Clayton Cramer on a roll

Clayton Cramer dug up some gold nuggets not related to his favorite two subjects:

• Oklahoma judge suspended for playing "Pump up the Jam" on the bench. (And no, I don't mean the Belgian-produced techno classic with the same title. Hat tip: Clayton Cramer.)
• Even the NYT (part 2) now (backhandedly) admitting a Saddam/OBL connection
• City of Berkeley invents constitutional 'right' to prostitution? Cramer himself, incidentally, favors legalizing prostitution on pragmatic grounds.
• Music companies settle price-fixing suit by free CD donations to public libraries. Only: don't look a gift horse in the hole:

  The Puget Sound Educational Service District, serving 35 school districts, received 1,300 copies of Whitney Houston's soaring rendition of the "Star-Spangled Banner," a disc that includes only one other song, "America the Beautiful." [...] Other discs have raunchy rap unsuitable for school libraries, and some librarians said it looked like the music companies were dumping stale inventory. [...] Librarian Lara Weigand from the Tacoma Public Library [...] said she doesn't need 57 copies of "Three Mo Tenors," based on a 2001 PBS special about African-American tenors

  Adds CC: "Of course, another way of looking at this is to remember the situation some years ago when Canada shipped many tons of cheese to a refugee camp on the Cambodian border--where the local population did not know what cheese was. "Thank you for the soap, but it doesn't wash very well.""
• Boston Catholics grieving as the Boston arseArchdiocese, racked by pedophilia scandals, is forced to sell off disused churches as... condo apartment buildings. Adds CC:

  Some immoral acts are going to take place in those churches turned condos--but few will match the immorality of what took place before. I wouldn't compare these churches to brothels. That would be unfair. To the brothels. At least prostitutes in brothels are usually adults, and there by choice.

  Knowing what every Israeli who follows the news knows about trafficking in women by organized crime syndicates from the former Soviet Union, I am not at all certain that all the 'working girls' are there by choice, although I am willing to grant that some are.