A fantastic story: A fashion designer who dislikes Obama because he think’s Obama is a Muslim sells a t-shirt that reads “Obama is my slave” to a grad student who thinks it’s a good idea to wear this t-shirt out and about in New York City.  The grad student is, unsurprisingly, assaulted by a group of angry New York denizens, then sues the fashion designer.

I can’t figure out who I like least in this story, the xenophobic fashion designer, the foolishly short-sighted and litigious grad student, or the violent street people?

CrazyMonk points to a great article about “how black Baltimore drug dealers are using white supremacist legal theories to confound the Feds.”

In the previous year, nearly twenty defendants in other Baltimore cases had begun adopting what lawyers in the federal courthouse came to call “the flesh-and-blood defense.” The defense, such as it is, boils down to this: As officers of the court, all defense lawyers are really on the government’s side, having sworn an oath to uphold a vast, century-old conspiracy to conceal the fact that most aspects of the federal government are illegitimate, including the courts, which have no constitutional authority to bring people to trial. The defendants also believed that a legal distinction could be drawn between their name as written on their indictment and their true identity as a “flesh and blood man.”

It’s long, but good.

Evidence that gas prices have gotten out of hand: two shot in bicycle drive by.

Even law firms fall for an audacious version of the Nigerian 419 scam.

I posted a link to a lower quality version of this picture last week, but The Big Picture published a fuller series of the amazing anti-terror drills, including this fantastic picture. Get ‘em, boys!

Someone plays professional slamball! He doesn’t sound like a great guy… but slamball! Via jbg.

Los Angeles’s Mayor Villaraigosa and Police Chief Bratton celebrate a 7.2% drop in crime, not including homicide. What? The homicide stats? Well, homicide is up 4.3%… but look at the 7.2% drop in crime!

“The first clue a dentist isn’t licensed is if he’s practicing out of his house.” So true.

An AP story about training daycare students to perform in sex shows included an odd phrase:

Mineola, about 80 miles east of Dallas, is a close-knit, conservative bean-processing town of with more than 30 churches. Residents there want to put the scandal behind them as quickly as possible.

Is “bean-processing” a euphemism? Like being a bean-counter?

I saw a bunch of these posters in Hollywood and was drawn in because they decried the shooting of what appears to be a ten year old by the LAPD. “Yegads,” I thought, “how did the LAPD manage to shoot a ten year old?”

As I got closer I noticed that the man was 21 when he was shot, not ten. The poster’s maker used an 11 year old photo. Now, look, I have a lot of sympathy for the friends and family of anyone shot and killed by anyone, but it’s awfully misleading to use the picture of a child to draw people in to your rally.

The story itself, according to the LATimes, is that Chaudhry was sleeping in the bushes outside an apartment building when two police officers approached him and asked him for ID. There was some interaction and then he stabbed one of the officers in the hand. The officer then shot Chaudhry three times in the stomach.

The family seems to question (1, 2) the official story, but doesn’t really provide an alternative one. They mostly seem mad that the police took a full month to notify them of the shooting (seems like a fairly reasonable complaint considering that he had ID on him).

I just thought the use of the picture in the poster was interesting.

UPDATE: Thanks to a commenter, here’s a more recent picture of him from Facebook:

Whatever your position on the recent Guantanamo ruling, I think we can all agree that Senator Graham’s position is based on faulty logic:

“The American people are going to wake up tomorrow and be shocked to hear that a member of Al Qaeda has the same constitutional rights as an American citizen,” said Graham.

“[Even] the Nazis never had that right.”

Even the Nazis? My god, the well-liked and respected Nazis? I can’t believe we would treat somebody better than we treated the Nazis. I just assumed we would treat every foreigner worse than the Nazis…

By the way, I assume he’s obliquely referring to Ex parte Quirin.

The Supreme Court this morning decided that detainees, captured abroad and held at Gitmo, have habeus corpus rights and those rights were not adequately served by the tribunal system Congress set up for them (full decision). Scalia is pissed!

America is at war with radical Islamists. The enemy began by killing Americans and American allies abroad: 241 at the Marine barracks in Lebanon, 19 at the Khobar Towers in Dhahran, 224 at our embassies in Dar es Sa-laam and Nairobi, and 17 on the USS Cole in Yemen. On September 11, 2001, the enemy brought the battle to American soil, killing 2,749 at the Twin Towers in New York City, 184 at the Pentagon in Washington, D. C., and 40 in Pennsylvania. It has threatened further attacks against our homeland; one need only walk about buttressed and barricaded Washington, or board a plane anywhere in the country, to know that the threat is a serious one. Our Armed Forces are now in the field against the enemy, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Last week, 13 of our countrymen in arms were killed.

The game of bait-and-switch that today’s opinion plays upon the Nation’s Commander in Chief will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed. That consequence would be tolerable if necessary to preserve a time-honored legal principle vital to our constitutional Republic. But it is this Court’s blatant abandonment of such a principle that produces the decision today.

I like the idea that we’re currently responding as if the threat were a serious one is itself evidence that the threat is a serious one.

Definition of the common law crime of seduction — “Inducing, by promise of marriage, an unmarried woman to engage in intercourse.”

More presidential assassination trivia: who was the most recent U.S. President NOT to have suffered an assassination attempt? Wikipedia’s got the list (including the odd Puerto Rican independence one).

Only one Secret Service agent has ever taken a bullet for a president. Can you guess which president?

12 real reasons why potential jurors on the R. Kelly trial were excused from duty. The final two are fantastic:

Please call my mom - When one juror failed to show up for service, deputies called his house and his mother answered. She told the court that she didn’t know where her son was and that he hadn’t been “right” since he was shot in the head a while back. The judge and attorneys agreed to let him off the hook.

I blame R. Kelly for Sept. 11 - When the judge asked one prospective juror about his feelings regarding Kelly, he cryptically answered: “R. Kelly may have led the Taliban in attacking us on 9-11, but you can’t prove it.” You’re right, we can’t. In fact, we’re fairly certain that no one has ever tried.

I might take the second guy, he at least seems open minded.

MSNBC has a schlocky Dateline documentary called Into the Woods about “[a] brave high school girl tries to outfox her fugitive kidnapper after being held hostage for ten days in an underground bunker.”

Now, of course there’s also the award winning Sondheim musical of the same name:

It’s understandable how you might confuse the two, and Daniel Kells noticed that Time Warner Cable had in fact done just that:

There’s going to be some very unhappy musical theater geeks tonight (and some very unhappy fans of pedophile kidnappers).

FROM: [Assistant Dan]
TO: All Students, All Faculty and Staff
DATE: Thu, May 8, 2008 at 4:57 PM
SUBJECT: Smoking

Today the Law Center had its second mulch fire this spring due to a discarded cigarette. If you smoke please do so in the smoking areas where ashtrays are provided. Please use the ashtrays. These smoking areas include the east side of Williams patio; the library quad; the northwest side of McDonough podium; the center of the Tower Green; the alley behind the Fitness center.

The University’s policy for a smoke free work place prohibits smoking at the entrances to the buildings. You need to move at least 20 feet from the building entrance before lighting up. Thanks for your cooperation on this.

Assistant Dean
Georgetown University Law Center
600 New Jersey Avenue NW
Washington DC

Let it be known, “the alley behind the Fitness center” is where a homeless man was stabbed two years ago. Smoke up!

Here’s the map that helpfully lets us know where we can smoke without starting a mulch fire, marked with big smiley faces!

Click to big-ify

Between homeless men being beaten to death with their own crutches, and ongoing gypsy disputes leading to firebombings, I’m pretty jazzed about moving to California.

Of course, while I’m afraid of the earthquakes and the imagery-heavy crime, one positive side about moving to California is the ongoing collapse in housing prices:

Buy buy buy!

“Homeless man is beaten to death with his own crutch.” Oh come on, seriously? Between this and the earthquakes, I’m getting seriously concerned.

From here. I like that Washington, D.C. maintains a relatively high price for female sex workers, but a very low price for male sex workers. Does politics attract mostly straight men, thereby destroying the demand for male sex workers? That seems unlikely. Is it possible that DC in fact draws so many gay men that there’s no need for a cash-based underground market? I have no way of knowing. I wish someone would investigate this further.

International rates are also available (Dubai is expensive, and a number of cities managed to secure a negative price for male sex workers, which I don’t understand).

Is it just a rounding error, or is murder the one violent crime in America that does not fluctuate over time?

Tom Lehrer doesn’t like being “fake” kidnapped. Go figure. Via Tom Lehrer Livejournal.

One LATimes reporter has had his 1989 Toyota Camry stolen, and returned, three times. After its most recent return, he opened the trunk to find “[b]oxes of highlighter pens and ink cartridges, and a DVD copy of ‘Bruce Almighty,’ the cinematic equivalent of a 1989 Camry.”