One Line Movie Review: Brideshead Revisited (Latest Version)

The new Brideshead Revisited – as cinematically suffocating as the Catholicism it fumbles about trying to undress… but never does.

Best Egg Sandwich Ever!

From the chef at West Egg Cafe, Howell Mill Rd at 14th Street, to you – a delightful, unusual take on the fried-egg sandwich. It’s marvelous! A special sweet sauce and the onions add the interesting touch.

Atlanta Political Blogger Andre Walker On Politicians’ Payroll

I almost titled this one You’ll Never Give Blog In This Town Again. (Would have made for poor SEO though!)

It doesn’t keep me awake at night that bloggers get paid, sometimes, to blog. That’s a good thing; most sure need the paycheck. What bothers and troubles me deeply is when they don’t disclose to their audience, with full transparency, who exactly they are blogging for… if indeed they are blogging for a client and/or a campaign.

Andre Walker of Georgia Politics Unfiltered and Peach Pundit (where I too blog) was “outed” by Atlanta Progressive News’ Matthew Cardinale:

Political blogger Andre Walker wrote dozens of blog items in favor of US Rep. David Scott (D-GA) this year but did not disclose to readers he was on Scott’s payroll. Walker runs a blog called Georgia Politics Unfiltered and also is a blogger at Peach Pundit.

Previously, Walker had faced scrutiny in the local blogger community for failing to disclose at least $1200 in payments from the Vernon Jones for US Senate Campaign 2008. According to the FEC reports, Walker was doing legislative updates; according to Walker, he was maintaining a blog for Jones called “Jonesin’ for Georgia.”

And then, it gets just downright creepy:

“I said, this young man was working with the Party, so I’ll give you a chance,” (former State Sen. Donzella) James said. James said he asked Walker not to be campaign manager anymore a few days later after Walker made public statements inconsistent with her campaign.

Now, James is wondering whether Walker was an undercover operative for Scott.

“Someone told me before I hired him, do not allow him in your office, he is with David Scott. They told me he had campaigned in the first campaign for Scott,” James said.

“Andre said that’s behind me, it’s a new day. He could have been sent to my campaign by David Scott in 2006,” James said.

James said she was leery when Andre pressured her to tell him if she had skeletons in her closet. “He said during that one week, what could they possibly say about you? You’ve got to tell me. When you look at your record, you look great. We’ve got to make sure we protect you if you have any skeletons. He said, are you sure, is there anything?”

Full story here. H/T to MUR for this one.

Live Blogging Tonight’s Senate Race Dems Runoff Debate

Most excellent reporter/blogger from OnlineAthens, Blake Aued, will be live-blogging the U.S. Senate Dems runoff debate tonight at 7pm here. Aued promises snark with his blogging sandwich. I am there.

Internet News Broadcasting – What NOT To Do

Jarvis says whatever you do about online broadcasting, no matter what kind of news farm you are, just do NOT try to emulate the CF that is local TV news:

Let’s get this straight, people: Local TV news sucks. It is no model for what newspapers or anyone should do in video online. It’s cheesy. It’s unbearable. I’m delighted that local TV news priests don’t like what the Ledger did. That’s best indication of success I can imagine.

What Jarvis loves is this broadcast from The Star-Ledger (yes, a NEWSPAPER) in New Jersey. And it’s got Rosenblum written (and paid too) all over it. Go Star-Ledger go!

Lynching Coming Back In Style? Ask Toby Keith.

Given that Georgia has historically been the lynching capitol of the world (we specialized in lynching not only blacks, women and children, but Jews too), if this method of dispensing “justice” comes back in vogue, you can blame Toby Keith for extolling the vigilante virtues of his long gone “Grandpappy.” Here are the lyrics to his latest old number, now a movie Keith is now on a publicity tour for – Beer For My Horses:

Well a man come on the 6 o’clock news
said somebody’s been shot
somebody’s been abused
somebody blew up a building
somebody stole a car
somebody got away
somebody didn’t get to far yeah
they didn’t get to far

Grand pappy told my pappy back in my day, son
A man had to answer for the wicked that he’d done
Take all the rope in Texas
Find a tall oak tree, round up all of them bad boys
Hang them high in the street
For all the people to see

That
Justice is the one thing you should always find
You got to saddle up your boys
You got to draw a hard line
When the gun smoke settles we’ll sing a victory tune
And we’ll all meet back at the local saloon
And we’ll raise up our glasses against evil forces singing
whiskey for my man, beer for my horses

We got too many gangsters doing dirty deeds
too much corruption and crime in the streets
It’s time the long arm of the law put a few more in the ground
Send ‘em all to their maker and he’ll settle ‘em down
You can bet he’ll set ‘em down

Cause
Justice is the one thing you should always find
You got to saddle up your boys
You got to draw a hard line
When the gun smoke settles we’ll sing a victory tune
And we’ll all meet back at the local saloon
And we’ll raise up our glasses against evil forces singing
whiskey for my man, beer for my horses
whiskey for my men, beer for my horses

He knew
Justice is the one thing you should always find
You got to saddle up your boys,
You got to draw a hard line
When the gun smoke settles we’ll sing a victory tune
And we’ll all meet back at the local saloon
And we’ll raise up our glasses against evil forces
Singin’ whiskey for my man, beer for my horses
Singing whiskey for my man, beer for my horses

Read more here on the songwriting prowess of Toby Keith. (WARNING: There are very graphic photos of lynchings, in Georgia, at the linked page.)

Actually, a look at the “Beer For My Horses” video, possibly one of THE worst “concept” videos ever made, seems to find the testosterone-laden Keith more interested in protecting street-walking trannies from hunting knife-wielding yuppies. WTF?!

Quote Of The Day

The legal definition of torture has been much aired in recent years, and I take “Mamma Mia!” to be a useful contribution to that debate.

Movie critic Anthony Lane in The New Yorker. And that’s your one-line movie review for the day, too.

Rusty’s (New) Blog

Well thank Gawd and Baby Jesus! Rusty Tanton, one of the first bloggers I ever met, and creator of one of the first, possibly THE first, Georgia political blog (Radical Georgia Moderate) I ever read is at it again. This time with Rusty’s Blog, where he will bog about whatever the f he cares to blog about.

I was about in tears when Rusty announced he was shutting down Radical Georgia Moderate, but I got over myself and acknowledged that longterm (lifetime?) blogging takes a toll. Sometimes it’s weary, pointless, defeating, saddening, difficult, crushing and just too compelling and needy on your time and energy. And then, sometimes you simply don’t like the directions and themes of how you were blogging along just fine for several years. You need to make a radical shift in concepts and direction, and thankfully Rusty’s done just that. We will all be better off because of his (continued) good sense and good writing.

OffTheBus In New York Times. Again.

Everyone’s fave citizen journalism political project (Mine included. Heck, I might like OTB even more than that other political project I contribute to. You know, the red one colored peach that smells like a toxic waste dump…) Queen Arianna’s OffTheBus at HuffPo is getting some serious MSM attention… AND contributors by the thousands. From the NYT, 7-23:

OffTheBus.net, the online citizen-journalist arm of the Huffington Post, celebrates its one-year anniversary this month.

Of all the new political, non-candidate sites to spring up during the last year, OTB is now probably the biggest, with 7,500 citizen correspondents. Through its growing pains, it continues to develop the technological and organizational know-how to become a force in journalism even as it challenges the standard notions of traditional journalism.

We have been charting the site’s progress throughout the campaign, with a report in October about its start-up and an interview in April with Mayhill Fowler, the correspondent who gained notoriety after reporting Senator Barack Obama’s “bitter” comments from a closed fund-raiser.

The site has evolved in several different ways. Perhaps most strikingly, OTB’s total of 7,500 citizen correspondents is up from 300 a year ago. Arianna Huffington, who helped found OTB, attributes the dramatic rise to the buzz created by Ms. Fowler’s two big scoops, first the Obama comments, then in early June when Bill Clinton lashed out at a Vanity Fair writer.

The scoops created news and also prompted intense self-reflection among traditional journalists (it’s all about us!). Had Ms. Fowler successfully pushed the envelope for campaign reporting? Or had she so fractured the rules that she set journalism back? Either way, she has become a rainmaker for OTB, the modern-day equivalent of Woodward and Bernstein inspiring hundreds of young cubs to become investigative journalists.

“The numbers started going up with Mayhill, then they accelerated,” Ms. Huffington said. “She became the poster child for ordinary citizens being able to impact the campaign.”

Full story here. My OTB video contributions/work here. Get fired up!!! Contribute yourself to OTB!!!!

Colbert Accepts Nas Petitions (See Below) When Fox News Won’t

Go to 8:45 on video to see the fun!

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Rapper Nas Not Afraid To Take On Fox News

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“Wall Street Got Drunk” Slurs W

That W sure is a funny guy in a financial crisis! Here’s video (from unknown sources) of him yapping about how “Wall Street got drunk” at a recent, pricey Houston fundraiser July 18th.

If Wall Street was so wasted, makes you wonder who was throwing the party, eh? And to think this clown wanted to hand ‘em Social Security too.

Now I wanna know what Bush was babbling on about, no doubt as incoherently as he did in Houston, at his yesterday, pricey Atlanta fundraiser. Anyone rolling with their wee little cams there in Buckhead yesterday? (And on the 8th day, God gave us YouTube…)

Make watching the little mystery-source vid clip a drinking game: chug when you see the glassy-eyed sycophants standing off to the side. Talk about too hungover to do anything but smile and nod.

Product Placement And News

Think I was just talking about product placement and news content two days ago. Of course when I write about stuff on Peach Pundit, any topic will do, it’s called ranting and raving and other such assorted hysterical commenting  over at that toxic waste dump. But low and behold, the issue pops-up in the NYT today! Whereby the topic will now be annointed as valid and serious and worthy of time (and money). Here ya go, from today’s NYT:

In recent weeks, anchors on the Fox affiliate in Las Vegas, KVVU, sit with cups of McDonald’s iced coffee on their desks during the news-and-lifestyle portion of their morning show. The anchors rarely touch the cups.

Executives at the station, one of 12 owned by Meredith Corporation, say the six-month promotion is meant to shore up advertising revenue and, as they told the news staff, will not influence content.

Full story here.

Georgia Media Unaware of… Georgia Media

I’m not going to get my feelings hurt that I didn’t win the Atlanta Press Club’s Journalist of the Year Award for Multimedia/Online Reporting. For, bless my own heart, I didn’t even realize there WAS such a catagory to compete in! Else I’d have submitted an entry. And bless my heart again, I’m even a rather active member of the APC. My bad for not being involved enough to know.

But bless their hearts too at the APC as their outreach to non-traditional media sources, such as blogs, bloggers, video bloggers, content creators, indie-style reporters, writers, commentators and journalists, really just kinda sucks. Even within their own plantation. No sour grapes though, but I’ll be ready for next year with plenty of submission possibilities to shuffle through for consideration by then.

So any other multimedia/online reporter/journalist/writer/blogger types out here in Georgia…. be thinking of entering regional journalism competitions with your most-excellent work too. (I’ll be sure to let you know when the deadline for submissions is for next year’s APC’s annual awards.) You’re ready to take this next important step, and so is your good work.

And congratulations to Jason Bronis of the AP for winning this year’s APC’s Journalist of The Year Award in the Multimedia/online Reporting category. I’d link you to something of his, but I might get sued!

If you’re interested you will find, behind the break, a typical sampling of my multimedia/online reporting work (this time for the Huffington Post’s Off The Bus project) and how it was singled-out as what that particular online political reporting project is looking for.

When Even A Bad Cell Phone Snap Would Do

The AJC online is so pitifully multimedia-deficient that it failed to run even a (very good) reporter’s grainy cell phone photo with this story about a Georgia bird:

Anhingas normally are found on the coast and in the coastal-plain region of Georgia. However, they are showing up now in the Piedmont, including suburban Atlanta. Naturalists at the Newman Wetlands Center in Clayton County said anhingas have been spotted during all seasons of the year in swamps and reservoirs managed by the county’s water authority. Several anhingas also have been seen in Henry County wetlands. No one knows for sure, though, why the birds seem to be spreading inland.

Full naked story here. (I will remove this post when/if any picture/video presentation of this bird is made available.)

It’s The Citizen, Stupid

Jeez Louise! With all the MSM journalists sobbing in their seats about the demise of journalism (as they know it) at last night’s Atlanta Press Club/Society of Professional Journalists awards, and the Georgia Gang scratching their receding hairlines over how to make money online, since it’s obvious (even to them) that journalism is headed online, you’d think these j-folk types were dumb and dumber.

In reality, these are very smart people. Only thing is, most of ‘em aren’t terribly entrepreneurial or techno-creative. (HINT: things online are driven by innovative technology and compelling journalistic content.)

So, let’s say the mutual point of agreement is that news and journalism are moving primarily online. Thus, you’d think that would be an environ you’d need to be hyper-aware of, right? And participating in by all means. Not diddling around on the bureaucratic cluster-f**k that is Georgia public TV, but I digress…

Mentally Ill And Homeless In The South – Another Installment

The South’s favorite debutante-turned-psychiatrist, Dr. Dorothy Fowles Kendall, has committed media yet again on behalf of the mentally ill and homeless in Columbia, SC. Whatever would her great-great-great-you-get-the-point-grandmother have to say about such “modern” ladies as Dr. Kendall!? From The State:

As a psychiatrist working with Columbia’s homeless, I’m thrilled about plans for an integrated homeless services center. I’m also disappointed by the “Not in My Backyard” reaction of some downtown residents and politicians. As a 46-year resident of downtown Columbia, I might add that it’s my backyard, too.

• Myth: We do-gooders are unrealistic. It will be a money pit.

Reality: Homeless visits to local hospitals cost taxpayers $23 million per year. Psychiatric illness, followed by live birth, is the top reason for inpatient admission. Improving access to non-emergency services will save money.

It’s great that our community is coming together to fix this problem rather than just continuing to shuffle people around all day — by design — as was done in George Orwell’s England. There has been an extraordinary amount of planning for this project, including visits to other cities to figure out what works and what doesn’t. We can dramatically reduce homelessness by making the roads into it narrower and the paths out of it wider. The center will not enable chronic dysfunction, but instead will provide escalators up and out of it.

Full op/ed here.

Keeping Eyes On The Prize In SC

more about “Keeping Eyes On The Prize In SC“, posted with vodpod

Congressman Teaches Fox News Journalist How To Use The Internets!

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And we wonder why traditional journalism is in trouble. Well, wonder no more!

BS-1 and BS-2

With a sweeping staff cut, the AJC has iced-out daily print news coverage of life in Gwinnett County. Seems nothing’s terribly interesting out there. And whatever there is, it’s certainly not impacting the bottom line. Given last night’s MARTA referendum, maybe Gwinnettians should just build a moat and a drawbridge now. And oh yeah, get a few blogs going. You’re gonna need ‘em out there in the ‘burbs. Now more than ever.

And if you haven’t had enough BS with your morning coffee, read this funny memo from AJC publisher, John Mellott. Funny because Mellott neglects to mention the biggest phenom that’s tanked newspaper advertising nationwide: Craig’s List.

A few key blogs in Gwinnett, and hey, even the AJC’s Editor, Julia Wallace, might have to curtail churning out her special brand of bs-laden memo too. You can read yet another prime specimen of her notes ‘o arrogance here. No one does corporate spin like that gal Julia!

Paging Arianna. ATL primed for online local news showdown at the lagging Marietta Street corral.

UPDATE: OMG! Stop the presses! (Ooops, they’ve already done that.) Alert the media then. Julia Wallace has been sighted commenting on a blog. I swear to God this is true. With full transparency too, albeit it IS an AJC-generated blog. Pigs are surely flyin’ overhead in Dixie now. Scroll comments here to see for yourself.