Relationship Building

Want to know Glenn Beck’s secret to successful relationships? Or at least how to be as successful as he is?

No, no. Not those kinds of relationships. Liberal relationships. The relationships between Liberal politicians, campaign donors, and fundraising organizations. If you don’t have a cast of thousands like Glenn does, you can always go to Muckety.com.

Muckety allows you to type in the name of a Liberal power player, like Anita Dunn, and it draws you a map of all the key links in her political relationships, personal, political, and organizational. Anita, for instance, is related to Robert F. Bauer, Obama’s personal and White House counsel.

I typed in George Soros, figuring it would be full of names - and it was. Somewhere in the maps I subsequently researched was the Brain Trauma Foundation. Why in the world, I wondered, was such a benign-sounding organization being linked to such a web of spiders?

You hear Brain Trauma Foundation, you think, “Christopher Reeve.” But that’s the wrong answer. The name you should be thinking, it turns out, is Hassan Nemazee.

Nemazee is a member of the board of directors of the Brain Trauma Foundation. So is George Soros. But put Soros to one side for now. Nemazee is the interesting character here.

He contributed to the presidential campaigns of John F. Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and eventually, Barack Obama, and actually served as the Clinton’s campaign finance manager.

His name has surfaced before. He is involved with the Iranian American PAC. Somehow, the media always manages to bury him again, though. Especially with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad arriving in New York City next week – if he can obtain a U.S. visa – to attend the nuclear proliferation talks at the United Nations.

Talk about inconvenient timing.

The Iranian-American son of a shipping magnate, Nemazee was chairman and chief executive of Nemazee Capital, a holding company with investments in private and public companies. He was arrested in August for running a ponzi scheme from 1998 to 2009 that obtained $292 million in fraudulent loans from Bank of America, Citibank and HSBC.

Last month, he pleaded guilty to stealing the money to buy property in Westchester County, and donate to charities and political campaigns.

When I was little, my father would read the Sunday New York Times from cover to cover. It didn’t matter that we were all waiting around, clutching our favorite beach toys. My mother would complain.

“Why do you have to read it now? It’s a beautiful day! The kids want to be outside.”

He said it was important to read it from cover to cover to unearth the important news the Times had buried in its back pages.

The story about Nemazee was on page 22 of the March 18th New York Times, in the N.Y./Region section. Other media outlets are only now catching up to the story, long after the mainstream media has yawned and gone on to other, more important issues.

Nemazee has been ordered to turn himself in by this Friday.

According to the New York Times article, “A spokeswoman for the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan declined to identify the political action committees or campaigns that received money from Mr. Nemazee’s schemes.”

The New York Times will never reveal the information, either.

But go to Muckety.com. You’ll be able to connect all the dots yourself.

Trying Our Patience

The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday that New York City terror bomb suspect Najibullah Zazi was tracked by the F.B.I. on the 1,800-drive from Colorado to New York City.

The Port Authority Police were waiting for him at The George Washington Bridge at a pre-arranged drug checkpoint, without a warrant to search for the explosives he was allegedly carrying. Unable to do anymore than look, they waved him across the bridge.

A police department spokesman later pooh-poohed the incident. “The important thing,” he assured the news cameras, “was that Zazi was caught. We stopped him.”

Those comforting words beg the question – then why was he stopped on the bridge in the first place? What were the authorities trying to prove, if they couldn’t prove anything?

One thing it proves is how dysfunctional our legal system is, when law enforcement can see or at least easily find dangerous explosives, only to have the evidence dismissed. Let’s see. The Top 10 Reasons Zazi hid explosives in his car:

10. I needed to remove some tree stumps.
9. My kid wasn’t waking up in time for school.
8. I was trying to evict a tenant from my rental property.
7. I have a rock band and we wanted to have some pyrotechnics.
6. I wanted to dig a hole for my new swimming pool.
5. I was going to a bachelor’s party. We wanted to give the groom a big bang.
4. It’s my kid’s birthday; I promised him fireworks.
3. It’s my anniversary; I promised my wife fireworks.
2. My cellar door is jammed; I needed to get it open.
1. I needed to jump-start my wife’s car.

There’s no end to the excuses defense attorneys will make to have evidence dismissed.

Zazi’s car, it seems, could have been loaded from bumper to bumper with explosives, with a lit fuse dangling out of the trunk; yet, without that piece of paper, the PAPD would have to let him go right out onto the bridge and blow it up.

Nor will there be any end to the blame the Liberals will gleefully lay upon law enforcement and upon our own country, all the while shedding their own enormous share of blame the way a snake sheds its skin.

This event is evidence for one thing, at any rate: it’s another reason why the 9/11 Terrorist Trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed should be a military tribunal.

Heaven only knows what sort of embarrassing evidence against the F.B.I., the Port Authority P.D., and the New York City P.D. will emerge (you won’t hear it from me). We don’t even know what we don’t know. But we know what we don’t want to know.

KSM, as they call him, doesn’t deserve a civilian show trial. Neither does he deserve a firing squad. That would be too good for this evil clown and would dishonor all our service men and women. He doesn’t rate a warrior’s death.

Many are opposed to him having a lethal injection. But it would be the best way to send this murderous showman to the ash heap of history, with a quiver and a snivel, and nothing more.

No pompous speeches, outlandish theatrics, or courtroom temper tantrums for him. Above all, no television cameras to record his last, “heroic” moments. Turn this guy off, for the love of Pete. Give him the old #30#.

A military tribunal would spare us any further examinations into the “unusual” methods of the F.B.I. We don’t need to add any more fuel to the fires of the 9/11 Truthers, for one thing. Nor do we need to hold our useless legal system up to scrutiny.

Finally, if nothing else, think of the poor George Washington Bridge. Every day, it’s faced with traffic jams, accidents, fires, suicide jumpers, car chases with drug dealers. Lunatics scaling its cables.

Sleeping security guards.

It’s the busiest bridge in the world. The GW doesn’t need this kind of publicity.

Next time you need to track down a terrorist guy, terrorist-guy chasers, send him through the Lincoln Tunnel, instead.

The "Fairness" Tax

What gets you up in the morning? If you’re like the rest of us, the answer is a four-letter word: work.

You have to feed your kids, pay your mortgage, and pay your “fair” share of taxes. Welcome to real life.

That word “fair” is what got me up this morning. Obama used it again to describe amnesty for illegal aliens. But he’s also used it for a host of his other socialist programs including health care reform, the Fairness Doctrine, and the redistribution of wealth.

Otherwise known as taxes.

In doing my taxes, I discovered I was eligible (barely) for the working class tax credit. I accepted it. I don’t deny it. I don’t deny that I could use it.

However, my older brother was not eligible for this tax because he made more money than I did. Well, that’s fair, isn’t it? He can afford to pay more taxes. He probably deserves to pay more taxes, right? He’s the “evil rich.”

I think I’ve been down this blogger road before but the subject is worth repeating, especially since the word “working” is used to justify this “credit.”

My older brother has worked longer than I have. He’s worked harder. At age 11, he was busy building a newspaper route empire. He’s stayed at the same company since graduating from college with a master’s degree in business administration.

He’s smarter than I am. He studied harder and got better grades than I did. He did his homework. He did his chores. He was more responsible than I was. He was more careful with his money. He did a better job of saving it. He shopped around for the best prices for everything, from stereos to automobiles.

He looked to the future. He built his own house. He took on more responsibilities at work than I did and got more promotions, and more money. He invested his money wisely. Well maybe not always as wisely as he could have, but more wisely than I did.

When there was a strike, as a manager he was called upon to fill in for the striking workers. It was a hazardous duty, and he had to hire protection for himself. In general, he’s worked longer hours than I have and spent more time away from home.

But the Fates got “even” with him for being so responsible. He married (and divorced) a woman who spent extravagantly enough for both of them. He had a son who’s even smarter than he is and whom he now has to support through an expensive school.

And his younger sister is getting a tax credit for working and saving only half as hard, diligently, and responsibly as he did.

It just isn’t fair.

Off with Their Heads

“Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it… Not one now, to mock your own grinning?" [Hamlet]

In olden tymes, the court jester was allowed to do what no one else could: criticize the king.

But The Fool was only allowed so much leeway. He mock and jest and the king until His Majesty said, “That’s enough!” and then the court jester had to hold his tongue, or risk losing his head.

Today’s coMEDIAns (Get it? Chuckle, chuckle!) are the modern-day court jesters. Their skits, routines, and jokes must pass the Democrat Party censors, naturally, and the Republicans must be seen as the butt of all jokes.

For several generations, Saturday Night Live was the reining court jester. Their takes on President Gerald Ford were legendary. Their mockery of First Lady Nancy Reagan brought howls of laughter.

With the advent of cable television and new networks, pretenders to the throne challenged SNL’s crown as King of (Liberal) Comedy. The Simpsons began the new Golden Age of Comedy.

As Queen of my household, no one was allowed to turn the channel to that program, nor any of its ilk, particularly the cartoon, South Park. Other fools in other households in America notwithstanding, I would not give it house room.

South Park, however, went a step too far. Naively, its writers assumed there were no sacred cows. If they could mock Santa Claus and Jesus, why should Mohammed get any special consideration?

After a Danish cartoonist was placed under a fatwa for insulting Mohammed in a newspaper editorial cartoon, South Park’s creators evidently felt a movement of comic solidarity was in order.

In a two-part episode, they took on Mohammed. Never having watched the show, I don’t know what it was all about. Nor watching it, would I have found out, because before it ever made it onscreen, the producers of Comedy Central censored the program.

A character at the end of each show apparently delivers a Linus-like homily. This speech was supposed to be about standing up to intimidation. Instead, the speech was deleted because the creators had received death threats from Islamic extremists.

So much for standing up to intimidation. Meanwhile, it’s comedic open season on those dangerous Tea Party activists and by association, the Republican opposition. That “irrepressible” funny man, Jon Stewart of The Daily Show, is show in promotional ads telling the Republican to go “fudge” themselves.

In the background, audience members titter hysterically. Once upon a tyme, to hear such erudite humor, you had to be at the bottom of the high school football team pile-up.

Now, you can hear it with the click of your remote. That is real progress, indeed.

Let us see if President Clinton will don his grandfatherly spectacles again and warn us all against making jokes about Islamic terrorists, the way he’s compared the Tea Parties to Timothy McVeigh, who railed against Clinton’s government.

How now, though. The present king (Obama) is displeased with both. He has ordered his predecessor and his chief of staff to denounce the innocent Tea Party protestors and Comedy Central has been given the order to flail itself.

Tea Partiers must not cajole the King and his own jesters must not cajole the King’s favorites.

The king is not amused.