So a few days ago I wrote a blog post with a vlog about the Iran Elections or given what's going on over there the "Iran Revolution" and in preparing for it ran across an article who's take on Twitter, the main event in the Iran uprising, I disagreed with. It was written by Kara Swisher, the semi-well-known Wall Street Journal vlogger who covers "All Things D" or "Digital" as her blog site's called.
I wrote:
The amount of information communicated through Twitter has been of staggering proportions. While Kara Swisher may write that it's "inane and half-baked", the fact that Iranians can use their cell phones to tweet information and share photos has done more than the mainstream media in telling the World what's happening.
Well that sent her into a tizzy. She got on Twitter and publicly blasted me, writing things like:
karaswisher@zennie62 "inane and half-baked" were NOT my words and you said they were. I said it was simple which is different. Are you all-baked?
At first, I looked at her words with empathy and offered to make a correction, even though I totally disagree with her take. As a response, she wrote:
karaswisher@zennie62 it is not a favor to me for you to make an alteration. You attributed a quote to me I did not say. You made an error, so fix it.
After that, I reconsidered. After all it's my view, my opinion, and it's not against her at all. I like Kara's work and her -- not met her yet. But that doesn't mean I have to agree with everything she writes.
And her title did use the words Inane and Half-baked. Maybe she'll go back and change it (please don't), but that's what was there.
So Kara, it wasn't personal. Ok? Twitter is a complex system to me. The rules of engagement on how to gain followers, following the right people, improving one's reach; that's a complex set of relationships in my view.
Twitter's not simple, and it's indeed revolutionary.
If you remember, Alex Shoumatoff set out last year to help his Harvard roommate Jock Hooper do a smear job on the Bohemian Club, which is a kind of resort home for many San Francisco luminaries, and not all of them male. Hooper was someone described as a "disgruntled former member" of the exclusive gentlemen’s club that has is favored by the business elite, former presidents, international leaders, and men who enjoy music, wine and song, and ok, I know at least two women who've recently been there (with their boyfriends). The club's lightened up a lot over the years.
Anyway, Hooper quit the club when it wouldn’t approve his forest management plan (read: major ego) and then became the leading critic of the club’s plans to preserve and protect old growth redwood trees on its property. He then got Alex and Vanity Fair to do some dirty work for him, or try to.
Now I write this with the full expectation of being invited to the 2010 Vanity Fair Oscar Party, rather than having to sneak into it. Hear me talking Graydon!
This story started last year when Shoumatoff managed to sneak in to the Bohemian Grove during the annual event the club holds in July. But his wandering, covered in detail in his story, only lasted 40 minutes before he was arrested by security guards and a part-time service employee at the famed Grove who quickly spotted that the kind of sloppy, preppy Topsider-wearing editor was not one of their own.
In VF, Alex writes that he was trying to fit in with that style of dress, but folks I talked to say he wasn’t hard to miss: he was dressed like a caddy wearing a Pebble Beach pullover and apparently asked off-beat questions that proved to be his downfall. Most of which he mentions in his article.
He was quickly captured cowering behind a bush, but his large body gave him away. He was then arrested by the Sonoma County Sherriff’s Department, spent the night in county jail, and forced to pay a fine for trespassing. His arrest was captured in the San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Post, Gawker, Huffington Post, and, of course, here at zennie62.com and the San Francisco Sentinel .
Shoumatoff’s piece in Vanity Fair this month may be the first case of a hatchet job that turned into a hachet boomerang: Club members say Shoumatoff’s piece is so dramatized and so full of factual errors (that I will detail in a follow-up post), that it proves to be an embarrassment for him and well as Vanity Fair editor-in-chief Graydon Carter. And they refered to being attacked by "right wing bloggers"!
I'm neither right of center, nor posessing wings like a bird, but I am a blogger. As an Oakland guy who hangs out in San Francisco a lot, has worked for and helped many local politicians both Democrat and Republican (but I'm a Dem), and gotten to personally know a number of "Grovers" as Alex calls them, I can tell you they're more than a little tired of people putting them into this "conservative White male" box, especially since this "liberal Black male" has been invited to visit and by members who are not all White, and aren't at all conservative.
I'm happy to come to their defense to be frank.
I'm glad Alex got caught because he could have just used the contacts he was developing to visit the club in a legitimate fashion. Instead, he bozoed his way in and looked like a clown in doing so.
And the club's forest plan? According to several sources, it's going through the review process well. But what I find so interesting even over the important consideration of the trees, is how one blue-blood institution, Vanity Fair, can muster the gall to call another blue-blood institution The Bohemian Club "elitist" when VF's not even invited me to its Oscar Party, and Graydon Carter will not take my calls.
I got an email from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that they are going to screen the classic "Midnight Cowboy" in New York City, March 16th. You can gain a "taste" for the film from this fan-made trailer:
The Academy reports: "The 1969 Best Picture winner “Midnight Cowboy” will screen for New York audience as part of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ “Monday Nights with Oscar®” series on Monday, March 16, at 7:30 p.m. at the Directors Guild of America Theatre in New York City.
"Academy Award®-winning producer Jerome Hellman will join Academy Award-nominated actress Sylvia Miles in a post-screening discussion. David V. Picker, the executive-in-charge at United Artist during the film’s development, will moderate the onstage conversation, which also will include actor Bob Balaban, cinematographer Adam Holender, composer John Barry and costumer designer Ann Roth.
“Midnight Cowboy” stars Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight as two mainstream society outcasts who forge an unlikely friendship on the lonely and unforgiving streets of New York City. The film endures as a powerful story of friendship, compassion and redemption.
The tickets are cheap: $5 and the DGA Theatre is located at 110 West 57th Street in New York City. The box office opens at 5:30 p.m. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. All seating is unreserved, which means get their early. For more information, call (212) 821-9251
More at NY Daily News: “Morgenthau, now 89, mentored generations of lawyers who used his office as a launching pad: Lanny Breuer, an Obama administration nominee for the Department of Justice; ex-Gov. Eliot Spitzer; state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo; John F. Kennedy Jr., and sex crimes prosecutor turned author Linda Fairstein. His biggest cases ran the gamut from white-collar crime to cold-blooded murder: 1981 - John Lennon's killer Mark David Chapman pleaded guilty to murder. 1987 - Subway gunman Bernie Goetz was convicted on weapons charges. 1988 - "Preppie Killer" Robert Chambers pleaded to manslaughter in a Central Park killing. 2000 - Mom-and-son grifters Sante and Kenneth Kimes were convicted of murder. 2005 - Tyco corporate crooks Dennis Kozlowksi and Mark Swartz were convicted. "They were all memorable," Morgenthau said Friday, declining to name his most significant prosecutions.”
-- Now this is what people think of when they talk about "New York Lawyers"
More at NY Daily News: “TV tough guy Vincent Pastore, who starred as Sal (Big Pussy) Bonpensiero on "The Sopranos," walked away from a $5.5 million court fight Tuesday with his ex-fiance, who says he beat her. The 62-year-old actor, who played a snitch on the hit HBO drama, was tight-lipped about the confidential settlement as he walked out of Manhattan Supreme Court and away from his battle with actress Lisa Regina. "I think I just wanna say, thank God it's over," Pastore said. "How can anybody be happy about something like this?"”
More at NY Daily News: “Mayor Bloomberg's bad-news budget tries to plug a $4 billion hole with less than $2 billion worth of spending cuts and new sales taxes - and counts on unions, Albany and the federal govermment to come up with the rest. He proposed a $43.4 billion budget Friday for the fiscal year starting July 1, up $123 million from the year before - one that slices deep into the pockets of city residents and the ranks of city workers. "Are we going to go through some difficult times? I don't think there's any question about that. But we have a plan to balance our budget," Bloomberg said. "It is serious, but I think it is manageable."”
More at NYTimes.com: “John D. Feerick, the chairman of the state Commission on Public Integrity, has resigned.
The commission, which oversees ethics and lobbying rules in Albany, announced the surprise resignation on Monday afternoon. The commission is mired in an investigation by the state inspector general.
Inspector General Joseph Fisch has been examining whether Herbert Teitelbaum, the commission’s executive director, or any other commission staff member improperly passed information to the staff of former Gov. Eliot Spitzer in the midst of the so-called Troopergate scandal.
The commission has said nothing improper occurred.
Mr. Feerick, a respected former dean of Fordham Law School, was appointed by Mr. Spitzer in 2007. In a statement, Mr. Feerick, 73, said “my health and energy have declined and I no longer believe that I can give my responsibilities the attention they require.”
More at New York Post: “The lawyer for Dawnell Batista, 44, asked Judge Jeffrey Grob to place a gag order on the case after her estranged husband, Richard Batista, held a news conference last week accusing her of adultery.
Though Grob denied the motion, lawyer Douglas Rothkopf also argued that his client was the victim of a "hyper-suspicious" husband and that no adultery had ever taken place.
"He would rummage through her underwear drawer sniffing her underwear [to see if she had cheated]," Rothkopf said inside a Mineola courtroom.
Batista, a vascular surgeon at Nassau University Medical Center, said that his wife left him after having an affair with her physical therapist.
The Batista's were both in court this morning, but never made eye contact with one other throughout the proceeding.
"This is a man who put his life on the line and his wife has treated him like a piece of dirt," said Richard Batista's lawyer, Dominic Barbara, adding that his client has the right to speak publicly about what he had been through.”
Seeing a Pattern of Hate in Attacks on Immigrants on Long Island - NYTimes.com: “ Marcelo Lucero, another Ecuadorean immigrant, was stabbed to death on Nov. 8 near Main Street. Prosecutors say seven 16- and 17-year-old boys, mostly from neighboring Medford, were attacking Mr. Lucero when one of them rushed at him with a knife. The attacks were such an established pastime that the youths, who have pleaded not guilty, had a casual and derogatory term for it, “beaner hopping.” One of the youths told the authorities, “I don’t go out doing this very often, maybe once a week.”
That was not news to Latinos in Patchogue, who say that regular harassment, muggings and assaults have had them living in fear — 11 men told The New York Times of 13 attacks, nine of them in the past two years.
But the Suffolk County police said it was news to them.
“We hadn’t noticed this,” Richard Dormer, the Suffolk County police commissioner, said in an interview last month when asked about the attacks by groups of young men. “And that’s a concern to us.””
More at NYTimes.com: “Three bloggers who had sued New York City after the Police Department denied them press credentials because they work for online or nontraditional news outlets were issued credentials on Friday after the police relented, the bloggers’ lawyer, Norman Siegel, said.
The three men — Rafael MartÃnez Alequin, Ralph E. Smith and David Wallis — filed a federal lawsuit in November asserting that they were denied press credentials in 2007 “with little explanation or opportunity for appeal.” They argued that the system for issuing press credentials was “inconsistent and constitutionally flawed.”
Mr. Siegel walked out of 1 Police Plaza on Friday morning with the three men, who were issued press identification cards, one of the types of press credentials issued by the Police Department. Mr. Siegel sad he was delighted with the outcome, but he vowed to continue the lawsuit, saying further reforms were needed.”
BLOOMBERG Has a blast in Israel New York Post: “Mayor Bloomberg yesterday got a firsthand experience of what it's like for Israelis living under constant threat from Hamas rockets.
On a trip from one southern Israeli town, Ashkelon, to another, Sderot, the mayor yesterday heard missile sirens and a rocket explode five seconds later.”
More at NYTimes.com: “A 39-year-old woman jogging in a park behind Gracie Mansion on Sunday afternoon was slashed across the forehead by a man who walked away after the attack, the police said.
The attack occurred in Carl Schurz Park, near the corner of East 88th Street and East End Avenue, shortly before 2 p.m..”
More at NYTimes.com: “It has been opined on chat shows and blogs, insisted on publicly and whispered privately. It has somehow been concluded — with delight in some quarters and aggravation in others — that Gov. David A. Paterson has little choice but to appoint Caroline Kennedy, she of the royal political lineage, fund-raising prowess and pure star power, to the United States Senate.
“I’ve heard this a hundred times: ‘He has to pick her,’ ” said Erick C. Mullen, a Democratic political consultant who has worked extensively in New York. “Or what? If he doesn’t pick her, what happens?””
--- What happens is he takes it in the rear in fund-raising, assuming a viable alternative candidate comes forward for Governor.
