POKEMON WORLD IS THE WORLD OF THE DEMONIC!!!!!

h/t: Danny Ledone

Any readers on active duty? Operation Mesoporntamia

I had a good friend who was serving in Iraq. The only thing he wanted in care packages was high quality pornography. He is back now, and I have piles and piles of porn, generously donated by my clients, to give away. This porn is earmarked for active duty service members who are deployed overseas in a place where you can’t get porn.

If you fit the bill, drop me a line and a care package will be sent your way.

The only restrictions are:

1. You must be active military
2. You must be deployed overseas somewhere in the Middle East, or headed there soon
3. You must agree to give the porn to your fellow soldiers when you are done with it. If not, you agree to give it to some locals when you are done with it, to help show them the superiority of our way of life

When you email, please make sure the subject line reads "Operation Mesoporntamia." Please specify if you want straight, gay, or tranny content. (we don't judge, nor will we keep records of who we send it to).

Well that figures

I was just chuckling at myself, for being such a moron that I bought into that HOPE crap. Just to see what was there, I navigated over to HOPE.com. I found a completely appropriate web page there, a pay per click page that was full of links to worthless crap about loan modifications, debt consolidation, foreclosures, and online schools.

hope.com

Fourth Circuit: You don’t have to choose between girls and booze

By Randazza & DeVoy

In this recently released opinion from the Fourth Circuit, Gentlemen’s Clubs have won an important victory in their ability to serve alcohol as well as T’n'A on premises.  The decision in Miller (Defendant-Appellant) v. Legend Night Club (Plaintiff-Appellee), Case No. 09-1540, released today, holds that a Maryland Statute that restricts the activities allowed at an alcohol-serving establishment is unconstitutionally overbroad.

Among the conduct prohibited by Maryland Code Article 2B, §§ 10-405(c) and (d) is allowing patrons to caress or fondle employees’ breasts and buttocks, permitting “any employee or person to wear or use any device or covering exposed to view, which simulates the breast, genitals, anus, pubic hair or any portion of it,” the “display of the pubic hair, anus, vulva or genitals,” and so forth.  Violation of any of these provisions results in an establishment having its alcohol license revoked. Md. Code Article 2B, § 10-405(b).  Prince George’s County was added to the list of counties to which these provisions would apply, effectively ending the adult club industry in that area, which is fortuitously close to Washington, D.C.

Plaintiffs originally sought a declaration that the statute was unconstitutional.  In April of 2009, the District of Maryland held that the statute was unconstitutionally overbroad, and could not readily be limited.  The court also found that the statute’s grandfathering provision, which allowed strip clubs to continue operating and serving alcohol so long as they had been doing so since 1981, violated the Equal Protection Clause.  As much as “cougarism” is the in thing these days, hopefully these longstanding establishments would have hired new talent throughout their existences.

At the appellate level, the Appellants argued that the statute was appropriate under the secondary effects doctrine.  Rather than seeking to curtail nudity and erotic entertainment, the Appellants claimed that they were concerned about the deleterious social effects associated with alcohol-fueled adult entertainment.  For those who aren’t First Amendment attorneys, this is the equivalent of facilely shrieking “think of the children” in the face of everything you dislike.

The Fourth Circuit subjected the relevant statute to intermediate scrutiny, requiring that the  Appellants show that the law materially advances a substantial or important interest by redressing past harms or avoiding future ones.  The Circuit panel’s analysis of this standard was driven by the fact that the Appellants could not provide any evidence of harmful secondary effects arising from alcohol served at gentlemen’s clubs in Prince George’s County.

While such restrictions are surprisingly common around the country, they generally apply specifically to strip clubs and similar institutions.  The statute at issue in Miller did not, and its prohibitions, broadly written, applied to every institution in the state that sold alcohol.  Consequently, a wide breadth of protected behavior would have been trapped within the statute’s ambit.  Simulated sex during dinner theater would result in the venue’s alcohol license being suspended.  Virtually any bar that allowed a bachelorette party in its doors would be put out of business by the statute, and the same would go double for bachelor’s parties.  While nobody seriously questions that these events are protected by the First Amendment, Maryland’s law would have stripped any venue permitting them to occur on their premises of their alcohol license.

Furthermore, the Appellants’ argument that the statute would only be applied to adult entertainment venues found no traction in the Fourth Circuit.  Not only was the statute silent on this issue, but Appellants presented no way to read the statute so it would apply only to those establishments.  The state’s brief history of only enforcing the statute against adult entertainment businesses was not sufficient to show the statute had a limited construction.

Because the financial remedy for the harm caused by enforcing this provision would not be adequate to compensate adult club owners, the Fourth Circuit held that the District Court properly entered a permanent injunction against the statute’s enforcement.  The Circuit wrote that: “Regarding the third requirement for injunctive relief, the threatened injury to Plaintiffs easily outweighs whatever burden the injunction may impose. At a minimum, each Plain- tiff faces a loss of its license coupled with a loss of valuable business opportunities.”  The imposition of this injunction imposed no burden on the state of Maryland and furthered the public interest of protecting constitutional rights, even at the expense of crybabies.

Maryland could amend its statutes to circumvent this decision.  Because it already declined to do so in 2007 when the case was originally pending, though, it seems unlikely to do so again.  As a result, the alcohol distribution rights of adult entertainment venues in Maryland are safe for now.  One cannot doubt, however, that some Palinite will agitate against this constitutional protection in the near future.

Stuff you can’t do

If you’re a cop, you can’t pretend to be an inmate’s lawyer so that you can gather confidential information from the inmate to use against him in his prosecution. (source)

If you’re a lawyer and you omit portions of a quote from a court opinion, you can’t do it without using ellipses to show that you’ve omitted something. This is especially true when you take out words that hurt your case and leave in the ones that help it. (source)

You can’t run on that “HOPE” and “CHANGE” platform and then do MORE OF THE SAME CRAP. Well, you can, but you don’t get my vote in 2012. (source)

You can’t use the word “faggot,” even if you’re really in favor of gay rights, and you’re using the term to make a completely valid and strong gay-rights point. (source).

You can’t (for now) just run around in the woods in New Hampshire, dressed as bigfoot, to scare hikers and film their reactions — at least not without paying for a permit and getting insurance coverage. (source) The ACLU is challenging the requirements. Given the 603′s friendly attitude toward free speech, Bigfoot may once again roam free on Mount Manadnock.

No matter how shitty you might think Firefox is, you can’t tell Firefox that you think their shitty browser is shitty. (source)

Civil Procedure Fun!

For those of you who are not lawyers, you can play too.

A plaintiff files a defamation lawsuit. The plaintiff lives in California. The defendant lives in California too — in fact, just a few miles from the plaintiff. Where do you file the suit?

A) California
B) California, because you are not an imbecile
C) California, because you are not an imbecile, and you have ethics
D) Virginia

If you answered D, you are “Internet defamation lawyer” Domingo J. Rivera!!!! (Or a reasonable facsimile).

Okay, so what am I talking about?

Public Citizen reports:

Usha Rajagopal, a San Francisco cosmetic surgeon, has tried to use cosmetic surgery of a legal sort to improve the appearance of her online reviews. She is under discipline by the California Medical Board because of the sloppy administration of anesthesia that put one of her patients in a vegetative state. She was also the subject of a devastating article in the San Francisco Weekly which explained that glowing reviews that helped give Rajagopal a favorable ranking on Google search for plastic surgeons in San Francisco, with five stars suggesting that her patients love her, are the product of her having hired a firm that wrote phony reviews.

Not satisfied by adding favorable reviews, Dr. Rajagopal is apparently intent on extirpating negative reviews as well. After several members of the public placed comments on Google maps about her situation, Rajagopal sued the commenters as Doe defendants, alleging defamation, in an apparent effort to remove the negative comments from her public profile. (source)

Public Citizen filed a motion to quash Rajagopal’s attempt to unmask her anonymous critics.  Here’s the Complaint in the case.

This is why I give money to Public Citizen, and you should too.

Nice article about Judge Roll

I did not know Judge Roll, (the judge who died in the attack on Gabrielle Giffords) but he was the judge who swore me in to the D. Ariz. The few minutes I spent in front of him were memorable, and actually hilarious.

There is a nice article about him in this month’s Arizona Attorney.

Probable cause = black guy with a $50 bill

Suspicious!

The Flori-duh Department of Transportation has apparently been “illegally detaining” motorists who pay with large bills. The video at this link shows that tollbooth operators recorded the personal information about the people who used $20, $50, or $100 bills along with what made them so suspicious in the first place. Y’know, like being a young black male. (source)

Intellectual Property in Farm Operations?

No taking pictures of our farms... we got that there int'llecuel propartah right!

This just in from the “could Flori-duh get any dumber” department.

SB 1246 by Sen. Jim Norman, R-Tampa, would make it a first-degree felony to photograph a farm without first obtaining written permission from the owner. A farm is defined as any land “cultivated for the purpose of agricultural production, the raising and breeding of domestic animals or the storage of a commodity.” (source)

It seems that the motivation for the bill is because PETA engages in undercover filming operations to expose animal abuse on farms. Of course, instead of targeting that behavior, the bill just sweeps all farm photography into one pile.

Judy Dalglish, executive director for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said shooting property from a roadside or from the air is legal. The bill “is just flat-out unconstitutional not to mention stupid,” she said. (source

Unconstitutional and stupid. Just another day in the Flori-duh legislature, Ms. Dalglish.

EDIT: A reader has this post on the issue. Very nicely done.

Smokers, cut your bitching. Nannies, you do the same.

Lung Cancer distribution rates in the United States. Funny, it looks like KKK membership rates distribution.

If there is one group of people that I don’t want to hear whining, it is the cigarette smoker. Imagine any other habit being half as obnoxious, and yet tolerated. Otherwise clean people smell like they slept in a dumpster (sorry guys, you do). They expel carcinogenic chemicals that you couldn’t even bury in a toxic waste dump without a visit from the feds. Meanwhile, those of us who elect to avoid this pollution are accused of infringing upon smokers’ “freedom” when we demand that they engage in their dirty habit somewhere that it doesn’t affect us.

I am not prudish about the consumption of poison. I think that people should be allowed to consume liquor anywhere they please — in the park, on the street, in a hot air balloon, or even while driving — as long as they are not truly impaired. I wouldn’t care if a guy sat next to me on a public park bench and began shooting heroin into his arm — as long as he took proper precautions to keep from getting blood on me, and he took his needle with him when he left and disposed of it properly. If you want to snort cocaine off a hooker’s ass on the sidewalk, as long as you don’t block the sidewalk, I’m all for it.

What do all those things have in common? Lots of people might find them objectionable, but they really don’t cause any physical discomfort to anyone else. They don’t hurt anyone but the consumer. I think that it is improper for the state to restrict the freedom to do anything that “neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” But when it does either, then that is a proper place for the state to act. This is in sharp contrast to ciggy smoke, which does, in fact, harm people who have chosen not to partake.

We all have a right to a little roving zone of personal autonomy — that zone should be large when we are on our own private property. Therefore, if I commit an act inside my house, and the effects do not break beyond the walls surrounding me, then the state should have no right to interfere. (The state does not agree. See Gonzales v. Raich (previously Ashcroft v. Raich), 545 U.S. 1 (2005). In that case, the U.S. Supreme Court bizarrely held that if a man grows marijuana in his own living room, and smokes it in his own kitchen, he is somehow interfering with interstate commerce sufficiently that the federal government should have a right to restrict his conduct. But, this piece is not about the law as it is, but as I think it should be.)

Once I step out onto the street, my zone of autonomy ebbs and flows depending on my surroundings. If I am in the middle of the desert, and the nearest person is 1 mile away, then my zone of autonomy ought to be pretty wide. I should be able to scream and shout at the top of my lungs, as my crazy behavior will not graze the ears of another. I can, however, accept that doing so in the middle of a crowded sidewalk would be properly punished as “disturbing the peace.” On a lonely sidewalk, if I want to swing my arms around wildly, that ought to be my right, but as soon as I enter a crowd and my hands start slapping faces, I’ve gone beyond my personal autonomy zone, and entered my fellow citizens’ zones. At that point, I’ve broken the law, and the law is no ignoramus for saying so.

You should have every right to do this to yourself. You shouldn't have a goddamned right to do it to me.

So lets talk about cigarette smoke specifically, as nothing is truly analogous. Cigarette smoke contains chemicals that, if you buried them in the ground or discharged them into the air via any other means, you would go to prison. As far as the unpleasant nature of the stuff, most non-smokers would rather tolerate the smell of dog shit. However, if I carried a pail of dog shit with me into a public park, I would likely be shunned if not charged with some appropriate misdemeanor.

Here in San Diego, the lack of cigarette smoke is absolute bliss. You can go into any bar, any nightclub, on to any beach, into any park, and you will not be assaulted by the stench or the poison carried by cigarette smoke. You can sit down on the beach, and you can know with absolute certainty that no asshole will sit right next to you and start belching chemicals and stench into your zone of personal autonomy. New York is seeking to do the same, but the NYT editorial board seems to think that this goes too far — calling it “prohibition.”

Someone at the New York Times needs a new dictionary.

Nothing in the proposed legislation says that people can’t smoke. It simply requires that if they do so, they do so within their zone of personal autonomy, and remain outside of their neighbors’ zones. To define this as “prohibition,” you would have to change the definition of prohibition. If the 18th Amendment said that Americans could not consume alcohol while spitting a portion of it on other people, well then the prohibition analogy would be sustained — and we never would have had the 21st Amendment.

This all said, I am not hostile to the consumption of tobacco, nor to the individual choice to consume it. I think that smokers should have an absolute right to smoke in their homes, so long as they can keep the smoke from penetrating the homes of others. There have been cases where apartment and condo dwellers have gone to legal loggerheads with their neighbors over the stuff, and in those, I side with the neighbor of the smoker. If I can smell your ass or your cigarettes through my wall, you deserve to have your ass kicked.

On the other hand, there is a growing movement to restrict smoking in cars with children inside. Emotionally, I understand the point of the legislation — powerless children should not be subjected to the harm visited upon them by second hand smoke spewed out by an adult in the car. I think this goes too far. Yes, I feel badly for the children. However, 99% of the time, this will be harm visited upon them by their parents. Parents should have a right to raise their children as they see fit — even if that means giving them cancer or emphysema. I recognize that this is a debatable point — that perhaps the children should have a right to health protected by the state. After all, you can’t starve your kids to death, nor can you put tequila in their sippy cups at home. So, why should you be allowed to close them in a hermetically sealed bubble and then fill their little lungs with arsenic, nicotine, and whatever else shit is in ciggy smoke? I say that they’re your kids. Turn them to shit if you want to. If you’re too much of an imbecile to wait to smoke until your kids are out of your car, then perhaps it would be better if your kids die young, before they spawn the next generation of imbeciles.

A recent article in the New York Times, which seems to have hired a new pro-smoking editor, brings us the story of people who are avoiding the high cost of cigarette taxes by growing their own tobacco..

“It’ll make the antismokers apoplectic,” said Ms. Silk. “They’re using the power of taxation to coerce behavior. That’s not what taxation is supposed to be for.”

“We fear that the antismokers are so hysterical that if they start finding that people are doing this, they would craft a law to make it illegal,” Ms. Silk said. “I’m waiting for the black helicopters to start flying over my yard.” (source)

In that fight, I side with the smokers / home tobacco farmers. I’m not a fan of raising the taxes on cigarettes to try and reduce smoking rates. I don’t mind taxing the hell out of them and applying the tax to health care costs in some way, but to influence smokers to give up their habit isn’t a proper use of the power to tax. I’m even more on Ms. Silk’s side when it comes to growing and smoking her own tobacco. As I mentioned above, the feds think it is a proper use of the commerce clause to regulate whether someone grows marijuana in their own home and smokes it there, with the buds never leaving their own private property. Therefore, I’m certain that the government will eventually make life a pain in the ass for home tobacco famers. That, I find intolerable.

The nanny state really rears its ugly head when it comes to the new fashion — banning electronic cigarettes. These are a god-send for smokers and non-smokers alike. As much as I personally despise tobacco smoke, I have had happy dinners sitting right next to friends who were puffing away on their blue-tipped smokeless cigarettes. No carcinogens came my way. No smell came my way. Just the barely perceptible puff of water vapor and the pleasant blue hue from the tip of the device. Despite their inoffensiveness and harmlessness to others, legislative bodies are now trying to add these to the list of naughty sins committed by nicotine addicts. King County, Washington and the New Jersey state assembly have both classified these devices right alongside the real McCoy. This is total, and un-debatable nannyism in its darkest form. (Of course, when a place like Richmond, Kentucky moves to ban them, I suspect tobacco money in the mix).

The solution to the problem is easy: Sit down and draw yourself, top view. You can just make a circle. Then, draw a line around the radius that your conduct will affect. If you’re smoking a cigarette, that line will likely be an oblong oval about 5 feet in one direction, and drifting downwind about 50 feet. You don’t get to own that. That belongs to your fellow citizens. If you’re a smoker, piss off if you want to smear your gaseous crap in my personal autonomy zone.

On the other hand, if you’re a legislator, do the same exercise. Draw yourself. Now show me how the smoker’s conduct affects you or your fellow citizens. If they are smoking in their home or their car, it does not. If they are smoking an electronic cigarette, it affects nobody but themselves. If that is the case, you have no place regulating their conduct.

Now everyone quit their whining. Smokers, you are not an oppressed minority. And government has no business telling anyone what they can and can’t do to their bodies within their personal zone of autonomy.

Scumbags Welcome!

One of the clergy members that I have always admired was an old Italian priest I knew years ago. His congregation was limited to a maximum security prison — including death row. He explained to me that ministering to the condemned was the most rewarding assignment he had ever received. He then explained a story from christian mythology to me that he found at Mark 2:17, In that passage, Jesus is eating and drinking with some real sleazeballs, and the “good people” take issue with him for it.

And Jesus, hearing it, said to them, Those who are well have no need of a medical man, but those who are ill: I have come not to get the upright but sinners.

A church in Lake County, Flori-duh seems to put this piece of mythology at the center of a recent outreach project. The church put up a billboard that stated “Scumbags Welcome.” Naturally, the “good people” of the 352 area code took issue with the church, called the city, and complained. Much to the City’s credit, it found that the church was well within its First Amendment rights. (source)

Shall we call it ‘Nikki’s Law’?

By J. DeVoy

Illinois Representative Tom Holbrook introduced a bill in the Illinois legislature that would severely curtail the ability of third parties to take photos of accident scenes. (Source.)  While the law would allow accident victims to take photos of their wrecked cars, Holbrook believes that citizen journalists often get in the way of emergency response personnel.  In the article, he weaves an incredible hypothetical about a citizen-journalist using a cell phone over a fireman’s shoulders while he’s using the jaws of life to save the innocent passengers.  After all, if you take photos of something that likely will be reported on the news anyway, grandma dies!  For the politically inclined, fear not: the “or the Terrorists win” meme is alive and well.

Except for “specified purposes” not identified in the article, the bill prohibits using wireless devices within 500 feet of an accident.  Five feet would be concerning, but might withstand judicial scrutiny.  Ten feet may also stand up to judicial review, though it is more unlikely to be upheld by a court with any concern for the First Amendment.  Five hundred feet, however, is ludicrous.  If this bill becomes law, the overbreadth doctrine will tear it a new asshole.

Whether intentional or not, this law seems like an orthogonal response to the Nikki Catsouras controversy, where her family used the dubious services of Reputation Defender-r-r-r to take down grisly photos of a high-speed accident she had in her father’s porsche. The Legal Satyricon previously discussed this issue in The Catsouras Photos, Privacy, and Privilege.

Unsurprisingly, the photos propagated around the internet, are still available (google it if you want them, we don’t post links to them), and the parents’ efforts (using the worthless services of “Reputation Defender”) to censor the free flow of information turned their daughter into an internet meme (Porsche Girl) and spread the photos far wider than they ever made it before.  Barbara Streisand can explain why.

Northwestern University: anti-sex whining trumps academic freedom

Last week, a human sexuality class at Northwestern University was followed by a non-mandatory demonstration. The professor warned everyone that it would be “explicit and graphic.” 467 of the 567 students in the class left. 100 stayed behind “to watch a sexual act involving a woman, a man and an electric-powered device.” (source)

Initially, Northwestern had a pair of academic balls.

As the incident gained notoriety in the Chicago media, Northwestern University initially supported Prof. Bailey.

“The university supports the efforts of its faculty to further the advancement of knowledge,” a Northwestern spokesman said earlier this week. “Northwestern University faculty members engage in teaching and research on a wide variety of topics, some of them controversial.” (source)

But, after an “outcry” by “a substantial number of people expressing concern and unhappiness,” the University changed its mind.

What I would like to know is how many of these “people” who were “expressing concern and unhappiness” were actually in the room? If any, they were forewarned. (So they should fuck off) or the were not in the room (and thus should fuck off). College kids can handle seeing a live sex act, especially when done in the context of a human sexuality class. Anyone who is scandalized by it should, in a painful manner, fuck off.

NO! NO!!!! NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

There may be a prequel (or a sequel) to Blade Runner. (source)

If anyone out there knows voodoo, please put a curse on anyone who touches this project.

H/T: Craig

Geriatric French Farmer Lightsaber Battle

All this video needs is an “I am a motherfucker” t-shirt.