New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has fired his top aide, deputy chief of staff Bridget Anne Kelly, and is giving a news conference. He maintains Kelly lied to him and said he's embarrassed and humiliated by his team's conduct.

DOJ is now investigating whether laws were broken.

A judge in NJ has refused to block a subpoena for David Wildstein, a former executive at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, to testify before the legislature.

Christie also instructed his former campaign manager, Bill Stepien, to withdraw from consideration as Republican party chair of N.J.[More...]

This is an amazing story. 72 former NYC cops and 8 former fireman are among 106 people charged in New York state court for a massive social security fraud scam that robbed the Government of an estimated $400 million. The amounts paid to these defendants was over $20 million. You can read the Indictment here.

The scheme was allegedly spearheaded by a former FBI agent who is former prosecutor (in the rackets unit, no less, of the Nassau County DA's office.) He and the other three organizers allegedly collected $28,000 per applicant.

Keep in mind, the Indictment is merely a charge, and all of them are presumed innocent. Their lawyers say they did nothing wrong.

The DA says many of the defendants falsely claimed they were disabled due to PTSD from the 9/11 attacks.

What did them in? Their Facebook pages, showing photos of them doing activities they claimed they were too disabled to do. And recorded undercover telephone calls. [More...]

It sure is cold outside, but the view from my living room was very pretty today.

I've been mostly reading news from Mexico today. The papers there have been filled the past few days with revelations that the DEA made deals with top Sinaloa cartel members to provide information about rival cartels in exchange for immunity and the freedom to continue their illegal activities. This is about the case of Jesus Vincent Zambada-Niebla, awaiting trial in Chicago. I'm not sure why the Mexican papers are just picking it up now -- it was news in the U.S. in 2011. Here's a long post I wrote about the case and the DEA's "snitch and carry on" policy. It's an interesting question whether Humberto Loya-Castro, the Sinaloa lawyer who became a DEA informant and provided information about rival cartels for years to the DEA, and who set up a meeting in Mexico City between the DEA and Zambada-Niebla, at which Zambada-Niebla claimed the DEA offered him the same deal as Loya (become a snitch against rivals and continue on without fear of busts) was not so much an informant as an agent of the Cartel.

Snitch and receive a get out of jail free card pales in comparison to snitch, stay in business and be free from arrest. The DEA used the same strategy in Colombia when targeting Pablo Escobar. It's called "Divide and Conquer."[More...]

The new TV season is beginning. Last night, I got bored during Downton Abbey and was not impressed with The Good Wife. They both seemed sluggish and a bit dull. Tonight, The Bachelor begins a new season, which of course I'll watch, but it will be the same old formula (although the Bachelor this year is from Venezuela and a native Spanish speaker.)

I think know why these shows, which I used to really like, now seem plodding and predictable to me: For the past few months, I've been watching Teleseries produced in Colombia, including La Reina Del Sur and Pablo Escobar: El Patron del Mal, and they just rock. They are like the Sopranos on speed. Only Breaking Bad and the first season of Homeland come close in terms of capturing your attention and holding it.

But here's the problem and why I'm writing about this. Other than these two shows, which were available with English subtitles when I watched them on MUN2-TV, since I can't understand Spanish when spoken rapidly, I have no way to watch other shows like El Capo, El Cartel de Sapos (Snitch Cartel), Alias al Mexicano and Los Tres Caines. None of the networks airing these other shows provide English subtitles or even English closed captioning.

These shows aren't all fictional. From the cartels to FARC and the right-wing paramilitary death squads, to the militarization of law enforcement, corrupt cops and the global reach of the DEA, many are educational as well as entertaining. [More...]

"Jihadi Jane" aka Colleen La Rose, has been sentenced in Philadelphia to ten years in prison for her role in the planned attack on Danish newspaper cartoonist Lars Vilks.

Prosecutors depicted Ms. LaRose as a “lonely and isolated” woman who sought excitement by joining the jihadist cause. She was flattered to get an assignment to kill a foe of Islam.

The original indictment is here. Rose has already served four years, so she has about four more years to do. She cooperated with authorities to avoid a life sentence.

“The fact that out of boredom, or out of being housebound, she took to the computer and communicated with the people she communicated with, and hatched this mission, is just unbelievable,” Judge Tucker said.

Still to be sentenced in the case: Jamie Paulin Ramirez, originally from Colorado, who became a mail-order bride for alleged co-conspirator Ali Damache, an Algerian national in Ireland who pleaded guilty there during trial to sending a menacing message by telephone to an American Muslim activist. [More...]

[Bump and Update from Friday. Thanks to those of you who donated over the weekend, I'll be sending thank you e-mails later this week.]

New Years is always the time I re-assess blogging. Should I continue? Have I been doing this too long? (TalkLeft has been publishing daily for 11 1/2 years.) Should I keep paying hundreds of dollars a month for a dedicated server? Should I pay thousands on a professionally done site overhaul to get it off Scoop and onto Wordpress or another blogging platform? Should I go back to taking ads or start charging for full, premium access? Should I keep the site as is but invest in making a mobile version of the site, compatible with mobile devices?

I've finally made a few tentative decisions. I want to keep blogging. I don't want to charge people for reading the site or clutter the site with ads. I want to be done with Scoop and move to Wordpress. I want to be able to write using easy to read Google-type fonts. I want to stop having to check for spammer registrations every few days. I don't want to keep paying hundreds of dollars a month to keep the site going.

So changes are coming, here's what's in store: [More....]

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo will announce this week that he is issuing an executive order which will allow seriously ill patients to receive medical marijuana from hospitals.

The policy is intended for patients with serious diseases like cancer and glaucoma.

In light of how far the rest of the country has come, this seems like very small potatoes. But at least it's a step in the right direction.

Politico today has an article, Hillary Clinton's Shadow Campaign, about a group of her supporters gearing up for 2016.

More than two dozen people in her orbit interviewed for this article described a virtual campaign in waiting — a term that itself makes some of Clinton’s supporters bristle — consisting of longtime Clinton loyalists as well as people who worked doggedly to elect her onetime rival Obama.

It says there's a group of insiders and ones not so close, and they don't always see eye to eye.

The article has some speculation about who might be at the helm of her 2016 campaign, and some details about the roles of Bill and Chelsea (who has hinted 2014 may be the year for a baby.)

In interviews for this article, just about every close Hillary Clinton ally, asked to describe who is at the top of her organizational chart, gives the same answer: Chelsea....But in terms of 2016, people close to the Clintons say it is difficult to divine whether Chelsea wants her mother to run.

The bottom line is that no one knows whether Hillary will run. I'm sure it's tempting, but I tend to think she won't run.

The Department of Justice signed a contract December 24 to pay $544,000 for an "enhanced profile" and increase its branding on the social networking site "Linked In." The recipient of the contract is Carahsoft Technology Corporation, and you can view the contract details here.

Here is DOJ's justification for avoiding the open-bidding process and what it gets for its money. Among the benefits: Full access to every Linked-In profile.

DOJ will be using Linked In to recruit new prosecutors.

The White House today announced two actions pertaining to gun purchases. One is a rule change that expands the definition of a mentally defective person prohibited from possessing a gun. The second is an HHS regulation that expands the information HIPPA-covered entities can provide to NICS, the federal background checking system.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) is proposing a regulation to clarify who is prohibited from possessing a firearm under federal law for reasons related to mental health, and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is issuing a proposed regulation to address barriers preventing states from submitting limited information on those persons to the federal background check system.

[More...]

Nebraska senior Federal Judge Richard Kopf, whose excellent blog Hercules and the Umpire I've written about a few times here and here, has decided to pack up his keyboard and quit blogging. I'm really sorry to see him go. His blog was immensely readable, sometimes serious, sometimes humorous. He has not been pressured to give up the blog, he's doing it voluntarily.

I'm sure many blogs would be willing to host him if he felt like writing a post or two, TalkLeft among them. I wouldn't care that he's not a "leftist," as he says.

Judge Kopf isn't taking the blog down, he's just not writing any more. If you haven't read him yet, go over and take a look. I think the judiciary would be much more transparent if more judges blogged. We, the public, tend to think of federal judges as being isolated in their ivory towers. It's nice to see a few that show their personality off the bench, and provide us with valuable legal insights while doing so.

An editorial in the New York Times requests clemency for NSA surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden.

In retrospect, Mr. Snowden was clearly justified in believing that the only way to blow the whistle on this kind of intelligence-gathering was to expose it to the public and let the resulting furor do the work his superiors would not.

...When someone reveals that government officials have routinely and deliberately broken the law, that person should not face life in prison at the hands of the same government.

The editorial concludes with:

...President Obama should tell his aides to begin finding a way to end Mr. Snowden’s vilification and give him an incentive to return home.