I thought about covering this myself, but Lawrence did a much better job on the death of Patrick Day.
For the historical record: Rep. Elijah E. Cummings.
Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category
The lazy man’s obit watch: October 17, 2019.
Thursday, October 17th, 2019You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#59 in a series)
Wednesday, October 9th, 2019Hempstead, Texas, is perhaps best described as a suburb of Houston. (Technically, it is in Waller Caunty, while Houston is Harris County. Apple Maps says it is roughly an hour’s drive from Houston to Hempstead.)
Hempstead isn’t a big city: just under 6,000 people. Mike the Musicologist, who tipped me off to this, tells me that Mayor Michael Wolfe has been in that post for 15 years.
Now, being mayor of any decent sized city is probably a full time job, and being mayor of a 6,000 person city probably doesn’t pay very well. This is significant for reasons I’ll get into shortly.
Back a few months ago, the Texas Rangers started looking into “financial irregularities” discovered “during an audit of the city budget”. They turned up something interesting. You see, folks in Hempstead had until the 20th of each month to pay their utility bills, or else they’d get cut off. One of the city employees was responsible for generating a list of folks who hadn’t paid up. But that employee would then take the list over to the mayor, who’d mark off certain accounts on the list as being exempt from utility cutoffs.
Among those names: the mayor. And his daughter. Apparently, they were over $20,000 behind in their utility payments. Mayor Wolfe’s personal account was over $10,000 behind.
Okay, so this is sleazy. The good citizens of Hempstead who were paying their bills had to absorb the delinquency of the mayor and his daughter. No question about it, this is bad behavior. But is it a crime?
Yes!
…
According to an affidavit, Shayne is believed to have “intentionally or knowingly misused government property, services, personnel, or any other thing of value belonging to the government that has come into the public servant’s custody or possession by virtue of the public servant’s office or employment”.
The document cites Texas Penal Code 39.02(a), Abuse of Official Capacity.
Texas Penal Code 39.02(a), Abuse of Official Capacity, for your reference and because I don’t trust nested links.
I kind of like “Abuse of Official Capacity”. It has a ring to it, though it doesn’t quite stir the soul in the same way “barratry” or “misprision” does.
And, once again, someone throws away their life and becomes a convicted felon over a relatively small amount of money. Seriously, dude, pay the darn bill. (Yes, yes, presumption of innocence, but according to the report, he’s pretty much confessed to the crime already, and is using the ‘nobody would have known about it if it wasn’t for those meddling auditors” defense.)
You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#58 in a series)
Thursday, October 3rd, 2019By way of Lawrence:
The Press is kind of obnoxious,but local. More from nj.com:
Mayor Gilliam pled out to one count of wire fraud, and has agreed to pay restitution.
{Harry] Rimm [the mayor’s defense attorney – DB] said Gilliam has already started paying back the money, making a voluntary payment Thursday in connection with his plea.
“To date, and in advance of sentencing, Mr. Gilliam has paid back almost half of the restitution amount that the parties have agreed is owed,” said the attorney.
Now I’m wondering: does that “almost half the restitution amount” include the “recovered” $41,000?
Guess the party watch: paragraph nine of the NJ.com story. Criminal Mayors Against Law-Abiding Gun Owners Watch: status of Mayor Gilliam unknown. I need to dig deeper into that.
But:
Even before the FBI raid on his house, Gilliam found himself in an unwelcome spotlight. The mayor was accused of simple assault and harassment stemming from a 2:30 a.m. brawl outside the Golden Nugget Casino’s Haven nightclub last year.
He was cleared of criminal charges in March by a municipal court judge in nearby North Wildwood, where the case had been transferred to avoid a conflict of interest.
But we all know he’s probably not going to get that, right?
And as far as I can tell, he hasn’t resigned as mayor. Yet.
In a statement following the plea, defense attorney Harry Rimm said the charge to which he pleaded guilty related only to his conduct as a private citizen, and not conduct in his official capacity as mayor.
“He is not charged with taking any public or taxpayer funds,” the attorney said, adding that the mayor “is accepting responsibility for his actions and is genuinely remorseful.”
Edited to add: he’s out now.
The (Houston) Chronicle of our times.
Friday, August 23rd, 2019Two stories from HoustonChronicle.com (not chron.com, which is basically imitation Buzzfeed these days):
Gerald Goines, the Houston Police Department officer at the center of the botched drug raid scandal, has been charged with two counts of felony murder. His partner, Steven Bryant, has been charged with tampering. (Apparently, that’s “tampering with a government record”, though I saw some early reports claim it was “witness tampering”.)
Lawrence has been on the botched drug raid story like flies on a severed cow’s head at a Damien Hirst exhibition, so I’m going to direct you over there for coverage and background. If the HouChron is too obnoxious for you (in terms of subscriptions and ad-blockers) here’s coverage from KHOU (with equally obnoxious auto-play video).
In other news, the paper would like for you to know that you can buy guns.
Okay, that’s not quite 100% fair. You can buy Bushmaster M4 assault rifles.
Okay, that’s still not quite fair. You can buy Bushmaster M4 assault rifles…from DPS employees who bought them from the agency.
The paper apparently found two – yes, two – M4 rifles for sale on “online gun forums” “recently”. That’s two out of “over 1,000” sold since September of 2016. DPS has also sold “over 2,000 SIG Sauer P226 pistols”, and a total of 5,254 guns during that time. So it looks like there’s about 2,000 guns not accounted for in this count. Shotguns? “high-powered rifles equipped with accessories worth thousands of dollars”?
So it sounds like you can buy up to three guns on your way out the door. But:
Does this mean you can buy more after you retire? That’s how I read it: it sounds kind of like how my Dad got an old Ford F100 pickup, by signing up for the waitlist at Brown and Root and paying $800. Except for guns.
Also according to the paper: the SIGs were going to DPS troopers for $350 each, and the Bushies were going for “$401-$601 each”. It’s not clear what the difference is between the $400 and the $600 Bushies, but: Mike and I have spent the past few weekends at gun shows, and you can get a pretty nice Smith and Wesson M&P-15 (not the M&P15-22, but the .223/5.56 one) for under $600 if you shop carefully. Right now, CDNN will sell you a SIG P320 for $350, and they have P226s with a factory optic for “too low to print – call”. (I would, but they’re closed now.) At least one DPS guy who was selling his Bushie (the ad’s been taken down now, according to the paper) was asking $975 for his.
I only note this story because it seems like a giant nothing burger, except for (maybe) the question of whether the state is getting a good deal by letting retired troopers buy these guns, instead of selling them to licensed gun dealers for credit towards replacements. But if CDNN is selling AR pattern rifles to the public for $600, and SIGs for $350, I doubt DPS is going to get anything close to that on a wholesale deal with any vendor.
Obit watch: August 23, 2019.
Friday, August 23rd, 2019NYT obit for David H. Koch, for the historical record. (Edited to add: Reason.)
Russ Conway. No, you’ve probably never heard of him, but I think he’s noteworthy.
Mr. Conway was a reporter for the Eagle-Tribune in North Andover, Massachusetts. He covered the Boston Bruins for the paper. And, while doing so, came up with evidence of serious – indeed, criminal – misconduct by the head of the NHL Players Union, Alan Eagleson.
Mr. Eagleson, he wrote, had, among many things, skimmed money from players’ disability payments; lent union funds to friends and associates at favorable rates; and billed the union for personal expenses, including a London apartment and Wimbledon tickets.
He also reported that Mr. Eagleson had promised that the N.H.L. players’ pension fund would profit from the Canada Cup — which was held five times between 1976 and 1991 between teams from Europe, the United States and Canada — but that little was left after subtracting questionable expenses.
His reporting was published as a series in the paper, and was a finalist for a Pulitzer. It was later expanded into a book, Game Misconduct: Alan Eagleson and the Corruption of Hockey.
Even better, his reporting led to investigations in the US and Canada, and a 1994 Federal indictment on 32 charges. Mr. Eagleson pled guilty to three counts of mail fraud in 1998, and was ordered to make restitution to the union. He was also convicted on fraud charges in Canada, and was sentenced to 18 months in prison. (He served six months.) In addition, Mr. Eagleson was disbarred and forced out of the Hockey Hall of Fame.
What Mr. Conway uncovered about Mr. Eagleson occasionally disgusted him. He recalled one player, Ed Kea, who suffered a brain injury when he was checked into the boards during a game in 1983 while he was with a minor league affiliate of the St. Louis Blues.
“Al Eagleson didn’t even have the common decency to go visit the family,” Mr. Conway told Maclean’s. “He wouldn’t aid them in the insurance process. He was gone. Crush up the cigarette pack, throw it out. Next!”
Many small bloodsucking insects.
Wednesday, August 21st, 2019I think I’ve managed to keep on top of the Austin City Council and Travis County Commissioners lists.
But I let the list of Texas Congressional reps fall into disrepair and obsolesce. And I didn’t think the list of Texas Senators needed to be updated, either.
It seems that the House and Senate IT people (or whoever is in charge of the websites for reps and senators) have been doing a lot of reconfiguration and standardization. Even if the senator or rep hadn’t changed since 2016 or so, there were still broken links to district maps and contact forms. Plus it seems like these folks move office locations about as often as…well, as something that moves a lot.
Anyway, I’ve spent a good chunk of my spare time for the past couple of days updating the Senators and Representatives lists. Just in case you want to make use of those for a specific purpose, such as contacting your rep to explain that a magazine ban is going to cost him his seat in Congress. You know, the usual.
The next bunch of free mental CPU cycles are going to spent going back over the commissioners and city council lists, just to make sure they haven’t slipped in any changes. (It looks like Jeff Travillion has hired some staff members since he took office, and I’ve updated his entry.)
If you good folks notice anything that’s wrong or broken or out of date, please contact me and I’ll get it fixed ASAP.
In the meantime, UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this IMPORTANT Information is ENCOURAGED, ESPECIALLY to COMPUTER BULLETIN BOARDS.
Obit watch: August 20, 2019.
Tuesday, August 20th, 2019Obit watch: July 9, 2019.
Tuesday, July 9th, 2019Ross Perot. (Edited to add: Lawrence. Dallas Morning News.)
He was no quitter: an Eagle Scout, a Navy officer out of Annapolis, a top I.B.M. salesman, the founder of wildly successful data processing enterprises, a crusader for education and against drugs, a billionaire philanthropist. In 1969, he became a kind of folk hero with a quixotic attempt to fly medicine and food to American prisoners of war in North Vietnam. In 1979 he staged a commando raid that freed two of his employees, and thousands of criminals and political prisoners, from captivity in revolutionary Iran.
And in 1992 he became one of the most unlikely candidates ever to run for president. He had never held public office, and he seemed all wrong, like a cartoon character sprung to life: an elfin 5 feet 6 inches and 144 pounds, with a 1950s crew cut; a squeaky, nasal country-boy twang; and ears that stuck out like Alfred E. Neuman’s on a Mad magazine cover. Stiff-necked, cantankerous, impetuous, often sentimental, he was given to homespun epigrams: “If you see a snake, just kill it. Don’t appoint a committee on snakes.”
…
…
His folk-patriot reputation stemmed from two adventures. In 1969, after months of speaking on the plight of 1,400 American prisoners of war in North Vietnam, he chartered two jetliners, filled them with 30 tons of food, medicines and gifts and flew to Southeast Asia. Hanoi rejected the mission, but it was hardly a failure. The spotlight on prisoners’ hardships embarrassed Hanoi and led to better treatment for some.
In 1979, as an Islamic revolution swept Iran, Mr. Perot mounted a commando raid on a prison in Tehran to free two employees being held for ransom. A riot was orchestrated at the gates, and in the chaos of an ensuing breakout 11,800 inmates escaped, including both employees. The episode was chronicled in Ken Follett’s best-selling book “On Wings of Eagles” and in a 1986 mini-series on NBC.
You know, I need to read that book. (Also The Pillars of the Earth.)
Also among the dead: Jack Renner, co-founder of Telarc and a good Cleveland boy.
In 1978 the company made what Mr. Renner said was the first commercially released digital recording of symphonic music in the United States, featuring Frederick Fennell and the Cleveland Symphonic Winds.
“It created a lot of stir among audiophiles,” he said. “It had a bass drum that blew up speakers. Everybody accused us of hyping the bass drum. We didn’t.”
Back in the day, I had a fair number of Telarc CDs (including some of their P.D.Q. Bach).
You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#57 in a series)
Monday, July 8th, 2019There’s an interesting article in today’s NYT about Jenna Garland, the former press secretary for Atlanta mayor Kasim Reed.
Ms. Garland is currently under indictment. She’s charged with two misdemeanors. But, unlike the usual run of tax-fattened hyenas, the charges against Ms. Garland involve…
…violations of the Georgia open records law.
…
There are two interesting things about this.
1. Criminal charges against public officials for open records act violations are “extremely uncommon”, as the paper of record describes it.
Open-records or “sunshine” laws in a number of other states include no criminal sanctions for noncompliance, although a number of them call for civil penalties or the payment of attorneys’ fees and court costs if a news organization or a member of the public successfully sues a government agency for documents.
In Colorado, lawmakers removed criminal penalties for violating the state’s open-records law two years ago because almost no one was ever charged.
And something that’s feeding into this: even though Kasim Reed left office last year, his administration is still under federal investigation.
It kind of sounds like the charges against Ms. Garland are more fallout from the ongoing investigation of Mr. Reed. I’d be tempted to suggest that they’re trying to flip her: but that seems unlikely with misdemeanor charges.
Scott R. Grubman, an Atlanta-based lawyer experienced in white-collar crime matters who is not involved in the Garland case, read Ms. Garland’s text messages the same way. He said he thought the government’s case against her was “flimsy” and an overreaction, given that civil penalties could be levied instead.
In Georgia, both state agencies and local governments “regularly engage in delay tactics” in response to open-records requests, Mr. Grubman said in an email. “By bringing a criminal prosecution against Ms. Garland without having ever criminally prosecuted any other violation in the past, the A.G.’s office appears to be unfairly targeting Ms. Garland and opening up a can of worms that will be difficult to close.”
I actually kind of agree with Mr. Grubman’s position, at least in part. This does seem like selective prosecution. But: I only agree with him in part because I think more public officials should face criminal charges for open records act violations. The heck with “civil penalties”, which are probably going to be paid by the taxpayers anyway: let’s hold these people personally responsible for violating the law. And if that means some of them wind up in jail…fiat justitia ruat caelum.
Obit watch: June 10, 2019.
Monday, June 10th, 2019Nicky Barnes, the other (after Frank Lucas) legendary NYC heroin dealer of the late 1960s and 1970s.
I would use the “bad week for dope dealers” joke, but Mr. Barnes actually died in 2012: his death was not reported until late last week.
Mr. Barnes estimated that he had earned at least $5 million selling heroin in the several years before his 1977 conviction — income he had augmented by investing in travel agencies, gas stations, a chain of automated carwashes and housing projects in Cleveland and Pontiac, Mich. He also marketed something called a flake-burger, made from remnants of butchered beef.
By the time he audaciously agreed to be photographed for the cover of The Times Magazine and an article inside, he had a record of 13 arrests as an adult and no convictions.
Unfortunately, being profiled in the Times Magazine and called “Mister Untouchable” caused a certain amount of tsuris on the part of Jimmy Carter, who ordered the Justice Department to go all out after Mr. Barnes. In 1977, he was convicted and sentenced to life without parole.
While he was imprisoned, though, his wife and former business parters took over his herion empire and began running it into the ground. Mr. Barnes ended up agreeing to testify against all of them, and was released from prison because of his cooperation in 1998.
After his release, Mr. Barnes entered the Witness Protection Program.
Because he was in witness protection, his death was not reported at the time. Apparently, it only came to light now because various people got to wondering what had happened to Mr. Barnes after Mr. Lucas died: Mr. Barnes’s daughters and anonymous sources confirmed his death.
David Bergland, 1984 Libertarian Party presidential candidate.
Obit watch: May 31, 2019.
Friday, May 31st, 2019Leon Redbone has died. He was 127.
Well, that’s what the press release said. Most sources I see say he was 69, though Wikipedia footnotes that as “disputed”.
The “Variety” obit (hattip: Lawrence) is pretty good. If it seems like I’m giving Mr. Redbone short shrift, well, I don’t have a lot to say: I never really caught that particular gene. I’ve been told he was on “Prairie Home Companion” a lot, but since that show basically makes me want to stab myself in the thigh repeatedly with a spork…
Also among the dead: Thad Cochran, congressman for 45 years.
And finally, Claus von Bülow, who was not a murderer. Really. Two out of three courts said so.
Seriously, this was one of the great true crime circuses of the 1980s. Mr. von Bülow was charged with attempting to murder his wife by giving her an overdose of insulin. She went into hypoglycemic comas twice (in December of 1979 and December of 1980). She recovered the first time, but her second coma was irreversible.
Mr. von Bülow was convicted in his first trial, but that conviction was overturned on appeal. (His legal team included Alan Dershowitz, Eliot “Client #9” Spitzer, and Jim “Mad Money” Cramer.) He was tried a second time and acquitted.
I’m glossing over a lot of stuff here (because I don’t have time), including the testimony in the second trial from Truman Capote and Johnny Carson’s wife. Wikipedia has a pretty good summary, though you have to read both the Sunny and Claus articles. (There’s a great story in one of them about Norman Mailer and his wife attending a dinner party with Claus and Dershowitz. You have to read it: I won’t spoil the punchline.)
Sunny von Bülow never recovered from her second coma, and remained in a vegetative state until she died in 2008.
Obit watch: May 27, 2019.
Monday, May 27th, 2019Bart Starr, one of the greatest of the Green Bay Packers. NYT.
Starr’s name may have been the most flamboyant thing about him. But he proved to be skilled, sly and, by at least one measure, incomparably successful: He won three N.F.L. championships (for the seasons played in 1961, ’62 and ’65) in the pre-Super Bowl era, and then the first two Super Bowls, in January of 1967 and ’68. That Packers’ run of N.F.L. championships helped bring new attention to professional football as it moved into the Super Bowl era. (With his victory in 2019, Tom Brady has won six Super Bowls with the New England Patriots.)
Starr was named the league’s most valuable player in 1966 and received the same honor in Super Bowls I and II. He was selected to the Pro Bowl four times. And on a team known for running — with the flashy Paul Hornung and the rugged Jim Taylor (who died in October) — Starr was one of the league’s most efficient passers. He led the N.F.L. in that crucial category in three seasons and, on average, for all of the 1960s — even though his rival Johnny Unitas of the Baltimore Colts was often viewed as better. Starr set career records for completion percentage, 57.4, and consecutive passes without an interception, 294.
Murray Gell-Mann, Nobel prize winning theoretical physicist.
Much as atoms can be slotted into the rows and columns of the periodic table of the elements, Dr. Gell-Mann found a way, in 1961, to classify their smaller pieces — subatomic particles like protons, neutrons, and mesons, which were being discovered by the dozen in cosmic rays and particle accelerator blasts. Arranged according to their properties, the particles clustered in groups of eight and 10.
In a moment of whimsy, Dr. Gell-Mann, who hadn’t a mystical bone in his body, named his system the Eightfold Way after the Buddha’s eight-step path to enlightenment. He groaned ever after when people mistakenly inferred that particle physics was somehow related to Eastern philosophy.
Looking deeper, Dr. Gell-Mann realized that the patterns of the Eightfold Way could be further divided into triplets of even smaller components. He decided to call them quarks after a line from James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake”: “Three quarks for Muster Mark.”
Edmund Morris, biographer. I’m slowly working my way through his Theodore Roosevelt biographies, and I’d argue he’s at least as famous for those as he is for Dutch:
The columnist George Will attacked “Dutch” as “dishonorable,” and the writer Joan Didion accused Mr. Morris of resorting to the fictional device to conceal his own inadequacies as a fact-gatherer.
One of his toughest critics, Michiko Kakutani of The Times, called the book a “loony hodgepodge of fact and fiction” about a president that mimicked “the very blurring of reality and state-managed illusion that that president was often accused of perpetrating.”
No judgment intended here: this is in last place because it is breaking news. Bill Buckner passed away a short time ago.
He was most famous, unfortunately, for bobbling a play during game 6 of the World Series in 1986, costing the Red Sox the game and probably the Series. But there are other Sox fans who can speak with more authority on Mr. Buckner and his legacy.
Random notes: May 13, 2019.
Monday, May 13th, 2019I’ve avoided discussing the recent NRA issues because, frankly, I don’t trust anybody to cover them fairly and objectively. If you want to read a take on what’s going on, though, Lawrence put up a post last week on his blog: if you’re not a regular reader there, you might want to check it out.
Also brought up by Lawrence, though this was just a quick hit in the Linkswarm: the New Orleans Times-Picayune was bought out by The Advocate, and the entire Times Picayune staff was laid off. The NYT has a considerably more detailed story on what happened and why, if you care about New Orleans newspaper wars. Personally, I pretty much relied on nola.com for anything involving the city, so I’ll be interested in seeing what changes.
(Also, good to know that there are still places where you can get Baked Alaska.)
Healthy Holly update.
Thursday, May 2nd, 2019In great haste, because this is breaking and I have seven minutes left on my coffee break:
Baltimore mayor Catherine E. Pugh resigned today.
The mayor has been on leave since April 1st, dealing with health issues.
Obit watch: April 30, 2019.
Tuesday, April 30th, 2019These are mostly for the historical record at this point, since I took a few days off. (More on that later.)
Richard Lugar, former Indiana Senator.
Manuel Luján Jr., former Congressman from New Mexico and Secretary of the Interior under George H.W. Bush.
Jo Sullivan Loesser, actress:
She also co-starred in “The Most Happy Fella”, which is significant because she ended up marrying Frank Loesser and left acting. After Mr. Loesser’s death in 1969, she became the keeper of his legacy.
She raised their two daughters and, after Loesser died of lung cancer at 59 in 1969, she managed his music publishing company, Frank Music, until it was bought by CBS in 1976. (It was subsequently sold to Paul McCartney, but she retained creative control over her husband’s theater music and productions for Frank Loesser Enterprises.)
In 1977, feeling free of business obligations and with her daughters grown, Mrs. Loesser attended a party where Morton Gottlieb, a theatrical producer, urged her to return to singing — specifically, to perform her husband’s repertoire at the Ballroom, a restaurant and cabaret in SoHo.
She did, billed as Jo Sullivan, and her comeback was triumphant.