Tag: pornography
Former GOP Staffer Sentenced For Running Child Porn Ring

Former GOP Staffer Sentenced For Running Child Porn Ring

On Thursday, the Department of Justice announced Ruben Verastigui has been sentenced to 151 months in prison on a federal charge of receipt of child pornography.

A Washington, D.C., resident, 29-year-old Ruben Verastigui has spent his entire career in conservative circles, including as an aide to the Trump re-election campaign and stints as a digital strategist for the Senate Republican Conference and the Republican National Committee.

The Department of Justice detailed the evidence against Ruben Verastigui, and this case is extremely disturbing.

[Warning: Graphic description of the DOJ’s case is listed below]

According to the government’s evidence, from April 2020 through Feb. 2021, Verastigui was active in an online group devoted to trading child pornography and discussing child sexual abuse. Verastigui shared child pornography videos with another member of the group and made numerous comments about sexually abusing children. Verastigui indicated his preference for babies, saying they were his “absolute favorite,” and solicited another group member for videos of babies being raped. The other group member promptly sent Verastigui a video of a baby being raped, to which Verastigui responded enthusiastically. The other group member then sent Verastigui numerous other videos of child pornography.

Verastigui is just one of numerous Republican staffers to face child pornography charges in recent years. Chase Tristan Epsy, a lawyer for Alabama Gov. Kay Ivy, was arrested in 2021 for soliciting a minor.

As usual, it seems the howls of Republicans are pure projection.

And last, but not least, Verastigui was a featured speaker at the 2013 anti-choice rally in Washington, D.C.

Ruben Verastigui speaks at the National March for Life 2013www.youtube.com

Printed with permission from Daily Kos.

Not Moving To Ireland — Because America Will Be Just Fine

Not Moving To Ireland — Because America Will Be Just Fine

Two weeks ago, a woman from New Jersey approached me in The Spaniard, a pub and restaurant in Kinsale, Ireland.

“You look Irish,” she said “but you sound American.”

“That’s easily explained,” I answered.

All eight of my great grandparents emigrated from Cork and Kerry to the United States during the late 19th century. Over there, I’m an ethnic stereotype: a burly fellow with thick white hair wearing a collarless blue shirt from a local shop. Everybody looks like my cousin.

Frankly, we’d decided to spend time in Kinsale, a fishing port and resort town on Ireland’s southern coast, to try it on for size. When we’d visited there ten years ago, I’d felt very much at home. If push came to shove, how might it feel to live there?

Pretty good, I think. The Irish remain talkative and warm, eager to hear your story and tell theirs. (Even the pub’s name—memorializing the Spanish army’s 1601 occupation of Kinsale in a futile effort to support Celtic independence from England—goes a long way to explaining my dark eyes and sun tan.)

OK, so it rains more days than not. It’s also never hot and rarely cold. Sure I’d be halfway lost without the Boston Red Sox and the Arkansas Razorbacks, but only halfway. A man could certainly do worse than hiking Kinsale’s harbor trail out to Charles Fort of an afternoon, stopping en route to have Sinead or Fiona serve him a Guinness and a bowl of their ambrosial fish chowder.

Alternatively, a man could wake up to find himself in a country governed by an irascible, egomaniacal bully—a thin-skinned pathological liar and cheat. A race-baiter and serial womanizer who boasts about seducing his friends’ wives, and has even phoned newspapers pretending to be a press agent crowing about all the nookie Donald J. Trump gets.

Donald Trump is the world’s oldest middle school punk, incapable of governing his own big mouth, much less the world’s indispensable democracy. One minute he brags that paying no income taxes “makes me smart.” The next he brazenly denies saying it, although 80 million viewers heard him.

I not only wouldn’t buy a used car from the guy, I wouldn’t trust him to walk my dogs. I wouldn’t let him in my front door, nor leave him alone with a 13 year-old girl. Would you if the child were your daughter? No, you wouldn’t.

I trust I have made myself clear.

Anyway, the good news is that emigration to Ireland won’t be necessary. A Trump presidency is almost certainly never going to happen. When we left the country three weeks ago, some Democrats were beginning to panic over The Donald’s seeming climb in the polls. Even somebody as skeptical as I am of the TV networks’ ratings-driven need to promote the presidential contest as a nip-and-tuck struggle couldn’t help but be mildly alarmed.

But only mildly. For all the hugger-mugger, as Kevin Drum keeps calmly pointing out, Trump’s aggregate poll numbers have never topped 43 per cent nationally. He trails convincingly in almost every must-win “swing” state except Ohio.

And then came the first presidential debate. Say anything you like about Hillary Clinton. The mismatch between the former Secretary of State’s intelligence, self-discipline and command of the issues and Trump’s bluster couldn’t have been more dramatic. If it had been a prize fight, Trump would have taken several standing eight-counts. Faced with an opponent he couldn’t rattle, the GOP nominee appeared helpless: an angry, befuddled old man.

Next came what NBC News Benjy Sarlin and Alex Seitz-Wald described as “the Worst Week in Presidential Campaign History.” Try to imagine the next President of the United States getting baited into a 3 AM Twitter war with a former Miss Universe over her weight problems. Urging his twelve million followers to check out her seemingly non-existent sex tape.

Interestingly, Buzzfeed turned up a softcore Playboy video featuring tuxedoed Manhattan man-about-town Donald J. Trump, introducing naked identical twins who demonstrate the same kinds of Sapphic entanglements later exhibited by, yes, Melania Trump in a photo shoot you may also have seen.

Who could possibly make this stuff up?

Then, confronted with a New York Times blockbuster documenting that he evidently paid no income taxes for 20 years, Trump reacted with a bizarre attack on Hillary Clinton, mimicking her pneumonia-induced stumbling. “I don’t even think she’s loyal to Bill, you wanna know the truth,” he told a Pennsylvania audience. And really folks, really, why should she be, right? Why should she be?”

“In other words,” Amanda Marcotte aptly noted, “he hit the Big Six of misogynist slurs: Ugly, slutty, crazy, disloyal, deceitful, and weak.”

The Trump campaign now promises to hit Hillary hard on the critical Gennifer Flowers/Monica Lewinsky “issue.” That’ll definitely bring back wavering Republican women, won’t it?

Don’t kid yourselves: It’s all over but the counting.

 

Republicans Are Coming For Your Porn

Republicans Are Coming For Your Porn

You heard that right. The Republican Party’s platform committee published a draft of the party’s priorities on Monday that contained a bit of a surprise, given the candidate that party is about to nominate for president.

“We know how big of a problem it is. It is an insidious epidemic, and everyone knows that and that is not a controversy,” Mary Frances Forrester, who introduced the amendment to call porn a “public health crisis” and “public menace,” told the Guardian.

The amendment, which expanded on the GOP’s 2012 platform language that encouraged the “energetic prosecution of child pornography,” was part of a much larger push to the right on social issues: The 2016 GOP platform supports barring women from combat roles in the military, teaching the Bible in public schools, and securing parents’ rights to take their kids to gay conversion therapists.

Trump, of course, has appeared on the cover of Playboy and even managed to get a picture in front of that cover with evangelical Christian leaders Jerry Jr. and Becky Falwell.

The moral and legal status of pornography, especially internet porn, has been in question in recent years.

The state of Utah recently officially called pornography a “public health crisis,” the result of a bill passed unanimously by the state legislature and quickly signed by Gov. Gary Herbert. The resolution blamed porn for “emotional and medical illnesses” and “deviant sexual arousal.”

In 2014, across the pond, an amendment to the UK’s 2003 Communications Act included a long list of now-banned performative sex acts, including “aggressive whipping” and “humiliation.”

Perhaps most notably, the Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011 would have required internet providers to hold onto identifying information about their customers, to assist investigators in case any of those customers visited child pornography websites.

However, Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, one of the bill’s co-sponsors, refused to consider prohibiting the use of internet user data for anything other than child pornography investigations — opening the door for that data to be preserved and used in cases as varied as financial crime and gang activity. After intense opposition from the ACLU and other groups, the bill stalled in the House.

Still not considered a “public health crisis” by Republicans: Guns.

 

Photo: FILE – In this Nov. 9, 2011, file photo, Republican presidential candidate former House Speaker Newt Gingrich speaks during a Republican Presidential Debate at Oakland University in Auburn Hills, Mich. AP Photo/Paul Sancya, File

China Seeks To Turn Entertainers Into Moral Models

China Seeks To Turn Entertainers Into Moral Models

By Julie Makinen, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

BEIJING — Imagine if, after arresting a wave of celebrities on drug charges, American government officials pressed the heads of major Hollywood studios, A-list actors, record-label chiefs and chart-topping singers to sign promises that they would stay away from vices like drugs, pornography and gambling.

Simultaneously, substance-abusing performers found their films shut out of cinemas, forcing producers into hasty reshoots and re-edits. And news media began running editorials criticizing top directors for failing to inform on associates they had seen smoking pot or taking Ecstasy.

This is no fanciful figment: With China developing a hearty appetite for marijuana, methamphetamine and other illicit substances, Chinese authorities are training their crosshairs squarely on stars — even as they look to celebrities as front-line soldiers in the nation’s nascent war on drugs.

As of June, China had listed more than 3 million people on a roll of drug users, up from 1.8 million in 2011, according to Liang Ran, a drug-control official in the Ministry of Justice.

Millions more fly below the radar of police, and China’s National Narcotics Control Commission estimates the number of drug users to be more than 14 million, roughly 1 percent of the population. In 2014, authorities seized 69 tons of illicit drugs, arrested nearly 890,000 people on possession-type charges and almost 170,000 more on charges related to production and trafficking.

Among the celebrities who have been arrested on drug charges in the past 18 months are Jackie Chan’s son, Jaycee, and his fellow actor friend Kai Ko; the pop singer Yin Xiangjie; and actor Wang Xuebing, who had a major role in Black Coal, Thin Ice, which took top honors at the 2014 Berlin Film Festival.

Yin and Chan spent months in jail; Ko delivered a tearful public apology but nevertheless found himself cut out of films including Monster Hunt, a partially animated family film that after hurried reshoots became the top-grossing Chinese movie of all time. Wang’s drama, A Fool, abruptly had its May release date scrapped and arrived in theaters only in November with some of the supporting actor’s scenes trimmed.

But in a one-party system where even today’s Communist Party leaders maintain that art should “serve the state,” authorities are not merely setting out to punish stars who break the law. They also seek, in a time of rapidly loosening social mores, to turn entertainers into moral models — and even model informants.

The campaign has caught even the most respected celebrities flat-footed. Last month, after Yin was arrested, the state-run New China News Agency interviewed director Zhang Yimou and about a dozen major stars about their attitudes on celebrity drug use.

“I have seen many actors using marijuana together during their breaks … . It’s terrible that artists are involved in pornography, gambling and drugs,” said Zhang, who has directed such films as Hero and Raise the Red Lantern, and is in production on the big-budget The Great Wall starring Matt Damon.

“This trend is unhealthy for the industry. Many people tried to persuade me to try Ecstasy, and even told me, ‘This is the origin of inspiration,’” Zhang said.

But rather than winning praise for his propriety, Zhang was pummeled in the state-run press for failing to report the lawbreakers to police.

“Instead of protecting his actors, he was appeasing and shielding them. This will only make these movies stars more addicted to drugs,” said Eastday, a Shanghai-based news outlet. “If Zhang considered it disloyal to report his friends to the police, he has made a serious mistake, sacrificing the greater good for the sake of his self-interest.”

The Southern Metropolis Daily wrote a similar commentary headlined “Real love is informing on friends to police,” while the Global Times, a nationalist tabloid closely affiliated with the Communist Party, ran a cartoon of a sad-looking star shooting up with a hypodermic needle as Zhang watched from around a corner.

“The government wants celebrities to actively shoulder more responsibility” for spreading anti-drug messages, said Pi Yijun, an adviser to the Beijing Narcotics Control Commission. “Although celebrities are a small percentage of China’s overall drug users, they are an indicator of the trend. If more celebrities are taking drugs then so are more ordinary people.”

China, Pi said, is still much less permissive about drug use than America. And censors ensure that drug use very rarely figures in popular Chinese entertainment. A Chinese TV program along the lines of Breaking Bad would almost certainly never be approved by authorities — though the American show about a meth-cooking high school science teacher is available online in China and is popular.

“Even President Obama has acknowledged he smoked pot,” Pi said.

By pressuring people like Zhang shoes to be informants, some observers say, Chinese authorities are walking a thin line that can erode social trust and sow a culture of fear, discontent, secrecy and creative conservatism. That could undermine China’s efforts to develop a world-class entertainment industry, which officials see as a key to advancing its cultural and economic influence.

“This is the perfect ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ situation. If (Zhang) told, he might be called a rat; if not, then he’d be accused of dereliction of duty,” said Ying Zhu, a scholar of the Chinese entertainment industry at the City University of New York. “The nanny state and the media/Internet vigilantes need to be mindful of the consequences of ratting out friends, colleagues, and neighbors and families … . There is a chilling price to be paid for turning people against each other while looking over one’s own shoulders.”

“Ethically,” Pi said, “Zhang should report drug users, but in Chinese culture, it’s hard to put righteousness above friends and family.”

Authorities, he added, might have more success in making it commercially risky for stars to use (or silently condone) drugs. That’s why Chinese officials are pressing measures to discourage bad behavior.

This fall, the China Alliance of Radio, Film and Television — a state-sanctioned umbrella group of official industry organizations — formed an ethics committee that it said could order individuals or organizations who violate its norms to issue public apologies. It could also disqualify them from awards, or blacklist them from the industry.

Last month, the group held a forum in Beijing, touting the fact that 50 of its member organizations had signed on to its “pledge on professional ethics and self-discipline.” (In addition to shunning drugs, the pledge also obligates signatories to “protect the leadership of the Communist Party.”

Actress Fan Bingbing, who has crossed over into Hollywood productions including X-Men: Days of Future Past and Iron Man 3 said at the forum, “A good actor must be a good person first.”

(Nicole Liu and Yingzhi Yang of The Times’ Beijing bureau contributed to this report.)

©2015 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Photo: A participant waves a Chinese Communist Party flag as he waits backstage before his performance at a line dancing competition in Kunming, Yunnan province January 31, 2015. REUTERS/Stringer