Wednesday, January 08, 2003

Oil Moneyed Diva's Brand New Bag: We've always liked Arianna Huffington. She has gobs of money and throws really great networky parties and clearly, never needed a "big stwong man" in her life. Her tendency to cleave to odd causes is her business and has little or no real effect in the world. But, her latest cause is the loopiest yet and offensive. She's spending a wad of the oil money her oilman ex-husband forked over to tell those who drive SUVs that they are supporting terrorism. You may not know that the Lucianne.com staff car is a Mercedes M Class SUV (with fluttering flags on the fenders, of course) and this kind of group smear is hurtful.

Too Late for The Torch: Back just a day and congress has loosened up on its ethics rules and let the caviar-and-lobster camel get his nose in the tent. They say its just so interns can get their hands on pizza (ah, memories.......) but you just know dinner for twelve from Le Cirque is on the shuttle to DC shortly.

Anybody Out There?  We know there are only about nine people in South Dakota but couldn't one of them have given Tom Daschle a clue? Only now he's getting hip to the fact that he'd likely lose his Senate seat to a Republican if he gave it up to run, which he would have to do - Instead, they let him embarrass himself by saying he was "leaning" toward a presidential race. Then a heartbeat later saying he'd decided not to run. Good. He doesn't make particularly good copy anyway.

Today's KaChing Thing: W shook the tax tree yesterday and it will take a day or so to climb out from under the pile and sort it all out.  Lieberman calls it an "irresponsible, ineffective, ideologically driven wish list," while the rest of the dems trot out the tired old "it's for the rich" class warfare whine.  Ari Fleischer points out that Americans who earn over $49,800 pay 96.1 % of all taxes.  At $49,800, your take home does not make you rich. Here Deborah Orin bring us the highlights.

Missed Connection: While it's kind of inside baseball, the announcement yesterday that one David Shipley, a former Clinton speech writer, would become the new op-ed editor of the New York Times, did not include the pertinent fact that he is married to the seemingly gone-missing Naomi Wolf - she of the see-through harem pants and such a passion for earth-tones that she all but destroyed Algore's "look" in 2000 and probably his go for the gold.

-Your Unfairly Safety Advantaged LComStaff