- A word of advice for you, reality TV knob Jon Gosselin: You need to rethink your plan to sue the TLC network for $5 million. While you may believe that the network and its representatives damaged your reputation and career by preventing you from working with other media outlets, your lawsuit is inspiring an idea in my mind that I think will catch on with the rest of America which, by the way, hates your freaking guts, you IQ-deprived ass clown. While you sue TLC for $5 million, I find myself think that I would like to sue you, Jon Gosselin, for the freaking emotional distress and suffering you have inflicted on me and every other American who has been subjected to even one second of conversation or news about your sorry ass. You, my man, are a random idiot who became quasi-famous only because he knocked up his attention whore of a wife and with the aid of fertility drugs, that pregnancy resulted in sextuplets. You are prolific only in the fact that you have cranked out eight kids, which is eight more than a nincompoop like you should ever be allowed to have. So if you don’t back off your lawsuit against TLC, I’m going to go ahead with my plan to sue you for whatever you might earn from the case, doubled. As for the lawsuit itself, Gosselin alleges that TLC contacted various media outlets he'd been in touch with to persuade them to stop dealing with him. "Their behavior has caused Jon great anguish and it has caused him financial losses," said his attorney, Mark Heller. Heller maintains Gosselin did not have an attorney or a manager present when he signed the contract for "Jon and Kate Plus Eight" with TLC last year. Umm, whose fault would that be? "They had a cadre of lawyers so they had a one-sided agreement," Heller added. No dispute there, counselor. Your client is a moron and the fact is that even if he’d had F. Lee Bailey and Johnnie Cochran in their primes, he would have been totally outclassed and outsmarted – even if TLC were represented by a half-dozen mentally handicapped raccoons. Gosselin’s lawsuit is actually a counterclaim against a lawsuit that TLC has filed against him, but it gives him a chance to claim the network breached its own contract with him and owes him $175,000 for shows that already aired. The contract, dated April 28, 2008, says he gets $22,500 for each half-hour episode and $45,000 for each one-hour episode, according to the lawsuit. The lawsuit was filed in District Court in Rockville, Maryland, where TLC's parent company, Discovery Communications, is based. TLC’s original lawsuit claims that Gosselin is in violation of his contract with them for making paid and unpaid TV appearances without the network's permission. The next hearing in that case will be Dec. 14, giving Gosselin time to waste even more of the world’s time by trying to extract as much time in the public eye as possible while awaiting his eventual slaughter in court……….
- What with our country currently running a national deficit in the trillions of dollars, I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that the federal government making $98 billion in improper payments in fiscal 2009 is not a good thing. Welcome to life in these here United States, where a new administration has managed to show that it can colossally f*ck up just like the previous one. The 2009 total for improper payments -- from outright fraud to misdirected reimbursements due to factors such as an illegible doctor's signature -- was a 37.5 percent increase over the $72 billion in 2008. Those figures were provided by Peter Orszag, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. To address the problem, President Obama will issue an executive order in coming days to combat the problem. In a disturbing development, Orszag was unable to provide an overall figure for what percentage of the bad payments was due to fraud, nor could he provide a breakdown on how much of the total improper payments involved spending on Obama's $787 billion economic recovery package passed in February. Instead of those answers, we will get an executive order designed to promote some of the very things Obama promised in his campaign and has thus far failed to deliver: transparency, strengthen accountability and improving the government payment process. "Our goal is to make sure the right person or entity gets the right amount at the right time," Orszag said. He also attempted to deflect blame for the problem by explaining that the increase in the total over the previous year was due in part to improved detection through stricter and expanded accounting methods. In other words, the problem really isn't any worse than in the past, we were just paying closer attention this time. Examples of excess are easy to find, examples like the $24 billion of improper payments in the Medicare fee-for-service health care program for senior citizens. Should Obama and Democratic leaders actually succeed in eliminating more than $100 billion in government subsidies for the Medicare Advantage program in which private insurers supplement standard Medicare coverage and shave the several hundred billion dollars from national health care costs that they are touting, it would be a decisive victory indeed. As for the executive order, it will set up up Web site dashboards for each agency to provide the public with "easy-to-follow" information on improper payments, designate Senate-appointed officials in each agency to be accountable for combating improper payments and require specific plans for reducing improper payments when any agency shows an increase two years in a row. States and local communities will be rewarded for reducing improper payments and penalized for not reporting such offenses. In total, 99 agencies and programs that received $1.98 trillion in 2009, with $98 billion of the money -- or 5 percent -- in improper payments. The most egregious offenders were: $24 billion for Medicare fee-for service, out of a total of $308 billion, $18 billion for Medicaid health care for the poor, out of a total of $188 billion, $12 billion for Medicaid Advantage, out of a total of $77 billion, $12 billion for unemployment insurance, out of a total of $119 billion and 12 billion for the Earned Income Tax Credit, out of a total of $48 billion. In other words, more of the same for a country that is still in need of drastic change……….....
- Tony Dungy is a man of many talents, but he is apparently on some sort of mission to become the Mother Theresa of American football. In addition to his new role as an analyst for NBC on its Sunday night football show, he has spent the past year or so as a mentor to embattled quarterback Michael Vick following Vick’s conviction and jail term for operating a dogfighting ring in his native Virginia. Dungy met with Vick regularly during his time behind bars and has continued to serve as a mentor and role model since Vick’s release from prison. Now that Vick is a member of the Philadelphia Eagles and has managed to stay out of trouble thus far in the season, calling Dungy’s mentoring efforts a success would seem fair. Having gotten one train wreck back on the tracks, Dungy has now set his sights on a new reclamation project: New Mexico football coach Mike Locksley. Locksley, famous for a) guiding his team to a winless season up to this point and b) punching one of his assistant coaches in the head and choking him during a Sept. 20 staff meeting, says he has turned to Tony Dungy as a personal mentor. After losing his first ten games as a head coach and being suspended for blasting one of his assistants in the face, this would seem like a good idea. Dungy is universally respected around the sports world as a man of faith, character and integrity. When he speaks, people listen and they believe what he is telling them. If he is mentoring you and you do enough to earn his trust and convince him that you have changed, his word will count for a lot with the rest of the world. "I see coach Dungy being a guy with a wealth of experience and knowledge, not just in football, but in life," Locksley said. "He's a class act. A guy that I have a ton of respect for and I thought it would be another source of information for me to grow as a head coach." So far, Locksley says their conversations have focused on how his first year on the sideline at New Mexico has "been a whirlwind for me.” The first thing Dungy should advise Locksley to do, aside from not punching any more assistant coaches in the face, is to apologize to former New Mexico coach J.B. Gerald, the man he allegedly choked and punched him during that Sept. 20 attack. Should Dungy be able to bring Locksley’s troubled coaching career back from the brink of disaster on the heels of steering Vick back from disaster, he truly will be on his way to earning the title of the Mother Theresa of the football world……....
- This next story is more than a little kooky. Sure, when most of us go out of town for a few days, we worry about the security of our most valued possessions. Will someone break into our home while we are away and steal our money, jewelry and electronics? We all have those fears, but we don’t all take our life savings to a local Catholic shrine for safekeeping while we’re gone. An unidentified woman in Emmitsburg, Md. decided that this was her best option and elected to quietly leave $40,000 worth of coins, her life savings, at the Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes at Mt. St. Mary's University near Emmitsburg. This weirdo claimed she wanted the Virgin Mary to watch over her money while she was out of town, and it apparently worked. When she returned home, she was able to get her money back from operators of the shrine, who thought they had been blessed with a big donation when a groundskeeper found the two plastic freezer bags filled with gold and silver while raking leaves. "I said, 'Why did you leave it there?' And she said, 'Well, I had to go away and I was afraid to leave it and I wanted the Blessed Mother to watch over it for me -- and evidently she did because you found it,"' shrine director William Tronolone said. Apparently grotto visitors often leave anonymous donations, so this wasn’t totally out of the blue. But Tronolone admits that he was surprised when Director the woman approached him after a noon Mass Sunday, six days after the discovery, to ask whether anyone had found the rare coins. Fortunately for her, university officials had had the coins appraised, notified police and placed the rare currency, contained inside two freezer bags and initially covered with leaves, in a safe. Ultimately this situation could be a great thing for this bizarre woman, as the school's security director was able to persuade her to put the coins in her safe deposit box (seriously). That begs the obvious question of why the hell a person wouldn’t just put the coins in the safety deposit box to begin with. Even if you are one of the most religious people in the world and have all the confidence in the world that some inanimate object is watching over you, how is a safety deposit box at some random Maryland bank a terrible option? Besides, the Emmitsburg statue is a replica, not even the real thing. Sure, it draws more than 200,000 visitors annually, but a knockoff statue safeguarding your life savings? As bad as the outlook is for banks these days, I think I’d pick the safety deposit box……..
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