folo

McCain says Bush is torturing prisoners, but it’s not leding any paper or newscast anywhere. Heck, it’s not even a story.

(h/t neffable)

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The internet bloggers vs. journalism debate brought a song to mind.

As folks probably aware, the word saboteur comes from French “sabot,” wooden shoe. When automatic looms were coming in, horrified weavers would toss their wooden shoes into the (relatively delicate) machinery to sabotage them. There’s a nice old time string band song from the Carolina Tar Heels about a similar change, “Peg and Awl,” which is about the invention of shoe lasting machines in the 19th Century.  The song can be found on the Anthology of American Folk Music.  The words are after the Youtube clip

In the days of 18 and 1, peg and awl (x2), in the days of 18 and 1, pegging shoes is all I done.
Hand me down my pegs, my pegs, my pegs and awl.
In the days of 18 and 2, peg and awl (x2), in the days of 18 and 2, pegging shoes is all I do.
Hand me down my pegs, my pegs, my pegs and awl.
In the days of 18 and 3, peg and awl (x2) In the days of 18 and 3, pegging shoes is all you see.
Hand me down my pegs, my pegs, my pegs and awl.
In the days of 18 and 4, peg and awl, (x2), In the days of 18 and 4, I said I’d peg them shoes no more.
Throw away my pegs, my pegs, my pegs, my awl.
They’ve invented new machines, peg and awl, (x2) They’ve invented new machines, prettiest thing you’ve ever  seen,
Throw away my pegs, my pegs, my pegs, my awl.
Make 100 pair to my one, peg and awl (x2) pegging shoes it ain’t no fun, throw away my pegs, my pegs, my awl.

Some shoemaker!

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Alan Lange had better luck finding it than I, so h/t to Y’allPolitics for this clip with movin’-pitchers of several big Scruggsiana names.

And I find Frank Trapp’s honesty particularly refreshing.

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Wow, MsBornMsBred just sent us this:

Lotus and NMC,

I thought you guys might find this interesting. First of all, I warn you that it can be painfully slow yet “hard to quit” reading. A gentleman was sentenced to 3 months prison time, and he blogged about the experience. The relevance is that he was assigned to the Pensacola prison Dickie has requested. You can get some insight into what Dickie’s life will be post August 4th.

http://60733066.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2007-05-03T18%3A23%3A00-04%3A00&max-results=50

I would suggest starting at March 29th (towards the bottom of the page) and read up. Once you have read the first page, you can go back down towards the bottom and click on the “newer posts” link to see the account of the remaining days of his sentence.

An excerpt: 

It was such a relief to realize I was not entering Shawshank. Actually, I knew I was not entering Shawshank, but I at least thought I was entering prison, at least what most of us imagine as prison.

Every inmate I have spoken with says this is the best place in the SE Region, if not the entire Bureau of Prisons (BOP).

This is going to be a lot different than I feared.

With one exception, every inmate I have met has been somewhere else before here. In some cases, this is because drug offenders are not allowed to self-report; they are remanded to jail immediately. Typically, that would be a county jail until BOP determines their assignments.

In other cases, inmates are transferred here from other facilities after their security level has been lowered. Only inmates with less than 10 years remaining qualify for a prison camp. (There are several guys in my room doing 15+ year sentences.)

In my case, my point is that these guys know what they are talking about when they say this is the easiest time they have done.

According to the inmates I have spoken with, 80 – 90 % of the population here are drug offenders; the remainder are in for white collar offenses. Additionally, 60% are black, 20% Hispanic and 20% white (a subject I will write on later).

Hope you find it as interesting as I did.

Thanks, MBMB!

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No, not Dickie. Paul Minor.

“Much had changed from the 2005 trial that resulted in acquittals and a mistrial to the 2007 trial that resulted in a hasty conviction and a significant sentence,” his attorneys write. “This appeal addresses these changes – a series of constitutional, evidentiary, legal and sentencing errors by the district court that ultimately resulted in an unlawful conviction and sentence that cannot stand.”

Washington attorney Abbe Lowell, Minor’s lead defense attorney during the 2005 trial, filed the appellate brief with other members of his firm, McDermott, Will & Emery. …

Lowell argues the loans Minor extended and then repaid for the judges were not bribes as defined under the law because prosecutors failed to show he expected or received specific favors in exchange. [U.S. District Judge Henry T.] Wingate, the brief says, failed to accurately define bribery in instructions given to the jury that returned the guilty verdicts in 2007.

The brief also details charges of selective prosecution, currently under investigation by Congress, that Wingate rejected.

(h/t ccvz)

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This one’s much shorter but no less interesting — indeed, au contraire . . .

The Sun Herald (Biloxi, MS)
March 26, 2002
MOORE CARRIED GUN AS HE FOUGHT STATE CORRUPTION
By TOM WILEMON

State Attorney General Mike Moore began his political career in the 1970s at age 26 simply because he wanted to keep his job as a Jackson County prosecutor.

His boss, the district attorney, was elected to a judgeship, so Moore decided to run for district attorney.

After winning election, Moore soon learned about corruption within the Jackson County Board of Supervisors and launched an investigation.

State auditors had looked the other way while supervisors had used public money to improve private property and had directed contracts to political cronies. The man running the show was Edward A. “Eddie” Khayat, a popular, longtime supervisor.

“Every Friday, the auditors would go by Mr. Eddie’s office,” Moore said, reminiscing about his career at a meeting with The Sun Herald editorial board on Monday. “He had a freezer. In the freezer, he would have them steaks, bottled whiskey, five pounds of shrimp and oysters. That sounds like not a big deal, but they took it consistently every week, for a long time.”

Supervisors had friends in both high places and low places. Moore had to simultaneously fight for impartial judges and contend with death threats.

“I was carrying a gun with me in those days,” he said. “It was pretty fearful. I tried to watch what I did and where I went.”

At the least, he was worried about making newspaper headlines if he got into a fight. In the worst-case scenario, he was worried about someone putting a bomb in his car.

The popularity of Khayat turned out to be Moore’s biggest obstacle. The jury acquitted Khayat in his first trial. But Moore’s office, which at that time included present-day Circuit Court Judge Kathy King Jackson as an assistant prosecutor, persisted until Khayat and three other supervisors left office after either being convicted or pleading guilty.

Years later, Moore was on a plane trip with Khayat’s son, Robert Khayat, who is chancellor of the University of Mississippi. The atmosphere between them was a bit “standoffish,” he said, until Khayat approached him and mentioned his father.

Moore recalled the conversation.

” ‘Mike, I’ve never had a chance to talk to you about my dad,’ he said. ‘Dad lived in a different time when people did things a different way. I think you were very courageous in what you did. The family holds no ill feelings toward you in any way. You were a gentleman in the way you handled it. I just want to let you know. We’re proud of you, proud of what you’ve done.’ “

Oy.

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From today’s Bar Briefs Mississippi Bar newsletter:

2008 MB Award Recipients To Be Recognized At annual Meeting

Recipients of the Bar’s 2008 Awards will be recognized at the Farwell Brunch at the bar’s 2008 Annual Meeting in Destin. 2008 recipients are: Lifetime Achievement Award – Fred Bush, Tupelo; Judicial Excellence Award – Judge Henry Lackey, Calhoun City; Distinguished Service Award – Karl Steinberger, Pascagoula and Jennifer Wilkinson, Hattiesburg;  Susie Blue Buchanan Award – Carolyn Ellis Staton, Oxford; Outstanding Young Lawyer – Carlos Moore, Grenada and Mississippi Volunteer Lawyers Project Curtis E. Coker Access to Justice Award, Melody McAnally, Memphis.

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Oh wow, wow wow wow WOW. Over at DKos, a house rule holds that you’re not supposed to call out other contributors by name. Fine, but diarist “two roads” thinks it’s high time to name the “purity trolls.” The who? People

who don’t understand that the most important election of our lifetime is at hand. They seem to just want to sit in their ivory towers and criticize, ignoring what it takes to get elected.

They seem to bitch and moan about the FISA compromise with no understanding of practical politics. And they pay no attention to things like Olbermann’s number one top recommended diary on the subject, or that Obama taught constitutional law.

Some here are willing to call them out in comments as purity trolls, while others just think it. And since DKos is a blog dedicated to electing Democrats, point out that these purity trolls come pretty close to being traitors to the cause as well.

So here’s some purity troll comments I’ve culled together, and I’m calling them out by name…

Among my favorites in two roads’ collection:

I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by the gradual and silent encroachment of those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpation.

– James Madison

The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. One’s right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections.

– Justice Robert A. Jackson

The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them.

–Patrick Henry

Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.

– Daniel Webster

Emergency does not create power. Emergency does not increase granted power or remove or diminish the restrictions imposed upon power granted or reserved. The Constitution was adopted in a period of grave emergency. Its grants of power to the federal government and its limitations of the power of the States were determined in the light of emergency, and they are not altered by emergency.

– Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes

More where these came from . . .

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Well, I’ll be. Tim and MSlawyer got me all curious about Judge Kathy King Jackson, so I asked a friend of mine with Nexis to help me out. Unfortunately (for me), she’s on vacation in the Colorado mountains and has only dial-up, so it’s slow going. But she’s just found a mighty interesting story on Mike Moore in a 1996 edition of the Commercial Appeal.

It’s kinda loooong, but I rather suspect it’ll hold your attention. Twelve years ago, Mike’s future wuz so bright, he hadda wear shades . . .

The Commercial Appeal (Memphis)
June 15, 1996
Moore loves a crusade; tobacco suit is his latest
Atty. Gen. is a performer
By Reed Branson, The Commercial Appeal
Jackson, Miss., Bureau

DATELINE: PASCAGOULA, Miss.

It’s Mike Moore’s kind of morning.

NBC Today host Katie Couric lofts a softball over the satellite link: ”Is your ultimate goal, Mr. Moore, to put the tobacco industry out of business?”

”You know,” an earnest Moore responds to Katie and 11 million Americans at their breakfast tables, ”my ultimate goal right now is to stop the tobacco companies from pandering to and selling to kids.”

In the brief interview, Mississippi’s attorney general is a sound-bite machine. He calls tobacco executives liars and killers, fights for the taxpayers and even defends smokers’ rights: ”If they (adults) want to smoke, smoke.”

A modern-day Eliot Ness to admirers, a frenetic show horse to detractors, Moore these days is using the courtroom as well as the camera in a national crusade against a multibillion-dollar tobacco industry that suddenly finds itself on the defensive.

”Without the diligence and tenacity that he’s exhibited, I don’t think we’d be where we are today,” says Scott Ballin with the Coalition on Smoking OR Health, a group of about 200 anti-smoking groups including the American Heart and Lung associations and American Cancer Society.

Less charitably, Peggy Carter, spokesman for R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., one of 13 companies named in a Mississippi lawsuit, says, ”It is a relatively safe strategy on behalf of an attorney general or politician to take, because who’s going to criticize you for it?”

(more…)

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Brian Garrity in the New York Post:

For PC users, the countdown to Windows 7, Microsoft’s next operating system, starts now.

The Redmond, Wash.-based software giant today is discontinuing widespread distribution of its long-running Windows XP, leaving most consumers buying a new computer stuck with the much-maligned Windows Vista through at least 2010. …

Most retailers have been pushing Vista on consumers since its release 18 months ago, and Microsoft has sold more than 140 million copies of the operating system to date.

But that’s a small fraction of the estimated 1 billion Windows users worldwide. …

Tech consulting firm Evans Data Corp. recently reported that only 8 percent of North American software developers are currently writing applications to run on Vista.

PC makers like Dell, blocked from pre-installing XP on its computers, will still be able to re-sell it as a ‘downgrade’ to customers buying Vista for an extra $50. It will also still be available on budget-oriented laptops that don’t have enough power to run Vista.

The Clarion-Ledger‘s Earnest Hart says, “… if you still have concerns about Vista, there are Web sites just waiting for you sign up to keep XP available. Maybe, with enough support, XP can be spared a little while longer or at least until Vista’s successor, Windows 7, is on the scene.”

Hey, go ahead and pull for Tinkerbell too while you’re at it, Peanuts! (Only Ben Cole and I are aged enough to get that one, I betcha.) Mumph.

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