perfect sense

You may recall the story of Anthony Gruber. In July of this year he was speeding down a highway. An undercover police officer pulled a gun on him to stop him. Gruber was videotaping his joy ride and decided to post the video on YouTube, a decision that ultimately lead to his arrest and being charged for a violation of Maryland’s wiretapping law. Gruber faced up to 16 years if convicted.

Well it turns out common sense has prevailed and a judge has thrown out the wiretapping charges against Gruber, leaving only the moving violations for him to face. In his decision, the judge made perfect sense:

"Those of us who are public officials and are entrusted with the power of the state are ultimately accountable to the public," the judge wrote. "When we exercise that power in public fora, we should not expect our actions to be shielded from public observation."

Isn’t it a shame that those who enforce the law can’t use the same type of common logic when deciding who to charge and who not to charge?

Wow they are dropping like flies today:

Embattled Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd (D) has scheduled a press conference at his home in Connecticut Wednesday at which he is expected to announce he will not seek re-election, according to sources familiar with his plans.

Dodd's retirement comes after months of speculation about his political future, and amid faltering polling numbers and a growing sense among the Democratic establishment that he could not win a sixth term. It also comes less than 24 hours after Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) announced he would not seek re-election.

State Attorney General Richard Blumenthal is widely expected to step into the void filled by Dodd and, at least at first blush, should drastically increase Democrats' chances of holding the seat.

Dodd has been trailing the Republicans in recent polls, so this is actually good news. People are predicting that Blumenthal will have a much better chance.

UPDATE:

This tweet from PPP Polling explains why a Dodd retirement is great news for Democrats:

Our CT polling is confirming a Blumenthal/Dodd swap would make the seat uber safe for Dems

I got a feeling they have talked Blumenthal into running and figured this would be a great way to soften the blow of Dorgan retiring. The timing makes perfect sense.

This makes such perfect sense:

"Obama's election has taken the wind out of al Qaeda's sails in much of the Islamic world because it demonstrates America's renewed commitment to multiculturalism, human rights, and international law. It also proves to many that democracy can work and overcome ethnic, sectarian, or racial barriers.

"Obama's commitment to withdraw from Iraq also takes away an al Qaeda propaganda tenet: that the U.S. seeks to occupy oil rich Arab lands. His commitment to defeat al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan also challenges their plans. Most of all, by returning to American values the world admires, Obama sets al Qaeda back enormously in the battle of ideas, the ideological struggle which determines whether al Qaeda will continue to have significant support in the Islamic world."

-Richard Clarke

Al Qaeda now has to face a United States with a President who is highly respected around the world. This puts a serious damper on their PR tactics. Yes – this is change you can believe in.

It amazed me a few weeks ago when a federal judge ruled that Google had to turn over the viewer logs for YouTube to Viacom, in Viacom's lawsuit. I read a lot of blogs that quickly blasted the decision as an invasion of privacy. It looks like they were following the tinfoil hat committee:

Google and Viacom have reached a deal to protect the privacy of millions of YouTube watchers.

Earlier this month, a New York federal judge ordered Google to turn over YouTube user data to Viacom and other plaintiffs to help them prepare a confidential study of what they argue are vast piracy violations on the video-sharing site.

Google claims it had now agreed to provide plaintiffs' attorneys with a version of a massive viewership database that blanks out YouTube usernames and IP addresses that could be used to identify individual video watchers.

Now I am not a lawyer, but this makes perfect sense. Viacom never planned on going after the millions of people who may have seen their content on YouTube. Think about it for a second - if they did these people have the ability to really hurt Viacom by simply turning off Comedy Central, not going to movies by Paramount, or boycotting any other product Viacom offers. Instead the decision was made so that Viacom could prove that people were using YouTube to watch the videos. It's part of the chain of evidence, and the ruling makes perfect sense.

Back to the bloggers for a minute. There are some on the left that really got to me. They were so quick to denounce this lawsuit and blast Viacom openly. Some of these bloggers are the very same that will fire off a nasty email to other bloggers when they feel like their content has been used without attribution. It's amazing how they love to apply double standards on this stuff.