I worked two years for G-nett and all I got was this stupid T-shirt

AngryJournalist.com is apparently trying to figure out how make money without ads. Here's what they're selling (there are a few, but this is my favorite):
(Incidentally, our Christmas bonus last year was a CJmoms hoodie. I would have rather gotten this)

How to become a viable presidential candidate:

Find yourself a sugar daddy.

Since I blogged about the Clintons' tax returns a few weeks ago, I figure I'll post something on the McCains as well. Like in the Clintons' case, the non-candidate makes significantly more than the candidate. This comes as a surprise to no one (and frankly, some of you may find the cunt thing or the recipe-stealing thing more interesting), but I thought I'd give you some numbers anyway.

Assets (from Politico):

Assets held exclusively by Cindy are worth at least $9 million, and those held by her and the McCain children are worth at least $15 million, according to John McCain’s disclosure statement filed last year with the Federal Election Commission. His assets were worth less than $81,001, according to the FEC disclosure.

Alimony (from Politico):

John McCain paid $17,700 in alimony last year stemming from a 15-year marriage that ended in divorce in 1980, the same year he married Cindy.

Taxes (from johnmccain.com)

For 2006, Senator McCain paid $72,771 in federal income, alternative minimum, and self-employment taxes (LINES 57 and 58) on taxable income of $215,304 (LINE 43), which is a 33.8% tax rate. View
For 2007, Senator McCain paid $84,460 in federal income, alternative minimum, and self-employment taxes (LINES 57 and 58) on taxable income of $258,800 (LINE 43), which is a 32.6% tax rate. View

As for details about Cindy McCain's finances, they're not releasing them. (They file their taxes separately so there's little connection) I don't think this is a big deal, but the GOP did attack Kerry in 2004 when the campaign declined to release Teresa Heinz Kerry's returns. The DNC is trying to draw attention to it, but they're just not as good at this as the Republicans are.

McCain supporters want more fiber in their diets

From the New York Times:

If there’s butter and white wine in your refrigerator and Fig Newtons in the cookie jar, you’re likely to vote for Hillary Clinton. Prefer olive oil, Bear Naked granola and a latte to go? You probably like Barack Obama, too.

And if you’re leaning toward John McCain, it’s all about kicking back with a bourbon and a stuffed crust pizza while you watch the Democrats fight it out next week in Pennsylvania.

It's a political strategy called microtargeting, where pollsters try to find a connection between your political allegiances and everyday things like food, magazines, hobbies, etc. It's not a new thing, but Karl Rove brought it to a new level in the 2004 election.

Its reliability as a valid indicator is still being debated. Mark Penn thinks it's a good strategy and James Carville think it's a colossal waste of time. I don't know how I feel about it. Some of the supposed connections fit for me and others don't, which is probably consistent across the board. Try it yourself.......

Here are some of the established connections (all from the NYT story):

Dr Pepper is a Republican soda. Pepsi-Cola and Sprite are Democratic. So are most clear liquors, like gin and vodka, along with white wine and Evian water. Republicans skew toward brown liquors like bourbon or scotch, red wine and Fiji water. When it comes to fried chicken, he said, Democrats prefer Popeyes and Republicans Chick-fil-A.

As for the candidates...
Clinton supporters:
elliptical trainers
Boca burgers
honey as a sweetener
fig newtons
Whole Foods
Kashi GoLean cereal
Luna bars
Odwalla Super Protein drinks
Amy's frozen pizza

Obama supporters:
trail running
burgers made from grass-fed local beef
Sugar in the Raw
soft chocolate chip cookies
Bear Naked Granola
olive oil
Wolfgang Puck all-natural frozen pizza

McCain supporters:
fishing
corn-fed beef burgers
Splenda
crunchy chocolate chip cookies
Fiber One cereal
Power Bars
DiGiorno's stuffed crust pizza

More on murderous old ladies

Two Los Angeles women in their late-70s are on trial for killing homeless men to collect on their life insurance plans.

I'll back up. Helen Golay, 77, and Olga Rutterschmidt, 75, allegedly befriended two homeless men and took out at least 19 life insurance policies on them worth about $2.8 million. Then they had them run over in hit-and-runs.

Each woman's defense is to blame the other woman. Essentially, they're admitting to insurance fraud but not to murder. The initial plan, they claim, was to befriend old homeless men who were going to die soon anyway -- so there would be no need to kill them.

Golay's attorney says Rutterschmidt was responsible for finding old homeless men to insure but suddenly started finding younger men:

From the AP:

"We'll concede it's pretty sleazy what's going on here with the insurance,'' Diamond (Golay's attorney) said. "These two little old ladies embarked upon a cockamamie insurance fraud scheme. ... The theory was if you insured an old, sick homeless person, that person is likely to die more quickly.... That's insurance fraud. It certainly isn't a murder scheme.''

But he said that when Rutterschmidt, who was to recruit old homeless people, began recruiting younger homeless men for insurance policies, "Maybe Olga had her own scheme to have these people killed.''

Rutterschmidt's attorney paints her as a hopeless half-wit who simply did whatever Golay told her to because Golay drove a Mercedes and owned property in Santa Monica.

From the L.A. Times

Olga Rutterschmidt lacked savvy, was "simple-minded" and even "stupid," said Michael Sklar (Rutterschmidt's attorney).

"I can't tell you how a person can be that stupid. I can only tell you that she was," Sklar said, alleging that co-defendant Helen Golay, 77, planned the murders but kept Rutterschmidt in the dark throughout the scheme that spanned at least eight years and targeted several men. The evidence shows that Golay committed McDavid's murder, Sklar said.

There are all kinds of other twists in this story (like the accusation that Golay's daughter killed at least one of the men), which has been covered closely in the L.A. Times since it first started to unfold. You can read any of those previous stories here.

Ann Coulter has giant--

The Wall Street Journal is reportedly running around New York, trying to buy up every copy of the Wall Street Journal parody being released this week. The parody, which was written by Daily Show writers, Onion writers, and others, has the tagline "We Distort, You Decide" and includes a full-page spread of a topless Ann Coulter in the traditional speckled WSJ style.

From Poynter:

The seeds of My Wall Street Journal took root in 1982, when Blum, then a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, decided to lay waste to his business journalism career by parodying his own employer. Edited by Hendra, the former editor of National Lampoon and Spy Magazine, the debut issues featured contributions by a now-illustrious mix of media stars including Jeff Greenfield and Kurt Andersen. The parody, and a follow up issue, sold more than 650,000 copies and landed Hendra on the cover of Newsweek in 1983.

It is apparently published every 26 years, and was slated for release today (but some newsstands started selling it early).

It's being sold at newsstands around New York that haven't already had all their copies bought up by Murdoch. If you're interested, you can find Romenesko's summary here.

If you were uglier then maybe this wouldn't have to happen

The subway groper, who has a 57-page rap sheet mostly full of rubbing up against women on subways, got out of prison last month. And immediately got on the subway to grope more women.

MTA cops were following Freddie Johnson one day about two weeks after his release, and found him rubbing up against a woman on a crowded 6 train. He kept his messenger bag in in front of him, swung it to his back to rub himself against her, and then quickly swung it in front of him again.

From the Daily News:
"The detectives said, 'Not so fast, Freddie,' and grabbed me, but I didn't touch her," he insisted. "I was trying to get out."

Johnson is supposed to stay off trains as a condition of his parole, but his ankle bracelet doesn't work underground, so the only way to enforce it is if subway cops recognize him.

The Daily News got a jail interview with Johnson, who is about as insane as a drunk donkey on crack (I'm sticking with it).

Apparently, the genesis of the creepy came in 1982, when Johnson saw a guy saw another man rub up against a woman on a train and run away at the next stop. He said the woman didn't even notice, convincing him this was a victimless crime.

"I was curious," he said to the Daily News.

Anyway, he said, the women should expect to be groped.

"When there's this many attractive women in the city and on the subways, don't they know [this will happen]?"

What you never knew about your mother

While cleaning out her dead mom's closet last week, a West Virginia woman found a decomposing body wrapped in clear plastic wrap, blankets and a sleeping bag, according to the Associated Press.

The mom, who was in her early 60s, had died of a stroke and head injury, and the daughter was in her house the next day cleaning things out. She called the cops when she and her husband were overwhelmed by a noisome smell emanating from the closet, and police found the body of an elderly woman wrapped up on the closet floor.

The daughter told police that whenever she visited, her mother never let her inside.

“We’re trying to rule out all aspects of homicide and foul play,” the detective told the local paper. “It looks like natural causes but I can’t say for 100 percent certain. We’re treating it as a suspicious death.”

Because that's what I do when someone dies in my apartment. Wrap them in saran wrap and shove em in the closet. I mean, are there other options?

Story from the Martinsburg Journal News here.

Intelligence/proximity to a cat

This from xkcd.com:

CAT PROXIMITY

With unemployment at 5.1 percent, somebody's gotta pay for the war

I'm sure you people have seen this elsewhere, but just in case...

The Clintons made $109.2 million over the last seven years.

Most of that came through Bill Clinton's speeches and book earnings. He also got $1.2 million in presidential pension. I guess we can't have ex-presidents mooching for change on the street corners.

In any case the way this tax return thing has unfolded has been strange. In fact, it's really unusual for a candidate to release the returns during the primary, but I don't think a lot of people realize that because Obama made such a big deal out of the fact that he released his returns and Clinton didn't. I'm not sure why the Clinton camp decided to do it now after putting this off for so long -- I guess it's because Jay Carson wanted the opportunity to say things like this (via the Clinton Web site):

The Clintons have now made public thirty years of tax returns, a record matched by few people in public service. None of Hillary Clinton's presidential opponents have revealed anything close to this amount of personal financial information.

In a nutshell, the Clintons paid $33.78 million (31 percent of their adjusted gross income) in taxes and gave $10.26 million (9.5 percent of their adjusted gross income) to charity. That's almost exactly like me. *I* made a little more than $30K last year and gave $25 a month to charity, so that's, like, the same thing, percentage-wise, right? Maybe I'll run for prez -- I could definitely use that presidential pension.

Anyway, here's the breakdown (appropriated from the Huffington Post, which pulled from Clinton's Web site):

Sen. Hillary Clinton's campaign has released her 2000-2006 joint tax returns, showing nearly $109.2 million in income over the last seven years.

The key details from Clinton's website:

TAXES PAID: $33,783,507

The Clintons paid $33,783,507 in federal taxes - 31% of their adjusted gross income. According to the most recent data available from the IRS, in 2005 taxpayers earning $10,000,000 or more paid on average 20.8% of their adjusted gross income in taxes.

CHARITABLE CONTRIBUTIONS: $10,256,741

The Clintons donated $10,256,741 to charity - 9.5% of their adjusted gross income. According to the most recent data available from the IRS, in 2005 taxpayers earning $10,000,000 or more contributed 3.1% of their adjusted gross income in cash contributions to charity. Information about the Clinton Family Foundation, including a list of charities to which the Clintons contributed through the Foundation, is available online in the Foundation's publicly available tax returns (www.foundationcenter.org).

AFTER TAX EARNINGS: $57,157,297

CUMULATIVE TOTAL(GROSS) INCOME: $109,175,175

Including, among other items:

* Senator Clinton's Senate Salary: $1,051,606
* President Clinton's Presidential Pension: $1,217,250
* Senator Clinton's Book Income: $10,457,083
* President Clinton's Book Income: $29,580,525
* President Clinton's Speech Income: $51,855,599

There's always Emerson...

So I probably wouldn't get into any school if I were applying now. The top Ivy League schools accepted fewer than 10 percent of their applicants this year. Harvard accepted 7.1 percent of its 27,462 applicants; Yale 8.3 percent of 22,813; and Columbia 8.7 percent. Back when we were applying, those schools were accepting more than twice that, percentage-wise.

The dwindling acceptance rates are a product of huge applicant pools -- that could stem from the larger number of kids going to college, the ease of online applications, and the end of early admission at schools like Harvard and Princeton, according to the New York Times.

Anyway the low admissions rates at top schools are must be trickling down to other schools, so B students are probably getting screwed. In other words, if I were eight years younger I'd probably be going to University of Phoenix.

Awwww, snap

In keeping with the Spitzer theme that has been so popular in the recent weeks, and ignoring the inevitable ennui that goes along with seeing the same story over and over again...

The following ad for New York Sports Clubs ran in our paper today:

$29 to join

That's about $79,971 less than Spitzer's "workout" budget.

I'm Hillary Clinton, and when I'm not dodging invisible sniper fire I like to answer random Hillarys' cell phones

I posted last week about a schlub reporter in Ohio who mistakenly identified a freshman congressman's press aide for Hillary Clinton over the phone, then wrote a story quoting her as if she were Clinton.

This is stupid enough.

The argument was that he called the congressman's office and the press aide, whose name is Hillary Wicai Viers, answered the phone by saying, "This is Hillary." Because Clinton had previously visited that congressman's office, he assumed the Hillary he was speaking to must be Clinton. (apparently forgetting that Ohio had already held its primary, and not even getting suspicious when this Hillary said she'd be following the congressman for his entire statewide economic tour)

Now, it turns out he called the press aide on the aide's CELL PHONE.

Here's the aide's response on Poynter.

I want a lion

Courtesy of Gina...

These two British guys brought up a lion cub and then put him in a wildlife sanctuary in Africa when he got big enough. A year later, they went to visit him and they were told he wouldn't remember them.

Here's how that meeting went:

How to access Wall Street Journal articles for free

I have a WSJ subscription, but the discounted rate will probably run out soon and I'll need this, too. In any case, here's how:

The Wall Street Journal site, which I'm sure you all know requires a subscription, is set up to allow access through Internet news searches. Presumably, this is because more and more people are getting their news through Google News, et al, instead of choosing one or two favorite sites and sticking to them. This was the ultimate reason the New York Times scrapped its Times Select plan -- because it wanted to allow people to access stories through Web searches.

So anyway, if you Google News a Wall Street Journal article and click through that way, you will be able to access the site. It's only when you try to click through on the WSJ splash page that you're required to log in.

That means you can circumvent the subscription process in one of two ways: First, if there's a story you want to read and know the headline, you can Google News the headline and click through that way. But according to Salon, the search engine doesn't always bring up the story.

The other method (and this is also pulled from Salon) is to *convince* the Wall Street Journal that you're clicking through a news search engine. You can do this by downloading a Firefox add-on, which you can access here.

Once you install it, you'll see this addition to the Firefox toobar:
Then go to wsj.com, and follow these directions from Salon's machinist:

• In the refspoof toolbar's "spoof:" field, type "digg.com."
• Also in the refspoof toolbar, click the R icon, and select "static referrer."

By doing this, you fool the paygate into thinking you are accessing the site through digg, another news search engine.

And the machinist assures us that it's totally on the up-and-up, noting that if the Wall Street Journal didn't want you to have free access to its stories, it wouldn't provide that free access through search engines. They say it better than I can:

I'll grant you that setting your browser to spoof Digg is slightly deceptive. But it's a minor fib, on the order of, say, handing a cashier an expired coupon. The Journal adds Digg buttons to all of its stories, encouraging you to open its articles to everyone (including you) for free; by pretending that you're coming from Digg, you're simply taking advantage of that implicit offer.

The Journal no longer really has a pay wall. It's a pay curtain, useless and flimsy, and you're committing no transgression in dancing around it.

So there you go. Have at it...

Wait, why would I make my tax returns public?

A reporter at an Ohio paper called the Tribune Chronicle accidentally quoted a PR lady as Hillary Clinton because the woman answered the phone at a local congressman's office, saying, "This is Hillary."

The Tribune Chronicle published a correction yesterday saying:

Reporter John Goodall, who was assigned to the story, spoke by telephone with Hillary Wicai Viers, who is a communications director in U.S. Rep. Charlie Wilson’s staff. According to the reporter, when Viers answered the phone with ‘‘This is Hillary,’’ he believed he was speaking with the Democratic presidential candidate, who had made several previous visits to the Mahoning Valley.

You can find the full story, which the paper pulled from its Web site, through Google's cache here.

Clinton was apparently in Washington when this guy thought he was talking to her in Ohio.

And the guy apparently never asked a question relating to her chances at the nomination... unless he was under the impression that Hillary Clinton speaks in the third person...

But I mean, seriously, who wouldn't assume that Hillary Clinton would be answering the phone at a random congressman's office after that congressman's state had already held its primary?

Because it's been too long...

...since you've seen pictures of my cats. And I don't feel like studying Econ and doing laundry. So to begin with, I bought them an "activity cube," which Giz thinks is awesome, both for playing and relaxing.

***

For a while, A.M. liked hanging out in my closet (I think she's over it now). She made a huge mess, but it was OK because she tended to look very sexy in there.

***

Here she just looks majestic, which makes me happy since she's normally not very photogenic.

***

And then there was the day when they were lying on the bed completely parallel. I was impressed.


OK, I'm seriously going to study now. I have my priorities...

The $4,300 Woman

Spitzer's ladyfriend has stripped down (bad pun intended) her MySpace page, but thanks to Google's cache, you can still access it here. It's relatively non-descript, but there are some funsies about the 22-year-old "musician." (The picture to the right used to be her profile picture, but has been taken down)

From her About Me section, with my own parenthetical points included...

• I live in New York and am on top of the world (and the governor). Been here since 2004 and I love this city (in addition to anyone willing to shell out $1,000 an hour), I love my life here.
• I spent the first two years getting to know the music scene, networking (if you know what I mean) in clubs and connecting (penally) with the industry.
• What we Want is my latest track. It’s really about trust, something my past has made very difficult for me to feel. This one was inspired by a guy (named Eliot), who taught me not to confuse my dreams with the sounds of the city (or the sounds of the city's governor grunting loudly on top of me)…I hope you like it.

I do feel badly for this kid. She's had a tough life and suddenly got caught in the center of a giant scandal, and she's been bombarded by media since her name went public.

That said... according to the NYT, Ashley Alexandra Dupré's story is pretty sad. She is a Jersey Shore native who left home at age 17. The Times described her latest track (which you can no longer access, even through the cached page) this way: “What We Want,” an amateurish, hip-hop inflected rhythm and blues tune that asks, “Can you handle me, boy?” and used some dated slang, calling someone her “boo.”

She hasn't been charged with anything. The guy she was living with recently walked out on her after she discovered that he fathered two children. She told the NYT she can't afford her rent anymore, and that she's considering either waitressing or moving back with her family in Jersey.

The Times story is here. You can listen to her song through the New York Post site.

How many diamonds is your hooker?

I wanted a more creative headline, but "Eliot Mess," "Ho no!", "Addicted to love Gov" and "Spitzer swallows" were all taken, and "Spitz likes tits" wasn't creative enough to justify the profanity. Or was it? As for "Spitz's ditz," that just makes unfair assumptions about this "Kristen." Especially since the Emperor's Club site says their ladies are well-educated.

In any case, I figured it was only proper to provide my own pun-filled take on the ins and outs of the Spitzer scandal. I'll preface this by saying I feel really badly for his daughters and his wife, but I'm assuming none of them read harbatkat so I'll soldier on.

If anyone's unfamiliar with the situation because they have apparently been living in seclusion this week, New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer on Monday was implicated in a high-end prostitution ring. Spitzer's involvement was discovered after his bank filed a "suspicious activity report" because he had broken up a $40,000 transfer into a bunch of smaller transfers and then asked the bank to remove his name from the transactions.

Investigators were expecting to find fraud -- kickbacks, bribes, etc. What they found instead, through an investigation of financial records and court-approved wiretaps, was that he'd transported a prostitute named Kristen from New York to D.C. when he was on a business trip there.

It gets even ickier because Spitzer was apparently in D.C. to testify Feb. 14 before a congressional subcommittee that hadn't invited him to testify. He apparently had to convince the subcommittee to let him speak on Valentine's Day. Knowing this, his wife has to stand behind him at the podium throughout this ordeal, seemingly showing her support in both his apology and his resignation.

In 2004, he signed into a law a bill raising the penalties for patronizing a prostitute. And transporting the prostitute to D.C. is a violation of the Mann Act, a 1910 law that made it illegal to transport individuals over state lines for the purposes of prostitution.

According to the New York Post, he has spent $80,000 over as long as 10 years on these services. His most recent transactions have been with Emperors Club VIP, an international prostitution ring that rates its ladies from three diamonds up to seven diamonds. Ratings are based on the "individual education, sophistication, and ambiance created by each of our models," according to the site, which has been taken down.

Spitzer's girl, Kristen, was probably a three-diamonder, since she cost $1,000 an hour (He paid $4,300 for two hours, but he's just a good tipper). Hourly prices range from $1,000 for three diamonds to $3,100 for seven diamonds. Salon has a good story on it, cum-plete with rates and screenshots from the site (I told you to expect bad puns).

According to an AP story, Kristen was warned about Spitzer's shenanigans:

The agent said she had been told the client "would ask you to do things that ... you might not think were safe ... very basic things,'' according to the papers, but that Kristen responded by saying, "I have a way of dealing with that ... I'd be, like, listen dude, you really want the sex?''

And if you're so inclined, you can access a broken-up version of the page through Internet Archive, a free service that provides old versions of Web sites that have been taken off the Web. Just type www.emperorsclubvip.com into the "Way Back Machine" search box and choose a date. Warning: it can be slow.

The worst youth basketball team in America

Here they are. The 2008 Villanova Wildcats: 0-8Top row, from left to right: Brent shoots the ball like he's a quarterback throwing a 50-yard pass; Ariel is the one I'm gonna be coaching individually starting next week; Ishi always does the jump ball for us but never jumps; Jason is the greatest defensive player ever; Jisu thinks I made up the concept of boxing out; Colin is the son of the other coach; Alan is the other coach.
Bottom row, from left to right: Max has been known to spin around in place for minutes at a time during games; David really enjoys the armpit-farting game; Mordy, who I couldn't tell apart from Ariel for at least the first half of the season.

So that's it. Tomorrow is the end-of-season celebration, so you will no longer hear about my team's inability to shoot, dribble, pass, rebound or score. Although the coach's game is tomorrow, so you may be hearing about my own inability to shoot, dribble, pass rebound or score. Fun.

Is that a peek-a-boo dance dollar in your 10-year-old's garter?

Apparently this made international news back when it happened in 2006, but in case you're like me and missed it...

A toy company in the U.K. began selling this toy about a year and a half ago. If you think you're seeing it wrong, you're not. The £49.97 kit comes with an 8½-foot chrome pole, complete with play money, "a sexy dance garter," and an instructional stripping DVD for aspiring young strippers.

The toy company, Tesco, advertised this on their Web site with the following:
"Unleash the sex kitten inside...simply extend the Peekaboo pole inside the tube, slip on the sexy tunes and away you go! Soon you'll be flaunting it to the world and earning a fortune in Peekaboo Dance Dollars."

After public outrage from parents who for some reason didn't want to encourage their 8-year-olds to become strippers, Tesco removed the toy from the "toys and games" section of its Web site but said it would continue selling it under the "fitness accessory" category.

Wombat sex

Somehow, my coworker Gene and I got to talking about wombats. I think for some reason we were discussing that fetish where people dress up in animal costumes, and Gene's mind immediately went to the wombat. Then we realized that neither of us knew what a wombat looked like.

So I ran a Google image search for "wombats," and the first result was an Australian newspaper article with the headline, "Secret sex life of wombats."

Perhaps if American newspapers had stories this awesome, they're circulations would not be declining at the rate of a female wombat running a figure-eight around her potential mate.

Intrigued yet?

A study was released in December 2005 detailing the sex life of wombats, a previously unexplored phenomenon. Turns out, they're way into the Kama Sutra.

"It appeared to be a physically demanding process, complete with chasing, biting, grunting and loads of heavy breathing," said biologist Clive Marks, the author of the study.

After prolonged copulation, Marks said, the female pulls away and begins trotting in figure-eights around her mate.

"The male chased her, following closely behind, and then bit her on the rump," Marks wrote in the study, published in Nature Australia.

"She immediately stopped just long enough to permit him to roll her on her side and begin copulating again.

"If the male was slow to mount, she would kick back aggressively and not let him roll her on her side again until she had run round in more circles and figures of eight. This happened seven times."

This study prompted zoos to reevaluate their wombat enclosures. Apparently, if wombats don't have enough space to trot figure-eights around their mates then they just won't mate at all.

If you're interested — and seriously, who *wouldn't* be? — here's the full study, entitled "Wombat Sex. It includes gems like:

But in an obtuse if not flippant sort of way, Australians have always nursed a fascination for the sex life of wombats. If only I’d been given a dollar every
time I was asked the question: “Is it true that a wombat eats, roots and leaves?”

If you read it, try not to judge the dude for his overuse of exclamation points. He's just really excited about wombat sex.

www.AngryJournalist.com

'Nuff said.

Wait, why is this entire column written in Latin?

I must have missed this story from the GRE bubble I was living in last week:

President Bush's social and religious liaison who sometimes writes guest columns for an Indiana newspaper was forced to resign Friday after a blogger discovered that he plagiarized. From the Pope.

Tim Goeglein had been working for the Bush administration since 2001 and was a top aide for Karl Rove. He was largely credited for garnering the evangelical vote in 2004, according to the New York Times. He had been writing columns for the News-Sentinel in Fort Wayne, Ind., for more than a decade.

He plagiarized from an array of sources (the Pope is obviously my favorite), and an internal investigation revealed that 19 of his 38 guest columns over the years contained plagiarized material.

A former columnist for the News-Sentinel broke the story in her blog.

Pulled straight from her blog:

On April 6, 2005, Roger Cohen wrote in The New York Times: “It was based in the belief that, as he (the Pope) once put it, ‘a degradation, indeed a pulverization, of the fundamental uniqueness of each human being’ was at the root of the mass movements of the 20th century, Communism and Fascism,”

In a column published Oct. 18, 2005, Goeglein wrote: “A degradation and pulverization of the fundamental uniqueness of each human being was at the root of the 20th century, the twin evils of communism and fascism.” No attribution is given to the Pope or to Cohen in the column.

Well I guess if you're gonna plagiarize, there's really no one better to pull from than the Pope.

No more GRE!

I am officially done with the GRE. I will never have to look at another permutation or isosceles triangle or strange algebraic equation again. I am also free to forget the 600-some useless words I learned in the process of studying.

Oh, and in case you people are wondering, I am awesome at English and not-quite-awesome at math. I'll take that...

Kitten saved

A black kitten who got out of her carrier in a subway station last month was found and is recovering after spending three weeks wandering around the tracks. She had a scratch on her nose and a broken leg, but other than that was OK.


The Daily News had tracked the story so people have been looking for the cat, and an anonymous donor added $500 to the $1,000 reward. Three MTA workers ended up walking around the tracks, meowing, looking for her.

They're taking another crack at it...

Today the campaign accused Obama of lifting words from Deval Patrick. The passage, which Obama used in a speech over the weekend, was a response to Clinton's claim that Obama's smooth rhetoric does not make him a better presidential candidate.

Obama: “Don’t tell me words don’t matter,” he said in his remarks. “ ‘I have a dream.’ Just words? ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.’ Just words? ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself.’ Just words? Just speeches?”

Patrick said he had encouraged Obama to use those words, which he used in a 2006 Massachusetts gubernatorial campaign in response to similar criticism from Kerry Healey.

Patrick's speech, if you're interested:

"Her dismissive point, and I hear it a lot from her staff, is all I have to offer is words. Just words. 'We holds these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal' -- just words. Just words. 'We have nothing to fear but fear itself. Just words. 'Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.' Just words. 'I have a dream' -- just words. "

Obama has responded to the criticism by saying, "I really don't think this is too big of a deal."

I've already heard the pundits compare this to the Biden debacle in 1988, when he lifted part of a speech from the leader of the British Labour Party and ended up dropping out of the race. I don't think the voters will see it that way, but I guess it depends on how much the media plays this up and whether anyone in Wisconsin really cares.

And the comments I've seen so far on the Web mostly talk about Clinton being desperate, saying things like "Made her look like a complete idiot" and "It's really sad. She apprently doesn't realize that we all have eyes and can see through her tactics. I used to respect her. Not any more."

Anyway, I'm thinking Thursday's debate is going to lose the congeniality of the last one and fall back into the tone of the South Carolina debate...

Clinton, once again, trying to start a semantic debate

The Clinton camp has accused Obama of going back on his word about pursuing a publicly financed general election.

This is exactly what hurts Clinton in the long run -- the campaign latches onto something that voters see as petty, Obama reacts articulately and says he doesn't understand why they're focusing on this instead of the issues, and ultimately, more people jump ship from Clinton to Obama.

Here's the gist:
In a questionnaire in 2007, answering a question about agreeing to a publicly financed election, Obama wrote, "If I am the Democratic nominee, I will aggressively pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee to preserve a publicly financed general election."

Then, at a press conference on Friday, Obama loosened that position, saying, "If I am the nominee, I will make sure our people talk to John McCain's people to find out if we are willing to abide by the same rules and regulations, with respect to the general election, going forward. ... It would be presumptuous of me to start saying now that I am locking in to something, when I don't even know if the other side will agree to it. And I'm not the nominee yet. We're trying to get through this process. As soon as we do, I assure you, my folks and John McCain's folks will sit down and see if we can arrive at a common set of ground rules."

The Clinton campaign pounced, saying this is an example of Obama going back on his word.

Here's The Note's take on it.

The reality is, I think, that this type of campaigning may be effective against McCain, but it hasn't effective against Obama. It has consistently worked against Clinton in the polls, and I'm not sure why the Clinton camp thinks that's going to change.

Maybe I should just get drunk the night before and see what happens...

As some of you know I've been studying like crazy for the GRE. Turns out, studying does not become me. A couple of weeks ago I got a 700 on the math section of a practice test, and tonight, after spending the last few weeks on a detailed GRE math workbook, I got a 630.

This does not bode well for my chances of getting into grad school. But seriously, they asked questions like this:

Talk show host Ralph Blowhard has exactly one guest on his show each day, and Blowhard’s show airs every Monday through Friday. Blowhard always schedules politicians on Mondays and Wednesdays, Actors on Tuesdays and Athletes on Thursdays, but can have a guest of any one of these three kinds on Friday. No guest appears more than once per week on Blowhard’s show. If Blowhard has five politicians, three actors and six athletes he could invite, and if no politician is also an actor or an athlete and no actor is also an athlete, how many different schedules of guests from Monday to Friday could Blowhard create?

For the record, I got that one right. (by multiplying ten gazillion by ten gazillion and then adding it to ten gazillion, if I remember correctly), but like a dumbass I spent seven minutes on it (seriously, Princeton Review clocks this stuff for you), and completely ran out of time two-thirds of the way through.

And then I had no time to work through gems like this:

Seriously. What the fuck?

On the plus side, I've apparently learned the English language since I started studying, having raised my verbal score from tard-level (seriously, I'm not even telling you people how bad) to 670, which is better than the 90th percentile, which is about the best I can hope for. Of course, the verbal is all luck depending on what words you get, so my chances of repeating that are probably crappy.

The "fairy tale"

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=aaad0724-dd13-4ffa-810b-d5d3220ff055

The New Republic has an interesting story about Barack Obama's stance on the war. As you guys know, Obama delivered in a speech in 2002 opposing the war. This speech has become a staple of the Obama campaign, as he has said he opposed the war from the start while Clinton voted to authorize it.

Clinton, of course, took to another extreme, calling Obama's war stance a "fairy tale" and trying to paint him as a flip-flopping opportunist who refused to take a hard stance on the war when that stance became a political risk. In approaching Obama's record this way, the Clintons have angered a slew of voters who believe the Clinton campaign is misrepresenting the truth and created harsh infighting within the Party. Obama, meanwhile, takes more subtle swings at Clinton, emphasizing his own opposition over her vote and therefore keeping ride smoothly along his hope/change theme.

The truth about the Obama's stance on the war, stands pretty squarely in the middle of what the two candidates have been saying, according to the New Republic story.

I've been saying that the Obama camp has been misleading on the war. I think a giant percentage of voters do not realize Obama was not in the Senate for the vote, and an even larger number do not know that 99 of 100 members voted to authorize Iraq. Obama did, however, return to his anti-war roots after a brief period of uncertainty (which was when he pulled the speech from his Web site)

In any case the TNR story makes some good points about the issue, namely:
He did, however, strike a different tone during his star turn at the Democratic National Convention that July. Obama's inspiring keynote address barely mentioned the war. ("There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it," he declared.) More notably, in interviews around that time, Obama refused to say flatly that he would have voted against the 2002 congressional war resolution. "I'm not privy to Senate intelligence reports," Obama told The New York Times on July 26. "What would I have done? I don't know. What I know is that, from my vantage point, the case was not made." In other interviews that week, Obama said, "[T]here is room for disagreement" over initiating the war, and that "I didn't have the information that was available to senators."

That statement, I think, gets to the crux of this debate. Obama acknowledged then that he could not legitimately judge the Senate vote because he was not privy to the same intelligence and was not in the same position as Congress.

The war is obviously going to be an issue in this campaign, and it should. But I wish the candidates would step away from this essentially semantic debate and start discussing the issues where they genuinely differ. I think Clinton would be well-served to stop trying to attack Obama's "fairy tale" and start focusing on their real differences. Any counterattacks she brings tend to bounce back at her -- with teeth.

Of course, she'll have to figure out how to do all this with no money...

Because apparently I don't sleep anymore

I somehow got all excited about successfully writing a specific formula in Excel (because I am that cool), which got me on a what-else-can-I-do-on-the-computer-tonight-that-has-previously-not-been-working-for-me mood, which means I have once again updated my Web site.

Check it out at www.harbatkin.com and let me know what you people think. It's actually almost done, I think, so let me know if any egregious errors jump out at you. You can also tell me what you think of it overall. Be honest, but nice... my brain hurts from state report cards.

Anyway all I'm waiting for now is a suitable version of Adobe Acrobat so I can create all the PDFs. I have been assured that Sara would try to obtain said software for me. Of course that was more than a month ago... hmmmmm...

So who the *#% & $+ wants to know?

I'm not sure if this reached outside journalism gossip blogs last week, but some of the subsequent coverage has amused me, so...

After billionaire Sam Zell bought out the Tribune Co. (L.A. Times, Orlando Sentinel, etc.), he visited the newsrooms and spoke to the employees at each newspaper. Standing behind a podium, speaking to the hundreds of Sentinel employees, he called for questions. Then he said "fuck you" to a photographer who asked a question.

It went something like this:

The photographer asked where the paper's coverage was headed.

Zell said reporters should focus on what readers want in order to make more money for the paper.

The photographer said, readers want "puppy dogs" rather than real information.

Zell responded, "you're giving me the classic... journalistic arrogance of deciding that puppies don't count." He continued by saying if they cover the local puppies well then maybe the paper can generate enough revenue to cover puppies in Iraq.

Then the photographer supposedly started to walk away as he was excoriating her for "elitism" and Zell he added, "fuck you."

You can also view the full video here, complete with a synopsis and comments if you're interested. (If you do, I would also recommend you take a few minutes to scroll down to the reader comments -- they range from

"I throw a secret fuck you into conversations all the time, thankfully with no video evidence.
Fuck you."

to

"TECHNICIAN (into earpiece)
Mr. Zell, your microphone is hot.
ZELL (annoyed)
What?
TECHNICIAN
Your microphone sir, it's on.
ZELL
Fuck you!
TECHNICIAN
Sir, your mic is hot. Please, say nothing more, lest you disgracethyself courtesy of the Internet, prompted by an innocuous query froma photog, of all people.
ZELL (flamboyantly, like Nathan Lane in "The Birdcage")
FuuuUUUUck... yOOOOOOUUUUUUU!

Anyway, this generated all kinds of responses in the world of journalism gossip, and then continued to generate responses about the responses.

The initial coverage in the mainstream papers said Zell responded to the photographer's question with "a two-word profanity," which prompted bloggers/columnists/everyone else to say this type of coverage is why people seek their news on the Internet rather than newspapers.

The reason I'm finally blogging about it is this L.A. Times opinion piece, which ran yesterday. Its headline is "So who the *#% & $+ wants to know?" and it continues to get better from there. My favorite part:

Seriously, Spring Street: a "two-word obscenity?" What on Earth did Zell say? "Darn tootin'? " "God dammit?" (Or is that one word?) "Mitt Romney?"

And we've hit a new low

My team just lost 22-3.

That's right. We scored one point in the first 39 minutes. One. No field goals in 39 minutes.

Then we hit a layup at the buzzer and I considered it a moral victory. Which, I think, I'm going to count as a notch in the win column. Because we need it.

On basketball

I'll probably post something about Super Tuesday when I get home today, but in the interim.

This is something I'd been wanting to write about for a while, and Bobby Knight's sudden retirement gave me a news hook/inspiration.

Column 2/6
(incidentally please ignore the horrible column mug -- they took a new one for the paper but *shock and awe* it didn't make it onto the Web site.)

Still the greatest coach ever

Today my team lost 18-6. The other team was making layups, setting screens and generally doing all kinds of things my kids will never ever be able to do.

One is terrified of the ball and ducks out of the way whenever it comes near him. One runs with it without dribbling -- just running around, ball in hand, until the ref finally calls a travel. One of the tallest kids is stuck to the floor and refuses to jump for rebounds. One shoots a basketball like the rest of us throw a football (although in his defense, he did make one of our three shots today). And one of our point guards just dribbles directly into his defender, hands him the ball and then runs alongside the kid while he dribbles to the other end of the court and makes a layup.

I'm thinking of recruiting Gizmo to be our power forward. I don't think it would hurt.

Why Bush won the presidency

Fox News was voted the most trusted TV news organization for accurate reporting, according to a study of American's trust in the news media by Sacred Heart University.

The poll was conducted through 800 phone interviews spanning 50 states.

Of course, the people surveyed seem to have the IQ of a toad, as 22.3 percent of them said Fox News is "somewhat or mostly liberal."

Did you pay taxes on that blow?

North Carolina has an "unauthorized substance tax," requiring "any individual who possesses an unauthorized substance" to purchase tax stamps within 48 hours of purchasing the unauthorized substance.

In other words, state law requires that anyone who purchases cocaine, marijuana, etc., must purchase stamps from the Department of Revenue and affix the stamps to the drugs. People who purchase these stamps are not required to provide any identifying information, and tax department employees are not permitted to report them (it's a Class 1 misdemeanor), but... Seriously?

From an AP story on weird taxes:

The idea is that a peddler, even one who sells illegal substances,
should pay taxes. But in reality the revenue is only collected after
arrests, when dealers are slapped with a tax bill.

"The only folks we have buying those stamps are stamp collectors,''
said Kim Brooks, spokeswoman for the North Carolina Department of Revenue.

Gov. Spitzer, of course, (who also wants to start DNA-testing everyone who gets arrested) thinks it's an awesome idea. Back to the AP:

In his budget proposal to the Legislature last week, he promised $17
million in revenue from it. He also wants to require Internet giants such
as Amazon.com to collect tax on an estimated $47 million in sales to New
Yorkers, who are currently on an honor system to report on their tax
returns how much they spend online.

AcRonyMs gOne awRy (ARMOR)

There is a program in New Jersey called ACHIEVE: Action Communities for Health, Innovation and EnVironmental ChangE

Seriously.

Piano cat!

Because I am the best coach ever

Today the youth basketball team I coach scored a total of 4 points over the course of the entire 40-minute game. Four points. That's two shots. In an entire game. How is that possible?

They're too sexy for their hat...

...too sexy for their hat -- what you think about that?

Incidentally in looking up that song to decide what A.M. and Gizmo are too sexy for, I rediscovered that it mentions being too sexy for cats. Which I think is quite appropriate here. (Although it would obviously be more appropriate if it said my cats were too sexy for my bed, but that's just not what the song's about)

Oh and harbatkin.com has undergone an overhaul since you last checked. Still no content, but I created a new design and you can click around a little to the clips and resume pages. So once again, I welcome your aspersions (does that work in this case? this is why I'm going to bomb the GRE). Harsh criticism. I welcome any and all harsh criticism. About the site, of course. Not the cats.

I live in the epitome of suburbia

I got home this afternoon to find two children bopping around on pogo sticks outside my apartment.

Because inexperience is the new experience, and experience is the new herpes

As Barack Obama picks up momentum in the race for the Democratic nomination, the media seems to be reacting to his success with kid gloves instead of the mallets they're using on Hillary Clinton. The rise of the Obama Fan Club is a pretty strange situation -- in straight news coverage and with pundits on both sides of the aisle. Frontrunners are generally stampeded by the opposing party -- think Hillary earlier in the season, Bush, Kerry, etc.

Just passing along some interesting takes on it...

From a Howard Kurtz story in the Washington Post:

The media overall are being swept up by a wave of Obamamania, in which normally hard-bitten journalists watch the orator in action and come away dazzled by his gifts. A New York Times piece Saturday compared the Illinois senator to JFK and Martin Luther King in the same paragraph. A Newsweek cover story out yesterday gushed that Obama, "tall and handsome and blessed with a weighty baritone, knows how to bring along a crowd while seeming to stay slightly above it." The journalistic scrutiny usually visited on instant front-runners has been replaced by something akin to a standing ovation.

From a Gloria Steinem op-ed in the New York Times:

... what worries me is that he is seen as unifying by his race while she is seen as divisive by her sex.

What worries me is that she is accused of “playing the gender card” when citing the old boys’ club, while he is seen as unifying by citing civil rights confrontations.

What worries me is that male Iowa voters were seen as gender-free when supporting their own, while female voters were seen as biased if they did and disloyal if they didn’t.

What worries me is that reporters ignore Mr. Obama’s dependence on the old — for instance, the frequent campaign comparisons to John F. Kennedy — while not challenging the slander that her progressive policies are part of the Washington status quo.

What worries me is that some women, perhaps especially younger ones, hope to deny or escape the sexual caste system; thus Iowa women over 50 and 60, who disproportionately supported Senator Clinton, proved once again that women are the one group that grows more radical with age.

Anyway, here's to New Hampshire voters being smarter than Iowa caucusers... in both parties.

On spending your Saturday night watching a fat lady's stomach expand and shrink...

Legend has it that an historical Central Jersey landmark is haunted by the spirits of its past, ranging from orphans to soldiers to Ben Franklin's son. (I'm going to leave off the name of said place in order to avoid offending any ghost/history buffs who might regularly Google the place.)

In any case my coworker Gene decided to do a story on the ghosts that apparently live there, so he invited a bunch of people from the newsroom to hang out there Saturday night, waiting for the ghosts to come out. We arrived at 10 p.m. and stayed until 2 a.m., trying to summon the ghosts. Now the clusterfuck of people who showed was strange enough -- we ranged in age from 25 to 60; editors to reporters to office managers to historians to friends of friends; people to dogs. (OK, so there was only one dog, but she had dreadlocks and there totally could have been more dogs hidden inside them) So about 30 of us were standing around with coffees, beers and subs, waiting for the ghosts to make themselves known.

But it got so much stranger.

The landmark has a house psychic named Jane. She's exactly what you would expect. Large. Bright red hair. Big blue, purple and black sequined shirt. And believes ghosts visit her by penetrating her belly.

She and the house historian took us on a tour, and she was telling us stories about ghost sightings in various rooms. Apparently each ghost has its "path," which it paces in a straight line constantly. For me, walking back and forth along the same path over and over would get boring after eternity or so, but Jane said they do, so it must be true.

How does she know each ghost's path, you might ask?

Her stomach expands when she's walking the path.

Obviously.

She ambled through the house and made everyone watch her stomach expand and shrink as she paced the paths in each room. She even had people two-step with her across the room, holding her stomach as it protruded because she was "walking in the ghost's path." Gene tried to volunteer me to hold her stomach, but I politely declined. (in fact, I think she saw me later trying to make other people feel *my* stomach as I pushed it out and back in *There must be a ghost inside me!* and she was not my biggest fan)

Apparently one way you know a ghost is in the room is by smell. They know horse-ghosts hang out in one room because it smells like horse manure sometimes (and it's just not possible that someone keeps farting). In fact the closest anyone got to a ghost sighting Saturday night was a strong body odor stench in one of the rooms. I mean, I guess it's true that people in the 18th century weren't big on the deodorant.

In any case my editor Lois brought along a Parker Brothers Ouija board, and Jane informed us this is a very dangerous tool but that she'd teach us to use it at our own risk. (Good thing we didn't bring the Monopoly) First, Gene and Lois sat down with the wedgie board and a candle, and, as instructed, asked if there were any "spirits from the light." There weren't. The little Ouija-board-window-thingie sat still in the middle of the board for a good five minutes while they tried to badger the spirits from the light to come communicate.

So Jane told Gene he was doing it wrong and took his place. And just then -- shock and awe -- the spirit came! Its name was Vewstom Ct but Jane conveniently ignored the Vews and Ct part and decided we were talking to Tom. Tom gave us some lottery numbers to play and then said bye. If you're interested, I believe they were 7, 4, 54 or 45 (apparently Tom is dyslexic), 30 and 10. I think.

Then it was time for the seance, in which we all sat in a circle and tried to summon spirits from the light. Apparently some dude named Dennis came and squeezed Gene's left kidney.

So that was the night, essentially. And just in case you're wondering, I'll bullet a list of things I learned from Jane:
• Having more than two alcoholic drinks creates holes in your aura and emits negative energy, allowing spirits from the dark to penetrate your aura and latch onto you.
• If you train yourself right, you can bring spirits into your belly and then release them out into the air.
• Ghosts turn over teacups. (so does Gene)
• Ghosts like to lock people in the bathroom.
• Ghosts from the 1700s know how to operate elevators. They like to turn them off when people are inside.
• Ghosts poke.
• Jane is allergic to wheat.

Incidentally I think Keith got video of Becky two-stepping across the room with the psychic -- I'll ask him about it and post it if I can.

*corrections appended*

Gizmo for president!

Just in case you people are like me and need a fuzzy pick-me-up after Iowa...








Incidentally I'm planning to submit a photo of Giz (and maybe A.M., if she could learn to be more photogenic) for the 2009 Cat-a-day calendar, so you people will periodically be seeing some Cat Photo Shoots.

So if you at any point see one you believe effectively conveys the awesomeness that is Gizmo (or A.M., for that matter), let me know.

Oh, and I soooo don't wanna hear the crazy cat lady comments. You knew I was crazy long before this.

New Year's pics

We went to a party in the city for New Year's, at a place called Sin Sin in the East Village.

I recognize that all the pictures of Becky and me over the last few months are starting to make it look like we're dating, but, well... this wouldn't be the first time people thought that. Oh, and if we *were* dating, she like totally cheated on me -- a lot...

...mostly with him...


...but also with him...


...and sometimes with both.


Yup. She was the life of the party...



...which had an open bar.

Shruti and Brian.

Shruti, Brian and Mark.

Shruti and Mark.

Aiming the camera on two people is very difficult when drunk.

And now we're getting to me...



...because my boobs look kind of awesome in that shirt.



Becky didn't cheat on me with him, though.

Shruti and me.

The End.