"Boy, do I get depressed when I read things like this, from White House press spokesman Jay Carney the other day: “The president hopes that members of Congress of both parties, having returned from their August recess, will come back imbued with the spirit of bipartisan compromise, and imbued with the urgency required to address the needs of our economy and the needs of our workforce.' And this: 'There will be plenty of reasons for people on both sides of the aisle to like it' (with 'it' referring to the president’s soon-to-be-unveiled jobs plan). That’s White House 'Principal Deputy Press Secretary' Joshua Earnest (Earnest! Did Dickens name this guy?). I just shudder to think that the president is going to head into this fall’s battle over the economy while sticking to these soupy clichés and the worldview behind them. How much evidence do they need to see that Republicans will return to Washington imbued with the spirit of partisan hostility? When will Obama ever utter fighting words? I hope—alas, against hope—that the White House is keeping a scorecard of this year so far. That scorecard reads Republicans 2, Obama 0 (the threatened government shutdown and the debt deal), covering a period during which the president’s approval ratings have sagged by about 10 points, and this even though he iced Osama bin Laden. What the Republicans are doing is working. It’s pretty nearly working perfectly. It doesn’t matter that the GOP’s disapproval numbers are high. People vote for individual candidates, not parties, and Obama is now in trouble in some big states in head-to-head matchups with Mitt Romney and Rick Perry. Obviously the people in the White House know all this. They just don’t seem to want to do anything about it." (TheDailyBeast)
"The coming of television terrified the film industry in the early 1950s. No one had any vision about the new medium (with the possible exception of Jules Stein and Lew Wasserman, who were still agents in those days). The studios were afraid they would be killed by it. So did just about everybody else. This was traumatic because they had been spoiled. In the mid-1940s when the country’s population was about 145 million, forty to fifty million Americans went to the movies every week. There were dozens of movie magazines. Two women, Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper wrote syndicated movie gossip columns read by millions daily. Radio shows featuring the movie stars drew the biggest ratings. The major studios ruled the town (with MGM at the top of the heap, and Louis B. Mayer its king). Then television came along and suddenly broke the stats by the as the boob tube took over millions of American homes in the early 1950s. For actors, television was a boon. It was work, a job; the rent; a way to keep food on the table until a break in pictures came along. George Reeves was one of those actors. Born in Iowa in 1914, he was a Golden Gloves champion by his late teens with an excellent record (30 – 1). He’d migrated to Los Angeles when someone planted the idea his head that he was good looking enough to be a movie actor. He joined the Pasadena Playhouse. And somewhere thereafter someone discovered him." (NYSocialDiary)
"AMC has greenlighted 2 unscripted series, Kevin Smith’s Secret Stash and JJK Security, about a private security firm. Additionally, the network announced that, just like Season 1 did, the second season of The Walking Dead will launch with a 90-minute premiere episode. It will once again kick off AMC’s two-week long Fearfest on Sunday, Oct, 16. The 13-episode second season will be split in 2: 7 episodes airing in the fall and the remaining 6 launching Feb. 12." (Deadline)
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