Category: The Back Channel

Speaking of Double Super-Secret Off-the-Record Gatherings...

Mickey Kaus writes:

If Karl Rove really is "in charge of the [Katrina] reconstruction effort," what's he doing at a Teddy Forstmann schmooze event in Aspen? You'd think he'd have had more important duties this past weekend.

Others in attendance at said Teddy Forstmann schmooze event: Harvey Weinstein, Brad Grey, Michael Eisner, Les Moonves, Tom Freston, Tom Friedman, Bob Novak, Barry Diller, Martha Stewart, Margaret Carlson, Alan Greenspan, Andrea Mitchell, Norman Pearlstein and Walter Isaacson.

Could we get Harvey Weinstein to ask Rove what he's doing there? C'mon, Harvey! Do it for New York.

Or we could just go the usual route:

According to this thread, Google is hosting a big secret OFF THE RECORD confab in October:

Zeitgeist '05: The Google Partner Forum is happening on Oct. 25-27, ...About 400 people are on the invite only list...The traditional press is well in attendance, with James Fallows of the Atlantic Monthly, New Yorker staff writer Malcolm Gladwell, the chairman and publisher of the New York Times Arthur Sulzberger and others...

But...

All speeches and discussions at Zeitgeist are off the record. To ensure that our presenters and attendees can speak openly, no press coverage or blogging is permitted.

As everyone knows, an off the record conference with 400 attendees is a leaky conference. Just ask Michael Wolff. (Or Steve Rattner.)

[ATTENTION CONFERENCE ATTENDEES: Leakage may be directed to FishbowlNY@mediabistro.com. Note to "Karl R.": Stop emailing us "leaked information." The conference hasn't happened yet. Don't you have a country to run?]

Whether you're cheering the new pictures of voters in the new wire-guided Iraqi democracy, or think they'll soon be replaced by something far grislier and none of this was worth it, you can all stop arguing about the precise cost. www.icasualties.org tells Fishbowl that as of today, 1,606 soldiers have died there in 684 days, breaking that news down in as fragmented a piece as you can bear to read.

Incidentally, when will major NY papers and wire services stop waiting for official Pentagon excuses about why those helicopters keep crashing over there? You think a Sea Stallion plummets and kills over 30 people because the sand filters on the rotors break down? No, a shoulder-launched missile will do that. icasualties is the only open-source outlet that also cross-references all up-to-the-minute news about what network pundits present weeks later as "shocking new numbers." Memo to Chris Matthews: They won't be new by then.

When you want to be Governor, you use every available medium. And legal big-game hunter Eliot Spitzer proves it on his new spitzer2006.com website where you, Dear Reader, will be treated to how someone not normally associated with the word "hip" gets a makeover in a way we can only imagine his campaign managers saw it work for Howard Dean:

There's the obligatory suckup quote to Dr. King ("In Memory of a Giant"), windblown "action" pictures of Eliot on the go, and tailored platforms to fit both a motorman from Brooklyn and a closeted Bush voter in Saranac. Funniest of all, though, is his "friend meter," which currently reads an exact 8500. Uh, no, Eliot, that's called a counter. Spitzer does have one persistent cyber-friend above everyone else, one Timothy Saint from Queens who has amassed 10,890 "points" so far by logging onto the site. What's the prize, we wonder? A cabinet post? Dick Grasso's stuffed head? We'll just have to wait and see.

Fishbowl is certain you've heard of clandestineradio.com and that you've been waiting feverishly for its immediate relaunch, exact moment still TBD. Right? For instance, what other news outlet would tell you that the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors (which controls all non-military broadcasting in this country) spent $577 million this last fiscal year to promote us to the world, an amount that includes every new pro-American station overseas?

And while you swallow that figure, where else can you sample all the voices of the enemy in one convenient spot? CR has amassed an unprecedented "open-file" archive of practically every political radio station on Earth, complete with a dossier analyzing each station's relative importance and degree of political radicalism. It's your very own CIA-in-a-can! Rumsfeld favorites such as Voz de la Resistencia Chilena, Revolutionary Voice of Zimbabwe and Voice of Mojahed are sure to have thrilled the NSA boys at Ft. Meade, which is probably why CR has been off the air since June 17, 2004, though its owners swear on their website that they're about to come back on. In this political environment, boys, you'd better bring a big aerial and boost the signal up past 11. Because the interference has gotten pretty strong since you've been away.