Media-Whore D'Oeuvres

"While endorsements have begun to trickle in for Republican presidential candidates as they battle for standing in the race for the 2012 nomination, no game-changing endorsements haven't been landed yet. The Hill put together a list with some of the endorsements the presidential candidates covet most, listed below in no particular order." (TheHill)

"Photographer Howard Schatz had an idea: place actors in a series of roles and dramatic situations to reveal the essence of their characters. Such was the premise behind his book, In Character: Actors Acting, which captures some of Hollywood’s most emotive stars in the act of, well, making faces. Luckily for us, he continued the tradition for the pages of Vanity Fair. Here are some of the best ... FRED ARMISEN Left: You’re at your first official White House dinner, trying not to nod off while Joe Biden regales your table with tales of brokering backroom deals with Howard Baker in the 70s. Center: You’re in a meeting with your national-security team when an aide whispers in your ear that the Reverend Jeremiah Wright has just shown up unannounced at the White House gates. Right: A month after your inauguration, you discover that Dick Cheney’s 'undisclosed location' was a pantry in the private residence—and he’s still there!" (VanityFair)

"Frank Schaeffer saw the birth of the religious right from the inside. His father, the brilliant Presbyterian theologian Francis Schaeffer, was the intellectual father of the movement. He channeled the countercultural spiritual yearnings of '60s-era Jesus Freaks into the right-wing movement that now dominates the Republican Party. It was Schaeffer who first led evangelicals to mobilize against abortion, for many years ignored as primarily a Catholic concern. His three-party documentary, How Should We Then Live?. which Frank produced, inspired a whole generation of evangelicals into politics, including Michele Bachmann, who cites it as a formative influence. As his son, Frank was a conservative Christian celebrity in his own right, keynoting the Religious Broadcasters Convention and the Southern Baptist Convention. Now, though, he has a new message. The Christian right, he says, is fundamentally motivated by an anxious, terrified obsession with sex, an obsession that once drove him as well. 'Since the 1970s, the American culture wars have revolved around a fear of sex and women no less insane and destructive than any horror story to come out of Afghanistan,' he writes in his intriguing if hyperbolic new book, Sex, Mom and God." (TheDailyBeast)

"And who is the John McCain of 2012? No one. Neo-Reaganite foreign policy appears to have exhausted itself after only a decade ... Today's conservatives seem to want to return to the party's origins -- thus the popularity of the Tea Party label. Thomas Jefferson, the first Republican president, also deeply distrusted what he called the 'central' government, and opposed a standing army, a diplomatic service, and, above all, warfare, as instruments for the aggrandizement of the state and thus the diminishment of personal liberty (though he proved quite willing both to threaten and to wage war if the circumstances required it). The Republicans became the party of bellicosity only at the end of the 19th century, under Presidents William McKinley and Roosevelt, when their business base recognized the economic value of foreign conquest -- and when it had forsaken its small-government principles. When the GOP again began to define itself against activist government, as it did in the face of the New Deal, its partisans also turned decisively away from engagement with the world. Maybe it's too soon to say that the Republican Party has committed itself to genuine small-government conservatism: Certainly Romney and Gov. Tim Pawlenty, the most politically seasoned of the current candidates and the ones most likely to be nominated, favor increasing the defense budget even as they cut everything else to ribbons. (Bill) Kristol has half-seriously suggesteda ticket of Rep. Paul Ryan, the zealous budget-cutter, and Marco Rubio, the freshman Florida senator, who apparently favors 'more decisive action in Libya.' But the contradiction between seeking the smallest and least active federal government possible, and a muscular foreign policy can't be sustained over time. That's why the GOP has traditionally embraced one or the other, but not both. Is it the Democrats, then, who are the natural heirs to the doctrine of benevolent global hegemony? Probably not, if only because the hegemonic era is now behind us, presumably forever. In part for that very reason, and partly also in reaction to Bush's unilateralism, this administration is prepared to lead, if not from behind, then at least from the side, giving both authority and responsibility to allies. The Obama national security strategy does not insist upon unrivaled military superiority. And Obama is a cautious figure, acutely aware of the limits of the possible. So no, today's Democratic Party will probably not become the home for disappointed foreign-policy neoconservatives.  (ForeignPolicy)

"This year’s Emmy race for Outstanding Drama Series will continue cable’s dominance in this most prestigious category. Cable claimed 10 of the 13 nomination spots over the past two years, and 13 of 19 since 2008. By contrast, cable earned a mere nine nods combined in the seven years between 2001 and 2007 when the networks still ruled. The shift from broadcast is so extreme in 2011 that CBS’ The Good Wife is considered the only network series with a solid shot to earn its second nomination in as many years. (Though not in that league, NBC/DirecTV’s Friday Night Lights, NBC’s Parenthood, and CBS’ Blue Bloods deserve consideration while ABC has entered a rebuilding phase.) The sad reality is that the broadcast networks, which just signed a new eight-year deal with the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences to carry the Emmys, are facing a possible first-ever shutout from the top drama series category. That’s because of the continuing strength and ambition of programming on cable — in particular, HBO in a return to form, and AMC still on a roll." (Nikki Finke)

"Samantha Ronson's secret talent? Bowling. The deejay took a break from manning the decks at a party for sister Charlotte's JCPenney line, I Heart Ronson, and turned the music duties over to Danny Masterson so she could hit the lanes at Hollywood's Spare Room.  'Samantha bowled about six or seven games,' said a spy. 'She loves to bowl and was pretty good.' Zac Efron rolled up on his long board and bowled with Rashida Jones. Ashlee Simpson, Paris and Nicky Hilton and Nicole Richie all picked out I Heart Ronson pieces from a gift area." (PageSix)

"In 1960 Philip Roth won the National Book Award, America’s prestigious literary prize, for his first book, Goodbye Columbus. Last month he was awarded the Man Booker International, a biennial prize for a body of work. In the half century between, for his astonishing output of 53 books, Roth has also gathered in every one of the important American laurels, including the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the Gold Medal in fiction, the National Medal of Arts, some of them more than once – it’s hard to think that another prize will make much difference, or much impact. 'The first one did. Certainly. It plucked that book out of nowhere. After that, well, it’s better to win them than to lose them.' It’s a typically laconic remark. He does not travel these days and he will not be in London to receive his prize on Tuesday, preferring to stay put in his chosen seclusion. We are sitting in Roth’s study at his Connecticut home, a small wooden cabin detached from the tall grey clapboard house built in 1790, where he has lived since 1972 – although the cold half of the year is now spent in Manhattan. A broad desk occupies most of the space and, right behind it a huge fireplace, empty now in summer, silently describes the winter weather here. There’s a reclining chair and a comfortable leather couch – it is an unostentatious space perfectly adapted for long solitary hours of work. Through the window are apple trees, an old barn, the huge branches of a 200-year-old ash tree creaking gently in the wind. I think of Swede Levov, the protagonist of Roth’s 1997 novel American Pastoral, a Jewish boy from Newark who managed to move his family from the city streets into deep rural peace, and his feelings of astonishment that you could own a tree. Roth, now 78, owns many trees." (FT)

"Who should own Hulu? This has long been a parlor game in Hollywood and Silicon Valley, where the online TV site has always been perceived as the offspring of two contradictory cultures. Since its launch in 2007, Hulu has won millions of viewers—and is supposedly on track to earn $500 million in sales this year—by offering an attractive, user-friendly way to watch the most popular shows on TV. But its start-up ethos has run up against the wishes of its owners—News Corp., Walt Disney, and Comcast—who see Hulu as a threat to their main sources of revenue: ads and monthly subscription fees on broadcast and cable television. In the last few years, those owners (who are also the site's main licensors of TV shows) pushed for Hulu to run more ads and to launch a subscription version, Hulu Plus. The negotiations about these restrictions have been tense. Last year, Hulu CEO Jason Kilar threatened to quit when executives rejected his plan to offer Hulu Plus for $5 a month rather than $10. That time, the two sides managed to compromise: Hulu Plus now sells for $8 a month. But Hulu, which has to fend off attacks on its business model from pretty much every giant in the tech industry, will never survive long-term if its plans are always getting second-guessed by hyper-cautious higher-ups. Fortunately, both Hulu and its benefactors seem to have realized that their marriage is doomed. News broke this week that the company has hired a couple of investment bankers to begin putting together a sale of the firm. The question, now, is who would make the best use of its assets." (Slate)

"ON a recent Monday evening, Jared Kushner, the 30-year-old publisher of The New York Observer, was holding court in the grand ballroom at the Harmonie Club on East 60th Street. The occasion marked the newspaper’s annual '100 Most Powerful People in New York Real Estate' issue, and many in attendance were city fixtures, people whose names appear on donor plaques and ballots, not on movie marquees: the developer Richard LeFrak, New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman, the public relations wizard Howard Rubenstein. A seraphic figure with neatly sculptured chestnut brown hair and fair skin, the young publisher worked his way through a stream of approaching guests with business-like efficiency. In a corner stood a white backdrop covered in company logos. A velvet rope sat unused nearby.  'Isn’t this fun and glamorous,' Mr. Kushner said, his wry tone and boyish grin suggesting that he found the scene around him neither.

If you knew anything about Jared Kushner five years ago, it was probably that he was the oldest son of Charles Kushner, a New Jersey real estate developer who had spent time in prison for orchestrating one of the more memorable get-even schemes perpetrated in the name of sibling rivalry. He had hired a prostitute to entrap his brother-in-law and captured their encounter on hidden camera to show his sister.  After watching his father’s case play out in the media, with articles full of unflattering, anonymous leaks, Mr. Kushner did the one thing he could do to gain a modicum of control over the press: he bought his way in, paying about $10 million for The Observer, a newspaper read obsessively by New York’s business, political and cultural elite.  He was 25 at the time." (Observer)

"Everyone knows Mitt Romney is going to outpace the GOP presidential field when next month’s fundraising reports come out. But the scale of his money advantage is finally coming into shape: the rest of the field is going to be eating his dust. Romney is so confident in his fundraising that he will not put any of his own money into the campaign this quarter, campaign officials tell POLITICO. Beyond that, there are mostly questions. Rep. Michele Bachmann, while expected to clean up with low-dollar contributions, has yet to demonstrate she can haul in checks from the party’s coveted bundlers. Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman is impressing some of the GOP’s moneymen but remains a mystery. Those are just the candidates who’ve made clear they’re running. Proven fundraiser Rick Perry is still casting a shadow from the sidelines." (Politico)

"Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair's address book—including the names, phone numbers, and addresses of members of government, plus Blair's own National Insurance Number—was apparently leaked to the public by a group of hackers on Friday. The group, Team Poison, claims to have accessed the Blair office's webmail server "via a private exploit" in December of last year. (Though the group said seperately that they've had the information "for 1 year now.") In the document, which was put up on Pastebin around 6:30 p.m. ET on Friday, the hackers claim that they 'still have access to the webmail server, [sic] phone numbers may have changed but all the information is legit.' According to the Team Poison Twitter (manned by a hacker called "Trick"), the motive seems to be political—Blair is described as a 'war criminal,' and Trick seems to imply that those whose information is being released 'supported the war in iraq.'" (Gawker)

"Why doesn't anyone launch a startup in a dive bar? Is every startup really best represented by a fancy hotel bar? Granted, Fortnighter -- a place to order custom-written travel itineraries for $100 and up -- is best represented by a fancy hotel bar. In this case, it's Above Allen at the Thompson LES hotel. I double-checked whether it really cost a hundred dollars to get anything from this site. It does. On Fortnighter, which soft-launched three weeks ago, you fill out a questionnaire with sliders, checklists, and open text boxes about the types of restaurants, hotels, and activities you want. Then the site picks a travel writer from their network to write you a custom itinerary. One of the co-founders, Justin Kalifowitz, claims they’d already gotten feedback from users saying they got so much for their hundred bucks or two, they felt like they should have paid much more. I don’t understand this. I do not understand the concept of feeling you have underpaid for information. I didn’t understand it in college when I paid $200 per world-unlocking textbook, and I sure as hell don’t understand it this week, when I freaked the fuck out at a one-hour Wikipedia downtime. My free information was NOT AVAILABLE. I complained on Twitter. But the real sign you’re smart is knowing how many people are richer and dumber. Or, hell, just richer and busier. At some point it must actually make sense to hire a writer to custom-assemble an itinerary, right? I never much thought about the economics of this until a stint I did at Gridskipper (then edited by BlackBook’s current editor) around 2007. At the time, Gridskipper was Gawker Media’s travel blog, aimed at jetsetters and written by poor freelancers. The reviews were thus either unhelpful, lies, or revealed the writers’ poor financial habits. Most opinions were stolen from Yelp reviews. What a perfect moment in the great media switch. At one point, it made sense to pay someone to go on a trip just so they could write about that trip for others. But now you can ask people who went on the trip anyway to write up the experience for free." (BlackBookmag via TheAwl)