Here’s the first pictures of Josh Brolin as George W. Bush and Elizabeth Banks as Laura Bush for the movie “W.”
The GWB biopic will chronicle the life and presidency of the 43rd President of the United States of America. Bush is reportedly portrayed in the film as a foul-mouthed, reformed drunk obsessed with baseball, Saddam Hussein and the conflicted relationship with his dad.
Directing is Oliver Stone, whose film credits include Nixon and JFK.
Here’s the rest of the cast: Thandie Newton as National Security Advisor turned secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Ioan Gruffudd as Tony Blair, Rob Corddry as Ari Fleischer, James Cromwell as George Herbert Walker Bush, Ellen Burstyn as Barbara Bush and Jeffrey Wright as General Colin Powell.
Tammy Nyp is currently the #4 most popular item at Technorati, with 3,349 blogs using that tag in the past 24 hours. Who is Tammy Nyp, you might ask? Is she any relation to Kim Kardashian, of whom I have also never heard?
The Tammy sex video scandal was a scandal in Singapore involving a sex video first circulated in mid-February 2006 that turned into an Internet phenomenon. The incident began when a cheerleader and student from Nanyang Polytechnic (NYP), known only as Tammy, apparently had her mobile phone stolen by an enemy, and a 10-minute video stored in her phone involving oral sex and intercourse with her boyfriend was uploaded on the Internet.
The video was initially spread obscurely via instant messaging, email and blogs, but eventually made it to the front pages of national newspapers. Shortly after, the video gained international notoriety as many people curiously began searching for it online under the keyword Tammy Nyp, causing the scandal to make it to the first five places in Technorati’s top search terms for almost two weeks.
Cases of people capitalising on the scandal have been widespread, from traffic whoring to commercialisation. Bloggers who wrote about the scandal, or even gave a mention of the abovementioned search phrases, found themselves experiencing a spike in their visitor traffic, often by thousands. The video was reportedly sold in DVD at Penang, Malaysia, and made it as far as New York City. A domain on the scandal’s top search term was also squatted, and other merchandise such as T-shirts was sold online.
Questions on morality have been raised and debated after the scandal broke. Critics blamed the girl for shooting the video in the first place, while others pointed the finger at the person who uploaded the video. Her boyfriend, on the other hand, has escaped the same level of the criticism thrust upon Tammy, prompting comments questioning some critics’ bias. The girl, when interviewed, claimed that she had no intention for fame or being a porn star, and has since undergone counselling.
All very interesting, you might say. So, why is she suddenly a hot topic again nearly a year later?
It’s not clear, to be honest. Most of the references to Tammy Nyp on the blogs are, like this one, a discussion of why “Tammy Nyp” was suddenly such a big term on Technorati. That, of course, pushes up the Technorati juice of “Tammy Nyp.” It’s all quite circular.
Dream Logic reported a resurgence of interest in our gal Tammy a couple weeks ago:
But there she is, good old NYP Tammy, apparently making her Technorati comeback. She’s the fifth most popular search on Technorati right now (in between “Britney” and “Saddam Hussein”)
The strange thing is, Technorati blocked NYP Tammy from showing up in the search results back in March when she was totally dominating them. I’ve been getting a steady stream of people who are still looking to download her video, apparently, so for some reason people in Singapore just can’t forget about her. It’s very strange.
But now for some reason she’s back in the Technorati top 15, even with all the Saddam hanging hoopla going on. So Technorati has unblocked her from showing up and there’s something new going on with her that makes people want to search for her again.
Very weird. Anyone know why people are going crazy looking for her again? Was there some year in review article in Singapore that mentioned it in passing or something like that? Singaporeans seem to be pretty easy to set off as far as sex videos are concerned, if the NYP Tammy excitement from the beginning of the year is anything to go by.
There’s nothing in GoogleNews about this at all, except an oblique reference in Jawa Report about a crackdown on porn in Singapore.
So, the sudden interest in a sex video involving Tammy Nyp is inexplicable.
BTW, those interested in seeing the Tammy Nyp Sex Video can go see it for yourselves at Sleepy John.
A video showing Saddam Hussein shortly after he was executed has emerged on the internet. The video and images from it are shown below. The first uncut, uncensored, unedited video showing Saddam Hussein executed caused quite a stir. Another video of Saddam’s funeral has also been making the rounds.
This video does not show the execution. Rather, it shows Saddam’s body, proportedly right after he was hanged. The short video simply shows Saddam’s corpse under a sheet, and the effects that hanging had on his neck.
The video seems to have first emerged at a Shia website in Arabic, after which it was uploaded to Google.
Here’s the video:
Rusty has several rather graphic photos captured from the video as well.
A new video of Saddam Hussein’s corpse, with a gaping neck wound, was posted on the Internet early Tuesday, the second leaked release of clandestine pictures from the former leader’s hanging.
The video appeared to have been taken with a camera phone, like the graphic video of the hanging which showed guards taunting Saddam in the final moments of his life.
The footage pans up the shrouded body of the former leader from the feet. It apparently was taken shortly after Saddam was executed and placed on a gurney. He was hanged shortly before dawn on Dec. 30. As the panning shot reaches the head region, the white shroud is pulled back and reveals Saddam’s head and neck. His head is unnaturally twisted at a 90 degree angle to his right. It shows a gaping bloody wound, circular in shape, about an inch below his jaw line on the left side of his neck. His left cheek is marked with red blotches, and there is blood on the shroud where it covered his head.
The newest video leak was likely to increase the angry reaction over the way the execution was carried out. There already has been a global outcry about the undignified manner in which the Shiite-dominated government hanged Saddam, a Sunni.
The 27-second video was posted on an Iraqi news Web site that is known to support Saddam’s outlawed Baath Party. “A new film of the late immortal martyr, President Saddam Hussein,” the web site said in a headline over a link to the video.
Voices could be heard on the video. As the shroud is pulled back, one voice says, “Hurry up, hurry up. I’m going to count from one to four. One, two … . Hurry up you’re going to get us into a catastrophe.” Then another voice, apparently the man taking the pictures, says, “Just one second, just one second, Abu Ali. I’m about finished.” Then a third voice says, “Abu Ali, you take care of this.”
It was the second clandestine video to have leaked, the first showing Saddam being taunted in his final moments. That clandestine video showed the former leader dropping through the gallows floor as he offered chanted prayers. It ends with his dead body swinging at the end of a rope.
The hanging video was in sharp contrast with an official video that was broadcast not long after Saddam’s execution which showed him standing silently on the gallows as the noose was put around his neck. The official video was muted.
The leaked hanging video, however, was shot from the floor of the gallows chamber, looking up at Saddam. Voices could be heard taunting him with cries of “Muqtada, Muqtada, Muqtada,” referring to radical anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, the leader of the Shiite Mahdi Army militia and a key support of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
In one final moment of defiance, Saddam Hussein refused to cover his face before his execution Saturday. He clutched a Quran as he walked to the gallows.
Before the rope was tied around his neck, Saddam shouted “God is great.” He was calm before his death.
WARNING: The video is graphic, if this sort of thing will offend you, don’t watch it. The video is void of audio.
*** UPDATE *** A lot of readers are asking where the whole video is.
With Saddam Hussein’s execution scheduled to take place in the next couple of days and videotaped, there’s plenty of speculation about how the hanging will be covered on television. Reuters’ Hollywood Reporter Paul Gough assures us it will be “tasteful.”
Television networks face a killer of a conundrum with the impending execution of Saddam Hussein, whose hanging could be videotaped and perhaps aired on Iraqi TV.
The timing of Saddam’s date with the gallows was unclear, but late Thursday CBS, NBC and Fox News Channel reported that the former dictator, convicted this year in the deaths of 148 people in 1982, would be turned over by the American military to the Iraqi government within 36 hours and hanged before the start of a Muslim holiday on Sunday.
Several sources said Saddam’s execution would be videotaped by the Iraqi government, though it wasn’t clear whether it would be released to the public or broadcast. “We will video everything,” Iraqi National Security adviser Mouffak al Rubaie told CBS News.
Judging by the Iraqi government’s release Tuesday of videotape of the hanging of 13 convicts, it could be a gruesome affair. Meetings were held Thursday in at least two network headquarters over how to handle the potentially graphic images.
ABC and CBS said they wouldn’t air the full execution if the video became available. “We’re very aware that we’re coming into people’s living rooms and that there could be children watching,” CBS News senior vp Linda Mason said.
Mason and her network counterparts have broadcast standards and procedures they follow in these cases. Phil Alongi, special-events executive producer at NBC News, said there are ways the network can approach the video or photographs that will get the point across without having to be graphic.
The operative word: taste.
“We have very, very strict guidelines with how to deal with that,” said Bob Murphy, senior vp at ABC News. “If there were pictures made available of the execution, they would have to be viewed by senior management before we would put them on the air, and we would make a judgment of taste and propriety of what we would show.”
CNN and Fox News Channel still were discussing what they would do if the footage were made available. It also wasn’t clear what the newly launched network Al-Jazeera International would do. An e-mail and phone call to the channel’s Qatar headquarters weren’t returned Thursday. Despite popular assumptions to the contrary, Al-Jazeera’s pan-Arab channel has never shown an execution.
While video of an execution would be unprecedented in U.S. television, the war in Iraq has led to a number of judgment calls on graphic video. The U.S. military released graphic photographs of Saddam’s two sons who were killed in a U.S. raid on their Mosul hideout in July 2003. “We edited down the pictures to show only what was appropriate, what we thought was appropriate,” Murphy said. “We didn’t show the pictures live (when the network received them), and we made sure that they showed enough of the bodies so that it was clearly them, but we didn’t dwell on it.”
None of the networks showed the beheading of Nick Berg, an American who was kidnapped and killed in Iraq in May 2004. But Berg’s beheading by kidnappers — along with the killings of others, including a South Korean — was distributed on the Internet and fed to American networks that chose not to use the footage.
Mason, Alongi and Murphy said Thursday that an execution video widely distributed on the Internet wouldn’t change their minds about not airing the graphic portions of any video.
Steve Benen and Kim Priestap both predict it will be online soon. There’s no reason to doubt that. Indeed, AllahPundit promises he’ll “do everything in my power to get it for you.”
Frankly, I’ve got no interest in seeing it. Once I find it, though, I’ll be sure to make it available for those who want to see it.
Madonna might be getting somewhat long in the tooth, but she’s still got the energy of a 20-year-old as her “Confessions” tour kicks off.
She was an equestrian, a disco princess and a black-clad rocker — plus she crucified herself on a mirrored cross — all in less than two hours. Madonna is known for her theatrical, action-packed shows, and Sunday night’s sold-out opener of her “Confessions” world tour was no exception.
More than a dozen dancers — who had as many costume changes as the Material Girl herself — provided ample eye candy. The enormous T-shaped Forum stage featured moving platforms that carried her four-piece band and three backup singers. A jungle-gym contraption lowered from the ceiling became a play place for Cirque du Soleil-style gymnasts, while multiple massive video screens flashed images of war, world leaders, nature and, of course, Madonna. The production was so tightly choreographed, it left little room for spontaneity. Even when Madonna flipped the crowd the bird, it felt scripted, not subversive.
[...]
Wearing jodhpurs and a top hat and carrying a jeweled riding crop, the singer emerged from a giant disco ball covered with $2 million worth of Swarovski crystals. (Maybe that’s why the tickets cost up to $350.) Male dancers were the horses, wearing leather straps on their heads and bits in their mouths. Madonna mounted one and tugged on his reins as she sang the opening song, “Future Lovers,” from last year’s “Confessions on a Dance Floor.”
She dedicated much of the show to the album, playing nine of its 12 tracks. Selections from her other nine records were sprinkled in between. For “Like a Virgin,” Madonna climbed onto a kinky version of a carousel horse. It looked like a cross between a saddle and a motorcycle seat, black with silver studs. It raised and lowered and moved in a circle while Madonna gyrated atop it. “The show has just begun,” she declared before disappearing for one of the night’s half-dozen costume changes. Moving video screens obscured the stage and old-school breakdancing kept fans’ eyes busy.
Next, a mirrored cross carrying the singer rose slowly from the stage floor. She wore purple pants, a red blouse and a crown of thorns. Her feet rested on a tiny platform and silver cuffs held her arms in place. As she sang “Live to Tell,” from 1986’s “True Blue,” numbers ticked away on a screen above the stage. They represented the 12 million children orphaned by AIDS in Africa. It was the first of the show’s two overtly political displays. Just before Madonna hoisted a Les Paul guitar to accompany herself on “I Love New York,” images of world leaders — from Richard Nixon to Saddam Hussein to George W. Bush — flashed on a screen beneath bold red letters that read “Don’t Speak.” The guitar didn’t seem organic to Madonna, but she stayed behind it for “Ray of Light” and switched to an acoustic for “Drowned World.”
While Madonna still has her youthful energy and a looks great, she has managed to become almost a parody of herself. People go to see her shows for the spectacle rather than the art at this point. She is one of those people who can be simultaneously provocative and boring.
Madonna has once again ticked off religious leaders. During her Sunday concert in Los Angeles, which launched her first world tour in two years, Madonna sang “Live to Tell” while hanging from a giant mirrored cross as video screens showed images of third-world poverty. “Why would someone with so much talent seem to feel the need to promote herself by offending so many people?” the Church of England said in a statement, according to the BBC.
David Muir of the Evangelical Alliance also accused Madonna of “blatant insensitivity.” He said, “Madonna’s use of Christian imagery is an abuse and it is dangerous,” and called for her to “drop it from the tour.”
YouTube has some videos, at least until someone screams “Copyright!”
Comedy Central censored an image of Mohommad in last night’s episode of “South Park” making fun of television networks and others bowing to pressure from Islamist extremists by censoring Muhammad. They displayed the following image during the show:
One might have presumed this was just a gag by Trey Parker and Matt Stone. That would have been my guess (I watched the previous week’s episode but have not watched last night’s, which is in my TiVo) and it was Ed Morrissey’s presumption. Stephen Spruiell discovered otherwise.
I just got off the phone with a Comedy Central spokesman. I asked him about last night’s episode of South Park in which, at a moment right before the prophet Mohammed was supposed to make a cameo, the words, “Comedy Central has refused to broadcast an image of Mohammed on their network” appeared on the screen.
I asked him whether this truly was Comedy Central’s decision or whether this was just another gag (with South Park, you never know). He said:
They reflected it accurately. That was a Comedy Central decision.
Just in case there was any confusion, that settles it. Comedy Central censored the image.
Quite bizarre and gutless. Not to mention hypocritical, given that “South Park” continually does vicious parodies of other sensitive topics, apparently without censorship from the network. They will apparently make fun of Christians and Scientologists but yet they are afraid to incur the wrath of intolerant Islamists. Which, again, was the very topic of this two-part episode?
Wow.
Michelle Malkin, from whom I got the above screen cap, has the video of last night’s episode available for download.
Jim Lindgren provides an episode summary and quotes a commenter, “Comedy Central apparently allows South Park to show Jesus defacating on others and being defacated on, but prohibits showing Mohammed ‘just standing there, looking normal.’”
Ironic, too, the week after “South Park” won a Peabody Award:
“South Park” was praised as a show that “pushes all the buttons, turns up the heat and shatters every taboo,” Peabody Awards Director Horace Newcomb said. “Through that process of offending it reminds us of the need for being tolerant.”
Or not.
Update: Matthew Stinson does not engage in the present controversy but has an excellent summary of why this two-parter was classic “South Park.” This passage from the first part is especially fitting in light of the no-show decision:
Cartman: And in just a few weeks from now, “Family Guy” will be off the air forever.
Kyle: Off the air? But, we’re just trying to get the Mohammed episode pulled.
Cartman: It’s simple television economics, Kyle. All it takes to kill a show forever is get one episode pulled. If we convince the network to pull this episode for the sake of Muslims, then the Catholics can demand a show they don’t like get pulled. And then people with disabilities can demand another show get pulled, and so on and so on, until “Family Guy” is no more…
I guess we shall now see.
Update 2: Kevin Aylward isn’t buying it. Caltechgirl points to the following image, which is on Wizbang’s server (but not linked by Kevin):
It’s from the opening sequence for the current 10th season of “South Park.” Among those in the crowd shot are Jesus, a recurring character with his own public access show, Satan (who is gay–not that there’s anything wrong with that–and having an affair with Saddam Hussein) and–in the little box–a figure that looks suspiciously like Mohammed. Interesting.
Update 3 (4/14): AP Television Writer David Bauder has more details.
Banned by Comedy Central from showing an image of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, the creators of “South Park” skewered their own network for hypocrisy in the cartoon’s most recent episode. The comedy — in an episode aired during Holy Week for Christians — instead featured an image of Jesus Christ defecating on President Bush and the American flag.
In an elaborately constructed two-part episode of their Peabody Award-winning cartoon, “South Park” creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker intended to comment on the controversy created by a Danish newspaper’s publishing of caricatures of Muhammad. Muslims consider any physical representation of their prophet to be blasphemous.
[...]
Parker and Stone were angered when told by Comedy Central several weeks ago that they could not run an image of Muhammad, according to a person close to the show who didn’t want to be identified because of the issue’s sensitivity. The network’s decision was made over concerns for public safety, the person said. Comedy Central said in a statement issued Thursday: “In light of recent world events, we feel we made the right decision.” Its executives would not comment further.
[...]
A frequent “South Park” critic, William Donohue of the anti-defamation group Catholic League, called on Parker and Stone to resign out of principle for being censored. “The ultimate hypocrite is not Comedy Central — that’s their decision not to show the image of Muhammad or not — it’s Parker and Stone,” he said. “Like little whores, they’ll sit there and grab the bucks. They’ll sit there and they’ll whine and they’ll take their shot at Jesus. That’s their stock in trade.”
That’s certainly what the Family Guy manatees would have done.
