You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#98 in a series)

November 2nd, 2022

Good news, everyone!

Santa Clara County Sheriff Laurie Smith resigned Monday morning.

You may remember that former Sheriff Smith was indicted by a civil grand jury last December on corruption charges. You may also remember that those corruption charges (mostly) involved her issuing concealed carry permits to large campaign contributors.

What you may not know (and I missed it too) is that the corruption trial is going on right now, and the jury is actively deliberating whether she should be removed from office. Obviously, the fact that she’s resigned sort of takes the air out of the jury deliberations.

Which seemed to be part of her evil plan:

But in court Monday afternoon, her attorney, Allen Ruby, asked the judge in the corruption trial to dismiss the charges against Smith, arguing the primary penalty she faces — removal from office — is now meaningless since the jury cannot oust Smith from a job she no longer holds.

Except it didn’t work:

A judge has ruled that the civil corruption trial for Santa Clara County Sheriff Laurie Smith will continue even after Smith suddenly resigned Monday and asked the court to dismiss the case now that she can’t be kicked out of office.

…

Fineman’s response to the arguments highlighted the lack of precedent for removal-from-office trials spurred by a civil grand jury; the only other one in known memory in the South Bay was in 2002 when a Mountain View city councilmember was ousted. The trial is conducted in the same structure of a criminal trial and adheres to a reasonable doubt standard for guilt, but is held in civil court. Fineman is presiding because the local judiciary recused itself, and the county also recused itself, which is why the prosecution is headed by Markoff, a San Francisco assistant district attorney.

…

Markoff and Ruby also sparred over the collateral consequences of not allowing a verdict to be reached. Fineman and Markoff mentioned pension implications and eligibility to hold office in the future.
That touched on another ambiguity by the hybrid standing of the trial. A 2013 law penalizes a public official’s pension benefits if they are found guilty of a felony corruption crime, and bars them from holding public office again. Both Fineman and Markoff discussed how the law might apply because some of the current trial counts allege criminal elements.

…

A guilty verdict on any of the counts would prompt the court to expel Smith from office two months before her previously planned retirement, at the end of her sixth term in January. Her resignation undercut the trial, now in its final stages, by effectively removing its stakes and throwing into question whether the jury should be allowed to reach a verdict.
Both legal observers and Smith’s critics suspected that was a strategic move for her legacy, since an aborted trial means she can’t be formally cast in the public record as a corrupt public official thrown out of office for wrongdoing.

It isn’t clear to me: if she resigns and then is found not guilty, can she run again for the same office in the next election? If she is found guilty, is she barred from running for that office again? For any office in California?

As noted above, there’s not a lot of precedent for this. It does seem, based on the article quoted above, that it is very likely she will be found guilty of at least one charge:

Larsen and other experts nitoring the trial also believed the resignation was influenced at least in part by Smith and her attorney’s anticipation that jurors would come back with a guilty verdict on at least one of counts she was facing. Three of the counts were relatively cut-and-dry, asking jurors to decide if she accepted a San Jose Sharks luxury suite — which violates gift limits for public officials — and if she intentionally masked the suite use by buying cheaper tickets for the same game. Detailed and direct testimony from Smith’s staff seemingly confirmed those allegations.

(Hattip: Mike the Musicologist.)

Posted in California Über Alles, Guns, Law, Politics | 2 Comments »

Net loss.

November 1st, 2022

And the latest on the firings front: Steve Nash out as coach of the Brooklyn Nets.

94-67 over roughly two years.

But wait, it gets even better! Though this is technically not part of the firings watch: Ime Udoka is rumored to be next up as Nets coach.

That’s Ime Udoka, who was suspended for a year by the Boston Celtics for having an inappropriate relationship with a female subordinate.

Personally, I’m thinking: this is not a good look.

Posted in Firings, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 1, 2022.

November 1st, 2022

Gael Greene, noted restaurant reviewer for New York magazine.

After graduation, she was hired by United Press International, which on one memorable occasion sent her to cover a show by Elvis Presley in Detroit. She wangled an invitation to the singer’s hotel room, where one thing led to another. As she left, Presley asked her to order him a fried egg sandwich from room service.
Later, she wrote in her 2006 memoir “Insatiable: Tales From a Life of Delicious Excess,” she could not remember much about the sex, but the sandwich stayed in her mind: “Yes, the totemic fried egg sandwich. At that moment, it might have been clear I was born to be a restaurant critic. I just didn’t know it yet.”

…

In no time, her swaggering, fearless style made her one of the magazine’s star writers. She made short work of the Colony, an old society standby, and skewered the snobbery of Manhattan’s finer French restaurants.
In a town where snob, snoot and snub flower in perpetual renaissance, Lafayette is the ‘most,’” she wrote in one review. “Here the spleen is infinitely more memorable than the sweetbreads.”

Julie Powell, of the “Julie/Julia Project” and later Julie and Julia: My Years of Cooking Dangerously (affiliate link). She was 49.

In 2002, Ms. Powell was an aspiring writer working at a low-level administrative job in Lower Manhattan. She was about to turn 30 and had no real career prospects. It was, she said in an interview with The New York Times, “one of those panicked, backed-into-a-corner kind of moments.”
To lend structure to her days, she set out to cook all 524 recipes from her mother’s well-worn copy of Mrs. Child’s 1961 classic “Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 1.” But as an untrained cook who lived in a small Long Island City loft, she found the road to be long, sweaty and bumpy.
In a blog for Salon.com that she called the Julie/Julia Project, she wrote long updates, punctuated by vodka gimlets and filled with entertaining, profane tirades about the difficulties of finding ingredients, the minor disappointments of adult life and the bigger challenges of finding purpose as a member of Generation X.

…

Ms. Powell’s second book, “Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession,” published in 2009, dived deeply into their relationship, which sometimes flourished and sometimes faltered. She described in detail her struggle with an extramarital affair she had and, later, one her husband had. This time, the food connection was darker: She juxtaposed her apprenticeship as a butcher with a dissection of her moods and the marriage.
Without the sauciness and celebrity connection of her first book, “Cleaving” was not well received, and although Ms. Powell continued writing, it was her last book.
“She had so much talent and emotional intelligence,” said Judy Clain, editor in chief of Little, Brown, who was Ms. Powell’s editor. “I only wish she could have found the next thing.”

Posted in Books, Elvis, Food, Obits | Comments Closed

Firings watch.

November 1st, 2022

Bryan Harsin out as Auburn football coach.

Harsin’s tenure on the Plains lasted just more than 22 months, and he finishes with a 9-12 record at Auburn that included a 4-11 mark against Power 5 opponents. He’s the first Auburn coach to finish his tenure with a losing record since Earl Brown’s three-year stint wrapped with a 3-22-4 record between 1948-50.

He was two years into a six year contract. He was also the subject of an inquiry by the university back in February:

Former players spoke out publicly about their experience with Harsin last season, while current players rallied around the embattled coach. After an eight-day investigation and uncertainty about whether Harsin would see a Year 2, Auburn announced its decision to retain the coach, with Gogue releasing a statement on the matter, explaining that it “would have been an abdication of the university’s responsibilities” to not investigate concerns raised about the football program. Gogue added that the university was committed to Harsin and providing him the support necessary to achieve his goals as head coach.

Ultimately, though, it was the on-field product:

After starting 6-2 in Year 1, Auburn spiraled to close out the 2021 season, ending the year on a five-game losing streak. That skid included blown double-digit leads against Mississippi State, South Carolina and Alabama, ultimately losing the Iron Bowl in a quadruple-overtime classic at Jordan-Hare Stadium. The year was capped with a loss to Houston in the Birmingham Bowl, which solidified the program’s first losing season since 2012 and its first five-game losing streak to end a season since 1950.

…

Two uneven performances against opponents from the FCS and Group of 5 to open the [2022 – DB] season, followed by a humiliating loss to Penn State that marked the program’s worst at home in a decade. Auburn escaped its SEC opener against Missouri in overtime before losing each of its next three. The death knell came in the form of Saturday’s double-digit loss to the Razorbacks, which dropped the Tigers to 3-10 in the last calendar year and brought an end to a coaching tenure that was uncomfortable, unfounded and ultimately didn’t work.

Posted in Firings, Sports | Comments Closed

Your loser update: October 31, 2022.

October 31st, 2022

The LA Lakers finally won a game.

There are no NBA teams that have a chance at going 0-82 this year.

Posted in Loser, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 30, 2022.

October 30th, 2022

Thomas Cahill, author. (How the Irish Saved Civilization)

D.H. Peligro, drummer for the Dead Kennedys. (Actually, he replaced the original drummer, “Ted”, in early 1981. Also, if you haven’t looked at the recent history of the Dead Kennedys, it’s a pretty sad story.)

Posted in Books, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 29, 2022.

October 29th, 2022

Jerry Lee Lewis. THR. Variety. Pitchfork.

Noted: Jimmy Swaggart is still alive. (As you may recall, Mickey Gilley died in May.)

I feel like I’m not giving the Killer the coverage he deserves, and I’m sorry for that. At the same time, I’m really not a music guy and don’t have the knowledge to put him in context. Plus, everyone is on this story like flies on a severed cow’s head at a Damien Hirst installation.

“Patrick”, also known as “Patrick Non-White” formerly of Popehat. He passed away in September, and I had noticed his Twitter feed had been silent for a while. But I did not become aware of his death until yesterday.

I feel like Patrick and I would have disagreed somewhere between 25% and 50% of the time. But our disagreements would have been based on reason, not personalities. Patrick was incredibly kind to me when I first started out blogging, and I regret having lost touch with him. I knew he was having health problems, but I thought he was over the hump on those. I regret that I never got to eat barbecue with him.

Thinking about him, I kind of like this as a eulogy:

But whatever I may have to say of him hereafter I want to say this thing of him here, that his bigotry and his vanities were builded on the foundations of a man. He stood up as though he stood alone, with no glance about him to see what other men would do, and he faced the Judge calmly above his great black stock.

I didn’t know Patrick, but I doubt that he ever in his life glanced around him to see what other men would do before doing what he thought was right.

Posted in Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch note.

October 28th, 2022

While the death of Jerry Lee Lewis is being reported, it was also reported earlier in the week by an unreliable source I don’t link to, and that report turned out to be false.

The latest report is apparently from the AP, and seems more reliable. But I am still going to wait until tomorrow to post the obit watch.

Posted in Admin, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Your loser update: interregnum.

October 28th, 2022

Lawrence pinged me this morning, but in truth, he was just nudging me to do something I was contemplating anyway.

Yes, there are no NFL teams that can go 0-17. Or at this point, even 0-16-1.

But: the NBA season has started. I don’t care much about basketball, but why not kick a few teams around?

NBA teams that have a shot at going 0-82 this season:

Orlando Magic
Sacramento Kings
Los Angeles Lakers

Posted in Loser, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 28, 2022.

October 28th, 2022

Lucianne Goldberg, literary agent who was behind the Lewinsky scandal.

It was Ms. Goldberg who advised Linda Tripp, a Pentagon aide, to record her conversations with her young co-worker Monica Lewinsky, who as a White House intern had an affair with President Bill Clinton.
Those recordings became crucial evidence in the special counsel investigation that led to Mr. Clinton’s impeachment for lying under oath in claiming that he had not had an affair with Ms. Lewinsky.

Rod Dreher put up a very nice tribute to her, and links to John Podhoretz’s equally nice tribute.

Robert Gordon, musician.

Mr. Gordon had been the frontman for the buzzy CBGB-era band Tuff Darts when he traded his punk attitude for a tin of Nu Nile pomade and released his first album, a collaboration with the fuzz-guitar pioneer Link Wray, in 1977. At the time, 1950s signifiers like ducktail haircuts and pink pegged slacks had scarcely been glimpsed for years outside the set of “Happy Days” or the Broadway production of “Grease.”
But, turning his back on both the pomp of ’70s stadium rock and the rock ’n’ roll arsonist ethos of punk, Mr. Gordon helped seed a rockabilly resurgence that would flower during the 1980s, with bands like the Stray Cats and the Blasters hitting the charts and punk titans like the Clash and X also paying their respects.

Lawrence emailed an obit for Edward Dameron IV, SF and fantasy artist. He did illustrations for The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands and designed the base for the 1988 Hugo Awards.

Ian Whittaker, set decorator. Among his credits: “Alien”, “Tommy”, and “Highlander”. He did also do some acting. IMDB.

Posted in Art, Movies, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 27, 2022.

October 27th, 2022

John Jay Osborn Jr., author. (The Paper Chase.)

Between 1978 and 1988, Mr. Osborn was credited with writing 14 episodes of “The Paper Chase” and one episode apiece of “L.A. Law” and “Spenser: For Hire.” In that period, he also wrote his fourth novel, “The Man Who Owned New York” (1981), about a lawyer trying to recover $3 million missing from the estate of his firm’s biggest client.
In the 1990s, he became a private estate planner and taught at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, and then at the University of San Francisco School of Law, where he taught contract law until his retirement in 2016.

Mike Davis, author. I’ve heard a lot about City of Quartz, and should probably read it one of these days.

Detractors questioned the accuracy of some of Mr. Davis’s assertions and the hyperbole of his prose. That criticism seemed to peak after he won a $315,000 MacArthur “genius” grant in 1998.
“A lot of writers are tired of Mike Davis being rewarded again and again, culminating in the MacArthur fellowship, for telling the world what a terrible place L.A. is,” Kevin Starr, California’s state librarian, told The Los Angeles Times in 1999.

…

“I understand having acquired a public stature and being someone with unpopular ideas that I’m going to get attacked — being a socialist in America today, you better have a thick skin,” he told The Los Angeles Times. “There is a kind of intolerance in the city for people who say things that went wrong haven’t been fixed.”

Jody Miller.

Signed by Capitol Records as a folk singer, Ms. Miller released her first album in 1963 and cracked the Billboard Hot 100 the next year with the pop song “He Walks Like a Man.”
Her career took off in 1965 when Capitol, seizing on the popularity of Roger Miller’s “King of the Road,” had her hastily record “Queen of the House,” which set distaff lyrics by Mary Taylor to Mr. Miller’s melody and finger-snapping rhythm.
Where Mr. Miller (no relation to Ms. Miller, although they both grew up in Oklahoma) sang of “trailers for sale or rent; rooms to let, 50 cents,” Ms. Miller rhapsodized in a similarly carefree fashion about being “up every day at six; bacon and eggs to fix.”
“I’ll get a maid someday,” she sang, “but till then I’m queen of the house.”

…

Over time, Ms. Miller landed about 30 singles on the Billboard charts, 27 of them in the country category and several of those in the top five. In the 1970s she worked with the prominent Nashville producer Billy Sherrill, who guided her to another crossover hit with a cover of the Chiffons’ 1963 song “He’s So Fine,” which reached No. 5 on the country chart and No. 53 on the pop chart in 1971.

Posted in Books, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 26, 2022.

October 26th, 2022

Michael Kopsa, actor.

Other credits include “Black Lagoon: Roberta’s Blood Trail”, “The Dead Zone”, “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids: The TV Show”, and lots of voice work, especially on “Mobile Suit Gundam” related properties.

Jules Bass, the “Bass” in “Rankin/Bass Productions”, the folks who brought you such timeless classics as “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”, “Frosty the Snowman”, and “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town”.

Bass also directed and produced Mad Monster Party, a 1967 feature starring Boris Karloff and Phyllis Diller.

“Mad Monster Party?” on IMDB. Oddly, it seems to be available on blu-ray (affiliate link).

Lawrence emailed an obit for Ashton B. Carter, defense secretary under Obama.

Posted in History, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

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