What’s with Sir Elton John performing for the, ahem, fourth (traditional) wedding of flaming asshole and noted homophobe, Rush Limbaugh?!?! And not only that fat piece of shit, but Karl Rove and Sean Hannity as well? Isn’t something very, very odd about this situation? Sir Elton has not—so far at least—made any statements regarding why an outspoken—and of course, notably flamboyant—gay man would sing for such a vile occasion, but I hope the answer is that he simply wanted to bleed Rush Limbaugh of a million bucks to donate to anti-Prop 8 and gay rights activists across the country. (I recall reading once the John donated all of the money he made from performing (or was it royalties?) to the Elton John AIDS Foundation which has raised $220 million dollars since 1992, so maybe it’ll go there).

I really don’t want to believe that Elton John would demean himself to perform for fucking Rush Limbaugh for a mere payday—if it was that idiot Sting singing for Kim Il Jong, I’d have no trouble believing that—but if he’s donating it to charity, then I can understand it.

As for Limbaugh, well, fuck that asshole. As for his new bride, Eva Braun Kate Rogers, with any luck, good ol’ Rushbo will drop dead before she’s 40 or 45 and she’ll still have plenty of time left to spend all of that lovely blood money of his. Ka-ching! (The News Corp wire report about the wedding quotes the new bride as saying of the couple’s 26-year age gap: “I’m sometimes not able to relate to the average person my age.” Memo to Kate: No one believes a word of it, doll…)
 

Kate Rogers, left,and her big fat idiotic payday.
 

 
Although it’s fairly obvious why someone would say hypnotist and mass “faith healer” Anatoly Kashpirovsky is Russia’s “new” Rasputin, calling him Russia’s Uri Geller or even Russia’s Benny Hinn, seems like a better fit. Kashpirovsky, a controversial—and very famous—television “remote healer” was all the rage when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, but the psychic left Russia 15 years ago to “treat” Russian ex-pats in the US (see what I mean about him being a Russian Benny Hinn?). Now he’s back on television in Russia and opinion is no less contentious. From a fascinating article in the Guardian by Moscow-based journalist Marc Bennetts:

Clad entirely in black, his piercing eyes staring into apartments across the vast territory of the USSR, Kashpirovsky “treated” millions, his voice both reassuring and oddly threatening.

“For those of you with high blood pressure, your blood pressure will lower… whoever has hip injuries, they will heal…” he droned, his litany of the suffering and the saved a potent lullaby that plunged the nation into a communal trance.

Who cared if the country was collapsing around them, if the shops were almost empty, and the threat of separatist violence in the Caucasus was moving ever closer? The USSR turned on, tuned in and switched off.

“The streets would empty whenever Kashpirovsky came on,” journalist Katya Murzina tells me. “I was just a kid, but I remember we all talked about his shows at school. Everyone was convinced he really could heal the nation.

“We had never seen anything like this on TV before,” she goes on. “You have to remember, there were basically no adverts on Soviet TV. Everything was taken at face value. So if state TV presented him as possessing these incredible powers, most people believed it.”

I suppose that would explain why anyone would be convinced of Kashpirovsky’s “talents: after watching something as silly as this:
 

 
Faith healer Anatoly Kashpirovsky: Russia’s new Rasputin (Guardian)

Thank you Chris Campion of Berlin, Germany!

 
The following was posted on Wonkette and I am reposting it here in full because I don’t think they’d mind and I sure couldn’t say it any better. As an American I am horrified by this. Please post this story on your Facebook and Twitter and get it out there:

Hard to find even the Gallows Humor in this story, so maybe we won’t even try. Maybe it’s time to admit that large chunks of America are in the hands of unreconstructed racists and vulgar idiots, and that the popular election of a black man as president just might’ve pushed these furious, economically doomed old white people into a final rage that is going to end very, very badly. Ready? Here you go: An Arizona elementary school mural featuring the faces of kids who attend the school has been the subject of constant daytime drive-by racist screaming, from adults, as well as a radio talk-show campaign (by an actual city councilman, who has an AM talk-radio show) to remove the black student’s face from the mural, and now the school principal has ordered the faces of the Latino and Black students pictured on the school wall to be repainted as light-skinned children.

This is America, in 2010, and there’s a dozen more states and endless white-trash municipalities ready to Officially Adopt this same Official Racist Insanity.

From the Arizona Republic:

A group of artists has been asked to lighten the faces of children depicted in a giant public mural at a Prescott school. The project’s leader says he was ordered to lighten the skin tone after complaints about the children’s ethnicity….

R.E. Wall, director of Prescott’s Downtown Mural Project, said he and other artists were subjected to slurs from motorists as they worked on the painting at one of the town’s most prominent intersections.

“We consistently, for two months, had people shouting racial slander from their cars,” Wall said. “We had children painting with us, and here come these yells of (epithet for Blacks) and (epithet for Hispanics).”

The children depicted on the mural, as we mentioned before but feel compelled to repeat, are little kids who go to the school — “a K-5 school with 380 students and the highest ethnic mix of any school in Prescott. Wall said thousands of town residents volunteered or donated to the project.”

And these children, for the past several months as this happy mural encouraging “green transportation” was being painted by local artists, have been treated to the city of Prescott’s finest citizens driving by and yelling “Nigger” and “Spic” at this school wall painted with pictures of the children who attend the school. And this has been encouraged by a city councilman, Steve Blair, who uses his local radio talk show to rile up these people and demand the mural be destroyed.

And now the faces are being painted white, “because of the controversy.”

Remember where you were, when you could still laugh about teabaggers and racists and Arizonans, because funny time is almost over. If the unemployment keeps up — one in five adult white males has no job and will never have a job again — and people keep walking away from their stucco heaps they can’t afford and the states and cities and counties and towns keep passing their aggressive racist laws to rile up the trash even more, shit’s going to very soon become very bad, and whether it’s the National Guard having wars in the Sunbelt Exurbs against armies of crazy old white people who are finally using their hundreds of millions of guns, or whole Latino neighborhoods burned to the ground the way the Klan used to burn down black neighborhoods a century ago, we are in for a long dark night and no light-colored paint is going to fix that.

Postscript: So that asswipe Steve Blair got fired from the radio station. Blair emphasized in his statement that “I’m not a racist by any stretch of the imagination, but whenever people start talking about diversity, it’s a word I can’t stand.” What a fucking idiot.

 
Sad to hear that Richard Dunn, the befuddled senior citizen from the cast of Tim and Eric Awesome Show—great job! passed away at 7:14 a.m. on June 4, 2010.

It’s nearly impossible to pick a favorite Pep Pep moment, but this clip, of Dunn and Jane’s Addiction’s Dave Navarro is mine:
 

Via Xeni Jardin/Eric Wareheim on Twitter.

(via Nerdcore)

 
A mixed martial arts fighter has been arraigned on charges of ripping his close friends heart out after drinking psychedelic mushroom tea in Northern California. According to the Contra Costa TImes, the victim and the suspect, according to the testimony, became preoccupied with the idea that a tidal wave was coming, that the end of the world was upon them and that a struggle between God and the devil was taking place.

Not to make light in any way of such a grisly, horrific crime, but it seems to me that his fellow was gripped in equal amounts by paranoiac delusions brought on by psilocybin mushrooms, as he was by religious superstition… and yet religion is still legal:

Under questioning by Del Norte County District Mike Riese, Sgt. Elwood Lee said he was dispatched to Requa on March 21 to meet a man who had reported a stabbing nearby. Lee met the man, later identified as Justin Davis, who took them to the Fizer Road house in question. When Lee entered the house, he noticed what he believed to be dried blood on some cabinets in the entryway, and broken glass on the floor. Drywall had been discovered on a wall, Lee said. He heard someone mumbling in the living room, and saw a foot sticking out from a couch. Lee testified that he saw a man, later identified as Wyatt, standing near a body on a couch, naked and covered from head to toe in what appeared to be dried blood. Wyatt said,”I killed him,” Lee said.

Lee was able to cuff Wyatt without incident, and then he proceeded to look at the body on the couch. The body had had the majority of its face removed, and an 18-inch incision in its chest cavity. Lee said that he did not attempt first aid because he could see the man was dead.
”At one point,” Lee said, “(Wyatt) asked if we were God, or if we were God coming to save him.”

Lee said that Wyatt said he’d cut out Powell’s tongue, and that he’d removed his heart. He also mentioned that there had been a “big fight” in the kitchen. Wyatt told him that when he’d looked at Powell’s face he’d seen the devil, Lee said.

 
Mixed martial arts fighter Wyatt faces murder charge in Northern California (Contra Costa Times)

Thank you Paul Gallagher!

 
You have to love the fact that a joke political party in Iceland, started six months ago by a comedian, won the most seats during a local election The party, know simply as “the Best” won local elections in the Icelandic capital, Reykjavik, scoring 34.7% of the vote and securing 6 of 15 seats of the city council. The campaign video featured members of the party, including founder Jon Gnarr—now the city’s mayor—singing Tina Turner’s “The Best” (what else?)

From BBC News:

Key pledges included “sustainable transparency”, free towels at all swimming pools and a new polar bear for the city zoo.

The party also called for a Disneyland at the airport and a “drug-free parliament” by 2020.

As well as specific pledges, its video promised change, a “bright future” and suggested that it was time for a “clean out.”

Clearly Icelanders, who have seen their entire economy collapse, get the joke!

 
It felt like the 80’s died last year with the passing of both Michael Jackson and John Hughes.  Losing Gary Coleman pretty much seals the deal for me, as Diff’rent Strokes was THE show as a kid.  Check out this classic episode up above condensed down to five minutes courtesy of the Minisode Network.

 
Yep, starve…to death.  A 41-year-old taxi driver and his wife were sentenced to 2 years in prison for choosing to play 10 hours a day at internet cafes rather than bottle feed their newborn daughter more than once a day.  And, for tragic irony, the couple’s game of choice, Prius, was one where they “played” raising a virtual baby. 

Court affidavits also stated that the girl, who was born premature and weighed 5 pounds, was fed rotten formula and, when she cried out of hunger, was beaten by her parents.  What did the couple name their newborn?  The Korean equivalent of “love.”  Oh, and, FYI: the mother received a lesser sentence because she’s currently pregnant with baby number two.  Some pre-sentencing video follows below:

 
South Korean Couple Let Baby Starve To Death

 
Conservative activist—and Tea Partier—Pamela Geller runs an organization called Stop Islamization of America (and in a fun bit of synchronicity today, Google her name and the first site that pops up is AtlasShrugs).

When she’s not working to prevent a mosque from going up at Ground Zero (watch her with Mike Huckabee below), Geller’s busy backing Refuge From Islam, a website designed to, in her words, “provide resources for Muslims who are fearful of leaving the faith.”

Well, what better place to promote a potentially volatile idea like that than the side of a New York City bus?!  The above “Leaving Islam?” ads are currently running on 30 MTA buses in all five of NYC’s boroughs.

While Geller asserts they’re “not meant to be offensive to Muslims,” and are more about “religious freedom,” Eugene Volokh, an expert of constitutional law at UCLA, thinks they “could leave some Muslims reluctant to ride the bus, and “there could also be a risk that some extremist groups might bomb the buses, although that possibility wouldn’t limit,” the free speech right that Geller’s exercising.

 
Controversial ads that help Muslims abandon Islam appear on NYC buses