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Adultery in South Carolina: Blame the Woman
By Jon Wiener
Here in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, the famed "redneck Riviera," the death of the King of Pop has taken second place to the adultery of the Governor in the local news. But it's the comments posted online at South Carolina daily newspapers that suggest something about local sentiment on this issue. I guess I should not have been surprised by the number that blamed the woman, especially after the media identified her as Maria Belen Chapur, a journalist for the Argentine TV station Canal America.
In the Myrtle Beach Sun News [all quotes verbatim]: "Like most married men, he got caught involved with a woman of ways who seduced him. . . His biggest mistake was getting involved with a woman that when he tried to end it, sent copies of emails to his wife and the press anonymously and all knows she did it"-- tooclassy4you.
"This gal is having the time of her life. She's enjoying a sexual encounter with a governer in the US, AND most likely has another local stud on call for quickies. WOW! Ladies and gentleman this gal is a professional COUGAR" ibshagn.
(72) CommentsJune 26, 2009
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Hawaii Prepares for North Korean Attack
By Jon Wiener
Vacationing on Kauai, the westernmost of the Hawaiian islands, the only question most tourists ask is which beach to go to today but visitors and locals alike were startled by Thursday's news from Washington: a North Korean missile is now aimed at Hawaii, and Hawaii's missile defenses are being fortified.
Does that mean it's time to cancel the luau and get on the first plane home?
A Japanese newspaper reported that North Korea may repeat may fire "its most advanced ballistic missile toward Hawaii around July 4." Secretary of Defense Robert Gates then announced moving ground-based "interceptor" rockets to Hawaii, and activating the SBX Sea-Based X-Band Radar, a $900 million, 280 foot high seagoing dome that looks like the world's biggest floating golf ball. It rides on a self-propelled oil platform, and is based at Pearl Harbor.
(76) CommentsJune 19, 2009
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Harvard Strike 40th Anniversary
By Jon Wiener
This spring is the 40th anniversary of the Harvard strike, one of the iconic moments of 1960s student protest, but -- strangely -- the only notice thus far has been in the "Opinion/Taste" pages of the Wall Street Journal.
They're still against it.
The strikers I was one of them (as a grad student) -- demanded an end to university complicity in the war (kicking ROTC off campus); an end to evictions of working-class people from property the university wanted to develop; and the creation of a black studies program.
(7) CommentsMay 18, 2009
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Disaster in Dodgertown: Manny is Banned for 50 Games
By Jon Wiener
Somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout; but there is no joy in Dodgertown: mighty Manny has struck out.
Manny Ramirez, the baseball superstar who led Los Angeles to a record-breaking winning streak at home this season, has been banned from baseball for 50 games. He tested positive for performance enhancing drugs on Wednesday night, and the town is reeling.
The drug in question, according to news reports, was human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG), identified by Wikipedia as "a women's fertility drug typically used by steroid users to restart their body's natural testosterone production as they come off a steroid cycle." However Manny has never tested positive for steroids, and he said his doctor had prescribed it for "a medical condition."
(35) CommentsMay 8, 2009
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Hurricane Expert Fired by Bush Allies at LSU
By Jon Wiener
Louisiana State University is firing a leading hurricane scientist who was scheduled to testify as an expert witness in a case against the Army Corps of Engineers for their pre-Katrina work in New Orleans. Ivor van Heerden, who had been deputy director of LSU's Hurricane Center, says the school's former president, previously a Bush appointee, had earlier threatened to fire him if he testified.
Tenure exists, we are told, to protect the expression of views that are unpopular with the powerful. This is another case where the person who needed the protection of tenure didn't have it. LSU was able to fire van Heerden because he is an untenured Associate Research Professor.
Van Heerden was the leader of "Team Louisiana," the official independent state-funded investigation of the Katrina flooding. That panel found that the levee failures reflected poor design, bad science and shoddy engineering on the part of the Corps. The Bush Administration had held the levee failures were an "act of God."
(42) CommentsApril 13, 2009
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South Carolina Suffers While Gov. Rejects Stimulus Funds
By Jon Wiener
On a recent visit to a state whose Republican governor rejected $700 million in federal stimulus funds, I got a sense of how deep the economic slide has been. Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, is a prime resort destination for families from New York and New Jersey to Ohio and North Carolina. But the unemployment rate in Horry County, home of Myrtle Beach, reached 14.3 per cent in February, with the state as a whole at 10.7 per cent, among the worst in the nation (where the average in February was 8.1 per cent).
Nevertheless South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford has said he will reject federal stimulus funds to keep the government off our backs, of course. Now Republicans competing to succeed him are debating his decision.
Tourism is life on the Grand Strand, with its long, long beach lined with miles of high-rise timeshare condos and hotels and more than a hundred golf courses in the area. But for families coping with job loss, cancelling the summer vacation at the beach is one of the most obvious moves which means economic disaster here.
(47) CommentsMarch 29, 2009
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Obama's 'Katrina Moment'? Never Mind.
By Jon Wiener
The AIG bailout bonuses were "Obama's Katrina Moment" -- that's what Frank Rich argued in his New York Times column on Sunday. Just three days later that seems like a ridiculous claim.
The original "Katrina Moment" came when the public turned against George W. Bush, definitely and permanently, after seeing his massive incompetence in handling the aftermath of the hurricane in August 2005. Bush's approval ratings dropped below 40 percent, and never went back up.
Obama's approval ratings in contrast actually have gone up since Rich made his pronouncement: in a new CBS poll released Tuesday, 64 percent of Americans say they favor the job that Obama is doing right now two points more than CBS's poll earlier this month. Even more significant, ratings for the president's handling of the overall economy increased from 56 to 61 percent.
(64) CommentsMarch 25, 2009
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Obama Takes Fight to Southern Calif. GOP
By Jon Wiener
When Barack Obama appeared on Wednesday at a town hall-style event at the Orange County Fairgrounds in Southern California, he was challenging the Republicans in their historic heartland. The area had been ground zero for the Goldwater revolution in the early 1960s. Orange County provided the core supporters and the money that launched Ronald Reagan's political career in the mid-sixties. Reagan won 75 per cent of Orange County's vote in 1984; George W. Bush won 60 per cent in 2004. The county has always been solidly Republican.
Until Obama.
The hardest of hard-core Republican congressional districts in California is coastal Orange County, centered on the wealthy town of Newport Beach previously Chris Cox's district before George Bush elevated him to head the SEC. California political experts were stunned on Nov. 4 when Obama carried the district by 2,500 votes. And in the city of Costa Mesa, Obama beat McCain 51-45.
(82) CommentsMarch 18, 2009
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AIG's "Best and Brightest"
By Jon Wiener
"We cannot attract and retain the best and brightest talent," AIG says, unless they pay those bonuses -- $165 million. Barney Frank had the best and brightest reply: on the Rachel Maddow Show Monday night, he said: "I don't want to retain them."
He's talking about the people at AIG who brought down the company and then the financial institutions and then the rest of the world economy. "If you are trying to undo mistakes," Frank said, "its very often not a good idea to keep the people who made the mistakes in there."
But that $165 million is only the latest in outrageous payments to "the best and brightest" talent at AIG. The disaster was rooted in AIG's Financial Products Group in London. In 2008, when the unit was collapsing, "they were still paying the head of the unit a consulting fee of $1 million a month," according to Gretchen Morgenson of the New York Times, interviewed Monday on "Fresh Air with Terry Gross."
(55) CommentsMarch 17, 2009
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Stop the Presses?
By Jon Wiener
"It's time to stop the presses" at daily newspapers, and turn them into online-only publications that's what former L.A. Times staffer Rick Wartzman says. Writing in Business Week this week, he says it's the only way to preserve the mission of journalists everywhere: report the facts on what the powerful are doing, and what's happening to the rest of us, and do it with the skill, professionalism and ethics often missing in the blogosphere. We need journalists, he says, but we don't need newsprint.
Wartzman is not some teenage blogger. He's worked in the heart of print journalism: he's the former Business Editor at the L.A. Times, and for a while he edited the paper's West magazine. Before that he worked as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. (He's also written a couple of terrific nonfiction books.) He took the Times buyout recently and now is director of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University. He's not an enthusiast for reading the news on the web; he calls himself "a guy who loves to go out and pick up the three newspapers that land on my front lawn every morning."
But he calls the end of daily newsprint "inescapable" an economic necessity. The alternative, he says, is simple: daily newspapers will go broke and disappear completely. Denver's Rocky Mountain News has already stopped publishing. The LA Times is owned by The Tribune company, headed by the evil Sam Zell (so much for journalistic "neutrality" online), which is in bankruptcy. Also in bankruptcy: the owners of The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News and the Minneapolis Star Tribune. The Hearst Corp. will probably close the San Francisco Chronicle sometime soon.
(42) CommentsMarch 12, 2009
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