Flaming hyenas watch.

The LAT has gotten really obnoxious about viewing articles on their site with ad-blockers enabled (or disabled) so I haven’t been keeping up as well as I should with goings-on in the banana republic of California.

For example, I totally missed that Lee Baca was being re-tried. (You may remember his first trial ended in a mistrial.)

And even better:

Lee Baca, the once powerful and popular sheriff of Los Angeles County, was found guilty Wednesday of obstructing a federal investigation into abuses in county jails and lying to cover up the interference.

Let me just remind folks:

To get to Baca, prosecutors methodically worked their way up the ranks of a group of sheriff’s officials who were accused of conceiving and carrying out a scheme to impede the FBI jail inquiry. In all, 10 people — from low-level deputies to Baca and his former second in command — have been convicted or pleaded guilty. Several other deputies have been found guilty of civil rights violations for beating inmates and a visitor in the jails.

Dumber than a bag of hair. But I digress. The NYT claims he “could face up to 20 years in federal prison”. As we all know, claims like this should be taken on good quality rice with some soy sauce and wasabi. My totally outsider speculation, as someone who isn’t a lawyer and hasn’t practiced in federal court: I’ll be surprised if Baca gets any prison time, given his age and alleged Alzheimer’s. I expect a long probated sentence.

3 Responses to “Flaming hyenas watch.”

  1. FWIW, I’m pretty aggressive with my use of AdBlock on Firefox, and LA Times isn’t one of the sites that gives me trouble.

    I also have RefControl and GreaeMonkey.

  2. stainles says:

    I use AdBlock Plus in Firefox on this machine and browse the LAT in private mode, and I get obtrusive “disable your ad blocker or subscribe” messages. I don’t have RefControl or GreaseMonkey installed, though, just AdBlock Plus.

    I don’t get the same messages using private mode in Chrome, for what that’s worth, but I also don’t have any form of ad blocker installed in Chrome.

  3. Actually, looking at RefControl and GreaseMonkey, they don’t seem to be doing anything for LAT. It may be a matter of what I have blocked (like, two pages worth of red blocks).

    Possible culprits:

    tribdss.com
    moatads.com
    brightcove.com (now annoyingly slow video autoplay)
    bounceexchange.com
    krxd.net
    taboola.com
    One specific google tag service.
    adnxs.com
    adsvr.org
    afy11.net