Pretty soon they'll be hosting Jefferson family reunions in prison. I am shocked -- SHOCKED -- to report that Dollar Bill isn't the only criminal in his family. A group of them, including assessor Betty Jefferson, set up bogus "non-profits" that were designed to take taxpayer money and profit the Jeffersons. I reported this before, and Forgotston has given this great coverage. There is no legitimate (or Constitutional) justification for the government to confiscate taxpayer money only to dole it out to pet non-profits of their choosing, whether they are legitimate or criminal. Just return this money to the taxpayers, who can distribute it as they see fit a lot better that our politicians can.
Clancy DuBos has an interesting review of the situation involving FBI Special Agent in Charge Jim Bernazzani.
Dollar Bill Jefferson now wants the feds to ignore his family members' crimes. Obviously, he should not have made all these sham companies in their names to launder his dirty money. If my spouse/father/brother was a known criminal who asked me to sign off on a sham company in my name that did nothing but receive suspicious checks, I would say thanks but no thanks.
Eddie Jordan is a disaster. He needs to resign. He has done the unthinkable -- almost managing to make us forget how incompetent he is at his job, i.e., at prosecuting criminals. His incompetence as a District Attorney has largely been overshadowed this week by the need for taxpayers to pay for his racist employment practices and by his apparent harboring of a fugitive cop killer. We all need to jam the phone lines at the District Attorney's office with calls for his resignation, tell all of our other elected officials they need to publicly call for his resignation, tell our state senators and state house members to impeach him, flood local talk radio with complaints about him, and do anything else you can think of to force him out of office. The Eddie Jordan Should Resign bumper sticker is available here.
Senator David Vitter's local prostitute Wendy Yow Ellis has passed a lie detector test administered by Larry Flynt. Let's see, it's a credibility call between a politician, a hooker and a pornographer - hard to imagine anyone in any of those professions being less than truthful.
Congressman William Jefferson of New Orleans is looking to launch a pre-paid bribe debit card for Louisiana residents to more easily pay off state legislators. Story at New Orleans Levee.For generations now--and this is the city's deepest problem--New Orleans has hobbled along without a real law-and-order presence. Criminals graduate from petty crimes to burglary to drug-dealing to carrying illegal weapons to gang robberies to murder, and face few consequences at any stage. The police, and especially the prosecutors, are ineffectual. Since Katrina, things have gotten much worse, in part because criminals, finding life difficult in cities that enforce the law, have returned to the Big Easy in numbers disproportionate to those of law-abiding citizens. Mayor Ray Nagin doesn't try to fix things, perhaps because, as he often says, he believes crime is a social problem, rooted in a lack of opportunity for poor youth.
The Bush administration has deployed extra federal law-enforcement agents to try to get the worst criminals off the street. The state of Louisiana, meanwhile, has sent the National Guard to patrol half-empty neighborhoods. But just as the U.S. military can only do so much in Iraq when Baghdad's local government is ineffective, the federal government can't do much in New Orleans until the city's local government changes its attitude and behavior. Residents have no reason to think that criminal behavior has predictable negative consequences, because Mr. Nagin and District Attorney Eddie Jordan have failed to make clear that people who commit crimes in New Orleans will be prosecuted.
But President Bush can use federal dollars to try to convince them to do it. In his speech in New Orleans today, Mr. Bush should announce that he's ready to ask Congress for $500 million over two years to overhaul New Orleans's police and prosecutorial forces. But he also should say that the money is contingent on a pledge from Messrs. Nagin and Jordan that their city's No. 1 priority will be law enforcement. Mr. Bush should also tie the federal money to measurable results: rational arrests (from quality-of-life crimes all the way up to homicide), effective prosecutions and, ultimately, fewer crimes.
It's an enduring mystery why Mr. Bush hasn't used the Katrina disaster to show the world that America can rebuild a major city using a bedrock conservative principle: law and order first. Democrats are welcome to propose the same idea, of course. Mr. Obama, Mr. Edwards and Mrs. Clinton have all mentioned New Orleans's crime problem in their recent speeches. But they often tie it to a lack of staff and equipment in the city after Katrina--as if it's a question of rebuilding something that was lost, instead of building from scratch the most essential component of any city's success. Until politicians understand that basic difference, spending more money--or bragging about past billions spent--while tolerating intolerable conditions in a first-world city is nothing short of disgraceful.
Michael Vick agreed Monday to plead guilty to federal dogfighting conspiracy charges, a deal that leaves the Atlanta Falcons quarterback facing up to 18 months in prison and puts his NFL career in jeopardy. Under the plea agreement, prosecutors will recommend Vick be sentenced to between a year and 18 months in prison, according to a government official who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the terms have not yet been made final.
I saw the bumper sticker at left -- Eddie Jordan Should Resign -- on a car the other day and tracked it down and ordered one. It is available for order here.
I figured out how to add a countdown clock to the blog and decided to have a little fun with it. This week's countdown clock is dedicated to Dollar Bill. It counts down the days, hours, minutes and seconds until he a) provides that honorable explanation for all the cash in his freezer that he's been promising us or b) is convicted. I'll put up a different countdown clock every week or so.
