In declaring May 20th to be "Everybody Draw Muhammad Day," Seattle artist Molly Norris created a poster-like cartoon showing many objects -- from a cup of coffee to a box of pasta to a tomato -- all claiming to be the likeness of Muhammad.
Such depictions are radioactive as many Muslims believe that Islamic teachings forbid showing images of Muhammad.
"I am Mohammed and I taste good," says the pasta box in the cartoon. On top of the cartoon images (but no longer on her website) was an announcement explaining the rationale behind the event.
"In light of the recent veiled (ha!) threats aimed at the creators of the....
Is party-hardy Nevada ready for a bachelor governor?
This week, Republican Gov. Jim Gibbons, who recently reached a divorce settlement with his estranged wife, Dawn, likely realized the perils of being an (almost) single public official running for reelection in a relatively small state.
On Monday night, just before the part-time Legislature convened to close an $887-million budget gap, a KLAS-TV news crew confronted Gibbons at the Reno airport. He was returning from a governors’ conference and presidential banquet in Washington.
Gibbons initially denied he was traveling with a woman named Kathy Karrasch, one of the women Dawn Gibbons had accused of being her husband’s mistress. Karrasch was also the infamous recipient of more than 800 text messages from the governor during the 2007 legislative session.
(She and Gibbons have denied they are romantically involved. In fact, in a recent deposition that KLAS obtained, the governor claimed he hasn’t had sex with anyone, including his wife, for 15 years: “I'm living proof that you can survive without sex for that long," he said.)
After Gibbons’ airport denial, the news crew cornered Karrasch outside. She was heading toward the governor’s state-owned SUV.
“You know what? I could have been in Las Vegas having tea with the first lady,” Karrasch said.
Soon after, Gibbons joined Karrasch, the wife of a Reno doctor, and offered a few choice words to the news crew.
“You are full of (expletive). You are. You really are. All you're doing out here late at night trying to make a scene,” Gibbons said.
The next day, Gibbons apologized for his denials. He apparently had no choice. Karrasch, according to a Reno TV station, had posted on Facebook that she had very much enjoyed dinner at the White House.
Back by popular demand in some areas, ex-Mayor Sarah Palin will soon be popping up at a rally near many of us.
And, no, this isn't about selling the book, although savvy local bookstores should stock up.
First up is the national Tea Party Convention in Nashville on Saturday night, a time usually reserved on cable TV for stale stories of missing persons and Geraldo Rivera exposes.
So, let's see, as a TV producer, which would you choose to lure in idling weekend eyeballs: News rehashes or Sarah Palin addressing a crowd of fervent anti-tax people the night before the Super Bowl? Even a Harvard grad could figure that one out.
Hence, check your local politically extreme cable channel that evening. (UPDATE: Tea Party speeches including Palin's will also be live-streamed over here.) Even MSNBC, the White House's favorite channel, won't be able to resist this as SP herself begins a multi-month tour of speaking engagements across the country, helping Republican candidates but -- gee, who knows? -- she might reap some benefit too.
Moving forward, as they say in the nation's capitol of blab.
Some pre-convention pushing and shoving in Music City scared off some other....
The Ticket erred Wednesday morning predicting the dress color for Speaker Nancy Pelosi. We said power red; she actually chose purple, as did Michelle Obama. But we got the Obama-Biden duo's tie colors right; blue for the elderly VP, bright red for the boss.
The Ticket also reported here Wednesday morning on Republican Rep. Joe Wilson's promise to behave politely during President Obama's State of the Union speech last night.
The South Carolinian kept his word. He saved his strong presidential criticism for a web video after the Democrat's nationally-televised long address, live-blogged here. More on Wilson in a few paragraphs.
But someone else disagreed with the president during this speech, a surprising someone, though he expressed his disagreement far more discreetly than Wilson's shouted outcry "You lie!" during last September's Obama healthcare speech to both houses.
Justice Samuel Alito was among only six justices who attended the joint session of Congress (see video below), where the chief executive rather bluntly....
Her name, we think, is Ellie Light, or maybe that's a composite. Claiming to be a local resident, Ellie has been writing letters to editors all over the world defending President Obama against his critics.
This one ran in Ohio's Chillicothe Gazette, a template for the others: "Today, the president is being attacked as if he were a salesman who promised us that our problems would wash off in the morning,. He never made such a promise. It's time for Americans to realize governing is hard work and that a president can't just wave a magic wand and fix everything."
As the sparring continues over what Ellie Light means, let's pause to celebrate this remarkable if overlooked aspect of the story: at a time when newspapers are in economic free-fall and the future of the industry is said to be in doubt, turns out that quaint anachronism called The Letter to the Editor still packs some punch.
As the holidays unfold, The Ticket's thoughts turn to a little undeserved time off.
So we're re-publishing some of our favorite or most-read items from
2009. This item originally appeared on Aug. 21.
Over the last few days, Firas Alkhateeb, the artist behind the picture of President Obamaas the Batman Joker whom we profiled on Monday, has become the unlikely poster boy for several issues.
To some, he's a hero for using art to craft an image that embodies widespread frustrations with the president.
To
others, he's a fascinating topic of conversation -- one who threw off
expectations when he unveiled himself as a so-called liberal.
And the technology community sees him as the most visible representative of free speech after photo-sharing site Flickr removed his image.
But the University of Illinois history student has more important things to worry about: Classes start on Monday.
His
e-mail inbox is flooded. In the last few days, Alkhateeb has received
30 to 40 interview requests from online, print, radio and TV stations
spanning the globe. He's had to turn a lot of them down and is still
trying to find time to respond to the rest.
That's not even
counting all the fan and hate mail. "The day after your article, I had
gotten 50 friend requests on Facebook from people I didn't know,"
Alkhateeb said on the phone Thursday.
For the most part, the responses have been positive. People write in to tell him "good job" or ......
As the holidays unfold, The Ticket's thoughts turn to a little undeserved time off.
So we're re-publishing some of our favorite or most-read items from
2009. This item originally appeared on Aug. 17.
When cryptic posters portraying President Obama as the Joker
from "Batman" began popping up around Los Angeles and other cities, the
question many asked was, Who is behind the image?
Was it an ultra-conservative grassroots group or a disgruntled street artist going against the grain?
Nope, it turns out, just a 20-year-old college student from Chicago.
Bored during his winter school break, Firas Alkhateeb, a
senior history major at the University of Illinois, crafted the picture
of Obama with the recognizable clown makeup using Adobe's
Photoshop software.
Alkhateeb had been tinkering with the program to improve the looks
of photos he had taken on his clunky Kodak camera. The Joker project
was his grandest undertaking yet. Using a tutorial he'd found online
about how to "Jokerize" portraits, he downloaded the October 23 Time
Magazine cover of Obama and began digitally painting over it.
Four or five hours later, he happily had his product.
On Jan. 18, Alkhateeb uploaded the image to photo-sharing site Flickr
(shown at right). Over the next two months, he amassed just a couple
thousand hits, he said.
Then the counter exploded after a still-anonymous rogue famously
found his image, digitally removed the references to Time Magazine,
captioned the picture with the word "socialism" and hung printed copies around L.A., making headlines.
Alkhateeb's original Flickr page
surpassed 20,000 views. The Times found his Flickr site last week
thanks to a tip left by a loyal reader of The Ticket. By Friday, the
page had been taken down.
On Alkhateeb's page, a manipulated image condemning fellow Chicagoan and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel (captioned "epic fail") was mixed in with parodies of the "Guitar Hero" game franchises -- dubbed Quran Hero -- and of Napoleon riding a motorcycle (pictured after the jump).
Flickr had removed the Joker image due to copyright-infringement
concerns, Alkhateeb says the company told him in an e-mail. A Flickr
spokeswoman declined to comment due to a company policy that bars
discussing inquiries about individual users.
Alkhateeb says he wasn't actively trying to cover his tracks, but he did want to lay low. He initially had concerns about ....
Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin got a lot of mileage out of her allegation last summer that the healthcare reform bill touted by President Obama and moving through a Democratic Congress sanctioned "death panels" that would choke the life out of the nation's seniors.
Now Politifact.com, the nonpartisan, Pulitzer Prize-winning Truth-O-Meter run by the St. Petersburg Times, says that Palin's assertion won an online contest as the biggest political lie of the year.
The “death panels” allegation -- one of the sparks that ignited the tea party movement of angry town hall meetings last summer -- accounted for 61% of about 5,000 votes cast at Politifact.com to determine 2009’s Lie of the Year.
Runners-up included Glenn Beck's claim that Obama science advisor John Holdren favored forced abortions, Orange County dentist Orly Taitz's claim that Obama was born in Kenya, which helped spark the birther movement, and Vice President Joe Biden's claim that swine flu spread because “when one person sneezes, it goes all the way through the aircraft.”
As the Ticket noted earlier, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin took to the opinion pages of the Washington Post to urge President Obama not to attend the U.N. Climate Change Conference in light of leaked e-mails suggesting that scientists were manipulating data to maximum public effect.
Now the newspaper is taking heat for giving her a national platform -- for the second time in five months -- from which to opine.
"Once again, the Washington Post has given Sarah Palin the chance to harness herself to the political story of the hour," wrote the Atlantic's Marc Ambinder, in a point-for-point rebuttal of the former Republican vice presidential candidate's arguments on global warming.
Even harsher was the ScienceBlogs.com's Tim Lambert, who headlined his piece on Palin's op-ed: "The Washington Post can't go out of business fast enough." Noting that the Post's own reporting rebuts Palin's arguments, Lambert added, "The Washington Post simply does not care about the accuracy of the columns it publishes," he concluded.
Some folks are even dissing Palin for giving the Post almost exactly what she wrote on her Facebook page.
Op ed pages are supposed to be a forum for debating the issues of the day. So maybe the real grievance here is that critics don't think Palin should have a seat at the table.
We're still scratching our head as to what exactly Sarah Palin meant by her four-sentence blog post Thursday night on Facebook.
The blip, titled "Stupid Conspiracies," starts out with a clear complaint about "conspiracy-minded reporters" during the election bothering her doctor and lawyer about whether her baby, Trig, was truly her son. She's of course talking about Andrew Sullivan's blog post, which sparked the nontroversy.
Then Palin triumphantly points out that she never "asked the president to produce his birth certificate or suggested that he was not born in the United States."
OK ...
Because The Ticket spent many months in 2008 attempting to decode various statements and allusions by Palin, we've got the experience to give this one a crack. We've narrowed it down to two possibilities.
Possibility A: She wanted to take a moment to highlight that she had reached the moral high ground.
If you thought "Going Rogue" would be the end of Sarah Palin's written rants, you probably don't follow the former Alaskan governor's fan page on Facebook.
The Republican has been blogging like crazy recently with her 1.07 million Facebook fans. (See new video below of the campaign-like scenes.) And getting thousands of comments back.
In addition to pictures from her "Going Rogue" book tour -- of happy children, grinning U.S. troops and flags of the American variety -- Palin gives a more personal look behind her many interviews and individual visits with fans and customers.
According to a new industry sales report, her book is coming up on half a million copies sold in its first five days on the market, a sales rate of about 4,000 per hour around the clock. Which ought to keep her in moose chili a while.
Her Facebook page also has some touching photos of memorabilia that fans give her when buying the book. Plus, of course, the long lines of eager book-buyers at stores and malls along the way on her strategically planned 25-state tour.
Also behind-the-scenes looks at her unscheduled visit with the Rev. Billy Graham.
Her legions of Facebook fans are growing by a couple of dozen every few minutes. They grow each time you refresh the page.
In one recent post, the Republican calls Fox News' Sean Hannity "a great American." Oh, and an apology for leaving 100 fans at a book signing in Indiana.
But the main focus of her blog posts lately has been about Congress -- things like war spending and "Obamacare," her pet name for the healthcare bill.
Palin blasts the healthcare "scheme" for taxing everyone starting next year. The actual legislation, however, plans to ramp up taxes in 2011 and on a sliding scale, where richer residents are taxed more and the modestly wealthy get a 0.5% hike.
On Tuesday night, Palin was bothered over "liberal Congressional proposals" that would institute a tax to fund the war in Afghanistan. Palin supports the war and the troops but not the idea of paying for it with new taxes.
"With Congress and President Obama spending money on everything at breakneck speed, it’s interesting that they are only now getting nervous about ...
... spending," Palin writes, "but only when it comes to providing the necessary funds to complete our mission in Afghanistan."
This qualm about the government proposing taxes on war and nothing else comes less than a week after she complained about the government proposing taxes on healthcare.
The early-stage war tax proposal called the "Share the Sacrifice Act," which House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she may support, would fund a U.S. troop escalation in Afghanistan that Rep. David Obey estimates will cost $1 trillion over 10 years. [Note: An earlier version of this post called Obey a senator.]
That would buy a lot of books.
(Update: Palin, whose father was her high school track coach, has now Twittered to followers that she's leaving the book promotion trail over the Thanksgiving holiday to travel to Kennewick, Wash., for a 5K Red Cross charity run with numerous relatives before a book appearance Sunday in nearby Richland.)
Sarah Palin recently started a new Twitter account to promote her new book. But what about her old one?
As Alaska's governor, @AKGovSarahPalin sent updates regularly and built a large following.
The profile has more than 152,000 followers and has made its way onto more than 1,500 lists. The latter is perhaps more impressive because that feature didn't even exist until about three months after she stopped tweeting there.
The @AKGovSarahPalin page also has the "verified account" tag, which means Twitter Inc. authorized it as a legitimate user.
But Palin has inexplicably started from scratch. The new page, @SarahPalinUSA, quickly drummed up 14,700 followers despite not having a single update or following anyone -- not even her 2008 GOP presidential partner Sen. John McCain.
But still, there's 152,000 people on that other account. Just sitting there.
On Facebook, Palin kept her old fan page, which is nearing a million fans. She simply dropped any mention of being governor from the "current office" section. Rather than promoting Alaskan legislation, it now mentions TV appearances and, uh, her new Twitter page.
Did nobody tell Palin that she can click on "settings" in Twitter and change the name of an account?
She could have easily switched the name of @AKGovSarahPalin to @SarahPalinUSA or @SarahPalinRocks or @QTPiSarahPalin or whatever she wanted.
Then, swap out the profile picture and background image, and she's set. Bonus: She gets to keep all of her followers.
Websites like Facebook and Twitter are a book publisher's dream because they let authors and promoters connect directly with fans. But they're only valuable when the pages have a lot of people paying attention to them.
