March is almost here.....

So, this here is my new mo'sicle. It's a 6-speed, shaft driven, in-line four touring machine. I LOVE IT. So should you.

Kawasaki Concours

I GOT A NEW BIKE!!!!

I can't find any good pictures combining model and year online, so I'm gonna have to take pictures of it to put up here. Let's just say that as far as reasonably priced touring machines go, this one fit both my wallet and my ego. \/\/007!

So, since I got a bike, it looks like the trip to the Pacific Ocean is ON for July!!!

An Irvine cop ejaculates on a motorist but escapes criminal liability

So, this is one story that really caught my eye yesterday. It is reprinted in it's entirety, but I did not write any of the words- all credits have been given where credits are due. And if you see this guy, be sure to ejaculate on him.....

By R. SCOTT MOXLEY

Thursday, February 8, 2007 - 3:00 pm

No one disputes that an on-duty Irvine police officer got an erection and ejaculated on a motorist during an early-morning traffic stop in Laguna Beach. The female driver reported it, DNA testing confirmed it and officer David Alex Park finally admitted it.

When the case went to trial, however, defense attorney Al Stokke argued that Park wasn’t responsible for making sticky all over the woman’s sweater. He insisted that she made the married patrolman make the mess—after all, she was on her way home from work as a dancer at Captain Cream Cabaret.

“She got what she wanted,” said Stokke. “She’s an overtly sexual person.”

A jury of one woman and 11 men—many white and in their 50s or 60s—agreed with Stokke. On Feb. 2, after a half-day of deliberations, they found Park not guilty of three felony charges that he’d used his badge to win sexual favors during the December 2004 traffic stop.

Park, 31, was red-faced and unable to control his twitching foot in the moments before the verdict was announced; if convicted, he would have faced prison. When he was found not guilty, he briefly embraced Stokke. In the public seating section, tears flowed from his gray-haired mother’s face. His father, a mechanic, closed his eyes and threw his head back. Outside the courtroom, surrounded by his family, a smiling Park said he felt vindicated.

Veteran sex crimes prosecutor Shaddi Kamiabipour—who’d called Park “a predator” during the nine-day trial—said she was disappointed with the verdicts. She also dismissed Stokke’s contention that the Orange County District Attorney’s office had overcharged the case. At stake, Kamiabipour said, was the principle that no one—not even a horny cop who’d once won honors for community service—is above the law.

“Park didn’t pick a housewife or a 17-year-old girl,” Kamiabipour said in her closing argument. “He picked a stripper. He picked the perfect victim.”



* * *


In the wee hours of Dec. 15, 2004, Lucy (only her first name was used during the trial) finished her final shift at Captain Cream in Lake Forest, not far from the Irvine Spectrum. Management had let her go after an incident involving a female customer in a bathroom stall. According to court records, there had been a small amount of cocaine, kissing and breast fondling.

Meanwhile, Park was on patrol in the southwest portion of Irvine. Prosecutors believe he was craving a sexual rendezvous, and so he watched for Lucy’s white BMW to leave the strip club parking lot, then tailed her, waiting for an excuse for a stop. Park insisted he’d been cruising on the 405 north and coincidentally saw Lucy’s vehicle weave and speed.

Kamiabipour, the prosecutor, shook her head in disbelief. She knew the facts—that the officer had waited at least eight or nine minutes before stopping the stripper on a secluded section of a highway that was out of his jurisdiction.

“He was stalking her,” she said.

Four months earlier, Park had stopped Lucy under similar circumstances. That time, he’d ignored a plastic drug baggie he’d found in her car and her suspended license. But the stop wasn’t a waste of time. After friendly chit-chat, the officer had scored Lucy’s phone number. Telephone records show that Park called the stripper the next morning. She told him she was too busy to meet.

On the witness stand, Park explained that he’d called Lucy out of concern for a citizen’s safety. He also shrugged his shoulders when Kamiabipour slowly listed the first names of nine Captain Cream female employees—Annette, Denise, Rashele, Marlia, Brandi, Andrea, Deborah, Laura and Shannon—whose license plates he’d run through the DMV computer in the weeks prior to his sexual encounter with Lucy. (Another coincidence, according to Stokke.) Jurors also learned that Irvine Police Sgt. Michael Hallinan had previously warned Park as they left work to stay away from the strippers.

Park, who works in construction nowadays, conceded that he’d been given the warning but claimed that he had no clue it was Lucy in the vehicle or that she had an invalid driver’s license, even as he approached her car window.

Kamiabipour believed she’d caught the 6-foot-3 cop in a lie. Records show he ran the bosomy, 5-foot, 110-pound dancer’s license plate before the stop, did not call for backup despite the potential for an arrest and failed to tell his supervisor or dispatch that he was leaving Irvine. Several Irvine officers testified that Park’s behavior that night was odd.

“[Park’s] testimony was just incredible,” said Kamiabipour. Irvine city officials must have doubted his story, too. After an exhaustive police internal affairs investigation, they felt it was prudent to give Lucy $400,000 to make her civil lawsuit go away—for fear a jury might give her much more.

In a secretly-recorded phone call to Laguna Beach police shortly after the incident, Lucy recalled that she’d told Park she had no license. Park began “rubbing himself up against me,” she said. “Then, he said, ‘What are we going to do here, Lucy?’”

Park unzipped his pants, took his penis out and got an erection, she explained. “Basically, the officer made me give [him] a freaking hand job and he let me go. I’m so freaked out about it.”

(Lucy also told police, prosecutors and the jury that Park had also fingered her vagina and fondled her breasts before he ejaculated on her.)

“I was confused,” she told the Laguna Beach dispatcher. “He called me afterwards. I’m scared, you know . . . What’s an Irvine cop doing hanging out at a strip club in Lake Forest?”

Telephone records prove that Park made a 19-minute call to Lucy shortly after their encounter. The officer—who told the woman he was “Joe Stephens,” an Orange County Sheriff’s Department deputy who had died months earlier—said it was a friendly call to make sure she’d arrived home safely. The stripper said he told her to keep her mouth shut.

And then Kamiabipour introduced the bombshell evidence from a high-ranking Irvine police officer: on the night Park tailed Lucy out of the city, the global positioning system in his patrol car had been disconnected without authorization.

“I checked and [the GPS] was not working,” said Lt. Henry Boggs.

An unexplainable coincidence, Park’s defense countered.



* * *


For all his boneheaded mistakes, Park madea sharp decision picking his legal counsel. Stokke (and John Barnett, Paul Myer and Jennifer Keller) is among the elite of the local defense bar. His fine suits and mastery of courtroom procedures compliment the folksy, grandfatherly style he uses to charm juries. And there was this unspoken advantage over the prosecution: longtime courthouse observers have no memory of an Orange County jury convicting a police officer of a felony.

It wasn’t a surprise that Stokke put the woman and her part-time occupation on trial. In his opening argument, he made it The Good Cop versus The Slutty Stripper. He pointed out that she’d once had a violent fight with a boyfriend in San Diego. He mocked her inability to keep a driver’s license. He accused her of purposefully “weakening” Park so that he became “a man,” not a cop during the traffic stop. He called her a liar angling for easy lawsuit cash. He called her a whore without saying the word.

“You dance around a pole, don’t you?” Stokke asked.

Superior Court Judge William Evans ruled the question irrelevant.

Stokke saw he was scoring points with the jury.

“Do you place a pole between your legs and go up and down?” he asked.

“No,” said Lucy before the judge interrupted.

“You do the dancing to get men to do what you what them to do,” said Stokke. “And the same thing happened out there on that highway [in Laguna Beach]. You wanted [Park] to take some sex!”

Lucy said, “No sir,” the sex wasn’t consensual. Stokke—usually a mellow fellow with a nasally, monotone voice—gripped his fists, stood upright, clenched his jaws and then thundered, “You had a buzz on [that night], didn’t you?”

As if watching a volley in tennis, the heads of the male-dominated jury spun from Stokke back to Lucy, who sat in the witness box. She said no, but it was hopeless. Jurors stared at her without a hint of sympathy.

In his closing argument, Stokke pounced. He called Lucy one of those “girls who have learned the art of the tease, getting what they want . . . they’ve learned to separate men from their money.”

Kamiabipour wasn’t amused. “Dancer or not, sexually promiscuous nor not, she had the right not to consent,” she told jurors. “[Park] doesn’t get a freebie just because of who she is . . . He used her like an object.”

rscottmoxley@ocweekly.com

Do ya really wanna lobby me? Do ya really wanna make me cry?

Deep fried jezuss..... I think I'll go to the International Heart On and march in a poorade tonight. Why don'cha come with me?

Pfizer, Halliburton Grab Democrats as Hearings Loom (Update2)

By Jonathan D. Salant

Jan. 31 (Bloomberg) -- Pharmaceutical companies and Iraq war contractors, both heavy Republican contributors, are among the companies scrambling to hire lobbyists with Democratic ties as they prepare for congressional investigative hearings next week.

Pfizer Inc., the world's biggest drugmaker, has hired the Glover Park Group, whose partners include Joe Lockhart, a former spokesman for President Bill Clinton, and Howard Wolfson, a spokesman for Senator Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. Roche Holding AG picked as its lobbyist William Clyburn, cousin of the House's third-ranking Democrat, Jim Clyburn of South Carolina.

The increased hiring coincides with the Democratic congressional sweep that has sent shudders through corporate boardrooms.

``No general counsel or CEO wants to have to explain to his board why the company's name is appearing on the front page of a news article in a scandal,'' said Nick Allard, a partner in the law and lobbying firm of Patton Boggs LLP, which just landed military contractor Halliburton Co. as a client. ``Firms and industry groups that have not yet been represented are talking to firms all over town.''

Representative Henry Waxman, 67, the California Democrat who heads the House Oversight and Government Reform committee, plans to hold hearings beginning Feb. 6 on Iraq contractors. The committee has asked executives from Halliburton to testify.

``We're the main committee in the House of Representatives to look at matters that deserve scrutiny,'' Waxman said in an interview today. ``Nothing deserves scrutiny more than whether taxpayers' dollars are being used appropriately.''

The Cheney Connection

Halliburton, a Houston-based oilfield services company once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, gave 92 percent of its political-action committee contributions to Republicans for the 2006 campaign, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington research group.

The company's new firm, Patton Boggs, counts Democratic lobbyist Thomas Boggs among its name partners. KBR Inc., a Halliburton unit, hired the law and lobbying firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP, whose partners include Democratic former House Speaker Thomas Foley.

``Halliburton retains firms with deep experience in the industry, on Capitol Hill and in the administration to help us navigate the policy arena,'' Melissa Norcross, a spokeswoman for Halliburton and KBR, said in an e-mailed comment.

Particularly Valuable

Lobbyists with Washington experience are considered particularly valuable when chief executive officers face nationally televised hearings. Waxman presided over one of the most famous on April 14, 1994, when seven tobacco- industry CEOs testified that they didn't add nicotine to their cigarettes.

Public hearings raise the stakes for corporations, said Mark Paoletta, a lawyer who helped run investigations for the House Energy and Commerce Committee when Republicans were in control. ``The company has a much larger risk with respect to its reputation'' than in civil litigation that can be resolved away from the public glare, he said.

Some Republican lobbyists are also benefiting from the increased congressional attention. Paoletta and another Energy and Commerce lawyer, Andrew Snowdon, just joined the Washington office of lobbying and law firm Dickstein Shapiro LLP.

Republican Firm

Mark Corallo and Barbara Comstock, two former Justice Department officials who have formed their own lobbying firm in Alexandria, Virginia, are talking to representatives of oil and drug companies. One of their current clients, Blackwater USA of Moyock, North Carolina, is scheduled to testify next week before Waxman's committee, Corallo said. The panel is probing possible waste and fraud in Iraq war contracts.

``When we realized that the political winds were blowing the other way, we understood there would be a market,'' said Corallo. Industries that ``escaped oversight'' for more than a decade ``are going to find themselves in the congressional crosshairs,'' he said.

The pharmaceutical industry, which the Center for Responsive Politics says gave 68 percent of its 2006 campaign gifts to Republicans, may be the biggest target for investigators. The House voted Jan. 12 to require the Medicare program, which provides health care for the elderly and disabled, to negotiate prices with drug companies; five congressional committees plan hearings into industry practices, including the generic-drug approval process and drug safety.

Number of Assignments

Paul Fitzhenry, a spokesman for New York-based Pfizer, and Glover Park partner Joel Johnson, a former Clinton administration and Senate Democratic staff member, said the group has handled a number of assignments for the drugmaker for about two years.

This year marks the first time Glover Park has registered as the company's lobbyists, congressional filings show. Johnson said the firm registered `` when it became evident that the inside role was to require outside contacts'' on legislative matters. Lockhart and Wolfson, the Glover Park partners, aren't listed on congressional forms as the firm's lobbyists for Pfizer.

William Clyburn didn't return phone calls seeking comment. Roche, based in Basel, Switzerland, had no immediate comment when asked about the investigations.

Thousand Oaks, California-based Amgen Inc., the world's largest biotechnology company, hired two firms in the last two months, congressional filings show. ``It certainly is a different political landscape,'' Amgen spokeswoman Kelley Davenport said.

Duberstein Group

Amgen's new lobbyists include the Duberstein Group, led by Kenneth Duberstein, former chief of staff to President Ronald Reagan, and Michael Berman, a veteran Democratic political operative. The company also hired Lent, Scrivner & Roth LLC, whose partners include former Republican Representative Norman Lent of New York and Alan Roth, staff director of the House Energy and Commerce Committee when it was previously under Democratic control.

Another Washington law firm, Venable LLP, brought in Raymond Shepherd III, a Republican who is former chief counsel to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs investigations subcommittee, to run its new congressional-investigation group. Birch Bayh, a former Democratic senator from Indiana, is a partner at the firm.

Venable's new clients include London-based drugmaker AstraZeneca PLC, maker of Crestor, the fastest-growing cholesterol medicine.

``In the era of instant news, even the threat of a congressional investigation can impact a company's brand, reputation, and, just as importantly, its bottom line,'' said Gloria Dittus, head of Dittus Communications, a Washington-based public-affairs firm.

To contact the reporter on this story: Jonathan D. Salant in Washington at jsalant@bloomberg.net

Well, fuck.....

Sure alotta stuff has been going on in the world lately. It seems that the Bu$h administration is waking up a little bit, and it's a good thing. For me, personally, things have been going fantastic- catching up with old friends, making plans for crazy worldtrips this year, eating great food, and playing phenomenal music in a new band.

We will actually be on the radio later this month- I may post links and shit. Cool thing is, I've learned how to play harmonica, in addition to the other instruments I play. Sometimes it freaks me out though.... I've never had the first piano lesson, yet, I can sit down and play it. Same with guitar. Now, I'd had voice and music training as a child, and of course, I practice. But something musical is an everpresent, sleepkilling companion. Only one soulgnawin' sensation can supercede it.

I don't care if I ever make any more money playing music. I'm just glad that all of the melodies and rhythms can finally claw their way out of my heart and head.