Because we are on his delightful blast email list, we were alerted to today's StoneZone post wondering why Spitzer didn't face criminal prosecution for sleeping with prostitutes, with his socks on. Sure, most johns aren't prosecuted, but Spitzer violated the Mann Act!

What do Chuck Berry, Frank Lloyd Wright, Charlie Chaplin, and Eliot Spitzer have in common? Answer: All of these men violated the federal Mann Act, but only one - Eliot Spitzer - was not prosecuted.

The Mann Act prohibits taking women across state lines for immoral purposes. It was mostly written to prosecute black people who slept with white women.

And what do Berry, Wright, and Chaplin have in common? Unlike Eliot, they all violated the Mann Act more than fifty years ago, when the Mann Act was actually enforced.

But why bring this up now? Well, Vanity Fair is apparently on the case and Mr. Stone would presumably like to be a part of whatever that story ends up being.

Reports the New York Times:

The Bloomberg administration, which has struggled with a seemingly intractable problem of homelessness for years, has paid for more than 550 families to leave the city since 2007, as a way of keeping them out of the expensive shelter system, which costs $36,000 a year per family. All it takes is for a relative elsewhere to agree to take the family in.

The city, which spends $500,000 a year on the program, employs a local travel agency, Austin Travel, to book one-way tickets for domestic trips. Department of Homeless Services employees do all the planning for international travel.

The story goes on to report that city officials say there is no limit on where entire families can be transported. So far, they have placed people all over the country and on 5 continents. Financial aid is also offered to help ease the transition, with the city willing to advance a family up to four months worth of rent money and pay their security deposit, plus an allowance to cover the cost of new furniture and any broker's fees involved.

Reading this story caused two things to enter our minds: The first thing being this woman that we've been seeing for years panhandling with her kids on the subway, the 6 train if we remember correctly. Over the entire span of time we've seen her working the trains, she peddles the same tale of woe—that she and her kids are from out of state and that her car broke down and she just needs money for a new battery or something to get back to where she and her kids came from. We're going to print a copy of this story out and carry it inside of our trusty backpack so we can give it to her the next time she asks us for change on the train.

The second thing we thought of was how we've always wanted to live in Paris and how we're pretty deft at dirtying ourselves up, to the point where people have actually thought we might actually be homeless. Just saying.

City Aids Homeless With One-Way Tickets Home [New York Times]
pic via

Think this will only work on gullible old ladies? Think again. We heard from a would-be-former News subscriber who is gainfully employed at a public relations agency.

That's right: even flacks, who take pride in bending newspapermen to their will, have trouble wriggling out of their News subscriptions.

Our tipster has tried calling, twice, but was put on hold for more than half an hour each time. She tried letters, of a sort, and even emailing the publisher and top editors. No dice. See her account below.

Perhaps the source of her headaches is obvious: the News is owned by Dean Singleton's MediaNews Group. Singleton, presently chairman of the Associated Press, just gave a speech saying he's "mad as hell" at those who would "walk off with our work" online. With that much anger at the top of the organization, maybe it was inevitable some non-customers in the offline world would get burned, as well.

The official line at Fox News, you see is that the network sometimes tries not to pointlessly stalk and harass people. It sometimes uses ambush interviews as a last resort.

[Fox News producer David] Tabacoff - who started a telephone interview by asking, "This is going to be a fair piece, correct?" - said the interviews are "part of the journalistic mission" of The O'Reilly Factor...



"We're trying to get answers from people," he said. "Sometimes the only way to get them is via these methods."

(Emphasis added.)

Other times, then, Fox producers must be spending "days... waiting in trucks and hotels" for the sheer ratings value. Such was the case with Amanda Terkel, the Think Progress blogger who was followed by Fox News from her apartment across state lines into Virginia, where she and a friend were accosted by a cameraman and O'Reilly Factor producer.

Fox didn't so much as try to call Terkel or come to her office, she said on MSNBC a few weeks ago. (See attached clip.) The network just went straight into a manhunt.

Perhaps Fox News should just admit it will take a camera anywhere, at the drop of a hat, in order to keep viewers entertained. People don't hold that sort of behavior against, say, TMZ. Do they really expect much better from The O'Reilly Factor?

Lefty blogger Terkel appeared on Keith Olbermann's MSNBC Countdown last night to describe exactly how O'Reilly's producer staked out her apartment and followed her across state lines to ambush her in Virginia.

Terkel's case is particularly likely to draw sympathy: The show didn't try calling her or visiting her office, she told Olbermann, just went straight into the stalking. Then the 5'0", 100-pound woman was accosted in a desolate area by yelling men with cameras and microphones. All for daring to quote the terrible things the Fox News host said about a rape victim.

O'Reilly blamed the whole thing on desperate NBC executives and radical leftists, who somehow forced his show to hound Terkel. In other words, they were asking for it.

In closed-door meetings of the ominous-sounding "Google Publishers Advisory Council," executives from struggling old media like the New York Times, Time Inc., The Wall Street Journal and Hearst are pressing their case: They want their content to get higher sort rank in Google search results.

Those results are determined, at the most fundamental level, by Google's famed PageRank algorithm, which weighs Web pages based on how many other pages link to them, and based on the rank of those linking pages. So the newspapers and magazines are basically whining they don't get enough links, and/or don't know how to structure their content in in the simple and straightforward manner Google prefers.

In fact Martin Nisenholtz (pictured), despite an astonishing 14 years atop the Times website, still hasn't figured out how to get his articles to show up in many Google search results. This frustrates him to no end.

Why, just the other day, according to Ad Age, Nisenholtz Googled "Gaza" and got back "outdated" BBC stories, results from something called a "Wikipedia" and a YouTube video he says was anti-Semitic. Which is shocking, but only because Nisenholtz should realize after 10+ years that Google is not a breaking-news search engine. A search for "Gaza" shouldn't bring up the latest news on the Gaza Strip any more than a search for "New York" would bring up the latest front-page Gotham murder.

(Maybe he should fix nytimes.com's search engine before complaining about Google. It falsely claims to have published more than 10,000 articles on Gaza in the past month, and presents them in an unsortable mush riddled with duplicates.)

You know people are getting delusional/megalomaniacal when Michael Wolff is the most reasonable-sounding of the bunch:

"It's the plaintive cry of people who have lost their monopoly trying to scrounge a little of it back," said Michael Wolff, Vanity Fair columnist and founder of Newser, which aggregates and links news from around the web. "Sometimes it's true that you'd rather get what The New York Times has to say about something rather than a host of bloggers. But more interestingly it's not always true. And it is in fact less and less true."

We just had a newspaper editor lobby in Washington to bend antitrust law; now we find out publishers are convening secret meetings with Google to twist search results. If the mass media are going to be so obvious in their self-serving flackery, people just might get the idea they're more interested in self preservation than in their supposed civic contribution: standing up for the little guy. Imagine that.

[Ad Age]

(Photo: Teresa Boardman on Flickr)

This is how it looked shortly berfore 5 p.m. For at least a few minutes, the URL dodd.senate.gov returned a blank page with the words "not an error"; now it appears to be working again. Dodd's been catching heat lately for lying about his role in the legal loophole that allowed AIG executives to be paid bonuses after $175 billion or so in federal bailouts.

While Dodd's site was down, the rest of the Senate web site appeared to be functioning normally. Hacking into a .gov web site is serious business that can get somebody into serious trouble. Maybe he's just preparing to redesign — or resign.

Just think: Kushner's investors thought their money was tucked securely into the rock-solid real estate market when really a tiny sliver of it was being sacrificed in a media bonfire so the Observer could investigate exactly why and how Park Slope moms would like to fuck Don Draper.

If that's somehow "wrong" in this topsy-turvy world then we don't want to be right. Honestly, the money probably fell out of Charles' pockets during a walk through the offices or something. When you buy a building numbered "666 5th Street," strange things are bound to happen!

When asked Friday about an assertion in his court papers that “Jews, historically and in daily living, act through clans and in wolf pack syndrome,” he said, “That one sort of rings a bell.”

He said he was not anti-Semitic. “I was trying to show that everybody in the bankruptcy court was Jewish and I was not Jewish,” he said, “and I was being victimized by religious bias.”

Also, in 1993, Martin told CBS News' 48 Hours "the record speaks for itself" when asked about a 1983 statement in court papers that "I am able to understand how the Holocaust took place, and with every passing day feel less and less sorry that it did."

None of Martin's statements are hugely surprising once you know that the law-school graduate was in 1970 denied entry to the Illinois bar on psychiatric grounds, specifically "moderately severe character defect manifested by well-documented ideation with a paranoid flavor and a grandiose character."

But, really, would Fox News' Sean Hannity have barred Martin from his special even if he'd known about that diagnosis? It's practically his own job description!

Setting aside his tactical blunders, McCain heads a party deeply divided on the campaign's central issue, the economy. If the showdown between Bush and Congressional Republicans over the Wall Street bailout didn't illustrate the fissure clearly enough, the public loss of faith by populist conservatives O'Reilly and Scarborough should do the job nicely.

For all his problems, one can't escape the uneasy feeling that McCain may very well sacrifice what remains of his dignity in a desperate, last-ditch shot at victory-via-dirty tricks. It almost certainly wouldn't work. But an October Surprise — well beyond the attempt to brand Obama a Bill Ayers-loving terrorist — would cause real pain in a nation that has already had more than enough this month. And that, my friends, would suck!

Academy rules dictate that documentaries must screen for at least one week in Los Angeles County and Manhattan before the qualifying deadline of August 31. Thus, if you're up for a schlep out to the Laemmle Claremont 5 or, in NYC, the Coliseum Quad in Washington Heights, you can be the among the first to see Maher and Charles torment the Christian Right and other supposed fanatics. The early run is especially unusual in the context of Toronto, where the "premiere" classification is generally sacrosanct for distributed films of this size and budget. But hey — it is just Claremont, and most observers seem to agree that major papers won't run reviews the way they did for Polanski, potentially undercutting the unveiling up North.

That said, we're happy to air your opinions below if you've got the much shorter journey in you in the days ahead. We think we can wait for October.

• Suburban Booking [Hollywood Elsewhere]

The National Enquirer, in a story headlined "Top Dole Aide Caught in Group-Sex Ring," reported that the Stones had apparently run personal ads in a magazine called Local Swing Fever and on a Web site that had been set up with Nydia's credit card. "Hot, insatiable lady and her handsome body builder husband, experienced swingers, seek similar couples or exceptional muscular . . . single men," the ad on the Web site stated. The ads sought athletes and military men, while discouraging overweight candidates, and included photographs of the Stones. At the time, Stone claimed that he had been set up by a "very sick individual," but he was forced to resign from Dole's campaign. Stone acknowledged to me that the ads were authentic.

So. He wrote a letter to the FBI about Spitzer's hooker patronage. We know that. Also he has advice on how McCain can win the election that would probably actually work, if McCain is smart enough to run a Nixon campaign.

Stone also seems to have enjoyed Angels in America, as his description of legendary scumbag Roy Cohn closely matches a monologue the Cohn character delivers in that play. "'Roy was not gay,' Stone told me. 'He was a man who liked having sex with men. Gays were weak, effeminate.'" Glad we got that cleared up.

The Dirty Trickster [New Yorker]

Seemingly self-appointed Republican "strategist" Roger Stone began his illustrious career pulling dirty tricks for Dick Nixon at the age of 19. He later served as post-resignation Nixon's "man in Washington," and competed with noted asshole Lee Atwater to see who could be more repellent and quasi-legal in support of Ronald Reagan's reelection. According to, well, Stone himself, he was responsible for disrupting the 2000 Florida recount. Recently he started an anti-Hillary Clinton organization called C.U.N.T.. That little scheme followed Stone's perfected model of gaining attention and press for himself, generally to the detriment of whatever cause he is ostensibly supporting, which is why it is best to take all of his grandiose claims of political sophistication with large grains of salt.

Last August, someone calling from Roger Stone's New York apartment called Eliot Spitzer's dad and left a crazy, sweary message. Once the details of the call were released to the media, Stone declared that it wasn't him at all, as he was attending a performance of Frost/Nixon the night the call was made. Frost/Nixon didn't have a performance that night, but whatever. Then Stone claimed to have gotten a tattoo of Richard Nixon's face, because the story was not yet crazy enough for his liking.

Stone sent the letter after the FBI called him up to maybe ask about that sweary phone call. Stone's response, of course, was to have lawyers send them a letter about Spitzer's whoring. "'Mr. Stone respectfully declines to meet with you at this time,' the letter states, before going on to offer 'certain information' about Spitzer." Of course, the banking investigation that eventually led to the Emperors Club bust was already underway by November, so even if the date on the letter is accurate, who knows if it had any effect.

The whole thing could be bullshit, but at least it's well-crafted bullshit. The socks!

Beach man told FBI of alleged Spitzer sexscapades [Miami Herald]

• Hide behind anonymity: For chrissake, the Grand Old Party isn't about transparency, it's about shady dirty tricks organizations like C.R.E.E.P. and Vietnam Veterans for Truth! (The only thing different about the Democrats is that they haven't been caught (yet), and don't pick names that are nearly as catchy). The rules: Don't let your campaign staffers hold social network accounts in their own names unless they're doing nothing but disseminating thoroughly vetted talking points. Use online anonymity to your advantage. Create fake "sock puppet" accounts, and lots of 'em. There are certainly security consultants mercenary enough to teach you the finer points of spoofing IP addresses, emails and phone numbers to protect your schemes from being discovered.
• Think alternate reality, not astroturfing: If you're going to game the Web to literally scare up votes, you need to start thinking like Alternate Reality Game (ARG) designers. Hire an army of twentysomethings to create an even larger army of fake Americans across the country and the demographic spectrum. Give them back stories with linked accounts on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, et al. The next step: figuring out their artfully fakes stance.
• Moderate, not extremist: This army of sock puppets should all be moderate voters who claim to be undecided. Republicans already have the overtly racist right-wing extremist vote, and they're already blogging. What the GOP needs is moderate voices who will subtly tip voters in your direction by doing things like expressing fears about neighborhood safety while linking to local news reports of violent crimes which just happen to be committed by immigrants and people of color. Use nuance when pointing to the other party's extremist element by also linking to more reasoned articles criticising your opponent as a centrist.
• Engage with the online audience: Once you've assembled hundreds of fleshed-out fakesters, start weighing in on debates — everywhere from blog comments to Wikipedia. And have your virtual voters pretend to fight amongst themselves over policy points. Only then do you use your real soldiers to weigh in with a reasonable compromise that agrees with party policy. A few fake Democrats who turn the debate in a less-than-civil direction might be handy to gain sympathy for your argument, but you can probably count on the Kossacks — fans of DailyKos — to do that work for you.

Yes, this is all incredibly evil. If your party isn't doing it you can bet the other party is.