Stevens' Brain Bucket Defense

Here is one for the law reviews. The ADN reports this morning that Stevens' defense team has requested Bill Allen's medical records. They argue that Mr. Allen's recall & testimony of gifts given to the Not-Quite-Senator-For-Life all date from 2001 forward. 2001 is the year in which Allen crashed his motorcycle and suffered brain injury.

These defense lawyers are sure earning their hefty retainers. You got to give them a nod for a very inventive answer to incriminating evidence that just can't be glossed over. It's pretty hard to fudge and obfuscate when you got people caught on tape talking about back-scratching, pay-offs and handsome gifts given for favors received - especially when one of those caught chatting is Stevens himself.

Oops. Just what is a defense team to do?

Shazam! Enter the brain bucket defense. Bill Allen crashed his bike, scrambled his brains, and presto/chango - is just making this up or mis-remembering things.

Brilliant.

Probably won't save Unc' Ted's hide, but they definitely get high marks for creativity.

Sometimes a Picture is Worth a 1000 Words

The G-Man Diet

First there was Scarsdale, then Eat-Right-for-Your Blood-Type, closely followed by Atkins, the Zone, and South Beach. Now, brought to you by the men in black is the G-Man Diet. I couldn't help but notice that the federal corruption investigation has helped Jim Clark achieve what years of jogging around Juneau and the Hill couldn't - he is downright svelte in his court room appearance.

It's a trend that is hitting the country - from Abramoff and DeLay to our own home-grown corrupt bastards politicians and lobbyists, Kott, Kohring, Hayes, Allen and Smith, thin is all the rage. Melted away by months of fretting about search, seizure and subpoenas are the pounds and pounds of flesh extracted from others, and larded on during Baranoff and Beltway bacchanales.

Yup, the fat cat image of the power brokers in this State certainly has been taken down a notch or two by the G-Man Diet!

The Hayes Chronicles #2: PTL, Squarebanks Style

Remember the days of Praise the Lord, runny mascara and holy(--ier than thou) men like Jim who didn't practice what they preach? The fly on the wall isn't insinuating that LOVCOGIC approached anything near to the likes of a PTL, but there are parallels. Call it PTL, Squarebanks Style.

First, there are the delusions of grandeur that come at a cost to the congregation. Both couples counted on the strength of people's faith and their willingness to trust their religious leaders to do their best to live moral and ethical lives. Second, both couples benefited materially from those faithful -- who, in the case of LOVCOGIC, were willing enough to believe that their charismatic pastor had indeed effected a miracle -- that somehow, just in the nick of time, when the coffers were completely empty, God blessed them with more money to continue construction of their beautiful new church. That the money arrived via fraud, conspiracy and money laundering, and not by divine dispensation I doubt ever occured to anyone in the congregation. Certainly there were suspicions, but when voiced, rapidly and thoroughly squelched by Pastor and Mother Hayes.

So, on the backs of the faithful and the tax payers, here is what Squarebanks' own Bakker-esque couple achieved:

• a Mercedes and a Jaguar (admittedly used), because a former mayor "deserves a mayor car"*,
• a Rolex for him, gold and diamond jewelry for her,
• clothes, manicures, trips, geegaws for them and their family that yearly outstripped by several orders of magnitude their mad money budget allowed by annual earnings and savings,
• a plasma TV,
• an ornamental lighthouse (with operational light and fog horn) in front of
• a new 1/2 million dollar house, trading up from their more modest home of roughly two decades,
• a new truck,
• a 21,000 square foot church complete with the James C. Hayes Fellowship Hall,
• a church sound and projection system a la the megachurches,
• a $2K fountain out front same church, and
• enough musical instruments to back up the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

It's never good to sit at the ringside of someone's trainwreck, even a trainwreck of their own making. This was a church built by family -- the father of Mother Hayes, and it had and probably still has a devoted and solid congregation. Not only does the congregation suffer from the fallout of the transgressions of its leaders, but so does a wholly unrelated entity.

Because the collateral damage in this little PTL scandal was Love In the Name of Christ, or Love, Inc... a small social services organization that does a lot of good in this community. It has suffered from the similarity in names (which the fly on the wall is not wholly unconvinced was coincidental) -- as many who were unaware that there were two different "Loves" assumed Love Inc. was the one under investigation by the FBI.

Pride goeth before a fall... an axiom Pastor and Mother Hayes would have done well to have remembered.

* Jim Hayes, during testimony

The Hayes Chronicles #1: Pimp My Bathroom

What’s with the obsession of the nouveau riche, crooked CEOs and other white-collar criminals with tricked-out bathrooms? There’s the Donald with his faucets of gold, and Kozlowski, former CEO of Tyco and now denizen of some federal pen, who showered behind gold-threaded shower curtains worth six grand.

Here, in Squarebanks, the fly on the wall in the recent trial of Jim Hayes, former city mayor and pastor of Lily of the Valley, Church of God in Christ (otherwise referred to by the prosecution as LOVCOGIC), learned that one of the centerpieces of the prosecution’s exhibits were fancy bathrooms for the offices of Pastor and Mother Hayes. No gold here, that’s too uptown for Squarebanks, but the word was that the bathrooms in the newly built church were furnished with “high-end” fixtures (as testimony goes) picked out by the Mrs.

It’s a crap shoot as to what constitutes high-end up here*, that was never really made clear by the prosecution, and the pics were far to murky to really tell whether that was marble on the counters or just some fancy Corian. Regardless, the bathrooms were part of a long list of no-nos that constituted inappropiate use of some of the 3 million of federal money that was granted, not for fancy faucets, but for mentoring and tutoring programs for the kids on Southside. No word from the Pastor or the Mother as to whether the kids got to use the fancy commodes, or if those were off limits.

*especially since a blue foam seat in an outhouse is considered by many, many Fairbanksans to be "high-end".