Archive for March, 2014

Obit watch: March 29, 2014.

Saturday, March 29th, 2014

Jeremiah A. Denton Jr., retired from the Navy as a rear admiral and a former US senator from Alabama.

He was also a war hero.

Over the next seven years and seven months, Commander Denton was held in various prison camps, including the notorious “Hanoi Hilton,” and endured beatings, starvation, torture and more than four years of solitary confinement, including periodic detentions in coffinlike boxes. He and other officers nevertheless maintained a chain of command and a measure of discipline among the prisoners.

And:

The North Vietnamese, who lost face, were even more outraged when they learned that Commander Denton, in the Japanese-taped interview broadcast on American television on May 17, 1966, had blinked out “T-O-R-T-U-R-E.” It was the first confirmation that American prisoners of war were being subjected to atrocities during the Vietnam War.
The commander was beaten all night.

FAQ.

Friday, March 28th, 2014

In case you’re coming into the Leland Yee/Raymond “Shrimp Boy” scandal late, and haven’t been reading this blog or Battleswarm, the LAT has a handy guide to the affair, which answers many of the burning questions (such as “why is he called ‘Shrimp Boy’?”).

(I cannot tell a lie: I enjoy typing Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow. Almost as much as – no, strike that, I enjoy it even more than typing Robert “Ratso” Rizzo.)

Also, in case you were wondering, the California state Senate has suspended Sen. Yee without pay. The same august body has also suspended Sen. Roderick White, who was convicted of perjury and voter fraud, and Sen. Ronald Calderon, indicted on bribery and corruption charges.

Random notes: March 28, 2014.

Friday, March 28th, 2014

Man is released from death row after 46 years, after courts rule that his confession was coerced and evidence against him was fabricated.

Williamson County? No. Texas? No. Japan.

More on Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow. And more. Since I made the observation the other day:

His grandmother coined the “Shrimp Boy” nickname on account of his small stature. Clocking in at 5’5 today, the name stuck.

(And you should also be reading Battleswarm: Lawrence has been able to devote a little more time to his coverage than I have.)

I stumbled across this while looking for “Shrimp Boy” links:

Marilyn Hartman, the 62-year-old woman busted three times for trying to sneak onto a plane at San Francisco International Airport — and arrested another time for hanging around the food court — is back in custody yet again.

I have nothing to say about this story, I just want to insert an obscure reference here:

(Perhaps they could give her a job: maybe keeping people from hanging around the food court.)

Item: Bronze window frames. Bill: $2.38 million. Fun fact: The cost was supposed to be half that. But Tebartz-van Elst, the report shows, really wanted his window frames to be bronze.

(Previously. WP article also contains yet another photo of the bishop’s residence that looks like a Thomas Kinkade painting, but at least this one wasn’t taken with a fish-eye lens.)

It just gets better and better.

Thursday, March 27th, 2014

More information about the charges against Leland Yee is trickling out.

As you may recall from yesterday’s post, Senator Yee advocated “tighter restrictions” on “semi-automatic weapons”. Well, guess what? The charges against Senator Yee include “conspiracy to traffic in firearms”.

The full complaint is available from the SFGate site. By way of Overlawyered, we found a summary from San Francisco Magazine (complete with bonus “The Wire” references!):

…he offered to set up an arms deal with Islamic rebels for $2 million in cash.

[The agent] asked about the availability of shoulder fire missiles or rockets. Senator Yee responded ‘I told him about the rockets and things like that.'”

Tell me about the rockets, George Leland!

“In addition to his relationship with Chow and the Chee Kung Tong, Jackson is also a close associate with, and has a long-time relationship with, Senator Yee. Keith Jackson owns and runs a business called ‘Jackson Consultancy,’ a San Francisco based consulting firm. During the time frame from at least May 2011 through the present, Keith Jackson has been involved in raising campaign funds for Senator Yee.”

I single that out because Keith Jackson is apparently a well known “political consultant” and political figure. And he was a former president of the San Francisco Board of Education. And the charges against him, other than gun trafficking and “wire fraud of honest services”, include involvement in a “murder for hire” conspiracy.

I didn’t link to Overlawyered earlier because I wanted to save the best part for last: Yee was named to the “Gun Violence Prevention Honor Roll” by the Brady Campaign. Seriously, I am not making this stuff up.

Flames! Flames!

Wednesday, March 26th, 2014

State Sen. Leland Yee of San Francisco was arrested Wednesday as part of a public corruption probe after a series of raids by FBI and gang task force officials Wednesday, a law enforcement official told The Times.

Of course, these are just charges, and Senator Yee hasn’t been convicted yet. But I wanted to make note of this arrest, and:

Dan Lieberman, Yee’s press secretary, told The Times his office would not comment on the FBI raids, which were reportedly linked to the arrest Wednesday morning of Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow.

I didn’t insert “Shrimp Boy”; that’s in the actual LAT article.

I’d really like to know how he got that nickname.

More from the SFChron, which describes “Shrimp Boy” as “a notorious former San Francisco gangster”.

In 1992, the Hong Kong-born Chow was indicted with two dozen others on racketeering charges for their alleged involvement in everything from underage prostitution to the international heroin trade.
Chow was subsequently convicted of gun charges and sentenced to 25 years in prison. In 2003, however, he was released after he cut a deal with the government to testify against a high-ranking associate.

So “Shrimp Boy” served time on gun charges, and is apparently a close friend of Senator Yee. By the way:

Yee has drawn both praise and controversy for his efforts to tighten restrictions on semiautomatic rifles.

Heh. Heh. Heh.

You don’t say (part 2)

Wednesday, March 26th, 2014

The rent is too damn high.

Rising rents in Manhattan have forced out many retailers, from pizza joints to flower shops. But the rapidly escalating cost of doing business there is also driving out bookstores, threatening the city’s sense of self as the center of the literary universe, the home of the publishing industry and a place that lures and nurtures authors and avid readers.

You don’t say.

Tuesday, March 25th, 2014

Five bidders have come forward with proposals to keep the distressed Long Island College Hospital in Brooklyn running as a hospital, but none of them have licenses to run hospitals in New York, which could prove a significant hurdle, hospital experts said Monday.

Yes, I suppose “not having a license” would qualify as “a significant hurdle”. More:

Only one of the five, Prime Healthcare Foundation, the nonprofit arm of a for-profit hospital turnaround company, actually runs hospitals. But those hospitals are in other states, so Prime would have to go through the same process of applying for a New York license as the others.

(Previously. Previously.)

Dear Prudence…

Monday, March 24th, 2014

A Slate Plus membership will give readers special access to the site’s editors and writers, as well as members-only discussions with Emily Yoffe, Slate’s Dear Prudence advice columnist. Members will also be invited to give advice on which politicians or entertainers they would like to see profiled.

This will almost be worth $5 a month to watch.

Random notes: March 24, 2014.

Monday, March 24th, 2014

What does the fox say?

“I resign.”

Rhode Island Speaker of the House Gordon D. Fox, enveloped by an apparent criminal investigation, announced Saturday that he has resigned his leadership post.
He fell in a lightning-quick series of events that began Friday with investigators, armed with search warrants in a probe of an undisclosed matter, taking boxes of evidence from his State House office and his East Side home.

The paper of record describes agents “carting out boxes and bags labeled ‘evidence.'” This raises some questions, at least for me: did they write “evidence” on the side with a Sharpie? Or do these boxes and bags come pre-labeled as “evidence”? Can you buy “evidence” boxes and bags from your local law enforcement supply store?

(Isn’t it kind of cartoonish when you think about it? Sort of like Scrooge McDuck carrying around a big bag with a “$” on it, only instead you’ve got a neatly attired IRS agent with a bag that says “Evidence”?)

So much for that. Looks like I owe Lawrence $5. See if I buy one of your damn t-shirts now, Gonzaga.

(Still hopeful for those Cubs, though.)

City That Squandered Baseball Relishes Brief Return

“Squandered Baseball”? Well, I suppose that’s one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is that the Expos made unreasonable demands after the 1995 baseball strike and drove fans away.

Conspiracy theory of the day.

Saturday, March 22nd, 2014

Aerolinee Itavia Flight 870. I would have been 15 at the time, and I don’t remember hearing about this incident. Even better, the wrangling is still going on.

In brief, Flight 870 went down on June 27, 1980. It was a DC-9 flying between Bologna and Palermo, and crashed into the Tyrrhenian Sea, killing everyone.

Much of the wreckage was recovered, and there was an investigation. But the Italian government never released any kind of official accident report.

In 1989, the “Parliamentary Commission on Terrorism” issued a statement that Flight 870 was brought down in “an act of war, real war undeclared, a covert international police action against our country…”

Four generals in the Italian Air Force were charged with “high treason”; they were accused of obstructing the investigation. Two were acquitted; the other two were convicted, but their convictions were overturned on appeal.

Last year (yes, 2013), the Italian courts ruled that Flight 870 was shot down by a missile, and the government of Italy was ordered to compensate the families of the survivors.

Here’s the Wikipedia entry, and here’s the episode of “Air Crash Investigation” that set me on this path.

So what really happened? There seem to be three theories, two of which are missile related. Theory #1: Flight 870 was accidentally shot down during a joint Italian/U.S./French training exercise.

Theory #2: Flight 870 was shot down during a military mission also involving the French, U.S., and Italian forces. Specifically, the claim is that NATO forces were trying to kill Muammar al-Gaddafi (or some other “important Libyan politician”, as if there were any other “important Libyan politicians” in 1980), there was a dogfight with the Libyan Air Force, and Flight 870 was hit by a stray missile.

Theory #3, and the theory that seems to be endorsed by the air crash investigators and “Air Crash Investigation” (but notably not the Italian government): a terrorist bomb. The investigation team states that this theory is backed by the technical evidence they collected from the recovered wreckage. However:

It must be considered that the flight was delayed outbound from Bologna by almost three hours, so apparently the timer would have been set to actually cause an explosion at Palermo airport, or on a further flight of the same plane.

It also must be considered that if there was a device, it may not have been on a timer. It could have been set to be triggered at a specific altitude, or even at a certain time after a specific altitude was reached. On the other hand, I’m not sure how easy it would have been to do these things with 1980 technology. Also:

Parts of the discovered wreckage showed telltale signs of an outside explosion – some outer skin parts were shown to have blast residue on the outside with the metal curved inwards, uncharacteristic of a bomb (which would have curved the metal outwards as the force would have come from inside the plane outwards instead of out to in, like in the case of a missile). However, other pieces – especially the area around the rear lavatory, showed many signs of a bomb that exploded inside, such as the deformities of the surrounding support beams situated around the lavatory in question.

I’d really really like to see a cite for that.

And what is any good conspiracy theory without a list of “mysterious deaths”?

Pithy quote, from the “ACI” episode: “I’m sorry, but Italy is a dreadful place to have an aviation accident. If you want the truth you’re less likely to find it there than just about anywhere else in the world.”

Random notes: March 22, 2014.

Saturday, March 22nd, 2014

Which United States city is the “Bank Robbery Capital of the World”?

(Bzzzzzt!) Oh, I’m sorry. That was a trick question. If you answered “Los Angeles”, you would have been correct for a long time.

But last year, San Francisco actually passed LA.

The seven-county region covered by the FBI’s L.A. office saw a mere 212 bank robberies in 2013, reaching a low not seen since the 1960s. That’s less than a tenth of what it was at its height in the early ’90s, when the region logged 2,641.

(And I’ve mentioned this before, but Where the Money Is is a swell book that I enthusiastically recommend.)

Gonzaga!

A sixth-round pick?

Complete babbling.

Friday, March 21st, 2014

I was planning to steal a lyric from “Radio Free Europe” for this post title. Then I went to look up the actual lyrics, and found this; “complete babbling” seems like it fits just as well here.

By way of Big Jim, I found a rather interesting LA Weekly article on the latest goings-on at Pacifica Radio, about which I’ve written before. Some highlights:

On March 13, after weeks of rumors, Pacifica Radio’s board of directors voted to fire its executive director, Summer Reese, during what was essentially a conference call…
And so it was that Reese marched to the Pacifica national office in Berkeley on March 17, bolt cutters in hand, removed a padlock placed on the front doors over the weekend, and essentially occupied the building. When newly appointed interim executive director Margy Wilkinson showed up, Reese and 12 of her compatriots — including Reese’s mother, a longtime anti-war and civil rights activist — refused to let Wilkinson, her husband and two of her allies pass.

Pacifica’s New York station, WBAI, is even worse off, with too few listeners to register on the Arbitron rankings, and is all but bankrupt. Last year, most of the staff was laid off, including the entire news department.
Making matters worse, the federal government, via the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, is withholding Pacifica’s grant money, thanks to the network’s “failure to provide documentation” for a 2012 audit.

“We’re no longer a radio network, we’re a sad political glee club,” [Ian] Masters [a KPFK host – DB] says. “We desperately need adult supervision.”

Reese admits to having no Social Security number, saying she is legally exempt because of a “religious objection.” When asked her religion, she says only that she’s a Christian; when asked whether she pays income taxes, she says only, “I don’t think that’s relevant to the article.”

While KCRW holds two nine-day-long fund drives each year, KPFK holds a monthlong fund drive every three months — meaning one out of every three days is a pledge drive, days full of DVDs and nutritional supplements and get-rich-quick schemes such as the “Wealth Propulsion Challenge,” an online course that promotes “how to get rich holistically” — and quickly — via “subconscious reprogramming.”

Within a few months, Democracy Now! was privatized. In what may have been a reward for Goodman’s support of the revolution, she was handed complete ownership of the show. For free. In fact, they paid her to take it, handing Goodman a contract worth hundreds of thousands of dollars a year — and gave her an automatic 4 percent raise every year, regardless of the size of her listenership or the money she raised…
Today, Pacifica’s debts amount to roughly $3 million; $2 million of that is owed to Democracy Now!, which is also the name of an independent nonprofit run by Goodman.