Having Jay Severin call me an a-hole is like having Lady Gaga call me a hermaphrodite. (I know Lady Gaga is not a hermaphrodite, but I thought that if I used the terms “Lady Gaga” and “hermaphrodite” I might get some hits on Google.)

The “other version” of the Hitler-Coakley-Brown video has now received well over a million views. But not only on DrRonPaul2012’s page. The same video has been uploaded to YouTube by:

• Battlefield315 (67,000 views as of Friday afternoon)
• RonPaul4Pres2K8 (4,200)
• tikamue (1,500)
• tonytonytee (1,200)
• wbradss (400)

… and a whole bunch of others. There are probably additional me-too posts coming in every hour.

So now I’m wondering whether DrRonPaul2012 is really the author of the subtitles of “Hitler Finds Out Scott Brown Massachusetts Senate Seat” or if he was also merely a re-poster who happened to get found by the right people.

Can anyone shed some light the true origins of this clip? (Not the TRUE origins … we know it’s from the movie “Downfall.” I mean the true origins of the more popular Coakley-Brown version.) And if DrRonPaul2012 is not the real subtitle author, does the real subtitle author have any copyright claims against him? Or does the fact that we’ve all be stealing from “fairly using” the original movie void any sort of authorship rights for the new subtitles we’ve added?

Some three-and-a-half hours later, I posted my creation:

I put a link to the video in my Facebook status update and in a tweet with the #MASen hashtag, and went to bed.

This morning I was very happy to see that a handful of people had already watched it. Some of my Facebook friends shared it, and some of their friends watched it, too. It wasn’t too long before the video had over 100 views. I was pretty psyched. People were paying attention.

Then around 1:00 this afternoon I saw myself mentioned in a tweet. It said “@universalhub Local playwright Dave Schrag’s video @dvschrag is a better take: http://bit.ly/7iOtjH.” OK, I thought, that’s good news. One of my friends is spreading the word. But then I thought … Wait a minute. A “better take” than what?

I looked at @universalhub’s earlier tweets and found “Hitler is stunned by Coakley’s defeat. http://bit.ly/6pRqzt.” Someone else had come up with exactly the same idea. And this other video was getting picked up all over the place, including big-name sites like Comedy Central. It was no contest. By early evening, my video had been watched almost 350 times, a number that I would have been awfully pleased with twelve hours prior. But this other video – which is funny but, IMHO, not as funny as mine – had almost 75,000 views. Seventy-five-THOUSAND views in a day. It was the 55th most viewed video today on ALL OF YOUTUBE!

So I ask those of you who know this stuff better than I, what did I do wrong? Why did this other guy go viral and not me? Did I fail to plant some seeds in the most obvious places? Or did this DrRonPaul2012 fellow have a huge head start on me? (He’s only got 61 YouTube subscribers, so I don’t think that alone could account for the rapid spread.)

Any ideas?

That warning was posted on Facebook by a magazine targeted to teenage girls. (No, I don’t read the magazine myself. It’s published by a client of mine.) I read that post a couple times and said to myself, “that can’t be right.” And in fact, it’s not. It seems I’d stumbled onto an urban legend in the making.

The Facebook post linked to an article at Feministing.com titled “Carrying condoms could get you arrested.” The article begins:

Jaclyn Friedman has a good post up at Amplify about an initiative in D.C. that could literally get you arrested for prostitution charges if you’re caught carrying three or more condoms with you. In short, D.C. police are using their "Prostitution Free Zone" law to go as far as arresting women for carrying condoms in their purse. This is happening in New and San Francisco as well.

Follow the link to Jaclyn Friedman’s article and you’ll read that

in some areas of D.C., carrying three or more condoms is grounds for arrest on prostitution charges

Follow this link in turn and you’ll come to a January 7 article by Alex DiBranco at Change.org titled “Don’t Carry Condoms in D.C. – You Could Be Charged Charged With Prostitution.” DiBranco opens with:

Think you might get lucky tonight? Well, if you’re in D.C., don’t bring more than two condoms in your purse, or you could be arrested as a prostitute. In D.C., police can declare "Prostitution Free Zones" where officers can pick up (I mean, arrest) anyone suspected of sex work. And they’ve been accused of using carrying three or more condoms as proof of intent to sell sex — rather than intent to spend the weekend getting jiggy with a guy.

Finally, we’ve arrived at some primary source material: A 2008 report written by the Alliance for a Safe & Diverse DC and published by a nonprofit called Different Avenues, as well as the official definition of a Prostitution Free Zone from the DC Metropolitan Police Department.

One teensy-weensy problem: Neither the report nor the police regulations nor anything else outside the blogosphere state that carrying condoms – whether three or three hundred — can get you arrested.

Alex DiBranco knows this now. Five days after posting the “Don’t Carry Condoms” article, she wrote a follow-up, titled “D.C. Police Confirm Condom Policy that Endangers Public Health.” She noted that DCist.com, another blog, had done some fact-checking. DiBranco wrote:

DCist contacted the Metropolitan Police Department for comment on its policy after they reported on an article I wrote last week about the use of condoms as evidence in "Prostitution Free Zones." According to DCist, MPD spokesperson Gwendolyn Crump confirms that condoms can be used as a factor leading "an officer to suspect (reasonable suspicion) that a person is engaged in prostitution," but stresses that possession of rubbers alone isn’t sufficient cause for an order to disperse or arrest. [emphasis added]

Here is the full comment from the police spokesperson, as posted by DCist:

Although the possession of multiple condoms may be a factor that leads an officer to suspect (reasonable suspicion) that a person is engaged in prostitution, it is not enough to establish probable cause for any crime. Depending on the circumstances, factors such as this may justify an investigative stop – but not an arrest.

If an individual is congregating with at least one other person in a Prostitution Free Zone (PFZ), which is already by nature a high prostitution area, late at night with no apparent destination, and in possession of multiple condoms, that would be sufficient to order the individual to disperse. Police cannot just order individuals to leave a PFZ without a reasonable suspicion that they are engaged in prostitution or prostitution-related activities.

The criminal offense associated with a PFZ involves the failure to disperse after an officer issues such an order to two or more persons congregating on public space within the PFZ for the purpose of engaging in prostitution or prostitution-related activities. The indicators for determining whether a group is congregating for prostitution-related activities are below, and the full DC Code section is attached.

Essentially, if police cannot arrest someone for having two or more condoms outside a PFZ, police cannot arrest them for it within a PFZ. Community members often refer to PFZs as an anti-loitering statute. To some extent that is accurate, but the only loitering that is prohibited is that related to prostitution.

One may approve or disapprove of DC’s actual tactics to thwart prostitution, but boiling down their policy to “carrying condoms in DC will get you arrested” is preposterously misleading. Advocates do their causes no favors by repeating errant claims, and bloggers should take the time to drill down to the original source material before rebroadcasting inflammatory reports.

As of this writing (January 13 at 11:15 AM EST), the main text of DiBranco’s original “Don’t Carry Condoms” article has not been updated to reflect the DCist’s post of the MPD clarification. I’m going to tell her to edit the original article. Even if she does, though, it’s probably too late to prevent this urban legend from making the rounds. Look for it someday at snopes.com.

Update: Alex DiBranco has since thanked me for my comment and an update has been posted on the January 7 article. The misleading headline and statements in the body regarding condom counts and arrests remain.

N.B. It occurred to me too late to check to see whether anyone else had already exposed this myth. After Googling carrying condoms arrest I found that CityPaper scooped me by a couple of hours. Drat!

All posts from the Jay Severin category from this blog have been ported over there, but it’s too much trouble to port the comments, so the original posts and comments will stay here.

Severin’s plan was to queue up a bunch of sound bites from Michelle and Barack Obama, Jeremiah Wright, and Bill Ayers and have McDormand respond to them. Severin’s argument was “if these are the beliefs of people Obama associates with, then how can we trust him with our country?” McDormand was completely unruffled and landed one body blow after another. She pointed out that:

• If one is going to judge a presidential candidate based on associations, it probably makes more sense to consider the candidate’s choice of running mate than anything else.
• The person on the ballot is Barack Obama, not Wright, Ayers, or anyone else.
• Five-second sound bites are probably not the best things on which one should base a meaningful conversation.
• Anyone, including McDormand’s father (a minister), can be made to sound radical with sound bites taken out of context.
• If we are interested in exercises in defamation of character, all we need to do is check out Jay Severin on Wikipedia.

McDormand had clearly done her homework and was ready to rumble. Severin was flustered, interrupted his guest repeatedly, and wound up the show by disconnecting the call and proclaiming victory. It was a joy to listen to. Thank you, Frances McDormand. (P.S. Loved you in Fargo.)

That’s what you meant, right Jay?

Didn’t have the recorder set up for this one so I can’t provide the full transcript, but on Wednesday, October 15, between 3:30 and 4:30 pm, Jay Severin made a couple statements that are – to use one of his favorite terms – demonstrably false.

Lie #1: Barack Obama’s plan for higher taxes only for those making $250,000 or more would apply to any small business with more than $250,000 in gross receipts.

Truth #1: The $250,000 level refers to personal income. While it’s true that small business EARNINGS are treated as wages for sole proprietorships and S-corporations, the amount of gross receipts has nothing to do with income tax calculations. This is spelled out clearly on Barack Obama’s web site:

As a small business owner who claims small business income on your individual tax return (whether through a sole proprietorship, partnership, or S-corp) you pay individual income taxes only on your net income — or profit — and not on your firm’s gross revenue. Accordingly, when Obama says that he would roll back the Bush tax cuts for all couples earning more than $250,000 a year, these income figures include only net income that a small business owner takes home. Because net income is usually far lower than gross revenue, even if your revenue is above $250,000 you are still likely to get a tax cut under Obama’s tax plan.

For more details on Obama’s tax plan, check out this fact sheet.

Lie #2: Barack Obama has refused to release his birth certificate.

Truth #2: His birth certificate is also on his web site. And now it’s on my web site, too:

So what’s your defense, Jay? That Barack Obama is putting false information on his web site and that no other major media outlet has called him on it? I don’t think so, Jay. Stop lying.