Dead presidents

Senator Mel “why bother” Martinez

Big shout out to the Democrats in Congress for attempting to do what they’re supposed to do when the majority of American people oppose a war that the president won’t stop waging. Yay for finally effectively exercising the power of the purse in our name and spinning shut the tap: we [...]

Bush speechwriting comedians

The side-splitting routines Bush has been delivering in the absence of fresh TV comedy.

Relief disaster

News shocker: most of the federal money sent to help folks in Mississippi has gone to relatively affluent residents and big business. According to the New York Times, the Bush Administration waived a rule mandating that 50 percent of all federal disaster relief grants go to low-income programs.
Mississippi officials told the Times that they do [...]

Sex offender crazy

When Ricky was 16, he went to a party and met a girl named Amanda. She told him she was also 16, he says. They hit it off and had sex.
Turns out, Amanda was 13. According to Iowa state law, where they were living, a 13-year-old cannot consent to sex. Ricky was arrested, held in [...]

Pushing Off: Teenage Sex Crimes

Great party, except that now I’m 16, going to jail, and a registered sex offender. Awesome.

Strike force

With the Daily Show writers on strike, where can you go to get real news? You get online and find yourself some fan vid remixes, of course. This one, by LostTapesFiles, provides some much-needed context on the entertainment-industry labor dispute that has shut down the Daily Show and most of the rest of TV.

The xen(ophobic) master

An Associated Press report today has peeled back one more layer of the homophobic onion that exists in professional sports in the United States, detailing an off-handed remark made by Los Angeles Lakers coach Phil Jackson regarding a game against the San Antonio Spurs in which his team got lit up from three-point land:
The Spurs [...]

Schooled

Here’s beausia’s YouTube response to Rosie O’Donnell’s slurring improv on The View. After some perfunctory public dismissals where she claimed she was just being funny, I guess she apologized at her website. The apology reportedly came after someone sent her the link to beausia’s YouTube classroom for racist comedians. This material is going to be [...]

My hair, my self

What exactly do you think that long straight hair is saying about you, girl?

Mama says

Seriously trailing in the polls, raising questions everywhere he goes about his continued viability as a candidate, John McCain brought out the big guns this week: he asked his moms, 95-year-old Roberta McCain, to step out at MSNBC and tell the world what a great president her little Johnny would make. It’s like you went [...]

It’s (Saturday) morning in America

Wet chairs. Bad music. Motivational speakers. And yet I feel good about the future.

reverb: music from los angeles & beyond

I wonder if Buck 65 ever gets tired of being called the Tom Waits of hip-hop? It isn’t just his gravelly-throated vocal style that earns him the comparison. It isn’t his macabre and often humorous tales of strange characters in desperate situations. And it isn’t his whole “solitary man with the world weary heart of [...]

An “incredibly depressing” situation

In light of the arrest of hundreds of lawyers and activists in Pakistan and the suspension of the country’s constitution by President Pervez Musharraf last week, about fifty demonstrators protested these human rights abuses outside the Pakistan Consulate’s office in Westwood today.
“Crisis has been a daily part of life in Pakistan,” Hamid Khan, executive director [...]

Snoop weekend

Felicia (Felecia?) Pearson, the woman behind the wildest most-intriguing character on TV, hitgirl Snoop on The Wire, came out this week with a memoir called Grace after Midnight. We haven’t had the honor of peeping it yet (G-C publishing, send us a copy already!) but the stories in that book are sure to be the [...]

The sell

In 1979, according to history books and some of the people who were alive back then, Ronald Reagan, with that folksy Hollywood brand he had going, somehow convinced working class Americans that the Republican party was looking out for their interests as well as the interests of their millionaire bosses. Suddenly the guys who owned [...]