What is a multi-millionaire Grammy winning artist and respected celebrity to do? Barbra Streisand is supposed to attend the Kennedy Center Awards Ceremony that will honor Yentl along with celebrities Morgan Freeman, Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey, but the DC event comes with a catch: she will have to meet and play nice with the prez. And no one (celebrity-wise) hates the Bush klan more than Babs, except for maybe bloated advocate Tim Robbins Michael Moore.
Remember, this is the same big-nosed vocalist who frequently stopped during her "comeback" tour to bash George W. via sketch comedy(?). Whatever.
Kennedy Center is already planning the damage control, saying, "Typically, the honorees go to the White House and see the president, and that's something that's been happening for years regardless of personal politics. It's all pretty standard."
Yep, pretty standard stuff. Just make sure to frisk our lady of the People to make sure she's not packing heat. Don't worry Babs, one more month and he's out of there! Just grit your teeth and bear it.
Wanna know how record producer/cocaine smuggler John Forté got a presidential pardon, while his fellow prisoners must continue to languish in a Fort Dix, New Jersey, prison? Favors! Such huge favors from a labor-hating Mormon who wouldn't give a shit about Forté if he weren't friends with wealthy, famous white people like Carly Simon.
Here's the story:
In some completely WTF? news, President Bush yesterday commuted the 14-year prison sentence of former Fugee associate John Forté. Forté has been in jail since 2000, when he was arrested at a New Jersey airport in possession of $1.4 million worth of liquid cocaine.
Hey listen, no one said George Bush couldn't relate to a little nose candy related whoops. Although pretty sure that liquid cocaine is an energy drink, not a drug.
So even though he probably won't be getting that pardon from George W. Bush, investment fraud-er and international con man Conrad Black is okay with being in prison. He hasn't had "unpleasantness" with anyone, and has spent his time in the slammer teaching other inmates how to launder money read (that's the first step!).
But despite being locked up in an American courthouse and watching the country's quick decline into financial ruin, Black has no schadenfreude towards the nation that currently punishes him.
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Irascible Brit Conrad Black is just one of the many jailbirds hoping to receive some clemency from an on-his-way-out George Bush.
Black used to be the third biggest newspaper baron in the world, with affiliations to The Daily Telegraph and Chicago Sun Times. Of course, that was before he defrauded all his shareholders at Hollinger Inc. and was convicted on several counts of mail and wire fraud. Whoops, someone get this man out of FAIL jail and give him a last-minute position on Bush's cabinet.
Although, ironically, even Black thought that John McCain's economic plan was a bunch of horeshit.
Look at how much the rest of the world leaders at the G20 Summit don't like our world leader. Nobody will shake his bloody, bloody hands. He's like the sad nerd at school. Won't it be great when everyone doesn't completely ignore the man we've put in charge?
Video after the jump.
Earlier today we did a point/counterpoint on whether politics will ever be funny again now that Barack CRAMAZING Obama is in the White House. What, you don't think anyone made fun of George Washington's teeth? There's always something, people.
On the other hand, it's going to be hard to top the last eight years in terms of shooting fish in a comedy sized barrel. Stereohyped/Mollygood editor Cord Jefferson now gives us his take on the world of political ha-ha's:
Here we go again.
In the San Francisco Chronicle today, yet another stupid article about how it's hard for comedians to make fun of Barack Obama. This one with stats:
Point: It's inevitable that after Bush is gone, the late night hosts will be at a loss for a new target. There is just no one in the public eye with such a position of authority that can ever beat George W. for incompetence jokes. And as much as much as we've paid lip service to the idea that The Daily Show and Colbert Report can continue on due to the cleverness of its writing, there is definitely, 100%, no doubt that there will be a dearth in material that was once evident all around us.
If only because it is harder to make fun of hope than it is of crippling fear of our future. Says one writer from the satirical Onion:
"For me, comedy is essentially about personal horror, and transforming that horror into something people can laugh at." Hanson went on, "People always say, 'You should do a book.'"
And now, for the comedic good news:
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Arizona State University is a place where scantily clad women can suddenly appear and convince two cadres of frat guys to star in a porno. So it wouldn't be surprising if the little in-joke hand sign among ASU students was "The Shocker." Alas, despite appearances, the gesture Arizona State fans throw in support of their Sun Devils is the "pitchfork," which distinguishes itself from its vulgar cousin with the separation of the index and middle fingers.
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Superman. Batman. Barack Obama. Our nation's 44th president is a geek, says Matthew Yglesias, because he is a huge comic book nerd. Of course, when Yglesias says "geek" he means it as a compliment, because obviously Obama is just like James Bond or something, so the fact that he reads Spiderman comics doesn't make him a loser, it's just one more of his awesome quirks, like listening to Lil' Wayne or being black.
So I thought, what are some other "fun factoids" about presidents that reveal unnecessary information used to prove that our country's leaders are just like us?
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AP Style Guide Comes Out with New Election Based Issue — which I promptly plan on forgetting. Sorry, Grammar Nazi(s). But now we have to refer to certain heads of state by their full name, like President Nicolas Sarkozy, and President George W. Bush, and President-Elect Barack Obama. But not Barack Hussein Obama, because then it will remind everyone that we elected a Muslim terrorist as our president and style guides are no longer relevant in our new world order. Can't wait!
So while the rest of us plebes idled in our taxis on the West Side Highway yesterday, wondering whatthefuck the hold up was: George W. Bush, our great and powerful leader (for now) was in town at the Intrepid, honoring soldiers and anyone who got their hands on a sailor outfit during Fleet Week. Said W., "The truth of the matter is, I will miss being the commander-in-chief of such a fabulous group of men and women, those who wear the uniform of the United States military," because Bush still doesn't know the appropriate adjectives to commemorate important events.
Meanwhile, over at the Regency Hotel, a little birdie informed us that Mayor Bloomberg was having a pow-wow with a higher up from Israel, maybe something to do with those bank cuts Mike's paper reported on yesterday, or their standoff with Hamas at the Gaza strip, perhaps?
Guess who else was at the Regency? Emma Roberts of Nancy Drew fame, but more importantly daughter of Eric Roberts. She was there filming a promo for her upcoming Hotel for Dogs (exciting!).
To our surprise and delight, there are consequences for carving great chunks out of the world's progress.
As you'll remember, some great news out of last week is that no publishing company is interested in paying good legal tender for stinky ol' George W Bush's memoirs, a sale that's been a foregone conclusion for most other modern ex-Presidents. Today, more great news: President Bush is being both ostracized AND emasculated by book publishers, as his wife, Laura, is reportedly fielding all kinds of multimillion dollar offers for her memoirs.
For all the comparison's he would like to make about himself and Harry Truman (who left the White House with a high disapproval rating but history later proved him to be jawesome), George Bush has managed to outshine his predecessors in at least one respect: he's beaten every other president in history with how much he's hated.
No other President's disapproval rating has gone higher than 70 percent," said CNN pollster Keating Holland. "Bush has managed to do that three times so far this year." Including his current highest-ever rating of 76%.
Harry Truman left with a 67% rating, and Nixon, post-Watergate, only had a 66%.
The Obama family has already been given delightfully awesome nicknames, and by "nicknames" I mean code terms the Secret Service uses to refer to members of the family, although since this shit is already leaked on the Internet it's not so much a "code" now and just more of an "awesome nickname," so my original point stands.
Anyway, all the Obamas have names now beginning with the letter R, and they are way better than those of the Clinton family, who were referred to as Eagle (Bill) and Evergreen (Hillary), or the Bush family which was Tumbler (George W.), Tempo (Laura) and Sheepskin (George Sr.).
If you guys ever want to use your ham radios to listen in to your Secret Service station, get ready for President-Elect Renegade.
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For all the jokes about President Bush being borderline retarded that have been made in the last eight years, you would think that the man would leave well enough alone once he left the White House and stopped being the world's chief source of ridicule.
But no. Our 43rd commander-in-chief wants to publish his memoirs as soon as he gets out of office, despite the fact that no one is buying books in this bad economy, and no one wants to buy a book written by the guy who gave us this bad economy. So that's a double neg.
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Nobody here is going to deny that George W. Bush royally fucked up the White House and the last eight years of American politics. But you can't blame him for everything: if you are a premature ejaculator, it's not because you are busy worrying about those prisoners over at Guantanamo.
But Wallace Shawn, famed playwright, actor, and writer, who will forever be known as the midget from The Princess Bride, feels totally comfortable pinning the demise of his love life on the 43rd president:
"Bush has openly mocked law and proclaimed a certain pleasure in sadism and exulted in holding prisoners and mistreating and torturing them, really. Of course this affects one emotionally: my emotional life has been very strongly affected by the fact that Bush was president and my writing life is affected by my emotional life."
Shawn's longtime partner is writer Deborah Eisenberg.
The View was awesome yet again this morning, thanks partly to Elisabeth waking up on the wrong side of the bed and also because of Whoopi's absence. Poor Barbara Walters had to mediate between Joy and Elisabeth, which was ineffective and led to one of the more intense shouting matches we've seen as of late:
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Let's place our bets now, what will be the biggest tension-builder on Saturday Night Live tomorrow? Will it be Josh Brolin hosting to promote his George Bush-slamming W. movie (which he's already slated to do an impression of during the show) while Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin cameos on the same episode? Or will it be Andy Samberg getting punched in the face by a disgruntled Mark Wahlberg?
We guess the former: Wahlberg would never sully his "good name" by appearing on such an uncouth program as SNL *McCain eye-roll*.
Will Ferrell revives his George Bush impression for his Broadway debut, "You're Welcome America. A Final Night With George W Bush." The show will be directed by Adam McKay, the co-founder of Ferrell's Funny or Die website (and also the other guy in the famous Landlord sketch for the site).
We'd say his biting off Josh Brolin's commander-in-chief style so soon after W. is a little tacky, but technically Ferrell did it first, during his run on Saturday Night Live. After the jump, one of the curly-haired comedy man's funnier impression of our current president:
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