Former Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell still feels upset about the shooting death of his service dog DASY almost three years after the fact.
When the local war hero took the stand Thursday in the cruelty to non-livestock animals trial of Alfonso Hernandez, one of the two accused in the case, Luttrell said he was so angry the night his dog was killed that he drew a pistol on the car the suspects were riding in.
I wanted to take a shot at the driver, but I figured if I missed and shot out the back window, I would not be able to catch them, Luttrell said.
An hour after DASY was shot on April 1, 2009, law enforcement officers eventually caught up to the car with Luttrells help. And Thursday, Luttrell got some closure in the case.
Hernandez was found guilty of a state jail felony by a Walker County jury of four men and eight women in the 278th District Court.
Two days earlier, Michael Edmonds pleaded guilty to the same charge and admitted he was the one who fired the shot that killed DASY, a Labrador retriever that was given to Luttrell by friends to help him cope with emotional and physical injuries he sustained while fighting in the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Edmonds and Hernandez, who was charged as an accomplice, will have to wait for a pre-sentence investigation to be conducted before a punishment is handed down, which is expected to take place in February. Cruelty to non-livestock animals carries a sentence of up to two years in a state facility and a $10,000 fine.
Luttrell, who left as soon as he finished testifying Thursday morning, is best known for being the lone survivor of a mission in June 2005 when his SEAL team was pinned down in a firefight with Taliban forces in Afghanistan. He was awarded the Navy Cross for combat heroism in 2006.
Luttrell had DASY, whose name is an acronym of the initials of Luttrells team members who were killed in the firefight, for four years. He testified Thursday that at around 2 a.m. on April 1, 2009, he let DASY out and sat down in his home on Four Notch Road in southeast Walker County, to watch television because he had trouble sleeping.
Luttrell said he heard a single gunshot, grabbed his pistol and ran next door to his mothers residence to check on her. He then made his way down to the roadway, crawled underneath a fence and saw DASY had been shot.
I saw my dog in a ditch and two men standing outside the car, Luttrell said with his new service dog by his side on the stand. I could hear them laughing.
The car, which belonged to Alfonso Hernandez, was being driven by Caleb McGough. Edmonds and Arturo Hernandez, Alfonsos brother, were also passengers. McGough and Arturo Hernandez did not face charges in the case.
Edmonds testified that he shot DASY, but that the others wanted to go back and look at the dog. He said that Alfonso Hernandez then got out and started beating the dog with a wooden baseball bat.
Luttrell chased the suspects through Walker, San Jacinto and Polk counties before a patrol officer with the Onalaska Police Department pulled the car over on Highway 190 near the bridge over Lake Livingston.
The jury heard testimony this week from Texas Ranger Steve Jeter, who helped investigate the case, and Edmonds that Alfonso Hernandez and Edmonds were connected to other dog shootings prior to the incident on Four Notch Road.
This time they shot the wrong dog, the dog of a man who cant sleep at night, Walker County Assistant District Attorney John Hafley said during closing arguments. ... Everyone else would have been sleeping. They shot the wrong dog and this time they were stopped. ... (Alfonso Hernandez) is a dog killer who celebrated like they scored a touchdown.
Defense attorney Fritz Barnett challenged the states lack of evidence that his client knowingly and intentionally took part in DASYs death. He said Alfonso Hernandez was out hunting varmints and had no idea Edmonds was going to shoot a dog.
(Alfonso Hernandez) was out hunting rabbits, coons and possums, Barnett said in closing arguments. ... It would have been like if Mr. Luttrell had been out on patrol in Afghanistan and one of his men up and shot a woman or a child and Mr. Luttrell was held responsible. Alfonso was not responsible for what Mr. Edmonds did.
... Going out and shooting dogs might have been in (Edmonds) mind, but there is no shred of evidence it was in Alfonsos mind.
Assistant District Attorney Stephanie Stroud went back to the testimony of Luttrell and Edmonds before the state rested its case. Luttrell said he heard laughing and Edmonds said Alfonso Hernandez laughed while he hit DASY with a bat.
(Alfonso Hernandez) got out and kicked and beat that dog and thought it was funny. They thought it was just another dog, she said. To Marcus Luttrell it was so much more. It was a symbol he carried around for what happened to him. He was reminded of the people it was named after. To Marcus Luttrell that was just not another dog.
#1
Sometimes, assigning certain individuals to the group Homo Sapiens is just wrong. I believe there's an entire life category called the slime mold. Perhaps if these assholes repent really, really hard, and pray, they might be allowed up into the slime mold category in their next life.
Posted by: Richard Aubrey ||
12/03/2011 9:10 Comments ||
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#2
My fantasy:
Judge to defendants: You have a choice of sentencing: two years in the state penitentiary, or 20 minutes alone with Mr Luttrell, who is allowed to do anything to you he can with his bare hands. Remember that Mr. Luttrell is a former SEAL. Think carefully, gentlemen.
Posted by: Rambler in Virginia ||
12/03/2011 10:11 Comments ||
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#3
At least with the SEAL it would be relatively quick.
And AFAIAC, there is no such thing as "just another dog", except maybe in the mind of a criminal like this, who needs to have his DNA and fingerprints put on file.
#5
"... It would have been like if Mr. Luttrell had been out on patrol in Afghanistan and one of his men up and shot a woman or a child and Mr. Luttrell was held responsible. Alfonso was not responsible for what Mr. Edmonds did."
Example No. 456789432 illustrating why people have higher opinions of crack whores than lawyers...
#6
I'm surprised that argument by his lawyer didn't work. Heh.
Posted by: Frank G ||
12/03/2011 11:20 Comments ||
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#7
Luttrell is a poster-boy for SEALs, who grew up on a ranch in east Texas. His book is worth the read. Especially interesting is the part where he is hosted by local Afghans until he's rescued.
May the fleas of a thousand dogs infest anybody who shoots a dog!
Posted by: Bobby ||
12/03/2011 15:28 Comments ||
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#8
All in all, I think Marcus Luttrell was restrained when his dog got killed by these four cruel lame brain idiots.
#11
I would find anyone innocent if they shoot any of them. But somehow I think something worse may await them in the Texas Penal System. Where do dog killers stand relative to pederasts?
#13
These bad guys should learn. If you get arrested for shooting a dog, you are not cut out for a life of crime. The best you can hope for is that the police catch you before a citizen catches you.
#16
coon and varmint hunting often takes place at that time of night. i do not buy their story that that is what they were doing, but living in backwoods GA, you do see some varmint hunting at that hour (sometimes even legit). lot of variation in the regulations for such activity from state to state.
These perps are scum and it would have been quite difficult to find a jury to convict the seal if he had killed all 4 on the spot.
Posted by: abu do you love ||
12/03/2011 18:34 Comments ||
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Ukulele player Bill Tapia, believed to be the oldest performing musician in the world, died on Friday at the age of 103, his official website said.
Honolulu-born Tapia, who played with the likes of Louis Armstrong and Bing Crosby, died in his sleep at his home in Los Angeles, the website said.
Tapia, whose nickname was Tappy, died just six months after releasing his latest album a live version of his 100th birthday concert celebration and one month short of what would have been his 104th birthday in January 2012.
Tapia started his career entertaining troops from World War I and later worked on steamships between the U.S. West Coast and Hawaii. He became a teacher to Hollywood stars including Clark Gable and Shirley Temple when a ukulele craze hit the United States.
After World War II, Tapia moved to San Francisco and worked for years as a guitar teacher until making a comeback in 2004, age of 96, with the release of a CD featuring jazz and Hawaiian standards.
Tapia was inducted into the Ukulele Hall of Fame in 2004 and continued to tour until 2010.
News of his death on Friday, also posted on his Facebook page, brought tributes from friends and fans.
#1
These people love to perform for everyone anywhere.
I remember a Vaudeville banjo player in his 90's at the time perform at a party. He had constant eye contact and a big smile for everyone. Generally they stay fit mentally and physically. Just like this Tappy.
The National Security Agency (NSA) announces today that it has declassified and released to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) over 50,000 pages of historic records. These records cover a time-frame from before World War I through the 1960s.
This release of documents is the first in a series of releases planned over the next two years as part of NSA/CSSs commitment to meeting the requirements outlined in the Presidents 21 January 2009 Memorandum on Openness and Transparency in Government (Executive Order 13526).
Highlights of this release include:
Manuals, charts, and other documents on the development of early computer systems at NSA/CSS, including the HARVEST. This innovative system was developed with IBM and was in use from 1962 to 1976;
Early publications on cryptography, including Cryptology: Instruction Book on the Art of Secret Writing from 1809;
Documents from World War II, including previously unreleased German documents from the Target Intelligence Committee (TICOM).
The released documents will be maintained by NARA and available for review at the National Archives at College Park, 8601 Adelphi Road, College Park, Maryland. A list of the documents is available on NSAs Declassification and Transparency Webpage.
Since the records were physically transferred to NARA, NSA is no longer the custodian and does not maintain copies of the records for release under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Information about conducting research at NARA is available on the National Archives Website.
#1
President's 21 January 2009 Memorandum on Openness and Transparency in Government (Executive Order 13526).
Now I get it! Zero didn't mean to suggest he would be open and transparent, nor his administration. Just they guys that kept the secrets had to start being open - by Executive Order. It's not bad enough we have Wikileaks, Obumble has to go and make it official.
Posted by: Bobby ||
12/03/2011 15:21 Comments ||
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[An Nahar] Election-related violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo killed at least 18 civilians between November 26 and 28, Human Rights Watch ... dedicated to bitching about human rights violations around the world... said Friday, urging an end to killings by security forces.
"The government of the Democratic Republic of Congo should immediately rein in its security forces, especially the Republican Guard, and prevent the targeting of political opponents and their supporters in the aftermath of the November 28, 2011 presidential and legislative elections," the group said in a statement.
The New York-based rights watchdog said the majority of those killed were rubbed out by Republican Guard soldiers in the capital Kinshasa.
Other non-combatants were killed and maimed during festivities between rival political parties, attacks by gangs and mob violence, it added.
At least 100 civilians had been seriously maimed in election-related violence, it said.
Human Rights Watch warned further unrest could erupt when the provisional results of the presidential election -- which pits incumbent Joseph Kabila against a field of 10 opposition candidates -- are announced on December 6.
"Tensions are running high given the logistical complications of organizing the election," Anneke Van Woudenberg, Human Rights Watch senior Africa researcher, said in the statement.
"Security forces should be protecting people, not fueling the violence."
Monday's polls were rocked by apparent separatist attacks in the restive southeastern city of Lubumbashi that officials had said left 10 to 11 people dead, including two police.
The campaign also saw deadly festivities between police and opposition supporters, and repeated street fighting between Kabila's partisans and those of his chief rival, veteran opposition leader Etienne Tshisekedi.
Posted by: Fred ||
12/03/2011 00:00 ||
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#1
Given the milieu, a peaceful and orderly elections.
A report given to a high-level advisory group in Saudi Arabia claims that allowing women in the kingdom to drive could encourage premarital sex, a rights activist said Saturday. And blindness. And excessive hair growth. And acne. And excessively tight turban fitment.
The ultraconservative stance suggests increasing pressure on King Abdullah to retain the kingdom's male-only driving rules despite international criticism. Did the same folks who put together the NIE about Iran not being a threat put this together?
After holding his position as head of the Mexican Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) for less than a year, Humerto Moreira Valdes resigned Friday, according to Mexican news accounts.
Moreira submitted his resignation at the 38th Special Session of the PRI today.
In his place, Cristina Diaz a former Nuevo Leon state mayor and previous general secretary of the PRI, has assumed leadership on an interim, presumably temporary basis.
Moreira has come under severe criticism, both within and outside PRI for his role in the massive expansion of Coahuila state government spending and debt assumption during his term as governor.
The ensuing scandal which began last August has caused four top officials with the Coahuila finance ministry to either resign, go to trial or has simply disappeared. Much of the debt acquired during his term had been fraudulently contracted using falsified docuemnts and allegedly forged signatures. News reports indicate the fraud goes back as far as December 2009.
Moreira's record as leader of the PRI has been nearly exemplary, save for the Michoacan elections last month in which the PRI barely eked out a win in the governor's house by less than 63,000 votes, and fail to get a majority in the state Chamber of deputies. All the other state elections during his brief tenure were marked by crushing wins over the opposition both in the legislatures or in municipalities, continuing the near clean sweep by his predecessor, Beatriz Parades Rangel, during whose term the PRI flipped or retained 11 of 14 state houses.
During the last few months as the scandal grew clearer, calls were raised by the leadership within some of the PRI's internal organizations for his resignation, calls which he fiercely resisted, claiming the scandal was about politics.
A protest began last week including PRI members in Tabasco state and elsewhere within the national PRI structure threatened the internal cohesion of the party which was uniting behind former Mexico state governor Enrique Pena Nieto, who is widely considered to be the frontrunner for president of the republic. Mexican presidential elections take pace the first Sunday in July, 2012.
At issue was the way Moreira rammed the coalition among PRI, Partido Verde Ecologista de Mexico (PVEM) and Convergencia through.
Although Mexican news accounts fail to report on it, it is possible the removal of Sonoran Senator Manilo Beltrones from consideration for PRI candidate as president may have also played a role in forcing Moreira's resignation.
Senator Beltrones had demanded at least an explanation from Moreira for his role in the debt scandal in Coahuila in a public speech earlier last month.
A few days later a contrite Beltrones removed his name fron consideration citing the need for party unity.
The southern Russian republic of Ingushetia has banned sales of alcohol on Thursdays and Fridays.
Supporters say the measure is intended to help fight bootleg booze and reduce the number of drunk-driving accidents. However, some locals maintain that the new legislation is closely connected with Islam. The head of the republic insists that the new law is in no way meant to discriminate against people of other faiths.
In Ingushetia, alcohol sales are allowed between 10 a.m. and 10 p.m. during the rest of the week. In neighbouring Chechnya, you can only buy alcohol between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m. During the bloody holy month of Ramadan, all sales of alcohol are banned.
[The Local (Sweden)] A man from Nyköping in eastern Sweden has been denied a power wheelchair despite having had both of his legs amputated as the local health authority remained "uncertain if the impairment was permanent".
The man had his legs amputated after a long struggle with diabetes, but despite being unable get about, his application for a power wheelchair has been denied.
"I was bitterly disappointed in the local authorities. I don't feel I got the support I deserve," Evert Stefansson told The Local.
Evert Stefansson had struggled with his health for a long time. As a long-suffering diabetic his kidneys have taken a beating, as has his eyesight.
About a year ago, his condition took a turn for the worse when his toe suddenly went black. He was rushed to hospital where they had no other choice than to amputate his leg. Within a year, they had to take his other leg too.
Since then Evert has experienced some difficulty in getting about. He might be able to walk short distances again with prosthetic legs, but that will take up to a year, according to his wife Siv.
In order to regain some of his independence, Stefansson applied for a so-called Permobile, a power wheelchair, that he could manoeuvre himself.
"But I had my suspicions right from the start that it wouldn't be easy, when the woman from the county visited. She sort of hinted that he could have an ordinary electric wheelchair," Siv Stefansson said.
The electric wheelchair was less desirable as it would still need a carer operating it, and would therefore not allow Stefansson to get about by himself, without the constant help of his wife.
However, some people cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go... the motivation for the county council's decision was allegedly that it was "uncertain if the impairment was permanent", reported local media.
After the couple found out that Evert's application would be rejected, Siv decided to take the matter into her own hands.
"I got angry. It just isn't right that he has worked all his life but now can't do anything that he loves anymore. Not even go fishing," she told The Local. "I decided to contact the papers and the broadcast media. And it was definitely what was needed."
Through media's reports, a woman in the nearby area caught wind of the couple's plight and contacted her brother, who works with permobiles and has previously helped others in the same predicament. Thanks to the woman's initiative, Evert's new permobile will arrive next week, on loan from the company that manufactures them.
"I am overjoyed! It is by far the best Christmas present we could receive," Siv Stefansson told The Local.
Posted by: Fred ||
12/03/2011 00:00 ||
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#1
And they want us to believe there are no death panels.
#1
weâre struggling to figure out how to deal with reasonable accommodations [of minorities].
By giving minorities a veto over the majority?
That was the form of government for most of history till democracies came in vague around the start of the 19th Century. Now we're devolving back to the will of the few over the many, not derived by the consent of the governed but to alleviate 'feelings'.
#3
Except there is no judicial creation doctrine of absolute separation of church and state in Canada. As noted in a previous day's posting of the Rant, the South Koreans have erected a Christmas Tree display on the DMZ. South Korea is not predominately Christian, but have adopted [as the Japanese] it as a consumer/business cultural holiday celebration.
[Dawn] The emergence of four new cases of polio ...Poliomyelitis is a disease caused by infection with the poliovirus. Between 1840 and the 1950s, polio was a worldwide epidemic. Since the development of polio vaccines the disease has been largely wiped out in the civilized world. However, since the vaccine is known to make Moslem pee-pees shrink and renders females sterile, bookish, and unsubmissive it is not widely used by the turban and automatic weapons set... (type-I wild virus) has showed that the federal government`s campaign has failed to achieve the desired results despite the fact that a polio eradication emergency year has been declared in the country, Dawn has learnt.
The number of nationwide polio cases has now reached 165 after the four new reports came from Bahawalpur, Qila Abdullah, Balochistan ...the Pak province bordering Kandahar and Uruzgun provinces in Afghanistan and Sistan Baluchistan in Iran. Its native Baloch propulation is being displaced by Pashtuns and Punjabis and they aren't happy about it... , and Khyber and Bajaur agencies in Fata. According to a senior federal government official, the affected children had been given routine dosages of polio vaccine.
"This is the second case after a span of over two years in Bahawalpur, where the first one was reported in June 2009. Now it has affected a baby girl, Hafza Bibi, 4," said the official. "Waleed Rehman, 21-month, from Khyber Agency and Naseerullah, 4, of Bajaur were also given dosages of polio vaccine but the crippling virus attacked them," he added.
Pakistain now risks becoming the last remaining reservoir of the endemic polio virus in the world, and the only remaining threat to achieving global polio eradication. The virus is continuing to cripple children in Pakistain because of the failure to reach all children with sufficient dosages of vaccine.
The official said the federal government`s polio campaign was on degeneration and the emergence of new polio cases was evidence of its poor performance.
In a report, Dr Altaf Bosan, the national coordinator for the prime minister`s monitoring and coordination cell for polio, recommended: "There is a need for radical steps by the provincial, district health and administrative leadership to plug the gaps in the campaign quality with special focus on high-risk tehsil, UCs and hard-to-reach areas," added the official.
Officials in the national polio emergency campaign, including Dr Bosan, refused to give any statement to this news hound. However, the difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits... a health expert added: "The government has to rethink its policy about the anti-polio drive which is being looked after by the bureaucracy, including the cabinet division."
Posted by: Fred ||
12/03/2011 00:00 ||
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Internet traffic and Web search measurement tools from several sources indicate that despite massive promotion efforts on MSNBC and in other venues, Politico.com is rapidly losing readers, especially outside of Washington, D.C.
Measurements of U.S. Web traffic provided to The Daily Caller by Compete, Inc. indicate that the number of total monthly visits to Politico.com dropped by 31.8 percent during the 18-month period that ended on October 31.
During that same period, and perhaps not coincidentally, Politico has come under sustained criticism from many observers, including Fox News Channel anchors and several prominent radio hosts, for exhibiting liberal bias in its news stories.
Other third-party traffic measurements also indicate a recent traffic decline for Politico.
Yet a glowing review of the news outlet published Wednesday by the American Journalism Review, a project of the University of Maryland Foundation, claimed it "receives nearly 60 million pageviews per month from between 8 million and 11 million unique visitors."
Jodi Enda, the article's author, wrote that she relied on Politico's "internal tracking" for those numbers.
Enda, a freelancing former Philadelphia Inquirer national correspondent who has also been published in the liberal American Prospect, Mother Jones and the Huffington Post, told The Daily Caller in a phone conversation that her "researcher" fact-checked the numbers. Enda did not, however, name that researcher.
Afterward, Politico confirmed to TheDC during a follow-up conversation that Enda contacted the publication to verify the numbers it had given her.
Enda also did not say whether she or anyone else verified Politico's self-reported Web traffic numbers against other, independent measurements.
"Tracking numbers are all over the lot for online publications, so we used Politico's internal numbers and attributed the information accordingly," she emailed The Daily Caller Thursday, in response to questions about her article.
Statistics provided to TheDC by Compete -- one of many independent traffic arbiters -- also show that from October 2009 through October 2011, total monthly visits to Politico.com dropped by more than 11.5 percent. And the average number of times each of Politico's readers actually visited the website declined by 24.7 percent during the same two-year period.
While Compete indicates that the number of "unique" visitors to Politico.com increased by 17.4 percent during the same period, the raw number of unique visitors it reported for Politico in October 2011 was just 2.96 million -- a number far lower than similar measurements provided to The Daily Caller by measurement services run by Nielsen, Inc., and comScore.
Lincoln Merrihew, Compete's Managing Director of Business Insights, told TheDC that there could be two explanations for why Politico's readers are returning to the site less often than they used to.
"So what you can say is that [either] the site is so much better, and therefore people are able to get all the news they need in fewer visits," said Merrihew, "or it's become much worse, and more confusing, therefore people are getting frustrated and visiting less."
Compete's online measurements show that Politico.com suffered an 8.6 percent decrease in unique visitors between October 2010 and October 2011. By comparison, HuffingtonPost.com enjoyed a 111 percent increase, and DailyCaller.com increased its unique visitor traffic by 100 percent. Other news websites had similar growth.
Compete bases its conclusions on measurements taken from a sample of 2 million U.S. web surfers.
"We stand by our numbers," a Politico front man told The Daily Caller on Thursday, insisting that Politico's own traffic measurements -- collected by Omniture, an Adobe program used to measure Web traffic data -- were more accurate than any third-party measurements.
Posted by: Fred ||
12/03/2011 00:00 ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[An Nahar] Election-related violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo killed at least 18 civilians between November 26 and 28, 
A report given to a high-level advisory group in Saudi Arabia claims that allowing women in the kingdom to drive could encourage premarital sex, a rights activist said Saturday.
For a map, click 
The southern Russian republic of Ingushetia has banned sales of alcohol on Thursdays and Fridays.
A man from Nyköping in eastern Sweden has been denied a power wheelchair despite having had both of his legs amputated as the local health authority remained "uncertain if the impairment was permanent".
Internet traffic and Web search measurement tools from several sources indicate that despite massive promotion efforts on MSNBC and in other venues, Politico.com is rapidly losing readers, especially outside of Washington, D.C.
