My Sunny Beatdown

American Scofflaw

Two burglars in southern Florida got more than they bargained for when they broke into a couple's home early Monday morning.

Two men broke into a home around 1 am Monday morning. One pointed a gun right at the resident's face while he was in bed.

"Screamed at me don't move, don't move, with vulgarities involved, that wasn't happening in my house. He came to the wrong party."

The victim, who wishes to remain unidentified, is a retired special operations officer for the coast guard. His fiance who was also in bed is a former maximum-security corrections officer.

"We weren't just going to let them rob us, absolutely not. I work too hard for the things I have and people who don't have jobs who make a living off of robbing people, not me."

The male victim and one of the suspects got in a fight, both trying to get control of the gun.

"When the victim and the suspect were fighting in the corner of the bedroom, a shot fired from the gun, went through the wall, through the medicine cabinet, and right into the bathroom mirror."

The other suspect ran out of the house.

Meanwhile, the victim's fiance grabbed their own rifle and beat the other suspect so hard the rifle broke in two. Then the male victim got a hold of the suspect's gun.

"At that point I was going to take his life, and he begged for his life, 'I don't want to die, I don't want to die, please don't kill me, let me go.'"

That's when he took the suspect outside-- and bashed his head into this truck before the man ran away. But not before the suspect was able to fire two more shots at the house, one going through the door and grazing the male victim's shoulder.

The Lee County Sheriff's Office is still searching for the suspects.

As for the victims, they say what they did was risky, but because of their law enforcement training, they knew how to react.

It's Your Fault, Not Mine

by Gary Fleming

So, I’ve done it to you again. My gay marriage series this week has lit a fire under you, and I took all your punches.

This series was designed to do just that. The goal was to challenge your notions of both sides of the gay marriage debate and make you think about things you may not have considered before. I didn’t ask you to agree, just to think.

Two stories particularly grabbed your attention. The first was about a gay black man who is struggling to awaken the black community — which largely opposes gay marriage — to gay rights.

In his eyes, many African-Americans are being hypocritical by not supporting gay rights, considering their own background of oppression and prejudice.

I received buckets of letters saying I had no business equating the civil rights movement to the gay rights movement. So let’s be clear: I made no such argument. I brought you the story of a man who makes that argument. It’s up to you to decide whether you agree.

The second story that got you fired up was one featuring gay marriage opponents who say their stances don’t make them bigots. I brought you three people who voted for Proposition 8 in California but who also say they don’t think being gay is immoral, despite the way they voted.

Well, you just ripped me a new one. You told me that if I was willing to run such a story, I must be willing to run a story on backing slavery and the like. You said I was giving credence to hatemongers and that I ruined your gay pride month celebrations.

So, another point of clarification: For those who said I’m supporting “hatemongers” by printing a certain side of the debate, talk to your fellow readers who told me the opposite the day before.

More importantly, the opinions of the opponents are theirs, not mine. I simply brought you the story, and let you decide for yourselves. By presenting both sides of the debate, I was bound to irk some readers one day, and others the next.

If the story ruined your good time, that’s your fault for letting it get to you that much.

Head Slam

Okay, Obama Scares Me

The Gay Secretary
Okay, I’m officially getting scared.

For now, let’s just call it a nonspecific, even remote, sense of dread – like the foreboding that often accompanies the first bark of an approaching thunderstorm: hardly an irrational unease, but often a harbinger of nothing worse than a dusting of rain.

Just a sense of unease — yeah, that’s what we’ll call it — for now.

It isn’t that Barack Obama hasn’t been liberal enough for my tastes. He hasn’t, but that’s not what’s unnerving me. It isn’t that he’s starting to break some of his most important campaign promises to the progressive base of the Democratic Party. He’s doing that certainly; but, no, that’s not the source of my unease either. It isn’t even that his administration seems to be placing a higher priority on protecting the pirates of the financial industry than on defending the rights of ordinary workers. They do seem to be doing that and yeah it’s awful, but once again it isn’t what’s scaring me.

No, what’s scary is how often — and in such a short time — he’s simply been wrong — dead wrong. And what’s even more disconcerting is how often this wrongness has been the result of his growing tendency to default to inside the Beltway status quo thinking. Time after time, faced with a choice between new directions and conventional wisdom, Obama has been taking the conventional route.

But the scariest thing of all is Obama’s growing default to the Military/Beltway Complex on Iraq and Afghanistan. Did you hear we’re going to win the war in Afghanistan? We’re going to kick us some Taliban butt and bring peace, capitalism and democracy to the region. No outside force in history has ever had much luck in trying to pacify this tragic but fiercely independent nation, but apparently we’re going to do it. And what’s more, we’re going to do it while at the same time carrying Iraq and Pakistan on our shoulders.

When I think about this ever increasing expansion of our military presence in Afghanistan, I can’t help but hear the echoes of LBJ in Vietnam. He was a president who wanted desperately to pursue other priorities: to do great things; to build a Great Society. But he found himself increasingly sucked into an intractable war he could never win. And just like Obama, he marched into this hell armed to the teeth with the wisdom of the finest minds conventional thinking had ever produced.

As a strong supporter of the president, it pains me to say this, but Barack Obama is dancing with disaster: a potential catastrophe born of a refusal to truly embrace the change he’s come to represent. He is doing much that’s good, but the good can so easily be swallowed up and destroyed by the bad. It isn’t too late to put things right, but the signs that he is willing to do what’s needed have so far been frighteningly few.

American Scofflaw
Obama is simply an infinitely more telegenic and intellectually gifted "pitch man" for precisely the same agenda we got from the Bush Republicans; nothing more, nothing less.

Which is why I wouldn't bet against Obama re-instituting the draft before the end of his first term in office. The military requirements for the campaigns he's signed up for cannot possibly be met with an all-volunteer army, and draft boards have already been set up, very quietly, across this country.

Damn, I'm Dead

A group of college students said they are lucky to be alive and they’re thanking the quick-thinking of one of their own. Police said a fellow student shot and killed one of two masked me who burst into an apartment.

Channel 2 Action News reporter Tom Jones met with one of the students to talk about the incident.“Apparently, his intent was to rape and murder us all,” said student Charles Bailey.

Bailey said he thought it was the end of his life and the lives of the 10 people inside his apartment for a birthday party after two masked men with guns burst in through a patio door.“They just came in and separated the men from the women and said, ‘Give me your wallets and cell phones,’” said George Williams of the College Park Police Department.

Bailey said the gunmen started counting bullets. “The other guy asked how many (bullets) he had. He said he had enough,” said Bailey.That’s when one student grabbed a gun out of a backpack and shot at the invader who was watching the men. The gunman ran out of the apartment.The student then ran to the room where the second gunman, identified by police as 23-year-old Calvin Lavant, was holding the women.

“Apparently the guy was getting ready to rape his girlfriend. So he told the girls to get down and he started shooting. The guy jumped out of the window,” said Bailey.A neighbor heard the shots and heard someone running nearby.“And I heard someone say, ‘Someone help me. Call the police. Somebody call the police,’” said a neighbor.

The neighbor said she believes it was Lavant, who was found dead near his apartment, only one building away.Bailey said he is just thankful one student risked his life to keep others alive.“I think all of us are really cognizant of the fact that we could have all been killed,” said Bailey.

One female student was shot several times during the crossfire. She is expected to make a full recovery.Police said they are close to making the arrest of the second suspect.

Oh..Oh

Mr. Big

Get 'Em When Their Young

American Scofflaw
Us needs kids to fight all these wars

Crazy Man in Action

Scofflaw Grabbed Identities

American Scofflaw
A former New York state tax department worker was accused of stealing the identities of thousands of taxpayers and running up more than $200,000 in fraudulent charges.

Walter Healey gathered credit card, brokerage account and Social Security numbers that he used to open more than 90 credit card accounts and lines of credit between 2006 and 2008, prosecutors said.

Healey pleaded not guilty Wednesday to four counts: identity theft, unlawful possession of personal identification, tampering with public records and official misconduct. Healey, escorted into a Troy courtroom by two officers, posted $5,000 bail and left.

A Gay Man Asks: What's The Big Deal???

The Gay Secretary

I watched closely all the tea parties all over the country Wednesday. What a showing of national pride and solidarity. What a showing of subservient compliance and casual indifference. What a joke. In Lafayette Park, Washington D.C., of all places to protest, the plan was to dump one million tea bags in the park, but the brave dissidents never did it because they forgot to get the proper permits. Are you kidding me? What is civil disobedience without civil disobedience? They even went so far as to say that they were willing to put down plastic tarps and clean up after themselves.

That's like saying we don't agree with your oppressive, unconstitutional despotism of our nation and to show our ire in no uncertain terms we're going to break public law and disrupt the peace so take that, nah- nah-ne-boo-boo. But don't worry because we'll put everything back when we're done as if nothing happened cuz we don't want any trouble! Videos on the Internet of Lafayette Park show people standing around in their trendy turtlenecks and Tommy Hilfiger and North Face jackets, chatting, socializing, drinking coffee and talking on their cell phones. Some dressed in colonial garb (how cute) and waving flags. Others even break into a rendition of the Star Spangled Banner followed by a chant of "USA, USA, USA." What a terrific show of meaningless symbolism.

Who are they chanting to? The buildings in front of them? The birds in the trees? Themselves? What was this supposed to do, because it doesn't take a rocket scientist to surmise that it did NOTHING! All the politicians were inside, smugly and comfortably seated in their expensive leather chairs that we paid for. They were discussing their next round of special interest pandering and deficit spending at our expense while we mingled as if at a, well, tea party. But not the sort of 1773 but rather more like the sort at 4 p.m. in England that is served with crumpets.

The politicians could have cared less about the goings on outside and NO ONE took it to them. Shame on us. No one made sure they took notice. No one was put out one bit. No economic loss to the government whatsoever, as was the purpose of the original tea party, so why should they notice? Is this like giving to a charity? You write a check to feed a starving child for 10 cents a day in some far off, nameless, faceless country and you feel better about yourself?

Get Off My #$@#$ Phone

American Scofflaw
The National Security Agency intercepted Americans' e-mails and phone calls in recent months on a scale that went beyond limits set by the U.S. Congress last year, The New York Times reported on Wednesday.

Citing unnamed intelligence officials, it said the NSA had engaged in "'over-collection' of domestic communications of Americans." The sources variously characterized the practice as significant, systemic or unintentional, the Times said.

"A series of classified government briefings have been held in recent weeks in response to a brewing controversy that some officials worry could damage the credibility of legitimate intelligence-gathering efforts," the paper said.

It said the Justice Department acknowledged in a statement on Wednesday that there had been problems with NSA surveillance operations and said they were resolved.

A bill passed by Congress in July 2008 authorizes U.S. intelligence agencies to eavesdrop without court approval on foreign targets believed to be outside the United States.

Critics complained that this allowed warrantless surveillance of phone calls and e-mails of Americans who communicate with the foreign targets. The bill sought to minimize such eavesdropping on Americans, but critics said the safeguards were inadequate.

The Times said "congressional investigators say they hope to determine if any violations of Americans' privacy occurred."

If These Bastards Have Their Way: The Draft

My Favorite PR Stunt

American Scofflaw
The details of how exactly the four pirates managed to get the captain onto a lifeboat are still sketchy, but it seems a little bit like a scene out of a Marx brothers movie.

From the start, this whole affair has seemed like a Disney comedy than a
real story. First the pirates grab a ship carrying emergency supplies; hardly a tasty target. The the US crew regains control of the ship, and now the pirates that can't shoot straight are stuck in a lifeboat with the hostage only the lifeboat is out of gas, and US warships are there with nobody to shoot at.

Hillary is trying to play like she is taking on Tripoli all over again, and the whole affair smells of a staged PR stunt to show the rest of the world how butch the new administration is that has run aground!

Just as it seemed that this drama was coming to an end, the story has taken a very bizarre turn. It seems as though the pirates essentially tricked the ship's "all-American" crew into handing over the Alabama's captain, Capt. Richard Phillips.

The Return of Eliot "Ness" Spitzer

by Eliot Spitzer

Everybody is rushing to condemn AIG's bonuses, but this simple scandal is obscuring the real disgrace at the insurance giant: Why are AIG's counterparties getting paid back in full, to the tune of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars?

For the answer to this question, we need to go back to the very first decision to bail out AIG, made, we are told, by then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, then-New York Fed official Timothy Geithner, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke last fall. Post-Lehman's collapse, they feared a systemic failure could be triggered by AIG's inability to pay the counterparties to all the sophisticated instruments AIG had sold. And who were AIG's trading partners? No shock here: Goldman, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, UBS, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Barclays, and on it goes. So now we know for sure what we already surmised: The AIG bailout has been a way to hide an enormous second round of cash to the same group that had received TARP money already.

It all appears, once again, to be the same insiders protecting themselves against sharing the pain and risk of their own bad adventure. The payments to AIG's counterparties are justified with an appeal to the sanctity of contract. If AIG's contracts turned out to be shaky, the theory goes, then the whole edifice of the financial system would collapse.

But wait a moment, aren't we in the midst of reopening contracts all over the place to share the burden of this crisis? From raising taxes—income taxes to sales taxes—to properly reopening labor contracts, we are all being asked to pitch in and carry our share of the burden. Workers around the country are being asked to take pay cuts and accept shorter work weeks so that colleagues won't be laid off. Why can't Wall Street royalty shoulder some of the burden? Why did Goldman have to get back 100 cents on the dollar? Didn't we already give Goldman a $25 billion capital infusion, and aren't they sitting on more than $100 billion in cash? Haven't we been told recently that they are beginning to come back to fiscal stability? If that is so, couldn't they have accepted a discount, and couldn't they have agreed to certain conditions before the AIG dollars—that is, our dollars—flowed?

The appearance that this was all an inside job is overwhelming. AIG was nothing more than a conduit for huge capital flows to the same old suspects, with no reason or explanation.

So here are several questions that should be answered, in public, under oath, to clear the air:

What was the precise conversation among Bernanke, Geithner, Paulson, and Blankfein that preceded the initial $80 billion grant?

Was it already known who the counterparties were and what the exposure was for each of the counterparties?

What did Goldman, and all the other counterparties, know about AIG's financial condition at the time they executed the swaps or other contracts? Had they done adequate due diligence to see whether they were buying real protection? And why shouldn't they bear a percentage of the risk of failure of their own counterparty?

What is the deeper relationship between Goldman and AIG? Didn't they almost merge a few years ago but did not because Goldman couldn't get its arms around the black box that is AIG? If that is true, why should Goldman get bailed out? After all, they should have known as well as anybody that a big part of AIG's business model was not to pay on insurance it had issued.

Why weren't the counterparties immediately and fully disclosed?

Failure to answer these questions will feed the populist rage that is metastasizing very quickly. And it will raise basic questions about the competence of those who are supposedly guiding this economic policy.

It Was Me, All Right

April 15th, Bring It On

The American Scofflaw Roster of Stars

By Deborah Barrow

Here’s a question, fellow 401K-robbed victims of the meltdown: Exactly where did this toxic batch of bankers and businesspeople — who engineered the economy into the ditch, the stock market into free fall and frittered away the fortunes of our country and maybe even the world — learn their craft? Which MBA, economics and law programs produced the perpetrators of the calamities that have befallen the great Wall Street institutions and, now, Main Street Americans as well? Which schools are the Academies of the Apocalypse, and who and how many went to each?

Winner: Harvard

Second Runner-up: New York University’s Stern School of Business

Third Place: Cornell

It’s well-known by everyone except those with an MBA that the rest of the world hates the average overeducated-in-the-wrong-way whiz kid who emerges from an elite graduate school of business. These soulless, humorless, real-world-experience-starved scammers descend upon Wall Street and corporate America by the truckload every May, typically making life miserable for the professional peasants who work at the unfortunate firms to which they flock, for those who must stand mutely by as their new bosses proceed to make Every Mistake in the Book. The craftiest and most mendacious of each generation invariably finds their way to the corner office, where for years now they’ve been shipping jobs overseas, changing the focus of their firms from making products to managing money and getting richer than Marie Antoinette could have ever imagined.

Well, now these geniuses have failed even farther upwards and we have on our hands a full-fledged global economic meltdown.

Taking an inventory of CNN’s Ten Most Wanted: The Culprits of the Collapse, Time magazine’s 25 People to Blame For the Financial Crisis, plus a peek at the pontificators on CNBC (where the soaring level of screaming and finger-pointing makes for great daytime reality TV), we found ourselves wondering: From which schools did the stars of the meltdown emerge?

Harvard - 9 Stars

• Stanley O’Neal, Harvard MBA: Ousted as Chairman, CEO of Merrill Lynch, after the firm posted its first $8 billion in losses due to the sub-prime crisis. Received a severance package valued at the time at $161 million in stock and options.

• John Thain, Harvard MBA: Hired to succeed O’Neal at Merrill Lynch and eventually managed to sell it to Bank of America. Forced out when it was revealed that he spent $1.3 million to decorate his office, and, according to The Wall Street Journal, asked for a 2008 bonus of $5-10 million, prompting President Obama to complain about "the reports that we’ve seen over the last couple of days about companies that have received taxpayer assistance, then going out and renovating bathrooms or offices or in other ways not managing those dollars appropriately." In January ‘09, NYS Attorney General Andrew Cuomo subpoenaed Thain about the purported billions in executive bonuses paid out to Merrill employees.

• Christopher Cox, Harvard MBA: Former Chairman of the SEC, the organization that missed Bernie Madoff’s massive Ponzi Scheme even though the agency investigated him numerous times is known for his lax enforcement of Wall Street.

• Henry Paulson, Harvard MBA: Secretary of the Treasury under President Bush, spoke ardently against government regulation of Wall Street. The resulting financial meltdown forced Paulson to oversee the greatest infusion of American taxpayer money into the banking system of any Treasury Secretary in history, including the $750 billion unregulated TARP plan. His choice to let Lehman fail after bailing out Bear Stearns and AIG has also been faulted for dramatically worsening the financial crisis.

• Andrew Hedley Hornby, Harvard MBA: Failed former CEO of what used to be one of the UK’s largest bank group, HBOS, which had to merge with Lloyds in the face of bad mortgage loans.

• Lawrence Summers, Harvard PhD, Economics; Former President, Harvard University: Current head of President Obama’s National Economic Council, and former Deputy Secretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton, where he helped prevent government employee Brooksley Born from imposing government oversight of derivatives, those toxic Wall Street investments now believed to be at the root of much of the current crisis.

• Franklin Raines, Harvard Law: Former CEO of Fannie Mae, took "early retirement" amid an accounting investigation.

• Daniel Mudd, MPA, Harvard JFK School of Government: Took over Fannie Mae from Raines, and increased the number of subprime mortgages it guaranteed until the government dismissed him in 2008, when the Feds had to put Fannie into conservatorship to keep it afloat.

• George W. Bush, Harvard MBA: Rode herd over the most alarming financial meltdown since the Great Depression, as the tsunami of unregulated Wall Street derivatives collided with the bursting of the housing bubble.

New York University - 3 Stars

• Alan Greenspan, MA, Economics, NYU: Former Federal Reserve Chairman and lifelong acolyte of Ayn Rand l’aissez-faire capitalist theories, kept Wall Street unregulated and the lending rate low, allowing the mortgage bubble to expand until it finally blew up, taking the economy with it.

• Dick Fuld, NYU/Stern MBA: Former CEO of Lehman Brothers, the 158-year-old investment bank that, under his leadership, had to file for bankruptcy after it went deep into the subprime mortgage and CDO cesspool.

• Kathleen Corbet, NYU/Stern MBA: Ran ratings agency Standard & Poor’s as they slapped Triple-A ratings on risky pools of loans, luring investors all over the world to invest in now-worthless CDOs.

Cornell University - 2 Stars

• Sandy Weill, Cornell BA, Government: Former CEO of Citibank, created the banking behemoth that put commercial banking and investment banking under one roof for the first time since the 1930s, after successfully lobbying for the repeal of Depression-era regulations that kept those banking functions separate. The result is a Citibank that the government just recently took a 38% stake in to keep it afloat.

• Richard Marin, Cornell MBA: Former CEO of Bear Stearns Asset Management, ran two highly leveraged hedge funds that blew up in the summer of 2007, kicking off the credit crisis cascade that eventually saw 85-year-old Bear Stearns dismantled and sold to JP Morgan Chase for parts.

Honorable Scofflaw Mentions

Read It And Weep, Scofflaw, I Mean Sucker

Obama's Tax Scoflaws

The Gay Secretary

White House general counsel Gregory Craig has seized control of Obama's vetting process after a series of nominees with unpaid taxes. But his wife's business may also have avoided taxes. Who vets the vetter?

Derry Noyes, Craig's wife, runs Noyes Graphics, a design business, out of the couple's home in northwest Washington. ... Operating a business out of one's home in D.C. requires a home occupation permit and registration with the city's division of corporations. Additionally, the government has instituted a new requirement for business license permits. A spokesman at the Washington D.C. Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs told Gawker that no one has ever sought any kind of permit or registration for a business under the name of Noyes Graphics or at the Craigs' home address. By not registering Craig may have avoided local business taxes. ...

An unregistered home business may seem like a "gotcha" scandal. And were some new appointee to come along with this kind of problem, the public might shrug it off, even with the past tax scandals of Obama nominees. But Craig was charged with putting an end to those problems. As Politco explained it: "A narrative was building, and the president asked us to be more vigilant in the vetting process," said a source involved in the vetting. Instead of closing a chapter, Craig has become part of the story himself.