Mesa cop accused of illegal background checks

A Mesa police officer has been charged in connection with illegally checking backgrounds on 10 people over the course of more than three years.

Officer Daniel Albert Coronado, 37, of Gilbert, was indicted Tuesday on four counts of computer tampering and four counts of unauthorized access to criminal history.

The case was first investigated internally by Mesa police after it was uncovered during a separate criminal investigation. It has since been turned over to the Arizona Department of Public Safety. Coronado has been suspended with pay, police said.

"I don't know his motives," said Mesa police spokesman Sgt. Ed Wessing.

According to the indictment, Coronado is accused of using police computer terminals to access the Arizona Criminal Justice Information System and computerized criminal history records between January 2005 and June 2008. The indictment accuses Coronado of illegally logging onto the computer terminals 149 times and accessing the criminal records of about 10 people, police said.

Since officers are assigned a login ID number, it's easy for investigators to see every time someone logs in and who they search.

Wessing said the people whom Coronado allegedly looked up were those he associated with in some manner.

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Florence detention officer arrested for stealing inmate monies

Detention Sergeant Amado Martinez, an employee of the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office Detention Facility, was arrested by investigators of the Pinal County Attorney’s Office.

Utilizing the checks and balances system put in place by Sheriff Chris Vasquez over all financial operations at the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office, a staff employee at the Pinal County Adult Detention Center discovered the potential of the alleged theft of inmate monies by Sgt. Martinez.

Due to the nature and severity of the complaint and allegations made by the employee, Sheriff Vasquez contacted the Pinal County Attorney’s Office and requested that they conduct a thorough criminal investigation into the possible theft of monies.

As a result of the investigation, Mr. Martinez was indicted on 18 charges, which include forgery, theft and identity theft. Mr. Martinez was arrested and booked by the Pinal County Attorney’s Office.

Mr. Martinez was initially booked into the Pinal County Detention Facility with a $100,000.00 secured bond. He has been placed on administrative leave without pay pending the outcome of an administrative investigation.

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Despite attacks on media by McCain campaign, case studies show disparate coverage in McCain's favor

The media have for months reported complaints by Sen. John McCain's campaign that they have favored his opponent in their coverage of the presidential race, while making little attempt to assess accuracy of those complaints or to confirm or refute them. Media Matters for America has undertaken a review of the media's coverage of two stories negatively affecting or reflecting on Sen. Barack Obama and two stories negatively affecting or reflecting on McCain and compared the extent of media attention to each. Specifically, Media Matters compared the media's coverage of Obama's association with Chicago developer Antoin Rezko to the media's coverage of McCain's associations with donors for whom McCain reportedly facilitated land deals. Media Matters also compared coverage of Obama's association with former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers to coverage of McCain's association with G. Gordon Liddy, whom Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman has described as McCain's "own Bill Ayers."

Media Matters found that while the five major newspapers -- the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post -- and the three evening network news broadcasts have frequently mentioned Obama's ties to Ayers and Rezko, they have rarely mentioned McCain's dealings with donors whom he reportedly benefited and have completely ignored McCain's association with Liddy. Indeed, since The New York Times first reported that McCain facilitated land deals that benefited major donors, these media outlets have mentioned those deals in only six additional reports, but news reports and editorial and opinion pieces by or in those media outlets have mentioned Obama's ties to Rezko -- who was convicted in June in a case in which Obama was never accused of any wrongdoing -- 44 times during that same time period. Moreover, while these same media outlets have frequently mentioned Obama's ties to Ayers -- 69 mentions so far in 2008 -- they have yet to mention McCain's connections to Liddy, whom McCain has praised and repeatedly associated with in public and in campaign settings. In addition to serving more than four years in prison for his role in the Watergate break-in and the Daniel Ellsberg case, Liddy also admitted that he plotted to murder journalist Jack Anderson; plotted to murder fellow Republican operative E. Howard Hunt; and plotted to firebomb the Brookings Institution. Liddy also reportedly gave advice on how to shoot agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and reportedly admitted to naming shooting targets after the Clintons.

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Can Obama Win and Lose Ohio at the Same Time?

Ohio attorneys pushing to convince a federal judge in Franklin County to lift the stay on a case alleging Republican Party operatives and Bush family loyalists cyber-rigged the vote in certain Ohio counties in 2004, filed two affidavits on Wednesday from data security and academic research experts on voting. The attorneys hoped to convince the court to lift a stay on their case, allowing them to issue a subpoena to Mike Connell, a long-time information technology handyman who worked in both Ohio and Florida, who they want to depose now in an effort to see whether the Matrix-like system he helped build in Ohio, that some say put Ohio in the win column in 2004 for President Bush instead of his Democratic opponent John Kerry, a senator from Massachusettes, is still rigged to go off on Election Day in November.

Al Gore received hundreds of thousands more votes than George W. Bush did in 2000 nationwide, but didn't become president, even though a recount of votes after the election in Florida showed that he also won more votes there, too. Some say John Kerry won more votes in Ohio in 2004, but due to dozens of Election Day irregularities, some maybe orchestrated while others were just vulnerabilities in Ohio's system of voting, lost the state by 118,601 votes. So the question of whether Barack Obama, who currently trails John McCain in Ohio but who leads him in recent polls nationwide by four percentage points (49-45, Gallup) can both win and loose Ohio. If three Ohio attorneys get the signal to re-energize their now moribund lawsuit, we all might learn somethings that we need to know but that also might scare us straight, and show us that the wacky election conspirators the news media has marginalized were not as wacky as first thought.

The stay, which was lifted by the court of Judge Algernon Marbley last Friday after Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, who had previously issued motions to keep it in place least it interfer with plans for the upcoming presidential election, agreed to let plaintiff attorney's pursue more discovery by moving forward with the issusing of subpeonas to Connell and, maybe, to others like Karl Rove, President Bush's political adviser and master Republican strategist, who the attorneys and those helping them think a path of breadcrumbs will lead to. The attorneys say Connell can blow the whistle on how democracy was compromised in Ohio and other states, like Florida, where he was given the keys to the castle of cyber systems.

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