Freedom of the press aint so free.

I’m on team Aniston by default. When news first broke of the Bradswap, I cared not one bit. And yet somewhere along the way I became, however minimally, emotionally invested in many things Brangelina.

As a teen and young adult, I was mildly obsessed with Angelina. Impressed with her brazen sultry/crazyness in Gia, and her pure crazyness in Girl, Interrupted (though the movie lacks a depth that the book has), I felt for her as a beautiful, talented and lonely actress. I was floored when I heard that she gives away 33% of her salary to charity.

But recently, Angelina Jolie’s zealousness has turned me against her. While watching crappy entertainment TV at the gym, I heard reports that she told celebrity couples “don’t adopt inner city kids, adopt third-world kids.” While flying on a plane back to New York City after Christmas, I feverishly read the VOGUE cover story on her. Key points:

• She doesn’t like to hug
• She loves her kids but sometimes needs to get away from them by staying in a hotel
• She likes to travel the world and thinks everyone should be worldy
• Brad and her hug at the end of the article in some dramatic way in the southwest desert and Annie Leibowitz flicks away

I even, however accidentally, tuned into her “I’m the best person in the world” interview with Ann Curry. I think it was an interview for her June 2007 movie “A Mighty Heart,” but it featured Brad and seemed to focus on their efforts to improve life in third-world countries.

From much of her and Brad’s recent exposure, there’s a sense that because she has done so much good, because she is one-half of the hottest couple on earth, the rules don’t apply.

A sense all too confirmed by yesterday’s New York Times article “A Deal Too Far: Interviewer’s Balk at Jolie’s Terms.” Here’s what happened;

The international celebrity do-gooder Angelina Jolie found herself in a strange situation this week when she insisted that journalists at the premiere of her new movie about a murdered journalist — a screening that was in itself an event on behalf of persecuted journalists — sign an agreement limiting their questions and their use of her answers.

To seek to limit journalists at a movie premiere about a journalist / “benefit for Reporters Without Borders, the Paris-based nonprofit organization that champions press freedom” isn’t playing by the rules. It’s saying those rules don’t even begin to apply to me. Jolie’s lawyer admits that the agreement was his doing and Jolie knew nothing of it, but I’m doubtful:

This wasn’t the first time such an agreement was used. Mr. Offer said journalists were asked to sign a similar agreement around the release of “Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” when Ms. Jolie and her co-star Brad Pitt caused a media firestorm over their apparent affair and the collapse of Mr. Pitt’s marriage to Jennifer Aniston.

Who doesn’t understand why Angelina would want that contract to protect her privacy? And yet she sets a standard that others can’t play by. Much of her career as a celebrity actress and much of her new family have used to the media to further their cause. So why limit the media when it tries to further it’s.

Justice: A Necessity

Today’s New York Times blog The Lede features a post about James Ford Seale. The Klu Klux Klansman was convicted yesterday by federal court for a crime committed four decades ago: the 1964 murder of two black men, Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee. Times reporter/blogger Patrick Lyons argues that while Seale’s delayed conviction is necessary, “it may well be too late to punish him in proportion to his crimes.” He continues:

At 71, even a life sentence for Mr. Seale would probably not be very long. When his health begins to fail, look for another essential American trait to kick in, and another emotional debate to begin about whether a man rendered harmless by illness and age ought to be sent home to die.

Phil Garner, a commenter, replies to Lyons and to other comments with a very moving argument about why we shouldn’t let go of justice:

I am two years younger than Seale, white, and a career-long Southern journalist, and linked to his generation of violent resistance by age, location and an occupation that made his business my business. I have been threatened by the Klan and fired from jobs for being too liberal. I find it worrisome that you would resort to curbstone psychologizing to figure out why we’d never let go. It isn’t a monument. It isn’t an obsession. It is a necessity.

Yes I just commented on a comment on a blog.

No really, us black people exist.

I love beautiful bustling diverse black people. But according to Hollywood or Lifetime TV or whatever, we’re not beautiful, and we’re maybe only pretty with white folk, we’re not diverse – er’ybody’s from the ghetto -- and even then, we don’t really exist. Take Army Wives, Lifetime TV’s new show about army wives. The show has ten characters, five couples. But here’s the thing:

• The real army is nearly 1/3 black, where only 1/5 of those couples is black
• The black couple features the wife as an officer and the husband as a layman
• (my bootleg cable doesn’t get me Lifetime so yeah)

The one black Army wife is Joan Burton. She is differentiated from all the other women on the show by being an actual officer, as opposed to the wife of an officer. I’m all for women fighting in the army, but to make the only black female on this show an officer furthers racial stereotypes of black women as un-sexual, tough and dominant beings, and is just damn uncreative. Give the sister the hot woa is me role of a well-to-do southern belle-ish army wife.

Let’s further consider Joan Burton’s character. Lifetime describes:

Raised on the tough streets of Chicago’s South Side, Joan overcame the challenges of a troubled youth…

Why is every fictional black person on TV from “the streets?” It’s a parochial characterization that denies the breadth of black Americans. More so when comparing Joan to the other female characters:

• Claudia Joy Holden is “Sophisticated, strong and smart.”
• Denise Sherwood is “an always proper, intelligent, but extremely shy girl.”
• Roxy LeBlanc is an “Alabama native … sexy and self-reliant single mother of two young boys.”
• Pamela Moran is a “soft beauty, which gives little clue to the tough, rebellious personality of this former Boston cop.”
  

There’s so much diversity among the white women on the show. The one black character who adds racial diversity, however, seems to fall within the very undiverse stereotype too often assigned by Hollywood to black women.

From all this it seems that it’s not that they don’t try to see us, it’s that they don’t want to.

No one, let alone these folks, deserves to be forgotten

This week in Colorado, former workers at nuke power plant were denied government compensation for illnesses from their exposure. A 6-4 panel decision ruled that even though scientists have not been able to determine the levels of radition exposure to these workers, scientists can and workers must wait until the scientists do before submitting an acceptable claim.

Of all industries, the bureaucracy that goes along with the more than rightful workers compentation for power plant workers is maddening:

Charlie Wolf, a former project engineer at the plant who now suffers from brain and bone marrow cancer, said he had waited more than four years before his claim was approved. “It’s hard for me to even read anymore,” said Mr. Wolf, whose bald head is creased by a nine-inch scar from brain surgery related to his cancer.

And the results are inhumane and fatal:

Michelle Dobrovolny, 42, is one of 15 family members who worked at Rocky Flats. Four have died of cancer. Five others are sick, among them Ms. Dobrovolny herself, who has a brain tumor.

“We’re the forgotten bunch,” she said.

No one deserves to be forgotten.

Two years for nook?!

The few mourning Paris’ sentence should turn their sympathies to Genarlow Wilson. Wilson was arrested three years ago for having consensual oral sex with a 15 year old. Then, he was only 17. Still the act, given the ages, is illegal in Georgia and Wilson was ordered to serve TEN years in prison.

Georgia law aside, I really think his was a case of LWB (Living While Black). Wilson was a star football player and an honors student.

Oh and check this:

Critics pointed out that if Mr. Wilson had engaged in full sexual intercourse with the girl instead of oral sex, under Georgia law he could have been charged only with a misdemeanor, because of an exemption written into the molestation law specifically to cover contact between minors. But because that exemption did not mention oral sex, when Mr. Wilson was convicted, he received a mandatory sentence of ten years in prison without possibility of parole.

Love that Georgia law that promotes fourth base to third base. Love them state’s rights.

Today, a Georgia Superior Court judge ordered the release of Wilson. Yay, one would think. But so much of this case is still infuriating:

· Wilson has already spent two years in prison

· He would have been released if he accepted a deal from the district attorney to “admit guilt and register as a sex offender, but Mr. Wilson has refused.”

· “Not until the thirteenth and last page was it clear that the judge had ordered that Mr. Wilson be freed.”

· the Attorney General will appeal the decision

What a Pulitzer Prize gets you.

AP photo-journalist Nick Ut is widely known for his 1972 Pulitzer Prize winning picture of the naked girl running down the road from her bombed village in Vietnam.

Nick Ut / The Associated Press

He now works the domestic celebrity shift in Los Angeles, CA taking pictures of Paris Hilton. Check out his picture today, currently on the front of NYTimes.com. It’s of Paris crying whilst being chauffeured back to jail.

Nick Ut / The Associated Press

What talent we devote to our world’s filth. I guess it’s a lead story.

I’d scam your pup.

This morning’s Today show featured a segment about American dog buyers being conned by Nigerian puppy scam artists. An American wanting a certain pure-breed dog that ‘retails’ at $900 would find an ad for that dog from a Nigerian breeder for $450. Realizing the good deal, the American would pay for the dog via money order. Then, the American would receive a confirmation email indicating that the ordered dog would arrive on such and such date at a nearby airport. Of course the dog would never arrive and the American would be out $450, desired pure-bred, and tons o’ pride.

The segment was supposed to elicit sympathy by featuring Granny, who promised her grandson a pure-breed pug. Flash to sad shots of Grandma and Grandson looking at sickly pure-breed pugs on the internet, flash to soundbites “I was really looking forward to our new pup” or “I feel so cheated.” Granny represented one of the hundreds of pure-bred lovers who had been scammed.

The thing is these folks who have been scammed are greedy, cheap and careless. Greedy because they want a rare and often very sickly species of dog when they could easily adopt or buy one of the millions of a lovable muts. Cheap because they want a dog half-off. And careless (and lazy) because they fail to follow basic and decent procedures of obtaining pets: getting to know the breeder, getting to know the pet and assessing health concerns. (Pure-breed fanatics are a bit scary, too).

To feature these foolish folk as victims is insulting. Thanks Today.