Mitt Romney — who’s probably my favorite presidential candidate because I’m incredibly shallow and he looks like a computer-generated composite of everybody who’s ever played the president in a movie — has been claiming that his dad marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the ’60s. But the Boston Phoenix can’t find any evidence that it really happened:
Asked about the specifics of George Romney’s march with MLK, Mitt Romney’s campaign told the Phoenix that it took place in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. That jibes with the description proffered by David S. Broder in a Washington Post column written days after Mitt’s College Station speech…
But that account is incorrect. King never marched in Grosse Pointe, according to the Grosse Pointe Historical Society, and had not appeared in the town at all at the time the Broder book was published. “I’m quite certain of that,” says Suzy Berschback, curator of the Grosse Pointe Historical Society.
They also give lots of other reasons it probably didn’t happen. In Romney’s defense, he would have been a teenager at the time, so he probably wasn’t really listening. Maybe his dad said, “One time I lunched with Emmett Kelly,” but young Mitt heard it as “marched with MLK,” and nobody ever bothered to correct him.
Hey, maybe it was one of Mitt’s other dads. Don’t Mormons have one mom and a bunch of different dads? Or it could be the other way around, I forget.
Update: Romney says, and I’m paraphrasing, “Well, I didn’t mean it literally.”
Denise Martin, a contestant on “Survivor: China,” scammed the show’s producers when she sobbed on air that going on the show caused her to be demoted from lunch lady to janitor at the Massachusetts public school where she works. Mark Burnett, the show’s creator, gave her $50,000 to compensate for her troubles.
But the school’s superintendent says the job change was actually a promotion. Custodians are paid more than cafeteria workers at the school, and she was informed of the raise before she left to film the show in China:
“Although Mrs. Martin was a cafeteria employee prior to her selection as a contestant, she asked to be considered for a promotion to full-time custodian, and was promoted to this position on March 30, 2007. This promotion came with additional benefits and a higher salary. Following her leave, she then returned to this same position.
“Regretfully, the Douglas Public School District was inaccurately portrayed as failing to be accommodating to an employee during what the District viewed as a ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ opportunity.”
I thought custodians were supposed to clean up messes, not make them.
Queen Latifah has been tapped as the new spokesperson for diet giant Jenny Craig, despite how she’s been shilling for Pizza Hut for a while now. Says Scott Parker, a marketing guy for Jenny Craig:
“Queen Latifah joins forces with Jenny Craig to communicate the importance of how small lifestyle changes, in the areas of diet and exercise, can have positive effects on overall health.”
Pretty creative, but not as creative as Pizza Hut has been with their pizza concoctions. They’ve put cheese in places I didn’t even think were legal.
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