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Buddy of mine just heard it on a Dominican radio station Can anyone confirm this?

From Mark's website - Also, Mark gets an excellent call from a neurosurgeon who gives an inside look on what exactly Obamacare will do. For example, instead of patients, some people over a certain age will be considered, "units," as they try to dehumanize patients and the care they receive.

Bank of America’s actions continue to betray its words. CEO Brian Moynihan bravely maintained in an investor conference call last week that the beleaguered bank would be around for the next 230 years and did not need more new capital. He nixed selling equity at its current price levels, because it would be highly dilutive. Yet we and others have raised the issue that the bank is in a corner in dealing with its not so hot balance sheet. Not only are equity sales an alternative the bank desperately wants to avoid, but the other route back to health, earning...

Breaking on Fox. Castro has stepped down as head of the Communist country. Wonder what's going on???

In early July, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation placed its two London-based “quality” dailies, the Times and Sunday Times, behind a paywall, charging £1 for 24 hours access, or £2 a week (after an introductory £1 for the first month.*) At the same time, News Corp also forbad the UK’s Audit Bureau of Circulations from reporting site traffic*, so that no meaningful measure of the paywall’s effect was available. That situation has now been partially reversed, with News reporting some of its own numbers: they claim 105,000 total transactions for digital content between July and October.* (Several people have wrongly reported...

Ted Koppel on Sunday published an op-ed at the Washington Post wherein he claimed that opinionated television personalities like MSNBC's Keith Olbermann represent the death of real news. The "Countdown" host apparently isn't taking this lying down for he tweeted the following Sunday evening: FYI Special Comment tomorrow night: Koppel, False Equivalence, and his part in the real "death of news" [sic] Here's what's caught Olbermann's ire this time: To witness Keith Olbermann - the most opinionated among MSNBC's left-leaning, Fox-baiting, money-generating hosts - suspended even briefly last week for making financial contributions to Democratic political candidates seemed like a...

67% Say They Are Better Informed Than 10 Years AgoSunday, September 19, 2010 While newspapers and broadcast outlets struggle to survive in the Internet age, two-out-of-three Americans (67%) feel they are more informed today than they were 10 years ago. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just eight percent (8%) consider themselves less informed these days, while 22% think their level of knowledge is about the same. Women are more confident than men that they are better informed now. Adults ages 30 to 49 believe that more strongly than those in any other age group. Forty-four percent...

While channel-surfing last night I wanted to see which Conservative Rachel Maddow was trashing and lying about. To my astonishment, she was doing her best impression of 'Poor Dick Cheney' and his heart condition. The segment included a heart specialist explaining Cheney's new hardware as Rachel sat listening intensely and sympathetically. This was the most phony BS concern I've ever seen. Watching her, you knew what she was really thinking, 'When is this bastard gonna die?'Rachel Maddow's Dick Cheney Death Watch

The Honolulu Star-Bulletin and The Honolulu Advertiser have competed to chronicle Hawaii for more than a century. That rivalry ends Sunday when the Advertiser, Hawaii's largest newspaper, publishes its last edition. It's being bought out and combined with its smaller rival. More than 400 reporters, pressmen and other workers are losing their jobs. The 154-year-old Advertiser is the latest casualty of the recession and the upheaval that the Internet has unleashed on the traditional media industry. The new owner plans to launch the Honolulu Star-Advertiser on Monday. Honolulu now joins Denver and Seattle as cities served by only one daily...

US Approved Flight 253 Passenger List, Source Says Mark Hosenball American security agencies reviewed the passenger list for Northwest Airlines flight 253 before it left Amsterdam for Detroit on Christmas day and informed the airline that the flight was cleared to take off for the U.S., a Dutch government spokeswoman tells NEWSWEEK. Judith Sluyter, spokeswoman for the NCTB, the office of Holland's national counter-terrorism coordinator, said that before Flight 253 left Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport, the passenger list was transmitted in full to U.S. authorities for review. Under procedures negotiated between the United States and various foreign countries, U.S. agencies --...

BY JOHN LAIRD THE COLUMBIAN EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR Tea party patrons, rejoice! Unite! Or for some of you, I suppose, to arms! Your grass-roots movement has gained such momentum as to warrant a national blue-ribbon, round-table, fact-finding, rootin' tootin' hoedown! The first National Tea Party Convention is set for Feb. 4-6 at Nashville's Gaylord Opryland Hotel & Convention Center. For details, visit the Web site www.nationalteapartyconvention.com. Hurry, and get an early discount on registration: $558.95 (excluding hotel) to show up and protest excessive spending by the government. Headline speakers will include the electrifying and eloquent Sarah Palin, a renowned expert...

VANITY Fair yesterday took some of the deepest staff cuts at Condé Nast, but Editor Graydon Carter didn't deliver the bad news himself. Although Carter was said to have been at his restaurant, The Monkey Bar, Wednesday night, he was a no show in the office yesterday because he had jetted off on a vacation yesterday morning. Vanity Fair's layoffs were said to be in the double-digit range, and hit as high as senior editors and as low as fact checkers, and were deep, in part, because Carter largely ignored the edict to chop 5 percent late last year.

The New York Times reports today that the paper will cut 8 percent of its newsroom staff, or around 100 people by the end of 2009. Currently, the New York Times employs 1,250 staff members in the news department. The media company is planning to offer buyouts to both union and non-union staff and will need to implement layoffs if they can’t get enough people to participate in the buyout offer.

The public’s assessment of the accuracy of news stories is now at its lowest level in more than two decades of Pew Research surveys, and Americans’ views of media bias and independence now match previous lows. Just 29% of Americans say that news organizations generally get the facts straight, while 63% say that news stories are often inaccurate. In the initial survey in this series about the news media’s performance in 1985, 55% said news stories were accurate while 34% said they were inaccurate. That percentage had fallen sharply by the late 1990s and has remained low over the last...

Visiting Chinese top legislator Wu Bangguo (L) shakes hands with Fidel Castro, first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba, in Havana on Thursday.

More than $10bn in advertising disappeared from US media markets in the first six months of this year, according to new data that show intense pressure on media owners and ad agencies as they search for other business models. Preliminary figures from Nielsen show a 15.4 per cent year-on-year decline in US advertising revenues, the largest drop for any period in the decade since the marketing and media measurement group began compiling such reports. The study showed sharp differences in the behaviour of different media and product categories, with cable television the only medium on which ad spend increased, up...

Freedom could file bankruptcy this week - source * Freedom has reached agreements with lenders - report (Recasts; adds new sourcing) PHILADELPHIA, Aug 30 (Reuters) - Freedom Communications Inc, owner of the Orange County Register newspaper, is expected to file for bankruptcy this week, a source familiar with the situation said on Sunday. Freedom, which has been majority owned for more than 70 years by the Hoiles family, has reached agreements with its lenders to restructure its debts, according to a report in the online edition of The Wall Street Journal. The lenders include JPMorgan Chase (JPM.N), SunTrust and Union...

A new picture of Fidel Castro has been published in a state-run newspaper, apparently showing Cuba's ailing former leader in much better health. The photograph in Juventud Rebelde, the Communist Youth newspaper, showed Mr Castro talking to Ecuador's left-wing president, Rafael Correa. Mr Castro, 83, was dressed more smartly than in other recent photos, wearing a white shirt rather than a tracksuit. He has not been seen in public since undergoing an operation in 2006. Mr Castro stepped down and his younger brother, Raul, took over his various offices.

The recent cases of a right-to-life extremist accused of killing an abortion doctor in Kansas and an elderly white supremacist accused in the fatal shooting of a Holocaust museum guard in Washington, D.C., match warnings in the report. It concluded individuals with white supremacist views, acting as so-called lone wolves, pose the most significant domestic terrorism threat because they are difficult for law enforcement to detect before they commit crimes. Right-wing extremism is not a liberal figment of the imagination. As the DHS report and recent incidents make clear, it is a growing threat and a valid concern for federal...

I'm not going to complain about the latest price increases announced by the Boston Globe, since I'm on the record as believing that newspapers can and should charge a lot more for their print editions. But does it have to be so confusing? (snip) Over at the Boston Phoenix, Adam Reilly, ponders moving to online-only, and asks whether his readers will pay the higher price. My answer: I couldn't rely solely on Boston.com, the Globe's free Web site, because its ad servers are miserably slow. It's fine for reading a few stories, but not the whole paper. (snip) In such...

The New York Times Co. said last night that it is notifying federal authorities of its plans to shut down the Boston Globe, raising the possibility that New England's most storied newspaper could cease to exist within weeks. After down-to-the-wire negotiations did not produce millions of dollars in union concessions, the Times Co. said that it will file today a required 60-day notice of the planned shutdown under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification law. The move could amount to a negotiating ploy to extract further concessions from the Globe's unions, since the notice does not require the Times Co....

USA TODAY -- 2,113,725 – (-7.46%) WALL STREET JOURNAL -- 2,082,189 -- 0.61% NEW YORK TIMES -- 1,039,031 -- (-3.55%) L.A. TIMES -- 723,181 -- (-6.55%) WASHINGTON POST -- 665,383 -- (-1.16%) NEW YOK DAILY NEWS -- 602,857 -- (-14.26%) NEW YORK POST -- 558,140 -- (-20.55%) CHICAGO TRIBUNE -- 501,202 -- (-7.47%) HOUSTON CHRONICLE -- 425,138 -- (-13.96%) ARIZONA REPUBLIC -- 389,701 -- (-5.72%) DENVER POST (02/28/2009 to 03/31/2009) -- 371,728 -- N/A NEWSDAY -- 368,194 -- (-3.01%) DALLAS MORNING NEWS -- 331,907 -- (-9.88%) MINNEAPOLIS STAR-TRIBUNE -- 320,076 -- (-0.71%) CHICAGO SUN-TIMES -- 312,141 -- (-0.04%) SAN FRANCISCO...

William Dean Singleton, a newspaper publisher and chairman of the Associated Press, speaks for many of his comrades when he says online news aggregators are making him "mad as hell and we are not going to take it any more." Singleton and his colleagues threaten legal action against Web sites like Google, Drudge Report, Huffington Post and Digg -- the sites that have been linking to their newspaper stories without paying. But their righteous indignation is misplaced. Forget that these aggregators push vast amounts of traffic to their sites and readers to stories that would otherwise disappear without a trace....

Uproar over 'news story' ad on front page of LA Times April 10, 2009 WASHINGTON (AFP) – An advertisement dressed up as a news story on the front page of the Los Angeles Times has reporters at the newspaper fuming and the publisher defending the move. The advertisement, for the NBC television series "Southland," appeared on page one of the Times on Thursday. Although it was labelled "advertisement," the ad resembled a news story complete with a bold-type headline. According to the blog MediaMemo, more than 100 staffers at the newspaper signed a petition protesting the appearance of the fake...

Bank of America has sued The Columbian Publishing Co., the parent company of Vancouver's daily newspaper, to recover $15.4 million in unpaid debts and interest. The bank also seeks to foreclose on the newspaper's current headquarters through a sheriff's sale. The bank's suit, filed Monday in Clark County Superior Court, says The Columbian Publishing Co. has defaulted on $14.5 million it borrowed for working capital between 2006 and 2007. The company owes $498,419 more under a separate agreement tied to interest rate changes, according to the suit and bank spokeswoman Shirley Norton. As part of a 2006 loan, The Columbian...

~ EXCERPT ~ CHICAGO, Illinois (CNN) — The company that owns the Chicago Sun-Times and 58 other newspapers and online sites said Tuesday it had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

SEATTLE - The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which has chronicled the news of the city since logs slid down its steep streets to the harbor and miners caroused in its bars before heading north to Alaska's gold fields, will print its final edition Tuesday.

NEW YORK — The New York Times [NYT] Co. has sold 21 floors of its headquarters building near New York’s Times Square. The sale to investment firm W.P. Carey & Co. is for $225 million. The newspaper had said in January that it was in talks with Carey for such a deal. Like other publishers, it has been seeking different ways for raising cash to pay off debt as sales of advertising decline. It suspended its dividend in February.

Obama will use spring summit to bring Cuba in from the coldUS companies are queuing up as the president moves to ease restrictions on travel and trade, raising hopes of warmer relations and an end to the embargo Rory Carroll, Latin America correspondent The Observer, Sunday 8 March 2009 President Barack Obama is poised to offer an olive branch to Cuba in an effort to repair the US's tattered reputation in Latin America. The White House has moved to ease some travel and trade restrictions as a cautious first step towards better ties with Havana, raising hopes of an eventual...

HAVANA – The ouster of Cuba's two most prominent younger leaders leaves more doubt than ever about who will guide the country once the Castro brothers and their gray-haired revolutionary contemporaries are gone. President Raul Castro is 77. His hand-picked No. 2, Jose Ramon Machado Ventura, is a year his senior. And there are no obvious next-generation successors in the ranks of mostly obscure communist party officials, military officers and bureaucrats who were suddenly promoted this week in Cuba's largest leadership shake-up in decades. "This is the old guard, most of them are very traditional hard-liners," said Uva de Aragon,...

It was announced this evening that the Philadelphia "Daily News" soon would no longer publish as an independent newspaper, but instead would begin printing as a separate "edition" of the Philadelphia "Inquirer". Both papers are owned by the same parent company which announced only last week that it was filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. In doing so the company insisted that the filing was only to reduce its debt load, and that current operations were financially strong for both papers - - - maybe not.......

HAVANA – President Raul Castro abruptly removed some of Cuba's most powerful officials Monday, putting a personal stamp on the government in the biggest shakeup since he took over from his ailing brother Fidel Castro a year ago. The changes replaced some key Fidel loyalists, including the longtime foreign minister and the secretary of the Council of State, with men closer to Raul. They also reduced the enormous powers of a vice president credited with saving Cuba's economy after the fall of the Soviet Union. But analysts saw no immediate indication that the changes are related to hopes for closer...

NEW HAVEN, Conn. — As sharp revenue reductions put the future of many U.S. newspapers in doubt, one idea gaining attention is the conversion of newspapers into tax-exempt nonprofits supported by large endowments. Although viewed by many as a long shot at best, such a radical change could be a savior for the industry and its vital role in a democracy. That's why the endowment model is drawing renewed attention as newspapers impose massive layoffs, scale back home delivery and make other drastic cuts to counter plunging advertising revenue amid a recession that has compounded struggles from the migration of...

DENVER – Questions about the future of the Rocky Mountain News had become so common, the newspaper's staff put up a handwritten paper sign on the news desk that said, "We don't know." On Thursday, someone wrote over it in heavy black marker: "Now we know." Colorado's oldest newspaper, which launched in Denver in 1859, printed its last edition Friday, leaving The Denver Post as the only daily newspaper in town. Since 2001, the News has shared business operations with The Denver Post in a joint operating agreement between Scripps and The Post's owner, MediaNews Group Inc.

Breaking news on Philadelphia local TV - Philadelphia "Inquirer" and "Daily News" are filing for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy - company says papers will continue to publish, filing is to retire debt primarily -

Three Calkins Media newspapers in suburban Philadelphia will stop publishing Saturday print editions next week. The Bucks County Courier Times, The Intelligencer of Doylestown and the Burlington County Times in Willingboro, N.J., will continue to publish Saturday editions online. The newspapers announced the change Saturday. It goes into effect Feb. 7. Publisher Michael Scobey says the move is being made to control costs and provide expanded local and national news and sports coverage. Scobey says the change is a return to the traditional publishing schedule. The Saturday print editions were introduced about five years ago. He says the market no...

A photograph of Cuban leader Fidel Castro has appeared for the first time in more than two months. The office of Argentine President Cristina Fernandez released the photo on Friday, two days after they met in Havana. [Snip] The long spell without a photo of Mr. Castro had contributed to rumors he was gravely ill.

El País newspaper in Spain reported Wednesday that there were apparent movements at the Armed Forces and Interior Ministries Friday after Castro suffered a "possible'' heart attack. Another Spain-based web site, Cubaecuentro.com, reported that his condition was ‘‘irreversible."

Virtually all the predictions about the death of old media have assumed a comfortingly long time frame for the end of print—the moment when, amid a panoply of flashing lights, press conferences, and elegiac reminiscences, the newspaper presses stop rolling and news goes entirely digital. Most of these scenarios assume a gradual crossing-over, almost like the migration of dunes, as behaviors change, paradigms shift, and the digital future heaves fully into view. The thinking goes that the existing brands—The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal—will be the ones making that transition, challenged but still dominant as...

Get ready for a Star Tribune bankruptcy filing. The newsroom's Newspaper Guild announced today they had ended negotiations with management over concessions. The Strib's owners have said that unless all Strib's unions agree to a specific list of cutbacks, they will file for bankruptcy. Says Guild co-chair Graydon Royce, "We tried to work this out and this didn't happen. All we can do is go by what they have said, and that [bankruptcy] is what they said will happen. So we'll find out." Strib publisher Chris Harte has backed away from previous, more subtle bankruptcy threats, but few expect that...

There is no Hollywood ending in sight in 2009 for the entertainment industry, which along with the rest of the nation is experiencing its worst economic slump in decades. The fallout from declining local TV ad revenue, weakening DVD sales and diminishing sources of film financing will continue to pound Los Angeles' signature industry, which employs more than 200,000 people and pumps an estimated $20 billion to $30 billion into the local economy. Many expect that will trigger further layoffs at the studios, networks, independent production outfits and other media companies on top of the thousands of job losses that...

NBC Universal is in serious negotiations to give its 10 p.m. weeknight time slot to Jay Leno, a move that would secure the popular "Tonight Show" host's place at the network after he vacates his late night perch this spring, according to three sources close to the network. An announcement could come as early as Tuesday. The move would address several major problems for the network, which is bleeding ratings and has failed to develop any new hit shows this fall, at a time when advertising revenue is plummeting. Under the proposal, NBC would only develop programming for two hours...

NEW YORK – The New York Times is reporting that NBC has signed its late-night star Jay Leno to a contract that will keep him at the network and move him to prime time. Under the new deal, Leno, whose "Tonight" show hosting job will go to Conan O'Brien, would have a new show airing 10 p.m. Eastern every weeknight. The deal reportedly will be announced Tuesday.

Fifteen years ago, I had a stupid idea. I was the co-executive producer on ..."Cheers." NBC...was faltering: Ratings were sliding, money was tight, management was nervous ...Johnny Carson...was retiring... I was 28 then, and like all 28-year-olds, I had no idea exactly how stupid I was. So when I found myself standing next to the president of NBC ...I offered my solution to his network's crisis. "You know what you should do?" ... "You should move the 'Tonight Show' with Jay Leno to 10 p.m. Think of all the money you'd save." "That's a pretty stupid suggestion," he said to...

SANTIAGO DE CUBA, Cuba (Reuters) – Cuba celebrated on Thursday the 50th anniversary of a 1959 revolution whose leader Fidel Castro transformed the island into a communist state that has survived despite decades of opposition from the United States and the collapse of its Cold War benefactors. The revolution's landmark anniversary comes at a time when the era of Fidel Castro, now 82 and in poor health, is winding down and uncertainty hangs over the future of the Cuba he built into an improbable world player admired for its social gains but criticized for its human rights record. Celebrations have...

Cuban Stalinism at 50--and the Media Lies Continue By Humberto Fontova "Cuban mothers let me assure you that I will solve all Cuba's problems without spilling a drop of blood." Upon entering Havana on January 7, 1959, Cuba's new leader Fidel Castro broadcast that promise into a phalanx of microphones. As the jubilant crowd erupted with joy, Castro continued. “Cuban mothers let me assure you that because of me you will never have to cry." The following day, just below San Juan Hill in eastern Cuba, a bulldozer rumbled to a start, clanked into position, and started pushing dirt into...

In our favorite continuing series on the Decline and Fall of The Fourth Estate, see here, here, here, and here, there is more good news. The New York Times Co's (NYT.N) November advertising revenue fell 20 percent, the company said on Wednesday, illustrating how the financial crisis is aggravating dizzying revenue declines at U.S. newspapers. Ad revenue at the publisher's New York Times Media Group, which includes the Times newspaper, fell 21.2 percent from a year earlier because of a drop in real estate and jobs classified advertising. . . . Total company revenue fell 13.9 percent. More . ....

The king is dead. Long live the king. Victory is ours. The internet, which emerged this year as a leading source for campaign news, has now surpassed all other media except television as a main source for national and international news. Currently, 40% say they get most of their news about national and international issues from the internet, up from just 24% in September 2007. For the first time in a Pew survey, more people say they rely mostly on the internet for news than cite newspapers (35%). . . More . . .

As Cuba prepares to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Fidel Castro's revolution on 1 January, most of those in power are the same people who fought alongside him half a century ago. ...But there is a new generation of communists waiting in the wings. ...The youngest, Liaena Hernandez, is just 18 years old. A petite young woman with long black hair and an engaging smile, she has been a political activist since her early teens... "Having young Cubans in parliament shows that the revolution continues. It isn't just something from our history..." Her father is in the army and she...