Marilyn Mosby, Baltimore prosecutor, indicted on federal charges of “perjury and making false statements”.
Additional coverage from the NYT.
What do we always say, folks?
Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category
You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#79 in a series)
Friday, January 14th, 2022Obit watch: December 29, 2021.
Wednesday, December 29th, 2021Comment I made to Lawrence last night: “Sure,” the NYT reporter said, “I’ll cover the obituary desk between Christmas and New Year’s. Nothing ever happens between Christmas and New Year’s.”
I’m being kind of short with these first two because everyone is on them like a fat man on an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet.
John Madden. ESPN. LAT.
“Rabelaisian emissary”. Gotta give that guy credit.
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I wouldn’t say I was ever a big Madden fan. I had nothing against him, it was more a matter of me not being a big football fan in general. But that seems like a good general leadership principle: be yourself, and treat your people like intelligent human beings.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, Madden was offered the “Ernie Pantusso” role on “Cheers”, but turned it down.
Harry M. Reid. Las Vegas Review Journal.
Jeff Dickerson, ESPN reporter covering the Chicago Bears. He was only 44.
I wanted to note this, even though he wasn’t as famous as the other guys. The ESPN obit makes Mr. Dickerson sound like a really good guy who was taken too soon:
Even after being placed in hospice last week, he told colleagues he was there merely to humor his doctors. No one around him heard a word of self-pity, and he disarmed those who expressed concern by asking them about their own lives.
“JD always wants to know how you’re doing,” Waddle said. “I’d ask him how he’s doing and his first response is, ‘How are you doing? How are [Waddle’s daughters]?’ The dignity with which he has carried himself through some of the most difficult times any human being would be asked to go through, what his wife went through and the dignity and strength and grace that he showed at her side throughout all of this … I don’t know anybody I’ve met in my 54 years in life who has handled adversity over the last decade with more grace and strength and dignity than Jeff Dickerson. I know a lot of people go through [stuff]. I do. I’m sympathetic to all of it. But what Jeff Dickerson has had to go through the last decade is cruel.
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“He always carried a care for the subject that he was going to write about,” said Gould, who co-hosted an ESPN 1000 radio show with Dickerson during a portion of his Bears career. “As a player you can appreciate that the wisdom he put on paper was as neutral and correct as it ever was going to be. It was always going to be your words. It was always going to be what the story was. It was never going to be someone filling in the blanks …
“Players definitely noticed. He always wrote a true story. He always wrote what was happening at the moment. He didn’t try to back the bus up over somebody. He tried to get it exactly how the story was. … I think you saw a lot of guys give him a lot of credit because they knew he would write it right.”
Obit watch: December 27, 2021.
Monday, December 27th, 2021Man, you take some time off for Christmas, and Death decides to be even busier than usual.
As an expert on insects, Dr. Wilson studied the evolution of behavior, exploring how natural selection and other forces could produce something as extraordinarily complex as an ant colony. He then championed this kind of research as a way of making sense of all behavior — including our own.
As part of his campaign, Dr. Wilson wrote a string of books that influenced his fellow scientists while also gaining a broad public audience. “On Human Nature” won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 1979; “The Ants,” which Dr. Wilson wrote with his longtime colleague Bert Hölldobler, won him his second Pulitzer in 1991.
Dr. Wilson also became a pioneer in the study of biological diversity, developing a mathematical approach to questions about why different places have different numbers of species. Later in his career, Dr. Wilson became one of the world’s leading voices for the protection of endangered wildlife.
Jean-Marc Vallée. THR. Credits include “Dallas Buyers Club” and the “Big Little Lies” series. (Hattip: Lawrence.)
Desmond Tutu, for the historical record.
Sarah Weddington, attorney in the Roe v Wade case. (Hattip: Lawrence.)
Wanda Young, of the Marvelettes.
I’ve read (and thoroughly enjoyed) Rogue Warrior and, believe it or not, Leadership Secrets of the Rogue Warrior and The Real Team: Rogue Warrior (affiliate links). Oddly enough, though, I never met Mr. Marcinko. I say “oddly” because he was actually one of the guests of honor at a convention Lawrence and I went to years back, but I never sought him out. Both of us were busy hanging out with one of the other guests.
Bruce Todd, former Austin mayor.
Todd served two terms as mayor, first elected in June 1991 and retired in June 1997. In his time as mayor, he and the council considered issues such as airport relocation, wilderness preservation and transferring the city-run hospital to Seton. He also helped recruit major employers to the city, like Samsung, AMD and Applied Materials.
He also helped pass the city’s no-smoking law, banning cigars and cigarettes in all restaurants and bars.
Todd also led the effort to get the U.S. Airforce to transfer then-Bergstrom Air Force Base to the city when the base was being decommissioned. He succeeded and also worked to pass a $600 million bond election to transform the base into Austin-Bergstrom International Airport.
(Hattip: Lawrence.)
This is a little old, and has been touched on by other folks, but I did not find a good obit until now: Edward D. Shames.
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Entering combat as a sergeant with Easy Company, he was among its many paratroopers who found themselves scattered and lost upon hitting the ground behind Utah Beach before dawn on D-Day.
“I landed in a bunch of cows in a barn,” he recalled in a July 2021 interview with the American Veterans Center. “I had no idea where I was.”
He rounded up his men and found a farmhouse. The farmer didn’t speak English and he didn’t speak French, but he took out his maps and, through the farmer’s gestures, found that he was in the town of Carentan, some five miles from a bridge where he was supposed to have touched down. When he got there with his men, he received a battlefield commission as a second lieutenant for his resourcefulness.
Mr. Shames was the last surviving officer of Easy Company.
You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#78 in a series)
Tuesday, December 21st, 2021This is a couple of days old, but I’ve been busy. I’ve also been going back and forth on posting this one, for reasons that I’ll get into directly.
Brian Downey, the deputy mayor of Airmont, New York (in Rockland County, population 8,628 in 2010) has been indicted.
But: most of these charges are gun charges, and the sort of gun charges that I’m not sure should be a crime in a free country, much less New York state.
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There’s a semi-meme in the gun community about people ordering “fuel filters” from Chinese vendors…and getting a knock on the door from the Feds. I wonder if that’s what happened in this case. (The only online reference I could find to this was on a site that I have a policy of not linking to or acknowledging in any way.)
Downey acknowledged that weapons were not licensed in an interview with federal agents, according to the complaint filed in federal court.
“He stated that he lacked any registration or authorization for controlled firearms, such as the short-barrel rifle or the sawed-off shotgun,” said Daniel Suden, a special agent with the US Department of Homeland Security.
Really, seriously, just shut the f–k up.
It sounds like he may have been planning on using an “only ones” exemption. Except…he wasn’t one of the “only ones”.
So I can’t gloat too much over the gun charges: after all, if I believe that silencers, modern sporting rifles, and normal capacity magazines should be legal, I can’t throw stones at this guy.
But fake law enforcement credentials? He deserves whatever he gets for that.
You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#77 in a series)
Friday, December 17th, 2021This is a couple days old, but I missed it. Hattip to Mike the Musicologist.
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Six involve ongoing criminal indictments alleging Smith engaged in political favoritism and traded favors by leveraging her control over issuing concealed-carry weapons permits.
The seventh accuses her of failing to cooperate with the county law-enforcement auditor in an investigation into negligence allegations stemming from a 2018 jail inmate’s injury that led to a $10 million county settlement, the Mercury News reported.
The articles I’ve read don’t say, but I’m 99 44/100ths percent sure that this is related to the Apple scandal that I wrote about a while back.
Now, I am not a lawyer, I am not a California lawyer, and I am especially not Perry Mason. (They renewed that crap for a second season? What is wrong with people?)
But, as I understand it, the “civil grand jury” indictments are not criminal. The “civil grand jury” in California is chartered to investigate “actions or performance of city, county agencies or public officials.”
The jurisdiction of the Civil Grand Jury is limited by statute and includes the following:
- Consideration of evidence of misconduct against public officials to determine whether to present formal accusations requesting their removal from office
- Inquiry into the condition and management of public prisons within the county
- Investigation and report on the operations, accounts, and records of the officers, departments, or functions of the county including those operations, accounts, and records of any special legislative district or other district in the county pursuant to state law for which the officers of the county are serving in their ex officio capacity as officers of the districts
- May investigate the books and records of any incorporated city or joint powers agency located in the county
So this isn’t the equivalent of criminal charges, but it is a grand jury saying “We think you’re corrupt as fark”.
Count 1: Illegally issuing concealed carry weapon permits (CCW) to VIP’s
Count 2: Failing to properly investigate whether non-VIP’s should receive CCW permits
Count 3: Keeping non-VIP CCW applications pending indefinitely
Count 4: Illegally accepting suite tickets, food, and drinks at Sharks game
Count 5: Failing to report Sharks game gifts on financial documents
Count 6: Committing perjury by failing to disclose Sharks game gifts
Count 7: Failing to cooperate with internal affairs investigation surrounding treatment of Andrew Hogan
Tweet of the day.
Friday, December 10th, 2021Ok – so apparently after all of the memes, NH has decided we should be a 'shall issue' kangaroo state.https://t.co/1yvJSv773n pic.twitter.com/hgYY7eYM2D
— Jeff NH (@Reardon_Steel) December 10, 2021
I don’t live in NH, so I don’t have a roo in this fight. But I did read the text of the proposed legislation.
While I am generally supportive, my one concern is that the appeal process for denial of a permit is to the state fish and game commission. I think it would be better if the appeal process was handled by a separate dedicated judicial body…
…a “kangaroo court”, if you will.
(I’ll see myself out.)
Obit watch: December 5, 2021.
Sunday, December 5th, 2021Bob Dole, for the record. WP. Battleswarm.
I don’t have much to add to any of these, but I am glad he’s getting credit for his honorable service during WWII.
That’s Stonewall Jackson, the Grand Ole Opry singer, not the Confederate general.
Obit watch: November 9, 2021.
Tuesday, November 9th, 2021Dean Stockwell. He was 85.
204 credits in IMDB, dating back to 1945. The man worked, and had been working since he was a child.
Yes, “Quantum Leap” and “Blue Velvet” and the Lynch “Dune”. Also the “Battlestar Galactica” revival, the original “Twilight Zone”, one episode of a spinoff of a minor 1960s SF TV show, “Beverly Hills Cop II”, “To Live and Die in L.A.”, “Paris, Texas”, “Wagon Train”, and the list goes on. He was no slouch when it came to movies, and if it was a TV series, he was almost certainly in it at some point.
And that includes “Mannix”. (“A Step in Time”, season 5, episode 3. He was “Chris Townsend”.)
Lawrence sent over a nice obit from National Review for Gerald Russello, NR contributor and editor of the University Bookman.
Edited to add: NYT obit for Dean Stockwell.
Max Cleland, former Senator from Georgia.
Stipulated: he was a liberal (according to the NYT, too liberal for Georgia), and we probably would have disagreed on many issues.
But: he also served honorably in Vietnam.
On April 8, 1968, just days before his tour was to end, Capt. Cleland was on a rescue mission in the village of Khe Sanh when he noticed a hand grenade on the ground. He picked it up and it detonated, instantly severing his right leg and right arm; his left leg was amputated within the hour. He was later awarded the Bronze Star and a Silver Star for meritorious service.
For three decades, Mr. Cleland blamed himself for his injuries, thinking the grenade had fallen off his own belt. But he later learned from a Marine who had witnessed the explosion that it had been dropped by an unnamed private who had manipulated the pins in a misguided attempt to make the grenade easier to use in combat.
Edited to add 2: THR obit for Dean Stockwell.
You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#76 in a series)
Wednesday, October 20th, 2021Representative Jeff Fortenberry (R-Nebraska) was indicted yesterday.
Specifically, he’s charged with the ever popular lying to the Feds.
The indictment stems from a separate federal investigation into Gilbert Chagoury, a Lebanese Nigerian billionaire who was accused of conspiring to make illegal campaign contributions to American politicians in exchange for access to them.
Foreign citizens are prohibited by federal law from contributing to U.S. election campaigns. Mr. Chagoury admitted this year to providing approximately $180,000 to four candidates from June 2012 to March 2016. He said he had used others, including Toufic Joseph Baaklini, a Washington lobbyist, to mask his donations.
Mr. Fortenberry, who has served in Congress for 15 years, was one of those politicians. He is not disputing the fact that the donations, ultimately from Mr. Chagoury, were illegal.
“Five and a half years ago, a person from overseas illegally moved money to my campaign,” Mr. Fortenberry said in his video. “I didn’t know anything about this.”
But the government is saying he’s lying about not knowing the donations were illegal.
The government said in court filings that in spring 2018, one of Mr. Fortenberry’s fund-raisers told the congressman that he had funneled $30,000 from Mr. Baaklini to the 2016 re-election event, but that the money “probably did come from Gilbert Chagoury.”
The fund-raiser, referred to as Individual H in the indictment, was cooperating with law enforcement when he spoke with Mr. Fortenberry, according to the indictment.
Despite the fact that the donations were most likely illegal, Mr. Fortenberry did not take appropriate action, such as filing an amended report with the Federal Election Commission or returning the contributions, the indictment said. It was not until after the Justice Department contacted him in July 2019 that Mr. Fortenberrry returned the contributions, according to the document.
In his initial interview with the F.B.I. in 2019, Mr. Fortenberry said that the people who had contributed during his fund-raising event in 2016 were all publicly disclosed, and that he was unaware of any contributions made by foreign citizens, according to the indictment.
Noted:
Obit watch: October 15, 2021.
Friday, October 15th, 2021Gary Paulsen, author.
I was a little old for Hatchet (affiliate link) when it came out, and haven’t gotten around to reading it. But whenever I see discussions of young adult books people liked, or liked when they were that age, Hatchet always comes up. It seems to have had a strong influence on many young people.
And he was the kind of guy who could write that book.
When Gary was 4, his mother, Eunice (Moen) Paulsen, moved with him to Chicago, where she got a job in an ammunition factory. An alcoholic, she would dress Gary in a child-size soldier’s outfit and take him to bars, where she made him sing on tables as a way to get men to pay attention to her.
She could also be fiercely protective. Once he sneaked outside their apartment when she was sleeping. A man dragged him into an alley and began to molest him. Suddenly his mother appeared, beating and kicking the assailant into unconsciousness.
Eventually, her own mother forced her to send Gary to live with an aunt and uncle in northern Minnesota, where he learned to hunt, fish and live outdoors for long stretches.
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In “Gone to the Woods,” a memoir published this year, Mr. Paulsen recalled how at one point the passengers watched in horror as a plane crash-landed nearby. As the plane’s passengers struggled in the water, a pack of sharks descended on them, pulling men and women and children below the water.
His family later returned to Minnesota, where his parents drank and fought constantly. To get away from them, Gary would take to the woods, exploring, hunting and trapping, or wander around their small town, Thief River Falls, near the Canadian border. He worked odd jobs, like setting pins at a bowling alley and delivering newspapers, and used the money to buy his own school supplies, as well as a .22-caliber rifle.
One day he ducked into a library to get warm. A librarian asked if he had a library card. When he said no, she gave him one, along with a Scripto notebook and a No. 2 pencil, with instructions to read everything he could and write down everything he thought.
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When he was 14 he ran away and joined a carnival. He returned home just long enough to forge his father’s signature and join the Army.
The Army trained him in engineering, and he later tracked satellites for a government contractor at a facility in California. He also spent time in Los Angeles, writing dialogue for television shows like “Mission: Impossible.”
All along, he had been reading and writing, and one day in 1965 he decided to try his hand at a novel. He moved back to Minnesota, where he rented a cabin and went to work.
For several years he wrote westerns for adults under a pseudonym. He made just enough money to sustain a simple rural life, living off what he could grow and hunt.
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He also fell in love with dog-sledding. He took part in the Iditarod, the grueling 1,000-mile race across Alaska, three times before giving up the sport in 1990, citing heart problems.
“When you run a thousand miles with a dog team, you enter a state of primitive exaltation,” he said in an interview with the American Writers Museum in January. “You go back 30,000 years, you and the dogs, and you’re never the same again.”
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For the historical record: Sir David Amess, Conservative MP. Everybody’s covered this by now, and I don’t have anything to add.
Well, okay, perhaps one thing: I don’t mean to make fun of our friends in the UKOGBNI, nor do I mean to seem provincial. But “constituency surgery” is such an interesting term…
You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#75 in a series)
Thursday, October 14th, 2021Giggle. Snort. Both Mike the Musicologist and Lawrence sent this to me.
Also charged: Marilyn Louise Flynn, “who at the time was dean of USC’s School of Social Work”.
In a 20-count indictment, he and Flynn face charges of conspiracy, bribery and mail and wire fraud.
But what exactly did they do?
Allegedly, the senior Ridley-Thomas funneled about $100,000 to USC.
The Times reported that USC alerted federal prosecutors to the unusual arrangement after an internal investigation. It also described the intense budget pressure Flynn was under at the time of the alleged scheme with Mark Ridley-Thomas in large part because of her embrace of online degree programs.
Under her tenure as dean, USC’s social work program became the largest in the world, growing from an enrollment of 900 in 2010 to 3,500 in 2016.
That growth, however, was achieved largely through a partnership with a digital learning startup that received more than half of the tuition that students paid for a master’s degree through the school’s online program. The profit-sharing required Flynn to aggressively raise money and seek government contracts to increase revenue.
To fill the online ranks, the school began admitting less qualified students, who sometimes struggled to do the work and who ultimately drove down the rankings of the once-prestigious program. In 2019, USC was forced to lay off social work professors and staff members.
More fun: Ridley-Thomas is the third council member to be indicted in the past two years.
The council has been mired in corruption scandals. Former L.A. Councilman Jose Huizar is awaiting trial on racketeering, bribery, money laundering and other charges. Prosecutors allege he headed up a criminal enterprise involving multiple real estate developers looking to build projects in his downtown district when he was on the council. Huizar and a former deputy mayor who was indicted with him have pleaded not guilty and are seeking to have many of the charges dismissed.
In a related case, former Councilman Mitchell Englander is serving a 14-month prison sentence after pleading guilty to lying to federal authorities about cash and other gifts that he received in casinos in Las Vegas and near Palm Springs.
And even more fun: USC has other issues.
And the cherry on top:
Obit watch: October 11, 2021.
Monday, October 11th, 2021Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, the first president of the Republic of Iran, right up until the point Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini threw him into the street.
In one of the 20th century’s most spectacular political collapses, the shah fled Iran on Jan. 16, 1979. Ayatollah Khomeini, who had directed the revolution from exile, returned home two weeks later. In the broad-based government that the ayatollah installed, Mr. Bani-Sadr served as deputy minister of finance, then minister of finance, and finally as minister of foreign affairs. With the ayatollah’s blessing, Mr. Bani-Sadr easily won the presidential election of Jan. 25, 1980. The ayatollah, however, had secured approval of a constitution giving him power to dismiss presidents at will. Over the next 18 months, he directed Mr. Bani-Sadr’s rise and fall.
In his first weeks in power, Mr. Bani-Sadr worked to bring order to the shambles that had been left by the collapse of the shah’s government. However, he was quickly was distracted by the hostage crisis.
“The takeover of the U.S. embassy was wholly in line with Khomeini’s strategy of focusing hostility abroad,” he later wrote. “It was at this moment that the idea of a religious state became viable. He also realized that he could now silence people at will, by threatening them with the accusation of being pro-American.”
In the venomous political climate of post-revolution Tehran, enemies rose against Mr. Bani-Sadr. Several of his associates were convicted on trumped-up charges and executed. After war with Iraq broke out, militants criticized him for relying more on the regular army, which they associated with the shah’s monarchy, than on revolutionary guards and other political forces. In the summer and fall of 1980, he survived two helicopter crashes.
The combination of the hostage crisis and the war created a hyper-radical atmosphere in which a tweedy, mustachioed intellectual like Mr. Bani-Sadr could hardly hope to survive. On June 10, 1981, Ayatollah Khomeini removed him from his post as commander in chief. On June 21, parliament ruled him “politically incompetent” and voted to impeach him as president. Ayatollah Khomeini signed the bill the next day.
Several years ago, when I was immersed in the Iranian Revolution, I read Mr. Bani-Sadr’s book. It is like many of the books that came out of revolutionary Iran: “We hated the Shah. We thought Khomeini would be a change for the better. Boy, we got played for suckers.”
Abdul Qadeer (A.Q) Khan, “the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb”.
Lawrence sent over an obit for Patrick Horgan. He had a long run as “Dr. John Morrison” on “The Doctors”, and did a few movies: “Zelig” and “The Curse of the Jade Scorpion”. Other TV credits include an episode of a minor 1960s SF television series.
Interesting to me: he was “Major Strasser” in “Casablanca”.
“Casablanca”, the 1983 TV series starring David Soul as Rick Blaine, that is. Anybody remember that? I have a vague memory of seeing commercials for it, but I can’t blame you if you don’t remember it: it was cancelled after three episodes, and NBC burned off the remaining two during the summer.
Granville Adams, of “Oz” and “Homicide: Life on the Street”.