Where Are My Keys?

Rich fat-cat businessman sued to pay employees money owed..

Here's an example of a connected Rich Guy finally being held to paying hard-working employees the money earned, that he had been withholding.  These five men just want to be paid for work they did for his organization.  It's a shame they had to go to court to get what was owed them:

Sued for non-payment by a group of coaches, the owner of Sacramento's moribund minor league football team vowed today to make good on the debt.

The majority owner of the Sacramento Mountain Lions also told The Bee that he hopes the team and the league can resume operations next spring.

He acknowledged that his coaches are still owed pay after the Mountain Lions and the entire United Football League suspended operations during mid-season last fall.

"I'm committed to pay them and they will be paid," he said. He added that the team's players have been paid.

Did I forget to mention that the majority owner is Paul Pelosi, husband of Nancy Pelosi?  Here I thought Democrats were all for taking care of the workers and the "little guy".  Why does Mr. Pelosi hate the working class so much?

Your predictions on the Zimmerman case? +++UPDATED+++

I'm thinking he walks.  After watching/reading some of the goings-on, I can't fathom how a jury doesn't walk away with some reasonable doubt.  In my opinion, the whole case hinges on who threw the first punch. 

If Zimmerman did, he was clearly the aggressor, and anything that happens after that punch is on him.

If Martin threw the first punch, than Zimmerman is well within his rights to defend himself.

We can argue all day on how the circumstances would have been different if Zimmerman hadn't gotten out of his vehicle.  We can also argue about how the circumstances would have been different if Martin hadn't made the choice to confront Zimmerman.

Bottom line, regardless of the outcome from the trial, both men made poor decisions, and both men are stuck with life-altering repercussions-Martin lost his life, and Zimmerman, in a sense, lost his.

I'm guessing that in that split second before the fateful shot was fired, both men wished they had taken a different approach.

+++UPDATE+++

The verdict is in: Not Guilty.

Zimmerman/Martin murder case, Day 4..

As usual, Legal Insurrection has a great recap:

Much of the day was consumed in West’s continuing cross-examination of Rachel Jeantel, the State’s star “ear-witness.” She was purportedly on the phone with Martin up to the final moments of his confrontation with Zimmerman, and has over time come to claim an increasing amount of knowledge of the details of that confrontation.

It has become common knowledge that Jeantel has perpetrated a number of lies on this case, both under oath and otherwise, and West made certain to touch on each of these, albeit with a relatively light hand. She lied about her age–she was 18-years-old not 16-years-old at the time, she lied about why she did not attend Martin’s funeral or wake, she lied about her name to Martin’s mother and others, and so on.

For many of these lies she offered a relatively innocuous excuse–she didn’t go the funeral because she doesn’t like to see dead bodies, for example. But the sheer number and variety of them cast Jeantel as someone who was perfectly comfortable creating a fabrication if it served her convenience or purposes.

The State's "star witness" was just plain awful.  Certainly appears as if she was coached after the fact, and didn't look all too credible on the stand.  Excellent job by the defense to not paint her as an idiot (thus making the jury sympathetic to her), but to systematically destroy her testimony.

The second witness didn't do any favors for the prosecution either, as she was unable to identify Zimmerman from a photo taken as he sat in the patrol car.  Zimmerman was a person she had met before, at HOA meetings.  Lends credibility to his claim of self defense, as he was beaten badly enough to render him unrecognizable to a person that was familiar with him.

Shockingly, she was unable to identify Zimmerman, because of the severity of his injuries. This powerful testimony obviously strongly supported the defense’s theory of the case that Zimmerman had been the subject of a brutal aggravated assault by Martin, against which he had necessarily used deadly force in self-defense. With that statement Lauer had struck a heavy blow against the State’s theory of the case, of an innocent young black boy ruthless murdered, and in favor of the theory of the defense.

She also spoke to his character:

O’Mara then asked a few questions that will undoubtedly–if incorrectly–become great overnight fodder for the legal pundits. He asked Lauer if in her personal interactions with Zimmerman he had acted appropriately. Yes, she answered. Did he appear to be a hot head? No. A wannabe vigilante? No. Did he seem to be a well-intentioned neighbor trying to help his community? Yes.

Good day for the defense, not so much for the prosecution.

Let me make sure I understand..

When SCOTUS upheld Obamcare as "good law", they were wise and just in the eyes of the Left.  Today, when the same Court strikes down the Voting Rights Act, they are insane.

It's so difficult to understand how the Liberal mind operates.

Hey, perjury in the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman case!

Never a good thing when your star witness lied under oath:

The murder case against half-Latino neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman was dealt a devastating blow Tuesday, when prosecutors acknowledged that their star witness, the 19-year old former girlfriend of the late Florida teenager Trayvon Martin, lied under oath.

The woman, who also told police she was on the phone with Martin shortly before his death, falsely testified that she was in the hospital on the day of Martin’s funeral — perhaps to garner sympathy.

“In fact, she lied,” defense attorney Don West said. Prosecutors also acknowledged her lie, but were reportedly vague about whether they would charge the woman with perjury.

Funny how Zimmerman is referred to as "half-Latino", yet Barack Obama isn't referred to as "half-Black" or "half-White", isn't it?

Isn't this forcing a suspect to self-incriminate?

Interesting events in a case involving an encrypted hard drive:

A federal magistrate is reversing course and ordering a Wisconsin man suspected of possessing child pornography to decrypt hard drives the authorities seized from his residence.

The development comes as a month after the same magistrate thwarted prosecutors’ demandsthat Jeffrey Feldman unlock drives they believe contain child pornography.

Decryption orders are rare, but are likely to become more commonplace as the public slowly embraces a technology that comes standard even on Apple computers. The orders have never squarely been addressed by the Supreme Court, despite varying opinions in the lower courts.

Just last month, U.S. Magistrate William Callahan Jr. said the Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination protected even those suspected of unsavory crimes, but added that “this is a close call.”

But prosecutors convinced Callahan to change his mind. Among other reasons, the authorities were able, on their own, to decrypt one drive from Feldman’s “storage system” and discovered more than 700,000 files, some of “which constitute child pornography,” the magistrate said.

When he ruled against the government last month, the magistrate said the authorities did not have enough evidence linking Feldman to the data, and that forcing the computer scientist to unlock it would be tantamount to forcing him to confess that it was his. But that theory is now out the door, because the data on the decrypted drive contains pictures and financial information linking Feldman to the “storage system,” the magistrate said last week.

“Such being the case, the government has now persuaded me that it is a ‘foregone conclusion’ that Feldman has access to and control over the subject encrypted storage devices. Thus, under the current state of the law as more particularly discussed in the court’s April 19 Decision and Order, Fifth Amendment protection is no longer available to Feldman with respect to the contents of the encrypted storage devices.”

How is this any different than me having a locked super-secure safe in my house, after the Cops have shown up with a warrant?  They can't force me to open that safe, can they?  They can ask for the key/combination, I can tell them I lost it, and it's on them to find a way in.

The authorities know the hard drive is his, they know it is encrypted, how can he be compelled to "unlock" it for him, and not violate the Fifth Amendment?

Good.

The "discovery" process should be interesting.

Disgusting abuse of power..

 

Why was he arrested?  Mr. Grisham will soon be winning a large sum of money from the State of Texas.

Can't marry, can't divorce?

A judge in Arizona has refused to divorce the "pregnant man" that gave birth to three kids.

Welcome to the world's most confusing divorce case. A judge in Arizona today declined to grant a divorce to Thomas Beatie, who attained minor celebrity status as the "pregnant man" a few years back and gave birth to three children. Beatie, who was born a woman but identifies as a man, married wife Nancy in Hawaii in 2003. But was he a man or a woman at the time? Beatie had undergone a double-mastectomy by then and was starting hormone therapy, but he still had a woman's reproductive organs, reports AP. The judge today decreed that there wasn't enough evidence proving Beatie was a man at the time of the wedding. That makes it a same-sex marriage, which means that the state of Arizona doesn't recognize it. And if the state doesn't recognize the marriage, it can't grant a divorce, either.

SCOTUS and Marriage..

As usual, Steyn nails it:

 Three weeks ago, I wrote:

An institution that predates the United States by several millennia will be defined for a third of a billion people by whichever way Anthony Kennedy feels like swingin’ that morning. The universal deference to judicial supremacism is bizarre and unbecoming to a free people.

Paul Mirengoff says today over at Powerline:

The fact that the Supreme Court may be about to pass judgment on the age-old definition of marriage is the reductio ad absurdum of American constitutional jurisprudence. That we have reached this point tells us that the Supreme Court has taken some terribly wrong turns.

The fact that, until very recently, marriage has universally been deemed to require an opposite sex component doesn’t mean that this component must be required forevermore. But a decent appreciation of democracy, human history, and the fallibility of the individual means that nine glorified lawyers shouldn’t be the ones who make the change. Nor should they be in a position where they might make it.

Amen. And no court with any understanding of accountable government or constitutional propriety would go along with it. It may well be that the tide has turned, and the American people are cool with gay marriage. In that case, their elected representatives should enact it into law (as the House of Commons at Westminster recently did). But the spectacle of a nation agog waiting for a puff of smoke from Justice Kennedy to see which way he’s going to blow is ridiculous. Why not ask Punxsutawney Phil?