CRAWFORD -- Police tracked down war protester Cindy Sheehan at a vigil near President Bush's ranch for failing to pay a traffic ticket.
Officers from the Waco suburb of Woodway went to a roadblock near the ranch Tuesday night where Sheehan and other war protesters had gathered, said Sheehan's spokeswoman Tiffany Burns.
A Woodway police spokeswoman said the officers told Sheehan there were two outstanding warrants for her arrest, one for an unpaid traffic ticket and the other for failure to appear in court.
State securities regulators charged Patrick Davison, a Billings, Mont. businessman and recently co-chairman of Montana Sen. Conrad Burns' re-election finance committee, with fraud while he was a broker at UBS PaineWebber.
Mr. Davison was a broker with UBS PaineWebber until 2003.
The state, in a complaint filed Friday, alleges that Mr. Davison convinced several investors to put $1.2 million into phony investments.
The year after Mr. Davison left UBS PaineWebber, the firm received "several customer complaints" against him, "resulting in over $500,000 in restitution being paid by the company," the state said.
Mr. Davison, a Republican who ran for governor in 2004, resigned as chair of Mr. Burn's re-election finance committee on July 27 for personal reasons, according to reports.
"Phony investments"? Who were the investors? More as I find it.
WASHBURN, Mo. - The minister of a rural Ozarks church, his wife and her two brothers have been accused of molesting young girls from their congregation for years, sometimes as part of a religious ritual, officials said.
The county prosecutor says the Rev. Raymond Lambert, 51, of Grand Valley Independent Baptist Church, repeatedly had sex with two underage girls with the help of his 49-year-old wife, Patty, according to court records.
For 10 years, the pastor told the girls, “We are preparing your body for service to God,” the prosecutor said. [...]
Lambert’s church is on property owned by the Epling brothers [Patty Lambert’s brothers — Paul Epling, 53, and Tom Epling, 51 — each are accused of repeatedly having sex with girls as young as age 4 in the late 1970s and early 1980s] and houses up to 100 people on a 100-acre farm in western McDonald County, Sheriff’s Deputy Michael F. Le Seuer said.
“They refer to it as a compound,” Le Seuer told The Associated Press.
The compound is behind a high gate marked “Grand Valley Farm” on a gravel road about 13 miles west of the small town of Washburn.
Local Randy Turner of The Turner Report has been covering this story in depth, noting: "Hopefully, reporters for the local newspapers and television stations are already looking into this, but just how much money is being siphoned away from the McDonald County School District by the Grand Valley Independent Baptist Church? [...] Church property is tax-exempt, a concept which is a hallmark of America, but how much property other than one church building and its immediate surroundings (if such a building exists) has been taken off the tax rolls? [...] Obviously, the tax issues pale in comparison to the alleged sexual abuse of children, but this is a side of the story that is hopefully being examined by our local media."
For the context behind the decision, you have to go to ThinkProgress:
The Players: Adm. William Owens, former SAIC president and CEO, became an influential member of Sec. Rumsfeld’s Defense Policy Board
Christopher Henry, former senior vice president at SAIC, became a key aide to Douglas Feith, who was in charge of supervising contract work done by SAIC in Iraq.
Gen. Wayne Downing, SAIC board member, became the chief counterterrorism expert at the National Security Council. Also a lobbyist for disgraced Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, he was a vocal advocate for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
Follow the Money: In the last election cycle, SAIC’s PAC gave $45,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee alone.
In other words, routine Republican cronyist incompetence.
I find it difficult to believe Google couldn't have solved the FBI's information-retrieval problem in six months.
Of course I do understand that these types of shows are actually displays of air power, but that makes them even more sickening under the circumstances. What kind of role did air defense play in 9/11? A failing role. Did the "Shock and Awe" of American air power do much of either, three years after the fact? The Iraqi insurgency seems neither shocked nor awed. When does the bragging stop and the achieving begin?
Speaking of shockingly awful, since 9/11 it is difficult to witness these jets flying in such close proximity to North America's tallest buildings — all in the name of "entertainment." Tons of steel flying at hundreds of miles per hour next to the nation's highest skyscrapers. What could go wrong?
And the cost... Body armor, nope. Veterans, nope. Airport security, nope. Given this administration's reckless tendency to fund a bizarro universe instead of the one in which we live, how do we know the budget for altimeters and gyroscopes wasn't slashed, sending these jets headlong into a bunch of highrise condominium buildings? It's no longer inconceivable that routine aviation threatens cities.
So much risk for so little return. Wherever he has been for the last five long years, Osama is grinning.
Conservative Christian radio host James C. Dobson's national organization, Focus on the Family, said yesterday that it will work with affiliated groups in eight battleground states to mobilize evangelical voters in the November elections.
In targeting individual churches the way political organizers traditionally pinpointed certain wards, Focus on the Family is filling a void left by the near-collapse of the Christian Coalition and stepping into an area where recent Republican Party efforts have created resentment among evangelicals. [...]
During the 1990s, the Christian Coalition distributed millions of voter guides through churches and played a major role in mobilizing evangelicals. After the Christian Coalition suffered financial and management problems, the Republican Party directly organized conservative Christian congregations in key states in the 2004 presidential race.
When memos leaked about the Bush-Cheney campaign's effort to collect church membership directories, however, the GOP came under sharp criticism from some evangelical leaders. Neither the Federal Election Commission nor the Internal Revenue Service charged Republican officials with any violation, and the GOP never backed away from the tactic. But political strategists came to view church-based organizing as both effective and controversial. [...]
The Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of the Washington-based group Americans United for Separation of Church and State, charged that "Dobson's drive to build a church-based political machine will jeopardize the tax exemption of participating congregations."
Comverse Technology Inc.'s former chief executive is regarded as a fugitive by the U.S. government, which last week charged him with conspiracy related to backdated stock options, his attorney said.
Robert Morvillo, a high-profile criminal-defense lawyer who is representing Kobi Alexander, Comverse's former CEO, said he last spoke to his client about two weeks ago. At that point, Mr. Morvillo said, Mr. Alexander was in Israel. He said he has no idea of his client's whereabouts.
During the last two weeks of July, the federal government charges, Mr. Alexander transferred more than $57 million from the U.S. to accounts in Israel "to conceal the funds from U.S. authorities."
CEO criminal Kobi Alexander contributed to that Connecticut elephant in donkey clothing, Joe Lieberman.
I guess despite years of documenting white-collar crime, this post officially makes me anti-Semitic.
Lawyers for Ken Lay are setting the groundwork to clear his criminal record.
Samuel Buffone, a Washington, D.C., attorney who was expected to represent Lay in his appeals, filed a motion Wednesday asking District Court Judge Sim Lake to substitute Lay's estate for the late defendant so the lawyer can appear in court on Lay's behalf.
Buffone said in the motion that once the court recognizes him as the attorney for the estate, he will "move to vacate the convictions of Mr. Lay and dismiss the indictment."
And the most pertinent facts of all: "Lay's $5 million bond — backed by his children's homes — also would be canceled at that time. With his conviction vacated, the government also will not be able to seize Lay's property through the criminal proceedings."
Despite the autopsy report from a county where he undoubtedly had friends in high places, I stick with my assessment of death by suicide.
