Alec Baldwin vows to fly to L.A. to “straighten out” his 11 year-old daughter

Alec Baldwin left quite a message on his 11 year-old daughter’s voicemail (audio). In it, he calls her a “rude, thoughtless little pig”, seems confused as to her age, says that she has “humiliated” him “for the last time”, and threatens to fly from New York to Los Angeles “just to straighten you out.”

Some father, huh? Well, some people actually think he’s a great father:

Tony Zizza, for example, wants to ” give Alec Baldwin a pass on this.” Zizza will never forgive Baldwin for opposing the war in Iraq, but calling his 11 year-old daughter a pig? Not a problem.

At Paxalles, we find a more balanced position. The word over there is that both parents must somehow be at fault for Baldwin’s tirade.

At the heart of the defense of Baldwin is the concept of Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS), a long-discredited theory that custodial parents are able to persuade their children to stop loving the non-custodial parent. And of course, this theory is still getting big play on CNN, ABC, and other mainstream outlets, despite the fact that this theory has long since been debunked (see here and here).

As usual, Jon Swift has the best post on the topic.

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Jessica Valenti’s new book, Full Frontal Feminism, is now available for the outrageously low price of $10.85, if you buy it through Pandagon.

Lindsay of Magic Thighs links to an outrageous interview with Valenti and an outrageous summary by The Guardian.

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Lindsay also points out that the new floodwalls protecting what’s left of New Orleans will be weaker than the flood control system that they’re replacing.

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Here’s Josh Marshall, outlining some of the evidence that US Attorney Carol Lam was fired because her investigations were leading her too close to the White House:

Marshall also catches CNN doing White House political adviser Karl Rove’s work for him. CNN chose to attach this headline to a story about the war appropriations bill: Cheney attacks defeatist Dem plan.

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Karl Rove is now claiming that the war in Iraq “Osama bin Laden’s idea“. So while the White House and CNN are pushing the “Democrats are defeatists” meme, Bush’s closest adviser is so sure we’ve lost that he’s already trying to say that the war was started by someone else.

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This Old Brit has some interesting video: Jessica Lynch testifying before congress about the way the Bush administration used her as a propaganda tool (video).

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When it comes to Iraq, the American people aren’t the only ones being lied to. Foreign workers are being hired to work in the country, without being told that the jobs are in Iraq:

“When I left Ethiopia for Jordan, they told me that I was going to work in Amman and receive US $200 a month for my services. On the second day of my arrival in Amman, they told me that I had to travel to another city by plane. Soon after, I found myself working in a house in Baghdad,” said Muluken Alemu, a 22-year-old Ethiopian who lives as virtual prisoner in the house she works in.

“I got desperate. They took my passport away and since I came here five months ago, I haven’t received a single dollar for my work - they always tell me that they’ll pay me after I complete one year of service. I pleaded with them to send me back to my country, but each time I do that, the owner of the house beats me,” Muluken added.

Of course, there’s no reason to bring workers into a country that has a 70% unemployment rate, unless you plan to treat those workers as slaves.

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It looks like the White House is not following standard security protocols for secret information:

Among the lapses cited by the security officers, who spoke to the committee anonymously, are multiple instances of breaches being reported to the security office that were ignored and never investigated. Several of those instances allegedly involved the mishandling of SCI (Sensitive Compartmentalized Information), which is the highest level of classified information.

In one instance, a White House official reportedly left SCI material behind in a hotel room during a foreign trip with the president. The CIA did recover the highly classified material, but the security office did not investigate the incident or discipline the individual, according a security officer’s account in the letter.

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Rush Limbaugh claims that the Virginia Tech shooter was a liberal in this entertaining video.

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Today’s final outrage involves a spat at a Santa Barbara newspaper. Apparently, the publisher of The Santa Barbara News-Press didn’t get along with one of his editors, and fired him. And then ran a front-page article alleging that the editor had kept child pornography on his computer at work. The editor in question denies the charge and is threatening legal action, and points out that his work computer had been used by at least three previous editors before he was hired.

It will probably not surprise you to learn that the publisher, Wendy McCaw, has a history of bizarre behavior:

Current and past employees of the paper are at odds with Ms. McCaw over their vote to unionize last fall, which she has declined to recognize. Ms. McCaw has also stirred broader tension in the community with threats of legal action against local merchants who hung signs sympathetic to the union cause, and against a journalist who wrote an unfavorable article about her in The American Journalism Review.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 24th, 2007 at 5:37 pm and is filed under Outrage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.