'Best of TBH Politoons'
Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Susan Feiner and Drucilla Barker: Microcredit? Spare Us the Praise for a Panacea (womensenews.org)
Does the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the Grameen Bank add credence to the neo-liberal myth of individuals escaping poverty merely through their own hard work? Yes. Do these programs help some women pull themselves up by their bootstraps? Yes. Will micro-enterprises do much to end widespread poverty among the world's poorest women? Not a chance.
Eric Bangeman: The Daily Show is as substantive as the "real" news (arstechnica.com)
The Daily Show is much funnier than traditional newscasts, but a new study from Indiana University says it has the same amount of meat on its bones when it comes to coverage of the news. The brand of news coverage Jon Stewart and the rest of The Daily Show's staff brings to the airwaves is just as substantive as traditional news programs like World News Tonight and the CBS Evening News, according to the study conducted by IU assistant professor of telecommunications Julia R. Fox and a couple of graduate students.
Sidney Blumenthal: All roads lead to Rove (salon.com)
"... across the nation from 2001 through 2006 the Bush Justice Department investigated Democratic office holders and candidates at a rate more than four times greater (nearly 80 percent to 18 percent) than they investigated Republican office holders and seekers." They also report, "Data indicate that the offices of the U.S. Attorneys across the nation investigate seven times as many Democratic officials as they investigate Republican officials ..."
Steven Pearlstein: 'No Money Down' Falls Flat (washingtonpost.com)
Today's pop quiz involves some potentially exciting new products that mortgage bankers have come up with to make homeownership a reality for cash-strapped first-time buyers.
Mark Morford: Can George W. Bush Be Purged? (sfgate.com)
Mayan priests purified their sacred land after Shrub scurried off. Can we do the same?
Paul Krugman: Overblown Personnel Matters
Nobody is surprised to learn that the Justice Department was lying when it claimed that recently fired federal prosecutors were dismissed for poor performance. Nor is anyone surprised to learn that White House political operatives were pulling the strings.
HAL CROWTHER: That's all she wrote: Remembering Molly Ivins (indyweek.com)
At the end of the film Venus, which stars Peter O'Toole as a decrepit actor holding off his final curtain, Vanessa Redgrave delivers a bleak line: "When you die, everyone wants to be your friend." Though I knew Molly Ivins forever-since the Kennedy administration-I would never claim that I knew her well. If I implied any special relationship, I'm sure that Molly, listening somewhere, would roll her eyes toward the heavens in one of those gestures of wry exasperation that all of us who knew her scrambled to avoid.
Garrison Keillor: A Tribute to Molly Ivins (texasobserver.org)
Molly said once that there are two kinds of humor-the affectionate kind that makes people chuckle (that's me) and the slashing satire that makes people sit up and take notice (that's her)-and maybe so, but oh she gave pleasure and love to her friends. God bless her memory.
Rotten Tomatoes: The Best User-Rated Film of 2006
"The Departed" is a thoroughly engrossing gangster drama with the gritty authenticity and soupy morality that has infused director Martin Scorceses past triumphs. Featuring outstanding work from an excellent cast that includes Jack Nicholson, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Matt Damon, some critics say the film even tops its source material (the Hong Kong thriller "Infernal Affairs").
Rotten Tomatoes: The Worst of the Worst
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Another foggy night, followed by a sunny, breezy, cool day.
Recalled dog foods
Recalled cat foods
Joins War Protest
Pedro Almodovar
Spanish film director Pedro Almodovar joined tens of thousands of people in a march through the Spanish capital on Saturday to protest the war in Iraq and to demand the closure of the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Chanting "No to War" and "The People of Madrid with the People of Iraq," the protesters marched along a 2 1/2-mile route from central Cibeles Plaza to Atocha Square. Organizers estimated the crowd at 400,000, but eyewitnesses put the attendance at less 100,000. Police did not give an estimate.
Almodovar told the private Europa Press news agency he was protesting "the barbarities they have been committing in Iraq for the past four years."
"We're here for peace and for the closure of Guantanamo because it is a disgrace for civilization," he added.
Pedro Almodovar
Starts Record Company
Willie Nelson
He has a seemingly endless playlist, his own brand of alternative fuel and a country club.
Now Willie Nelson has something else: his own record company. The country singer announced Friday during the South by Southwest Music Festival that he has formed Pedernales Records to nurture new talent. The first act on Nelson's label will be the band 40 Points, featuring his sons, guitarist/singer Lukas Nelson and drummer Micah Nelson.
Pedernales Records is named for the river that flows by Nelson's home outside Austin, where he also owns Pedernales Country Club and founded Pedernales Studios, now owned by his nephew Freddy Fletcher.
Partnering with Nelson in the Austin-based venture are his longtime manager Mark Rothbaum, Fletcher and producer James Stroud, who has worked with Toby Keith, Neil Diamond, Hank Williams Jr. and the Neville Brothers.
Willie Nelson
Horror Writer's Secret
Joe Hill
Joe Hill knew it was only a matter of time before one of the publishing industry's hottest little secrets became common knowledge. He just wished he could have kept it under wraps a bit longer.
But when Hill's fantasy-tinged thriller, "Heart-Shaped Box," came out last month, it was inevitable that his thoroughbred blood lines as a writer of horror and the supernatural would be out there for all to see.
After 10 years of writing short stories and an unpublished novel under his pen name, Hill knows that the world is now viewing him through a different prism - as the older son of Stephen King.
Hill, 34, took on his secret identity to test his writing skills and marketability without having to trade on the family name.
Joe Hill
Dutch Author Finds Lost Novel
Hella Haasse
Hella Haasse's "Sterrenjacht" ("Hunt for the Stars") was published as a serial in a newspaper in 1950, but the manuscript was lost.
"I have this incredible pile of paper at home -- and by chance I came across a stack of yellowed newspaper," the 89-year-old Dutch novelist told Saturday's edition of the newspaper De Stentor.
She showed the work to her editor as a joke, but the company decided to publish it. It will be released in June.
Haasse has published more than 50 books and won numerous literary prizes. She had her breakthrough in 1948 with the novel "Oeroeg", translated into English as "Forever a stranger".
Hella Haasse
1,423 Returned To Kabul
Afghan Artifacts
More than 1,400 artifacts - protected from looters and the Taliban since 1999 at a museum-in-exile in Switzerland - were returned to the National Museum of Afghanistan on Saturday.
The collection, which includes a piece from a foundation stone that was "touched by Alexander the Great" and several items thousands of years old, was assembled in Switzerland by Afghans who wanted to save their cultural heritage after decades of war.
A shipping container holding the collection arrived Friday in Kabul and was opened at the National Museum on Saturday.
Afghan Artifacts
New York Artists Sue NBC
'Heroes'
Two artists sued NBC Universal and the creators of the network's superhero drama "Heroes" in U.S. district court this week, claiming their work had been wrongfully copied on the television show.
New York-based artists Clifton Mallery and his wife Amnau Karam Eele charged in a suit filed on Thursday in Manhattan that "Heroes" creators based their plot line -- about an artist who can paint the future -- on a short story, a painting series and a short film the couple exhibited in 2004 and 2005.
The artists said in the lawsuit that two people who identified themselves as writers from NBC's "Crossing Jordan," which also developed by "Heroes" creator and executive producer Tim Kring, attended an April 2005 exhibition of their work at Hunter College in New York City. The two were believed to have taken copies of the couple's work, the lawsuit said.
The artists said their work focused on an artist who paints the future and who specifically paints the destruction of two landmark buildings in New York City. They alleged this was "strikingly similar" to the character of Isaac Mendez on "Heroes," whose paintings of the future depict an explosion in New York City.
'Heroes'
Here Be Dragons
Nikolas Schiller
He is sly, this rebel cartographer. He makes maps that look like quilts, masks, feathers, acid trips. You can find America in these maps -- you can probably find your house in these maps -- if you can find the maps at all, since their creator has posted them to an online underground.
Nikolas Schiller, 26, is the god of this alternative reality. Making maps at a frenzied pace of one every two days for the past 1,000 days, he has done everything he could to keep himself off the map of the World Wide Web.
This is brazen defiance of the Hear Me! ethos of the blogger age, for which he probably will be punished and sentenced to fame. He's a shadow blogger who didn't want you to read his, thank you very much. He pulled the electronic blinds on his Web site: He blocked Google and the other search engines. When one of his creations made it onto the Drudge Report -- 42,000 hits in no time, baby! -- nobody could figure out who was this masked mapmaker.
So here the cyber cipher is now, on the roof of his group rowhouse off U Street NW, conducting another experiment in extreme geography. He recently used discarded chimney bricks to write a message: "No war."
Nikolas Schiller
He's The Daddy
Conan The Chimp
The paternity tests are in: The retired chimpanzee whose monkey business made Teresa a mother despite his own vasectomy is 21-year-old Conan.
Conan was one of seven males living in a group with the mother, Teresa, at Chimp Haven, which provides long-term care for chimps that had been used for laboratory research or in the entertainment industry or as pets.
All seven underwent DNA tests after Teresa, a wild-born animal estimated to be in her mid- to late 40s, gave birth to Tracy.
All male chimps get vasectomies before they are brought to Chimp Haven. But its attending veterinarian, Elysse Orchard, said on the Chimp Haven Web site that vasectomy failures in chimpanzees are not uncommon.
Conan The Chimp
Utah License Plate No-No
'Merlot'
Glenn Eurick's 1996 Mercedes has had the license plate reading "merlot" for 10 years. He says the plate never got a lot of notice until the Utah Tax Commission told him last week that he had to remove it because the state doesn't allow words of intoxicant to be used on vanity plates.
Six or seven-letter words like liquor or whiskey probably wouldn't make it through the state screening process before the plates are issued. But merlot did and Eurick was fine until an anonymous caller told the state that merlot was also an alcoholic beverage.
Eurick's car with the offending plate is dark red, like the wine. He said few people who asked about the plate made the connection. Though one man did ask "if we chose merlot because there were too many letters in cabernet sauvignon," Eurick said.
'Merlot'
In Memory
Charles A. Einstein
Charles A. Einstein, a former San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle reporter who became a noted baseball historian and collaborated with Willie Mays on a pair of books, died March 7. He was 80.
Einstein worked with Mays on the books "Born to Play Ball" and "My Life In and Out of Baseball," and also wrote a television documentary on Mays' life. He wrote or edited more than 35 books, including four volumes of the "Fireside Book of Baseball." His 1979 book, "Willie's Time: Baseball's Golden Age," was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.
Born in Boston on Aug. 2, 1926, Einstein came from a show-business family. He was the son of comedian Harry Einstein, whose stage name was "Parkyakarkus." Harry Einstein died in 1958 when he slumped into Milton Berle's lap after performing during a roast for Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz.
Charles Einstein was a half-brother of actor and director Albert Brooks and comedian Bob Einstein, also known as Super Dave Osborne.
A graduate of the Horace Mann School in New York and the University of Chicago, Charles Einstein became sports editor of the Chicago bureau of International News Service, then transferred to New York.
Charles A. Einstein
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