Category: Celebrities

Bizarre Drama Surrounds Teenage ‘Modern Family’ Starlet Ariel Winter

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If you’re like me, your TV viewing is limited almost entirely to news, more news, documentaries and old movies, which means you don’t watch network primetime shows, and therefore have never heard of Ariel Winter. She is a 14-year-old actress who stars in the ABC comedy Modern Family, which is one of the network’s most popular shows, with an audience of more than 12 million viewers.

Like most of you — we’re all political news junkies here, right? — I was only vaguely aware that this TV show existed and had never heard of Ariel Winter at all until last week when the tabloid sites like TMZ started going nuts about an ugly custody battle involving Winter, her mother and Winter’s older sister.

A California court ordered Ariel removed from her family home because of accusations that her mother physically abused her:

[O]n October 3rd, after a guardianship hearing, a judge determined the allegations  that Ariel was being physically and emotionally abused by her mother Chrystal Workman were serious enough that the judge placed  Ariel in a temporary guardianship with her older sister Shanelle  Workman. . . .
Ironically, we’ve learned Shanelle suffered the  same alleged abuse as Ariel.  Nearly two decades ago, the Department of  Children and Family Services removed her from Chrystal’s home based on similar  abuse allegations. Law enforcement sources tell us … D.C.F.S. placed Shanelle  in foster care for more than 2 years. She never went back to her mother.

OK, this is serious stuff. But there is another side of the story: Ariel has reportedly been dating an 18-year-old actor named Cameron Palatas and, according to Ariel’s mother, the two young lovebirds were, um, inappropriately intimate:

The mother of Modern Family star Ariel Winter filed an incident report with the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department after she allegedly caught her 14-year-old daughter engaged in a sexual act with an 18-year-old man.
The police filing — obtained exclusively by Celebuzz — details “suspicious circumstances, possible unlawful sex with minor,” according to the officer who spoke to Chris Workman, Winter’s mother, on October 6. . . .
“On 09-24-12, at approximately 2200-hours, she walked in the guest bedroom of her home and found her daughter, Ariel Winter Workman, in bed with boyfriend, [Name Redacted],” the three-page report claims.
Workman told the Sheriff explicit details about what she saw when she walked into the room at her Montrose, Calif. home. . . .
“According to the informant, Ariel and [Name Redacted] have been boyfriend/girlfriend for approximately 5 months. She has attempted to break them up because of their age difference.” . . .
In an earlier statement on Thursday, Workman claimed her teenage daughter’s relationship with the man, four years her senior, was the real reason behind the young actress’ decision to ask a judge to temporarily place her in her sister’s care. . . .
Workman told Celebuzz she “caught them engaging in behavior that I feel my daughter is too young mentally and physically to understand.”
“I put a stop to it immediately,” Workman said.
“I filed charges against him because legally he is an adult and if he wants to engage in adult behavior with a minor than he should also be ready to suffer adult consequences for his actions and poor judgment.”

The gossip site makes a big deal of not naming Ariel’s boyfriend, but it’s not exactly a secret, per this Newark Star-Ledger headline:

More ‘Family’ drama: Ariel Winter’s
boyfriend Cameron Palatas targeted by mom

So we have Ariel accusing her mom of abuse and Ariel’s mom accusing Palatas of robbing the cradle, and all of this lurid stuff involving the young star of one of TV’s most popular sitcoms is being played out daily in the gossip headlines.

TMZ seems intent on making Ariel’s mom the villain in the story, implying that she just made up the sex allegation after she lost custody, but as a parent — and having once also been a teenage boy — I’m decidedly more sympathetic to the mother’s side of the dispute.

All in all, this story does not bode well for Ariel Winter’s future and, having watched similar dramas play out in the cases of former teen stars like Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan, I’d say we’re just a few years away from seeing headlines along the lines of “Ariel Winter gets another DUI” and “Ariel Winter goes back to rehab.”

On TV, Modern Family is a comedy. In real life, not so much.

The Execrable Bill Maher

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Noel Sheppard asks, “Exactly how does HBO put up with this week after week after week?”

“The other good news is the Republicans are taking the loss well. Who am I kidding? Are you serious? No. It’s like half the nation just found out that their wife is f–king a black guy. That’s what really happened.”

Update (Smitty): if I may be so rude as to step on a Stacy post,

 

“We’ll Fight Again Tomorrow”

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— by Wombat-socho


The post title, of course, is from Michelle Malkin’s morning after column, which was a bright torch amid the gloom of Obama’s victory. Indeed, conservatives must stand tall, resist the siren songs of “moderation” and “compromise” and continue to present America with a choice, not an echo. We must take note of things that went wrong, but keep in mind that there were things that went well; these are both summed up well by Dana Loesch. So, to echo Lenin, what is to be done?


We can start with Bill Quick’s angry post-mortem. As much as I respect Ed Morrissey, Bill is absolutely correct to savage him for the “messaging” nonsense he’s spouting, which is no different from the kind of crap we used to mock Thomas Frank for pooting forth. We’re dealing with people that would rather be hip than smart, and “fairness” has always been an easier sell than the fable of the Little Red Hen, especially if you’re one of the hipsters who wants their bread and circuses for free. Bill also makes the point that we were wrong about the polls and Nate Silver was right; our desire to believe that America was still a center-right nation blinded us to the ugly reality of the polls, and as happens every time you wish away bad news or unpleasant facts, they come back to bite you.


We can then look to Mark Levin, who called for Karl Rove to get off the stage, and linked to this Bloomberg article that openly mocked Rove as “Biggest Super-PAC Loser”. Stacy and others have been saying for years that the Establishment GOP and their consultant pilot fish need to be forcibly retired, and this massive failure on the part of the Establishment calls for not just retirement, but a wholesale application of wooden stakes and decapitations. This is the second Presidential election in a row that we have lost thanks to The Powers That Be anointing a “moderate, electable” candidate who was promptly painted as a soulless monster by the Democrats and the press (BIRM); in the end, they turned out not to be so electable after all. Worse, their much-vaunted ad spending didn’t buy us victory in the places we needed it the most, while Obama’s Operation Narwhal identified marginal voters and got them to the polls.


I think the conflict between the Washington Establishment and the TEA Party needs to come to a head, and we need to make sure the TEA Party wins. We need to build on those populist networks and rebuild local GOP party organizations from the ground up, allying with the Ron Paul libertarians to take power away from Washington and return it to Richmond, Austin, Nashville, Raleigh, Salt Lake City and the rest of the state capitals. We need conservative precinct captains and volunteer cadres who know the territory (and their neighbors) far better than any last-minute PAC-sponsored crew of door-knockers ever could. For too long, we’ve allowed the party of Main Street to be run from K Street, and now in this moment of defeat, we have a chance to reach out to the Stewart Adelsons and Bob Perrys and convince them that they can get more bang for their buck by supporting the little grassroots platoons instead of the big, plush headquarters that spent so much and accomplished so little.


This local emphasis also addresses the problem of culture change. We have a Kulturkampf on our hands and have had for decades, but we’re beginning to fight back effectively. This is another area where we have an advantage over liberals. On balance, we tend to be more polite and friendly, less snarky and prone to hectoring and preaching. We can use those advantages to reach out one on one to disaffected minorities and other people who are getting hosed by the seemingly endless misery of the Obama Depression. We may not change enough minds in two years, or even four, but we have to remember we’re playing the long game. It took the progressives most of the last century to get their hooks into education, entertainment, and news media, and it may take us just as long to take them back or (more likely) supplant them with schools and media of our own. That doesn’t mean we should give up; this is a #WAR, and we are all Breitbart’s soldiers in it.


Once we control the local parties, from townships to state committees, WE will be the ones deciding who the candidates are. We will have the ability to block another “moderate” like Mitt Romney or Stacy’s Crazy Cousin John from the nomination. We will take our government back at every level. It all starts with us, in our precincts and wards, building a political force of extraordinary magnitude, purging the Karl Roves and any other talking head who thinks they can control the party from a K Street office. It starts with you. It starts today.

The Self-Dramatizing Victimhood Narrative of Lana (Neé Larry) Wachowski

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There is nothing more pathological in contemporary culture than our de rigeur celebration of the hero/martyr/victim as the ambitional ideal. If you can achieve nothing else in life, you can always claim victimhood and be applauded for it. This is why we have hate hoaxes by people like Sharmeka Moffitt, and this is why all the bien-pensants expect us to join their pity party for Lana Wachowski:

Director Lana Wachowski, whose films include Cloud Atlas and the Matrix trilogy and who came out as transgendered earlier this year, told an audience in San Francisco last weekend that she nearly committed suicide as a young adult because of her identity struggles.
“In the absence of words to defend myself, without examples, without models, I began to believe voices in my head – that I was a freak, that I am broken, that there is something wrong with me, that I will never be lovable,” Wachowski said at the Human Rights Campaign’s gala dinner in San Francisco, where she accepted the LGBT organization’s Visibility Award.

Congratulations! You’ve won the “Visibility Award”! You are now a Certified Official Victim-Hero! From Wachowski’s acceptance speech:

 I am completely horrified by the “talk show,” the interrogation and confession format, the weeping, the tears of the host [applause] whose sympathy underscores the inherent tragedy of my life as a transgender person. And this moment fulfilling the cathartic arc of rejection to acceptance without ever interrogating the pathology of a society that refuses to acknowledge the spectrum of gender in the exact same blind way they have refused to see a spectrum of race or sexuality. . . .

(See? It’s society’s fault.)

I remember the third grade, I remember recently moving and transferring from a public school to a Catholic school. In public school I played mostly with girls, I have long hair and everyone wears jeans and t-shirts. In Catholic school the girls wear skirts, the boys play pants. I am told I have to cut my hair. I want to play Four Square with the girls but now I’m one of them — I’m one of the boys. . . .

(He never got over third grade — or Four Square, for that matter.)

Here in the absence of words to defend myself, without examples, without models, I began to believe voices in my head — that I was a freak, that I am broken, that there is something wrong with me, that I will never be lovable.
After school I go to the nearby Burger King and write a suicide note. It ends up being over four pages. [laughter] I’m a little talkative. But it was addressed to my parents and I really wanted to convince them that it wasn’t their fault, it was just that I didn’t belong. I cry a lot as I write this note . . .

Well, boo hoo hoo. You see how the celebration of victimhood encourages people to think of their self-pity as justified, as a reaction to “society,” externalizing blame for their own unhappiness onto the uncaring Other. The culture of victimhood permits them to embrace their selfish narcissism — their lack of empathy or understanding for the innumerable Others lumped into the dehumanizing category “society” — in order to export their sense of shame onto these scapegoats: “How dare you be insensitive to my problems, you hateful bigots!”

Here’s the thing: All children experience occasional moments of social awkwardness. Many teenagers feel unloved and sad. These problems are so common as to be nearly universal, and yet Wachowski has such a sense of specialness and entitlement as to believe it horribly unfair — indeed, a social injustice, a violation of human rights — that he/she should ever have had such feelings. And so “society” must be scolded and punished, for we were all guilty of our failure to recognize Wachowski’s specialness.

Hey, Larry, what about your ex-wife, Thea Bloom? You know, the “college sweetheart” you married in 1993, and who divorced you in 2003 saying you had “been extremely dishonest . . . in our personal life”? Is she just part of that uncaring “society” against whom you rage? And isn’t it possible that your rage is actually an externalization of your own guilt feelings over the cruel deceit you practiced against her?

Where does Thea go to get her award?

Wachowski’s problem isn’t “gender identity disorder,” it’s egomania. And there is something profoundly perverse about a culture that empowers such bullies, by celebrating their make-believe victimhood and assisting their petty revenge on society in the name of “human rights.”

 

Obscure Ex-Starlet @SophiaBush Sticks Her #LadyParts Out on Twitter, With Hilariously Predictable Results

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Civility™ is getting so complicated, I just can’t keep up with all the new rules, in the same way I have trouble keeping track of which former starlets actually count as “celebrities.”

Last night, after I filed my American Spectator column about the debate — strategically, a win for Romney — I was kind of randomly browsing Twitter and saw Michelle Malkin having a war with someone named Sophia Bush:

It went on for a while, raising the obvious question: “Who is Sophia Bush?” I mean, Malkin’s a New York Times bestselling author, a syndicated columnist, New Media entrepreneur, Fox News contributor — a genuine somebody — so why is she arguing with this person I never heard of?

It began, evidently, when the actress read a satirical article mocking Ann Romney and Tweeted it out, apparently not recognizing that the stupid quotes attributed to Mrs. Romney were not anything the GOP candidate’s wife had actually ever said. Republican women then started arguing back at Ms. Bush on Twitter, causing her to get all huffy and defensive, finally issuing this intensely stupid retort:

Her idiocy earned Ms. Bush a post at Malkin’s Twitchy site, but she apparently failed to study the First Law of Holes, and began digging again Monday during the debate:

With that, I think, Sophia went from the ridiculous to the sublime. It’s like political haiku or something. Transcendent gibberish. And of course, Twitchy blew her up again.

Let us pause, readers, to contemplate the sequence: Sophia apparently cannot make any political statement without invoking her vagina, but if you object to argumentum ab vagina, this proves you’re some kind of insensitive misogynistic cretin. She just talks, talks, talks about her genitals, and we’re suppose to act like this is enlightened, sophisticated, praiseworthy, courageous.

Well, no, it’s weird and offensive.

Imagine you’re at the shopping mall and some woman you never met walks up to you and starts blabbering about her vagina.

Call 911, right? This woman’s either a crack whore or some kind of mental case, but either way, her behavior is so profoundly abnormal she must be a danger to herself or others.

Yet, thanks to Eve Ensler and the feminist movement, women like Sophia Bush have been persuaded that constantly talking about their vaginas in public is not only healthy and normal, but that anyone who is offended is a crazy right-wing extremist. The world has been turned upside down, so that the values are exactly reversed, and the crazy vagina-talkers think themselves fit to lecture others about “respect” and “civility.”

Although tempted to invoke my scrotum to settle the argument — “How dare you disrespect the First Amendment rights of my scrotum?” — this is unnecessary, as my point is simply this: The Left routinely defies all traditional norms and societal values, while reserving to themselves the right to be as indignant as a Victorian prude should anyone speak to them discourteously. It’s really just a crude totalitarian power-game, an expression of Marcusean radicalism, “liberating tolerance,” and it takes a strong mind to resist being lured into that Humpty-Dumpty alternative universe where words mean whatever the Left says they mean.

Well, to hell with the niceties, you see: Raw mockery is what they deserve, and I’ll make damned sure they get all they deserve. So I went right to work on Sophia Bush:

Let’s see here: Thirty years old, was queen of the 1999 Rose Bowl Parade, made her acting debut in 2002, best known for a cable TV show (One Tree Hill) you never heard of before, as well as a couple of movies John Tucker Must Die (2006) and The Hitcher (2007) you likewise never heard of before. Won a few “Teen Choice Awards” when she was, in fact, in her mid-20s.

Sophia can’t seem to keep a man. She was briefly married to her TV co-star Chad Michael Murray in 2005, but that didn’t last six months. She dated another co-star, James Lafferty, and then another, Austin Nichols, only to be returned to the reject pile each time. Basically, it looks like any male actor cast in One Tree Hill was contractually obligated to bang Sophia Bush for a while.

Is it cruel to mock her like this? Yes, purposefully so. Yet there’s nothing personal about it — heck, I never even heard of her until last night — and it’s not really political, either.

There are plenty of women every bit as liberal as Sophia Bush who don’t make themselves obnoxious by lashing out at Republicans, blabbering about their vaginas and acting as if they were courageous First Amendment heroes deserving of admiration and praise. If she’s going to get up in Michelle Malkin’s face with that kind of crude act, she’s practically handing us an engraved invitation to mock her politics, her miserable B-list career and her pathetic vagina, too.

Shut your pie-hole, woman, or I’ll start talking about my scrotum again.

Fake Celebrity Account Fools Drudge, Crashes Twitter With Endorsement

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If you were on Twitter last night, you might have noticed that the notorious “fail whale” made its unwelcome appearance for a while: Twitter was over capacity, and now we know why:

Drudge Report posted a headline that would likely perplex anyone who has followed the politics of various Hollywood celebrities.
Actor Jake Gyllenhaal, the news site read, has officially endorsed Republican candidate Mitt Romney for president.
The proof? Well, the outspoken liberal celebrity tweeted it . . .
Except one thing. That’s not Gyllenhaal’s actual Twitter account.
As others have documented before, the Twitter handle @Jake_Gyllenhaal is a fake account made by a fan.

The traffic surge from the mistaken headline — which appeared atop the left-side column at Drudge — was enough to push Twitter past capacity until the headline was removed later in the evening.

Speaking of Drudge and Twitter, I noticed this from Michelle Malkin:

What’s up with that? Why would Drudge be linking articles from 9/11 Truther Alex Jones’s InfoWars site — a Friday article by Michael Snyder and a Monday article by Paul Joseph Watson were both headlined by Drudge — rather than linking Malkin’s Twitchy site?

Considering how much traffic a Drudge link throws, why encourage an obnoxious conspiracy theorist who (and I remember it well) sicced a mob on Malkin at the 2008 Democratic convention?

Desperate to salvage the fizzled demonstration, 9/11 nutball Alex Jones started barking at me and attempting to make a scene and incite a riot.

Here’s the video in which you’ll see Charlie Martin of PJ Media acting as ad hoc bodyguard for Malkin while Alex Jones calls them “neocons” who “help destroy this country” and “sell it out to the New World Order,” declares that 9/11 was “an inside job,” then begins whipping up the anarchist mob that shouts, “Kill Michelle Malkin!”

Well, it’s a free country, but exactly why the hell would Matt Drudge want to throw traffic at someone like that?