Palestinian hip-hop trio DAM, above, wield the power of hip-hop as a force against the Israeli occupation of their homeland—the world’s longest—and their minds as well.
Formed in 1998 by brothers Suhell and Tamer Nafar, center and right (friend Mahmoud Jreri, left, was added later), they initially sought to make party records that would earn them cool points with peers and the ladies. Then it was still “just for fun,” says Tamer. They completed a six-track EP titled Stop Selling Drugs, the first time any Palestinian had ever recorded rap music.
Is it me, or does former Presidential candidate John Edwards’ paramour, Rielle Hunter, above, give off a certain, I dunno, trashy, ‘coon-eatin’ vibe in her decidedly un-erotic pictures for Gentleman’s Quarterly?
According to Barbara Walters, on today’s The View, Hunter called the doyenne aghast and in tears over her own photos. (This despite footage released by the artist, Mark Seliger, showing Hunter enjoying the shoot and the images.)
Yet, says HuffPo humorist Andy Borowitz, that’s not the worst of it, and far more extreme responses to Hunter’s pics have been widely noted:
NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report) – In a move that many in the magazine world called unprecedented, GQ today recalled the entire print run of its new issue after a photo spread featuring John Edwards mistress Rielle Hunter was found to cause nausea and in some cases projectile vomiting.
“We at GQ want our readers to know that we are doing everything in our power to avert a public health catastrophe,” said magazine spokesperson Carol Foyler. “And if that means tracking down every last copy of those Rielle Hunter pictures [right] and destroying them, that’s what we’re going to do.”
As emergency rooms across the country overflowed with people who had unwittingly opened the latest GQ and seen the Hunter photos, fresh concerns were raised over the existence of a John Edwards-Rielle Hunter sex tape.
Rand Deckle, press spokesman for the National Institutes of Health, issued this statement on the matter: “Given the health crisis that the Rielle Hunter photos have created, it is imperative that every copy of that sex tape be secured and buried in the center of the Earth.”
I’m tellin’ you that they…wait…no…Bobby!! Put DOWN that DVD!! DO NOT PRESS “PLAY”!!!!!
Hundreds of comments were posted on Michaele Salahi’s Facebook page, after the socialite and her husband, Tareq, not only crashed the Obama administration’s first White House state dinner last Tuesday night, but cravenly posted photos documenting their breach.
Of all those FB responses to this outrage, here’s my absolute favorite:
OBAMA: Good evening! Hey: How d’ya like my rundown, ghetto security? Man, I’ve been to rap concerts that were harder to get into…. SALAHI: We like it more than you presently imagine, Mr. President.…
Not bad for not having been invited: In the above photo, released yesterday by the White House, Michaele Salahi, center, and her husband, Tareq, right, are seen meet-n-greeting the leader of the free world, having done nothing but show up.
Oh, bonus: Look who’s next to the president, as is appropriate, given protocol: The guest of honor, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh!
Wow. So, you mean if I, say, support Pakistan’s goal of redrawn borders in Kashmir, all I need do to get close enough to killmy opposition—the leader of the similarly nuclear-armed nation it borders—is put on a tux, go to the White House, and, like Jay-Z suggested, bring a blonde?
Well, this might offend my political connects, but somebody call Islamabad after I stick a fork in him: He’s done!
Amazing. I don’t know if we should throw these two losers in jail for red-teaming the U.S. government, or give them Nobel Peace Prizes for helping avoid World War III.
was inspired by Jon Ronson’s non-fiction bestseller of the same name, an eye-opening and often hilarious exploration of the government’s attempts to harness paranormal abilities to combat its enemies.
The flick stars George Clooney, Jeff Bridges, Ewan McGregor, and Kevin Spacey, all somberly coin-profiled on the poster. But besides the dry humor of the Illuminati-ish background graphics—and the trailer, below—what I dig most are the image’s soothing ochre tones, the full credit for “Goat,” and that hair on his chinny-chin-chin. The Men Who Stare At Goats original one-sheet, 27 in. by 41 in., rolled, single-sided, $18, Movieposter.com.
That was my response Friday when a friend tweeted me with news that President Barack Obama had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Unguarded as my words were, though, similar sentiments would soon reverberate across the land as incredulous newswatchers wondered the same question aloud. Like him or not, what exactly had Obama done during his first eight months in office to deserve what is, arguably, our species’s highest honor for reconciliation?
TIME.com writer David Von Drehle remains one of the incredulous, apparently. As he ponders next year’s Nobel, and the list of presumably more deserving recipients, the journalist has reached an odd, yet captivating, conclusion:
If the Nobel Committee ever wants to honor the force that has done the most over the past 60 years to end industrial-scale war, its members will award a Peace Prize to the bomb.
Von Drehle is not kidding in the least. In his adroitly titled, “Want Peace? Give a Nuke the Nobel,” he argues
that industrial killing was practiced by many nations in the old world without nuclear weapons. Soldiers were gassed and machine-gunned by the hundreds of thousands in the trenches of World War I, [right] when Hitler was just another corporal in the Kaiser’s army. By World War II, countries on both sides of the war used airplanes and artillery to rain death on battlefields as well as cities, until the number killed around the world was so huge that the best estimates of the total number lost diverge by some 16 million souls. The dead numbered 62 million or 78 million — somewhere in there.
So when last we saw a world without nuclear weapons, human beings were killing one another with such feverish efficiency that they couldn’t keep track of the victims to the nearest 15 million. Over three decades of industrialized war, the planet averaged about 3 million dead per year. Why did that stop happening?
It did, Von Drehle says, for one reason: Thanks to nuclear weapons,
Major powers find ways to get along because the cost of armed conflict between them has become unthinkably high.
Is Von Drehle right? It’s an old argument, that the power of the nuke is not explosive, but aversive; that no one really wants to see one go off. And although there’s exactly zero chance the Norwegians will give a Peace Prize to the Peacekeeper, the notion has got to have the inventor of dynamite—Alfred Nobel—cracking up in his grave.
After disrespectfully yelling out “You lie!” to the President of the United States, in the middle of Obama’s address to Congress last night, Republican South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson, above, quickly received the contempt of the body’s fellow members, on both sides of the aisle. (“Stand with me against liberal attacks: Today I need your help more than ever before,” he urged from his home page on Twitter, shamelessly plugging for money.)
Wilson may actually do all right in that department because, according to TwitterCounter.com, as of today, he also has more than 6,000 new followers on the popular social networking site.
OBAMA: Good evening! Hey: How d’ya like 
that industrial killing was practiced by many nations in the old world without nuclear weapons. Soldiers were gassed and machine-gunned by the hundreds of thousands in the trenches of World War I, [right] when Hitler was just another corporal in the Kaiser’s army. By World War II, countries on both sides of the war used airplanes and artillery to rain death on battlefields as well as cities, until the number killed around the world was so huge that the best estimates of the total number lost diverge by some 16 million souls. The dead numbered 62 million or 78 million — somewhere in there.
