Eideard

An Indiana jury convicted embattled Republican Secretary of State Charlie White in the early hours of Saturday on six out of seven felony charges including perjury, theft and voter fraud…

White was indicted last year on seven counts stemming in part from accusations that he lied about his home address while serving on the Fishers Town Council so that he could retain a stipend…Council members are elected to represent a district and must resign if they leave that area.

White had maintained he was living in the basement of his ex-wife’s home within the district he represented. Prosecutors introduced documents they believed told a different story, that he lived outside the district with his fiancee.

Under Indiana law, any public officer convicted of a felony must be removed from office…

The seven-count indictment even contended that White lied on his marriage license application and on an application to vote in a special election…Using his ex-wife’s address allowed White to retain a $1,000-a-month stipend for his council seat and continue to pursue his political ambitions, prosecutors said…

Separately, a Marion County judge in December ruled that White was not eligible to run for secretary of state in 2010 because he was not properly registered at his own address. White has been allowed to stay in office while he appeals that ruling.

The Marion County judge ruled that the Democrat White defeated by more than 340,000 votes in 2010, Vop Osili, should be declared the winner of the election.

No date was set for sentencing.

With the Republican campaign to limit voters in full swing around the country anyone think this will come up as a question in one of the Presidential Primary debates?

Here was a real crook – and Indiana Republicans did their best to defend his greedy little fraud.

In the latest example of a corporation trying to nickel and dime its customers, the telecom giant has announced a new “$2 payment convenience fee” for people who, well, want to pay their bill.

Basically if you are the kind of person who can’t commit to auto-paying your phone bill and like to pay online or on your phone, well, your bill is going to be going up two bucks a month starting on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, January 15.

Yeah, there are ways to go month-to-month without incurring the fee—electronic check, a Verizon gift card, paper check in the mail, or paying in person at a Verizon store — but if you want to pay your bill online or on your phone, well, be ready to part with two hundred pennies.

So, why is Verizon doing this? According to Big Red, “The fee will help allow us to continue to support these single bill payment options in these channels [the still free options] and is designed to address costs incurred by us for only those customers who choose to make single bill payments in alternate payment channels (online, mobile, telephone).”

So…basically Verizon (which is not exactly in the poor house) found a place where they could wring out a few extra pennies and is doing just that. What comes after this? Fees for accessing more than 100 cell towers in a month?

Methinks they’re trying to sneak in the backdoor on transaction fees like those charged merchants by credit card companies. However it turns out, this is just one more example of special privileges afforded telcos. If your state or city tried to impose a tax like this every so-called taxpayer organization would rise up in arms [especially those already carrying guns].

UPDATE: Verizon caved. Ain’t the internet something?

Stephan Brooks, a postal worker, was caught stealing penis enlargement pills from a parcel.

Brooks was spotted by his manager using a penknife to slice open post at his job at the Royal Mail sorting office in Chelmsford, Essex. The 47-year-old from Benfleet, Essex was put under two days of surveillance.

Investigators watched as Brooks helped himself to a pot of VigRX – a penis enlargement supplement – from a parcel he had opened.

Staff watched Brooks opened up parcel after parcel, checking contents before putting them back if they were of no interest. During a second day of CCTV surveillance he took his penknife to seven more packages and stole cash…

Brooks was confronted by security staff and asked that he be allowed to turn himself in to police…

Brooks was handed a six-month suspended sentence at Chelmsford Magistrates’ Court after admitting two counts of theft and three charges of unlawfully opening Royal Mail packages…

Other items Brooks nabbed included Ray-Ban sunglasses, a designer watch, cufflinks and a harmonica.

A Renaissance thief – though his mates will never let him hear the end of stealing penis enlargement pills. No doubt.

An Albuquerque restaurant owner called it one of the strangest events he’s ever seen: three men arrested after they stole toilet paper from his bathroom.

The incident went down at Burgers, Dogs and Wings on Saturday.

Employee Josh Flannery-Stewart said when the three men entered his restaurant, he was immediately suspicious. “They weren’t really talking. Their eyes were all messed up and droopy and dilated,” Flannery-Stewart said.

Shortly thereafter, workers said they noticed the men come out of the bathroom carrying rolls of toilet paper. In all, police said the man made off with about a dozen rolls, but they didn’t get far.

“They got in their car and all of a sudden APD (Albuquerque Police Department) was surrounding them,” Flannery-Stewart said. Officers said the men were already under surveillance by police.

Flannery-Stewart said the men were suspected of having a mobile heroin rig…

The restaurant manager said they were able to get the toilet paper back.

Guess the Albuquerque coppers didn’t need it for evidence.

You know, there aren’t too many crooks roaming the streets of America with an overwhelming amount of smarts, anyway. These clowns certainly score high on the dumbometer.

A Wisconsin cemetery worker could spend 10 years in jail after pleading no contest to stealing an electric guitar from a casket.

The cream-colored Fender Telecaster was laid upon the body of Randall Jourdan, who wished to be buried with his “pride and joy,” the criminal complaint said. The guitar was recovered from the suspect’s home the next day.

“I have to have that guitar. It’s too expensive to be in a crypt,” Steven Conard allegedly told a groundskeeper at the Allouez Catholic Cemetery and Chapel Mausoleum near Green Bay where he was working, the complaint said.

Jourdan was a guitar player for more than 40 years, family members told investigators.

Same old, same old. Egregious behavior leading to crime. Whether it’s politics on a mass scale or just some creep deciding his personal “needs” override someone else’s freedom to make decisions on their own life – or death in this case.

One of my old singing partners was buried with two of his guitars. I still would bust anyone trying to despoil his wishes by stealing either axe. But, when I lived in the Navajo Nation I opposed the tradition that allowed families to kill someone’s horse and bury it along with the horse’s owner. I understand it. It’s still demented behavior.

A favored spot near Harare

Three Zimbabwean women have been accused of a series of sex attacks on male hitchhikers, purportedly to steal their semen for use in ritual practices. In a case that has gripped media and public imagination, the gang appeared in court to face charges of aggravated indecent assault.

Sophie and Netsai Nhokwara, sisters aged 26 and 24, along with 28-year-old Rosemary Chakwizira, are the first suspects to be arrest since accounts of women gang-raping men in Zimbabwe emerged two years ago. They were charged along with Thulani Ngwenya, 24, who is Sophie Nhokwara’s boyfriend.

The gang’s alleged 17 victims identified so far include a soldier and a police officer whom they allegedly forced to have sex without condoms, the Herald newspaper reported…

The women were arrested when they were involved in an accident and police reportedly found 31 used condoms – three half-full of semen – in the boot of their car.

James Sabau, a spokesman for Harare police, told state media that preliminary investigations suggested a ritual link to the collection of victims’ semen.

“We are still trying to figure out why semen was collected,” he was quoted as saying. “Information we have gathered so far links the entire female rapist issue to rituals that make people rich. It is, however, still unclear how the supposed rituals work.”

RTFA. Honestly – I haven’t a comment for this one. What do you think?

 
A collection of 300 paintings worth millions of euros have been discovered in a Polish outhouse belonging to a 92-year-old former bricklayer, with police baffled as to how they got there.

The paintings were found mixed up with junk and rubbish in a dirty two-storey concrete building in the bricklayer’s garden near the north-western city of Szczecin.

Police said the mysterious collection included works of art from the Renaissance and German baroque periods, with the oldest painting dating back to 1532. They also discovered a lithograph by the Polish artist Jozef Czajkowski, which disappeared from a museum in Katowice during the war…

The collection, having suffered from its 66 years in the outhouse, has now been moved to a museum in Szczecin. “Many of the pictures are in a terrible condition and we’re trying to identify them and find out where they came from,” said Przmyslaw Kimon, spokesman for Szczecin police. “Some of them are Italian so we’re in contact with the Italian authorities, and we are also working with Interpol.”

But police admitted to being perplexed as to how the bricklayer, now charged with handling stolen art, came to possess the paintings. Their investigation has also been hindered by the fact that two strokes have left the man known only as Antoni M. [owing to reporting restrictions] unable to communicate.

Most theories revolve around the possibility that the bricklayer had somehow managed to get hold of a collection of looted art, abandoned in the chaotic last weeks of the Second World War as Germans put life before property in their efforts to escape the advancing Red Army…

Possessing an interest in art he decided to keep the paintings rather than turn them into the authorities.
He also decided to keep them out of public sight. Stashing them in hiding places in his outhouse, he made the building off-limits to even his closest family.

The news of the discovery was welcomed by Leszek Jodlinski, director of the Silesia Museum in Katowice, one of the museums stripped bare by the Nazis during the war, and the former home of the Czajkowski lithograph.

BTW – ever wish to see a great film about Resistance fighters stopping a Nazi art hoard from being carried off to Germany, rent The Train [1964], starring Burt Lancaster.

The first thing you need to know about the U.S. patent system is that it has a backlog of more than 700,000 patents.

The second thing you need to know is that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has been so neglected for so many years–essentially robbed of funds by Congress, which reappropriated portions of the agency’s budget for other purposes–that the organization tasked with protecting America’s technological and scientific assets labors with too few staff and a “20-year old technology infrastructure that does not even remotely enable it to take advantage of modern information technology.”

And the most important thing you need to know about the U.S. patent system is that the America Invents Act just passed by Congress doesn’t fix any of this. Nor does it touch the larger issue of whether or not it’s wise to allow inventors to patent business processes and software and then sue the hell out of each other in a cage match that is essentially a tax on innovation.

The major opportunity in this act, aside from the elimination of software patents, was to free the USPTO from the congressional appropriations process, whereby Congress exercises control over the agency’s budget. The USPTO doesn’t use taxpayer money–it’s funded by application fees–and yet it still has to ask Congress for permission to access those funds, giving that body an opportunity to reappropriate them for any other purpose.

Giving the USPTO self-determination over its own budget would have at least allowed it to tackle that 700,000+ backlog of patents. That provision of the bill, which originally appeared in the Senate version, was blocked by House Budget Committee Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-KY), who appear to have been confused about the source of the USPTO’s funds. (i.e., not taxpayer dollars.)

Surely no one expected Congressional Republicans to take the time to find out what exactly it was they were saying “NO” to?

If the appropriate corporations – in this a range of korporate killer klowns from Walt Disney to Microsoft – tell them to say “NO” – the only question from Republicans is, “How loud, boss?”

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission
No, that’s not Cooperman and Schwartz

Click on photo for Leon Cooperman, Marvin Schwartz on topic
[The real conversation starts at 2 minutes into the video]

The best thing to be said of the recent stomach-churning turmoil on Wall Street is that it’s taking place in August, a time of year when many people are lounging at the beach or camping in the woods and not paying attention to stocks…

“Everyone felt this was idiotic,” says Susan Kaplan, president of Kaplan Financial Services, referring to last week’s volatility. “Most clients didn’t want to deal with the markets anymore and went back to their summer vacations,” said Kaplan, whose firm manages about $1.3 billion in customer money…

Thursday brought another August storm. The S&P500 plunged 4.46 percent and the benchmark 10-year Treasury note yield fell below 2 percent for the first time in 70 years. And the trouble is this turmoil may not be some temporary anomaly.

Experts say investors should expect even more volatility in stocks, as herd trading by hedge funds, knee-jerk trader reaction to news and lightning fast computer programs combine to make for a new and uncomfortable normal on Wall Street.

This new trading frontier even has its own signature milepost, something called “a liquidity black hole.” It’s a trading phenomenon in which there’s so much intense selling pressure in big-cap stocks that it sucks all the oxygen out of the market and stocks plunge precipitously – as on August 8 when every single stock in the S&P500 ended the day in the red…

There’s a concern that frenzied trading could drive people further away from stocks at a time when, other than gold, there are few assets generating any kind of substantial return.

And that’s something that could have long-term ramifications for the ability of investors to build retirement nest-eggs, especially given the historic poor ability of retail investors to time market swoons and surges…

Also if investors flee stocks it could make it harder for small, niche companies, such as ones in the biotech or clean energy sectors, to tap the public markets for capital. Or more of those companies might take their capital-raising business overseas to places like Hong Kong, which would be another blow to Wall Street.

I’m fed up for the same reasons Messrs Cooperman and Schwartz declare. High frequency trading adds nothing to the stock market except no sense of direction and qualitatively dangerous volatility. It’s the ultimate in day trading with no one investing in the companies traded and adding value.

The Securities and Exchange Commission, the regulatory body for these shenanigans is doing what they did to prevent the subprime meltdown that gave us the Great Recession. Nothing, nada, nuttin’ honey! They’d rather not risk offending the moneyboys invested in platforms profiting profit for the trading corporations – not investors. But, that’s not what a stock market is for.

A U.S. military task force has discovered that part of a $2.16 billion transportation contract was diverted through a murky network of subcontractors and into the hands of a group of Afghan power-brokers, criminals and Taliban insurgents…Roughly $600 million of the contract had been spent before authorities were alerted to the scandal…

Only part of that money, however, is believed to have been diverted to “nefarious elements,” the source added…Well, that makes me feel better.

The official said it appears some of the payments were given for truckers to be assured of safe passage through insurgent areas of Afghanistan. As has happened in other instances, trucking contractors paid off local drivers who then turned around and paid local security forces, who in turn paid insurgents in their areas…

Actually, when I worked in traffic management, we did the same thing to get our shipments through Mafia checkpoints in Newark.

The contract program, called Host Nation Trucking — which expires in September — has since been replaced by a more stringent system that requires up to 40 different contractors — an effort to reduce overall reliance on a single firm.

The new program is also meant to tighten accounting measures of second and third party vendors, an area various groups had previously been able to exploit, the source said…

Government officials are currently pursuing corrective actions against the trucking firms, including suspensions and limits on work, though all eight companies still remain on the U.S. payroll.

If you’re functioning here at home within a Republican-devised system like “mark to market” accounting, why expect the Pentagon to deploy legitimate accounting and oversight in a war zone created by the same phonies?