unusual."

"People hear now and then of accusations of dead people voting," he said, "but these are examples of dead people continuing to give and give and give."

The Democratic committee received the most campaign money from deceased donors, nearly $225,000, according to USA TODAY's tally of federal campaign-finance data compiled by CQ MoneyLine, a non-partisan group. The Republican National Committee was the second-largest recipient, with about $93,000.

I don't really care who is getting the money, this should not be allowed. While it might be possible to allow a one-time bequest at a person's death, a continuing series of donations long after someone is dead is ridiculous. There is no way for that dead person to decide that he or she does not like the direction his or her party is heading.

“The Indiana Jones Of Tiki Drinks”

Jeff Berry is a man with a mission. His self-imposed quest: to recreate many of the lost drink recipes from the heyday of the Tiki-themed bars. He thinks he has found the Holy Grail of Tikidom, the original recipe for the Zombie.

Mr. Berry believes in doing them properly. His latest book, “Beachbum Berry’s Sippin’ Safari” (Club Tiki Press), published this summer, represents a culmination of his research. In it, he reveals what he believes to be the original recipe for the Zombie, a famed rum drink that has been made often but rarely well. “The Zombie was the Cosmopolitan or Margarita of its day,” Mr. Berry said recently. “There are hundreds of recipes for it — and they all stink.”

Many of the cocktails that Mr. Berry has studied, the Zombie included, owe their creation to a raconteur named Ernest Raymond Beaumont-Gantt who remade himself as Donn Beach and started the tiki craze in 1934 by opening Don the Beachcomber’s in Hollywood. In their interior design, the tiki joints inspired by Mr. Beach tended to thoroughly fake pastiches of tropical themes — swaying hula girls, angry savages — that can offend some modern eyes.

But Mr. Beach was a gifted mixologist, and his drinks were the real thing. His “Rum Rhapsodies” were elaborate concoctions that called for multiple brands of rum, fresh fruit juice, crushed ice, obscure syrups and esoteric ingredients like honey-butter mix.

Unlike Trader Vic, who was born Victor Bergeron and who wrote several books and printed his recipes, Donn Beach kept his formulas a closely guarded secret.

Berry actually had to decode the original recipes - which were a closely guarded secret. This could be a book and a movie: The Beachcomber Code.

Spitzer To NY Assembly: Please Marry Me?

If you want to know just how far Eliot Spitzer's political stock has fallen in New York, you have to look no further than this somewhat bizarre appearance he made before Democratic party members of the New York Assembly. The New York Times reports:

At first, Gov. Eliot Spitzer told a packed room of Assembly Democrats yesterday, his wife didn’t like him much either.

After meeting his bride-to-be, the Southern-bred Silda Wall, at Harvard Law School in the 1980s, he asked her out, and she said no. But he was persistent, Mr. Spitzer said, and she finally agreed. Now, they are happily married.

All he wants from the Assembly members, whose affections for him have largely evaporated in the last 11 months, is a similar sort of second chance, Mr. Spitzer told the group.

“That set the tone for the whole meeting,” said Assemblyman Rory Lancman, a Queens Democrat, who attended the closed-door meeting with the governor at the Marriott Hotel in Downtown Brooklyn. “People didn’t feel the need to stand up and harangue him for being a bad partner.”

It was an atypically self-deprecating appearance for Mr. Spitzer, who faces a difficult legislative season in the months ahead and is doing his best to woo lawmakers in advance.

The Times adds that the meeting resembled a taping of a Dr Phil show more than a typical New York political meeting. Given Spitzer's recent fall in the polls, I suspect this was an act of desperation on his part. Because if he does not mend fences pretty quickly, his political career is going to continue to sink. I dunno if marriage counseling is the answer, though.

Common Sense On Common Language

John Fund comments again today on the deal Nancy Pelosi made with the Hispanic Caucus to kill a bipartisan amendment to a funding bill that provides money to FBI, NASA and Justice Department. That amendment would have indemnified the Salvation Army and other employers from efforts by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to penalize them for enforcing English language requirements in the workplace (original post here.). The Hispanic Caucus had refused to vote for a patch to the Alternative Minimum Tax bill if Pelosi didn't kill the amendment. Fund points out the destructiveness of the position taken by the Hispanic Caucus - to Hispanics and other immigrants.

In theory, employers can escape the EEOC's clutches if they can prove their policies are based on grounds of safety or "compelling business necessity." But most companies choose to settle rather than be saddled with the legal bills. Synchro Start Products, a Chicago firm, paid $55,000 to settle an EEOC suit against its English-only policy, which it says it adopted after the use of multiple languages led to miscommunication. When one group of employees speak in a language other workers can't understand, the company said, it's easy for personal misunderstandings to undermine morale. Many companies complain they are in a Catch-22–potentially liable to lawsuits if employees insult each other but facing EEOC action if they pass English-only rules to better supervise those employee comments.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R., Tenn.), who authored the now-stalled amendment to prohibit the funding of EEOC lawsuits against English-only rules, is astonished at the opposition he's generated. Rep. Joe Baca (D., Calif.), chair of the Hispanic Caucus, boasted that "there ain't going to be a bill" including the Alexander language because Speaker Pelosi had promised him the conference committee handling the Justice Department's budget would never meet. So Sen. Alexander proposed a compromise, only requiring that Congress be given 30 days notice before the filing of any EEOC lawsuit. "I was turned down flat," he told me. "We are now celebrating diversity at the expense of unity. One way to create that unity is to value, not devalue, our common language, English."

That's what pro-assimilation forces are moving to do. TV Azteca, Mexico's second-largest network, is launching a 60-hour series of English classes on all its U.S. affiliates. It recognizes that teaching English empowers Latinos. "If you live in this country, you have to speak as everybody else," Jose Martin Samano, Azteca's U.S. anchor, told Fox News. "Immigrants here in the U.S. can make up to 50% or 60% more if they speak both English and Spanish. This is something we have to do for our own people."….

….The alternative to Americanization is polarization. Already a tenth of the population speaks English poorly or not at all. Almost a quarter of all K-12 students nationwide are children of immigrants living between two worlds. It's time for people of good will to reject both the nativist and anti-assimilation extremists and act. If the federal government spends billions on the Voice of America for overseas audiences and on National Public Radio for upscale U.S. listeners, why not fund a "Radio New America" whose primary focus is to teach English and U.S. customs to new arrivals? 

Locking immigrants into a nether region where they cannot communicate with the rest of the people in the country is a recipe for creating a permanent under-class. It leads to balkanization and fragmentation of the society as a whole. The Hispanic Caucus has not done any favors for Hispanics or other immigrants with this. I disagree with Fund's characterization of people who want English only rules as nativist, however. Some are, but the majority are not. Most Americans are perfectly happy with legal immigrants who want to become Americans. What they are not happy with is an illegal underclass with a different language.