Tag: Journalism

Someone is SO Getting Fired

The New York Times published a rather ordinary article about how various space launcher firms are trying to appeal to the hyper-rich.

What you may not notice if you click to go to the story is what the original URL is: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/09/style/pigs-in-spaaaaaace.html though it now redirects to https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/09/style/axiom-space-travel.html.

I prefer the first url, since this is clearly a “Rich Pig” story, even if the author played is straight.

Kudos to whoever got this on the Times web site, if only for a few hours.

H/t Naked Capitalism for finding this bit of IT mischief.

If Arkady Babchenko Walks Outside, and Sees His Shadow, It Means 6 More Weeks of Winter


Roll Tape

This just in, Arkady Babchenko is still alive:

The assassination bore all the hallmarks of yet another contract killing carried out in the murky shadows of the conflict pitting Russia against Ukraine.

A photo of the victim, a dissident Russian journalist, showed him lying face down Tuesday in a vermilion pool of his own blood. He was found by his wife, and died on the way to a hospital from multiple gunshot wounds to the back, said the police in Kiev, Ukraine’s capital.

Then on Wednesday, the journalist, Arkady Babchenko, to all appearances very much alive, walked into a news conference that Ukrainian security officials had called to discuss his “murder.”

………

The staged death, said Vasily S. Gritsak, the head of the Ukraine Security Service, was a sting operation aimed at stopping a real assassination plot against Mr. Babchenko. It was the latest twist — if an especially bizarre one — in the tortured relations between Ukraine and Russia, which annexed the Crimean Peninsula in 2014 and is fueling a separatist war in eastern Ukraine.

Ukraine and Russia constantly lob charges and countercharges accusing each other of various forms of skulduggery. And they often accuse each other of fabricating claims. The announcement by the Ukrainian authorities that they had, in fact, made up the Babchenko killing offered the Russians a rare chance to claim the high ground. Russia’s Foreign Ministry issued a blistering statement, saying Ukraine would be better off solving real crimes, like the killing of two journalists in Kiev in 2015 and 2016.

“Matters of life and death in Ukraine, as well as trust of the international community to its policy, are nothing more than a bargaining chip used to fuel the anti-Russian hysteria of the Kiev regime,” the Russian statement said.

Both the story of Mr. Babchenko’s death and that of his resurrection garnered enormous attention around the world.

Various voices, especially from the world of journalism, called the ploy a bad idea in an era when battling fake news has become a daily problem — and when real news is dismissed as fake news whenever politicians from Washington to the Kremlin find it in their interest to do so.

I am not entirely clear of how this all works, but it appears that reports of his death were greatly exaggerated.

Good Point

The good folks at FAIR note, and disapprove of the fact that when white people engage in racist behavior, the press does their level best to maintain their anonymity:

The presumption of innocence is supposed to protect those accused of a crime, in law and in the press. In corporate media, that rule also seems to apply to white people who report people of color to the police for doing innocuous things. As FAIR found, their identities are far more closely protected than those of people falsely targeted for “suspicious” behavior.

In the past few weeks, major news media have been flooded with coverage of incidents of alleged racial profiling and implicit bias—from golfers reported to police for playing “too slowly,” to picnickers fingered for using the wrong type of grill at a park. This coverage was prompted by viral videos and other social media posts released by the accused or by concerned bystanders, in real time or soon after these events occurred. The characters in these stories had one thing in common: The callers and officers involved were white; the alleged offenders, black or brown.

In a survey of coverage of four recent racial profiling cases, FAIR examined articles or segments in the New York Times, Washington Post and USA Today; on NPR, CNN, Fox, and the CBS, NBC and ABC evening news; as well as in major papers in the region where the incidents occurred.

These stories, while similar in content (often using the same quotes or incorporating Associated Press reports), didn’t lack for details. Those accused, police, witnesses, and corporate and institutional leaders were interviewed. Multimedia elements were included, such as smartphone, regular, and police body cam videos, audio from 9/11 calls, police reports and screen captures of social media posts.

But almost across the board, while the accused’s names and personal details have been made public, the accusers remain unnamed. Though equally newsworthy, they were allowed to retain their anonymity.

It took a while for the racist Starbucks manager, or the racist Yale grad student, or the woman who called the police on black people barbecuing in the park, to be revealed, and the information was crowd sourced, and on Twitter, before the major news organizations deigned to publish this information.

For other news stories, the identity of the malefactor would be in the first two paragraphs of the story, but there seems to an editorial omerta as regards wypipo behaving badly.

Like Lord of the Flies, on Acid

In appears that in response to the widening miasma of corruption surrounding EPA chief Scott Pruitt, he has directed his staff to start leaking damaging information on Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke:

As Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt faces a seemingly endless stream of scandal, his team is scrambling to divert the spotlight to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. And the White House isn’t happy about it.

In the last week, a member of Pruitt’s press team, Michael Abboud, has been shopping negative stories about Zinke to multiple outlets, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the efforts, as well as correspondence reviewed by The Atlantic.

“This did not happen, and it’s categorically false,” EPA spokesman Jahan Wilcox said.

The stories were shopped with the intention of “taking the heat off of Pruitt,” the sources said, in the aftermath of the EPA chief’s punishing congressional hearing last week. They both added, however, that most reporters felt the story was not solid enough to run. On Thursday, Patrick Howley of Big League Politics published a piece on the allegations; he did not respond to request for comment as to his sources.

Abboud alleged to reporters that an Interior staffer conspired with former EPA deputy chief of staff Kevin Chmielewski to leak damaging information about the EPA, as part of a rivalry between Zinke and Pruitt. The collaboration, Abboud claimed, allowed the Interior staffer to prop up Zinke at the expense of Pruitt, and Chmielewski to “get back” at his former boss.

Not a surprise.  Both Pruitt and Zinke have little interest in the underlying purpose of their jobs, or their agencies, and as such, it’s all about that old career ladder.

Squirrel!!!!!!!!

It appears that in their quest to hide the fact that the incompetents who lost to a human inverted traffic cone still work there, the DCCC has filed suit against Russia and WikiLeaks for exposing their actual internal discussions to the public.

I can’t imagine that a judge won’t dismiss this before the ink is dry, because publishing information that your target does not want published is the very epitome of journalism.

That being said, if it DOES go to trial, WikiLeaks, and Russia, get to do discovery, which means putting people like Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, John Podesta, Donna Brazile, etc. under oath and asking them questions. This will not end well:

The Democratic National Committee filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit Friday against the Russian government, the Trump campaign and the WikiLeaks organization alleging a far-reaching conspiracy to disrupt the 2016 campaign and tilt the election to Donald Trump.

The complaint, filed in federal district court in Manhattan, alleges that top Trump campaign officials conspired with the Russian government and its military spy agency to hurt Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and help Trump by hacking the computer networks of the Democratic Party and disseminating stolen material found there.

“During the 2016 presidential campaign, Russia launched an all-out assault on our democracy, and it found a willing and active partner in Donald Trump’s campaign,” DNC Chairman Tom Perez said in a statement.

“This constituted an act of unprecedented treachery: the campaign of a nominee for President of the United States in league with a hostile foreign power to bolster its own chance to win the presidency,” he said.

The case asserts that the Russian hacking campaign — combined with Trump associates’ contacts with Russia and the campaign’s public cheerleading of the hacks — amounted to an illegal conspiracy to interfere in the election that caused serious damage to the Democratic Party.

Props to keeping the Congressional Democrats in the dark about this until the last minute.

Instead of hunting Russian spies, which I have been told is a difficult thing, how about searching for incompetents in the organization, and looters among your consultants and contractors.

It’s an easier job, with a much larger payoff.

Yes, It Has Been a Strange Year, and It’s not Yet May

.@jaketapper: The judge forced Michael Cohen to admit in court he has a third client. And the third client is Sean Hannity.

Go home 2018, you’re drunk. https://t.co/7McUZSjki8 pic.twitter.com/rXkx91hxCI

— The Lead CNN (@TheLeadCNN) April 16, 2018

2018 isn’t just drunk.

2018 is locked in a closet, wearing two wet suits, hogtied, with a dildo up its ass. (What I am referring to)

We are living in the Chinese curse of interesting times. (Yes, I know it apocryphal, but give me this one)

There is Nothing that High Finance Cannot Ruin


Who has been let go since 2013

Though it should be noted that destroying a newspaper is not one of the more difficult failures out there:

Demoralized by rounds of job cuts, journalists at San Jose’s Mercury News and East Bay Times in Oakland, Calif., took their case to the public last month. At a rally in Oakland, they handed out a fact sheet detailing the “pillaging” of their papers, accompanied by a cartoon of a business executive trying to milk an emaciated cow.

“Dude! I’d produce more milk if you fed me!” read the caption.

The drawing was a barely veiled swipe at the newspapers’ majority owner, a little-known hedge fund called Alden Global Capital.

Headquartered in New York with investment funds domiciled in the tax-lenient Cayman Islands and a clientele that is mostly foreign, Alden has been investing in American newspapers since 2009. Through its majority control of a management company called Digital First Media, Alden owns nearly 100 daily and weekly papers, including such big-city dailies as the Mercury News, the Denver Post and the St. Paul Pioneer Press. The company’s holdings are notably concentrated in California, where it effectively owns every major newspaper around Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area with the exception of the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle.

………

In an extraordinary rebellion last Sunday, the Denver Post devoted its editorial pages to series of commentaries about its parent company’s practices. “Denver deserves a newspaper owner who supports its newsroom,” the paper’s lead editorial said. “If Alden isn’t willing to do good journalism here, it should sell the Post to owners who will.”

………

Two things about the newspapers Alden owns are clear: They’re profitable, and they’ve been hit with far steeper cutbacks than other newspapers.

In a memo to employees last summer, then-chief executive Steve Rossi said the company was “solidly profitable” in fiscal 2017, and that its “performance in advertising revenue has been significantly better than that of our publicly traded industry peers over the past couple of years.”

………

Alden’s alleged practice of diverting resources from its newspapers is detailed in a lawsuit filed last month by another hedge fund, Solus Alternative Asset Management, which owns a minority stake in Digital First Media.

It is increasingly clear that the financial industry is primarily a parasitic activity.

When they aren’t looting, they are scamming their clients.

Quote of the Day

It is not the story of men and women who have a better and deeper understanding of the world than we do. In fact in many cases it is the story of weirdos who have created a completely mad version of the world that they then impose on the rest of us.

Adam Curtis on the fact that journalism on intelligence has been getting it wrong for decades.

This is undoubtedly true.

Whether Allen Dulles or Lavrentiy Beria, what has characterized the the minds of spies is their perverse view of the world.

Live in Obedient Fear Citizen

It looks like the Orwellian named Department of Homeland Security is compiling a database of media and “Media Influencers”, which has civil libertarians concerned.

This seems to be rather more extensive that a typical clipping service, which would make copies fof articles about an organization and file them, in the days or yore:

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security wants to monitor hundreds of thousands of news sources around the world and compile a database of journalists, editors, foreign correspondents, and bloggers to identify top “media influencers.”

It’s seeking a contractor that can help it monitor traditional news sources as well as social media and identify “any and all” coverage related to the agency or a particular event, according to a request for information released April 3.

The data to be collected includes a publication’s “sentiment” as well as geographical spread, top posters, languages, momentum, and circulation. No value for the contract was disclosed.

………

The DHS wants to track more than 290,000 global news sources, including online, print, broadcast, cable, and radio, as well as trade and industry publications, local, national and international outlets, and social media, according to the documents. It also wants the ability to track media coverage in more than 100 languages including Arabic, Chinese, and Russian, with instant translation of articles into English.

………

The DHS request says the selected vendor will set up an online “media influence database” giving users the ability to browse based on location, beat, and type of influence. For each influencer found, “present contact details and any other information that could be relevant, including publications this influencer writes for, and an overview of the previous coverage published by the media influencer.”

Why does the Department of Homeland Security always make me feel less secure?

Ronan Farrow Has Found His Journalistic Niche

Specifically, Farrow completely owns the “Powerful men behaving badly toward women,” space:

In June, 2006, Donald Trump taped an episode of his reality-television show, “The Apprentice,” at the Playboy Mansion, in Los Angeles. Hugh Hefner, Playboy’s publisher, threw a pool party for the show’s contestants with dozens of current and former Playmates, including Karen McDougal, a slim brunette who had been named Playmate of the Year, eight years earlier. In 2001, the magazine’s readers voted her runner-up for “Playmate of the ’90s,” behind Pamela Anderson. At the time of the party, Trump had been married to the Slovenian model Melania Knauss for less than two years; their son, Barron, was a few months old. Trump seemed uninhibited by his new family obligations. McDougal later wrote that Trump “immediately took a liking to me, kept talking to me – telling me how beautiful I was, etc. It was so obvious that a Playmate Promotions exec said, ‘Wow, he was all over you – I think you could be his next wife.’ ”

Trump and McDougal began an affair, which McDougal later memorialized in an eight-page, handwritten document provided to The New Yorker by John Crawford, a friend of McDougal’s. When I showed McDougal the document, she expressed surprise that I had obtained it but confirmed that the handwriting was her own. 

I didn’t care about this crap when Bill Clinton did it, and I don’t care about it now.

The problem is not that Donald Trump f%$#ed Karen McDougal, it’s that he f%$#ed the rest of us.

A Good Surprise

The staff of the Los Angeles Times has overwhelmingly voted to unionized:

The Los Angeles Times’ editorial staff voted to unionize in a rebuke to owner Tronc Inc. that marks a new era in the newspaper’s 136-year history.

The employees’ union, NewsGuild, won the vote by a margin of more than 5-to-1, organizer Nastaran Mohit said Friday. The guild is an affiliate of the Communications Workers of America union, which has been organizing at the Times since late 2016.

Perhaps the fact that overpaid senior executives in the organization are being investigated for misconduct, while the news room has been gutted, has something to do with the lopsided vote:

The company also said Friday that Ross Levinsohn, the L.A. Times’ publisher, is taking a voluntary unpaid leave while the company looks into allegations of misconduct.

The vote heralds the beginning of a bargaining process that’s sure to prove contentious. Like the rest of the industry, the L.A. Times has been in almost constant turmoil in recent years, amid dwindling readership, falling advertising revenue, editorial shakeups and, most recently, the allegations against its publisher. Meanwhile, the company that eventually became Tronc has lurched from bankruptcy to a spinoff to a change in ownership and, finally, a new name in under a decade.

………

“There was a time, way back when, when a guild couldn’t make headway in the newsroom, because the people were treated very well,” Paul Pringle, an investigative reporter who helped spearhead the drive, said in an interview before the vote. “Those days are over.”

Increasingly, newspapers are run by people who do not believe in newspapers, and because of this, their business model is to extract as much money as possible by making its employees lives a living hell.

Unionization is a logical response to this.

Nice Response

Recently, the Washington Post had a “major” expose revealing that one “Alice Donovan” was a Russian plant feeding to the online publication CounterPunch, and some other largely unnamed publications.

Strongly implied in the Post story is that CounterPunch was a willing tool of the Russian state security apparatus.

After being fielding inquiries from the Post, CounterPunch decided to look at her work for them.

What they determined is that the reality, for them at least, was pretty anodyne:

  • They published one of her articles in 2016, and that was a generic article on cyber-warfare, which had first been published in Veterans Today. (Dead link)
  • In 2017, after the elections they published 3 generically left leaning stories on Syria which they published, one supporting Maduro in Venezuela, and a commentary condemning Erdoğan, which they chose not to run. 
  • “Alice Donovan” was a serial plagiarizer, which they should have picked up on.

Their conclusion is pretty spot on:

In sum, we published five stories by Donovan. One was apolitical. Four could be considered critiques of US foreign policy during the Trump administration. None mentioned Hillary Clinton (or Vladimir Putin for that matter).

Based solely on what we’d just reviewed was there any reason at the time to suspect that Alice Donovan was anything other than what she appeared to be: an occasional contributor of topical stories? Not as far as we could tell. The stories weren’t pro-Russian polemics and they didn’t read like awkward Google-translations of the Russian language. The most controversial thing that could be said about them was that some stories attempted to present a particular Syrian view of the war, a perspective rarely heard in the US media.

………

None of this, however, is an exculpation for our own blunders. Somewhere along the line we blew it. We let a plagiarist and a possible troll onto CounterPunch. Were there warning signs that we missed? Sure. Should we have been alert to the awkward phrases in some of the articles on Syria that didn’t read like the original Donovan piece? No doubt. But recall that we had published more than 5,000 articles between the first and second Donovan stories. We should have picked up on the lifted passages in the “Escalation in Syria” story because there was a link that took us directly to the piece that was plagiarized. We should have become suspicious about Donovan after the New York Times story ran in September. Those are on us.

I agree with that conclusion: they need to drop some coin on editors, because her plagiarism, and by that I mean straight cut and paste, should have been easy to spot after a few submissions.

They need some copy editors.

As to the Post, if this does seem to be making a mountain out of a molehill.

The final word goes to CounterPunch though, “If Donovan’s intent was to destroy ‘our democratic values’ by committing crimes against journalism, she’ll need to swing a lot harder to surpass the damage done by Judith Miller.”

Lame Politician of the Day, The Death of Hashtag Metoo Edition

It appears that Susan Collins’ response to the fact that her so-called deal over the tax plan is a fraud is to accuse reporters of sexism:

Quite a moment just now. We asked Susan Collins about House Republicans vowing not to pass the provisions McConnell promised her to win her tax vote. She stared for several seconds and said she thought the press's coverage of the tax bill has been extremely sexist.

— Paul McLeod (@pdmcleod) December 19, 2017

Oh, you delicate snowflake………

I am a Complete Whore, So Where is My Money

It appears that it is a not uncommon practice for brands to buy coverage on blogs.

Despite my solicitations for such filthy capitalist lucre on the front page of my blog, (right hand column toward the bottom) I have not received any offers:

Please, send me free stuff, and I will consider doing a review.

I am a complete whore, so assume that any review is the result of free stuff, and/or under the table payments.

I will do my level best to reveal such conflicts when I remember to.

I am feeling very neglected right now.

It’s Called Control Fraud. It Can Also Be Called Looting.

The LA Times guild, who is trying to unionize the newspaper, details how much senior executives at TRONC (formerly Tribune Publishing) are overpaying themselves while starving the business:

It’s a question we hear often: How would Tronc pay for the raises and improved benefits we’ll pursue through our union?

Well, the answer is that a great deal of money continues to flow into The Times, because of the high-quality journalism our newsroom produces every day. At a recent all-hands meeting, Ross Levinsohn said Tronc still earns $1.5 billion in annual revenue and remains profitable.

The problem is that a disproportionate amount of those profits are lavished on the salaries and perks for Levinsohn and a handful of other richly compensated Tronc executives.

The Columbia Journalism Review noted Monday that executive compensation at Tronc shot up 80% last year — a nearly $9 million jump over 2015. That squares with the findings below from a NewsGuild analysis of Tronc’s SEC filings.

………

Michael Ferro’s private jet alone costs the company millions. From February 2016 through September of this year, Tronc spent $4.6 million to sublease and operate the sleek Bombardier aircraft, which costs $8,500 an hour to fly. The kicker? Tronc subleases the jet from Merrick Ventures, one of Ferro’s companies.

………

Last year, Tronc CEO Justin Dearborn made an eye-popping $8.1 million in total compensation. He made substantially more than his counterparts at The New York Times Co., Gannett Corp., Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal and McClatchy, among others. In fact, Dearborn’s compensation was $3 million more than that of New York Times CEO Mark Thompson, whose company has revenues similar to ours but a market value many multiples of Tronc’s. Plus, Thompson took a pay cut in 2016 because he did not meet his performance goals.

………

………
If executives were paid more in line with their industry peers, the savings alone would finance thousands of dollars in annual raises, lower out-of pocket healthcare costs, accrued vacation (that was taken away unilaterally), and perhaps even lower parking fees. In fact, if Dearborn last year had made the same as his New York Times counterpart – a “mere” $5 million – the $3 million in savings could provide a raise of about $8,000 to everyone in our Guild bargaining unit.

Given the performance of the company, these guys may be the most overpaid senior executives in media, including Harvey Weinstein.

The Evil James O’Keeve Is at It Again

This is Not Star Trek. In Startrek, the Evil Spock has a goatee. In our world the evil James O’Keefe is clean shaven, and the good one, a cat-herder for the Massachusetts Pirate Party, has a goatee.

Please note that there are two James O’Keefes, 

This time, he unsuccessfully tried to plant a false story with the Washington Post:

A woman who falsely claimed to The Washington Post that Roy Moore, the Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Alabama, impregnated her as a teenager appears to work with an organization that uses deceptive tactics to secretly record conversations in an effort to embarrass its targets.

In a series of interviews over two weeks, the woman shared a dramatic story about an alleged sexual relationship with Moore in 1992 that led to an abortion when she was 15. During the interviews, she repeatedly pressed Post reporters to give their opinions on the effects that her claims could have on Moore’s candidacy if she went public.

The Post did not publish an article based on her unsubstantiated account. When Post reporters confronted her with inconsistencies in her story and an Internet posting that raised doubts about her motivations, she insisted that she was not working with any organization that targets journalists.

But on Monday morning, Post reporters saw her walking into the New York offices of Project Veritas, an organization that targets the mainstream news media and left-leaning groups. The organization sets up undercover “stings” that involve using false cover stories and covert video recordings meant to expose what the group says is media bias.

James O’Keefe, the Project Veritas founder who was convicted of a misdemeanor in 2010 for using a fake identity to enter a federal building during a previous sting, declined to answer questions about the woman outside the organization’s offices on Monday morning shortly after the woman walked inside.

“I am not doing an interview right now, so I’m not going to say a word,” O’Keefe said.

In a follow-up interview, O’Keefe declined to answer repeated questions about whether the woman was employed at Project Veritas. He also did not respond when asked if he was working with Moore, former White House adviser and Moore supporter Stephen K. Bannon, or Republican strategists.

The group’s efforts illustrate the lengths to which activists have gone to try to discredit media outlets for reporting on allegations from multiple women that Moore pursued them when they were teenagers and he was in his early 30s. Moore has denied that he did anything improper.

A spokesman for Moore’s campaign did not respond to a message seeking comment.

The woman who approached Post reporters, Jaime T. Phillips, did not respond to calls to her cellphone later Monday. Her car remained in the Project Veritas parking lot for more than an hour.

The Post positioned videographers outside the group’s office in Mamaroneck, N.Y, after determining that Phillips lives in Stamford, Conn., and realizing that the two locations were just 16 miles apart. Two reporters followed her from her home as she drove to the office.

After Phillips was observed entering the Project Veritas office, The Post made the unusual decision to report her previous off-the-record comments.

“We always honor ‘off-the-record’ agreements when they’re entered into in good faith,” said Martin Baron, The Post’s executive editor. “But this so-called off-the-record conversation was the essence of a scheme to deceive and embarrass us. The intent by Project Veritas clearly was to publicize the conversation if we fell for the trap. Because of our customary journalistic rigor, we weren’t fooled, and we can’t honor an ‘off-the-record’ agreement that was solicited in maliciously bad faith.”

Your Kung Fu is weak, old man.

Get a real job Mr. O’Keefe. 

I would suggest a night watchman, a lighthouse keeper, or the Taliban.

You really need to separate yourself from civilized society.

F%$# the Mouse

The LA Times published an article describing how much corporate welfare Disney Land is extracting from the city of Anaheim.

The mouse didn’t like this, so they banned LA Times movie reviewers from advance showings of their movies, including things like Marvel and Star Wars movies.

In response many critics from other papers have announced that they will not be participating in advance showings, and a number of critics groups have barred all Disney movies from consideration at their year end awards.

If this were about an Times critic violating an embargo date, I could see some justification, but this is just thuggery.

BTW, Disney just caved.

Good, but someone at the movie studio needs to be fired.

Tweet(s) of the Day

They both have to do with Russia, and the current hysteria that posits that $100,000 in ads on Facebook somehow trumped the $1,000,000,000 that the Clinton campaign spent.

The first is about bus kiosk ads from RT:

While everyone freaks out about Russian ads, RT takes out more Russian ads pic.twitter.com/Z5eW8GS6pg

— Jane Lytvynenko (@JaneLytv) October 10, 2017

The second one, from the Russian ambassador to the UK, hits the British where it hurts, their 52 year drought in the World Cup:

A football team would be a better option pic.twitter.com/4Psj4ZkGy5

— Russian Embassy, UK (@RussianEmbassy) October 10, 2017

Dayyymmmm! That one is going to leave a mark.

H/t Naked Capitalism.