In the wake of Lori Drew’s indictment, which I noted a couple of times yesterday, comes word of a case in which a 15-year-old Florida girl claims in a YouTube video that she was raped by a 23 year old, but that the DA has declined to press charges because she was only a month shy of the age of consent, which is 16, there. I should also note that according to the case file, she admitted she continued to have a sexual relationship with the “man.”

As CNN strangely puts it, you are not to miss watching “Crystal plead for help on YouTube.”

I don’t really understand the DA’s attitude in this matter. I don’t believe I have ever heard of a bartender being let off the hook for serving a minor simply because he was close to being old enough to be served. But it’s interesting how difficult DAs generally are finding it to continue to be unanswerable to the public in this age of new media, and I think that’s a good thing. The poor dears. And I’m sure that the conscientious ones, like Patterico, would agree with me.

(h/t Liz and Todd at the B-Cast)

At The Moderate Reliably Lefty Voice, ventriloquist Joe Gandelman again plays the dummy for Barack Obama’s campaign, dutifully relaying the talking point that Obama’s hysterical over-reaction to Pres. Bush’s comments on appeasement of terrorists and radicals shows he’s a fighter.

As Ed Morrissey notes at HotAir, Obama’s response shows that Obama is now claiming he would follow the very same Bush Administration approach he wants to claim has failed.  This from the same candidate who (just two weeks ago) claimed Hillary Clinton sounded too much like Bush in adopting a deterrence strategy toward Iran.  Obama’s flailing response is actually not all that different from his ever-shifting policy on Iraq (and international trade, for that matter).  Sen. Joe Biden rushed to Obama’s defense, calling Bush’s remarks “bullsh*t,” so it will be fun if and when someone asks Biden why he would support direct, unconditional presidential talks with someone Biden called a “madman” last year.

Though Gandelman — echoing WaPo blogger Chris Cillizza — look at 2006 as a Democratic success in challenging the GOP on national security and foreign policy, the fact is that midterm elections are simply not the same as presidential elections.  For that matter, the results of that election (mostly GOP members losing to Blue Dog Dems) show that Congress did not change very much on the issue of Iraq.

What Cillizza gets right — and Gandelman totally misses — is that the kerfuffle demonstrates Pres. Bush’s ability to put foreign policy in the news pretty much at will.  He could do it to help John McCain or — just as likely — he will do it because foreign policy is pretty much what lame duck presidents do.

Barack Obama is forced to react to situations like this (though not to over-react) and one thing that has emerged in the course of this cycle to date is that Obama does not do nearly so well when he is not in absolute control of his media environment.  And regardless of his reaction, public discussion of whether Obama would be too soft on Iran and too chummy with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad simply does not help him.  Roughly half of Democrats worry that the US will wait too long to deal with the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear program.  Moreover, to the extent that Obama flails about in his reactions, he will lose voters (especially the white male swing vote) who look for the candidate who “has clear stands on the issues,” is a “strong leader,” or is “honest and trustworthy.”

Welcome to the NFL, rook.

(h/t Memeorandum.)

Update: Gandelman has since updated his post, but does not mark what he has updated, because it would show he is responding to this post.  He also added links to other blogs discussing the issue, so let’s cross reference Memeorandum:

You’ll be shocked to discover that Gandelman’s list leaves out pw, HotAir and RWNH (he includes a token link to Crittenden, so he doesn’t look like the one-sided clown he really is).  And he throws his own little hissy fit in the comments when someone points out that his site is not moderate.  That is going to happen when Gandelman’s site runs posts by someone who sheltered a fugitive member of the Weather Underground calling former Sen. Phil Gramm a terrorist. 

Reluctantly in the news:

The indictment of Lori Drew in the MySpace suicide case brings a small sense of satisfaction to Richmond-area blogger Sarah Wells.Wells is credited with being the first person to identify Lori Drew publicly as the person allegedly responsible for creating a fake MySpace account from which cruel messages were sent to Megan Meier, 13, of suburban St. Louis.

Though Megan killed herself in October 2006, allegedly in response to the messages, the case didn’t become public until an article was published in the St. Louis-area Suburban Journals newspapers on Nov. 11, 2007. Wells posted Drew’s name Nov. 13 on her blog, bluemerle.blogspot.com.  

 Go read the rest. 

Re-Imagining the Pantsuit: A Feminist Primer to Hillary 2012

Please submit your paper topics or ideas for panels to:  croolwurld-at-earthlink.net  by June 30th, 2008.

About Maverick.  Obama would later pick these lies up and use them to claim that Maverick was lying about his own record, when he criticized Obama.  Even as Obama repeated the claim that McCain anticipates a 100 year American military occupation of Iraq.

Waiting for Obama apology.  Sweetie.

I am one of those people, like Malkin, who was first inspired to blog by a fellow named Jeff Goldstein, whose blog, Protein Wisdom is one of the best that ever has been (Scott Burgess also deserves discredit).  Jeff (”Heff” in Spanish) is looking to blog from the Democratic National Convention in Denver.  I’d like to see him put up in a suite with plenty of good single malt, so that he can do his very best work.

So, as it’s Friday night and you’re intoxicated, and before you think better of this, please hit the PayPal or Amazon button and send Jeff a little money, so that he can provide us with a panoramic view of Democracy in action.

(more…)

(h/t Ace)

By 2014, the New York Times has become a print-only newsletter for the elite and the elderly.

Uh. Too late. Guess this thing’s 4 years old, though, so it would have been hard to anticipate how far the NYT’s fortunes would have dropped by now.

If everybody’s special, nobody’s special, right? Anyone have the information on who funded this? The production values are very good.

More: For $5,000, AuthorTree will write your book for you.

The Girl with the Jackalope Eyes 

A great review of what appears to be an exciting book by possibly the best war reporter alive. I don’t know the publisher, Richard Vigilante Books, but please support them if you can, and make the big names wish it were theirs. And, if you haven’t seen it yet, don’t forget JD Johannes’s Outside the Wire, more than halfway to surpassing Redacted’s box office gross.

Dissident Frogman’s Obama campaign poster. (h/t Beth)

Friday Night Cool: Giant Steps

Washington Post Staff Writer Libby Copeland bemoans “poor Hillary” — or rather, that people say it of Hillary Clinton’s seemingly Quixotic quest for the White House:

“Poor Hillary,” write the op-ed writers and the bloggers and the newspaper letter-writers. “Poor Hillary’s done,” writes a gleeful reader in Portsmouth, Va., on Mother’s Day. “The Billstone Around Poor Hillary’s Neck,” reads a New York Daily News headline yesterday. The talk show host Bill Maher has used the phrase, and the occasional CNN anchor, and, of course, the conservative yakkers who like the pure, distilled schadenfreude of those two words.

***

Hillary hate is something profound, something that may never be fully unraveled. It is her very name, so polarizing; it is Slick Willy and Vince Foster and Whitewater and that nickname “Shrillary” and her supposed unending ambition and . . . something else, something ancient. It is Hillary Clinton stretched like taffy, the photos you see of her on right-wing Web sites with her eyes all big and crazy:

Is it about her womanhood? Or is it about this woman? Is that a false distinction? (”Poor Hillary: right gender, wrong woman,” goes the headline on the Web site of a Scottish newspaper, as if you can separate the two. But it’s all mixed up. And you don’t find too many references to “poor Johnny” or “poor Barry,” even when their campaigns hit black ice.)

Poor Libby apparently is unable to grasp the concept that many people might vote for a female candidate, but not for Hillary Clinton, due to many things Clinton has said and done in her past.  Poor Libby lives in a parallel dimension (i.e., the newsroom of the Washington Post) where conservatives yakkers would not lift up an American reincarnation of Margaret Thatcher.

Poor Libby lives in a special place where no one has ever referred to poor, poor, poor, poor, poor, poor, poor, poor, poor, poor, poor, poor, poor, poor, poor, poor, poor, poor, poor, poor, poor, poor, poor, poor, poor, poor, poor, poor Barack Obama.

Poor Libby may not even know what a search engine is. Poor journalism.

(h/t Memeorandum.)