Teen Model’s Parents File $28 Million Lawsuit Over ‘Salacious’ Crotch Photo

Posted on Comments

Has the world gone completely insane? Pole-dancing classes for 7-year-olds, 12-year-old bikini models, academics trying to de-stigmatize pedophilia and now this:

Clothes store Urban Outfitters is being sued for using sexually suggestive pictures of a 15-year-old model on some of its merchandise.
The ‘salacious’ images, taken in March 2010, showed the girl — named this morning in the New York Post as Hailey Clauson — with her legs spread in a provocative pose.
Her parents are suing photographer Jason Lee Parry, Urban and two other stores for $28 million damages, claiming they did not give permission for the photographs to be used on T-shirts and other apparel. . . .
It is also claimed that Mr Parry – who specialises in topless shots – agreed never to release the image after a complaint from the girl’s agent at the time.  . . .

Read the rest. The photo in question has been online since April 2010, and the lawsuit doesn’t seem to be generating sympathy from commenters:

Please… she should sue her mother for being on the set and allowing her to be posed this way. She has many other over the top sexy pictures so what… she is going to sue every photographer for her choices.

As if this is her most provocative picture? Mommy & Daddy have pimped out their child for far worse, they are suing becasue they are not getting any money from the sales of the shirts with this image, spare us the decency line, as if you know what that is!

Let’s ask some questions: Why is a 15-year-old working as a top fashion model? Who are the designers, advertising directors and magazine editors who represent the demand side of this market equation? Why aren’t the readers of fashion magazines (i.e., women) complaining about advertising and pictorials which offer anorexic adolescents as a beauty ideal?

That’s the real kick in the head: These “provocative” and “salacious” images aren’t being produced as pornography, but rather are being used in fashion ads targeted at women consumers — and those consumers don’t seem to mind.

PREVIOUSLY:

Chris Matthews: Exceptionally Idiotic

Posted on Comments

I’ve been sitting here with MSNBC on my office TV and have twice today seen a particular “Lean Forward” promotional spot in which Chris Matthews uses the phrase “American exceptionalsm” in a way that is both wrong and tendentious.

Strangely, this MSNBC spot isn’t available on YouTube, and some Birthers have claimed it was taken offline because Matthews appears (they say) to be granting the possibility of Obama’s foreign birth. That’s too conspiratorial for my taste, but yet it is remarkable that this ad is still running regularly without being available online. WorldNetDaily describes the ad:

“Sometimes I think the critics of the president are just clearly unfair when they say he doesn’t love this country,” says Chris Matthews, anchor of MSNBC’s “Hardball” program in one of the “Lean Forward” ads directed by Spike Lee.
“And here’s a guy of mixed background, and he said ‘Only in this country, my country, is this story possible.’ I think that was the greatest testament to American exceptionalism. I don’t think that you can say that in Japan or in China. You can’t go these countries and become Chinese.”
Then while pointing to the White House in the background, Matthews concludes by saying, “And look where he is.”

The first objection is this: Which critics are saying Obama “doesn’t love this country”? Can Chris Matthews produce a list of such people, with relevant quotations? But if Obama’s critics are saying this, isn’t the accusation in some sense fair?

“We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America,” Obama told a cheering crowd on Oct. 29, 2008. If he loves America so much, why the need for fundamental transformation? How can you, on the one hand, be a patriotic believer in “American exceptionalism” and then expect people to cheer when you proclaim you are intent on “fundamentally transforming” America? There is a discordance between these two ideas.

Beyond that, however, Matthews seems to have a mistaken notion of what the phrase “American exceptionalism” actually means. Quoting Wikipedia:

American exceptionalism refers to the theory that the United States is qualitatively different from other states. In this view, America’s exceptionalism stems from its emergence from a revolution, becoming “the first new nation,” and developing a uniquely American ideology, based on liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, populism and laissez-faire. This observation can be traced to Alexis de Tocqueville, the first writer to describe the United States as “exceptional.” Historian Gordon Wood has argued, “Our beliefs in liberty, equality, constitutionalism, and the well-being of ordinary people came out of the Revolutionary era. So too did our idea that we Americans are a special people with a special destiny to lead the world toward liberty and democracy.”
The specific term “American exceptionalism” was first used in 1929 by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin chastising members of the American Communist Party for believing that America was independent of the Marxist laws of history “thanks to its natural resources, industrial capacity, and absence of rigid class distinctions.”

So if we accept the Wiki etymology of the phrase, it was Tocqueville who first wrote of the “exceptional” qualities of our nation, and this proved an obstacle to the ambitions of Stalin, who shrewdly perceived how “American exceptionalism” (and our citizens’ widespread belief in American exceptionalism) hindered Communist aims toward this country.

That isn’t what Matthews is talking about in the MSNBC promo, however. What he is talking about is one of the favorite themes of open-borders multiculturalists, who like to speak of America as a “propositional nation” — i.e., referencing Lincoln’s descripion in the Gettysburg Address of America as a nation “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” According to advocates of the “propositional nation” theory, the key to American citizenship is whether one accedes to this egalitarian formula.

One can (and many have) criticized the “propositional nation” thesis, but my point is that Matthews has managed to conflate this idea with “American exceptionalism,” so that merely by the fact of being sired by a Kenyan — “mixed background,” as Matthews puts it — Obama becomes a symbol of that exceptionalism.

All of which is sort of an aside to the question of why MSNBC, which purports to be a news network, seems to have devoted itself to a politician’s re-election.

If Sarah Palin Isn’t Running for President, Why Is She Releasing This Iowa Video?

Posted on Comments

New from SarahPAC:

And everyone who had previously concluded that Palin is not running in 2012 — I among them — must now ask themselves: Why is she making a such a big deal about her Iowa trip? And, while we’re asking that question, why is she giving a speech at a Sept. 3 Tea Party rally in Waukee, Iowa? Given the current large field of GOP candidates, what percentage of the vote would Palin need to win Iowa caucus Feb. 6?

These questions seem to multiply, the more I think about it. For example, if Palin used her Sept. 3 speech at Waukee to declare herself a candidate, would that secure her an invitation to the Sept. 7 Simi Valley debate? Or the Sept. 12 Tampa debate?


1 In 5 U.S. Web Sites Are Powered By WordPress

Posted on Comments

by Smitty

This blog, on the strength of a decision by Lead Über Design Decision/Integration Technical Engineer (LUDDITE) Robert Stacy McCain, migrated from Blogger to WordPress a couple of years back. We’re in good company, apparently. 22% of U.S. web sites are using it.

Once that call was made, a query among the other cool kids, including Jimmie Bise, led us to the hosting services of Silver Logic. This has proven an excellent relationship. I suspect I’m one of SL’s more demanding customers, knowing just enough of the technical aspects of the MySQL back end to be dangerous. It is great to be stuck halfway around the world, need a bit of specific technical support just to be able to blog at all, and get it promptly. Blogging is a mighty fine addiction, and SL has been a great resource.

Even if you’re not hooked enough to need your own hosting, keep blogging. We stand in the tradition with the pamphleteers who drove the Revolution. Now our federal government has become as odious and unrepresentative today as the British Parliament was then. If we do not apply pressure to restore life, liberty, and the pursuit of debt-free happiness to subsequent generations, who will? Barney Frank? John McCain? Nancy Pelosi? Lindsey Graham? Harry Reid?

Thousands Flock to Georgia ‘Job Fair’ While Obama Goes on Vacation

Posted on Comments

ABC News:

Thousands of unemployed waited overnight, camping out in their business suits and office heels and braving the tormenting heat in Atlanta to stand in line for a job fair Thursday. Authorities treated 20 people for heat exhaustion as they struggled to keep the line moving and get people moved inside.
The incredible turnout at the job fair comes on the heels of the state labor commissioner’s announcement that Georgia’s jobless rate rose.
The state unemployment rate increased to 10.1 percent in July from the 9.9 percent in June. The unemployment rate for African-Americans stands at 15.9 percent, far above the national rate of 9.1 percent.

Meanwhile, the President and First Lady flew to Martha’s Vineyard on “his and hers” jets for their 10-day vacation. Guess that’s “stimulus.”

Piers Morgan Really Likes Masturbation (And Really Hates Christine O’Donnell)

Posted on Comments

Making the media rounds to promote her new book Troublemaker, 2012 Delaware senatorial candidate Christine O’Donnell appeared on CNN with Piers Morgan, who decided that he needed to grill O’Donnell about masturbation and whether she had “committed lust”:

What an annoying twerp. This is not only offensive, it’s boring.

There are far more interesting questions I’d like to ask Christine O’Donnell, and it has been suggested that I should interview her, but I’m probably still too angry at her — yes, I said “angry.”

It goes back to the morning of Sept. 15, the day after her triumph over RINO Mike Castle in the GOP primary. There were several of us — including O’Donnell and her campaign manager, Matt Moran — standing around the lobby of the Fairfield Inn in Dover, Delaware. And I distinctly remember telling Matt that what they needed to do, having recently reaped a bonanza of online contributions, was to come out with an attack ad hitting their Democratic opponent Chris Coons as hard as they could.

Hit him hard and hit him now, I told Matt. Make the campaign about him and his record — Coons raised taxes three time in four years — or else the Democrats would make the campaign about Christine, and we’d already seen enough of those old MTV/Maher videos to know how that would turn out.

They didn’t listen. For reasons that have never been adequately explained to me, instead the O’Donnell campaign brought in Fred Davis who took three weeks to produce the now-notorious “I’m You” ad. I defended that ad at the time, but I was still furious that the O’Donnell team had missed the opportunity to turn Coons’s tax-raising record into an ad, as I wrote on October 5:

Having some relevant experience with video production, I bet it wouldn’t take 48 hours for anyone with access to Final Cut Pro to turn those basic facts [of Coons’s record] into a hard-hitting 30-second ad. And had I been in charge of the O’Donnell campaign, saturating the Delaware TV market with that attack ad would have been Priority One. Yet here we are three weeks after the primary, and it hasn’t been done yet. So where is the attack ad making that argument?

They could have (and should have) hit Coons with a barrage of attack ads within a week of their Sept. 14 primary victory but didn’t, and as a result O’Donnell became the poster girl for an endless round of “told you so” smears on the Tea Party by the GOP Establishment.

And it also cost me a bet with John Fund.

Like I said, I’m still angry about it, and when the publicist for O’Donnell’s book caught me at Ames last week and pitched me, I went off on a three-minute rant about how O’Donnell’s campaign botched that opportunity.

“Fred F–ing Davis!” I yelled. “What the hell were they thinking?”

Maybe the explanation is in her book, but the publicist still hasn’t sent me the book, so I don’t know. However, if Christine O’Donnell wants to name names of whatever consultants or advisers told her to hire Fred Davis, I’d certainly be interested to find out, because those incompetent assclowns deserve to be exposed and humiliated for their embarrassing blunder. But I suppose she’d rather talk to George Stephanopoulos.