Daily Archives: July 11, 2011
If You Plan On Cheating, Move To One Of These States…
The next time a married man or woman glances your way, you might think twice before acting on impulse and frolicking between satin sheets. The scorned spouse could sue you.
Yes, you read that right. You, the paramour, can get hit with a lawsuit that could cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars.
They’re known as “alienation of affection” suits, when an “outsider” interferes in a marriage. The suits are allowed in seven states: Hawaii, Illinois, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Carolina, South Dakota and Utah.
The law allowing such legal action dates back to antiquated times when a wife was considered the property of a husband. A broken-hearted hubby could go after his wife’s lover — not with a gun, but with the law.
In modern times, the suits are filed for two reasons: money and revenge. Juries in North Carolina have handed out awards in excess of $1 million on multiple occasions.
“If your spouse is going to cheat, you really would like them to cheat with somebody who has a lot of money,” says Lee Rosen, a North Carolina divorce attorney who deals with alienation of affection cases on a daily basis.
And that’s why many legal experts are paying close attention to the Tiger Woods saga. Will his wife go after an alleged mistress?
Were any of his “transgressions” with someone who is married? If so, the jilted hubby might be able to go after the world’s richest golfer.
It doesn’t matter that Woods lives in Florida, a state where the suits aren’t allowed, legal experts say. If any of Woods’ professed “sins” took place in an alienation of affection state, look out.
“If he had been dating a married woman, there could be the potential for a lucrative recovery,” Rosen says. “You’ve got to have a really affluent paramour that makes for a good target.”
The suits rarely make it to trial. Usually, just the threat of such a lawsuit is enough for an out-of-court settlement.
Click through a gallery of famous sex scandals
“When folks are getting divorced, the threat of having the person’s new boyfriend, girlfriend, husband or wife dragged into court and the dirty laundry aired … causes enormous pressure,” says Matt Steffey, a law professor at Mississippi College School of Law.
Mississippi has been rocked by a high-profile suit, filed this summer, involving everything from allegations of ski resort trysts to a secret journal ordered kept under seal by a judge.
Better yet, it involves a congressman who once co-sponsored legislation for President George W. Bush to declare 2008 the “National Year of the Bible.”
The son of a prominent federal judge in Mississippi, Chip Pickering was the rising GOP star of the state — hand-picked to succeed Trent Lott in the U.S. Senate. Then, everything unraveled.
Pickering decided not to run for re-election in 2008 after 12 years in the House. At the time, he said he wanted to spend more time with his family. He’s married with five children.
Like a tale from William Faulkner, who penned many a book on Mississippi elite with personal flaws, Pickering’s tumble has been staggering.
“Chip Pickering has fallen far faster than the surrender of Vicksburg,” Steffey says, referring to a key turning point in the Civil War, when Confederates gave up the Mississippi River town.
The real doozy came July 14, when Leisha Pickering filed the alienation of affection suit against her husband’s alleged lover, a socialite named Elizabeth Creekmore-Byrd.
“As a direct and proximate result of the negligent, wrongful and reckless misconduct and behavior of Creekmore-Byrd with Pickering,” the suit says, “plaintiff has suffered damage to the affection and consortium with her husband.”
So hush-hush is the case, lawyers on both sides have reached a confidential agreement to not discuss the case publicly.
The suit, in effect, has branded the once-proud congressman with a Scarlet “A.” “He had certainly fallen from the pinnacle of his professional life and his public life, but it had not yet become a public disgrace,” Steffey says. “And what this lawsuit did is it turned a fall into a disgrace.”
“There’s a particular cast of tragedy when people are undone, not by accidental misfortune, but by their own character defects.”
Watch: Are men programmed to cheat?
Most states have abolished alienation of affection lawsuits. Proponents in the holdout states say the threat of such legal action helps protect the sanctity of marriage.
But, Steffey and Rosen say, alienation of affection suits do just the opposite: They result in already contentious divorces getting even more heated, and they leave behind a public trail of personal shortcomings and wild tales of infidelity.
“To allow these suits to go forward,” Steffey says, “is destructive to family life.”
“It’s much like dropping a nuclear bomb on a family,” Rosen says. “It really does damage the relationship between spouses. If there are children involved, it’s devastating for them.”
It would require legislative action for states to change the law. And anyone who tries that in a conservative state could get painted as a pro-divorce lawmaker who holds cheaters less accountable.
“It’s a very delicate matter legislatively,” Steffey says.
And as long as the law remains on the books, Rosen says, he’ll keep busy: “We have an obligation to pursue our clients’ rights.”
There is one way to avoid such suits: Respect marital vows.
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Although most people, obviously, don’t act on this law, I do believe that it could come in handy in some cases. You would want to ensure that the “lover” was well aware that who they were sleeping with was married, which in most celebrity cases is rather obvious. Then again, I always hate when all of the blame gets transplanted onto the lover as opposed to the spouse, and could see people taking advantage of this law and doing exactly that. I guess what it comes down to is if you’re going to cheat, make sure your spouse is in on it and the person you choose has a lot of money; Oh, and you must live in one of those 7 states too.
Good luck out there!
Source: http://articles.cnn.com/2009-12-08/living/cheating.spouses.lawsuits_1_suits-lover-law?_s=PM:LIVING
“Kenny Powers: MFCEO (Official Video) “
This is funny! Plenty of cameos and adult language. So if the kiddies are in the room, turn the volume down 
Posted by: VBSdotTV on youtube
Can You Speak English?
Just a funny video from Britain…
“Simon Pegg and the Big Train comedy sketch team perform a funny short on life of an English speaking tourist in France.”
How To Ensure Your Child WON’T Be An Atheist
I absolutely love David M for this answer. While I don’t agree that all religious people are what he describes, I do feel that what he is saying is a sarcastic way of poking fun at what are; truths behind the basic principle of religion.
Gary’s Weather Stone
The weather forecaster that weather men/women didn’t want you to see. This is how they get all of their reliable weather information.
Woman Dies from Allergic Reaction to Dog She had Screwed
Mid-Western Regional Hospital in Limerick, where a 43-year-old woman died after having sex with an Alsatian dog.
A MAN HAS appeared before Limerick District Court charged with ordering his Alsatian dog to have sex with a 43-year-old mother of four, who died from an adverse allergic reaction to the intercourse.
reports that Sean McDonnell, 57, is charged with buggery contrary to Section 61 of the Offences against the Person Act of 1861 – and is believed to be the first person in Ireland to be charged under the legislation.
The Irish Daily Star adds that McDonnell and the deceased woman had discussed the arrangement on a bestiality internet chat room, and that Gardaí are satisfied that the intercourse was consensual.
The Alsatian dog has been kept in quarantine ever since the incident of 7 October, 2008, Patrick O’Connell wrote.
The woman fell ill at around 7:30pm that evening and was rushed to Mid-Western Regional Hospital where she died at around 8pm. Tests showed she had died of anaphylaxis, a severe allergic reaction similar to that prompted by peanut allergies.
The Sun’s Barry Moran said McDonnell could face a life sentence in prison if found guilty.
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If you have an allergic reaction to something, you probably shouldn’t fuck it. I mean, especially when it’s already rather disgusting to participate in. When I read that she was a mother of four, I got a little sick because I couldn’t imagine what her children must be going through: in all aspects. Luckily they were able to determine that she was a willing participant and this man won’t be getting in trouble for murder. Still, I’m confused as to why there are chat rooms and places to set these kinds of things up? I know it’s a fetish, but it just seems a little too far out there for me.
Source: http://www.thejournal.ie/woman-died-from-allergic-reaction-to-sex-with-dog-172620-Jul2011/
A New Strain of Super Gonnorhea
Neisseria gonorrhoeae bacteria is shown in this undated file photo. (Kallista Images/Getty Images)
Scientists have discovered a new strain of gonorrhea-causing bacteria in Japan that is resistant to available treatments.
Since the 1940s, the sexually transmitted disease known as “the clap” has been easily treated with antibiotics. But the new strain of Neisseria gonorrhoeae has genetically mutated to evade cephalosporins — the only antibiotics still effective against the infection.
“This is both an alarming and a predictable discovery,” lead researcher Magnus Unemo, professor at the Swedish Reference Laboratory for Pathogenic Neisseria in Örebro, Sweden, said in a statement. “Since antibiotics became the standard treatment for gonorrhea in the 1940s, this bacterium has shown a remarkable capacity to develop resistance mechanisms to all drugs introduced to control it.”
The discovery, announced by Unemo at the International Society for Sexually Transmitted Disease Research meeting in Quebec City, Canada, could hail gonorrhea’s transition from treatable STD to global public health threat.
“While it is still too early to assess if this new strain has become widespread, the history of newly emergent resistance in the bacterium suggests that it may spread rapidly unless new drugs and effective treatment programs are developed,” Unemo said in a statement.
Cephalosporin-resistant Neisseria gonorrhoeae joins methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus and vancomycin-resistent enterococcii in a sinister class of bacteria known as superbugs. But unlike hospital-acquired MRSA and VRE, which spread where antibiotic use runs high and immune defenses run low, super gonorrhea could spread anywhere.
“This report points out that antibiotic resistance is occurring not only in hospitals, but out in the community,” said Dr. William Schaffner, chair of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tenn. And while the strain was disovered in Kyoto, Japan, antibiotic-resistant bacteria “don’t need a passport.”
Antibiotic resistance is not a new phenomenon — even for Neisseria gonorrhoeae, which developed resistance to several other antibiotics used before cephalosporins.
“We were concerned about this 20 years ago and combated that very effectively,” said Schaffner, explaining how gonorrhea treatments have evolved alongside the bacteria. “But if you have a strain that’s completely resistant to antibiotics, you have to very quickly develop strategies to recognize the resistant strain and alternative treatment regimens.”
Such tests and new treatments could be developed, Schaffner said, but they would likely be more expensive. Amid cutbacks across all facets of research, pharmaceutical companies are investing less in the quest for new antibiotics, he said.
With an estimated 700,000 new cases each year in the U.S. alone, gonorrhea is one of the most common STDs. It spreads through direct contact with the penis, vagina, mouth or anus, and can also be transmitted from mom to baby during delivery.
But only 50 percent of infected women and less than five percent of infected men develop symptoms, such as a burning sensation and discharge. Left untreated, the infection can spread to the skin, blood and other organs causing pain, infertility and even death.
A July 8, 2011, report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urged doctors to be on the lookout for gonorrhea resistant to cephalosporins, and to report cases promptly.
The new superbug serves as a reminder that antibiotic resistance is a problem that spreads beyond hospital and nursing home walls.
“We need to implement a program so that pharmaceutical companies are motivated financially to pursue research in developing antibiotics,” Schaffner said. “And both the public and professional have to be much more rigorous in their expectations and use of antibiotics.”
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This is why I always encourage people to practice safe sex. They seem to think because there are many diseases out there that are treatable that it’s worth the risk. But you never know when one day the disease could have developed so much that it can’t be treated for you. There is no way that we’re going to continue finding cures for such diseases, just to have none show up. The world is a constant work in progress and there’s always something new that is waiting to show face. Protect yourself and stay aware.
The Westboro Baptist Church is BACK!
This video doesn’t make me angry so much as it makes me laugh. It is ironic how they speak over this individual, and yet stop him in his tracks when he speaks after thinking they have finished. The things that they mention or discuss make no sense, and they give NO ONE an opportunity to speak to them about THEIR opinions. They are so brainwashed that they know if they listened to anything logical, they may call into question their whole sense of self-worth. Pathetic.
Their website (which I only put on here for your curiosity. I rarely visit to try and deter popularity): http://www.godhatesfags.com
This Kid Understands Gay Marriage, Why Don’t You?
This kid has an amazingly genuine reaction to finding out that these 2 men got married. It is adorable how he has the ability to make up his own mind. Without influence of hate, he’s able to see that they love each other and that is why they’re married, not that they’re trying to enforce the “gay agenda”.
PS. If anyone has this gay agenda, I’m in desperate need for a copy. Apparently during gay orientation someone forgot to give me mine.
“Why ‘Caylee’s Law’ Is A Bad Idea”
First Posted: 7/11/11 09:49 AM ET Updated: 7/11/11 03:31 PM ET
Within minutes of the Casey Anthony verdict, much of America devolved into the mass media equivalent of a mob bearing torches and pitchforks. Twitter lit up with calls for vigilante justice, and proposals that we revoke the Fifth Amendment’s protection against double jeopardy (or at least that we revoke it for Casey Anthony). Nancy Grace nearly spit fire, proclaiming, “The devil is dancing tonight.” Conservative syndicated columnist Ben Shapiro wants to do away with juries altogether.
Even as DNA testing continues to exonerate wrongly convicted people, including people who were nearly executed, it’s this rare case — in which a jury recognized that there was no physical evidence linking Anthony to her daughter’s murder — that has America questioning its justice system.
High-profile trials are anomalies. They’re about as far from the day-to-day goings on in police precincts, courtrooms, and prisons as your typical TV crime drama (the other place Americans get most of their (bad) information about the criminal justice system). Despite what much of the public seems to have taken away from these sorts of trials in recent years, the average person wrongly accused of a crime isn’t a wealthy college lacrosse player with top-notch legal representation. Prosecutors who wrongly charge people aren’t usually stripped of their law license or criminally sanctioned. (In fact, they’re rarely sanctioned at all.) Black men accused of murder aren’t typically represented by “dream teams” of the country’s best defense attorneys. And, believe it or not, if there’s a problem in the criminal justice system when it comes to children, it’s that parents and caretakers are too often overcharged in accidental deaths or as a result of bogus allegations, not that they regularly get away with murder.
Even more regrettable is that every time a Casey Anthony-type trial captures the public’s attention, someone gets the idea that we need a new law in response to the completely unrepresentative case, a law that presumably would have prevented that particularly travesty from happening. The problem, of course, is that the new law — usually poorly written and passed in a fit of hysteria — is too late to apply to the case it was designed for. But it does then apply to everyone else.
Laws named after crime victims and dead people are usually a bad idea. They play more to emotion than reason. But they’re disturbingly predictable, especially when they come after the death of a child. So it’s really no surprise that activist Michelle Crowder is now pushing “Caylee’s Law,” a proposed federal bill that would charge parents with a felony if they fail to report a missing child within 24 hours, or if they fail to report the death of a child within an hour. What’s surprising is just how quickly the Change.org petition for Caylee’s Law has gone viral. As of this writing it has more than 700,000 signatures, and is now the most successful campaign in the site’s history. For reasons of constitutionality and practicality, it seems unlikely that Caylee’s Law will ever be realized at the federal level. But according to the AP, at least sixteen state legislatures are now considering some version of the law. That’s troubling.
This is a bad way to make public policy. In an interview with CNN, Crowder concedes that she didn’t consult with a single law enforcement official before coming up with her 24-hour and 1-hour limits. This raises some questions. How did she come up with those cutoffs? Did she consult with any grief counselors to see if there may be innocuous reasons why an innocent person who just witnessed a child’s death might not immediately report it, such as shock, passing out, or some other sort of mental breakdown? Did she consult with a forensic pathologist to see if it’s even possible to pin down the time of death with the sort of precision you’d need to make Caylee’s Law enforceable? Have any of the lawmakers who have proposed or are planning to propose this law actually consulted with anyone with some knowledge of these issues?
Jamie Downs is the Coastal Regional Medical Examiner for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, and co-editor of a forthcoming book on forensic ethics about Caylee’s Law. Downs also formerly served on the board of directors for the National Association of Medical Examiners. Contrary to what you may have learned from watching CSI, Downs says, there’s no way for a medical examiner to determine time of death in the sort of narrow window that would be necessary to enforce Caylee’s Law. “I understand that people are outraged, and I understand why they’d want a law like this, but I just don’t think it’s a good idea. I don’t see how you would enforce it,” Downs says. “You just can’t say for certain that a person died an hour and five minutes ago as opposed to 45 minutes ago.”
If medical science can’t pinpoint the time of the child’s death to the minute, how else are authorities going to determine it? They can’t ask the parent. A guilty person isn’t going to give you an honest answer, and even an innocent parent may lie if they fear the truth could land them in prison. It also seems safe to assume that a parent’s first instinct upon witnessing the death of a child isn’t to look up at the clock to take note of an official time of death.
Certainly it’s easy to distinguish a body that’s been dead for less than hour from one that has been dead for six or seven. Presumably, Crowder and the lawmakers supporting this bill put the cutoff at one hour to prevent someone who intentionally or accidentally kills a child from having time to cover up what happened. But if that’s the justification, it’s all the more important that a forensic pathologist be able to nail down the time of death to the minute. And that just isn’t possible.
There are myriad other problems with the one-hour requirement. What if a child dies while sleeping? When would you start the clock on the parent’s one-hour window to report? From the time the parent discovers the child is dead, or from the time the child actually dies? If it’s the former, can you really believe what a parent tells you if he knows a felony charge hinges on his answer? What if a parent or babysitter missed the deadline because she fell asleep at the time the child was playing outside and suffered a fatal accident? You could argue this is evidence of bad parenting or inattentive babysitting, but under those circumstances, do you really want to charge a grieving parent or heartbroken babysitter with a felony?
The portion of the bill that requires a parent to report a missing child within 24 hours is just as fraught with problems. When does that clock start? From the time the child actually gets abducted, gets lost, or is somehow killed, or at the time the parents noticed the child was missing? How do you pinpoint the time that they “noticed”? When teenager Rosie Larsen is abducted and murdered in the new AMC drama The Killing, it takes two days for her parents to notice she’s missing. They thought she was spending the night at a friend’s house, and she and her friends often rotated sleeping over at one another’s homes on the weekends. The Killing is fiction, but this isn’t an implausible scenario. Again, are we really so angry about the Casey Anthony verdict that we’re prepared to charge grieving parents with a felony because it takes them longer than some arbitrary deadline to notice their child is missing?
The law and the attention it attracts could also cause problems of overcompliance. How many parents will notify the authorities with false reports within an hour or two, out of fear of becoming suspects? How many such calls and wasted police resources on false alarms will it take before police grow jaded and begin taking note of missing child reports, but don’t bother investigating them until much later? How many legitimate abductions will then go uninvestigated during the critical first few hours because they were lost in the pile of false reports inspired by Caylee’s Law?
It isn’t difficult to come up with other scenarios where innocent people may get ensnared in Caylee’s Law.
Here’s another: You’re camping with your family when your son goes missing. One of your other children says she last saw him swimming in a lake. You spend several hours frantically looking for him before discovering that, tragically, he has drowned. You call the police. Under Caylee’s Law, is this a “missing child” case, or a “dead child” case? Do you get charged with a felony for not notifying authorities within an hour of your son’s drowning, or are you afforded the 24-hour window from the time you noticed he went missing? Is this really the sort of thing we want parents to be considering while they’re trying to find their child? What if your kid gets lost hiking on a camping trip where there’s no cell phone reception? It could take a few hours to notice your kid is missing, another few to look for him before you begin to panic. In some cases, it may be best to keep looking than to abandon the area to notify authorities.
The counter to these hypotheticals is that a prosecutor wouldn’t charge grieving parents under those circumstances. But why give them the option? Sure, it may be difficult to conceive of a prosecutor charging good parents who bear zero blame in a child’s death, but it’s not hard to envision a prosecutor using the notification requirements to punish parents or guardians who make subjectively poor decisions that aren’t otherwise crimes. Why were you letting your kid swim in the lake unsupervised in the first place? Maybe the babysitter bears no blame for the SIDS death of the infant she was watching, but it took her two hours to notice the baby had died in his sleep because she was napping off a hangover, or making out with her boyfriend downstairs. If you find it doubtful that a prosecutor could be so vindictive, look at Mississippi and Alabama, where women who have had miscarriages are being charged with murder.
While Caylee’s Law could quite conceivably ensnare innocent grieving parents, it seems unlikely that it will prevent a single child’s death. Consider: Is a father who is depraved enough to kill his own son really going to be dissuaded by a law that says he must notify the authorities of his son’s death within an hour of having killed him? He’s already committing murder. The law isn’t likely to affect a parent who kills a child in a fit of anger or rage, either. By definition, crimes of passion are perpetrated in the heat of the moment, with little consideration of consequences.
The law will have at least have one effect that Crowder and her supporters intend. Crowder’s petition letter expresses her hope that once the law is passed, “no more innocent children will have to go without justice.” And she’s right. Caylee’s Law provides another way for prosecutors to convict a suspected parent or guardian of something, even if they don’t have the evidence to prove the actual murder. Florida state Rep. Scott Plakon, sponsor of the bill in his state, told the AP “God forbid we ever run into a mother like Casey Anthony again. If we do, that mother will be a felon.” I suspect this is why so many people have signed Crowder’s petition. This is about vengeance. They’re angry at this verdict.
That anger is understandable. But anger is a bad reason to make public policy. New laws, especially laws with serious criminal sanctions, demand careful consideration: Will the law actually address the problem it is intended to address? Is it enforceable? What are some possible unintended consequences of this law? Could it be abused by police and prosecutors?
Laws named after the victims of brutal crimes make it difficult to ask these questions, especially for politicians, who aren’t exactly known for taking bold stands against an angry public. When you put Caylee Anthony’s name on a bill, you imply that anyone who opposes the bill — even for good reasons — is indifferent to the death of its namesake, or at least isn’t as concerned about it as you think they ought to be. That’s not a formula for an honest discussion of the bill’s merits.
In a country of 308 million people, bad things are going to happen. We already have laws against murder, child abuse, and child neglect. When you pass laws that make it easier to imprison people in cases where the state doesn’t have enough evidence to prove the crime everyone knows they’re actually prosecuting, you undermine the integrity of the justice system. The “flaw” that led to the Casey Anthony verdict is pretty straightforward: The state failed to prove its case. And the government must prove its case, even when all of America is 100 percent certain of the defendant’s guilt, because we want to be sure the state will always also have to prove its case when we aren’t so certain.
Of course, there’s another reason we go through the formality of a trial before throwing someone in prison, even in “slam-dunk” cases like this one. Sometimes, even when Nancy Grace herself is completely sure that the bastards are guilty, we later discover that she was wrong.