Author: TSO

The discussion on the Stolen Valor thread has gone down what I consider an absurd route, but so it goes. However, for those who assert a theory of victimless crimes being contrary to common law and constitutional law, I would ask that you spot for me any crimes I may commit in the follow hypothetical. (Also, as regards prostitution and how it is victimless, I would ask that you reconcile that with the common law tort of Alienation of Affections.)

Vt Woody is my arch nemesis. We loathe each other. And it has gotten worse since we both starting vying for the attention of the same cheerleader. Each day I sat in the dark scheming. My neighbor Herbert asked me to come spend some time with him and his dog Jesse. As I explained everything to him he said that nothing would make me feel better than to spend some time with young boys. So Herbert calls to all the boys in the neighborhood and they come over. Now Herbert is creepy, so he gives all the boys sleeping pills to knock them out. Only, they are Flintstone chewables, and the boys go home. Herbert is broken hearted, and has a heart attack and dies right there.

Now Herbert is a gun collector, and he has told me that he wants his remains burned with his guns. Instead though, I use his skull to fashion a really lovely lamp, while I ponder what to do to VT Woody. At long last I take one of Herbert’s guns, and a silencer, and head down to the football stadium. Now, because I was raised in a Tibettan Monastary by ninjas, I am able to unlock the gate, and then scale the side of the building with my sniper rifle. I hide in the lights and wait for VT Woody and his troop of cheeleaders (including the chick) to arrive.

Finally the game starts, and out they both come. I take aim and fire. Now, on account of being a shitty shot, I miss. But, because it is silenced, no one hears it. I take aim again. Nothing. I do this 8 times before a police officer sees me, and arrests me.

Now, what crime(s) have I committed under the theory that only crimes which have a victim are actionable?

I hate fighting with fellow milbloggers, even debating them. But, this deserves a response since I have devoted the better part of the past month working on a legal brief on the subject.

CJ asserts that the Stolen Valor Act is unconstitutional. Now, I obviously disagree, but many folks think so. However, CJ’s reasoning behind this conclusion concerns me. To wit, CJ asserts that by replacing certain words with easier to understand language, the First Amendment stands for the proposition that:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or curtailing with regulation, interference or control any form of speaking, communication, sound or gesture, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

No court has ever held that to be the case, as there are exceptions. In fact, were CJ to be accurate, it would invalidate NUMEROUS laws. For instance, that would immediately invalidate all libel, slander, defamation, copyright and similar laws. If there is no curtailing of what anyone can say, for any reason, then impersonation would be legal, perjury, and others.

In fact, even the example that CJ later uses would be invalidated by that reading:

Now, where I believe that laws should apply to these fakers is when they lie to obtain things that they wouldn’t otherwise be entitled to. It’s called “fraud” and there are stiff penalties for it. Fraud is “deceit, trickery, sharp practice, or breach of confidence, perpetrated for profit or to gain some unfair or dishonest advantage.” Every state has laws against fraud and those are the laws that should apply in these “stolen valor” cases.

What is fraud if not speech? If there can be no infringement of speech, how could one have a law regarding fraud? It is not illegal to give someone money, nor has anyone ever contended it was. Fraud is giving someone money based on an untruth which they have voiced. So, if Fraud is to be illegal, it must by neccessity be on the virtue of the speech, to wit, the falsehoods.

CJ proceeds:

The name of the damn Act makes no sense anyway. From whom are they “stealing” valor anyway? They didn’t steal MY valor and I would posit that they haven’t “stolen” anyone else’s, either. All they’ve done is stolen their own honor and integrity. But, the moment they attempt to gain pleasure, profit, or personal safety from someone else then should they be charged with fraud and dealt with accordingly.

I will dispense with the first part regarding the name and answer the second with questions of my own:

1) Has anyone ever attended the Army Achievement Medal Society of America conventions?
2) Does one treat with the same respect an AAM recipient and an MOH recipient? If not, why is that?
3) If you work with 4 people and you have agreed to provide the labor for $1, and your 3 coworkers get $1,000 do you end up better after the days labor or not? What if those 4 individuals comprise everyone in the town?

CJ next argues the bar pick up line argument. We have answered that one on a few occasions. The difference between a generic untruth, and asserting you have received an award for valor is two fold:

1) Congress has it withing it’s purview (Art I Sec 8) to regulate the Armed Services, and one of the premiere interests there is in ensuring the nobel nature thereof. This would not be the case with a generic bar line.
2) Verifying military records is somewhat straightforward, and is not susceptibe to the vagaries of subjective interpretation. One has the award, or one does not.

Lastly, CJ makes the argument of disenfectant, that one can always verify, and then vilify such individuals. However, to assume such is to assume that folks have the wherewithal and the ability to verify the stories. Alvarez (the case in the 9th cicruit) was in fact elected before his lies where figured out. If all the individuals in that district were either unable or unwilling to verify his claims, then would that not argue against such a belief? And in so thinking, does CJ assert that the media is the one we should trust in to verify such claims?

OK, so recently I got my Indiana Drivers License. Not because my other license was expiring, but because it was the only way to get a library card, and there is a ginormous library right next door. So 2 days ago I went over there and perused the 3 rows of books on CD. I selected 2, both among my favorite books. The first was Stephen Pressfield’s “The Afghan Campaign.” (I am listening to Pressfield’s Gates of Fire as I write this.) And the second was a 20 hour unedited copy of The Swords of Night and Day which is by David Gemmell.

Anyway, as some who know me can attest, I have a rather strange experience around books. Bookstore or library, the minute I enter I get so wound up I have to go to the restroom. VT Woody used to laugh at me every time we went in because even before finding the exit in case of tsunami or other calamity, I had to locate the restroom.

Anyway, now I read this:

NEW YORK, April 19 (UPI) — A 1992 survey of 5,000 U.S. librarians, long withheld by a professional journal, found one in five respondents had engaged in sexual trysts among the stacks.

Will Manly, who said the New York-based Wilson Library Bulletin withheld the results of his survey in 1992, published results recently on his Web site indicating 51 percent of librarians in the early 90s were willing to pose nude for money and 61 percent of respondents admitting to renting an X-rated film, the New York Daily News reported Monday.

Ok, so the librarians are randy, whatever. This concerns me though:

The survey also found 22 percent of respondents believed condom dispensers in library bathrooms would be a good idea and 14 percent said they had been sexually harassed by a patron.

I’ll admit that Joseph Conrad and Edmond Rostand get me going too, but damn, can’t wait until you get home? If you are that sexed up, go get a job at the SEC.

H/t Hotair Headlines which I actually use more often than Drudgereport lately. Getting a link from them is like winning the lottery, but no denying they are among the best at what they do.

Saw this over at Barstool Sports, and found it rather interesting….

Hmmmm. I am not sure what I think except that the Mayor here seems to have his shit together. Do these local TV stations run off taxpayer funds? Just curious on that regards. What oversight should the community have?

Like BSS says though, that lady can just shut her pie hole. It’s easy to get to channel 2 without going through channel 3, you hit the “0” key on the remote, followed by “2” and then “Enter.” Once again, you hit the “0” key on the remote, followed by “2” and then “Enter.”

What do you guys think? My only concern is if the local taxpayers are paying for it, they might ought to have some control over it. If there is no money spent by the taxpayers, then they need to just shut up. Either way, you don’t like what you see, change the channel. And what is with the TV station fuzzing out the chicks making out? Really? We watched Al Gore slide the tongue to his wife in a Presidential Debate, if we are truly so progressive on gay rights issues now, why would they block this out?

BTW- Meanwhile, back at the Hall of Injustice:

On a day when President Obama argued for more government regulation over the financial industry, a new government report reveals that some high-level regulators have spent more time looking at porn than policing Wall Street.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is supposed to be the sheriff of the financial industry, looking for financial crimes like Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. But the new report, obtained by ABC News, says senior employees of the SEC spent hours on the commission’s computers looking at sites like naughty.com, skankwire, youporn, and others.

The investigation, which was conducted by the SEC’s internal watchdog at the request of Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, found 31 serious offenders over the past two and a half years. Seventeen of the offenders were senior SEC officers with salaries ranging from $100,000 to $222,000 per year.

$100,000 plus to watch YouPorn? Never heard of skankwire, but given the option of having beaurocrats watch skankwire or screw me over all day, I say have fun with your porn. Someone is getting screwed either way, I’d prefer our civil servants watch rather than participate.

Stolen (?) from The Burn Pit because I think everyone should see this.

Meet Mohammed

Every once in a while some jackass person will go off and apologize to another country over something that America is alleged to have perpetrated. The one that made me the maddest was “War-Resister” Matthis Chiroux who apologized to an Afghan Peace Activist saying:

[I]n 2005, for a brief time, I helped occupy Malalai’s country, and it was wrong. It was my mistake. I should not have been there. I should not have been supporting this oppression of her people. Today I want to look Malalai in the eye, and I want to tell you, Malalai, how sorry I am for the violence that my Army has done to your people, to your country. I want to apologize to you for the role that I played in it. I was wrong, and I will show you that my country and the rest of the world can come to a place where they can admit wrong, apologize, and offer some sort of reconciliation.

What really made this apology so asinine is that Matthis spent a grand total of 6 days in Afghanistan, and never left Bagram Air Base. When I was in theater, I watched guys in my unit ask for things from home not for themselves, but for the children and the people of Afghanistan who needed the small things: some soap, comic books and sharpies.

I served over there with fellow Milblogger The Sniper. (His site is mildly unsafe for work.) He’s my friend, he’s my comrade in arms, and he made a picture that sums up EVERYTHING that is wrong with folks like Matthis who deign to apologize on our behalf. They say that a picture is worth 1,000 words, well, this is the Encyclopedia Britanica of pictures.

It is something I think a lot about. Putting aside the moral and legal validity of the conflicts we find ourselves in, what separates us from them?

I’ll answer that, THIS is what does:

LANSING, Mich. -A 13-year-old Iraqi boy brought to Michigan a year ago by a National Guardsman so he could get plastic surgery to repair scars from a house fire no longer is shy about pulling off his beloved Detroit Tigers baseball cap.

Black, glossy hair now grows where only scar tissue was before. And Mohammed’s left hand and wrist — deformed in the fire when he was 2 — now can adeptly field baseballs.

On Sunday, Mohammed will head back to Iraq with Army National Guard Major David Howell, who brought the shy, slender boy to mid-Michigan last April for the life-changing surgery.

I could waste your time and write up a bunch of stuff on this, but as is my custom, why write when I have a perfectly fine video to share? [Consider this a mild hankey warning.]

And so, Mohammed is going home. At first I felt sad that he was returning, since he seems so happy here. But his family is there, and that is his home. It’s men like Major David Howell who make me feel so humble that I was granted the honor of serving in your United States Army.

I pray that the future of Iraq is entrusted to the children and young men like Mohammed who were touched by men and women like Major Howell who awake each day in theater and strive to be the very public, beneficent face of America. Acts like this can have repercussions just as long-lasting as when bad things happen. I wish we could see more stories like this.

I’ve always reserved for Michigan State a hostility that is only surpassed by the loathesome, degenerate and perfidious New York Yankees. Maybe it is time to reevaluate that?

I have nothing against Udall, but this is idiotic:

I am a longtime advocate for repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” which prohibits gay men and women from serving openly in the military, and today I had the chance to speak with three former service members discharged under that law.

For the 17th million time:

DADT is NOT the Law. DADT is a policy put in place by Clinton. As wiki helpfully reminds those who have forgotten:

Don’t ask, don’t tell (DADT) is the common term for the policy restricting the United States military from efforts to discover or reveal closeted gay, lesbian, and bisexual service members or applicants, while barring those that are openly gay, lesbian, or bisexual from military service. The restrictions are mandated by federal law Pub.L. 103-160 (10 U.S.C. § 654). Unless one of the exceptions from 10 U.S.C. § 654(b) applies, the policy prohibits anyone who “demonstrate(s) a propensity or intent to engage in homosexual acts” from serving in the armed forces of the United States, because “it would create an unacceptable risk to the high standards of morale, good order and discipline, and unit cohesion that are the essence of military capability.”

If you repeal DADT, THE POLICY, you are left with the law which dictates that homosexual acts are incompatible with military service. i.e. Gays get tossed out, whether they disclose their “gayness” or not. DADT was an effort to lighten the burden on homosexuals serving, removing that policy will hurt them.

Is it too much to ask that our lawmakers actually understand the laws they are talking about?

First, the background from WaPo:

Sometimes you have a headline that makes the rest of the story superfluous, but here’s the background. Actor Lance Baxter, otherwise known as “D.C. Douglas,” currently known as the man who informs you how much Geico can save you on car insurance, left a message last month with FreedomWorks in which he asked the group how many “mentally retarded” people it had on staff and what it would do when a tea partyer “killed someone.” On April 14, FreedomWorks put his voicemail online.

My sympathy level for this guy was low, but then it plummetted when I read his twaddle at his blog. When I first got my 12.3 minutes of internet fame, some asshole thought it would be appropriate to take my name, my actual name mind you, and get a yahoo account with that name, and then splash across the internet “my” search for underage boys to fornicate with. Then Media Matters put up some bio thing of me that contained so many inaccuracies that I sent them 4 emails to get them to correct it, they never did.

Now, bear in mind I never maligned a group of people, I never called anyone retarded, never suggested anyone would be killed etc. Actually, in watching the video again, I still think I was painfully polite. Nonetheless, I got hit from about 60 angles. Some folks where saying that I wasn’t even an Iraq vet. That should suprise no one, since I never once claimed to be.

My point is this, there is very little in the way of private/public distinction, and this knucklehead learned that the hard way. I do VERY little to hide my identity, but every now and again some punk comes along to “out” the real me, and some suggest contacting my employer. NEWSFLASH: This blog is *ME*, private me, not suit and tie at work me. The left seems incapable of that distinction.

Now, do I think the guy should have been fired? Honestly, don’t know, don’t care. I have Geico, and I am now torn between cancelling it to voice my disgust with this jackass, and keeping it since they fired him. Either way, that is the companies problem, not mine. Just as it is my employers’ decision, and your employers decision etc. I believe in the private/public distinction, and try to “do unto others” etc, even though no one has shown me the same respect. Luckily, I have a great employer.

But I am wondering what you guys think. If the tables were turned, what would you say. If it was Flo the Progressive Lady and she called MoveOn and asked how many ri-tards were injured coming up with the General Petreaus ad, should she be fired? And what, if any, is the responsibility of Freedom Works not to put the voicemail on line? I would argue none, but curious what you guys think.

So, the Punch Heard Round the World case has started in Iraq:

A U.S. sailor testified Wednesday he saw a Navy SEAL punch an Iraqi prisoner suspected of masterminding the killings in 2004 of four U.S. private security contractors, as the court-martial of another member of the elite unit allegedly involved in the incident opened at a military base outside Baghdad.

Petty Officer 1st Class Julio Huertas, wearing his blue Navy uniform, appeared in a military courtroom at the Victory Base Camp on Baghdad’s western outskirts to answer charges of dereliction of duty and impeding an official investigation. He has pleaded not guilty.

Huertas, 28, of Blue Island, Illinois, is the first of three Navy SEALs to go on trial in connection with the alleged assault of the Iraqi prisoner, Ahmed Hashim Abed. He is accused of failing to safeguard the prisoner and attempting to influence the testimony of another service member.

Let’s home the collateral bruising doesn’t ruin these guys careers.