So, the FBI says that it’s case closed.
I’ve been following this for some time, and as I have noted before, I’m not certain of this.
Category: Crimes
Bernie Kerick Gets 4 Years for Corruption
Kind of a sad end of a sad story.
He was mobbed up, and Giuliani’s right hand man.
I will leave what this says about Rudy as an exercise to the reader.
Breaking News
Some whack job set his house on fire and flew his airplane into federal offices in Austin, TX.
Germany Gets It
The German tax authorities have decided to pay €2.5 million to a whistle blower who stole information on 1500 accounts, with the payments being dependent on the data being real. (See also here, and here) in order to catch tax evaders.
They did this before, with Lichtenstein in 2008, where payment netted tax revenues in excess of €200 million.
The Swiss have a problem, because I bought a 4 Gig memory stick a year ago for $12, and it’s smaller than a pack of gum.
Even if you assume 100K per account, this stick can hold about 40,000 accounts on each memory stick, and with the going rate from German tax authorities of about €1,666 per account, that memory stick could net an insider well over €50 million, with a bulk discount.
Their style of bank secrecy is likely to go away, because it is unsupportable.
Now, Germany needs to learn about the “Perp walk”.
The Robin Hood Tax Gains Support in the UK
I Would Like to See This on US Television
It’s actually called a “Tobin Tax“, and the idea is that a tax of about 5 basis points (0.05%) on non-consumer bank transactions (otherwise known as “speculation”).
As was noted with the original Tobin proposal, this is actually very hard to evade, because they sales have to be settled something, and for any transaction of any significant size, this means only a few places, New York, London, Paris, Frankfurt, Tokyo, etc. settle (i.e.) pay.
If you moved from highly trafficked settling institutions to obscure ones, the costs of settling become much higher, and in fact will likely likely be much higher than 5 basis points.
There is an organization in the UK, the Robin Hood Tax campaign, which is lobbying for the idea, and produced the above video, which illustrates how it would work, and how it would benefit everyone except for the vampire squids* of the world.
In an interesting twist to all of this, the folks at the campaign put up an online poll, and some online entities spammed the poll to oppose the proposal.
I wonder who might have done this?
The Robin Hood Tax campaign alleged that a Goldman computer was one of two computers that allegedly “spammed” the internet poll with more than 4,600 “no” votes in less than 20 minutes on Thursday.
Technical staff for the Robinhoodtax.org.uk website said the “no” counter increased at a “dramatic rate” from 3.41pm.
The number of “no” votes jumped from 1,400 to 6,000 before campaigners – who are calling for the introduction of 0.05pc tax on banking transactions – tightened the site’s security.
Robin Hood’s security team claimed it traced the erroneous votes to two computers, one of which is allegedly registered as belonging to Goldman.
Goldman is saying that it has, “just received this information and is investigating fully,” which in the UK means busting which ever staff member is of Indian or Pakistani extraction, I guess.
In any case, the “Yes” vote is winning by about 9:1, 41488 to 4626.
I approve of their program, though I think that 5 basis points is too low. It should be at least 25 basis points (¼%).
*Goldman Sachs and their Evil Minions™
Landrieu Bugging Update
It appears that the lawyer for Robert Flanagan is involved in negotiations with prosecutors.
Flanagan is the one who is the US Attorney for Baton Rouge’s son, and my guess is that he’s the one most likely to sing, because he’ll get the best deal because of who daddy is.
Pass the popcorn.
Haitian Kidnapper Update
First, I think that it’s pretty clear that something if fishy, since the State Department is refusing to intervene in the case, despite the fact that they, and their allies have aggressively lobbied for this.
It may have something to do with a report that this appears to be the 2nd time that they tried to abscond with children without paperwork or vetting that these were in fact orphans.
As I said before, this was a religiously motivated kidnapping.
Luckily for them, it looks like the they will be released shortly, with a finding by the judge of “the White American get out of jail free card” “no criminal intent.”
If On the Jury, I Would Vote to Acquit
A group of German pensioners are on trial for abducting and imprisoning their investment adviser:
A retired architect and four other pensioners took their financial adviser hostage and held him in a purpose-built prison in Bavaria after their stock market investments failed, a court has heard.
The 74-year-old architect, identified only as Roland K, told a court in Traunstein, southern Germany, that he and his accomplices thought their financial adviser had “cheated and taken the piss” out of them after their investments in the US property market evaporated. As a result, he told the court, they had “decided to invite him for a few days’ holiday in Upper Bavaria”.
Roland K denied kidnapping but admitted the group, including his seventh wife, 79-year-old Sieglinde, Willi D, 60, and Iris F, 64, a retired doctor, abducted James Amburn at his home in Speyer, southern Germany, in June before transporting him in the boot of a car to Roland K’s house at the lakeside resort of Chiemsee, where he had built a prison for him in the cellar.
I don’t approve of such behavior, and I would not do so myself, but if these sorts of vigilante justice are nullified by juries on a regular basis, bankers will start looking to preserving their skins, and not their bonuses and tax dodges.
If they don’t get the message soon, we will see the people with guns shooting bank presidents.
I hope that the bankers get the message before we start seeing widespread murders.
Remember the Auschwitz Sign Theft
In December, some Jamokes stole the sign over the gate of Auschwitz, the one that said “Arbeit Macht Frei,” basically saying (it was a lie) that work would set the inmates free.
I remember reading about it, and thinking that I would wait a couple of days until the full story played out.
I wasn’t sure if this was a stupid prank, something involving organized antisemitism, or something falling into the middle ground, where the history Polish anti-Semitism could be inferred from the incident, but there was no some grounds for doubt.
Well, 2 months later, and the story has played out, and Mithras has nailed what happened in just 28 words (+ title):
Turns Out, It Was Anti-Semites
The guy who commissioned the theft of the Auschwitz sign is a Swedish neo-Nazi. The Poles who stole the sign for him say They Were Just Following Orders.
(emphasis mine)
Anti-Abortion Terrorist Convicted of Murder
The Jury deliberated only 37 minutes before convicting him of 1st degree murder, which means that they basically voted to convict while waiting to get into the jury room:
In a trial that never became the referendum on abortion that some abortion foes wanted, Scott Roeder, a 51-year-old airport shuttle driver, was convicted today of murdering George Tiller, one the nation’s few physicians who performed late-term abortions.
The jury of seven men and five women deliberated for only 37 minutes. Roeder faces life in prison after being convicted of first-degree murder.
Roeder also was convicted on two counts of aggravated assault for threatening to shoot church ushers Keith Martin and Gary Hoepner as he fled Reformation Lutheran Church after murdering Tiller.
This guy needs to be prosecuted under federal statutes too, and locked up under the most severe restrictions possible at the SuperMax until he breaks, and gives up his accomplices, because it’s clear that they wound him up, and pointed him at tiller.
More College Republican Bull Sh%$
Remember James O’Keefe, he dressed up like a pimp, and got those videos of ACORN helping him and his “Ho” buying a whore house.
I believe that at the time, I thought that I didn’t have much to add, and besides, College Republican guerrilla theater bullsh%$ just wasn’t particularly interest, so I limited my self to the bill of attainder that Congress passed.
Well, James O’Keefe has now taken College Republican antics straight to the felony level, by attempting to wiretap the office of Senator Mary Landrieu with three friends, Joseph Basel, Stan Dai and Robert Flanagan.
They pretended to be phone repair guys, and they tried to tap phones, so it appears to be a clear case of, “entering federal property under false pretenses with the intent of committing a felony,” which can get you 10 years, and if they have more evidence of tapping equipment, then the jail time can go to 20 years.
Oops! It’s all fun and games until someone puts an eye out, I guess.
The kicker on all this, Robert Flanagan is, “the son of William Flanagan, who is the acting U.S. attorney for the Western District of Louisiana.”
Any wonder what political discussions are like in the Flanagan house?
Do you wonder, just a little bit, if maybe Flanagan the elder might be inclined to make politically motivated prosecutions? Do you wonder even a little?
This is why the decision not to review the illegal political hirings at the DoJ was a bad idea.
It sounds hopey-changey to let bygones to be bygones, but what this means is that the legal toxic waste that are Bush DoJ hires remains on site.
Somali Pirates Create Better Fishing
Not surprising.
It appears that there is upside to Somali piracy. The pirates have scared off the people plundering the fishing grounds off of the Somolian coast:
MALINDI, Kenya–Kenyan fisherman are perhaps the only people in the world who have reason to be grateful to Somali pirates – they keep away illegal fishing boats.
In past years, illegal commercial trawlers parked off Somalia’s coast and scooped up the ocean’s contents. Now, fishermen on the northern coast of neighboring Kenya say, the trawlers are not coming because of pirates.
“There is a lot of fish now, there is plenty of fish. There is more fish than people can actually use because the international fishermen have been scared away by the pirates,” said Athman Seif, the director of the Malindi Marine Association.
One of the reasons for the popularity of the Somali pirates in Somalia is because they are perceived as going after foreign poachers.
If the external powers started policing the 200 mile limit for Somalia, or better yet, commissioned and supported a Somali Coast Guard, and pursued the people who are strip-mining their coastal waters, we might find some real improvement in the piracy problem.
Read the Rude Pundit
He’s a genius, as he shows in his latest, “It Shouldn’t Surprise Us that Some Ex-Gitmo Detainees Want to F%$# Us Up.” (%$# mine):
We are incapable of dealing with the notion that whether you’re the good guy or the bad guy is a matter of perception. And that sometimes the United States is the bad guy. Unless we’re willing to confront that and do something about it (like, at minimum, apologize and offer compensation), then we shouldn’t be surprised that Yemeni Mel Gibsons will seek to go all Lethal Weapon on us.
The man is a genius, if somewhat profane.
Go read.
How Quaint
The 9th Court of Appeals has ruled that the police do not have the right to torture citizens they find inconvenient with Tasers:
A federal appeals court on Monday issued one of the most comprehensive rulings yet limiting police use of Tasers against low-level offenders who seem to pose little threat and may be mentally ill.
In a case out of San Diego County, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals criticized an officer who, without warning, shot an emotionally troubled man with a Taser when he was unarmed, yards away, and neither fleeing nor advancing on the officer.
(emphasis mine)
I’m sure that some will find this an outrage. After all, aren’t police supposed to use potentially lethal force on people who don’t comply immediately, like the kid who did not obey orders to get up because he had a broken back?
Hoocoodanode?
Needless to say, this cop still has his job, because, after all, law enforcement investigates itself in such instances.
The State Department Cover-Up of Blackwater Succeeds
Basically, the State Department used the Oliver North option, so by immunizing and debriefing them, they made a trial almost impossible, and the judge, U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina, was forced to dismiss the case.
Obviously, part of the problem is that the prosecution screwed up, though they can refile, but the real crux of the matter here is that the Bushies in the State Department intended this result. They wanted to protect Bush supporter Eric Prince and his company, now called Xe.
Republican Congressmen did this at the Iran-Contra hearings, because they feared that North would rat out Reagan if he actually ended up in prison.
An Insight into the Mind of Ayn Rand
Mystery/thriller writer Michael Prescott has looked through the journals of Ayn Rand, and he finds her musing on one William Edward Hickman, who said, “What is good for me is right,” which seems to pretty classical Randian Objectivism.
She is enthused about this person, and his philosophy, describing it as, “The best and strongest expression of a real man’s psychology I have heard.”
While Mr. Hickman is fairly obscure these days, unless you are a lawyer, in which case it is one of the earliest attempts at an insanity defense, he was well known during his day, basically 1927 and 1928, because he kidnapped a 12 year old girl, ransomed her, and dismembered her.
And Ayn Rand calls what he did a, “Real man’s philosophy.”
If there were any doubt as to her being evil, it is ended. If there were any doubt as to her sanity, those doubts are reinforced.
I will leave you with the last two ‘graphs, but please read the rest, but be warned, the specifics of the murder are grisly:
By the appraisal of any normal mind, there can be little doubt that William Edward Hickman was a vicious psychopath of the worst order. That Ayn Rand saw something heroic, brilliant, and romantic in this despicable creature is perhaps the single worst indictment of her that I have come across. It is enough to make me question not only her judgment, but her sanity.
At this point in my life, I did not think it was possible to significantly lower my estimate of Ayn Rand, or to regard her as even more of a psychological and moral mess than I had already taken her to be.
I stand corrected.
If He Were a Democrat….
Now it turns out that it appears that the man who allegedly shot 4 police officers in Tacoma was granted clemency by Huckabee, allowing for his pardon.
This guy’s rap sheet is unbelievable in chronological order, we have:
- Sentenced at 18 to 60 years for robbery, theft, burglary, aggravated robbery, posession of a gun on school property.
- After his parole, it was two more armed robberies, and other assorted crimes.
- Punching a police officer during a domestic dispute.
- He has a pending charge of 2nd degree child rape.
Let’s make this clear, sentencing people to prison, and paroling them is a crap shoot. Some people don’t need to be in prison a day, some will never, ever be safe to put on the streets.
So, governors will get this wrong, but Huckabee has a particularly bad record, see also the earlier case of Wayne DuMond, where Huckabee seems to have engineered his release because it was a relative of Bill Clinton’s who was raped, and reports that he was more likely to pardon someone when, “evangelical leaders attested that a prisoner had found Jesus“, and it appears that the accused, Maurice Clemmons, used the language of Evangelical Christianity in his appeal for clemency to Huckabee, which likely had something to do with that decision.
There are also cases that seem to be tied to his personally knowing the prisoner, because they worked at the governor’s residence (WTF is up with that?), and because they had personal ties to him.
So, it’s not just that he’s made a mistake, it’s that he’s been a real horror show on this.
Of course, if he were a Democrat with a gig as a new host, someone like Roger Ailes, who created the Willie Horton ads, would be on him, and on the network to dump him, but this won’t happen, because Roger Ailes runs Fox News, and has hired him as that host:
Back in 1988, when it came to light that Willie Horton committed fresh crimes while out on a weekend furlough program backed by then-Gov. Mike Dukakis of Massachusetts, Republicans used it to help destroy Dukakis the presidential candidate. It may even have cost him the election.
“The only question is whether we depict Willie Horton with a knife in his hand or without it,” said a gleeful Roger Ailes, then a media consultant to Republicans.
Ailes now runs Fox News. If they decide to hold the politician accountable for early release of a violent felon linked now to a death of four police officers, they know where to find him – in studio, as a Fox News host.
Consequence free lifestyle, all you have to do is to be a Republican politician…..Damn….I just cannot do that.
Update on the Census Worker Death
It appears I was wrong, the death of US Census worker Bill Sparkman, which I, and a number of other people was an act driven by the recent right wing anti-government hysteria.
Well, the Kentucky State Police, along with the FBI, have now ruled it to be suicide.
My condolences to his family.
Least Surprising News of the Day
The New York Times is now reporting that mercenary corporation Blackwater (now Xe) approved over a million dollars in bribes to Iraqi officials in order to continue to operate in Iraq:
Top executives at Blackwater Worldwide authorized secret payments of about $1 million to Iraqi officials that were intended to silence their criticism and buy their support after a September 2007 episode in which Blackwater security guards fatally shot 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, according to former company officials.
Blackwater approved the cash payments in December 2007, the officials said, as protests over the deadly shootings in Nisour Square stoked long-simmering anger inside Iraq about reckless practices by the security company’s employees. American and Iraqi investigators had already concluded that the shootings were unjustified, top Iraqi officials were calling for Blackwater’s ouster from the country, and company officials feared that Blackwater might be refused an operating license it would need to retain its contracts with the State Department and private clients, worth hundreds of millions of dollars annually.
So they violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and, if you go down further, it looks like they were paying off victims and witnesses in order to secure their silence during the FBI investigation.
Srsly, prosecushuns, now!
Bad News for the Cyberterrorism Protection Racket
A while back This Sunday, 60 Minutes did a piece on how hackers created a massive blackout in Brazil.
Only it wasn’t any sort of computer problem, it was poorly maintained power lines, where soot (carbon is conductive) created short circuits which took down the line:
Brazil’s independent systems operator group later confirmed that the failure of a 345-kilovolt line “was provoked by pollution in the chain of insulators due to deposits of soot” (.pdf). And the National Agency for Electric Energy, Brazil’s energy regulatory agency, concluded its own investigation in January 2009 and fined Furnas $3.27 million (.pdf) for failing to maintain the high-voltage insulators on its transmission towers.
Also look at their additional links:
- No Chinese Hackers Found in Florida Outage Either
- Did Hackers Cause the 2003 Northeast Blackout? Umm, No
- Put NSA in Charge of Cyber Security, Or the Power Grid Gets It
So, as it stands right now, the only people claiming this have no proof, but are likely to get contracts, if they are private, or additional government money, if they are public.
The issue here is the vulnerability of the grid, see the 2003 blackout, and the problem is that since privatizing electric utilities, they have skimped on infrastructure, leaving no margin for error.