A Friday LinkSwarm on Friday. Will wonders never cease?
Posts Tagged ‘Crime’
LinkSwarm for August 16, 2013
Friday, August 16th, 2013Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before
Tuesday, August 13th, 2013“Travis County prosecutor charged with DWI.”
A prosecutor with the Travis County District Attorney’s Office was charged with driving while intoxicated after being involved in a traffic wreck over the weekend.
According to an arrest warrant affidavit released Monday, Brandon Grunewald, 33, was in a collision Sunday afternoon on the southbound MoPac Boulevard service road near Barton Skyway, Grunewald was driving a 2008 Land Rover. The other driver was in a Mini Cooper.
And what did his boss have to say?
Grunewald’s boss, Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg said she is reviewing his case
“It’s a first offense DWI and I don’t know what will happen until I have all the facts,” explained Lehmberg. “I have never terminated an employee for a first offense DWI and we have had employees with first offense DWI up and down the ranks.”
Indeed.
You know, I don’t think I’ve worked anywhere where “people up and down the chain of command” had “first-time” DWIs.
Sadly, Mr. Grunewald was not reported to have stamped his feet and implored the police to “Call Greg!”
(Hat tip: Blue Dot Blues.)
Detroit Celebrates 50 Years of Uninterrupted Democratic Rule By Declaring Bankruptcy
Thursday, July 18th, 2013Stockton, California can now breath a small sigh of relief. It’s no longer the largest American city to declare bankruptcy. Detroit has filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy.
Bonus: The city has more than 100,000 creditors.
This is the endpoint of the cradle-to-grave welfare state. Certainly Detroit got there faster than most will, thanks to endemic corruption, horrific mismanagement, and an overwhelmingly unionized (and thus expensive and inflexible) manufacturing base workforce. But the problem of overspending, bloated government, overregulation, declining population and cronyism are endemic to blue states and members of the European Union. Greece’s future is Detroit (with possibly fewer race riots), California’s future is Greece, and deficit spending continues, eventually the United States’ future is that of California.
Texas vs. California Update for June 27, 2013
Thursday, June 27th, 2013Time for another update of just how hard Texas is kicking California’s ass:
The BEA revised California’s real GDP growth downward from 2009 to 2011 in each of three years by a cumulative 2.6 percent, the third-largest negative revision in the nation.
In other words, California’s economy shrank an additional 2.6 percent before it grew 3.5 percent.
So, in the past five years California’s real GDP contracted 0.3 percent, one of ten states where economic activity was less in 2012 than it was in 2008.
By contrast, the BEA revised Texas’ growth upward by 0.5 percent from 2009 to 2011.
Texas’ newly revised real GDP growth from 2009 to 2012 was 13 percent.
From 2009 to 2012, California’s share of the U.S. economy shrank from 13.1 percent to 12.9 percent while Texas’ portion of the American economy increased from 8.2 percent to 9 percent.
What should be the Federer vs. Nadal of state-level competition has become a lopsided trouncing: Texas has humiliated its opponent in straight sets. The federal Bureau of Economic Analysis is out with its state-by-state economic growth numbers for 2012, and Texas is dancing the two-step all over California’s “recovery.”
What China Needs: Stronger Knife Control Laws
Thursday, June 27th, 201336 killed after knife gang attacks China police station.
But don’t worry: If a knife gang attacks your average Chinese citizens in their home or apartment, they don’t need a gun, they can just call the pol—
Oh, right.
Also, when armed gangs attack a police station, it’s not a “riot,” it’s something closer to an insurrection. Or Assault on Precinct 13, Chinese-style.
If confirmed, it would be one of the bloodiest incidents in Xinjiang since nearly 200 people were killed in the regional capital, Urumqi, in 2009.
The region, which borders Afghanistan and Pakistan, has been the scene of numerous violent incidents in recent years amid tensions between the large population of Muslim Uighurs and the ruling Han ethnic group.
You know, if 200 people were killed in an American city at one time, we’d never hear the end of. The mere fact that such things keep happening suggests that China has a much weaker grip on its hinterlands than the media usually suggests.
(Schtick hat tip: Dwight.)
Ted Cruz Fights Gang of 8 Illegal Alien Amnesty Proposal
Thursday, June 20th, 2013Now would be a good time to call and email you Senator (and your Representative) to let them know you oppose the “Gang of 8” illegal alien amnesty proposal currently being debated in the Senate, especially since it does less than nothing to secure the border, and makes hiring illegals more attractive than hiring Americans, since employers need not pay for their ObamaCare.
Now would also be a great time to contact anyone you know at the national Republican Party and inform them that you will not donate a dime to any national GOP committee if illegal alien amnesty passes.
Here’s Ted Cruz speaking against the amnesty proposal on the Senate floor:
And on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show:
Adventures in Criminal Dumbassery
Wednesday, June 19th, 2013Suppose you want the police to arrest you, but you aren’t quite ambitious enough to issue a death threat to the President. What to do? Well, How about:
Well, Nick K. Gates appears to be just that special kind of criminal dumbass since he left threatening messages against Ted Cruz at two of his offices under the name “Abolfanzi Akbori.”
The article makes Gates seem quite the prize:
In a June 10 interview at his Houston apartment, Gates told investigators he has spent 12 days in the Harris County Mental Health Center.
Gates has a prior felony conviction for attempted retaliation, where he threatened the life of a Houston police officer and his child after the officer arrested him for driving while intoxicated, according to the arrest warrant. He also was convicted on the DWI charge.
More information on this Super-genius:
Upon further investigation, FBI agents in Austin learned that agents in Houston were investigating Gates for “threatening the life of a Houston based FBI agent.”
Authorities also learned that Federal Protective Services Houston had an open case on Gates for “sending inappropriate emails and making inappropriate phone calls” to the U.S. Citizens and Immigration Services case worker who handled his immigration case.
What a want to know is: With just a single felony conviction, wouldn’t our crazy, threatening felon be eligible for the Gang of 8 amnesty proposal?
(Hat tip: Jammie Wearing Fools via Ace of Spades.)
Lawsuit Against Rosemary Lehmberg Moves Foward, Jury Trial Schedule for July 22
Thursday, June 13th, 2013That’s what I’m gleaning from this Statesman article on Travis County DA Rosemary Lehmberg following her DWI, though it doesn’t say the July 22 trial is for her removal under state law for intoxication of public officials. (The trial is not for her DWI, for which she already plead guilty and served time.) Unfortunately, the piece by Ciara O’Rourke is hardly a model of journalistic clarity:
Judge clears way for suit to remove Lehmberg
Visiting Judge David Peeples made several rulings Tuesday in a lawsuit to remove Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg from office, including allowing another removal petition filed recently by a former district attorney candidate to proceed.
Rick Reed, who ran against Lehmberg in 2008, filed a petition two weeks ago that claims 16 counts of official misconduct ranging from coercion of a public servant to retaliation.
That and a separate petition to remove her from office on grounds of intoxication were filed under a state law that allows the removal of a district attorney on grounds of incompetency, official misconduct and intoxication on or off duty.
Lehmberg pleaded guilty to driving while intoxicated April 19, a week after Travis County sheriff’s deputies arrested her following a 911 call about a car driving for about a mile in a bike lane, swerving and veering into oncoming traffic, according to an arrest affidavit. A blood sample showed her blood alcohol level was nearly three times the legal limit.
Reed cites Lehmberg’s behavior as she was being booked in jail, including asking for Sheriff Greg Hamilton several times, as examples of her alleged misconduct.
A jury trial is scheduled for July 22, though the Travis County attorney’s office, which is representing the state, could decline to pursue the suit on either ground.
Executive Assistant County Attorney James Collins said the county attorney’s office is at this point preparing for trial on July 22, though he told Peeples that prosecutors haven’t finished reviewing Reed’s petition.
A second hearing before the trial date was scheduled for June 21, when Collins told Peeples prosecutors expect to request to test a hair sample from Lehmberg and to further test the blood sample taken after her arrest.
I’m assuming the trail is for “a separate petition to remove her from office on grounds of intoxication were filed under a state law that allows the removal of a district attorney on grounds of incompetency, official misconduct and intoxication on or off duty,” but the piece is so poorly written it’s hard to tell.
The Fox 7 report is considerably clearer: “A petition filed by County Attorney David Escamilla calls for her removal on grounds of intoxication saying Lehmberg violated Texas Government Code. Lehmberg did not appear in court Tuesday when a judge decided there will be a jury trial.”
In other news, as Dwight already reported, Governor Rick Perry is threatening to veto all state funding for the Travis County Public Integrity Unit, which Lehmberg heads as Travis County DA, unless she resigns.
But there is one good spot of news for Lehmberg: She’s no longer a suspect in a hit-and-run that happened the night of her drinking-and-driving binge.
Ted Cruz Sides with the Dissent in Maryland vs. King
Tuesday, June 4th, 2013Ted Cruz sides with the dissent in the recently decided Maryland vs. King DNA gathering case:
All of us should be alarmed by this significant step towards government as Big Brother. The excessive concentration of power in government is always inimical to liberty, and a national database of our DNA cannot be reconciled with the Fourth Amendment.
Accumulating DNA from arrestees—without warrant or probable cause to seize the DNA—is not designed to solve the crime for which the person has (rightly or wrongly) been arrested. Rather, it’s to test the DNA against a national database to potentially implicate them in other unsolved crimes. But the Constitution requires particularized suspicion of a specific crime; indeed, the Fourth Amendment was adopted to prohibit the British practice of “general warrants” targeting individuals absent specific evidence of wrongdoing.