Top Stories 12/09/08 9:45 a.m”
Why am I not surprised to hear that Illinois Governor Blagojevich is in custody for bribery. Not saying that I know the guy personally. I do know that he’s the guy who decides who takes Barack Obama’s old spot in the Senate. The dude is a politician. Word is that they’re usually shady, doing anything to get where they want to be.
Lo and behold, Blagojevich had been under investigation for more than a year, the phones at his home and work tapped. The Ny Times reported:
According to the indictment, while talking on the telephone about the Senate seat replacement with his chief of staff and an adviser, Mr. Blagojevich said he needed to consider his family and their financial struggles. “I want to make money,” he said, according to prosecutors. He then added, they allege, that he wanted to make $250,000 to $300,000 a year.
Illinois politicians like him have been scrutinized for the past five years as part of a larger investigation of state wide cronyism. The FBI knocked on his door at 6 a.m. and took him into custody. Talk about a wake up call. A search warrant is being executed. No word on whom the potential buyers were.
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Mendicants GM, Chrysler and Ford still have their hands out. They’re six days away from withdrawing 15 billion dollars from the Energy Independence and Security Act money pot. That fund was created to stimulate production of energy efficient cars. In exchange for the fat loan, the gov will get to buy 20 percent of the company. And earn 5-8% interest on it’s investment.
It’s unclear what Nancy Pelosi was thinking when she started babbling about haircuts. A yet-to-be-named person gets to restructure the way the companies will be run. America’s next car czar should be announced by the end of the week.
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The Juice is no longer loose…For life?
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Newspaper printing presses are trying to survive a consumer-quake. L.A. Times owner, the Tribune company has filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy, because they can’t make the payments on their 12.9 billion dollar debt.
Traditional methods of news distribution are being whisked away like a table cloth at the hands of a magician.
Back in October, the Christian Science Monitor stopped printing newspapers, because they weren’t making enough money doing it. The paper was making more from their online ad revenue than their print ad revenue. Consequently, “the paper” is only available online now (I put that in quotes, ‘cos it wasn’t made from trees).
The NY Times might mortgage it’s offices. And Gannett fired two thousand people.
A Pew Research for People and the Press study said that less than half of Americans say they read a newspaper everyday. More news consumers are going online to get information…kind of like you.
Question: Would you be willing to contribute money to journalists in the form of donations, sort of like wikipedia, to ensure that journalists are independent from those they cover…and save the day?
