“Today we have scored a victory for American civil liberties and sent a message to President Bush that we will not tolerate his abuse of power and veil of secrecy,” [Chris] Dodd said in a written statement Monday night, after the compromise was announced. “The President should not be above the rule of law, nor should the telecom companies who supported his quest to spy on American citizens.”
Congrats to Dodd for showing Reid and the rest of the Senate Dems where their spines are located.
Francisco Nava ‘09 said his falsification of threatening emails to prominent campus conservatives and subsequent assault on himself stemmed from a belief that his actions would draw attention to the pro-chastity cause, attendees at a Monday-evening meeting said early Tuesday morning. The gathering included Nava, Butler College administrators and fellow Anscombe Society members.
[...]
“He said he pummeled his face; he didn’t say what with. He scraped his head against a brick wall [and] broke the bottle ... over his head,” Anscombe president Kevin Staley-Joyce ‘09 said, referring to a glass Orangina bottle with which Nava had initially said his assailants beat him during the attack. “It certainly was enough to merit treatment by doctors,” Staley-Joyce added.
[...]
Nava admitted to being “responsible for everything that happened,” Staley-Joyce said, adding that Nava “saw Anscombe’s ideals as not making enough progress” and wanted to bring more publicity to the group’s cause.
“He wanted something big and showy as opposed to the approach that we set out in our mission statement,” Staley-Joyce said. The statement describes Anscombe’s goals as providing “social support and a voice” for students committed to its ideals and “intellectual engagement” on campus.
[...]
Additionally, Staley-Joyce said, he found it “strange” that he “couldn’t tell a whole lot of difference” between Nava’s behavior during the meeting and the way he had acted before the hoax was revealed. In terms of his demeanor, “it was almost as if I was meeting the same Francisco that I met this time last week,” Staley-Joyce said.
And as a commenter notes, this would get more attention if it had involved a noose on a doorknob even though in this case, according to the reports, we have an actual physical assault and beating.
Francisco Nava ‘09 has admitted to fabricating an alleged assault on him that he said occurred Friday evening and to sending threatening emails to himself, other members of the Anscombe Society and prominent conservative politics professor Robert George, Princeton Township Police said today.
“He fabricated the story,” Det. Sgt. Ernie Silagyi said.
Nava was released to Public Safety and charges “have not been filed pending further investigation,” according to a statement from Township Police.
WE WILL, WE WILL MOCK YOU:
Atlas Shrugs: “Princeton Hate Crime: If it were a Black or Muslim Student .... the media would be beating us over the head with this story. Even the hoaxes get full media attention. Not this and it’s a horror.”
Brandon McGinley, The Daily Princetonian: “Whoever is responsible seems to have gotten the message that it is open season on people who defend morally traditional views on our campus. It’s time for the administration to send them a new message: the season is closed.”
Vocal Minority: “My guess is that nothing will happen to these perpetrators if they’re caught, owing to the religion and political views of the victim. Liberals claim to reject intolerance and violence; that statement is only half-right. It all depends on who the victim is. If the victim belongs to a group the left deems ‘protected,’ e.g., a religious, racial, or ethnic minority, then they will defend them to the ends of the earth.”
MarkTalk: “Compassionate Liberals beat conservative student to a bloody pulp, following death threats for his conservative political views or because he is a Hispanic Mormon, hard to tell with the mentally, culturally and socially retarded Moon Bats of the Left.”
The Strata-Sphere: “Left with know [sic] political recourse (no one is buying the paranoid delusions) these people have one recourse: take matters into their own hands. Do not be surprised if we see a spate of violence break out as we near the elections and there is no radical lefty among the top contenders. I think the top is coming off the restless and angry left.”
IN ADDITION: Eugene Volokh, who is supposedly an intellectual or something, opines: “And you further undermine others on the Right, some of whom might face real threats or attacks in the future but who will have a harder time being believed because of you. Lovely.” Yeah, because as we all know, the righties are the most put-upon minorities in America. As a Volokh commenter so succinctly put it: “Don’t we on the right EVER get our own Tawana Brawley?”
Over the weekend the beltway crowd has pushed forth the meme that there’s some kind of John McCain surge in the works, but I just ain’t buying it. First of all, poll-wise, there’s just no evidence of it, so all they seem to be running with are some recent newspaper endorsements he’s received (and, please, the endorsement of the sniveling “Independent Democrat” Joe Lieberman won’t help at all). Let’s take a look at what impact those newspaper endorsements will have according to Rasmussen:
Just 4% of Americans say an endorsement by their local newspaper will make them more likely to vote for a candidate. Thirteen percent (13%) say it will likely have the opposite impact.
McCain is dead in the water barring some weird confluence of extraordinary circumstances. I still think Romney’s going to be their guy. The Huckabubble will burst relatively soon and Mitt’s sitting on piles of cash. Thompson is a dud and Giuliani is covered in ooze.
MORE: I don’t see Ron Paul doing much in Iowa, but look for a surprise showing by him in New Hampshire. I’m going to go out on a limb and predict he’ll come in third behind Romney and McCain.
If you were watching the movie version of the terrorism trial that ended Thursday in Miami, FL, you might walk out around the time the seven suspects take an oath to al-Qaeda in a warehouse. The scene would feel so contrived, such a low-budget mockumentary of itself, that you might not be able to stomach another second.
The fact that this videotaped scene was in reality the centerpiece of the government’s case against seven defendants accused of conspiring to wage war against America is a testament to the strange challenges of trying to preemptively prosecute the war on terrorism.
[...]
The entire situation was concocted by the government. The warehouse was paid for by the FBI, and the defendants moved their operations there at the suggestion of an undercover informant who was also paid by the FBI. The swearing-in ceremony was led by the informant — who at another point also suggested a plan to bomb FBI offices in Miami. “The case was written, produced and directed by the FBI,” defense attorney Albert Levin said in his closing arguments.
[...]
But the heavy reliance on informants has led to cases that sometimes appear to exist in the land of make believe. At one point during the Liberty City investigation, Batiste suggested to the informant that they could blow up the Sears Tower so that it would fall into Lake Michigan and create a tsunami. “Where did you get this idea?” Batiste’s attorney later asked him on the stand. His answer was believable: “Just from watching the movies.”
And from the earlier Times article linked in the first blockquoted paragraph above:
When alleged ringleader Narseal Batiste, 32, presented an FBI informant he thought was an al-Qaeda operative with a list of materials necessary for jihad, it did not include explosives. Instead Batiste asked for $50,000, radios, uniforms and steel-toed boots. Was the plan to blow the Sears Tower up or kick it down?
Hey, and lest anyone forget, when this story broke back in June of last year the nuttersphere lurched into full panic/gotcha mode, alternately fretting about “homegrown jihad” and chiding the left for not taking this story seriously. This insightful ReidBlog post, written by a black woman from Florida, got the goat of a few hyperventilating pro-war bedwetters at the time. She wrote:
Guys. Take a deep breath. Liberty City is not Peshwar. It’s the hood, man. These are probably some militant brothas working out and doing marshal arts and fancying themselves revolutionaries. The idea that they had a serious plot going, or that they had any conceivable ties—familial or otherwise—to actual terrorists, is laughable. Prediction: this will go the way of the dirty bomber and the two yokels who were supposed to blow up electrical transformers in South Florida but wound up trying to buy a couple of AK-47s with a bad credit card. They’re doing 5 years apiece for some low-level violation today, after getting the Ashcroft treatment not long before the 2002 midterms.
Spot.Fucking.On.
I’ll give you one guess who penned this overwrought response to her post:
…Because really, the idea that a bunch of ‘hood negroes are capable of more than watching old Jim Kelly movies and playing pretend revolutionary? That’s just crazy talk! The black man is naturally lazy and shiftless, you see—and so his threats are idle ones, even when they come dressed in starched white Karate gear and tied up nicely with a cloth blackbelt bow.
Alas, what J Reid seemed to miss, in her eagerness to brush this off as insignificant, is that the group of “brothas” had no real ties to al Qaeda because the part of al Qaeda was played by undercover federal agents. Does that mean the silly “brothas” didn’t pose a threat? Well, thankfully, that’s now a moot question.
I wouldn’t be caught dead reading the Post and frequently resist picking up a copy someone has left on the subway because I don’t want to look like a booger-eating moron, but they do have a knack for coming up with front page headlines that even I can’t resist. Here’s today’s:
When compiling a list of the most loathsome douchebags involved in the Bush admin (I know, an endless task), b-lister Douglas Feith (along with David “I Keep Evil in My Beard” Addington) is often overlooked. Monday Feith came crawling out of his dank little hole (currently located at Georgetown, where he teaches a course that’s sole purpose seems to be trying to scrub the massive shit stain off his reputation) to speak at the cretin-packed stink tank American Enterprise Institute. He was introduced by the deeply delusional and discredited Richard Perle while his massive failure of a buddy Paul Wolfowitz sat in the front row to cheer him on. No cameras were allowed at the event, but the Washington Postwas there:
A former top Pentagon official blamed the Bush administration’s top official in Iraq for abandoning a plan for a quick transition to Iraqi leadership in the summer of 2003 and instead keeping the U.S. government in control of the country for more than a year.
The decision to carry out “a lengthy occupation was, I believe, the single biggest mistake the United States made in Iraq,” said Douglas J. Feith, who as undersecretary of defense for policy was a key figure in the drive to war.
[...]
Feith served as one of the top civilians in the Pentagon from July 2001 until August 2005. Many military officers disliked his precise, intellectual approach to making decisions, which they found tangled and time-consuming. Most famously, retired Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks, who led the U.S. invasion force in Iraq, stated in his memoir that Feith had achieved the reputation within the military of being “the dumbest [expletive] guy on the planet.”
But Feith was consistently supported by then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who in a 2004 interview with the Associated Press called him “without question, one of the most brilliant individuals in government” and “one of the really . . . intellectual leaders in the administration in defense policy.”
Defenders of Feith constantly throw around the “intellectual” tag when referring to him, probably to soften the blow of that Franks quote which will, thankfully, follow Feith to his grave. Is he an intellectual? Sure, maybe using the simplest definition of the word, he is an intellectual, but he’s also WRONG ABOUT EVERYTHING, which should count for something outside of the neocon clubhouse. And after hearing him interviewed on NPR back in April, let’s just say, I came away thinking Franks was pretty spot-on in his, ahem, frank assessment.
Fortunately, the Post wasn’t the only paper to cover Feith’s speech, The New York Times let the uber-crotchety Maureen Dowd loose on the Feithdom:
Doug Feith, the former Rummy gofer who drove the neocon plan to get us into Iraq, and then dawdled without a plan as Iraq crashed into chaos, was the headliner at a reunion meeting of the wooly-headed hawks Monday night at the American Enterprise Institute.
[...]
But he wasn’t self-flagellating. He was simply trying to put an egghead gloss on his Humpty Dumpty mishegoss.
“At the end of the day, here we are, and as of now there’s a reasonable chance that the country is going to remain united,” he said. Not quite the original boast of democracy cascading through the Middle East.
There’s a little bit for both liberals and conservatives to hate about Rudy in this excerpt from Meet the Next President:
Rudy Giuliani says he wanted to deport all 400,000 illegal immigrants from New York City when he was mayor, but ended up welcoming most of those who were “causing me no trouble.”
In an interview for the new book “Meet the Next President,” Giuliani lamented that the Immigration and Naturalization Service deported only 700 to 1,500 of the city’s 400,000 aliens each year during his mayoralty. Giuliani said it was obvious the INS was not about to increase deportation “from 700 or 1,500 to 400,000.”
“If they could, I would have turned all the people over. It would have helped me. I would have had a smaller population. I would have had fewer problems,” the Republican presidential candidate told The Examiner in an interview.
Dear Daily News, a “girlfriend” is something you have when you’re not a married man, a “mistress” is something you have when you’re a married man fucking around on your wife. Thank you.
It looks like the Noble Knight of Nineelevenstan was strong-arming the NYPD to play limo service for Judi “First Mistress” Nathan long before it had been recently reported. The New York Daily Newshas it all:
Judith Nathan got taxpayer-funded chauffeur services from the NYPD earlier than previously disclosed - even before her affair with then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani was revealed, witnesses and sources tell the Daily News.
“It went on for months before the affair was public,” said Lee Degenstein, 52, a retired Smith Barney vice president who formerly lived at 200 E. 94th St., Nathan’s old building.
“It was going on longer than anybody thought,” added Degenstein, who, along with others in the neighborhood, said they often saw Nathan hopping into unmarked NYPD cars in early 2000, before the affair was revealed that May.
When pressed by The News Thursday, aides to the Republican presidential hopeful conceded that Nathan got police protection “sporadically” before December 2000 - the previously acknowledged beginning of her taxpayer-funded detail.
Then-Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik said in January 2001 the NYPD assigned Nathan round-the-clock protection the month before because of an unspecified threat against her on a streetcorner near her home. He insisted at a news conference she had no guards until then.
Thursday, Giuliani aides changed their story. They said Nathan had received previously undisclosed “threats” earlier in 2000, and that protection was provided at those times.
They refused to provide dates, describe the nature of the threats or confirm - as witnesses and a law enforcement source now contend - that the protection began before she was publicly identified as the married mayor’s girlfriend in May 2000.
That would make the threat justification all the more puzzling, because she wasn’t a public figure.
[...]
A law enforcement source familiar with mayoral protection said Nathan got bodyguards as far back as 1999, shortly after the affair began.
“If she had to go shopping, errands, that’s where you went,” the source said.
Other residents at the building said they often saw Nathan coming and going with two well-dressed drivers, who occasionally toted her packages.
“She was always coming back with shopping bags from the different well-known stores in New York,” said Jacqueline Elman, a building resident for 12 years who walked her dog regularly and often spotted Nathan, who became the third Mrs. Giuliani in 2003.
But, ya know, quick, look over there! Bill Clinton is getting a blow job!
My wife and I were just talking about how we haven’t read or heard much about Al Franken’s run for the Senate lately, but today The NY Times has published an article about him working the ropes in Minnesota. I hope the state’s Democrats do the right thing and nominate him because, well, it would be entertaining as hell to watch him run against the thoroughly despicable Norm Coleman. Best quote (via an MP3 audio excerpt available with the article):
To the extent that I have money from show business ... ya know, he gets it from big pharma, big insurance, big tobacco, big coal, you know, I get it from big comedy. And big comedy doesn’t want anything from me. Big comedy doesn’t want me to put the seventh fleet off of China so that they don’t make more knock-offs of Caddyshack.
ADDED AL FRANKEN BONUS!!!: Video of him giving a speech this year at a wedding in Little Rock, AK on 11/24.
FANTASTIC DOCUMENTARY COMING TO NYC: The wonderful and unique documentary Billy the Kid is opening this Wednesday, December 5th at the IFC Center in Manhattan for a limited engagement. Carve out some room for it if you live in NYC because it’s highly recommended. Make sure to check out the excellent trailer at the documentary’s web site (or these outtakes at YouTube). You can read our review of it at some point tomorrow here at Rumproast.
UPDATE: A new entry for our horribly neglected Worst.Band.Name.Ever category. One of the bands opening for Mudhoney tonight is called Pissed Jeans. No matter how good they are a little part of me will always hate them for that.
ALSO: WBZ in New Hampshire has some limited coverage here.
2:05 PM ET: WMUR is reporting on their live broadcast that it’s a man in his 40’s with salt-and-pepper hair who allegedly has a bomb strapped to his body. He asked a woman with a child in the HQ to leave and is holding two other people (campaign workers) hostage.
2:14 PM ET: WPTZ is mirroring the same information that’s currently on WMUR (including live video). Apparently Drudge has linked to WMUR, so that site may start crawling soon.
3:09 PM ET: Two people have been released per WMUR. Apparently, that’s all of the hostages. Good news.
3:45 PM ET: WMUR and MSNBC are backing away from earlier reports that two people have been released. Now it can only be confirmed that one hostage (a young woman) has been released.
4:55 PM ET: A press conference just concluded that released no info at all. The latest info from various news agencies is that the suspect’s name is Troy Stanley, that he’s mentally disturbed and that he’s apparently armed only with road flares. I’m signing off on this story. Looks like it’s going to come to as good of a conclusion as possible.
FINAL UPDATE: I was out last night, but apparently during the crisis the suspect legally changed his name to Leeland Eisenberg.
As New York mayor, Rudy Giuliani billed obscure city agencies for tens of thousands of dollars in security expenses amassed during the time when he was beginning an extramarital relationship with future wife Judith Nathan in the Hamptons, according to previously undisclosed government records.
The documents, obtained by Politico under New York’s Freedom of Information Law, show that the mayoral costs had nothing to do with the functions of the little-known city offices that defrayed his tabs, including agencies responsible for regulating loft apartments, aiding the disabled and providing lawyers for indigent defendants.
At the time, the mayor’s office refused to explain the accounting to city auditors, citing “security.”
The Hamptons visits resulted in hotel, gas and other costs for Giuliani’s New York Police Department security detail.
