The weekend’s most bizarre story is that British cancer specialist Dr. Brooke Magnanti has revealed that she is “Belle de Jour,” the pseudonymous blogger who managed to get several bestselling books and a television movie out of having paid her way through graduate school as a high priced prostitute. Jon Ungoed-Thomas for The Times.

Her identity has been one of the great literary mysteries of the decade after the publication of bestselling books about her secret life as a prostitute.

Magnanti is a respected specialist in developmental neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology in a hospital research group in Bristol. Six years ago, in the final stages of her PhD thesis, she ran out of money and turned to prostitution through a London escort agency, charging £300 an hour. Already an experienced science blogger, she began writing about her experiences in a web diary that was adapted into books and a television drama starring Billie Piper.

[...]

The scientist, a petite 34-year-old, has no regrets about her 14 months as a prostitute. “I’ve felt worse about my writing than I ever have about sex for money,” she said. Anonymity had become “no fun”, however: “I couldn’t even go to my own book launch party.”

Until last week, not even her agent knew her real name. A month ago she revealed her secret to her colleagues at the Bristol Initiative for Research of Child Health, who were “amazingly kind and supportive”. She was preparing to tell her parents this weekend.

Magnanti said she was working on a doctoral study for the department of forensic pathology of Sheffield University in 2003 when she took up prostitution. “I was getting ready to submit my thesis. I saved up a bit of money. I thought, I’ll just move to London, because that’s where the jobs are, and I’ll see what happens.

“I couldn’t find a professional job in my chosen field because I didn’t have my PhD yet. I didn’t have a lot of spare time on my hands because I was still making corrections and preparing for the viva; and I got through my savings a lot faster than I thought I would.”

When she could no longer afford her rent, she started to think: “What can I do that I can start doing straightaway, that doesn’t require a great deal of training or investment to get started, that’s cash in hand and that leaves me spare time to do my work in?”

Apparently, threats that an ex-boyfriend (whether of the paid or unpaid variety is unclear) would reveal her secret forced her hand.

She claims to have earned £300 a night, which I find baffling on a number of levels.   And says that her blog “will continue for a bit – I’d like her to have a happy ending.”  Which is an amusing double entendre, whether intentional or otherwise.

Her “Secret Diary of a Call Girl” blog was controversial, since it depicted prostitution as glamorous.  Since the blogger was pseudonymous,many speculated that it was a work of fiction, with some claiming the author was a man.  Presuming Magnanti’s claim to authorship is genuine, it’ll be interesting to see what the reactions are.

A Vogue cover model of whom I’d never previously heard and does not conform to my preconceptions of what a Vogue cover model looks like has won a lawsuit against Google over an anonymous former blogger who called her names on the Internet.

A Vogue cover girl has won a precedent-setting court battle to unmask an anonymous blogger who called her a “skank” on the internet.

In a case with potentially far-reaching repercussions, Liskula Cohen sought the identity of the blogger who maligned her on the Skanks in NYC blog so that she could sue him or her for defamation.  A Manhattan supreme court judge ruled that she was entitled to the information and ordered Google, which ran the offending blog, to turn it over.

Ms Cohen, a tall, Canadian blonde who has modelled for Giorgio Armani and Versace, went to court after reading the wounding anonymous comments on Google’s Blogger.com.  “I would have to say the first-place award for ‘Skankiest in NYC’ would have to go to Liskula Gentile Cohen,” the blogger “Anonymous” wrote in one posting. The blog, since removed, ridiculed the former Australian Vogue covergirl as a “40-something” who “may have been hot 10 years ago”, when she was actually 36.

Justice Joan Madden rejected the blogger’s claim that the blogs “serve as a modern-day forum for conveying personal opinions, including invective and ranting”, and should not be treated as factual assertions.

The model was looking forward last night to discovering the identity of the alleged acquaintance who insulted her. “Everybody is waiting to see who this coward is,” Steven Wagner, her lawyer, said.

While I absolutely believe that bloggers should be held just as liable as anyone else for defamation — even if that requires forcing the disclousure of their identity to the alleged victim — it’s hard to see how voicing the opinion that someone is the “skankiest in NYC” even comes close to defamation.  There is no factual assertion being made, given that there would seem to be no universal standard of measurement for such condition.

A second report at the NY Post (via Tom Maguire) however, reveals something that might rise to the level of defamation:

A Manhattan judge ruled yesterday that a blogger can’t hide behind a web of anonymity while flinging the ugly words “skank” and “ho” at somebody online.

The sternly worded ruling orders Google to give up the identity of an anonymous blogger-assailant who inexplicably devoted an entire blog — titled “Skanks in NYC” — to maligning beautiful blond model Liskula Cohen.  [Apparently the view of reporter Laura Italiano, who editorializes throughout. - ed]

Once she learns her attacker’s name — possibly as early as today — the model can serve the anonymous blogger with a defamation lawsuit.

The blog, which was posted through Google’s “Blogger.com” subsidiary last year, had included sexy fashion shots of Cohen with captions using the words “skank,” “ho” and “whoring.”

The thrust of the blog is that [Cohen] is a sexually promiscuous woman,” Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Joan Madden wrote in her decision. That included references to Cohen as “whoring” and “ready to engage in oral sexual activity.”  As such, the international cover girl is entitled to insist in a defamation lawsuit that the blogger’s statements are false and damaging — and to get from Google the blogger’s name she needs in order to do so, the judge ruled.

Cohen’s lawyer, Steven Wagner, said he hopes the decision sends a message to bloggers, Twitterers, and whoever else would use the anonymity of the Internet for cowardly defamations. ”The rules for defamation on the Web — for actual reality as well as virtual reality — are the same,” Wagner said. “The Internet is not a free-for-all.”

Well, it pretty much has been for going on two decades now.  But, again, I agree that people should be held liable for their actions on the Web. Indeed, spreading false rumors on the Web is far more damaging than simply stating them in words somewhere, given the much larger audience.

I’m not sure what the rules of discovery are in such cases. Presumably, the blogger isn’t entitled to a fishing expedition through Cohen’s sex life to see whether there is any truth to the descriptors he applied.

One imagines that the burden here is high, though.  The word “whore” has been transformed in the popular culture into a meaning well beyond traditional prostitution.  And I’m not sure that insinuating that an adult engages in oral sex with other adults, especially of the opposite sex, can even still be considered defamatory.

UPDATE:  My wife informs me that the identity of the blogger has already been revealed.  Gawker (Warning: NSFW) has a good roundup, including a link to a new story at NY Post.

The anonymous cyber-bully who harassed and belittled Manhattan model Liskula Cohen with insulting terms like “skank,” “ho” and “old hag” on a mean-spirited blog was a female acquaintance of hers.

[...]

The model said she’s still mystified about why the woman went after her so viciously. “I have no idea. She doesn’t have a lot going on and she’s jealous,” she said. “It’s the only logical explanation.”

[...]

She “was an irrelevant person” whom she’d bump into at events and restaurants around town, Cohen said. “She was always around.”

Cohen said they exchanged pleasantries when she called her on Tuesday night. Then Cohen confronted her when the woman asked, “How are you?” “I’m sure you know exactly how I am right now,” Cohen told her — and then astonished the backstabber by apologizing to her. She told her, “If I’ve ever done anything to you to actually deserve this, then I’m really very sorry.”

The stammering blogger responded, “We shouldn’t be talking . . . We should talk with the lawyers.” Cohen stopped her in her tracks. “I said, ‘No more lawyers. It’s OK. I said I forgive you. It doesn’t matter anymore,’ ” Cohen told ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

Except that she’s still suing for defamation.

Former President Jimmy Carter quit the Southern Baptist Convention more than eight years ago because of its refusal to ordain women as pastors (rather odd, since the policy had been in place since the early seventeenth century origins of the Baptist faith based on the example of another follow with the initials J.C.).   To make sure people noticed — since he had long stopped having anything to do with the SBC — he sent out 75,000 letters.

Over the weekend, Carter apparently reckoned people forgot about this (and, I must confess, I had) he up and quit again, this time via op-eds in The Guardian and The Age. (The latter was published a week ago but, owing to the confluence of the International Date Line and a lot of famous celebrities dying, nobody in the United States noticed until yesterday.)

But I digress.  I bring this up not because I much care about Carter’s religion, having neither a dog in the fight nor interest sufficient to warrant exchanging a rodent’s hindquarters for his views on the subject, but rather because of the extraordinarily bizarre explanation given.

At its most repugnant, the belief that women must be subjugated to the wishes of men excuses slavery, violence, forced prostitution, genital mutilation and national laws that omit rape as a crime. But it also costs many millions of girls and women control over their own bodies and lives, and continues to deny them fair access to education, health, employment and influence within their own communities.

Now, I can’t vouch for Plains, Georgia.  But I’ve lived in plenty of communities where Southern Baptists predominated.  In all of them, prostitution and rape were against the law.  Girls went to school and the doctor.  Women had jobs and influence.  So far as I know, their genitals were intact.

The impact of these religious beliefs touches every aspect of our lives. They help explain why in many countries boys are educated before girls; why girls are told when and whom they must marry; and why many face enormous and unacceptable risks in pregnancy and childbirth because their basic health needs are not met.

But these aren’t countries run by Southern Baptists.  In rural Alabama and Mississippi, girls start and finish school at the same age as boys. Young women now outnumber young men in our colleges and universities.  Arranged marriages have never been part of our culture.  To the extent “their basic health needs are not met,” it’s because of poverty, not religious dogma.

In some Islamic nations, women are restricted in their movements, punished for permitting the exposure of an arm or ankle, deprived of education, prohibited from driving a car or competing with men for a job. If a woman is raped, she is often most severely punished as the guilty party in the crime.

In Southern Baptist towns in the United States, women show a hell of a lot more than their arms and ankles. They’re required to go to school up to age 16 and are strongly encouraged to graduate high school and go on to college.  Women work outside the home at tremendous rate.  Rape is abhorred and the rapist is severely punished, often in extracurricular fashion.

The same discriminatory thinking lies behind the continuing gender gap in pay and why there are still so few women in office in the West. The root of this prejudice lies deep in our histories, but its impact is felt every day. It is not women and girls alone who suffer. It damages all of us. The evidence shows that investing in women and girls delivers major benefits for society. An educated woman has healthier children. She is more likely to send them to school. She earns more and invests what she earns in her family.

A goodly number of Western countries (although, granted, none with large Southern Baptist populations) have women prime ministers and presidents.  In the United States, including the South, women governors, senators, and other high office holders were quite common long before Carter quit the Convention (the first time).  We’ve had three female Secretaries of State, a woman National Security Advisor, a woman Attorney General, a woman Secretary of Homeland Security.  We’ve had two women as vice presidential nominees and one who came close to getting a major party presidential nod.   Sarah Palin, despite rather little experience or demonstrated expertise, seems to be the enthusiastic favorite for the Republican presidential nomination among Southern Baptists.

There are plenty of reasons to pick nits with the Southern Baptists.  But the depredations of radical Islam are not among them.

Baptist photo by Flickr users djking under Creative Commons license.

Jonah Goldberg argues that conservatives should have embraced “The Wire” more than we did.

This is a Democratic city, run almost uniformly by liberals. While many of the problems most prominently on display can certainly be traced back to racism, racism itself is not a central issue in The Wire (nor is racism an inherently or historically conservative phenomena). These drug gangs and the poor souls in their orbit, are not trapped by racism so much as by a dysfunctional culture. That’s certainly the lesson of much of season four. The stoop kids do okay. The Corner Boys are destined for a life of misery. For every main character who is a murderer or dope dealer (but I repeat myself), there’s a representative of the black middle class who rejects the criminal culture of the street. For every Marlo, there’s a Bunk. Race relations between the actual characters are remarkably healthy, and nearly every mention of race as a salient issue is in the context of the political nonsense inherent to Baltimore, or rather urban, Democratic politics. To the extent many liberals try to explain all of the problems of poor blacks on racism, the show was a powerful rebuttal.

Some liberals (including some of the show’s creators) might look at the manifest failures of the schools in The Wire as evidence that we don’t “invest” enough in urban education, which is itself a symptom of racism. Okay, fine. But as a conservative, I don’t look at the schools in the Wire and say, “gosh, if only they had more money.”

Alex Massie, sensibly I believe, wonders, “have we really reached the stage where even TV programmes have to be apportioned between conservatives and liberals so that watching television becomes a dreary act by which one demonstrates ones political allegiance?”   Nonetheless, he wades in fearlessly:

In any case, if you have to investigate The Wire’s politics, it seems to me that you might be tempted to conclude that it endorses a libertarian view of local politics, rather than  conservative or liberal perspective. No wonder it’s such a trendy show to like… The evidence is there: manifest failure of a crippling and immoral war on drugs? Check. Manifest failure of a school system resistant to reform and implicitly ripe, therefore, for real school choice? Check. Desperate consequences of the criminalisation of prostitution? For sure. Ghastly consequences of local government and planning regulations held hostage by rent-seeking?

Which just goes to show that programs with a heavy dose of social drama can be read in ways that conform to one’s own preexisting ideological bent.  In any event, we should refrain from drawing too many political lessons from fictional television shows, however “realistic” they seem.

Economic researchers at Yale managed to successfully train Capuchin monkeys to understand and use currency. The result? The monkeys used their newfound currency to buy sex:

Perhaps the most distinguishing characteristic of money, after all, is its fungibility, the fact that it can be used to buy not just food but anything. During the chaos in the monkey cage, Chen saw something out of the corner of his eye that he would later try to play down but in his heart of hearts he knew to be true. What he witnessed was probably the first observed exchange of money for sex in the history of monkeykind. (Further proof that the monkeys truly understood money: the monkey who was paid for sex immediately traded the token in for a grape.)

I’ll depend on crowdsourcing for the snarky comments here. I’d urge you to read the whole thing. To me what was fascinating is that once they learned the concept of money, the Capuchins pretty much behaved like people. As the article concludes:

But these facts remain: When taught to use money, a group of capuchin monkeys responded quite rationally to simple incentives; responded irrationally to risky gambles; failed to save; stole when they could; used money for food and, on occasion, sex. In other words, they behaved a good bit like the creature that most of Chen’s more traditional colleagues study: Homo sapiens.

(link via Wired Science)

UPDATE (James Joyner):  In looking for an illustration for this story (tip:  Don’t Google “monkey sex” photos at work…) I came across stories about how shrewd monkeys are at business and their strong sense of fair play. Make of that what you will.

Remember the good old days when everyday events were coordinated by Karl Rove? Today could have counted as one but, alas, Karl Rove is nowhere to be found.

Child rapists can’t be executed, Supreme Court rules
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 Wednesday that child rapists cannot be executed, concluding that capital punishment for crimes against individuals can be applied only to murderers.

Patrick Kennedy, 43, was on Louisiana’s death row after being convicted of raping his 8-year-old stepdaughter.

The ruling stemmed from the case of Patrick Kennedy, who appealed the 2003 death sentence he received in Louisiana after being convicted of raping his 8-year-old stepdaughter.

Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion that execution in this case would violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, citing “evolving standards of decency” in the United States.

FBI arrests hundreds in child sex crackdown
In a series of raids, authorities have arrested more than 300 members of prostitution operations and removed 21 juveniles from sex-selling rings, the FBI announced Wednesday.

FBI Director Robert Mueller announces the arrests of hundreds suspected in child sex rings.

The sweeps were conducted in 16 cities nationwide over the past five days, authorities said.

“Our top priority in these cases has always been to identify children victims and move swiftly to remove them from these dangerous environments,” FBI Director Robert Mueller said.

Mueller said this week’s sweeps bring to 433 the number of child victims recovered in the five years since the FBI began its Innocence Lost initiative. The program was designed to combat a growing problem of underage prostitution.

That makes for an interesting contrast: the executive branch (currently controlled by Republicans with an FBI head appointed by President Bush) is busting up child sex rings and protecting children while those latte-sipping libruls on the Supreme Court are sparing the most gruesome child rapists. Sadly, the left is but a shadow of its old self these days without Rove to play off of, so this story is not getting the exposure it deserves.

As far as the death penalty goes, I’m mildly against it. I don’t favor it and would vote against it at a state level if given a chance, but am strongly opposed to SCOTUS getting involved and overruling the desires of state residents. Allah goes into more detail about that here.

A young Fox News staffer was fired for telling John McCain she’d voted for him, Chris Ariens reports.

Insiders tell us the assistant, identified as Jennifer Locke, was on assignment with a camera crew to cover the entertainment angle of the event. When Sen. John McCain walked by, the assistant said, “I voted for you in the primary, you’re going to win.” McCain was overheard saying to her, “You’re not supposed to reveal that.” Locke apparently continued to explain that she is the daughter of a Vietnam veteran.

Insiders who were at the event were surprised and shocked to hear the disclosure, which was recorded on videotape. A Fox News insider called it “journalistically unacceptable.” An FNC spokesperson would not comment on the personnel matter but did confirm Locke is no longer with the company, where she’d worked for a couple of years.

Some wonder whether there’s a double standard in place. Bob Owens wonders,

So when is MSNBC going to step up to those same standards and dismiss Chris Matthews for his on-air announcement that Barack Obama caused a”thrill” up his leg? Is telling a candidate that you voted for him unacceptable, but blurting out a homo-erotic reaction to a candidate’s speech not a level of disclosure that is forbidden, even if that disclosure is merely hyperbole making the journalist’s personal attraction to the candidate equally strong?

Ken Shepherd observes, “Of course that is journalistically unacceptable, as much if not more so than the Obamania that ostensibly objective journalists at other networks have expressed.”

Paddy thinks “kick[ing] some kid to the curb over a little hero worship is just freaking wrong,” especially when “Fox talking heads that day after day do the cable version of prostitution for anyone with an R after their name.”

Most of the cases cited are analysts, who are there to give their opinions. But, as Shepherd notes, straight reporters not infrequently reveal their biases. One would think even a 24-year-old would know not to do this sort of thing, especially after two years on the job. Still, firing seems rather harsh. It’s not as if she’s on-air talent. Then again, we don’t know her history she might have been warned on previous occasions.

Megan McArdle is “physically sick” that the DC Madam has committed suicide, driven to do so by a state using its resources to hound a woman engaging in consensual commerce rather than tracking down violent criminals. James Poulos wonders why he should care that a lawbreaker has killed herself.

Emotionally, I’m much closer to James than Megan on this one. Palfrey knowingly and willingly did the crime, took her reward, and the risk caught up to her. That she killed herself rather than suffering the consequences has not caused me especial devastation.

Policywise, though, I’m on Megan’s side. Not only is this is a bizarre prioritization of our law enforcement resources but, more fundamentally, it would make no sense to criminalize prostitution even if we had somehow managed to end the scourge of violent crime.

As Ezra Klein notes, it’s no small irony that Palfrey was facing a sufficiently harsh prison sentence that she preferred death for arranging services partaken of by the likes of still-Senator David Vitter. Or, as has been noted here and elsewhere during the unfolding of this episode, that it’s illegal to sell sex for cash but permissible to make pornographic movies, wherein all manner of people are paid for having sex so that others can then pay to watch them.

Megan feels justified in her outrage here because she thinks the state indirectly responsible for Palfrey’s death. While I agree that she has every right to feel that way, I disagree with the culpability argument. That a possible long jail sentence was a proximate cause of her suicide is unfortunate but hardly society’s responsibility. I think people should be permitted to drive faster than 65 mph on the Interstate when road conditions allow them to do it safely and that libertarians ought to be able to dance around the Jefferson Memorial with their iPods in the middle of the night, too. If someone gets a ticket and choses to kill themselves rather than pay it, though, I’m not going to blame the state.

Further, Palfrey wasn’t a citizen activist for legalizing prostitution; she was a criminal who made a fabulous living taking advantage of the supply constraints the law imposed. The law has always treated providers of illegal services more harshly than their customers. Abortionists, bootleggers, bookies, pimps, and drug dealers get or got more police attention and longer sentences than pregnant teens, drunks, gamblers, Johns, and junkies. Some of those activities have been legalized and others haven’t. Until they are, people are expected to obey the law.

The Eliot Spitzer saga has reopened the debate as to why prostitution should be illegal.

Reason’s Kerry Howley has written several posts on the subject arguing that, while anti-prostitution laws are sold under the guise of protecting women, they’re really just a form of “slut shaming” aimed at limiting women’s sexual freedom.

Anti-prostitution laws add a layer of legal sanction to all of our worst intuitions about the treatment of sexually independent women; they strengthen and validate the idea that women who bed men with any frequency are sick, marginal, pariahs. Even decriminalization, which treats Johns as outlaws and sex workers as victims, assumes that all sex workers are damaged, that no woman would ever love sex enough to make a career out of it. And why not? Well, because every woman knows that she is her sexual purity rating. No sane woman would ever choose to mess that up.

Megan McArdle notes that male prostitutes are not free from scorn but figures that,

But if the only prostitutes were men selling themselves to women, no one would want to make it illegal. Supporting yourself that way might bring social opprobrium, like becoming a Morris dancer or eating live chickens–can’t you find something better to do? But we wouldn’t criminalize it in the name of protecting them from violence, criminals, or the untold horrors of multiple anonymous sexual encounters. A bizarre “We must destroy the village in order to save it” mentality permeates the discussions about legalization on both left and right.

Stacy McCain observes that, “The stigma against patronizing prostitutes is very strong among men, since when a guy has to pay for sex, this implies that he can’t attract partners otherwise” and goes on to argue that, to the extent that there’s a double standard, the emphasis should be on “increasing the stigma on male promiscuity” rather than making it more acceptable among women.

Ross Douthat agrees and states the premise upon which anti-prostitution laws are grounded:

Laws against prostitution ultimately depend on the assumption that the state has an interest in preventing serious forms of self-abuse, and that renting out your body to satisfy another person’s sexual needs is a form of self-inflicted violence serious enough to merit legal sanction irrespective of why and how you decided to become a prostitute in the first place.

Will Wilkinson retorts:

The whole case for banning trade in sexual services stands or falls on the defense of this claim and the assumption behind it. Even granting the assumption that paternalistic efforts to protect adults from the consequences of their own choices are justified, which I certainly don’t, the claim that prostitution is, by its nature, a kind of self-harm is pretty clearly false.

Again, it bears emphasizing that absolutely every form of labor involves renting out your body. The language of “selling your body” is generally intended to elicit a “wisdom of repugnance” disgust response, but it just doesn’t when you consider that folks like Ross and me get paid for things we do with our bodies — thinking, typing. Surgeons rent out their brains, and steady hands, to meet people’s health needs. Construction workers rent out their arms, legs, backs, brains. Etc. I sell my body for a living. So do you.

I think the real claim is not about bodies, but about vaginas and penises in particular. These should not be rentable. (Do note, however, that it is legal to rent a uterus and vagina for the purposes of surrogate gestation and childbirth, but no one really enjoys that and a lot of conservatives don’t like it anyway. And there is always porn, which is nothing without genital rental.)

While I find the idea that renting one’s brainpower to the Cato Institution or one’s hands to a hospital is tantamount to renting one’s sex to random strangers strained, he’s essentially right on the economics. As I noted some months back during a similar debate,

Certainly, the man who cuts my grass isn’t doing it for self-actualization. The couple who cleans our house every two weeks are exploited for no other reason than my laziness. If those people quit, or stopped performing their jobs to my satisfaction, I’d replace them with others without any significant remorse. They are, in a purely economic sense, commodities.

[...]

[I] see no obvious point of demarcation after which exploiting labor on the basis of voluntary exchange becomes too exploitative. People who do manual labor or drudge work are, for all intents and purposes, selling their bodies. For that matter, cops, firefighters, and soldiers put their bodies in mortal danger for a living.

One could argue it happens even at the upper range of the pay scale, such as with professional athletes. In what sense is a professional boxer less exploited than a prostitute? What about lingerie models? Indeed, one could argue that players in professional team sports, who may be traded to other teams and forced to move across the country — or even out of the country — if they wish to continue to work in their industry are much more like serfs than a self-employed prostitute.

Also, as Will points out, the fact that “acting” in pornographic movies is legal while prostitution isn’t points to the absurdity of the law. If anything’s more exploitative and degrading that trading sex for money it’s doing it whilst being filmed so that many others can later watch.

Megan and Kerry have also received the strange retort that, if prostitution is so great, why don’t they change jobs? But that’s just silly. Nobody’s arguing that prostitution is a wonderful job, just that people shouldn’t be thrown in jail for engaging in their best possible career choice (as demonstrated by the fact they haven’t been offered preferable alternatives) unless said activity is harmful to others.

Aside from the circular argument that the existence of prostitutes demonstrates to young girls that prostitution is a viable career, it’s not clear how prostitution per se creates harm to anyone not choosing to take that risk.

New York Governor Eliot Spitzer has finally resigned.

New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer is resigning following intense pressure to step down because of a prostitution scandal. Spitzer says his resignation is effective Monday.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.

Gov. Eliot Spitzer has decided to resign, completing a stunning fall from power after he was nationally disgraced by links to a high-priced prostitution ring, a top state official said Wednesday. Spitzer was scheduled to announce his resignation midday, according to a second top Spitzer staffer. The officials spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the announcement had not yet been made.

The New York Times adds,

Gov. Eliot Spitzer, reeling from revelations that he had been a client of a prostitution ring, announced his resignation today at his headquarters in Manhattan.

Mr. Spitzer’s resignation is to be effective Monday, and Lt. Gov. David A. Paterson is to be sworn in to replace him.

In the two days since news of Mr. Spitzer’s involvement in the prostitution ring surfaced, he has been engaged in an intense legal and family debate about whether to resign or, as aides said his wife was urging, to stay on. Mr. Spitzer, who had been holed up at his apartment at Fifth Avenue and 79th Street in Manhattan since issuing an apology on Tuesday, emerged at about 11:15 a.m. Wednesday with his wife by his side and got into a black S.U.V., which headed for his headquarters on Third Avenue as news helicopters followed above.

On Tuesday, as Mr. Spitzer, a first-term Democrat, contemplated his next move, the New York political world remained in a suspended state, with cries — even from fellow Democrats — growing louder for him to step down.

In one of the last and desperate rounds of the end game, a top Spitzer administration official reached out to Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver’s staff on Tuesday to see if the governor could avoid an impeachment vote. But the prospects were grim.

Republicans have pledged to try to have Mr. Spitzer impeached and only 34 of the more than 100 Democrats in the Assembly would be needed for the matter to be referred to the Senate for an impeachment trial. It was clear during the discussions that 34 or more Democrats were almost certain to vote against the governor. That outcome would have been a dire for the governor, because his top political rival, Senate majority leader Joseph L. Bruno, leads the Senate, where a trial would have been held. “An impeachment proceeding would force Democrats to either abandon him or defend him,” said one leading Democrat. “They would abandon him.”

It’s telling that his wife was pushing for him to hold on despite misconduct that harmed her much more than the public. AP has two different stories on that topic.

NY first lady’s charmed life slips away

Silda Wall Spitzer appeared to have it all. The Harvard Law School graduate succeeded as a hard-charging corporate lawyer, then raised three daughters and supported the ambitions of her husband, Eliot, as he became New York’s attorney general and then governor. On Monday, she stood wordlessly by his side as he admitted to acting “in a way that violates my obligations to my family.”

[...]

Silda Spitzer, 50, grew up in Concord, N.C., where her father was a hospital administrator. She attended Meredith College, a women’s college in Raleigh, N.C., and went from there to Harvard Law School, where she met Spitzer, and to a career in mergers and acquisitions. While at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, a prestigious New York law firm, she billed as many as 3,300 hours a year — more than nine hours a day, including weekends.

[...]

“I felt very conflicted and emotional about leaving my job,” she told an interviewer from Vogue magazine last year. “It was not something I wanted to do, but I have never once doubted that it was the right decision for us. You don’t want to give up your dreams, but you also have to confront the reality of your life. Ultimately, it was more important for me to have my family work.”

Women ponder why Spitzer’s wife stood by

When Silda Wall Spitzer stood beside her husband in ashen-faced misery the other day as the governor made his brief apology in the prostitution scandal, she uttered not a word. Yet she launched a thousand conversations.

“Why is she standing there?” many women wondered. “Should she be? Would I be?” And for many, who’ve seen a long line of wronged political spouses do the same, from Hillary Rodham Clinton to Dina Matos McGreevey to Suzanne Craig, the immediate answer was a resounding, “Hell, no.” “I watched her and I thought, ‘Again, the wife is standing there,’” said Jessica Thorpe, a 38-year-old mother of three in Larchmont, N.Y. “And I had a visceral reaction. I just don’t get it. Why does it always have to be that way in politics? What will she get out of standing there?”

[...]

Yet many women also understood that Silda Spitzer was obviously in pain, and in the unforgiving glare of the public spotlight. So while Donna Webster, a product development executive in Boston, wished the New York governor had been forced to face the music alone, she also empathized with his wife’s choice, which she assumed was for the sake of her three daughters. “I’ve been thinking about this constantly. I cringed when I saw her next to him,” said Webster, 59. “I think he should have taken it like a man — without her.” But, she added, “She was in crisis mode. She was like a mother bear protecting her cubs. When crisis hits, you do what you think you need to for your family. Later, you can step back and think about protecting yourself.”

Amid the din, one of the most poignant voices defending Silda Spitzer was Matos McGreevey, who stood next to her husband, New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey, in 2004 as he told the world he was gay, claimed he had an affair with a male aide and resigned. “I’m reliving that moment and what it was like standing there next to Jim,” Matos McGreevey told The Associated Press Monday night. “I wanted to embrace her and say, `Be strong, you’ll survive this.’”

In another interview on CNN, she referred to others who’d also stood by their spouses at moments of deep humiliation — Clinton, during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and Suzanne Craig, the wife of Idaho Sen. Larry Craig, who was accused of soliciting sex in an airport bathroom. “We all do it for personal reasons,” said Matos McGreevey, now going through a contentious divorce with the former governor. “I did it because he was my husband. I had always supported him. I loved him. I had a daughter … I wanted her to know I was there for her father.”

[...]

Joanna Coles, editor in chief of the women’s magazine Marie Claire, feels that at least for the moment, Silda Spitzer had no choice but to stand publicly by her husband, for whom she gave up an active career as a corporate lawyer. “People are very quick to judge her, but that’s the deal that you make when one of you decides to give up your career so that the other can go all out for his,” said Coles. “I think it would have been odd if she wasn’t there. It’s the pact that they made. She chose to be the wife of a governor, and she’s done it very conscientiously, and very well.”

It’s a very surreal situation she finds herself in, through no fault of her own. This isn’t a Hillary Clinton situation, where she stood by a serial adulterer; so far as we know, Spitzer had been a model husband before this.

New York Governor Elliot Spitzer is “involved” in a prostitution ring. Details are still sketchy.

Gov. Eliot Spitzer has informed his most senior administration officials that he had been involved in a prostitution ring, an administration official said this morning. Mr. Spitzer, who was huddled with his top aides inside his Fifth Avenue apartment early this afternoon, had hours earlier abruptly canceled his scheduled public events for the day. He had scheduled an announcement for 2:15 this afternoon after inquiries from the Times. But his appearance was delayed by at least 45 minutes.

Mr. Spitzer, a first-term Democrat who pledged to bring ethics reform and end the often seamy ways of Albany, is married with three children.

Just last week, federal prosecutors arrested four people in connection with an expensive prostitution operation. Administration officials would not say that this was the ring with which the governor had become involved. But a person with knowledge of the governor’s role said that the person believes the governor is one of the men identified as clients in court papers.

The governor’s travel records show that he was in Washington in mid-February. One of the clients described in court papers arranged to meet with a prostitute who was part of the ring, the Emperors Club VIP on the night of Feb. 13. Mr. Spitzer appeared on a CNBC television show at 7 a.m. the next morning. Later in the morning, he testified before a Congressional committee.

Aside from a general sense that chief executive officers ought to obey the laws they’re charged with enforcing and that married men ought to be faithful to their wives, I really don’t care much about this story. The interesting angle, really, is the
hypocrisy bit:

Spitzer has built his political legacy on rooting out corruption, including several headline-making battles with Wall Street while serving as attorney general. He stormed into the governor’s office in 2006 with a historic share of the vote, vowing to continue his no-nonsense approach to fixing one of the nation’s worst governments.

Time magazine had named him “Crusader of the Year” when he was attorney general and the tabloids proclaimed him “Eliot Ness.”

But his stint as governor has been marred by several problems, including an unpopular plan to grant driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants and a plot by his aides to smear Spitzer’s main Republican nemesis.

Spitzer had been expected to testify to the state Public Integrity Commission he had created to answer for his role in the scandal, in which his aides are accused of misusing state police to compile travel records to embarrass Senate Republican leader Joseph Bruno.

Having only cursory knowledge of the two scandals, the misuse of the powers of office to harass a political opponent strikes me as more problematic than patronizing prostitutes.

More commentary will follow if the story develops into something more interesting.

Other reax:

• Marc Ambinder notes “Spitzer is a Clinton superdelegate.”

• Flip Bidot entitles his post “From Troopergate To Shtupergate”

• Steve Benen: “[I]t’s hard to believe brilliant people in positions of responsibility could be this stupid and this self-destructive. And yet, here we are.”

• Jon Henke wonders if it isn’t time to change the laws.

• Sean Hackbarth: “The man who demagogued his way to the governor’s mansion on the backs of Wall Street firms ends up in deep doo-doo.”

• Will Bunch: “WNBC-TV says prosecutors have text messages from Spitzer(no link yet). On MSNBC, there’s also talk that this prostitution ring is linked to a probe of the Gambino crime family — still, just wow.”

• Bob Owens: “It remains to be seen what political impact this breaking development will have, but all snark aside, my thoughts and prayers go out to his daughters—I think they are teenagers—and his wife.”

UPDATE: Various reports have Spitzer resigning. Headline changed accordingly. Developing.

CNBC reports that, “If Eliot Spitzer resigns, he would be succeeded by Lt. Governor David A. Paterson, who would become New York’s first African American governor and the first who is legally blind.”

UPDATE: Fox’s report on Spitzer’s resignation, “Sources: Spitzer to Resign Following Reports of ‘Involvement’ With Prostitution Ring, Faces Indictment,” is the most cited. Thus far, however, no confirmation. His presser was oblique:

Gov. Eliot Spitzer, accused in news reports of being involved in a prostitution ring, apologized to his family and the public on Monday at a hastily called news conference. He did not elaborate on the story.

With his wife at his side, Spitzer told reporters that he “acted in a way that violates my obligations to my family.” “I have disappointed and failed to live up to the standard I expected of myself,” he said. “I must now dedicate some time to regain the trust of my family.”

The “private matter” bit is straight out of Bill Clinton’s playbook.

UPDATE: A well placed source tells me that Spitzer will announce his resignation at 7 Eastern this evening.

UPDATE: As of 8 Tuesday morning, Spitzer has not made public any intention to resign.

UPDATE: Eliot Spitzer Resigns. Finally. For Real This Time.

MSNBC’s David Shuster has been suspended for his on-air musing, “Chelsea is sort of being pimped out in some weird sort of way?”

I saw the news yesterday evening and didn’t find it particularly interesting but apparently I’m alone, in that it’s getting the mega treatment at Memeorandum.

Howie Kurtz, the media critics’ media critic, gets page C1 for the story.

In case there was any doubt, using a prostitution metaphor for the daughter of a presidential candidate is not a good career move.

MSNBC suspended correspondent David Shuster yesterday for an undetermined period for making a disparaging on-air remark about Chelsea Clinton. Meanwhile, officials in her mother’s campaign raised the possibility of punishing the news channel by boycotting future debates.

While filling in as a host Thursday, Shuster was discussing the 27-year-old’s role in Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign with two guests when he asked: “Doesn’t it seem as if Chelsea is sort of being pimped out in some weird sort of way?”

Howard Wolfson, the campaign’s communications director, called Shuster’s remark “disgusting,” “beneath contempt” and “the kind of thing that should never be said on a national news network.” Wolfson appeared to suggest that Clinton is reconsidering an agreement this week to participate in an MSNBC debate Feb. 26 in Cleveland, saying: “I at this point can’t envision doing another debate on that network.”

Shuster, who plays a prominent role in MSNBC’s political coverage, told viewers last night that his words were “inappropriate. . . . I apologize to the Clinton family, the Clinton campaign, and all of you who were justifiably offended. . . . I am particularly sorry that my language diminished the regard and respect she has earned from all of us and the respect her parents have earned in how they raised her.”

[...]

Wolfson noted that MSNBC’s Chris Matthews expressed regret last month for suggesting that Hillary Clinton’s political success can be traced to sympathy stemming from her husband’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. “At some point you have to question whether there is a pattern at this particular network,” Wolfson said.

I’m no fan of Shuster. Indeed, he’s a total and utter hack and MSNBC should be ashamed they can’t find a more serious journalist to put on their air.

But these remarks aren’t worthy of tut-tutting, let alone firing. Ace, who shares my view of Shuster but more colorfully, gets it right: “It’s a common expression now. We know it doesn’t literally mean ‘turning out as a whore.’” Quite so.

Shuster’s analysis is rather silly — it’s pretty common for adult children of candidates to be trotted around during the campaign — but his word choice is completely unobjectionable unless one’s campaign is imploding and desperate to make political hay. TPM’s Greg Sargent seems to agree that this is precisely what’s happening.

And, frankly, Matthews was exactly right in his remarks. Hillary Clinton got a huge bounce in public sympathy after the Lewinsky affair, without which her successful Senate bid and multi-million dollar book deal simply wouldn’t have happened.

Digby, though, feels the Clintons are right to be offended.

My suspicion is that the bigger questions about all this have been lost on the MSNBC crew as they circle their wagons and get more and more defensive. They’ve sublimated their own discomfort(shame?)with this discussion by making it into a political/journalistic turf battle, when in fact, it’s something much more psychological/sociological.

Matthews is somewhat deranged on this subject, because he sees the entire political system through some sort of gender prism, so he’s a special case, but the other offenders could be caught up in this out of a sort of collegian loyalty which has morphed into outright hostility toward people who are “making” them feel uncomfortable with their own behavior. It snowballs to the point where nobody knows what’s true anymore.

The defensiveness doesn’t surprise me. Journalists think it’s their role to criticize politicians but don’t think it’s fair game for the politicians to fire back.

Maybe she’s right that, “it behooves all of us to be skeptical of news organizations that behave like adolescents, no matter where your political allegiances lie.” Certainly, you wouldn’t have caught Walter Cronkite or David Brinkley or John Chancellor or any of the biggies from a generation ago using this kind of language. (Although, come to think of it, there was an open mic incident late in Brinkley’s career.)

But the business has changed. These channels are on 24/7/365, trotting about people to fill the time with what amounts to idle speculation. It’s only natural that they’re going to say some really stupid things or even phrase some smart observations in inappropriate ways. That’s even more likely when there are three of them competing for a rather limited set of eyeballs. Rather than go Walter Cronkite on us, they’re trying to be hip and fresh with yahoos like Shuster.

UPDATE: Olbermann Watch wonders why Keith Olbermann felt the need to apologize for his MSNBC roster-mate’s using the phrase “pimp out” in relation to the Clintons but not his own use of “pimping General David Petraeus.” Cox has a very special video remix.

D.C. Madam Deborah Jeane Palfrey is claiming a state secrets privilege because she provided services to Muslims, Carol Leonnig reports.

The woman accused of being the D.C. Madam now argues that the fact that Muslim men used her elite, Washington-based escort service before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks might have played a role in the government’s effort to prosecute her.

Deborah Jeane Palfrey says she might need to divulge classified information that has sensitive national security implications — perhaps including the identities of Middle Eastern customers — to defend herself against the charges. She is asking a federal judge for a hearing behind closed doors to discuss the information as it relates to the government’s charges.

Prosecutors, who have charged Palfrey with running an illegal prostitution ring in the District from 1993 to 2006, have declined to comment on Palfrey’s newest claims. Previously, Palfrey unsuccessfully argued that the attorney general needed to appoint a special counsel to investigate her case because the Justice Department might be covering up information that former prosecutors were customers of her escort service.

You’ve got to hand it to her for creativity. “Jihad me at Hello,” indeed.

And what’s up with the “alleged” and “accused” business? Palfrey is making no bones about the fact that she ran a call girl ring. Indeed, her various arguments concede that openly.

Ace of Spades guest Jack M. links a two-and-a-half-year-old story about U.N. peacekeepers committing sex crimes in Congo as part 1 in a 5 part series on “International Law: Why it sucks, why people shouldn’t buy into it, and why it should be abandoned.”

In that spirit, I will use his post as the first of an unlimited series on Logical Fallacies. Call this lesson “Hasty Generalization.”

Consider this a follow-up to the post on how stupid our judicial system can be, at times…perhaps most of the time.

Frederick Freeman was convicted of murdering Scott Mecklam (via Radley Balko). His conection to Mecklam? He dated a girlfriend of Mecklam’s who got back together with Mecklam once Freeman was out of the picture (i.e. moved to the upper peninsula in Michigan). What is amazing about this case is how much the case has fallen apart since Freeman’s conviction. The title is actually from Mecklam’s girlfriend’s, Crystal Merrill’s, testimony,

The star witness was Crystal Merrill, who’d dated Freeman briefly before getting back together with Macklem. Merrill spent the first two days of trial on the stand, testifying that Freeman raped her on their first date but that she continued to see him for several weeks, never telling anyone about the alleged assault. She described his cache of ninja weaponry and a way he said he could make door keys from clay. She said Freeman was a “higher up” at a secret organization that fought prostitution and drugs where he could “call contracts out on anybody.” She said he had listening devices and could hear conversations across parking lots and camped out in cornfields around her family farm to learn what kind of tractors they owned. “He told me he could read my mind,” she said. Most of her testimony would go unsubstantiated by other witnesses.

I’ve been to the Upper Peninsula in Michigan and I highly doubt that is where you are going to find ninja assassins for the Yakuza, let alone people who have a cache of listening devices and can make keys out of clay. This isn’t the only nonsense in the case. The jail house snitch has since recanted and claimed he offered testimony only to get a lighter sentence of his own. The theory of how Freeman could kill Mecklam and be in the upper peninsula at various times before and after the murder was that Freeman chartered a plane. Of course no corroborating evidence was presented for this theory. If you follow the link there is basically a litany of amazing revelations that make one wonder how Freeman could have ever gone to jail, and wonder why he is still there.

Just another example of our fine police, court system, and district attorneys showing what a bunch of highly professional and decent human beings they are. And why is that when ever somebody is supposedly a martial arts experts the cops wet their pants? I mean seriously, is this reasonable,

They handcuffed and searched Freeman, saying, “We got a report that you’ve got a lot of weaponry.” Police found nothing. The police report from the time notes, “Officers were advised to use extreme caution as suspect is a martial arts expert and may be armed with poison darts.” Merrill had told Port Huron police Freeman was a ninja who carried poison darts in the tongue of his shoes.

Poison darts….for crying out loud.

Update: More here on the single eye witness. The witness was in the vicinity of the murder and noted a red car driving away. But what makes me rather suspicious is the use of hypnosis to enhance the witnesses memory. My understanding is that such practices are highly unreliable.

“I don’t know, something told me to get a look at it and I did,” he said at trial. He figures he got roughly a 20-second look at the car and spent about five seconds on the driver’s face.

Gobeyn would later pick Freeman out of a photo lineup and then be the only one of three people to pick him out of a physical lineup.

“I saw him. It wasn’t somebody that resembled him,” Gobeyn said of Freeman at the trial. “It was him.”

But was it?

“You don’t need to be a rocket scientist or an expert to know this is an outrageous identification case,” says Ezekiel Edwards, a staff attorney and Mayer Brown Eyewitness Fellow at the Innocence Project in New York.

If the hundreds of exonerations to date using irrefutable DNA evidence have shown anything, it’s that witnesses get it wrong. A lot.

In other words, DNA testing puts the lie to many eyewitnesses who claim to have seen the person committing the crime. As such jurors should put much less weight on the testimony of eyewitnesses, IMO.

According to the Innocence Project, mistaken identifications are the leading factor in wrongful convictions.

Several studies also have shown a significant reduction in accuracy if the perpetrator was wearing a hat. Gobeyn described the driver as wearing a ski mask pushed up on his head.

The Center on Wrongful Convictions in Illinois released a report this year that found 52 defendants who were eventually exonerated were convicted as a result of erroneous eyewitness identification.

In 2003, nearly 80 percent of the first 130 DNA exonerations in the United States involved mistaken eyewitness identification, according to the Innocence Project.

More on witness misidentification here.