Wednesday, July 11, 2007

U.S. Attorney: Distributing Wilson tape violates law

It looks like Jones may have been successful:

Douglas County District Attorney David McDade violated federal law when he distributed a videotape from a rape and child molestation case to legislators and journalists, the U.S. Attorney in Atlanta said Wednesday.

U.S. Attorney David Nahmias said in a statement that federal law prohibits the distribution of the Genarlow Wilson videotape because it depicts minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct. He warned that people who had received it would be in violation of federal child pornography laws. [...]

McDade told the Associated Press that he was required to release the tape under the state’s Open Records Act because it was introduced as evidence at the trial.

Nahmias, though, said federal law trumps any contrary requirement of the open records law.

Nahmias said that his office issued the statement to end further distribution of the videotape and advised those who possessed it to destroy or return it. His office, under federal policy, would neither confirm nor deny whether it was investigating the distribution.

State Sen. Emanuel Jones (D-Decatur) has called for an investigation to determine whether McDade violated federal law in distributing the videotape in response to requests under the open records law.

On Tuesday, Jones characterized the videotape as child pornography and called it “an absolute, utter disgrace” that a videotape of the raunchy party in a Douglasville hotel room that led to the conviction of Wilson on aggravated child molestation charges has been given to reporters and legislators.

Wilson was 17 at the time and the tape showed him receiving consensual oral sex from a 15-year-old girl.

McDade told the Associated Press that Jones was one of the legislators who requested a copy of the tape. On Wednesday, Jones denied making any such request. “David never gave me a copy of the tape and I never requested a copy,” Jones said.

Meanwhile, tomorrow’s AJC has Mike King urging Genarlow to take the deal (I am not persuaded) and Al Sharpton’s coming back to march again this weekend (I’m sad to say we’ve gotten to the point that I’m glad for it).

SEE ALSO: My roundup of letter-of-the-law critics.

Crocs

I got mine - Islander, khaki/chocolate - because they’re comfortable, cool and I can wear them at work. Besides, the students love them. I can’t say that I do so I won’t likely buy another pair. I noticed that in New York they were nowhere near as ubiquitous as they are here. Apparently, they may one day be. The NYTimes Magazine has a piece about them coming this Sunday:

Aspiring lifestyle brands are a dime a dozen, but Crocs have trod an unusual path. The shoes caught on first in Middle America, then migrated toward the more trend-centric coasts, possibly aided by the most significant marketing campaign in the company’s brief history: ads in Vanity Fair and other magazines carried the theme “Ugly can be beautiful.” ... Comfort is the consistent theme in testimonials on the company’s site - despite the presence nearby of, say, a woman wearing Crocs with her wedding dress.

David Chidester, a computer-products marketer in Dallas, started a site called CrocFans.com in 2005, shortly after his wife discovered the shoes. He posts Crocs-related items like a recent photograph of President Bush wearing a pair - black, with what appear to be presidential-seal socks - and his traffic has grown steadily, hitting its latest high last month. Chidester says he has no affiliation with and has never heard from the company, but he sticks to the official comfort line just the same: he wears his green pair to work on his lawn and a more understated khaki pair to the mall, purely for functional reasons.

After a while, all the comfort talk starts to sound a little bit like a guy with a Mohawk saying he simply wants to spend less time washing his hair. Perhaps it is the Crocs fans’ refusal to admit that the shoes are an aesthetic statement that really motivates people like Kate Leth and Vincenzo Ravina, two college students in Halifax, Nova Scotia, who operate a Web site called ihatecrocs.com. “We don’t understand why people can’t freely admit that they’re hideous,” says Leth, who describes herself as “stunned” at the persistence of the shoes and the e-mail she gets from around the world as Crocs enter new markets “like a disease spreading.” In addition to anti-Croc rants, the site includes videos of the shoes being burned with firecrackers or shredded with scissors; Leth says they have sold “a few hundred” anti-Croc T-shirts, many to members of one of the larger Croc-hating Facebook groups.

Too good to be true

Cory appears to believe this 1928 Popular Mechanics ad is for real; I’ve been snookered one too many times so I’m not buying it quite yet.

OBVIOUSLY the aliens know we have cell phones now

Marginal Revolution quotes Discover Your Inner Economist

Small changes in incentives can make a big difference in our beliefs.  For instance, UFO sightings are down dramatically in the last decade...I think [one factor is] cell phones and cell phone cameras.

“The spaceship was in a no-call dead zone.  And you didn’t snap a picture?”

...The story is suddenly a little harder to swallow.  Most of all, it is harder to fool oneself, not just one’s spouse and friends.

Via Virtual Economics.

Social Networks in plain english

CommonCraft’s leelefever, “This video is for people who wonder why social networking web sites are so popular. We think one reason is because they help solve a real-world problem. We’ll let the video explain how it works.”

The nation’s doctor muzzled

It was all over the blogs yesterday, and in the NYTimes today:

Former Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona told a Congressional panel Tuesday that top Bush administration officials repeatedly tried to weaken or suppress important public health reports because of political considerations.

The administration, Dr. Carmona said, would not allow him to speak or issue reports about stem cells, emergency contraception, sex education, or prison, mental and global health issues. Top officials delayed for years and tried to “water down” a landmark report on secondhand smoke, he said. Released last year, the report concluded that even brief exposure to cigarette smoke could cause immediate harm.

Dr. Carmona said he was ordered to mention President Bush three times on every page of his speeches. He also said he was asked to make speeches to support Republican political candidates and to attend political briefings.

Video here and much more here.

Gupta and Moore

DarkSyde:

CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta took a step in the right direction by admitting to errors in the CNN hit piece on Michael Moore’s SiCKO on Larry King last night (Video courtesy of Scarce). The good doctor even praised the film saying it ‘raised awareness of an important issue.’

But herein lays a puzzle: Sanjay Gupta is a media super-star on America’s premier cable news network. We know he is both courageous and not easily politically intimidated. His reporting from Iraq and New Orleans demonstrated that. He’s tackled many aspects of healthcare and science on his regular program, House Call is one of the best CNN has to offer in my view. So one has to wonder: If non-doctor, film-maker Michael Moore can raise awareness of what Gupta agrees is an important issue, doesn’t it make sense that the best known medical doctor/journalist in America could too?

Moore received thousands of healthcare horror stories in a matter of days simply by posting a brief request on a single, dinky website. What might Sanjay Gupta uncover with the might of CNN behind him and years of experience in the field, if he tried something similar? How much heat could a regular segment on his weekly show highlighting abhorrent practices, intentional abuse, and open fraud in the managed care industry put on these scum bags? How many slimy rocks could a guy like Gupta flip over?

Here’s the CNN piece that started it all. Moore fact checks Gupta here, prior to the Larry King appearance. And Brian Beutler notes the weird priorities:

[I]n principle, I have absolutely no problem with journalists fact checking people like Michael Moore, as long as they do it accurately. The thing is that the four minute fact-checking video you can see embedded in this clip is exactly the sort of effort we should see on CNN after every one of the president’s major speeches and it should have been this way since the beginning. I realize that newsmen and pundits think they won’t be taken seriously if they don’t give Michael Moore’s work a second look. So great. Give it a second look. And then give similar scrutiny to The Path to 9/11 and the State of the Union. And maybe then the media’s credibility ratings will outstrip, say, those of the president whose statements they never verify.