Start to finish: Kanye West’s Taylor Swift stunt

September 18, 2009  Tags: ,   Posted in: Entertainment  No Comments

Obama calls Kanye West a Jackass

President Barack Obama off-the-record honest comment about Kanye being a jackass.

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Cartoon Credit: Vic Harville, Little Rock, Arkansas

September 16, 2009  Tags: , ,   Posted in: News  No Comments

Pink: Kanye West “an idiot. a waste. a toolbox”

Appearing on the Today show with Matt Lauer, Pink responded to Kanye Wests jerkiness displayed at the MTV VMA’s by saying “I just think he’s an idiot. He’s just a waste. He’s just a toolbox.”

Pink had previously condemned West soon after the VMA’s when West jumped onto the stage and snatched the microphone from winner Taylor Swift, saying via Twitter, “Kanye west is the biggest piece of shit on earth. Quote me.” She added, “My heart goes out to taylor swift. She is a sweet and talented girl and deserved her moment. She should know we all love her” and “Beyonce is a classy lady.I feel for her, too. Its not her fault at all, and her and taylor did their thing. And douche bag got kicked out. HA”

On Today, Pink told Lauer, “I think Beyonce‘s a classy lady for what she did at the end,” and ended the conversation by saying, “He’s getting exactly what he wanted, people are talking about him.”

Watch her talk about the VMAs and perform her hit single “Please Don’t Leave Me,” below.

September 14, 2009  Tags: , , ,   Posted in: Entertainment  No Comments

Levi Johnston keeps scumming it up for cash

So slimy and jerkfaced are Levi Johnston’s continued desperate attempts to milk his 15 minutes of fame stemming from his role as baby daddy to former Alaska Governor and 2008 failed Vice Presidential candidate, Sarah Palin’s daughter Bristol, that even some of the Governers critics and non-fans are speaking out about what a tool this guy is.

In a new Vanity Fair hit piece Levi Johnston alleges that Palin rarely attended her son Track’s hockey games, and she “often complained about her job as governor”, saying it was “too hard”. Palin resigned as Governor this summer, citing her family as one of the reasons, although Levi seems to imply that her absence from her sons hockey games may have been to carelessness and not to her duties as Governor and that the “too hard” aspect was not her ability to be a good politician and keep up with her duties as a mother, but suggests ineptitude. Johnston also claims that Sarah and husband Todd talked of divorce often and had a troubled marriage, ignoring that there were no signs of such a rift on display to the public and Sarah publicly laughed off such charges when they were made early last month.

Ace, a political blogger points out the absurdity in the premise that Johnston would have had access to any dirt with which to dish, saying “I don’t know about you, but in my experience, whenever I was dating some girl in high school, her parents were always carelessly exposing family secrets in front of me.” adding “The fact that I was sticking it to their daughter brought me fully within the family circle of trust. I became the family’s therapist/financial advisor/lifecoach based just on the fact that I was ridin’ dirty on their Precious.” Ridiculous when put in those comedically sarcastic terms, yet that is precisely the premise of Johnston’s book. Pathetic.

Even in England, they know this guy is a wanker:

Hang on a minute: this is the grandmother of his son. Whatever you make of the Republican politician, she doesn’t come off worse in this lazy, base ‘exposé’ – Johnston does. And how is he going to explain this interview to his son one day?…

Yet, perhaps Vanity Fair is more at fault here, with its peculiar obsession with savaging Sarah Palin. Having incessantly aimed vitriol at her looks, her ‘narcissism’, her ‘aggressive’ personality and caricaturing her into an elk-shooting bimbo, it has started scraping the barrel. And this time its instrument of choice is Johnston, a teenage scumbag who would put his ego before his child.

Levi’s scumbaggery was recently commented on MSNBC as his credibility, character and fact that his only claim to fame is that he got his teenage girlfriend pregnant was discussed:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

September 3, 2009  Tags: , , , , , , ,   Posted in: News  No Comments

Ted Kennedy: no friend to women

In addition to the more well known Chappaquiddick scandal where Kennedy, allegedly driving home drunk, like his brothers, had a long record of poor treatment of women.

In 1990, GQ magazine ran a devastating profile of Kennedy. Two 16-year-old girls near the Capitol startled by a limo rolling up, the door opening, Ted sitting in the back with a bottle of wine, asking one, then the other, to join. A former aide who acted as Ted’s “pimp.” His penchant for dating women so young that one did not know he was the subject of many books. Kennedy, at a swank DC restaurant with his drinking buddy Chris Dodd, throwing a petite waitress on his dinner table with such force that glass and flatware shatters and goes flying. Then Ted throws her on to Dodd’s lap and grinds against her. He is interrupted by other waitstaff. He is later caught in the same restaurant, in a semi-private area, having sex on the floor with a lobbyist.

In 1991, Kennedy’s nephew William Kennedy Smith is charged with rape. Kennedy Smith had been out drinking with Ted and Ted’s son Patrick at Au Bar in Palm Beach. Kennedy Smith is eventually acquitted, and it’s never proved that Ted had any knowledge of what happened on the Kennedy grounds that night. He remarried, in 1992, and very publicly domesticated himself.

But the tawdriness — the ostensible elder statesmen getting s – - t-faced and picking up women with his son and his nephew; the acquittal won, in part, by shredding the accuser on the stand and in the press; privilege winning out, always — is in such stark contrast to Kennedy’s politics that you have to wonder: Is this really what Kennedy thought of women?

So how is it exactly that so many women, and feminist minded women no less, were able to support and admire someone who engaged in grossly inappropriate, occasionally criminal behavior with younger women while binge drinking?

Ignorance of this record could play a major part at least to young citizens. “I didn’t know about Chappaquiddick and the rape case until yesterday,” Miriam Perez, a 25-year-old editor at Feministing.com, told the NY Post. She said that she admires Kennedy’s accomplishments, but is perplexed. “Like every person, he’s human and there are lots of flaws involved,” she says. “But a big feminist tenet is: The personal is political. So I don’t feel it’s fair to fully ignore it in this case.”

As is largely suspected is the reason so many feminists turned a similar blind eye to Bill Clintons many sex scandals which included allegations of harassment and rape, it is Kennedys 100% consistent record in championing abortion law that could shed light on why Teddy got a pass from women.

September 2, 2009  Tags: , ,   Posted in: News  No Comments

Ted Kennedy and abortion

Was Kennedy really “Committed to changing the world one life at a time“?

Kennedy wrote in a letter to a voter in 1971 that “wanted or unwanted, I believe that human life, even at its earliest stages, has certain rights which must be recognized — the right to be born, the right to love, the right to grow old.” But like many other Catholic liberals, from Joseph Biden to Dennis Kucinich, he moved leftward with his party, becoming a down-the-line supporter of abortion rights, with a voting record that brooked no compromise on the issue.

A review of Kennedy’s unwavering pro-abortion record:

  • Voted NO on defining unborn child as eligible for SCHIP.
  • Voted NO on prohibiting minors crossing state lines for abortion.
  • Voted YES on expanding research to more embryonic stem cell lines.
  • Voted NO on notifying parents of minors who get out-of-state abortions.
  • Voted NO on criminal penalty for harming unborn fetus during other crime.
  • Voted NO on banning partial birth abortions except for maternal life.
  • Voted NO on maintaining ban on Military Base Abortions.
  • Voted NO on banning partial birth abortions.
  • Voted NO on banning human cloning.
  • Rated 100% by NARAL, indicating a pro-choice voting record.

Ted Kennedys sister Eunice remained against abortion later in her life, so what made Teddy change? Along with her husband, Sargent Shriver, Eunice belonged to America’s dwindling population of outspoken pro-life liberals. “Like her church, she saw a continuity, rather than a contradiction, between championing the poor, the marginalized and the oppressed and protecting unborn human life.” notes Ross Douthat in a NY Times column asking What if Teddy had opposed abortion?

At times, Ted Kennedy’s fervor on abortion felt like an extended apology to his party’s feminists for the way the men of his dynasty behaved in private. Eunice, by contrast, had nothing to apologize for. She knew what patriarchy meant: she was born into a household out of “Mad Men,” where the father paraded his mistress around his family, the sons were groomed for high office, and the daughters were expected to marry well, rear children and suffer silently. And she transcended that stifling milieu, doing more than most men to change the world, and earning the right to disagree with her fellow liberals about what true feminism required.

It’s worth pondering how the politics of abortion might have been different had Ted shared even some of his sister’s qualms about the practice. One could imagine a world in which America’s leading liberal Catholic had found a way to make liberalism less absolutist on the issue, and a world where a man who became famous for reaching across the aisle had reached across, even occasionally, in search of compromise on the country’s most divisive issue.

September 1, 2009  Tags: , ,   Posted in: News  No Comments

Matthew McConaughey hits beach with pregnant girlfriend showing off her bump

The Failure to Launch actor took to the beach with pregnant girlfriend Camila Alves and their one-year-old son Levi.

Despite being due at the end of the year, the model cut a stunning figure as she showed off her second baby bump in a stripy bikini and lace sarong.

More at the Daily Mail >

September 1, 2009  Tags: , ,   Posted in: Entertainment  No Comments

Environmental group leader admits exagerating claims

Greepeace leader Gerd Leipold admitted in an interview with BBC reporter Stephen Sackur (full interview here) that the environmental activist group included an unsupported (and indeed false) claim in an announcement made last month that sounded an alarm over the need for immediate action against global warming under the headline “Urgent Action Needed As Arctic Ice Melts”.

The July 15th press release stated that all of the Arctic ice would disappear by 2030, however when pressed in the interview, Leipold did not hesitate to call that claim “a mistake”. However, despite the alarming but false information, Leipold defended the organization’s practice of “emotionalizing issues” to persuade public opinion.

Later in the interview, a more expansive agenda that went beyond environmentalism was given to Greenpeace’s motives. “We will definitely have to move to a different concept of growth. … The lifestyle of the rich in the world is not a sustainable model,” Leipold said. “If you take the lifestyle, its cost on the environment, and you multiply it with the billions of people and an increasing world population, you come up with numbers which are truly scary.”

Leipold said later in the BBC interview that there is an urgent need for the suppression of economic growth in the United States and around the world. He said annual growth rates of 3 percent to 8 percent cannot continue without serious consequences for the climate.

What do you think? Hopefully we can all agree that accurate information should be used to persuade the public, but what about the practice of intentionally adding emotion to what is allegedly otherwise just a scientific argument?

August 21, 2009  Tags: , , ,   Posted in: News  No Comments

Patti Ann Browne’s Red Eye Intros

Tucked away, but hardly hidden (according to the ratings) at 3AM eastern (midnight on the west coast) is a news analysis and commentary show unlike any other you’ll find. The show, Red Eye, featuring guests from the entertainment industry and political scene who chat with the host and an always rotating cast of guest commentators with day jobs as comedians, magazine editors, columnists and bloggers airs on an unlikely source: not E! or Comedy Central, but on Fox News.

While Fox News opinion personalities are frequent guest commentators,  one of the most endearing and unique features of the show is the inclusion of the hard-newscasters invited to appear, giving us rare glimpses into the casual and quirky sides of the anchors who we would normally only see as straight-men and women during the day delivering news on world leaders, natural disasters and economic developments at the top of every hour.

One of these anchors is Patti Ann Browne, a Red Eye favorite who uses her news reading skills and charmed delivery by day to inform the world, but uses those talents for “evil” by night when invited on the late night shows panel. Here she is doing a newsbreak on 7/23/07:

When appearing on Red Eye however, the viewer is treated to Patti Ann’s humorous side as she delivers absurd intro’s, announcements and corrections for the late night comedy show. Watch the mashup below and just try not to bust a guy laughing…

August 17, 2009  Tags: , , , ,   Posted in: Entertainment  No Comments

Why do women love the womanizing hero of “Mad Men”?

Mad Men Pictures, Images and PhotosMad Men is an American television drama series broadcast on the cable network AMC. Set in New York City, Mad Men begins in 1960 at the fictional Sterling Cooper advertising agency on New York City’s Madison Avenue. The show centers on Don Draper (Jon Hamm), the agency’s creative director, and the people in his life in and out of the office. It also depicts the changing social mores of 1960s America.

“Mad Men is more than Don Draper, which is a good thing since for most of last season he behaved despicably” notes a commenter on an article by John Boot where he wonders out loud why exactly females enjoy the character.

While he recognizes that at least in part, the show is fantasy and escape, he acknowledges that the men and women are uniformly despicable.

They cheat on their spouses and stab each other in the back. Don’s wife Betty (January Jones) drives drunk, horrifically mismanages her children, and has an affair of her own with a stranger. Don’s colleague at the ad firm Sterling Cooper, Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss), denied even to herself that she was pregnant until she was about to give birth, then managed to mysteriously separate herself from the baby without an apparent second thought and return to work. Everyone drinks, smokes, schemes, and keeps secrets.

Mr John guesses that style has a large part to do with the shows appeal to women, pointing out that not only does “everyone look great” but that “style-conscious women can’t stop talking about the sleek craftsmanship of every ashtray and tie clip” and that “At glossy magazines, designers are gushing Mad Men-inspired layouts”.

mad-men

So is Mad Men just Melrose Place with skinny ties? asks Boot. Not quite.

The deftness and subtlety of the show’s writing and directing, the way characters’ shadings emerge only in scenes of whispery quiet, carries a strong rebuke to today’s confessional culture. Imagine the wordless disgust on Don’s face if you told him you were Tweeting your wedding planning, or your training for the marathon, or your search for your birth parents.

Boot mentions women’s fondness for “fictitious sexy rascals” that has always existed and will never go away but argues that Don’s misbehavior comes as “part of a package that women find hard to resist”.

mad-men-joy

Women aren’t likely to rise to the top in the working world of Mad Men but “they assume total command of the household” notes Boot. “They may not know where their men are in the evenings when they say they’re at ‘business dinners’ (and frequently are, with young models or foxy department-store heiresses) but that leaves them plenty of time to conduct discreet little flirtations of their own.”

Mr Boot concludes that “the women who watch the show aren’t just sighing with lust for Don. They’re sighing with relief in contemplation of a world that, though unfair and imperfect, is carefully ordered and stable, at least on the surface. Yet Mad Men is a testament to how important surfaces can be when there is a consensus that the unpleasant parts of the past ought to be enthusiastically buried. There’s no monster of the deep so fearsome that it can’t be chased away for a moment or two with a pitcher of martinis.”

What do you think? Do you watch Mad Men? Why do you like it?

August 17, 2009  Tags: , ,   Posted in: Entertainment  No Comments