The news out of Richmond, California today is that a bloody fight broke out at City Hall...in the office of a gang prevention unit. The details are pretty funny... if you think bringing the ghetto into the corridors of power is a bad idea:    

A bloody fistfight broke out among rival gang members at Richmond City Hall on Friday, according to police.

The ONS director said he sees the unarmed brawl as a sign of progress, since the young men involved all have a history of gun violence.

“They decided to pick their fists up instead of a gun,” Boggan said. “Everyone got up and walked away—not one mother has to bury their child this week.”

San Francisco businesses that hire people with felony convictions would get a tax break, under legislation expected to be introduced today.

"Ex-felons are among the most challenged populations in getting work," said Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi, who is crafting the plan.
...The goal is to shave about $10,000 off a business' companywide payroll tax burden for every new convict it hires full time. The tax relief for companies hiring part-time employees would be less.

The exact formula was still being developed Monday. The city's payroll tax is equivalent to 1.5 percent of the value of an employee's compensation package.

It's another one of those rare days when the Obama Administration launches an initiative that I wholly support. Today it was the four US attorneys in California launching a major crack down on the state's marijuana dispensaries:  

The four United States attorneys in the Golden State announced an initiative cracking down on medical marijuana dispensaries on Friday in Sacramento, according to this Associated Press story.

In recent weeks, landlords of some pot shops have received letters from federal prosecutors warning them to stop sales within 45 days or risk seizure of their property and criminal charges

“I assume the story you’re calling about is: Obama takes resources away from fighting terrorists and goes after old ladies with glaucoma,” Greg Anton, a lawyer for the Marin Alliance for Medical Marijuana in Fairfax, Calif., told the LAT.

You may have heard that CA was ordered to release tens of thousands of prisoners to deal with a level of overcrowding that is, apparently, unconstitutional. Even Jerry Brown is not eager to have a re-run of the soft-on-crime Seventies; but, since the one practical solution - that would be building some new prisons - is impossible in CA's can't-do society, prison "reform" is taking the form of releasing prisoners to county sheriffs.     

Starting Monday, California will radically change the way it sentences criminals, sending the first of thousands to serve time behind bars in their local county jails instead of in state prisons.

They show up bright and early on Saturday mornings, parking cars and trucks along the side of Pacific Boulevard and polishing them inside and out. Once they have chalked prices onto the windshields (an old Honda Civic for $1,900) they are open for business: a pop-up used car lot on the side of the road.

But like so many other pop-up markets in Southern California, the dealerships are unlicensed, unregulated and, according to public officials, illegal.

Now, local governments are trying to curb the unlicensed dealers by making it illegal to park any car with a “For Sale” sign in the areas where these markets proliferate. TheCity of Los Angeles has already enacted a ban on two major streets, and the county is set to add Pacific Boulevard and many more roads to that list after a final vote Tuesday.

“This attempt to use the street as a place of business creates a hazard for businesses and residents who pay taxes to maintain those streets,” a Los Angeles County supervisor, Gloria Molina, said. “We are trying to correct a public nuisance.”

These used car markets have appeared all over Los Angeles County in the past 15 years, especially in the largely Latino communities southeast of Los Angeles like Walnut Park, where they conduct business entirely in Spanish.

Much as I would like to believe that the "socialist" (as if he could survive 5 minutes under real socialism) head of the IMF actually sodomized a hotel maid yesterday...I find it hard to believe.

...

DSK is no stranger to sex-capades, which I have discussed before. That's the magic of being a "socialist." You can live like an old-fashioned potentate, so long as you mouth the right words about equality and justice.

Still, a rape accusation is a harsh thing, something that has already ended DSK's career at the IMF and likely ended his political career as well. The details are so bizarre - supposedly a naked DSK entered the room, found the maid, and ordered her to give him a BJ (what, no teabagging?) - as to be almost incredible. If he really did do this, it can't have been the first time.

Mrs. Mellon, a Democrat in a world of Republicans, first met Mr. Edwards, a former senator from North Carolina, through Mr. Huffman five years ago. She expressed an interest in Mr. Edwards because he reminded her of President John F. Kennedy, she told the decorator. And he arranged a first meeting, over tea, at her estate, Oak Spring Farms, in Upperville, Va.

Mr. Edwards ingratiated himself with Mrs. Mellon to the point where she gave him millions of dollars as well as a gold necklace as a good-luck charm for the campaign trail, according to a tell-all memoir by Andrew Young, Mr. Edwards’s former aide, who is also an unindicted co-conspirator in the case.

In May 2007, when Mr. Edwards’s mistress, Rielle Hunter, told Mr. Edwards she was pregnant, Mr. Edwards and Mr. Young began looking for people who could give them money to help conceal the affair, the indictment said.

About the same time, it said, Mrs. Mellon wrote a note to Mr. Young, saying: “I was sitting alone in a grim mood — furious that the press attacked Senator Edwards on the price of a haircut. But it inspired me — from now on, all haircuts, etc. that are necessary and important for his campaign — please send the bills to me. ... It is a way to help our friend without government restrictions.”

At that point, the indictment said, Mrs. Mellon had already contributed the maximum permitted by law — $2,300 — to Mr. Edwards’s campaign.

Over the next eight months, the indictment said, Mrs. Mellon sent checks for Mr. Edwards through Mr. Huffman totaling $725,000, “falsely” referring in memo lines to things like “chairs,” “antique Charleston table” and “bookcase.” (Mr. Huffman refused to discuss this aspect of the case.)

At the deepest level, many of these shifts, taken together, suggest that crime in the United States is falling—even through the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression—because of a big improvement in the culture. The cultural argument may strike some as vague, but writers have relied on it in the past to explain both the Great Depression's fall in crime and the explosion of crime during the sixties. In the first period, on this view, people took self-control seriously; in the second, self-expression—at society's cost—became more prevalent. It is a plausible case.

The arrest in New York of one of France’s leading global figures and a possible next president, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, on charges of attempted rape produced an earthquake of shock, outrage, disbelief and embarrassment throughout France on Sunday.

The country woke up to the tawdry allegations that Mr. Strauss-Kahn, 62, a leading Socialist and the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, had waylaid and tried to rape a maid in a $3,000-a-night suite at a New York hotel, and the reverberations were immediate.

The government of President Nicolas Sarkozy responded cautiously, saying the presumption of innocence must be maintained and the courts must be allowed to do their work, while the leader of the Socialist Party, Martine Aubry, admitted that she was “totally stupefied” by the charges against the man who had been considered most likely to bring her party back to power in next year’s presidential elections by defeating Mr. Sarkozy.

Thirty-five years ago, three men in their 20s kidnapped a bus full of schoolchildren in the Central Valley town of Chowchilla (Madera County), stuffed them and their driver into a makeshift underground dungeon and demanded a $5 million ransom.

The 27 prisoners dug their way to freedom after 16 hours, the abductors were nabbed and given life terms in prison, and the victims all tried to get on with their lives.

...

The Schoenfelds lived in Atherton and Woods lived in Portola Valley. They told relatives they hijacked the school bus at gunpoint on a road in Chowchilla on July 15, 1976, to get money to pay off a $30,000 debt they'd racked up in buying a house.

After piling the driver and all the children into vans, they drove them 100 miles north to Livermore, where they left the prisoners buried in a moving van in a quarry.

That's when, failing to get through overloaded phone lines at the Chowchilla police station, they took a nap. When they woke up, they learned from the radio that their victims had dug themselves free. Richard Schoenfeld turned himself in eight days later, and the other two were captured less than a week later. The Schoenfelds' only brother, John Schoenfeld of Belmont, said his siblings would have jobs waiting if they got out. Richard Schoenfeld, now 57, could work at drafting, and James Schoenfeld, 59, could work in air conditioning, he said.