They did a new song, and one of their standards, Dreaming,
The performance was good, and Debbie Harry’s voice is still good, though she’s lost a bit on the high end of her range.
I will note, I just Wikied her, and realized that she is 68, and she is still smoking hot, and still maintains the New Wave attitude that she, and Blondie pioneered.
It was announced today that the New York Times fired Jill Abramson as executive editor.
It appears that this was largely because she complained when she discovered that her pay was significantly less than her predecessor, as well as one of her (male) subordinates:
As with any such upheaval, there’s a history behind it. Several weeks ago, I’m told, Abramson discovered that her pay and her pension benefits as both executive editor and, before that, as managing editor were considerably less than the pay and pension benefits of Bill Keller, the male editor whom she replaced in both jobs. “She confronted the top brass,” one close associate said, and this may have fed into the management’s narrative that she was “pushy,” a characterization that, for many, has an inescapably gendered aspect. Sulzberger is known to believe that the Times, as a financially beleaguered newspaper, needed to retreat on some of its generous pay and pension benefits; Abramson, who spent much of her career at the Wall Street Journal, had been at the Times for far fewer years than Keller, which accounted for some of the pension disparity. Eileen Murphy, a spokeswoman for the Times, said that Jill Abramson’s total compensation as executive editor “was directly comparable to Bill Keller’s”—though it was not actually the same. I was also told by another friend of Abramson’s that the pay gap with Keller was only closed after she complained. But, to women at an institution that was once sued by its female employees for discriminatory practices, the question brings up ugly memories. Whether Abramson was right or wrong, both sides were left unhappy. A third associate told me, “She found out that a former deputy managing editor”—a man—“made more money than she did” while she was managing editor. “She had a lawyer make polite inquiries about the pay and pension disparities, which set them off.”
Of course, Abramson was good for business, and the paper is “financially beleagered” Sulzberger decided to build a palatial new headquarters for the paper, and use very short term debt to finance this, which required a refinance at junk bond rates from Mexican crony capitalist Carlos Slim, and a sale-leaseback of $¾ million square feet in their headquarters.
Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. is letting his sense of entitlement show.
Do not piss off Jon Stewart.
That goes for you, Rush Limbaugh:
With 200-300 school girls kidnapped by Boko Haram, and Limbaugh decides to take the side of the terrorists, because Michelle Obama took up their cause.
Stewart is rahter pithy about this:
So that’s our choice: Malala [Yousafzai, who was shot in the face by the Taliban for saying that girls should go to school] or Rush, the quivering rage heap who is apparently desperately trying to extinguish any remaining molecule of humanity that might still reside in the Chernobyl-esque superfund cleanup site that was his soul.
Follow the hashtag, “#F*@KYOURUSH”.
Crap. Monica Lewinsky is back, and Dick Cheney’s wife is suggesting that it’s some sort of Clinton plot.
Kill me.
Just kill me.
In a joint press conference today, editor Cole Bolton and CEO Steve Hannah have announced that The Onion will be ceasing publication immediately immediately, with all staff made redundant, and all assets put up for sale.
Bolton, shaking his head sadly, announced that following the in response to the declaration by the campaign for former Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown for New Hampshire (this time) Senate that his opponent is, “A Senator from Massachusetts,” said that satire has been rendered obsolete by reality.
“I knew that it would be John Sununu who would destroy us,” said Bolton, the now former editor. “His continuous innovation in the area of unintentional self parody have always threatened us with obsolescence, and now he has finally made us completely irrelevant.”
John Sununu’s statement introducing Scott Brown at a campaign rally left the staff dumbstruck, with many in tears, even before the announced layoffs.
“We just gotta remind people that he’s coming back to his roots,” former New Hampshire Gov. John H. Sununu told me after the Portsmouth rally. Sununu, in case you have forgotten, was one of Romney’s most ubiquitous and delightfully crotchety fsurrogates during the presidential campaign in 2012. In true Sununu fashion, he not only defended Brown’s alleged Live Free or Die bona fides; he’s gone on the attack. To him, it is Shaheen, not Brown, who’s the real outsider.
“She votes with Elizabeth Warren. She votes with [Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Ed] Markey. She is the third senator from Massachusetts,” Sununu told supporters at the Portsmouth rally before introducing Brown. “Scott’s happiest days as a young man were in New Hampshire. … So it’s going to be great to have a senator that was born virtually in the state of New Hampshire. Jean Shaheen, by the way, was born in Missouri!”
Did you catch how Sununu cleverly described Brown as “virtually” born in New Hampshire? He was actually born in Maine, which for Brown’s campaign is close enough for government work and has the great advantage of being closer than Missouri and not being Massachusetts. It is also rather audacious to paint Shaheen as a “senator from Massachusetts,” since Brown quite literally was, and very much wanted to remain, a senator from Massachusetts.
In related news, the General Manager and Editor-In-Chief of The Onion‘s AV Club, Josh Modell has announced, “I got nothing,” that they will shut down their studio, and cease producing satirical films, and simply re-broadcast cable news stories.
Her birthday was today, so last night, we saw Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
I am going to try to avoid spoilers, so the cast list is after the break, but I will be putting my guesses as to future movies (when not spoiling this one) above the break.
First, this is a good movie. In some ways, the best of the Marvel movies, though as I have said before, I would pay money to listen to Robert Downey Jr. read the phone book.
Captain America is simply more compelling than Iron Man, more relevant than Thor, and less contrived than the Hulk.
This movie deals with a lot of things, but at its core, it is the story of an alien, by which I mean Steve Rogers/Captain America.
He is very from another world, one which has ceased to exist, which from that perspective, is rather a lot like Superman, only Cap is far more aware of this than the guy in the red and blue PJs.
Chris Evans is good as Captain America, and Scarlett Johansson and Samuel L. Jackson reprise their roles as Nick Fury and Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow.
It introduces some new characters, most notably Anthony Mackie who plays Sam Wilson/Falcon, a kickass vet with a flying suit who I think that we will be seeing more, and Emily VanCamp as Kate/Agent 13, in what seems like a future role (if the movie follows the arc of the comic books) as Captain America’s off and on love interest. (Though there is also an indication of some future fireworks between Cap and Black Widow)
Interestingly enough, the movie is rather topical, and fairly explicitly offers a critique of our wonderful world of pervasive digital surveillance that Edward Snowden confirmed to the world.
It does all this while it dealing with the issues of loss and friendship that are inherent in Captain America’s back story.
I would give the movie an 8 out of 10.
*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.
Cast:
Chris Evans … Steve Rogers / Captain America
Samuel L. Jackson … Nick Fury
Scarlett Johansson … Natasha Romanoff / Black Widow
Robert Redford … Alexander Pierce
Sebastian Stan … Bucky Barnes / Winter Soldier
Anthony Mackie … Sam Wilson / Falcon
Cobie Smulders … Maria Hill
Frank Grillo … Brock Rumlow
Maximiliano Hernández … Jasper Sitwell
Emily VanCamp … Kate / Agent 13
Hayley Atwell … Peggy Carter
Toby Jones … Dr. Arnim Zola
Stan Lee … Smithsonian Guard
Callan Mulvey … Jack Rollins
Jenny Agutter … Councilwoman Hawley
Remember her?
She was the Kuwaiti ambassador’s daughter (and member of the royal family) who testified to Congress that she saw Iraqi troops throwing babies out of incubators.
She falsely claimed to be a nurse’s aid when she had not even been in the country at the time of the invasion.
Well,”Nurse Nayirah,” meet Liz Wahl, the former RT News anchor who resigned on the air:
Liz Wahl’s on-air resignation as a Russia Today news anchor came amid a perfect geopolitical storm. She announced her departure from RT just as tensions escalated between the U.S. and Russia over Ukraine.
“I cannot be part of a network funded by the Russian government that whitewashes the actions of Putin,” said the 28-year-old American reporter and show host, who worked at RT America for two-and-a-half years. “I am proud to be an American and believe in disseminating the truth. And that is why, after this newscast, I am resigning.”
………
Wahl’s Howard-Beale-like moment came just one day after her colleague Abby Martin, host of RT America’s “Breaking the Set,” committed her own on-air indiscretion. Martin denounced Russia’s military occupation of the Crimean peninsula, which had been part of neighboring Ukraine since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991
Unlike Wahl, however, Martin didn’t quit the network; she is still hosting her daily 30-minute show. Martin’s decision to stay at RT drew criticism from the same reporter who landed the first interview with Wahl after her resignation, The Daily Beast’s Jamie Kirchick.
“Indeed, far from damaging the propaganda efforts of the Russian government, Martin’s momentary act of nonconformity plays right into the Kremlin’s hands,” Kirchick wrote in a March 4 article in Tablet Magazine. “RT will now be able to hold up her 60-second departure from the official script as evidence of its editorial independence.
………
Case in point: The Beasts’ Kirchick—who got the first interview with Wahl and was critical of Martin after she remained at RT—gets his paychecks from the neoconservative Foreign Policy Institute, where he is a Fellow. FPI has been described as a renascent version of the Project for the New American Century, which is in turn often described as one of the well-connected brain trusts behind the launch of the Iraq War.
Note that the Foreign Policy Institute (FPI) was founded by William Kristol, who founded PNAC, and
A source from inside RT, who spoke to WhoWhatWhy anonymously for fear of retribution, had at one point “observed [Wahl] taking pictures of the office over the summer, asking all sorts of odd questions about my experience, and looking at Jamie Kirchick’s website while in the office.”
This led the RT America employee to believe that Kirchick—with the help of Wahl—was planning to write a hit piece on the organization.
A recently published piece by TruthDig goes further, contending that Kirchick and neoconservative allies orchestrated—in TruthDig’s words “stage managed“—Wahl’s resignation right from the start.
………
A large part of TruthDig‘s contention that Kirchick and the Foreign Policy Institute “stage managed” the whole thing relies on FPI’s Twitter feed activity in the minutes leading up to Wahl’s on-air resignation.
FPI’s feed that day telegraphed “something big might happen on RT” and teased “you’re really going to want to tune in to RT” within 19 minutes of Wahl’s stepping down. Then, as soon as Wahl made her announcement, FPI tweeted, “RT Anchor RESIGNS ON AIR. She ‘cannot be part of a network that whitewashes the actions of Putin.’”
Asked about the feed and timing of the tweets by WhoWhatWhy, Kirchick responded, “I am an employee of FPI. Liz called me [while I was] at work. I told everyone in the office to watch. We did.”
Wahl corroborated Kirchick’s account of how events unfolded.
The prevalence of this kind of sh%$ in the political and media landscape is why I try to get as much of my news as possible from overseas sources.
H/t Crooks and Liars.
I just realized that not only had I not read them in a long time, but that I had not taken them out of the box this century.
I just finished inventorying them, my notable comics are:
More than 200 comic books in all.
Anyone know who would be a good person to sell all for these for me on consignment? I know that eBay offers “Sell it for me,” but I am also considering one of the local outfits that does this.
I am not referring to Murdoch’s recent meltdown over the sponsors dropping the St. Patrick’s day parade for their gay ban. (The fact that the quintessential Irish brewer, Guinness, has dropped the parade amuses me.)
Rather I am referring to the fact that Matt Groening has revealed that Murdoch was considering suing the producers of The Simpsons over their parody of a Fox News crawl:
Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Channel threatened to sue the makers of the Simpsons over a spoof news ticker, the show’s creator Matt Groening has claimed.
Mr Groening said Fox News raised the unlikely prospect of suing a show broadcast by its sister channel, Fox Entertainment, because it wanted to stop the Simpsons parodying its famously anti-Democratic party agenda.
The alleged row centred on a parody of Fox News’ rolling news ticker, which included headlines such as “Do Democrats cause cancer?”
Mr Groening said the news channel backed down because it would have caused Fox to bring a lawsuit against itself.
“Fox said they would sue the show and we called their bluff because we didn’t think Rupert Murdoch would pay for Fox to sue itself. We got away with it,” Mr Groening told National Public Radio in the US.
“But now Fox has a new rule that we can’t do those little fake news crawls [tickers] on the bottom of the screen in a cartoon because it might confuse the viewers into thinking it’s real news,” he added on NPR’s Fresh Air programme.
I am so reassured that a media magnate billionaire who is one white Persian cat away from being a Bond villain is wasting his time on this sh%$.
They put a holocaust revisionist who calls for genocide of the gays, and they neglect to mention these facts to their listeners:
National Public Radio’s Michel Martin did a segment on Uganda’s growing crackdown on its gay population, and decided to interview Holocaust-revisionist hate-group leader Scott Lively, who is truly one of the most horrific religious right extremists in America.
How did NPR’s Michel Martin describe Lively to her audience? Simply as “Evangelical leader Scott Lively.”
That’s it.
No mention of the fact that Lively was labeled a Holocaust revisionist by HateWatch for his “thoroughly-discredited” 1995 tome, “The Pink Swastika,” which tried to argue that gays were the really force behind the Holocaust.
No mention of Lively’s organization, Abiding Truth Ministries, that was officially-designated a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
He was extensively involved in Uganda’s proposed “Kill the Gays” bill, and the now just passed “Jail the Gays” bill.
You don’t just call him “Evangelical leader Scott Lively.” At the very least you call him a controversial anti-gay activist, unless you are so cowed by the Talibaptists that you should quit journalism and take up knitting.
They throw some highbrow opera and such, and then they pursue the political agenda of right wing industrialists:
Last month, Pando’s “Wolf of Sesame Street” investigation broke the news that one of PBS’s flagship outlets had inked a secret deal with anti-pension billionaire John Arnold. That deal, which was not explicitly disclosed to viewers, was designed to broadcast anti-pension programming on public television stations throughout the country.
The story spotlighted how ideological billionaires and powerful corporations are increasingly – and stealthily – attempting to launder their political agendas through the trusted public-television brand, potentially in violation of PBS’s own rules.
Now, as part of our continuing investigation into who funds public television, Pando has learned that a new campaign is being launched against another major PBS station, once again over the issue of billionaire influence.
The campaign, sponsored by the environmental group Forecast the Facts, aims to remove one of the most influential and politically active fossil fuel magnates from the board of the PBS station that provides science-related programming to outlets across the US.
The campaign’s target is David Koch, who serves on the board and the Science Visiting Council of Boston’s WGBH. These are particularly powerful posts for the conservative financier — one of the infamous Koch brothers — because, like the Arnold-infiltrated WNET in New York, the Boston station produces many of the national PBS network’s programming. In fact, according to its own website, WGBH is “PBS’s single largest producer of Web and TV content.” That includes PBS’s iconic science show, NOVA.
And if you read further, you see that WGBH violated PBS guidelines repeatedly to appease the right wing billionaire.
It really sucks.
John Stewart and Larry Wilmore tear into professional bigot Fox News Legal analyst Andrew Napolitano for rolling out standard grossly KKK/Sons of the Confederacy lies.
Notice that they are both smiling.
They are f5$#ing outraged, and the smiles never leave their faces, and Wilmore draws blood when he compares Napolitano’s differing attitudes on the Civil War and the Revolutionary war, “You know, there’s something not right when you feel the only black thing worth fighting for is tea,” but he drives a much deserved stake through the anti-tax libertarianism espoused by Napolitano, and Fox, when he says, “You think it’s immoral for the government to reach into your pocket, rip your money away from its warm home and claim it as its own property, money that used to enjoy unfettered freedom is now conscripted to do whatever its new owner tells it to. Now, I know this is going to be a leap, but you know that sadness and rage you feel about your money? Well, that’s the way some of us feel about people.”
It’s frightening that such a contemptible human being as Napolitano was once a judge.
Just watch.
This time, it’s Matt Taibbi, who is perhaps the only financial journalist in America who has not gone native with the financial services industry:
Matt Taibbi, who made a name as a fierce critic of Wall Street at Rolling Stone magazine, has joined First Look Media, the latest big-name journalist to leave an established brand to enter the thriving and well-financed world of news start-ups.
Mr. Taibbi will start his own publication focusing on financial and political corruption, he said in an interview on Wednesday. First Look is financed by the eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, who is worth $8.5 billion, according to Forbes. Mr. Omidyar has pledged $250 million to the project.
“It’s obvious that we’re entering a new phase in the history of journalism,” Mr. Taibbi said. “This is clearly the future, and this was an opportunity for me to be part of helping to found something and create something that might carry us into the next generation.”
………
First Look began its first publication, The Intercept, with the national security reporters Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill. In recent weeks, the group has hired Lynn Oberlander, formerly of The New Yorker, as its general counsel, and the author and journalist Peter Maass, among others.
Taibbi, of course nailed Goldman Sachs, and enraged vampire squid aficionados everywhere, when he described them as, “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”
Also, we have seen Dan Froomkin and Jay Rosen.
This is beginning to look like an impressive team, if someone *cough* Jim Romenesko *cough* could update us on whether they are getting some utility infielders to go along with the stars, I would be more sanguine about its prospects.
There are now rumors that former Congressman and current MSNBC journalistic impersonater Joe Scarborough is considering a run for President:
This is only slightly less embarrassing than engaging with a rumor about Donald Trump, how do they say, “mulling a presidential bid,” so let’s start with an apology: I’m sorry. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get down to the lowly business of the day. Joe Scarborough, co-host of MSNBC’s wake-up chat show “Morning Joe,” is “mulling a presidential bid,” according to a couple of anonymous people and Mark McKinnon, who spoke to Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller website. What a world.
Even without the inevitability of some Republican Karl Rove wannabee making an issue of Lori Klausutis, his candidacy would make the Freddie Dalton Thompson clown look like the Obama campaign.
BTW, that rumbling you feel is not an earthquake. It is the writing staff of The Daily Show frantically high fiving each other.
So Entertainment reporter Sam Rubin confused Samuel L. Jackson and Lawrence Fishburne, and Mr. Jackson was not amused.
As I have seen his performance as Jules in Pulp Fiction a number of times, I’m kind of surprised that I had not already put him on the list.
When something bad is happening to an group of truly awful people, I frequently experience schadenfreude.
When it in suggest negative implications for the rest of us, my feelings are more mixed.
Case in point, the defamation suit that may bankrupt the National Review:
National Review, founded by William F. Buckley Jr. in 1955, has had an enormous impact on the nation’s politics. Its writers formulated the ideology that animated the quixotic Barry Goldwater campaign of 1964, and then Ronald Reagan’s successful run for the White House in 1980. In the years since, National Review has often worked to keep Republican presidents focused on implementing its vision of conservatism, while bucking up the conservative troops when the movement has found itself out of power.
Today the magazine enjoys circulation roughly equivalent to that of The Nation, the American Left’s leading journal of opinion, and more than twice that of William Kristol’s The Weekly Standard, its primary competition on the Right.
And now, National Review may be fighting for its life.
Climate scientist Michael Mann is suing National Review and Mark Steyn, one of its leading writers, for defamation. It’s a charge that’s notoriously hard to prove, which is no doubt why the magazine initially refused to apologize for an item on its blog in which Steyn accused Mann of fraud. Steyn also quoted a line by another conservative writer (Rand Simberg) that called Mann “the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data.” (Simberg and the free market think tank for which he works, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, are also named in the suit.)
The lawsuit has not been going well for the magazine. In July, Judge Natalia Combs Greene rejected a motion to dismiss the suit. The defendants appealed, and last week D.C. Superior Court Judge Frederick Weisberg rejected the motion again, opening the door for the discovery phase of the lawsuit to begin.
That’s not all. On Christmas Eve, Steyn (who regularly guest hosts Rush Limbaugh’s radio show) wrote a blog post in which he excoriated Greene, accusing her of incompetence, stupidity, and obtuseness. As a result of this outburst, the law firm that had been representing National Review and Steyn (Steptoe & Johnson) has dropped Steyn as a client and reportedly has plans to withdraw as counsel for the magazine as well.
Part of me hopes that The National Review gets sued into oblivion. It is a pernicious organization, and it has been since Buckley founded it, and filled it with Oh-So-Civilized support for segregation.
Part of me worries that the Kochs will start funding SLAPP suits against in an attempt to intimidate real news gathering organizations.
And so I leave it with all of you: Which came out of the opened door – the lady, or the tiger?
H/t Salon.
John Haggerty is much braver than I am.
He decided to rely exclusively on Fox News for information on current events for one month.
I would have gnawed my own eyes off by the end of the 2nd day.
Normally, I have no interest in awards, but the Grammy’s have their moments.
The last time was in 1984, when Annie Lennox stunned and offended ½ of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences of the United States (and amused the other ½).
This year, however, it is a bit more significant. Queen Latifa officiated at the wedding of 34 couples, some of them same sex, and right wingers are having a major butt hurt about this:
Anti-gay commentators were none too pleased with last night’s performance of Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’ “Same Love” at the Grammy Awards, which included a ceremony where thirty-four couples — including same-sex couples — were married. Unsurprisingly, many claimed that the show was evil and mean to anti-gay activists.
My heart bleeds borscht for these bigots.
It appears that the hyper wealthy think that people not liking them or how they make money is just like the holocaust, “Seems like billionaire venture capitalist Tom Perkins is very, very afraid of progressives. In a letter to the Wall Street Journal, Perkins expressed his deep fear that fascist progressives were going to burn down the city.”
He actually invoked Kristallnacht:
From the Occupy movement to the demonization of the rich embedded in virtually every word of our local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, I perceive a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent. There is outraged public reaction to the Google buses carrying technology workers from the city to the peninsula high-tech companies which employ them. We have outrage over the rising real-estate prices which these “techno geeks” can pay. We have, for example, libelous and cruel attacks in the Chronicle on our number-one celebrity, the author Danielle Steel, alleging that she is a “snob” despite the millions she has spent on our city’s homeless and mentally ill over the past decades.
This is ludicrous.
BTW, San Francisco has a law against private vehicles blocking bus-stops, as the aforementioned Google buses do. It’s a $271 fine, and this means something north of $½ billion in fines have been ignored by the city by various tech firms, because big tech is above the law.
The idea that somehow or other, either criticism or legitimate law enforcement actions directed toward the extremely wealthy is somehow a fascist style persecution against the 0.01% is both pernicious and laughable.
On Monday, I went to the Doctor, and on the way there, I was listening to the Midday talk show on WYPR, and they were interviewing Dan Pallotta, who gave a TED talk (no link, ever) about how we need to spend lots of money on high powered executives and self promotion, and not be so concerned about overhead costs. (Link to this show)
I called into the show (you can hear me at 41:05), and made two points, both from experience:* That aggressive fundraising and growth as a strategy will take place at the expense of the core function of that organization, and that studies have shown that very high levels of compensation actually decrease performance.
Pallotta spouted banalities about the use of “appropriate metrics” when discussing how a high growth focus won’t distract , and for the studies showing that excessive pay decreases performance, he pulls out the straw man about whether we should stop paying real estate agents after their 3rd sale.
The reality is that his failed for-profit event promotion business died because it became excessive expensive, and the self aggrandizement of its CEO, Dan Pallotta.
In it’s own way, this is TED Talks in a microcosm, it is all about comforting the comfortable.
After all this, I Wiki the motherf%$#er and found this “clearly-written_by-his-publicist” article:
Pallotta TeamWorks
Pallotta built his for-profit company Pallotta TeamWorks. His company employed 400 full-time people in 16 U.S. offices and was raising $169 million annually by 2002. In total, the company raised $582 million from 1994 to 2002. The company charged a fixed production fee for its services. It did not do commission-based fundraising or get a “take” off of the top. One hundred percent of all donations went to lock boxes under the charities’ exclusive control. The charities then reimbursed the company for its expenses on a dollar-for-dollar basis. Pallotta TeamWorks fees, in a hindsight calculation, amounted to 4.01% of funds raised.
As is shown below, this is a bogus number. It refers only to direct fees, and not the expenses of putting on the increasingly lavish events.
Palotta was criticized for the large amounts of money Pallotta TeamWorks was making each year and the $394,500 salary he was receiving, described as “stratospheric” for the aid world.[ His annual salary ranged from $150,000 in 1994 to approximately $425,000 in 2002. Palotta commented that “We allow people to make huge profits doing any number of things that will hurt the poor, but we want to crucify anyone who wants to make money helping them”.
In 2002, the company moved into an innovative headquarters that it had outfitted, The Apostrophe. For years Pallotta TeamWorks was located in poor offices spaces in Hollywood. A new and completely empty 47,000 square-foot ’tilt-up’ warehouse was located in Atwater Village, Los Angeles. ………
Shut-down of Pallotta Teamworks
……… At the time the Breast Cancer 3-Day program was the company’s largest fundraising event series. For five years the Avon Products Foundation had been the beneficiary of the events, which netted $194 million in unrestricted funds for the Foundation in just five years. In 2002 Avon informed Pallotta TeamWorks that it would no longer be associated with the company’s events. Pallotta TeamWorks began negotiating with another charity to become the beneficiary of the events. During that period, Avon announced a nationwide series of multi-day breast cancer fundraising walks, each with a four-figure pledge minimum, in many of the same cities in which the 3-Days had been conducted and, in many cases, on very similar dates. As a result, the new charity with which Pallotta TeamWorks had been negotiating, fearing that the events would cannibalize one another, decided against partnering with Pallotta TeamWorks on the 3-Days. A few days after the news, on August 23, 2002, the company laid off its entire staff nationwide and closed the doors on its new headquarters.
So, they got dumped by their charities (more below), and they tried to set up competing events to keep their gravy train rolling.
But we can look at the Internet, where nothing goes away, and see what was being said of Pallotta Teamworks at the time:
Published on Tuesday, August 27, 2002 in the Washington Post
Expenses Eat Profits Of District AIDSRide
by Carol Morello
Expenses ate up at least 86 percent of the $3.6 million raised in June for the annual D.C. AIDSRide organized by Pallotta TeamWorks, a rate that is expected to increase when the tally is complete, the benefiting charities said yesterday.
If the riders had not raised more money than required, the event might have lost money. Per-rider expenses averaged $400 more than the $2,400 each rider needed to raise to participate. But the event turned a $500,000 profit only because riders raised an average of more than $3,200, according to preliminary estimates made by the two charities that co-sponsored the ride.
“Disappointed doesn’t even begin to describe how we feel,” said Cornelius Baker, head of Whitman-Walker Clinic, one of two charities benefiting from the ride.
When the audit is completed in the fall, the return may be less than 14 cents on the dollar.
………Critics of Pallotta events said the return on the D.C. ride was indicative of problems that have beset the company this summer.
“The returns are abysmal,” said Wayne Turner, an AIDS activist with the D.C. chapter of Act Up. “People are beginning to wake up to the fact these AIDS rides are not about raising money at all. They’re about building Dan Pallotta’s empire, which is now crumbling.”
This year, Pallotta TeamWorks was to have run 23 charitable events across the United States and in Africa and Europe. Pallotta’s fee for each AIDS ride runs from $225,000 — the amount for the District ride — to $450,000. Locally, it also has organized the Avon Breast Cancer walk, held in May, and a night walk this month from Fairfax County to the District to raise awareness of suicide prevention.
Pallotta had been one of the country’s most successful promoters of charitable events. But criticism grew as the company expanded and began aggressively promoting itself. Its events are characterized by emotional opening and closing ceremonies, slick marketing and creature comforts for participants, including cucumber eye masks and massages. Expenses run into the millions, though net proceeds are often high, too. But recently, many riders and walkers have complained that the events’ purity has been clouded by excessive promotion. At walks and rides attended by survivors and relatives of people with breast cancer and AIDS, vans were set up marketing the company’s other events and selling books by founder Dan Pallotta.
………
Pallotta, though, has lost numerous clients this year.
This spring, Avon Products announced that it would no longer use the company to produce its three-day breast cancer walks and would launch its own walkathons. After seven years of collaboration, Food & Friends decided to hold its own bike event next year. The huge Heartland AIDSRide across the Midwest also is being dropped.
So he is a f%$#ing serial narcissist who put on lavish charity events for the purpose of his own self-aggrandizement, and so his business imploded.
His response is to go on TED and suggest that the way to improve our charities is to throw more money at those overpaid narcissistic sociopaths who are our looting class.
Just beautiful.
* My background: