Puff Daschle 'Deeply Embarrassed' For Being a Criminal

Poor little Puffy. He's really sorry for cheating on his taxes and now claims to be embarrassed.

OK, so if you're embarrassed, reject the cabinet nomination and go away. You and your fat-cat lobbyist wife don't have to worry about finances like the little people.

Thomas A. Daschle, picked by President Barack Obama to be Health and Human Services secretary, said he was “deeply embarrassed” about $128,000 in errors on his taxes, and promised in a letter to answer all questions about how it happened.

The letter was sent to the ranking members of the Senate Finance Committee prior to a meeting today between the panel and the former U.S. senator, according to a person who provided the correspondence to Bloomberg. Daschle amended his returns for 2005, 2006 and 2007, and paid $140,000 in taxes and interest.

Daschle’s nomination must be confirmed by the finance committee. Republican Jon Kyl of Arizona, a panel member, said on “Fox News Sunday” that it’s too early to tell whether the nomination is in trouble. Daschle refiled his returns Jan. 2 to add unreported consulting fees, unspecified charitable contributions and a car and driver provided by Leo Hindery Jr., a founder of the private-equity firm InterMedia Advisors, a committee draft report said.

Virtually any other American busted for avoiding taxes for three years would be facing jail time.

Why the double standard for these criminal Democrats?

Ten years ago The Puffster had this to say:

“Make no mistake, tax cheaters cheat us all, and the IRS should enforce our laws to the letter. ” Sen. Tom Daschle, Congressional Record, May 7, 1998, p. S4507.

Now though, schmucks like John Kerry call it an innocent mistake.

Finance Committee member Senator John Kerry on the same program called the tax problem an “innocent mistake that doesn’t affect one iota his ability to do the job.”

No, deliberately avoiding taxes is a criminal offense, not an innocent mistake.

High Comedy: Obama Attacks McCain Over Iraq

After rejecting John McCain's invitation to tour Iraq together, the Obama camp is now insane enough to actually attack McCain over his knowledge of the subject.

You can't make this stuff up.

Even more amusing, they use a fraud to go out and question McCain's cred.

Surrogates for Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign pushed back against Sen. John McCain today, questioning the expected Republican nominee’s comprehension of foreign policy, strains on the U.S. military, and his strategy for the Iraq war.

Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, the party’s 2004 presidential nominee who has shared close ties to McCain and reportedly flirted with putting McCain on his presidential ticket, offered a harsh rebuke of the Arizona senator’s recent and regular criticism of Obama as a candidate too inexperienced to lead the country, particularly as it pertains to Iraq and national security.

Kerry, like McCain a Vietnam War veteran, ticked off a list of McCain’s missteps on Iraq, including misstating the troop levels in Iraq at a Wisconsin town hall meeting Thursday, and his recent highly publicized flub incorrectly identifying Iranians as training al Qaeda.

Do the Obama people really want to get into people's flubs?

Now the McCain camp fires back.

Team McCain just held a media conference call with the campaign's foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann and Senator Jon Kyl, who conclude that no, Obama doesn’t want to go there. "It's instructive that the Obama campaign, rather than deal with that real issue and Obama's lack of experience, is trying to nitpick the verb or the tense of the verb about the surge troops being home," said Kyl. Obama hasn’t been to Iraq since January 2006, and McCain has been five times since then.

"The real point is that al Qaeda has been significantly, significantly degraded in Iraq as well as other places, that the surge that General Petraeus put into place last year has significantly worked, that violence is significantly down, and that as a result of these successes, we are able to bring troops home," said Kyl. Three of the five surge brigades are home and the rest will be home by July, so McCain wasn't incorrect in his statement that we have "drawn down to pre-surge levels."

Scheunemann focused on the Obama camp's dismissive response to the idea of a trip to Iraq with McCain and Obama's numerous gaffes this week. "Senator Obama has said he will follow his withdrawal plan which amounts to retreat and surrender regardless of the events on the ground, regardless of the advice of military commanders," said Scheunemann, responding to a reporter who questioned McCain's verb usage. "If we're going to talk about verb tenses in this level of detail rather than the fact that Senator Obama doesn't care enough about what's going on in Iraq to either meet General Petraeus or to take the time to visit the country in the last 873 days, let's talk about some of the other things Senator Obama has said, like campaigning in 57 states...or...a nonexistent uncle that helped the Red Army liberate Auschwitz."

Obama is by far weakest against McCain when it comes to military affairs and national security, and it's absurd they'd even want to get into a debate over it, thereby drawing more attention to his ineptitude. Then again, Kerry blundered away any shot at the White House by trying to build up his dubious military history only to have it torpedoed by the Swift Boat Vets for Truth, who exposed him as a serial prevaricator.

Doing Obama's bidding here won't help Gaffe Man, who's probably just desperate to change the subject after another psychotic friend of his grabbed headlines yesterday.

Calls to Close 'Terror High'

One of those rare occurrences where I find myself in agreement with Charles Schumer

The academy opened in 1984 and stayed out of the spotlight until the Sept. 11 attacks. Criticisms were revived in 2005, when a former class valedictorian, Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, was charged with joining al-Qaida while attending college in Saudi Arabia. He was convicted on several charges, including plotting to assassinate President Bush, and was sentenced to 30 years in prison.

Most recently, the religious freedom commission—an independent federal agency created by Congress—issued its report, saying it was rebuffed in its efforts to obtain textbooks to verify claims they had been reformed.

The commission recommended that the academy be shut down until it could review the textbooks to ensure they do not promote intolerance.

Since the commission's report, the academy has given copies of its books to the Saudi embassy, which then provided them to the State Department. The commission is waiting to get the books from the State Department.

On Nov. 15, a dozen U.S. senators, including Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., and Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., wrote a letter to the State Department urging it to act on the commission's recommendations. And on Tuesday, Reps. Frank Wolf, R-Va., and Steve Israel, D-N.Y., introduced legislation to write the commission's recommendations regarding the academy into law.

Michael Cromartie, the commission's chairman, said he does not question the character of the student body or the faculty, most of whom are Christian. The commission is focused specifically on the textbooks, and has legitimate concerns given the problems that have been endemic in the Saudi curriculum, he said.

"It's not about whether the students are civil to their opponents on a ball field. It's about the textbooks," he said.

Of course, since it's a Saudi funded school, the kids are learning hatred of other religions, though they claim to have cleaned it up a bit.

But al-Shabnan said the school significantly modified those textbooks to remove passages deemed intolerant of other religions. Among the changes, officials removed from teachers' versions of first-grade textbooks an excerpt instructing teachers to explain "that all religions, other than Islam, are false, including that of the Jews, Christians and all others."

Bush to Hispanics: Habla Up, Y'all!

The dreaded conservatives are being trashed every which way to Sunday, Trent Lott urges that something must be done about those rebel yahoos on talk radio, and now the president is now urging Hispanics to join the fray in trying to pressure senators to vote for shamnesty.

No word on what language they'll speak up in. The Senate will probably set up Spanish-speaking phone lines.

President Bush yesterday told Hispanics to step into the middle of the immigration debate and make sure senators who have been bombarded with calls from opponents also hear from those who support the bill.

"There's a lot of emotion on this issue, and it makes sense to have people from around the country come and sit down with members of Congress to talk rationally about the issue," he told those attending the Hispanic Prayer Breakfast in Washington yesterday.

He was speaking a day after the bill, which collapsed last week, was revived by the top Democrat and Republican in the Senate.

Majority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat, agreed to put the bill back on the Senate's schedule next week, and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican, agreed to limit the number of amendments Republicans would offer.

But roadblocks are already popping up.

Sen. Jim DeMint, South Carolina Republican, said he will block any attempt to send the bill to an eventual House-Senate conference, complicating the usual path a bill takes to reach the president's desk.

"Ted Kennedy has sold us another bill of goods and I don't trust him to make even more changes to it behind closed doors in a conference with the House," Mr. DeMint said, referring to the Massachusetts Democrat who has spearheaded the bill along with Sen. Jon Kyl, Arizona Republican.

Read the rest.

Good for Sen. DeMint. South Carolina has at least one sane GOP senator.

Meanwhile, some rather stunning news in the House last night, via Michelle Malkin.

UPDATE: You've got to be kidding me. They can't be this stupid. Can they?