Yeah, and a lot of us were “jerks” when we were 18 . . . and some still are!
Adam Montiel, has a radio show, “Adam Montiel in the Morning” on a local radio show (KXTZ/KXDZ) in San Luis Obispo, California. Prisons are big business in California and around San Luis Obispo. 12.9% of California’s state workforce are in the prison biz. California spends almost $11 million a year on prisons, 83% of what it spends on higher education. So understand that there are a lot of people in Central California . . . particularly in the “armpit” towns of the state (Santa Barbara obviously doesn’t want, or need a prison!) . . . who have a vested interest in keeping as many people locked up as possible. Now I’m not saying that’s Adam’s position, just that his listening audience has a real vested interest in the prison biz.
Anyhow, Adam took issue with my recent comments about Brandon Hein.
Very disappointed you’re still on the same “wrong place-wrong time” We all know that’s not true. I went to school with these guys. They were jerks. They were the guys you would look at them and say, “yea, they’ll end up dead or in prison”. Well, we were right. But Jimmy Farris was the one that ended up dead.
And to have the balls to call the deceased a “bodyguard” for a drug dealer is abhorrent. Yes, Mike was selling weed, so he was a drug dealer. Jimmy was a long time friend of his who had long time lived on his street.
Yes, being a person who sells, weed can be fairly considered unsavory character. But certainly not more than the group who tries to outnumber and rob him of his weed.
And I wonder if the HS official knows about Alice Moulder. The lady they stole from right before the stabbing of Jimmy and Mike.
My only consolation in reading all your garbage: Simply put…you’re wrong. The court thought so. The law thinks so. The jury thought so. And I know that those folks who did this, especially Brandon and Jason will get what they deserve, which was their sentence….LIFE.
Weren’t you a clergymen at some point? I thought TRUTH was supposed to seep its way into that lifestyle, no?
Hey Adam! I appreciate you taking the time to comment, even if I disagree.
Yes, these guys were jerks!! Brandon would be the first to tell you. But we don’t put people away for life for being jerks! Otherwise you and I . . . to say nothing of Barack Obama (screwed up as a teenager and used drugs), John McCain (smart ass, “maverick” Admiral’s-son-Navy-pilot who crashed 4 Navy planes in his reckless youth), George W. Bush (drunk and shiftless college student) . . . and a whole host of others, would be locked up for life. So let’s forget that argument.
Alice Mulder. Yes, Jason Holland stole her wallet. Jason Holland did, probably showing off for his jerky friends. But again, we don’t put kids away for life for stealing wallets or being smart asses. So what does that have to do with anything? [And because of that should not have been brought up at the trial.]
Each of us is responsible for our own actions. If someone listens to your show, and based on something you say, goes out and does something stupid, or reprehensible, are YOU responsible?
Yeah, Mike was the local high school drug dealer. Was he yours? And Jimmy was his buddy . . . and his mom says he was “an angel”, clean as the driven snow and perfect in every way and never smoked pot. OK, he was that 1% of high school kids in Agoura Hills . . . but he clearly hung out with Jimmy Farris and according to other kids was his “bodyguard.”
Brandon didn’t know Mike or Jimmy but went with his friends to buy pot and get smoked out. Sure, wrong. But again, we don’t lock up every kid who uses pot!! Or every adult, or talk show host, or minister, or president. The operative word is “buy.” Although it never came out at trial, Brandon stopped at an ATM at the supermarket to withdraw $20 en route in order to have money to buy pot.
The ONLY testimony that these guys went to steal anything was from the drug dealer, Mike McCloren, who was high when detectives interviewed him and high when he testified in court. No finger prints were found on the audio/TV equipment, which McCloren first claimed they were there to “steal”, no fingerprints were found on the drawer or the hiding place in the floor where McCloren kept his stash . . . no credible evidence whatsoever that these guys intended to steal anything.
This was a railroad job pure and simple, or as ROLLING STONE put it, a “Lynching in Malibu.” The victim’s dad was an LAPD officer and LAPD put tons of pressure on the Judge, who was on parole for rolling over his car while drunk (because that happened on a Freeway it was CHP who responded and arrested him, not LAPD) . . . so the whole “trial” process reeked!
Jason Holland always accepted responsibility for HIS actions. I realize Jimmy’s family was devastated, consumed by grief and looking for revenge. But how many people are you going to lock up? Is their loss somehow compensated by locking up other kids who didn’t commit the murder? If you locked up everyone in Agoura Hills who smoked pot at the time, would that ameliorate their grief? Jason accepted the responsibility and is willingly “doing the time”, so why everyone else? And why “life without possibility of parole” in a state where gang bangers who hop into a low slung old car and go out intentionally to drive by and kill and end up killing innocent kids and folks . . . and those gang bangers routinely get 15 year sentences . . .
And you don’t see that this is WACKED? Adam, wake up man!!
Obviously, we have very different world views. But keep reading, and have your say, and if I ever get back to the Central Coast I’ll be sure and tune in!
What???
The Terminator is sometimes difficult to understand . . . is confused syntax a “Republican thing”? Bush often leaves me shaking my head, and Palin jumps around Cliff Notes talking points so rapidly I’m quickly lost . . . but here’s Arnie’s take on Palin . . .
(CNN) — Wednesday, I [Campbell Brown, CNN correspondent] sat down with California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for a lengthy interview mostly about the presidential campaign.
One exchange in particular has been getting a lot of attention. It was when I asked the governor if he thought Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin was qualified to be president.
Now, a quick nod to transparency here. When we do interviews like this, due to the time constraints of television, we often edit down a portion of the interviewee’s remarks.
But we try to make sure we maintain the full context of what was said, so that there is nothing misleading about a given sound bite.
There is a shortened portion of the governor’s remarks about Sarah Palin circulating on the Internet and other TV outlets that leaves the impression he does not think she is qualified for the job.
Right now, I just want to show you the governor’s full answer, so you can decide for yourself exactly what he meant.
Brown: Do you think she is qualified to be vice president?
Schwarzenegger: I think that she will to be qualified get there.
Brown: She will get there? What do you mean? She’s not ready yet?
Schwarzenegger: She will be ready by the time she is sworn in. I think she will be ready. You get up to speed.
I know when I became governor there were a lot of things I did not know but it is not about what you know.
Because Sacramento, for instance, in 2003 had all the knowledge and has all the experience, warehouse full of experience, but there was not the will for both of the parties to work together and solve the problems.
So that’s not the only answer, the experience. The answer is, do you have the will? Do you have the will to educate yourself? Do you have the will to get up to speed? Do you have the will? Are you a sponge that absorbs information very quickly? And I have read some of her stuff and she said, ‘When I became governor, you know, I didn’t know a lot of things but I absorbed information quickly and they could run with the state.’ And that’s the kind of person that she is. That is what I think she would also do if she becomes vice president.
Can you figure out what he was saying? Is he saying she’s qualified . . . or not? Or is he just saying she’s a quick learner?
So I got to wondering what is Sarah to do if she doesn’t win?
I came up with a few ideas . . .
10. Become a faith healer and cast out demons of witchcraft
9. Become a FOX News State Department, UN or foreign relations correspondent
8. Open a travel agency in Wasilla
7. Get a multi-million dollar advance on a book deal . . . and find someone to write it for her
6. Do dog mushing tours from Wasilla to Russia . . . “right across this frozen little thingy of water between Russia and Alaska”
5. Have an affair with John Mc Cain and replace Cindy, just as Cindy replaced . . .
4. Become a personal shopper for Sak’s Fifth Avenue
3. Become a cruise director on a Carnival ship and write a blog
2. Do Tina Fey impersonizations on “Saturday Night Live”
1. Replace Katie Couric
Even if you hate Obama . . .
You have to admit he’s run an almost flawless campaign. His campaign staff didn’t have the bickering and infighting that Clinton’s did. There were no false starts and erratic turns. He’s cool, calm and collected. Even if you don’t like his message, you have to admit he’s stayed focused and “on message.” He’s run an effective campaign, used the Internet and media, and tried to shift the focus from personalities to issues. Whether you want him as President or not, you have to admit he’s an effective leader and administrator.
Now comes word of yet another big storm brewing in the McCain/Palin camp, just at the very time it is NOT needed. This from POLITICO:
Even as John McCain and Sarah Palin scramble to close the gap in the final days of the 2008 election, stirrings of a Palin insurgency are complicating the campaign’s already-tense internal dynamics.
Four Republicans close to Palin said she has decided increasingly to disregard the advice of the former Bush aides tasked to handle her, creating occasionally tense situations as she travels the country with them. Those Palin supporters, inside the campaign and out, said Palin blames her handlers for a botched rollout and a tarnished public image — even as others in McCain’s camp blame the pick of the relatively inexperienced Alaska governor, and her public performance, for McCain’s decline.
“She’s lost confidence in most of the people on the plane,” said a senior Republican who speaks to Palin, referring to her campaign jet. He said Palin had begun to “go rogue” in some of her public pronouncements and decisions.
“I think she’d like to go more rogue,” he said . . . [Ed Note: She said she was a "maverick"!]
The emergence of a Palin faction comes as Republicans gird for a battle over the future of their party: Some see her as a charismatic, hawkish conservative leader with the potential, still unrealized, to cross over to attract moderate voters. Anger among Republicans who see Palin as a star and as a potential future leader has boiled over because, they say, they see other senior McCain aides preparing to blame her in the event he is defeated.
“These people are going to try and shred her after the campaign to divert blame from themselves,” a McCain insider said, referring to McCain’s chief strategist, Steve Schmidt, and to Nicolle Wallace, a former Bush aide who has taken a lead role in Palin’s campaign. Palin’s partisans blame Wallace, in particular, for Palin’s avoiding of the media for days and then giving a high-stakes interview to CBS News’ Katie Couric, the sometimes painful content of which the campaign allowed to be parceled out over a week.
“A number of Gov. Palin’s staff have not had her best interests at heart, and they have not had the campaign’s best interests at heart,” the McCain insider fumed, noting that Wallace left an executive job at CBS to join the campaign.
Wallace declined to engage publicly in the finger-pointing that has consumed the campaign in the final weeks.
“I am in awe of [Palin's] strength under constant fire by the media,” she said in an e-mail. “If someone wants to throw me under the bus, my personal belief is that the most graceful thing to do is to lie there.”
But other McCain aides, defending Wallace, dismissed the notion that Palin was mishandled. The Alaska governor was, they argue, simply unready — “green,” sloppy and incomprehensibly willing to criticize McCain for, for instance, not attacking Sen. Barack Obama for his relationship with his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
Palin has in fact performed fairly well in the moments thought to be key for a vice presidential nominee: She made a good impression in her surprise rollout in Ohio and her speech to the Republican National Convention went better than the campaign could have imagined. She turned in an adequate performance at a debate against the Democratic Party’s foremost debater.
But other elements of her image-making went catastrophically awry. Her dodging of the press and her nervous reliance on tight scripts in her first interview, with ABC News, became a national joke — driven home to devastating effect by “Saturday Night Live” comic Tina Fey. The Couric interview — her only unstaged appearance for a week — was “water torture,” as one internal ally put it.
Some McCain aides say they had little choice with a candidate who simply wasn’t ready for the national stage, and that Palin didn’t forcefully object. Moments that Palin’s allies see as triumphs of instinct and authenticity - the Wright suggestion, her objection to the campaign’s pulling out of Michigan – they dismiss as Palin’s “slips and miscommunications,” that is, her own incompetence and evidence of the need for tight scripting.
But Palin partisans say she chafed at the handling.
“The campaign as a whole bought completely into what the Washington media said — that she’s completely inexperienced,” said a close Palin ally outside the campaign who speaks regularly to the candidate.
“Her strategy was to be trustworthy and a team player during the convention and thereafter, but she felt completely mismanaged and mishandled and ill advised,” the person said. “Recently, she’s gone from relying on McCain advisers who were assigned to her to relying on her own instincts.” . . .
When a McCain aide, speaking anonymously Friday to The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder, suggested that Palin’s charge that Obama was “palling around with terrorists” had “escaped HQ’s vetting,” it was Scheunemann who fired off an angry response that the speech was “fully vetted” and that to attack Palin for it was “bull****.”
Palin’s “instincts,” on display in recent days, have had her opening up to the media, including a round of interviews on talk radio, cable and broadcast outlets, as well as chats with her traveling press and local reporters.
Reporters really began to notice the change last Sunday, when Palin strolled over to a local television crew in Colorado Springs.
“Get Tracey,” a staffer called out, according to The New York Times, summoning spokeswoman Tracey Schmitt, who reportedly “tried several times to cut it off with a terse ‘Thank you!’ in between questions, to no avail.” The moment may have caused ulcers in some precincts of the McCain campaign, but it was an account Palin’s admirers in Washington cheered.
Palin had also sought to give meatier policy speeches, in particular on energy policy and on policy for children with disabilities; she finally gave the latter speech Friday, but had wanted to deliver it much earlier.
She’s also begun to make her own ad hoc calls about the campaign’s direction and the ticket’s policy. McCain, for instance, has remained silent on Democrats’ calls for a stimulus package of new spending, a move many conservatives oppose but that could be broadly popular. But in an interview with the conservative radio host Glenn Beck earlier this week, Palin went “off the reservation” to make the campaign policy, one aide said.
“I say, you know, when is enough enough of taxpayer dollars being thrown into this bill out there?” she asked. “This next one of the Democrats being proposed should be very, very concerning to all Americans because to me it sends a message that $700 billion bailout, maybe that was just the tip of the iceberg. No, you know, we were told when we’ve got to be believing if we have enough elected officials who are going to be standing strong on fiscal conservative principles and free enterprise and we have to believe that there are enough of those elected officials to say, ‘No, OK, that’s enough.’”
(A McCain spokeswoman said Palin’s statement was “a good sentiment.”)
But few imagine that Palin will be able to repair her image — and bad poll numbers — in the eleven days before the campaign ends. And the final straw for Palin and her allies was the news that the campaign had reported spending $150,000 on her clothes, turning her, again, into the butt of late-night humor.
“She never even set foot in these stores,” the senior Republican said, noting Palin hadn’t realized the cost when the clothes were brought to her in her Minnesota hotel room.
“It’s completely out-of-control operatives,” said the close ally outside the campaign. “She has no responsibility for that. It’s incredibly frustrating for us and for her.”
Between Palin’s internal detractors and her allies, there’s a middle ground: Some aides say that she’s a flawed candidate whose handling exaggerated her weak spots.
“She was completely mishandled in the beginning. No one took the time to look at what her personal strengths and weaknesses are and developed a plan that made sense based on who she is as a candidate,” the aide said. “Any concerns she or those close to her have about that are totally valid.”
But the aide said that Palin’s inexperience led her to her own mistakes:
“How she was handled allowed her weaknesses to hang out in full display.”
If McCain loses, Palin’s allies say that the national Republican Party hasn’t seen the last of her. Politicians are sometimes formed by a signal defeat — as Bill Clinton was when he was tossed out of the Arkansas governor’s mansion after his first term — and Palin would return to a state that had made her America’s most popular governor and where her image as a reformer who swept aside her own party’s insiders rings true, if not in the cartoon version the McCain campaign presented.
“There are people in this campaign who feel a real sense of loyalty to her and are really pleased with her performance and think she did a great job,” said the McCain insider. “She has a real future in this party.”
Steven M. Gorelick is a Fulbright Scholar and Professor City University New York. He wrote the following letter to Gene and Janice Hein after the US Court of Appeals hearing.
While Brandon, who received a sentence greater than that of Charles Manson, sits in a maximum security prison in California (because of the severity of his sentence), and having already cost the taxpayers of California over $1 million . . . no wonder the State is broke! . . . his case has tortuously ground it’s way through the legal system. Presently his case is sitting before the United States Court of Appeals, 9th District, scheduled for oral arguments October 7th in Pasadena.
a cat, and most importantly . . . a life! Brandon has been sitting in prison for a crime nobody says he committed. Doesn’t anyone see the injustice and stupidity of this?
You would like Brandon Hein. His warm, engaging smile and personality. He’s articulate, talented, and although I can’t see him much, especially now that I live in Panama, he has been a good friend for 13 years and an inspiration.
