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House passes bill taxing AIG and other bonuses (AP)
WASHINGTON – The Democratic-led House overwhelmingly approved a bill on Thursday to slap punishing taxes on big employee bonuses from AIG and other firms bailed out by taxpayers. The vote was 328-93. “We want our money back and we want our money back now for the taxpayers,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

So President Obama Is Finally Pissed Off? So What? (by Glen Ford at the Black Agenda Report)
The President’s public display of anger at AIG is a cover for well-deserved political embarrassment. He and his bankster advisors have dedicated trillions to rescuing the criminal corporations of Wall Street from the consequences of their actions. He acts disappointed that they’re still gangsters. “The logic of bankster capitalist enterprise, which AIG was created to protect and serve, is take the money and run – every chance you get.”

Outraged Americans Want AIG Bonus Money Recovered (Gallup)
Three in four Americans (76%) want the government to take actions to block or recover the bonuses insurance giant AIG paid its executives after receiving federal bailout funds.

TONE DEAF? (by David Kurtz at Talking Points Memo)
Yesterday, Rahm Emanuel called the AIG bonuses a “big distraction.” Today, David Axelrod says: ”People are not sitting around their kitchen tables thinking about AIG,” Axelrod said. “They are thinking about their own jobs.” I honestly don’t get what up-side they see politically in taking this tack. Thoughts?
My comment: Of the last two candidates standing in last year’s Democratic primary, Hillary Clinton was the one attuned to ordinary people and our concerns.  Barack Obama has had, all his life, only to tell people how special he is because of his multiracial heritage, to have people fawn all over themselves to give him benefits they wouldn’t even consider giving to most people.  George Bush is tone deaf because he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but Barack Obama is tone deaf because people shoved silver spoons into his mouth.  How can either one of them have any inkling of what ordinary people face?

Hillary, on the other hand, has had to fight for everything.  But TPM savaged her relentlessly, using the most vicious right-wing lies that have dogged her for almost 20 years.  And you put Obama on a pillow, refusing to credit any concerns about him.

Don’t talk to me now about worries that he might not be up to the job.

FLASHBACK: In October, Obama Said That AIG Executives ‘Should Be Fired’ For Their Excesses (Think Progress)
Last fall, as Wall Street crumbled and just one week after the federal government bailed out AIG, the firm’s executives spent $440,000 on manicures, facials, pedicures, and massages at a luxury resort in California. At the time, Obama was a vocal proponent of firing AIG executives. During an October 7, 2008 presidential debate with Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), candidate Obama declared, “those executives should be fired”.
Click through to watch the video.

The Public Wants Justice (by Froma Harrop)
Brush aside the congressional theatrics about taxing the bonuses to their eyeballs. Let’s talk jail time. William Black, a law professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, envisions a federal investigation into AIG’s past accounting, securities disclosures and executive-pay program. Black was the litigation director of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board and helped bag the “Keating Five” lawmakers during the savings-and-loan scandal in the late ’80s and early ’90s. As the bottom was falling out of its derivatives trading, AIG was reporting healthy profits, he told me. That’s not allowed… “If you’re publicly traded, the SEC rules require that you follow GAAP,” he says. “If you don’t follow GAAP, then it’s securities fraud.” The excuse that the auditor gave the accounting a green light won’t fly. Enron and the infamous Lincoln Savings & Loan had clean opinions, too.

The “buzz on Wall Street” is that the bonus-deprived AIG employees might leave, then “simply turn around and trade against AIG’s book,” writes Andrew Ross Sorkin in The New York Times Dealbook column. “Why not? They know how bad it is.” (Trading against book involves using what is known about weaknesses in what a company owns to presumably short sell the stock.) I asked Black about this scenario. He almost laughed. Using that inside information would be securities fraud, “and everyone that hires them would be frauds.” It’s time that the Obama administration stopped issuing statements of shock as it coddles the Wall Street bankrupts. The public wants more than the bonus money back. It wants justice.

Happy Hour Roundup: Cantor Agrees With Boehner That Geithner Is “On Thin Ice” (by Greg Sargent at The Plum Line)
* Are Republicans getting closer to calling for Tim Geithner to get the push over the AIG mess?…
* Newt Gingrich test-drives a new phrase: The “Bush-Obama-Geithner policy of bailing out failing companies.”
Every day I become more convinced that the Republicans wanted Obama elected so they could blame all of the problems from the Bush administration on him.

Hannity on proposal to tax AIG bonuses at very high rate: “In other words, we’re going to just steal their money” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Scarborough, Carlson, and O’Donnell agree: “We have 535 Hugo Chavezes out on Capitol Hill and one in the White House” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Morris on Obama: “I think that we not only have a socialist here, we have an incompetent one” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)
So here you are, Obama fans who were so happy to use Dick Morris’ hatred of Hillary last year.  Here’s your payback.

Limbaugh claims the “big point” of “this AIG business” is to “poison” minds “to capitalism and to corporate America. This is exactly the kind of thing Barack Obama and his team love” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Limbaugh claims White House is “[p]erfectly timed, perfectly programmed, perfectly educated to destroy capitalism … and they’re in the process of doing it” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Limbaugh is “sure” threats to AIG execs were made by “deranged leftists from the Democrat blogs” because “they’re the ones that hate capitalists” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Malkin agrees with Beck that attempt to recoup AIG bonuses is “whipping up mob rule” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Beck joins Limbaugh, defends AIG from “mob rule” that is “attempting to void legally binding contracts” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

CNBC’s Kudlow lights dollar bill on fire, says “This is the value of our money” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Forget the bonuses: AIG can’t repay its loans, GAO says (McClatchy)
Lost in all the shouting over the $165 million in bonuses paid to executives of disgraced insurer American International Group was this sober message delivered to Congress on Wednesday by a government watchdog: AIG’s ability repay its $170 billion in loans from taxpayers has eroded significantly.

Mad Men (by Greg Marx, Columbia Journalism Review)
As the Post tells it, anger over the AIG bonuses leads to less support for the rest of Obama’s agenda. Here’s an alternate interpretation: the government we have now is the government we’ll have for the next twenty months, and everybody in office knows it. In that time, Obama will have begun to succeed or fail, and the results of the next election will play out accordingly. So when politicians invoke the specter of public anger today to push back against Obama’s agenda, they’re reaching for a tool to advance their own interests. And “political capital” doesn’t come from short-term swings in public opinion—it comes from having sixty senators who support your agenda (or fifty-one, if you can employ the budget-reconciliation process to your advantage).

As for a press that obscures that story in favor of a vague narrative? Just another thing to be angry about.

Reuters
Now, isn’t this innaresting?  Code Pink is now demonstrating against economic injustice.  Now that their supposed anti-war candidate is a war sustaining president, have they given up demonstrating against war?

The Next AIG Scandal? (Time, thanks to Susie at Suburban Guerilla)
Thomas Gober, a former Mississippi state insurance examiner who has tracked fraud in the industry for 23 years and served previously as a consultant to the FBI and the Department of Justice, says he believes AIG’s supposedly solvent insurance business may be at least as troubled as its reckless financial-products unit… Most of this as-yet-undiscovered problem, Gober says, lies in the area of reinsurance, whereby one insurance company insures the liabilities of another so that the latter doesn’t have to carry all the risk on its books. Most major insurance companies use outside firms to reinsure, but the vast majority of AIG’s reinsurance contracts are negotiated internally among its affiliates, Gober says, and these internal balance sheets don’t add up.

AIG’s Small London Office May Have Lost Big (ABC News, thanks to Lambert at Corrente)
Ground zero for AIG’s spectacular implosion, which has soaked up more federal bailout money than any other entity, appears to have been a small London branch office that may have put as much as half a trillion dollars at risk. The disastrous deals were built up in a decade… The struggling New York-based insurance giant has avoided collapse with the massive infusion of $160 billion in taxpayer money. The U.S. government has agreed to prop up AIG because it fears that AIG has such extensive financial involvement around the world that its failure would be far more costly. Britain’s serious fraud office and U.S. regulators are combing through the records of AIG’s Financial Products Group, formerly located on the fifth floor of an office building in London’s Mayfair section.

AIG in the Caymans (by Margie Burns)
American International Group (AIG), the gargantuan insurance conglomerate, has 135 companies around the world registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission, three of them located in the Cayman Islands… Together, from June 2006 to May 2007, the companies sold about $76 million in securities to ‘qualified investors’ under the SEC’s Regulation D, designed for small companies that might have limited access to capital markets.

It is one symptom of the corporate laissez-faire attitude of the Bush administration that AIG’s complex global network could include so many variously categorized subsidiaries and affiliates, in so many companies, with so little oversight, that reportedly the company itself could not keep up with them. Another symptom is that a shadowy office or division of a giant multinational corporation can avail itself of devices meant to be used by small companies, much as a subsidiary of a large multi-state corporation will sometimes get itself loans from the Small Business Administration.

Pin AIG woes on Brooklyn boy: Joseph Cassano walked away with $315 million while company staggered (New York Daily News)
In our fury over the bonuses at AIG, we should not forget the PIGs there who pocketed millions while endangering the global economy. At the top of the list is 54-year-old Joseph Cassano, a Brooklyn cop’s kid made good who went oh so bad. As head of the Financial Products unit, Cassano racked up billions of losses while assuring investors it was nearly impossible for his unit to lose. “It is hard for us, without being flippant, to even see a scenario within any kind of [rhyme] or reason that would see us losing one dollar in any of those transactions,” he told investors. Before he was finally fired last March, Cassano pocketed $280 million in cash and an additional $34 million in bonuses.

Under a “retirement” agreement marked “confidential,” Cassano also got a $1 million-a-month “consulting fee.” AIG subsequently cut off these payments, but Cassano still walked away with more than $315 million while the company staggered under $440 billion in liabilities. Taxpayers had to pour in $170 billion in bailout money. The investors who lost big because of this cop’s kid with the $1million-a-month retirement sweetener include police pension funds in Florida, Ohio and Michigan. Cassano would be advised not to get caught speeding in Michigan, where AIG losses hit judge pensions as well.
Claw it back.  CLAW IT BACK!

How Congress Protected AIG’s Bonuses (The Note, ABC News)
Last month, the Senate unanimously approved an amendment to the stimulus bill aimed at restricting bonuses over $100,000 at any company receiving federal bailout funds. The measure … was stripped out during the closed-door conference negotiations involving House and Senate leaders and the White House. A measure by Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., to limit executive compensation replaced it. But Dodd’s measure explicitly exempted bonuses agreed to prior to the passage of the stimulus bill.

Here’s the exact language from Dodd’s measure in the stimulus: “The prohibition required under clause (i) shall not be construed to prohibit any bonus payment required to be paid pursuant to a written employment contract executed on or before February 11, 2009…”

Dodd: Administration pushed for language protecting bonuses (CNN)
Senate Banking committee Chairman Christopher Dodd told CNN Wednesday that he was responsible for language added to the federal stimulus bill to make sure that already-existing contracts for bonuses at companies receiving federal bailout money were honored. Dodd acknowledged his role in the change after a Treasury Department official told CNN the administration pushed for the language. Both Dodd and the official, who asked not to be named, said it was because administration officials were afraid the government would face numerous lawsuits without the new language.
Ooooh! Lawsuits!  They must have been SO scared!

The dishonest “Blame Dodd” scheme from Treasury officials (by Glenn Greenwald at Unclaimed Territory, Salon)
There is a major push underway — engineered by Obama’s Treasury officials, enabled by a mindless media, and amplified by the right-wing press – to blame Chris Dodd for the AIG bonus payments.  That would be perfectly fine if it were true.  But it’s completely false, and the scheme to heap the blame on him for the AIG bonus payments is based on demonstrable falsehoods…

It was Dodd who did everything possible — including writing and advocating for an amendment — which would have applied the limitations on executive compensation to all bailout-receiving firms, including AIG, and applied it to all future bonus payments without regard to when those payments were promised.  But it was Tim Geithner and Larry Summers who openly criticized Dodd’s proposal at the time and insisted that those limitations should apply only to future compensation contracts, not ones that already existed.

Report: Federal Reserve informed Treasury staffers of AIG bonuses earlier than Geithner claimed. (Think Progress)
Earlier this week, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told congressional leaders that he did not learn of AIG’s plans to award $160 billion in retention bonuses to employees in its “troubled” financial products division until March 10. But as Time magazine reports today, the New York Federal Reserve “informed Treasury staff that the payments were imminent on February 28,” at least 10 days “before Treasury staffers say they first learned ‘full details’ of the bonus plan, and three days before the Administration launched a new $30 billion infusion of cash for AIG.” Time explains that “the fault [for the delay] appears to lie with career staffers at the department career staffers at the department who failed to report the imminent bonus deadline up the chain to Geithner.”
Think Progress is proving to be rather independent of the White House.

Matt Davies

Wyden-Snowe Proposal Could Have Saved Govt. $3 Billion-Plus (by Sam Stein at the Huffington Post)
Had Congress ultimately passed Sen. Ron Wyden and Sen. Olympia Snowe’s proposal to tax a portion of bonuses issued by bailout recipients, the government could have raised more than $3 billion from 2008 alone, an analysis by the Joint Tax Committee showed. Wyden and Snowe had proposed, during the crafting of the stimulus legislation, that those companies receiving TARP or bailout funds face a choice when it comes to the bonuses given to its employees: either cap those payments at $100,000, pay a 35 percent excise tax on anything above that level, or repurchase TARP shares in the amount that exceeded $100,000.

CREW FILES TREASURY DEPT. FOIA OVER AIG’S USE OF BAILOUT MONEY FOR EXECUTIVE BONUSES (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington)
18 Mar 2009 // Washington, D.C. - Today, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the Department of the Treasury, seeking documents related to AIG’s payment of bonuses to its top executives.

Fannie Plans Retention Bonuses As Outlined by the Government (Washington Post)
Fannie Mae, the federally run mortgage finance giant, plans to pay four top executives $1 million or more in retention bonuses. The bonus plan prompted the company’s federal regulator to defend compensation decisions the government made when it took over Fannie Mae in September. It comes as American International Group faces public outrage over $165 million in bonuses it awarded last week. Fannie Mae, which suffered $59 billion in losses last year, has requested $15 billion in taxpayer assistance and has said it expects to need plenty more.

Citi spends $10 million of your bailout money on a new office for Vikram Bandit — with “soft seating” and blast-proof windows! (by lambert at Corrente)
Bloomberg: “Citigroup Inc. plans to spend about $10 million on new offices for Chief Executive Officer Vikram Pandit and his lieutenants, after the U.S. government injected $45 billion of cash into the bank… Pandit, criticized by lawmakers over Citigroup’s use of U.S. bailout capital, canceled an order for a company jet in January and told Congress on Feb. 11 that, ‘I get the new reality and I’ll make sure Citi gets it as well.’” Yay! No longer will Bandit have to breathe the same air as the little people!

Nothing Succeeds Like Failure (by Susie at Suburban Guerrilla)
I don’t even know what to say about this: “Citigroup Inc.’s chief economist is leaving the company for a job at the Treasury Department, according to an internal Citigroup memo. Lewis Alexander, who has been at Citigroup since 1999 and before that worked at the Federal Reserve, will head to the Treasury ‘to work on domestic financial issues,’ said the Citigroup memo, which was sent Tuesday.”

What’s another $1 trillion? Fed moves to boost lending (McClatchy)
The Federal Reserve’s surprise announcement Wednesday that it would purchase more than $1 trillion in Treasury securities and mortgage bonds in hopes of sparking greater economic activity shows that Chairman Ben Bernanke is working hard to keep his pledge to do whatever it takes to reverse the nation’s deep recession.

Freddie Mac: Government’s New Black Hole? (Time)
AIG is to date the most expensive corporate bailout in American history, requiring $180 billion in government funds. But it may soon have competition. Last week mortgage giant Freddie Mac said it had lost $50 billion in 2008 alone. A look at the company’s books suggests the government will have to spend at least triple that much to save the financial firm from collapse. If the housing market worsens, the tab could be even larger.

The credit rating industry: Incentives, shopping and regulation (by Xavier Freixas, thanks to Economist’s View)
Credit rating agencies played a significant part in the financial meltdown, failing (sometimes intentionally) to properly estimate complicated products’ risk. This column summarises the problems plaguing the industry – conflicts of interest, “shopping” for ratings, and informational issues. It concludes that regulators must reshape the agencies and their role.

U.S. Weighs Taliban Strike Into Pakistan (New York Times)
President Obama and his national security advisers are considering expanding the American covert war in Pakistan far beyond the unruly tribal areas to strike at a different center of Taliban power in Baluchistan, where top Taliban leaders are orchestrating attacks into southern Afghanistan.

Obama’s Afghanistan ‘surge’: diplomats, civilian specialists (McClatchy)
President Barack Obama is planning a major “surge” into Afghanistan of diplomats and civilian specialists steeped in running elections, fighting corruption and battling narcotics trafficking as part of a counterinsurgency strategy to stabilize the country, current and former U.S. officials said on Wednesday.
Gee, we could use some of those experts in running elections and fighting corruption right here in the U.S.!

White House caves on veterans plan, but what was it thinking? (McClatchy)
The Obama administration on Wednesday abandoned a controversial plan to make veterans use private insurance to pay for costly treatments of combat-related injuries.

Pressure works (by lambert at Corrente)
WaPo: “President Obama today abandoned a proposal to bill veterans’ private insurance companies for treatment of combat-related injuries after the measure prompted an outcry from veterans service organizations and members of Congress.” More like this, please.
Yes, pressure does indeed work.  That’s why those who apologize for Obama no matter what are not helping the nation.  When he was my senator, we had to push him.  Now that he’s the president, we have to push him.  I have to say, though, that it’s a relief that pressure does work now.  It never did with Bush.

Daily Show: That Can’t Be Right – Veterans’ Health Insurance (video)

Jon has another suggestion—sponsorship of military medals.

U.S. military to halt ‘stop loss’ service extensions for troops (McClatchy)
Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced on Wednesday that the Army is effectively halting “stop loss,” the practice of ordering soldiers to stay in the military service beyond their obligation, saying the practice was “breaking faith” with the troops.

House moves to expand national volunteer service (McClatchy)
Congress is moving quickly to expand volunteer national service programs dramatically and to create service corps to help lower-income communities with energy, education, health and veterans’ needs.

Examining Administration’s Shift On ‘Enemy Combatant (by Hamid Khan, an associate with the Denver office of  McKenna Long & Aldridge LLP and an adjunct professor at the University of Colorado School of Law, writing at the American Constitution Society)
In recent court filings, the Obama administration announced it is abandoning the term “enemy combatant” used by the Bush administration as a means to justify indefinitely holding prisoners at the U.S. Naval Facility at Guantanamo Bay. Included in the Justice Department filing was a declaration from Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. that the department was continuing an interagency review of detention policies and a review of the status of each detainee at Guantanamo. Finally, under the new policy, the Justice Department says a person may only be detained if he or she had provided “substantial assistance” to terrorists.

The administration’s largely symbolic move, packs some legal potency. Consider that under the previous administration, the president could declare someone an “enemy combatant” and order them held indefinitely. But the Justice Department now says that power no longer lies with the president, but with Congress and under the auspices of international law. 

Obama’s Numerous Torture Loopholes (by Prof. James Hill at the Black Agenda Report)
“America does not torture,” Barack Obama recently proclaimed. George Bush said the same thing, and was proven to be lying. An analysis of President Obama’s executive order on torture “may permit cruel abuses of prisoners to continue.” Although the order seems to cover the closing of CIA torture centers, it does not mention torture centers that might be run by other federal agencies or corporate outfits like Blackwater. And, while imposing safeguards on prisoners taken in “armed conflict,” the order pointedly leaves out prisoners seized in “counterrorism operations.” Obama should close these huge loopholes, or “explain why he won’t.”

What’s Law Got To Do With It? (by Reza Fiyouzat at the Black Agenda Report)
The Obama administration seems determined to allow George Bush and his cronies and lawyers to get away with eight years of lawless behavior. Perhaps more striking than the impunity likely to be extended to the Bush gang, is the ease with which the former president shredded the Constitution and the very concept of the rule of law. If it’s that easy to lay low the pillars of justice in the United States, the underlying system must be weak, indeed. But of course, that’s what should be expected of a nation “based on the greatest ever land theft, genocide of the Original Peoples of the subcontinent, and slavery.”

Obama Backs Gay Rights Declaration (Political Wire)
The Obama administration formally endorsed a U.N. declaration calling for the worldwide decriminalization of homosexuality, a measure that former President Bush had refused to sign, the AP reports.

Teleprompter president in St. Patty’s Day gaffe (by Craig Meister, World News Examiner, at examiner.com, thanks to pm317 at No Quarter)
Rarely does Obama deliver public comments without [a teleprompter]… [Tuesday], during a St. Patrick’s Day event with the Irish prime minister, Obama’s guest accidentally repeated teleprompter remarks that Obama had just delivered. Next, trying to regain control of the situation, Obama interjected – but referred to the teleprompter for his lines.  By this point the words on the teleprompter were those meant to be delivered by the Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen, and as a result, President Barack Obama thanked himself for inviting everyone to the party.
I don’t know anything about this website, so it’s probably conservative, but there doesn’t seem to be any doubt that this gaffe occurred.)

EDITORIAL: Obama’s reliance on teleprompters (Washington Times, a conservative newspaper, also thanks to pm317 at No Quarter)
Is President Obama able to conduct a news conference without a teleprompter? Is he an automaton in answering questions? With all the jokes about Karl Rove as George Bush’s brain or cracks during the 1980s about Ronald Reagan supposedly being an amiable dunce, could you imagine the reaction if either president had used a teleprompter to answer questions? The late night joke writers wouldn’t have let it go until the president gave in to the merciless ridicule as he was painted as an idiot who couldn’t tie his shoes without being fed instructions on how to do it.

Obama In Prime Time Next Week (Political Wire)
The White House has a scheduled a prime time press conference for President Obama on Tuesday, March 24 at 8 p.m. There’s no word yet on what will happen with the schedules for two very popular television shows, American Idol and Dancing with the Stars. TV Week says the networks are “grumbling” about having to adjust the schedule, though all have agreed to carry the press conference.

Barack Obama Annoys TV Networks With Constant Need To Address Nation (by Ryan Tate at Gawker)
You know who this global economic implosion is really hurting? Broadcast networks. How can they mint money if Overlord Obama is constantly doing TV addresses, like a Soviet Secretary General?

Obama Banks Big Royalties (Political Wire)
Heard in the CQ newsroom: President Obama banked $2.5 million last year in royalties from two bestselling books — $950,000 for Dreams of My Father and $1.5 million for The Audacity of Hope. The royalties were revealed this morning in new financial disclosure reports Obama was required to file with the Senate because he was still a lawmaker for most of 2008.

Bust of MLK Joins President Obama in Oval Office (by Jake Tapper at Political Punch, ABC News)
Well, here’s another way President Obama has put his historic stamp on the presidency. With no fanfare or media attention, President Obama last month added a new decoration to the Oval Office: a 12 5/8″ bronze bust of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr… The King bust sits near the fireplace and adjacent a bust of President Abraham Lincoln, with the two legendary Americans facing President Obama when he sits at the HMS Resolute Desk. The Lincoln bust sits where a bust of Sir Winston Churchill — on loan from the British Embassy after the 9/11 attacks, and returned before Mr. Obama’s inauguration — once sat.
If only Obama took King’s words and deeds to heart, instead of putting a bust in the Oval Office.

Dallas ex-mayor confirmed as trade representative (McClatchy)
The Senate on Wednesday easily confirmed former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk as the U.S. trade representative, making him the ambassador for a new, more limited Obama administration approach to free trade.

Pelosi dodges chance to end automatic pay raises (AP)
Congress’ automatic pay raises are in little immediate danger of being scrapped for good, even with the economy slumping and millions of Americans unemployed. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday would not commit to holding a vote on a bill to do away with the annual cost-of-living increases. She pointed out that Congress recognized the economic crisis by voting this week to skip next year’s raise. In so doing, though, lawmakers defeated a Senate measure to abolish the automatic pay hikes and force them into the deep discomfort of casting actual votes to give themselves raises.

Franken Wants Coleman to Pay Court Costs (Political Wire)
Al Franken (D) wants the judges who heard Minnesota’s U.S. Senate trial to force Norm Coleman (R) “to pay court costs and some opposing lawyers’ fees — a potentially expensive bill — if the Republican loses his bid to overturn the results of the recount,” the Minneapolis Star Tribune reports. If Franken wins the ruling, it could be a big disincentive for Coleman to continue his efforts to drag out the court fight.

Burris Investigations Continue (Political Wire)
CQ Politics reports that two investigations of Sen.Roland Burris (D-IL) are under way and according to Sen. Richard Durbin, are quite active. Durbin says he has answered questions about Burris from both an Illinois prosecutor and the Senate Ethics Committee. Durbin refused to disclose what he discussed at either meeting but said he hoped for a timely conclusion to the investigations.
Is Durbin trying to poison Burris’ chances for election?  Is he helping to put Mayor Daley’s brother Bill into Burris’ senate seat?

Dodd Not Considering Retirement (Political Wire)
In an interview with the Hartford Courant, Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-CT) acknowledged he has been enmeshed in multiple controversies recently and that doesn’t help his re-election bid. Said Dodd: “I’ve been getting whacked around the head for the last eight or nine months — part of it my own fault for not stepping up earlier. The backdrop doesn’t help. Jobs being lost. Homes being lost.” But he said he’s not thinking of stepping aside for another Democrat in 2010. “I’m running. I haven’t announced anything yet… I want to win. What I want more than winning is to do what I’m supposed to be doing.”

Rendell Will Throw His Full Weight Behind Democrat Against Specter (by Greg Sargent at The Plum Line)
Okay, another key development in the Machiavellian maneuvering that’s going on in Pennsylvania around the question of whether Senator Arlen Specter will switch parties. I’ve just confirmed with a spokeman for Governor Ed Rendell that he will do everything he can to help the Democratic candidate defeat Specter if the latter remains a Republican or if he pulls a Joe Lieberman from the right, switching to Independent while promising to caucus with Republicans. That’s key, for two reasons. First, because Rendell is a longtime close friend of Specter, and many thought he tacitly aided Specter in 2004. And second, because it ups the pressure on Specter to switch to the Dems.

Dept. of Long Overdue Attitude Changes:
The belief that the wealthy are worthy is waning (by Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times)
With financial crisis and scandal as backdrop, Americans are questioning whether plutocrats are either indispensable or deserving.

President Obama’s Deeply Flawed Housing Plan (by Petrino DiLeo at the Black Agenda Report)
The Obama administration’s plan to deal with the housing crisis is far superior to George Bush’s “do-nothing approach.” However, the attempt is “dwarfed” by the “$6 trillion in housing wealth that has been lost so far,” and leaves significant segments of at-risk homeowners unaided. Bankruptcy judges still cannot “cram” new terms down the banker’s throats, and only about one in four homeowners can take advantage of refinancing under the plan. For those who have already lost their homes – tough luck.

Department of Double Standards: Rep. Maxine Waters Maligned for Helping Black Banks (by Glen Ford at the Black Agenda Report)
With the bankster class methodically looting the national treasure in collusion with purchased politicians, questions of conflict of interest have become a dead letter. Lawless banksters are “empowered to dictate the terms of their own deliverance from insolvency.”  Republican and Democratic administrations seem ruled by one master, by the name of Goldman Sachs. “But let a progressive Black congresswoman arrange a meeting in which Black bankers beseech the government for some miniscule piece of the bailout pie – and it is the stuff of scandal.”

Now, as to what’s REALLY important:
Strange doings down on the farm (by Carl Hiaasen, Miami Herald, thanks to Susie at Suburban Guerilla)
Sometimes it’s not easy to admit that you live in Florida. Last week, our state Senate boldly took the first step toward making it illegal for a person to have intimate relations with an animal. Although such a law might thin the dating pool in certain counties, it should ultimately serve to protect household pets and domestic livestock, which evidently are at far greater risk than most of us had imagined.

Colin Powell’s former chief of staff: Cheney is ‘evil,’ his fearmongering is ‘assisting’ al Qaeda. (Think Progress)
Weeks after President Obama was inaugurated, Dick Cheney gave an interview to Politico slamming Obama’s detainee policies and warning that he was making America less safe (charges he repeated again last Sunday). Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff who left the Bush administration in protest, wrote an essay on the Washington Note last evening slamming Cheney’s fearmongering. Wilkerson calls Cheney “evil” and says his detainee policies were only “assisting” terrorists:

Rice: ‘No One Was Arguing That Saddam Hussein Somehow Had Something To Do With 9/11′ (Think Progress)
On PBS’s Charlie Rose yesterday — six years after the eve of the Iraq invasion — former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice discussed the decision to invade Iraq. Rice said she has had no “second thoughts” about striking the country, and when pressed by Rose on whether Saddam Hussein had connections to 9/11, Rice blankly said that “no one” believed in such a link. “…No one was arguing that Saddam Hussein somehow had something to do with 9/11.”
Click through to watch the video.

Nation’s major newspapers ignore Iraq war’s sixth anniversary. (Think Progress)
Today marks six years since former President Bush launched the invasion of Iraq — a preventive war of choice based on “intelligence fixed around the policy.” Since that time, hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent, over 4,000 U.S. servicemen and women and hundreds more from coalition countries have died (tens of thousands more physically and mentally wounded), nearly 100,000 (or more) Iraqi civilians have parished and nearly 5 million have been displaced. Yet the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, Wall Street Journal, and many other major American newspapers are ignoring the anniversary today. Only USA Today printed a story noting the anniversary of the invasion. Today’s Progress Report has more on the good, the bad, and the ugly of developments surrounding the Iraq war over the last year.

Six Years Ago on Eve of Iraq War: Judy Miller vs. Paul Krugman (by Greg Mitchell  at Editor & Publisher)
One of them looked forward to finding those WMD. The other wrote: “Victory in Iraq won’t end the world’s distrust of the United States because the Bush administration has made it clear, over and over again, that it doesn’t play by the rules … nor, as we’ve just seen, is military power a substitute for trust.” - 

WaPo Launches ‘Head Count;’ Tracks Obama Appointees (FishbowlDC, Media Bistro)
WaPo announced “Head Count” today. The site is a database to track President Obama’s senior political appointees and offer details about the nominations and process. With only 5.6 percent of positions confirmed so far, WaPo says HC will offer users the opportunity to dive deep into appointees’ biographies and learn about their connections to political families, previous jobs, age, education, hometown and ethnicity. Check it out here.

Returning to “Tony Soprano … with his lead pipe” analogy to blast EFCA, Limbaugh declares: “Nobody wants their kneecaps busted. I’m speaking figuratively, of course” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Fox’s Megyn Kelly asks ACORN spokesman: “You’re going to send child rapists out to conduct the census?” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

On MSNBC, media figures speculate about whether Obama’s NCAA bracket picks were politically motivated (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Still waiting for Bloomberg News to update its ‘Obama Bear Market’ reporting, cont’d (by Eric Boehlert at County Fair, Media Matters for America)
We noted earlier this week that it might be a good idea for the biz news outlet to revisit its heavy-handed report from March 6, which announced an Obama Bear Market, and quoted lots of Wall Street insiders claiming Obama’s agenda was driving the market down. That it was punishing investors and the new White House just didn’t get The Street. Since Bloomberg’s Drudge-friendly report, the Dow, as of today’s opening bell, has climbed nearly 900 points. Yet we’re still hearing crickets from Bloomberg about the Obama Bear Market.

Scarborough: “Tim Geithner is paying for the sins of everybody in Washington, D.C.” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Williams to Hannity on Pelosi comments: “[I]t’s her responsibility to challenge unjust laws, and when you’re taking little babies away from their [illegal immigrant] mothers, I say that’s an unjust law” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Undo Suburbia: The Imminent Transportation Catastrophe (by Glen Ford at the Black Agenda Report)
Last year’s “brief but terrifying” experience with $4-a-gallon gasoline “proved beyond doubt that the suburban and exurban model of development based on automobiles is broken beyond repair.” When the era of high-priced gasoline returns for good – which it will, and soon – it will bring on a “transportation crisis so excruciating it will make the whole society scream.” A multi-trillion dollar national makeover is desperately needed, to undo suburbia and the car culture.

Ingraham blames “left-wing smear machine” for “gin[ning] up a phony controversy” over her “satirical impression” of Meghan McCain (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Radio host Lee Rodgers on Obama’s relationship with the Islamic world: “I think the guy’s out to sell us out” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Echo chamber: Fox News’ Smith joins Limbaugh, MacCallum in comparing Rep. Frank to McCarthy (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Pat Robertson says “it’s time the Republicans gave the Democrats a dose of their own medicine,” states they “ought to filibuster every single one” of Obama’s judicial nominees (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Limbaugh finds it “hilarious” that “three dingbats … are about to die” looking for proof of global warming (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Lou Dobbs attacks St. Patrick’s Day: ‘How about an American day?’ (Think Progress)
Dobbs’ is right: What about an American day? Besides Independence Day, Presidents’ Day, Martin Luther King Day, Columbus Day, Thanksgiving, Veterans Day and Memorial Day, there’s barely a chance to celebrate America at all.

Media Matters for America headlines

• Hannity falsely asserted Dems “voted for those bonuses,” while GOP “did not”

• “This is what’s happening to our money”: CNBC’s Kudlow lights dollar bill on fire

• Fox News’ Bream uncritically repeats conservative claim Obama judicial nominee “has ties” to ACORN

• Fox News promo falsely claimed Obama “pushes a plan” requiring vets to pay for health insurance

• After admitting culpability during Daily Show interview, Cramer now calls Stewart’s criticism of CNBC “naïve and misleading”

• Fox’s Hemmer did not challenge Inhofe’s assertion that Obama cap-and-trade proposal is “the most regressive tax that you can have”

• Limbaugh defense of AIG bonuses follows attacks on “insane benefits” of UAW sending Big Three “down the tubes”

• On MSNBC, Tucker Carlson rewrote history to blame Frank for mortgage crisis

• Limbaugh joined by other conservatives standing up for AIG against “mob rule”

• Limbaugh falsely claimed “not one Republican voted for the TARP bailout”

• CNN’s Bash falsely claims recovery bill language required AIG bonuses “to stay in place”

• Hannity falsely claimed McCain had “been against the AIG bailout from the very beginning”

• Time cites NRSC attack on Dodd over AIG bonuses without noting that several GOP senators reportedly opposed executive pay restrictions

• USA Today, LA Times continue to omit Bush Treasury’s role in AIG bonus controversy

• Fox’s Hannity, Doocy repeated falsehood that Dodd to blame for AIG bonuses

• What do AIG bonuses have to do with health care and cap-and-trade?

Rights groups: Iranian blogger dies in prison
Rights groups say an Iranian blogger convicted of insulting the country’s ruling clerics has died in Tehran‘s main prison.

Attorney General Open to Antitrust Aid for Newspapers
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said on Wednesday preserving a healthy newspaper industry was important and he was open to adjusting antitrust policy if it could help. He was responding to a call by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to give newspapers more leeway to merge or combine operations.

Congressman, Marking ‘Sunshine Week,’ Calls For Passing a Federal Shield Law in 2009 
In an opinion piece for E&P, Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) writes, “As a conservative who believes in limited government, I believe the only check on government power in real time is a free and independent press.”

What Your Tax Money Buys You. (Capitol Ideas, The Morning Call, thanks to Susie at Suburban Guerilla)
So What Do You Get …. with the $336 million in public money that funds one of the four largest and most expensive Legislatures in this great land of ours? Take a listen, and then continue reading: Download 031609statewide

So here’s one answer to our question above. Your money buys you pretend journalism. The audio clip you just heard was created earlier this week by state House Democrats and made available to radio stations around Pennsylvania as a way of getting the word out on Stimulus-funded transportation spending. In every way that matters, that audio “actuality,” as it’s known in the business, sounds exactly like any news report you might hear on your local station as you’re driving into work in the morning. But there’s one critical distinction: At no point will you hear a disclosure that the report is actually a taxpayer-funded piece of propaganda produced by the House Democratic Caucus.
The author goes on to say that the Republicans do it, too, but that’s no excuse.  My tax money should not be paying for fake news reports.  Period.

“Someone is going to sue the Huffington Post”
“It’s not just about the volume of the content that it appropriates, it’s about the value,” says Nieman Journalism Lab director Joshua Benton. “It’s a big player, and the site that has got closest to the line” between fair and unfair use of copy. Arianna Huffington says: “We drive millions of page views to people who produce content, and we get a hundred requests a day from editors and reporters to link to them.”

@ McGraw-Hill: For Philippe Dauman, Copyright Suits And Google Run In The Family (Paid Content)
In his introduction of Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman at an afternoon keynote at the McGraw-Hill Media Summit, Dauman’s interviewer Ron Grover, BusinessWeek’s LA bureau chief, offered some family history with the aid of a year-old LA Times piece. Back in 1996, Dauman’s father, a freelance photographer living in New York, noticed that a Life magazine photo he had taken was used by the late Andy Warhol in a painting. Seeing that the Warhol painting had sold for over $400,000, the elder Dauman promptly sued the artist’s estate, which eventually settled. Like father like son: Dauman’s Viacom sued Google for copyright infringement over YouTube’s unauthorized use of content from its cable programs.

You Might Not Love the New Facebook, But Brands Should (Mashable)
Not only are Facebook Pages – the network’s competitive play against celebrity Twitter users – revamped and more social, but their updates are taking up space on member’s homepages, and in turn, as our data shows, driving lots of traffic and engagement for brands. At Mashable, we’ve been using our page to share our articles, post photos from our journey to SXSW, and engage users in conversation. And the results so far have been rather stunning… Now, to be fair, we have been actively promoting our Facebook Page to users on our blog and Twitter, which has helped grow our fan base on Facebook.
One of the big problems with the blog biz, as I see it, is that you have to be a technical whiz and a promoter, in addition to creating useful content, to succeed.  Not many people can do all those things well.  It seems to me that groups of blogs could work together in this regard, but there’s been almost no interest in doing it.

How to Start a Web Site in Six Easy Steps (Poynter Online)
“Greg in Hollywood” gets more than 12,000 Google hits, many of which are to or about Greg Hernandez’s new blog. Hernandez and a friend have written about how the blog got off the ground a week after he was laid off from the Los Angeles Daily News. We don’t all have his resources, or the resources of a number of other new sites. But, that’s OK. You can start a Web site anyway. You can do it quickly, easily, cheaply. Here’s how.
Easy to start, difficult to build traffic.

How Much Should Journalists Know about SEO? (by Amy Gahran at Poynter Online)
If you’re in the media business, like it or not, search engines have largely become the arbiter of your career. In a recent Wordtracker blog post, “The Bad, Good And Ugly Advice Given To Journalists On SEO” (search engine optimization), U.K. journalist Rachelle Money made some excellent points about how journalists can craft stories in ways that will attract more search engine traffic. I agree with much of what she said. I disagree with her, however, about the role of a journalist in the editorial process.

SXSW ’09 Wrapup: Interactive Festival Closes With Wired EIC Anderson in Fiery Final Keynote On ‘Free’
Anderson: “China is the future of free… “The Internet is the first truly competitive market in history. In a competitive market, price will fall to the marginal cost. This is physics, this is gravity… If you do not make your product free, piracy will do it for you. You can’t fight digital piracy, but China has found a way of using it. There, you don’t fight piracy, you use it for marketing. It creates celebrity, which they then monetize. So, create celebrity — ‘microcelebrity,’ if you will — then convert it into cash. This is done through public appearances, advertisements, product endorsements…

“In terms of business models versus free, you have to have one. The crisis has driven businesses toward the ‘freemium’ model… New York is very institutional, there you see the institutions like publishing starting to crumble [cites Conde Nast as an example]. In San Francisco where Guy and I live, we’re more driven by individual action; there, you’ve got the idea that this is a great time to start a company. I don’t think people feel as disempowered by this crisis in San Francisco as they do in New York.”
And just how does one get those “public appearances, advertisements, product endorsements”, Mr. Anderson?

Will NPR Save the News?
In one of the great under-told media success stories of the past decade, NPR has emerged not as the bespectacled schoolmarm of our imagination but as a massive news machine poised for what Dick Meyer, editorial director for digital media, half-jokingly calls “world domination.”
Yes, but much of their “news” consists of stories like hunting rare butterflies in the Amazon forest?  Not exactly relevant to what’s happening in the world.  But don’t overlook the fact that NPR and PBS have the most diverse sources of funding of any news entities—individual donations and subscriptions, foundations, government, AND advertising.

NPR explains why it canceled newspaper subscriptions
The network’s statement says: “NPR made the decision to change its newspaper delivery service from a print to an online subscription for most of its publications because we could save almost $100,000… NPR is strongly committed to the highest quality of journalism everywhere, and are pleased that most publishers offer free online access to their content for us at NPR – as well as all readers.”

Paying for the news (by John Dankosky, Connecticut Public Broadcasting)
[T]o the main question posed by Rick Green’s blog: If NPR says it’s okay not to pay for news they can get online, how can we ask people to pay for the news they get on the radio?  It’s a pretty sensitive question…

[But] this week Rick Green and I engaged in what many others see as the real model for media moving forward: The Collaboration.  He’s said on many occasions he likes the work we do, and we feel the same way.  He’s been a guest on the show several times, talking about a wide range of topics.  He joined me for an hour long conversation on Where We Live about heroin in Connecticut’s suburbs.  We referenced the newspaper’s excellent series of stories on the topic, we opened the airwaves to listeners, advocates and narcotics officers, and then he gave us a shout-out on his blog.  It was a moment of high-level synergy between two news outlets, born of the 20th Century – supposedly battling in a new media landscape over the scarce resources our citizens have left to give.  

It’s the future.  Get used to it.  

Consider Embedding Ads in Online Cartoons (by Paul Bradshaw at Poynter Online)
Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of taking part in the Professional Cartoonists’ Organisation’s biannual meeting. Like most content creators, cartoonists are struggling to adapt to how the Web is changing their livelihoods — while also finding themselves increasingly marginalised by publishers focused on what they see as their core product: news. As I’ve written previously, I think cartoons are massively overlooked in online news production. They have potential international appeal, are unique and — importantly — unlike text, when people redistribute it you can keep the advertising with it. So why don’t newspapers embed advertising in cartoons?

They embed ads in video and audio, after all — and video advertising is proving to be particularly successful for many newspapers. Of course, there are obvious editorial and branding issues. I can’t imagine an advert for high-class perfume next to an over-corpulent caricature of Gordon Brown. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t possibilities. As one of the cartoonists pointed out, imagine the advertising potential next to golf cartoons. Now, imagine you positively encourage users to share that cartoon; help them embed it elsewhere, or personalise it. Isn’t that a market advertisers would want?
And if they offered website owners part of the ad revenue, they’d get even wider distribution.

Why Brands Can’t Be Trusted (by Rory O’Connor)
Internet users put considerable trust in search engines as the online equivalent of traditional gatekeepers. But most are not even aware that sponsors pay for their links or that most search engines do no verification whatsoever of the information links they offer.

An Icon That Says They’re Watching You
A marketing professor says online ads should be marked with a special icon that, when clicked, displays what they know about you.

Media Cloud Aims to Help Track How Stories Evolve (Poynter Online)
Last week, Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society launched Media Cloud, an intriguing tool that could help researches and others understand how stories spread through mainstream media and blogs. According to Nieman Journalism Lab: “Media Cloud is a massive data set of news — compiled from newspapers, other established news organizations, and blogs — and a set of tools for analyzing those data. Some of the kinds of questions Media Cloud could eventually help answer.”

iPhone 3.0 Software Offers New Opportunities for News (by y Amy Gahran and Barb Iverson at Poynter Online)
News is going mobile in the U.S. In fact, the number of people getting news via cellphone doubled from 10.8 million in January, 2008 to 22.4 million in January, 2009, according to comScore. As news consumers, creators or publishers, improvements in the iPhone OS have the potential to make or break news delivery. The iPhone is due for a major operating system update, and Tuesday Apple revealed what the iPhone OS 3.0 software (due to be distributed summer 2009) will allow users and developers to do. In a nutshell: Plenty.

Department Of Self-Promotion (by Greg Sargent at The Plum Line)
I’ve been meaning to tell you guys more about the site that’s hosting this blog, WhoRunsGov, and to urge you all to go and check out the many interesting profiles of power-players we have over there for you. But the Columbia Journalism Review beat me to it with a new profile of the site and of this blog that does a better job of explaining the project than I ever could have done. If you want to know what we’re trying to do here, that’s a good place to start… [L]ater this spring we’ll be opening up WhoRunsGov to public editing, allowing readers to weigh in on the people who make up our politics by contributing editor-cleared changes to all our profiles. We’d love to know what you think of the site.

USAT’s Ad Revs Face 30 Percent Decline… (Paid Content)
In a sign of the depth of the declines facing even the strongest newspaper brands, USA Today’s Q1 ad revenues could fall 30- to 35 percent year-over-year, Gannett executives told an analyst conference, Reuters reported. No word yet as to what was said about Gannett’s prospects for the digital side. In the meantime, Gannett said that capital expenditures would come in around $100 million by the end of this year.

San Diego Paper Lands Fire-Sale Buyer
Platinum Equity, a Beverly Hills firm specializing in distressed deals, clinched a deal — at a rock-bottom price — to buy the San Diego Union-Tribune newspaper, one of the few large dailies that have found a buyer as industry profits sag.

El Nuevo Herald editor resigns rather than make mandated cuts
Humberto Castello, who has been El Nuevo Herald executive editor for seven years, said a reduced staff would mean the paper would likely have to share more stories from the Miami Herald. ”In the end, it’s going to be something else,” he said. Managing editor Tony Espetia also announced that he’ll retire in June.

Gannett CEO Dubow’s Pay Package Slashed 
An Associated Press analysis of Gannett Co. figures filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission show the company slashed CEO Craig Dubow’s pay package by 60% last year, passing along the financial misery that has tormented the largest U.S. newspaper publisher.

Copley Family Exits Newspapers Completely — With Sale of Weekly
Just over a century after Col. Ira Clifton Copley began Copley Press with a newspaper in Illinois, the family-owned chain announced the sale of its last print newspaper Thursday… Copley, which once owned about four dozen dailies and weeklies in California and the Midwest, began getting out of the business two years ago with the sale of several of its Midwest papers to GateHouse Media Inc.

Washington Post CEO Sells Bundle of Stock 
The family that owns the Washington Post has been selling shares in the parent company in earnest in recent months. Donald Graham, the chairman and chief executive officer of Washington Post Co., has sold tens of millions of dollars worth of stock in the past year.

Sony, Google Team Up Against Amazon E-Reader With 500,000 Free E-Books (Paid Content)
Google will provide Sony with some 500,000 copyright-expired titles for its e-book Reader, giving both companies the chance to take jabs at Amazon and Kindle. Sony can claim that it has a much-larger library and is more open; Google gets prime placement at the Sony eBook store and a boost in positive (it hopes) publicity for Google Book Search. Each is emphasizing open platform, a dig at Amazon and its proprietary Kindle format.

The New Yorker Again Leads Magazine Award Nominations
Ten for the Weekly; GQ Close Behind With Eight

VH1 Resuscitates Behind the Music
VH1 is reviving its former signature series Behind the Music. The cable network is ordering about 10 new episodes of Music, bringing back the iconic documentary program that ran for several years on VH1 starting in 1997.

Colbert Report to Film Episodes in Persian Gulf
The Colbert Report will tape a week’s worth of episodes on a USO tour in the Persian Gulf, becoming what Comedy Central claims is the first TV series to shoot more than one episode in a combat zone. The network hasn’t announced an airdate for these shows or the specific location in which they’ll be shot.

NBC Tuning Up Singing Competition Series
NBC is launching a singing competition series destined to draw comparisons to Fox’s American Idol. The project is called The Sing Off, and it’s billed as the first a cappella singing-style reality series. The network described the show as “bringing modern singing to the forefront of pop culture”

‘Best of the Web’ Award Winners Announced
Conde Nast Digital, United Business Media’s TechWeb, The Atlantic, Scholastic, and Time Inc. properties were among the big winners of min’s 2009 Best of the Web Awards, which were presented yesterday in New York.

Gains for the Web in March Madness
The annual N.C.A.A. men’s college basketball tournament is a pressure cooker for the 64 teams involved. CBS, which owns the television rights, also has plenty at stake. But the online video and gambling businesses could turn out to be the up-and-coming teams to watch.

Silverlight Scores Again: NBCU, Microsoft Re-Up For Vancouver 2010 Olympics (Paid Content)
Major League Baseball’s digital unit may have dropped Microsoft’s Silverlight as its online video platform, but Silverlight serves NBC Universal just fine. In fact, it performed so well during NBCU’s online coverage of the Beijing Olympics, that NBCU has re-upped with Microsoft for the 2010 Vancouver Games. The two companies will run “NBCOlympics.com on MSN” again, complete with live and on-demand event coverage in both standard and HD, packaged clips and interviews, stats and athlete bios. Olympics content will also be syndicated across the MSN Network, including on MSN.com and MSN Video.

It’s another sports coup for Microsoft’s Silverlight, following news that CBSSports.com would use the video platform to power HD content for March Madness—since Silverlight is up against the de facto standard of Adobe Flash. (Silverlight only launched in 2007, and an estimated 76 percent of online broadcasters were already using Flash then, a number that’s likely higher now).

Hulu Making Documentary Push
Hulu is planning a new section of the site dedicated to documentary programming. The section will feature documentary films as well as short form content. “It is really an exciting part of the industry, these filmmakers and their distributors are really looking at streaming carefully,” said a Hulu exec.

Can IMDb Be A Player In The Streaming-Video Business? (Paid Content)
Amazon’s IMDb wants in on the streaming-video business in a big way: founder Col Needham said the company, which dominates the movie-database business, wants to be able to give users one-click access to the 1.3 million titles in its index. Of course, that’s a mammoth task—Needham said it was a goal for 2009 “and beyond,” per CNET. Given the tangle of licensing agreements IMDb would have to negotiate with multiple studios and organizations like the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the “beyond” could mean a few years

YouTube Adds Detailed Engagement Statistics (Mashable)
YouTube is adding more features to its Insights platform that helps video publishers get a more detailed look at how their uploads are performing on the site. Users will now get a “Community” tab that includes information on ratings (YouTube’s 1-5 star scale), the number of users who favorite videos, and comment counts. Additionally, these stats can be narrowed down per video or per geographic region.

Path 101: Data-Driven Guidance for Career Indecision (Mashable)
In times of economic turmoil many of us are finding ourselves unemployed or stuck in dead-end jobs for fear of not being able to find a better one. Sure you could try to find a job on Twitter, or reference our career toolbox, but where do you go for direction and career guidance? Path 101, a new alpha site released to the public [Tuesday], is hoping to be the guidance resource for your career indecision. They’ve crawled millions of resumes across public Web pages to build a database of information on what people typically do with various work histories, skills, and educational backgrounds.

10 Great Social Sites for Resume Building (by Dan Schawbel, author of Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success, at Mashable)
Creating the perfect resume is not easy. Luckily, there are a number of online resources dedicated to helping you create outstanding traditional and social media resumes. Here are 10 great social sites with unique features that let you create your own resume-like profile, edit your resume online, get it reviewed by experts, print it, share it on social networks, and much more. Remember, building a strong profile can help serve as a great marketing tool to help you get the job you’re looking for.

Girl Ambition: Inspire Your Tween to Safely Play and Create Content Online (Mashable)
Girl Ambition is site for girls by girls. Started by three working moms, the site hopes to provide a safe, fun, positive, and inspirational environment for tween girls and their parents. Girls can play games, participate in arts and crafts, take quizzes, email and chat with friends, and even raise a virtual pet. Parents can benefit from expert resources and advice on online safety, and how to stay hip to the trends that tween girls think are all the rage.

Get YouTube, Flickr, Picasa, and Yelp Previews from Inside Gmail (Mashable)
Google’s been busy making sure you never have to leave their products to view the content your friends share with you. They recently made YouTube videos watchable in Gmail chat, and now they’re extending that functionality to your entire inbox. Your inbox will never look the same once you enable the four new Labs features for Gmail — YouTube, Flickr, Picasa, and Yelp previews. To enable the new Labs features, just click on the green labs icon, enable the previews you want to start seeing in your Gmail, then click save.

Genwi: Where Your Ego Feed Meets Your Feed Reader at a Vanity URL (Mashable)
Right now most of us probably use one site to aggregate our online activity from social services, another tool to keep up with our RSS feeds, and yet another service to check what our friends are up to. If the process is getting a little overwhelming, you might consider Genwi, the all-in-one ego feed, news reader, and friend follower with social elements baked into the system. Genwi’s service lets you grab your activity across the Web, add RSS feeds, and publish that content as a newspaper that anyone can follow, share, and comment on. You can also follow the content you find interesting, filter activity, add your favorite feeds, and use Genwi as a social feed reader. Plus, since the service just enhanced their vanity URL offering, you can even publish your newspaper at a custom URL for an annual fee.

Ballmer reiterates interest in Yahoo talks
Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Steve Ballmer is still signaling an interest in a deal to buy part of Yahoo Inc. Ballmer said at a technology and media summit Thursday in New York that a deal would help improve Microsoft’s Web search business by expanding the base of users.

@ McGraw-Hill: Ballmer: Apple Is Too Expensive For This Economy (And That’s Why MSFT Will Win) (Paid Content)
The deteriorating economy and cutback in consumer spending will hurt Apple and Microsoft—at least that’s the way MSFT CEO Steve Ballmer sees it. In a Q&A with BusinessWeek editor-in-chief Steve Adler at the McGraw-Hill Media Summit, Ballmer took aim at the iPod, iPhone and and Apple’s computers in general. “No one’s going to pay $500 more for a logo,” he said to audience gasps as he alluded to Apple’s various offerings.

Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 Offers Better Performance
Mozilla has unleashed its third beta release of Firefox 3.1 to testers. Available in 64 languages as well as separate builds for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 includes several new features and enhancements for boosting browser performance, Web compatibility, and speed.

Microsoft adds shortcuts, security to new browser
Microsoft Corp. released a new version of Internet Explorer Thursday, adding features meant to speed up common Web surfing tasks and bringing the browser’s security measures in line with those of major competitors.

Samsung launches movies to mobiles service
Korea‘s Samsung Electronics Co Ltd launched a service allowing its customers to buy or rent movies and TV series to download to their mobile phones.

Can other ‘app’ stores work for mobile users?
Research In Motion, Microsoft and Nokia are getting ready to launch online “app” stores for their mobile phones. In a tough economy, can they  play catch-up with Apple’s hugely successful “App Store” for the iPhone?

AT&T to sell iPhone without contract for $599
AT&T Inc. is going to start selling iPhones without requiring a two-year contract, but they will cost $400 more than those sold with contracts.

Cisco Does Buy Flip Maker Pure Digital For $590 Million; Big Bet On Consumer Electronics (Paid Content)
Cisco is making an even bigger bet on consumer electronics in a direct way than it has ever done before: it is buying Pure Digital, the maker of the popular Flip video cameras… Flip line of pocket-size video cams have been simple ones known for their ease of use and FlipShare software which allows users to upload or e-mail video to video sharing sites. like YouTube and MySpace.The products are usually priced at between $100 and $229, and have storage space of between 30 to 60 minutes of video.