Please be advised that a demonstration, directed at FOX News and consisting of approximately 150 people, is expected in front of 1211 today (Wednesday, November 11) from 12:00 pm to 2:00 pm. The NYPD will be present to monitor the demonstration along with News Corporation security.

Although no disruptions are expected, you may wish to contact any visitors or appointments you are expecting this afternoon and suggest they allow additional time for processing. If you are booking car service this afternoon, request pick up on 48th Street.

We also encourage employees to use the alternate entrances at the back of the building and on the C-1 level if the main entrance becomes congested. As a reminder, it is always recommended that you NOT display your building ID card once outside of 1211. This is particularly important when arriving and departing the building during the demonstration.

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact Corporate Security Manager Lee Boody through the Security Operations Center at [redacted].

Karl Solterer
Vice President, Corporate Security
News Corporation

[Pic via]

That's them in the tiny pen in the middle.

"The dude is a very anti-birther friend who could not resist the opportunity."

After causing a ruckus in Rome, and stirring up chaos in Nashville, the Church of Scientology came down on D.C. today to reveal their new "Ideal Org" building, which is apparently like Scientology's version of the special McDonalds that serve all the new special things that the rest of America has to wait for first, or something: it's a special super-awesome Scientology outpost.

To help assist the citizens of D.C. welcome it, they shut down a huge street, hung giant sheets, and tried to scatter and rid themselves of protesters. Via DCist:

Police are out in full force around the humongous 50,000-square foot building, and security is tight — a ten-foot tall white temporary barricade is blocking off 16th Street; there are huge draping banners reading "SCIENTOLOGY" and "DIANETICS", though, in case those walking by on their Saturday jaunts to the 14th and P retail corridor were wondering what the hell was going on with this big white thing in the middle of the street.

Ohhhh. That's why those people are creepily going through that gigantic white sheet. Wonder what's on the other side of it? I know! It's a small man with scary eyes named David Miscavage. He's the head of Scientology and he talked to his Scientology followers today.

There're way fun things in this picture! See if you can spot the guy in the anti-psychology jacket. And important Scientologists! And the guy in the peach-colored shirt who looks like he's missing his head. And here're more people ready for Miscavage to rock their faces:

There're also the people waving French flags outside this joint in honor of France's recent ruling against Scientology "fleecing" followers. Fleecing, indeed.

Looks like they keep on keepin' on after the awful week they just had, between Tommy Davis' freakouts and Paul Haggis' resignation from the church. So, basically, your typical Scientology shitshow. If you have any reports from what was said on the inside, let's hear 'em.

We pulled out the frame of her (apparently) kicking at a cop, for fairness. Still, maybe those four or five full-grown adult male police officers could have managed to arrest the lady without shocking her into screaming submission? The lesson, here, of course, is that telling a cop "The world is watching" or similar outraged liberal thing while waving a camera will not prevent you from getting fucked up, by that same cop. Take note, hippies. [via Feministing]

Exertion, competition, marketing, body shaving, sportscasters with goatees; the Olympics are like a convention of hipster betes noire.

So apparently the Chicago hoodie community didn't get the memo from the President about the vital importance of winning the 2016 summer games for the Windy City.

Last night, six 20-somethings hit pause on their Animal Collective mix and took to the streets last night in a display of anti-Olympic hooliganism certain to make the IOC think twice before exposing the world's greatest athletes to a metropolis filled with so many bummed out young people. Before the mayhem was over, an Olympic's boosting banner had been ripped from the downtown area's Picasso statue, and immolated forever, in the nearby eternal flame.

Peer into the faces of the Chicago Six, ye purveyors of Discus throwing contests and know your mortal foe.

Meet the Chicago Six, the beacons of a new movement against global athletic competitions and all the banners and pageants stuff that goes along with them.

E&P reports from the front lines of the controversy that kids are totally not taking the fact that this comic strip ran in their school paper lying down or whatever:

"We don't care if it was a black, white, orange, purple, pink person who wrote this article," Audrey Foreback, a sophomore, told local radio station WYTV. "They should not have been allowed to print it and publish it throughout the school. It's just wrong."

That extraordinarily stupid statement appears even more stupid once you read the actual comic strip in question. Also stupid is the fact that "some students showed up at the student center with nooses around their necks in protest of the cartoon," which simply does not make sense, if the sight of a man in a noose offends you so (unless the offense is only taken when said noose is rendered in cartoon form).

Keith Knight himself is gracious about the whole thing on his blog but what he's really trying to say is: Shut up, college.

[Pic: K Chronicles]

"Check out that fucking teabagger," writes in tipster Stefan, referencing "Look At This Fucking Hipster," the blog chronicling hipsters looking ridiculous. Unfortunately, while hipsters have to be sought out within the pseudo-bohemian enclaves of their respective parishes, people who can't have any kind of normal, rational discussion about politics—or even a rational, agenda-based protest—are easily found at protests like the one going on today in Washington D.C.

These creatures are to conservatism what globalization protesters are to liberalism: irrational, screaming without aim, intent on burning the system down for the sake of doing so, with talk of a revolution they couldn't conceive or execute without being worse off than before.

Except globalization protesters are young and hot, and these people sluffed on their weekly Early Bird Specials to come.

Anyway! On to the Protesting Porn. Again, thank you Stefan, for bringing us these images with speed and a wonderful eye, in a series he titled simply: Teabagged.

He's making a joke about balls, you should know.
Sadly, this one was actually referencing this New World Order. Right idea, wrong protest, slightly late to both parties.
Go Buckeyes!
Sen. Cam'ron (D) would like to have a word with you, sir.
"Fucking parents."
Indeed, the Port-O-Potty situation got a little out of control. See, this is what happens when there's too little government intervention.
Hey, fellow Nevadans! You guys had trouble taking a shit, too? Hold it in, Lady PinkPants. You made an excellent sartorial choice, today.
Sudoku is INTENSE.
Don't you wish it said "ass destruction?" I'm going to pretend I don't see the "M."
Former hiking camp counselor goes off the trail, ends up here. Next time, we should probably fill the Camelback with more water, less Thunder Acid.
The plan to draw the "Don't Tread On Me" snake on Uncle Gendolf's head failed miserably. Also, the most disconcerting detail about this: Who uses disposable cameras anymore?! Didn't even know they still make those. This guy's in desperate need of a Broleroid Camera.

In "The Toronto Declaration: No Celebration of Occupation" posted online today, a dazzling array of festival-hopping luminaries denounced the festival for celebrating "an apartheid regime." Saying that the Tel Aviv celebration plays into a sinister Israeli government cabal to create "Brand Israel" the declaration states:

This program ignores the suffering of thousands of former residents and descendants of the Tel Aviv/Jaffa area who currently live in refugee camps in the Occupied Territories or who have been dispersed to other countries, including Canada. Looking at modern, sophisticated Tel Aviv without also considering the city's past and the realities of Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza strip, would be like rhapsodizing about the beauty and elegant lifestyles in white-only Cape Town or Johannesburg during apartheid without acknowledging the corresponding black townships of Khayelitsha and Soweto.

The signatories include Naomi Klein, David Byrne, Eve Ensler, Jane Fonda, Danny Glover, Ken Loach, Wallace Shawn, Alice Walker and Howard Zinn.

On the other end of the entertainment world, thousands of citizens of Los Angeles were reportedly struck deaf by a thunderous electronic tone after every agency and production company in Hollywood simultaneously took their phones off the hook to avoid being asked if they supported the Toronto's Film Festival's Spotlight on Tel Aviv.

Oh, and here is the Tom Coburn Town Hall, where a weeping woman asks a Republican Senator for government help because her husband suffered a brain injury and then his insurance was canceled, and Coburn suggests that she should ask her neighbors for help, because Government Is Never The Answer, even though in any other industrialized democracy in the goddamn world this woman would not need to beg her Senator for basic medical care for her sick husband.

Martin emailed the Tea Party listserve explaining that CNBC needed "lots of energy and lots of anger." She asked: "where are the big events this week and where can TPP best be represented on the news?"

Patriot and Teabagger Pat Wayman responded with a great suggestion: let's throw a riot at a health fair sponsored by Rep. David Scott (D-GA), the Congressman who got a swastika painted on his office sign last night!

Martin explained to TPM Muckraker that the Teabaggers would not be protesting that particular health fair, but the bit about CNBC specifically asking Tea Baggers to display "lot of anger" for their cameras was not disputed.

So. There you go. Maybe we should all join Bill O'Reilly's fight against GE! It actually really is a pretty shitty corporation!

As you can see in this confusing and poorly shot amateur video, Gladney was brutally beaten by goons and required immediate medical care (he is the guy who is briefly knocked over 6 seconds into the video and who is then shown up and running around and acting pretty much fine for the remaining 3 minutes). He got a lawyer and went to the hospital. (Maybe even in that order!)

And then of course he is suddenly showing up at demonstrations and on Fox News in a wheelchair and all bandaged up, because the union thugs dropped a piano on his head while he was just eating some birdseed under a giant "X." Gladney needs your help!

Supporters cheered. Brown finished by telling the crowd that Gladney is accepting donations toward his medical expenses. Gladney told reporters he was recently laid off and has no health insurance. [emphasis added]

Right. Well. Basically all the miserable perversions of our entire broken political system are just kinda sitting there mocking you, right? This litigious uninsured charity case is the new spokesman of the Republican Party.

See, a blogger took a picture of anti-health care protesters outside a town hall. Their signs were hand-made, with markers and stuff! Then, to drive the point home, they show another picture of people advocating for health care reform. Their signs were printed professionally!

Thus something or other is proven beyond any possible doubt. If this group of people wrote things on signs by themselves, the Town Hall disruption campaign can't possibly be a coordinated media effort by Dick Armey's FreedomWorks.

To commemorate the historic bloodshed, the fucking cops got together to congratulate themselves on smiting the lawless hippie menace:

"From the pictures the media showed, it always looked like poor little Jimmy was getting attacked by the police, but what they didn't see was what Jimmy did just a minute before," said Tom Rowan, 65, a retired officer. "Everybody who got hit during the convention may not have deserved it, but 95 percent of them did."

Meanwhile, the anarchist protesters who came to Chicago as college kids to throw bricks and some poor terrified young cop who was just out there doing his job to feed his family are still acting just as outraged about the mere existence of police:

Some among the thousands who had demonstrated in 1968, meanwhile, said they were appalled by the notion of a reunion party, and others who have objected to Chicago police officers' behaviors in more recent years and even months considered the meeting an affront worthy of a protest march, which materialized with signs and musical instruments and old convention photographs just down the block from where the former officers had gathered.

In this way we see that—no matter how passionate our political differences—the healing passage of time can calcify those differences into resolute hatred for one another.

[NYT. Pic via]

The massive, traffic-stopping march that drew a couple dozen to Manhattan's Ed Sullivan theater on Tuesday in protest of Letterman's rape-speech was organized by failed sportscaster and radio host John Zeigler. But he and his followers aren't the only ones who've heeded Sarah Palin's call to "rise up." Deprived recently of a target to shrilly—that's right we said shrilly—harangue, disaffected Hillary Clinton voters have taken to the streets, and to Photoshop, to threaten Letterman's advertisers with a boycott unless they stop subsidizing his sexual assaults bad jokes.

UPDATE: An Olive Garden spokesman tells the New York Times that they didn't actually pull their ads; rather, they merely let a previously scheduled run of ads expire earlier this month. Sounds like a standard advertiser dodge when they're trying to cave to outrage without appearing to do so.

Hillbuzz, one of the premier reactionary Clintonist sites, has taken time off from its ongoing search for Michelle Obama's "whitey tape" to draw up clever versions of some Letterman advertisers' brands that reflect the truth about the man they sponsor. Here's some of their handiwork:

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

[Via Balloon Juice.]

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Yes, according to Representative Hoekstra, this thing looks like that thing. Oh, and according to John Culberson, some jerkoff Rep from Texas, the attempts by Iranians to publicize news the government doesn't want released—acts that put their very lives at risk—are just like how congressmen Tweeted about how the Democrats were mean to them, yesterday.

How incredibly self-deluded do you have to be to say these things, in public?

We sent our very own video whiz Mike Byhoff up to midtown to check out the scene. What he found: a handful of retirees, some fans of radio host John Ziegler, one very bored looking little boy, and a scrum of media trying their best to keep this insipid feud going after Letterman apologized and Palin accepted it.

What have we learned from this little episode? First, we should send Mike out to shoot video more often — nice job, Mike. Second, what people say on the Internet has little bearing on what they do IRL. And lastly, we should all go re-read Daniel Boorstin.

• Seven protesters were killed by the military Monday, according to Iran's state media.
• Ahmadinejad is asserting his iron grip on control of Iran by...leaving the country? Mahmoud declared victory and then immediately left town and is currently attending a global financial meeting in Russia, where he's been photographed chilling with Russia's president and looking quite relaxed.
• Just to make sure that word of this little "bad election" episode doesn't get out (that would be disastrous!), Iran authorities are "requiring journalists to obtain explicit permission before covering any story." They've also totally banned reporters from covering the street protests. Which feature hundreds of thousands of maddened Iranians and the aforementioned killings. Because they don't exist. Got it?
• And all that is just the sideshow, at least in the classic newspaper sense of covering the news. The real political story is the protests have worked, to some extent—the nation's Guardian Council has ordered a recount. Which supporters of Moussavi, the alleged loser, reject! They want a whole new election. So we can do all this over again. But yea, who's gonna do the recount?
• Ayatollah Ali Khameini, that's who!

Breitbart has a website all about how dumb Hollywood people are so dumb, because they are liberals even though they are rich, and this is a life-consuming obsession of his, cataloging the dumbness of the opinions of people famous because of their ability to say the words other, smarter people wrote. It eats away at his soul, the fact that Matt Damon is a Democrat!

This is a very common cause among the conservatives in Hollywood, and from what we understand there are plenty of them, but they all pretend to be endangered, secretive outcasts, even they are just as rich and dumb as the rest of the population, out there. And their dumb beliefs are generally just as unimportant and inconsequential, except when they kill people, like Jenny McCarthy.

But yes, on the whole, who gives a shit that Jon Voight is a psycho right-winger and Ed Begley Jr. drives a solar-powered Segway or whatever? What does it matter? It just offends Breitbart to his very core that these successful people can be kind of dumb and knee-jerk in their politics. They are elitists!

So the other day, Breitbart is out with his wife at "Shutters, an elegant, white-veneered hotel along the ritzy Santa Monica shoreline." (Don't worry, this is a "rare" trip to a "special-occasion place," he is not one of those elitists!) And some protesters go by. And Andrew Breitbart's response, during a fucking romantic dinner with his wife, when confronted with people marching by on the beach, is to run to the balcony and flip them off, because they hate America.

As they passed, the protesters stared sourly at the second story where we sat. Fellow patrons wondered aloud what this now massive conga line was all about. About 300 people into the procession, I spotted a sign that had "war" written in it. One T-shirt read, "Stop forcing our children to be your soldiers."

It's a voluntary army, you stupid kids!

A thousand marchers into the protest, the sour looks aimed at the hotel's clientele began to wear on us. The marchers' defiant smugness started to make an enemy of me.

"Oh, no," I thought. The antiwar movement that I saw growing only days after Sept. 11, 2001, was at it again. I thought: Even with a new president - and one who mostly shares their point of view - the I-love-a-protest-parade political left couldn't help itself. It likes ruining nice sunny days. Protesting is what these people do. Sneering at their fellow citizens is their chief skill. Projecting arrogance is their birthright.

So with the antiwar sign, the T-shirt and the thousand-strong parade right under our noses, I began to seethe. These anti-warriors were trying to destroy the peaceful seaside vibe and our pleasant Jose Cuervo buzz.

Knowing that Susie considers a true escape a day when politics isn't on the menu, I kept my observations to myself. I even restrained my natural impulse to run down to the sand to go mano a mano with the rabble-rousers.

But when one dude raised his fist like runners Tommie Smith and John Carlos did at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, I could not hold myself back. I jumped from my seat and bolted to the center of the balcony, where the American flag waved furiously in a now-harsh wind. Positioned next to Old Glory, I countered the young punk and reached out my right arm directing my middle finger in his direction.

Can you guess what actually happened here? The hint is the bit about "children" being "forced" to be "soldiers." Andrew Breitbart just flipped off a demonstration by Invisible Children, a group dedicated to raising awareness of the plight of child soldiers in Uganda.

And as those quoted paragraphs from his self-serving "apology" basically show, he is still fairly proud of his seething hatred for the "defiant smugness" of "stupid kids" who just go out marching against wars because they enjoy "sneering at their fellow citizens" (per the guy who flipped the fucking bird at his "fellow citizens").

So don't try to harsh Andrew Breitbart's pleasant seaside mellow with your boring, smug talk of sending aid money to help abducted child soldiers return home, stupid kids!

Here is a lady following our worst Defense Secretary ever right into the White House Correspondents' Dinner reception, at the Hinkley Hilton. She calls him a war criminal, and shouts at him, and so on. As a blogger who happens to agree that Don Rumsfeld is a war criminal, we are all, "oh, lady, stop it, we are so embarrassed."

But, you know, the first time we went to this event, the Correspondents Dinner, we saw Henry Kissinger hanging out five feet away from George Clooney (they weren't together), in the Newsweek reception or something, wearing a little tux, fat and rich and at the satisfying end of a full and comfortable life.

And no one was shouting at him, and he was having just a wonderful little time, and everyone—liberal, conservative, politician, journalist—was polite or obsequious to him, and we just didn't really know what to think or do, in that situation, confronted with a man who'd killed 600,000 Cambodians and then set up the Pinochet coup for good measure. It's not our responsibility to arrest him, or even yell at him, but it's nice that someone is at least making these people uncomfortable, when they go out in polite society, where they're are still welcomed with open arms and free hors d'oeuvres. Even if the person making them uncomfortable is just confirming all their stereotypes about unhinged hippies.

Update: According to Variety, Rumsfeld was so flustered that he came to think of himself as a mere beast!

The event drew no where near the GOPers of the Bush years —- one attendee called last year's event "glum" —- but figures like Newt Gingrich mingled at the pre-dinner parties. A beaming Rumsfeld seemed unfazed as he entered to the woman's shouts of "War criminal! Arrest this man!" right in his face. Asked about it by Variety, he threw his hands up in the air and said, "They are out front demonstrating about animals... It is life in America."

Either that or he's so deluded that he doesn't actually hear or process negative criticism.