Woman in Louisiana serves boyfriend with a side of boiling grits; parboiled.

The man told sheriff’s deputies that he came home from work on Nov. 7, got into an argument with Brown, told her that he was breaking up with her, then went to bed.

Child stealing and smuggling rings in China, including a bust in the twins’ home town.

Shanghai Daily _ 上海日报 — En.. (PDF. 28 k – pdf’d version of story)

Weird – the guy who transported me up to my room from the ER last night was going on at length about the horrible injustices done to former Congress critter James Trafficant; I hadn’t heard that name for a while.  Most of the rest of his blurb was a odd and incoherent rant about the Powers In Charge smashing the little guy, but in a very weird ‘the aliens are coming in black helicopters’ style.

Roman Polanski was arrested in Switzerland on his old 31-year old criminal warrant from America.  I didn’t think they’d ever manage that one.

It’s early evening on Friday, and I’m slogging tthrough a ton of paperwork that’s built up; the washer is re-doing the blankets for our bed, and I’m getting tired – today was my first day back at work, and the last couple before that were ‘hi, I’m groggy!’ “Hi, Groggy!”

Today, Susan and Meredith (Susan says she was never really sick, and that it was more of her nasty sinus problems, most likely) are out and about taking care of some family errands, and I really don’t expect them home before 9 pm at the earliest.   Part of their errands today put them right behind a high-speed manhunt for an escaped prison waaay out in the western suburbs – the guy’s car went out of control, and there was a heck of a traffic jam as a result that they were caught in.

Interesting article on how India’s endemic corruption problems are holding the country back, with this comment from the Prime Minister:

“The pervasive corruption in our country tarnishes our image [and it] discourages investors who expect fair treatment and transparent dealings with public authorities.”

Read it all.

The inspector general of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) reports that five SEC exams and investigations of Bernie Madoff were incompetently done.   I can believe one screwup happened, but five?  Five is agency policy to not look too hard.

Both Markopolos and an SEC staff accountant testified that it was clear the Boston office’s assistant district administrator at the time “did not understand the information presented,’’ Inspector General David Kotz wrote in a blistering report. As a result, the Boston staff failed to investigate the complaint or, at first, to even refer it to the regional office in New York, according to the inspector general.

and:

“Moreover, we found that Madoff proactively informed potential investors that the SEC had examined his operations. When potential investors expressed hesitation about investing with Madoff, he cited the prior SEC examinations to establish credibility and allay suspicions or investor doubts that may have arisen while due diligence was being conducted.”

This was a man who was a former chairman of NASDAQ, and his family and he were on all sorts of securities industry oversight and control boards, including the industry’s internal compliance office.   He got away with his actions because there was a lot of loose money floating around, he was a fantastic con artist, and because of his numerous connections.  The Chinese call this guanxi, 关系 – the old-boy-network.

As in ‘we can’t being him to justice; he’s one of the connected people. Laws and taxes are for the little people.’

Stupid thief of the day: Dayton, Ohio cops catch man outside barbeque joint, reeking of grease while the burglar alarm was going off (yes, I know the newspaper’s writers say wreaking; I can’t help the fall of journalistic standards) – he claimed he was dumpster diving for leftovers, but the cops found that he’d broken in through the roof and chimney to get at the cash register inside.

…which was my minor in college.  It allows situations where you can write headlines like this:
Chihuahua With Earrings Stolen At Gay Bar
Police Seek Man With Britney Spears Tattoo

Heck, just go to Google News and google up “Chihuahua” news articles and see what you get…

• I had to look up the meaning of hoon for this one (wild, stupid and reckless driver in a criminal sense) – 79 year old man doing 160 k in a 100k zone
• Best man claims he was raped by a stripper as part of the show at the bachelor party.

New blasphemy criminalization law passed by the Irish Parliament. “Under the changes, the maximum fine for blasphemy will be cut from €100,000 to €25,000.” Gee, thanks.

Betting ring on an Australian Navy ship alleged where one could win points/money on having sex with female sailors, with bonuses for daring locations and less attainable women (including gay women).

Some people do not learn.   Disgusting.

The new way to get tourists back to Mexico: we did such a good job on H1N1, don’t worry. Now, on to making sure that the furious drug lords war in Mexico doesn’t catch you on the street with an AK-47 before you get to see an interesting stage show in Tijuana.

Tip to Bamm Hartman for the video link.

While retrieving THE FIXER from one of my off-air VHS tapes, I ran across the real-life story that the movie/novel was based on - see the story of the Beilis Trial in late Tsarist Russia in Wikipedia.  Wow.

Horrible story (with the names blanked out) from a divorce court in Britain about an effort by the husband to get a L500000 settlement from his ex, which the judge shot down - because the husband had been a terrible pedophilic monster, preying on the wife’s grandchildren.

Describing the man as “manipulative”, Mr Justice Moylan ordered him be paid £100,000 from the sale of a jointly-owned overseas property. However, he also ordered him to pay £50,000 towards his ex-wife’s £250,000 legal costs.

…and I also find the idea of political murder and terror repugnant.    I understand that you find Dick Cheney a sadistic MF, or a Army recruiter someone who is hurting your co-religionists by supporting the war, or you find Dr. Tiller a baby-killer.

Fine.  Then work constructively to bring people to justice, or to outlaw abortions, or to end the war.  Don’t go out and kill people over their politics or for doing things that are legal where they are done.   Political murder and assassination is wrong. Such things lead to — the death of Gandhi himself, because he didn’t hate enough.   It’s terror, no matter how you slice it.

From my old home town of Dayton, Ohio:

…from Think Progress.   Give it a look for a summary of why it’s major bad news, if you didn’t know that already…unless you think you’re Jack Bauer or something.

As Jesse Ventura said on The View:

“If waterboarding is OK, why don’t we let our police do it to suspects so they can learn what they know?” he asked. “If waterboarding is OK, why didn’t we waterboard [Timothy] McVeigh and Nichols, the Oklahoma City bombers, to find out if there were more people involved? … We only seem to waterboard Muslims… Have we waterboarded anyone else? Name me someone else who has been waterboarded.”

And no, I don’t care if half the Democratic leadership knew something about the bad stuff pulled off by Bush; they should have had the guts to stand up at the time and say - NO - but they apparently didn’t.  Them being gutless wonders is not a reason to excuse anyone else from prosecution.  The more in the dock or politically dealt with and squished on this, no problem.

My focus is on justice, the law, and good government.  Torture and other arbitrary government crap has caused an awful pile of hurt to most all of us in some form from the past; just ask a Japanese-American whose family was in internment camps during WW2, or blacks who had to deal with government-backed racism in the South (or North, and I’m talking the Bull Connor sort of thing), or those of us out there who have family who were destroyed in the Holocaust or disappeared in the Gulags behind the Iron Curtain.

Two items from my hometown newspaper in Dayton, Ohio:

Montgomery County Sheriff Phil Plummer and two of his deputies warned on Tuesday April 21, that county budget cuts will decimate the sheriff’s department and hamper crime fighting efforts. “If don’t have the people I can’t keep people safe,” said Plummer, during the county commission meeting “I need more resources, not cuts.”

And then this little gem:

Warren County is saying “no thank you” to federal stimulus funds. The county is the only one in the state that has rejected stimulus money for transportation improvements, according to the Ohio Department of Transportation.

Commissioners rejected $373,000 in stimulus money to buy three new transit buses and upgrade their fleet, citing their opposition of deficit spending for buses and vans.

“I’ll let Warren County go broke before taking any of Obama’s filthy money,” Commissioner Mike Kilburn said.

ODOT spokesman Scott Varner said the money was specifically for transit improvements in rural areas to improve transportation for disabled people, seniors and others needing access to health care and educational opportunities.

“I’m tired of paying for people who don’t have,” Kilburn said. “As Reagan said, ‘Government is not the answer, it’s the problem.’”

…which is the Organization of American States’ irregular meeting of the leadership of the OAS states (34) countries).  Interesting news coming out of it, of course.  Discussions between Obama and the US delegation on the one side, and some people Bush would never deal with on the other…discussions with the Cubans and Venezuelans and so on are very non-Bush.

Do I think that the Cuban embargo has worked?  Not really.  It hasn’t worked in 50 years of trying to bring-down-Castro, obviously.  It’s certainly helped out the Big Sugar producers in the US, some of whom are repulsive jerks, and about the only things you can say for it is that it has made Cuba the expensive problem child for either the Soviets or other lefty dictators with money who want to back him up.

I have no stars in my eyes about brutal dictatorships, and can’t stand the Cuban government and / or Chavez’s efforts to become El Jefe Por Vida in Venezuela, but I will note that what got them there was a great deal of idiocy and looking-the-other-way-while-the-rich-got-richer-and-more-brutal in both countries.    It occurs to me that stupid rich bastards who don’t give a damn about anyone else have caused a mighty amount of pain in the world and created revolutionary conditions again and again, and never realized that pushing people repeatedly to the edge will end up in disaster, eventually.

The key word there is *stupid*, allied with *cheap and greedy*.  As I’ve also noted before, most of the consumer protection things that I’ve sen in my time have rotated around that sort of root, where people cut corners and exposed the public to risks because they wanted to make a cheap, fast buck, and didn’t care about the problems they created for the public at large.  Goes for food safety, pollution, you name it.

You’d think some folks would learn…

I also found it interesting that the only ‘anglo’ in the bunch is now the PM of Canada; and if the Governor-General of Canada was there to represent the nation, there would be a shutout (she’s a Haitian refugee who came to Canada as an 11 year-old.