Category: Crimes

And Back in the Middle East, We Have a Captain Renault Moment………

No Comments

I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here!

The UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) is shocked to find 20 rockets in one of their schools in Gaza:

The UN agency for Palestinian refugees is investigating the discovery of 20 rockets hidden in one of its vacant schools in the Gaza Strip. The UNRWA condemned the incident as a “flagrant violation” of international law, adding that the rockets had been removed and that the relevant parties had been informed.

Israel regularly accuses Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza of using civilian installations to store and rockets, including during the current conflict, which began on 8 July.

I find the protestations of UNRWA to ring hollow.

While I understand that the agency needs to maintain good a relationship with the authorities in Gaza in order to effectively provide services, this sort of behavior has been the rule, not the exception, with UNRWA for nearly 70 years.

In This Case, it is Appropriate to Use Porcine Metaphors to Refer to Law Enforcement

No Comments

You know the story, girl sexts boy, boy sexts girl back, and the police and district attorney demand a photo of boys erect penis:

A Manassas City teenager accused of “sexting” a video to his girlfriend is now facing a search warrant in which Manassas City police and Prince William County prosecutors want to take a photo of his erect penis, possibly forcing the teen to become erect by taking him to a hospital and giving him an injection, the teen’s lawyers said. A Prince William County judge allowed the 17-year-old to leave the area without the warrant being served or the pictures being taken — yet.

 The teen is facing two felony charges, for possession of child pornography and manufacturing child pornography, which could lead not only to incarceration until he’s 21, but inclusion on the state sex offender data base for, possibly, the rest of his life. David Culver of NBC Washington first reported the story and interviewed the teen’s guardian, his aunt, who was shocked at the lengths Prince William authorities were willing to go to make a sexting case in juvenile court.

 ………

 Foster said the case began when the teen’s 15-year-old girlfriend sent photos of herself to the 17-year-old, who in turn sent her the video in question. The girl has not been charged, and her mother filed a complaint about the boy’s video, Foster said. The male teen was served with petitions from juvenile court in early February, and not arrested, but when the case went to trial in juvenile court in June, Foster said prosecutors forgot to certify that the teen was a juvenile. The case was dismissed, but police immediately obtained new charges and also a search warrant for his home. Police also arrested the teen and took him to juvenile jail, where Foster said they took photos of the teen’s genitals against his will.

 The case was set for trial on July 1, where Foster said Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Claiborne Richardson told her that her client must either plead guilty or police would obtain another search warrant “for pictures of his erect penis,” for comparison to the evidence from the teen’s cell phone. Foster asked how that would be accomplished and was told that “we just take him down to the hospital, give him a shot and then take the pictures that we need.”

(emphasis mine)

This is beyond contemptible.

This is a profound abuse of prosecutorial discretion.  In fact, I would argue that this is a credible threat of torture, as well as conspiracy to produce child pornography.

This is profoundly and deeply unethical, and the local bar should be apprised of this behavior.

If there were justice in the world, that evil ratf%$# attorney would be flipping burgers for a living.

The Depressing Thing is that this is a Close as a Googler will Ever get to Being as Cool as John Belushi.

No Comments

You know the story, a man, a femme fatale, injected heroine, and death:

Police have arrested a 26-year-old high-priced call girl from Georgia who is suspected of injecting heroin into a Santa Cruz tech executive on his yacht and then fleeing when he overdosed

Alix Catherine Tichelman and 51-year-old Forrest Timothy Hayes found each other online and had met a few times before their Nov. 26 encounter on Hayes’ 50-foot yacht, Escape, at the Santa Cruz Small Craft Harbor, said Santa Cruz Deputy Police Chief Steve Clark.

Tichelman provided heroin for Hayes, a Google executive, while they were inside the yacht, police said. A surveillance video from the boat shows that Hayes was “suffering medical complications” and lost consciousness, Clark said. She made no effort to help him, and instead gathered her belongings and even gulped a glass of wine before she drew a window blind and left, the video shows.

I am the worst person on the internet today, but the parallels to the death of John Belushi are striking.

Yes, Blackwater Threatened to Kill a State Department Investigator

No Comments

And what’s more, the response of the state department was to expel the investigator from Iraq:

Just weeks before Blackwater guards fatally shot 17 civilians at Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007, the State Department began investigating the security contractor’s operations in Iraq. But the inquiry was abandoned after Blackwater’s top manager there issued a threat: “that he could kill” the government’s chief investigator and “no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq,” according to department reports.

 American Embassy officials in Baghdad sided with Blackwater rather than the State Department investigators as a dispute over the probe escalated in August 2007, the previously undisclosed documents show. The officials told the investigators that they had disrupted the embassy’s relationship with the security contractor and ordered them to leave the country, according to the reports.

 After returning to Washington, the chief investigator wrote a scathing report to State Department officials documenting misconduct by Blackwater employees and warning that lax oversight of the company, which had a contract worth more than $1 billion to protect American diplomats, had created “an environment full of liability and negligence.”

(emphasis mine)

This raises the obvious question, just who at the State Department makes a habit of engaging in unnatural acts with sheep, and how did Blackwater get video of them doing this.*

Well, it’s mentioned in passing in the above story that when State investigated this, the investigation was headed by Patrick Kennedy. (Not one of THE Kennedys)

At Foreign Policy, they go into detail on Mr. Kennedy’s repeated roll in this, and similar clusterf%$#s:

Eye-opening new revelations about the private security firm formerly known as Blackwater Worldwide and its cozy relationship with the State Department are raising new questions about a senior Foggy Bottom bureaucrat who has found himself in Capitol Hill’s crosshairs before — and seems certain to now do so again.

 On Sunday, the New York Times reported that Patrick Kennedy, the State Department’s current under secretary for management, led a review of the private security firm in 2007 after its guards fatally shot 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square. Kennedy’s review, however, failed to reference a scathing State Department memo on the contractor completed just weeks earlier that found the company had systematically overcharged the government. The memo also alleged a senior Blackwater executive in Baghdad threatened to kill the State Department auditor behind the memo. At the time, Kennedy dismissed questions about early warnings of Blackwater misconduct.

………

 Though the incident is now seven years old, anger remains on Capitol Hill about how the State Department, and in particular, Kennedy, manages relations with government contractors. On Monday, an aide for Senator Claire McCaskill (D-M.O.) noted his boss’s “longstanding frustrations with the failure to improve contract management at the State Department.” He cited an April letter between McCaskill and Kennedy in which she scolds Kennedy for failing to implement recommendations from the Inspector General about the maintenance of contract files dating back seven years.

………

 No one on the panel interviewed Richter, according to the panel’s final report, which includes a list of everyone consulted about the incident. It’s particularly unusual that the panel didn’t talk to Richter given that he specifically visited Iraq to review the State Department’s contract with Blackwater, the firm at the center of the controversy. During a press Q&A on October 23, 2007, then-Time magazine reporter Brian Bennett noted the existence of “complaints about contractor conduct,” and asked “why this review wasn’t done earlier?” In response, Kennedy told reporters that his review found no communications from the embassy in Baghdad complaining about contractor conduct prior to the Nisour Square killings.

It should be noted that a cursory record of Kennedy’s record (his Wiki, for what it’s worth) it appears that Kennedy has had at least one similar incidents previously.

*To be fair, it could also be bribery that is responsible for this behavior, but my money is on a dead hooker in a hotel room in Bayonne, NJ.†
†Actually, it is also possible that this was a product of the cronyism that was rife at the instigation of Rumsfeld and Cheney.‡
‡Or, he could, as a lifelong member of the State Department, he could simply be inculcated in a tradition of CYA and obfuscation, particularly as regards the actions of politically connected ambassadors, but the sheep thing just makes better copy.

This is Going to Get Very Ugly

No Comments

The bodies of the three kidnapped teens have been found in Israel:

Israel’s intense 18-day search for three abducted teenagers ended Monday when three bodies were found buried under a pile of rocks in an open field about 15 miles from where the youths were last seen in the occupied West Bank. A nation that had been enmeshed in hopeful prayer was instantly engulfed by a mix of grief and anger and vowed retaliation against the militant Palestinian group Hamas, which Israel says was behind the kidnapping.

“They were kidnapped and murdered in cold blood by beasts,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said at the start of an emergency cabinet meeting Monday night. “Hamas is responsible, and Hamas will pay.”

Just after midnight, witnesses in the West Bank city of Hebron said the retaliation had begun as Israeli forces used explosives to demolish the homes of Marwan Qawasmeh and Amer Abu Aisha, the Hamas men who have been missing as long as the teenagers and are Israel’s prime suspects.

We are going to see dozens, if not hundreds, of casualties following this, and there is a real possibility that hostilities between Hamas and Fatah resuming as well.

I do not know how many people will die because of this, but my guess is that 90% of them will be Palestinian.  (Particularly since that ratf%$# Natanyahu clearly does not view Palestinians as full human beings)

What the hell were the perps thinking?  I could (kind of) understand if they had demanded a prisoner swap, or if the targeted people were troops, but this is just destructive for its own sake.

The only think that I can figure out is that, to quote Alfred Pennyworth, “Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

Thank You for Keeping Maryland Weird

No Comments

I just heard about this on the radio, and confirmed this on the Prince George’s County Police Department Facebook page:

PGPD Issues BOLO for Bunny

The PGPD is asking for our community’s help in finding the burglar who snatched a bunny costume. Please keep your eyes peeled for a 6′ gray and white furry bunny with pink ears and a pink nose.

Unfortunately, we aren’t joking. On June 6, 2014, patrol officers were called to the 4600 block of Calvert Road in College Park for a burglary. Employees discovered a storage shed had been broken into overnight. The only item taken was the costume.

Last week, we told you about how our officers helped a tortoise (http://tinyurl.com/p2wpojj ). Please help us rescue the hare now too.

Anyone with information on this case is asked to call the Prince George’s County Police Department’s Regional Investigation Division – Northern Region at (301) 699–2601. Callers wishing to remain anonymous may call Crime Solvers at 1–866–411–TIPS (8477), text “PGPD plus your crime tip” to CRIMES (274637) on your cell phone or go to www.pgcrimesolvers.com and submit a tip online.

Posted via mobile.

25 Years Ago Today

No Comments

The most famous news photo of the 1980s


The long shot


A ground level shot about a minute earlier (on the left side between the two trees in the background)

The Tienanmen massacre.

That’s all been swept under the rug, and to the degree that anyone in China thinks about it, it’s in the context of a highly restrictive media environment which mischaracterizes the events of that day.

One wonders when the people who did this will be made accountable through either the justice system or via the judgement of history.

If these guys are any indication:

It won’t ever happen.

I’m Not Sure What I Can Say About the Santa Barbara Shootings

No Comments

But I do agree with the response of Richard Martinez, the the father of one of the victims, Chris­topher Michaels-Martinez, makes a powerful and heartfelt statement

He’s asking members of Congress to stop calling him to offer condolences but nothing more for the death of his only child, Chris­topher Michaels-Martinez, who was killed in the rampage Friday in Santa Barbara, Calif.

 “I don’t care about your sympathy. I don’t give a s— that you feel sorry for me,” Richard Martinez said during an extensive interview, his face flushed as tears rolled down. “Get to work and do something. I’ll tell the president the same thing if he calls me. Getting a call from a politician doesn’t impress me.”

 Saying that “we are all to blame” for the death of his 20-year-old son, Martinez urged the public to join him in demanding “immediate action” from members of Congress and President Obama to curb gun violence by passing stricter gun-
control laws.

 “Today, I’m going to ask every person I can find to send a postcard to every politician they can think of with three words on it: ‘Not one more,’ ” he said Tuesday. “People are looking for something to do. I’m asking people to stand up for something. Enough is enough.”

Of course the small number of people who possess a lethal juxtaposition of small penisises and revenge fantasies have immediately jumped on the grieving father, because they are deeply evil ratf%$#s.

Rahter unsurprisingly, Joe the Plumber led the hit parade:

I am sorry you lost your child. I myself have a son and daughter and the one thing I never want to go through, is what you are going through now. But:

 As harsh as this sounds – your dead kids don’t trump my Constitutional rights.

I am not particularly surprised that this is not the worst thing said so far, but the worst thing said so far actually stunned me:

F%$# him. He is a piece of shit. His tragedy sucks, but he blamed me for it and wants to take away my rights. The guy is trying to take away my rights to protect my family. F%$# him every day of the week and twice on Sunday.

(%$# mine)

This is Todd Kincannon, who is perhaps the perfect demonstration about how the people who have been drawn to the NRA’s increasing insanity are a priori (in a Kantian sense) unsuited to possess anything more dangerous than a plastic spoon,

I know that there are responsible firearm owners out there, but the folks that the NRA speaks to are not in that group.

I would add that it appears that the shooter was closely tied into the pick-up artist/mens rights community, which is a group of people who make furries seem sane.

This is a Good Day for Schadenfreude

No Comments

Dinesh D’Souza has just pled guilty to using straw donors in violation of campaign finance laws:

Conservative author and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza entered a guilty plea Tuesday to a charge that he used straw donors to make $20,000 in illegal contributions to Republican Senate candidate Wendy Long in 2012, officials said.

The unexpected guilty plea came on the same day the trial for the strident critic of President Barack Obama was set to open in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.

The single felony count D’Souza admitted guilt on carries a maximum prison sentence of two years, but the plea agreement D’Souza’s lawyers reached with the government says sentencing guidelines applicable to the case call for a sentence of 10 to 16 months.

Judges are not required to sentence defendants in accordance with the guidelines, but usually do. Both sides reserved their rights to argue for a sentence outside that range and D’Souza’s lawyer Benjamin Brafman indicated he plans to ask Judge Richard Berman not to send D’Souza to prison.

The plea deal calls for dismissal of a second charge D’Souza faced if he went to trial: causing Long to file a false report with the Federal Election Commission. That carried a potential sentence of up to five years behind bars.

Atrios has noted that he is feeling far less schadenfreude about this than he expected, despite his being, “One of America’s Worst Humans.”

Me not so much.

This is the guy that has never grew up beyond tacky College Republican guerrilla theater that had classmate Timothy Geithner asking him, “how it felt to be such a dick.”  (And that is ignoring his rather idiosyncratic marital life)

This really could not happen to a more contemptible human being.

This is Complete and Total Contempt for the Law and Civil Rights

No Comments

Not only was the FBI spying on the defense counsel at the kangaroo courts military tribunals at Guantánamo, they actually flipped a member of the defense team with access to all their documents into an informant:

The US government’s troubled military trials of terrorism suspects were dealt another blow on Monday when proceedings were halted after an allegation surfaced that the Federal Bureau of Investigation turned a member of a 9/11 defendant’s defense team into a secret informant.

Judge James Pohl, the army colonel overseeing the controversial military commission at Guantánamo, gaveled a hearing out of session after barely 30 minutes on Monday morning, following the revelation of a motion filed by the defense stipulating that the FBI approached an unidentified member of the team during the course of an investigation into how a manifesto by accused 9/11 architect Khalid Shaikh Mohammed found its way to the media.

Defense attorneys argued the government plunged them into a potential conflict of interest, as they would need to potentially defend themselves against a leak investigation, risking their ability to put their clients’ legal needs ahead of their own.

They implored Pohl to investigate, and if necessary, assign their clients with new independent counsel to advise the defendants about the existence and implications of conflict of interest. That could be a lengthy process – potentially the next delay for a proceeding that has yet to get out of the pretrial stage nearly two years after the latest incarnation of the 9/11 military trials began.

“We have an impossible situation in terms of representing our client … on any issue,” said James Harrington, a civilian attorney for Mohammed’s co-defendant Ramzi bin al-Shibh in the case, which carries the death penalty.

………

On 6 April two FBI agents approached the defense security officer assigned to bin al-Shibh’s defense team with a document that “in essence, seeks to enlist defense personnel” in an inquiry into the manifesto leak, said Walter Ruiz, an attorney for co-defendant Mustafa Ahmed al-Hasawi.

Harrington said the unnamed security officer, a contractor for the firm SRA International, had signed the document, which was written to indicate the start of an “ongoing” relationship with the bureau.

A defense security officer is a non-lawyer assigned by the commission’s convening authority to advise the defense team on the handling of classified information, among other issues. The officer would have had “unlimited access to our files,” Harrington said, although not to those of the other legal teams.

The presiding officer has adjourned hearings to determine who else might have been turned into a government agent. Of note is that even though the prosecution denies knowledge of any FBI investigation, “Joanna Baltes, an absent member of the prosecution team who recently became chief of staff to FBI deputy director Mark Giuliano, played a role in the FBI involvement.” (emphasis mine)

Yea, sure, no collusion between the FBI and the Prosecutors at Guantánamo.  None at all. (Not)

On every single level, the military commissions have been a failure.

It was created to generate guaranteed convictions, and in so doing it eschewed the hundreds of years of developments that created the modern Unified Code of Military Justice, and the nearly 800 years of development of legal process that began with the Magna Carta.

These proceedings are an embarrassment to the nation which diminishes our stature throughout the world while serving as a highly effective recruiting tool for extremists,

Bitcoin Has Had a Disasterous Week

No Comments

We’ve just had 3rd Bitcoin exchange robbery in a week, the suspicious death of the CEO of another exchange, the discovery the mysterious founder of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, is actually a guy named Satoshi Nakamoto, and Japan has decided not to regulate it as currency.

I know what you are wondering why is Japan deciding not to regulate Bitcoin a bad thing?

Well, because if it is not currency, then it is subject to the VAT (sales tax) and the capital gains tax:

The Japanese government officially said Friday that it doesn’t consider bitcoin to be a currency and has no plans at present to regulate it as a financial product.

As it tries to cope with the fallout from the bankruptcy of the Tokyo-based Mt. Gox exchange, the government said that the crypto-currency would be treated like other goods and services, with commercial sales of bitcoin itself and bitcoin-based transactions subject to sales tax. In addition, any gains on exchange rates will be taxed as well.

“Any bitcoin transactions are taxable when they fulfill requisitions stated by laws on income tax, corporate tax and consumption tax,” the government said in its statement, which came in response to questions over how bitcoins will be regulated.

At the same time, the statement ruled out treatment of bitcoin as a currency or a financial instrument.

“Bitcoin are neither Japanese nor foreign currencies and its trading is different from deals stated by Japan’s bank act as well as financial instruments and exchange act,” according to a document released by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s cabinet.

(emphasis mine)

I don’t know if Bitcoin is done, but I think that a stake has been driven though the heart of the Randroid libertarian dream of completely unregulated and untraceable crypto currency.

Heh.

I am Feeling so Much Schadenfraude Right Now

No Comments

Its beginning to look like George Zimmerman is starting to learn that there are people out there who aren’t NRA gun nuts with small penises with racial murder fantasies:

Zimmerman taped an interview last Tuesday with Univision and Fusion, and then took his girlfriend, her kid and his brother to the beach. While they were catching some rays, people noticed him, started harassing him, and then someone shouted out George had a $10,000 bounty on his head.

We’re told it freaked him out and they all retreated to the hotel, but the crowd followed them.

Security swept their room to make sure no one tampered with their stuff and then stood guard throughout the day and night. We’re told Zimmerman did his CNN interview early the next morning and then beat it … literally fleeing Miami.

I am not feeling any sympathy, or empathy, for that racist murderer right now.

Just a Reminder: Big Ag is Evil, Not Just Monsanto, and it is US Policy to Subsidize them Through International Agreements

No Comments

You really need to read this account of a systematic program of harassment and libel against Tyrone Hayes for his research showing that Syngenta’s herbicide atrazine was dangerous:

In 2001, seven years after joining the biology faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, Tyrone Hayes stopped talking about his research with people he didn’t trust. He instructed the students in his lab, where he was raising three thousand frogs, to hang up the phone if they heard a click, a signal that a third party might be on the line. Other scientists seemed to remember events differently, he noticed, so he started carrying an audio recorder to meetings. “The secret to a happy, successful life of paranoia,” he liked to say, “is to keep careful track of your persecutors.”

Three years earlier, Syngenta, one of the largest agribusinesses in the world, had asked Hayes to conduct experiments on the herbicide atrazine, which is applied to more than half the corn in the United States. Hayes was thirty-one, and he had already published twenty papers on the endocrinology of amphibians. David Wake, a professor in Hayes’s department, said that Hayes “may have had the greatest potential of anyone in the field.” But, when Hayes discovered that atrazine might impede the sexual development of frogs, his dealings with Syngenta became strained, and, in November, 2000, he ended his relationship with the company.

………

[Former student Roger] Liu and several other former students said that they had remained skeptical of Hayes’s accusations until last summer, when an article appeared in Environmental Health News (in partnership with 100Reporters)* that drew on Syngenta’s internal records. Hundreds of Syngenta’s memos, notes, and e-mails have been unsealed following the settlement, in 2012, of two class-action suits brought by twenty-three Midwestern cities and towns that accused Syngenta of “concealing atrazine’s true dangerous nature” and contaminating their drinking water. Stephen Tillery, the lawyer who argued the cases, said, “Tyrone’s work gave us the scientific basis for the lawsuit.”

Hayes has devoted the past fifteen years to studying atrazine, and during that time scientists around the world have expanded on his findings, suggesting that the herbicide is associated with birth defects in humans as well as in animals. The company documents show that, while Hayes was studying atrazine, Syngenta was studying him, as he had long suspected. Syngenta’s public-relations team had drafted a list of four goals. The first was “discredit Hayes.” In a spiral-bound notebook, Syngenta’s communications manager, Sherry Ford, who referred to Hayes by his initials, wrote that the company could “prevent citing of TH data by revealing him as noncredible.” He was a frequent topic of conversation at company meetings. Syngenta looked for ways to “exploit Hayes’ faults/problems.” “If TH involved in scandal, enviros will drop him,” Ford wrote. She observed that Hayes “grew up in world (S.C.) that wouldn’t accept him,” “needs adulation,” “doesn’t sleep,” was “scarred for life.” She wrote, “What’s motivating Hayes?—basic question.”

………

In January, 2001, Syngenta employees and members of the EcoRisk panel travelled to Berkeley to discuss Hayes’s new findings. Syngenta asked to meet with him privately, but Hayes insisted on the presence of his students, a few colleagues, and his wife. He had previously had an amiable relationship with the panel—he had enjoyed taking long runs with the scientist who supervised it—and he began the meeting, in a large room at Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, as if he were hosting an academic conference. He wore a new suit and brought in catered meals.

After lunch, Syngenta introduced a guest speaker, a statistical consultant, who listed numerous errors in Hayes’s report and concluded that the results were not statistically significant. Hayes’s wife, Katherine Kim, said that the consultant seemed to be trying to “make Tyrone look as foolish as possible.” Wake, the biology professor, said that the men on the EcoRisk panel looked increasingly uncomfortable. “They were experienced enough to know that the issues the statistical consultant was raising were routine and ridiculous,” he said. “A couple of glitches were presented as if they were the end of the world. I’ve been a scientist in academic settings for forty years, and I’ve never experienced anything like that. They were after Tyrone.”

………

Michelle Boone, a professor of aquatic ecology at Miami University, who served on the E.P.A.’s scientific advisory panel, said, “We all follow the Tyrone Hayes drama, and some people will say, ‘He should just do the science.’ But the science doesn’t speak for itself. Industry has unlimited resources and bully power. Tyrone is the only one calling them out on what they’re doing.………

The Supreme Court has said that corporations are people in the Citizens United case.

Why isn’t Syngenta being criminally prosecuted for stalking?

H/t The Washington Monthly.

Pack Your Toothbrush, Governor

No Comments

The DoJ has finally gotten around to indicting former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell and his wife, Maureen:

Former Virginia governor Robert F. McDonnell and his wife, Maureen, were charged Tuesday with illegally accepting gifts, luxury vacations and large loans from a wealthy Richmond area businessman who sought special treatment from state government.

 Authorities allege that for nearly two years, the McDonnells repeatedly asked executive Jonnie R. Williams Sr. for loans and gifts of money, clothes, golf fees and equipment, trips, and private plane rides. The gifts and loans totaled at least $165,000.

 In exchange, authorities allege, the McDonnells worked in concert to lend the prestige of the governor’s office to Williams’s struggling company, Star Scientific, a former small cigarette manufacturer that now sells dietary supplements.

 McDonnell, 59, is the first governor ever to face criminal charges in Virginia, a state that has prided itself on a history of clean and ethical politics, and the charges will probably accelerate a push for the legislature to tighten state ethics laws.

 The criminal prosecution marks a stunning crash for a politician who was considered for the Republican vice presidential nomination in 2012 and who, just a year ago, was considered a credible prospective candidate for president.

 The 43-page, 14-count indictment adds new details to a story line of largess that was first recounted by The Washington Post in March. It depicts an elected official in financial trouble who sought help from a businessman with something to gain.

Finally.

The Washington Post noted earlier that the DoJ deliberately held off indicting while he was still in office, which to my mind was a bad decision.

I can understand not indicting before an election, the DoJ has an obligation to avoid effecting electoral politics, but in the ensuing months between the election and the indictment, there was no such excuse.

The law cannot should not be deferential to power, and he should have been indicted while still in office.

Things that I Really Did Not Want to Know

No Comments

Philadelphia police are looking for a scofflaw they call the Swiss Cheese Masturbator:

The cops are looking for him, and now a Philadelphia Magazine writer may have actually tracked down the man who’s been exposing himself in front of “a number” of Philadelphia women and asking them to jerk him off with a slice of swiss cheese.

According to reports, the overweight cheese aficionado likes to drive up next to women in parking lots, show them his genitals, and then offer them money to masturbate him with a slice of swiss. Other Philadelphia women have reported receiving similar messages from him on dating sites like OKCupid.

I should have taken the blue pill.

Clearly, Answer is More Money to the NSA Contractors for Cyberdefense

No Comments

Did you hear about the attack on a power plant in California?

No, it was not a cyber attack, it was guys with guns:

When U.S. officials warn about “attacks” on electric power facilities these days, the first thing that comes to mind is probably a computer hacker trying to shut the lights off in a city with malware. But a more traditional attack on a power station in California has U.S. officials puzzled and worried about the physical security of the the electrical grid–from attackers who come in with guns blazing.

Around 1:00 AM on April 16, at least one individual (possibly two) entered two different manholes at the PG&E Metcalf power substation, southeast of San Jose, and cut fiber cables in the area around the substation. That knocked out some local 911 services, landline service to the substation, and cell phone service in the area, a senior U.S. intelligence official told Foreign Policy. The intruder(s) then fired more than 100 rounds from what two officials described as a high-powered rifle at several transformers in the facility. Ten transformers were damaged in one area of the facility, and three transformer banks — or groups of transformers — were hit in another, according to a PG&E spokesman.

………

“These were not amateurs taking potshots,” Mark Johnson, a former vice president for transmission operations at PG&E, said last month at a conference on grid security held in Philadelphia. “My personal view is that this was a dress rehearsal” for future attacks.

I am inclined to agree with Mr. Johnson.

We’ve spent billions on cyber defense for an attack on the grid which has never occurred, anywhere in the world, but physical attacks on power stations by insurgents have been occurring since power plants first existed.

Of course, it’s not the current business model for the for-profit portion of out state security apparatus, so not a whole bunch of money there.

Rapists in the Pentagon win ……… For Now

No Comments

The Senate has passed the defense authorization bill, and caved to the pro-rape faction in the military by dropping Kristen Gillibrand’s proposal to remove such charges from the chain of command:

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand said she will push legislation to remove sexual-assault allegations from the military’s chain of command after congressional leaders spurned her approach in crafting a compromise defense measure.

“I have an assurance that we will get a vote, just not when we will get a vote — before the end of the year or maybe right away in the new year,” Gillibrand, a New York Democrat, told reporters today. Leaders of the House and Senate armed services committees yesterday agreed on a $552.1 billion defense authorization bill for the current fiscal year.

Under the compromise, commanders would be stripped of the ability to dismiss a finding by a court martial and would be barred from reducing guilty findings. Retaliation against personnel reporting sexual assaults would become a military crime.

President Barack Obama has said the issue of sexual assault is undermining trust and readiness among members of the armed forces, and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has called attacks a “scourge” and a “blight” on the military.

While Hagel and uniformed leaders in the military have backed changes in the handling of such cases, they have resisted Gillibrand’s approach, saying commanding officers must be able to discipline their own troops.

The issue has crossed party and gender lines. Gillibrand has won support from Republicans including Senators Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky, while her proposal has been opposed by such Democrats as Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, who heads the Armed Services Committee, and Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri.

Just so you know, the military says that such crimes need to remain in the chain of command to preserve, “Good order and discipline,” even though other militaries, like, you know, the Israel Defense Forces.

After all, it’s not like the Israelis have been at war in existential struggles in the past 60 years, has it?

Our officer corps is profoundly dysfunctional, and we need to stop the inmates from running an asylum.