“A 20-inch laptop might sound perfect for a game of Grand Theft Auto on the way to work, or navigating a mammoth spreadsheet. But are they really usable as laptops, or are they just luggable desktops? This week CNET attempted to work on the super-sized 20-inch Dell XPS M2010 laptop while travelling across London on the subway. The resulting video review is hilarious. This is not your typical tech video review — it's actually funny, and, refreshingly, completely advertising-free. The reviewer is in constant fear that anti-terrorism police are about to swarm him.
Could easily have been a parody. But in fact the laptop seems to exist, for just under $4,000.
Aide may have misdialed phone sex line A Democratic congressional candidate accused in a political ad of billing taxpayers for a call to a phone-sex line said an associate may have misdialed the number while trying to reach a state agency.
The ad that began airing Friday shows Democrat Michael Arcuri leering at the silhouette of a dancing woman who says, “Hi, sexy. You’ve reached the live, one-on-one fantasy line.”
But Arcuri’s campaign released records showing the call two years ago from his New York City hotel room to the 800-number sex line was followed the next minute by a call to the state Department of Criminal Justice Services. The last seven digits of the two numbers are the same
On the one hand you have to be kind of amazed at the attention to detail in opposition research that was capable of ferreting out this call from phone records.
On the other hand, you have to be appalled at the sleaze of running with it.
The ad’s sponsor, the National Republican Congressional Committee, stood by the 30-second message. Spokesman Ed Patru insisted it was “totally true”…
So far, I’ve spent the majority of this weekend asleep. I’ve been battling some sort of bug for well more than a week, and at best I was holding it to a draw. So this weekend I tried to sleep it off. When I do 14-hours of sleep in a day (two naps and a long night), that means not much blogging. So here are a collection of links to things that accumulated while I was in the land of nod.
One of the sleaziest strategies in this election has been the unsubtle use of the race card by the GOP in the Tennessee election. The Democratic candidate, Harold Ford, is black, his opponent is white, and time and again the Republicans have made a very big deal of Ford being around or dating white women. Thus, the big push early in the campaign about Ford being at some party (when single) that had (white!) Playboy bunnies. And national Republican party issued a press release about Ford having gone on a date with a (white) college sophomore when he was a single thirtysomething. The national Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee has paid for an entire web site just to push the Ford and white women angle — while all the time saying it’s a “values” issue (that a single man went on dates?)
And now, the TV commercial — using at least some actors posing as voters — that really lays on the sleaze:
It looks as if the party that wins two out of three of Missouri, Virginia and Tennessee might have a majority in the Senate.1
Democrats have a tiny, uncertain, lead in Tennessee. Virginia looks leaning GOP, despite everything revealed about the incumbent. So that means the pressure is on in Missouri. Here's one of the hardest-hitting ads I've seen in a long time, starring Michael J. Fox, for Claire McCaskill, running against incumbent Jim Talent.
1 To get a majority the Democrats must pick up six seats. The assumption is that Democrats retain New Jersey & Connecticut (in some form or other), gain in Rhode Island, Ohio, Montana, and Pennsylvania. Of these, Montana and New Jersey seem the least safe bets.
During National Character Counts Week, Bush Stumps for Philanderer: So it has come to this: Nineteen days before the midterm elections, President Bush flew here to champion the reelection of a congressman who last year settled a $5.5 million lawsuit alleging that he beat his mistress during a five-year affair
….
While representing the good people of the 10th District, the married congressman shacked up in Washington with a Peruvian immigrant more than three decades his junior. During one assignation in 2004, the woman, who says Sherwood was striking her and trying to strangle her, locked herself in a bathroom and called 911; Sherwood told police he was giving her a back rub.
At a time when Republicans are struggling to motivate religious conservatives to go to the polls next month, it is not clear what benefit the White House found in sending Bush to stump for Sherwood — smack dab in the middle of what Bush, in an official proclamation, dubbed “National Character Counts Week.”
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s office has instructed the country’s health ministry to stop providing mortality figures to the United Nations, jeopardizing a key source of information on the number of civilian war dead in Iraq, according to a U.N. document.
We may not be able to stop the ‘insurgents’ but (for the time being) we can still manage the news.
Posted inIraq|Comments Off on Annals of News Management
