Friday, March 28, 2008

 

Daily Douchebag: the Los Angeles Times


Name: the Los Angeles Times

DOB: 1881

Occupation: getting duped by corpulent imprisoned con artists

Hometown: Los Angeles, California

Current residence: same

Douchebaggery: On St. Patrick's Day, Pulitzer Prize-winning entertainment reporter Chuck Phillips went to press with a story suggesting that Sean "P. Diddy/Puffy/Diddy/whatever the hell he's calling himself now" Combs was involved in the shooting of Tupac Shakur at a New York City studio two years before his death. When the story went to press, Diddy vehemently denied any involvement in that incident. Since the story was based on several FBI interview reports, the world authority on making stories out of official documents, The Smoking Gun, decided to investigate.

It turns out that Chuck Phillips has been slacking on his pimping when it comes to establishing the authenticity of his sources. The four "302s" he used as sources were actually typed from the Allenwood Federal Penitentiary by this portly fellow, Jimmy Sabatino:

Jimmy Sabatino is currently doing eight years for fraud and identity theft, the latest in a long string of outlandish criminal misdeeds. Starting in 1994, with a felony conviction for credit card fraud at the tender age of 17, Jimmy has spent most of his adult life behind bars and/or running ludicrous scams. He has scammed computers, cell phones, hotel stays, Super Bowl tickets, pagers, limo rides, and various other merchandise. He also got thrown in the clink during a trip to Merry Olde Englande for defrauding a hotel, and spent his tenure there making telephone death threats against President William Jefferson (Hot Piece) Clinton and threatening to blow up a federal courthouse, offenses for which he was promptly arrested, extradited to the U.S., and imprisoned.  The Miami New Times even wrote an epic feature story in 1999 detailing Jimmy's illustrious career as a grifter and all-around fraudulent douchebag, including an anecdote about him posing as a Sony Music executive to get backstage at an Enrique Iglesias concert.  However, this was all lost on Chuck Phillips when he wrote the story about Diddy arranging a hit on Tupac, as he described Jimmy as "a fixture in Combs's circle...helping him stage lavish parties and land corporate sponsorships."

Even worse than Chuck Phillips's failure to do so much as Google "Jimmy Sabatino" is the fact that he missed that the FBI hasn't used typewriters such as the prison model used to create these "302s" in over 30 years, FBI agents generally have enough of a command of the written word to remember that i goes before e except after c, and the FBI didn't even investigate the Tupac-Biggie bullshit!  For whatever reason, the federal investigation into the whole East Coast-West Coast rap feud was handled by the Secret Service.  Yet Chuck Phillips just assumed that these 302s were typed by a federal agent inclined to incorporate phrases like "peice of shit" into his reports, apparently without raising an eyebrow.

Chuck believed all sorts of whoppers that Jimmy Sabatino told, including his claim that he was a "rodie" on a New Kids on the Block tour at age 15, his cultivation of Mark Wahlberg's rap career, he was shut out of money owed on Biggie's posthumous album Born Again for "creative consultant" work, he was a "person of interest" in the murder of Biggie despite being incarcerated in Miami, he negotiated a peace treaty on Diddy's behalf with Suge Knight, that he was rebuffed by Tupac the night of the shooting and subsequently "dealt with" Tupac for disrespecting him, and was the son of a high-ranking captain in the Colombo crime family.

Having recently become far more acquainted with defamation law than I ever anticipated, I am confident in saying that I have been a far more responsible journalist than Chuck Phillips.  For one thing, I have never written anything that I didn't believe to be true based on reliable sources.  For another, I would never present anything as fact that was based on such obviously suspicious material.  And my website is hardly the LA Times.  Rather, my blog purports to be "the ultimate source for useless bullshit," which should be considered a disclaimer that ANYTHING printed here should not be considered reliable news or anything besides my opinion and (feeble) attempts at being funny.  Unless, of course, one considers "useless bullshit" to be their criteria for news that's fit to print.  If guys like Chuck Phillips can get a Pulitzer for outstanding journalistic techniques like rehashing forged documents originating from a federal prison that are easily disproven by a simple Google search, I'd like to know when I can expect to receive that honor for my achievements in the field of bullshit generating.  I'll have to work the funds for a new tschotschke shelf into my budget to display it and prevent Chingy! and Caesar from getting at it, as I imagine they would find that a Pulitzer makes for a most delicious chew toy.   Then again, maybe I'm out of the running for this prestigious honor as, unlike Chuck, I have never actually recklessly disregarded the truth and committed defamation or libel.  So much for my future lucrative career in blog-based journalism.  Fuck...I guess I'm stuck with this science crap.

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# posted by Razzy @ 4:16 AM
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