Friday, August 10, 2007

Dumb Legal News

A couple of minor odd news items.

  • Today's New York Times has an article about a federally funded program designed to root out obscenity on the Internet. For $150,000 (of your tax money, of course) two retired cops sit around tracking down dirty web sites funneled to them by a fundie group called Morality In Media. Over 67,000 "citizen complaints" have been investigated, resulting in a whopping zero prosecutions by the Justice Department. Why is it that when it comes to the First Amendment, online porn is so prevalent that we've got to shut the whole thing down "for the kids," but to find something that doesn't even merit prosecution, much less conviction, under obscenity laws it takes $150k?
  • Leroy Greer has a wife. He also has a mistress. And now the world knows it. Why? Because he ordered some flowers for his mistress from 1-800-Flowers, which then sent some follow up mailings to his home address. Where his wife found them, thus finding out about the affair. The good news? Greer and wife were already in the process of getting divorced. The bad news? Those flowers are probably gonna' cost him in the end.

1 comment:

Christopher Scott Jones said...

$80,000 of the 150K goes to purchasing Vasoline and Kleenex...