Both Waters and Rangel are prominent members of the Congressional Black Caucus. Dual ethics trials would be a major political liability for Democrats, forcing them to defend their party’s ethical conduct while trying to hold on to their House majority.

While [...]]]> California Congresswoman Maxine Water is going to be charged with violations by the House Ethics Committee.

Both Waters and Rangel are prominent members of the Congressional Black Caucus. Dual ethics trials would be a major political liability for Democrats, forcing them to defend their party’s ethical conduct while trying to hold on to their House majority.

While Rangel is a former chairman of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, Waters is a prominent member of the Financial Services Committee.

Waters came under scrutiny after former Treasury Department officials said she helped arrange a meeting between regulators and executives at Boston-based OneUnited Bank without mentioning her husband’s financial ties to the institution.

Her husband, Sidney Williams, held at least $250,000 in the bank’s stock and previously had served on its board. Waters’ spokesman has said Williams was no longer on the board when the meeting was arranged.

Waters has said the National Bankers Association, a trade group, requested the meeting. She defended her role in assisting minority-owned banks in the midst of the nation’s financial meltdown and dismissed suggestions she used her influence to steer government aid to the bank.

Besides being a ginormous asshole. Maxine Waters is crooked as a dog’s hind leg. Continued kudos to the House Ethics Committee and the Democrats on that panel. Rangel and Waters are two very powerful and igh profile folks. The Dems must be soiling themselves for the Fall. Also a nice very late Friday dump.

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h/t: JJ

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Harlem friends of Rangel tell CBS 2 they have been told that the details could be unveiled when the House Ethics Committee meets Thursday afternoon.

“Sixty years ago I survived a Chinese attack in [...]]]> CBS News is reporting that Charlie Rangel has cut a deal with the House Ethics Committee (stop laughing!) to avoid a public trial.

Harlem friends of Rangel tell CBS 2 they have been told that the details could be unveiled when the House Ethics Committee meets Thursday afternoon.

“Sixty years ago I survived a Chinese attack in North Korea and as a result I wrote a book saying that I hadn’t had a bad day since,” Rangel said. “Today I have to reassess that statement.” In a sense, Thursday is Charlie Rangel’s war. He is battling to preserve his legacy of 40 years of congressional service in the face of ethics charges that, at the very least, will subject him to a humiliating process of having to admit ethical wrong doing.

Just what he will admit to and how he will do it remains to be seen. The punishment remains to be seen as well, but sources tell CBS 2 that at the end of the day, Rangel is not expected to be thrown out of Congress and that he is expected to run for reelection to a 21st term.

I’m hoping he gets a slap on the wrist so we can use this in November to beat Democrats about the head and shoulders. Here is where I’d normally say, “Surely Nancy Pelosi isn’t that stupid.” I’m not saying that.

UPDATE: Sorry Charlie!

The deal between the lawyers will have little meaning if the committee members don’t approve it, and Republicans said at the proceeding they were insisting on going forward with a trial. The panel is evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans.

“Mr. Rangel was given multiple opportunities to settle this matter. Instead, he chose to move forward to the public trial phase,” said Rep. Jo Bonner of Alabama, the senior Republican on the ethics panel

Chairman Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., has made clear that she wants the committee to be unanimous — leaving little chance for agreement without Rangel capitulating on virtually all counts.

Many Democrats had urged Rangel to settle the case to avoid the prospect of televised hearings right before November congressional elections that will determine which party controls Congress next year.

However, as Thursday’s public airing of the charges drew nearer, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi seem resigned to the case proceeding.

“The chips will have to fall where they may politically,” she told reporters. Pursuing ethics cases against House members is “a serious responsibility that we have,” she said.

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How bad can the long term environmental damage be when the Gulf of Mexico is already loaded with oil and has been for thousands or millions of years?

So [...]]]> Last week I blogged an item about how the Gulf oil spill’s long term effects are being over hyped by the media. In that post I asked:

How bad can the long term environmental damage be when the Gulf of Mexico is already loaded with oil and has been for thousands or millions of years?

So what does the BP Gulf oil spill have in common with WikiLeaks’ recent 92,000 document dump of classified Afghanistan war documents — besides both being leaks of sorts? I’ll rephrase my question above… which was based not on scientific expertise, but on a common sense understanding of the way the world works (admittedly applied inconsistently by me — as it is with us all).

How bad can the long term national security damage be when the Afghanistan war is already very well-reported with multiple leaking along the way and has been since 2001?

An op-ed from Sunday’s New York Times goes a long way towards answering my questions. A few people are in real danger and so like the spill we don’t want to undersell the damage — real and potential. But neither do we want to over hype it. From Andrew Exum’s op-ed, read the whole thing here:

I myself first went to Afghanistan as a young Army officer in 2002 and returned two years later after having led a small special operations unit — what Mr. Assange calls an “assassination squad.” (I also worked briefly as a civilian adviser to General McChrystal last year.) I can confirm that the situation in Afghanistan is complex, and defies any attempt to graft it onto easy-to-discern lessons or policy conclusions. Yet the release of the documents has led to a stampede of commentators and politicians doing exactly that. It’s all too easy for them to find field reports to reaffirm their preconceived opinions about the war.

The Guardian editorialized on Sunday that the documents released reveal “a very different landscape … from the one with which we have become familiar.” But whoever wrote that has not been reading the reports of his own newspaper’s reporters in Afghanistan.

The news media have done a good job of showing the public that the Afghan war is a highly complex environment stretching beyond the borders of the fractured country. Often what appears to be a two-way conflict between the government and an insurgency is better described as intertribal rivalry. And often that intertribal rivalry is worsened or overshadowed by the violent trade in drugs.

The Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel did nothing wrong in looking over the WikiLeaks documents and excerpting them. Despite the occasional protest from the right wing, most of the press in the United States and in allied nations takes care not to publish information that might result in soldiers’ deaths.

But WikiLeaks itself is another matter. Mr. Assange says he is a journalist, but he is not. He is an activist, and to what end it is not clear. This week — as when he released a video in April showing American helicopter gunships killing Iraqi civilians in 2007 — he has been throwing around the term “war crimes,” but offers no context for the events he is judging. It seems that the death of any civilian in war, an unavoidable occurrence, is a “crime.”

I’m not a national security expert, but I haven’t read much in or about the documents that I didn’t already know from books, articles, and conversations or couldn’t have guessed if I’d taken the time to think about whatever the issue is. Don’t get me wrong… Mr. Assange should be charged with capital crimes for what will most likely be the deaths of American assets in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but it doesn’t strike me that there’s long term strategic damage to the U.S.

If I haven’t learned anything new then surely our enemies aren’t surprised by much in there either.

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A lot will be written about WikiLeaks’ motivations…. I don’t know that that is very useful — why does a toddler throw a tantrum? Because he can and because he lacks the wisdom [...]]]> The ongoing WikiLeaks release is being covered by The Guardian here — it seems to me to be the most comprehensive coverage.

A lot will be written about WikiLeaks’ motivations…. I don’t know that that is very useful — why does a toddler throw a tantrum? Because he can and because he lacks the wisdom and maturity to control his emotions and make his demands in a constructive and, more importantly — non-destructive way. This is one of the many consequences of the infantilization of the post-modern Left.

I hope the Obama Administration strikes hard — there should be capital sentences handed down and also reforms in both security and in the way the government classifies documents. A lot of these documents are uselessly classified to begin with — that only increases distrust and encourages leaking. That’s not an excuse or even a reason for leaking — just a truism about human nature.

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Then read this from The Australian:

Correspondence obtained by The Sunday Times reveals the Obama administration considered compassionate release more palatable than locking up Abdel Baset al-Megrahi in a Libyan prison.

The intervention, which has angered US relatives of those who died in the attack, was made by Richard LeBaron, deputy head of the US [...]]]>
Watch the above…

Then read this from The Australian:

Correspondence obtained by The Sunday Times reveals the Obama administration considered compassionate release more palatable than locking up Abdel Baset al-Megrahi in a Libyan prison.

The intervention, which has angered US relatives of those who died in the attack, was made by Richard LeBaron, deputy head of the US embassy in London, a week before Megrahi was freed in August last year on grounds that he had terminal cancer.

The document, acquired by a well-placed US source, threatens to undermine US President Barack Obama’s claim last week that all Americans were “surprised, disappointed and angry” to learn of Megrahi’s release.

Scottish ministers viewed the level of US resistance to compassionate release as “half-hearted” and a sign it would be accepted.

The US has tried to keep the letter secret, refusing to give permission to the Scottish authorities to publish it on the grounds it would prevent future “frank and open communications” with other governments.

In the letter, sent on August 12 last year to Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond and justice officials, Mr LeBaron wrote that the US wanted Megrahi to remain imprisoned in view of the nature of the crime.

The note added: “Nevertheless, if Scottish authorities come to the conclusion that Megrahi must be released from Scottish custody, the US position is that conditional release on compassionate grounds would be a far preferable alternative to prisoner transfer, which we strongly oppose.”

Mr LeBaron added that freeing the bomber and making him live in Scotland “would mitigate a number of the strong concerns we have expressed with regard to Megrahi’s release”.

The word “Tepid” doesn’t even come close.

BHO is an outright liar… this will stick.

Granted it was not our decision to make, but a stronger response would surely have kept him behind bars. And what is it with liberals and wanting to release jihadists into the countries they victimize? They have a Grizzly Man complex it seems. They think jihadists can live among and be so impressed by our awesomeness or whatever that they will cease to be jihadists. If they can just get used to our scent and our presence. Yeah… didn’t work out for Grizzly Man either.

Freedom in Libya — his home country is more humane than Libyan prison… I get that, but more humane than staying in Scotland with modern Western medicine to treat his cancer? These folks really are moral idiots.

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And this one on his service in Iraq…

And if you’re not familiar with his service in Iraq… here’s a snip from The Weekly Standard:

In 2003, Allen West was facing a possible court martial hearing that could have put him in prison.

Responsible for over six hundred men as a Lieutenant-Colonel in [...]]]> Both of these clips are awesome…

And this one on his service in Iraq…

And if you’re not familiar with his service in Iraq… here’s a snip from The Weekly Standard:

In 2003, Allen West was facing a possible court martial hearing that could have put him in prison.

Responsible for over six hundred men as a Lieutenant-Colonel in Iraq, West conducted a harsh interrogation in which he fired gun shots near the head of an Iraqi police officer he suspected of withholding information about a plot to kill him and some of the soldiers under his command. At a hearing over the incident, West defiantly declared that “if it’s about the life of my men, I’d go through hell with a gasoline can.” And though he said he may not have used the right methods, “if he had to err,” he declared, “I would err on the side of not losing my soldiers.”

Taking into account mitigating factors, the Army opted not to pursue a full court martial, though it did fine West and relieve him of his command, effectively ending his highly decorated 20-plus year Army career.

The GOP left him out to dry in 2008 as part of our “winning” strategy and he came close. I think it looks good for 2010.

h/t: Mama Turbo and Cubachi

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One of the most prominent voices against the U.S. military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, who came [...]]]>
Lt. Dan Choi (here pictured protesting Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell by handcuffing himself to the White House fence) was discharged honorably by the New York Army National Guard for violating the policy. Here’s the story from AOL News:

One of the most prominent voices against the U.S. military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, who came out on national TV last year and was arrested in March for handcuffing himself to the White House fence, has now been discharged from the Army because he is gay.

Lt. Dan Choi is a 2003 West Point graduate who is fluent in Arabic and served two tours in Iraq as an infantry platoon leader. Since returning from deployment, he’s become one of the most vocal critics of the military’s policy that bars anyone from serving in uniform if they are openly gay.

Choi, 29, revealed his sexual orientation publicly for the first time last year on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show,” prompting the Army to begin proceedings to discharge him. But his case had been in limbo since then, and Choi hoped to stay in the military long enough to see “DADT” repealed.

Even though I tend to support DADT and I’m not enough of an expert to be outright against gays in the military though my gut tells me it’s wrong, I have a hard time generating sympathy for this guy. He went to West Point in 1999 — knowingly. DADT has been military policy since the early 1990s and for crying out loud the guy came out on the Rachel Maddow show, chained himself to the White House fro crying out loud.

Choi told the Orange County Register, his hometown California newspaper, that he found the Army’s decision “infuriating and painful.”

“It’s very painful news to know you’re getting fired just for who you are,” Choi said. “‘Of course we expected it. You don’t go into battle like this, you don’t start a journey like this, without fully knowing what lays ahead.”

He wasn’t fired for being gay — he was fired for telling. The US Army did its part by not asking. Mr. Choi failed his part by telling. Whether or not the policy is right or just that’s the policy. Get your DD-214 and then fight like hell to get the policy overturned. Choi is obviously intelligent and probably an able spokesman for his point of view. He forced their hand and now he wants to cry about it? And while his service in Iraq sounds very honorable as was his discharge — his actions triggering the discharge don’t sound so honorable.

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