400-408 – Your thoughts on the Michael Jackson memorial…
(:30) Paris Jackson
(:16) Brooke Shields, "…we need to look up, where he is undoubtedly perched in a crescent moon, and we need to smile."
• Fox News (7/7/09) Fans, Stars Pay Tribute to Michael Jackson at Memorial in Los Angeles.
• Reuters (7/7/09) Stars sing for Jackson in emotional farewell.
413-423 – Calls ("Chandler from LA," an agnostic, questions the exclusivity of Christianity – we'll talk next Tuesday @ 6pm).
428-437 – Calls
443-452 – Calls
458-508 – Calls (Pastor Dudley Rutherford shares about Judith Hill, who sang the last two songs today, and would have sung duets with MJ on the upcoming tour).
512-523 – Calls
528-538 – Calls
544-554 – Janice Shaw Crouse, Senior Fellow at the Beverly LaHaye Institute at Concerned Women for America (cwfa.org), on the piece below (she is quoted.)
• U.S. News & World Report (7/7/09) Religious Conservatives Certain Palin Will Stay in National Politics.
555 – [1:30] Robert Micone/Bill O'Connor aka "The Money Guys" at Applied Financial, 866-SEEK-COUNSEL, and online at appliedfinancialplanning.com.
558-608 – Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council (frc.org), and co-author of Personal Faith: Public Policy with Bishop Harry Jackson.
612-623 – Jill Martin-Rische, daughter of the original Bible Answer Man Walter Martin, is Executive Director of Walter Martin Ministries (waltermartin.com) and a trained apologist in her own right, she and her late father, along with co-author Kurt Van Gorden are the authors of The Kingdom of the Occult – they also have a Spanish version available.
628-638 – Jill Martin-Rische
644-655 – Jill Martin-Rische
• Rich Lowry (7/7/09) Sarah Palin: Up and Out: She didn't do it for Alaska. She gets a rumored $60,000 per paid speech.
• David Kahane (7/7/09) I Still Hate You, Sarah Palin: The Republicans bring a knife to a gunfight, and lose again.
• WSJ Political Diary (7/7/09) Death by a Thousand FOIAs. Since returning from the 2008 campaign, she has been served with 150 FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests, and has accumulated $500,000 in legal fees.
• Mark Joseph (7/7/09) The Lessons of Michael Jackson: Michael Jackson's death is a good time for us to step back from both the man and his work and remind ourselves of our values. Mark Joseph is a record producer, editor of Bullypulpit.com and author of "Faith, God & Rock 'n' Roll".
If my friends are any indication, this country is divided into three camps -- those who think Michael Jackson was a genius, those who think he was a pervert and the rest of us who think he may have been both.
For nearly three decades Jackson asked us, his fans, to suspend belief and believe him instead of our own senses. He swore to us that he hadn't had any plastic surgery, that relationships with boys who slept with him in his bed were all platonic, that he wasn't intent on erasing his African-American heritage, that his obviously Caucasian children were his genetic offspring, that it was acceptable even heroic for him to intentionally bring three human beings into the world without a mother, and that he didn't really mean some of the weird things he was singing about. And we believed him. And those of us who enjoyed his songs and can, to this day, sing along to every line of his amazing repertoire like "Rock With You," "Don't Stop 'Til you Get Enough," "Billie Jean," "Thriller" and others are complicit not only in what he did to himself, but what he did to us: getting us to give tacit approval to things we'd never approve of our neighbors doing.
Jackson was clearly an amazing entertainer, probably the greatest dancer of all time, a very good singer and a decent songwriter. While attention is always on "Thriller" because of its enormous sales, I'd make the case that "Off the Wall" is his strongest record of all, skillfully weaving elements of pop, disco, and R&B to create a masterful collection of songs that still sound fresh today.
Most of Jackson's songs like "Rock With You," "You Are Not Alone" and "She's Out of My Life" were relatively innocent and harmless, but others like "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough," though musically brilliant, were more troubling to some, with its insistence that a young man should "keep on with the force" and not be dissuaded from taking what he needs and wants from his girl.
// Michael Jackson is gone and the man and his songs alternately entertain and haunt us. As sophisticated music fans, we should be able to both separate the personality from the work, and in some cases the music from the lyrics, but his death is a good time for us to step back from both the man and his work and remind ourselves of our values: that the damsel in distress deserves our help instead of our winks at her captor, that while we all generally cherish a right to privacy, we are suspicious of those who in an attempt to "rub" an "ache," demand an oath of silence, that middle-aged men shouldn't share a bed with random children, that children shouldn't be intentionally brought into the world bereft of one parent, that an African-American heritage and the features that accompany it are to be celebrated and not erased at the hands of a plastic surgeon and that our girls should beware of boys whose twisted idea of love is to use "the force" to get what they want until they "get enough."
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