Tuesday Treasures
What happens when you're not the US Supreme Court pick, at least for now?
A quick withdrawl from public awareness, even if you happen to be US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.
Gonzales managed to slip into Santa Cruz County, California and avoid detection by anybody, while doing a number of TV interviews, according to the Santa Cruz Sentinel:
To accommodate the East Coast time zone, Gonzales arrived at 3:30 a.m. at The Hilton Santa Cruz/Scotts Valley to be interviewed for CBS’ "Face the Nation" with Bob Schiefer, CNN’s "Late Edition" with Wolf Blitzer and "Fox News Sunday" with Brit Hume.
Two TV watchers called the Sentinel on Sunday to say the attorney general was being interviewed in Scotts Valley for "Face the Nation," as the show put a Scotts Valley label on the screen. But nobody else in the city seemed to be aware, including Mayor Paul Marigonda, who laughed at the inquiry.
"If the U.S. attorney general were in Scotts Valley, I think I would know about it," Marigonda said Sunday.
The mayor was not the only one out of the loop. The Scotts Valley Police Department reported Sunday it hadn’t heard anything about such a visit.
Just three FBI agents were protecting the attorney general? What's wrong with alerting local police departments? Are they really that untrustworthy?
I thought agencies were working together, post 9-11.
Bad Liberal ideas spread just like diseases from dirty needles, sad to say.
Tory activist Brent Colbert, a great source for the latest Canadian political developments, exposes how Ottawa plans to follow in Vancouver's footsteps by providing "safe injection sites" for addicts:
Ottawa, our National Capital, one of the first cities to provide free needles to I.V. drug users to “prevent the spread of Hepatitis and AIDS”. A progressive council that gives out free crack pipes to “prevent the spread of hepatitis and AIDS".
Ottawa now has the highest provincial HIV and Hepatitis C rates among injection drug users. So any sane person would suggest that the millions spent on enabling drug addiction has done nothing to stop the growing drug use problem. So what does City Council want to do now? Well following on the disaster of Vancouver’s “safe” injection site they want to bring one to by-town to “prevent the spread of hepatitis and AIDS”.
The injection storefront in east Vancouver costs $3.5 million dollars and is funded by the provincial and federal governments has not slowed the rate of drug overdose, has done little to get drug users off the streets and Vancouver’s alleyways and parks are still littered with discarded “free” syringes.
Don't tell the stealth Canadian Province of Washington about this, or it'll be seen in Seattle pronto.
Sure enough, he did an interview on Seattle talk radio today regarding the story!
The rest of Brent's article is found here, don't miss his great work at Colbert's Comments.
The last thing radio needs is more bad publicity, but here it comes in spades today, with the announced payola settlement plan. A number of stories provide insight into just how corrupt music radio really is, RadioDailyNews has them all linked.
From the New York Times:
To disguise a payoff to a radio programmer at KHTS in San Diego, Epic Records called a flat-screen television a "contest giveaway." Epic, part of Sony BMG Music Entertainment, used the same tactic in delivering a laptop computer to the program director of WRHT in Greenville, N.C. - who also received PlayStation 2 games and an out-of-town trip with his girlfriend.
Stephen Chernin/AFP — Getty Images/ New York Times
Eliot Spitzer, the New York State Attorney General, announces an agreement to halt pervasive "pay-for-play” practices in the music industry. (New York Times)
In another example, a Sony BMG executive considered a plan to promote the song "A.D.I.D.A.S." by Killer Mike by sending radio disc jockeys one Adidas sneaker, with the promise of the second one when they had played the song 10 times.
The gifts, described in a $10 million settlement with Sony BMG that was announced yesterday by New York's attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, exemplify what Mr. Spitzer called a broad effort by the recording industry to curry favor with radio station programmers in exchange for their promises to play specific songs.
Nice work if you can get it, no?
Is this really good breakfast reading? Nicole Brodeur of the Seattle Times has a column today on bestiality and abortion. Not sure of the connection, other than both being affronts to any decent, modern society.
New conservative blog discovery: Peter Porcupine, a Cape Cod Republican. Do you know who Peter was? He has quite a place in history.
Why "blame whitey" lingers, at LaShawn Barber's Corner.
A Chicago judge prohibits all-white juries. Michael King has the details at Ramblings' Journal.