Moe Lane

Chuck Schumer is claiming that he’s going to pass legislation that will effectively neuter Arizona’s SB 1070 immigration law if/when (and a lot of people are starting to say ‘when’) the Supreme Court upholds said legislation.  Ann Althouse notes that the law is actually popular, and that even Latinos themselves are divided on whether or not it’s a good idea.  I have a much more elemental take on this: Chuck Schumer has considerably less ability to dictate what or what does not get passed in this Congress – but if he really wants to get his legislation considered, there’s an easy way to do it.

Attach it to a Democratic Senate budget proposal.

Today in the Wall Street Journal we have a fairly caustic editorial about the EPA and its determination to make the city of New York pay for a 1.6 billion dollar cover for a Yonkers water reservoir, whether NYC wants to or not.  Which the city of NYC does not want to do, partially because they don’t have the money, and partially because the specific problem that the EPA is demanding that NYC address isn’t actually a problem for the reservoir.  And what is this specific problem?

Why, it’s the scourge of cryptosporidium (or ‘crypto’), of course.

Cryptosporidium.

Cryptosporidium. (more…)

I have a very quick question for Sen Chuck Schumer regarding his desire to create a list of people who are not allowed to go on Amtrak… no, really: the Senator from NY apparently got a little scared by reports that al-Qaeda was thinking about debating about targeting American rail lines.  There’s no real indication that there’s an active terrorist plot to do that – not malignantly sexy enough, apparently – but, well, Democratic politicians panic easily.

Anyway, let’s set the scenario: I am in the Newark-Penn Station train station located in New Jersey.  I wish to take an Amtrak train to the Trenton, New Jersey train station*. Please note that both locations are fully within the confines of one state: please also note that Amtrak tickets may be purchased with cash, which traditionally does not require providing ID.  So here’s my question: under what authority is Congress allowed to either restrict or regulate my intrastate transportation? Please be specific, including the underlying Constitutional clause.

No, I’m being perfectly serious.  Do-not-fly lists cover international flights, not national ones; if the need to regulate the latter ever came up, you could possibly stretch the Commerce Clause to fit (we do it for everything else involving interstate activities, apparently).  But even then, the default domestic flight crosses state lines, except in the very largest states; Amtrak provides services to people who travel inside states, and I’d like to know precisely where the federal government would derive its authority to regulate such activity.  (more…)

Sour and not recognizing your greatness and not properly appreciative of all the wonderful things that your party has done to them. And you’re very, very, very indignant that they’re not running around singing your praises… and more importantly, that they’re not planning to particularly vote for most of your colleagues.  So I guess that means that, instead of the voters not really caring about those little, porky amendments:

…what actually happened is that they didn’t really care for those amendments.

Oops?

Anyway, Hot Air’s ‘looking forward’ to you running the Democratic side of the Senate next year; my hope that you won’t be able  to do is not quite dead.  After all, we’ve gotten CT-SEN down to single digits already and it isn’t even Labor Day yet.  Hey: can’t win if you don’t bloody try…

Moe Lane

(H/T: Instapundit) Very cognizant of the plight of the working class:

…the notoriously chatty New York Democrat referred to a flight attendant as a “b[*]tch” after she ordered him to turn off his phone before takeoff.

Schumer and his seatmate, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), were chatting on their phones before takeoff when an announcement indicated that it was time to turn off the phones.

[snip]

“The senator made an off-the-cuff comment under his breath that he shouldn’t have made, and he regrets it,” Schumer spokesman Brian Fallon told Shenanigans.

Just not enough to do so himself. Then again, the flight attendant was merely a woman who wakes up every day wondering Is today the day that they try to use my workspace as a bomb again? – and it’s an open question, of course, which half of that description is more instinctively scorned by Senator Chuck Schumer (D, NY).  And if you think I’m being unfair… well.  I suppose that if you’re likewise in the habit of muttering gender-based epithets to your female coworkers, you might have a different opinion than mine…

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

[UPDATE]: Welcome, Instapundit readers.

Everybody’s overthinking Chuck Schumer’s (D, NY) flip-flop from his 2001 stance on military tribunals:

…those who commit acts of war against the United States, particularly those who have no color of citizenship, don’t deserve the same panoply of due process rights that American citizens receive. Should Osama bin Laden be captured alive—and I imagine most Americans hope he won’t be captured alive. But if he is, it is ludicrous to suggest he should be tried in a Federal court on Center Street in Lower Manhattan.

…to his current stance:

…when asked by the reporter why Schumer now backs criminal trials over military tribunals, Schumer says he wants to see them executed.

You see, in 2001 there was a Republican running the government, and that Republican was taking the attitude that we were going to treat the 9/11 attacks as attacks. So Schumer went along with that. But now it’s 2009, and there’s a Democrat running the government, and that Democrat is taking the attitude that we are going to treat things like 9/11 as crimes. So Schumer is going to go along with that.

Besides, there’s money in it.  After all, this is the man who justified “little, porky amendments.”

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Via Jen Rubin:

Wall Street money rains on Schumer

Wall Street has showered nearly $11 million on the Senate since the beginning of the year, and more than 15 percent of it has gone to a single senator: Democrat Chuck Schumer of New York.

[snip]

Of the $10.6 million the industry has given to sitting senators this year, more than $7.7 million has gone to Democrats. Schumer got his $1.65 million; his New York colleague Kirsten Gillibrand took in $886,000; Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada received $814,000; Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd of Connecticut scored $603,000; Colorado freshman Michael Bennet got $401,000; and Agriculture Committee Chairman Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas— who will have a big say on the derivatives portion of regulatory reform — got $336,000.

Mind you, it’s a perfectly rational decision on Wall Street’s part: paying protection money often is. Despite Yahoo/Politico’s somewhat disingenuous suggestion of ‘Stockholm Syndrome,’ what actually is happening here is a trade. Wall Street gives Schumer – and his new junior partner Gillibrand* – money, and Schumer makes sure that all those potentially fatal regulations and restrictions and investigations that Schumer says and talks about never happen. Remember, this is the guy who declared that the American people don’t care about “little porky amendments:” he’s about as populist as T. Coddington Van Voorhees VII. (more…)

Hassan Nemazee helped raise 115 million for the DSCC in 2006.

[UPDATE] Welcome, Hot Air readers.

Hassan Nemazee was more recently a heavy donor and bundler for both the Clinton and Obama Presidential campaigns, bringing in over half a million for the new President; he was also a major bundler for the Presidential Inaugural.

NY Businessman Charged With $74 Million Bank Fraud Against Citigroup

A New York man was charged with allegedly defrauding Citigroup Inc. (C) out of $74 million in loans.

U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara in Manhattan and the Federal Bureau of Investigations say Hassan Nemazee, with residences in Manhattan and Katonah, N.Y., fraudulently applied for the loans for Nemazee Capital Corp., of which he is chairman and chief executive.

Federal prosecutors contend Nemazee obtained the money by giving the banking giant “numerous documents that purported to establish the existence of accounts in Nemazee’s name at various financial institutions containing many hundreds of millions of dollars,” the Justice Department said in a statement. “In fact, those were fraudulent and forged documents.”

And I originally had him down as ‘former’ national finance chair for the DSCC, except that I’m seeing no signs that he quit the job (screenshot here).

See also AoSHQ & @AmandaCarpenter. [Also, Dan Riehl, who's doing some more research on the topic.]

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Hey, who here thinks that the Nation, ThinkProgress, Washington Monthly, Firedoglake, and the rest of the Journolist stenographers are going to reference this?

(For those who can’t see it: it shows Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer bragging about cutting out the very funding that a good number of ostensibly-unrelated Left-bloggers and writers are trying to pin on the GOP, in the person of Senator Susan Collins.  And never mind the fact that the cutting was done as a spectacularly unsuccessful attempt to bribe the GOP into signing on to the Democrats’ debt bill; or that it was an incredibly tacky unsuccessful bribe in the first place.  Reality-based thinking is somewhat… flexible for the Online Left.)

Yes, neither did I. Even the ones that aren’t overtly obediently writing whatever they get told to write are busy with their uncritical willingness to accept Democratic talking points as gospel truth (as if it’s our fault that it takes a Cabinet appointment to make a Democrat pay his taxes). So it’s almost certainly foolish to expect that the dogs linked above will even dare bark at their masters. Never a good idea to make those who feed you angry, right?

Anyway, see Michelle Malkin, Don Surber, Protein Wisdom, The Sundries Shack, Legal Insurrection, Q & O, AoSHQ, Hot Air, and my unworthy self for more details of what is proving to be all the evidence that you need that not only is the Left-sphere being fed its points: it’s being fed its points sloppily. Frankly, any of the above could have done a better hit job, even if you assume (as well you should) that we’d be intending to sabotage it…

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

[UPDATE]: And I thought that I was being harsh.

Back in the day, Senator Schumer bragged about removing the funding, in fact. He thought that it was “bipartisan.”

He said the compromise hammered out between Senate Democrats and moderate Republicans – which has enough support to get it past any threat of a filibuster – was far better than that passed by the House on Jan. 29.

“All those little porky things that the House put in, the money for the [National] Mall or the sexually transmitted diseases or the flu pandemic, they’re all out,” Schumer said.

(H/T: AoSHQ)

“Bipartisan” being defined as “three Republicans and the Democratic party,” of course. Now that there’s a question about said funding, suddenly they feel like they need to pin it all on the Republican party, and never mind that the stripped-out appropriations was part of a failed attempt to bribe the GOP. Note, “failed”: if they had wanted to do a real cut, they would have axed things that would have hurt across the board; instead, they went with what they themselves considered extraneous or meaningless, and it’s just Schumer’s bad luck that the swine flu decided to break out in Mexico. So, as Don Surber notes, we’re going to get the default option from the Democrats again: blame it on the GOP somehow.

Of course, the people that will scream loudly about this will say not a word about Schumer if they can possibly help it. That’s because they don’t actually care about swine flu. Well, that’s not quite true: after all, the more people that die, the more they’ll feel justified and righteous about screaming about the Republican party. Sure, it’s a tragedy, but the really important thing for them is to elect more Democrats.

Moe Lane

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