Did This Congresswoman Have Lesbian Affair With a Turkish Spy?
According to an American Conservative interview with Sibel Edmonds, a Turkish and Farsi language translator who used to work for the FBI, a Democratic congresswoman from Illinois was seduced by a Turkish secret agent. Edmonds was hired by the FBI as a contractor right after 9/11, and she worked for them until they fired her for whistleblowing in 2002. As reported by Vanity Fair in 2005, an internal FBI Inspector General's report stated that Edmonds had been improperly fired and it further said that "many of her allegations had bases in fact." She has made lots of allegations, too! Like the ones involving former Illinois Congressman and Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, who, according to Edmonds, received tens of thousands of dollars in secret campaign payments from Chicago-area Turkish diplomats and Turkish-Americans. (Hastert then withdrew from House consideration one of those perennial resolutions acknowledging the Armenian genocide.) (Hastert now works for a lobbying firm hilariously named Dickstein Shapiro, where he lobbies for Turkey.) She has further claimed to have heard evidence of Turkish agents recruiting sources in the FBI and State Departments to steal nuclear secrets which were then sold on the old black nuclear secrets market. Nice work if you can get it! And now she says that these Turkish spies discovered that married Democratic Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky was bisexual, and so a female agent was assigned to sleep with her on camera, in order to blackmail her. Yes! According to an interview in Pat Buchanan's American Conservative magazine, as related by BradBlog: Edmonds says in the Giraldi interview that "in 2000 ... Turkish agents started gathering information on her, and they found out that she was bisexual." A female Turkish agent is said to have "struck up a relationship with her", and then, following the death of Schakowsky's mother, the woman is said to have attended the funeral "hoping to exploit her vulnerability." "They later were intimate in Schakowsky's townhouse," Edmonds tells Giraldi, "which had been set up with recording devices and hidden cameras." The reason for attempting to get at Schakowsky, Edmonds believes, is so that they would be able to get both her "and her husband Robert Creamer to perform certain illegal operational facilitations for them in Illinois," along with Hastert, who was already on the payroll, and several other Chicago officials. The old lesbian honeypot! Wow! Anyway we can barely follow this insane story so who knows if you should be freaked out about the Turkish spy ring selling nuclear secrets or if their bribery and blackmail has thus far succeeded only in preventing Congress from officially recognizing this mass murder they perpetrated in 1915. MORE >>
Emmys Are Relevant Again, Declares Dying Old Media
Claiming this year's Emmys are better than your typical awards show is a bit like saying the bagel that's been lying on the kitchen floor for two weeks and gnawed by mice isn't too bad with a little cream cheese. But in these last days of media, if there is a slim reed to grab on to, no one's going to turn that down. And if we can make it seem like there might be a place in the Mad Max media world of the future for Hollywood's attempts at a Chamber of Commerce dinner featuring anachronistic tuxedo-clad parades of acceptance speeches, then I'm buying! Traditionally the Emmys have been the most hapless of awards shows, lacking the gravitas of the Oscars, the booziness of the Globes and the musicality of the Grammys (not to mention the ridiculousness of the People's Choice Awards, the glamor of the SAGs, the OMG'ness of the Teen Choice Awards, the controversy of the VMA's). Emmys have been right in middle, which in the dying awards sector is to say, nowhere. Ratings were up for the Doogie Howser-hosted show. 13.3 million people tuned in last night, which is not quite two million more than watched the season premiere of Survivor. The critics however, are all Lady Gaga for the brilliance of NPH. The LA Times wrote, "From the moment he walked onstage, itself a richer and more evocative setting than last year's bleak theater-in-the-round, you knew you were in good hands." USA Today was positively besides itself, gushing about the brilliant success, "much of the credit goes to Harris, the show's dapper, constantly congenial host. Proving his Tony Awards stint was more than a flash-in-the-reward-show-host pan, Harris rescued the show from two years of reality-host miasma with style, grace and musical flair." The NY Times labeled Howser, "genial and efficient" but decried the inside-jokeyness of the show, and of awards shows in general. The crusade for jokes that everyone can get is a venerable movement, dear to the hearts of newspaper editors and copy editors everywhere, and we're delighted to see the Times still standing by its worthiness in these final hours. And the Washington Post's Tom Shales declared that NPH had turned the tide for all of media. "America's traditional old broadcast networks staged a comeback Sunday night at the 61st annual Emmy Awards and snatched a few of the key prizes back from cable channels that have been making inroads and all but staging raids, especially in the 21st century." Our review: Doogie was a more affable version of the Hugh Jackman genial-quasi-old-school-glamorous-song-and-dance-man host model. The opening number was fun. Breaking things into categories sort of gave it some kinda continuity. But in the end, 90 percent of the show is reading lists of names and listening to pompous speeches punctuated by dumb jokes, and even a teenage doctor can't make that relevant for the modern age. MORE >>
Mad Men: The Night of the Lawn Mower
Many things happened last night on Mad Men, but the one that everyone will remember was when poor, poor Englishman Guy got his foot run over by a John Deere tractor. In fact, it was a bloody good show. That accident was unexpected (and a little unimaginable, like Rosalind Shays falling down an elevator shaft on L.A. Law) and had far-reaching consequences for all the internal shifts that continue to plague Sterling Cooper since it fell into the hands of its English overlords. Though it looked dire at first, last night's British invasion may still have some positive effects, even though it's already caused one amputation. Blood wasn't the only motif winding it's way through the episode, which focused on office politics, Joan's departure, and future hippie Sally's crazy fear of her youngest brother. Here are the other tendons that were connecting the tissue of this visceral hour. Lights: Much of the episode was shot with the dim lighting and inevitable dread of an ADT commercial, especially the scenes in Joan and Don's home, but each character is fixated on a fixture for a different reason. Joan falls asleep on the couch waiting for Doctor Rapist to come home and tell her that he is the new King of All Surgery. Instead, he stumbles home and informs her that he will never be a surgeon and she can't leave her gig, or has to find a new one. In the gloom, she jiggles over to him in her nightgown (her ample cans on magnificent display) and tries to soothe her man—and herself—by taking control of the situation. She already realized that her choice was no good when all the doctor's starting talking shit about him at their dinner party, now she's stuck trying to wring the best out of a bad situation. She says that she'll take care of him as soon as she "closes the light." Like always, Joan is trying to control her own destiny, but even though she may be able to master the environment around her, the future is slipping out of her exquisitely manicured iron fist. Don lies in bed staring at the dome on his ceiling, his mind illuminated with the thousand possibilities of a promotion at work and possibly a move to London. Last week we saw him staring at pictures of his parents in the moonlight, reflecting on the past. This week the night is just as dim, but the glare of the future is staring him down. For all the success he's had, he still wants more, and it seems like his private moments at night are the only time that he allows himself to escape the confines of "Don Draper" and really live as himself. At the end of the episode, he has another revelation in the dark, confronting Betty about their new son's name—which he doesn't like—and his honesty, with himself and his family, shines through again. Sally, on the other hand, is filled with terror by the night, afraid that her baby brother is possessed by the spirit of her beloved Grandpa Gene. After Don hooks her up with a nightlight, she stares into it, like that is the only thing that... MORE >>
Facebook Gaydar Emerges From Breakthrough MIT Project
Are you quietly stalking someone and too dense to figure out their sexual orientation from Google searches, Flickr party photos and real-life gossip? Well, a couple of MIT geniuses invented just the tool for you. The best part of Carter Jernigan and Behram Mistree's software, created for a research project, is that you don't even need to "friend" your target to figure out if he's gay. You simply need access to his friends list, which is made public by default on Facebook. In the students' test, which examined 947 profiles, the program identified all 10 of 10 men the students knew to be gay, but who had not declared so on Facebook, according to a summary in the Boston Globe. Studies following up on this crucial research will, presumably, deal with the problems of false positives and of lesbians, who somehow evade the gaydar completely. In the meantime, people can't stop talking about the MIT students' unreleased software. Because while sexual orientation has never been less of a secret, particularly among the young oversharers on Facebook and Twitter, users of these social networks love nothing so much as a little passive-aggressive e-stalking. Especially of the pseudo-scientific sort. MORE >>
Terror Arrests Could Be Good News for Obama
Take that, Dick Cheney! Federal officials this weekend made three arrests in an interstate terror investigation. Sure, it's good news for democracy, freedom and the such, but it could be great news for President Obama. Even during the endless campaign, Obama's opponents claimed he would be soft on terrorism, an idea that's simmered quite tenaciously on the right. Cheney only reinforced that fear when he said Obama's torture and intelligence policies make the nation "vulnerable" to attack, an argument so absurd that we can't believe people believe it. And believe it they do. But now, after last week's raids, the feds have arrested two men — 26-year old Najibullah Zazi and his father, Mohammed Wali Zazi — who they think may have been planning an attack on American soil, possibly at Fashion Week(!). The third suspect, a Queens-based imam named Ahmad Wais Afzali, allegedly tipped the Zazi men off to federal interest. All three are charged, for now, with lying to investigators. The younger Zazi, however, admitted to training with Al Qaeda in Pakistan and had been jotting notes on how to make a bomb, which, to the feds, looks like he had plans to wreak havoc upon this dear nation. Government spooks made clear that there's no imminent threat, but did describe the happenings as "ongoing and fast-paced." If Obama were more like Cheney or Bush, he would be playing these arrests up as a big win in our fight against terrorism. He would be cheering and making emboldened speeches celebrating his supreme powers as Commander-in-Chief. It would be nice to see a little good-natured "suck on that, Dick!" But, alas, Obama and his administration are far too classy. Meanwhile, the right will likely remain mum, because now they look like prejudiced jerks. Again. MORE >>
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