"[A]n unpopular hero to civil libertarians, the Devil incarnate to an unlikely alliance of feminists and morality preachers, a conundrum to judges and juries..."

"... and a purveyor of guilty secrets to legions of men slinking off from porn shops or the mailbox with brown paper parcels."

"Larry Flynt, Who Built a Porn Empire With Hustler, Dies at 78" (NYT). 

Hustler’s June 1978 cover caught the enigmas of a magazine that was at once salacious, satirical, perverse, decadent, gleefully immoral and hypocritical. It portrayed a woman upside down and half gone into a meat grinder, with a plate of hamburger below. A “seal of approval” noted: “Prime. Last All Meat Issue. Grade ‘A’ Pink.” A caption quoted Mr. Flynt, “We will no longer hang women up like pieces of meat.”... 

"And the NYT runs the story on New Year's Eve Sunday."

"Clinton backers David Brock & Susie Tompkins Buell steered a total of $700k to @LisaBloom’s firm to try to bring forward sexual misconduct accusations against Trump before Election Day" (Instapundit).

The headline on the NYT story is "Partisans, Wielding Money, Begin Seeking to Exploit Harassment Claims."

The photograph at the Times article is freaky. Gloria Allred, looking grim and evil, seems to be carrying a Summer Zervos robot.

The Times article makes the problem about "partisans," and not specifically Democrats. Paragraph 5 quotes a "Republican lawyer":

“I approach this with a pure heart,” said Jack Burkman, a flamboyant Republican lawyer known for right-wing conspiracy theories who is seeking to represent sexual harassment victims. “I don’t want to see it politicized, even though, in a democracy, you see the political weaponization of everything.”

Very funny — a lawyer asserting that he has "a pure heart."

You've got to go way into the article to find the $700,000 donation that Instapundit talks about:

Ms. Allred’s daughter, the lawyer Lisa Bloom, seized on the political potency of sexual harassment charges against Mr. Trump not long after he clinched the Republican presidential nomination. She said she reached out to a pro-Clinton “super PAC”... for money to help her vet a sexual misconduct claim against Mr. Trump....

Ms. Bloom would not identify the donors. But two Democrats familiar with the arrangements said a nonprofit group founded by [Democratic activist David] Brock, American Bridge 21st Century Foundation, gave $200,000, while the fashion entrepreneur Susie Tompkins Buell, a major donor to Mr. Brock’s suite of groups, gave $500,000 to Ms. Bloom’s firm for the last-ditch effort....

Ms. Buell, a longtime friend and financial supporter of Mrs. Clinton who helped found the clothing brand Esprit, would not comment on the financial arrangement....

ADDED: This story got me thinking about Larry Flynt. Here's a NYT column by Felicity Barringer from January 1999:

If a tree falls in a forest, is it news? Does it become news only if Geraldo Rivera, Larry King, Sam Donaldson, Matt Drudge, eight talk radio shows, five World Wide Web sites, four newspapers, three cable channels, two wire services and a late-night talk-show host take notice? Or, to be less metaphorical, can Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler magazine, get the press to give him a platform for his campaign of offering cash to anyone who can expose the sexual transgressions of a politician seeking to remove President Clinton from office?

Last week's coverage of Mr. Flynt's latest revelations showed that yes, he can get attention. But it also showed that, unless the target of his attacks responds, making news himself, self-appointed newsmakers like Mr. Flynt can't necessarily keep the press's attention very long....

Many of the filters that once kept such news from the American public are easy to bypass. It is now conventional wisdom that the Internet, talk radio and late-night comics provide a conduit through which half-baked news, gossip and innuendo flow to the public. Now new kinds of grass-roots editing seems to be evolving. When people hear purportedly scandalous news that doesn't meet their criteria of newsworthiness, they don't react. Since the whole rationale for putting out scandalous news is the potential for public and political reaction, no reaction means no story.

To put it another way, the generation that is learning to invest its own retirement money is now doing more editing of its own news....

Ha ha. And look where we are today, 2 decades later. We no longer have to say "World Wide Web sites" or capitalize "internet," but we're hungrier than ever for news about sex and still trying to build some competence at using our own brains to filter the real and the fake.

"Freedom is only meaningful if it includes all speech, no matter who is offended by it."

"It would be a hazardous undertaking for anyone to start separating the permissible speech from the impermissible, using the standard of offensiveness. The freedom guaranteed in the First Amendment is indivisible. You can’t take it away from Larry Flynt and keep it for yourself. The real issue of this case is: Are we afraid to be free?"

Said Herald Price Fahringer who represented Larry Flynt at trial — and also Al Goldstein and Claus von Bülow and Jean S. Harris. The quote appears in his NYT obituary, which has a nice picture of him sitting in his law office and reading Screw. He was 87.

"In all the years since the shooting, I have never come face-to-face with Franklin."

"I would love an hour in a room with him and a pair of wire-cutters and pliers, so I could inflict the same damage on him that he inflicted on me. But, I do not want to kill him, nor do I want to see him die...."

"I'd like to finish the week without Scott's dick in my ear, but until captain douche-nozzle is recalled..."

"I'll drink and stew and become more resolute in my hate directed at this prick."

A sample of the discourse over in the Isthmus forum, where Madisonians bemoan the newly signed Wisconsin law that repealed the 2009 Equal Pay Enforcement Act.

MEANWHILE: In the comments section of last night's post "The Democrats' War on Women," a couple commenters engage in sexist wordplay about Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch (who, like Walker, faces recall). A commenter referred to "Walker and his 'minions'" and chickenlittle quipped "What about all the filly minions like Kleefisch? Do you want to filet them too?" and leslyn said "How do you filet a filly??" This portrayal of a woman as meat called to mind the infamous Hustler magazine cover (showing a woman's body fed through a meat grinder). I said:

"How do you filet a filly??"

Said, about Rebecca Kleefisch, by a female commenter who probably regards herself as a feminist. That image is one of sexual violence.

You compare an adult woman to a juvenile animal. You refer to slicing into her dead (animal) body, prepping her for cooking.

But the woman you revile is conservative, so maybe you didn't notice.

If you think you are a feminist, you are a fake one, really a lefty or a Democrat, and your partisan politics comes first.

Go stand over there will Bill Clinton.

Leslyn defended herself this way:

Oh for goodness sake, Althouse, "how do you filet a filly" was A PLAY ON WORDS on CHICKENLITTLE'S comment. Which you'd have recognized were you not humorless.

And get off the "feminist" rant already. To use a METAPHOR, you jump both sides of the fence.

My response:

I saw the joke. That is was a joke is irrelevant to my point.

Would you like me to Google "sexist jokes" for you?

Try making racist jokes out in public and see how far "it was humor" gets you.

Picture a filleted young horse. Picture a woman in a similar condition. Picture a particular named woman in that condition.

Now, is that funny?

Remember when Rush Limbaugh portrayed Sandra Fluke as a prostitute and said we should have sex tapes of her on the internet?

How funny was that?

Now... go on with your explanations about why you are really not a hypocrite.

Alternatively, concede. It might be the better option.

Being a feminist is hard. You have to be consistent. Take the challenge.

"I test limits by publishing controversial material and paying people who are willing to step forward and expose political hypocrisy."

Larry Flynt says in a WaPo op-ed:

Murdoch’s minions, on the other hand, pushed limits by allegedly engaging in unethical or criminal activity: phone hacking, bribery, coercing criminal behavior and betraying the trust of their readership. If News Corp.’s reported wrongdoings are true, what Murdoch’s company has been up to does not just brush against boundaries — it blows right past them.

One cannot live off the liberty and benefits of a free press while ignoring the privacy of the people.