Brad Friedman Misstates the Law (What Else is New?)

Update: Brad revises his post slightly to acknowledge my dispute.  I think the fair way to put it is he is not sure I am right but considers my argument credible.  You can look and judge for yourself on that interpretation, of course.  He also feels it is necessary to label me a right-winger.  Actually I am a moderate, but whatever.  And for some reason he thinks my name is Andrew.

And a commenter raises a reasonable point and I respond.  My full response is at the end of the post.

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The beginning of wisdom, Socrates once said, was “I don’t know.”  It meant that the moment you were willing to admit you need to learn something, you had the chance to eventually become wise on the subject.

Brad Friedman could learn that lesson, by admitting he doesn’t know anything about the law.  Apparently he has been on a multi-year jihad to prove that Ann Coulter committed voter fraud in Florida and Connecticut.  The one in Florida he says is barred by the statute of limitations, but he is still holding out hope that they will get her for offenses in Connecticut as late as 2004, because

in Connecticut, where officials [sic] complaints were filed in 2009 --- by aconservative activist --- that she also committed absentee voter fraud in the years prior to moving to Florida, when she allegedly voted illegally from her residence in New York, there is no such statute of limitations for voter fraud.

That immediately raised a red flag with me.  Really, no statute of limitations at all?  Lawyers know that typically the statute of limitations is rarely absent entirely.  The idea is twofold.  First, the older the case, the crappier the evidence.  If the case is 20 years old exonerating physical evidence is lost, memories go bad, and witnesses die—and so the quality of the trial drops off for every years that prosecution is delayed.  Second, it is generally felt that people deserved to know that they cannot even be accused of crimes arising out of an incident after some time.  The point is most crimes have a statute of limitations, except for really really serious crimes.  Like probably no state has a statute of limitations for murder.

So I did about fifteen minutes of research and discovered he was wrong.  And indeed, most of what I found was easily discoverable on the web.  First General Statutes § 54-193 deals with statutes of limitation.  You can read the text for yourself here.  Basically the only crimes that have no statute of limitations are capital felonies (that is stuff you can be executed for), Class A felonies, or a violation of section 53a-54d (Arson murder) or 53a-169 (escape).  So pretty much the only category you think it might fit into is the Class A felonies.  Were any of the crimes he accused Coulter of committing Class A felonies?  Nope.  Today, none of these offenses in the election code rise above being a Class D felony.  And back when the offenses were committed, they were generally unclassified felonies, with one or two of them rising to Class C.  So you have five years as the statute of limitations.

Now without getting into the actual facts, let’s just take Brad’s allegations as true.  I am not saying Coutler did anything he accused her of, I am just asking if you could even charge a person with a crime based on what Brad alleges to be true.  So when did the offenses occur?

Two Kick-Ass Movies

Go here and here.  They ain’t long, but they are powerful.

And the choice of an orchestral version of the song “Creep” by Radiohead is inspired.

To Be Fair to Phil Hare

Hot air has a clip from Rep. Phil Hare (famous for saying he doesn't care about the Constituion) under the headline Video: Hare calls deficit, debt a “myth”  Now as harsh as I have been to the Dems, I was reluctant to believe that he would say something so obviously untrue.  I mean that would either be proof of insanity, or a lie so unbelievably stupid, you would have to think he was nuts to think he could get away with it.

Then I read on and… I think there is a defensible (or at least less nuts) interpretation to his quote.  Here’s what he said:

And we will see a terrible price that we will pay years down the road for letting our children down when they need us the absolute most.  I’m not going to be part of that, so every minute that I have here is going to be spent debunking the myth that this country’s in debt and we just can’t spend.

So here’s where I think Hot air is going wrong.  The Myth is not just “we are in debt” but that because of it we can’t spend.  So the myth isn’t really the debt, in that sentence, but the claim it means we can’t spend.

Now of course that is wrong, but its not as batshit crazy (or as mendacious) as Hot Air’s interpretation.

Still I concur with Ed Morrissey.  Run this sound bite all across the nation.  Let us know that even as bad as things are, democrats are ready to make it even worse.  And if anyone is in the position to vote Mr. Hare out of office, please do.  No one who says they don't care about the constitution should even be allowed to hold public office.

Quote of the Day; or, How NOT to Show your Independence...

There has been a lot of questions about the representation of Gloria Allred of Nicky Diaz Santillan, the former maid of Meg Whitman.  I agree the whole thing looks bad.  I mean this woman is a mother of two children who is risking prison (for falsifying documents) and deportation (for being an illegal alien) by putting a giant target on her head.  Certainly from a financial perspective this makes just about no sense.  But I have argued with others that you can’t really file ethics charges against Allred because she has a ready defense.  She can say that the maid was so mad at Whitman and so wanted to ruin her political career she didn’t care about those potential negative consequences she would personally suffer.  Its dubious but just plausible enough that I don’t think the disciplinary board would even be interested in investigating her.

But you still have to wonder how much Allred truly pushed her in this direction.  So Allred being asked about this several times apparently felt it was time for her client to respond to the cliam that Allred or others are manipulating her.  And the result is unintentional hilarity:

Nicky Diaz Santillan, a Mexican who Whitman says used a fraudulently obtained Social Security card and California driver’s license, dismissed claims by the GOP nominee that she was part of a Democratic smear intended to damage Whitman’s standing with voters, particularly Latinos.

“I make my own decisions and I am not anyone’s puppet,” Diaz Santillan said in a prepared statement she read at the Los Angeles office of her attorney, Gloria Allred. “Nobody made me do it.”

(emphasis added).  I don’t know if the AP writer was intentionally snarking or what.  I mean the AP article goes on to mention a few other harsh facts.  But yeah, that doesn’t exactly help the case to read a prepared statement that you are not being controlled by anyone.  It’s reminiscent of that classic scene in Monty Python and the Life of Brian when the crowd says, in unison, “we are all individuals.”  And yeah, I will post a link to a video of that later.

That being said I have come to think that Whitman should absolutely sue Allred.  Someone needs to hold this woman accountable for her antics.  And I think the malice standard for defamation—necessary in this kind of case—is easily met.  As Greta said the other day, her reading of the facts borders on delusional.

Awesome—James Hetfield of Metallica Says is Proud They Use His Music to Make Terrorists Talk; and is O'Donnell a Headbanger?

This is an old story, but awesome:

Metallica frontman James Hetfield is rather proud his band's music was played at top volume to break down the resistance of Guantanamo detainees under interrogation. "It’s strong, it’s music that’s powerful,” he told an interviewer from a German TV network. “It represents something that they don’t like—maybe freedom, aggression—I don’t know. Freedom of speech."

But he added that he was also "kind of bummed about it" because of his belief that politics and music don't mix. Several American musicians opposed to the use of their music on Gitmo prisoners recently joined a call demanding that the federal government release documents on the practice.

Um, no, Newser, that sounds more like he is saying that the musicians should stay out of the debate.

Meanwhile, Christine O’Donnell made me think of an old Metallica song.  Her recent ad is entitled “I’m you” and like when the President said that bit about people talking about him “like a dog” it made me think of a song.  I finally remembered what the song was just a few minutes ago: “Sad But True:”

When Hacking is an Act of Patriotism

No, not talking about Stuxnet, given especially that we don’t even know which country sent it—although it might turn out to be a service to humanity.  No, I am talking about how the D.C. Board of Elections wanted to try an experiment in online voting.  Someone thought it would be possible to make that system “hack proof.”  Which is complete idiocy.

There is no such thing as hacker proof anything.  Nothing at all.  I can guarantee you that every computer in the world can be hacked, so long as the hacker can get access to it.  But these idiots were determined to give it a shot, so they tried a one week experiment where they put the system online and told hackers to go at it.  Mind you, no real votes were being cast; they just wanted to see if anyone could hack it.

Within a few days someone managed to make it so that every time you cast a vote, the University of Michigan fight song played.

Honestly, I think the city of Washington, D.C. should ask the hacker to come forward and give him a medal.  He or she showed all of them it was a waste of time to put voting online.

Now if only they could get equally smart about electronic voting machines.  Hey, any hackers want to harmlessly hack their system just to show how vulnerable it is?  Like making it play a song after every vote is a perfect example of patriotic hacking.  Someone needs to show these people you can’t trust these machines.

(Crowd) Size Doesn’t Matter, but MSNBC Still Flushes What Little Credibility It had Down the Toilet

Ed Schultz does the same, but I never gave him much credibility in the first place.

So Glenn Beck had his rally back in August, and last weekend Ed Schultz had his rally.  Fast Eddie bragged that he could match Beck’s rally and then the next day you saw an oddly defensive claim that his crowd was about the same size, via Newsbusters:

This Sunday the Washington Post reported, "More than 400 groups endorsed the Nation Working Together rally, which organizers said drew a crowd of 175,000 people - about what they expected."...

Now, conservatives want you to believe that Glenn Beck's phony religious revival was way bigger than the One Nation rally. Well, let me take you back to the day of the Beck rally on August 28th, 2010, at 6:32 P.M., CBS.com proved Beck's crowd was, as I said, no big shakes. "An estimated 87,000 people attended the rally organized by radio talk show host and Fox News commentator Glenn Beck Saturday in Washington, according to a crowd estimate commissioned by CBS News. The company, AirPhotosLive.com, based the attendance on aerial photos it took over the rally." Now to be fair, NBC News put the size of Beck's crowd at 300,000 people. So, somewhere in between all of this, 87,000, give or take 9 grand by that company, and 300,000 is reported by NBC. Pretty much, would you say that the size of the crowd is pretty much the same? I would. I was there. The people I saw, it was packed.

Yes, so what are you going to believe?  Fast Eddie or your lying eyes?  Here’s Fast Eddie’s crowd:

 And here is Beck’s:

And notice how Fast Eddie makes his argument.  He doesn’t show you these kinds of photos.  Instead he goes by estimates.  First he claims the Fast Eddie rally drew about 175K by relying on the organizers of the rally.  You know, because they are so trustworthy.  Then when it is time to estimate Beck’s rally, he he first cites the supposedly proven estimate of not his network, or its affiliates, but CBS news.  Then he eventually he mentions the 300K estimate of his network’s affiliate.

Of course I guess you could play a game of saying, sure a crowd that looks half the size is actually “about the same size” after all, how close does two things have to be to be “about” the same size?  About is inherently a vague term.  But MSNBC should not have allowed that to air without a correction.  I expect to hear of one soon.  As they say, Fast Eddie is entitled to his own opinions, but not his own facts.

And all of this is silly anyway.  Demonstration is the right of the people, but honestly I have been to like one demonstration in my whole life.  Oh, right, two.  I forgot about the time I participated in a walkout because my school eliminated spring break due to Hurricane Hugo.  How many of you ever protested anything, as in a demonstration?  Not many, I believe.  I mean let’s take the larger estimate of Beck’s crowd: 300K.  Okay well there are 300 million people in the United States, so basically Beck’s rally represented about 0.1% of the American population.  And Fast Eddie’s represented like 0.05% of it, probably less.

The important thing is not to show up at Beck’s rally.  The important thing is to show up at the voting booth.  Even if you are going to vote for the wrong people, vote.  I mean I hope you vote for all the people I want to win, but hope even more fervently that you vote.

But still, important or not, MSNBC has an obligation to the truth and letting Fast Eddie’s bullshit stand violates it.  I expect a correction soon.

Update: Weasel Zippers catches the official Fast Eddie rally page using a picture from MLK's I have a Dream speech, rather than a picture of the actual rally.  Heh.

Update II: I was curious about how Grayson was doing ever since his outrageous Taliban Dan ad, (answer: not good), when I ran across this bit.  Guess who loved the Talilban Dan ad?  Fast Eddie!  I wish I was shocked.

Is this Paid-For Sexist, Homophobic, Lying, Comment Spam by the Jerry Brown Campaign?

Update: I corresponded with Patterico and long story short, it appears that this guy is a freelancer with serious OCD.  He has done this sort of thing on a myriad of causes, many of which have no obvious link, besides the fact he seems to be pretty liberal.

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No sure yet, but it sure looks suspicious...

I was commenting back and forth about Meg Whitman and the nanny controversy over at Patterico, when I find a comment saying the following:

Griff Harsh, the husband of California gubernatorial candidate Nutneg Whitman, acknowledged in a statement on Thursday that “it is possible” he received and wrote notes on a letter from the Social Security Administration back in 2003, regarding the former housekeeper. The Whitman/ Harsh household then fired their housekeeper in June 2009 (after nine years of service), when Nutmeg handlers decided that she was an election liability.

Meg, Meg, Meg, where do I start, you have reportedly spent $119 million of your own money to get elected Governor but you couldn’t use some of it to get your housekeeper (after nine years of service) some legal help to get her papers, and worse you lied about it. Wow, what a WITCH, of course I meant it with a “B”.

It goes on and on, in similar mendacious fashion.  But something about this comment just set my “spider sense” off.  It just struck me as “canned.”  So I googled a specific phrase from it: “Meg, Meg, Meg, where do I start, you have reportedly spent $119” and guess what I got?  Well, take a look.  Yep, someone has repeated that exact phrase over 300 times—really more like 400 times.

Now just to show my work, let me tell you how I generated that search.  You go to google.  Then you type in that phrase exactly as I did this including the quotation marks.  The quotation marks are important because it tells google you want to find only that phrase.  The first time you hit the search key you will get 7 results as of this writing.  But then it will say at the bottom that

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 7 already displayed.

If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.

If you select the option to include the omitted results, then that large result is what you get.

Also if you search for a phrase that appears later in the comment “but what puzzles many is if you real cared and loved California then why not do your civic duty and vote” with a grammatical error, you get 30 results.  Interesting.  I couldn’t click on every one of the 300 results, but it appears that the comment was evolving and expanding as time went on.

Now I lack the expertise to really investigate this, but I bet if we followed the ip address, it would lead us right back to brown, or someone hired by him.

And notice some of the features about it.  It falsely suggests that Whitman could have made her maid legal.  I can tell you there is no way to do that short of congressional legislation.  The commenter calls her a bitch.  He calls her a liar, without evidence.  He refers to the republicans as the “Gay Old Party”—which is interesting, homophobia from the left.

So lying, sexism and homophobia.  Anyone interested in seeing if this can be connected to the Brown campaign?  Because like I said, I lack the expertise to figure it out.

Update: I was curious about the specifically anti-gay portion of the message.  First I searched for a large chunk of the phrase and got like four results.  I tried googling this: +montana "Gay old Party (GOP)" and this is what I got.  There are like two false positives toward the end and but every other one seems to be more cut and pasting--about 45 hits at this posting.

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Sidebar: it is fair to note that I spoke out against someone investigating a commenter in the past.  But here is the distinction.  The Joe My God comment was just, as far as anyone could tell, a one-off comment which had all the appearances of being someone’s genuine, albeit stupid, opinion.  By comparison, this is someone who is either paid or OCD.  If this is in fact a paid-for message, by the Brown campaign, this would be significant.

This Friday in FAIL!

First, we have a potential fail in the making with Rahm having left the White House to run for mayor of Chicago.  One tiny problem: he is probably ineligible to run:

Odelson told Roe and Roeper on WLS Radio that when Emanuel leased out his Chicago home he could no longer claim he is a resident.

“He rented his house out in Sept 09 and has not been back since and has no residency in Chicago,” Odelson said.

Odelson says he has been involved in several residency cases in Illinois that “the law is clear.”

But the best fail of the day comes from Rick Sanchez at Cnn, having a surprising anti-semitic flame out.  He was on a radio show, attacking Jon Stewart for being prejudiced toward him as a Hispanic, and the radio host asked him what he would say to the point that Stewart, as a Jew, was a minority, too:

Please, what are you kidding? … I’m telling you that everybody who runs CNN is a lot like Stewart, and a lot of people who run all the other networks are a lot like Stewart, and to imply that somehow they — the people in this country who are Jewish — are an oppressed minority? Yeah. [sarcastically]

So basically the jews—er, I mean, the JOOOOOOS—run the media.

This is what identity politics leads to: bigotry.

Meanwhile, this isn’t quite a fail, but I threw up in my mouth a little reading this puff piece about the fame whore Gloria Allred.

By the way, when Whitman’s former maid is facing lawsuits for fraud and deportation, how good a friend will Allred seem to her?

Was Chris Coons a Bearded Marxist?

Patterico and I have been going back and forth on this for a while.  Let’s start with the basic facts.  Chris Coons wrote in the mid-eighties a piece called “Chris Coons: The Making of a Bearded Marxist.”

Patterico’s position is that “Bearded Marxist” was meant ironically, because his friends were mocking him as that.  My position is I don’t see it the irony.

First, for starters, you should read it yourself.  Don’t just accept our version of things.  Certainly this line, where the term “bearded marxist” comes from has an element of... if not humor then at least irony and wit:

My friends now joke that something about Kenya, maybe the strange diet, or the tropical.un, changed my personality; Africa to them seems a catalytic converter that takes in clean-shaven, clear-thinking, Americans and sends back bearded Marxists.

Now obviously there is humor there somewhere.  And there are jokes peppered throughout the piece.  He shows a picture of “a clean-shaven Chris Coons” and a picture of Africa with the words “Kenya: the ‘catalytic converter.’”

But what was the joke in the “bearded Marxist” line?  That he was a bearded Marxist?  Or something in the diet or the tropical sun made him one?  I would posit the only obvious joke in that sentence is the diet and sun part.  Where is the clear irony about Marxism?

And if I made a joke about being a “bearded Marxist” I would follow it up by saying, “which I am not.”  Or “the truth is I believe that capitalism is the best system, but flawed.  And Marxism is a failure wherever it goes.  And I shave daily.”  Or something specific to say it is not true.