September “Stupidest Thing …” Race Already Crowded Thanks to Norman Hsu

 

It’s only September 1^st but, thanks to the pre-election money-grubbing by the herd of Democratic Presidential Nominee wanna-be’s, the race for the September nomination for the “Stupidest Thing of the Year” is already heating up.

The earlier entries into the competition include:

Hillary Clinton fund raiser Norman Hsu.  Hsu enters the competition because, although he is wanted on a felony warrant in the State of California for failure to appear for sentencing after pleading guilty to a single count of grand theft in 1996 (a year in which he was a major figure in Bill Clinton’s re-election fundraising).  Now, I don’t want to prejudice anyone’s chances to win the September nomination, but you have to admit that he will be hard to beat a man who:

 

1) Despite being wanted in California, engaged in high profile fundraising activities that would have easily revealed what part of the country he was hiding in.

 

2) If the above wasn’t enough to put Hsu on the police radar, he starts throwing his own money into the campaign war chest even though his name and address would be listed on the financial disclosure statement.

Hsu returned to California on Friday, August 31 where he turned himself in to authorities.  He was promptly taken before a judge who ordered Hsu held in the county slammer (did he get the Paris Hilton suite?) until he could post bond in the amount of $2 million.  Hsu was back on the streets 5 hours later.

Hsu’s scofflaw antics while on the run leads to our next candidate, the California Department of Public Safety.

The California cops get a nomination for not having a clue to Hsu’s whereabouts even though he was all over the second (Bill’s re-election) and third (Hillary’s) Clinton campaigns. Do you think that maybe Arnold’s Gestapo was too busy enforcing the laws against smoking in bars and other locations?  How about that they were too busy enforcing the myriad of laws against “hate speech,” “hate writing,” or “not being politically correct?”  Either that or perhaps the word had gone out for the cops to just say “no, we don’t have the slightest idea where Hsu is.”

However, doing or saying something stupid isn’t the only ways to become candidates for the monthly nomination. You can also be nominated by trying to convince us that we’re too stupid to see through a fraud or a scam. This seems to be the tactic adopted by the Paw family.

 According to a copyrighted story in the Wall Street Journal, the six members of the Paw family, all of them claiming the house at 41 Shelbourne Ave. in San Francisco as their residence, have donated a combined $45,000 to Hillary Clinton’s presidential primary bid since 2005, her Senate re-election last year and her political action committee. In all, the six Paws have donated a total of $200,000 to Democratic candidates and political action committees since the 2005.

 
Public records indicate that the Paws own a gift shop and live in a 1,280-square-foot house that they recently refinanced for $270,000. William Paw, the head of the household, is a mail carrier with the U.S. Postal Service who earns about $50,000.  Mrs. Paw lists her occupation as housewife and their children are all employed.

How this family, of relatively modest means, by California standards, has a surplus income that allows it to throw around a quarter of a million dollars has yet to be explained.  To this writer, such largess can be explained by one of the following scenarios (in increasing order of likelihood).

1)      The Paw family has a pile of money and just felt like giving it away

2)      The Paw gift shop is raking in money faster than the owners can give it away

3)      The Paw children are making a bundle

4)    The Paw family lied through its collective teeth to the Internal Revenue Service about their incomes in what is known in legal terms as tax evasion.

5)      Somebody gave the Paw family money that was earmarked for Sen. Clinton’s political aspirations.

As the potential political fallout from Norman Hsu’s fund raising became apparent, the campaign poobahs of the Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Bill Richardson announced that direct contributions from Hsu (those that he made under his own name) would be donated to charity.  In Sen. Clinton’s case, the loss of $23,000 from a campaign war chest estimated to be at least $50 million will go unnoticed. 

Gov. Richardson got off easy since Hsu had only contributed a total of $28,000 to Richardson’s 2006 re-election campaign.  Gov. Richardson’s campaign staff announced that the contributions would be shipped off to an undisclosed charity.  Since Richardson’s re-election campaign raised about $13.5 million yet only spent $12 million, $28,000 is mere chump change

Of the three candidates, Obama gains credibility at the cost of donating the $2,000 that Hsu contributed to his 2004 senate campaign and his $5,000 to Obama’s PAC to another undisclosed charity.

In keeping with at least a degree of fairness Larry Craig, the mow-former Republican Senator from Idaho, gains entry into the September competition by virtue of pleading guilty (without consulting a lawyer) to public indecency charges related to an alleged attempt to initiate a homosexual sex encounter at the Minneapolis, MN airport.

Craig’s entry is felt, by many observers, to be a long shot since resigning from the senate was about the only smart move he had left. su