Tim Lambesis, lead singer for the heavy metal band As I Lay Dying, was arrested in California on Tuesday on charges that he sought the help of an undercover detective to have his estranged wife killed, police said.

Lambesis was taken into custody in Oceanside, near San Diego, said San Diego County Sheriff’s Department spokeswoman Jan Caldwell.

Police had previously learned Lambesis was looking for someone to carry out the killing, Caldwell said.

“The information came to us late last week. We acted quickly on it. I believe that we averted a great tragedy,” she said.

Caldwell said the ongoing investigation prevented her from disclosing any details about why Lambesis might have wanted to have his wife killed or how police first learned about what they described as his murder plan.

Lambesis’ wife, Meggan, filed papers in San Diego Superior Court in September 2012 seeking a dissolution of marriage, according to an online court database.

More: Heavy Metal Singer Tim Lambesis Arrested in Murder-for-Hire Plot

Youtube Video
Roger Hedgecock, former San Diego mayor and current right wing talk show host, equated teaching about race with “hatred of white people,” claimed “hatred of white people has now become an epidemic in this country”, that the California public school curriculum was “anti-white” while blaming President Obama for “racial tensions” that “are at an all-time high in my lifetime.” Hedgecock made these comments on Feb. 4, 2013, on San Diego station KFMB-AM, which features white talk show hosts for 100% of their programming, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Hedgecock started out by resurrecting a story from 2012 about a Portland school principal, Verenice Gutierrez, who was involved in programs to help educators understand white privilege in order to “change their teaching practices to boost their minority students’ performance.” Hedgecock called this “hatred of white people.”

“It will boost minorities performance to teach them, in essence, hatred of white people, which is basically what she said,” is how Hedgecock characterized it.

Hedgecock then presented what was supposed to be a scary list of the “hatred of white people” training for teachers involving Gutierrez, including an exercise “to examine a news article and discuss the white privilege it conveys… A week-long seminar called ‘coaching for educational equity’…that focuses on race and how it affects life… She also serves on an administrative committee that focuses on ‘systemic racism.’

“…This stuff is going on in every school, every public school,” Hedgecock warned.

After relating a news story about a deranged murderer who said his shooting spree was prompted by his racist attitudes toward white people, beliefs he developed while an anthropology major in college, Hedgecock said, “Where do people get these notions? They get them in taxpayer-supported schools. Hatred of white people has now become an epidemic in this country.

“It is now informing polical decisions that are made. When President Obama told the editorial staff at the San Francisco Chronicle during the 2008 campaign that the bitter clingers, people in Pennsylvania, and he was talking about white people, who cling to their guns and their bible, were the problem he was having.

“No one has more racially divided this country since John C. Calhoun, than Barack Obama…

“No one in this country believes that we are better off in race relations, that there is less racial tension in this country today, because of Barack Obama’s election. Racial tensions are at an all-time high in my lifetime and I lived through the 50s…

“I lived through Rosa Parks, I lived through Martin Luther King, Jr. The consensus was at that time among white people that those civil rights efforts were in the noblest tradition in the American republic…

“Do you have a feeling that all this stuff in the schools, teaching hatred of white privilege, is bringing us closer together? Is bringing us past racism?

Referring to a story about a review of the school system in Texas, Hedgecock concluded, “You should see the curriculum we have. It is as anti-American, anti-West and anti-white as you could imagine.”

Hate Group Leader to Serve as California State Judge
by Leah Nelson
June 20, 2012

In a 2011 fundraising letter for USJF, Kreep suggested that the president is a ‘stealth jihadist,’ Marxist, and ‘strident enemy of America,’ who ‘is working to destroy our sovereign republic.’

Gary Kreep, a longtime antigovernment activist, ‘birther’ and hate group leader who uses anti-Obama rhetoric as a proxy for anti-Muslim hate, has emerged victorious in a tight race for a seat on San Diego’s Superior Court, the San Diego Union-Tribune reports.

Gary Kreep

Kreep, who received the San Diego County Bar Association’s lowest rating of ‘lacking qualifications,’ beat opponent Garland Peed, a deputy district attorney of 27 years who received the county bar association’s highest rating and who was supported by local police unions and sitting judges.

The San Diego Superior Court is part of the state’s trial court system, which handles a wide variety of cases, including civil lawsuits and felony criminal cases. Kreep will serve a six-year term and earn an annual salary of $178,789.

Continue reading at SPLC.

Related:

Lawyer Who Filed Birther Case Against Obama Poised For Superior Court

Gary Kreep leads highly endorsed Dep. DA Garland Peed by 1,500 votes, with 1,000 left to count. U.S. Supreme Court denied Kreep a hearing on Obama case in June.
by Julie Pendray
June 20, 2012

It appears Gary Kreep is about to make history.

Just weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court denied him a hearing on his birth certificate case against President Obama, it looks like the conservative constitutional attorney will land a seat on the Superior Court bench in San Diego county.

Voters countywide have given him a lead of 1,569 votes over highly endorsed longtime Deputy District Attorney Garland Peed, with 1,000 ballots countywide still to be counted. His lead is less than 1 percent.

Peed was endorsed by many the Superior Court judges and had been given a high qualification ranking by the San Diego County Bar Association. The Bar Association gave Kreep a low ranking, noting that his opinions were swayed too much by his religious beliefs.

Kreep heads up the U.S. Justice Foundation, a conservative political group based in Ramona, which has nationwide support.

Continue reading at the Coronado Patch.

From Source Watch: Gary Kreep on “Political Assassinations”:

Political Assassinations ‘OK’

In October 2001 the conservative online news service WorldNetDaily reported on a paper written by Gary Kreep, the executive director of the group, and Richard D. Ackerman, the then litigation counsel for the organization supporting the lifting of the executive orders 11905 and 12333, signed by President Gerald Ford in 1976, that banned political assassinations.

The report cited an article - not available online - which argued that “the use of violence in defense of the United States should be a right of the leaders of our nation. The right to assassinate a foreign leader is qualified by certain critical factors, including, but not limited to, reasonableness of the force or threat, the interests sought to be protected by the use of violence, and the personal morality of our leaders.

The revival of an ability to defend our nation by assassination of rogue leaders is more than justified given the present threats of biological, chemical and nuclear violence against the United States by foreign states.”

Update:

Superior Court Judge Candidate Has ‘Sincere’ Doubts About Obama’s Citizenship

usatoday.com

A growing number of cities across the United States are making it harder to be homeless.

Philadelphia recently banned outdoor feeding of people in city parks. Denver has begun enforcing a ban on eating and sleeping on property without permission. And this month, lawmakers in Ashland, Ore., will consider strengthening the town’s ban on camping and making noise in public.

And the list goes on: Atlanta, Phoenix, San Diego, Los Angeles, Miami, Oklahoma City and more than 50 other cities have previously adopted some kind of anti-camping or anti-food-sharing laws, according to the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty.

The ordinances are pitting city officials against homeless advocates. City leaders say they want to improve the lives of homeless people and ensure public safety, while supporters of the homeless argue that such regulations criminalize homelessness and make it harder to live on the nation’s streets.

More

thedailybeast.com

As temperatures are rising in Southern California, so are tensions over the future of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, also known as SONGS. It’s been nearly four months since the nuclear power plant, located 45 miles north of San Diego, was shuttered after a small amount of radiation leaked into the atmosphere from a recently installed steam-generator tube in the plant’s reactor Unit 3.

It was subsequently discovered that a large number of these tubes, which function like a car radiator and carry hot, pressurized radioactive water, were damaged in Unit 2, the other operating unit at the seaside plant, which is operated by Southern California Edison, San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E) and jointly owned with the city of Riverside, Calif.

Jennifer Manfre, a spokeswoman for Southern California Edison, told The Daily Beast that the company has since plugged 510 damaged tubes in Unit 2 and 807 tubes in Unit 3. But investigators with Edison and the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) still haven’t pinpointed the reason for the tubes’ erosion — other than to say it was the result of a vibration.

nytimes.com

LOS ANGELES — By his own admission, Daniel Chong planned to spend April 20 like so many other college students: smoking marijuana with friends to celebrate an unofficial holiday devoted to the drug.

But for Mr. Chong, the celebration ended in a Kafkaesque nightmare inside a San Diego Drug Enforcement Administration holding cell, where he said he was forgotten for four days, without food or water.

To survive, Mr. Chong said he drank his own urine, hallucinated and, at one point, considered how to take his own life. By the time agents found him on the fifth day and called paramedics, he said he thought he could be dead within five minutes.

To survive, Mr. Chong said he drank his own urine, hallucinated and, at one point, considered how to take his own life. By the time agents found him on the fifth day and called paramedics, he said he thought he could be dead within five minutes.

‘By that time, I’d accepted that I would probably die there,’ Mr. Chong, a 23-year-old student at the University of California, San Diego, said Wednesday, three days after his release from the hospital.

A spokeswoman for the D.E.A. said the case was under investigation, but confirmed that Mr. Chong had been ‘accidentally left in one of the cells’ from April 21 until April 25, and that he had not been charged with a crime.

This is completely inexcusable. It’s hard to believe that this wasn’t intentional. Daniel Chong is going to get one hell of a settlement when this case goes to court.

Eugene Iredale, one of Mr. Chong’s lawyers, said he planned to file a claim against the federal government, and, if that is denied, a lawsuit.

“How they failed to realize he was there or ignored him is beyond comprehension,” Mr. Iredale said.

No kidding.

MSNBC Video

A 32-year-old woman from Iraq who was found severely beaten next to a threatening note saying “go back to your country” died on Saturday.

Shaima Alawadi’s 17-year-old daughter found her unconscious in a pool of blood Wednesday morning in the dining room of the house in El Cajon, police Lt. Steve Shakowski said.

“(They) took my mother away from me … took my best friend away from me. Why?” the victim’s daughter Fatima Al Himidi told KUSI-TV. She added that her mother had been beaten on the head with a tire iron.

Hanif Mohebi, the director of the San Diego chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said he met with Alawadi’s family members Saturday morning and was told the mother of five was taken off life support around 3 p.m.

“The family is in shock at the moment. They’re still trying to deal with what happened,” Mohebi said.

Mohebi said the family had been in the United States since the mid-1990s.

Al Himidi told KUSI-TV her mother had been beaten on the head repeatedly with a tire iron, and that the note said “go back to your country, you terrorist.”

Police Lt. Mark Coit said a threatening note was discovered “very close to where the victim was found,” but he did not disclose other details of the note. The family said they had found a similar note earlier this month but did not report it to authorities, Coit said.

Coit said the attack appeared to be an isolated incident.

“A hate crime is one of the possibilities and we will be looking at that. We don’t want to focus on only one issue and miss something else.”

Sura Alzaidy, a family friend, told UT San Diego the note told the family to “go back to your own country. You’re a terrorist.”

Alzaidy said the attack apparently occurred after the father took the younger children to school. Alzaidy told the newspaper the family is from Iraq, and that Alawadi is a “respectful modest muhajiba,” meaning she wears the traditional hijab, a head scarf.

The family had lived in the house in San Diego County for only a few weeks, after moving from Michigan, Alzaidy said. Alzaidy told the newspaper her father and Alawadi’s husband had previously worked together in San Diego as private contractors for the U.S. Army, serving as cultural advisers to train soldiers who were going to be deployed to the Middle East.

El Cajon, northeast of downtown San Diego, is home to some 40,000 Iraqi immigrants, the second largest such community in the U.S. after Detroit.

This article includes reporting by The Associated Press and Reuters.

bbc.co.uk

Five million people were without power on Thursday, with many likely to remain out of service for another day or two.

There was traffic chaos. San Diego was the worst affected city, where all outbound flights were cancelled.

An investigation is looking into why the blackout spread from Arizona, where a piece of equipment was switched off. Extreme heat may be a factor.

Continue reading the main story

“Start Quote

There’s no doubt this has never happened before to our system”

Mike Niggli San Diego Gas and Electric

‘Like an oven’

Officials say that a power line between Arizona and California was knocked out of service after an employee carried out a procedure at a substation in Arizona.

“There appears to be two failures here - one is human failure and the other is a system failure. Both of those will be addressed,” said Damon Gross, a spokesman for APS.

Daniel Froetscher, a vice-president at APS, told the Associated Press news agency it was “not a deliberate act”.

“The employee was just switching out a piece of equipment that was problematic,” Mr Froetscher said.

MSNBC Video

This is a NBC video report about a cop that was ambushed in his patrol car by a suicidal (left a note, killed by police in the end) asshole.

But his last moment before the killing was caught on tape at the local McDonalds.

Watch.

This guy worked in one of the craziest neighborhoods in San Diego.

I’ve followed this sad story unfortunately, very closely.

A person who’s life, though ended so unfairly, will continue to affect people.