"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler
Last night, I received an e-mail tip:
The Pentagon just released a photo of the Pakistani man who gave the CIA credible information that led them to Osama bin Laden.
He is eligible to get the $25M reward the US Gov’t was offering.
Now we can reveal this exclusive photo: Continue reading REVEALED: The Secret Source Who Helped U.S. Forces Get Bin Laden →
The first fallout of Tuesday’s big reveal: A 2003 story by the Daily Mail about Tanner Tousignant — teenage son of a former stewardess on Arnold’s private jet — suddenly seems a lot more credible.
However, when Gawker recycled the Tanner tale, the reporter on that old Daily Mail story said, “Nuh-uh. That’s the wrong love child. Must be another one.” So, the tabloids kept digging and — bingo!
Mildred Baena is the mother of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s love child, RadarOnline.com and Star magazine have learned exclusively in a joint investigation.
Baena, 50, worked as a housekeeper for Arnold, Radar and Star have learned.
Baena and Schwarzenegger, 63, conceived their illegitimate child more than a decade ago,behind the back of the Hollywood superstar’s wife and Kennedy heiress, Maria Shriver . . .
Old habits are hard to break, and shagging the help appears to have been an old habit of Arnold’s. One might profitably compare Schwarzenegger’s situation to that of IMF boss Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
It’s not as if there were no warnings about Strauss-Kahn’s habits. And he is now reportedly prepared to assert that the hotel maid he is accused of raping is a liar, claiming that he had consensual sex with her, a claim that her lawyer angrily rejects:
The woman, 32, a widowed immigrant from Guinea who was granted asylum seven years ago, has not been publicly identified by the authorities in New York and has made no public statements about what prosecutors say was an attack by Mr. Strauss-Kahn, 62, a Frenchman, as she prepared to clean his hotel room on Saturday.
But her lawyer said she had been unable to return to her job at the Sofitel New York or to her home, as both had attracted swarms of international news media. In short, the case has been devastating, the lawyer, Jeffrey J. Shapiro, said in an interview . . .
“There is no question this was not consensual — she was assaulted and she had to escape from him, which is why when she finally got out of the room, she reported it to security immediately,” Mr. Shapiro said. “It doesn’t matter what Mr. Brafman says, and it doesn’t matter what the defendant says. Her story is her story, which she has told to everyone who asked her, and she is telling the truth. She has no agenda.”
Mr. Shapiro said his client “did not even know who this guy was” until she saw news accounts, adding, “She is a simple housekeeper who was going into a room to clean a room.”
Droit de Seigneur, indeed!
UPDATE: Why is it that Little Miss Attila can never resist the urge to scold me in public?
Are we sure we want to conflate rape with consensual sex?
There was no conflation. When I said that the two situations might be profitably compared, I knew exactly what similarities I had in mind:
When the boss does the help, consent becomes problematic, oui? This is the whole point of sexual harassment law, am I not correct? That the unequal power relationship is exploitative? As I say, old habits die hard: A man who becomes accustomed to shagging the help when he is young and attractive will not necessarily take ‘no’ for answer when the help stops saying ‘yes.’ Shagging the help is shagging the help, and is bad business under all circumstances.
(The links are to the specific Twitter messages; 140 characters being an insuperable difficulty to extended argument.) Permit me to say that my mind often functions in gestalt mode: I see a pattern in the dots and, this seeming obvious enough to me, I make the mistake of assuming that others see the same pattern. So I will merely point out the dots, without bothering to explain what I see as the connection, and this sometimes leads to confusion as to my meaning.
This is an acknowledged fault of mine. But as I have said before, just because you don’t know what I’m doing, don’t make the mistake of assuming that I don’t know what I’m doing.
Little Miss Attila’s scolding, however, is another one of those gestalt patterns. Exactly what it means, I’m not sure, but it is perhaps significant.
UPDATE II: Fox News had the Mildred Baena story on their Web site this morning, but didn’t mention it on air until 2:15 p.m. ET. And while the Arnold’s love-child baby-mama story is all over the We Smirch celebrity gossip aggregator, it seems no political blogger wants to go near that TMZ birth-certificate story.
PREVIOUSLY:
TOP NEWS
Senator Coburn Quits “Gang Of Six”
“I’m not going to put my credibility on the line for something that I don’t think will fix the problem.” Apparently Senate Dems can’t face reality that Social Security, Medicare are broke; agreement that spending needs to be cut but no agreement on what’s going to get cut
Strauss-Kahn’s Alleged Victim Experienced “Extraordinary Trauma”
Lawyer says chambermaid’s life turned upside down
Flooding Hinders Mississippi River Shipping
Barges resume movement after day-long halt
Even The French Can’t Hide From The Internet
Days of covering up pols’ peccadilloes are over
POLITICS
Big Oil Tax Vote Fails In Senate
Three Democrats oppose bill calling for punitive repeal of oil companies’ tax credits
Gingrich Apologizes To Ryan For Medicare Comments
Lawmakers Defend French Fries As Government Limits Potatoes In School Lunches
Geithner Wants Debt Ceiling “Done And Clean” In July
THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Euro Stocks Seen Higher; Limited Gains
Lower HP Outlook, Economic Concerns Sink Dow
Oil Futures Rise As Dollar’s Decline Continues
“Corporate Accountability” Killjoys Want McDonald’s To Axe The Clown
Probes Into Banks’ Mortgage Lending Grow
TransCanada Sticks To Alaskan Pipeline Plan As Rival Bows Out
Netflix Now Largest Source Of Internet Traffic
Intel: Windows On ARM Won’t Run “Legacy Apps”
SPORTS
Timberwolves’ GM Hints That NBA Lottery Is Fixed; Fine On The Way
Last-place team hosed out of first draft pick, GM cries foul
Nowitzki Scores 48 As Mavs Win Big
Cancer Claims Twins’ Legendary Slugger Harmon Killebrew
Structure Collapses On Lightning, Bruins Win 6-5
Kemp and Kuroda Lift Dodgers Over Brewers
Gonzalez Sparkles In A’s 14-0 Rout Of Angels
Yankees Pull Out All The Stops To End Six-Game Skid
FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
Shocker: Lisa Edelstein Not Returning For Eighth Season Of “House”
Wouldn’t take salary cut
Arnold’s Son: Some Days I Just Want To Be Normal
Kelsey Grammer Trying To Rip Custody From Ex Camille
Oprah’s Star-studded Final Show Details
Standing Ovation At Cannes For Mel Gibson And “The Beaver”
Keanu Reeves Passes On “Akira”
FOREIGNERS
Egyptian Saif Al-Adel Interim Al-Qaeda Chief
Queen To Visit Massacre Site, War Memorial
Journalist Detained In Syria Released By Iran
Pakistan Militants Storm Police Checkpoint
Gaddafi Oil Minister Defects?
Syrian Activists Call For Nationwide Strike
“Land Mine” Melons Go Off In PRC Fields
BLOGS & STUFF
Jonah Goldberg: Ben Stein v. The Maid
Neo-Neocon: Perp-Walk The Ruling Class? L’Horreur!
Volokh Conspiracy: Senate Oil Bill Was Unconstitutional Anyway
American Digest: Slow Impoverishment In American Middle Class Life
AmSpecBlog: Good News – Foggy Bottom Snubs Carter & Friends
Big Journalism: CNN’s Sex Scandals Story Leaves Out Spitzer
Allahpundit: Feingold Says Democrats Opposing Obama EO Are Corporate Tools
Daily Caller: Palin Says Obamacare Waivers In Pelosi’s District Seriously Corrupt
Daley Gator: Obama-Run GM Sponsors And Celebrates PRC Agitprop Film
— compiled by Wombat-socho
“…just in the nick of time, I looked at his hand”
Monday night on MSNBC, Rachel Maddow went off on a tangent so incredibly weird that it is almost impossible to describe. The topic was Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, who had apparently signed legislation defunding Planned Parenthood in his state. Maddow then evidently decided that guys in the audience failed to understand why Planned Parenthood is so vital, suggesting that what Planned Parenthood mainly does is health-care “maintenance” for women. Watch the video:
Question: Why is it only women who require “routine maintenance”? Is there no special need — a need so urgent that it must be subsidized by taxpayers — to provide health-care for men?
It’s almost as if Rachel Maddow were saying that men and women are biologically unequal.
But surely she doesn’t believe that? Or does she?
Tina Brown, empress of the recently merged Newsweek/Daily Beast, tells Joe Pompeo of Yahoo that her operation will be profitable at some point “in the next two to three years.”
Mark your calendars, then: Newsbeast will be in the black by May 2014 at the latest. According to Tina Brown, that is.
Do you trust Tina Brown? Jeff Bercovici of Forbes suggests you keep a few grains of salt handy, noting that Brown appears to be moving the goal posts: In October 2010, she told the Wall Street Journal she expected Newsbeast to reach profitability within two years. She has thereby pushed back the projected profitability point by 18 months.
More grains of salt, reminding you what I wrote as soon as the merger was announced last November:
Looking through the history of Ms. Brown’s career – Tatler, Vanity Fair, New Yorker, Talk — it’s hard to resist the suspicion that Newsbeast (or whatever the resultant hybrid is called) will be mainly about celebrities, both as subjects and as writers.
The investors can expect to lose a crapload of cash in the process. The New Yorker reportedly lost $42 million in three years (1995-97) under Ms. Brown’s editorship. Talk lost an impressive $80 million during its two-year existence. Whatever else you might say about Tina Brown, she’s undeniably brilliant at convincing investors to lose money on her projects.
Brown’s business model is obviously the same as Arianna Huffington’s: An updated online version of the old reliable pump-and-dump. Carve out a slice of online readership, then sell those “eyes” to some larger entity.
Arianna sold HuffPo to AOL. To whom will Tina sell Newsbeast?
You want to invest in a New Media project? Just hit my tip jar.
Ed Morrissey writes up a blogger conference call that Newt Gingrich held today, as does Philip Klein at the Examiner:
Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, speaking on a Tuesday conference call held to respond to his controversial comments about Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget, said that he didn’t go into his interview with NBC’s David Gregory “hostile enough” and should have pushed back more forcefully against the “gotcha” questions the host asked.
But he argued that this controversy, which many have argued spells the end of his candidacy, will be fixed in a matter of days, and he likened his experiences to Ronald Reagan’s.
“Every once and awhile there’s going to be a problem, and you gotta spend three or four days fixing it,” he said. “If you go back and look at Ronald Reagan’s record, the opening week of the campaign in Sept. 1980, they didn’t have a very good week. And they had to go back and fix it. This happens occasionally. The trick is to relax, look at it, try to figure out what happened, and keep moving.”
Gingrich said he should have been better prepared for the “adversarial nature” of “Meet the Press.”
“I didn’t go in there quite hostile enough, because it didn’t occur to me going in that you’d have a series of setups,” Gingrich said. “This wasn’t me randomly saying things. These were very deliberate efforts to pick fights.”
Newt didn’t realize David Gregory was going to play “gotcha”? Hello? But the comparison with Reagan is a bit much. The 24/7 New Media environment — including cable TV, talk radio and the blogosphere — didn’t exist in 1980.
Does the acronym WCFCYA mean anything to you?
This is where Newt’s long, long political record works against him. Leave aside the ex-wives and the half-million-dollar Tiffany’s account. That’s just a distraction. The fact is, Newt has a record to defend, he’s opined on a variety of topics during TV appearances and speeches, and his difficulty in meeting Gregory’s “gotcha” attacks exposes that vulnerability. And if he thinks he can bamboozle Republican voters, he’ll get more of what he got in the “Rebuke in Dubuque“:
For me, of course, it’s personal. I was there in the ballroom at the Hotel Saranac on Nov. 3, 2009, when Doug Hoffman gave his concession speech. Lot of red-rimmed eyes in the crowd there that night. But there is no crying in journalism . . .
Still, I haven’t forgotten. Michelle Malkin has not forgotten. There are lots of us who remember that Newt suppored Dede Scozzafava against the Tea Party movement’s first national hero.
Newt will not win the Republican nomination. Not while I live and breathe. Hit the freaking tip jar.
UPDATE: Karen Martin of the Spartanburg Tea Party recalls the Hoffman campaign:
I sent him money, I called his campaign office and talked to his staffers, I was on his email list. It was my first realization that from that moment on … NO politics were local. What happened in that district “somewhere in NY” could potentially mark a point in time when the tide turned and the Every Man could make a significant impact.
And I remember how enraged I was when Newt Gingrich mocked us. Tried to destroy Doug’s candidacy. Endorsed and praised and supported that abomination of a women. Not once. Not a couple of times. For weeks. And he … was “on our side.”
As I have argued, the Hoffman campaign actually did “mark a point in time when the tide turned.” That’s why, on Election Night 2010, in Boca Raton, Florida, I walked outside of Allen West’s victory party and placed a call to Doug Hoffman.
Those of us who were involved in the NY-23 — and that includes a lot of our blog readers here who gave money to Hoffman — knew we were in the middle of a crucial moment. And the fact that Hoffman lost didn’t change that. What was important was the fight, and the fighter who had the guts to tell the clueless GOP establishment to go to hell.
UPDATE II: Had to do this:
Sissy Willis re-Tweeted a link to a post at The Anchoress in which Max Lindenman talks about the growing menace of bad punctuation, including people who don’t know the God-Fearing American Way of putting commas or periods inside the quotation marks.
Go read Lindeman’s post, and then come back here and we’ll have a little talk, OK? Continue reading Stuff Spell-Check Won’t Fix →
Watching MSNBC is fun from an anthropological perspective. This is the kind of stuff that liberals believe. This is how their minds work. Here is Chris Matthews accusing Republicans and the Tea Party of hate:
What is so bizarre about that is that this wasn’t some off-the-cuff gaffe. It was an actual scripted segment, during which Matthews used the words “hate” or “hatred” ten times in less than two minutes.
Following up on David Gregory’s idiotic race-baiting on Meet the Press, yesterday Mark Levin went off on NBC:
” ‘Some people think that when you called Obama the food stamp president, you know, that has a racial connotation.’ Really? Isn’t that interesting?
“Well, some people think, Mr. Gregory, that your question has a racial connotation. Not just race-baiting, but prejudice, because apparently now it is the official position of ‘Meet the Press’ that if you’re on food stamps, you’re black. I just wanted to clarify that point, because otherwise the question makes no sense. Or, that a majority of the people are on food stamps are black, which is not true. And yet that is the inference. Well, why would Mr. Gregory make that inference? Sure he’s not prejudiced? Why would he do that?”