Fresh Loaf

You’ve heard about the birthers, right? Those tragic souls who insist that President Barack Obama wasn’t born in Hawaii, but in Kenya? They will not rest until the president — who’s totally an illegal alien, y’all — is ousted from office and sent to a supermax prison, where he will confess he’s a Muslim and write books about jihad and the audacity of mandatory life sentences.

The Huffington Post dispatched a reporter to ask Republican Congressmen whether they believed Obama was born in the United States. In a hilarious video, most of the lawmakers — probably scared they’ll lose the cherished never-leaves-the-house demographic — run from the reporter, hide in an office-supply store, and lovingly tell the journalist he’s the “scum of the Earth.” Only one lawmaker says Obama is a U.S. citizen.

The back of U.S. Rep. Tom “Flanders” Price, R-Ga., has a brief cameo at around 2:00.

After the jump, a Price spokesman tells us why the Congressman fled the scene — and what he thinks about Obama’s citizenship.

(more…)

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Maybe Gov. Sonny Perdue, in Washington, D.C. this weekend for the National Governors Association’s winter conference, has the flu. If so, get better and come home soon, sir! We wanna talk to you about this whole might-not-take-some-of-that-stimulus-money thingy.

From the Huffington Post’s frontpage (photo by Charles Dharapak of the Associated Press):

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The Chicago Reader, CL’s sister paper, is a bit miffed that the Huffington Post, “The Internet Newspaper,” is copying content willy-nilly, and repurposing it within their own site.

Anyone familiar with Arianna Huffington’s brainchild website knows that a big part of their model is to “aggregate” content aka, copy/paste/link it. Anyone also familiar with copyright law knows that the so-called “fair use” doctrine has its limits, and the jury is still out on whether HuffPo’s model is “fair use” or “fair steal.”

As my colleague Whet Moser writes in his Chicagoland blog:

The Huffington Post’s local “aggregation” wing straight stole our entire Bon Iver Critic’s Choice–they didn’t ask permission (”read the whole article”? that is the whole article, dumbass). Here’s a screen shot (or click the thumbnail), since we’re obviously about to ask them to take it down.

Update: I guess they left off the time, price, and Vic address/contact info. Perhaps that’s what counts as “fair use” in this bright future we live in now.

We’ve had our own internal debates about copyright infringement and the like, and in fact, we contacted the HuffPo ourselves about their usage of one of our photographs on their site (here’s the screen capture in case it gets taken down).

They’ve since credited the source of the photograph, but ask Joeff Davis (and any copyright lawyer) — they’ll tell you that this is infringement and/or plain ol’ theft.

(And for those of you paying attention, yes, we too aggregate, but we actually just link to external sources, we don’t add an extra page in between you and the destination.)

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