A Warwick man who impersonated a federal agent and falsely claimed that he could link a gas station owner to Islamic terrorists was sentenced Friday to serve eight months in prison followed by two months in home confinement.
While it’s good that justice is being served, this brazen attempt at extorting money out of a middle-eastern gas station owner seems pretty messed up, and the sentence, given the years we dole out for drug-related crimes, seems kind of light. I guess it’s because he plead out:
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Are you planning a children’s party or some other event in which you need a magician? Consider hiring President Bush’s newly appointed Attorney General, Michael Mukasey. He is a master of sleight-of-hand tricks. Under fire because of his agency’s support of torture, Mukasey has launched a national campaign to change the subject.
Maybe you’ve seen his handiwork
in your local newspaper: “The U.S. Sentencing Commission is letting violent criminals out of prison!” “20,000 crack dealers about to be released into your neighborhood!!” “And they’re all black!!!” “Crack!” “Black Men!!” “Scared yet, America?”
I know Quizno’s legal department probably has
a lot on their hands already, but I think I have no choice but to sue. Popping into their new Dorrance street location I noticed their new
flatbread “sammies” being advertised in the window. I don’t want to be a jerk about this, but I invented the word “sammie” to describe a sandwich. To add insult to injury, when I brought this up with the employees there, and told them they owed me money, they laughed in my face. This means war.
I’ll be joined in my suit by rock band
The Sammies, R-and-B crooner
Sammie, featured above, elderly Samoyed group
Silver Sammies, and my college room-mates, who also coined the word sammie as applied to sandwiches. Anyone else?
Quizno’s: You have been warned. Cut chex and get it over with.
TexasMonthly Editor Evan Smith has a beef with Rhode Island. He claims:
Some of you may be aware of a two-plus-year-old
dust-up between TEXAS MONTHLY and Boston Magazine over a purloined cover concept. In February 2005, we put Tom Craddick on the cover of our “Power” issue, only to discover, a few months later, that our neighbors to the far northeast did a clumsy job of ripping off our design. (The cover subject for their “Power” issue was Mitt Romney. Hey, how’d that work out for you?) Now comes this: Rhode Island Monthly’s February 2008 issue on steak. Look familiar? The art director of that fine publication has a future. Elsewhere in New England.
Tidbits on Frank Zammiello, the developer. First, his connections to the New England mob:
The project is the brainchild of Frank Zammiello, who rose from a start as an Olneyville electrician to head a powerful real estate company and now splits his time between Providence and Florida. Zammiello has developed the Bridlewood Estates in Lincoln and a 438-unit condo project in Highland Beach, Fla., among others, and owns Northstar Aviation Fueling, at T.F. Green Airport.
In 1986, Zammiello and his family pledged more than $6 million to secure a pretrial release for New England mob boss Raymond J. “Junior” Patriarca, when he was facing racketeering charges. Zammiello and Patriarca had worked together on real estate deals.
Zammiello also owns Camille’s restaurant, formerly Camille’s Roman Garden, which he purchased in 2001.
The owner of one of the air charter companies involved in the airlift of Saudi Royals and bin Laden family members out of the U.S. after the 9/11 attack has been identified in numerous published reports as a business partner and “close associate” of New England Mob Boss Raymond J. (Junior) Patriarca, the MadCowMorningNews has learned.
Frank Zammiello’sNorthstar Aviation in Warrick R. I. flew four Saudis, including a Saudi Sheikh (name unfortunately redacted) on a flight which left Providence R.I. September 14, 2001 and flew to Paris.
So, for better or worse, the project looks pretty hard-wired and ready to go…
CRANSTON — City officials say they have discovered the forged signature of a man who died nearly a year ago on the nomination papers of Republican presidential candidate Fred Thompson.
The three-member Board of Canvassers voted unanimously yesterday afternoon to turn the matter over to the state police for investigation.
Forging a signature on nomination papers is a felony in Rhode Island.
My excuses for why I didn’t get the 150 signatures necessary to qualify as a candidate for delegate after the jump. (more…)
The two men who interrupted Hillary Clinton’s speech in NH on Monday, January 7th with shouts of “
Iron my shirt!” were, as many of us have suspected, planted by H-bomb and her staffers. Thanks, Hill, for simultaneously accusing your opponents of sexism while organizing your stooges to spew hatred.
The bad news: a lethal, fungal infection has bombarded inmates in the California state prisons. The good news: Missouri is working to rehabilitate its teen offenders in home-like therapeutic settings, rather than juvenile or adult prisons.
The New York Times reports today that over 900 inmates at California’s Pleasant Valley State Prison have been infected with “valley fever” over the past three years. Jesse McKinley writes:
Endemic to parts of the Southwest, valley fever has been reported in recent years in a widening belt from South Texas to Northern California. The disease has infected archaeologists digging at the Dinosaur National Monument in Utah and dogs that have inhaled the spores while sniffing for illegal drugs along the Mexican border. In most cases, the infection starts in the lungs and is usually handled by the body without permanent damage. But serious complications can arise, including
meningitis; and, at Pleasant Valley, the scope of the outbreak has left some inmates permanently disabled, confined to wheelchairs and interned in expensive long-term hospital stays.
One in ten Pleasant Valley inmates contracted valley fever in 2006, and at least a dozen Central California inmates died from the disease. Other Western states have reported epidemics; the Arizona health department reported more than 5,500 cases and 33 deaths from the fever in 2006 alone. California state prison officials blame the spread of valley fever on the construction of a nearby hospital, but doctors are still struggling to understand and curb the disease.
Meanwhile,
Todd Lewan of the AP brings us a more encouraging story: Unlike
states like Rhode Island, where fiscal and political pressure have led lawmakers to enforce tough-on-crime policies for juvenile offenders, Missouri is working to rehabilitate its teen offenders in therapeutic settings.
Harvard, somehow, gets more toolish,
expands aid to middle class applicants.
Conservative study says Fox news gives
most balanced coverage. Also, the tooth fairy is real, and O.J. is innocent.
Dan Rather’s Emmy goes for
$2500 on eBay. Bidding still open on his pacemaker.
Chuck Norris is so inconsequential, he’s
suing the author and publisher of a fan book. Oh, also,
Chuck Norris once roundhouse kicked someone so hard that his foot broke the speed of light, went back in time, and killed Amelia Earhart while she was flying over the Pacific Ocean.
Marilyn Manson
officially single. Also, he’s standing RIGHT BEHIND YOU.
Perhaps this is old news to you, or no news to some, but did y’all know that Duke, in response to the
Lacrosse Scandal, is forming a
Center for Criminal Justice that will focus on wrongful accusations??? The Center,
set to open Fall 2008, will be a part of the Duke Law Wrongful Convictions Clinic. “Three of our students suffered a grave injustice at the hands of the legal system,” Duke President Brodhead declared in a written statement, “I am determined that we will make some good come out of the grave injustice that took place.” The
Duke Law website does not, at present, mention any clinical focus on wrongful accusations. Meanwhile, an Innocence Project that began at the University of North Carolina law school in 1999
has been poorly received by state law enforcement and prosecution.
Most of our clients are poor, forgotten, and have used up all legal avenues for relief. The hope they all have is that biological evidence from their cases still exists and can be subjected to DNA testing. All Innocence Project clients go through an extensive screening process to determine whether or not DNA testing of evidence could prove their claims of innocence. Thousands currently await our evaluation of their cases.
The Cardozo Innocence Project was created to help communities without access to legal recourse prove their innocence. It took Duke until 2007–when the innocence of wealthy, white students came into question–to deliberate on the foundation of a similar project. Nauseating. Hopefully the Center will serve the local community as well as those privileged students who clash with the law every now and drunken again.
Remember how Mitt Romney said he watched his Pa, former Michigan Gov. George Romney, march with Martin Luther King Jr. during the Civil Rights Era? On Wednesday, his campaign clarified that the remark was meant figuratively.
The Detroit Free Press has the shcoop:
“He was speaking figuratively, not literally,” Eric Fehrnstrom, spokesman for the Romney campaign, said of the candidate. The campaign was responding to questions raised by the Free Press and other media after a Boston publication challenged the accuracy of Mitt Romney’s account. In a major speech on faith and politics earlier this month in Texas, Mitt Romney said: “I saw my father march with Martin Luther King.”
He made a similar statement Sunday during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” He said, “You can see what I believed and what my family believed by looking at our lives. My dad marched with Martin Luther King. My mom was a tireless crusader for civil rights.”
Jack and Jill Politics adds, “Romney’s campaign is also saying that reports of Romney being with Salt-and-Pepa and Heavy D up in the Limousine were also not meant to be taken literally.”
Okay, so it’s not a Ron Paul quote, but it is a quote about
Ron Paul’s connections to the American Nazi Party. Good enough, if not better. Bill White, Commander of the American National Socialist Workers Party, writes: “He really is someone with extensive ties to white nationalism and for him to deny that in the belief he will be more respectable by denying it is outrageous - and I hate seeing people in the press who denounce racialism merely because they think it is not fashionable.”
Having spent MLK day 2007 outside New Orleans’ St. Bernard Housing Project while residents fought to reenter their homes, I am exceedingly troubled by reports of the current situation down there. Today, city police used violence to fend off protesters outside the city council vote to proceed with the public housing demolition. The AP reports:
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Despite occasionally violent protests outside, the City Council voted Thursday in favor of demolishing some 4,500 public housing units, a milestone in the city’s effort to balance its heritage and its hurricane rebuilding efforts. The unanimous vote to permit the federal government to tear down four public housing developments — a critical moment in a protracted fight between the U.S.
Department of Housing and Urban Development and residents, activists and preservationists — followed hours of debate and periodic clashes in the street. Police used chemical spray and stun guns as dozens of protesters tried to force their way into the packed City Council chamber. One woman was sprayed and dragged from the gates. Emergency workers took her away on a stretcher.
Dave Zirin is a great radical sportswriter, with whom I don’t always agree. But yesterday he had
this dead-on excoriation of George Mitchell, which includes a tidbit that I’ve been unaware of:
In a report that excoriates a “steroid era” in the sport, there is no recommendation for Selig to resign. This shouldn’t surprise because Mitchell is part of ownership, sitting on the board of the Boston Red Sox. The report seems more aimed to head off congressional action than deal with how and why steroids make their way into Major League muscles. The problem with the Mitchell Report - the reason why it is so deeply flawed - is the man himself. In the end, the flaws of the messenger have terribly disfigured to the message.
Mitchell’s selection was definitely intended to create a veneer of objectivity about the whole investigation — and I was duped by it. Zirin also notes Mitchell’s service to the tobacco industry, GE in its battles against the Environmental Protection Agency, and the candy industry’s attempt to cover up child- and slave-labor.
Another instance of no-show jobbing rears its ugly head yet again in Rhode Island, this time the accusations are against Providence Fire Union president Paul Doughty, who has allegedly not come to work a whole lot in the last three years. Doughty claims the allegations are retaliation from all the bad blood between the union and the city. It’s a pretty meaty story, read the whole thing
here.
LAAAAAADY…. just move the car. Speaking of doppelgangers…. when the Rhode Island Emergency Management Agency is being run by Jerry Lewis, whaddya expect? A cover story in
today’s ProJo about ‘The Storm’ indicates that RIEMA director, Robert Warren, has been canned. Now, how do we fire the thousands of Rhode Island drivers who really bolloxed the whole thing up by pulling into and blocking the goddam intersections?!
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Tidbits on Frank Zammiello, the developer. First, his connections to the New England mob:
