- Hooray (I think) for Hank Clinton? Not really sure of the appropriate response when a former presidential candidate is able to get her remaining campaign debt to $6.4 million and that’s the lowest it’s been all year. Not exactly what you’d hope for from your Secretary of State-designate, but I suppose it’s better than having one with a $7.4 million presidential campaign debt; it’s all about relativity. As the month of November ended, Hank was still trying to shovel out from a debt that, at its peak, was more than $12 million at the end of June, according to a report filed Saturday with the Federal Election Commission. I’d always wondered what the price of a failed presidential bid is - aside from the total loss of all personal integrity, dignity and character - and now I know. Fortunately, Hank says she hopes to pay off her debt before her possible confirmation as secretary of state, which I think would be a solid idea. It’s not like this is a few thousand in student loans from college hanging over her head; this is millions of dollars in campaign funds she was given. Oh, and how magnanimous of Hank to officially forgive the $13.2 million she personally loaned her campaign. Must have been a tough decision, agreeing to forgive yourself a $13.2 million debt owed - to yourself. If you are keeping score at home with your own “failed presidential candidate ledger book” score card, here’s how to score November for Hank: she began November with $985,000 in her campaign account and raised nearly $290,000 by the end of the month. Her campaign paid out $1.2 million, mainly to unpaid vendors, ending the month with $188,000 in the bank. As such, she ends the month with a total of $6.4 million owed, distributed amongst a total of 16 creditors. Her largest creditor remains Penn, Schoen & Berland, a political consulting and polling firm that advised Clinton during her presidential bid - apparently not well enough. Actually, the firm might want to consider slashing its fees in the future, as I can't see many candidates rushing to hire them after the firm's president, Mark Penn, served as chief strategist to Clinton for most of her campaign before being forced out of his position after revelations that he lobbied for a U.S.-Colombia trade deal on behalf of the Colombian government despite Clinton's opposition to the measure. So a) dude was basically fired, and b) the work he did do was for a campaign that came from ahead in the Democratic race to choke away a lead in the polls and the party’s nomination. Money sure doesn’t buy you much in politics, not as much as you would think, anyhow.…….
- Never have I been prouder of a team in any sport at any level than I am of Detroit Lions at this moment. With the dream of an 0-16 NFL season in peril and the Lions with an infinitely winnable contest in their final home game against the season against the New Orleans Saints, the Lions showed what they’re made of. Instead of seizing the moment, rising up and ruining the dream, they manned down, didn’t do what it took to win and showed the lack of heart and execution that has become their hallmark. Faced with a Saints team that had been eliminated from the playoff race a week before and had nothing much to play for, the Lions could have come out like gangbusters, put up a couple of early touchdowns and choked their way to a win. They could have, but these Lions are better (or worse) than that. They gave up a touchdown on New Orleans’ opening drive and kept giving them up all day long, six TDs in all. The Saints waltzed to a 42-7 win in which they converted every single third down until taking a knee on a third down at the end of the game in order to run out the clock. Drew Brees soared past 350 yards passing, Marques Colston caught two TD passes and the Lions amassed a studly 255 yards in total offense. Quarterback Dan Orlovsky stopped playing like he was the next Joe Montana, coming crashing back to Earth with 10-of-23 passing for 125 yards and two interceptions after several disturbing and inexplicable weeks of competence. Four Saints rushed for a touchdown and this game was over at halftime with New Orleans ahead 28-7. This was just the type of performance I needed to see from the Lions at this point, equal parts lack of heart, ineptitude, failed execution and lack of focus. Seeing this performance, I fully believe that they are ready, willing and able to march into Green Bay for Sunday’s season finale and lose to finish off the reverse perfect-o. I’ve said it all year, but I’ll say it again here: now is not the time to suddenly focus, try hard and play smart, Lions. Just keep not doing what it takes to win and this will all end soon, and in spectacular fashion…..
- Speaking of Michigan….I think Brighton (Mich.) City Council has an admirable goal here, but their execution is a bit off and because of that, they could end up seeing 75-80 percent of the town’s residents hit with $500 fines on a regular basis. That’s because last week, the council approved a public conduct code which includes fining someone up to $500 for being annoying. And how to define being annoying? Is merely existing if you are an offensive, ridiculous tool like, well, like anyone appearing on American Karaoke or The Hills, enough for a fine, assuming you live in Brighton, Michigan? Well, according to one section of the approved bill, "It shall be unlawful for a person to engage in a course of conduct or repeatedly commit acts that alarm or seriously annoy another person and that serve no legitimate purpose." So who makes the final call on what’s annoying enough to violate the law? Rest assured, it’s someone who is utterly and completely qualified and is in no way ever biased, wrong, off-base or unreliable (channeling my best Borat voice)…..NOT! Yes, it’s the Brighton Police Department! Right, because cops are always, smart, fair and on point. Yes, the Brighton City Council has a approved a totally subjective ordinance on which police officers will have the final say. I’m giving this all of one week on the books before it’s stricken. Two things are going to happen here, I guaran-frickin-tee, 1) residents will abuse this law and make so many calls to police that it becomes a nuisance and impossible to enforce, and 2) someone charged under the law will take it to court, challenge it as unconstitutional and win. Even worse, this bill also contains language making it unlawful for anyone to insult, accost, molest or otherwise annoy any person in public. If you’re going to try to prosecute everyone who insults another person in public…..Brighton better hire ten full-time judges working around the clock without restroom breaks. Oh, and props to the two council members expressed concerns for the language of the ordinance, but voted for it anyway. The ordinance takes effect Jan. 17, 2009, so expect the full-fledged shit storm to hit right around January 25……
- Okay, so I was off by a week last week when I proclaimed that both Heroes and Prison Break were done for the fall season. PB had one final episode this week, with a major reveal providing the requisite cliffhanger. This week saw Linc and his new team of Gretchen, T-Bag and Don Self in Miami, trying to find the people who stole Scylla from Self and Gretchen last week during the attempted sale of the device. Linc is the de facto team leader, but T-Bag and Self seem intent on undermining him. The group’s first tip comes from tracking the phone number Gretchen and Self received a call from last episode during the sale process. That tip takes Linc to a club in Miami where he gets into a brawl trying to extract some information and finds a female employee at the club who claims that a server there dates the guy Linc is looking for. Together, they go to the beach and wait in Linc’s company-provided SUV for the second girl to show up. When she does, Linc gets out of the vehicle but senses a setup. He ducks for cover and returns fire as shots ring out, but the girl he came with, Tia, flees in a car with the men who shot at him. Fortunately for Linc, he snagged her wallet before getting out of the vehicle and her driver’s license provides the group’s next lead. T-Bag and Self ransack her apartment and rip the hard drive from her computer, but don’t seem to find much. Meanwhile, Alex Mahone shows up in Miami, having successfully fled from Agents Wheeler and Lang of the FBI and gotten a call from Linc inviting him to Miami. The five-person team forges ahead, with Mahone using his law enforcement background to break down Tia’s movements from the past day and track her to a transaction she made at a local marina. Going there yields more information, specifically that the man Tia went to the marina with rented some space there and asked to have his spot as far from the coast guard’s location as possible. Pointing a gun at the owner of the marina also produced some intel, specifically that a charter boat from the Bahamas is what this man who was with Tia was waiting for. Self and the rest of the team pose as Homeland Security agents in order to search the bags of everyone on the boat, believing that Scylla might be aboard. The search yields no results, but the search through Tia’s hard drive does. Gretchen recognizes a photo on the drive as the man who stole Scylla and sets up a meeting with him - on her own. At the meeting, she offers to sell out her new team, point the company in the wrong direction and allow the new custodians of Scylla to get away - for $10 million. When she gets back to the hotel, she rallies the team by telling them that she knows who has Scylla and where to find him. Everyone rushes right into an apparent ambush, where Gretchen’s new business partner has men waiting with guns. But at the last moment, she pulls another double cross, shooting two of those men and sparking a firefight in which she herself is shot. However, all the members of the other group die in the process, leaving a wounded Gretchen with Linc standing over her, gun pointed at her head. Ironically, it’s T-Bag, six-time killer, advocating for her to live. Linc doesn’t shoot Gretchen, leaving her for the cops to find as he, Mahone, Self and T-Bag flee. Fleeing is also what Linc’s little brother Michael has in mind. He’s being held by the Company at a remote mountain house 60 miles outside of Los Angeles following last episode’s surgery that successfully removed a growth from his brain. However, his brain is under attack again, this time in the psychological sense. The General has arranged for a psychologist to stay with Michael and attempt to manipulate him into agreeing to join the Company. This shrink attempts to Jedi mind trick Michael by revealing that his mother is still alive, that she worked for the company as an environmental researcher who had been watching her sons from afar for years and knew everything about them and who was just as brilliant as Michael. The doctor then told Michael that his secluded stay in the mountains was all about getting him to join the Company, tossing in a photo album of Michael and Linc as kids for proof that he was telling the truth about their mother. Michael rejected the offer and although the doctor believed he could crack Michael if given a few days, the General became impatient and panicked when T-Bag phoned in a tip from Miami after overhearing Linc on the phone with Sarah, talking about how she had found out Michael’s location. She found out after getting a bizarre text message with an address, going there, being grabbed by masked men in an unmarked van, taken to a freeway underpass/back alley and jammed inside a limo with none other than Lisa Tabak, the daughter of the General who tendered her resignation from the Company last episode because of disgust over the direction it was headed. She informed Sarah exactly what was being done to Michael and what the time frame was, then kicked Sarah out of the car lest they be seen together. But T-Bag’s tip moved the timeline for everything up a bit, leading the General to demand that the psychologist use psychotropic drugs to expedite the process of winning Michael over to their side. Michael had other ideas, having spotted a chemical cleanser in the bathroom he was given to use, along with a water heater in a nearby closet. Drawing on a formula he had in the full-upper-body tattoo he sported for the first three seasons of the show and used to break out of Fox River, he concocted a recipe to cause the water heater to explode just as the Company thugs were holding him dwon so the doctor could administer the drugs to him. That gave Michael an opening to grab a gun, force one of the thugs to inject the doctor with the drugs instead and then handcuff himself to the bed. Michael then made a run for it, but the Company operatives who had shown up to transport him back to L.A. once he had been drugged showed up and together with the men already on site, gave chase in an ATV. The chase reached its end at the nearest road, where Michael appeared to be cornered. As he was ordered to raise his hands and get down on his knees, Sarah came careening around the corner in a jeep, crushing the ATV picking up Michael. The two escaped but inexplicably stopped a little ways down the road, where Michael got out of the car to clear his head and revealed to Sarah that he believed his mother was still alive. Ironically, Linc was even closer to that truth. Taking a phone call on the phone taken from the man Gretchen had made a deal with and then double-crossed at the big shootout, Linc answered and told the person on the other end, who didn’t answer when they didn’t recognize the voice, that their man was dead and was coming for them. On the other end, we saw the person Linc was talking to and it was his mother, holding Scylla and realizing immediately just who she had talked to. That’s where we’ll be leaving PB for a few weeks until the final six episodes of the season roll around after the holidays…..
- Amazingly, a recording of late Beatles front man John Lennon under the influence went for an amazing $30,000…..and the substance he was under the influence of wasn’t pot, coke, LSD or PCP. No, the substance in question was allegedly alcohol, with a drunken Lennon fumbling through a cover of Lloyd Price's "Just Because." It may not have been “Let It Be” or “Imagine,” but it didn’t need to be to fetch that $30,000 price tag at auction Sunday in Los Angeles. The tape was sold at Bonhams and Butterfields auction house in Los Angeles, with auction house spokeswoman Margaret Barrett saying Lennon had apparently had one too many when he got behind the mic in the 1973 recording session. "It was six minutes, 16 seconds, and John singing very drunk and with John ad-libbing his own lyrics into the song -- so it's actually a fun song to listen to," Barrett said. The auction catalogue, which did not reveal the identity of the tape’s former owner, described the recording as "One standard orange-colored cassette tape with audio of Lennon in fall of 1973 singing the Lloyd Price song 'Just Because.’” It would have been cool to hear it, but for $30,000, I think I could buy a whole lot more music than one song and have it be by artists who are at least somewhat sober and understandable, which Lennon was - most of the time, just not here……
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