Category ►►► Kriminal Konspiracies

July 28, 2010

Brilliance at Midnight - the Dawn

Educational Elucidations , Kriminal Konspiracies , Terrorism Intelligence , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Dafydd

In the comments of the previous post, commenter BigLeeH asked how I would "go about pursuing the war of ideas which we both agree should be a central focus in our confrontation with radical Islamism." Here are some thoughts I've had recently on that very subject.

(Note that I only discuss here the war of ideas against the radical Islamists; we of course also need actual military action... but that is beyond the scope of this piece.)

I point out that every one of these suggestions was actually carried out during World War II, within the context of the 1930s and 40s, of course. In fact, the defenders of American values went even farther, making scores of movies that were pro-American, pro-allied (including pro-Soviet), anti-Nazi, and anti-Imperial Japanese; producing pro-America propaganda for radio and the stage; and enlisting the aid of popular entertainers world-wide. There is no reason that conservatives within the entertainment industry -- and there are some -- cannot do at least some of that; "What Man has done, Man can aspire to do again."

School's in forever

The most important task before launching into a war of ideas is to fully arm and equip our "soldiers" -- in this case, our soldiers comprise all Americans willing and able to defend Western values of individual liberty, property and Capitalism, freedom of speech and religion (not merely freedom of worship, as Obama would have it), actual rule of law, and governance by the consent of the governed. Bluntly, I mean educating the masses about the Grand Jihad, its goals, its methods, and the existential danger it poses.

There are, as we know, any number of excellent books which will give the reader a very good education in the goals, strategies, and history of what Andrew McCarthy calls the Grand Jihad or the Project, a.k.a. the Islamist Project (just to be more specific). I'm not going to give a suggested reading list, because I can't possibly survey the literature deeply enough to make even a fair pass at it. But I'm sure there are experts in the field, such as former federal prosecutor McCarthy, or Professor Bernard Lewis, or even a lowly journalist like Mark Steyn or Hugh Hewitt, who could promulgate a required and desired reading list.

Step 1 in the war of ideas is not to be a tabula rasa; let's assume you've all read enough to educate yourselves. We move along.

Alas, while such books are necessary, they won't do the heavy lifting of educating the American heartland. Not because Americans are too stupid to read (that's a canard of the Left), but because most Americans either don't have time to read, or have been so traumatized by being force-fed leftist propaganda in school that they never developed the habit of reading. Thus, a 300-page tome is unattractive and intimidating.

Too, young Americans prefer a more interactive, more human style of communication. I believe much of what we find out, despite the left-leaning news media's desperate attempts to suppress it (such as the true nature of ObamaCare, with its huge taxes, massive premium hikes, and rationing councils that amount to death panels), we find out just by talking to our friends. (I call this news distribution system "water-cooler samizdat.")

Americans are always news-hungry; but for the water-cooler samizdat to start spreading the news virally, it must have an input source somewhere.

Our ideological army must publish short, readable articles in surprising venues, from Readers Digest to People to McCall's to Newsweek to Popular Mechanics, even to Playboy... except for the last, all magazines you'd find in a doctor's office or in the lobby of your office building or in the waiting room of your automobile service center.

These articles should:

  • Keep the message simple and clear, using plain words.
  • Include necessary examples but not lard down the piece with too many anecdotes.
  • Be brutally honest -- not minimizing, but not exaggerating, either.
  • Focus on the ideology and how it encourages violence when necessary, but is even more dangerous when it's "mere" propaganda and sabotage.

So much for structure; what about substance? I think this should be the general outline of the articles, though obviously each one should deal with a different aspect or "take" on the central theme:

Radical Islamism has been at war with us not just since 9/11, not even just since 1979, when Ayatollah Khomeini seized control in Iran, but at least since 1928, the year that Hassan al-Banna founded the Society of Muslim Brothers (the Muslim Brotherhood). Or perhaps since the mid-eighteenth century, when Muhammad ibn Abd-al-Wahhab began preaching what we now call Wahhabism. Or one could even trace the war's beginning all the way back to Mohammed himself at the turn of the 7th century.

The point is that they, the Islamists, have always known they were at war with us, the West; and they have acted accordingly. Contrariwise, we have known, then forgotten, then remembered, then forgotten again, then remembered again, then forgotten again... for literally centuries. 9/11 was an alarm klaxton warning us that we've allowed the enemy to breach the outer defenses. The threat persists; but too many Americans, and especially too many of our national leaders, have long since hit the snooze button, rolled over, and fallen back asleep.

But can anti-Islamists really gain a toehold in national magazines? Not all, but surely some.

A few of the obvious venues will be utterly hostile to "outing" radical Islamism. But credentialed journalists who oppose the Grand Jihad must keep trying; and of course, keep publishing in those magazines that are not actively hostile to Western values or active collaborators with radical Islamism.

(How does an ordinary writer get published in a magazine like the above? It's not easy; I've never been able to crack them. But one tactic is to team up with someone who has "credentials" in the national-security or Islamic studies field, someone who has the knowledge but not the ability to write a strong article. National magazines are much more likely to publish something by, say, a former senator and his co-writer, or a former CIA analyst and his co-writer, than by some no-name writer whose only nonfiction publication is the blog he writes. Of course, if the writer himself has such credentials, that's even better!)

Another good source of education is a guest speaker at a club, service organization, or church gathering. Such venues are often desperate for entertaining and motivational speakers on a wide variety of topics; so why not this one? Those of you who are good at public speaking could work up a nice 45-minute talk: Why the world seems suddenly upside-down -- and how it's been a long time coming.

The presidential "bully pulpit" is another powerful venue. Of course, Obama is highly unlikely to aid or abet this effort... but if this president won't do it, we must demand that the next president becomes the Great Communicator, like Ronald Reagan, about the threat of our time that rivals the threat of Communism that Reagan faced -- and defeated.

But there are plenty of mini-bully pulpits, many Republican and even some anti-jihad Democratic congressmen who can talk about the Islamist Project -- its origins, its agenda, the threat it poses, and what we can do about it -- during town-hall meetings, during interviews, and during their reelection campaigns. It shouldn't be too much of a distraction; national security is always an important "issue" for American voters.

Once Americans have a much better understanding of what we're up against and where to look for radical Islamist subversion of our system of government (for example, demands for "sharia law" in some section of an American city that happens to have a large Moslem population), they can denounce the idea, out the vermin who are pushing it, and largely neutralize the "soft jihad."

There's gotta be a law...!

And for the most part, there is.

It's long past time we start prosecuting (at the least) every member of the government, federal, state, and local, who knowingly leaks classified information, contributes money or effort to terrorist groups, or infiltrates vital agencies or departments with the intent to sabotage them. For too long, our policy has been to fret and dither but never actually file charges.

This stands in marked contrast with how we treat those caught spying, infiltrating, or sabotaging on behalf of foreign governments in past decades, such as the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, or a host of other hostiles. Why should covert agents for enemy ideologies like radical Islamism get a free pass?

We'll win some prosecutions and lose others; but even the losses, if well publicized, will serve to wake up Americans and other Westerners to the danger. And every prosecution will out another batch of deep-cover, enemy organizations and individuals; just as the Holy Land Foundation prosecution outed CAIR, the Council for American Islamic Relations, as an "unindicted co-conspirator" in the Grand Jihad.

More particularly, we need to find and expose all the "Major Hasans" who have infiltrated the military, the intelligence services, or the State Department; alas, I suspect there are hundreds of such (wide awake) sleeper agents in our midst.

At the very least, we can start with the loudest, most visible, and most astonishingly overt about their sympathies... as was Nidal Malik Hasan, who is charged with murdering thirteen of his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood and attempting to slay 32 others. His radical Islamism and America hatred was an open secret for years, but the Army did nothing substantial about him. And then he had his episode of "sudden" jihad syndrome. But in most cases, such explosions of violence are neither sudden nor surprising; such radicals generally cannot contain themselves for longer than a few minutes without outing themselves... if anyone's listening.

Let the Midnight Special shine a light on them

Similarly, whenever anti-Islamist government officials of any party, or any news organization that actually supports freedom of the press, obtains intelligence of some atrocity or infiltration or subversion in the West, even outside the United States, it should issue a press release or publish a story, respectively. In the first case, politicians should e-mail the press release to every newspaper, local or national news channel, and news radio show in the country. Many small-town newspapers love getting national press releases, because they can quickly write a story from it, getting some nice, international coverage without them having to pay reporters to hang out in Washington D.C. And Even the big metro papers and the network newsies find it hard to ignore forever a story that powerful Washington personalities are pushing hard.

Even if they write a story to try to refute or rebut the claim that Islamists are trying to subvert and destroy Western democracy, that would be better than completely ignoring it... which is what they do now, with nobody pushing back.

As a general rule, the best way to disrupt the infiltration and sabotage phase of the soft jihad is to drag it, writhing and screaming, into the light of day.

Invite the God of the West into the debate

Conservatives who are well educated on the subject of the Islamist Project, and who are members of a congregation, should encourage their pastors to begin giving sermons on the differences between the Judeo-Christian God and what He wants from Mankind -- and the radical Islamist version of Allah, and what he demands from Mankind. I daresay many more Americans get their worldview and moral compass from church or synagogue than from the rive-gauche news media, shocking as that may sound.

Again, it's vital not to exaggerate; we are not fighting a jihad against all of Islam. There are hundreds of millions of Moslems who reject the Islamist Project, who have undergone a quiet Enlightenment on their own, however ahistorical such moderating influences may be within Islam.

Of course, the Mediaeval Christian Church itself was militant, supremacist, totalitarian, and perfectly willing to slaughter those we now see as innocents, but who the Church damned at the time as heretics, infidels, Jews, witches, or sadly, sometimes simply people who owned property that some powerful clergyman coveted. Such hypocritical or intolerant behavior is, in fact, what led to the Judeo-Christian Enlightenment in the first place; and it can lead to the same rejectionism within Islam... though admittedly, Enlightenment thinkers had more to work with in Judeo-Christianity; neither Jesus nor Moses was a bitter, enraged, vengeful old man defined entirely by who and what he hated, rather that what he loved.

Still, the Reformation and the Enlightenment are precedents we should not discard. I don't believe there are many today who defend, say, the harsh sentences (including death by stoning) for seemingly trivial offenses in ancient Judaism; the violent excesses of the crusades; the expulsion of all Jews from Spain in 1492; the continent-wide Inquisition against witches in the fifteenth century; the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in 1572; the brutal suppression of Catholics under Queen Elizabeth in the late sixteenth century, the seventeenth-century witch-mania among Protestant churches in the United States; or even such modern-day acts of extraordinary religious violence as the Mountain Meadows Massacre of more than a hundred peaceful settlers by the Mormons in 1857.

Yet today, neither the Catholic Church, nor the Protestant churches, nor any branch of Judaism, nor the Mormons engage in, condone, or even tolerate such violence and totalitarian control over the individual. They changed; they changed in the wink of an eye; and they changed much for the better.

But no one living in the earlier versions of those societies would have suspected such a change was about happen. It seemed to come out of nowhere; but reformation and englightenment typically do spring "ex-nihilio." There clearly is hope, and we must believe there is hope, that Islam too can shed its own history and become "just another religion."

Such change begins by dissidents drawing contrasts between the paradise the radicals promise -- and the Hell on Earth they actually deliver.

Finally, closer to home, Christian ministries must focus with an even greater intensity on converting black prison inmates to Christianity, to save them from being converted by the Nation of Islam instead. The combination of a violent life history, an unwillingness to live within the law, and a violent, jihadist ideology is the ideal incubator for terrorists, subversives, and saboteurs. Reform would be best; but even if they remain mere criminals, that's far better than becoming self-styled "soldiers of Allah."

"Good enough" is good enough

This list of suggestions is surely not inclusive, but we cannot wait for the perfect plan before we start to implement what we can do today. In fact, if we even followed half or a third of the obvious paths I suggest here, we'd be a heck of a lot better off, better armed, more vigilant, and we would make much harder targets than we do right now.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 28, 2010, at the time of 4:26 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

September 24, 2007

Cindy Sheehan's Day of Out-of-Tunement Manifesto

Afghan Astonishments , Asquirmative Action , Dhimmi of the Month , Domestic Terrorism , Drama Kings and Queens , Econ. 101 , Enviro-Mental Cases , Hippy Dippy Peacenik Groove , History of Moral Philosophy , Illiberal Liberalism , Impeachment Imbecilities , Iraq Matters , Kriminal Konspiracies , Liberal Lunacy , Logical Lacunae , News of the Weird , Palestinian Perils and Pratfalls , Politics 101 , Scurrilous Scribblings , Terrorism Intelligence , Unnatural Disasters , Unuseful Idiots
Hatched by Dafydd

I rarely do this, as you know: I rarely link to some piece and say simply "read this." (I'm too in love with the sound of my own fingers typing on a keyboard.)

But here's an exception. Read Cindy Sheehan's Yom Kippur "sermon," delivered at Michael Lerner's Beyt Tikkun "synogogue;" you will be -- if not exactly glad, then at least agape. (Rabbi Lerner is Hillary Clinton's mentor, author of the Politics of Meaning and other works of Socialist agit-prop masquerading as theology.)

My response (I love this) is entirely contained in the list of categories I had to attach to this post.

(Well, one more thing. It has always been my understanding that Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, is a day for each person to atone for what he, personally, has done wrong -- not "atone" for his enemies failing to live up to his own lofty standards, apologize for all the times America hasn't followed his lead, or wallow in self-righteous indignation that nobody listens to him. 'Nuff said; read the list of categories above.)

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 24, 2007, at the time of 2:36 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

April 11, 2007

Capping the Cooper Caper - What Does Beldar Say?

Kriminal Konspiracies , Plame Blame Game
Hatched by Dafydd

I was reading the statement by North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper, dropping all remaining charges against the three Duke lacrosse team members, and I noticed the following passage:

The result of our review and investigation shows clearly that there is insufficient evidence to proceed on any of the charges. Today we are filing notices of dismissal for all charges against Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty and David Evans.

The result is that these cases are over, and no more criminal proceedings will occur.

Had Cooper stopped right there, he would have been just about as informative -- and just about as fair -- as Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald was in concluding his lengthy, costly investigation into the Plame name blame game.

But Cooper did not stop there; he went on at some length to this effect:

We believe that these cases were the result of a tragic rush to accuse and a failure to verify serious allegations. Based on the significant inconsistencies between the evidence and the various accounts given by the accusing witness, we believe these three individuals are innocent of these charges.

We approached this case with the understanding that rape and sexual assault victims often have some inconsistencies in their accounts of a traumatic event. However, in this case, the inconsistencies were so significant and so contrary to the evidence that we have no credible evidence that an attack occurred in that house that night.

Note what Cooper said: that he believes the three former defendants are actually innocent. This goes a long way towards making them whole again after their warrentless persecution over the past thirteen months by election-driven DA Mike Nifong (who now faces his own day in court -- rather, before the bar association -- on various ethics charges).

By contrast, Fitzgerald's refusal even to say whether a crime was committed by revealing Valerie Plame Wilson's name, coupled with his tightlipped silence about the alleged violations by Vice President Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and other high-ranking members of the administration, leaves a sword of Damocles hanging over the president's head... deliberately so, in my uninformed gut feeling.

I don't know whether Fitzgerald's animus against President Bush predates his appointment as special counsel or whether it developed during the investigation; but I honestly believe, without a shred of evidence to support it, that one reason he won't answer any questions is that he wants the administration to suffer... even though he could not find a single substantive charge to lodge against any one of them -- other than Scooter Libby's foolish perjury.

But even if I am incorrect that Fitzgerald wants a cloud of suspicion to hover over Bush's head for the next 1.75 years, few on either side would deny that that is the effect of Fitzgerald's refusal to speak. The vice president, the president's top advisors, and the president himself have all been smeared by inuendo for years, while the real liars who started everything -- "Ambassador" Joe Wilson himself, along with his duplicitous wife -- have been lionized; and the man who could lift that cloud smiles and says nothing.

A while back, you may recall that I had a lengthy go-round with brilliant lawblogger Beldar (Bill Dyer):

My position was that Fitzgerald owes the country a duty to resolve the controversy we set him to investigate. I call upon the special counsil to answer a series of general questions about the case.

Beldar's position was that prosecutors should speak only through indictments (or their lack), and that allowing them to answer such questions was too dangerous to those they may implicate without trial.

I'm curious whether Beldar will now denounce North Carolina's attorney general for his clear and unambiguous statement exonerating three young men falsely accused of a crime... thus, by definition, equally clearly implying that the false-accuser, 28 year old Crystal Gail Mangum, committed a bitter and vengeful felony against three innocent men.

Beldar may land on Cooper with both feet, for consistency's sake; or else he may be able to make a good case that Cooper is not just a prosecutor, he is an elected official, thus has a different duty. But I must confess, the circumstances seem pretty similar to me... though the decisions taken by the two principals, Fitzgerald and Cooper, are polar opposites.

Beldar, care to weigh in on this point? (Alas, he has closed comments and trackbacks on the two linked posts above, so he may never hear about this post at all. I think I'll e-mail him to let him know... I'm sure he'll be wildly appreciative!)

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 11, 2007, at the time of 3:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 27, 2006

The Times - Are They a-Changin'? Not Really.

Kriminal Konspiracies
Hatched by Dafydd

The Atlanta Journal Constitution has a new story up: the informant who was said to have bought drugs at the Atlanta house that was later raided by cops, resulting in the death of 88 year old (not 92) Kathryn Johnston, now claims that he never did any such thing, and that some unnamed Atlanta narcotics officer called him up out of the blue -- after the shooting -- and told him to lie about the buy.

This sounds like gibberish on several levels:

  • If the officers had no reason to suspect narcotics at that residence, why would they have raided in the first place?

I asked this earlier in the comments of a previous post on this subject, but nobody has essayed an answer. Are we to suppose the officers just wanted to kill some random old lady?

  • If they were going to lie and claim that the informant (who is evidently known to the AJC) bought drugs there... wouldn't they have arranged this story with him beforehand, rather than call him for the first time after the shooting?

Assuming the raid was successful, netting a bunch of drugs and computers and such, wouldn't any defense attorney try to call the informant as a witness to see if the warrant were valid? And even if the judge wouldn't allow that (to protect the informant from retaliation), I assume he would want to see the informant himself in camera. If the guy expressed total bewilderment, that would be the end of the case right there.

If you're going to fake probable cause for a warrant, this is the most foolish possible way to do it, almost certain to come to light no matter what the outcome of the raid. It would be much easier for a cop to claim in the affidavit that he, personally, bought crack undercover. That way, there is nobody to contradict him.

The affidavit, by Officer Jason R. Smith, says that the informant told him he used $50 provided by the department to buy crack cocaine. It says that the informant had a conversation with a man named "Sam" (described), and that "Sam" talked about security cameras that were installed. Lots of details.

  • Why would a cop make that all up, knowing it would be discovered as fake the moment anyone investigated?

The security camera claim is especially odd: wouldn't officers who arrived later that night (the shooting was at 7:00 pm) notice the lack of such security cameras? And if there was one, wouldn't they grab the videotapes -- making it very easy for defense counsel to subsequently review the tape of the alleged buy that led to the warrant?

This is exactly the kind of detail that a cop would never invent, because he would know that it would be the first thing everyone would check. Thus again, I think it more likely the informant invented this whole story and tricked the Atlanta narcotics unit into believing it.

This opens up one possible new avenue for debate: ultra-libertarians could argue that the ease with which the informant duped the cops shows that they cannot rely on informants. But very often, that is the only way they hear about a crime being committed; and police resources are not infinite: they cannot send officers to every site where a drug buy is reported by a previously reliable informant, just to see if the undercover cop can make a buy himself.

If that's the level of checking and cross-checking you demand, then are you willing to double the police force to achieve it? That's an awful lot of new taxes.

So long as we have such a small ratio of cops to citizens, they're going to have to rely upon informants. Most are pretty good; in this case, it looks to me like one was a creep. So it goes.

This reminds me of something a libertarian friend of mine (a fellow science-fiction author) said once. This was during the OJ Simpson criminal trial, and my friend was 100% convinced that the Juice was innocent. (I won't go into his reasons for believing that; suffice to say they were not exactly logical. And if you guess who I'm talking about, please don't out my friend in a comment -- if you don't want your comment deleted, that is.)

During one of our frequent "discussions" of the case, my friend opined that no one should ever be tried for murder unless there is an eyewitness to the actual killing itself.

I pointed out that this would essentially make murder unprosecutable: any time someone committed a homicide, then all he had to do was kill any witnesses. Even if he were caught moments later standing over the body with a smoking gun in his hand, he could just laugh at the cops. It didn't matter; my friend quoted the aphorism that it's better a hundred guilty men be set free than one innocent man (he meant OJ) be sent to prison.

This is a ludicrous logical fallacy, of course; if it must have a name, call it the fallacy of unbalanced consequences. It has the same structure as arguing that, if it saves the life of just one child, we should ban all swimming pools. By the same token, arguing that because one group of cops were idiots, therefore no cop should be able to use a dynamic entry, commits the same logical fallacy: the consequences are risibly unbalanced.

Here is what I think actually happened in the Atlanta case:

  1. The informant tells Officer Smith that the house is selling crack;
  2. Smith gives the informant $50 to make a buy;
  3. The informant uses the $50 to pay off his bookie, who has threatened to break the informant's hands;
  4. The informant, belatedly afraid of what Smith might do if he finds out, spins the story about buying crack there;
  5. The cops believe him -- he's been reliable before -- and in good faith get a warrant based upon his perjury;
  6. Later, the informant concocts a new story: that he had nothing to do with it, the cops just raided the house for no reason at all, then contacted him after the shooting.

The one common element here is that, at every step of the way, the informant's word is taken by everyone: by Smith on the affidavit, and now by the Atlanta Journal Constitution about his claim that the cops told him to lie.

But does this change anything I wrote about this raid the last time, in our post Doom Is Nigh - for "Movement Libertarianism"? No, it does not.

The only thing that would change my original position would be if an investigation showed that all the cops were in on it, and that they deliberately faked the affidavit just to get someone. If that is the case, then that is good proof that they are thugs and should be behind bars. But the evidence presented so far falls very short of that mark.

Assuming it's not some wild conspiracy, then all of the major points I made remain intact... even if it turns out that the informant never really made a buy. In fact, my earlier post remains viable even if it turns out that Officer Smith himself concocted the whole thing, rather than the the informant (though I still think the latter is more likely, as the informant has much less to lose and less knowledge of how easily such a subterfuge would be discovered).

How so? Well, take a look at what I actually said...

First, here is what I said Patterico had brought out from earlier reporting:

The points about the shooting that Weintraub's brief brief missed, which Patterico brought out, are these:

  1. The police were attempting to search the premises on the basis of a legitimate search warrant -- not the "wrong house" (as early reports claimed);
  2. It was the old woman, not the cops, who began shooting;
  3. She shot three officers before they returned fire;
  4. Bullets fired by a 92 year old are just as deadly as bullets fired by a 22 year old;
  5. The police have every legal right, and 95% of Americans would say moral right, to return fire when fired upon.

Points 2-5 are obviously unaffected by this new claim. Point 1 is impacted, but only slightly: although it's likely the warrant was not fully legitimate (whether the liar was the informant or Officer Smith), it was in fact issued by a court; and it's highly unlikely that anyone but the actual miscreant would know it was illegitimate.

In particular, I doubt the cops who executed it would know there was any problem -- possibly excepting Smith himself, if he were the liar and also one of the people serving the warrant. But even in that case, I doubt he would inform the other officers that the warrant was bogus; that's the kind of thing you keep to yourself.

And of course, if the liar was the informant, not Officer Smith, then none of the officers would have any reason to doubt its legitimacy.

I think it clear that Ms. Johnston shot first; if the officers shot first, striking her two times in the chest, she certainly wouldn't be able to return fire -- unlike the cops, she had no bullet-resistant vest.

Nobody denies that three cops were shot. And the other two points are general truths.

The rest of the post is generalized discussion, mostly of ace reporter and Bee-blogger Daniel Weintraub's complaint that police spied on "peace protestors." When I discuss the Atlanta case, I talk mainly about the reasonableness of cops returning fire when fired upon -- which remains true, unless someone thinks that after deliberately murdering the doddering, old woman, they picked up her gun and shot each other, just to provide themselves an alibi; that's got more than a soupçon of "black helicopter" in it, and I don't buy it.

So we still have the situation that the cops (or at least all but one of them) were attempting to execute a warrant they believed, in good faith, was legitimately issued by Fulton County Magistrate Kimberly Warden; the warrant was a "no-knock" warrant; and the officers simply did their duty in serving it.

They were shot at; they returned fire; and an aged woman was killed. It's a tragedy, as I have said all along; but it's certainly not an example of jackbooted police thugs "murdering" an 88 year old woman.

And that is the point. What are the legit officers supposed to do -- refuse to execute what they believe is a legal warrant on what they fully believe is a crack house? Are they supposed to run away whenever they're shot at? Or are they supposed to knock politely, when they have been told the suspects are possibly armed and dangerous?

Nothing that has come out so far indicates a labyrinthian conspiracy to murder some old biddy they didn't even know, nor any recklessness on the officers' part, nor anything other than the weak possibility that one cop was dirty -- and a much higher probability that all the cops were duped by a good liar.

That proves nothing except that cops, like the rest of us, are human and can make mistakes. You go to the streets with the cops you have, not the cops you wish you could have.

So it goes, so it goes.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 27, 2006, at the time of 11:57 PM | Comments (22) | TrackBack

June 30, 2006

Culture of Corruption Rules!

Kriminal Konspiracies , Media Madness , Politics - National
Hatched by Dafydd

Former Gov. Don E. Siegelman of Alabama was convicted yesterday of bribery, according to the New York Times:

After twice telling a judge it was deadlocked, a federal jury on Thursday convicted former Gov. Don E. Siegelman and a former HealthSouth chief executive, Richard M. Scrushy, on charges that they conspired in a bribery scheme seven years ago.

Two other defendants who had served in the Siegelman administration were acquitted on charges that they participated in a racketeering scheme during Mr. Siegelman's term in office.

Now, I don't know Mr. Siegelman from Adam. I don't make a practice of assiduously following the gubernatorial history of states other than my own. And of course, I know that Alabama is a very conservative state... but some Southern states do have Democratic governors.

Naturally, I was curious: is this more grist for Nancy Pelosi's mule? I skipped a bit then read a few paragraphs (or "grafs") further...

At a news conference after the verdict Thursday, the acting United States attorney, Louis Franklin, praised the jurors for holding Mr. Siegelman and Mr. Scrushy "accountable for what they did."

"The message to everybody else is that public servants have a fiduciary duty to the citizens of Alabama, and they should take that very seriously," Mr. Franklin said.

Yup, sounds good. Darned Republicans and their corrupt culture! Will their perfidy never cease? But still, there was that nagging feeling that it was a little odd that the Times had not yet mentioned any party affilliation for Mr. Siegelman. Some more grafs later (you understand I'm skipping other, even more boring grafs in between these excerpts):

The verdict came after a six-week trial and 11 days of deliberations. Mr. Siegelman was convicted of conspiracy, bribery, mail fraud and obstruction of justice. The jurors convicted Mr. Scrushy of bribery, conspiracy and mail fraud. The longest term, up to 20 years, is carried by the mail fraud convictions.

Mr. Siegelman's former chief of staff, Paul Hamrick, and his former transportation director, Gary Roberts, were cleared on all charges.

All right, all right; I've milked this goat for all she's got. Here's the payoff, which was probably visible from the first couple of sentences:

Mr. Siegelman, a Democrat, called the case a ruthless campaign tactic by Gov. Bob Riley, a Republican who defeated him four years ago. During the trial, Mr. Siegelman campaigned unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination for governor, sometimes soliciting votes on the courthouse steps.

Having held most of the state's executive offices, Mr. Siegelman once cast himself as Alabama's first "New South" governor. Considered progressive, he was elected governor in 1998 on the promise to pay college tuition for Alabama students with an education lottery.

There you go: the Times was finally forced to admit that Siegelman was a Democrat... in the eleventh graf of the story!

It turns out that the lottery was a huge bust for Siegelman: it was presented as a ballot initiative, the centerpiece of the governor's economic package, and the state lottery campaign cost at least $2 million... which Siegelman personally guaranteed. When the initiative went down in flames -- defeated, in a simple twist of fate, by a counter-campaign by religious conservatives who opposed financing children's education by legalized gambling -- Siegelman found himself suddenly having to cought up a couple of million bucks.

Hence his desperate need for bribes: Scrushy funneled $500,000 into Siegelman's pocket in exchange for appointment to a state board that regulates hospitals; as the CEO of HealthSouth, Scrushy stood to gain a lot more than $500,000 from being able to craft regulations that benefited his own company at the expense, one presumes, of his competitors.

All right, now let's engage in a little bit of alternative history. Suppose the governor caught up in this had been a Republican instead of a Democrat. How many of you think that this New York Times story would have begun thus:

After twice telling a judge it was deadlocked, a federal jury on Thursday convicted conservative Republican Gov. Fester Bestertester and former HealthSouth chief executive, Karbunkle, on charges that they conspired in a bribery scheme seven years ago.

Mr. Bestertester, a former fellow governor of President George W. Bush and his brother Jeb Bush, was a very vocal champion of "clean government" until his arrest for bribery and mail fraud. HeathSouth is a conservative multinational corporation, much like Halliburton, the company formerly run by Vice President Dick Cheney; CEO Karbunkle was a frequent GOP fundraiser who had often met with the Republican governor for private, one-on-one "advisory meetings."

At a joint press conference, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid urged voters to end the "Republican culture of corruption," citing legal troubles by former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, among many others.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 30, 2006, at the time of 8:01 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

June 13, 2006

Rove Walks; Dean Balks

Elections , Kriminal Konspiracies , Plame Blame Game
Hatched by Dafydd

As expected, Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald told the attorney to White House political aide Karl Rove that he had no intention of indicting or charging Rove with any crime. Shocked Democrats, eying congressional elections in a scant five months, worried that the loss of their critical election theme might adversely affect the outcome:

Attorney Robert Luskin said that special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald informed him of the decision on Monday, ending months of speculation about the fate of Rove, the architect of Bush's 2004 re-election now focused on stopping Democrats from capturing the House or Senate in this November's elections.

The blow was doubly hard, as President Bush would certainly have fired Rove had the aide been charged in the probe. Sadly, Rove will continue in his role as chief Democrat tormentor, which will also affect election results.

In a related but wholly unexpected development, Democratic National Committee Chairman and failed presidential candidate Howard Dean made a complete ass of himself:

If Karl Rove had been indicted it would have been for perjury. That does not excuse his real sin which is leaking the name of an intelligence operative during the time of war. He doesn't belong in the White House. If the President valued America more than he valued his connection to Karl Rove then Karl Rove would have been fired a long time ago. So I think this is probably good news for the White House, but its not very good news for America.

So saying, Dean shuffled off the set of NBC's "Today" show and returned to his sterile and largely ceremonial post.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 13, 2006, at the time of 5:19 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

June 7, 2006

A Bird In the Bush Ain't Worth Much

Elections , Kriminal Konspiracies , Politics - California , Politics - National , Predictions
Hatched by Dafydd

It's looking more and more like Brian Bilbray won the critical California 50th district race to succeed former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, who currently resides in prison. But it's not yet clear whether the second half of my prediction will come true; at the moment, with 96% counted, Bilbray leads by only 4.2%, not 5%... but it wouldn't take much to add an extra 0.8%, so we'll have to wait a day or two to see whether I get a full point or only a half.

But a win is a win, in any case.

However, this retention shines a big, bright light on the Democrats' dilemma: their strategy for taking back the House relies upon winning a bunch of races -- many of which just don't look at all likely to fall to them. They must win virtually every open seat, and they must wrest a number of seats away from Republican incumbents... one more, now that the Cunningham seat will remain with the GOP up through the election.

The main unifying theme of the Democrats this year has been the Republican Kulture of Korruption; but if it's going to work anywhere, it would have to be either in Cal-50 or in Tex-22 (Tom DeLay's erstwhile seat). The Democrats just lost Cal-50 when it was open; I don't think they're likely to win it in November, when Bilbray will be the incumbent. (In fact, he'll probably do better... the power of name recognition, which works even for former congressmen being re-elected in a different district).

And as far as the Texas seat goes, the biggest boon that Democratic candidate Nick Lampson had going for him was that he was running against the indicted Rep. Tom DeLay (R-TX, 88%).

But now he's not; DeLay is resigning from Congress this Friday, and presumably his brief replacement in the 109th Congress will be chosen by a special election (open, anyone can run). Thereafter, the Republican parties in the four counties that have voters in the 22nd district (Fort Bend, Harris, Galveston, and Brazoria) will select a nominee to replace DeLay on the ballot for the 110th Congress.

But with DeLay himself, the lightning rod, gone from the scene, it's very likely that Tex-22 will stay in Republican hands in both the special and the general elections.

So where does that leave the Democrats? They staked everything on winning Cal-50 and Tex-22, and it looks pretty unlikely that they'll win either one. There is only one other Republican congressman who is in serious legal jeopardy: Bob Ney of Ohio (88%). And Ney is very unlikely to be indicted before November, if he is at all.

So far, all that the Democrats have against him is rumor and inuendo, and that's nothing like indictment (as in DeLay's case), and certainly nothing like conviction and la calabooza, as with Cunningham. If the Democrats can't make the Kulture of Korruption theme work in those two cases, I'm very skeptical they can make it work for a smoke-but-no-fire-yet representative like Ney.

When all is said and done, I doubt that this election is going to turn on charges of Republican corruption -- especially with the various Democrats who have suddenly found themselves on the wrong end of the law. I believe it will turn on other issues: policy issues, such as immigration, taxes, and the Iraq war.

It's still possible for the Democrats to take the House back; but they will need to have a real campaign after all. Yet so far, they haven't even made the effort to come up with an agenda, let alone a "Contract With America."

And perhaps even more important here in California, the "Meathead" Amendment, Proposition 82 -- taxing the rich to pay for "free" preschool for all California kids, pushed onto the ballot by Rob "Meathead" Reiner -- went down in flames. Go, team!

This is the ballot proposition where Reiner was caught red-handed (shouldn't that be blue-handed?) funneling at least $23 million of taxpayer money into an ad campaign for his pet Proposition 82; so at least in this case, crime did not pay.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 7, 2006, at the time of 4:04 AM | Comments (19) | TrackBack

May 13, 2006

Like Bullets Off Superman's Chest

Kriminal Konspiracies
Hatched by Dafydd

I've refrained from commenting on the Duke Lacrosse team rape case, mostly because -- at a remove of some 2,500 miles -- all I know is what I read in the papers. Still, I've never before seen a case where literally every piece of physical evidence or independent witness corroboration comes back heavily favoring the defense... in a case where there is already an indictment and it's going to trial.

Here in California, the normal pattern is for various positive results to leak out, followed by furious defense attorneys complaining about leaks and trying to spin their way out of something really damning. Instead, we have the defense attorneys openly telling the press about the negative DNA results (a new round of such negative results today) and the taxi-driver alibi eyewitness (who suddenly finds himself threatened with prosecution if he testifies) and the dormatory card-key evidence and the ATM-camera evidence and the other exotic dancer who didn't see anything and the supposed victim who changed her story (she originally claimed she was raped by a score of white males).

And we have a prosecutor who simply shrugs it all off, refuses to talk, and insists that his rape cases usually don't include any evidence... except, of course, for the word of one exotic dancer who claims to be a victim:

After the first round of tests came back from a state crime lab without a match, Nifong said that in 75 to 80 percent of all sexual assault cases, there is no DNA evidence. In those cases, prosecutors had to proceed "the good old-fashioned way. Witnesses got on the stand and told what happened to them," he said last month.

Facts and physical evidence bounce off Nifong like bullets off Superman's chest. I wonder how many men in Durham, N.C. have been sent to prison as rapists on no other evidence than the unsupported accusation of one woman?

I also wonder what on earch Nifong presented to the grand jury to get them to indict. Now that he has narrowly survived reelection (45% for Nifong vs. 42% for Freda Black, with Keith Bishop, 13%, as the spoiler), how much longer will this Democratic DA continue this case? Will he just wait a couple of months, then dismiss the case, not even caring how many people think he cynically charged innocent boys just to help himself with the black vote and get reelected? Or will he litigate this case to the bitter end, even filing an appeal if a judge tosses it for lack of evidence?

Suppose the alleged victim told Nifong that she wasn't really raped. Would Nifong drop the case then? Or would he bully her into testifying anyway, perhaps by threatening to prosecute her for filing a false police report, perjury, and obstruction of justice if she fails to accuse the two (soon to the be three) boys on the stand? I honestly don't know, and that's pretty frightening.

I see more and more political prosecutions these days. It sure is starting to look like a lot of Democrats and even some Republicans are "solving" their political disagreements by prosecuting their opponents:

  • Rep. Tom DeLay (D-TX) is indicted for a non-crime on the basis of virtually no evidence;
  • Every Republican is routinely accused of being bribed by Jack Abramoff, and it seems as if half the cases have sprouted Democratic DAs to investigate the Republican with an eye towards indictment;
  • The Democrats as much as promise that if they gain control of either body of Congress, they will spend the next two years criminally investigating every aspect of the Bush administration;
  • Democrats in Congress threaten to send half the executive branch to prison for war crimes, "price gouging" on gasoline, the NSA al-Qaeda intercept program, the NSA traffic-analysis program; secret CIA prisons in Europe (that appear to be invisible as well as secret), and mopery with intent to gawk;
  • A prominent Democrat promises to have Karl Rove "frog-marched" out of the White House in handcuffs -- and is then embraced by his fellow liberal Democrats and proclaimed a Hero of the People;
  • And now it sure seems like it's trickling down to purely local races -- case in point, Durham, N.C.

I'm sorry, this is simply dispicable, no matter who does it (though it's mostly the Left). Corrupting the criminal courts is pehaps the most destructive act a politician can undertake, other than collaborating with al-Qaeda. If we lose faith in our judicial system, the entire country will come apart at the seams.

But of what moment is such a potential catastrophe, compared to the urgent necessity of winning elections by any means necessary? I have a feeling this is just the first step of the iceberg: such politically motivated prosecutions will keep increasing (particularly if the Democrats win in November) until it begins to seem the norm. The price of defying the Democrats appears to be rising.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, May 13, 2006, at the time of 6:34 AM | Comments (16) | TrackBack

March 28, 2006

The Strolling Dead

Iraq Matters , Kriminal Konspiracies
Hatched by Dafydd

Here is a bizarre update on our three posts of yesterday: AP's Mainscream Media Bias, Iraq Army, Coalition Begin Mahdi Militia Campaign, and Who Is Policing the Police? We Are.

The American military is now flatly asserting that Sadr-linked Shiite leaders in Iraq moved the bodies and staged the scene to falsely accuse Americans of committing a massacre in the Mustafa "mosque." (This presumably would include gruesomely handcuffing some of the bodies post-mortem, to make it look like execution rather than combat, though the article doesn't get into that level of detail.)

U.S. commanders in Iraq on Monday accused powerful Shi'ite groups of moving the corpses of gunmen killed in battle to encourage accusations that U.S.-led troops massacred unarmed worshippers in a mosque.

"After the fact, someone went in and made the scene look different from what it was. There's been huge misinformation," Lieutenant General Peter Chiarelli, the second-ranking U.S. commander in Iraq, said.

He rejected the accusations of a massacre that prompted the Shi'ite-led government to demand U.S. forces cede control of security but declined to spell out which group he believed moved the bodies.

Well, Big Lizards has no such reticence. All one need do is look at who is screaming the loudest -- and who has the most to gain. "Cui bono?" as the Romans asked: who benefits?

Actually, while LG. Chiarelli wouldn't point a finger (likely because he knows that's beyond his pay grade), he rather roundly hinted:

Chiarelli stood by the U.S. account, disputed by Sadr aides and other Shi'ite leaders but which is broadly in line with police reports and some local witnesses who spoke of a fierce gun battle around the site....

Though he declined to be drawn on the possible involvement of Sadr's Mehdi Army militia, whose political leaders have led condemnation of the raid, Chiarelli said: "I think the backlash has been caused by the folks who set the scene up."

That is, 'the folks who set the scene up are the Sadrites causing the backlash.' Another way to phrase that last sentence is, 'the Sadrites causing the backlash are the folks who set the scene up.' So I think -- like the immortal Barry Goldwater -- in Chiarelli's heart, he knows Big Lizards is right!

Nowadays, we routinely videotape most engagements (many soldiers have helmet cams), so I suspect we can easily prove our case. The only question is -- will Transitional Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari -- the "cui" who most obviously "bonos" -- allow us to?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 28, 2006, at the time of 4:17 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

March 25, 2006

More DeLay DeLights

Kriminal Konspiracies
Hatched by Dafydd

News flash: according to Bob Novak, tarred and feathered lobbyist Jack Abramoff is not only not implicating Tom DeLay (R-TX), he's actually going out of his way to let folks know that he's got nothing on the Texan:

Disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff has advised friends that he has no derogatory information about former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and is not implicating him as part of his plea bargain with federal prosecutors.

Now, Novak could of course be wrong; he's been wrong before. Or Novak could be technically accurate, in that he could be correctly quoting Abramoff (second hand); yet Abramoff could be spoofing his friends and still be singing like a canary about all the supposed misdeeds of Tom DeLay.

But I've always been skeptical about the suggestion -- rampant in the blogosphere on both Left and Right -- that Tom DeLay was going to be brought down by some huge revelation of corruption from Jack Abramoff. From the very beginning, I have thought the "connection" was based upon nothing deeper than the gleeful belief among liberals (and the secret fear among conservatives) that DeLay was really guilty of all the stuff obsessed Inspector Javert Ronnie Earle alleged -- and therefore DeLay is a Kriminal -- and Jack Abramoff was a Kriminal -- so they must have been Kriminally Konspiring with each other... it only stands to reason!

Shame (as always) on the Left for smearing a man for no reason other than pique that he broke up their little Texas gerrymander that gave Democrats a majority of congressmen -- even though the state was overwhelmingly Republican. And shame too on the Right for being such cowards and poltroons that they rushed to join the smear campaign, hoping to be spared attacks on themselves.

Evidence may still emerge that DeLay is somehow involved with Jack Abramoff's payola machine. But we've been awful long on accusations and mighty short on evidence for months now. If truth means anything to Republicans, I think it's time to start sticking up for Tom DeLay's right to be considered innocent until proven guilty... not just in the courtroom but in our hearts as well.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 25, 2006, at the time of 2:09 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

December 5, 2005

DeLay Okay Today, I'd Say

Kriminal Konspiracies
Hatched by Dafydd

The first shoe dropped on the head of obsessed District Attorney Ronnie Earle today, as Texas Judge Pat Priest threw out one of the two felony charges against Tom DeLay. Priest declined to throw out the second charge on the legal grounds that DeLay's attorney, Dick DeGuerin of Houston, had offered. But this simply clears the deck for a subsequent motion that Priest will now hear, calling for the second charge also to be thrown out because of prosecutorial misconduct.

DeGuerin had asked to have the indictments dismissed because of prosecutorial misconduct. Priest said he would hear that motion only if he upheld the indictments against the legal challenges. [Emphasis added.]

Ordinarily, such motions are pro-forma; but in this particular case, Ronnie Earle -- the "Inspector Javert" of Travis County -- engaged in such egregious and obvious personal targetting of Tom DeLay that the misconduct motion is probably the stronger of the two. Earle had to run through three separate grand juries before finally finding one that was willing to return an indictment that wasn't invalid on its face. The second grand jury actually refused to indict after hearing the evidence... a fact that was not revealed to the third. The third grand jury finally indicted after only hearing four hours of testimony.

And then it turned out that Earle's major piece of evidence, a document supposedly detailing a list of Texas politicians that the Republican National State Elections Committee was allegedly supposed to funnel money to on behalf of Tom DeLay's Texans for a Republican Majority PAC, did not actually exist. The DA's office didn't actually have this alleged document. Here is how I described the stunning lapse in an earlier post:

He was unable to produce "said" document. Not that he didn't produce A document; he simply said he was "unable to authoritatively confirm" that it was in fact THE document mentioned in the indictment. However, he rallied, the document he produced was "factually similar" to the document upon which the entire indictment rested!

Brian Wilson reported that the document contained names of several Texas politicians, some of whom had received money from the RNSEC and some of whom had not. I suppose this is "factually similar" to the actual document they allege existed in that both are pieces of paper, both have words printed on them, and both contain lists of names of prominent Texans. I eagerly await testimony from an eyewitness who claims he saw someone in a conspiratorial meeting... he won't be able to swear it was actually Tom DeLay, but it was surely someone who was "factually similar" to DeLay, in that he was a male and had some funny sort of accent.

Read all about it here and here, on Big Lizards, of course -- your one-slog blogging center for DeLay DeLights.

The primary legal reason that DeGeurin offered for quashing the money-laundering charge, the one that remains, was such a technicality that I don't think I would have thrown it out on those grounds myself:

[T]he definition of money laundering did not include checks until 2005. TRMPAC transferred the $190,000 in corporate money to the RNC by using a check.

Oh, puh-leez! This is definitely one you argue to a judge, not a jury, because a jury would probably leap right out of the jury box and pummel you with their notebooks, if that were your only defense.

But now the decks have been cleared. DeGuerin will certainly now ask Judge Priest to hear the misconduct motion... and on that one, I think there is an excellent chance Tom DeLay will prevail. To allow this to go forward gives political DAs a green light to keep empaneling grand jury after grand jury, until they finally get one that gives them the results they demand.

So don't let the mainstream media spin you into losing heart, thinking that DeLay "suffered a blow" that "dashed his hopes." The legal problems have taken their toll on Earle's folly, and now we move to the ethical problems. As far as Ronnie Earlie is concerned, as they used to say on the old Batman TV show, the wildest is yet to come.

So tune in after the next ruling -- same moonbat time, same moonbat channel!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 5, 2005, at the time of 4:23 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

November 22, 2005

"Hello, Bernie Goldberg?"

Kriminal Konspiracies , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

Let's see how many blatant instances of anti-Tom-DeLay bias we can find in this one short article....

Judge puts off ruling on Delay dismissal
Nov 22, 2005
By Jeff Franks

Title's innocuous enough. Let's look at the first paragraph.

AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) - Attorneys for U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay sought the immediate dismissal of conspiracy and money laundering charges against the once-powerful Republican on Tuesday, but a Texas judge said he would not rule for two weeks in the case that has derailed DeLay's political career.

Wow. So the case didn't just impede DeLay's career, or put it on hold, or even jeopardize it... it derailed it! What a train wreck. How can Tom DeLay ever recover from such a mortal blow?

Judge Pat Priest, new to the case after DeLay complained the previous judge was too close to the Democratic Party, also said he was unlikely to hold a trial before year's end if he did not throw out the indictments.

What a whiner that DeLay must be. Of course, the chief judge in Austin did actually agree with DeLay's complaint, but we don't need to get into that much detail, do we?

"This is not the only thing on my plate," he said.

...He said, wagging a finger in DeLay's face. Actually, I suspect the only finger-wagging here is by Mr. Franks.

In the nearly three-hour hearing on DeLay's case, his attorney, Dick DeGuerin, repeated assertions that DeLay had broken no laws and the indictment against him was flawed because of legal technicalities.

Yes. Technicalities such as "no crime occurred and no crime is charged," which is what DeGuerin actually argued.

The charges are part of a widening political scandal around DeLay, who has been accused of several ethical violations in recent years and whose former top aide and press secretary, Michael Scanlon, pleaded guilty on Monday to conspiracy to bribe public officials in a separate case in Washington.

Scanlon, after leaving DeLay's staff in 2000, was a partner with lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who is being investigated for bilking American Indian tribes of millions of dollars for legislative help with their gambling casinos.

Say, where there's smoke... there's usually a lot of hot air. I love that Scanlon angle: the guy leaves DeLay, then gets in trouble -- and that's part of Tom DeLay's "widening political scandal." Never before have I seen a more artful use of guilt by disassociation.

Whew, is there a single point in these two paragraphs that is in any way germaine to this case? Oh, wait, here's something substantial:

Abramoff is also being probed for treating politicians, including DeLay, to lavish trips and perks that may have violated ethics rules in the House of Representatives.

"Politicians" including members of both political parties. But that's a minor quibble compared to the urgent necessity of singling DeLay out as particularly corrupt.

DeLay's Texans for a Republican Majority political action committee helped Republicans win control of the Texas Legislature for the first time since the post-Civil War Reconstruction era. Under DeLay's guidance, the legislature then redrew congressional districts to increase the number of Republicans elected to Congress from Texas.

Waiter! A little context, please? Prior to the redistricting, Texas, one of the Reddest states in the Union, actually had a congressional delegation that was majority Democratic, due to gerrymandering. The district boundaries were so ludicrous that they more or less resembled a plate of spaghetti (which reminds me, I'd better start fixing dinner). Thanks to Tom DeLay, the Republican voters of Texas are now represented by a majority Republican delegation to Congress. Quelle dommage!

This might well be a new bias record, even in the difficult Reuters division. Keep up the good work, Mr. Franks. If you ever want to make the jump to CNN, I understand they're still looking for a replacement for Eason Jordan.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 22, 2005, at the time of 8:55 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

November 21, 2005

DeLay Hearing Tomorrow

Kriminal Konspiracies
Hatched by Dafydd

Rep. Tom DeLay (R-TX) will get his first opportunity tomorrow to argue that the bogus indictment against him by obsessed Democratic Texas D.A. Ronnie Earle should be dismissed for prosecutorial misconduct. That will give us our first opportunity to see how the wind is blowing, now that Earle's pet judge has been removed from the case.

We will of course blog it at Big Lizards when there is a decision (which may come some days later); this is just a heads-up!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 21, 2005, at the time of 6:01 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 1, 2005

DeLay DeLight

Kriminal Konspiracies
Hatched by Dafydd

Rep. Tom DeLay (D-TX) won the first round today of his epic toe-to-toe squareoff with obsessed political prosecutor Ronnie Earle when the judge hearing the recusal motion, C. W. Duncan, decided that Bob Perkins, the "MoveOn" judge, would not be hearing the case as originally planned. Instead, DeLay will get a different judge... presumably one who is not a longtime Democratic activist who had donated to an organization and groups that actively sought to remove Tom DeLay from the House by any means necessary.

It isn't merely that Perkins is a Democrat, it's that he has been a Democratic activist, donating thousands of dollars to the cause -- including $200 to the extremist left-wing group MoveOn.org, which in particular has had a vendetta against Tom DeLay for years. From the New York Times on October 21st (free registration required to read article):

In respectful tones, Mr. DeLay's lead defense lawyer, Dick DeGuerin, noted that Judge Perkins had given money to, among others, MoveOn.org, a liberal group that Mr. DeGuerin said had been "selling T-shifts with Mr. DeLay's mug shot on it...."

(MoveOn.org quickly denied that it had been selling DeLay T-shirts. "DeGuerin has either bad information or lied in court," said Tom Matzzie, the organization's Washington director. "Americans are sick of the corruption in Congress and think it will be a better place without Tom DeLay.")

In court filings this week, Mr. DeGuerin listed dozens of contributions that Judge Perkins had made since 2000 to "causes and persons opposed to Tom DeLay," including $1,175 to Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, last year's Democratic presidential nominee; $400 to the Democratic National Committee and $200 to MoveOn.org.

(Incidentally, nice defense, Mr. Matzzie: the claim, true or false, that MoveOn.org had been "selling T-shifts with Mr. DeLay's mug shot on it" was intended to show that they had a very strong and visceral hatred of Tom DeLay in particular. So in the course of vigorously denying this, the Washington director simply could not stop himself from tacking on a completely gratuitous statement of visceral hatred of Tom Delay as the embodiment of "corruption" in Congress. If I ever want to get the chair, I'll hire Tom Matzzie as my attorney.)

In contrast to Mr. Matzzie, DeLay's attorney, Dick DeGuerin, made a point that he was not accusing Judge Perkins of any wrongdoing, only that his liberal activism created the appearance of a political trial. This seems to have gotten under Ronnie Earle's skin:

District Attorney Ronnie Earle, who heads the criminal investigation into DeLay's fund-raising activities, watched in the courtroom while his deputies questioned witnesses. He got up at the end of the hearing and chided DeLay's attorneys for repeatedly calling it a "political case."

"This is not a political case; this is a criminal case," Earle said. "Mr. DeLay stands charged with a felony."

Yes... a felony indictment that Earle had to go through three grand juries to obtain -- and finally did so only on the basis of a critical piece of evidence that Earle has now admitted he does not actually have. Thank goodness Mr. Earle has only disinterested justice at heart.

And now he will have to play out his obsession before a disinterested judge.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 1, 2005, at the time of 2:25 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

October 27, 2005

Double Sourced, Double Trouble

Iraq Matters , Kriminal Konspiracies
Hatched by Dafydd

It is well known that Sens. Norm Coleman and Carl Levin believe that Respect Party MP George Galloway lied under oath when he testified before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs; when Galloway was being questioned by the two -- and he was unfurling his usual sneer and condescension -- he seems to have forgotten that in addition to sitting on that committee, the two were also the chair and ranking member of one of its subcommittees: the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

Galloway has responded with predictable bravado, practically daring Investigations to refer him for indictment. Per the Belmont Club: "I am ready to fly to the US today, if necessary, to face such a charge because it is simply false," he boasted. But perhaps he'll cash in those plane tickets and plan an extended holiday in Switzerland instead after reading the upcoming report by Paul Volcker, who has hardly been considered a serious investigator of U.N. corruption -- given that he reports directly to Kofi Annan, one of key suspects in the case. Surprisingly, however, Volcker's report strikes hard against a number of targets that the Turtle Bay Illuminati would have preferred be protected... including a certain Respect Party MP from Bethnal Green and Bow (HT Dirty Dingus for correcting Galloway's district):

Among those named in the report as receiving oil vouchers that could be sold for a commission were British lawmaker George Galloway, former French UN Ambassador Jean-Bernard Merimee, former French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua and Russian ultranationalist leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky.

So it's not just those radical right wingers, Norm Coleman (R-MN) and Carl Levin (D-MI)... it's former Chairman of the Federal Reserve and current Elliot Ness of the United Nations, Paul Volcker. Maybe it's time for George of the Bungle to drop the ludicrous posturing and raspberry blowing and simply confess his guilt and expiate his sins, else he may get the opportunity to see how his rhetoric falls on the ears of an American jury.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 27, 2005, at the time of 3:54 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

October 15, 2005

Earle-y to Bed -- and Stay There

Elections , Kriminal Konspiracies , Media Madness , Politics - National
Hatched by Dafydd

Yesterday, on Special Report With Brit Hume, Brian Wilson had the most fascinating report yet on the growing national embarassment: the Persecution and Assassination of Tom DeLay, As Performed By the Inmates of the Travesty County District Attorney's Office, Under the Direction of the Marquis de Earle (with only the most muted apologies to Peter Weiss).

The most important piece of evidence on which Crusading D.A. Ronnie Earle based his multiple attempts to properly indict Rep. DeLay is single a piece of paper. After Earle found that DeLay's political action committee, Texans for a Republican Majority PAC (TRMPAC), sent that now famous $190,000 check to the Republican National State Elections Committee (RNSEC), the only way that Earle could allege "money laundering" was to claim that the transaction was a sham whose only purpose was to disguise "soft" money being funneled indirectly into state campaigns in defiance of Texas law. His only piece of evidence to that effect was that, as the indictment puts it:

[O]n or about the thirteenth day of September, 2002, in Washington D.C., the defendant, James Walter Ellis, did provide the said Terry Nelson with a document that contained the names of several candidates for the Texas House of Representatives that were supported by Texans for a Republican Majority PAC, namely, Todd Baxter, Dwayne Bohac, Glenda Dawson, Dan Flynn, Rick Green, Jack Stick, and Larry Taylor, to whom the defendant, James Walter Ellis, requested and proposed that the Republican National Committee and the Republican National State Elections Committee make political contributions in exchange for the committees' receipt of the proceeds from the aforesaid check, and that contained amounts that the defendant, James Walter Ellis, and Texans for a Republican Majority PAC suggested be contributed to each of the said candidates;

Yesterday, Brian Wilson reports, the Travis County Assistant D.A. was in court, and he was asked to produce this critical document, which had been subpoenaed by the attorneys for Ellis and DeLay.

He was unable to produce "said" document. Not that he didn't produce A document; he simply said he was "unable to authoritatively confirm" that it was in fact THE document mentioned in the indictment. However, he rallied, the document he produced was "factually similar" to the document upon which the entire indictment rested!

Brian Wilson reported that the document contained names of several Texas politicians, some of whom had received money from the RNSEC and some of whom had not. I suppose this is "factually similar" to the actual document they allege existed in that both are pieces of paper, both have words printed on them, and both contain lists of names of prominent Texans. I eagerly await testimony from an eyewitness who claims he saw someone in a conspiratorial meeting... he won't be able to swear it was actually Tom DeLay, but it was surely someone who was "factually similar" to DeLay, in that he was a male and had some funny sort of accent.

I wanted to link to an article about this latest Keystone Kops escapade, but amazingly enough, at this point, I cannot find a single article about this absurdity -- not even on FoxNews.com. Since they actually had video of the incident as it unfolded and discussion with the attorneys right after they came out of the courthouse, I would find it hard to believe it never occurred; but in the mad world of the MSM, even being caught on videotape doesn't mean something really exists: it only exists when one of the media news managers decides it exists. Perhaps I hallucinated the entire thing.

Here we have a story that even the MSM agrees is important: the indictment of the second most powerful man in the House of Representatives. And five years after Ronnie Earle began hounding DeLay, three years after the alleged crime of "money laundering" occurred, at least a year after the D.A.'s office began investigating this particular transaction, and eleven days after obtaining the new, improved indictment from the third grand jury to investigate, we discover that the District Attorney's office doesn't even have the critical piece of evidence that underpins their entire case.

But evidently, that's just not news.

Sad to say, except for those of you who watched Brit Hume last night, "you read it here first."

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 15, 2005, at the time of 2:51 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

October 5, 2005

Ron and Tom's Bogus Journey, part Deux

Elections , Kriminal Konspiracies , Politics - National
Hatched by Dafydd

Once again, Democrats prove that, contrary to what some may think, it really is possible to fall off the floor.

If you -- I mean they -- today, Ronnie Earle -- oh for heaven's sake, just read this, from the Austin American Statesman:

Prosecutor Reveals Third Grand Jury Had Refused DeLay Indictment
Newly impaneled grand jury returned money-laundering charge within hours
By Laylan Copelin, American-Statesman Staff
October 4th, 2005

A Travis County grand jury last week refused to indict former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay as prosecutors raced to salvage their felony case against the Sugar Land Republican. [emphasis added]

In a written statement Tuesday, Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle acknowledged that prosecutors presented their case to three grand juries — not just the two they had discussed — and one grand jury refused to indict DeLay. When questions arose about whether the state's conspiracy statute applied to the first indictment returned last Wednesday, prosecutors presented a new money-laundering charge to second grand jury on Friday because the term of the initial grand jury had expired.

Working on its last day Friday, the second grand jury refused to indict DeLay. Normally, a "no-bill" document is available at the courthouse after such a decision. No such document was released Tuesday.

Ronnie Earle claims that after prosecuting the case with single-minded zeal -- "obsession" would be a better word -- for literally years, he suddenly discovered "new evidence" over the weekend, coincidentally just after fatal problems arose with the first indictment from the first grand jury, and just after a second grand jury refused to return an indictment. Amazing how perfectly that worked out. God must be in Ronnie Earle's back pocket.

DeLay's legal team, led by Houston lawyer Dick DeGuerin, has been taking to the airwaves to portray Earle as an incompetent prosecutor who is pursuing DeLay only as a political vendetta.

"It just gets worse and worse," DeGuerin said. "He's gone to three grand juries over four days. Where does it stop?" [emphasis added]

I find it quite telling that the first grand jury, which returned the first (flawed) indictment, and the third, which returned the second indictment four hours after being seated on their first day, were both empaneled by Democratic judges; but the second grand jury, the one that heard Earle out but refused his call to indict (a very rare thing in a venue where the defense isn't even allowed to participate) was empaneled by a Republican judge.

Is it perhaps just barely possible that there might be something to this "partisan" charge after all?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 5, 2005, at the time of 1:26 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

October 4, 2005

Ron and Tom's Bogus Journey

Elections , Kriminal Konspiracies , Politics - National
Hatched by Dafydd

I have now read all the way through the second indictment of Tom DeLay by Ronnie Earle, the obsessesed "Inspector Javert" of Travis County, TX. In fact, I read through it several times. And I'm completely befuddled.

Now, I'm what's known in the Navy as a "sea lawyer." That is, I'm not an attorney, but I sometimes play one in my own mind. So I may be unaware of case law that might clarify this indictment further. But so far as I can make out, reading the indictment and the sections of the Texas Election Code that it cites, it doesn't really even allege a crime... and in any event, the connection to Tom DeLay is as tenuous as gossamer.

DeLay is only mentioned twice in the indictment:

John Dominick Colyandro, James Walter Ellis, and Thomas Dale DeLay, the defendants herein, with intent that a felony be committed... did agree with one or more persons... that they or one or more of them engage in conduct that would constitute the aforesaid offense, and the defendant, John Dominick Colyandro, the defendant, James Walter Ellis, and the Republican National Committee, did perform an overt act in pursuance of the agreement....

[T]he defendants, John Dominick Colyandro, James Walter Ellis, and Thomas Dale DeLay, did knowingly conduct, supervise, and facilitate a transaction involving the proceeds of criminal activity that constituted an offense classified as a felony under the laws of this state....

In both cases, the only "law of that state" cited is the Texas Election Code, chapter 253, subchapter D. I didn't have any trouble finding that code section online, either (subchapter D begins at 253.091).

Sec. 253.104. CONTRIBUTION TO POLITICAL PARTY. (a) A corporation or labor organization may make a contribution from its own property to a political party to be used as provided by Chapter 257.

Chapter 257 lists the detailed restrictions in section 257.002:

Sec. 257.002. REQUIREMENTS RELATING TO CORPORATE OR LABOR UNION CONTRIBUTIONS. (a) A political party that accepts a contribution authorized by Section 253.104 may use the contribution only to:

(1) defray normal overhead and administrative or operating costs incurred by the party; or

(2) administer a primary election or convention held by the party.

(b) A political party that accepts contributions authorized by Section 253.104 shall maintain the contributions in a separate account.

In other words, money contributed by corporations is "soft money," which can't be used directly for campaigns; and parties must maintain separate accounts to segregate "soft money" from "hard money" (contributions from individuals). This is exactly the same as the federal prohibition -- not surprising, since the Texas statute was modeled on the federal statute.

But the Republican National State Elections Committee (RNSEC) responds that this is exactly how they handled these transactions, and indeed, all such soft-money transactions, since they must obey federal law themselves. They had two separate accounts, one for "soft money," the other for "hard money". The money from Texans for a Republican Majority PAC (TRMPAC), which came from corporations, went into the "soft money" account. But the money sent back for use in political campaigns came from the "hard money" account.

Ronnie Earle calls this "money laundering." Now, I don't know about Texas, but to me, money laundering can only occur if the initial source of the money is itself criminal. I've never before heard the term used to mean money legally donated to a political party or political action committee.

Also, don't you have to show that the money at the end of the process is the same money that was criminal at the beginning -- that is, that there is no separate and distinct origin of the end money? But in this case, when the RNSEC donated money to the Texas campaigns, the money came from their separate "hard money" account collected from specific, named, and reported individual donors. It was not the same money.

Well, maybe there technically wasn't any crime; but what about the spirit of the law? Did this agreement attempt to circumvent the law? Again, the answer is emphatically No, it did not: Texas set up a procedure to follow for corporate/union money on the one hand and money from individual donors on the other; all that TRMPAC did was follow those rules.

In fact, it appears that Ronnie Earle has charged the defendants with willfully conspiring to obey the law.

The purpose of campaign finance reform is twofold: to strictly limit the amount of money that can be donated by corporations and unions to campaigns, and to sever the direct connection between candidates and deep-pocket donors. The money sent into the Texas campaigns came from individual donors, not corporations; every dollar sent to Texas was a dollar that could not be sent to any other state or federal campaign. Those Texas corporations could have contributed a billion dollars, and the RNSEC still would not have had one, single extra dime to spend on political campaigns!

And as far as severability, Earle's indictment doesn't even allege that a single candidate was told "pssst! this money is actually from such-and-such a corporation." There is no allegation they were even told it was from TRMPAC. So far as I can tell, the candidates would only know they had gotten money from the Republican Party.

Well how about coordination? Does the list of proposed recipients of the money that TRMPAC sent to the RNSEC make it into money laundering? Again, that seems quite a reach: the whole point of money laundering is to conceal the source of criminal proceeds or their destination; yet both the point of origin (XYZ Corporation) and the destination (RNSEC) were not only not concealed, they were reported to the Federal Elections Commission.

The final absurdity is the contortion that Ronnie Earle had to go through in order to extend the indictment to Tom DeLay himself. Every single act alleged in the indictment is the act of somebody other than Tom DeLay; hence the conspiracy charge... Earle has to prove that Tom DeLay "did agree" to do all the things that other people did, which Earle alleges were illegal.

But unless Earle has some explosive evidence that nobody else has heard about, the only thing Tom DeLay agreed to do is found a political action committee; he left all the day-to-day decisions to the people who actually ran it.

This indictment is no less tendentious (and ridiculous) than the first; the only difference is that Earle has added "money laundering," so he can threaten DeLay with a 99-year sentence. A bogus travesty has just been converted into a double-secret bogus travesty, if I can mix my movie metaphors.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 4, 2005, at the time of 4:29 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

September 29, 2005

DeLay DeFense?

Kriminal Konspiracies
Hatched by Dafydd

On Special Report with Brit Hume last night, Hume mentioned something that he had been told by (I believe) the Republican National Committee (RNC) about the Tom DeLay case. Now, I'm not a lawyer (though I do play one sometimes when I want to get a good deal on a used car); but if this is true, it sure sounds like a great defense to me.

DeLay appears to be accused of setting up a conspiracy to collect funds from corporations, launder them somehow through the RNC in Washington D.C., and then illegally distribute them to Texas candidates in defiance of Texas state law. I say "appears" because the indictment obtained by Ronnie Earle from a Travis County grand jury is so vague that Tom DeLay might actually stand accused of mopery with intent to gawk, for all I know.

As best I can gather, Travis County, TX District Attorney Ronnie Earle claims that the Texas Republican Majority Political Action Committee (TRMPAC), set up by U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay and others, collected money from corporations, sent the money to the RNC, which sent it to the RNC-State Elections Committee (RNC-SEC), which then (charges Ronnie Earle's grand jury) sent it back to Texas into the coffers of various Republican candidates for state and federal office. It's evidently against the law in Texas for corporate money to be used in political campaigns. DeLay, of course, denies the charges.

Assuming I have the gist of the indictment, here is what Brit Hume says the RNC told him. They have, they say, two separate accounts (simplifying here); or possibly the separate accounts are at the RNC-SEC; Brit wasn't quite clear. Since some states allow corporate money to be used in elections while others don't, the RNC says it (or else the RNC-SEC) set up two separate accounts: one for corporate contributions, the other for hard-money contributions from individuals.

He said that they said (hearsay alert!) that what actually happened was that TRMPAC collected the corporate donations; it sent them to the RNC, which trasferred them to the RNC-SEC, which put them in the corporate account. The money in that account was then distributed to states that had no laws against corporate or out-of-state money being used in elections. Then, to get money to the Republicans running in Texas, the RNC-SEC took funds from the separate, hard-money (individual-donor) account and used those to contribute to campaigns of various politicians in Texas.

Tom DeLay himself, who made an unexpected appearance on Special Report, said that after setting up TRMPAC, he had no involvement in the day-to-day financial transactions, and that he never entered into any agreement about how or where the money would be collected or spent. But leaving that aside, I have a question for any lawyers out there in Lizard Land: assuming "arguendo," as you guys like to say, that what Brit said was true -- that there were two separate accounts, and all the money going from the RNC-SEC into Texas came from the hard-money account (and ultimately from individual donors subject to the $2000 limit), and the corporate money collected in Texas went into other states that had no prohibition against corporate funds going to political campaigns -- assuming that is all correct, would there be any violation of the law underlying this supposed "conspiracy?"

And if there is no underlying criminal act, can a conspiracy charge stand? Can a person be convicted of "conspiring" to perform a legal act?

Finally, Brit said the RNC said that they informed Ronnie Earle of this accounting method, with the two separate accounts; if Earle obtained the indictment by not telling the Travis County grand jury about this accounting arrangement, or by telling them in such a way that they didn't understand what was being done, could Earle himself be in any trouble for abusing his prosecutorial authority?

I won't deny that I hope he would, since I think he's a partisan sleazeball. But I certainly admit I have no clue; this is way too much into the legal weeds for my poor brain, wasted for too many years on logic and mathematics to comprehend all this lawyer stuff.

Free legal opinions, anyone? Please mention if you're a lawyer. I'm particularly going to solicit comments from some lawyer bloggers with whom I have some vague contact... and if none shows up, won't that be embarassing!

(If anybody wants to answer more fully in his own blog, please leave me a trackback so I can go read it. The trackback URL for this post is http://biglizards.net/mt32/mt-tb.cgi/63. Thanks!)

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 29, 2005, at the time of 2:12 AM | Comments (10)

September 28, 2005

Paging Ronnie Earle...

Kriminal Konspiracies , Unuseful Idiots
Hatched by Dafydd

Let me get my thoughts in order here. Today, Rep. Tom DeLay was indicted by District Attorney Ronnie Earle (D-DNC) on charges of conspiracy to violate campaign finance laws because a political action committee, Texans for a Republican Majority, on whose board DeLay serves, accepted some money from some corporations -- and then sent a different amount of money to the Republican National Committee with recommendations of various Texas politicians to whom they might, if they chose, donate money.

The indictment accused DeLay of a conspiracy to "knowingly make a political contribution" in violation of Texas law outlawing corporate contributions. It alleged that DeLay's Texans for a Republican Majority political action committee accepted $155,000 from companies, including Sears Roebuck, and placed the money in an account.

The PAC then wrote a $190,000 check to an arm of the Republican National Committee and provided the committee a document with the names of Texas State House candidates and the amounts they were supposed to received in donations, the indictment said.

The indictment included a copy of the check.

Ah, but did it also include a copy of the contributions to Texans for a Republican Majority by ordinary people, not corporations? Did that amount exceed $190,000?

John Hinderaker, over on Power Line, has much, much more on the DeLay "indictment." As usual, John nails it.

Democrats are screaming that DeLay, being in charge of the PAC, just shoulder the legal blame for any irregularities committed (or even alleged to have been committed) by the PAC. In short, they want Tom DeLay sent to prison, or at least expelled from the House.

Over on the other channel, we have two aides to Charles Schumer, Katie Barge and Lauren Weiner, who allegedly fraudulently obtained a credit report on Maryland Lt. Governor Michael Steele, a likely Republican contender to steal away the Senate seat being vacated by five-term Democratic Sen. Paul Sarbanes -- first elected to the Senate the year Jimmy Carter stumbled into the presidency.

Schumer Staffers Eyed in Probe of Political ID Theft
By Deborah Orin
Bureau Chief
New York Post
September 22, 2005

Two staffers on a Democratic political committee headed by Sen. Chuck Schumer are being investigated by the FBI for an alleged dirty trick — getting a Republican candidate's credit report illegally, officials confirmed yesterday....

Sources familiar with the situation said the [Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee's] head of research, Katie Barge, and a deputy, Lauren Weiner, got the credit report by using Steele's Social Security number, which they say they obtained from public documents....

The U.S. Attorney's office confirmed that it was alerted by the committee but declined to say whether it is or could become a target of the probe.

I'm not a lawyer, but if true, this would appear to be a violation of the Schumer-Nelson ID Theft Prevention Bill, which as Captain Ed wryly notes, was introduced by one Sen. Charles Schumer.

So correct me if I've missed something, but here we appear to have the allegation that a couple of aides who work for Chuck Schumer -- Schumer is the chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee -- have committed serious ethical and possibly criminal violations. In response, per Captain Ed (quoting the New York Post), Schumer sent the two on paid vacations:

Phil Singer, a spokesman for the Schumer-headed Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said two staffers were instantly suspended — with pay — in July after admitting they obtained the credit report of Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, who is running for Senate. [emphasis added]

So where, may I ask, are the Democrats screaming for an indictment of Schumer under the same theory by which DeLay was indicted for something allegedly done by a committee he doesn't even head, but on whose board he merely serves?

Where is the Republican Ronnie Earle for the District of Columbia?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 28, 2005, at the time of 3:26 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

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