Rep. Jackie Speiers has announced her intention to introduce a bill in Congress to criminalize revenge porn, as predicted. Via US News & World Reports:

The war against “revenge porn” is about to enter Congress.

Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., is preparing to introduce legislation to criminalize the non-consensual online dissemination of lewd content by jilted lovers and hackers, her office confirms to U.S. News.

This is the big prize to the crusaders, as it accomplishes what state law cannot:

Most websites hosting revenge porn, however, cannot be forced to remove the content because Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act grants Internet companies legal immunity if third-party content doesn’t violate federal copyright or criminal law.
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A while back, I made a deal with Gerry Spence’s Trial Lawyers College. In exchange for my plugging his upcoming world tour, I would get his cowboy hat and buckskin coat.  I never thought they would go for it, but they did. So, I kept my word.

The hat came pretty quickly, but the venerable buckskin coat, well, not so much. It took a while, with alt headlines of “All Hat, No Cattle” and “Welching in Wyoming” (courtesy of TLC’s Scott Trimble, who has a gift for headlines) spinning in my head. But then, coat finally arrived.

Remember Jon Voight as Joe Buck in Midnight Cowboy, the only x-rated movie to win the Academy Award for Best Picture?

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I don’t get to watch it, because Dr. SJ has an issue with premium cable. She thinks we send Jimmy Dolan too much money already, and won’t send him a dime more than necessary. She’s very tough about things like that.  But I did see a video of it the other day, and it involved one guy having a sword fight with another guy, who he killed.

To put it mildly, the guy who was killed lost the sword fight. With extreme prejudice.

For all those who are fans of the show, take a memo: sometimes, you lose.  Most of the time, you get to fight another day, unless you lost with extreme prejudice. Then, you don’t.  I thought about this after a late night phone call with Marco Randazza last night.  Continue reading →

When Milwaukee County Deputy Joseph Quiles t-boned the car, he knew there was going to be a problem.  So he did what he had to do, lie through his teeth, blame the victim and rely on the kindness of his brothers in blue to make sure someone’s butt was protected. That butt was his.

Tanya Weyker was hurt so badly, she couldn’t blow into a breath-testing device or perform field sobriety tests.  But a Sheriff’s deputy arrested her for drunk driving anyway.  And the County hung those charges over her head for nearly a year, even long after blood tests proved she was perfectly sober.

Five months later, it was absolutely certain that she was stone sober.  Weyker made a rookie mistake when first asked what happened. She told the truth. Continue reading →

One of the smartest and funniest guys I know is a Catholic priest. This is a never ending source of jokes, which he takes with aplomb, because he knows that I don’t share his enthusiasm for Jesus, pomp and circumstance and trappings. I insist he’d be Buddhist except that black is slimming.

But why does his tribe get to invoke the name of his God before petty officials meet to decide mundane issues of state town?  Tradition.  The Supremes, in what is aptly described as a deeply fractured decision, upheld the tradition of the Town of Greece, New York, in having a clergy-guy give a ceremonial invocation before their monthly meetings.

It’s not that they’re Christian-centric, they say, but there aren’t any other churches in the phone book, and so they end up with a prayer like this:

“Lord, God of all creation, we give you thanks and praise for your presence and action in the world. We look with anticipation to the celebration of Holy Week and Easter. It is in the solemn events of next week that we find the very heart and center of our Christian faith. We acknowledge the saving sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross. We draw strength, vitality, and confidence from his resurrection at Easter. . . . We pray for peace in the world, an end to terrorism,violence, conflict, and war. We pray for stability, democracy, and good government in those countries in which our armed forces are now serving, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan. . . . Praise and glory be yours, O Lord, now and forever more. Amen.”

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Marketing guru Seth Godin offers an unpleasant truth.  What makes it unpleasant is that it blows one of the most common excuses out of the water.

“I didn’t have time”

This actually means, “it wasn’t important enough.” It wasn’t a high priority, fun, distracting, profitable or urgent enough to make it to the top of the list.

One of the questions/assumptions posed or imposed here is how it’s possible to write this blawg without it being all-consuming.  Having been over this ground too many times already, I won’t bore you with the details, but the relevant piece is that I choose to make the time to write.  Sure, I could use the time to post kitteh pics to instagram instead, but I don’t. I wake up every morning, look at a screen, and my fingers just start twitching. It’s what I do.

Every few days, Twitter and Facebook soak up a billion hours of ‘spare’ time. Where did that time come from? What did we do before social media was here? Weren’t we busy five years ago?

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Sharing is caring, which is why the government loves it so dearly.  The third party doctrine holds that when a person “shares” information, data, writings with a third party, there is no longer an expectation of privacy such that it is protected by the Fourth Amendment and a search warrant is required for the government to search and seize it.  And the most interesting man on the TSA security line, Stewart Baker, explains why this is right and just.

The theory of Smith [v. Maryland] is that I have a reduced privacy expectation in things I’ve shared with others. Life teaches us the same lesson.

When you hit “save,” are you “sharing” with the cloud?  Is it your way of telling Google employees that you’re fine with them to read your emails, that you’re part of a big happy family that has no secrets? Continue reading →

This came in a while back, and I had forgotten about it until now.  But a post by Judge Kopf reminded me of a telephone etiquette issue that has long bothered me, which in turn made me think of monumental telephone gaffes.  Gary Ostrow, who doesn’t really like me for having pointed out that he has issues, is one such gaffe.

This gives rise to a few modern day telephone rules:

1.  There is this technological marvel called “caller ID.”  When you call, the person you are calling can see who it is (or see that you’ve concealed your identity), and decide whether to answer or not. If a receptionist sits between the telephone and the person to whom the call is directed, caller ID makes it remarkably easy to yell out, “let it go to voicemail.” It’s like magic. Continue reading →

It’s spreading.  From Judge Jed Rakoff in the Southern District of New York to Judge John Kane in the District of Colorado.

The Proposed Final Judgment as to Van Gilder contains provisions and recitations that I will not endorse, namely: (1) a waiver of findings of fact and conclusions of law that is directly contrary to F.R.Civ.P. 52; (2) a waiver of the right to appeal, the acceptance of which is indisputably a matter of judicial discretion and for which no reasons are given to support the exercise of that discretion; (3) a statement that Van Gilder neither admits nor denies the allegations of the Complaint without providing any basis therefor; and (4) a permanent injunction prohibiting future violations of existing statutory law.

Rulings like this please neither party, both of whom enjoy the fruits of their agreement while avoiding certain issues they would rather not address.  The government gets to claim a “win” without proving any wrongdoing in fact occurred and collect its blood money, while the defendant gets to similarly claim a “win” by not being compelled to admit any wrongdoing and buys its way out of a tight spot. Continue reading →

In an op-ed that reaches into a universe too distant for even the New York Times, Alfie Cohen attempts to revitalize the “everybody gets a trophy” sense of entitlement that gives rise to exaggerated self-esteem of youth.  Yes, the Slackoisie have a new champion.

But seriously, has any child who received a trinket after losing a contest walked away believing that he (or his team) won — or that achievement doesn’t matter? Giving trophies to all the kids is a well-meaning and mostly innocuous attempt to appreciate everyone’s effort.

Even so, I’m not really making a case for doing so, since it distracts us from rethinking competition itself and the belief that people can succeed only if others fail.

Rather, my intent is to probe the underlying cluster of mostly undefended beliefs about what life is like (awful), what teaches resilience (experiences with failure), what motivates people to excel (rewards) and what produces excellence (competition).

Between the use of bizarrely loaded language, obvious strawman arguments and low-rent logical fallacies, Cohen posits that society has returned to the bad old days of meritocracy. Continue reading →