08/25/10 by David.

The House Oversight Committee proudly states its concise mission: “The House Oversight Committee is determined to root out waste, fraud and abuse throughout the federal government.”

Fantastic.

But they need to narrow it down just a little. We don’t think it’s quite in the purview of the Federal Government to root out waste, fraud and abuse in all areas of American life. Roger Clemens has been indicted for lying to this committee. The Oversight Committee should indict itself for conducting hearings on baseball players. Even if MLB was conducting an international drug and child trafficking ring, the Oversight Committee would be responsible only for investigating how law enforcement agencies were spending/allocating resources.When a congressional committee can flatly ignore its purpose and conduct under-oath hearings of individuals for activities conducted in the context of their non-government job, every citizen can be placed under the same scrutiny. Sure, he could have invoked his right to not incriminate himself, but he isn’t being charged with controlled substance crimes. The prosecution believes Clemens lied to a congressional committee that had no right to question him.

So the moral of this story is; if ever you do something to enhance you performance at work, even if you are unlikely to be prosecuted for the act, don’t lie to people who shouldn’t be questioning you.

David

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08/25/10 by David.

Nancy Pelosi has kind-of clarified her comment on investigating the funding of people opposing the building of a mosque two blocks from where terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center complex in the name of Islam.

We have been trying for some time to get funding for just thinking to no avail. With any luck, she’ll let us know how it works. We have not seen anything that would require funding to be investigated. If you go out and ask someone if they thinks it’s a good idea to build a 15 story building to celebrate the religion invoked on 9/11 so close to ground zero that the original structure was hit by an aircraft landing gear, they say “no” and no funding is needed for the decision.

The Imam has indicated that the mosque is for building bridges. If 68% of Americans believe it is at least in poor taste and shouldn’t be built, we don’t understand how pissing off two thirds of a nation helps. It doesn’t help when the Imam has been taped blaming the United States for 9/11.

Jonah Goldberg wrote an interesting piece about anti-Islamic hate crimes. We looked into his numbers and a little more. In 2001, anti-Islamic hate crimes peaked at well under half the number of incidents aimed at Jews, then settling at about 10%. Of more interest though, the number of incidents reported as anti-Jewish has changed very little every year over the last 15 years. Perhaps we should be investigating how Jew haters have maintained funding for so long.

David

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