But Think Of The Children!

Or, rather, think of the distortions we peddle to get you to think of the children!

The Internet may not be such a dangerous place for children after all.

A task force created by 49 state attorneys general to look into the problem of sexual solicitation of children online has concluded that there really is not a significant problem.

The findings ran counter to popular perceptions of online dangers as reinforced by depictions in the news media like NBC’s “To Catch a Predator” series.

Wait, you mean a sensationalized television show doesn't provide the whole story? You mean not everyone on the Internet is a pervert?

Well, blow me down.

“This shows that social networks are not these horribly bad neighborhoods on the Internet,” said John Cardillo, chief executive of Sentinel Tech Holding, which maintains a sex offender database and was part of the task force. “Social networks are very much like real-world communities that are comprised mostly of good people who are there for the right reasons.” [...]

The task force, led by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, looked at scientific data on online sexual predators and found that children and teenagers were unlikely to be propositioned by adults online. In the cases that do exist, the report said, teenagers are typically willing participants and are already at risk because of poor home environments, substance abuse or other problems.

Can't wait until Joe Lieberman gets the news. Think of how great he'll feel to be able to stop endlessly moralizing!

The Internet is "dangerous" in the same respect that walking down the street is "dangerous." The meme was always pushed by over-sensitive figures on the theocratic right who wanted to use fear as a weapon to censor and stifle dissent. It happens to be untrue.

Have You No Decency, Sir?

Yes, I'm fully aware that the answer is no. But today's events in the Obama-McCain campaign maybe put Mr. Maverick in the most dishonorable light yet.

The McCain campaign started by whining incessantly at a comment made by Joe Biden about the Republican Party's extremism on medical research and science:

“I hear all this talk about how the Republicans are going to work in dealing with parents who have both the joy…and the difficulty of raising a child who has a developmental disability, who were born with a birth defect,” he said. “Well, guess what folks? If you care about it, why don't you support stem cell research?”

That's a perfectly factual statement, and yet it was called "a new low." This goes along with the hissy fit over a common analogy uttered by Barack Obama today.

(Oh, and Biden's right - the Republican ticket is going to have to defend their unpopular, extremist viewpoints. Tough.)

But if you want to talk about new lows, take a look at this new ad.



The Obama vote that McCain is actually talking about was designed to teach kids how to avoid sexual predators. I don't know if McCain is going for the pro-rapist vote or what, but it would sure fit a pattern:

I shit you not. This article doesn't mention her by name, but check the dateline: Palin was mayor of Wasilla.

That means that under her leadership,

the Wasilla police department [did] charge the victims of sexual assault for the tests.

That police chief was Charlie Fannon, Palin's appointee. One can only assume that she supported Wasilla's policy of billing rape victims for their own rape kits--the kits police and hospitals use to collect evidence after a rape--not only because Fannon was her appointee, but also because this was four years into her tenure as mayor and because, let's be honest: in a town of that size, the mayor doesn't get to plead ignorance of policies or public statements of her own chief of police.

The entire ad is ridiculous, actually. It cites articles that describe McCain as far worse on education policy than Obama. But to try and fearmonger to parents that their kindergardeners would be taught sex education when the bill in question would protect kids from sex predators is about the most shameful situation in this entire election cycle.

Here's the Obama campaign's response:

"It is shameful and downright perverse for the McCain campaign to use a bill that was written to protect young children from sexual predators as a recycled and discredited political attack against a father of two young girls - a position that his friend Mitt Romney also holds. Last week, John McCain told Time magazine he couldn't define what honor was. Now we know why," said Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton.

But again, until the media fits this into a well-worn narrative of McCain being a compulsive liar, which is patently the case, he will not be punished for these actions. He is appearing as dishonorable as anyone to ever chase the White House. That is an objective truth, and it needs to be reflected in the coverage.

UPDATE: I know that there are about 8 of us that desire this, but Obama's speech on education, actually an articulated and comprehensive policy instead of 30 seconds' worth of soundbites, is here.

The Continuing Story Of California's Worst Law

The assumption with Prop. 83, "Jessica's Law," was that it simply perpetuated the "Tough on Crime" myth that reactionaries have always rode to popularity. It turns out that Jessica's Law also made a small group of contract psychologists rich for no discernible reason.

A 2006 law intended to crack down on sex offenders has proved a bonanza for a small group of private psychologists and psychiatrists, 14 of whom billed California taxpayers last year for a half a million dollars or more each, a Times investigation found.

Among the 79 contractors hired by the state to evaluate sex offenders, the top earner was Robert Owen, a Central Coast psychologist who pulled in more than $1.5 million in 2007, according to state records reviewed by The Times.

At issue is a provision in the law that mandated government-funded psychiatric evaluations for sex offenders, to determine whether or not they required hospitalization or instutionalization after their prison terms have been served. If this resulted in actual hospital commitments, perhaps there'd be a return on investment. But the $24 million state taxpayers have sunk into this just in 2007 has yielded nothing:

It's unclear, however, what benefit the investment has yielded. There's been a nearly ninefold increase in evaluations and a threefold increase in recommendations for hospital commitment. But the actual number of commitments has remained essentially the same -- 41 in the 18 months before the law was passed, 42 in the 18 months afterward.

As the state confronts a budget shortfall of $15.2 billion, legislation to fund contractors to evaluate offenders through 2010 is expected to be voted on in the Assembly as soon as this week. Costs from Jessica's Law are expected to rise to several hundred million dollars annually over the next eight years, with further increases thereafter, according to projections by California's legislative analyst.

What a horrible boondoggle this thing has turned out to be, doing nothing to keep anyone safe, costing the state hundreds of millions, and violating all kinds of civil rights leading to ex-offenders sleeping under bridges (which makes them far more difficult to track). Prop. 83 is the poster child for why initiative campaigns have strayed far from their initial purpose as exercises in direct democracy, and why serious reform of the process is needed desperately.

Judging The Crazy

Two of the three potential Vice Presidential nominees shuttled to Chez BBQ last month for a powwow with John McCain were Mitt Romney and Bobby Jindal. They're both a real pair of winners. Today, Romney called nuclear nonproliferation a "liberal position."

This morning, failed Republican presidential candidate and former governor Mitt Romney was interviewed by CNN anchor John Roberts. During the interview, Mitt dutifully repeated the McCain campaign's latest anti-Obama smear, that he's "never been a part of a bipartisan group that came together to solve a controversial issue." [...]

When it was pointed out that Obama has worked with Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Indiana on the Lugar-Obama Nonproliferation legislation, signed into law by President Bush, and with Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Oregon, on increasing gas mileage efficiency requirements, this was Romey's actual response:

"Actually, on both cases, you’re talking about two liberal positions, non-proliferation as well as the gasoline mileage."

It is now considered liberal to want to reduce the potential of nuclear destruction. For context, four years ago George Bush and John Kerry agreed that nuclear proliferation was the greatest current threat to global security. Romney either doesn't know what non-proliferation means, or thinks that anything with the word "non" involves taking away the sweet sweet cash funnel to military contractors. Henry Frickin' Kissinger believes in nonproliferation, fercryinoutloud.

This position puts Romney on the radical left when compared to Bobby Jindal's latest bill-signing ceremony:

On the heels of today's SCOTUS decision in Kennedy v. Louisiana barring the death penalty for sex offenders, Gov. Bobby Jindal released a statement calling the ruling an "affront to the people of Louisiana" - and what's more, vowing to do whatever possible to amend the state’s laws in order to maintain the death penalty for child rape.

But that's not all he did.

Today, Gov. Jindal signed the "Sex Offender Chemical Castration Bill," authorizing the castration of convicted sex offenders. They get a choice: physical or chemical. Oh, and they don't just get castrated and leave - they still have to serve out their sentence.

Hammurabi would be proud. Would this hold for those offenders who committed forcible optical intercourse, too?

Good Lord these people are out of their skulls.

The Continuing Story Of California's Worst Law

This is the impact of lawmaking by emotion instead of reason. Jessica's Law, the initiative passed by the voters in 2006, could increase the risk of crime. No one could have anticipated that, right? I mean, when you force ex-cons to sleep under bridges and give them no hope of rehabilitation, and you hobble police departments and sap their ability to actually track sex offenders, how could crime go up, right?

In the 15 months since voters approved Jessica's Law, which restricts where paroled offenders may live and requires electronic monitoring of their whereabouts, the state has recorded a 44% increase in those registered as transients, according to a report released by California's Sex Offender Management Board.

The law prohibits ex-offenders from living within 2,000 feet of places where children gather, but it lacks adequate definitions of such places, the report says. And in some counties and cities, the law's residency restrictions make large swaths of housing off-limits.

Unresolved questions about major parts of the law make it impossible to determine whether the state is safer now from sex offenders, panel member said. Some said the law could be making things worse.

Tom Tobin, the board's vice-chairman and a psychologist, said that homelessness removes offenders from their support systems, such as family members, which increases the chances they will commit new crimes.

"I see homelessness as increasing overall risk to public safety, and as a very, very undesirable consequence of probably a well-intended law," he said.

While I don't necessarily agree with the connection between homelessness and public safety, certainly THIS kind of homelessness, of former sex offenders, is not desirable. But it falls along the same stupid, shortsighted, Tough On Crime (tm) policies we've seen in California for 30 years. We extend sentences longer and longer and then try to build our way out of the inevitable overcrowding problem (by the way, that building plan was wildly optimistic; they're now talking about 6,900 less beds and a longer time to get them constructed); we punish sex offenders with an unrealistic law that actually endangers the state's citizens instead of protects them. This is the legacy of a failure of leadership.

The California Report

Let me clear out my Inbox and set you on your weekend way:

• The Megan's Law website apparently is being used as a hit list and may have led to at least one death. This is the downside of a "what about the children?" über alles mentality.

• I'm not entirely certain about this claim that state lawmakers could have solved the mortgage crisis back in 2001 by cracking down on predatory lending practices. It's a boilerplate story, a typical "they bought off the politicians" frame. But the problem, as Paul Krugman notes today, is that home prices lowered, leading to negative equity for homeowners. Not sure what the lawmakers could have done about that. This is a national crisis that required federal action. And what action could be taken on the state level is in the purview of the Attorney General. Jerry Brown is investigating home loans from Countrywide Financial for improprieties, particularly forcing buyers with good credit into subprime mortgages.

• For all the talk about Steve Poizner, he is doing his job in suing Blue Shield for their loathsome practice of dropping patients retroactively after they seek coverage. Blue Shield's response?

The state's interpretation of laws governing policy cancellations "is simply wrong."

Stupid state, not knowing their own laws as well as a private entity!

• Nancy Pelosi is under fire for saying that Republicans like this war. Juan Cole is right to slam her for assuming that Republicans would act in good faith and help to end the war after the 2006 elections. What Republican Party was she talking about?

• Anthony Wright has the new amendments released to the public on the new health care reform. I should have a lot more on this over the weekend.

• I know that I didn't execute a House roundup in November, but honestly there wasn't a whole lot going on in the races. So I postponed it and will have a December roundup in the next few days.

• And finally, I would be remiss if I didn't mention the California Democratic Party buying three grand in French wine from Fabian Nuñez, who's now a wine salesman, I guess. I have to acknowledge Kevin Spillane (two Republicans in one day, I know) from the No on 93 campaign for the funny move of sending a bottle of Two Buck Chuck to Nuñez' office. It is an award winner.

Prop. 83: Exhibit A for the failure of direct democracy

So now we learn that the implementation for Jessica's Law is completely impossible and will likely never happen.

Law enforcement leaders who pushed for a ballot initiative requiring sex offenders in California to be tracked by satellite for life are now saying that the sweeping surveillance program voters endorsed is not feasible and is unlikely to be fully implemented for years, if ever [...]

The difficulties include the impracticality of tracking sex offenders who no longer must report to parole or probation officers, the lack of any penalty for those who refuse to cooperate with monitoring and the question of whether such widespread tracking is effective in protecting the public.

The biggest issue, however, is that the law does not specify which agency or government should monitor felony sex offenders -- and shoulder hundreds of millions of dollars a year in related costs.

That said, these same law enforcement officials claim that the law is worthwhile, mainly because they don't want the egg on their face for the next 20 years, and they can quietly put the whole thing to rest once everyone forgets about it.

In truth, the unworkability of this law, which trades liberty for security and provides neither, making it far more difficult to track sex offenders while beginning a slippery slope toward lifetime surveillance of anyone who commits a crime we collectively decide not to like in the future, was obvious from the beginning. It was written poorly, and maybe some of that can be fixed. But the restrictions on housing have caused ex-cons to live under bridges, which seems to me to set the table for them to commit more crimes so they can get some shelter. The lack of reporting to parole officers, too, just drops these offenders off the map - when the point is supposed to be to FURTHER track them so they don't molest again.

This is also about the dangers of ballot-box budgeting. With the vague nature of the funding in the law, everyone's trying to force payment on somebody else.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and state law enforcement leaders, who were allied in backing the measure, are engaged in a standoff over who should bear its financial burden.

"I don't know of any agency that has the resources to track and monitor . . . in real time," said Vacaville Police Chief Richard Word, president of the California Police Chiefs Assn. "You'll need an air traffic controller to track these folks." [...]

Corrections analysts estimate that it costs the state up to $33 a day in equipment and labor to monitor a sex offender by GPS, and it would take nearly $90 million a year just to track the 9,000 now on parole if all were subject to Proposition 83.

Once offenders are discharged from parole, the state will no longer monitor them electronically, Corrections Secretary James Tilton said last month, because his department lacks jurisdiction at that point. The agency also is overextended, with an overcrowded prison system under review by the federal courts.

Nick Warner, a lobbyist and spokesman for the California State Sheriffs' Assn., said the state's refusal to monitor sex offenders after parole "passes the buck to local law enforcement, who are not equipped to handle them." He said the state was "setting up communities to fail" and predicted that the matter would end up in court.

Schwarzenegger, who faces a $10-billion state budget gap next year, said through spokesman Bill Maile that he would wait for the sex offender board to address the question of who should fund lifetime GPS tracking before taking a position on the issue.

The law is clearly unworkable and unsuccessful. Yet it got 70% of the vote because these flaws were hidden from public scrutiny. And as a result, everyone is afraid to say we should scrap it, due to political factors.

Welcome to your direct democracy in action!

I Think Crime's Getting Tough On Them

I was rendered almost ill by John Edwards' stance in the debate against the decriminalization of marijuana because "it would send the wrong signal to young people." Chris Dodd made a strong response that cut to the heart of our failed prison policy.

DODD: Can I respond, I mean just why I think it ought to be? We’re locking up too many people in our system here today. We’ve got mandatory minimum sentences that are filling our jails with people who don’t belong there. My idea is to decriminalize this, reduce that problem here. We’ve gone from 800,000 to 2 million people in our penal institutions in this country. We’ve go to get a lot smarter about this issue than we are, and as president, I’d try and achieve that.

This, of course, is most acute in California, where we're waiting for the other shoe to drop on a federal court order that could potentially force the release of thousands of prisoners due to overcrowding. State Sen. Gloria Romero held her ground and didn't allow the usual spate of tougher sentencing bills to pass the Legislature this year. So once again, George and Sharon Runner will go to the ballot with a punitive measure designed to make themselves look tough while further battering a crippled prison system.

A year after bringing to California Jessica's Law, the crackdown on sex offenders, the husband-and-wife team of state Sen. George Runner and Assemblywoman Sharon Runner announced Monday a new initiative that would target gang members for tougher prosecution and dedicate nearly $1 billion annually to enforcement and intervention.

The Republican legislators from Lancaster hope to collect enough signatures to qualify the measure for the November 2008 ballot, and they have the backing of the father of the state's three-strikes law as well as law enforcement officials, including Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca.

The Legislature has already rejected this bill, and it would again constrain the state budget with another walled-off mandate while doing nothing to address the major crisis in overcrowding. It's feel-good nonsense for "tough-on-crime" advocates.

By the way, let's see how the last initiative the Runners promoted, Jessica's Law, is working out:

Hundreds of California sex offenders who face tough new restrictions on where they can live are declaring themselves homeless, making it difficult for the state to track them.

Jessica's Law, approved by 70 percent of California voters a year ago, bars registered sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of a school or park where children gather. That leaves few places where offenders can live legally.

Some who have had trouble finding a place to live are avoiding re-arrest by reporting that they are homeless - falsely, in some cases.

Experts say it is hard to monitor sex offenders when they lie about their address or are living day-to-day in cheap hotels, homeless shelters or on the street. It also means they may not be getting the treatment they need.

"We could potentially be making the world more dangerous rather than less dangerous," said therapist Gerry Blasingame, past chairman of the California Coalition on Sexual Offending.

I agree with all of that except the word "potentially." We felt good about "getting tough" on sex offenders, and now we have them living under bridges and untrackable. How do you think "getting tough" on gang violence is going to work out?

Here's A Headline That Doesn't Scream "Victory"

"Giuliani Defends, Employs Priest Accused of Molesting Teens"

It's a somewhat old story, covered briefly on TRF before, but the investigative report from Brian Ross uncovers some new details. First of all, Monsignor Alan Placa, the priest accused of molestation, is STILL working for Giuliani Partners. Second, he was hired AFTER the accusers came forward and the church requested that he stop performing priestly duties.

"This man did unjust things, and he's being protected and employed and taken care of. It's not a good thing," said one of the accusers, Richard Tollner, who says Placa molested him repeatedly when he was a student at a Long Island, N.Y. Catholic boys high school in 1975.

At a campaign appearance in Milwaukee last week, Giuliani continued to defend Placa, who he described to reporters as a close friend for 39 years.

"I know the man; I know who he is, so I support him," Giuliani said. "We give some of the worst people in our society the presumption of innocence and benefit of the doubt," he said. "And, of course, I'm going to give that to one of my closest friends."

There's not going to be any accountability, so it's easy for Giuliani to say that. This actually would be prosecuted, were is not for a statute of limitations (the accuser described actions from 1975), as well as obfuscatory church policy, under orders directly from Rome, in which Placa participated, using "deception and intimidation," according to grand jury documents.

The appearance from Richard Tollner, the accuser and now a mortgage broker on Long Island, is lurid.

Tollner, now a mortgage broker in Albany, N.Y., says he was one of three people to testify about Placa.

"This man harmed children. He still could do it. He deserves to be shown for what he was, or is," says Tollner.

Appearing publicly for the first time today on ABC News' "Good Morning America," Tollner says the abuse started when he and Placa were in the high school making posters for a Right to Life march.

"As he started to explain how these posters should be done, I realized that something was rubbing my body," Tollner said. "After a minute or two, I realized that he's feeling me, feeling me in my genital area."

According to the story, the Giuliani campaign SOUGHT OUT former students from the same high school and asked them to "contact ABC News and vouch for Placa." There are dozens of pictures of Giuliani with Placa, too. And really, this is another example of where Rudy can credibly be judged by the company he keeps.

The man named yesterday by the Giuliani campaign to a law enforcement outreach campaign post in Minnesota was forced to resign a government job in 2004 when proof surfaced that he’d admitted to repeatedly using the word “nigger” in the past, Election Central has learned.

Sheriff Richard Stanek was appointed to the post of chair of Minnesota Law Enforcement for Rudy. The campaign’s press release promised that Stanek “will work with law enforcement personnel throughout the state to communicate Mayor Giuliani’s record of fighting crime and his commitment to first responders.”

But as a rival campaign has pointed out to us, it turns out Stanek has admitted to having a history of racially charged remarks. He was forced to resign his post as Minnesota’s public safety commissioner in 2004 after it came to light that he’d admitted in a deposition that he’d used racist slurs in the past, including repeated use of the word “nigger.”

Steve Benen has a list of Giuliani's associates, which could fill a lineup.

This one in particular could snowball.

The 25-Day Sprint

Well, Mitch McConnell has resigned himself to the fact that he can't stop the thundering momentum of WideStance Craig.

MCCONNELL: I heard from Sen. Craig this morning. He called me to give me an update on where he is in order to dispel, as he put it, any confusion that might exist with regard to his intention.

So let me relate to you his comment -- he said that he is going to try to get the case in Minneapolis dismissed, that if he is unable to have that disposed of prior to Sept. 30, it is his intention to resign from the Senate as he expressed last Saturday. If he is able to get he case favorably disposed of in Minneapolis it would be his intention to come back to the Senate, to deal with the ethics committee case that he knows he will have, and to try to finish his term.

So whatever confusion may have been created in the last few days, as of this morning that is his view about where he is headed.

So he's got 25 days for his high-powered legal team, led by the lawyer from the Michael Vick dogfighting case, to dismiss the case up in Minneapolis. How that can possibly happen, given that he has admitted to perjuring himself by saying that he pleaded guilty just to make it go away, is beyond me.

His lawyer is now trying to say on Hardball that he simply committed a misdemeanor and the Congress has no jurisdiction over it, so the Ethics Committee should back off and he should be permitted to stay EVEN IF he cannot rid himself of the guilty plea.

This is getting crazier and crazier. And the GOP must be screaming right now.

As for why Sen. Specter would give WideStance this advice to fight on, it's difficult to underestimate the clubbiness of the Senate. These guys have a sense of entitlement, and Specter more so than anyone. So it's obvious to me that he would speak out for protecting the rights of his fellow Senator. Would that he looked out for his constituents in this manner.

You Can't Kill Me I'm Already Dead!

It's the return of Craig.

Sen. Larry Craig is reconsidering his decision to resign after his arrest in a Minnesota airport sex sting and may still fight for his Senate seat, his spokesman said Tuesday evening. "It's not such a foregone conclusion anymore, that the only thing he could do was resign," said Sidney Smith, Craig's spokesman in Idaho's capital.

"We're still preparing as if Senator Craig will resign Sept. 30, but the outcome of the legal case in Minnesota and the ethics investigation will have an impact on whether we're able to stay in the fight — and stay in the Senate."

Apparently Arlen Specter got him in a room and told him he wuz framed.

I've been arguing that there wasn't really enough here to convict somebody. And I agree with Arianna that vice-squad busts are totally insane in a time of terror, and just because they're needed for a lot of Republicans doesn't mean that they're necessary.

But here's the thing: he already pleaded guilty. And the law is pretty clear on this, that you can't "un-plead" guilty without some seriously extenuating circumstances, and I don't think "I wanted it to go away" is one of them. In fact, by admitting that he was lying about pleading guilty in the first place, he's potentially eligible for perjury. And we all know how seriously Republicans take perjury.

So Craig has his head in the clouds if he thinks he can win this fight legally. And politically this is a disaster for the GOP. It keeps the story in the news, and highlights their hypocrisy, as they continue to lean on Craig to leave the stage while David Vitter sits casually in his Senate seat. The Republican Caucus can't vote a sitting Senator out; only he can make the decision. And right now it looks like Craig is being obstinate. Even Mark Foley had the sense to get out while the getting was good.

This is hilarious.

UPDATE: Too, too much. Roll Call got a hold of a phone call that Craig placed to the wrong answering machine explaining the whole thing:

Roll Call, a Capitol Hill political newspaper, posted a voice mail tonight that Craig may have inadvertently left at a wrong number Saturday morning. In it, Craig says he changed the wording in his speech and that "this thing could take a new turn or a new shape."

"Yes, Billy, this is Larry Craig calling. You can reach me on my cell. Arlen Specter is now willing to come out in my defense, arguing that it appears by all that he knows that I have been railroaded and all that.

"Having all of that, we have reshaped my statement a little bit to say it is my intent to resign on Sept. 30. I think it is important for you to make as bold a statement as you are comfortable with this afternoon, and I would hope you could make it in front of the cameras.

"I think it would help drive the story that I’m willing to fight, that I’ve got quality people out there fighting in my defense, and that this thing could take a new turn or a new shape, it has that potential. Anyway, give me a buzz or give Mike a buzz on that. We’re headed to my press conference now.

"Thank you. Bye."

I don't understand these people that are so desperate to hold on to power. Is it a pathology? I mean, Larry Craig will never win another election again. Why not go off into the sunset and hope that everybody forgets all about this?

GOP Campaign Aide Police Blotter Expands

This one kind of got by the national media, given the fact that they can only deal with one Republican gay sex scandal at a time:

An organizer for a Rudy Giuliani presidential event plans to step down amid revelations of his arrests for allegedly extorting an FSU student in a sex case and his conviction for dealing in stolen state computers.

Barry S. Edwards, 45, told The Miami Herald that the charges against him were ''old news'' --- and were 'unfounded' in the student sex case -- but he nevertheless thought it would be best to withdraw from the Pinellas County Republican Party fundraiser because ``I'm not relevant and I shouldn't be the story.''

Edwards said he was not being paid for organizing the Sept. 7 Reagan Day dinner, and had no real connection to the campaign of Giuliani, who is to be the keynote speaker at the Renaissance Vinoy Resort and Golf Club in St. Petersburg.

The two criminal incidents involving Edwards were unrelated, and occurred within months of each other in 1998.

According to a Florida State University arrest affidavit: Edwards was first charged after a 19-year-old FSU political science intern claimed Edwards, then an adjunct professor, plied him with beers, trolled briefly for prostitutes, watched ''heterosexual'' pornography and then exhorted him to masturbate in a game.

Masturbate in a game? Was it part of the game? Was it in lieu of a field goal or something?

Keeping The Faith

Tammy Faye Bakker Messner was someone who had an incredible spirit and fought through extremely tough circumstances without succumbing to the easy piety borne of ignorance. She treated people as they deserved to be treated, and for that adhered more to the Bible than her contemporary figures in the evangelical movement. She started as a laughingstock but closed her life as an inspiration. She will be missed.

“I refuse to label people,” Ms. Messner said in a 2000 documentary, “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” when asked about her attitudes toward gay rights. “We’re all just people made out of the same old dirt, and God didn’t make any junk.”

There's an incredible first-person story in this weekend's LA Times about William Lobdell, a writer who became extremely religious and sought to write a column on faith for the paper. As the years went by, with sex scandals and cardinals covering up pedophiles and all of the rest of the grotty side of the church, Lobdell found his faith slowly slipping away. We all at one point or another search for some higher power to help explain the unexplainable, but then when we're faced with the imperfections of human beings who purport to hold absolute moral authority, the explanations fall short. How does one look to man for proof of God? It's a very provocative read, almost too good for a mainstream newspaper, and while it asks important questions is will likely be met with criticism. Maybe if more religious leaders were like Tammy Faye, acknowledging of man's foibles yet tolerant and compassionate, it would be a lot easier for people like Lobdell to cover them without that sense of alienation and scorn. Absolute loyalty is not absolute faith, and what disgusted Lobdell the most were the subjects of the obviously morally diffident laity, who had no problem defending them outside of all reason.

I sought solace in another belief: that a church's heart is in the pews, not the pulpits. Certainly the people who were reading my stories would recoil and, in the end, recapture God's house. Instead, I saw parishioners reflexively support priests who had molested children by writing glowing letters to bishops and judges, offering them jobs or even raising their bail while cursing the victims, often to their faces.

On a Sunday morning at a parish in Rancho Santa Margarita, I watched congregants lobby to name their new parish hall after their longtime pastor, who had admitted to molesting a boy and who had been barred that day from the ministry. I felt sick to my stomach that the people of God wanted to honor an admitted child molester. Only one person in the crowd, an Orange County sheriff's deputy, spoke out for the victim.

If we were all a bit more honest, and less unequivocal that our belief was the ONLY belief, that our lifestyle was the ONLY lifestyle, this world would certainly be better for it. It requires thinking for oneself and coming to one's own conclusions. I wish we had more Tammy Fayes to be symbols of this in action.

Sex And Slavery In Iraq

A war zone is a terrible brreding ground for desperation, where survival means doing whatever is necessary. Usually that means leaving, but what if left for the refugees to sustain themselves? The sex trade, of course. This is shocking but it's all too typical an example of how refugees survive:

Back home in Iraq, Umm Hiba’s daughter was a devout schoolgirl, modest in her dress and serious about her studies. Hiba, who is now 16, wore the hijab, or Islamic head scarf, and rose early each day to say the dawn prayer before classes.

But that was before militias began threatening their Baghdad neighborhood and Umm Hiba and her daughter fled to Syria last spring. There were no jobs, and Umm Hiba’s elderly father developed complications related to his diabetes.

Desperate, Umm Hiba followed the advice of an Iraqi acquaintance and took her daughter to work at a nightclub along a highway known for prostitution. “We Iraqis used to be a proud people,” she said over the frantic blare of the club’s speakers. She pointed out her daughter, dancing among about two dozen other girls on the stage, wearing a pink silk dress with spaghetti straps, her frail shoulders bathed in colored light.

As Umm Hiba watched, a middle-aged man climbed onto the platform and began to dance jerkily, arms flailing, among the girls.

“During the war we lost everything,” she said. “We even lost our honor.” She insisted on being identified by only part of her name — Umm Hiba means mother of Hiba.

The sex trade has always been an outlet of last resort for poor women, alone and stranded in foreign countries. And in the war zone itself, there is such horror and confusion that deviance appears to rise to the surface, as if the only way to make sense of madness is through more of it:

A U.S. contractor who worked at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was sentenced to more than three years in prison Friday for possessing child pornography that he obtained using the prison's computer network.

Ahmed Hasan Khan, 31, of Woodbridge, had been working at Abu Ghraib for contractor L-3 Communications Holdings Inc. in November 2005 when a network administrator at the prison saw that Khan had been visiting suspicious sites. A search of Khan's laptop computer later found hundreds of child pornography images, including children as young as 4, officials said.

I'm not defending a purveyor of child pornography, just saying that up is down in a war zone, where human life appears to mean a little less, and so the ugliest thoughts are given sanction. These are the stories of war that are shielded from a sheltered nation. Here's another one:

In the months following September 2005, complaints began coming in to the US State Department that all was not well with its most ambitious project ever: a sprawling new embassy project on the banks of the ancient Tigris River. The largest, most heavily-fortified embassy in the world with over 20 buildings, it spans 104 acres-- comparable in size to the Vatican.

Soon after the State Department awarded a $592-million building contract to First Kuwaiti General Trading and Contracting in July 2005, thousands of low-paid migrant workers recruited from South Asia, the Philippines and other nations poured into Baghdad, beginning work to build the gargantuan complex within two years time. But sources involved in the embassy project tell Slogger that during First Kuwaiti’s rush to the finish the project by this summer on schedule, American managers and specialists involved with the project began protesting about the living and working conditions of lower-paid workers sequestered and largely unseen behind security walls bordering the embassy project inside the US-controlled Green Zone....

The Americans protested that construction crews lived in crowded quarters; ate sub-standard food; and had little medical care. When drinking water was scarce in the blistering heat, coolers were filled on the banks of the Tigris, a river rife with waterborne disease, sewage and sometimes floating bodies, they said. Others questioned why First Kuwaiti held the passports of workers. Was it to keep them from escaping? Some laborers had turned up “missing” with little investigation. Another American said laborers told him they were been misled in their job location. When recruited, they were unaware they were heading for war-torn Iraq.

Forced labor of this nature is common in Iraq, I wrote about this exact circumstance in October 2005.

So the desperately poor in Bangladesh, Nepal and elsewhere are brought into Iraq to scrub toilets and such. Never mind that unemployment in Iraq is skyrocketing, these migrants come much cheaper to KBR and the like. The system for transporting them from their countries to Baghdad is no different than the system for sending girls from Malaysia and Eastern Europe into the international sex trade. Workers get paid pennies in Iraq, and must pay that money back to their job placement agencies at predatory lending rates. Once they get there, they are not benefited by any labor protections. Should they die in insurgent attacks (and at least 200 of them have so far), their surviving next of kin are not likely to receive the death benefit that all families of federal contractors deserve by law. In a place as dangerous as Iraq, that's arguably the greatest motivating factor for subcontractors to use migrants.

This is called indentured servitude, and in a country where supreme effort is required just for it not to explode, this kind of dehumanization is the last thing that gets rectified. Obviously so, this has been known as a problem for two years. Taxpayers, you and I, are funding a 21st-century indentured servitude in the form of no-bid Congressional contracts funneled to the companies engaging in this practice.

I think what this all underscores is that wars should never be entered into frivolously or through deception, because they are so disruptive to society that it can break down at the edges. These stories of sexual slavery and deviancy and forced labor are now commonplace in Iraq; they weren't before. And it makes a mockery of this so-called "mission to spread democracy."

Unintended Consequences

California should get ready for scenes like this:

Five convicted sex offenders are living under a noisy highway bridge with the state's grudging approval because an ordinance intended to keep predators away from children made it nearly impossible for them to find housing.

Some of them sleep on cardboard raised slightly off the ground to avoid the rats. One of the men beds down on a pallet with a blanket and pillow. Some have been there for several weeks [...]

The conditions are a consequence of laws passed here and elsewhere around the country to bar sex offenders from living near schools, parks and other places children gather. Miami-Dade County's 2005 ordinance — adopted partly in reaction to the case of a convicted sex offender who raped a 9-year-old Florida girl and buried her alive — says sex offenders must live at least 2,500 feet from schools.

"They've often said that some of the laws will force people to live under a bridge," said Charles Onley, a research associate at the federally funded Center for Sex Offender Management. "This is probably the first story that I've seen that confirms that."

Am I asking for sympathy for sex offenders? Absolutely not. But putting people into desperate situations like this only exacerbates their despair and will do nothing but lead to more crimes. Statistics show that it doesn't matter where sex offenders live relative to where their sex crimes are committed. Laws like this are pieces of feel-good legislation that does nothing to actually protect minors and does violate the civil rights of the perpetrators, if we care about that anymore. And Prop. 83, passed by the voters last year and subsequently ruled partially unconstitutional, will lead to this kind of scene in urban areas.

Everyone feel safer now?