VFTB Exclusive: Breaking News! Sheen and Gaddafi agree to a job swap

VFTB Exclusive: Breaking News! Sheen and Gaddafi agree to a job swap

In recent weeks, the situation in the chaotic, volatile region of the world has turned increasingly tense.

The mood of his fractured nation has become more volatile with each passing day.  Images on TV show streets filled with shouting, angry protestors, crying out for an end to the insanity. Meanwhile the intransigent tyrant refuses to listen to the advice of his inner circle. Recently he has gone on TV making bizarre, seemingly incoherent pronouncements about how the people love him and everything is fine – causing experts around the world to speculate whether he has lost touch with reality and become completely delusional.

But enough about Glenn Beck. I’m here to talk about Charlie Sheen. Sheen, star of the #1 sitcom on television, Two and a Half Men, is the richest actor on television, receiving a weekly paycheck of $2 million per episode. Apparently these meager wages are not enough for a man of his epic stature. This past week, Sheen went on one talk show after another, insisting he deserves $3 million an episode and denying that he has any problems with drugs or alcohol  – sharing the results of his most recent drug test on live national TV on  Piers Morgan Tonight.

(more…)

2010 – The Year in Review – As seen from the Bleachers – Part I: January – June

2010 – The Year in Review – As seen from the Bleachers – Part I: January – June

As a professional journalist, it is my job to stay informed about important news stories and trends, so you don’t have to. This week, as I have done every year since this blog’s inception in 1975, I take stock in the people and events that shaped our world over the past 365 days.

[Editor’s note: For those of you following the Jewish calendar, look for my special Rosh Hashanah “You won’t believe what the Goyim world did to our people this past year” Edition, to be published at sundown on September 28, 2011, the start of the Jewish New Year. – TEJ]

Consider this my Holiday gift to you – a week late, sorry. Blame it on the Post Office. Here is the annual View from the Bleachers’ Year in Review – 2010 Edition, or as I like to call it VFTBYIR-2010E, for short.

Oh, just one thing: Pay no attention to the subtle and repeated placement of gratuitous links to previous VFTB articles scattered throughout this week’s post. My tech person told me search engines like that sort of stuff. Hope you don’t mind. Let’s get started, shall we?

January: Avatar smashes box office records as the biggest grossing movie of all time (not to be confused with Cannibal Holocaust, which gets VFTB’s vote for grossest movie of all time).  Thanks to Avatar’s amazing 3D effects and unprecedented profits, Hollywood begins unleashing a tidal wave of 3D films for 2010, including Alice in Wonderland, Toy Story 3, Rocky XXXVII and Oscar-buzz, early odds-on favorite for Best Picture, Jack Ass 3D (right).

(more…)

Breaking News: WIKILEAKS plans to release all your emails

Breaking News: WIKILEAKS plans to release all your emails

In the past week, WikiLeaks, the controversial organization that claims its goal is to keep governments honest by revealing classified documents, made news again. They announced that in the upcoming weeks, they will be releasing more than 250,000 classified U.S. diplomatic cables and internal documents – to the dismay and embarrassment of top government officials in the US and the world over.

Government leaders from Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi to Libya’s Muammar Gaddifi to Russia’s Vladimir Putin to North Korea’s Kim Jong Il have been privately ridiculed and derided as incompetent, sexually promiscuous, behaving like a thug or having amazingly bad hair. WikiLeaks’ Australian-born editor and Internet activist, Julian Assange (right) has been characterized as everything from an anarchist to a terrorist – but he has not been ridiculed for having bad hair. This reporter thinks it’s quite stylish, actually.

But this is just the tip of the WikiLeaks iceberg. Thanks to my own painstaking Pulitzer-Prize-deserving investigative journalism and my extensive network of contacts within the Latvian intelligence community, I am about to blow the lid off the latest WikiLeaks scandal. In a View from the Bleachers EXCLUSIVE, I have uncovered WikiLeaks’ secret plans to release everybody’s email communications from the past ten years – Yes, everybody’s – including yours. The reasons for this latest attempt at public humiliation are unclear. My own speculation is that WikiLeaks chief Assange is trying to get back at an ex-girlfriend. But whatever the reasons, the consequences could be potentially devastating for millions of Americans, Russians, Chinese, Indians, Europeans, Middle Easterners, and potentially as many as three Greenlanders.

(more…)

Torn about who to vote for this year

Torn about who to vote for this year

I try to be an informed voter. So this year, I researched the candidates running for political office in my region, listened to the debates, read their policy platform statements, watched their TV ads and scoured through their direct mail literature to get a clear picture of where they stand and how they differ from their opponent on the important issues facing us.

After all my research, I am still a bit uncertain as to whom to give my vote. Perhaps you can help me decide. Take the race for U.S. Senate for my state. It’s between three-term Democratic incumbent, Patty Murray, and Republican challenger / pro-business advocate, Dino Rossi.

Let’s take a look at how they stand on some of the major issues of the campaign, in their own words:

On Jobs and the Economy

 

Democratic position: The most important issue in front of us this election year, without question, is jobs. Our unemployment rate is almost 10%. While Wall Street fat cats are raking in record profits again, none of this has trickled down to the millions of unemployed workers on Main Street. My honorable opponent has no idea what it’s like to be unemployed. He has the luxury of sitting in his corporation’s penthouse office suite – a captain of industry, sipping dry martinis with his Wall Street bailout buddies. He has no idea what it’s like to be a laid-off fork lift operator or an unemployed single working mother of three. You know he didn’t buy those cuff links at Sears. Probably drives a Bentley, if you ask me.

 

Republican position: My reputable opponent and I agree on one thing – and that’s that she wants to turn this great country I love into a bloated big government, socialist bureaucracy intent on taking over every major industry and depriving your freedom to pursue the American dream. As a three-term, inside-the-Beltway bureaucrat, my opponent is completely out of touch with America’s small business people. She wants to do an extreme makeover on the USA and convert it into another Belgium. But this is America, the greatest nation on earth. I won’t let us become another Belgium, no matter how hard my distinguished opponent schemes for this to happen.

(more…)

Confessions of a Reformed Bleeding-Heart Liberal

Confessions of a Reformed Bleeding-Heart Liberal

palin vw bus

I have to get something off my chest.  This is my open confession to the world that for years, I was – and I am ashamed to admit it – a bleeding-heart liberal of the worst kind.  And for this I want to publicly apologize.  Oh, sure, my father was a staunch Richard Nixon Republican. But did I listen? Like any rebellious teen, I had to go “find my own path.” So I voted for Clinton, Gore, Kerry, and yes, even that charismatic young man who “claims” to have been born in Hawaii, Barack Obama.  The closest thing I came to voting Republican was in 1980 when I voted for the Independent, John Anderson, for President.
(more…)