On the brink.

July 12th, 2012

The fiscal brink, that is.

From today’s LAT:

Facing the same financial stressors that pushed San Bernardino toward bankruptcy, cities across California are slashing day-to-day services and taking other drastic actions to skirt a similar fiscal collapse.
For some, it may not be enough.

The major examples cited by the LAT are:

  • Vallejo, which filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy in 2009, because “salaries and benefits for its public safety workers were eating up too much of the general fund”.
  • Stockton, which filed last month “after it was unable to come to agreement with its employee unions and creditors on a plan to close a $26-million gap in its general fund”.
  • Mammoth Lakes, which filed earlier this month because of a $43 million court judgement.
  • and San Bernardino, which “couldn’t close a $45.8-million budget shortfall and would be unable make its payroll this summer”.  As noted previously, the city is also claiming that budget figures had been falsified for 13 out of 16 years.

[San Bernardino Mayor Patrick] Morris, a former judge elected on an anti-gang platform, says the city may have to dissolve its Fire Department or portions of the Police Department, an unavoidable reality when public safety accounts for nearly 75% of the general fund budget. The city would then contract with county and state agencies for those services.

Have you ever noticed how it is always the police and fire departments that they threaten to cut first? You never hear them say “We’re going to cut the budget for big-screen TVs and office furniture”. Always the cops and the firefighters. In this case, that may make sense, especially if they can contract out the services cheaper. But:

Steve Tracy, a fire engineer and spokesman for the city firefighters union, said San Bernardino’s labor groups already gave up $10 million in concessions. He blamed the financial crisis on the mayor and former city manager spending money on such pet projects as a new downtown movie theater.

And is filing for bankruptcy worth it? Let’s ask the people of Vallejo:

The Bay Area city of 112,000 was forced to shut down two of its fire stations and today fixes just 10% of its crumbling roads. Its workforce, including police and firefighters, is about half its pre-bankruptcy size and those people left are “insanely” overworked.
Meanwhile, Vallejo spent $10 million on legal fees. It ended up with employee contracts that Osby thinks the city could have struck more cheaply if it had stayed out of bankruptcy court and turned to the bargaining table.

Municipal pensions may be a growing crisis, and there’s certainly some evidence in the LAT‘s coverage to support that. But of the four major examples they cite, one dates back three years, one involves a court judgement against the city, one may involve falsified financial information provided to the city…and that pretty much leaves Stockton, which might be worth more investigation.

Posted in California Über Alles, Clippings, Law, Politics | 1 Comment »

The Hero(s) of Canton.

July 11th, 2012

The man woman they call Jayne Ida!

When I was younger, my family lived within reasonable driving distance of Canton, Ohio. As I’ve noted in the past, I still have relatives in the area.

For some odd reason, we never visited the Pro Football Hall of Fame (or, as we called it:

“TheWorldFamousProFootballHallOfFameInCantonOhio”

all one word). I did visit it much later in life, and it’s an okay museum, if possibly a little overpriced.

Canton is about a 30-minute drive from Akron, if you’re planning a family vacation. However, the National Inventors Hall of Fame was closed last time I was in the area, and has since moved to Alexandria, VA. And, sadly, Goodyear has closed the World of Rubber museum.

So what to do to occupy yourself in the greater Akron/Canton area? Especially if you don’t like football?

How about the National First Ladies Historic Site and Library? They even have a gift shop: would you like some Ida McKinley china?

We learn of this fine tourist attraction by way of this column by Drew Johnson, who is among the guest bloggers at Balko’s site. You see, the federal government spent $1,021,000 to run the site last year…and it got 8,254 visitors.

In other words, taxpayers paid $124 in subsidies to the First Ladies National Historic Site for every single man, woman and child who walked through the door last year.

Why does this exist? Because of the hard work of (now retired) congressman Ralph Regula, who spent 36 years representing Canton and the surrounding area, and who set up the deals that acquired Ida Saxton McKinley’s childhood home (now the museum) and a former bank (now the library).

Shortly before he retired in 2009, Regula managed to snag one final $124,000 earmark…The pork handout was used by the National First Ladies’ Library to catalogue every book purchased by First Lady Abigail Fillmore for the White House during Millard’s presidency, and then buy duplicates of those books for the library’s collection.

Not the original books. Duplicates.

And here’s the best part. Would you like to know who the founder of the National First Ladies Library was? Go on, guess.

Would you like to know who else works for the Library? Go on, guess.

Posted in Politics, Travel | 2 Comments »

The poor man’s lounge.

July 11th, 2012

As they often do, Andrew Rausa and a few friends spent the evening of July 4 lounging barefoot on the front stoop of a friend’s brownstone home in Brooklyn and enjoying a few beers. Escaping the indoor heat, Mr. Rausa and two friends sipped cans of Brooklyn Summer Ale; his girlfriend held an unopened bottle of a blueberry ale.

Cutting to the chase, Mr. Rausa and his friends were cited by the NYPD for drinking in public. Mr. Rausa and his friends dispute the application of the law, as they were on their own stoop behind a locked gate when cited. Mr. Rausa plans to contest his citation in court.

It seems that both the law itself, and the application of it by the NYPD, is ambiguous:

…people who received summonses after the police saw them drinking through open doorways, behind gates, on roofs and even in the hallways of their apartment buildings.

Ah, if only there were a simple solution for this…

Posted in Clippings, Cops, Law | Comments Closed

Free stuff!

July 11th, 2012

Randy’s Doughnuts in Inglewood is giving away free doughnuts between 11 AM and 2 PM (I assume that’s PDT) today.

“So what?” you ask.

Well, I wanted to post this because: compare this picture

to this one:

Yep. Same doughnut.

Also, this being 7/11, 7-11 is offering their usual free Slurpee today. Note that the free Slurpees are Dixie cup size, so I wouldn’t recommend going out of your way for one. But if you happen to have a 7-11 on the way home…

Posted in Food | Comments Closed

When the Red, Red Robin goes broke.

July 11th, 2012

There used to be three Red Robin restaurants in Austin.

The one on 290 was seized by the landlord for non-payment of rent, stripped to the studs, and turned into a Longhorn Steakhouse.

The one on 183 near Anderson Mill closed for a while, re-opened, closed again, and is now stripped of all signage. Nothing’s gone in at that location yet.

The one on Parmer at I-35 (near the Wal-Mart) is “closed temporarily” according to the corporate website, and has a notice from the sheriff’s department (stating the fixtures have been seized) taped to the front door.

I know, they’re chain burger places. But when I first went to one, I thought it was actually a pretty decent chain place to get a burger (especially since Fuddrucker’s collapsed). The last few times I went to the Parmer Red Robin, though, it was…not good. Not in the “induced vomiting” sense, but in the “I paid good money for this?” sense.

I feel sorry for the staff who lost their jobs; most of them seemed like good people trying hard. But I don’t feel too sorry for the management, who managed to take a workable concept and run it into the ground.

Posted in Clippings, Food | Comments Closed

Banana republicans watch: July 11, 2012.

July 11th, 2012

Fullerton PD officer Manuel Ramos is no longer with the department as of July 3rd.

Former officer Ramos faces murder and manslaughter charges in the beating death of Kelly Thomas. (Graphic image at that link.) The department did not state whether officer Ramos was fired or resigned. Ramos and officer Jay Cicinelli (also charged in the Thomas death) have been on “unpaid leave” since October.

In other news, the LA County Sheriff’s Department was apparently in the habit of passing out “official looking” badges to “civilians with no law enforcement duties”, like local politicians.

Now they’ve decided they’re going to take back about 200 of those badges.

At first glance, the badges closely resemble those deputies wear, with the same six-pointed star design. Instead of identifying the person as a “deputy sheriff,” the badges read “City Official Los Angeles County.”

Why are the badges being recalled? Well, they’ve been a source of concern since the attorney general issued an opinion in 2007, stating that the badges “created the potential for civilians to falsely pose as law enforcement officers”. The department swears that the badge recall is prompted by that opinion, and has nothing to do with the arrests of the Cudahy council members.

And why would anyone think this had anything to do with the Cudahy council members?

That’s why. That photo was taken in a nightclub in Cudahy. The badge she’s wearing is one of the badges in question; specifically, indicted Councilman Osvaldo Conde’s badge.

(Obligatory.)

It looks like San Bernardino is the next city up on the bankruptcy watch.

And retiring police chiefs are making out like bandits when they cash in their unused sick leave and vacation time:

Those employees include Roy Campos, Downey’s former police chief, who was paid $594,000 in 2009 after cashing out more than 3,300 hours of unused sick and vacation time. The same year, Monterey Park’s outgoing chief, Jones Moy, earned $531,000, including cash-outs of about 2,700 unused hours. In 2010, Santa Clara’s police chief, Steve Lodge, left his job with almost $600,000 in total pay thanks to a variety of cash-outs.
In contrast, [Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie] Beck earned $297,000 last year and [Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee] Baca made $334,000.

More:

Over his thirty-plus years with the department, [El Monte Police Chief Thomas] Armstrong was permitted to bank unused hours without limit, then cash them out at the hourly rate he made as police chief. Some of the unused sick hours also counted toward his CalPERS safety pension, which at $229,000 a year is among the largest in the entire state. Armstrong’s pension is also higher than the largest base salary he earned, $217,000.

(The LAT notes that the El Monte PD had 110 officers, for a city of 113,000, and that El Monte’s credit rating has been downgraded to “junk bond”.)

And more:

[Former El Monte chief Ken] Weldon’s and Armstrong’s contracts permitted more than three months off each year. That total covered one month of vacation, about three weeks of leave, as many as 12 sick days and 14 holidays (including Admissions Day, a September holiday that celebrates the date California became a state).

I picked the wrong profession. I should have become a police chief in California.

Edited to add: Here’s a shocker that either I missed, or that wasn’t in the original LAT story about San Bernardino:

City Atty. James Penman said city budget officials had falsified documents presented to the mayor and council for 13 of the last 16 years, masking the city’s deficit spending.
“For the last 16 years the budget prepared for the council showed the city was in the black,” Penman said, not naming those allegedly responsible. “The mayor and the council were not given accurate documents.”

If the city attorney’s assertions are true, I would expect criminal indictments somewhere down the line.

Posted in California Über Alles, Clippings, Cops, Law | 2 Comments »

The Kennedys are still dead.

July 9th, 2012

At Lawrence’s suggestion, I’ve added a new sub-category under “Law”, designed to cover goings-on in the People’s Republic of California. This category includes bad cops, bad laws, bad crimes, and, of course, civic corruption.

Please enjoy.

Posted in Admin | Comments Closed

Banana republicans watch: July 9, 2012.

July 9th, 2012

And we have news from the notoriously corrupt California city of Vernon:

California’s state auditor has called on Vernon to seriously consider replacing its top leadership, saying the state found it difficult to determine who is in charge in the small city beset by financial problems and corruption scandals.

More:

It was at times unclear who was actually in charge at City Hall, [state auditor Elaine] Howle and her staff said. She noted that top Vernon officials routinely deferred to counsel from their outside law firm, Latham & Watkins LLP, and called the presence of the firm within the city “striking” and “highly unusual.”

Posted in California Über Alles, Clippings, Law, Politics | 2 Comments »

Lockdown!

July 9th, 2012

Once upon a time, there was a man named Peter “Pistol Pete” Rollock. Mr. Rollock led a narcotics gang called “Sex, Money, and Murder” in the Bronx.

Eventually, federal prosecutors were able to hang seven murders on Mr. Rollock. Some of those murders were allegedly ordered while Mr. Rollock was in jail on other charges.

In 2000, Mr. Rollock agreed to a plea deal, apparently in an effort to avoid the death penalty. Mr. Rollock agreed to a life sentence. Mr. Rollock also agreed to another condition imposed by the Feds: he would be “……placed in solitary confinement and barred from communicating with virtually all outsiders. ”

In cases where the attorney general finds that allowing a prisoner to communicate with others could result in “death or serious bodily injury,” the Bureau of Prisons imposes special administrative measures, or S.A.M.’s, limiting access to mail, calls and visitors, but at least leaving open the possibility of an inmate’s “stepping down,” that is someday earning an easing of restrictions. But in Mr. Rollock’s case, restrictions were imposed as part of the sentence itself, and he claims he was told he would never be allowed into the “step-down” program.

Mr. Rollock was sent to the federal Administrative Maximum prison in Florence, Colorado (also known as the “SuperMax”) in 2000, where he joined such notables as Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, Theodore Kaczynski, and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

He has been in solitary confinement ever since. But now he’s trying to get out of solitary.

Mr. Rollock, after arriving at the Supermax in December 2000, threw himself into education, beginning his path toward redemption, his lawyers say. By the end of 2002, he had taken closed-circuit television courses in philosophy, political theory and economics, and he had earned his G.E.D., records show.

He’s also written a children’s book. (Of course, so did Tookie Williams.)

I’m not sure how I feel about this. If we don’t provide some motivation for prisoners to reform, we’re going to get people who have nothing to lose. (And according to the NYT, the prosecution has agreed to allow Mr. Rollock’s status to be determined by SAMs; Mr. Rollock feels that even with this concession, it will still take him “years” to get out of solitary.)

On the other hand, his “solitary confinement” doesn’t sound so awful, especially when compared to Thomas Silverstein.

Also:

A current prosecutor, Margaret M. Garnett, said last year in court that Mr. Rollock and his family had been discussing a business called Team Rollock, which would “monetize and capitalize” on his reputation on the street. She even cited talk of Team Rollock T-shirts, with a rifle sight as the “primary design element.”

I know the lawyers have to be paid, folks, but I’m not sure that’s smart at all.

Posted in Clippings, Law | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: July 9, 2012.

July 9th, 2012

I am becoming convinced that if you’re going to read only one obit for a prominent cultural figure, the obit to read is the Onion A/V Club’s. It seems to me that the writers for that site, especially Sean O’Neal, consistently manage to do a great job on tight deadlines summarizing why someone who just died was important, and do so with no snark or cruelty. In addition, the A/V Club doesn’t require logins or subscriptions.

Anyway, Ernest Borgnine: A/V Club. (I’m happy to see that so many of the obits mention his key role in The Wild Bunch.) LAT. NYT.

Edited to add: And, oddly enough, a nice tribute from Patrick at Popehat, guest blogging at Balko’s site.

Posted in Clippings, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

Your loser update for July 8, 2012.

July 8th, 2012

I haven’t been following the baseball losers this year: I plan to do a post at the All-Star break about who has the worst records.

But I did want to point out this article from the HouChron:

Along with the worst record in baseball at 32-52, the Astros are alone in last place in the National League Central for the first time this season. The nine-game skid matches the longest for the Astros since Sept. 13-22, 2009, and is two shy of the club record.

(The Astros lost today, to make their record 33-53, still the worst record in baseball. Second worst is a tie between the Colorado Rockies…and the Cubs, both at 33-52.)

Edited to add: Huh. Well. Whaddya know? I guess we’re at the All-Star break after tonight’s games finish. I had no idea…

Posted in Clippings, Loser, Sports | Comments Closed

Kindle notes.

July 8th, 2012

Thursday and Friday were kind of slow days at work. For various reasons (including a series of discussions with several co-workers) I ended up downloading the Shooter app, which does run on the Kindle Fire. (I find that slightly surprising, but I won’t look a gift horse in the mouth.)

Since the Kindle Fire lacks GPS and Bluetooth, you do miss out on a few features, such as interfacing with the Kestrel and GPS-based weather station input. On the other hand, I think the interface on a Kindle Fire may be slightly more pleasant; since you can apparently do cloud-based syncing, what I suspect will work out well is to do data entry on the Kindle Fire, sync with Shooter on your smart phone, and use the phone at the range.

This, in turn, led to me consider .22 LR ballistics. In turn, my consideration of same led me to start poking around on Amazon for some things I’d seen previously, such as The Complete Book of the .22: A Guide to the World’s Most Popular Guns (available used at a good price) and Rifleman’s Guide To Rimfire Ammunition (a book I want, but the Amazon prices aren’t that good; I’d rather support my local gunshop).

One of the books I found while poking around is a quaint and curious volume called The Art of Rimfire Accuracy by a gentleman named Bill Calfee. From what I can tell, Mr. Calfee has forgotten more about .22 accuracy than most people ever knew; he’s somewhat famous in the community as a .22 specialist gunsmith. (One thing that particularly amuses me is that Mr. Calfee builds custom .22 benchrest guns based on the XP-100 action; when I was six years old, I thought the XP-100 was the coolest gun in the world. I still want one chambered in .221 Fireball, but a Calfee .22 conversion sounds like it would be a neat thing to own as well.)

My understanding is that the book is mostly a collection of Mr. Calfee’s writings for Precision Shooting magazine: the book is 700+ pages long.

Mr. Calfee’s book is published by Authorhouse, a POD publisher and one that seems popular in the gun community. (Authorhouse also publishes The Rifleman’s Rifle: Winchester’s Model 70, 1936-1963, a book I want badly but can’t justify the $90 price tag for.)

Anyway, here’s my point: Mr. Calfee’s book in paperback is $42.63 with Prime shipping. Interestingly, it is also available on the Kindle…

…and the Kindle edition is $9.99. I’ve only made through the first three chapters so far, but it doesn’t look to me like there’s any photographic or other detail lost on the Kindle Fire. Welcome to the future of publishing. Now if we could only get more gun books on the Kindle, like History of Smith & Wesson or The Rifleman’s Rifle or Hatcher’s Notebook or even Applied Ballistics For Long-Range Shooting, things would be hopping…

(I can even see a version of the Litz book that runs as an application, and allows you not only to read the text, but also to do ballistic calculations based on Litz’s equations interactively within the book itself, instead of using the supplied CD. Hey, a fellow can dream, can’t he?)

Posted in Books, Guns, Hoplobibilophilia, Kindleing | 1 Comment »

Horse tacos.

July 8th, 2012

Today’s Statesman has a long backgrounder about Amado Pardo and Jovita’s. Jovita’s, you may recall, is the South Austin restaurant alleged to be at the center of a heroin distribution ring, and Pardo is one of the key figures in the indictment.

There’s some stuff in the article I was previously unaware of. Specifically:

  • Pardo’s political activism, not just for Democratic candidates, but specifically for Hispanic Democrats. (The Glen Maxey story, in particular, is interesting.)
  • Pardo was convicted of murder. Twice. The first murder was in 1971: he was sentenced to 12 years, and paroled in 1975 “after serving about four years” according to the Statesman. The second time was in 1983: he was sentenced to eight years, but paroled after four. He was also convicted of illegally possessing a firearm in 1978, and was released from prison on that charge in 1981. So he got almost as much time on the gun charge as he did on each of the two murders.
  • “….some who knew Pardo best said he appeared to have overcome his criminal past to become a community leader, a successful businessman and a strong patriarch to his large family.”
  • “Though the indictment accuses Pardo and the others of dealing heroin since May 2011, an FBI agent testified during a co-defendant’s detention hearing that he believes Pardo has been dealing the drug for more than 25 years — a period that predates Jovita’s.”

Posted in Clippings, Food, Law | 1 Comment »

Noted.

July 6th, 2012

The Onion A/V Club reviews the first set of digital comics from Chris Roberson’s new Monkeybrain Comics.

Mr. Roberson has previously been mentioned in this space, but I was not aware of his dispute with DC Comics. Then again, I really haven’t been keeping up with the comics world…

Posted in Books, Clippings | Comments Closed

If I put this into a novel, nobody would believe it.

July 6th, 2012

An apparently suicidal man was hit by a car on U.S. 281 while being chased by a person in a gorilla costume early today, police said.

Posted in Clippings | Comments Closed

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »