'Best of TBH Politoons'
Been Bizzy
Izzy
Recommended Reading
from Bruce
PAUL KRUGMAN: Whining Over Discontent (New York Times)
We are, finally, having a national discussion about inequality, and right-wing commentators are in full panic mode. Statistics, most of them irrelevant or misleading, are flying; straw men are under furious attack. It's all very confusing - deliberately so. So let me offer a few clarifying comments.
The lightning bolt strikes again (guardian.co.uk)
From child star to trailblazing radical feminist, Robin Morgan's life reads like a movie script. Now she has taken on Bush and his 'American Taliban'. She tells Sharon Krum why.
Nightmare Mortgages (businessweek.com)
They promise the American Dream: A home of your own -- with ultra-low rates and payments anyone can afford. Now, the trap has sprung.
Alfalfa male takes on the corporation (guardian.co.uk)
He helped to create the animal rights movement - now Peter Singer wants to change the way we eat. He tells Patrick Barkham why McDonald's, GM crops and food miles are not all bad.
Erin Aubry Kaplan: Can a Teacher Care Too Much? (latimes.com)
A passionate instructor's transfer from a poor L.A. school signals it's time for African-Americans to have a voice in education reform.
Jacques Peretti: Why Ronnie Barker earned so little (guardian.co.uk)
John Sullivan, who created Only Fools and Horses, spent so long waiting for his cheque to come through from the BBC that he continued to work as a window cleaner. He tells a great story about being up a ladder one day, chamois in hand, and watching his own show through the window he was cleaning.
Joel Stein: I Want My Country Back (latimes.com)
Spinning favorites with an ex-DJ from the recently silenced KZLA FM, while mourning over a fragmented country.
Earthlike planets may be common: study (news.yahoo.com)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Earthlike planets covered with deep oceans that could harbor life may be found in as many as a third of solar systems discovered outside of our own, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.
The Space Shuttle and the Horse's Rear End (astrodigital.org)
... a major design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was originally determined by the width of a horse's ass.
Median income trends in multiple states
Courtesy of the Detroit Free Press, here's a handy map showing how far median incomes have dropped over the past six years.
Live in Jefferson County, Alabama? Borrow Bruce's Books.
Perform a KEYWORDS search for "Funniest People." By the way, did you know that you can request that your public library buy a book that you would like to read? (Hint, hint.)
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Sunny and fall-like.
Anybody else notice a crapperload of TV commercials for the CIA? There's been at least one in 'The Simpsons' (Faux) every night this week. Saw one late last night on NBC, another mid-day on the CBS secondary (KCAL) and the kid reports they're all over cable.
How many agents left after the appointment of political hack Porter Goss? Or seeing Valerie Plame's career snuffed as political pay back?
What ever happened to recruiting the best & the brightest from college campuses? What about security clearances?
They think they're going to get the same level of candidates through cheesy commercials on TV? OMFG.
No new flags.
Helps Out N.Y. Democrat
Viggo Mortensen
Actor Viggo Mortensen is on a three-day fundraising tour for Robert Johnson, the Democrat challenging U.S. Rep. John McHugh (news, bio, voting record) for the 23rd Congressional District seat.
"I'm pretty skeptical of all politicians, and I think it's only in the movies that you find no-strings-attached, sincere people," Mortensen said Thursday at a $75 buffet dinner that drew 140 people.
Mortensen said he has contributed $2,100 to Johnson's campaign, the maximum limit for an individual under federal election laws. He said he also planned campaign appearances for Johnson in Oswego on Friday and Watertown on Saturday.
Viggo Mortensen
Marks 40th Anniversary
'Star Trek'
Cue the iconic theme music: Forty years ago, on September 8, 1966, "Star Trek" lifted off into TV and cultural history. Over the subsequent decades, the sci-fi adventure series has amassed millions of fans and emerged as a relentless entertainment empire.
Stars William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy sat down recently with the Associated Press and recalled "The Man Trap," the episode that would kick off the show's three-year prime-time run.
"The first show that was on the air was a show with a creature that was a salt sucker," recalled Nimoy. "It was somebody inside a weird-looking suit and it attacked humans because it needed the copper or the salt out of your body to survive or something like that."
"That was the first one?" asked Shatner.
"'Star Trek'
More Pressure Over Propaganda
ABC
ABC faced growing pressure Friday about its planned miniseries on the buildup to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Former Clinton administration officials, historians and a Democratic petition with nearly 200,000 signatures urged the network to scrap the five-hour drama.
A group of historians, including Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Princeton University's Sean Wilentz, wrote to ABC parent Walt Disney Co. CEO Robert Iger, urging him to scrap the series. They said that permitting inaccuracies to heighten drama is "disingenuous and dangerous."
"A responsible broadcast network should have nothing to do with the falsification of history, except to expose it," they wrote.
The Democratic National Committee said it delivered a petition with nearly 200,000 signatures to ABC's Washington office urging the network drop its "right-wing factually inaccurate mocudrama."
ABC
Wants Speech To Interrupt Propaganda
The Decider
ABC, still trying to deal with angry former Clinton administration officials about their Sept. 11 miniseries, was also faced Friday with a request from resident Bush to interrupt the film for a speech.
The resident has asked broadcast networks to clear time for an address to the nation Monday at 9:01 p.m., or at the start of the last hour of "The Path to 9/11" on the East Coast.
The network did not immediately say what it will do. It has said the film, which stretches to five hours running commercial-free Sunday and Monday, is still being edited amid concerns by Clinton officials that it drastically distorts history.
If Monday's portion of the film is interrupted by Bush's speech, the break will come as O'Neill is shown leaving the FBI, his warnings about bin Laden largely ignored and his career stalled by politics, to take his job as security head at the World Trade Center. He died weeks later in the attack.
The Decider
BBC Series Fires Shot At War On Terror
Robin Hood
The BBC's new flagship television series about legendary mediaeval outlaw Robin Hood echoes the British government's troubles in fighting modern war on terror, BBC chiefs said.
The first episode in the 13-part series, due to hit British screens next month, was given its first showing in London late Thursday.
BBC1 controller Peter Fincham said Robin Hood had a "timeless" quality but added: "There is also something oddly modern about it as well.
"Robin comes back from a controversial war in the Middle East to a country where the government is unpopular, raising taxes and losing touch with the people" in what is seen as a "dark time".
Robin Hood
18th Season
`The Simpsons'
As Bart Simpson skips into his 18th season of TV mischief, fans will be glad to know that creator Matt Groening sees no end in sight for the wayward lad or "The Simpsons."
Groening's reasoning is sound: The show, which returns Sunday night, is fun to make, fun to watch, just earned its 23rd Emmy and is finally jumping to the big screen with a summer 2007 movie about Bart and the rest of Springfield's first family.
The landmark 400th half-hour, due to air next May, is a spoof of Fox's "24" that's titled "24 Minutes" and features the drama's Kiefer Sutherland and Mary Lynn Rajskub as their characters.
`The Simpsons'
1st Woman Finalist At Solti Competition
Sung Shi-Yeon
A 31-year-old South Korean, Sung Shi-Yeon, has become the first woman to reach the final of the prestigious Sir Georg Solti International Conductors' Competition, organisers announced on Friday.
The competition is held every two years in Frankfurt and is named after the legendary British conductor Sir Georg Solti (1912-1997) who was general music director of the Frankfurt Opera between 1952 and 1961.
In the final concert on Sunday, Sung will conduct Tschaikovsky's "Romeo and Juliet" fantasy overture.
The two other candidates -- Matthew Coorey, 35, of Australia and Shizuo Kuwahara, 30, of the United States -- will conduct Bela Bartok's "The Miraculous Mandarin" suite and Richard Strauss' tone poem "Death and Transfiguration" respectively.
Sung Shi-Yeon
Knickers To Be Auctioned
Bridget Jones
The famously large underpants worn by film character Bridget Jones are to be auctioned off to raise cash for some of London's most famous green spaces, Britain's Royal Parks Foundation announced Friday.
The large, white underwear was worn by Renee Zellweger in her role in "Bridget Jones's Diary" and prompted the comment, "Hello, mummy!" from Hugh Grant, who played her suitor, Daniel Cleaver.
The underwear, signed by Grant, will be auctioned off at a charity dinner next week for the foundation.
Bridget Jones
Lamborghini Ride Leads To Ticket
50 Cent
50 Cent may have to dig in for a lot more change than that after being pulled over by police Friday in midtown Manhattan while taking his silver Lamborghini for a spin.
Plainclothes officers in an unmarked car stopped the star rapper, whose real name is Curtis Jackson, at about 2 p.m. after he allegedly made an unsafe lane change.
The rapper was cited for a lane-change violation, and for having an expired license and no registration, said Detective Christopher Filippazzo, a police spokesman.
He was let go after a friend showed up with proof that 50 Cent owned the vehicle. The friend, who had a valid license, drove him away, police said.
50 Cent
'Conversations: William Jefferson Clinton, From Hope to Harlem'
Bill Clinton
Bill Clinton, once dubbed the nation's first "black president," is the focus of a book chronicling nearly 100 black Americans' thoughts on the 42nd president.
Clinton celebrated the release of his former diarist Janis Kearney's book, "Conversations: William Jefferson Clinton, From Hope to Harlem," as an unprecedented look at his eight years in office.
The book, which features interviews from U.S. Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., former Atlanta Mayor Bill Campbell and baseball great Hank Aaron, is part history and part historical narrative, Kearney said.
Bill Clinton
No Immediate Plans For Marriage
Brad Pitt
Brad Pitt, ever the social activist, says he won't be marrying Angelina Jolie until the restrictions on who can marry whom are dropped.
"Angie and I will consider tying the knot when everyone else in the country who wants to be married is legally able," the 42-year-old actor reveals in Esquire magazine's October issue, on newsstands Sept. 19.
Brad Pitt
$1.2M Theft
Songwriters Guild of America
The former royalty manager for the Songwriters Guild of America has admitted that she conspired with her daughter and another relative to steal more than $1.2 million from the organization.
Marsha Aiken, 54, of Brooklyn, N.Y., admitted Thursday to conspiring with her daughter, Nicole Williams, 27, and a nephew in the embezzlement, which occurred between 2001 and 2005, U.S. Attorney Christopher Christie said.
Aiken's daughter pleaded guilty to the same charge Aug. 30. A third defendant, Anthony Ray, 33, of Providence, R.I., who is Aiken's nephew, pleaded guilty Aug. 29 to the same charge, and to tax evasion.
Songwriters Guild of America
Strangles Intruder
Nurse
A nurse returning from work discovered an intruder armed with a hammer in her home and strangled him with her bare hands, police said.
Susan Kuhnhausen, 51, ran to a neighbor's house after the confrontation Wednesday night. Police found the body of Edward Dalton Haffey 59, a convicted felon with a long police record.
Under Oregon law people can use reasonable deadly force when defending themselves against an intruder or burglar in their homes. Kuhnhausen was treated and released for minor injuries at Providence.
Haffey, about 5-foot-9 and 180 pounds, had convictions including conspiracy to commit aggravated murder, robbery, drug charges and possession of burglary tools. Neighbors said Kuhnhausen's size - 5-foot-7 and 260 pounds - may have given her an advantage.
Nurse
Qualified For OK Judgeship
Auto-Eroticism
A Slovak driver who crashed into a bus shocked rescuers who found him unconscious and half naked with a vacuum pump on his penis.
Police said the 42-year-old man, driving an old Citroen in the Slovak town of Levice, had ignored a "give way" sign.
"It's very likely he had auto-sex while driving, it is a matter of investigation. After the accident he was found lying in the seat, his pants were off and it (the pump) was placed on his penis," police officer Peter Polak told Reuters.
The man was taken to hospital with head injuries.
Auto-Eroticism
Arrests Followed
Cookie Party
Three people including two students at the University of California, Berkeley, were arrested on Thursday on suspicion of making and serving marijuana-laced cookies that sickened at least a dozen students.
University police said a student who felt anxious and ill after eating the cookies told them the treats were served on Wednesday at a student-run housing cooperative near the campus.
About 15 other students at the cooperative reported similar symptoms, and a dozen of them were sent to local hospitals. They were released on Thursday morning.
Cookie Party
Talking Elephant
Kosik
He's no Dumbo the Flying Elephant but with his ability to "speak," perhaps as close to the Disney cartoon character as a real life elephant can get.
The Everland amusement park said Friday its 16-year-old male Asian elephant, named Kosik, can make sounds imitating up to eight Korean words, including "sit," "no," "yes," and "lie down."
The pachyderm produces humanlike sounds by putting his trunk in his mouth and shaking it while exhaling - similar to how people whistle with their fingers. But the park said it's unclear if Kosik knows the meaning of the sounds he makes.
Spectrograms show Kosik's voice frequency when he makes human sounds are similar to his keeper's, Everland said.
Kosik
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