N.Y.'s Spitzer linked to prostitution ring

One of my favorite Op-Eds on the Spitzer Scandal is "Eliot Rex", appearing in today’s American Spectator. Here are some excerpts:

But Spitzer himself does not deserve an ounce of sympathy for the public humiliation he is set to endure, because he built his career on the public humiliation of others.

Back in 2002, as a wave of corporate scandals rocked Wall Street and the Securities and Exchange Commission was seen by some as too slow to respond, Spitzer cleverly seized on an opportunity to make his name. By broadly defining his role as New York's Attorney General and using any angle he could, Spitzer aggressively prosecuted corporate malfeasance, whether it was real or perceived.

HIS TARGETS WERE always unsympathetic -- insurance companies, mutual funds, Wall Street investment banks, and greedy CEOs -- and the victims were always average investors who lost money as a result of corporate skulduggery.

The media, which was clamoring for action and in no mood to empathize with big business, ate it up. They affectionately dubbed Spitzer the "Sheriff of Wall Street" and compared him to legendary mob-fighter Eliot Ness.

It never mattered whether companies or individuals actually did anything illegal, because his cases rarely made it to court. Wall Street investors abhor uncertainty more than anything else, and when publicly traded companies watched their stock prices crater amid a barrage of Spitzer-generated negative headlines, it was always in their best interests to reach a settlement to put the scandal behind them. On the few occasions when his targets did fight back, Spitzer's success rate was far less impressive.

Spitzer's arbitrary choice of targets highlighted his political opportunism. When Richard Grasso was forced to resign from his position as head of the New York Stock Exchange because Spitzer filed a lawsuit charging him with receiving excessive compensation, Spitzer also went after NYSE board member Ken Langone, a prominent Republican.

But he didn't lay a finger on Carl McCall, an influential New York Democrat, even though McCall served on the NYSE board as chief of the compensation committee that had approved the $140 million pay package that Spitzer deemed not only outrageous, but illegal. END EXCERPT (the article is worth a complete read)

In honor of Chuck Norris’ 68^th birthday on Monday March 10, here are some Norris legends (a few courtesy the Boston Globe):

With the end of the first week of March, there has so far been only a single American fatality this month (incurred in a non-combat Iraqi helicopter crash). If that were to continue (and it could change tomorrow), we are in a period in which the entire war could be redefined as something analogous to ongoing operations in Afghanistan or even the Balkans. And that, coupled with Iraq’s strong economic performance and political improvement, would radically change the Obama message of Iraqi as an ungodly horror worthy of abject withdrawal.  Victor Davis Hanson

As Hanson’s comments suggest, things have quieted down in Iraq. But there is still some fighting and Michael Yon is on scene in Mosul, one of the last bastions for al Qaeda in Iraq. In his most recent posting, Yon reports on an extraordinary group of fighters he calls the Guitar Heroes.

Kiowa Warrior (the OH-58D Kiowa Warrior, an economy-sized helicopter that would make a Ford Pinto seem spacious) pilots (in Mosul) spend part of their time on call, often playing Guitar Hero to pass the time. SNIP

One day after a long mission, LTC Jamison was just coming down to a hover back at the airfield when mortars exploded nearby. Before touching down, he lifted straight off. The counter-battery radar gave Jamison and his left-seater, Chief Warrant Officer 2 George Siegler, a Point of Origin (POO) to the firing site about four kilometers away in the Al Uruba district of Mosul. Swooping in, Siegler spotted a mortar team through the Plexiglas under his feet, and a split second later about four enemy machine guns and two RPGs fired at once. Ambush! Three bullets struck the helicopter and one hit Jamison’s helmet. The flight helmets have no ballistic protection because Kevlar is heavy, and when you crash it can break your neck or even snap your head off. The bullet went straight through the back of Jamison’s helmet, through the Styrofoam and out the other side, missing his head by maybe an inch. Jamison told me it felt like getting whacked with a bat. "Just a little bat," he said. Last year, a helicopter pilot in Mosul was shot in the head and killed.

Just as Jamison got whacked, he felt a strong blast come in from Siegler’s side. Jamison pushed the helicopter lower and started doing S-turns to break out of the kill zone.

Jamison asked Siegler if he were okay, but Siegler didn’t know. Jamison started patting down Siegler for blood while still flying low because oftentimes soldiers are seriously or even mortally shot and have no idea they were even hit. When Siegler saw bullet holes in Jamison’s helmet, he started patting down Jamison for blood. Jamison thought it strange because Siegler didn’t bother to tell him about the holes in his helmet, and Jamison didn’t know he had been helmet-shot. Meanwhile, Jamison had flying to do. The aircraft was badly damaged, almost no instruments were working. They flew back toward the base. The moment Jamison touched skids to tarmac, Siegler unstrapped and ran to another helicopter and started the engine. While those rotors were picking up speed, Jamison quickly shut down his broken helicopter, unbuckled, joined Siegler in the other helicopter and they flew back to the ambush site.

These pilots are fighting every day. They get into so many gunfights, rocket-fights (where pilots are launching rockets and the enemy is launching RPGs), and Hellfire attacks, not to mention flying so low the left-seater is shooting the little M-4 out the door, that it’s hard to know what fight the reader might want to hear about. It would take a book to explain half of them. END EXCERPT