By John Y. Brown III, on Fri Aug 3, 2012 at 12:00 PM ET
Inspirational Facebook Stories
It is hard to move ahead in the present until we can make peace with our past.
Facebook has allowed us to have an unprecedented opportunity to find people from our past and find ways to work through past differences.
Last night I looked up a guy who bullied me mercilessly in 6th grade. I hadn’t seen him since middle school.
I looked at his pictures on Facebook and at his life and saw him as he really was (and still is): A scared and lonely and lost boy with a seemingly empty life. I looked into his eyes and felt sorry for him and let go of the anger I had felt toward him for all these years.
I forgave him.
And then, in my imagination, I walked over from my Facebook page to his and beat the crap out of him.
As I was walking back, I turned and saw him getting up and about to come toward me.
“No, no. You don’t want to do that.” I said.
He had that resigned look on his face as if to say, “I know. You are right,”
“Be glad you caught me in a forgiving mood. If I ever see you on my Facebook page, I’ll knock you into last year’s Facebook Timeline. We clear? We good?”
“Yes, sir.”
And just like that, thanks to Facebook, I was able to make peace with a part of my past. And then some.
A bipartisan group of senators and political strategists are pressing for a national presidential debate on the Bowles-Simpson deficit-reduction plan.
The new effort is aimed at highlighting the nation’s grim fiscal outlook and forcing President Obama and Mitt Romney to provide specific solutions to tackle the nation’s record debt. Neither Obama nor his GOP rival has embraced the recommendations of the Bowles-Simpson commission.
In a letter released Wednesday morning, Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) called on the Commission on Presidential Debates to address the national debt this fall.
“Specifically, we request that you ask the presidential candidates which of the recommendations of the [Bowles-Simpson proposal] they would adopt as part of their plan to reduce the deficit. As part of this discussion, we believe that it would be essential to engage the candidates in a detailed discussion of their priorities for tax and entitlement reform,” the letter from the four senators states.
Three presidential debates have been scheduled: Oct. 3 on domestic policy; Oct. 16 town hall on foreign and domestic policy; and Oct. 22 on foreign policy. The vice presidential debate will occur on Oct. 11.
All four senators who signed the letter have demonstrated an interest in deficit-reduction deals during this Congress. Chambliss was a major player in the so-called Gang of Six, which unsuccessfully sought to craft a deal based on Bowles-Simpson.
A bipartisan group of political heavyweights on Wednesday night echoed the senators’ concerns in a letter sent to the Frank Farenkopf and Mike McCurry, co-chairmen of the Commission on Presidential Debates. The signers included former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, ex-Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell (D), former White House special counsel Lanny Davis and former Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.). (Davis and Gregg are columnists for The Hill.)
By John Y. Brown III, on Thu Aug 2, 2012 at 12:00 PM ET
It wasn’t long ago that this was the only option for TV entertainment after 1 am.
And now you can’t find the DVD series anywhere. I guess that shouldn’t come as a surprise.
The writing was weak. Nothing much happened. Yet it was nice knowing it was an option. And when I did stare at the Indian test pattern, it had a calming effect on me.
And it became a TV institution.
I suspect someone somewhere in Hollywood is thinking of a modern remake of this time honored piece of TV history.
Maybe starring the Indian guy from the Twilight series who turns into a werewolf. I actually liked him a lot. He inspired me to start working out and I thought he was a more compelling and interesting character than the guy who played Edward Cullen.
On the other hand, the Indian role in the test pattern is eerily similar in breadth and scope to the Edward Cullen character. Quiet, stoic, brave, eccentric, bit of an outcast, and up all night without much nuance. Yeah, maybe the guy who plays Cullen would be a better fit.
This remake idea could be big. I am already seeing a sequel in the works before the first one is finished.
RP Krystal Ball talks about the calls for Mitt Romney to release more tax returns saying the 2012 GOP presidential candidate “might be a genius at legal tax avoidance, leveraged buy-outs and financial engineering, but he isn’t the person to fix this rigged system – he’s part of the problem.”:
By John Y. Brown III, on Wed Aug 1, 2012 at 12:00 PM ET
The Onion dominates print humor on the web leaving an opening for video humor, which seemed more difficult by comparison.
Until Will Ferrell and some friends tried their hand at it by creating an oddly named website, Funny or Die.
And now they excel and dominate in this niche.
If you like dry humor and modern comedy, you gotta spend some time tooling around the Funny or Die website.
It’s been around for a while but recently seems to have made a significant leap in content. The quality has always been good. Now there’s plenty of it to check the site regularly
Showtime’s new mini-series “Political Animals” insists that it is not really a knock-off on the saga that is Bill and Hillary Clinton: the resemblance between Sigourney Weaver’s Elaine Barrish and Hillary is merely the surface match between two former First Ladies who endured a presidential sex scandal involving a junior staffer, subsequently launched their own political careers, and lost the Democratic presidential nomination to a smooth, if distant, senator who brings Elaine/Hillary into the Secretary of State’s position. Elaine’s ex, former president Donald “Bud” Hammond, (Ciaran Hinds) just happens to sound, charm, and manipulate like William Jefferson Clinton.
The parallels do break: Elaine Barrish, we learn by episode two, executed the forgiving spouse role only up to a point, divorcing her husband in the aftermath of her defeat in the primaries. And unlike Hillary, Elaine’s loyalties to her new boss are skin deep at best: she is already plotting to take him on in the next campaign. But the severance in the time line does not begin, or even attempt, to mask the obvious: the show is a guilty pleasure window into what the Clintons’ personal and public chaos might look like from the inside, and if the characterizations so far can seem more like an impersonation of the Clintons than an real exploration, it is richly entertaining in the same way the originals are. “Political Animals”, like the real thing it is based on, is a brew of tawdriness, deceit, inspiration, and fortitude, that works in spite of all the reasons it shouldn’t.
Among the reasons it shouldn’t work: the storylines to date–a mini hostage crisis in the Middle East, the Hammonds’ juggling of one son’s engagement party with the other son’s emotional spiral–are pedestrian stuff. The personal sketches reach for their share of clichéd foibles: the young reporter who exposed Bud Hammond’s escapades and has trained her sights on Elaine Barrish has her own penchant for personal turbulence and seems to have boundary issues of her own; the two Hammond children are sons (thankfully, Chelsea remains outside creative license, at least for now) and in predictable modern cinematic fashion, one is tormented, artistically gifted, and gay; the other ferociously protective and resentful of his father’s capriciousness, but if the teasers at the end of the last episode are right, possibly possessed of some of his father’s weaknesses. If cultural stereotypes are your peeve, some of the clichés touch on troubling ground: the Asian woman who is the fiancee of Douglas Hammond is a bulimic perfectionist whose first generation parents are inordinately status conscious; the foreign diplomats are all lecherous or spineless, and there is a weird dearth of African American or Latino characters. This is not the “Good Wife”, whose regular and recurring cast seamlessly integrates every strand of the social rainbow without really trying, and gives each the gift of individuality.
Read the rest of… Artur Davis: “Political Animals” is Telling Us Something
By John Y. Brown III, on Tue Jul 31, 2012 at 12:00 PM ET
Imagine for a moment what it would be like to have lived our lives up to this point truly believing in our hearts every day the words below spoken by a great Kentuckian:
“Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men/women who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.”
Now imagine what it would be like to live the rest of our lives truly believing in our hearts every day these same words….
Tired of imagining yet?
The owner of these words, of course, is Louisville native Muhammad Ali. Whose life is proof that these words can be true.
MSNBC’s newest show The Cycle is unlike any other political talk show on cable. That may sound like a PR cliché, but unlike your usual assortment of cable news veterans, old-school journalists, and suit-and-tie pundits, The Cycle resembles more a collection of Generation X-er political geeks talking about their passions. All four hosts represent a newer, younger generation of political pundits.
As the show’s executive producer Steve Friedman explains, that design was on purpose: “It’s basically a dinner party show, unlike any other ensemble on television.” A forty-year veteran of the business, Friedman has produced a slew of ensemble shows including ESPN2′sCold Pizza, The Early Show on CBS, and a little morning program called Today on NBC. “This is my computer,” he jokes, showing his college-ruled notebook and a pen. He may come from an older world of television, but he says that his goals with The Cycle don’t necessarily match that mentality.
The Cycle came about in the wake of Dylan Ratigan‘s abrupt departure from his MSNBC show. Friedman and executives decided to soft-launch an ensemble show with four distinct voices. “We wanted an ensemble show because we didn’t want the new person to be compared to Ratigan,” Friedman explains. “If we had just replaced him with a single host, reporters like you might’ve said ‘That’s who they replaced him with?’”
And so Friedman recruited a younger batch of frequent MSNBC guests to host the new show: controversial music journalist Touré, Salon‘s stat-obsessed political writer Steve Kornacki, former Democratic congressional candidate Krystal Ball, and outspoken conservative S.E. Cupp.
“It’s the personalities that set apart ensemble shows,” Friedman says, underscoring the network’s belief that these four are particularly unique host additions to a daytime landscape usually brimming with straight-reporting cable newsman types. Interestingly, their on-air dynamic is an accurate reflection of their off-air relationship.
Touré is the eldest of the group, probably the most talkative, and definitely no stranger to controversy. Within the show’s first week, he drew criticism for suggesting the death of U.S. soliderPat Tillman was an intentional silencing by the American government; another week, he drew the ire of small government advocates when he advocated for a variety of government mandates. “He just loves to argue,” Cupp says of her co-host, pointing out that even at group dinners a conversation can’t go on without Touré playing devil’s advocate.
Kornacki, by contrast, was enlisted by Friedman as the “anti-Touré” — not politically, but characteristically. Friedman sees his two male hosts as a perfect juxtaposition: Touré pushes buttons and invites controversy; Kornacki is measured and intellectual in demeanor. Off-air and on-air, the other three “Cyclists” openly tease Kornacki for his “nerdy” ability to rattle off obscure polling numbers at the drop of a hat. During one show, the cast created a compilation video of the most neurotic things Kornacki has said on the program, and all enjoyed a good laugh at the result.
Cupp was chosen because, as Friedman describes, “the show needed someone who is not a card-carrying liberal.” Among the network’s non-liberal personalities, Friedman says, Cupp is “the best one.” She jokes that she never dreamed of hosting a show on MSNBC beside all the network’s openly liberal personalities; but she has relished the opportunity: “This is a great opportunity for me to slay dragons in front of an unfriendly audience,” she says. Her conservative fans, however, have had mixed reviews for her new job: “I’ve gotten ‘you’re a traitor,’ to ‘you’re so courageous,’ to ‘I will never watch you on that network.’”
Much like the Touré-Kornacki pairing, Ball was selected as the “anti-Cupp,” in the political sense. Before her television career, she was a 29-year-old liberal congressional candidate in Virginia. Shortly thereafter, she made the rounds as a “Democratic strategist” on Fox News and MSNBC. She credits her on-air experiences with Touré during Ratigan’s “Mega Panel” as helping shape her comfortability with The Cycle‘s format. And even with the stresses of hosting a cable news program, Ball says “running for Congress was way harder,” especially in terms of having the time to spend with her young daughter.
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