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Politics / Commentary


I hated Evil Dead, but I’m a fan of Bruce Campbell anyway.

His performance in Burn Notice (if you’re not watching it, you should be) is spot on perfect.

And another reason to like him- he’s a man of the troops.

Read here about the recent visit Campbell and his co-star Jeffrey Donovan made to Iraq.

Exit quotation: “It is more fun out here than firing on a film set,” Bruce Campbell said. “We have editors who make sure we always hit the target.”



Don’t we have an economy to fix?

Or health care to universalize?

or jobs to create?



Meat-flavored vodkas.

Yes, Sexy Sarah can be outdone…

Wasilla, Alaska is now exporting Smoked Salmon Vodka. < /barf>



So… Milwaukee County, you know the armpit of Wisconsin, where teens routinely murder people, have apparently solved all their other problems, and are now ready to tackle a boycott of Arizona over AZ’s much maligned immigration law.

The highlight of the debate, straight from the mouth of genius County Supervisor Peggy West

“If this was Texas, which is a state that is directly on the border with Mexico, and they were calling for a measure like this saying that they had a major issue with undocumented people flooding their borders, I would have to look twice at this.  But this is a state that is a ways removed from the border”

Arizona Senator Jon Kyl, displaying a sense of humor I’ve never known him to possess, responded appropriately.




John McCain to ‘Jersey Shore’ star Snooki: ‘I would never tax your tanning bed!’.

McCain, a skin cancer survivor, replied Wednesday on Twitter, saying “u r right, I would never tax your tanning bed! Pres Obama’s tax/spend policy is quite The Situation. but I do rec wearing sunscreen!”



March 2010 — A Sacramento car wash owner owed 4 cents to the IRS from a calculation error on their tax return.

This apparently required two (2), [more than 1, less than 3] IRS agents to physically show up on site at the car wash to collect the amount due.

IRS Comes Knocking … for Four Cents – CBS News.



Today is Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.  (Background here, more info here.)

I can’t draw.  At all.  Even my stick figures are hard to discern.

So instead of embarrassing myself, I’ll point you over to Zombie’s Mohammed Image Archive.

I encourage you to check it out.  And be patient.  I’d guess the server will be slow today.  (If it is, read more here while you wait.)

Oh, and free to post your own drawings or links to drawings.

This is a free speech zone, where nobody has the right to not be offended.



This is post #2000!

Celebrate!!!!

Now all you co-bloggers get off your butts and post something.



Since the vast majority of the SNEDBlog contributing authors work in banking, I thought they may find Fortune’s behind-the-scenes look at the story of Eliot Spitzer interesting.

It seems a SAR brought down “Client #9″:

In July 2007, North Fork Bank vice president Adam Brenner got a peculiar phone call from his branch’s most prominent client, New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer. Brenner’s private-banking office, on Madison Avenue and 49th Street in Manhattan, catered to wealthy New Yorkers, many of them involved in real estate. It prided itself on service.

“Is there a way to wire money where it’s not evident that it’s coming from me?” the governor asked. Brenner referred the matter to his superiors. They wouldn’t make this anonymous wire transfer, even for the governor. It was against all sorts of banking regulations.

But the bankers noticed that the governor’s desired recipient — a company called QAT Consulting — also had its account at a North Fork branch. They would make an intrabank transfer instead, anonymously. Even so, the incident clearly required reporting. Any unusual money transfers were supposed to be disclosed to banking authorities on a Suspicious Activity Report, known as an SAR. This was Banking 101 — everyone at North Fork took an online course about it his first day on the job.

Politically prominent people received extra scrutiny because of their susceptibility to extortion or corruption. Spitzer’s transaction generated an unusually detailed and lengthy SAR, which the bank sent to FinCEN — the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, a branch of the U.S. Treasury Department with offices in Detroit.

There the SAR was entered into a database accessible to federal, state, and local law-enforcement agencies. FinCEN typically received more than 3,400 SARs a day. The North Fork filing would remain buried among them, unnoticed for months.

From this point on the article, which is actually an excerpt of an upcoming book, goes into some of the more sordid details of Spitzer’s affairs.

And then it takes a turn for the obnoxious, as the author seems to come to the conclusion that Spitzer’s a good guy and was a victim of evil Republican scheming.

The author, unlike babies, but like Barack Obama, cannot seem to tell the difference between good and evil.

Eliot Spitzer made his career by destroying other people.  (Some of them deserved it, some didn’t.)  And when he was rewarded for his efforts by ascending to the position of Governor of New York, the state’s highest elected office, he broke the law. Repeatedly.

And the coward used his friend’s name to do it.

He betrayed everyone in his life, from his family, to his staff, to the voters who elected him.

I don’t care who leaked the information that brought him down.

There is only one villain in the story of Eliot Spitzer, a point that seems to be lost on Fortune editor-at-large Peter Elkind.



Yale University has released the results of an interesting study that concludes that babies, from the age of six months, can recognize the difference between good and evil:

Professor Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale University in Connecticut, whose department has studied morality in babies for years, said: ‘A growing body of evidence suggests that humans do have a rudimentary moral sense from the very start of life.

‘With the help of well designed experiments, you can see glimmers of moral thought, moral judgment and moral feeling even in the first year of life.

Obviously those intrinsic moral features can be un-learned.  The quickest way to restore moral ambiguity and relativism is through the public school system, followed up by seeking a liberal arts degree in women’s studies.