I still want a lion

Again, courtesy of Gina:

From Reuters... turn up your volume all the way.

The power of Fox News et al

So apparently 15 percent of people believe that Obama is a Muslim. I guess this shouldn't surprise me given that about half of Americans don't accept evolution, but it sort of serves as a reiteration of the power of Fox News.

There are people who would never vote for a Democrat anyway, and their reasoning then is moot, I guess. (The same poll found that 8 percent of respondents admitted they wouldn't vote for Obama solely because he is black. And that's just the people who admitted it. They, I guess, were never going to vote Democratic.)

But I do wonder if any of these respondents are independents, and ultimately decide not to vote for Obama because they think he's a terrorist.

Everyone's talking about the importance of substantive debates, but the swing voters are probably paying a lot more attention to misleading photos than to policy differences.

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.