Yesterday we reported that RT’s Alyona Minkovski would be joining HuffPost’s fledgling video network HuffPost Live as a producer and host. What we didn’t know is if she’d be bringing her popular online news show The Alyona Show with her. Well, we have an answer for you: no. As of the close of this week, the DC-based Alyona Show will be put to rest as its host heads to LA to start work for HuffPost Live.

“She’s working on something completely new,” says HuffPost spokesperson Tiffany Guarnaccia. “She’ll be 100% on HuffPost Live, which will reflect the all-encompassing tastes of the Huffington Post itself.”

We here at FishbowlLA were big fans of The Alyona Show, in part for her willingness to have edgy guests like Mark Ames and Yasha Levine of The eXiled on. Here’s hoping she’ll continue to showcase great alternative voices at HuffPost Live.

eXiled editor Yasha Levine still has a host of legal woes hanging over his head from being arrested while covering last November’s LAPD crackdown of OccupyLA. Turns out, those are the least of his worries at the moment. During his two-day stay in Los Angeles Metro Jail, Levine says he contracted a wicked case of scabies.

Until a few days ago, I thought my scabies was just a gnarly poison oak rash that I had picked up in the Santa Monica mountains after losing the trail and having to cut through the overgrown backyards of multimillion dollar mansions. For weeks the rash kept getting worse and worse, and I finally went to a doctor to get some relief. But it turned out that poison oak was the least of my worries.

“You have scabies,” said the doc, sucking in his breath through his teeth and shaking his head. It took him no more than 30 seconds to diagnose my condition. “The track marks are a dead giveaway,” he said, and pointed out a couple of elongated welts about a half-inch long creeping up the side of my right ring finger. These “tracks marks” were actually burrows made by  mother-parasites as they tunneled right below the surface of my skin and laid eggs in the process. I had dozens of similar track marks of all shapes and sizes on both hands. As I stared at my hands in disgust, the doc moved to the sink and violently scrubbed his hands with medical soap. Our contact was minimal, but he wasn’t taking any chances…

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The eXiled is on the verge of launching its new media transparency project, aimed at exposing the “conflicts-of-interest and corruption in the media and among our major ‘thought leaders’ and ‘independent voices.’” They’re calling the site S.H.A.M.E–Shame the Hacks who Abuse Media Ethics. The eXiled’s Yasha Levine put up a preview dossier of The Atlantic‘s resident Randian Meghan McArdle–who, incidentally, just got into a bizarre argument in the comment section of Julian Sanchez‘s blog, in which she essentially argued that prosecutors shouldn’t bring charges against George Zimmerman in the Trayvon Martin case because they might lose. Wouldn’t want to squander taxpayer money in pursuit of justice, now, would we?

Anyway, Levine claims he has the goods on dozens of prominent U.S. journalists who take money from various think tanks and corporate sponsors in exchange for slanted coverage. Can’t wait to see who makes the list. Although we have a few guesses who might be on there.

Journalist Yasha Levine was arraigned late last week on “failure to disperse” charges for attempting to cover the police crackdown on OccupyLA. He was sent home with “no charges filed.” But that doesn’t mean his case was dismissed.

Writes Levine:

According to my attorney, “no charges filed” was shorthand for “no charges filed today.” Which means that there is no reason that charges couldn’t—and wouldn’t—be filed a little while later, like next week or next month. And judging by the threatening letter I received from the City Attorney’s office, that looks like a definite possibility.

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Journalist and eXiled editor Yasha Levine may have been freed last week after getting arrested while covering the LAPD crackdown on Occupy Los Angeles. But, as he wrote over the weekend, the repurcussions of his arrest are far from over.

So now that most of the detained protesters have been released, what is our legal status? Are we going to be prosecuted? Well, that’s not very clear.

I’ve been charged with misdemeanor# 409PC: failure to disperse (or, as my booking officer put down on my prisoner’s receipt, it’s “fail to disclose”). My court date is set for early January, so I guess I’ll find out then. But apparently I shouldn’t expect the city to drop the charge.

Levine is referring to a recent LA Weekly story which reports that in lieu of prosecution, OccupyLA arrestees may be allowed to enroll in a 90-day Alternative Prosecution Program–aimed, ironically, at giving the protesters lessons in the First Amendment.

Says Levine of that prospect: “Ha! So there you have it, folks. Not only does the City of Los Angeles arrest those who exercise their constitutional right to peacefully protest (or in my case simply to report on a peaceful protest), apparently it now requires anyone caught exercising that right to enroll in a political reeducation camp.”

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After posting a $5,000 bond and spending two nights in jail, eXiled editor and journalist Yasha Levine is finally free after being arrested while covering LAPD’s Occupy Los Angeles crackdown at City Hall. Levine says that prior to being booked, arrested protesters were stuck on an LA County Sheriff’s transport bus for upwards of seven hours–forced to use the bathroom in their seats if they had to go. Levine says his plastic cuffs were so tight, and were on for so long, that he still lacks sensation in one of his hands.

Writes Levine:

[D]on’t believe the PR bullshit. There was nothing peaceful or professional about the LAPD’s attack on Occupy LA–not unless you think that people peacefully protesting against the power of the financial oligarchy deserve to be treated the way I saw Russian cops treating the protesters in Moscow and St. Petersburg who were demonstrating against the oligarchy under Putin and Yeltsin, before we at The eXiled all got tossed out in 2008. Back then, everyone in the West protested and criticized the way the Russian cops brutally snuffed out dissent, myself included. Now I’m in America, at a demonstration, watching exactly the same brutal crackdown.

Levine says he’s still dazed and dehydrated after being denied food and water for the majority of his time in custody. He promises to write a lengthy piece on his experience in the coming days after he recovers.

eXiled editor Yasha Levine was arrested late Monday night while covering the Los Angeles Police Department’s purge of the Occupy Los Angeles encampment at City Hall. As we wrote yesterday, any journalist who attempted to report from inside the police cordon during the crackdown–where the real action was taking place–was threatened with arrest by the LAPD. Levine, who also writes for The Nation and has appeared on Dylan Ratigan‘s MSNBC show, is definitely the type of journalist to take such risks. He clearly paid the price.

From The eXiled:

Exiled editor Yasha Levine was arrested late last night during the savage and unconstitutional police crackdown on Occupy LA. We call on the police and authorities to release Yasha, and release all protesters and media illegally arrested at the Occupy LA encampment and illegally imprisoned merely for exercising constitutionally-guaranteed rights. (Update: Latest word is that Yasha is going to have to spend another night in the Los Angeles County jail, and will be brought before a judge tomorrow and hopefully released, as bail is currently set at an incredible $5,000.) …

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eXiled editors Mark Ames and Yasha Levine were on the Dylan Ratigan Show yesterday, talking about their latest scoop for The Nation. The pair uncovered a series of letters from billionaire libertarian robber baron Charles Koch to the free-market economics guru Friedrich Hayek, urging the latter to come to America and take advantage of America’s generous Social Security and Medicare programs–the same programs that Koch and his brother are now pushing to obliterate for the rest of us.

The letters are an amazing find, revealing once again just how morally and ethically bankrupt the philosophy of the ruling elite truly is.

Andrew Breitbart seems to have fully recovered from his Shirley Sherrod scandal. But he just helped pick a fight that has the potential to get a whole lot uglier. Former Illinois Tea Party candidate Joel B. Pollak just published a lengthy “investigation” on Breitbart’s Big Government site into eXiled founder and editor Mark Ames. At the heart of the piece is the contention that Ames and his fellow eXiled editor Yasha Levine are the ones who originated the anti-Koch brothers meme so prevalent in the media these days. Which is true. However, since Pollak is a huge fan of the Kochs, the piece is mainly a rhetorical strategy to deflect attention away from the Koch brothers–by dismissing the critiques against them as originating from the degenerate Ames. Ames, you see, unapologetically uses drugs and has solicited prostitutes, which automatically makes him unreliable–or so the thinking goes.

Ames and The eXiled were at the forefront of the anti-Koch movement. It would seem logical for those looking to turn the rhetorical tide against the brothers to target Ames. But Pollak and Breitbart should have let this one go.

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The eXiled’s Yasha Levine seems to think so. And he puts forward a pretty convincing case. Levine tracks Gladwell’s career back to the Washington Post, where he dug up a number of unquestionably pro-tobacco pieces. One of those pieces from 1990 essentially made the argument that curbing smoking would bankrupt social security–by causing people to live longer. Yikes.

But more damning, Levine traced Gladwell’s name back to a tobacco industry “THIRD-PARTY MESSAGE DEVELOPMENT CONTACT LIST.”

For those not familiar with public relations industry lingo, “third-party” refers to a PR technique in which corporate propaganda is funneled through seemingly independent journalists, academics, non-profits, think tanks and other respected “third parties” in order to bolster the credibility of “the message” with the public. Here’s how a Burson-Marsteller PR expert described the third-party technique in 1995:

“For the media and the public, the corporation will be one of the least credible sources of information on its own product, environmental and safety risks. Both these audiences will turn to other experts … to get an objective viewpoint.

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