TGIF?
Roll Call Staff
Gabriel Bitol, a junior aide on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee majority staff, must have thought he was being helpful when he sent out an e-mail last week detailing the committee’s schedule for this week. Instead, he inadvertently managed to offend a few people.
The main body of the e-mail itself was fairly innocuous, noting a “committee coffee with the president of Liberia” on Wednesday. But at the bottom of the e-mail was a photo depicting a scene from the 1995 cult movie “Friday,” which pokes fun at stereotypes of black culture.
The photo shows a scene in which one of the movie’s heroes, played by comedian Chris Tucker, is confronting the drug dealer to whom he owes money. Tucker has a cigarette (or is that a joint?) behind his ear and a large gold chain around his neck, while the drug dealer sports a full head of curlers.
Below the picture, Bitol, who is black, included an oft-cited quote from the flick. “Playing with my money is like playing with my emotions,” it reads.
The juxtaposition of an event with the head of an African nation with the “Friday” joke didn’t sit well with some staffers who received the e-mail.
“A lot of people who saw it thought it was really offensive,” one Senate aide said. “It’s a really serious thing, and there’s this attachment of a picture from a movie. ... People thought it was off-color.”
It isn’t uncommon among the younger members of the Hill’s e-mailing set to include a funny clip or quote at the close of their e-mails, so junior staffer Bitol isn’t alone in his e-mail style.
But his elders on the committee staff weren’t amused. “This is a good staffer who did a dumb thing,” said Antony Blinken, the committee’s staff director. “He knows it was unprofessional and he’s assured me it won’t happen again.”
Rep. Baby-Daddy. Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.) is suddenly so newsworthy. On Monday, he shocked all of Washington, D.C., with his freshly shorn upper lip after 40 years of mustachioed glory. And now, another bombshell: It turns out that he’s the father of deceased tabloid princess Anna Nicole Smith’s baby.
Gingrey broke the shocking news during an appearance on Fox News Channel on Wednesday morning. During a spot on “America’s Newsroom with Bill Hemmer,” he was asked about the Iraq War resolution the House was debating. Gingrey, though, had something more important to discuss first.
“Well, before we get into that, I want to make an announcement on Fox News,” the lawmaker said. “I am actually the father of Anna Nicole Smith’s baby, and I wanted to make sure I got that out there.”
(For those of you who have been living in a cave without cable television, the hot story of the last several days was the legal battle to determine who fathered the infant daughter of Smith, who died last week, apparently of a drug overdose.)
But just as HOH was about to jump into full-on National Enquirer mode and start tailing the Congressman’s every move, Gingrey spokeswoman Becky Ruby took the wind out of our sails.
Buzz-killer Ruby assures us that the remark was made in jest. “All the news before the segment was all Anna Nicole Smith, all the time, and all the news after was all Anna Nicole Smith, all the time, and he was just poking a little fun at all the 24-hour news coverage,” she said.
Taylor: Preventing Another Underwear Bomber
March 19, 4:09 p.m.
The intelligence community faces challenges daily. No example is more emblematic of the problems faced than the so-called underwear bomber of 2009. As threats emerge, the hunt for “persons of interest” must occur in a more reliable and efficient manner because the consequences of inaction can be catastrophic. Read Full Article
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