Scrapbook
Scrapbook Wisconsin Hurricanes and Other FEMA News A SCRAPBOOK pal emails with important emergency-preparedness news: "I'm writing from Wisconsin with an urgent message for my fellow Cheeseheads:...
...Even THE SCRAPBOOK was impressed by oprah's willingness to admit she was wrong and play disciplinarian to her wayward author, but the show itself seemed at times a similarly slick bit of narrative construction...
...The press ecstatically praised the Big o for taking her lumps after she confronted Frey on her January 26 show, citing page numbers and contrary evidence, demanding to know the real story behind several episodes recounted in his drugologue redemption story...
...But what took the cake for us was the appearance on the show of superannuated columnist Richard Cohen, who showed off his famous independent streak by immediately making nice with oprah once in her highness's presence...
...That's four out of 70,000...
...My motto, though (like the Boy Scouts), is: Be prepared...
...Learn more now!' Having seen all of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katri-na, and being at that very moment in Wisconsin, I wasted no time following the link...
...The $20,000 prize is named for longtime New York Post editor and columnist (and Weekly Standard contributor) Eric Breindel, who died in 1998 at the age of 42...
...Chertoff predicted: 'In the next weeks you will be seeing that we come forward with some specific plans' to improve FEMA...
...Which, if our own long-ago math teacher taught us correctly, must mean that something like 99.995 percent of American teachers are competent...
...These FEMA reforms are encouraging...
...Hanson scrolled through the results, she saw that several of the sites were available only to people over 18...
...You're (Hardly Ever) Fired...
...I did some research and found out that there has never been a hurricane in Wisconsin...
...oprah started by opening a can of whoop-ass on Frey, then brought on "some of the country's leading journalists" to have their turn, and finally ushered the episode to a neat close with Frey claiming that the exposure of his lies had made him a better person and taught him an important lesson...
...I think Chertoff is a big sandbag to the rising tide of anti-FEMA vitriol...
...I learned from one of the 'Fast Facts' on the front page of FEMA's Floodsmart.gov site that 'almost 25 percent of all flood insurance claims come from areas with minimal flood risk.' See...
...Be prepared...
...Imagine my relief when I was taken to a website from the Federal Emergency Management Agency called Floodsmart.gov...
...The teachers' unions have made it practically impossible to fire teachers...
...Hanson had seen the term, so, in search of a definition, she typed it into Google...
...Job security, it turns out...
...Breindel Award Applications are invited for the eighth annual Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Journalism...
...I told him I'd Googled 'rent boy,' just in case I got whisked off to some Navy prison in the dead of night," she said...
...Leading journalist" Frank Rich of the New York Times tried drawing a connection between James Frey's fabrications and the supposed fabrications Rich believes brought the United States to invade Iraq...
...In addition, the show was—surprise —less than a ringing endorsement of intellectual seriousness...
...The National Education Association, for instance, has given some $65 million, according to the Wall Street Journal, to left-liberal groups like Jesse Jackson's Rainbow PUSH Coalition, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, and AIDS Walk Washington...
...Publisher Nan Talese seemed offended by the suggestion that an editor might ask a writer questions to ferret out the veracity of over-the-top stories...
...I think FEMA should adopt my motto—either one, actually...
...For further information about this year's Breindel Award, please contact Germaine Febles at 212-843-8031 or gfebles@rubenstein.com...
...Thanks to new federal regulations, unions now file extensive disclosure reports with the Department of Labor allowing us to learn what members' dues are being spent on...
...I'll bet Chertoff was a Boy Scout...
...I have another motto: You never know...
...A wave of reassurance washed over me as I remembered seeing a speech given not long ago by Michael Chertoff, who runs the Department of Homeland Security and has authority over FEMA...
...Oil-for-Food program...
...FEMA's in charge...
...Yours on guard in Wauwatosa...
...In that same speech, he said: 'It's not pleasant to see FEMA being made the butts of joke.' "Well, the days of FEMA being the butts of joke are over...
...We're sorry, but it won't be possible for us to concede that oprah has licked her truth problem until she stops referring to the likes of Rich and Cohen as the country's "leading journalists...
...And he added, 'We do anticipate some very significant, far-reaching changes in FEMA to get ourselves ready for hurricane season in 2006.' "Chertoff didn't say it directly, but I'm pretty sure that raising awareness of potential Wisconsin hurricanes must be part of that plan...
...As Ms...
...A recent report from the New Teacher Project found that in a one-year sample of five large, urban school districts, only four teachers had been formally terminated for poor performance...
...Memoirs of Oprah Last week Oprah Winfrey confessed that her critics had been "absolutely right" to challenge her commitment to truthfulness after she made a public and sweeping defense of James Frey, the memoirist whose oprah Book Club-selected A Million Little Pieces was exposed by "The Smoking Gun" website as containing a million little exaggerations, distortions, and lies...
...Hanson, 45, immediately told her boyfriend what she had done...
...Either that, or the NEA is protecting an awful lot of deadwood...
...Members' dues also go to pay the salaries of NEA employees, which are about double what the average teacher makes...
...I was clicking around the Internet from my suburban Milwaukee home," our correspondent advised, "when I came upon an eye-catching advertisement: 'Wisconsin Hurricanes: Don't be a victim of the next big storm...
...Stanley Crouch appeared in a video montage, declaring that "oprah Winfrey is number one, the queen of good will in the United States...
...Annals of Liberal Paranoia From a front-page story in the New York Times, "After Subpoenas, Internet Searches Give Some Pause, " January 25, 2006: Kathryn Hanson, a former telecommunications engineer who lives in Oakland, Calif., was looking at BBC News online last week when she came across an item about a British politician who had resigned over a reported affair with a "rent boy...
...It was the first time Ms...
...She even seemed to agree with Frey that memoirs like his inhabit some parallel universe in which the laws of fact and fiction are suspended...
...Would Google have to inform the government that she was looking for a rent boy—a young male prostitute...
...It is presented each year to the columnist, editorialist, or reporter whose work best reflects the spirit of Breindel's too-short career: love of country, concern for the preservation and integrity of democratic institutions, and resistance to the evils of totalitarianism...
...The book people were just as unctuous...
...What do the teachers get in return...
...You never know...
...Last year's winner was Claudia Rosett, journalist-in-residence at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, for her peerless reporting on the scandalous palm-greasing and bribery engaged in by Saddam Hussein's Iraqi regime under the U.N...
...Scrapbook Wisconsin Hurricanes and Other FEMA News A SCRAPBOOK pal emails with important emergency-preparedness news: "I'm writing from Wisconsin with an urgent message for my fellow Cheeseheads: There's no need to evacuate...
...She suddenly had a frightening thought...
Vol. 11 • February 2006 • No. 20
