Mediaboss Marketing

The Irish Times - Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Ferdinand was asked to demonstrate precisely how he had gestured towards Terry, writes DANIEL TAYLOR

ON THE pavement outside Westminster Magistrates Court, a lone Chelsea fan in a replica shirt and baseball cap held up a life-size cardboard cut-out of John Terry and tried to attract the attention of the small army of photographers jostling for position behind the metal fences.

Inside up the stairs, turn right past the security guys and through the two sets of double doors Terry sat behind the glass-walled dock of courtroom one. Wearing a pale grey suit, salmon-pink tie and polished shoes, he could have been dressed for a summer wedding. Instead, he was face-to-face with Anton Ferdinand, the opponent he called a f**king black c**t while playing for Chelsea in a Premier League match against QPR last October.

It was the row, ultimately, that led to Terry losing the England captaincy although he still played in Euro 2012 which, in turn, brought about the dispute between Fabio Capello and the Football Association that saw the Italian resign as national team manager. And it all started from a dispute over a penalty-kick that was never given.

Ferdinand was angry that Terry thought he should have been awarded one; Terry barged into him. The two players swapped insults. Terry waved his hand in front of his nose, as if to indicate that Ferdinand had bad breath. Handbags, they agreed after the match. Banter, football stuff, shake hands and keep it on the pitch. But then it got serious. Ferdinand was shown some YouTube footage and told he was trending on Twitter. It had become global news, as he put it. By the time court case 1103985595, listed as John George Terry 07/12/80, had finished for its first day, it was difficult to recollect how many times, even roughly, the word c**t had been used. Forty? Fifty? One hundred? More?

The only certainty was that it was going to be a difficult day for newspapers, radio and television when it came to their asterisk and bleeping policy.

Early in his evidence, Ferdinand was unsure about whether or not he could swear in court. Its a serious issue, the prosecutor Duncan Penny told him. Please do not worry about the language. What did you call Mr Terry? Ferdinand replied: A c**t. And so it began.

At times Ferdinand could be seen looking to his mother, Janice, and other relatives in the front row of the public gallery. Along from them sat Chelseas chairman, Bruce Buck. Representatives from the football anti-racism and discrimination organisation Kick It Out, and the Football Association were also among the assorted media. The court had doled out tickets in the manner of a football club distributing press passes, and the queue of reporters turned away at the door was substantial.

They missed an extraordinary day in which Ferdinand was asked at one point to demonstrate to the court precisely how he had gestured towards Terry on the pitch. He did so with a clenched fist, bending his elbow and delivering a pumping action. Asked what it was supposed to signify, Ferdinand replied: A shag.

Go here to read the rest:
C-word has its day in court as Ferdinand replays face-off

There are new hands at the tiller for the Tri-County Regional Planning Commission. As part of a routine, two-year swap in the chairmanship between commission members in Peoria, Tazewell and Woodford counties, Larry Whitaker is stepping up to replace Mike Phelan.

The change comes after what has been an extremely active past couple years for the commission under Phelan's chairmanship, something Whitaker - who stepped back onto the commission recently after some time off - noted with the air of someone quite impressed.

"When I came back on the commission, I was just staggered by the intensity of work, the quality of work, the volume of work the commission has continued to take on," he said. Tri-County is "one of those organizations that people really don't hear about until a big project comes along."

Among those lately has been work involved with the Army Corps of Engineers' construction of the island in the Illinois River just north of the McClugage Bridge and a close focus on U.S. Environmental Protection Agency air standards issues - the latter in an effort to keep local air cleaner so we don't face even tighter regulations and restrictions during summer months.

Those are the kinds of things that don't "make for glorious headlines and a lot of glamorous news copy," Whitaker said, but they're the bread and butter of what the commission quietly does.

In addition, of course, the commission has spent time discussing a potential rail link into the Amtrak corridors passing through Bloomington and Galesburg, and commissioned a major study on regional economic development.

"I'm hopeful I can come close to that level of accomplishment" over the next two years, Whitaker said, giving Phelan credit for a "phenomenal job engaging the organization and the people it serves."

Whitaker also earns plaudits from Woodford County Board Chairman Stan Glazier for his experience and leadership, but moreover for the fact that "his personality blends in nicely with everyone so well."

That ability to work well with others is particularly critical for an organization that has to deal with sometimes competing regional interests and parochial interests.

It's a song Whitaker sings well.

Read this article:
Word on the Street: Planning commission chief figures to be busy

If there is one thing Republicans claim to hate more than taxes and big government, it is sexual promiscuity. A recently introduced fee attached to adult live entertainment in Houston, Texas, the so-called pole tax, appears to pass muster with the Republican right. The fee applies to bars and nightclubs, which offer events that could be construed as sexually explicit, such as wet T-shirt contests or naked sushi contests, in which revellers are invited to eat raw fish off the body of a nude woman. Houston is a city that insiders describe as Tea Party-infused, meaning that in Houston tax-raising is anathema to Republican legislators. But apparently, the pole tax is different.

What happens deep in the heart of Texas does not usually hit the headlines in the rest of the United States. And so Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, has not been asked yet, whether he supports or rejects the pole tax for ideological reasons.

The chances are that Romney will be on the defensive as he was after the Supreme Court upheld President Obamas signature health care legislation. It turned out that the question of what is a tax and whether a tax could be reasonable is a difficult issue for someone who, as an ex-governor of Massachusetts, has to rally the anti-tax Republican right behind him.

Just look at how the Romney campaign reacted to the discussion about whether the result of not complying with the individual mandate in the health care law amounts to a penalty or a tax. Under the law, every American is required to buy health insurance. If someone is too poor to do it, the government will help. If someone does not want to do it, then that person has to pay a fee/penalty/tax take your pick.

Romneys chief spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom named it a fee, not a tax, echoing Romneys long-time script book ever since the candidate backed such a mandate when he was governor of Massachusetts. Asked whether Romney would side with Obama on that one, Ferhnstrom said: Thats correct. But two days later, Romney, in a rare TV interview, contradicted his spokesman by calling the mandate a tax. Thus, he belatedly fell in line with the rest of the party by saying that what the Supreme Court rules is the law of the land. And therefore the mandate is a tax, because the Supreme Court ruled it so.

This latest flip-flop brought Romney harsh criticism from the left and particularly from the right. The Washington Post wrote that Romney changed his mind because he would now be able to brand Obama a tax raiser. And the conservative Wall Street Journal judged that the Romney campaign looks confused in addition to being politically dumb. The Journal, a Romney ally, had let off some remarkable steam. Just days earlier, the papers owner, media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, had openly voiced his anger and disappointment at Romney, stating that the candidates campaign advisers were slowly squandering an opportunity to beat Obama.

Another opportunity for Romney to pounce on Obama came last Friday, when the wimpy June unemployment numbers showed that economic recovery is still stagnant, at best. But while Obama was aggressively defending his record on a bus tour in the crucial swing state of Ohio, Romneys attack was standard campaign talk, predictable and uninspiring. On top of that, a pro-Obama group pushed a two-minute video they uncovered from a June 2006 press conference in which then-governor Romney basically sounds like Obama as he explains why he could not turn the economy around overnight. If you are going to suggest to me he told reporters back then, that somehow the day I got elected, somehow jobs should have immediately turned around, well that would be silly.

The only bright spot for Romney this weekend were the latest fund-raising numbers. His campaign and affiliated Republican committees raised more than $100 million in June, according to the Republican National Committee. That is Romneys best month of the 2012 campaign to date. His June haul easily trumps his previous fund-raising best. He pulled in $77 million in May, outdoing Obama for the first time in this campaign and forcing the President onto the defensive.

Copyright 2012 euronews

See the original post here:
Despite the “T” Word and Jobless Gloom – Romney is on the defensive

Wiggins, right, on Sunday. (Photo by James Startt)

Brad Wiggins has a point. But so do fans.

By Joe Lindsey

With apologies to FDJ-BigMat director Marc Madiot, the most emotional moment in Stage 8 of the 2012 Tour de France might not have been his dog-in-the-window screaming act for protg Thibaut Pinots stage win but race leader Brad Wiggins dropping the c-word in the post-race press conference.

Wiggins was asked what his response was to peopleparticularly on social media such as Twitterwho questioned whether the performances they saw in the Tour were free of doping.

Wiggins reply:

I say theyre just fucking wankers, Wiggins said. I cannot be doing with people like that. It justifies their own bone idleness because they cant imagine applying themselves to do anything in their lives.

Its easy for them to sit under a pseudonym on Twitter and write that sort of shit, Wiggins added, rather than get off their own arses in their own lives and apply themselves and work hard at something and achieve something. And thats ultimately what counts. C**ts.

And with that, he tossed the microphone on the table and got up and left.

Wiggins has vacillated between calm moments and outbursts this year. Hes normally composed before the press, but he can be set off with the slightest provocation, at which point he turns particularly snarly.

View original post here:
follow us:

By STEVEN KURLANDER | Florida Voices Published: July 08, 2012 Updated: July 08, 2012 - 12:00 AM

Since appearing before Congress and lamenting the intolerance found in today's Republican Party, Jeb Bush is continuing to press his case, most recently in a National Review article titled "The Grand Solutions Party."

Bush argues that President Obama has governed from a "One Ideology, One Party, and One Man" perspective "a centralized, planned, command-and-control government."

Bush suggests Republicans present an alternative governing style, one that embraces "policy experimentation and fresh approaches" and presents the GOP as the "party of competing ideas."

"It is time for the Republican Party to offer an alternative. Not just an alternative to President Obama's agenda of liberal government, which is important to do. We need to present an alternative to his approach to governance in general. An approach that applies to every elected office."

For role models, Bush points to New Jersey's Gov. Chris Christie, Louisiana's Gov. Bobby Jindal and Indiana's Gov. Mitch Daniels. These leaders have successfully worked with Democrats on contentious issues, and have expressed divergent opinions on issues such as immigration and social policy.

"The animating force of this governance is diversity and creativity of thinking. And that is how the Republican Party should always be," Bush wrote.

While acknowledging that Republicans should continue to believe in an ideology that encompasses individual achievement and opportunity, and small government, he stressed that strict adherence to ideology is not always practical when attempting to resolve complicated issues.

"Thick black lines of ideology are good at keeping people in, but they are also good at keeping people out. And our party can't win if we keep people out. Our goal is not to assemble a small army of purists. We need a nation of converts. We have seen the other way of governing. It has had its day. It has made its best case. It has failed."

Yet Bush's advocacy for open discussion and tolerance only goes so far.

View post:
Jeb should stop using 'Liberal' as dirty word