- Can Bishop Brown Utter The Truth? Frank Mickadeit has an excellent column this morning on yesterday’s press conference by women who have been
victimized at least three times–that would be: molested, ignored and then harassed–by Catholic Church officials. There will be more festivities today. This time Bishop Tod Brown (pictured) is set for a court contempt hearing in Orange County and if he decides to hold a press conference, The Mick has a few questions:
If your Covenant With the Faithful is about doing everything possible to help the victims heal, and you admit the church's gross culpability ($6.7 million worth) in these four cases, what in God's name did you gain by subjecting some of the victims to eight days of brutal examination by your attorneys? The type of examination that broke Monsignor John Urell, a grown man with years of being in the public eye, after less than one day? How can you possibly say you weren't victimizing these women all over again? And don't–-DON'T, FOR GOD'S SAKE –hide behind the lawyers-made-me B.S.
Well, Brownie?
Dana’s Memory Returns, Selectively: Remember how Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (R-Skipped Vietnam Combat Duty) claimed he couldn’t remember bringing now-accused man-boy sex villain Jeffrey Ray Nielsen from Westminster with him to Washington, D.C. as his congressional aide in the ‘90s? While working for Rohrabacher, Nielsen allegedly molested a 7th grade Virginia boy. You can read excerpts of some high-strung love letters Nielsen sent the boy in the OC Weekly archives. After Rohrabacher wrote a personal letter of recommendation to get Nielsen into USC law school, Nielsen began a relationship with a Westminster High School freshman boy. He now faces criminal charges for both relationships. Today, Dena Bunis–Rohrabacher’s press secretary, oops, the Register’s DC correspondent–reports on the congressman’s numerous, detailed memories of another fellow who served as his intern around the same time as Nielsen: Blackwater USA’s Erik Prince.
Back To The Liar’s Nest: Proponents of a new tollway in South Orange County won a four-month delay in a California Coastal Commission hearing yesterday in the wake of a “blistering report” by agency staffers who slammed the project as a mess, the Times reports. In hopes that the commissioners might overlook that report and quickly approve the deal, OC’s Transportation Corridor Agencies (TCA) dangled $100 million in their faces. The bait wasn’t swallowed and now the TCA needs more time to figure out which lie to tell next. A February hearing is scheduled. Backers of the project claim the road is necessary to reduce traffic congestion. In reality, a future Foothill South would be critical to real estate developers who desperately want to build tens of thousands of new homes near San Onofre State Park.
The Power of One: Remember the powerful image of the unknown Chinese man standing in front of Red Army tanks during the 1989 pro-Democracy rallies in Beijing? Vietnamese Americans believe they also possess a potent picture that illustrates the brutality of the communists running Vietnam and they’re using it in a $2,500-a-month billboard campaign, reports My-Thuan Tran of the Times. The image shows soldiers muzzling Father Nguyen Van Ly during a trial in March. The government convicted Nguyen as a national security threat because of his anti-communist stances. On Monday, Little Saigon residents unveiled the photograph on a billboard at Brookhurst and Hazard. Protestors yelled, “Down with communists! Down, down, down!” Who is listening? Not the White House. President George W. Bush has twice met cordially with Vietnam’s leaders, and focused on aiding U.S. corporate ties instead of human rights.
Loony Register Reader of the Day! George Zeissner of Fountain Valley grabs first prize. Zeissner is furious that people are interested in why Santa Ana police officers fired perhaps more than a dozen bullets at an apparently unarmed man and killed him last week on the 55 Freeway. He writes, “So, a suspect evades police while driving a stolen vehicle with a female suspect as a passenger is shot. So what? Anyone who runs from identified police and refuses to stop should not have any rights and there should be no criminal/civil action resulting from this.” Bootlicker must have just felt a tingling sensation in his loins.
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.