from the money-equals-speech dept.

Now that a suitable interval has passed during which politicians were able to bask in the glory of their righteous vote to limit soft-money contributions, the political machine has shifted into gear to dismantle campaign-finance reform. Arguing that they have a constitutional right to buy politicians, the Republican National Committee filed a federal suit yesterday seeking to overturn key provisions of the recently enacted measure. Not to be outdone, Democrats crossed the aisle to join a state-court lawsuit in California that is aimed at overturning state- and local-campaign fundraising limits in the same law.

from the anyone-else-want-in-on-this? dept.

Apparently deciding that all this free publicity was too good to pass up, tennis player and famed email-virus bait Anna Kournikova has now filed her own lawsuit against Penthouse magazine, a few hours after the magazine publicly apologized for running topless photos of Judith Soltesz-Benetton and mistakenly identifying them as being of Kournikova. As reported here yesterday, Soltesz-Benetton had previously sued, and obtained an injunction blocking further distribution of the photos. Tune in tomorrow for the class action suit on behalf of the magazine’s readers.

from the um,-okay dept.

Lucy Spelman, director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Zoo in Washington, has rejected a reporter’s request for the medical records of a recently deceased giraffe, Ryma, saying that to release the records would violate the dead animal’s right to privacy. Legal experts want to know what she’s been smoking, though it seems likely, given the circumstances, that she’d view that information as private, too.

from the no,-seriously dept.

I think you just have to read the story, over at Yahoo News, courtesy Reuters Oddly Enough: Count Dracula Stirs Row with His ‘Kingdom’ in Germany. Then you can go visit the Count’s web site, at www.prince-dracula.com. As befits his ultimate-evil nature, his site uses frames, hard-to-read navigational links, and the following warning: “This site is optimized for browsers with Internet Explorer 5.0 or better and screen resolution of at least 800 x 600. Best results are achieved with Internet Explorer 5.5+ and 1024 x 768 screen resolution.” Oooh, very evil.

from the see-if-you-can-follow-this dept.

A U.S. District Judge in New York has issued an injunction requiring Penthouse magazine to stop distributing its June issue, and to refrain from posting on its web site a series of images allegedly showing tennis player Anna Kournikova topless. The injunction comes in the wake of a suit filed Monday not by Kournikova (who denies the pictures are of her), but by 28-year-old Judith Soltesz-Benetton, daughter-in-law of fashion designer Luciano Benetton, who says the pictures are of her. The part that has me wondering is Soltesz-Benetton’s motivation: I can see her being upset that photos snapped of her flashing her rack on Spring break in Florida (or something; I’m not clear on the circumstances) had found their way into the magazine, but wouldn’t it maybe have been better, at least from the icky-publicity standpoint, just to keep quiet about the whole thing?

from the maybe-if-we-ignore-her-she’ll-just-go-away dept.

Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi was released after 19 months of house arrest by the country’s ruling junta yesterday, and was reportedly mobbed by supporters during her first day of freedom. Interestingly (well, at least to someone raised outside the realm of state-controlled media), Myanmar’s government-controlled newspapers studiously ignored any mention of the event, as Malaysia’s The Star Online reports.

from the seldom-heard-voices dept.

From the Jordon Times (as reprinted from the Web-hostile login-required Chicago Times web site) comes Omar Karmi’s explanation of the post-1948 Palestinian experience, and of the national yearning for the right of return that is the result. It’s a calm, measured, succinct statement of the Palestinian position – which makes it amazing that it appeared in a U.S. newspaper. I’m sure Congress will act quickly to condemn the heresy.

from the can-we-bomb-him-anyway? dept.

Robert Scheer’s column today calls NYT columnist William Safire to task on the latter’s wholehearted embrace of the Mohammed-Atta-met-with-Iraqis story, first floated by the Czech government and widely cited by the Bush Administration as justification for taking the War on Terra to Iraq. Except that it turns out pretty much everyone now agrees that the meeting never took place, and the FBI and CIA, despite plenty of effort, have basically concluded that there simply isn’t any evidence linking Saddam Hussein with the 9/11 attacks. I like Scheer’s closing thought: “Bush’s foreign policy is based on a fairy tale, the persistent if childish hope that all of our problems can be solved by one solid blow to the latest Evil Empire, now found in Baghdad. Someone needs to read the president a better bedtime story.”

from the another-narrow-squeak dept.

Thomas H. Kimbell Jr. is a free man today, four years after he was convicted of the brutal murder of a woman and her three children. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court had previously ruled that his original trial judge erred in not allowing the defense to present testimony raising doubts about his guilt. As a result, Kimbell had been convicted despite the fact that there were no eyewitnesses and no physical evidence linking him to the crime. After a two week retrial, Kimbell was found not guilty. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, this represents the 101st time that a person has been exonerated and released from death row since the death penalty was re-instituted in this country in 1973.

from the myth-in-the-making dept.

Abu Jamous is a master burglar with a string of successful heists. He’s also a Palestinian, one who has been accused of working with Yasser Arafat’s Fatah group to help Palestinians elude Israeli security. Captured once, he escaped as he was being brought to court. A special police unit formed to recapture him eventually succeeded, but now he has escaped again, this time from a fortified police bus where he was secured with handcuffs and leg restraints, accompanied by two other security vehicles and guarded by 10 elite prison guards. Wow.

from the guilty-pleasures dept.

With my lies.com posting obsession temporarily hijacked by an obsession of another sort, I appealed to the folks in the Ishar mud for a suitable item to post today, and this is what they came up with: Celebrity Prank Calls. Enjoy.

from the anti-gravitas-presidency dept.

This past weekend the White House Correspondents Association held its annual dinner bash, at which Presidents are encouraged to drink and act silly in front of their Fourth Estate adversaries. Say what you will about dubya, he’s never been one to back away from a challenge like that. Anyway, Reuters has some details of the edgy hilarity that ensued, including a slide show during which dubya displayed a photograph of Dick Cheney peeing on the door to the Oval Office. That’s my dubya.

from the devil-in-the-details dept.

The New Zealand Herald is running a detailed story on events in Jenin, and whether the Israeli Defense Forces there were guilty of war crimes. Based largely on the report issued by Human Rights Watch, the story focuses on the evolution of IDF tactics over the course of the operation. There is also an interesting quote from Anthony Cordesman, a military analyst for ABC News, who says, essentially, that this is just how urban warfare works. Not mentioned explicitly, but underlying all this, is the Sharon government’s assertion that it actually should be praised for the restraint it showed in Jenin, that it was their concern for Palestinian civilians that prevented them from doing what they very well could have done, which was to just shell and bomb the entire camp, with its 14,000 civilian inhabitants, from a distance. Like we Americans did to Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki in World War II, for example, or to North Vietnam in the early 1970s.

from the say-cheesecake dept.

I started off thinking it was funny, in a startling kind of way, but as I went through the images, looking at the way they’d married a particular memorable dubya expression with a particular model’s body, I found it even funnier, if disturbing. I didn’t RFLMAO, but I did LOL. The images actually come from a different site, as per the original creators’ overlaid URL.

from the NOW-how-much-would-you-pay? dept.

Got this one in an email spam. Have I mentioned how much I hate spam? I do. Anyway, here it is: Learn to Detect Deceit in Everyday Life – if you’re lucky, you’ll learn to detect it before you send them your $34.95.

from the how-blessed-are-those-who-cannot-read dept.

Again from the L.A. Times comes a story about the Rev. William R. Grimbol, author of the latest work in the “Idiot’s Guide” series: The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Life of Christ. It joins such other venerable crossover titles as The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Enhancing Self-Esteem and The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Raising Your IQ.

from the love-makes-the-world-go-’round dept.

Providing another example of her extraordinarily bad judgement, soon-to-be-ex teacher Tanya Hadden gave a jailhouse interview to the L.A. Times yesterday. In the course of the interview she “scoffed” at news reports that she and Richard Pena, the 15-year-old with whom she ran off to Vegas, had been having sex, though she apparently stopped short of giving a denial more explicit than “that’s so not what this is.” Interesting stuff, in a depressing sort of way.

from the backing-away-from-the-m-word dept.

The L.A. Times has a story today titled Massacre at Jenin Doubted. It focuses on whether or not Israeli soldiers committed an indiscriminate massacre of civilians in Jenin, concluding, on the basis of interviews with investigators from groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, that they probably didn’t. Instead, it seems likely that the civilian deaths (22 of which have been documented so far by Human Rights Watch, along with an additional 30 Palestinian and 23 Israeli deaths) were side effects of the Israelis’ overwhelming-force approach to rooting out Palestinian combatants in the camp. Still unclear, according to the story, is the extent to which Israeli soldiers committed various other war crimes, such as using civilians as human shields and blocking access of emergency medical personnel to the dying.

from the science-lesson-over,-for-now dept.

The 33-year-old high school science teacher who ran off with her 15-year-old student was apprehended at a Las Vegas hotel yesterday. Now the teacher is in custody and the boy is back home with his parents. The article includes a nice summary of earlier, similar cases.

from the corporate-rights-trampled-again,-darnit dept.

The California Supreme Court has ruled that a business making public statements must comply with truth-in-advertising laws if those statements are commercial in nature. This represents a higher standard than that used for evaluating statements made by non-commercial entities, who are presumed to have a First Amendment right to free speech (though they can still get in trouble for libel or slander). The case involves allegedly false claims Nike made about factory conditions in the firm’s southeast Asia operation; a lower court had thrown out an activist’s false-advertising suit, saying Nike’s press releases weren’t an ad, and so weren’t subject to truth-in-advertising laws. Now the state Supreme Court has disagreed, saying that the statements had a significant commercial impact. The ruling means the original suit can go forward again, though Nike, with support from the ACLU, says it is planning to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which, these days at least, seems likely to be friendlier to the idea that a corporation should be allowed to lie in pursuit of profit.