[Photo by TED ADAMS]
THE NEW REPUBLIC: A large, hairy bear of a man, Rendell would enliven Washington in a way that nobody has in years. He doesn’t double-talk when it comes to describing political reality. Like when he told me he would never consider being a U.S. senator: “It’s an incredibly easy job. They don’t do shit.” Like how he described his address to the Democratic National Convention in the 1980s: “Thirty seconds into my speech, it dawned on me that I could have been reading the best parts of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and it wouldn’t have mattered. … No one was listening.” Like his job description as mayor: “A good portion of my job is spent on my knees, sucking people off to keep them happy.” Like his refusal to deny a quote attributed to him in Philadelphia magazine in which he said that the publication “sucks the big wong“: “Anybody who knows me knows that it has the ring of truth, so I’m cooked. If I had said, ‘Your magazine eats shit,’ I could have denied it.” MORE
WIKIPEDIA: When Lady Chatterley’s Lover was published in Britain in 1960, the trial of the publishers, Penguin Books, under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959 was a major public event and a test of the new obscenity law. The 1959 act (introduced by Roy Jenkins) had made it possible for publishers to escape conviction if they could show that a work was of literary merit. One of the objections was to the frequent use of the word “fuck” and its derivatives.
In the U.S., Lady Chatterley’s Lover was one of a trio of books (the others being Tropic of Cancer and Fanny Hill), the ban on which was fought and overturned in court with assistance by lawyer Charles Rembar in 1959.
The movie version (1981) was the subject of attempted censorship in New York State on the grounds that it promoted adultery. The Supreme Court held that the law prohibiting its showing was a violation of the First Amendment‘s protection of Free Speech. [6]
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NEW ON PHAWKER: Complete Episodes Of The Daily Show & The Colbert Report!
REUTERS: Viacom Inc’s Comedy Central will begin offering full episodes of “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and the “Colbert Report” on [Phawker via] Hulu.com on Tuesday as part of a test, reversing an earlier position that it would mainly focus on offering its shows on its own sites. The deal to offer these popular shows on [Phawker via] Hulu could lead to other Viacom content on the online video service, co-owned by General Electric’s NBC Universal and News Corp. Comedy Central’s two most popular shows also will be available in full-length on ComedyCentral.com, Flanagan said. Previously, only clips of the skits were available. MORE