Tag Archives: hollywood

Donald Trump and the Shiny Object Strategy

by KitMowery0340 Posted on November 28, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Is Donald Trump using his Twitter outbursts about the popular vote to distract us from this week’s real news: the vast conflicts of interest between his business empire and his upcoming presidency? This question is getting a lot of attention today.

The answer is no. I mean yes. But no, not really. On the other hand, maybe a little bit yes. I’m sorry, what was the question again?

The real answer is the same as it was during the campaign: Trump is dedicated to creating constant uproars all the time. Is this because it’s just who he is? Or is it part of an instinctive strategy to keep us from ever paying attention to anything for long, aside from the fact that Trump is in the limelight? I can’t say for sure, but I’d put money on the latter.

My belief in this comes mainly from an observation about the campaign: Trump, it turns out, is fully able to focus on something for months at a time if he wants to. And the thing he focused on was “Crooked Hillary” and her emails. That was a constant theme of his campaign, which he hammered on relentlessly for months. And the press assisted, covering every new email revelation—big or small, meaningful or trivial— in blazing headlines on the front page.

And it worked. Sure, he needed a lucky break at the end when James Comey released his letter, but he had set the stage to take advantage of it. This constant drumbeat on a single issue was spectacularly successful.

Trump engaged in a high-risk-high-reward strategy by creating a strong brand identity—for Hillary Clinton. And as any brand manager can tell you, this is crucial. The relentless focus on Hillary Clinton’s email hurt her badly by confirming the sense that she was at least mildly corrupt. Trump’s scandals were different. The press did cover them, but it was something new every week. This didn’t confirm any particular view of Trump aside from his being a bit of a loose cannon. And within a week, each previous scandal was barely remembered. By November, the whole Access Hollywood thing—which was only four weeks old—might as well have been ancient history. It had been practically forgotten.

Donald Trump knows how to focus and he knows how to throw up lots of chaff to keep himself front and center. Does he mean this stuff to be a distraction? Beats me. I suspect it’s all intuitive with him. The only good news is that he can wear out his welcome doing this. In his previous life, that wasn’t a big problem because the press didn’t want to cover him 24/7 anyway. Now they do. He is likely to find that after a few months of this, even his most fervent supporters are a little weary of it.

Read this article: 

Donald Trump and the Shiny Object Strategy

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Donald Trump and the Shiny Object Strategy

20 Female US Presidents, as Imagined by Hollywood

by RalfBonetj Posted on November 8, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

If the odds-makers have it right, Hillary Clinton will soon be America’s first female president. But Hollywood, for better or worse, has been imagining women in the Oval Office for more than half a century. Here’s a taste of some scenarios the men of Tinseltown have come up with:

ROLE REVERSAL
Kisses for My President (1964 movie): Leslie McCloud (Polly Bergen) is elected the first female commander in chief, leaving hubby Thad stuck in traditional first-lady roles—like attending garden parties. (‘Cuz it’s all about the guy.) All is made right again when President McCloud learns she’s pregnant and resigns.

Warner Brothers

A HEARTBEAT AWAY…
Whoops, Apocalypse (1986 movie): Veep Barbara Jacqueline Adams (Loretta Swit) is elevated to the Oval Office after her boss, a former clown trying to prove his mettle, challenges a journalist to hit him in the stomach (fatally, it turns out) with a crowbar.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Mars Attacks! (1996 movie): First daughter Taffy Dale (Natalie Portman) succeeds her dad (Jack Nicholson) as president after cartoonish aliens gleefully kill everyone else in the government.

Chain of Command (2000 movie): Vice President Gloria Valdez’s (María Conchita Alonso) boss is shot and killed in a struggle over the “football.” As his successor, Valdez must face down China in a nuclear exchange.

Commander in Chief (2005-06 TV series): Mackenzie Allen (Geena Davis), a Republican congresswoman turned vice president, ignores the dying request of President Teddy Roosevelt Bridges that she step aside to make way for a successor who sees “the same America” as he does.

VICTIMS OF ALIENS AND STUFF
Contact (1997 movie): In Carl Sagan’s 1985 novel, a female “President Lasker” presides over radio contact with extraterrestrials, but she doesn’t survive Hollywood’s knife: In the 1997 movie version, Lasker is replaced by cleverly edited footage of Bill Clinton.

XIII: The Conspiracy (2008 TV miniseries): President Sally Sheridan is assassinated during a Veterans Day speech—her own brother is behind it. The ill-fated series was canceled after only two episodes.

Independence Day: Resurgence (2016 movie): Elizabeth Lanford (Sela Ward) and most of her cabinet are obliterated by nasty alien invaders. (Film critics are forever traumatized.)

20th Century Fox

NASTY WOMEN
Hitler’s Daughter (1990 TV movie): So, it turns out the mother of President Leona Crawford Gordon was impregnated by the Fuhrer, brought to the States by U-boat, and then killed by the Nazis shortly after giving birth to America’s future commander in chief. Got that?

USA Network

Prison Break (TV series, 2004-2009): As vice president, Caroline Reynolds (Patricia Wettig) collaborates with “the Company” to fake her brother’s death. When the shadowy group turns on her, she arranges for the president’s assassination so she can assume control.

20th Century Fox Television

Divergent (2011-13 novel series, 2014 film)
In a society sorted by personality type, President Jeanine Matthews—actress Kate Winslet likens her character to a “female Hitler”—aims to kill factionless Divergents, whom she sees as a threat to her dominion.

Scandal (TV series, 2012-present): Ultraconservative VP Sally Langston (Kate Burton) kills her husband and hides the evidence. Then, after a would-be assassin leaves President Fitzgerald Grant in critical condition, she takes over the White House.

COMICS IN CHIEF
Hail to the Chief (1985 TV series): President Julia Mansfield (Patty Duke) struggles to run the country while keeping tabs on her philandering husband and wild teenagers. The series was canceled after seven episodes. Go figure.

Mafia! (1998 movie): Diane Steen (Christina Applegate) almost achieves world disarmament—but peace is put on the back burner when her mobster ex-boyfriend comes around looking to win her back.

The Simpsons (2000 “Bart to the Future” episode): Lisa Simpson, the “first straight female president,” is elected in 2030—following in the footsteps of Donald Trump and Chastity Bono.

Iron Sky (2012 movie): An unnamed Sarah Palin spoof (Stephanie Paul) sends a black model to the moon as a publicity stunt to get herself reelected—and later leads an attack on a Nazi moon base.

Veep (TV series, 2012-present): Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss) starts this HBO comedy series as a perpetually dysfunctional vice president. She moves up during season three, after her boss resigns to care for his mentally ill wife.

PLANETARY POLITICS
Special Report: Journey to Mars (1996 TV movie)
President Elizabeth Richardson’s (Elizabeth Wilson) support of a Mars mission gets her reelected, but the mission is sabotaged. Crisis ensues.

KEEPING AMERICA SAFE
24 (TV series, 2001-10): Republican President Allison Taylor “has nothing to do with Hillary,” insists actress (and Hillary Clinton doppelganger) Cherry Jones. Nope. America’s first female president in this thriller series is “a combination of Eleanor Roosevelt, Golda Meier, and John Wayne.”

State of Affairs (TV series, 2014-2015): Before Sen. Constance Payton (Alfre Woodard) becomes America’s first black female president in this widely panned series, her son is killed by terrorists in Kabul.

NBCUniversal

Homeland (TV series, 2011-present): Sen. Elizabeth Keane (Elizabeth Marvel of House of Cards) is elected president in the upcoming season of Showtime’s terrorism drama. Co-creator Alex Gansa says she’s basically a composite of Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and Bernie Sanders. Keane “challenges the norms,” Homeland star Claire Danes noted in a live appearance, and “is a little scary for that reason.” You’ll catch some glimpses of her in the trailer.

Link to article: 

20 Female US Presidents, as Imagined by Hollywood

Posted in alo, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on 20 Female US Presidents, as Imagined by Hollywood

A Parliament in Australia Just Passed a Motion Declaring Trump a “Revolting Slug”

by LaraeVestal074 Posted on October 14, 2016

Mother Jones

Just after the damning Access Hollywood tape dropped last week, my mom called from my family home in Sydney to tell me Donald Trump was a “sleaze.” Such was the power of the tape: My polite and lovely mom never uses such strong language in referring to political figures.

She’s not alone. Along with the rest of the world, Australians are fiercely monitoring the US campaign for signs of impending global apocalypse. Every morning I awake to an antipodean surge of concern from friends and family on social media, built up over the previous night. But the outrage isn’t restricted to Facebook or private conversations.

Trump creates drama everywhere, even half way around the world in Australia, where issues of race, immigration and the threat of terror are equally divisive and galvanizing for the electorate. Australian politicians have been forced to declare their views on Trump in media appearances. This week, former Prime Minister Tony Abbott, a conservative, appeared to defend Donald Trump, telling a radio show that Trump’s policies were “reasonable enough” and his supporters were “decent people.” But the current PM, Malcolm Turnbull (who replaced Abbott in a dramatic intra-party leadership coup) called Trump’s behavior on the Access Hollywood tape “loathsome.”

The energy minister Josh Frydenberg called Trump “a dropkick.”

Brutal.

But perhaps the most eloquent condemnation of Trump came from one of the houses of state parliament in New South Wales, which, according to Buzzfeed Australia, just passed a unanimous motion to declare Donald Trump a “revolting slug.” The motion—a symbolic declaration of sorts with no real legislative heft—was tendered by a member of the Greens Party:

“I move that this house condemns the misogynistic, hateful comments made by … Mr Donald Trump, about women and minorities, including the remarks revealed over the weekend that clearly describe sexual assault … and agrees with those who have described Mr Trump as ‘a revolting slug’ unfit for public office,” the motion read.

Read the full story over at Buzzfeed. This from their Facebook page sums it up:

It wasn’t immediately clear which “revolting slug” the legislators had in mind. Australia is home to an array of mollusks. Perhaps I could suggest the giant bright pink slug—Triboniophorus aff. graeffei—found in the Mount Kaputar National Park in northern New South Wales:

Meanwhile, in contrast to the US, both Prime Minister Turnbull and his parliamentary opponent, the opposition leader Bill Shorten, recently backed a bipartisan declaration in favor of immigration. “Australia is an immigration nation,” Turnbull said. “Everyone sitting in this chamber and every Australian is a beneficiary of the diversity that is at the heart of our nation.”

Excerpt from: 

A Parliament in Australia Just Passed a Motion Declaring Trump a “Revolting Slug”

Posted in alo, Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on A Parliament in Australia Just Passed a Motion Declaring Trump a “Revolting Slug”

Top Republican Spokesman Thinks Pussy Grabbing Might Not Be Assault

by Terence11V Posted on October 10, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Sean Spicer, a top Republican National Committee official, on Sunday night refused to acknowledge that the conduct Donald Trump claimed to have engaged in during a 2005 Access Hollywood taping constitutes sexual assault. In that video, which has roiled the GOP since its release Friday afternoon by the Washington Post, Trump discussed forcibly kissing women and grabbing their genitals. “Grab them by the pussy,” Trump said. “You can do anything.” In the days since, the press has referred to what Trump described as sexual assault. Trump’s shocking comments caused women around the country to come forward with their own stories of being assaulted in this way on social media and in the press—describing it repeatedly as a violent form of sexual assault that still haunts them.

But Spicer, the RNC’s communications director, refused to acknowledge that grabbing someone’s genitals is sexual assault when asked about this by The Weekly Standard after Sunday’s debate. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not a lawyer.”

The answer sounds a lot like Republican Sen. Marco Rubio when he once dodged a question about how old the planet is by saying, “I’m not a scientist, man.” Except Spicer is talking about sexual assault—and trying to minimize the definition and experiences of the people subjected to it. Perhaps Politico reporter Edward-Isaac Dovere said it best:

Spicer isn’t the only Trump supporter trying to claim that what Trump described is not sexual assault. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) also denied that groping someone’s genitals is sexual assault. Here is Sessions’ exchange with The Weekly Standard:

SESSIONS: This was very improper language, and he’s acknowledged that.

TWS: But beyond the language, would you characterize the behavior described in that video as sexual assault if that behavior actually took place?

SESSIONS: I don’t characterize that as sexual assault. I think that’s a stretch. I don’t know what he meant—

TWS: So if you grab a woman by the genitals, that’s not sexual assault?

SESSIONS: I don’t know. It’s not clear that he—how that would occur.

Unlike Spicer, Sessions is a lawyer—one who’s nomination to a federal judgeship three decades ago capsized after critics accused him of racism.

Continue reading:

Top Republican Spokesman Thinks Pussy Grabbing Might Not Be Assault

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Top Republican Spokesman Thinks Pussy Grabbing Might Not Be Assault

Trump on Tape: “Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”

by GlennaMcc448650 Posted on October 7, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

I can’t even go to lunch anymore without missing the latest loathsome excretion from Donald Trump’s mouth. Here’s the headline:

Trump recorded having extremely lewd conversation about women in 2005

This is not a big surprise. Is there anyone on the planet who didn’t already figure that Trump talked lewdly about women routinely? Probably not. In any case, here’s the extremely lewd conversation, caught on a hot mic while Trump was chatting with Billy Bush for a 2005 appearance on Access Hollywood:

Trump discusses a failed attempt to seduce a woman, whose full name is not given in the video.

“I moved on her and I failed. I’ll admit it,” Trump is heard saying. It was unclear when the events he was describing took place….“I did try and fuck her. She was married,” Trump says….“I moved on her like a bitch, but I couldn’t get there. And she was married,” Trump says.

At that point in the audio, Trump and Bush appear to notice Arianne Zucker, the actress who is waiting to escort them into the soap opera set.

“Your girl’s hot as shit, in the purple,” says Bush, who’s now a co-host of NBC’s “Today” show….“I’ve gotta use some tic tacs, just in case I start kissing her,” Trump says….“And when you’re a star they let you do it,” Trump says….“Grab them by the pussy,” Trump says. “You can do anything.”

Trump’s excuse is that he’s heard Bill Clinton say a lot worse. Or something.

The video of all this was “obtained” by the Washington Post, which raises the obvious question of just who found this and who decided to leak it. And is there more?

More: 

Trump on Tape: “Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Trump on Tape: “Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”

The Cast of the Original "Roots" Knows All About Hollywood’s Diversity Problem

by WallyLUDCfn Posted on June 2, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The Roots miniseries that aired back in 1977 had the largest black cast in the history of commercial television—and the biggest audience numbers, too. It drew more than 100 million viewers in the United States, and millions more internationally. This unprecedented success seemed to herald new possibilities for black employment in television and film, and optimism that more black-themed shows would cross over to white audiences. But nearly four decades later—think #OscarsSoWhite—that dream remains unfilled. With History’s Roots remake now making headlines, it’s useful to look to the original series as a cautionary tale on the pace of progress in Hollywood.

Roots failed to change the racial dynamics of the industry primarily because Hollywood executives perceived it as a unique black story they could pitch to white audiences. In discussing the casting, the creators emphasized that Roots would have to appeal to whites to succeed commercially. Alex Haley’s best-selling book, the basis for the saga, contained no major white characters—but that was never seriously considered as an option for television.

Producer David Wolper argued that hiring white “television names” was the only way to ensure that Roots wouldn’t be marginalized. “If people perceive Roots to be a black history show—nobody is going to watch it,” he said. “If they say, ‘Let me see, there are no names in it, a lot of black actors and there are no whites’…It looks like it’s going to be a black journal—it’s all going to be blacks telling about their history.”

Wolper, whose son Mark produced the new Roots, was a white TV veteran who had pitched and developed programs for two decades before Roots came along. He understood as well as anyone the logic of race and demographics that governed Hollywood in that era. For Wolper and for ABC, it was simple arithmetic. “Remember, the television audience is only 10 percent black and 90 percent white,” Wolper said following Roots‘ record-breaking run. “So if we do the show for blacks and only every black in America watches, it is a disaster—a total disaster.”

Roots was successful in many ways. It sparked a national conversation about race and slavery. It helped legitimize the miniseries format and begat several follow-up projects—Roots: The Next Generation (1979), Roots: The Gift (1988), and Alex Haley’s Queen (1993). It also paved the way for unrelated miniseries such as Holocaust (1978), The Thorn Birds (1983), and Winds of War (1983). It made ABC (and Doubleday books) a ton of money to boot. But what Roots didn’t do was persuade the suits to greenlight more shows with black leads.

Roots‘ black cast members felt this failure acutely. “We were so fabulous I thought we would have jobs up the wazoo,” Leslie Uggams, who played Kizzy, told Wendy Williams in 2013. “And there were no jobs. I didn’t get another job until two years later when I did a show called Back Stairs at the White House. We were very disappointed, because we had all these accolades; it was like we did our quota, and now that’s it for the rest of time.” Lynne Moody, who portrayed Alex Haley’s great-great-grandmother in the original, said she “thought Roots would skyrocket me,” but when those acting jobs failed to materialize, “I felt the color of my skin” and fell into a “deep depression.”

When an interviewer asked John Amos, the actor who portrayed the grown-up Kunta Kinte, whether he’d reaped any rewards from Roots, Amos joked, “Yeah, the unemployment office.” Even David Wolper conceded that Roots‘ success had limits. “I don’t think it changed race relations,” he told an interviewer in 1998. “I think for a moment it had an impact. Did it help African American actors? No. A lot of them couldn’t get work even after Roots came on. Did more stories about African Americans show on television? No.”

The new series plays out, of course, in a very different cultural landscape. The Black Lives Matter movement has drawn national attention to the mistreatment of African Americans by the police. And the #OscarsSoWhite social media campaign called out the problematic lack of color in Hollywood’s production pipeline with help from watchdogs like UCLA’s Bunche Center, whose annual “Hollywood Diversity Report” compiles data showing how people of color are underrepresented as actors, directors, and writers in film and television.

America is far more racially and ethnically diverse today than it was in 1977, but Hollywood has been slow to catch up, particularly at the cineplex. And while the success of recent black-led television shows, including How to Get Away With Murder, Blackish, Empire, and Underground, is a hopeful sign, there’s no guarantee this trend will continue.

If Roots proved anything, it’s that high ratings aren’t enough. There have to be more people of color (and women, for that matter) in the writer’s room, behind the camera, and, crucially, in positions of power at the studios and talent agencies that determine what America watches. The Roots remake, though well worth watching, is an apt reminder that the road to equal opportunity is a long one.

Originally posted here – 

The Cast of the Original "Roots" Knows All About Hollywood’s Diversity Problem

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Cast of the Original "Roots" Knows All About Hollywood’s Diversity Problem

Three Sentences About the Cocoon

by JoshuaDadson Posted on May 13, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Sentence #1: Drew Altman on whether people are satisfied or not with their Obamacare coverage:

In the Kaiser survey, which will be published next week, 29% of Republicans in marketplace plans (i.e., Obamacare) say they have benefited from the ACA compared with 75% of Democrats, a 46-point difference.

This is now so common that it makes top-line polling almost useless. How’s the economy doing? It depends on your party. Do you believe in climate change? It depends on your party. In unemployment up or down? It depends on your party. We’re accustomed to opinions about things like abortion depending on party ID, but more and more, views of objective reality depend on party ID too. Why?

Sentence #2: Ezra Klein on why Facebook is likely to become more biased, not less:

Before the web…it was possible to cocoon yourself inside an echo chamber, but you really had to work at it. Then came cable news…. Constructing an echo chamber became easier….But now we have personalized search results, handcrafted Twitter feeds, and a Facebook algorithm based on likes. Now you can end up in an echo chamber without even knowing it.

Aha. The cocoon. This is why the objective state of the world depends so much on party ID. If you watch Fox News and read the Drudge Report, you get exposed to more than just different spins compared to people who listen to NPR and read Mother Jones. You get exposed to an entirely different set of stories. Conservatives and liberals these days are increasingly exercised by issues that their opposites barely even know exist.

Sentence #3: Todd VanDerWerff on the ultimate hollowness of the latest George Clooney vehicle, Money Monster:

Hollywood used to excel at telling stories of people who lived and worked in the lower classes….Whether it was The Grapes of Wrath or Raging Bull, filmmakers used to treat the concerns and hopes of the working class as worthy of consideration. That happens less and less now.

The cocoon again! Back in the day, plenty of screenwriters and film directors came from working-class backgrounds. Today they all have degrees from the USC film school and live in Silver Lake. They get their news from Variety and the LA Times, not drive-time radio and People. In this cocoon, the working class is something to make money from via transparently condescending TV shows, not real people with real problems.

Years ago, I used to think that everyone who did the kind of thing I do—blather about public policy from the perch of an upper-middle-class existence—should read the National Enquirer weekly to get a better sense of what kinds of news shaped the views of ordinary people. I don’t think the Enquirer fills that bill anymore, but what does? The media-verse is so fragmented these days that I’m not sure there’s any single outlet you can count on anymore. Suggestions?

Read article here: 

Three Sentences About the Cocoon

Posted in Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Three Sentences About the Cocoon

GOP Leaders Are Preparing to Submit to Donald Trump

by KaiGerowspeox Posted on April 27, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Following Donald Trump’s overwhelming victory last week in his home state of New York and his impressive sweep across five East Coast states on Tuesday, Republican Party leaders may be finally reaching the final stage of Trump grief: acceptance that the real estate mogul is likely to be their presidential nominee. Some GOP insiders are even coming to terms with the distinct possibility that the primary race may not reach an open convention and that Trump may well bag the necessary 1,237 delegates to win the nomination, according to two Republican National Committee members.

This recognition began to sink in last week at the RNC’s spring meeting in Hollywood, Florida, where the committee’s 168 members convened to discuss party business. Trump’s resounding New York victory earlier that week “kind of shocked everyone into reality” and “had an enormous effect at the RNC meeting,” says one longtime RNC member, who asked to remain anonymous. “All of a sudden people started accepting the fact, either happily or regretfully depending on who you are, that there seems to be a clear movement here. So that helped Trump in Hollywood, Florida, at the meeting. People were much more open to him then, in my opinion.”

Continue Reading »

See more here: 

GOP Leaders Are Preparing to Submit to Donald Trump

Posted in Anchor, Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on GOP Leaders Are Preparing to Submit to Donald Trump

Black Movie Directors are Hosting an Oscars-Night Fundraiser in Flint

by JakeOhmancnqgc Posted on February 24, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Not really feeling the Oscars this year? Well, there’s another star-studded event you can tune into Sunday night—this one is in Flint, Michigan. Blackout for Human Rights, an activist coalition co-founded by directors Ryan Coogler (Creed, Fruitvale Station) and Ava DuVernay (Selma) is hosting #JusticeforFlint, a live benefit to raise funds for residents of the lead-stricken city. The shindig, hosted by comedian Hannibal Burress, will feature the awesome singer Janelle Monae—who led several Black Lives Matter protests last summer during stops on her nationwide music tour—Empire‘s Jussie Smollett, Jesse Williams of Grey’s Anatomy, and other prominent black actors and performers. It’s free to the public, but attendees can donate to a Flint fund at the event. The event coincides with Oscars day, but that’s just a coincidence, according to Coogler, who was snubbed for the Best Director category for Creed. (DuVernay was snubbed for Selma last year.) The date was chosen because it was the last weekend of Black History Month.

“We will give a voice to the members of the community who were the victims of the choices of people in power who are paid to protect them, as well as provide them with a night of entertainment, unity, and emotional healing,” Coogler said in a statement to BuzzFeed. “Through the live stream we will also give a chance for people around the world to participate, and to donate funds to programs for Flint’s youth.” #JusiceforFlint will be live-streamed exclusively on revolt.tv, the online counterpart to the RevoltTV network founded by hip-hop mogul Sean “Puffy” Combs. The event airs at 5:30 p.m. ET, 90 minutes before the Oscars’ Red Carpet coverage commences. So if you’re interested, you can probably catch most of both.

Blackout for Human Rights also held an MLK Day event in New York City last month where black entertainers including Chris Rock, Michael B. Jordan, and Harry Belafonte read speeches by civil rights icons. Rock is hosting the Oscars on Sunday. He’s expected to deliver a monologue on diversity in Hollywood.

Flint has been in the national news since last October, when news broke that the city’s water had been contaminated with lead for well over a year, despite pleas to local and state officials. Check out this article about the Flint mom who helped bring the scandal to the nation’s attention. It’ll make your blood boil.

View original: 

Black Movie Directors are Hosting an Oscars-Night Fundraiser in Flint

Posted in Anchor, Citizen, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Black Movie Directors are Hosting an Oscars-Night Fundraiser in Flint

Ted Cruz Links New Hampshire’s Heroin Epidemic to "Undocumented Democrats"

by ShannaRickman Posted on February 4, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

New Hampshire’s status as the first primary state in the nation has had one clear policy consequence in 2016: It has turned a New England heroin epidemic into a national political conversation. And so, with five days to go until votes are cast, Ted Cruz took a break from his hectic town hall circuit to speak at a church here in Hooksett, New Hampshire, about his family’s history of addiction.

As the headliner of the Addiction Policy Forum, hosted by a Baptist church and a half-dozen recovery organizations, Cruz told two personal stories he’s offered before. The first was about his half sister, Miriam, who died of a drug overdose in 2011. Cruz recalled driving from Washington, DC, to Philadelphia, where he and his father picked up Miriam from the crack house where she was living and, over the course of five hours at Denny’s, tried desperately to help her piece her life back together. After his sister’s death, Cruz took a $20,000 loan to pay for his nephew, Miriam’s son, to go to boarding school. It’s a difficult story, and he tells it well. Then he talked about his father, Rafael, who left Ted and his mother behind in Calgary when the future senator was three years old, only to find Christ in Texas and return to the family. When he was finished, the mostly partisan crowd offered a chorus of “amen!”; it’s a story about his father’s faith that in actuality is a story of his own.

And if that’s how his speech had ended, it would have been in line with the way a number of candidates have talked about drug addiction in New Hampshire during the 2016 campaign—heartbreak at the human toll (New Hampshire averaged more than a death a day from overdoses in 2015), and a promise to act. But what Cruz really seemed to want to talk about was something else—the flood of “undocumented Democrats” coming across the border, and the urgent need for a magnificent wall to stop them. Take care of the illegal immigration, his argument goes, and you’ll take care of your drug problem.

“I would invite you to do as I have, to meet with farmers and ranchers in Texas who will show you photographs of dead body after dead body after dead body, of women and children abandoned and left to die in the desert,” he said. “Local farmers for whom it has become sadly a recurring experience to just encounter dead bodies of people being trafficked in, abused and abandoned by the coyotes and left to die. And it is the very same cartels that are trafficking in human beings, that are physically abusing these human beings, that are sexually abusing these human beings, that are selling God’s creatures into sexual slavery. It is these very same cartels that are the drug cartels, that are bringing heroin.”

He had a specific cartel in mind:

El Chapo. You know, Sean Penn seems to think he is a sexy and attractive character. I so appreciate Hollywood for glorifying vicious homicidal killers. What a cute and chic thing to celebrate. Someone who murders and destroys lives for a living. El Chapo’s organization brings vast quantities of drugs into this country, vast quantities of heroin. Heroin confiscation at the border have increased from about 556 kilos in 2008 to 2,100 kilos in 2012. When the border’s not secure, that’s what happens: You have drugs flooding into this country. And you have people in New Hampshire and elsewhere, they sometimes start with prescription painkillers, but those become harder and harder to get and they turn to heroin. if we want to turn around the drug crisis, we have got to finally and permanently secure the border. Now I tell you, we know how to do this. We’re told by the media over and over again, this problem can’t be solved. You can’t secure the border. How many times have you heard a reporter say, ‘If you build a 10-foot wall, they’ll build an 11-foot ladder.’ Reporters think they’re very clever. Well, if you want to know how walls work, I invite you all to come to Israel.

From there, Cruz introduced the audience to another villain, what he often refers to on the stump as the “Washington cartel.” “Solving the drug problem becomes de-emphasized because Republicans’ policy view instead is to open the borders to illegal immigration,” Cruz said. “On the Democratic side, you know there’s a new term for illegal immigrants. It’s called ‘undocumented Democrats.'” He wandered even further into his stump speech, connecting the dots from the heroin crisis to the lack of a decent fence on the border, to the stagnation of Americans’ wages and the dissatisfaction of the American middle class with Washington politicians. If you showed up late, you might have been surprised to hear that the event was about drug abuse in New Hampshire.

Heroin has become a serious issue in the 2016 presidential race in part because talking about the epidemic is also a way to talk about something else—to show you’re attentive to what’s happening at the local level, to show you have empathy. For Cruz, riding high off the momentum of his big victory in Iowa, it’s a way to show that he can be just as Donald Trump as Donald Trump—but with a conscience.

Credit:

Ted Cruz Links New Hampshire’s Heroin Epidemic to "Undocumented Democrats"

Posted in Anchor, ATTRA, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Ted Cruz Links New Hampshire’s Heroin Epidemic to "Undocumented Democrats"