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I’m kicking off another daily feature today. My choice for the most pointless Tweet (or Twitter post) of the day.
And what better way to kick off the feature than with this one from the official Britney Spears Twitter account:
Britney has a secret… visit BritneySpears.com to be the first to know what it is. ; P ~team britney
Yeah, thanks for nothing.
Sirius XM Radio is continuing to shed staff, a reduction that comes against a troubled company forecast. The latest round involves roughly 30 staffers, according to tips from All Access, FMQB, and Orbitcast. The move follows the rollout of a freshly consolidated dial, and the eliminations affected a number of program directors from shuttered stations.
Last week, Sirius subscribers were transitioned into the merged dial, a process that created some confusion. Additionally, the elimination of certain stations - often in favor of a redundant or similar station - created some disappointment among certain loyal listeners. The broader impact on subscription levels remains unclear, though the move towards a simpler, consolidated dial offers greater clarity moving forward.
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The Insiders one and only major label CD was probably my favorite album released in the 1980s. Imagine Lennon/McCartney teamed with Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers, and you get this band. While their lone near hit “Ghost On The Beach,” is wonderfully melodic, they were an impressive live band. This Epic release is available on Itunes, as is their best independent effort, “Live At Fitzgerald’s.”
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When I was living in Chicago in the late 1980s, there were a number of really talented pop, punk and instrumental bands. And for the most part, even the ones who snagged a major label deal never really found much success.
The Slammin’ Watusis were a sizzling live band, but their two Epic CD’s never really captured the magic. But the two videos above do give some sense of what America missed.
Lynn Smith, a veteran TV writer for the L.A. Times Calendar section is one of the many journalists exiting the newspaper, according to this list in L.A. Observed.
As per my usual practice, I’ll list staff departures from the Los Angeles Times who put out the word that they’re leaving or whose exit I’m able to confirm. They include buyouts, resignations and layoffs — in many cases I don’t know the exact circumstances. Today’s exodus, said to include 75 newsroom staffers, includes examples of each. The cuts seem to be falling hardest on the features sections. This list is a work in progress.
CNET reports that Britney Spears now has an official Twitter feed.
But it’s true–go to the newly revamped BritneySpears.com, and check it out. You can “Friend Britney” not only on Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, and Britney’s own “VIP” social network, but also Twitter. For obvious reasons, it’s not actually Spears doing the Twittering. But you can still get updates like “OMG!! 7 hours until Womanizer premieres!!!!!!!” (”Womanizer” is Spears’ latest hit single) and “Hey paparazzi…Rolling Stone cover rumors? Too bad you weren’t inside the shoot. Brit had a great time and was dancing around the set.”
Written By Rick Ellis, Sunday, September 14th, 2008
George Takei, Star Trek’s Mr Sulu, has married his longtime partner Brad Altman in a romantic Buddhist ceremony.
Takei, 71, and Altman, 54, were married Sunday in a multicultural ceremony at the Japanese National Museum that featured a Buddhist priest and Native American wedding bands. The couple wore matching white tuxedo jackets with black trousers and bow ties. Music was provided by a Japanese koto harp and bagpipe procession, and they made their grand entrance to One Singular Sensation from the Broadway musical “A Chorus Line.”
Takei’s Star Trek co-stars, Nichelle Nichols (Lieutenant Uhura) and Walter Koenig (Pavel Chekov), were maid of honor and best man respectively.
They stepped into a circle of yellow rose petals to exchange vows, which they had written themselves.
“I vow to care for you as you’ve cared for me …… and to love you as my husband and the only man in my life,” said Takei. Altman described Takei as his “life partner, significant other… now I can add ‘my husband’ to the list of things I call you.”
The couple, together for 21 years, was the first to receive a marriage license in West Hollywood when the state began granting licenses to gay couples on June 17. They plan to honeymoon in Argentina and Peru.
More than a million registered voters in at least a dozen states have received unsolicited absentee ballots from the McCain campaign. The problem? Many of them seem to have wrong info on them, which would in many cases lead to the ballots being thrown out or disallowed by local election officials.
Reports of the ballots began surfacing in Ohio more than a week ago, and in the case of that state, the problem was relatively straight-forward. A small note at the top of the ballot is a statement that reads: “I am a qualified elector and would like to receive an Absentee Ballot for the November 4, 2008 General Election.” Next to the statement is a small checkbox.
The box is easy to miss, and on Thursday, the Ohio Secretary of State ordered applications to be rejected if the box was not checked. While it’s not clear how many ballots have been disallowed, Hamilton County election officials said on Friday they have already invalidated more than 740 ballots. Ohio State election officials estimate as many as a million ballots may have been mailed to voters in that state alone.
This is not the first time an absentee ballot such as the one sent out by McCain campaign officials has surfaced in Ohio. A form almost identical to the McCain application was used by Ohio Republicans during registration for a 2007 special election. State election officials said that no complaints were lodged at that time about the ballots.
Similiar ballots have reportedly been sent to registered voters in a number of states. In Wisconsin, Minnesota, Florida, Pennsylvania, Missouri, and Iowa the ballots seem to target primarily registered Democrats or voters otherwise identified as possible Obama voters. In many cases, the ballots appear to have the address of the incorrect election office, and often an office in the wrong state.
Sending the absentee ballot to the wrong election office would almost certainly ensure it wouldn’t be counted. And in most case, the voter attempting to cast the ballot would never learn of the problem in time to vote at their local precinct.
In the battleground state of Missouri, the problem is even more complex. The McCain campaign has admitted it has sent out the ballots to voters of both parties.
“It’s a convenience factor, a reminder to vote,” Jack Jackson, the co-chair of the Missouri McCain committee told a St. Louis TV station earlier in the week.
But Missouri has a strict set of guidelines on who can vote absentee. And convenience is not a valid reason. That leads to a scenerio where absentee votes could be successfully challenged by Republicans who suspect that a vote was cast by someone who did not fit the state’s mandated guidelines.
On Friday, Ryan Hobart, the Spokesperson for the Missouri Secretary of State’s office issued the following statement:
“Voters need to read the fine print on mailers like this because there are specific requirements for absentee voting in Missouri.”
“Currently, to vote absentee, voters are required to have an excuse, like being out of town on Election Day. If they falsely make such a claim, they could be prosecuted with a felony and lose their right to vote.”
Voters in Michigan, Colorado, Iowa, Nevada and several other states have reported receiving automated phone calls from the McCain Campaign, asking for permission to send an absentee ballot. Several voters in Colorado have complained they were then sent ballots with the return address of an Ohio Election Board, and similiar reports from other states have complained the ballot had the incorrect return address or some other mistake which would disallow the ballot.
At the same time reports of the incorrect or misleading ballots are surfacing, Republicans in several of the same states are leading moves to challenge voters who have registered by mail and/or voted with an absentee ballot.
In Wisconsin, the Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen, a Republican, filed the lawsuit last Monday in to get ineligible voters off the rolls. It called for a court order mandating the Government Accountability Board to cross-check voters who have registered since Jan. 1, 2006, when federal Help America Vote Act legislation required that states implement a voter database to cross-check voter registrations with Department of Transportation, criminal and death records.
A spokesperson for the Obama campaign said on Sunday the campaign was aware of the compaints and was collecting examples of the ballots. They plan to issue an official response “soon.”
I’ve been covering the cable news networks for a long time. Particularly, MSNBC. So when they make a programming move that has some political implications, older pieces I’ve written about Phil Donahue’s exit from the network get another flurry of links and page views.
Today, many of the links are coming from Salon.com’s Glenn Greenwald, whose piece today (updated several times), does a solid job of covering MSNBC’s changes to their election coverage.
So rather than replowing the same ground, let me make another related point.
People tend to see this move as politically driven, and indeed the headline on many media outlets was that complaints from the Right somehow pushed the network into pushing Olbermann and Matthews off the anchor desk during election coverage.
But the truth is a bit more complicated. Since its earliest days, there has always been this tugging at the network between those people aligned with NBC News and those people who seem themselves as working for MSNBC, a separate part of the larger NBU empire. The more traditional NBC News supporters have always fretted about MSNBC somehow tainting their image as being unbiased. That’s part of the reason the network resisted the move to the left for so long, and why it still includes strong voices from the right (including Pat Buchanan and Joe Scarborough).
That tension has helped to keep the network honest. Blocked from being a strictly left-leaning network, MSNBC hasn’t fallen into some of the problems with perspective that plague Fox News.
Olbermann’s success has protected him from that pushback from the traditionalists, and that’s not necessarily a positive thing. My main beef with Olbermann has been that his show is often “intellectually incestuous,” and I’ve argued that he would benefit from having more guests who disagree with him.
It’s also not relevant to compare how Fox News handles the same fairness and perspective issues. Explaining away dumb behavior with “yeah, but they do things even worse than we do,” is an arguement that is at best glib and lazy. At worst, it’s the moral equivalent of “hey, everyone else steals, so why shouldn’t I?” Either a practice is correct or its not. Everyone else’s behavior is just back story.
I can’t say that I disagree with the premise that having Olbermann and Matthews as the network’s main election anchors was an idea that made great ratings sense. But especially in Olbermann’s case, it’s ludicrous to argue that he isn’t leaning left in this election. And having him in a role that requires an “unbiased” (or least centrist) public position was just bound to cause problems. He’s great at what he does, and I mean that in the best possible sense. He’s a freaking genius at drilling down to the core issues, and he’s defined the niche for liberal news commentators in the same way that Rush Limbaugh defined the prototypical conservative during his early years.
But he’s not unbiased, and if MSNBC had any hopes of being seen as a somewhat fair player in this election, it needed to make the change.
The problem was that MSNBC made some truly dumb public moves, and seemed to cave in to complaints from Republicans and the McCain Campaign. According to sources I’ve spoken with at the network, this move had been discussed for weeks at the highest levels of NBC Universal. In the end, pressure from Tom Brokaw and other heavyweights at NBC News–as well as some direct complaints to executives at NBCU–forced the change. But it’s one that nearly everyone at MSNBC figured would come at some point. So delaying the move and then not spinning it properly insured that everyone involved would look as foolish as possible.
I’ve haven’t touched on Chris Matthews in this piece, and that’s because his problem was a bit more complex. It’s certainly worthy of a separate post, and that will be on its way in the upcoming days.
The Insiders one and only major label CD was probably my favorite album released in the 1980s. Imagine Lennon/McCartney teamed with Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers, and you get this band. While their lone near hit “Ghost On The Beach,” is wonderfully melodic, they were an impressive live band. This Epic release is available on Itunes, as is their best independent effort, “Live At Fitzgerald’s.”
When I was living in Chicago in the late 1980s, there were a number of really talented pop, punk and instrumental bands. And for the most part, even the ones who snagged a major label deal never really found much success.