Let the games begin!
Blogging live from the Utah Legislature . . .
Eagle Forum President Gayle Ruzicka is remote controlling Rep. Mike Morley to introduce yet another bill to regulate those cop-killing video games. Ruzicka, who has been pushing this issue for years, told me today that the bill has yet to get a number:
The last version of the video game violence bill, sponsored by former Rep. Dave Hogue in 2006, and reluctantly carried in 2007 as a courtesy by also-former Rep. Scott Wyatt (who acknowledged the bill was likely unconstitutional) went nowhere.
Florida-based wingnut crusader and disbarred* lawyer Jack Thompson apparently has roughed out the bill for Gayle. He writes in the Deseret News:
*The DNews refers to him as a "former" lawyer.
Eagle Forum President Gayle Ruzicka is remote controlling Rep. Mike Morley to introduce yet another bill to regulate those cop-killing video games. Ruzicka, who has been pushing this issue for years, told me today that the bill has yet to get a number:
We are working on the language right now.Apparently, Morley needs to build cred with the Eagles, because he is carrying a bill that other right-wing lawmakers are staying as far away from as possible. (I checked and Morley's pupils appear to be dilating properly.)
The last version of the video game violence bill, sponsored by former Rep. Dave Hogue in 2006, and reluctantly carried in 2007 as a courtesy by also-former Rep. Scott Wyatt (who acknowledged the bill was likely unconstitutional) went nowhere.
Florida-based wingnut crusader and disbarred* lawyer Jack Thompson apparently has roughed out the bill for Gayle. He writes in the Deseret News:
It doesn't define what content is "harmful to minors," so we avoid the phony First Amendment arguments Hollywood loves to make. The bill simply states: If you promise the public you don't sell adult-rated entertainment to kids, then you had better be telling the truth, because if a parent catches you selling this stuff to his or her kids, then you're guilty of fraud under the Truth in Advertising Law.Attorney General Mark Shurtleff told me he understands the Ruzicka-Morley bill will be completely different from earlier versions, but, "They keep changing the language." He says the evidence that Thompson keeps quoting about video games turning kids into cop killers hasn't stood up in court. Looks like Thompson will have to call for Shurtleff's impeachment again.
*The DNews refers to him as a "former" lawyer.
14 Comments:
I have played every major iteration of Grand Theft Auto since 2002: So far, I have killed 0 cops in real life.
I'm really disappointed in my results. Can someone send me information on how my Grand Theft Auto addiction into successful cop killing, please let me know.
Tards.
Since you don't provide sources to any of your information, why should we believe the words of an permanently disbarred attorney, who was disbarred for, among other things "[Thompson] made false statements of material fact to courts and repeatedly violated a court order; [Thompson]falsely, recklessly, and publicly accused a judge as being amenable to the "fixing" of cases;
[Thompson] sent courts inappropriate and offensive sexual materials; [Thompson] harassed the former client of an attorney in an effort to get the client to use its influence to persuade the attorney to withdraw a defamation suit filed by the attorney against respondent;
[Thompson] retaliated against attorneys who filed Bar complaints against him for his unethical conduct by asserting to their clients, government officials, politicians, the media, female lawyers in their law firm, employees, personal friends, acquaintances, and their wives, that the attorneys were criminal pornographers who objectify women."
A "Truth in Advertising" law. In that case, since Mr. Thompson was shown as a "former praticing attorney" in his Op-Ed and on the Utah Eagle Forum page, wouldnt that law apply to him as well? Then the Deseret News and the Utah Eagle Forum would be held responsible for falsely advertising a disbarred attorney.
To quote Mr. Thompson "I think people ought to do what they say they do, don't you?". This again would be false advertising as Mr. Thompson as been proven a liar and a fraud.
Yet another 'Look at me! I'm protecting the children!' law from people who are blinkered to anything other than their own censorious agenda.
Take away a parents Right to be a parent and you get left with bills such as this. Makes one wonder how good a parents the sponsors and writers of this Bill actually were.
If this bill becomes a law, I will be waiting for the ESA to collect a nice big check filled with Utah taxpayer's money. Maybe they will end up like my state of Illinois, a state that has no money. Thanks ex-gov for the $510,000 court payout.
Utah I would fight this so taxdollars will be used to make jobs not line the pockets of game companies CEO's
John B. Thompson, J.D.
5721 Riviera Drive
Coral Gables, Florida 33146
305-666-4366
amendmentone@comcast.net
February 4, 2009
The Honorable Mark Shurtleff
Attorney General, State of Utah
Utah State Capitol Complex
350 North State Street, Suite 230
Salt Lake City, Utah Via Fax to 801-538-1121
Re: Bill to Remedy Fraudulent Sales of Adult Entertainment to Minors in Utah
Dear Attorney General Shurtleff:
I hope this finds you well. I repeat my offer and request to speak with you about the above bill.
I note that you have spoken with a blogger. Your following quotation is in the Salt Lake Tribune, http://blogs.sltrib.com/slcrawler/, offered up by Glen Warchol:
I talked to Attorney General Mark Shurtleff [who] says he has been told the bill will be completely different from earlier versions, but "They keep changing the language." He says the evidence that Thompson keeps quoting hasn't stood up in court.
1. First, let me address your statement that “the evidence that Thompson keeps quoting hasn’t stood up in court.” What happened in Louisiana is both instructive and disturbing. At the request of a legislator there, I drafted a video game bill. The harm done to minors by adult games that I presented “that hasn’t stood up” persuaded each and every Louisiana legislator there was harm, as the bill I wrote was passed unanimously in both houses and signed into law by Governor Blanco.
When it came time for the Louisiana A.G. to defend the law in federal court, he failed to present the scientific and medical proof that games like Grand Theft Auto were harmful to minors. Why did he take a dive? Because the Entertainment Software Association, which spreads money around to federal and state officials to stop game legislation as the industry’s lead “lobbyist,” brazenly and publicly threatened Louisiana that if its A.G. defended this unanimously passed law, then it would withdraw all of its design studios and other game enterprises from the state. ESA blackmailed Louisiana, and it worked. Nobody can claim evidence “hasn’t stood up in court” when it hasn’t been presented.
Relatedly, look at my Deseret News op-ed piece of yesterday. No A.G. has ever presented that evidence recited to a federal court. Nobody has introduced the Harvard, Indiana, and Michigan State MRI studies. Nobody has introduced the 2005 American Psychological Association formal findings that teen game play leads to increased aggression. And no state A.G. has bothered to cite U.S. Supreme Court Justice Kennedy’s opinion in Roper v. Simmons, which struck down the juvenile death penalty, which court ruling relies on the brain scan studies that show the harm done by the violent games. The US Supreme Court, Mark, says our evidence stands up. That’s a pretty high court, no?
Again, when evidence is not put before a court, it can’t have a chance to stand up, can it? This is like the joke in which a scientist cuts all the legs off a frog, shouts at it to jump, and it does not jump. The scientist writes in his journal: “Removed all legs; frog cannot hear.”
By the way, I would point out that the game industry never likes to mention Alabama. The trial court and the Alabama Supreme Court have both agreed with me that the First Amendment does not protect the sale of adult games to kids. The evidence in that case stood up just fine. I argued the evidence, and I won. This is in part because elected state judges are far more in tune with what the Constitution really says rather than what the leftwingnuts at the ACLU say it says. Everyone knows the federal judiciary is littered with First Amendment absolutists who posit a view of the First Amendment that our Founders would laugh at.
2. Secondly, you have had the bill I drafted for Utah for many months now. You know, Mark, that the bill’s approach is to completely leave alone the harm issue. It does not deal with content, and thus it avoids altogether the phony First Amendment trap that the industry loves to spring. There is literally no arguable First Amendment issue in this bill. We have avoided it.
You know that.
We’ve changed the subject to be the fraudulent advertising of the industry. There is absolutely no content issue in this bill (by the way, it is not just about video games but all entertainment, which Mr. Warchol doesn’t know or care to know. Maybe his phone can’t access the 305 area code). Any real journalist would have contacted me to get the facts, but bloggers cant’ be bothered with facts. Because the content and harm issues are not addressed, any assertion that “the evidence has not stood up” is a red herring.
The only evidence that is relevant to this bill is what the Federal Trade Commission has found and has available at its own www.ftc.gov web site. The evidence that stands up and which is overwhelming and unrebutted is that the music, video game, and movie industries continue to say they uniformly age ID kids under 17. The FTC proves otherwise. Does somebody think that I am paying the FTC to say this? The FTC has found this on its own. This proof is unrebutted. It is the only proof that matters as to our bill.
3. The only people “changing the language” of the bill are the good folks in your office. Mr. Roberts has come up with two new approaches that are patently unconstitutional and dead on arrival. I heard this remarkable and unworkable language from your people yesterday. It tries the tired old approaches that the courts have disfavored. Whyyou’re your people coming up with an unconstitutional bill? I have no idea. Maybe you do. They want to mandate age-ID-ing and they also want to sequester Mature games from adults. All the court cases show neither will stand up, so I have no idea why they have come up with such an approach that has been so thoroughly discredited.
If your own office wants to come up with a rival bill, Mark, then, that is patently unconstitutional, then you are welcome to do it, but Representative Morley and I and others will have nothing to do with it. We have a clean bill. Your people have yesterday’s discredited, hammered, unconstitutional approach.
4. When I was in Utah recently meeting with Lt. Gov. Herbert and legislators on this bill, who were all enthusiastic about it (contrary to what the Trib blogger foolishly says), Mr. Kenneth Wallentine of your office and I talked by chance, and he told me that one of his very best friends is Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, whom most consider the world’s leading authority on the danger to to public safety posed by teens playing Mature pornographic and violent video games. I believe if you speak with your own Mr. Wallentine, your concerns about the “harm” issue will be allayed. Grossman has testified multiple times before Congress. He has trained police personnel in Utah, and President Clinton, the Saturday after Columbine said, “This is the one man America should listen to as to why these events are occurring.” But I am not raising the harm standard, which invokes the strict scrutiny test. You did, to this blogger. We, at least, are on to other things.
5. As to any “fiscal note” on this bill that would assert this would be an expensive law to enforce, that is utter nonsense and demonstrably so. Utah’s fraud and truth in advertising laws are already on the books. Secondly, the real “enforcement” that would come here would be in the form of consumer complaints, and the consumers can themselves pursue a remedy on their own as the plaintiffs, period. The A.G. need not go after a single offender if he does not want to. And it would be unnecessary for him to do so in light of private consumer remedies. The amount of money that the state must spend to enforce this law, then is this: zero dollars.
6. Finally, if anybody wants to make me the issue here, then I’m more than ready for them. The video game industry went after my right to practice law because I appeared on 60 Minutes. We’re in the U.S. Supreme Court on all that right now. The tobacco industry went after Jeffrey Weigand (The Insider) when he appeared on 60 Minutes as well. Whistleblowers risk everything when they do the right thing. Ed Bradley got out of a sick bed dying of leukemia to put me on 60 Minutes for the second time, so convinced was he that the evidence I had “stood up.” The industry couldn’t discredit it, so it has tried to shoot the messenger. I’m doing fine, and indeed I have a bill here that literally scares the dickens out of the ESA. That is why this blogger has been recruited to fib.
As you know, the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), which wants no legislation anywhere to impede the sale of adult games to kids, is literally spreading millions of dollars around in protection money. Their own spending records now prove it. That is wrong. It pollutes genuine public policy debate. Nobody is paying me to tell the truth, but the game industry is paying lots of folks money to protect their $21 billion a year predatory industry and to spread disinformation. Still, it is the genius of our system of government that all the companies that would buy officials cannot drown out the people.
As I noted in my Deseret News piece, 80% of the American people know we have a problem with violent video games. ESA can’t, by bribes, erase that concern.
I am sure you want to protect children from this corporated predation, and we intend to proceed to do just that.
At root, this new approach bill says this: Best Buy and Wal-Mart and Target and all you other entertainment retailers, you are more than free to sell your adult products to kids. Go ahead. Have a ball. But IF you say to the public you age ID everyone but you don’t, then we’re going to hold you accountable for this fraud and this breach of the truth in advertising laws.
Best Buy’s Chairman Dunn appears in a PSA for the video game industry on Best Buy’s own web site and assures all parents everywhere that no Mature games are sold to anyone under 17. Best Buy has made a very big deal about its ironclad assurance that “anyone appearing to be 21 is required to produce an age ID to buy a Mature game. This is a lie. My own son was able to go into Best Buys and purchased Mature games at the age of 15. He did his own stings. The FTC has done its own stings. Best Buy’s assertions that this policy is adhered to is an absolute, damnable lie. And all of these retailers sell this adult entertainment on-line to kids of all ages with no age verification even attempted!
We’re going to get this law passed, because Utahns deserve it, and they want it. The entertainment industry cannot buy its way out of the consequences of its decades of lies. They promised us after Columbine this selling of adult entertainment to kids would stop. It has not. We’re going to stop it, starting right here in Utah.
Warm personal regards, Jack Thompson
Copy: gwarchol@sltrib.com
Real journalists
Others
Jack you were not disbarred for your believes, you were disbarred for the following reasons, among others "[Thompson] made false statements of material fact to courts and repeatedly violated a court order; [Thompson]falsely, recklessly, and publicly accused a judge as being amenable to the "fixing" of cases;
[Thompson] sent courts inappropriate and offensive sexual materials; [Thompson] harassed the former client of an attorney in an effort to get the client to use its influence to persuade the attorney to withdraw a defamation suit filed by the attorney against respondent;
[Thompson] retaliated against attorneys who filed Bar complaints against him for his unethical conduct by asserting to their clients, government officials, politicians, the media, female lawyers in their law firm, employees, personal friends, acquaintances, and their wives, that the attorneys were criminal pornographers who objectify women."
John B. Thompson, J.D.
5721 Riviera Drive
Coral Gables, Florida 33146
305-666-4366
amendmentone@comcast.net
February 4, 2009
The Honorable Mark Shurtleff
Attorney General, State of Utah
Utah State Capitol Complex
350 North State Street, Suite 230
Salt Lake City, Utah Via Fax to 801-538-1121
Re: Bill to Remedy Fraudulent Sales of Adult Entertainment to Minors in Utah
Dear Attorney General Shurtleff:
Your staff, as I indicated earlier, has come up with its own video game bill, with two provisions, as I understand, both of which are patently unconstitutional.
The first provision that your staff has proposed is to segregate “Mature” games in a sector of a store and allow access to them for perusal only by adults.
This approach was struck down in Shipley, Inc. v. Long, 454 F.Supp. 2d 819 (E.D. Ark. 2004). Note that that was five years ago in a law championed by Arkansas’ Mike Huckabee. The federal court found: Provisions of Arkansas law regarding segregation of materials that are inappropriate for younger minors but constitutionally protected as to older minors and adults declared to be “facially unconstitutional under the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution because such provisions are overbroad and impose unconstitutional prior restraint on the availability and display of constitutionally protected, non-obscene materials to both adults and older minors.”
The other provision that your staff came up with was to mandate age identification of buyers. This has been attempted, and repeatedly struck down by the courts. Why would anyone age ID a buyer other than to restrict the sales to anyone 17 and older. This is nothing but the supplanting of a harmful to minors standard with a private industry rating, which has been deemed unconstitutional since the 1930’s.
By contrast, the bill Rep. Mike Morley has proposed avoids all of these constitutional pitfalls that your own staff has missed. I look forward to the passage of this bill, the whole notion of which is that retailers should not lie to consumers.
Regards, Jack Thompson
Wow, so much B.S. from Thompson and it's so easy to debunk that steaming pile of USDA 100% Grade-A Monkey crap, a caveman can do it.
1) That bill in Louisiana(which you and the idiot that sponsored the pile of garbage lied to everyone in the room to get it passed) was not unanimously passed, as three representatives and four senators did not even vote on the bill.
As far as the case against the state's law and the state "taking a dive" goes, you intentionally withheld your so-called "scientific and medical proof" and your so-called "experts" from the state, and you were told by a deputy attorney general to "put up or shut up". And you chose to shut up and take your ball and go back to Miami, whining about how the Attorney General of Louisiana would rather run press conferences in reference to Hurricane Katrina(the worst natural disaster in U.S. history, which Louisiana and Mississippi is still recovering from to this day) than worry about your precious little pile of garbage bill and probably whining because they wouldn't put your egomaniacial behind in charge.
Besides that, there were no design studios or game enterprises in the state at the time(even with a law that was passed a year before granting tax credits to companies that moved operations to Louisiana) to withdraw from the state. So if there was a "threat", it was one of the biggest bluffs ever made in recorded history.
And regarding that unconstitutional law, the so-called "scientific and medical proof" was used. And the judge said:
"It appears that much of the same evidence has been considered by numerous courts and in each case the connection was found to be TENUOUS and SPECULATIVE..."
"The evidence that was submitted to the legislature in connection with the bill that became the statute is SPARSE and could hardly be called in any sense RELIABLE..."
Not only that, but I'm pretty sure that the so-called "scientific and medical proof" was used by Oklahoma and Minnesota around the time Louisiana's law was thrown out and their laws got thrown out also. In reality, you have no proof, let alone absolute proof.
And one last thing regarding Alabama: They still haven't gone to trial yet, so there's nothing to discuss. And you were thrown off of that case. And they didn't "agree" with you on anything, since from Judge Moore's ruling: (2)Alabama Law provides that courts should be especially reluctant to dismiss a case on the pleadings when the theory of liability is novel and untested
They only kept it afloat because of unproven theory although I've argued that the Alabama piece of garbage suit is no different than the lawsuit against Ozzy Osbourne over the song "Suicide Solution", the suit against Judas Priest over the song "Better By You, Better Than Me" claiming subliminal messages in the song caused someone to commit suicide, and the lawsuit against Oliver Stone over the movie "Natural Born Killers". So the "theory of liability" was already tested and failed miserably.
2. If the "First Amendment trap" is "phony", then why are you trying to avoid the unavoidable? Since the bill is based on essentially limiting access to First Amendment-protected material based on content rated by a third-party, there is still a content issue, no matter how many times you try to spin it otherwise.
And the FTC's last report showed that the video game industry is doing way better than the other entertainment industries, so your point is diminished.
3) No, Thompson, you're the working on an unconstitutional bill. You failed miserably in Louisiana because of your arrogance and you'll fail in Utah, if it even gets that far.
4) Dave Grossman is seen as a liar, a fraud, and a hypocrite. He called Professor Henry Jenkins a "prostitute" because Jenkins defends the video game industry, yet Grossman accepts thousands of dollars per speech to law enforcement, which makes Grossman the "prostitute".
And the only reason President Clinton said that pile of horse manure about Grossman, a product of the vulgarity of the mainstream news media's 24-hour news coverage of the shooting, was because he was trying to solicit favor after he was caught in a lie regarding his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Everyone knows that.
And the "harm standard" still applies to the bill, as you yourself are using that same "scientific and medical proof" to prove "harm" to prove the Constitutionality of the bill.
5) Then, what would be the point of even complaining to the state about "false advertising"(which never happens to begin with), if they can just proceed with their own litigation? Besides that, if they do complain to the state and the state takes no action or rejects the complaint(taking no action afterward), then they'd have no reason to file litigation(unless they sue the state). And it would cost the state money to investigate the complaint.
Basically, you just admitted to the Utah attorney general that your own bill is useless!
6) The U.S. Supreme Court only extended a deadline to file a writ of certorari(sp?) until later this month at your request because you were in mourning over the death of your father. Until the Supreme Court actually says they'll hear your case, you're not in the Supreme Court. Besides that, a similiar writ involving a convicted rapist that you tried to use to keep your license(and tried to get released on a technicality in that same deal) got tossed by the same U.S. Supreme Court.
Filing two $600 million lawsuits as a "get rich quick" scheme is not "whistleblowing".
Ed Bradley got out of his deathbed to interview Howard Stern(a man you love to falsely claim you got off of AM/FM radio) on the eve of his much-hyped move to satellite radio. And you complained to the FCC a year before your appearance on a increasingly irrelevant TV show against said show, claiming you heard Mary J. Blige say "s***" twice. So what's your point?]
And you were paid to "tell the truth"(which is really lies and everybody, including you, knows it), paid by those greiving families that you mentally molested to get to file those $600 million lawsuits.
And you base that "80% of American people" on a fraudluent poll conducted by a second-rate Public Relations firm looking for business.
Your "stings" with your son doesn't count, since a) he's statistically insignificant and b) you're not a law enforcement officer.
Finally, age verification is done. As has been told to you repeatedly, The Federal Trade Commission says that credit cards can be used as age verifiers. Go Google the federal Children's Online Privacy Protection Act.
The FTC said that for kids under 18 to get those precious little credit cards, they have to be attached to the parent's card.
Plus, bank cards can be used as both a credit card and a debit card, whether you're using an ATM, buying groceries at Wal-Mart/grocery store or filling up your car at a gas station.
It is truly a burden being right all the time.
Jack Thompson fails to realize that Mature-rated games are NOT adult games, those are rated AO. Mature-rated games are labeled 17+, meaning minors who are 17 cannot be denied access to such games. As for preventing Adult-games from reaching kids*, you already cannot find the small handful of Adult-rated games in stores. One such example is GTA:SA which, after receiving the AO-rating, was edited down to recieve the 17+ rating, like how many movies are edited to avoid the dreaded NC-17 rating.
*(why young goats would want optical media is beyond me)
"I look forward to the passage of this bill, the whole notion of which is that retailers should not lie to consumers".
Which is why this policy is basically pointless. Let's put ourselves in the shoes of a retailer here: "If we say we check the ID of buyers for 17+ rated games and videos and a clerk moits it that one time, even though by suing they would need to prove intent of fraud when its cleary a human mistake, why not keep the policy but not advertise it? Then we would not be liable".
Wouldnt that work?
JT, for once could you actually back up your claims with solid evidence?
@ Sortableturnip
The only sources he has are the ones that he made up in his head
Does anyone REALLY need to bribe a State AG to "lay down" to opposition when the "scientific proof" that Jack Thompson says is a lock that proves your children will be turned into psychotic mass murderers has been SHOT DOWN AS INSUFFICIENT IN SEVEN OTHER COURT CASES.
Despite what Thompson says, this "scientific evidence" WAS introduced into the Louisiana case, and the judge there found the same thing that seven other courts had already found. INSUFFICIENT PROOF and JUNK SCIENCE.
If you think Thompson is an honest, God-fearing human being, you might want to read this to find out who he really is:
http://cdn3.libsyn.com/gamepolitics/Corrected_Final_Report_of_Referee-Thompson.pdf?nvb=20090205212935&nva=20090206213935&t=05c485bb5c58acd1b37ee
That's the Referee's Report from his PERMANENT DISBARMENT.
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