I don’t normally inflict my legal interests on readers here, but while doing some research recently I came across an unusually action-packed case that I thought was worth sharing.
It involves a guy and his buddy stealing a bag of clothes irons (!?!?) from a JC Penny in El Paso. There’s a seven-person brawl on the side of a freeway off-ramp involving some extremely dedicated store security personnel (”Appellant rose from the pavement, and he stomped on Carreno’s testicles-causing Carreno considerable pain . . . Both loss prevention officers denied kicking Appellant in the face or head during the confrontation, but they acknowledged that Appellant may have sustained injuries.”). There’s gang threats, a random appearance by the Border Patrol, and some “enormously high” levels of methamphetamine.
And then the guy who stole the irons testifies, and he tells a radically different but equally riveting story (”Appellant stated that Hernandez punched him [in] the stomach, and he vomited on the floor. He was then told to mop the floor with his pants.”)
The full facts of the case are below the jump. Legal pervs can read the full case here, but I don’t think, aside from the facts, that there’s anything interesting about the case.
I am not what you would call an audiophile. I don’t obsess over my meticulously cataloged music files in .FLAC format, I don’t own $500 headphones, and I don’t buy all my albums in vinyl because “the music just has more soul, man.” That said, I was recently lent a copy of The Beatles Mono Box Set from a friend of mine.
Holy Crap.
To say that this was an entirely different experience is putting it mildly, it was like hearing many of these songs for the first time. Over the course of the day, and evening, it became quite clear that most of these songs were never meant to be heard in any other format. They were written, arranged and mixed for mono sound and to hear them the way they were intended is to hear the true genius of the greatest band of all time.
I highly reccomend this box set for any true fan of The Beatles (stereo…blech) I know I will need to buy it as my friend is expecting his copy back today.
And rightly so!
Jamie posted this at 10:28 AM HKT on Tuesday, December 15th, 2009 as Nerdom, Ourselves
To put this in context, Lieberman was invited to participate in the process that led to the Medicare buy-in. His opposition would have killed it before liberals invested in the idea. Instead, he skipped the meetings and is forcing liberals to give up yet another compromise. Each time he does that, he increases the chances of the bill’s failure that much more. And if there’s a policy rationale here, it’s not apparent to me, or to others who’ve interviewed him. At this point, Lieberman seems primarily motivated by torturing liberals. That is to say, he seems willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in order to settle an old electoral score.
Personally, I oppose socialized medicine because I love the sound of the uninsured wailing and gnashing their teeth. Their lamentations help me relax.
So I guess it’s a bad thing that Joe Lieberman is committing genocide just to annoy Ezra Klein. But compared to me, his motives seem almost noble.
Apollo posted this at 12:07 PM HKT on Monday, December 14th, 2009 as Health Care, Journalism
It seems that TSA’s Standard Operating Procedures manual (or, at least a version of the SOP dated May 2008) got released online. Some years ago when I was a member of the national security apparatus (either as a James Bond-like secret agent whose job was to win poker games and bang models in Monaco, or as a schlub in northern Virginia who wrote training manuals for airport baggage screeners; my memory’s hazy on some of the details) I had access to that document and probably read most of it. I’m anxiously waiting to find out which contractor posted it – it may well be someone I know. How exciting!
Anyhow, reading the now-released details that are supposedly the most revealing, I have the exact same reaction that I had back when I worked on such matters: 1. It’s hard to think of a concrete way how someone could use specific details of screening techniques to defeat the screening process; but 2. the most important information in the book is how un thorough the screening actually is.
One of our great advantages in battling terrorists is that terrorists aren’t very bright and don’t seem capable of solid analytical reasoning. Anyone who flies a half dozen times a year knows exactly how spotty the screening can be. Immediately after I quit my job working on airport security issues, the wife and I went to France for a month. When we got to Paris I got to looking for something in the backpack I’d used as a carryon, and I found but a box cutter we’d used while packing. Ask anyone who flies regularly, and they’ll have a half dozen of those stories. I was disappointed that I’d made it onto an international flight with a box cutter, but I wasn’t surprised (well, I was surprised that it was in my backpack, but I wasn’t surprised I made it through security).
I’m not saying the screening process is a completely wasted effort. Nor am I saying that we need a significantly more complete screening process – a nation of frequent fliers like America would not tolerate El Al levels of scrutiny on every Des Moines to Chicago flight. But I am saying that a big part of why we’ve spent eight years without an act of air terrorism is because the baddies aren’t very good at calculating their odds of success. To the degree that releasing the SOP allows them to precisely calculate those odds, we’re less safe today than we were last week. However, I just don’t think many terrorists are smart enough to figure that out. Three cheers for ignorance and irrationality in the Muslim world!
“I liked what he said,” Palin told us in a phone interview. “I talked too in my book about the fallen nature of man and why war is necessary at times.” For Palin, that view strikes close to home: Her eldest son, 20-year-old Track, is an Army infantry member who recently returned from a tour of duty in Iraq.
Track is “an Army infantry member”? That’s sounds strange to my ears. Can’t we say infantryman? I understand the urge to avoid “man” language, but that urge is misplaced when it reaches a situation like this, where all “members” of the infantry are in fact men.
There’s no way anyone could seriously propose this:
The “inconvenient truth” overhanging the UN’s Copenhagen conference is not that the climate is warming or cooling, but that humans are overpopulating the world.
A planetary law, such as China’s one-child policy, is the only way to reverse the disastrous global birthrate currently, which is one million births every four days.
The world’s other species, vegetation, resources, oceans, arable land, water supplies and atmosphere are being destroyed and pushed out of existence as a result of humanity’s soaring reproduction rate.
Ironically, China, despite its dirty coal plants, is the world’s leader in terms of fashioning policy to combat environmental degradation, thanks to its one-child-only edict.
I swear to god, it’s like these morons read 1984 and A Brave New World and said “Hey, that sounds like a good idea!”
Jamie posted this at 2:13 PM HKT on Thursday, December 10th, 2009 as Brave New Worlds
The man who said Congress had to pass Porkulus without debate or else our economy would decline and never recover, who says the government has to take over the healthcare system or else we’ll go bankrupt, who says that we need to pass cap and trade or else the ice caps will melt and everyone’s house will flood, is now telling Senate Republicans to “stop trying to frighten the American people.”
Has Barry ever once tried to sell a policy through any method other than, “We’ve got to pass this now or else THE WORST THING IN THE WORLD will happen!!!!”? In the Age of Obama, “Hope” can only be realized by scaring people.
Is there any way to construe that other than naked racism? Did anyone here listen to the full context of the quote? Maybe HuffPo is taking it out of context? (Which would not be shocking in the least.)
Jamie posted this at 11:27 AM HKT on Wednesday, December 9th, 2009 as Buffoon Watch, Race
However, 53% of voters believe the president places higher importance on ending the war. Just 28% say Obama thinks winning the war is more important. Another 19% are not sure.
Certainly the speech the president gave last week was not meant to communicate his desire to win. I think most of that 28% is composed of people giving the president a presumption of good faith – that surely he would not escalate a war, sending tens of thousands more Americans into combat, simply to provide political cover for when he cuts and runs. Given the content of his speech, I’m not sure it’s fair to make that presumption. He had an opportunity to lay out the ingenious plan for victory that he’s spent months crafting, but instead he mostly just groused about how much it sucks that we’re having to spend money fighting one of those war thingies.
War is, everywhere and always, a competition of wills. The American people don’t think our commander-in-chief has the will to win this war. Let’s hope our enemies in Afghanistan come to a different conclusion.
When will people stop asking why Obama has suddenly lost his great ability to communicate and finally realize that he never had the ability to begin with? It is still the case that the only thing he has ever convinced anyone of is to vote for him; considering his opponents were Hillary Clinton and John McCain, opinions vary about how large this rhetorical achievement was.
It’s amazing how dogmatically journalists stick to their memes. George W. Bush will always be a partisan idiot who couldn’t string together two sentences. Barack Obama will always be the bipartisan super genius who always knows exactly what to say. Please ignore the fact that by the summer of 2001, with a slim majority in the House and opposition control of the Senate, Bush had passed his two biggest campaign issues (tax cuts – actually a larger tax cut than he campaigned on! – and No Child Left Behind), but here we are almost at the end of 2009, with Obama’s party having a large majority in the House and a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, and he’s managed to pass . . . um . . . Porkulus and an expansion of hate crimes laws. How high on the list of campaign pledges were those? Wow, I guess Obama must have suddenly lost his Mesmer-like ability to enthrall an audience!
The fact remains that when George Bush spoke, Americans went off to war; when Barack Obama speaks, West Point cadets nod off and the rest of can’t figure out what the hell he’s talking about. Obama has never been a skilled speaker, and he isn’t one today. He has a pretty voice and smiles at opportune times. Everything else is the audience’s projection and wishful thinking.
The White House is apparently invoking the theory of separation of powers to prohibit Desiree Rogers, President Obama’s Social Secretary, from testifying on the recent imbroglio regarding gate-crashing at the White House. . . . it is literally inconceivable that anyone drafting the Constitution would have imagined the position of White House Social Secretary, paid for with taxpayer funds, and that the majesty of separation of powers rhetoric would apply to a situation like this.
In some ways our society has progressed; in others it has regressed. We have a black president with a government-paid social secretary. Which part of that sentence would surprise the Founders more? I suspect they’d look at our present state of affairs in much they same way that sane people look at this.
Most war presidents cast themselves as heroes on a white charger, believing that no one heeds an uncertain trumpet. Obama, on the other hand, cloaked himself in what you might call Niebuhrian modesty.
I hope Krauthammer is wrong, but I can’t think of a single reason why that would be the case:
Despite my personal misgivings about the possibility of lasting success against Taliban insurgencies in both Afghanistan and the borderlands of Pakistan, I have deep confidence that Petraeus and McChrystal would not recommend a strategy that will be costly in lives, without their having a firm belief in the possibility of success.
I would therefore defer to their judgment and support their recommended policy. But the fate of this war depends not just on them. It depends on the president. We cannot prevail without a commander-in-chief committed to success. And this commander-in-chief defended his exit date (versus the straw-man alternative of “open-ended” nation-building) thusly: “because the nation that I’m most interested in building is our own.”
Remarkable. Go and fight, he tells his cadets — some of whom may not return alive — but I may have to cut your mission short because my real priorities are domestic.
Has there ever been a call to arms more dispiriting, a trumpet more uncertain?
I confess I feel conflicted about Afghanistan myself: given its history, I’m ambivalent about whether establishing a reasonably competent government with a manageable level of corruption is either possible or worth it. Unfortunately, it’s too late for second guessing on this and — as Krauthammer says elsewhere in the article — if Petraeus and McChrystal believe it’s doable, I’ll for it.
I do have one retrospective question: given the extraordinarily complicated nature of the GWOT — from defining victory to detainee status — would we have been better served in 2001 by acknowledging the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan and then declaring war on them (the declaration could have defined al Qaeda as an irregular co-combatant, or something) ?
It seems to me that this was have solved the tremendous legal and strategic ambiguities that have been so troubling over the past eight years.