A 49-year-old woman pleaded not guilty to charges arising from her role in a MySpace hoax that ended with a 13-year-old girl committing suicide after being spurned by a fictitious boy. Lori Drew, 49, of Missouri, denied charges of conspiracy to inflict emotional distress and accessing MySpace computers without authorization. She will fact [sic] trial on July 29.

California courts, on the other hand . . . welcome, game mirage!

Following up on a prior post, Alex Kozinski, chief judge for the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, stepped down from a high-profile obscenity trial in Los Angeles, three days after acknowledging that he had posted sexually explicit material on a publicly accessible personal website. Inasmuch as the rules of legal ethics preclude Kozinski from speaking out while the prosecutor to explore what he saw as a potential conflict of

Or, how Sly and the Family Stone have prefigured the tortured logic of mainstream “liberal” American academic/media elite discourse on race. From the Chicago Tribune: It’s hard to come up with an ethnic slur that has less of a sting than “whitey.” A prevalent yet unsubstantiated Internet rumor has it that Barack Obama’s wife, Michelle, used this term at some point in a speech, and the Obama campaign is concerned

Patti Solis Doyle joins Obama campaign. Daisy pusher.

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the most revered Shia cleric in Iraq (and perhaps in Shia Islam), is more diplomatic about saying so, but the subject of his recent statement on the US-Iraq security pact is not all that veiled: A representative of top Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani on Friday called Iraqi officials to show patience during the U.S.-Iraq long-term deal negotiations, terming pledges of withdrawing foreign troops from

VDH rips Pat Buchanan a new orifice, employing a phalanx of facts. Conservatives (not Clinton supporters) to blame for Michelle Obama “whitey” tape rumors. Bush lied; Jesus cried.

This morning’s New York Times carries a piece by Jeff Zeleny and Jim Rutenberg on Barack Obama’s emerging management style: The skill will become more important should he win the presidency, and his style is getting added attention as the country absorbs the lessons of President Bush’s tenure in the Oval Office. Mr. Bush’s critics, including former aides, have portrayed him as too cloistered, too dependent on a small coterie

The mourning over the untimely death of Tim Russert — host of Meet the Press and Washington bureau chief of NBC News — may continue, but the Politico, the L.A. Times and BloggingStocks are just a few of the media outlets covering the internal jockeying to sit in the host chair of television’s longest-running program.  According to the L.A. Times: Speculation on possible successors centers on three on-air personalities already under