Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 912

October 15, 2013

The Ted Cruz Filibuster Paid Off — for Ted Cruz!

If you were curious, talking on television for 21 straight hours is very lucrative. Over the last quarter, Ted Cruz's still-young political action committee pulled in $797,000 during the period that included his extended C-SPAN advertorial. It's nearly twice what Cruz pulled in the quarter prior.

[image error]Cruz wasn't the only one weaving political obstructionism into gold. As the shutdown approached, a number of conservative organizations began sending out fundraising emails, generally suggesting that a donation to their organizations would help halt Obamacare in its tracks. Heritage Action, as you can see at right, raised $330,000 for its efforts, vaguely articulated as ensuring that language to defund Obamacare was included in House and Senate bills. (The latter never happened.)

But even Heritage Action — the group with which Cruz toured the country over the summer, advocating for a fight over defunding — couldn't match Cruz himself. His October report, which covers July 1 to September 30, notes that his PAC has $378,000 on-hand after the nearly $800,000 haul, money that will be used to support conservative candidates and issues close to Cruz's heart. In the second quarter of the year, the first during which the Texas senator's PAC ("Ted Cruz Victory Committee") raised any money, it raised only $412,000. That success is the second indicator that Ted Cruz's strategy is fulfilling his political goals. (This was the first.)

[image error]A sad footnote to all of this is Utah Senator Mike Lee. Lee's PAC, Constitutional Conservatives Fund, contributed to Cruz's Senate bid in 2012. Lee was also the author of the letter that first called on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to strip Obamacare funding out of any budget bill — a letter that galvanized congressional support for the movement. But Cruz's flair for theatrics and willingness to throw caution to the wind was far more profitable. Lee helped Cruz's filibuster, appearing at various points to ask Cruz questions, giving Cruz a breather — a role that meant he got a lot of screen time, too. But in September, Lee's PAC didn't do quite as well. It raised $525.

Update, 8:00 p.m.: Our apologies. We vastly underreported one of the Senators' fundraising. Cruz's. His state director, John Drogin, emails to note that combining all of the senator's accounts (including his reelection and leadership PACs) yields a haul of $1.19 million from 12,000 individual donors. So there you go.


       





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Published on October 15, 2013 15:15

October 14, 2013

Four Dry Ice Bombs Were Found at LAX

Police at Los Angeles International Airport are currently investigating how four dry ice bombs ended up in restricted areas of the facility late Monday night. Two of them exploded, though nobody was injured and it caused little disturbance to normal airport operations.

A dry ice bomb is an improvised device in which an airtight container is partially filled with water and dry ice. When the dry ice warms up, the gas inside the container expands until the container bursts.

On Sunday night, a similar bomb was found in a restroom in Terminal 2. According to The Los Angeles Times, "Officials said an airport employee heard an explosion in a men's room and went to investigate. He discovered a 20-ounce plastic bottle that had contained the dry ice. The blast did no damage, and no injuries were reported. "

A detective for the LAPD said that currently their is no clear connection to terrorism. The FBI is assisting in the investigation.

LAX UPDATE: LAPD: dry ice device exploded, no injuries; source says 2 more similar devices found, total of 3 pic.twitter.com/csK2wfK7vO

— Julie Sone (@JulieSone) October 15, 2013

       





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Published on October 14, 2013 23:57

Western Countries Prepare for Nuclear Talks with Iran

Negotiations are set to begin in Geneva on Tuesday over Iran's growing nuclear capabilities. These talks will be the first such discussions for Iran's new president, Hassan Rouhani, a more moderate leader who was elected this past June. While Western leadership continues to be wary of Iran's growing nuclear program, the Middle eastern country is also seeking to lessen the strict economic sanctions imposed on it. The last nuclear agreement between Iran and the West was reached in 2003, when Rouhani was the country's lead nuclear negotiator.

Iran's nuclear program has grown exponentially in the last decade. According to The New York Times:

In 2003, when Iran struck its only nuclear deal with the West, it had a relative handful of somewhat unsophisticated centrifuges. Today, Iran has at least 19,000, and 1,000 of those are of a highly advanced design and have been installed but are not yet being used to enrich uranium.

The levels of uranium enrichment could be a contentious point in the talks. Iran is expected to propose a 20 percent enrichment moratorium, which—still being weapons grade—other parties might view as too high. (Those parties being the five members of the Security Council, the United States, Russia, China, France, and Great Britain, as well as Germany.) While officials said that Iran has a right to a civilian nuclear energy program, it did not specify a stance on whether the country could enrich uranium itself or be restricted to acquiring it from other nations.

An official told the Times that any easing of sanction would be "proportional to what Iran puts on the table." The U.S. will also almost certainly push for more comprehensive inspection mechanisms. Iran currently only allows inspectors to view its 17 declared nuclear sites.

Presidents Rouhani and Obama spoke over the phone last month—the first time such a conversation has happened since 1979.


       





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Published on October 14, 2013 23:29

Netflix Could Be Headed to Cable Boxes

Netflix, the popular film and television streaming service, could be coming to cable boxes. According to The Wall Street Journal, the company is currently in talks with television providers to have the service deployed directly on cable boxes, as opposed to set-top, internet-enabled devices. The rumored deals are by no means close to fruition, but such an arrangement would come with pros and cons for both sides.

While Netflix and cable companies could be seen as competitors in some respects, Bloomberg reports that "Cable operators increasingly see Netflix’s $7.99 monthly service as a tool to attract and retain customers and promote their own on-demand offerings, rather than a threat that will lead users to abandon their pay-TV subscriptions." The service has long been eyed as a threat to classic cable dominance—and their dreaded bundles. The potential arrangements have apparently hit a snag over Netflix's insistence that cable companies adopted their proprietary technology, which the company deems essential.

Cable providers apparently envision a scenario in which "In the event of [a blackout], an operator that had a deal with Netflix could direct subscribers to programming from the blacked-out channel that appears on Netflix." But that's only a stopgap, since Netflix rarely carries brand-new episodes and channels that license their shows to the service could yank them at their next possible opportunity. Despite ramping up its production on original content, the service is still very reliant on the existing production channels.


       





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Published on October 14, 2013 22:07

North Carolina County Official Will Start Accepting Gay Marriage Applications

The Register of Deeds in one North Carolina county announced on Monday that he would begin accepting same-sex marriage licenses, despite a constitutional ban. The challenge, from Buncombe County's Drew Reisinger, follows soon after state Attorney General Roy Cooper announced his support for same-sex marriage. 

Here's Reisinger's plan, according to a statement:

“I will let each couple know that it is my hope to grant them a license, but I need to seek the North Carolina Attorney General’s approval," Reisinger said. "I have concerns about whether we are violating people's civil rights based on this summer's Supreme Court decision."

At least six same-sex couples have already signed up to apply for licenses on Tuesday, according to Reisinger's office.  

So, is North Carolina the next gay marriage battleground state? The Attorney General's announcement, along with Reisinger's plan to ask for Cooper's legal advice on the applications, is certainly a challenge to state law. But Cooper intends to defend the ban, and enforce it against Reisinger's plan, despite his personal views on the subject. In other words, this particular challenge won't get very far beyond the symbolic. A spokesperson for Cooper's office has already said that  "these marriage licenses cannot be issued." 

The latest challenge comes as the state's ban faces a lawsuit from several same-sex couples challenging the constitutionality of North Carolina's anti-gay marriage amendment. Cooper, as the Attorney General, will defend the state against that suit. But over the weekend, Cooper angered anti-gay conservatives in the state when he told the Associated Press that he supported "marriage equality," which seems to confirm what many believed was his personal stance. Cooper, for instance, opposed the 2012 amendment that banned same-sex marriage in the state, but only on the grounds that the language was unclear. Even though Cooper has made it pretty clear that he'll defend the law anyway, some conservative groups are already complaining that his personal beliefs will affect his case

In any case, this would make North Carolina the third state to have a county official accept marriage applications after the Supreme Court's Defense of Marriage Act decision. In New Mexico, where no state law exists banning or allowing same-sex marriages, several counties are now issuing licenses. In Pennsylvania, where gay marriage is banned by law, Montgomery county issued close to 200 licenses to same-sex couples before the state tried to stop the practice with a court order. Pennsylvania's governor Tom Corbett recently compared same-sex relationships to incest.


       





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Published on October 14, 2013 19:51

The NSA Collects Contact Lists, Too

The NSA scoops up contacts from millions of email and instant messaging address books for personal accounts, according to the latest Washington Post report based off of a leak from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. According to the Post, some of those accounts are owned by Americans. 

Here's how it works: every time a user synchs an address book with a remote server, or (depending on the service) logs into an account, the NSA can collect it. And they're doing so, in bulk, rather than by targeting individual users. The program relies on agreements with foreign internet providers — FISA makes such collection from American facilities illegal. But while the data mining of address books happens overseas, it includes account information belonging to Americans. Not only that, the Post notes, but the NSA "is not legally required or technically able to restrict its intake to contact lists belonging to specified foreign intelligence targets." So, how many contacts are we talking about here? This many: 

During a single day last year, the NSA’s Special Source Operations branch collected 444,743 e-mail address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail and 22,881 from unspecified other providers

[image error]That's via a PowerPoint slide obtained by the Post through Snowden — the Post speculates that the vast number of Yahoo collections, compared to the others, comes from the fact that Yahoo doesn't encrypt user connections automatically (the company is changing that next year). On top of the daily collection figures above, agency also collects 500,000 "buddy lists" from chat services on a typical day. That's so much data, apparently, that the sheer volume "has occasionally threatened to overwhelm storage repositories." And yes, that's in part because of all the spam in the mix. The spam problem is so overwhelming that the agency is trying to figure out how to reduce its "over collection" of repetitive, useless spam contacts. 

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence's spokesperson Shawn Turner gave the Post a familiar defense of the program, noting that the NSA must abide by rules designed to "minimize" the collection of data pertaining to Americans. Turner added that the agency "is focused on discovering and developing intelligence about valid foreign intelligence targets like terrorists, human traffickers and drug smugglers. We are not interested in personal information about ordinary Americans.”

U.S. intelligence uses the address books to examine relationships between various targets, according to the Post's report. And there's a lot there to work with. The paper outlines some of the things intelligence officials can figure out just from a contact list:

Address books commonly include not only names and e-mail addresses but also telephone numbers, street addresses, and business and family information. In-box listings of e-mail accounts stored in the “cloud” sometimes contain content such as the first few lines of a message. Taken together, the data would enable the NSA, if permitted, to draw detailed maps of a person’s life, as told by personal, professional, political and religious connections. The picture can also be misleading, creating false “associations” with ex-spouses or people with whom an account holder has had no contact in many years.

Because of the methods used to collect the information, the Post explains, the agency can basically enforce its own rules on itself, without going to the FISA court for approval. And it doesn't have to inform the companies hosting the data of the collection. That's evidenced by the series of statements obtained by the Post's reporters on the revelations from the companies to whom users voluntarily give up their contacts' information. Google denied having either "knowledge nor participation" in the program, Microsoft said that "we would have significant concerns if these allegations about government actions are true," while Facebook said "we did not know and did not assist” in the collection of address books and contact lists. 

(Image via the Washington Post


       





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Published on October 14, 2013 17:10

How a Single Senator Could Force Congress to Miss the Debt Deadline

Congress doesn't have very much time to make a debt ceiling-averting deal before the Treasury's approximate default deadline on Thursday. But even if the Senate leadership starts voting on a compromise tomorrow, any individual Senator [insert significant glances in Senator Ted Cruz's direction here], could easily force Congress to miss the deadline by slowing down the Senate with procedural moves. That's even if Senate Democrats wrangle up enough votes to bypass a filibuster attempt. 

The potential stalls come from the Senate's own rules. Once the Senate reaches a deal on the debt ceiling, Reid is expected to bring up the trimmings of the deal as an amendment to an existing bill to raise the debt ceiling. That bill is currently on hold, and pending a cloture vote, could proceed quickly to the next stop: 30 hours of debate. But Senate leadership would likely want to waive that debate period, which required unanimous consent from the Senate. If Cruz, or any other Senator wants to, he could deny that consent, and force the Senate into 30 hours of extra time on the deal. In fact, any Senator could do this twice: once on the amendment containing the deal, and once on the entire bill. Businessweek's Joshua Green laid out this scenario as a hypothetical timeline earlier on Monday, showing that Cruz could easily stretch out the Senate through Friday on the bill, before it even goes to the Republican-controlled House for consideration. And Green's timeline assumed the best-case-scenario for the Senate's dealmaking, theorizing that Reid could bring up the amendment by 5 p.m. on Monday. It's now after 5 p.m., however, and the Senate leadership hasn't yet reached a deal, though they're reportedly close. The Senate GOP won't even meet until Tuesday to look at whatever ends up on the table, as some members of Congress are still flying into town. 

So far, Cruz has been noncommittal on whether he'll try to delay an Obamacare-free deal, telling the Hill that he and his cohort would "need to see what the details are first." So Ted Cruz hasn't made any promises to stop a deal he doesn't like in its tracks. The senator, despite widespread polling to the contrary, believes that his tactics are earning the backing of most Americans. If Ted Cruz thinks it's up to Ted Cruz to stop a compromise that doesn't stop Obamacare on behalf of America, he could definitely at least delay it past the "doomsday" congressional leadership are furiously negotiating to try and avoid. Senator Rand Paul, meanwhile, has said that he has no plans to delay a vote on any potential Senate deal this week. 

There is, however, some possibility flexibility here if Congress doesn't pass a deal until, say, the weekend. As the Atlantic Wire explained earlier today, Thursday's Treasury deadline is more of an estimate than a guarantee of an instant default. It's the day we're most likely to stop being able to pay our bills. But after Thursday, the Treasury can no longer guarantee that we'll be able to do so in the future — we just don't know when the disastrous default becomes reality until it happens. That doesn't mean Congress can take a breather here by any means: even optimistic estimates don't give Congress that much more time to work out its problems — Goldman Sachs, for instance, has pegged November 1 as the default date. 


       





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Published on October 14, 2013 16:06

Donald Trump Lowers His Pretend Political Ambitions

Noted fake political candidate Donald Trump is throwing his hat in the ring once again — sort of. This time he thinks he can be governor of New York. On Monday, someone leaked to the New York Post that New York state assemblyman Bill Nojay suggested in a memo to Republican state party leaders that should Trump for governor as a Republican next year, and state GOP chair Ed Cox backs the idea. Trump told the Post he is "very flattered" by the suggestion. Given the outcome of his last few political campaigns, we think the real question is not whether Trump will run, but what he'll get out of pretending to do so.

Trump didn't tell the Post whether or not he'd campaign in 2014. But even his non-confirmation included a promotion of his business interests:

Under the current Gov. Cuomo, “taxes are way too high, and people are fleeing New York. We should become the energy capital of the East, and we’re not,’’ Trump said.

“He has the dumbest attorney general ... in the United States, who is driving business out of New York and his father, Mario, was one of the worst governors in the history of the state. Otherwise, I like him very much.” 

That attorney general is Eric Schneiderman, and he happens to be suing Trump's real estate academy scam, Trump University. Schneiderman is pursuing $40 million in restitution from Trump and his Organization for running Trump University as "an unlicensed educational institution from 2005 to 2011 and making false claims about its classes in ... 'an elaborate bait-and-switch.'" The University was not a university at all, and classes cost as much as $35,000.

Trump has responded to the lawsuit by suggesting President Obama was behind it (Obama and Schneiderman have golfed together). Trump also called Schneiderman "a political hack looking to get publicity." Hm. Sounds like someone we know.

Trump's pretend presidential run in 2012 produced real results for him: He landed a Fox News gig and upped ratings on Celebrity Apprentice. Once Trump "decided not to run," he publicly endorsed Mitt Romney, who in turn publicly accepted the endorsement. Then Trump was a major speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference in March.

And Trump's wasted no time in promoting himself this time around. After the Post story ran, he took to Twitter to quote flattering tweets from random followers and insult random critics:

"@vinnypac: @realDonaldTrump gr8 spot on@foxandfriends. Insightful, honest, Intelligent xommon sense. U woulf make a phenomenal gov of NY"

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 14, 2013

"@jlow6603: Best part about Monday mornings is listening to @realDonaldTrump on Fox and Friends! You should run for POTUS!!" Thank you!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 14, 2013

"@01101O10: only an idiot loses money in real-estate @realdonaldtrump does that all the time." I've made over ten billion $'s, you idiot!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 14, 2013

It's unlikely that governor's race chatter will deter Schneiderman from pursuing the suit against Trump. But it is likely that that same chatter will drum up publicity for Trump's business interests. He knows the best way to get attention is to pretend to run for office — before "top Republican" Nojay suggested the governor's race, Trump floated a 2016 presidential candidacy


       





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Published on October 14, 2013 14:57

The Shutdown Fight Comes to a Stop Where Everyone Predicted. Almost.

A deal in which Senate leaders reach bipartisan agreement and the House then ratifies the deal with more Democratic than Republican votes is 1) basically what everyone guessed would happen in the shutdown fight and is 2) what happens nearly every time something controversial comes up since the 2010 elections. But by making the fight tied to sequestration spending, the GOP might be in a better position than could have been expected.

It was clear that Speaker John Boehner's vocal and visceral conservative base needed to be mollified before it would acquiesce to any sort of government funding bill or debt ceiling increase. Late last year, when the talk of the town was the "fiscal cliff" — the simultaneous need to fund the government, increase the debt limit, and deal with the expiration of the Bush tax cuts — Boehner faced a fairly significant threat to his position as leader of the Republican caucus. That opposition stemmed in part from Boehner's ready willingness to work around the so-called "Hastert Rule," an informal policy that required Republicans to have enough support within their own party to pass any legislation brought to the floor for a vote. Among the measures that weren't subject to the Hastert Rule was the fiscal cliff itself.

There was basically no reason to think that this time would be any different. But the vote in which Boehner was elected Speaker by an uncomfortably small margin made clear that his conservative base would be hostile to any repeat of what happened in January. The New Yorker's Ryan Lizza summarizes the line of thinking in a tweet:

Ending how most predicted: cons force shutdown>public support collapses>O doesn't negotiate until he does>Sen deal w/figleaf>Boehner jammed.

— Ryan Lizza (@RyanLizza) October 14, 2013

Boehner gives the conservatives enough rope to see that their plan won't work; with some small concession in hand, he can use the Senate deal as cover for a vote in front of the full House. Hastert Rule set aside, progress made.

It didn't have to be this way, of course. Boehner could have allowed a vote on an unamended funding resolution — a vote that, again, his No. 2 Eric Cantor all but called a victory in itself as it locked in sequestration-level funding. The two-week-old shutdown could have been avoided even earlier, had Boehner stuck to his commitment to follow "regular order," going to conference committee with the Senate to work out a budget deal before the deadlines for the budget and the debt ceiling arrived. Boehner decided to take the risk that President Obama might more readily cave in the face of the looming deadlines. Obama didn't.

If the deal being floated at this point does make its way back to the House, there's not much time for Boehner to do much but approve it. Even as it is, there's concern that the measure — including short-term measures to open government and raise the debt ceiling — might not make it out of the Senate in time, especially if motivated senators decide to obstruct its progress. In order to approve the measure, Boehner will need to "throw the Tea Party overboard," in the words of The Washington Post's Greg Sargent. Unlike past similar abandonments of the conservatives' priorities, Boehner has more evidence at-hand that their political plans simply don't work, including a poll out Monday showing that Republicans bear the brunt of the blame for the unpopular shutdown. Not that this will convince Boehner's far right wing, a group apparently still convinced at least in public of their ongoing success, but at least he has the evidence.

So far, each time a deal has seemed to be within reach, one party or another has said no, sinking the country even further into this morass? Why should we feel confident that this time is different? For one thing, because it's playing out exactly as the politics predicted: Boehner can now say, "we tried it your way." For another, moving the fight to December over a January budget deadline actually puts Republicans in a position of renewed strength as it makes the fight about the sequestration. "The timing of all this is designed to create a fight about sequestration," Ezra Klein writes. "The Jan. 15 deadline means funding for the federal government runs out at the exact moment sequestration's deeper cuts kick in." So by negotiating at that point, the choices are between keeping existing funding — already cut savagely from pre-sequestration levels — and allowing even further cuts.

That's the one surprise to emerge out of all of this. It's playing out as could have been predicted. It hasn't been good for Republicans, by any stretch, nor is it clear that Boehner's done his own leadership any favors. But where the wheel wavered and fell over turns out to be a spot that actually isn't bad for House Republicans — and only 10 months before all of them are up for reelection.

Photo: Boehner seeing stars. (AP)


       





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Published on October 14, 2013 14:52

'50 Shades of Grey' Producers Hire Filth Poet for Rewrite

Today in show business news: A ringer has been brought in to punch-up 50 Shades of Grey, TNT gets into the food business, and Netflix plans its next big hit.

Still reeling from a big casting shakeup, the producers of 50 Shades of Grey have hired playwright and screenwriter Patrick Marber to do a touch-up on the script. Well, "a polish and character work," according to The Hollywood Reporter. Marber is a good choice! Among other things, he wrote the 1997 play turned 2004 movie Closer, which is positively filled to the brim with filthy talk. So he ought to be able to handle all the various f--ks and other profanities in E.L. James's florid sex fantasia. I mean, he got Julia Roberts to say things about, um, a particular fluid, in Closer, so he's pretty fearless. If you need a reminder, here's this particularly NSFW scene. So! Should be the right man for this job. Hehe. "Job." Whoo boy. Gonna be a long road with this movie, giggling-wise. [THR]

TNT has greenlit a somewhat chilling cooking competition series from Mark Burnett. It's called On the Menu (that's the working title, anyway) and it features amateur chefs partnered up with professional chefs, competing to get dishes on the menu at chain restaurants, ballparks, cruise ships, etc. The day after the episode airs, the winning recipe will be available at that venue, so the audience can go feast on it themselves. Meaning, I see someone on TV win a Ruby Tuesday challenge, then the next day I dig myself out of my trash hole and shuffle my way over to the Ruby Tuesday in Owasso and try that ding-dang dish myself. Or I guess book passage on a cruise liner? I don't know, I find something a little alarming about that. I know they've done that for Project Runway, making a winning garment available online the day after the episode airs, but that's different. We're talking  food here. Chain restaurant and stadium and cruise boat food. It's not like you'll be eating the exact plate that the TV cooks made. You'll be eating some mass-produced version of it. It just seems odd and vaguely depressing. Though, who knows what the chain restaurants will be! Maybe it'll be California Pizza Kitchen, in which case, sign me up because that business is delicious, but if it's Fuddruckers I'm gonna be kinda bummed. That's all. [Deadline]

Eva Amurri Martino has successfully sold a comedy pitch to NBC that would have her and her mother, Susan Sarandon, playing mother and daughter. (Sarandon would obviously play the mother. At least I hope that was obvious.) The show would have Martino playing "Type A+ Ivy Davis (Martino), who craves the stability she lacked in her childhood, and as a result, has thrown herself into her career at the expense of her personal life. In an attempt to restore balance and potentially find love, she invites her freewheeling, eccentric mom Franckie (Sarandon) to move in with her and work on their relationship." Oh. Hm. OK. So it's yet another adult children living/reuniting with their parent thing. Like Dads and Mom this year. And We're the Millers. And How to Live With Your Parents... from last year. And so many others. But that's OK! There's room for more. Plus it's Susan freaking Sarandon! Imagine if she and Meg Ryan were on TV at the same time? It'd be like the early '90s all over again. Except with them on TV and not in movies. But whatever. Who doesn't miss the early '90s? [The Hollywood Reporter]

On a roll with House of Cards, Arrested Development, and the sleeper hit Orange Is the New Black (and, I guess, Hemlock Grove?) Netflix is expanding its portfolio. The online service has ordered an untitled drama from the guys who created Damages. Which is super promising! That was a great show in its heyday, full of intrigue and brown liquor and weird writing and great acting and more brown liquor, so there's no reason to think another show from this gang won't be good. What we know about plot is this, according to Entertainment Weekly: "The show will focus on a set of adult siblings whose secret-packed lives are impacted when their 'black sheep' brother returns to the fold." Huh, all right. Sounds good. Not sure I would have put "secret-packed" and "impacted" in the same sentence, but that's not the show's problem. This is exciting. Carry on, Netflix. [EW]

Ty Simpkins, the funny little boy from Iron Man 3 — no, not Ben Kingsley, the other one — has landed what is said to be a lead role in Jurassic World, aka Jurassic Park 4. It's unclear who he will play, but it sounds like a big role. So that's interesting. I'd complain about kids being in movies — most kids in movies are terrible and make the movies they are in worse — but the original has kids, so we can't really argue this, can we. What is kind of funny in a haha oh sweet god kind of a way is that young master Simpkins, who's a boy of but 12, is about three weeks younger than the last Jurassic Park movie. As in, Jurassic Park III came out on July 16, 2001 and Ty Simpkins was born on August 6, 2001. So the movie was still in theaters when he was born, but it's definitively older than him. Sigh. Time does march terribly on, doesn't it? [Deadline]


       





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Published on October 14, 2013 14:47

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