Get ready!

Hobo Food Slang:
Blue-John = skimmed milk
Punk = bread
Toppings = pastry
Gun Boat = Empty can used for cooking which is usually a coffee can.
Work the stem = Try to get food handouts from food businesses.
Handout = Food that is not wrapped that is given to a person.
Knee-shaker = Food handout that is given on a plate at the back door of a house. Person eats it on backsteps of a house while the plate is balanced on the person's knees.
Lump = A packaged meal to be taken on the road.
Sit-down = A meal that a person can sit down to at a table.
Specks = Fruit that has specks on it.
Pearl Diver = dishwasher
Kitchen Dog = Kitchen Prep Worker

Wieners and Losers
Here's a tearjerker of a story from Philadelphia's KYW-TV:

The discovery of several hot dogs in packages outside Citizens Bank Park brought the bomb squad out and forced the temporary evacuation of the stadium Wednesday evening.According to police, Pattison Street between Darien and 11th Streets was shutdown as officials investigated the discovery of several suspicious packages near a ticket office.Fans inside the stadium were evacuated, but players remained on the field during the incident.Bomb squad members further investigated the packages and determined they were simply several hot dogs in foil wrappers. Sadly, the wieners were detonated as a precaution.

Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise

"I am suffering here from a delusion, and I
know it's a delusion, this envy of another ship,
but still it's painful. It's also representative of a
psychological syndrome that I notice has gotten
steadily worse as my' Luxury Cruise wears
on, a mental list of dissatisfactions that started
off picayune but has quickly become despairgrade.
I know that the syndrome's cause is not
simply the contempt bred of a week's familiarity
with the poor old Nadir,
and that the source of all
the dissatisfactions isn't the
Nadir at all but rather that
ur-Arnerican part of me
that craves pampering and
passive pleasure: the dissatisfied-
infant part of
me, the part that always
and indiscriminately
WANTS. Hence this
syndrome by which, for
example, just four days ago I experienced
such embarrassment over the perceived self-indulgence
of ordering even more gratis food
from cabin service that I littered the bed with
fake evidence of hard work and missed meals,
whereas by last night I find myself looking at
my watch in real annoyance after fifteen minutes
and wondering where the fuck is that cabin
service guy with the tray already. And by
now I notice how the tray's sandwiches are
kind of small, and how the wedge of dill pickle
always soaks into the starboard crust of the
bread, and how the port hallway is too narrow
to really let me put the used cabin service tray
outside 1009's door at night when I'm done
eating, so that the tray sits in the cabin all
night and in the morning adulterates the olfactory
sterility of 1009 with a smell of rancid
horseradish, and how this seems, by the Luxury
Cruise's fifth day, deeply dissatisfying.
Death and Conroy notwithstanding, we're
maybe now in a position to appreciate [he
falsehood at the dark hearr of Celebrity's
brochure. For this-the promise to sate the
part of me that always and only WANTS-is
the central fantasy the brochure is selling. The
thing to notice is that the real fantasy here
isn't that this promise will be kept but that
such a promise is keepable at all. This is a big
one, this lie.28 And of course I want to believe
it; I want to believe that maybe this ultimate
fantasy vacation will be enough pampering,
that this time the luxury and pleasure will be
so completely and faultlessly administered
that my infantile part will be sated at last. But
the infantile part of me is, by its very nature
and essence, insatiable. In fact, its whole raison
consists of its insatiability. In response to
any environment of extraordinary gratification
and pampering, the insatiable-infant part
of me will simply adjust its desires upward until
it once again levels out at its homeostasis
of terrible dissatisfaction. And sure enough,
after a few days of delight and then adjustment
on the Nadir, the Pamper-swaddled part
of me that WANTS is now back, and with a
vengeance. By Wednesday, I'm acutely conscious
of the fact that the A.C. vent in my
cabin hisses (loudly), and
that although I can turn off
the reggae Muzak coming
out of the speaker in the
cabin I cannot turn off
the even louder ceilingspeaker
out in the 10-
Port hall. Now I notice
that when Table 64's
towering busboy uses his
crumb-scoop to clear off
the tablecloth between
courses he never seems to get quite all the
crumbs. When Petra makes my bed, not all
the hospital corners are at exactly the same
angle. Most of the nightly stage entertainment
in the Celebrity Show Lounge is so bad
it's embarrassing, and the ice sculptures at the
Midnight Buffet often look hurriedly carved,
and the vegetable that comes with my entree
is continually overcooked, and it's impossible
to get really numbingly cold water out of
1009's bathroom tap.
I'm standing here on Deck 12 looking at the
Dreamward, which I bet has cold water that'd
turn your knuckles blue, and, like Frank Conroy,
part of me realizes that I haven't washed a
dish or tapped my foot in line behind somebody
with multiple coupons at a supermarket
checkout in a week; and yet instead of feeling
refreshed and renewed I'm anticipating how totally
stressful and demanding and unpleasurable
a return to regular landlocked adult life is
going to be now that even just the premature
removal of a towel by a sepulchral crewman
seems like an assault on my basic rights, and
the sluggishness of the Aft elevator is an outrage.
And as I'm getting ready togo down to
lunch I'm mentally drafting a really mordant
footnote on my single biggest peeve about the
Nadir: they don't even have Mr. Pibb; they
foist Dr. Pepper on you with a maddeningly unapologetic
shrug when any fool knows that Dr.
Pepper is no substitute for Mr. Pibb, and it's an
absolute goddamned travesty, or-at best--ex- .
tremely dissatisfying indeed."

http://harpers.org/archive/2008/09/hbc-90003557

Rourke

Baby-faced Rourke in "Diner," 1982, and as the battle-scarred star of "The Wrestler."
(Photo: (From left) MGM/The Kobal Collection; Courtesy of Wild Bunch)

To look at Mickey Rourke is to see a man who has consistently failed to destroy himself, despite repeated, determined attempts. Through all the spousal batteries, the Vespa DUI, the mob ties, the soft-core porn, the Chihuahua obsession, and, of course, the repeated blows to the face (and subsequent horrifying facial reconstruction), Mickey Rourke has, against all logic and notions of common decency, remained a riveting screen presence. He’s survived because, no matter how awful his career choices and chaotic his personal life, onscreen, he’s hypnotic, a wounded animal you’re forced to eye … warily. Even when he’s sleepwalking through a role, Rourke has an authenticity he can’t shake off. As damaged as he has been, he’s always been a prime candidate for a Travolta-esque Career Resurgence, one that might have happened years ago had he not turned down, among other roles, Butch in Pulp Fiction.

With Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler (which closes the New York Film Festival), the comeback is finally here. As broken professional wrestler Randy “The Ram” Robinson, Rourke’s already an Oscar favorite. Variety said Rourke gives a “deeply moving portrait that instantly takes its place among the great, iconic screen performances.” It’s the type of praise that puts him in league with Marlon Brando. But if you take a look at Rourke’s career arc—if such a rapidly vacillating beast could possibly be classified as an “arc”—it’s clear he’s been Brando all along, as we attempt to prove (with apologies to chronology).

Phase 1 Marlon Brando of On the Waterfront (1980–1985)

Rourke, in just his third film, steals Body Heat as a professional arsonist, but the Brando comparisons first arise in Barry Levinson’s Diner, where his sweet-faced dirtbag-gambler persona hides an oddly sentimental soul. (To be fair, it’s easy to look tough next to Steve Guttenberg and Paul Reiser.) After Diner, Rourke consistently nails the tough-but-soft-rebel Brando parts, specifically in Coppola’s Rumble Fish and the tragically forgotten The Pope of Greenwich Village. The sky’s the limit; clearly he’s a contendah.
Phase 2 Marlon Brando of Last Tango in Paris (1986–1990)

For an actor as raw, daring, and masculine as Rourke, it’s inevitable that he starts doing arty soft porn. He is feral ravaging Kim Basinger in 9½ Weeks—even if some sex scenes seem to defy the physical laws of space and time—then follows it up by having sex with Lisa Bonet in a pool of blood (Angel Heart) and with then-wife Carré Otis in a scene rumored to have not been simulated (Wild Orchid). In between all the fornication, he sneaks in a brilliant portrayal of Charles Bukowski in Barfly. Warning sign: He writes and stars in Homeboy, in which he plays a boxer.
Phase 3 Marlon Brando of The Island of Dr. Moreau (1991–2001)

The lost decade. Rourke quits acting in 1991 to become a professional boxer; he wins a few fights but breaks his nose and his ribs and severely compresses his cheekbone, leading to the surgeries that will haunt him forever. When he returns to acting in 1995, he stars in Double Team with Dennis Rodman, Fall Time with Stephen Baldwin, and Out in Fifty with someone named Scott Leet. He also makes Another 9½ Weeks with Angie Everhart. He walks off the set of one movie because the director refuses to allow his Chihuahua in the film.
Phase 4 Marlon Brando of Apocalypse Now (2001–2007)

Now that he’s deformed and broken, directors realize casting Rourke will give their movies a glint of authenticity and world-weariness. Tony Scott uses him twice, to good effect, in Man on Fire and Domino, but it’s Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City that captures Rourke’s late-blooming, defeated anger—romantic, elusive, deadly. And he does it by somehow deforming Rourke’s face even more.
Phase 5 Marlon Brando of The Godfather (2008–present)

In the same way that Coppola saved Brando after ten years of vanity projects, Aronofsky wangles a classic performance by tapping into what made Rourke so hypnotic in the first place: his peculiarly tender toughness and buried sadness. (Watch for The Wrestler’s crushing scene where he plays Nintendo with a 12-year-old.) For the first time in years, the movie is as good as he is. Moreover, though he’s equally eccentric, Rourke proves that Method-y machismo doesn’t have to lead to kissing Larry King. In that one way, he’s trumped Old Man Brando.

Two Papers in One!

On Friday, we noted that ABC News had engaged in some sleight-of-hand to conceal Charlie Gibson's misrepresentation of a Sarah Palin quote. On Saturday Jacques Steinberg, a reporter for the New York Times, noted it too:

The questions some respondents took issue with included Mr. Gibson's reference to a recent church speech, in which he quoted Ms. Palin as saying, "Our national leaders are sending U.S. soldiers on a task that is from God." In an excerpt of the speech on YouTube--which ABC spliced into the interview when it was shown--Ms. Palin had prefaced that comment by appearing to say she was praying that America's mission in Iraq represented God's will.

But Palin's meaning escaped the Times editorial page, which repeated the falsehood that her prayer was an assertion:

Her answers about why she had told her church that President Bush's failed policy in Iraq was "God's plan" did nothing to dispel our concerns about her confusion between faith and policy. Her claim that she was quoting a completely unrelated comment by Lincoln was absurd.

How about this exchange from Barack Obama's January interview with Beliefnet.com:

Q: Is it difficult in the rough and tumble of campaign politics to stick to that, to live out your faith? And can you talk about whether you have a favorite prayer or what you pray about?

Obama: The prayer that I tell myself every night is a fairly simple one: I ask in the name of Jesus Christ that my sins are forgiven, that my family is protected and that I am an instrument of God's will. I'm constantly trying to align myself to what I think he calls on me to do. And sometimes you hear it strongly and sometimes that voice is more muted.

Obama, like Palin, prays that he is on God's side. Palin, unlike Obama, does not (so far as we know) claim to hear the voice of God. Why is she the one who gets painted as a religious nut?

Many were skeptical of Taheri’s report that Barack Obama had asked Iraqi officials to delay a security agreement until after the elections, and the Obama campaign denied it—but their denial is actually a confirmation of Taheri’s article.

Obama’s national security spokeswoman Wendy Morigi said Taheri’s article bore “as much resemblance to the truth as a McCain campaign commercial.”
In fact, Obama had told the Iraqis that they should not rush through a “Strategic Framework Agreement” governing the future of US forces until after President George W. Bush leaves office, she said.

http://harpers.org/archive/2008/09/hbc-90003557

Finance

Good Morning, Your Money Is On Fire The morning news is terrifying even before the ominous opening of U.S. markets today, and was also scary hours ago before overseas markets opened and U.S. stock futures fell sharply. The bankruptcy at Lehman Brothers, the takeover of Merrill Lynch and the plea by insurance giant AIG for $40 billion in federal aid made for scary front pages (pictured, click for larger image) and heated chatter on CNBC. And no one wasted any time telling everyone how bad things really are. The "American financial system was shaken to its core," the Wall Street Journal said, warning of a "crisis on Wall Street." Other media outlets were scarcely more comforting: More »

In alchemy, the ouroboros is a purifying sigil. Swiss psychologist Carl Jung saw the ouroboros as an archetype and the basic mandala of alchemy. Jung also defined the relationship of the ouroboros to alchemy:[4]

The alchemists, who in their own way knew more about the nature of the individuation process than we moderns do, expressed this paradox through the symbol of the ouroboros, the snake that eats its own tail. ouroboros, has been said to have a meaning of infinity or wholeness. In the age-old image of the ouroboros lies the thought of devouring oneself and turning oneself into a circulatory process, for it was clear to the more astute alchemists that the prima materia of the art was man himself. The ouroboros is a dramatic symbol for the integration and assimilation of the opposite, i.e. of the shadow. This 'feed-back' process is at the same time a symbol of immortality, since it is said of the ouroboros that he slays himself and brings himself to life, fertilises himself and gives birth to himself. He symbolises the One, who proceeds from the clash of opposites, and he therefore constitutes the secret of the prima materia which [...] unquestionably stems from man's unconscious.

The famous ouroboros drawing from the early alchemical text The Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra dating to 2nd century Alexandria encloses the words hen to pan, "one, the all", i.e. "All is One". Its black and white halves represent the Gnostic duality of existence.

ABC News Hid Important Parts of Palin Interview
Sat, Sep 13, 2008 at 9:08:07 am PDT

It won’t come as a surprise to LGF readers, but Charlie Gibson’s interview with Sarah Palin was heavily edited by ABC News to make Palin appear more hawkish and less knowledgeable. Mark Levin has the complete transcript, and what ABC News tried to pull here is a textbook example of media malfeasance: Gibson Interview.
Also see: ABC News Edited Out Key Parts of Sarah Palin Interview.
The interview was so egregiously biased, even UPI is calling out ABC News for their blatant double standards: ABC’s Gibson grilled Palin hard, but it may backfire.
The double-standard Gibson applied to Palin, compared with the uncritical media platforms repeatedly offered to Obama, who has had zero executive experience running anything, was especially striking. ABC and Gibson focused on Palin as if she were running right now for the presidency rather than the vice presidency. He and other media pundits, by contrast, have never asked the Democratic vice presidential nominee, Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, if he has ever had to make a decision on anything.
Gibson’s aggressive approach appeared to take Palin by surprise: He was clearly attempting to put her on point by presenting her as having extreme religious views. This again, however, appears to be a double-standard, as Palin grew up in the Assemblies of God, one of the largest Christian denominations in America with 16 million members, and is now a member of the Wasilla Bible Church. Even now, Obama has yet to receive any comparable grilling on his 20-year attendance in the congregation of the notoriously racist Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

'A Vote for Frank Peters is a Vote for America'

"Before meeting Jack, though, I retouched base at the Portland Airport with that city’s foremost rogue and outrageous character, Frank Peters, a still strapping, 63-year-old blond hunk, world-class senior basketball player, notorious degenerate and womanizer who currently owns and operates a crew of 15 girls at his Grand Cafe nightclub on the wrong side of the Willamette River that separates it from the more opulent downtown. Peters, who held a single balloon to welcome me at the airport after a 43-year separation, sometimes carries around a book entitled “How to Deal with Your Oversized Penis” and makes sure to place it over his snoozing face whenever he flies somewhere.Peters, who once played for and managed the Portland Maverick baseball team, ran for mayor on the outlaw platform, (he received around 20 votes), and his nightclub sports hundreds of framed and life-sized photos of himself. After a few drinks at his bar, he took me on a tour of strip clubs (something unheard of in San Luis Obispo County). In the morning I helped Frank count the booty from the legalized slot machines in his establishment, and later I was picked up out front by Jack Joyce of Rogue Ales."

Poll Position: Be Very Afraid

Oh no! The polls! They suddenly don't look good for Barack Obama! But does it really matter at this point? Should the campaign—and its supporters—start to panic? We checked in with two Democratic strategists who have different opinions on the situation. Here's the case for pessimism.

The jobless rate is up, home sales are down, and the Democrats have an appealing, history-making nominee. So that rash of McCain red, spreading like measles over the RealClearPolitics.com polling chart, is nothing to worry about—a temporary Republican sugar high, right?
Not so fast. Yes, this year's trends should favor the Democrats, with a poor economy and an unpopular Republican president. But we can't ignore how much the underlying landscape always favors the Republicans.
Sunday night, USA Today released a shocking poll that puts McCain four healthy points above 50%, leading Obama by 54%-44%, with only 2% undecided. Six other polls have McCain narrowly ahead or tied; none has Obama leading—a sharp reversal from last week.
If you hide behind electoral maps or statistical projections at your favorite number-crunching site, and ignore the national polls because "it's 50 state elections," you'll be lulled by projections based on weeks-old data, often conducted by middling polling operations. And you'll miss what's happened.
This election just flipped.
It's not "over," and Obama is far from doomed. But important dynamics were established over the summer, and especially the past 10 days, that help McCain tremendously.
Panic isn't helpful, but neither is denial. Actually, a little panic at Obama HQ would be prudent. An absence of panic means no lessons are being learned.
The biggest threat to Democrats winning the presidency—despite an economic agenda much better than the GOP's for the disengaged, downscale voters who decide elections—is always the decades-old perception by those voters that Democrats aren't "like them"—that they're culturally alien.
Bill Clinton was able to beat that tag, though he ultimately won more with his economic message than because of any stirring reaction to his "man from Hope" bio. But Republicans successfully attacked the basic American values of Michael Dukakis and John Kerry. Both lost, despite favorable political winds.
The economy's important. But you won't win over the undecided voters with generic-sounding economic proposals—like "cutting taxes for 95% of Americans" or "preserving Social Security"—if you can't convince them you come from the same place they do. The promises are great but lack credibility, and voters are anxious.
Race aside—and it's a huge factor, of course—Obama has struggled all year with looking like he "gets" the lives of those whose votes he needs. By choosing Palin, Republicans set a trap that made that vulnerability critical.
Commiserating with Iowa farmers about the high price of arugula at Whole Foods wasn't too swift. Much worse were the off-the-record comments about bitter people in small towns clinging to their guns and religion.
Obama's attempts to establish that he didn't come from the elite were tone-deaf: Talking about student loans you've only recently paid off isn't the best way to convince non-college-educated voters that you're one of them. Neither is telling them that your wife is a Brady Bunch fan.
When the Republicans rolled out the real deal, Wal-Mart mom Palin, Democrats took the bait.
First, they opened up a very unhelpful debate over experience. As Kirsten Powers points out in today's New York Post, "Lured by the McCain camp, Obama supporters engaged in an argument about who had more overall experience—the top of the Democratic ticket or the bottom of the GOP ticket." Making the obvious attack on Palin's experience only shifted the battle to McCain's best territory.
But the main damage was cultural, as Kirsten's must-read explains. It was so obvious to all the smart people supporting Obama that a small-town mayor is unqualified for leadership! They swapped mocking e-mails, cackled that Palin was a Quayle/Eagleton disaster who'd soon be off the ticket, and argued that the recklessness of her selection demonstrated John McCain's mental instability.
And instantly, they undid all Obama's success in winning new consideration in the small towns that resisted him in the primaries, and that had been insulted by his "bitter" remarks.
Palin, of course, was a huge hit at the convention. But so blinded by derision were the Democrats, and the media, that they completely missed the launch of a "new Ronald Reagan" a family-values superstar cooked up, under the radar, in the Republicans' Alaskan Frankenlab.
So now, McCain and Palin cast themselves as America's team, and Obama as the exotic community organizer from Hawaii who bugs people to go to meetings.
When Palin's background and "redneck" origins were so savagely ridiculed by Democrats, her mockery of "community organizers" came off as admirable gumption. She was fighting back. Soon, Obama was reduced to pleading that his organizing—which he'd made central to his bio—represented only a brief phase after college. You see, he explained, he went on to become a professor of constitutional law and a state Senator.
Barack Obama has never needed to win swing voters. His entire career has been based on appealing to core Democrats—from his organizer days, to his state Senate career, to his 2004 speech to a packed Boston convention hall, and his US Senate race that same year (he had no serious Republican opposition), to his stunning series of primary and caucus victories earlier this year. This results in a certain tin ear when it comes to communicating with the economically anxious, politically disengaged voters who Bill Clinton had such a gift for reaching out to.
But the problem isn't only Obama himself, it's those around him who live in the same bubble, who think a good way to connect with average American voters is to stage a mass rally—more than double the size of Obama's largest U.S. crowd—in a foreign country. Or who think it's persuasive to argue, as Jacob Weisberg did recently, that if we don't elect Obama we'll be shamed before the entire world:
>>>"If Obama loses, our children will grow up thinking of equal opportunity as a myth. His defeat would say that when handed a perfect opportunity to put the worst part of our history behind us, we chose not to. In this event, the world's judgment will be severe and inescapable: The United States had its day but, in the end, couldn't put its own self-interest ahead of its crazy irrationality over race."
This is the thinking that loses elections. The new rash of polls is a wake-up call.

Peter Feld is a writer and long-time Democratic strategist.

In honor of Kim Jong-Il:

• 5'2" and wears 4" lifts.


• According to propaganda in NK, neither he or his father urinate or defecate.


• Over 7000+ Mercedes automobiles. in 1998 he is said to have ordered 200 S Class Mercedes at $100,000 each. Critics say that this $20 million was one-fifth of the total aid promised to North Korea in 1998 by the United Nations. One-third of North Koreans receive UN food aid every year.


• Afraid to fly, travels by armoured train and uses silver chopsticks to thwart poisen


• In 1994, Hennessy said that Kim Jong-il was its best customer for cognac for two years running, switching from Hennessy VSOP to $630-a-bottle Hennessy Paradis in 1992. When doctors told him to stop smoking, all senior officers in his army were required to quit with him.


• Birth greated by double rainbow and bright start in sky (!)


• He is said to have a library of 20,000 Hollywood movies and to have even written a book on the cinema. He even went so far as to engineer the kidnapping, in 1978, of a South Korean film director and his girlfriend.


• Claimed to have 11 holes-in-one in a single round of golf.


• According to a Newsweek report, he has been married four times and favours Scandinavian blondes. He created `pleasure teams' to `service' him and his father when he was a young man, and often has parties in his seven-storey pleasure palace surrounded by women.


• His wine cellar reportedly contains nearly 10,000 bottles, his library thousands of cookbooks and texts on gastronomy. An institute in Pyongyang, the capital, staffed by some of North Korea’s best-trained doctors, is devoted to ensuring that Kim eats not only the most delectable but also the most healthful foods – “The purpose of the institute is 100% to prolong the life of Kim Jong Il,” said Seok Young Hwan, a physician who worked there and later defected to South Korea. He said 200 professionals were working just in the division that handled Kim’s diet.


• Has written 400 operas!

Hairclub/Mullet

This is fantastic.

http://harpers.org/archive/2008/06/0082061

You have to love Lawyers.

Imagine if you had to get permission before you linked to the Web site of companies, people or organizations.
If “permission-based” linking was a requirement - blogging and much other Internet activity as we know it (even mainstream media news sites) would cease to exist.
Well, if the lawsuit of one major law firm against an Internet news publication succeeds, that “permission-based” linking may become the law…and effectively kill the Internet.
The upcoming edition of National Law Journal reports (subscription only):

Attorneys at major law firms, including Bryan Cave, Jones Day and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, are finding themselves and their recent home purchases or sales in an Internet spotlight — and some of them aren’t too happy about it.
Blockshopper.com, a Web site that posts information about residential sales in Chicago, St. Louis, Las Vegas and south Florida, highlights lawyers, among other professionals, who recently bought or sold property by naming them, posting their photos and linking to their law firm Web site biographies.
Jones Day, which had two of associates show up on the site, found the coverage so objectionable that it recently sued the Chicago-based Internet company for trademark infringement in the U.S. District Courtfor the Northern District of Illinois.
The unauthorized use is likely “to deceive and cause confusion and mistake among customers as to the source or origin of the service provided or offered for sale by the defendants and the affiliation of Jones Day with those services,” the firm said in the Aug. 12 lawsuit. (Jones Day v. Blockshopper.com, No. 08-4572.)

Trademark infringement? For simply linking to the firm’s Web site? Are you kidding me? But it gets better:

Jones Day offered to take $10,000 to drop the lawsuit if the Web site stopped reporting on the firm, but the company isn’t caving, said Brian Timpone, president of two-year-old Blockshopper LLC.
Bending to the law firm’s demands to stop coverage of the firm’s lawyers would strangle the company’s business model of using public records and publicly available Internet information, he said.
Blockshopper, founded by former newspaper industry professionals, considers itself a next generation media outlet entitled to First Amendment protections just like any other news organization, he said.
“If we don’t fight it, Jones Day could do this to any news organization or any blog,” Timpone said. “You would completely throttle the Internet if you required online journalists and bloggersto get permission before linking.”

If a company doesn’t want people to link its site - then it shouldn’t have a Web site.
We’ll keep you updated on this important lawsuit - but make sure to forward and repost this far and wide.

I wish I had faith this will be thrown out.

"She's not bad looking. She looks like one of those women in the Van Halen videos who takes off her glasses, shakes out her hair, and then all of a sudden, she's in high heels and a bikini. All of a sudden, I am FOR drilling in Alaska." --Jimmy Kimmel