On her LinkedIn page, Christine O’Donnell lists “Claremont Graduate University” and “Oxford University” in the “Education” section of her bio:

Tonight it is looking as though she will have to explain questions about both. Greg Sargent:

O’Donnell’s LinkedIn bio page lists “University of Oxford” as one of the schools she attended, claiming she studied “Post Modernism in the New Millennium.” But it turns out that was just a course conducted by an institution known as the Phoenix Institute, which merely rented space at Oxford.

What’s more, the woman who oversaw Phoenix Institute’s summer program at Oxford tells me O’Donnell’s claim about studying at Oxford is “misleading.”

By itself, O’Donnell’s Oxford claim might not matter too much. But the larger context is that O’Donnell has already been nabbed fudging her education record not once, but twice. She claimed for several years to have graduated from Fairleigh Dickinson Un[i]versity, but she actually obtained her bachelor’s degree last summer. And in a lawsuit she suggested she was trying for a Master’s degree courses at Princeton — but subsequently acknowledged she hadn’t taken a single Princeton graduate course.

And then there is the listing of “Claremont Graduate University.” Gary Scott, producer for Warren Olney’s shows Which Way, L.A.? and To the Point, says:

I asked CGU’s public relations officer, Rod Leveque, if the school had any record of O’Donnell attending classes there. His response:

In short, no. Claremont Graduate University has no student or education record for an individual named Christine O’Donnell.

In 2002, O’Donnell was listed as a “Lincoln Fellow” at the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank also based in Claremont. However, the institute is not affiliated with the Claremont Graduate University or any of the other Claremont Colleges.

TPMDC reports the same quote from Leveque.

So there you have it then.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m still lovin’ the “idea” of Christine O’Donnell.

But the actual person has a lot to address here, to put it mildly.

UPDATE: Ben Domenech rises to the defense. (H/t Crank in comments.)

UPDATE x2: O’Donnell says she neither set up the LinkedIn entry nor authorized anyone else to.

Fascinating.  If true, someone independently went to great lengths to set up a flattering profile, without her knowledge or acquiescence, that subtly exaggerated her educational accomplishments.  It would certainly be interesting to learn who would do such a thing and why.

I told you this morning that this execution isn’t going to happen any time soon. It was clear to me that King Fogel was going to block it. Now he has.

You may have read that there is strong evidence of voter fraud in Houston. Here’s what you may not have heard: the organization accused of shady behavior is linked to a former head of an Obama campaign office. She is a fan of Che Guevara. She is also the person who invited to a town hall meeting a woman who then posed as a doctor at that meeting during the health care debate.

Here are the details.

Last month, Houston’s Registrar accused a Democratic organization called “Houston Votes” of voter registration fraud. The allegations were recently detailed here, and make compelling reading:

When Catherine Engelbrecht and her friends sat down and started talking politics several years ago, they soon agreed that talking wasn’t enough. They wanted to do more. So when the 2008 election came around, “about 50” of her friends volunteered to work at Houston’s polling places.

“What we saw shocked us,” she said. “There was no one checking IDs, judges would vote for people that asked for help. It was fraud, and we watched like deer in the headlights.”

Their shared experience, she says, created “True the Vote,” a citizen-based grassroots organization that began collecting publicly available voting data to prove that what they saw in their day at the polls was, indeed, happening — and that it was happening everywhere.

. . . .

Their work paid off. Two weeks ago the Harris County voter registrar took their work and the findings of his own investigation and handed them over to both the Texas secretary of state’s office and the Harris County district attorney.

Most of the findings focused on a group called Houston Votes, a voter registration group headed by Sean Caddle, who also worked for the Service Employees International Union before coming to Houston. Among the findings were that only 1,793 of the 25,000 registrations the group submitted appeared to be valid.

The other registrations included one of a woman who registered six times in the same day; registrations of non-citizens; so many applications from one Houston Voters collector in one day that it was deemed to be beyond human capability; and 1,597 registrations that named the same person multiple times, often with different signatures. . . .

“The integrity of the voting rolls in Harris County, Texas, appears to be under an organized and systematic attack by the group operating under the name Houston Votes,” the Harris voter registrar, Leo Vasquez, charged as he passed on the documentation to the district attorney.

Guess who was active in recruiting for Houston Votes? That would be one Maria Isabel.

Does that name sound familiar? It should. She is a radical Obama supporter who ran an Obama campaign office that sported a picture of Che Guevara.

Maria Isabel (identified by Babalu blog) at Obama/Che HQ

Her name resurfaced when we reported here that Isabel had invited Roxana Mayer to a Sheila Jackson Lee town hall meeting. Mayer, of course, is the woman who pretended to be a doctor to lend credibility to her support for Obama’s health care reform.

Maria Isabel at town hall meeting

Maria Isabel, having invited Mayer to the meeting, was sitting right there with this fraud in the front row:

Isabel is a long-time Organizing for America activist.

Maria Isabel with Obama

(So, as it turned out, was Mayer.)

So last year, you had two Obama activists sitting in the front row of a Sheila Jackson Lee town hall meeting, one of whom invited the other via a listserv.  One was a Che Guevara fan and the other lied about being a doctor.

Now the fan of Che Guevara and Obama is shown to have been involved (beginning as early as 2007) with an organization that stands credibly accused of rank voter fraud.

Doesn’t mean she had anything to do with it, of course. And she didn’t necessarily have anything to do with Roxana Mayer’s fraud, either. She just happens to keep popping up in the company of others who commit fraud. That’s all.

Or is it?

(Thanks to a reader who wishes not to be identified.)

UPDATE: Thanks to Instapundit for the link.

UPDATE x2: David Jennings, who took two of the photos used above, has a post that further ties Isabel to the Houston Votes organization — using photos that Isabel herself put on Flickr. It’s excellent work — go see it now.

But, but, they told us nobody would lose their health insurance plan because of ObamaCare.

I guess that wasn’t entirely true:

Harvard Pilgrim Health Care has notified customers that it will drop its Medicare Advantage health insurance program at the end of the year, forcing 22,000 senior citizens in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine to seek alternative supplemental coverage.

The decision by Wellesley-based Harvard Pilgrim, the state’s second-largest health insurer, was prompted by a freeze in federal reimbursements and a new requirement that insurers offering the kind of product sold by Harvard Pilgrim — a Medicare Advantage private fee for service plan — form a contracted network of doctors who agree to participate for a negotiated amount of money. Under current rules, patients can seek care from any doctor.

“We became concerned by the long-term viability of Medicare Advantage programs in general,’’ said Lynn Bowman, vice president of customer service at Harvard Pilgrim’s office in Quincy. “We know that cuts in Medicare are being used to fund national health care reform. And we also had concerns about our ability to build a network of health care providers that would meet the needs of our seniors.’’

The new substitute plan will be “slightly more expensive’’ than the existing plan.  Also, it “won’t pay for prescription drugs, which are covered by some versions of the current plan.”

No problem, right, seniors?

Will this company be locked out of the system for daring to act according to its business interests?

Thanks to A. W. and another reader.

If you weren’t paying attention, it might have appeared like his execution was coming up.

Dream on.

A federal appeals court in San Francisco late Monday ordered a trial judge to reconsider a ruling that allowed for a convicted murderer and rapist to be executed this week at San Quentin State Prison.

Albert Greenwood Brown was scheduled to be executed at 9 p.m. Thursday for the 1980 killing of a 15-year-old Riverside County girl.

But the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said that a U.S. district court judge erred by offering Brown a choice of being executed with a one-drug lethal injection or a three-drug cocktail.

I have downloaded the decision for your perusal here. I may have more to say about this later, but my quick analysis is: nothing is happening any time soon. Perhaps the weirdest part of all this: the moratorium on executions is likely to continue because . . . California doesn’t have fresh supplies of the execution drug:

The California attorney general’s office said Monday it would recommend not scheduling any more executions after Thursday until the state can secure a fresh supply of the drug, an anesthetic that renders condemned inmates unconscious before lethal drugs are injected.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has said it likely can’t acquire more of the drug until next year. That would further extend the de facto execution ban Fogel put in place in 2006 when he found California’s lethal injection process deeply flawed.

It’s only a de facto ban because the Attorney General never made the judge issue a real ruling, choosing instead to roll over and not set execution dates, forcing the judge to halt them.

The time has come, folks. Our officials are failing us. They are failing to force the issue. They are failing to buy fresh supplies of the necessary drugs.

Bring back the firing squad.

The title is poking fun at the people who constantly invoke the “coldest [winter, summer, day] in history” stories as proof there is no global warming:

It was so hot Monday that it broke the all-time record — and the weatherman’s thermometer.

The National Weather Service’s thermometer for downtown Los Angeles headed into uncharted territory at 12:15 p.m. Monday, reaching 113 degrees for the first time since records began being kept in 1877.

Shortly after that banner moment, the temperature dipped back to 111, and then climbed back to 112. Then at 1 p.m., the thermometer stopped working.

I was in Dallas, Texas, where it was an unseasonably cool 73. When a colleague texted me that it was 106 in Long Beach, I didn’t believe him. So I checked the Weather Channel site on my phone. He was wrong. It was 109.

It is silly to take a single day of any type of weather and extrapolate that to conclude anything about long-term heating and cooling trends. One hot day or season does not prove global warming any more than one cold day or season disproves it.