Long suspected in the murder of Leah Freeman, Coquille PD Sgt Pat Smith and Officer Ray McNeely arrested Nicholas McGuffin today at his home in Green Acres. The grand jury voted to indict McGuffin after hearing evidence and testimony from more than 100 witnesses. Bail has been set at $2M.

McGuffin, according to DA Paul Fraser, has never married but is the father of little girl and works as a chef at The Mill Casino. Trial will probably be late next year or early 2012.

The room was packed with well wishers and media. Not present were former Coquille PD Chief, Mike Reaves nor City Manager, Terence O’Connor (that I could see anyway).

Kudos again to Coquille PD for resurrecting this long dormant case, having the vision to work with other law enforcement agencies and hopefully bringing some peace to the Freeman family.

UPDATE: From KCBY

Suicide rates for veterans returned home are sometimes exceeding the casualty rates in combat. War is hell!

Lights, schools, emergency responders all falling by the wayside in the light of republican refusal to allow federal money to help states.

Jon takes Congress to task for its inability to pass a bill to help the heroes of 9/11… not surprising considering how badly Congress treats our veterans as well.

Jon pokes fun at the frenzy surrounding immigration and the birth of Mexican sleeper cell terrorist babies.

Michael Scherer does an excellent job of dissecting toture advocate Mark Thiessenattack on Wikileaks. Scherer looks back at history, namely the release of the Pentagon Papers that helped turn the war. The Pentagon Papers showed that more than one president deliberately mislead the country about the war in Vietnam and almost 70,000 US troops died as a result.

Supreme Court’s opinion in New York Times Co. v. United States, the so-called Pentagon Papers case from 1971.

Concurring in that case, Justice Potter Stewart observed, “In the absence of governmental checks and balances present in other areas of our national life, the only effective restraint upon executive policy and power in the area of national defense and international affairs may lie in an enlightened citizenry — in an informed and critical public opinion which alone can here protect the values of democratic government.. . . . Without an informed and free press, there cannot be an enlightened people.”

The article also quotes from Justices Hugo Black and William Brennan

[W]e are asked to hold that, despite the First Amendment’s emphatic command, the Executive Branch, the Congress, and the Judiciary can make laws enjoining publication of current news and abridging freedom of the press in the name of “national security.” The Government does not even attempt to rely on any act of Congress. Instead, it makes the bold and dangerously far-reaching contention that the courts should take it upon themselves to “make” a law abridging freedom of the press in the name of equity, presidential power and national security, even when the representatives of the people in Congress have adhered to the command of the First Amendment and refused to make such a law. To find that the President has “inherent power” to halt the publication of news by resort to the courts would wipe out the First Amendment and destroy the fundamental liberty and security of the very people the Government hopes to make “secure.” No one can read the history of the adoption of the First Amendment without being convinced beyond any doubt that it was injunctions like those sought here that Madison and his collaborators intended to outlaw in this Nation for all time. The word “security” is a broad, vague generality whose contours should not be invoked to abrogate the fundamental law embodied in the First Amendment. The guarding of military and diplomatic secrets at the expense of informed representative government provides no real security for our Republic.

A government that lies to its people betrays everything a soldier hopes to be fighting for, everything. Long live Wikileaks and all independent media because without it we have no democracy at all.

Read the excellent transcript here

I have sat behind this desk for seven years and pushed back at these counterfeit journalists, as a man might stand at the shore and try to push back the tide. I have been branded an ideologue and a profiteer and a mirror of image of that which I assail. I have said it in every way I could think of, and been told I have been over-the-top because I have mocked and shouted and repeated.

And today the proof lies in front of you, bleeding: the reputation of Shirley Sherrod, a woman who 24 years ago saw and overcame the vengeance in her own heart and achieved the kind of true greatness the rest of us can only hope we might express for one moment in the whole of our lives. Assassinated by Fox News! Assassinated by that scum Breitbart! Assassinated by all their meager-brained imitators on other channels and other sites, their limp fellow travelers who never asked questions first, but simply shot, and shot, and shot, and shot and laughed!
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Let me make this utterly clear: What you see on Fox News, what you read on Right Wing websites, is the utter and complete perversion of journalism, and it can have no place in a civilized society. It is words crashed together, never to inform, only to inflame. It is a political guillotine. It is the manipulation of reality to make the racist seem benevolent, and to convict the benevolent as racist — even if her words must be edited, filleted, stripped of all context, rearranged, fabricated, and falsified, to do so.