I read the news today, oy vey ...

[babylonsister]

http://mediamatters.org/altercation/200806110002#2

I read the news today, oy vey ...
Eric Alterman

snip//

Is the new Note as much as a captive of right-wing-driven conventional wisdom as it was under Karl Rove's personal PR rep, Mark Halperin? I like to think it isn't, but what the hell? In writing about Obama's (dumb) hiring of Jim Johnson, it highlights quotes from Commentary, The New York Sun, The Wall Street Journal edit page, and The Washington Times. (What, nothing from the John Birch Society?) OK, so they want to be inclusive? Where are their counterparts? Where are the quotes from Salon, from The American Prospect, from The Nation, from Media Matters, from CAP's columns, from Josh Marshall, etc.? These are routinely ignored by The Note, even though the work they do is by and large first rate. For the Beltway media, there is only a center and a right, and Obama better understand that these people -- so smitten with McCain -- are not his friends.

[WillyT]

1. K & R !!!

:kick:

[question everything]

2. First, everyone - media and invidviduals - tend to go negative more often

than positive. Why? Human nature. Just look at all the threads that bashed Clinton in the now departed GD Primaries.

Second, just because the sources are from the right does not make the facts go away.

Obama went after the CEO of Countrywide, who got multi million dollars severance pay while his ship was sinking, yet Johnson got special loans reserved for "friends of Angelo."

And, yes, it shines lights on Obama's judgment and experience (or lack of). It follows the path of Rev. Wright when, first, Obama ignores the criticism, then acknowledge them but still stands by his man and last, distance himself.

[PoliticalAmazon]

3. Deleted dup. post. n/t

[PoliticalAmazon]

4. On a more bizarre note...in L.A., a pornography trial was halted when it was found that the judge...

maintained his own website with "sexually explicit" images.

I think they need to vet the judges for conflicts of interest just a little more carefully...

[PoliticalAmazon]

5. "...image of masturbation and public sex...slide show striptease featuring a transvestite..."

div class="excerpt"]
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article4122560.ece

A high-profile US obscenity trial has been put on hold after it emerged that the top federal judge hearing it had posted sexually explicit material on his personal website including footage of a semi-naked man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal. Other material found on Judge Alex Kozinski's site, which has now been blocked, included a photograph of nude women on all fours painted to look like cows and another of a young man giving himself fellatio.

Mr Kozinski is hearing the trial of Ira Isaacs, a 57-year-old Los Angeles-based film maker, who faces up to 20 years in jail and a huge fine if convicted of selling criminally obscene fetish videos depicting bestiality and defecation. But his trial at the Los Angeles Federal Court was put on hold just hours after it opened after an LA Times report about obscene material posted online by Judge Alex Kozinski. The judge agreed to the prosecution's request for a 48-hour delay so that the Justice Department could look into possible issues of prejudice in the case.

Mr Kozinski, 57, is a larger-than-life character who is chief judge of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which has jurisdiction over nine western states. A judicial conservative who has been mooted as a possible candidate for the Supreme Court, he is also a noted advocate of free speech: he is most famous for having personally switched off the filters blocking access to internet pornography from 9th Circuit computers. According to the LA Times, the material on Mr Kozinski's website could only be accessed by those who knew to type in the name of a subdirectory to which there was no visible link. Apart from family documents and photographs there were also images of masturbation and public sex as well as a "slide show striptease featuring a transsexual and a folder that contained a series of photos of women's crotches in snug-fitting clothing or underwear". ....