The terrifyingly prolific Sullivan took one of the 73 or so posts he penned before lunch to quickly frisk today's Wall Street Journal piece on Sarah Palin's web strategy for her Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Bullshit, Going Rouge (©McSweeney's, 2009). And what is Sarah Palin's web strategy for her book?

Among the features of this new strategy: buying Internet advertising based on Google searches of her name, and using Facebook as a key means of communicating with voters. Her team also has considered filing libel suits against bloggers who spread rumors about her family.

GAMECHANGER. Not exactly the VBS.tv campaign I was hoping for, but still: damn. Sullivan, however, took this opportunity to note his (and my) favorite part of what's otherwise a snoozer of a filing. Which was this gem:

Ms. Palin was particularly angry at bloggers and the media, associates said, for speculation that her baby Trig was really the child of Bristol, her daughter. At one point, according to people familiar with the discussions, Ms. Palin considered pursuing a libel suit against at least one blogger, the Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan. Ms. Palin decided against such a move because of the publicity it would bring. Mr. Sullivan, in response, said asking "factually verifiable questions is obviously not libel." A spokeswoman for Ms. Palin didn't respond to email requests seeking comment.

Oh ho ho. Christmas came early for Andrew (though the trees stay year-round, thug). Sullivan's been a veritable thorn in many sides of many Palins, but naturally, Sarah's the big game. And let's be clear about this: people who have bloggers who write nasty things about them should never, ever, ever admit that they read that blogger. Because that blogger now knows they have a mainline to their target's face. And like she's gonna stop reading. What does Sullivan have to say about this? Besides hysterically prefacing what's probably his favorite block of text ever with the words "Money quote," he basically goes for the jugular while victory dancing on her face. This is basically the political blogger's version of the Dirty Bird, in a post titled Sarah Palin, Obsessive Daily Dish Reader:

Sources with access to Palin have indeed told to me that the Wasilla whack-job was an obsessive reader of this blog as it dared to ask factual questions about her past that could be easily answered. I have no way of knowing this myself, and regard it as odd that a vice-presidential candidate would be hell-bent on suing a blogger who, presumably, was merely making a total ass of himself in wondering if Palin's surreal account of her last pregnancy was factually accurate. Or is there something there - of some unknown sort - that she desperately wanted to intimidate and suppress? As Bubble would note: "Who can say?" What can Levi possibly mean that "she knows what I got on her?" The MSM won't touch this, of course.

Ho! We'll take some of that, please. Move it on your left, Andrew. Shit's bomb.

Meanwhile, if Sarah Palin or Bristol Palin admit to reading this website—operative term: admit—please give us a shout and let us know so we can dedicate a tag to them or something. In the mean time, here's the latest update on your son-in-law's your ex-boyfriend's Levi Johnston's penis.

Are these the "Free Love Cookies" in question? Or is that some sort of romantic literary reference that sailed over our heads? In any case: As you would expect, Min and Salman's modern friendship blossomed on the Facebook.

Llongots? We don't even know! And what else of Min herself—one doesn't get into Harvard just by loving models and going out with models and being way attractive, you know. It turns out she wrote quite a readable blog! It was called "Mongol Whored." Its most recent entry is from January of 2008, and it's now set to private, but the Google caches everything, you know.

"How do we know this is really Min's blog?" we asked ourselves. Well: "Here's how I roll: me: half Chinese, half Hungarian." And also, for example:

To: Hot Babe
From: Min
Subject: last night
Text: lovely to meet you last night—i had such a wonderful time. though am being punished for our revelry with a merciless hangover. totally worth it, though :) oh my god, smileys are so not my style (incredibly cheesy, no?), but i can't help smiling at some of the shit we pulled last night. we're quite a pair, don't you think?
love to see you again,
xoxo,
m

Steamy! We are fanning ourself—as, we expect, is Salman—over things like, for example:

In the graph of my (ineffectual) picking up men with lascivious intent, it's plotted with desire as the constant, and availability as the variable. There's no fucking mention of time, which I suppose is tied to ideas of decorum and the other things I missed when being raised at wolf-tit. I've had mixed success with my all-hours tactics...

I don't begrudge odd-hour requests of me, either. 19, taking the Greyhound back from Nova Scotia through New Hampshire I was stretched long in my seat, feet dangling in front of me. I woke, shoes and socks off, to the warm lapping on my toes. There was a guilty smile on the man sitting ahead of me, and I sized him up sleepily, not nasty. I thought briefly of the ripeness of my feet, nasty. And I mumbled, "do them evenly, yo."

We too would like 2 B Facebook friends 2 get 2 no U, gurl. Let's have one more.

I was writing, if you remember, about songs that make me wish I was in college again. The song of my senior year, of course, was Nelly's "Hot in Herre." The next year, the first year of my nostalgia, was "Hey Ya," and this year it's "Promiscuous" and "Buttons." I speak of this with my old college roommates, and we wistfully speak of the days where we mixed Red Bull, vodka, and champagne, and called it a cocktail, of dragging ourselves into an 11am sections and thinking it was early, of when scabies and self-loathing were the most serious STDs floating around campus. My musical tastes usually run to the more, well, good, but not in the case of these particular songs, these songs of if not love, then youthful experimentation and inexperience. And the rare moment when I'm walking past a homeless dude selling some acrylic gloves and pleather cellphone holders and I hear "Promiscuous," I think, damn, wish I were in college. But that I'm moved to undulate, grinding with an imagined partner on W 23rd street, reminds me, hey, maybe it's a good thing you're not in college anymore, maybe it's some sort of silver lining blessing kinda thing, maybe college Min couldn't have handled this kinda shit. Now I hear "Promiscuous," and think, damn, shame that I'm missing making out with 20 year olds to this song, but I probably saved myself an abortion or ten.

We totally like that song, too—and its message. Salman Rushdie, you are one charismatic fella.

Kimball (pictured) is the fellow who wrote a wrongheaded and nakedly self-serving New York Times op-ed about how much internet recipes suck, and how the web's terrible food writing basically killed Gourmet magazine. Where can you turn for quality recipes? Cook's Illustrated, naturally.

Now that the op-ed has drummed up controversy, Kimball is trying to stage a fight, between himself and "the WIKI [sic]:"

The current rage is the WIKI [sic] recipe notion... I am willing to put my money, and my reputation, where my big mouth is. I offer a challenge to any supporter of the WIKI or similar concept to jump in and go head to head with our test kitchen.

Well, of course Kimball wants to cook off against something from a Wiki. Cooking is a chemical process, and tinkering with what is fundamentally a science experiment via the Wiki's trademark mass, open editing process is... well, it's a recipe for disaster, as Kimball surely knows.

Far more interesting would be to see Kimball square off against a reasonably popular food blogger. Here is just a brief sampling of some of the free online material I gathered in five minutes from various food blogs I track from home in the San Francisco Bay Area:

• A restaurant pastry chef's recipe for Madeira Cake.
  
• A restaurant sous chef's recipe for jams, pickled vegetables and cooked vegetables.
  
• A farmer's recipe for canning your own tomatoes.
  
• An urban farmer's guide to when the fruits and veggies grown in the backyards of my actual town are at their peak ripeness.
  
• A restaurant cook's guide to frying an egg "Spanish-style in olive oil... my new favorite way to devour these culinary jewels." See also his "Least popular recipe ever."

Of course, acknowledging that this stuff even exists would slightly undermine Kimball's point that the internet is an eater's idiocracy in need of rescue by his fine magazine (which, side note, I subscribe to, being a proud media omnivore). But at least it would make for an interesting cook off rather than the contrived burning of a culinary straw man.

(Pic by Laurie Chipps)

Of course, 24/7 Wall Street has the advantage of being able to conjure made-up estimates out of thin air; that's how the site put a price tag on various blog networks back in February (PerezHilton.com: $32 million (ha); Gawker Media: $170 million (HA!)). Now the site's taken those made-up estimates and combined them with additional made-up estimates of how much each blog network would be worth without its iconic founder. In other words, it's estimating the economic worth of each blogging boss — not to be confused with their actual wealth.

Here are the numbers. Spoiler: Drudge is king, even in hypothetical death.

(Correction: This post originally said 24/7 Wall Street was an AOL property. It is in fact independent.)

Gawker Media's Nick Denton: $26 million. Sure, that sounds like a lot, but it's only 15 percent of his company's hypothetical net worth, since Denton doesn't do much writing or editing. "Gawker would miss the guiding hand, but presumably the company could get another skilled CEO." (Pic: Eliot Shepard via mednut on Flickr)

Huffington Post's Arianna Huffington: $23 million. Huffington is the face of her company, 24/7 correctly notes, lending it valuable "star power and relationships." But the site overestimates the extent to which Huffington has delegated control to "highly skilled editorial staff:" although she's made some promising recent hires from the likes of the Washington Post, Huffington has stocked the wide-ranging site with nepotistic hires willing to abide her detailed (headlines, story placement, story assignments) and wide-ranging orders. As such, she's probably at least twice as essential to the organization as 24/7 estimates (25 percent of HuffPo's $90 million net worth). (Pic: JD Lasica)

Drudge Report's Matt Drudge: $43 million. That's 90 percent of his site's estimated $48 million value. Sure, Drudge has in the past received help from swell guys like Andrew Breitbart (no longer working for him), but they hardly had the skill to open email messages containing Republican talking points and newsroom leaks: "Drudge obviously has editors working for him to gather the hundreds of links from other media but the scoops that run on the sites are almost certainly his."

PerezHilton.com's Mario "Perez Hilton" Lavandeira: $30 million. The jizz-doodling celebrity gossip blogger is obviously an irreplaceable genius i 24/7's eyes: Without him, says the website, "the $32 million value of PerezHilton.com would go to under $2 million." Right, except for the fact that Lavandeira's got his sister and probably others actually writing/doodling the damned thing on his behalf. And since 1> Perez Hilton isn't anyone's real name to begin with and 2> his sister doesn't go around calling people "fags" like Lavandeira does, she might actually be able to make the site more popular.

TechCrunch's Mike Arrington: $12.5 million. Sure, TechCrunch's flagship tech business blog has "more than 20 senior writers, editor and business staff," but Arrington is "a controversial and polarizing figure," so he's worth half the company's total imaginary valuation of $50 million. (Pic: Robert Scoble)

The rest: MacRumors' Arnold Kim, a onetime doctor is estimated worth $4.2 million to his $21 million site; GigaOm's Om Malik accounts for $2.9 million of his tech blog network's $9.5 million value; Mashable's Pete Cashmore is estimated worth $1.25 million, or half of his tech blog's $2.5 million value; Business Insider's Henry Blodget $1.5 million or two-thirds of the total value of his financial blogging company; Markos Moulitsas (pictured) $1.7 million of political blog Daily Kos' $2 million made-up value. (Pic: Steve Rhodes)

Erickson, a lawyer and "consultant," is the editor of RedState.com. He has repeatedly disavowed the Birthers and wants to create a more credible, mainstream Republican movement.

And, you know, he also thinks Barack Obama is the same as Hitler. Not, like, for serious or anything! He just thinks that health insurers are The Jews of 2009, and to call their little report "a self-serving analysis" is basically the same thing as inciting Kristallnacht.

(He also thinks Hitler was awarded the Berlin Olympics two years before he was even sworn in as Chancellor.)

So, you know, he will certainly look foolish if Herr Obama allows the Republicans to pick up an seats next year! Not that he will know about it, because there is no internet in Insurance Industry Concentration Camps.

The Conde Nast cuts are apparently ongoing. After a massacre at Brides yesterday, a tipster today tells us there are "Mass layoffs at Conde Nast in Chicago today (lots of advertising people). Chaos." If you have more details, email us.


Kiki Paris, a former employee of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, is suing the company for "forcing her to return to work too soon after a debilitating injury and then firing her soon after." Due to our irrational and sensationalistic one-sided "feud" with Martha Stewart, this doesn't surprise us one bit.


Renee Ferguson, a black TV journalist, discusses how her television employers told her to stop wearing an afro, because it would intimidate white viewers. Yet Lou Dobbs' hair draws no complaints? Astounding.


What is Choire Sicha exercised about today? The FTC's new rules about bloggers being forced to disclose their freebies! It's a pointless and arbitrary rule, he says in an NYT op-ed, and furthermore "Stealth marketing, direct advertisement and product placement work only on the clueless, and our immersive, hippo-like wallowing in the marketplace serves only to make us resistant to these viral contagions." Always with the hippos.

What is it with mayors and bloggers, anyway? They're always fighting! Robert Forrey is a retired English professor who writes a blog about local issues like parks and the Kiwanis Club and such. He filed a perfectly reasonable request for town records relating to the building of a local park with Mayor Jim Kalb last week, and got the following response at 1:47 a.m. on Sunday:

From: City of Portsmouth
To: rforr1@roadrunner.com
Subject: Re: Freedom of Information
Priority: Normal. Date: Sunday, September 27, 2009 1:47 AM
To: Robert Forrey

Per your public records request;

You are correct in stating that at the meeting in the park the fact was "acknowledged that such a written agreement existed". What I don't understand is why you feel that a confirmation of this fact would necessitate a publication or distribution of the mentioned document.

As you requested, a copy of the document has been prepared for you to pick up at my office. Our regular office hours are from 8:00 AM to 4:30 PM, Monday through Friday.

If there is anything else that I can do for you, which is required by law, don't hesitate to call my office. If it isn't required by law then don't bother asking, because I think that you're a worthless piece of s**t and I wouldn't p**s on you if you were on fire (my opinion). You're a poor, lonely, jealous, old man with aspirations of being a writer. You write your lies and uneducated opinions on people and issues from behind the safety of your slobber stained keyboard with the hope that somebody will read them that doesn't know you and believe that you're more than the pitiful, broke-down, lizard-looking thing that you are, in my opinion. Get a life old man. On second thought, don't bother..............

I do have a question for you. Do you have family and if so do they even like you?

Looking forward to your next Internet issue of "FORREY'S FOLLIES".....NOOOTTTTTT

With little respect for you,
Mayor James D. Kalb

Now that's freedom of speech at its best, in my opinion.

"NOOOTTTTT"! Burn, Robert Forrey. Burn. (The redacted expletives appear to have been written into the original e-mail; the "freedom of speech" line after the sign-off was in Kalb's e-mail as well.)

The Columbus Dispatch asked Kalb if he regretted sending the e-mail, and he replied: "I regret that he made it public." Come, on mayor—he's a blogger. Sheesh.

[Via State Sunshine and Open Records.]

One of Finke's many charms is the way she has treated her readership like her boss—she'll call in sick via a post, or beg for just a few more minutes to get her thoughts together on breaking news. And as any regular reader knows, she scarcely goes a month without going dark for a day or two for some reason or other, which she invariably explains on her blog in the manner of a harried writer trying to get an editor off her back: I'm down with the flu, I've got jury duty, this damn internet's not working, I had some bad dental work, I broke my hand.

We're all for writers taking time off. And we're in no way prepared to put our own work ethic up against Finke's. But ever since she sold DeadlineHollywoodDaily.com to Jay Penske's Mail.com in a reported multimillion-dollar deal that has her earning $400,000 a year, we've wondered how Finke's frequently erratic work habits would mesh with a real boss, who has investors to satisfy. So we've decided to keep an eye on Finke's "I'm out today" posts, to see what a $400k blogger can get away with.

Last Thursday, Finke wrote that she had been in the hospital by way of explaining a shortage of recent posts. We hope she's OK. Finke has written in the past that she suffers from diabetes, which may explain her frequent absences from blogging (though it hasn't hampered a long and active career that has included stints in Moscow and London for the Associated Press). She seems to have bounced back fairly quickly from her latest illness, with a lot of posts over the weekend.

To put Finke's salary in perspective, we've gone through her archives and put together a sampling—and this really is just a sampling—of her posts offering reasons for not being able to work. We hope that in her new, corporate environment, Finke will find a way to pace herself and accommodate a more predictable work schedule. Because we agree with this blogger, who wrote a post called "Why Hollywood Gets No Work Done" in 2006:

I was shocked to hear that Hollywood types were already leaving town for the July 4th holiday. It's bad enough you guys cancel four straight scheduled meetings with screenwriters. Or have your assistants book appointments six months ahead which you'll cancel anyway. And all without a twinge of guilt. But lately you've become Slacker Town.

Finke is no slacker—anyone who's been on the business end of her reporter's notebook knows that she is not afraid to put in the hours on any given story. But she certainly does seem to cancel a lot of appointments with her readers:

September 17, 2009

September 14, 2009

September 10, 2009

August 12, 2009

July 31, 2009

July 13, 2009

July 9, 2009

July 7, 2009

June 29, 2009

April 20, 2009

April 15, 2009

April 6, 2009

April 2, 2009

March 30, 2009

November 10, 2008

November 3, 2008

October 15, 2008

September 11, 2008

September 4, 2008

August 1, 2008

July 28, 2008

July 9, 2008

June 10, 2008

June 9, 2008

May 20, 2008

May 16, 2008

May 15, 2008

April 23, 2008

April 1, 2008

February 20, 2008

February 12, 2008

January 23, 2008

January 14, 2008

January 9, 2008

December 27, 2007

December 17, 2007

December 10, 2007

November 30, 2007

October 16, 2007

October 10, 2007

October 1, 2007

September 13, 2007

August 13, 2007

July 20, 2007

July 13, 2007

July 11, 2007

July 7, 2007

February 25, 2007

December 30, 2006

December 5, 2006

September 11, 2006

June 12, 2006

[Full disclosure: Your blogger's wife works as an editor at Finke's former employer, Village Voice Media, and occasionally edited her stories.]

Hilden, a Yale-trained First Amendment specialist, examined a New York trial judge's decision to strip Rosemary Port of her anonymity in lawsuit brought by her nemesis, "skank" model Liskula Cohen. In reviewing Google's stance in the case, she found the company dodged big First Amendment issues and instead objected that the judge's request for blogger information was a pain in the ass; "overbroad, vague and ambiguously worded."

In short, Google took no real stand in support of the First Amendment rights of bloggers on its system, even though the Supreme Court has held that anonymous speech is often protected. The court itself noted in its opinion that Google "essentially has no substantive opposition to [Cohen's] application."

So if you want to anonymously call a model a "skank," or anonymously satirize Steve Jobs, or anonymously pick on the New York Times, maybe try WordPress.com instead, you filthy insane adorable whore skank anony-bloggers, you.

(Pic: Port)

Yes, the most curious thing about this piece about fashion bloggers is that not one of their blogs is named or linked to. Isn't that kind of like running a fashion spread but not telling us any of the designers who make the clothes? Anyway, Gevinson's is called Style Rookie, and the Associate Press revealed her identity in a story about the dangers of children who blog last year.

But that doesn't seem to have anything but a positive effect on her. Noted fashion line Rodarte is using her as a muse and has invited her (and her father) to their fashion show on Tuesday in New York. Sure, she may be a little precocious and affected, but the kid does has some major style. In our fantasies, she grows up, goes to a good school, slaves away as an assistant for a few years, and then is dubbed the chosen one to unseat Anna Wintour. Imagine, a blogger at the helm of Vogue! Oh, never mind. By the time all that happens, there won't be any print media left anyway.

A Massachusetts legal blog called The Docket carries an odd story: a federal judge wanted to hold Sullivan to account for marijuana possession on a national seashore, which after all is only a misdemeanor and $125 fine, and other people are prosecuted for it all the time in his very court. But the U.S. Attorney's Office insisted on dropping the charges, to keep Sullivan's record clean so his immigration can go through.

Are bloggers getting VIP treatment at the federal level now? The magistrate hearing the case, Robert Collings, certainly thought Sullivan was:

Collings says he expressed his concern that "a dismissal would result in persons in similar situations being treated unequally before the law. … persons charged with the same offense on the Cape Cod National Seashore were routinely given violation notices, and if they did not agree to [pay the fine] were prosecuted by the United States Attorney … there was no apparent reason for treating Mr. Sullivan differently from other persons charged with the same offense."

In his day, newspaper columnist and radio host Walter Winchell enjoyed a close, favor-trading relationship with FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover; according to Neal Gabler's biography of Winchell, this mainly involved the funneling of confidential information. But his special relationship with the Justice Department eventually became public knowledge and helped turn him, in the public eye, from the scrappy underdog into a dangerous media baron. If anything, the blogosphere has bred an even stronger distaste for special treatment than the tabloids did; which is why Sullivan, heretofore tight-lipped about the incident, will probably issue some sort of plausible explanation for the whole affair posthaste. Or at least attempt to.

UPDATE: Here is Collings' "memorandum and order" on the matter, which at 12 pages is quite concise by the standards of federal legal documents. We daresay it's almost eloquent! Docs via The Docket.

(Pic: Sullivan by Trey Ratcliff)

You'll no longer find Rebecca Ruiz's post "NYTPicker Revealed" on the Times' Media Decoder blog, although for the moment it remains in Google's cache. Citing "a person with close ties to the site," the Times fingered as NYTPicker's author David Blum, the Times vet turned fumbling newspaper turnaround artist. Blum had declined to comment to the Times, but about half an hour later, NYTPicker denied the report on its Twitter feed, and the Times pulled it from the Web.

The wording of NYTPicker's tweet did imply a team of two or more writers is behind the site, and that would certainly help explain its impressive track record: The site caught the Times romanticizing the plight of a child rapist, taking a hypocritical position on publishing the identities of foreign kidnap victims, and writing several erroneous things in Walter Cronkite's obituary. It also coaxed the first admission of plagiarism from Times columnist Maureen Dowd.

The site's authors are no doubt having still more fun at the paper's expense in the wake of its bad guess. And to think that, just two years ago, this sort of embarrassing public guessing game was played only by unscrupulous bloggers. Silicon Valley was in a frenzy about the identity of the author of the anonymous blog Fake Steve Jobs. After several erroneous, confidently-worded guesses by Gawker Media CEO ringleader (and then-Valleywag blogger) Nick Denton, the identity of the real author, Forbes editor Dan Lyons, emerged, thanks to some old-fashioned digging by none other than... the New York Times. Maybe the writer behind that successful exposé, Brad Stone, can be brought in to help this time around.

UPDATE: The Times has issued a new post, carrying a full denial by Blum. The paper adds that Blum "hadn't intended to decline comment." WTF?

Original post:

The latest case: A decorating firm in Queens called Holiday Image has asked a court to force Google to reveal who made a Gmail account in the company CEO's name, then sent fraudulent emails to clients of the company badmouthing the company itself, and its clients.

Well! We are not lawyers but that one sounds a lot more like "fraud" than does the Liskula Cohen case, where a pissed rival girl made an anonymous blog calling Liskula a skank. That one just sounded like "dumb." But the type of dumb that should be protected by free speech!

The bigger issue here is that if Google plans to roll over and reveal the identity of anyone doing something anonymously on the internet that pisses someone else off, we're all screwed. Here's another case that's a little more serious, courtesy of someone who is a lawyer—Anne Salisbury, who defended skankblogger Rosemary Port in the Liskula Cohen case. She notes a case in California, where a developer is suing to get Google to reveal the identities of an investigative group of journalists who wrote stories about a bribery scheme the developer was involved in:

Google has taken the position that unless it receives a written
"motion to quash" the subpoena, it will release the information to the
developer's attorneys. Many people in the free speech community are
alarmed at this potentially dangerous incursion, because of the belief
that vigorous, honest discourse will be stifled by fear of retribution
if personal, identifying information can be so easily obtained.

The problem is not anonymous insult artists or their victims. The problem is Google. Why don't you just shut up, Google?
[Pic via]

See, a model named Liskula Cohen googled herself and found out that some anonymous and completely unread blogger called her a "skank" and so she sued to find out the identity of the blogger who called her a skank and it turned out that it was this girl she knew, of course, because who the hell else would bother to blog about how some random model is a skank?

Dowd aligns herself with Cohen, the wronged party, which is odd, because Dowd's entire career has been built on calling people names. But Dowd has also been a victim, herself, of people saying mean things about her, on the internet! (People like us!)

If I read all the vile stuff about me on the Internet, I'd never come to work. I'd scamper off and live my dream of being a cocktail waitress in a militia bar in Wyoming.

Yes, well, we can both dream, can't we?

The argument is always framed as "I have no problem with being criticized, it's being criticized by anonymous cowards that is wrong and must be stopped!" Our position has always been, bullshit is bullshit, bylined or no. And this is bullshit:

Yet in this infinite realm of truth-telling, many want to hide. Who are these people prepared to tell you what they think, but not who they are? What is the mentality that lets them get in our face while wearing a mask? Shredding somebody's character before the entire world and not being held accountable seems like the perfect sting.

But our very own MoDo has proved that you don't actually need anonymity to shred somebody's character before the entire world and not be held accountable.

Tucker gives Bitter Lawyer an exclusive sneak peek of his own opinion of his own movie about him:

BL: Do you feel like the hilarity of your written work translated well into a movie?
TM: Fuck yes. The movie is absolutely drop-dead hilarious. Wait until you see it, you will laugh your ass off.

There you fucking have it. Tucker also notes that he cast the actor that plays him based on his "likability and redeemability," for unexplained reasons.

An actual non-Tucker review of Alcohol and Fruit of the Looms Go Together Like Grilled Cheese and Mail Order Brides, TK.

[Previously: The script of this shitty movie, Parts One and Two. Pic: Flickr]

The changes at Wikipedia, which mandate review for anonymous changes to articles about living people, sound reasonable enough. The online reference has messed up its share of biographies, after all, falsely reporting the deaths of Senators Edward Kennedy and Robert Byrd and erroneously linking a prominent journalist to the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy.

"The Ethicist" Randy Cohen's diatribe against anonyblogging of the sort aimed at Vogue model Liskula Cohen (pictured) likewise rests on a not-so-controversial assertion, namely that anonymous internet commenters are often complete assholes. And yet the column by Cohen (the nebbishy Times writer, not the hot model) is controversial, because it turns out he quoted his ex-wife without disclosing that fact. Which we know because of a — wait for it — anonymous blogger!

And that's the thing about being impolite online: it might be needlessly abrasive 95 times out of 100, but those other five times it's awesome, conveying fresh perspective readers would not have seen were it not for the cloak of anonymity. Cohen says we should make anonymity utterly shameful, except in cases where there is a "reasonable fear of retribution," but this sort of etiquette is basically just a way of regulating opinion, and runs counter to the rawness that has historically been one of the Web's great strengths. You could say the same thing about Wikipedia's new mechanisms for institutional control. Anonymous writers might not always absolutely need the secrecy the shroud themselves in, but they have good reason to want it.

Put another way, if we have to choose between prim scolds like Randy Cohen and impolitic ankle-biters like Fake Steve Jobs (anonymous for many months) or NYTPicker, we'll take the latter any day, even if the price is wading through tons of crap.

After alleged skank model Liskula Cohen went to court and got Google to reveal Port's identity last week, this case has become the Most Important Moral Question of Our Time. And since the Post has signed on as Liskula Cohen's official blowjob journalism provider, Rosemary Port ran to the Daily News to tell her sad, sad tale of woe. She says the following things!

"This has become a public spectacle and a circus that is not my doing...I feel my right to privacy has been violated."

Now she is suing Google! If anyone deserves millions in damages here, it is skankblogger Rosemary Port. One thing she has going for her is that Liskula Cohen and her attorney are none too bright. A man who passed the bar exam says:

"If we had thought for a minute that the Google case would have brought more attention to the anonymous blogger's site, we never would have started it."

It's like trying to pick sides in Godzilla vs. MechaGodzilla!

People call each other names every day and it's not particularly noteworthy, but since Cohen actually won the legal right to unmask her internet Skankaccuser, the New York Post has decided to portray her in a heroic light, with comical consequences.

The secret angry Liskula Cohen-hating skankblogger is Rosemary Port, a 29 year-old who "used to work as a telemarketer and a nightclub hostess and promoter," according to the NYP, and started her skankblog after she heard Cohen was talking trash about her. Here's her Facebook photo, which she hasn't gotten around to taking down yet.

Port says she's scared now that her name is public, as well she should be. Because the Post, for reasons unclear (scandalous sexy ones? Nobody knows!), has decided she is not just some lady who got mad about some other lady talking shit about her on the internet and then wackily went to court over that internet thing—she is a brave crusader! Andrea Peyser was ordered to write a worshipful column about Liskula and as hard as she tries, she can't get that sexy enthusiasm going too much, as she plumbs the depths of Liskula's soul:

And she cooks. "I'm not a very good cook, but I try a couple of times a week to make a new recipe. 'The Joy of Cooking' is very good."

She also plays with her cocker spaniel, Chaya.

Right-o. People arguing, on internet. Not a god damn thing happening in August.
[Pic: FMD]

So, what does 11 year-old Obama interviewer Damon Weaver—whose journalistic role model is Wolf Blitzer, he says—think of our president?

TIME: At the end of the interview you asked Obama to be your homeboy, and he said yes. How does it feel?
Damon: It feels good. It feels the same, though.

He is already more insightful than Wolf Blitzer.


The SEC (college football yall, LOOK IT UP) is trying to somehow keep a monopoly on all of its content by banning any bloggers or other unsavory types from posting real-time updates on games or game video. Good luck with that.


Let's have one of those sunny newspaper news roundups! Newspaper ad revenue hasn't been as low in real dollar terms since 1965. Newspaper stocks have seen a recent bump, but it probably won't last. And newspapers are protesting off-the-record briefings en masse, but it probably won't work.


ESPN Magazine is selling yearlong subscription renewals for one dollar! I'm renewing even though I have to admit that ESPN Magazine is pegged to a readership no smarter than Stephen Smith. One dollar!