Accounting Bum

Police arrested an ABC News producer as he was attempting to take pictures of Democratic senators and VIP donors leaving a private meeting at the Brown Palace Hotel.

Watch the video.

Michael Totten:

The Ossetians start provoking and provoking and provoking by shelling Georgian positions and Georgian villages around there. And it’s a classic tit for tat thing. You shell, I shell back. The Georgians offered repeated ceasefires, which the Ossetians broke. . .

“On top of that, for the last four years the Russians have been dishing out passports to anyone who asks in those areas. All you have to do is present your Ossetian or Abkhaz papers and a photo and you get a Russian passport on the spot. If you live in Moscow and try to get a Russian passport, you have the normal procedure to follow, and it takes years. So suddenly you have a lot of Ossetian militiamen and Abkhaz militiamen with Russian passports in effect paid by Russian subsidies.

“So back to the 3rd of August. Kokoity announces women and children should leave. As it later turned out, he made all the civilians leave who were not fighting or did not have fighting capabilities. On the same day, irregulars – Ingush, Chechen, Ossetians, and Cossacks – start coming in and spreading out into the countryside but don’t do anything. They just sit and wait. On the 6th of August the shelling intensifies from Ossetian positions. And for the first time since the war finished in 1992, they are using 120mm guns.”

“Can I stop you for a second?” I said. I was still under the impression that the war began on August 7 and that Georgian President Saakashvili started it when he sent troops into South Ossetia’s capital Tskhinvali. What was all this about the Ossetian violence on August 6 and before?

He raised his hand as if to say stop.

“That was the formal start of the war,” he said. “Because of the peace agreement they had, nobody was allowed to have guns bigger than 80mm. Okay, so that’s the formal start of the war. It wasn’t the attack on Tskhinvali. Now stop me.”

“Okay,” I said. “All the reports I’ve read say Saakashvili started the war.”

“I’m not yet on the 7th,” he said. “I’m on the 6th.”

“Okay,” I said. He had given this explanation to reporters before, and he knew exactly what I was thinking.

“Saakashvili is accused of starting this war on the 7th,” he said.

“Right,” I said. “But that sounds like complete bs to me if what you say is true.”

Thomas Goltz nodded.

The “official story” coming out of Georgia never made sense to me.

Supposedly Russia had an extra division or two sitting on their border just as the Georgians decided to be provocative in response to “minor shelling” that they should have ignored. The timing was bad because the Olympics had just begun, which forced the Russians to protect the Ossettians living in Georgia by prosecuting the Georgian government for breaking Russian law. Fortunately the Russians happened to have a mechanized division nearby, which along with the beefed up “peace keepers” and para-military forces already in place allowed them to keep the peace by invading the rest of Georgia. Meanwhile its too bad that the only oil pipeline from the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean is threatened. Fortunately it survived the first bombing attempt by the Mig fighter/bombers.

But then Russia became the largest country in the world merely through a series of defensive actions. At least if you’re talking to Russians.

Anyway, read the whole thing. And I’m eagerly awaiting the next installment or three from Mr. Totten.

Sure, Obama was eight when Ayers was bombing the Pentagon. But it doesn’t explain why he was friends with an unrepentant terrorist for what may have been 20 years.

I used to wonder how people got so uptight in the nineteenth century that people would put skirdts on pieano legs.

I don’t any longer.

WSMV
via Instapundit.

The ordeal began last week when Hensley’s wife sent him to a local grocery store to buy ground beef. While there, Hensley encountered a woman with her two nieces, ages 11 and 13. “I offered to trade her a fattening hog for those girls,” Hensley said. “I meant it as a joke. I’ve said it a million times. Most people get a kick out of it.”

The woman didn’t laugh. Instead, the family obtained a warrant for Hensley’s arrest from the local prosecutor, claiming the comment was intended to entice the children into illegal sexual activity.

I’m not a big McCain fan, but Obama is enough to make even McCain look good.

And the thing about him not knowing how many houses he owns? Come on, he knows. He just didn’t want to give out video of saying it.

If it was me, and my wife owned, directly or indirectly, a passel of houses that I didn’t want the media making hay about, I would have answered for how many houses I owned.

I think the reason McCain didn’t do that is because he personally doesn’t own any. The only thing he’d worse than being a rich, old, out of touch, white fart, is being a kept man.

That’s my theory, and I’m sticking to it.

We Will Not be Silenced:

There’s more at the link.

1. Hillary supporters are complaining that Obama was better organized immediately after Super Tuesday, when she was expected to have it locked up. Maybe Hillary’s aides weren’t as smart as they thought they were.

2. They are complaining that they were treated the way Republican have been treated by Democrats for longer than I’ve been alive. (My dad has a story from when he lived in El Paso of how the Sheriff would count the ballot boxes behind locked doors in the county jail - without Republican observers. Funny a lot of the complaints are still coming out of Texas.)

3. Surprise, surprise. Illegal voting actually does take place. Funny how it only happens in Democrat primaries, and certainly not in general elections. (Any imputation of illegal voting in a general election or desire to reduce such is an obvious Republican scheme to discourage minority and lower class voting, except in Chicago. In Chicago it’s just normal Republican sour grapes.)

4. Caucuses are easier to game and control. Normally this favors machine politics and the group in power. Not this time. Any system that cannot tell you how many delegates each candidate has within 24 hours is not transparent. I understand they still aren’t sure about the total delegate count from of the caucasus in 2004. Maybe Hillary should work to increase democracy by outlawing caucuses (including union card check laws). I didn’t think so.

5. Hey, acts of voter intimidation. No big deal. It was for a good cause.

6. Missing voter tallies. Almost reminds me of the time they found missing ballot boxes (with the ballots still in them) floating in the San Francisco Bay. But it was weeks after the election got certified, so it was all good.

Steve Browne:

In a democracy, where issues are decided by weight of opinion, a minority willing to use violence has a disproportionately weighted vote.

And the west has a growing minority increasingly willing to use violence.

will be the gift that keeps on giving.

Jonah Goldberg:

But, again, what’s fascinating — and what might be distracting some folks from seeing his underlying-yet-occassional smarts — is that he lets his ego and vanity get in the way. The man loves his voice so much, you’d expect him to be following it around in a grey Buick, in defiance of restraining order, as it walks home from school. He seems to think his teeth are some kind of hypnotic punctuation marks which can momentarily disorient the listener and absolve him from any of Western civilization’s usual imperatives to stop talking. Listening to him speechify is like playing an intellectual game of whack-a-mole where every now and then the fuzzy head of a good point pops up from the tundra but before you can pin it down, he starts talking about how he went to the store and saw a squirrel on the way and it was brown which brings to mind Brown V. Board of Ed which most people don’t understand because [TEETH FLASH] he taught Brown in his law school course and [TEETH FLASH] Mr. Chairman I’m going to get right to it and besides these aren’t the droids you’re looking for….

and from the opposite side of the spectrum, The New Republic:

Biden’s admirers spin his undisciplined chatter as a kind of John McCain-esque straight talk. Their shining example is the way, in 1992, Biden told Slobodan Milosevic to his face that he was “a damned war criminal and should be tried as one.” Washington insiders “like people to speak in this kind of thought-speak where you talk for three minutes and don’t say anything,” says his former longtime chief of staff, Ted Kaufman. “That’s not Joe Biden.”

But Biden’s mouth does him as much harm as good. ” He gives Castro-length speeches,” says one exasperated Senate staffer. In Democratic caucus meetings, he is famous for declaring, “I’ll be brief,” and then talking the room into a stupor. (Biden’s colleagues have been known to burst into laughter when he makes that promise.) People who know Biden also warn that his loose talk often reflects muddled thinking. In his classic study of the 1988 presidential candidates, What It Takes, Richard Ben Cramer wrote, “Joe often didn’t know what he thought until he had to say it.” In one recent committee debate, recalls an observer, Biden delivered a rambling explanation of his opposition to a foreign aid amendment, by the end of which he had seemed to talk himself out of his original position.

With all the positive he has said about McCain, and the negative about Obama, the political ads will almost write themselves.

Bonus clip:

No he didn’t. No he didn’t. No he wasn’t. No he didn’t. And about the IQ thing? I doubt it.

Comment at stephenbainbridge.com.

I also met a guy in college who had just finished law school. He told that he could never actually practice law as it would require him to suspend every moral teaching he knew. Don’t know what happened to him, but I doubt he went into litigation.

The Clintons popularized the idea that anything legal is ethical. Lawyers work under the assumption that failing to do anything for their client because of morals is unethical. In other words professional ethics requires at least a modicum of amorality.

And once the line is crossed, it’s hard to stop.

Funny, both Clintons are lawyers.

On my previous post I wrote about the outer connections.

The three inner connections are mind to intent, intent to chi, chi to body. I don’t have a video to explicitly demonstrate the connections, but this guy looks good.

Actually I understand that some practitioners in Shanxi China say that each of the connections if present will have specific attributes show up in the forms. But I don’t know what they are, and I don’t anyone who does.

One way of looking at the inner three connections is the mind creates intent, intent causes the chi (energy) to move, and the chi strengthens the body. Joe Crandall, my teacher, says that it has more meaning in Chinese. Unfortunately I don’t speak Chinese.

David Anselmi has a version that may work better for you. His is intent (third chakra) connects to shen (energy), shen connects to chi, and chi to the void.

Which leads to my next topic, what is Shen and Chi.