Today’s the last TMQ of the season!
Hurrah, hurrah!
No more “cosmic thoughts”!
Hurrah, hurrah!
The readers will cheer and the blogger will shout!
And we’ll all feel happy after the last TMQ of the year…
Archive for February, 2013
TMQ Watch: February 5, 2013.
Tuesday, February 5th, 2013Over The Hump to La Tuna.
Tuesday, February 5th, 2013A long time ago, I noted the scandal over the Santa Monica sushi restaurant, “The Hump”, which closed after it was discovered they were serving whale sushi.
A few days ago, Typhoon Restaurant Inc. (“The Hump”‘s parent company), chef Kiyoshiro Yamamoto, and chef Susumu Ueda were indicted on federal charges. Specifically, “nine counts of conspiracy to import and sell whale meat from 2007 to 2010, a violation of the Marine Mammal Protection Act.”
Quoth the LAT:
Other sources reported other possible sentences, like 77 years and even “life in prison”.
So? Well, beyond the followup aspect, Ken over at Popehat has the kind of brilliant post that only Ken can write, using this indictment to explain how sentencing in the federal system actually works.
I encourage you to go read the whole post, as it shines a huge frigging spotlight on a little understood area of federal law. Cutting to the chase, Ken (who has worked both as a federal prosecutor and a defense attorney; he’s a for-real lawyer, not just someone with an Internet GED in law like me) figures that the defendants are probably looking at 24 to 30 months, and that’s if their lawyers can’t make a good argument to the judge that they should serve less time.
(FCI La Tuna.)
40% followup.
Tuesday, February 5th, 2013Previously on WCD, we talked a little about the “40% of all gun sales are done without background checks” figure.
Ted Cruz has pointed out some of the same holes we discussed in those figures, and “Politifact Texas” decided they’d fact check him.
What did they find?
What Politifact means by “people who post firearms for sale on the Internet” is unclear. If they mean people who sell to other people locally, that’s quasi-true. If a firearm – any firearm, rifle, pistol, or shotgun – is being shipped rather than sold face to face, the gun has to be shipped from a licensed dealer to a licensed dealer, and the receiving dealer has to do a background check before turning over the firearm.
Rounding does not work that way!
By the way, Politifact also quotes the Post as pointing out the small sample size means there’s a large margin of error: “plus or minus six percentage points”. So it could be anywhere from 8% to 28%. And by the way…
And more:
More:
And there were 18 states that required background checks prior to Brady. But:
So, summing up: the figure was never 40%, but 36% (see, that’s how rounding works), and is probably closer to 20% before the margin of error kicks in, which could make the actual figure anywhere from 8% to 22%. And the survey was conducted in a pre-Brady environment. And the researchers themselves say (again I quote) there is “no way to reach any conclusions about background checks for any of the transactions that are reported in the survey”.
PolitiFact’s rating: “Half True”. I see nothing in their summary that refutes anything Ted Cruz said, or that justifies the “half true” rating.
2^57,885,161 – 1
Tuesday, February 5th, 2013I think everyone knows I geek out over pi, and the calculation thereof.
I’m not sure that folks know that I also geek out over prime numbers, primality testing, and the calculation of large prime numbers.
But I do. And we have a new largest known prime.
Random notes: February 5, 2013.
Tuesday, February 5th, 2013First, they came for the owners of modern sporting rifles, and I didn’t speak out because I hate guns and want everyone to live in peace and harmony. Then they came to shut down the raves…
More:
Yesterday’s update from the Bell trial: Craig Rhudy of the “L.A. County district attorney’s office’s public integrity division” is on the stand now. So far, he’s testified that “former council members drew most of their nearly $100,000 salaries from panels that seldom met.”
Rhudy has charts.
In 2007, the Finance Authority met once, while the Housing Authority met twice. “By 2009, in spite of the fact that the panels continued to meet only sporadically, the pay for serving on each had jumped to $18,368, according to Rhudy’s chart.” In 2010, the Housing Authority was the only one that had a meeting.
And why does this matter? “In total, the defendants drew more than $1.3 million of their salaries from the authorities in question, Rhudy confirmed.”
I missed noting this over the weekend, but the LAT also ran a story on the “mountain of lawsuits” Bell is dealing with.
And the SEC and IRS are both investigating Bell’s bond sales. Here’s a great story:
The Richard III story has been reported everywhere, but I want to throw in a link to the Richard III Society, another group that deserves your support. And if you haven’t read it, I commend to your attention Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time
Today’s Austin quasi-gun show update.
Tuesday, February 5th, 2013I have written previously about the activities of the Austin Public Safety Commission, an appointed “advisory body to the city council on all budgetary and policy matters concerning public safety, including matters related to the Austin Police Department, the Austin Fire Department, and the Austin/Travis County Emergency Medical Services Department.”
The Public Safety Commission, it should be noted, is different from the Greater Austin Crime Commission, which has engaged in gun buybacks in the past.
I call that point out because the Public Safety Commission issued a series of “recommendations” to the city council yesterday. As reported in the Statesman, APSC recommends:
- “banning the leasing of government-owned facilities to gun shows”.
- “vendors at such shows to conduct background screenings”. This doesn’t make a lot of sense: we’re going to ban gun shows on public property, but we’re going to require vendors to conduct background screenings at the gun shows we’ve banned? I don’t believe the city can require vendors to conduct background checks at gun shows on private property; I think this is superseded by state preemption law.
- “…enforcing a state law prohibiting the carrying of firearms — except by those with concealed hand gun permits — in public parks, public meetings of government bodies, non-firearm related events at schools, colleges or professional events and political rallies, parades and meetings.” Wow, that’s a daring recommendation, guys. Enforce existing law.
- Instruct the “Austin City Council, Travis County Commissioner’s Court and Austin Community College and Austin Independent School District boards of trustees” to “divest ownership in any companies that manufacture and sell assault weapons or high capacity magazines to the public”.
- “Direct the Austin Police Department and Travis County Sheriff’s Office to study gun buy-back programs and come back with recommendations.” Oh, boy, I hope they do. As you may have noted at the link above, the last gun buy-back turned into a gun show. If they have another buy-back, I’d love to take a shot at picking up some more nice older Smiths.
- “Collect data on guns used in crimes”. I’m not sure from the context of the Statesman article what this means. I was listening to KLBJ-AM briefly last night, and caught part of a story on the commission recommendations; apparently, what they’re looking for is information about where crime guns come from. Are they stolen, legally purchased, bought at gun shows, etc.?
It is perhaps also worth noting that former mayor Will Wynn and current mayor Lee Leffingwell are members of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, and that Wynn is one of the members of that group who has been convicted of a criminal offense.
The more I hear out of these people, the better a recall election sounds.
Bread blogging: Sourdough Chèvre Bread
Monday, February 4th, 2013This recipe is from Brody and Apter
I followed the recipe without deviations or alterations, carefully measuring out exactly 5 ounces of goat cheese (interesting that Brody and Apter call for 5 ounces, when goat cheese is usually sold in 4 ounce packages in my neck of the woods), using my on-going sourdough starter, and yes, even using the powdered goats milk.
How did it turn out?
Somebody has to pay for all those Dagwood sandwiches.
Sunday, February 3rd, 2013The Duluth News Tribune is replacing “Blondie” with “Pearls Before Swine” starting February 6th.
I’ve pretty much given up newspaper comics, but I did kind of like “Pearls Before Swine”. As for “Blondie”, it was always one of those strips that took less effort to read than it did to skip; kind of banal, but not as offensive as “The Amazing Glacial Spider-Man”. (“This week: Spider-Man crosses the street! And we flash back to his origin yet again!”)
What makes this story noteworthy to me, though, is the paper’s reasoning for dropping “Blondie”:
(“King” is King Features Syndicate. They also syndicate “Spider-Man”, and a small number of actually decent comics.)
(Wow. “Mandrake the Magician” is still being syndicated?)
It appears that the News-Tribune has a paid circulation of just under 30,000, based on the most current information I can find. Let’s be generous and call it 30,000 even: if I did the math right, that means they’re being charged about 0.2 cents per subscriber per week, or about 10.75 cents per subscriber per year. This is kind of an interesting insight into the business. King Features certainly does not make this information available online (they want you to call their sales weasels), and I can’t turn up current information for other syndicates either.
(Hattip: Jimbo.)
More on the Patricia Cook case.
Saturday, February 2nd, 2013The verdict stands.
Former Culpeper Police Department officer Daniel Harmon-Wright will serve three years in prison. (Edited to add: Well, technically, jail. “…in Virginia, sentences measured in months, like in his client’s case, the person convicted serves their imprisonment in a county jail.” This doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, though: if I’m sentenced to 99 years, I go to prison, but if I’m sentenced to 1,188 months, I go to jail? I’d always thought the dividing line was: a year or less, jail. More than a year, prison.)
Ah, yes, his mother. That would be the woman charged with “uttering” for allegedly aaltering her son’s police department personnel records.
Banana republicans on trial: February 2, 2013.
Saturday, February 2nd, 2013Yesterday’s development from the Bell trial: patented Rizzo confuse-o-vision!
Lourdes Garcia, the $422,000 a year “former director of administrative services” went on to testify that “former City Manager Robert Rizzo regarded council members as unsophisticated and easily manipulated”. And the things “Ratso” Rizzo did were “all justifiable because ‘it was for the greater good of the organization.'”
It gets even better.
Captain Renault, call your office, please.
Saturday, February 2nd, 2013The NYT would like for you to know that there’s illegal gambling going on in New Orleans.
A theater critic once bit my sister.
Saturday, February 2nd, 2013I am absolutely mind croggled. Utterly speechless.
The “Beautiful Soup Theater Collective” did a revival of “Moose Murders” by Arthur Bicknell.
Why does this leave me stunned? Because “Moose Murders” is a legendary fiasco, one that opened and closed on the same night. Here’s the original Frank Rich review from the NYT.
And here’s Charles Isherwood’s review of the revival:
(By the way, the producers of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” say they’ve “re-shuffled” funds and are going ahead. Previously.)