Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wants to get to the bottom of what she describes as a “data breach.” A lowly congressional staffer, bless their little heart, inadvertently uploaded to a secret document to a file-sharing computer network, which eventually found its way into the eager hands of the press. It’s a secret report by the House Ethics Committee regarding ongoing investigations into possible wrongdoing by over 30 members of the House of Representatives, which includes at least half the members of the House Appropriations Defense Committee. The committee oversees more than $600 billion in Pentagon spending. The most interesting corruption charges involve the now defunct lobbying organization called the PMA Group.

PMA was founded by Paul Magliocchetti, a protégée of the powerful House Appropriations Defense Committee chairman Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.). Murtha is believed to have received $2.3 million in campaign contributions from PMA since 1989.

The Los Angele Times reported that Murtha’s friends at PMA weren’t above threatening those who wouldn’t play ball:

“Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Tulare) said that his staff was recently interviewed by ethics investigators after Nunes complained that he was threatened by a PMA lobbyist for refusing to sponsor an earmark to benefit a PMA client in Nunes’ district. The lobbyist threatened that the client would move out of the district, taking jobs with it.”

According to the Washington Post, Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.), chairman of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, as well as members of the Congressional Black Caucus made a trip to the Caribbean’s island paradise of St. Martin. “The trip initially was said to be sponsored by a nonprofit foundation run by a newspaper. But the three-day event, at a luxury resort, was underwritten by major corporations such as Citigroup, Pfizer and AT&T. Rules passed in 2007, shortly after Democrats reclaimed the majority following a wave of corruption cases against Republicans, bar private companies from paying for congressional travel,” the Post reported.

Ken Spain, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, told The Los Angele Times, “This is evidence of the fact that Nancy Pelosi is standing knee-deep in the very swamp she promised to drain. Her decisions to stand by corrupt members of Congress like John Murtha and Charlie Rangel are putting members of the Democratic caucus at risk in 2010.”

Ken Spain is right to condemn Pelosi and her big spending Democrats, but this kind of corruption is unavoidable as long as Washington, whether in the control of Democrats or Republicans, wields such overwhelming power over our money and our lives. In other words, fight the power by taking back the power.

– Mr. Curmudgeon

Republican Dede Scozzafava is out of the running. Since she would not lead or follow, she did the next best thing and got out of the way. Scozzafava was nominated by New York’s deluded Republican Party to run in that state’s 23rd Congressional district special election. As Gov. Sarah Palin and other prominent conservatives have noted, Scozzafava wasn’t all that different from her Democratic challenger Bill Owens. Leading conservatives, mostly out of office – and therefore unmoved by the Republican Party leadership – supported Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman with words and cash. With Hoffman draining the energy and cash from the lackluster Scozzafava campaign, she announced that she would fold her tent.

Former Bush speech writer and champion of squishy “compassionate conservatism,” David Frum, is upset that real conservatives are working to excise the cancer of big tent squishiness from the party of Lincoln. “From the New York experience, Republicans will be tempted to draw the lesson: Always nominate the more conservative candidate…we need to drive pro-environmental fiscal moderates out of our party and into the Democratic Party where they belong!” Sorry, Dave, but that’s exactly the prescription needed to save the country from Obamaism.

Scozzafava withdrew from the congressional race with a statement that other Obamaesk Republicans should take to heart:

“It is my hope that with my actions today, my Party will emerge stronger and our District and our nation can take an important step towards restoring the enduring strength and economic prosperity that has defined us for generations.”

Her wish for a prosperous and strong nation can only begin when Republicans stop acting like confused Obama Democrats.

– Mr. Curmudgeon

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom announced he was dropping out of the race to be California’s next Governor. The New York Times said it best, “Newsom, 41, was unable to find the same popularity throughout California that he enjoys in his home city.” No kidding. However, former Democratic Governor and Mayor of Oakland, Jerry 1-800 Brown, is the expected frontrunner among his state’s donkeys.

Unfortunately, for California’s Republicans, Gov. Schwarzenegger has done to his state’s party what George W. Bush did to Republicans at a national level…destroyed any remaining vestige of credibility on fiscal or social matters. Schwarzenegger, ever ready to obliterate the thin veneer of difference separating Democrats from Republicans, was in Washington to help Vice President Joe Bien celebrate the measly 1 million jobs supposedly created by Obama’s $800 billion stimulus. No one, not even the press, bothered to mention that since last January, over half a million jobs have been lost every month. Eventually, servicing Obama’s stimulus and entitlement debt will add even higher numbers of unemployed to the bonfire.

The disintegration of the Golden State is a microcosm of things to come at the national level: voter moral confusion finds expression through equally confused politicians, followed by economic and eventually social collapse. The Tea Party better hurry and start fielding candidates before the ball of wax we call the United States of America melts into an amorphous blob. You would think Arnold and his fellow Republicans, instead of being co-opted by Obamaism, would be warning their fellow Americans of its impending Terminator-like judgment day.

– Mr. Curmudgeon

The government that protects him decided that moving the man from one safe house to another was less cost effective than simply equipping his home with high-tech surveillance cameras, steel doors, bulletproof windows and a panic room. No, he’s not a Justice Department witness against the mob or an American diplomat living in Baghdad’s Green Zone. He’s a cartoonist named Kurt Westegaard. You might remember his now famous (or infamous) drawing of the prophet Mohammed with a bomb for a turban. The cartoon sparked riots across the Muslim world, resulting in over 130 deaths – mostly Muslims.

In a surreal moment back in 2008, Taliban spokeman Qari Yousuf Ahmadi told journalists that Danish troops in Afghanistan’s Oruzgan Province were “primary targets” for his knuckle-dragging gunmen. Nothing better underscored the child-like nature of the Taliban than that they believed NATO troops already engaged in a fierce shooting war would be especially traumatized at the prospect of dying deathlier deaths.

74-year-old Cartoonist Westegaard is not in the least bit apologetic. “I don’t regret anything,” he told Canada’s National Post. “I would do it again. I have one advantage — I am an old man. There is not so much at stake for me anymore. I have lived most of my life, so I have not so much at risk.” According to the Post, during the interview, Westegaard calmly smoked a cigarette outdoors while a friend held a framed enlargement of his Mohammed cartoon close by.

And his reason for drawing the now famous cartoon? “I attempted to show that terrorists get their spiritual ammunition from parts of Islam and with this spiritual ammunition, and with dynamite and other explosives, they kill people. I showed this in a cartoon and what happened? They want to kill me, so I think I was right.”

Recently, the artist began a speaking tour that brought him to Yale and Princeton universities. Yale University Press published a book on the Westegaard’s cartoon and its effect. It did so without including the image that sparked all the controversy. At Yale, the artist was refused permission to project his cartoon onto a screen while he delivered his remarks. Instead, Yale assured Westegaard his cartoon would be shown in a separate room “so that students who do not want to see it, do not have to see it.” The brave Yale authorities never provided the room in which to display the drawing.

According to the Brussels Journal, Yale’s Muslim chaplain Omer Bajwa claimed Westergaard’s visit was part of a plot hatched by Dutch Member of Parliament Geert Wilders and American scholar Daniel Pipes. Wilders, as you may recall from a previous post to this blog, is also a Dutchman living under threat of death by fanatical soldiers of the “religion of peace.”

During the question and answer phase to Westegaard’s Yale visit, a student – proving how successful today’s universities are at transmitting cowardly nihilism – told the artist, “You feel unsafe today, which is unfortunate, but you should realize that your presence here today has made thousands of other people feel unsafe.” This student’s parents can be proud knowing the $50,000 tuition they paid Yale closed their child’s mind to the obvious: that Islamic fanatics who murder women and children, writers, musicians, politicians, artists, Jews and anyone else who refuses to conform to their narrow, barbaric and primitive worldview — pose a far greater threat to our otherwise tranquil lives than do cartoonists.

The thousands of American’s who died on and since 9/11 make it difficult to step back and see the profound absurdity of an enemy our crumbling Western World fears and seeks to accommodate. The violent reaction by deranged Islam to Westegaard’s cartoon is tantamount to maddened mallards threatening the life of Daffy Duck’s creator Chuck Jones. With several plots to kill Westegaard foiled, the continuing fervor to murder the cartoonist proves what daffy and odd ducks jihadists truly are.

– Mr. Curmudgeon

As President Obama and his Democrats near completion of a health care bill that grabs over13% of the U.S. economy, it’s good to look back through the annals of big government power grabs and consider the saga of Joseph, Martin, Alex, and Aaron Schechter. The brothers may not be remembered or honored, but they should. They, as well as their sick chicken, freed the United States from the iron grip of FDR’s Mussolini-like control of the U.S. economy.

The Schechters ran afoul of FDR’s 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA). Under the U.S. Constitution’s Commerce Clause, which grants congress power “to regulate commerce … among the several states,” Roosevelt sought to control prices, wages, and hours worked as well as mandate the right of workers to organize unions. A little New York City wholesale poultry business run by the Schechters undercut federal price controls and, according to the government’s 60-count indictment, sold unhealthy chickens in violation of the Live Poultry Code. There was a slight problem with the government’s case. The Schechter brothers bought and sold their chickens within the confines of the Empire State. Their clever lawyers argued, therefore, that neither FDR nor his rubberstamp congress had authority to regulate trade that did not cross state lines. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed.

In his 1935 majority opinion, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes intoned through his thick white mustache:

“We are of the opinion that the attempt through the provisions of the Code to fix the hours and wages of employees of defendants in their intrastate business was not a valid exercise of federal power.”

Justice Hughes reserved a few choice words in defense of the sick chicken in question:

“The same may be said of violations of the Code by intrastate transactions consisting of the sale ‘of an unfit chicken’ and of sales which were not in accord with the ordinances of the City of New York.”

With the bang of a gavel, the most draconian aspects of FDR’s New Deal were relegated to the ash heap of history in what became known as the “Sick Chicken Case.” Americans, the high court ruled, were not to be penned-in like, well, chickens.

Associate Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis is said to have remarked to Roosevelt’s aids, “This is the end of this business of centralization, and I want you to go back and tell the president that we’re not going to let this government centralize everything.”

Recently, when a reporter asked Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi if the Constitution granted congress authority to nationalize health care, it caught her off guard, “Are you serious? Are you serious?”

Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner was equally befuddled, “I’m not a lawyer, and I’m certainly not a constitutional lawyer, but I think it’s wrong to mandate that the American people have to do anything,” We can only hope Boehner dedicates a little more grey matter to the weighty Constitutional question.

According to the Washington Times, when then First Lady Hillary Clinton tried to snare the nation’s health care system in 1994, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported:

“The government has never required people to buy any good or service as a condition of lawful residence in the United States.”

Georgetown University law professor Randy Barnett told the Times:

“Where in the [Constitution] is the power to mandate that individuals buy health insurance?”

“The business of providing health insurance is now an entirely intrastate activity beyond the regulatory sway of the federal government.”

If congress passes ObamaCare, it may fall to the high court’s 5-4 conservative majority to rein in the Democrat’s unprecedented power grab. We can only hope that our nation’s majestic and emblematic Eagle is saved once again by a sick chicken.

– Mr. Curmudgeon

It seems that the international community President Obama so cherishes isn’t cherishing back. In last September’s speech to the United Nations, Obama blamed his predecessor’s war policies for diminishing America’s image in the eyes of the world. “America has acted unilaterally,” said Obama, “without regard for the interests of others. And this has fed an almost reflexive anti-Americanism…” He promised the U.N. “a new era of engagement with the world.”

Today, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions is demanding that the Obama administration demonstrate to the world that it is not randomly killing people in violation of international law. Phillip Alston, investigator for the United Nations Human Rights Council, is concerned with CIA directed Predator drone attacks in Pakistan. He decries the CIA’s attitude of “Let’s use drones in a broader context.” And warns that “once you use targeting less stringently, it can become indiscriminate.” It’s estimated that since coming into office, Obama has ordered at least 41 Predator strikes.

Alston told the BBC, “My concern is that these drones, these Predators, are being operated in a framework which may well violate international humanitarian law and international human rights law. The onus is really on the government of the United States to reveal more about the ways in which it makes sure that arbitrary executions, extrajudicial executions, are not in fact being carried out through the use of these weapons.” In the eyes of the Obama administration, the “war on terror” is a law enforcement matter best left to prosecutors, judges and juries. Now the U.N. is upping the anti by demanding Obama live up this fantasy by placing his Constitutional war powers under the legal jurisdiction of the U.N.

It seems that Obama’s idiotic, unworkable policy of international “engagement” might land him in the docket as a war criminal. Move over George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

– Mr. Curmudgeon

In 1943, Harvard Dr. Henry A. Murray was asked to prepare a physiological profile of German dictator Adolph Hitler for the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA. He concluded that Hitler’s personality type was prone to:

Holding grudges, low tolerance for criticism, excessive demands for attention, inability to express gratitude, a tendency to belittle, bully, and blame others, desire for revenge, persistence in the face of defeat, extreme self-will, self-trust, inability to take a joke, and compulsive criminality.

I was reminded of the above when the FBI announced the arrest of three men in connection with a plot to kill the former cultural editor and cartoonist of the Danish newspaper that printed the 2005 Prophet Mohammed cartoon.

Unlike offending infidels, Islamic grudges never die.

According to an FBI spokesman, one of the conspirators, David Coleman Headley, posted a message on an Internet discussion site declaring, Yosemite Sam-like, “I feel disposed toward violence for the offending parties.” Some people, like Hitler or Yosemite Same, can’t take a joke.

What does it say about a mass movement’s worldview that a cartoon can so disturb its fragile equilibrium that men spend four years of their lives stewing and plotting the death of a cartoonist who sits at a drawing board?

Dr. Murray’s analysis of the German Fuhrer fits these Islamic misfits to a tee:

“Hitler perceives in other people the traits or tendencies that are criticizable in himself. Thus, instead of being devoured by the vulture of his own condemning conscience…he can attack what he apperceives as evil or contemptible in the external world, and so remain unconscious (most of the time) of his own guilt or his own inferiority.”

It belies what Bugs Bunny once said, “My, I’ll bet you monsters lead innnnteresting lives.”

– Mr. Curmudgeon

In the view of constitutional scholars working for Georgia’s Catoosa County school board, the cheerleaders urging on the Lakeview-Fort Oglethorpe High School Warriors football team are the property of the state. The New York Times reports that, “With salaried coaches and the school’s name on their uniforms, the cheerleaders would most likely be considered school-sponsored…” At the urging of their attorneys, the school board ordered the cheerleaders cease displaying Christian banners at Friday night football games, a tradition that began after the attacks on 9/11. Tax dollars collected from parents living in the Catoosa County school district are used as a pretext to stop kids from expressing their faith.

According to the Catoosa County News, Matthew Bryan, an attorney who spoke to the county school board in support of the cheerleaders, said, “Through a series of judicial twist and turns, the restraints on the Congress of the United States are now widely regarded as applying to you. There can be no valid court decision in opposition to the Constitution itself.”

Bryan makes a valid point. The Constitutional convention’s Anti-Federalist members insisted upon including the Constitution’s original ten amendments. They saw them as the citizen’s protection from an all-powerful national government. Federalist Alexander Hamilton argued against the inclusion of these amendments because, in his view, the Constitution gave congress no such power to subvert the liberties of Americans. Boy was he wrong. Now the First Amendment’s congressional restraint against “respecting an establishment of religion” has shifted to the citizen… even down to the high school cheerleader.

School board attorney Renzo Wiggins said he believes the law “requires on the part of the public school system…that it take a neutral stance on the issue of religion.” He further advises Christians to avail themselves of the “free-speech zone” outside the stadium. It never occurs to Wiggins that the very act of confining speech to a “zone,” destroys any pretense of neutrality and, by definition, robs the citizen of his freedom. The courts, therefore, have declared there shall be no other God above government and equates expressions of religious devotion with “shouting fire in a crowded theater.”

– Mr. Curmudgeon

In the unfair and unbalanced opinion of President Obama and his White house staff, Fox News poses a danger to its remaking of America. The problem, at least as they see it, is that Fox breaks stories the mainstream media are forced to follow. That’s why presidential adviser David Axelrod expressed his fear on ABC News that by following up on Fox’s exposés on the Obama administration, the mainstream media lends legitimacy to the only cable news station with a conservative bent. Axelrod went so far as to demand, “…organizations like yours [ABC], ought not to treat them that way.”

White House Communications Director Anita Dunn told the Los Angeles Times, “I think the mainstream media has to ask themselves at a time when there are wars, when there is a bad economy, when there are huge challenges facing this country, whether they want to chase a narrow political agenda.” The answer to Dunn’s question appears to be…YES!

New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller said, “if someone else breaks a good story, and if — important if — our own reporting backs it up, we’ll run it. Even if it’s Fox.”

Los Angeles Times Editor Russ Stanton agrees, though in a sheepish and wordy way, “We would follow any news story — after confirming the facts and figuring out a way to advance it — if we believed it was important to the readers of the Los Angeles Times, regardless of the organization or individual that broke it.”

The mainstream media first became aware that it was blinded by its left-leaning prejudices when Glenn Beck broke the story that Obama “Green Jobs Czar,” Van Jones, founded a San Francisco Maoist organization. The revelation led to Jones’ resignation. As the Los Angeles Times noted, “The story was belatedly picked up by the rest of the media, prompting editors at the New York Times and other news organizations to say they needed to watch the [Fox] network more closely.”

In an interview with NBC News, President Obama insisted his flap with Fox was no big deal. “…If media is operating basically as a talk radio format, then that’s one thing. And if it’s operating as a news outlet, then that’s another thing. But it’s not something I’m losing a lot of sleep over.”

With major media, including “America’s newspaper of record,” looking to Fox for news leads, the only way Obama is getting any sleep is by asking nervous White House aids for sleep aids.

– Mr. Curmudgeon

US magazine once asked the question, “Spike Lee: Why is He so Angry?” Apparently, some African-Americans aren’t living up to Lee’s vision for a new black stereotype. “I think there’s a lot of stuff out today that is coonery and buffoonery. I see ads for ‘Meet the Browns’ and ‘House of Payne’ and I’m scratching my head. We’ve got a black president and we’re going back. The image is troubling and it harkens back to Amos ‘n’ Andy.” Lee’s remarks at the 14th annual Black Enterprise Entrepreneurs Conference were aimed at filmmaker and television sitcom creator Tyler Perry.

In an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes,” Perry responded, “All these characters are bait – disarming, charming, make you laugh bait. I can slap Madea [a female character he’s played on stage, film and TV] on something and talk about God, love, faith, forgiveness, family, any of those.”

Lee suffers from the mindset of most Utopians: that human beings can be molded to fit a vision that self-proclaimed leaders have for them. The Soviet Union had a similar plan to create a “new Soviet man.” After seventy years, that social experiment succeeded in creating a nation of chain-smoking, cynical alcoholics.

Oprah Winfrey weighed in on Perry’s behalf, “I think [Perry] grew up being raised by strong, black women. And so much of what he does is really in celebration of that. I think that’s what Madea really is a compilation of all those strong black women that I know and maybe you do to?”

When I was a kid growing up in the early 1960s, my East Los Angeles neighborhood had a real life Madea. Since most of us were latchkey kids with working parents, the woman we all knew as Bamma sat on her porch, keeping a watchful eye on us as we played. If we struck a playmate, used bad language or talked back to an adult, she’d swoop down from her perch, take us by the hand and led us to a small tree nestled by the side of her house. She would point to one of its long, pliable branches and say, “Pick a switch.” After a couple of whacks across the backside, we knew better than to cross her. She was not above asking strangers to the neighborhood why they were there. In her mind, we were all her grandchildren, and she was in the business of keeping us safe while making us better human beings.

Spike Lee may prefer that African-Americans strictly follow the example provided by the power couple Obama, but our world would be a better and safer place with more real life Madeas.

– Mr. Curmudgeon