Judge Dredd wannabe Nancy Grace is finding herself on the defensive as Ben Siebert, falsely dubbed the ‘Selfie Stalker,’ is filing a defamation lawsuit against Grace. Grace, never one to let the facts get in the way of a sensational story to boost her ratings, made no effort to correct her mistake.
The lawsuit filed Monday in Denver says Grace, who hosts a show on Turner Broadcasting’s HLN network, incorrectly told millions of viewers that Ben Seibert invaded a woman’s home and snapped a photo of himself on her phone, which she described as a “textbook serial killer’s calling card.”
Seibert said Grace humiliated him with her commentary, which went viral on an array of social media sites where readers called him a weirdo, a sicko, a rapist and a pervert. The suit says Grace didn’t check the facts and didn’t care.
Wow, Grace didn’t check the facts and didn’t care? As far as I can tell, this is normal operating procedure for Nancy Grace. It goes something like this:
Accuse an individual of wrongdoing
Use emotional language and imagery
Report only facts which seem to support her theory
Launch into ad hominem attacks against anyone who suggest she is jumping to conclusions or that the accused is innocent until proven guilty
“It hasn’t been easy for him as a result of this,” Seibert’s attorney, John Pineau said.
Denver Metro Crime Stoppers released Seibert’s photo on Jan. 29, after a woman called police saying a man had entered her home while she was putting her children to bed. Police said she was especially fearful because she believed the man had taken a selfie with her phone inside of her home.
But further investigation showed the picture was Seibert’s Facebook photo that had been taken elsewhere. Seibert, who was working in California, called police Feb. 8 after friends told him his photo was being associated with the Denver home invasion. He was not charged.
The same month, police told Grace her broadcast was false, but she continued to air it, according to the lawsuit, which seeks more than $100,000 in damages.
Personally, I think $100k is too low. Nancy Grace needs to be taught a lesson. We all make mistakes. If she had taken steps to correct this error and learned to take a different, more ethical approach to her ‘journalism’ such a lawsuit would be unnecessary. The damage she has done to advance the lay person’s understanding of the criminal justice system, however; cannot easily be quantified.
The idea that either Democrats OR Republicans actually support net neutrality is a joke.
The Democrats have (and still do) very strongly supported big media and big communications, who are largely anti neutrality. it’s only when net neutrality obviously became a big issue among young liberals (who were largely unmotivated to turn out this midterm election) that they have pretended to support it.
The Dems could have made it a campaign issue, except then they wouldn’t have had the huge media and communications industry money for the elections, that they needed to avoid getting spanked even worse than they did.
If Obama had actually supported net neutrality, he wouldn’t have appointed an anti neutrality industry stooge as FCC chair… but again, if he did that, the Dems would have lost that sweet sweet big media money.
On the other hand, the Republicans are largely anti “big media” and anti “big communications”, and only became anti-neutrality when the Democrats decided to take it as an issue.
What is Net Neutrality?
Frankly, any libertarian should support net neutrality as a principle (government regulation is another matter).
Net neutrality as a principle, is simple. All legitimate traffic should be treated equally, no matter the source or destination. No internet service provider should filter, censor, or slow down traffic from their competitors, their critics, or because of politics or national origin; or for any reason other than technical requirements for safe, efficient, and reliable network operation.
It’s how the internet has always been run, up until recently, without any government action necessary. There’s a famous quote: “The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it”. Any internet service provider that censored, filtered, or slowed down traffic from anyone (for anything other than technical reasons) was routed around, and cut out of the net, by its peers. It was a great example of independent action and peer enforcement working in the marketplace.
Unfortunately, this is no longer the case.
Why is it an issue now?
Large media and communications companies like Comcast and Verizon have been deliberately and artificially blocking or slowing down traffic to and from their critics and competitors.
Of course, getting government involved does generally make things worse. In fact, it already did in this case, since the government has been involved from the beginning, and it was largely government action that created the current problem.
In a rational and unbiased competitive environment, consumers would have a reasonable choice of internet service providers, and any ISP that chose to censor or limit access, would lose customers, and either correct themselves or go out of business.
Unfortunately, we don’t have anything like a free and competitive market in internet access. Government regulation and favoritism has created huge monopolies (or at best duopolies, and no, wireless access is not realistic and reasonable competition given the distorted market and cost structures there either) in internet access.
We’ve reached a point where the telecommunications monopolies that government created and support, are in fact deliberately applying anticompetitive, unfair (and in some cases already unlawful) restraint against their critics and competitors.
Since they are government supported monopolies, the market is not allowed to correct the undesirable private action.
This means that, unfortunately, government action IS required… and even if it were not required, it’s inevitable, because politics is politics, and this is now an “Issue”.
So what do we do about the problem?
Please note, I don’t trust either Democrats OR Republicans on the issue in general, and I don’t trust either, or the FCC to regulate neutrality at all. Cruz does have at least one valid concern, in that the history of government regulation of almost every industry, but particularly technology, is mainly a long record of suppressing innovation and other negative unintended consequences.
The ideal solution is to end the government created internet access monopolies that most Americans live under, and allow free and open market competition to correct the problem.
Without government limitations on competition in actual high speed, high quality internet access; competition will increase, prices will fall, and any provider that filters or slows legitimate traffic will lose all their customers and go out of business.
This isn’t just a prediction or libertarian idealism talking by the way. It’s been proved out in Korea, Japan… even in the UK. Everywhere that internet access competition has been allowed to flourish, everything has improved (conversely, in the U.S. where we have deliberately increased the power and scope of these monopolies, we have the worst internet access of any technologically advanced nation).
Unfortunately, that isn’t going to happen.
The next best thing, is to mandate net neutrality in the least intrusive, least stupid way possible, and to react intelligently (and rapidly) to changes in technology and its uses, to avoid regulatory distortion and suppression of innovation.
Unfortunately, that isn’t likely to happen either…
That said, it’s remotely possible for us get closer to that, quicker, than we can to disassembling the thousands of federal, state, and local regulations, which have created these monopolies, and made the barriers to entry for competition impossibly high.
Of course neither Democrats nor Republicans support or plan to do that.
The whole thing is a spiraling charlie fox of disingenuous cynical idiocy.
Personally, I say forget Obama, forget Cruz, and listen to Oliver (or if you don’t care for Oliver, or can’t watch a video, there The Oatmeal):
*Reactionary Populist Disingenuous Grandstanding Cynic… not the Republican party, just Cruz
Edited to add a few paragraphs clarifying what net neutrality was, and why it’s currently an issue
I am a cynically romantic optimistic pessimist. I am neither liberal, nor conservative. I am a (somewhat disgruntled) muscular minarchist… something like a constructive anarchist.
Basically what that means, is that I believe, all things being equal, responsible adults should be able to do whatever the hell they want to do, so long as nobody’s getting hurt, who isn’t paying extra
On Friday, United States Supreme Court agreed to hear the appeal in King v. Burwell. The plaintiffs in that case assert that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act only allows tax credits to people who buy insurance “from an exchange established by a state.” The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeal disagreed and ruled that the federal government may interpret that language as allowing tax credits to purchasers who bought insurance on one of the federal exchanges, operating in the more than 30 states that declined to create their own.
On the same day the Fourth Circuit delivered its decision in King, a panel in the D.C. Circuit found for the plaintiffs in a companion case captioned Halbig v. Burwell. This conflict would ordinarily invite SCOTUS to weigh in. However, the D.C. Circuit then accepted a rehearing en banc in Halbig. Thus, even though the King plaintiffs appealed, many observers speculated SCOTUS would wait to see if a conflict really developed, or if after rehearing in Halbig, the courts ended up aligned.
As a result, it is somewhat surprising that SCOTUS accepted the King appeal, and it may signal bad news for the Affordable Care Act. As Nicholas Bagley writing a SCOTUSblog explains:
[F]our justices apparently think—or at least are inclined to think—that King was wrongly decided. … [T]here’s no other reason to take King. The challengers urged the Court to intervene now in order to resolve “uncertainty” about the availability of federal tax credits. In the absence of a split, however, the only source of uncertainty is how the Supreme Court might eventually rule. After all, if it was clear that the Court would affirm in King, there would have been no need to intervene now. The Court could have stood pat, confident that it could correct any errant decisions that might someday arise.
There’s uncertainty only if you think the Supreme Court might invalidate the IRS rule. That’s why the justices’ votes on whether to grant the case are decent proxies for how they’ll decide the case. The justices who agree with King wouldn’t vote to grant. They would instead want to signal to their colleagues that, in their view, the IRS rule ought to be upheld. The justices who disagree with King would want to signal the opposite.
And there are at least four such justices. If those four adhere to their views—and their views are tentative at this stage, but by no means ill-informed—the challengers just need one more vote to win. In all likelihood, that means that either Chief Justice Roberts or Justice Kennedy will again hold the key vote.
If I read this correctly, the speculation is that four (or more) SCOTUS justices agreed to accept the case in order to send a signal to the lower courts still considering challenges to this provision of the ACA. The signal they wanted to send is that those other courts should not necessarily follow King, because SCOTUS might think it was wrongly decided.
A reversal of King (i.e., a finding in the plaintiff challengers’ favor) would seriously undermine—perhaps fatally—the structure of the Affordable Care Act. Fully 87% of the people who purchased policies through the federal exchanges during the first open enrollment period are receiving subsidies. If the government cannot give subsidies to low-income purchasers, it cannot tax them for failing to have the insurance, and the entire system collapses under its own weight. Fewer people can afford the insurance, the risk pool shrinks, costs rise, and more people are forced to opt out.
If on the other hand, SCOTUS upholds tax credits not authorized by Congress, it would be one more in a long line of revisions, waivers, exemptions, delays and modifications made to the law made by the very administration that purports to uphold it.
Supposedly, Colorado parents have a ‘unique challenge’ this Halloween. You see, because enough Colorado voters were bamboozled into legalizing pot for recreational purposes in 2012 (in addition to the already legal for medicinal purposes), now parents have to worry about cannabis laced candy in their trick-or-treat bags. There have even been products made available to test questionable candy of the presence of THC. It really makes you wonder if Canada will have the same issue, since it was rumored that the country was going to legalize recreational cannabis. According to rumors, Canadian citizens will even be allowed to buy concentrates online canada dispensaries will also be able to offer this type of service. However, only time will tell if this rumor is true or not; as for Colorado, it seems that they may have their work cut out for them.
[T]his year should be no different for parents, who should always employ common sense on Halloween. Throw out any unwrapped candy and inspect all packaging before letting your kids gorge on treats.
If the package looks suspicious, tampered with, torn, unwrapped or in unfamiliar packaging, throw out the candy. That should be the same message every year.
Wow, how hard was that? The board also points out that these ‘edibles’ aren’t cheap. The example they use: a package of 10 pot laced gummy bears retails for about $27 before taxes, that doesn’t include the price for weed delivery washington DC, Colorado, and other states provide. Who is really going to be that motivated to spend that much money to get strange children high? I suppose it only takes one to start a new wave of ‘Reefer Madness’ circa 2014*.
My bold prediction: there won’t be even one reported case of a child receiving pot-laced candy in Colorado. Do you know what I’m starting to think this all is? A marketing scheme for people to realize that marijuana is now legalized in Colorado, after all, it’s apparent that cannabis brands thrive with creative talent, so maybe there is no alarm that a child will receive THC-infused goods after all. Instead, maybe it was just someone’s bright idea to advertise legal cannabis to the potential consumers of Colorado?
*Maybe a bit conspiratorial on my part but who would be more motivated to give children pot-laced candy, those who are in favor of its legalization or those opposed?
Here’s a great observation for Lucy Steigerwald writing from Rare:
Whether the shooting of Brown by Wilson was justified or not, it’s important to remember that there were good reasons people distrusted the Ferguson police’s narrative of events.
Police did everything wrong after Brown was killed. They left his body in the street, they refused to answer questions or identify the officer. They used military tech to answer the protests that resulted. They repeatedly teargassed crowds, arresting peaceful protesters and members of the media.
Officer Darren Wilson shouldn’t be punished for the impression that people — especially minorities — have of the police. If he doesn’t deserve prosecution, he shouldn’t be prosecuted. Whether he deserves harsh, little, or no punishment is still up for debate.
Read the whole thing. The entire article is worth quoting but I thought I would just wet your beak.
