Mighty Mighty Pleasin', My Pappy's Corn Squeezins... mmmmmm... White Lightnin'!

The Truth Comes Out

The absence of bike lanes leaves a small margin of space between motorists and cyclists. That small margin of space leaves little to no margin for error.

In 2008, Robert Boyd pleaded guilty to gross vehicular manslaughter for killing bicyclists Lyle Rosser and Raymond Moore as they pedaled up the Yucca Grade.

Town leaders admit the current state of cyclist safety is dismal. (Courtney Vaughn, Hi-Desert Star, January 13, 2010)

I admit it! All my pro-biking posts have been a lie!

Note on Cop in the Hood

Cop in the Hood by Peter Moskos

The simple way to describe Cop in the Hood is to say that it is the academic version of The Wire. Moskos, a sociologist PhD candidate, went to work as a Baltimore policeman (POE-lees, as they say in Baltimore) for two years as a research project. The congruences between The Wire and this book are pretty profound. And like the TV series, Moskos has two purposes--to describe life as a cop, and to prescribe certain practices associated with policing.

His big problem is with drugs and the fact that they are illegal. I won't reiterate his arguments for legalizing it--they are pretty familiar to anyone who has heard the various public health, harm reduction, and cost-benefit arguments for legalization. Moskos does a good job of summarizing them and relating them to the lives of working police.

His other argument is about police being proactive versus reactive. 911 is one of the big villains here. As Moskos describes it, it is nearly impossible to successfully stop a crime called in to 911. It's not like a medical emergency or a fire--by the time the paramedics or firemen get there, there's a very good chance that the fire or medical emergency is still in progress and can be stopped. For a cop, even if the response time were instantaneous, the crime is over or (in the case of drug dealing) easy to stop doing by the time the police arrive.

But 911 means that police will constantly be reacting instead of preventing. And this leads to Moskos's other big complaint--police in cars. Putting police in radio cars was a big technological advance in the late 40s and 1950s, but it has ended the regular contact between ordinary citizens and the police. Furthermore, as citizens are encouraged to call 911, people are discouraged from dealing with neighborhood problems on their own. Moskos shows the relative efficacy of foot patrols, but also says that police hate foot patrols. They hate pounding the pavement in all kinds of bad weather, not to mention the very real danger of being physically exposed. Foot patrols are considered punishment.

Moskos's solution is simple and a bit crass. Pay officers more for doing foot patrols. As Moskos puts it, it's expensive to send out a patrol car every day--the money saved on gasoline could go straight into a cop's pay--that would get a few out of their cars.

But one thing about foot patrols is that they may be practical in Baltimore or New York, but what about Houston (or Phoenix or L.A.)? The people who planned and built the roads and subdivisions of Houston built them for cars--the city is very low density (except in certain neighborhoods) and thus difficult to cover on foot. This can be mitigated by bike patrols, but not totally.

But that is a minor quibble. This is a very good book, and Moskos also writes a very good blog here.

A Note on Methland

 
Methland: The Death and Life of An American Small Town by Nick Redding

An excellent piece of book-length reporting--it combines small personal stories with a large historical narrative and big theories to explain it all. The pharmaceutical industry is one of the surprise villains here (because of their long and somewhat successful attempt to keep the U.S from regulating ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, two of the basic chemicals from which methamphetamine is manufactured), as are NARCS (the National Association of Retail Chain Stores), but the biggest villains are the big agribusinesses like Archer Daniels Midland, ConAgra, Tyson, etc. Redding blames them for consolidating the ag industries and turning what had once been $18/hour meat processing jobs (for example) into minimum wage jobs held by illegal aliens (who were recruited by the ag giants). This devastated small town America and inadvertantly provided a distribution system (dealers were workers at the local meat processing plant). He doesn't blame illegal aliens in general for being here, as he writes at one point, "if you encourage people to come to your country, you cannot then hold it against them for showing up."

There are also stories--sometimes heartbreaking and often astonishing--of the tweakers, smurfs, beavis and butthead lab operators, etc. The notion that at one time, small-scale meth manufacturers were riding around cooking meth in 20 oz soda bottles strapped to the backs of their mountain bikes is amazing. But in one small Iowa town, this practice was so pervasive, they actually considered outlawing bikes! I am generally a libertarian about drugs, feeling that legalizing would end many of the most pernicious effects of the illicit drug trade. But this is the glib assessment of someone who is comfortably isolated from the worst effects. After reading a book like this, the thought of legalizing meth is utterly terrifying. But weirdly enough, meth isn't the problem--it just happens to be the horrific (yet perversely All-American) drug that rushed in to fill the void left when a way of life died. If it hadn't been meth, it would have been something else.

To Commit the Perfect Crime You Need a Perfect Victim

A police report said the 21-year-old Denton woman answered a knock at her door by someone who claimed he was doing field work for a massage class.

She let the man into her apartment and allowed him to massage her, but became suspicious when he asked her to keep taking off more clothes Monday.

Police say the woman finally got the man to leave, but not before he asked her to go on a date.

She declined.

She called the massage school and was told the man was not enrolled. She then called police. (The Houston Chronicle, 12/3/09)

I really don't have anything to add to this nearly perfect piece of journalism.

The Man With the Candy

I picked up this book a few weeks back at a book show. A piece of scary, mostly forgotten Houston history, it became relevant once again as the remains of another victim of Dean Corll was discovered, nearly 40 years after the fact. The author of this book about the Dean Corll serial killings really has it in for Houston, down to his mocking depictions of people's accents (Author Jack Olsen seems to consider himself a master of dialect).

But one thing he gets right is the sheer awfulness and incompetence of the Houston Police Department. Houston was the murder capital of America, and its police force was undermanned, underpaid, and run by a psychotic, Herman Short, who spent more money on running an anti-subversive unit than on homicides. The disappearance of 26 boys from the Heights was poo-poohed by the police, who wrote them all off as runaways.

Houston's police continued to be a bad joke throughout the 70s (for example, consider Joe Campos Torres and Randy Webster), and the local law enforcement system continues to struggle with legitimacy--challenged every time an exonerated man walks free.

Whatever its flaws, this book is a chilling reminder of how bad things were in Houston and in the Heights. It's hard to believe the affluent Heights of today has anything to do with the white slum that was the Heights in the 1970s.

The Hatchet Beat

If you see Melchor Izquierdo, he'd like his hatchet back please

What is it with Houston and hatchets and machetes and killing people? Dale Lezon of the Chron seems to have the "hatchet murder" beat, and it's keeping him busy!

Police are searching for a man wanted in the apparent hatchet killing of a his co-worker whose body was found in the cab of a dump truck days after he had been slain.

Melchor Izquierdo, 29, is charged with murder in the slaying of 42-year-old Estevan Francisco Tellez.

Police said Tellez's body was found in the truck that was parked at small business park in the 5500 block of Gasmer about 7:30 a.m. on Sept. 14.

Tellez had several deep cuts on his face and a hatchet was found nearby. He had been dead in the truck for several days before his body was discovered by workers.

Izquierdo and Tellez worked together at a foundation business in the office park. (The Houston Chronicle, Dale Lezon, October 1, 2009)

(See also this.)

Disco Bank Robber from Outer Space!

Jeezus, it's September already, but people got a few excellent crimes in the last days of  August! The latest bank robber to hit Houston wants to out-weird the Reckless Robber (hero to bicyclists everywhere).

Authorities are searching for a man they say robbed two banks in less than a hour while wearing a silver sweat-inducing jogging suit and toting a pistol.

The first robbery occurred about 11:30 a.m. last Friday at a Wachovia branch at 5650 Memorial Drive, according to the FBI. The second heist occurred about 45 minutes later and 25 miles away at a Bank of America branch at 1550 West Bay Area Boulevard, officials said.

Because of his distinctive get-up, which included sunglasses, the FBI has labeled him the “Sweatin' to the Oldies” robber. (Dale Lezon, The Houston Chronicle, Sept. 3, 2009)

What the fuck? Is it the official policy of the FBI to give ridiculous names to robbery suspects?

    

Over at B.S. Houston Art Blog, it is suggested he looks like Frank Black. But I think he looks more like David Thomas of Pere Ubu. What's your opinion, readers?

 Frank Black

David Thomas

More Crime in Sugar Land

Man, what is it about that place--people can't stop doing crimes! Chron crime-beat reporter Dale Lezon has the scoop.

A Sugar Land woman is accused of bilking millions of dollars from the chemical company where she previously worked to buy a luxury home and bankroll trips to Las Vegas, according to federal authorities.

Diana Simon, 49, pleaded not guilty today to one wire fraud, which, authorities say, arose in her alleged scheme to steal more than $3.6 million for Kaneka Texas, a subsidiary of a Japanese chemicals firm with U.S. headquarters in Pasadena. (Dale Lezon, The Houston Chronicle, September 2, 2009)

I'll say one thing for Sugar Land criminals--when they steal, they steal big.

When to Call the Cops and When Not to

No doubt readers have heard the mind-boggling, horrible story of the little girl who was kidnapped when she was 11, kept in a back-yard prison for 17 year, and bore her kidnapper two children, one when she was 14. Really the story is so strange, it's hard to wrap ones head around it. And it's so terrifying, I don't even really want to think about it. But this jumped out.

Neighbours and even some of his own family considered Garrido strange as he told them about his messages from God and kept the females at his house from contact with outsiders.

Erika Pratt, 25, who stayed next door two years ago, said she was "freaked out" by Garrido's behaviour, and when she popped her head over the fence she saw his secret compound. There were tents, sheds and pitbull terriers, she said, and water hoses leading from her house next door.

"He had little girls and women living in that backyard, and they all looked kind of the same," Pratt told the San Francisco Chronicle. "They never talked, and they kept to themselves."

Pratt said that people came and went from the property, but the core group consisted of two girls about four years old, one girl about 11, another girl about 15 and a young woman about 25. They were all blonde, she said.

Pratt said she had called Contra Costa County sheriff's deputies to investigate, but that officers "told me they couldn't go inside because they didn't have a warrant". (Mark Tran and David Batty, The Guardian, August 28, 2009).

So he had the girls living in a makeshift prison camp in his backyard. He wasn't off in the mountains or on some remote farm. He had neighbors, and Prattt, at least, knew there was something weird and maybe wrong. But the other neighbors seemed cool with the guy. For 18 years.

My gut reaction is that these neighbors were totally irresponsible. An unimaginably horrible crime was taking place right over their fences and they were willfully blind to it.

OK, let's go back one week.

[Bob Dylan] was stopped in July by police in Long Branch, New Jersey, who were responding to a call about a suspicious person roaming the neighborhood, police said.

According to Long Branch Police Department Sgt. Michael Ahart, Dylan had been peering into a window of a house that was for sale, which prompted a neighbor to call the police on July 23.
One of two responding officers, Officer Kristie Buble, 24, approached Dylan and asked him for his name.

"She recognized the name, she just really didn't believe it was Bob Dylan," Ahart told CNN. "He was soaking wet because it was raining and he was wearing a hood."

So Buble asked the musician for identification, but he had none.

Buble and her partner, Officer Derrick Meyers, 24, then asked Dylan, 68, to accompany them to where his tour buses were parked. Once they arrived, Dylan showed them identification. (Deborah Brunswick, CNN, August 14, 2009)

Now this story was played for laughs. Ha ha, young whippersnappers don't recognize aged rock legend! But when I read it, I was outraged. Why did Dylan have to show ID? When did it become a crime to walk down the street. Or look in the window of a house that was for sale? Some scaredy-cat neighbor calls the cops because they see someone they don't know walking along a public street. How many times do non-famous people get hassled by the police for the same "crime"?

But now that I look at the two stories together. At some point, you want the neighborhood busy-bodies to get involved. If more people had fingered Garrido, maybe that tragedy could have ended sooner. But at the same time, you don't want to have a police state with cops coming up as you are out for a stroll and asking for your papers, as if you were in the old Soviet Union. So the question is how to balance this, and if balance is possible.

But then I asked myself, what is different about these two cases (aside from the obvious)? Garrido was a neighbor--presumably a home-owner. The neighbors might not have known him that well, but they knew he was from their neighborhood, that he had a job and a house. Dylan was apparently seen as a stranger, someone not from the neighborhood, a possibly dangerous outsider.

So I think there might have been some primitive tribal feelings at work here. Garrido was an insider--an admittedly eccentric one, but a familiar face nonetheless. Thus we don't call the cops. We tolerate his eccentricities. Dylan was an outsider. Since neither the person who called the cops nor the cops themselves recognized him, the reaction is to protect the home turf from the outsider.

So because of the relative social positions of Garrido and Dylan within the two neighborhoods, the reactions were totally different--a tragic under-reaction for Garrido, and humorous (but unacceptable) over-reaction in the case of Dylan.

Never Forgetting Steven Hardin

Every now and then, I don't take the freeway home from work, but try to explore the many interesting neighborhoods between IAH (near where I work) and Memorial City (near where I live). If you go more-or-less straight south from my office, you end up on Gloger Street, and where the ends of Gloger and Mt. Houston meet, you see this sign.



It looks the same from the back.



Then as you go down Hartley, you see the same basic sign affixed to a chain-link fence.



This is apparently the home of William Hardin. And his son was indeed murdered by a firefighter named Barry Crawford.

In April, some of Crawford's neighbors in his Humble trailer park complained that he was hogging parking spots. He was warned that his truck would be towed, and on April 17, Steven Hardin tried to do that.

Crawford, a veteran Houston firefighter, left his house with a loaded rifle and tried to get Hardin to release his truck. He testified that he kicked Hardin in the face to try to get him to stop.

The confrontation escalated when Crawford pointed the weapon at Hardin. Witnesses said Hardin grabbed a nearby shovel, and Crawford shot him in the chest.

Crawford claimed self-defense. But the jury said it was murder, and prosecutor Kelly Siegler asked for a minimum 25-year sentence.

"Do you really think probation is punishment?" she asked the jury during the punishment phase of the trial. "Probation for a murderer like this is a joke."

But that's what the jury gave Crawford. (Stephanie A. Sin, Houston Chronicle, October 10, 1998) 

Ten years probation. The judge was Ted Poe (now a Republican Congressman), and he added additional conditions to the probation (which had been decided by the jury). Poe required Crawford to put flowers on Hardin's grave every year, and every year Crawford had to spend two days parading with a sign saying that he had murdered a fellow citizen. And most important, he had to pay $412 a month in restitution to Hardin's widow and children.

But in the case of the court-ordered restitution and child support, family members say more than $12,000 is owed to them that has not been paid. This family plans to go to court to try to get the matter settled. (13 Eyewitness News, Cynthia Cisneros, June 16, 2009)

Hardin's sister remembers her brother on a website dedicated to his memory.

I miss my brother very much!  He was my best friend and would call me several times a day just to chat.Oh, how I wish that when the phone rings, it could be Steven on the other end of the line. Just saying, Hey, T, what are you doing? Oh, what I would give to hear his voice just one more time!  To see his smile one last time! Just to hug him and say I LOVE YOU - ONE LAST TIME!

The idea of my car getting towed fills me with anger. I remember a comic by Scott Gilbert where he fantasized about burning his car rather than letting a tow-truck take it. I could relate. But we're civilized people. We don't kill someone because we're mad at him, mad at what he's doing. Crawford stepped outside the bounds of civilization and should have paid a heavier price.

Funny what you stumble across when you drive around Houston.

More Photos of the Reckless Robber

Hero to cyclists (i.e., CRIMINALS) everywhere!

Oh, and awesome fanny-pack, fella!

(Swiped from B.S. Houston Art Blog.)

Bad Bicyclist

Recently I have been blogged about crimes against bicyclists (here, here, and here). But maybe I was too hasty! Maybe bicyclists deserve what they get and more because of their own criminal nature. Indeed, if you read the reader comments of the stories linked to above, you will find numerous examples of bicyclist lawlessness being used to excuse crimes against bicyclists.

Up to now, I have pooh-poohed their concerns. After all, the fact that cyclists sometimes don't stop at stop signs hardly seems to justify killing them. But check this out (reported by the Chron's master of weird crimes, Dale Lezon):

A man who is suspected in more than a dozen armed bank robberies in the Houston area struck again this week, riding a bicycle to get away and brandishing a pistol as he demanded money from tellers at a bank in Kingwood.

The man, who has been dubbed the "Reckless Robber" because of the way he waves his gun wildly, most recently hit the Wells Fargo branch at 1910 West Lake Houston Parkway about 10:30 a.m. Thursday, federal officials said.

He is suspected in 13 other bank heists dating back to Oct. 8 according to the FBI.

I think this proves the criminality of bicyclists, which in turn certainly justifies running them down with cars or shooting them. I condemn the "reckless robber," but at the same time, I want to commend him.

The Reckless Robber

He wore a white T-shirt with dark colored sleeves, dark shorts, a dark-colored bicycle helmet, bicycle gloves, and dark sunglasses.

Bike safety is an important lesson to impart to our children, and it is encouraging to see that even violent criminals are doing their part to get the message across. Reckless Robber, on behalf of the children of America, I thank you.

Upside to Obesity

George Vera--Man With the Hidden Gun

Two weeks ago, I went on weight watchers. Being overweight is unhealthy, unsexy, and forces a fellow to shop at big-and-tall stores with terrible yet overpriced clothes. So wish me luck.

That said, being fat can have its advantages.

An obese Harris County jail inmate turned over a pistol that had been hidden in the folds of his skin after he went through at least five searches upon his arrest and was booked into two different local lockups, authorities said. George Vera, 25, is charged with possession of a firearm in a correctional facility. [...] The Houston Police Department, which operates the city jail, and the Harris County Sheriff's Office, which operates the county jail, are investigating. [...]

A spokesman for the Houston Police Department, Kese Smith, said that procedures call for a suspect to be searched upon arrest, twice at the city jail and once more upon his transfer. He said there's no special provision regarding obese people, but officers are trained to thoroughly search suspects.

Vera, who is 5-foot-10 and weighs more 500 pounds, was arrested by Houston police and booked into the city jail Sunday on suspicion of bootlegging compact disc recordings, said Donna Hawkins, spokeswoman for the Harris County District Attorney's Office.

By Monday, Vera was transferred to the county jail, where he was searched at least once. While he was in the shower that day, he told a guard that he had weapon on him.

Garza said officers found a 9-millimeter handgun beneath folds of his skin. The gun was not loaded and it was unclear whether bullets were found. (Dale Lezon, The Houston Chronicle)

This story begs all kinds of questions--some I don't even want to ask. But here's one--don't the prisoners go through metal detectors? And if so, isn't there something inadequate about a metal detector that can't detect a gun hidden under a guy's, um, folds? Just wondering.

(Dale Lezon gets the most awesome stories at The Chronicle. I hope he's saving them up so he can write the truly demented crime novel that Houston deserves.)

Hot Houston Days

Ah, the halcyon days of summer...

Houston police have arrested and charged a man in the ax-slaying of his roommate.
Robert Fulton Burns, 42, is charged with murdering a man identified by relatives as Lewis Mack Holiday, 41, at his home in the 5800 block of Hirondel in southeast Houston on Sunday night. (Dale Lezon, The Houston Chronicle)

...When we sit in the sultry shade sipping tall cool drinks...

A man was killed by another man wielding a machete or a large knife Tuesday night just north of downtown.
The slaying happened about 9 p.m. in the 2800 block of Lorraine at Jensen. (Dale Lezon, The Houston Chronicle)

...Reading Dale Lezon's pithy accounts of life in our fair city.

Robert Fulton Burns, man about town

Don't Throw Bottles at Bicyclists in Colorado

To follow up on an earlier post, Colorado has passed a law making it a crime for motorists to throw stuff at bicyclists. Wait, surely that was already a crime, right? No apparently it was only a crime if the motorist connected. As long as he missed, it was perfectly legal.

Note to Self: Bike Helmets Are Not Bullet-Proof

This is nuts.

Charles Alexander Diez, 42, apparently fired at the Asheville man after arguing with him about riding his bike on the busy road with his 3-year-old child in a bike seat behind him, Asheville Police Capt. Tim Splain said. (Josh Boatwright, Asheville Citizen Times, via Felix Salmon.)

But wait, it is even more bizarre than this journalistically correct paragraph implies. Keep reading.

Diez was driving his car off Interstate 40 at Exit 55 at about 11:24 a.m. Sunday when he saw Alan Ray Simons and his wife riding bikes up the road with Simons' 3-year-old son behind him in a bike seat, he said.

“He decided he needed to tell them he thought it was unsafe that they would do that and have their child out there in an area where they had a lot of traffic,” Splain said.

Diez stopped his car and confronted Simons near 1360 Tunnel Road. When Simons began to walk away, Diez shot at him, Splain said.

The bullet blew a hole through the outer lining of Simons' helmet and went straight through both sides of it, but he was not hit.

Amazing, huh? So this Diez guy must be completely out of his tree, right?

Buncombe County Sheriff's deputies found Diez's vehicle at his home on Rowland Road in Swannanoa and arrested him. Diez was not under the influence of any drugs or alcohol at the time of the shooting and has no prior criminal record, Splain said. He has been employed by the Asheville Fire Department since February 1992, according to interim Chief Scott Burnette. Diez has been placed on paid leave during the investigation, Burnette said.

This case is too weird to draw any general conclusions from. But hey, overreaching is the birthright of all bloggers, so I'll try.

1) This is an extreme example of what to me seems like a really common problem--that many drivers have an irrational resentment of bicyclists. As a cyclist, I have seen this in the behavior of lots of drivers who will pull dangerous, asshole-ish moves near me (passing way too close to me, honking when they get next to me, etc.). You can also see it whenever there is a news article about a car-bicycle accident in the comments--a frightening proportion of the responses will side with the driver (regardless of the facts of the case) and excoriate cyclists in general. (In this article, however, Diez's action was so extreme that none of the commenters have defended him, as far as I can see.) As a cyclist, it's this irrational anger that I fear the most.

2) Gun rights advocates often say that an armed society would decrease gun violence because people contemplating using a gun would know that their victims (or any bystander) might be armed as well. This makes sense if you assume everyone is acting with rational self-interest when they make the decision to use a gun. Obviously that is not the case, and Diez is a really good example. Assuming the information in the article is correct, even if you had iron-clad laws prohibiting criminals or crazy people from owning guns, you wouldn't have stopped Diez.

I'm not suggesting that guns be outlawed or anything. But I would like gun rights advocates to have a little less hubris when they assert that gun violence would drop if more people carried guns. Such a statement is like the efficient market theory--it depends on self-interested people who are rational. People who fire guns at other people are not rational. They're drunk or high or crazy or jealous or...

Baby Steps in Criminal Justice System Reform

We still have the death penalty, and that seems unlikely to go away despite the huge and growing number of reversed cases, the growing questions about the veracity of eyewitness accounts, the history of incompetent or pro-prosecution forensics, not to mention craziness like letting the "testimony" of dogs count as evidence.

But at least the state of Texas recognized that handing over the appeals of death row inmates to often inexperienced or incompetent attorneys is on its face unfair.

Texas, which executes more convicts than any other state in the nation, will open its first capital defense office next year to manage appeals for death row inmates after years of reports that appointed private attorneys repeatedly botched the job. [...]

The law was inspired by a series of stories about Texas inmates who lost crucial appeals after court-appointed attorneys missed deadlines or filed only so-called “skeletal” writs — documents with little information often copied from other cases. It represents a significant reform for Texas, one of the only capital punishment states that lacks a public defender to oversee key death row appeals known as state writs of habeas corpus.

The office, with an annual budget of about $1 million and a staff of nine, won't open soon enough to help any of the inmates whose appellate rights were squandered recently.

“Better late than never,” said Juan Castillo, one of four death row inmates whose state appeals were never filed by the San Antonio attorney assigned to represent them. “This is a start. There's a lot of cases” that have been screwed up. [Lise Olsen, Houston Chronicle, July 27, 2009]

Something like this is long overdue, but it is only one small reform to the criminal justice system that we need. Improved, independent forensics and revised rules for the use of eyewitnesses (for example, new techniques for the flawed method of police line-ups) would help insure that innocent people are not convicted and that the guilty ones don't walk in this world free in the meantime.

You can help by joining The Innocence Project. I did.

Honestly, Officer, I Have No Idea How the Dead Guy Got In My Bathtub!

Why do I think this is not the whole story?

A couple discovered a man they did not know shot to death in the bathroom of their southwest Houston apartment early Sunday, authorities said.

The couple were asleep at their apartment in the 5800 block of Fondren when around 5:30 a.m., they awoke to the sound of gunfire and saw two men running out of their apartment, said Houston Police Department spokesman Jodi Silva.

While searching the apartment to make sure nothing was taken, the couple found a man they did not know dead with multiple gunshot wounds in their bathroom, Silva said.

His identity is pending notification of next of kin.

Investigators suspect a possible motive for the shooting is robbery.

This could be a good beginning for a crime novel.

Voting Fraud in Harris County?

This is a pretty powerful piece of YouTubery. Question: who created it?



Hat tip Kuff. This is related to the issues swirling around unelected county tax assessor Leo Vasquez and his employee in that office, Ed Johnson, who also is a campaign consultant for Republican candidates through a firm called Campaign Data Systems (CDS) -- co-owned by Bohac. No one has demonstrated that Johnson has done anything wrong, but the stink of conflict of interest is overpowering. If you want to rig a vote, this is how you do it--by running the vote. That's why the famous vote-stealers in history have been urban and county machines that were already in power and that controlled the ballot boxes. This is why ACORN is such a weak candidate for serious voter fraud--they don't have the power to commit effective fraud.