[UPDATE 12/10 ]For the second time in as many days, Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign has had to deal with accusations of planting questions during public appearances, FOX News has learned. — Fox News I guess that stuff about “It won’t happen again” went the way of all her other positions.

---

Democratic Presidential frontrunner Hillary Rodham Clinton is a sock puppet. Her campaign is comprised of illegitimate, creepy sock puppets. Their hands stay warm, of course, but nothing is what you see:

From FOX:

SIOUX CITY, Iowa Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clintons campaign admitted Friday that it planted a global warming question in Newton, Iowa, Tuesday during a town hall meeting to discuss clean energy.

Clinton campaign spokesman Mo Elliethee admitted that the campaign had planted the question and said it would not happen again.

“On this occasion a member of our staff did discuss a possible question about Senator Clinton’s energy plan at a forum, Elliethee said.

But they (Mo Elliethee) must maintain plausible deniability for Hillary:

However, Senator Clinton did not know which questioners she was calling on during the event. This is not standard policy and will not be repeated again.

In a state where the caucus is held sacred and the impromptu and candid style of the town hall meeting is held dear, Clintons planted question may come as a great offense to Iowans.

Read On

All we need now is a big shindig for his daughter’s wedding and a semi-articulate thug hoping that Hugo Chavez’s first grandchild is a masculine child and the imitation will be complete and convincing. Except that Don Corleone was a whole lot more classy than this:

While President Hugo Chavez has been molding Venezuela into his personal socialist vision, other transformations — less visible but equally profound — have taken hold in the country.

Venezuela has become a major hub for international crime syndicates. What attracts them is not the local market; what they really love are the excellent conditions Venezuela offers to anyone in charge of managing a global criminal network.

A nation at the crossroads of South America, the Caribbean, North America and Europe, Venezuela’s location is ideal. Borders? Long, scantly populated and porous. Financial system? Large and with easy-to-evade governmental controls. Telecommunications, ports and airports? The best that oil money can buy. U.S. influence? Nil. Corrupt politicians, cops, judges and military officers? Absolutely: Transparency International ranked Venezuela a shameful 162 out of 179 counties on its corruption perception index. Chavez’s demonstrated interest in confronting criminal networks during his eight years in power? Not much.

While this situation has so far been rather invisible to the rest of the world, it is patently clear to those in charge of fighting transnational crime. Anti-trafficking officials in Europe, the United States, Asia and other Latin American countries are paying unprecedented attention to Venezuela. These officials are not particularly interested in Venezuelan politics or in Chavez’s policies. All they care about is that the tentacles of these global criminal networks are spreading from Venezuela into their countries with enormous power and at great speed.

The numbers speak volumes: About 75 tons of cocaine left Venezuela in 2003; it is estimated that 276 tons will leave the country this year. Before, the main destination was the United States; now, Europe is increasingly the target. Italy and Spain are two new important and lucrative end-user markets, and earning in euros is undeniably better than getting paid in dollars these days.

A senior Dutch police officer told me that he and his European colleagues are spending more time in Caracas than in Bogota, Colombia, and that the heads of many of the major criminal cartels now operate with impunity, and effectiveness, from Venezuela. The cartel bosses aren’t exclusively Colombians — there are Asians (especially Chinese) and Europeans too. Caracas’ most posh neighborhoods are home to important kingpins from around the world, including some from Belarus, a country that Chavez notably has visited several times.

This is what Naomi Campbell and Sean Penn celebrated? Charming. Pity the Venezuelan people in your spare moments. They must suffer not only the incompetence of a dictator but also the indifference of the superstar set.

To wit:

The king of Spain told Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to “shut up” Saturday during a heated exchange at a summit of leaders from Latin America, Spain and Portugal.

Chavez, who called President Bush the “devil” on the floor of the United Nations last year, triggered the exchange by repeatedly referring to former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar as a “fascist.”

Aznar, a conservative who was an ally of Bush as prime minister, “is a fascist,” Chavez said in a speech at the Ibero-American summit in Santiago, Chile. “Fascists are not human. A snake is more human.”

Spain’s current socialist prime minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, responded during his own allotted time by urging Chavez to be more diplomatic in his words and respect other leaders despite political differences.

“Former President Aznar was democratically elected by the Spanish people and was a legitimate representative of the Spanish people,” he said, eliciting applause from the gathered heads of state.

Chavez repeatedly tried to interrupt, but his microphone was off.

Spanish King Juan Carlos, seated next to Zapatero, angrily turned to Chavez and said, “Why don’t you shut up?”

Question of the year.

There is great success in Iraq. Violence is down. The terrorists appear to be mostly routed. People are returning home from abroad. Signs of progress everywhere. So what are the Democrats going to do about it?

Try to paint the scene as hell on earth and rally the base to kill the progress.

Of course, as Roy Blunt twittered, this is really a stop gap measure to reunify the left in the House so they can push forward their massive tax increase, currently stalled.

The Democrats have decided to rally around killing our gains in Iraq, rekindle their old time tax-spend-and anti-war religion, and then have a tent revival around their massive tax increase on the middle class once their members have successfully re-ingested their unholy spirit.

Who says the Democrats don’t get religion?

By the way, is it just me or does it seem a tad ironic that the so called progressives, seeing progress in Iraq, are desperate to abort the progress lest the Iraqis start making progress to standing on their own two feet and the progressives no longer have the one issue on which they all rally around other than killing children in utero?

Democrats: Aborting infant humans and infant democracies since 1973!

So, Barack Obama is irritated by that photo of him without his hand over his heart.

What crap.

Obama said the photo was taken during the singing of the national anthem, not the pledge.

“My grandfather taught me how to say the Pledge of Allegiance when I was 2,” Obama said, his annoyance obvious. “During the Pledge of Allegiance you put your hand over your heart. During the national anthem you sing.”

Um, I’m sorry. I didn’t grow up in this country. In fact, I didn’t learn the pledge of allegiance until I was fifteen and moved back to his country.

But even I know, and have known since I was little growing up overseas, that you put your hand over your heart for the National Anthem.

Everybody knows. Or at least everyone should.

On one of his MSNBC shows this evening, infotainer Chris Matthews talked to Pat Buchanan and washingtonpost.com blogger Chris Cillizza about Republican Presidential politics. I suppose its good to hear opinions from outside the party neither Buchanan nor Cillizza is a Republican and it fills time for Matthews.

Matthews thinks Rudy wins the nomination. I dont remember Cillizza expressing a certain opinion beyond Rudy, but Buchanan thought Mitt Romney had a good shot at defeating Giuliani no matter what Romney did. When confronted with the cumbersome fact that Romney is not faring well outside the few primary States where he is buying TV time and on one else has until recently, Buchanan echoed the popular theory that somehow wins in Iowa, New Hampshire, Michigan, South Carolina, etc. will lift Romneys popularity in other States. Its plausible, PJB, but it would be insane to bet the fortune on that one. So many States are moving forward this cycle to increase their clout vis–vis the traditional candidacy-makers. No ones going to follow these States just because Pat Buchanan complains that this is how it has always been done.

Nah, if Romneys going to win this nomination, hell need to win more than a few States early, fingers crossed.

But if he does win this nomination, there is no reason why he could not, with some help, defeat Hillary.

Let’s look at a poll. (Read More….)

Iraqpundit (Via Ace, Via Jules Crittenden).

I know those who are wedded to the idea of a failed Iraq are calling me a deluded idiot and worse. But things are improving slowly. My relatives in Baghdad say there’s no comparison; things are much better than they were six months ago. They can visit friends in different areas and walk about the neighbourhood in the evening.

Frankly, I don’t understand why so many mock us for wanting a future for Iraq. Is your hatred for George Bush so great that you prefer to see millions of civilians suffer just to prove him wrong?

It really comes down to this: you are determined to see Iraq become a permanent hellhole because you hate Bush. And we are determined to see Iraq become a success, because we want to live.

The answer to his question is, of course: yes, there are people whose hatred is so great. But don’t worry. I’m sure that soon enough there’ll be sufficient terrorist attacks in Iraq to keep the antiwar movement from having to think too hard about the consequences of their choices; or, indeed, from having to think at all.

And I leave you with this thought. Remember: Not In Their Names.

Moe Lane

PS: That wasn’t hatred on my part, by the way. That was “contempt.” Hatred implies fear. Contempt can make do with elemental revulsion.

Bizarrely enough, this article mentions nothing one way or the other regarding whether the surge might have been helpful in reducing violence so dramatically in Baghdad. I recognize that there are certain quarters in which praise of the surge is verboten. But at the very least, we could get some analysis of the issue, no?

Then again, perhaps there was a belief on the part of the writers that any honest analysis would have shown the surge to be a primary cause of the reduction in violence. An inconvenient truth amongst a specific group of people, if you will.

And yes, I am about as disappointed as this blogger is. However, there is something to be learned from this entire experience, and Adam Schaeffer may have put his finger on it:

The voucher program is dead, but school choice doesn’t have to be. Tax credits for donations to scholarship organizations can help support school choice for lower-income families, and personal-use credits can help middle-class families. Tax credits reduce the amount a taxpayer owes the government for each dollar he spends on education. For instance, if a business owes the state $4,000 and donates $2,000 to a scholarship-granting organization, it would pay just $2,000 in taxes. Similar benefits for donations can be applied to individuals.

Three states have modest forms of personal-use tax credits: Illinois allows families to claim credits worth 25% of their educational expenses up to $2,500. Iowa allows 25% up to $1,000, and Minnesota allows 75% of non-tuition expenses up to a maximum credit of $1,000 per child. Five states — Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island — have more powerful donation credits. Pennsylvania allows a 90% credit for donations and Florida allows a 100% credit, helping thousands of children from lower-income families attend good, independent schools.

Education tax credits are less controversial than vouchers, so they provide a way forward in places where it would otherwise be difficult to pass school-choice programs. Broad-based education tax credits that combine personal-use and donation credits to cover most kids are preferable. But with the setback in Utah, reformers will need a policy that has the best possible chance of surviving another ballot challenge, so they may want to proceed incrementally.

Tax credits also enjoy bipartisan support, and they’re already expanding in a number of states. With the support of a Democratic legislature or the signature of a Democratic governor, Arizona, Rhode Island and Iowa passed tax-credit programs last year, and Pennsylvania expanded its existing program. This year a unified Democratic government in Iowa increased the tax-credit dollar cap by 50% to $7.5 million from $5 million. A strong center-left coalition, including many prominent African-American Democrats — most notably, Newark Mayor Cory Booker — supports tax credits. New York’s Democratic Gov. Eliot Spitzer proposed an education-tax deduction in his first state budget and also supports tax credits.

Donation credits also look different to the average voter than universal vouchers. The credits are seen by many as an unremarkable extension of existing tax benefits for charitable giving. A donation credit expands choice through tax incentives and private money, whereas a voucher expands choice through a dramatic change in the funding system for public education. A donation credit is less risky than a universal voucher program, and it therefore has better chances of surviving a referendum.

Education tax credits are a big-tent policy, with more support on the left, right and in the middle. Many social conservatives, libertarians and homeschoolers support tax credits but not vouchers because they fear government funds will bring government control. In Utah, a socially conservative state with more children homeschooled than at private schools, credits could mobilize more enthusiastic support on the right.

Read it all; Schaeffer’s arguments are compelling from both the policy standpoint and the public relations standpoint. In the meantime, so long as we have arguments about school choice, we will likely also have arguments about Economics 101. But what else is new?