Man Calls 911 To Save Him From Police

Now this is funny -- from the AP, 7/16/07:

Man calls 911 to save him from police

A 38-year-old man was arrested after he called 911 and told a dispatcher he was surrounded by police officers and needed help, authorities said.

Police officers met Dana Farrell Shelton after being called to investigate a disturbance at a bar on Sunday but had found no problems and told him to move along.

Shelton, who officers said appeared intoxicated, then called 911 to report he was "surrounded by Largo police," according to an arrest affidavit.

"Our officers were standing there scratching their heads. He called, standing there in their presence," Largo Sgt. Melanie Holley said. "It's one of our 'truth is stranger than fiction' cases."

Shelton was charged with misdemeanor misuse of 911. The charge carries maximum penalties of one year in jail and $1,000 in fines.

LA Times Front Page for Rent

Wow -- reporting on itself, the Los Angeles Times says:

Amid a steep decline in revenue, the Los Angeles Times is planning to break with long-standing tradition by selling ads on its front page, Publisher David Hiller said Friday.When it happens, the newspaper will be the largest metropolitan paper in the country to place ads there.

[...]

The ads would be confined to the "brand-and-image" category, he said. As contemplated, an ad would be a 1 1/2 -inch "strip" across the bottom of the page.

[...]

Employees in the Times newsroom circulated a petition Friday exhorting the publisher to reconsider."Page One has traditionally been sacrosanct among American newspapers," said Alan Mutter, a media investor and online commentator who used to be a newsroom executive with the San Francisco Chronicle. But with newspapers facing increasingly stiff competition from Internet-based news and entertainment sources, the industry has been scrambling to cut costs and find new sources of revenue, Mutter said, noting that the Wall Street Journal, the Chronicle and numerous other papers have been selling front-page ads for months."It's now become perfectly acceptable, just as not running stock tables in the business section and not having foreign bureaus is acceptable," he said.

I suggest you save a copy of your local newspaper -- soon -- so you can show your grandchildren an example of what people used to read back in the 20th Century.

(Via Howard Kurtz's Media Notes column at the Washington Post)

Ouch

"Family-values" Republican Senator David Vitter (LA) becomes the first pol ensared in the DC Madam scandal.

OK, so a Christian Right politician is exposed as a hypocrite. Not exactly the first time this has happened (and no, I don't think it discredits the Christian Right). But the weird thing is this old quote from his wife Wendy, included in a Salon piece about Vitter:

"I'm a lot more like Lorena Bobbitt than Hillary. If he does something like
that, I'm walking away with one thing, and it's not alimony, trust me," - Wendy Vitter, 2000, talking about the Clinton scandal to the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

Via Andrew Sullivan.

McCain Implosion

Some supposedly inside McCain scoop is reported here by Marc Ambinder in his Atlantic Monthly blog.