Well, if the weeping fans will allow us to do that....I suspect we'll be hearing about Michael Jackson "sightings" for the next 100 years.   The 24 hr cable news channels have been pretty much all Michael/all the time, running on 18 hrs now, pushing anybody else who's died, like people in Iraq, Afghansitan, Pakistan, Iran, America right off the news.   Kind of hard to overlook some of the controversies in the face of that.

At any rate, his dangling his baby by one arm (the baby's one arm, that is) over a highrise balconey was pretty much the last straw, and I am forever glad he was not allowed to buy the remains of the Elephant Man.  I fully expected him to be allowed to get away with that. way back when.

He was an odd duck, but I have to admire anyone who is extremely talented at whatever they do.  He was an incredibly talented entertainer.  I find music to be a very powerful artfrom...it can improve your mood, help you through an emotional situation, send a message to someone that you can't find the words to send.  I've never been musically inclined myself...I wouldn't subject my worst enemy to having to listen to me sing!    Maybe that's wy I have so much admiration for people who can...and he didn't just sing...he had a unique way of entertaining people with his music and dance moves that made him a very rich & famous man.  It's too bad he had such turmoil in his life, self-created or not.  It's also too bad he obviously didn't know how to handle the money...since I hear he died about 400 million in debt.

I just read on a Google News report that Jackson may well have died from an overdose of Demerol to which he was addicted. Apparently he was also addicted to Oxycotin. If the story is accurate the pieces are falling into place.

Jun 26, 2009 -- 3:38PM, Boethius wrote:

Let us rather mourn for those mostly unnamed souls who lost their lives bravely defying the Islamic dicatatorship in Iran than a self-indulgent pop star

Let us also mourn for all those Iraqi dead and permanently injured because of us, more than 200 dead in just this week alone, and in the hundreds of thousands, if not a million+, by now.

Let us also mourn for all those civilians killed in Afghanistan and Pakistan, by American drones, and let us also mourn for those Muslims who died from the harsh treatment they received from their American captors, in our Gitmos.

IMO, Americans haven't even begun to mourn those unnecessary deaths yet, and it's going on more than 7 years now.