Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 835

Ten Great Movies That Opened in the January Wasteland

The wisdom has long been accepted that movie studios dump their crappiest product into theaters in January. This is a month when everybody is far more concerned with positioning their prestige films from the just-completed year for awards. Movies that may have gotten a one-week qualifying run in New York or Los Angeles (so they can compete for awards) are now getting rolled out to the rest of the country. Money is going into marketing and campaigning films and stars for that elusive Oscar. And since nobody has the time or money to dedicate to the next year’s product, might as well give the shaft to the movies that are generally believed to be junk. 

Oh, nobody will say this outright. But if Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit or I, Frankenstein were any good, they would be almost certainly opening in higher-profile release slots. This doesn't mean that January is an iron-clad guarantee of crappiness, of course. It's just that the flowers that grow up among all these weeds are all the more rare. Most often, the good January movies come from genres that are critic-proof and attract their niche audiences in steady numbers no matter when they open. Horror movies, say.

We decided to pick ten favorite movies that managed to open in January and actually be worth the price of a ticket. We limited the list to post-1990, when the month really began to take shape as a wasteland of quality. 

 

10. Final Destination 2

For the most part, this list is going to avoid some of the movies that, while terrible, are also deeply enjoyable. Your Spice Worlds. Your Varsity Blueses. Final Destination 2 [clip Not Safe For Work, by the way] may, for some, belong in that category. But it's so emblematic of a series that got very smart about its best assets—the Rube Goldberg devices of happenstance and danger that would end up felling all principal characters—and this was the movie that kind of cemented the template for good.

9. The Hand that Rocks the Cradle

Not only is this a delicious little bit of elemental suburban horror (your nanny is going to replace you! IN EVERY WAY!), it's also a career peak for Rebecca DeMornay, an early glimpse at Julianne Moore, and the first real look at what Curtis Hanson could do with genre before he rattled off a string of excellent (and often underrated) movies like The River Wild, L.A. Confidential, and In Her Shoes. 

8. Teeth

A body-horror comedy that manages to tear down the misogynist "vagina dentata" myth by investing fully into literalizing it. Watching this movie in a theater full of yelping, squirming horror was one of the best cases for watching horror with an audience.

7. The Grey

Liam Neeson has kind of become the king of January Movies, even if most of them don't actually come out in January. As it happens, only The Grey and Taken have opened in the year's crappiest movie month, though doesn't it seem like Unknown, Taken 2, and both of the Clash of the Titans movies should have opened then? Not to mention his upcoming February release Non-Stop. Of all of them (Non-Stop excluded, for now), The Grey is the best of them, with a snarly Neeson pitted against nature, fate, and some hungry wolves.

6. City of God

A big part of the reason why City of God's unexpected Oscar nominations came as such a big shock was because it had opened waaaaay back in January, after trying (and failing) for a Best Foreign Language Film nomination the year before. The success of the film shot Fernando Meirelles into prominent, where he stayed through The Constant Gardener and was promptly punted out after Blindness. 

5. From Dusk 'til Dawn

Robert Rodriguez's best movie (yes) and his most successful teaming with Quentin Tarantino (YES), this manages to be a tip-top road movie, western, and vampire movie, one right after the other in rapid succession. No film better represents Tarantino and Rodriguez's "throw it against the wall and see what sticks" ethos. Literally.

4. Aileen: the Life and Death of a Serial Killer

Documentaries are not a commercial venture, really, so it's not that big of a surprise that even one of the genre's best examples might have been dumped in January. That's no comment on its quality, just on the fact that a documentary audience will show up, even in its modest numbers, whenever there's a good product to be seen.

3. Cloverfield

The J.J. Abrams-produced monster movie was kept under lock and key until a surprise trailer appeared before the first Transformers movie in summer 2007. The fact that Cloverfield was a January movie getting a buzzy pre-release treatment was kind of a new phenomenon, and not one that has been repeated too much (though February has become  surprisingly fertile ground for mid-level quasi-blockbusters), which is surprising since Cloverfield made a ton of money. 

2. Before Sunrise

Slightly less popular opinion: Before Sunrise is the best of the trio of Richard Linklater/Ethan Hawke/Julie Delpy films, though they all have their wonderful qualities. The chatty way in which infatuation is expressed across a night while backpacking across Europe is so intoxicating. After premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, Columbia decided to release it right away, birthing a cult hit and two of the least expected sequels ever. 

1. Waiting for Guffman

Despite the cult status of This Is Spinal Tap, I guess you could forgive studios for not quite understanding what they had in Christopher Guest's repertory company and their mockumentary about community theater and its lovable, deluded denizens. Still .... they saw the movie, right? After playing a couple festivals, to January it went, whereupon its songs about stool production and interplanetary travel could flourish.

       

Peter King Calls The New York Times 'A Disgrace,' Which Is Actually Pretty Nice for Him

Associated Press

New York Rep. Peter King told Fox News that The New York Times is "a disgrace" that doesn't "care about American lives being lost" in the wake of the newspaper's editorial supporting Edward Snowden. It's the meanest thing King's said about the paper since he asked the Attorney General to prosecute its editors for treason in 2006 — after it reported on NSA surveillance.

King gets excited about things. And he got very excited in the wake of the Times' suggestion that the NSA leaker (or, in its words, whistleblower) be given some sort of clemency deal that would allow him to come back to the United States. Politico has the video and a partial trascript:

"Their editorial today and their whole pattern over the last several years, they’ve really made themselves a blame-America-first rag as far as I’m concerned, and why we exalt The New York Times is beyond me. … They go out of their way to be apologists for terrorists and go after those in law enforcement and military who are trying to win this war."

In 2006, the paper reported that the CIA and the Treasury Department under President George W. Bush were analyzing international financial transactions for evidence of terror links. That June, the Associated Press reported King asked the attorney general to "begin an investigation and prosecution of The New York Times — the reporters, the editors and the publisher." King said, "We're at war, and for the Times to release information about secret operations and methods is treasonous."

Other papers ran the same report as the Times, but King singled it out in particular for having previously reported on rumors that the NSA was collecting information about Americans' phone calls without a warrant. That report led to the first public critique of the government's surveillance structure, and prompted later congressional revisions to the Patriot Act. In the wake of Snowden's disclosures earlier this year, the government finally admitted that the program existed.

The Times was sanguine in response to King's threats back in 2006. When it offered an endorsement in his race that October, it declined to back King, writing, "We do not support Mr. King, but not because he wants us in jail. Our decision has to do with temperament, effectiveness and differences on issues from taxes and Iraq to abortion and immigration." He doesn't get everything wrong, the paper's editors added, though this was apparently not enough of an olive branch to assuage King's anger over the long term.

       

America Passed More Abortion Restrictions in the Last 3 Years Than the Previous 10

AP

A survey of abortion trends has produced a somewhat startling quantification to the increasing effort to legislate restrictions to abortions. From 2011 to 2013, 205 abortion restrictions were enacted in the U.S. That's more than the total number enacted for the entire decade between 2000 and 2010, according to the Guttmacher Institute's year-end report. 

Source: Guttmacher Institute

Their numbers also detail another effect of that increased legislation: essentially, the percentages of women living in abortion-supportive states and abortion-hostile states have flipped. In 2000, 31 percent of women lived in states hostile to abortions, and 40 percent of women lived in states supportive of access to the procedure. Now, 31 percent of women live in supportive states, while 56 percent of women live in hostile states. 

According to the report, 2013 was the second most active anti-abortion law year, second only to 2011. The relative lull in 2012 is explained in part by the quirks of state legislative sessions. Texas, for instance, didn't hold a legislative session in 2012, nor did North Dakota. The two states combined to enact 13 restrictions against abortion in 2013. 

Some of the active states on that front include:

Texas: In one of the most high-profile cases of state abortion legislation last year, the state passed a wide-ranging bill that banned abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy, and placed a number of new restrictions on clinics. Those restrictions, including a requirement that all abortion-providing doctors have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital, forced the closure of about a third of the state's clinics when the law took effect in the fall. Meanwhile, as Al Jazeera America reported Thursday, Texas-based anti-abortion "pregnancy centers" are doing just fine, and face virtually no restrictions in the state. That's despite the fact that "pregnancy center" workers can provide ultrasounds, often dress in white coats, and frame themselves as a competing resource to women's health clinics. 

Michigan: In late 2013, the state enacted a measure that bars private health insurers from covering abortions, unless the woman's life is in danger. Michigan is now one of nine states with private insurance restrictions on abortion, including Arkansas, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. In Michigan, women will have to purchase a separate rider before they get pregnant (that provision is derisively called "rape insurance") in order to have the procedure covered by their providers. 

North Dakota: This state now has what's widely regarded as the toughest abortion laws in the country. The state passed four anti-abortion measures in 2013, including a "fetal heartbeat" ban on abortions, which can effectively ban the procedure after six weeks of pregnancy. But abortion access advocates believe that particular provision can be overturned in court, and the provision is blocked while those legal challenges proceed. Other provisions of the law are also facing legal challenges, including one limiting the use of drug-induced abortion procedures. The state has only one abortion-providing clinic. 

Ohio: Ohio had its own omnibus anti-abortion law take effect this fall, one of a series of incremental laws in the state passed with a quickened pace since John R. Kasich's election as governor in 2011. The measures were passed as part of the state budget. Doctors in the state must test for a fetal heartbeat, and inform women seeking an abortion of the likelihood of her carrying the fetus through a full-term pregnancy. Public hospitals are also barred from signing required admitting privileges agreements with abortion providing clinics and doctors. And, the budget bill makes it harder for abortion-providing clinics to get family planning funding from the state. 

There are other states, like Kansas, Wisconsin, and North Carolina, also facing a recent wave of restrictions on abortion that nudge at the procedure's constitutional protections stemming from the Roe v. Wade decision. Last year's uptick in legislation was inspired in part by the anti-abortion movement's determination to use the Kermit Gosnell trial as a rallying cry for state-by-state restrictions. But Guttmacher's numbers indicate that the foundation for the latest anti-abortion push comes from conservative Republican victories in recent statewide elections. 

       

Puppy Bowl: Don't Appease Cat People, They Don't Want to Be Saved

AP

Is it really worth giving cat people and their cold hearts a tiny bit of pleasure by putting felines in the Puppy Bowl if it means ruining the Puppy Bowl for the rest of us? Short answer: no.  

For some reason or another the producers of Animal Planet's well-loved Puppy Bowl, the only Super Bowl alternative out there, have decided to sell their souls to the feline minority tinker with the fundamentals of the event and incorporate cats. The producers announced that, in honor of the Puppy Bowl's 10th anniversary, they will be featuring a Keyboard Cat halftime show and a "perma-kitten" sideline guest named Lil Bub, Entertainment Weekly reports. 

This is absurd beyond reason, and sacrilege. If there's one surefire way to ruin something that is genuinely good you can be sure it starts with "let's add a cat." A few thoughts: 

Keyboard Cat Is Dead, Therefore the Halftime Show Is Devil Magic

Keyboard Cat was pretty awesome in 2007. You know what else was cool in 2007? Dita Von Teese. Dita is now a junior shoe sales associate at the Short Hills Nordstrom, and Keyboard Cat videos aren't faring any better.

But the real offense here is that the original Keyboard Cat, a feline named Fatso, passed away in 1987. And Animal Planet will apparently perform some dark magic ritual to get him to perform a Bruno Mars song. EW explains: 

Keyboard Cat has been resurrected in his new incarnation to play a song during the Puppy Bowl’s Kitty Halftime Show (the magic and charm of Keyboard Cat need not be constrained to one fur-body; he’s like Shamu or Santa).

It's probably as good a time as any to remind you that Shamu killed someone. Just chew on that. 

"Perma-Kittens" Are Scary Lil' Bub via YouTube

The other half of this feline tag team is "Lil Bub", an underdeveloped, mouth-breathing cat. If this cat were human, he or she would be operating the tilt-a-whirl at your county fair with an unchecked thyroid. This is just more proof cat people are strange. 

Cat People Are Not Worth It  AP

This world is divided between the 82 percent of good people who love dogs and the 18 percent of people who like cats. You know who was a cat person? Mussolini was a cat person. But that might not be here nor there. What matters here is that cat people aren't watching the puppy bowl— that's partly because their hearts don't know what love is like and they don't know any better. They've resigned themselves to loving creatures incapable of loving them back (they share this trait with Shia LaBeouf fans). 

They probably don't even want to read news about the puppy bowl, and at this point, they're so deep in their cat love that they two cats won't change their mind. We then come to the unavoidable question: Why would Animal Planet do this?

Animal Planet Is Greedy

To answer the previous question, you have to look at the Hallmark Channel. Last year, they announced they were creating an inferior product to compete with the Puppy Bowl: The Kitten Bowl. Animal Planet wants to be the king of cute, Super Bowl alternative programming, and adding cats could give them the kind of ammunition to destroy the Kitten Bowl. And clearly, they don't mind if they lose some true fans of the Puppy Bowl along the way.

       

NFL Punter Chris Kluwe Says He was Driven Out of Football for Supporting Gay Marriage

Associated Press

Former Minnesota Viking punter Chris Kluwe has been an outspoken advocate of same-sex marriage over the last couple of years, a stance that has won him a lot of fans and a few enemies. He didn't play in the NFL this season after being cut by the Vikings in the spring, in a decision he now says was motivated in part by his political views. 

In an essay published on Deadspin on Thursday, Kluwe writes he is "pretty confident" that his activism ended his tenure with the Vikings, and has perhaps even prevented him from catching on with another team. Specifically, he blames the "two cowards and a bigot" who ultimately decided to fire him. The cowards are his old head coach, Leslie Frazier, and the team's general manager Rick Spielman. (Frazier was fired on Monday after another disappointing year.) The "bigot" is special teams coordinator Mike Priefer, Kluwe's position coach and the leading "in-house" candidate to replace Frazier.

Kluwe says he wrote most of this story as it happened last May, but published now to avoid an in-season distraction, but also to "make sure that Mike Priefer never holds a coaching position again in the NFL, and ideally never coaches at any level."

Coach Mike Priefer is a "bigot,"
Kluwe alleges (AP)

In his story, Kluwe says that almost immediately after he began publicly expressing his support for gay marriage in 2012, Frazier began asking for him to keep quiet, despite getting encouragement from team owner Zygi Wilf. Spielman also told him to "fly under the radar please" after a series of tweets criticizing Pope Benedict and the Catholic Church.

But it was Priefer who made things especially difficult. Through the 2012 season, Priefer was openly hostile to Kluwe's activism, often making homophobic statements, like "denounc[ing] as disgusting the idea that two men would kiss," and "said on multiple occasions that I would wind up burning in hell with the gays." He then began to threaten Kluwe's job, bringing other punters in for tryouts, even though his play was consistent and the team had no intention of replacing him.

During one player meeting, Priefer allegedly said to the whole group, "We should round up all the gays, send them to an island, and then nuke it until it glows." The next off-season, despite not getting any complaints about his play, the Vikings drafted a punter and then cut Kluwe before the next practices began. Kluwe accuses Priefer of orchestrating his departure, and calls Frazier and Spielman "cowards" for not standing up for him.

When people ask: why don't gay players just come out? That Kluwe writing should be shown as the definitive answer.

— mike freeman (@mikefreemanNFL) January 2, 2014

It's pretty much impossible to read Kluwe's story and imagine an NFL team sincerely embracing an openly gay player. So that's depressing.

— Andrew Sharp (@andrewsharp) January 2, 2014

The football reasons given for Kluwe's axing are that as a league veteran, he's expensive; his talents were replaceable; and an off-season surgery made him a potential liability. But Kluwe says that doesn't explain why none of the other 31 teams in the league took a chance on him in 2013.

I can still hit the ball 45 yards outside the numbers with good hangtime, and at the tryouts I've had this year I've gotten praise from the scouts and personnel people on hand, but for whatever reason I cannot find a job ...

It's clear to me that no matter how much I want to prove I can play, I will no longer punt in the NFL, especially now that I've written this account. ...

I realize that in advocating noisily for social change I only made it easier for them to justify not having me around. So it goes.

Chris Kluwe (AP)

Perhaps Kluwe has burned his last bridges with these straightforward accusations, but they remain consistent with his reputation for speaking his mind. Unfortunately, that's dangerous behavior in a league so obsessed with its own public image. In the end, Kluwe doesn't blame the NFL or the culture of the NFL locker, but merely says that he hopes someone, somewhere will hold Mike Priefer accountable. "There are homophobic people in the NFL, in all positions, but that's true for society as well, and those people eventually get replaced."

       

Let's Try One More Time to Explain How Climate Change Works to Donald Trump

Guys, did you hear that a "global warming" expedition got trapped in ice and also it's been pretty cold recently? Yes, you did, because both stories have been used as a rationale to deny the existence of climate change, because people are disingenuous or misinformed or both. But, fine, let's explain it to them one more time.

This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop. Our planet is freezing, record low temps,and our GW scientists are stuck in ice

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 2, 2014

For example, Donald Trump! Trump, a former reality television star, tweeted on Thursday morning that global warming is "bullshit" for the reasons you can see at right. Trump's previous environmental activism has been mostly focused on being mad at wind turbines that are interfering with a golf course he wants to build. Suffice it to say his foray into the broader sphere of environmental science has been equally dumb.

But he's not alone. Deniers of global warming like Breitbert.com and Newsmax and a host on Fox Business and the Drudge Report have seized on the two occurrences to prove their point, or bolster their point, or just insult their opponents, whichever. Breitbart's John Hayward even wrote a poem about the ship, which was in the Antarctic to investigate sea ice levels. "The water started getting cold / The frozen ship was stuck / Their theories called for melting ice / But they were out of luck... yes, they were out of luck…" Lol, etc.

Screen shot of the Drudge Report on Wednesday evening

The Guardian explains why this argument is incorrect. The Arctic, where sea ice melt has rapidly accelerated in recent years, is very different than ice in the Antarctic. There's no land, no continent in the Arctic, just ocean, which leads to a different pattern of melt than on Earth's southern pole. As the University of Tasmania's Tony Press told the paper, "[Antarctica] is losing continental ice while sea ice has been increasing by about 1% a decade." This has been known for a long time. Oh, and the ship wasn't frozen in; it was trapped by shifting ice.

How bad is Arctic ice melt? As The Hill reports, Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski is mad that the United States isn't moving faster to stake a claim in regions of the Arctic Circle that are become accessible due to warming temperatures. In 2012, a U.S. major general referred to the creation of a "northern coast" — that is, a new sea border for the continent as the Arctic opens up to sea travel. That is all thanks to global warming. Hayward didn't make up funny poems about it.

But the much dumber argument is the one that it is cold therefore there is no global warming. As it turns out, it is winter. Even as temperatures warm, winter will still be colder. There will still be snow! It will just be wetter and in different places, and the cold nights will not be as cold on average. Take the mangrove trees in Matt Drudge's home state of Florida. They're suddenly being found further up the state's coast, thanks to a decreasing number of cold winter nights that would normally kill off the plants.

New research suggests that the predicted increases in global temperatures have been underestimated, meaning that our expectations for what's to come are probably too optimistic. That's what the Drudge headline in the image above was linking to, but Drudge added the quotation marks, because who believes "scientists"? Losers. People who are "Fired™."

Climate change's reality is obvious to anyone paying attention or who isn't motivated by trying to score political points. Meaning that our counter-arguments, as always, are falling on deaf ears. Or, perhaps, covered eyes. This is going to be the most bittersweet "we told you so" in world history.

       

A Guide: How to Be Town and Country's Sexiest Bachelor

AP

For the second year in a row, rich person coffee table tome Town and Country has decided to concoct a list of the "Top 50 Bachelors" in the universe. Out of all the single men in the world, these are the ones who were deemed most desirable. And who wouldn't want to be a part of that select group?  We took a look at the list and spotted some surefire ways to be considered one of the sexiest bachelors in the universe. So here's our guide for any guy who wants (c'mon now, who doesn?) in on that list:

Have Awesome Parents An Eastwood offspring, via Associated Press

Forget being a self-made man, what you need to get on this list are awesome parents — royals, artists, editors, politicians movie stars, musicians, movie stars who procreated with musicians — the cooler your parents are, the more desirable you are. If you look at the short dossiers of each the 50 bachelors, 26 of them state who's son they are within the first couple of lines. There's an Eastwood, a Spielberg, a few royals, some Wenners, a Schwarzenegger, a Robinson, a Kennedy or three (more on that later), and possibly a Sinatra. 

Tip: Ride those coattails. Bonus points if both your parents are famous. 

Examples: Scott Eastwood; Theo Spielberg; Gus and Theo Wenner; Ronan Farrow; Alex Drexler.

Be a Kennedy John Bouvier Kennedy Schlossberg, via AP

It doesn't matter if you're a little weird-looking or still in high school — if you're a Kennedy, you're on the list. 

Tip: Post your exploits to Instagram and/or date Taylor Swift. 

Examples: Robert F. Kennedy III; Conor Kennedy; Jack Schlossberg; Patrick Schwarzenegger.

Have a Brother

Double trouble! T&C loves the idea of bachelor duo — more chances to marry into the family, of course. Brother bachelors are most revered for being independently wealthy and enjoying things like "tennis" and "skiing." 

Tip: Make sure you nail your signature brother pose for the photos.

Examples: Nick and Jon Paul Pérez; Gus and Theo Wenner; Liam and Sam Fayed.

Bad Marriages Ansel Elgort via AP

Other than being a Kennedy, there's nothing T&C likes more than a man who's back on the market after a divorce. There also seems to be a correlation between how beautiful the woman in the failed relationship is and how desirable the bachelor is.

Tip: Make sure your breakup hits Page Six. 

Examples: Spike Jonze; Justin Portman; Jeff Bewkes; Russell Brand.

Be a Child

For some inexplicable reason (Axe body spray?), being under 20 years old makes you a highly eligible bachelor. If you still know your high school locker combination (because you use it every day), you have a great chance of making the list.

Tip: Again, dating Taylor Swift really helps. Also nice to be a freshman football player at Notre Dame. 

Examples: Corey Robinson (18); Conor Kennedy (19); Alain-Fabien Delon (19); Ansel Elgort (19); Prince George Alexander Louis (infant).

Be a Royal Prince Harry via AP

Of the 50 bachelors on the list, seven are European royalty. Even if your "prince" title is irrelevant, because you live in Germany where a monarchy no longer exists, that's fine. For T&C, it's enough to know that you would have been royal. 

Tip: Avoid inbreeding! 

Examples: Prince Harry; Lord Edward Spencer-Churchill; Prince Albert von Thurn und Taxis, Prince Pierre Casiraghi, Prince Hussain Aga Khan, Earl Hugh Grosvenor, Prince George Alexander Louis (yes, the infant boy king of England) .

Go to a Good School

"I went to the University of ..." said no one on this list. If you want to make it on this list, it might actually be better to drop out of high school than go to UCLA or Berkeley if you can't get into Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, or Oxford. 

Tip: Don't go to a state school.

Examples: Jeff Bewkes; Carter Cleveland; Ivan Pun.

Be White Ronan Farrow via AP

There are barely any minorities on this list. If you want to be the sexiest bachelor it pays to be Caucasian or be of European descent. There is only one Southeast Asian bachelor on the list (Ivan Pun) and only three black bachelors (one of whom is Steven Spielberg's adopted son).

Tip: Ummm....

Examples: The whole list. 

Be Somebody the Third 

What's the easiest way to signify to T&C that you come from a long line of once-eligible bachelors? Slap a III or a IV on the end of your name. 

Tip: If you could be called a "tycoon" or a "magnate," all the better.

Examples: Stavros Niarchos III; Robert F. Kennedy III.

Own a Startup

Lest you think T&C is not "hip" or "in touch with the modern world," the mag has included a number of Silicon Valley bros who are good at making apps. One of the guys started his company "in his dorm room at Princeton." 

Tip: Be friends with Peter Thiel.  

Examples: Carter Cleveland; Jack Dorsey; Joe Lonsdale; Evan Spiegel.

Fellas, it's clear that being the sexiest bachelor in T&C's eyes isn't impossible (same things goes for Esquire's sexiest woman alive, People's sexiest man alive and whatnot). It's just close to it. If this is really a list you'd like to be on or think you should be on then, well, godspeed and good luck. 

       

Britain Is Scandalized by PJ Harvey's 'Rather Unusual' BBC Radio Program

AP

We're not entirely sure what BBC producers were expecting when they invited vicious songstress and recently crowned Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire PJ Harvey to guest "edit" the Radio 4 news program Today, but they seem to have gotten what they asked for. No, she didn't yelp the "Lick my legs! / I'm on fire!" coda from "Rid Of Me" or discuss the finer points of ringing sheep testicles. She did, though, invite WikiLeaks' Julian Assange aboard for a "diatribe" describing the Olympics as a "neo-liberal Trojan Horse," blast music by Joan Baez and Tom Waits, and chat with such curious characters as Dr. Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, and Shaker Aamer, a former Guantanamo Bay detainee for whom Harvey released a song last year. 

Fittingly, the United Kingdom is unanimously scandalized. Or so claims The Daily Mail in an article that goes to remarkably lengthy detail to say that this was the worst Today segment in 30 years, cluttered with "bizarre music and poetry and a string of left-wing rants." One member of Parliament tweeted that it was the "worst ever"; another Brit more gently termed it "rather unusual." So, success for Polly Jean?

As Stereogum notes, maybe not; Harvey began the show by saying she had "come to realize that a great deal of its content is about censorship in one way or another," which portends the possibility that her show was itself censored. We hope Harvey's burgeoning radio career doesn't squash the possibility of a Let England Shake follow-up in 2014.

You can listen to a few segments from the show here.

       

Here's a Birther's 7-Point New Year's Plan to Arrest Obama

AP

Like many World Net Daily columnists, former Margaret Thatcher advisor Lord Christopher Monckton believes 2014 is the year that America will take action to end this whole Obama thing. Monckton outlined his plan just before the New Year. When it's successful, patriotic Americans will be able to "fill the jails" with not only the president himself, but any public officials who deny that Obama is a presidential interloper.

Monckton, of course, is not alone in his flirtation with the idea of punishing Obama for some reasons. In early December, the House Judiciary Committee spent 3 1/2 hours discussing "The President’s Constitutional Duty to Faithfully Execute the Laws," a hearing widely seen as an attempt to discuss impeachment without using that actual word. Republican critics of the president mentioned a number of possible actions that could form the basis of impeachment proceedings, according to Hearst, including: "bombing Libya without congressional authorization" and "permitting the Internal Revenue Service to scrutinize conservative organizations’ applications for non-profit, tax-exempt status." The Democratic National Committee is now fundraising off of that implicit impeachment threat, presumably to boost a campaign to give the Democrats a majority in the House.

But there's a big problem with any plan to impeach Obama right now: the House of Representatives can impeach the president, sure, but he'd stand trial before a Democratically-controlled Senate, who would certainly not remove him from office of the basis of any current charge against him, including the whole thing with the birth certificate. That is where Monckton comes in with his seven steps for victory. "For no one expects 'Democrat' senators to do their duty, even when confronted with overwhelming evidence that Black Jesus, as Obama’s fawning White House coterie call him, has flouted the Constitution itself," Monckton writes. Republicans will have to take another approach. 

Step One: "Stop being panty-waists." 

The problem, Monckton begins is essentially that Republican members of Congress are afraid to go public with what they know is the truth — that Obama's birth certificate is clearly fake:  "the real reason why no congressman has yet moved to set up a congressional inquiry into the self-evidently bogus 'birth certificate' that festers to this day on the White House website," Monckton writes,  "is that they are terrified that the left will work night and day to trash the reputation of anyone who dares to question Mr. Obama’s legitimacy." 

The solution? Man up (see: this step's header). Birther Republicans should "band together" and call a congressional inquiry into the president's birth certificate anyway. For his troubles, Monckton says,  "I should like the honor of being the first witness."

Step Two: Call Hundreds of Public Officials Before Congress. 

Monckton wants to know why the attorney general of Hawaii, the head of the Secret Service, and the head of the FBI haven't answered his letters about Obama's birth certificate. Also, he eventually wants to arrest them, along with "hundreds" of other public officials who also didn't respond to queries about Obama's now public birth certificate: "They will be jailed with [Obama] when their failure to act when the evidence was put under their noses becomes a focus of the ever-widening investigation." 

Step Three: Visit Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

"The GOP caucus should get its wobbly bottom down to Phoenix and get itself up to speed on the investigation," Monckton writes of an ongoing effort by Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's ongoing effort to "prove" that Obama's birth certificate is fake (the investigation is run by the nonprofit Maricopa County Sheriff's Office Cold Case Posse). Arpaio's lead birther investigator Mike Zullo has promised that their investigation is "universe-shattering." Originally intended to remove Obama from the 2012 ballot for re-election, Arpaio has repeatedly claimed that Obama's birth certificate is "forged." Monckton would like Republican members of Congress to use this investigation as its basis, because "the sheriff has now called in professional, full-time detectives to supplement the unpaid volunteers ... Joe Arpaio would never have taken that step unless he were very sure of his ground." 

Step Four: Undo Everything the President has Ever Done.

This is pretty self explanatory: Monckton thinks that at this point, Congress should "prepare" a giant undo button of a bill to wipe Obama's accomplishments from the record. 

Step Five: Wait Until 2016.

This step is more of a statement than an actual step: "don’t expect anyone to arrest Mr. Obama while he is still the people’s tenant." Presuming he leaves office in 2016 (UNLESS THE MEDIA HANDS HIM A THIRD TERM), the best part of Monckton's plan happens then. 

Step Six: Arrest Everybody. 

Ok, here we go: 

Obamagate is the paradigm of why Big Government does not work. Give private citizens the right to bring prosecutions without the consent of the states’ attorneys general. All of them were shown an outline of the evidence. None – without exception – has lifted a finger to put right what is so obviously wrong.

Let the heads roll, right across federal and state governments. Fill the jails. Only when the crooks have gone can America march forward again as her Founding Fathers had intended.

Step Seven: "If you think all of the foregoing is mad, just watch and learn." 

That is it. That is the entirety of the last step. Good luck, America. 

(h/t Right Wing Watch) 

       

The Producers Guild Nods '12 Years,' 'Hustle' Among Others

Fox Searchlight

The Producers Guild of America picked their 10 nominees for their best picture equivalent, the Darryl F. Zanuck Award, including many of the usual suspects this season. The nominees are: 

12 Years a Slave American Hustle Blue Jasmine Captain Phillips Dallas Buyers Club Gravity Her Nebraska Saving Mr. Banks The Wolf of Wall Street.

There's nothing extremely surprising in that lineup, except perhaps the substitution of Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine for, say, Inside Llewyn Davis or Lee Daniels' The Butler. In fact, the lack of The Butler, August: Osage County, Philomena,  Fruitvale Station, or Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom points to a Weinstein Company shut out, Anne Thompson noted. The presence of Saving Mr. Banks also likely gives hope to a movie that garnered an underwhelming response. 

There are no out of the blue choices like last year's Skyfall inclusion, however. Steve Pond at The Wrap noted that the PGA is one of the most "reliable Oscar predictors," with the winners of the PGA also winning the Oscar 17 times in the PGAs 24 year history.