A 47 year old investment banker tried to kill himself by jumping from his 7th Floor New York apartment this weekend.
Police say Adam Silberman survived the fall, partly because he hit a canopy on the second floor. Silberman was in several disputes with his co-op board over an 18,000 judgment, and most recently because of complaints about barking from his three French poodles.
I think I told you June 24 that there was a stench rising over the Arizona State Capitol. Blondie Jan Brewer is responsible for signing the budget into law. But the beguiling ‘Cute Young Thing’ (Representative Michelle Ugenti) decided to slip a few unconstitutional things into the verbiage so Blondie didn’t have time to see it. Dirt floor, finger-crushing politics, but that’s what she got away with.
Well, not much slips past Homeowners Advocate George Staropoli. He readily recognized the massive financial forces behind our sneaky ‘Cute Young Thing’ were nothing more than a money/power grab for some very narrow special interests. He also noted that the Arizona Constitution is screamingly clear. You can’t throw bills into the annual Omnibus bill without specifically naming them. It’s designed to keep dirty fingers out of the cookie jar. It’s designed to keep Arizona politics clean. And Rep. Ugenti just found a sneaky way to skirt the law.
SO….
Now there’s a lawsuit asking for a declaratory judgment that the ‘Cute Young Thing’ gets her fingers slapped because her actions in sneaking SB-1454 into the budget were a blatant violation of the state Constitution.
http://pvtgov.org/pvtgov/downloads/sb1454-complaint.pdf
With all the madness surrounding the George Zimmerman verdict Americans are having to deal with a whole series of tragedies. First and foremost is the death of Trayvon Martin. The second tragedy is that the Sanford Police department, inexperienced at handling complex crime scenes, just did a poor job of thoroughly processing the area of the murder. They should have canvassed the entire neighborhood looking for every possible witness. They simply didn’t have all the evidence that could have been gathered and presented to prosecutors.
But there were more tragedies: The political involvement of Florida Governor Rick Scott, who was pressured to appoint a special prosecutor, Angela Corey.
Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, in an interview with CNN, said Angela Corey has a horrible reputation in Florida for overcharging suspects. And there’s now plenty of evidence that Corey intentionally hid important evidence from the defense, a massive violation of legal ethics. It took a whistle blower to come forward and produce the evidence that Corey was illegally holding back. And she has now fired that whistle blower. In fact, Professor Dershowitz says Corey’s misbehavior borders on “criminal conduct.” Dershowitz is certainly no fan of George Zimmerman or of racial profiling. But he notes that all the racial profiling in this case was done by the news media.
And that’s the greatest tragedy of all. In a country where racial sensitivities are raw, a huge opportunity is being lost. The search for mutual understanding is being drowned out by the activists and the noisemakers and by those who have no understanding of how our legal system works. The Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman trial was not the place to have those conversations. The ‘show trial’ just ginned up more disrespect for the law on both sides of the fence.
Having worked 44 years in news, and 40 of those years in television news, I can personally tell you, DON’T TRUST THE NEWS! Oh, believe me, I worked my heart out to get the facts straight and to write provocative stories but stories that were absolutely true, not shaded, varnished or tilted to one side or the other. Were there mistakes? Sure. But once a mistake was detected, we went overboard trying to get the accurate information out there. For many years, a banner hung over our assignment desk that read “Be First, But Be Right!”
A competitor, Chuck Green at the Denver Post, was rumored to have a sign over his desk that read,”If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” The intent of both messages was, “if you don’t get the facts right, your career in the news media is dead!” That’s a tough standard.
But a television station in San Francisco, KTVU, will take decades trying to live down the monstrous mistake it made when trying to identify the pilots of the Asiana plane that crashed this week at the San Francisco airport. You’d better believe that five or six people were fired over this one The identification list started with Captain Sum Ting Wong:
Yes, sometimes a system fails. Sometimes it fails catastrophically.
Trayvon Martin
A young man is dead, and that certainly is a massive tragedy. But another man’s life was ruined with all the racial allegations connected with the ‘murder’ of another man, and possibly ruined by a vengeful prosecutor who went to the bar with no evidence.
My big question is, should the prosecutor have charged Zimmerman in the first place? I’ll speak to some of the reasons he should not have, but first let’s look at a case of prosecutorial misconduct that happened at Duke University. Yes, the Duke Lacrosse team.
There was zero evidence of a rape of two strippers hired by the lacrosse team. Yet Durham County prosecutor Mike Niphong continued pushing, publicly calling it a gang rape, and making other outrageous statements about the alleged guilt of the lacrosse players. The players were later exonerated, Niphong lost his job as a prosecutor, and then was stripped of his law license by the North Carolina Bar Association.
![Scales_of_justice2[1]](http://neighborsatwar.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Scales_of_justice211.jpg)
Did justice prevail?
But let’s toss in one final bit of knowledge in the Trayvon Martin case. Everyone involved in the case knows that Florida has one of the strongest ‘stand-your-ground’ laws in the country. All you have to do to pull the trigger is to “reasonably believe that you were facing death or great bodily harm.”
Zimmerman had injuries to his face and the back of his head. If he didn’t believe he was facing great bodily harm, he would have been an idiot.
The prosecutor had to prove Zimmerman did not have reason to have such fear. Yet his star witness was a perjurer and was still allowed to testify. The standard for the jury is “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Did the prosecutor think he could prove BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT that Zimmerman was not afraid of bodily harm?
There are still some interesting things left to come. From the beginning, the national media and many public figures have tried to exploit every possible racial trigger. It’s impossible to predict how the public will react once the final outcome is announced.
George Zimmerman
I guarantee you, homes in The Retreat At Twin Lakes Homeowners Association are not going to be selling well.
If at all.
George Zimmerman has an incredibly good case against his Homeowners Association for not supporting him in his time of need. They were the ones who wanted a neighborhood watch. They were the ones who accepted Zimmerman’s offer to walk the streets at night. But when the time came for him to show heroism and stand up against a potential burglar, they walked out on him.
This neighborhood has already tried to walk out on Zimmerman by paying Trayvon’s attorneys a million dollars to ‘settle’ this case. But it’s not settled, not by a long shot. Now, it’s Zimmerman’s turn.
This particular Homeowners Association, The Retreat At Twin Lakes Homeowners Association, is about to bite the ‘big one’.
They’re going down the toilet.
