, July 2, 2014
Daily Bafflements
Just file it under "fact-finding mission," or, uh, "office supplies." / Photo by Jeff Brown.
• Last week the Baffler blog discussed junket journalism—but what about junket policy-making? According to National Journal, new rules in the House mean that lawmakers no longer have to include all-expenses-paid trips they receive from lobbyists or others on their year-end financial disclosure forms. “The move, made behind closed doors and without a public announcement by the House Ethics Committee, reverses more than three decades of precedent,” reports Shane Goldmacher.
• Today in Billionaires: Oh, but they look so nice! Meet the Hobby Lobby billionaires, David and Barbara Green.
• From Columbia Journalism Review, the last nine American reporters who faced the possibility of jail time for refusing to reveal their anonymous sources—several of whom have cases that are still ongoing.
• Virginia Democrat Joe Morrisey has been indicted by a grand jury for having sex with an underage female employee; investigators have found one very incriminating text message. But in a bizarre press conference yesterday, Morrisey insisted it never happened, and that he is being framed by a lesbian hacker, who planted the text in a revenge plot. The text from the underage girl that read “OMG, I just fucked my boss” couldn’t have come from her, Morrisey explained: “We have examined 10,000 texts,” and she “has never used the acronym OMG in her life.” Read more of this baffling story at Richmond’s Style Weekly.