The washingtonpost.com has a fascinating article on Lillian McEwen — the former girlfriend of Justice Clarence Thomas.

The former assistant U.S. attorney and Senate Judiciary Committee counsel had dated him for years, even attending a March 1985 White House state dinner as his guest. She had worked on the Hill and was wary of entering the political cauldron of the hearings. She was never asked to testify, as then-Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.), who headed the committee, limited witnesses to women who had a “professional relationship” with Thomas.

More at the WaPo

It seems that Virginia Thomas’s voicemail message to Anita Hill has sparked McEwen to come forth and give more background on Clarence Thomas as private citizen. My guess is Virginia Thomas is regreting that phone call and that a lot fo conservative bloggers and analysts will have to rethink their initial thoughts on Thomas.

“He was always actively watching the women he worked with to see if they could be potential partners,” McEwen said matter-of-factly. “It was a hobby of his.”
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Presented with some of McEwen’s assertions, Supreme Court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg said Thomas was unavailable for comment.

However bizarre they may seem, McEwen’s recollections resemble accounts shared by other women that swirled around the Thomas confirmation.

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Good Bye Juan Williams “controversy,” hello Justice Thomas…

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From time to time I write on the economics of paid content on NetNoir.com. As NetNoir.com moves into more regular production of articles and opinion, I have had to deal with the daunting aspects of creating a strong revenue model.  During the course of the research I often read about the struggles that newspapers are having –trimming costs and increasing revenue.

As a result, I think that newspapers really need to focus strongly on providing great local news content, and stop spending significant amounts of money on opinion, even syndicated opinion, which is often the worst type of warmed over mushy opinion.

Instead, newspapers should be allowing local people to talk about local issues, views and ideas in order to improve the integration between the local environment and the newspaper’s service to the community.

ThinkProgress.org has an interesting catch, yesterday several GOP congressional members admitted that the Iraq War was a mistake.

It’s pretty amazing.

Watch for yourselves:

ROHRABACHER: Well, now that we know that it cost a trillion dollars and all of these years and all of these lives and all of this blood, uh, I don’t know many…

NORQUIST: Looking for a number. Two-thirds? One-third?

ROHRABACHER: I, I can’t. All I can say is the people, everybody I know thinks it was a mistake to go in now.

NORQUIST: That’s 100 percent.

Norquist then turned to McClintock, asking “what percentage”:

NORQUIST: Of Republicans in Congress, who would agree with the general analysis here that it was a mistake and/or we should go in.

MCCLINTOCK: I think everyone would agree Iraq was a mistake.

NORQUIST: Two hundred percents. Ok, we’re going to average these.

MCCLINTOCK: And, you know, again, I think virtually everyone would agree going into Afghanistan the way we did was a mistake. How many share my, my cynicism over this idea of a resolution of force, which I can’t find anywhere in the Constitution. And how many believe that in those rare cases where we go in, we put all of our resources behind our soldiers, I would say certainly more than half of the Republican caucus probably believe that.

h/t ThinkProgress.Org

Columbia Journalism Review has an interesting feature article, “An Icon Fades” by Don Terry, that conducts a bit of analysis on the failure of Johnson Publications to transition from print publications of their flagship Ebony and Jet magazines into a strong position on the Internet.  Mr. Terry leads into his analysis of the African American icon with a brief bit of history.

Born November 1, 1945, Ebony showed off her glamour and vitality for decades. But she is tired now, debt-ridden and seriously ill, her once crystalline voice a raspy whisper. The black celebrities who once courted her now have other media suitors, thanks in no small part to the trail Ebony blazed. Too many readers and advertisers have followed them. “An Icon Fades” by  Don Terry.

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We are now adding sites and resources within sites to our black network section. We’ve added Weeseeyou.com, and hope to add more soon.

In addition, you will be able to add your own blog to our new site umoja.com. There will be a section in Umoja for both African Diaspora blogs and African Diaspora Websites.

We’ve got the new NetNoir.com logo hot off the press!

As we have said earlier, this site is gradually going to go through a process of uprgrades during the next three to four months. After our flagship site is running smoothly, NetNoir.com will get a full revision.

We have upgraded some more tools — and now a few more features should be working.

Hello All!

Currently we are having trouble with our WordPress installation. Hopefully we will get that fixed in the next day, and begin to eliminate some of the missing page errors that you might be experiencing.

Thanks

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