Category: Crimes

WalMart Doesn’t Just F%$# the Taxpayer Over Welfare, Medicaid, and Foodstamps

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It also deliberately avoids engaging in actions that might reduce drime so as to put the load on the local police as well:

………

 Police chiefs and their officers on the ground say that’s just not so. Ross likes to joke that the concentration of crime at Walmart makes his job easier. “I’ve got all my bad guys in one place,” he says, flashing a bright smile. His squad’s sergeant, Robert Rohloff, a 34-year police veteran who has to worry about staffing, budgets, and patrolling the busiest commercial district in Tulsa, says there’s nothing funny about Walmart’s impact on public safety. He can’t believe, he says, that a multibillion-dollar corporation isn’t doing more to stop crime. Instead, he says, it offloads the job to the police at taxpayers’ expense. “It’s ridiculous—we are talking about the biggest retailer in the world,” says Rohloff. “I may have half my squad there for hours.”

 Walmart knows police departments are frustrated. “We absolutely understand how important this is. It is important for our associates, it is important for our customers and across the communities we serve,” says Judith McKenna, Walmart’s chief operating officer for the U.S. “We can do better.”

 But when? That’s what law enforcement around the country wants to know. “The constant calls from Walmart are just draining,” says Bill Ferguson, a police captain in Port Richey, Fla. “They recognize the problem and refuse to do anything about it.”

 There’s nothing inevitable about the level of crime at Walmart. It’s the direct, if unintended, result of corporate policy. Beginning as far back as 2000, when former CEO Lee Scott took over, an aggressive cost-cutting crusade led many stores to deteriorate. The famed greeters were removed, taking away a deterrent to theft at the porous entrances and exits. Self-checkout scanners replaced many cashiers. Walmart added stores faster than it hired employees. The company has one worker for every 524 square feet of retail space, a 19 percent increase in space per employee from a decade ago.

 ………

 Police departments inevitably compare their local Walmarts with Target stores. Target, Walmart’s largest competitor, is a different kind of retail business, with mostly smaller stores that tend to be located in somewhat more affluent neighborhoods. But there are other reasons Targets have less crime. Unlike most Walmarts, they’re not open 24 hours a day. Nor do they allow people to camp overnight in their parking lots, as Walmarts do. Like Walmart, Target relies heavily on video surveillance, but it employs sophisticated software that can alert the store security office when shoppers spend too much time in front of merchandise or linger for long periods outside after closing time. The biggest difference, police say, is simply that Targets have more staff visible in stores.

 “Target doesn’t have these problems,” says Ferguson. “Part of it may be the lower prices at Walmart or where Walmart is located, but when I walk into Target I see uniformed security or someone walking around up front. You see no one at Walmart. It just seems like an easy target.” A Target spokeswoman declined to comment on the two companies’ security policies.

 ………

 Dennis Buckley found a way to get Walmart moving faster on crime: shaming and threats. A blunt former fire chief, Buckley is the mayor of Beech Grove, Ind., an Indianapolis suburb with a population of 14,000. He’d been swamped with complaints from his police chief about the daily calls to Walmart. He demanded action from Walmart’s local lawyer, as did the City Council. Nothing happened. Then, in June of last year, Buckley reached his limit. He received news that a local woman had been killed and her grandson seriously injured in a car crash caused by a Walmart shoplifter fleeing police. Later that day, he learned his town had become a laughingstock. A YouTube video of a fight at the Beech Grove Walmart was going viral. It showed two women, one riding a motorized scooter, the other accompanied by a 6-year-old boy, in a furious fistfight that turned into a profane wrestling match in the shampoo aisle. The video also contained glimpses of jeering bystanders recording the action on their phones. By the time Buckley saw the video, it had been viewed millions of times.

 Enraged by the circus atmosphere around the video, he denounced Walmart on Facebook and in the local media. “The Beech Grove Walmart is NOT a good corporate partner,” he posted. The YouTube video “was embarrassing to the City of Beech Grove and the people who live in our beautiful city. Walmart should be ashamed of itself once again for failing to control the people who enter their store.”

 Regional Walmart executives asked for a meeting with Buckley and Craig Wiley, the city attorney. “You could tell by their body language that they came to the meeting with a very conciliatory tone, and they were going to get their arms around the problem,” Wiley says. Walmart promised to hire security and extend a fence on the rear of its property, which barred an easy exit for shoplifters into a retirement community. It said it would skip calling the cops for first-time offenders shoplifting merchandise valued below $50 if the shoplifter completes the company’s theft-prevention program.

 Buckley was pleased. But in the weeks following the meeting, Walmart dragged its heels. Buckley went public again, this time appearing on national cable news. “Walmart Beech Grove is draining our police resources,” he told Fox Business Network. “It’s the string of terrible events that have been occurring down there over the past two months that have led me to instruct our police chief to declare the Walmart a public nuisance.”

 That meant the threat of a $2,500 fine for every call to the police. Walmart now pays for off-duty police to man the store, and the pressure on the local police has eased. A year later, Buckley is pleased, but it still irks him that he had to go to such measures to get Walmart to act. “Cities really need to put their thumb down and get them to the table,” he says. “It’s taken a long time, but they can really be good partners if they want to be.”

(emphasis mine)

Yet another reason to avoid the stores.

For many years their business model has been to suck the marrow out of society for profit, and I do not see this changing.

H/t Naked Capitalism.

Sauce for the Gander

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After decades of merrily hacking into other people’s computers and snooping on people’s emails, it appears that the NSA has been hacked.

A group of hackers are trying to auction off malware that the spy organization has been using to spy on the rest of us:

A mysterious online group calling itself “The Shadow Brokers” is claiming to have penetrated the National Security Agency, stolen some of its malware, and is auctioning off the files to the highest bidder.

The authenticity of the files cannot be confirmed but appear to be legitimate, according to security researchers who have studied their content. Their release comes on the heels of a series of disclosures of emails and documents belonging mostly to Democratic officials, but also to Republicans. Security researchers believe those breaches were perpetrated by agents thought to be acting on behalf of Moscow.

The NSA did not answer Foreign Policy’s questions about the alleged breach on Monday. But if someone has managed to penetrate the American signals intelligence agency and post its code online for the world to see — and purchase — it would constitute a historic black eye for the agency.

………

The files posted over the weekend include two sets of files. The hackers have made one set available for free. The other remains encrypted and is the subject of an online auction, payable in bitcoin, the cryptocurrency. That set includes, according to the so-called Shadow Brokers, “the best files.” If they receive at least 1 million bitcoin — the equivalent of at least $550 million — they will post more documents and make them available for free.

The set of files available for free contains a series of tools for penetrating network gear made by Cisco, Juniper, and other major firms. Targeting such gear, which includes things like routers and firewalls, is a known tactic of Western intelligence agencies like the NSA, and was documented in the Edward Snowden files. Some code words referenced in the material Monday — BANANAGLEE and JETPLOW — match those that have appeared in documents leaked by Snowden. Security researchers analyzing the code posted Monday say it is functional and includes computer codes for carrying out espionage.

If this hack is real, my guess is that they got in through backdoors that the NSA itself insisted on.

It’s a Self Licking Ice Cream Cone

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The DEA has decided to keep classifying Marijuana as a Schedule 1 Drug, which means that they claim that it has no therapeutic value.

It also means that a large portion of the DEA’s budget, the part that is driven by its anti-pot activities, remains safe.

How convenient:

For the fourth consecutive time, the Drug Enforcement Administration has denied a petition to lessen federal restrictions on the use of marijuana.

While recreational marijuana use is legal in four states and D.C., and medical applications of the drug have been approved in many more, under federal law, it remains a Schedule 1 controlled substance, which means it’s considered to have “no currently accepted medical use” and a “high potential for abuse.”

The gap between permissive state laws and a restrictive federal policy has become increasingly untenable in the minds of many doctors, patients, researchers, business owners and legislators.

For instance, last fall, a Brookings Institution report slammed the federal government for “stifling medical research” in the area of marijuana policy. As a Schedule 1 drug, it’s much harder for researchers to work with marijuana than with many other controlled substances. The American Academy of Pediatrics has called on the government to move marijuana into Schedule 2 to facilitate more research into medical uses.

Perhaps this determination should be made by an organization whose budget is not contingent on it remaining illegal.

Seriously? Boasting About an Endorsement from John f%$#ing Negroponte?

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It appears that the latest endorsement for Hillary Clinton from the “Guilty of Crimes Against Humanity” crowd is in, and her campaign is crowing about John Negroponte’s Endorsement, probably because Henry Kissinger was busy:

In her continuing tour of the dingier side of the 20th Century American diplomatic elite, Hillary Rodham Clinton picked up the endorsement on Wednesday of one John Negroponte. ………

 ………

 Well, that’s special, isn’t it? And what did Negroponte do while serving “in numerous diplomatic and national security positions starting in 1960”? I’m glad you asked.

 In the 1980s, he served as the U.S. ambassador to Honduras. In addition to (at best) covering for that country’s murderous autocrats, he also served the Reagan Administration by helping to turn Honduras into a staging area for American-trained death squads in places like El Salvador and Guatemala. (Remember, Eugene Hasenfus was flying out of a base in Honduras when he got shot down over Nicaragua, which is when the Iran-Contra criminal enterprise began to unravel.)………

 In any case, the essential Robert Parry has been dogging this story for nearly 40 years now. From In These Times:

Given the human rights records of the Honduran military and the Nicaraguan contras who set up shop in Honduras during Negroponte’s tenure as ambassador in the early ’80s, he will have no moral standing as a public official who repudiates abusive interrogation techniques and brutal counterinsurgency tactics. Indeed, some cynics might suggest that’s one of the reasons Bush picked him. Negroponte’s work in Honduras means, too, that he will come to his new job with a history of forwarding inaccurate intelligence to Washington and leaving out information that would have upset the upper echelon of the Reagan-Bush administration. For his part, Negroponte, who is now 65, has staunchly denied knowledge of “death squad” operations by the Honduran military in the ’80s.

 In 1983, in another move that helped the Honduran military and the contras, the Reagan-Bush administration closed down the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) office at the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa, just as Honduras was emerging as an important base for cocaine transshipments to the United States. “Elements of the Honduran military were involved … in the protection of drug traffickers from 1980 on,” is how a Senate Foreign Relations investigative report, issued in 1989 by a subcommittee headed by Sen. John Kerry, put it. “These activities were reported to appropriate U.S. government officials throughout the period. Instead of moving decisively to close down the drug trafficking by stepping up the DEA presence in the country and using the foreign assistance the United States was extending to the Hondurans as a lever, the United States closed the DEA office in Tegucigalpa and appears to have ignored the issue.” It’s unclear what role Negroponte played in shutting down the DEA office in Honduras during his time as U.S. ambassador, but it is hard to imagine that a step of that significance could have occurred without at least his acquiescence.

 ………

 “Given what we know about the extent and nature of Honduran human rights abuses, to say that Mr. Negroponte was less than forthcoming in his responses to my questions is being generous,” said Dodd. “I was also troubled by Ambassador Negroponte’s unwillingness to admit that—as a consequence of other U.S. policy priorities—the U.S. Embassy, by acts of omissions, end[ed] up shading the truth about the extent and nature of ongoing human rights abuses in the 1980s. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights had no such reluctance in assigning blame to the Honduran government during its adjudication of a case brought against the government of Honduras [in 1987],” [Senator Christopher] Dodd said.

Hillary Clinton has been completely captured by they dysfunctional, immoral, and incompetent foreign policy consensus that has been mismanaging our foreign policy since the 1960s.

This The Best and the Brightest crap really needs to end.

It has produced nothing but death and misery and failure.

Not Again

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We just had an another cop shooting, this one in Baton Rouge, where police recently shot Alton Sterling and then went postal on protestors:

Three police officers were killed after a gunfight in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on Sunday and three injured, one critically. The gunman was also killed, and police said they do not believe any other suspects currently threaten the city.

President Obama condemned the shooting and said attacks on police were “attacks against all of us and the rule of law that makes society possible”.
At about 8.40am officers responded to a report of a man with a rifle and wearing black by a convenience store, state police colonel Mike Edmonson told reporters late on Sunday. Two minutes later, shots were reported over police radio, a recording of which was posted online.

You just have to love American gun culture and American Law enforcement culture.

Enough is f%$#ing enough.

Admittedly, Just One Report, But If True, Nice Was Not Terrorism

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There is a report that  Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the alleged perpetrator of an attack in Nice that has killed over 80 people,  may have been depressed because his wife left him.

If this is true, it means that this guy was not ISIS or al Qaeda, but a spree killer driven over the edge by family problems,

That would make him culturally American:

A terrorist who used a hired lorry to kill at least 84 people in a rampage during Bastille Day celebrations in Nice has been named as a convicted criminal well known to the police for armed attacks.

Tunisian-born Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel – described as a “weird loner” who “became depressed” when his wife left him – was a French passport holder who lived in the Riviera city and was regularly in trouble with the law.

The 31-year-old delivery driver’s wife is this afternoon in police custody as officers question her about his alleged Islamist links. Bouhlel was reportedly not on a terrorist watch list and investigators are seeking to establish his motives – and are also looking for possible accomplices.

………

Neighbours described him as a “very weird loner” and father of three who had recently become estranged from his wife and had become depressed following the breakdown of his marriage.

Seriously, if these reports are accurate, he sounds a lot like the majority of the white mass shooters in the United States.

This Business Will Get out of Control. It Will Get out of Control and We’ll Be Lucky to Live through It

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And we have the first attempted assassination of a Presidential candidate of the season, by one Michael Steven Sandford, a British National:

A Briton who tried to grab a police officer’s gun at a Donald Trump rally in Las Vegas said he wanted to shoot the US candidate, court papers say.

 Michael Steven Sandford, 20, did not enter a plea when he appeared before a judge in Nevada and was remanded in custody until a hearing on 5 July.

 He is charged with an act of violence in a restricted area.

 He had reportedly tried to seize the gun after saying he wanted Mr Trump’s autograph at Saturday’s rally.

 He said he had been planning to try to shoot Mr Trump for about a year but had decided to act now because he finally felt confident enough to do so, court papers say.

I’m sure that the bloke from Dorking (Seriously, he is from Dorking, Surrey) won’t be the last one this campaign season.

This is nuts.

Not Your Call

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Well, after a freakout from the right wing, the DOJ has agreed to release the full transcripts from the Orlando shooter during his rampage:

The Orlando killer pledged allegiance to the Islamic State while in the midst of murdering 49 people at a gay nightclub last weekend. But for a few hours Monday, we couldn’t read that part of Omar Mateen’s phone conversations with dispatchers and police because the FBI took it out of transcripts of 911 calls it released.

To Republicans, the redacted transcripts were yet another example of how the Obama administration is mishandling this whole war on terror by ducking every opportunity to avoid talking about the real issues behind it — and specifically, Islam.

………

The pressure worked. The FBI reversed course Monday afternoon and released the redacted parts of the transcript in which Mateen pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, saying the political debate over the redaction had become a distraction.

It’s more than that, it’s public records, and the Department of Justice wanted to suppress these records because they did not approve of that message:

[FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge Ron] Hopper Hopper said authorities also did not want to “give credence to individuals who have done terrorist acts in the past.”

“We’re not going to propagate their violent rhetoric,” he said.

Mr. Hopper, that decision is is not your call, nor should it be.

Your job is not to determine what news is available to the general public.

Nuland’s Folly

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Following the US supported coup, The Ukraine has turned into an open air arms bazaar for criminals and terrorists:

When the the Ukrainian Security Service, the SBU, announced recently that it had detained a 25-year-old French citizen, Grégoire Moutaux, who was trying to cross the country’s border into Poland in a vehicle full of explosives and weapons, that sounded like a major blow against terrorism.

SBU spokesman Vasyl Hrytsak declared that after two weeks of investigation, which is to say of interrogation, “The Ukrainian Security Service managed to prevent 15 terrorist attacks targeting the territory of France.”

According to the SBU this alleged French criminal attempted to smuggle five Kalashnikov assault rifles, more than 50,000 bullets, two RPG-7 anti-tank grenade-launchers, 100 electronic detonators, and 125 kilograms of TNT across Ukraine’s frontier.

Perhaps. But in Kiev, the announcement was greeted with deep skepticism. Neither local journalists nor independent observers place much trust in SBU reports these days, and with good reason.
………

“Unfortunately, when both Ukraine and Europe are endangered by terrorism and need professional security services more than ever, there is not much confidence in what the SBU tells us,” independent journalist Saken Aymurzaev told The Daily Beast.

The ideological and ethnic conflict that has torn Ukraine apart over the last two hears has attracted radical nationalists from different countries, some of them involved in weapon smuggling. Among these, notably, were a few French volunteers, ideological supporters of pro-Russian forces who were fighting in eastern Ukraine two years ago.

Poland had to increase security measures last year to try to prevent criminals attempting to transport weapons from Ukraine into its territory. If in 2013 Polish police seized only three firearms smuggled from Ukraine, last year law enforcement arrested smugglers with 53 guns, and there are many, many more where those came from.

Between right wing Neocons, and Liberal Interventionists, our foreign policy establishment is going to destroy us all.

It Would Be My Concern Too

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The anonymous source behind the huge leak of documents known as the Panama Papers has offered to aid law enforcement officials in prosecutions related to offshore money laundering and tax evasion, but only if assured of protection from punishment.

“Legitimate whistle-blowers who expose unquestionable wrongdoing, whether insiders or outsiders, deserve immunity from government retribution,” the source, who has still not revealed a name or nationality, said in a statement issued Thursday night.

The documents, which list the true owners of thousands of companies created to hide the people behind them, expose the holdings of current and former world leaders and other prominent figures. The source, who uses the pseudonym John Doe but whose gender is not known, said that the papers could spur thousands of prosecutions, “if only law enforcement could access and evaluate the actual documents.”

John Doe noted that journalists who have viewed the papers have said they will not turn over the full archive of 11.5 million documents. “I, however, would be willing to cooperate with law enforcement to the extent that I am able,” the source wrote.

The statement, which was issued Thursday night under the condition that it not be reported until Friday morning, gave some hints about John Doe’s political views and concerns. They include income inequality, the American campaign finance system and the “revolving door” of United States officials who take jobs at banks or other companies they once regulated.

………

In the statement, the source denied being a government official or contractor, now or in the past. The confidential source was also extremely critical of the news media, suggesting that certain unnamed news organizations had declined initial offers to take and report on the documents.

I can understand “John Doe’s” concern.  There have been numerous cases where whistle blowers have been typically been sentenced to more jail time than the folks actually breaking the laws.
What’s more, when one looks at those prosecutions, and the the sentences, it becomes pretty clear that this is a feature of the American criminal justice system, and not a bug.
Prosecutors seem intent on punishing people who whistle blow on members of our plutocracy.

Not Long Enough

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Child rapist and money launderer Dennis Hastert has been sentenced to 15 months in prison:

Mr. Hastert, whose date to report to prison has yet to be set, was ordered to pay $250,000 in fines, never to contact his victims and to receive sex-offender treatment.

“If there’s a public shaming of the defendant because of the conduct he’s engaged in, so be it,” Judge Durkin said.

Hopefully, given the nature of the crime and the length of sentence, he spends his time in a at least a medium security prison.

Yeah, I Guess Kasich Is the Best They Have

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Today, Donald Trump (but you already guessed that) wondered in a speech how former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno was doing.

It appears that Trump forgot that:

  • Paterno was fired a because he covered up the activities of a serial child rapist.
  • Jo Paterno is dead.

Oops:

Speaking at a rally in Pittsburgh, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump mentioned late Penn State football coach Joe Paterno, who died in 2012. Paterno was fired from the school and his statue removed after Jerry Sandusky’s sexual abuse of children came to light. (Reuters)

Pandering to local crowds is a staple of political campaigns everywhere, and Donald Trump’s is no different. But the key to successful pandering is knowing to whom you’re speaking and, of course, what you’re saying.

Trump was way off base on both those counts Wednesday, when he spoke before a crowd of supporters at a rally in Pittsburgh.

“I know a lot about Pennsylvania, and it’s great,” Trump said. Which is standard-issue stuff, but then things got awkward.

“How’s Joe Paterno?” Trump asked. “We’re gonna bring that back? Right? How about that whole deal?”

Paterno, for those who may have forgotten (including, possibly, a certain presidential candidate) died in 2012. (Wait, is bringing him back from the grave an essential part of making America great again?)

His campaign is now claiming that he was asking if the coach’s statue was returning to the State College campus.

No.  Trump had a brain fart that makes John Kasich look like Stephen f%$#ing Hawking, only, of course, Stephen Hawking is a far more inspiring speaker.

Thanks Hillary

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As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton aggressively supported the coup in Honduras.

Now that government has brought back death squads:

Three weeks ago, Honduran activist Gaspar Sanchez spoke at a briefing on Capitol Hill, urging lawmakers to support an impartial investigation into the murder of environmental activist Berta Cáceres.

Cáceres had mobilized native communities to speak out against the Agua Zarca Dam, a hydroelectric project backed by European and Chinese corporations, before being killed by two unknown gunmen last month.

Last week, back in Honduras at a protest outside the Honduran Public Ministry in Tegulcigalpa, Sanchez unfurled a banner demanding justice for Cáceres’s murder.

When nearby soldiers saw him, they dragged him away from the crowd and brutally beat him, stopping only after the crowd of protestors came to his defense.

………

Victor Fernandez, a prominent human rights attorney and lawyer representing the Cáceres family, insisted that her assassination was carried out by either the Honduran government or by “the paramilitary structure of companies.”

“Honduras is the victim of international theft due to its national resources,” said Fernandez, speaking through a translator. “What we have now is our natural resources — minerals, rivers, forest. Cáceres was killed because she was confronting the extractive model.”

Bertha Oliva compared the current situation to the early 1980s, when the CIA funded, armed, and trained Honduran government death squads that murdered hundreds of opposition activists.

………

In 2009, a coup toppled Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, who had long been seen as a leftist threat to the interests of international corporations. In 2008, Zelaya blocked a series of hydroelectric dam projects, citing concerns raised by native Hondurans. Less than a year after he was deposed, the new government had already approved 40 dam contracts. When the current President Juan Orlando Hernández came to power in 2013, his slogan was “Honduras is open for business.”

The coup was accompanied by a huge rise in political violence. By 2012, state security forces had assassinated more than 300 people, and 34 members of the opposition and 13 journalists had disappeared, according to data compiled by Honduran human rights organizations. The political assassinations added to the emboldened violence from gangs and drug traffickers, making Honduras one of the most dangerous countries in the world. In 2012, Reuters reported that it had the highest murder rate of any country.

I know that Clinton claims that she has the experience to be President, to paraphrase the wisest thing that I’ve read this century:

Give me one single example of something with the following three characteristics:

  1. It is a policy initiative of the current Hillary Clinton.
  2. It was significant enough in scale that I’d have heard of it (at a pinch, that I should have heard of it)
  3. It wasn’t in some important way completely f%$#ed up during the execution.

Yes, I am comparing her to the Bush administration.

Dynastic Politics at Its Finest

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Duncan D. Hunter, the son of Duncan L. Hunter, has been caught spending campaign funds on personal expenses, a federal crime:

Rep. Duncan Hunter — whose spending of campaign funds on video games made national news this week — said on Thursday that he’s cutting short a trip to Israel to return to the United States and rectify that problem and several other mistakes.

“There was no taxpayer money involved, and I take full responsibility,” Hunter, R-Alpine, said by telephone from his trip. “That’s it. I’m going to pay everything back by tomorrow morning, with interest.”

Hunter said he and his wife were the only two holders of his campaign’s credit card, which incurred most of the expenses. As of Thursday morning, he said, he is now the only card-holder.

Hunter’s call came amid a review by The San Diego Union-Tribune of an unusual pattern of expenditures listed on his disclosure forms as personal expenses or mistaken charges “to be paid back.”

Campaign finance reports show $5,339 in such charges during 2015 alone: $1,128 in travel, $1,650 to Hunter’s children’s school in El Cajon, $1,424 for video games and $1,137 paid to an oral and facial surgeon.

The forms list only one personal expense that was actually paid back by Hunter — $169 on Oct. 21, with no indication of which personal expense was being reimbursed. None of the other outstanding charges were listed as repaid, or as an ongoing debt to the campaign for the year-end accounting.

The Union-Tribune was the first to report this week that more than 60 video game transactions totaling $1,302 were being questioned by the Federal Election Commission. News outlets from Esquire to Roll Call picked up the story.

I will note that dynastic politics has a long of enabling corrupt and unqualified, whether we are talking about the Hapsburgs, the any number of the Bush clan, Ron Paul’s idiot son, and **ahem** another prominent Presidential candidate.

Erdoğan Is Now Owned by the House of Saud

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It turns out that, following his indictment for money laundering, Bilal Erdoğan was smuggled out of Italy with aid from the Saudi Embassy, which included hiring the Mafia and using a Saudi diplomatic passport:

According to Rai News 24, Italian police spokesman Lt. Colonel Domenico Grimaldi accused the Saudi legation in Rome of facilitating the escape of Bilal Erdoğan who was detained for money laundering allegations. Bilal Erdoğan’s short detention in Rome and later escape are the latest in a series of scandals hitting President Erdoğan’s family.

“Mafia activities continue to plague our judicial system and the Polizia di Stato is blamed for this humiliating security lapse in Rome airport. We also found that a notorious mafia gang active in Calabria and Sicily was hired by members in the Saudi embassy and they managed to release Mr. Erdoğan from Regina Coeli Prison,” police spokesman Lt. Colonel Grimaldi told AFP.

They moved Bilal Erdoğan to Excelsior Hotel, added Lt. Colonel Grimaldi, and Erdoğan was caught on cameras leaving the Hotel, donned traditional Arab dress and adroitly disguised as a Saudi diplomat; Bilal passed the security check holding a fake Saudi diplomatic passport and we believe, he couldn’t have escaped without the connivance of a number of police officers in Leonardo da Vinci Airport.

Turkey is a US ally like Pakistan is a US ally, which is to say, “Not at all.”

H/t Naked Capitalism.

How Convenient?

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The office in Flint Michigan that stores their water records has been burgled, and the police chief is calling it an inside job:

Mystery still surrounds an unsolved December break-in at an executive office inside City Hall where Flint water files were kept.

As of Friday, March 18, there were still no suspects in the case, and officials say it may never be known what — other than a TV — was taken.

But the city’s new police chief Tim Johnson says it’s too suspicious that there was a break-in where important documents were kept, just as investigations began heating up and decision makers were beginning to be held accountable.

“It was definitely an inside job. The power cord (to the TV) wasn’t even taken. The average drug user knows that you’d need the power cord to be able to pawn it,” Johnson said.

………

An employee returning to work at City Hall, 1101 S. Saginaw St., after the holiday break on Monday, Dec. 28, discovered a broken window and the break-in. No other offices were disturbed.

[Flint Mayor Karen] Weaver did not say exactly where the room was located in the suite, but did say a window was broken in an apparent effort to access to the area.

“They had to know what room to go into, I could just say that,” she said.

This does sound a like a Nixonian rat-f%$#ing, doesn’t it?

Emails: Flint water warnings reached gov’s inner circle

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Another email dump, and now we have proof that the Governor’s senior staff knew of the problems with Flint’s water over a year before they acknowledged the problem

Two top advisers to Gov. Rick Snyder urged switching Flint back to Detroit’s water system in October 2014 after General Motors Co. said the city’s heavily chlorinated river water was rusting engine parts, according to governor’s office emails examined by The Detroit News.

Valerie Brader, then Snyder’s environmental policy adviser, requested that the governor’s office ask Flint’s emergency manager to return to Detroit’s system on Oct. 14, 2014, three weeks before Snyder’s re-election.

Mike Gadola, then the governor’s chief legal counsel, agreed Flint should be switched back to Detroit water nearly a year before state officials relented to public pressure and independent research showing elevated levels of lead in the water and bloodstreams of Flint residents.

“To anyone who grew up in Flint as I did, the notion that I would be getting my drinking water from the Flint River is downright scary,” Gadola wrote. “Too bad the (emergency manager) didn’t ask me what I thought, though I’m sure he heard it from plenty of others.”

………

Brader’s email alludes to festering concerns about how the chlorine used to kill the bacteria outbreak was causing the formation of a harmful disinfection byproduct known as trihalomethane, a carcinogen that can increase the risk of cancer, liver, kidney and central nervous system problems.

“Specifically, there has been a boil water order due to bacterial contamination,” Brader wrote. “What is not yet broadly known is that attempts to fix that have led to some levels of chlorine-related chemicals that can cause long-term damage if not remedied (though we believe they will remedy them before any damage would occur in the population).”

Two months later, the Department of Environmental Quality issued a Safe Drinking Water Act violation to Flint for the high levels of trihalomethanes in the water. Flint violated the law twice more until coming into compliance on Sept. 2, 2015, state records show.

Despite the staff concerns about the city’s brownish water quality, Snyder’s staff never took a recommendation to him that Flint be switched back to Detroit water until the following October.

The Governor was not told because he made it clear that he did not want to be told.

We need to see some depraved heart murder prosecutions.

The classic Scorsese movie is Taxi Driver, not Uber Driver.

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I dunno, maybe it’s a 20-teens thing that a wannabee Travis Bickle is now driving Uber:

The man accused of killing six people and injuring two more in a Saturday evening shooting rampage in Kalamazoo, Michigan, was an Uber driver who picked up and dropped off passengers between shootings, a source with knowledge of the investigation told CNN.

 The source, who is not authorized to speak to media, said investigators believe Jason Brian Dalton was even looking for fares after the final shooting of a nearly seven-hour killing rampage.

It could be that this guy is just nuts.

It could be that Uber’s abuse of its drivers drove him mad.

It could be that a he has a history of issues that would not have allowed him to get a hack license.

I’m not sure, but I saw the Scorsese reference.

I Can Haz Prosecushuns?

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Michigan Governor Rick Snyder has released more of his emails, and it is pretty clear that he knew that he was poisoning the people of Flint, and he did not care:

Gov. Syder released 1.02 GB of emails in pdf form from various departments in his administration. However, none of them are pre-2014, a time period when many of the decisions regarding Flint’s move to the Flint River as its temporary source of drinking water were being made. Still, there is a LOT of new information in these emails and much of today’s news round-up comes from analysis of them by various news outlets. If you have a burning desire to plow through the gigabyte and change of files, here are the links to all of them:

………

In late March 2013, a full year before Flint switched to the Flint River as the source for its drinking water under the order of its Emergency Manager and with sign-off by their boss State Treasurer Andy Dillon, DEQ officials warned them about the potential for problems. In an email sent on March 26th, Stephen Busch, a staffer in the drinking water division of the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) informed his superiors about problems they could anticipate making the switch. That email was then forwarded up the food chain to Treasurer Dillon. Here’s are some of the warning flags he raised:

………

Mike Glasgow, Flint’s laboratory and water quality supervisor at the time of the switch to the Flint River made it very clear in an email to DEQ officials that the city’s water treatment plant was not going to be ready to treat river water in time for the conversion from water obtained from the Detroit Water and Sewerage (DWSD). However, his superiors were blowing him off:

………

On September 30th, Gov. Snyder finally acknowledged what nearly everyone else already knew: Flint had a problem with poisoned water and his administration had made mistakes, including not properly treating the water to prevent corrosion. However, it took until November 4th for his administration to finally authorize the installation of the corrosion control equipment:

………

Between Gov. Snyder’s admission and the approval of the corrosion control equipment, DEQ director Dan Wyant, a man with no background in water treatment or water regulations, assured the public that corrosion control had been in place the whole time. By the time he got around to approving the equipment, Flint had already switched back to DWSD water (that is already treated with phosphate for corrosion control.)

All of this happened, by the way, months after the EPA had been pushing them to begin phosphate treatment back in August:

The original docs are at the link along with some damning quote.

I want to see some prosecutions for depraved heart murder.

They knew that they were putting people’s lives at risk, and they did not care.

Finally! Part Deux

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Following the arrests of the Y’all Qaeda militants yesterday, the FBI has blockaded the remainder of the militants at the Malheur refuge:


Federal agents sealed off an Oregon wildlife refuge occupied by armed protesters Wednesday, hours after authorities arrested several members of that group and killed one of the most prominent occupiers.

The frenzy of activity at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Harney County marked a sudden escalation in the ongoing standoff that has simmered for more than three weeks, ever since a small group of men and women took control of a remote facility in southeastern Oregon.

Officials set up checkpoints and roadblocks around the refuge, saying that people who tried to travel inside would be arrested and calling for the armed people remaining there to leave. That message was echoed by the leader of the group later in the day. But law enforcement officials suggested Wednesday that the situation at the refuge would not continue indefinitely and placed blame for the fatal encounter a day earlier on those occupying the refuge.

“They had ample opportunity to leave the refuge peacefully,” FBI Special Agent in Charge Greg Bretzing said at a news conference late Wednesday morning. “And as the FBI and our partners have clearly demonstrated, actions are not without consequences.”

They really should have done this weeks ago.

LaVoy Finicum might be alive if they had not held off, and given those inbred morons ime to develop a sense of impunity.

Instead, they were allowed to come and go as they pleased  ……… At an occupation.

That was some seriously weak tea from law enforcement.