Wednesday, April 18, 2007

1,100 to 92 and still Genarlow sits in jail

You will recall that Georgia State Senate President pro tem Eric Johnson, R-Savannah, objected to the bill proposed by Sen. Emanuel Jones, D-Decatur, that would have allowed Genarlow Wilson’s case to be reconsidered because, said Johnson, it would “require the courts to revisit more than 1,100 cases like Wilson’s.”

Jones rewrote his bill:

After a prolonged debate, the amendment failed on a vote of 19-32.

Last year, the legislature reduced the penalties for such cases as part of a sweeping reform of the state’s sex crime and sex offender laws. The change, however, only affected cases after July.

Senate President pro tem Eric Johnson, R-Savannah, argued that Jones’ proposal could let predators out of prison early.

“Some of these, if not all of them, could be very dangerous people,” Johnson said. “I don’t think it’s worth the risk for just one or two of these people getting out.”

Jones estimated that his measure would affect 92 cases in the state. [...]

Johnson said Wilson would be better off taking a deal that has been offered to him for a new trial, a reduced prison sentence of five years and the possibility of getting off the sex offender registry in the future.

Let’s be clear, the bill didn’t release anyone, it allowed a judicial review. As to his suggestion for Genarlow, five years for consensual sex and only ”THE POSSIBILITY of getting off the sex offender registry in THE FUTURE”??? Despicably, inexplicably wrong! If that’s Georgia justice there is no justice in Georgia.

SEE ALSO: The AJC editorial calling on Georgia Attorney General Thurbert Baker to break legal ranks to right the wrong done to Genarlow, and my take on the Sex Panic: Why we’re freaking out.

Google Docs presentation “feature”

Google Docs is very popular at my house; I expect the new promised presentation “feature” will go over well too:

Google’s planned presentation application will be just another feature of the Google Docs application, Rajen Seth, product manager for Google Enterprise Applications told InfoWorld.

Rather than appearing as a separate application within the Google Apps suite, the new Google presentation features will be just another feature, along side the document and spreadsheet features that are accessed by clicking on Documents within the Google desktop environment, he said.

“What you’ll see is similar to something like Google Docs. In terms of naming and branding, the way we look at it is as a feature of Google Docs and Spreadsheets,” Seth said.

The world according to Google:

In fact, “traditional office tools” as Seth calls them (aka Office) only cover one fourth of what Google considers must have functionality: document creation. The other three fourths—collaboration, document publishing and retrieval (aka search) aren’t part of the traditional Office suite, but are central to Google’s vision.

Cow update: The T-Bones!

The good news is that the cow cost considerably less than I thought. (And I feel like such a rube city-slicker for it!) The bad news is that I over-cooked the first steaks I grilled from it. Said Doug, “If this were a restaurant, I’d send it back...”

T-BONE - 1 Hosted on Zooomr

T-BONE - 2 Hosted on Zooomr

T-BONE - 3 Hosted on Zooomr

T-BONE - 4 Hosted on Zooomr

T-BONE - 5 Hosted on Zooomr

The meat was tender and delicious nonetheless.

SEE ALSO: The abattoir, The cow: #9 and Where’s that cheeseburger from?

Gun Control Derby

President Bush takes the early lead:

[W]ho really was the first to “use the tragedy” for their “agenda” on this issue? Monday afternoon, in the White House’s first statement on the killings, President Bush’s spokesperson Dana Perino included this odd comment:

“The president believes that there is a right for people to bear arms, but that all laws must be followed.”

It wasn’t until much later in the day—after 10 pm Monday—that Congressional Quarterly posted a piece, widely quoted on right-wing websites, reporting that Democrats in favor of gun control were pointing to the killings “as evidence of the need for tighter firearm restrictions.” Looks like Bush beat the gun control advocates there.

The conservative website Red State railed against Rep. Jim Moran (D-VA) in a post with this lead:

Less than 24 hours after the deadliest shooting spree in U.S. history, liberal Rep. Jim Moran took to the airwaves to launch a political attack against President Bush, congressional Republicans and the National Rifle Association.

”Less than 24 hours?” Even if it took Rep. Moran just 20 hours to call for gun control, that still puts him at least 12 hours—and probably more like 15—behind President Bush’s campaign to oppose gun restrictions.

If you think Democrats are gun control champions you’re sadly mistaken. Today the most visible supporters of gun control are New York Republicans; Democrats dumped gun control years ago:

Today, a substantial portion of the party’s new standard-bearers are pro-gun, or at least anti-gun control. Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor who now heads the Democratic National Committee and is the favorite of the new party power base emerging from the Internet, has long been an opponent of gun control. So has Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., the man whose squeaker victory in November gave Democrats control of the Senate and who was selected to give the party’s response to President Bush’s State of the Union address this year. Last month, one of Webb’s aides was arrested on his way in to a Senate building with one of Webb’s guns in his possession. Webb responded with a spirited defense of his right and need to bear arms. Even Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., the new Senate majority leader, is pro-gun.

Lenders a factor in neighborhood deterioration

On Marketplace last night we learned that foreclosures in California rose 800% since last year. (Lenders need oversight.) But the highest foreclosure rate is in Ohio. And there lenders lay low to avoid taxes and maintenance costs:

MHARI SAITO: It used to be that if a mortgage went bad, the local bank took back the house. And that local bank had to pay if the city maintained the house to keep up its resale value.

But these days, just try finding the owner. In the 1990s, banks started bundling loans and selling them as securities to investment, hedge and pension funds. Add that to the convulsions in the subprime industry, and you’ve got a noxious mix when it comes to Ohio’s ability to recover millions of dollars. [...]

Just try getting an owner to maintain a home if you can’t find them. What happens next is these boarded properties become magnets for criminals who trash them and gut them for any metal they can sell. That devastates resale value.

Larry Litton Jr., a loan servicer in Dallas, says lenders are stuck. Even if a property had some resale value, there’s virtually no market for it.

LARRY LITTON JR: There’s some markets whenever you sell real estate, the only buyers may be investors. That perpetuates the problem. Because an investor buys a house, they put a tenant in the house, the house may not get fixed up. It becomes a cycle.