Lawrence Taylor reacts to sentenceDuring an interview after he was sentenced to six years' probation on Tuesday, Lawrence Taylor made no apologies for visiting a prostitute.

---

Speaking to Shepard Smith on Fox, Taylor did say that he did not look for an underage girl. The victim in the case was 16 at the time of the incident last May. In January, he pleaded guilty to sexual misconduct and patronizing a prostitute to avoid jail time.

	Lawrence Taylor leaves Rockland County Courthouse on Tuesday after his sentencing. He did not speak in court but later lashed out in a TV interview.

"That's not my M.O. I've been around kids and people all my life," said Taylor, a former New York Giants Hall of Fame linebacker. "I'm not the cause of prostitution. And sometimes I make mistakes and I may go out there, but I didn't pick her up at no playground. She wasn't hiding behind the school bus or getting off a school bus. This is a working girl that came to my room. And I don't know what her age was. I asked her age. She told me she was 19. It is what it is."

Taylor blamed the institution of prostitution for the fact that he ended up with an underage girl.

"It's the world of prostitution," he said to Fox. "You never know what you're gonna get. Is it gonna be a pretty girl, an ugly girl or whatever it's gonna be."

Or a young girl? Shepard asked.

"You can only ask," Taylor said. "I don't card them. I don't ask for birth certificate."

Taylor said he had "no beef" with the girl.

"I'll take my punishment like I should, but my problem is at home with my wife, so that's really the only one I have to answer to," he said.

How did he get in this situation in the first place?

"It happens sometimes," Taylor said. "I'd been on the road 10 or 11 days and I came in to town. Actually, I made a phone call to a friend of mine, and he made a phone call."

Taylor said he has used the services of prostitutes in the past, especially between 1994 and 2001 when he was not married.

"I'm not looking for a relationship. Hey, sometimes I look for some company," Taylor said. "It's all clean. I don't have to worry about your feelings. It's all clean. I'm not saying it's right. It's the oldest profession in the world."

But right or wrong, Taylor appears to not consider prostitution a serious crime.

"I guess you call it a crime," he said. "It's one of those crimes you don't think about. You never think you're gonna get busted because everyone does it until you get busted, and then it's more embarrassing than anything else."ESPNNewYork.com

The single stupidest right-wing reaction to the Libya campaign

Hillary Clinton and Moammar Gadhafi

 

The conservative press has not yet coordinated its official position on the United States' military actions in Libya. They dislike Obama and Gadhafi almost equally. They love wars but consider Democrats feckless at waging them. The "good guys" in this particular fight are disconcertingly Islamic. A sign of the confusion: Rush Limbaugh's position a few days back was "it's a tricky situation." That's not exactly the clear-cut message his listeners have come to expect. (Though Rush did argue that our president is fighting to establish sharia law in Libya.)
Glenn Beck was fairly schizophrenic in his response to the idea of American intervention last week, though presumably he'll devote this week's programs to determining his actual position on the matter.
For the best of real-time mainstream right-wing reaction to the Libyan campaign, we turn to the National Review Online. The posts at The Corner today are a mixture of skepticism about those rebels -- there have been reports that some of them may be Muslims -- and the barely restrained ecstasy of the war blogger greeting a brand-new invasion. Jim Manzi helpfully explains that the United States cannot afford war, a classic conservative argument from the olden times that the right is rapidly Taking Back from the hippies. Victor Davis Hanson opposes the intervention because, you know, Obama = Carter and all that. (Andrew McCarthy is among those who've rediscovered the constitutional need for a congressional declaration of war. Partisans from both sides have taken turns ignoring that requirement for a century now, and it's always nice when they remember it again.) Pete Hoekstra writes in to say: "We should be under no illusions -- to fix it will be hard and will take more than a few days!"

And Mark Krikorian says ... well, Krikorian examines the issue quite creatively. It is actually about uppity women. Our "enemies" have "learned," he says, "that our commander-in-chief is an effete vacillator who is pushed around by his female subordinates." His problem isn't with women, he clarifies. His problem is that Obama looks like a weakling and those awful women "nagged him to attack Libya until he gave in."
America has a president who gives in when women nag him. This cannot stand. This will make America look weak to everyone who isn't as enlightened as "sensitive New Age guy" Krikorian.

Do you think Putin and A-jad and Chavez and the ChiComs are more afraid of Obama now? It was obvious to most of us that Hillary has more, uh, stones than Obama, but to have it confirmed so publicly for less-attentive foreign goons means they’re that much more likely to try to push us and see how The One responds.

So, there you have it. This war is a bad idea because Barack Obama isn't manly enough to stand up to his emasculating staff of harpies. Women!

• Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon

Nearly 7 in 10 support air strikes in Libya, CBS News poll finds

Nearly seven in ten Americans support the use of military air strikes in Libya in order to protect civilians from attacks by Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, a new CBS News poll finds.

In a survey taken on Sunday and Monday, following Saturday's first round of U.N.-sanctioned missile and air strikes aimed at Libya, 68 percent of Americans said they approved of the military action. Just 26 percent said they disapproved.
Eight in 10 Americans want budget compromise
Support for new nuclear plants drops
Fifty percent of Americans said they approved of how President Obama was handling the situation in Libya, and the president earned more support from Republicans on the issue than he did on domestic issues like the economy and the deficit. Forty-three percent of Republicans said they approved of Mr. Obama's handling of the Libya situation, according to the poll, and 41 percent disapproved. Sixty-six percent of Democrats approved, as did 43 percent of Independents.


Nearly three in four Americans also said they expected the air strikes to be effective on some level, although respondents' confidence levels dipped in regard to the extent of the strikes' predicted success: Just 20 percent of respondents said they thought the strikes would be "very effective" in protecting Libyan citizens, while 54 percent said they thought the actions would be "somewhat effective." Eighteen percent said they thought the recent military actions in Libya would be not very - or not at all - effective.

More than four in five Americans say that what happens in Libya is important to the U.S., according to the survey, including 38 percent who said they considered it "very important." Last month, 46 percent felt what was happening in Egypt was "very important" to the U.S.

Americans have supported this type of military action before. According to a CBS News Poll conducted in September 1995, 59 percent of Americans approved of air strikes in Bosnia during the war there. In March 1999, 51 percent favored US and NATO air strikes in Yugoslavia during the Kosovo War.