Kate Moss and Pete Doherty had a fight in the Eurostar train in front of the shocked passengers. . . .
An eyewitness told The Sun “He was accusing Kate of being a psychopath and complaining that she was back with [former boyfriend] Jefferson [Hack].”
It seems everything started Tuesday in Paris, when Jefferson attended a party where Kate Moss and Pete Doherty were also invited.
Pete Doherty failed to turn up at the Oasis concert with his band, Babyshambles. Oasis are reportedly furious and kicked the band from their tour.
Meanwhile, after the Live 8 concert ended, Pete Doherty, who sang in duet with Sir Elton John, was criticized for his lousy performance. Pete was suspected of taking drugs just before he entered the stage, because he could barely stand up.
But Pete Doherty has slammed the accusations, insisting he was seduced by Bob Gedolf’s daughter, Peach, seconds before he went on stage.
He says, “I wasn’t lost for words and I wasn’t out of it on drugs. Just before I went on stage, Peaches squeezed my bum hard and whispered something rather suggestive to me. It left me in such shock, I didn’t know where I was.”
Kate Moss and Pete Doherty are set to have an official wedding this month after reports that they have secretly “married” in a Buddhist ceremony on a beach in Thailand.
The wedding was, by all accounts, a romantic affair, with Moss, 32, wearing flowers in her hair as the couple exchanged vows on the island of Phuket. . . .
[S]trong rumours are circulating which suggest that Kate and Pete, 27, are planning to get married on 18 January at a London register office . . .
Given my vast experience with online media and famous celebrities, I’m sometimes asked, “Stacy, what’s the best way for international superstars to conduct themselves on the Internet?”
While obviously I can’t share all my secrets here on the blog, here’s a little lesson in how not to use Twitter:
The sentiment was prompted by a tabloid report that Spears – who turned 29 Thursday – was abused by boyfriend Jason Trawick.
The allegation came from Spears’s one-time husband, Jason Alexander, whose 55-hour Las Vegas marriage to her was annulled in 2004. In the report, Alexander says Spears told him Trawick “beat on me,” and RadarOnline posted an audio clip of the alleged conversation between Alexander and Spears. The singer’s reps, however, deny the woman’s voice on the tapes belongs to the pop star.
Spears, who announced she has a new album coming out in March, also Tweets she is “off on a romantic weekend with Jason for my birthday. xoxo Brit.”
Coincidentally, last night I was thinking along very similar lines not only in regard to Julian Assange’s info-terrorism, but also in regard to what Betsy Rothstein does at FishbowlDC.
Those who delight in prying into the privacy of others are shocked when the tables are turned. The feature on Rothstein points out that she — who played a key role in the “Journolist” revelations — becomes quite flustered when people want to make her life the subject of inquiry:
By the next campaign season she had left [a congressional staff position] for The Hill, where she worked for a decade until leaving abruptly for (highly un-salacious) reasons about which she did not want to elaborate on the record. Before I learned most of this I gleaned that, despite the Adams Morgan residency, she spends many days blogging from a coffee shop in Bloomingdale. When I asked if she had a boyfriend in that neighborhood, it caused a mild freakout. . . .
This elusiveness only serves to reinforce Rothstein’s “agenda vacuum,” the unexplained motivations behind her posts that rankle her critics the most.
Exactly: What ax is she grinding? What’s she all about? What makes her tick? The kind of curiosity that drives Rothstein’s exposure of other people’s secrets feels distinctly uncomfortable to Rothstein when it’s directed at her.
And likewise, as Dan Riehl pointed out, while Julian Assange is subjecting massive amounts of U.S. national security materials to total disclosure, the details of Assange’s own operation — Who’s paying the bills at WikiLeaks? Where’s he getting these leaks? What’s his motivation? — are unknown.
What would we discover if somebody hacked Assange’s e-mail account? What would happen if someone tapped his phone and released the recordings? What might be concealed in the financial records of WikiLeaks?
Dalrymple’s observation about the totalitarian impulse to eradicate privacy is relevant here because, of course, totalitarian governments are always intensely secretive about their own activities. And this inherent double-standard of totalitarianism was something that crossed my mind last night, as I pondered the WikiLeaks revelation of State Department secrets.
[I]n an attack on imperialism, [the Congress of Soviets] called on the nations of the world to abolish secret diplomacy. It promised that the Soviet government would conduct all negotiations in the light of day before the people. And it promised to publish all of the secret treaties to which Russia had been a party.
As the historic record shows, as soon as Lenin’s Bolsheviks gained power, they entered into secret negotiations with Germany that led to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. With similar secrecy, the Kremlin sent Comintern agents everywhere to subvert “capitalist” governments and foment labor unrest in an effort to spark revolutionary uprisings. The U.S. and other governments for some years refused to grant diplomatic recognition to the Soviet government, in part because of the concern — entirely warranted, as subsequent events proved — that Soviet embassies would become hubs of espionage and subversion.
Most notoriously of all, in 1939, after years of Communist propaganda about the need to maintain a “common front” against the fascist menace, Stalin reached a secret treaty with Hitler that provided for the partition of Poland and the liquidation of the Baltic states — the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact that was the necessary and immediate precursor to World War II.
So now, while the democratic government of the United States finds its diplomatic messages turned into front-page news through the crimes of Julian Assange and his accomplices — and this action is defended by some who call themselves “libertarians” — WikiLeaks seems to pose no threat to the secrets of North Korea, Cuba, Iran and other terror-states.
As the communists used to say, “This is no accident.”
An interesting profile of Betsy Rothstein of Fishbowl DC, the Washington media-gossip site. There are many people who despise Rothstein, but you probably also hate most of the people who hate her, so there’s no point trying to convince you how evil she actually is.
it seems that just about everyone else is obsessed with Palin’s presidential prospects, and that includes a certain Ed Rollins, who holds forth today on CNN.com with a piece titled, “Palin, I knew Reagan. You’re no Reagan.”
Well.
There is much to mock about a piece on Gov. Palin’s supposed lack of presidential qualifications, especially coming from a man who once tried to help win the presidency for H. Ross Perot, who was not only unqualified but also insane.
Jennifer Caballero at Liberty Pundits asks the all-too-obvious question:
Bingo, Jen. Whatever your opinion of Sarah Palin, the problem is that nearly all her most prominent critics are professional operatives of one sort or another. If they are not already on the payroll of some prospective 2012 GOP presidential candidate, then they are presumably seeking such work. And they know they can get headlines and ingratiate themselves to those prospective employers by publishing anti-Palin rants.
The real danger here, as I’ve said before, is that this relentless Palin-bashing from within the GOP can have no good result. Either (a) Palin wins the nomination anyway, in which case the GOP 2012 nominee will have been damaged by all these friendly-fire attacks, or (b) someone else will win the nomination as the beneficiary of a none-too-subtle “Anybody But Sarah” campaign in the primaries. And then good luck getting those people energized for the general election.
Only Sarah Palin can beat Sarah Palin. And let me tell you why no one will take her on. Her defenders and supporters, the likes of Rush Limbaugh and people I admire, are so powerful on the right that nobody wants to anger any of those people, nobody wants to end up in the crosshairs, and nobody wants to look like they are unwilling to let her do her thing. I don’t think people should be, you know, uptight and angsting about Sarah Palin. I think she’ll reveal herself, and people will love her or hate her. I really believe that if it looked like she were about to become the nominee, or, heaven forbid, the leader of the free world, a whole lot of people would stand up and say a whole lot of things.
Understand one thing: Nicolle Wallace is Team Bush all the way. She is speaking for, and serving the interests of, the Bush wing of the GOP. I’ve long warned that there is a Jeb 2012 bandwagon geared up and ready to roll at a moment’s notice, if Jeb decides to take a shot at it. If that doesn’t happen, the Bushies are trying to keep their thumb on the scale, to make sure that whoever gets the 2012 nomination, it’s someone acceptable to them.
But the Bushies know that, whatever else happens, it’s all over for them if Sarah Palin gets the 2012 nomination. Establishment phonies like Nicolle Wallace will be persona non grata to a Palin-led Republican Party.
Just keep that in mind. There’s a lot more going on behind the scenes of the GOP than most grassroots conservatives suspect.
P.S.:Ed Rollins? Dude worked on the Huffington ’94 Senate campaign.
The longer people stay out of work, the more trouble they have finding new work. . . .
This country has some of the highest levels of long-term unemployment — or joblessness lasting more than six months — ever recorded. . . .
[T]he legions of long-term unemployed will probably be idle for significantly longer than their counterparts in past recessions, reducing their chances of eventually finding a job even when the economy becomes more robust. “I am so worried somebody will look at me and say, ‘Oh, he’s probably lost his edge,’ ” said Tim Smyth, 51, a New York television producer who has been unable to find work since 2008, despite having two decades of experience at places like Nickelodeon and the Food Network. “I mean, I know it’s not true, but I’m afraid I might say the same thing if I were interviewing someone I didn’t know very well who’s been out of work this long.”
Read the whole thing. Advice for Tim Smyth: Dude, you’re going about this the wrong way. Just create a Web site and keep doing what you would be doing if you actually had a job with a paycheck.
Make some YouTube videos or something. Print yourself a card that says, “Tim Smyth, independent producer” and, if anybody asks what it is you’re producing, give ’em some mumbo-jumbo about “projects” and “clients.” You don’t have to tell them that your client is your brother-in-law and the project is a DVD highlight compilation of his home videos of his kids’ softball season.
Alternatively: “I’m negotiating a development deal.”
Every other bartender and convenience-store clerk in L.A. is “negotiating a development deal,” which translates to “calling up producers to ask them to take a look at my crappy reality-series proposal,” or whatever.
The important thing is to convey the impression that you’re a hot property, with plenty of offers to choose from, just waiting for the right deal to come along.
UPDATE: Now a Memeorandum thread. All joking aside, we are talking about a couple of related problems:
Structural unemployment, not cyclical unemployment — In many cases (although probably not Tim Smyth’s case), long-term unemployment represents an actual shift in the structure of the labor market. As I’ve said, “if you’re waiting for the buggy-whip industry to rebound, you’re going to be waiting a long time.” Even if your occupational skill-set hasn’t become obsolete, it may be that what was a growing sector of the labor force 15 or 20 years ago is now a declining sector, and your long-term unemployment therefore reflects a developing surplus of people with similar skill sets.
Labor market demographics — Tim Smyth is the same age I am, which means he was born near the peak of the Baby Boom. In October, “60 Minutes” did an eye-opening segment (which I mentioned on the blog) about middle-class people in San Jose, Calif., whose 99 weeks of unemployment benefits had run out. Guess what? Most of those people weren’t just middle-class, they were middle-aged, too.
“Financial analyst at a real estate firm, age 54 . . . people in their 40s, 50s, and 60s who though they’d done everything right . . . too young to retire and maybe, too old to rehire . . . fiber-optics engineering manager . . . today, nearly 20 percent of the unemployed in America have college degrees. . . . Doug [Francone] was a $200,000-a-year personnel executive . . . Claudia Bruce . . . was an office manager making $70,000 a year.”
There is a similarity to these people, you see. Although short-term prospects are grim for young people — unemployment for those under 25 is very high — they at least have the hope of getting on with their careers once the economy recovers.
For the middle-aged and (formerly) middle-class unemployed, however, the wrecked economy has devastated their lives in a way that is genuinely irreparable. Even if they manage to find new careers in new fields, there will never be a “recovery” for these people whose careers were permanently derailed — savings drained, homes lost — as a result of the Great Crash.
The “winners” of this grievous misfortune are those who recognize the reality and stop deluding themselves with the false belief that their next job will be like the jobs they lost.
When companies begin to re-hire financial analysts and office managers, they won’t be looking for 55-year-olds to fill those jobs, will they? No, they won’t.
You can yell “age discrimination” at the top of your lungs, but it’s not going to change that reality. You’re going to have to find some new way to earn a living, and the sooner you start figuring out what that “new way” is, the better off you’ll be in the long run.
PARIS- The Swedish Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder and guiding spirit, must appear before a magistrate in Stockholm to answer accusations of rape and sexual harassment brought by two Swedish women. . . .
Maybe you don’t remember that irresistibly sexy pop singer with the famous international supermodel girlfriend, so here’s a story from 2005 to refresh your memory:
There were even reports in 2007 that Pete and Kate were married: