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10.31.2008

ER - Probable cause hearing for man facing 70 charges expected to end today

☛ ER Probable cause hearing for man facing 70 charges expected to end today

A decision to hold over a man facing 70 counts related to the alleged continuous rape and abuse of his step-daughters is expected today.

Paul Alan Jasnosz, 42, has pleaded not guilty to the various charges, including 51 counts of rape by force, two counts of false imprisonment and two counts of assault with a deadly weapon. The man, who was living in the Fairhaven/Samoa area prior to his arrest in early October, was on probation for assault and discharging a firearm at the time. He was also convicted of robbery in Orange County, Humboldt County District Attorney Paul Gallegos said.

A series of alleged crimes spanning about four days in early October led to the arrest of Jasnosz. He was arrested on Oct. 5, after his wife of 18 years and 22-year-old step-daughter told Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office officials he raped his step-daughter at gunpoint, threw her into a wall, threatened to kill them and locked them in his bedroom, according to a probable cause statement for his arrest.

“There were a lot of events that happened over that four-day period,” Deputy Julia Oliveira said at the Thursday preliminary hearing.

For privacy purposes, Jasnosz’s wife will be referred to as “Jane Doe No. 2,” the 22-year-old step-daughter will be “Jane Doe No. 1” and the 21-year-old step-daughter will be “Jane Doe No. 3.”

According to Thursday’s testimony, Jasnosz started molesting “Jane Doe No. 1” when she was 6 and started having unlawful sexual intercourse with her at least three times a week at age 14. He allegedly raped “Jane Doe No. 1” on Oct. 2 and again at gunpoint on Oct. 4.

Deputy Charles Lamb said after Jasnosz was arrested, he had “difficulty understanding the way he referred to himself.”

Jasnosz told Lamb he didn’t have a religion, but had a faith and that the “master” sent him a dream about going to jail.

“He wasn’t making a lot of sense,” Lamb said. Jasnosz also denied having sex with “Jane Doe No. 1,” Lamb said.

Gallegos said while Jasnosz is facing serious charges, he’s anticipating mental health issues will be raised. Conflict Counsel Chief Glenn Brown is representing Jasnosz.

When Lamb spoke with “Jane Doe No. 1” on Oct. 5, she was “terrified beyond words” and expressed fear that Jasnosz would kill her, her mother and law enforcement if he saw their car parked in front of the Sheriff’s Office, he testified.

Oliveira testified the alleged molestation and rape started while the family was living outside the area and continued through Oct. 4. If “Jane Doe No. 1” tried to resist her step-father, he would beat her and threatened to kill her or her family with a firearm or machete, Oliveira testified.

“She was afraid to resist him, she was still afraid during the interviews,” Oliveira said.

While the family was present during some of the alleged beatings, they were afraid to interfere, Oliveira said.

Jasnosz’s wife wouldn’t inquire about his relationship with “Jane Doe No. 1” because she’d get beaten if she did, Oliveira said.

Humboldt County Superior Court Judge Dale Reinholtsen is hearing the case, which is scheduled to continue today at 8:30 a.m.

Jasnosz remains in the Humboldt County jail on $300,000 bail.

(Karen Wilkinson can be reached at kwilkinson@eurekareporter.com or 707-269-7441.)


By KAREN WILKINSON, The Eureka Reporter
Published: Oct 30 2008, 9:57 PM · Updated: Oct 30 2008, 9:58 PM

10.28.2008

ACORN Voter Registration Fraud Allegations, 10/2004

ACORN Voter Registration Fraud Allegations Are Just the Tip of the Iceberg, Says Employment Policies Institute

Illegalities, Fraud and Contradictions Detailed in Report
on Lead Organizer of Florida's Amendment 5

WASHINGTON, Oct. 13 /PRNewswire/ -- A Florida state attorney is
investigating thousands of potentially fraudulent voter registrations
associated with the leading organizer of Florida's Amendment 5 ballot
initiative. But this is just the tip of an iceberg of illegalities, fraud and
contradictions connected to the Association of Community Organizations for
Reform Now (ACORN). In recent days, ACORN has been at the epicenter of
reports on thousands of potentially fraudulent voter registrations across the
nation -- including many by ex-felons -- submitted by ACORN employees in the
presidential swing states of Ohio, Colorado, Missouri Pennsylvania, New Mexico
and Minnesota.
The Employment Policies Institute has updated and re-released its report,
"The Real ACORN: Anti-Employee, Anti-Union, Big Business" with the latest
details on ACORN's involvement in what appears to be widespread voter
registration fraud. The report includes statements from former ACORN
employees on the illegal nature of the organization's promotion of the ballot
initiative to raise Florida's minimum wage to $6.15 per hour.
"This report reveals ACORN's pattern and practice of deception and fraud,"
said EPI research director Craig Garthwaite. "The latest allegations of
widespread voter registration fraud should prove to be the last of ACORN's
nine political lives."
Former ACORN Miami-Dade field director Mac Stuart has declared an intent
to sue ACORN and has made charges of rampant voter fraud operations. Stuart
was employed and specifically tasked by ACORN to generate 103,000 new voter
registrations from Dade County. He reports that ACORN threw out Republican
registrations while paying for Democratic ones. Stuart also charges that
ACORN targeted ex-cons and that he personally set up registration tables
outside the Miami police department and Dade County jail. He went on to
state, "The voter registration project has been operating illegally since it
started."
ACORN has paid workers for every voter registration card collected -- a
felony in Florida and also illegal in Missouri and Pennsylvania. ACORN also
routinely accepted signatures for Amendment 5 from individuals who were not
currently registered to vote -- a requirement under Florida law.
Voter registration and petition fraud is just the latest chapter in
ACORN's long sordid history. The EPI report also reveals:

ACORN Involved in Union Embezzlement -- In the late 1990s, ACORN's Project
Vote was involved in an $850,000 embezzling scheme, where union funds and
kickbacks were used to illegally aid the 1996 re-election bid of then-
Teamsters President Ron Carey. A New York federal jury found the Teamsters
political director guilty of the conspiracy.

ACORN bilks AmeriCorps -- In 1996, the Inspector General of the AmeriCorps
program stripped a $1 million grant from the ACORN Housing Corporation (AHC).
When applying, AHC had denied any connections to ACORN, since the grant was
not intended for political advocacy organizations. Evidence later uncovered
by the Inspector General found that not only was AHC created by ACORN, engaged
in numerous transactions with one another, and sharing staff and office space
-- but it utilized the AmeriCorps grant to increase ACORN membership, a
violation of federal guidelines.

ACORN Union-Busts Own Workers -- On March 27, 2003 the National Labor
Relations Board (NLRB) found that ACORN had violated the National Labor
Relations Act and was required to rehire and pay restitution to employees
terminated for attempting to form a union. The NLRB ruling is just the latest
in a trend of ACORN's union-busting tactics. ACORN employees have
historically demanded higher wages, safer working conditions and more timely
contracted wages. These efforts have been repressed behind closed doors by
the hypocritical ACORN leadership, which publicly advocates higher pay and
better working conditions for private sector workers.

ACORN and Minimum Wage Hypocrisy -- Most egregiously, ACORN promotes
ballot initiatives and local ordinances to force businesses to pay higher
minimum wages, as they are currently doing with the minimum wage proposal in
Amendment 5. In 1995, however, ACORN sued the state of California to have its
employees exempted from the state minimum wage. ACORN argued that being
forced to pay higher wages would mean that they would hire fewer employees --
the very dilemma faced by businesses. Incredibly, ACORN stated that paying
its employees a lower wage would allow them to be more sympathetic to the low-
and moderate-income families they were attempting to help. ACORN argued that
abiding by the state minimum wage would limit their ability to promote their
agenda and would therefore be a violation of their First Amendment rights.
The trial court judge dismissed ACORN's suits, stating, "leaving aside the
latter argument's absurdity ... we find ACORN to be laboring under a
fundamental misconception of constitutional law."

"ACORN's history of voter registration fraud, hypocrisy, abuse of federal
grant programs, and disregard for sound economics should raise a red flag for
voters considering support for Amendment 5," Garthwaite said.
The full report is available online at http://www.EPIonline.org.

The Employment Policies Institute is a nonprofit research organization
dedicated to studying public policy issues surrounding entry-level employment.


SOURCE Employment Policies Institute

Salzman ripples

Don't send fake letters to newspapers: it's California law

Here's a little bit of wackiness from the California Penal Code:
538a. Every person who signs any letter addressed to a newspaper with the name of a person other than himself and sends such letter to the newspaper, or causes it to be sent to such newspaper, with intent to lead the newspaper to believe that such letter was written by the person whose name is signed thereto, is guilty of a misdemeanor.
Obviously, we don't want impersonations of other people, but at the same time this might impact people who are playing harmless pranks using completely made-up names. Of course, in that case the defense might be that if there's someone by that same name it was just a coincidence.

In any case, my foray into the morass was occasioned by the story "Consultant used others' names in letter-writing blitz to local newspaper":
Activist and political consultant Richard Salzman liked to sound off about his causes in letters to the editors of Eureka-area newspapers. Other local residents, like R. Trent Williams, Dick Wyatt, and R. Johnson, often backed him up, praising Salzman's points and echoing his jabs at political foes.

Salzman made a name for himself last year by helping Humboldt County District Attorney Paul Gallegos defeat a recall attempt backed by the timber industry. Salzman also worked on other successful campaigns in the area.

But his star quickly dimmed when a newspaper revealed that all of those like-minded letters penned over several months actually came from Salzman himself. Now, he's under investigation by local authorities and could face criminal charges for violating a state law that makes it a misdemeanor to send phony letters to newspapers...
On a slightly related note, see "In letters to the editor, too many copycats?"

10.23.2008

The Republican record on racism


May surprise you - I post this for my own reference - but you may find it interesting, h/t: Wolfhowling

◼ The Republican Party - the party of Abraham Lincoln - was borne in 1854 out of opposition to slavery.

◼ The party of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan was, as Jeffrey Lord points out in an article at the WSJ, the Democratic Party. And Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) is the only living member of the Senate who was once a member of the KKK.

- The 13th (abolishing slavery), 14th (due process for all citizens) and 15th (voting rights cannot be restriced on the basis of race) Amendments to the Constitution were enacted by Republicans over Democratic opposition.

- The NAACP was founded in 1909 by three white Republicans who opposed the racist practices of the Democratic Party and the lynching of blacks by Democrats.

◼ In fairness, it was the Democrat Harry Truman who, by Executive Order 9981 issued in 1948, desegregated the military. That was a truly major development. My own belief is that the military has been the single greatest driving force of integration in this land for over half a century.

- It was Chief Justice Earl Warren, a former Republican Governor of California appointed to the Supreme Court by President Eisenhower, also a Republican, who managed to convince the other eight justices to agree to a unanimous decision in the seminal case of Brown v. Board of Education. That case was brought by the NAACP. The Court held segregation in schools unconstitutional. The fact that it was a unanimous decision that overturned precedent made it clear that no aspect of segregation would henceforth be considered constitutional.

- Republican President Ike Eisenhower played additional important roles in furthering equality in America. He "proposed to Congress the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 and signed those acts into law. . . . They constituted the first significant civil rights acts since the 1870s." Moreover, when the Democratic Governor of Arkansas refused to integrate schools in what became known as the "Little Rock Nine" incident, "Eisenhower placed the Arkansas National Guard under Federal control and sent Army troops to escort nine black students into an all-white public school."

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was championed by JFK - but it was passed with massive Republican support over 80%) in Congress and over fierce opposition from Democrats who made repeated attempts at filibuster. Indeed, 80% of the vote opposing the Civil Rights Act came from Democrats.( Women were added to the Act as a protected class by a Democrat who thought it would be a poison pill, killing the legislation. To the contrary, the Congress passed the Act without any attempt to remove the provision....

◼ Martin Luther King Jr. was the most well known and pivotal Civil Rights activist ever produced in America. His most famous speech, "I Had A Dream," was an eloquent and stirring call for equality. If you have not read the speech or heard it, you can find it here. I would highly recommend listening to it. Rev. King was, by the way, a Republican.

Standing At The Crossroads - Identity Politics, Multiculturalism & The Melting Pot (Updated & Bumped)
WSJ
***
Yet not a single teacher will mention any of this. Not a single classroom in the Country will mention any of this. Not a single newspaper will report this.
Related:
DR. ALVEDA C. KING founded King for America, Inc. "to assist people in enriching their lives spiritually, personally, mentally and economically." She is the daughter of the late slain civil rights activist Rev. A. D. King and his wife Naomi Barber King. Alveda is the grateful mother of six children and she is a doting grandmother.

(...) My grandfather, Dr. Martin Luther King, Sr., or “Daddy King”, was a Republican and father of Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr. who was a Republican. (...)