Basically, the story is about how Keith Olbermann likes being on TV all the time, so that when he’s not on TV, an existential crisis ensues.
Being someone whose métier is the written word, I am mystified by whatever mad compulsion — I need to be in front of a camera every day! — drives Olbermann into such an obscure venue as Current.
He’s been fired from every other network he’s ever worked for and, assuming this trend continues, I suspect one day we’ll see him hawking cubic zirconia jewelry on HSN.
It’s hard to be sympathetic to Newt Gingrich, but his remarks about campaign staffers and/or consultants who talked trash anonymously to reporters are worth hearing:
(From Mediaite with a Twitter hat-tip to Matt Lewis.) Why would anyone hire a consultant or staffer who backstabbed his last boss?
CBS Investigative reporter David Goldstein has learned that a top LAX official has resigned his post after allegations surfaced that he was sexting and sending sexually explicit messages on his LAX-issued phone.
Goldstein tracked Michael Molina down at his house but Molina had no comment.
LAX CEO Gina Marie Lindsay confirmed the resignation to Goldstein late Wednesday afternoon. . . .
Molina was with LAX for three years. His reported salary: $192,400. . . .
Prior to working for LAX, Goldstein reports that Molina was a chief of staff for council member Janice Hahn. She told Goldstein, “Mike used bad judgment. I asked him about it and he resigned…and I can’t say more.”
Representative Anthony D. Weiner has told friends that he plans to resign his seat after coming under growing pressure from his Democratic colleagues to leave the House in the wake of revelations of his lewd online exchanges with women, said a person told of Mr. Weiner’s plans.
NBC News confirms that Weiner called Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chair Rep. Steve Israel last night to inform them he had decided to resign on Thursday.
For the first 10 days, Weiner lied, lied, lied, and the liberals who believed Weiner were wrong, wrong, wrong, while conservatives were right, right, right. In the past 10 days, since Weiner’s June 6 press conference, liberals have tried to forget that their credulity in believing Weiner’s lies, and the idiotic conspiracy theories they proffered in his defense.
Now is the day when Jeffrey Toobin, Joan Walsh and a lot of other liberals must be called to account.
Nancy Pelosi is about to have a press conference in D.C.
UPDATE V: All Pelosi had to say at the press conference was that she was not going to comment on Weiner. And then . . . let’s talk about the real issues! Blah, blah, blah.
Weiner will hold at 2 p.m. ET press conference today, but I’ll have to miss that. I’ll be on my way to the airport to catch my flight to Minneapolis to attend the Right Online conference, where I’ll be hanging out with Andrew Breitbart, Herman Cain, Michelle Malkin and many more.
U.S. stocks tumbled on Wednesday, driven lower by escalating Greek debt woes, while troubling U.S. data pointed to further losses ahead.
Financials came under fire after Moody’s Investors Service said it may cut the credit ratings of French banks, citing exposure to Greek debt.
U.S. data showed the U.S. economy is facing a troubling mix of higher prices and weak growth. …
Here’s an Associated Press video report on the increasingly ugly situation in Greece:
Confidence among U.S. homebuilders slumped in June to the lowest level in nine months as executives turned more pessimistic on the outlook for sales, a sign that any pickup will take time to develop. The National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo sentiment index unexpectedly fell to 13 from 16 in May, the biggest drop in a year, data from the Washington-based group showed today.
Ms. Hahn, a Los Angeles City Councilwoman and a Democrat, released a statement deeming the ad “degrading to women in the worst way.” . . .
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sent out a fundraising e-mail, calling for $150,000 in donations to help fight “vile right-wing attacks like these,” while Ms. Hahn, in her statement, urges supporters to “help Janice fight back with a $25, $50 or $100 donation.”
Last night on MSNBC, Lawrence O’Donnell and Ed Schultz both discussed it. So, when it comes to reporting on “vile right-wing attacks,” this blog is at least 36 hours ahead of the mainstream media. The Democrats are demanding an investigation:
Hahn’s campaign believes there was coordination between Huey’s campaign and Turn Right USA PAC, the group that launched the ad. The Hahn campaign is calling for a Federal Election Commission investigation into the ad . . .
But once everybody is finished jumping up and down and screaming about the video, how about somebody do some reporting on Janice Hahn and LA’s “anti-gang intervention” program? Because that looks like a pretty interesting story, as you can see in this excerpt from my latest American Spectator column:
Hahn’s support for the “gang intervention” program was the subject of an investigative report by KTTV in Los Angeles in April 2008. That report focused on Steve Myrick, a member of the Crips gang who told police he was “working with Janice Hahn” and even had a certificate of appreciation from the councilwoman for his work with a summer job program. “That’s why I’m out [of jail] right now,” Myrick told police after he was arrested on a drug charge in 2006. “Miss Hahn got me out, like, three weeks ago.” He said he violated a police order banning him from a public housing project because Hahn “sent me over there to do some work. She got me off, so it was cool.” In 2007, Myrick was sentenced to life in prison for rape.
Hahn told KTTV it was “blatantly false” that she had made “direct payments” to Myrick or other gang-intervention workers, but defended the program’s hiring of convicted criminals: “I do know that it does take a different kind of person to be able to speak the language that convinces the shooters to not retaliate…. I see it as keeping the peace in a community that has been plagued by violence.” The report also exposed the case of Brandon Bullard, another Crips gangster who told police he was paid to work on Hahn’s gang-intervention program. Hahn spoke at Bullard’s funeral after he was murdered in February 2008.
That 2008 report also named gangsters Marlon “Bow Wow” Jones and Demarco “DC” Chaffold among those who had claimed Hahn as a patron, but KTTV did not mention other notorious examples of how LA’s anti-gang efforts have funded criminality. Mexican Mafia gangster Hector “Big Weasel” Marroquin, whom federal agents of the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms arrested in May 2007 on gun-trafficking charges, headed a group that received some $1.5 million in city anti-gang money. In February 2009, former Long Beach gang-intervention worker “Crazy John” Kennedy was convicted in the murder of a couple who were tied to an anchor and thrown off their yacht to drown. And in May 2009, a federal racketeering indictment named Alex “Rebelde” Sanchez as a top leader of the ultra-violent MS-13 gang. Sanchez had been one of the most high-profile gang-intervention activists in Los Angeles. . . .
Just for starters, it’s kind of hard for Hahn to deny her connection to Bullard, given that she spoke at his funeral. And it is impossible for Hahn to deny that she has spent year supporting this crazy program, even calling for a tax increase to fund its expansion.
So once you major media genius types are through recycling Democratic Party talking points about “vile right-wing attacks,” you might want to try reporting, y’know, facts and stuff.
The Torrance (Calif.) Daily Breeze has an article that would appear to exonerate Democrat Janice Hahn of accusations that her “gang-intervention specialist” program abetted violent felons. I say it “would appear to exonerate” her, because the article leaves unanswered several questions raised by previous reports about Hahn’s involvement in the program. In an attempt to clarify the issue, I sent an e-mail to the Daily Breeze reporter:
I just saw your story about the Ehlinger video and, having previously scanned the Breeze’s reporting about the Fox11 story from 2008, I am having trouble reconciling the two stories. In addition to convicted rapist Steven Myrick, Fox11 named three other individuals — Brandon “BL” Bullard, Marlon “Bow Wow” Jones and Demarco “DC” Chaffold — as having told police they were involved in the LA anti-gang program, specifically mentioning Janice Hahn’s name.
Is it now your contention that NONE of these individuals were actually paid through the program? That is to say, have the police reports been proven false?
Reading your own newspaper’s reporting from 2008, I gather that Bullard, Jones and Chaffold were all connected to Unity One, a non-profit anti-gang operation that received city money, and they had interacted with Hahn through her role in the anti-gang task force. So while the Fox11 report may have sensationalized the accusations, are we to doubt that Myrick, Bullard, Jones and Chaffold all viewed Hahn as a sort of political patron saint, and dropped her name when talking to police as a way of signaling that they were “connected” and/or “protected”?
More generally, there have been other examples (including Alex Sanchez and Hector Marroquin) of “gang intervention specialists” who evidently continued gang-banging while involved in these programs. Isn’t it fair to suspect that these programs are being exploited by the gangs as a sort of non-profit “legit” hustle, so as to access charitable contributions and government grants for their own benefit? And aren’t voters entitled to ask why, when it comes to fighting gang violence, the city is hiring gangsters instead of hiring cops?
Beyond the narrow matter of how this controversy affects the current congressional campaign, it seems to me that the efficacy of LA’s anti-gang programs is certainly a matter of dispute, and that further reporting on this subject is warranted. I write to you in the hope that you will clarify the facts, which your latest story does not seem adequately to address.
— Robert Stacy McCain
correspondent, The American Spectator
FEDERAL ALCOHOL, TOBACCO AND FIREARMS AGENTS knocked first, then entered the Downey home of purported anti-gang activist Hector Marroquin on Wednesday, arresting him for selling silencers and weapons — including three assault rifles and a machine gun — to an undercover ATF agent.
The gun sales, some of which Marroquin, the founder of the gang-intervention group No Guns, transacted at his bar in the city of Cudahy, were captured on videotape and audiotape, said police officers present at his arrest.
Inside the house, the 51-year-old veteran of the 18th Street Gang surrendered as his daughter’s boyfriend, David Jimenez, a parolee at large, jumped out a window, tossed a gun into the backyard pool and climbed on the roof, authorities said. Officials said ATF agents then confronted him, he climbed back inside and was arrested and charged as a felon in possession of a gun. Marroquin, an alleged associate of the prison-based Mexican Mafia, has grown accustomed to such intrusions, having been arrested many times over the years while at the same time being the founder and CEO of No Guns, which has received $1.5 million from Los Angeles City Hall via the much-criticized L.A. Bridges program designed by the Los Angeles City Council to keep youth out of gangs. . . .
Along with his wife, son and daughter, who police say is a member of the Hawthorne L’il Watts Gang, the Marroquins made more than $200,000 a year in salaries — public funds paid by L.A. taxpayers — to steer children away from gangs and help active gangsters escape the life.
You see what I’m talking about? The Daily Breeze seems to be quibbling over details in the KTTV report about Hahn and gangsters, and let’s grant that the KTTV (Fox11) report may have factual errors or a sensationalistic presentation. Yet the Breeze‘s approach to the story overlooks the much larger and general issue of whether LA’s “gang intervention” effort amounted to a taxpayer subsidy for thugs.
We have to distinguish between (a) criticism of Ehlinger’s ad, and (b) the significance of the facts about Hahn’s record on the LA City Council. Ladd’s ad has already passed the 125,000-views threshold, BTW.
