Bent Corner

It took seven months, but former Maryland Delegate Robert A. McKee has finally been charged in connection to possessing child pornography. Washington County deputies raided his home this past January and discovered a plethora of kiddie porn including computer images, magazines, and video tapes.

The charges are federal. In my opinion, if it was up to local authorities, McKee would never be charged. Washington County deputies confiscated a large amount of child pornography from McKee’s home on January 31. The same home he shares with his “adopted granddaughter”. Washington County Sheriff Douglas Mullendore, a friend of McKee, was present during the raid on McKee’s home. Instead of informing the public that a large stash of child pornography was found in McKee’s home, the news remained secret for two weeks. McKee continued working not only as a Maryland Delegate, but as the executive director of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Washington County.

According to his attorney, McKee plans on pleading guilty in a plea agreement with the Justice Department.

I blogged a while back about the time I tried to purchase a Sportster 5 Sirius satellite radio from my local Hagerstown Best Buy. I was paying cash. The person at the register refused to sell it to me unless I gave her my personal private information. I refused to do this so they refused to sell it to me. They told me that Sirius requires them to record the personal private information of anyone buying on of their radios.

I contacted Sirius and they informed me that this was not correct. There was no requirement to gather the personal information of the people that were buying their hardware.

The Best Buy employee lied.

There now appears to be one more reason not to give your personal information to an employee at Best Buy. Amanda Hopkins, a former Best Buy employee in New Mexico has been indicted by a grand jury on numerous felony counts of credit card fraud. She worked as a customer representative at Best Buy. Her duties were opening new accounts for customers. She obtained customer credit information and used the information make numerous purchases on their accounts.

Best Buy doesn’t trust their employees so why should you? Every Best Buy I have been to has a person standing the exit checking the receipts of customers that purchase high value items. The reason? They are afraid that the person who ran the sale did not charge the right amount. They worry that their employees with have friends or family members come in and buy something and they won’t charge the correct amount. Instead of scanning the iPod player or the Blu-Ray player, they’ll scan a DVD movie or a pack of gum.  By all appearences, it looks that you paid for what you were purchasing.

Yes, this says what you think it says. Click here to see a larger image.  I don’t know what is more disturbing, that something like this could be found in Hagerstown’s own Rocky Ridge Collectibles or that the seller wants $45 for it.

And that was not the only piece of racist crap sitting on the shelf.  No, it was only the most agregous.  There were other similarly framed works of racism for sale along with this one.

Sorry for the crummy quality of the photo.  I took it with my camera phone.  I had to temporarily move a stack of cowboy hats to get a clear picture.  Who would have guessed that the same vendor that was selling this framed piece of historical hate would also be selling cowboy hats?

It’s 2008.  It would be nice if we could finally get past this type of stuff.

And to think I thought the city of Boston was bad when they treated a stupid Lite-Brite character flipping the bird as some sort of terrorist attack.   It turns out Hagerstown is a city of scardey cats too.

Someone left a black and white porcelain clown doll on the front steps of Hagerstown’s very own methadone clinic.  Someone called 911 and the Hagerstown City Police responded by shutting down traffic so they could investigate this vile terrorist threat. It rook them an hour to realize that it posed no threat.

A porcelain clown doll?  That’s what we’ve come to?

Link

Hagerstown has an all-star Little League team in the Little League World Series currently under way in scenic Williamsport, Pennsylvania.  People around here are very excited about this.  Some are more excited then others. I’m not really into Little League. I never played Little League.  No one in my family played Little League.  I really don’t necessarily understand the hoopla.

Speaking of things I don’t understand, the Washington County commissioners decided to award the team $10,000. This is from today’s Herald-Mail:

The money was approved by a 3-1 vote to help pay travel expenses for the Federal Little League 11-12 All Stars, who recently won the Mid-Atlantic Regional tournament and played their first game in the Little League World Series on Saturday.

This didn’t make any sense. I remember reading a while back that ABC and ESPN agreed to a long term deal with Little League for the rights to televise the Little League World Series. The deal was for millions of dollars. With all that money going to Little League, why can’t Little League pay for the travel expenses incurred by the team?

As it turns out, they do. From the official Little League website:

Who pays for the teams to travel to the Little League Baseball World Series?
There is no fee of any kind for any team in the Little League Baseball World Series. Neither the parents nor the local league are asked to pay anything for the team’s expenses.

All of the expenses for all teams, including travel, are paid by Little League International. While here, the teams are housed in dormitories on our complex, and food is provided at no charge. All teams are provided with exactly the same accommodations, without regard to their economic status.

So what’s the $10,000 going to?

It also appears that the money given to the team by the Washington County commissioners came from the “wrong” account.  It was supposedly taken from an account funded solely by a special county tax applied to area hotel rooms.  This money by law is to be only used to help develop tourism and support cultural and recreational projects in Washington County.  Paying for the out-of-state travel expenses of an all-star Little League team does not fall within the law.

One way to solve this problem would be for the three Washington County commissioners that voted to award the team with a $10,000 gift — Commissioners President John F. Barr, Vice President Terry L. Baker and Commissioner James F. Kercheval — pay the money out of their own pockets.  If they think the Little League all-star team deserves some extra travel money on top of what Little League is already providing, they each can come up with $3,333.33 on their own and award that to the team.  That way the team still gets the extra travel money and not one dime of tax dollars is spent.

It’s a win-win situation.

On January 31, 2008, law enforcement officers raided the home of Robert A. McKee and seized two computers, 30 videotapes and printed materials from his home that officers described as being child pornography.  At the time of the raid, McKee was an elected delegate to to the Maryland House of Delegates.  He was also the executive director of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Washington County.

He was also a Republican.

When news of the incident was made public a week later, McKee resigned from both the Maryland House of Delegates and his position with Big Brothers Big Sisters of Washington County.

It has now been 190 days since investigators seized the child pornography from McKee’s home. He has yet to be charged with any crime.

Why not?

If the Herald-Mail newspaper is going to continue smearing the reputation of Hagerstown City Councilperson Kelly S. Cromer, I guess I will continue to blog about it.  Being that the Washington County Ethics Commission cleared Cromer of acting unethical the day she was pulled over by a Hagerstown police officer for speeding, I thought the Herald-Mail would move on.

Evidently I was wrong.

Today’s edition included a front page story reporting that the local chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) voted unanimously on July 16 to rescind Councilwoman Kelly S. Cromer’s associate membership. This was before the Washington County Ethics Commission even ruled on the matter. Their decision wasn’t made public until July 31.

Today’s article included something that appears to be factually wrong. It reads:

She also was quoted as saying the police department had a vendetta against her because she questioned the validity of a program under which some city employees are permitted to drive city-owned vehicles to and from work.

She was never quoted as saying the police department had a vendetta against her. Someone who claimed to have been with Cromer when she took a phone call from the reporter from the Herald-Mail asking about the incident claimed on a message board that at no time in the phone conversation did Cromer say the word “vendetta”.

Shortly after reading that, I emailed Dan Dearth, the reporter who wrote the article, and asked him if Cromer actually said the world “vendetta”.  He promptly replied:

Rick,

I never quoted her directly as saying that. I asked her whether she felt some city officials and some members of the police department had a vendetta against her. She said, “Yes.”

Thanks.

Dan

Dan Dearth was the one that chose the word vendetta, not Cromer.  She only answered in the affirmative when asked if she felt “some” city officials and “some” members of the police department had a vendetta against her. She did not answer in the affirmative that she felt that the entire police department had a vendetta against her.  The key word is “some”.  The way it reads in today’s paper is that Cromer was quoted as saying the entire Hagerstown police department had a vendetta against her.

She never said that.

Can anyone even blame her if she does feel that some in the Hagerstown police department have a vendetta against her? How else did the newspaper learn about the traffic stop three weeks after it happened?  Someone leaked the story to the newspaper and it wasn’t because they were a supporter of Councilperson Kelly Cromer.  They did it to make her look bad and the Herald-Mail seems to be going out of their way to do everything they can to help.

People from the anti-choice group Face the Truth came to Hagerstown yesterday and terrorized people with giant scary abortion photos. Hagerstown is only one stop on their 15 city terror tour.  Who knows, maybe they will make a stop in your city too.

My biggest problem with groups like this is that they take photos from a medical procedure and blow them up to 100 times the actual size to make them look like something they are not. They then wave these giant posters in your face and demand (demand!) you look at them.

It doesn’t matter who you are.
It doesn’t matter how old you are.
It doesn’t matter how young you are.

They will force you to look at their ghastly pictures.

It’s as though their right to make you look at ginned up photos is more important than your right not to see the photos.

Some members of Face the Truth even dragged their young children to the event and made them hold signs denouncing a woman’s right to choose.

The members of Face the Truth and other similar anti-choice groups want you to think that a fetus is the same thing as a human baby.  The reality is that the two are not the same. Just because a gigantic posterized photo of a fetus might look like a human baby doesn’t make it an actual human baby. Have you ever seen a pig fetus? They too kind of look like a human baby. The same thing applies to a monkey fetus. They look remarkably similar to a human fetus.

That doesn’t mean they are human, even if they look like they are human.  Looks can be deceiving.

I blogged a while back about the local newspaper’s war against one of Hagerstown’s city elected councilmembers, Kelly Cromer. I read an editorial that was even more of a hack job then normal. I decided to temporarily lift my self-imposed ban on writing more letters to the newspaper. I originally blogged that if the newspaper didn’t publish my letter, I would go ahead and publish it here.

I don’t think they ever published my letter, so here it is:

I read the editorial published June 24 (Cromer’s apology for incident isn’t enough) and I was amazed at what I read. By demanding that Hagerstown City Councilwoman Kelly Cromer prove that her version of events concerning the May 26 traffic stop are true, you are in a very real sense demanding that she prove her own innocence. That’s not the way that it works. If Cromer committed some type crime or abuse of power, it’s up to her accusers – mainly the Hagerstown Police Department and the Herald-Mail — to prove her guilt. So far that hasn’t happened.

Much of what we know about this traffic stop was learned from reading a special supplemental report written by the officer that stopped Cromer, a supplemental report that was written the day after the actual traffic stop. We know from reading the supplemental report that the officer had to call his supervisor during the traffic stop and ask for advice. I wonder, did this officer receive any more advice the next day while writing the supplemental report? If so, how many people helped him write the supplemental report? Do any of them drive city owned take-home vehicles?

Cromer made no public mention of this incident until three weeks later when a reporter from the Herald-Mail contacted her while she was on vacation. The reporter asked if she believed there was a vendetta against her and she answered in the affirmative. Cromer didn’t choose that word “vendetta” to describe the situation, it was your reporter.

What I find to be the most peculiar thing – and that’s saying a lot — about this whole controversy is how the Herald-Mail found out about the traffic stop in the first place. It would appear that someone from the Hagerstown Police Department or some other city employee leaked the story to the Herald-Mail. Three weeks after the fact. It appears to me that this was done to make Cromer look bad in the eyes of her constituents. She is certainly taking a lot of heat for a word she herself never said. What would motivate someone to do such a thing? Maybe just maybe it was in response to her suggestion that the city investigate the validity of the take-home vehicle program. I can’t help but wonder if the person who leaked the story to the newspaper drives a city owned take-home vehicle. Since we will never know the identity of this person, we are left with only our suspicions.

Rick Rottman
Hagerstown

The local newspaper, The Herald-Mail runs a daily feature called Mail Call. It’s where they publish comments left on an answering machine, supposedly by people in and around the Hagerstown area.

I’ve had the theory for some time now that most of the calls are fake. I think they are made up by someone over at the Herald-Mail. Listening to a bunch of voice mails and transcribing them word for word sounds like a lot of work.

That’s something not often associated with the Herald-Mail.

This one cracked me up:

I’m a resident in the North End of Hagerstown, and I’d like to make a comment on this article in the paper this morning about shutting down the street to have a booze party. We can’t even have a nice Christmas tree in the square anymore because they said it interfered with the flow of traffic, but yet they want to have a booze party. I think it’s ridiculous. They call it an art district down there. How does that coincide with a booze party? Someone please tell me.

I’m going to out on a limb and take a guess that this fictitious caller doesn’t like booze parties. What he or she is referring to is the Downtown Live Hagerstown music festival. It’s a one day event where national bands and musical artists come and play on the square in downtown Hagerstown. They shut down Washington and Potomac street to vehicle traffic and make it a pedestrian-only area.

It’s been a huge success the first two years it’s been held. Though they serve beer, I don’t think any of the street vendors serve hard alcohol.