'Best of TBH Politoons'
Recommended Reading
from Bruce
A Liberal's Pledge to Disheartened Conservatives ...by Michael Moore (michaelmoore.com)
To My Conservative Brothers and Sisters, I know you are dismayed and disheartened at the results of last week's election. You're worried that the country is heading toward a very bad place you don't want it to go. Your 12-year Republican Revolution has ended with so much yet to do, so many promises left unfulfilled. You are in a funk, and I understand.
'Humble Suggestions for Reid and Pelosi' ...by Adam McKay (Huffington Post; Posted on michaelmoore.com)
I'm out of practice dealing with good political news. It's been a bit of an overload these past two days. It's kind of like getting a letter from my doctor informing me that I can now suddenly windmill dunk a basketball. I almost hesitate to bring up the House and Senate victories to people for threat they might inform me I feel asleep near some model glue with CNN on and the whole thing's a Testor's-induced hallucination. We.... won the House.... and the Senate? And Rumsfeld resigned?! And Bush said he's meeting with Democrats?!!! It's so wonderful I'm a tad suspicious.
Robert Fisk: This was a guilty verdict on America as well (The Independent; Posted on michaelmoore.com)
So America's one-time ally has been sentenced to death for war crimes he committed when he was Washington's best friend in the Arab world. America knew all about his atrocities and even supplied the gas - along with the British, of course - yet there we were yesterday declaring it to be, in the White House's words, another "great day for Iraq". That's what Tony Blair announced when Saddam Hussein was pulled from his hole in the ground on 13 December 2003. And now we're going to string him up, and it's another great day.
PAUL KRUGMAN: True Blue Populists ( The New York Times)
Senator George Allen of Virginia is understandably shocked and despondent. Just a year ago, a National Review cover story declared that his "down-home persona" made him "quite possibly the next president of the United States." Instead, his political career seems over.
David Von Drehle: Looking Good (washingtonpost.com)
Our obsession with physical appearance may not be so shallow, after all
Kay S. Hymowitz: The Trash Princess (city-journal.org)
Why Americans love to hate Paris Hilton What would Hilton Sr. make of the vulgarity of present-day Hiltons? As if Paris weren't bad enough, her parents also make a mockery of Conrad's industriousness and self-discipline. ... Surely old Conrad would not be amused by such flaunting-or by the irony that Paris buys her stripper wardrobe and sleazy nightlife with money meant for the nuns.
Nobody Is More Beautiful Than You (bonehead.oddballs.com)
World famous advertising agency Olgilvy and Mather shows you why nobody is more beautiful than you because the models they use on billboards are nobody. They don't exist. Our perception of beauty is based on people who do not exist. Watch this 1 minute 10 second video and see how the agency turns an ordinary everyday looking woman into a super model. The real surprise is toward the end.
Bonehead Of The Day (bonehead.oddballs.com)
Welcome to the home page of the Bonehead Of The Day Award. Each day we bestow a Bonehead Award to a group or individual for a boneheaded action. This site is great for starting off your day. Your coworkers and friends will appreciate the uplifted mood you carry around with you each morning because you read the day's award! Or maybe not.
Big Jackpots, Bigger Tragedies (nssta.com)
Think a large cash windfall means no more financial worries? Think again. Celebrities, lottery winners, and even victims of the Septemer 11 attacks have all witnessed the dangers of large cash settlements. Look below to see for yourself ...
Generic Drugs (snopes.com)
Claim: The price of generic drugs can vary widely from one pharmacy to the next.
Status: True.
Costco Drug Pricing
You don't have to be a member to use the pharmacy.
Reader Comment
War Profiteerers
Death Penalty for War Profiteerers
I'm no proponent of the death penalty but I'm willing to be talked
into it as punishment for this one crime. And only this crime: war
profiteering.
This would be enforceable for politicians who get us into wars for
their own personal gain.
This would be enforceable for members of the news media who root for
war because it helps their ratings and keeps them in good standing
with the oil companies who underwrite their shows.
This would, of course, without question, be enforceable for CEOs in
the oil industry.
I'm vehemently against the death penalty. But in this one instance -
I'm in favor of it. As a deterrent. Take the profit out of war and
there'll be far less war.
I could not only be talked into it, I just convinced myself it's the
best idea I've ever had or heard.
Jayson
mystic 23
P.S. Listen to my Folk Rock & Soulful Country
Eclectic Radio Show, "The Wrecking Ball"
Sundays from Noon til 2pm Eastern time -
Exclusively through WCOM's website
Thanks, Jayson!
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Sunny, dry and warmer than seasonal.
`Sexiest Man Alive'
George Clooney
George Clooney has been named the "sexiest man alive" - for the second time - by People magazine.
The 45-year-old actor is pictured on the cover of People's annual issue, on newsstands Friday. Clooney, who first took the title in 1997, is now tied with his good friend Brad Pitt.
He tells People that his celebrity dream date is Sophia Loren.
"Oh my god. I met her in Milan," Clooney says. "She's unbelievably beautiful, unbelievably fun."
George Clooney
Cecil B. DeMille Award
Warren Beatty
Actor, director, writer and producer Warren Beatty will receive the Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement at the 64th annual Golden Globe awards, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association said Wednesday.
Beatty will add the award to a collection that includes five other Golden Globes, one Oscar and the Irving G. Thalberg Award, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' highest honor. The 69-year-old filmmaker has also won honors from the Directors Guild, Producers Guild, Writers Guild, National Board of Review and the Kennedy Center.
Beatty will receive the award at the Golden Globes ceremony on Jan. 15, 2007.
Warren Beatty
Honored In Vegas
Triumph
Triumph the Insult Comic Dog is now an honorary member of the Las Vegas police department's K-9 unit.
The cigar-smoking, foul-mouthed hand puppet given life by comic Robert Smigel is the first toy Rottweiler adopted into the elite group of bomb-sniffing dogs. The honor was bestowed at the weeklong Comedy Festival that kicked off Tuesday.
"I will do my part to get all the drugs and hookers off the street, and into my hotel room," Triumph said in accepting the honor.
Triumph
English Channel Finally Launched
Al-Jazeera
Al-Jazeera's English-language channel began operation on Wednesday, promising a fresh perspective on international news, but virtually no American television viewers could see it.
Despite extra months for negotiating because a planned spring launch was scrapped, the network had only one small satellite system and two online services in the U.S. offering it Wednesday. The network was streamed for free on its Web site, but it could sometimes be difficult to reach and offered blurry pictures.
Unlike other news networks, Al-Jazeera English is striving to offer international news from multiple perspectives, free of any geographic or cultural reference points, he said.
Al-Jazeera English hired more than 500 staffers, luring journalists from American and British networks, including former CNN anchor Riz Khan and reporter Lucia Newman, the BBC's David Frost and former ABC News correspondent Dave Marash.
Al-Jazeera
Welcomed Home In Colombia
Shakira
Fans unveiled a six-ton statue of Colombian pop diva Shakira in this port city on Wednesday, hours before a festive benefit concert organized by its favorite daughter.
Proceeds from the show, part of Shakira's worldwide Oral Fixation tour, will go to build an arts school for 1,800 children displaced by Colombia's civil war.
Speaking with journalists, the visibly moved singer said arriving in her Caribbean hometown after months on the road felt like returning to her mother's embrace.
"Barranquilla is the big breast that fed and nurtured me as a human being, a woman and an artist," said the 28-year old performer, who dominated the 2006 Latin Grammys this month with five awards. "Returning is a chance to be with all the people from whom I learned and to pay homage to my roots."
Shakira
Suit Settled
U2
U2's Bono finally found what he was looking for on Wednesday after winning a drawn-out legal battle to get his hat and trousers back from a former stylist with the band.
In a case that stretched the credulity of even the most fervent fan, U2 sued Lola Cashman last year for the return of mementos she said had been given as presents when she worked with them in the 1980s.
During the appeal Bono, a prominent anti-poverty campaigner, praised Cashman's work, saying that before her arrival he had looked like Greek songstress Nana Mouskouri.
However, he maintained he would not have given Cashman the items, which he said had iconic status.
U2
Begin At NBC News
Job Cuts
NBC News has begun carrying out layoffs that it said last month were coming as part of a corporate restructuring, affecting mostly off-camera workers on "Dateline NBC," "Today" and "NBC Nightly News."
The only on-camera employees who have been laid off so far are "Dateline NBC" correspondents Edie Magnus and Rob Stafford, according to a network executive who spoke about personnel matters on condition of anonymity.
At the news division, the job cuts are hitting hardest at the newsmagazine, which is producing fewer hours of prime-time programming than it used to. Between 15 and 20 "Dateline NBC" employees are losing their jobs, the official said. "Dateline" fluctuates between 150 and 200 employees, depending on its workload.
Job Cuts
Oh That Rupert
O.J.
More than a decade after he was acquitted of murdering his ex-wife and her friend, O.J. Simpson will describe in a televised interview how he would have committed the crime if he were the one responsible, the Fox network said.
The taped interview was conducted by publisher Judith Regan, who is putting out a book Simpson wrote in which he "hypothetically describes how the murders would have been committed," Fox said in a statement on Tuesday.
The interview will be the basis for a two-part Fox special, tentatively titled "O.J. Simpson: If I Did It, Here's How It Happened," airing on November 27 and November 29, Fox said. The book, "If I Did It," goes on sale on November 30.
Regan Books is an imprint of book publisher HarperCollins, which, like Fox, is a unit of News Corp. Ltd.
O.J.
Back In NYC Court
Naomi Campbell
Naomi Campbell returned to court Wednesday as her lawyer and a Manhattan prosecutor tried unsuccessfully to cut a deal on charges that she threw a cell phone at her maid over a pair of missing jeans.
"We're still in the process of working out a possible disposition," said Assistant District Attorney Shanda Strain at a short hearing where the 36-year-old supermodel stood mutely. She is due back in court Jan. 16.
Campbell's lawyer, David Breitbart told reporters Campbell hoped to reach an agreement that would only require community service. The British catwalker could face up to seven years in prison and deportation if convicted on the assault charge.
Naomi Campbell
Reportedly Faces Foreclosure
Whitney Houston
Whitney Houston's New Jersey mansion is slated to be sold at a sheriff's sale because she is more than $1 million behind on the mortgage and taxes have not been paid this year, according to reports published Wednesday.
The Jan. 4 sale was scheduled Tuesday by the Morris County Sheriff's Office, the Daily Record of Parsippany reported. The service agent for Chevy Chase Bank, the mortgage holder, sued Houston in June.
Houston's estate comprises two lots, and the sale would be of the lot assessed at $889,300. The adjacent lot is valued at more than $5.6 million, the Daily Record reported. Houston, 43, bought the properties in 1987 for $2.7 million.
Whitney Houston
Sets Record At Auction
Francis Bacon
A Francis Bacon painting fetched 15 million dollars at a contemporary art auction in New York, a record for the British artist, according to the auction house Sotheby's.
"Version No. 2 of Lying Figure with Hypodermic Syringe," a 1968 painting depicting a naked woman, came from a Belgian collection that raked in 42.1 million dollars in sales on Tuesday. The buyer requested anonymity.
The previous record for a Bacon piece was 10 million dollars. The Dublin-born artist died in 1992.
Francis Bacon
Palms Dying
Los Angeles
It's official: The tall, skinny palm trees that have come to define Los Angeles will be replaced with native species as they die of old age and disease.
The City Council on Monday agreed to replace the trees with oaks, sycamores and other native species that provide more shade and are native to Los Angeles.
Large numbers of palms are dying of a fungal disease, and tree surgeons don't know how to stop the bacteria that gets into the soil. Because new palms will likely fall victim to the same ailment, it doesn't make sense to replace dying palms with more palms.
Los Angeles
RNC Ethics On Parade
Telemarketer
A former telemarketer has agreed to plead guilty in a Republican phone-jamming plot against New Hampshire Democrats four years ago.
Shaun Hansen faces two federal counts of conspiracy to commit interstate telephone harassment in a deal with prosecutors. No sentencing date was posted.
In 2002, Hansen owned Mylo Enterprises, an Idaho telemarketing company prosecutors say received $2,500 to place hundreds of hang-up telephone calls to Democratic get-out-the-vote phone banks and a ride-to-the-polls line run by Manchester's firefighters union.
Three former Republican officials were convicted in the phone-jamming plot. Former state Republican Committee Executive Director Chuck McGee served seven months in federal prison after admitting to devising the scheme.
Telemarketer
Bad Shot
Ouch
A botched kidnapping ended with one of the assailants shooting himself in the groin, Wichita police said. The man had just stuck the gun back into his waistband when it fired, shooting him in the left testicle.
He cringed, causing the gun to fire again and strike him in the left calf.
When the shooting ended, the 23-year-old man managed to walk himself into the hospital for treatment, police said. He and his two accomplices, ages 18 and 20, were arrested for aggravated attempted kidnapping and conspiracy to obstruct justice.
The men were attempting to kidnap a teen in a dispute over stereo speakers, police said.
Ouch
The Silent Catastrophe
Electronic Voting
Though you wouldn't know it from watching the election night and post-election coverage on the Cable news shows, preliminary reports from local papers and from a host of electronic voting activist groups and researchers indicate that there were widespread and significant problems with the new electronic voting machines used in the November 7th mid-terms. The many groups who're working on collecting and summarizing the information gleaned from nationwide hotlines and poll watching efforts have a ton of data to sort through, but a few of the broader outlines are clear already. In a nutshell, the kinds of problems highlighted by the two post-mortems done on Cuyahoga County, Ohio's May 2nd primaries proved exemplary-in terms of the types of problems and their relative frequencies-of what the nation as a whole faced on November 7th.
Many activist groups kept logs, like this one, of problems that cropped up on election day. Among the most publicized collections of problems is the database run by Common Cause. Common Cause logged 16,000 calls on the 1-866-MYVOTE1 hotline. The calls registered all sorts of problems, with registration problems being the most common. The biggest change from their 2004 hotline was the percentage of calls reporting mechanical failures, up from 3 percent to almost 17 percent. Poll access was also a big problem, and one that was greatly exacerbated by the mechanical failures. There were reports of people waiting in line for three and four hours, due to issues like poor machine allocation and voting machines that didn't work.
Most of the House and Senate races on Nov. 7th were very, very close, with many being decided by a few thousand (or in some cases, a few hundred) votes. With margins of victory so narrow, the kinds of problems I'll describe below are simply unacceptable, and in some instances these problems could've decided the race. (Whether they actually did decide a race or not is impossible to determine, which is the problem.)
For the rest - Electronic voting: the silent catastrophe
In Memory
Francais Tullis
Francais "Rusty" Tullis, the troubled mother portrayed by Cher in the 1985 movie "Mask," has died, nearly a month after being injured in a motorcycle accident in Azusa. She was 70.
Tullis drove her three-wheeled motorcycle into a utility pole near First Street and Cerritos Avenue in Azusa on Oct. 14, Azusa police Lt. John Momot said.
Tullis, a psychic reader and former go-go dancer, was living with her niece, Helen Cunningham in Glendora at the time of her death.
She was portrayed by Cher in the movie "Mask," which was about Tullis' son, Rocky Dennis. He was born with craniofacial disease, which made his head grow to twice its normal size. He died in 1978 at 16. Her other son, Joshua, died at 32 from AIDS.
Cunningham said no services are planned for Tullis.
Francais Tullis
| CURRENT MOON lunar phases |
