That’s kids for ya
This sophomore MIT electrical engineering student is one crazy gal:
According to an MIT Web site, Simpson is from Kihei, Hawaii, and a sprinter on the school’s swim team. A personal website that purports to be hers includes this description: “In a sentence, I’m an inventor, artist, engineer, and student, I love to build things and I love crazy ideas.”
Like this one, for example: she shows up at Logan airport
wearing a board with nine lights over a hooded black sweatshirt, and carrying a putty substance that turned out to be Play-Doh, when she went to meet a friend at the airport at about 8:40 a.m., officials said.
Experts say she is lucky she wasn’t shot dead.
Giuliani on guns: unconvincing but irrelevant
In my mind, the gun issue for Giuliani is — like Romney’s abortion stance — about authenticity, not policy:
At one point, he came close to disavowing a lawsuit against gunmakers that he initiated while mayor of New York.
The 2000 lawsuit sought to hold gunmakers liable for shootings with illegal guns (the case, by chance, was heard this week in a federal appeals court). At the time, Giuliani called it an “aggressive step towards restoring accountability to an industry that profits from the suffering of others.”
Yesterday, Giuliani backed away from the lawsuit, saying he might not uphold it if he were a judge.
No one is going to ratchet up gun control in America any time soon. The Democrats tried that in 1993, got burned in 1994 and have never forgotten it. You don’t lose a sitting Speaker of the House in an NRA district without feeling the pain. The Dems have gone underground on that issue ever since. Don’t look for a president of either party to chance it. It thus differs from other hot-button base issues, like immigration amnesty, where Bush was in a position to alienate the base in a close battle.
The NRA may go to the mattresses on this just to prove they can, to maintain their aura of political potency. But I seriously don’t think the policy implications are there, now or any time in the near future.
You can equivocate, but it ain’t equivalent
So six black teenagers jump this white kid and beat the crap out of him in rural LA. This occurs subsequent to a handful of white teenagers hanging nooses from a tree, in a patently grotesque racist gesture that got them suspended from school, but they were not prosecuted for a crime because, apparently, they didn’t commit one. Now thousands of protesters are rallying in defense of the so-called “Jena Six.”
”What we need is federal intervention to protect people from Southern injustice,” Sharpton told the AP. ”Our fathers in the 1960’s had to penetrate the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, we have to do the same thing.”
The six black teens were charged a few months after three white teens were accused of hanging nooses in a tree on their high school grounds. The white teens were suspended from school but weren’t prosecuted. Five of the black teens were initially charged with attempted murder. That charge was reduced to battery for all but one, who has yet to be arraigned; the sixth was charged as a juvenile.
The symbolism of the noose there is horrific, and it cannot be countenanced. However, there is a vital distinction that the protesters seemed to have missed. The noose was symbolic. The beating was physical assault and battery.
If you want a white on black racial parallel, go to West Virginia, where an unthinkably sick and violent racist crime was perpetrated by a handful of white inbred hillbillies, and they should be locked away for life for it.
Making excuses for this kind of violence by pointing to offensive but nonviolent provocation sends a really, really bad signal. Assault and battery is inexcusable, and community leaders should be in the business of teaching self-control and peaceful problem-solving, not cathartic revenge.
I’m all for shining a harsh light on the obscure recesses of racism in the South or anywhere else. But Sharpton and the gang are not doing their friends any favors by excusing this behavior.
Yeah, right
The naiveté expressed here is almost charming:
According to the Italian human rights organisation, Hands Off Cain, at least 190 people have been hanged in Iran since the beginning of the year, while last year the total was estimated to be at least 215.
In its annual report released at the end of August, Hands Off Cain, said 27 countries employed capital punishment and Iran, China and Pakistan had the highest rates in the world.
It said the picture was chilling and called for the European Union to press the United Nations to call for a moratorium on capital punishment.
Let’s just consider this for a moment: a regime of homicidal lunatics is frantically scrambling to build a nuclear bomb, while expressing the hope and intent to wipe Israel off the map, funding terror throughout the middle east, and looking forward to the coming the twelfth imam. The entire international community is scrambling to figure out how to deal with them. The French foreign minister warns that war may be inevitable.
And you think a UN moratorium on capital punishment will have an effect there?
Good news, bad news [ok, really, really bad news]
That mean thing Michelle Malkin is still staking out the illegal immigration crime watch, and reports another incident involving illegal immigrants from Guatemala. The bad news, is, of course, the crime: a brutal sexual assault on an unconscious woman. The good news is that the police department notified immigration authorities. That, oddly enough is progress and good news:
The fact that the police reported the men to the feds is a significant step forward in combating the criminal alien crisis. This is the Newark effect in action. While national media outlets have moved on and forgotten the lessons of the awful execution-style murders by criminal aliens, law enforcement has not.
This is good news.
What we need to know now is how these suspects got into the country, who aided and abetted them in staying here, who employed them if they had jobs, whose identities they stole if they had fake papers, and who released them if they had ever been caught and let go by judges/immigration courts before.
Marc Rich pops up in the oddest places
Like a painful zit on Hillary’s nose. Now his name is showing up in an odd way involving the Iraqi Oil for Food scandal trial of a Texas oilman. What his name has to do with the case is far from clear, but it appears in the defendant’s address book, and its relevance is apparently being challenged in court:
He apparently left the book behind at the Houston airport in the spring of 2002, the lawyers said in asking a U.S. District judge to prevent use of the information at his trial.
The address book contains the name of Marc Rich, who fled the United States after being charged with tax evasion and fraud. In one of his last acts as president, Clinton pardoned the fugitive financier, touching off a firestorm.
The lawyers said letting jurors see the entry would be “totally irrelevant and inflammatory.”
“Wyatt’s relationship with Rich, if any, adds nothing to the government’s allegations of prohibited transactions with Iraq except the prejudicial association of their suspect with a notorious felon,” the lawyers wrote.
Philly turning pathos into bathos
The mayor of Philly wants to recruit “10,000 black men” to voluntarily patrol his streets and help cut into a crime wave:
Philadelphia, the sixth-largest U.S. city, has nearly 1.5 million residents, 44 percent of them black. It has notched 294 homicides this year. More than 80 percent of the slayings involve handguns, and most involve young black males.
Yeah, that’s pretty clear. Then here’s the counter?
The men who join Johnson’s program will not carry weapons or make arrests but will instead emphasize conflict resolution, similar to the Guardian Angels’ ground rules.
Police in other cities have hired Muhammad in recent years to provide sensitivity training to officers and community members, but it was not immediately clear whether any have deployed a volunteer patrol force.
Problem as I see it is this: these aren’t killings in passion. These are cold-blooded gang-oriented murders. Conflict resolution techniques would have no more effect here than in The Godfather. It’s a funny thought, but not necessarily a productive one.
A sucker born every minute
As the subprime mortgage crunch drags on, news comes out today that Norman Hsu–the Everyready Rabbit of Democratic party campaign cash–somehow walked off with $40 million in cash from some idiotic investment firm that failed to figure out that the guy had pulled a similar stunt way back in 1991.
[WSJ] reports that a company run by Norman Hsu, who donated nearly $2 million to Democratic candidates since 2004 — including presidential hopeful Sen. Hillary Clinton — recently received $40 million from a Madison Avenue investment fund run by Joel Rosenman, one of the creators of the fabled Woodstock rock festival in 1969.
Now, that $40 million is missing, Rosenman reportedly told investors this week.
Hsu reportedly told Rosenman the funds provided by Source Financing Investors would be used to manufacture apparel in China for top designers such as Gucci and Prada, and would yield a 40 percent profit, according to documents examined by the newspaper.
Rosenman now says that when Source Financing tried to cash checks from Hsu’s company, Components Ltd., the checks bounced.
Rosenman reportedly now wants Hsu to repay the entire $40 million.
Good luck with that. My sense is that Norm is a bit tied up right now.
I guess the lesson is never invest funds with someone who fried his brain at Woodstock.
Hey, this is America!
This radical enviro nut was surprised to learn that giving a crowd of people step by step instructions for making a Molotov cocktail and urging them to do it can get you in trouble:
Rod Coronado, who has advocated sinking whaling ships and destroying mink farms and animal research labs, was charged after a 2003 speech in which he showed a California audience how to make a Molotov cocktail out of an apple-juice jug.
“He has said things that are offensive, but he believed, perhaps naively, that under the First Amendment he had the right to say those things,” Gerald Singleton said in opening statements Tuesday.
The basic legal precedent here is Brandenburg v. Ohio, which very generously said that a bunch of KKK goons could say anything they wanted, as long as they weren’t poised to harm anyone. The two measures are imminence and incitement. It’s OK to incite, as long as it’s not imminent. I guess someone saw this as imminent:
… The prosecution said Coronado was urging listeners to start fires similar to one set that day at an unfinished condominium project in San Diego, which caused $50 million in damage, making it the costliest eco-terror attack in United States history.
What’s funnier than a school board on graft?
Paraphrasing Kissinger, the battles are so fierce because the stakes are so small. Michelle Malkin has the lowdown on the small time crooks swaggering around with their big payoffs in the FBI sting. Don’t get me wrong. Some of this involves big time stuff–city mayors, etc.. And the culture of corruption on NJ seems to run deep indeed. But even still, the pettiness of it all is a riot:
On or about November 8, 2006, defendant McCORMICK was interviewed at the FBI office in Atlantic City, New Jersey. During the interview, defendant McCORMICK acknowledged that he had received the $3,500 wire transfer discussed in paragraph 13. In explaining why he had received these funds, defendant McCORMICK stated that he told Official 1 that he needed $2,000 to $3,000 to renovate his basement so that the Pleasantville Democratic Club had a place to hold its meetings. Defendant McCORMICK further stated that he then received a telephone call from Official 1, who asked defendant McCORMICK whether he wanted the funds by cash or check. Defendant McCORMICK said that he
instructed Official 1 that he wanted the money transferred into his account.
Mess of pottage indeed.
A thin blue line
Oh. My.
I’ve known this was a classic for years, but I had never seen it before. Decided to watch it as background on the Duke rape fiasco. This film is gut-wrenching. It defies description.
Randall Adams spent 12.5 years in prison, much of it on death row.
You have a small island of sanity–three defense attorneys, a remarkably poised and articulate falsely-accused murder convict, and one cop who knew the real killer first hand. This core of sanity is surrounded by the most remarkable collection of crooked phonies you can imagine: a DA who thinks the highest achievement is to convict an innocent man, ’cause anyone can convict the guilty, a casual murderer who kills again while the innocent man he framed rots in prison, and perjured-for-payoff witnesses so kooky you would accuse them of gross overacting if this were fiction.
It is transparently obvious by the time the film is over who the real killer was. No rational person could question it. But it still took four more years before his conviction was overturned and he was released from prison.
I find it difficult, after watching this, to not question my position on the death penalty.
Hugh on Hillary & Hsu: show us the money
Hugh Hewitt has a point today, namely that the bundles of cash delivered to Hillary by Hsu are critical information to tracking this goon down. Don’t wait for the MSM to hold Hillary accountable:
Investigators tracking Hsu ought to call Hillary’s campaign people and immediately demand the names of every bundled contributor as these are people the fugitive is most likely to contact. If Hsu isn’t grabbed today or tomorrow, I doubt very much if we will ever get him –Hillary’s preferred outcome, of course. But just because she’s got to be hoping he gets back to Hong Kong before the police catch him doesn’t mean authorities should allow her campaign to refuse to turn over very relevant information.
Those names are key to the attempt to catch up with Hsu. They should be demanded and turned over today. Perhaps even the threat of having his network publicized would get the fugitive to come in from the cold.
The Crucible: the Duke case revisited
WSJ has a good review of Stuart Taylor Jr. and KC Johnson’s Until Proven Innocent, the definitive review of the pathologies that led to the Duke rape case travesty. The review is well worth reading, as is, it appears, the book:
The state attorney general–after an agonizing yearlong investigation, culminating in Mr. Nifong’s removal from the case–determined in April 2007 that Messrs. Evans, Finnerty and Seligmann were innocent of all charges. Nothing–absolutely nothing–had happened at the party. The players’ innocence had been apparent to their own attorneys from the outset. It should have been apparent to Mr. Nifong, too, given all the exculpatory details he knew. But he was desperate to win a close primary election and needed black votes, so he proceeded with an unjustified prosecution and publicly vilified innocent young men.
In this fundamental injustice, he was aided and abetted by others in Durham. Richard Brodhead, the president of Duke, condemned the lacrosse players as if they had already been found guilty, demanded the resignation of their coach and studiously ignored the mounting evidence that Ms. Mangum’s charge was false. He was clearly terrified of the racial and gender activists on his own faculty. Houston Baker, a noted professor of English, called the lacrosse players “white, violent, drunken men veritably given license to rape,” men who could “claim innocence . . . safe under the cover of silent whiteness.” Protesters on campus and in the city itself waved “castrate” banners, put up “wanted” posters and threatened the physical safety of the lacrosse players.
The details should, to borrow a phrase from John Kerry, be seared into our national consciousness. And we cannot allow the perpetrators to escape responsibility, nor the culture of vicious self-righteous conformity in which they wallow.
[Here’s the website of the boneless chicken who runs Duke and should have resigned in shame if he had any conscience at all.]
Dem donor de-emerges after re-emerging … again
You should all know this story by now. The big time Democratic donor Norman Hsu, who was a fugitive for years, shows up and somehow manages to kick over $2 Million in cash, not bond, for bail. Then he skips the bail and disappears again today.
The angle that struck me as most puzzling is this: the man was convicted of grand theft in 1991, leaves town before he is sentenced, and then re-emerges as a wealthy benefactor of Democratic candidates–apparently without even assuming a new identity or name? How do you just re-emerge?
Apparently Billary reverts to don’t ask/don’t tell when people march around collecting and dispensing obscene quantities of cash?
Hsu pleaded no contest in 1991 to a felony count of grand theft, admitting he’d defrauded investors of $1 million after falsely claiming to have contracts to purchase and sell Latex gloves. He was facing up to three years in prison when he skipped town before his 1992 sentencing date.
Prosecutors said they suspected Hsu fled the country then. But a few years ago, Hsu re-emerged in New York as an apparel executive and a wealthy benefactor of Democratic causes and candidates. They included presidential contenders Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose campaign designated Hsu a “HillRaiser” — a title given to top donors.
Something weird going on here
I think we are dealing with a weird cultural moment that I can’t quite put my finger on, but it’s awfully creepy.
In Oregon, we just had the bizarre case of two boys of thirteen being criminally tried for sexual harassment after then over-exuberantly joined in a stupid little seventh grade game known as “butt slap Fridays.”
Today, we have a British student who was arrested and criminally tried for resting her feet on the chair of a train, thereby endangering the upholstery.
A student who was taken to court for putting her feet on a train seat escaped a potentially career-wrecking criminal conviction yesterday after lawyers branded the case a “ludicrous” waste of time and money.
Kathleen Jennings, 19, wiped tears from her eyes as she was given an absolute discharge by Chester magistrates.
The university student, who is studying maths, had fallen foul of the train operator Merseyrail’s “zero tolerance” policy to protect its upholstery.
In both cases, they won, and, as they say, there is nothing quite as satisfying as being shot at and missed. But is this just a coincidence, or is there some kind of cultural pathology creeping in here on both sides of the Atlantic? My sense is that these are not really isolated cases. I think there is something going on here.
Nifong heads for the slammer
Only one day, but a day oh so richly deserved. Specifically, the contempt charge was for failing to reveal exculpatory evidence to the defense. Wonder if he’ll get the Paris Hilton treatment on his way over to the jail?
Before Nifong was sentenced, another Superior Court judge, former Durham County District Attorney Ron Stephens, testified on his behalf.
“I always felt like I could take him at his word, his word was his bond,” Stephens said. “Basically, if he told you something, you could take it to the bank.”
His word was his bond? Sounds like he might need one about now …
The lesson of Haditha? War is hell.
Another marine cleared by the investigating officer in the Haditha incident, where marines were accused–by Rep. Murtha and others–of grisly murders as revenge for a buddy who was killed. The consistent story emerging is that of decent boys reacting according to their training in a nearly impossible situation:
Investigating officer Lt. Col. Paul Ware said the evidence was too weak for a court-martial. Tatum shot and killed civilians, but “he did so because of his training and the circumstances he was placed in, not to exact revenge and commit murder,” Ware wrote.
“I believe (Lance Cpl.) Tatum’s real life experience and training on how to clear a room took over and his body instinctively began firing while his head tried to grasp at what and why he was firing,” Ware wrote. “By the time he could recognize that he was shooting at children, his body had already acted.
Anyone who has read Malcom Gladwell’s Blink will immediately recognize in this event his description of the inevitable manner in which cops under fire tunnel their vision and stop absorbing the kind of contextual information that would help them recognize nuances, and how all of this occurs within 1-3 seconds of reaction time.
If you have not read Blink, you should. It does a tremendous job of explaining how cops [and soldiers] react under stress, and how to limit erroneous snap decisions. Blink is noteworthy because Gladwell is black, and he does a great job balancing the role of subliminal prejudice–which is real–without condemning or simplifying.
The lesson of Haditha may simply be that life is complicated, war is hell, and Congressmen like Rep. Murtha should shut the hell up until investigations are complete.
As to those whose ideological agenda is so entrenched that they will insist that these recommendations are a whitewash: shame on you.
Witness intimidation
It’s a thin line between a decent society and anarchy. Every society has creeps who would destroy it if they could, and the key is to (1) limit their numbers, (2) make sure decent citizens are willing to stand up.
In places like Iraq and Pakistan we see that it doesn’t take many creeps to destabilize a society. A small number can do it if they instill fear in enough of the rest.
Are we close to such a a tipping point in the West? In addition to being awash in gang violence, the Brits are having a hard time getting witnesses to come forward in the Rhys Jones case. They have nine (9!) arrests, but the news reports today are full of plaintive appeals for witnesses:
“I understand people are concerned about giving information to the police, that is natural,” Supt Armitt said.
“But they have got to stand up and be counted. We have ways to protect members of the public who come forward, we can protect their identities if they go before a court.”
Speaking about those who might know the identity of the BMX gunman who shot Rhys in the back of the neck, Mr Armitt added: “They must look to themselves and examine their conscience and if something else happens think ‘If I hadn’t given that information as quickly as possible can I live with myself?’.”
Witness intimidation is a U.S. problem as well, illustrated in this case where an accused gang murderer was apparently acquitted by silencing witnesses.
When the criminals are so brazen that they can manage this, the wall between ourselves and chaos grows dangerously thin.
And the wisdom to know the difference
Russ Smith has a column here in the NY Press castigating, albeit in passing, the immigration control crowd for linking the Newark murders to our disastrously lax immigration policies:
Just last week, syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin, echoing the intellectually-gone-to-seed Newt Gingrich, blamed the heinous killings of three students in Newark on porous borders, as if that’s the cause of all homicides today. This is deceitful hysteria at its most blatant: Look at the drug-related murders in Baltimore and Detroit, say, and you’ll find that the vast majority of criminals are U.S. citizens.
Whoah, hold on there, dude. First, no one has suggested that immigration is “the cause of all homicides today.” Russ, where did you learn to write with such tendentious hyperbole?
Michelle and others, myself included, have noted that all of these creeps are immigrants of dubious standing and that more than one of them has a rap sheet that ought to be have gotten them deported. So, yes, our lax immigration deportation policies and don’t ask/don’t tell sanctuary city policies helped cause this disaster.
No one has said a word about drug-related murders in Detroit or Baltimore, so far as I can tell. Nor has anyone suggested that the vast majority of criminals are not U.S. citizens; only a statistical numskull would suggest such a thing.
The real issue here is captured in that hackneyed cliché: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change [domestically bred crime]; the courage to change the things I can [deporting known criminal aliens with lengthy rap sheets]; and the wisdom to know the difference.
Russ, God grant you some obviously needed extra help on the last of these.
Thirst you say? I could go for a pint
Watching Britain deal with guns kind of reminds me of watching the West deal with Iran: you know nothing you do is going to work, but admitting as much is too horrible, so you just keep trying–whatever.
First, let’s define the problem:
This month, an inquest heard how Jessie James, 15, was killed on Sept 9 2006 in Moss Side, Manchester, because he refused to join a gang. In London there have been a spate of shootings involving youngsters.
Scotland Yard recently compiled a list of more than 170 gangs in London alone, some of them up to 100-strong. It means on any given night, several thousand gang members are roaming the capital, many of them thirsting for violence.
So we have rampant gang banging–is rampant a strong enough word?–and a pervasive thirst for violence. Thirst, you say?
On Monday, Merseyside’s Chief Constable, Bernard Hogan-Howe, called for the reduction in the number of off-licences [liquor stores] and legislation to prevent under-21s buying drink at “grog shops”.
Uh, that was a thirst for violence, guys.
