kirsten gillibrand

NYT: Sen. Daniel Inouye (D, Hawaii) reportedly the Gillibrand Groper; and, oh, yeah, he might have raped a hairdresser once.

With his deep baritone and courtly manner, Mr. [Daniel] Inouye was revered by his colleagues and was a powerhouse in both Hawaii and the Senate, where he was a reliable supporter of women’s rights.

But in an all but forgotten chapter of his career, the senator had been accused of sexual misconduct: In 1992, his hairdresser said that Mr. Inouye had forced her to have sex with him.

Her accusations exploded into a campaign issue that year, and one Hawaii state senator announced that she had heard from nine other women who said they had been sexually harassed by Mr. Inouye. But the women did not want to go forward with their claims.

This is, I swear to God, the first that I have ever heard of this. Apparently it was a 1975 (and afterwards) alleged incident that came up in the 1992 election, and it got buried. Thoroughly. Way down deep, and the ground tamped down with a shovel. Why? …Well, the NYT of 1992 was unusually blunt: Continue reading NYT: Sen. Daniel Inouye (D, Hawaii) reportedly the Gillibrand Groper; and, oh, yeah, he might have raped a hairdresser once.

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D, New York) still profanely covering up for her male colleague’s sexism.

What message does Senator Kirsten Gillibrand think that this is sending to people? “Don’t rock the boat?”

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand is giving more details, and dropping f-bombs, about her experience with sexist comments she’s received about her weight, saying she couldn’t tell a male colleague “to go f—- himself.”

“At that moment, if I could have just disappeared, I would have. If I could have just melted in tears, I would have. But I had to just sit there and talk to him. And I switched the subject and I didn’t hear another word he said, but I wasn’t in a place where I could tell him to go f—- himself,” Gillibrand told HuffPost Live in an interview posted Monday.

Continue reading Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D, New York) still profanely covering up for her male colleague’s sexism.

#rsrh Kirsten Gillibrand to NOT run for NY-SEN in 2012?

There’s a rumor going around that she’s being tapped to replace Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket (no link, sorry: I’m getting this one via email). Supposedly it’s at the point where certain NY Republicans are quietly exploring the possibility of doing a run for the seat, after all; I’ve heard that at least one downstate Republican elected official is seriously considering going for it.

I’m not all that convinced that this rumor is credible, but I have to admit that my reasons for discounting it are as follows:

It’s a bad idea for New York Democrats (win or lose, they’ll be removing a potential candidate for Governor down the line);
It’s a bad idea for national Democrats (they can ill-afford to put yet another Senate seat in play for 2012);
It’s an embarrassment for everybody who dutifully insisted that Biden would be a net positive for the Obama administration.

Which is to say, none of the reasons would have any effect on Barack Obama – even the last one; he can always claim that choosing Biden wasn’t really entirely voluntary on his part* – and God knows that the man is narcissistic enough to think that he could get away with it.

So, there’s that.

Moe Lane

*It’d be easy, really. Party leadership wanting to add the voice of experience to the ticket, blah blah, no wish to hurt the party further after the primary, yadda yadda, Obama now realizes that he should have trusted his own judgement more, etc, etc, etc…

EPA orders NYC around on Yonkers reservoir.

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. Continue reading EPA orders NYC around on Yonkers reservoir.

Reid: Gillibrand ‘hottest’ Senator.

You’ve come a long way, baby.

(Via Hot Air Headlines) If you were wondering whether or not current Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D, NV) is snapping under the strain of facing Sharron Angle, well, stop wondering. If he was not snapping, Reid almost certainly would not have made such a strong contrast between Chuckie Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand at a recent NYC fundraiser thrown for Reid by Mayor Bloomberg. To sum up the difference in the tenor of Reid’s remarks (subtext added):

Schumer: Chuckie Schumer is so smart and so good at politics! He was great as DSCC Chair, too – unlike that idiot we have now who can’t even get rid of one single, troublesome, inconvenient woman…
Gillibrand: …she’s HOT! …And, oh, yeah, she knows something about securities law.

Continue reading Reid: Gillibrand ‘hottest’ Senator.

Marvelous political party that you work for, Sen. Gillibrand.

(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.

Democratic election fraud in Troy, NY: a follow-up.

[UPDATE] Welcome, Instapundit readers. And Big Government readers, too.

(Via Atlas Shrugs) For the next time somebody tells you that Democrat/ACORN/WFP election registration fraud does not equal election fraud, feel free to point this story coming from Troy, New York, where the one led seamlessly to the other. Feel free to also point out that it doesn’t take all that much to flip some races:

Thirty-eight forged or fraudulent ballots have been thrown out — enough votes, an election official admits, to likely have tipped the city council and county elections in November to the Democrats. Candidates would have been able to run both on the Democratic and Working Families Party lines in two weeks, and that could have given the Democrats the general election.

A special prosecutor is investigating the case and criminal charges are possible. New York State Supreme Court Judge Michael Lynch ruled that there were “significant election law violations that have compromised the rights of numerous voters and the integrity of the election process.”

[Bolding mine.]

Continue reading Democratic election fraud in Troy, NY: a follow-up.

Schumer, Gillibrand, and the Wall Street payoffs.

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. Continue reading Schumer, Gillibrand, and the Wall Street payoffs.

Siena poll (NY-SEN): Giuliani beats Gillibrand by 8 points.

(Via RCP) I’m still trying to reconcile a 46/38 result among registered voters (which represents a flip since January 2009) with Siena’s statement that half of NY voters can want Giuliani to run for neither Governor nor Senator, unless a large proportion of those voters don’t want him to run because he could actually win. Absent a look at the actual questions, I’m not sure whether I can reconcile. Giuliani in the Senate would be… interesting. And an improvement over the current incumbent, of course. Lots of stuff in that poll, by the way: the general thing that you’ll take away from it is that Andrew Cuomo has an almost-lock on the gubernatorial nomination and election, and that New Yorkers loathe their current state government.

It’s going to be an interesting primary there next year.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Siena: Pataki +3 over Gillibrand.

RCP has the basic poll details:

Siena	8/17 – 8/20	621 RV	42	39	Pataki +3

…the link itself is broken. However, looking at the trends Sen. Gillibrand is as having as fun an August as just about every other Democrat: in other words, a rotten one. I don’t know if this means that Pataki will actually run, but it certainly won’t hurt. And I find that I approve of the Democrats having to spend money defending seats that they assumed would be theirs for forever, and a day…

Crossposted to RedState.