Mika Brzezinski on Obama's Kamala Harris remark: "It just divides people up to separate them by looks."

Longer quote as transcribed at HuffPo:

I'm sure he meant to pay her a compliment... but quite frankly, it just divides women and it just divides people up to separate them by looks and probably was a little hand-fisted. I just think the whole thing, the whole dynamic about women and their looks puts women under a lot of stress that they don't need. and they should be sort of talked about by their qualities at work, especially when he is introducing someone because she is the attorney general. I actually think, you know, he meant to do -- say something nice. I think he made a mistake.

Did she really say "hand-fisted"? The colloquialism is "ham-fisted." I tried to check, listening to the video at the link, but it went on and on, beginning with a commercial, which I put up with, proceeding through some David Letterman jokes about North Korea, on to introductions of a number of internet-focused male journalists, and then to a presentation of what Obama said about Harris, and I'm still waiting to hear the Mika quote that I can already read, but I actually still care about whether she said "hand-fisted" or "ham-fisted," and then Morning Joe turns to the insipid internet men and asks:

"What did you see on line yesterday?"

I'm all: What did you see on line yesterday? What did you see on line yesterday? What did you see on line yesterday? What the hell am I doing slogging through a video with some guys summarizing what was on line yesterday? Is TV like this now? They don't have commentators opining about what they think. They have little men who pick through Twitter and, essentially, retweet for... who is this for? People who can't find Twitter on their own and need Twitter summarized?! People who think the news is the way the news looked to the people who tweeted about the news the other day" And the only news underlying all of that news is that the President said a pretty lady is pretty?

But like a pretty lady's face, the President's remark has got our attention. (What are we not paying attention to?) And it's something we can all chat about. (What are we not talking about?) And if we don't have anyone to talk to, we can lull ourselves into utter oblivion by listening to Morning Joe's little men repeat the texts of tweets they saw on line yesterday.

That's what I have to say, and you are so far ahead of the Morning Joe-level folks, because you are seeing it on line today.

"I feel like I just won the Academy Award. If an artist can offend so many people that he has to go to prison..."

"... to protect society, that's really saying something. Most shock artists dream of this kind of attention, without the prison part."

Ira Isaacs, sentenced last month by a federal judge — this is in the United States— for 4 years, for violating obscenity law. The Huffington Post — considered a liberal website, and, again, this is in the United States — began its article about the sentencing with a joke: "Looks like someone's career went down the toilet." (The movies included the simulated consumption of feces.)

There is no shame anymore. And yet there still are obscenity trials. Absurd.

I'm finding this story now because I happened across an account to the trial in an article published last March at Reason.com: "Porn So Icky That It Can't Be Obscene" (by Jacob Sullum), describing the argument made at trial, which describes the argument made by Isaacs's lawyer:

"My intent is to be a shock artist in the movies I made," [Isaacs] testified, "to challenge the viewer in thinking about art differently... to think about things they'd never thought about before." Similarly, [his lawyer Roger] Diamond argued that the films have political value as a protest against the government's arbitrary limits on expression, illustrating the "reality that we may not have the total freedom the rest of the world thinks we have."

Sullum wrote:

I will be impressed if Isaacs, who faces a possible penalty of 20 years in prison, can pull off this feat of legal jujitsu, transforming the very qualities that make his movies objectionable into their redeeming value — especially since at least some of the jurors... found the evidence against him literally unwatchable. But if the jurors want to blame someone for making them sit through this assault on their sensibilities, they should not blame Isaacs. They should blame the Justice Department, which initiated the case during the Bush administration, and the Supreme Court, which established the absurdly subjective test they are now supposed to apply. Will they take seriously Isaacs' references to Marcel Duchamp, Robert Rauschenberg, Kiki Smith, and Piero Manzoni, or will they dismiss his artistic name dropping as a desperate attempt to give his masturbation aids a high-minded purpose?

But here's some up-to-date news from 2 days ago: Minutes before Isaacs was to turn himself in to the  federal Bureau of Prisons, Isaacs go a call from his lawyer saying "don't go." The judge had approved his motion for bail pending appeal.

Isaacs told XBIZ that today's events were so surreal he had felt like he was in an episode of the "Twilight Zone" or a Quentin Tarantino movie....

"Last night, I was thinking it would be my last night of freedom," he said. "I really thought that this would be it; that I would be sleeping in prison the following night... and that would continue for a very long time."

We'll see what happens in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and — if we're lucky — the Supreme Court.