Original Story

California has banned electronic bingo machines, effective Feb 1, 2009, because they are “too close to slot machines”. And why is that a problem? Because it competes with Indian casinos. The casinos have lobbied heavily to the state legislature to attack freedom and the state legislature obeyed.

“It’s going to be a very immediate and devastating thing that takes place tonight, when we’re not allowed to raise funds using electronic bingo machines,” said Topo Padilla, President of the El Camino High School Booster Club, who says the machines helped raise tens of thousands of dollars for the school’s football team and other programs.

Corporate communists have won another victory against freedom.

Original Story

Portland, OR – Officer Thomas Brennan was worried that his sergeant was under too much stress while working the streets after his involvement in the police custody death of James P. Chasse Jr. The mentally ill man died in 2006 after his ribs were broken during an arrest. A federal lawsuit is still pending. Brennan met with his precinct commander last fall, provided details of a call in which he thought the sergeant “grossly overreacted” and recommended the sergeant be moved to a lower-profile assignment. Five days later, Brennan, 41, became the first rank-and-file officer who has been assigned to work at the property evidence warehouse. He also is facing a police internal investigation.

Brennan says his latest transfer is part of a pattern of retaliation and harassment since he informally told a city staffer in June 2006, and filed a formal complaint in December 2006, accusing his traffic sergeant of groping Brennan’s wife at a co-worker’s birthday party while off-duty.

Original Story

Officials at the New York Fed did not want AIG to submit a critical bailout-related document to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission without getting assurances from the regulatory agency that “special security procedures” would be used to handle the document. How special? The AIG’s bailout filing would be kept “in a special area where national security related files are kept.” The New York Fed has gone to great lengths to keep the terms of the bailout secret from the American tax payers whose hard-earned money is being funneled into this boondoggle.

Jordan Miles. He was afraid he was being illegally abducted. He was right.

Original Story

In Pittsburgh, three plainclothes officers savagely assaulted an 18-year-old honors student. His crime? Being black and carrying an object of any kind. The three buffoons saw Jordan Miles walking down the street in a manner they found unacceptable. The threesome started lumbering towards Miles without identifying themselves as police. Miles, who understandably believed he was about to be abducted, started to run toward home. The cops then tackled Miles who resisted, still believing he was being criminally abducted (and in fact he was). They beat the boy severely, pulling out his dreadlocks and flaying him with a tree branch.

The mysterious object they thought they saw young Jordan carrying? It was a bottle of Mountain Dew.

Are these three monsters rotting in jail right now? No. They have been transferred to uniformed duty. They’re still drawing a paycheck from our tax dollars! Of course these are the same idiots that brutalized innocent bystanders during the G20 so we shouldn’t be shocked.

Thanks Genevieve and Mary Lou!

Original Story

• Greg Schubert, a lawyer and licensed firearm owner, was walking in a high crime area of had a pistol concealed under his suit coat, and Mr. Schubert was walking in what the court described as a “high crime area” of Atlanta.
• At some point police officer, J.B. Stern caught a glimpse of the attorney’s pistol, and he leapt out of his patrol car “in a dynamic and explosive manner” with his gun drawn, pointing it at the attorney’s face.
• Officer Stern “executed a pat-frisk,” and Mr. Schubert produced his license to carry a concealed weapon.
• Schubert was disarmed and ordered to stand in front of the patrol car in the hot sun. Eventually, the officer locked him in the back seat of the police car and started to lecture the man, telling him some of his Miranda rights, brought up the possibility of criminal charges and in a blatant display of hubris, lied to Schubert saying that he was “the only person allowed to carry a weapon on his beat.”
• Stern finally stole Schubert’s firearm permit and drove off.
• The attorney sued in federal court, but the District Court threw out his suit. Then he appealed, and the First Circuit upheld the District Court’s ruling.  The court held that the stop was lawful and that Officer Stern “was permitted to take actions to ensure his own safety.”

D.A.G. Says: They forget who their real boss is.

Thanks Joseph!

Original Story

• Rachel Porcaro, a 32-year-old mother of two boys, was summoned to the Seattle office of the Internal Revenue Service. She had been flagged for an audit.
• Given that she had made a paltry $18,992 in the past year, had no home, no business, and no car, she could not figure out why she was being audited. The auditor replied, “You made eighteen thousand, and our data show a family of three needs at least thirty-six thousand to get by in Seattle.”
• Consequently her tax returns for 2006 and 2007 were found “deficient” and she “owed” the federal government $16,000 of money she never made.
• Porcaro’s father Rob, who runs a local painting business, asked his accountant Dante Driver to investigate. Driver determined that the problem was the IRS bungling his daughter’s “earned income credit”. Because Rachel was living at her parents’ house, the IRS determined she must not be providing for her children and could not claim them as dependents.
• Driver sent in citations of tax code that would exonerate Porcaro, however what happened next stunned everyone. The IRS then launched an audit of Porcaro’s parents that cost them $10,000 in accountant fees.
  
• The IRS continues to maintain that Rachel Porcaro is not supporting her children, who according to the IRS do not exist.

D.A.G. Says: Not only has this stupidity cost this family great quantities, but imagine how much we, the taxpayer, are paying to support the bureaucratic buffoons who perpetrate it!

Original Story

• Senator Max Baucus (D-MT) has disclosed that he nominated his girlfriend, Melodee Hanes, for the position of Montana’s U.S. Attorney.
• Hanes ultimately withdrew her nomination.

Thanks Benjamin!

Charles Steger. President of Virginia Tech.

Original Story

• On the day of the Virginia Tech massacre, at least two administrators alerted their family members long before the rest of the campus was notified that there was an armed lunatic on the loose.
• An administrator who was a member of a policy group dealing with the shooting mailed a colleague in Richmond around 8:45 a.m. that a gunman was on the loose, but warned the colleague to make sure that information didn’t get out because it was not yet “releasable.”
• It took 17 minutes for the chief of the Virginia Tech Police Department to get through to the executive vice president’s office after he learned of the dorm shooting.
• One student killed in the dorm, Emily Hilscher, survived several hours after being shot, but no one bothered to notify her family until she had died.
• Even garbage collection on campus was canceled before students and staff were notified of the danger.
• This is all in addition to the University’s failure to investigate the lunatic himself whose insane ramblings were evident well before the massacre.
• University President Charles Steger, as head of the Emergency Policy Group, is primarily responsible for these failures.

Original Story

• Golden Beach, FL police officer Robert Barrio is still on the job, still wielding a badge and a gun, seven months after being arrested for beating his wife.
• During an argument over possible infidelity in their marriage, Barrio found his wife looking through his cell phone, and picked her up by the shoulders and threw her to the ground. He then dragged her to his pickup but she escaped to the call the police, only to be dragged back to the truck. He put the children in the back seat and drove off while stunned neighbors watched.
• Police chief James Skinner defends his actions of allowing Barrio to continue work on grounds that no “injunction” had been issued against him and because he didn’t believe him to be “a significant risk to the community” despite the fact that he has beaten his wife in front of his children.

Harry Reid, you sly dog, you.

Original Story

• On page 432 of Harry Reid’s health care bill, there is a section increasing federal Medicaid subsidies for “certain states recovering from a major disaster”. The section spends two pages in incredibly opaque, rambling verbiage to simply say that Louisiana would be the sole recipient of the bill.
• The support of Democratic Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu is crucial to the passage of the bill, so allocating extra money for Louisiana is seen as a way to ensure her support.
• This ridiculous wording is likely an attempt to coverup an otherwise naked bid to buy Landrieu’s support.

D.A.G. Says: The difference between leaders and politicians summed up.

Here is the wording in its entirety:

SEC. 2006. SPECIAL ADJUSTMENT TO FMAP DETERMINATION FOR CERTAIN STATES RECOVERING FROM A MAJOR DISASTER.

Section 1905 of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C. 1396d), as amended by sections 2001(a)(3) and
2001(b)(2), is amended— (1) in subsection (b), in the first sentence, by striking ‘‘subsection (y)’’ and inserting ‘‘subsections (y) and (aa)’’; and (2) by adding at the end the following new subsection:

‘‘(aa)(1) Notwithstanding subsection (b), beginning January 1, 2011, the Federal medical assistance percentage for a fiscal year for a disaster-recovery FMAP adjustment State shall be equal to the following:
‘(A) In the case of the first fiscal year (or part of a fiscal year) for which this subsection applies to the State, the Federal medical assistance percentage determined for the fiscal year without regard to this subsection and subsection (y), increased by 50 percent of the number of percentage points by which the Federal medical assistance percentage determined for the State for the fiscal year without regard to this subsection and subsection (y), is less than the Federal medical assistance percentage determined for the State for the preceding fiscal year after the application of only subsection (a) of section 5001 of Public Law 111–5 (if applicable to the preceding fiscal year) and without regard to this subsection, subsection (y), and subsections (b) and (c) of section 5001 of Public Law 111–5.

‘‘(B) In the case of the second or any succeeding fiscal year for which this subsection applies to the State, the Federal medical assistance percentage determined for the preceding fiscal year under this subsection for the State, increased by 25 percent of the number of percentage points by which the Federal medical assistance percentage determined for the State for the fiscal year without regard to this subsection and subsection (y), is less than the Federal medical assistance percentage determined for the State for the preceding fiscal year under this subsection.

‘‘(2) In this subsection, the term ‘disaster-recovery FMAP adjustment State’ means a State that is one of
the 50 States or the District of Columbia, for which, at any time during the preceding 7 fiscal years, the President has declared a major disaster under section 401 of the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act and determined as a result of such disaster that every county or parish in the State warrant individual and public assistance or public assistance from the Federal Government under such Act and for which— ‘‘(A) in the case of the first fiscal year (or part of a fiscal year) for which this subsection applies to the State, the Federal medical assistance percentage determined for the State for the fiscal year without regard to this subsection and subsection (y), is less than the Federal medical assistance percentage determined for the State for the preceding fiscal year after the application of only subsection (a) of section 5001 of Public Law 111–5 (if applicable to the preceding fiscal year) and without regard to this subsection, subsection (y), and subsections (b) and (c) of section 5001 of Public Law 111–5, by at least 3 percentage points; and ‘‘(B) in the case of the second or any succeeding fiscal year for which this subsection applies to the State, the Federal medical assistance percentage determined for the State for the fiscal year without regard to this subsection and subsection (y), is less than the Federal medical assistance percentage determined for the State for the preceding fiscal year under this subsection by at least 3 percentage points.

‘‘(3) The Federal medical assistance percentage determined for a disaster-recovery FMAP adjustment State under paragraph (1) shall apply for purposes of this title (other than with respect to disproportionate share hospital payments described in section 1923 and payments under this title that are based on the enhanced FMAP described in 2105(b)) and shall not apply with respect to payments under title IV (other than under part E of title IV) or payments under title XXI.’’.