"Agitate, agitate, agitate!" -Frederick Douglass
NBC4:
CAROLINE COUNTY, Va. — Maryland State Police are investigating the death of a man who died while police were preparing to take him for an emergency evaluation.
The man is identified as Raymond H. Bartles, Jr., 43, whose last known address was in Woodbridge, Va. Bartles was pronounced dead Wednesday afternoon at the Easton Memorial Hospital.
NBC4:
Three Frederick County judges have doubled a man’s sentence for sexually abusing two young girls after he asked the judges to reduce his sentence.
Donald Fox, 62, asked Judges Edward Dwyer, Julie Solt and Theresa Adams to reduce his 40-year sentence Tuesday.
But within 20 minutes, the three judges came back and decided to double his sentence to 80 years. Whenever judges review a sentence, they have the option of reducing the sentence, leaving it the same or increasing it.
The judges ruled the sentence should be increased and said there’s no reason to go below the state sentencing guideline of at least 60 years.
There have been cracks made about the media’s relationship with Barack Obama and the fact that they portray Obama as a messiah.
Well, apparently Rob Wittman gets the same treatment from certain people (The Free Lance–Star):
A silver lining? Yes, with Rob Wittman
America is in a time of foreboding, we are told. Global warming is catastrophic, the economy is in a nose dive, our president should be tried for everything, and only more taxation will fix our troubles.
Last summer, the nation’s 1st District had a dark cloud hanging over it, and, try as we might, we could see no silver lining.
But by the middle of December, we had found and elected Rob Wittman to fill our vacant congressional seat. Now, after a close check of his voting record and legislative efforts, we can definitely see the silver lining to last year’s ominous cloud.
The silver lining doesn’t lessen the darkness of the cloud and the hurt it presented, but it does give us hope for the future.
Recently, Rep. Wittman was here talking about energy, and he’s got it right [“Wittman: Congress ‘must get it done’,” July 5].
We need to drill and build. Now what we need is a couple hundred more politicians just like him to get this situation turned around.
The nation’s 1st District is in good hands. We are indeed very fortunate to have Rob Whitman working for us in Congress.
Keith Angle
Stafford
What in the hell is this guy smoking?
Seriously, police need to obtain a search warrant for this guy’s house and search for meth and/or crack cocaine.
What the hell was this “dark” and “ominous cloud” that was hanging over the 1st Congressional District last summer?
This sounds like some stupid narration from the opening of a Star Wars movie:
It is a dark and ominous time for the Republican Party. The charismatic leadership of Senator Obama has put the Republican Party on the run. But from the shadows, comes a ray of hope: Rob Wittman, the former director of field operations for the Division of Shellfish Sanitation for the Virginia Department of Health. Etc., etc…
Sure, Jo Ann Davis passed away in October from breast cancer but that was the fall, not the summer.
And what exactly have Rob Wittman’s legislative efforts been composed of?
Putting a campaign contributor in for $3,125,000 worth of federal earmarks (link)?
Supporting a pork laden, $290,000,000,000, corporate welfare bill (link)?
Putting out information that the House Armed Services Committee held a “top secret briefing” on bombing Iran (link)?
The fact that Wittman thinks so little of our fighting men (and women) that they can’t decide for themselves what they should read and watch (link)?
And the only bill that guy has managed to pass so far was a bill renaming a bloody post office (link)!
Further, would the readers of The Free Lance–Star be interested in the fact the author of this letter, Keith Angle, is the Stafford County Republican Committee’s secretary and Chairman of their Finance Committee (link)?
That seems kinda relevant to the [supposed] independent nature of letters to the editors, right?
UPDATE: D.J. McGuire (The right-wing liberal) has his take here.
A “yuppie”, by my definition, is anyone stupid enough to pay $3 for a cup of coffee. RT-D:
Five Starbucks outlets in Virginia are among the 600 company-owned stores that the coffee retailing giant plans to close.
No Richmond-area stores are on the closure list released yesterday by the Seattle-based company.
The underperforming Virginia stores that Starbucks said it is closing are at Spotsylvania Towne Centre in Fredericksburg, Madison Crescent in Gainesville, the Power Plant in Hampton, Patrick Henry Mall in Newport News and Stonewall Plaza in Winchester.
Starbucks said it will begin closing targeted stores this month.
There are three things I’m proud of in my life: a) I have never had a cup of Starbucks coffee, b) I have never set foot inside a Starbucks, and c) I have never seen an episode of Grey’s Anatomy.
I have a question: Who knew the Spotsylvania Mall (or Towne Centre) was still around?
Christ, I haven’t been in there in years.
I posted previously about the POS, Vincent Puglisi, who was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of the coauthor of “Curious George”, Alan Shalleck.
Shalleck suffered “83 blunt force injuries and more than three dozen stab wounds” in the attack that killed him.
Well, according to the trial court, Puglisi wasn’t eligible for the death sentence (of course, the AP story didn’t mention any of this):
Circuit Judge Krista Marx rejected the state’s attempt to have Puglisi sentenced to death for the brutal killing of Curious George collaborator Alan Shalleck because Puglisi’s co-defendant, Rex Ditto, got a life sentence. That’s what the judge gave Puglisi.
[…]
Puglisi admitted to police that he held a pillow over Shalleck’s face at one point while Ditto stabbed Shalleck. And he said he threw candlestick holders at the man who adapted more than 100 stories about Curious George to television.
Shalleck did not die easily. A forensic pathologist testified that he suffered 83 blunt-force injuries, 37 stab wounds and 49 defensive wounds in a fight for his life. When it was over, his assailants left his body in trash bags in his driveway and stole some of his jewelry.
Ditto pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and robbery with a deadly weapon in October in return for a life sentence. Puglisi was convicted by a jury of the same charges last month.
Assistant State Attorney Andy Slater argued that Puglisi should be sentenced to death. But Judge Marx said the law prohibits her from doing so unless Puglisi was more culpable than Ditto.
“Much of the evidence points to Rex Ditto being the dominant player in the crime,” Marx said. At most, she said, Puglisi was equally culpable, and a death sentence for him would be disproportionate to that of his co-defendant and therefore an illegal sentence.
A similar problem occurred with the four defendants charged with the murder of Redskins football player Sean Taylor.
The triggerman in the case was a 17 year-old.
Persons that commit capital crimes when under the age of 18 are not eligible for the death penalty (Roper v. Simmons).
Therefore, the state couldn’t seek the death penalty for the other three defendants either (About.com).
Gee, thanks, Supreme Court.
When 1st District congressional candidate Keith Hummel said three weeks ago he was suspending his campaign, local Democrats hoped he could exit the race quietly and they could find a new candidate.
But since then, Hummel has not taken steps to withdraw formally from the race.
Frustrated, Fredericksburg Democrats have passed a resolution demanding that he withdraw. And they also passed a resolution asking for the resignation of 1st District Democratic chairwoman Suzette Matthews.
Hummel, an emergency room doctor who also runs a vineyard in Montross, suspended his campaign on July 3 because his multiple past bankruptcy filings had become an issue.
In a written statement announcing the suspension, he blamed others for making his financial difficulties an issue that threatened to overshadow his campaign.
No, the issue here is that you lied repeatedly Keith.
At the First Congressional Democratic Committee meeting in March, you said that you had one bankruptcy filing; not five:
While Hummel has said he was open about his financial difficulties, area Democrats say he misled them as to the extent of his past bankruptcy filings, and that if they’d known his full background–which includes three bankruptcies in the Eastern District of U.S. Bankruptcy Court and two older ones elsewhere–he never would have gotten the party’s nomination.
But Bush and Cheney aren’t there drilling for oil and drive SUVs all around the plant! AP:
Jupiter’s third spot may not be around for long.
Images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope show the third spot, the smallest of the three, recently passed under the Great Red Spot and now is a pale version of its former self. Meanwhile, the planet’s second-largest spot passed by its neighbor apparently unscathed.
The Space Telescope Science Institute, which coordinates the use of the orbiting Hubble telescope, released a series of three images taken since mid-May on Thursday.
The institute said some astronomers now predict the so-called Baby Spot will now get pulled back into the Giant Red Spot and disappear.
The second spot, dubbed Red Spot Jr., appeared in the spring of 2006 while the Great Red Spot has been observed for centuries. Some believe the new spots may be due to climate change on Jupiter.
Rob and kill someone while afflecting “83 blunt force injuries and more than three dozen stab wounds”?
Not-****ing-good-enough:
A man convicted of killing “Curious George” collaborator Alan Shalleck in South Florida has been spared the death penalty.
A judge sentenced Vincent Puglisi to life in prison yesterday after a jury found him guilty of first-degree murder and robbery with a deadly weapon.
His co-defendant Rex Ditto was given a life sentence in 2007.
Authorities said the pair went to Shalleck’s home in February 2006 intending to rob him.
Shalleck suffered 83 blunt force injuries and more than three dozen stab wounds.
Shalleck wrote and directed episodes of “Curious George” and co-wrote books with Margret Rey, who created the mischievous monkey with her husband more than 60 years ago.
I was watching the 3 a.m. news that either ABC or CBS was running on Tuesday morning (the 15th), when they had some female talking head talking about the recent request by the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court for an arrest warrant for Omar al-Bashir, the President of Sudan, for war crimes committed during the Darfur conflict.
The talking head stated that the Darfur conflict was “the first time rape has been used as an instrument of war.”
Uh, hello? Has this woman heard of World War II?
During World War II, the Japanese invaded China in 1937. In December of 1937, the city of Nanking, at the the time the capital of the Republic of China, was captured by Japanese forces.
In what became the Nanking Massacre, a.k.a. the Raping of Nanking, 300,000 unarmed soldiers and civilians were killed according to United States records (link). The International Military Tribunal for the Far East, a.k.a. the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, estimated that 20,000 women were raped during the first month of occupation, including adolescents and the elderly (link).
Estimates for the number of rapes in Berlin after the fall of the city to the Soviet Red Army range from 90,000 to 130,000. A female Soviet war correspondent stated the following: “‘The Russian soldiers were raping every German female from eight to eighty,’ she recounted later. ‘It was an army of rapists.'” (The Guardian)
If a news agency is going to have a talking head on, they might want to get one with some knowledge…
At The Jawa Report:
AP photographer Rahmatullah Naikzad was a witness to a Taliban murder. The two women were alleged to have been prostitutes who served Western clientèle.
[…]
This page from the AP seems to suggest that Rahmatullah Naikzad also took a snuff video of the two women being murdered. [UPDATE: Yes, he did. Video added at end of post]
We would remind the AP that the act of the Taliban inviting a reporter to the murder means they wanted this news out there. The AP was clearly being used as a propaganda outlet for the Taliban.
Does this make him an accomplice or only a witness to the crime? When you know a crime is about to be committed, do you not have a moral and ethical obligation to try to prevent that crime? Even if you’re a journalist? Even if all you do is try to call the authorities, in this case someone in the Afghani government or NATO?
A quick Yahoo News photo search of Rahmatullah Naikzad seems to indicate that he’s very friendly with the Taliban. Many of the pictures show Taliban fighters posing for the AP photographer.
[…]
UPDATE II: It gets worse. A snuff video was made by Naikzad. It’s horrible. The murder of the two women is at night, so it’s not visually graphic, but the audio is awful. You can hear at least one of the women screaming after the first shots are fired.
It’s official: the AP has now replaced al Jazeera as the official outlet for terrorist snuff videos. You’ll have to scroll all the way down for video. I’ll put additional updates before it with relevant bail out warnings.