'Best of TBH Politoons'
Recommended Reading
from Bruce
'Devastating' Moyers Probe of Press and Iraq Coming (editorandpublisher.com)
Bill Moyers returns to PBS next Wednesday with the most powerful indictment yet of the media's performance in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Some media figures admit he is right, but the press as a whole, he charges, has not yet taken responsibility for a tragic failure.
Greg Mitchell: "Sorry We Shot Your Kid, But Here's $500" (editorandpublisher.com)
For the entire war in Iraq, the press has been kept largely in the dark concerning the number of civilians killed by our forces, and what happened in the aftermath. Now several hundred files posted online reveal some of the true horror while raising questions about lack of compensation.
Froma Harrop: Skilled Jobs Also in Danger (creators.com)
The master plan, it seems, is to move perhaps 40 million high-skill American jobs to other countries. U.S. workers have not been consulted. Princeton economist Alan Blinder predicts that these choice jobs could be lost in a mere decade or two. We speak of computer programming, bookkeeping, graphic design and other careers once thought firmly planted in American soil. For perspective, 40 million is more than twice the total number of people now employed in manufacturing.
Massimo Polidoro: The Devious Art of Improvising, Lesson One (csicop.org)
Take it from James Randi: real tricksters rarely read magic books, they just improvise along the way, according to the needs of the moment...
Jim Hightower: THE INVADERS FROM AFAR (jimhightower.com)
Like something from a 1950s horror movie [eerie music], they came from afar, wriggling into our waterways, endangering our very ecosystem, and threatening human safety.
Elizabeth Montalbano: Red Hat founder's Lulu promotes self-publishing
San Francisco (IDGNS) - In 1994, Bob Young founded Red Hat, the popular Linux distribution vendor, in his wife's sewing closet. Now, the entrepreneur is giving others a chance to create a successful business in the same do-it-yourself way - by self-publishing their creative projects through his new venture, Lulu Inc.
Don Quixote and The Narrative Self (philosophynow.org)
Stefán Snaevarr asks, are our identities created by narratives?
DAVID BLUM: A True Feminine Mistake (nysun.com)
Ladies: you can choose your fate. Take it from Leslie Bennetts, a rich braggart whose charmed life hanging around movie stars qualifies her, she thinks, to tell you how...
Jeff Sharlet: Keeping it unreal (newstatesman.com)
We consider the primitive music of blues singers such as Leadbelly to be more authentic than that of the Monkees. But all pop musicians are fakes...
'Sicko' Selected for Cannes Film Festival! (michaelmoore.com)
We at MichaelMoore.com have just received word that Michael's new film, "Sicko," has been selected to be part of the main program of this year's Cannes Film Festival. This is Michael's third film in a row to be an "Official Selection" at the Cannes Film Festival ("Bowling for Columbine" and "Fahrenheit 9/11" were the other two).
ERIC BRADNER: THE JOE BOB BRIGGS INTERVIEW (retrocrush.com)
Investigative reporting has been going downhill for 30 years. Newspapers invest less in it, and networks don't invest in it at all. (If you'll notice what they do on their magazine shows, it's all stories that are "pre-reported" from other sources.) So it's not surprising that there would be alternative forms of expression showing up to deal with the anger and frustration that inevitably occurs when the media stops doing its job.
Joebobbriggs.com
The Hill's Pundit Blog
Bambi Meets Godzilla (Video)
Commentoon: Abstinence Sex Ed (womensenews.org)
Reader Suggestion
Nose Gold
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Back to sunny and cool.
Roaming Ambassador
Bill Clinton
Hillary Rodham Clinton said Saturday that if she is elected president, she would make her husband a roaming ambassador to the world, using his skills to repair the nation's tattered image abroad.
"I can't think of a better cheerleader for America than Bill Clinton, can you?" the Democratic senator from New York asked a crowd jammed into a junior high school gymnasium. "He has said he would do anything I asked him to do. I would put him to work."
Clinton spoke at a town hall-style meeting Saturday where she took questions from about 200 people. When asked what role the former president would play in her administration, she left no doubt it would be an important one.
"I believe in using former presidents, particularly what my husband has done, to really get people around the world feeling better about our country," she said. "We're going to need that. Right now they're rooting against us and they need to root for us."
Bill Clinton
Edits James Bond
British Airways
British Airways cut a cameo by Richard Branson from its in-flight version of the latest James Bond film and blurred out the tail fin of a Virgin Atlantic plane seen in the movie.
BA's entertainment team cut a cameo appearance by Branson, chairman of the rival airline Virgin Atlantic, that appears in the original version of "Casino Royale," a spokesman confirmed Saturday. In the original film, Branson can be seen turning around after walking through a metal detector at Miami Airport.
"We screen all films before they're used on our aircraft so that we can control the content of what is displayed," the spokesman said on condition of anonymity, in line with company policy. "We have full control over what is shown."
The tail fin of a Virgin plane appearing in the film is also obscured in BA's in-flight version.
British Airways
Crashes In Australian Rally
Eric Bana
Australian actor Eric Bana crashed his painstakingly restored 1974 Ford XB Coupe into some trees during an around-the-state rally Saturday but emerged uninjured along with his co-driver.
Bana and co-driver Tony Ramunno walked away from the crash during the Targa Tasmania rally, where they had been in 53rd place in field of 115 cars in the Outright Classic competition.
Initially, Bana hoped that the car, which he has owned since he was 15, could be repaired to continue the final day of racing on Sunday. But a closer inspection by his support crew showed that the front right-hand steering and suspension were too badly damaged.
Eric Bana
Bollywood Wedding News
Aishwarya Rai & Abhishek Bachchan
Abhishek Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai, one of Bollywood's best-known screen couples, married on Friday in a traditional Hindu wedding in which the groom rode a white horse before the pair took their vows around a sacred fire.
The ceremonies concluded three days of celebrations at the actors' homes in India's entertainment capital of Mumbai, creating, what industry pundits said is, Bollywood's ultimate power couple.
Rai, 33, is a former Miss World and Bachchan, 31, belongs to Indian film royalty, being the son of Amitabh Bachchan, the country's best-known actor who has a huge fan following around the world.
The celebrations have transfixed Bollywood and sent India's celebrity-obsessed media into a frenzy even though the Bachchans have tried to keep the event strictly private and low-key because the groom's grandmother is ill.
Aishwarya Rai & Abhishek Bachchan
Sued For Imus Reruns
KCAA
CBS Radio is suing a small radio station for airing reruns of Don Imus' program since his firing for sexist and racist comments about the Rutgers University women's college basketball team.
The lawsuit filed this past week in federal court in Riverside claims KCAA-AM and its license holder violated copyright protections. The suit seeks a temporary restraining order and $150,000 for each violation. A hearing is set for Tuesday.
The station, which had carried the shock jock's morning show since 2003, started airing recordings of old shows last Monday along with listener calls, mail and e-mails reacting to the controversy.
KCAA chairman Fred Lundgren wrote to CBS attorneys saying the station plans to continue airing the shows through April 27 but would then destroy its Imus materials and tapes.
KCAA
Miss America 1944
Venus Ramey
Miss America 1944 has a talent that likely has never appeared on a beauty pageant stage: She fired a handgun to shoot out a vehicle's tires and stop an intruder. Venus Ramey, 82, confronted a man on her farm in south-central Kentucky last week after she saw her dog run into a storage building where thieves had previously made off with old farm equipment.
Ramey said the man told her he would leave. "I said, 'Oh, no you won't,' and I shot their tires so they couldn't leave," Ramey said.
She had to balance on her walker as she pulled out a snub-nosed .38-caliber handgun.
"I'm trying to live a quiet, peaceful life and stay out of trouble, and all it is, is one thing after another," she said.
Venus Ramey
USC Plans
Lil' Romeo
Lil' Romeo says he's bound for the University of Southern California, where, if all goes according to plan, the teenage hip-hop star would become Romeo Miller, basketball player.
The high-school junior has committed to playing basketball for the Trojans in 2008, Dave Lindsay, a spokesman for Lil' Romeo's online label, UrbanDigital Records, said Friday.
USC spokesman Dave Tuttle declined to confirm or deny the report, but said the university hasn't received a signed letter of intent from the young rapper.
Lil' Romeo, whose full name is Percy Romeo Miller, is currently a guard on his Beverly Hills High School team.
Lil' Romeo
Selling Wedding Gowns
Disney
Walt Disney Co. is looking to grab a bigger piece of the wedding cake, and feed its burgeoning Princess business, with a new line of character-inspired bridal gowns aimed at women who want to look and feel like Cinderella at the ball on their big day.
The 34 gowns by designer Kirstie Kelly were inspired by princesses from Disney films like "Sleeping Beauty" and "Beauty and the Beast" and mark the latest effort by Disney to steer its weddings business toward higher-end nuptials.
Disney instructed Kelly to base her gown designs on those characters in a bet that the popularity of the Disney Princess line of products for girls, which racked up $3.4 billion in worldwide sales last year, would carry over to brides who grew up with Disney.
Kelly's gowns, which debuted on a New York catwalk, range in price from $1,500 to $3,000, below couture prices but above the average wedding dress price of $1,000. The price point is aimed at a generation of couples who are getting married older and paying for their own celebrations, Disney said.
Disney
Righteous Woman
Andree Geulen-Herscovici
An 86-year-old former teacher who risked her life to save more than 300 Jewish children from the Nazis in Belgium was granted honorary Israeli citizenship at an emotional ceremony in which she was reunited with dozens of the people she rescued.
"What I did was merely my duty. Disobeying the laws of the time was just the normal thing to do," Andree Geulen-Herscovici said softly in French in accepting the honor.
Geulen-Herscovici was a teacher in Brussels in 1942 when she witnessed a Gestapo raid on a school. That prompted her to join a rescue organization and for more than two years she took in Jewish children and hid them in Christian homes and monasteries under assumed identities.
Throughout the war, she kept track of the children, keeping a secret record of their original names and other details about them in a diary. At the end of the war, she returned as many as she could to their surviving relatives.
Andree Geulen-Herscovici
Lets MTV 'Pimp' His Ride
$chwarzenegger
In the latest promotion of his environmental agenda, Gov. Arnold $chwarzenegger is scheduled to make an appearance Sunday on the popular MTV show "Pimp My Ride."
The actor turned politician uses the opportunity to praise the show's hosts, rapper Xzibit and Mad Mike, for showcasing what he describes as an environmentally hip project. It is the latest environmentally themed event for $chwarzenegger, who continues to generate international attention for signing a landmark global warming law last year.
For the show, mechanics converted a 1965 Chevy Impala, installing an 800 horsepower engine that runs on biodiesel fuel and goes from zero to 60 mph in three seconds. The governor said the converted car's emissions of greenhouse gases will be 50 percent lower.
$chwarzenegger
Washes Ashore On Brando's Atoll
Garbage
Tennis balls, 10-year-old aluminum cans and neon tubes were among more than a tonne of junk collected in recent days on the tiny Polynesian atoll bought by Marlon Brando in the 1960s, the actor's son said.
The garbage had washed ashore with the tides, and Teihotu Brando made the Friday announcement as a way of drawing attention to pollution and other types of environmental destruction.
The cleaning of the 13 miniscule islands belonging to the French Polynesian Tetiaroa atoll took three days and was done in conjunction with Earth Day, which is Sunday. Members of environmental organisation Te Mana O Te Moana (Spirit of the Ocean) joined in the project.
Some cans collected during the clean up had expiration dates on them from 10 years ago and remained in good condition.
Garbage
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