Tag: Crime & Punishment

Arrest The Lot Of Them!

It is time for Congress and SCOTUS to step out of the partisan shadows and think and act for the good of the nation.

Time for the officials in DC are held accountable and responsible for their actions.

There are lots of examples but the one that sticks in my throat…is the looting of 9/11 funds….

A health care program that serves 9/11 first responders is nearly $4 million short because the Trump administration shifted those dollars away to another program, the New York Daily News reports. In fact, the Treasury Dept. has quietly siphoned money from the FDNY World Trade Center Health Program—which covers paramedics, EMTs, and firefighters—for about four years now. “This was just disappearing,” says program director David Prezant. “This is the most amazing thing. This was disappearing—without any notification.” According to Prezant, the program lost between $500,000 and $600,000 a year from 2016 to 2019, then fell short roughly $1.5 million through late August of 2020.

Pezant says he complained for years to no avail, until GOP Rep. Pete King got involved. King, who called the shortfall “disgraceful,” wrote Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin two letters and never received a direct response. But MSN reports that a Treasury official told King’s office in August that nearly $2 million had been shifted to another program to offset costs. “I don’t even care what the details of this thing is. That fund has to be fully compensated, fully reimbursed,” said King. “I mean, this is absurd.” Sen. Chuck Schumer agreed, saying “this needs to stop forthwith.” Prezant says the program is still functioning with money fronted by the Fire Department—but the feds are supposed to reimburse those dollars under the 9/11 Health and Compensation Act.

This is not the worse violations of them trust the voters gave these people….but just the most recent.

All the lies and corruption that has finally come to the head of the government needs to be punished…… and punished hard!

If Democrats do hold their House majority and retake the Senate and the White House, pressure will be intense to avoid looking backward and focus solely on solving the problems in front of them. This is understandable: the wreckage the Trump administration would leave behind after just four short years is immense, the policy challenges dire. If successful in November (and if Trump doesn’t create irredeemable chaos in the transition), Biden and Congressional Democrats will have to deal with a raging pandemic, a collapsing small business and renter economy, a climate crisis and continuing unrest over racist police violence—as well as the myriad ongoing policy challenges related to healthcare, tuition, inequality, tech giant accountability and so much more. It’s easy to foresee a scenario where, coupled with pressure from Republicans and centrists, Democrats decide that the public is sick of even thinking about Trump and bygones are allowed to be bygones.

But that would be a huge mistake. If Trump and his enablers are allowed to get away with the misdeeds of the last four years unscathed, it may mean the end of the American experiment.

To Save Democracy, Democrats Must Hold Trump Officials Accountable

Arrest the lot of them.  Just once I would like to see a politician in the leadership rolls to be held accountable for their actions….especially when it comes to the deception of the population.

Arrested, tried and sent to PRISON!

Just a fanciful dream on my part.

Learn Stuff!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Get Out Of Jail Free Card

Closing Thought–08Sep20

These days the police are always in the headlines for one thing or another……and deservedly so….but most of the news is about the crimes they commit or the actions they take.

Then there are stories like this that seldom make the evening news.

Remember when you played Monopoly and we cherished the “Get Out Of Jail Free” card…..well there is really is such a thing….

Some cops give their friends and family union-issued “courtesy cards” to help get them out of minor infractions. The cards embody everything wrong with modern policing.

Mike, a white man in his 50s, was in a bad spot: He was stuck idling in traffic on New York City’s Riverside Drive, running late for a meeting, and he needed to get to the Upper East Side pronto. Hopping on the shoulder to bypass the other cars wasn’t the right thing to do, he told VICE, but he’d seen other people get away with it before.

Mike, whose name has been changed to protect his privacy, said he knew it was risky—especially because the borrowed car he was driving didn’t have a license plate, let alone a registration under his name. He decided to roll the dice anyway. Right away, bad news: a traffic checkpoint, and cops pulling people over.

“That was probably the tightest spot I could’ve been in,” Mike said. “Because [the offense] could’ve been ‘driving without a plate,’ ‘driving with no registration…’” By driving on the shoulder, too, Mike was driving illegally in at least three different ways.

Despite that, he felt confident as the cop approached his car and told him to roll down his window. Instead of pulling out his driver’s license, Mike simply introduced himself and produced something better. “I just basically happened to have one of their PBA cards on me,” he said, referring to the small, plastic “courtesy” cards issued by the Police Benevolent Association, which usually have an officer’s name, phone number, and signature on the back.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/v7gxa4/pba-card-police-courtesy-cards

So if you are a “Friend” to the cops then you can break the law and get away with it…..

And you still can sit there and believe that the police do not need reforming?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Another Bad Day For Trumpites

Those people around Donald the Orange have not had a goo run in the court systems…..just look at the criminals that have saddled up to Trump.

Rick Gates: Convicted. Paul Manafort: Convicted. George Papadopoulos: Convicted. Mike Flynn: Convicted. Michael Cohen: Convicted. Roger Stone: Convicted. Donald Trump: Impeached.

Now we can add yet another Trumpian stoolie….Steve Bannon.

Remember him?

He has been indicted by the Manhattan court….

Former top White House adviser Steve Bannon appears to be facing serious legal trouble. Federal prosecutors indicted him Thursday on charges that he defrauded hundreds of thousands of donors in a online fundraising campaign, reports CNBC. The charges are related to a group co-founded by Bannon called “We Build the Wall,” which sought to raise money to build a border wall, per Bloomberg News. Prosecutors say he used money raised by the group for personal expenses. Three others also were charged, reports CNN. Bannon has been arrested and was due to make a court appearance Thursday.

Prosecutors say that Bannon and another organizer, Brian Kolfage, pledged to take no compensation, but that Bannon received $1 million and Kolfage more than $350,000, reports the Washington Post. Those two and two others (Andrew Badolato and Timothy Shea) are accused of routing money from the online campaign through a shell company in an attempt to conceal their personal payments, say prosecutors. They all face charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering in the campaign, which the Hill reports raised more than $25 million. Bannon was a key adviser in President Trump’s 2016 campaign, then served as a top strategist in the White House until he was fired in the summer of 2017.

Donald the Orange is having a real bad year and it just keeps getting worse….more and more of his toadies are getting snapped up by the judicial system.

Trump’s pardon finger has got to be getting tired….and I am sure that he will use it more and more between now and January of 2021…….then hopefully he will be back in New York bothering locals instead of screwing the nation.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

03 August 1807

History on this day……1882 the Immigration Act that banned Chinese immigrants for ten years (sounds familiar for some reason)

1908–Allan Allensworth filed for the first Afro-American city…..Allensworth, California

But the big situation was in the early years of the republic.

On this day in 1807, Aaron Burr,  the former VP of the United States and presidential candidate goes on trial for treason.

Burr was arrested in the Mississippi Territory in 1807……my post on this situation……https://lobotero.com/2019/02/19/the-arrest-of-aaron-burr-1807/

The synopsis…..

What was the nature of the plot that had seen Burr charged with treason? Even today, many details of the scheme remain hazy. “Too many people told too many different stories, and too many people had things to hide,” historian Buckner F. Melton has written. What is known is that Burr worked to raise a small army on the American frontier. He may have hoped to lead an independent campaign against Spanish-held territories in Texas and Mexico, but it’s also possible that he planned to wrest a portion of the newly acquired frontier from the United States. According to some contemporaries, Burr had designs on founding a new western nation with himself as its emperor.

https://www.history.com/news/aaron-burrs-notorious-treason-case

A very good account of the trial……

Click to access burrtrial.pdf

For those too lazy to read…..this video will help……

I have studied this incident….and I think that it was Jefferson being petty that caused the acquittal…..Jefferson had made promises that he did not keep and Burr wanted revenge on Tommie…..for his lies and manipulations.

Learn Stuff!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“legho ergo scribo”

Let It Go!

Closing Thought–13Jul20

The big story still is that Trump has commuted Roger Stone’s conviction…..

As the Washington Post notes, the last disclosed cognitive test for the president was in January 2018, and that was a fairly basic 10-minute exam in which people are asked to identify animals in pictures and such. It’s unclear if Trump took a more recent exam. Biden, for his part, said Thursday that he can’t wait to debate Trump, referencing Trump’s description of himself as a “stable genius,” per NBC News. At 77, Biden is three years older than Trump, and he said in response to a reporter’s question last month that he is “constantly” tested for cognitive decline, prompting Hannity and other Trump allies to wonder why Biden felt it was necessary to be tested so much, per Fox News. “Look, all you gotta do is watch me, and I can hardly wait to compare my cognitive capability to the cognitive capability of the man I’m running against,” Biden said at the time.

  • Mitt Romney: “Unprecedented, historic corruption: an American president commutes the sentence of a person convicted by a jury of lying to shield that very president.”
  • The Washington Post editorial board: “The United States is supposed to be a place in which laws apply equally to all. And while it never has—and never will—live up to that ideal in full, no modern president before Mr. Trump has so clearly renounced it.”
  • Jonathan Bernstein, Bloomberg: “Clemency for a crony convicted of interfering with an investigation of presidential malfeasance is a flagrant abuse of power. President Richard Nixon wasn’t willing to pardon the Watergate criminals who broke into Democratic Party offices in the run-up to the 1972 presidential campaign because he knew how bad it would look.”
  • Jeffrey Toobin, New Yorker: “Trump had not, until now, used pardons and commutations to reward defendants who possessed incriminating information against him. The Stone commutation isn’t just a gift to an old friend—it is a reward to Stone for keeping his mouth shut during the Mueller investigation.”
  • Corey Lewandowski: “Look, Roger Stone was clearly targeted by an unfair prosecution,” he told Fox News. “Look, I’m not the biggest fan of Roger Stone. … But, the way he was treated by this government should scare the hell out of every American.”
  • President Trump: “Roger Stone was targeted by an illegal Witch Hunt that never should have taken place. It is the other side that are criminals, including Biden and Obama, who spied on my campaign—AND GOT CAUGHT!”

My thoughts is seriously?

Trump telegraphed what he was going to do….and yet the media makes it out as soon sort of surprise…..yet another story that the media will milk for every drop of analysis out of…..look at the BLM…it is still going on but it is NOT all that important to the media.

My advice….LET IT GO!

We knew what Trump is going to do….now move on to something truly important…..

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

 

Clinton’s Serbia/Kosovo

In the 1990s I was never a supporter of Clinton’s war in the Balkans….

The communist years

The former Yugoslavia was a Socialist state created after German occupation in World War II and a bitter civil war. A federation of six republics, it brought together Serbs, Croats, Bosnian Muslims, Albanians, Slovenes and others under a comparatively relaxed communist regime. Tensions between these groups were successfully suppressed under the leadership of President Tito.

After Tito’s death in 1980, tensions re-emerged. Calls for more autonomy within Yugoslavia by nationalist groups led in 1991 to declarations of independence in Croatia and Slovenia. The Serb-dominated Yugoslav army lashed out, first in Slovenia and then in Croatia. Thousands were killed in the latter conflict which was paused in 1992 under a UN-monitored ceasefire.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-17632399

It all began……

Milosevic in 1998 launched his fourth war in the former Yugoslavia, this time intending to address his “Albanian problem” by using his army to force out over 60 percent of the population of Kosovo. Given European and American inaction for years as people were killed in Bosnia earlier in the decade, Albanian Americans were fearful that history could be repeated in Kosovo. So, they organized themselves. They united different community factions, opened an office in Washington, D.C., and began engaging in one of the oldest of American traditions – petitioning their government to do something to stop the killing and rape in Kosovo.

https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/foreign-policy/435462-lessons-from-the-1999-us-military-intervention-in-kosovo

Clinton put all the hopes of Kosovo in the hands of Hashim Thaci and now this person has been indicted for war crimes….

President Bill Clinton’s favorite freedom fighter just got indicted for mass murder, torture, kidnapping, and other crimes against humanity. In 1999, the Clinton administration launched a 78-day bombing campaign that killed up to 1500 civilians in Serbia and Kosovo in what the American media proudly portrayed as a crusade against ethnic bias. That war, like most of the pretenses of U.S. foreign policy, was always a sham.

Kosovo President Hashim Thaci was charged with ten counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity by an international tribunal in The Hague in the Netherlands. It charged Thaci and nine other men with “war crimes, including murder, enforced disappearance of persons, persecution, and torture.” Thaci and the other charged suspects were accused of being “criminally responsible for nearly 100 murders” and the indictment involved “hundreds of known victims of Kosovo Albanian, Serb, Roma, and other ethnicities and include political opponents.”

Kosovo Indictment Proves Bill Clinton’s Serbian War Atrocities

Another version to above article here…..https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/06/30/bill-clintons-serbian-war-atrocities-exposed-in-new-indictment/

This makes Clinton just as guilty in my book as Thaci…..I love the closing statement of the article…..

“Bill Clinton’s 1999 bombing of Serbia was as big a fraud as George W. Bush’s conning this nation into attacking Iraq. The fact that Clinton and other top U.S. government officials continued to glorify Hashim Thaci despite accusations of mass murder, torture, and body trafficking is another reminder of the venality of much of America’s political elite. Will Americans again be gullible the next time that Washington policymakers and their media allies concoct bullshit pretexts to blow the hell out of some hapless foreign land?”

That is a rhetorical question….for I already know the answer….and the media will make sure that it does occur again…..and again……

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

BUSTED! (Again)

Stealing is despicable…..but the theft of culture is unforgivable…..

Looks like the Green Family of Hobby Lobby fame has been caught again with stolen artifacts….this time one of the oldest sagas in history….the Epic of Gilgamesh….and must return it to where it belongs….

A 3,500-year-old clay tablet bought by the Hobby Lobby for display in the Museum of the Bible should be returned to Iraq, US federal prosecutors said in a civil complaint Monday. The cuneiform tablet is inscribed with a portion of the Epic of Gilgamesh, hence, its name: the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet. NBC News reports Hobby Lobby purchased it for $1.6 million in 2014 by a major auction house that is unnamed in the complaint. That auction house allegedly told Hobby Lobby the tablet, one of 12 bearing the creation story, was acquired in San Francisco prior to 1981. The complaint details a different backstory. One part of it, per NPR: In 2013, the person who possessed the tablet at the time allegedly got in touch with the auction house’s London office with an offer to sell it.

But the auction house’s antiquities department head was reportedly told the tablet’s provenance was not iron-clad, meaning a public auction wouldn’t be possible. Hobby Lobby acquired it in a private sale that next year. Three years later, in July 2017, the company agreed to pay a $3 million fine over thousands of artifacts it acquired without verifying their provenance; federal authorities said they had been smuggled out of Iraq. In October 2017, a Museum of the Bible curator doing provenance research on the Gilgamesh tablet reached out to the auction house. A press release from Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations division notes “the Auction House withheld information about the tablet’s provenance,” leading the museum to realize something was amiss. Agents from the HSI division seized the tablet last year.

I have written about all the problems this family has had with their Museum of the Bible…..it seems it is full of stolen artifacts and fakes…..which cost the family millions to acquire.

https://lobotero.com/2020/05/17/a-sucker-born-every-minute-3/

https://lobotero.com/2020/03/19/theft-of-culture/

Desperation leads to stupidity and that leads to loss of money……and yet this group has been caught many times with stolen artifacts and yet they pay a fine and go on stealing the culture and history of other people….all in the hope of proving a premises….if it were anybody other than some religious twats they would be under a jail.

Time for people like these to be taught a valuable lesson and made to pay dearly for their crimes.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

A Sucker Born Every Minute

I have written several times about the Green family, owners of Hobby Lobby, being conned in their endless search to prove the Bible is a historic document.

The family has scanned the world for artifacts that can prove the existence of everything in the Bible and in doing so has been caught with fakes and stolen artifacts…..read the story so far……https://lobotero.com/2020/03/19/theft-of-culture/

It looks like they were conned yet again…..

Dirk Obbink seemed eerily calm when a reporter knocked on his door near Oxford University last year. “I’d like to tell it,” the scholar said of his alleged role in a major antiquities scandal. “But I’m under a duty not to speak about the matter while it’s under investigation.” But that reporter, Ariel Sabar, has untangled the byzantine tale of how Obbink—a world-renowned classicist from Nebraska—allegedly made millions selling stolen papyri to US evangelicals, including a New Testament fragment that set the world of biblical studies on fire. In Sabar’s Atlantic piece, Obbink is portrayed as a legitimate papyrologist enticed by money. And in the Green family, who own the craft-store chain Hobby Lobby, he appears to have found the perfect mark.

The gospel fragment is one of several Obbink apparently sold to Hobby Lobby for the Green family’s Museum of the Bible and falsely dated to “circa 100 AD,” making them unique—the only New Testament fragments from the century in which Jesus is said to have lived and showing how his earliest chroniclers portrayed him. But those documents weren’t Obbink’s to sell. The scholar was arrested in April and accused of selling artifacts from Oxford’s Sackler Library, which was housing ancient texts on loan from the Egypt Exploration Society, per ArtNet. Now Obbink is out of an Oxford job and facing an uncertain future. But he maintains his innocence, saying that incriminating documents “have been fabricated in a malicious attempt to harm my reputation and career.” Click for Sabar’s full article.

Apparently this family has never heard the saying “buyer beware”…..ignorance and greed work well together and the Green family is proof of how profitable ignorance can be.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Covid-19 Fraud In Mississippi

In the recent past a pharmacist and a doctor and his son were nailed for prescription fraud against Medicare…..well it seems that we also have some d/bags that were hoarding supplies in this time of emergency….

A pharmaceutical company owned by Ocean Springs developer Kenneth Ritchey is accused in a federal court case of hoarding scarce personal protective equipment needed during the COVID-19 pandemic, with federal agents recovering a trove of respirator masks, face shields, gloves and other items from the business.

FBI agents raided Gulf Coast Pharmaceuticals Plus LLC on North Halstead Road on April 17, but Southern District U.S. Attorney Mike Hurst declined then to comment on the investigation.

Ritchey is a former business partner of Clark Levi, a pharmacist who owned Lovelace Drugs in downtown Ocean Springs before he died in a car crash with his wife.

I Read, I Write, You Know
 
“lego ergo scribo”

You Have A Friend At DOJ

Soon to be a song recorded by pedophile Ted Nugent……(snark)

If you are in the pocket of Donald the Orange then you have a free ticket to act and do as he sees fit….with that traitor Barr at DOJ Trump sycophants can literally get away with murder on 5th Avenue (I heard that somewhere before)…..

Another criminal is about to get away with his crimes simply because he is a Trump worshiper…..this d/bag has pleaded guilty but he has the Orange dolt on his side…..

Who?

A big win for President Trump: The Justice Department said Thursday it is dropping the criminal case against Michael Flynn, per the AP. The case involving Trump’s first national security adviser had become a rallying cry for the president and his supporters in attacking the FBI’s Russia investigation. The move is a stunning reversal for one of the signature cases brought by special counsel Robert Mueller. It comes even though prosecutors for the last three years had maintained that Flynn had lied to the FBI about his conversations with the Russian ambassador in a January 2017 interview. Flynn himself admitted as much, and became a key cooperator for Mueller as he investigated ties between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign.

In court documents being filed Thursday, the Justice Department said it is dropping the case “after a considered review of all the facts and circumstances of this case, including newly discovered and disclosed information.” The Justice Department said it had concluded that Flynn’s interview by the FBI was “untethered to, and unjustified by, the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into Mr. Flynn” and that the interview on January 24, 2017, was “conducted without any legitimate investigative basis.” The US attorney reviewing the Flynn case, Jeff Jensen, recommended the move to Attorney General William Barr last week and formalized the recommendation in a document this week. The decision is certain to be embraced by Trump, but it will likely add to Democratic concerns that Attorney General William Barr is excessively loyal to the president.

This illustrates that if you kneel before the god of idiocy enough you can get away with any crime you choose.

Don’t try this at your next court appearance….this is a one off for Trump’s “piss boys” (you need to watch “History of the World Part One” to understand that)……

I Read, I Write, You KNow

“lego ergo scribo”