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It’s quite clear that I’m going to be able to fill up a daily feature on the wanker of the day, but I’d rather come up with a new title to at least pretend I have some originality.
Suggestions? Snark encouraged.
Wanker of the Day
Tom Roeser could probably be the wanker of the decade as well, but today he is very special:
Ah, but one has the potential to do serious damage.
That’s the rumor, reported by Sweet that began with blogster Debbie Schlussel, a conservative talking-head on MSNBC, now carried widely by word of mouth by some political cognoscenti in Chicago bars. Right now the tale is in a decidedly phase 3 cyclonic stage as a key rumor in the bars. The rumor goes: While Barack Hussein Obama is affiliated with the Unitarian-like United Church of Christ in Chicago, he may have, at one time, been a Muslim-or at the very least was accepted as one in his early years: which, if verified, could truly be explosive and possibly disqualifying politically for the presidential nomination of a major political party in a nation at war with extreme elements of the religion. There has been no formal answer to that charge by the Obama people but the rumor gains currency.
First, his Kenyan father, Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., killed in an automobile accident, was apparently a Muslim. No big stuff so far as it goes although it’s interesting to note that Hussein, given to both father and son, is a distinctively Muslim name-derived from that of Husayn ibn Ali [626-680], grandson of the prophet Muhammad. He was killed in the battle of Karbala in A. D. 680 and is a day of mourning and religious observance for Shi’a Muslims. Let’s say if you got a kid running around named Hussein, it means something.
Second, according to best-selling lawyer-novelist, Chicago native and fervent liberal Democrat, Scott Turow in the Internet publication “Salon,” young Obama went to a Muslim school for two years in Indonesia. Third, his mother, Anna, re-married an Indonesian man (most likely a Muslim as Indonesia has the largest Muslim population in the world).
Fourth, while Junior’s affinity is for Kenya which is largely Christian, it has a fast-growing Muslim population which has engaged in a good deal of religious violence and riots against Christians. Kenyan courts apply Sharia (or Muslim) law when the participants are Muslim. Fifth, in Junior’s book Dreams from My Father, after his father died in Nairobi in 1982, Obama was working in Chicago. He met his Kenyan sister, Auma, a linguist educated in Germany who was visiting in the United States. When she returned to Kenya in 11986 to teach for a year at the University of Nairobi, Obama finally made a trip to his father’s homeland. There he fully embraced the heritage and family he’d never known and came to terms with his father whom he had mistakenly believed was a foreign prince but who now realized was a human being burdened by his own illusions and vulnerabilities: this from his best-seller autobiography.
Schlussel puts it out this way: “Even if he identifies strongly as a Christian, and even if he despised the behavior of his father (as Obama said on “Oprah”), Obama is a man whom Muslims think is a Muslim and who feels some sort of psychological need to prove himself to his absent Muslim father and who is now moving in the direction of his father’s heritage.” She asks: Is this “a man we want as President when we are fighting the war of our lives against Islam? Where would his loyalties be?” She goes further: “Is [he] even the man we’d want to be a heartbeat away from the presidency if Hillary Clinton offers him the vice presidential candidacy on her ticket (which he certainly wouldn’t turn down)?
Or, put another way: A president thought to have been a Muslim as a child and who left the faith for Christianity is the last person to “heal”-which is Obama’s favorite word applied to foreign affairs. Even a third way: a president trying to disabuse a suspicious world that he’s soft on the Muslim religion may want to use replete examples to get tough. Finally a fourth: how would a president once viewed as a Muslim who became a backslider do in the concert of world politics?
Now there has been no substantiation or denial by the Obama people of the rumor that Ms. Schussel has put forward other than for Obama people to claim it is (a) racist, (b) vindictive and (c) full of suppositions. Very well, then let them answer it. Racist? It has nothing to do with Obama’s half caste black-white heritage. Vindictive? Not any more so than the theory put forward against John F. Kennedy, when he was the Democratic nominee in 1960. Full of suppositions? Sure: so the best way to clear the air is for Obama or his staff to give out all the facts.
Besides the level of bullshit that someone said it so it must be a big deal even though there is no evidence and it’s directly contradicted by Obama’s own account of his life, Roeser is too stupid to even get the attribution of the quote right.
Karl Frisch works for Media Matters of America, not the Senator.
IOW, despite claiming the Senator’s staff ducks the question, no one has asked the Senator’s staff because everyone in their right mind knows Debbie Schlussel and Tom Roeser are fucking batty.
Oh
Rich already ranted on that–same point, but go read. Jimenez is a moron of the first caliber.
Let me add–who do you think finishes the test the fastest? Those who are better readers and have some common sense. This is exactly the kind of perverse incentive that lowers morale of good workers.
Moron. Huge Moron.
Wanker of the Day
State university employees began the training in September. According to the state ethics Web site, it should have taken them “no more than one hour” to read the materials. There is no warning that employees must spend a minimum amount of time on it.
Those who finished too fast received letters from the state and the university.
“Contrary to instructions, you appear to have failed to carefully read and review the subject matter contained in the program’s introduction and three lessons,” according to the state’s letter to Zeman.
The letter also instructs employees to sign a statement acknowledging that future failure to complete the training “on a timely basis” will result in disciplinary action “up to including termination.”
Zeman, president of SIU’s Faculty Association, said he is refusing to sign the letter and encouraging other faculty members not to sign. The faculty union has filed a grievance against the university.
“Imagine what would happen to me if I failed a student because he was too quickly doing an exam. I would probably be fired,” said SIU math professor Walter Wallis, who also has to redo the ethics training after completing it in about seven minutes. “The whole thing is kind of absurd. Most of us did what is essentially the same thing, with the same training, a year earlier. Are we supposed to have forgotten it all?”
Jimenez, however, said that this year’s training included updated lessons pertinent to an election year, including a warning that employees only could engage in political activity during half of their one-hour lunch break. The other half is state-paid time when they are prohibited from doing political work.
“The reality is that somebody who works an 8-hour day all year long works 2,080 hours a year,” Jimenez said. “It does not seem unreasonable to expect state employees to take 30 minutes out of their busy work year to complete the ethics training.”
I know several professors at SIU. None of them work 2,080 hours a year. They work many more if they are still trying to get tenure and even after that most do as well.
Trying to argue with people who deal with curriculum for a living that they did not spend enough time on a ‘test’ is one sign that you are a moron. A big one.
If someone can pass your test without taking the time you think they should, the problem isn’t the test taker, it’s the person giving the test. Tests can do many things, but in this case the relevant point of the test appears to be that state employees should be able to demonstrate an adequate understanding of state ethical guidelines. If passing the test does not do that adequately by itself, then why is the test given?
You, Mr. Jimenez are wasting the valuable time of state employees and thus, the tax dollars of every citizen in Illinois. Congratulations.
Moron.
Brilliant
Funny that a government might deny the existence of some guy to make things look better.
Not so funny when they finally admit that the guy exists, but….they are going to arrest him. Dandy.
The right wing blogs have been running all over this story thinking they had a big story. The essential thread was that it was the AP making up a story to make things look worse in Iraq than they really were. As d over at LGM put it:
I truly fail to understand Right Blogistan’s obsession with Jamil Hussein, but I suppose if it can be proven for certain that he doesn’t exist, then everything else will arc toward a resolution — the non-existent WMD will suddently unearth themselves; the abattoir outside the Green Zone will de-escalate; the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who fled the country last year will return and bring forth a new generation of virtuous citizens; the death squads being run by the government we ushered into power will put down their guns and drills; the execution of Saddam Hussein will be shown to be a model of due process and sobriety; the insurgency will evaporate like the morning dew; and Iraq’s infrastructure will bloom like wild prairie flowers.
It’s fine to challenge the AP, however, most professional journalists aren’t going to make up people. There are cases like Blair and Glass, but the editors checked their stories eventually and caught it. In this case, the AP pushed back hard–it wasn’t too hard to guess there was a reason for that.
But don’t let the Iraqi Government confirmation of the guy get in the way of a good conspiracy story, Confederate Yankee is trying to assert that the AP made up the fact that the Iraqi government actually identified a guy as Jamil Hussein. Malkin is skeptical of the story still because, you know, they must have made up that ethnic violence leads to horrible events.
Let me give them some advice. When you fuck up a story. Admit it. It makes it all easier in the end. I know this from experience. It might hurt your ego, but it’s a lot less hurt than if you have to do it in three weeks.
Pretty Simple
This past Election Day, the American people sent a clear message to Washington: Clean up your act.
After a year in which too many scandals revealed the influence special interests wield over Washington, it’s no surprise that so many incumbents were defeated and that polls said “corruption” was the grievance cited most frequently by the voters.
It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that this message was intended for only one party or politician. The votes hadn’t even been counted in November before we heard reports that corporations were already recruiting lobbyists with Democratic connections to carry their water in the next Congress.
That’s why it’s not enough to just change the players. We have to change the game.
Americans put their faith in Democrats because they want us to restore their faith in government — and that means more than window dressing when it comes to ethics reform.
Last year, I was hopeful that scandals would finally shame Congress into meaningful ethics legislation. But after the headlines faded, so did the enthusiasm for reform. In the end, I found myself voting against the final ethics bill because it was too weak and unresponsive to the obvious need for comprehensive reform.
This time around, we must do more.
We must stop any and all practices that would lead a reasonable person to believe that a public servant has become indebted to a lobbyist. That means a full ban on gifts and meals. It means no free travel or subsidized travel on private jets. And it means closing the revolving door to ensure that Capitol Hill service — whether as a member of Congress or as a staffer — isn’t all about lining up a high-paying lobbying job. We should no longer tolerate a House committee chairman shepherding the Medicare prescription drug bill through Congress at the same time he’s negotiating for a job as the pharmaceutical industry’s top lobbyist.
But real reform also means real enforcement. We need to finally take the politics and the partisanship out of ethics investigations. Whether or not the House ethics committee has been covering for its colleagues, the secrecy with which its members have operated has led people to question why legislators who are serving jail time were not caught and stopped by the committee in the first place. It’s led people to wonder why Congress cannot seem to police itself.
I have long proposed a nonpartisan, independent ethics commission that would act as the American people’s public watchdog over Congress. The commission would be staffed with former judges and former members of Congress from both parties, and it would allow any citizen to report possible ethics violations by lawmakers, staff members or lobbyists. Once a potential violation is reported, the commission would have the authority to conduct investigations, issue subpoenas, gather records, call witnesses, and provide a report to the Justice Department or the House and Senate ethics committees that — unlike current ethics committee reports — is available for all citizens to read.
This would improve the current process in two ways. First, it would take politics out of the fact-finding phase of ethics investigations. Second, it would exert greater public pressure on Congress to punish wrongdoing quickly and severely. Others have proposed similar good ideas on enforcement, and I am open to all options. We must restore the American people’s confidence in the ethics process by ensuring that political self-interest can no longer prevent politicians from enforcing ethics rules.
The truth is, we cannot change the way Washington works unless we first change the way Congress works. On Nov. 7, voters gave Democrats the chance to do this. But if we miss this opportunity to clean up our act and restore this country’s faith in government, the American people might not give us another one.
It’s a Good Day
When you watch your college advisor vote to elect Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House
From Comments
We’ve seen the stages before because we’re from here, but it’s fun to watch the national press go through it all over again.
1. Holy shit, you’ve got to hear this guy speak.
2. Holy shit, this guy was the first African American editor of the Harvard Law Review. Everyone we talk to says he’s really smart.
3. Holy shit, in his book he talks about doing blow, this could hurt him big time.
4. Holy shit, the right is going bonkers (He’s not really black because he wasn’t decendant from slaves – Keyes, His middle name is Hussein – tv right, Holy shit he’s in our church – religious political right, He’s a false messiah and the anti-Christ – nutjob right)
5. Holy shit, everywhere you look people are wild about Barack Obama. Don’t they know he did blow and HIS MIDDLE NAME IS HUSSEIN?
6. Holy shit, he won huge.
7. Holy shit, I can’t believe I lost like that. But at the end of the day I can’t really be too upset about it because I like the guy. (Dan Hynes 2004, Hillary Clinton 2008)Not McCain though, we all know how he gets when Barack steals his thunder. (see Ethics, WATB)
I’m a Conservative!
The Illinois Civil Justice League Blog has labeled me a conservative. I imagine it has to do with me defending Barack on the one piece of class action reform and my general dislike of all things St. Clair County (though I haven’t been talking about it as much lately). The hilarity is that I’m right above the Illinois Review.
It’s true that I have actually been critical of trial lawyers from time-to-time, but I’d suggest my views are actually pretty close to Representative Fritchey’s on the subject and he’s a liberal according to them.
I do appreciate the link and when I update, I just realized their link went away in the remodel–it’ll be back up and I’ll be adding some of the Chicago Reader blogs.
Their point on St. Clair’s Circus is pretty good though so take a look.
Born Alive Veterans for Truth
It’s now a badge of honor to imitate a group of people who lied about a soldier’s war service. Dandy.
Stanek hits on the old nugget that Obama is for infanticide because he kept stopping an unconstitutional bill. The problem with this theory is that the pro-life movement was more interested in using the bill to beat up others instead of passing a bill that would pass Constitutional muster.
Essentially the bill didn’t include an exception for the health of the mother which is necessary for a bill to pass Constitutional muster. So instead of getting a bill with that exception, the pro-life movement insisted on passing a bill that was sure to go to the courts and get struck down. And if you opposed them? You were for infanticide.
The reality is a lot more murky with cases such as the following:
No one likes late term abortions. They are just necessary in some cases. The way to eliminate late term abortions not related to the health or life of the mother was to pass a bill that did just that. Insisting that health wasn’t a legitimate exception is what kept the bill from passing.