Charging that Craigslist remains a "one-stop shop for all your prostitution needs," a Florida sheriff yesterday announced the arrest of 28 women who allegedly advertised sexual services on the popular online classifieds site. Dubbed "Operation Hot Date," the undercover police action also netted several pimps who worked with the alleged hookers, said Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd. The women, pictured in the mug shots on the following pages, offered a variety of sexual acts carrying prices between $125 and $800. Two of the alleged hookers who arrived for appointments with undercover officers were pregnant, and a third arrived with fur-lined handcuffs. In announcing the sweep, Judd criticized Craigslist for "facilitating prostitution" and deriving proceeds from the illegal act, since the site charges for the placement of the adult ads. Judd added that he wanted to press charges against the web site, which has previously pledged to law enforcement agencies that it would crack down on ads promoting prostitution. I wonder if they can claim that they knew it was the police all along and that they were just playing along with them. Nah, they'd have to be crazy to try that. Well, in any case, click on the link to find out what goes for $150-$800 across Florida. AFAIAC, the reason the girls are smiling is because they know the police just paid thousands of bucks in straight time, OT, gas, maintenance, overhead, legal counsel costs, detention costs, etc. to arrest them, and they won't get a dime back from them. And they'll be back on the street after they're done getting free room, board and healthcare for a while. Oh, I guess the judge gets some attention though, even though he didn't even put a dent in the industry in Florida any more than he did in DC. Maybe he and Kanye can form a support group.
#2
Judd added that he wanted to press charges against the web site, which has previously pledged to law enforcement agencies that it would crack down on ads promoting prostitution.
Of course Judd is posturing. He knows that local penny rags have 'personal' sections that do functionally the same thing and that any attempt to prosecute the web service would result in questions why such prosecutions weren't executed against those. Judd already knows the reason and why such costly efforts would fundamentally fail in the court system. Just ask the AG of South Carolina who's playing a similar game.
#5
The dole has been reformed with stringent requirements, with the gadabouts now forced to be "working girls". The real crime is usually tax evasion, although some actually do pay, filing as "independent contractors", "performing artists", "dancers", or "massage therapists". Going after the johns would be more fair, especially after the suicide of the DC madam over this kind of stuff. Legalizing it would be a better alternative.
#6
This will not do one thing to reduce prostitution. Those women will still be prostitutes tomorrow, craigs list or no craigs list.
Just legalize and tax it like just about every other western nation does. This idiocy of simply trying to hide it spreads disease, gets people hurt, and funnels money to the mob.
No civilization in history has ever gotten rid of prostitution.
#7
If only he would keep to having RAB encounters with scumbag Miami drug dealers (the officers shot him 40 some times because they ran out of bullets!). I think some of this is budget related. On our road someone from code enforcement went and gave violation notices to almost everyone. So this might be justify your budget time.
This is pretty much fish in a barrel stuff get a short term rental house near Disney and start calling hookers. Last time they did a reverse sting by placing ads on Craig's List and asked potential johns to e-mail them a photo to set up the date. Those guys weren't smiling.
#9
The real crime is usually tax evasion, although some actually do pay, filing as "independent contractors", "performing artists", "dancers", or "massage therapists".
In case you haven't been following "current events", it seems Kanye has been feeling a little bit too irrelevant for his liking lately, so he thought he'd do something racist about it.
Kanye West called Taylor Swift with a "very sincere" apology Tuesday for interrupting her acceptance speech at Sunday's MTV Video Music Awards, Swift said.
West phoned Swift following her appearance on ABC's "The View" Tuesday, her publicist said. Swift talked about it in a radio interview with ABC. "Kanye did call me and he was very sincere in his apology," she said. "And I accepted that apology." Score one for Kanye.
The apology came the morning after West, in an interview with Jay Leno, appeared to blame the pain of his mother's death two years ago for his "rude" behavior. The Jay Leno show? Score two for Kanye, at his mother's expense. Man, is there nothing this guy won't do for publicity?
The rapper told Leno he would now "take some time off" to think about how he will "make it through the rest of this life."
I think that's a very good idea.
West's appearance on the prime-time premiere of "The Jay Leno Show" capped a 24-hour period that began Sunday evening with him strolling down the red carpet at New York's Radio City Music Hall while gulping from a bottle of cognac.
The low-light came about an hour later, when West jumped onstage and grabbed the microphone from Swift as she accepted the Best Female Video award. West declared that Beyonce Knowles should have won. Whoa, maybe this should have been Kanye's first score. I guess it's three for Kanye now.
West appeared sober and humble when he spoke on Leno's Los Angeles stage Monday, an appearance that was originally to be just musical.
"I immediately knew in this situation that it was wrong," West told Leno. "And it wasn't a spectacle, you know. It was actually someone's emotions, you know, that I stepped on and it was very, it was just, it was rude, period."
When Leno asked West what his mother would have thought of his behavior, he fell silent for more than a dozen seconds and appeared near tears. Leno pressed him again. "Would she be disappointed in this? Would she give you a lecture?" Ooh, that's gonna leave a mark.
West gave a rambling, emotional answer. "Yeah, you know, obviously, you know, I deal with hurt and, you know, so many, you know, celebrities, they never take the time off, and I've never taken the time off to really, you know, I just, music after music and tour after tour on tour, and I'm just ashamed that my hurt caused someone else's hurt." Uh huh. Haven't had any time to grow up, either, I see.
West said he wasn't trying to justify his behavior, "because I was just in the wrong. That's clear." And you'll be just as sorry the next time you shoot your racist mouth off, right?
"But I need to, after this, just to take some time off and analyze how I'm going to, you know, make it through rest of this life, how I'm going to improve," he said. "Because, I am a celebrity and that's something I have to deal with."
He said he would like to personally apologize to Swift, a 19-year-old pop-country singer. "And if there's anything I can do to help Taylor in the future or help anyone, I want to live this thing. It's hard sometimes, so."
After his four-minute talk with Leno, West joined fellow hip-hop superstars Jay-Z and Rihanna to perform "Run This Town," a song they recorded together. Score four for Kanye.
The timing of West's antics came at a good time for Leno, who embarked on a new era of his career Monday. After 17 years of hosting "The Tonight Show," Leno debuted his 10 p.m. weeknight talk show on NBC.
Apologies from celebrities behaving badly have boosted Leno's ratings.
In 1995, Leno enjoyed a ratings-grabbing moment when he asked actor Hugh Grant, "What the hell were you thinking?" Grant had been arrested two weeks earlier for public lewd conduct with a Hollywood hooker. When Grant told Leno "I did a bad thing," it gave Leno's "Tonight Show" a viewership bump that has been credited with solidifying his lead over rival David Letterman in the late-night ratings war.
This is just the kind of "immediacy" Leno was talking about in a call with reporters last week. "The idea here is that we'll tape a new, fresh show every single day, talking about the events that happened that day that night," Leno said.
Jerry Seinfeld also appeared on Leno's premiere Monday. At the end of they day: Score four for Kanye, one for Swift, and one for Leno the Enabler. Why change something if it's working? We'll see him again.
#1
I can think of many countries that would like nothing better than to see America get bogged down in Afghanistan, not the least of which is preventing Islamic extremism from spilling into their own backyards. Sad to say, they would like nothing better than to see us become trapped, overextended and bled to death.
On Tuesday, August 18, the Saudi Arabia-based Arab News reported that Khalid bin Mahfouz, the Saudi billionaire perhaps best known in the West as the "Libel Tourist" for his penchant for using U.K. connections to bring libel lawsuits against his critics had passed away.
However, the much-publicized phenomenon of 'libel tourism' -- that is, the practice of non-United Kingdom residents suing American researchers and authors for libel in the plaintiff-friendly U.K. -- had already effectively met its own demise over a year ago, date needed after Rachel Ehrenfeld's refusal to comply with a British court's default judgment in favor of bin Mahfouz against her led to the enactment of protective legislation in several U.S. states, and consideration of similar bills in Congress.
In fact, bin Mahfouz's only newsworthy success came when he sued for libel over the book Alms for Jihad: Charity and Terrorism in the Islamic World, whose publisher, Cambridge University Press, capitulated to him, abjectly apologizing publicly and even requesting that libraries pull copies off of shelves -- a request that American libraries categorically refused. However, unlike the Ehrenfeld case, bin Mahfouz's suit over Alms for Jihad, reprehensible and predatory though it was, was not a case of libel tourism, since Alms for Jihad was "Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge."
Yet, despite its brief and extremely limited existence, libel tourism has been allowed for too long to overshadow the real extent of the threat to free and open discourse on radical Islam, terrorism, and its sources of funding -- Islamist legal warfare, or "lawfare."
Unlike libel tourism, Islamist lawfare is not a mere tactic, but part of a grand strategy, and one that uses every legal opportunity possible to achieve its goals: including rewriting international human rights norms to comport with Shari'a-based interpretation, attempts to globally criminalize manufactured and unsubstantiated assertions of "Islamophobia" or "defamation" of religion, claims of "hate speech" or "harassment," and promoting self-censorship by American publishers and media. Even as far as predatory libel lawsuits go, there have been many cases brought within the U.S. without the need to resort to British libel law, leaving bin Mahfouz's "libel tourism" as generally unnecessary.
Even within the United States, fixating on the predatory domestic libel suits that are a mainstay of Islamist lawfare is dangerously myopic. Counterterrorism consultant Bruce Tefft is being sued by a John Doe Muslim police officer not for libel, but for "workplace harassment." Random House's cowardly decision not to publish the novel The Jewel of Medina, like Palgrave McMillan's earlier decision to renege on publishing QURAN: A Reformist Translation, had nothing to do with threats of libel lawsuits, but everything to do with Islamist pressure.
Despite these and countless other examples, few are even aware of the term Islamist lawfare, much less the extent of its reach. Conducting an online search for the term "Islamist lawfare" on a major search engine will likely result in somewhere between 14,000 and 18,400 hits, while a search for "libel tourism" will net between 189,000 and 213,000 hits. In part, the number of hits for libel tourism is the positive result of excellent analyses of the phenomenon, such as Andrew C. McCarthy's highly informative article, which appeared in the September, 2008 issue of Commentary magazine, where he clearly laid out the crucial public interest at stake, as "the need to understand and address financial support systems that invigorate the terror networks targeting Americans for mass murder."
The danger does not stem from the fact that a search for libel tourism nets many results, which demonstrates how effective the response to libel tourism has been, but from the fact that the vastly more complex and dangerous issue of Islamist lawfare has yet to be fully addressed in the public arena.
Perhaps bin Mahfouz's demise will provide an end to the dangerous overemphasis that has been placed on libel tourism. Islamist lawfare is a far larger threat that needs to be understood as such. Otherwise, we in the West will find ourselves further outflanked by Islamist entities with immense political and financial resources -- and by a certain point, that could prove sufficient for radical Islam's victory.
Lots of people who voted for Obama believed that his election would reflect the extent to which Americans had moved beyond racism. That was part of why some people voted for him. Little did we realize that it would turn every criticism of the President into an occasion to make an accusation of racism. Racism is revolting, but so is the notion that we aren't allowed to criticize a President!
Jimmy Carter's supremely sleazy accusation requires a solid, sound rebuke. It is an effort to place the President of the United States beyond criticism.
Imagine if, before last year's election, someone had argued: If a black man becomes President, anyone who dares to criticize him will be called a racist.
1. I would have viewed that argument itself as racist. If that is really true, I would have said, then it means that we have to vote against the candidate because he is black, since it is not acceptable to have a President who can't be criticized.
2. I would also have said: It is racist to say that it's racist to criticize a black President, because you are being patronizing and you are saying that a black person needs to be coddled and protected in some special way that doesn't apply to white people.
Jimmy Carter is doing something that, before the election, he would not have revealed that he planned to do. It is a low and despicable political move that he should be ashamed of.
And since demanding apologies is all the rage, let me say that I would like the wizened old husk of a former President to beg our forgiveness.
Posted by: Mike ||
09/16/2009 15:22 ||
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#1
Don't forget that is is the man, while President, confessed that he had 'lust in his heart'. He's never had any sense of what something might sound like if he blurts it out. He doesn't have enough descretion to qualify as a hairdresser let alone as President. Thank God he is no longer President.
Posted by: Richard of Oregon ||
09/16/2009 16:18 Comments ||
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#2
"... you are being patronizing and you are saying that a black person needs to be coddled and protected in some special way that doesn't apply to white people."
Congratulations, Obama-voter Ann.
You just summed up what "liberals" think about all non-white people (except maybe not Asians, as long as those Asians are make high grades and are really smart....).
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
09/16/2009 20:27 Comments ||
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#3
Althouse prides herself, ad nauseum, on being bipartisan.
I can imagine, in her own mind, she only criticizes Obama's white half.
Posted by: 49 Pan ||
09/16/2009 10:49 Comments ||
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#2
The organizers say that it was Barry's inauguration speech in January and his speech broadcast from Egypt in June that gave them the idea for this prayer gathering on Capitol Hill.
#3
I don't object to praying. No ever got trouble praying too loudly or too often. Pray more, kill children less.Praying too much is not a radical Muslim problem.
Posted by: ed ||
09/16/2009 14:41 Comments ||
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#6
Kind of an amateurish looking web site. The graphics are strictly high school grade and I spotted at least one typo in less than a minute's worth of browsing. If Allan is so powerful you'd think he could come up with a better web site.
#7
I'm all in favor of National Days of Prayer, but if someone proposed a National Day of Catholic Prayer, or Lutheran Prayer, or even Jewish Prayer, it would be wrong to use public grounds for it. So how does this BS get allowed?
The answer would seem to me to have lots of Christian and Jewish and Ba-Hai and Wiccan people attend, with crosses, Star's of David and even some pagan synbols, maybe a Boar's head of something? That should help show the nature of the religion opf peace (lol)
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
By Aaron Eitan Meyer
