This week Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal told a national audience what was meant to be a stirring story about how he stood in Jefferson Parish sheriff Harry Lee’s office “during Katrina” when Lee was on the phone screaming at government bureaucrats who were imposing red tape in his efforts to rescue stranded victims.  Turns out Jindal’s story was not true.  Here is what Jindal said:

During Katrina, I visited Sheriff Harry Lee, a Democrat and a good friend of mine. When I walked into his makeshift office I’d never seen him so angry. He was yelling into the phone: ‘Well, I’m the Sheriff and if you don’t like it you can come and arrest me!’ I asked him: ‘Sheriff, what’s got you so mad?’ He told me that he had put out a call for volunteers to come with their boats to rescue people who were trapped on their rooftops by the floodwaters.

The boats were all lined up ready to go – when some bureaucrat showed up and told them they couldn’t go out on the water unless they had proof of insurance and registration. I told him, ‘Sheriff, that’s ridiculous.’ And before I knew it, he was yelling into the phone: ‘Congressman Jindal is here, and he says you can come and arrest him too!’ Harry just told the boaters to ignore the bureaucrats and start rescuing people.

Both Daily Kos and TPMmuckraker questioned the truth behind the story.  TPMmuckraker pointed out that Jindal had told CNN that he didn’t know about the bureaucracy problems until a week later. Daily Kos showed that Jindal was nowhere near Lee when the incident allegedly happened.

A Jindal spokesperson has now admitted to Politico that Jindal only overheard Lee talking about the episode to someone else by phone “days later.” TPMmuckraker points out the problem:

This is no minor difference. Jindal’s presence in Lee’s office during the crisis itself was a key element of the story’s intended appeal, putting him at the center of the action during the maelstrom. Just as important, Jindal implied that his support for the sheriff helped ensure the rescue went ahead. But it turns out Jindal wasn’t there at the key moment, and played no role in making the rescue happen.

There’s a larger point here, though. The central anecdote of the GOP’s prime-time response to President Obama’s speech, intended to illustrate the threat of excessive government regulation, turns out to have been made up.

For those of us in the Reality-Based Community, it’s a disappointment that the Republicans continue to live in a world of made-up anecdotes and denial of what’s really happening.   The reality is, the country is in crisis and we need these people to pull their heads out of the sand.  Looking back to October 2008, Paul Krugman’s column could have been a response to Jindal’s fabricated anti-government regulation speech in February 2009:

These days, with even Alan Greenspan admitting that he was wrong to believe that the financial industry could regulate itself, Reaganesque rhetoric about the magic of the marketplace and the evils of government intervention sounds ridiculous.

Why is anyone still listening to these guys?

Kenneth the Page responds to comparisons with Bobby Jindal

In case you missed it earlier this week: Jimmy Fallon had Kenneth the Page of 30 Rock (Jack McBrayer) on his new Late Night show to respond to the onslaught of media comparisons between his persona and Bobby Jindal’s:

Recommended reading: NPR reports that the drug violence and murders in Mexico have escalated to such an alarming degree, that they are threatening to take down the government of President Felipe Calderon.

“Thousands [have been] murdered this year,” says retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who served as U.S. drug czar under President Clinton. He visited Mexico recently and painted a desperate picture.

“I mean squad-sized units of police officers and soldiers abducted, tortured to death, decapitated. So the violence is simply shocking and we’ve got to help,” he says.

The situation has deteriorated to a degree that planning needs to be undertaken if Mexico becomes a failed state, according to the military planners.

Freelance writing can be a harrowing income to depend upon for writers, because there can be a flux of work and, worse, in the time it takes to be paid for published work.  Amongst freelancers it is no small secret that the big media outlets are also the biggest laggards in timely payment of compensation.

Worse, freelancers are now facing not getting paid at all.  Recently making headlines at Transracial and Gawker is that the beloved New York Observer is incredibly late paying writer Glenna Goldis for a few fashion pieces (there is a Freelancers Union petition here).

From the career freelance writers I’ve spoken to, the time lag before payment from the major publications has grown exponentially as the economy has worsened.

My friend Samantha recently described herself as “born of the wrong womb,” and the phrase had such a cool ring to it.   It sounds like a politically-correct alternative to “batshit insane“.  For instance, you and a friend could be walking down the street, and a naked homeless man jumps and out and takes a dump right there in front of the both of you!  A way to ease the tense moment is you could sigh and smile, look toward your friend,  beleaguered, and say, “That one was born of the wrong womb, ay?”

I found a job at an investment bank today, one of the ones in meltdown and making headlines.  Strangely, I met with a very senior member of management  for the interview.  We hit it off and he offered me the job on the spot.  It’s a contract position–”I feel like we’re all contract right now,” he joked–but it’s a decent wage for a day’s pay.

They are in bad shape: much of the institutional knowledge has been lost as people who had been there over 25 years suddenly jumped ship.  He said morale is down with the employees at the bank.

I was told that they were hoping I would infuse some “new blood” into the group.  That’s telling.

I’m looking forward to it.  I have a taste for chaos.  Now I’m going to be right in the eye of the financial storm, and I can read the headlines from the inside.

A close friend of mine at a top legal temp agency told me that they are expecting a need for “hundreds of people” in about three weeks once the discovery process in the Bernard Madoff scandal is wrapped up.  Agencies all over town are  stocking up on legal temp resumes in preparation.  Every law firm in the city has their hand in the Madoff pie, and the need is expected to be huge for long-term contract attorney and paralegal assignments.  Somewhat positive news after large rounds of layoffs at law firms.

In Vinales, Cuba, a pig is slaughtered for a family celebration (2002).

This week in a series of great coincidences people I know, or who my friends know, had brushes with death or had death play an important part in their life.  It’s always surprising to realize that death doesn’t play more of a role in my waking life.  I live in a city with millions of people on top of each other, yet I have never seen a person just drop dead in front of me.  I’m not complaining.   But I would think the odds were favorable that at least once over eight years traversing New York City’s street at all hours and in all manner of places, that I would have witnessed at least one person drop dead.  Never once.

The Book of Dead Philosophers by Simon Critchley is out, and its central argument is that to learn how to die is to learn how to live.  Critchley, a professor at New School, told Time Out New York that, “We can talk endlessly about sex and your right to have an orgasm and your right to whatever, but we can’t talk about death, and without that we are enslaved by our fear.  Happiness is an illusion.”   Critchley’s book, which I haven’t read, profiles how 190 great thinkers faced and met their own death.

I read the latest headlines about death to see if anything might pop out as strange; some indicator of an overactive reaper.  Skipping past  the death-penalty stories, there was a strong family theme:

1. OC nursing home fined over sandwich choking death
2. Man accused in death of girlfriend’s son
3. Judge convicts couple of second-degree murder in starvation death
4. Sumner woman charged with stabbing mother to death
5. Buffalo wife sentenced for husband’s shotgun death
6. Documentary “Death” gets second life as feature
7. Rare Federal Death Penalty Trial Begins In Tampa
8. Parents plead in death of toddler who ate drugs
9. Dog’s Death More Painful Than Losing Home, Blast Survivor Says
10. Autistic son charged in death of professor in Ohio

In the previous week’s Time Out New York:

Question:  How did you get such a large gay audience?  By design or circumstance?

Kathy Griffin:  Circumstance.  They’re not afraid to go there.  They’re an unshockable people.  When you’re having your civil rights questioned on a daily basis, you need to go out and laugh at a few dick jokes.

Iyoba Pendant Mask: there is a need for more of this....

When the western world thinks of Africa, it conjures images of conflict, famine, dictators, destruction and disease.  The stereotype of African existence is enforced unwittingly by the western media, who only travel to Africa in the tradition that a flood is news, sunshine is just weather.  The visual imagery of the continent has been skewed toward its problems, with little coverage of its daily life.  This lack of context and knowledge creates misunderstanding; Africa is a place far richer than just its conflicts, but about which we see little else.

A second problem is apparent on the Internet, and within the massive creative commons community itself: the lack of imagery from the developing world has created an unintentional western bias in graphic illustration.  A story in USA Today discussed the effects:

Rahul Dewan typed “India” into the search box of an online stock photo service, hoping to find digital images of his native country. He found only three — all of flags.  Dewan then typed “Switzerland,” a country smaller than his, and found 33, while “USA” returned 72.

His demonstration underscores a major challenge in getting the developing world online: Even with access, the Internet remains meaningless to most of the world’s population, its Web sites heavy in English and reflecting a Western tilt.

Dewan, managing director of the New Delhi software company Srijan Technologies, ultimately settled for Western faces and hands on his Web site, after failing to find Indian images he could use or a similar photo service catering to Indians.

Bias keeps Internet from expansion, USA Today, December 24, 2003

In 2008, stock photography giant Getty Images and dominant on-line photo-sharing site Flickr announced a partnership. Gerard Meijssen, Chairman of the non-profit Stichtling Open Progress organization, and a prolific writer about the creative commons, observed:

What is most notable, is the reason for this collaboration. Getty’s stock has a bias towards what is photographed by typically Western photographers. As a result there is a bias towards Western subjects and more importantly, a lack of material that illustrates far flung places and events.  The same bias both Wikipedia and Commons suffer from.

Bias in stock photography, Gerard Meijssen, August 26, 2008

Even the Getty/Flickr partnership will not solve the most vexing issue: the people who take up photography are almost solely found in the developed world.  The developed world has the time, the camera equipment and the internet access.  There remains an outstanding need for photographers to create public domain African imagery that can be used by academic, commercial and non-commercial projects, free of copyright.

Is Al Sharpton hitting the New York Post at just the right time?

What’s going on at the New York Post?

The Post is a guilty pleasure for many New Yorkers.  It is well known to be a right wing gossip rag that people enjoy flipping through on the subway.  However, no serious person in the city would carry an open copy around their colleagues.

Page Six is still read, but it seems so irrelevant now.  Then there is this Obama/Chimp controversy that is Al Sharpton’s latest campaign.  Michael Wolff is predicting the Chimp will get Col Allan–a “hard-drinking, profane, sometimes violent newspaper hack without education or polish”–fired.  Allan is the paper’s editor and big time Friend of Murdoch.

A typical New York Post reader holds up a typical Post cover when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke at Columbia University in 2007.

Four years ago in 2005 Businessweek wrote that, ” The Post has lost so much money for so long that it would have folded years ago if News Corp. applied the same profit-making rigor to the tabloid as it does to its other businesses.” Hamilton Nolan at Gawker thinks Sharpton’s protest is going to work, but Wolff thinks its the Post‘s losses of $60-$80 million a year that are going to cause a huge shake-up at the paper.  Whether the Post hangs on or not, Murdoch is under fire from investors over deep losses at his beloved newspapers, and according to the New York Times, the Post is in for deep changes:

For years, Mr. Murdoch has stomached tens of millions of dollars in annual losses at The New York Post, in exchange for the power the paper afforded him. But given the economic times and the shift of his attention to The Journal, there is a sense of urgency in the News Corporation executive suite about stemming The Post’s losses.

The Chimp episode apparently has Murdoch “livid,” especially with investors beating him up over the $8.4 billion in write-downs that New Corp. had to take ($3 billion over newspapers).