VMA Gossip: A source who was there reports to BeansTalk: [that] "after attending the "Style Villa" at the Sagamore, where trimspa had the most famous bike in the world (The trimspa Orange County Chopper) on display, Jessica Simpson "put a bid on it" for Nick. That bike is valued over $1,000,000, but since trimspa was the sponsor for her (and ashlee's) post-VMA party, maybe she thought she would get a good deal.... I could see her really spending the $1,000,000 on the bike (kinda like she did with the Jacob [the Jeweler] watch) and Nick making her return it because it was so expensive. ;-) Also, at their post party, there was a HUGE fight which some say turned to a shooting because so many people wanted to get in. The party was also being web cast live, and after only 10 minutes....the server crashed due to volume of people trying to log on! Sounds to me like mixing Jess, Ash & Nick with trimspa was just too hot for
Bettina Angelli
Precious jewelry featuring superior craftsmanship and magnificent gems.
Brad Byrd
Singer/Songwriter
Colleen Quen Couture
Custom-made evening gowns and cocktail dresses.
Jelessy Collection
Novelty dye clothing with customizable lining and superb cutting.
Jünker
Rock 'n' Roll fashions for men and women.
Kiki Stash
One-of-a-kind handcrafted ensembles, along with lingerie, travel bags, and purses.
Kinky Chinky
Whimsical and fun one-of-a-kind and limited edition designs.
Nataya
Theatrical and folkloric womenswear.
Reese Li Baby
This is no ordinary diaper bag: functional and pretty.
Reo Starr Denim
Lived-in, hand-sanded, and Rock 'n' Roll-inspired denim.
Szulika
Contemporary women’s design - day and evening fashions.
Yvonne’s Pecans
Scrumptious pieces of sweet and spiced pecans.
Who’s Wearing What:
The Return of RuPaul: RuPaul's new album, RuPaul Red Hot marks RuPaul's return to the entertainment industry after a four-year hiatus, and is the No.1 breakout single on Billboard's Hot Dance Club Play for the week of
PBS Programming for October:
FRONTLINE “The Choice 2004” Tuesday, October 12,
October 10, 2004, 8 to 9 p.m. NATURE -- Television’s longest-running weekly natural history series, NATURE has won more than 200 honors from the television industry, parent groups, the international wildlife film community and environmental organizations, including the only award ever given to a television program by the Sierra Club.
Octorber 10, 2004,
October 10, 2004, 10:30 p.m. to 11 p.m.-NEW-VISIONES: LATINO ART AND CULTURE -- Latino artists across the United States take center stage in this groundbreaking six-part television series. Viewers experience the world of Latino artistic _expression as the series journeys throughout the country, capturing rich stories about theater, music, dance, spoken word and the visual arts. From
MONDAY, OCTOBER 11, 2004 8 p.m. to 9 p.m.: ANTIQUES ROADSHOW -- The series presents a winning lineup of shows with host Lara Spencer. /TV-PG/ (series)
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 12, 2004: 8 to 9 p.m. -NEW- NOVA -- PBS’ premier science series helps viewers — men, women and children of all ages — explore the science behind the headlines. Along the way, NOVA programs demystify science and technology, and highlight the people involved in scientific pursuits.
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 13, 2004 8 p.m. to 9 p.m.: CAPTURING THE KILLER CROC (R) (OB: 5/12/04) -- In the heart of Africa, a killer is on the loose. Over the past few years, more than 200 people in the vicinity of Lake Tanganyika have disappeared. It was thought at first their disappearance was the result of tribal warfare or a serial killer. In fact, the killer is a giant, predatory crocodile estimated to be 30 feet long and nearly a century old. This program documents the mission to catch and relocate the croc to safe waters — before he kills again. /TV-PG/
9 p.m. to 11 p.m. DEBATES 2004: A NEWSHOUR SPECIAL REPORT “Presidential Debate” -- The third general election debate between presidential candidates President George W. Bush and Sen. John Kerry is broadcast live from Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona. Bob Schieffer — CBS News chief Washington correspondent and moderator, “Face the Nation” — moderates the 90-minute debate. Post-debate commentary and coverage are provided by the NEWSHOUR team of correspondents. /EXEMPT/ (series)
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2004, 8 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.-NEW-WASHINGTON WEEK #4416 -- PBS’ longest-running public affairs series features Washington’s top journalists analyzing the week’s top news stories and their effect on the lives of all Americans. Gwen Ifill hosts.
8:30 p.m. to 9 p.m.: -NEW-WALL $TREET WEEK WITH FORTUNE #317 -- Geoffrey Colvin, editorial director of Fortune, and veteran business reporter Karen Gibbs co-host WALL $TREET WEEK WITH FORTUNE. Each week, a panel of leaders in business, finance and government joins them to discuss what’s ahead for the financial markets.
9 p.m. to 10 p.m.:-NEW- NOW WITH BILL MOYERS #341 -- Bill Moyers, one of the most recognized and respected journalists in America, anchors this weekly news program, which includes documentary reporting, in-depth one-on-one interviews and articulate commentary to offer viewers relevant and diverse perspectives on the events, issues and ideas that are shaping their world. Flexible in format from week to week, the series also draws on the editorial resources and journalistic strength of NPR News to tap public radio’s brightest talents every week.
10 p.m. to 10:30 p.m.-NEW- TUCKER CARLSON: UNFILTERED #117 -- This weekly half-hour public affairs series combines serious, in-depth analysis with the lively wit and commentary of its host and managing editor. Incorporating newsmaker interviews, roundtable discussions with thinkers from across the political spectrum, packaged production briefs and weekly commentaries from Carlson’s unique perspective, the series promises a fast-paced, provocative half hour that will enlighten, engage and inform, encompassing political, social and cultural issues.
SCHEDULING NOTE RE: PRESIDENTAL DEBATE October 13, 2004: The third planned presidential debate is on October 13. If the major candidates agree to appear, the debate will occur from 9:00-11:00 p.m. ET. If the debate does not occur, PBS will present an encore of JOURNEY OF MAN on October 13, 9:00-11:00 p.m. ET. Description below. If the debate does occur on October 13, JOURNEY OF MAN will be softfed for stations who wish to air it (check local listings). 9 p.m. to 11 p.m.: JOURNEY OF MAN (R) (OB: 1/21/03) -- Today, some six billion people are spread across the planet. But there was a time when the human species numbered only a few thousand and the world was a single continent: Africa. Then a small group left their African homeland on a journey into an unknown, hostile world. Against impossible odds, these extraordinary explorers survived and went on to conquer the earth. Their story can finally be told through the science of genetics. Dr. Spencer Wells, a 33-year-old geneticist, has been disentangling this epic story from evidence all people carry with them — in their DNA — inherited from those ancient travelers. Wells travels to every continent in search of the people whose DNA holds humanity’s secret history, including Namibian Bushmen, Chukchi reindeer herders of the Russian Arctic, Native Americans and Australian aborigines. /TV-PG/
Barbie Sings and Dances (Yes, She Does): The world's most famous fashion doll, Barbie, is coming to DVD in her first animated musical, Barbie as The Princess and The Pauper, featuring songs by Megan Cavallari and Amy Powers. One of the music industry's only female composer/songwriter teams, Cavallari & Powers created music for the movie that will support a "smarter and more empowered" Barbie for children and their parents. Featuring Martin Short, Barbie as The Princess and The Pauper will be released domestically and internationally in 21 languages on September 28, 2004. The DVD package includes a bonus soundtrack CD.
Barbie as The Princess and the Pauper is a computer-animated movie showcasing for the first time Barbie’s singing talents. Barbie plays dual roles as the princess and the pauper. Barbie as The Princess and the Pauper teaches girls lessons of self-empowerment and delivers the message that "every person has a gift and in that gift lies his or her destiny." Barbie, Ken and friends are all brought to life by Mainframe Entertainment's amazing CGI animation.
Cavallari & Powers' original music has been featured in productions for FOX, HBO, Warner Bros., Paramount, Miramax, Showtime, Disney, Disneytunes, Disney Channel, Hanna-Barbera and DIC. They are presently writing songs for Mattel's Little People.
Cavallari and Powers met at the BMI Musical Theatre workshop in New York, where they developed The Game, a critically acclaimed musical based on the novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses, a production successfully tested for Broadway in August 2003 at the Barrington Stage Company. In addition to being commissioned to write music for projects, Cavallari and Powers also create and produce new work in TV, animation, musical theatre and film.
Megan Cavallari began her music career as Danny Elfman's music and vocal assistant on six motion pictures, most notably Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas and Dolores Claiborne. She has worked as a songwriter, score and song composer, music producer and orchestrator on television shows including Happily Ever After and Captain Kangaroo, and on films such as A Christmas Carol starring Whoopi Goldberg, All Dogs Go To Heaven and Oliver Twist. Cavallari has received numerous awards including the ASCAP Film Music Award, the BMI Film Music Award and the Dramatists Guild Musical Theater Award.
Amy Powers' first published songs, "As if We Never Said Goodbye" and "With One Look" achieved international renown in Andrew Lloyd Webber's Sunset Boulevard. Her first film effort, "When We Were Kings," was the title track to the Academy Award-winning movie of the same name. A writer for pop and country as well as musicals and animation, her work has been recorded by multi-platinum artists including Barbra Streisand, Brian McKnight, Diamond Rio, Alabama and OV7. Powers has written opening and end title songs for films including Ella Enchanted and Sweet Home Alabama.
Very Interesting Piece from Salon.Com on The Bush Family: George W. Bush's missing year: The widow of a Bush family confidant says her husband gave the future president an Alabama Senate campaign job as a favor to his worried father. Did they see him do any National Guard service? "Good lord, no."
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Mary Jacoby
Sept. 2, 2004 | NEW YORK -- Before there was Karl Rove, Lee Atwater or even James Baker, the Bush family's political guru was a gregarious newspaper owner and campaign consultant from Midland, Texas, named Jimmy Allison. In the spring of 1972, George H.W. Bush phoned his friend and asked a favor: Could Allison find a place on the Senate campaign he was managing in Alabama for his troublesome eldest son, the 25-year-old George W. Bush?
"The impression I had was that Georgie was raising a lot of hell in Houston, getting in trouble and embarrassing the family, and they just really wanted to get him out of Houston and under Jimmy's wing," Allison's widow, Linda, told me. "And Jimmy said, 'Sure.' He was so loyal."
Linda Allison's story, never before published, contradicts the Bush campaign's assertion that George W. Bush transferred from the Texas Air National Guard to the Alabama National Guard in 1972 because he received an irresistible offer to gain high-level experience on the campaign of Bush family friend Winton "Red" Blount. In fact, according to what Allison says her late husband told her, the younger Bush had become a political liability for his father, who was then the United States ambassador to the United Nations, and the family wanted him out of Texas. "I think they wanted someone they trusted to keep an eye on him," Linda Allison said.
After more than three decades of silence, Allison spoke with Salon over several days before and during the Republican National Convention this week -- motivated, as she acknowledged, by a complex mixture of emotions. They include pride in her late husband's accomplishments, a desire to see him remembered, and concern about the apparent double standard in Bush surrogates attacking John Kerry's Vietnam War record while ignoring the president's irresponsible conduct during the war. She also admits to bewilderment and hurt over the rupture her husband experienced in his friendship with George and Barbara Bush. To this day, Allison is unsure what caused the break, though she suspects it had something to do with her husband's opposition to the elder Bush becoming chairman of the Republican National Committee under President Nixon.
"Something happened that I don't know about. But I do know that Jimmy didn't expect it, and it broke his heart," she said, describing a ruthless side to the genial Bush clan of which few outsiders are aware.
Personal history aside, Allison's recollections of the young George Bush in Alabama in 1972 are relevant as a contrast to the medals for valor and bravery that Kerry won in Vietnam in the same era. An apparent front group for the Bush campaign, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, has attacked Kerry in television ads as a liar and traitor to veterans for later opposing a war that cost 58,000 American lives. Bush, who has resisted calls from former Vietnam War POW John McCain, R-Ariz., to repudiate the Swift Boat ads, has said he served honorably in the National Guard.
Allison's account corroborates a Washington Post investigation in February that found no credible witnesses to the service in the Alabama National Guard that Bush maintains he performed, despite a lack of documentary evidence. Asked if she'd ever seen Bush in a uniform, Allison said: "Good lord, no. I had no idea that the National Guard was involved in his life in any way." Allison also confirmed previously published accounts that Bush often showed up in the Blount campaign offices around
"After about a month I asked Jimmy what was Georgie's job, because I couldn't figure it out. I never saw him do anything. He told me it basically consisted of him contacting people who were impressed by his name and asking for contributions and support," Allison said.
C. Murphy Archibald, a nephew of Red Blount by marriage and a
Bush, who had a paid slot as Allison's deputy in a campaign staffed largely by volunteers, sat in a little office next to Allison's, said Archibald, a workers compensation lawyer in
While Kerry earned a Silver Star and a Bronze Star after saving a crewmate's life under fire on the Mekong River in Vietnam, by contrast, the Georgie that Allison knew was a young man whose parents did not allow him to live with the consequences of his own mistakes. His powerful father -- whom the son seemed to both idolize and resent -- was a lifeline for Bush out of predicaments. After Bush graduated from Yale in 1968, his slot in the Texas Air National Guard allowed him to avoid active duty service in
Yet, after receiving unusual permission to transfer to the Alabama Guard from
A graceful blonde with a Texas drawl, Linda Allison now lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, in an apartment decorated in the dusky tones of Tuscany with a magnificent view of the high-rises framing Central Park. I visited her there Monday on the opening night of the Republican National Convention as she related publicly for the first time her long and ultimately painful history with the Bush family. On the table between us were two photographs of her late husband -- an elfin man with curly hair, shown in animated conversation. From her drawers she pulled out old letters and notes from Barbara Bush, George H.W. Bush and even one from George W. Bush, written to Jimmy in 1978 as he was dying of cancer.
Jimmy Allison's family owned the Midland Reporter-Telegram and other small-town newspapers, and they were part of the establishment in the
The Blount Senate campaign he ran against the Democrat, Sparkman, in 1972 was notable for a dirty racial trick: The Blount side edited a transcript of a radio interview Sparkman had given to make it appear he supported busing, a poison position at that time in the South. When Sparkman found an unedited script and exposed the trick, the Blount campaign was finished. But it was an early introduction for Bush to the kinds of tricks that later Republican strategists associated with the Bush political machine, from Lee Atwater to Karl Rove, would use against Democrats, often to victorious effect.
After Bush won a House seat in 1966, Allison followed his patron to
"Aide, confidant, campaign manager, source of joke material, alter ego -- Allison and Bush were bonded by an uncommon loyalty," former Reagan White House deputy press secretary Peter Roussel, who got his start in politics when Allison invited him to work for Bush's 1968 congressional reelection campaign, wrote in a 1988 newspaper column dedicated to Allison.
Linda, too, had a long, though not as close, relationship with the Bushes. She remembers watching Bush in 1964 at a campaign appearance at the Adolphus Hotel in
But it was also this sense of being connected to a larger, more powerful force that seduced the Allisons -- a trap that many aides and friends of important politicians fall into. The dynamic allowed the Bushes -- Barbara especially, Allison said -- to manipulate the friends and supporters they needed to further their ambitions, a lesson she says could not have been lost on the young George. "They had a way of anointing you, then pushing you out," she said. "It was like a mind game. It was very subtle, very hard to describe. But when you were out, you wanted desperately to be let back in." It was how she and Jimmy felt when, in 1973, they experienced a strange and, to Allison, never fully explained rupture with the Bushes, which took place against the backdrop of boorish behavior by their son that persisted during the time he was nominally under the Allisons' care.
The break happened not long after a boozy election-night wake for Blount, who lost his Senate bid to the incumbent Democrat, John Sparkman. Leaving the election-night "celebration," Allison remembers encountering George W. Bush in the parking lot, urinating on a car, and hearing later about how he'd yelled obscenities at police officers that night. Bush left a house he'd rented in
Around the same time, for the 1972 Christmas holiday, the Allisons met up with the Bushes on vacation in Hobe Sound, Fla. Tension was still evident between Bush and his parents. Linda was a passenger in a car driven by Barbara Bush as they headed to lunch at the local beach club. Bush, who was 26 years old, got on a bicycle and rode in front of the car in a slow, serpentine manner, forcing his mother to crawl along. "He rode so slowly that he kept having to put his foot down to get his balance, and he kept in a weaving pattern so we couldn't get past," Allison recalled. "He was obviously furious with his mother about something, and she was furious at him, too."
Jimmy, meanwhile, had larger issues on his mind. According to Linda, he was hoping to use the visit in
Apparently, Jimmy Allison's advice was not appreciated. In Hobe Sound, Bush senior kept trying to avoid talking with Jimmy about the RNC, Allison said. Then later, as the Allisons took their leave, Barbara "thanked" them for their Christmas present with unexpected cruelty. "She said, 'I'm so sorry, but we've been so busy this year that we didn't have time to do anything for our political acquaintances.' I swear to God, I'll never forget those two words as long as I live. For her to say that was absolutely appalling. Mind you, Jimmy was an old, old friend. And I had stayed as a houseguest with the Bushes, been invited in my pajamas into their bedroom to read the papers and drink coffee while Bar rode her exercise bicycle.
"Big George was just stricken by this," Allison continued. "There was a wet bar in the hall on the way to the front door. He grabbed this moldy bottle of Mai Tai that he said had been given to him by the president of
The Allisons found they were no longer being invited to the Sunday cookouts the Bushes held to chew over the week's political events. And though Jimmy had once been deputy chairman of the RNC, when Bush chaired the committee, he "couldn't even get invited to a cocktail party there," Allison said. The freeze-out was subtle and surgical. "It took us some time to realize we'd been lopped off," she said. At home, the Allisons once decided to try that dusty bottle of Mao Tai from
By 1978, Jimmy was dying. Whether out of guilt, genuine affection for old times or a desire to maintain appearances with a revered member of the
George W. Bush, then running unsuccessfully for Congress, wrote his old mentor a letter. "Every person I see in
In a letter to the editor of Allison's newspaper in
But soon after Linda picked him up, Jimmy crashed. "He was in so much pain. It was unreal." At the emergency room, he waited 10 hours for medical attention. "I begged them to do something. I begged," she said, wiping tears from her eyes. "He was in so much pain. I was so angry." Jimmy died about a week later.
More than a quarter century later, George W. Bush is running for reelection as a "war" president. At the Republican Convention, delegates pass out Purple Heart stickers mocking Kerry's
Linda Allison watches it all from her
- - - - - - - - - - - -
| About the writer
|
