Former DA charged for misconduct. It’s a miracle!

From statesman.com:

Former Williamson County [Texas] District Attorney Ken Anderson was arrested and booked into jail and then released on bail Friday after a specially convened court found that he intentionally hid evidence to secure Michael Morton’s 1987 conviction for murder.

Of course, to any District Attorney looking for a pathway to, say, a judgeship, all that matters is getting convictions.  Innocence just isn’t all that important.

Sturns told the standing-room-only courtroom that the evidence showed that Anderson improperly concealed two pieces of evidence that could have helped Morton fight the murder charge:

• The transcript of a police interview revealing that the Mortons’ 3-year-old son, Eric, witnessed the murder and said Michael Morton wasn’t home at the time.

• A police report about a suspicious man who had parked a green van near the Morton home and, on several occasions, walked into the wooded area behind the house.

Sturns’ ruling is the first step in a potential criminal case against Anderson, who was Williamson County’s celebrated law-and-order district attorney for 16 years before he became a district judge in 2002. His current term as judge will end in 2014. State law does not require him to step down as the case against him progresses.

Interesting.  Where I work, it takes a lot less than sending an innocent person to prison for a quarter century to get my ass thrown out on the street.  I guess this shouldn’t be surprising when you consider that politicians tend to protect their own when making of the rules of conduct.

EU funds a movement to control the press

From The Telegraph:

The European Union is quietly pouring millions of pounds into initiatives and groups seeking state-backed regulation of the press, including key allies of the controversial Hacked Off campaign.

These groups apparently want to see the same restrictions on print outlets that are currently imposed on broadcast outlets.

The recommendations call for the press to be controlled by the same body and on the same basis as broadcasters, who are currently tightly regulated with statutory “balance” obligations that do not apply to newspapers.

Nothing pisses off government more than when the press doesn’t play along like they should and nothing makes a media outlet more of a team player than when their right to exist is controlled by the government.

The group wants a new media regulator to correct the “national conversation” which it says has been “distorted” by Right-wing newspapers and to change the “terms of public debate” by “imposing public-service duties” on the press.

Boston: Five observations from Greenwald

Glenn Greenwald makes some astute observations about the public, governmental, and media reaction to yesterday’s Boston bombings.  I summarize below and add a little of my own flavoring.

  • How unfortunate that Americans are horrified when innocent civilians are killed by bombs, but take no notice of when teh U.S. routinely does the same to innocent people in other countries.  Who could be so “evil” as to detonate a second bomb targeting rescuers responding to the first bomb?  Well, the U.S. government, for one.   Americans seem to think bombs that fall from the sky are more moral than bombs planted on the ground.
  • Everyone seems to be eager to suspect militant Muslims without a shred of evidence.  Is that because the U.S. has already been targeted by Muslim extremists before or do we automatically suspect them because we know our constant attacks on them in their own countries probably gives them plenty of incentive for retaliation?
  • Arabs and Muslims around the world have been openly expressing hope that the attackers will not turn out to be Arabs or Muslims.  Maybe this is how the black community used to feel when a local white woman was raped.
  • How quick the media is to pronounce this event terrorism, reacting with dismay that Obama didn’t immediately recognize it as a terrorist attack.  Fox News quoted a “senior  administration official” as saying, “When multiple (explosive) devices go off that’s an act of terrorism” without noting the irony of such a statement coming from a government hat routinely bombs people in other countries.
  • And, above all, this bombing, while bad for the victims, represents yet a fresh opportunity for the government to claim more power for itself and whittle down even further what few liberties remain with citizens.  The attacks of 9/11 have taught us that, as gruesome and destructive as these attacks are, the real lasting damage to the nation comes afterwards at the hands of a fear mongering government with an insatiable thirst for control over everyone and everything.

CNN and gun control

Is it just me or is CNN actively campaigning 24/7 in support of gun control?  They really are becoming another Fox News in terms of their transparent bias and obvious agenda.  For anyone with a brain, the establishment media is essentially useless as an objective news source.

Tuesday Afternoon Links

  • Careful driving is not probable cause for the police to search your car.  At this point, I’m pretty sure you can probably count on one hand the activities that are not probably cause for a search.
  • If you work at a company that provides free lunch, like Google, Yahoo, and Facebook, the IRS wants to tax it as income.
  • RTP, Mouseketeer, Annette Funicello.  This is a personal tragedy for most guys om their 60s and 70s.

Glenn Beck calls himself a libertarian…again.

On this week’s Stossel, Glenn Beck apologized for being wrong in the past and whined about how libertarians aren’t enthusiastically embracing him and his new found wisdom.  In reality, it sounds more like he is disenchanted with republicans than undergoing some intellectual awakening.  The idea that he can simply change his mind on a few issues and suddenly expect to be welcomed as a new voice for libertarianism highlights the one thing that many libertarians find so repugnant about Beck.  Beck is all about Beck.

Listening closely to what he says on Stossel tells me that Beck has a long way to go in his metamorphosis.   The establishment parties select their positions on various topics based on politics rather than philosophy, so their positions are inconsistent and routinely conflict with each other.  Beck is product of that environment, so he picks and chooses what his position is on issues, and sometimes he happens to pick the same position as libertarians.  So, he now thinks he must be a libertarian.  Maybe he will someday be a libertarian, but he ain’t there yet.  And instead of complaining about how he’s not being welcomed with open arms, maybe he ought to learn a little humility.  While it is true that conservatives sometimes sound like libertarians, conservatives have established a history of not practicing what they preach.

Exxon-controlled no-fly zone over Arkansas oil spill?

Not sure what to make of this, but the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has apparently established flight restrictions over the site of an oil spill in Arkansas. Furthermore, according to Arkansas Online:

The FAA site noted earlier Wednesday that “only relief aircraft operations under direction of Tom Suhrhoff” are allowed in the zone. Lunsford said later Wednesday that officials were amending the restriction to also allow news media aircraft.

Suhrhoff is listed on a LinkedIn profile as an aviation advisor for ExxonMobil. A message left with a media line for the oil company wasn’t immediately returned.

Solon has a report on it here.

What strikes me as most interesting is that, aside from RT, there apparently hasn’t been a peep out of the establishment news outlets about this. I have no idea how common such flight restrictions are in the U.S., but it is inevitable that there will be lawsuits over this oil spill and the idea that the company responsible for the spill has been empowered to prevent low-flying aerial news coverage of the damages seems fairly irresponsible.

6000+ victims respond to Australian sex abuse inquiry

From The Guardian:

Australia has launched a national inquiry into allegations of child sex abuse in state and religious institutions and NGOs, a process in which more than 5,000 victims are likely to give evidence.

This can’t bode well for the Catholic Church.

The New South Wales state government had ordered an inquiry a week earlier into allegations of a sexual abuse cover-up by Catholic priests in the Hunter Valley region north of Sydney. Victoria state officials had also begun investigating a separate series of priest sex abuse allegations in their state.

Since the federal inquiry was announced, more than 6,000 people have contacted staff in writing or by phone.

This is interesting:

A panel of six commissioners launched the inquiry, known in Australia as a royal commission. Witnesses can be compelled to testify and risk imprisonment for lying.

So, does this threat apply to the victims as well?  Refuse to tell what happened to you and you get to be a defendant just the like people who victimized you…

Afternoon links

The U.S. considers sanctions against Pakistan over a $7B “peace pipeline” deal with Iran.  Such a deal threatens U.S. efforts to bring Iran to its knees for failing to prove that it is not manufacturing nuclear WMDs in a repeat of the same strategy used to start a war with Iraq.

Secretary of State John Kerry says the U.S. will not accept North Korea as a nuclear state.  Wait a sec.  Aren’t they already a nuclear state?  Surely the recent U.S. strategy of flying strategic war planes around over the peninsula will calm things down.

A Saudi Arabian court has sentenced a man who stabbed his best friend ten years ago, paralyzing him, to be paralyzed himself if he can’t come up with $266,000 in compensation for his victim.

What happens to persecutors who abuse their trust and destroy people’s lives?  Nothing.

From reason.com:  A Texas state trooper charged with sexually assaulting two women during a traffic stop was providing them with “customer service,” says Dale Roberts, the executive director of the Columbia Police Officers Association (CPOA) and a professor at the University of Missouri. (The CPOA is a part of the Fraternal Order of Police, one of the country’s largest police unions.)