Kids, mommy’s a fame-hungry whore

Kate Gosselin Says ‘Dancing With the Stars’ Sends ‘a Message to My Kids’

What does Caspar Milquetoast have on Jamie Foxx?

The least interesting man in television returned to late night Monday, somehow attracting 6.6 million viewers. Assuming Malcontenters don’t watch such tripe, here’s what you missed:

But Jay’s excitement was nothing, nothing compared to that of his first guest, Jamie Foxx. Bouncing off the walls with the energy of an entire preschool class hopped up on Capri Suns, Foxx didn’t sit down. He browbeat the audience, “When I say ‘Welcome,’ you say ‘Back!’ When I say ‘Welcome,’ you say ‘Back!’ Jay LENNNNNO!” So giddy was Foxx at the pure magical joy of having Leno back, he could barely sit to do his well-rehearsed patter about his daughter’s 16th birthday party. By the time the show had come back from a commercial, he’d already regressed back into exhorting the crowd to “Give it up for Jay Leno! Do the wave!”

Someone tell Foxx that Oscar-winners need not shill for bland talk show hosts. Imagine Denzel Washington trying to rouse Pat Sajak’s audience.

Corporate folly

I’d rather gargle thumbtacks:

Descriptions of Team Building Activities, Initiative Games, & Problem Solving Exercises
Helium Stick	Deceptively simple teamwork activity.  Form two lines facing each other.  Lay a long, thin rod on group’s index fingers.  Goal: Lower to ground.  Reality: It goes up!
Toxic Waste	A popular, engaging small group activity.  Equipped with a bungee cord and rope, a group must work out how to transport a bucket of “Toxic Waste” and tip it into the neutralization bucket.  Can be used to highlight almost any aspect of teamwork or leadership.
Mine Field	Objects are scattered in an indoor or outdoor place.  In pairs, one person verbally guides his/her partner, a blindfolded person, through the minefield.
Zoom	A group tries to create a unified story from a set of sequential pictures.  The pictures are randomly ordered and handed out.  Each person has a picture but cannot show it to others. Requires patience, communication, and trying to understand from another’s point of view in order to recreate the story’s sequence.
Pipeline/Gutter Ball	A fast paced activity that can be modified to suit age and setting. Each participant gets one gutter or half pipe tubing. The object is to move a marble or assorted size balls using lengths of guttering from point A to point B without dropping them.
Keypunch	A powerful teambuilding exercise for medium sized groups. Participants must touch the randomly placed numbers, in sequence, within a given time frame in multiple attempts.
Warp Speed	A team building exercise based on the icebreaker “Group Juggle“.  Groups are challenged to juggle as fast as possible.  Invite group to “tender” a time they can deliver.
Balloon Activities	Group activities that can be done with balloons.  Promotes gentle, fun physical movement, people getting to know one another, trust and working together.

Does suddenly spendthrift Jim Bunning still have a taxpayer-funded police escort?

The new hero of the tea party crowd, Jim Bunning, is either intensely crotchety or crazy. I’m far from the first to raise this issue. Speculation about his mental state began four years ago during his campaign for re-election.

It’s no secret in Kentucky that Sen. Jim Bunning, a Republican who was expected to coast to reelection on Nov. 2, has been acting strange. Over the past few months, Bunning has angrily pushed away reporters, exchanged testy words with a questioner at a Rotary Club and stuck to brief, heavily scripted remarks at campaign events, delivered in a halting monotone. The former major league baseball star now travels the Bluegrass State with a special police escort, at taxpayer expense. His explanation? Al-Qaida may be out to get him.

More substantively, the incumbent would agree to only one debate with his Democratic challenger, state Sen. Daniel Mongiardo. And the rules Bunning negotiated were bizarrely rigid: The encounter could not be live; the taping has to occur in the afternoon, not the evening; no audience could be present in the studio; and, under threat of legal action, Mongiardo could not use any sound clips or video of Bunning’s debate performance in campaign advertisements.

This apparent fear of the spontaneous has spurred rumors in Kentucky that Bunning, a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame, is suffering from some sort of dementia, perhaps Alzheimer’s. Bunning has declined to release his medical records. But until now, there was nothing hard to suggest that the one-term Republican senator was anything but a crotchety, occasionally confused, or arrogant old man.

At the very least it appears Ty Cobb has some competition as the biggest asshole in the baseball HOF.

Why the working class doesn’t trust the GOP

I know, government spending is spiraling out of control. But blocking temporary unemployment benefits is both misguided and mean-spirited. Not that it’s hurt retiring Kentucky Sen. Jim Bunning among his fellow Republicans. Already the two leading candidates bidding to replace him have voiced their support for Bunning’s “principled stand.”

And the base loves it. Red State blogger Erick Erickson just tweeted:

ewerickson God Bless Jim Bunning. Wish he was staying in the Senate. about 2 hours ago via web

Now Bunning’s colleagues are jumping on the bandwagon. Arizona Sen. John Kyl said yesterday unemployment benefits discourage job-hunters “because people are being paid even though they’re not working.” Unemployment insurance “doesn’t create new jobs,” Kyl said. “In fact, if anything, continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work.”

I thought it was Obama’s fault that unemployment has approached 10 percent. To hear Kyl tell it, the fault lies instead with those lazy bumps on unemployment.

As Jay Bookman points out, the ratio of applicants to openings is 6-to-1. And in Georgia, jobless benefits TOP out at $330 a week — less in most cases. Try living the high life on that.

UPDATE: Bunning did it again. According to the WSJ, the expiration of unemployment benefits caused 100,000 people to lose their benefits immediately and about 400,000 people within one to two weeks. About 500,000 jobless people would lose their health-insurance subsidies under the Cobra program over the course of a month.

Should New York’s governor go to prison?

Sure sounds like it — assuming obstruction of justice is still a crime. At the very least David Paterson should resign.

Gov. David Paterson personally directed his press secretary to ask a woman who had accused his close aide of attacking her to say the run-in was nonviolent and contradict her previous accounts to the police in court, The New York Times cites three sources as saying …

The woman accused the aide, David Johnson, of “choking her, smashing her into a mirrored dresser and preventing her from calling for help,” but failed to appear in court after the phone call for her hearing, and the case was dropped.

Sixty minutes of unrelenting terror

Residents said a series of waves started to reach shore shortly after the 8.8-magnitude quake struck at 0634 GMT Saturday. The first waves hit about five minutes after the quake, while the biggest wave slammed into the town about an hour later.

State neglect + MARTA mismanagement = bad news for working poor

MARTA could lose 66 of its 131 bus routes, or more than half. Bus routes could be dropped in some areas to make up for losses on other routes. Wait times for trains, which increased after last year’s modest budget cuts, could stretch to 30 minutes on weekends before 7 a.m. and after 9 p.m. Rush-hour train intervals could be 12 minutes.

The state is unlikely to help out, this time out of necessity. Georgia’s as broke as MARTA. But years of state neglect and internal mismanagement helped get us to this point.

I can’t help but wonder if MARTA still has 13 people working in its diversity office.