You don’t know him, but Don Unsworth is dead: “In lieu of flowers the family respectfully asks that donations be sent to the American Cancer Society, or to the campaign of anybody who is running against President Barack Obama in 2012.” [WIS-TV]

“It’s official: Sidney Harman, the businessman who made his fortune selling stereo equipment, has secured a deal to buy Newsweek from the Washington Post Co. and will announce the deal later Monday afternoon.” [Ad Age]

Daily Show co-creator Lizz Winstead: “I get really frustrated when people claim that the Daily Show is sexist when I’ve worked with Jon Stewart on four separate projects and he is the least sexist person ever. They’re not trying to not hire women, they’re trying to hire the best possible people for the show. You can call it a boy’s club, it’s not. It’s a nerd club… When I first launched that show, I got 150 writer submissions. Three were from women. Three, that’s it.” [Bloggasm]

[ Comedy Central Flash video not available. ]

We’ve been promising for ages to work up a Bagram Post, always putting it off because (1) it’s complicated, (2) it depresses the hell out of us, (3) we don’t have a clever angle on it, and (4) we’d just end up copying and pasting giant clumps of Greenwald.

So we’d like to thank Jon Stewart’s industrious researchers for picking up our slack. Also, for reminding us about the candidate we voted for, rather than the president he became.

According to the New York Times, the U.S. economy showed a 3.5% expansion in the 3rd quarter of this year, after more than a year of contraction. Read more »

And the award for Best John Cleese Impression of the Day goes to…

Larry Whitten marched into this northern New Mexico town in late July on a mission: resurrect a failing hotel.

The tough-talking former Marine immediately laid down some new rules. Among them, he forbade the Hispanic workers at the run-down, Southwestern adobe-style hotel from speaking Spanish in his presence (he thought they’d be talking about him), and ordered some to Anglicize their names.

No more Martin (Mahr-TEEN). It was plain-old Martin. No more Marcos. Now it would be Mark.

And if you didn’t follow the new rules, you were fired.

Read more »

Mentioned in the comments, so up goes the video: