Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category

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You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#97 in a series)

Thursday, September 8th, 2022

Jeff German was a reporter for the Las Vegas Review Journal. He specialized in investigative reporting, and was apparently quite well regarded by his peers.

I say “was” because Mr. German was stabbed to death on Friday. Mike the Musicologist sent me a tweet from some Twitter rando claiming that Mr. German’s latest investigative reporting was on the Oathkeepers.

Robert Telles is the “public administrator” for Clark County. According to the Clark County webpage:

Rob’s primary focus is to ensure that the CCPA serves the community as best as possible. Under the current administration, safeguarding and customer service performance have been increased significantly according to the statistical data provided on the CCPA website. Further, the CCPA now objects to many probate court matters where families are at risk.

It isn’t exactly clear to me what the “public administrator” does, but it is an elected position. Mr. Telles (who is a Democrat) lost the primary election for the position in June. He apparently blamed his loss on Mr. German, who had done a series of investigative pieces on Mr. Telles’s management of the office:

Reporting from May included allegations from former employees that Telles created a hostile work environment and had an “inappropriate relationship” with a staffer. There were also accusations of bullying and favoritism.

Yesterday, the police searched Mr. Telles’s home. Shortly afterwards, Mr. Telles was arrested and charged with “suspicion of murder”.

Not really sure what I can say here. Seems tragic that a reporter got stabbed for doing his job, especially when it was apparently a politician who’d already lost his own job. What did he think he was going to get out of killing a reporter? His old job back? Or was he just a bully who thought he could get away with killing someone who crossed him?

Considered innocent until proven guilty, yadda yadda, but it’ll be interesting to see this one play out.

Edited to add: More from Reason. I haven’t quoted from the Review-Journal at all because that outlet is totally unreadable without a subscription, even in incognito mode.

Posted in Law, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 5, 2022.

Monday, September 5th, 2022

Great and good FotB RoadRich was kind enough to send over a couple of Frank Drake links: SETI.org. NASA’s astrobiology branch.

And, because that’s just the way these things work, the NYT posted an obit this afternoon:

Young Frank was good enough at the accordion to play gigs at Italian weddings, recalled his youngest daughter, Leila Drake Fossek. He was always interested in chemistry and electronics as well as astronomy. He attended Cornell University on a scholarship from the Navy Reserve Officer Training Corps, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in engineering physics in 1952.

…

In what he called Project Ozma, after the Wizard of Oz, Dr. Drake alternately pointed the telescope at a pair of sunlike stars, Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani, each about 11 light-years from Earth. That telescope, known informally as the Ozmascope, is now on exhibit at Green Bank. The only signal he detected with it was from a rogue aircraft radar, but the effort drew the public’s attention.
A year later, in November 1961, 10 scientists, including luminaries like the young Carl Sagan and John Lilly, who was trying to learn to communicate with dolphins, convened at the Green Bank observatory to ponder the extraterrestrial question. (They did so secretly, fearing professional ridicule.) After Dr. Lilly’s research, they called themselves the Order of the Dolphin.
It was at Green Bank that Dr. Drake, who had planned the meeting, derived his famous equation as a way of organizing the agenda. It consists of seven factors, which range over all human astronomical knowledge and aspiration. Some are strictly empirical, like the rate at which stars are born in the Milky Way and the fraction of those stars with habitable planets. Others are impossibly mystical, like the average lifetime of a technological civilization — 1,000 to 100 million years was the guess. Multiply all the factors together and you get the putative galactic census.
In the realms in which astronomers have actually gotten new data, the old guesses of the Dolphins have held up well, said Seth Shostak, an astronomer and spokesman at the SETI Institute. NASA’s Kepler planet-hunting satellite and ground-based telescopes have verified optimistic estimates of the abundance of potentially habitable Earth-size planets, and scientists know from the Kepler mission that there could be 300 million of them in the Milky Way galaxy alone.
“These guys were either enormously lucky or amazingly prescient,” Dr. Shostak said of the Dolphins.
At the same time, scientists have discovered that life on Earth is tougher and more versatile than scientists had thought, thriving in weird places like boiling undersea vents. “There is so much evidence for lots of pathways to the origin of life,” Dr. Drake said.

Just for giggles, and since I don’t believe I’ve posted this before, here’s a paper I wrote back when I was at St. Edward’s on the Fermi Paradox, Drake’s Equation, and Clarke’s “The Sentinel”. (Yes, this was for an English class. Ask me about that class sometime.)

Moon Landrieu, former mayor of New Orleans.

“They were passing segregation laws every other day, and the one hand that would go up and say no was his,” recalled Norman Francis, a longtime friend and the former president of Xavier University of Louisiana, a historically Black Roman Catholic institution in New Orleans. In the fall of 1952, Mr. Francis became the first Black student to be admitted to Loyola Law School, also in New Orleans. When Mr. Francis arrived early on the first day of classes, Mr. Landrieu was one of three white students who approached him.
“Those three guys walked up to me and said, ‘We want you to know that if you ever need a friend, we’re going to be your friend,’” Mr. Francis said in an interview for this obituary in 2013.

Posted in Obits, Politics, Science | 1 Comment »

Quick flaming hyena update.

Thursday, August 18th, 2022

By way of Lawrence: remember the police chief and his Earth, Wind, and Fire cover band?

15 years in prison.

Posted in Law, Music, Politics | Comments Closed

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#96 in a series)

Tuesday, August 9th, 2022

This is a bit of a change-up pitch.

RBB is a German public broadcaster. More specifically:

RBB is one of the nine regional public broadcasters that make up ARD, Germany’s joint pubweb network which, with an annual budget of $7 billion (€6.9 billion) and more than 22 thousand employees, is the world’s largest public broadcaster. RBB is also one of the main sponsors of the Berlin International Film Festival.

Patricia Schlesinger was the director of RBB. She resigned on Sunday, as did Wolf-Dieter Wolf, chairman of the board.

On Monday, Berlin’s public prosecutor confirmed it had opened an investigation into accusations Schlesinger embezzled RBB funds to support her lifestyle, including getting the network to pay for lavish dinners at her home and financing her private use of a luxury company car.

…

Schlesinger, who was on a $308,000 (€307,000) annual salary at RBB, is accused of using the German public broadcaster to bankroll a lavish lifestyle for herself and her ex-husband, the Spiegel journalist Gerhard Spörl. Among the allegations, many of which have been revealed in explicit detail in the German media, are that Schlesinger regularly hosted exclusive dinners at her home for prominent guests, getting RBB to pick up the bill, and that she pushed through a $662,000 (€650,000) luxury renovation of her office – all while cutting jobs and programming costs at her network.

Wolf-Dieter Wolf has been “linked with some of the accusations leveled at Schlesinger”, whatever that means.

Posted in Law, Politics, TV | 1 Comment »

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#94 and #95 in a series)

Thursday, August 4th, 2022

Wanda Vázquez, the former governor of Puerto Rico, has been charged with taking bribes from a donor to her campaign.

The donor, Julio M. Herrera Velutini — a Venezuelan banker who has been mired in regulatory problems in Puerto Rico — was also charged. Mr. Herrera, 50, owns Bancrédito, an international bank that faced scrutiny from Puerto Rico regulators over suspicious banking transactions.
According to the Department of Justice, Mr. Herrera wanted the island’s top banking regulator to be replaced, and in return offered to pay $300,000 to political consultants working on the governor’s campaign. Ms. Vázquez, who was facing re-election at the time, agreed to the plan, W. Stephen Muldrow, the United States Attorney for Puerto Rico, said, adding that Mr. Herrera then formed a political action committee for Ms. Vázquez.
The grand jury’s 42-page indictment details meetings and text messages purported to show the quid-pro-quo nature of the arrangement. The governor went through with her end of the bargain, forcing the incumbent banking commissioner to step down and installing Mr. Herrera’s choice as the new commissioner, according to the indictment.

It gets a little better: the bribe money was funneled through an ex-FBI agent.

Mr. Rossini, 60, is a former F.B.I. supervisory agent who, before the Sept. 11 attacks, was assigned to a C.I.A. task force investigating Al Qaeda, but was criminally charged for illegally running unauthorized searches on a government computer. After pleading guilty to those charges, he paid a fine and served community service and a year of probation.

Ms. Vázquez became governor in 2019, after the previous governor resigned. She lost the primary election in 2020. The NYT describes her as a pro-statehood Republican.

The former governor, the banker and the former federal agent were each charged with conspiracy, federal programs bribery, and honest services wire fraud, and could face up to 20 years in prison if convicted…

Do I need to say it?

In other news, Hillsborough County State Attorney Andrew Warren got booted out of office. No, he didn’t lose an election. No, he hasn’t been indicted.

Ron DeSantis fired his arse for not enforcing state law.

At a news conference flanked by police from around Tampa Bay, DeSantis said Warren has “put himself publicly above the law” by signing letters saying he would not enforce laws prohibiting gender-affirming care for minors or laws limiting abortion.

…

DeSantis’ order does not cite examples of Warren not prosecuting individual cases. The state has no laws on gender-affirming care that Warren could refuse to prosecute. Instead, DeSantis’ order points to Warren’s public comments on abortion, transgender issues and office policies Warren has adopted.

But:

…Hillsborough County Sheriff Chad Chronister said at Thursday’s news conference that police have had long-running frustrations with Warren for not prosecuting particular cases.
“I continue to work with my law enforcement counterparts who privately are frustrated with the state attorney, who seems intently focused on empathy for criminals and less interested in pursuing justice for crime victims,” Chronister said.

In addition to the abortion and transgender stuff, the complaints include:

▪ Warren enacting a policy not to prosecute “certain criminal violations, including trespassing at a business location, disorderly conduct, disorderly intoxication, and prostitution.”
▪ Warren enacting a policy “against prosecuting crimes where the initial encounter between law enforcement and the defendant results from a non-criminal violation in connection with riding a bicycle or a pedestrian violation.”

Bonus: Scott Israel is apparently working as a chief of police in Opa-locka, Florida. That’s Scott Israel, former Broward County Sheriff, who got booted from office by Ron DeSantis after the Parkland shooting. Did not know this.

Posted in Law, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 4, 2022.

Thursday, August 4th, 2022

Private First Class Robert E. Simanek (USMC – ret.). Alt link.

Private Simanek received the Medal of Honor for actions during the Korean War. From his Medal of Honor citation:

For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty while serving with Company F, in action against enemy aggressor forces. While accompanying a patrol en route to occupy a combat outpost forward of friendly lines, Private First Class Simanek exhibited a high degree of courage and a resolute spirit of self-sacrifice in protecting the lives of his fellow marines. With his unit ambushed by an intense concentration of enemy mortar and small-arms fire, and suffering heavy casualties, he was forced to seek cover with the remaining members of the patrol in a nearby trench line. Determined to save his comrades when a hostile grenade was hurled into their midst, he unhesitatingly threw himself on the deadly missile absorbing the shattering violence of the exploding charge in his body and shielding his fellow marines from serious injury or death. Gravely wounded as a result of his heroic action, Private First Class Simanek, by his daring initiative and great personal valor in the face of almost certain death, served to inspire all who observed him and upheld the highest traditions of the U.S. Naval Service.

I kind of liked this quote:

“I had been to the outpost before and thought of it as a somewhat vacation because no action had ever been there all the time I’d been on that particular part of the line,” Mr. Simanek recalled in an interview with the government website Department of Defense News in 2020. “So I took an old Reader’s Digest and a can of precious beer in my big back pocket and thought I was really going to have a relaxing situation. It didn’t turn out that way.”

He was 92. His death (according to the NYT) leaves two surviving MoH recipients from the Korean War: Hiroshi Miyamura, who is 96, and Ralph Puckett Jr., who is 95.

Rep. Jackie Walorski (R-Indiana) was killed in a car accident yesterday. Two of her aides, district director Zachery Potts and communications director Emma Thomson, were also killed.

Lawrence sent over an obit for British actor John Steiner, who died in a car accident on Sunday. Credits include “Caligula”, “Deported Women of the SS Special Section”, and “The .44 Specialist”.

Richard Tait, co-inventor of “Cranium”. He was 58, and died of COVID complications.

Dallas Edeburn, deputy with the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office in Minnesota. He was found dead in his car after his shift. In March of 2021, he was in a serious accident when his patrol car was hit by a stolen car fleeing from the police. Other officers pulled him from his burning car, and he sustained pretty serious injuries. It isn’t clear if his death is related to the previous incident.

Johnny Famechon, former featherweight champion of the world.

The Australian boxer’s most memorable world title victory was his decision win against Cuban Jose Legra for the WBC title at London’s Albert Hall in 1969. Famechon boxed professionally for more than 20 years and had a record of 56 wins (20 by knockout), five losses and six draws.

Posted in Cops, Law, Movies, Obits, Politics | 4 Comments »

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#93 in a series)

Thursday, July 14th, 2022

Jason Lary, the ex-mayor of Stonecrest, Georgia, was sentenced to 57 months in prison yesterday.

Former Mayor Lary pled guitly in January to wire fraud, conspiracy, and theft of federal funds. He took COVID relief funds granted by DeKalb County and used them to pay off his mortgage and back taxes. Some of the money also went to pay his bookkeeper’s son’s college expenses. (She’s also pled guilty to conspiracy, but hasn’t been sentenced yet.)

In addition to the prison time, Mr. Lary will have to pay $120,000 in restitution, and serve three years of supervised release.

Apologies for linking to the NYT on this. I can’t get the story from the Atlanta paper to go through archive.is, and the AJC is very obnoxious about subscribing/adblocking.

Posted in Law, Politics | Comments Closed

(Lazy) You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#92 in a series)

Wednesday, June 29th, 2022

This one is short and lazy because I missed the story, while Lawrence is on it like flies on a severed cow’s head in a Damien Hirst installation.

Harris County misdemeanor court Judge Darrell Jordan has been indicted on charges of Official Oppression related to a 2020 incident in which he jailed investigative reporter Wayne Dolcefino for contempt of court.

…

On June 30, 2020, Dolcefino entered Jordan’s courtroom to question the judge about his lack of action on a series of complaints of public corruption. Dolcefino was wearing a hidden camera to document the interaction.
According to the video evidence, Jordan at first greeted Dolcefino, but then told the reporter he would not answer his questions and threatened to hold him in contempt if he persisted. Moments later, Jordan had Dolcefino shackled and taken to jail.
The following day, television cameras recorded guards ushering Dolcefino back into the courtroom in handcuffs and a jail-issued orange jumpsuit. Jordan then sentenced him to three days in jail and 180 days of probation. After Dolcefino appealed, Jordan added an alcohol monitor and random drug tests to his probation conditions.
Although Jordan maintained he had been holding virtual hearings when Dolcefino entered, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals later overturned Dolcefino’s conviction, writing, “after a review of evidence and arguments, the contempt of court allegation is not supported by the habeas corpus record.”

Posted in Law, Politics, Texas | Comments Closed

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#91 in a series)

Wednesday, June 22nd, 2022

Remember Andrew Gillum? Ran against Ron DeSantis in 2018? Crystal meth?

He was just indicted.

The 21-count indictment, which was unsealed Wednesday following his arrest, accuses Gillum and another associate, Sharon Janet Lettman-Hicks, with conspiracy, wire fraud and making false statements, according to a news release from the Department of Justice.
Federal prosecutors allege that between 2016 and 2019, Gillum and Lettman-Hicks, a consultant and one of Gillum’s closest advisers, solicited and obtained money from people “through false and fraudulent promises and representations that the funds would be used for a legitimate purpose,” according to the news release. Instead, that money was diverted to a company owned by Lettman-Hicks, who paid Gillum “disguised as payroll payments … for his personal use.”

Since the indictment is fresh (thanks to Mike the Musicologist for letting me know about it) there’s not a whole lot more information beyond that. If I see any interesting updates, I’ll add them here.

Posted in Law, Politics | 2 Comments »

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#90 in a series)

Tuesday, May 24th, 2022

Yesterday was one of those “Day For Yourself” days that my company has been granting since the recent unpleasantness began. In my case, I used a large chunk of it to go down and renew my DBA for Low Fat Heavy Industries, which was a less than fun experience. (The people in the assumed names/corporate filings branch of the county clerk’s office were awesome. The problem was that the county clerk’s office has a horrible shortage of parking: it took me longer to find a parking space than it did to get the DBA renewed. And this is not downtown: the county clerk’s office is located near where Airport hits I-35.)

So I missed covering this yesterday, but I’m only a little behind: Harry Sidhu resigned as mayor of Anaheim. He still hasn’t been charged with anything.

Also resigning:

The announcement in a two-paragraph statement from his attorney came after another prominent figure caught up in the probe, Melahat Rafiei, announced she was stepping down as a member of the Democratic National Committee and state party secretary.

…

…Rafiei identified herself to local media outlets as the confidential witness referenced in an affidavit supporting a criminal complaint accusing Ament of lying to a mortgage lender. The affidavit said the witness — identified as CW1 — was arrested in October 2019 on a federal bribery charge, but the complaint was dismissed at the government’s request after the witness agreed to cooperate. But no further cooperation is expected.

That’s Todd Ament, former head of the Chamber of Commerce, aka “Cooperating Witness #2”. (Previously.)

And more from “Field of Schemes”.

Posted in California Über Alles, Law, Politics | Comments Closed

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#89 in a series)

Tuesday, May 17th, 2022

This is one of the oddest hyena watches I’ve ever done. One reason is that I’ve never seen someone accused of “illegal registration of a helicopter”. (As we will see, there’s slightly more to the story than that.)

The city of Anaheim sold land to the Los Angeles Angels for a new stadium. There’s already been one issue with the land sale violating California affordable housing law.

Now, the state attorney general has asked a court to put the deal on hold. Why?

…a detailed FBI affidavit showed {Mayor Harry] Sidhu is under investigation for public corruption, and the attorney general said he does not yet know whether the facts uncovered in the investigation could make the sale illegal.

…

However, FBI special agent Brian Adkins wrote: “I believe Sidhu illustrated his intent to solicit campaign contributions, in the amount of $1,000,000 … in exchange for performing official acts intended to finalize the stadium sale for the Angels.”

…

Adkins also said Sidhu “has attempted to obstruct an Orange County grand jury inquiry into the Angel Stadium deal.” The agent also said he believed there was probable cause that Sidhu “may have engaged in criminal offenses,” including fraud, theft or bribery, making false statements, obstruction of justice and witness tampering.

…

Sidhu, according to the affidavit, met with a witness who was cooperating with the FBI investigation, although the mayor was unaware the person was an FBI source, and coached the witness to lie to the county grand jury about what the two had discussed and when they had discussed it.

Okay, so we’ve got obstruction of justice and witness tampering, as well as bribery. I’m guessing the false statements probably involve lying to the Feds. As for the fraud:

…SIDHU is engaged in an ongoing scheme to commit honest services fraud by sharing confidential information with representatives from the Los Angeles Angels Major League Baseball team (“the Angels”) regarding negotiations related to the City’s sale of Angel Stadium with the expectation of receiving a sizeable contribution to his reelection campaign from a prominent Angels representative.

Where does the helicopter come in?

The evidence, according to the affidavit, also showed Sidhu pursued an Arizona address to register his helicopter, despite the fact that he lived in Anaheim and based the helicopter out of Chino.
Had he registered the helicopter in California, he would have owed $15,888 in sales tax. Had he registered the helicopter in Arizona, he would have owed a $1,025 vehicle tax.

I’d tend to call that “tax fraud” myself, though I also have trouble throwing stones at someone who tries to lower their tax bill (especially in California).

It should be noted that:

  • Mayor Sidhu has not actually been charged with any crimes yet, though the release of the FBI affidavit makes me think this is coming soon.
  • Nobody from the Angels has actually been accused of a crime yet.

The other odd aspect of this story is that I got tipped off to it by Field of Schemes. Neil deMause is a little more to the left than I’d like, but we find common ground in being opposed to giving tax dollars to sports franchises. This is the first actual political corruption story I’ve ever picked up from him, so take a bow, Mr. deMause.

Edited to add 5/18: Well, we have an actual indictment. But not against Mayor Sidhu: against Todd Ament, the former head of the Anaheim Chamber of Commerce.

According to federal officials, Ament – with the assistance of an unnamed political consultant who federal officials describe as a partner at a national public relations firm – devised a scheme to launder proceeds intended for the Chamber through the PR firm into Ament’s bank account, authorities say.
Federal officials say Ament and the PR consultant defrauded a cannabis company that believed it was paying $225,000 for a task force that would craft favorable legislation regarding cannabis.

The way I’m reading this, the charges against Mr. Ament aren’t directly related to Mayor Sidhu or the land deal: but the Feds had Mr. Ament nailed on those charges, and used them as leverage to flip Mr. Ament, who is strongly believed (based on poor document redaction) to be “Cooperating Witness #2” in the Sidhu affidavit.

More from Field of Schemes.

Posted in California Über Alles, Helicopters, Law, Planes, Politics, Sports | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: April 25, 2022.

Monday, April 25th, 2022

For the historical record: Orrin Hatch.

Jim Hartz, NBC news guy and former “Today” host.

Sarah Shulze. She was 21 years old and ran track for the University of Wisconsin.

She earned academic all-Big Ten honors in 2020 and 2021 for cross country and in 2021 while running at Wisconsin.

According to her family, her death was a suicide.

The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a good page of additional resources.

Laura Hales. I am not a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, nor had I heard of Ms. Hales previously. However, I have a lot of respect for people who explore the difficult parts of their religion.

Ms. Hales was a writer and podcaster.

The Haleses maintained a website, Joseph Smith’s Polygamy, devoted to examining that contentious aspect of the history of the church and its 19th-century founder. In 2015 they co-wrote a book on the subject, “Joseph Smith’s Polygamy: Toward a Better Understanding.” In 2016 Ms. Hales compiled and edited “A Reason for Faith: Navigating LDS History and Doctrine,” a book of essays by church scholars whose chapters include “Race, the Priesthood and Temples,” “Joseph Smith’s Practice of Plural Marriage” and “Homosexuality and the Gospel.”
But Ms. Hales found an even bigger audience when, in 2017, she created the podcast “Latter-day Saint Perspectives,” which she recorded, edited and hosted. In 130 episodes, before she closed it out last year, the podcast brought on experts to talk about aspects of church history and doctrine.
Some of the episodes were light, like one on Joseph Smith’s dog. But most took a serious look at topics that might be confusing or troubling to church members. “Homosexuality and the Gospel,” “The L.D.S. Church and the Sugar Industry” and “A Global History of Blacks and Mormonism” were among the episode titles.
The church has long been criticized by outsiders and former members for aspects of its history, doctrine and culture. But Ms. Hales, a lifelong church member, approached the subjects from “a faithful but not necessarily devotional perspective,” as she put it in the podcast’s final episode, last May.

…

Ms. Hales took up many topics in her writing and on her podcast, but she dealt with polygamy so often that in 2015 she wrote an essay for The Millennial Star, a blog maintained by church members, entitled “Why I Write About Polygamy.” In the essay, she mentioned that she and her husband had given a number of presentations on the subject.
“The most unanticipated question I have fielded in these forums is why I feel a need to defend polygamy,” she wrote. “Perhaps it is because I don’t see my work as a defense of polygamy so much as an effort to help more people better understand the history of polygamy.”

She was only 54. Pancreatic cancer got her.

The Lustgarten Foundation.

Posted in Obits, Politics, Religion, Sports | 1 Comment »

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