I don’t begrudge anyone the good fortune of right place/right time, take your money and run, but first drop a knee and be humbled before God reflecting soberly on the knowledge that you didn’t deserve it. I love getting paid, do whatever you can do to get paid, but do not let the money whisper to you that you are worth it, it will be lying and you will believe it. You hold a fetish of value and not actual value.
via The Last Psychiatrist: Who Can Know How Much Randi Zuckerberg Is Worth?.
Maybe it doesn’t pay to be a jerk to everyone who’s ever given you a chance.
“One of the cards his people played was hardship,” the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told POLITICO. “He spent last fall talking to all the major networks, and he couldn’t get a job. The idea was, this could be the last money he ever earned.”
The source said Olbermann’s lawyers used this as “a bargaining chip” to “appeal to the sympathy” of Current TV executives, but said it was unclear if that factored into Current TV’s decision to agree to a settlement.
Olbermann did not respond to a request for comment regarding the discussion; his manager Michael Price declined to comment, citing confidentiality. Current TV spokesperson Tony Fox also declined to comment, citing confidentiality.
POLITICO has confirmed that Olbermann approached numerous cable and broadcast news channels, including ABC News, in pursuit of a job while still on contract with Current TV. Olbermann has also approached non-news networks, including ESPN and AMC, the channel that broadcasts “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad,” sources told POLITICO.
But when representatives from Current TV complained in mediation that Olbermann had violated his contract by pursuing other employment opportuntities, Olbermann’s representatives responded by pointing out that nothing had come of those talks, according to the sources.
“No one would hire him, and that became a negotiating ploy,” a source told POLITICO.
via Sources: Olbermann’s inability to get a job cited in Current TV settlement – POLITICO.com.
Woodward, almost 70, is Washington’s Reporter Emeritus. His facts stand up to scrutiny. His motivations withstand the test of objectivity. Sperling obviously assumed that Woodward wouldn’t take offense at the suggestion that he not only was wrong but was also endangering his valuable proximity to power.
He assumed, in other words, that Woodward would not do his job. This was an oversight.
This is no tempest in a teapot but rather the leak in the dike. Drip by drip, the Obama administration has demonstrated its intolerance for dissent and its contempt for any who stray from the White House script. Yes, all administrations are sensitive to criticism, and all push back when such criticism is deemed unfair or inaccurate. But no president since Richard Nixon has demonstrated such overt contempt for the messenger. And, thanks to technological advances in social media, Obama has been able to bypass traditional watchdogs as no other president has.
via Kathleen Parker: The Obama White House ‘threat’ to Bob Woodward matters – The Washington Post.
Bob Woodward’s charge that he was threatened by a high-ranking Obama administration official after publishing a column critical of the White House was, it turns out, at least somewhat exaggerated. But it’s no accident that the media has chosen to focus on Woodward’s characterization of his exchange with White House economic director Gene Sperling, while all but ignoring the essence of the column that touched off the brouhaha in the first place: that Obama’s claims about Republican responsibility for the looming sequester were false, and that it was “months of White House dissembling” that had “eroded any semblance of trust between Obama and congressional Republicans.”
Indeed, the media treatment of the episode provides an all-too-telling glimpse into the administration’s relationship with the press. It hardly bears repeating that from the start of Barack Obama’s career on the national stage, he has enjoyed an unprecedented kinship with the media—one that, as frustrated opponents rightly observe, often seems indistinguishable from outright alliance. On contentious issues like those involving the budget, especially, the administration has been hugely dependent on a compliant press—not only to shore up public support for its ongoing campaign of class warfare, but also to marginalize competing arguments.
At least Walker admits that the UK’s violent crime rate isn’t a myth. Maybe he should have titled his piece Debunking 17 Pro-Gun Myths and Substantiating One Pro-Gun Fact but I’ll admit that doesn’t roll off the tongue quite so trippingly.
As for the lack of gun violence in the UK, I guess being raped at knife-point is somehow preferable to getting raped at gun-point even if it happens almost 6 ½ times as often? You read that correctly; in 2011 in the U.S., the forcible rape rate was 26.8/100,000 while the England and Wales rate was 172.9/100,000. Of course England and Wales don’t hold a candle to Scotland, where the rape, attempted rape and sexual assault rates are almost thirty times the US rate. So in lovely gun free Scotland, 796.5 out of 100,000 people were raped last year.
Or maybe Walker thinks that getting glassed and robbed is preferable to a straight-up stick-up?
via Debunking the “Pro-Gun Myth” Debunker — Part Deux | The Truth About Guns.