Luke Ford | No sacred cows.

I Suffered For Your Sins

Posted on July 24, 2007 by Luke Ford

I write in The Los Angeles Times to KTLA’s Eric Spillman:

As a blogger, I am despised and rejected of journalists, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.
I gave my back to the smiters, and hid not my face from shame and spitting. I have borne your griefs and carried your sorrows. I was wounded for your transgressions, bruised for your iniquities, and with my stripes you are healed.
It seemed like just an ordinary January day in 1999, when, in the course of doing my journalistic due diligence, I came across topless porn actress Nancy Vee walking in a garden. With no thought for my own dignity, I selflessly and immediately threw my hands over her chest to preserve her honor (this is forever immortalized on certain JPEGs floating around the Internet).
Similarly, Eric, by breaking the Antonio Villaraigosa story, I covered up your journalistic nakedness. I took the shame of writing about the mayor’s sex life onto myself so that you and your peers could follow up with the mayor: "Tony, we hate to ask you this, but there’s this darn blog…"
Reporting is now a profession. It goes by the fancy name of "journalism." It’s a major in dozens of universities, and you can even go to graduate school to study it. Journalism has this ponderous code of ethics, and its practitioners at the big-city level are overwhelmingly bourgeois. They don’t want to write, unbidden, about somebody’s sex life because they are above such things (also, journalists are overwhelmingly secular, and they don’t want to be outed when they screw around).
It sounds noble to eschew penetrating a politician’s private life. But if you argue that the mayor’s sex life is not important, then you must also argue that the mayor as a person is not important. It’s one thing if you want to devote your news organization solely to covering the issues, but once you start covering personalities, you can’t always avoid sex, particularly if it violates communal norms. What if a politician is committing incest? Would you ignore that so long as it does not affect his work? What if he has a taste for rough trade and shows up to news conferences with bruises?
Nobody writes about Meryl Streep’s sex life, or Jimmy Carter’s, because they carry themselves in this respect with dignity. The mayor, however, is a reckless philanderer. Angelenos deserve to know whom he’s banging — after all, it’s the person you most consistently have sex with who usually has the most influence over you.
Affairs make a public figure susceptible to blackmail and to conflicts of interest, not to mention lawsuits and bribery. I know I’d be willing to devote my blog to any subject a particular hottie reporter desired if she’d only have dinner with me.
There are many problems with reporting on somebody’s sex life. It’s difficult to prove since the action usually goes on behind closed doors. Still, it is possible to ascertain who the mayor is spending his quality time with. Maybe they’re just studying Shakespeare?

Posted in Antonio Villaraigosa, Journalism | Comments Off

L.A. Mayor Routinely Got Questions In Advance From Univision

Posted on July 24, 2007 by Luke Ford

It is not just Mirthala Salinas who’s been in bed with the mayor but L.A.’s entire Spanish-language news media. From Telemundo to La Opinion, Antonio is their guy.

Eric Longabardi reports:

ERSNews has exclusively obtained e-mails documenting that Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was receiving written questions in advance, sometimes days in advance, before television interviews that were conducted on the Univision Los Angeles based television station KMEX-TV34. The questions were then asked during on-air interviews conducted by the stations in-studio anchors for a segment known as "Villaraigosa a su lado", which translates from Spanish as "Villaraigosa on your side".
The so-called broadcast "interviews" were conducted regularly on Wednesdays each week in 2006 and through mid-2007.
The questions sent to the Mayor were represented to the public as impromptu-unscripted questions. ERSNews had uncovered they were anything but that. The topics ran the gamut of issues concerning Villaraigosa’s job as LA’s mayor.
ERSNews has learned that the questions were provided to the Mayor in advance via a direct link. That link was the Mayor’s Deputy press secretary Diana Rubio. Rubio was working directly with the Executive Producer of Univision and others at KMEX, including at the time the station’s Vice President of News. Other news staff was well aware of the communications and the intertwined relationship the station had developed with the Mayor’s office. According to sources familiar with the situation, the mayor’s office exerted extensive influence and sway in insuring the Mayor was not put in any light other than a favorable one, something Univision accommodated routinely.
ERSNews has the obtained emails, parts of which are translated below (the verbatim text in Spanish as communicated between Univision news executives and the Mayor’s deputy press secretary Ms. Rubio can be seen here:

Posted in Antonio Villaraigosa, Eric Longabardi | Comments Off

Though you wouldn’t realize it from my writing, I think about girls a lot. As a single man, I’ve met enough to keep me interested but not enough to satisfy. What I’ve lacked in quality, I’ve made up for in quantity, which as Amalek notes, has a quality all of its own.

When I could pull myself from the latest pictures of The Calendar Girls, the Jewish Journal‘s best innovation since Amy Klein took up the singles column, I sought out spiritual recommendations from Danielle and Dikla. They recommended a Tisha B’Av program at the Museum of Tolerance (MOT).

I enjoy making fun of rich, successful, accomplished, productive Jews as much as the next guy, but everything the MOT does is quality (with help tonight from JConnect and Birthright Israel).

About 200 young Jews showed up to Monday night’s program. With all the hotties around, I felt like a kid in a candy store, only the Holocaust pictures and the mournful tone of the evening kept me from bringing with my A-game. Instead I buried myself in my prayers, my lamentations and my copy of David Gelenter‘s new book Americanism.

Kevin Costner narrarated the disturbing documentary Ever Again — about the rise of Jew hatred in Europe.

Mirim emails me about the MOT:

"Chayim Nachman Bialik Poet, translator, essayist, storyteller, editor, one of the greatest Hebrew poets of all time. Bialik is considered Israel’s national poet…
"In the poem: ‘City of Killings’ concerning the Kishinev pogrom 1903 – Wikipedia he describes its horrors and also takes time to ‘clean house’ with the Jewish community readiness always, to sell out."
Deja Vu?
To the cemetery, beggars! (where) you will dig up your fathers
and the bones of your Martyred brethren’s, filling up your backpacks,
putting them on shoulder and start your way, going
to turn them into commodities in all the markets
and when no one sees, you will pull out – a hand, publicly
displaying it, in the daylight, on your crappy rags
and in thirsty voices, you will chant a jingle about them,
calling for Ch’ssed from the nations, praying for the Goyim’s compassion
And as you ask for hand out, you’ll turn into beggars and as you Sh’norr
you’ll be Sh’norrers.

Posted in Jewish Journal, Los Angeles, Museum of Tolerance, Orthodoxy | Comments Off

Man Sues His Therapist

Posted on July 23, 2007 by Luke Ford

Daniel Bolour, who has a long history of mental problems, is furious and he’s going after a lot of people in the Pico-Robertson community (particularly at Mogen David and Aish HaTorah).

Posted in Orthodoxy, Pico/Robertson | Comments Off

The Calendar Girls Are Hot

Posted on July 23, 2007 by Luke Ford

Danielle Berrin writes about the TV show "On The Lot":

Just before showtime, regular judges Carrie Fisher (actress, "Star Wars") and Garry Marshall (director, "Pretty Woman"), along with guest judge Antoine Fuqua (director, "Training Day") stepped into the spotlight, but were quickly swarmed by makeup artists and soon upstaged by host Adrianna Costa, who traipsed about in 6-inch clunkers and a teeny-tiny disco dress that pushed out enough cleavage to boost saggy ratings. The scintillating get-up was almost enough to distract people from noticing she read verbatim from teleprompters and feigned flirtation with the all-male cast of contestants while urging "America" to call in their votes to the box office.
Five filmmakers, neatly dressed according to their personal style, sat to the side of the stage while screening their action flick and then went front and center to face the judges’ gavels. The audience booed Fisher’s harsh critiques and laughed aloud at Marshall’s kooky witticisms. Fuqua commended the filmmakers for focusing on wild chases, skateboard rides and running rampant instead of depending on violence to drive the narrative.

This photo made a great impression on me.

Posted in Jewish Journal | Comments Off

Ohr Somayach Rabbi Banned From South Africa, Having Affairs With Many Women

Posted on July 23, 2007 by Luke Ford

FailedMessiah reports:

Writing on Jewschool, David Kelsey reports on a leading Ohr Somayach rabbi, Lewis Furman tossed out of South Africa because he is a "serial philanderer." His liaisons are said to include married women. One woman’s husband, on discovering the affair his wife was having with Rabbi Furman, confronted the rabbi and beat him up. That confrontation – not what appears to be years of private complaints from spouses and friends – is what got Rabbi Furman exiled. Before that, it seems the rabbis covered up for one of their own.
What interests me most about the story is not the human failings of this rabbi – what interests me is the lengths South Africa’s rabbis went to cover up the story. They allowed the rabbi to flee to Israel to seek unspecified "treatment," and blocked publication of the story in the Jewish media.

Posted in Abuse, Orthodoxy | Comments Off

MAYOR DEFENDS MIRTHALA

Posted on July 23, 2007 by Luke Ford

KFI’s Eric Leonard reports:

Villaraigosa confirmed he and — as he called her — "Seniorita Salinas" were still dating and speak to each other daily.
He said he has not spoken to Telemundo to confirm when the relationship began, and then began bragging about Salinas’ accomplishments as a reporter.
"Even what you’ve read doesn’t accurately reflect the level of her talents and the seriousness of her journalism," Villaraigosa said.
"She’s been nominated for three Emmys, she’s received two Emmys – not one; she has four Golden Mikes, not one — maybe five!"

Posted in Antonio Villaraigosa | Comments Off

Ostracizing Jews Who Marry Out

Posted on July 23, 2007 by Luke Ford

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach writes in the Jerusalem Post:

Noah Feldman was a brilliant, Orthodox Jewish Rhodes scholar who arrived in Oxford in my fourth year as rabbi there in 1992. We quickly hit it off. For one thing, there was scarcely a subject – Jewish or secular – upon which Noah did not have some profound knowledge. We studied Talmud together several times a week and I made Noah a kind of secondary rabbi at our L’Chaim Society, such was the range of his Jewish erudition and his phenomenal capacity for teaching.
Noah was one of the most accomplished young students I had ever met. He was valedictorian of Harvard, a Rhodes and Truman scholar, and completed his Oxford doctorate in about 18 months, which may or may not be a university record. It was a source of great pride for me that Noah was observant and wore a kippa. We all marveled every Shabbat at Noah’s incredible ability to read any section of the Torah at our student synagogue.

Jewcy.com interview Noah Feldman.

Posted in Shmuley Boteach | Comments Off

Los Angeles Times Dust-Up

Posted on July 23, 2007 by Luke Ford

Here’s day one of our debate. "What is the difference between news and gossip? Is the distinction changing? All this week, blogger Luke Ford and KTLA reporter Eric Spillman debate ethics, credibility and high-profile snafus in the changing media environment."

Eric Spillman makes a traditional and gentlemanly argument about the need for credible journalism. I respond by falling on my sword and whining.

Khunrum writes: "Many words have been written concerning the mayor banging the cutie Hispanic reporter. Evidently Luke was one of the first to catch him with his trousers down. But at the end of the day who cares if the guy is double dipping?. It’s a great gossip story but there are more important issues out there. If a blogger uncovers a planned terrorist attack instead of uncovering the mayor in bed with some honey, well then, you got something."

"I would cut back (or better yet cut out) the self deprecating humor. As a fellow Tom Fool I know where you’re coming from. However your opponent is a serious sort and wants to score points. Do battle with him on his level. Save the funny stuff for your columns. At least that’s what I think."

Fred emails:

L–
I would not fall on my sword so quickly and extravagently. After all, these guys want some kind of dueling debate (Hannity v. Colmes, as it were). This is like watching a pro wrestling match where one of the wrestlers surrenders four seconds into the match, before the crowd gets to see the first sleeper hold or the first back drop.
I would argue that bloggers are not bound by the economic needs that journalists face when they fear to offend advertisers. When a big story breaks, they need not stick to rules that sometimes get in the way. Sure, this sometimes means that they get a story wrong. But that happens a fairly low percentage of the time, and if more of the truth gets out, humanity is served well.
Luke, it may be true that you get some of your best material while in the horizontal position, but so does James Bond. You don’t see him refusing to follow a lead just because of the manner in which the truth is exposed, do you?
Chaim, even if Luke is sometimes inaccurate, do you immediately completely dismiss his blog? I think not. I would react by saying, "this is an interesting story. Let’s see if it pans out."
Rum, for whatever reason, the public thinks that double dipping is big news. If they didn’t, Clinton would not have to face an impeachment hearing.
Bloggers provide the public with a new avenue for finding out truth. They find it out quickly and economically. God Bless America! A new day is dawning in the U.S. You haven’t seen nothin’ yet! Remember the Alamo!

Posted in Journalism | Comments Off

Antonio thanks officials for silence on marital scandal

Posted on July 23, 2007 by Luke Ford

Rick Orlov writes in the Daily News:

First there was the Redemption Tour. Now, it’s gratitude time.
Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is making the rounds among elected officials these days thanking them for not taking any shots at him – in the press, at least – over his marital problems.
The mayor has had private meetings, calls and dinners with various officials to express his gratitude and to renew pledges of cooperation with the City Council to continue to push his agenda.

Posted in Antonio Villaraigosa | Comments Off