undercover officer uses taser on pallbearer
It happened as the coffin was being loaded into a hearse.
Overheard Today
Woman trying to get screaming child into a car:
“No! Daddy cain’t take you he done lost his driver’s license.”
t-shirt justice
Daryl, Deron–I Told You Not To Run Over Those Squirrels!
Texas leads the nation in deaths from vehicle/animal crashes.
What did I tell you?? It’s like running with scissors.
the people versus
A lawsuit against God has been thrown out for lack of known address.
“Given that this court finds that there can never be service effectuated on the named defendant this action will be dismissed with prejudice,” Polk wrote.
Chambers, who graduated from law school but never took the bar exam, thinks he’s found a hole in the judge’s ruling.
“The court itself acknowledges the existence of God,” Chambers said Wednesday. “A consequence of that acknowledgment is a recognition of God’s omniscience.”
Therefore, Chambers said, “Since God knows everything, God has notice of this lawsuit.”
state of the union
Nonviolent, American citizens were put on terrorist watch lists for anti-war and death penalty activism.
The Maryland State Police classified 53 nonviolent activists as terrorists and entered their names and personal information into state and federal databases that track terrorism suspects, the state police chief acknowledged yesterday.
(via andrew sullivan)
Neither side supports Gay Marriage!
I don’t either. Don’t call it Marriage! I don’t give a crap about what it’s called. But I want the same legal recognition for my commitment to my partner. Marriage is word play, why can’t we get past it?
LaBruzzo considering plan to pay poor women $1,000 to have tubes tied
Worried that welfare costs are rising as the number of taxpayers declines, state Rep. John LaBruzzo, R-Metairie, said Tuesday he is studying a plan to pay poor women $1,000 to have their Fallopian tubes tied.
“We’re on a train headed to the future and there’s a bridge out, ” LaBruzzo said of what he suspects are dangerous demographic trends. “And nobody wants to talk about it.”
LaBruzzo said he worries that people receiving government aid such as food stamps and publicly subsidized housing are reproducing at a faster rate than more affluent, better-educated people who presumably pay more tax revenue to the government. He said he is gathering statistics now.
(via Beezies & Bankrolls )
I wish I’d known
A New Hampshire Vermont town has repealed an edict against fortune tellers on the books since 1966.
“When the ordinance was lifted, I actually felt a large weight lifting from my shoulders,” said Maria Pawlowski, a tarot card reader. “It was very oppressive to have to refrain from something that was as natural to me as breathing.”
I wonder if she saw it coming.
because if terrorists can’t buy guns, the terrorists have won
A top McCain adviser lobbied against a bill that would keep people on the terrorist watch list from buying guns.
Newsweek reports that, according to registration documents filed by Scheuenemann’s lobbying firm, Orion Strategies, Scheunemann lobbied on behalf of the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) against a bill that aims to close a gun-control loophole that inhibits the government from stopping people on terrorist watch-lists from buying guns. According to Newsweek, “the bill was inspired by an official audit covering a five-month period in 2004 which found that, because of the loophole, the Feds had to greenlight 35 out of 44 cases where a gun buyer was on a terrorist watch list.”
retort
The Attorney General of the United States said:
Not every wrong, or even every violation of the law, is a crime.
Unless it’s a blow job.
little wing
An eight year old blues prodigy has been denied the right to play clubs in Wisconsin.
“He goes, ‘It’s not how many times you get knocked down but it’s how many times you get back up and go forward,’ Carl Latz said his son told him. “And I told him that’s exactly what this is all about and if nothing else this letter just taught you a life lesson.”
So true, little soldier.
What would accountability look like post-Bush?
anthrax scientist commits suicide
A scientist about to face indictment in the post 9/11 anthrax case committed suicide.
The Times said federal investigators moved away from Hatfill and concluded Ivins was the culprit after FBI Director Robert Mueller changed leadership of the investigation in 2006. The new investigators instructed agents to re-examine leads and reconsider potential suspects. In the meantime, investigators made progress in analyzing anthrax powder recovered from letters addressed to two U.S. senators, according to the report.
Besides the five deaths, 17 people were sickened by anthrax that was mailed to lawmakers on Capitol Hill and members of the news media in New York and Florida just weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The victims included postal workers and others who came into contact with the anthrax.
Talula Does The Hula From Hawaii
A New Zealand judge has removed custody of a nine year old girl from her parents so that her name — Talula Does The Hula From Hawaii — can be changed. A few others that got flagged:
Registration officials blocked some names, including Fish and Chips, Yeah Detroit, Keenan Got Lucy and Sex Fruit, he said. But others were allowed, including Number 16 Bus Shelter “and tragically, Violence,” he said.
penal code
Calvin Morrett, the young man in this video, has been ordered to write a letter of apology to the city of Saratoga Springs and pay to have it published in local newspapers.
Too Weird for The Wire
In Baltimore, inner city drug dealers are using white supremacist legal theories in an attempt to undermine cases against them.
“I am not a defendant,” Mitchell declared. “I do not have attorneys.” The court “lacks territorial jurisdiction over me,” he argued, to the amazement of his lawyers. To support these contentions, he cited decades-old acts of Congress involving the abandonment of the gold standard and the creation of the Federal Reserve. Judge Davis, a Baltimore-born African American in his late fifties, tried to interrupt. “I object,” Mitchell repeated robotically. Shelly Martin and Shelton Harris followed Mitchell to the microphone, giving the same speech verbatim. Their attorneys tried to intervene, but when Harris’s lawyer leaned over to speak to him, Harris shoved him away.
The precedents the West Baltimore drug dealers were invoking were based in the laws southern Democrats after the Civil War used to limit the protection of black southerners from violence and discrimination and that marked the beginning of Jim Crow.
Judge Davis and his law clerk pored over the case files, which led them to a series of strange Web sites. The flesh-and-blood defense, they discovered, came from a place far from Baltimore, from people as different from Willie Mitchell as people could possibly be. Its antecedents stretched back decades, involving religious zealots, gun nuts, tax protesters, and violent separatists driven by theories that had fueled delusions of Aryan supremacy and race war in gun-loaded compounds in the wilds of Montana and Idaho. Although Mitchell and his peers didn’t know it, they were inheriting the intellectual legacy of white supremacists who believe that America was irrevocably broken when the 14th Amendment provided equal rights to former slaves. It was the ideology that inspired the Oklahoma City bombing, the biggest act of domestic terrorism in the nation’s history, and now, a decade later, it had somehow sprouted in the crime-ridden ghettos of Baltimore.
The evolution of this defense culminated in a series of self-help seminars for white farmers in the 1980s.
Hucksters and charlatans prowled the Midwest as the farm crisis deepened, selling desperate farmers expensive seminars and prepackaged legal defenses “guaranteed” to cancel debts and forestall foreclosure. Since the gold standard had been abandoned in 1933, they argued, money had no inherent value, and so neither did their debts. All they had to do, farmers were told, was opt out of the system by sending a letter to the appropriate authorities renouncing their driver’s license, birth certificate, and social security number. That number was allegedly tied to a secret government account held in a secure subterranean facility in lower Manhattan, where citizens are used as collateral against international debts issued by the Fed and everyone’s name is on a master list, spelled in capital letters—the very same capital letters used in the official court documents detailing foreclosure and other actions against them. The capital letter name was nothing but an artificial construct, they were told, a legal “straw man.” It wasn’t them—natural, live, flesh and blood men.
A PCP dealer locked up for twenty seven years brought these arguments to inner city drug defendants.
In Baltimore, Burpee found a group of inmates at the margins of society, people like Willie Mitchell and company who were staring at the full force of the federal government. As one defense attorney representing a flesh-and-blood defendant put it, they “saw a freight train coming and felt three feet tall.” Soon the unorthodox legal filings and courtroom outbursts began to multiply. It was, one public defender later explained, “like an infection that was invading our client population of pre-trial detainees.” Burpee appears to have been patient zero in the epidemic. For over a year, he harangued his lawyers and judge about the conspiracy and spread the word in the Baltimore lockup. Then, in a stroke of bad luck for the public defender’s office, the U.S. Attorney’s office decided to drop the charges against Burpee—perhaps reasoning that he wasn’t worth the hassle considering that he had already been sentenced to twenty-seven years. For Burpee’s peers, the decision imbued the flesh-and-blood defense with legitimacy and the hope of freedom.
So, the use of the defense ended 180 degrees from where it began.
Like the Midwestern farmers before them, the Baltimore inmates were susceptible to the notion that the federal government was engaged in a massive, historic plot to deprive them of life, liberty, and property. Such suspicions are prevalent in certain pockets of the black community—that year, a study from the Rand Corporation found that over 25 percent of African Americans surveyed believed the AIDS virus was developed by the government, and 12 percent thought it was released into the population by the CIA. And black separatist groups like the Nation of Islam—also fond of conspiracy theories—have long cultivated members through the prison system; some of these groups have explicitly adopted the language of constitutional fundamentalists. Given these developments, Levitas told me, “I’m surprised this didn’t happen sooner.”
[Removed.]
Thank you for your thoughts about Bruce. We have lost an amazing artist . . . . Bruce was firmly opposed to display of his films on-line, and on his behalf as an attorney I made numerous requests for removal. Now that Bruce has died, all copyrights are now held by Jean Conner (Bruce’s wife), and she has explicitly directed that I request and otherwise take action to have all on-line postings of Bruce Conner movies removed immediately.
Quite a number of links to Bruce Conner films were removed from Movie City Indie, and much as I respect honoring artistic integrity, I am sorry that those of you who do not know his oeuvre cannot whet your appetites online.
But take a look at this from Dennis Cooper.
Update. For now, at any rate, you can whet your appetities online.
Doctorow on Copyright Enforcement
It’s a bit snarky but it has some merit:
You see, the big copyright companies – record labels, broadcasters, film studios, software companies – are lobbying in the halls of power around the world (including Westminster) for a three strikes rule for copyright infringers. They want to oblige internet service providers (ISPs) to sever the broadband links of any customer who has been thrice accused of downloading infringing material, and to oblige web-hosting companies to terminate the accounts of anyone accused of sticking infringing material on a web server three times.
They’re not even proposing that this punishment should be reserved for convicted infringers. Proving infringement is slow and expensive – so much so that the Motion Picture Association of America just filed a brief with the US court considering the appeal of Jammie Thomas, a woman
sentenced to pay $222,000 in fines for downloading music, in which the trade association argued that they should never have to prove infringement to collect damages, since proof is so hard to come by.
Richard Prince and Copyright
Some thoughts on Richard Prince from Rob Haggart get to the core of our copyright discussion.
‘Lactivists’ and Lawmakers Push to Allow Public Nursing
In true Jonathan McNicol form, I am linking to an old, breast-related article I haven’t read for the sake of the subtitle above.
If he can do it, then so can I. So there.
google me this
A defense lawyer in an obscenity trial in Pensacola, Florida is using publicly accessible Google search data to prove community standards.
In the trial of a pornographic Web site operator, the defense plans to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for terms like “orgy” than for “apple pie” or “watermelon.” The publicly accessible data is vague in that it does not specify how many people are searching for the terms, just their relative popularity over time. But the defense lawyer, Lawrence Walters, is arguing that the evidence is sufficient to demonstrate that interest in the sexual subjects exceeds that of more mainstream topics — and that by extension, the sexual material distributed by his client is not outside the norm.
Looking to the Court to Give Them Balls
This is an interesting example of the way Congress has tacitly accepted the power of an administration it can and should confront:
Congress has never gone to court to demand the testimony of White House aides, and any ruling by Bates — even simply agreeing that he has the authority to issue a ruling — could alter the Capitol’s political system of given and take.
Normally, such disputes work themselves out. Either it becomes politically untenable for the White House to refuse congressional demands or Congress backs down. Congress also has the power of the purse. It can withhold money for White House projects, refuse to pay Department of Justice salaries or confirm the president’s nominations until the president cooperates.
And then there’s the ultimate option: If the House really feels wronged by the president, it can vote for impeachment. It takes the same simple majority that approved the contempt measure against Miers and Bolten.
Police Chase UFO
Police in Cardiff chased an unidentified flying object that almost hit their helicopter.
The police aircraft was hovering at 500ft and waiting clearance to land on June 7, when those on board spotted the other craft hurtling towards them from below.
It was reported that the aircraft closed in at great speed, aiming straight for the helicopter which swerved sharply.
The helicopter crew are said to have crossed the Bristol channel in pursuit of the UFO, but lost sight of it and had to turn back due to a fuel shortage.
lawyers, guns, and dudes
Efraim Diveroli, a 22-year old with a 300 million dollar US military weapons contract, has been arrested for trying to sell the Army prohibited Chinese weaponry.