Recently our 2008 eight-medal winning Olympic swimming champion smoked pot for the first time at a Michigan hotel. His reaction was a bit boisterous – the stoned Phelps broke all the televisions in his room, but later bought exact replicas so he could replace them before anybody at the hotel was the wiser. But we have to forgive Mr. Phelps since he’s been in training for most of his 23 years and this is the first time he has let loose.
Last week the still very, very sexy Susan Sarandon had her first face-lift. Susan is the mother of the statuesque and stunning 23 year old Eva Amurri.
It started early when Governor Spitzer of New York was identified as 
The year also started with a no drama Obama campaign and came full circle with an all drama Rahm Emanuel for Obama’s White House Chief-of-Staff. Rahm gets the job done and that’s huge. It will be good to have a little ‘safe’ drama in the White House. It’s only fair since Obama doesn’t give the late shows and comedians food for fodder – Rahm will.
You take a driver who, while attempting to pull out of a parking space, mistakes “forward” for “reverse,” then, in an effort to correct this error, mistakes the accelerator for the brake and sends his car lunging across a sidewalk and into a diner whilst attaining a speed of 40 mph by the time it rams into the salad bar and car and driver are saturated by carafes of salad dressing. 
Florida seems to attract inferior drivers like a magnet.
My nine year old nephew Elijah (a H-U-G-E Kobe fan!) will vehemently disagree with the title of this post.
The Republican Party’s selection of former Maryland Lieutenant Governor Michael Steele as party chief is almost as historic as the Democrats’ nomination of Barack Obama as the party’s presidential candidate. President Obama attracted many independents and even a smidgen of Republicans into the Democratic Party and widened the Democrats’ membership and popularity – can Steele do the same for the GOP? 
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had surgery today after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, the court said.
Even at first glance the image of a black chimpanzee represented a black man to me. Once I read the caption and the dead chimp was associated with the stimulus package I thought 
Not so long ago in May 2008 
In 2005, his daughter Maya Keyes came out as a lesbian and it was reported that her family threw her out the house and stopped talking to her. The family allegedly reconciled in 2007.
Tonight, five weeks into his presidency, President Obama will address a joint session of Congress.
Despite the demise of his endorsement deal with General Motors, Woods’ comeback stands to generate other business opportunities. On his bag he will carry the logo of AT&T, the company that sponsors his tournament outside of Washington, D.C., over the Fourth of July. Nike, which manufactures Woods’ clubs, balls and apparel, is also planning to release a new commercial timed to his comeback at the Match Play. The company often has launched commercials to coincide with Woods’ victories, including at the 2005 British Open and at last year’s U.S. Open, his final tournament before undergoing ACL surgery.
It’s (almost) official: The Obamas are getting a rescued 
Yesterday night it was very different story.
On Tuesday President Obama continued with his diplomacy push and met with Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso. Obama told Aso that the United States wanted to strengthen ties with Japan, a country Obama described as the cornerstone of U.S. security policy in East Asia and a major economic partner. Aso, who is struggling to stay in power, was the first foreign leader to visit the Obama White House, and the president called the prestigious invitation “a testimony to the strong partnership between the United States and Japan.”
Obama is proving that he can ‘walk and chew gum’ at the same time.
Last Thursday President Obama laid all his economic cards on the table when he revealed his first budget. He decided to do what has never been done in Washington before and treated taxpayers like grown-ups. He was open, honest and straightforward about what Washington has spent in the past and what he proposes to spend to get our economy out from it’s deep abyss.
On Friday, February 27 President Obama and friend Marty Nesbitt watched the Washington Wizards play the Chicago Bulls at the Verizon Center in Washington.
He sat next to 5 year old DC native Nicholas Aiello. Obama and Aiello chatted several times during the game.
Obama wore a black collarless shirt and a black sport coat and remained in his courtside seat until just before halftime and returned just after the start of the third quarter.
The U.S. economy lost 651,000 jobs in February, the fourth month in a row where job losses were near or above 600,000 and the unemployment rate climbed to 8.1%, the highest rate in over 25 years. 
Billionaire Warren Buffett whose Berkshire Hathaway Inc. posted its worst results ever in 2008, said the economy “has fallen off a cliff” and that efforts to stimulate recovery may lead to inflation higher than the 1970s. 
The Republican Party is full of prophets.
If you are the owner of a small business President Obama wants to help you. The President knows that many small businesses are struggling during the recession so he has requested that the US Treasury do something to help small businesses get loans so they can meet their expenses. 
She was joined by students from Bancroft Elementary School in the District of Columbia. The children will stay involved with the project including planting herbs, vegetables and fruits in the coming weeks and harvesting the crops later in the year.
On Friday Elena Kagan, 48, was sworn-in by Chief Justice John Roberts and became the nation’s first female Solicitor General, a position informally regarded as the tenth Supreme Court justice.
Sunday night in a pregame interview at the Nets’ Izod Center (Cavs 96/Nets 88) the subject of the rivalry between LeBron James and Dwyane Wade came up.
This is the kind of cavalier chatter that will cause Cleveland fans to freak and Knicks fans to wish upon a star.
Nationally existing home sales were up 5.1 percent according to the National Association of Realtors which equals to 4.72 million homes sold.
Now is the time to purchase your first home!
Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula de Silva in the past has argued that poor and developing nations have been victims of mistakes made in richer countries, caused by irresponsibility or a lack of regulation in the world’s banking systems. 
In an effort to improve water quality in Washington waters, the state is reducing one of the most common causes of pollution: phosphorus in household products. 
Magic – absolute magical, impressive and dramatic!!!
What a great example the Obama’s are setting! New presidents have traditionally undertaken extensive redecoration efforts to their personal quarters reflect their own tastes, with a new Oval Office rug tradition ringing in as the priciest item. 
The United States and Russia 
The leaders agreed to craft a replacement for the expiring 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which limited the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals to between 1,700 and 2,200 warheads, known as START before it expires on December 5, 2009. It seems that a formal USA/Russia summit 
President Obama said that a new arms control treaty push
First Lady Michelle Obama arrives at 10 Downing Street…
First Lady with Prime Minister Gordon Brown…
First Ladies Brown and Obama…
The International Monetary Fund has received super financial powers at the G20 meetings and it seems to me that we might be on our way to a New World Financial Order. 
Police in riot gear stand outside a Royal bank of Scotland branch. Thousands of demonstrators converged on London’s financial district on chanting “abolish money” and “storm the banks” in a heavily policed protest to coincide with the G20 summit of world leaders. 
In the case of Barack Obama’s first visit to London and the Group of 20 conference to save the endangered habitat of bankers and real estate salesmen, it was the handshake with the bobby that seemed to be emblematic. In a forest of waving palms, this handshake meant more. 
The other thing that she rose above was Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip: Honey, we shrunk the royal family. If ever we needed a totemic image of the merits of a republic over a monarchy, this was it. 
Of all the G-20 wives, Carla Bruni, a k a Mrs. Nicolas Sarkozy, was noticeably absent. With her carefully demure wardrobe and the fluttered eyes of a reformed and legitimized mistress, she was too canny to let her herself be compared to those dumpy other halves. It left one dying to see what Jackie O.-type manipulation would go down when the Obamas crossed the Channel for the NATO summit meeting. 
The French are never happy coming to London; this is an ancient and comforting enmity. President Nicolas Sarkozy of France plays nicely to our patronizing stereotypes. He is a small man, a Gallic in lifts who can’t hide the puffed-up, tip-toe insecurities of his shortness. Almost as if he wanted the world to think he has Napoleon syndrome, he postured and pouted and made arbitrary demands, and drew lines in the sand. 
We may be in the rare position of having an American president who has a deeper mandate among people who could never vote for him than with those who did. For the time being, he has only to offer his hand, and ask politely.
Turkey is the first predominantly Muslim nation that President Obama has visited in his quest to improve the United States’ relationship with Muslims worldwide and the America-Turkey relationship is very complicated.
Turkey maintains a small military force in Afghanistan, part of the NATO contingent working with U.S. troops to beat back the resurgent Taliban and deny al-Qaida a safe haven along the largely lawless territory that straddles Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan. Turkey’s participation carries enormous symbolic importance to the Muslim world because of its presence in the fight against Islamic extremism. Albania, one of the poorest nations in Europe, has a small contingent in Afghanistan.
Obama is admired in Turkey. One Kurdish village sacrificed 44 sheep when he was elected, and a major bank used his image in a successful ad campaign on billboards and television in recent weeks. Still, many Turks remain suspicious about U.S. intentions.
One of President Barack Obama’s first stops on his visit to Turkey will be the imposing mausoleum of the national founder and independence war hero whose personality cult dominates the nation seven decades after his death.
If tradition holds in Ankara, the American president will lay a wreath Monday at the site of soaring stone columns, red, white and green marble, a gold mosaic ceiling and a huge sarcophagus. The tribute is vital to the alliance between Turkey and the United States which seeks help in its Iraq pullout and NATO’s troubled Afghan campaign.
A speech to parliament by Obama will restore good will, and reinforce the Western view that Turkey can serve as an example that Islam and democracy can flourish together, despite internal divisions and concerns about reform.
He landed at a well fortified Baghdad International Airport and his plan to visit Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki and President Jalal Talabani changed because visibility problems disrupted his plans to fly by helicopter to meet them in person. 
The main reason for President Obama’s visit was to visit our brave heros in Iraq. While at Camp Victory he presented ten medals of valor to our soldiers. 
President Obama said, 
Saturday during a UNASUR (
Prior to that, on Friday, at the opening of the Summit, Chavez went out of his way and “bum-rushed” President Obama with a camera crew and literally ‘pilfered’ a handshake.
Driving while speaking on cell phones and driving while texting is not mentioned in this report but I see folks swerving from lane to lane while talking or texting every minute I’m driving, which is very dangerous.
Bon Ami, an earth friendly cleaning powder and polishing powder, is celebrating its 120th year anniversary. The polishing cleanser, which works magic on stove tops, is made from calcite & feldspar mineral abrasives, and biodegradable detergent. It does not contain chlorine, perfume, or dye. The cleaning powder, which will make your tub sparkle, is recommended by allergists because it is gentle. This product is safe to use almost everywhere in your home.
Ecover, founded in Belgium in 1980, makes its earth-friendly cleaning products in a factory with a grass roof for insulation, wooden beams from a sustainable forest, and bricks made from coal mine waste. This glass and surface cleaner has a light floral scent and leaves mirrors completely streak free and clean of residue.
Seventh Generation Natural Green Mandarin and Leaf Shower Cleaner has real mandarin and spearmint essential oils that masks the odor of hydrogen peroxide — a safe bacteria and fungus killing agent — that also removes stains and impressively whitens bathtubs. 
While President Obama met with executives from the leading credit card companies yesterday two senators have called on the Federal Reserve to immediately implement an emergency freeze on interest rates tied to existing balances on credit cards. 
In vast contrast President and Michelle Obama are the toast of Washington. It shows that being likeable is an important asset for leaders even for our President and First lady. 
In life some people have most everything stacked in their financial favor but it doesn’t stop them from being greedy. The wealthy in America have had tax breaks that allow them to keep more of what they earn AND the wealthy have also had laws that have allowed them to move their monies out of America (where they earned the money) to countries where they don’t have to pay taxes on that money and therefore keep more money in their greedy little paws while keeping tax money out of the Feds bank account. 
The move comes as the IRS continues its crackdown on offshore accounts through a high-profile investigation involving thousands of people with Swiss bank accounts managed by the United Bank of Switzerland (UBS) in Zurich. The proposal restricts the ability of companies to defer taxes owed on profits earned overseas and eliminates a popular method, known as “check the box”, for reducing taxes through transfers of money to overseas affiliates. The proposal will also target individuals whom the IRS suspect of hiding income offshore and these individuals would bear the burden of proof, rather than the IRS. With the proposed changes IRS penalties for failing to make required disclosures about foreign accounts would be doubled in some cases under the plan.
Radio personality Rush Limbaugh who seems to be the anointed spokesman for the GOP is trying to kick retired General Colin Powell out of the Republican Party. 
Crews spent the past few days building the stage and setting up signs for the big event. There will be mariachi music, Native American performances and marching bands. Rock icon Alice Cooper will be the opening act.
“Have you met ROTUS?” This is a question 
“I tried not to be very star-struck,” Ms. Page said of the golfer’s recent visit. “I’m usually not, but I was caught completely off guard. All of the people that come in, I think, are humbled by the office, so they are all very nice.”
There should be no political correctness during the playoffs and that’s the way it should remain. Supporters should not hide their love for their favorite teams. I understand players being diplomatic because they don’t want to provide fodder that will annoy, irritate or anger their opponents. But I’m not a player so I don’t have to be genteel. 
Former U.S. Senator John Edwards has secretly undergone a DNA test and supposedly the test confirms that he’s the father of his former mistress’ 18 month old daughter Frances Quinn. 
WASHINGTON — In 1850, the elderly master of a South Carolina estate took pen in hand and painstakingly divided up his possessions. Among the spinning wheels, scythes, tablecloths and cattle that he bequeathed to his far-flung heirs was a 6-year-old slave girl valued soon afterward at $475.
In his will, she is described simply as the “negro girl Melvinia.” After his death, she was torn away from the people and places she knew and shipped to Georgia. While she was still a teenager, a white man would father her first-born son under circumstances lost in the passage of time.
In the annals of American slavery, this painful story would be utterly unremarkable, save for one reason: This union, consummated some two years before the Civil War, marked the origins of a family line that would extend from rural Georgia, to Birmingham, Ala., to Chicago and, finally, to the White House.
Melvinia Shields, the enslaved and illiterate young girl, and the unknown white man who impregnated her are the great-great-great-grandparents of Michelle Obama, the first lady.
Viewed by many as a powerful symbol of black advancement, Mrs. Obama grew up with only a vague sense of her ancestry, aides and relatives said. During the presidential campaign, the family learned about one paternal great-great-grandfather, a former slave from South Carolina, but the rest of Mrs. Obama’s roots were a mystery.
Now the more complete map of Mrs. Obama’s ancestors — including the slave mother, white father and their biracial son, Dolphus T. Shields — for the first time fully connects the first African-American first lady to the history of slavery, tracing their five-generation journey from bondage to a front-row seat to the presidency.
The findings — uncovered by Megan Smolenyak, a genealogist, and The New York Times — substantiate what Mrs. Obama has called longstanding family rumors about a white forebear.
While President Obama’s biracial background has drawn considerable attention, his wife’s pedigree, which includes American Indian strands, highlights the complicated history of racial intermingling, sometimes born of violence or coercion, that lingers in the bloodlines of many African-Americans. Mrs. Obama and her family declined to comment for this article, aides said, in part because of the personal nature of the subject.
“She is representative of how we have evolved and who we are,” said Edward Ball, a historian who discovered that he had black relatives — the descendants of his white slave-owning ancestors — when he researched his memoir, “Slaves in the Family.”
“We are not separate tribes of Latinos and whites and blacks in America,” Mr. Ball said. “We’ve all mingled, and we have done so for generations.”
The outlines of Mrs. Obama’s family history unfolded from 19th century probate records, yellowing marriage licenses, fading photographs and the recollections of elderly women who remember the family. Ms. Smolenyak, who has traced the ancestry of many prominent figures, began studying the first lady’s roots in earnest after conducting some preliminary research into Mrs. Obama’s ancestry for an article published in The New York Times earlier this year.
Of the dozens of relatives she identified, Ms. Smolenyak said, it was the slave girl who seemed to call out most clearly.
“Out of all Michelle’s roots, it’s Melvinia who is screaming to be found,” she said.
When her owner, David Patterson, died in 1852, Melvinia soon found herself on a 200-acre farm with new masters, Mr. Patterson’s daughter and son-in law, Christianne and Henry Shields. It was a strange and unfamiliar world.
In South Carolina, she had lived on an estate with 21 slaves. In Georgia, she was one of only three slaves on property that is now part of a neat subdivision in Rex, near Atlanta.
Whether Melvinia labored in the house or in the fields, there was no shortage of work: wheat, corn, sweet potatoes and cotton to plant and harvest, and 3 horses, 5 cows, 17 pigs and 20 sheep to care for, according to an 1860 agricultural survey.
It is difficult to say who might have impregnated Melvinia, who gave birth to Dolphus around 1859, when she was perhaps as young as 15. At the time, Henry Shields was in his late 40s and had four sons ages 19 to 24, but other men may have spent time on the farm as well.
“No one should be surprised anymore to hear about the number of rapes and the amount of sexual exploitation that took place under slavery; it was an everyday experience, “ said Jason A. Gillmer, a law professor at Texas Wesleyan University, who has researched liaisons between slave owners and slaves. “But we do find that some of these relationships can be very complex.”
In 1870, three of Melvinia’s four children, including Dolphus, were listed on the census as mulatto. One was born four years after emancipation, suggesting that the liaison that produced those children endured after slavery. She gave her children the Shields name, which may have hinted at their paternity or simply been the custom of former slaves taking their master’s surnames.
Even after she was freed, Melvinia stayed put, working as a farm laborer on land adjacent to that of Charles Shields, one of Henry’s sons.
But sometime in her 30s or 40s, census records show, Melvinia broke away and managed to reunite with former slaves from her childhood on the Patterson estate: Mariah and Bolus Easley, who settled with Melvinia in Bartow County, near the Alabama border. Dolphus married one of the Easleys’ daughters, Alice, who is Mrs. Obama’s great-great-grandmother.
A community “that had been ripped apart was somehow pulling itself back together,” Ms. Smolenyak said of the group in Bartow County.
Still, Melvinia appears to have lived with the unresolved legacy of her childhood in slavery until the very end. Her 1938 death certificate, signed by a relative, says “don’t know” in the space for the names of her parents, suggesting that Melvinia, then in her 90s, may never have known herself.
Sometime before 1888, Dolphus and Alice Shields continued the migration, heading to Birmingham, a boomtown with a rumbling railroad, an iron and steel industry and factories that attracted former slaves and their children from across the South.
Dolphus Shields was in his 30s and very light skinned — some say he looked like a white man — a church-going carpenter who could read, write and advance in an industrializing town. By 1900, he owned his own home, census records show. By 1911, he had opened his own carpentry and tool sharpening business.
A co-founder of First Ebenezer Baptist Church and Trinity Baptist Church, which later became active in the civil rights movement, he supervised Sunday schools at both churches, which still exist today, and at Regular Missionary Baptist Church.
“He was the dean of the deacons in Birmingham,” said Helen Heath, 88, who attended church with him. “He was a serious man. He was about business.”
He carried his family into the working-class, moving into a segregated neighborhood of striving black homeowners and renters. In his home, there was no smoking, no cursing, no gum chewing, no lipstick or trousers for ladies and absolutely no blues on the radio, which was reserved for hymns, remembered Bobbie Holt, 73, who was raised by Mr. Shields and his fourth wife, Lucy. She said the family went to church “every night of the week, it seemed like.”
He carried peppermints for neighborhood children, Mrs. Holt said, and told funny stories about his escapades as a boy. But his family struggled.
His first wife, Alice Easley Shields, moved around after they split up, working as a seamstress and a maid, and two of their sons stumbled.
Robert Lee Shields, Mrs. Obama’s great-grandfather, married Annie Lawson in 1906 and worked as a laborer and a railroad porter, but disappeared from the public record sometime around his 32nd birthday.
Willie Arthur Shields, an inventor who obtained patents for improving dry cleaning operations, ended up working as a maintenance man, Mrs. Holt said.
As for his ancestry, Dolphus Shields didn’t talk about it.
“We got to the place where we didn’t want anybody to know we knew slaves; people didn’t want to talk about that,” said Mrs. Heath, who said she assumed he had white relatives because his skin color and hair texture “told you he had to be near white.”
At a time when blacks despaired at the intransigence and violence of whites who barred them from voting, from most city jobs, from whites-only restaurants and from owning property in white neighborhoods, Dolphus Shields served as a rare link between the deeply divided communities.
His carpentry shop stood in the white section of town, and he mixed easily and often with whites. “They would come to his shop and sit and talk,” Mrs. Holt said.
Dolphus Shields firmly believed race relations would improve. “It’s going to come together one day,” he often said, Mrs. Holt recalled.
By the time he died in 1950 at age 91, change was on the way. On June 9, 1950, the day that his obituary appeared on the front page of The Birmingham World, the black newspaper also ran a banner headline that read, “U.S. Court Bans Segregation in Diners and Higher Education.” The Supreme Court had outlawed separate but equal accommodations on railway cars and in universities in Texas and Oklahoma.
Up North, his grandson, a painter named Purnell Shields, Mrs. Obama’s grandfather, was positioning his family to seize the widening opportunities in Chicago.
But as his descendants moved forward, they lost touch with the past. Today, Dolphus Shields lies in a neglected black cemetery, where patches of grass grow knee-high and many tombstones have toppled.
Mrs. Holt, a retired nursing assistant, said he came to her in a dream last month. She dug up his photograph, never guessing that she would soon learn that Dolphus Shields was a great-great-grandfather of the first lady.
“Oh my God,” said Mrs. Holt, gasping at the news. “I always looked up to him, but I would never have imagined something like this. Praise God, we’ve come a long way.”
Today in the Rose Garden President Obama said he was “surprised and deeply humbled” by the committee’s decision, and quickly put to rest any speculation that he might not accept the honor. Describing the award as an “affirmation of American leadership on behalf of aspirations held by people in all nations,” he said he would accept it as a “call to action.” 
If you believe in conspiracy theories, then this is right up there with the “chilled” envelope pulled by David Stern in the 1985 Draft lottery, putting Patrick Ewing in New York. You mean LeBron, a die-hard Yankees fan, gets an up-close look while the city is being painted in pinstripes? Is there a better marketing opportunity? 
The Knicks hope the intoxicating celebrity factor will be enough to sway LeBron next summer as a free agent, because that’s all the Knicks really have in their favor. They can’t offer more money. They can’t offer a better collection of teammates, at least not right away. They can offer Spike Lee while Cleveland offers Drew Carey. They can (and will, you watch) get Spike and Chris Rock, among other celebrity row fixtures, to make a recruiting film in which famous people explain to LeBron why playing in New York will be far more enjoyable than playing in Cleveland.
A handful of the Yankees, still smelling of champagne, will be strategically seated at courtside Friday, making LeBron the second-most loved athlete in the house … if Derek Jeter shows up. 
Then there’s C.C. Sabathia, big basketball fan and friend of LeBron’s from when Sabathia played in Cleveland; he left for New York and scored an instant jackpot, both with money and a ring. The video screen will constantly show their faces and they’ll get a standing ovation, all designed to show LeBron what it’s like to be a champion in New York. And the fans, no doubt, will chime in, cheering LeBron at warmups (like, who else will they cheer this year?), gushing whenever he does something spectacular and chanting “MVP,” as they did last year, when he dropped 52 on the Knicks.
All this will play to LeBron’s ego and convince him that a star of his magnitude needs to be in New York. That theory, by the way, is obsolete. Maybe 20-25 years ago, a star could receive better perks in New York, as Reggie Jackson did when he left the small market A’s. But with the global media and advertising of today, that’s not really necessary. LeBron blew up commercially without ever leaving Cleveland, and that will continue to be the case if he stays in Cleveland.
Obviously, the big factor for LeBron is collecting championships and whether his best chance is in Cleveland with a Cavs’ team that’s probably third-best behind Boston and Orlando and lacks a starry supporting cast, or a Knicks team being furiously stripped and rebuilt on the fly. The Knicks hope it also comes down to the stars and whether LeBron wants to hang with his buddy Jay-Z after the game, or retire to his palatial pad in Cleveland and call it a night.
This morning, we are one step closer to achieving health care reform in the United States of America. Can I get a “hip, hip!”
Olbermann: Those Who Live In Ice Igloos Shouldn’t Throw Lipstick
Tags: Keith Olbermann Special Comments, Kenya, Palin, Witch Doctor
I hope all you Obama supporters are smart enough to see that this is a good Kenyan witch doctor preacher praying over Sarah – the Bible states that in the ‘end-times’ all roads will lead to Alaska because you will be able to see hell (Russia) from Alaska and pergatory (Afghanistan) is a neighbor of Alaska. Rolling my eyes.
Obama supporters are just too blind to see the truth and too sophisticated to understand about witches!