More Judith Regan Malarky

Two more articles on Judith Regan.
The first is a Seattle PI article where Judith is alledged to believe in an zesty Zionist Conspiracy. Surely getting fired had nothing to do with the bad press and crazed attitude- blame the Jews. They're out there and they're are not eating bacon. GASP.
The second is from the NY Times and is simply an interesting and funny reading on the situation.

Publisher allegedly cited 'Jewish cabal'
By HILLEL ITALIE
AP NATIONAL WRITER

Regan, was fired Friday, Dec. 15, 2006, her sensational, scandalous tenure at Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. ending with the tersest of announcements.

NEW YORK -- In an explosive telephone argument that led to her firing, publisher Judith Regan allegedly complained of a "Jewish cabal" against her in the book industry and stated that "Of all people, Jews should know about ganging up, finding common enemies and telling the big lie."

A spokesman for Regan's former employer, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., told The Associated Press on Monday that the remarks were based on notes taken by HarperCollins attorney Mark Jackson, with whom Regan was discussing the future of a controversial new novel about baseball star Mickey Mantle.

The spokesman, Andrew Butcher, released the comments in response to a threatened libel suit from Regan's legal representative, Hollywood attorney Bert Fields, who had called earlier reports of anti-Semitic remarks "completely untrue" and added that the publisher "didn't have an anti-Semitic bone in her body."

If you told me that Judith Regan said something nasty about Jewish babies, I could only assume that she was implying that black babies are less stringy and have a less-like-chicken, more-like-pork flavor. I wouldn't put anything past this woman.

Since 1994, Regan had headed the ReganBooks imprint at News Corp.'s HarperCollins. She was fired Friday.

The allegations first emerged earlier Monday when The New York Times, citing two unnamed News Corps officials, referred to unspecified anti-Semitic comments.

Regan, one of of the book world's most successful publishers, already had tense relations with HarperCollins and News Corp. Last month, Murdoch cancelled "If I Did It," her planned O.J. Simpson book and Fox television interview.

Simpson's book, said to have described how he theoretically would have committed the murders of ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman, had been scheduled for release Nov. 30 following the airing of a two-part Simpson interview.

Simpson was acquitted of murder in 1995 but later found liable for the killings in a wrongful-death suit filed by the Goldman family.

This Time, Judith Regan Did It
By DAVID CARR
Published: December 18, 2006

When the News Corporation killed Judith Regan’s multimedia rollout of O. J. Simpson’s “hypothetical confession,” Rupert Murdoch called the project “ill-conceived.”

The phrase he should have used was “ill-received.”

The “If I Did It” book and television package was shelved not because it was in bad taste or because it was bad for the culture at large, but because it was bad for business. The News Corporation, after all, was riding with Ms. Regan every step of the way as she bolted together the multiplatform deal for “If I Did It.” It was only after an outcry that included two dozen Fox affiliates that the HarperCollins project was junked.

And now Ms. Regan’s career at the News Corporation is in the same trash bin. Why now?

No one woke up Friday morning and discovered that Ms. Regan had bad, if lucrative, taste. But when her O. J. Simpson deal went south, she refused to go away quietly even though Mr. Murdoch had already taken a bullet, then continued to complain that she was being undermined long after the story had quieted down.

The News Corporation had profited handsomely from Ms. Regan’s tendency to shoot from the hip, but when she started firing inside the corral, well then, that was another matter.

If she did it, here’s how: Ms. Regan first responded to public opprobrium over the Simpson project with an unhinged eight-page defense of her interview. And then, after the plug was pulled on Nov. 21, she failed to accept the decision. (When Mr. Murdoch says something is dead, put away the paddles and pull up the hearse.)

Instead she railed against HarperCollins, the News Corporation book division that owns her ReganBooks imprint, while taping her Sirius Satellite Radio show, according to Ron Hogan, an editor at GalleyCat, which is a book-oriented blog. And finally, she made offensive remarks in a phone call to one of the company’s lawyers on Friday, according to a report in The Los Angeles Times.

“I think someone looked a little bit down the road and saw train wrecks everywhere,” said a HarperCollins executive who declined attribution because the case might end up in litigation.

That someone was Jane Friedman, the head of HarperCollins, who gave Ms. Regan the gate last Friday night in a two-sentence statement. It was made in a hurry — there were no expressed accommodations for the authors and 40 employees of the ReganBooks imprint — which suggests that the decision was made in a hurry, as well. (The company said on Saturday that the division will continue operations under Cal Morgan, the editorial director of ReganBooks.)

None of this was part of the plan when Ms. Regan moved her hugely successful publishing operation to Los Angeles this year. In announcing the move, she suggested she was switching to the left coast to form a literary salon of sorts, seeking out interesting folks from the entertainment and publishing worlds to form a kind of “cultural center.”

In therapeutic circles, her move to Los Angeles is called a geographic cure. A person up against the consequences of bad decisions and bad judgment — her affair with Bernard B. Kerik, the disgraced former police commissioner and ReganBooks author, was made all the more interesting to the media when it emerged that she was one of two women on the side — decides to switch ZIP codes for a fresh start.

Instead, she found O.J.

Ms. Regan’s strategic shift to California put her more closely in touch with an entertainment culture that was of a piece with her approach to publishing. Her big television project, after all, was “Growing Up Gotti.” Those who found “If I Did It” to be a patently offensive title need only remember that she also published the very successful “How to Make Love Like a Porn Star.” (It might have been subtitled, “Making do with vacant eyes, stage moans, and anonymous co-stars.”)

But then, Ms. Regan has actually been in the celebrity business her whole career, with her ability to sell the tatty and salacious elements of contemporary culture. She formed those skills as a reporter for The National Enquirer, but in a world where many office workers spend their days surfing for a shot of Britney Spears sans panties, that work history was a credential, not a knock.

Ms. Regan always lived her public life as if it were one big MySpace page, which she filled with outrageous personal and professional behavior and intemperate words. Part of it seemed like shtick, but she seemed to cross a line bordering on mania after her motives in interviewing Mr. Simpson were questioned.

First, she issued a statement that compared her own alleged victimization as a battered woman with that of the murdered Nicole Brown Simpson. “The men who lied and cheated and beat me — they were all there in the room. And the people who denied it, they were there, too.” (It sounded a little crowded in there.)

Instead of saying sorry about that, Ms. Regan went ballistic in a statement that read like an autopsy on an open deadly wound. Her nonapology apology approached absurdity, a biblical Act of Contrition written (at times) in the voice of a young girl.

“I made the decision to publish this book, and to sit face to face with the killer, because I wanted him, and the men who broke my heart and your hearts, to tell the truth, to confess their sins, to do penance and to amend their lives. Amen.”

Ms. Regan then reflected on her time with Mr. Simpson: “Thought process disorder. No empathy. Malignant narcissism,” she wrote as if she had been looking in a mirror, not conducting an interview.

Her decisions made quick enemies of almost everyone, including some of her colleagues at the News Corporation. To his credit, Bill O’Reilly (a man who knows a thing or two about riding out bad press) called the Simpson project “simply indefensible.” Even Geraldo Rivera’s journalistic principles were offended.

She might survive those two but, in 2006, Mr. Murdoch is another matter. He has done a fine job recently of repositioning himself as media baron who is both a friend of Hillary Rodham Clinton and yet again a pioneer in the evolving media space. One of the cardinal rules in business is to protect the king, but after the Simpson affair, he found himself dragged into the muck of his tabloid past.

In The Los Angeles Times, Tim Rutten invoked that past, assailing the “predatory Australian-born media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, who has devoted his life to making money by making sure that news and entertainment are as coarse and vulgar as can be imagined in as many places as possible.” That kind of public reframing, combined with Ms. Friedman’s antipathy for a renegade West Coast office, made Ms. Regan’s firing a matter of when, not if.

Ms. Regan will change addresses, but not disappear. The best-seller list in any given week attests to the fact that she has a talent for identifying and filling consumer needs. And it is the job of media corporations to satisfy the market without regard to taste or rectitude. That’s no altogether a bad thing. We wouldn’t have “The Simpsons” — another News Corporation product — without it.

But stars, even the biggest-earning ones, become expendable when they begin to embarrass someone besides themselves. Just ask Tom Cruise.

Oh, for Pete's sake.

Iran Holocaust conference draws ire

By NASSER KARIMI, Associated Press Writer
2 hours, 48 minutes ago
TEHRAN, Iran -

Iran on Monday hosted a conference gathering prominent Holocaust deniers that it said would examine whether the World War II genocide of Jews took place, drawing condemnation from Israel and Germany.

The conference was initiated by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in an apparent attempt to burnish his status at home and abroad as a tough opponent of Israel. The hard-liner president has described the Holocaust as a "myth" and called for Israel to be wiped off the map.

Organizers touted the conference as a scholarly gathering aimed at discussing the Holocaust away from Western taboos, but the 67 participants from 30 countries were predominantly Holocaust deniers. They included David Duke — the former Louisiana state representative and Ku Klux Klan leader — and France's Robert Faurisson and Australian Frederick Toben, who was jailed in Germany in 1999 for questioning the Holocaust.

Also at the conference were two rabbis and four other members of the group Jews United Against Zionism, who were dressed in the traditional long black coats and black hats of ultra-Orthodox Jews. Jews United Against Zionism, which says the creation of the state of Israel violated Jewish law, does not deny the Holocaust occurred but argues that it should not have been a reason for the founding of Israel.

In Israel, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert called on the world to protest the conference, terming it "a sick phenomenon."

German Parliament President Norbert Lammert protested the conference in a letter to Ahmadinejad.

"I condemn any attempt to offer anti-Semitic propaganda a public forum under the pretext of scientific freedom and objectivity," Lammert wrote.

The two-day conference was organized by the Iranian Foreign Ministry's Institute for Political and International Studies.

"This conference seeks neither to deny nor prove the Holocaust," the institute's chief Rasoul Mousavi said in an opening speech. "It is just to provide an appropriate scientific atmosphere for scholars to offer their opinions in freedom about a historical issue."

In Germany, Austria and France, it is illegal to deny the Holocaust.

Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki dismissed the foreign criticism as "predictable," telling conference delegates there was "no logical reason for opposing this conference."

"The objective for organizing this conference is to create an atmosphere to raise various opinions about a historical issue," Mottaki said.

"If the official version of the Holocaust is thrown into doubt, then the identity and nature of Israel will be thrown into doubt. And if, during this review, it is proved that the Holocaust was a historical reality, then what is the reason for the Muslim people of the region and the Palestinians having to pay the cost of the Nazis' crimes?" Mottaki said.

Ahmadinejad has said that the killing of 6 million Jews by the Nazi German regime during World War II was a "myth" and "exaggerated." He has also repeatedly questioned why the Holocaust has been used to justify the creation of Israel at the cost of Palestinian lands — a view popular among Iranian hard-liners.

Israel's official Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, condemned the Tehran conference as an attempt to "paint (an) extremist agenda with a scholarly brush."

The leading Israeli novelist and peace activist, Amos Oz, also denounced the meeting.

"I think the conference in Iran is a sick joke, and I hope it will be received with revulsion and disgust everywhere in the world," Oz said.

The gathering coincided with an independently convened academic conference on the Holocaust in Berlin, Germany, where historians affirmed the accuracy of the Nazi genocide data and questioned the motives of those behind the Tehran forum.

The number of Holocaust deaths "is not a figment of the imagination. This comes from the Germans themselves, and therefore any denial of these figures is absolutely senseless," historian Raul Hilberg, author of "The Destruction of the European Jews," told the Berlin conference.

Wolfgang Benz, head of the Center for Research on Anti-Semitism at Berlin's Technical University, said people who deny the Holocaust "know perfectly well what happened."

"They want to use what happened — through denying it — to effect something else, to articulate the crude old anti-Semitism against Israel," he said.

Iran has spent months preparing for the conference, even publicizing it during the September visit to Tehran of U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who contradicted his hosts by saying the Holocaust was a historical fact and that an exhibition of anti-Holocaust cartoons, then on display in the city, promoted hatred.

I will readily grant that the Holocaust should not have resulted in the Allies butting in and redistributing The Holy Land all higgly pigly. And I am damned tired of constantly supporting Israel with my tax dollars at the expense of American lives, commerce, etc. Especially given that, considering Israel's size, they have the best trained and I believe best funded army in the world. If my Wayback Machine was working I would journey back in time and stop the whole stupid business.

And while I'm at expressing unpopular opinions, I also think that if we stopped being so damned cuddly with Israel now, they would work a hell of lot harder to gain peace. God promised them The Holy Land, I didn't. I'm pretty sure that God's way doesn't involve acting like a dick all the time, then running to your big brother to prevent you getting your just desserts.

I don't think there can be peace in Israel. There will be no peace in The Holy Lands until all sides can get their religions out of their governing.

However, denying that the Holocaust actually occurred is the stupidest thing I have ever heard in my entire life. There is a very special place in hell for these assholes.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the stuff nightmares are made of- if you want to know what keeps me up at night, there you go.

Jew for Jesus

So for years I have encountered the strangest thing. During the holidays, I will be in the checkout line and the checker or bagger will be Merry Christmasing the customers as the leave and they'll get to me and say Happy Hanukkah.
Now this is not an occasional occurrence. We are talking nearly every time I would go to the store in Philly and even 30% of the time now.
All this time I've wondered if there is some kind of Global Grocery Checker Zionist Conspiracy.
It turns out there is.
I've known about having Jewish relatives- though it is not talked about too often in my family (red neck, red neck, red neck). Now my mother drops that I am, in the technical sense, a Jew. Judaism runs in the female line, this woman is apparently my some increment of greats granny, thus I am one of God's chosen people. Eat your hearts out bitches.

Hello JDate.

Kidding! Sort of. I actually dated a phenomenal Jewish guy briefly in college and we eventually ended it when he found out that:
1. I wasn't Jewish (maybe he was led to believe I was Jewish by the constant phone calls from my female relatives to settle down and raise some kids.)
2. I wasn't going to switch.

So I'm just saying, David, if you are out there stalking me over the interweb, looking for just this sort of technicality, call me!

Friday Thoughts

1. Really must stop intentionally aggravating dates in order to "gauge their response." I went out with a very lovely and sincere teacher this week and as soon as I found out that he was the wrong kind of geek I turned on him like one of those crazy-ass raccoons. A conservative political geek. Oh my stars and garters- I may be a sci-fi, comic book, history, and science geek; but really, isn't a political geek only a few minor steps above a sports geek (unless you are Terry, in which case it is highly sexy). Especially if you are a sycophantic commentator TV show watcher. As he went on I decided to throw my NPR obsession in for shits and giggles. Oh well. I guess the Liberal Zionist Media Conspiracy claims yet another good American.

2. This Warren Jeffs guy better be sweating bullets. Child rapists have a special place in hell.

3. Very distressed about the Jon Benet Ramsey thing. I have always felt so miserable for her poor brother. Either the police cocked that up royally or those parents are guilty as sin. I'd really hoped for a breakthrough with this Karr guy although it seemed like such a longshot to begin with.

4. More boring foot updates: I went to the podiatrist today and he recommended PT and orthotics. Which burns my buttons as that is exactly what the PT said, and that my family doctor called, and I am not exaggerating, "poppycock." Additionally, said specialist was particularly intrigued by my tumor removal from a few years ago. "You had a schwanoma in your arm?! Wow, that is quite rare," he said with simultaneous longing and excitement. "Did you see it?" "Nope," I responded, "but my doctor kept it." Looking at me as though to say "duh" he said"Naturally, how interesting!" I briefly considered hooking them up. Blech!

5. I recently decided that if I can't exercise on this stupid doom foot and thus will be fat as a beluga, I should try to divert attention from my fat ass to my face. I feel pretty good about it thus far (my face, not the ass) though I have not been brave enough to use the eye shadow yet. I have this weird thing about not jabbing myself in the eye. Anyway, I think I feel girlier than ever now. I'll let you decide if that's a pro or a con.