Filed under: Celebrity Justice , Chikezie Eze ” American Idol ” alum Chikezie Eze … who was charged with felony identity theft in connection with trying to allegedly buy two bottles of ridiculously expensive cologne with a phony credit card … just copped a plea. Chikezie pled no contest to… Read more
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‘American Idol’ Chikezie Eze Pleads in ID Theft Case
Filed under: Heidi Montag , Spencer Pratt , Celebrity Justice , MTV TMZ has learned … Heidi Montag is downright furious with Spencer Pratt ‘s new claim that he plans to write a tell-all book about her private life — and is now threatening legal action to stop him. We just spoke to Montag who tells us, “This is exactly… Read more
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Heidi Threatens Legal Action Over Spencer’s Tell-All
Posted in Celebrities, Gossip, Hot Stuff
Tagged hollywood-news, Mtv, private, spencer, stars, tell-all-book, TMZ
Rachel Maddow has nothing but contempt for the so-called Southern strategy by which Republicans have allegedly courted the votes of Southern white males through veiled or overt race-baiting. Which makes it all the more peculiar for Maddow to engage in a Southwestern strategy of slandering Republicans as racist toward Latinos in order for her to garner votes for Democrats. Here is the most recent example of Maddow doing this, on her MSNBC show Aug. 12 and 13. On both nights, reporter Morgan Loew of the CBS affiliate KPHO in Phoenix was one of her guests. On her Aug. 12 show, Maddow described how three inmates escaped from Arizona State Prison in Kingman, the latest in a string of break-outs from privatized prisons in Arizona stretching back to 1996. Maddow then segued to saying this (first part of embedded video) — MADDOW: After this incredible record of achievement, after all of these prison escapes from private prisons, how did the state of Arizona decide to proceed with the issue of prison privatization? Even as prison privatization declines around the country, even as state budget cuts make it so that many states are closing facilities or reducing their sentencing guidelines so that fewer people are in prison altogether, how did the state of Arizona decide to proceed? As Maddow says this, the graphics on screen show a photo of Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, a map of Arizona and the capitalized word “INCARCERATION,” with “INC” set off in red font. MADDOW: Last year Arizona state officials moved legislation to try to privatize the whole state prison system! Arizona planned to seek bids from private companies for nine of the state’s 10 prison complexes. It was the first effort by a state to put its entire prison system under private control. Great news for the private prison companies, right? Great news in particular for Corrections Corporation of America, which is the single largest private prison company in the country. CCA already runs six detention facilities in Arizona. They hold prisoners from other states at their facilities in Arizona. They also hold the federal contract to hold federal detainees in the state. Here’s where Maddow makes her shabby insinuation, one that backfired after what Loew would soon reveal — MADDOW: So, you know what would be awesome for a company like that? You know what would be awesome, it would be really awesome for the shareholders and everybody? If the state of Arizona started producing a whole lot more federal detainees, people detained on federal issues. Federal issues like, I don’t know, say, immigration violations? Footage is then shown of Brewer signing SB 1070, Arizona’s anti-illegals law, as Maddow says … — MADDOW: Imagine the boon to the private for-profit prison company that has the contract to house federal detainees in Arizona if Arizona came up with a wacky plan to arrest a lot more people for suspected immigration violations. Imagine how awesome a law like SB 1070 would be for an industry like the for-profit private prison industry in Arizona. Maddow proceeded to air a report by Loew for KPHO in Phoenix, detailing how Brewer’s deputy chief of staff, Paul Senseman, is a former CCA lobbyist whose wife still lobbies for the company; and Brewer policy advisor Chuck Coughlin owns High Ground Public Affairs consulting, which represents CCA. (To see the Maddow segment in its entirety, link here ). In Loew’s report, Brewer was quoted as saying that Senseman “does not advise the governor on these issues”; CCA stated that it “did not lobby at any time … anyone in Arizona on the immigration law.” To remind viewers of her insinuation about Brewer’s rationale for signing SB 1070, Maddow added this — MADDOW: Then again, why would you need to lobby when two of the governor’s top people are your lobbyist, your former lobbyist, and/or married to your lobbyist? But after Maddow introduced Loew, and Loew rehashed the details of his reporting on Senseman, Coughlin and CCA, Loew mentioned this awkward fact right at the end of his interview with Maddow (second part of embedded video, starting at 1:56) — LOEW: In addition, in Arizona we have a mindset among a couple of key legislators that privatizing the prison industry is a good thing. As you mentioned, they tried to privatize the entire system last year. The governor did veto that after the state corrections director sent her a letter saying, look, we can’t imagine having death row inmates in private prison systems and having death row inmates being taken care of by the lowest common bidder. Excuse me, did you say “the governor” — by whom you mean Jan Brewer, correct? — vetoed the bill to privatize nearly all of Arizona’s state prisons? Shortly before she signed SB 1070, the law that would create vast penal colonies of suspected illegal immigrants? Apparently Brewer missed the memo on this fine-tuned, lucrative conspiracy. Maddow’s flimsy premise having been demolished before her eyes — by a simpatico guest, no less — she invited Loew back the next night to harrumph about links between Republican state senator Russell Pearce, a major backer of SB 1070, and the private prison industry. (full segment from Maddow show linked here ). Once again, Loew served up an inconvenient fact right at the end of his discussion with Maddow (third part of embedded video, starting at 2:28) — MADDOW: Morgan, am I also right that in thinking that Russell Pearce was the man behind the effort last year to privatize all of Arizona’s state prisons? LOEW: He was. He sponsored that legislation and we looked through his legislative record and it looks like as far back as 2003 he was pushing legislation that was calling for the privatization of state prison beds, I think 1,000 beds back in 2003, another 1,400 before that. But the biggest one is the bill that you just referred to, which would have handed over our entire prison system to the private prison industry. Now, that bill was vetoed but another bill passed that essentially did the same thing. Last year, our prison system would have, in a sense, most of it, would have been handed over to the private prison industry, but none of those companies would come forward to bid on them. Once again, this fine-tuned, lucrative conspiracy — thwarted by the alleged conspirators.
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Crash! Inconvenient Facts Demolish Rachel Maddow’s Premise on Rationale for Arizona’s Anti-Illegals Law
Posted in Hollywood, Hot Stuff, News
Tagged arizona, arizona law, bennyhollywood, jan brewer, Phoenix, politics, private, rachel maddow show, rachel-maddow
Here’s model/professional freeloader Victoria Silvstedt hanging out in her little bikini at something called the Monte Carlo Beach Club in Monaco. Well excuse me. I wonder what a membership goes for at one of these places, and do they allow celebrity bloggers who swim with their t-shirts on? I’m getting kind of annoyed by all these pictures of her having a good time on some rich old dude’s dime. Why can’t some rich old lady ferry me around the Riviera in her private yacht? I may not look as good in a bikini, but I’ll definitely put out. more pictures of Victoria Silvstedt here
Posted in Celebrities, Hot Stuff
Tagged beach, beach-club, bennyhollywood, Bikini Pictures, Hollywood, monaco-well, more-pictures, Pictures, private, silvstedt, time-on-some, victoria silvstedt
Here are a few more pictures of supermodel Marisa Miller from the FHM article about how hot she is and how it’s next to impossible for me to ever get my private parts anywhere near anything as remotely spectacular this. Obviously that’s not what the article is about, but it might as well be, this woman is incredible. This is exactly how I imagined Marisa would do chores like water the lawn, do the dishes and make spaghetti… In some tiny boner inducing lingerie. She’s too perfect.
Posted in Celebrities, Hot Stuff
Tagged article, bikini-picture, boner-inducing, dishes, models, picture, private, private-parts, Sex, shape-magazine, the-article, woman
On Tuesday’s Rick’s List, CNN’s Jessica Yellin harkened back to her college days at Harvard as she defended Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan against charges by conservatives that she is anti-military: “When I was at Harvard, a full decade before she was dean of the law school, there was already institutional opposition to ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’….it steeps the whole university.” Yellin, actually, was a key left-wing student agitator during her time at the university, as she revealed in several interviews with The Crimson, the student newspaper at Harvard. She was labeled a ” prominent feminist activist in her own right ” in a June 10, 1993 profile of Sheila Allen , her first-year roommate and self-proclaimed “dyke of the Class of ’93.” The then-student certainly earned this label, as she helped resurrect Harvard-Radcliffe Students for Choice after a “relatively inactive period,” was a women’s studies major, and, in an April 10, 1992 interview , bemoaned how Harvard was apparently opposed to her feminist agenda: “For people interested in women’s issues or gender studies, this is an overtly hostile environmen t.” In a May 1, 1992 article , Yellin expressed how the acquittal of the four police officers involved in the controversial Rodney King arrest was ” the most blatant evidence of the indelible racism… in this country .” Anchor Rick Sanchez brought on the correspondent just after the top of the 4 pm Eastern hour as the nominee continued her testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committe. Sanchez first referenced how Senator Jeff Sessions was “grilling Kagan about banning military recruiters from an on-campus recruiting facility when she was Harvard Law dean.” He then asked the correspondent, “Is it fair, based, Jessica, on what happened at Harvard, to charge, as Sessions seems to be saying- or alluding to or suggesting- that Elena Kagan has a bias against the military?” Yellin defended Kagan from the very beginning and immediately cited her time at the Ivy League school: YELLIN: I think that’s apples and oranges, Rick, because, when I was at Harvard, a full decade before she was dean of the law school, there was already institutional opposition to ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’ It was alive and well . So, beginning in 1979, when Harvard instituted this no-discrimination policy, there were people in ROTC- the Reserve Officers Training Corps- who could not train and drill on campus because, initially- a holdover from Vietnam- it continued because of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’ That was a decade before she was there. Then, when General Colin Powell was invited to speak at graduation in 1993, there were massive protests over ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’ I can’t emphasize enough how this- it steeps the whole university . She was continuing with prevailing beliefs on campus, and this whole debate feels very out of context for someone who was at Harvard, because- to suggest this didn’t predate her- saying that’s a left-wing talking point is like arguing that reality is a left-wing talking point. The correspondent does have a personal memory of the 1993 commencement, as she graduated from Harvard that year. The Clinton administration had introduced the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy just months earlier, shortly after coming to office. Later, the CNN correspondent excused Kagan’s open opposition to military recruiters on the Harvard Law campus as merely a manifestation of the left-wing environment at most “elite” institutions of higher learning: SANCHEZ: She was there in 2003. YELLIN: Yeah. SANCHEZ: Isn’t this about the same time, though, that there was a lot of questions? Michael Moore had this movie that came out about that time [Fahrenheit 9/11], as I recall, where a big part of his movie was questioning whether recruiters had a right to go out there and get people to join the military, and that they were, maybe, not being all that honest with them. I mean, if you put it in the context of that time frame, there were a lot of questions being raised about recruiting by the left. YELLIN: There have been since the Vietnam era, when some of these organizations were kicked off of these elite campuses then. I mean, there are a number of colleges that have resisted allowing military recruitment. But that’s hardly unique to Elena Kagan or to Harvard. It might be- you know, some on the right have argued that that’s the culture of elite universities, that are- you know, anti-military in some way. I don’t buy that. I think that there’s a tension there, but this is- the fundamental point here is that it’s in no way special to her , and there were 24 faculties that joined in the lawsuit against this policy of requiring these military recruiters. Hers wasn’t even one of them. So she wasn’t even leading the charge on this.
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CNN’s Yellin Cites Her Own Liberal Harvard Days in Defense of Kagan
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Tagged celeb news, Cnn, covert liberal activists, feminism, higher-education, jessica-yellin, misguided, mma, movie, nominee, personal, private, rick sanchez
Andrew Breitbart has arrived at a simply remedy to at least some of the problems that ail contemporary journalism: cold, hard cash. Yesterday he offered $100,000 to anyone who will supply him with the full archive of JournoList, the email listserve that brought down Dave Weigel . “$100,000 is not a lot to spend on the Holy Grail of media bias when there is a country to save, ” Breitbart wrote yesterday. Americans “deserve to know who was colluding against them,” he added, “so that in the future they can better understand how the once-objective media has come to be so corrupted and despised.” And there’s the rub: Breitbart is attempting to out liberal journalists as just that: liberal. His tactics and his objectives have been dubbed by some on the left as ” digital McCarthyism ,” in the words of Michael Roston, “in which any of us could become the next Dave Weigel based not on the public output of our journalism, but based on our private sentiments.” Roston seems less upset about Breitbart’s $100,000 offer than he is about the notion that JournoList emails would be leaked at all. Ezra Klein echoed this misguided outrage when he dubbed the Weigel controversy ” dedicated character assassination .” Let’s be clear: Weigel resigned, he was not fired. Maybe he thought he would no longer be able to cover conservatives effectively after earning their disdain (rightfully, in my mind). Or maybe the Post felt that he had violated their professional standards, and encouraged him to leave. Those were both internal decisions — there was no McCarthyite witch hunt. Indeed, you’ll be hard-pressed to find conservatives who called for Weigel’s resignation, and some of his most vehement defenders were on the right . The outrage over Weigel’s statements was less directed at his personal political views, than at the Post’s decision to hire him to cover the right. As I have written , the issue for most conservatives is not Weigel’s lack of objectivity, but rather the Post’s lack of balance. Weigel was not a counterweight to Ezra Klein. Not even close. There is, however, a group of journalists griping about Weigel’s lack of objectivity, and using it as an occasion to decry the ascendency of opinion journalism. Of the ongoing battle between the self-proclaimed “objective” journalists and opinion reporters such as Klein and Weigel, Ned Resnikoff writes at Salon, It’s not hard to see the implications of this argument for journalism in general. Weigelgate has instigated a long-overdue fight within the bowels of a major newspaper over the relative merits of traditional, self-consciously impartial reporting and opinionated coverage. It’s an old skirmish, but not one that has ever been fought with this level of intensity, before such a wide audience. And perhaps now that it’s out in the open, we can expose the misguided, antiquated ideology its supporters have dubbed “objective journalism” for what it really is. Because, make no mistake, it is an ideology — one predicated on the notion that human beings can educate one another on complex, hotly contested issues without using any sort of subjective or ideology-based language or ordering principle. Maybe this isn’t an unreasonable argument to make a priori, but by now, experience should have taught us that the opposite is true. Human language is too complex, too subjective, and too ambiguous to express non-mathematical propositions in wholly mathematical, objective terms. Human perception is too impressionable and susceptible to self-editing for it to capture, much less perfectly reproduce, a completely unslanted cluster of objective facts. And when journalists behave as if these things are untrue, it distorts their coverage in curious, frequently unacknowledged ways… The solution is to follow the example set by Weigel, Klein, Sargent and countless others: acknowledge your own biases. Disclose them to your audience. Never shy away from advancing an argument that is open to contradictory interpretation, but be prepared to defend it and, when necessary, admit error and adjust your beliefs accordingly. Roston and others on the left have dubbed “McCarthyism” Breitbart’s offer, and the potential that other “objective” journalists could have their biases exposed to the world. But that label seems to assume that a journalist who is outed as a liberal faces any meaningful threat to his or her career. That notion is nothing short of silly. Weigel did not leave the post because he is a liberal. And conservatives did not force him out. Think about those two assertions for a minute. Do some commentators actually believe that a blogger’s lefty views could get him fired from one of the most liberal papers in the nation? Do they actually believe that righty commentators have any say in or sway over the Post’s employment decisions? Did Weigel’s statements offend a great number of conservatives? Absolutely. But since when is offending conservatives a fireable offense at the paper that helped bring down Nixon? This is the same paper that employed extremely liberal reporters such as Carl Bernstein and Dana Milbank. Bernstein is venerated, and Milbank was made a columnist. Liberalism is hardly taboo at the Post. Roston is terribly concerned that “any of us could become the next Dave Weigel based not on the public output of our journalism, but based on our private sentiments.” But that is just the problem, as Breitbart and so many others see it: the 20th century model of journalism promotes a mythical separation between a reporter’s work and his or her private sentiments. As explained above, it is near impossible to avoid injecting one’s own biases into that reporting. Are there journalists who manage it? Of course. But a journalistic model that assumes reporters can do what few actually manage — remain objective, that is — is a dysfunctional model. Decades of stilted journalism have demonstrated that fact. Breitbart is simply exposing that model for the sham that it is.
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Breitbart Offers $100k For JournoList Archives, Libs Cry ‘Digital McCarthyism’
Posted in Hollywood, Hot Stuff, News
Tagged bennyhollywood, Career, celeb news, ezra klein, personal, private, salon, weigel
Filed under: Jay-Z , Beyonce , Ride Me Jay-Z may or may not have paid the $137,000 bill for his private jet — but one thing’s for sure, this plane is by far the most baller piece of aviation equipment we’ve ever seen. TMZ broke the story … the company behind the jet — Air Platinum… Read more
Posted in Celebrities, Gossip, Hot Stuff
Tagged behind-the-jet, Beyonce, may-not, most-baller, plane, platinum, private, ride-me, story, TMZ
Late last year, a story carried by the wire service AFP reported on an announcement by Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez that his government would launch “a new chain of government-run, cut-rate retail stores that will sell everything from food to cars to clothing.” Chavez reportedly said that these “discount socialist stores” would show people “what a real market is all about, not those speculative, money-grubbing markets, but a market for the people.” This initiative was on top of Chavez’s creation of Mercal (link is to the Venezuelan home page, complete with “The Bolivarian Government of Venezuela” logo), a state-run network of grocery stores , seven years ago. How is this great leap forward into state control working out? A June 18 Reuters dispatch carried at CNBC reports that the government can’t even keep its food fresh. But that’s okay. The wire service takes a while to get there, and even then a bit of interpretation is necessary, but eventually we learn that the Chavez “solution” to that thorny problem is to seize replacement goods from private merchants: Hugo Chavez Spearheads Raids as Food Prices Skyrocket Mountains of rotting food found at a government warehouse, soaring prices and soldiers raiding wholesalers accused of hoarding: Food supply is the latest battle in President Hugo Chavez’s socialist revolution. Venezuelan army soldiers swept through the working class, pro-Chavez neighborhood of Catia in Caracas last week, seizing 120 tons of rice along with coffee and powdered milk that officials said was to be sold above regulated prices. “The battle for food is a matter of national security,” said a red-shirted official from the Food Ministry, resting his arm on a pallet laden with bags of coffee. It is also the latest issue to divide the Latin American country where Chavez has nationalized a wide swathe of the economy, he says to reverse years of exploitation of the poor. Chavez supporters are grateful for a network of cheap state-run supermarkets and they say the raids will slow massive inflation. Critics accuse him of steering the country toward a communist dictatorship and say he is destroying the private sector. They point to 80,000 tons of rotting food found in warehouses belonging to the government as evidence the state is a poor and corrupt administrator. Jose Guzman, an assistant manager at a store raided in Catia, watched with resignation as government agents pored over the company’s accounts and computers after the food ministry official and the television cameras left. “The government is pushing this type of establishment toward bankruptcy,” said Guzman, who linked the raid to the rotten food scandal. “Somehow they have to replace all the food that was lost, and this is the most expeditious way.” Brilliant. The Reuters report goes on to inform readers that “Food prices are up 41 percent in the last 12 months during a deep recession,” that Chavez has “revived threats to take over the country’s largest private food processor, miller and brewer, Polar,” and that “government now controls between 20 percent and 30 percent of the distribution of staple foods.” A search on “Venezuela” at the Associated Press’s main site indicates that though there are several stories on developments in that country, the wire service has not reported on this latest ratchet-up of the country’s ongoing socialist horror show. It would be unfair to contend that AP is ignoring Venezuela, but its headlines and/or its dispatches have displayed an annoying tendency to downplay the significance of what should be seen as scary developments. For example, a June 14 story with a misdirecting headline (“Venezuela takes control of another private bank”) would appear to be about government seizure of a financially troubled enterprise. The real story is that the the bank’s owner/former owner “just so happens” to be “a minority shareholder of Globovision, the country’s last TV channel that takes a stridently anti-government line.” A June 8 AP report on the country’s inflation casually notes that “The government has sought to confront inflation with a range of measures including recent seizures and shutdowns of businesses that authorities accuse of driving up prices.” Pray tell, what does seizing and shutting down businesses, thereby restricting supply, have to do with fighting inflation? The wire service also gives a virtual PR voice to Chavez statements that appear at first glance to be ploys designed to position his government as the virtue police. In a deceptively titled June 11 report (“Chavez targets alcohol, smoking in Venezuela”), AP reporter Jorge Rueda uncritically relays Chavez’s assertion that “the transition (to socialism) requires a moral crusade to change Venezuelans’ values.” Readers have to get to Rueda’s final paragraphs before they understand what this appeal to virtue is really all about : Chavez has also recently used the issue in his criticisms of the country’s largest food producer, Empresas Polar, which sells the country’s leading brand of beer, Polar. Chavez has ordered the expropriation of some of Polar’s warehouses, and has warned he could decide to take over more of the company. If the government did take over the Polar brewery, it would be shut down, Chavez has warned. Addressing Polar’s president, Lorenzo Mendoza, during Thursday’s speech, Chavez said: “I don’t know what you’re going to do … with your little Polar.” He used the term “Polarcita,” which Venezuelans often use for the small beer bottles that are popular in the country. Here’s an idea: If CNN, which yesterday declared its independence and fired the Associated Press , wants to make a mark with its own wire service efforts, it might want to consider dispatching correspondents to Venezuela to catch the world up on the slow-motion horror there that the AP and broadcast TV networks have either ignored or downplayed for years. Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com .
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Revolutionary Rot, But News It’s Not: AP Ignores Venezuela’s ‘Battle for Food’
Posted in Hollywood, Hot Stuff, News
Tagged agence france-presse, chavez, communism, food, government, jorge rueda, polar, president, private, Television, venezuelan
www.A3Network.com. The Groove Cruise. Groove Cruise Sexiest Party At Sea Part 2. A3 Network brings you the action from the legendary Groove Cruise…Now going into it’s 5th year, over 2500 chic, young professionals have experienced The Groove Cruise; the only cruise in the world geared for those who love dance music and live by the mantra to ‘Work Hard and Play Harder’. A3 Network is a group of online TV channels that reflect the modern lifestyle featuring Nightlife, Clubs, DJs, How-Tos, Music Video, Style, Art, Fashion, Travel, Bikini Girls, Film and Sexy Pool Parties. Whatever The Flavor – The most exciting videos on Youtube! A3 Network videos are produced by http
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Groove Cruise Sexiest Party At Sea Part 2
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