Oscar de la Renta Embarrasses First Lady Laura Bush

Oscar de la Renta whines about First Lady Michelle Obama's stunning British-designed Alexander McQueen dress that she wore to the State Dinner, "Why do you wear European clothes?"

According to the Huffington Post, Oscar de le Renta told WWD, "My understanding is that the visit was to promote American-Chinese trade -- American products in China and Chinese products in America. Why do you wear European clothes?" adding, "I'm not talking about my clothes, my business. I'm old, and I don't need it. But there are a lot of young people, very talented people here who do."

De la Renta made similar comments in April 2009, right after the first lady visited London. He told WWD at the time:

"American fashion right now is struggling. I think I understand what [Obama and her advisers] are doing, but I don't think that is the right message at this particular point....I don't object to the fact that Mrs. Obama is wearing J. Crew to whatever because the diversity of America is what makes this country great. But there are a lot of great designers out there. I think it's wrong to go in one direction only."

In the same article, he also knocked the outfit Michelle wore to meet Queen Elizabeth, remarking, "You don't...go to Buckingham Palace in a sweater."

Let's flashback to December of 2006, when Oscar de la Renta's dress made the Official White House Holiday card . . .

People Magazine writes, "Imagine spending $8,500 on a beaded Oscar de la Renta gown to wear to an exclusive White House holiday reception and then arriving to find three other women wearing the same dress. Now, imagine that you’re the First Lady who has found herself in the middle of a real-life, four-way fashion faceoff! "

That’s what happened to Laura Bush at a Dec. 3 event at the White House. Luckily, she able to sneak off upstairs mid-party to change into a new dress.

Susan Whitson, Press Secretary to Mrs. Bush, tells PEOPLE: “Though Mrs. Bush has seen guests at the White House wearing dresses she herself owns, this was the first identical dress-to-dress encounter she has had.

She and the President found it quite amusing that Mrs. Bush and three other ladies had on the same gown at the same event.” If only all Fashion Faceoffs could be solved with a quick run upstairs! (source: People Magazine. 8 December 2006)

"Why do you wear European clothes?"... Perhaps First Lady Obama doesn't want to be humiliated like First Lady Laura Bush was by wearing a matronly, off-the-rack Oscar de la Renta's gowns.

Best Super Bowl Commercials 2011

It looks like the car commercials won for the best Super Bowl commercials. My top picks were the Audi-Kenny G jailbreak, Eminem's Imported from Detroit, and the cute kid in the VW ad. We also liked the mix of the Doritos commercials. Honorable mention goes to the Sealy ad.

2011 Audi A8 Commercial - Kenny G (Super Bowl)

Chrysler Eminem Super Bowl Commercial - Imported From Detroit

This one is so good that Detroit's Chamber of Commerce should use it to generate investments and tourism. Brilliant!

The Force Darth Vader Volkswagen Commercial

Sealy (Mattress) - Posturepedic After Glow

Meltdown: THE HARD FACTS

"Hard Facts" from CBC's Meltdown Series:

• Half of America owns only 2.5% of country's wealth. The top 1% owns a third of it.
• The gap between the top 0.01% and everyone else hasn't been this bad since the Roaring Twenties.
• In 1950, the ratio of the average executive's paycheque to the average worker's paycheque was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to between 300 to 500 to one.
• In 2008, the total national household debt in Canada has reached an all-time high of$1.3 trillion. A survey found that 42% of respondents said their personal debt was rising in the past three years, and 21%said they couldn't manage their debt.
• 61% of Americans "always or usually" live paycheck to paycheck, which was up from 49% in 2008 and 43% in 2007. The numbers are similar in Canada.
• A staggering 43% of Americans have less than $10,000 saved up for retirement.
• In America today, the average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks.

• In 2008, the World Economic Forum rated Canada's banking system No. 1 in the world. The U.S. came in right behind — Namibia.
• It is being projected that the U.S. government will have a budget deficit of approximately1.6 trillion dollars in 2010. How much is that? If you went out and spent one dollar every single second, it would take you more than 31,000 years to spend a trillion dollars.
• In February 2010, there were 5.5 unemployed Americans for every job opening.
• In California’s Central Valley, 1 out of every 16 homes is in some phase of foreclosure.
• U.S. banks repossessed nearly 258,000 homes nationwide in the first quarter of 2010, a35% jump from the first quarter of 2009.
• In May 2009, the number of Canadians getting regular employment insurance benefits in reached 778,700, the highest level on comparable records going back 12 years. During the month, the number of people getting EI benefits grew by 9.2%, from April.
• More than 24% of all homes with mortgages in the United States were underwater (the mortgage is more than the current market value of the home) as of the end of 2009.

• This recession has erased 8 million private sector jobs in the United States.
• 39.68 million Americans are now on food stamps, which represents a new all-time record. But things look like they are going to get even worse. The U.S. Department of Agriculture is forecastingthat enrollment in the food stamp program will exceed 43 million Americans in 2011.
• The Dow Jones Industrial Average just experienced the worst May it has seen since 1940.
• If you only make the minimum payment each and every time, a $6,000 credit card bill can end up costing you over $30,000 (depending on the interest rate).
• Approximately 21% of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010 - the highest rate in 20 years.
• In 2010 the U.S. government is projected to issue almost as much new debt as the rest of the governments of the world combined.
• In 2009, U.S. banks posted their sharpest decline in private lending since 1942.
• 
  

• During the first quarter of 2010, the total number of loans that are at least three months past due in the United States increased for the 16th consecutive quarter.
• As of February 2009, there were 111,500 employees working in motor vehicle assembly and parts, down 37% from its peak in 2001, according to a Stats Canada report.
• According to a Pew Research Center study, approximately 37% of all Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 have either been unemployed or underemployed at some point during the recession.
• For the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together.

Source: CBC

HOUR 1: The Men Who Crashed the World

HOUR 1: The Men Who Crashed the World

Greed and recklessness by the titans of Wall Street triggers the largest financial crash since the Great Depression. It's left to US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, himself a former Wall Street banker, to try and avert further disaster.



Source: CBC

HOUR 2: A Global Tsunami

HOUR 2: A Global Tsunami

The meltdown's devastation ripples around the world from California to Iceland and China. Facing economic ruin, desperate world leaders are at each other's throats.



Source: CBC

HOUR 3: Paying the Price

HOUR 3: Paying the Price

The victims of the meltdown fight back. In Iceland, protestors force a government to fall. In Canada, ripped off autoworkers occupy their plant. And in France, furious union members kidnap their bosses.



Source: CBC

HOUR 4: After the Fall

HOUR 4: After the Fall

MELTDOWN: THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE GLOBAL FINANCIAL COLLAPSE

Investigators begin to sift through the meltdown's rubble. Shaken world leaders question the very foundations of modern capitalism while asking: could it all happen again?



source: CBS

Crises of Capitalism by David Harvey

My favorite Marxist, David Harvey, presents his take on the "Crisis of Capitalism" at the R.S.A., the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce.

The animation on this short talk is absolutely brilliant.

Watch David Harvey's "Crises of Capitalism"



In this RSA Animate, renowned academic David Harvey asks if it is time to look beyond capitalism towards a new social order that would allow us to live within a system that really could be responsible, just, and humane?

This is based on a lecture at the RSA (www.theRSA.org).

Racist Teabaggers

KELLY: Rand Paul is a libertarian. You are a libertarian. He is getting excoriated for suggesting that the Civil Rights act -- what he said was, "Look it's got 10 parts, essentially; I favor nine. It's the last part that mandated no discrimination in places of public accommodation that I have a problem with, because you should let businesses decide for themselves whether they are going to be racist or not racist. Because once the government gets involved, it's a slippery slope." Do you agree with that?

STOSSEL: Totally. I'm in total agreement with Rand Paul. You can call it public accommodation, and it is, but it's a private business. And if a private business wants to say, "We don't want any blond anchorwomen or mustached guys," it ought to be their right. Are we going to say to the black students' association they have to take white people, or the gay softball association they have to take straight people? We should have freedom of association in America.

KELLY: OK. When you put it like that it sounds fine, right? So who cares if a blond anchorwoman and mustached anchorman can't go into the lunchroom. But as you know, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 came around because it was needed. Blacks weren't allowed to sit at the lunch counter with whites. They couldn't, as they traveled from state to state in this country, they couldn't go in and use a restroom. They couldn't get severed meals and so on, and therefore, unfortunately in this country a law was necessary to get them equal rights.

STOSSEL: Absolutely. But those -- Jim Crow -- those were government rules. Government was saying we have white and black drinking fountains. That's very different from saying private people can't discriminate.

KELLY: How do you know? How do you know that these private business owners, who owned restaurants and so on, would have said, "You know what? Yes. We will take blacks.

STOSSEL: Some wouldn't.

KELLY: We'll take gays. We'll take lesbians," if they hadn't been forced to do it.

STOSSEL: Because eventually they would have lost business. The free market competition would have cleaned the clocks of the people who didn't serve most customers.

KELLY: How do you know that, John?

STOSSEL: I don't. You can't know for sure.

See Cartoons by Cartoon by Olle Johansson - Courtesy of Politicalcartoons.com - Email this Cartoon

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Flordia Gets Ready

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Fareed Interviews Michael Lewis

Part 1


Part 2

GOP Chases Wall Street Donors

Republicans are stepping up their campaign to win donations from Wall Street, trying to capitalize on an increasing sense of regret among executives at big financial institutions for backing Democrats in 2008.

In discussions with Wall Street executives, Republicans are striving to make the case that they are banks' best hope of preventing President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats from cracking down on Wall Street.

GOP strategists hope to benefit from the reaction to the White House's populist rhetoric and proposals, which range from sharp critiques of bonuses to a tax on big Wall Street banks, caps on executive pay and curbs on business practices deemed too risky.

Last week, House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio made a pitch to Democratic contributor James Dimon, the chairman and chief executive of J.P. Morgan, over drinks at a Capitol Hill restaurant, according to people familiar with the matter.

Mr. Boehner told Mr. Dimon congressional Republicans had stood up to Mr. Obama's efforts to curb pay and impose new regulations. The Republican leader also said he was disappointed many on Wall Street continue to donate their money to Democrats, according to the people familiar with the matter.

(source: Wall Street Journal, 4Feb.2010)

Crazy Republicans

"In this sense, the tea parties are simply the latest manifestation of populism, which has arisen periodically throughout American history. In the 19th century populist anger was based in rural America and directed at the banks and railroads as well as government. Populists thought that free coinage of silver, an inflationary policy that would have raised prices for farm commodities, was the solution to their problems in the same way that today's Tea Party crowd thinks that the Federal Reserve, bailouts to big businesses and a looming government takeover of the health industry are at the root of our economic malaise. Tax cuts are like free silver--a one-size-fits-all policy response."

"Unfortunately for the Tea Party populists, there is no evidence in American history that populism has ever had a meaningful effect on policy. Even when the movement had a charismatic and articulate leader in William Jennings Bryan, the populists only elected a handful of members to Congress and never achieved the presidency. One reason is that the major parties co-opted populist issues and leaders, which bought time until the populist impulse burned itself out like a brush fire."

"Whatever the future of the Tea Party movement in American politics, it's a bad idea for so many participants to operate on the basis of false notions about the burden of federal taxation. It only takes a little bit of time to look at one's tax return to see what one is actually paying the Treasury, calculate the percentage of one's income that goes to taxes, and compare it with what was paid last year and the year before. People may then discover that their anger is misplaced and channel it into areas where it is more likely to bring about positive change."

-- by Bruce Bartlett is a former Republican Treasury Department economist and the author of Reaganomics: Supply-Side Economics in Action

GOP Bailouts

More Republican Administrations used public funds (taxpayer money) to bailout private corporations.

Let's take a look at the record shall we:

1. Penn Central Railroad -- 1970-- Republican Nixon ($3.2 billion)
2. Lockheed -- 1971 -- Republican Nixon ($1.4 billion)
3. Franklin National Bank -- 1974 -- Republican Ford ($7.8 billion)
4. New York City -- 1975 -- Republican Ford ($9.4 billion)
5. Chrysler -- 1980 -- Democrat Carter ($4.0 billion)
6. Continental Ill. Bank and Trust -- 1984-- Republican Reagan ($9.5 billion)
7. Savings & Loan -- 1989-- Republican BushI ($293.3 billion)
8. Airline Industry --2001-- Republican BushII ($18.6 billion)
9. Bear Stearns -- 2008 -- Republican BushII ($30 billion)
10. Fannie Mae / Freddie Mac -- 2008 -- Republican BushII ($400 billion)
11. American International Group (A.I.G.) -- 2008 -- Republican BushII ($180 billion)
12. Auto Industry -- 2008 -- Republican BushII ($25 billion)
13. Troubled Asset Relief Program-- 2008 -- Republican BushII ($700 billion)
14. Citigroup-- 2008 -- Republican BushII ($280 billion)
15. Bank of America -- 2009 -- Democrat Obama ($142 billion)

Republicans have spent $1.9582 TRILLION DOLLARS on corporate bailouts
Democrats have spent $146 Billion Dollars on bailouts.

What's wrong with the hysterical response to this picture?

Teabaggers: Political Psychos

Teabaggers: Political Psychos

Tea Party: Public Psychotic Episodes in groups.

The best way to describe psychosis is that it's like losing contact with reality. Your mind plays tricks on you and causes you to experience unusual thoughts, feelings and behaviors.

When someone is experiencing psychosis they may have:

*Delusions (unusual beliefs) -- like "Keep the government out of my Medicare!"

*Hallucinations (your senses experience things that aren't really real) "Obama is a Muslim, commie, socialist, anarchist, Nazi, foreigner, etc."

*Paranoia (believing that everything is directed at you) "Obama wants death panels".

*Unusual and disorganized thoughts and behavior: "Universal Health care is Armageddon!"

*Flat emotions "Bush bailed out is cronies--yawn...We're spending trillions of dollars in an unnecessary war in Iraq--yawn...Soldiers don't have the proper equipment--yawn ".

*Bizarre reactions to everyday situations.--this goes without comment.

*Things they say don't always make sense to others.

Bankers

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Predicting Crisis: Dr. Doom & the Black Swan

Activist for environmental justice: Majora Carter

In an emotionally charged talk, MacArthur-winning activist Majora Carter details her fight for environmental justice in the South Bronx -- and shows how minority neighborhoods suffer most from flawed urban policy.

Dan Ariely

Cut Republicans out of healthcare!

Salon Magazine's Garrison Keillor writes: "Cut Republicans out of healthcare! Lett them make do with aspirin and hand sanitizer. Meanwhile, the money we save will pay off the deficit" ...Up here in the North we believe that adversity is a stimulus of intelligence, so we don't want our kids stuck in the slow track in school, putzing around in the shallows, trapped in boredom and lazy thinking. We want the schools to push them, make them write whole sentences and paragraphs, grapple with calculus, learn about the Renaissance, and all the more so if they're bound to become truck drivers. What is so disheartening about politics is the putzing around in the shallows. The sheer waste of time -- years, decades, spent on thrilling public issues in which the unconservative right fights tooth-and-nail against the regressive left and nothing is gained. It's like a tug-of-war between two trees...


The so-called cultural wars over abortion and prayer in the schools and pornography and gays, most of it instigated by shrieking ninnies and pompous blowhards, did nothing about anything, except elect dullards to office who brought a certain nihilistic approach to governance that helped bring about the disaster in the banking industry that ate up a lot of 401Ks, and all thanks to high-fliers in shirts like cheap wallpaper who never learned enough to let it discourage them from believing that they had magical powers over the laws of economics and could hand out mortgages by the fistful to people with no assets and somehow the sun would come out tomorrow. The anti-regulation conservatives enabled those people. We're still waiting for an apology.

Conservatives and liberals can agree on the basics -- that the nation wallows in debt, that it is shortsighted of the states to cut back on the most essential work of government, which is the education of the young, and that somehow we have got to become a more productive nation and less consumptive -- but the ruffles and flourishes of Washington seem ever more irrelevant to the crises we face. When an entire major party has excused itself from meaningful debate and a thoughtful U.S. senator like Orrin Hatch no longer finds it important to make sense and an up-and-comer like Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty attacks the president for giving a speech telling schoolchildren to work hard in school and get good grades, one starts to wonder if the country wouldn't be better off without them and if Republicans should be cut out of the healthcare system entirely and simply provided with aspirin and hand sanitizer. Thirty-two percent of the population identifies with the GOP, and if we cut off healthcare to them, we could probably pay off the deficit in short order.

It's time to dump the dead-end issues that have wasted too much time already. Old men shouldn't be allowed to doze off at the switch and muck up the works for the young who will have to repair the damage. Get over yourselves. Your replacements have arrived, and you should think about them now and then. Enough with the shrieking. Pass healthcare reform.
source: Salon Magazine, by Garrison Keillor.

Trash Talk TV

Stop Before the President Gets Hurt

by Thomas Friedman, New York Times:
I hate to write about this, but I have actually been to this play before and it is really disturbing.

I was in Israel interviewing Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin just before he was assassinated in 1995. We had a beer in his office. He needed one. I remember the ugly mood in Israel then — a mood in which extreme right-wing settlers and politicians were doing all they could to delegitimize Rabin, who was committed to trading land for peace as part of the Oslo accords. They questioned his authority. They accused him of treason. They created pictures depicting him as a Nazi SS officer, and they shouted death threats at rallies. His political opponents winked at it all.

And in so doing they created a poisonous political environment that was interpreted by one right-wing Jewish nationalist as a license to kill Rabin — he must have heard, “God will be on your side” — and so he did.
Others have already remarked on this analogy, but I want to add my voice because the parallels to Israel then and America today turn my stomach: I have no problem with any of the substantive criticism of President Obama from the right or left. But something very dangerous is happening. Criticism from the far right has begun tipping over into delegitimation and creating the same kind of climate here that existed in Israel on the eve of the Rabin assassination.

What kind of madness is it that someone would create a poll on Facebook asking respondents, “Should Obama be killed?” The choices were: “No, Maybe, Yes, and Yes if he cuts my health care.” The Secret Service is now investigating. I hope they put the jerk in jail and throw away the key because this is exactly what was being done to Rabin.

Even if you are not worried that someone might draw from these vitriolic attacks a license to try to hurt the president, you have to be worried about what is happening to American politics more broadly.

Our leaders, even the president, can no longer utter the word “we” with a straight face. There is no more “we” in American politics at a time when “we” have these huge problems — the deficit, the recession, health care, climate change and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — that “we” can only manage, let alone fix, if there is a collective “we” at work.

Sometimes I wonder whether George H.W. Bush, president “41,” will be remembered as our last “legitimate” president. The right impeached Bill Clinton and hounded him from Day 1 with the bogus Whitewater “scandal.” George W. Bush was elected under a cloud because of the Florida voting mess, and his critics on the left never let him forget it.

And Mr. Obama is now having his legitimacy attacked by a concerted campaign from the right fringe. They are using everything from smears that he is a closet “socialist” to calling him a “liar” in the middle of a joint session of Congress to fabricating doubts about his birth in America and whether he is even a citizen. And these attacks are not just coming from the fringe. Now they come from Lou Dobbs on CNN and from members of the House of Representatives.

Again, hack away at the man’s policies and even his character all you want. I know politics is a tough business. But if we destroy the legitimacy of another president to lead or to pull the country together for what most Americans want most right now — nation-building at home — we are in serious trouble. We can’t go 24 years without a legitimate president — not without being swamped by the problems that we will end up postponing because we can’t address them rationally.

The American political system was, as the saying goes, “designed by geniuses so it could be run by idiots.” But a cocktail of political and technological trends have converged in the last decade that are making it possible for the idiots of all political stripes to overwhelm and paralyze the genius of our system.

Those factors are: the wild excess of money in politics; the gerrymandering of political districts, making them permanently Republican or Democratic and erasing the political middle; a 24/7 cable news cycle that makes all politics a daily battle of tactics that overwhelm strategic thinking; and a blogosphere that at its best enriches our debates, adding new checks on the establishment, and at its worst coarsens our debates to a whole new level, giving a new power to anonymous slanderers to send lies around the world. Finally, on top of it all, we now have a permanent presidential campaign that encourages all partisanship, all the time among our leading politicians.

I would argue that together these changes add up to a difference of degree that is a difference in kind — a different kind of American political scene that makes me wonder whether we can seriously discuss serious issues any longer and make decisions on the basis of the national interest.

We can’t change this overnight, but what we can change, and must change, is people crossing the line between criticizing the president and tacitly encouraging the unthinkable and the unforgivable.

Economists for an Imaginary World

From the Washington Post, "Economists for an Imaginary World":

"The worldly philosophers" was economist Robert Heilbroner's term for such great economic thinkers as Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes and Joseph Schumpeter. Today's free-market economists, by contrast, aren't merely not philosophers. They're not even worldly.

Has any group of professionals ever been so spectacularly wrong? Pre-Copernican astronomers and cosmologists, I suppose, and for the same reason, really: They had an entire, internally consistent, theoretically rich system that described the universe. They were wrong -- the sun and other celestial bodies save the moon didn't actually revolve around the Earth, as they insisted -- but no matter. It was a thing of beauty, their cosmic order. A vast faith was sustained in part by their pseudo-science, a faith from which such free thinkers as Galileo deviated at their own risk.

As it was with the pre- (or anti-) Copernicans, so it is with today's mainstream economists. Theirs is an elegant system, a thing of beauty in itself, as the New York Times' Paul Krugman has argued. It just fails to jell with reality. And unlike the pre-Copernicans, whose dogma posed a threat to those who challenged it but not, at least directly, to anyone else, their latter-day equivalents in the economic profession pose a clear and present danger to the well-being of damned near everyone.

The problem with contemporary economics, at least with the purer strain of free-market economics associated with the University of Chicago, is not simply that it failed to predict the near-collapse of the world financial system last year. The problem is that it believed such a collapse could not happen, that all risk could be quantified by mathematical models and that these quantifications could help us correctly price just about everything. Out of this belief arose the banks' practice of securitization, which put a value on all manner of mortgages and enabled buyers to purchase and swap them with the certainty that such transactions reflected an accurate judgment of the value of the properties and the risks associated with them.

Except, they didn't. So long as economists insisted that they did, however, there really was no need to study such things as bubbles, which only a handful of skeptics and hopelessly retro Keynesians even considered possible. Under mainstream economic theory, which held that everything was correctly priced, bubbles simply couldn't exist.

The one economist who has emerged from the current troubles with his reputation not only intact but enhanced is, of course, Keynes. Every major nation, no matter its economic or political system, has followed Keynes's prescription for combating a major downturn: increasing public spending to fill the gap created by the decline of private spending. That is why the world economy seems to be inching back from collapse and why the nations that have spent the most, China in particular, seem to be recovering fastest.But Keynes's vision has yet to reestablish itself among economists, who, like the Catholic Church in Galileo's time, aren't about to change their cosmology just because the facts demonstrate that they happen to be wrong. The quants at the banking houses say that they simply failed to sufficiently factor some risks into their mathematical models. Once they do, their system will be corrected, and banks can resume their campaign to securitize everything (as some banks are already doing by establishing a secondary market in life insurance policies).

The problem with that, Robert Skidelsky argues in a new book on economics after the fall, "Keynes: The Return of the Master," is that it neglects one of Keynes's central insights -- that an uncertainty attends human affairs that transcends quantifiable risk. (Skidelsky is also the author of a magisterial three-volume biography of Keynes.) Psychology affects value as much as rational calculation does. Thus the state must ensure against periodic madness in the markets with regulations and social insurance, because madness is a potential threat in markets just as it is in other human endeavors -- because the market is a human endeavor, not reducible to a mathematical construct.Will contemporary economists ever accept this last precept? In the 1970s, a wry economist named Robert Lekachman observed that economics students had to master so much mathematics that they became emotionally invested in the idea that the math they had learned explained -- had to explain -- the universe. Skidelsky calls for combining the postgraduate course in macroeconomics with another discipline -- history or psychology, say -- to expose young quants to the complexities of human institutions.

If mainstream economics doesn't change, however, it may eventually face the worst of all possible fates: market failure. How many students want to spend their lives quantifying a world that doesn't exist?

By Harold Meyerson, Washington Post, 30September2 009

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Kanye West Interrupts Obama's Speech

Congratulations Taylor Swift, You're A Star

A cruel irony played itself out at the Video Music Awards last night. Kayne West self destructed underneath the klieg lights, on center stage in front of an audience of his musical peers, filmed on a live television. He stormed the stage to eclipse the spotlight of Taylor Swift. As he oafishly snatched the microphone from Taylor Swift during her acceptance speech for the MTV's "Best Female Video" award, he ironically launched her musical career into the stratosphere.

Although Taylor Swift seem rightfully shocked and dismayed, her agent couldn't have paid for this level of free publicity. Ironically, Kayne West unintentionally birthed a new star. As the days unfold, Taylor Swift will garner headlines from across the globe. Likewise, her videos will be in heavy rotation, and her record sales will soar. I'll even bet that Taylor Swift will vie for the newest MTV “it girl" replacing icons like Madonna, Brittany Spears and Hanna Montana. Taylor Swift should send a thank-you note to the one person who was able to shatter the fame noise barriers, Mr. Kayne West.

As Alanis Morissette sang “Isn't it ironic... don't you think.”

Of course the situational irony doesn't end with Kayne's outburst. Near the end of the program, Beyoncé (the damsel in distress that caused Kayne West to jump on stage to defend her video honor), graciously offered Taylor Swift her spotlight to finish the acceptance speech.

Within the next few weeks Taylor Swift will certainly gain on the Billboard charts as Kayne's sales will diminish. Next year as Taylor Swift receives her Grammy Awards, MTV Awards, American Music Awards and the Country Music Awards Ms. Swift should give a special shout out to the guy that got booed off the stage and became the pariah of Radio City Music Hall, Kayne West. After all Kayne to extinguish his own career while inadvertently igniting the career of Taylor Swift.