Mark your calendars!

Jan 28, Blender cover on Britney hits the stands by the amazing Michael Joseph Gross. You dont want to miss it. Also, check out MJG's book, Starstruck: When A Fan Gets Close to Fame and his current story in Vanity Fair.

TRCB is a tough customer to most media, but MJG is one of the good guys. Tells it for real. You can be open and let him experience the story himself, without concern. His seeming only bias is for relevant truth.

That's refreshing. Can't wait for the Brit Back Story.

Run, Mayor Bloomberg, Run!

With Kang and Kodos winning in NV (but a very high uncommitted number), here is my own cobbled together news items on my favorite candidate (pending his social agenda):

Last week Gerald Rafshoon, a former media adviser to President Carter, and Doug Bailey, a former consultant to moderate Republicans, quit Unity08, a group dedicated to electing an independent presidential candidate. The move came amid reports the two planned to announce the creation of a “Draft Bloomberg” committee sometime this week.

Next month, Bloomberg pollster and close adviser Doug Schoen will be publishing his new book, on how an independent candidate can win the presidency.

While still insisting he is not running for president, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg signaled his seriousness about a possible independent campaign by meeting with the ballot access expert and campaign manager for H. Ross Perot's third-party presidential bid, Clay Mulford, who is well-versed in third-party ballot access.

If Bloomberg wants a chance at winning the state's large slice of electoral votes — 34 — he would need to collect about 74,100 signatures by May 12, and he could not begin circulating petitions in Texas until March 5. Not only does he have a short window to petition — the signatures need to be from Texas residents who did not vote in a party primary.

Earlier in the day, Bloomberg appeared at an Austin hospital to talk health care with Lance Armstrong, a cancer survivor and seven-time Tour de France champion cyclist. Armstrong is an emerging political power in Texas, and any hint that he's supporting Bloomberg would lend credence to the mayor's prospective campaign and signature-gathering efforts.

Hey, eHarmony, listen up!

From the WSJ blogs:

Why Gay Couples Might Be More Likely to Split
Posted By topeditor On January 18, 2008

Researchers have found that gay and lesbian couples split up more often than straight pairs, a tendency that Time’s John Cloud suggests has roots partly in the unique struggles gay people face in childhood.

Though studies have long been conducted on heterosexual couples, psychologists only recently began examining how gays and lesbians interact in relationships, Mr. Cloud reports in Time. What researchers have discovered is that gays and lesbians tend to be nicer to one another during arguments with partners, being less likely to be belligerent during fights and more apt to use humor.

At the same time, the gay and lesbian couples who reported being happiest about their relationships exhibited the most tension during disagreements. Straight couples, by contrast, tended to be more satisfied when tension levels were lower. And gay men in particular fare worse than straight or lesbian couples when it comes to repairing the damage after an argument.

The preference for heart-racing interaction could stem from the stigma and confusion that gays and lesbians confront as kids, Mr. Cloud says. Childhood pain tears as adult relationships in the gay community. A lack of legal sanction for gay relationships in most places also might raise the odds that gays and lesbians will call it quits. Lawrence Kurdek, a psychology professor at Wright State University in Ohio, has found that while straight marriages deteriorate just as fast as homosexual relationships, straight couples are more likely to avoid breaking up. – Wendy Pollack

Seems to me the answer to why gays walk away is, unfortunately, because we can. We have no support from family, friends, work, church, etc. to take greater care before we get committed and before we walk away. Lot easier if no one knows about it. When is the last time you saw a gay man put up or take down a photo of his significant other at work?

Gotta love the Navy. This will get your heart racing...

Think about this tonight

Paul Rieckhoff, executive director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) on Countdown with Keith Olbermann, speaking about homeless veterans:

"...the VA [U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs] says that there are approximately 200,000 of all generations. We know that there are at least 1,500 that have served in Iraq and Afghanistan."

Cost of caring for them? Say, the cost for each vet for a year?

"... For one veteran. About $15,000 for room, board, supportive servicing, and a staff that can take care of them."

Besides the fact that we owe them everything and more, take a look at this from this weeks NYT report. A real life In the Valley of Elah.

The New Currency

Brilliant!

UKs Britney

Amy Crackhouse shows up in court yesterday and seems to be taking career advice from Britney and fashion tips from Alexis Arquette. Thats Lex on the right in case you were confused. How did following the mentally ill and drug addicts become sport?

TALK ABOUT BURYING THE LEAD!

Cheney has a tendancy to have anyone who confronts him detained and arrested, because he believes in democracy enough to start a war over it, but don't expect him to practice it at home. NYTimes reports:

The arrest of a man named Steven Howards in June 2006 after he approached Vice President Dick Cheney at a Colorado ski resort and denounced the war in Iraq might have seemed, at the time, no more than a blip on the vice president’s schedule.

But now the blip has become a blowup, with Secret Service agents — under oath in court depositions — accusing one another of unethical and perhaps even illegal conduct in the handling of Mr. Howards’s arrest and the official accounting of it.

The agent who made the arrest, Virgil D. Reichle Jr., said in a deposition that he was left hanging with an untenable arrest because two agents assigned to the vice president had at first agreed with a Denver agent that there had been assault on Mr. Cheney by Mr. Howards, then changed their stories to say that no assault had occurred.

Mr. McLaughlin said Mr. Reichle, who has since been transferred to Guam, asked him in a call several hours after the encounter to say that there had been an assault to bolster justification for the arrest.

The agent who stands up for right is suddenly transferred to Guam. Since so many Bushies had no qualifications for their job, they just seem to have watched a bunch of old movies and used that as training. Want to intimidate someone, send them to Guam.

The Future????

If Kodos (Romney) gets elected, I have to assume that AP reporter Glen Johnson's reaction will be how we all feel. Mr. Jonson has been on the Romney trail for a while and just had enough of his lies!

Best part is when he blows a gasket trying to make Mr. Johnson accept his lying and playing with words (running a campaign versus senior advisers who debate prep, travel with the candidate and raise money), but not on this video.

Kodos: Listen to my words, Glen.
Johnson: Thats semantics. You're playing semantics.

Scariest part, a woman in the audience defends Romney. He was just caught lying and she calls the reporter "rude and ugly." Wanna get really scared, read the comments at the MSNBC version of this.



So check out how Kodos responded to Mr. Johnson on the issue of porn at Marriott, where you can get the Book of Mormon AND the Bible with your porn, and isnt that just what this party is about: Money, power, say anything to win.

During a recent Associated Press interview, Romney said he did not recall pornography coming up for discussion while he was on the Marriott board from 1992 to 2001. Despite being chairman of the board's audit committee, he also said he was unaware of how much revenue pornography may have generated for the hotel chain.

Shows where his priorities are. Now corporations are going to try to elect themselves a president. Kodos is fond of asking if we want healthcare from the same people who brought us Katrina. How about do we want healthcare from the people who brought us:

Healthcare insurance, Savings and Loans scandal, sub-prime mortgages, Enron, Blackwater, Cheney Energy Task Force...

Hey, TiVo, PREPARE!!!

From the network that brought us Mad Men (and this years fashion look for men - Grey suit, white shirt, tie, tie bar), Breaking Bad: 

Break Bad (v.) 1. To challenge convention 2. To defy authority 3. To raise hell

Chemistry: the study of change. Apply heat and, boom, no going back. Meet Walter White, high school chemistry teacher. Sleepwalking through life when, boom, a terminal diagnosis changes everything. Liberates him. Empowers him to use his chemistry skills anew: to man a rolling drug lab and finance the future for his struggling family. It's an uncontrolled experiment with the American dream. And it finally wakes him up.
BREAKING BAD: Change the Equation.
The series premieres Sunday, January 20 @ 10PM | 9C.

I mean who doesn't love a good meth yarn?

Breathe

Female Suicide Bomber Kills 9 Shiite Worshippers in Iraq's Diyala Province - Canadian Press
White House Tape Recycling May Have Erased Controversial E-Mails - Washington Post
Romney Wins Michigan Primary - Reuters
FDA OKs Food Sales from Animal Clones - Chicago Tribune
Inflation Continues to Edge Up - NY Times
American Idol is Back - Ugh

"Just how do you do it, Pooh?"
"Do what?" asked Pooh.
"Become so Effortless."
"I don't do much of anything," he said.
"But all those things of yours get done."
"They just sort of happen," he said.

We can pick this up later.

Now, thats a protest!

Love that the Italians even protest in style and over Malaise. PR lesson? Hey, Im writing about it after reading about it on the AP and 55 other stories an hour after it was published. 

Colored Balls Tumble Down Spanish Steps
ROME (AP) — Hundreds of thousands of brightly colored balls went cascading down Rome's famed Spanish Steps on Wednesday in the latest stunt orchestrated by the man who dyed the waters of the Trevi Fountain red. TV cameras caught organizer Graziano Cecchini and several others emptying bags full of red, green, yellow and blue balls down the 18th-century steps.

The balls bounced down the steps, filling the boat-shaped Barcaccia fountain in the piazza below in a spectacle that stunned passers-by, who snapped photos and scooped up the balls as souvenirs. Officials were forced to briefly cordon off the popular tourist spot. Police detained Cecchini and three others, Italian news reports said. Cecchini, interviewed at the scene, told Italian TV newscast TG5 that he uses "art — if we want to call it art — to stress our malaise."
He said half a million balls were deployed.

Rent

NY Times Reports:
Nearly 12 Years Old, ‘Rent’ Is to Close
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
Nine hundred thirty thousand, one hundred eighty minutes. That’s how you measure the total running time “Rent” will have played on Broadway when, as the producers said on Tuesday, it closes after its evening performance on June 1, making it the seventh-longest-running Broadway show in history.

But the length of its run is not nearly as significant as the kind of show it was. An East Village rock version of Puccini’s opera “La Bohème,” “Rent” brought a youthful energy — and young theatergoers — to Broadway, to a degree not seen since “Hair.” It also brought with it a real-life story so affecting that it would have overwhelmed the musical itself had the substance of the musical not been so intertwined with the story of its creation.

For JJ.

Nevada Debate Thoughts

Looks like Obama brand blue is going strong.


MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell, or Mrs Alan Greenspan as she is known, always reminds me of F. Murray Abraham in Star Trek: Insurrection. 

Anyone?

In Defense of Katie Holmes

Apparently, Page 6 isnt happy that News Corp has lowered the standards for anything close to reporting or journalism on everything it owns, now it is castigating real news organizations for not being sleazy repeaters of gossip.

ABC suits were red-faced yesterday after Katie Holmes was interviewed on "Good Morning America" without being asked about claims that her baby, Suri, was created with the sperm of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, not hubby Tom Cruise. "GMA" host Diane Sawyer asked Holmes only inoffensive, softball questions about her hair, her clothes, her baby and her new movie, "Mad Money." Incredibly, she never even brought up Andrew Morton's controversial new book, "Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography" — which has set off a worldwide buzz and has the superstar going ballistic and threatening a massive lawsuit.

GMA interview with Katie Holmes is softball because they didn’t ask if her baby was the result of L Ron Hubbards sperm, a la Rosemary’s Baby? Insane. Would talking about gossip be hardball? Andrew Mortons new book repeats the claims by others, but NEVER claims this as true. So why ask? Should we ask her to deny EVERY claim this is thrown at her? Does it have anything to do with her art? Mortons book is so NOT respected that his book this week is being covered on "Inside Edition" and on the "Opie & Anthony" radio show on Thursday. Remember Opie and Anthony? They got fired for encouraging a couple to have sex in St. Patricks Cathedral.

If you offer your personal life as part of your art, you're fair game, but you're a tabloid star. Katie Holmes has assiduously maintained her personal privacy, so why ask her about her baby? We're not happy destroying lives of adults anymore? Ask Preston and Jayden James.

Why do these purveyors of gossip and garbage think that they get to set the rules? We are going to write anything we make up, and you have to respond to it and play our game, or we will attack you for that. If you don't reply, that just helps sell more copy. We give politicians a free ride as they lie to us, but hold Katie Holmes up to a standard whereby she has to answer any crazy accusation made? To sell more books for Andrew Morton?

Nope. Holmesy don't play that. Good for her. The Shins said it best in Sleeping Lessons:

Jump from a book,
You're not obliged to swallow anything you despise,
See, those unrepenting buzzards want your life,
And they got no right,
As sure as you have eyes,
They got no right

Check out the PopSquire take here.

Joe in the Morning

TRCB doesnt sleep so well. I like the reporting of MSNBC and the format of the show. But now that the election is on, Joe Scarborough is not a journalist and his slant is just too much.

Gov Romney was just on. He was asked a question about the auto industry and he spoke in generalizations. No follow up even though he said a private industry should be relieved of its healthcare and legacy burdens??? How is that conservative? Then a question about his hair from Mika Brzezinski. She made a name for herself for refusing to do a Paris Hilton story. She's smart and on it. But, since Joe is so partisan you can just watch the struggle in her to be journalist neutral, while trying to counter his political pontificating.

To me, Scarborough is just O'Reilly on the wrong network. An authoritarian among free thinkers, except that sychophantic Willie Geist who played populist sidekick to the soon to be booted Tucker Carlson.

Back to the interview. Question 3, a softball from Scarborogh about McCain 'hating' Romney, followed by a softball on Huckabee. So Joe just gave him the chance to be negative under the cover of answering his questions but we got platitudes on economy and personal attacks. You usually have to go to Larry King for such a fluffy interview with no news value.

Media doesn't seem to get why we are all so mad out here. Romney has run the only truly negative campaign (so far) - fake State Trooper, dead dog, set up photo ops, MLK - but we get nothing on issues. Hair and personal attacks.

The show goes on to discuss the problems with the Dems. Um, WHAT? McCain had to announce a dirty tricks committee to watch his own party, but that seems of less interest than a comment from a non-candidate to the media.

Change indeed. An example of this fine journalism.

Upside of the strike

I'm discovering shows that aren't so bad (big bang theory) and watching shows that usually act as a talking lamp (How I Met Your Mother). When out of no where, Enrique Igelsias in a recurring role on Mother?

TRCB likes a lot of talent. But very few people have made me stop dead, unable to speak. Takes lust or awe. The combination will actually cause me to lose consciousness. 

Top of mind, Jodie Foster. But who expects Jodie Foster to stop and talk to you on the street on your way to the movies? David Bowie. But who expects David Bowie to call you on your cell phone and sing you a song he wrote for his wife, to tell her how she made his life make sense?

And while walking into a house in Studio City for a recording session with Left Eye and Mel C., the door swings open and Enrique steps out, temporarily blinding me as he smiled. We shook hands. I mumbled unintelligibly, giggled and tried with all my might NOT to throw up on him.

Lisa just looked embarrassed for me.

Remind me to tell you about Mandy Moore, also on Mother, next time.

John Adams

Exciting new mini-series from HBO:

Starring Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney, executive produced by Playtone's Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman, and directed by Emmy®-winner Tom Hooper, JOHN ADAMS is a seven-part epic miniseries event that explores American history through the eyes of one of its greatest founding fathers, John Adams (Giamatti), a fiercely independent spirit whose unwavering vision steered America through a tumultuous period.

Odd casting, but TCRB LOVES Laura Linney. Adams was of course, our second president, rival of Jefferson and father of our 6th president. John Adams, Jr. was, in turn, a rival of Andrew Jackson, as complicated a man and president as ever we have had (used, then slaughtered Native Americans, slave owner, adulterer, war hero and the only President to have a period of history to be named after him - the Jacksonian Period). Adams vs Jackson was the first dirty political campaign and the first battle between populism and elitism.

A friend asked me to define the Democratic ideal. Jackson, of course, founded the Democratic party (see how that came together?) to curb the excesses of big business in government. The Republican party was then founded to counter the Dems. What I learned, made me re-think my Republicanism, and reinforces my belief that we need a strong independent movement.

So, I’m going back to Andrew Jackson on this. The Dems are not supposed to be about an agenda, it is about protection of the rights of the individuals, and as such, will always evolve with the needs of the oppressed.

“There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing."

That again, was:

"If it would confine itself to equal protection it would be an unqualified blessing.”

Sounds like the far right and the far left meeting on that political continuum.

No Country for Old Men

Im watching this Nature special on Dogs and finally felt like I could say something about No Country for Old Men.

This special featured a theory that Dogs may have evolved from Wolves in a few generations, not whole millennia. They think this happened in one human life span. A researcher in Russia bred and raised foxes, chosen only for their tameness by offering his hand to them in cages.

10 generations later, they were like dogs. Floppy ears. Black and white coloring. Colored eyes. Playfulness, lack of fear and answered to a name. The theory is that wolves hung out by human garbage dumps and the smaller, more docile ones were more successful, then became reliant on man. My point was, seems to me that we, as a species, are going in the other direction.

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
Written by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen (adapted from the Cormac McCarthy novel)

In the film's opening sequence, matched to shots of sunbaked plains and empty Texas landscapes, a country sheriff muses in voice-over about how times have changed. His father and grandfather were lawmen. He wonders how the old-timers would have coped in the brutal present.

EXTERIOR. WEST TEXAS ROAD -- DAY

VOICE-OVER The crime you see now, it's hard to even take its measure. It's not that I'm afraid of it.

Back to the shot over the light bars of a police car: the deputy, with a hand on top of the prisoner's head to help him clear the door frame, eases the prisoner into the back seat. All we see of the prisoner is his dark hair disappearing into the car.

VOICE-OVER I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job -- not to be glorious. But I don't want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don't understand.

The deputy closes the back door. He opens the front passenger door and reaches down for something -- apparently heavy -- at his feet.

VOICE-OVER You can say it's my job to fight it, but I don't know what it is anymore.

The deputy swings the heavy object into the front passenger seat.

Matching inside the car: It looks like an oxygen tank with a petcock at the top and tubing running off it.

VOICE-OVER ... More than that, I don't want to know. A man would have to put his soul at hazard.

The deputy slams the door.

On the door slam we cut to Texas highway racing under the lens, the landscape flat to the horizon. The siren whoops.

VOICE-OVER ... He would have to say, O.K., I'll be part of this world.

Hostility seems to be rewarding itself in humans, exponentially. This seemed to be the message brilliantly expressed by The Coens (again) in No Country. And, Mike Judge in Idiocracy.

ProtoDog, as they kept calling the first domestic dogs as we know them, appeared 4000 years ago. Now I want a dog to name Proto.

60 Mins - Generation Gap LIVE!

Lesley Stahl (1941) needs to really limit herself to subjects that she understands.


First there was her big wet kiss to Justice Thomas (PT1, PT2). Then her outright attack on Intel for daring to compete against Prof Negropontes inferior $100 laptop.* Then her embarrassing interview with French Pres Sarkosy, in which he walked out moments after sitting down.

Tonight, however, she epitomized the struggle within media. She interviewed Mark Zuckerberg (1984), founder of Facebook and was condescending in much the same way your crazy aunt talks about your job - which she knows nothing about - and is trying to brag about you to her bitty friends. No substance for anyone who has ever turned on a computer. Worse was her narrating the interview in voice over to characterize his comments as if I was reading it instead of listening to it myself, in case we didn't agree with her interpretation of his responses. That assumes that I dont know enough to interpret his comments on my own. 

Who was this report for? Lesley Stahl? She seemed thrilled with the Internets. And does CBS think we're old or dumb or that old people are dumb? Because this report didn't seem like news to anyone who is the least bit computer savvy or has picked up a magazine or newspaper, watched a news program or sitcom in the last 2 years.