In their own distinct ways, Snyder and Emanuel are perfect examples of what happens when politicians base their entire public careers on the principle that the people who elect them can be trusted to do only that. Once they elect you, their job is to sit down, shut up, and take what comes. The difference is that Snyder seems a bit more likable than Rahm Emanuel. So is a gaboon viper. That doesn’t matter a damn any more.
—Charlie Pierce on Michigan Governor Rick Snyder and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel
Category: Evil
The Elmer Gantry of Home Schooling
Christofascist and home schooling leader Bill Gothard has been accused of rape and covering up rape by his staff:
Ten women on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against Bill Gothard, who for decades was a major force in the conservative Christian homeschooling movement, charging him and leaders in his ministry with sexual abuse, harassment and cover-up.
Gothard, who urged Christians to shun things like short skirts and rock music, is accused of raping a woman. The same woman says she was raped by one of the ministry’s “biblical counselors.”
The lawsuit is part of a battle between dozens of women and the Institute in Basic Life Principles, which was until recently an influential homeschooling ministry, and its charismatic leader Gothard, who urged Christians to focus on their “biblical character” and have large families. Gothard has never been married.
Gothard, 81, resigned from the ministry in 2014 after more than 30 women had alleged that he had molested and sexually harassed women he worked with, including some who were minors.
Reached by phone on Wednesday, Gothard said he has not seen the lawsuit and denied allegations that he had raped one woman. “Oh no. Never never. Oh! That’s horrible,” he said. “Never in my life have I touched a girl sexually. I’m shocked to even hear that.”
Gothard denied sexually harassing women. “That really is not true,” he said. “I’d rather hold off to comment until I see what’s in the lawsuit.”
………
Gothard’s ministry was once a popular gathering spot for thousands of conservative Christian families, including the Duggar family from TLC’s “19 Kids and Counting.” Gothard’s Advanced Training Institute conferences, where families would learn from Gothard’s teaching, were popular among homeschooling families. He has also rubbed shoulders with Republican luminaries like former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee.
Wednesday’s lawsuit includes an undated letter in which Gothard allegedly wrote to the women who were accusing him. “I was very wrong in holding hands, giving hugs, and touching their hair and feet. I was also wrong in making statements that caused emotional turmoil and confusion,” the letter reads, describing what he did as “sin.”
In Wednesday’s interview, Gothard declined to confirm or deny whether he had written the letter. “I need to get more facts here, okay?”
………
Although Gothard resigned, his affidavit makes clear he intends to return to the ministry he started in 1961.
The specifics are pretty horrific:
The lawsuit in DuPage County Circuit Court in Illinois, where IBLP’s headquarters is located, charges that IBLP, its employees and board members received reports of sexual abuse, sexual harassment and “inappropriate/unauthorized touching” from women and girls. But, the women allege, the defendants never reported the “potentially criminal allegations” to law enforcement authorities or the Illinois Department of Children & Family Services as required by state law.
One of the Jane Doe plaintiffs in the lawsuit alleges that she was raped by her father and other relatives and says she was sold by her father through human trafficking when she was a minor. She said she reported the abuse and trafficking to IBLP staff, which failed to report to authorities.
When people believe that God is on their side, as opposed to worrying if they are on God’s side, corruption is the most common result.
Still, this is kind of shocking.
It makes the Borgia Pope look like an amateur,
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?!?!?!?
It appears that law enforcement is allowing the members of the white privilege performance art acting troupe occupying the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon to come and go as they please to get groceries and booze:
Their supplies look to be dwindling and militia men who overtook the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon have pleaded with sympathizers to send food, but law enforcement tell TPM that the men are free to resupply on their own.
“Right now, they are allowed to come and go as they want,” says Bill Fugate, a spokesman for the Oregon State police.
The unknown number of militia men involved in the stand off are calling themselves Citizens for Constitutional Freedom. The group sent an alert message to supporters Monday asking for snacks as they are holed up in the refuge center, but authorities confirm that they are free to drive to the grocery store and pick up snacks.
Fugate says that to his knowledge, law enforcement are “not monitoring what they are doing.”
This isn’t a protest involving an occupation of a federal building, it’s a f%$#ing ski lodge weekend.
I understand the desire not to escalate the situation, but this is obscene.
Your Law Enforcement Misconduct Update
First, we have former (Yay!) Texas State Trooper Brian Encinia, who went postal on Sandra Band, has been indicted for perjury and fired by the Texas DPS:
The state trooper who arrested Sandra Bland, the 28-year-old African-American woman who was found dead three days later in her Waller County jail cell, has been indicted on perjury charges, a special prosecutor said.
Hours after the decision was announced, the Texas Department of Public Safety said it was initiating termination proceedings against Brian Encinia, the 30-year-old trooper who last July stopped Bland for failing to signal a lane change and arrested her.
The announcement came late Wednesday afternoon at the courthouse in Hempstead, about 50 miles northwest of Houston, during the grand jury’s fourth meeting since it was convened this fall to deliberate the circumstances around Bland’s arrest and incarceration.
Darrell Jordan, one of five special prosecutors, said the grand jury’s indictment stemmed from a statement the trooper made in a one-page affidavit he filed in Bland’s arrest, in which he said he pulled her out of her Hyundai Azera to “further conduct a safe traffic investigation.”
Well, that was fairly clearly a lie, and it was material, which is the basic definition of perjury.
Meanwhile, in my hometown of Baltimore, the prosecution continues apace, with Officer William Porter, whose trial ended in a hung jury, being ordered by a judge to testify at the trial of Officer Caesar Goodson, Jr.:
In an unprecedented move, Judge Barry G. Williams ordered Officer William G. Porter on Wednesday to testify at the upcoming trial of a fellow city officer charged in the death of Freddie Gray.
Porter’s attorneys immediately said they would seek an injunction to block the ruling.
Williams said he found himself in “uncharted territory” but felt the law was “clear.” He granted Porter a type of immunity that allows his charges to stand, but which precludes his testimony in the trial of Officer Caesar R. Goodson Jr. from being used against him.
Legal experts — and Williams — said the ruling was unprecedented for a criminal defendant with pending charges.
Williams also warned prosecutors that calling Porter as a witness could have serious implications for their ability to retry him. Porter’s trial on manslaughter and other charges ended last month in a hung jury, and he is scheduled to be tried again in June.
“The second he testifies, that may change the game,” Williams said.
After Williams issued the ruling, defense attorney Gary Proctor leapt to his feet and told Williams he intended to appeal to the Court of Special Appeals on Thursday to block prosecutors from calling Porter to testify.
Should Williams’ ruling stand, Porter would not be able to invoke the Fifth Amendment and would have to testify or face the threat of contempt and jail time.
I think that the strategy here is to force him to testify in the hope that some of the other officers get angry enough to roll in him, and under those circumstances, the first guy to make it to the prosecutor’s office wins, and everyone else loses.
Also, the prosecution has let slip some elements of its strategy, and it appears that they will be attempting to prove that Gray was the victim was of a “Rough Ride” where officers use abrupt maneuvers to throw a detainee around a car to punish him:
The idea has long been floated that Freddie Gray might have been given a “rough ride” — a practice in which police transport vans are intentionally driven erratically to harm unbuckled, handcuffed detainees.
Now prosecutors have signaled for the first time that they may adopt the theory in the case against Officer Caesar R. Goodson Jr., the driver of the van in which they say Gray suffered a fatal spinal cord injury. Goodson faces second-degree depraved-heart murder charges in a trial that begins with jury selection Monday.
Prosecutors have notified Goodson’s attorneys that they intend to call expert witness Neill Franklin, a retired Baltimore police officer and Maryland state trooper who has testified in Annapolis on policing, to talk about “retaliatory prisoner transportation practices.” Legal experts said that refers to what is colloquially known in Baltimore as a “rough ride.”
“That is a retaliatory, sort of ‘teach the guy a lesson’ move,” said Geoffrey Alpert, a University of South Carolina professor and an expert in use of force by police.
Both the defense and prosecution are barred by a gag order from discussing the case, and retained witnesses are not allowed to discuss their intended testimony.
Here is the kicker:
Gray was unbuckled, handcuffed, placed in leg shackles and driven around West Baltimore for about 45 minutes before he was found unconscious and not breathing in the back of the van when it arrived at the Western District police station.
There is no reason for it take 45 minutes to get him to booking.
I am sure that the defense will attempt to provide an alternate theory for this, but there is no justification for going on a joy ride with a detainee in the back.
And Now, Even the Rich People are Throwing Rahm Emanuel Under the Bus
Since emails came out revealing the Rahm Emanuel administrations aggressive efforts to manage and suppress information on the Laquan McDonald shooting, Rahm’s old friends, basically rich corrupt people from whom he has raised money from over the years, have been avoiding him like the plague.
One of his very good friends, they have vacationed together and Rauner was a former client of Emanuel’s, was wingnut, gazillionaire, and now Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner how has announced that he would sign a bill allowing for a recall vote for the Chicago Mayor:
Fresh from a Saharan Desert holiday where he says he and his family rode camels and slept in tents, Gov. Bruce Rauner did nothing Monday to quell the shifting sands beneath Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
Rauner told reporters he would sign a bill allowing Chicago voters to recall their mayor from office if it reaches his desk.
The governor also said he was “very disappointed” in Emanuel and Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez over their handling of Chicago police misconduct cases.
………
Asked about state Rep. La Shawn Ford’s legislation that would allow Chicago voters to attempt recall the mayor, Rauner said he hasn’t studied the bill but based on what he’s been told about it, “I would sign that bill.”
The governor went on to say that he would also be “broadly supportive of the recall concept in general for all elected officials in the state. … That would be the best bill to pass.”
6 months ago, I would not have predicted the degree to which his power base, once thought to be unassailable, to have collapsed like this.
It’s gone from a crazy guy on the street corner rant to an implosion in a very short time.
Additionally, it appears that people appointed after the sh%$ hit the fan have absolutely no interest whatsoever in having his back:
The new chief of the agency that looks into shootings by Chicago police officers says she wants to hear out an investigator who was fired by her predecessor last July after refusing orders to change findings that the cops were at fault in several cases.
Sharon Fairley, acting chief administrator of the Independent Police Review Authority, last month reached out to the investigator, Lorenzo Davis, a former Chicago police commander.
“I’d like to hear about his side of what happened,” Fairley said at a news conference Monday afternoon. “I look forward to that conversation and I think that that will be happening soon.”
Davis’s lawyer, Torreya Hamilton, said an attorney with the city’s Law Department called two weeks ago to set up the meeting. Hamilton said Davis, who is suing the city for wrongful termination, is eager to meet with Fairley. The sides have not yet set a time and place.
Fairley, a former federal prosecutor appointed a month ago by Mayor Rahm Emanuel, said she also wants to examine the work that got Davis fired.
………
WBEZ revealed Davis’s termination and his resistance to orders by IPRA superiors that he change findings about at least a dozen incidents, all shootings or alleged excessive-force cases.
Davis said Monday evening he would welcome Fairley’s review of his findings. “I’d like to be present when she does it,” he said. “It’s better to review a report with the person who wrote it.”
………
Fairley’s predecessor, Scott M. Ando, was forced out as IPRA’s chief administrator after heading the agency since 2013. Ando, a former U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent, filled several key IPRA posts with former sworn law-enforcement officers, including two other former DEA agents, a WBEZ investigation found.
Fairley did not directly criticize Ando’s hiring but said the agency needs “stronger independence.”
“I was a prosecutor for eight years, where my job was to collect evidence and then make the call,” said Fairley, who worked at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Chicago. “That’s what I’m planning on doing here.”
Fairley also insisted she is independent from Emanuel despite a pile of email messages that show coordination between his aides and IPRA in recent years.
“Yes, I’m in communication with the mayor’s office,” Fairley said. “They’ve been very helpful in helping me get situated here but they have not tried to direct my activities or tell me what to do. I don’t have any pressure on me from the mayor to conduct an investigation any particular way.”
Fairley serves at the pleasure of Rahm Emanuel.
The fact that she is subtly dismissive of the Mayor’s office is significant.
I’m hoping that Rahm ends up recalled, and in jail, and it actually looks like these outcomes are no longer outside of the range of possibility.
I Can Haz Impeachment?
I used to say that Antonin “Fat Tony” Scalia would die by choking on his own bile.
It turns out that I was wrong.
It appears that bile and resentment have driven him insane:
Government support for religion is not only justified by the Constitution, it was the norm for hundreds of years and it helped the United States become a free and prosperous nation, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said Saturday in Metairie.
Speaking before a small crowd at Archbishop Rummel High School, Scalia delivered a short but provocative speech on religious freedom that saw the conservative Catholic take aim at those who confuse freedom of religion for freedom from it.
The Constitution’s First Amendment protects the free practice of religion and forbids the government from playing favorites among the various sects, Scalia said, but that doesn’t mean the government can’t favor religion over nonreligion.
That was never the case historically, he said. It didn’t become the law of the land until the 60s, Scalia said, when he said activist judges attempted to resolve the question of government support of religion by imposing their own abstract rule rather than simply observing common practice.
If people want strict prohibition against government endorsement of religion, let them vote on it, he said. “Don’t cram it down the throats of an American people that has always honored God on the pretext that the Constitution requires it.”
BTW, it appears that the first thing to go is a sense of irony, because he unironically quotes Charles de Gaulle insulting the United States:
Citing a quotation attributed to former French President Charles de Gaulle, Scalia said “‘God takes care of little children, drunkards and the United States of America.'” Scalia then added, “I think that’s true. God has been very good to us. One of the reasons God has been good to us is that we have done him honor.”
Seriously, He’s lost it.
I do understand that technically impeachment is for “high crimes and misdemeanors”, but the juxtaposition of batsh%$ insane and just does not give a flying f%$# in a rolling doughnut, particularly when he has no interest at all in recusing himself on cases where he has explicitly stated that his mind is already made up.
This ain’t the first time.
One Conflict That I Want to See Resolved with a Maximum of Bloodshed
It appears that the Bundy clan, in what seems like a never ending quests to intimidate the have occupied a federal building in a dispute over a poaching trial
This is not a conflict that the government can deescalate. These folks goals is to use the threat of violence to get as much as they can, and then they will go to explicit violence.
This is an insurrection, and a fair number of the fellow travelers are not ready for this, but every time the government backs down, this movement picks up supporters and momentum.
It is not a question as to whether the US government will have to go after them with lethal force, but when.
Sooner is better than later here:
A group of armed anti-government activists remained encamped at a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon on Sunday evening, vowing to occupy the outpost for years to protest the federal government’s treatment of a pair of local ranchers set to report to prison Monday.
The occupation of a portion of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, about 30 miles southeast of Burns, Ore., began a day earlier, after a small group of men broke off from a much larger march and rally held on Saturday evening
The armed occupation is being led by Ammon Bundy, an Idaho rancher whose father, Cliven Bundy, led an armed standoff with federal agents in Nevada in 2014 and who has described his supporters as “militia men.”
“Those who want to go take hard stand, get in your trucks and follow me!” Ammon Bundy declared to rally-goers at the conclusion of Saturday’s event, according to several people who were in attendance. Not long afterward, the group had taken over the federal wildlife preserve.
Harney County Sheriff David M. Ward said authorities from several law enforcement organizations were monitoring the ongoing incident.
“These men came to Harney County claiming to be part of militia groups supporting local ranchers,” Ward said in a statement Sunday. “When in reality these men had alternative motives, to attempt to overthrow the county and federal government in hopes to spark a movement across the United States.”
Organizers of the rally say several hundred attended the procession through Burns, Ore. — a ranching town of less than 3,000 residents — in a show of support for Dwight Hammond, 73, and his son Steven Hammond, 46, who in the conclusion of a decades of clashes with the federal government were sentenced last October to serve five years in prison.
Prosecutors accused the Hammonds of committing arson on federal land in 2001 and 2006. The men and their attorneys argued that the fires had been set on their own property — once to prevent the spread of an invasive species of plant and once in attempt to prevent the spread of a wildfire — and had inadvertently burned onto public lands. But prosecutors said the fires were set in attempt to destroy evidence that the Hammonds had been illegally hunting deer on the federal lands.
This needs to be shut down before it metastasizes, if it hasn’t already done so.
As an aside, I think that we need to minimize the private use of federal land in the west, because history shows that people who derive public benefit for their private benefit are inclined to go to extremes to cling to their undeserved windfall.
Just look at the behavior of the 2nd Estate around the time of the French Revolution. They did more to create the Reign of Terror than any other segment of society.
We’re Apple, We Don’t Care. We Don’t Have To.
We don’t care, we don’t have to … we’re Apple.
Lawyers in New York have filed a class action lawsuit against Apple, saying that the iOS 9 operating system upgrade slowed their older iPhone 4S handsets into uselessness.
“Plaintiff and other class members were faced with a difficult decision: use a buggy, slow device that disrupts everyday life or spend hundreds of dollars to buy another smartphone,” reads the lawsuit spotted by Apple Insider.
When iOS 9 was released in September, the operating system was supposed to fix many of the faults of its predecessors. But the owners of more than 100 iPhone 4S handsets claim Apple knew the new OS would be virtually unusable on the older hardware but released it anyway to force people to upgrade.
To add insult to injury, Apple won’t allow the aggrieved users to uninstall iOS 9 and go back to simpler times. So 4S owners are left stuck with sluggish screens, hanging apps, and lousy touch use, the lawsuit claims.
Apple’s internal testing must have shown these effects while the operating system was being developed, but Cook & Co nevertheless advertised the new operating system’s benefits without warning of obsolescent hardware, the plaintiff’s lawyers argue.
………
One suspects Apple’s response will be “well what did you expect?” The iPhone 4S runs a 32-bit A5 processor and packs 512MB of DDR2 RAM, compared to the iPhone 6S’s A9 64-bit core with the M9 coprocessor and 2GB of DDR4 memory. Expecting similar performance ignores certain technical realities.
Actually, the scenario here is pretty straightforward.
Apple pushed an upgrade to inadequate hardware that could not handle it.
Either they did not do appropriate testing, or they did the testing, but decided that they could force users of old phones to upgrade.
In either case, Apple could have provided a downgrade option, or warned of the issues before the release, but they don’t give a sh%$.
Class action lawsuits are the corporate ecosystem’s way of making you give a sh%$.
And Some Good News in the Justice Front
The Federal Court just cut the antichoice liars at the so called pregnancy crisis centers a new one:
Two federal judges in California delivered a one-two punch to anti-choice activists at crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) last week by declining to block the state’s new reproductive disclosure law.
The law, set to go into effect January 1, requires a public notice about access to abortion and birth control at pregnancy-related clinics statewide. CPCs have sought to block the California Reproductive Freedom, Accountability, Comprehensive Care, and Transparency (FACT) Act, arguing in a flurry of lawsuits that it violates their constitutional rights to freedom of speech, assembly, and free exercise of religion.
But federal judges at courts in the Northern and Eastern Districts of California rejected requests for a preliminary injunction on the law in separate decisions handed down Friday.
Judge Jeffrey S. White in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California held that the three CPCs behind one of the suits fell short of the “high standard” required for a temporary injunction, and “failed to demonstrate that they would face irreparable injury.”
The licensed clinics—the Livingwell Medical Clinic, the Pregnancy Care Center of the North Coast, and the Confidence Pregnancy Center—offer free pregnancy services like pregnancy testing and ultrasounds, espouse Christian beliefs, and oppose abortion rights, according to court documents. The lawsuit was brought on behalf of the CPCs by the American Center for Law and Justice, a Washington, D.C.-based anti-choice legal organization.
Judge Kimberly Mueller of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California also rejected a request for a temporary injunction brought by the Sacramento-based Pacific Justice Institute, which represented three other CPCs. The 59-page decision held that “enjoining the act would interfere with the public interest regarding the health of state residents.”
A recent California undercover investigation found that CPCs, generally staffed by anti-choice activists, discourage patients from having abortions by routinely lying to women about their options. Other investigations found that CPCs convince women to remain pregnant with false promises of financial aid and housing.
The CPCs that brought the Northern District lawsuit contend they will not comply with the law, a fact that White noted in his decision: “Indeed, Plaintiffs maintain that their speech will not in fact be chilled.”
Operators of CPCs have said they’d rather close than comply with the state disclosure law.
Hopefully, we will see some arrests for fraud (they take money under false pretenses) and contempt of court in addition to their offices being terminated with extreme prejudice.
A Better Reason than Steve Miller Not to Go to Cleveland
A while back, I suggested that there was one less reason to go to Cleveland, because Steve Miller had been put in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and I wished to have nothing to do with any institution that has anything to do with Steve Miller.
Well, we now have another reason not to go to Cleveland, or for that matter the whole of Cuyahoga County, specifically, it is now clear that the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor is less interested in pursuing police misconduct than Frank Rizzo, who famously promised to “Make Attila the Hun kook like a faggot.”
Simply put, black, white, or green, if you go there, you are taking your life into your own hands:
Tim McGinty never intended to prosecute the officers who killed Tamir Rice. Will that cost him his job?
Cuyahoga County, Ohio, prosecutor Timothy J. McGinty’s announcement that a grand jury, at his office’s recommendation, declined to file charges against the two officers who killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice surprised almost no one.
McGinty has made no attempt to mask his belief that rookie officer Timothy Loehmann and his partner Frank Garmback committed no crimes on the afternoon of Nov. 22, 2014. That’s the day when Garmback rapidly pulled their police cruiser within inches of Rice at a Cleveland community center and Loehmann jumped out, firing.
In fact, during his press conference, McGinty made numerous mentions of the many risks police officers face, the split-second decisions they have to make to protect their and the public’s lives, and how real the toy gun Rice was holding as he played at the park looked.
In what could have been a defense closing argument, McGinty stated that the enhanced surveillance video that captured Rice’s shooting, and the aftermath in which he lay bleeding and unattended on the ground, while his 14-year-old sister was tackled to the ground by officers, handcuffed and put in the back of a patrol car as she tried to run to him, “proved” that Rice was indeed “drawing his pistol” (which was actually a pellet gun) as the officers approached.………
None of it was unexpected.
McGinty insisted on taking the case to a grand jury, dragging it out for months, despite a judge ruling in June that there was probable cause to charge Loehmann and Garmback with crimes, including involuntary manslaughter, reckless homicide, negligent homicide dereliction of duty and, in Loehmann’s case, murder. Attorneys for Rice’s family cried foul as McGinty allowed the officers to take the oath and read prepared statements to the grand jury with no cross-examination, and he released reports justifying the killing written by outside experts, which the family’s attorneys denounced as biased.
Last month, he made disparaging remarks about the Rice family and their lawyers, appearing to accuse them of seeking to profit from the child’s death through a pending lawsuit.
And despite his professions of sympathy for the family, including saying he and his staff could see their own children and grandchildren in the face of the now-dead boy, attorneys for Rice’s family said that prior to telephoning her on Monday to inform her of the grand jury decision, the prosecutor has rarely bothered to communicate with Tamir’s mom.
We have a deeply evil bigot running criminal justice in Cuyoga county.
Simply put, until the rule of law returns to Cuyahoga county, visiting, conducting business, going to school in that place is a dangerous decision.
DoJ Shuts down One Method of Law Enforcement Extortion
One of the most widely used asset forfeiture program in the United States has been shut down by the Department of Justice.
Unfortunately, the reason for closing it down is not widespread evidence of abuse and corruption in the program, but rather budget issues:
The Department of Justice announced this week that it’s suspending a controversial program that allows local police departments to keep a large portion of assets seized from citizens under federal law and funnel it into their own coffers.
The “equitable-sharing” program gives police the option of prosecuting asset forfeiture cases under federal instead of state law. Federal forfeiture policies are more permissive than many state policies, allowing police to keep up to 80 percent of assets they seize — even if the people they took from are never charged with a crime.
The DOJ is suspending payments under this program due to budget cuts included in the recent spending bill.
“While we had hoped to minimize any adverse impact on state, local, and tribal law enforcement partners, the Department is deferring for the time being any equitable sharing payments from the Program,” M. Kendall Day, chief of the asset forfeiture and money laundering section, wrote in a letter to state and local law enforcement agencies.
In addition to budget cuts last year, the program has lost $1.2 billion, according to Day’s letter. “The Department does not take this step lightly,” he wrote. “We explored every conceivable option that would have enabled us to preserve some form of meaningful equitable sharing. … Unfortunately, the combined effect of the two reductions totaling $1.2 billion made that impossible.”
Asset forfeiture has become an increasingly contentious practice in recent years. It lets police seize and keep cash and property from people who are never convicted — and in many cases, never charged — with wrongdoing. Recent reports have found that the use of the practice has exploded in recent years, prompting concern that, in some cases, police are motivated more by profits and less by justiceAsset forfeiture has become an increasingly contentious practice in recent years. It lets police seize and keep cash and property from people who are never convicted — and in many cases, never charged — with wrongdoing. Recent reports have found that the use of the practice has exploded in recent years, prompting concern that, in some cases, police are motivated more by profits and less by justice.
Of course, the usual suspects’ heads are exploding with people like the National Sheriff’s Association invoking the specter of narco gangs and terrorists.
The truth here is that these people could still seize property in much the same way that they do now. The only difference is that they can no longer keep quite as much as they used to.
What this means is that cops will have to find other money sources to buy their: (Buzzfeed listicle ahead)
- Gatorade
- Zambonies
- Segway scooters
- “Disney Training” (Not The Onion)
- First class flights and car rentals
- Parties
- Tequila, Kegs, and a Margarita Machines (Again, not The Onion)
- Tanning Salons (OK, this one resulted in corruption charges)
- Casino Junkets
- Hawaii Vacations
- Bribing other cops (Convicted, but reversed on appeal)
- A Dodge Viper supercar (Because they want to play Grand Theft Auto for real, I guess)
- A “Party House”
- Marijuana and Prostitutes (Again, charges pending)
Asshole of the Week
No, he’s not an asshole, an asshole asshole actually serves an essential function.
Comcast CEO Brian Roberts is just a parasite:
Everybody hates Comcast. The cable giant consistently ranks last or near last among all companies on consumer satisfaction surveys. Hurling insults at Comcast — its prices, its speeds, its customer service — has risen nearly to the level of a national pastime.
But what if there’s nothing the company can do to change its customers’ minds? What if most of what people hate about Comcast has its roots in the structure of America’s cable market?
That’s what the company’s CEO, Brian Roberts, suggested last weekend when asked about the company’s poor record in an interview with Business Insider founder Henry Blodget.
………
The problem isn’t Comcast’s service, Roberts is saying; it’s that people have to pay for it. Comcast operates by striking deals with content creators and publishers — ABC, CBS, FOX, ESPN, HBO, and the rest — for the right to broadcast their shows, movies, football, baseball, and basketball games. And as Roberts said, it doesn’t come cheap.
………
One problem with Robert’s argument is that Comcast makes money too — a lot of it.
In 2014, it brought in nearly $69 billion in revenue, with $14.9 billion of that being operating income, a.k.a. profits.
So, yes, Comcast has to charge its customers, but it could charge them less if it wanted to. It could also invest more heavily in more and better-trained customer service workers. It could boost those data caps that customers are always complaining about.
………
But he seems to believe that it may just never be enough. No matter how hard Comcast tries to make its customers happy, they still wind up disgruntled. Customers just can’t stand paying for things, and the only way Comcast could really earn their love is by giving away its product, as Google and Facebook do.
The problem with this argument is that most companies do charge for their products, and few if any are as hated as Comcast. Indeed, the cable TV industry’s upstart rivals — Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime — charge their customers as well.
Comcast’s business model is predicated on monopoly rents.
To paraphrase Lily Tomlin from a long time ago, “We’re the Cable Company, we don’t care, we don’t have to.”
They treat their customers, and their employees with complete contempt, and the customers, return the favor.
The Past 48 Hours in Criminal Justice has Been a bit of a Roller Coaster
Yesterday, I looked out the window at work, and saw 2 helicopters hovering about 5000 feet up in the general direction of Lexington Market.
On closer examination, I noticed that they were both news choppers, as I saw the cameras, and I figured that something had happened in the first Freddie Gray trial.
It turned out that we had a hung jury and a mistrial:
A judge declared a mistrial Wednesday in the case of Baltimore Police Officer William G. Porter after jurors said they had failed to reach an agreement on any of the charges against him in the death of Freddie Gray.
The decision, which came a day after jurors told Baltimore Circuit Judge Barry Williams they were deadlocked, frustrated activists who had watched the first trial in Gray’s death closely. Outside the downtown courtroom, city officials and community leaders pleaded for calm, and authorities reported two arrests, but no violence or serious disruptions.
Porter, 26, the first of six police officers to be tried in Gray’s death, remains charged with involuntary manslaughter, second-degree assault, reckless endangerment and misconduct in office. Gray, 25, died in April after suffering a severe spinal cord injury in the back of a police van.
Jurors deliberated for three days before Williams declared the mistrial. The decision now throws the other trials into flux.
Prosecutors chose to try Porter first, planning to use him as a witness at the trial of Officer Caesar Goodson. Goodson, who is charged with second-degree murder, was slated for trial in the first week of January.
I can’t imagine that the States Attorney Marilyn Mosby is not going to announce her intention to retry him soon.
Even ignoring the political overtones, if she gives up, she has no leverage at all about getting him to testify against his superiors.
Even so, it’s kind of depressing.
On the other hand, the announcement that “Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli had been arrested for securities fraud:
It has been a busy week for Martin Shkreli, the flamboyant businessman at the center of the drug industry’s price-gouging scandals.
He said he would sharply increase the cost of a drug used to treat a potentially deadly parasitic infection. He called himself “the world’s most eligible bachelor” on Twitter and railed against critics in a live-streaming YouTube video. After reportedly paying $2 million for a rare Wu-Tang Clan album, he goaded a member of the hip-hop group to “show me some respect.”
Then, at 6 a.m. Thursday, F.B.I. agents arrested Mr. Shkreli, 32, at his Murray Hill apartment. He was arraigned in Federal District Court in Brooklyn on securities fraud and wire fraud charges.
In a statement, a spokesman for Mr. Shkreli said he was confident that he would be cleared of all charges.
Mr. Shkreli has emerged as a symbol of pharmaceutical greed for acquiring a decades-old drug used to treat an infection that can be devastating for babies and people with AIDS and, overnight, raising the price to $750 a pill from $13.50. His only mistake, he later conceded, was not raising the price more.
The picture of him being hauled off in handcuffs (above) just made my day. (Does this make me a bad person?)
The comment of the day on this comes from the inimitable Charlie Pierce, “I suppose he could argue for a change of venue, but I think it impractical to delay the trial until we make it to Mars.”
Honestly, I think that it would be impossible to find a jury that wouldn’t want to give him the death penalty for jaywalking.
This is Repugnant
It appears that the Danes have have become the Donald Trumps of Europe:
Denmark vows to strip refugees of their valuables to help pay for the cost of resettlement. Weddings rings are off limits.
As if refugees needed yet another reason not to want to resettle in Denmark after the country placed “Don’t come here” ads in Arabic newspapers over the summer, now the country warns it will strip immigrants of their valuables.
The latest anti-refugee sentiment came closer to reality on Sunday when Denmark’s parliament debated a measure that would allow border police to strip incoming refugees of all valuables and cash worth over €300 to help offset costs of resettlement, according to Swedish STV television.
After some discussion, the Danish government apparently decided that refugees could keep their wedding rings, cellphones, and laptops in the measure that will eventually go up for a vote. At least one Danish parliamentarian reportedly insisted that wedding rings with a diamond over a certain carat weight should also be confiscated.
Sören Pind, Denmark’s immigration minister, told Danish television that the plan was the only way the country could afford to house the refugees seeking asylum. “I’m talking about a situation in which there are personal items of significant value but no sentimental worth,” Pind told the television station. “I’m talking about a situation in which a man comes along with a case full of diamonds and asks for protection in Denmark. That’s only fair.”
Fair, perhaps, in that strange world in which theft is OK. The measure, whether it eventually passes or not, raises the question of whether certain European countries really think it is OK to repeat the Nazi approach to immigration, during which the confiscation of valuables was the practice.
I’m with the Danish journalist who said, “Having armed men indiscriminately seize refugees’ personal belongings doesn’t strike me as the best representation of a free society.”
But wait there’s more:
Denmark has promised that any of the 13,000 asylum seekers who are eventually granted a right to stay will be forced to live in segregated tent camps erected in two tent cities and that they will defy European standards and triple the normal waiting period for family reunification as a further deterrent.
So, stealing their stuff, and putting them in internment camps.
This? From the Danes?
What do they think they are? Germans?
Can Someone Please Hang Him from the Empire State Building by His Underwear?
Martin Shkreli is at it again:
After dropping $2 million on a Wu-Tang Clan album, the pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli has found a new project: making an essential treatment unaffordable for poor immigrants from Latin America.
Shkreli, otherwise known as “pharma bro,” gained notoriety earlier this year when his company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, increased the price of a drug used to treat AIDS patients from around $13.50 to $750. He’s now the CEO of KaloBios Pharmaceuticals, which recently announced its plans to submit benznidazole, a treatment for Chagas disease purchased earlier this month, for Food and Drug Administration approval next year. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that about 300,000 people in the United States have the deadly disease. Most of them are immigrants from Latin America, where as many as 8 million people are infected.
………
Right now, doctors in the U.S. obtain benznidazole free of charge through the CDC. According to Rachel Cohen, the regional executive director of the Drugs for Neglected Disease Initiative in North America, the drug sells in Latin America for somewhere between $60 and $100 for each course of treatment. Both of these would change the moment the FDA approved benznidazole from any company—and Shkreli, in particular, seems determined to price this drug out of reach of the people who need it. In filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, KaloBios wrote that it expects to price the Chagas drug similarly to antivirals for Hepatitis C, which can cost almost $100,000 for a single course of treatment in the United States.
………
The CDC currently purchases benznidazole from a Brazilian company. They used to send less than a dozen treatments a year to physicians across the country, according to Susan Montgomery, who leads the epidemiology team at the CDC’s Parasitic Diseases Branch. But after blood banks started testing people for Chagas in 2007, that number spiked.
In theory, FDA approval for benznidazole would make it more accessible to patients: Right now, because benznidazole isn’t approved, a patient who needs the drug has to be enrolled in a clinical trial in order to receive it from the CDC. In practice, though, the current plans for pricing will negate any good that could come from removing the drug’s “experimental” label.
………
Recently, the FDA added Chagas to a special program for neglected diseases. If a pharmaceutical company submits a drug for a disease on the program’s list, the FDA gives the company a “priority review voucher.” That voucher lets companies bring another drug to the FDA for expedited review, usually around six months between submitting the application and receiving a decision (a process that usually takes years. The hope is that the program will incentivize companies to invest in new treatments for neglected diseases that afflict the poorest regions of the world. But companies aren’t required to come up with new drugs to get those fast-track vouchers. The drugs only have to be new to the FDA. (Companies can also sell those vouchers for big money—last August, for example, United Therapeutics sold its voucher for $350 million.)
Last month, Doctors Without Borders, joined by a number of other public-health organizations, asked the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions to amend this voucher program. The groups argued that companies should be eligible only if they actually invest in researching and developing new treatments for neglected diseases, and that they should be required to submit a strategy for how they would keep the drugs accessible for patients.
“If this price hike were to happen, it would be a complete disaster for Chagas patients in the United States,” Cohen said. “People affected by this disease in the United States are poor, are marginalized, have very limited access to health care to begin with. It would be catastrophic.”
2 years ago, on the occasion of actor Jack Klugman’s death, I noted that one of the things that he was lauded for was lobbying for the Orphan Drug Act of 1983.
I took issue, and said that the effect of the act was to manufacture non-patent monopolies that primarily served to raise the cost of drugs through rent-seeking behavior.
The IP restrictions and incentives that are a part of the US medication development regime are killing and impoverishing us.
How about price controls and compulsory licensing? That sounds good.
Predictably Depressing
It appears that the overwhelming majority of Americans now consider mass shootings to be a regular fact of life:
A new national NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that a whopping 71% of Americans surveyed believe the many shootings and other acts of mass violence in we’ve seen in 2015 are now a permanent part of life in our country.
That’s compared with just 21 percent of Americans who think the violence this year — from Charleston, S.C., and Oregon, to the terrorist shootings in San Bernardino, Calif. — has been unusual and won’t happen as often in the future.
America is broken.
David Whorowitz Strikes Again
In case you are unaware, David Whororitz is a self styled expert on the Middle East and Islam.
He’s a nut and a bigot.
It’s kind of like Nathan Bedrord Forrest claiming to be an expert on Civil rights.
Well, he’s come up with a list of the 10 most anti Semitic and pro-Muslim colleges in the country, and one of them is a complete mind f%$#, Brandeis University.
That’s right, he’s calling what is arguably the most Jewish non-sectarian school in the nation a den of anti-Semitic Muslim extremists:
David Horowitz used to hang at the Café a lot. In fact, when we first opened, he was here for lunch every day. [Charle’s Pierce’s, have some stupid for lunch cafe] We haven’t seem much of him, largely because he’d been obscured by the lunch rush of customers that we now get every day. So it was nice to see him pop up in his old booth today. Edroso, our brilliant daytime bartender, spotted him first.Harvard, Columbia, and Brandeis are among 10 leading American universities named by the David Horowitz Freedom Center as being the “most friendly” to radical Islamic propaganda and anti-Israel incitement.
Contemptible, bigoted, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
It’s Back
After having their plans to thwarted by activists, CISA is back:
US librarians have joined with a host of civil liberties groups to condemn a cybersecurity bill now passing through Congress they claim will be both “unhelpful” and “dangerous to Americans’ civil liberties”.
The American Library Association, the world’s oldest and largest library affiliation, has joined with 18 other groups including Fight for the Future, Demand Progress and FreedomWorks to issue a letter to the White House and Congress urging lawmakers to oppose the final version of a bill they claim will dramatically expand government surveillance while failing to tackle cyber-attacks.
Politicians from both sides of the House have been pushing for stronger cybersecurity measures in the wake of the Paris attacks and the recent San Bernardino shooting.
Republican House speaker Paul Ryan has been leading the charge to push through legislation and reconcile two bills, the Protecting Cyber Networks Act (PCNA) and the National Cybersecurity Protection Advancement with the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 (Cisa), a controversial bill that passed a Senate vote in October.
The speed with which Ryan is trying to push through a compromise has worried privacy activists. “We’ve just learned that the Intelligence Committees are trying to pull a fast one,” Nathan White, senior legislative manager at digital rights advocate Access, said in a recent email to supporters. “They’ve been negotiating in secret and came up with a Frankenstein bill – that has some of the worst parts from both the House and the Senate versions.”
- According to the letter’s signatories, the proposed “conference” legislation would:
- Create a loophole that would allow the president to remove the Department of Homeland Security, a civilian agency, as the lead government entity managing information sharing.
- Reduce privacy protections for Americans’ personal information.
- Overexpand the term “cyber threat” to facilitate the prosecution of crimes unrelated to cybersecurity.
- Expand already broad liability protection for information disclosure.
- Pre-empt state, local or tribal disclosure laws on any cyber-threat information shared by or with a state, tribal or local government.
- Eliminate a directive to ensure data integrity.
They are going to keep trying until we put a stake through the heart of the surveillance industrial complex.
Nice Work if You Can Get It
The lobbying operation Purple Strategies is lobbying for the NRA and for the gun control advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety:
The growing frequency of mass shootings has done little to change the political stalemate over guns in Washington, with gun rights and gun control groups each declaring that the latest massacre — for now, the one in San Bernardino — supports their diametrically opposed arguments.
In this environment, no one can predict the future of gun policy in America. But at least one thing is certain: The team of political consultants at Purple Strategies will get paid.
The partners at Purple Strategies — a bipartisan lobbying firm and consulting agency formed in 2008 through a merger of Issue & Image, a Democratic-led company, and National Media, a Republican campaign firm — have developed business relationships on both sides of the gun control debate, working with both the National Rifle Association and Everytown for Gun Safety, the umbrella organization for pro-gun control advocacy groups.
Everytown did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Officials from the NRA declined to provide a comment for this article — although they did ask us for more information about Everytown’s ties to Purple Strategies.
A spokesperson for Purple Strategies denied that the firm has relationships on both sides of the gun policy debate.
………
We had asked Morgante to describe what appeared to be a close relationship between Purple and National Media, Red Eagle Media Group, and the American Media & Advocacy Group, all of which had done work for the NRA.
“The founding partners of Issue & Image and National Media Public Affairs founded Purple, however, Purple Strategies operates independently and does not share clients or employees with any other company that you referenced,” Morgante wrote.
Notwithstanding Morgante’s claims, however, documents and business filings reviewed by The Intercept show considerable overlap between National Media and Purple Strategies when it comes to clients, staff, office space, and leadership.
Consider how this works for gun-related clients:
Everytown and Mayors Against Illegal Guns, two groups heavily funded by billionaire Michael Bloomberg to enact gun restrictions, have relied on Purple Strategies’ Margie Omera and her firm, Momentum Analysis, for multiple polling services in 2014 and this year. Momentum Analysis was acquired by Purple Strategies in 2013. In a memo to Everytown, Omera identified herself as working for Purple Insights, “the in-house opinion research group at Purple Strategies.”
The NRA’s relationship with Purple and National Media is obscured through a network of affiliate companies. But documents filed with the Federal Communications Commission show that the NRA regularly buys political advertising through American Media & Advocacy Group and Red Eagle Media, two firms that share an address in Alexandria, Virginia, with Purple Strategies and National Media.
Records maintained by the Alexandria Circuit Court reveal that Red Eagle Media is an “assumed or fictitious” business created and owned by National Media. Robin Roberts, a co-founding partner of Purple Strategies and the president of National Media, registered the name.
They are laughing their way to the bank.
Sharia Law in Murfreesboro, Tennessee
It looks like the religious nut-jobs in the Murfreesboro district attorney’s office have turned a personal tragedy into an The Handmaiden’s Tale by charging a woman who attempted to abort her fetus with first degree murder:
A woman who attempted to perform an abortion with a coat hanger six months into her pregnancy has been indicted on a first-degree attempted murder charge, Murfreesboro Police reported.
Anna Yocca, 31, of 1939 Swindon Circle, was arrested Wednesday at Juvenile Court by Detective Tommy Roberts after the December session of the Rutherford County grand jury issued an indictment on the charge, according to the report. An employee at the Amazon fulfillment center in Lebanon, she was booked into jail on a $200,000 bond.
Roberts began investigating the case in September when evidence showed Yocca went to her upstairs bathroom, filled the tub with water, got in and tried to “self-abort” her pregnancy using a coat hanger, the report shows.
She became “alarmed and concerned for her safety” when she saw a great deal of blood in the tub, and her boyfriend took her to St. Thomas Rutherford Hospital emergency room. From there, she was transported to St. Thomas Mid-Town in Nashville where staff members saved “Baby Yocca,” the report shows.
This is the world that anti-abortion forces want.
We’ve already seen a woman jailed to compel her to carry her fetus to term, a woman charged with murder for taking an abortion drug, prosecuting a mother for helping her daughter obtain an abortion, and passing laws making some miscarriages murder, among other cases in the past few years.
These folks won’t be satisfied until every woman in America is back in chains.
(on edit)
The irony here is that a few years back, Murfreesboro was trying to prevent a mosque from being built in the area.
Taliban, Talibaptist, there is no difference.