Don’t Taunt the Happy Fun Ball
ArchPundit
I imagine Krugman is sitting behind his desk and wryly smiling after getting the reaction that TAPPED points out from Neil Cavuto.
And they call Krugman shrill.
May 2003
Don’t ask
Back tomorrow night or Wednesday. Sigh.
Vice Watch
Brooklyn and Washington Park make the news.
Brooklyn fires the officer who lost control of his vehicle and hit a suspect trying to flee. It is truly remarkable to be fired from the most corrupt and incompetent police force around.
The Washington Park follies continue with the Mayor being allowed to use an official vehicle for official duties. Glad to hear that could get settled while Washington Park considers granting two new strip club licenses. From the Post-Dispatch on April 18th,
Washington Park, already home to the most strip clubs in the Metro East area, four, has approved permits for two more.
The village has been struggling financially, and the two clubs approved Tuesday by the village board will bring in more than $100,000 a year, officials said.
"We need the revenue," said board member Charlie Byrd, one of five board members who voted to approve the licenses. "We’re a poverty-stricken village. If we don’t increase the revenue, we’re going to have to start laying off police officers."
The licenses were awarded to Doug Talley, owner of a Washington Park trucking company, and Stephen Romanik, whose father, Robert, is former Washington Park police chief and a one-time strip club owner.
Are these two screaming racketeering clowns to anyone else?
They should,
Romanik’s father, Robert, has said in the past that he was acting as a consultant for his son’s business. Robert Romanik was placed on probation in 1997 for lying to a grand jury during the Thomas Venezia gambling and racketeering investigation.
With just three days to go on a sentence of probation in the Venezia case, Romanik was charged in 1998 with bank fraud for concealing from a bank the true nature of loans used to build topless clubs in Washington Park and Centreville.
He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 20 months in prison.
Under the plea agreement, Romanik agreed to sell his Washington Park c lub, which is now the Hustler Club.
And with all Metro East nefarious connections, unindicted co-conspirator Jerry Costello is only separated by one degree.
What adults do is their business, but the particular form of businesses in Metro East catering to adults are inextricably linked to racketeering and corruption.
Political State Report
Neal Reports Edgar is up 15 in early polls
Stroke the Base
Matt Yglesias points out that some of the social conservatives are unhappy with Bush over not supporting Santorum for his anti-gay comments and some are threatening to bolt.
Matt doesn’t think they have anywhere to go, but Jacob Levy makes an interesting observation in the comments:
The loony U.S. Taxpayers’ Party is always lurking out there– despite its libertarianish name, it’s a Reconstructionist Christian outfit. They almost managed to recruit the equally loony then- Senator Bob Smith to head their ticket in 2000. As with the pre-1999 Greens (or, for that matter, the pre-implosion Reform Party), they’re just big enough to be worth taking over (from the perspective of a Nader-like outsider who wants ballot access and a party structure) and small enough that a friendly takeover would be very, very easy.
I’m not sure that is likely, but it is a good point. The US Taxpayer Party is now the Constitution Party and is full of fruit cakes. They held their convention here in Saint Louis in 1999 and I had the ironic pleasure of being stuck on Metrolink with a few of them on the way downtown. They thought Metrolink was great. Irony is truly dead.
They are wingnuts of the umpteenth order however. They would make a great home to the more extreme social conservatives. I’m not sure that Dobson isn’t just pushing the administration, but you never know when one of them will jump ship.
Sympathy for the Devil
It takes a lot for me to be concerned about how Matt Hale, racist hatemonger, is being treated, but the ever talented John Ashcroft pulls it off. Carol Marin reports on the legal wrangling between Hale’s lawyers and the US Government.
Hale was arrested in January for plotting to kill a federal judge who had ruled against Hale’s organization, the World Church of the Creator, in a copyright infringement case. I’ve blogged about Hale and this case and arrest here, here, here, here, and here.
The meat of the issue concerning Hale’s access to his lawyers is contained in Marin’s article,
When lawyers Thomas A. Durkin and Patrick W. Blegen were hired by Hale’s parents to defend him, Hale’s lawyers expected to be able to talk to their client. They didn’t expect to get a memorandum signed by U.S. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft. That document is 14 pages and outlines severe restrictions called Special Administrative Measures (SAMS), not just on Hale but on them too. Not to mention media restrictions as well.
What did Ashcroft say? I wish I knew. The SAMS memo said the government, is "sensitive," so it has been sealed. That’s not all.
U.S. Atty. Patrick Fitzgerald, in a letter to Durkin and Blegen, said that unless they signed a document promising to abide by the SAMS memo, they would not be permitted the privileged conversations attorneys have with their clients.
In other words, Hale’s attorneys couldn’t talk to their client to prepare his defense unless they promised to abide by government demands they considered to be indefensible. Things, they said, like not being able to tell anyone what Hale says unless it is specifically for his defense, not being able to communicate to Hale anything the government deems "inflammatory," not being able to communicate Hale’s point of view to the press.
They refused to sign.
SAMS have been around since 1996. Fitzgerald used the measures when he was in New York as a way of stopping terrorism suspects from sending "coded" messages to their disciples.
The measures have been used against convicted street gang members to prevent them from ordering hits from their prison cells.
Nobody, however, can point to SAMS being used against a pre-trial detainee in a non-terrorism case where a person is still presumed innocent until proven otherwise. Until now.
Hale is scum, but there is no excuse to deny him access to a legitimate defense.
I can’t sum it up any better than Marin did:
If Hale did in fact plot to kill a federal judge, it is undeniably an assault on the judicial system.
But cynically using the war on terrorism to compromise the Constitution is as well.
More Blogroll News: Gary Hart
Hart’s log will be moved to an area not for Presidential blogs as he just announced he is out of the race.
Speaking of Blogrolls
I generally loathe discussions of blogrolls. I seldom have reason to link to Acidman. But these two posts are too damn funny.
What terrifies me about Den Beste’s post (actually there is probably a lot, but I’m not weeding through it is the notion that someone is out there plotting revenge because they were removed from SDB’s blogroll:
It isn’t possible for me to please everyone. People I don’t include hate me; people who were on the list and get removed resent it and make elaborate plans for revenge. But if it were long, it would be of negligible value. That’s one of the problems with reverse network effect: it is precisely the exclusivity that makes it valuable, and therefore it is unavoidable that the majority be disappointed.
I’d dismiss this as paranoid rantings from one’s parents’ basement, but the fact that SDB exists makes me all too aware that there might be someone out there actually concerned about his blogroll.
A New Look–Additions to the Blogroll
Hey, don’t go away, it is my new look!
I think this is a bit smoother and concentrates the attention on the content more. I’m looking for a non-obnoxious background if anyone has a suggestion.
I’ve also updated the blogroll.
Mysteriously, Chip Taylor didn’t make the transfer, but he’ll be back up soon.
The Daily Dystopian is a fellow Blogstudio user.
Dan Drezner was not on my previous blogroll for unknown reasons.
Brian Linse also never made the previous blogroll– I don’t know why not.
Angry Bear joins.
Beautiful Horizons joins up and was excluded previously for unknown reasons.
Blog Baby was mentioned yesterday.
Border’s Union was added out of reciprocity. We’ll see how interesting it is.
Promising Carl With A K is added.
DataFood is yummy.
GeekPol is in the house.
Mac Diva’s venture is here.
Pain Pill provides some Chicago info.
Julian Sanches is finally added.
Tacitus makes an appearance.
Unlearned Hand can be found here as well as at the top of Ted Barlow’s page.
Tim Lambert gets a permanent link in the watch section.
I dropped a bunch–either sites that don’t need linkage or don’t update frequently or I simply didn’t visit. If you link to me and I don’t have you listed, let me know. I will, in most cases, link back.