Sanai has an ongoing feud with Kozinski over an obscure procedural matter in which – as Kozinski scathingly pointed out - Sanai has an undisclosed vested interest:

Mr. Sanai has been trying for years to get the federal courts to intervene in his family's state-court dispute, an effort referred to by a highly respected district judge as “an indescribable abuse of the legal process … the most abusive and obstructive litigation tactics this court has ever encountered.”  ... [H]e and certain members of his family have hounded a state trial judge off their case; been held in contempt and sanctioned under 28 U.S.C. §1927 and had their ninth sortie to our court in the same case designated as “frivolous” and “an improper dilatory tactic” by the district court. A detached observer, Mr. Sanai is not.

In this context, one might ask the difference between “monitoring” and “online stalking.” Perhaps Kozinski should consider himself fortunate that Sanai didn’t go any further in his quest for revenge.

For his part, Kozinski acted quickly to contain the fallout from the controversy, immediately calling for an investigation:

“I have asked the Judicial Council of the Ninth Circuit to ... initiate proceedings concerning the article that appeared in … [the] Los Angeles Times. I will cooperate fully in any investigation,” the judge said in a statement Thursday.

The Recorder reports that the matter could be kicked to a judge in another circuit to decide whether an investigation is warranted.” At issue:

Whether Kozinski will ultimately be disciplined may depend in large part on whether his failure to keep the Web server private was just a mistake, or whether he recklessly made the images public, [University of Pittsburgh School of Law professor Arthur] Hellman said.

If, for instance, Kozinski kept porn videos at home and invited friends to come over and watch, such behavior would hardly be actionable, the professor said. …

To access the explicit photos, one would have had to know additional words to add into the Web address. On the other hand, Kozinski has long been known as a computer-savvy enthusiast who personally disabled the circuit's Internet filtering systems as a protest to the court's monitoring policy several years ago.

Kozinski insists he never intended the images to be public, and his son took the blame for not password-protecting the site that he maintained on a private server that he owns. (The site has since been taken down.)

Kozinski also recused himself from an obscenity trial over which he was presiding and declared a mistrial “in light of the public controversy surrounding my involvement in this case.” The high-profile federal prosecution involved filmmaker Ira Isaacs, who is accused of distributing obscene images depicting bestiality and defecation.

While Kozinski is fond of off-color humor, he is not a fan of porn (or college basketball, for that matter), as evinced by this E-mail to a mutual friend:

If you want to waste your life watching 10 guys run around aimlessly for two hours chasing a ball, that's your personal choice. I suppose it's no worse than watching porn, though both have the same voyeuristic appeal that I don't understand. … I like sex too, but not watching other people doing it.

While Isaacs and his attorney probably thought Kozinski would be more sympathetic to their case than they dared hope once the existence of the racy Web site became known, this E-mail exchange suggests otherwise.

In any case, Kozinski told The Mercury News, “I do believe federal judges should have some latitude to be human beings in their private life.”

Despite having outed him, The Los Angeles Times agrees (though the paper insists on adopting Sanai’s characteriziation of this material as depraved porn rather than tasteless jokes):

“So what?”

Not everyone may like it, but pornography is freely available on the Internet … Any adult has, and ought to have, the right to view those sites and to download those photos and videos - subject, of course, to the strictures of copyright law. People who don't want to see such images can, and should, avoid them.

Scolds who argue that judges should uphold a higher standard of decorum than the common citizen … should recall that the 1st Amendment is not limited to high-minded endeavors.

For the time being, at least, this has to be the last word on the subject.

Is This One Of Those Jobs That “Americans Won’t Do?”: Part IX

The Associated Press describes a “mystery shopper” gig – with a twist:

Lori Erickson-Trump has faked headaches and back pain. She's had physicals and MRIs she didn't need and she gets paid for it - all to evaluate the performance of doctors and their staffs.

Hospitals and health clinics are increasingly turning to these undercover patients to grade the health care experience being offered. …

Erickson-Trump, 37, works for Perception Strategies, an Indianapolis-based company that provides undercover patients to health systems in about 25 states. Her preferred job title is “mystery shopper,” a service more familiar in the retail and food industries. …

When a hospital wants its emergency room evaluated, Billingsley said sometimes she'll schedule a fake patient with a real medical problem, such as pneumonia symptoms.

Occasionally, undercover patients have been asked to undergo invasive tests that reveal a surprise ailment, she said.

“Health care mystery shopping is so unique … It's just not like going and getting a Happy Meal.”

Think about that for a moment: Erickson-Trump gets paid for enduring endless waiting room waits listening to the cacophony of coughing, sneezing, wailing babies and Muzak; wearing hospital gowns that tie (but don’t really close) in the back; and getting poked, prodded, jabbed and getting diagnostic tests most of us would prefer to avoid. She works hard for the money.

Editorial Note: You’d be amazed at some of the jobs Americans are doing. To read previous posts in the “Is This One Of Those Jobs …” series, click here (fourth item), here (second item), here (third item), here (third item), here (second item), here, here and here.

Tim Russert (1950 – 2008)

Friday was a very unlucky day for viewers and voters who depended on “Meet The Press” moderator Tim Russert to get beyond poll-tested, scripted sound bites that media-trained politicians and corporate titans routinely spewed with impunity on other news programs to get at the facts needed for informed judgments about policy, personality and the pressing issues of the day. 
 

It was also a very unlucky day for those of us who watched this consummate journalist for pointers on how to stick with a line of questioning until an interview subject was maneuvered deftly into a corner with no more wiggle room left to obfuscate or to evade.  

Russert, who died of a sudden heart attack while preparing for Sunday’s edition of the program at NBC’s Washington bureau, was a lawyer and a politico before turning his considerable talents to journalism.

He was “fair and balanced” well before Roger Ailes dreamed up Fox News. Fox’s Bill O’Reilly - who never tires of reminding viewers and guests alike that he’s a “tough interviewer” – often drives The Stiletto to near-apoplexy by losing focus and jumping to another topic before asking all the follow-up questions needed to pin his subject down. There was only one way to stop Russert from asking yet another follow-up question during one of his trademark grillings: Answer the last one to his satisfaction.

New York Times political blog, “The Caucus,” includes condolences from many who found themselves on the receiving end of the “Russert treatment.” On Sunday morning, retired NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw led a group of Russert’s closest friends and colleagues in a sort of “Irish wake” that took place on the set of “Meet The Press” (video link) during which they shared remembrances and tributes (Russert’s chair was empty).

Here’s a snippet in which Brokaw and Russert’s producer Betsy Fischer explain his famed interrogation technique:

TB: I always thought that both his Jesuit training and his legal education, which a lot of people didn't have a full appreciation of, were so important to him because this broadcast was always about accountability. If you're in the public arena and running for office, then we have an obligation to hold you accountable.

BF: Absolutely. And the way he would structure the questions was very lawyerly. We--he, he always knew how a candidate was going to respond, and he was, he was prepared enough to know that. And he would sketch it out in his mind: "I'm going to ask A, that'll get us to B, that'll get us around to C, and then there's D." And he, he knew how to get you into that cycle, and he was very skilled at that.

Brokaw and historian Doris Kearns Goodwin discuss Russert’s transition from politics to journalism:

TB: We don't have a big tradition in this country of people being in politics then in journalism, or going from journalism back into politics. But Tim really dropped that firewall because he did it with such integrity.

DKG:  [H]e was able to become an objective journalist … I mean, journalism was to him the highest profession. He … set the standard. You know, the old days you had Edward R. Murrow and you had Walter Cronkite. People of authority who would look out at the television screen. But what Tim did was to make that transition to the world of relationship talking. That's what so much television is now, talking. Think about how no razzle dazzle in this show. What it had were people sitting around the table and talking, talking like you might have talked 200 years ago but with civility in a time of polarized country.

Brokaw, Mary Matalin and James Carville describe the tough-but-fair “Russert treatment”:

TB: I was always struck, Mary, by the fact that so many politicians came here and became deer caught in the headlamps, that when Tim would come after him in that civilized but persistent fashion, it would have been helpful to the candidates if they would have said from time to time, "You know what, Tim, you got me there."

MM: It's--they were double dumb if the got caught in the headlights, because, you know, we're all talking about how much he liked politics. He genuinely liked politicians. He respected politicians. He knew that they got blamed for everything, got credit for nothing. He knew how much they meant. He never treated them with the cynicism that attends some of these interviews. So they had a place to be loved. He understood who they were. They were a combination, as was he, of idealism and realism, so if you messed up on this show, it was nobody's fault but your own. …

TB: Tim would do the show … [during the postmortem] we'd be talking about who did well … what their weaknesses were. This one's got a chance to go. I remember who--a candidate whose name I will not use here, who came waltzing in here one day and crawled out the door. I mean, he thought he was going to be the next president of the United States. The next time he came, he was in much better shape.

JC: He was, And, and I know exactly who you're talking about. And, and Tim was proud of, Tim was proud of the guy that he came again.

Brokaw and Gwen Ifill agree that Russert set the bar high for other journalists:

TB: I think he has elevated the process in a lot of ways.

GI: He made journalists better, too. I mean, one of the other postmortems that happened was around this table after every program, where we sat around and not only decompressed about what had happened on the program, but often what had happened in our reporting. I learned more things - some of them reportable, some of them not - around this table because that was part of the ritual.

And the group also recalled Russert, the man:

Matalin: He was ambitious for his friends. … If you had a book, he'd put you on one of his shows. He tried to help everybody. He wanted everybody to do their best. … he enjoyed everybody's success, and he pulled for everybody's success. And he put them in positions to succeed, starting with the interns.

Fischer: He always said the best exercise for the human heart was to bend down and pick someone else up. And he not only picked us up, but he held us up every week, and, as the backbone of the show.

Mike Barnicle: I mean, his working-class roots … he never forgot where he came from. But where Timmy came from, conditioned to south Buffalo, was much more than that. … he had a missionary's zeal … for lifting people up, for helping people in times of trouble, whether you were his friend or whether you were a complete stranger.

Maria Shriver: [O]ne of the things that always struck me about Tim was his faith in G-d, his belief in prayer. He always carried a rosary around. And he would always say to you, you know, "I'm going to pray for you, I'm going to pray for your family, I'm going to pray for your uncle." And you knew he meant that, that he actually would really do it.

Brokaw: There's a word that is used so often these days as a test for national character in politics or in culture or whatever, and the word is authenticity. And our friend was as authentic as any human being I've ever met.

For her part, The Stiletto would like to think that Russert has wasted no time tracking down Dwight Eisenhower and the Shah of Iran and is hammering them about the genesis of Iran’s nuclear capability and how best to diffuse the threat of the current regime weaponizing enriched uranium.