I'm still really busy with work stuff, not much time for news. Here's an open thread, all topics welcome.

Back in 2010, the feds brought an 89 count indictment against former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and others, concerning the awarding of contracts in the city's Department of Water and Sewerage. The charges included racketeering, extortion, bribery, mail and wire fraud, tax evasion and filing false tax returns.

His father, Bernard Kilpatrick, was charged with racketeering, extortion, and two counts of filing false tax returns.

The trial lasted five months. The Government called 80 witnesses. A brief history of the trial is here.

Today the jury returned guilty verdicts against Kwame on 24 counts. His father, Bernard Kilpatrick, was convicted of one tax count, and contractor Bobby Ferguson was convicted on 9 counts.

It seems a little early for Daylight Savings Time, but it's here. Don't forget to turn your clocks ahead (spring forward, fall back.)

This is an open thread, all topics welcome.

What happens when you refuse to comply with a request for information about your citizenship at an immigration checkpoint within the U.S.? Apparently, they have to let you continue on your way and you don't have answer questions or go to the secondary area. At least, that's what happens to those stopped in this video that refused -- the agents backed down.

Good to know. But why are there immigration checkpoints 30 miles from the border?

Busy at work today. Here's an open thread, all topics welcome.

Found in a comment by Tara at Conservative Treehouse: this link to ABC's website with 5 minutes of ABC's recording of the telephone call between Martin family lawyer Benjamin Crump and Witness 8, Trayvon's phone friend, recorded on March 19, 2012. Crump has acknowledged ABC's Matt Guttman and his assistant were present during the interview and Guttman tweeted at the time he had a recording of the conversation.

Why are we only finding this clip now? Did ABC recently release this? It appears so. Does it have anything to do with O'Mara's motion for a subpoena to ABC News for the original recordings, to which it filed an objection but which has not yet been heard by the court? Or does it have to do with Benjamin Crump's oh-so carefully worded affidavit about his interview with Witness 8 and the circumstances of the recording?

While this ABC clip is only 5 minutes and 19 seconds of the 14 minute recording, it is so much clearer than any version Crump or the State have produced to date. Witness 8 is much easier to understand.

I'm still working on the analysis I began last night, and won't get to finish it until this evening. In the meantime, please see Diwataman's preliminary analysis.

I just realized we haven't had an open thread since Monday. Here's one, all topics welcome.

During today's Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Department of Justice Oversight, Attorney General Eric Holder defended the prosecution of Aaron Swartz. He said prosecutors offered him a three month sentence and later said they would seek six months. He said the charges carried a potential of 35 years in prison.

What about the overcharging? Any prosecutor can overcharge and then offer you a deal to what you should have been charged with in the first place. What kind of deal is that?

Holder said DOJ has examined the matter and determined the prosecutors acted appropriately. Their examination included talking to the prosecutors. Did they talk to defense counsel? [More...]

Attorney General Eric Holder will testify this morning at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on DOJ oversight. Many expect him to discuss DOJ's response to Colorado and Washington's recently passed marijuana legalization laws.

I doubt the objections to the laws raised yesterday by former DEA officials will sway him. When they wrote him in September 2012, before the elecion, asking him to publicly take a stand against the laws there was no response. There was silence. Here is their latest letter. The organization on the letterhead, Save Our Society From Drugs, is political action committee. [More...]

(Video by Diwata Man.) A hearing was held in the George Zimmerman case Tuesday. You can watch the hearing here (part 1, begins at 11:45 in) and here (part 2.) The post-hearing press-conference is here.

The first significant motion to be heard was the defense request for a subpoena to obtain the hospital records of Witness 8, Trayvon Martin's 19 year old phone friend. (Starts at 13:40 into part 1.) The defense advised the court the subpoena was no longer necessary as the state told them yesterday the records did not exist. Witness 8 had lied when she told Trayvon Martin's parents' lawyers and the state prosecutor (the latter under oath) she could not attend Trayvon Martin's wake on Friday, March 2, 2012, because she had gone to the hospital where she spent the night. More on this at the end. [More...]

Cancer:

President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela died Tuesday afternoon after a long battle with cancer, the government announced, leaving behind a bitterly divided nation in the grip of a political crisis that grew more acute as he languished for weeks, silent and out of sight in hospitals in Havana and Caracas.

Ryan Lizza writes:

[T]the fact that Barack Obama now so appreciates the limits of his office and his lack of Jedi powers is rich with irony. As I’ve written about before, the premise of Obamaism— from his famous convention speech in 2004, through his primary challenge to Hillary Clinton, in 2008, right up until the later half of his first term—was that Obama was a politician uniquely suited to transform American politics by breaking through the polarization in Washington and bringing the two parties together.

[More . . .]