"New Orleans fans boo Madonna after she demands they vote for Obama."

Always one to pick up and run with a trend, she changed to: "Seriously, I don't care who you vote for.... Do not take this privilege for granted. Go vote."

Privilege? Hey, lady, this is America. It's not a privilege. It's a right.

"Madonna had the outfit ready to go. She was really proud of it and said it was her 'Terror Bride' costume."

"She had paraded around in it and said she was going to wear it in her next music video. At first when people started telling her it was madness she just brushed it off. But when they mentioned that her actions could put her life at risk she decided to ditch it from her video and certainly won't be wearing it on stage.''

(Via Instapundit.)

"If Jennifer Lopez or Madonna just showed up in a place of worship, stripped down to their skivvies and started dancing around the altar..."

"... would that fly in any Western democracy?"

"France's far-right National Front is to sue Madonna..."

"... after an image at the US singer's Paris concert showed party leader Marine Le Pen with a swastika imposed on her face."

National Front vice-president Florian Philippot said the party could not accept "such an odious comparison."

Idiots. Use the "more speech" solution or you are helping her make her point.

I'm sure she doesn't mind the publicity. Go ahead, make me a free-speech martyr.

Idiots.

"America secretly loves whipping itself up into a frenzy over this sort of thing, but it wasn't just the rightwing press expressing outrage..."

"... even Pitchfork was in on the act. 'In the few bars Madonna was kind enough to grant her during the biggest television event of the year, MIA's message to America was simply, "Fuck you"' it complained, somewhat innacurately (surely the message was 'I don't give a shit', otherwise she'd have just said 'fuck you'). It went on to conclude that: 'It wouldn't be the worst idea [for MIA] to draw as much focus as possible back on to her music.'"

Writes Tim Jonze in The Guardian, embarrassingly choosing the word "inaccurately" to spell inaccurately.

This is all so stupid. First of all, listen to the recorded song, or just read the lyrics. "I'mma say this once, yeah, I don't give a shit" is in the original song, so it's not as if MIA was going off script and inserting some spontaneous self-expression. Even though Madonna has famously sung "Express Yourself" — and even sang a bit of it during last night's big show — MIA didn't suddenly come up with an opinion and decide to spit it out to the world. And the word "shit" wasn't even vocalized. If you think you hear it, you're only hearing it in your head because it's the word that rhymes and obviously follows "I don't give a," and there was a hissing "shhhh" sound in the instrumentation that was used for a bleeping effect.

So the only issue is the giving of the finger. I remember when the America Online movie discussion forum was afire with the discussion of the finger back when "Titanic" came out and the Kate Winslet character gives the finger. Here's an old "Straight Dope" column from 1998 discussing whether it was historically accurate — or as they say in England "acurrate" — for Rose to give the finger in 1912? ("[T]he middle-finger/phallus equation goes back way before the Titanic, the Battle of Agincourt, or probably even that time Sextillus cut off Pylades with his chariot.")

Are we going to get all heated up about the finger again? Because that would be really stupid. A throwback to 1998. But what the hell. We are that stupid. We are getting all jazzed up about "Titanic" again right now:

Fans crashed multiple servers trying to secure advance tickets for the now sold-out Feb. 14 preview screenings of Hollywood's "Titanic in 3D," producers said.

You want to know my opinion? I think giving the finger is completely appropriate.

Madonna: greatest half-time show ever or...

... greatest show ever?

"What Time Does the Superbowl Start?"

= the best-ever string of words for pulling internet traffic.

Part of the strategy is the missing space. It should be: Superb Owl.

AND: Speaking of the Super Bowl, here's Madonna:



Who doesn't want to walk along the helmeted heads of football players as if they were a cobblestone street? And... where can I get wall-sconces like that (see 2:25)?

"You have a movie coming out, a fragrance, a new album and a tour—and now the Super Bowl. Was this a master plan?"

"No, everything kind of converged in a bottleneck. I was always planning on making a record when I finished my film but I ended up finishing my film much later than I had expected so, because I had already scheduled time with all the producers and writers for my record, I had to multitask and work on my record at the same time I was finishing my film. And then somehow it worked out that the record was being finished right around the time the movie was coming out. Then I got talked into doing the Super Bowl."

Madonna sounds quite smart, normal, and appealing in this interview with the Wall Street Journal.

Madonna's homeless brother.

Reason's Hit & Run takes the opportunity to attack the big pop star:

For the Material Girl, charity, apparently, does not begin at home. Born and raised in Bay City, Michigan, Madonna gave $135,600 in campaign donations to Democrats last year. And two years ago she contributed $11 million of her own money toward Raising Malawi, an elite academy she founded for impoverished girls in Malawi. The academy was abandoned this year after $3.8 million was spent without a brick ever being laid.

It's one thing to spend on a charity — and Madonna seems to have a problem getting that right — and another to hand out money to individual friends and family. What is the whole story here? What problems led to this man's downfall? I see that he was fired from a job in his father's vineyard and winery. I know, it seems so easy to punch Madonna around, but we're talking about a 50-year-old man. There's a long history to his predicament, and we don't know what it is.

Madonna should probably...
	Set up a trust to give her brother at least a modest home.
	Set up that trust, unless his past behavior was truly heinous.
	Set up that trust and give large sums to charities helping the homeless.
	Leave him in the gutter where he belongs, since that's where he is, and spend on whatever she likes.
pollcode.com free polls

"A-Rod must go!"

Says Trooper York:

A-Rod struck out with the bases loaded. He struck out to end the game. He failed miserably as he has done for most of his career. Did you see his face when he struck out with the bases loaded? He was a tight lipped tight assed mess. He froze. He choked. His disgraced the uniform. He might have Hall of Fame numbers but he is a drag on the team. As he has been since the day he got here. We would have been a lot better off without him. His bloated salary and his off the field antics have only brought trouble to the Yankees. He is a disgrace to the uniform.

IN THE COMMENTS: Maguro says:

Don't hate on ARod, the man has a painting of himself as a centaur hanging behind his bed. You gotta respect that.

He links to an article that doesn't have an image of the painting. I'm forced to do an image search. Hmmm. There's this. Or is it this?

ADDED: Here he is with Madonna.

"Strike a (Heisman) pose, there's nothing to it."

Nice post title.

This peasant doesn't realize I loathe hydrangeas....

Don't cry for me Qaddafi/Obama...

Look at what Drudge has going on right now.

First you've got the 2 leaders — Qaddafi and Obama — both frowning.



Qaddafi says "No surrender!" And Obama says — Drudge is paraphrasing — "OK, let's do it before the game." That is, he's surrendering to pressure and doing his speech before the Packers/Saints game.

Next, we get a symphony of hands: the painting behind Berlusconi (who's got a good rhyme for Italy — in English, anyway), Madonna (whose movie about the wife of a former king of England is apparently shitty), Hillary (who's happy in Paris), Margaret Thatcher (presumably in England), Venus Williams (like Thatcher, she's ill), and Cher (gripping the shoulder of her soon-to-be-dancing, former-daughter Chaz):



Now let's interpret this symphony. One clue is the link under Madonna, after the reference to "Death in Venice": "BOOK SHOCK: Evita 'kept Nazi treasure taken from Jews'...." Of course, Madonna played Evita in the movie "Evita," and if there's one thing we think about when we think about the musical "Evita," it's the hands in the air gesture that goes with the song "Don't Cry for Me Argentina."

Evita, of course, was the wife of President, and, of course, so was Hillary. Now, clearly, Drudge is picturing Hillary that way for a reason.

The hands make a graceful composition, guiding our eyes from left to right. The woman in the painting appears to hold a glowing globe in her hand. Madonna, her hand in a similar upcurved position, blows the kiss that symbolically had been place on her fingertips, and Hillary opens her arms to receive, receive, receive.

A step down, we see the elderly, elegant Thatcher reaching out, palm toward us, grasping nothing, and perhaps there is nothing left in her head as she drifts into oblivion. She is dappled with jewelry: earrings, necklace, brooch. The missing item of jewelry is a ring, and we shift our eyes slightly to right and see a ring. It's on the hand of Venus Williams, whose fingers are curved inward, grasping not a glowing globe, but a neon-colored ball. Venus is sick! She has Sjögren's syndrome. Take one more step and it's Cher, her fingers delicately curved over the shoulder of the offspring she's fiercely defending with Tweets.

Madonna breaks up with her 24-year-old boyfriend because they fought about...

... religion.

Judas, the guy on the motorcycle wearing a crown of thorns.

"I fell in love with Judas," sings Lady Gaga.

Because, you know, the girl always falls for the bad boy.

And Lady Gaga always tries to out-Madonna Madonna.

BONUS: Lady Gaga and Yoko Ono.

Are you excited about the new Lady Gaga single or did you feel compelled to hit pause and start singing Madonna's "Express Yourself"?

You can listen to Lady Gaga's "Born This Way" here. And here's Madonna over at YouTube, where there are lots of new comments about "Born This Way."

Gaga is singing about self-affirmation in this form:

Rejoice and love yourself today
'Cause baby you were Born This Way

No matter gay, straight, or bi,
Lesbian, transgendered life
I'm on the right track baby
I was born to survive

Madonna's "Express Yourself" had you expressing yourself and demanding that your man express himself:

What you need is a big strong hand
To lift you to your higher ground
Make you feel like a queen on a throne
Make him love you till you can't come down

"[T]he worst pop song designed to reflect a profound moral conscience. I.e. the smuggest, most pretentious pop song in history."

Andrew Sullivan sets up a poll for what he (a bit inaptly) calls the "Shut Up and Sing" award. You can't really shut up and sing. He's just looking for bad lyrics of a particular sort.

I only know 4 of the 10 songs on his list, and they don't really bother me. I mean, it's fun to knock Sting, but other than that, who cares what Madonna was actually saying in "American Life"? And if Stevie Wonder wants to sing with Paul McCartney about racial harmony using a piano keyboard metaphor, that's too sweet to get upset about. As for "Okie From Muskogee," that song has aged fabulously well. I was around in the 1960s when we hippies loved hating Merle Haggard for the things he said in that song, but it's nuts to take it the way we did back then:

"Okie From Muskogee," 1969's apparent political statement, was actually written as an abjectly humorous character portrait. Haggard called the song a "documentation of the uneducated that lived in America at the time."... "I wrote it when I recently got out of the joint. I knew what it was like to lose my freedom, and I was getting really mad at these protesters. They didn't know anything more about the war in Vietnam than I did. I thought how my dad, who was from Oklahoma, would have felt. I felt I knew how those boys fighting in Vietnam felt."

That text is from Wikipedia. "Abjectly humorous character portrait"? Somebody doesn't know the meaning of "abjectly." But I'm inclined to say that Andrew Sullivan is abjectly humorless... at least when it comes to marijuana....

"We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee..."



Smug? Pretentious? Absurd!

You know what deserves to win the award Sullivan defines. It's damned obvious and it's not on the list. Imagine all the peeepull....

Really, this award is no fun if you take shots at lightweights like The Partridge Family and the New Kids on the Block — as Sullivan does. Get the guys who've been taken seriously, like Bob Dylan. ("He that gets hurt will be he who has stalled...") Pick a worthy target or... as they say... shut up.

Camille Paglia relives her burst into our consciousness in 1990 with her NYT op-ed about Madonna.

The anti-sex feminists are all gone, she says: "And I'm still here." And so is Madonna.

"Living in her gilded cage all these years, Madonna, once a frequenter of dirty Manhattan bars, clubs, and pizza joints, has lost touch with the Real New York...."

And then she encountered our Palladian!

If only he had stuck around. He might have heard a whispered "Thank you."

Ha ha ha ha.

"I yelled at Madonna today, and I didn't even realize it until later!"

So Madonna is filming this movie in Brooklyn... and our longtime commenter Palladian has an encounter:

I yelled at Madonna today, and I didn't even realize it until later!

She's apparently directing a film (!) and was shooting right in front of my house in Brooklyn on Wednesday. I came outside to do my morning walk and there were crowds of people all over the place: screaming black girls, curious Chassidim, hipsters in Ray-Bans feigning disinterest, irritated cops... I saw a bunch of Arri equipment boxes and realized it was a film shoot of some sort. I walked a few feet down my block and a chick with a headset held up her arm and said "You have to cross the street, sir!" I replied: "I don't have to do anything. This is my neighborhood, and a public sidewalk, and I'll go where I please!"

I walked a few more feet and another drone with a headset came rushing up to me and said "The sidewalk's closed. Please cross the street!" I replied: "This is a public sidewalk. I will continue to walk where I please."

I pushed past him and a I came upon a haggard woman in sunglasses, a baseball cap and a scarf printed with a stylized skull pattern holding a clipboard and looking into a hand-held monitor along with a couple of other people. Being a veteran of the terrible world of film production, I recognized that this woman was probably the director. I paused as I passed and said to her: "You need to inform your brain-dead P.A.s that they need to treat us residents a little better, honey." She looked at me, expressionless behind her sunglasses for a moment before one of the men with her said "Move along, sir." I replied "a hearty fuck you to both of you" and I walked onward.

Later, when I was on my way home, I stopped in the local market and the Korean guy who runs the place said to me: "what do you think of that mess out there?" I told him of my encounter with the production assistants and the director. He laughed and said: "do you know who that director is? Madonna!"

I smiled and said "No, I didn't recognize her.. but she looks like hell and sure runs a shitty location shoot."