The XX Factor: Slate women blog about politics, etc...

Obama's AG Pick

On my blog, I wrote at length about what Obama's attorney general pick may mean to the adult movie industry. I've been writing about the sex business for over a decade now, and while every previous presidential election has seen some discussion around obscenity, this one was remarkable for its total lack thereof. As Declan McCullagh opined on CNET, Eric Holder is a bit of a mixed bag when it comes to free speech. A decade ago, as deputy attorney general under Janet Reno, he pushed U.S. attorneys to prosecute pornographers, although the Clinton administration took a mostly hands-off approach toward obscenity prosecutions. Interestingly, Clinton's leave 'em alone attitude toward the adult industry spawned one of the most dramatic changes in the business, as the largely unchecked business of making porn movies became increasingly more extreme. These days, most liberals believe the less government intervention the better when it comes to free speech, but in Porn Valley, "anything goes" isn't always the best answer when it comes to the hardcore day-to-day lives of adult performers.

Eric Holder for Attorney General?

And now on to a different Obama Cabinet post: At Newsweek, Michael Issikoff is reporting that Eric Holder will be tapped as Obama's attorney general, assuming he vets well. What I like about this choice is that it's bold but not crazy bold. The strike against Holder is that he signed off on Bill Clinton's pardon of Mark Rich, a crackup wherever you are on the ideological spectrum. On the other hand, Holder has a solid-to-gold reputation as a federal prosecutor. And he served as a not-fancy judge in the District of Columbia's Superior Court. When the right tried to tar him with the Rich screw up when he was on Obama's vice-president selection team, it didn't much stick--at least, not enough to fell him. The Obama folks must be making a similar calculation here.

I don't know enough about Holder's particular role in the Rich episode to know for sure whether they're right to look beyond it, but taken as a whole, Holder's record shows that he knows his stuff and should be able to run the Justice Department well. On national security, his rep is not hard left. That's of a piece with the move to the center that Obama made on wiretapping by the National Security Agency over the summer. It could mean that he's going to disappoint liberals who want to rip up every Bush administration DoJ order. This is the test of governing as opposed to criticizing from the outside. The Democrats are about to own the war on terror. Holder will be nothing like Alberto Gonzales; that I think we can count on. It's harder to know how many degrees apart he will be from the current attorney general, Michael Mukasey, who was sent in to clean up the Gonzales mess. For example, what will Holder do with Mukasey's recent order expanding the FBI's powers to infiltrate and investigate? May the tests begin.

My Challenge to Emily and Mickey: Bag a Philanderer and Then Get Back to Me

Here's the thing: I just do not see you chasing anybody into the men's room in the middle of the night, Emily B. Or you either, Mickey. And believe me, I mean this as a compliment. So, if you wouldn't want all-night stakeout duty outside the hotel where the National Enquirer seems to have cornered John Edwards and his "love child''—sorry, but I can't hear that phrase without imagining Diana Ross breaking into song—why are you so enthusiastic about having someone else do the dirty work?

Isn't cheering and leering from the comfort of the cheap seats on something like this (yeah, you go out and get that sleazo story that I personally would consider beneath my dignity) the journo equivalent of being a Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld-style chickenhawk? And isn't there a journalistic equivalent of the fruit of the poison tree? I mean, this is how sex scandals become news: Either the stories burble up from the tabloids, like toxic sludge at a superfund site, or the former lover steps to the microphone, a la Gennifer Flowers. (I used to think the reason we had so many more Democratic than Republican sex scandals was that the conservatives were rather more liberal in taking care of their former close personal friends—a theory developed after some or other supposed mistress was busted for failing to pay duty on several fur coats she was bringing into the country. But this is an outdated assumption on several levels.)

Anyway, the relevant question isn't whether every time a fire breaks out in somebody's pants it's news; if people want to know about it—and oh, we do, and me as much as anybody—then of course it meets that low bar. To me, the question is whether this is how we in the news business want to spend our time, energy, and ever-shrinking resources. Mickey quite fairly accuses me of failing to get totally "inside the marriage'' of John and Elizabeth Edwards and I don't disagree; that is an awfully big claim. (That he saw my piece on them as a PR release in defense of their big ol' house, however, just shows that the reader brings at least as much to the story as the writer does; I'd be willing to bet good money—euros, in other words—that Elizabeth didn't see it that way.) In any case, there is a difference between "inside the marriage" and inside the pants! We can learn plenty that's legit and pertinent about a candidate by looking at his or her spouse and their relationship without necessarily providing a detailed sexual history.

And if you think stories like that are no problem to double rivet even if you wanted to, just look at the debacle of the NYT piece on John McCain and Vicki Iseman; four top reporters were on the case for months and netted only hearsay that struck readers across the political spectrum as cheap and beneath the paper's usual standards. Not that I'm looking down my nose at their efforts, because the exact point at which the public interest outweighs privacy concerns is not always so easy to pin down, either. On the contrary, it's because I've been sent out on so many stories like that—located out there somewhere in the vast expanse of moral gray area—that privacy issues are not theoretical for me.

Grieving relatives? I've knocked on their doors at daybreak and approached them coming out of church. Politicians and their personal lives? I've asked questions that made even me wince lots of times, and written a handful of stories that were true but broke my own heart to see in print. On one memorable occasion, I was ordered to "dress up like a delivery girl if you have to'' to get the scoop on Donald Trump's first divorce. (No, it didn't come to that, but I did come back with the story and made my editor's day.) So I'm not pure, pretending to be pure, or acting like these aren't ever hard calls. And if you've never toiled in these particular vineyards, then how much easier it must be to declare, as Emily did at this week's "Gabfest," that love affairs involving public figures are always news and that proof of philandering is automatically disqualifying. (Can I possibly have heard you right? You really couldn't bear having an AG who had fooled around? After all we've been through with this crew of perhaps perfect husbands who happened to be lousy public servants?)

So here's my invitation to Emily and Mickey: If you are so high on stories like this, if they seem to you such a cinch to nail down and such a no-brainer to run with, then what's stopping you? It's not like all the good ones are taken, just because the Edwards story is already in print and available at your local supermarket. No, there's a wide selection of rumored philanderers out there—gay and straight, old and young, R and D—just waiting to be bagged. And once you have done that, then you can get back to me on whether that experience has altered your opinion at all, about either the righteousness or the relative value of these stories.

Meanwhile, the bottom line for me looking at the Slate site back when we started this conversation was wow, here we have this great, well-reported story on how a bunch of top Bush officials may have committed war crimes they will in all likelihood never be prosecuted for—but a luv child, now that's a clear career-ender? Sometimes, I just think that when it comes to sex, our whole country needs some kind of therapeutic intervention.

Wanted: Nu Role Model

Good for Mukasey

Try It, You'll Like It . . .

Via Think Progress, we learn that at a speech last night at the University of Colorado, former Attorney General John Ashcroft answered a question about his willingness to undergo waterboarding. He told his audience, “the things that I can survive, if it were necessary to do them to me, I would do.”

That answer is deranged in at least 20 ways, and I’ll think of 20 more as soon as I post this. But can someone please sit down and explain to the bright lights of the Bush administration, patiently, and like they are 7, that there is a difference between being willing to die for one’s country (and apparently Ashcroft is only willing only to all-but die for his) and the ways in which civilized humans treat their enemies? His effort to turn a serious question into a chance for sloppy braggadocio is astounding.

For one thing, Ashcroft didn’t do anything necessary to protect America. He sat out Vietnam (six student deferments and one occupational deferment). Moreover his DoJ colleague who apparently did allow himself to be waterboarded, acting head of the OLC, Daniel Levin, underwent the procedure in 2004. According to an ABC News report, Levin “found the experience terrifying and thought that it clearly simulated drowning,” then concluded that waterboarding was illegal torture “unless performed in a highly limited way.” He lost his job at Justice for that.

The most telling thing about Ashcroft’s non-answer is that it lays bare the central fallacy in Bush administration thinking about how to conduct their torture: The relevant question for these guys is never "what are the rules," but "how tough can I pretend to be while breaking them?"

Obama Opposes Mukasey

In a press release today, Obama said of Mukasey: “While his legal credentials are strong, his views on two critical and related matters are, in my view, disqualifying. We don't need another attorney general who believes that the President enjoys an unwritten right to secretly ignore any law or abridge our constitutional freedoms simply by invoking national security.  And we don't need another attorney general who looks the other way on issues as profound as torture.  Judge Mukasey's professed ignorance of the debate over the propriety of practices like “waterboarding,” or simulated drowning, as a means of interrogation, was appalling."

Now what? Do other Democrats--among them Hillary Clinton--jump the same way? Or do they (ie some of the senators on the Judiciary Committee) keep trying to look like they're pressing Mukasey while planning to wave him through?

Mukasey and Sex Discrimination

At today's confirmaton hearing for Michael Mukasey, Bush's pick for attorney general, Sen. Dianne Feinstein asked questions about a disturbing ruling Mukasey made as a federal judge in the Southern District of New York. Here are the facts (I just looked them up): In 1983, a woman police officer was sexually assaulted. She later testified that the attack took place over six hours and was by a fellow officer. But when she initially reported the assault, she said she'd been attacked by a man she'd met at a laundromat instead of naming her assailant. A few days later, she named the male officer. He denied the accusation and passed a lie dectector test. So did she.  Still, she was charged criminally for having falsely stated that she didn't know the man who'd attacked her. She was also suspended from the NYPD without pay, and eventually fired. Her alleged rapist retired with his police pension intact.

 Two years later, the woman brought a sex discrimination suit. Judge Mukasey ruled that she couldn't bring her case to a jury because there wasn't enough evidence to support it. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed, saying that it was the jury's job to decide whether the allegations were true and "whether the discipline meted out to [the woman officer] was unlawfully disparate to that received by her male fellow officer." A trial followed. The jury ruled for the woman and awarded her more than $260,000 in damages. (Her name is in the record, but somehow I don't feel right about publishing it here--a whole different issue.) For a second time, Mukasey thwarted the woman's claim, this time by setting aside the jury's verdict. Mukasey said that "no reasonable jury could infer an unconstituional pattern or practice of gender discrimination" from the facts. (I'm quoting the Second Circuit again.) And he ordered a new trial. Also for a second time, the Second Circuit reversed. It held that Mukasey's grant of a new trial was an abuse of discretion.

 Feinstein wanted to know if Mukasey considered this an "unusual" case. Mukasey said that to call it unusual was "a stark euphemism." And then he talked about all the women law clerks he has hired--"each of them hired on the merits, on the merits." He also talked about his effort to get a woman admitted to an all-male club he used to belong to, and leaving the club when he failed.

But his handling of the sex discrimination case seems awfully rigid, doesn't it? He got knocked down by the Second Circuit, and he insisted he was right, at this woman's expense. Trial judges aren't often that stubborn. I wonder what was going on here.