The CW is reportedly spinning off The Vampire Diaries into a new series called The Originals, starring Joseph Morgan (Klaus) and Phoebe Tonkin (Hayley). An upcoming episode of The Vampire Diaries , the network’s biggest hit, will serve as a “backdoor pilot” for The Originals . Tentatively, that’s set for April 25. The title refers to Klaus’ status as one of the original vampires in the show’s mythology. Guy has been doing his badass, yet charming thing for a long time . Also prominently featured will be werewolf Hayley, introduced in the current fourth season. She and Klaus return to the French Quarter of New Orleans. There, in the city he helped build centuries earlier, Klaus will reportedly be reunited with a Marcel, a former protege. No other details are available. Vampire Diaries show-runner Julie Plec will write and produce; no word on any involvement from Klaus’ Original siblings Elijah, Kol or Rebekah. Daniel Gillies and Claire Holt (Elijah and Rebekah) also recur on TVD . What do you think? Good idea by the CW? Or would you miss them too much on the Ian Somerhalder, Paul Wesley and Nina Dobrev-anchored hit? Yes! Love Klaus, and great idea for a show! Maybe. I’d check out the pilot. NO! Terrible idea! View Poll »
Phil Gingrey, a Republican Congressman from Georgia, has brought back up the topic of ” legitimate rape .” The term was broached by Todd Akin – a losing candidate for Congress in Missouri who drew MAJOR fire last year for saying a woman’s body “shuts down” in the face of this type of act – and Gingrey tried to defend the point yesterday at a Chamber of Commerce breakfast. “What he meant by legitimate rape was just look, someone can say I was raped: a scared-to-death 15-year-old that becomes impregnated by her boyfriend and then has to tell her parents, that’s pretty tough and might on some occasion say, ‘Hey, I was raped.’ Continued Gingrey, who has served as an OB-GYN: “That’s what he meant when he said legitimate rape versus nonlegitimate rape. I don’t find anything so horrible about that. But then he went on and said that in a situation of rape, of a legitimate rape, a woman’s body has a way of shutting down so the pregnancy would not occur. He’s partly right on that.” He is? “I’ve delivered lots of babies, and I know about these things. It is true. We tell infertile couples all the time that are having trouble conceiving because of the woman not ovulating, ‘Just relax. Drink a glass of wine. And don’t be so tense and uptight, because all that adrenaline can cause you not to ovulate.’ “So he was partially right, wasn’t he?” Well, no, for the reason that Gingrey himself then outlines: a woman doesn’t know when she is going to be raped. “But the fact that a woman may have already ovulated 12 hours before she is raped, you’re not going to prevent a pregnancy there by a woman’s body shutting anything down, because the horse has already left the barn, so to speak. And yet the media took that and tore it apart.” As you might expect, Gingrey was then forced to backtrack from what appeared to be a semi-defense of Akin’s position, releasing the following statement today: “I do not defend, nor do I stand by, the remarks made by Rep. Akin. … In my attempt to provide context as to what I presumed they meant, my position was misconstrued.” The lesson, as always: politicians are best served by not bringing up the topic of “legitimate rape.”
Some 67 GOP members voted “No” on $9 billion in aid , and good ‘ole boy Paul Lyan was one of the heartless politicos who wouldn’t give additional assistance to victims in NJ and NY. SMH. Via the NY Daily Mail : Republican lawmakers who voted against the first Hurricane Sandy relief package scrambled to explain their votes as their offices were swamped Saturday by a deluge of angry phone calls from storm victims. Sixty-seven members of the House of Representatives, all Republicans, voted against the $9.7 billion funding package that will help the ailing federal flood insurance program to pay the legitimate claims of those impacted by the historic storm. Most of the lawmakers explained that they were making a statement not against the victims in the northeast states, which all lean Democratic, but rather the federal government’s bloated budget.”Being from South Carolina, I can understand the need for disaster relief,” said Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-SC). “However, we’re over $16 trillion in debt, and this bill did not offset the disaster relief funds with spending cuts in other areas.” Some of the representatives who voted against the measure on Friday hail from the Gulf Coast states that received billions of federal aid – some within two weeks – after being hit by Hurricane Katrina. “Of course, we are sympathetic to the hurricane victims,” said Laura Chambers, spokeswoman for Rep. Steven Palazzo (R-MS), who represents cities like Gulfport and Biloxi that were nearly washed away by the killer 2005 storm. “But on the heels of a fiscal cliff deal that added $4 trillion to our existing $16 trillion national debt, we must ensure that disaster relief is paid for,” she said. Staffers of several Congressional Republicans confirmed Saturday that their offices had received scores of angry calls and emails from people furious about their vote. The Daily News printed the office phone numbers of the 67 lawmakers who sided against the bill. That vote total – and the looming clash over the nation’s debt limit – could foreshadow a tougher fight to get the rest of the $60.4 billion package passed when it comes to a vote Jan. 15. The Club for Growth, a conservative lobbying group that advocates for limited government and low taxes, has already warned lawmakers that they would campaign against any candidate who votes for the aid bill. The group demanded that every dollar spent be offset by one cut from somewhere else in the federal budget. “It doesn’t help the nation to pass a giant, overpriced bill that isn’t paid for,” said group spokesman Barney Keller. “This is Congress’ fault. All we’re asking for is them to spend the money responsibly.” Damn…we’ve got some cold-hearted people up on Capitol Hill. Images via AP
In the wake of the Newtown, Conn. massacre, the national conversation has included no lack of conjecture that the media we consume is to blame for the violence. Most famously, NRA second-in-command Wayne Lapierre’s Dec. 21 speech in Washington, D.C. featured a lengthy segment in which he pointed the finger at video games and movies and singled out a number of decades-old films as particularly culpable. Lapierre was roundly mocked for his tone-deaf diatribe, but he was hardly unique. Numerous public figures on the right and left have gone out of their way to make certain we spend more time talking about Quentin Tarantino and Natural Born Killers than about access to assault weapons. Is all this talk of violent media having an effect on the public at large? A poll conducted by The Hollywood Reporter suggests that it is., but only barely. The survey, conducted with pollster Penn Shoen Berland, asked “consumers of movies and television” how their opinions regarding violent media had been affected by the Sandy Hook shootings. The findings are inconsistent, but they reveal interesting information about the mind of film and TV fans. Among them: * 60 percent of respondents still believe mental illness is the primary cause of mass killings. * 44 percent of parents polled said that the shootings made them “more aware” of how much violence is in the media their kids enjoy. * 46 percent of all respondents felt Hollywood should make fewer violent movies. When only parents are considered, the number jumps to 54%. * Women were more than twice as likely as men to call for fewer violent films. * Only 6 percent of respondents said they want more violent films to be produced. * 70 percent of respondents older than age 30 — a category so broad as to almost feel unquantifiable — feel there is too much violence in advertising for film and TV. * Despite that get-off-my-lawn attitude, only 34 percent of total respondents said violent advertising should face greater restrictions. * In fact, even parents aren’t grabbing for the pitchforks. Only 34 percent of parents polled believe it’s the job of the president and Congress to pressure Hollywood to change advertising. In fact, 75 percent of all respondents believe the opposite. * Not surprisingly, political affiliation matters: 68 percent of liberals held the NRA more responsible than the media; 74 percent of conservatives blamed the media over the NRA. It’s important to note that methodology, sample size, and demographics are not revealed in the report. (At least not in the online version.) It’s entirely possible the respondents are all Nielsen families in a rush to get back to watching Hawaii Five-0 . It also should be considered that responses to polls taken in the immediate aftermath of a significant tragedy might not reflect a permanent, or even accurate, change in mood. With the massive outpouring of public grief, not to mention the very real terror people tend to feel about such events, there is essentially a massive amount of peer pressure placed on people to respond in the ‘correct’ way. Note that a similar phenomenon is seen in polls of American church attendance ; people report much higher levels of religiosity than their behavior suggests. We should therefore expect that responses to these questions include at least a few people saying what they think they’re supposed to say, rather than what they actually believe. What’s interesting is that despite the number of poll respondents who have concluded that something needs to be done about violence in the media as a result of Sandy Hook, the results do not show a corresponding desire for censorship. In fact, they show the opposite: instead of blaming film and video games for mass murders the way rock music was blamed for suicides and Satanism in the 1980s, the poll suggests that your average citizen actually wants to deal with the real roots of the problem. Unfortunately,that’s not happening. Nearly three weeks after the shootings, we have yet to see a single proposal to address gun violence. We haven’t even seen a real proposal of any kind from the national government (unless you count the demand for yet another study on the effects of video-game violence.). The only concrete action we’ve seen? A community near Newtown has established a buyback program… for violent video games . President Obama said, in his statement on Sandy Hook, that “we can’t tolerate this anymore.” And he’s right. But until we identify what it is we’re not supposed to tolerate, we’re stuck, and so far it looks like the conversation is successfully being misdirected away from guns and toward popular culture. I don’t need a poll to tell me that’s a bad sign. [ The Hollywood Reporter ] Ross Lincoln is a LA-based freelance writer from Oklahoma with an unhealthy obsession with comics, movies, video games, ancient history, Gore Vidal, and wine. Follow Ross Lincoln on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
GTFOHWTBS! Wall Street wins…again. We knew politicians were shady as hell but, to throw in perks for banks like Morgan Stanely, that have already been bailed out by US already, is just a cotdayum slap in the face! And according to The Huffington Post , there’s a loooong azz list of other tax breaks for that 1% that we couldn’t even try to pull with Uncle Sam: The 11th-hour deal to avert the so-called fiscal cliff preserved billions of dollars in corporate tax giveaways even as it slashed take-home pay for millions of American workers. Tucked inside the last-minute fiscal cliff package were more than a dozen tax loopholes, many of which will benefit Wall Street financial firms and some of the nation’s biggest corporations. These breaks will cost hundreds of billions of dollars in the coming year, underscoring the lobbying power of corporate interests. The deal was less kind to the middle class. Congress permitted a cut in the payroll tax to expire, meaning that the tax burden for the average worker will increase about $1,000 in 2013. “This shows that the lobbyists are able to get what they want even when everyone else is starving,” said Phineas Baxandall, senior analyst for tax and budget policy at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. “It also shows they are best able to get what they want when no one else is paying attention.” The corporate loopholes were part of a package of so-called tax extenders tacked onto the main bill. The extenders package, first approved by the Senate in early August, mixes popular benefits, like a deduction for teachers who buy classroom supplies, with corporate-friendly carve-outs, such as the “active financing” exception that permits businesses earning interest on overseas lending to defer U.S. taxes on that income indefinitely. There is even a tax break for construction of new racetracks. The tax extenders were passed for only one year, and they still need to clear another potential hurdle: upcoming negotiations over mandated spending cuts and the debt ceiling. President Barack Obama and congressional leaders have indicated they’d like to see a “grand bargain” on taxes, which would feature lower overall rates but close a slew of loopholes. The financial services industry, whose leaders had earlier joined a group of other corporate executives pushing for a “fair” solution to the fiscal crisis, is one of the primary beneficiaries of special-interest tax breaks. The active-financing exception, for example, permits banks like Morgan Stanley to avoid the 35 percent U.S. corporate tax rate on interest income from money lent overseas. A handful of other U.S.-based multinational companies with financing arms, such as Ford Motor Co. and General Electric, also use that exemption to lower their tax bills. The two-year cost to taxpayers is an estimated $11.2 billion, according to the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation. U.S. financial institutions argue that the active-financing exemption is necessary for them to compete in overseas markets with foreign banks that carry a lower tax burden. The loophole was repealed in the Tax Reform Act of 1986, but was reinstated in 1997 as a temporary measure after fierce lobbying by multinational corporations. According to Citizens for Tax Justice, the financial services industry paid an average effective tax rate of 15.5 percent from 2008 to 2010, far lower than that of most other industries. As part of the fiscal cliff deal, Congress also extended another little-known tax break that benefits large multinationals selling products through overseas affiliates. This “pass-through” exemption permits a U.S.-based company to set up a new corporation in a tax haven like the Cayman Islands and sell it a patent owned by the U.S. parent company. Royalties on overseas licensing of that patent would then route to the tax-sheltered firm, instead of the U.S. parent company. The Joint Committee on Taxation says the two-year cost of extending this shelter is $1.5 billion. One of the more unusual tax benefits in the fiscal cliff legislation is a longstanding carve-out for racetracks used by NASCAR. Since 2004, Congress has passed a series of stopgap measures that allow owners of motorsports complexes to accelerate their depreciation expenses. This means that owners can deduct more in expenses, reducing the taxes they must pay. Track owners and NASCAR together have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying for the tax benefit over the past five years, according to lobbying disclosure forms. The International Speedway Corp., which owns and manages NASCAR race tracks, has spent more than $1.1 million lobbying Congress since 2008. Over the same period, NASCAR spent more than $300,000 on lobbying efforts, which included a push to “make permanent the depreciation classification.” Supporters in Congress and industry groups have argued that the tax break is necessary to “maintain the current standard expected by our competitors and fans.” According to estimates by the Joint Committee on Taxation, the so-called NASCAR loophole will cost taxpayers $46 million this year and an additional $95 million through 2017. A spokesman for the International Speedway Corp., Charles Talbert, said the industry is simply seeking to preserve a tax designation it has relied on for years. He said in an email that racetracks had always used the accelerated depreciation schedule, but Congress had specifically written it into law after the Internal Revenue Service argued that it was improper in the early 2000s. Though Congress was willing to sign off on all these business-friendly goodies, legislative leaders couldn’t muster enthusiasm for extending the payroll tax holiday, which had cost the federal government $120 billion each year in lost revenue. As a result, a worker who earns $50,000 a year will now pay at least $80 per month in taxes. The payroll tax increase will affect as many as 160 million people. These bullsh*t excuses corporations can throw around in order to get a tax break are inexcusable. The Senate, Congress, and The Pres should all be ashamed of themselves. Images via tumblr
It’s about cotdayum time ! Via The Daily Mail … With just three hours to go before the start of 2013, the White House and congressional Republicans have struck a deal to avoid falling over the looming fiscal cliff. These officials said a New Year’s Eve vote in the Senate to ratify the deal was possible later in the evening, barring opposition from majority Democrats. There was no immediate confirmation from aides to the top Republicans in Congress, Sen Mitch McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner. The measure would extend Bush-era tax cuts for family incomes below $450,000 and briefly avert across-the-board spending cuts set to strike the Pentagon and domestic agencies this week, according to a Democratic aide. Vice President Joe Biden was set to sell the agreement to Senate Democrats at a meeting at the Capitol on Monday night. The aide required anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak publicly. A White House source told Reuters that Democratic leaders Sen Harry Reid and Rep Nancy Pelosi have signed off on the deal. Earlier in the day, President Obama announced that a deal to avert billions of dollars of tax increases that will kick in at midnight is ‘within sight, but it’s not done yet.’ He lamented that he and Congress were unable to reach a ‘grand deal’ to tackle the debt and reform the tax code – but said he would settle for a plan to stop taxes from going up on all but the richest Americans. ‘Our most immediate priority is to prevent taxes from going up on middle class families tomorrow. I think that is a modest goal we can accomplish,’ he said. Think this is going to help our pockets in 2013?? Images via facebook
For real tho??? We still have no deal with the Fiscal Cliff and the Farm Bill… but let’s go ahead and give Congress a pay raise. According to The Huffington Post , this years session in Congress has been one of the most unproductive in more than 50 years: President Barack Obama gave a New Year’s gift to returning members of Congress, federal workers and Vice President Joe Biden on Thursday, signing an executive order calling for an end to a years-long pay freeze. As of March 27, 2013, federal employees will see a half-percent to one percent pay increase, marking the end of a pay freeze that has been in place since late 2010. Congress hasn’t seen a pay raise since 2009. According to the order, Biden’s pay will increase from $225,521 to $231,900 a year, before taxes. House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) will see his salary increased to $224,500 and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) will take home an annual pay of $194,400 after his raise. While Obama’s order made no mention of merit for such a raise, HuffPost’s Amanda Terkel reported on Friday that the 112th Congress is set to end the session as the most unproductive since the 1940s, with only 219 bills passed by the body becoming law. The raise won’t take place until the 113th Congress, meaning that outgoing members will see no effect from the order. Obama ordered the raise as he continues to negotiate unsuccessfully with congressional leaders to find a deal in order to avoid the fiscal cliff at the end of the year. If no agreement is met, over $500 billion in planned tax increases and spending cuts will be implemented. WOW! The more you know folks. Images via tumblr/facebook
For real tho??? We still have no deal with the Fiscal Cliff and the Farm Bill… but let’s go ahead and give Congress a pay raise. According to The Huffington Post , this years session in Congress has been one of the most unproductive in more than 50 years: President Barack Obama gave a New Year’s gift to returning members of Congress, federal workers and Vice President Joe Biden on Thursday, signing an executive order calling for an end to a years-long pay freeze. As of March 27, 2013, federal employees will see a half-percent to one percent pay increase, marking the end of a pay freeze that has been in place since late 2010. Congress hasn’t seen a pay raise since 2009. According to the order, Biden’s pay will increase from $225,521 to $231,900 a year, before taxes. House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) will see his salary increased to $224,500 and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) will take home an annual pay of $194,400 after his raise. While Obama’s order made no mention of merit for such a raise, HuffPost’s Amanda Terkel reported on Friday that the 112th Congress is set to end the session as the most unproductive since the 1940s, with only 219 bills passed by the body becoming law. The raise won’t take place until the 113th Congress, meaning that outgoing members will see no effect from the order. Obama ordered the raise as he continues to negotiate unsuccessfully with congressional leaders to find a deal in order to avoid the fiscal cliff at the end of the year. If no agreement is met, over $500 billion in planned tax increases and spending cuts will be implemented. WOW! The more you know folks. Images via tumblr/facebook
After the festive ones from earlier in the week , we’ve got a few more pictures of Jennifer Aniston vacationing in a bikini again today. And while they aren’t exactly the best quality, much like Jennifer’s movies, we all know that’s not going to stop people from checking them out. So enjoy. Related Articles: Jennifer Aniston Gets Wet Jennifer Aniston Bikini Pictures Jennifer Aniston Upskirt With Panties Jennifer Aniston Gets Wet Photos: FameFlynet
Here’s Italian showgirl-turned-politician Nicole Minetti showing off her obvious political qualifications at the beach, just further proof that Italians truly do it better. Anyway, I don’t know much about Italian politics, but I do know that if American politicians looked half this good in a bikini, I’m pretty sure the fiscal cliff nonsense would’ve been solved months ago, just so Congress could take an early beach vacation. Oh well, maybe next election. » view all 18 photos Photos: WENN.com , PacificCoastNews
