#criming

Great! Let's get criming then!

[Hunter charges up a fireball to set the place on fire, but looks around and stops]

Hey, weren't there only one dead waiter in a pool of blood? Why are there three guys dead now?

(via Crime Guy's Lawyers Go To Justice Department To Say Hey, Don't Charge Crime Guy With Crimes - Wonkette)

Here is the text of that "truth" from Trump's Truth Social, in case a drag queen wants to read it at today's Story Hour:

HOW CAN DOJ POSSIBLY CHARGE ME, WHO DID NOTHING WRONG, WHEN NO OTHER PRESIDENT’S WERE CHARGED, WHEN JOE BIDEN WON’T BE CHARGED FOR ANYTHING, INCLUDING THE FACT THAT HE HAS 1,850 BOXES, MUCH OF IT CLASSIFIED, AND SOME DATING BACK TO HIS SENATE DAY WHEN EVEN DEMOCRAT SENATORS ARE SHOCKED. ALSO, PRESIDENT CLINTON HAD DOCUMENTS, AND WON IN COURT. CROOKED HILLARY DELETED 33,000 EMAILS, MANY CLASSIFIED, AND WASN’T EVEN CLOSE TO BEING CHARGED! ONLY TRUMP - THE GREATEST WITCH HUNT OF ALL TIME!

I love the specificity of the lies - to lend credibility?

"[Wayland] Childs runs a garage... Child’s [sic] garage has been broken into... repeatedly. His laptop computer was stolen in one of the burglaries.

About a month ago, a woman called Childs, saying some guy named Scott Irish was trying to sell her Childs’s laptop. The woman agreed to bring Childs to a rendezvous in nearby Barre, ostensibly to buy the computer. The woman called police in Barre, asking them to arrest Irish at the meeting spot at a motel. When the cops didn’t show, Wayland Childs allegedly took the law into his own hands, holding Irish at gunpoint on the ground to await the police.

When police finally arrived, they arrested Childs for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. Irish was not charged with stealing the computer, though he was later charged with stealing catalytic converters elsewhere...

... Childs’s arrest, and the kid glove treatment afforded Irish, was greeted with outrage by people all over this region, capturing their frustration with the inability of police and the criminal justice system to control a menace in many small, rural towns across Vermont: drug dealers and those who do crime to pay for their drugs...

... Vermont State Police insist their tallies of criminal activity don’t match local concerns about a surge in crime, but Steve Thomas, who... runs Chicken Wiggle Farm here, says the state stats are meaningless because so many local people have given up calling the police...

“A lot of people don’t call the police anymore because they never come,” said Thomas...

“Most of this is about heroin,” [sheriff] Bohnyak said.

There was one truly odd moment, after three days of trying to break this thing, where I said: "Jesus, we've pulled corrupt money-laundering apart, international cyber-cons, kleptocratic hustles -- and we cannot break this fucking cheerleading scam. The real version of it is just too ironclad."

Downey: "This web of companies looks like a mob breakdown on The Sopranos."

Me: "Okay, so how do you bring down the mob?"

Downey (who, you will remember, is a former white collar defense attorney): "RICO Act. It's ridiculously broad."

That's how a cut-down version of the RICO Act wound up on the writer's room wall. The key, of course, being that you need to commit TWO acts of racketeering activity. So while half the room banged various combos of offenses off the walls ("Kidnapping and criminal copyright infringement?"), we tackled the other big problem --

-- we can't write a cheerleading episode.

By which I mean, it obeys none of the structural parameters which allow us to make Leverage on a weekly basis. There aren't really enough "hats" for the characters in cheerleading. Coach, cheerleader, maybe judge ... there's no inherent threat of violence or prosecution or meddling law enforcement. What's the real-time (used to be fourth) fifth Act sequence as we tempo up heading into the back of the show?

Again, back to the research. Jeremy had talked to several groups who were trying to change the cheerleading rules, primarily by trying to get it declared as a sport, where Title IX safety rules would kick in. These groups' primary frustration was in the politics of the situation -- which for once fell on both sides of the aisle. Generalizing roughly, Conservatives didn't want to establish that sort of excess regulation, Liberals didn't want Title IX money being diverted to cheerleading from other women's sports. Few friends on either side.

Well, there you go. Despite assumptions by some of our viewers, we try to stay very even-handed on the political spectrum on the few times we venture into politics. My policy is alway that the primary split in politics is along the money/power axis, and there are plenty of R's and D's chasing both. We'd never done a Congressional episode, and Congress is a lovely, complicated, antiquated ramshackle system all based in a one big, swinging doors-French farce worthy building. Aces. We came up with some prototypical Congresspeople, assigned unlikely humans to deal with them, and turned loose the Fun Train.