I bet he does now:

South Carolina authorities say they are weighing a criminal charge against Olympic superstar Michael Phelps who was photographed smoking from a marijuana pipe, the Associated Press and other news media report.

Speaking for me only

This is damn funny to me (photo here):

Olympic great Michael Phelps has acknowledged “regrettable” behavior and “bad judgment” after a photo in a British newspaper showed him smoking marijuana. In a statement released to The Associated Press, the swimmer who won a record eight gold medals at the Beijing Games conceded the authenticity of the exclusive picture published Sunday by the tabloid News of the World.

Phelps said: “I engaged in behavior which was regrettable and demonstrated bad judgment. I’m 23 years old and despite the successes I’ve had in the pool, I acted in a youthful and inappropriate way, not in a manner people have come to expect from me. For this, I am sorry. I promise my fans and the public it will not happen again.”

No word on whether he inhaled. UPDATE- Obama's half brother arrested for marijuana possession in Kenya. A "youthful indiscretion" no doubt. I hate the hypocritical BS.

Speaking for me only

A federal prison inmate in South Carolina has filed a motion seeking to intervene in a Securities Investor Protection Corporation lawsuit against Bernie Madoff. He accuses Madoff of promising inmates a 16.9% return on their investments, but instead sending their money to Switzerland.

Even stranger, the inmate claims he had an intimate relationship with Madoff and that they met at Harmony.com.

That claim, of course, raises a bit of a flag, since eHarmony has refused until this year to match same-sex couples.

But never mind that little fact. Mr. Riches says in his motion that Mr. Madoff was attracted to his identity theft skills and that he schooled the former Nasdaq chairman on how to commit fraud for two years. Mr. Riches also claims he has “documents, photos, exhibits and phone transcripts” that contain “juicy details” about Mr. Madoff, now 70, that he wants to share with the court.

The motion was denied by a bankruptcy judge who told the inmate to file a claim in bankruptcy court like everyone else. He also noted that this particular inmate has filed over 1,000 lawsuits in the past 3 years, mostly against famous people.

A 20 year old from Cortez, Colorado has been indicted for threatening to kill then-President Elect Barack Obama eight days before his inauguration. He was also indicted for threatening to blow up the Mall of America in Minneapolis.

[Timothy Ryan]Gutierrez faces one count each of transmission of threats and falsely threatening to use explosives. The indictment claims Gutierrez e-mailed the FBI's Washington office eight days before Obama's inauguration saying: "I'm going to assassinate the new president of the United States of America. P.S., you have 48 hours to stop it from happening."

The indictment says a second e-mail threatened to blow up the mall with 40 pounds of C4 explosive and TNT planted on seven cars parked outside.

The FBI paid Guitierrez a visit the day of the emails, but didn't arrest him. Guitierrez turned himself in this afternoon at the FBI Office in Durango. Cortez is a small town with a population under 10,000 in Southwestern Colorado.

The mother of Branch Davidian leader David Koresh, killed during the 1993 Waco Siege, was found stabbed to death yesterday. Her sister, Beverly Clark, is being held in the death.

Bonnie Clark Haldemann, who wrote a book about her son in 2007, was 64. Some news articles say she was 60, but that's not possible since Koresh was born in 1959.

According to her autobiography (p. xi), she was born Sept. 8, 1944 and only 14 both when she became pregnant and when Koresh was born. She met his father at age 13 while working at her junior high school. He was 18. They never married although it seems they stayed in touch and she remained close to his mother.

Bonnie went on to become a nurse. She worked in elder care facilities. Her autobiography says Bonnie "lived, worked and worshipped" with the Branch Davidians from 1985 to 1991 (p. xii). She lost 14 children in the deadly siege and fire.

R.I.P. Bonnie Clark Haldeman.

A bizarre story on top of the tragedy of the death of John Travolta's son:

Authorities in the Bahamas have charged an island lawmaker and detained two other people in an alleged plot to extort money from actor John Travolta after the death of his son, police said Friday. Two of the suspects — ambulance driver Tarino Lightbourne and former tourism minister Obie Wilchcombe — were detained on Friday. Earlier, several tabloids quoted Lightbourne describing efforts to revive the celebrity's chronically ill son, Jett, who died of a seizure this month at their family vacation home on Grand Bahama.

[More...]

Back in 2007, we wrote about Sargent Binkley, an army officer and PTSD victim, facing a 12 year mandatory minimum sentencing in California for robbing a Walgreens for drugs he became addicted to in Bosnia. A jury Tuesday found him not guilty by reason of insanity.

Binkley, 33, is an Army veteran from Los Altos who attended Los Altos High School and West Point military academy. Psychiatrists testified at the trial that Binkley developed PTSD during his time in Bosnia and Honduras and developed an addiction to painkillers after a hip injury that went untreated for years.

While it remains to be decided if he needs in-patient treatment, the probability is he will be given out-patient treatment. He won't go to jail. Sometimes the system works. Or as his supporters' website says, "A Victory for all veterans
with PTSD!."

U.S. U.S. Magistrate Judge Ronald Ellis has issued a 22 page opinion (available here) refusing to revoke Bernard Madoff's bond. ABC News has this report. It's a really good opinion. And, I think, the correct ruling. As the Court notes (from the opinion):

Generally, a court must release a defendant on bail on the least restrictive condition or combination of conditions that will reasonably assure the defendant’s appearance when required and the safety of the community. See 18 U.S.C. § 3142[c](1)(B). The issue at this stage of the criminal proceedings is not whether Madoff has been charged in perhaps the largest Ponzi scheme ever, nor whether Madoff’s alleged actions should result in his widespread disapprobation by the public, nor even what is appropriate punishment after conviction.

The legal issue before the Court is whether the Government has carried its burden of demonstrating that no condition or combination of conditions can be set that will reasonably assure Madoff’s appearance and protect the community from danger. 18 U.S.C. § 3142(e).

[More...]

After reading this, I fiddled around with my cell phone until I learned how to use the video camera.

The videotaped shooting death of Oscar Grant by a BART police officer on New Year’s Day marks how far technology has advanced since the 1991 videotaped beating of Rodney King. The cell phone video recorded by BART rider Katrina Vargas shows that Grant was unarmed, and that he apparently was not acting in a manner that would compel an officer to consider using a firearm. Grant’s death was recorded by several other cell phone video cameras, and may have been recorded by BART security cameras. The videos were posted immediately on the Internet, where they were seen by thousands, if not millions of people before being picked up by the Mainstream News Media.

Here's the video. BART's Board of Directors personally apologized for the senseless killing. Protests in Oakland have taken a misguidedly violent turn. The officer (who may have mistaken his Glock for a Taser, although that seems unlikely) has not yet been arrested or charged with a crime.

Remember Dr. Jan Adams, the plastic surgeon who operated on Kanye West's mother the day before she died?

Adams was sentenced to a year in jail yesterday following his guilty plea to misdemeanor drunk driving. Why so much time? It was his third D.U.I. and he was still on probation for one of them when he caught the last one. (Medical examiner board complaint here (pdf.) Despite the board's recommendation that his license be suspended due to the alcohol offenses, it appears when his license was suspended this June, it was for failure to pay child support. His ex-wife got a restraining order against him alleging spousal abuse.

Adams asked to begin serving the sentence immediately.

Jeffrey Skilling, sentenced to 24 years in prison in the Enron case, had his conviction affirmed today by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals -- but the Court said the trial judge erred in his sentencing calculations.

The trial judge bumped Skilling four levels for "substantially jeopardizing the safety and soundness of a “financial institution.” The appeals court said that was improper because there was no evidence the Enron Corporation Savings Plan and the Employee Stock Ownership Plan
are "pension plans" or “financial institutions” and any doubt must be resolved in favor of Skilling. It said "We are unprepared to declare every corporate retirement vehicle a “financial institution.”

Skilling must be resentenced. His guidelines now will be level 36 and Criminal History Category 1 or 188 to 235 months. Since the court initially sentenced him to the bottom of the range, I expect it will do the same on resentencing, resulting in Skilling's sentence dropping from 240 months to 188 months. [More...]

In this post and this one, TalkLeft wondered how the FBI could be so sure that Bruce Ivins was the sole perpetrator of the anthrax attacks seven years ago. (Some of the comments to those posts are quite informative.) Ivins, you will recall, committed suicide but never admitted responsibility.

Scott Shane writes that The New York Times has finished a thorough examination of the investigation, and is less persuaded of Ivins' guilt than is the FBI:

That examination found that unless new evidence were to surface, the enormous public investment in the case would appear to have yielded nothing more persuasive than a strong hunch, based on a pattern of damning circumstances, that Dr. Ivins was the perpetrator.

[more ...]