This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Legal

  • More Clinton stock shenanigans

    We all remember the greatest stock trade in history when Hillary Clinton raked in a cool 100 grand from a $10,000 investment when she and her husband were in Arkansas. Well the Washington Times’s Jim McElhatton reports this morning that Bill Clinton made have made an equally fortunate deal;

    The spring before his wife began her White House campaign, former President Bill Clinton earned $700,000 for his foundation by selling stock that he had been given from an Internet search company that was co-founded by a convicted felon and backed by the Chinese government, public records show.

    Mr. Clinton had gotten the nonpublicly traded stock from Accoona Corp. back in 2004 as a gift for giving a speech at a company event. He landed the windfall by selling the 200,000 shares to an undisclosed buyer in May 2006, commanding $3.50 a share at a time when the company was reporting millions of dollars of losses, according to interviews.

    A spokesman for the William J. Clinton Foundation declined to identify the buyer who was willing to pay so much for a struggling company’s stock, saying only that the transaction was handled by a securities broker.

    Funny how the Chinese always seem to be behind everything that casts a bit of shade over the Clintons, isn’t it?

  • Finally, an illegal alien we can deport

    Virginia has finally decided that there is one group of illegal aliens they can all agree needs to be deported – sex offenders (Washington Post link);

    More than 170 immigrants convicted of sex crimes are being deported after authorities found their names on Virginia’s sex offender registry, state and federal officials announced yesterday.

    Some of those being deported are undocumented immigrants, and others were in the United States legally, but all were convicted of sex crimes once they entered the country. All immigrants are subject to removal under federal law if they commit crimes of “moral turpitude.”

    The majority of those arrested in the past year, 36, were lawful permanent residents who had lived in Northern Virginia, officials said. One hundred and thirty-five offenders had been incarcerated for such crimes as sexually abusing a 4-year-old and using a “date-rape drug” to rape a woman. All will be deported.

    I suppose one question might be; why didn’t they do this before? What was there to stop them? Was there some moral issue they needed to wrestle with first?

    Of course, lawyers need to keep some loopholes open so they can chase behind the buses rounding up the pervs;

    “Certainly we want our immigration enforcers to focus on community safety and to prioritize serious crime,” said Jeanne Butterfield, executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, which pushes for fair immigration policies.

    She added, however, that all immigrant sex offenders should not be deported automatically. “It depends on the seriousness of the crime, did it occur decades ago and have they since led an exemplary life,” Butterfield said.

    Bob Dane, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which seeks to crack down on illegal immigration, said: “The concern is that when you have open borders, many of these people are fleeing justice.”

    Dane added, however: “Checking a list for places of birth to identify a particular crime seems a little discriminatory or intrusive.”

    Was it intrusive for the Army to ask me my place of birth when I joined? Is it intrusive for banks and credit card companies to ask me my place of birth? We can’t just declare being a sex criminal unsavory enough, we’ve got to have lawyers to tell which are socially palatable and which are not.

  • Yalies (Heart) Padilla

    The Wall Street Journal editorial board this morning publishes a piece entitled “Yale and the Terrorist“. Apparently, the Yale Law School is has filed charges against John Yoo, a Yalie himself, on behalf of Jose Padilla convicted al Qaeda terrorist, wannabe dirty bomber and ungrateful little snot-nosed punk. Yoo, then a Justice Department lawyer, now a Berkeley Law professor, is being sued for doing his job; (more…)

  • Supreme Court to decide voter ID

    I picked this up over at Liberty Pundit who has the background on the case from Indiana before the Supreme Court. It’s in regard to voter IDs and here are my thoughts. (more…)

  • DC gun ban appeal at the USSC

    The Supreme Court is listening to arguments for and against DC’s gun ban – the first time the Second Amendment will be discussed among the judiciaries for more than 70 years. The 33-year-old DC law absolutely forbids private ownership of handguns and shotguns and requires long gun owners to have their weapons rendered useless and in pieces, locked away. It is arguably the most draconian of gun regulations in the country. The Washington Examiner prints the District’s main points before the court;

    Dellinger, along with D.C. Solicitor General Todd Kim, Akin Gump partner Thomas Goldstein and Covington & Burling’s Robert Long, will argue the case on three points: That the city’s existing law is manifestly reasonable, that the District has the same right as states to restrict firearms, and that the 2nd Amendment speaks only to state militias, not individuals.

    Well, let’s look at the Second Amendment;

    A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

    On first blush, the District could have a point on the fact that amendment “speaks only to State militias”, however, that’s without understanding the main reason for the entire Constitution – to protect people from their government. A “militia”, using today’s terms, is also an arm of government – the entity that the Constitution recognized as the main enemy of personal freedom.

    I will not argue that the District doesn’t have the same right as States to reasonably restrict gun ownership, however, that’s not a carte blanche to forbid ownership by law abiding citizens. Contrary to what I’ve been told by the Left, the Right doesn’t agree that mentally-impaired people and criminals (what’s the difference really) should have guns. A DC judge once told me that the NRA thinks everyone should own guns – that’s just bogus leftist crap used to cloud the issue of the Second Amendment.
    But the District also claims their regulations are “reasonable” – reasonable to the point that law abiding citizens are unable to protect themselves and their families from gun-wielding malcontents. That’s not even in the same ball park as “reasonable”.

    By the Metro Police’s own admission, they recovered almost 2300 illegal weapons from DC’s streets last year (2007). Thirty three years after the law was enacted, DC cops are still taking an average of six guns everyday from law breakers – that’s 6 guns everyday since 2002. That tells me that the only people who aren’t armed are the people who don’t break laws. So how can the District argue that’s it’s reasonable for anyone except criminals.

  • Lawyers suck

    Blackfive writes about a young Marine sergeant who has been victimized by a smart-assed punk lawyer with shit-for-brains;

    While saying goodbye, at about 11am, he noticed a man leaning up against his car. Mike left his friend’s apartment and caught the man keying his car on multiple sides.

    After caught in the process, the man told Mike, “you think you can do whatever you want with Department of Defense license plates and tags”. (In Illinois you can purchase veteran, Marine, or medal plates. Mike has Illinois Marine Corps license plates.) During the exchange, he made additional anti-military comments.

    Mike called the Chicago police and had the man arrested. A citation against the man was issued for misdemeanor criminal damage to private property.

    The story all boils down to this; the scumbag piece-of-shit is a lawyer (sorry for being redundant) named jay Grodner, the Marine sergeant is deploying to Iraq in two days and the scumbag piece-of-shit lawyer plans on filing a continuance so he can avoid paying for his malfeasance.

    Blue Star Chronicles has Grodner’s contact information, if you’re so led.

    And, yes, I’m impugning an entire profession based on the underhanded behavior of a few – if the rest of you scumbag piece-of-shit lawyers would police your ranks the way you should, maybe I wouldn’t. Cry me a friggen river.

    And this guy should have been disbarred a loooooooong time ago;

    In addition to being disciplined for being involved in a scheme to forging documents, it has been reported to CLR that attorney Jay Robert Grodner has since then engaged in a conflict of interest with his clients, has abandoned his clients, has engaged in false billing, has engaged in a fraud upon his clients, provided ineffective assistance of counsel, and has engaged in a “fraud upon the court”.

    Um, forging documents – isn’t that like the most heinous crime for a “man of letters”? Of course, in Chicago that resume` could get him a judgeship – maybe even mayor.

    Crotchety Old Bastard is contemplating a legal fund for the Marine.

  • Only 5?

    I was doing some research for something else and, as it often happens, I got sidetracked and ended up bumping into this story about a movie about the only 5 Cubans ever to be imprisoned apparently; (more…)

  • Pelosi approved of waterboarding five years ago

    So, while Congress acts as if it didn’t know about the destruction of certain torture tapes by the CIA, the CIA and Justice Department are starting their own “investigation” into the incident (Washington Examiner, Pamela Hess);

    The Justice Department and the CIA’s internal watchdog announced Saturday a joint inquiry into the spy agency’s destruction of videotaped interrogations of two suspected terrorists as the latest scandal to rock U.S. intelligence gathered steam.

    The review will determine whether a full investigation is warranted.

    “I welcome this inquiry and the CIA will cooperate fully,” CIA Director Mike Hayden said in a statement. “I welcome it as an opportunity to address questions that have arisen over the destruction back in 2005 of videotapes.”

    The House Intelligence Committee is launching its own inquiry next week. It will investigate not only why the tapes were destroyed and Congress was not notified, but also the interrogation methods that “if released, had the potential to do such grave damage to the United States of America,” said Chairman Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, on Saturday.

    “This administration cannot be trusted to police itself,” Reyes said.

    What they’re investigating, I don’t have a clue – it’s well-known by now that the Democrats were told about the impending destruction years before it happened. SO what’s to investigate?

    Well, maybe they can start by investigating the Democrats who gave their tacit approval of waterboarding and other information extraction techniques back in 2002 (Washington Post, Joby Warrick and Dan Eggen);

    In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA’s overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

    Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.

    CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said in an interview two months ago that he had informed congressional overseers of “all aspects of the detention and interrogation program.” (By Charles Dharapak — Associated Press)

    “The briefer was specifically asked if the methods were tough enough,” said a U.S. official who witnessed the exchange.

    Funny how there’s so much dirt to dig up relating to Democrat hypocrisy while this administration is said to be untrustworthy.

    Other bloggers;

    Ed Morrissey: If Congress couldn’t find it objectionable when waterboarding was employed, they have little to complain about years afterward.

    Mad as Hell: Can we just jack up the Capitol dome and drive a new Congress underneath?Â