Dogs searching a landfill in Abilene, Texas, found evidence in the case of a missing 13-year-old girl from West Texas, a spokesman for the investigation told the Associated Press.
Authorities did not elaborate on the evidence discovered and why the investigation led them to a vast landfill in the town, which is 70 miles east of Colorado City, where Hailey Darlene Dunn went missing last month.
Hailey was reported missing by her mother on Dec. 28. . . .
Authorities have said that her mother’s live-in boyfriend, Shawn Casey Adkins, is among several “persons of interest” in the case.
According to a police affidavit filed in the investigation, Adkins remarked to a relative that hurting a teenager would be “like killing a deer.”
Police say both Adkins and the girl’s mother lied on polygraph tests. Here’s a clip from a recent Nancy Grace show that includes video footage of Shawn Adkins:
“[S]exual abuse does not randomly occur throughout the child population. Rather, it occurs more often in single-parent or reconstituted families. . . .
“Virtually all studies of child sexual abuse report that girls living with stepfathers are at high risk. . . .
“In sum, mounting divorce rates, soaring nonmarital births, and the ubiquity of cohabitation combine to create a profoundly negative consequence for young girls: the prospect of sexual exploitation.”
— Robin Fretwell Wilson, “Children at Risk: The Sexual Exploitation of Female Children After Divorce,” Cornell Law Review, 2001
What you see is that, at its peak in 2007-08, LGF routinely had 1,500-2,000 different people — identified in the chart as “unique nics” (nicknames) — commenting each week. That was essential to the functionality of LGF, which was always more of a comment-driven “community” blog, where the commenters provided more content than did the brief headline-type posts.
The number of LGF commenters appears to have peaked in late summer 2007, when 2,000-plus commenters were regularly participating, but by mid-2008 noticeably sagged toward 1,500. Interestingly enough, there was a period in 2008 when the number of comments increased even as the number of commenters declined.
The real freefall began in 2009 and, by late that year, the average number of “unique nics” commenting in a week fell below 500 for the first time. By early 2011, the core commenting community at LGF was down to about 250 people — which is to say, about one-eighth of what it had been in 2007.
That a site could lose more than 80% of its regular commenters in less than four years is remarkable. But it seems there is limited interest in railing against creationists, global warming “deniers” and, of course, those dangerous Belgians.
State regulators shut down four banks on Friday, bringing the new year’s total number of bank failures to seven, following 157 bank closures during 2010.
Three of the four failed banks — Enterprise Banking Co., CommunitySouth Bank & Trust, and The Bank of Asheville — had been previously included in TheStreet’sBank Watch List of undercapitalized institutions, based on third-quarter regulatory data provided by SNL Financial.
United Western Bank is the lone exception. Its failure represents the biggest bank to go belly up since August.
After days of relentless attacks by media across the fruited plain, Sarah Palin’s unfavorable rating hit an all-time high this week. …
From January 8 [the day of the Tucson Massacre] through January 16, CNN ran 80 stories that included the name of the former Alaska governor.
That’s roughly nine pieces per day, during which her name was mentioned approximately 664 times or over 70 times every 24 hours!
Rarely do we get such a clear example of the bias of the mainstream media and the extent to which it fears and hates Sarah Palin.
But since she is “not electable” because of this media bias, we should throw Palin overboard and demand she not run and not be taken seriously by Republican voters, right?
Because Dana Milbank and the Editors of The Washington Post get to pick our candidates, right?
Keith Olbermann, the highest-rated host on MSNBC, announced abruptly on the air Friday night that he was leaving his show, “Countdown,” immediately.
The host, who has had a stormy relationship with the management of the network for some time, especially since he was suspended for two days last November, came to an agreement with NBC’s corporate management late this week to settle his contract and step down.
In a closing statement on his show, Mr. Olbermann said simply that it would be the last edition of the program. He offered no explanation other than on occasion “all that surrounded the show – but never the show itself – was just too much for me.”
Mr. Olbermann thanked his viewers for their enthusiastic support of a show that had “gradually established its position as antiestablishment.”
In a statement, MSNBC said: “MSNBC and Keith Olbermann have ended their contract. The last broadcast of ‘Countdown with Keith Olbermann’ will be this evening. MSNBC thanks Keith for his integral role in MSNBC’s success and we wish him well in his future endeavors.”
A knowledgeable official said the move had nothing to do with Comcast taking control of NBC next week, although the cable giant was informed when it received final federal approval for the purchase that Olbermann would be leaving the cable channel. This official described the dramatic divorce—Olbermann was about halfway through a four-year, $30 million contract—as mutual.
Olbermann, who quit MSNBC once before — in 1998, ripping his bosses in the process—almost single-handedly revived the network by leading it on a leftward march and aggressively attacking the rival operation he called Fox Noise. But his relations with top NBC and MSNBC executives sharply deteriorated when he was suspended for making donations to Democratic candidates, and they began to talk about how the channel was now on solid enough footing to survive without him.
If Olbermann was too much for the suits at Comcast, they’re not going to want Little Miss Lesbian anchoring their 8 p.m. hour. Bet $20 it’s O’Donnell.
UPDATE II: The great thing about Olbermann was, he was so easy to parody, even a kid could do it.
UPDATE III: Professor Glenn Reynolds: “He was a useful idiot for a while. Now he’s no longer useful. Expect to see more of this kind of thing. . . . I was only on Olbermann’s show once, on election night 2004, when he was still more or less sane.” More or less.
UPDATE VI: Let me show you the kind of stuff that used to drive me nuts when I was a newspaper editor dealing with Associated Press copy. The AP’s David Bauder:
Keith Olbermann was MSNBC’s most popular personality and single-handedly led its transformation to an outspoken, left-leaning cable news network in prime time. Despite that, he often seemed to be walking on a tightrope with his job. Friday night, it snapped.
“Despite that”? Don’t you mean, perhaps, because of that? Bauder evidently doesn’t stop to think if maybe Olbermann and the anti-Republican agenda at MSNBC had stayed out past their curfew. Once Bush was out of office and Obama became president — elected with the help of gale-force media tailwinds — what was the point of being the anti-GOP network? Where did that make sense from a market-share perspective?
By moving left in 2006 — becoming the raging liberal doppeganger of Fox News — MSNBC pushed CNN into third place. But then what? Where was the audience-growth strategy? They couldn’t go farther left, and the steady diet of liberal indignation had reached its saturation point. Well, never mind the bias. Bauder reports what I’d expected as soon as I heard the news of Olbermann’s departure:
MSNBC announced that O’Donnell, who had frequently filled in for Olbermann before starting his own 10 p.m. show, will take over Olbermann’s time slot starting Monday. “The Ed Show,” with Ed Schultz, will move to 10 p.m. Cenk Uygur of the Web show “The Young Turks” will fill Schultz’s vacated 6 p.m. time slot.
If MSNBC won’t keep Olbermann, Schultz’s days as Cable TV’s Angriest White Man are likely numbered.
How is it that one psychotic is made a symbol for all the other Americans who haven’t shot their members of Congress? If random criminals are to be said to symbolize America, why not the mafioso rounded up this week?
No, when a British writer wants a “pathetic symbol” of America, it can’t be gangsters or Mr. Hookers-and-Blow. It’s got to be the 22-year-old Bush Derangement Syndrome sufferer who, despite the fact that he had no connection with conservatives — and not even much connection with reality — provides Alice Miles an excuse to criticize conservatives:
What Palin and others on the right in particular do have to answer for is not Loughner’s behaviour, but the diminution of political debate in the US; the way populist poses have taken the place of argument. They have seized on the First Amendment right to free speech and twisted it to encourage dishonesty and stupidity. Uninterested in facts, they offer a dangerously combustible mix of religion and politics, an elision of dogma, morality and “patriotism” which mirrors the similarly ignorant ramblings of other extremists. The internet fuels this ignorance, allowing myths such as Obama’s supposed foreign nationality to spread.
We’re uninteresting in facts, you see. We’re encouraging dishonesty and stupidity, and we’re using the Internet to fuel ignorance.
There’s something “pathetic” here, all right, but it’s not America.
As women progress in educational and professional opportunities, their odds of finding a committed man appear to go down.
That’s one of the findings in the new book “Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate and Think About Marrying,” by researchers Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker at the University of Texas at Austin.
Researchers found that since women in the 18- to 23-year-old group feel they don’t need men for financial dependence, many of them feel they can play around with multiple partners without consequence, and that the early 20s isn’t the time to have a serious relationship. But eventually, they do come to want a real, lasting relationship. The problem is that there will still be women who will have sex readily without commitment, and since men know this, fewer of them are willing to go steady.
“Women have plenty of freedom, but freedom does not translate easily into getting what you want,” Regnerus said. The wide availability of pornography has also influenced the dynamics of relations between men and women, Regnerus said. A segment of 20-something men are content to have their sexual experiences by themselves, removing them from the pool of available partners. That means high-quality men – likely those who want monogamous, committed relationships – are still eligible for dating, but the overall dating pool has shrunk, meaning some women will be left unsatisfactorily single.
Which is to say that it is in women’s long-term best interests to organize a nookie shortage — making sex available only on condition of marriage — and to revile as sluts those floozies who refuse to cooperate with efforts of the Nookie Cartel to increase the value of the aforesaid commodity.
But why lecture, when it has been so well expressed in a song?
I think we’re all pretty well agreed that if the charges against Kermit Gosnell are true, then dude is a criminal and needs to go to jail. Killing a baby after it’s born and has taken breaths? Is not abortion. It should be, and is, a crime punishable by law. And Kermit Gosnell is being criminally prosecuted.
Fortunately, there is no need for me to refute Filipovic’s counterfactual insistence that the Gosnell case has nothing to do with the legality of abortion, because her late-term fisking has already been accomplished:
So, um… very glib, very semantic, but, even granting the Humpty Dumpty power to just say “these were not abortions” despite the fact that the women showed up for abortions at a place known for late-term illegal abortions and the doctor performed what he called an abortion, in fact 33 counts are about illegal abortions. The eight murder charges are just about the babies he decided it would be easier to deliver and kill. . . .
This is one of those missing-girl cases that Nancy Grace is always covering. If you’ve seen enough stories like this, the patterns become familiar, and this one’s starting to look like a murder investigation:
