The Rich You Will Always Have With You

Various and sundry wingnuts are up in arms that a low-income victim of Hurricane Katrina has what they claim "appear[s]" to be an "absolutely enormous flat screen television" in her subsidized apartment. This woman and her teevee, it seems, retroactively vindicate the concept of welfare queens that Ronnie Reagan so courageously advanced back in the day.

To date, I have not located these wingnuts' posts trumpeting proof of the corrupt CEO and the war profiteer, as evidenced by this article:

CENTRAL ISLIP, N.Y. (AP) -- The former head of the leading supplier of body armor to the U.S. military, facing federal charges in an alleged fraud scheme, may be freed after two months in jail but only under house arrest, a judge has ruled.

And instead of the usual bail posting, David H. Brooks must convince prosecutors that they have full control of his millions in assets so he cannot use them to flee, U.S. District Judge Joanna Seybert said Friday.

Prosecutors have accused the founder and former chief executive of DHB Industries Inc. of refusing to disclose the location of millions of dollars held overseas, including $4 million recently sent to spiritual leaders in the African nation of Senegal.

The spiritual leaders were paid to pray for Brooks' acquittal, according to testimony at a hearing Friday, but Assistant U.S. Attorney John Martin characterized the expenditures as "quasi-religious."

Brooks' attorney, Paul Shechtman, would say only that "no money was sent to Senegal to hide assets."

...

Prosecutors say he garnered more than $185 million by falsely inflating the value of the inventory of DHB's top product, a vest designed to withstand rifle fire and shrapnel, and then selling company stock after the doctored accounting boosted its price.

Imagine the big-ass teevee you could get for $185 million.

What sort of fellow is David "Non-Bobo" Brooks?

Brooks and Hatfield also are accused of failing to report more than $10 million in bonus payments to themselves and other DHB employees to the Internal Revenue Service.

Brooks also is accused of using DHB funds to buy or lease luxury vehicles for himself and family members, and to pay for vacations, jewelry, cosmetic surgery, country club bills and family celebrations.

Prosecutors say he threw lavish bar and bat mitzvahs for his children in which entertainers like Tom Petty, Aerosmith and the Eagles performed.

Brooks, who owns more than 100 horses and races them at harness tracks around the country, also used DHB funds for his private horse racing business, prosecutors said.

But that's not all!

Over the course of 2005, the Marines and Army recalled a total of 23,000 vests – all of them produced by DHB -- after an investigation by the Marine Corps Times revealed that the vests had failed ballistics tests for stopping 9 mm bullets. The exposé showed that Pentagon officials had dismissed repeated warnings by inspectors. In one instance, army ballistics expert James MacKiewicz alerted higher-ups of "major quality assurance deficiencies" by DHB and recommended rejecting certain lots of vests and "disciplinary action against the contractor."

The military maintains that the recall was merely to calm fears stoked by the Marine Corps Times exposé -- fears they claim are unfounded because subsequent tests on a sample of the vests found nothing wrong. And while there were rumors that the Pentagon Inspector General's office might conduct an investigation into the faulty vest affair, to date there is no sign that one is underway. Instead, the Defense Department is focusing on alleged financial wrongdoing at DHB -- a matter further from their own hands.

I'd feel confident in body armor that passed one out of two sampling tests -- nothing in life is guaranteed! And Brooks seems like the sort who'd never put his own interests before others.

I doubt this news will cause the wingnuts to sign on to John Edwards' Two Americas campaign. But perhaps the fact that the Senegalese spiritual leaders on the receiving end of Brooks' generosity are "Muslim holy men" will cause the nuts to wake up and soil themselves.

Grosse Pointe Blankety-Blank

Shouldn't the criticism of Willard be coming from the right? Why would they support a man who brags about his family's ties to, according to one of the wingnutosphere's most respected and successful journalists, the husband of a known communist?

I'll bet Willard never marched with Alan Keyes in the Bud Billiken Day Parade.

Quote:

Tucker Carlson is an anchor on MSNBC.

Mitt Romney

He went varmint hunting with Medgar Evers.

He fought at Stonewall ... on the side of the N.Y.P.D.

He liberated the death camps with Ronald Reagan.

Mitt Romney, the Photoshop President.

Dumb Hucks

The geniuses at The Corner are wondering if the Reverend Huck is a Manchurian Candidate:

The reader was convinced that none other than Bill and Hill were Huckabee's ultimate backers. Given how divisive Huckabee is, how well they know know the passions of the Evangelical community (and deep anger there, if my inbox is any guide), and the magnitude of money in Bill's "library fund," well, it's as plausible an answer as any to "how the hell did this happen?"

It seems the doctors who performed all of Hillary's abortions and eradicated the distinguishing characteristic from the Clenis implanted a microchip in the Reverend when he went in for his latest round of liposuction.

Libertarian Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation From Pat Buchanan To Ron Paul

The sources for this are Kevin McCullough, the Little Green Genociders and actual Nazis, one of the biggest collections of dipshits you'll find in these United States. So who knows.* But they're accusing Ro Paul and his staffers of consorting with white racist groups with ties to Pat Buchanan, the late Sam Francis and Joe Sobran (who is either dead or alive; I can't be bothered). If Paul was serious candidate, this would definitely merit scrutiny. Since he's not, it just makes his supporters' efforts raise 6 million sound creepy.

* To be fair to Paul, McCullough claims that the white supremacists' alleged meeting place, a Thai restaurant, comped Paul for some meals. ("Looks like the eatery even comped Ron Paul's lunch as a campaign contribution.") What his link actually shows is that Paul's campaign paid the restaurant $314. (Look up the words "payee" and "disbursements," dude.) You don't get much dumber than our Kev.

The Carpeting In A Six-Foot Radius of Mickey Kaus's Computer Is Pregnant With Kaus' Love Child

Blogger's landlord begins eviction proceedings, vows not to return security deposit.

What Ron Paul Juggernaut?

The maverick Republican polls the same as Alan Keyes--3% nationally--in the latest Gallup poll.

Imagine the kind of salary Keyes would pay himself with the tens of millions raised by Ro Paul. Instead, Keyes' supporters barely manage to write subliterate columns for Keyes' website. Columns -- even those with super classy puns in their title -- won't run the washing machines at the Des Moines Budget 8, people.

Of The Year

In comments, nominate someone or something the (fill in superlative) Of The Year. The nomination doesn't have to relate to this blog or its usual subjects, nor does it have to mean anything to anyone but you. Just give some props where props are due.

To start things off, I nominate "open thread" as the Blocked Blogger's Friend of the Year.

The Outrage, It Burns

Or is that the stupidity?

A testosterone-deficient Harvard professor, a wingnut welfare queen and an aptly-named collegiate tosser express outrage at a false report that a Mormon virgin was beaten by pro-miscuous terrorists in the wilds of New Jersey:

Some students yesterday said they the incident would not intimidate them into silence.

"An assault on those who express their opinion hurts all of us who might want to express their views. If you have a problem with what I say, then come and get me," a sophomore who is a member of the Princeton College Republicans, Wyatt Yankus, wrote on a blog, Princetontory.blogspot.com.

"It's a terrible incident, but it doesn't surprise me," a conservative author who has campaigned against a culture of left-wing conformity on college campuses, David Horowitz, said in an interview. "The left has now become the hate group."

A conservative professor at Harvard, Harvey Mansfield, said he is outraged. "I hope Princeton comes down on them like a ton of bricks, and by Princeton I mean either the university or the township or both," Mr. Mansfield said. "It should be easy for liberals to identify a case of intolerance; they're good at that."

Lord, what fools these moralists be. How gullible do you have to be to believe that an obscure college student would be kidnapped and beaten by leftists for advocating abstinence?* The skankofascist terorists would surely pick a higher-profile virgin, like Ben Shapiro, Don Surber or any Ron Paul supporter.

* Answer -- Brit Hume/Instacracker stupid.

I saw (without paying much attention) this morning that Pumpkinhead was putting Willard Romney through his paces regarding his Mormon faith. The correct answer to all Father Tim's questions was "Sod off, you simpering Papist, and take your child-molesting priests with you." Unfortunately for Willard, he's pandered so much to the fundies, both Catholic and Protestant, that he couldn't go down that road.

Meanwhile, TID points out in comments that noted theologian Jack Chick has a more recent -- and meticulously footnoted -- comic book featuring Joseph Smith, who looks amazingly like Liberace.