A Mighty Wind

Posted on September 7, 2008 by Berlin Wally
Filed Under The Bunker || Leave a Comment |

Tropical Storm Hannah was the functional equivalent of a medium-sized nor’easter. The Bunker was fine but our off-site media production facility lost power for about 10 hours overnight. This prevented approx. 16 spontaneously-combusted anti-Obama bin Biden posts. It’s an ill wind…

All together now: “It’s Bush’s fault.”

Hurricane Ike still might end up in the Gulf Oil Patch. Better fill up your tank now. Stay tuned for Herr Doktor von Rundfunk und Höhenschtauffen’s nightly economics and market forecast podcast: “Don’t Panic… OK, Now You Can Panic” coming to an iTunes near you. We’ve bought him a button-down collar shirt with the sleeves already rolled up and some throat lozenges.

Your Morning Thought Exercise: Why did the MSM have to be dragged kicking and screaming to even mention John Edwards’ “love child”, but they jumped all over the Palin daughter like wolves on a sheep?

Ways & Means

Posted on September 6, 2008 by Berlin Wally
Filed Under Corruption, Suspicious Characters || Leave a Comment |

Congressman Charley Rangel typifies liberal Dem politics. He squawks loudly about the working man and then proceeds to live like a fatcat.

And it turns out that like so many other holier-than-thou politicians, he’s dirty.

Rangel owns a villa in the Dominican Republic (don’t you?) that he rents out. According to this, he somehow neglected to report that income on his income taxes.

[Lawyer Lanny] Davis said Mr. Rangel’s accountant believed he would most likely owe back taxes to the state and New York City.

But Mr. Rangel will probably have no federal tax liability, Mr. Davis said, because he considered the villa an investment rather than a vacation home, and was therefore entitled to deduct depreciation on the property, as well as taxes the resort management paid to the Dominican Republic.

This is the sort of barely legal chicanery that the Federal tax code has set up to benefit the folks like Rangel, so let’s move on from tax fraud to election fraud.

In another NYT article, it is reported that Rangel has been given a no-interest mortgage (don’t you have one?) on that same villa.

The loan was given to him by the resort development company, in which Theodore Kheel, a prominent New York labor lawyer, was a principal investor. Mr. Kheel, who has given tens of thousands of dollars to Mr. Rangel’s campaigns over the past decade, had encouraged the congressman to be one of the initial investors in the project.

Interest was waived because profits from the development were not as high as expected. After all, you don’t want an influential Congressman taking a bath on an investment you recommended; certainly not when he is voting on legislation that may affect the unions you represent.

Mr. Rangel, 78, who was elected to the House in 1970, has already asked the ethics committee to examine his renting four rent-stabilized apartments in Harlem and his use of Congressional stationery to solicit donations for an academic center at the City College of New York that would be named for him.

And millionaires like Rangel and Kheel claim to represent the interests of the ordinary working stiff. Because that is another characteristic of the liberal: flaming hypocracy.

Democrat Par-tay!

Posted on September 5, 2008 by Berlin Wally
Filed Under Democrats || 2 Comments |

Orange mocha frappuccinos for everyone!
(Original via Suzette, Flash-ification by Wally).

As Suzette notes, not long after this sequence in the original movie, they go up in flames.

Cruel But Fair #133

Posted on September 4, 2008 by Der Funkenmeister
Filed Under Podcasts || Leave a Comment |

Russia bets on McCain. Biden our time with Working Class Joe.

A Stand-Up Guy

Posted on September 4, 2008 by Berlin Wally
Filed Under Conventional Wisdom, Republicans || Leave a Comment |

Deb over at Baristaville thinks “Giuliani smiles like Satan”. Well, it was pretty obvious he was having a Hell of a good time…

Any more so and he would have been literally licking his chops and dry-washing his hands. He seemed to be both channeling a stand-up comedian and harkening back to his days as a prosecutor: cracking one-liners and laying out the people’s case against Barack Obama for the crime of fraud.

Anyone who thought the GOP Convention was going to be out-shone by the Dems in Denver should have been watching last evening. It was a celebrity roast… for Barack Obama.

And guess who was laughing the loudest?