Below The Beltway

Ilya Shaprio notes this over at Cato@Liberty:
The King of Pop’s creativity allowed him and his family to make hundreds of millions of dollars, yes, but it also created thousands of jobs in the music and marketing industries and brought joy to fans around the world. Whatever his personal eccentricities — perhaps, in part, as a [...]

After her long battle with cancer, yesterday’s announcement that Farrah Fawcett had died, while said, did not come as a much of a shock.
The same cannot be said, however, for the second celebrity death that overshadowed hers:

Michael Jackson, 50, died yesterday in Los Angeles as sensationally as he lived, as famous as a human being [...]

We learned today that, after a long and apparently painful battle with cancer, Farrah Fawcett died today in California.

One beauty queen will be filling in for another on Fox & Friends later this month:
Miss California and Miss USA runner-up, Carrie Prejean, tossed around in the battle over gay marriage, will be a one-day guest host for Fox News Channel’s popular morning show Fox & Friends, Whispers learns. She will host the 6 a.m.-to-7 [...]

During the press conference yesterday where Donald Trump announced that Carrie Prejean would not lose her title as Miss California, the new heroine of social conservatives everywhere had this to say:
“I exercised my freedom of speech and I was punished for doing so,” an emotional Prejean said at a news conference. “This should not happen [...]

I had hoped to make it though the week without blogging about the faux controversy surrounding the remarks that Miss California Carrie Prejean made at Sunday’s Miss USA contest, but Wendy Sullivan makes a point that bears repeating:
Miss Prejean has as much free speech as anyone else in America. She was asked for her opinion, [...]

I really don’t need to say much, her words speak for themselves:

Here’s hoping that Jack Bauer recovers from his illness soon so that he can bitch slap her 24 character all over FBI Headquarters.
         

Dayana Mendoza, Miss Universe 2008, visited the prison at Guantanamo Bay and came back with this rather bizarre blog post:
This week, Guantanamo!!! It was an incredible experience.
We arrived in Gitmo on Friday and stared going around the town, everybody knew Crystle and I were coming so the first thing we did was attend a big [...]

Apparently Bob Barr isn’t the only American libertarian politician to fall victim to Sasha Cohen’s unique brand of comedy:
Presidential candidates will do almost anything for publicity. But Ron Paul’s appearance in Sacha Baron Cohen’s upcoming Bruno movie suggests he draws the line at making sex tapes with gay Austrian TV hosts.
In a five-minute scene, comedian [...]

James Joyner pretty much sums up how I feel about the whole Rush Limbaugh story that’s predominated the news this week:
Had Limbaugh delivered the “I hope Obama fails” line in the course of a three hour stream of consciousness monologue in the course of his daily radio show, I’d defend it, too. But he [...]