Today’s photo of the day comes from the NBA All-Star game, where Prince was seated directly next to Tony Parker’s partner, Eva Longoria. Why does this feel like a bad idea?

PLEASE ADD YOUR OWN CAPTIONS/THOUGHT BUBBLES!!!

Today’s video of the day shows Lebron James, Dwight Howard, and Shaquille O’Neal getting their dance on during an all-star game practice. This one is an instant classic!!!

The “talent of the century” hits the campaign trail, and while it isn’t clear who Obama really is, he’s certainly helping make it clear who the bad candidates are.

Obama Is the Best BS Artist Since Bill Clinton
By Matt Taibbi 

Last Friday night a friend called and told me that Barack Obama had posted a sort of pre-announcement of the start of his presidential campaign on his website. I immediately cued it up and within ten minutes was writing a column blasting him for ripping off half of his campaign speech from a smorgasbord of ‘04 Democratic candidates — then stopped when I realized that I’d already written exactly that column about Hillary Clinton’s kickoff speech a few weeks ago.

So I went back and watched the speech again, and I actually felt chills run up my spine. A few weeks ago, Hillary Clinton’s launch speech ripped off John Kerry and the DLC with its “Let’s have a conversation” theme; Obama, meanwhile, went the Howard Dean route, nicking “A campaign to take America back” from Dean and RFK Jr., among others. The fact that Hillary, like Kerry, is set up as the DLC-acolyte candidate while Obama, like Dean, is set up as the antiwar candidate suggests a kind of permanent template for the Democratic primary process. Maybe soon the race for the Democratic primary will be like Everytown USA’s annual high school production of A Streetcar Named Desire, where every year they find a new antiwar Blanche and a new pro-corporate Stanley. The faces are different, the lines are the same.

I’ve been on the fence about Obama for more than two years now, ever since his breakout performance at the Democratic convention in ‘04. When I saw that speech — an iconic piece of inspired nonsense/political showmanship, one that set flashbulbs popping like Michael Jordan’s virtuoso 1988 dunk contest performance — I knew right away that he would be the Democratic presidential nominee someday, perhaps even in the next election cycle.

When I mentioned this to my friends, they told me I was crazy. Obama had had absolutely no national experience at that time, he was a political virgin, there was no way he was ready for prime time. My answer to that was, compared to what? Throw a guy who can speak like that against the list of likely Democratic candidates in 2008 — a sorry collection of human saline drips that included Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, John Kerry, Joe Biden, and Chris Dodd — and Obama could fucking walk to the nomination, even if he chose a page from the Betty Crocker cookbook as his stump speech.

Fast forward two years and that appears to be exactly what Obama has done. The Illinois Senator is the ultimate modern media creature — he’s a good-looking, youthful, smooth-talking, buttery-warm personality with an aw-shucks demeanor who exudes a seemingly impenetrable air of Harvard-crafted moral neutrality. If Hillary Clinton even dares to open her mouth within a hundred feet of him at any time during the campaign, she’s going to come off like a pig digging for truffles. Even Edwards — the so-called “slick” candidate from ‘04 — sounds like a two-bit suburban Buick dealer next to Obama. You get past the “issues,” and it’s a wipeout.

Obama knows this, and so his entire political persona is an ingeniously crafted human cipher, a man without race, ideology, geographic allegiances, or, indeed, sharp edges of any kind. You can’t run against him on the issues because you can’t even find him on the ideological spectrum. Obama’s “Man for all seasons” act is so perfect in its particulars that just about anyone can find a bit of himself somewhere in the candidate’s background, whether in his genes or his upbringing. You can be white, you can be black, you can be Christian, you can be Muslim, you can be from the American heartland or from Africa…

For the rest of this article, click here. 

Tough World
By Cynthia Fuchs 

Monty (Idris Elba) is a good man. He’s hardworking, broad-shouldered, and affectionate toward his three young daughters, who turn giddy when he visits, proffering Pepperidge Farm treats and joyful hugs. His job down at Willie’s Garage doesn’t pay a whole lot, but he means to open his own auto shop some day, and so be able to keep his girls with him, rather than at his big-hearted ex-mother-in-law’s.

All this is set up in the first two minutes of Tyler Perry’s Daddy’s Little Girls. Yet another of Perry’s possessively titled, strenuously life-affirming melodramas, this film leaves out his broadest invention, the wildly popular drag character Madea. But it does rummage around in his usual themes and stereotypes, touching on some and hammering home others. Contrived and well-intentioned, the movie looks at the effects of class conflicts, single parenting, drugs, violence, and gang-bangers on regular folks in the neighborhood, located, here as in other Perry movies, in Atlanta.

Living in a one-bedroom walkup in the city’s Edgewood section, Monty is limited in what he can offer his girls, five-year-old China (China Anne McClain), seven-year-old Lauryn (Lauryn Alisa McClain), and 12-year-old Sierra (Sierra Aylina McClain). But when their grandmother (Juanita Jennings) dies, he brings them home and offers his own queen-sized bed, while he takes the couch. (Grandma coughs a couple of times, then informs Monty she’s got lung cancer as the camera reveals her array of prescription pill bottles and an ashtray half-filled with cigarette butts: somehow, Monty has heretofore missed these odious cues.)

At the funeral in the next scene, you meet Monty’s ex, the long-absent, excessively trashy Jenny (Tasha Smith). She arrives with a flurry of accusations (somehow, she wasn’t invited to her mama’s funeral) and wild gestures, determined to grab back her daughters just as they’re getting into Monty’s car. Supported gruffly by her live-in boyfriend, drug dealer and local menace Joe (Gary Sturgis), Jenny draws fire from her Aunt Rita (”You out whoring around all this time!”) but insists that she’ll get her daughters back: “We goin’ to court!” she promises, only because she wants to make Monty miserable, not because she actually wants her daughters.

For the rest of the review, click here.