It’s a controversy which has been going on for some time now, but a stalemate between Louisiana’s two senators over Jim Letten’s future as the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana is beginning to get some traction in the local media.
Letten, who was elevated to his current position in 2001 after having served as a prosecutor in the New Orleans-based Eastern District since 1990, has become a wildly popular figure in the Crescent City – New Orleans Gambit Magazine named him New Orleanian of the Year for 2009 – for his efforts at cleaning up the rampant corruption among local politicians, among other things. Since his ascension to his current job in 2001 (prior to that he had achieved a degree of notoriety for having tried the case which put former governor Edwin Edwards in the pokey), Letten’s office has prosecuted some 230 individuals on public corruption charges and another 150 on post-Katrina fraud beefs, in addition to the standard work a U.S. Attorney does. Among some of the former rock band drummer’s notable trophies are (per Gambit’s piece on Letten last week):
After a week of fallout from Ed Murray’s withdrawal from the New Orleans mayor’s race and the conventional wisdom mounting that Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu was now a heavy favorite to win, one of the minor candidates in the race has now emerged at the head of the line.
Troy Henry, a businessman making his first run at a political office, is an engineer by background and reputedly a fairly smart individual. As such, Henry does math pretty well. Today, Henry proved it.
Among the many issues we focus on within the pages of this blog are the worthiness – or lack thereof – of the elites here in America and elsewhere in the Western world. It is our contention here at the Hayride that elite status must be maintained through merit and quality; if elites do not reflect the best values and traditions of a society then either they aren’t actually the elites or the society as a whole is in the process of rejecting its best values and traditions – with steep decline an inevitable result.
For at least 40 years, America’s elites – intellectual, cultural, academic, commercial, scientific and journalistic – have not only failed to reflect the best values and traditions of our society, but have actively put them under assault. The examples of this are legion; a few which easily come to mind are the head-scratching controversy over Carrie Prejean expressing the same support of legal preference for heterosexual marriage that Barack Obama does (at least publicly), the astonishing rarity of films in which American business is portrayed in anything other than a positive light or the refusal of our educators to present the United States as a beacon of freedom and morality rather than a racist, aggressive and unjust nation.
Yes, I’ll agree that there has been a dispiriting amount of lies told by presidential administrations throughout the country’s 200-plus year history. But has there ever been a White House so contemptuous of the American people as to insult our intelligence the way this crowd does?
Andrew Breitbart has been following a story over at <a href=http://biggovernment.com/2009/12/30/white-house-visitors-log-acorn-ceo-bertha-lewis-in-obama-residence-week-before-sting-videos-launched which outlines exactly how dishonest the Obama administration actually is. The White House released its September visitors log, which included a “Bertha E. Lewis” early in the month, and…well, let’s let Andrew take it from here:
On Saturday, Democratic state senator Ed Murray pulled out of the New Orleans mayor’s race, essentially clearing the field for Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu, brother of Sen. Mary Landrieu, to walk into the job.
One day after setting off a stampede of criticism, covered earlier today on the Hayride, over its heavy-handed efforts to bull-rush a pair of travel bloggers into finking a whistleblower which had leaked its Dec. 25 security directive, the Transportation Security Administration has now backed off its demands for immediate compliance.
Blogger Chris Elliott, who had been served with a subpoena from TSA last night demanding he immediately turn over the identity of his source for the security directive, contacted a lawyer after his conversation with TSA agents. Anthony Elia, Elliott’s attorney, told the Associated Press that the subpoena had been suspended until Jan. 20. Later today on Elliott’s blog it was reported that the subpoena has been dropped altogether…
“When his friend of 30 years Ted Kennedy, with whom he had fought so hard to provide health care to children, was being used as a cheap foil to oppose health care reform, Senator Baucus gave a passionate defense. Unfortunately, those who want to kill any meaningful reform, turned it into an unfounded, untrue personal smear internet rumor. This is beyond the pale and this type of gutter politics has no place in the public sphere. It is this type of slander that makes Montanans, and Americans, disgusted with the politics as usual in Washington. And what is even more sad is that such a personal attack would be given any validity at all, let alone being elevated to the status of ‘news’.”
Today’s New York Daily News, which as a center-left paper is a reasonable representation of the non-propagandist Old Media, skewers the president for his rather anesthetic and torpid response to the attempted Christmas Day bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight over Detroit.
“President Obama’s initial response Monday was too long in coming, too cool in delivery and too removed from the extreme gravity of the plot,” said the paper.
If it wasn’t enough to force airline passengers to remove shoes, jackets, sweaters, belts and other clothing during hour-long delays for security purposes, and if it wasn’t enough to harrass grandmothers and mothers with children in an effort not to “profile” the demographic group responsible for the terror threat to air travel, the U.S. government now is taking even further steps to impose invasive, stupid policies to discourage normal people from flying.
First, let’s assess American policy toward Iran in the Obama era.
Said policy is aimed at “engagement” with the Iranian regime, presumably on the basis that the previous administration refused to engage with Iran and achieved little in the form of tangible results. The Obama approach, therefore, is to promote a higher level of dialogue, in fact going so far as to suggest high-level discussions with Iran.
Anybody remember Chloroflourocarbons (CFC’s)? The chemicals, used in aerosols and refrigerants, were a big deal in the 1980′s and 1990′s – the major environmental threat of that era. CFC’s were going to destroy the ozone layer and kill us all.
Turns out, maybe CFC’s were even worse than everybody thought.
One of the topics our readers at the Hayride will become very familiar with is natural gas and its immense potential to redefine America’s energy equation in the coming years.
But just as with seemingly every other industry with growth potential in this country, that potential is under threat by Congress.
Last week, ExxonMobil announced a massive $31.2 billion merger with Fort Worth-based natural gas player XTO Energy, an indication that some of the big boys in the energy market are beginning to see the burgeoning natural gas industry, and particularly the four massive shale gas plays – the Haynesville Shale in North Louisiana, the Marcellus Shale in western Pennsylvania and New York, the Barnett Shale right under the Dallas/Ft. Worth Metroplex and the Fayetteville Shale in western Arkansas – for the game-changer it represents. The deal is expected to fully close some time early next year.
From The Hayride, and by the way if all are in accord perhaps we should take turns pointing out monsters and the purveyors of grotesque and inhuman ideas as often as possible here…
If you’ve got the movie channels on cable, one of the flicks which has made the rounds quite a bit in the last few months is Children Of Men, an Alphonso Cuaron horror show starring Clive Owen which takes place in an England (and world) ravaged by an epidemic of sterility so severe that it has been years since anyone has had children.
Naturally, a slow-motion apocalypse is the result:
Maybe it’s LSU Tiger football. Maybe it’s boiled crawfish. Or deer hunting, or fishing off Delacroix. Maybe it’s Friday lunch at Galatoire’s, or Christmas lights in Natchitoches. Maybe it’s bonfires on the levees, Jazz Fest or a Hays Town house.
Maybe it’s Abita Purple Haze.
Maybe it’s Buckwheat Zydeco, Kermit Ruffin or Tim McGraw. Maybe it’s Cajun jokes. Or a beignet. Or a turducken.
Sarah Palin was right. She was ignored by the current crowd in charge of the federal government, but she was right.
Palin suggested last week to President Barack Obama that in light of the Climategate scandal, which threw into doubt the entire empirical and scientific foundation of anthropogenic global warming theory, it would be advisable for the president to boycott the Copenhagen conference on climate change. Above all else, she suggested, America should not commit itself to any of the prescriptions put forth at Copenhagen until a full vetting of the “science” generated by the proponents of AGW had been made by objective sources.
In what has to be seen as one of the least surprising developments of the current political season, Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu has finally dropped all pretense of “centrism” or “objectivity” or “Blue Doggy-Style” and embraced Obamacare with all her bleeding heart.
The official Landrieu release reads as though it was written months ago, and it’s an awfully full-throated endorsement of legislation Landrieu has been acting as though she was on the fence about for quite some time…
There are lots of conflicting stories floating around today as to the health of Harry Reid’s 2,074-page monstrosity of a healthcare bill, and clearly all is not well on the Democrat plantation.
Evidence of the trouble with the bill, for which Reid has seemed completely incapable of getting 60 votes and for which there is increasingly scant support among the American populace, is that the president has summoned all 60 Democrats to the White House to presumably harangue them in an effort to wrap up a majority. Not a single Republican senator has been invited.
It’s a dog-bites-man story, granted, but today in Copenhagen Al Gore was caught in yet another lie.
From the Times of London:
There are many kinds of truth. Al Gore was poleaxed by an inconvenient one yesterday.
The former US Vice-President, who became an unlikely figurehead for the green movement after narrating the Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, became entangled in a new climate change “spin” row.
Mr Gore, speaking at the Copenhagen climate change summit, stated the latest research showed that the Arctic could be completely ice-free in five years.
In his speech, Mr Gore told the conference: “These figures are fresh. Some of the models suggest to Dr [Wieslav] Maslowski that there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.”
However, the climatologist whose work Mr Gore was relying upon dropped the former Vice-President in the water with an icy blast.
“It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at,” Dr Maslowski said. “I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.”
Mr Gore’s office later admitted that the 75 per cent figure was one used by Dr Maslowski as a “ballpark figure” several years ago in a conversation with Mr Gore.
Apparently Gore isn’t even familiar with facts sixth-graders can easily understand (Earth’s core temperature is roughly 8,000 degrees Fahrenheit, which is why we’re a planet and not a star) – or he just doesn’t care. After all, no one is allowed to confront this birdbrained, bloated, boorish bloviating buffoon to his face without being dragged away by his handlers; for example…
Or…
Or…
Of course, it’s not just self-promoting filmmakers and creepy anti-globalists who have taken a whack at Gore…
Or, finally…
There are lots more examples of Gore’s ridiculous bleatings – going all the way back to his claim to have invented the internet or that the internal combustion engine is the most dangerous invention in the history of mankind. He’s a gasbag and a clown and he has lost whatever credibility he once had.
But the question is, how much longer will this charlatan be given a forum to spew his lies? How much more must the public endure out of his piehole before the media elites finally concede his mendacity and grudgingly drag him off the stage? Isn’t it long past time that this man be ignored?
It’s a controversy which has been going on for some time now, but a stalemate between Louisiana’s two senators over Jim Letten’s future as the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana is beginning to get some traction in the local media.
Moe Lane
Dan McLaughlin
Dan Spencer
Jeff Emanuel
Neil Stevens
