Battle of the Tween Queens

AOL headline: Miley Cyrus and some friend of hers make a YouTube video mocking a video Selena Gomez from Wizards of Waverly Place (yes, I have watched it with my brother) and some other Disney wannabe from something called “As the Bell Rings” made. Whatever. I watched the video in which Miley took clips from Selena’s video and made fun of each one of them by copying what was said and putting her own spin on it. Obviously, it was fueled by the fact that Selena supposedly stole Miley’s ex-boyfriend, some dude from the Jonas Brothers (I think Nick but I’m not sure). Personally, I couldn’t stop laughing. It was so childish that it was funny. In the first video, Selena and her friend looked like they had taken a strong dose of acid and in the second one, Miley and her friend looked like they had been taking what ever Papa Cyrus did after his “Achy Breaky Heart”. I couldn’t stop thinking about these girls getting a ride to each other’s houses because they can’t drive and making dumbass YouTube videos. Anyway, AOL posed the question “Is Miley going to the dark side?” I guess that’s some allusion to the bad road Britney and Lindsey have gone down. Another question asked “Was this mean-spirited or all in good fun?” An overwhelming majority said ol’ Hannah Montana WAS going to the dark side, that mean-spirited bitch.

Okay, making a YouTube video that happens to be a bit harsh does not mean St. Miley is going to shave her head bald or turn gay (even though Katy Perry would love it). Why are people so shocked that these girls act like teenagers? Teenagers are mean as fuck! In this technology age, if someone steals your boyfriend, you are going to make fun of them on YouTube. Look at the so called “YouTube wife”. The Internet is a new forum for bitching. Look. I’m doing it right now. Miley Cyrus is not America’s Sweetheart, people! She is a teenager. Even if she’s famous, she’s still a teenager. I’ll bet she wanted to take those sexy Vanity Fair pictures. I bet when Papa Cyrus left, she was like, “Quick, take pictures of me half naked! Aren’t I hot?” Point is, TV is wholesome family fun. Real life is not. It’s the best of both worlds.

Freedom of Speech: Being An Idiot

This happened a long time ago, but I feel the need to bring it up again: conservative New York radio talk show host Michael Savage made some controversial statements about autism. Poughkeepsiejournal.com reports that Savage said autism is:

“a fraud, a racket. … I’ll tell you what autism is. In 99 percent of the cases, it’s a brat who hasn’t been told to cut the act out. … What do you mean they scream and they’re silent? They don’t have a father around to tell them, ’Don’t act like a moron. … Act like a man. Don’t sit there crying and screaming, idiot.’

Protesters  rallied outside the offices of Savage’s station, demanding his immediate termination. Of course I 100% DO NOT agree with what this idiot has to say… but so what? Last I checked, we have this little thing called the Constitution, and in that little thing, we have a littler thing called the First Amendment.That entitles all people to freedom of speech, right? Okay, as long as we’re clear. People are allowed to say whatever they want, save for shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theatre. Same thing with Don Imus. So he calls a basketball team a bunch of “nappy-headed hoes”. He gets fired for THAT? They’re called “shock jocks” for a reason. They’re supposed to make loud, brash statements about things. They’re SUPPOSED to have an opinion, even if it’s not popular. People are trying so hard to be politically correct that they’re afraid to have an opinion. Our ancestors died for our rights. It’s hard to swallow that the American Revolution was fought so some old fart can call autism fake or degrade women, but that’s exactly it. We need to stop firing people for speaking their mind! Politicians, stop apologizing for your comments. It’s like that famous old quote, “I don’t agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Obama Dragging on DADT

Gays and lesbians cheered all over California the night of November 4, 2008 as Barack Obama became the nation’s first Black President, and the first Democratic one in eight years. They thought their dreams had finally been realized; that the country was moving forward in a more liberal directions and the American people were becoming more accepting of other cultures.

They were wrong.

Little did they know when they woke up the next morning, the right to marriage they had obtained just a few months before had been snatched away from them from a ballot initiative called Proposition  8. Equal marriage was gone. With this battle lost, they turned their attention to a more solvable issue: Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, which prevents gays from serving in the military. They were soon reassured when Obama took the mike and told them that DADT was on its way to becoming a thing of the past and he was the one who was going to end it.

Yeah… okay. They should have been tipped off by the fact that Obama did not say WHEN this was going to happen. Meanwhile, gays and lesbians are being “dishonorably discharged” from the U.S. military in droves and the President is not doing a damn thing about it. He acknowledged his slow pace at a Human Rights Campaign (HRC) gala but said:

He would view “these years as a time when we put a stop to discrimination against gays and lesbians.”

Whether that will happen during this term of a future term remains to be seen.

Nobel “Have Not Even Been In Office For A Year” Prize

On October 9, Americans all over the country woke up to the shocking news that President Barack Obama had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The nomination process takes several months so this would mean that Obama was nominated in January of 2008, just a few weeks into his presidency. Other than a demonstrated willingness to reach out to foreign nations and attempts to talk to the Muslim world, Obama had not done anything yet to merit such an honor. He is a president that inherited two world wars: in Iraq and a forgotten one in Afghanistan that he has been sending troops to in droves.

Those on the front lines are baffled as to why Obama won this award, being in the thick of the killing and chaos. In an L.A. Times article titled “Obama’s Nobel Puzzles Pakistanis Living Close to War”, Nadeem Umtaz, a salesman at a women’s clothing store at the Jinnah Super Market in Islamabad said:

If the category is peace, he doesn’t deserve the peace prize. The situation keeps getting worse in Pakistan and Afghanistan. I think he got the prize because he’s a powerful man, that’s all.

Republicans are also bringing up the apparent “love” the international community has for Obama and the fact that the rest of the world hates Bush so much that they’d welcome any replacement. Marc Thiessen, former speechwriter for George W. Bush had this to say:

We’re laughing about it. It just shows how the international left is so in love with this guy, and for no apparent reason except that he’s not George Bush.

There’s literally nothing that he has done to earn the award. There’s no accord of any kind — no treaty. He has literally been in office for nine months and accomplished nothing in terms of peace. He hasn’t even withdrawn from Iraq.

Still, the fact that there is now a lot of pressure on Obama to live up to this award is often shoved to the side in favor of criticism. If he does not withdraw from Iraq, his opponents will point at it and assert that he never deserved it in the first place. Obama himself said the award is:

A call to all nations to confront the common challenges of the 21st century. This award must be shared with everyone who strives for justice and dignity.

In his 1895 will, inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel directed that the prize go to “the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations and the abolition or reduction of standing armies and the formation and spreading of peace congresses.” Hopefully this will describe our President by 2012.

Caster Semenya: All We Know Is She’s A Runner

Now here’s a case that isn’t receiving a lot of widespread media coverage, but that may just be because the case won’t be cleared up until the test results are released in November: Caster Semenya, a South African runner may or may not have both male and female sex organs. If she does(I will refer to Semenya as a female because she has not been proven to be otherwise), it would make her what is commonly referred to as a hermaphrodite. To some, that is not such a big deal as it is a biological irregularity and there’s not much Semenya could do about that. The problem is that Semenya entered herself in a women’s running category and if she has male genetics, that gives her an advantage that is just as unfair as steroids in baseball.

But to be completely frank, we don’t know yet and we won’t know until the test results have been revealed in November. Still though, if Semenya is a hermaphrodite, there should be a running category established for those of that persuasion. Either this, or assimilate such individuals into the male and female categories based on their levels of estrogen or testosterone. I do not appreciate how Semenya has been exploited by the media as they state her possible condition as fact. This is a perfect case of the scandal-hungry media scrambling around for a juicy story and crucifying a young girl when they don’t even know all the facts.

BREAKING NEWS: Michael Jackson Is Still Dead

I was surfing the L.A. Times website today (which I feel guilty about because their own site is putting their paper out of business) to see what the most popular stories are. At the top, there is a bar that says “In the News”. Next to it, it says “California Wildfires”, “Nancy Garrido”, “MICHAEL JACKSON“, “U.S. Open” and “Susan Atkins”.

What? Michael Jackson? In the news? A few months ago that would have been unsuprising. There’s just one problem: Michael Jackson has been dead since June 25th.

The man has been dead for a month and he’s still top news. Farrah Fawcett of the “Charlie’s Angels” fame died on the same day and I don’t see her name on the “In the News” list but then again, she was only battling cancer. She was buried relatively quickly after she died. There was no mystery, no murder conspiracy theories behind her death so, yeah, we don’t care. Jackson’s getting more press coverage than Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy, who died  two months after Jackson did.

Don’t get me wrong, I think Jackson was one of the most talented and exciting entertainers of the 20th century, but that was over for a while. Jackson belonged to America, being a citizen, but we have been disenchanted with him for a long time. It was the Europeans who stayed with him before the bitter end and as a present, he was going to begin his comeback tour (an attempt to add money to his dwindling estate, which you can read more about here) in London. Now that he’s gone, the American media is foaming at the mouth to get any story they can, glorifying him and appeasing those who think Jackson’s birthday should be a holiday. Don’t  believe there are people that want this? Go to Petition Spot  and see for yourself.

What’s more, it feels like his family is dragging out his story to add to the drama. It took forever to autopsy him, forever to hold his funeral, and forever to bury him. It’s like they thought keeping him out of the ground would somehow bring him back to life. And it didn’t help that Joe Jackson went to the BET Awards to plug his own record company. The blogger hortense on Jezebel.com summed my feelings up pretty well in her blog:

Jackson’s answers were strange right off the bat: [CNN's Don] Lemon asks him how he’s doing, and Jackson responds, “great, I’m doing pretty good,” which seems like a peculiar thing to say after one has just lost one’s son. He then switches gears and says, “It has been really tough. Remember, we just lost the biggest star in the world.” Which also struck me as strange, as it seemed like a fairly detached way of phrasing things.

What a jerk.

Anyway, it seems as though this media nightmare will continue, what with Jackson’s death certificate having just been amended, ruling his death as a homicide and listing his cause of death as “injection by another”. Read about the madness in the U.K.’s Guardian. Who knows, maybe now that he’s more loved and getting more attention than he did in his last few years of life, Jackson will find some way to rise from the grave à la Thriller and get to enjoy the loss his “Wacko Jacko” moniker.