Wilkes Doesn't Get Enough Time In Jail

The "Duke Stir"
Americans never pay attention to what matters. Corruption during wartime? Hey, that matters. People end up dead or maimed for life because of contracting fraud. It ain't sexy, but it's real. And it matters. It matters what gear the troops get and it matters how that money is spent.

Today, something that matters happened and I doubt you could find more than a handful of people who get the significance of it.

SAN DIEGO - A defense contractor was sentenced to 12 years in federal prison Tuesday for bribing former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham with cash, trips, the services of prostitutes and other gifts in exchange for nearly $90 million in Pentagon work.

Brent Wilkes was labeled "a predatory wolf (in) self-styled patriot's clothing" and a "poster boy for war profiteering" by prosecutor Phillip Halpern. U.S. District Judge Larry Burns said he was troubled that Wilkes continued to maintain his innocence.

"If you were to do the right thing about this, today is the day to own up," Burns told Wilkes at the sentencing hearing.

Well, of course, there's no way in hell Wilkes is ever going to own up to being a world class sleaze. Isn't there a war on? Wouldn't Wilkes qualify for the Death Penalty if somehow, somewhere, there was just an ounce of shame left in the US Justice system? Twelve years for a slam dunk case like this? What do you want to bet that a whole lot of prominent people wrote the judge nice letters about Wilkes?

This is what it was all about:

Prosecutors argued during a three-week trial that Wilkes lavished Cunningham with more than $700,000 in perks, including cash, submachine gun shooting lessons and the services of prostitutes. In return, they said, Cunningham helped Wilkes secure $87 million in Pentagon contracts, mainly for scanning paper documents.

Wilkes' attorney asked for a sentence less than the eight years and four months Cunningham received. Prosecutors asked for a "significantly higher punishment," and federal probation officials had recommended 60 years.

Wilkes acknowledged no wrongdoing in a brief statement in which he asked the judge to look beyond his dealings with Cunningham.

"I am a man who cares deeply for this community, for my family, for my country," Wilkes said.

Bullshit. Wilkes cared about that contract, and nothing else. This country was at war and he profited from it by bribing a Congressman. AND THAT DOESN'T GET YOU THE DEATH PENALTY IN THIS COUNTRY? I mean, what the hell?

This war has been a massive transfer of spending from social programs and entitlements to a defense contracting world that is stuffed full of contracts like the one Wilkes got Cunningham to send his way. Was he the lowest bidder? Probably not. Was it rigged? Obviously. So scanning paper documents probably isn't a sexy, glamorous contract. Not like, say, providing Marines with Mine Resistant Vehicles. Except that instead of money going to something that would save lives, here's a classic case of a bullshit contract eating up tens of millions of dollars that should have gone somewhere else. Isn't it weird to see Kit Bond actually doing something decent for once? Gotta take note of that.

Anyway, this contract also went into the Homeland Security realm, including a link to a limosine company. Nice to see how that money was pissed away, too.

This is what set me off tonight, though:

Authorities said Wilkes bribed Cunningham to win work for ADCS Inc., a data and document storage company he owned.

"Wilkes coldly and successfully exploited the simplemindedness of one of this country's war heroes, now a tortured shadow of his former self," prosecutors wrote in a pre-sentencing court filing last week. "Wilkes stands now revealed as a war profiteer, a thug, a bully, a lecherous old man who preyed on his young female staffers and hired prostitutes."

BULLSHIT! How loud can I scream it. Bull fucking shit.

Cunningham was not duped--Cunningham made a fucking list of what he wanted! He wrote it out on his office stationery! He knew exactly what he wanted, including spending time doing weird shit with women on the Duke Stir.

This went back years, for crying out loud. And Cunningham was always the bully in the room, NOT the one being bullied:

In the case of Cunningham, Stern remembers an incident he witnessed in 1996 between Duke and Congressman Barney Frank, the gay congressman from Massachusetts, embroiled at the time in his own scandal involving a former male companion who had been caught running a prostitution ring from the congressman's basement. The exchange happened at a meeting on immigration during which Republicans were maneuvering to prevent Democrats from commenting on a related bill. Frank objected to being steamrolled.

“When Barney started to make his plea, Cunningham cut him off and said, ‘Well, would you like to talk about prostitutes and basements,'” Stern remembered. “The room just fell silent.”

Yeah, so good riddance to you, Mr. Wilkes. May you rot in prison and then find a way to rot in hell as well.

Cunningham gets to rot with you...

Tuesday Night Music Club & Delegate Watch open thread

Roy Orbison & Jeff Lynne - Heartbreak Radio



Rock on.

I'm following election returns at MSNBC, and will update periodically. Polls just closed but they were calling the Republican race for McCain before a single vote was counted.

UPDATE I 8:50 p.m.

With 14% of precincts reporting, Obama leads 56% to 43%, and MSNBC is calling it for him. I dunno - Super Tuesday and the Missouri fiasco is still fresh in my memory, so it just seems silly to call it with 85% of the vote uncounted...But that's just me...

UPDATE II - 10:45 p.m.

Two hours and a bubble bath later, and the percentages didn't change and Clinton's campaign is in trouble. It looks like Obama is likely to be our nominee. He absolutely crushed Hillary tonight in Wisconsin.

But once again, the story is in the overwhelming numbers of Democrats voting. Again, Hillary came in a lagging second, and still ran circles around the entire republican slate. As of this update, Hillary is closing in on 400,000 votes, while all the republicans together are struggling toward 350,000.

I'm going to wait until after March 5th, but if it goes the way it looks like it will, I will consider it time to get behind the presumptive nominee and get busy getting him elected and exposing McCain's many faults.

What is it with the wingnuts in the Missouri Legislature...

...always thinking they can legislate their way out of having to follow federal law?

Um, folks, federal supersedes state. If you learned nothing else from the voter-ID fiasco, you should have learned that.

What are the foam-flecked, goose-stepping rascals up to this time, you ask? Well, they are trying to change the parameters of medically accepted definitions to classify emergency contraception, or the Morning After Pill as an abortive agent. It isn't.

They state legislature has spent a lot of time and energy since the GOP took over in 2000 toward trying to legislate a woman's right to control her own body out of existence. These are the folks who decided that a city bus driver who transported a teenage girl to an abortion appointment could, under certain but certainly not unusual circumstances, be prosecuted as an accessory.

Legislation presented to a House panel last week would classify emergency contraception as an abortion-inducing medication, contrary to the definition used by the Food and Drug Administration.

The bill also would protect pharmacies from lawsuits and from punishment by state regulators for refusing to sell or fill a prescription for any drug defined as triggering an abortion. Supporters said it would remove any financial incentive to sue the pharmacy’s owners for refusing to sell or stock an item that violated their conscience.

Opponents attacked the proposal as an unconstitutional restraint on reproductive freedom and an unconscionable affront to sexual assault victims. They said the bill would enshrine an inaccurate medical description in Missouri law, lead to increased numbers of abortions and leave millions of rural Missouri women without access to a safe and reliable form of birth control.

Filling prescriptions “is an essential function of your job,” said Pamela Sumners, executive director of the Missouri affiliate of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League. “If you become a pharmacist, you should do your job.”

The bill applies specifically to two drugs: RU486, the early name for mifepristone, the drug administered in a doctor’s office to perform a nonsurgical abortion; and emergency contraception, which is marketed as Plan B. (emphasis added)

A spokewoman for Missouri Right to life said that her group considers ec a form of abortion because in some instances it can prevent implantation of a fertilized egg, and members of her group believe that pregnancy gets underway the second the sperm hits the egg. By the time of implantation "the human is long past the stage of being a so-called fertilized egg" she submitted in a written statement. (All would do well to note that, scientifically, that is exactly what it is. A fertilized egg is to a fully formed human what a cookbook on the shelf is to a seven course meal. It is the instructions. There is a real live fully functioning, sentient, human female providing the building materials. She shouldn't just get a vote, she should have veto authority.)

The FDA notes that the morning after pill won’t work if the fertilized egg has already implanted in the uterus, pregnancy has begun, and the females body has begun the requisite endocrine support for a successful pregnancy.

This is just another try by the paternalistic nitwits in the state lege to make an end run around the law and force their own version of morality and misogyny down the throats of the women in this state.

Because I am sick of the horserace

I am going to ignore it today, at least until the returns from Wisconsin and Hawaii come in. Instead I am going to share a couple of thoughts on down-ticket races...

The farther down the ticket a race is, the more direct impact it has on your life.

Think about it: An incompetent city councilman or alderman, a corrupt county commissioner or a crooked sheriff has more potential to negatively impact your life than a bad president does; and don't even get me started on school boards.

I watched in abject horror as school boards were overtaken by fundamentalist, anti-science whack-jobs who openly scorned intellectualism.

I'm not going to preach for paragraphs, but I am going to enter a plea that we all, each and every one of us, watch our newspapers and familiarize ourselves with the issues facing our localities, and with the candidates running in those down-ticket races. They really are important, they really do matter.

Those are the people we elect to select textbooks and set curriculum for our schools, fix the pothole at the end of the street, get that buzzing street light outside your bedroom window fixed and prosecute the bad seed who broke into a secluded, empty house, trashed it, and used it for a meth lab.

When you really stop and think about it, their impact is manifest.

Choose wisely.

Another Cold War Icon Crumbles

Wow. This is something I have known all my life that I would eventually see, but it still caught me unawares when I heard it on the BBC Overnight as breaking news at about 3:00 a.m. Fidel Castro is officially out of power permanently. Maybe I am stunned because of how he left - voluntarily. Usually leaders cast from the same mold as Castro leave in a box or at the barrel of a gun.

Sometimes they are marched outside at gunpoint and then they leave in a box - Think Christmas with the Ceausescu's.

But resigning? Holy hell, what a mindblower that is!

Fidel Castro has been in charge in Cuba all my life. Until today. Add this to the Berlin Wall coming down, Boris Yeltsin standing on that tank, the demise of SAC, the closing of iconic military installations on foreign soil, like Clark, Subic and Rhine Mein; or the Czech-Slovak no-fault divorce.

It's a real live seismic shift in world politics, a signal moment where everything changed. How this all unfolds is going to be interesting to watch indeed.

Oh, Come On...

[Burt Lancaster, Elmer Gantry]

I don't consider myself an Obama supporter or a Clinton supporter--I'm a Democrat, I've participated in the primary process, and when the party selects a nominee, that's the person I'm going to support. You see, there's a greater good, and while I will always demand better Democrats, I'll still vote Democrat this fall. No Republican alive could earn my vote this year.

But Taylor Marsh jumps the shark:

Cons eventually catch up with you. Obama's played his supporters for suckers. They bought into the hope hype, sucking up this stuff with a straw, only to find out Obama's not an original, he's a knock off, of a governor, no less. Siphoning off of a winning campaign to try to win the presidency with a formula. Hey, it's politics. One campaign model fits 'em all. Put your twenty bucks in the bucket and shut the hell up!

The traditional media, cable talking heads, and quite a few large progressive blogs have regurgitated the Obama story like a pack of nomads wandering in the political desert in search of sustenance; people bankrupt of political or factual integrity looking for the answer and refusing to see what was in front of their faces all along. The question is whether the journalists who bought into the Obama hype, along with the cable talking heads who propped his campaign up, and the Obama blogs who didn't care one whit about the facts or his record but were only interested in spreading their Hillary hatred, have got so much invested they won't have the honesty, the integrity, and the moral courage to back peddle on their craven cave in before it's not only too late for them, but too late for the Democratic party.

Barack Obama isn't an original. He's the first 21st century L. Ron Hubbard of politics, Elmer Gantry, name your huckster.

"I have a dream" just became "I have a con."

Hold on, have to wipe off the spittle...

Really, Taylor? L Ron Hubbard? Elmer Gantry? One was real, one wasn't. Not much else in your metaphor stands up. No further comment on Hubbard will appear here, thank you very much. But Elmer Gantry was banned in Boston, of course, and Taylor Marsh's bullshit can't get out of Hooterville. This is a perfect example of getting completely unhinged in public and wondering why no one can take Marsh seriously anymore.

Quick question--How does THAT help Hillary accomplish anything? The real problem is this--she needed to run a great campaign and she only managed to run a pretty good one. There's nothing wrong with her or Obama, in my eyes, and we are blessed as a Democratic Party to have this kind of talent to choose from.

The derangement of the people on my side of the aisle sometimes approaches the derangement of those who oppose me politically. But derangement is derangement, and Taylor Marsh exemplifies the kind of derangement we do not need as Democrats.

UPDATE I - PALE RIDER

Sadly, one of our commenters had to do a "full disclosure" and identify themselves as an Obama supporter.

Hello? You don't need to do that. Thanks, but if you support Obama, that doesn't mean you have to disclose it. The vitriol of liberal blogs in recent months has people self-identifying themselves, lest they be "outed" and persecuted and shut down for their beliefs. You have to disclose, for example, that if you're a paid shill of Monsanto that your twenty-six blog posts highlighting what a safe and pleasant line of products that Monsanto safely makes out of distilled water and grass clippings come from a biased point of view.

A Democrat shouldn't feel obligated to disclose who they support. Come on, has it come to this? I hope not. That's why I would argue that people like Taylor Marsh have jumped the shark, and have crossed the line into irrelevance.