They put up a billboard using Appalachian Trail hiker Mark Sanford:
According to AshleyMadison.com founder Noel Biderman, 60,000 cars a day will pass this billboard along 1-26 in Columbia, South Carolina, as Mark Sanford battles Elizabeth Colbert Busch for one of the state’s congressional seats. ………
Heh.
Not only is CNN looking to relaunch Crossfire, but they are in negotiations with Newt Gingrich.
What on earth possessed them to try bring back that moribund franchise?
Did Jon Stewart teach you idiotic ratf%$#s anything the last time around? He literally embarrassed this show off the air.
Just the other day, he cut CNN a new on on their incompetent coverage of the Boston bombing.
Seriously, do not make him stop this car.
You do not want him to open up another can of whup ass on your flabby white asses.
Just in case you do not remember, let’s roll tape:
Yes, I’m actually rooting for Verizon against the cable networks.
You see Verizon wants a new deal for its content.
It does not want to pay for each person who has access to a network, but rather it wants to pay only for the people who actually watch the shows:
Verizon wants to change how it pays television providers for their shows, according to a new report.
The company, which operates Fios TV, is currently in talks with several “midtier and smaller” television companies to pay them not for the number of subscribers their channels can reach, but by the number of people who actually watch their shows, according to the Wall Street Journal, which interviewed the company’s executives.
“We are paying for a customer who never goes to the channel,” Verizon Fios TV chief programming negotiator Terry Denson told the Wall Street Journal.
The payment structure would be passed on a “unique view” model in which one person who spends at least five minutes on the channel would count towards a fee, according to the Journal. Verizon would not need to pay for anyone who didn’t actually spend that time on the channel.
If they can apply this generally it makes it less economically viable to use things like ESPN to overload the cable networks, and our cable bills, with stuff that no one else watches.
This is a decent step toward à la carte content delivery.
The Boston Phoenix has just shut down.
Boston’s alt-weekly is no more.
The author of a biography on John Belushi compared his understanding of the life, and death, to Bob Woodward’s account, the book Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi, and finds the Washington Post scribe’s account to be bizarrely inaccurate.
Tanner Colby is not suggesting that Woodward fabricating anything, but rather that he is completely incompetent when it comes to putting the facts he has in an accurate context:
A little more than a week ago, during an interview with Politico, Bob Woodward came forward to claim he’d been threatened in an email by a “senior White House official” for daring to reveal certain details about the negotiations over the budget sequester. The White House responded by releasing the email exchange Woodward was referring to, which turned out to be nothing more than a cordial exchange between the reporter and Obama’s economic adviser, Gene Sperling, who was clearly implying nothing more than that Woodward would “regret” taking a position that would soon be shown to be false.
A rather trivial scandal, but the incident did manage to raise important questions about Woodward’s behavior. Was he cynically trumping up the administration’s “threat,” or does he just not know how to read an email? Pretty soon, those questions tipped over into the standard Beltway discussion that transpires anytime Woodward does anything. How accurate is his reporting? Does he deserve his legendary status?
I believe I can offer some interesting answers to those questions. Thirty-one years ago, on March 5, 1982, Saturday Night Live and Animal House star John Belushi died of a drug overdose at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles—which, bear with me a moment, has more to do with the current coverage of the budget sequester than you might initially think.
………
Twenty years later, in 2004, Judy Belushi hired me, then an aspiring comedy writer, to help her with a new biography of John, this one titled Belushi: A Biography. As her coauthor, I handled most of the legwork, including all of the interviews and most of the research. What started as a fun project turned out to be a rather fascinating and unique experiment. Over the course of a year, page by page, source by source, I re-reported and rewrote one of Bob Woodward’s books. As far as I know, it’s the only time that’s ever been done.
………
Wired is an infuriating piece of work. There’s a reason Woodward’s critics consistently come off as hysterical ninnies: He doesn’t make Jonah Lehrer–level mistakes. There’s never a smoking gun like an outright falsehood or a brazen ethical breach. And yet, in the final product, a lot of what Woodward writes comes off as being not quite right—some of it to the point where it can feel quite wrong. There’s no question that he frequently ferrets out information that other reporters don’t. But getting the scoop is only part of the equation. Once you have the facts, you have to present those facts in context and in proportion to other facts in order to accurately reflect reality. It’s here that Woodward fails.
………
Woodward also makes peculiar decisions about what facts he uses as evidence. His detractors like to say that he’s little more than a stenographer—and they’re right. In Wired, he takes what he is told and simply puts it down in chronological order with no sense of proportionality, nuance, or understanding.
………
Of all the people I interviewed, SNL writer and current Sen. Al Franken, referencing his late comedy partner Tom Davis, offered the most apt description of Woodward’s one-sided approach to the drug use in Belushi’s story: “Tom Davis said the best thing about Wired,” Franken told me. “He said it’s as if someone wrote a book about your college years and called it Puked. And all it was about was who puked, when they puked, what they ate before they puked and what they puked up. No one read Dostoevsky, no one studied math, no one fell in love, and nothing happened but people puking.”
Here is the money quote:
Whenever people ask me about John Belushi and the subject of Wired comes up, I say it’s like someone wrote a biography of Michael Jordan in which all the stats and scores are correct, but you come away with the impression that Michael Jordan wasn’t very good at playing basketball.
It’s not that Woodward is a manipulator with a partisan agenda. He doesn’t alter key evidence in order to serve a particular thesis. Inconsequential details about rehearsing movie dialogue are rendered just as ham-handedly as critical facts about Belushi’s cocaine addiction. Woodward has an unmatched skill for digging up information, but he doesn’t know what to do with that information once he finds it.
My thesis about Woodward, and I’ve thought this for a while is that he’s kind of a big Hoover* for information, but he needs someone who can connect the dots to create actual meaning.
As I have followed Woodward’s solo career, I have increasingly given more credit to Bernstein.
*The vacuum cleaner, not the former FBI director.
Michael Winston was a high ranking executive who tried to blow the whistle at Countrywide Financial.
He was marginalized, and later fired by Bank of America after they took over the firm.
He filed suit, and was awarded $3.8 million dollars for wrongful termination.
Well, a few weeks after he described the rampant fraud and abuse on the Frontline piece, The Untouchables, the appeals court overturned the verdict based on the facts.
Now I’m an engineer, not a lawyer, dammit,* but even I know that appeals courts are to rule on issues of law, not issues of fact.
It smells to high heaven, as the great Matt Taibbi observes:
When I spoke to him last week, Winston was still as amazed and repulsed by what he saw at Angelo Mozilo’s crooked subprime mortgage company as he was when he worked there. Winston, who had worked for years at high-level positions at companies like Motorola and Lockheed before joining Countrywide in the 2000s, described a moment in his first months at the company, when he rolled into the parking lot at the company headquarters.
………
When Winston refused, he was essentially stripped of his normal responsibilities and had his corporate budget slashed. When Bank of America took over the company, Winston’s job was terminated. He sued, and in one of the few positive outcomes for any white-collar whistleblower anywhere in the post-financial-crisis universe, won a $3.8 million wrongful termination suit against Bank of America last February.
Well, just weeks after the PBS documentary aired, the Court of Appeals in the state of California suddenly took an interest in Winston’s case. Normally, a court of appeals can only overturn a jury verdict in a case like this if there is a legal error. It’s not supposed to relitigate the factual evidence.
Yet this is exactly what happened: The court decided that the evidence that Winston was wrongfully terminated was insufficient, and then from there determined that the “legal error” in the original Winston suit against Bank of America and Countrywide was that the judge in the case failed to throw out the jury’s verdict:In short, having scoured the record for evidence supporting the jury’s verdict on the issue of causation, we have found none. It follows that the trial court erred in denying defendants’ motion for judgment notwithstanding the verdict.
The f%$#ing fix is f%$#ing in.
This is a deliberate attempt to chill the activities of any potential whistle blowers.
If this were an isolated incident, I might not assume corruption, but it is not an isolated case.
It seems to be an cultural imperative to punish whistle blowers, as was shown when the only person to go to jail in the UBS tax evasion case was the whistleblower.
I don’t know how this can be fixed, but it needs to be fixed.
*I LOVE IT when I get to go all Doctor McCoy!!!
OK, it’s not real, it’s the comedy stylings of Brian Firenzi and Maria Del Carmen, but this is what we should see from CEOs.
I’ll go with the aesthetic sensibilities of the Norwegian people:
The TV program, on the topic of firewood, consisted mostly of people in parkas chatting and chopping in the woods and then eight hours of a fire burning in a fireplace. Yet no sooner had it begun, on prime time on Friday night, than the angry responses came pouring in.
“We received about 60 text messages from people complaining about the stacking in the program,” said Lars Mytting, whose best-selling book “Solid Wood: All About Chopping, Drying and Stacking Wood — and the Soul of Wood-Burning” inspired the broadcast. “Fifty percent complained that the bark was facing up, and the rest complained that the bark was facing down.”
He explained, “One thing that really divides Norway is bark.”
One thing that does not divide Norway, apparently, is its love of discussing Norwegian wood. Nearly a million people, or 20 percent of the population, tuned in at some point to the program, which was shown on the state broadcaster, NRK.
In a country where 1.2 million households have fireplaces or wood stoves, said Rune Moeklebust, NRK’s head of programs in the west coast city of Bergen, the subject naturally lends itself to television.
“My first thought was, ‘Well, why not make a TV series about firewood?’” Mr. Moeklebust said in an interview. “And that eventually cut down to a 12-hour show, with four hours of ordinary produced television, and then eight hours of showing a fireplace live.”
………
But the real excitement came when the action moved, four hours later, to a fireplace in a Bergen farmhouse.
Perhaps you have seen a log fire burning on television before. But it would be very foolish to confuse Norway’s eight-hour fireplace extravaganza on Friday with the Yule log broadcast in the United States at Christmastime.
While the Yule log fire plays on a constant repeating loop, the fire on “National Firewood Night” burned all night long, in suspensefully unscripted configurations. Fresh wood was added through the hours by an NRK photographer named Ingrid Tangstad Hatlevoll, aided by viewers who sent advice via Facebook on where exactly to place it.
For most of the time, the only sound came from the fire. Ms. Hatlevoll’s face never appeared on screen, but occasionally her hands could be seen putting logs in the fireplace, or cooking sausages and marshmallows on sticks.
“I couldn’t go to bed because I was so excited,” a viewer called niesa36 said on the Dagbladet newspaper Web site. “When will they add new logs? Just before I managed to tear myself away, they must have opened the flue a little, because just then the flames shot a little higher.
Yes, this is deliciously weird, but this is a hell of a lot less pathological than the American regime of reality programing.
This is one big shark that he jumped.
With Frikken Lasers!
The White House press corps(e) is mad as hell and they are not going to take it any more.
They have been stonewalled by the Obama administration for the last time?
What was it? The secret kill list? The use of the CIA and the NSA to spy on US citizens? The secret negotiations for the the Trans-Pacific Partnership?
Nope. The press is livid that they did not get a press availability when Obama played a round of golf with Tiger Woods:
The White House pushed back Tuesday against complaints from the press corps that the administration was too restrictive last weekend in denying reporters and photographers a glimpse of President Obama playing golf with Tiger Woods during his vacation in Florida.
Press secretary Jay Carney said he sympathizes with the press corps’ bid for greater access, but he disputed suggestions that Obama has been more off-limits than his recent predecessors.
Carney said Obama has held 35 news conferences in which reporters were permitted to ask questions, compared to 19 by George W. Bush to this point in his presidency. And Obama has granted 591 interviews, including 104 with television networks, Carney added.
………
Later that afternoon, the White House confirmed that Woods was among Obama’s foursome after a reporter for Golf World Magazine and the Golf Channel had published the news on his Twitter feed hours earlier.
After several reporters, including Fox News correspondent Ed Henry, president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, complained about the lack of access, Obama spoke with reporters aboard Air Force One on Monday evening on the way back to Washington. But that conversation was off the record.
Do you know how stupid this is?
It’s so stupid and over the top that lunatic and long distance psychotherapist Charles Krauthammer thinks that this is whiny inconsequential bullsh%$:
Charles Krauthammer is blasting the media for complaining about a lack of access to President Barack Obama over the weekend while he golfed with Tiger Woods, calling it “the biggest non-story” since the Kardashian weddings.
“If the guy wants to play golf, the guy deserves a couple of days off. He wants privacy — big deal. This is the biggest non-story that the media have created since the Kardashian weddings,” Krauthammer said on Fox News on Monday. “I don’t understand what the story is and what the outrage is.”
Seriously, Charles Krauthammer is correct.
I cannot f%$#ing believe that I f%$#ing just f%$#ing said f%$#ing that.
*The largest shark, and likely largest predator fish ever. It died out some 1.5 million years ago. The Genus is still in dispute, between either Carcharodon (Great White) or Carcharocles (broad toothed Mako). But in either case, you are jumping C. Megalodon, you have jumped the biggest shark ever.
Seriously, do I need to explain this one?
For those of you don’t get the reference, you should watch Star Trek, but I will direct I will direct you to this picture for context, courtesy of DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS:
Former half term Senator Scotty Brown has joined Fox News.
The soon to be ex-Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner plans to write a book:
Timothy Geithner, who played a lead role battling the global financial crisis both at the U.S. Treasury and New York Federal Reserve, is planning to write a book on the U.S. response, a spokeswoman said on Wednesday.
Geithner, who was the longest-serving member of President Barack Obama’s economic team when he stepped down as secretary of the Treasury last month, is credited with helping to calm the financial storm that swept through Wall Street in 2007-2009.
But his support for bailing out big banks was controversial and many critics have accused him of doing too little for Main Street. In 2009, some lawmakers called for his resignation.
His spokeswoman said he had not started writing the book and will meet with publishers soon.
Any guess as to the size of his advance?
I’m guessing that it will be 7 figures.
Say what you will about the banksters, but they do tend to throw a few crumbs to their evil minions.
Jenny McCarthy has been has been dropped from a cancer fundraiser because of her anti-vaccine bullsh%$:
The Ottawa Cancer Foundation has reversed its decision to hire actress and model Jenny McCarthy to headline its one-day fitness fundraiser Bust A Move.
In a statement released late Friday afternoon, the foundation said McCarthy would be replaced by Canadian celebrity fitness instructor and former CFL player Tommy Europe.
The statement said that since the announcement of McCarthy’s appearance, “…attention has shifted away from breast cancer awareness and fundraising.”
On Tuesday, McCarthy was revealed as Bust A Move’s guest fitness instructor, which caused many to question why an organization supporting cancer research would invite someone with a history of promoting erroneous ideas about health and disease.
Despite reams of scientific research to the contrary, McCarthy writes and speaks publicly about the supposed link between child vaccination and autism. The former Playboy Playmate also blames her son’s autism on vaccinations.
Word of McCarthy’s appearance at a charity cancer event sparked a #dropjenny hashtag on Twitter, which generated many comments about whether the actress was a credible choice. Similar online debate occurred on Bust A Move’s Facebook page.
I’m not saying that Jenny McCarthy should not be able to work because of her beliefs, but allowing her to be a spokesperson for anything remotely medical is like having António Egas Moniz (the inventor of the prefrontal lobotomy) as a spokesman for psychological counseling.
This is why the Texas legislature took the power to select textbooks away from Texas Board of Education:
Much has changed since then. In 2011, the Texas Legislature shifted authority to order textbooks from the state to individual school districts with Senate Bill 6. The law deprived the board of its final say-so. Now, school districts have control over how they spend their almost $800 million on learning materials.
“It’s pretty clear that it reduces our authority in the sense that we’re not the only game in town,” board member Michael Soto, D-San Antonio told the Austin American-Statesman.
Filmmaker Scott Thurman describes it this way: Before, “the textbook publishers had to meet 100 percent of the TEKS [Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills standards]. In The Revisionaries, I follow the process of making those standards. Now, they only have to meet 50 percent of the standards…Textbook publishers have a little more wiggle room.”
He speculates that SB6 was passed because of the controversy the board raised in 2009 and 2010. “According to moderate members of the board, the far right didn’t like this at all. They wanted complete control. They wanted to lock in those standards and not allow textbook publishers to work around it.”
Yes, having a Board of Ed that is batsh%$ insane is a problem, particularly when, before the new law, they dictated text books for 5 million students in one fell swoop, which would lead text book publishers to make their books for everyone match the frequently nonsensical requirements of this body.
This is very good news for education in the US.
This explains why the media has largely ignored the revelation in the latest release of the Federal Reserve’s meeting minutes from 2007, which is that Timothy Geithner was leaking changes to the discount window to the big banks ahead of their official release:
In the summer of 2007, as storm clouds gathered over the world’s financial system, then-New York Federal Reserve President Timothy Geithner allegedly informed the Bank of America and other banks about the possibility the U.S. central bank would lower one of its critical interest rates, according to a senior Fed official.
Jeffrey Lacker, the head of the Richmond Fed, originally raised the allegation during a Fed conference call in August 2007, and he stuck to his 5-year-old claim against the current U.S. treasury secretary in a statement provided to Reuters on Friday.
“From conversations I had prior to the video conference call on August 16, 2007, I was aware of discussions among a few large banks about borrowing from their discount windows to support the asset backed commercial paper market,” Lacker said in the statement. “My understanding was that (New York Fed) President Geithner had discussed a reduction in the discount rate with these banks in connection with these initiatives.”
The folks at Zero Hedge were the first ones to notice this, and they nail it when they say, “[J]ust when we thought our opinion of the outgoing Treasury Secretary and former NY Fed head Tim Geithner, whose TurboTax incompetence is now legendary, couldn’t get lower, it got lower. Much lower.“
Here is the pertinent section from the transcript of the August 16, 2007 conference call:
MR. LACKER. If I could just follow up on that, Mr. Chairman.
CHAIRMAN BERNANKE. Yes, go ahead.
MR. LACKER. Vice Chairman Geithner, did you say that [the banks] are unaware of what we’re considering or what we might be doing with the discount rate?
VICE CHAIRMAN GEITHNER. Yes.
MR. LACKER. Vice Chairman Geithner, I spoke with Ken Lewis, President and CEO of Bank of America, this afternoon, and he said that he appreciated what Tim Geithner was arranging by way of changes in the discount facility. So my information is different from that.
CHAIRMAN BERNANKE. Okay. Thank you. Go ahead, Vice Chairman Geithner.
VICE CHAIRMAN GEITHNER. Well, I cannot speak for Ken Lewis, but I think they have sought to see whether they could understand a little more clearly the scope of their rights and our current policy with respect to the window. The only thing I’ve done is to try to help them understand—and I’m sure that’s been true across the System—what the scope of that is because these people generally don’t use the window and they don’t really understand in some sense what it’s about.
They also note that there was a sudden and unexplained jump of 50 points (4%) in the S&P 500 in just 1 hour. (Note that they also make a compelling circumstantial case that Geithner’s schedule indicates that he leaked this information)
BTW, as ZH also notes, the Fed’s 5 year delay in the release of records means that Geithner has outlasted the statute of limitations.
Awfully convenient, nu?
We won’t have a fix to our financial system until Geithner, and his mentor Robert Rubin are under criminal investigation for what they dud.
*Not my words, but a slight reworking of sentiments expressed by JR at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.
He talks about the chattering classes, and aptly titles it What Are The Gobshites Saying These Days?
Just go read it.
How is the world ruled and how do wars start?
Diplomats tell lies to journalists and then believe what they read.
—Karl Kraus
H/t A Tiny Revolution.
Karl Rove just got a 4 year contract extension from Fox News, despite his meltdown on election night 2012:
Politico reports that Fox News has extended Karl Rove’s contract through 2016. If the past is any indication, you can expect the network to continue to be used as a fundraising and publicity vehicle for Rove-affiliated outside groups, Republican Party propaganda masked as news analysis, and repeated failure to disclose Rove’sentangled interests.
Rove, the so-called “architect” of President Bush’s election wins, was hired as a Fox contributor in 2008.
During his appearances, Fox has frequently failed to inform its viewers that Rove is still an active participant in Republican Party politics — specifically the creation and operation of American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, his PAC and non-profit, respectively, that spent millions opposing Democrats in the 2010 and 2012 elections.
He called everything wrong, he pissed away millions of dollars given him by right-wing rich chumps, and he ……… gets his paid gig at Fox extended by 4 years.
I wish that I had a job where I could f%$# up this badly, and still get my lucrative contract renewed.
Say what you will about the VWRC (Vast Right Wing Conspiracy), but their pay and benefits are pretty damn good.
they just did an article about the advantages of state owned banks:
The American Great Plains are known for their expansive farm lands, endless horizons, and — in recent history — staunchly conservative politics. So it may come as a surprise that only state-owned bank in the U.S. (an institution more widely associated with communist China than the Republican Party) can be found in ruby-red, rural North Dakota.
That’s right, The Bank of North Dakota (BND) — the largest bank in the state by deposits — was founded by legislative mandate in 1919, and has been a mainstay of the North Dakotan economy since that time, mostly through partnering with community banks to provide loans for local businesses. And advocates of public banking are holding up the BND as an example of what government-owned banks can do for an economy.
………
Sure, there are many obstacles to launching publicly-owned financial institutions. Pulling state capital out of commercial institutions could prove to be disruptive to the current financial system. And proper controls need to be set up to avoid political considerations overwhelming proper analysis of lending opportunities. But North Dakota has avoided these pitfalls, and the NBD is an institution that has proven its ability to work alongside the private banking industry to help the state’s economy — one of the most successful in the nation in recent times — develop and grow.
The idea that this idea has gained enough currency to appear on the pages of Time Magazine is pretty remarkable.
Generally, the MSM will view something like North Dakota’s as an anachronism, or some sort of upper Midwest peculiarity, like something from the movie Fargo.
They are actually taking this seriously, and that’s a change.
And They Are So Dumb!
You remember how Dick “Army of Dicks” Armey spilled the beans on how he and the rest of FreedomWorks was basically grifting?
Well, it appears that he confused the conservative Media Research Center, and the liberal Media Matters when he spilled the beans:
There’s been a remarkable amount of drama surrounding Dick Armey’s departure from FreedomWorks, culminating Friday with a stunning report from Media Matters, who interviewed the former House Majority Leader directly. Armey had all kinds of interesting insights to share with the progressive group, including tidbits on pay-for-play agreements with Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, and the FreedomWorks’ practice of charging activists to attend free events.
Though many of Armey’s revelations should probably be taken with a grain of salt — the former GOP leader seemed confused about some of the details he shared — there was a larger question that puzzled nearly everyone: why in the world was Dick Armey dishing dirt to Media Matters?
The Daily Caller, a conservative outlet, tracked down the answer.Dick Armey had no idea he was speaking to the left-wing Media Matters organization during an interview last week, he told The Daily Caller Tuesday. Instead, Armey thought he was chatting with the conservative Media Research Center. […]
As for who he thought he was speaking to, Armey asked the Daily Caller, “Who’s the guy with the red beard that always does the show where he points out how biased the press is?” Told he seemed to be referring to the Media Research Center’s Brent Bozell, who does a weekly “Media Mash” segment on Fox News, Armey said, “Yeah, I thought it was Brent Bozell.”
As the saying goes, “ない愚かさはない薬です”.*
If these guys had half a brain, we’d be in trouble. Of course, if they had half a brain. they would not be movement conservatives.
H/t Crooks and Liars.
*Pronounced in Japanese, “baka ni tsukeru kusuri wanai”, which means, “There is no medicine for stupidity.” Apologies for any inaccuracies in the text, I do not know Japanese.