I'm No Longer Even Shocked...

The first openly trans lawmaker in the US — who was hailed as a trail-blazer — has admitted to sickening child sex charges involving young kids in a daycare. Former Democratic New Hampshire state Rep. Stacie-Marie Laughton, 41, a biological male who identifies as female, pleaded guilty to charges including sexual exploitation of children last week in a Boston federal court, WMUR reported.

He pled guilty because he didn't really have much choice, being caught bang to rights. The state motto is 'Live Free Or Die', but maybe they should change it to 'Don't Elect Trans Criminals' instead? 

Four pictures of children believed to be 3 to 5 years old were sent to Laughton by former partner Lindsay Groves, who took the horrific images in the bathroom of the daycare where she worked in Tyngsborough, Mass., federal prosecutors said.Laughton — who was called a history-maker following their election to the New Hampshire House in 2012 — asked Groves to take the nauseating pictures and exchanged thousands of text messages about them, according to the feds.

It makes you wonder how bad the opposition must have been, that he could get elected at all: 

Laughton was previously forced to resign twice from the New Hampshire House over separate legal issues — including three felony convictions in 2008 for credit card fraud and conspiracy to commit fraud.

And yet they kept electing him! What are they putting in the water in New Hampshire?  

Well, That Was In Another Country, And Besides, The Wench Is Dead..

Hours before Katie Madden took her own life, she had a tense phone call with her former partner Jonathon Russell. Russell was on bail after allegedly assaulting Madden – he was banned from contacting her – but the conversation took place nevertheless.

Like the tango, it takes two to make a phone call. Why didn’t she hang up?

There was a witness to the call who gave evidence to the inquest into Madden’s death. Mason Jones, a friend of Madden’s, said Russell was “vile” and “abusive”. Although Jones said he could not remember the exact words Russell used, he said: “I recall Jon saying at least once that he was in control of the town and would end her life if she didn’t do it herself.”

Which she promptly did. And her family is OUTRAGED! that he’s not being charged as a result, as is the ‘Guardian’, apparently…

In the days leading up to Madden’s death, her mother, Bernadette Sutton, had told police and social services that she was concerned about the threat Russell posed to her daughter. “By this point, I thought he would kill her or she would take her own life,” Sutton said, in a statement. Nigel Parsley, the coroner, concluded that Madden died by suicide while the balance of her mind was disturbed, but he also cited her relationship with Russell, with whom she had two children, as a contributory factor.“Kate’s toxic relationship, in conjunction with Kate’s known mental health conditions, affected her state of mind and therefore contributed to her death,” he said.

Is that a crime that carries a charge, then?  

Despite this, no police investigation into Bignell’s role in Barter’s death has ever been launched and the Crown Prosecution Service says there is insufficient evidence to bring charges.

Seems not. 

Inquests have a different burden of proof to criminal courts, finding on the balance of probabilities, rather than the criminal threshold of beyond reasonable doubt. There is no criminal due process and nobody is convicted or acquitted.

In other words, coroners get to grandstand and sympathise with the grieving family and it costs them nothing, so they do it. And it seems this one wasn't prepared to sign off on something they could be criticised for later: 

In Katie Madden’s case, although the coroner acknowledged that a toxic relationship contributed to her death, he did not make any finding of unlawful killing. Almost two years on, Madden’s family say Russell has not been investigated in relation to any of the inquest findings or any alleged abuse. This is despite admitting at the inquest that he gave Madden a black eye weeks before she died.

Have the police charged him with assault then?  

Police closed the assault investigation just days after Madden was found hanged at her home in Lowestoft, Suffolk. “The idea that it would just be dropped because she died – it should never be the case,” her mother says.

The police have to cut their cloth according to the CPS's budget. With no live complainant, it's not hard to see why they aren't preapared to go to trial, is it?  

Tweet Of The Month

 Another bumper crop (well, a lot did happen this month!):  

Post Title Of The Month

 Tim Worstall enlightens the bewildered (or more accurately, those claiming bewilderment): 

Quote Of The Month

Farenheit 211 on the suggested 'Freedom Portal':

"There’s not much yet on this Freedom Portal site apart from a graphic that ripples to reveal the word ‘freedom’ and an animation of a rider, presumably a reference to Paul Revere who, during the Revolutionary War, carried news of British troop movements to American Patriot forces prior to the battles of Lexington and Concord. There’s little indication on the freedom.gov site as to how this site will work but the fact that this site was created in the first place is of great consequence. It’s a sort of declaration of war by America not on Britain as a sovereign nation, but instead against an authoritarian political current that for various reasons has gained significant influence in places like the United Kingdom and other European and Anglophone nations."

Post Of The Month

 Bucko goes for a shopping trip.

I Remain Unconvinced...

Ministers must end “barking mad” restraints on civil service pay or risk being unable to recruit the technical and digital specialists it needs to keep pace, a union leader has warned.

Really?  

Mike Clancy, the Prospect general secretary, said the government should end the “rightwing trope” that restrained the pay of highly skilled civil servants and left government unable to compete with the private sector. He said it should be realistic for senior specialists in competitive fields to be paid more than the prime minister.

Can't argue against this! But isn't this more an indictment of the woeful performance of the Prime Minister than the spectacular performance of the civil serpents?

In an interview with the Guardian, Clancy also told the government to take more care with its approach to deregulation, and said it could risk falling foul of its own Employment Rights Act.

Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha!  

Clancy was the TUC’s lead on the Employment Rights Act, and said he was concerned about how angrily business groups were still lobbying against the changes. He said the government should come out more forcefully to demonstrate that there had been a fundamental shift back towards workers in the labour market.

That'll be difficult, since there hasn't been one.  

Well, Nesrine, If So, It's A Hole He Dug Entirely By Himself

It's not often she makes sense, but I like to highlight it when she does: 

He is in a hole that is too deep to climb out of. The prime minister’s persistent unpopularity is best understood as the result of abundance: there is simply, in Starmer, something for everyone to deplore.In policy, he has taken stances that have established him in the minds of many people as devoid of principle and compassion.

He's still got the shovel in his hands, Nesrine, and there's no sign yet that he's finished... 

On Gaza, Starmer got it wrong from the start. From his early assertion that Israel had the right to cut off water and power, to refusing calls for a ceasefire and then cracking down on protest (a move now judged as unlawful by the high court), the prime minister positioned himself against a huge domestic swell of distress.

'Huge domestic well', Nesrine? Hardly. Only emanating from those people we should really be looking to remove from the country at the first opportunity, the ones we regret ever inviting in.... 

And then there is Starmer himself. Personality alone does not make a politician, and God knows we have suffered enough from big personalities such as Boris Johnson – but you need something. Not necessarily fireworks and charm, but at the minimum just a sense of tangibility.

Starmer is impalpable; not in the sense that he isn’t there, but that he is hiding. He doesn’t dream, he says, nor does he have phobias, nor favourite novels. He communicates in only the most generic terms, in staccato sentences using repetitive themes – “change” or his working-class roots – connected by meaningless “let me be clears” and “make no mistakes”

I agree here, it is strange that someone who was a lawyer could be such a poor public speaker. 

Who is this person’s constituency? Not the left, to which he has made clear in policy and in purges that this is not its Labour party. Not the right, which will never be at home in Labour, no matter how many people it deports or how much capital it courts. And not the centre any more, for which Starmer’s incompetence and lurching from one debacle to the next is becoming increasingly hard to rationalise.

His constiturncy appears to be himself.  

Another One Of Those 'Isolated Incidents'.

A man who was fatally stabbed in a triple stabbing in Croydon was named by detectives as his family spoke of their heartbreak. A murder investigation has been launched after 22-year-old Lorik Abazi was killed in the early hours of Sunday morning.

Just another day in Mayor Khan's London, as our wonderful enrichment kills each other off with depressing regularity, and the police do their best to sweep it under the carpet, so as not to frighten the tourists. 

Police were called to Hesterman Way at around 1.15am following reports of a stabbing. Three men with stab wounds were attended to at the scene, but despite best efforts from the London Ambulance, Mr Abazi died at hospital.Two other men stabbed in the incident, both aged 21, were also taken to hospital. They have since both been arrested on suspicion of affray. One man has potentially life-threatening injuries in hospital, while the other has been taken into police custody. In total seven people have now been arrested.

Just don't mention the gang war!  

“I know a tragic incident like this will concern people locally. We believe this to have been an isolated incident and I hope the fact we have a number of suspects in custody provides some reassurance to people in Croydon. We have increased patrols in the local area and I would ask anyone with concerns to speak to my officers.”

There's an awful lot of these so-called 'isolated incidents'... 

Only Effective If They Are The Type Used In The Ukraine War

Specialist pilots are to deploy drones to catch crime gangs fly-tipping waste in London and other parts of the country. The team of 33 pilots will use 54 unmanned aircraft fitted with laser mapping technology to track from the air illegal waste dumps in the South East and other regions.

Unles it's given these types of drones it's doomed to failure:

London has the highest rate of fly-tipping in the country, according to recent data, at more than twice the English average, with Croydon the worst affected borough.

Really? Worse than my own dear borough, where I cannot walk the 10 minutes to the local station without seeing the overnight activities of my diverse and enriching 'neighbours'?

Ugh...

  

The new Environment Agency (EA) squad will target criminal gangs behind large-scale waste dumping rather than individuals involved in opportunistic and smaller scale fly-tipping.

So, ignoring the 'Broken Windows' effect that did so much to clean up New York, before the idiot Democrats went and elected someone who turned it back into a crimeridden literal shithole again? 

Officers from the agency will also be able to swiftly scan and cross-check lorry licence applications against waste permit records, using a new screening tool.

It's staggering that this is a new thing, and not something implimented from the get -go.