…Exploring the role of the prankster as artist, activist and social observer and the significance of the prank in society.
Republicans Debate in Des Moines
FactCheck.org
December 12, 2007
More exaggerations and mis-statements in the final GOP debate before the Iowa caucuses.
Summary:
Read the detailed analysis here.
The 90-minute debate was sponsored by the Des Moines Register and televised nationally on CNN, Fox News Channel, MSNBC and C-SPAN3. It was the final debate among GOP candidates before the first-in-the-nation Iowa presidential nomination caucuses, which are scheduled for January 3.
Art? My little boy could have painted that…
by Sanchez Manning
Hampstead and Highgate Express
December 6, 2007
A Toddler with a nice line in tomato ketchup paintings has duped the art world into buying his work online.
Two-year-old Freddie Linsky’s artistic creations were posted by his mother Estelle Lovatt on the online gallery Saatchi.com and had respected art critics swooning.
Ms Lovatt, a freelance art critic and lecturer at the Hampstead School of Art in Kidderpore Avenue, added over-the-top descriptions to her son’s pieces.
One of Freddie’s paintings made up of red and green splodges called Sunrise is captioned: “A bold use of colour inspired by Monet’s plein air habit of painting, drawing on the natural world that surrounds us.”
She also wrote: “Freddie W. R. Linsky paints over and over, making us curious to know what is going on.
“It seems that one stroke is being repeated – the same stroke or one very close to it, hence the possibility of the infinite opening up of the structure of time.”
It began as a prank. But when buyers from all over the world started snapping up little Freddie’s artwork, Ms Lovatt kept up the pretence. Continue reading “Ketchup Art Prank”
Submitted by Peter Markus: An out of focus, wind blown blue piece of paper, lint or maybe even a feather dangling in front of security camera lens is declared a ghost by the locals and the media at this “haunted gas station. No arrests were made.
Parma, Ohio, November 11, 2007:
On August 17, 2007, Bill Moyers commented on the Rove Legacy on his PBS Bill Moyers Journal. Yesterday, The Village Voice ran James Ridgeway’s Grime Pays: a chronology cataloging Karl Rove’s “legacy” of dirty political tricks starting in the early 70’s.
Here’s the Moyers video (via MediaChannel.org), followed by a few highlights from the Voice article:
Here are highlights from The Village Voice, Grime Pays article:
1970: Rove pays visit to Chicago campaign headquarters of Alan Dixon, a Democrat running for state treasurer. Disguised as a volunteer, Rove steals official campaign letterhead and sends out 1,000 invitations to people in the city’s red-light district and soup kitchens, offering “free beer, free food, girls, and a good time for nothing” at Dixon headquarters. When hundreds of homeless and alcoholic Chicagoans show up at a fancy Dixon reception, Rove succeeds in embarrassing the candidate. Dixon still wins the election.
1971: Rove drops out of college to devote full time to College Republicans, where he becomes protégé of dirty trickster Lee Atwater, the group’s Southern regional coordinator. Rove becomes executive director, then national chairman.
1972: Under mentorship of dirty trickster Donald Segretti (who later went to jail for Watergate), Rove paints McGovern as “left-wing peacenik,” in spite of McGovern’s World War II stint piloting a B-24. Rove also works as staff assistant to George Bush Sr., then chairman of Republican National Committee (RNC). Continue reading “Karl Rove Legacy?”
From Media Lens: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media:
Media Alert: From Blair to Brown – The Killing Will Continue
July 23, 2007
The first truth of American foreign policy is that it is formulated to maximise corporate profits and state power. The second truth is that it is perennially sold to the public as a mission to spread freedom, democracy and human rights. The third truth is that the first two truths apply regardless of whether the Republicans or Democrats hold power.
But this cannot be true. After all, America led the 1999 Nato campaign to stop “the Serbian genocide machine” in Kosovo, as the Guardian observed in April of that year. (Peter Preston and Patrick Wintour, ‘War in the Balkans,’ The Guardian, April 4, 1999)
Although the word genocide is rarely used now that the basic facts have become undeniable, Kosovo continues to be almost universally acclaimed as an example of “humanitarian intervention”. Indeed it is used as circumstantial evidence for the purity of US-UK motives in Iraq. In reviewing the “legacy” of Tony Blair, Polly Toynbee wrote:
“Abroad, Blairism was a noble ideal of liberal interventionism: sheer force of moral argument brought a reluctant US to the rescue of Kosovo and the downfall of genocidal Milosevic.” (Toynbee, ‘Regrets? Too few to mention any in particular,’ The Guardian, May 11, 2007) Continue reading “The more things change, the more they stay the same”