Charlie Sheen is serious about paying Brooke Mueller zero child support if at all possible, and is evoking the name of a longtime co-star to boost his case. The actor filed legal documents requesting the massive change in child support – $55,000 to $0 – because Brooke doesn’t even have custody of their boys. While she’s in and out of rehab, Bob and Max are living with Sheen’s other ex-wife, Denise Richards, who’s already getting support from him. In court papers, Charlie references Jon Cryer’s divorce , in which his ex-wife was arrested in ’09 for alleged child abuse and temporarily lost custody. Charlie claims Cryer requested his support payments be reduced from $10,000 per month to zero, and the court granted that request, setting a precedent. Sheen also reveals that he earns more than $740,000 a month (before taxes), more than enough to cover $90,000 a month in expenses on all his homes. Also, Charlie says he foots the bill for ALL the kids’ expenses – therapy, medical, schooling, and more – on top of that $55,000, and will continue to do so. His point? I take care of the kids anyway, and Brooke Mueller clearly isn’t using that $55,000 a month to do so, as she doesn’t care for them anyway. A judge has yet to rule.
Ruben Studdard rose to fame on American Idol . He will now attempt to shrink back down to size on The Biggest Loser . People Magazine confirms that the Season 2 winner of that Fox competition will be a contestant on the next edition of The Biggest Loser . It will air this fall on NBC. “I’ve never had an issue with my weight,” Ruben has said in the past to that publication. “[But] my family has a history of high blood pressure, diabetes, heart-related issues – things I didn’t have to deal with yet because I’m young. But I don’t want to be worried at 40, and if I don’t fix things now, I will be.” Trainers Bob Harper, Jillian Michaels, and Dolvett Quince will be responsible for helping Studdard shed multiple pounds. He’s the second celebrity in show history to appear on The Biggest Loser, as Olympian Rulon Gardner competed on Season 11.
On the eve of beginning her three-month prison sentence for tax evasion, Lauryn Hill took to Tumblr to rant about racism, slavery, the IRS and more. Hill, who was sentenced in May for failing to pay taxes on around $1.8 million in earnings, appears to be pinning her fiscal woes on historical racism. “The concept of reverse racism is flawed, if not absolutely ridiculous,” Lauryn laments in what can only be described as one of the all-time celebrity rants. Martyring herself in dramatic terms, Hill summates that “the institution seeks to hide its own criminal history at the expense and wholeness of the abused.” You really need to read this for yourself after the jump … The concept of reverse racism is flawed, if not absolutely ridiculous. Most, if not all of the negative responses from people of color toward white people, are reactions to the hatred, violence, cruelty and brutality that they were shown by white people for centuries. Much of the foundation of the modern world was built on the forced free labor of black peoples. The African Slave Trade, the institution of slavery, colonialism, its derivative systems, and the multiple holocausts throughout history, where whites used race as the defining reason to justify their oppression, conquest, and brutal treatment of non-white peoples, are how race became such a factor to begin with. The initial claim by the oppressors, followed a moral imperative (so they said) that people outside of Occidental and European birth were in savage and cursed conditions, and that God justified the captivity of these people, and the rape and pillage of their lands. Ironically, these oppressors would try to discard this same God, who supposedly justified this brutality, in the name of Darwin, whose famous line ‘survival of the fittest’ was used to justify criminal behavior once the Bible could no longer be used as a hiding place for economic domination and evil intention. Spirituality and morality were replaced by capitalism, and with it a conscious shift of focus toward the exploitation of the vulnerable. In order to justify reverse racism one would have to first create an even playing field, undo the generations of torture, terror, and brutality, and then judge whether or not a non-white person is in fact a racist. This approach would require people to examine the need/addiction to feel superior to someone else for no justifiable reason, and the myriad policies: Spiritual, political and social, that it bore. True dominion is self evident and not the result of sabotaging another in order to achieve it. That would be an illegitimate as well as a fleeting position. The Universe, will eventually seek to right/balance itself. Of course there are white people who live transcendent lives, not exploiting ill-gotten privilege or perpetuating the sins of their ancestors who used violence and deceit as a means to gain advantage over others. Humanity in proper order is obligated to acknowledge the Truth, whoever it comes from, be they Black, White or other. Righteous indignation is simply a response to long-standing evil. Much of the world is still reeling from the abuses of Imperialist selfishness, misunderstanding, ignorance and greed. Black people remain in many ways a shattered community, disenfranchised, forcefully removed from context and still caged in, denied from making truly independent choices and experiencing existential freedom. Their natural homes, just like their natural selves, raped and pillaged of the resources and gifts God has given to them. Interpreted through someone else’s slanted lens and filter, they remain in many ways, misrepresented. Taxation without proper representation, might I remind you, was the very platform of protest that began the Revolutionary War, which gained this country its independence from England. Anger is not only the natural response to the abuse of power, but is also appropriate when there is no real acknowledgment of these abuses, or deep, meaningful and profound change. If we took all of what we deem horrible regarding the criminal abuses that black people have committed over this country’s history, and add it all up, it still does not compare to the hundreds of years of terrorism, violent domination, theft, rape, abuse, captivity, and beyond that black people have suffered under the ideologies and systems of white supremacy, racism, and slave based paradigms. I say this only to say that abuse unresolved begets or creates abuse. How then does the chief offender become the judge? Might does not necessarily mean right. Right is right. People forcibly reduced to sub-human existences, so that they behave in sub-human ways, helps a system to justify itself or feel less guilty about its blood saturated foundation and gross crimes against humanity. People, like plants, grow where the light is. When you enclose a plant and limit its light source, it will bend itself toward the light, for the light is necessary for its survival. This same thing happens to people locked in communities where little light and little opportunity is allowed them, survival then forces them to twist and/or bend toward the only way of escape. There is good. And I both acknowledge and encourage the good. Instead of throwing out the Baby with the bath water, we do well to expose the intentionally poisoned water the Baby has been forced to soak in since its origin in these lands. America’s particular brand of hypocrisy is gross (double entendre). I shuddered during sentencing when I kept hearing the term ‘make the IRS whole’… make the IRS whole, knowing that I got into these very circumstances having to deal with the very energies of inequity and resistance that created and perpetuated these savage inequalities. The entire time, I thought, who has made black people whole?! Who has made recompense for stealing, imposing, lying, murdering, criminalizing the traumatized, taking them against their wills, destroying their homes, dividing their communities, ‘trying’ to steal their destinies, their time, stagnating their development, I could go on and on. Has America, or any of the nations of the world guilty of these atrocities, ever made black people or Africa whole or do they continue to sit on them, control them, manipulate them, cage them, rob them, brutalize them, subject them to rules that don’t apply to all? Use language, veiled coercion, and psychological torment like invisible fences to keep them locked into a pattern of limitation and therefore control by others. You have to remain focused to cease from rage. The prosecutor, who was a woman, made a statement during sentencing about me not doing any charity work for a number of years during my ‘exile.’ A) Charity work is not a requirement, but something done because someone wants to. I was clearly doing charitable works way before other people were even thinking about it. And B) Even the judge had to comment that she, meaning I, was both having and raising children during this period. As if that was not challenging enough to do. She sounded like the echo of the grotesque slave master, who expected women to give birth while in the field, scoop the Baby up, and then continue to work. Disgusting. When you are beaten and penalized for being independent, or truly self reliant, then you develop a dysfunctional relationship with self-reliance, and a fear of true independence. When you are beaten or threatened with death for trying to read a book, then you develop a dysfunctional relationship with education. When families are broken up by force and threat of violence, then the family structure becomes dysfunctional. When men who would naturally defend their women and families are threatened with castration and death, then this natural response also becomes dysfunctional. When looking at the oppressor is punishable by violence, then examination of him and his system becomes a difficult and taboo thing to do, despite every bone in your body demanding it. When questioning or opposing oppression is punishable by death, imprisonment, or economic assassination, then opposing systemic wrong in any or all of its meta manifestations is a terrifying concept. Anyone forced to live so incredibly diametrically opposed to that which is natural to themselves, will end up in crisis if they don’t successfully find a way to improve or transcend these circumstances! All of which require healing. It is only by the Grace of God and the resilience of the people that things haven’t been worse. Much of my music, if not all of it, is about Love, a therapeutic resolve created in response to the lack of messages encouraging people like me toward free moral agency. Helping to ameliorate this condition has never been addressed through the political arena alone. It is a sacrificial work that doesn’t simply happen between the hours of 9 to 5 or Monday through Friday, but when inspiration leads us to avail ourselves for the Truth that needs to be said. Unlike the system too often contrarily demonstrates, we believe that people can be and should be helped, and that trauma should not be criminalized but acknowledged, healed and dealt with. This takes awareness, sensitivity and a level of freedom in my opinion the system lacks. And if we don’t know or understand how to do it, then we humbly refer to a higher authority. We have no desire to create humanoids, turn people into machines, or dumb them down so that they remain dependent longer than necessary to an antiquated system in denial of its many inadequacies and need to evolve. Instead we seek to educate and shed light on the snares, traps, and enticements that people set up in the name of business that are intended only to catch the sleeping and/or uninformed. Why would a system, ‘well intentioned’, wait until breakdown or incarceration to consider rehabilitation, after generations of institutionally inflicted trauma and abuse on a people? To me it is obvious that the accumulation of generational trauma and abuse have created the very behaviors the system tries to punish, by providing no sufficient outlets for the victims of institutional terror. Clearly, the institution seeks to hide its own criminal history at the expense and wholeness of the abused, who ‘acting out’ from years of abuse and mistreatment, reflect the very aggression that they were exposed to .
Detroit Residents In Crime Ridden-Neighborhood Say They Feel Like Prisoners In Their Homes A group of residents living in a crime-ridden and predominantly black Detroit neighborhood say they often feel like prisoners in their own homes and are afraid to even leave to go to church. via News One You would think going to church wouldn’t pose a security risk, but some Detroiters beg to differ. On city’s West Side, between Seven and Eight Mile Roads near Telegraph, rests a tight-knit community that has grown tired of vagrants who frequent a park near their homes. On any given day or night, street walkers], drug dealers and other trouble makers can be seen hanging out in Fargo-Fenton Playground. Too often, they leave behind syringes, liquor bottles, and used condoms, according to one resident interview by Fox 2 News Detroit. Other residents told the television station that they believe the shady people hanging around the park are connected to a string of recent home break-ins in the neighborhood–especially during church hours. Here is more of what some residents told Fox 2 about break-ins during church hours: “Come home and find that their windows have been pried open,” said a resident. “You don’t know who’s going to attack you next.” “Your hands are tied basically as a citizen. You really are at the mercy of the criminals.” “We have to defend ourselves against the criminals who want to just singly take over,” said another neighbor. “People are afraid, and they’re getting older, and the kids are now beginning to move them away.” “We’re being targeted when we go to church. Come home and everything should be fine, but when you come home and everything you’ve worked hard for is ripped apart and then you’ve got to pay to repair the damage that was done to your home, it will deter you from going because you want to try to protect what you have because no one else is going to do it for you.” This is a shame. We really have to do better….NOW.
This lady is a little cray cray. Abortion Leader Compares Rape To A Car Accident According to Raw Story Right to Life president Barbara Listing said Wednesday that women should purchase additional health insurance if they feared being raped, because the sexual crime was like a car accident. “Nobody plans to have an accident in a car accident, nobody plans to have their homes flooded. You have to buy extra insurance for those,” she told reporters. Michigan’s Board of State Canvassers on Wednesday approved a ballot petition that seeks to prohibit health insurance companies from covering abortion procedures, even in cases of rape or incest. The initiative would require abortion coverage to be purchased as a separate rider. If the activist collect signatures from 3.48 percent of all registered voters in the state, lawmakers can adopt the initiative without a signature from Gov. Rick Snyder. The Republican governor vetoed a similar proposal last year. Jessica Tramontana of Progress Michigan slammed Listing over her remark. “These extremists and religious special interests should have dropped their narrow agenda after voters rejected right-wing attacks on women last November,” she said in a statement. “Politics don’t belong in the doctor’s office. It’s time for special interest lobbyists to stop the hateful attacks on women in Michigan.” If someone would rape her and get her pregnant, maybe she would be singing a different tune.
Michael Bay does not apologize for Armageddon. I repeat, he does not apologize. Yesterday, we reported that Bay apologized for Armageddon , saying that he didn’t have enough time to do it right. But today the director has released a statement to the contrary: “One press writer has gone too far in reporting false information. He has printed the bare minimum of my statement which in effect have twisted my words and meaning.” The director added “still today Armageddon, is still one of the most shown movies on cable TV. ” “And yes, I’m proud of the movie. Enough said.” Some fans think Bay has plenty of other movies he could apologize for, but that’s beside that point.
The new The Bling Ring trailer has dropped, based on the story of the real-life gang of miscreants who hatched a celebrity robbing scheme. Watch it now: The Bling Ring Trailer New Katie Chang, Israel Broussard, Emma Watson, Taissa Farmiga, and Claire Julien star as a group of fame-obsessed teens who start robbing celebrities’ homes. The group tracks the whereabouts of celebrities on the Internet, then enters their homes when they are in the least danger of getting caught. Celebrities who were robbed by the group in its heyday included Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan , Megan Fox, Audrina Patridge and Rachel Bilson. The Bling Ring is directed by Sophia Coppola and will premiere June 14.
Armed with explosives and guns, the Boston Marathon bombing suspects battled law enforcement officers in a Boston suburb early Friday morning. The two men unleashed chaos and killed an MIT campus officer before police took one of the men into custody and the other fled, officials said. The suspect taken into custody later died. Officials identified the man on the run as the “white-hat” suspect, referring to the photos released by the FBI Thursday. Authorities warned he should be considered armed and dangerous. The standoff with the suspects in Watertown, Mass., erupted after the fatal shooting of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer. A transit police officer was also wounded in the Watertown firefight. Officials in Watertown were warning residents to “stay in their homes and not open their doors unless a police officer is there,” according to reports. “There is a terrorist on the loose,” said one officer at an impromptu press conference at about 4:30 a.m. Friday morning, after the intense battle. The suspect at large is believed to be the man who physically placed the bags containing the homemade bombs which killed 3 and injured 170 on Monday. He is described as “dressed in a grey hoodie, light skinned male, brown curly hair,” with international links and having been in the country legally a year. The suspects approached the MIT officer and shot him in head, sources said, then stole the MIT officer’s cruiser, robbed a nearby 7-11 and carjacked a Mercedes. They briefly kidnapped the driver of the SUV, and the suspects threw explosives out the window of the moving car in what was a harrowing and chaotic scene. The dead suspect had an improvised explosive device strapped to his chest and law enforcement sources warned that the suspect on the run may as well. The intense situation in Watertown followed an hours-long lockdown at MIT, where the campus police officer was shot and killed while investigating. A disturbance was reported on the Cambridge campus. It is not clear exactly what, but the suspects are believed to have killed the MIT officer and fled. Even as police swept the campus, there were reports of a violent car chase and then an extremely heavy police presence in Watertown, four miles away. The events began unfolding with reports of shots fired on the MIT campus at 10:48 p.m. ET, and the situation remained “active and extremely dangerous” for hours. It was later reported that a campus officer had been killed. Watertown resident Andrew Kitzenberg described the police shootout outside his house that followed when officials tracked down the Boston bombing suspects . “They engaged in gunfire for a few minutes,” he told NBC News. “They were also utilizing bombs, which sounded and looked like grenades, [during] the gunfight.” “They also had what looked like a pressure-cooker bomb.” Kitzenberg said two people took cover between a black Mercedes SUV and a sedan, and began shooting 70 or 80 yards toward six Watertown police vehicles. “It was a firefight,” the witness added. “There was a long exchange of gunfire.” One of the shooters then ran toward the cops, while the other got into the SUV. The person on foot later fell to the ground, either tackled or shot. The other drove the SUV through the line of police cars at the end of the street, he added. Kitzenberg said that while he had a “very clear view of the shooters,” he couldn’t see their faces but described them as “average size, average height.” Story developing … UPDATE : The two bombing suspects are brothers, aged 19 and 20, and legal permanent U.S. residents of Chechen origin, law enforcement sources say.
One of my favorite Sundance Film Festival movies has gotten a name change and a May 31 release date, and you should see it for a lot of reasons, the primary one being 18-year-old Moises Arias’ breakout performance. He’s the kid dancing on the pipe in this teaser trailer for The Kings of Summer — previously Toy’s House — and he had me and a lot of other audience members laughing out loud at the Park City screening I saw in January. Arias plays Biaggio, one of three kids who escape their homes and frustrating families for a makeshift house they build from scavenged materials in a secluded forest in their hometown. He’s not the star of Jordan Vogt-Roberts coming-of-age comedy — he’s actually the extremely odd classmate who invites himself along for the adventure — but he gets a lot of the best laughs. That has a lot to do with Arias’memorable face and his deer-in-the-headlights stare, which he uses to great advantage. I hope we’re going to be seeing a lot more of this kid, who’s also playing Bonzo in one of the fall’s hotly anticipated films, Gavin Hood’s adaptation of Orson Scott Card’s Hugo Award-winning science-fiction novel, Ender’s Game . Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said this week that he isn’t sure if he would sign a bill to ban the practice of using therapies to turn a gay child into a straight child. His expected challenger for reelection, State Sen. Barbara Buono, a co-sponsor of the bill banning gay conversion therapy of minors, calls that “disgusting.” The Buono team clearly senses an opening to cast the popular Republican governor as a right-wing fanatic, something he is rarely if ever called. He was asked yesterday about the bill, which passed out of a legislative committee Monday and has yet to be approved by the full state legislature. Christie said that he generally doesn’t decide on bills before they reach his desk and he had only recently heard of the practice of gay conversion. He also said: “You know, I’m of two minds on this stuff in general. One, I think there should be lots of deference given to parents on raising their children.” “This is general now not to this bill, but generally philosophically on bills that restrict parents’ ability to make decisions on how to care for their children.” “I’m generally a skeptic on those things. Now, of course, there can always be exceptions to those rules and this bill may be one of them.” Buono responded: “I was shocked at the stunning level of ignorance that statement showed.” She accused Christie of playing to the right. “All of this governor’s decisions are geared to what plays in the national Republican party,” Buono said on a conference call with reporters Wednesday. The bill, which passed out of committee with all Democrats voting in favor and all but one Republican voting no or abstaining, is short and straightforward. It would forbid licensed therapists and counselors from trying to change the sexual orientation of a minor. Simple, and yet anything but for Christie. Senators heard dramatic testimony about such conversion therapy, with a transgender woman from Toms River telling of being forced to go to a conversion camp. There, she said she was shocked with electricity and given vomit-inducing medicine while being shown “unacceptable” images during her “conversion.” Others who experienced gay conversion told of being forced to masturbate while looking at images of naked women and being shown pics of AIDS victims. Opponents said that banning conversion therapy – also known as reparative therapy – would violate both parents’ rights and the First Amendment. “I don’t understand why you people are coming into our homes and trying to tell us what to do with our minor children,” said Carol Gallentine of Living Free Ministries. “Under 18, it’s the parents’ right, it’s our civil right, to raise our children the best we can.” Christie opposes gay marriage but doesn’t believe homosexuality is a sin. He favors civil unions and a ballot referendum so voters can decide on gay marriage. A Christie spokesman later said he “does not believe in conversion therapy.” He also cited his comments that sexual orientation is determined at birth. He won’t say whether he will sign the gay conversion ban until he sees the final bill. Christie, a name frequently mentioned as a 2016 election candidate for president, is seeking a second term as Governor of New Jersey this fall.
