EDIT: And here’s why Petraeus created a security risk by using Gmail in this manner.
Looks like Tropical Storm Beryl isn’t the only storm brewin’: The National Weather Service just had its director step down after a hailstorm of criticism following an improperly forecasted allocation of bonuses to contractors. We’re sure that while those workers had mostly sunny days, taxpayers have a lower level of barometric pressure these days for misappropriated funds — especially $43 million worth, which is high whether you’re looking in Fahrenheit or Celsius. Recently, the storm trackers — er, auditors — showed up. As a result, Jack Hayes felt the humidity rising in his position and got out after the heat got too hot to bear. (Editor’s note: Sorry. We couldn’t help ourselves.)
He’s the most important man in the world this week.A Colombian cab driver • Joking about the current situation with fellow cab driver Jose Pena, a 42-year-old man who lives with his mother who has become a central point of the Secret Service prostitution scandal – simply by driving the alleged prostitute who sparked the scandal home. Pena has become an intense focus of local media outlets, with some alleging that the cab driver is charging huge prices for interviews in the process of breaking an unspoken code between cab drivers and sex workers. The result? Pena has helped make the case an even bigger media frenzy, if that’s somehow possible.
Today in downgraded haircuts. John Edwards’ haircuts used to be far more super.
He knows he made mistakes. But John thinks that the treatment of him is so unflinchingly horrible and that what he did is not so different from what others did — JFK, Clinton, the whole rogues’ gallery. We’ve had this conversation about his situation, and I remember he did compare it to Clinton. He said, ‘I did a horrendous thing, but I don’t know why I’m getting such an unforgiving treatment when you think of what other people have done.’New Jersey lawyer (and close friend of John Edwards) Glenn Bergenfield • Discussing the former senator’s treatment by the press, which Edwards feels is unfair, according to Bergenfield. Edwards, who fathered a love child out of wedlock while his wife was suffering from cancer, then denied the child was his for a couple of years, is accused of violating campaign contribution laws tied to his 2008 run for president and his affair with Rielle Hunter. His trial begins Thursday.
via @BenjySarlin
Quick to the draw, a campaign slogan nobody wants to be associated with.
I had hoped to be able to continue to work… the distraction that I have created has made that impossible.Anthony Weiner resigns. @rickklein (via brooklynmutt) • How about the distraction that jerk from Howard Stern made? That was worse than impossible. No respect.
I’m moving back to New York in a few days. Unlike past...
OMG. I got so...
In this week’s Newsweek, a little...
Tumblr this morning. [h/t anne]
#@#$%!.tumblr.com
Here’s a hidden feature that shipped in...
Watch: PCB gets a visual shout out on GMA’s Yahoo/Tumblr...
whyarethegoodurlsalreadytaken asks: Am I the only one who thinks this whole "Weiner-gate" is being blow out of proportion? I'm a New Yorker, and there is barely no coverage of the incident. Out of the NY Post, the NY Times, Wall Street Journal, and the local paper Newsday, only the Post has had any coverage of it. It seems like most of the area has just dismissed the claims all together.
» SFB says: For what it’s worth, The New York Times has essentially ignored a Breitbart original once — with ACORN — only to be caught by surprise after the fact. (Also, the New York Daily News has covered it.) So, from our perspective, it’s better to be ahead of the story and catch what evidence we can than to see the steamroller of a smear campaign do the work for us. If Weiner’s in the right — and we hope he is — we merely want to be sure we exhausted all available options on the story, which has been picked up by large sites people read, like Mediaite and Gawker. — Ernie @ SFB
Look, we don’t want the Weiner story to be true. But we’ve done enough tweeting in our day to know all the tricks for reading someone’s social media tracks. We spent a couple of hours digging through tweets to find out more info. And, to us, there seems to be some evidence pointing in both directions on this story. The key thing for us is the existence of the rogue tweet, which was captured by TweetCongress.org even after it was deleted. But there’s also stuff that makes us wonder. The patient zero — the first person to retweet Anthony Weiner’s NSFW tweet — was this guy, who we’ve found in our research to be overly fixated on the congressman even BEFORE the tweet in question. In fact, he posted about a cheating scandal just like this one over TWO WEEKS AGO. Really? How was he so quick to hit the trigger on this? Some other things we noticed from the scandal:
» The important things to take from this: We don’t think Weiner did anything wrong as of yet, but we do think that there is a lot to suggest one of two things: One, this was possibly a scandal planted by someone who had closely followed the congressman’s Twitter account (because, based on our research, people have), and there were somewhat bizarre things that may have connected Weiner to the girl. Given the track record of Big Journalism, where the story originated from, we’d like to see a better source tackle this thing, because we don’t trust Breitbart as far as we can throw him. We rate this an “inconclusive.”
Look, we’re giving Rep. Weiner the benefit of the doubt here, but considering the subject of the message is no longer on Twitter, that raises alarm bells. We’ll keep looking to see if we find out more details.
EDIT: A version of the tweet in question is on this page. And the deleted yFrog image is over here.
John Ensign fouls up his legal situation: A report by Reuters today suggests that a decision by John Ensign himself may have paved the way for the charges he could be facing. Throughout the probe, investigators had wanted to get a look at a trove of Ensign’s e-mails, which he and his team claimed were protected by attorney-client confidentiality. The probe could very well have gone nowhere without them. That is, until Ensign himself handed them over as he was preparing to leave the Senate, after having refused for 18 months. Why on earth he did this is unknown, but it seems he may have scored an “own goal” here. source
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