Matt Drudge: Disappeared?

By Michael Wolff
Newser.com
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The New Republic, continuing the political world’s odd obsession with the Drudge Report, says its editor, Matt Drudge, has disappeared, or gone into seclusion like some latter-day Howard Hughes.

I do not think Drudge has disappeared. I think he is dead. Certainly the Drudge Report, which the New Republic claims gets “20 million hits per day” (a meaningless locution as old-fashioned as the Drudge Report itself) has been on automatic pilot for several years.

If he is not dead, he is definitely brain dead. There hasn’t been a breaking story on the site in months. Drudge, once one of the most vaunted gossips in the nation, clearly isn’t in the loop. Or he is just bored to death. He had been doing this for a decade. It is the same old Drudge Report, without improvement or variation. Or staff. Drudge may have theoretically gotten rich (“sources believe he makes millions per year off his site,” says the New Republic breathlessly, although Compete.com reports his traffic at 2.6 million visitors a month, which certainly isn’t going to make him millions), but he hasn’t built a business—it’s him alone performing the same repetitive act. (Or him and one Andrew Breitbart, a conservative blogger who seems to help him, and who has a site Drudge links to—and who exists only as an odd Drudge appendage; certainly nobody else seems to link to him.)…

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Your “Mark-to-Market” Cheat Sheet

By Matthew Philips
For Newsweek.com

To most people, it’s an arcane accounting rule. But to bankers, it’s the whole ballgame: “mark to market” pricing is the practice of requiring banks to value their assets based on their current market value. Not what banks paid for those assets yesterday. Not what they could get for them in, say, a year or two when the financial industry has settled down. What they could get right now. Which is basically bubkes. Banks have been pleading for this requirement to be lifted since the credit crisis began, and last week they got their wish. Confused? Here are four things you need to know about “mark to market” in order to sound smart at a cocktail party…

The Top 10 Highest Paid Politicians

From TimesOnline.co.uk…

1. Lee Hsien Loong – Singapore

Salary in dollars – $2.47 million

Salary in local currency – S$3.76 million

2. Donald Tsang Yum-Kuen – Hong Kong

Salary in dollars – $516,000

Salary in local currency – HK$4 million

3. Barack Obama – United States

Salary in dollars – $400,000

4. Brian Cowen – Ireland

Salary in dollars – $341,000

Salary in local currency – €257,000

5. Nicolas Sarkozy – France

Salary in dollars – $318,000

Salary in local currency – €240,000

6. Angela Merkel – Germany

Salary in dollars – $303,000

Salary in local currency – €228,000

7. Gordon Brown – UK

Salary in dollars – $279,000

Salary in local currency – £194,250

8. Stephen Harper – Canada

Salary in dollars – $246,000

Salary in local currency – C$311,000

9. Taro Aso – Japan

Salary in dollars – $243,000

Salary in local currency – Y24 million

10. Kevin Rudd – Australia

Salary in dollars – $229,000

Salary in local currency – A$330,000

Obama makes Oval Office call to reporters to clarify socialist question

By Joe Curl
WashingtonTimes.com
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President Obama was so concerned that he had appeared to dismiss a question from New York Times reporters about whether he was a socialist that he called the newspaper from the Oval Office to clarify his policies.

“It was hard for me to believe that you were entirely serious about that socialist question,” he told reporters, who had interviewed the president aboard Air Force One on Friday.

Opening the unusual presidential call to reporters by saying that there was “just one thing I was thinking about as I was getting on the copter,” he said it wasn’t he who started the federal government’s intervention into the nation’s financial system.

“I did think it might be useful to point out that it wasn’t under me that we started buying a bunch of shares of banks. It wasn’t on my watch. And it wasn’t on my watch that we passed a massive new entitlement -– the prescription drug plan — without a source of funding. And so I think it’s important just to note when you start hearing folks throw these words around that we’ve actually been operating in a way that has been entirely consistent with free-market principles and that some of the same folks who are throwing the word ‘socialist’ around can’t say the same.”

The New York Times asked, “So whose watch are we talking about here?” but Obama wouldn’t name names.

“Well, I just think it’s clear by the time we got here, there already had been an enormous infusion of taxpayer money into the financial system. And the thing I constantly try to emphasize to people if that coming in, the market was doing fine, nobody would be happier than me to stay out of it. I have more than enough to do without having to worry the financial system. The fact that we’ve had to take these extraordinary measures and intervene is not an indication of my ideological preference, but an indication of the degree to which lax regulation and extravagant risk taking has precipitated a crisis…”

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A Letter to the Cleveland Plain-Dealer about Gov. Strickland’s Education Plan

Check out this slammin’ letter to the editor by my friend Megan! It appeared in the Cleveland Plain-Dealer 2/26/09:

As an Ohioan teaching English in rural Austria, I have a very different perspective on Gov. Ted Strickland’s proposed education reforms.

I was among those over-achievers who took all of the toughest high school classes while involved in several extracurricular activities. A “senior thesis” would have been superfluous. It would only add to the overwhelming stress that highly motivated high school pupils face daily. Those who want to achieve will do so. Determination isn’t instituted through a required project.

And 20 extra classroom days a year would serve largely to make pupils fidgety and distracted. Shorter summers mean less opportunity for employment to pay for ever-increasing college tuitions.

Want to really equip Ohio’s youth with “21st-century skills”? Add a serious foreign language program in early elementary school, when students’ brains are still linguistically malleable.

I teach at three high schools here in Austria — two “middle level” and one “upper level” in difficulty and prestige. My seniors at all three are not just bilingual — they are trilingual. They can converse fluently in German, English, and Italian or French. While Ohio attempts foreign language offerings, the impression I took from my own high school and from peers at others was that most who opted to take a foreign language (in Austria it is mandatory) might at best have been able to locate the post office or library, or announce whence they hail — hardly a marketable skill set.

If Gov. Strickland truly wants distinguished Ohioans, he should add a far more world-competitive language program. As things stand, any of my Austrian students would be a much more desirable out-of-high-school hire than any Ohioan — or any American, for that matter. And that puts us at a serious global disadvantage.

Megan Strang
Avon, OH
Judenburg, Austria

Jackie O’s Brewpub featured in the new edition of Backdrop Magazine

The Winter 08-09 edition of Backdrop Magazine just hit shelves today in Athens, Ohio. Pick up a copy TODAY! Meanwhile, check out this article about Jackie O’s from the recent edition!

By Will Strome
Backdrop Magazine
BackdropMag.com

Brewmaster Brad "B.C." Clark makes beer at Jackie O's Brewpub in Athens, Ohio.

Beer. Perhaps former syndicated humor columnist Dave Barry said it best, “Without question, the greatest invention in the history of mankind is beer. Oh, I grant you that the wheel was also a fine invention, but the wheel does not go nearly as well with pizza.” It’s the oldest and most widely consumed alcoholic beverage known to man and I’ll be damned if that’s to change anytime soon. Is it bad to say that beer has been a bigger impact on my college experience than TI-83 calculators, measuring beakers and history text books combined? Not at all because I’m not alone! Beer is as vital to the college scene as professors and the ridiculous excuses for missing class we email to them. I Digress. Unlike most college towns, Athens is fortunate enough to have Jackie O’s Pub and Brewery that crafts 18 different types of beer with 11 to 13 on tap at all times. Jackie O’s is one of the few genuine and always welcoming bars in Athens, with remarkably talented and gifted brew master, Brad “BC” Clark, working behind the beer scene to help set Jackie O’s apart from all the other alcohol establishments Athens has to offer…

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Scene Stealer: The aXXo Files

This is a REALLY cool and well-written article about the elusive pirate known in the digital realm only as “aXXo“…

From Independent.co.uk:

To Hollywood executives, he’s public enemy number one. To film fans around the world, he’s a modern-day Robin Hood. As the internet’s most prolific pirate makes his 1,000th illegal film download available to the masses, Tim Walker investigates the mysterious figure known only as aXXo…

The aXXo prayer

Our Ripper, who art on mininova,
aXXo be thy name.
Thy torrents come.
Seeding will be done,
Here as it was on suprnova.
Give us this day our latest rips.
And forgive us our leeching,
As we forgive those that leech from us.
And lead us not on to private trackers;
But deliver us from the MPAA:
For thine is the ripping, the seeding, and the glory,
For ever and ever.
Amen…

My Blog Ate My Career!

By Linda Keenan
Boston.com
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If this were Facebook, my status update might read this way: “Linda is . . . terrified that her reckless blogging and social networking has rendered her utterly, irrevocably unemployable.” In another life, I was a CNN head writer and senior producer. These days, Google my name, and in a few clickety clicks, you’ll find a sorry list of intimate grotesqueries I’ve catalogued about myself for all the world to read.

I would like to work again full time. And if I were applying to be, say, Flava Flav’s girlfriend or an unhinged Real Housewife on Bravo, I might well prove qualified. But would I blame a proper boss in this brutal job market for ignoring me because of my online shenanigans? No. The fact is: I wouldn’t hire me either. Further, I’m not sure I’d let me in the PTA, or even near my kid. An employer typically looks for someone trustworthy, helpful, courteous. My attributes, etched forever in the digital record, read like a perversion of the Boy Scout Law…

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Senate Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy (D-VT): Don’t Prosecute Michael Phelps

By Ryan Grim
HuffingtonPost.com
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Michael Phelps might feel like the entire world is coming after him for taking the bong hit seen around world. His sponsor Kellogg Co. is dropping him, the local sheriff is threatening to prosecute him, and USA Swimming has suspended him for three months.

But at least one cooler head on Capitol Hill isn’t going to join the mob. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is a former prosecutor and said that if a sheriff had brought a case like Phelps’ to his office, he would have used his discretion and not prosecuted it.

“When I was a prosecutor, I was far more interested in going after armed robbers, murderers and rapists rather than trying to go after some kid for smoking marijuana,” said Leahy.

Where does the Vice President live?

Everyone knows that the President of the US lives in the White House… but where does the Vice President live? After some online searching I came across the following answer from InfoPlease.com:

The Admiral's House in Washington D.C.

In July 1974 Congress designated a house on the southeast corner of 34th Street and Massachusetts Avenue in Washington DC where the vice president of the United States would live. Located on the grounds of the United States Naval Observatory, the house was built in 1893 for the Superintendent of the Observatory.

Before 1974, vice presidents either bought a temporary home in Washington DC or stayed at hotels.

Gerald and Betty Ford were the first family eligible to live in the house. But the resignation of President Richard Nixon occurred before renovations on the house were completed, and the Fords headed to the White House. New Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, of the wealthy Rockefeller family, used the house mainly to entertain.

The first full-time residents were Walter Mondale, President Jimmy Carter’s vice president, and his wife, Joan, in 1977. Every vice president since has lived there.

The house is a three-story, white-painted brick, Victorian-style home with 9,150 square feet of floor space. It served as the home of the chief of the Naval Observatory beginning in 1929. This is why people often call it the Admiral’s House.

You can see photos of the house, circa 1997, at At Home With the Gores.

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