A real life "Training Day"

A fun read can be found here, from the FOXNews website.

It seems that Mr. Hick's was operating a corrupt police organization not unlike the one portrayed in the Academy award winning movie Training Day. From the article:

Authorities say Hicks wasn't interested in busting bad guys in those raids — he was after the drugs instead, and allegedly kept the money and sold the seized cocaine and marijuana to rival dealers. None of those rotten raids netted any arrests, and officials say kept it up for almost a decade until he and his accomplices were picked up in an undercover sweep in 2001.

This is how it came apart for Hicks:

For nearly 10 years, feds say, this crew robbed and extorted hundreds of pounds of marijuana and kilograms of cocaine, telling their targets they were DEA task force officers even as they robbed them blind. But on April 20, 1999, one bust went wrong, and it started the investigation that would bring them down two years later.

According to press reports, a drug dealer was on the phone with his girlfriend in Alsip, Ill., when his house was raided by Hicks' crew. The woman thought her boyfriend was being attacked, and she called local police. They arrived on the scene to find Hicks & co., who offered a cover story the cops found suspicious.

Mr. Hicks is on the lamb, and I bet he has a little bit of cash he never told the IRS about.

Some history of Fannie and Freddie

The New York Times ran this article in September of 2003.

The Bush administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.

Under the plan, disclosed at a Congressional hearing today, a new agency would be created within the Treasury Department to assume supervision of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored companies that are the two largest players in the mortgage lending industry.

This organization was to:

... determine whether the two are adequately managing the risks of their ballooning portfolios.

It is also noted that:

The plan is an acknowledgment by the administration that oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- which together have issued more than $1.5 trillion in outstanding debt -- is broken.

A report by outside investigators in July concluded that Freddie Mac manipulated its accounting to mislead investors, and critics have said Fannie Mae does not adequately hedge against rising interest rates.

OK. So we have people noticing a problem and calling for some change. Remember change is the only thing we're looking for these days in politics.

This part of the article speaks to some of the problems:

''The current regulator does not have the tools, or the mandate, to adequately regulate these enterprises,'' Mr. Oxley said at the hearing. ''We have seen in recent months that mismanagement and questionable accounting practices went largely unnoticed by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight,'' the independent agency that now regulates the companies.

... and the piece de resistance ...

''These two entities -- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- are not facing any kind of financial crisis,'' said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. ''The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.''

WOW!

An election doomsday

From the Washington post we get this.

On Nov. 5, the presidential election winds up in a electoral-college tie, 269-269, the Democrat-controlled House picks Sen. Barack Obama as president, but the Senate, with former Democrat Joe Lieberman voting with Republicans, deadlocks at 50-50, so Vice President Dick Cheney steps in to break the tie to make Republican Sarah Palin his successor.

"Wow," said longtime presidential historian Stephen Hess. "Wow, that would be amazing, wouldn't it?"

"If this scenario ever happened, it would be like a scene from the movie 'Scream' for Democrats," said Democratic strategist Mary Anne Marsh.

Palin's email hack

Great explanation of what happened in the Palin email hack here.

Basically the individual had to answer these 3 things to reset the account password.

What is your birthdate?
What is your ZIP code?
Where did you meet your spouse?

Most of my friends can answer those questions about me.

From the article:

The answer took a few Google searches. Every celebrity birthdate can be easily found online. Wasila, Alaska only has one ZIP code, and Palin is known to have met her husband in high school. The last took three guesses, with the correct answer being "Wasilla High", according to the post on 4chan.org's /b/ board by someone calling himself Rubico --(rubico10@yahoo.com)-- and now confirmed to be 20-year-old David Kernell who, Republicans are pointing out, is the son of a Democratic State Representative in Tennessee.

Election statistics in overdrive

I just discovered FiveThirtyEight.com.

I am in love!

From this Wikipedia entry:

Notably, FiveThirtyEight.com's new polling methodology gained national attention for beating out most pollsters' projections in North Carolina and Indiana in the heavily contested political primary race between Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in 2008.

Did you know that as of today (9/12/08) Obama has a 9.7 percent chance of winning the popular vote, but loosing the electoral vote? McCain has only a 0.49 percent chance of the same scenario... damn those small population states that lean right.

Politics and business

Do they mix?

When I was very young I asked my father why he didn't place a political endorsement sign in his front yard, and he said, "I'd loose half of my business."

Way back when... 2006 (10 years ago in internet years) this blog contained a mix of security technology, general technology, photography and politics. When I started my own business I shut this blog down. I was fearful of disenfranchising potential business relationships because of light jaunts into the political world. I think there are too many closed minded people out there and I didn't want to miss out on work if one of them read this blog. I've now learned from people who have come before me that this is completely manageable.

Well... I'm jumping back into this. Keep looking here once in a while for updates.... wish me luck!