Enjoy more Madonna.
1982–85: Madonna, Like a Virgin, and marriage to Sean Penn
After Madonna signed a singles deal with Sire, her debut single, “Everybody”, was released in October 1982, and the second one, “Burning Up”, in March 1983. Both became big club hits in the United States, reaching number three on Hot Dance Club Songs chart compiled by Billboard magazine.[21] After this success, she started developing her debut album, Madonna, which was primarily produced by Reggie Lucas, a Warner Bros. producer.[22] However, she was not happy with the completed tracks and disagreed with Lucas’ production techniques, so decided to seek additional help. Madonna moved in with boyfriend John “Jellybean” Benitez, asking his help for finishing the album’s production.[22] Benitez remixed most of the tracks and produced “Holiday”, which was her third single and her first global hit. The overall sound of Madonna was dissonant and in the form of upbeat synthetic disco, utilizing some of the new technology of the time, like the Linn drum machine, Moog bass and the OB-X synthesizer.[22][23] The album was released in July 1983 and peaked at number eight on the Billboard 200 six months later, in 1984. It yielded two more hit singles, “Borderline” and “Lucky Star”.[24][25]
“I was surprised by how people reacted to ‘Like a Virgin’ because when I did that song, to me, I was singing about how something made me feel a certain way—brand-new and fresh—and everyone interpreted it as ‘I don’t want to be a virgin anymore. Fuck my brains out!’ That’s not what I sang at all. ‘Like a Virgin’ was always absolutely ambiguous.”
—Madonna on the backlash for “Like a Virgin”[26][27]
Madonna’s look and style of dressing, her performances, and her music videos influenced young girls and women and her style became one of the female fashion trends of the 1980s. It was created by stylist and jewelry designer Maripol and the look consisted of lace tops, skirts over capri pants, fishnet stockings, jewelry bearing the crucifix, bracelets, and bleached hair.[28][29] Madonna achieved global recognition after the release of her second studio album, Like a Virgin, in November 1984. It topped the charts in several countries and became her first number one album on the Billboard 200.[24][30] The title track, “Like a Virgin”, topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart for six consecutive weeks.[31] It attracted the attention of organizations who complained that the song and its accompanying video promoted premarital sex and undermined family values,[32] and moralists sought to have the song and video banned.[33]
Madonna came under further fire when she performed “Like a Virgin” at the first 1984 MTV Video Music Awards (VMA) where she appeared on stage atop a giant wedding cake, wearing a wedding dress and white gloves. The performance is noted by MTV as an iconic moment in VMA history.[34] In later years, Madonna commented that she was actually terrified of the performance. The next hit was “Material Girl” promoted by the iconic video, which was a mimicry of Marilyn Monroe’s performance of the song “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” from the 1953 film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. While filming this video Madonna started dating actor Sean Penn and married him on her birthday in 1985.[35] Like a Virgin was certified diamond by the Recording Industry Association of America and sold more than 21 million copies worldwide.[36]
Madonna entered mainstream films in February 1985, beginning with a brief appearance as a club singer in Vision Quest, a romantic drama film. Its soundtrack contained two new singles, her U.S. number-one single, “Crazy for You” and “Gambler”.[37] She also appeared in the comedy Desperately Seeking Susan in March 1985, a film which introduced the song “Into the Groove”, her first number one single in the United Kingdom.[38] Although not the lead actress for the film, her profile was such that the movie widely became seen (and marketed) as a Madonna vehicle.[39] The New York Times film critic Vincent Canby named it one of the ten best films of 1985.[40] In February 1984, according to the film director Sir Richard Attenborough, Madonna auditioned at the Royale Theatre on Broadway for a dance role in his movie version of A Chorus Line using her birth-name of Ciccone, but he rejected her.[41]
Beginning in April 1985, Madonna embarked on her first concert tour in North America, The Virgin Tour, with the Beastie Boys as her opening act. She progressed from playing CBGB and the Mudd Club to playing sporting arenas. At that time she released two more hit singles from the album, “Angel” and “Dress You Up”.[42] In July, Penthouse and Playboy magazines published a number of nude photos of Madonna, taken in New York in 1978. She had posed for the photographs as she needed money at the time, and was paid as little as $25 a session.[43] The publication of the photos caused a media uproar, but Madonna remained defiant and unapologetic.”[44] The photographs were ultimately sold for up to $100,000.[43] She referred to the whole experience at the 1985 outdoor Live Aid charity concert saying that she would not take her jacket off because “[the media] might hold it against me ten years from now.”[44][45]
2008 Meltdown Was Worse Than Great Depression, Bernanke Says
4:03 pm ET Aug 26, 2014
By PEDRO NICOLACI DA COSTA
Former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, a prominent student of the Great Depression, contends that the 2008 financial crisis was actually worse than its 1930s counterpart.
Mr. Bernanke is quoted making the statement in a document filed on Aug. 22 with theU.S. Court of Federal Claims as part of a lawsuit linked to the 2008 government bailout of insurance giant American International Group Inc.AIG +0.34%
“September and October of 2008 was the worst financial crisis in global history, including the Great Depression,” Mr. Bernanke is quoted as saying in the document filed with the court. Of the 13 “most important financial institutions in the United States, 12 were at risk of failure within a period of a week or two.”
Former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is quoted in the document offering a similarly apocalyptic assessment. From Sept. 6 through Sept. 22, the economy was essentially “in free fall,” he said.
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2014/08/26/2008-meltdown-was-worse-than-great-depression-bernanke-says/
McDonnell marriage becomes focus of trial
Matt Zapotosky, reporter for The Washington Post, talks with Rachel Maddow about the corruption trial of former Virginia governor Bob McDonnell and the prosecution’s attempt to refute McDonnell’s claims about his marriage failing.
http://on.msnbc.com/1qIfGlM
I left you a video clip down thread from that “LA Law” episode. Supposedly, Bob and his wife are playing the same game.
Scott Brown pulls off a rare climate reversal
08/26/14 11:19 AM
By Steve Benen
Running for re-election in Massachusetts two years ago, then-Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) was eager to highlight issues on which he disagreed with his party. Asked in 2012 whether he believes in global warming, for example, Brown said in a debate, “Yes, yes I do. I absolutely believe that climate change is real and I believe there’s a combination between man-made and natural.”
Now, however, Brown is running in a new state, New Hampshire, where he’s adopted a new position.
During a GOP primary debate on Saturday, Brown was asked if he believed that “the theory of man-made climate change has been scientifically proven.” The former Massachusetts senator, who hopes to challenge Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), responded, “Uh, no.” […]
NextGen Climate, a group backed by billionaire financier and climate activist Tom Steyer working to elect Democrats, said Brown “can’t make up his mind about what he believes” on climate change, immigration, health care or women’s rights. “New Hampshire voters see Scott Brown for what he is: someone more interested in his own political career than in the issues that matter to Granite State voters,” said Pete Kavanaugh, the New Hampshire director for NextGen.
The criticism is well grounded, though what strikes me as the most significant angle is the direction of Brown’s reversal.
There are, to be sure, plenty of climate deniers, especially in contemporary Republican politics. There are also plenty of climate skeptics who grudgingly came to terms with reality in the face of overwhelming evidence.
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/scott-brown-pulls-rare-climate-reversal
Inequality Is Only Growing Worse
Aug 25 2014 @ 1:17pm
by Dish Staff
Drum flags new numbers that put that fact in stark relief:
[N]ew census data shows that when it comes to net worth—which is basically total wealth—the biggest change has been at the bottom. Even after taking some lumps immediately after the recession, the well-off had recovered and even made some gains by 2011. But the poor have been devastated. Their median net worth has always been pretty close to zero, but by 2011 it had plummeted to $-6,029. On average, poor families were in the hole to the tune of $6,000, an astronomical and completely debilitating number to someone with barely poverty-level earnings.
http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2014/08/25/inequality-is-only-growing-worse/
Gov. Christie Shifted Pension Cash to Wall Street, Costing New Jersey Taxpayers $3.8 Billion
By David Sirota@davidsirotad.sirota@ibtimes.com
on August 25 2014 8:16 AM
Gov. Chris Christie’s administration openly acknowledged that more New Jersey taxpayer dollars were going to land in the coffers of major financial institutions. It was 2010, and Christie had just installed a longtime private equity executive, Robert Grady, to manage the state’s pension money. Grady promoted a plan to put more of those funds into riskier investments managed by Wall Street firms. Though this would entail higher fees, Grady said the strategy would “maximize returns while appropriately managing risk.”
Four years later, New Jersey has secured only half the promised results. The state has sent more pension money to big-name Wall Street firms like Blackstone, Third Point, Omega Advisors, Elliott Associates and Grady’s old firm, The Carlyle Group. Additionally, the amount of fees the state pays financial managers has more than tripled since Christie assumed office. New Jersey is now one of America’s largest investors in hedge funds.
The “maximized returns” have yet to materialize.
Between fiscal year 2011 and 2014, the state’s pension trailed the median returns for similarly sized public pension systems throughout the country, according to data from the financial analysis firm, Wilshire Associates. That below-median performance has cost New Jersey taxpayers billions in unrealized gains and has left the pension system on shaky ground. Meanwhile, New Jersey is now paying a quarter-billion dollars in additional annual fees to Wall Street firms — many of whose employees have financially supported Republican groups backing Christie’s reelection campaign.
http://www.ibtimes.com/gov-christie-shifted-pension-cash-wall-street-costing-new-jersey-taxpayers-38-billion-1667622
Cornel West and the Insular World of the Obama-Hating Left
By Jonathan Chait
The political subculture of anti-Obama leftists has entered a phase by this point in the Obama presidency where the truth of its worldview is so well-established to its own adherents that it requires no exposition. Tom Frank, an anti-Obama leftist, interviews Cornel West, another anti-Obama leftist, in a conversation so deeply marinated in shared assumptions that, at one point, both interviewer and interviewee agree that nobody disagrees with them. Frank asks West, “Is there anybody who thinks he’s progressive enough today? West replies, “Nobody I know. Not even among the progressive liberals.” What about maybe the 61 million people who voted for Mitt Romney? Some of them may even think Obama is too progressive.
West and Frank are certainly correct about one thing: Obama does not fully subscribe to their point of view, and he never has. When he ran as a pragmatist who understood the value of the market, Obama was not lying. A world where Cornel West could govern without any constraints would look very different from a world where Obama could govern without constraints. In that one sense, the left’s mistrust of Obama has a fully rational basis.
But West, and much of the American left, doesn’t merely believe that. It also believes that a world where Obama can govern without constraints is the actual world we live in, or, at least, a reasonable approximation thereof. More inspiring speeches, harder fighting, or some other unspecified application of willpower is all it would take to have forced Olympia Snowe to vote for a larger stimulus or Scott Brown to go along with tougher financial regulation. Because they cannot conceive of any limits to Obama’s power, betrayal and haplessness are the only causes they can imagine for their distress. (West: “What I hear is that, ‘[Obama] pimped us.’ I heard that a zillion times. ‘He pimped us, brother West.’”)
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/08/cornel-west-and-the-insular-obama-hating-left.html?mid=twitter_dailyintelligencer
When Rove’s Crossroads moves sharply to the left
08/26/14 08:39 AM—UPDATED 08/26/14 08:40 AM
By Steve Benen
Last week, Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS operation launched a curious attack in Arkansas, accusing incumbent Sen. Mark Pryor (D) of being too conservative. This week, as Greg Sargent reported yesterday, Rove’s group is at it again, this time in North Carolina’s U.S. Senate race.
Now Rove’s Crossroads is back with another ad that does pretty much the same thing, this one hitting Senator Kay Hagan in North Carolina over Social Security’s retirement age. The spot, which is backed by more than $1 million, says Hagan is a “big believer” in a “controversial plan” that “raises the retirement age,” while the words “raises Social Security retirement age” flash on the screen. It also claims the plan Hagan supports “increases out-of-pocket Medicare costs.”
Yes, it appears Rove’s Crossroads is attacking Hagan for saying nice things about the Simpson Bowles debt reduction plan, which squeezes seniors by cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits.
In reality, Hagan really did say, “I am a big believer in what Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson did on their fiscal commission.” In context, the senator appears to have supported the commission’s goals, more so than its specific recommendations, but it’s not as if Crossroads simply made up the attack out of whole cloth.
But that doesn’t make it any less strange – Rove’s attack operation has basically positioned itself in this case as aggressive liberals.
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/when-roves-crossroads-moves-sharply-the-left
After all,
they invented
Shot in the BACK WHILE RESISTING ARREST
for us..
Nobody’s been able to explain that to me – EVER
but, they got away from it.
so, why not Suicide by GUNSHOT While Handcuffed BEHIND YOUR BACK
……………………………………………….
Handcuffed Black Youth Shot Himself to Death, Says Coroner
BY HANNAH RAPPLEYE
A coroner’s report obtained exclusively by NBC News directly contradicts the police version of how a 22-year-old black man died in the back seat of a Louisiana police cruiser earlier this year — but
still says the man, whose hands were cuffed behind his back, shot himself.
In a press release issued March 3, the day he died, the Louisiana State Police said Victor White III apparently shot himself in an Iberia Parish police car. According to the police statement, White had his hands cuffed behind his back when he shot himself in the back.
But according to the full final report of the Iberia Parish coroner, which was released nearly six months later and obtained exclusively by NBC News, White was shot in the front, not the back. The bullet entered his right chest and exited under his left armpit. White was left-handed, according to family members. According to the report, the forensic pathologist found gunshot residue in the wound, but not the sort of stippling that a close-range shot can sometimes produce. He also found abrasions on White’s face.
And yet, despite the contradictions – and even though White’s hands were never tested for gunpowder residue – the Iberia Parish coroner still supported the central contention of the initial police statement issued back in March. Dr. Carl Ditch ruled that White shot himself, and declared his death a suicide.
In a press release issued Monday, Dr. Ditch said that based on the findings of the pathologist and investigators, it was possible for White “due to his body habitus” to manipulate the gun to shoot
himself in the chest.
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/handcuffed-black-youth-shot-himself-death-says-coroner-n185016
Is President Obama a sociopath? The Alabama Republican state chairman is asking this
By Jim Stinson | jstinson@al.com
August 25, 2014 at 12:00 PM
BIRMINGHAM, Alabama — President Barack Obama’s golfing vacation in Martha’s Vineyard has so angered his critics, some are asking questions about the president’s commitment to his job and his sensitivity to human suffering.
Alabama’s Republican Party chairman, Bill Armistead, is among them.
In an email sent out on Monday, Armistead cited an article written by Wayne Root, one of Obama’s classmates at Columbia University, in which Root asks if Obama is a sociopath.
“I believe we have a president who is an arrogant, egomaniacal sociopath,” Root wrote, describing a sociopath as “a person with an antisocial personality disorder. They are often well liked because of their charm and high charisma, but they do not usually care about other people.”
http://www.al.com/news/index.ssf/2014/08/is_president_obama_a_sociopath.html#incart_river
Rick Perry Hires Top McCain 2008 Aide Steve Schmidt
BySAHIL KAPUR AUGUST 26, 2014, 12:16 PM EDT
Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) has hired Steve Schmidt to assist with strategy in fighting criminal charges against him for abuse of power, as first reported by Politico.
Schmidt, a longtime Republican strategist, was a senior campaign adviser and strategist in John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign.
The move is the latest in a series of high-profile hires to Perry’s legal team, which suggest that the rumored 2016 presidential hopeful is taking the indictment very seriously.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/rick-perry-hires-steve-schmidt?utm_content=bufferfe73c&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
Pew Research Poll:
46% of African Americans have “very little confidence” in police to treat black and white people equally.
Only 12% of white respondents felt the same way
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2014/08/26/poll-african-americans-see-less-harmony-with-police-and-also-with-whites/
of course the VA scandal about dying vets was a bald-faced LIE from jump, but the media ran with it any way without proof.
The soon-to-be-released inspector general’s report finds that no veterans died as a result of being on a wait-list at the VA facility in Phoenix, a Department of Veterans Affairs official tells CNN’s Jim Acosta.
The department’s Office of Inspector General confirmed to CNN that its report into excessive wait times and delays in care at the Phoenix facility will be released at 1:30 p.m. ET.
The department will have a formal response after the report is released
Alan Grayson’s Dumb Jihad Against President Obama
Spandan Chakrabarti | August 25, 2014
The reactionary Left is pissed – pissed, I tell you – that President Obama has ordered air strikes against the Islamic State in Iraq. The successes of the air strikes, most recently the beating back of ISIL from the Mosul dam notwithstanding, the “militant pacifist” movement in this country has been out for President Obama’s blood. Their leading general: the one and only self-proclaimed “Congressman with guts”, Alan Grayson, whose campaign website’s sections of issue positions have been replaced by a varitable look-how-good-I-perform-as-a-talking-head-on-TV collection of his big-screen appearances.
http://www.thepeoplesview.net/main/2014/8/25/alan-graysons-dumb-jihad-against-obama
Good morning.
Good Morning, SHO.
https://twitter.com/kerrywashington/status/504049383651172353
Kerry’s rocking the look, especially after child birth. I love the color of her dress too.
https://twitter.com/CSiriano/status/504053963550109697
https://twitter.com/EarthBeauties/status/503821679769165824/photo/1
https://twitter.com/planetepics/status/503921078822244352/photo/1
https://twitter.com/ReignOfApril/status/504069003992907777
https://twitter.com/ethiopiennesays/status/504070584293400576/photo/1
I want this gown for nex’t month’s red carpet in Beverly Hills!
https://twitter.com/TheObamaDiary/status/504051809041018881/photo/1
https://twitter.com/EW/status/504090529437859840
https://twitter.com/MLB/status/503601280187518976/photo/1
https://twitter.com/TanyaHollywood/status/504075291065876480/photo/1
President Barack Obama to unveil initiatives to help veterans in Charlotte speech
By JIM KUHNHENN
The Associated Press
Posted: Tuesday, Aug. 26, 2014
Three months after a veterans’ health care scandal rocked his administration, President Barack Obama is taking executive action to improve the mental well-being of veterans. The president was to announce his initiatives during an appearance before the American Legion National Convention that is fraught with midterm politics.
Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2014/08/26/5129749/president-barack-obama-to-unveil.html#storylink=cpy
https://twitter.com/13NewsNow/status/503886522458730497/photo/1
Good Morning, Everyone! I’m enjoying Madonna week, Ms. Rikyrah.
Good Morning, Everyone :)
Did you see this clip? Maddow did a segment on it last night. She said Bob McDonnell and his wife stole scenes from this script and are using it to get off scot free!
Basically the end where Jimmy Smitts is in the elevator with the couple charged with murder.