Dana’s Idea of Sacrifice: Ex-Dana Rohrabacher aide Erik Prince and other Blackwater USA corporate officials have been dodging congressional questions about their private army’s alleged corruption, including killing innocent, unarmed Iraqi citizens. Mainstream news accounts thoroughly detail the stories. But an excellent update this morning in the Detroit Free Press quotes Rohrabacher (R-Skipped Vietnam Combat Duty) claiming that Prince has sacrificed himself financially for the nation by owning Blackwater. “If he wanted to make money, he could have done a lot of things to make more money,” the Huntington Beach/Long Beach congressman said. Really? Thanks to his GOP connections, Prince–who helps fund the Family Research Council and other right-wing operations–nabbed more than $1 billion in federal funds in recent years.
Judge Joker: Superior Court Judge James M. Brooks likes to play when he works. He’s held up hand-made placards during a trial as if it was judging a soccer match. He’s made fun of Mexicans, Asians, short people, poor folk and, of course, fellow members of the bar. Justices at the state court of appeal in Santa Ana aren’t laughing. “A courtroom is not the Improv, and the [judge’s] role model is not Judge Judy,” they’ve written about the 70-year-old former prosecutor. Reporter Christine Hanley watched the judge in action and found that the clown is loved and hated. Read the story here.
CYA Time At Santa Ana PD? Tony Barboza at the Times digs into the odd Santa Ana cop killing of a motorist four days ago and finds that authorities still “have not said whether the victim was armed or why he was fired upon.” We could be cynical and guess that the police are cooking up something, uh, plausible. I remember a story in the Village Voice, our sister paper in New York City, that detailed the case of the cops who killed an man and then said they thought the Snickers candy bar in his pocket had been a gun. According to Barboza, “Witnesses said eight to 15 officers fired as many as 20 shots at the SUV” driven by 41-year-old Kevin Rene Powell, a parolee from Aliso Viejo. A Powell relative saw a picture of the bullet-riddled SUV and asked, “Why so many bullet holes? I was just sick to my stomach, and I felt that something is definitely wrong.” The cops aren’t talking yet, except defensively pointing out that Powell had a history of weapons violations. Barboza also found a professor of criminal justice who says it looks like officers overreacted and a woman who was driving nearby at the time of the shooting. She told the Times, “Why would you open fire on a freeway in the afternoon when school gets out? It just seemed incredibly irresponsible.” Powell was a black man.
A Push for Hillary Deep Inside Conversative Circles: Gordon Dillow (AKA Bootlicker) is probably spent this morning after watching Dirty Harry all night in the nude, but Steven Greenhut is wide awake and angry with the Republican Party. In his Sunday Register editorial, Greenhut notes that Hillary Clinton is “loathsome” but still hopes “that she obliterates any of the front-running Republican candidates and has long-enough coattails to expand Democratic control of the Senate and House of Representatives.” Why? Unless Ron Paul wins, Greenhut argues that “there is nothing else but a Clinton victory that will save the Republican Party and help rebuild the nation’s long-suffering freedom movement.” Read the column here.
Will Miracles Never Cease? Don’t you love the fear of the mainstream media to acknowledge reality? Here is a headline in the Oct. 1 Orange County Register, “Sex is important, at whatever age, expert says.” Okay, but only if an “expert” says so. And by “whatever age,” I presume the Reg wasn't trying to delight the likes of Jeff Nielsen, accused GOP activist child molester. The column written by Jane Glenn Haas makes revolutionary pronoucements: “Sex is good for you. Good for the body. Good for the mind. Good for the soul.” See, Bootlicker. Everybody else at the Reg has left the 12th century.
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.