Novel daily editorials

Songwriter Jonathan Mann of Berkeley, Calif., has come up with a unique format to express his editorial opinion. Huffington Post or some other online newspaper would be smart to hire the Rock Cookie Bottom guy to post his song-a-day exclusively at that site to drive hits.

Irony aside, listen to Saving Newspapers, The Musical (DEMO).



Click here for Mann's entire playlist. Most-viewed: Hey Paul Krugman (A song, A plea), seen more than 151,000 times.

Website find of the day

News and Verse blog's motto is "light verse, ripped from headlines."

Clever stuff. Today's entry:

NEWSWIRE--Accused investment scam artist Bernie Madoff is expected to plead guilty today and could face life in prison.


A pink slip means your laid off,
A furlough means you're day'd off
A buyout means you're paid off,
All, better off than Madoff.

Simple and to the point

The new "COALergy: Smudge" ad that ran on CNN should win awards. It does what a great ad should do: entertain and make a simple point.



Bravo, Reality Coalition, and hat tip to TPM.

"First, you have to get mad."

Peter Finch's achorman character in the classic movie, Network, seems more precient today than he was in 1976. We should be thinking about a better ending for today's real world, though.

A word on words

The Sunlight Foundation reports Sen. Robert Menendez is, by far, the most outspoken member of New Jersey's delegation in Washington. His statements on the floor and in the Congressional Record outpace fellow Democrat Sen. Frank Lautenberg almost 3-to-1.

The list at the foundation's website, CapitolWords.org, left me wondering why we see so little about what Menendez says in any media at the Jersey Shore.

Of the words New Jersey's delegation speaks most often on the record, the word "billion" comes up more quite a bit often than the word "women." Sad.

(Hat tip: Herb Jackson's blog, Capital Games)

Ultimate woman bosses

A few days ago, Anne Dunwoody became America's first woman four-star U.S. Army general. Today, we met Maria Falca-Dodson, the first woman commander of the New Jersey National Air Guard:

Falca-Dodson, who had served as Deputy Adjutant General of New Jersey since March 2002, ... replaces Brig. Gen. Lawrence Thomas III. ...

For Maj. Gen. Glenn Rieth, there was little doubt that Falca-Dodson was qualified for her new position.

“I had the opportunity to work with her the last six years directly,” Rieth said. “Make no mistake; she's a soldier and an airman first. During her time as a deputy, she didn't always get the glorious jobs. But every issue she took and every project that was handed to her was carried out. And there were a lot of things that needed to be carried out during that time.”

Thomas said he is fully confident in Falca-Dodson.

“Changing command is like dropping kids off at school for the first time and you want to make sure they succeed,” he said. “I know she is ready to assume this command. She has my full support.”

I'm not following Rieth's little analogy, but still, the glass -- and brass -- ceilings have a couple more cracks.

The Beatles were bad boys

Curvature plays the 5 most anti-feminist Beatles songs:

1. Run For Your Life
2. You Can't Do That
3. You Like Me Too Much
4. Martha, My Dear
5. You Won't See Me

You can vote however you like

Go Mayberry!

See more Ron Howard videos at Funny or Die

Aaack!

I'm still not convinced this wasn't PhotoShopped, but every source I see says this is the real McCain after he and Barack Obama finished up the last debate:

Nailing Gov. Palin, er, or something like that

Tina Fey and Amy Poehler did it again this week on Saturday Night Live!

Introducing Caribou Barbie

It's a sad day when the Republicans create more relevant ads for the Democrats than do the Democrats.



And is this Sarah Palin or the real Tina Fey? It's hard to tell the difference, but if it's Fey, she has nailed Palin to a T. Bravo!:



Best lines:

Gov. Palin: "And to think, just two years ago I was just a former small-town mayor of the crystal meth capital of Alaska."

Sen. Clinton: "I invite the media to grow a pair, and if they can't, I'll lend them mine."

Who wouldn't want to pay their fair share?

Former N.J. Rep. Jim Courter (right), it seems.

Lucy Komisar reports that the Federal Communications Commission has fined Courter's New Jersey telecom company, IDT, $1.3 million for failing to file a contract for telephone service to Haiti in 2004.

Seems the man who's John McCain's biggest presidential campaign fundraiser in New Jersey found a novel way to conspire with a dictator and avoid paying due taxes at the same time.

Its work with Haiti has been put under scrutiny since a former employee, Michael Jewett, then IDT’s manager for the Caribbean, sued the company. His suit claims he was fired when he balked at negotiating a scheme that routed a portion of the company’s long distance revenue from Haiti calls to a shell company owned by then-president Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Jewett’s suit alleges that the deal cut IDT’s long-distance payments to Haiti to 8.75 cents a minute, from 23 cents, the legal tariff, which mainline U.S. carriers such as AT&T were paying.

Payments went to an offshore shell company, Mount Salem in the Turks & Caicos, which sent 3 cents to Aristide and the rest to the Haiti telecommunications company.

Courter, a former New Jersey Republican congressman, is one of 20 McCain national finance co-chairs, and joined the campaign in February 2007. He’s a “Trailblazer” for McCain, meaning he raised at least $100,000. The IDT PAC has contributed $84,850 in 2008.

So, this is the kind of economy a McCain administration would endorse? He who can better outsmart the tax system is rewarded, while a bigger portion of the burden falls on the shoulders of us common wage earners?

Read Komisar's full report here.

(Getty picture cropped from Komisar's blog.)

Welcome to the Jersey Shore

This is funny, but seriously, most of us here do welcome any visitors to come enjoy our beaches and restaurants, while the rest of us jealous suckers work our butts off.

Happy Indie Day

Flash back to 1982 (thanks, Crooks and Liars blog)

Memory failing or a flip-flopper?

Could be either, but it's not presidential material.



And here, with hat tip to John Aravosis at Americablog, is one of his flip-flops on one of the most critical aspects of this election: court appointments.

McCain in a Town Hall today "I will not impose a litmus test on any nominee."

McCain in 2000: "Somewhat surprisingly, McCain had the support of Gary Bauer, the social conservative, who had dropped out of the race by that time. 'I wanted a commitment from either George Bush or John McCain that if elected he would appoint pro-life judges to the Supreme Court,' Bauer told me. 'Bush said he had no litmus test, and his judges would be strict constructionists. But McCain, in private, assured me he would appoint pro-life judges.'" [New Yorker, 5/30/05]

McCain 2007. McCain said, "I do not support Roe v. Wade. I think it should be overturned." [New York Times, 2/24/07]

Broken hearts in Brick

None of the kids wanted to tell me their names.

The half dozen or so young adults who stopped around 7:30 tonight to put flowers on the natural grave where Brick Township boys Joe Sendzik, 27, and Greg Brown, 29, died yesterday in a burning car said they didn't know the victims well enough to be identified as mourners.

Yet, they mourned. They cried. They shared what they heard and how sad they are that this tragedy happened.

And they shared stories about how their paths had crossed with Joe and Greg, to various degrees. Pop Warner. Brick Memorial High School. A sister's fiance's friend or whatever.

I've watched them come in a steady stream all evening, even though Herbertsville Road there has no shoulders and they, themselves, were at some risk stopping. Traffic is pretty fast and heavy there as people who live in Brick and Point Pleasant travel home from points west. Most folks on the road are locals who've driven it thousands, hundreds of thousands, of times.

The kids, well, young adults, also shared how most of us, when we're heading east, often speed up just before that bump there -- right there at the skid marks -- the biggest of three that make what my kids always called the "wee road," because the descent from the bump makes your stomach jump like amusement rides do, except for free.

But if you go too fast on the "wee" bumps, it's possible to lose control of the car. And by the skid marks and tire tracks etched through the scub pine border screening the sports field at Pine Grove Day Camp in Wall, it's possible that's what happened just before the 2000 BMW chopped down one of the bigger pines and burned up with the boys in it.

Everyone agrees that no one ever will know exactly what caused the crash.

Today, the fragrant scent of pine is strong from tearful sap of the broken trees. The earth is charred.

And people have been laying all kinds of flowers, silk and fresh. One glass candle reads, "Joe," and the other, "Greg."

One young woman brought fresh-cut lilacs, now at the high of their bloom and ever-so-fragrant. I think the boys' souls can smell the aromas.

For those of us grieving with the families -- Joe's mother, Maria, is a popular English teacher at Brick Memorial High School -- the site is a little disturbing though. There's still charred pieces of the 2000 BMW and ashes of clothing and a book of some sort, now unrecognizable except for the clump of margins now bleeding sepia.

Our hearts are heavy. The students and staff at Brick Memorial are taking donations to help the Sendziks with funeral costs and to buy food to serve the huge number of mourners sure to pay respects to the two friends.

These still are days of shock. The worst pain is yet to come.

Joe and Greg and their families will be in our prayers tonight as we seek comfort for them at this time of deep sorrow.


(Photos by Abby Petterchak)

RIP Eight Belles but ...

... is there a karma going on here? CubbyChaser at Comedy Central posts what I think a lot of us, heads cocked, were musing after presidential candidate Hillary Clinton asked supporters to put money on Eight Belles for her, then ...

On Saturday, the Kentucky Derby -- which is essentially the Kentucky Derby of horse races -- was held in, I think, Tennessee, and Hillary Clinton put her money on Eight Belles, the one female horse, running against a bunch of male chauvinist horses to win. ...

Unfortunately, Eight Belles came in second place to (I'm not making this up) a horse named Big Brown, suffered a fatal injury and had to be euthanized immediately following the race.

Girl, feel the cosmic karma ...

Tuesday was the latest in a string of Super Duper Tuesdays that should decide the Democratic primary. Sen. Barack Obama creamed Sen. Clinton in North Carolina and lost by a dubious 51-49%, far better than the double-digit loss expected, in red state Indiana.

I say dubious because 1 in 10 voters in exit polls reported they are Republicans who crossed over to sabatoge the race for the candidate they think McCreepy can beat, in compliance with radio god Rush Hussein Limbaugh's Operation Chaos instructing them to vote for Clinton. The voting poll games already have begun.

Then there's the untimeliness of a massive voter registration purge and nuns who were prevented from having a voice in the Indiana elction. A dubious win, but along with an infusion of another $6.5 million from the Clinton's personal bank account, will keep her going.

Women as second-class citizens

For the first time since 1918, life expectancy is falling for a significant number of American women, according to this Washington Post report.

In nearly 1,000 counties that together are home to about 12 percent of the nation's women, life expectancy is now shorter than it was in the early 1980s, according to a study published today.

The downward trend is evident in places in the Deep South, Appalachia, the lower Midwest and in one county in Maine. It is not limited to one race or ethnicity but it is more common in rural and low-income areas. ...

The phenomenon appears to be not only new but distinctly American.

"If you look in Western Europe, Australia, Japan, New Zealand, we don't see this," Murray said.

I think all those countries have government-guaranteed health care.

(Flickr photo by plagueoftruth)

Accurate vote counts shouldn't be so hard

People have voted on slips of paper -- or rocks or some other tangible, countable resource -- since the beginning of civilization.

So, in 2008, why is it so daunting for public officials who can't get their acts together on electronic machines to print up some ballots and have us all vote by putting our hand to pen to paper? Have you ever seen anyone other than for-profit newspapers and broadcast stations say they care whether the results are announced an hour after the polls close or a day afterward?

Today's Asbury Park Press has this must-read editorial: "Will the winner be the winner?"

Who is this Nina Mitchell Wells and how did she become the all-powerful N.J. secretary of state that gets to pull the levers behind the curtain in Oz?

Down the rabbit hole

If you thought American "elections" couldn't get more surreal than that absurd flag-pin interrogation last week that ABC called a Democratic "debate," get a load of this Hillary Clinton ad running today in Pennsy.

Earth Day is tomorrow

Plant a tree. Pick up some litter. Carpool, if just for one day.

But do something, please.

Enjoy Jay Leno's Earth Day clips. I like the kids' letters about global warming:

My kind of guy

Father Mike Pfleger makes me want to turn Catholic, were they all so straight talking:



"It doesn't make it right just because that's what you (Bill O'Reilly's Fox Snooze ambush "reporter")say about him." Exactly.

Why doesn't the media ask whether candidates and clergy think it's moral that more children in the U.S. live in poverty than children in any other country in the industrialized world.

Now we're talking

Superior Court of New Jersey issued subpoenas a few hours ago for Sequoia's voting machine testing records, including in our own Ocean County.

Election officials in Bergen, Gloucester, Mercer, Middlesex, Ocean and Union counties were instructed to turn over the machines by April 15. Activists trying to persuade Superior Court Judge Linda Feinberg that electronic voting machines should be discarded succeeded in convincing her that examining these counties' machines is critical to their case.


"In order to succeed in our case and show Sequoia machines are insecure and can be hacked into, we need to look at these machines," Venetis argued. Clerks in the six counties uncovered discrepancies in 60 machines when they doubled check the vote tallies after the Feb. 5 presidential primary.

The Star-Ledger is planning a full story in the morning, so we'll keep you posted.

Ed Felton on Friday posted on his blog that the discrepancies were worse than originally thought.

This week we obtained six new summary tapes, from machines in Bergen and Gloucester counties. Two of these new tapes contradict Sequoia’s explanation and show more serious discrepancies that we saw before.

Can't make this stuff up

Last week we learned Princeton experts aren't good enough to look at the software Sequoia uses to count my vote in Ocean County. Sequoia threatened to sue Princeton if they touch it.

Bradblog now is reporting Sequoia has the solution.

This guy Mike Gibbons of Kwaidan Consulting, whose quest in life is to find a "well endowed blonde nymphomaniac ... that likes to be under the influence of Jim Beam whiskey in a dimly lit room at least 3 times a week" and shares his curiosity about the fundamental differences between Kierkegaard and Right Guard (or maybe InfraGard?), is the one and only trustworthy "expert" the voting machine company will trust to look at its product -- independently, of course. Here he shows himself in an undated grip-and-grin with Poppy Bush.

He and his friend Starbuck (his only Myspace friend, so sad) are surely more trustworthy than those clowns at Princeton University. Geez! That's Starbuck in the photo. Hotter than Gibbons, no?

Because, after all, Gibbons hails from Sugar Land, Texas, the same Houston suburban where disgraced former Rep. "Hot Tub" Tom Delay made a name for himself as a pest exterminator, literally.

Kwaidan Consulting's address, 2510 Stephens Grant Drive in Sugar Land, is the address Raymond Michael Gibbons signed on a Securities Exchange Commission filing for Suntron Corp. in 2001 as an employee of K*TEC Electronics Corp. of Sugar Land and Kent Electronics Corp. of Houston. Gibbons is listed as Suntron's executive vice president for new business development.

Gibbons created Kwaidan in March 2005 and listed Sanjuro Corp. of Dallas as its general partner. Texas Secretary of State records show Sanjuro ceased to exist as part of a tax forfeiture in February 2007. Now, what enterprise seems more stable for the public to expect accountability for its report on our county voting machines: Princeton University or Kwaidan Consulting, LLC, LLP? (cough cough)

I have to say, his interest in Schroedinger’s cat, referring to the quantum physics genius who won the Nobel, seemed kind of creepy because of 1) the analogy between him inspecting these black boxes and the Schroedinger’s cat paradox and 2) the woman who filed a lawsuit claiming George W. Bush raped her was Margie Schoedinger (all but one ‘r’) of (cue the “Twighlight Zone” music) of Sugar Land, Texas.