DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum is shrugging off reports that the vote count from Iowa’s caucuses might be wrong, saying the errors appear not to change the fact that he and Mitt Romney were nearly tied. Santorum tells Fox News that a party official says the two cases in which errors were reported in the count from Tuesday night nearly cancel each other out. A Ron Paul supporter told Des Moines TV station KCCI that the posted count from his precinct in Appanoose County gave Romney more votes than he actually received. The GOP chairman in Iowa, Matt Strawn, says in a statement that state party officials don’t have any reason to believe the final results from Appanoose County will change the outcome of Tuesday’s vote.
Can it really be true? Police dispatched to retrieve overdue library books from a five-year-old? It is. The chief of police in Charlton, Massachusetts sent a uniformed police officer to pay a visit to a home and demand the return of two overdue library books. A sergeant from the Charlton Police Department was dispatched to the home of Shannon Benoit and her five-year-old daughter. The sergeant’s task: to investigate two library books that were a few months overdue. The CBS affiliate in Boston covered the story :
“Tax policy should be serious business carried out by serious politicians using real facts and figures. This is why we have the Library of Congress and the Congressional Budget Office, among other expert institutions,” writes Paul Roderick Gregory of Forbes . Indeed, given the current state of the U.S. economy, tax policy has become an increasingly important subject. And yet, some top-ranking politicians have been making “patently inaccurate, outrageous and bizarre” claims on tax-policy issues and they are doing it without repercussion. For instance, on Dec.12 , while proposing his 1.9 percent surtax on millionaires, Sen. Harry Reid said the following (via Forbes ): Millionaire job creators are like unicorns. They’re impossible to find, and they don’t exist…Only a tiny fraction of people making more than a million dollars, probably less than 1 percent, are small business owners. And only a tiny fraction of that tiny fraction are traditional job creators…Most of these businesses are hedge fund managers or wealthy lawyers. They don’t do much hiring and they don’t need tax breaks. His comments were based on a Dec. 9 National Public Radio report that claimed to have gone searching for the oft-touted “millionaire jobs creator.” They came back with this earthshattering discovery: “NPR requested help from numerous Republican congressional offices, including House and Senate leadership. They were unable to produce a single millionaire job creator for us to interview.” However, the NPR report and Sen. Reid’s subsequent claims did not sit well with Paul Roderick Gregory of Forbes . He decided to dig deeper than NPR and thoroughly scrutinized Sen. Reid “facts.” “Unlike Harry Reid’s office, I went to the IRS’s Table 1.4 ‘Sources of income, adjustments, and tax size of adjusted gross income, 2009’ to check things out,” writes Gregory . This is what he found: There are 236,883 tax filers with incomes of a million dollars or more. By Harry Reid’s count, only one percent, or 2,361 of them, are business owners, and a tiny fraction of them create jobs. I do not know what Harry means when he says “a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction.” If we let 5 percent represent Harry’s “tiny fraction,” we are left with 118 businesses owners who earn a million or more and create jobs. Yes, they are only slightly less rare than unicorns, if Harry is to be believed. This leaves 236,765 million-dollar-plus tax payers, most of whom are “hedge fund managers and wealthy lawyers” who “don’t create jobs and don’t need tax breaks…” Millionaire tax filers earn a total taxable income of $623 billion, on which they pay the highest average rate (30 percent) of any tax bracket…A 1.9 percent tax surcharge on million-dollar-earners would yield $11 billion, assuming those shifty millionaires take no evasive action to avoid the tax. Millionaire tax filers earn $221 billion – almost a quarter of a trillion — from business and professions, partnerships, and S-corporations. This is puzzling: If Harry Reid’s figure is correct (2,361 millionaire businesses), then the average millionaire-owned business earns almost a hundred million dollars, and all, except 118 of them, do this without hiring anyone. These super heroes do their own typing, selling, drafting. public relations, building, and manufacturing. They do not need employees. Remarkable! So what does this mean? “Millionaire tax filers earn almost a quarter trillion dollars from their businesses. They must hire hundreds of thousands of employees to do so,” Gregory concludes. If Gregory’s facts are correct, and it is simply the case that Sen. Reid– a top-ranking U.S. politician– is simply lobbing undisciplined and poorly researched “facts” while discussing issues critical to the fiscal health of the country, this does not bode well for the future of the U.S. economy. Unless those in charge start taking this conversation seriously, America will most likely continue its downward spiral into financial ruin. Furthermore, such “class warfare will be the anchor of the Democrat election playbook,” Gregory predicts. Indeed, it may not be unwarranted to expect more of this type of rhetoric as we approach the 2012 election. Read the full report here. Update : Since the original publication of this article, an update has been made. It was mistakenly reported that Sen. Reid’s comments were made on Dec. 6, before the NPR report. This is not true. His comments were based on a report that NPR produced on Dec. 9 and the Senator made his comments on Dec. 12. (h/t Ken Hansen).
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Fact Check: Harry Reid‘s Claim That ’Millionaire job Creators…Don’t Exist’ Thoroughly Debunked
Holder speech at LBJ Library accuses Texas of violating Voter Rights Act of 1965.
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Cornyn Defends Voter ID Laws Against Attorney General’s Criticism
Another day another dollar. Check out these links before bed time: Speaker John Boehner lights up the Capitol Christmas Tree . Ann Coulter headlining CPAC again . Everything sent out over Twitter will be saved in the Library of Congress. A lot of people are searching for Anderson Cooper . Online, that is. Bill O’Reilly isn’t aware that “Soul Train” is no longer on the air . Tweet of the night (here’s the all-too-cute photo ):
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Midnight snacks 12.06.11
The politics of economic obstruction Occupy Oakland strike promoter Boots Riley, who penned “5 million ways to kill a CEO,” celebrates the attack on the World Trade Center My new column spotlights the Occupiers’ “general strike” action scheduled for today — and climaxing tonight in an anticipated shutdown of the Port of Oakland (Calif.). Many of the same old agitators I’ve covered over the past decade are behind the latest manufactured chaos. I refresh your memories below of the Bay Area Left’s violent Oakland port shutdown in 2003 and the ignominious Oakland agitator and strike leader Boots Riley, and also connect the dots between Riley, Oakland’s Van Jones, Occupy Oakland, and the violent ILWU thugs and their supporters who kicked off the Day of Rage warm-up show in Longview, Washington in September. Related reading: Here’s the scathing open letter from Oakland’s police union blasting the quivering Democrat mayor Jean Quan. She’s a UC Berkeley-bred moonbat now more interested in restoring her prog credentials than in cleaning up her dysfunctional city and standing up for law-abiding businesses and taxpayers. The organizers have distributed their chants for the day, including: “Strike, Occupy, Shut it Down! Oakland is the People’s Town” “Every Hour, Every Day! The occupation is here to stay!” “Occupy Everything! Liberate Oakland” “Politicians & Bankers, Liars & Thieves, We’re taking it back! We’re not saying please!” “No more cops, we don’t need ‘em! All we want is total freedom” “Shut Down OPD! Not the Public Library!” “Let’s Go Oakland! Let’s Go!” [clap] [clap] Perhaps they’ll throw some of Boots Riley’s violent rap lyrics into the mix, too. The mob enablers in Oakland’s city government — and the voters who keep putting these stooges in office — have only themselves to blame for disgracing their basket-case city. Shame. *** Occupy Oakland’s dangerous “strike” follies by Michelle Malkin Creators Syndicate Copyright 2011 The next stage of the Aimless Occupation of America is upon us: On Wednesday, rabble-rousers in the San Francisco Bay Area will walk off jobs they don’t have and encourage everyone else around the country to abandon work to protest high unemployment. The Occupiers are calling their organized day of inaction a “Mass Day of Action. ” The Carpenters Local 713, the Service Employees International Union, the United Auto Workers, and the Industrial Workers of the World have all endorsed the “general strike.” Longshore workers and their union agitators are rooting for the shutdown of the Port of Oakland. Teachers’ unions will push students and educators to play hooky. Their posters urge: “No Work. No School. Occupy Everywhere.” A city suffering from chronic poverty, out-of-control crime, a $76 million budget deficit , and a 15 percent unemployment rate (nearly 50 percent for Oakland’s youth ) can hardly afford such social justice follies. But a pushover Democratic mayor and an overwhelmed police force have left what’s left of gainfully employed Oakland taxpayers at the mercy of professional freeloaders and anti-capitalism saboteurs. Instead of unequivocally condemning efforts to paralyze downtown commerce, Oakland city officials have all expressed sympathy for the protesters. For a brief moment, the city council president fretted meekly about the city’s image after a violent clash between Camp Chaos inhabitants and law enforcement officers last week. Nevertheless, city leaders — or rather, city enablers — have informed public employees they can use vacation or other paid time to ditch their offices and raise their fists in solidarity with the Occupiers. Instead of targeting local bank branch managers and private-sector entrepreneurs, the protesters should be camping out at government offices asking where all the tens of millions in federal Obama stimulus funding for Oakland went over the past two years – including $40 million from the Department of Health and Human Services, nearly $30 million from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, $26 million from the Department of Justice, $24 million from the Transportation Department, $15 million from the Department of Education, and $5.3 million from the Environmental Protection Agency. One local analysis found last year that the Oakland Housing Authority squandered nearly $11 million in federal project renovation and clean-up stimulus grants to create a measly 10.7 jobs. It would all be an amusing object lesson on the impotence of the welfare state, if not for the looming shadow of violence that hangs like stubborn Bay Area fog over the movement. In 2003, a like-minded mob of police-provoking anarchists, anti-war organizers, and progressive activists descended on the Port of Oakland to coordinate a “Day of Action.” They hurled concrete, wood, and iron bolts at cops while attempting to block military shipments to soldiers in wartime – then whined about police brutality. Fast-forward eight years. This week’s “Day of Action” is spearheaded by the likes of Oakland rapper Boots Riley, a militant, self-declared “communist” who penned “ 5 million ways to kill a CEO” (“Toss a dollar in the river and when he jump in/If you find he can swim, put lead boots on him and do it again”) and “Lazy Muthaf**kas” (“You ain’t never learned to drive or tie your shoe/I got my ear to the street and my eye on you/… You’re a lazy ********** ! Lazy **********!). After the 9/11 attacks, I reported on Riley’s appalling album cover depicting him partying in front of a doctored image of the World Trade Center being blown up. Like fellow Occupier, 9/11 conspiracy theorist, and Oakland community organizer Van Jones, Boots Riley has long stoked anti-police grievances. In “Pork and Beef,” he rapped: “If you got beef with c-o-p’s/Throw a Molotov at the p-i-g’s.” Add to this toxic mix the thugs of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. The planned march on Oakland’s port is being billed as an expression of “solidarity with longshore workers in their struggle” against grain importer EGT. In Longview, Washington, wildcat union workers cut train brake lines, smashed windows, dumped grain, and took hostages earlier this fall to protest the company’s decision to employ not non-union workers, but workers from a competing shop. A federal judge fined the ILWU $250,000 after it defied a court restraining order; even Obama’s National Labor Relations Board was forced to issue a complaint against the union’s “violent and aggressive” actions. The unapologetic local union president vowed: “It’s going to get worse before it gets better.” Mark those words. *** UPDATE: Men’s Wearhouse = moonbats. Thousands “strike”… Thousands of Wall Street protesters marched in the streets of Oakland on Wednesday as they geared up with labor unions to picket banks, take over foreclosed homes and vacant buildings and disrupt operations at the nation’s fifth-busiest port. Demonstrators as well as city and business leaders expressed optimism that the widely anticipated “general strike” would be a peaceful event for a city that became a rallying point last week after an Iraq War veteran was injured in clashes between protesters and police. Embattled Oakland Mayor Jean Quan, who has been criticized for her handling of the protests, said in a statement that she supported the goals of the protest movement that began in New York City a month ago and spread to dozens of cities across the country. …Nurse, teacher and other worker unions are taking part in the protests, and Oakland is letting city workers use vacation or other paid time to take part in the general strike. About 5 percent of city workers took the day off Wednesday, according to City Administrator Deanna Santana. About 360 Oakland teachers didn’t show up for work, or roughly 18 percent of the district’s 2,000 teachers, said Oakland Unified School District spokesman Troy Flint. The district has been able to get substitute teachers for most classrooms, and where that wasn’t possible children were sent to other classrooms, he said. The day’s events in Oakland began with a rally outside City Hall that by midmorning drew more than 1,000 people who were spilling into the streets and disrupting the downtown commute. About three dozen adults with toddlers and school-age children formed a “children’s brigade, gathering at Oakland Public Library for a stroller march to the protest in downtown Oakland. Demonstrators handed out signs written as if in a children’s crayon that read “Generation 99% Occupying Our Future,” which the marchers attached to their baby backpacks and strollers. The protests were expected to culminate with a march to the Port of Oakland, where organizers said the goal would be to stop work there for the 7 p.m. shift. Organizers say they want to halt “the flow of capital” at the port. Stay tuned.
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Occupy Oakland’s dangerous “strike” follies; Plus: Capitalism-bashing, cop-hating rapper Boots Riley is back; Updated
This was in the news when the legislature authorized teaching homosexual studies some time back. And now at LAT , ” California schools scrambling to add lessons on LGBT Americans .” If this were being introduced when kids are in, say, 5th or 6th grade, I personally wouldn’t have an issue with it for my own kids. But as it is, kindergarten or 1st grade, and so on? God, that’s almost obscene in its assumptions. It’s understandable why parents would object. I recently asked my 10-year-old if he knew what homosexuality was. He didn’t have a clue, so I explained it to him. He didn’t seem to care that much about it, but the point is I’d prefer it was my wife and I talking about these things with him, especially in the moral context. I would not teach my child that all family structures are equal, for example. My position is that the traditional household with one father and one mother is the most healthy and prosperous for children. Schools will teach kids that all alternative family arrangements are equally valid, and that’s a radical curriculum. In any case, from the article: At Wonderland Avenue Elementary School in Laurel Canyon, there are lesson plans on diverse families — including those with two mommies or daddies — books on homosexual authors in the library and a principal who is openly gay. But even at this school, teachers and administrators are flummoxed about how to carry out a new law requiring California public schools to teach all students — from kindergartners to 12th graders — about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans in history classes. “At this point, I wouldn’t even know where to begin,” Principal Don Wilson said. Educators across the state don’t have much time to figure it out. In January, they’re expected to begin teaching about LGBT Americans under California’s landmark law, the first of its kind in the nation. The law has sparked confusion about what, exactly, is supposed to be taught. Will fourth-graders learn that some of the Gold Rush miners were gay and helped build San Francisco? Will students be taught about the “two-spirited people” tradition among some Native Americans, as one gay historian mused? “I’m not sure how we plug it into the curriculum at the grade school level, if at all,” said Paul Boneberg, executive director at the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco. School districts will have little help in navigating this sensitive and controversial change, which has already prompted some parents to pull their children out of public schools . Well, yeah. I don’t have kids that young, kindergarten or 1st grade, but my youngest would still be introduced to these topics as a 4th grader. I don’t think he’s ready. He barely knows that much about sexuality at all. We talk about it when he has questions. He’s more worried about Beyblades .
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California Public Schools to Teach Homosexual Curriculum to Children as Young as Kindergartners
Letters written by Helen Keller. Forty-thousand photographic negatives of John F. Kennedy taken by the president’s personal cameraman. Sculptures by Alexander Calder and Auguste Rodin. The 1921 agreement that created the agency that built the World Trade Center. Besides ending nearly 3,000 lives, destroying planes and reducing buildings to tons of rubble and ash, the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks destroyed tens of thousands of records, irreplaceable historical documents and art. In some cases, the inventories were destroyed along with the records. And the loss of human life at the time overshadowed the search for lost paper. A decade later, dozens of agencies and archivists say they’re still not completely sure what they lost or found, leaving them without much of a guide to piece together missing history. “You can’t get the picture back, because critical pieces are missing,” said Kathleen D. Roe, operations director at the New York State Archives and co-chairwoman of the World Trade Center Documentation Project. “And so you can’t know what the whole picture looks like.” The picture starts in the seven-building trade center complex. Hijackers flew jetliners into the twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001, which collapsed onto the rest of the complex, which included three smaller office buildings, a Marriott hotel and U.S. Customs. 7 World Trade Center, a skyscraper just north of the twin towers, collapsed that afternoon. The trade center was home to more than 430 companies, including law firms, manufacturers and financial institutions. Twenty-one libraries were destroyed, including that of The Journal of Commerce. Dozens of federal, state and local government agencies were at the site, including the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Central Intelligence Agency had a clandestine office on the 25th floor of 7 World Trade Center, which also housed the city’s emergency command center and an outpost of the U.S. Secret Service. The first tangible losses beyond death were obvious, and massive. The Cantor Fitzgerald brokerage, where more than 650 employees were killed, owned a trove of drawings and sculptures that included a cast of Rodin’s “The Thinker” — which resurfaced briefly after the attacks before mysteriously disappearing again. Fragments of other sculptures also were recovered. The Ferdinand Gallozzi Library of U.S. Customs Service in 6 World Trade Center held a collection of documents related to U.S. trade dating back to at least the 1840s. And in the same building were nearly 900,000 objects excavated from the Five Points neighborhood of lower Manhattan, a famous working-class slum of the 19th century. The Kennedy negatives, by photographer Jacques Lowe, had been stowed away in a fireproof vault at 5 World Trade Center, a nine-story building in the complex. Helen Keller International, whose offices burned up when its building, a block from the trade center, was struck by debris, lost a modest archive. Classified and confidential documents also disappeared at the Pentagon, where American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into it on 9/11. A private disaster response company, BMS CAT, was hired to help recover materials in the library, where the jet plane’s nose came to rest. The company claimed it saved all but 100 volumes. But the recovery limited access to information related to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s, as the U.S. prepared to launch an attack a month later. In New York, CIA and Secret Service personnel sifted through debris carted from the trade center to a Staten Island landfill for lost documents, hard drives with classified information and intelligence reports. Two weeks after the attacks, archivists and librarians gathered at New York University to discuss how to document what was lost, forming the World Trade Center Documentation Task Force. But they received only a handful of responses to survey questions about damaged or destroyed records. “The current atmosphere of litigation, politics and overall distrust surrounding the 9/11 attacks has made information sharing and compilation a complex task,” said the final 2005 report of the project. Federal agencies are required by law to report the destruction of records to the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration — but none did. Federal archivists called the failure understandable, given the greater disaster. After Sept. 11, “agencies did not do precisely what was required vis-à-vis records loss,” said David S. Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States, in an email to The Associated Press. “Appropriately, agencies were more concerned with loss of life and rebuilding operations — not managing or preserving records.” He said off-site storage and redundant electronic systems backed up some records; but the attacks spurred the archives agency to emphasize the need for disaster planning to federal records managers. Said Steven Aftergood, the director of the project on government secrecy at the watchdog group the Federation of American Scientists: “Under extreme circumstances, like those of 9/11, ordinary record keeping procedures will fail. Routine archival practices were never intended to deal with the destruction of entire offices or buildings.” Only the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Southern District formally requested help from federal archivists after discovering stored case files kept had been damaged by mold and water. The EEOC had to reconstruct 1,500 discrimination case files, said Elizabeth Grossman, supervisory trial attorney for the agency in 2001 at the time of the attacks. Cases were delayed for months. Computers had been backed up only as of Aug. 31, 2001. Witness interviews had to be conducted all over again. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the region’s airports, bridges and the World Trade Center, had much of its archives and library in the building. But a decade later, it only has “a general idea” of what documents were destroyed, Port Authority spokesman Steve Coleman said, including most of its video and photo archives, board meeting minutes and the compact that created the bi-state agency. It was kept on the 67th floor of the north tower. “We do not have a detailed list” of the missing records, Coleman said in an email. The agency meticulously stores thousands of tons of steel from the building and other wreckage of the trade center in a hangar at Kennedy Airport. A meeting had been scheduled — on Sept. 11, 2001 — by a group of libraries that had wanted to claim parts of the Port Authority collection, stored in the north tower. The meeting had been postponed at the last minute, said Ronald Becker, the head of special collections at Rutgers University Libraries, who was supposed to attend. Not everything was lost. Copies of inventories had been sent out to the libraries that had sought to take parts of the collection, and as workers sifted through the rubble at ground zero, they found remnants of a photographic collection kept by the agency. Tens of thousands images were restored from what had been a collection of one million before the attacks. One photo contact sheet — a picture of the Port Authority’s aviation director — was discovered by a recovery worker two days after the attacks. It was given to the Sept. 11 museum, along with office IDs, letters and other bits of paper that were recovered in the rubble in the days and weeks afterward. Jan Ramirez, the curator of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, said there was no historical consciousness surrounding the site before it was destroyed. “It was modern, it was dynamic. It was not in peril. It was not something that needed to be preserved,” she said. “Now we know better.” The Associated Press contributed to this article.
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Thousands of Records, Irreplaceable Historical Documents and Art Still Missing From 9/11
Reddit Co-founder Aaron Swartz could face up to 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine if convicted on charges filed by the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney alleging that the 24-year-old programer stole over four million documents from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and JSTOR, the popular article archiving site. The New York Times reports: “Demand Progress said on its site that it appeared Mr. Swartz was ‘being charged with allegedly downloading too many scholarly journal articles from the Web.’ It quoted the group’s executive director, David Segal, as saying, ‘It’s like trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out of the library.’ The charges filed against Mr. Swartz include wire fraud, computer fraud, obtaining information from a protected computer and criminal forfeiture. ‘Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars,’ said Ms.Ortiz (Massachusetts U.S. Attorney) in the press release.” The press release elaborated that Mr. Swartz broke into a restricted area of M.I.T. and entered a computer wiring closet where he apparently accessed the M.I.T. computer network and took millions of documents from JSTOR. JSTOR is a subscription-based not–for–profit service that provides scholars, researchers, and students, use of a wide range of content from thousands of academic journals and scholarly publications. Upon early news of the arrest, some in the tech community have come to Swartz’s defense. Wired.com ‘s Ryan Singel seemed puzzled, and claims the government is charging a well-known coder for violating federal hacking laws for downloading articles from a subscription database service that M.I.T. had given him access to. “The feds clearly think they have a substantial hacking case on their hands, even though Swartz used guest accounts to access the network and is not accused of finding a security hole to slip through or using stolen credentials, as hacking is typically defined. In essence, Swartz is accused of felony hacking for violating MIT and JSTOR’s terms of service. That legal theory has had mixed success — a federal court judge dismissed that argument in the Lori Drew cyber-bullying case, but it was later re-used with more success in a case brought against ticket scalpers who used automated means to buy tickets faster from Ticketmaster’s computer system.” Swartz is a online political activist who created a site called Infogami that later merged with the social news site Reddit , owned by parent company Conde Nast who also owns Wired. He has had writings published on a variety of topics, especially “the corrupting influence of big money on institutions including nonprofits, the media, politics, and public opinion.” Swartz founded and directs the nonprofit group Demand Progress , which calls itself a political action group hoping to change public policy that relates to the Internet. In 2008 Swartz was investigated for “exfiltrating” public records when he installed a small PERL script in the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals library in Chicago, but the case was dropped by the FBI.
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Reddit Co-Founder Indicted For Stealing 4 Million Documents from M.I.T. and JSTOR
When police arrested Barry Landau, a well-known presidential historian and collector, and accused him of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of historical documents on Saturday, it kind of makes you wonder about where he got the rest of his collection. A recent CNN article describes Landau as “one of the foremost collectors of presidential artifacts and memorabilia. His collection comprises more than 26,000 invitations and menus.” An American Digest issue from more than three years ago calls Landau the owner of the largest private collection of presidential treasure in the country. He even owns an invitation to dine with President and Mrs. Washington — a very rare and valuable national artifact. It’s incredible what he actually owns. Take a look at Landau showing off just a fraction of his collection in this CBS video from 2001: That’s a huge collection! And this recent arrest unfortunately calls it’s history into question. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is getting involved too. As of now, authorities haven’t decided whether to categorize the alleged crime under state or federal law, a bureau spokesman in Baltimore explained in this New York Times article . The case gets a little hazy because of its scale and the nature of the allegedly stolen materials. Here’s the back story: Landau’s suspicious actions at the Maryland Historical Society on Saturday morning caught the attention of a society employee who called authorities after he saw Landau’s accomplice conceal a document in a portfolio and walk it out of the library. The New York Times reports police later found a key in Landau’s pocket which led them to a locker in a nearby building that contained 60 documents. Among the documents were some signed by Abraham Lincoln, numerous inaugural ball invitations and programs worth about $500,000 and signed commemorations of the Statue of Liberty and the Washington Monument. Landau is no stranger to Washington, these types of documents, or any holes in his personal stock. He’s served nine presidents and worked with every White House since Lyndon Johnson to plan historic events. He’s been a part of every Inaugural Committee since 1965.
Image courtesy CNN
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Acclaimed Presidential Historian Accused of Stealing Rare Documents
