Media-Whore D'Oeuvres

           







"Days before al-Saadi Khadafy — the son of dead dictator Moammar Khadafy — stands trial in Libya, a new documentary reveals the debauched lifestyle of the soccer-loving playboy who paid to party with 50 Cent, engaged in wild orgies around the world and enjoyed videos of men playing sports nude. In Showtime’s 'Mad Dog: Inside the Secret World of Muammar Gaddafi,' airing Friday, director Christopher Olgiati interviews Libyan pro soccer player Reda Thawargi, who says al-Saadi — a wannabe soccer star whose career fizzled because he couldn’t pass drug tests — urged him to drop the sport so they could party. 'He said that I played [soccer] too much. He wanted me to accompany him in all his travels,' Thawargi says. He adds that al-Saadi traveled with '60,000 or 70,000 euros in cash just for shopping. He would rent accommodations for 200,000 or 300,000 euros a month. We would eat in a restaurant and pay 40 or 50 thousand euros.' And 'we would get girls . . . we did group sex together . . . He liked boys as well . . . He would watch DVDs of gay men playing football.' During one orgy, Thawargi says, the Khadafy scion 'wanted me to warm him up [sexually] . . . to get his blood running.'" (PageSix)





















"A number of months ago, I engaged in a spirited debate with Alan Abramowitz and Ruy Teixeira over whether there were 'missing white voters' in the 2012 election upon which Republicans could potentially draw in the future to win elections. We also sparred over whether white voters were trending Republican, potentially offsetting Democratic gains among nonwhites. Lost in this debate was a clever argument, set forth by Nate Cohn (then of The New Republic) and also alluded to by Benjy Sarlin at MSNBC. The gist of the argument was this: Even if whites are, in fact, moving toward Republicans, they are primarily moving toward Republicans in already-red Southern states and in Greater Appalachia — states like West Virginia, Kentucky and Arkansas, which were largely settled by Scots-Irish immigrants and their descendants. Cohn looked at competitive states’ Partisan Voting Index (how a state votes relative to the national popular vote) in 2000 and again in 2012 and concluded that almost all of the movement in competitive states has been toward Democrats. You can see the basis for Cohn’s argument in the table below from his article. This argument unfortunately slipped through the cracks due to the uproar over the main hypothesis. It has particular contemporary significance in light of some of the discussions that have occurred regarding the Democrats’ difficulties in the House and, to a lesser extent, the Senate. After all, it is becoming close to the conventional wisdom that a major reason Democrats failed to capture the House in 2012, despite winning a plurality of the popular vote, is that their vote is inefficiently distributed. There have also been pieces discussing a similar problem for Democrats in the Senate.What Cohn, Sarlin and others are essentially hypothesizing is that Republicans are developing a similar problem in presidential politics: As their vote share becomes increasingly concentrated among Southern whites, Republicans might remain competitive in the popular vote. However, their vote shares among northern whites will remain insufficient to offset the votes of the minority populations of those states, making it difficult for the GOP to win the Electoral College.I have two basic, interrelated thoughts. They revolve around the issues of which year should be used as a baseline and around the definition of a swing state.
The issue of the baseline year is particularly important. Put differently, from which year should we measure the change in the Electoral College? Cohn uses 2000 as the baseline, but that year had a substantial problem: Ralph Nader.To see how Nader renders 2000 problematic as a baseline, consider the example of Minnesota. In 2000, Al Gore won Minnesota with 51.3% of the two-party vote while winning 50.2% of the national two-party vote. Minnesota was only a point more Democratic than the country as a whole that year." (CenterforPolitics)















"Yesterday was Wednesday and it was Michael’s for a lot of people. My lunch was canceled and so DPC did not attend. However, a little bird gave me a rundown of the room which was filled with “the regulars” and here are some of them (with some exceptions to the “regular” qualification): David Schiff, Kelly Simon, Dave Dyer (VP Warner Brothers), Bonnie Fuller of Hollywoodlife.com; Pauline Brown (LVMH), Judy Licht (Mrs. Jerry Della Femina) with Liz Aiello; Steven Greenberg (of Allen & Co), Nina Griscom, Glenn Horowitz, Jerry Inzerillo (Pres. CEO IMG Artists), Walter Isaacson, who was honored last night at the World Monuments Fund gala, with M. David Skorton, new head of Smithsonian; Pamela Keogh; Henry Schleiff; Stan Shuman; Liz Smith with Jay Springer and LeRoy Rimes; Richard Turley with Rikki Klieman; David Zaslav (president of Discovery Channel) with Joe Squawk; Beverly Camhe; Alexandre Chemla; Jim Bell with Jonny G Weir; Joan Gelman; Scott Greenstein; Star Jones with Holly Phillips MD; Wayne Kabak; Neil Lasher of EMI Publishing; Anne Martin-Vachon of HSN; Steve Mosko President of Sony Pictures Television; Harvey Weinstein, and scores more just like ‘em." (NYSD)









"There is a scene in the film Cesar Chavez where a vineyard owner learns that labor organizer Cesar Chavez plans to target the family business for a boycott. 'What should we do?' the owner’s son asks. The owner is feeding his grandson and doesn’t answer right away. 'Zucchini?' he says, tenderly, handing the baby a piece of vegetable. Then he sighs. He doesn’t know the answer. He’s not the one who went to college. He’s merely the one who invested a lot of money in his only son, he says, hoping that one day the son would be able to answer one simple question. The vineyard owner, who is played by John Malkovich, pauses, presses his lips together, then opens them and ever so delicately, through sheer Malkovichian menace of enunciation, articulates the question and sinks in his fangs: 'How do I not drive my father’s business into the fucking ground?'Mr. Malkovich is onscreen only for a handful of minutes in the film, but his performance, at once sympathetic and terrifying, beautifully complicates an otherwise straightforward hagiography. The vineyard owner, the son of immigrants himself, can’t understand why Chavez is trying to ruin him, but what really hurts him is that his feckless, soft-handed son is so ill equipped to defend his family. 'So often when you see something like this, the antagonist is so unlikely,' the actor, whose company Mr. Mudd produced Chavez, says. 'And that always weakens the point of the film.'When it comes to antagonists, there are few more likely actors than Mr. Malkovich. With a curl of the lip, a flick of the tongue, a slow and lizard-like blink of the eye, he conveys tremendous potential energy under the surface calm. The rage is almost entirely latent, the capacity for violence implied rather than demonstrated, which makes it all the more chilling. His performances as the louche libertine Valmont in 1988’s Dangerous Liasions or the capricious Russian KGB gangster in 1998’s Rounders made his name synonymous with slippery, insinuating villainy." (Observer)















"Gwyneth Paltrow didn’t want to go public with her 'conscious uncoupling' from Chris Martin.
She wanted to keep pretending to the world that they were still together, sources tell me. 'It was his idea to announce the split. They had drifted apart, and there was no chance they’d get back together, so he felt it was wrong to keep pretending,' said one gossip. Now Paltrow is upset. Most people believe it was her fault the marriage ended because of her alleged links to real-estate mogul Jeffrey Soffer and entertainment lawyer Kevin Yorn. Martin, who didn’t lose his virginity until he was 22, seems to be the innocent naïf who couldn’t keep up with an entitled Hollywood princess." (Richard Johnson)





"Last night at Cipriani 42nd Street, The Paris Review was hosting its annual 'Spring Revel' honoring poet Frederick Seidel. The Paris Review was founded sixty-one years ago in 1953 by Harold Humes, Peter Matthiessen and George Plimpton. Mr. Matthiessen, who died over the weekend at age 86, was said to be the originator of the idea when he was living in Paris and working for the CIA. It is said that the idea was dreamed up as a kind of  'cover' for his work. In its first five years, the Paris Review published works by Jack Kerouac, Philip Larkin, V. S. Naipaul, Philip Roth, Adrienne Rich, Italo Calvino, Samuel Beckett, Nadine Gordimer, and Jean Genet, among many other distinguished writers." (NYSD)