The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Impeachment Circus Update

Posted on | December 11, 2019 | 2 Comments

 

Readers will excuse my paucity of commentary about this week’s “historic” impeachment news — CNN keeps repeating the word “historic,” as if we were watching the crash of the Hindenburg in real time — but I was busy destroying the feminist blogosphere. You’re welcome.

Anyway, on Monday the Democrats held a hearing in which their chief witness was a lawyer who, after he finished testifying, got up on the other side to serve as the interrogator of the Republicans’ chief witness.

It was like the Moscow Show Trials re-done as a Monty Python skit.

When Democrats are making a mockery of due process this way, can you blame me if I fail to provide running commentary? What can I do except point and laugh? Everybody with two eyes and a brain understands that this isn’t about President Trump’s “high crimes and misdemeanors,” it’s about ORANGE MAN BAD! We’re witnessing the symptoms of terminal Trump Derangement Syndrome, not an actual impeachment, and it’s very difficult for me to treat this ludicrous charade seriously.

What I didn’t realize Monday morning, however, was that the Democrats had scheduled that hearing on short notice as a means to try to hijack the news cycle on the day that Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz released his devastating report on the FBI’s malfeasance in its surveillance of the Trump 2016 campaign. So this impeachment business is actually a cover-up — Adam Schiff and his cronies are using this process to smear Trump and distract Americans from evidence of wrongdoing that occurred in Obama’s administration.

The so-called “mainstream” media is tangled up in all this, as Molly Hemingway explained Tuesday on Fox News Special Report:

I’m one of the few people who has actually read the 430-page report. It outlines such tremendous amounts of spying. Electronic surveillance, the use of confidential human informants that were replaced people on the campaign.
Two years ago you had competing memos come out. You had Devin Nunes say that there were problems with the FISA process, that that was abuse. You had the response memo from Adam Schiff who is now leading the impeachment effort. Never Trump media and liberal media completely disparage the Nunes memo and completely supported the Schiff memo and they were utterly humiliated by what come out in this report yesterday. Every single thing in the Nunes memo reported to be true. If anything, it underreported the problems with the FISA process.
Meanwhile, things that were claimed by Schiff that people took seriously, the people accepted uncritically, were shown to be false. They said there were no material omissions in the FISA warrants. . . .
There were so many errors. And, again, all in the same direction. The dossier was completely disputed. Remember that Adam Schiff read the dossier into the Congressional record. He hijacked a separate hearing in order to do so. There should be consequences for this. And there should be consequences for media that got it wrong as well.

Do you see why it seems to me futile to comment on every new development here? When all is said and done, the daily events of this circus will be just so many details that no one really cares about, because the Democrats (and the news media, but I repeat myself) as so obviously in the wrong that nothing I say about it could possibly matter.

Here’s the thing though: If Nancy Pelosi understands nothing else, she certainly knows how to conduct a whip count. In other words, she has enough Democrat members demanding impeachment in order to get the 218 votes necessary, and if she tried to stop it, the demented Trump-haters in her caucus would destroy her. Pelosi has no choice now but to pretend that this is legitimate, regardless of what the polls might say, and the polls aren’t very encouraging for Democrats. They have lashed themselves to the mast, and will go down with the ship.



 

Category: Donald Trump

Jersey City Shooting ‘Targeted’ Jews, ‘Being Investigated as a Hate Crime’

Posted on | December 11, 2019 | Comments Off on Jersey City Shooting ‘Targeted’ Jews, ‘Being Investigated as a Hate Crime’

 

After police engaged in a gun battle Tuesday with two gunmen in Jersey City, liberals on Twitter spewed out their predictable rhetoric blaming the NRA, President Trump, and Republicans generally. Never mind that New Jersey has some of the most stringent anti-gun laws in America, and never mind that at the time, nothing was known about the suspects or their motive. If it turns out that these perps were NRA members or Trump supporters, I’ll be rather surprised. Until police release the identity of the gunmen, it would be irresponsible to speculate about the motive here, but Jersey City’s mayor said the shooters “targeted” the kosher grocery store where three Hasidic Jews were killed, and said it is being “investigated as a hate crime.” Meanwhile, in New York:

New York City Councilman Chaim Deutsch said the NYPD was boosting its presence at “high-profile sites, including synagogues.” New York authorities were working with Jersey City police and New Jersey State Police, the councilman said.
“The Mayor of Jersey City has asserted that today’s incident was a deliberate attack targeting the Jewish community,” New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Twitter.
“This tragically confirms that a growing pattern of violent anti-Semitism has now turned into a crisis for our nation. And now this threat has reached the doorstep of New York City,” de Blasio’s post said.

De Blasio said he had “directed the NYPD to assume a state of high alert.” Despite suggestions of an attack motivated by anti-Semitism, we don’t actually know this for sure, and must await further reporting.



 

Category: Crime, New Jersey

In The Mailbox: 12.10.19

Posted on | December 10, 2019 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Thanks to everyone who hit the tip jar to save my car. Also, Shark Tank is back; whatever security cert issues were plaguing it previously seem to have been fixed.

OVER THE TRANSOM
Bacon Time: Here’s An Idea – Do Your F**king Job
357 Magnum: Neighbors Were Shocked
EBL: Brexit, Actually
Twitchy: Byron York Tears FBI, Media A New One In Vicious Thread On Steele Dossier
Louder With Crowder: British Mom Shamed For Saying “Father Christmas”

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Podcast #128 – The Rootlessness Episode
American Conservative: Five Infuriating Takeaways From The Afghanistan Papers
American Greatness: IG Report Shows Comey Briefed Obama On Trump Campaign investigation
American Thinker: Socialism’s Unbroken Trail Of Failure
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Bigfoot News
Babalu Blog: Photos Of The Day – Havana Before & After Socialism
Baldilocks: November 2019 Post Digest At Da Tech Guy Blog
BattleSwarm: Terrorist Cartels & The War On Drugs, also, Inflation Slayer Paul Volcker, RIP
Cafe Hayek: Quotation Of The Day
Camp of the Saints: The Left’s Abject Hatred
CDR Salamander: Shaping The Blame In Afghanistan
Da Tech Guy: Remember, Canonization Doesn’t Make A Saint…, also, It’s Almost Showtime
Don Surber: Red China’s Exports To US Down 23%, also, Why Trump Succeeded Where WFB Failed
First Street Journal: President Trump Has Kept Another Promise, And The Globalists Don’t Like It
Fred On Everything: On Rogues & Rogue States
The Geller Report: Muslim Migrant Plotted To Behead People With Chainsaw, Had Huge Weapons Stash, also, Navy Suspends Flight Training for 300+ Saudi Students In Wake Of Pensacola Shooting
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day, also, Double Plus Untrue
Hollywood In Toto: Tears, Rage, & Results – Season One of Red Pilled America, also, Star Wars Mocks Conservatives At Worst Possible Time
Legal Insurrection: Schiff Confirms Trump Impeachment All About 2020, also, Democrats Announce Articles Of Impeachment
Power Line: Hollywood? Inaccurate? You Don’t Say! also, What Besides Political Bias Can Explain The FBI’s Egregious Misconduct?
Shark Tank: FL Rep “Christmas Carlos” Smith Debuts In Gay Christmas Play
Shot In The Dark: Cultural Cleansing
STUMP: Taxing Tuesday – Taxes For Old, Taxes For New?
The Political Hat: You Will Be Made To F**k
This Ain’t Hell: Jeffrey Epstein – Not A Navy SEAL, also, No Bias In Anti-Trump FISA Request?
Victory Girls: Under-Rehearsed Democrats Give Pitiful Performance
Volokh Conspiracy: Seattle Public Library Considering Whether To Cancel Meeting Of Trans-Skeptical Feminist Group
Weasel Zippers: Dem Rep Spanberger (VA-7) Confronted By Constituents On Impeachment – “Incredible Bullshit”, “Crap”, also, CIA Alumnus Responds To Brennan’s Tweet – “I Will Attend Your Trial And Sentencing”
Megan McArdle: Why McKinsey Became A Problem For Pete Buttigieg
Mark Steyn: The Accelerating Madness, also, A Bicycle Built For #MeToo

Amazon Warehouse Deals




Category: Linkagery

Who Killed All the Feminist Blogs?

Posted on | December 10, 2019 | 3 Comments

 

Let’s throw a victory party to celebrate this good news:

Soon after Anna Holmes took on the job of building the website Jezebel, in 2007, she set it apart from established publications like Vogue and Elle with a post offering $10,000 to anyone who would send in the best unretouched version of a women’s magazine cover photo. And with that, Jezebel had marked its territory: feminist cultural criticism, with an edge. . . .
Within three years, Jezebel had surpassed its sibling publication, Gawker.com, the flagship site of Gawker Media, in monthly page views. . . .
In the aughts and the earlier part of this decade, other online feminist publications sprang to life — Feministing, The Hairpin, The Toast and many others — covering everything from paid leave to the Kardashians in a conversational voice that was sometimes rude, sometimes funny and never didactic.
Now many of those sites are dead or dying, and Jezebel is under new management, part of a stable of publications run by the hedge fund-controlled ownership group, G/O Media, that recently set off a staff exodus at the sports site Deadspin. Feminist media has been especially hard hit by the financial turbulence in the news industry.
Samhita Mukhopadhyay, a former executive editor of Feministing and now the executive editor of Teen Vogue, said she missed the years when those publications were connecting with readers, calling it “the heyday” of independent feminist media. . . .
The gradual collapse has continued into this year. Feministing, an independent blog founded in 2004, plans to shut down in the weeks to come. At its peak, the site had 1.2 million unique monthly visitors, with most revenue coming from ads and reader donations. The co-executive editors, Lori Adelman and Maya Dusenbery, said Feministing helped popularize the term “slut shaming,” ran early interviews with chart-toppers like Lizzo and pushed for coverage of Gamergate, a cybermob that targeted women.
“It was unclear how we could have such a ferocious audience and not be onto something,” Ms. Mukhopadhyay said. “Many of us involved in the feminist blogosphere are now in mainstream media, and that’s exciting. That said, we need independent media because they’re an important check.”
The Establishment, an independent blog focused on gender and race, stopped publishing in April with a farewell post bemoaning the “Sisyphean” difficulty of making money with a site focused on “intersectional feminist media.” In May, Vice Media’s women’s site, Broadly, was folded into the larger Vice brand.
The Hairpin, with recurring features like “Ask a Queer Chick” and “Interview With a Virgin,” shut down last year, as did Lenny Letter, the newsletter and website started by Lena Dunham and her producing partner, Jenni Konner. Rookie Magazine, the diarylike site started by the fashion-blogger-turned-actress Tavi Gevinson when she was 15, also ended its run. XoJane, known for first-person essays like “My Rapist Friended Me On Facebook (And All I Got Was This Lousy Article),” signed off in 2016.

Now, as much as I’d like to claim credit for destroying all these feminist blogs, the truth is that none of them were ever really successful enough to be self-sustaining. I mean, Feministing’s editors want to brag about 1.2 million uniques a month? That number sounds more impressive than it actually is, and it certainly could not have justified a full-time staff based on potential advertising revenue. No, those blogs were always a money-draining vortex, which chiefly owed their existence to (a) contributions from tax-exempt liberal non-profits like Planned Parenthood, and (b) the willingness of Gender Studies majors to write for free (or for minimal fees). And, it must be said, after Hillary lost the 2016 election, several of the Left’s moneybags evidently re-thought the wisdom of their investment in feminist Internet propaganda mills. For some reason, this New York Times feature ignores the demise of the very worst of the lot, Everyday Feminism, which now exists in zombie form — they don’t seem to have posted any new articles since 2016, although the site is still online. I never could figure out who was paying the bills at Everyday Feminism, but was under the impression that they must have some kind of deep-pockets sugar daddy willing to shell out a six-figure annual subsidy for all that “queer” intersectional insanity they published.

Whatever the case, the decline and fall of the feminist empire is good news — glad tidings! joy to the world! hosanna in the highest!

You don’t have to give me credit. All I ask is that you remember that the Five Most Important Worlds in the English Language are:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!



 

Category: Feminism

Dear Tyler O’Neil …

Posted on | December 10, 2019 | Comments Off on Dear Tyler O’Neil …

 

Politics is about winning. I understand that, and one of the main reasons I support Donald Trump is that, unlike so many Republicans, our president understands that. All your finest policy ideas count for nothing if you cannot win elections, and a certain ruthlessness about tactics is necessary to defeat the Democrats, who are utterly unscrupulous.

Nevertheless, Mr. Tyler, there must be limits to how far we go in pursuit of partisan goals, and you went too far Monday. To attack Joe Biden by smearing the United Daughters of the Confederacy? No, sir, my sense of honor requires me to object to this. You are perhaps not old enough to remember the uproar created by Illinois Democrat Sen. Carol Moseley Braun’s attack on the UDC in 1993. Her chief antagonist in that fight was North Carolina Republican Sen. Jesse Helms. The squabble over the renewal of the UDC’s patent was one of the incidents in President Clinton’s first two years in office which awoke the nation to the fact that the radical Left had taken over the Democratic Party. A year later, voters swept Republicans into majorities in both Houses of Congress.

It is insulting to claim that the UDC, a bunch of polite old ladies who every Memorial Day decorate the graves of our ancestors who fought for Southern independence, is akin to the Ku Klux Klan, which became a terrorist organization that was denounced by Nathan Bedford Forrest (who, in case you didn’t know it, was legendarily the founder of the KKK and scarcely a “progressive” in politics). It is entirely respectable — the decent thing to do — for anyone to defend the good name of their ancestors, and as it would be dishonorable for me to malign my wife’s Yankee forebears for being on the other side of the Late Unpleasantness, I expect others to extend the same courtesy to me.

Now, Mr. Tyler, I understand what you were doing with your Biden article. As a senator from Delaware, Biden used the phrase “many fine people” to describe those “who continue to display the Confederate flag as a symbol” — which is exactly what Trump said in August 2017 about those defending the Robert E. Lee memorial in Charlottesville.

 

An excellent find, this video — and I am grateful to you for bringing it to public attention. However, I must object to your dragging the nice little old ladies of the UDC through the mud as part of your attack on Biden. This was an unnecessary insult. Every American ought to appreciate the work done by the UDC in defending the memory of our Confederate ancestors, who deserve remembrance in the same way a Scotsman remembers his ancestors who fought at Culloden Bridge.

That C-SPAN clip of Biden speaking of “many fine people” who are proud of their Confederate ancestry serves to expose Biden’s hypocrisy in his attack on Trump for saying the same thing, but of course all liberals are hypocrites — you should read what Malcolm X had to say about them, and if I don’t scruple to invoke Malcolm X for the sake of winning an argument, that shows you how devoted I am to winning, as a principle.

Mr. Tyler, you and I cover the same Culture War terrain of American politics, and I have long been grateful for your work. I assume, given your Irish surname, that you are a conservative Catholic. Because of my own staunch pro-life advocacy, some of my readers have occasionally mistaken me for a Catholic, which compels me to correct them, as I am proudly Protestant and abhor your Papist superstitions. (The drift toward “liberation theology” heresies by Jorge Mario Bergoglio have perhaps made some conservative Catholics aware of the dangers inherent to their system.) Despite our theological differences, however, I consider Humanae Vitae a valuable contribution to Christian understanding of human nature, and thus find myself in alliance with conservative Catholics in our continuing Culture War. Indeed, this recalls to memory Jefferson Davis’s affectionate relations with the Catholic Church. As a youth, Davis was the only Protestant student at a Catholic school in Kentucky; as Confederate president, he wrote a letter to Pope Pius IX expressing “our gratitude for such sentiments of Christian good feeling and love” as the pontiff had conveyed in a letter to Catholic clergy. When Davis was imprisoned by the Yankees in 1866, the Pope sent him an autographed photo inscribed with the Latin text of Matthew 11:28.

Given this history, Mr. Tyler, I would hope that in the future you would keep in mind that Southerners are among the most resolute combatants in our Culture War, in which we must have the unity that Henry V urged at Agincourt: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.”

Let us therefore be more considerate of each other in the future, as it is my fondest hope ever to remain

Your Most Humble and Obedient Servant,

Robert Stacy McCain

 

 



 

Category: Culture, History, Joe Biden

In The Mailbox: 12.09.19

Posted on | December 9, 2019 | 3 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Two bits of administrivia for your Monday enjoyment: first, I dropped Shark Tank from the list because I’ve been getting security cert errors on Firefox, and I can’t find an e-mail link to inform Javier Manjarres, the main man over there, that he’s got a problem. If someone has that and can send it to me, I’d be much obliged; alternately, a recommendation for a good Florida-centric conservative blog would be good too.

Secondly – Help me, commentariat, you’re my only hope. The credit union dropped me a line to let me know that I need to give them $135 by Friday so they don’t repossess my Kia. This will, not coincidentally, keep them off my neck until January when I’ll be back in the tax mines generating regular paychecks again. Please, please hit the tip jar at the end of this post, and thank you in advance for your generosity.

OVER THE TRANSOM
Ammo.com: The Culpeper Minuteman Flag
EBL: Did Matt Drudge Sell The Drudge Report?
Twitchy: Mollie Hemingway’s IG Report Thread Paints A Very Different Picture From The MSM
Louder With Crowder: Sir Anthony Hopkins On Politics – “Actors Are Pretty Stupid”

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: A Review Of Roosh’s Babylon Road
American Conservative: The Campaign To Lie America Into World War II
American Greatness: Our Elites Have Learned Nothing
American Power: Pensacola NAS Jihadi Watched Shooting Videos Before Attack
American Thinker: Pro-Abortion Pelosi’s Convenient Catholicism
Animal Magnetism: Goodbye, Blue Monday
Babalu Blog: Ladies In White Violently Arrested In Another Sunday Of Brutal Repression In Communist Cuba
BattleSwarm: Our Stupid Media – An Update, also, Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update
Cafe Hayek: The Hubris Of Such People Is Appalling
Camp of the Saints: December 7, 1941 – “The Unprovoked & Dastardly Attack”
CDR Salamander: Holding The Line With Guy Snodgrass On Midrats, also, France’s Long War
Da Tech Guy: That Such Men Lived, also, Mrs. Maisel Goes Full Alinsky On Phyllis Schlafly
Don Surber: The Best Political Consultant In America, also, No Excitement Without An Indictment
First Street Journal: Nancy Pelosi Is Riding The Tiger, also, Wrongthink Must Be Punished!
The Geller Report: Muslim Who Stabbed Jews At Amsterdam Market Ruled Unfit To Stand Trial, also, Two Teens Beat, Tase Israeli Tourists In Brooklyn Robbery
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, also, Breaking – WaPo Discovers The Government Lies
Hollywood In Toto: Seven Uncomfortable Questions Bombshell Cast Should Answer, also, John Legend Virtue Signals While Defending Virtue Signaling
Joe For America: Portland Wants Private Property Owners To Add “Mandatory Rest Spaces” For The Homeless
JustOneMinute: Something For Everyone In The IG Report On Crossfire Hurricane
Legal Insurrection: Liz Warren Admits She Pocketed $2 Million From Law Practice Which Included Anti-Consumer Representation, also, Dershowitz – Democrats Found The Man, Now They’re Looking For The Crime
Michelle Malkin: Where Are All The AWOL Muslim Military Trainees?
The PanAm Post: Exclusive Interview With Juan Guaido’s Former Ambassador To Colombia
Power Line: Impeach Trump Because Of…Slavery? also, When You’ve Lost The Intelligent Voices On The WaPo’s Op-Ed Page…
Shot In The Dark: Misleading Advertising
This Ain’t Hell: Marine’s C-4 Joke At Airport Bombs, also, John DeSomer – Fake POW, Eight Bronze Stars, Four Purple Hearts
Victory Girls: Pensacola – NYT Sats Don’t Call It Terrorism Yet, also, Virginia AG Herring – They’re Really Not Going To Defy Us
Volokh Conspiracy: Impeachment Based On Improper Motives
Weasel Zippers: Pete Hegseth Banned From Twitter For Sharing Pensacola Shooter’s Manifesto, also, Nadler – Anyone Who Votes Against Impeaching Trump Is Not A Patriot
Mark Steyn: Ace In The Hole, also, Sleigh Ride

Amazon Warehouse Deals




Category: Linkagery

The Democrats and Their Narrative

Posted on | December 9, 2019 | 1 Comment

Watching the impeachment hearings this morning — Democrat lawyer Daniel Goldman is “testifying,” which is to say lecturing, uninterrupted by questions — one gathers the impression that Democrats believe (a) nothing Hunter Biden did in Ukraine was wrong, (b) it was perfectly OK for Ukraine to “meddle” in the 2016 U.S. election, and (c) it was therefore wrong for President Trump to urge Ukraine to investigate corruption.

The argument Goldman is making is that Trump (and his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani) wanted Ukraine to do something that would be politically beneficial to the president’s 2020 re-election campaign — and, according to Democrats, anything that is good for Republicans is inherently wrong.

It is important to Democrats that they keep repeating this narrative of how wrong it would be to investigate Burisma (and Alexandra Chalupa, etc.) because they can’t give the American people a minute’s peace in which to think about all of this and to say in reply, “So what?”



 

Category: Corruption, Democrats, Donald Trump, Ukraine

Gunmen in Florida Hijacking/Shootout Were Cousins and Career Criminals

Posted on | December 8, 2019 | Comments Off on Gunmen in Florida Hijacking/Shootout Were Cousins and Career Criminals

 

Thursday afternoon, a rush-hour traffic jam in Broward County, Florida, brought an end to a high-speed pursuit of two gunmen who had attempted to rob a jewelry store in Coral Gables and then hijacked a UPS truck in an incredibly stupid escape attempt. In a shootout with police in Miramar, both criminals were killed, along with a bystander and the kidnapped UPS driver. We now know the names of the robbers:

The FBI has identified the two armed robbers who were killed Thursday after police say they ripped off a jewelry store, stole a UPS truck and kidnapped the driver, then led police a pursuit through two counties which led to a deadly shootout.
They are Lamar Alexander, 41, and Ronnie Jerome Hill, 41, both of Miami-Dade County, according to the FBI.
CBS4 News spoke to Alexander’s brother, Corey Smith who said about his brother, “Make better choices in life. Your decisions affect more than just you.”
Smith says Alexander had three children.
The men, who are cousins, both have criminal histories.
Court records show Alexander was sentenced to probation for a 1996 robbery and 1997 burglary. Five arrests in the 2000’s resulted in no convictions before he served a lengthy stretch in prison for a 2008 armed robbery conviction in southwest Florida, gaining his release in 2017.
Florida Department of Corrections records show Hill served time in prison twice: in the 1990s on burglary and robbery convictions and more recently for five burglary-related convictions.
Naomi Hill, the aunt of both suspects, said Alexander was “a good boy — he had changed his life around.” She said he was married with three children and working for a garbage-collection company. . . .
April Wyche, the sister of Ronnie Hill, said he was the father of two young children, one with special needs, and was working as a driver for a cabinetry company. She said she has no idea why he would have committed the robbery, saying he could have turned to her or their mother for help if needed. . . .
Alexander, Hill, UPS driver Frank Ordonez, and innocent driver Richard Cutshaw, were all killed in the shootout which took place in a busy intersection in Miramar.

What did I tell you Friday?

[Y]ou know doggone well that this was not their first time at the rodeo. You don’t begin your criminal career by robbing a jewelry store. No, these guys had almost certainly been perpetrating since they were teenagers, and when we finally learn their identities, we’ll discover that they had extensive criminal records and yet, for some reason, were not in prison. This is predictable, to anyone who pays attention to news about crime, and yet somehow our criminal justice system hasn’t figured out that it’s a bad idea to turn these animals loose.

Exactly as I said, these guys have criminal records dating back more than 20 years, and both had gotten out of prison less than two years ago:

Lamar Alexander went to prison for nearly a decade for robbing a jewelry store in Lee County. Ronnie Hill spent most of his adult life locked up for a string of burglaries and holding a postal clerk hostage during a robbery in Miami.
Both walked out of state prison in 2017, only to engineer one final heist that left two innocent people dead and cost them their own lives. . . .
“I didn’t know he was living like that,” said Alexander’s brother, Corey Smith, a well-known football coach at Miami Senior High School. “In life, you gotta make better decisions. We weren’t raised like that. I love my brother, but he’s been making bad decisions his whole life.”
The FBI, which is leading the investigation, is examining whether the two men were connected to prior robberies in South Florida, according to one law-enforcement source. . . .
Alexander and Hill had long histories of arrests, smaller crimes that foreshadowed Thursday’s jewelry heist and hostage-taking.
Records show that Alexander’s first arrests for burglary and robbery in Miami-Dade happened in 1996, when he was in his early 20s. He was entered into a boot camp program. But he eventually flunked out of his probation when he was arrested again for a burglary — a judge sentenced him to 364 days in the county jail.
Alexander, who sports tattoos of clowns on both forearms and has three children, racked up another minor conviction for trespassing in 2000. Eight years later, he was arrested on an allegation he punched his pregnant wife in Overtown. She filed for a restraining order, which was eventually dismissed. The criminal charge was later dropped.
That was the same year that Alexander was one of four men arrested in Lee County for robbing a Mayors Jewelers in Fort Myers. He admitted he’d rented a car in Miami to serve as a getaway driver.
Alexander was sentenced to 10 years in state prison. He walked out of prison in September 2017. A Lee County judge lifted his probation a few months later after Alexander, in a court motion, wrote he was “ready to move forward with my life as a citizen.”
Hill had a similar history of arrests.
He picked up his first adult arrest, for burglary with a battery, in Miami-Dade in December 1993. He was only 15 years old. Court records don’t show if he served any prison time, but he was convicted and sentenced as a “youthful offender.”
When he was 20 years old, authorities said, Hill was arrested after he and another man robbed a female postal clerk in Liberty City. Inspectors said the men handcuffed the woman as she arrived to work, forcing her to open safes and cash drawers.
Federal authorities indicted Hill in 1998. He went to trial, lost and was sentenced to 151 months in prison. He walked free from prison in 2010. He could not stay out of trouble.
Over the next couple of years, he was arrested on a slew of minor charges, including loitering and dealing in stolen property. He was finally sent to Florida prison for a series of car burglaries in Miami-Dade and Palm Beach, between 2014 and 2016.
He got out in February 2017 — and within months was arrested again.
Police said he and another man broke into a car outside the Robert is Here fruit stand in South Miami-Dade. The State Attorney’s Office, however, did not press charges because the victims failed to cooperate, according to state records.

Well, they’re dead now, which is the only way to stop the criminal careers of such characters. As long as they’re breathing and not behind bars, habitual offenders will continue committing criminal violence.



 

Category: Crime, Florida
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