The judge, Charles Pannell Jr. of Northern Georgia District Court, praised T.I. Writes Eonline,

“I think this has been a great experiment. I hope this experience can lead to other experiments so others won’t make the same mistake at all. I congratulate you.”

]]> http://www.popandpolitics.com/2009/03/27/in-the-news-ti-sentenced/feed/ 9 http://www.popandpolitics.com/2009/01/27/first-lady-designer-jason-wu-has-a-secret-double-life/ http://www.popandpolitics.com/2009/01/27/first-lady-designer-jason-wu-has-a-secret-double-life/#comments Tue, 27 Jan 2009 20:14:52 +0000 tricia romano http://www.popandpolitics.com/?p=11230

I was looking at a picture of Jason Wu, the designer who did Michelle Obama’s Inauguration Ball dress, and thought, hmmmm he looks sort of familiar, and then I realized, it’s because I had taken a picture of him a few years ago. In 2006, I was slumming it in New York for the Village Voice and went to a benefit party for AIDS org DIFFA at clothing store Jeffrey. On the right is infamous tranny Amanda Lepore, and she somehow finagled Wu into making replicants of her. The dolls were for sale, and the proceeds went to the charity. And, yes that’s Wu on the left.

So, to review: Jason Wu: friend to the gays, and designer to nightlife trannies and First Ladies.

Eight years ago when George W. Bush was handed the election by the Supreme Court, I was in New York City, working at the Village Voice, that bastion of liberalism and lefty queers. The night of the election, I was in Astoria, Queens, eating an Italian dinner and checking my phone for news updates, then a newfangled technology that was certainly costing me a lot of money.

As the dinner progressed, and me and my roommate made our way back to our house in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, the updates were more and more dire; Al Gore, who had previously seemed like he would take the Presidency, was in a lock with Bush. We waited for hours and hours and stayed up all night, and in the morning still didn’t know who was the leader of the free world.

The week before the inauguration, the Onion ran a satirical story,  “Bush: ‘Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over.’” At the time, it was sort of funny, ha-ha. We laughed, but were uneasy.

While I knew a lot of people who didn’t like Bush and preferred the other guy, there were plenty of lefties who voted for Ralph Nader, having bought Nader’s pitch that Bush and Gore were essentially the same and voted for Nader. I knew they weren’t at all the same; I knew that on women’s issues and gay rights Gore and Bush were further apart than the Israelis and the Palestinians. I knew that Bush was a born-again Christian hellbent on pushing his binary vision of the world, good  and evil, and was sure that he would push legislation that he thought would work to banish his definition of “evil.”

That Onion article, it turned out, predicted, with frightening accuracy, all of the things that I feared.

Could the writers of the Onion really been thinking this would become a reality?

“During the 40-minute speech, Bush also promised to bring an end to the severe war drought that plagued the nation under Clinton, assuring citizens that the U.S. will engage in at least one Gulf War-level armed conflict in the next four years.”

Here we are, six years after Shock and Awe in Iraq failed to shock or awe, we are still in Iraq, with our troops stretched thin, and needed to battle forces in Afghanistan. People forget, also, that Bush, when when he wasn’t taunting Iran, essentially threatened and bullied North Korea, and if Iraq had been the cakewalk they had been predicting, we would have no doubt gone into another war, for absolutely no good reason.

Perhaps my favorite passage:

“We as a people must stand united, banding together to tear this nation in two,” Bush said. “Much work lies ahead of us: The gap between the rich and the poor may be wide, be there’s much more widening left to do. We must squander our nation’s hard-won budget surplus on tax breaks for the wealthiest 15 percent. And, on the foreign front, we must find an enemy and defeat it.”

And how scary accurate is this fake-prediction-turned-true?

“On the economic side, Bush vowed to bring back economic stagnation by implementing substantial tax cuts, which would lead to a recession, which would necessitate a tax hike, which would lead to a drop in consumer spending, which would lead to layoffs, which would deepen the recession even further.”

The unemployment rate is 7.2 percent, the highest since after the second World War; people are foreclosing on their homes; and I have so many friends who are out of work it’s hard now to swallow that pill that Nader was selling. Does anyone believe today that Gore and Bush were basically one and the same?

By the time Bush was elected in 2004, I had printed out and taped a piece of paper that was a mock-up of  a Time magazine cover. It was a picture of W. with a “who me?” look on his face over a black background, and the words, “We’re Fucked,” emblazoned across the top. I looked at that picture every single day. This time, I am looking forward to giving myself a more optimistic outlook. I just needed a little hope and man named Barack Obama.

Over the next few days our Pop and Politics correspondents—including our founder Farai Chideya— will be covering the historic swearing-in ceremony of the nation’s first-ever Black president, Barack Obama. Our coverage in D.C. is possible thanks to a generous donation from the Knight Foundation. All coverage can be found in our special section dedicated to the inauguration.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, today is Hill’s big day on the hill. The proceedings are being streamed live. The Huff Post has continuous updates. The NYTimes is liveblogging the whole affair.

President Bush participates in a photo opportunity with, l-r, Former President George H.W. Bush, President-elect Barack Obama, POTUS, Former President William J. Clinton and former President Jimmy Carter in the Oval Office at the White House. Wednesday, January 7, 2009 (Mary F. Calvert / The Washington Times)

The Economic Crisis Continues: Obama says in his latest press conference (we’ve lost count), basically, “You’ve got to spend money to make money.” The stimulus plan is go.

UN Halts Gaza Aid. The Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip have prevented the United Nations from delivering aid to the area—a driver of a United Nations truck was killed while trying to deliver supplies. As a result, the UN is ceasing its assistance.

Lunchin’ Presidents: Hopefully he got advice beyond rug selection from former President Bill Clinton yesterday at the historic meeting of once-and-future Prezzies, Bill, George Sr., George Jr., Jimmy, and Barry.

No Clinton Sequel: Sen. Tom Daschle ain’t going to let the health care situation crash and burn the way it did in the early 90s when then-First Lady Hillary had a go at reform. Rumored pick for the Surgeon General, CNN’s Sanjay Gupta might be the secret weapon he needs.

Every man is a critic until he gets sued. A chiropractor in San Francisco is suing a user on the city’s Yelp site, who posted a long negative review for libel and invasion of privacy. If the back doc wins, the case could have major repercussions for the unhinged, often negative, free speech found on message boards worldwide.

Obama’s addicted.…To his CrackBerry. The President-Elect is still fighting to keep his beloved phone, basically telling CNBC that the Secret Service are going to have to pry it out of his hands.

Democratic Senate candidate Al Franken, with his wife Frannie at his side, speaks to members of the media outside his home in Minneapolis after Minnesota

More Obama Drama: Hot on the heels of Gov. Richardson’s dropping out from consideration for his cabinet post, Obama has another mini-scandal on his hands with the selection of Leon Panetta, another Clintonite and former congressman and White House chief of staff, heading up the CIA.

Banana Republic, anyone? Does anyone remember the days when we had elections and there was a winner, pure and simple? It’s been a while? We’ve got not one, but two, up-in-the-air Senators, with Al Franken, after being declared the winner in Minnesota by the canvassing board (225 votes!), is likely to be challenged by Republicans; his fellow midwesterner, Roland Burris, the poor dude “apppointed” by disgraced Gov. Rod Blagojevitch, is being blocked by Congress from being seated.

Israel v. Palestine, the 1000th Sequel Surprise, there’s still fighting going on in the Mideast. In today’s atrocities, 30 were killed in a Gaza school. Which means that Hamas is fighting mad, and vows revenge. Yeah, this should turn out well. As Adam Sandler’s mother says in movie, You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, “They’ve only been fighting 2,000 years, it can’t last much longer.”

Gas prices are climbing again. Thanks to a standoff between Russia and the Ukraine, oil output is diminished, with the price-per-barrel climbing to $50. The disruption is effecting Europe, including Italy and Austria.

Another billionaire bites the dust. Adolph Merckle decided he would rather not live than deal with the mess of the economic crisis. A bad investiment in Volkwagen shares sent Merckle in a downward spiral; he lost “millions of dollars” and a likely breakup of his business.

This just in: Adding to the media meltdown, my former alma mater, the Village Voice, just laid off three more in editorial. [Full disclosure, I was laid off myself for "matters of taste" in 2007]. Among those laid off is Nat Hentoff, who’s been at the paper since 1958, writing about jazz, and later, civil liberties in his weekly long-running column. Fashion writer Lynn Yaeger, who has worked with the paper over 15 30 years, starting in classifieds, before moving into editorial, was laid off, along with staff writer Chloe Hilliard, who was hired under the current editor, Tony Ortega in 2007. We know, we keep saying this, but we continue to be amazed that there is anyone left to lay off.

Nat Hentoff’s Greatest Hits Compilation.

Via the Daily News.

JOHN GURZINSKI/LAS VEGAS REVIEW JOURNAL NEWS----People crowded the welcome sign on the Las Vegas strip to take photos as snow fell in Las Vegas Wednesday Dec. 17, 2008

Yesterday, Weather happened. Usually it’s the Northeast and the Midwest that suffers interminably during these long, cold months. But yesterday, everyone was experience winter; it snowed briefly and lightly in Malibu, California, and Las Vegas, Nevada got the biggest dumping of the white stuff since high rollers and the Mafia ran the Strip. Up in the usually temperate Pacific Northwest, Seattle was also buried under snow (and just got a second helping in less than a week), with temps hovering in the low 20s at night. The Northeast, which was unusually calm, is expected to get the West coast’s leftovers later this week.

The dollar took a dive. After the Fed lowered the interest rate to near zero, the currency fell against the Euro–which is now at $1.44, from $1.40—the biggest slide since the Euro was introduced in 1999. Guess a European vacation won’t be in the cards any time soon.

Obama’s honeymoon ends with at least one group. The gays are not happy with the Chosen One. He’s inexplicably picked right-wing evangelical pastor, Rick Warren,  who was against gay marriage (and therefore, for Proposition 8’s passage) to perform the invocation at his inauguration. So, let’s review: lunatic black pastor had to be put to pasture because he was too “extreme,” but the white guy is A-OK. And, all the hope that there’d be a bunch of gays running loose in his cabinet seems to be squashed for the moment: openly gay labor activist Mary Beth Maxwell, has taken a backseat to Harley Shaiken for the Labor Secretary post.  Meanwhile, BO’s tapped another lady, Mary Schapiro as the chair of the SEC.

Another hatemonger bites the dust. Slowly, but surely, we’re shedding the bigots that helped shaped the last century—and who continue to influence this century. As of yesterday, Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond can party with Paul Weyrich in ithe afterlife. Weyrich, who coined the phrase “moral majority,” kicked the bucket.

“American Taliban” seeks pardon. John Walker Lindh, the 27-year old Californian, is seeking a presidential pardon from George W. Bush. He joined the Taliban one month before the U.S. invasion of the country, and had converted to Islam. He was charged with “conspiring to kill American citizens,” but the terrorism-related charges were dropped. He’s seven years into a 20-year sentence.

FOB’s revealed. Financier’s of Bill Clinton’s were released today, disclosing a range of donors to his foundation. Among the foreign contributions: Saudi Arabia gave $10 mil, and Norway, Qatar, Italy, Jamaica, India, Kuwait, and places rarely heard of, like Brunei and Oman, gave money to the ex-Prez. According to the New York Times, “The two largest contributors, listed as giving more than $25 million apiece, were the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, a grant-making charity that focuses on sub-Saharan Africa and India, an UNITAID, an international alliance formed two years ago to fight H.I.V./AIDS.”

Mark Ruffalo’s brother’s death ruled a homicide. The barely believable story that Scott Ruffalo died from a gunshot wound to the back of the head while playing Russian Roulette with friends has been wisely dropped.

Mr. Cool almost loses it when a dogged reporter, John McCormick, from the Chicago Tribune presses for a response to the revelation that Obama’s Chief of Staff-to-be, Rahm Emanuel, had 21 taped conversations over Obama’s vacated Senate seat with disgraced Gov. Rod Blagojevitch.

Blago’s Football: if you’ve been hiding under a rock, perhaps you’ve missed the single greatest passage to appear in an American newspaper in the last 10 years, maybe forever. It’s in a piece entitled, “Two Sides of a Troubled Governor, Sinking Deeper,” by Monica Davey in the New York Times. It concerns the disgraced Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevitch, the man who is under investigation for trying to sell Pres-Elect Barack Obama’s vacated Senate seat. The piece talks about the Governor’s egomaniacal and narcisstic demands, which were at odds with his everyman public persona.

The passage reads:

And yet, Mr. Blagojevich, 52, rarely turns up for work at his official state office in Chicago, former employees say, is unapologetically late to almost everything, and can treat employees with disdain, cursing and erupting in fury for failings as mundane as neglecting to have at hand at all times his preferred black Paul Mitchell hairbrush. He calls the brush “the football,” an allusion to the “nuclear football,” or the bomb codes never to be out of reach of a president.

Seriously, just read that paragraph over and over. You don’t even need to read the rest of the article. This is what perfection looks like.

Bush got shoe-ed away. Lame duck loser—i.e. Georgie W. Bush Jr.—went to Iraq this weekend for a non-victory lap and thought he was going to come away with some sentimental fluff pieces about how he really cares. Instead, he got a different sort of photo-op: an Iraqi journalist—and now, hero to the world—threw his shoes at Bush during a small press conference. Bush—like he’s been doing for the duration of his two terms—ducked. Lame.

The world’s biggest Ponzi scheme just got worse. Bernie Madoff, the Wall Street legend who bilked “hundreds and possibly thousands and include major banks, hedge funds, charities and pension funds” has ripped off everyone from bank HSBC, a Steven Spielberg foundation, and Mort Zuckerman. His ponzi party was brought to an abrupt halt when he admitted to two employees that his fund was “just one big lie,” with “absolutely nothing” left and that he planned to distribute the remaining $200 million to family and friends before turning himself in. The whistle was blown before he got a chance to do that.

Senator Kennedy, the sequel. It looks like Caroline Kennedy has tossed her hat in the ring for Senator Hillary Clinton’s seat in New York. The New York Times points out that she would be filling a seat once held by her uncle, Robert F. Kennedy. Should she get the post, this could be an interesting political play. Imagine a day, 8 years into the future, say, and we’d have another possible female presidential candidate with even bigger name recognition than Clinton.

Meet Gina Rios and Sabrina Devens. These two ladies saw last month’s fires in Southern California as a golden opportunity. According the LA Weekly, after the Porter Ranch neighborhood in San Fernando Valley was evacuated, they allegedly decided to help themselves to the contents of Rafat Salib’s house, nicking Gucci and Chanel handbags, an Xbox 360, a laptop computer, and more goodies. Weirder still, when Salib, who returned home by chance to check on the house, discovered them mid-loot, Rios told him they were looking for Jerry McGuire.

Sylmar Fire’s Lady Looters – News – LA Weeklypage 1 – LA Weekly

La Muerte Las Vegas? The gambling capital of the country is also the new suicide capital of the country. Hilariously, the suicide researchers (how’s that for a job?) insist that the gambling losses have nothing to do with it. Says Mike Murphy: “”The vast majority of those that came to Las Vegas did not come here and lose their money and then commit suicide,” Murphy said. “They came here with the idea of making their last kind of ‘hooray,’ and then they took their lives.”

Oceans 14, the Al-Qaeda Edition: A female Al-Qaeda “legend,” Malika El-Aroud, a widow of a suicide bomber was arrested in Belgium, along with 13 others, all who had high-level contacts in the terror organization. The group is suspected of planning a coordinated terror attack during an EU Summit in Brussels Thursday and Friday.

The engine’s stalled on the auto bailout. However, the Bush administration might step up and throw the industry a bone from the $700 billion market rescue plan, especially after last night’s $14 billion emergency plan went up in smoke in the Senate.

Just call me Senator Al. The former comedian-turned-aspiring politician Al Franken is knee-deep in the recount for Minnesota’s Senate seat again Norm Coleman, gaining some momentum with the inclusion of 1500 absentee ballots that they contend were unlawfully dismissed. Meanwhile Coleman is looking at his own scandal: that a friend “and benefactor tried to steer money” to Coleman.

Ever since Lindsay Lohan started dating Samantha Ronson, she’s been kind of boring. Sure, every now and then, they have some rumored lovers squabble over whether or not Lilo can touch some random manho’s peen, but for the most part she hasn’t done anything interesting in a long, long time. No “Look ma, no panties” flashes, no nip slips, no getting arrested for driving too fast and having things in your pockets, no passed out drunk pictures, no rehab bikini shots. NOTHING.

It’s a fucking desert over here. I’m dying. (ED note—When will Lourdes and Frances Bean step up and put an end to this dry spell?)

The only thing left is to take current and former pictures of Lohan and give her ‘tarded LOLCATz speak captions.