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Jehuda
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Jehuda
Suspicious Vans: A gallery of creepiness on wheels.
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Jehuda
Now and Then: Hobo With a Shotgun vs. Dirty Harry.
I haven’t seen Hobo yet, but Amazon Instant Video has it for rent for only $3.99
– if you’re interested…
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Jehuda
Everybody’s a comedian…or a hacker, but this hack is funny because it’s true:
“1. Politicians and other public servants lie,” reads the event description provided on the Obama campaign website. “2. Politicians tell you what you want to hear and offer to provide things for ‘free’ to get votes. 3. When government buys, the people pay.”
The emperor has no clothes, in meatspace or cyberspace… -
Jehuda
Forbes: The FTC thinks your social media profile should be disclosed to potential employers:
Last week, the Federal Trade Commission gave a stamp of approval to a background check company that screens job applicants based on their Internet photos and postings…This means a search of what you’ve said or posted to Facebook/Twitter/Flickr/blogs and the Internet in general may become a standard part of background checks when you apply for a job.
Now social media demands that you behave with the same prudence your credit report demands. Good times…
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Jehuda
The recently released anti-Janice Hahn attack ad directed by Ladd Ehlinger was bound to ruffle feathers. Now Turn Right USA, the PAC responsible for the ad, has become the object of a DDOS attack on their website. But have they uncovered the man responsible for the attack?
Sounds like another instance of ‘Freedom of Speech for me but not for thee’, all too common among the oh-so-tolerant Left.
Now the FBI is involved. Stay tuned.
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Jehuda
With a redesign and a whole new section.
Incidentally, Prof. Jacobson of LegalInsurrection has also relaunched his blog, at a new url: legalinsurrection.com
No more Google Blogger!
UPDATE: And now there’s also Dan Collins’ new project on the web, The Conservatory, which he’s launched with Joy McCann. I like their style and coverage! Check them out.
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Jehuda
Ladd Ehlinger is at it again: “She ran a city program that coddled gang members, paid them with taxpayer money, got them out of jail to rape and kill again.” Now she wants to run for a seat in the U.S. Congress. Who is she? You’ll have to click here to find out.
I’ll tell you right now that she’s been a member of the Los Angeles City Council for about a decade. I lived in L.A. for almost 17 years and I can also tell you that’s not exactly a resume enhancer for her…
UPDATE: The predictable response. What’s so stunning about the ad? The imagery is the same as that of countless hip-hop videos. If the ad is nothing but lies, Hahn should sue for defamation. The fact that all she’s done is call for “condemnation” speaks volumes. Her calling it “sexist towards all women” is hilarious. The ad doesn’t address gender roles in any way or fashion. It’s about bad ideas by Janice Hahn, not about her being a woman. The ad has definitely taken her by surprise. And now she’s bringing even more attention to it. I’m not sure what I think about her Republican opponent’s reaction. I would have said nothing instead of condemning the ad.
TPM’s suggestion that Ehlinger is racist for describing Los Angeles gangs as mostly African American while citing 2005 gang population statistics from LAPD to back up their insinuation is also highly misleading. The statistics they link to are for Los Angeles County gangs, not for gangs within the City of Los Angeles. Los Angeles County is much larger than the City of L.A.; and a significant number of gang members in the city are African American. Maybe not all of them, but that doesn’t mean most gang members in the city are Latino.
MORE: Related content from TOM.
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Jehuda
Douchecanoe Diaries: Featuring the incisive commentary of Dan Collins, whom I know from Twitter well enough to tell you he doesn’t suffer fools well. Which probably explains why the blog is so Joan-Walsh-centric.
Via TOM.
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Jehuda
Mediaite: New Weiner Sexting Buddy Emerges. Good times. Sounds to me like the resignation countdown just sped up a bit.
Plus, the obligatory Next Media animation video of the scandal so far.
Next Media is a Taiwanese company about which you can read more here. You’ve seen their stuff before.
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Jehuda
Compare and contrast: Andrew Breibart crushes MSM and Sorosphere with Weiner. Meanwhile, the AOL/HuffPo sort of sounds like the Obama Administration in microcosm. Or worse!
UPDATE: Related content from Prof. Jacobson: Charles Johnson won’t apologize to Breitbart: “Not a freaking chance. If Weiner admits to sending the pictures in question, I’ll be surprised and disappointed, but I’m never going to apologize for calling it as I see it.” It almost sounds as if Johnson is describing the way he sees things as the wrong way…
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Jehuda
Size matters (story size, that is) and that’s bad news for Rep. Weiner: “The supply-and-demand incentives for coverage of this story are therefore so strong that, liberal bias or not, the major news networks can’t simply ignore it.”
But Weiner’s clumsy handling of the event is partly to blame. Talk about the emperor having no clothes. “Can’t say with certitude” whether the picture was of his own crotch or not? And this after downgrading the proximate cause of the kerfuffle from the ever-reliable computer hack to a mere prank? This doesn’t look like a cover-up anymore. It looks like a desperate cry for damage control.
Related: Some great Weiner puns at the Tygrrrr Express.
UPDATE: Interesting theory: “Rep Weiner did not send the tweet. Neither did Dan Wolfe. The reason Rep Weiner is so shifty on this [is] because it is his wiener, and he is horribly embarrassed that he took that picture, leaving himself so vulnerable in such a boneheaded way.” (via Insty)
MORE: R.S. McCain links with even more Weiner content! Thanks!
ANOTHER ONE: Theory debunked?
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Jehuda
“A man’s laptop is stolen, but he’s able to track it remotely and with the help of social media, recover it” after police refuse to help.
Related content at Gizmodo: “Internet, can we keep crowdsourcing all our law enforcement needs?”
Well, maybe not all of them. But it’s nice to see we can use the internet to compensate for some instances in which police are unable or unwilling to get involved.
Via Consumerist.
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Jehuda
At last! You can download it from the Android Market, free!
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Jehuda
LAT: “The Library of Congress is flipping a switch Tuesday that will open a large chunk of the national archive of more than 3 million music and spoken-word recordings for public online streaming as part of a new National Jukebox project, a joint venture between the library and Sony Music that will give free access to thousands of Sony-controlled recordings long out of circulation because of commercial or copyright issues.”
Cool.
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Jehuda
Harvard researchers are working on an app that finds landmines.
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Jehuda
Word is he did, via a helmet cam video feed.
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Jehuda
Gawker: ” The spying iPhone is no accident. A recent Apple patent application reveals that the location-tracking dossiers accumulated in iPhones are to be used in apps from Apple and any number of other companies.”
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Jehuda
That seems to be the lesson of the Great Revolt of the HuffPo Pawns, according to R.S. McCain, and I would agree:
The only requirement for membership in the “progressive community” is sufficient naivete to believe that your volunteer efforts accomplish anything other than enhancing the wealth, power and status of your so-called “leaders.”
McCain is talking about the labor organizer type who used to blog at HuffPo for free and – in typical Leftie fashion – has decided to claim for himself and other similarly situated bloggers a share of the windfall Arianna came upon in exchange for selling the website to AOL. This claim is being made via a class action, instead of with mere angry words.
I haven’t read the complaint in full and am unfamiliar with all the relevant facts; but speaking in generalities, I am certain no judge would ever find the right to profit-sharing arises from volunteered services. It’s always possible that there’s a big fat loophole in the old HuffPo terms of use that would allow for such a claim, but what are the odds?
And for that reason, perhaps, the plaintiffs’ complaint alleges deceptive business practices and unjust enrichment, not a right to profit sharing in and of itself. But were the volunteer bloggers in a business relationship with the HuffPo when they were mere volunteers? Can they in fact be cheated out of money that they were not expecting to receive? Was the site ever deceptive about the fact that it was making money? Who could ever be surprised about how valuable the site had become?
Unjust enrichment occurs – generally – when a party derives benefit from another unfairly. But what’s so unfair about willingly working for free for a company that never presented itself as a non-profit?
How could a volunteer ever be seen as a “modern-day slave” unless he or she was forced to volunteer? Who was cracking the whip other than the writers themselves and their drive to immanentize the Eschaton?
Closing thought: Lefties can’t seem to make up their mind about Wal-Mart:
I thought Wal-Mart was all progressive and stuff…
UPDATE: McCain links. Thanks!
“In my view, the Huffington Post’s bloggers have essentially been turned into modern-day slaves on Arianna Huffington’s plantation,” he said. “She wants to pocket the tens of millions of dollars she reaped from the hard work of those bloggers….This all could have been avoided had Arianna Huffington not acted like the Wal-Marts, the Waltons, Lloyd Blankfein, which is basically to say, ‘Go screw yourselves, this is my money.’” -
Jehuda
Indiana fleebagger Democrat David Cheatham compares bailing out on the Assembly to service in Afghanistan.
To the applause of – supposedly – union teachers.
Astounding, to say the least.
On the other hand, the campaign attack ad just writes itself.
UPDATE: While you’re fuming, why not send a Care Package to the troops? Dr. Wife and I recently sent one. We shall send one once more around Easter time…
MORE: JWF wrote about it last week. I suppose this video’s been all over Fox News already, but this is the first I hear of it.
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Jehuda
But comparing Arianna to the Borg?
Sounds rather unfair to the Borg. The Borg run a true collective, as opposed to Arianna who talks a good collectivist game, but is very much a capitalist…
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Jehuda
An important cog in the machine: Meet the former RIAA lobbyist who recently made it to the federal bench…and is coincidentally presiding over a massive peer-to-peer file sharing lawsuit.
This legislation the White House is pushing dovetails nicely with the above, doesn’t it?
As for Obama’s promises that lobbyists won’t find a job in his White House, I guess he never said anything about keeping lobbyists out of the judiciary.
That sound you hear is millions of rubes slamming their palms on their faces…
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Jehuda
By Lee Stranahan, guest-blogging at Patterico’s.
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Jehuda
WSJ: Selling Video Scoops Online.
In the era of the ubiquitous camera, websites that syndicate amateur video for professional news organizations had to emerge sooner or later. Is this another nail in Old Media’s coffin? A great deal of images for news has traditionally been provided by the likes of Reuters, AP and AFP. On the other hand, this is great for independent journalists such as Michael Totten and Michael Yon.
But perhaps it’s great in general. Journalism is hard. And many who practice it professionally are obviously unfit for it. We need more James O’Keefes and less Dan Rathers. And we simply can’t expect journalism schools to fill that void.
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Jehuda
Journalism is hard: “Tim Rutten’s Feb. 2 Op-Ed column about Simon & Schuster’s promotion of the political novel ‘O’ cited two passages it said were from the book, saying they demonstrated the author’s partisanship. Neither passage actually appeared in the book.”
To be fair, an opinion piece is not the same as reporting, but come on. Aren’t editors supposed to be minding the store here? Or has evil anti-Obama partisanship been living rent-free in their minds for so long that no one bothered to question the accuracy of Rutten’s accusations?
UPDATE: Linked at The Politisite Daily. Thanks!
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Jehuda
Because every episode is now available to watch for free, on line.
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Jehuda
Fairweather Socialists: HuffPo brass tries to defend exploiting free labor for profit.
Emphasis on ‘tries’…
UPDATE: TOM links with related content. Thanks!
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Jehuda
Pam Geller: White House creating “fake people” on social networks to push propaganda.
Wow. I guess the Left does need a bigger Sorosphere. MSNBC and all the Lefty blogs are not enough? Brings a smile to my face.
Or maybe this is what they do when they can’t steal elections with fake votes. They try to steal the debate with fake opinions. Either way, cynicism at its most digital…
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Jehuda
Feds mistakenly shut down 84,000 websites for 6 days.
Bonus damage: the sites were smeared as child porn distributors in the process.
Your tax dollars at work…
UPDATE: Related: TSA Screeners at JFK Admit to Stealing $160,000 From Passengers.
We let them touch us and on top of that they steal from us???
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Jehuda
Dana Loesch on the propaganda strategy to help Planned Parenthood in the aftermath of this undercover video sting.
UPDATE: Related: MMFA: Obama is right, even when he’s wrong. Oh, wait. That’s wrong, too!
Propaganda is hard…
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Jehuda
At Adweek’s very own Adfreak blog. 21 of them. Some are just teasers and some can be played in their entirety.
My favorite one is the Coca-Cola ‘Border Crossing’ spot.
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Jehuda
Norwegian member of Parliament Snorre Valen nominates Wikileaks for the award:
Last year, the editors of Wired’s Italian edition proposed that the Internet receive a Nobel Peace Prize; however, whereas that nomination was suggestive and unofficial, as a member of a national assembly or state government, Snorre’s WikiLeaks nomination is a valid one, per the Nobel Foundation’s statutes, and will be considered by the Nobel Committee.
I’m surprised Julian Assange wasn’t nominated. An alleged sex offender would fit right in with a murderer like Yasser Arafat and a con-artist like Al Gore…
I’m omitting president Obama from the list above because a lack of leadership skills isn’t really a crime…
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Jehuda
..broken down by someone who knows a thing or two about producing political ads.
I remember reading a long time ago that no one sets out to make a bad movie. I think that’s true – and the same goes for any audiovisual work. It takes so much effort, first of all, that no one would embark on such an enterprise if they weren’t expecting to create something good. Alas, the best of intentions rarely results in excellence.
To paraphrase Clint Eastwood’s Harry Callahan in Magnum Force, a filmmaker’s got to know his limitations…
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Jehuda
A PBS documentary about actor Jeff Bridges that you can watch online for free, in its entirety.
Via Anne Thompson.
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Jehuda
The Magazine Death Pool. Which publication will go next?
I don’t seem to have time to read magazines anymore. I’m certainly reading plenty of magazine-like content on the web, but still I subscribed to Texas Monthly (which I used to read religiously in the early 90′s) and Wired last year. I love both magazines, and yet the issues just pile up without me even touching them. It’s a struggle to find the time to sit down and read either one.
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Jehuda
A real-life fact pattern for a Contracts final exam: “How I got an uncooperative eBay buyer to pay for her purchase”.
Via Consumerist who asks: “Unethical? Yes. Illegal? Probably not. An eBay bid is a binding contract. An email is not.”
I believe in California a binding contract can result via e-mail, but you’d still need all the elements of contract formation to be present. Were they present here? Are there any defenses?
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Jehuda
Gateway Pundit: NYT to publish Wikileaks document dump tonight.
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Jehuda
I don’t mean to make light of people in need, but this particular family is needy in the “blogger tip jar” sense of the word.
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Jehuda
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Jehuda
Rap battle that is:
These animated news videos are probably familiar to you by now. They’re from Next Media, the same company that created that famous Tiger Woods animation. They are a Taiwanese company which was profiled by Wired magazine fairly recently.
