This dude just keeps gettin’ crazier every day ! Via The Huffington Post : Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh criticized President Barack Obama Thursday for going on vacation, calling his return to Hawaii after the fiscal cliff showdown a “slap in the face.” “[Democrats] are secretly throwing parties over this [fiscal cliff deal,]” Limbaugh said on his radio show. “Obama is! He’s doing pep rallies. Obama went back to Hawaii to finish the vacation. That’s another slap in the face, by the way. He gets back on Air Force One as soon as the Republicans caved.” The Obama family arrived in Hawaii December 22 for their annual Christmas vacation. The president returned to Washington — with First Dog Bo in tow — on December 27 to resume efforts to pass a fiscal cliff deal. After a deal was passed on New Year’s Day, Obama returned to Hawaii to resume his vacation. Obama signed the American Taxpayer Relief Act into law using an autopen, a mechanical device that copies his signature. While the whole ‘Fiscal Cliff’ deal is a bit shady, you can’t knock the guy for going on vacation twice a year. Sh*t…we’d take one if we could! Images via tumblr
Maria Menounos and Derek Hough may or may not be dating, but they’re clearly a perfect match on Dancing With the Stars. They scored the season’s first 30! That’s one way to top their on-stage kiss a few weeks ago. Derek and Maria performed the paso doble and judges were in love with what she turned in, awarding a trio of 10s for the first time in this fun 14th season. Carrie Ann Inaba joked “that dance sucked!” before remarking “You two were so on fire!” Bruno Tonioli, meanwhile, may still be having heart palpitations. Check out the first-place pair ‘s perfect paso doble below: Maria Menounos & Derek Hough – Paso Doble (DWTS Week 7)
A couple of TV stars who have more than credible Broadway resumes – Kristin Chenoweth ( GCB ) and Jim Parsons ( The Big Bang Theory ) – presented the nominations for the 2012 Tony Awards this morning. And just which shows and which actors/actresses are up for the hardware that will be handed out on June 10, in a ceremony hosted by Neil Patrick Harris? We’re so glad you asked… Best Play Clybourne Park Other Desert Cities Peter and the Starcatcher Venus in Fur Best Musical Leap of Faith Newsies Nice Work If You Can Get It Once Best Revival of a Play Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman Gore Vidal’s The Best Man Master Class Wit Best Revival of a Musical Evita Follies The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess Jesus Christ Superstar Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Play James Corden – One Man, Two Guvnors Philip Seymour Hoffman – Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman James Earl Jones – Gore Vidal’s The Best Man Frank Langella – Man and Boy John Lithgow – The Columnist Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Play Nina Arianda – Venus in Fur Tracie Bennett – End of the Rainbow Stockard Channing – Other Desert Cities Linda Lavin – The Lyons Cynthia Nixon – Wit Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Musical Danny Burstein – Follies Jeremy Jordan – Newsies Steve Kazee – Once Norm Lewis – The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess Ron Raines – Follies Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Musical Jan Maxwell – Follies Audra McDonald – The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess Cristin Milioti – Once Kelli O’Hara – Nice Work If You Can Get It Laura Osnes – Bonnie & Clyde Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role in a Play Christian Borle, Peter and the Starcatcher Michael Cumpsty, End of the Rainbow Tom Edden, One Man, Two Guvnors Andrew Garfield, Death of a Salesman Jeremy Shamos, Clybourne Park Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Role in a Play Linda Emond, Death of a Salesman Spencer Kayden, Don’t Dress for Dinner Cella Keenan-Bolger, Peter and the Starcatcher Judith Light, Other Desert Cities Condola Rashad, Stick Fly Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role in a Musical Phillip Boykin, The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess Michael Cerveris, Evita David Allen Grier, The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess Michael McGrath, Nice Work If You Can Get It Josh Young, Jesus Christ Superstar Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Role in a Musical Elizabeth A. Davis, Once Jayne Houdyshell, Follies Judy Kaye, Nice Work If You Can Get It Jesse Mueller, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Ghost Best Direction of a Play Nicholas Hytner, One Man, Two Guvnors Pam MacKinnon, Clybourne Park Mike Nichols, Death of a Salesman Roger Rees and Alex Timbers, Peter and the Starcatcher Best Direction of a Musical Jeff Calhoun, Newsies Kathleen Marshall, Nice Work If You Can Get It Diane Paulus, The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess John Tiffany, Once Best Book of a Musical Lysistrata Jones Newsies Nice Work If You Can Get It Once Best Original Score (Music and/or Lyrics) Written for the Theatre Bonnie & Clyde Newsies One Man, Two Guvnors Peter and the Starcatcher Best Choreography Rob Ashford, Evita Christopher Gattelli, Newsies Steven Hoggett, Once Kathleen Marshall, Nice Work If You Can Get It Best Scenic Design of a Play John Lee Beatty, Other Desert Cities Daniel Ostling, Clybourne Park Mark Thompson, One Man, Two Guvnors Donyale Werle, Peter and the Starcatcher Best Scenic Design of a Musical Bob Crowley, Once Rob Howell and Jon Driscoll, Ghost the Musical Tobin Ost and Sven Ortel, Newsies George Tsypin, Spider-Man Turn Off The Dark Best Costume Design of a Play William Ivey Long, Don’t Dress for Dinner Paul Tazewell, A Streetcar Named Desire Mark Thompson, One Man, Two Guvnors Paloma Young, Peter and the Starcatcher Best Costume Design of a Musical Gregg Barnes, Follies ESosa, The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess Eiko Ishioka, Spider-Man Turn Off The Dark Martin Pakledinaz, Nice Work If You Can Get It Best Lighting Design of a Play Jeff Croiter, Peter and the Starcatcher Peter Kaczorowski, The Road to Mecca Brian MacDevitt, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman Kenneth Posner, Other Desert Cities Best Lighting Design of a Musical Christopher Akerlind, The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess Natasha Katz, Follies Natasha Katz, Once Hugh Vanstone, Ghost the Musical Best Sound Design of a Play Paul Arditti, One Man, Two Guvnors Scott Lehrer, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman Gareth Owen, End of the Rainbow Darron L. West, Peter and the Starcatcher Best Sound Design of a Musical Acme Sound Partners, The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess Clive Goodwin, Once Kai Harada, Follies Brian Ronan, Nice Work If You Can Get It Best Orchestrations William David Brohn and Christopher Jahnke, The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess Bill Elliott, Nice Work If You Can Get It Martin Lowe, Once Danny Troob, Newsies
Facebook.com – Become a Fan! Twitter.com – Follow Us! Dan Aykroyd and John Lithgow were spotted leaving the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre tonight after “The Columnist”. Aykroyd takes a moment to give some pretty random travel advice, talks about the upcoming Easter holiday, and praises one of his favorite cities.
It’s happened again! Collecting quotes for the Labor Day edition of MRC’s bi-weekly Notable Quotables, I found more outrageous liberal eruptions than could fit into the normal newsletter. So, just for NewsBusters readers, here are 12 worthy quotes that just couldn’t squeeze into the regular issue (although hopefully a couple of these gems will find their way into our upcoming September 20 edition): Obama Opponents Pine for “Ethnic Purity” “First of all, we have a mixed race President who has a middle name ‘Hussein.’ And a good part of the anxiety that’s going on in small-town white America isn’t just the plain old black and white stuff of the past. It’s the fact that South Asians are moving in and running the local motel or, you know, I don’t want to deal in those sorts of cliches, but there are a lot of Latinos about who are moving into these areas that their grandchildren are coming out as gay or intermarrying. The purity of, the ‘ethnic purity,’ to coin a phrase, that they grew up with no longer exists….” — Time ’s Joe Klein on the Chris Matthews Show , August 29. It’s “Baffling” Stabbing Suspect Not Stereotypical American Bigot “It is the knife attack that’s cut deep into a national debate over faith and fear…The suspect, 21-year-old Michael Enright, has a baffling profile. An honors film school student, he volunteers with a church group that promotes peace and understanding….Still, the attack, some Muslims are certain, was fueled by what they call fearmongering over the Islamic cultural center and mosque planned for this site near Ground Zero….There is one other note about that suspected stabber that muddies the water even further. That peace group he volunteered with, they actually support putting that Islamic center down here near Ground Zero where we are tonight.” — ABC correspondent Jeremy Hubbard on World News , August 26. Burden Should Be on Everybody but the Mosque Builder “Some would say that it is really for Americans, for majority of Americans to be more sensitive to minority communities. It’s not really the obligation for the imam to, you know — he talked to members of the Jewish community, the JCC, the Jewish Community Centers were a model. And there’s a rabbi who has been helping. He talked to some members of the 9/11 families, not all clearly. Why is the burden on him?” — NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell to former Pakistani ambassador Akbar Ahmed on MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Reports , August 24. GOP Candidates: “Very Far to the Right” and “Ultraconservative” “Some of these candidates who are very far to the right, the one — many of the ones who are backed by the Tea Party — are they going to be Kryptonite come November?” “When it comes to Rick Scott, who ran as an ultraconservative against Bill McCollum, does he now have to run slightly to the center, if he wants to win in November?” — CNN’s John Roberts filling in as anchor of Anderson Cooper 360 , August 24. Upset Democrats Can’t “Demonize” George W. Bush Again “The problem for the Democrats is this, that the energizer bunny for the 2006, 2008 campaigns has disappeared because of George W. Bush’s being a circumspect and discreet former President it makes it very difficult for Democrats to demonize him again. He’s become a non-person.” — Columnist Mark Shields on Inside Washington , August 27. Only Liberal Women Are “Compassionate” Host Chris Matthews: “Margaret, it looks like liberals are in trouble this year, progressives, if you will. That includes a lot of women.”… Bloomberg’s Margaret Carlson: “There’s a certain kind of woman that’s gonna do okay. I mean you have the momma grizzlies but it’s the grizzly part of it, not the momma part that’s working….It’s the corporate titan bear — Carly Fiorina, Meg Whitman as you say. So that is the kind of woman. It is not the kind of — it’s not a compassionate women year.” — MSNBC’s Hardball , August 30. GOP = “The Party of Hate” “Tonight, we start with the party of hate. The Republican Party in this country has been running on hate and division for the last 50 years. First, it was the southern strategy meant to discriminate against African-Americans in order to gain white southern votes….Then there’s the vitriolic fight against immigrants, undocumented ones and in Arizona just people who happen to look undocumented. And, of course, there’s the grand daddy of all prejudice, fear and hatred stoked up against Muslims in this country….What black person, gay guy or girl, immigrant or Muslim American in their right mind would vote for the Republican Party? They might as well hang a sign around their neck saying ‘I hate myself.’” — Fill-in host Cenk Uygur on MSNBC’s The Ed Show , August 26. “The Republican method for winning elections is hate. Hate somebody. Anybody will do. We have seen it this year with immigrants and now, Muslims….They do it to win and did it in 2004 and 2006 against gay Americans…. Think the GOP has run out of minority groups to target and smear? No. Next, John Boehner attacks those federal bureaucrats with fattened salaries and pensions. Federal bureaucrats, like John Boehner.” — Keith Olbermann on MSNBC’s Countdown , August 26. Times Prefers Their Editorial Line to Actual Laws “The Justice Department decided last week not to bring charges against Tom DeLay, whose unethical conduct represented a modern low among Congressional leaders….Mr. DeLay, the Texas Republican who had been the House Majority Leader, crowed that he had been ‘found innocent.’ But many of Mr. DeLay’s actions remain legal only because lawmakers have chosen not to criminalize them.” — From a New York Times editorial , August 22. Host Sees Plot to “Harvest and Incarcerate” Young Black Men “How much of that [the cycle of poverty] in your opinion is family-planning driven, how much of that is a function of systematic racism in our country and laws that are enforced to basically pick-up, harvest and incarcerate young black men — particularly in New York with the Rockefeller laws — and how much of it is a complete abandonment of education as a value system period in this country, unless you’re rich?…Because it, in my opinion, has been a default position to incarcerate black men as opposed to educate and integrate black men into our economy.” — MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan on the August 23 Dylan Ratigan Show , talking to a blogger promoting more “family planning” counseling for young African Americans. People Are Against Destroying Embryos Because They Love Ignorance “I have the greatest respect for those who disagree, but to me putting restraints on stem cell research is not far from those who refused to look through Galileo’s telescope because they believed their doctrines and tradition had already told them what they would see. Their beliefs, too, were deeply held, but where would the store of knowledge be had their view prevailed? As we again try to untangle the arguments over stem cells, let us also consider this: No civilization, no society, has survived if its people came to believe they knew enough and needed to know nothing more.” — Bob Schieffer’s closing commentary on CBS’s Face the Nation , August 29. Are We Being Unfair to You, Sir? “It’s getting baked in a little bit in the media that [the] BP [oil spill] was President Obama’s Katrina. And it’s also getting baked in that the administration was slow off the mark. Is that unfair?” — NBC’s Brian Williams to Obama in an interview shown on the August 29 Nightly News .
Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz wrote Monday that Helen Thomas could have spared herself an embarrassing quick retirement if her media colleagues had “gently suggested” it was time to go. He said the press corps saw her as an “eccentric aunt,” but he claimed most of the country never saw her as cranky and ideological: But that’s not how she was seen by much of the country, which still viewed her as the groundbreaking correspondent she once was, not the cranky columnist she had become. So when Aunt Helen snapped that Israelis should “get the hell out of Palestine” — and go back to Germany, among other places — many onlookers were stunned. Any onlooker who was stunned wasn’t in the habit of watching White House briefings – or reading how media watchdog groups (ahem) routinely recounted Helen’s rants. Kurtz noted that journalists went soft on a colleague because they usually stay together in a pack, but didn’t quite note that journalists shared the vigorously anti-Bush/Cheney viewpoint Thomas offered: Journalists, especially those who spend a great deal of time together, don’t usually turn on each other. If Thomas was spewing bias and bile, the reasoning went, what was the harm? Kurtz acknowledged the reality that few journalists actually read her Hearst column, and she was never known as a great writer or notable breaker of scoops. But her columnist phase seemed to cloud her earlier reputation from her “choice bit of real estate” in the front row seat at the White House: There was something to admire in Thomas’s determination to ask uncomfortable questions. But when she declared George W. Bush the “worst president ever” in 2003, she shed any pretense of fair-mindedness. As time went on, her questions turned into speeches, as in this 2007 challenge to Bush over Iraq: “Mr. President, you started this war. It’s a war of your choosing. You can end it, alone. Today. At this point bring in peacekeepers, U.N. peacekeepers. Two million Iraqis have fled the country as refugees. Two million more are displaced. Thousands and thousands are dead. Don’t you understand? We brought the al-Qaeda into Iraq.” One might agree or disagree with those sentiments, but she was performing as an activist, not a journalist. Former CNN correspondent Jamie McIntyre wrote last week that “there’s a big difference between asking tough questions and getting answers to tough questions. Anyone can ASK tough questions. But figuring out how to hold government officials accountable, by posing questions in such a way that they can’t avoid answering them, is a much harder, and far more valuable journalistic exercise than just venting from a padded front seat in the White House briefing room. Helen Thomas’ questions were not designed to probe weaknesses in the president’s policies. They were just meant to provoke him.” Former Bush speechwriter David Frum said on his blog that “calling on Helen Thomas was a notorious method for a hard-pressed White House press secretary to EVADE tough questions from the rest of the press corps. A zany, out-of-left-field protest from Thomas would disrupt a flow of unwelcome queries, maybe spark a tension-breaking laugh, maybe change the subject altogether.” Frum is right that Helen’s rants were not designed to elicit meaningful answers. But it would be wrong to suggest that an Ari Fleischer would have welcomed the chance to call on Helen to disrupt a flow of questions or change the subject. There were occasions — as when I was in the briefing room in 2001 and 2002 — when other reporters (ABC’s Terry Moran comes to mind, working for “pro-Palestinian” anchor Peter Jennings) would support a Helen question, insist she had a point, and asked Fleischer to elaborate on his answer. I would also beg to differ with Frum on the notion that Helen’s questions could spark a “tension-breaking laugh.” They were often tension- builders , not tension-breakers. There was rarely giggling when Helen asked a question. By contrast, when conservative Les Kinsolving would begin reading one of his long questions from his notebook, often citing a report in The Washington Times, the chortling was an everyday affair, and it would start almost immediately, even if the question was good. PS: Kurtz ended his Media Notes column by relaying Sarah Palin’s interview with Greta van Susteren on “Boobgate” and other controversies. The Post had a picture of Palin with the snarky caption: “REFUTING THE RUMOR: ‘Nooo, I have not had implants,’ Sarah Palin told the intrepid Greta van Susteren.”
