Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) was injured by a mohair goat on Thursday during a press conference to highlight subsidies to the mohair industry. The goat nicked Weiner's right hand with one of its pointy, foot-long horns, hard enough to draw blood.
Posted by: Mike ||
06/10/2010 14:28 ||
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#1
Even a goat knows a Weiner when he sees one.
Posted by: Jefferson ||
06/10/2010 16:52 Comments ||
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#2
From the comments:
"Baaaa" means "No"
Posted by: Frozen Al ||
06/10/2010 18:08 Comments ||
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#1
Well, for one thing: ...40% excist tax on the value of employer-sponsored medical insurance...tax would be paid by the insurance company, not the employee
Ok. Defined for the mental midgets of DC and MSM (& BO trolls) that do NOT understand economics:
ALL customers of said insurance company will pay higher premiums as a result of this tax and the way it is structured from this vain attempt to penalize the insurance company.
The insurance co. will simply pass along the cost to ALL customers.
#3
My premiums went up $260 a month because of this. We had to go to a cheaper level with less coverage for only $120 bucks more a month than what we were paying for the better insurance before.
#4
The insurance co. will simply pass along the cost to ALL customers.
Idiots (politicians, liberals & progressives).
The lefties were very careful in crafting this Rube Goldberg machine: premiums spike immediately and over time; constituents scream bloody murder; lefties ride to the rescue demonizing insurance companies and utilizing their newfound regulatory powers to limit premium increases; insurance companies die quick deaths in bankrupcy court; lefties (they hope) implement full-on socialized medicine. They're not idiots by any stretch of the imagination, they're just on the other side.
#5
I got a call the other day asking if I thought California corporations should be forced to pay more tax in order to fund benefits for "public safety workers".
I said no, she sounded shocked. I said that California has probably the highest corporate tax rate in the world, if you increase it even more, the ones we have are going to fold or leave. Then I reminded her that most "corporations" have fewer than 100 employees yet together provide over 50% of the jobs in California.
They don't want to kill the golden goose, they want to bolt it into a hydraulic press and destroy it.
RTWT. It just gets better and better, even through the last line.
If I were a dem incumbent, I'd be getting religion right about now. This guy barely did anything other than pay the filing fee and he still beat the Dem incumbent who put on a decent campaign. The Dems could get him DQ'd on a technicality and reinstall the incumbent, but it sounds like Dem voters don't want anything to do with him so it would probably be a bad move for the Dems.
The SC Dem party had better keep quiet and get to like Alvin. Unless they think the job would be better held by a white guy, of course. [Snicker]
Alvin Greene has been on the phone all day. That's to be expected for the guy who just won South Carolina's Democratic Senate primary and is facing incumbent Republican Jim DeMint in November. But everyone calling Greene has just been trying to find out who the heck he is -- and one thing reporters learned Tuesday is that a criminal complaint was sworn out against him last year for allegedly showing obscene photos to a South Carolina college student and suggesting they go to her dorm room. So what?
Greene, a 32-year-old unemployed military veteran who lives with his parents, defeated Vic Rawl on Tuesday for the Democratic Senate nomination despite having run essentially no public campaign -- no events, no signs, no debates, no website, no fundraising.
The result has baffled political observers, who had heavily favored Rawl -- a former state legislator, attorney and prosecutor who had the edge inasmuch as he actually campaigned and tried to win. Many in South Carolina (which has grandly lived up to its reputation as a political circus this year) suspect that somewhere, a crafty GOP political operative is snickering.
As far as the local political press can discern, the only positive step Greene took toward campaigning was when he plunked down a $10,400 check in March to satisfy the state's filing fee and get on the ballot. He never registered a campaign committee with the Federal Election Commission or filed a financial disclosure with the Senate Ethics Committee.
So why did he run, and how did he win? "I campaigned," Greene, who spoke rapidly and seemed distracted, told Yahoo! News in a brief interview. "It was a low-budget campaign. I funded it 100 percent out of my own pocket, and kept it simple -- it was old-fashioned." Asked what, precisely, that campaign consisted of, and how much he spent on it, Greene demurred. "Not much. I had friends helping me."
He said he hasn't yet reached the $5,000 spending limit that triggers a requirement to file with the FEC, despite having spent that $10,400 filing fee (a pretty penny for someone with no job). Like any good politician, Greene tried to deflect questions about the particulars of his campaign to talk of "the issues."
"I graduated from the University of South Carolina," he said. "We have more unemployment than any other time in South Carolina history. Hold on, I have another beep."
Shortly after his Yahoo! News interview, the Associated Press reported that Greene was arrested in November on the obscene photo complaint. Charges are pending, and he hasn't entered a plea. One could, of course, note that such charges wouldn't necessarily hurt a candidate in a Palmetto state election season that's featured plenty of sensational sexual charges.
Greene's candidacy has raised suspicions that he may have been induced to run by Republican operatives in order to sow dissension in the Democratic ranks. It's not uncommon in South Carolina for Republicans to recruit African-American challengers to run against white frontrunners in Democratic primaries in the hope of drumming up racial tensions. (Greene is black.) The straw candidates aren't supposed to win -- they're just supposed to create a racially divisive primary to damage the candidate's ability to put together a coalition in the general election.
It's nothing new to Nu Wexler, the former executive director of the South Carolina Democratic Party. "In 2004, on the last day you could file to run in the primary, we were wrapping things up when an SUV with a Bush-Cheney sticker dropped off three black guys who came in to file to run in some local races, and they all paid the filing fee with sequentially numbered cashier's checks from a local credit union," he said. In 1990, famed South Carolina political consultant Rod Shealy was convicted of violating campaign laws after recruiting a black candidate to run in a GOP primary for lieutenant governor in the hope of drawing out racist voters -- a maneuver he thought would bolster support for his candidate.
Greene denies that he's a plant. But even if he is, the lack of an actual campaign seems to indicate that whatever plan he might have been a part of was quickly abandoned. Wexler says there may never have even been much of a strategy: "You have consultants doing this kind of thing just because they get bored, and they want something to tell good stories about. It's almost like fraternity pranks."
Greene's success is a testament both to the lackluster quality of the campaign run by Rawl (who raised $186,000 and ran ads) and to the, um, peculiar voting habits of South Carolinians. State Democratic Party Chairwoman Carol Fowler speculated to AP that Greene won because his name came before Rawl's on the ballot. Wexler says Greene is a "big name in South Carolina."
We called the South Carolina Democratic Party to ask if it intends to support Greene's candidacy, but haven't heard back. It could attempt to challenge Greene's win by claiming that he didn't pay the filing fee out of his own pocket -- which, if true, would be a federal crime. "It puts them in a tough position," Wexler said. "You can't exactly start challenging the filing fees of every candidate."
#1
Rawl wasn't an incumbent, he was an annointed party favorite to lose against DeMint. I get the distinct impression that the South Carolina Democratic Party is a classic clown-car.
"You have consultants doing this kind of thing just because they get bored."
That... is a hell of a way to run a republic.
Posted by: Mitch H. ||
06/10/2010 8:21 Comments ||
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#2
That... is a hell of a way to run a republic. For years now I have been thinking of the US as an oligarchy.
#4
...It's not uncommon here for the SC Republican Party - showing a great deal more combativeness here than they do in Washington - to pay nobodies to run in the primaries in order to draw votes away from potentially strong Democrat opponents. That's what happened here, and it worked beautifully.
Mike
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski ||
06/10/2010 12:08 Comments ||
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#5
So, the Democrat Party of South Carolina wants to find some way to disqualify the first black candidate for Senator of a major party in South Carolina's history? Gee that should play well with the 29% of voters who are black in S.C.
#1
I had a lot of dealings with HP when Fiorina was CEO and they sold second rate products with second rate staff. Even now I refuse to buy HP products.
But having said that, Fiorina's strategy was the right one and proved succesful. Go for the volume business of second rate products, undifferentiated from your competitors at a reasonably competitive price.
#4
Fiorina's strategy was the right one and proved succesful. Go for the volume business of second rate products, undifferentiated from your competitors at a reasonably competitive price
Disagree. HP is no longer viewed as a commercial product. It's only advantage is the good cartridge system that permits remanufacture and shaving of costs of operation.
Worse, HP screwed the pooch this last year, cancelling contracts with the factories.
I won't elaborate here, but HP is about to have its heaviest competition ever come forward with a new product line...I don't think HP will fare well and will react by producing more cheap crap.
#6
Someone will have to teach me on this. Do companies always grow? Do they never lay off employees or move manufacturing for profit? Are there any still in business?
#7
The criticisms of Fiorina as CEO go too far. Her plan was the right one, even if the fruits of it took longer than expected to realize. The company's stock has soared under Mark Hurd, her successor, who has done nothing more than execute the customer-centric (as opposed to product-centric) reorganization that Carly pushed for. Had HP not made this painful shift, it very likely would have gone the way of other aging tech giants like Sun Microsystems.
Her record here is a lot more mixed than her detractors will admit.
#9
You guys are nuts. Carly killed a lot of sacred cows at HP but she transformed that company into the largest computer company in the world. Her reorganization resulted in HP being the largest computer maker on the planet by 2006 when HP surpassed IBM.
In the middle of the tech bust, Carly jettisoned a lot of the old lines of gear and bought Compaq (which had bought Tandem and DEC). She focused the company on the Intel platform.
There is a HUGE amount of sour grapes from a large number of people in the more traditional lines that were cut loose. Her troubles started with the proxy fight to buy Compaq. It turned out she was 100% correct.
That woman has vision. What she did wasn't popular at the time but HP has profited nicely from it. Had she not done so, HP would be suffering the same fate as Sun Microsystems instead of being larger than IBM today.
A lot of people repeat that sour grape crap but don't know what they are talking about. She turned HP around, had she listened to Walter Hewlett, the company would be dead right now because the kinds of products Hewlett wanted to preserve and now located at the Silicon Valley Computer Museum.
#10
"the kinds of products Hewlett wanted to preserve and now located at the Silicon Valley Computer Museum."
Should be "are located".
And if HP had bought EDS, they would be even larger. There was a lot of resistance to her goring those sacred cows but it was the right thing to do. Those people would be out of a job now anyway as nobody makes that kind of hardware anymore.
#12
If she was the worst thing that ever happened to HP, she'd still be 'way better in the Senate than six more years of Barbara BlockheadBoxturtle Boxer.
Posted by: Mike ||
06/10/2010 14:57 Comments ||
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#13
I understand that corporations must downsize from time to time. But it seems anti-competitive to me when corporations buy their competition the way HP bought Compaq instead of at least making some kind of an effort to figure out how to do it better.
As for HP being the largest computer company in the world, I find it very disturbing that so many of the computers they sell these days are Made in China. I know, all the companies are doing it, and that makes it all the more disturbing.
I've been out of the loop for a few weeks, so if this is old news, I'm sorry. Here's the beginning of John Kass's column June 4, FYI. Rest at link.
Watching Republican U.S. Senate candidate Mark Kirk squirm before the Tribune editorial board on Thursday for embellishing his military record reminded me of something:
Watching Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Alexi Giannoulias squirm in the same chair a few months ago, for his role in his family's controversial and now failed Broadway Bank.
So now both candidates in the race for President Barack Obama's old Senate seat have problems.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
