The woman accused of playing a cruel joke on a family by posing as their missing daughter has turned herself in. She told ABC News that she "had nothing to hide" and is trusting the court system.
There are not enough words to sum up my feelings. I suppose "disgust" and "contempt" will have to do.
I'm so mad about this woman, I really have nothing more to say. All I know is that she deserves a much stiffer punishment than the one she'll receive, if she even gets one at all.
At first, I thought a television station had either put its newscast scripts directly on the Internet or used a voice-to-text program to do so. I thought this because I've generally known the NAACP as just that, rather than the "N-Double-A-C-P". Yes, I know it's pronounced the second way, but acronyms are still acronyms, no matter how you pronounce them.
However, it looks like a whole bunch of TV and radio stations do this. A search for "N-Double-A-C-P" over at Google news currently returns 569 hits. This is most peculiar.
(Context: "The inquest was held at the insistence of the N-Double-A-C-P." The story is about a black man who was found hanging and people began wondering if it was just a suicide or, in fact, a lynching.)
Maddening news item of the day: Jayson Blair (the New York Times reporter who fabricated dozens of stories) is reportedly going to get $5,000 to write two measly articles for magazines.
I hold myself to strict standards and have never made up a source or a quote in the last three years. I guess that's why I'm not making an average of $2,500 per story.
My last post was about Iraq and the government. Today, I thought I was going to post something about the New York City councilman who unknowingly escorted his own killer around the metal detector at the city hall this morning. The assailant was on the balcony when he was shot and killed by a plain-clothes policeman from the floor below.
Then I thought I was going to write my two cents' worth about how 1.3 million California residents have made history by getting the first gubernatorial recall election in the nation for the past 82 years.
So there's this big, world-wide ruckus about how a piece of evidence cited by both President George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair to justify war in Iraq is apparently bogus. It turns out that someone forged a document in which Saddam Hussein tried to buy uranium in Niger. A White House aide is taking responsibility for it, admitting that the CIA had sent him two memos about the credibility of the uranium document. Despite the two memos, the evidence was still included in Bush's State of the Union address, and the aide, the CIA and the White House are now doing damage control.
Also in Britain, a fire of questions and accusations regarding the apparent suicide of a scientist is still raging. David Kelly committed suicide two days after he was grilled by a government committee concerning whether he was an anonymous informant for the British Broadcasting Corporation. After his death, the BBC confirmed that, yes, he was the source who said the government had 'sexed up' a report on Iraq's weapons last fall. Prime Minister Blair is blaming the BBC for Kelly's death, while the BBC is now saying it has a tape of Kelly talking about weapons of mass destruction.
I do not think the uranium thing is grounds for Bush or Howard to resign (neither does former President Bill Clinton, who is on the opposite political party as Bush). I also don't think Kelly's suicide is a reason for officials to resign, unless an investigation reveals that he was threatened. I do think, however, that people should continue asking questions.
In America, we have the freedom to question those who hold the power. We have the freedom to state our opinions. Some people say that the people asking questions are merely conspiracy theorists and are out to topple the government. Others say it's a Democrat vs. Republican thing.
But it's not about conspiracy and party lines; it's much bigger than that. If we don't keep an eye on the government, we run the risk of allowing them to get sloppy. Those in power, whether it be over a tiny town or an entire country, owe it to their people to remain honest, and their people it to them to pay attention. All too often, we move up the ladder ranks and begin to lose sight of the ground. That's where we need other people to help us, and that's where the concept of government 'by the people and of the people' comes into play.
A slumlord (slumlady?) who was convicted in 2002 of 11 counts of slum violations has failed to fix up her run-down Los Angeles apartment complex, so now she must live in it. The woman will be on an ankle bracelet to monitor her movements, and she must live in one apartment unit for the next three months, a judge ordered.
If you ask me, that's a beautiful sentence, and one of the more appropriate ones I've ever heard. Since the woman has to live there for three months, I'm sure that will give her plenty of spare time to do things like, oh, fix the fire alarms and fire escapes.
Hypothetical, possibly rhetorical question: Should reporters have to defend their sources to superiors in the newsroom when the source is either a city/county employee or someone the superior asked the reporter to call?
Two clowns got married at an annual fair-type event in Weed. It wasn't just a wedding including a long-bearded gentleman and a tennis shoe-clad woman. No, it was a ceremony that included karaoke, band-aid rings and a ride on the ferris wheel. Yes, in Weed. I love my home town.
The David Lee Roth saga continues: In the last two weeks, two people searching for the singer's e-mail address have landed on my Web site. If that's not enough of a news item to warrant its own update on my weblog, I don't know what is.
The more photos I take, the more desperate I become to finish debugging a project that will -- if things go properly and my brain doesn't explode -- take over the main page of my Web site. I refuse to launch it until all the bugs are worked out, because it would be a Very Bad Idea to embark on a daily updated feature that has issues.
Yes, that's right: I said "daily updated." This, from the person who just finally updated her main page and added another feature after nearly three months of no changes other than weblog ramblings. (This seems like a good spot for advertising: Go see my main site.)
I'm not going to specify a daily time at which the site will be updated, and I may begin with a five-days-a-week schedule and set a date at which a trial period will end and I'll decide whether to continue the daily updates. Even so, it's a big change for me, because I've never before promised updates. I know it's just a personal Web site with no revenue, but the principle is the same and my future dreams are still in place.
I will not make a promise I cannot keep, so that is why I continue to test and tweak and then test and tweak some more. Until my eyeballs fall out and I implode with frustration, that is.
Attention Matthew and all faithful followers of this weblog: I am not dead. I simply went on vacation and didn't announce it. I've had company from Norway, so we did things like invade Santa Barbara, San Francisco and Six Flags Marine World. I wonder how many Norwegians get to experience part of a California murder trial, too.
Lest you think this is a boring post, I'll liven it up a bit: Remember how I wanted Iraqi playing cards? I found them in a San Francisco store. Card games might take on a new meaning now.
Hope thief arrest
The woman accused of playing a cruel joke on a family by posing as their missing daughter has turned herself in. She told ABC News that she "had nothing to hide" and is trusting the court system.There are not enough words to sum up my feelings. I suppose "disgust" and "contempt" will have to do.
(Related entry: 'Hope thief')
Posted by Layla at 7:17 PM, July 31, 2003. Comments (0)