Yech

This one will turn your stomach. A six-year old girl won a contest for tickets to a Hannah Montana concert by submitting an essay explaining that her father had died in Iraq. The problem?

None of it was true.

GARLAND, Texas (AP) — A 6-year-old girl who won four tickets to a Hannah Montana concert with an essay falsely claiming her father died in Iraq isn't going to the show after all.

The contest's sponsor, a store chain named Club Libby Lu, withdrew the prize Saturday and awarded it to another contestant. It didn't identify the new winner.

"With this decision, we hope to revive the intended spirit of the contest, which was designed to make a little girl's holidays extra special," Club Libby Lu chief executive Mary Drolet said in a statement Saturday.

The real problem is actually worse:

The girl's mother had told Club Libby Lu officials that the girl's father died April 17 in a roadside bombing in Iraq, company spokeswoman Robyn Caulfield said. But the mother, Priscilla Ceballos, admitted later Friday that the essay and the military information she provided about her daughter's father were untrue.

"We did the essay and that's what we did to win. We did whatever we could do to win," Ceballos said in an interview Friday with KDFW-TV of Dallas. "But when (Caulfield) asked me if this essay is true, I said 'No, this essay is not true.'" (Emphasis added.)

Fabulous parenting skills. Teach your child that lying and cheating is the way to get ahead in life. Just fabulous.

A Little Proof Would Be Nice

The New Hampshire Union-Leader is pretty blunt in an editorial today. They call Hillary Clinton out for trying to claim her vast experience as part of Bill Clinton's "White House Team" while simultaneously hiding the records that would prove or disprove all that experience. For all intents and purposes, they are calling Hillary a dissembler at best, a liar at worst.

"I was a member of the White House team that was involved with trying to make a lot of changes . . . I think that people who are running for President should lay out for Americans their record, their experiences, their qualifications, their vision, their plan, and their understanding of how to make it all happen, and that's what I'm doing," Clinton told Boston Globe columnist Joan Vennochi during a recent stop in Manchester.

A candidate with White House experience who really believes that would let voters examine the records from the period during which she claims she was such a vital part of "the White House team." But Mrs. Clinton's actions show that she does not believe what she says.

Her husband is keeping secret many of those records — 2,600 pages worth, a National Archives official told The New York Sun. The Clintons have claimed that the National Archives won't release the records, but the Archives official in charge says Bill Clinton has not authorized their release.

This is not a trivial issue. Among those records is Mrs. Clinton's schedule, which would help show just how involved she really was in her husband's administration.

Because she has made her "experience" her primary qualification for the presidency, the people deserve to see exactly what experience she really has. Which policies did she help shape? Which did she oppose? Did she serve as a de facto staff member or did her role primarily consist of whispering suggestions into her husband's ear? That history is blackened out, and she is keeping it that way. Why?

As they point out, if she cannot convince Bill Clinton - her own husband - to release those records, how in the world are we supposed to believe she will be able to influence Congress or foreign leaders? The answer is, of course, that we can't. This is pretty harsh stuff coming from a major news outlet in an influential early primary state.

The Clintons have been used to having it both ways for so long that they fail to see that this kind of thing grates on the public and more and more often these days on the media that used to provide cover for their antics. Some regulars here think Hillary is inevitable regardless, but the fact that the media is actually calling her on things like this make the sledding a bit rougher than it used to be for the Clintons. Is it enough? I have no idea. Ask me again after Iowa and New Hampshire have chosen. Those two states are actually more important this year than ever before.

How To Damage Your Cause In One Easy Step

The Washington Post reports that protesters will be present at the annual Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena, California this year. One group plans to protest a float that honors the 2008 Beijing Olympics, while Cindy "Whatever happened to my adoring media" Sheehan will be on hand to protest the war in Iraq and whatever other hobbyhorse she's riding this week. I expect that there will be a wave of revulsion afterward. Not in the direction the protesters want, however.

This won't be the first Rose parade touched by protest _ in 1992, American Indians complained about the naming of a descendant of Christopher Columbus as grand marshal _ but most problems have been mechanical.

"Honestly, in the past years, it's really been more about floats breaking down, delaying the parade, than other things, than protests," said Tournament of Roses President CL Keedy.

Yet some fear the protests could develop into an annual pattern that could tarnish the parade's shiny image.

"If controversy like this diminishes the positive impact of the Rose Parade, it would be of concern," Pasadena Mayor Bill Bogaard said.

Chinese Americans who claim they were victims of political or religious persecution in China are criticizing the $400,000 Beijing Olympics float.

Bogaard said the city cited security considerations in turning down the group's proposal for a demonstration along the parade route involving a large band and several vehicles…..

….Sheehan, the outspoken San Francisco Bay area activist whose son was killed in Iraq, is campaigning for Congress against Rep. Nancy Pelosi and calling for the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. She will join other pro-impeachment and anti-war groups at the parade, according to her sister, Dede Miller.

As many as 1,000 supporters are expected to rally before and after the parade and distribute 20,000 pamphlets while flying 300 banners along the parade route, said Peter Thottam, executive director of the Los Angeles National Impeachment Center.

Police said they were prepared for the protesters and the hundreds of thousands of spectators. As usual, about 1,200 officers from a number of agencies are set to be on hand.

It is never pretty when narcissism trumps common sense. People do not tune in to watch demonstrations and will be revolted at the politicizing of what is a holiday tradition. This is going to backfire on both groups. The public has not been happy about other parades being turned into protest venues. The Rose Parade is an institution that people will be very unhappy to see targeted. (If the media even shows the protests - they may turn the cameras away rather than give Sheehan and company free media coverage.)

The Era Of Instant Fact-Checking

The Washington Post notes something that the candidates - from both parties - have failed to grasp. The age of the instant fact-checking mob has arrived. It has already caught a lot of people, again from both parties, this season. The do not appear to be learning very fast. But at least one analyst thinks they are being more cautious than they have in the past. Others think the lessons will eventually take hold.

When a candidate is caught making a clearly false statement, embarrassment or ridicule often ensues — and over time a reputation can form. But the electoral rewards derived from stretching the truth or distorting a rival's record just as frequently outweigh the fleeting political costs.

"I would not say that the level of honesty or deception is better or worse than in past campaigns," said Brooks Jackson, director of the Annenberg Political Fact Check, who has been truth-squadding political candidates since 1992. "It is a function of running for office that you want to say things that are pleasing to voters."

Some campaign operatives argue that candidates are becoming more cautious about their public pronouncements, for fear of being caught making a mistake. "I think candidates are being more careful," said Mike Gehrke, research director for the Democratic National Committee. He notes that the ease of retrieving information online has made it possible "to fact-check at a much more granular level than ever before." …..

…..The pressure of responding to attacks is unusually intense this election cycle because of the number of plausible contenders in both major political parties.

"It's become a multifront war," said David Bossie, president of the conservative advocacy group Citizens United. "Candidate A attacks candidate B, but then C and D pile on. You have to be on your toes at all times."

Campaign finance records show that the candidates have spent more than $110,000 on subscriptions to the LexisNexis family of databases over the past year. Most of the leading candidates employ half a dozen researchers, who comb the records of their competitors for the smallest mistake. All the campaigns are constantly shoveling out "fact checks" pointing out the errors of rivals.

Opposition research has been a staple of political campaigns for decades, but the Internet has made it easier to disseminate the information. Video of embarrassing moments collected by rival campaigns is routinely distributed on YouTube. When the Democratic National Committee in November unveiled FlipperTV, a Web site devoted to tracking video from Republican political events, it got 60,000 hits on the first day.

The Post shows a bit of bias here in dwelling more on Republican gaffes than on Democratic ones. But there may actually be a reason for that. The Republicans have tried to clarify what they said while the Post reports that Democrats caught out have, for the most part, refused to address errors. They have simply stonewalled.

The blogs play an important role in this new instant fact-checking process, of course. The old media, however, is still acting as the gatekeeper on this - as demonstrated in the Post story - by choosing which stories to play up nationally. But as the old media increasingly loses readership, that influence is inevitably going to wane. Look for bigger changes in future campaigns.

Clinton’s Sockpuppets Strike Again!

Via Ann Althouse, news today that Hillary Clinton's Sockpuppet Army® has struck again. This is so utterly clumsy, it's laughable.

Easiest to find is this, from the WaPo:

[R]eaders of Blue Hampshire — about 800 a day, a relatively small but consequential group that includes party activists and state Democratic leaders — recommend "diaries" that visitors should read. Yesterday, four readers who created new accounts and recommended pro-Clinton postings were traced back to Clinton's campaign. And those readers, Blue Hampshire noted, didn't disclose their relationship with Clinton. In the blogosphere, there's a word for this frowned-upon behavior: "sock-puppeting."

WaPo links to the relevant post at Blue Hampshire, which shows the ineptitude of the puppetry:

Recently, we admins noticed this comment thread on a recommended diary, and the oddities it posed made us look a little deeper than we normally would.

As the comment thread revealed, users pinballwizard, elf, shley24, MTAY all registered in succession to recommend the diary. A further look by us revealed that:

* they had registered within minutes of each other, including another user a bit later, janbaby, who was not among the recommenders,

* the same IP address was used by all of them, and is registered to the Clinton campaign,

* two other recommenders, blues and kmeisje, also registered from the same IP address.

Between her campaign stops having more plants than the average commercial greenhouse and the sockpuppets, it's getting a bit crowded over in Hillaryland. We can see this causing problems for Clinton in the future.

Monsters At Christmas

Regardless of the outcome of the legal proceedings against these two, there has to be a special place in Hell already all made up for them when they arrive. On Christmas Eve, a family daughter and her boyfriend gunned down three generations of the woman's family, including children aged 3 and 6 years.

Twice wounded, her husband and his parents already gunned down, Erica Anderson huddled with her children and pleaded with Joseph McEnroe to spare their lives.

"You don't have to do this."

But her pleas prompted no mercy. McEnroe apologized before telling his victims, "Yes, we do."

Then he fired the last blasts in a Christmas Eve shooting spree that killed three generations of a family in a rural Carnation home.

He shot Anderson a final time, then turned a .357 revolver on 6-year-old Olivia and 3-year-old Nathan.

The final, frantic moments of the lives of six people were outlined Friday in murder charges filed against McEnroe, 29, a Target clerk, and his unemployed girlfriend, Michele Anderson, also 29.

The defendants are in the King County Jail with bail denied, accused of killing Michele's parents, her brother, his wife and their two children.

Each faces six counts of aggravated first-degree murder — the only crime punishable by death in Washington. King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg has 30 days from the couple's scheduled Jan. 9 arraignment to decide whether to pursue capital punishment. The only other sentencing option under the law for the crimes upon conviction is life imprisonment without release.

"Given the magnitude of this crime, I pledge to give this case serious consideration for the state's ultimate penalty," Satterberg said.

Monsters exist, they just aren't the kind fiction writers like Stephen King come up with routinely. Cases like this are why there should be a death penalty. The reasons the daughter wanted her family dead are so trivial as to defy belief. The family was "stepping on" the daughter. So we have self-esteem issues leading to the brutal murder of an entire family. Including little kids.

There really are monsters.

Opening Day Approaches

The Opinion Journal surveys the candidates as the Iowa caucuses approach. Less than one week out from the political opening day of the primary season and the Democrats are the ones with the biggest potential winners and losers in the Hawkeye state.

The first contest of the Presidential election season is finally upon us with Thursday's Iowa caucuses, and for our money it comes both too early and too late.

Iowa arrives too early this cycle in that it comes a full 10 months before the general election next November. We think the public was better served when the first primaries didn't begin until much later. In 1976, Ronald Reagan barely lost to President Ford in New Hampshire in February, but he was still able to make a contest of the nomination by winning the North Carolina primary in late March. That the Iowa home stretch is taking place this year when most families are preoccupied with the holidays is especially silly.

But Iowa comes late because the truncated nature of this primary season means the candidates have already been campaigning for more than a year. As Karl Rove wrote on these pages, both parties need to think about changing a nominating process that has turned into a two-year marathon yet could still yield nominees the public barely knows. There has to be a better way. Our own suggestion would be for primaries that began in the late spring and played out over three months, culminating in the nominating conventions close to Labor Day. Either that, or bring back the smoke-filled room.

This time we are nonetheless stuck with what we have, and at least Iowa will begin to cull the field. This year the state's caucuses seem especially important to the Democrats. Barack Obama and John Edwards need a victory to show they can challenge the Hillary Clinton juggernaut. Mr. Edwards has invested heavily in the state, and if his message of "two Americas" can't win amid the liberals who dominate Iowa's Democratic caucus-goers, it's not going to win anywhere.

With his recent rise in the polls, Mr. Obama has the new burden of higher expectations. Mrs. Clinton can afford to lose and fight on with her money and organization. As the upstart, Mr. Obama has to show he can put together enough of an organization to defeat her in Iowa and develop momentum to overtake Mrs. Clinton's lead in New Hampshire and beyond.

Go read the rest. Their take on Clinton is - to be kind - unkind. But that really isn't surprising given the almost frantic message try outs the Clinton campaign has been making lately. They've been all over the map trying to find one message that excites voters and have come off badly as a result. I still think that a third place finish in Iowa will cause sever problems for Clinton going forward. I don't know if it will be enough to completely derail her, but it will be a huge blow.

I do hope the parties get their collective acts together before the next election, though. This two year campaign is much too long. And the way the state parties have hashed up the schedules for primaries is not helping at all.

Ice Sculpture

Britain's Daily Mail has suddenly noticed that the Midwest of the United States is suffering through a brutal cold snap - which makes for a pretty spectacular picture.

It looks like a spectacular scene straight from a fairy tale.

But instead this winter wonderland is actually situated on the east shore of Lake Michigan in the United States.

After weeks of freezing temperatures, a thick coating of icicles has completely transformed the landmark South Haven lighthouse.

It really is a spectacular picture. For comparison, here's a picture taken in December, 2005 posted on Flickr. There are some other winter pictures here. None look as extreme as this year's icing.

Department Of Cosmic Justice

This is so ironic that no fiction writer would dare to try to put it in a story; nobody would believe it. A burglary suspect arrested by police cleverly gave a false address to avoid a search of his residence. The suspect was released after arraignment. A few hours later, said suspect became the victim of an armed robbery.

Whereupon he gave police his real address.

Police say 22-year-old Daniel Cabral was arrested Wednesday and charged with burglarizing a University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth building. He was arraigned and released until his next court date.

Hours later, he was robbed at gunpoint while walking home from a bar. He reported the robbery to police, this time giving them his real address instead of the phony address he reported earlier in the day, according to authorities.

Police arrested two suspects and a man accused of being an accomplice after the fact. They also obtained a search warrant for Cabral's real address and found computer equipment that had been taken from the UMass building as well as power tools that had been reported missing from a local theater.

Sometimes that old karmic wheel spins really, really fast, doesn't it?

Crime (Fighting) Doesn’t Pay

A now-former employee of a Whole Foods supermarket in Ann Arbor, Michigan has discovered that crime fighting does not pay. Hence his employment status. Said former employee stopped a shoplifter in the store by tackling him - and was promptly fired by management.

John Schultz said he lost his job as a fishmonger at a Whole Foods Market in Ann Arbor after he knocked a suspected shoplifter to the ground and detained him.

Schultz was fired on Monday. "Our policy is clear and listed in the employee booklet," said Kate Klotz, a Whole Foods spokeswoman.

"The fact that the employee in question touched the suspect is grounds for termination."

Schultz said he was acting as a private citizen and not as a Whole Foods employee. "The fact that I worked at the store at (the time of the robbery) is coincidental," he told The Ann Arbor News.

Well, Whole Foods certainly has sent a strong message, hasn't it? Employees have been told to let thieves alone and the thieves have been told it is open season at the store. Absolutely brilliant. Let's see what Whole Foods' shrinkage figures jump to in the next few months.

The Target

The Opinion Journal has an editorial today that should make a lot of people think hard about what is happening in Pakistan. They point out that al Qaeda has been failing in the West, losing in Iraq and having its proxy taliban in Afghanistan see loss after loss after loss. The fear is that al Qaeda is after the big score by hitting in Pakistan: a ready made nuclear arsenal.

"In Pakistan there are two fault lines. One is dictatorship versus democracy. And one is moderation versus extremism." Thus did Benazir Bhutto describe the politics of her country during an August visit to The Wall Street Journal's offices in New York. She was assassinated yesterday for standing courageously, perhaps fatalistically, on the right side of both lines.

We will learn more in coming days about the circumstances of Bhutto's death, apparently a combined shooting and suicide bombing at a political rally in Rawalpindi in which more than 20 others were also murdered. But there's little question the attack, which had every hallmark of an al Qaeda or Taliban operation, is an event with ramifications for the broader war on terror. With the jihadists losing in Iraq and having a hard time hitting the West, their strategy seems to be to make vulnerable Pakistan their principal target, and its nuclear arsenal their principal prize.

In this effort, murdering Bhutto was an essential step. Hers is the highest profile scalp the jihadists can claim since their assassination of Egypt's Anwar Sadat in 1981. She also uniquely combined broad public support with an anti-Islamist, pro-Western outlook and all the symbolism that came with being the most prominent female leader in the Muslim world. Her death throws into disarray the complex and fragile efforts to re-establish a functional, legitimate government following next month's parliamentary elections, which seemed set to hand her a third term as prime minister.

This is exactly the kind of uncertainty in which jihadists would thrive. No doubt, too, there are some in the Pakistani military who will want to use Bhutto's killing as an excuse to cancel the elections and reconsolidate their own diminished grip on power. In the immediate wake of the assassination, members of Bhutto's Pakistan Peoples Party have accused President Pervez Musharraf of being complicit in it. But whatever Mr. Musharraf's personal views of Bhutto–with whom he had an on-again, off-again political relationship–his own position has only been weakened by her death. It would be weakened beyond repair if he sought to capitalize on it by preventing the democratic process from taking its course.

That is exactly what I am worried about at this point. The thugs of al Qaeda could never win an election, as Bhutto pointed out, but they could disrupt things enough to seize power. With a nation as a base and with a nuclear missile capability, they would be able to wreak havoc on the planet. Even though they would cease to exist as a result of unleashing nuclear war, they would have already done the damage by doing so.

Frightening picture, isn't it?

Dead Heat On The Political Merry-Go-Round

The Los Angeles Times reports that Obama has pulled even with Clinton in New Hampshire and that there is a three-way tie with those two and Edwards in Iowa. The Times, as well as the rest of the media, is now trying to figure out how much impact the Bhutto assassination is going to have on the rapidly approaching voting. They are speculating wildly, but nobody really knows the answer to that question yet - and probably won't until the votes are actually tallied, no matter how learned the pundits try to sound about it.

WASHINGTON — Barack Obama has wiped out Hillary Rodham Clinton's once-commanding lead in New Hampshire and the two remain virtually tied with John Edwards in Iowa, as more and more voters get off the fence and decide whom to support, a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg Poll has found.

Obama drew backing from 32% of New Hampshire Democrats who intend to vote in the primary, compared with Clinton's 30% — a statistical dead heat. That's a dramatic shift from September, when a similar poll found him trailing 35% to 16% in the state that will hold its presidential primary Jan. 8.

In Iowa, which opens the 2008 presidential voting with its Jan. 3 caucuses, the poll found Sen. Obama of Illinois, Sen. Clinton of New York and former Sen. Edwards of North Carolina in a statistical three-way tie.

But other poll findings suggest Clinton might gain stature in both states if Democrats' concern about world affairs increases after Thursday's assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. The poll shows that Democrats in Iowa and New Hampshire consider Clinton far better equipped than her rivals to safeguard national security — as do Democrats around the country.

Such a shift in focus away from domestic policy also could affect the Republican presidential contest and benefit Sen. John McCain of Arizona, whose campaign has rebounded in New Hampshire. He's second behind Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts.

The fact is that voters in both states might pay no attention to what just happened in Pakistan. The people who are going to show up at the caucuses and first primary are mainly highly partisan voters. So trying to read the tea leaves on this one is not so much divination as it is wild guessing. I'd also caution that the poll was taken in the days leading up to Christmas and may or may not be all that accurate because of that. Who knows? But Pollster.com has been aggregating all of the polls and there are real trends (which are always the most valuable information coming out of polling - not the individual snapshots). Clinton is sliding, Obama is gaining. Huckabee is really gaining. How much the outside world's events change all that nobody can say right now. The national polls are not even close for the Democrats right now, however. Clinton has a commanding lead while the Republicans have no clear frontrunner at the moment.

Reasonable People

Peggy Noonan looks at all the candidates currently scurrying around in Iowa scratching for votes and judges them on her personal standard for this election: Is the candidate 'reasonable?' As in a reasonable person. Her judgments might not really surprise you. Then again, they might.

This is my 2008 slogan: Reasonable Person for President. That is my hope, what I ask Iowa to produce, and I claim here to speak for thousands, millions. We are grown-ups, we know our country needs greatness, but we do not expect it and will settle at the moment for good. We just want a reasonable person. We would like a candidate who does not appear to be obviously insane. We'd like knowledge, judgment, a prudent understanding of the world and of the ways and histories of the men and women in it.

Here are two reasonables: Joe Biden and Chris Dodd. They have been United States senators for a combined 62 years. They've read a raw threat file or two. They have experience, sophistication, the long view. They know how it works. No one will have to explain it to them.

Mitt Romney? Yes. Characterological cheerfulness, personal stability and a good brain would be handy to have around. He hasn't made himself wealthy by seeing the world through a romantic mist. He has a sophisticated understanding of the challenges we face in the global economy. I personally am not made anxious by his flip-flopping on big issues because everyone in politics gets to change his mind once. That is, you can be pro-life and then pro-choice but you can't go back to pro-life again, because if you do you'll look like a flake. The positions Mr. Romney espouses now are the positions he will stick with. He has no choice.

John McCain? Yes. Remember when he was the wild man in 2000? For Republicans on the ground he was a little outré, if Republicans on the ground said "outré," as opposed to the more direct "nut job." George W. Bush, then, was the moderate, more even-toned candidate. Times change. Mr. McCain is an experienced, personally heroic, seasoned, blunt-eyed, irascible American character. He makes me proud. He makes everyone proud.

You'll have to go read for yourself her opinions on Obama, Clinton and her dodge on Giuliani. I suspect many voters not rigidly in lockstep with their party  - or rabid ideologists - are actually looking for a reasonable candidate. While I would be in favor of one myself, I am not at all sure that reasonableness is going to be the deciding factor or not. There have been too many extreme positions staked out. (Some, like Clinton, are trying to stake all of them out at once, in classic Clintonian triangulation.) The irony here is that many states pushed up their primaries in order to challenge the primacy of Iowa and New Hampshire. That, in turn, has made both of those states even more important this year. The outcome of those early contests may send the races off in a completely new direction.

Spud Arson

How embarrassed is the Boise, Idaho fire department today after word got out about their most excellent Christmas Eve adventure? After all, it isn't every day that firemen get to fight a fire in their own firehouse - especially because of flaming potatoes.

Boise firefighters returning from a medical call had to turn their hose on the firehouse kitchen after an overheated pan full of Tater Tots melted and set some cabinets ablaze.

The Christmas Eve fire at Station 8 was quickly extinguished, with no injuries. No damage estimate was available.

Investigators were trying to determine why a computerized safety system that automatically turns off appliances when firefighters are called away apparently had not been activated.

Obviously, the spuds were smarter than the computer. Or the firemen.

K-8.5 Unit Catches Suspect

Tink the mighty crime-fighting dog can't really be called part of the K-9 unit. They have size requirements, after all. But Tink rounded up a suspect just as well as the regulars do it. Even if Tink is a chihuahua.

The dog's Christmas Day adventure began when four suspects who were fleeing police crashed a stolen minivan into a hillside in this Sierra foothill town east of Sacramento, and one of them fled.

Tink, a Pomeranian and Chihuahua mix, found him hiding under a neighbor's motor home and chased him into the woods, said Wendy Anderson. The dog belongs to her son.

Her son and husband directed a law enforcement helicopter to where the 20-year-old man was hiding.

One hopes the Auburn, California police are having a special unit patch made up for Tink as an honorary member. Note to criminals: watch out for the little guys - they overcompensate.