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David Brock penned memo on impeaching Clarence Thomas

Justices Thomas And Breyer Testify On U.S. Supreme Court FY2011 Budget

 

An email sent in October 2010 by Sid Blumenthal, a close confidant of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, shared a memo from David Brock in which Brock broached the subject of impeaching Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

The email, shared by Blumenthal with the subject line “H: Brock memo here, have many more ideas on this. S,” laid out a summary of interviews published that week in The New York Times, The Washington Post and Washington’s ABC affiliate, WJLA, with Lillian McEwen, a former prosecutor, law professor and judge, who said she was romantically involved with Thomas during the time of the Anita Hill scandal.

McEwen was not subpoenaed to testify by Democrats or Republicans during the infamous October 1991 hearing, even after appealing to then-Delaware Sen. Joe Biden, for whom she had worked on the Judiciary Committee. According to Maureen Dowd’s column cited from Oct. 23, 2010, Biden only allowed women who had professional relationships with Thomas to testify.

The memo, titled “Memo on Impeaching Clarence Thomas,” cited the Times article in which McEwen called pornography for Thomas “just a part of his personality structure” and that he frequented a Washington store “that catered to his needs” and allegedly bled over into his personal relationships. The assertions stood in contrast with Thomas’ sworn testimony in 1991 in which he denied having any sexual discussions with Hill.

The memo also detailed differences between McEwen’s 2010 accounts and Thomas’ testimony in terms of workplace behavior, including incidents in which Thomas remarked on the size of a woman’s breasts or her bra size, as well as making the case for suppression of evidence and intimidating witnesses.

“A fourth woman with knowledge of Thomas’s behavior, Kaye Savage, was first named in a 1994 book, “Strange Justice,” by Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson. Savage was a close colleague of Thomas’ and Hill’s in the Reagan administration. Savage was interviewed by Judiciary Committee staff after she contacted the committee, and a staffer made notes, but she was never called to testify. Her story was not made public until Mayer and Abramson obtained the staff notes and interviewed Savage, who told the authors of visiting Thomas’ apartment during the time Hill was working for Thomas and observing stacks of pornographic magazines and all of the walls of the apartment papered with centerfolds of large-breasted nude women,” Brock wrote.

Brock, who as a journalist in the 1990s wrote the book, “The Real Anita Hill,” casting doubt on the former nominee’s assistant, said in 2001 that he lied in print in that book in part to protect Thomas’ reputation.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/08/hillary-thomas-213205#ixzz3lvBF7a6H

 

The Slap

NBC makes the case for why prestige shouldn’t be limited to cable TV.

2/12/2015   Slate   By

The Slap is exactly the sort of prestige project that the beleaguered major networks should be making. Why leave all the gloss and glory—all the movie stars, all the movie directors, all the limited-run series they are willing to sign on for, and all the attendant attention and awards—to cable? NBC’s eight-episode The Slap stars Peter Sarsgaard, Uma Thurman, Zachary Quinto, Thandie Newton, and Brian Cox, among others. Directed by Lisa Cholodenko, who most recently helmed HBO’s Olive Kitteridge, the series has been adapted for American television by the playwright Jon Robin Baitz from an Australian show that itself was adapted from a novel. It examines the aftereffects of a controversial physical altercation—a man slapping a small boy—in the most philoprogenitive corners of Brooklyn, New York. But add all this up, and what results is not an elegant, adult, psychologically astute miniseries. Instead, The Slap is a bulldozer: bluntly, gracelessly effective.

The inciting incident of the series, the eponymous slap, takes place at Hector’s (Sarsgaard’s) 40th birthday party. Hector is a civil servant and married to Aisha (Newton); he’s the father of two biracial tweenagers, the son of Greek immigrants, and seemingly the quintessential milquetoast, decent guy—if he weren’t in the early stages of an affair with his children’s high school–aged baby-sitter. Assembled to celebrate him are his cousin Harry (Quinto), a rich, aggressive, Darwinian car salesman whose lawyer pal unironically describes him as a “1 percenter”; Harry’s wife, Sandi (Marin Ireland); Anouk (Thurman), a TV writer who arrives with her new, much younger actor boyfriend (Penn Badgley); Hector’s overbearing Greek parents (Brian Cox and Maria Tucci); Aisha’s best friend Rosie (Melissa George, reprising her role from the Australian series), who is still breast-feeding her 4-year-old son, Hugo (Dylan Schombing); Rosie’s husband, Gary (The Newsroom’s Thomas Sadoski), an artist who reviles Harry; and Connie (Makenzie Leigh), the baby-sitter. Over the course of the party, various low-level domestic tensions flare up, culminating in Harry slapping Rosie and Gary’s son, the completely undisciplined Hugo.

Each episode is told from the point of view of one of the characters, a shifting perspective highlighted by a narrator (Victor Garber), who provides The Slap with its cloying, overly literary voice-overs.  “On the day before his 40th birthday, Hector had only one thing on his mind—Connie,” the narrator begins the first episode. “Harry knew one thing in life, that his anger was a form of energy, and it had served him well, except when it hadn’t,” starts the second. This narration is at tonal odds with the series’ attempts to achieve some kind of psychological realism. Every time the narrator pipes up, we are suddenly watching events take place through a glass of faux-Updike. (What is bougie Brooklyn but the ’burbs?) It has a distancing effect, counterproductively draining urgency from a series about the various ways adults, too, lack impulse control.

And my, how they lack it. Hector may be flirting with a teenager, but Harry and Rosie quickly emerge as the most overtly inflexible adults assembled. They are matched caricatures, philosophically opposed and yet fundamentally similar, absolutely, unalterably convinced of their rightness and their righteousness. One imagines getting them going on the subject of vaccinations, for example, would be a brownstone-leveling event. The Slap is set in the extremely affluent neighborhoods of Brooklyn, where a backyard kerfuffle counts as a catastrophic incident, but you can see Baitz reaching for a grander meaning, a diagnosis of the American condition in which ideologues on both sides do battle the self-defeating way, both in the highly contentious realm of parenting and beyond it as well.

The conservative-liberal allegory is not particularly subtle: Harry is a hypermacho alpha-male with an explosive temper who understands America as a place where a man either takes or gets taken. (Quinto has been very well-cast: Harry has a number of abhorrent qualities, and Quinto keeps him just this side of not entirely detestable.) Rosie is the hyperpermissive, ultraprotective mother who blames everyone but herself for her son’s wild behavior and looks to resolve things by dragging everyone though the legal system. When the two face off, there is no possibility of reasonable compromise. Harry’s and Rosie’s personalities and philosophies are the plot of The Slap: the unalterable factors that determine everything else that happens.

The Slap can be didactic, diffident, cartoonish, yet despite being not quite good, I found it impossible to watch without emotionally engaging. It would be easier to turn the show off than to have no opinion about whether Hugo deserved to be slapped, about whether Harry or Rosie and Gary are more to blame. In this way, too, The Slap resonates with contemporary political conversation: How much junk punditry have we let make us hot under the collar? The Slap, graceless as it can be, is a conversation piece. Skip it, or argue about it.

 

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/television/2015/02/nbc_the_slap_review_why_prestige_shouldn_t_be_limited_to_cable_tv.html

Cruel Teaching Assistant Bullied Girl, 7

12/4/2014   

A classroom assistant who bullied a seven-year-old girl for five months has been found guilty of child cruelty.

Rachael Regan, 43, taped the pupil to her chair, shut her in a storeroom and tied her shoes on with string.

Bradford Crown Court heard that Regan “singled out” the girl at the school in Calderdale, West Yorkshire.

Her bullying campaign also included sticking Post-it notes to her thumbs to stop her sucking them, kicking her chair, calling her a nickname, hiding her doll and tearing up a photograph of her.

Regan spent more than a year on bail before being charged and her victim is now nine. Judge Neil Davey QC said the girl had waited “a quarter of her lifetime” to give evidence.

An investigation was launched by the school and the police after the girl told her mother a teacher had tied her to a chair with sticky tape in front of other pupils.

The woman, who cannot be named, said her daughter “clung” to her “for dear life” and was in tears after it happened.

“(My daughter) just came rushing out and hugged me and tears were just rolling down her face,” the woman said.

“It was just so heartbreaking to see her like that because (she) is so bubbly and outgoing and I have never seen my daughter so upset.”

Other staff members said they had seen some of the incidents. One support assistant said that after the girl was taped to the chair, Regan went to another classroom to show another teaching assistant what she had done.

She then told her colleague: “She’ll not get up and wander around the classroom now.”

A teacher, Deborah McDonald, 41, was found not guilty of the same offence. The two women hugged after she was cleared.

Regan will be sentenced in January but she will not go to prison because of delays between the incidents and the trial.

DCI Darren Minton, of Calderdale Police, said: “This person was employed in a position of trust and she broke that trust with her actions.”

 

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/cruel-teaching-assistant-bullied-girl-7-190748611.html?utm_content=buffer80747&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer#BMhpS2U

Anthony Bourdain’s CNN Show Inspires Rush of New Culinary Series

‘Epic Meal Empire’

12/11/2014  The Hollywood Reporter   by Lesley Balla

This story first appeared in the Dec. 19 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine.

In the past decade, food-themed television has gone from Emeril Lagasse‘s “Bam!” to chefs bow-hunting for buffalo in the Arkansas backcountry. That colorful scene, from a recent episode of Nat Geo’s Eric Greenspan Is Hungry, is not an outlier. It’s part of an onslaught of new culinary series on a half-dozen cable networks and marks a major departure for the genre. Call it the Anthony Bourdain effect.

“The beautiful thing about food programming is the ability to be broad,” says Tim Pastore, president of original programming and production at Nat Geo U.S., who also has ordered booze-centric Chug and six-part doc EAT. “It’s a way to grab our core audience but also attract new viewers, to find a new demographic.”

Bourdain, with his landmark No Reservations on Travel Channel, and Bizarre EatsAndrew Zimmern laid the groundwork for food exploration on TV. And now that Bourdain is a CNN poster boy, nabbing Emmys and driving the struggling news net’s biggest ratings with Parts Unknown, many are seeking to duplicate that success — including his former network. Travel launches Breaking Borders with Top Chef winner Michael Voltaggio in 2015. The 13-episode order puts Voltaggio and journalist Mariana van Zeller in war-torn countries to resolve conflict through cuisine.

It’s an evolved food TV landscape from the days of just Food Network and Bravo’s Top Chef, admits Ross Babbit, senior vp programming and development at Travel Channel: “We want to convey the uniqueness of food and how culture is expressed in food. That’s what you saw with Bourdain and Zimmern and now with Breaking Borders.”

Food also is an obvious choice for upstart lifestyle networks like Esquire and FYI — both of which have made it a focus. “People are interested in shows that they can see themselves experiencing, as opposed to just passively watching,” says Esquire originals head Matt Hanna, who has a Bourdain-produced offering in The Getaway. “Food is an equalizer, but making it relatable to people’s everyday lives is the challenge. You want to create something that can be watched across all platforms.”

FYI is being equally aggressive in the culinary space. The new A+E-owned network’s culinary offerings skew toward comedy with things such as Epic Meal Empire, a cooking show-meets-Mythbusters. This is where execs see wide-open spaces for expansion. Coming at food from different points of view — be it humor or history, adventure and exploration, politics or hunting — allows for a broader audience.

“Most people don’t actually want to be a renowned chef or the best baker, but they do want to taste the best noodles in Thailand or curry in India,” adds Hanna. “It’s all about giving viewers a visceral experience that immerses them in sounds, smells and tastes.”

 

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/anthony-bourdains-cnn-show-inspires-755515?mobile_redirect=false

PBS to Expand Sunday Night Drama Lineup

PBS is expanding its drama footprint.

The network is adding 20 new hours of anthology series Masterpiece through 2015, including Grantchester, Poldark, Indian Summers and Damian Lewis starrer Wolf Hall. The new series will join current dramas Mr Selfridge and Call the Midwife, which are returning for new seasons.

PBS has also announced premiere dates for their new titles. First Peoples, a five-part series that presents the latest genetic research exploring how humans migrated from continent to continent, will premiere Wednesday, April 29. Filmmaker Rory Kennedy‘s Last Days in Vietnam will bow on Tuesday, April 28, timed to the 40th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon, and will be complemented by other special programs, including The Draft, The Day the Sixties Died and Dick Cavett’s Vietnam.

Another new series, Earth: A New Wild, hosted by leading conservation scientist Dr. M. Sanjayan, will air Wednesday, Feb. 4, as part of the network’s “Think Wednesday” science and nature night. The three-part film, Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies, executive produced by Ken Burns and directed and produced by Barak Goodman, will bow on Monday, March 30. The next day, three-part miniseries Miracle Baby Unit, which examines the groundbreaking scientific frontier of fetal medicine, premieres.

“Our diverse schedule includes everything from award-wining documentaries to fascinating science shows to ovation-worthy arts performances. More than ever before, I can say that this winter/spring season, there’s something exceptional on PBS every night of the week,” said Beth Hoppe, PBS’ chief programming executive and general manager of general audience programming.

Hoppe adds: “What’s more, the expansion of Sunday night drama gives our audience more of what they are looking for — thrilling, gorgeous, quality storytelling. PBS offers the very best content on television and across digital platforms.”

The network is strategically placing like-minded shows on the same night, a programming decision that had led to a significant increase in viewership near the end of the 2013-14 broadcast season with the fifth-largest primetime household rating among all broadcast and cable networks.

 

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/pbs-expand-sunday-night-drama-749956

 

Janet Mock on MSNBC Melissa Harris-Perry 10/26/14 & 10/28/14

Shonda Rhimes rewriting rules for black women

10/26/2014   MSNBC Melissa Harris-Perry

VIDEO
The MHP table discusses how Shonda Rhimes is using “How To Get Away With Murder” to rewrite the TV rules for on-screen representations of African American women.
http://www.msnbc.com/melissa-harris-perry/watch/shonda-rhimes-rewriting-rules-for-black-women-348065859665
How Shonda Rhimes is opening doors for gay characters on TV

10/28/2014   MSNBC Melissa Harris-Perry

VIDEO

The MHP table discusses how Shonda Rhimes is using “How To Get Away With Murder” to rewrite the TV rules for on-screen representations of African American women.
http://www.msnbc.com/melissa-harris-perry/watch/shonda-rhimes-rewriting-rules-for-black-women-348065859665

 

Sarah Silverman transgender backlash

10/10/2014   Ronan Farrow Daily

VIDEO:

http://www.msnbc.com/ronan-farrow/watch/sarah-silverman-transgender-backlash-340241475788

Transgender people are some of the most marginalized people in the workplace. ACLU attorney Chase Strangio discusses the controversy surrounding an equal pay for women viral video released by Sarah Silverman and The National Women’s Law Center.

Ken Tucker: An Open Letter to MSNBC President Phil Griffin

10/17/2014   The Hollywood Reporter   by Ken Tucker

Phil Griffin

Cultural critic Ken Tucker offers MSNBC’s president, Phil Griffin, some free, unsolicited advice on how to get his channel back on track

Dear Mr. Griffin,

You are in ratings trouble. From Morning Joe to Rachel Maddow, you’re losing chunks of audience. You recently told The New York Times’ Bill Carter, “we’ve got to adjust; we’ve got to evolve.” May I suggest five ways to do so?

1. Look at a list of frequent guests on Fox News. Now book them all, on your shows, across all day-parts. But also look at a list of leftist thinkers, analysts and essayists. Now book them on those same shows, alongside those right-wing talking heads, and let the blood flow. By which I mean, get viewers’ blood boiling, stir things up, hear some spirited debate (not shouting), some extreme opinions uttered articulately from both sides. Fox has succeeded in convincing CNN and your network that “liberal” equals “left wing extremist,” cowing you into booking too many centrists. Centrists make for dull TV. Here’s your opportunity to reacquaint America with what real, patriotic-left opinions are.

2. Start a pop culture roundtable talk show. I thought that was what The Cycle would turn into, but, except for hiring Toure, you blew it there. You can afford to schedule a non-news show, because the intrinsic timeliness of pop culture frames many news stories these days. At a time when Gone Girl raises issues about gender roles, or ABC’s black-ish about race relations, there’s a lot to talk about, both on a fan-level and a more elevated, newsworthy level. Plus, it will be fun to hear smart cultural commentators champion, condemn and argue — just think of the Fox News jokes you can make during a Walking Dead discussion!

3. Think NPR. In at least three different ways:

• You don’t need a new business model as much as you need a new talent model, a new pool to draw from, a different way of thinking about on-air personalities. Look/listen to National Public Radio. You’re never gonna get another Terry Gross, but you can try to emulate her mix of high/low, political/entertainment bookings, with a host who’s not out to score her/his own laughs, but who rather relies on deep knowledge and research in a conversational manner.

• Want a way to program against CNN’s increasing reliance on personalities like Anthony Bourdain and Mike Rowe? Those guys are storytellers. NPR shows like This American Life are full of storytellers — that show made stars of storytellers. There are hundreds of young people doing long-form journalism and personal histories on shoestring budgets who’d love to become part of a show that would regularly showcase that kind of work.

• For God’s sake, would it kill you to program something light in the afternoon? In the midst of the networks’ game shows and syndicated talk shows, put something on your channel that is a smarter, swifter, snarkier version of NPR’s quiz show Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!

4. Your Morning Joe Problem: The sitting-around-reading-newspapers-and-yelling-at-each-other thing is no longer working because people at home are doing enough yelling getting the kids out to the bus stop. Here’s the morning show for MSNBC: Steal CBS This Morning’s “Eye-Opener” two-minute summary of hard-news headlines and stick your own rubric on it. Then ignore all the recent social media festooning the network shows (“Tweet us your opinion!”), and set up an old-fashioned-yet-new morning “family” in the tradition of old Today and GMA line-ups: The avuncular/dad figure; the working-mom; the smart-aleck kid; the weatherperson who knows from humor and headlines (never underestimate the value of an Al Roker). Make their discussion of the morning’s news relatable, quick and lively. Don’t ask the audience to tweet their opinions to you; that’s just embarrassing.

5. Your biggest evening draw is, according to the Times piece, Chris Matthews (who is 68). This should tell you something: Don’t be afraid to put people over the age of 40 on the air. You chase the youth demo at your peril, and here’s the thing about the 25-54 demo that is your desired audience: They don’t care how old someone is, they just care about whether that person is saying something provocative, enlightening, fresh, and/or funny. Of course Fox beats you all the time — they don’t care if a guest is 21 or 81 as long as he or she makes an impact.

You need to make a different kind of impact, Mr. Griffin.

Good luck,

Ken Tucker

 http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/ken-tucker-an-open-letter-741759?mobile_redirect=false