The Golden Globes Sounded Like a Porno Movie So I Watched Shane on Encore Western

I  guess I missed it.  NBC proclaimed Oprah the winner of the 2020 Presidential Elections!

Gee, and people think that the media is really fouled up.

Well, I read about Oprah's soaring rhetoric this morning in the Sun Times - the always hysterical gate-crashing, mouth-breather  Richard Roeper:

Oprah for president!
This was one of Winfrey’s finest moments, in ways big and small. “I want all the girls watching here to know that a new day is on the horizon!” she exclaimed.
She personally thanked the legendary TV exec Dennis Swanson, who hired her to host a show called “A.M. Chicago,” which eventually became “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” Such a classy gesture.
She said: “We all know the press is under siege these days, but we also know that it is the insatiable dedication to uncovering the absolute truth that keeps us from turning a blind eye to corruption and to injustice. … I value the press more than ever before …”
 . . .
And she said these words that should be etched in stone:
"I want tonight to express gratitude to all the women who have endured years of abuse and assault, because they — like my mother — had children to feed and bills to pay and dreams to pursue. They’re the women whose names we’ll never know. They are domestic workers and farm workers; they are working in factories and they work in restaurants, and they’re in academia and engineering and medicine and science; they’re part of the world of tech and politics and business; they’re our athletes in the Olympics and they’re our soldiers in the military … "

And I asked myself, " What if there were only one emoji?  Hmmmmm????

I thought The Golden Globes was a '70's soft-core porn epic starring Debra Messing and Rip Taylor.

What do I know.  I watched Alan Ladd and Van Heflin take on a huge-ass tree stump, a gang of cattle barons who hate stump-jumpers in an epic bar room brawl and then each other, leaving Allan Ladd to ride endlessly back to town make Jack Palance eat lead.



Our Next President?  Shane!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  Please, Come Back!!!!!!!!!!!!

Rahm "The Business Magnet" Mayor Waves Bye, Bye to Oprah?????

Did I miss something . . . again? Oprah and Stedm . . .Gail?  , , , are blowing town?  For keeps?

Rahm, my mail box stuffings told me was the reason Chicago has such a swell Moody's Rating and why big businesses love to soak their toes in the pot-holes on west Washington and Randolph street and drive.  He's the business magnet, the oozing sack of honey sugar spilled out on the concrete and clay crumbling 'neath* our feets.

Yet, yet . . .I learn that Oprah is being quit of Chicago . . . altogether!  Our iconic Steve Dahl with a tan and chick wardrobe will be as gone as the knocked out cats at a Pitchfork Musis Fest?

Oprah Winfrey and her collection of shows are settling in Hollywood.

By year’s end, Winfrey’s Chicago-based Harpo Studios will close its doors, with the 26-year-old company's productions transitioning to OWN headquarters in Los Angeles. The news, which Winfrey delivered in person to her Harpo staff on Tuesday morning, comes two months after her burgeoning cable network moved into a new space in West Hollywood. Though the Chicago lease continues through April 2016, Winfrey and her key executives intend to stop the back-and-forth routine they've been balancing for nearly half a decade sooner than that.
In a phone interview from the Harpo offices in Chicago, Winfrey acknowledges a mix of excitement and nostalgia. "[Chicago has] been everything for me. I've spent more hours in this building than I have any other building on Earth. ... We were here when there was nothing but hoes and rats on the street, and now it's one of the hottest neighborhoods [in Chicago]," she says, noting that OWN will stop shooting shows there as of Tuesday. "The time had come to downsize this part of the business and to move forward. It will be sad to say goodbye, but I look ahead with such a knowing that what the future holds is even more than I can see."

Well, I'll be dipped and rolled!!  Oprah is down-sizing her operations . . .and that is exactly what Rahm Emanuel is doing to Chicago!

I will not miss the tubby she- scold anymore than I will miss dialing into WLS AM!  Oprah did nothing for the poor black kids that I help go onto the colleges and trades and vocations of the American Middle Class.
Oprah's charity watch dog was no other than the CPS itchy-palm king Rufus Williams. Rufus, a nasty littleman, told me, 'Send no more Leo proposals for grants.'  As if.

Oprah, like Pfleger, Jesse Jackson and Bill Ayers, are "chicago people" that lemmings always defend with a solemn -"They do alot of good."   To which I invariably reply, " For example?"  AND the crickets chirp, while tie two legged lemmings ooze away from me.


"Alpha Mike Foxtrot, Oprah" , to quote the late Vietnam hero and Chicago homice detective Martin J. Tully,  take it with you; you didn't leave much here.

Maybe ex- Harpo Studio could be a Star Wars Museum and CPD blacksite, or a Presidential Mobile Library. 

Now, let's see if Mayor Rahm gets asked about Oprah's Exodus? Gee, Mr. Rahm, if a 1%er leaves your Chicagoland what about all the 99%ers?  Is that reall 'smart sizing?'  Shouldn't we, after all really be Oprah-Sizing?

Strike that rock, Moses! 


* I dunno, I just like it

You Can Continue to Fool Millions of the People All of the Time. . . If Oprah Matters to Them

Some people bought peach orchards years ago.  They were told that the peach stones had magical powers to cure cancer.  More recently, otherwise intelligent people dumped cash into carbon credits, or Green Energy scams, including the Obama White House.  Obama wasted tax dollars - our money - on Solyndra, algae farms and other ventures.

People can be fooled.  Hell, I wasted time, treasure and my very modest talents on John McCain's 2008 Campaign for President in the notion that a war hero who faced torture in the Hanoi Hilton had the stomach for the fiscal collapse of American banking due to the mortgage Ponzi scam of Dodd Franks.  John McCain sleep walked to defeat and allowed his campaign managers to heap scorn on the woman he begged to be his running mate.  One born every minute.

I was not that far gone in political mythology to believe that first term US Senator with a history of being a governmental purse puppy . . .nice, amiable, read a good speech, top-drawer clothes wrangler . . . with a career and biography crafted by bullet-proof clouted Leftists. Nope, I like Barack Obama in the Illinois Senate just fine.  Nice guy; keeps a neat wallet.

Four the past five years, President Obama has lived up to my expectations. Only recently, it has become only too obvious that Obama is not any where near as great as canned beer.  Oprah deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom?  Gloria Steinem?  Herb Alpert . . .the Lonely Bull?  President Obama is A Million Little Pieces.  

Why? Too many of us join book clubs.  We do not seem to want to trust our ourselves with thoughts that must at some time be made public.  We don't want to be wrong.  We don't want to be embarrassed.   We became Oprah's Book Club.   We allowed monstrously verbally challenged Mayor Richie Daley dictate Chicago Reads.  We formed our own little circles of readers who made agreement the touchstone for discourse.  'Yes, yes!  Atticus Finch is the American Patriarch.  The Color Purple is a Rainbow.   The Third World is wonderful and makes us ashamed to be Americans.  Greed is our only virtue. Bill Ayers is an educator!'

I have relatives who worship at the altar of the American Isis - Oprah.  Me?  I understood Oprah when her foundation watchdog ( Rufus Williams) tried to bully me into not sending any more funding requests to Harpo, or Ms. Winfrey.  Rufus was rewarded aplenty! Oprah was not at all interested in helping an inner-city Catholic high school for boys that remains unapologetically nonsense free even though more than 90 % of the school demographic was and remains African American. Oprah's Angels fear to tread where special interest and corporate dollars pave the walkway.

It's America and it's her money.  Personally, I am glad Oprah never made a drop.

Oprah maintains her ability convince millions of people to swallow exactly what she gulps down.  The pinnacle of her arresting charms is President Obama.   Last week President, after a year of concern in the public forums that perhaps Oprah had gone sour on the young fellow whose autobiographies ( ghosted or not) made a compelling narrative for the transformation of American Life.

Oprah swallowed Dreams from My Father and Audacity of Hope, not in a millions little pieces, but whole.  Oprah was hood-winked by James Frey and Margaret B. Jones, two writers of autobiographies that stretched the truth like Turkish taffy fresh from the oven.   Had the public not awakened to these literary frauds and people continued to believe the self-mortifying yarns of two phonies, the world would not have changed too much.  People believe another person's fabrications because they are good-hearted and want to accept the word of fellow sinner and feel good about their own struggles in this vale of tears.

Oprah continues to promote the emptiness that is President Obama and wears the highest civilian decoration our country can bestow on a citizen.

Look Under Your Seeeee-eats! There's a Medal of Freedom and a Fetus!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Oprah: Do you think we've lost the belief that we can succeed? I was talking with Skip Gates [Henry Louis Gates, scholar of African-American history and culture], and he was saying how ironic it is that our parents believed that their little nappy-headed boys and girls could grow up and be somebody if they worked twice as hard.

Barack: We no longer operate that way, but we should be working twice as hard, because we still have challenges and barriers other communities don't have. . . .like Hyannis Port, Martha's Vineyard, Hollywood, Maui,

 "On the Gosnell trial, Steinem added: "It makes more clear why you need Planned Parenthood." -  


President Obama will award the nation's highest civilian medal to his favorite Chicago White Sox player of all-time, Mr. Cub -Ernie Banks.

He will also toss the bling to the two women who defined what it means to be an Woman in the Age of Obama -

Gloria Steinem - who pioneered the gender specific lifestyles of women like Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Lady Gaga and the Dowager of Hags Madonna. Without the pioneering efforts of Ms. Steinem, a former Playboy Bunny, women would be free to be as loudly foul-mouthed, empty, self-absorbed, blood-thirsty and soulless as any man. . . even a member of Saudi Royal Family. Ms. Steinem was completely unmoved by the Dr. Kermit Baron Gosnell Butcher Shop in Philly and continues to advocate the snipping of spinal chords babies all the way up Kindergarten.

Oprah Winfrey - like Ms. Steinem, Oprah created generations of pan-demographic binge-eating female couch potatoes who anxiously awaited her pronouncements on books that preach the glories of abortion and home economics and find vicarious comfort in the discovery prizes under the seats of studio audience, Oprah placed there after shaking down the sponsors of the Oprah Winfrey Show! and the Oprah Winfrey Channel and the Oprah Winfrey Productions and the Oprah Winfrey Cosmetics.

The President chooses the recipients.  He is the President of Abortion.

What is the Value of the Presidential Medal of Freedom? Bill  Clinton is getting pay-back for being the voice of 2012 Campaign and Anthony Weiner and his Bride are still in the news.

If you love abortion drug addiction, rehab, suicide attempts, binge eating and purging, liposuction, Botox,  narcissism and graceless stupidity with no moral consequences are only the outlets that make perfect sense. Freedom demands choices after all.

In the words of President Obama's former Religion adviser and Secretary of State John Kerry's choice for the formation of the Office of Faith-Based Community Initiatives Shaun Casey, “I, frankly, am glad American civil religion is dying,”

But, you gotta love the choice of good old # 14 Ernie Banks.

The American Isis OPRAH? - Yale Scholar Asks Her Own Answers

Oprah is Huge! No doubt. However, a Religious Icon?

A Yale Prof wrote a monograph -soon on bookshelves everywhere (but not at Borders on 95th Street, because it closed) - arguing that Oprah is a religious icon. Get this treacle:

Yale professor Kathryn Lofton has written a book about Oprah Winfrey as a religious icon. Lofton compares the media mogul's speech patterns to those of southern preachers and believes she employs a sermon-like structure to each show. She tells the New York Post: "Gospel is a word that means 'good news.' Oprah says that the good news is you."

My Turn!


Yale's Kathryn Lofton* -A Few Eggs Shy of an Easter Basket?

Ripped from Professor Kathryn Lofton's page at Yale - Prof Lofton's rigorous pedagogy.

Q. How does the scholar name the religious?

Me: A as Q. The Religious What?

How do scholars and students determine the history and meanings of religions within the political and social histories of the United States?

Me: A as Q. Badly?


Q.How do we understand these histories in the light of concepts of the secular, the modern West, or modernity?

Me: A as Q. In sweet words of the Apostles et al. to Jesus on Ascension Thursday, 'Come Again?'

Q. What are the relationships between consumer activity and religious identity or between sexual and religious practices?

Me: A as Q. Oprah? . . .Mother Earth? Wait, wait don't tell me!! Murial Abbot? No, Nancy Kulp! Oprah?

At Yale, Professor Lofton teaches courses that seek to answer these questions of history simultaneously with those of social science classification and cultural studies.

No box scores?


Oprah - Seat of Wisdom? Nah.

And yet Yale is a preeminent American Seat of Learning. Happy Easter!


*

KATHRYN LOFTON
Department of Religious Studies
P.O. Box 208287
New Haven, CT 06520-8287
(203) 432-0836
e-mail kathryn.lofton@yale.edu
EMPLOYMENT
2009 - Assistant Professor of American Studies and Religious Studies, Yale University
courtesy appointments in the Department of History and Yale Divinity School
2008 - 2009 Associate Research Scholar, Center for the Study of Religion, Princeton University
2006 - 2008 Assistant Professor of American Studies and Religious Studies, Indiana University

2005 - 2006 Visiting Professor of Religion and Humanities, Reed College
EDUCATION
2005 Ph.D., Religious Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Thesis: “Making the Modern in Religious America, 1870-1935”
2002 M.A., Religious Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Honors, U.S. Religious History and Religion and Culture
2000 A.B, University of Chicago
Honors, the Committee on Religion in the Humanities and the Department of History
PUBLICATIONS
Monograph
Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011)
The Modernity in Mr. Shaw: Religion and Sexuality in America (in progress)
Edited Volumes
Women’s Work: An Anthology of African-American Women’s Historical Writings from Antebellum
America to the Harlem Renaissance, co-edited with Laurie Maffly-Kipp (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2010).
Indiana Magazine of History, 105: 2 (June 2009), “Special Issue: Thomas Hart Benton’s Indiana Murals at
75,” co-edited with Matthew Guterl.

I'll Go Biden on Oprah - BFD

Ho Hum! Something to do let's see. . . .yeah there was ham an' there was turkey, there was caviaran' long tall glasses, with wine yp to H'y'are!

Oh, Oprah! That'll kill a nano-second.

* Winfrey concocted stories about sexual abuse she suffered as a child -- and grossly exaggerated the poverty she was brought up in.

* She went to great lengths to conceal her "lesbian affairs" -- including hefty payoffs -- and publicly attached herself to Graham to appear more normal to her audience of housewives.


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* She lavished romantic gifts -- including a diamond toe ring -- on ABC talking head Diane Sawyer.

* Winfrey sold her body to earn extra money and has even described herself as a teen "prostitute."

* She doesn't know the true identity of her biological father.

* Her relationship with her own mother is so cold that Winfrey won't even let the older woman have her phone number.

Winfrey was born in Kosciusko, Miss., in 1954, and, the way she likes to tell it, she was so impoverished that she never had any new dresses or dolls and had to adopt two cockroaches as pets, naming them Melinda and Sandy.

But her family says that's nonsense.

She may not have been well off, but Oprah was relatively "spoiled" as a little girl, her cousin said.

"Where Oprah got that nonsense about growing up in filth and roaches I have no idea," said the relative, Katherine Carr Esters. "I've confronted her and asked, 'Why do you tell such lies?' Oprah told me, 'That's what people want to hear. The truth is boring.' "

A friend of Esters added that the manipulation of her past is a key to her success.

"Every move is calculated to further her brand and lift her image, which is why she does good works," Jewette Battles said.

As a teen, Winfrey was a wild child, promiscuous to the point of prostitution, her relatives said.

The future star would steal from her mother's purse, pawn her jewelry and even turn tricks. She was eventually sent to live in Nashville with Vernon Winfrey, who was her mother's former lover and who is listed on her birth certificate as her father. He has been described as the domineering disciplinarian who set her straight.

Later, determined to become rich and famous, Winfrey was ready to change her story to her advantage, making sure she cultivated her image as an everywoman, the book alleges.

That meant she had to quell rumors about her sexuality.

At one point, the rumors included seamy talk at ABC about a relationship between Winfrey and Sawyer when Oprah worked there.

Employees there described "giggly late-night phone calls" and a series of lavish gifts from Winfrey -- including gigantic sprays of orchids and a 1-carat diamond toe ring -- to Sawyer.

Despite such rumors, Kelley concludes Winfrey is "asexual."

Still, she quotes sources describing how, in 1989, Winfrey was insistent on paying Tim Watts, an ex-boyfriend, $50,000 to keep quiet about her lesbian affairs and the fact that her brother, who died of AIDS, was gay.

"He said she did not want him to talk about her brother being gay," said Judy Lee Colteryahn, who also dated Watts.

"It's no big deal to have a brother who is homosexual, but apparently it was to Oprah. Tim also said he knew about some lesbian affairs."

As for Winfrey's very public relationship with Graham, the pair do not even share a bedroom, according to the book.

Landscape architect James van Sweden of Oehme, who spent years working for the couple, said he planned to design a space for a wedding in front of their new estate but knew immediately after watching them together that there would never be a wedding.

"Oprah keeps Stedman around because she wants her audience to accept her as a normal woman with a man in her life, but from what I saw during those four years, I can tell you there's nothing there with Stedman. Nothing at all," he said.

"He's simply a fixture in her life," van Sweden added. "Window-dressing."

According to her father, Vernon, Oprah admitted that she was not in love with Stedman.

"I'm in like . . . not in love," she told him, according to the book.

She did reportedly have one affair with a man -- "Entertainment Tonight's" John Tesh, while the two were working in Nashville.

According to Tesh's ex, he broke things off because he couldn't deal with the stigma of being an interracial couple.

"He said one night he looked down and saw his white body next to her black body and couldn't take it any more," the ex said. "He walked out in the middle of the night."

Winfrey has played coy on Tesh.

Vernon Winfrey says he's been dismayed by how Oprah plays fast and loose with the truth.

"She may be admired by the world, but I know the truth," he says. "So does God and so does Oprah. Two of us remain ashamed."

Vernon reserves his harshest words for Winfrey's best friend, Gayle King, who put the kibosh on a biography he was working on.

Calling her a "dirt hog" and "street heifer," he blames King for a rift in his relationship with Oprah.

"She's become too close to that woman Gayle," he says.

King and others in Oprah's entourage worked hard to keep a tight grip on employees in order to keep her out of the tabloids.

"I thought I would be working for the warm and fuzzy person I saw on television," a former employee at Winfrey's Harpo production company said. "But, God, I was conned. It's a cult at Harpo. So oppressive it's frightening."

Perhaps the biggest secret of the book is left a secret.

Oprah allegedly does not know the true identity of her father.

Esters told Kelley who he is, on the condition she not publish the information until Winfrey's mother comes clean to her daughter.

"And you'll know when that happens because Oprah will probably have a show on finding your real father," Esters said. "As I said, the girl wastes nothing."

Let's see, now. . . Oprah refused to help the black kids at Leo High School, but hundreds of old middle class Catholic white guys pump dough here; she is omnipresent; hangs out with goofs . . .she is how important to me? What does Oprah mean to me? Oh yeah!

Oooooooo Lunch!

Dang! Missed lunch again; not good.

MSNBC Always Wrong and Mayor Daley is not the goat on the Olympic Bid

TODD: But the biggest political loser here is Mayor Daley in Chicago. Nobody had more on the line than Mayor Daley. He was pushing this, this was his pet project. He's the one that just put so much pressure on the White House to get the President out there. He worked this White House, every contact he had here, harder than anybody.

Nice try Chuck!

The Olympic bid by Chicago was solid.

Pat Ryan has never drawn a stupid breath in his life.

Mayor Daley's game was on.

Chicago's media was schizophrenic - "Corruption/Taxes?Machine . . .Oh, but Oprah likes it and the Obama White House is behind it . . .sort of."

As a guy who rides on financial fumes at the end of every pay cycle and prays the Memorare every half hour so that my City Parkway Maple Tree Roots ( Oh, Green Raptures!) do not insinuate their way into my sewer discharge pipes until a rich relative leaves me a check to cover the Roto Rooter costs in a will, the Chicago 2016 Olympic bid is about as important to me as the Mega Millions Jackpot. I stand to benefit from neither such bonanza.

However, I admired the gusto and verve that our Olympic 2016 Committee put out to nail the bid.

Mayor Daley should be applauded and loudly.

MSNBC - the General Electric Megaphone - wants cover for its political Brahma Bull - President Obama.

President Obama looks bad - real bad; Comb Over Dave Axelrod, Rahmbo, Valerie 'Green Jones' Jarrett look silly. THe Olympic 2016 bid was their pooch to screw and screw it they did.

Chicagoans know that the Boiled Beet Progressive amateurs in the Obama White House could not fix a Red Light traffic beef, let alone be players on the International scene. They called the shots for equally inexperienced Chief Executive on this one and on so many other pooches on the front pages of America.

Mayor Daley's power and leadership remains undiminished.

Chuck Todd and MSNBC cheerleader tried to shift the blame on Mayor Daley.

No Chuckie boy . . .this one is on the children of privilege - the Hyde Park mafia weaned on 501(c)3 money and appointed posts in government.

President Obama's approval numbers will be in the Marianas Trench of public approval by Columbus Day - which real Chicagoans celebrate with gusto and verve.

The Boiled Beet Progressives hate Columbus Day - mercifully they have nothing to do with it.

Nope, MSNBC -wrong as always - this one is on the Obama Amateur Hour White House. It's their jacket to wear.