COMEDY CENTRAL: As Barack Obama prepares to take office in less than two weeks — still seems like an eternity, doesn’t it? — There’s been a lot of talk about how he’ll spend, and what he’ll achieve, during his first 100 days in office. Even though he’s warned against expecting miracles during that time period and has tried in vain to consider instead his first 1,000 days in office (yeah, right), the speculation does not end. Mad Magazine has a different question: What will Barack Obama achieve during his first 100 minutes in office? In an exclusive timetable that they’ve […]
UNCOOL: Obama Puts Record Company Pitbulls In Charge Of Copyright And File Sharing Regulation
CNET: As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama won applause from legal adversaries of the recording industry. Stanford law professor Larry Lessig, the doyen of the “free culture” movement, endorsed the Illinois senator, as did Google CEO Eric Schmidt and even the Pirate Party. That was then. As president-elect, one of Obama’s first tech-related decisions has been to select the Recording Industry Association of America’s favorite lawyer to be the third in command at the Justice Department. And Obama’s pick as deputy attorney general, the second most senior position, is the lawyer who oversaw the defense of the Copyright Term Extension […]
DIRTY DEEDS: The Trouble With Harry Reid
BRENDAN CALLING: So on top of refusing to honor the holds of fellow democrats while upholding the holds of racists like Tom Coburn, doing the GOP’s bidding on FISA in return for campaign donations from Verizon and AT&T, working on behalf of the billboard industry to undermine Lady Bird Johnson’s Highway Beautification Act, we can add running defense for convicted felons, suspicious discussions with a soon-to-be-convicted governor, and also unconstitutionally trying (and failing) to turn away the duly appointed Senator from Illinois (shades of Little Rock Arkansas). And there is so much more, from his support for Joe Lieberman, to […]
THE ECHO CHAMBER: Like Porno For Pyros
[Photo: Hatem Moussa/Associated Press via New York Times] L.A. TIMES: Reporting from Cairo and Beirut — Face splotched in blood, eyes closed, mouth aslant, the child seems slumbering, but she is dead. The only part of her you see is her head tilting in ash and rubble above the caption, “A day of massacres in Gaza.” She is nameless, but her face, peeking from a black-and-white photograph spread like a flag of horror across the Saudi-owned Al Hayat newspaper, is unforgettable. In the Gaza Strip, Israel maneuvers with sophisticated tanks, missiles and planes. But the Arab media possess a potent […]
UNAMERICAN ACTIVITIES: You Are Being Watched
TEXAS OBSERVER: Allen Hamilton kept his files secret until his death in 2005, long after his retirement as campus police chief for the University of Texas at Austin. His son discovered them while cleaning out his father’s office. The boxes of documents and photos from the 1960s included records of the most horrific event in Chief Hamilton’s tenure—the August day in 1966 when Charles Whitman perched atop the UT Tower with a high-powered rifle, killing 15 and wounding 33. Graphic photos from the Whitman archives were made available to newspapers to mark the 40th anniversary of that bloody day. But […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR Although the Bush administration has stated that the interrogations techniques used at Guantanamo Bay came from the bottom up, British lawyer Philippe Sands disagrees. In his 2008 book, Torture Team, Sands argues that the harsh interrogation policy that emerged after Sept. 11 came from high-ranking government officials and top military figures. Sands warned in a June 2008 Fresh Air interview that the impact of the Bush administration’s conduct would be felt internationally: “The terrible tragedy of these memos and that dark period is that they have migrated into the hands of people who now say, ‘Well, Americans do […]
EYELESS IN GAZA: Israel Maintains Media Blackout
[Photo Source: BOSTON GLOBE] NEW YORK TIMES: And so for an 11th day of Israel’s war in Gaza, the several hundred journalists here to cover it waited in clusters away from direct contact with any fighting or Palestinian suffering, but with full access to Israeli political and military commentators eager to show them around southern Israel, where Hamas rockets have been terrorizing civilians. A slew of private groups financed mostly by Americans are helping guide the press around Israel. Like all wars, this one is partly about public relations. But unlike any war in Israel’s history, in this one the […]
Obama Taps CNN’s Sanjay Gupta For Surgeon General
CNN: The Obama transition team approached Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s chief medical correspondent, about becoming U.S. surgeon general, according to sources inside the transition and at CNN. Gupta was in Chicago, Illinois, in November to meet with President-elect Barack Obama on the matter, sources said. Gupta has declined comment. The transition team is impressed with the combination of Gupta’s past government experience, as a White House fellow in 1997 and a special adviser to then-first lady Hillary Clinton, along with his medical career as a neurosurgeon and his communication skills, the transition source said. Gupta is a member of the […]
DIRE MAN: Nutter Shutters Seven Fire Companies
Philadelphia Fire Department, circa 1913 [photo courtesy of PhillyHistory.Org] DAILY NEWS: Seven Fire Department companies were closed and 130 firefighters reassigned to other parts of the city yesterday as part of Mayor Nutter’s budget cuts. Nutter announced plans in November to eliminate five engine and two ladder companies to deal with a more than $1 billion hole in the budget over the next five years. MORE FIREFIGHTER HOURLY: Having visited fire departments all around the country, having ridden with very busy companies, I can say with a straight face that Philly faces some of the toughest conditions this side of […]
UNRELIABLE SOURCES: Did NBC Ban Ann Coulter?
DRUDGE: The nation’s top selling conservative author has been banned from appearing on NBC, insiders tell the DRUDGE REPORT. Banned for life! “We are just not going to have her on any more,” a top network source explains… MORE UPDATE: UNDER PRESSURE, NBC EXECS RE-THINK COULTER BOOKINGS… DEVELOPING… TV NEWSER: Late today, NBC News denied the story with this statement: “We’ve had Ann Coulter on ‘Today’ many times, but because of the news in Washington and the Middle East, we decided to cancel her appearance tomorrow. Understanding the media as well as she does, we are sure she knows this […]
MY SPY: Obama Taps Ex-Clinton White House Chief Of Staff Leon Panetta To Lead Central Intelligence Agency
NEW YORK TIMES: President-elect Barack Obama has selected Leon E. Panetta, the former congressman and White House chief of staff, to take over the Central Intelligence Agency, an organization that Mr. Obama criticized during the campaign for using interrogation methods he decried as torture, Democratic officials said Monday. Mr. Panetta has a reputation in Washington as a competent manager with strong background in budget issues, but has little hands-on intelligence experience. If confirmed by the Senate, he will take control of the agency most directly responsible for hunting senior Al Qaeda leaders around the globe, but one that has been […]
WE WILL ROCK YOU: BeardsBirds Crush Vikings
PHILADELPHIA 26 MINNESOTA 14 *** WHOOPSIE: Pay-To-Play Probe Ends Richardson Commerce Secretary Bid WASHINGTON POST: New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, chosen by President-elect Barack Obama to be commerce secretary, withdrew from consideration yesterday, citing an ongoing federal “pay-to-play” investigation involving one of his political donors as a significant obstacle to his confirmation. Richardson, 61, who competed unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination last year, becomes the first political casualty in Obama’s Cabinet, and his withdrawal marked the first visible crack in what had been one of the smoothest presidential transitions in modern history. MORE RELATED: Picture of Richardson Beating Up […]
EYELESS IN GAZA: Death From Above
[Photo slideshow at: BOSTON GLOBE] [WARNING: Graphic content.] EDITOR’S NOTE: Let the record show that Phawker has no dog in this fight. We are posting these pictures [CLICK TO ENLARGE] as neutral observers of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because we believe that sanitized reportage of conflict is a gross distortion of reality that only serves to enable conflict to persist. Setting aside for a a moment the convoluted tit-for-tat that stretches all the way back to 1947 and serves as the bloody preamble to what is happening right now, the chain of recent events goes something like this: enraged by Israel’s […]