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Jun. 12th, 2008 11:23 amFrom the Chicago Tribune:
Even if you cut down every sequoia in California, you still couldn't make a clue stick big enough to club some people with.
So a Federal judge has an account on one of the electronic bulletin board sites, where he's posted pictures and video that he found funny. And some of them, like much humor from the English speaking world, are sexually explicit. None of them would seem to be legally obscene. This is supposed to disqualify him from sitting over an obscenity trial?
It would have been better for the judge to flat out say that he has done absolutely nothing wrong and that no "controversy" contrived over this is legitimate, and then ignore any further calls for comment. You get life tenure and you ain't a politician. None of it was even "inappropriate." You shouldn't even concede this much to those weenies. Anyone who thinks that sort of thing is "inappropriate" isn't a real American, and it's time we stopped listening to those folks and started roughing them up a bit.
Of course, the obscenity trial, like any other, is a prodigious waste of time and your money. But that's beside the point. What this seems to be is a campaign by the Federal prosecutors to intimidate the judge in a prosecution of slight viability to begin with. It needs to be slapped down hard.
Alex Kozinski, chief judge of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, acknowledged in an interview with The Times that he had posted the materials, which included a photo of naked women on all fours painted to look like cows and a video of a half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal. Some of the material was inappropriate, he conceded, although he defended other sexually explicit content as "funny."
Kozinski, 57, said that he thought the site was for his private storage and that he was not aware the images could be seen by the public, although he also said he had shared some material on the site with friends. After the interview Tuesday evening, he blocked public access to the site.
Even if you cut down every sequoia in California, you still couldn't make a clue stick big enough to club some people with.
So a Federal judge has an account on one of the electronic bulletin board sites, where he's posted pictures and video that he found funny. And some of them, like much humor from the English speaking world, are sexually explicit. None of them would seem to be legally obscene. This is supposed to disqualify him from sitting over an obscenity trial?
It would have been better for the judge to flat out say that he has done absolutely nothing wrong and that no "controversy" contrived over this is legitimate, and then ignore any further calls for comment. You get life tenure and you ain't a politician. None of it was even "inappropriate." You shouldn't even concede this much to those weenies. Anyone who thinks that sort of thing is "inappropriate" isn't a real American, and it's time we stopped listening to those folks and started roughing them up a bit.
Of course, the obscenity trial, like any other, is a prodigious waste of time and your money. But that's beside the point. What this seems to be is a campaign by the Federal prosecutors to intimidate the judge in a prosecution of slight viability to begin with. It needs to be slapped down hard.
