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Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum said Tuesday that he was a "big believer" in free speech, but the "court has gotten it wrong" on pornography.

At a town hall-style campaign event in Belle Plaine, Iowa, a woman asked the Pennsylvania Republican what he would do about the Occupy Wall Street protests as president.

"In all due respect, nothing because that's not really the role of the president," Santorum replied. "This is a First Amendment right, but a First Amendment right isn't an absolute right."

He added: "I'm a big believer in the First Amendment. I think the court has gotten it wrong on some cases, particularly with respect to pornography and their rulings on that."

"But with respect to the Occupy Wall Street people, they have the right to protest. But they don't have the right to take over a community and terrorize it."

In their 1969 Stanley v. Georgia ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated all state laws that prevented the private possession of "obscene" materials.

However, the court ruled in 1973 that obscene material was not protected by the First Amendment if it appealed "to a prurient interest," showed "patently offensive sexual conduct, and "lacked serious artistic, literary, political, or scientific value."

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This topic came up for some brief discussion on Real Time With Bill Maher that ought to be part of a larger one, and that is just how sorry the state of our corporate media is with misinforming the public. Everything that is supposed to be "news" is either, as they described it here, "disaster porn" where you're making a buck chasing one ambulance after the other in order to increase your ratings, meanwhile, informing the public about nothing, or if you're not doing that you're putting up two people supposedly on different sides of an issue and at least one or both of them are lying to the viewers in the name of being "fair and balanced."

What's really pitiful about this ambulance chasing is the fact that they do it, and get the public worked up over an issue, and then ignore it. How many reports have we seen about what's going on in Egypt now that things are constantly turning there? What happened to the reporting on Haiti that they were so breathlessly reporting right after the disaster there? And we all watched them cover the gusher of oil BP had pouring into the Gulf until they got tired of that story as well.

I could go on and on but won't since it's not necessary to make the point I wanted to here. If our media wants to chase ambulances and pretend like they're not just doing "disaster porn", is it too much to expect them to do some follow up on the people and those countries that they feigned so much concern for in their previous breathless coverage we watched just a few months before?

Apparently it is too much to ask for them to chase more than one ambulance at a time. And that's exactly what Maher described here. It's disaster porn feeding off of the latest ambulance of the day to chase while ignoring most of what's going on around the world and calling yourself "news." And it's a damned shame that media consolidation in America has assured us we won't get much better until these companies are broken up.

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Tea Party candidate for NY Governor Carl Paladino wins Keith's Worst Persons for this, from TPM. Tea Party NY Gov Candidate's E-Mails Exposed: Racism, Porn, Bestiality:

An online news outlet in New York state has obtained dozens of emails, many of them racist and sexually graphic, which it reports were sent by Carl Paladino, the Tea-Party-backed Republican candidate for governor of New York, to a long list of political and business associates. One email shows a video of an African tribal dance, entitled "Obama Inauguration Rehearsal," while another depicts hardcore bestiality.

Paladino's campaign manager, Michael Caputo, would not comment on specific emails, but acknowledged to TPMmuckraker that Paladino had sent emails that were "off-color" and "politically incorrect," saying that few such emails represented the candidate's own opinion. Caputo accused Democrats of wanting to change the subject from substantive issues to "having sex with horses."

As TPM noted, here are "some of the most eyebrow-raising":

• An October 2009 email with a photograph showing President Obama and the First Lady dressed in 70s-era blaxploitation pimp and prostitute costumes while attending a formal event at the White House. Here's the photo, courtesy of WNYmedia.net:

• A December 2008 email showing a video of African tribesmen performing a traditional dance. The video is entitled "Obama Inauguration Rehearsal."

• A September 2009 email entitled, "Easy Steady Big Fella....XXXX," with a photograph that graphically depicts a horse having sex with a woman.

• A January 2010 email, containing a hardcore pornographic video entitled "Miss France 2008 F[***]ing."

• A July 2009 email showing a photograph of an airplane landing directly behind a group of black men. The caption reads: "Holy Sh*t. run ni**ers, run!"

Read on...

Keith's runners up were John Derbyshire -- John Derbyshire tells black law students they are inferior and Glenn Beck -- Beck states that Obama has said of tea partiers, "You are either with the president, or you're a terrorist".

From The Daily Show:

Mike Schwartz looks to adolescent boys for guidance on homophobia, while the unbelievably flamboyant Tom DeLay performs on "Dancing With the Stars."