Imagine my surprise when I woke up today to read the headline “Sarah Palin Steps Down as Alaska Governor.” Immediately, I was filled with joy and sighed with relief, assuming that she had stepped down because of political pressure surrounding all her recent ethics scandals. Even Fox News admits…
Palin has been dogged in recent months by ethics inquiries. Her office last month announced the 15th dismissal of an ethics complaint against her or one of her staff.
On Wednesday, Beverly Wooley, who has worked more than 20 years in public health in Alaska, most of it with the municipality of Anchorage, ended her stint as state public health director. She’s the second top health official to leave within days. The state’s chief medical officer, Jay Butler, left in late June after declining to take on Wooley’s job along with his own.
So I figured, “Well, that’s that then. We won’t be hearing from that idiot ever again.” She spent over a half a million dollars to defend herself and her husband against these complaints, after all. How much more dirty laundry could she really accumulate? Much to my chagrin, I found that she wasn’t really leaving in shame - she’s just taking a break before trying to snatch up the Republican nomination for president in 2012. Granted, she hasn’t officially confirmed this yet, but there’s plenty of speculation…
“Either Sarah Palin is leaving the people of Alaska high and dry to pursue her long-shot national political ambitions, or she simply can’t handle the job, now that her popularity has dimmed and oil revenues (in Alaska) are down,” Brad Woodhouse, a Democratic spokesman, said in a statement. “Either way, her decision to abandon her post and the people of Alaska who elected her continues a pattern of bizarre behaviour that, more than anything else, may explain the decision she made today.”
I can’t really disagree there. If this is her attempt to avoid more bad publicity while simultaneously readying herself for a presidential run, she’s not going to do so by leaving the much smaller and less complicated office that she was already elected to. I’m hoping that this is the beginning of the end of Palin’s career in politics, but when you look at the list of other potential candidates, you quickly realize that she might actually stand a fighting chance…at least for the nomination. You couldn’t even take on Tina Fey - good luck running against the Democrat that already beat your ass last year without even really addressing you directly. You’re your own worst enemy, Sarah, and if I have to watch you run, at least I’ll get to see you trip over your own high heels again and again.
I’m not really known for my popular opinions, so I’ll skip the introduction and just say this outright – I’m glad that Michael Jackson is dead.
My opinion stems from the hype he created around himself much more than anything he did personally, although I must go off on a tangent from my main point for a minute and wonder why this guy was given a free pass by so many people for the pedophilia thing. Whether or not a few parents and their kids lied about molestation is irrelevant – the fact is Michael used to play and sleep with lots of small children. That much we know for sure. If that wasn’t creepy enough, he had several children by surrogate mothers and then scarred them mentally for life by making them wear strange masks and dangling them out windows and who knows what else. People always jump to the “he had a bad childhood” defense, but that doesn’t excuse him from fucking up other kids’ childhoods, thus making him just as bad as his own abusive father. And the only reason people don’t want to think that he molested anyone is because they like his music and still want to listen to it without feeling weird about it – if he was Fred Durst, people would say he was guilty as fuck.
But I digress. The reason I’m glad that Michael is dead is because the media’s obsession with him will finally die with him. Yes, we’re going to watch career retrospectives, tributes, and tons of special/exclusive/investigative/insider reports over the next few months, and I’m sure his kids will come up in the news here and there, but there will finally be no more “breaking news” about the King of Pop. The real news will never be put on hold again for exclusive footage of Michael’s bad parenting or shocking new pictures of his latest plastic surgery. Never again will I have to hear about his financial troubles or what some pundit or gossip writer thinks of his stupid outfits. I won’t ever have to hear one of his mind-numbingly idiotic addresses to his obsessive fans or his painfully general and naïve statements about the children of the world. And what will late-night hosts joke about now that punchlines about his skin color aren’t relevant anymore? Folks, we have reached the end of an era – the celebrity distraction that keeps on giving I finally at peace, and with him dies a miserable tradition in “news” reporting.
The media has focused on Jackson more than any other celebrity because it was the train wreck story that never seemed to end – just when you thought he couldn’t get weirder, creepier, or crazier, he topped himself. Meanwhile, his career continued to topple. Yes, he had a ton of sold-out shows lined up. Yes, he was poised for a “comeback.” But look at it another way – does anyone remember his 2001 album Invincible? You’ve been hearing a lot about Thriller lately, but not much at all about Invincible (an ironic title, considering the current circumstances). I wonder why that is…maybe because it wasn’t all that great and was met with lukewarm reviews. The album sold 10 million copies, but does anyone remember it? The Michael Jackson everyone loved back in the ‘80s and early ‘90s is long gone. A lot of celebrities, especially singers, just don’t know when to hang it up, and very few ever leave on a high note. How many get to do their best album and then retire…or die, as the case may be? They slowly decline on stage for all the world to see, and younger fans pay to see them so they can say that they saw a “legend” in concert while older fans just humor them because they’re grateful for that artist’s past work. Just look at Ozzy Osbourne - no one has the heart to tell him that he can’t sing worth a shit anymore…hell, he can’t even utter a cohesive fucking sentence. When you stop biting the heads off doves and start letting MTV follow you around with a camera, you officially need to retire the “Prince of Darkness” moniker. In the same vein, you can’t be the King of Pop if you don’t tour or put out a decent album for more than a fucking decade. Even hardcore fans should admit that it would have been all downhill from here – a 50-year-old freak with flaring plastic nostrils would be moonwalking across that stage in place of that badass black man in tight leather we once knew and loved. Whatever he “did for music” he did a long time ago, and the guy who made that music has been dead since that time. All we’ve had since is a strange little man dressed in overly expensive women’s clothing begging for attention and then whining when he got it. What we had was the world’s biggest media distraction, all style (if you want to call it that) and no substance.
Time and again I have seen significant events passed over by the corporate media to cover Mr. Jackson’s escapades, so as I’ve said, I’m glad that he’s dead so that this era of utter nonsense reporting can die with him. I realize that there will always be another celebrity to preoccupy us and consume precious airtime (I’m looking directly at you, Ms. Spears), but if Michael was the king of anything, he was certainly the king of these idiots. He gave us Thriller and Bad, but he also made us dig deep within ourselves to find reasons to stick up for a fucked up pedophile, and is that really the kind of hope for a better world he sung about? So live it up now, paparazzi – once you’ve sold your last funeral pics to the highest bidder, there will only be a few more months of “speculation” surrounding his death before the story is as stiff as his corpse. No news is good news, as they say, and that has never been more true.
OK folks, playtime is over. Obama has been an infinitely better president than Bush so far, but that’s like saying, “He’s better at breathing than Michael Jackson is.” He’s also done quite a bit to piss people off. And no, I’m not talking about the Republicans, because they lost all credibility after their borderline retarded leader bankrupted our country after letting the worst act of terrorism in American history occur on his watch, so really, who gives a shit what they think? What I mean is Obama is pissing off the liberals - he’s purposely stalling on giving gays the right to marry, he hasn’t officially ended the Iraq War and started moving troops out, he hasn’t made the necessary effort to revolutionize healthcare, and he’s continued Bush’s mistake of bailing out almost every failing corporation looking for a handout, to name just a few errors. Bill Maher once again knocks it out of the park with the following rant and describes exactly what Obama needs to be doing to whip this country back into shape…
I couldn’t have said it better myself. Republicans had their way for the last eight years and look what happened - it’s time to try the exact opposite. I’m not talking bipartisanship here - that’s a pipe dream that’s absolutely never going to happen because the conservatives care more about an election four years away than they do about the nation of the very people who elected them suffering right now. Sure, I think it’s great that we have a leader that isn’t a daddy’s boy oil monger, but being able to relate to you doesn’t make you a great leader - making the tough decisions does. Would McCain have made the tough decisions? Of course not - he was just fine with the status quo and would have been happy with more war, more bailouts, and more bullshit. But that’s why people elected you - to change literally everything we know about the president of the United States. It’s not enough that your skin is darker than theirs…it’s not a relevant point anymore. If you want to stand out from the previous commanders-in-chief, start making heads explode by proving that politicians can actually be useful once in a while. Conservatives are willing to make up purely fabricated reasons to hate you - give them a real reason to do so by triumphing where they have failed for damn long. You’ve got the smarts and you’ve got the majority…I just wonder if you’ve got the balls.
Despite Manifested Glory Ministries recently removing the viral YouTube video due to unwanted criticism, millions of people have already seen the Connecticut black church’s exorcism of a “homosexual demon” from a 16-year-old boy. I saw the 20 minute video (some of which is reposted here) about a week ago and didn’t know whether to laugh [...]
Yes, I know we just talked about this. But, as it’s all over the place right now, I figured we should give it a mention for completeness sake.
So, as with the countless times this has happened before, the affair isn’t really surprising. People cheat on their husband/wife all the time. What was a shock here [...]
His nickname may have been “Tricky Dick” but it really should have been more like “Racist, Dick”. Recent proof of my suggested moniker comes in the form of White House tapes, where Racist Dick Nixon discusses abortion. Turns out, he wasn’t staunchly pro-life like many of his supporters. He favored abortion as an option for [...]
Yet again we find another member of the “pro-family”, “pro-marriage”, “oh my god, did I mention we fucking love marriage so much and it’s the best thing ever?” Republican party admitting to cheating on his wife. What makes it even better is that this time around it was Republican Sen. John Ensign.
Maybe you don’t remember [...]
