Bruno: “The worst movie that we have ever seen”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkOAdJS8L7Y

Paul Newman honored by House of Representatives, but Michael Jackson refused??

Paul Newman honored by House of Representatives but Michael Jackson is refused because “it is not necessary?”

Drudge reports on “Obama’s evil eye”

Yes folks, it’s true. They’ve got nothing.

RIP Michael Jackson: King of Pop forever

You were a multi-generational genius who brought joy to people across the world. You will be truly missed by millions. Rest in peace.

If you give a terrorist a cookie…

…he might be more cooperative. According to a recent article in Time, all it took to get one terrorist talking was a few sugar-free cookies.

The most successful interrogation of an Al-Qaeda operative by U.S. officials required no sleep deprivation, no slapping or “walling” and no waterboarding. All it took to soften up Abu Jandal, who had been closer to Osama bin Laden than any other terrorist ever captured, was a handful of sugar-free cookies

You can read the entire article here

White woman “abducted by 2 black men” lied. She was found at Disney World safe with her daughter

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22425001/vp/30978215#30978215

Here is the story

A 38 year old white mother, Bonnie Sweeten, lied to police that she and her daughter had been rear ended and abducted by two black men, then stuffed in the back of their Cadillac. The truth is the woman had withdrawn $12000 from various bank accounts, used false identification (her friend’s license) to purchase tickets to Florida and took her daughter to Disney World. The woman has been placed under arrest and is charged with with false reports and identity theft, both misdemeanors. Hopefully no black men were arrested or harassed because of the woman’s false story.

Police believe domestic issues between the woman and her husband might have been a motivator in this issue.

UPDATE:

Consuming Kids: The Commercialization of Childhood

http://www.mediaed.org/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=134

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQYKXGj2JA4

Part #1

Part #2

Above are a few video clips from the video “Consuming Kids”. It is an amazing film on how marketers and advertisers (aided by deregulation and dilution of power of the FTC in the 1980s & under Reagan) are targeting children like pedophiles. They are extremely aggressive, taking on an amoral approach to converting infants into life long loyal consumers of their products (whether it is good or bad for them). Cartoons were made for the sole purpose of selling the toys. Even schools are now taking field trips to malls and stores, and having gyms sponsored by companies like Pizza Hut or Pepsi. Marketers have done brain scans on babies to see what stimulates them the most. They’ve even followed children into the bathroom or observed how they bathe all as a part of “research” on how to target them to sell products.

This video is extremely eye opening and disturbing. Marketers are only interested in their bottom line, and their actions have contributed to many problems we now face including childhood obesity, attention deficit disorder, social anxiety/depression, teen pregnancy, etc. I have only posted two parts out of seven in this post, you can see the rest on youtube or I may follow up by posting more in an update.

Every parent should watch this video.

GOP’s racist attacks against Sotomayor

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1zGYZrxlws

Sotomayor graduated from Cardinal Spellman High School in the Bronx. She earned her A.B. from Princeton University, graduating summa cum laude in 1976. Sotomayor obtained her J.D. from Yale Law School in 1979, where she was an editor of the Yale Law Journal. Sotomayor then served as an Assistant District Attorney under prominent New York County District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, prosecuting robberies, assaults, murders, police brutality, and child pornography cases. In 1984, she entered private practice, making partner at the commercial litigation firm of Pavia & Harcourt, where she specialized in intellectual property litigation.

“Kids dying weekly in Chicago” How CNN should have covered youth deaths story

When reporting upon the tragic and brutal death of a 15 year old kid in Chicago (the latest in a trend of great violence against youth in that city), CNN did something that America must change if we are to perfect our union. They classified the death as “minority” and from the “streets”. Who cares that the kid was a minority? Does that make his tragic death any less tragic? There should be no special classification of deaths based on race, ethnicity, gender or social economic status. A 15 year old kid is a 15 year old kid, and he/she matters!

The second thing CNN did is added the word “streets”, which implies some kind of gangster/drug trafficking connection. But upon reading about the story, we learn that this youth had no criminal background, showed no sign of being affiliated with gangs, and actually was a quiet, shy, nice kid who was just leaving his girlfriends house. What is “street” about that? Regardless of whether or not the murderers were “street”, when CNN uses that word and places it beneath the image of the victim, it implies that he too had some “street” (criminal) affiliation.

CNN’s story would read much stronger if it was titled “Kids dying weekly in Chicago“. That makes the story universally accessible. Every adult has been a kid, and many adults have kids. By saying “kids”, you make the connection that that could have been your son or your brother or your cousin or you!
CNN should have also just said “Chicago” not “Chicago’s streets”, as if implying some special ghetto gangster subcategory of Chicago that can be easily stereotyped and dismissed. No this is Chicago:
Oprah’s Chicago
President Obama’s Chicago
The White Sox’s and Cubs Chicago
Michael Jordan’s Chicago
The Chicago Frank Sinatra was singing about
The Chicago that is hoping to host the Olympic Games Chicago

Yes, in this Chicago, kids are dying weekly. How can any city who hopes to host the Olympic Games, tolerate such unimaginable youth violence? At least 1 kid a week has been killed since the beginning of this year, some as young as 10.

One good thing that CNN did report was how this story would be covered if that many children had died due to the swine flu. We have to wake up America. The lives of our kids matter greatly, and this violence they face should not be tolerated! It should be exposed for the true tragedy that it is, something that should cause grief to all Americans.

Kids dying weekly in Chicago

Kids dying weekly on Chicago’s streets

CHICAGO, Illinois (CNN) — The Rev. Michael Pfleger has ordered the American flag at St. Sabina Church hung upside-down — a historic sign of distress — to symbolize the growing death toll among the city’s youngsters.
Alex Arellano was beaten, burned and shot in the head last week. He was 15.

So far this school year, 36 children and teens have been murdered — more than one a week — and Pfleger is among a chorus of weary Chicagoans who say the slayings aren’t getting the attention they deserve.

Had 36 kids died of swine flu this year, “there would be this great influx of resources that say, ‘Let’s stop this, lets deal with this,’ ” Pfleger said.

Instead, because violence is driving the epidemic, “We’re hiding it. We’re ignoring it. We’re denying the problems,” he said.

Pfleger is not the first Chicagoan to express the sentiment. In 2007, after the city recorded 31 murdered children during the school year, Arne Duncan, then-CEO of public schools, expressed similar disappointment.

Duncan, who now serves as President Obama’s secretary of education, said “all hell would break loose” if these killings took place in one of the metro area’s upscale enclaves.

“If that happened to one of Chicago’s wealthiest suburbs — and God forbid it ever did — if it was a child being shot dead every two weeks in Hinsdale or Winnetka or Barrington, do you think the status quo would remain? There’s no way it would,” he said.

Yet the problem has only worsened since Duncan publicly shared his observation. With about a month left in the school year, Chicago’s public schools have topped the number of students slain in the 2007-2008 and 2006-2007 school years — 27 and 31, respectively.

One of the most disturbing slayings came last week when the family of Alex Arellano found the 15-year-old’s body. He had been beaten, burned and shot in the head.

“It’s sad because they didn’t have to torture him that way. He never did nothing wrong, never. He was a good kid. It just gets to me. It’s crazy,” Alex’s friend Ashley Recendez said.

Indeed, police say the teen had no criminal record, no gang affiliation. His family says he was well-behaved and shy, almost fearful of strangers. They had recently taken him out of school to protect him after gang members threatened him.

He was last seen May 1, leaving his girlfriend’s house. His girlfriend told his family that several young men chased him and beat him with baseball bats. She didn’t know why.

The family found his brutalized body in an alley the next day, which at the time made Alex the 34th child slain this school year in the city, according to an unofficial tally kept by the Chicago Tribune.

“Why would they do this to a child that has nothing to do with nothing, and just, on top of that, brutally killing him?” asked Alex’s uncle Juan Tirado.

Chicago Police Superintendent Jody Weis said scuffles among youth have become more violent and a conflict that 20 years ago would have warranted a pushing or wrestling match now sometimes results in gunfire.

“There’s simply too many gangs, too many guns and too many drugs on the streets,” he said. “We’ve got a problem with some of our young people are resorting to use of weapons and violence to solve any type of conflicts they may have.”

Weis said he concurred with Duncan’s remarks from two years ago and bemoaned that society had become desensitized, almost to the point of acceptance, by the violence in some of America’s major cities.

“That is a very sad state of affairs,” he said. Video Watch how Chicago is struggling with the violence »

But not all officials are convinced the level of violence against children is unique to Chicago.

Mayor Richard Daley said the numbers appear worse in his city because the public school system considers teenagers students even after they drop out.

“The rest of America doesn’t count them. You’re a dropout forever. We don’t think they’re dropouts. They’re students,” he said.

He further said Chicago’s problems are no worse than those in any other American city.

“It’s all over, the same thing,” he said. “You go to a large city or small city, it’s all over America. It’s not unique to one community or one city.”

Despite Daley’s remarks, CNN has learned that none of the city’s 36 victims this year was a dropout.

Also, Daley’s statistics on the number of youths killed in other cities don’t appear to match reports from American cities.

Los Angeles, California, notorious for its gang problems, is larger than Chicago. It has reported only 23 child slayings this year. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is about half the size of Chicago, but it has witnessed only a ninth of the child slayings: four this school year.

In 2007, Diane Latiker, founder of the community group Kids Off the Block, began a memorial on a vacant lot in Chicago. She bought 30 landscaping stones and wrote the name of a slain school-age child on each of them.

Her hopes were that the stark sight of the memorial would shock the city into action.

Today, the memorial includes 153 stones, some for children as young as 10, and there is little indication the pace is waning, as at least two children were killed since Alex Arellano’s body was found Saturday.

“They come by here and they do this, and they come by here in cars and families come and cry,” Latiker said of the burgeoning memorial.

Asked who was failing the kids — police? schools? city officials? — she replied flatly, “We all are.”

Other community activists said they’re at a loss to find any simple explanation. In May 2007, public outrage overflowed after the death of 16-year-old Blair Holt, an honor student and aspiring songwriter.

According to various media reports, Holt was riding a city bus when a gunfight erupted between two gang members. Holt tried to shield a young girl who was in the line of fire and was fatally shot in the stomach.

His death sparked public protests, and grieving family and activists listed a host of scapegoats: lax gun laws, insufficient policing, bad parenting. But two years later, families and activists say they’re tired and discouraged by the torpid pace of change.

Lakeesha Stevens, whose son was shot as he slept in the car last year, said, “It can happen to anyone… you can be walking, you can be anywhere.”

Fortunately, Martrell Stevens survived the shooting, but kindergarten proved a lot tougher for the youngster after the bullet left him partially paralyzed.

Weis said Chicago police work tirelessly to keep the violence out of the schools, and he expressed relief that the city is “providing a safe place for our young folks to learn.”
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However, he acknowledged that the conflicts sometimes begin in the schools and are finished off-campus. The violence will continue to be a priority for Chicago police, he said.

“I can promise you the Chicago Police Department is outraged and we will continue to work these cases with high energy and a great deal of enthusiasm,” he said.