Monday, January 4, 2010
Sunday, January 3, 2010
The Tail Wagging the Dog
545 vs. 300,000,000
Charley Reese has been a journalist for 49 years.
545 PEOPLE
By Charlie Reese
Politicians are the only people in the world who create problems and then campaign against them.
Have you ever wondered, if both the Democrats and the Republicans are against deficits, WHY do we have deficits?
Have you ever wondered, if all the politicians are against inflation and high taxes, WHY do we have inflation and high taxes?
You and I don't propose a federal budget. The president does.
You and I don't have the Constitutional authority to vote on appropriations. The House of Representatives does.
You and I don't write the tax code, Congress does.
You and I don't set fiscal policy, Congress does.
You and I don't control monetary policy, the Federal Reserve Bank does.
One hundred senators, 435 congressmen, one president, and nine Supreme Court justices equates to 545 human beings out of the 300 million are directly, legally, morally, and individually responsible for the domestic problems that plague this country.
I excluded the members of the Federal Reserve Board because that problem was created by the Congress. In 1913, Congress delegated its Constitutional duty to provide a sound currency to a federally chartered, but private, central bank.
I excluded all the special interests and lobbyists for a sound reason.. They have no legal authority. They have no ability to coerce a senator, a congressman, or a president to do one cotton-picking thing. I don't care if they offer a politician $1 million dollars in cash. The politician has the power to accept or reject it. No matter what the lobbyist promises, it is the legislator's responsibility to determine how he votes.
Those 545 human beings spend much of their energy convincing you that what they did is not their fault. They cooperate in this common con regardless of party.
What separates a politician from a normal human being is an excessive amount of gall. No normal human being would have the gall of a Speaker, who stood up and criticized the President for creating deficits.. The president can only propose a budget. He cannot force the Congress to accept it.
The Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land, gives sole responsibility to the House of Representatives for originating and approving appropriations and taxes. Who is the speaker of the House? Nancy Pelosi. She is the leader of the majority party. She and fellow House members, not the president, can approve any budget they want. If the president vetoes it, they can pass it over his veto if they agree to.
It seems inconceivable to me that a nation of 300 million can not replace 545 people who stand convicted -- by present facts -- of incompetence and irresponsibility. I can't think of a single domestic problem that is not traceable directly to those 545 people. When you fully grasp the plain truth that 545 people exercise the power of the federal government, then it must follow that what exists is what they want to exist..
If the tax code is unfair, it's because they want it unfair.
If the budget is in the red, it's because they want it in the red ..
If the Army &Marines are in IRAQ , it's because they want them in IRAQ
If they do not receive social security but are on an elite retirement plan not available to the people, it's because they want it that way.
There are no insoluble government problems.
Do not let these 545 people shift the blame to bureaucrats, whom they hire and whose jobs they can abolish; to lobbyists, whose gifts and advice they can reject; to regulators, to whom they give the power to regulate and from whom they can take this power. Above all, do not let them con you into the belief that there exists disembodied mystical forces like "the economy," "inflation," or "politics" that prevent them from doing what they take an oath to do.
Those 545 people, and they alone, are responsible.
They, and they alone, have the power.
They, and they alone, should be held accountable by the people who are their bosses.
Provided the voters have the gumption to manage their own employees.
We should vote all of them out of office and clean up their mess!
Charlie Reese is a former columnist of the Orlando Sentinel Newspaper.
The Law - Interesting Legal Question
Suspected drug lord duped
More than 30 times this year, investigators say, Shannon Williams orchestrated a multimillion-dollar marijuana ring from inside the Douglas County Jail.
In one-on-one sessions with a jail visitor, Williams would use the visitor's cell phone to call associates and instruct them on how to divvy up the gobs of marijuana and money his operation was taking in.
He would confide in the visitor about his past exploits, claiming he had earned $15 million to $20 million while operating the marijuana ring in Omaha. He would ask the visitor to launder the money he was making. And he would use the visitor's cell phone to try to arrange hits: one to beat up his longtime defense attorney and another to “put a few into the back” of an Omaha man who had been messing with Williams' girlfriend.
All the while, the visitor would take it in, nodding and promising to follow Williams' orders.
THE PRINCIPALS
The inmate: Shannon Williams, 42, charged with conspiracy, money laundering and criminal forfeiture.
The girlfriend: Deshawn Hernandez, 29, charged with conspiracy and money laundering.
The initial informants: Steve Kisseberth, 45, and Richard Conway, 36, who have not been charged in this case.
The attorney turned informant: Terry L. Haddock, 52, of Omaha.
The alleged associates: Christopher Parrott, 29, and brother Anthony Parrott, 27, Vicki Cass, age unavailable, Sara Jarrett, 30, Amy Griffith, 33, Daniel Bouquet, 51, Jamie Ackerly, 39, and wife Yvonne Ackerly, 35, all of Omaha; Joe Mark Felix of Phoenix, all of whom are charged with conspiracy. Christopher Parrott, Cass and Jarrett also are charged with money laundering.
The girlfriend: Deshawn Hernandez, 29, charged with conspiracy and money laundering.
The initial informants: Steve Kisseberth, 45, and Richard Conway, 36, who have not been charged in this case.
The attorney turned informant: Terry L. Haddock, 52, of Omaha.
The alleged associates: Christopher Parrott, 29, and brother Anthony Parrott, 27, Vicki Cass, age unavailable, Sara Jarrett, 30, Amy Griffith, 33, Daniel Bouquet, 51, Jamie Ackerly, 39, and wife Yvonne Ackerly, 35, all of Omaha; Joe Mark Felix of Phoenix, all of whom are charged with conspiracy. Christopher Parrott, Cass and Jarrett also are charged with money laundering.
Turns out that jailhouse visitor was no friend, no ally, no dutiful worker. He was a government informant.
And here's the jaw dropper: He was a lawyer — an Omaha attorney who Williams says was representing him.
His name: Terry L. Haddock.
The revelation of whom the government was using as its informant not only rocked Williams, it shocked some legal observers. Several veteran attorneys say they have never heard of the federal government using a private lawyer to glean information from an inmate.
The U.S. attorney for Nebraska and at least one legal expert say investigators were on solid legal ground.
But others expressed concerns about whether the use of the attorney amounted to entrapment or possibly violated Williams' attorney-client privilege — and whether the resulting indictments of Williams and 10 others are the proverbial fruit of a poisonous tree.
“Put it this way, I'm not surprised the government wanted to do it,” said Omaha attorney D.C. “Woody” Bradford, in his 42nd year of practicing law. “But I'm shocked that an attorney was willing to do it.”
In a flurry of filings and letters from the jail, Williams, a 42-year-old street-savvy convict, said he, too, was floored.
“An FBI (informant) posing as my attorney!!!” Williams wrote. “I still can't believe it!”
The hard-to-believe story — complete with hit lists, a skinhead, two men who have been acquitted of murders, cars packed with drugs, hidden GPS devices and a defendant walking naked through an Arizona park — sounds like an episode of the former HBO series “The Wire.”
But make no mistake, court records and testimony show, this is real — all the way down to the Omaha attorney who for some reason was willing to wear a wire and risk his career, and even his life.
The following account of the allegations against Williams and 10 others is based on court documents and the testimony of Bellevue Police Officer John Stuck, a lead investigator in the case.
* * *
The investigation began with a traffic stop in Illinois.
About 8 a.m. Oct. 5, 2008, the Illinois State Patrol pulled over a U-Haul speeding east on Interstate 80. When the driver began acting skittish, the trooper called for a drug dog.
The dog sniffed out 329 pounds of marijuana. Troopers confronted the driver, Steve Kisseberth. He agreed to cooperate.
Kisseberth, 45, and an Omaha man, Richard Conway, 36, told investigators the group had been running 300 to 400 pounds of marijuana from Phoenix to Omaha every three weeks since July 2007. Kisseberth said he had joined in a handful of times — and the group had decided to truck some of the pot farther east on I-80 during the October 2008 trip.
Kisseberth told of the group's normal routine: He would fly to Phoenix, where he was provided with a vehicle packed with pot and bearing Arizona plates. He then would drive to Denver, where the pot was switched to a truck with Nebraska plates.
“They liked to have trucks that had that state's license plates so as not to attract suspicion,” Stuck said.
Investigators also discovered that New Mexico police, during a traffic stop, had found $145,000 in cash in a car rented by Omaha resident Christopher Parrott, one of Williams' alleged accomplices.
Then in January 2009, Williams was arrested after residents reported he was walking naked through a park in Peoria, Ariz. Police found 10 bales of marijuana, weighing 297 pounds, inside his house. They also found someone else in the house: James Hatten, an Omahan who was acquitted in a 1996 murder in rural Douglas County.
Williams gave Arizona authorities a fake name, posted an $8,000 bond and fled to Minnesota.
At that point, Stuck approached Haddock. It's unclear what prompted the drug investigator to try to use the attorney. However, Stuck testified that he knew Williams had paid Haddock $8,000 to represent Conway after his indictment over the marijuana found in Illinois.
Haddock then provided Stuck with Williams' cell phone number — a number that Stuck traced to Minnesota. Soon after, Stuck arrested Williams and brought him back to the Douglas County Jail for violating his supervised release from a 1993 crack-dealing conviction.
While Stuck tracked down Williams, a multistate drug task force had begun tracking the group's vehicles. At night, investigators would sneak up to the group's parked cars and attach GPS devices to them. In turn, the investigators used computer software to track the cars as one left Omaha and another left Phoenix, until both met in Denver.
Sometimes officers would pull over the cars and get the occupants to fess up. Other times, they would let them off with a warning for a traffic violation.
Either way, Stuck said, investigators were collecting names of drug runners on the outside.
* * *
Now they just needed someone on the inside.
This past summer, Stuck said, he asked Haddock if the attorney would agree to be outfitted with a recording device and meet with Williams at the Douglas County Jail. Attorneys are typically the only visitors allowed to meet face to face with inmates, and jailers aren't allowed to listen in on those meetings.
“Mr. Williams had asked Terry Haddock to bring a phone up to him,” Stuck testified. “He wanted the freedom, through Mr. Haddock, to … be able to do the operations without the recording of the phones inside the jail.”
Haddock agreed. Soon, he and the wire were witness to a vast conspiracy. In more than 30 meetings at the jail, Williams would use Haddock's phone to speak to suppliers “Flaco” and “Javi” in Arizona. Williams would direct the movement of thousands of pounds of marijuana.
And Williams would quash beefs. In August, Parrott became worried because, Stuck said, Parrott had stolen a “ticket” from Flaco. A ticket is more than 1,000 pounds of marijuana worth more than $1 million.
Williams told Parrott to get a safe and pack it with pot and money. He then ordered the others to throw away their cell phones so Flaco couldn't trace their whereabouts.
While Williams reassured the group he would find a new supplier, he was telling Flaco that someone had stolen the pot from Parrott.
He then gave Haddock orders. He asked the attorney to go to Parrott and to Williams' girlfriend, Deshawn Hernandez, to retrieve cash.
In turn, authorities gave Haddock more ammunition. They had him set up a corporation, called Mango Creek Properties, in which he could launder the drug money.
Under Williams' instruction, Haddock then took more than $80,000 from Parrott and Hernandez and placed it into Mango Creek's accounts.
Williams' requests grew bolder. On Nov. 13, Williams told Haddock he wanted to give $2,000 to an inmate — a white supremacist named Jason “Skin” Hawthorne — to beat up Williams' longtime defense attorney, Steve Lefler.
Williams then made a call to Hatten, who has not been indicted, and talked about an Omaha man who had been around Williams' girlfriend and children.
Williams wanted “to put a few in his back,” Stuck testified, “to let him know he was disrespected.”
Soon after, Haddock alerted authorities to the threats against Lefler and the other man. Neither man was harmed.
By mid-December, the conspiracy had unraveled into 11 indictments, with more possibly coming. Haddock, meanwhile, has told others he is in the witness protection program.
* * *
Attorneys wasted no time trying to attack the constitutionality of investigators' use of Haddock. At a detention hearing last week, Williams' court-appointed attorney, Michael Tasset, grilled Stuck — asking if Haddock had been paid or what “incentive Haddock was getting to assist the government.”
U.S. Magistrate Judge F.A. Gossett III cut off that line of questioning, saying it was irrelevant at a detention hearing.
The taped conversations “may be suppressible at a trial,” the judge said. “They may not be.”
Williams said he had retained Haddock for several matters, including a lawsuit Williams filed to try to expose disparities in crack cocaine sentencings.
Stuck disputed that.
“In the very first (jail) contact with Mr. Williams, Mr. Haddock explained that he is not his attorney and would not do any legal work for him at all,” Stuck testified. “Mr. Williams understood.”
At this point, little is known about why Haddock, 52, chose to get involved. A nontraditional student, he graduated from the University of Nebraska at Omaha with a perfect GPA in 1998. He then graduated from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Law School in 2001 and later joined the Omaha law firm of Raynor, Rensch and Pfeiffer. Haddock is no longer with the firm and hasn't been for months.
Haddock has had marital and financial problems in the past two years. Court records list credit card debts of $28,000 and $22,000.
His wife filed for divorce in 2008. The couple have several grown daughters.
Williams, who was acquitted in the 1993 murder of an Omaha man, said Haddock's “betrayal” has left him unsure whom to trust. At last week's hearing, Williams could be overheard asking if his new attorney “was an undercover agent, too.” Williams and the others face 10 years to life in prison if convicted.
“Not for Al Qaeda or John Gotti has the federal government stooped so low,” Williams wrote to The World-Herald. “Posing as a criminal attorney to get a defendant to talk ‘freely' of his criminal past screams of entrapment and will turn the U.S. justice system on its ear if this is allowed to happen.”
Contact the writer:
444-1275, todd.cooper@owh.comSaturday, January 2, 2010
The Norden Bombsight by Kent Ballard
The Norden Bomb Sights were top secret. After the middle of the war, every one of them were made at the Naval Avionics Facility at 16th and Ritter Street in Indianapolis. In the event that one of our bombers was shot down over enemy territory and made a "soft-crash-landing", in other words one that a few of the crew could walk away from, the crew were all ordered to pack explosive devices around it with long-burning fuses, just long enough for them to ignite them and get the hell out of the aircraft. Whoever survived the crash-landing did the job. They were all trained in the use of the pre-prepared explosive and ordered never to let an intact Norden bomb sight fall into the hands of the enemy. The Norden was invented by two brothers. One bought out the other, and held sole rights to the device. He, in turn, sold the the manufacturing rights and the entire patent to the United States Government for the sum of their development money, plus one dollar. I've read where this was not uncommon by inventors during the Second World War. The Norden bomb sight was last used to drop listening devices along the Ho Chi Minh trail during the Vietnam War. Which American fighter plane shot down the most enemy aircraft? If you'd asked me before I read the books, I'd have guessed the famed P-51 Mustang or the Navy Corsair fighter in the Pacific. Both guesses would have been wrong. It was the Lockheed P-38 Lightning. Twin engined, twin tail booms, and the pilot was crammed into a third and separate compartment in the center of the wing. It was a fairly tight fit, as the whole rest of the compartment held four .50 caliber machine guns and a 20 mm cannon, later a 30 mm on some models. The Lightning had a high fuel consumption rate (two engines instead of one) but also had a lift capability that allowed it to take off with huge drop tanks, making the P-38 the first American fighter to give fairly long-range escort to our heavy bombers over Europe. They couldn't make it all the way to Germany and back, especially dogfighting all the way, but they swept the sky of Luftwaffe fighters over France and the Low Countries before the Mustangs came into service. They could carry a load almost as heavy as a B-17's bomb load, making it a great ground-attack plane too. And once their bombs were dropped, they instantly turned back into a very deadly fighter. They worked over airfields, marshaling yards, pinpoint hits on pillboxes, tanks, and fuel and ammo dumps. If no Luftwaffe fighters were in the area to mix it up with, they used their remaining fuel to strafe military convoys, trains, and troop concentrations. Their pilots loved them. The Germans or Japanese could score a hit and kill one of their engines, and the Lightning would still bring its pilot home on the remaining engine. The Republic Thunderbolt was the largest and heaviest single-engined fighter of either side in WW II. It was fast and nimble enough to mix it up with Me-109s over Europe but found its real home in ground-attack. Any time you see films taken from an American fighter shooting up convoys or blowing up trains, they were almost certainly taken from P-38 Lightnings or P-47 Thunderbolts, probably Lightnings since they had more film in their gun cameras. But the Thunderbolts rained hell on German troop movements once they got bases in France, bringing daylight Nazi convoys and trains to a standstill. Anything that moved and was not ours had a Thunderbolt on it within minutes. And the P-47 was one of those ridiculously lucky and strong designs where it could take massive battle damage and still return to base, shot all to pieces but saving the pilot. "The Desert Fox", General Erwin Rommel's staff car--with Rommel in it--was shot to shreds by a single Thunderbolt. He survived, but just barely. His driver and all other officers in the car were killed. Today's A-10 Thunderbolt II is named after that same aircraft, although it's become popularly known as the "Warthog" due to it's ungainly and old-fashioned looks. American ground troops today think the plane is worth its weight in gold when they call in close air support, although the Air Force tried to get rid of the things several times before Iraq and Afghanistan, preferring "sexier" aircraft and planes capable of supersonic speed. The Thunderbolt IIs, like their older brothers, can take fantastic battle damage and keep on flying--and fighting. The A-10s were literally designed around the 30 mm Hughes Chain Gun which takes up the entire front third of the aircraft, and on its wing hardpoints it can carry tons of ordinance to drop on the enemy. I suggest you watch any YouTube film of a Thunderbolt II in action, films often taken by our troops hiding in shattered buildings or behind rock formations. The pilots fly like madmen, twisting, jinking, banking one way and skidding another. This is all to avoid heavy concentrations of ground fire. The gunners on the big Russian AA guns simply don't know where to aim--if they survive the initial attack. Aeronautical engineering genius, Clarence Kelly was the driving force behind Lockheed's P-38 Lightning. It was his baby, and it caused no end of grief for the Nazis and Imperial Japanese. P-38's shot down the transport plane carrying Japanese Admiral Yamamoto, who designed and orchestrated the attack on Pearl Harbor, killing him after we broke their radio codes and learned his schedule. Kelly would stay with Lockheed after the war, designing the first American jet fighter, the P-80 Shooting Star, which did not come in time to see service in WW II but was the early workhorse in Korea. And after that Clarence Kelly would lead the Lockheed design team to build the SR-71 Blackbird, still the fastest aircraft ever to fly (that we know of). North American Aviation built the P-51 Mustang, and later rush-designed and built the F-86 Saberjet to compete with the MIG-15s over Korea. If you look closely at photographs of the Mustang and the Saberjet, you'll eventually see the relationship between the two famed fighters. There IS a family resemblance The F-86 is a Mustang on steroids. America's 21st Century's air superiority fighter is so...different...than anything before it they agreed to give it a new name--The Raptor. Sure, it's just an airplane with engines and wings and a pilot--but after that, everything else about it is unlike anything ever flown before. Not only in the stealth characteristics, but in the maddeningly complex avionics that are said to be aboard the fighter. One of the design staff, when pressed for just a hint of what that aircraft is capable of, thought for a moment then said, "Let's just say there are 'magic things' in that bird." Rumors abound about the F-22 Raptor. It can become invisible to the naked eye. It has black boxes that show enemy radars 50 Raptors are approaching when there's only one--and it's coming in from a different direction and altitude. Or 50 Raptors can show up as nothing, nothing at all, on enemy air defense screens. It can send EMP bursts out to flatten enemy electronics within range. The Air Force is cheerfully allowing aviation writers to speculate all kinds of things about the F-22 Raptor--all while neither confirming nor denying any of them. One thing is certain, though. It has a gun, a rotary chain-driven Gatling cannon. We learned that lesson the hard way in Vietnam, and since those days no American fighter has been without a gun aboard. The Allied close-support and air defense fighter for THIS century, the F-35, to be flown by the USAF and many NATO countries, is stealthy, long ranged, fantastically nimble and maneuverable in the air, and is said to be the finest attack fighter flying today. It's now entering the U.S. Air Force in operational numbers. And it's more economical than many aircraft anywhere near its class. They're making THREE versions of it, one for the Air Force, one for Naval carrier operations, and a particularly unique one for the Marine Corps--which can fly both supersonic then land vertically like a Harrier on any clear spot on the ground--or on a smaller Navy vessel. For this aircraft--the only one since WW II--they took the name "Lightning" out of retirement and bestowed it on the F-35. It's that good. Both Lockheed and the Air Force have enough faith in this new aircraft that the F-35 Lightning will be our main tactical and ground-attack fighter for the next four decades or more. And yes, it can dogfight too. In our heavy bombers, during WW II we had the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress (nicknamed by a newspaper reporter who saw all the machine guns bristling out of it and said, "This thing is a flying fortress!"), the Consolidated-built B-24 Liberator, and the Boeing B-29 Superfortress. The '29s had the range and a hellacious bomb load, the Liberators were easier to fly and faster than the old B-17 and they too carried a heavier bomb load, but among pilots and air crew members the Flying Fortress was the most beloved of all. There are several photographs, taken from other bombers in a B-17 group, of hideously damaged B-17s still flying with the group, struggling to stay in formation, and yet more of B-17s which managed to make it back across the English Channel and either crash-land at their airbases or on some flat space in Great Britain. Among these were aircraft so damaged that aeronautical engineers from Boeing stated that they should not have been able to stay aloft. They'd suffered so much damage that, according to the slide rules, they should have simply fallen out of the sky. But they bought their crews home, and became legendary for doing it. Few, if any, other aircraft before or since were as respected and loved by their crews as the Boeing B-17.
Kent
Kent
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
