Tupperware Meets Victoria's Secret

Poor ol' Kathy Grubbs. She gets busted for DUI (not funny in Texas) on her way home from a Slumber Parties party in White Oak, a suburb of Longview in Deep East Texas. Ol' Kathy is the Treasurer (I think) of the Longview Chamber of Commerce. Anyway, the White Oak police found 17 dildos in her car. According to Texas law, it is legal to possess up to 6 of these devices. More than 6, you're a pusher. Ol' Kathy faces hard time in the slammer for all of these transgressions. I love the extra info the Longview fishwrap provided free of charge. Kathy's screwed. Wait for the Bum Steer Awards of 2003 in Texas Monthly. If this be (fair & balanced) Texas nonsense, so be it.

[x Longview (TX) News-Journal]
Police find 17 sex toys in local woman's car during DUI traffic stop
By JOHN LYNCH

WHITE OAK — A Longview woman who sells sex toys has been charged with felony obscenity after White Oak police found some of her wares in her car during a traffic stop

The arrest report describes the 17 items as "obscene materials and obscene devices," but Police Chief Charlie Smith said the items were mostly lotions and objects defined in a dictionary as having the shape and often the appearance of the male genitalia, used in sexual stimulation.

How illegal is that? Prosecutors will have to decide when White Oak investigators forward their findings to the district attorney's office sometime in the next week, Smith said.

"We'll see what they do with it," Smith said.

Kathleen Elizabeth "Kathy" Grubbs, a distributor for the national company Slumber Parties Inc., calls the charge, which carries a maximum penalty of two years in jail, "kind of ridiculous."

State law appears a little less forgiving: It's illegal to "wholesale promote" obscene materials or devices. Texas statute says an obscene device is a simulated sexual organ or an item designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs. The law allows investigators to assume that anyone with six or more of the items is intending to promote them.

In April, Kilgore police raided the Adult Book Store/Video Store at 1907 Industrial Blvd., seizing 12 large trash bags full of devices police said were being sold illegally. The raid came after an undercover officer visited the shop twice before the raid, making at least one purchase. An 11-page inventory compiled by police estimated the materials were worth $19,082. The sexual devices on the 11-page inventory ranged in price from a "Climax Band" that sold for $5.95 to a "Wild and Crazy Tickler" for $11.95; a "Hyper Sonic G" for $69.95; a "Plush Playmate" for $89.95; and a "Cyber Sexploration Kit" for $44.95.

The store owner, Robert Duggan III, was never arrested, but he agreed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor count of obscene display, a charge equivalent to a traffic ticket, and agreed to pay a fine and let police destroy the items.

Grubbs, 47, said she has been selling the items for about two months as a distributor for Slumber Parties Inc., a national sex toy party business that operates out of Ohio and Louisiana.

Slumber Parties is where the Tupperware party meets Victoria's Secret, the company says on its Web site. The distributors host women-only parties in private homes to show off their merchandise. Grubbs stresses the parties are only for adults, meaning no one allowed under age 18, and men are definitely prohibited.

"Believe it or not, there's a lot of women who go to these parties," Grubbs said. "It's very popular."

Company officials did not return a call Wednesday, but Slumber Parties claims its network of distributors sold $15 million in "romance-enriching" products, including lotions, powders, lingerie and private bedroom accessories, with prices ranging from $2.50 to $139. Sales this year are expected to reach $20 million.

The seizure of the items occured during a traffic stop on Texas 42 on Old Highway 80 in White Oak at 10:27 p.m. Monday. Police stopped Grubbs' truck after seeing her driving erratically, an arrest report said. She failed or refused to perform field sobriety tests and was charged with driving while intoxicated, and a breath test showed she had blood-alcohol levels of 0.228 percent and 0.22 percent, the report said.

Police searching her truck after the arrest found the box of erotic items. The White Oak police chief said investigators are used to finding drugs and guns, but sex toys are the first in his 22 years of experience.

"There's no telling what you'll find on one of these stops," Smith said.

Copyright © 2003 Longview News-Journal

43 Most Wanted?

Ah, Dictators are like flies. Kill one and 5 more appear. Is it possible to rid the world of dictators? When captured, Saddam had a satchelful of brand-new U. S. currency—$750K—in the Treasury Department wrappers. That is walking around money to someone like Saddam. The persistence of dictators around the world is easy to explain: Show me the money! Where is Osama bin Laden? THAT is the question. We are no safer with Saddam in captivity; our troops are not safer. If this be (fair & balanced) reframing, so be it.

[x WSJ.com Opinion Journal]
One Down, Dozens More to Go
A plan for ridding the world of dictators.
BY CLAUDIA ROSETT

We got Saddam Hussein. Now, what about all the other dictators?

That long list of surviving despots makes up the true axis of evil, which is the source of the worst troubles of the modern world, according to author and former U.S. ambassador Mark Palmer. Replacing every last one of them with democracy is not only desirable, says Mr. Palmer; it is doable.

Before anyone writes off such a claim as utopian raving, or U.S. unilateralism gone ballistic, let us all turn--please--to Mr. Palmer's Breaking the Real Axis of Evil, one of the best but least noticed books among all the tomes addressing the quest for peace in the post-Sept. 11 era.

A mix of broad argument and gritty guide, Breaking the Real Axis of Evil is basically an inspired field manual on the why and how of replacing tyranny with democracy--the sooner the better and, where possible, without violence. To come up with the names on his hit list, Mr. Palmer draws on the rating system of New York-based Freedom House, which has been tracking tyrants world-wide for decades. (Mr. Palmer is now a vice chairman of Freedom House.) Noting that a clear deadline and strategy would help end the era of despots altogether, Mr. Palmer somewhat arbitrarily picks the year 2025 for polishing off every last one and devotes the rest of his book to the program.

The ideas here are entirely in keeping with the democratic principles that President Bush has laid out these past two years as the basis of U.S. foreign policy. What's radical about Mr. Palmer's book is that he suggests scores of practical ways in which the U.S. and its democratic allies can live up to these principles, not only in Iraq but around the globe.
Mr. Palmer argues that replacing dictators with democracy is a matter not only of human rights and decency but of global security. Reeling off a list of the miseries that still plague much of mankind--"famine, refugees, poverty, environmental degradation, corruption, war, genocide, and terrorism"--he classifies them all as "toxic weeds that bloom in the deep shade of dictatorship." He cites extensive evidence that free nations generally avoid the atrocities to which dictatorships are prone. "Even in its immature form," he states, "democracy offers a better world than the tyranny it displaces."

That is not always the view at the U.S. State Department, where custom and bureaucracy tend to favor the "stability" of established relations with dictators and to nurture the hope that "engagement" will moderate their behavior. Mr. Palmer believes, by contrast, that "softening repression does not eliminate its cause; eliminating the dictator is the only way to do that." He goes on to make the case that, for people living under tyranny, signs of democratic solidarity from the outside, especially from the U.S., matter more than most Americans might imagine.

So what to do? To begin, he recommends that the State Department create a new slot of "Assistant Secretary for Ousting Dictators." Maybe that sounds odd, but it makes a lot more sense than such State Department traditions as bowing low to the Saudis. Mr. Palmer is seeking levers to engineer a shift in the thinking, methods and reach of U.S. diplomacy. He proposes, reasonably enough--and the italics are his--that "dictatorship itself must be recognized as a crime against humanity."

For pressuring tyrants from power, Mr. Palmer lays out a kit of practical tools--some as simple as "the uses of ridicule," which, he notes, really bothers Fidel Castro. He recognizes up front that "a strong defense among the democracies is an absolute precondition for peace and for ousting dictators." Early on, he quotes with approval Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute saying: "The best democracy program ever invented is the U.S. Army."

Mr. Palmer offers case studies ranging from Chile to the Philippines and draws on his own experience as ambassador to Hungary during the final years of the Soviet empire. He focuses on ways to make contact with democrats inside tyrannies, support them and help them peacefully free themselves. With China, Mr. Palmer recommends tactics as simple as having the U.S. ambassador visiting Beijing parks to perform exercises favored by the persecuted spiritual group Falun Gong. He suggests calling for an annual China Democracy Day, world-wide, which might summon a big display of support abroad and "help undermine the legitimacy of the communist dictatorship."

He also includes brief profiles of the world's current dictators, calling them the "Forty-Five Least Wanted" (now down to 43, with Saddam Hussein captured and Liberia's Charles Taylor forced from office). In these sketches is plenty to ponder. When America earlier this year went seeking a final vote in the United Nations Security Council to oust Saddam, and ended up dickering with the likes of Cameroon, how many Americans knew that Cameroon itself, ruled for the past 21 years by President Paul Biya, is a dictatorship where state security forces routinely torture and murder dissidents?

Not that this book is perfect. Mr. Palmer's prose style is more utilitarian than lyric. And there are a few items I would quarrel with, such as his reverence for South Korea's former President Kim Dae Jung as an exemplary democrat--something belied by Mr. Kim's own "sunshine policy" sellout to North Korea, mistakenly pushing detente with a regime clearly beyond redemption.

But by and large, "Breaking the Real Axis of Evil" is an invaluable foreign-policy guide. It needs to become a well-thumbed manual on the desk of every diplomat and leader who claims to represent the Free World. An honest United Nations might even want to replace its politically correct lobby exhibits with a portrait gallery of Mr. Palmer's Least Wanted--and cross them off as they fall. That would be the real start of meeting all those grand U.N. Millennium Development Goals, not by holding endless conferences on ending poverty, hunger and war but by eliminating their root cause: dictatorship.

Claudia Rosett is a fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and the Hudson Institute. Her column appears here and in The Wall Street Journal Europe on alternate Wednesdays. Breaking the Real Axis of Evil is available from the OpinionJournal bookstore.


Copyright © 2003 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

Bah, Humbug!

Ka-Ching! The sounds of Christmas! If this be (fair & balanced) cynicism, so be it.

[x HNN]
Top 5 Myths About Christmas
By Rick Shenkman

#1 Myth

Retailers Have Ruined Christmas By Commercializing It

Until retailers began to see in Christmas the opportunity to market their merchandise the holiday attracted little of the attention it does now. It was retailers who made Christmas exciting. It was they who turned Santa Claus into a national icon. Montgomery Ward gave us Rudolf the red-nosed reindeer. Coca-Cola helped popularize the smiling Santa. Retailers discovered the commercial possibilities of Christmas after the Civil War. Only then did newspapers regularly begin to feature advertising sales associated with the holiday.

Retailers helped establish Christmas as an American tradition by persuading Protestants to overcome centuries of hostility to the holiday, which had long been identified as a popish import. The leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony so disdained Christmas that in 1659 they passed a law prohibiting the public celebration of the holiday, punishing "anybody who is found observing [it], by abstinence from labor, feasting, or any other way." The law was repealed 25 years later, but the prejudice against Christmas remained strong. Judge Samuel Sewall was delighted to be able to report in his diary in 1685 that he did not see a single person celebrating the holiday.

#2 Myth

Christmas Cards Are a Venerable Tradition

Yes, Virginia, Christmas cards are venerable. But it was the Victorian businessman who made the Christmas card an American tradition. Before the middle of the 19th century Americans simply did not send holiday greeting cards at Christmas.

#3 Myth

Clement Moore Wrote the Poem, "The Night Before Christmas"

Several years ago Vassar professor and professional debunker Don Foster concluded that Moore did not write the famous 1822 poem with which he is so identified. Foster claimed, according to an account in the New York Times in 2000, that the poem's "spirit and style are starkly at odds with the body of Moore's other writings." Foster speculated that the poem was actually written by Henry Livingston, Jr., an author from Poughkeepsie (where Vassar happens to be located).

The story made a big splash in the newspapers. It was then promptly forgotten. The same cannot be said of the poem.

#4 Myth

Christmas Trees Are Traditional

The Christmas tree first made its appearance in America in the middle of the 18th century, thanks to German immigrants. But a hundred years later it was still rare. In 1851 a Cleveland, Ohio reverend who had recently emigrated from Germany put up a Christmas tree in his local church. He was roundly condemned. Nobody before had ever put up a Christmas tree in an American church. Victorians in the latter half of the 19th century slowly began adopting the German tradition, but the Christmas tree remained controversial. In the 1880s the New York Times editorialized against the Christmas tree. When Teddy Roosevelt became president he denounced the practice of cutting down trees for Christmas. Good conservationist that he was, he declared the practice a waste of timber.

#5 Myth

Santa Was Always Fat and Jolly

Whether he was a Dutch creation, as so many believe, is, according to scholar Eric C. Wolf, doubtful. "There is no evidence," says Wolf, "that the Santa Claus myth existed in New Amsterdam, or for a century after English occupation." To be sure, Santa is loosely based on the European figure, St. Nick, the fourth century Bishop of Demre, Turkey, who was said to have carried a sack full of toys for children. But it was only after the Revolution, when writers began inventing American traditions, that Santa suddenly achieved broad popularity. The myth was slow to build. Not until 1821 was Santa seen flying in the sky behind a pack of reindeer. Only in 1837 do we find evidence that he arrived in American homes via the chimney. And not until the Civil War did Santa look the way we imagine him. In colonial days he was often described as thin and beardless. In 1809 Washington Irving imagined Santa as a bulky man who smoked a pipe and wore a Dutch broad-brimmed hat and baggy breeches. Later, Santa was depicted as a fat man with brown hair and a big smile. Then in 1863 Thomas Nast gave us our modern idea of Santa Claus, as a jolly fat man with a flowing white beard dressed in a red suit.

Rick Shenkman is the editor of HNN.

Copyright © 2003 History News Network