by Colin Sweeney

The Human Rights Campaign stands as the the most well-connected and “influential” gay lobbying group in the United States. The repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is tops among their legislative goal this year. But winter is melting to spring and there is nothing to show other than Congressman Barney Frank’s rumblings that repeal may not happen until 2011-when the 2012 elections, in which Democrats have 23 Senate seats up for reelection, are well gearing up. So HRC was forced to break out the big guns down in D.C. Who else to force the arc of history other than a reality show star?

To be fair, this rally they held yesterday-across the street from a theater showcasing Harvey Fierstein in Fiddler on the Roof-was to be a Very Serious Episode of Kathy Griffin’s “My Life on the D-List.” The singular break with tradition, where Kathy Griffin shows that she cares more than just about Kathy Griffin. That’s hard to do on your own reality show! Yet she does! She tells us she supports the troops at USO shows! She read aloud the emails and letters she receives from gay service members and their would-be spouses detailing the destructive secrecy that defines their everyday lives.

For HRC, and for the Bravo network as well, it was already pretty much a slam dunk. HRC, including honcho Joe Solmonese, were all in matching “Repeal DADT” shirts, so they showed up well. (They made up about a tenth of the crowd.) They got local ABC 7 and FOX 5 to report on Griffin’s smackdown of Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Crazytown)-Griffin called the nutbag a “nutbag.” The synergy therefore spread beyond the 300-odd activists (and, obviously, HRC staffers) corralled in a rally in D.C.; amplified by the evening news, much-later to be amplified on Kathy Griffin’s show.

This triple win then, through no doing of HRC’s, became a quadruple win.

Lieutenant Dan Choi, the West Point graduate and combat veteran who outed himself on The Rachel Maddow Show last year, invited himself to speak at this “rally.” (Choi was initially discharged from the Army after his self-outing and has since been reinstated as an enlisted officer.) At the end, he asked everyone to march, not down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Capitol and Barney and Bachmann, but up Pennsylvania toward the White House. His remarks were met with cheers (though not from HRC, who hadn’t invited Choi and didn’t answer his requests to speak (though Griffin did).

Lieutenant Choi then left the stage to begin his march. He looked really intense. Most of the media stayed with Griffin, though-who, her job done, did not follow along. A block up, the few hundred at the rally were struggling to keep up with a soldier on a mission. By the time Choi reached the White House gates, mostly just a few dozen tourists were present to witness a uniformed officer in the U.S. Army handcuff himself to the White House gate. He was, yes, soon arrested, as were two others. Given such unbecoming behavior from an officer, he will likely be discharged once again. And so progresses the cause of equality for gay Americans and D-list celebrities and their respective television networks and lobbying institutions.

Video by Liz Glover. Colin Sweeney is a writer in Washington, D.C.

The Ritz-Carlton South Beach is looking for a new tanning butler! Could it be you? (Dudes only, but since this recession has hit men much harder that seems fair.) [Via]

“Repo Men, which to everyone’s great disappointment (or perhaps relief) has nothing to do with Alex Cox’s 1984 drug-punk classic, Repo Man, is a shallow, stupid critique of organ markets in specific and for-profit health care in general that doesn’t even have the decency to be amusing…. It’s probably too much to expect sci-fi screenwriters to understand economics, but even a little bit of basic common sense and logic would’ve sufficed. Even if regulators (nowhere to be found in the film) or social pressure (also absent) hadn’t put a stop to the practice of repossession-via-murder, competition probably would have, as organ companies would’ve quickly sought to attract customers by dropping the harshest contractual terms.”

“Shocked Westerners call it a human zoo, but the residents of China’s ‘Empire of the Little People’ have a different name for the place where people pay to watch performing dwarves. They call it home.” Uh, okay. I’m gonna leave this one alone.

Wow, what a way to kick off March Madness, am I right? Of the first 16 games, 8 (that’s half) were decided in either OT (overtime) or by 3 points or less. That means things were exceptionally close! For comparison, only nine games TOTAL last year were decided by the same criteria. You know what else is close? The rankings in the ongoing Official Awl March Madness Bracket Tournament Challenge!

There’s a tie at the top of the board between two people, someone named J. Elliott, with his bracket the Detective Goose (figuring out the meaning of that should drive me insane for the rest of the day) and P. Gaines with the Pete’s Jayhawks bracket-I’m going to go out on a limb and say P in “P. Gaines” stands for Pete. Deductive reasoning score! Swish! Still, not one of you has managed to get every single game right. Here’s where most people seem to have gone awry:

• Georgetown sucking balls. I watched almost all of this game and can say that they really were never trying at all and Ohio was playing with some real “Let’s do this!” fervor.

• A big year for Murrays. Not only is the Murray character from “Flight Of The Conchords” seeing a huge-to-mild resurgence by way of his HP ad campaign, but also the school Murray State provided one of the bigger upsets of the day by beating those obnoxious and preppy Vanderbilt Commodores (WTF? How obnoxious is that mascot?) with an insane shot by Danero Thomas as time ran out, sending the mainstream media into a real tizzy. Nice Vera Bradley luggage, losers.

Furthermore, do you guys think anyone at HBO or either of the actual Flight Of The Conchords are seeing any cash from the participation of Rhys Darby in these ads? They never address the character by name and he doesn’t necessarily do anything that’s particularly Murray-ish besides being a New Zealander so it seems like it could really go either way. ALSO, if you google Rhys Darby, you can see a really random picture of him when he’s not all Murray’d up and without a mustache even. So that’s cool/weird I guess?

• A few other upsets. Marquette, with its ugly-ass jerseys (below) lost to Washington, which I believe is located in the state of Washington, and Old Dominion prevailed over Notre Dame. Both games were 11 seeds over 6 seeds with close scores, but one was significantly more exciting than the other, as Notre Dame and Old Dominion scored a total of 100 points. That’s like women’s college basketball scoring, or so I’ve heard. Don’t get me wrong, I love lay-ups and sick mid-range jumpers as much as the next guy, but I don’t respect women’s athletic prowess nearly enough to actually watch them play organized sports, much less look at their box scores.

So here’s the rundown as we enter Day Two: A quick glance shows that most of you have Kansas winning your the whole thing, but Duke, Syracuse, and Kentucky are very much in the mix. This makes sense, since they are the the highest ranked seeds in each of their divisions-who says The Awl audience doesn’t get sports?!

The current highest ranking Awl contributor is Eric “Old Jews Telling Jokes” Spiegelman, while, amongst the staff, Choire and Alex are tied for the 184th position and I am in a modest logjam at 234. But you know what? Winners are not made in the first day of the tournament and it’s a marathon not a sprint and all’s well that ends well.

It’s the best magazine-related blogging on the whole Internet, according to the American Society of Magazine Editors! It’s The Best Defense: Tom Ricks’ Daily Take on National Security, at the website of Foreign Policy magazine. Unfortunately, Tom Ricks himself, who was twice on Pulitzer-winning teams in the 00s, was unable to get online yesterday to blog about it (“rare technical difficulties”). For me the most fascinating thing though about Best Defense is the commenters, who are apparently all current or former military? Also I’d love to see the financials on running such a site (Foreign Policy overall seems to have the same advertiser crowd as the D.C. Metro: Boeing, et al.) In any event, it’s worth adding to your RSS and it’s also worth noting as a data point that the award didn’t exactly go to Cosmo or whatever.

At midnight tonight, in the city of Valencia on the Mediterranean coast of Spain, the annual Las Fallas festival comes to an end with the burning of the giant sculptures that have been on display in various city squares for the past five days. Made of wood, cardboard and paper mache, and often made to satirize current events, the sculptures (called “ninots,” Spanish for “dolls”) are up to 72-feet tall and cost as much as $850,000 to build. “Las Fallas” means “the fires,” and the festival is believed to have pagan origins, celebrating the end of winter, but the million people it draws come in homage to Joseph, the patron saint of carpenters. Germany’s Der Speigel has a great photo gallery of some of the sculptures. But in the picture above, they’ve misidentified the number of women depicted frolicking in a hot tub with Italy’s prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. “This sculpture shows him in a hot tub with two lady friends,” says the caption. Nope, there are three.

Sweet mother of Christ, it was nice out yesterday! It’ll be pretty today, and it’s going to be absolutely stunning on Saturday. Come Sunday we will be reminded that all beauty is fleeting, but such is life. Such is spring. Such are the tides that carry us along through this world, with its torrential downpours and sun-strewn interludes. On days like this, enjoy what you have and worry not about tomorrow. (Seriously, don’t worry about tomorrow, it’s going to be crotch-hardeningly-or moisteningly, depending on your equipment-gorgeous.) It is so frigging great out there!

by Ian Retford

In 2008, George Skumanick, then-District Attorney for Wyoming County, Pennsylvania, noticed an alarming problem, one that called for the immediate intervention of the local law enforcement apparatus: “rampant sexting.” This grave threat to rural Pennsylvania’s social order was brought to his attention by various Tunkhannock School District officials, who, after confiscating the phones of males and females in the Justin Bieber age cohort, discovered pictures of ladies in various stages of undress. Most of those stages involved bathing suits or bras, but apparently, if you looked at some of the pictures carefully (and the Tunkhannock school district officials definitely did), there was nipplage to be seen. For reasons that are not entirely clear (read: insanity), the school officials concluded that the pictures were a criminal justice issue and so they handed the phones over to District Attorney Skumanick.

Realizing that the shots implicated delicate issues of burgeoning female sexuality, Skumanick sent letters to the parents of the girls in the photos informing them that the girls would be brought up on child pornography charges if they refused to complete a multi-month counseling program. He reminded them that, if convicted, they would have to register as sex offenders under Pennsylvania’s version of Megan’s Law.

If you’re confused about (a) how a girl could be charged with child pornography for taking pictures of herself or (b) why it’s appropriate for a DA to threaten people with felony charges as a way to get them to take counseling classes, you’re in the company of basically every human being other than George Skumanick.

To help sort everything out, Skumanick called a meeting with the families a few weeks later. But the meeting cleared up exactly nothing. One parent asked how his daughter, who was wearing a bathing suit in the relevant photograph, could possibly be charged with a crime. Answer? She posed “provocatively” in the photo. When asked what the hell that meant, the face of law and order for Wyoming County responded, “[T]hese are the rules. If you don’t like them, too bad.”

By this point, Skumanick’s investigation had escalated, Crucible-style, and twenty kids were being accused of being wild child pornographer nymphettes. All but one refused to take the counseling class.

This is what was in store for that one student: a five-part class designed to give the girls “an understanding of what it means to be a girl in today’s society.” The course included, among other things, an essay on why the student’s actions were wrong, an investigation of negative portrayals of women in advertising, a module entitled “Gender Advantages and Disadvantages,” and the reading of Maya Angelou’s poem, “Phenomenal Woman.” (Basically, imagine a Judith Butler class, but taught in the 1950s, and by a police officer.)

Fearing that Skumanick would make good on his threat to bring child pornography charges if they didn’t submit to the counseling program, three of the girls and their parents filed suit against Skumanick in federal court. At issue were two photographs. In one, two of the girls (both 13 years old) are wearing white bras, one talking on the phone while the other makes a peace sign. This image might make a normal person think of goofy sleepovers, hairbrush microphones and general adolescent hamminess, but to Skumanick, the shot smacks of one thing: porn. This is even more true of the second picture, where the third plaintiff is seen, presumably emerging from the shower, with a towel wrapped around her, just below her breasts.

Whether these pictures constitute child porn under Pennsylvania law seems like a pretty easy question. But that’s a question of state law, and typically one that can be raised only in state court, and only after someone is actually charged with a crime. To prevent the charges from being filed in the first place, the girls needed to allege that any criminal prosecution would implicate federal Constitutional rights.

The plaintiffs focused on two rights that they claimed would be violated by the counseling program: the girls’ freedom of speech, and the parents’ right to direct the upbringing of their children. According to the plaintiffs, the former would be violated by forcing the girls to explain why their actions were wrong, and the latter would be encroached by allowing Skumanick & Co. to instruct the girls on “what it means to be a girl in today’s society.” In threatening prosecution if the girls didn’t take the class, the plaintiffs argued, Skumanick essentially punished the plaintiffs for refusing to agree to these Constitutional infringements.

Skumanick’s (non-)defense: “Every pedophile, every predator, waits with eager anticipation of that ruling. It is the interest of those pedophiles that is being advanced by [plaintiffs’ attorneys].”

The district court judge agreed with the parents and entered an order [PDF] forbidding Skumanick from filing child porn charges against the girls. Reinforcing my belief that the judiciary is the only consistently sane branch of government, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday upheld the trial court’s decision [PDF]. In the category of sentiments we can all get behind, the court held, “[A]n individual District Attorney may not coerce parents into permitting him to impose on their children his ideas of morality and gender roles.”

And: “’What it means to be a girl in today’s society,’ while an important sociological concern, in this case is [at] a disconnect with the criminal and juvenile justice systems.”

To make this story even sweeter, the voters of Wyoming County voted Skumanick out of office last November, after a 20-year stint as District Attorney. (You can visit his website — and please do — here.) So, yay, great, the end. Right?

Not exactly. The Third Circuit decision really only prevents crazy moralizing district attorneys from strong-arming kids into taking bizarre gender studies courses. And though we should all celebrate any time anyone escapes from reading a Maya Angelou poem, this doesn’t really address the underlying issue: whether sext images by teens can be treated as child porn.

Though the question remains unresolved, it’s doubtful we’ll see ourselves enmeshed in a national epidemic of teen sexting prosecutions. Public opposition is a pretty good check on prosecutorial zeal. And public opposition tends to express itself most fervently when the threat of prosecution hits closest to home. Most parents of teens and tweens would probably agree that embarrassment is punishment enough for racy photos, and that a prison sentence and a spot on the sex offender registry might be overdoing things. It’s the rare person who sees a teen in a bra and thinks, “hardened sexpot,” and as Skumanick’s fate suggests, if that person is a prosecutor, he’s probably not long for his job.

Ian Retford is the pseudonym of a lawyer in New York City.

“The Black & Decker Workmate 425 ($150) has been a staple in garages and basement workshops for years. As one of the flagship tools of the DIY revolution, it has become the standard of clamping workbenches. But recently the tool world has seen a new style of three-legged workstation hit the market. The Rockwell Jawhorse ($177) is not the first of its kind (it’s modeled after the Triton SuperJaws out of Australia). But it is the first of this type to gain widespread recognition in the U.S. While the Workmate clamps stock between the movable slats of a small table, the Jawhorse boils down to a single massive clamping jaw operated with a foot pedal.”
–The Jawhorse is better for “clamping a glue-up,” while the Workmate wins the “ripping plywood” category. They tie at “soldering a pipe.” I would hurt myself quickly if I ever tried to do any of these things. But Popular Mechanics’ “Portable Workbench Showdown: Jawhorse vs. Workmate” makes for an exciting read.