It’s not nice to plant spyware in someone else’s website — and it’s not legal either. This little point of netiquette has been criminalized with the guilty pleas of two men who did that at MySpace — and it could be a major problem for the problem-racked retailer, Overstock.com.

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Well, well.

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Mitt Romney has hair that is too perfect, a flip-flop reputation and a particular antagonism toward France. That information comes not from an adversary but from a 77-page internal PowerPoint presentation about Romney’s strategy obtained by the Boston Globe … It also contemplates using antipathy toward France as a campaign tool, suggesting that comparing Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) to that country might earn Romney votes.

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After the Bush administration announced the U.S. would accept 7,000 Iraqi war refugees (second item, “The Daily Blade,” February 21, 2007), OH Governor Ted Strickland told The Associated Press: “I am sympathetic to the plight of the innocent Iraqi people who have fled that country. However, I would not want to ask Ohioans to accept a greater burden than they already have borne for the Bush administration’s failed policies.”

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Almost 500,000 books in the English language are published annually. The New York Times can only hope to review a fraction of those which makes its imprimatur all the more valuable and meaningful. On February 18th, the Times chose to review Ron Jeremy: The Hardest (Working) Man in Showbiz, by Ron Jeremy and Eric Spitznagel.

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Against my better instincts I have hired a fitness trainer and a nutritionist and embarked on a new regimen for my life. So far I have lost eighteen pounds and staved off a nervous breakdown. But, there is a journey of a thousand miles beyond that single step. Confuscious was right. We have NO idea what we are getting ourselves into here.

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Utah Killer’s Equal?

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Want a retreat from your daily routine? How about a night in a bona fide two-story Log Cabin? You’ll sleep in a four-poster timber bed with an aquarium built right into the headboard and bathe in an environmental habitat room – all this in the heart of D.C.?Or are you in the mood for a cruise? Try the windowless Stateroom, with its king-sized waterbed and nautical detail. Beatles fans can soak in the tub immersed with not only the sounds of John Lennon, but his face reflected on the bathroom floor of the Lennon room. I hunkered down in the magnificent Fifth Dimension suite while my house was undergoing renovation. After a whirlpool bath and a dreamy nights sleep in a hand-finished mahogany Sleigh bed from Milan, I worked out on my private treadmill.

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These days I am on my very best behavior whenever I leave the house. If I am wearing pantyhose, I double check to ensure there is no laughable bagging at the ankles. I drive as thoughtfully as if I’m being tested for a license, a DMV official sitting in the passenger seat. I won’t even allow myself to grimace or honk when another driver is blocking my path, taking ten minutes to parallel park single-handedly because her other hand has a death-grip on a cell phone, which she is using to make a manicure appointment. If I must sneeze, I hide in a secure location before honking into a tissue.

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There is a well-known story told in the movie industry about incompetence on an epic scale. It involves Cecil B. DeMille, the film director famous for Biblical extravaganzas, who once spent an entire day and a great deal of money creating an Exodus scene with thousands of Hebrew slaves fleeing Egypt. To guarantee it was captured on film, C.B, as he was known, had two back-up cameras in case his main camera malfunctioned.

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A richly ironic story is unfolding in Utah, where a powerful CEO had the legislature pass a law on his pet obsession — only to drag Utah into a costly and fruitless legal war.

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T.S. Elliott got it wrong. It’s February, not April, that has the sadistic streak in it. For it is in February that depression, gambling, alcohol consumption and body piercing peak. This is all documented, trust me, but really the only proof yee need know that all hope has indeed been abandoned in the dreary succession of overcast, flight-postponed, football-less days is the annual airing of the grand-mal spectacle, the Oscars. This utterly pointless, suspense-less, self-congratulatory preen-fest of wealthy high-school dropouts is the high point of the low point of the year.

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As of 3 p.m. Monday, ten video clips of Al Gore at the Oscars had been uploaded to YouTube.  But none of them had gone viral, meaning no one was e-mailing them around, or received any traction online.  A total of only 384 views for all 10 clips.

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In a satanic race to the depths of depravity against their evil sidekicks, the Shia militias and al-Qaeda-suspected Sunni insurgents have now begun to use what the Iraqis are calling “dirty weapons.”

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Should back-up cameras (designed to prevent kids from being run over by vehicles moving in reverse) be mandatory equipment in every new car sold? If legislation introduced by Sens. Hillary Clinton and John Sununu — the Cameron Gulbransen Kids and Cars Safety Act — is signed into law, they will be.

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Hilmi Aydogdu, a Kurd who heads the Democratic Society Party’s branch in the mainly Kurdish city of Diyarbakir was arrested and charged by Turkish authorities with “threatening public safety by inciting racial enmity and hatred,” reports The Associated Press. Aydogdu allegedly made remarks suggesting that if Turkey attacks Iraqi Kurds in the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, 20 million Turkish Kurds would consider it an attack on Diyarbakir.

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In regards to the jailed Egyptian blogger, I dashed off a letter to Egyptian Ambassador to the U.S. Nabil Fahmy just a few minutes ago. Reprinted here in full (save for the sign-off):

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A day after terrorist blow up 68 Indians and Pakistanis on the “Friendship train,” Pakistan tests Shaheen II nuclear capable ballistic missile. I suspect that while we are fighting a war against terror, other, even more dangerous, battle lines are also being drawn. There is an incredible arms race going on in Asia and plenty of prepositioning and testing. The recently established Hotline between Beijing and New Delhi was far from a sign of a new friendship. The real reemerging strategic partnership is between India and Russia. Consider:

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When Al Gore is one of the entertainment highlights of ANY show keep your remote control very, very close to your zapping thumb.

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Virginians rejoice! Governor Tim Kaine has promised to serve out his full four-year term. When I ran into him Sunday evening at President Bush’s annual dinner for the nation’s governors at The White House, I pressed him as to why he felt the need to endorse Sen. Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination so early in the election cycle. After all, Governor Rod Blagojevich of Illinois, Obama’s home state, is so far the only other governor to do so. Most savvy politicians sit back and wait rather than make such an aggressive move a year before the primary. It’s significant because Kaine, respected among Southern Governors – the south is an important voter block –supported a mid-westerner over a fellow southerner, former Sen. John Edwards (N.C).

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Boom! The DRUDGE REPORT is leading just now with a release from a Tennessee-based group that Al Gore’s mansion uses as much electricity in a month as the typical family uses all year. The hypocrisy is stunning. He’ll have to address this — but there’s no way he can get around it without moving into a reasonable-sized home. (You know, like the rest of us.) How I long to hear him say that his work is so important and involves so many others that he needs all that extra energy… you know, just like that argument he dismisses about the US being more productive and therefore needing more energy than other nations?

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A good friend and colleague once offered an interesting assessment of what the political spectrum really looks like: Instead of just conservatives, there are Pious Conservatives and Irreverent Conservatives; instead of just liberals, there are Smug Liberals and Cynical Liberals. He, a proud Cynical Liberal, further opined that newsrooms are generally populated by Irreverent Conservatives and Cynical Liberals. And that’s why righties and lefties in journalism are able to work well together.

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America Ferrara, star of “Ugly Betty,” was a presenter at Saturday’s Film Independent’s Spirit Awards. In one exchange with co-presenter Zach Braff, she said, “America’s supposedly the ‘land of the free,’ right? Or at least we will be in 2008,” implying that America wouldn’t be truly free until a Democrat replaces Bush in the White House.

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If you listened quietly during last nights Oscar telecast, you could hear the collective questioning by every Democrat in America (including myself) as they watched Al Gore seamlessly navigate the red carpet and Oscar telecast with humor and ease – where the hell was this guy six years ago?

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McCain is on a joke-telling tear.  His recent swing through Iowa featured rat-a-tat quip after quip, sometimes at his expense, sometimes at others’, and often at the weather, which is one of the few things in the world McCain really can’t do much about.

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I wanted to let some of my friends know that I am currently being heard on WNYC (NPR) on THE FISHKO FILES, in a story about the art of whistling in popular music. It’s a fascinating listen.

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Tom Wolfe labeled the 1970s the “Me Decade,” but Tom was a tad early. The `70s seem a prim, modest decade compared to our current ego-on-steroids decade. We appear to be knee-deep in the Me Century, in which every man is, if not yet king, an expert, a singer, a writer, an artist, possibly soon a self-appointed doctor or lawyer.

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Time to get aboard the all Anna Nicole Smith all the time bandwagon?

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In the 1969 movie “Goodbye, Columbus” there’s a scene in which main character Richard Benjamin is playing ping-pong with the spoiled-brat sister of his girlfriend, Ali MacGraw. When the girl flubs a serve, she gets very upset because Benjamin won’t give her a “do-over.”

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THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) U.N. court clears Serbia of legal responsibility for genocide and complicity in genocide in Bosnia.

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In his prosecution of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald contended that  Vice President Dick Cheney’s former Chief of Staff was actively involved in a smear campaign against anti-war diplomat Joe Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame and that he lied about what he said to whom during the early summer of 2003, thus obstructing the investigation to determine who “outed” Plame as a CIA agent by leaking her identity to the media. 

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I guess when you make a blockbuster movie and win an Academy Award you can say or do anything stupid and get away with it.

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Reuters recently reported this disturbing but predictable persecution of an American minority: Across the country, over the past 15 months,

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Here’s another example of how the Internet screws investors.

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Ok, now I know that I grew up in Michigan and lived in Boston for six years so I am perhaps better equipped to deal with foul weather of the winter variety than most. However, Washington, DC’s chronic inability to deal with any of the elements never ceases to amaze me. I mean, it’s not Atlanta, it’s not like it never snows here - we get a handful of storms a year, which is par for the course in this day and age of global warming.

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