we saw that...

johnny cashless sings "we're in obama's prison"

1st circuit appeals court smacks down nutty district court judge mike caldwell's tony the grosse tete truck stop tiger ruling

louisiana has so many incompetent and downright crooked judges and attorneys it's pathetic.

this assclown caldwell has been a lawyer since 1974; yet still doesnt know basic law such as you cant take someone's property without at least giving them a hearing.

the sad part is that it's no telling how many others "judge" caldwell has fucked-over in a similar fashion and gotten away with it too -- simply because they didnt have the money to take it to the next level or the media attention to bring his shoddy judicial practices to light.

hurricane irene nearing new york city

here are a few snaps a friend of ours who lives in brooklyn, took from her cell phone, saturday evening, 27 august 2011.

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louisiana college president joe aguillard devours a worm onstage

via: save our l.c. "joe ate a worm in chapel"

click here to download/view the clip
or view the whole thing over on wildcat media here.

hurricane irene: virginia beach, va., degenerate exposes himself during live weather channel standup

via: twitter @drudgeretort

As a broadcaster lamented the number of people who were out on the streets of Virginia Beach, Va., during Hurricane Irene, one of them exposed himself to the full fury of the storm. "I'm speechless," the broadcaster said. ~ read more

new yorkers blow off mickey bloomberg's hurricane irene scare

drudgereportarchives.com

video: lsu head coach les miles presser on suspension of quarterback jordan jefferson and linebacker josh johns

via: twitter @wwltv

click here or external link to view/download the video

rod noles: tax credit housing competes with alexandria landlord gayle underwood's rental properties

our [alexandria landlord gayle underwood call for federal investigation into city of alexandria government!] post from the other day takes a new twist.

photo: stockyard march 2011 sparc commission official website

alexandria attorney thomas davenport sues ladads.info webmaster

this is all developing but we'll probably have more as time goes on.

hurricane irene nasa terra satellite snap

via: twitter @nasa

All of Hurricane Irene captured in this image from our Terra satellite, Thursday ~noon ET. http://go.nasa.gov/ofJRnB #hurricaneirene

last days of the o.k. allen bridge

work crews continue progress laying out the replacement bridge soon to be hoisted and spanned across the red river at alexandria and pineville, louisiana.

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alexandria landlord gayle underwood call for federal investigation into city of alexandria government!

we agree. although, most likely not for the same reasons.

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alexander fulton hotel, downtown alexandria, la. 18 august 2011
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click here to skip ahead to ms. underwood's call or fast forward to 4:00 minutes
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related posts

rod noles: tax credit housing competes with alexandria landlord gayle underwood's rental properties

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indian hen woodpeckers

a pair of indian hen woodpeckers (pileated woodpecker:dryocopus pileatus), in rapides parish, louisiana, enjoy a game of drumming round the pecan tree around 7:28 am cdt, wednesday, 24 august 2011.

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**FLASH** richard lee mcnair talks about viewing solitary mermaid blog and wst... while on the lam

link to audio download page

richard lee mcnair is the federal inmate who escaped from the the united states penitentiary (usp) in pollock, grant parish, louisiana, a "high security institution housing male offenders," on wednesday, 05 april 2006. he was captured in campbellton, new brunswick, canada on thursday, 25 october 2007.

mcnair is now incarcerated at the the administrative maximum (adx) facility (aka supermax) in florence, colorado. it "houses offenders requiring the tightest controls."

as you can imagine, during his 568 days on the lam, mcnair, used the internet as much as he could.

at the beginning we posted about the escape several times; our most notable post is this one, because it contains the dashcam video.

sometime after friday, 11 august 2006, we noticed, probably from referral logs, that an anonymous, female canadian blogger, "solitary mermaid," had linked to that post.

we've often wondered and it was only recently that we learned, for sure, that mcnair had indeed visited wst... as well as the solitary mermaid blog.

while we're anxious to find out what mcnair writes about it, in the letter he mentioned in the above audio clip, that he is mailing to byron christopher this week, we can see where there might be some confusion about the mysterious "comment - link(s)" from wst... to solitary mermaid.

we refer to them as "mysterious comment-link(s)" now because if anyone who hears the above clip or if by chance it's included in mr. christopher's book and then visited the 06 april 2006 post or any other of our richard lee mcnair posts, they would not find any comment from, nor link to, the solitary mermaid blog. so wtf?

it looks like that on 26 october 2006, we registered with and installed the haloscan commenting system. we used haloscan until they went out of business in early 2010.

the thing about replacing the blogger commenting system is that you lose all those blogger comments. actually they're not lost, just covered over.

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internet archive, wayback machine snapshot from 14 april 2006

whether or not he viewed it from wst... or even viewed the video that we had uploaded is, at least for now, pure speculation.

so, in short (kinda), when we installed haloscan we lost the backlink to the solitary mermaid blog. a couple of weeks ago when mr. christopher mentioned mcnair's referring to a blog post from a woman who offered to put him up, we instantly recalled it but without that backlink and it being nearly five years since we had viewed that blog + we had ignorantly neglected to link to it in the body of one of our blog posts, irrespective of a dodgy backlink feature, so that it would have been preserved -- we didnt have a clue how to locate it or even if that blog was still online.

we thought that a seahorse was associated with that blog. seahorse ... mermaid at least we were in the ball park.

finally, yesterday morning we were able to locate that blog.

so after viewing all of solitary mermaid's richard lee mcnair posts, we couldnt find where exactly she had stated an offer to take mcnair in.

it's possible that we misremembered that or solitary mermaid could have thought twice about what she wrote and edited a sentence or two out of the post but according to mcnair that was his impression of the post as well -- guess we'll have to wait and see.

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after we found her blog we were able to get her email address -- its publicized on her blog -- and search our gmail account for it.

we found the record of her comments and a forgotten email exchange we had with her:

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as you know mcnair was captured on 25 october 2007 but it was only about 3 months ago that he had his telephone privilege restored.

mcnair is now allowed one telephone call per month no longer than fifteen minutes in length. the first two calls, naturally he called his folks.

saturday evening, 20 august 2011, mcnair made his third call this time to byron christopher. this is the first time that mcnair has spoken by voice to a news reporter. -- in late 2008, mr. christopher and mcnair began a postal mail correspondence that consists so far, of 153 letters from mcnair containing over 2,000 handwritten pages.

mr. christopher has generously shared with us a pretty good bit of confidential information: (1) about the minot, north dakota, shootings and murder and (2) details relative to cenla and louisiana concerning mcnair's escape and the search and (3) mcnair's leaving louisiana and we can honestly say, that whether or not any mention of wst... in mr. christopher's forthcoming case study makes the final cut, that this is a fantastic story.

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photo credit: richard lee mcnair via: byron christopher upon information kindly furnished by michael soucy

Here is a shot of McNair's stolen white GMC Savanna van, as seen in the reflection of a Ford dealership he was scoping out at night.

This was shot on October 4, 2007.

McNair was captured on October 25th. ~ photo caption: byron christopher

screen grab from a video made by richard lee mcnair in rimouski, quebec, canada, at medaillon ford on leonidas avenue -- released to wst... by byron christopher, 20 august 2011. the dealership has since moved and changed names.

salle de montre translates into english as showroom.

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see also

the richard lee mcnair label

in the footer of this post

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related posts

a wst... global exclusive: case study: the richard lee mcnair file

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internet support grows for tony the grosse tete, la truck stop tiger

2theadvocate.com

blogosphere: 3 rpso deputies suspended in wake of missing drugs/evidence internal investigation

topix - woodworth forum commetators. according to the commentator, "thetowntalk," probably not to be confused with the gannett/alexandria daily town talk, a public mail-out is forthcoming.

if wst... receives a copy we will post it.

slabbed blog sued by the canadian greg aymond's

in need of a good horse laugh? meander over to slabbed and read their post "First class bitches, common thugs or plain ol’ morons: The Girls at Trout Point Lodge sue Fox 8 and Slabbed. A Trout Point Lodge /Jefferson Parish Political Corruption Scandal Update" the accompanying lawsuit and the comments.

lawsuit excerpt:

Leary and Perret feared imminent contact and harm from obviously mentally unstable individuals from the deep south of the United States ~ paragraph 87

one crazy motorcycle stunt ... deserves another

via: email fwd

Red Bull paid the American biker $2 million for this stunt.

After the jump the biker said he will never do it again, not even for $10 million...

a wst... global exclusive: case study: the richard lee mcnair file

wst... note: this is an extremely lengthy and difficult post. yet one of the most interesting posts that we've ever done.

while there is a chance that some may interpret this as our "blowing our own horn" so-to-speak thats really not the case as there is a chance that wst... might receive a sentence or two passing reference in a book about richard lee mcnair, it gave us a good opportunity to relive the events of the spring of 2006 ... and 17 november 1987.

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click picture to enlarge

"notice of escaped federal prisoner" original fax sent at 1:53 pm cdt by the bureau of prisons

source: byron christopher via: roy hebron

where to begin ... around mid morning on wednesday, 05 april 2006, the united states penitentiary in pollock, louisiana inmate, richard lee mcnair, "mailed" himself to freedom.

wst... first learned of it later that evening when we happened to glance at the television screen and read kalb's crawl -- which we posted about here.

we assumed that the escapee would be captured overnight and that would be the end of it. boy were we wrong.

on the morning of 06 april we learned that the prisoner had not been captured. sometime before 10:33 am gannett/the alexandria daily town talk newspaper had acquired and uploaded to their website www.thetowntalk.com a dashcam video between a ball, la., policeman and the escapee in which the policeman and mcnair, playing a runner, exchanged pleasantries before the ball cop shook mcnair's hand and let him continue his run.

thus began mcnair's "the running man" saga.

we really cant remember what if any opinion we had of the ball cop and what he did or didnt do in the mcnair stop. we just knew that the video was an incredible find.

at that time youtube was fairly new we didnt even have an account there so we opened one and we attempted several times to add it there but they had a strict 10 minute in length and 100 mb file size per video limitation and the ball cop video is seven seconds over the 10 minutes cutoff and at 101 mb was always rejected.

so we uploaded it to google video and posted it here.

now it's instantaneous, however, in those days, at least as far as wst... posts were concerned, it took google up to 24 hours to fully spider and index our postings into their search engine.

the evening of april 6th, we noticed that our first post containing the kalb crawl was beginning to receive a lot of traffic from googlers searching for mcnair news. so we updated it with a link to the second post -- the one containing the embedded dashcam video.

not long after the second post became the primary post that google would send traffic to.

looking back at that post now the length of it and all the updates scattered around, it hardly makes any sense but due to all the interest in mcnair's escape we were attempting to keep everything on one page to avoid creating another post and waiting for google to catch up again.

many of the visitors were from the feds - doj, homeland security, fbi, bop and police departments. still many more visitors were from regular citizens who were concerned that they might live in the path that mcnair was taking and were looking for the latest news and links.

one news article that we were able to acquire and repost with his permission was written by our friend andrew w. griffin. mr. griffin had been a reporter with the alexandria daily town talk and he had left only a few months before to take a job with the lawton, oklahoma, constitution which as it turned out is mcnair's hometown newspaper.

living here, on the same side of the red river and not that far, as the crow flies, from where everything was taking place, the longer this "cold blooded killer" was on the loose made it easy to identify and empathize with the fear and tension that folks over in the tioga area were feeling.

so it became like an obligation or a challenge really that as long as mcnair was on the loose and so many people were looking for information about his whereabouts that we would attempt to post all the updates that we could.

some visitors now may think that we were just attempting to draw traffic here for the ad revenue. however, we didnt add google adsense until nearly 21/2 years later in september 2008.

after it was confirmed that mcnair was out of the area the story was pretty much over as far as we could tell. we continued to post a few updates about him from time-to-time because of the local interest

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source: adatlantic.com 2010 better newspapers competition 32 page [12.2mb].pdf
click here to download hi-res scan of section b cover page 05 august 2009 campbellton tribune
one page .pdf [631 kb]
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unbeknownst to us though was that in canada and elsewhere the mcnair escape and 18 months on the lam generated a massive amount of interest and remains a sensation to this day.

one interesting tidbit that we learned -- we know alex cenla will love this -- is that apparently, cenla is receiving tour buses sent here at least in part by interest in the mcnair escape.

in the fall of 2008, canadian crime reporter, byron christopher received a lead from a colleague about a federal prisoner who escaped and made his way all the way to canada before being captured.

mr. christopher explains in the below audio file how one thing led to another and he began corresponding with mcnair, now held at the florence, colorado, supermax federal penitentiary.

actually, we had heard of byron christopher before. in january 2009, wst... fave mike magnoli (now with katc in lafayette, la.), did a local interest story about mcnair and interviewed mr. christopher by phone about their burgeoning correspondence. we posted about it here.

as far as we can tell, that january 2009 post is the last we heard anything about mcnair.

until last sunday, 07 august 2011, when out of the blue we received an email from byron christopher.

mr. christopher's interest was in our 13 april 2006 post "riding the richard lee mcnair escape train." in that post we mentioned all the various traffic that the mcnair escape was generating.

so we emailed him back and again, one thing led to another and we wound up having two telephone conversations with him that afternoon and evening.

mr. christopher had been commissioned to write a case study of the mcnair case which will be an enlargement of his award winning "the running man" series that ran in the campbellton tribune newspaper from august 2009.

all last week mr. christopher answered our follow-up questions and sent us more information about his work.

while mcnair's escape was the cause for all the excitement and tension around cenla, we often wondered what the story was behind why mcnair was in prison for in the first place.

in the msm accounts you might get a sentence here or a paragraph there touching on the 17 november 1987 incident in which mcnair, reportedly, shot two men, killing one when they walked in on him burgling a grain elevator office in minot, north dakota.

mr. christopher made available to us several passages from his draft about mcnair's escape, the [cenla part of the] search and the ball police officer/dashcam incident.

both passages are painstakingly researched. where possible the participants describe what happened in their own words. this was the result of mr. christopher's travels to cenla, north dakota and elsewhere to interview anyone as well as view evidence thats been connected to mcnair.

mr. christopher has perfected a technique in his case study of allowing mcnair to tell the his story, in his own words, while mr. christopher fills in around that with whats happening based on his research.

one of our concerns was whether this was all an attempt to glorify mcnair.

for sure, the mcnair escape and subsequent 18 months on the lam makes for a compelling story. just how did a 47-year-old man escape from a federal prison in grant parish, louisiana, on foot, with no money, with no outside accomplices and with the full force of the federal government as well as every parish and county sheriff in the country out looking for him -- make it all the way to canada?

we're happy to report that from the passages that we've read from mr. christopher's case study that the central louisiana police and people were treated very well -- including ball policeman carl bordelon, whom mr. christopher says was given a bad rap by the media and after being privy to mr. christpher's research and methods we believe him.

but there was that reason for mcnair's being in jail to start with: the 17 november 1987 minot, north dakota shootings and murder.

the murder and shootings are not glossed over in any way whatsoever. mr. christopher has allowed mcnair, in his own words, to describe the events of that night, while using the technique we described before, he went back and filled in around mcnair's words with the words of the surviving victim dick kitzman, first responders and another grain elevator employee, jerry omvig who arrived at the scene right after it happened.

mr. christopher also drew from his viewing of the crime scene photos and police reports including a transcript (to be in the book) of dick kitzman's 911 call.

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jerry thies tombstone

fort snelling military cemetery, minneapolis, minnesota

photo credit: byron christopher, december 2010

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the vivid recounting of the break-in, shootings and murder as well as mcnair's reasoning for it all, are as disturbing as their inclusion is necessary.

we understand that the family of the slain trucker, jerome "jerry" theodore thies, are very reluctant to talk to the media.

while we've never had an immediate member of our family murdered, so we cannot know exactly how they feel, we can understand on some levels where they are coming from.

if we could, we would probably tell them that for reasons known only to god and satan, that the lives of mr. thies, dick kitzman, larry omvig and others are forever linked to richard lee mcnair and that as long as mcnair's story is being told so will mr. thies and he will not be forgotten.

as for us, we dont hate mr. mcnair, nor do we, even if we could, damn him to hell for all eternity. we believe that he deeply regrets what he did and how he messed up his own life.

mcnair writes that back then he was like a selfish, spoilt child. "a piece of shit." that if north dakota, at the time, had the death penalty that he would have received it and deserved it. we agree.

which brings us back to the present -- on sunday evening 14 august 2011, we had an opportunity to have a telephone conversation with byron christopher about all this. the embed is below.

towards the end, mr. christopher plays an audio clip from a home move that mcnair made while on the lam.

this is the first time that mcnair's voice has been broadcast publicly -- exclusively from wst...

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link to audio download page

wst... note: this is a telephone conversation we had with byron christopher on sunday, 14 august 2011. this is not an "interview" or represented as such.

although we had chatted by phone with mr. christopher for about 30 - 45 minutes the previous sunday as well as emailed back and forth all week -- we still became a bit nervous at the beginning - but such is life.

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related posts

oopsie federal prisoner escapes from pollock prison

oopsie no2 ball cops capture then release escaped fed prisoner

riding the richard lee mcnair escape train

richard lee mcnair spotted in canada

richard lee mcnair latest

**flash** richard lee mcnair video no2 on google video

**flash** richard lee mcnair breaks previous escape record

richard lee mcnair still free one year later

richard lee mcnair believed in calgary and southern alberta area

richard lee mcnair captured

mcnair capture pushes dashcam vid back to no. 4 on google video

richard lee mcnair ordered deported from canada

richard lee mcnair returns to central louisiana

richard lee mcnair arresting officer interview

richard lee mcnair writes to edmonton crime reporter byron christopher

dear zachary: a letter to a son about his father

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