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"Urbane New Jersey."

A funny expression I didn't expect to see in mainstream media:

President Barack Obama?s Justice Department has quietly agreed to move a pornography prosecution out of socially conservative Montana to more urbane New Jersey ? fueling perceptions by some attorneys that the new administration is stepping back from the aggressive approach the Bush administration took to prosecuting obscenity.

"Urbane New Jersey" was deemed apt ? apparently ? in the enterprise of contrasting the much-maligned mid-Atlantic state with Montana ? that state full of ? oh, the unsophistication of it all! ? social conservatives.

Actually, the dictionary definition of "urbane" is "notably polite or polished in manner."

What's as polite and polished as porn? Or is it that polite, polished people quietly tolerate things?

?This is a substantial change of position,? said Louis Sirkin, an attorney who has represented many in the pornography industry, including Hustler publisher Larry Flynt.

Isn't that's what you want in porn ? a substantial change of position?

?The new administration has come in there and made a new determination?.It certainly is different than what we have seen in the past.?

?I think it has a lot to do with the change in administration,? said a former federal prosecutor, Laurie Levenson of Loyola Law School. ?It makes you wonder how far they were pushing the envelope before?..These cases are fraught with problems and are not a high priority.?

Blah blah blah... why are they not dropping this prosecution altogether?

Since Obama?s inauguration, prosecutors have pressed on with pending obscenity cases and accepted guilty pleas in one high-profile prosecution brought in Pittsburgh. However, there have been no announcements of new adult obscenity indictments, a trend that Justice Department officials declined to discuss....

Presumably, they want to end it all quietly, so shhhh....

Obscenity cases are politically sensitive for the Obama Justice Department because the deputy attorney general, David Ogden, was criticized by Republicans during his confirmation for his past legal work for Playboy and other purveyors of sexually explicit material.

Shhhh....

Full post as published by Althouse on July 31, 2009 (boomark / email).