Easily the best one that you’ll read all week.  The context: nobody can pronounce the Congressman’s last name properly - up to and including the President (this isn’t a slam: I was getting it wrong, too).  So Joseph decided to set the record straight with a press release:

My last name – Cao - is actually pronounced (drum-roll please…) “Gow.” It starts with a “G” and rhymes (as Amanda Carpenter quipped in the Washington Post) with “Pow.”

I can understand your reluctance to accept such an absurd variation – surely no “C,” in the history of language, has ever been pronounced as a “G.” And yet, through no fault of my own, my native Southern Vietnamese dialect evolved such that this absurd mockery of consonants is, in fact, reality.

The whole thing is worth your time; it’s good from start to finish.  All in all, I’d like to keep Joseph in Congress for a while: how about you?  Thanks to his position as a Republican legislator in a heavily Democratic district, he’s currently under a good deal of pressure to break ranks on health care rationing (he’s already taken hits from the Democrats for not budging for the ’stimulus’ or cap-and-trade bills): he frankly needs all the help that he can get.

Moe Lane

PS: I keep calling him ‘Joseph’ because he said that we all could.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

From the diaries by Erick.

Just a reminder: the Defendant in this case was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 2008. The “honorable explanation” that he has promised since the $90,000 showed up in his freezer in 2005 turns out to be, “I didn’t take that money with the intention of bribing anyone. I took it with the intention of keeping it myself.”

From the Times-Picayune:

William Jefferson corruption case marks a legal first

ALEXANDRIA, VA. — Former U.S. Rep. William Jefferson [D-LA] is the first and only U.S. public official to be charged under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act since it was enacted in 1977.

Thanks, Congressman, for bringing that proud distinction to Louisiana!

Read More →

Fortunately, it won’t go anywhere, so the Democrats will have to try to win this seat back on their own, with no shenanigans. Note that even the AP isn’t buying the ‘ostensible’ reason for this:

NEW ORLEANS — Legal roadblocks will likely doom an effort launched this week to recall U.S. Rep. Ahn “Joseph” Cao, the Vietnamese Republican who scored a surprise December victory in a predominantly black, mostly Democratic New Orleans congressional district.

Still, the petition drive, started by two black ministers only weeks after Cao took office, demonstrates the challenges he’ll face if he seeks a second term in 2010.

“At this point it’s going to be more symbolic than substantive,” pollster and political consultant Silas Lee said Friday of the recall effort, ostensibly launched to protest Cao’s vote against the federal stimulus package. “But symbolism carries a powerful message.”

Via Libertarian Republican, via The Other McCain.

Read More →