Free Republic

***********UPDATE******************

New Charge Brought Against Sheriff Billy Long -

Agents Say He Was Helping With “Cocaine Deal” At Time Of Arrest

A fourth charge has been brought against Hamilton County Sheriff Billy Long, prosecutors said Monday.

The sheriff was out helping with what he believed was a sale of 10 kilograms of cocaine on Saturday morning when he was arrested, prosecutor Gary Humble said.

After he was arrested, Sheriff Long told federal agents “he had made bad choices for which he was sorry,” the new complaint says.

The prosecutor said Sheriff Long on Saturday went to the business of a man described as a cooperating witness (CW).

He said 10 kilograms of cocaine were loaded into the trunk of the CW’s vehicle, and the sheriff was told it was being dropped off at another location.

Sheriff Long followed the CW to the “drop” and then gave him a ride back to the business.

Then he took a split of $48,000 from the alleged drug deal, prosecutor Humble said.

He said the CW told the sheriff that he had to dispose of a gun the sheriff had given him earlier. He said Sheriff Long told him he had “done the right thing” and said he would get him another gun.

Sheriff Long is also charged with providing a gun to a felon, with bribery and with money laundering.

He made a brief court appearance on Monday afternoon before Magistrate Bill Carter and was again handcuffed and wearing the same jeans jacket as he did Saturday afternoon.

A detention hearing and preliminary hearing were delayed to allow attorney Jerry Summers to talk with Sheriff Long and to study the new charges.

It will be Friday at 2 p.m.

Those in the crowded courtroom included County Commission Chairman Bill Hullander and County Attorney Rheubin Taylor. Chairman Hullander said he has gotten no word that Sheriff Long has resigned from his post.

The new charge carries a charge of 10 years to life.

Sheriff Long was held in isolation in a facility in Blount County over the weekend, but he is now being held in the Bradley County Jail.

Meanwhile, Rep. Vince Dean said he is considering a race for sheriff at the expected election in August.

John Bailes, chairman of the Hamilton County Democratic Party, issued this statement, “The Hamilton County Democratic Party believes that injecting party politics into the judicial proceedings concerning Sheriff Long is petty and unproductive. Democrats have full confidence that our federal court system will be judicious and exact in dealing with this case.

“Moving forward, our party will stay focused on the presidential primary this week and upcoming elections later this year.”

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This guy is not some backwater Sheriff....Hamilton Co is metropolitan in nature, and it is almost beyond the imagination that anyone this dirty could be elected to the position he made it to.

Of course his lawyer is playing up the fact that Long had recently attended a John Edwards campaign event, so the bust MUST have been timed for political purposes.

He’s caught. The Feds have him on video and audio tape discussing his crimes in detail. I’m a firm believer in innocent until proven guilty, but that’s in the eyes of a court. I have no such constraints, and he’s toast!

He has a bond hearing in about 30 minutes, at 2 pm EST. Federal prosecutors have already been on record opposing his release. That tells more than anything else at this point.

Pretty much. The county commission can begin ouster proceedings, but it will take time.

Maybe, maybe not. It does not appear at this time that there were any other LE involved. The FBI had him up for over 9 mos. It seems that anyone else’s involvement would have come to light in that time. The scuttlebut is that a judge could be involved as well, but it’s nothing but rumor at this point.

Another high profile dem goes down hard in the TN Valley. This one was a shock. Sheriff Long was at a John Edwards campaign event this past Tuesday, and by Saturday he's in jail with no bond. The arrest has local LE bewildered. At least for now, it appears that Long was a lone wolf, and was not being helped with his crimes from within the department. Rumor has it that a judge could be next on the hotseat. Pretty wild weekend in Chattanooga to say the least.

You nailed Geek Squad squarely on the head. They are not technical people, and conversely, should someone with competent technical abilities somehow get hired on to the Geek Squad, their lives will be made so miserable that they end up quitting. Geek Squad is merely a sales force trained in technical jargon. I always get a good laugh out of conversations with them.

Haven’t run across that problem yet on Dells. I’m sure it will start to become a problem in the near future though.

Shouldn’t be a problem. I’ve done 3 or 4 XP to Vista downgrades on Dell laptops, and it’s just a matter of setting the BIOS to boot from CD\DVD and then nuking the partition to allow for a clean XP installation.

I recently bought a Waverunner from a guy who owned a very nice place on Lanier. Even though the ski was two years old, it was literally in showroom condition because he said he had hardly been able to use it. What little he had used it entailed a 20 mile drive to the nearest accesible boat ramp (he said there were a dozen or so between his place and the one he was forced to use, but they had been closed all summer) , and he said that now even it was closed. He went on to tell me that even over the last five years he had very litte time where he actually had water under his dock enough to use it and access his waterfront. Rough stuff.

Even though it doesn’t identify an attormey as the one filing the motions, it most likely is. Standard journalistic parlance usually attributes litigants court actions as their own, even though lawyers are the ones actually doing it.

I think everyone is kind of missing the point of this election year PR stunt. Kerry isn’t running for anything. He will make the appearance of ‘presenting his case’, but in the end when he is unable, it’s really of no consequence. What it does do, is paint the various 501c’s as ‘liars’. Then the various dem candidates who get ravaged by them can shake their heads and point and say things like ‘they’re lying about me like the lied about John Kerry’. Never mind that a ‘lie’ was never proven. We now have headlines like “Kerry vows to disprove Swift boat claims [prepared to prove the lie beyond any reasonable doubt]” in the public record. No one will remember that he never actually did it, just that he said he was going to.

What you’re seeing is here the birth of a brand new election year red herring.

I would add to that the abuse of trust he committed by being a ‘security consultant’. Said position probably gave him near un-fettered access to the systems he infected, which in my opinion, makes extreme punishment all the more acceptable. I agree that these people should rot away in prison for the rest of their lives as a deterrent to others who would do the same.

I wouldn't go so far as to say no down time, but with the telcos a call to their incident response is not met with the sound of drool dripping to the desk at the other end of the line. But yes, cable suffers not only a higher rate of non-connectivity, the incident response time is abhorrent. A call to their incident queue to report a high availability connection is down is met with the same level of urgency of telling them that your Channel 16 is starting to get some lines in it. But rest assured, that no matter which two of those problems you called to report, the same guy will be dispatched to correct it. Eventually.

I’d say you’re right. It has been my experience that Comcast, as well as all other cable internet providers I have dealt with are chocked full of incompetent ‘techs’ and this just seems to be yet another ham-fisted attempt by incompetents to ‘experiment’ on their customers. I have seen more than one bring down entire network sectors only to learn that the person responsible was some $12/hr tech with unprecedented network security access. In my part of the world, businesses avoid cable internet like the plague.

I have XM, and every so often, when I feel that I may have been bad, I punish myself with small snippets of Err America just to see what's going on. The first thing you notice, even over the general paranoid tone of the hosts, is that it just plain sucks. It is horrible radio. Every show, and every host take part in this, pardon the term, mental masturbation, constantly reinforcing one another, and emulating what they think conservative talkers are doing. It's mildly amusing in short doses. Very short doses.

My initial reaction to Office ‘07 was pretty much the same as yours, but after working with it for a month or so, I have found that the layout actually makes more sense. Users of previous versions always grumble about it for the first few weeks, but it’s been my experience that even the most hardened users of previous versions are off and running in a fairly short time period, and then grumble about going back to the same previous versions they loved so much just a few weeks before. There are a number of “here’s where the common tasks are” guides available on the internet that are helpful in reducing the learning curve.

If you like Sabayon, you really should check out PCLinuxOS 2007. I’m a recent Sabayon convert myself to it. I still have Sabayon running as a partition, but it’s getting ready to get relegated to a VM. I’m now running PCLOS 80%+ of the time. It’s the best thought out and deployed distro I’ve seen to date.

I definitely see Kyle saving the day, and being excused from his impending humiliation by Presidential decree.

Since everyone is throwing recommendations out there, I’ll get mine in. AVG makes a superb anti-spyware program. As Sr. Network Admin, I have successfully lobbied to have the paid version added to most of our Critical user/Execs PC’s. You can get the same program for free, the only difference being that you have to manually update and scan with the free version. I have been a big fan of AVG A/V suite for years, and their A/S offering is every bit on par.

http://free.grisoft.com/doc/29116/us/frt/0

If you think Ubuntu is so sweet, I challenge you to give PC Linux OS 2007 a test drive. After installing it as a virtual machine and tinkering around with it for an afternoon, I installed it as a dual boot option on my laptop, and haven’t looked back. Of course I didn’t think Ubuntu was all that hot to begin with, but PCLOS is the new apple of my eye.