HEADING OFF FOR A WEEK OF VACATION, BUT HERE’S A QUICK POST:
When it comes to criminals, I’m a lock-’em-up-and-throw-away-the-key kind of guy.
People who hurt or steal from other folks are pretty low on the food chain. If they do something seriously bad, they deserve to spend many, many days looking at the world through a set of iron bars.
But I will say this too: They should be treated OK while they are guests of the taxpayers.
That’s three meals a day, a shower every now and then and a little exercise to burn up some energy. No rough stuff from guards or other inmates.
Which brings us to Joe Francis, the guy who made millions upon millions by convincing college girls on spring break to flash for his cameras. Yes, we’re talking “Girls Gone Wild.”
It’s hard to believe any gal would be that stupid or slutty, but it happens.
Anyhow, Francis has managed to find himself on the wrong side of the law — tax evasion, contempt of court, having contraband in custody. And in more than one state, no less. What a schmuck.
While in a jail in Chickasha, Okla., recently, he said guards denied him food and blankets. And threatened to strap him naked to a chair for 48 hours.
It sounds crazy, and the guards deny it.
All I know is that if somehow, some way, this creep could be convicted for a stupid white-collar stunt like tax evasion, it would be sweet justice.
Why? Because what he did to get rich was not illegal. But it was incredibly sleazy.
There ought to be a penalty for it, but there isn’t. So I wouldn’t mind settling for some kind of secondary, after-the-fact conviction.
One more thing: When he goes to trial, I hope he gets a jury filled with men and women who have teen-aged daughters. Little Joey would then learn all about "Justice Gone Wild!"
Friday, November 23, 2007
Joe's gone wild
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Do the crime, do (some of) the time
If you’re planning to go to Arizona and break the law, you should try to end up before Judge Helene Abrams. If you do, let’s just say you don’t have to worry about dying behind bars.
Abrams is the Superior Court judge who gave perennial screwup Mike Tyson all of one day in jail for possession of cocaine and driving under the influence.
Tyson could have gotten four years and three months. The prosecutor even recommended a year in the slammer, and that seems generous.
Instead Iron Mike gets 24 hours. Heck, you don’t even have to eat lousy jail food or endure those unpleasant showers with other inmates if you’re in for that much.
Worse, Judge Abrams pumped up Tyson with some undeserved praise: “You’ve worked to address your addiction and self-destructive behavior,” she gushed.
I’ll believe it when I see it. So far, Mikey seems to be pretty good at addiction and self-destructive behavior.
As prosecutor Shane Krauser pointed out, Tyson’s run-ins with the law include convictions for rape in Indiana and assault in Maryland.
“Judge, by my calculations, this is his fourth or fifth chance,” he said.
Sheesh.
And we wonder why we have a crime problem in this country.
I don’t have all the answers, but one problem might be ridiculous sentences like 82 minutes to Nicole Richie, 84 minutes to Lindsay Lohan and one day to Mike Tyson for serious offenses that could have hurt or killed someone.
Oh, well. Maybe Tyson will get the book thrown at him the next time. And trust me, there will be a next time.
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Yanks in the tank
So what is it, Yankee haters?
Are we happy that A-Rod came slinking back to the Bronx because he found out he wasn’t worth as much as he thought? Or are we worried that he will be back in pinstripes because, even though he is obnoxious, he’s good?
Personally, I could go either way on that one. The good news is that nothing can ruin the fact that it’s a great year in sports for anyone who doesn’t live in New York. We don’t have to be irritated by all that bragging from the Big Apple about how wonderful their town and teams are.
First the Mets, with their big payroll and big egos, don’t even make the playoffs. Then the Yankees — same description, only more so —get into the post-season but promptly get bounced by the once-lowly Indians.
Then the Jets get off to a terrible year in football (1-8!) and the Giants slowly settle into mediocrity. (Here a hint, Giants fans: Eli is no Peyton and never will be).
Now the Yankees start to fall apart in the offseason. Ya gotta love it.
The A-Rod soap opera is a joke, but the Yankees deserve it.
His arrogant agent Scott Boras announces — during the World Series, no less — that Prince Alexander will not be returning to the fold next year. Then A-Rod finds out that few teams, if any, will give him the supersized paycheck he is dreaming of.
So he pulls a U-turn, and the spinning that followed was as ferocious as a Josh Beckett curve ball.
George Steinbrenner’s son Hank said, “But the bottom line, the only thing that really matters, is he wants to stay a Yankee. And it could be very well that he’s always wanted to stay a Yankee and we just didn’t know it.”
Right, Hankie. I guess we were thrown off by the part where A-Rod made it real clear that he didn’t “want to stay a Yankee.”
Then A-Rod himself releases a statement that’s so silly you almost bust out laughing when you read it:
“We know there are other opportunities for us, but Cynthia and I have a foundation with the club that has brought us comfort, stability and happiness.”
Gimme a gigantic break.
The moody ballplayer and the dysfunctional team deserve each other.
I hope A-Rod breaks the all-time home run record because Barry Bonds is so icky.
I just don’t want to see them celebrating at the end of a World Series — and hear the talk again about how much better they are than everyone else.
Fortunately, based on the way the team has been run in the past few years, we all should be spared that. Let’s hope our luck holds.
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
It's alive? I can take care of that.
Boy, the Manners Police are getting fussier and fussier.
Take poor Jerick Hutchinson, a high school agriculture teacher in Huntsville, Ark.
The other day he was all set to give his class a demonstration on how to skin an animal — and haven’t we all sat through dozens of them? — when a little problem came up.
See, a student promised to bring a raccoon for the demonstration, which he did, which is important, because you can’t have a skinning demonstration without a critter to skin.
Anyhow, the animal was alive, not deceased. So Hutchinson, being the resourceful type, took ol’ Rocky out back and turned him into a dead raccoon.
With a nail gun.
Now some of these tree-hugger types are saying that was just a bit icky for high school kids.
Gimme a break. Even the head honcho defended Hutchinson.
"It wasn’t like he held a nail gun against the head of a cute little animal in front of the class," said Superintendent Alvin Lievsay. " … He does a great job. The kids love him."
Damn straight. I mean, if he’d capped the ’coon in front of Billy and Susie, well, maybe then you’ve got a gripe. But he was discreet, as any good skinner is.
Thanks to Hutchinson’s pluckiness, the rosy-cheeked youngsters were able to observe proper skinning techniques on the raccoon, and, as the AP story put it, “examine the contents of its stomach.”
I have to end this post now. I’m just getting a little teary-eyed thinking about this Norman Rockwell moment in a little red schoolhouse somewhere in the hills of Arkansas.
Monday, November 12, 2007
Uh, what did you say?
If there’s a chutzpah award for attorneys, James Davis ought to win it.
He’s the barrister defending Kelsey Peterson, the 25-year-old middle school teacher in Nebraska who fled with one of her 13-year-old male students to Mexico. Yes, unless you are terminally naïve, it was one of those relationships.
Their little jaunt — the mother of all school trips — was mercifully cut short by men with guns and badges. Now Peterson is facing lots of years behind bars for getting real familiar with a boy who hasn’t been on this earth for lots of years.
If I were James Davis, I’d fall on my knees before the judge and beg for mercy for my client, seeing as how she looks really guilty and all that.
Not Davis. He must have gone to the “best defense is a good offense” school of lawyering.
In his view, Peterson is the innocent one here, not the kid.
“It’s my understanding he was grooming her and she wasn’t grooming him,” Davis said. “I see true victims every day. This young man is no victim. … The kid is sophisticated. He shaves, he has a mustache.”
Wow! Wonder if Davis wants the lad charged with kidnapping.
The boy’s aunt, Laura Rodriguez, said the boy is indeed 13 and not older as Davis suggests.
As for the horny teacher being the “victim” in the relationship, Aunt Laura made a good point: “She started up with him when he was 12. She was 24. How could that happen?”
Heck, maybe I’m being too hard on Davis. He has gone so far as to say about Peterson, “She understands what she did, and that she didn’t exercise the best judgment in leaving.”
Rigghhtt. That’s like saying Britney Spears “didn’t exercise the best judgment” in shaving her head.
We’ll see what a judge or jury in the Cornhusker State has to say about all this.
But from where I sit, calling an adult who seduces a child the “victim” in the relationship is, well, how, shall I put this? … preposterous!
Wednesday, November 07, 2007
Please, no more instant replay
Did you see that story in our paper on Wednesday (page 4C) about the possibility of adding instant replay to baseball? If you didn’t, just go to our Web site and do a search for, “How to ruin a great game.”
Good grief. Baseball does not need replay, instant or otherwise. No sport does.
The reason we watch sports is that it’s unscripted competition between athletes or teams. You don’t know what will happen. The game might be good or bad or somewhere in between. You watch because you like the sport and the suspense.
Bad calls by umpires are part of the game. This is not a “problem” that needs to be “fixed” by a bunch of suits in Orlando, Fla., trying to kill time until spring training starts.
If a bad call happens, you shrug it off and keep playing. If you do that, sooner or later a call will go your way.
In fact, most replays show that umps almost always make the right call, even though the play is happening at full speed and they might not have the best angle.
Even more annoying is the doubletalk coming from the people trying to push this nonsense:
“I don’t think there’s a significant impetus toward destroying what has been 150 years of the human aspects of baseball,” said Bob DuPuy, baseball’s chief operating officer.
Gosh, Bob, I owe you an apology. I guess I thought that using sophisticated TV cameras with slo-mo and freeze-frame capabilities to review an umpire’s call would undermine “the human aspect of baseball.”
Baseball is enjoying a resurgence: Steroid use has dropped. The Montreal Expos have been put out of their misery and the game has returned to the nation’s capital. (Though the franchise should have been renamed the Washington Senators.) Teams that aren’t named the New York Yankees are winning the World Series.
If the owners were smart, and they’re not, they would leave well enough alone. If they want to fiddle with something, go after the monstrosity called "the designated hitter" in the American League.
Monday, November 05, 2007
Baby Grace is not Maddie
It’s a sad, sad story — the discovery of the body of little girl in Galveston Bay dubbed “Baby Grace.”
But Lord, are some people stupid.
To back up: The child’s body was found last week in a storage box that washed ashore. The blonde child had been murdered — fractured skull — but nothing else was known about her.
She was two or three, had beautiful long hair, and was wearing a pink outfit with white light-up tennis shoes.
Your blood runs cold when you think about the monster who could harm that innocent soul and then throw her body into the bay in a box. This is why we have the death penalty.
Anyhow, authorities are trying to I.D. the child, so they put out a description and sketch of her and hoped that a good tip might come in.
Here’s where the Stupid Part comes in: A few people called to suggest that she might be Madeleine "Maddie" McCann, the 4-year-old British girl who was taken from a resort hotel in Portugal in May.
A very polite major with the Galveston County Sheriff’s Office said tactfully, “Based on the totality of the circumstances, we do not believe it’s her (Madeleine).”
What he should have said was, “Maddie disappeared in Portugal, which is a country on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, which is a large body of salty water, and to suggest that she somehow wound up in America six months later is "My Name is Earl" dumb.”
Apparently some folks couldn’t figure that out, and that’s scary. Even scarier is the fact that these folks are almost certainly eligible to drive cars, own guns and operate heavy machinery.
I hope I don’t run into one of them.
If you have a better idea about who Baby Grace could be, call the Galveston County sheriff’s Office at 409-766-2222 or the agency’s tip line at 866-248-8477.
Baby Grace deserves better. She deserves to have her name on her tombstone.
One more thing: Her killer needs to be named too.
Thursday, November 01, 2007
Can you hear me now?
A city near Dallas wants to be the first in the state to ban drivers from talking on cell phones while passing through school zones.
Two words: Won’t work.
Sure, it may garner some fines for Highland Park, but the ritzy town isn’t short of cash.
City Council members and state legislators all over should accept a transformation that has spread over this country in the past few years like a sunrise.
Cell phones are here to stay. Almost everybody has one, and we yak on them all the time. Even in our cars.
In theory, it’s not supposed to be safe, and I wouldn’t say it makes you a better driver. But it doesn’t necessarily make you a worse driver.
If you’re on a straight stretch of road with no traffic signals, you can probably gab away without waking up in the emergency room.
In other situations, you should react accordingly. But then, you’re always supposed to react accordingly to rain, stop signs, school zones, etc.
Even the claim that hands-free units are “safe” is shaky. Even with your hands on the wheel in the “10 o’clock and 2 o’clock” positions recommended in driver's ed, you’re still not focusing 100 percent on the road.
At least part of your brain is focused on the latest news about Aunt Sue’s baby or whether you should get milk on the way home or how much A-Rod can rake in as a free agent.
And unless your “hands-free” unit can dial numbers or hang up without you touching it, it really isn’t “hands-free,” now is it?
I don’t know what the answer is. If some moron plowed into me while he was blathering on a cell phone, I’d be ticked off. If I lived, that is.
But cell phones are not going away, and people will talk on them while they are driving.
Unless someone invents a jamming device that turns them to static on roads, we have to deal with that reality.
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