Jury's Requests Don't Bode Well for Jayson Williams

Williams Jury Hears Testimony Readback

As the jury in Jayson Williams' manslaughter trial continues its' second day of deliberations, his attorneys are likely trying to convince the New Jersey Net to accept a plea bargain ... that is, if the prosecutors are even offering one. This case is, and I use this term precisely, a "Slam Dunk". Williams' documented arrogance likely precludes recognizing just how bad the situation is for him, and how likely he is to end up in prison at the conclusion of this trial. I don't envy his attorneys in their efforts to get Williams to accept the inevitable.

The jury has thus far requested the transcipts of two witnesses, each of whom testified as to whether or not Williams tried to get them to lie to police and cover up the shooting death of Costas "Gus" Christofi. This jury knows exactly what it is looking for, and their request would seem to indicate a belief that Williams likely encouraged witnesses to lie about exactly where Christofi was shot, and whether or Christofi had in fact committed suicide:

"Williams, a former New Jersey Nets player, was playing with one of his shotguns in his bedroom when the weapon fired ... Williams, 36, faces eight charges, the most serious of which is aggravated manslaughter. To convict Williams on that charge, the jury must unanimously find that he recklessly caused Christofi's death "under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to human life."

He is also charged with trying to make the shooting look like a suicide by wiping down the shotgun and putting Christofi's hands on the gun. Prosecutors said he also instructed his guests to lie to authorities."

I wrote about Williams' rage in the archives of this blog ("I've had it with the NBA"), and it's something he lets loose with on those who are either weaker than or beholden to him. Christofi was Williams' chauffer and sometime fellow partier.

His crime on the night he died? Rolling his eyes at one of Williams' jokes.

I hope he gets convicted, and the judge maxes his sentence.

Atrocities Against Muslim Women & Girls Pooh-Pooh'ed by Left-Leaning-Lunatics ... er, Peaceniks

Pamela Boone has the LLL's sussed out in The Age: The enemy is not America. In spite of numerous instances where women and girls have been villified, dehumanized, and terrorized by misogynist Islamist cultures, many Feminists, and The Left in general, see America and its' military as the oppressors. This fundamental disconnect is something that fascinates me(that is, until I quickly find myself disgusted), in the same way that I might find fascinating the screaming, babbling, obviously unmedicated guy who paces in front of Water Tower Place here in Chicago. Why would one choose to be so blind to the obvious, so patently miserable, when the answer is right in front of you?

"No, the US didn't go into Iraq, or Afghanistan, to liberate women. Indeed, by the standards of the region Iraqi women were not badly oppressed - notwithstanding the hundreds who were executed by Saddam's son, Uday, for "dishonouring" their country (which meant speaking out about corruption in government). Nothing was done by Western governments to help the women of Afghanistan until Osama bin Laden became a threat. While South Africa was subjected to years of sanctions over the oppression of blacks, no sanctions are applied to countries because they condone or promote the oppression of women.

Yet if there is ever going to be a peaceful world there are few things more important than lifting the status of women. The hatreds of bin Laden and his kind will not be assuaged; but in general, fundamentalism wanes as prosperity increases. . And as a United Nations report notes, a large part of the reason so many countries in the Middle East are overpopulated, economic basket cases is the repression of women ... . (i)f there's a war on, we should be clear about who is the real enemy of civilisation. Despite the reservations any liberal would feel for some policies of the present Administration (and the doubts about its competence), the enemy is not America.

Indeed.

From the "Pot Calling the Kettle Black" files ...

Bill & Hillary Clinton's rabid hound, DNC Chair Terry McAuliffe is screaming "No Fair!"

McAuliffe Defends Kerry After Cheney Rap


"Call off the republican attack dogs," McAuliffe howled, castigating the Vice President Cheney for a speech he has yet to make.

"It's time for Dick Cheney to call off the Republican attack dogs. The American people have better things to do with their time than listen to more misleading attacks from a man who has been misleading them from the day he took office," McAuliffe said.

McAuliffe seems to forget that he and his lone patrons (Bill & Hillary) in the DNC were the architects & fomentors of the "politics of personal destruction", and that turnabout is fairplay. Rest assured, the Bush-Cheney administration was well-prepared for McAuliffe's hypocritical pronouncement:

A spokesman for the Bush-Cheney campaign, Steve Schmidt, responded that McAuliffe has "a staggering lack of credibility" on the issue.

"During the height of the Cold War John Kerry advocated canceling the critical weapons systems that helped win the Cold War and are still being used to win the war on terror," Schmidt said. "After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Vice President Cheney helped transform the military from the Cold War era to the 21st century military that serves America today."

John Kerry Should Have an Honorary PhD in Double Talk

John Forbes Kerry continues to engage in mind-numbing double talk, and frankly my brain is fried from trying to make sense of the reasoning behind statements made to "Good Morning America this AM. As is clear from this GMA Transcript of Kerry, the democratic candidate for President is unable to adequately explain why, after years of claiming that he had thrown his medals over the White House fence in protest over the Viet Nam war, he must now insist otherwise. Why this is so is clear from Kerry's own justification of his action of that day 30+ years ago.

At first, Kerry claimed that he had thrown his own medals away in protest; when confronted by organized labor (upon his entry into the Massachusettes senatorial race) about this disrespect, Kerry justified his actions by claiming that he had sent someone else's medals over the White House fence. Now that the story has resurfaced, and the public is reexamining his actions on that day in 1971, Kerry is trying, desperately, to have it both ways. Witness the latest attempt to spin this telling story:

GIBSON: 1984, senator, to the present. you have said a number of times, as brian pointed out as recently as friday with the ""los angeles times,"" have you said a number of times that you did not throw away the vietnam medals themselves. but now this interview from 1971 shows up the in which you say that was the medals themselves that were thrown away.

KERRY: no, i don't.

GIBSON: can you explain?

KERRY: absolutely. that's absolutely incorrect. charlie, i stood up in front of the nation. there were dozens of cameras there, television cameras, there were -- i don't know. 20, 30 still photographers. thousands of people and i stood up in front of the country, reached into my shirt, visibly for the nation to see, and took the ribbons off my chest, said a few words and threw them over the fence. the file footage, the reporter there from the ""boston globe,"" everybody got it correctly. and i never asserted otherwise. what i said was and back then, you know, ribbons, medals were absolutely interchangeable . senator simmington asking me questions in the committee hearing, look ad at the ribbons and said what are those medals? the u.s. navy pam let calls the medals, we referred to them it is a symbols, representing medals, ribbons, countless veterans through the ribbon -- threw the ribbons back. everybody did. veterans threw back dog tags. they threw back photographs, they th rew back their 14's. there are photographs of a pile of all of those things collected on the steps of the capitol. so the fact is that i have -- i have been accurate precisely about what took place. and i am the one who later made clear exactly what happened. i mean, this is a controversy that the republicans are pushing , the republicans have spent $60 million in the last few weeks trying to attack me. and this comes from a president and a republican party that can't even answer whether or not he showed up for duty in the national guard. i'm not going to stand for it.

GIBSON: senator, i was there 33 years ago and i saw you throw medals over the fence and we didn't find out until later -

KERRY: no, you didn't see me throw th. charlie, charlie, you are wrong. that's not what happened. i threw my ribbons across. all you have to do -

GIBSON: someone else's medals, correct in?

KERRY: after -- excuse me. excuse me, charlie. after the ceremony was over, i had a bronze star and a purple heart given to me, one purple heart by a veteran in the v.a. in new york and the bronze star by an older veteran of world war ii in massachusetts. i threw them over because they asked me to. i never --

GIBSON: let me come back to the thing just said which is the military --

KERRY: this is a phony -- charlie, this is a phony controversy.

GIBSON:the military makes no distinction between ribbons and medals but you are the one who made the distinction. in 1984 --

KERRY: no . we made no distinction back then, charlie. we made no distinction.

Kerry knows there is no distinction between ribbons and medals. And yet he chose, very precisely, I might add, to keep his own medals, as they might prove useful later in a political campaign. Countrary to his repeated assertions, he did make a distinction: one bourne of a curious combination of disdain for combat and those who engage in it, intermingled with a craven desire for grasping the political opportunities said medals could bring about. As is his wont, he is attempting, quite transparently, to have it both ways.

Note also that as he is trying to explain his own actions, he predictably brings up the subject of Bush's Air National Guard service (unlike Kerry, Bush has made all military records pertinent to his service available to the press: Kerry has yet to meet the standard of full disclosure). He blew this interview with Charlie Gibson, and his handlers have to know it. They must be hoping that the "anyone but Bush" sentiment is so strong that no amount of truth applied to Kerry's public persona could penetrate it. With the diehard LLL's this is so: but in key swing states like Ohio, where God, Family and Country form a triumverate that trumps liberalism, people see the distinction. Kerry's insisting otherwise is wishful thinking.

Perhaps I'm wrong, but could we in fact be witnessing the "YEEEEAAAAAGGGGHHHH!" moment of John Forbes Kerry?