BRYAN PRESTON: Travis County DA Rosemary Lehmberg’s Drinking Problem and Abuse of Power, By the Staggering Numbers. “While Texas Democrats have gone all in to support the indictment of Gov. Perry, outside Texas they are fast becoming laughingstocks, even among their fellow liberals.”
Archive for 2014
August 16, 2014
HIGHER EDUCATION UPDATE: Leaked Memo Tells Colleges To Fight ‘Advisor,’ ‘Bounty Mindset’ In Assault Bill. See, they know the bill is a disaster, but for tribal reasons they can’t say so outright.
JONATHAN CHAIT: This Indictment Of Rick Perry Is Unbelievably Ridiculous.
They say a prosecutor could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich, and this always seemed like hyperbole, until Friday night a Texas grand jury announced an indictment of governor Rick Perry. The “crime” for which Perry faces a sentence of 5 to 99 years in prison is vetoing funding for a state agency. The conventions of reporting — which treat the fact of an indictment as the primary news, and its merit as a secondary analytic question — make it difficult for people reading the news to grasp just how farfetched this indictment is.
Well, that’s what the anti-Perry forces are counting on, but thanks for making it clear. More:
Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg — a Democrat who oversees the state’s Public Corruption unit — was arrested for driving very, very drunk. What followed was a relatively ordinary political dispute. Perry, not unreasonably, urged Lehmberg to resign. Democrats, not unreasonably, resisted out of fear that Perry would replace her with a Republican. Perry, not unreasonably, announced and carried out a threat to veto funding for her agency until Lehmberg resigned.
True. I do not have a fancy law degree from Harvard or Yale or, for that matter, anywhere. I am but a humble country blogger. And yet, having read the indictment, legal training of any kind seems unnecessary to grasp its flimsiness. . . . To describe the indictment as “frivolous” gives it far more credence than it deserves.
I have to say, though, with police militarization, cameras for cops, and now prosecutorial abuses of power, this sure has been a good week for bringing some of my pet issues to the national stage.
WELL, HE’S A DEMOCRAT — JUST LIKE BULL CONNOR WAS! Missouri Governor Jay Nixon Once Tried to End Desegregation of St. Louis Schools.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Why You Should Take Your Kids Out Of School And Set Them Free.
HMM: Kenya Bars Travelers From Ebola-Stricken Areas. “The Kenyan government announced other restrictions, saying it is temporarily suspending entry into Kenya of passengers who have passed through Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia. Health professionals and Kenyan citizens returning home from those countries will be the exceptions, but will have to undergo extensive screening and close monitoring, said James Macharia, Cabinet secretary of the Kenya Ministry of Health.”
Related: Nigeria Trains 800 Volunteers To Fight Ebola. “Nigeria has said it has trained 800 volunteers to battle Ebola as fears rose that the worst-ever outbreak of the deadly disease could spread across Africa’s most populous nation. Authorities in the capital Lagos last week appealed for volunteers to make up for a shortage of medical personnel because of a six-week nationwide doctors’ strike over pay.”
UPDATE: Mob Destroys Ebola Center In Liberia Two Days After It Opens. Well, looting stuff from an Ebola clinic seems like a good example of evolution in action. But, of course, it makes things worse for everyone else.
PUNCHING BACK TWICE AS HARD: Perry Gives Defiant Statement on Indictment. The Dems are launching spoiling attacks at all the GOP prospects for 2016. That’s because they see it as war. The GOP, as Kurt Schlichter points out, needs to see things the same way if it hopes to win.
Some people seem to get it — see below — but if the GOP were serious it would be going after Dem prospects — Joaquin Castro, Andrew Cuomo, Elizabeth Warren, etc. — the same way.
@Swohtz @BoboFromTexas @instapundit @sheilaaj @PatVPeters pulling @tomdelay on him
#StandWithRickPerry pic.twitter.com/PiQAo9nShl
— RonMurphy II (@THETXEMBASSY) August 16, 2014
This 2016 campaign advertisement is brought to you courtesy of Texas Democrats: "Democrats Defend Drunk Drivers, Rick Perry Defunds Them."
— Katie Pavlich (@KatiePavlich) August 16, 2014
CHANGE: How Verizon lets its copper network decay to force phone customers onto fiber. The problem: “Fiber is fast, but copper is reliable—even during multi-week power outages.”
MARTIN GILBERT’S BIOGRAPHY OF CHURCHILL is currently $1.99 on Kindle.
OH, GOODY: Ebola Epidemic Most Likely Much Larger Than Reported, W.H.O. Says. “So far, 2,127 cases of the disease and 1,145 deaths have been reported in four nations — Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone — the W.H.O announced Friday. But the organization has also warned that the actual number is almost certainly higher, perhaps by a very considerable margin.”
I LOVE THE VIDEO: Sharks Want to Bite Google’s Undersea Cables. Left unanswered is why, exactly, they want to do that. Maybe it’s just like, I’m a shark, I bite things. That’s a thing, guess I should bite it.
MEMORIAL TO A FORGOTTEN ASTRONAUT.
A SPOTTER’S GUIDE TO military equipment being used by police.
A GENETIC TEST FOR SUICIDE RISK?
HAPPY 100TH BIRTHDAY to the Panama Canal. I wonder if we could do anything like it today?
THIS IS THE ANNIVERSARY OF ELVIS’S DEATH. Here’s a piece on how he kept Hitler from coming back. Well, kind of.
WELL, THIS INSPIRES CONFIDENCE: Report: CDC scientist kept quiet about flu blunder.
A government scientist kept silent about a potentially dangerous lab blunder and revealed it only after workers in another lab noticed something fishy, according to an internal investigation.
The accident happened in January at the headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. A lab scientist accidently mixed a deadly strain of bird flu with a tamer strain, and sent the mix to another CDC lab and to an outside lab in Athens, Georgia.
No one was sickened by bird flu. But unsuspecting scientists worked with the viral mix for months before it was discovered.
CDC officials have called the incident the most worrisome in a series of lab safety problems at the government agency, long regarded as one of the most respected public health agencies in the world. Earlier this summer, a lab mishandled anthrax samples and both the bird flu and anthrax labs were shut down.
“We all feel horrible this happened,” said Dr. Anne Schuchat, who oversees the CDC’s Influenza Division, which includes the lab where the bird flu accident took place.
Yeah, well, I don’t feel so good about it myself.
IN THE MAIL: From David Weber & John Ringo, Throne of Stars (Empire of Man).
Also, today only: 40% or More Off Select Strategy Games.
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 464.
UDALL LOOKING A BIT DESPERATE: Udall’s Top Spox Tells Whopper Of Lie. It wasn’t even a good lie, it seems.
MEGAN MCARDLE: Old Debts, Shady Collectors, and Your Rights.
As the industry has been described to me, there’s a hierarchy of debt-collection professionals, from the people who work for your bank or utility (indifferent, sometimes incompetent, occasionally mean) to the folks who buy ancient debt — known as “paper” — for pennies on the dollar and attempt to collect it, relying on no more than the occasional goodwill of debtors and their own antisocial tendencies. Very old debts are very difficult to collect, because they disappear from credit reports after seven years, and after a state’s statute of limitation on debt collections expires, the collector can’t even sue. So these wily collectors either hope that the debtor feels bad about being a deadbeat and wants to clear his good name . . . or that he doesn’t know the law. And when hope fails, collectors frequently resort to less savory tactics such as threatening to sue (legal), threatening to have you arrested (it may be legal to make the threat, but they can’t actually make good on it) or impersonating a law enforcement officer who is going to come arrest you (very, very, very illegal).
The problem is that even if they engage in illegal tactics, it’s a pretty low priority for the government. The harm these guys do is real, and it’s not like this is an industry where you clutch your hand to your heart in the fear that tougher regulations might put you of business. The problem is enforcement. The Federal Trade Commission, which is in charge of regulating this stuff, is not really equipped to rid the world of a bunch of fly-by-night collection shops operating out of temporary office spaces or the back of some guy’s warehouse; it’s good at wrangling with corporations that have big, marble-floored headquarters that can’t easily be moved to a nearby shed if the government comes knocking. It’s easy to see why enforcement would be a low priority when shutting one fishy operation down just means that someone else will pick up the paper and do the same thing — maybe even the owner, operating through a brand-new shell company.
It’s funny, but one of the reasons people use to argue against libertarianism is that under libertarianism shady operations like this won’t be restrained by law enforcement. And yet. . . .
DON’T FORGET THOSE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT AND HHS GRANTS: Senate Armed Services chief to review Pentagon program arming cops.