Jurors and others in Judge Donald Thompson’s courtroom kept hearing a strange whooshing noise, like a bicycle pump or maybe a blood pressure cuff. During one trial, Thompson seemed so distracted that some jurors thought he was playing a hand-held video game or tying fly-fishing lures behind the bench.
The explanation, investigators say, is even stranger than some imagined: The judge had a habit of masturbating with a penis pump under his robe during trials.
It’s True

Posted by: Cloned Poster | Feb 23 2005 22:18 utc | 4

LOL. Remember the woman in Texas who was charged with some crime for having “fuckerware” parties? Apparently, these suburban Texas housewives get together and someone explains the virtues of the “eager beaver” and other mechanical woody-land creatures …(doesn’t it sound like some animatronic character at Disneyworld?) …anyway, this got someone’s panties got in a wad, and not in a good way…uh, assuming there’s a good way…
They’ll get my shower massage when they pry it from my hot, wet hands…

Posted by: fauxreal | Feb 23 2005 23:43 utc | 6

Will they shoo all the women from the vegetable aisles down at the Piggly Wiggley too?

Posted by: beq | Feb 24 2005 0:15 utc | 8

This law, which is unenforceable and incoherent, offers a nice snapshot of political reality in Alabama. This state doesn’t exist as a political structure. It’s a perfect anarchy. It has no substance, texture, definition, or infrastructure–whatever term might best describe a real political entity. More precisely still: city government, county government and state government are effectively non-existent in Alabama. The only entity that counts in these parts is the smallest, and weakest, entity of all–namely the church parish, of which we have perhaps as many as 10,000. Now and then, it’s true, a group of churches (the “Baptists” comprise 65% of the population) join forces to pass a law exactly like this one–a puff of hot air that vanishes when exhaled. To get anything done hereabouts–as in health, education, welfare–you have to frame it as a constitutional amendment, to be passed in a state-wide referendum (of which, at last count, there were almost 800 on the books). I can see why the U.S. Supreme Court might prefer to forget the whole thing.

Posted by: alabama | Feb 24 2005 2:58 utc | 10

Alabama… This state doesn’t exist as a political structure. It’s a perfect anarchy. It has no substance, texture, definition, or infrastructure–whatever term might best describe a real political entity. More precisely still: city government, county government and state government are effectively non-existent in Alabama.
And the US of A is one homogeneous mass… uh huh. I grew up in northern Illinois. I suspect the politics are the same, but the legend that reinforces it is hugely different.

Posted by: Kate_Storm | Feb 24 2005 4:49 utc | 12

Kate, the state of Illinois may be anarchical, but surely the counties and towns and cities are structurally developed. Cook County, for example, is reputed to be stronly pulled together in some way. But we have no Cook County hereabouts, and we certainly have no Chicago, or Cicero, or Evanston….It’s a little hard to describe: we have all the place-names, but none of the institutions. They’ve been kept in perpetual arrest since the Civil War. Nothing has been permitted to grow. And this weakness has a predictable effect: the state is raped and raided by the states surrounding it, and by the capital based in those states. Money and people flow outward: Alabama is the only state in the Union whose population between the ages of 20 and 65 shows a negative growth-rate.

Posted by: alabama | Feb 24 2005 5:41 utc | 14

Fitting Billmon’s wonderful graphics, a Maureen Dowd editorial on AARP: Swifties Slime Again

The USA Next group intends to combine the two ruthless success stories of the Bush re-election: the Swiftian tactic of amplifying its vicious and dishonest attacks through the media, and the Rovian tactic of hanging gay marriage like an anvil around the neck of a foe.
It began with an almost comically hyperbolic Internet ad that briefly ran on The American Spectator’s Web site, painting AARP as pro-gay sex – even though it’s tough to think of AARP and steamy lust in the same hot breath – and anti-soldier. It showed a soldier with a red X across him, and two gay men kissing at their nuptuals, with the headline “The REAL AARP Agenda.”
(Mr. Jarvis, who used to be executive vice president of James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, also urged his Web site readers to “support Mel Gibson’s ‘The Passion.’ ” The group’s national chairman is Art Linkletter; it seems that aging right-wing trash-talkers say the darndest things.)
…
Mr. Jarvis defended his ad by saying that he was simply trying to provoke liberal bloggers, and that he succeeded. In fact, part of the sinister beauty of the Swift Boat method is its viral quality: it slips into a host body – “Inside Politics,” say – and hijacks it. An ad it showed briefly on the Internet has now been replicated free, all over the world, and, yes, it is now being transmitted through the Op-Ed page of The New York Times.
Senator Jon Corzine of New Jersey sent a letter to President Bush yesterday calling the USA Next ad “incendiary” and asking him to denounce such tactics. But, of course, President Bush has nothing whatsoever to do with any of this. Right?

Posted by: b | Feb 24 2005 8:48 utc | 16

The law, adopted in 1998 . . . exempted sales of sexual devices “for a bona fide medical, scientific, educational, legislative, judicial or law enforcement purpose.”
If you are a doctor, a priest, a teacher, a judge, a district attorney, a cop, a lawyer, a governor, an elected official, a college professor, or, most likely, even just head of the local girl scout troop – part of the establishment – you can buy what you want and do whatever you like. Lowly salespersons can sell them but not buy them.
Just like torture – if the end is legitimate, the means must be so as well.

Posted by: Blackie | Feb 24 2005 18:06 utc | 18

Don Siegelman, a Democrat, ran, and won, in 1999 on the premise that he could institute a state lottery by means of a referendum. Three months after he won the election, the lottery was suddenly, and surprisingly, defeated–by that coalition of Baptists, of course. For the rest of his term Siegelman did absolutely nothing–because, of course, he’d already backed off from any notion of a tax increase, and had no revenues to work with. When his right-wing successor, Bob Riley, came to office in 2003, only to discover just how bad the state’s finances really were, he too went to the public with a referendum for a property-tax increase, only to be defeated in his turn. What we have today is a state with no money for roads, schools, courts, police, prisons, medical care–you name it. It’s a total wreck, and no one, Democrat or Republican, has any idea of how to fix it. Republicans, at this point, want to mend things as much as Democrats, if only to attract some outside investment–and outside investors are horrified at what they see.

Posted by: alabama | Feb 24 2005 18:53 utc | 20

@bama… [wincing in sympathy]
Alabama is, I believe, what is known as “an internal colony,” i.e. a region w/in the Empire which is treated like an external colony: exploited for cheap labour and extractive resources and used as a dumping ground for toxics. There were several of these w/in the former USSR as well. Generally political chaos and public despair is encouraged in such areas, to ensure that the exploited population will not organise to challenge their colonial status. An inbred local elite, corrupt and relatively wealthy, functions as the caretaker/trusty government in the interests of the imperial core.
The story of various Southern States is curious and ironic — as colonies first of European power, then as colonisers themselves (importers of slaves from conquered territories overseas), and finally as defeated rebels (rebels in defence of a coloniser lifestyle, the slave-based Plantation Culture), relapsing into internal colony status…
For some reason I had never seen Sayles’ “Matewan” (had seen most of his work but not that one) and I watched it this week. The colonial resource-extraction relationship is perfectly clear (poor mountain and “holler” Appalachia colonised by big money fossil-fuel corporadoes from the wealthy NE). The tactics were identical with those playing out now in Brazil and elsewhere — colonisers/liquidators never change a riff that plays well — first squeeze and trick and lure the peasantry off their land, then exploit them, in their new vulnerability, as coerced labour in resource extraction from the lands they used to farm. The power of the Company in those isolated mining towns was chillingly brought to life.
The film can be criticised — one old labour historian I know said it felt like Sayles had read a couple of history books and then cast exactly one character to represent each “interest group” — but as a semi-documentary of the power of unchecked capital accumulation and the brute force required to promote and defend it, it’s gripping. Also a vivid reminder of how bad things have been, can be, when capital gets the upper hand and reigns unchallenged. This is a bit of American history that those in power today want us to forget, even as they steer us brutally and unerringly back into a replay.

Posted by: DeAnander | Feb 24 2005 19:24 utc | 22

Excellent description, DeAnander–going a long way towards explaining the marginal, comic, and pariah-like position of this state on the map of the American psyche. It takes some imagination for folks in places like California and New York to recognize, and accept, their kinship to folks in Alabama, and this is especially hard to do when trying to figure out such things as the U.S,. Supreme Court’s decision on sex toys.

Posted by: alabama | Feb 24 2005 21:10 utc | 24