The Media and the State

Left journalist Glenn Greenwald and libertarian Matt Welch discuss the current state of American politics. This is one hour but an hour well spent.

What I found most fascinating was their discussion of the relationship of the media to the State. Both note how the media tends to defend the political class. Through most of history the media was seen as a check on the State, a watchdog on politicians.

Thomas Jefferson suffered one of the most concerted press campaigns in history yet he remained a strong defender of a free press. He went so far as to say that if he had to choose between a government with no newspapers, or a society with newspaper but no government, he would take the latter.

But the media, of late, has shifted. Instead of being the bane to politicians it is their ally. And Greenwald and Welch suggest that the reason is that the make up of journalists has shifted. Many journalists no longer see their job as adversarial when it comes to the ruling elites. Quite the contrary, they see themselves as part of that elite. They are defenders of the regime because they view themselves as part of the social elite who know best how to run the lives of others. Certainly when this blogger was studying journalism at university the shift was already apparent.

I attended a decent state university, not one of the Ivy League elite schools. But even in that journalism department many of my fellow students came from the well-off strata of society. I came from a rather working class, middle class family. My father was a fireman, my mother a nurse, by grandfather still worked in the steel mill and both grandmothers worked as clerks at a major department stores. My fellow students were, however, often from much wealthier sections of society. And these were the ones who, for the most part, were heading for minor journalistic posts. The sought-after journalism majors were those who attended Harvard, Princeton, Yale, etc.

To a large extent this meant that the most sough-after journalists came from precisely the same social circles as the people they were covering. The politicians they were covering could be former classmates, even relatives, at worst they were people who shared similar values, who saw themselves as part of the intellectual classes endowed with a superior ability to determine what is best for others. This does not mean this social elite is always wrong, sometimes they are quite correct in what they are trying to do. But what it means is that do not see media and government in adversarial positions. And that changes how the media reacts when faced with government overstepping its bounds. They will tend to be protective of their own class first, and journalists seconds.

In recent days we witnessed precisely this happening. Consider Prop 19 in California, which would have legalized marijuana usage. The political elite wanted to keep their powers in this field and the "liberal" media, instead of taking the "liberal" position of defending freedom of choice, defended the State and almost universally opposed the measure.

With the Wikileaks scandal we again see a widespread consensus among the media that this is a terrible assault on the State and that the State's secrecy must be protected at all costs. And the recent outrage concerned the TSA's new intrusive policies was dismissed by the journalistic elite. Many editorialized that the public should just shut up and endure it.

Even where the social elites tends to be correct they are still being true to their own social class. Consider the matters of prejudice and bigotry. Contrary to Left ideology the working classes are not defenders of the downtrodden and oppressed. The working class tends to be highly prejudicial and bigoted. This applies religiously (such as toward Jews, Muslims), economically (illegal immigrants, and foreign competitive trade) and sexually (gays, transgendered people), as well as racially (blacks, Mexicans).

The social elites share some such prejudices but in a more genteel way. They would be less crass and obvious and, in many cases would overlook these "undesired" traits provided the individual in question shared the correct cultural values, especially about the role of a social elite. The media, as part of the upper classes today, is relatively unified behind the case for marriage equality. And here, I think, they are correct.

But this is not surprising. The social elites have always been less horrified at the existence of homosexual people than the working classes. Revolutionary Marxist have tried to claim that the oppression of gays is a phenomena of capitalism and that the worker's vanguard would defend them. But in reality the "fag bashers" in society tend to come from the lower classes, not the upper classes.

This has been the case for a very long time. The Oscar Wilde trials is an example. When it was clear that Wilde had been guilty of violating "sodomy" laws in England the reactions of the classes were quite different. While the upper classes acted horrified they also took their time to bring the matter to court. It was made quite clear to Wilde that he would be arrested and he was given time to pack his things and cross the channel to France in order to escape the ordeal. Wilde, under pressure from Alfred Douglas, didn't take advantage of the escape route conveniently offered to him. But while Wilde foolishly stayed in England many other gay men were heading for the coast in case the campaign expanded. What most offended the social elite was not that Wilde had relations with men but that his relationships tended to pay little attention to class distinctions.

I think Greenwald is correct when he notes that journalists today see their position as being part of the ruling class. This is especially true of the journalists at the top media outlets: the networks, the New York Times, Washington Post, etc. And that changes the nature of the media and its relationship to the political classes. This will dramatically reduce criticism of the political elite and turn the media, not into an adversary, but into the lap-dog of government.

Can a Stalinist experiment go right?

One of the more bizaree ledes I've come across in recent memory is from The Independent, a left-leaning paper in England. David McNeill writes a "special report" on "Face to face with the world's most repressive regime."

The lede is: "Pyongyang is the showcase capital for a Stalinist experiement gone horribly wrong."

What exactly would be a Stalinist experient that went right?

This is comparable to some Right-wing paper discussing a "Nazi experiment that went horribly worng." The idea that this has gone "horribly wrong" implies that there is a kind of Stalinism, or by implication, Nazism, that could get it right. If a Right-leaning newspaper had said something similar of Adolph's regime would it be overlooked? But then the Left has always had a fondness for Uncle Joe.

Crappy reporting sells but is it journalism?

I've seen this story making the rounds of the major media outlets. I specifically remember the Washington Post making this claim, and now Time magazine does as well. The claim: "Recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show that 1 in 5 sexually active gay and bisexual men in America are HIV-positive but that 44% of them don't know it."

What's wrong with that claim? Simple: It isn't true. This is not what the CDC said. But once the media starts spreading a false story they all tend to jump in line and do the same thing. Time is repeating the falsehood that the Washington Post started: "One in five gay men in the United States has HIV and almost half of those who carry the virus are unaware that they are infected..."

In both articles, with the sensational false claim in the first paragraph, you have to start reading down the article to discover facts that dispute the lede of the story.

The original claim is that 20% of all gay men across the US are HIV positive. But farther down the story you discover that the CDC tested 8,000 gay men in 21 major cities only. In other words the demographics of the test population was skewed to the major cities only, thus excluding all the gay men who live in rural areas or the suburbs.

Quite honestly speaking the lifestyle of gay men in urban areas is vastly different than that of gay men living on a farm in Kansas—just as the lifestyle of young straights in the major cities is different from their counterparts in the rest of the country.

You simply can not draw nation-wide conclusions by only surveying a very specific subset of the population.

One of the major differences is that the average age of people living in major cities, among the gay population at least, would tend to be younger and thus more sexually active. Living in a major city is not unusually for gay men, but many tend to move out of the cities as they age. Many, contrary to popular assumptions, never move to a major urban area in the first place. In addition the risks are not spread equally among all races. HIV infections are higher in the black community than in the white community and blacks are more likely to live in major cities than are whites.

Everything about this study skews it toward the highest infection possible. But the CDC is not to blame, that is what they were studying. It is the sloppy reporting of the media that is creating a false meme that the Right will use in their anti-gay campaigns. The CDC actually warned readers of the report that "these findings are limited to men who frequented MSM-identified venues (most of which were bars [45%] and dance clubs [22%])...."

By MSM they mean men who have sex with other men. The CDC found that a lot of men who are sexually active with other men deny that they are gay—this has been especially true in the black community—just ask Bishop Long if you don't believe me.

That reveals that not only is the sample intentionally skewed toward urban settings, but it is also skewed to a specific subgroup of urban gay men—those who frequent bars and dance clubs. Again this skews in favor of younger, single, more sexually adventurous young men. Older gay men in relationships, who rarely visit the clubs, are left out.

This one in five infection rate isn't even indicative of gay men in 21 major cities. Don't bother reading the mainstream media to find that out. The articles I read left out the part of the survey being done in gay bars and dance clubs. So, while they did mention the survey was done in 21 major cities, they left out that only a very specific subgroup of gay men were approached for the study: younger men who frequent gay bars and dance clubs.

To say that what is true for young gay men who frequent gay bars is true, on average, for all gay men in the United States is not just sloppy journalism, it is gross misreporting of the facts. This would be similar to surveying a frat house keg party in order to determine the drinking habits of the average American. Yet you will find the major media outlets making the same mistake. Time and the Washington Post are not local rags produced by amateurs.

The CDC actually warned readers not to jump to the false conclusion that this reflects the entire gay population of America. They wrote, "the results are not representative of all MSM..." The CDC actually puts the infection rate of all gay men at around half of what this survey finds, but even that is problematic.

The problem with surveys of the gay population is that being gay isn't like being black, it is something people can hide, and do. There are huge numbers of gay people in the country who are completely unconnected with the larger gay population. They may live in isolated locations, or simply live socially isolated lives.

Any study of the gay community goes to where the surveyors can get answers with a minimum amount of effort. And that means in the concentrated gay "ghettos" in the major urban areas. Here are some facts:

1. We simply don't know for sure how many gay men there are in the United States.
2. We are not likely to know for a very long time, if ever.
3. It is almost impossible to do a representative survey of the gay population, if not impossible.
4. What surveys we can do are all skewed toward one end of the lifestyle spectrum while entirely excluding those on the other end.

This doesn't mean the study is useless. Understanding the limitations of the study allows us to make reasonable conclusions, but what the mainstream media is reporting are unreasonable conclusions. The study shows that educational efforts directed toward young, sexually active, gay men in urban settings are not as successful as they should be.

If we assume that the study shows where new efforts might be necessary, then it fills its purpose. But what we can't do is jump to conclusions about the gay population as a whole. In other words the worst thing you can get out of the study is precisely what the major media outlets were reporting. That is not an indictment of the CDC but of the mainstream media in the United States.

Photo 1: those who got surveyd. Photo 2: those who didn't, to illustrate the point.

All I have to say about Tiger Woods

Let me make it clear that I have little to nothing to say about Tiger Woods and his private life, so I won't be saying it.

Mr. Woods does nor take it upon himself to try to arbitrate the morality of others, as do the Catholic hierarchy and fundamentalist Christians. Mr. Woods does not attempt to pass laws to control the sex lives of others as do the Republicans and various conservatives. Mr. Woods has, to my knowledge, never publicly expressed an opinion attacking others for their sex lives. In other words, Mr. Woods has basically respected the rights of others to live their own lives according to their own values. Given those facts I see no reason whatsoever to offer any opinion regarding his private life. He has not intruded, or attempted to intrude, on the private lives of others and I feel we should grant the same respect to him.

That Woods is well-known, because he plays golf well, is of absolutely no relevancy. That he is well-known does not make him public property. It does not bestow on others a "right to know" the most intimate details of his life. The media, acting like sharks in a feeding-frenzy, is it's typical self. Moralizing on a constant basis the journalism profession proves itself to be utterly immoral in how it treats others. While my university major was journalism, I have never had much respect for journalists. They are bottom-feeders who exaggerate and distort facts in order to sensationalize a story. They will report the opinions of activists, even if they know the "facts" being presented are lies. They will bias stories in subtle ways in order to push the public into accepting their preconceived political agenda. They do so because they feel they are morally and intellectual superior to the rest of humanity and thus have a right, nay, an obligation, to push people into "doing the right thing." Yet the media itself is frequently doing the wrong thing for no other reason than to sell a story.

What Tiger Woods does, or doesn't do, with his sex life is no one's business but his, and those he sleeps with. It is for them to work out, not a matter of public consumption. The real immorality in this story comes from the media. Shame on them. What a pathetic bunch of wankers the media has become. They deserve no respect. And they certainly won't get any here. Tiger Woods ought to be left alone. And all those prurient busybodies out there, who eat up the scandal and feed the profits of the sleaze-merchants in the media, deserve to have their darkest secrets exposed to the world. The whole thing is quite literally obscene, in a way that sex never could be.

A lesson in conservative thinking (so called).

I want to give you a lesson on how to think like a conservative. On our left you will see a picture of an individual who apparently had the ability to make a very adult-like decision. On your right is an individual who is "just a kid" and has no such ability. Welcome to the mind of the modern conservative.

On you left is a photo of Walter Polovchak. I knew Walter, he stayed in my home in San Francisco on one visit, some years after this photo was taken. When I knew Walter he was 20-years-old. Of course today he is around 40.

At the age of twelve Walter decided to leave his parents. He and his family and immigrated to the United States but the parents had decided to return to the Ukraine. Walter said he didn't want to go back. He wanted to stay in the United States even if it meant he was "divorcing" his parents. Conservatives rallied to his cause and applauded his ability to make the adult decision of seeking political asylum in the U.S. even if it meant he had to break up his own family to do so. They chucked "family values" because it conflicted with freedom. I personally thought they were right to do so, which is one reason I supported Walter and his decision.

Walter was a boy when he made a very momentous decision. In contrast, on the right, you will find Beau Breedlove of Oregon. Conservatives are referring to him as a "kid" who was "exploited". Breedlove worked as an intern in the Oregon state legislature. A city official from Portland, Sam Adams, had gone to Eugene to lobby for some legislation. While there he and Breedlove meet. This was just shy of Breedlove's 18th birthday. After that birthday Breedlove and Sam Adams dated briefly but were mostly friends. As Breedlove himself says: "I saw it as a friendship that had crossed the line a couple of times, but I saw it as a friendship. When I say cross the line, I don't mean as an unwarranted or unwanted affection." Breedlove made the decision to have sex with Adams. To be clear, he was 18 when he made that decision and was legally in an adult and entitled to do so.

And to this day Breedlove says: "I was not pulled into this situation by Sam. I was not unfairly influenced by Sam. I think Sam is a wonderful man."

Of course, Sam is the man that the conservatives are trying to lynch. Take the absurd "reporting" by a conservative "journalist" named Jennifer Cox. Cox claimed: "Sam Adams has finally admitted that he has been having sex with a teen intern." Note the number of falsehoods or false insinuations that Cox packed into that one sentence: she is a master at deceit. The term "has been having" implies it is ongoing. The fact is that they date briefly. Calling Breedlove a "teen" is her way of distorting the report so that the readers actually never know how old he was. In fact her article never actually mentions Breedlove's age.

This lying reporter wants her readers to imagine a teenager, perhaps one not much older than Walter was when he left his family, with the support of the conservative movement. In fact, Breedlove was an adult mentally, physically and legally. That is a distinction that Cox hides in her deceptive report. Also note that while she says Breedlove was an intern she also leaves out any further information about that position. The implication she intends is to deceive her readers into thinking that Adams used his position to seduce a young child who was interning for Adams. That is the false image she wants to convey. Breedlove was an intern at the state legislature. Adams was not a member of the legislature and didn't work there. In other words, the intern position had nothing to do with Adams.

Cox refers to Mr. Breedlove as "the kid". In fact this man is called a kid twice by Cox and referred to as a "teen intern" once. She reports "rumors" that the two had sex before Breedlove turned 18 but there is no evidence that was the case. She then becomes even more deceitful, however. "The rumors started when the kid was seventeen and Adams was running for mayor. A report from Associated Press notes that the pair denied the rumor, but a newspaper had the evidence so finally the mayor confessed, once he was trapped." Read that carefully. Ms Cox is lying, while berating a man for lying. Why brilliant hypocrisy! That sentence clearly claims that Adams and Breedlove had sexual relations before Breedlove was legally an adult and she also falsely claims that Adams confessed to this. She also lies about the timing of the Adams mayoral campaign in order to bolster her deception.

Let's unravel the lies of this Cox woman. Yes, Adams and Breedlove denied dating. But Adams never confessed to having sex with "the kid" before he turned 18. In fact, both men are very clear that the relationship only turned briefly sexual AFTER Breedlove was 18, not before. The relationship between the two men took place three years ago. The Mayoral election was in 2008. Cox says the rumor started when Breedlove was 17 and Adams was running for Mayor. Breedlove was 20 when Adams ran for Mayor, not 17. Ms. Cox had to move the date of the mayoral election by three years in order to deceive her readers. In fact, Adams didn't even announce an interest in the position until late 2007, when Breedlove would have been 19. At no point could it be simultaneously true that Breedlove was 17 and Adams was running for mayor. Ms. Cox was just fabricating claims to further her own personal agenda.

Cox is just a cheap pornographer pretending to be a reporter. She specializes in sleaze and sex, making me wonder why she is obsessed with the topic. If the public has a right to know, I'd like to know why she is obsessed with the sex lives of others. What sort of perversion is she hiding? Consider some of her other classic stories:

Britney Spears Nude Photos Purchased by Online Casino
Kenny Chesney Answers Allegations of Affair with Sara Evans
Kate Beckinsale Nude on Webcam for Hubby
Britney Spears Catches Hubby K-Fed Undressed at Ex's House
Super Model Sex Tape

The more you look at her own obsessive history with the sex lives of other people the more it becomes apparent that Jennifer Cox is simply sleazy. She is obsessed with the sexual activities of other people. I long ago learned to worry about people like her. It just seems that this sort of obsession is a cover up for some really deviant, sometimes dangerous, sexual obsessions. While I wouldn't make any specific accusation against Ms. Cox, other than that she is blatantly dishonest, I wouldn't hire to babysit either. At the very least she is profession voyeur. But I wouldn't be surprised if she has her own skeletons in the closet and, since the "public has a right to know", I think she should confess now.

Cox is clearly just dishonest and obsessed with sleaze. What is the excuse for other reporters? The Oregonian has turned into a local version of one of those trashy tabloids sold at the check-out stands for the bored and brainless. The Oregonian deceptively has a headline: Beau Breedlove tells of his romance as a 17-year-old with Sam Adams.

What are they reporting about? Breedlove meet Adams just before he (Breedlove) turned 18. He said that there were some "romantic" feelings but no sex. And he says he kissed Adams twice but there was no sex until after his 18th birthday. Yet the Inquirer, ooops I meant The Oregonian, breathlessly reports:

State law says third-degree sexual abuse, which is a misdemeanor, can occur when someone subjects another person to "sexual contact" when the person either does not consent to the advance or is younger than 18. The law defines sexual contact as "any touching of the sexual or other intimate parts of a person ... for the purpose of arousing or gratifying the sexual desire of either party."

Adams is under criminal investigation by the attorney general's office.

Apparently a kiss is "third-degree sexual abuse". I am horrified. It appears that for years I was sexually abusing my grandmother without realizing it! Oh, horrors! It is even worse than I thought! She was abusing me!!!!! I need compensation. Who can I sue?

The news media and conservatives have really stooped to new lows in this campaign to get Adams. Even some in the gay media are sounding like Jerry Falwell clones to their own shame.

The one person who kept his dignity in this has been Beau Breedlove. He has stood firm by his friend and says that nothing unwanted or wrong happened. As he said: "I do not feel like I was ever a victim." Of course he might feel different about being victimized by trashy journalists and moralistic conservatives.

Even Sam Adams has stupidly called the dating "inappropriate". That is ridiculous. The one good thing which Mr. Adams did was refuse to step down from office. I have no idea if I would vote for Adams in an election, even if I did think voting made any sense. I don't know enough about his views to say. But I don't think he did anything wrong for briefly dating an adult. Maybe he shouldn't have lied about the relationship. Personally I don't think even that was wrong since it is no ones business anyway and unrelated to his job.

But if I look at this incident and start to make moral judgments the people I find wanting are sleaze merchants like Cox and The Oregonian. The really unethical actions in this case are coming from journalists. But that is no surprise to me. Next to politicians I've long though journalists to be a pretty unethical lot. Both groups believes that the laws of common decency don't apply to them and that they are exempt from rules of morality. Both believe this exemption exists because they "serve a greater good". I'm not sure we need either group. Journalists only have value to the degree that the keep their eye on the sleaze of their counterparts holding office. But sometimes they go too far and this is one of those cases. When either group turns their attention on a private citizen watch out! Both are ruthless, vindictive, cruel and willing to do anything to anyone to further their own career.

The smearing of Judge Kozinski

Most bias in newspapers is subtle. Now and then some journalist comes of the closet with a piece so biased and distorted as to out himself. One such “journalist” is Scott Glover of the Los Angeles Times. He wrote an article that can best be described as a “hit piece” regarding Judge Alex Kozinski.

Let us get some background here. Kozinski is a strong advocate of the First Amendment. He is a friend to civil liberties. While he was appointed to the federal court by Ronald Reagan, Kozinski is more libertarian than conservative.

Kozinski was the presiding judge at an obscenity trial in Los Angeles. The trial dealt with some very fringe sexual material that most people would find unappealing. The prosecutors in the case know that Kozinski happens to take the First Amendment seriously and that meant they were gunning for him. They argued he should step down due to a conflict of interest claiming he has a “sexually explicit web site with similar material to what is on trial here.”

Let us note that the prosecutor is lying intentionally. Here are the facts as we know them.

Judge Kozinski had a private web site which was not promoted to the public or advertised in any way. The site had some files on it which had some images that included sexuality or nudity but the context was entirely different from what the prosecutor was implying. Most of the material was of a humorous nature. None of it was commercial. None of it even came close to being “similar material to what is on trial here.” The prosecutor does what he was paid to do -- lie through his eye teeth in order to destroy the First Amendment. To access the files you had to have the precise url address.

But what got worse was that Glover at the Los Angeles Times then stoops to smearing Kozinski by distorting beyond recognition the actual material that was on the site. Glover had to know he was twisting facts in order to make Kozinski look at bad as possible. If that were not the case then Glover never actually saw the material in question. Much of the material has made the rounds on the internet for years. It is widely available and unlikely to be classified obscene anywhere.

For instance, Glover says one video showed “a half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal.” I thought, when I read that, “what the hell is going on here?” It surprised me. I’m sure such material exists but still I doubted that Judge Kozinski would be collecting it. It turns out that Glover’s description is blatantly twisted and distorts the facts beyond recognition.

What I found surprised me. It surprised me because it was a film which I had seen aired on television, and I don’t mean cable. It was on broadcast television because it was funny. Glover carefully tells the truth but in a manner that the truth is no longer recognizable. The farm animal was a donkey. And the donkey was rather excited. The “half-dressed” man wasn’t quite half dressed and the term “half dressed” actually doesn’t say much. Responsible journalists wouldn’t use such a vague term. As for “cavorting” that is a distortion as well.

To “cavort” is to have “lively or boisterous fun”. Well, that wasn’t quite what was going on here. As I remember the video in its entirety this donkey was in a field in a sexually aroused state -- something which can’t be hidden on a donkey. This man climbed over the fence to have his picture taken standing next to the donkey. But the donkey apparently had other ideas in mind and charged at the man.

In the film the man is not “cavorting” with the donkey but actually trying to fend it off. He is pushing it away and trying to deflect its attention. The humor was that he wanted a funny picture of himself and the donkey decided he was the only live option around for some relief. So for a couple of minutes you see this man trying to escape the attention of the donkey. He can’t turn and flee since the donkey was taking that as an invitation. So he keeps turning around and pushing the donkey away.

The man was wearing somewhat loose trousers. As he is fending off the donkey the waistline of his trousers starts falling lower and lower exposing his underwear. The man is now trying to pull up his underwear and fend off the donkey, and flee, all at the same time. That was on television but in the LA Times is it described as a “a half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal.” (Please note that the video below is the video in question. It is so obscene that Youtube runs it.)


Did Mr. Glover actually see the video which he was reporting on? If he didn’t see it then he had no business reporting what it showed. If he did see it then he twisted the content and context to such a degree that he is guilty of a breach of common journalistic ethics. Either way Mr. Glover has no business pretending to be a journalist on a major newspaper.

Glover says that Kozinski “defended some of the adult content as ‘funny’....” Since Glover did not accurately portray the content in his article he makes Kozkinski look as if he is defending, as humorous, a film depicting bestiality. No such film was on the site. Kozinski’s response that material was funny is accurate. Only Mr. Glover’s false portrayal of the facts made Kozinski look jaded.

Kozkinski said that the material in question was not in a public area of his web site. Individuals had to have the file names to find the pages in question. And he, like everyone else on the net, sent funny images or videos to friends.

Glover then twists in the knife even more by claiming that after the LA Times released its smear story “the judge offered another explanation for how the material might have been posted to the site.” What Glover should have written is that he offered an additional explanation for some material not “another explanation.” Glover implies that Kozinski was lying and trying to come up with a new excuse.

Kozinski offered no excuses. He said that he added videos and images he found amusing to this collection and sometimes sent that material to others. Virtually everyone I know does something similar. Kozinski said that he didn’t remember adding some of the images or films in question. His adult son, Yale, says he also added images to the site. So both the father and the son had access to the site and both periodically added material to the files that were there. That sounds reasonable.

So how does the sleaze merchant Glover describe this: “By Wednesday afternoon, as controversy about the web site spread, Kozinski was seeking to shift responsibility, at least in part, to his adult son, Yale.” Glover is journalistic slime.

Kozinksi says that Yale called and told him that some of the material was uploaded by himself.

Of course Glover then goes bottom crawling by seeking comments from Senator Dianne Feinstein -- a smarmy politician if ever there was one. I never liked her from the day she took over as mayor of San Francisco. She has always had a moralistic streak that would ride roughshod over the Bill of Rights. Feinstein immediately said that: “If this is true, this is unacceptable for a federal court judge.” If what is true?

Notice that Feinstein is stupidly responding to a question put to her by Glover and she is even more stupidly relying on his description of the content. She should have said that she had no comment since she hadn’t seen the material in question. But no Senator wants to look uninformed. Her remarks are then used by Glover to indicate that Kozinski had done something seriously wrong.

But Feinstein is merely responding to Glover’s description and we have already seen that what Glover printed is a gross distortion of facts. He is was so inaccurate in his printed story one can only wonder how much worse his verbal descriptions were.

Another item that Glover wrote of “was a slide show striptease featuring a transsexual”. That is also false. According to various individuals who have seen the slide show it is not that at all. It is a series of photos of women except some of the women are actually men dressed as women. The viewer is asked to decide whether the woman is a biological woman or a man dressed to look like a woman. After they guess the outfit is removed to show the actual gender of the person involved. This is hardly a “strip tease” by any stretch of the imagination. [Update: Since writing this I have seen the slide show in question and Glover's description is utterly false.]

Glover writes: “Among the sexually explicit material on his site that he defended as humorous were two photos. In one, a young man is bent over in a chair and performing fellatio on himself.” What Glover leaves out is the entire context of that photo. By doing so he makes Kozinski look absurd by referring to the photo as humorous.

The photo in question was put into a bogus Mastercard ad featuring the “priceless” slogan that has been the target of satire regularly. The photo is of a young man performing oral sex on himself in front of his computer screen. The text says:

“A Mastercard bill you would not receive.”
Internet connection: $19.99/month
CyberSex Chatroom membership: $9.99/month
Hidden cam your little brother bought $69.99

Your brothers revenge on you for years of torment by posting a ‘private moment’ picture of you on the internet: Priceless!!

USLaw.com supports Kozinski. They say that his description of the files as funny and part of life is accurate. They contend that what he had were “the type of ‘viral’ videos and images that are commonly circulated among men of a certain humour by e-mail.” Kozinski said these were photos and films that various people sent him and when he found them amusing he saved them to the private file -- remember this was never a file he made public intentionally.

One has to question what the hell Glover was thinking to write trash like this. Is his output so meager or pathetic that he has to bolster his writing with flagrant, sensationalistic distortions? One can understand why the smarmy prosecutors would want to smear a First Amendment advocate like Kozinski, but why would a journalist want to do this? And we shouldn’t forget how quickly and easily Feinstein stuck her nose into the matter without bothering to find out what the facts were.

The First Amendment is under assault by the Religious Right and the feminist Left. Judge Kozinski is one of those rare justices who stands by the Constitution -- certainly far more so than most. To have him smeared in this sensationalistic manner is shocking. To have the Los Angeles Times acting as the mouthpiece of a federal prosecutor who is trying to gut the Bill of Rights is inexcusable.

Photos: The infamous self-fellatio photo is here but cropped so you can see the text that accompanies it -- text which Glover failed to mention. Another photo from the site is attached as well. This is a Halloween costume and the “child” is a rag doll. Numerous morons on the net are fuming because they are incapable of telling a live child from a doll. The costume is funny and one that I saw distributed widely after it first appeared. Most of the items that Kozinski filed away were of a similar nature. This pretty much shows that the prosecutors were lying. I’m wonder if Glover is sleeping with one of the prosecutors given the quality of his reporting.

PS: I don't want anyone to assume that if Judge Kosinski had clearly pornographic images on his computer that would mean he had violate judicial ethics. Such images are not illegal. The computer was a home computer not a work computer. And somebody should pay attention to the fact that someone bypassed the security on Kosinki's site. It may not have been good security but this was clearly a private file that was accessed without permission. If this had been taken from a file cabinet it would be called breaking and entering. We seem too lose about what people (and police) are allowed to do with computers.

More Pay Back for the Journo crowd

Anyone who has witnessed, or experienced, the feeding frenzy of modern journalists will know that they can be vicious. They are absolutely convinced that people have the "right to know" anything about anyone for any reason. They never stop to consider the harm they inflict on people in the process. And though I was a journalism major in university myself I have to argue that journalists have become a pretty unethical bunch. And I believe they do a great deal of damage to people who don't deserve it. So I have to enjoy this. Here is an amateur video of a undercover reporter sitting in on a conference and getting exposed for being their under false pretense. No one threatens her but they do gather round and video here peppering her with questions the way journalists typically do to their prey. She didn't turn and say: "Okay boys, what do you want to ask?" She walked rapidly and directly to her car. She acted just the way the prey of journalistic ambush tactics often act. Now maybe she'll understand.