David Phinney

Debbie Schlussel of FrontPage magazine has the lowdown.....She seems to be one of the few who has nothing better to do in the morning then to watch The View. It's a tough job, but somebody's got to do it. Here's her punchy lead:

So the annoying, insane former tub o' lard, Star Jones has been fired from anti-male yenta-fest "The View," a/k/a "The Spew." One down, 3 more old biddies (and one younger annoying one who pretends to be a conservative but is just an inane airhead) to go.

The best part about this whole thing is that we get to watch the forever annoying Baba Wawa (Barbra Walters to those not in the know) and Jones fighting about it all over the place, not to mention Walters openly lying about the whole thing (and getting caught with a million different stories). It's like "Alien Versus Predator."

The day after the 2002 Passover Massacre in Israel, Jones urged understanding of the terrorists because people in "different cultures" deal with their problems in other ways, and "we shouldn't apply our western mores to them."

Other complaints about Jones: Her nationally broadcast discussions of her tampon use.

I don't know if any of this is true, or if Schlussel is exaggerating, but I regret missing this one: Jones' statements relating the War on Terror to George Bush's penis and unzipped pants.

The obvious answer is, well, then the south would have won the American Civil War. It's all about states rights of course. Undoubtedly, Newt also posed an alternative way to abolish the inconvenient luggage of slavery in his vision of southern independence from those liberal abolitionists up north.

Now the former Georgian congressman and former House speaker is making a quick turnaround with a new novel. Yes, the south wins Gettysburg -- but then surrenders in August 1863 instead of fighting another two years.

Think the plot twist has anything to do with his presidential ambitions?

Feel free to explore the possibilities at the National Press Club July 13 when Newt flogs sales for his new book. Here's part of the press release:

The authors invented an alternative to how the Battle of Gettysburg was fought and won (in their version, the South won that battle) and offered a plausible consequence of the Confederate victory: namely, an advance on Washington, D.C. Now, the authors move up Lee's actual April 1865 surrender to August 1863 and, in the process, create quite realistic and creative actions and movements for each side leading up to the war's blessed end--with Lee realizing the futility of further Southern persistence.....

And Newt being elected president in 2008. Now THERE'S an alternatve view of history in the making....

Whoa! I'm impressed.

Eisner is sticking to his guns with his personal fixation about youth..... He was the one who pushed ABC news into canning as many experienced people in front and behind the camera as possible so that the news could be packaged for "young" viewers.

Young viewers, you see, are the ones that marketers believe have yet to develop brand loyalty for consumer goods. That creates an opportunity for advertisers to sell products!

ABC News president, David Westin, himself a highly inexperienced news person before landing his job, bought into Eisner's fixation. The perspective makes it all the odder that Westin found his back to the wall when he hired 63-year-old Charlie Gibson to take over World News Tonight.

ABC isn't the only news organization to think young, inexperienced journalists (usually young adults with affluent families and impressive "potential") are the key to new advertising markets. It's a virus spreading like the plague in news rooms around the US. The First Amendment may protect a free press but advertising rules -- not the news product, which is packaged increasingly for the advertiser's target market.

Here's Ed Wasserman's take in the Miami Herald:

When you consider who is being discarded in the various waves of right-sizing that the news business has indulged in to keep its owners, if not its customers, satisfied, you stumble on the unsettling truth that the advance guard of an entire newsroom generation is being shown the door, 10 or 15 years before they would, in the normal course of things, have finished their working lives....

So the overall picture is one of a profession that, for reasons of financial calculation and market repositioning, is deliberately being made prematurely young.

The complaint contends that the truckers were decoys sent out to draw fire and attacks from the Iraqi insurgency. They were nothing more than sitting ducks who were ordered to drive military-style camouflage tankers with no armored plating and directed to travel a different route from other convoys, the drivers claim.

Halliburton and KBR "knew and intended" that the decoy convoy would be attacked and intentionally put its civilian contractors in danger, the lawsuit contends.

And The Wall Street Journal follows, filling in the details on June 20:

Meanwhile Danubia is wrestling with another controversy. This one stems from an April clash near the Baghdad airport, in which Iraqi police personnel said Danubia security guards fired on them without provocation, killing several officers including a colonel. Danubia denies wrongdoing and says its guards were fired on first. The U.S. military is pursuing a formal investigation -- separate from the one about ties to Custer Battles -- and has barred Danubia from operating in the area.

Then again, if the judge determines that Halliburton/KBR needs to protect its trade secrets, we certainly won't learn that.

According to my notes, it may very well be proven that the KBR truck convoy under Thomas Hammill's command was recklessly ordered to drive into a known combat zone on April 9, 2004 -- the first anniversary of the fall of Baghdad to coalition forces.

We also may find that Hamill's convoy followed six other convoys that already had been attacked on the same road -- or in the same neighborhood -- between Camp Anaconda and Baghdad International Airport earlier that same day. Some drivers of those other convoys had already been wounded.

On the previous day, April 8, we may learn that 11 convoys had been attacked in the same area.

We may also find that KBR security recommended that Hammil's convoy NOT drive to the airport. And that convoy dispatchers ignored the recommendation. Apparently, there was a red code alert against driving that became amber only before Hammil's convoy left.

And so we may determine that April 9, 2004, was not a "normal" day as Hammil has insisted publicly.

And while KBR drivers were always advised they would be working in a war zone, they were also encouraged by KBR and KBR recruiters that they would be safe, i.e.:

"Must be willing to work in a war zone," advised one recruiter, Oil Career Professional Placement Services, on a flier. "Full 24-hour a day U.S. military protection will be in place to insure (sic) safety. With new heightened security you'll be 100% safe."

Then there is a Jan., 22, 2003 KBR memo:

"Contract operations are often conducted in a hostile environment. This does not mean your safety will be compromised..... There is not one thing that we do that is worth injury to an employee."

Unfortunately, much of what he has been railing about has now been proven to be far more accurate than what his congressional opponents claim. US and coalition powers (the coalition being about 1 percent of the authority) have spent over $50 billion on reconstruction alone -- including $30 in US Taxpayer money and $20 billion in seized Iraqi assets.

Then, of course, there is anouther $20 billion or more on contractors suppliying services to the military.

It's all starting to add up to a lot of money. Waxman's rant Thursday on the House floor during the war debate:

Before we went to war, President Bush and other senior Administration officials made three promises to the American people: (1) we would find weapons of mass destruction; (2) we would be welcomed as liberators; and (3) the reconstruction of Iraq would pay for itself.

All three promises turned out to be false.

Now, Judicial Watch released new documents -- after a protracted court battle with the Defense Department -- that reveal more tawdry details over the no-bid contract award, known as Restore Iraq Oil or RIO.

You gotta love this one, which includes a candid opinion by an Army Corps of Engineer official:

"I am copying you on this crap since I honestly believe the competitive procurement will never happen."

The Army attempted to withhold this silly document even though no worthy exemption applied to keeping it private.

It took a federal district judge to force the Army to release the document.

Oh, wait a minute -- perhaps the Pentagon information officers deem "national embarrassment" on the same level as national security.

But my voice of experience tells me that the Pentagon was just busting balls.

Another document released by Judicial Watch suggests that the Army Corp of Engineers (USACE) may have publicly lied regarding the involvement of the Vice President's office in awarding the contract.

In an email dated April 22, 2003, Carol Sanders of the USACE, writes:

"Mr. Robert Andersen, Chief Counsel, USACE, participated in a 60 Minutes interview today in New York regarding the sole source award of the oil response contract to Kellogg, Brown and Root....Mr. Andersen....was able to make many of the points we had planned." Sanders subsequently provided sound bites from the interview, including, "There was no contact whatsoever (with the VP office)."

The private security firm interviewed by CNN's Nic Robertson earlier this week in Iraq agreed to go on camera if the company was not named.... But, of course, the company's manager Amy Clark, agreed to use her name.

The last I heard she was working for Danubia Global. The Romanian company is rumored to have been purchased from another firm, Custer Battles, for the hefty price of $1. The politically connected Custer Battles was recently found guilty of defrauding millions of dollars from the Coalition Provisional Authority on a program to exchange old Saddam dinars for new dinars. Custer Battles was also suspended from doing business under US contracts, so the transfer may have been handy in many ways.

(The case against Custer Battles is ongoing on other fraud complaints.)

In the CNN segment, Clark complains about her company being banned from the Fallujah area. She said she has no idea why.

Perhaps it has to do with the rumor that Danubia personnel are accused of indiscriminately shooting Iraqi civilians?

More on this later.

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June 12, 2006

Some Things Never Change

I am waiting.

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Bullshit Jobs

Stanley Bing's latest book, 100 Bullshit Jobs...And How to Get Them, shares which media jobs were made for bullshit artists.

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June 02, 2006

Some Things Never Change

Our field is changing rapidly. Technology is overtaking us at an unheard-of pace. The journalists of tomorrow may not look anything like the journalists of today. I mean, literally. For all we know, they might have gills and three buttocks. That's how fast things are changing. But rest assured that, however dizzying the rate of change, when what's at stake is the sacred art of truth-telling, there is always one constant. One thing will always stay the same: Your editor is going to be an idiot.

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