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Red Bull Air Racing

Gas price by zip at Seti

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Red Bull Air Racing

Gas price by zip at Seti

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Red Bull Air Racing

Gas price by zip at Seti

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A SETI Political thread exclusive...

Donald Rummy

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me@rescam.org

Rush, it wasn't fraud. He found some glaringly minute point of law and got his client off on a technicality before the issue of guilt was ever addressed.
The statement that finally set me off was, "If a technicality gets your client off, it's the same as if he was innocent." As I said, legal in today's system, just not moral. And I swear to you, the man did not understand why I would be upset that a cold blooded murderer was walking free.

"Many that live deserve death. Some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. Even the very wise cannot see all ends." --The guy that wrote the screenplay for the Lord of the Rings.

I understand your frustration, Bill. That sucks. But the system really needs to be that way because the alternative--innocent people going to jail--is much worse.

Which is why I won't practice criminal law. Ick.

I'd throw Es in jail though.

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Cordially,
Rush

elrushbo2@theobviousgmail.com
Remove the obvious...

Rush, it wasn't fraud. He found some glaringly minute point of law and got his client off on a technicality before the issue of guilt was ever addressed.
The statement that finally set me off was, "If a technicality gets your client off, it's the same as if he was innocent." As I said, legal in today's system, just not moral. And I swear to you, the man did not understand why I would be upset that a cold blooded murderer was walking free.

"Many that live deserve death. Some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. Even the very wise cannot see all ends." --The guy that wrote the screenplay for the Lord of the Rings.

I understand your frustration, Bill. That sucks. But the system really needs to be that way because the alternative--innocent people going to jail--is much worse.

Which is why I won't practice criminal law. Ick.

I'd throw Es in jail though.

Well, that goes without saying ;}

Secret deals - San Diego wants to know who committed fraud

UNION-TRIBUNE EDITORIAL

November 16, 2006

The Securities and Exchange Commission has concluded its probe of financial wrongdoing at City Hall, finding multiple “violations of the antifraud provisions of the federal securities laws.” Yet, despite the enormity of the offenses – officials deliberately concealed damaging information from bond investors – the SEC's “cease and desist” order leaves San Diegans to wonder: Who, exactly, committed these violations?

The SEC decree, worked out behind closed doors by the city attorney, the City Council and federal investigators, is excruciatingly careful not to name any names. It merely concludes that “certain city officials knew or were reckless in not knowing that the (bond) Disclosures were false and misleading.”

“Certain city officials”? Does that include the sitting City Council members who were cited for negligence by the Kroll investigation – Scott Peters, Toni Atkins, Donna Frye, Jim Madaffer and Brian Maienschein? These five appear to have escaped SEC sanctions, but San Diegans have a right to know precisely what role their elected officials played in the securities fraud.

If you believe City Council President Peters, the SEC's findings were nothing more than a minor demerit. “It left it vague. There are no admissions or denials and no conclusions as to individuals,” declares Peters. His bid to sugarcoat the SEC decree is no less surprising than it is credible. Peters, after all, engineered the closed meetings of the City Council in which the “no names” order was devised outside of public scrutiny.

Handling such important issues in secret suits Peters just fine. In an interview with the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce newsletter, he indignantly assailed the Union-Tribune as “infantile and voyeuristic” for calling on the City Council to conduct the people's business in the open. Imagine the problems San Diego would have been spared if Councilman Peters' involvement in the reckless underfunding of the pension system had been exposed in open meetings rather than carried out in the dark.

Lamentably, secrecy is the SEC's trademark as well.

At least 11 former city officials have been notified by the SEC that they are targets of further enforcement action. However, the agency won't say who the individuals are or even confirm that they indeed are being investigated.

Contrary to the SEC order, the “city” did not violate the anti-fraud provisions of federal securities laws. Every one of the offenses documented in the order was perpetrated by an individual. Cities don't commit crimes. People do. By shielding these individuals in the “cease and desist” order, the SEC sends the unfortunate message that it really is not ready to hold municipal officials – in particular, elected officeholders – fully accountable for their financial misdeeds.

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me@rescam.org

It's a joke, right?
Ethics-light Murtha merits jeers, not top job

UNION-TRIBUNE EDITORIAL

November 16, 2006

It sure didn't take long for House Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi to make her first huge mistake. Now it's up to rank-and-file House Democrats to help minimize her error by rejecting her call for Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania, to be elected House majority leader in party caucuses today.

Some of Pelosi's motives in backing Murtha are perfectly understandable. She and many Democrats think that the ex-Marine's turn against the Iraq war was a galvanizing moment for their party and that having a decorated veteran in a leadership post makes sense during wartime. Pelosi and Murtha have been loyal friends and allies for many years. Pelosi also has had a frosty relationship with Maryland Rep. Steny Hoyer, Murtha's rival in the majority leader race, despite having worked with Hoyer in House leadership for years.

Nevertheless, in a crucial sense, Murtha is the exact wrong man for the job. At a time when Pelosi and others say disgust with a congressional “culture of corruption” helped fuel Democrats' takeover of Congress, it is unfathomable that a lawmaker who revels in that corrupt culture could be rewarded with a position as powerful as House majority leader.

Make no mistake: Murtha is not a garden-variety earmarker and donor rewarder. He is in the same league as disgraced ex-Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, steering an estimated $100 million in earmarks to clients of favored lobbyists, including his brother and his former top aide.

Murtha is the epitome of the lawmaker-plunderer and always his been. In 1980, he barely avoided prosecution on bribery charges after telling undercover FBI agents that he wasn't interested in taking a $50,000 payoff “right now” but might be later after “we do business together for a while.”

Twenty-six years later, he is still brazen. In May, incredibly enough, Murtha traded his vote against a tough ethics and lobbying reform bill backed by Pelosi to GOP House leaders in return for a promise of more earmarks. On Tuesday, he denounced a similar reform measure as “total crap.”

House Democrats – including San Diego Reps. Susan Davis and Bob Filner – shouldn't be considering Murtha for majority leader. They should be considering kicking him out of their caucus on the grounds that his mere presence gives lie to Pelosi's grandiose claims that the coming Democratic-run House will be a shining example of ethical purity.

A final note: Democrats' push to promote the use of “Swift boating” as a verb to describe a Republican distortion that turns a strength of a Democratic pol into a weakness is sure being undercut by ... Democrats.

First, Mr. Swift Boat himself, Sen. John Kerry, likens criticism of his appalling (though possibly unintentional) joke about the smarts of soldiers to “Swift boating.” Then Murtha likens criticism of his ethical record to “Swift boating.” Sorry, guys, We don't buy it.

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me@rescam.org

Creating obstacles for death penalty

GEORGE F. WILL
THE WASHINGTON POST

November 16, 2006

There should be two Supreme Courts, one to reverse the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the other to hear all other cases. Last term, more of the Supreme Court's caseload – 18 of 82 cases (22 percent) – came from the liberal 9th Circuit, based in San Francisco, than from any other circuit, and the 9th was reversed in 15 of the 18. The 9th's winning percentage (.167) was worse than that of the 1962 Mets (.250). On Monday, in the first decision of this term, the Supreme Court reversed the 9th's fretfulness on behalf of Fernando Belmontes.

In order, as he explained to one of his accomplices, to “take out a witness,” Belmontes used perhaps 20 blows with a metal dumbbell bar to bludgeon to death Steacy McConnell, whose home he had entered for a burglary. He emerged drenched with her blood and carrying her stereo that he sold for $100. She was 19. Belmontes killed her 25 years ago.

How did capital punishment jurisprudence reach its current baroque condition, in which cases live longer than did the murder victims? At the hands of judges such as Stephen Reinhardt, a residue of Jimmy Carter's presidency, who says Belmontes' “robbery gone wrong” lacked “especially heinous elements.”

Belmontes was convicted of murder “with special circumstances,” making him eligible for the death penalty. In the trial's penalty phase, the jury heard about his previous crimes, which included severely beating his pregnant girlfriend a month before murdering McConnell. Belmontes argued that he had an abusive and alcoholic father and had become a Christian (before beating his girlfriend). He also stressed – this is called a “forward-looking mitigation” – that he had been well-behaved in a previous incarceration and would contribute to society if sentenced to life in a prison's structured environment.

Belmontes' attorney asked the trial judge to specifically instruct the jury to consider Belmontes' ability to live acceptably in prison. Instead, the judge used California's “catchall mitigation instruction,” which was declared constitutional in 1990. It tells a jury weighing capital punishment that it can consider many things (e.g., the use of force or violence, the defendant's age, any extreme mental or emotional disturbance, prior felony convictions). Belmontes' case turned on whether the jury understood one provision of the catchall instruction – to consider “any other circumstance which extenuates the gravity of the crime” – to include the “forward-looking” consideration that life imprisonment might be a suitable punishment.

Reinhardt, writing for the 9th's divided three-judge panel, overturned Belmontes' death sentence because the trial judge “failed to instruct the jury that it was required to consider” what Reinhardt considered Belmontes' “principal mitigation evidence” – his aptitude for prison life. On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 against the 9th.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, argued that there was a reasonable probability that the jury weighed Belmontes' “future potential.” Justice John Paul Stevens, joined by Justices David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, dissented, arguing that because the trial judge never explicitly told the jury that it must consider Belmontes' capacity to live satisfactorily in prison, there is a “reasonable probability” that the jury did not.

Courts have enveloped the administration of capital punishment in so many arcane procedures that judicial opponents of capital punishment have vast latitude to speculate that a jury perhaps did not fully fathom its rights and duties, and hence the punishment is impermissible. And Steacy McConnells become afterthoughts.

There is something grotesque about an execution a quarter of a century after a crime. But there is something repellent about the jurisprudential hairsplitting that consumes decades, defeats the conclusions of juries' deliberations, and denies society the implementation of a punishment it has endorsed.

Belmontes' lawyer calls Monday's decision “an unwelcome setback” but cites “other issues,” such as the quality of Belmontes' trial lawyer, that the 9th Circuit did not address. Well, there is, it seems, always a next time.

The Supreme Court recently heard arguments in another death penalty case. The question at issue is: Jim Studer and his parents wore a button featuring a photograph of Studer's brother during the San Jose trial of the man who murdered him 12 years ago. A circuit court's three-judge panel, divided 2-1, reversed the conviction, arguing that the button interfered with the defendant receiving a fair trial because the button enunciated the “specific message” that the murdered man was “the innocent party” and that the defendant was “guilty.”

The circuit court was the 9th. The author of that opinion was Reinhardt. Tidying up after it, and him, is steady work.

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me@rescam.org

Military's gay policy brings ban on JROTC

ASSOCIATED PRESS

November 16, 2006

SAN FRANCISCO – High schools across the city soon will no longer have Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps programs, after officials decided to eliminate them because of the Pentagon's “Don't Ask, Don't Tell” policy regarding gay service members.

The Board of Education voted 4-2 Tuesday to phase out the JROTC from schools over the next two years, despite protest from hundreds of students who rallied outside the meeting.

The resolution states that the military's ban on openly gay soldiers violates the school district's equal rights policy for gays. The school district and the military share the $1.6 million annual cost of the program.

“One of the big components (of JROTC) is military branding, military thinking and military recruitment, and that has to stop,” board member Dan Kelly said during the meeting.

About 1,600 San Francisco students participate in JROTC at seven high schools districtwide. Cadets and instructors who spoke at the meeting and rallied outside argued that the program teaches leadership, organizational skills, personal responsibility and other values.

“This is where the kids feel safe, the one place they feel safe,” said Robert Powell, a JROTC instructor and retired Army lieutenant colonel. “You're going to take that away from them?”

Mayor Gavin Newsom called severing ties with the JROTC “a bad idea” that penalized students without having a practical effect on the Pentagon's policy on gays in the military.

Lt. Cmdr. Joe Carpenter, a Pentagon spokesman, has said he didn't know of a school district having barred JROTC from its campuses.

=====

So the BoE would rather have those kids loiter at street corners?

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me@rescam.org

Creating obstacles for death penalty

GEORGE F. WILL
THE WASHINGTON POST

November 16, 2006

There should be two Supreme Courts, one to reverse the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the other to hear all other cases. Last term, more of the Supreme Court's caseload – 18 of 82 cases (22 percent) – came from the liberal 9th Circuit, based in San Francisco, than from any other circuit, and the 9th was reversed in 15 of the 18. The 9th's winning percentage (.167) was worse than that of the 1962 Mets (.250). On Monday, in the first decision of this term, the Supreme Court reversed the 9th's fretfulness on behalf of Fernando Belmontes.

In order, as he explained to one of his accomplices, to “take out a witness,” Belmontes used perhaps 20 blows with a metal dumbbell bar to bludgeon to death Steacy McConnell, whose home he had entered for a burglary. He emerged drenched with her blood and carrying her stereo that he sold for $100. She was 19. Belmontes killed her 25 years ago.

How did capital punishment jurisprudence reach its current baroque condition, in which cases live longer than did the murder victims? At the hands of judges such as Stephen Reinhardt, a residue of Jimmy Carter's presidency, who says Belmontes' “robbery gone wrong” lacked “especially heinous elements.”

Belmontes was convicted of murder “with special circumstances,” making him eligible for the death penalty. In the trial's penalty phase, the jury heard about his previous crimes, which included severely beating his pregnant girlfriend a month before murdering McConnell. Belmontes argued that he had an abusive and alcoholic father and had become a Christian (before beating his girlfriend). He also stressed – this is called a “forward-looking mitigation” – that he had been well-behaved in a previous incarceration and would contribute to society if sentenced to life in a prison's structured environment.

Belmontes' attorney asked the trial judge to specifically instruct the jury to consider Belmontes' ability to live acceptably in prison. Instead, the judge used California's “catchall mitigation instruction,” which was declared constitutional in 1990. It tells a jury weighing capital punishment that it can consider many things (e.g., the use of force or violence, the defendant's age, any extreme mental or emotional disturbance, prior felony convictions). Belmontes' case turned on whether the jury understood one provision of the catchall instruction – to consider “any other circumstance which extenuates the gravity of the crime” – to include the “forward-looking” consideration that life imprisonment might be a suitable punishment.

Reinhardt, writing for the 9th's divided three-judge panel, overturned Belmontes' death sentence because the trial judge “failed to instruct the jury that it was required to consider” what Reinhardt considered Belmontes' “principal mitigation evidence” – his aptitude for prison life. On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 against the 9th.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, argued that there was a reasonable probability that the jury weighed Belmontes' “future potential.” Justice John Paul Stevens, joined by Justices David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, dissented, arguing that because the trial judge never explicitly told the jury that it must consider Belmontes' capacity to live satisfactorily in prison, there is a “reasonable probability” that the jury did not.

Courts have enveloped the administration of capital punishment in so many arcane procedures that judicial opponents of capital punishment have vast latitude to speculate that a jury perhaps did not fully fathom its rights and duties, and hence the punishment is impermissible. And Steacy McConnells become afterthoughts.

There is something grotesque about an execution a quarter of a century after a crime. But there is something repellent about the jurisprudential hairsplitting that consumes decades, defeats the conclusions of juries' deliberations, and denies society the implementation of a punishment it has endorsed.

Belmontes' lawyer calls Monday's decision “an unwelcome setback” but cites “other issues,” such as the quality of Belmontes' trial lawyer, that the 9th Circuit did not address. Well, there is, it seems, always a next time.

The Supreme Court recently heard arguments in another death penalty case. The question at issue is: Jim Studer and his parents wore a button featuring a photograph of Studer's brother during the San Jose trial of the man who murdered him 12 years ago. A circuit court's three-judge panel, divided 2-1, reversed the conviction, arguing that the button interfered with the defendant receiving a fair trial because the button enunciated the “specific message” that the murdered man was “the innocent party” and that the defendant was “guilty.”

The circuit court was the 9th. The author of that opinion was Reinhardt. Tidying up after it, and him, is steady work.

Although in my state the death row population is quite smalll compared to California's, it is the 9th circuit court advancing their anti-death penalty consensus against the will of the vast majority of the citizens within the jurisdiction of the 9th court. You're preaching to the choir reverend. :)

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Account frozen...

Although in my state the death row population is quite smalll compared to California's, it is the 9th circuit court advancing their anti-death penalty consensus against the will of the vast majority of the citizens within the jurisdiction of the 9th court. You're preaching to the choir reverend. :)

And yet all our attempts to split up the 9th circuit have met with failure. :(

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me@rescam.org

Military's gay policy brings ban on JROTC

ASSOCIATED PRESS

November 16, 2006

SAN FRANCISCO – High schools across the city soon will no longer have Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps programs, after officials decided to eliminate them because of the Pentagon's “Don't Ask, Don't Tell” policy regarding gay service members.

The Board of Education voted 4-2 Tuesday to phase out the JROTC from schools over the next two years, despite protest from hundreds of students who rallied outside the meeting.

The resolution states that the military's ban on openly gay soldiers violates the school district's equal rights policy for gays. The school district and the military share the $1.6 million annual cost of the program.

“One of the big components (of JROTC) is military branding, military thinking and military recruitment, and that has to stop,” board member Dan Kelly said during the meeting.

About 1,600 San Francisco students participate in JROTC at seven high schools districtwide. Cadets and instructors who spoke at the meeting and rallied outside argued that the program teaches leadership, organizational skills, personal responsibility and other values.

“This is where the kids feel safe, the one place they feel safe,” said Robert Powell, a JROTC instructor and retired Army lieutenant colonel. “You're going to take that away from them?”

Mayor Gavin Newsom called severing ties with the JROTC “a bad idea” that penalized students without having a practical effect on the Pentagon's policy on gays in the military.

Lt. Cmdr. Joe Carpenter, a Pentagon spokesman, has said he didn't know of a school district having barred JROTC from its campuses.

=====

So the BoE would rather have those kids loiter at street corners?

While I don't agree with banning the JROTC (even though I fully understand and agree with their reasoning) to imply the only alternative is loitering on street corners, especially in a city the size of San Fran, is absurd.

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While I don't agree with banning the JROTC (even though I fully understand and agree with their reasoning) to imply the only alternative is loitering on street corners, especially in a city the size of San Fran, is absurd.

Of course it is absurd. There is always the NAMBLA meetings that they can attend.

While I don't agree with banning the JROTC (even though I fully understand and agree with their reasoning) to imply the only alternative is loitering on street corners, especially in a city the size of San Fran, is absurd.

Of course it is absurd. There is always the NAMBLA meetings that they can attend.

Their street corner meetings prove me correct. ;)

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me@rescam.org

While I don't agree with banning the JROTC (even though I fully understand and agree with their reasoning) to imply the only alternative is loitering on street corners, especially in a city the size of San Fran, is absurd.

Of course it is absurd. There is always the NAMBLA meetings that they can attend.

Ahhh yes.

I forgot about the National Association of Marlon Brando Look Alikes

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Never in the history of the US has the US flag ever been hated or loved more.

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Never in the history of the US has the US flag ever been hated or loved more.

I would just settle for something in the middle like "respected."

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Account frozen...