From MediaBistro:
Howard Stern to Hold Beauty Pageant for Tiger’s Mistresses
Got to hand it to Howard Stern. He sure knows how to milk a controversy like no one else.
This week, Stern announced plans to host a beauty contest for Tiger Woods‘ alleged mistresses with a grand prize of $100,000. According to The Times of Britain, contestants will face off against each other on March 10, in no less than three categories: “Swimsuit,” “Personality” and “Talent.”
From our Late to the Party desk:
Quote in Time magazine’s March 1, 2010 edition:
‘Our modest guide can point you on the road to good music.’
L’OSSERVATORE ROMANO, the Vatican’s official newspaper, naming its top 10 rock albums of all time, including Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon and the Beatles’ Revolver
(The Missus: “What? No ‘Stairway to Heaven’?”)
No.
The Papal Hit Parade (via The Guardian):
1. Revolver by the Beatles
2. If I Could Only Remember My Name by David Crosby
3. The Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd
4. Rumours by Fleetwood Mac
5. The Nightfly by Donald Fagen
6. Thriller by Michael Jackson
7. Graceland by Paul Simon
8. Achtung Baby by U2
9. (What’s the Story) Morning Glory by Oasis
10. Supernatural by Carlos Santana
You gotta admit: Supernatural is a natural.
Via AlterNet:
Heather Graham and MoveOn Team Up for Huge Push on Congress to Pass the Public Option
If you followed the cues sent by the White House, you’d think the public option was dead. But on the heels of polls showing strong public support for a government health care plan, activists are pushing back hard — and getting results.
Just days ahead of President Obama’s bipartisan health care summit, scheduled for Thursday, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee announced that it, together with CREDO Action and Democracy for America, has succeeded in getting the signatures of 120 House members and 23 senators on letters pledging their support for passing a public option through the reconciliation process, a parliamentary maneuver that cannot be blocked by a Senate filibuster. And MoveOn.org Political Action, declaring, “THE PUBLIC OPTION IS BACK,” released a new version of its ad featuring actress Heather Graham (of Austin Powers fame) personifying the public option in a race against older, unattractive and out-of-shape insurance company executives.
So exactly what constitutes a “huge push”?
Letters with 120 Congressional signatures, of course.
And, apparently, this YouTube video:
Plug “Heather Graham MoveOn” into the Googletron and you get a whopping 17 results. Samples here (HuffPo) and here (Mediaite) and here (The Atlantic).
But nowhere did the hardworking staff at Campaign Outsider find any reference to the ad’s actually running in the mainstream media – which is to say, running someplace it counts.
Do your damndest, Digerati. But this “huge push” is a huge load of crap.
The New York Times flat out stole this piece from its wholly owned subsidiary, the Boston Globe.
NYT, Tuesday edition:
To Impress, Tufts Prospects Turn to YouTube
MEDFORD, Mass. — There are videos showing off card tricks, horsemanship, jump rope and stencils — and lots of rap songs, including one by a young woman who performed two weeks after oral surgery, with her mouth still rubber-banded shut.
For the first time this year, Tufts University in Medford, Mass., invited aspiring students to submit short YouTube videos to supplement their applications. About 1,000 of the 15,000 applicants did so, and their videos range from slick to, well, earnest.(Here, browse a selection.)
A fresh pitch on ‘U’ TubeTufts, in a first, invited applicants to submit one-minute videos. A creative flood followed.
Add toe-sucking Dick Morris to the body count of Christy Mihos’s increasingly quixotic campaign for the Massachusetts GOP gubernatorial nomination.
From Tuesday’s Boston Globe:
National GOP political consultant Dick Morris, tapped by Republican Christy Mihos last year to guide his gubernatorial candidacy, has left the campaign, another sign of trouble for Mihos’s bid for his party’s nomination.
Morris, whose hiring Mihos trumpeted to donors and activists, told the Globe that he has not worked for Mihos for two months.
Maybe that’s because Mihos’s eyes are clearly bigger than his wallet.
According to the Globe piece, Mihos has already sunk $300,000 into his current campaign, after spending $4 million on his equally quizotic [sic] 2006 windmill-tilting run for the corner office, which bought him 7% of the vote.
This time around (paging Mrs. Christy Mihos), the pursestrings aren’t so loose.
Liberal advocacy group Americans United for Change spent a whopping $13,000 (reportedly) on a Boston-area television campaign aimed at pressuring Sen. Scott Brown (D-Scott Brown) into voting to end the GOP filibuster of Pres. Obama’s jobs bill.
The TV spot:
Here at the Global Worldwide Headquarters of Campaign Outsider the question du jour is: Just what did the Changeniks get for their 13 large?
Specifically:
1) How many Massachusetts voters actually did what the TV spot urged:
Call Senator Brown. Tell him: Keep your promise to stand with us and create jobs for Massachusetts.
2) Will we see Americans United for Change also run TV spots poking Brown when the jobs bill goes to the Senate floor for a final vote?
The hardworking staff is standing by, waiting for return phone calls from the Changeniks and the junior senator.
We’ll keep you posted.
Over at BU on Monday afternoon, Naval Commander Suzanne Lachelier delivered the annual Shapiro Lecture, titled “Ground Zero for Justice: Guantanamo Military Commissions and the Future of Our Legal Rights.”
From the BU School of Law description:
CDR Lachelier currently represents Ramzi bin al Shibh, one of the five men accused in the planning of the 9/11 attacks, and Ibrahim al Qosi, who faces charges on conspiracy and material support for terrorism. Both men are detained at Guantanamo Bay. Notably, CDR Lachelier petitioned for and won access to Guantanamo Bay’s Camp 7, the secret prison site where Ramzi bin al Shibh is held. She has worked as a defense counsel on active duty for nearly seven years.
CDR Lachelier turned out to be young, energetic, and passionate about defending the rights of anyone in – or potentially in – the crosshairs of the justice system.
But first, some handy statistics (compliments of CDR Lachelier):
Gitmo opened: January 11, 2002
Last known detainee arrival: March 14, 2008
Current population of Gitmo: 195 (roughly)
Adjudicated military commission cases in 8+ years: Three
Pending military commission cases: Four
CDR Lachelier described defending Gitmo detainees as an Alice in Wonderland experience. During her lecture she implied but never said outright:
• That the Department of Justice and the Pentagon are obstructionist in the extreme;
• That the conditions at Gitmo’s “Camp 7” are classified for a reason;
• That the rules of the legal game are entirely rigged, with even the federal government’s concessions to the Constitution containing poison pills;
• That everything that has transpired in the legal tug-of-war points to the justice system’s having an overt intention of keeping Gitmo going.
CDR Lachelier ended with these two cautionary notes:
1) Executive power in government is out of whack
2) Words (“Camp Justice,” “Camp America,” etc.) and symbols (the American flag, for instance) don’t belong to any particular branch of government
So much for the Shapiro Lecture.
For an alternative view, see “The Real Gitmo” in the Weekly Standard from several months ago.
Sample text (re: Camp 7):
I never do get to see Camp 7. The military personnel who escort me around the island all insist that they do not know where it is located. I believe them–that is just how secure Camp 7 is.
The bigger issue is: Do you believe them?
In the wake of the legendary No Storm of 2010 several weeks ago, there’s been a flurry (sorry) of newspaper stories about two topics:
1) What a bunch of weather wimps New Englanders have become (see Boston Globe Irish Mafia here and here)
2) What a proud S’no Problem Nation we were during the legendary Blizzard of ’78 (see here and – Weekly Standard Alert! – here)
O tempora! O s’nowres!
Very interesting “Who’s Afraid of New Media?” symposium at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts on Sunday.
It was all about the influence of new media in the fine arts, something that dates back to 1425 according to kickoff speaker George Fifeld, an independent curator and founding director of the Boston Cyberarts Festival.
Fifeld traced new media in art back to the introduction of perspective in painting, specifically Tommaso Guidi Masaccio’s The Holy Trinity with the Virgin and St. John:
Next stop: Nam Jun Paik’s Exposition of Music – Electronic Television, circa 1963.
Fast-forward to: My boyfriend came back from the war. After dinner they left us alone, an early-’90s site on the World Wide Web’s first browser, Mosaic.
Wendy Richmond and Anne Morgan Spalter also presented, as did Georgie Friedman and Mark Tribe.
A splendid time was had by all roughly 60 people who attended.
The hardworking staff at Campaign Outsider isn’t on this earth long enough to read more than two articles about Friday’s Tigerpalooza.
But we did happen to catch a couple of pieces in the weekend Wall Street Journal.
The first piece was a basic recap of the Woodsman’s mea culpresser, complete with this handy chart:
Handy, yes?
The second piece was a flat out hoot from WSJ sports gadfly Jason Gay.
A taste:
What a predictably ridiculous scene Friday morning in Ponte Vedra Beach in Florida. Mr. Woods surfaced right after 11 a.m. Eastern Standard Time—a time when we’re usually tucking into an hour of Dr. Oz and a box of Dove bars—to stand before a velvety blue curtain seemingly purchased off Craigslist from Conan O’Brien. He wore a dark blazer, a light blue shirt with a spread collar, and, for the first time in his adult life, no corporate logos. Wake up, Nike. Your swoosh should have owned that collar.
As every mortal knows, when you dress in a dark blazer, a light blue shirt and gray slacks, it can mean only one of two things. The most likely possibility, of course, is that you’re about to umpire the National League Championship Series. The second possibility? You’re about to humbly look in a camera and seek the public’s forgiveness.
So far, it seems Tiger’s not getting it.
In any number of ways.
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