The next time you hear a Republican say his party is looking out for ordinary folk just like you, remind yourself that he's a damned liar.
Also remind yourself that you don't matter, that the whole political system is set up to screw you and screw you good, and that there will be no meaningful reform of, well . . . anything if there's big money on the side of the status quo.
HONEST TO GOD, Republicans are so shameless they don't even go off the record when they talk to The Wall Street Journal about workin' hard to stay the bankers' bitch:
In discussions with Wall Street executives, Republicans are striving to make the case that they are banks' best hope of preventing President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats from cracking down on Wall Street.
GOP strategists hope to benefit from the reaction to the White House's populist rhetoric and proposals, which range from sharp critiques of bonuses to a tax on big Wall Street banks, caps on executive pay and curbs on business practices deemed too risky.
Democrats have dominated Wall Street's fund-raising circles in recent elections. Mr. Obama himself raised millions of dollars from employees of Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Citigroup Inc., J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and other Wall Street firms.
Now, at least some Wall Street executives have reduced their political contributions to the Democratic Party and its candidates, according to fund-raising reports and interviews with executives at financial-services firms.
Last week, House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio made a pitch to Democratic contributor James Dimon, the chairman and chief executive of J.P. Morgan, over drinks at a Capitol Hill restaurant, according to people familiar with the matter.
Mr. Boehner told Mr. Dimon congressional Republicans had stood up to Mr. Obama's efforts to curb pay and impose new regulations. The Republican leader also said he was disappointed many on Wall Street continue to donate their money to Democrats, according to the people familiar with the matter.
A spokeswoman for J.P. Morgan declined to comment.
"I sense a lot of dissatisfaction and a lot of buyer's remorse on Wall Street," said Rep. Eric Cantor (R., Va.), the second-ranking House Republican and a top Wall Street fund-raiser for his party.
THE DEMOCRATS, of course, wasted no time in going all Huey P. Long on the GOP -- that is, if the Kingfish had used words like "symbiotic":
The White House referred calls seeking comment on Wall Street donors to the Democratic National Committee. A DNC spokesman said: "It's not surprising that Republicans are seeking money from the same banking industry they are the champions of. The relationship between Wall Street and Republicans is symbiotic."
THIS WOULD be funny if it weren't so Orwellian. Think 1984, Ministry of Truth.
The Democrats, you see, took home most of the Wall Street money during the 2008 campaign. And if the DNC spokesman's name happened to be Winston Smith, I'm reaching for the Early Times right now.
Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.
One day, you're a kid sitting in front of a 1962 Magnavox watching Julie and Susan go at it, while Tom and Alice Horton try to hold Salem together single-handedly. The Magnavox is the only TV in the house, and Days of Our Lives is one of Mama's "stories."
The next day, it seems, you're middle-aged, sitting in front of your home computer (Holy George Jetson, Batman!) noting the passing of Frances Reid -- a.k.a., Alice Horton -- hours ago at age 95. She had been on Days of Our Lives since the beginning in 1965 and made her last appearance in 2007.
Which spanned most of the days of my life.
THE NEWS broke early this morning on Twitter, when Days cast members began tweeting the sad news, along with their tributes to "Grandma Horton." In a sign of how much the world has changed during these days of our lives, the "mainstream media" has yet to catch up to social networks in the delivery of this latest news.
Born in Wichita Falls, Texas to banker Charles William Reid and Anna May Priest, Frances Reid grew up in Berkeley, California. Though an accomplished actor before stepping into the world of daytime, Reid's role on NBC's Days of our Lives is the role that would make her a household name. In her early years, Reid played a man in a thirty-minute play in grammar school. Reid attended and graduated from the Pasadena Community Playhouse, where she majored in acting. She began her professional acting career in her mid-20s with a bit part in the movie Man-Proof. The following year, Reid made her Broadway debut as Juliette Lecourtois in Where There's a Will.
(snip)
Reid's first soap role came in 1954 on the 15-minute Portia Faces. Reid quit after six months, saying that the workload was "exhausting." In 1959, Reid took another shot at daytime serials, joining the Procter & Gamble-produced As the World Turns. For the next three years, she'd appear as Grace Baker. A few years later, she appeared on The Edge of Night. Then, it was back to primetime, including a numerous appearances on Wagon Train.
When Ted Corday offered Reid the role of "Alice" on a new soap opera he had developed called Days of our Lives, Reid reportedly was hesitant at first to sign on. Reid eventually accepted the role because she enjoyed working and realized that roles for women over 40 were not plentiful. In November 2009, Reid marked her 44th year on Days of our Lives.
GRANDPA HORTON (Macdonald Carey) died in 1994, and now Grandma is gone, too. Lord help the woebegotten city of Salem -- who knows what will happen to the Hortons, and the Bradys, and the Williamses now?
Bzz bzzz bzzzzz! Did you hear about the Catholic bishops' conference being in bed with the pro-aborts? Bzz bzzz bzzzzz! It's the Catholic Campaign for Human Development! They gave money to the socialist baby-killer-backers!
Bzz bzzz bzzzzz! The head of the place was on the board of one of those commie-lib poverty-pimp outfits. And they're backing gay marriage and abortion rights!
Ohmigawd!
OF COURSE, the American Life League and the Bellarmine Veritas Ministry never bothered to contact anyone at the CCHD for comment -- that was left to Our Sunday Visitor, which was reporting on the online conflagration. Then again, it's not like these folks are real journalists -- the kind who seek facts and strive for balance -- they just play them on the Internet.
What we have here are activists in search of "gotcha," and that's fine. Just don't pretend it has anything to do with journalism . . . or Catholicism.
Now, mind you, I don't doubt that there's at least some smoke where the witch hunt says it has uncovered the towering inferno. Frankly, I find that the Catholic "peace-and-justice" crowd is at least as consumed by progressive politics as the Catholic "pro-life" crowd is by a slavish devotion to Republican talking points.
And it matters not whether you're prattling on about how "we are church" or happen to be more Catholic than the pope, it's still a sad fact that Jesus Christ and Catholic doctrine get pimped out to politicians and principalities.
In a church no less riven than anything else about the United States these days, that's to be expected. Alas.
BUT THE AWARD for excellence in unmitigated gall and sheer hypocrisy has to go to "conservative" Catholic "intellectual" Deal Hudson, who has busied himselftouting what awful sinners the commie-libs at the CCHD be.
What abortion supporters the commie-libs at the CCHD be.
What Bad Catholics (TM) the commie-libs at the CCHD be.
This is the second round of incriminating evidence presented by ALL and BVM about the [Center for Community Change]. Three months ago, they issued a press release and supporting research regarding 31 CCHD grantees with a relationship to CCC -- all of which was ignored by the USCCB.
As ALL's Michael Hichborn points out, these reports have "revealed no less than fifty organizations (one fifth of all CCHD grantees from 2009) that are, in some capacity, engaged in pro-abortion or pro-homosexual causes (www.all.org/cchd). The sad thing, however, is that these recent revelations manifest a pattern of cooperation stretching back for decades."
These latest findings make it impossible for the USCCB not to sever its ties with the CCC. However, the situation is made more difficult by the news that John Carr -- who oversees the CCHD as the USCCB's Executive Director of the Department of Justice, Peace, and Human Development -- served on the CCC board from 1999 to 2006 and on its executive committee from 1999 to 2001. Carr was hired by the USCCB in 1987, but his involvement with the CCC goes back to 1983.
ALL research shows that in 2000, while Carr served on its executive committee, CCC itself received a $150,000 grant from the USCCB. Carr's resume at the USCCB Web site does not mention his service at the CCC, while other published versions of his resume do.
I'D LISTEN to Deal if I were you. After all, it takes one to know one . . . on all counts. Let's go back to the summer of 2001, shall we? That's when President George W. Bush was trying to figure out what to do about funding embryonic stem-cell research.
Historically, the Catholic Church has been -- forgive my phraseology -- death on research involving fetal and embryonic stem cells. That's because it all starts, somewhere, with dead fetuses and discarded, cannibalized human embryos.
And even if you're not the one doing the killing of a developing human being, conducting research with the cannibalized "parts" constitutes significant "cooperation with evil."
Look at it this way, "Well, they were dead anyway, and we didn't want them to go to waste" was the same justification the Nazis gave for making lampshades out of the skin of Holocaust victims, not to mention harvesting the gold fillings they'd no longer be needing.
You shouldn't be surprised that Catholics think Jesus Christ would frown on such.
Not that that stopped Hudson, among other "conservative" Catholic "intellectuals," from trying to gild the moral-theology lily as they "advised" Bush, which is what I think folks call influence-peddling nowadays. From a July 8, 2001, article in the Los Angeles Times:
Now, however, three conservative Catholics who advise the White House are saying a compromise may be possible. Depending on how the details shape up, these opinion leaders may publicly offer arguments for why some funding of embryo experiments is morally acceptable and help Bush win support for the policy among Catholic leaders and voters.
The advisors are focusing in particular on one option, now under discussion among White House aides, in which the government would pay only for research that uses existing stem cells scientists already have isolated from embryos. Any experiment that caused the destruction of additional embryos to obtain new cells would be ineligible for federal funds.
Spokesmen for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which represents the church in the United States, specifically have rejected this idea, saying it would make the government complicit in embryo destruction. But one of the nation's leading Catholic thinkers on abortion issues now is offering a different view. "I can imagine circumstances in which this would not only be politically acceptable but could be a morally justified policy," said Robert P. George, a moral philosopher at Princeton University who participates in a weekly telephone conference of Catholic intellectuals that often includes White House staff.
Another participant in the weekly calls, Rev. Robert A. Sirico, who leads a Michigan-based ethics think tank, said he has told the White House that the compromise might be regarded as acceptable and consistent with church teachings if it ensures that the government never pays for the destruction of another embryo.
"I am open to it," said Deal W. Hudson, editor and publisher of Crisis, a Catholic magazine. While the compromise would be "a victory for those who want to use embryonic stem cells, it can also be seen as a victory for the pro-life side," Hudson said, "because it ensures, for the time being, that there is no more government support for the destruction of embryos for their stem cells."
The stem cell issue came up during the conference call Thursday, Sirico said, but he would not give details. The Catholic advisors have seen no formal proposal and have not endorsed any.
Still, the comments from the three advisors suggest there is more diversity among conservative Catholic leaders regarding the stem cell issue than previously has appeared in public debate. If Bush moves in any way to support embryo cell research, it will be crucial that he win the support of at least some conservative Catholic leaders, George said. "Then they could say there's a range of opinion and that this issue is not like abortion or euthanasia," which are uniformly condemned by church leaders and ethicists.
AFTER BUSH announced his decision, which was unappreciated by the Catholic hierarchy, I heard from a friend tuned in to such matters that, according to "Catholic gossip circles in DC," Hudson had been "spotted around town looking like the cat who ate the canary today."
This friend said he'd heard that Hudson was "praising Bush's decision as 'Thomistic,' and taking credit for influencing the president's thinking -- which I'm sure he did."
Pot. Kettle. Black. And we won't even go into why it was that Hudson abruptly quit as a "Catholic-outreach adviser" to Bush's 2004 re-election campaign. That was a doozy.
You want to know why The Best Years of Our Lives is my favorite movie ever?
It's because it gets so many things right. It's because there is truth in it -- lots of truth in it. I think that's because it's a story about struggling veterans of a horrible war -- men with newfound and profound impatience for all the pleasant lies and platitudes in which a society immerses itself.
In this respect, it's probably notable that the original story was written by a former war correspondent, and that director William Wyler had seen his share of aerial combat as a filmmaker in the Army Air Forces.
IN THIS FILM, which I watched yet again last night, there is no room for the self-absorbed or the self-righteous. I'll bet most people today would hate the hell out of it.
For example, the view of love and marriage you get from The Best Years of Our Lives isn't one for the squeamish. The clips above and below convict us and all the assumptions we've lived by in the decades since the film's release in November 1946.
IN THE FILM'S no-bull worldview, love is a verb. In the sentence "I love you," "love" is the action born of a decision made by "I." The object of the verb is "you."
And being that "love" is an active verb, it's implied that loving requires significant effort.
In today's world -- created by children who couldn't quite grasp what their postwar parents took for granted -- love has been recast solely as a noun. "Love" is this free-floating, self-actualized thing requiring nothing but to receive it.
Suddenly, the sentence "I love you" is like a sprinkler system without a backflow valve. Things flow the wrong way. We don't love so much as we're "in love" -- that is, until we're out of love again.
It's all about us. And that's not love -- or marriage -- at all. For the theologically inclined, the Catholic catechism puts it this way:
1604 God who created man out of love also calls him to love — the fundamental and innate vocation of every human being. For man is created in the image and likeness of God who is himself love. Since God created him man and woman, their mutual love becomes an image of the absolute and unfailing love with which God loves man. It is good, very good, in the Creator's eyes. And this love which God blesses is intended to be fruitful and to be realized in the common work of watching over creation: "And God blessed them, and God said to them: ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it.'"
1605 Holy Scripture affirms that man and woman were created for one another: "It is not good that the man should be alone." The woman, "flesh of his flesh," his equal, his nearest in all things, is given to him by God as a "helpmate"; she thus represents God from whom comes our help. "Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh." The Lord himself shows that this signifies an unbreakable union of their two lives by recalling what the plan of the Creator had been "in the beginning": "So they are no longer two, but one flesh."
AND THERE'S this as well:
1615 This unequivocal insistence on the indissolubility of the marriage bond may have left some perplexed and could seem to be a demand impossible to realize. However, Jesus has not placed on spouses a burden impossible to bear, or too heavy—heavier than the Law of Moses. By coming to restore the original order of creation disturbed by sin, he himself gives the strength and grace to live marriage in the new dimension of the Reign of God. It is by following Christ, renouncing themselves, and taking up their crosses that spouses will be able to "receive" the original meaning of marriage and live it with the help of Christ. This grace of Christian marriage is a fruit of Christ's cross, the source of all Christian life.
1616 This is what the Apostle Paul makes clear when he says: "Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her," adding at once: "For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one. This is a great mystery, and I mean in reference to Christ and the Church."
A CULTURE that could create a film like The Best Years of Our Lives still knew some things. Took for granted some concepts we find totally alien today.
I fear that we may understand the words recorded onto a soundtrack almost 64 years ago yet find that their meaning eludes us completely.
And if, somehow, our powers of comprehension continue to fail us so profoundly, the following scene will become a powerful metaphor for a whole new generation . . . and the country it has created in its own image.
Nor has the newspaper columnist been "livin' the life" . . . or "rockin' the town." And his personal branding has left something to be desired.
Today, when the totality of one's existence is reduced to "branding" -- and unabashed self-promotion is as much a part of "getting ahead" as continuing to breathe in and out (and suppressing one's inner Rip Torn) -- you explain a monthslong sabbatical as "an opportunity for personal growth" . . . or as "working on an exciting new project."
BUT YOU DON'T begin your first column since returning to the Omaha World-Herald this way:
You may or may not have noticed that this column hasn’t appeared in The World-Herald for quite a while.
For the last three months, I have been on a sabbatical.
Part of me would love to leave it at that. But the journalist, the part of me that seeks full disclosure from everyone else, feels I had better come clean with the reason behind my absence, no matter how embarrassing.
And besides, there are some interesting rumors out there that may or may not be as interesting as the truth.
How to say it? I went off the deep end? A screw came loose? I was off my rocker?
Actually, in all seriousness, I’ve clearly been grinding through life for quite some time with what I now know are some significant mental-health issues.
It’s estimated that one in every four Americans struggles with some diagnosable form of mental-health problem. It’s somewhat comforting knowing there are so many of us out there — so many people who know what an uncomfortable journey it can be to feel right again.
Over the last year, I increasingly had found myself struggling with depression and, at times, anger and anxiety. Some of it was simple midlife-crisis stuff.
Some, as it turns out, was more serious.
NELSON GOES ON to describe a harrowing journey to the dark side of . . . himself. An editor talked him out of committing murder. The authorities were called. A shrink took charge. Unless your name happens to be Andy Dick, there's not much "branding" gold to be mined here. And come to think of it, what's the last job Andy Dick has held down since News Radio? Making license plates?
How do you "tweet" yourself into the national consciousness when your daily triumph is as simple -- and humble -- as "I didn't get sh*tfaced today." Or, "Taking my meds. So far, so good. No psychotic breaks! Yay!"
This is America, dammit! Half the country is broke, the other half is worried, and the third half is making out like a bandit and bragging about it all on Twitter, Facebook and Blogger.
A nation devoted to shameless self-promotion -- to style over substance, to personality cults for profit and success -- is a nation that increasingly doesn't add up.
This nation full of failure demands we construct sunny, self-serving narratives of our lives, then sell the world on our version of the Big Lie. This nation full of tragedies writ large and small doesn't want to hear about it.
BUT NO. Robert Nelson outed himself as a fallen, broken human being, one completely average in his brokenness. One utterly unremarkable in his misery.
You want to see the one unforgivable sin in America today? That's it -- honesty. How the hell do you "crush" that?
I'm sure some folk will applaud the columnist for opening a vein in the pages of the local rag. They'll say he's brave. They'll say he's showing other suffering souls that there's hope.
Maybe.
These people are called "activists." Their goal in life is to harsh your mellow, which might pull the plug on the power of your positive thinking and detract from your living "your best life today." I would tend to agree with these "activists."
Then again, I think Debbie Downer is a hottie. Mwah mwaaaaaaaaaah.
The rest of you, I am sure, are saying "I knew something was wrong with that Nelson boy." Like you're not f***ed up, too -- in your own special, morally superior way, of course.
Promote that brand via social media.
RT @Revolution_21 Robert Nelson's honesty about affliction making us think of our own. Not cool. No marketing in that.
MONDAY,the "career diva" of MSNBC.com, Eve Tahmincioglu (please don't ask me to pronounce Tahmincioglu), asked via Twitter (of course), "have we all become a bunch of self-promoting whores?"
You know, I think we have. Mostly of the "two-bit" variety.
And if you'll excuse me, I need to tweet up this post. Facebook it, too. If I'm really lucky, maybe a couple hundred people will be blessed by my deep thoughts on this matter of great importance.
Please retweet!
Because I am a whore for the postmodern ages. It's what I do. Now, how do I take that and "crush it"?
My mama an dem ain't from Noo Orluns, but dat how dey tawk. You do indeed wrench ya' dishes in da zink. Only Mama say it mo' lak "zank" when she announce she gonna go wrench da dishes.
ANYHOW, dat shoit can be got fum da same sto' dat dem NFL Yankee bastids tried ta "cease an' desiss" ta det, sayin' dey can't put "Who Dat" on a shoit.
But dey had ta back down, bra, cause when dey pick on da Fleurty Girl, dey pick on all da Who Dat Nashun, and we gon' kick dey azz. Dat's fuh true!
Once upon a time, down in the City That Care Forgot, there was a sportscaster, name of Buddy Diliberto. Buddy D for short.
Buddy D achieved local-legend status, almost as legendary as WWL-TV legend Hap Glaudi. Neither guy could have existed anywhere but New Orleans -- mainly, because it would have been too troublesome and costly for a TV station anywhere else to put subtitles on their sportscast.
Also because, unless they brought in an English-speaking Yat to do the subtitling, you would have had a lot of "????????????????" at the bottom of your TV screen.
BUT THAT'S not important now.
What's important is that Buddy D -- who sadly did not live to see the day his Saints made it to the Super Bowl -- always used to say that if the Saints ever made it to the Big Game, he'd march down Bourbon Street in a dress.
And today, in a classic "only in New Orleans" moment, hundreds of Saints fans of the male persuasion did just that. In honor of Buddy D.
Of course, it didn't look that different from any other day on Bourbon Street, but that's not important now, either.
Who dat say dey gonna beat dem Saints? Who dat? Who dat?
WELL, ACTUALLY, right now I'm being rolled down a bright corridor strapped to a gurney. My new friend Nurse Ratched is being kind enough to post this for me with her laptop.
But when you go old school, things do get "eventful." And you also can get 33 songs in a mere 90 minutes of show time.
Though I may have gotten carried away . . . before I was carried away.
Crescent City funk master Dr. John went suddenly mute Thursday in the wake of a weeklong National Football League sweep across New Orleans with cease-and-desist orders in defense of its trademark on "Who Dat?" and other Saints-related phrases.
Local attorneys speculate the music legend was advised by counsel to cease all forms of communication, except for the occasional grunt and some rudimentary hand signs, out of fear that trademarks held by the league would subject Dr. John's entire vocabulary to stiff licensing fees or litigation.
When a reporter called the New Orleans home of the singer and piano man -- born in 1940 as Mac Rebennack -- someone picked up the phone, but did not respond to any questions. Only breathing could be heard over the line.
More details on this story as they become available.
Count the National Football League among the growing members of Who Dat Nation. After all, they own the phrase -- or so they say in cease and desist letters sent out to at least two local T-shirt retailers earlier this month.
In letters sent to Fleurty Girl and Storyville, the NFL ordered the retailers to stop selling a host of merchandise that it says violates state and federal trademarks held by the New Orleans Saints.
Among the long list of things the NFL says is off-limits without a licensing agreement are some obvious violations like the official logo of the Saints and the team's name. But the one that stands out is "Who Dat."
Who knew?
The NFL, noting a 1988 trademark the Saints registered with the Louisiana secretary of state, says it has exclusive rights to the phrase and demands that the retailers stop selling it.
"I was surprised," Fleurty Girl owner Lauren Thom said. "I think everybody was."
Thom's shirts feature the phrase Who Dat written as one word with lowercase letters and preceded by a hash mark, a nod to the language of the social networking site Twitter. On Twitter, a hash mark followed by a word unifies all tweets on a specific topic. If a tweet, for instance, includes #whodat, it joins other posts on a page generally about Saints topics on Twitter.
"It was designed to unify the Who Dat Nation, not within a tweet, but through a shirt," said Thom, who began selling the shirts in August on her Web site before opening a store on Oak Street two months ago.
The NFL also claims that several shirts at Storyville T-Shirts violate the NFL trademark, including a black shirt with the phrase Who Dat Nation, a name commonly used to refer to Saints fans, and a black shirt that uses the term Who Dat along with the Roman numeral XLIV.
According to the letter, "any combination of design elements (even if not the subject of a federal or state trademark registration), such as team colors, roman numerals and other references to the Saints" are also trademark violations.
That means that a black shirt featuring XLIV in gold letters, a representation of this year's Super Bowl, is off limits.
What do you think the devil is going to look like if he's around? Nobody is going to be taken in if he has a long, red, pointy tail. No. I'm semi-serious here. He will look attractive and he will be nice and helpful and he will get a job where he influences a great God-fearing nation and he will never do an evil thing...he will just bit by little bit lower standards where they are important. Just coax along flash over substance... Just a tiny bit. And he will talk about all of us really being salesmen.
And he'll get all the great women.
-- Albert Brooks from Broadcast News
John Edwards is the devil, I think. And he has the perfect hair to prove it.
The devil was raised a Southern Baptist son of a humble South Carolina mill worker. The devil was baptised in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost as a young teen-ager.
The devil went to law school and made a devilish amount of money as a personal-injury lawyer.
But the devil just wanted to "help" people after losing his teen-age son in a tragic auto accident, and he ended up in the U.S. Senate -- all the better if what you want is to be "nice and helpful."
National politics -- just the platform for the devil as "he influences a great God-fearing nation."
He talked pretty about helping poor folks and disenfranchised blue-collar workers just like his daddy. He got himself on a presidential ticket, but the then-incumbent powers and principalities denied Kerry-Edwards '04 the keys to the kingdom.
ON THE ROAD to the White House four years later, the devil was passionate for those things in which he believed. Like the "right to choose," for example:
The decision about whether to become a parent is one of the most important life decisions that a woman can face. She should make it with her family, her doctor, and in the context of her religious and ethical values; government and politicians should not make the decision for her. John Edwards supports a woman’s constitutional right to choose. As a senator, Edwards earned a 100 percent voting record with both NARAL and Planned Parenthood. As president, he will protect and defend the right to choose and reverse the damage that has been done by President Bush’s anti-choice agenda.
LITTLE DID the devil know, however, that his appetite for some groupie lovin' would give lie to his lofty rhetoric. ABC News picks up this tale from the dark side:
Former John Edwards' aide Andrew Young, who covered up the Democratic presidential candidate's affair, said when he cleaned up his house after his role in the cover-up ended he found one more shocker.
"There was one tape that was marked 'special,'" Young told ABC News' Bob Woodruff in an exclusive interview. "It's a sex tape of Rielle and John Edwards made just a couple of months before the Iowa caucuses."
Though Young never saw the woman's face in the tape, he said she was "visibly pregnant" and was "wearing a bracelet" and a "thumb ring" typically worn by Rielle Hunter.
"It's her jewelry," Andrew Young's wife, Cheri, told ABC News. "It could be on another woman with the same jewelry."
(snip)
Young claims that Edwards even called upon him in late May 2007 to convince Hunter to terminate her pregnancy.
"The senator tried to convince her to have an abortion. ... He tried to convince me to convince Rielle to have an abortion," Young told Woodruff.
"She [Hunter] asked me if I were in her shoes what would I do. And if I said, 'I'm pro-choice, but after having had three kids, if you're asking me what I would do, no, I would not do it,'" Young recalled of his conversation with Hunter.
Young claims that Edwards was infuriated with him for not convincing Hunter and stressed that he was not certain the baby was his because Hunter was a "weird slut and a freak."
Hunter had started out eager just to be around Edwards, but over time became more comfortable in her role as Edwards' lover -- even wife -- having sex in the Edwards' marital bed, according to Young. Eventually, she became possessive and demanding, Young claims.
When Edwards rushed home in tears from campaigning in Iowa at the news that his wife's cancer had returned, he used Young's phone to call Hunter to cancel a date to celebrate her birthday in Des Moines that night.
"All I could hear was Rielle cussing," Young said. "She [Hunter] didn't care about Elizabeth's prognosis. All she cared about was that the senator was not going to be there to celebrate the birthday."
Each time Edwards professed his love for his wife on the campaign trail, Young said, "Rielle would go crazy...and it was my job and Cheri's job to calm her down."
The stakes got even higher in May 2007 when Young said he got a frantic call from Hunter.
"She said, 'I need to talk to him right now,' and started cursing and she threatened to go public if I didn't put them together. I said, 'well, either somebody's died, or somebody's pregnant.' And she said, 'Well, nobody's died,'" Young recalled.
Young said Edwards was shocked by the pregnancy and believed there was only a one-in-three chance that the baby was his.
"He was cussing her out, calling her crazy ... and saying that ... she had sworn to him that she was physically unable to get pregnant. And that he just felt like he had been set up," Young said.
SO WHEN you hear a politician waxing eloquent about "To be or not to be, that is the question" -- and it's about somebody else's existence -- you just might be listening to the devil.
And when you hear lofty rhetoric about how abortion is a decision a woman "should make . . . with her family, her doctor, and in the context of her religious and ethical values; government and politicians should not make the decision for her," it just might be coming from the devil.
And if a politician who railed against politicians meddling in such matters tries to stack the metaphysical deck concerning "a young woman's right to choose" in favor of eliminating the biological evidence of his infidelity toward his dying wife . . . yep, it's the devil.
SEE, WHEN the subject is an inconvenient pregnancy and the solution involves eliminating an inconvenient life, the devil always gets his due.
And now that the devil is through with him, John Edwards is getting his.
What's shocking isn't that PETA wants to safeguard Punxsutawney Phil by replacing him with a robotic Groundhog Day prognosticator.
What's shocking is that the press takes seriously claims that the little fellow is not, and never has been, mistreated at the annual celebration. No, the go-along-to-get-along mainstream media is all too quick to take seriously the "debunkers" of claims by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
Should America's most famous groundhog be replaced with a robot? Organizers of the annual Groundhog Day celebration don't think so.
Animal-rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) called for the move to spare Punxsutawney Phil, who makes a "prognostication" on the length of winter, the glare of the spotlight when he emerges from his burrow.
"It's very ridiculous," said Bill Deeley, president of the Groundhog Club, which runs the event in western Pennsylvania.
But PETA says the dawn ceremony, which is attended by as many as 40,000 people, can be traumatizing for the groundhog that would normally be hibernating at this time of year.
"Groundhogs are typically shy animals and are likely to feel fear and stress when they are out of their burrows," PETA said in a statement. "Each year on Feb 2, Punxsutawney Phil is trotted out to face human handling and hundreds of noisy people, flashing lights and cameras."
But Deeley disagreed, saying groundhogs may be done hibernating and starting to emerge from their burrows to begin the mating season.
Deeley also defended the club against charges of mistreating Phil, saying he gets an annual medical checkup and lives in a zoo enclosure that is air conditioned in the summer and heated in the winter.
YEAH, I'm sure the pickup Phil Connors used in 1993 to catapult a Phil to his fiery death at the bottom of a quarry was nice and warm. Really warm.
Who, then, is unserious here -- PETA or its sneering critics?
After all, it's not like any of this foofarah about the right of groundhogs not to be bothered is one scintilla as crazy as some Jesus-jumper quarterback and his mama making a Super Bowl ad attacking the absolute right of women to eradicate the little humans in their wombs.
Thankfully, however, we Americans are a serious people, fully capable of keeping our priorities straight.
There are many ways to tell our stories . . . and the stories of others like us.
For me, this is a new way of doing what I've been doing for most of my life. In other words, video is not my native language.
"Tough," says the new-media universe. Learn some new languages.
OK, I think I will. And, in a roundabout manner, that's one of the points of this video -- the awful costs of a tragic failure of imagination . . . and adaptation.
We've only been waiting for this moment since 1967.
We've only suffered through countless seasons of NFL futility, bags over our embarrassed heads.
We well remember 1975 1979 -- the Saints first non-losing season -- when 8-8 felt almost as good as what we imagined 16-0 must be like. Not that we dared imagine such crazy things as 16-0 . . . 9-7, maybe.
WE ONLY WERE born to a state where, it seems, damn little ever goes right and getting collectively ahead can seem just as insane a proposition as the Ain'ts going to the Super Bowl.
Hell, it's about as crazy as having a place kicker with half a foot kick a 63-yard field goal. Oh, wait. . . .
AND NOW THIS. Which puts the remarkable video (at top) from the The Times-Picayune in a little better context.
Today, even Christianity seems a little less audacious. A little.
Ah, screw it. I just phoned it in this week. Deal.
EVEN THOUGH I phoned the Big Show(Medium-Sized Show?) in, the music still is pretty decent . . . probably. Whatever. Hope you like country. Then again, it's all the same to me.
'Cause I just phoned it in.
It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. (Or not . . . like I care this week.) Aloha.
The Society of Professional Journalists has decided it's time to shut the barn door -- years and years after Mr. Ed trotted off to Hollywood.
In other words, SPJ has gotten an eyeful of Anderson Cooper pulling bloodied Haitian kids out of the middle of a rampaging mob (and depositing him a safe 20 feet from the rampaging mob, conveniently in front of the CNN camera), Robin Roberts running the ABC Adoption Agency and Sanjay Gupta as Marcus Welby, M.D., and suddenly couldn't tell anymore where the evening news ended and "Celebrity Rehab" (or something) began.
Now, if the networks just could have gotten Dave, Jay and Conan into Port-au-Prince, we really might have had something there.
The Society of Professional Journalists applauds the efforts of all journalists in Haiti who are working tirelessly to report the aftermath of last week's devastating earthquake and the ensuing aftershocks. However, SPJ cautions journalists to avoid making themselves part of the stories they are reporting. Even in crises, journalists have a responsibility to their audiences to gather news objectively and to report facts.
"I think it's important for journalists to be cognizant of their roles in disaster coverage,” SPJ President Kevin Smith said. "Advocacy, self promotion, offering favors for news and interviews, injecting oneself into the story or creating news events for coverage is not objective reporting, and it ultimately calls into question the ability of a journalist to be independent, which can damage credibility."
Undoubtedly, journalists walk a fine line to balance their professional responsibilities with their humanity when covering disasters. SPJ does not nor would it ever criticize or downplay the humane acts journalists are performing in Haiti. But news organizations must use caution to avoid blurring the lines between being a participant and being an objective observer.
"No one wants to see human suffering, and reporting on these events can certainly take on a personal dimension. But participating in events, even with the intention of dramatizing the humanity of the situation, takes news reporting in a different direction and places journalists in a situation they should not be in, and that is one of forgoing their roles as informants," Smith said.
YOU KNOW, nobody's going to fault Cooper for trying to safeguard a child when all hell has broken loose. Frankly, I think what he did probably was insufficient.
Furthermore, no one whose humanity hasn't set sail for pleasanter climes is going to fault Roberts for checking up on that Haitian orphanage, or even for placing a call to worried adoptive parents back in the States. But if you're making that act of compassion the center of your story, it compromises both the journalism and the good deed.
It ain't brain surgery, and it doesn't require attending a graduate seminar on moral reasoning and crises.
Hell, Hoss. Jesus had it all nailed a couple of millennia ago. Check out Matthew 6:
1 "(But) take care not to perform righteous deeds in order that people may see them; otherwise, you will have no recompense from your heavenly Father. 2 When you give alms, do not blow a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets to win the praise of others. Amen, I say to you, they have received their reward. 3 But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right is doing, 4 so that your almsgiving may be secret. And your Father who sees in secret will repay you.
TIME WAS that almost everyone understood the concept. Time was.
Perhaps today's journalists, after reading the SPJ missive, need to take a look at the Good Book -- if for no other reason than to assure themselves that folks just aren't making this s*** up.
There is such a thing as too-free speech. Especially when it comes to big business and politics.
With the U.S. Supreme Court allowing corporate America to throw its money behind candidates directly -- as in running campaign advertising -- elections won't become just another opportunity for electing the best Congress money can buy. Nooooooo, elections will become major branding opportunities, too.
We only have to go back to 1948 to see what that looks like. Then, when ABC radio personality Don McNeill was "running" for president, Swift saw it as just another opportunity for (ahem) bringing home the bacon.
Broadcast radio is on life support, and broadcast television has a bad cough.
Newspapers are in the dementia ward, yelling into phantom telephones for ghostly operators to get them rewrite. Meantime, some of the various publishers still standing are hatching plans for their dwindling readership to pay up to peruse a degraded product online.
Some folks, Jerry Del Colliano of Inside Music Mediaamong them, think the "paid Internet" is the wave of the future. That there was a free lunch, but soon there won't be.
Soon enough, the thinking goes, if you want to access newspapers on the web, you'll pay up. And if you want to listen to podcasts -- the programming formerly known as "radio" -- you might well pay up there, too.
YOU'LL PAY to hear music, and you'll pay to get the news. And that's all after you will have paid a pretty penny for home and mobile Internet connections and then paid small fortunes for the devices by which you connect.
Now some companies are considering withholding content from the public and/or search engines like Google and dare to make the public pay or the distributor pay.
And that's what I'm seeing.
I know this is controversial because I, too, have become spoiled getting The Wall Street Journal and New York Times for free instead of the whopping $900 a year it costs for print subscriptions to both.
Rupert Murdoch is now challenging the free Internet -- Murdoch is the owner of News Corp that publishes The Wall Street Journal and other publications. Competitors have tried to charge money for subscriptions and have failed -- The New York Times being one of them, although the Times is said to be close to approving a paid model.
True, there are online niche publications that charge subscription fees but they are the minority and their content is specialized. And Murdoch himself was thought to be tinkering with making the Journal's paid site (they were an early adopter to paid subscriptions) free theorizing that free meant more eyeballs for advertisers.
Advertising isn't going away.
But the totally free Internet is.
(snip)
This blog for example will likely be $99 a year before the end of the year. But you can subscribe by the month. It's true that when "free" ends, many, many customers will not or cannot pay for the content but the ones who will are the ones the content will be customized for going forward.
Imagine the music and entertainment streams that can be accessed by people willing to pay a reasonable micropayment for them. The free Internet will always be available -- don't get me wrong. But those who embrace free as a business model must compete in a world of seemingly infinite competitors all looking to sell cheap ads for revenue.
THE IMPLICATION here is that the "good stuff" will be behind "paywalls," and digital rabble will be fighting over the "free Internet" crumbs.
That well could be; it already is happening. More and more, if there's something good on TV, you have to pay for cable to see it. And sometimes, you have to pay extra to see it on "pay channels" like HBO.
While it's true there's exponentially more content out there now than there was 50 years ago, pre-cable -- and also true that the "golden age" of TV featured its share of brass-plated crap -- you have to admit that it was a much more egalitarian landscape. For the price of a TV set (or of a couple of beers at Studs' Place), Ralph Kramden had the same unlimited passport to the best of American culture as did Alan Brady . . . as well as one to the worst.
Another thing is that, years ago, while there may have been less total media content -- both free and paid -- there was an amazing breadth to "free" media. You kind of had to work at it notto be exposed to wide swaths of what our culture had to offer. Even "Top-40" radio was just that -- the most popular music, whether it be from Frank Sinatra, the Beatles or Tammy Wynette.
TODAY, I worry about how a "paid Internet" could lead to even less democratization of information than existed before there even was an Internet.
And I think this becomes even more of an issue during an era of flat or negative economic growth and high unemployment. What if, during the Great Depression, commercial radio offered as scanty a product in terms of both quality and cultural breadth as it does now?
And what if one couldn't even rely on finding discarded newspapers on a park bench? Or in the local diner?
And what if public libraries had extremely scanty offerings of current newspapers and periodicals because of the massive cumulative expense of being "nickeled and dimed" via "micropayments"? How about the sheer unwieldiness of managing hundreds of passwords and accounts across many thousands of patron requests?
Impossible in the 1930s, and probably an IT and staffing nightmare today for strapped public and private institutions.
Ironically, technology in the coming "brave new world" -- contra popular opinion -- may well be a regressive force. And content originators not giving away their intellectual property will have far more ramifications (and present far more complications) for the less well-off than in the pre-digital past.
IF EGALITARIANISM catches a break, plans like The New York Times'for a "metered" website will give way to more creative models for making a buck. What doesn't bode well for such schemes is the distinct possibility of not being to charge a greatly smaller "paid audience" enough to make up for lost Internet ad revenue (due to fewer "views"). Well, that and the ability of just a few similar free sites of equal quality to blow up the entire business model.
The Times and Rupert Murdoch may charge, but someone won't. If I were them, the letters "N," "P" and "R" would strike fear in my heart.
I tend to think the genie is out of the bottle now, and the only thing more complicated than leaving it out is trying to stuff the sucker back in. The unintended consequences have been a bitch one way, and they could be an even bigger one the other.
This is a picture of what must be the most pissed-off man in America -- Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb.
Don't let the smile fool you.
If you look closely, the senator kind of looks like he's gritting his teeth. That would be more like it for a man who just realized tonight -- with the election of a Republican to Massachusetts' "Kennedy seat" in the Senate -- that he pissed away his political career over health-care reform, and all he got was . . . well, nothing.
He thought he was getting the best deal he could get for Nebraska on the bill's proposed unfunded Medicaid mandates, but ended up getting roasted for the "Cornhusker kickback."
He thought he was getting the best deal he could for pro-lifers in an extremely hostile Senate, but his best deal turned out to be not good enough. Now all the state's pro-life activists hate his guts.
He thought he was looking out for all his boyz in the insurance industry by drawing a line in the sand over the "public option," but all the lobbyists' horses and all the lobbyists' men probably can't put Nelson's approval rating back together again.
Scott Brown’s decisive Senate victory in Massachusetts imperiled the fate of the Democratic health care overhaul as House Democrats indicated they would not quickly approve a Senate-passed health care measure and send it to President Obama.
After a meeting of House Democratic leaders Tuesday night even as Mr. Brown’s victory was being declared, top lawmakers said they were weighing their options. But the prospect of passing the health care overhaul by pushing the Senate plan through the House appeared to significantly diminish.
Noting that the election in Massachusetts turned on a variety of different factors such as the economy and local issues, Representative Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland and a top party campaign strategist, acknowledged that resistance to the emerging health legislation also factored in the outcome of the Massachusetts race.
“Health care was also part of the debate and the people of Massachusetts were right to be upset about provisions in the Senate bill,” Mr. Van Hollen said, referring to “special deals” included in the bill to win the votes of Democratic senators and round up 60 votes.
The comment was a clear indication that Democrats were recalibrating their approach on health care, leaving them a diminishing and politically difficult set of choices.
Pushing the Senate plan through the House was favored by some lawmakers and strategists as a way to quickly deliver the president a bill on a signature domestic achievement, since it would require just one final House vote. Remaining problems could be worked out with a subsequent piece of legislation.
But many House Democrats expressed deep reservations about the Senate bill. Those complaints, combined with the message sent by the Massachusetts electorate, apparently were sufficient to leave Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her lieutenants reluctant by Tuesday night about moving in that direction.
WHO KNOWS? Maybe the Nebraska senator can pull it all back together before the 2012 election. Then again, maybe not.
In that case, Ben Nelson just would have to settle for being a cautionary tale. As in, "Never, never everdive on a political hand grenade to save a bill you don't really believe in in the first place."
Especially after a long, tortuous process during which you helped to take a pretty decent House bill and turn it into something that everybody could hate.
The next time you hear a Republican say his party is looking out for ordinary folk just like you, remind yourself that he's a damned liar."I sense a lot of dissatisfaction and a lot of buyer's remorse on Wall Street," said Rep. Eric Cantor (R., Va.), the second-ranking House Republican and a top Wall Street fund-raiser for his party.
