Cascajun

Dan Rather appeared on Larry King Live last night. Captain Ed say’s “the most charitable description one can give Rather is incoherent.”

Armed Liberal likens Dan Rather & Mary Mapes recent accounts of Rathergate to an attack from Zombie journalists.

What if MoveOn.org exisited 65-years ago?

Could it really be? Another case of Hillary as the victim of coincidental circumstances, finding herself embroilled in an improbable situation?

Commodities Trading

On October 11, 1978, the future First Lady, a neophyte investor with an annual income of $25,000, opened a commodity-futures account with a deposit of $1,000. Her first trade was the short sale of ten live-cattle contracts at a price of 57.55 cents a pound: a commitment to deliver in December of that year 400,000 pounds of cattle with a market value of $230,200. One day later, she bought the contracts back at a price of 56.10 cents, just 0.15 cent above the low of the day, pocketing $5,300 for a return of 530 per cent.

Mrs. Clinton continued to be a net winner at the game. By the time she closed her trading account ten months later, she had racked up $99,541 in profits, a spectacular 10,000 per cent return on her initial investment of $1,000. Either Mrs. Clinton was a better trader than the legendary George Soros, whose best-ever annual return in thirty years of trading was 122 per cent, or she was led by an invisible hand.

Real Estate Transactions

Whitewater, popular name for a failed 1970s Arkansas real estate venture by the Whitewater Development Corp., in which Governor (later President) Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, were partners; the name is also used for the political ramifications of this scheme.

Whitewater was backed by the Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan, which went bankrupt in 1989. The controlling partners in both the land deal and the bank were friends of the Clintons, James and Susan McDougal. Vincent Foster, a Little Rock law partner of Mrs. Clinton, represented the Clintons in the buyout of their Whitewater shares. Accusations of impropriety against the Clintons and others soon surfaced, regarding improper campaign contributions, political and financial favors, and tax benefits. Claiming that relevant files had disappeared (they were found at the White House in 1996) and that they had in any case lost money on the Whitewater venture, the Clintons denied any wrongdoing.

When Foster, now White House counsel, committed suicide (1993), however, more questions arose. Strongly pursued in Washington, mainly by Republicans, but largely ignored by the general public, Whitewater was investigated by a special prosecutor beginning in 1994 and by congressional committees in 1995–96. Special prosecutor Kenneth Starr’s investigation included testimony from Mrs. Clinton (which was the first time a first lady was subpoenaed by a grand jury) and videotaped testimony from the president.

In a 1996 trial, the McDougals and Jim Guy Tucker, Clinton’s successor as governor of Arkansas, were found guilty of fraud in the case, and in another decision the former municipal judge David Hale, who had pled guilty to fraud and had been a witness in the McDougal trial, received a jail sentence. In yet another trial the same year two Arkansas bankers were acquitted of some charges, and the jury deadlocked on others. Although nothing conclusive concerning the Clintons’ involvement in the Whitewater deal was proved in the congressional or special prosecutor’s inquiries, Republicans charged Hillary Clinton with having sought to suppress politically damaging information and accused Clinton administration officials of lying under oath.

And now, Hsu-Stock?

Woodstock Creator
Tells DA That Funds
Have Gone Missing
A $40 Million Shortfall
By IANTHE JEANNE DUGAN and BRODY MULLINS
September 12, 2007; Page A1

Where did Norman Hsu get his money?

[…]

New documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal may help point to an answer: A company controlled by Mr. Hsu recently received $40 million from a Madison Avenue investment fund run by Joel Rosenman, who was one of the creators of the Woodstock rock festival in 1969. That money, Mr. Rosenman told investors this week, is missing.

Hmmm…

Americans for Prosperity Releases List of Senate Earmarks to be Included in Labor, HHS, Education Appropriations Bill

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – July 3, 2007
Contact: Ed Frank or Annie Patnaude (202) 349-5880

WASHINGTON – The grassroots free-market group Americans for Prosperity (AFP) today released a list of Senate earmarks slated to be included in the Fiscal Year 2008 Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education appropriations bill. The 1,016 earmarks total nearly $392 million, and include millions for questionable projects such as $1 million in tax dollars for a museum dedicated to recreating the 1969 Woodstock Music Festival experience and $250,000 to help fund the Polynesian Voyaging Society, which makes and sails ancient canoes from Hawaii to Japan.

Quid-pro-quo? Or is there a vast conspiracy working against Hillary?

From Bloomberg.com: Hurricane Scientists Flubbed Forecasts for Two Years (Update1)

Sept. 10 (Bloomberg) — Hurricane researchers, who forecast seven more storms this season, have flubbed the past two annual estimates because of unusual El Nino and La Nina weather phenomena in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

The predictions reflect variables that make this kind of weather forecasting “more art than science,” said Eric Blake, a hurricane specialist at the National Hurricane Center in Miami. Two of the nine Atlantic hurricanes predicted already have occurred for the season that ends Nov 30. Last year, five storms emerged after nine were anticipated.

More art than science? I thought “the science was settled” when it came to climate models. Weren’t we told after Katrina that hurricanes were only going to get stronger and more frequent due to global warming? As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, if we can’t accurately model hurricane seasons in the Atlantic Basin 12-months in advance, how accurate are the models predicting the global climate decades in the future?