aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Monday, April 16, 2007
In memory of the VA Tech victims
in memory of the victims of the va tech shooting
Originally uploaded by Joits.
Coach calls Confederate flag embarrassing
The State, South Carolina’s largest newspaper, reports:
Steve Spurrier does not want to be a politician.
But the USC football coach believes the state would be a better place to live if the Confederate battle flag were removed from the State House grounds.
Spurrier brought up the flag issue Friday while accepting a leadership award from City Year at the service group’s Ripples of Hope banquet at the Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center. Spurrier said Saturday that he believed he was in an appropriate setting to voice his opinion.
“It would make us a more progressive, better state, I think, if the flag was removed. But I’m not going to go on any big campaign to have it removed. That’s not my position,” Spurrier said in an interview with The State. “But if anyone were to ask me, that would certainly be my position. And I think everyone in there, it was their position, too.”
Spurrier said it was “embarrassing” last year when someone waved a Confederate battle flag behind the set of ESPN’s “GameDay” before the Gamecocks’ home game against Tennessee.
“Some clown or some dude was waving that big ol’ Confederate flag right behind them about the whole time they were on,” Spurrier said. [...]
Other South Carolina college football and basketball coaches, including Clemson’s Tommy Bowden and Larry Shyatt and USC’s Lou Holtz and Eddie Fogler, also have spoken out against the flag at various times, according to The Associated Press.
And still:
[Don] Gordon, a state officer with the Sons of Confederate Veterans, said Spurrier’s call for the removal of the flag was “the moral equivalent of calling our ancestors ‘nappy-headed hos.’”
I’m speechless.
Via Digby.
AJC to Georgia AG: Break legal ranks to right a wrong
With a penchant for hovering below the radar, Georgia Attorney General Thurbert Baker is no Eliot Spitzer, the ex-top lawman in New York whose high-profile tenure won him the governorship of that state last year.
The question for supporters of Genarlow Wilson is whether Baker is a Roy Cooper, the North Carolina attorney general who threw out the charges last week against the three former Duke University lacrosse players accused of sexually assaulting a stripper at a party.
“There were many points in the case where caution would have served justice better than bravado,” said Cooper, explaining why he took the rare action of overruling a district attorney. “This case shows the enormous consequences of overreaching by a prosecutor.”
There was also prosecutorial overreach in Wilson’s case, and Baker would serve the cause of justice if he agreed that the courts should revisit the case. [...]
The issue here isn’t whether Wilson did something wrong. He did. The partying and the sex act - caught on video camera - aren’t behaviors that anyone should applaud or excuse. But the sentence outstrips the crime, especially considering the quirk in Georgia law that punished oral sex more severely than intercourse. Typically, elected attorneys general support district attorneys in such legal challenges. But as Cooper demonstrated, loyalty to legal brethren should not outweigh justice.
Lorne loves YouTube
The NY Observer says Lorne longs for YouTube:
“YouTube has been great for us,” [creator and executive producer of Saturday Night Live Lorne] Michaels reiterated.
Perhaps no other network show has gotten more out of the free video-sharing Web site than Saturday Night Live. Indeed, at the very moment the long-running program seems to be emerging from a years-long slump, producing sketches-not just lip-synch bloopers-that people actually want to share, discuss, and watch again and again, YouTube has been there, doing more to re-establish the show’s cultural relevance than any honcho at NBC.
So what does he have to say about the new News Corp/NBC Universal web venture promised for this summer?
“I think it should be clear, I don’t quite understand what NBC is doing with Fox,” said Mr. Michaels. “It sounds-” Mr. Michaels paused. “Cool. But it all seems like it’s still shaking out.”
The article goes on to point out that as the political season heats up, SNL stands to miss what might otherwise be a big boost from its political sketches spreading virally on the net. If its own YouTube channel is any indication of what is to come - poorly selected clips with pre-roll ads that are only likely to get worse - we’ll all just go somewhere else.
I’ll go where it’s best and easiest. I’m among those many minions invited (and accepted) for the Joost beta. Their service doesn’t live up to its tagline - “TV, the way you want it” - I haven’t even gotten round to downloading. That very requirement bugs me (and only support for Intel Macs, I might ad).
The longer these guys hold up access to their content the longer we the people have to develop and refine our own. They live in the figmentary sky-high value of their own imagination. Their stuff’s not worth what they think it is! I want my peer-produced Web native content!
But it looks to me like Lorne gets it. And had they still been on YouTube, I ‘d have been linking to at least one clip from Saturday’s show. I’m sure I wouldn’t have been the only one.
Birds of a feather: Mike Nifong & David McDade
UPDATE: For a roundup of what has happened since, see also Barr, Genarlow, McDade & Nifong.
When I pointed last week to attorney B.J. Bernstein filing a motion to get another trial for Genarlow Wilson based on the Duke dismissal, a commenter wrote, “I don’t see the connection.” At the time I have to admit that I really didn’t either.
Since, with all the news of the out of control rogue prosecutor Nifong, I see Bernstein’s point.
The former football player, Genarlow Wilson, is serving 10 years without parole for having consensual oral sex with a 15-year-old girl at a New Year’s Eve party, an offense that constituted aggravated child molesting even though he was 17 at the time.
The mandatory sentence shocked even the jury that convicted him. State law has since been changed to make most consensual sex between teenagers a misdemeanor.
But the courts have ruled that the new law does not apply to Mr. Wilson, and the district attorney in his case, David McDade of Douglas County, has opposed efforts this session to pass a law that would allow judges to review earlier cases and to revise sentences.
“Six young men basically gang-raped a 17-year-old and had repeated sex acts with a 15-year-old,” Mr. McDade, told Channel 11, the local NBC affiliate, in March. “There’s no member of the legislature that I think would condone that behavior.”
But the jury in Mr. Wilson’s case disagreed with Mr. McDade’s depiction. After being repeatedly shown a home videotape of sex, drugs and alcohol at the New Year’s Eve party in a hotel room in Douglas County, they acquitted Mr. Wilson of rape.
Anyone want to hazard a guess at what would be going on now if Genarlow Wilson had been a white UGA lacrosse player?
