I realize I’m going to sound about twice my age when I write this, but this performance is far sexier than 90 percent of the scantily-clad booty-shaking crap on MTV. (When MTV is actually playing music, I mean.) Not that I’m opposed to scantily-clad booty-shaking.
Just saying. There’s something to be said for the understated.
Last night, my article from April of last year on Michael West, Steven Hayne, and the Jimmie Duncan case won a 2010 Maggie Award for best news story.
You can read the article here.
I’m not really sure what’s going on in either of these videos, but both of them made me laugh. And I figure y’all could use a little levity after yesterday’s went-crazy-viral puppycide post.
The latest round of commie spooning from a dimwitted international bureaucrat:
North Korea’s health system would be the envy of many developing countries because of the abundance of medical staff that it has available, the head of the World Health Organization said on Friday.
WHO Director-General Margaret Chan, speaking a day after returning from a 2-1/2 day visit to the reclusive country, said malnutrition was a problem in North Korea but she had not seen any obvious signs of it in the capital Pyongyang.
North Korea — which does not allow its citizens to leave the country — has no shortage of doctors and nurses, in contrast to other developing countries where skilledhealthcare workers often emigrate, she said.
This allows North Korea to provide comprehensive healthcare, with one “household doctor” looking after every 130 families, said the head of the United Nations health agency, praising North Korea’s immunization coverage and mother and child care.
“They have something which most other developing countries would envy,” Chan told a news conference, noting that her visit was a rare sign of the communist state’s willingness to cooperate with outside agencies.
The three-year North Korean famine that killed about 3 million people in the 1990s gets all of a four-word mention in the Reuters write-up of Chan’s remarks. But, you know, massive-famine-that-killed-12-percent-of-the-population aside, Chan notes, North Korea has none of that filthy excess we see in countries whose citizens aren’t considered the property of the state:
Chan spent most of her brief visit in Pyongyang, and she said that from what she had seen there most people had the same height and weight as Asians in other countries, while there were no signs of the obesity emerging in some parts of Asia.
But she said conditions could be different in the countryside.
Well thank goodness North Koreans aren’t getting fat. Good to know the WHO has its priorities in order.
In other news about clueless international organizations, the latest member of the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women will be . . . Iran. You may remember Iran from such hits as “7 Iranianan Women Face Stoning Death for Adultery,” “Iranian Authorities Continue to Harass Activists Working for Women’s Rights,” and last summer’s #1 YouTube smash, “The Murder of Neda Agha-Soltan.”
From Saturday’s Kentucky Derby.
In February, I wrote the following about a drug raid in Missouri:
SWAT team breaks into home, fires seven rounds at family’s pit bull and corgi (?!) as a seven-year-old looks on.
They found a “small amount” of marijuana, enough for a misdemeanor charge. The parents were then charged with child endangerment.
So smoking pot = “child endangerment.” Storming a home with guns, then firing bullets into the family pets as a child looks on = necessary police procedures to ensure everyone’s safety.
Just so we’re clear.
Now there’s video, which you can watch below. It’s horrifying, but I’d urge you to watch it, and to send it to the drug warriors in your life. This is the blunt-end result of all the war imagery and militaristic rhetoric politicians have been spewing for the last 30 years—cops dressed like soldiers, barreling through the front door middle of the night, slaughtering the family pets, filling the house with bullets in the presence of children, then having the audacity to charge the parents with endangering their own kid. There are 100-150 of these raids every day in America, the vast, vast majority like this one, to serve a warrant for a consensual crime.
But Jonathan Whitworth won’t be smoking that pot they found in his possession. So I guess this mission was a success.
I’ve exchanged emails with the mother of the family, who was in the home at the time of the raid. I’m waiting on her permission to publish her account of what happened.
So if we had been governed by the wisdom of one Joe Lieberman over the last 15 years, Richard Jewell and Steven Hatfill—both innocent and both U.S. citizens accused of terrorism-related crimes—may well have been stripped of their citizenship, treated as enemy combatants, and left to rot on some Navy ship off the coast of South Carolina.
And let’s not forget all of those other stories we’ve read in the last few years about pranksters getting cited for “terroristic” crimes. Just dispense with their trials, already. Lock ‘em up. Hey, while we’re at it, let’s go ahead and add drug crimes to the list of accusations that will strip you of your citizenship. After all, Ronald Regan’s 1984 declaration that illicit drugs are a “threat to national security” has never really been revoked, and the ONDCP regularly informs us that pot smokers are supporting terrorism.
Lieberman’s ready to dispense with the Bill of Rights over a flubbed attack that didn’t take a single life.
So let’s dispense with the niceties, here. Joe Lieberman is a coward.
“Carrying his luggage.” Is that what the kids are calling it these days?
I think we’ve reached the point where the most accurate form of gaydar may be the nastiness of the invective one spews at homosexuals.
Oklahoma state Rep. Randy Terrill wants to adopt Arizona’s immigration bill in the Sooner State, only with added asset forfeiture provisions.
Because what’s the point of passing a new law if you can’t also take away people’s stuff?
Even creepier is that I’m sure a number of Pennsylvania state bureaucrats had to sign off on this video.
At Saturday’s Kentucky Derby.
Here’s the clip of Scott Bullock and I discussing asset forfeiture on John Stossel’s show last week.
The Crime and Federalism blog reports on the case of Carlos Alfredo Simon-Timmerman, a New Yorker who was stopped in Puerto Rico last year on his way back from a vacation in Venezuela. Simon-Timmerman was stopped by U.S. Customs agents, who found a pornographic video in his bag entitled Little Lupe the Innocent; Don’t Be Fooled By Her Baby Face. The movie featured Lupe Fuentes, a porn actress who, as the movie title suggests, is a 23-year-old with a more youthful appearance.
Fuentes is currently under contract with a U.S. porn production company, and has made movies for other U.S. companies in the past. Those companies are required by federal law to keep records showing that all participants in their adult films are of legal age. That means Assistant U.S. Attorney Jenifer Yois Hernandez-Vega could have verified Fuentes’ age with as little effort as a Google search and a phone call. (Hell, she probably could have just consulted one of the porn experts at the Securities and Exchange Commission.)
Instead, the prosecutor pushed ahead with child pornography charges against Simon-Timmerman, even after the man’s attorney was able to show that Fuentes had appeared in movies produced in the U.S., as well as other documentation that Fuentes was of legal age at the time the movie was made.
Hernandez-Vega still didn’t buy it. Her evidence that Fuentes was a minor was apparently so strong that she not only apparently felt she didn’t need to take 15 minutes to look up the proof of Fuentes’ age on file with the federal government, she could also dismiss the evidence produced by Simon-Timmerman’s attorney that his client hadn’t broken any law—all while keeping Simon-Timmerman locked up for months.
And what was that evidence? “Expert” testimony. At trial, Hernandez-Vega called Alek Pacheco, A U.S. Customs agent and self-described expert in child pornography who concluded (presumably after viewing the video several times) that Fuentes was “13 or 14″ years of age.
The state also called a Dr. Pedro R. Jaunarena who, according to court documents (PDF) filed by Hernandez-Vega…
…will explain from viewing the images in question the bodily features he considers in making his determination, such as the face of the minor, the breast area, the genital area to include the existence or non-existence of pubic hair, the height of the minor, among other factors to be considered to establish the approximate age range of the minor depicted and to establish that the relevant images depict minors under the age of eighteen.
Simon-Timmerman’s attorney was even able to get Fuentes to confirm her age over the phone. That still wasn’t enough for the prosecutor.
Little Lupe herself would have to fly to Puerto Rico, show her passport to the prosecutor, and testify under oath that she was really, really not 13 years old.
“My fans mean everything to me, ” Fuentes told Asylum via her publicist. “It was important to me to make the trip to Puerto Rico to show support to someone who did no wrong.”
That was last month. After Fuentes’ appearance, Simon-Timmerman was finally released, and the charges against him were dropped. It took the graciousness of a porn star to keep Simon-Timmerman from going to prison.
If this case follows other clear-cut prosecutorial abuse cases, Hernandez-Vega will suffer little if any penalty or sanction for her stunning incompetence, which caused the arrest and months-long incarceration of an innocent man. And Jaunarena and Pacheco will continue testifying as experts in federal courtrooms, despite the fact that their expertise in this case was off by by about five years.
(Thanks to Jonathan Pratt for the tip.)
I had planned on looking for an apartment in Nashville today. Looks like that won’t be happening. Hope any of you reading from my soon-to-be new home city are able to stay safe. And dry.
From Saturday’s Kentucky Derby.
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