Emily Blunt Is Bored By Female Parts in Superhero Movies

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Mar 7, 2012 at 6:38 pm

Oh, do I sympathize with Emily Blunt here:

Usually the female parts in a superhero film feel thankless: She’s the pill girlfriend while the guys are whizzing around saving the world. I didn’t do the other ones because the part wasn’t very good or the timing wasn’t right, but I’m open to any kind of genre if the part is great and fun and different and a challenge in some way. I would love to do a comic-book movie or a science-fiction film that would scare the bejesus out of me. Maybe I need to be James Bond! I just did Looper, because it’s so original and breathtakingly cool. The time-travel aspect is just a backdrop to visit this heightened world, where you’re atoning for something and attempting to be more than you’ve been.

I actually thought Jennifer Lawrence’s Mystique in X-Men: First Class was a considerable improvement on this score: she got to be angry, and to make choices, and to have messy feelings about her looks and sexuality. And the way the part was written, it had lovely resonances with her character’s abandonment by Magneto in X-Men: The Last Stand. And oh do I have hopes for The Avengers, if Joss Whedon can resist killing off or emotionally torturing Black Widow or Maria Hill. But if your’e an intelligent female actress, most superhero movies—and most action movies, for that matter—have nothing to offer you other than a paycheck. And if you can afford to turn down one paycheck in favor of another, why take work that’s thankless, and that you have little to no hope of elevating?

The whole thing actually reminds me of the insanity of awards-season dresses. If talented and famous actors were more willing to turn down or not read for work that bored them because they can make a living on the interesting stuff, Hollywood might become a more thoughtful, creative place in a jiffy. But it’s far easier for the industry to distract people with large checks and shiny cars than to embrace creative risk-taking, even risks that seem like they’d have a decent shot at paying off.

()

Justice

Republican Challenger Accuses Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-FL) Of Trying To Bribe Him

By Josh Israel on Mar 7, 2012 at 6:30 pm

Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-FL)

Republican James Jett, the clerk of the circuit court for Clay County, Florida and a primary challenger to 12-term incumbent Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-FL) said today that Stearns tried to buy him out of the race.

The Florida Times-Union reports that Jett claimed Stearns offered him, through a middleman, “a job on Stearns’ campaign staff or cash to cover the approximately $25,000 Jett has personally spent on his congressional run,” and possibly “a job heading the Florida Department of Law Enforcement or a U.S. marshal position” pending future vacancies. Jett claimed to have audio recordings of the conversations, though he has not yet made those public.

Jett said he reported this to the FBI and that the Bureau is looking into the matter. A spokesman for the FBI’s Jacksonville bureau told ThinkProgress that as a matter of policy, they do not confirm or deny investigations.

According to Clay Today, a local newspaper, a Stearns spokesman denied the charges, saying:

Mr. Jett requested a meeting with Rep. Stearns through Stearns’ supporters indicating that he intended to drop out of the race. At the meeting, Jett announced that he would not drop out of the race. Neither Stearns nor his supporters suggested that Jett receive anything in return for dropping out and the meeting was terminated.

If the FBI does open an investigation, Stearns would join several Republican colleagues on the list of ongoing ethics scandals.

()

Economy

Why Is Utah Paying Goldman Sachs Tens Of Millions Of Dollars?

By Pat Garofalo on Mar 7, 2012 at 5:50 pm

Goldman Sachs is one of the U.S.’s most profitable companies, making, in the last three years, profits of $13.9 billion, $8.5 billion, and $4.4 billion, even as the country grappled with the effects of the Great Recession. But despite these sky-high profits, the state of Utah is still seeing fit to give the mega-bank tens of millions of dollars to create jobs:

Goldman will receive an estimated $47.3 million from Utah over a 20-year period in the form of a 30 percent tax rebate, according to Governor’s Office of Economic Development.

In exchange, the bank agreed to maintain at least 1,065 employees in Salt Lake City and pay them at least 150 percent of the average local county salary.

State legislatures can’t seem to help themselves when it comes to doling out tax breaks in order to create or preserve jobs, but the history of such policy should act as a warning. For instance, Illinois doled out millions in subsidies to Sears, only to have the retailer layoff 100 workers last month. Boeing not only received a slew of tax credits from Wichita, Kansas, but had Kansas lawmakers lobby for it to receive billions in federal contracts: the company will leave Wichita at the end of 2013, costing thousands of jobs.

And the list goes on and on. The Des Moines Register found that “15 [Iowa] companies enjoying tax credit dollars given to them by the state have defaulted on the job-creation requirements tied to those credits.” Louisiana doles out hundreds of millions in tax credits to businesses, with no clue as to whether or not they create jobs.

As Citizens for Tax Justice noted, “the reasons for these failures should be obvious. When the economy is weak, businesses generally can’t sell as much of their product as they used to. You can throw money at them and ask them to hire more people, but ultimately it doesn’t make sense for a company to bring on more employees unless there’s some new, unmet demand that needs to be filled.” But states continue to try this failed strategy, with Utah giving a humongous investment bank millions of dollars in the hopes that it will bring some of “god’s work” to the Beehive State. (HT: Jess Kutch)

()

Alyssa

‘Awake’ and the Quippy Black Cop Trope

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Mar 7, 2012 at 5:23 pm

I quite liked Awake, NBC’s beautifully-shot and subtly-acted new show about a cop, Detective Michael Britten (a wonderful Jason Isaacs) confused about which of two worlds he’s living in is real and which is a dream. But one thing that struck me about the pilot is the way it handles Detective Isaiah ‘Bird’ Freeman (Steve Harris), Michael’s partner in the world where his son is still alive. Harris is good in the role. But as can be the case with black characters in cop shows or movies, he sounds like he’s in an entirely different show than the white characters he works with.

Part of it is that Freeman has some of the best, quippiest lines in the show. Much of the dialogue in Awake is muted, straightforward in keeping with the fact that this is a very strange situation that’s being treated as if it’s normal or sustainable by the person at its center. The fact that Michael and his therapists are trying to work through this situation logically and gently rather than making grand pronouncements about the utter weirdness of this lets us appreciate the power of Michael’s circumstances without constantly being bashed over the head about it. Freeman isn’t an actual exception to that rule, but he does spend a lot of time uttering koans like “This is why I’ve avoided success at all costs. You work your whole life to afford some nice stuff, so someone can come along and kill you for it,” or “Been a cop for 20 years. Only seen hunches on TV,” or “Remember when you used to think that solved and fixed meant the same thing?” It’s an oddly performative role.

And there was also a moment when Freeman and Britten were investigating a brutal murder when Awake‘s writers decided to just straight up have Freeman channel The Wire‘s Bunk Moreland. “You see this coffeemaker? $600. My ex-wife wanted one of these. I told her if she wanted a $600 coffee-maker she shouldn’t have married a police,” Freeman said, pronouncing police with an exaggerated “o.” “Eventually, we agreed on that.” I’m not saying it’s not a good line. But it’s a weird reminder that when it comes to black characters, folks seem to reach for archetypes first and to go through the process of developing original characters second.

()

Climate Progress

John Shimkus: Big Oil Should Write Off Drilling As Business Expense

By Rebecca Leber on Mar 7, 2012 at 5:15 pm

Shilling for big oil at a House Energy and Power Subcommittee hearing, Rep. John Shimkus (R-IL) declared that, just like “little mom and pop drillers,” multinational corporations deserve to write off billions in tax breaks if they don’t hit oil.

Shimkus defended the $4 billion annual tax breaks the industry receives, claiming the oil giants — that collected a combined $137 billion in profits last year — should write off some drilling as a “business expense”:

Just because you have a lease, it doesn’t mean there’s oil underneath there. You have to look for it. It takes capital expense … I’m tired, I’m really tired of this attack on drilling. Because my little mom and pop drillers, all they want to do is if they don’t hit the well, they want to record that as an expense. That’s all this tax break for big oil is. If they don’t hit, they don’t count it as an expense. You can write it off as a business expense if you drill and you don’t hit the oil. That’s all it is.

Now multiply that to a multinational corporation and it’s the same thing. If they go deepwater drilling and they don’t hit, should they not write that off as a business expense? Sure they should. Just like my mom and pop should do it locally.

Watch it:

What he doesn’t note is that the five oil giants have plenty of excess capital to spend on developing leases. At the end of 2011, they were sitting on $60 billion in cash reserves and spent $38 billion on stock buybacks. They could easily spend some of this $100 billion on exploration.

Not surprisingly, Shimkus’ donors include some of the same big polluters, like Exxon Mobil. Oil and gas is Shimkus’ fifth-largest donor this election cycle and he’s collected a $311,000 career total from the industry.

At a GOP-led hearing already stacked with oil and gas spokesmen like American Petroleum Institute President Jack Gerard and American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers President Charles Drevna, the focus was less on gas prices and more on protecting oil subsidies.

Health

Bachmann: Federal Government Could Force A One-Child Policy

By Annie-Rose Strasser on Mar 7, 2012 at 5:10 pm

Michele Bachmann argued last night that the Obama administration could institute a one-child policy under the Affordable Care Act. Appearing on Glenn Beck’s online television show Real News From The Blaze, Bachmann launched into a long monologue on why she thinks the health care reform law could negatively impact women and explained that “the federal government will only pay for one baby to be born in the hospital per family.”

When anchor Amy Holmes pressed her on that point, she quickly backed away from singling out the Obama administration, and instead talked of a generic “health care dictator” who may institute such policies:

BACHMANN: Women have a lot to lose under Obamacare If you want to go into specifics, what the government gives, the government can take away. It certainly isn’t beyond the pale to think, in light of Kathleen Sebelius, the Health and Human Services Secretary — she said that it’s important that we have contraceptives because that prevents pregnancy, and pregnancy is more expensive to the federal government. Going with that logic, according to our own Health and Human Services Secretary, it isn’t far-fetched to think that the President of the United States could say ‘we need to save health care expenses — the federal government will only pay for one baby to be born in the hospital per family, or two babies to be born per family.’ That could happen. We think it couldn’t?”

Watch it:

()

Climate Progress

Brutal Droughts, Worsened By Global Warming, Threaten Food Production Around The World

By Joe Romm on Mar 7, 2012 at 5:00 pm

Severe drought (or Dust-Bowlification) “is the most pressing problem caused by climate change.” As I wrote in the journal Nature last year, “Feeding some 9 billion people by mid-century in the face of a rapidly worsening climate may well be the greatest challenge the human race has ever faced.”

A vulture picks at a dead steer. Ranchers say many cattle have died because of the drought that has ravaged much of Mexico. NPR.

As far back as 1990, NASA scientists projected that severe to extreme drought in the United States, then occurring every 20 years or so, could become an every-other-year phenomenon by mid-century if temperatures kept rising. They did.

In fact, a major 2011 NOAA report concluded, human-caused climate change is already a major factor in more frequent Mediterranean droughts.

A comprehensive 2011 study of drought, by Aiguo Dai of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, looked at ”Characteristics and trends in various forms of the Palmer Drought Severity Index during 1900–2008.” The PDSI is “the most prominent index of meteorological drought” used in the U.S. That study concluded:

All the four forms of the PDSI show widespread drying over Africa, East andSouth Asia, and other areas from 1950 to 2008, and most of this drying is due to recent warming. The global percentage of dry areas has increased by about 1.74% (of global land area) per decade from 1950 to 2008….

Thus, I believe that our main conclusion is robust that recent warming has caused widespread drying over land. And model predictions suggest that this drying is likely to become more severe in the coming decades.

A look at the headlines and ledes from just the last month make clear that drought is slamming the world right now:

Drought Reduces Mexico’s Agricultural Production by 40%
Farmers warn food prices could go up because of drought (UK)
Argentina tries to combat a drier future
Climate change made the drought worse, scientists say (San Antonio)
After Portugal’s driest February in 80 years, farmers are praying for a miracle as drought ravages pastures and sparks forest fires, exacerbating the country’s economic crisis.

And last week I reposted this story, “Syria: Climate Change, Drought and Social Unrest.”

While the Texas drought has gotten much of the attention in this country, what has happened in Mexico is equally devastating. Since Mexico is projected to suffer even worse warming-driven Dust-Bowlification in the coming decades — and that will certainly have consequences for the United States — it’s worth looking in a little more depth at what’s happening to our neighbor to the south:

(28)

NEWS FLASH

Officials Give Undocumented Valedictorian A 2-Year Reprieve From Deportation | After being threatened with deportation because they are both undocumented immigrants, Daniela Pelaez, a Miami high school senior who is valedictorian of her class, and her sister, Dayana, will be allowed to stay in the U.S. for two more years, Pelaez’s attorney announced Tuesday. Last week, more than 2,600 students and teachers rallied outside of Daniela’s high school to protest her deportation. Her attorney Nina Shefer said the next step will be to get permanent residency for Daniela, who came to the U.S. from Colombia at age 4. Nestor Yglesias, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman, cited “prosecutorial discretion” for the deportation reprieve. The Obama administration signaled last summer that it would be more lenient and allow discretion for cases like Daniela’s.

NEWS FLASH

Ad Agency Tells Clients They Will No Longer Place Spots On Limbaugh’s Program | The list of advertisers pulling their spots from Rush Limbaugh’s radio program continues to grow, and today the first advertising agency announced that they would be pulling all of their clients’ ads from the show. PageOne Advertising, LLC based in Youngstown, Ohio announced today that it would no longer place clients’ spots on Limbaugh’s program. “No woman, including Ms. [Sandra] Fluke, should ever be subject to the type of insults and vitriol broadcast during ‘The Rush Limbaugh Show’ last week, and no individual or business should wish to be associated with this type of irresponsible behavior,” wrote PageOne President Robert Roach in a letter to the company’s clients, which are primarily based in eastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania. Follow our list of companies who have dropped Rush here or on our Pinterest board.

Economy

STUDY: Contrary To GOP Claims, EPA Regulations Create Jobs

By Travis Waldron on Mar 7, 2012 at 4:40 pm

So-called “job killing regulations” have become a favorite target of Republicans since the economic downturn, as legislators have denounced the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Labor Relations Board, and virtually every other government agency that writes rules. The EPA has emerged as target number one, with Republican presidential candidates promising to shut it down for good and the GOP-controlled House of Representatives seeking to defund it at every turn.

According to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute, however, the “job-killing” part of the phrase “job-killing regulation” is built largely on myth. Last year, EPI released a report that found that several of the EPA’s proposed environmental regulations would actually create jobs. Now that the EPA has finalized a rule regulating toxic waste, EPI has used that rule to analyze whether such regulations are, indeed, job-killers. Once again, it found the opposite to be true, and said the new rule will actually create more jobs than it previously estimated:

Previous studies (such as Bivens 2011) that have estimated the jobs impact of specific proposed regulatory changes have probably understated the gains to employment spurred by the rule, likely by roughly 50%. But even given these understatements, the effects of some specific regulatory changes—such as the toxics rule, the largest single air-quality rule currently being proposed by the EPA—are surely positive for job creation. [...]

Even with multiplier effects, these estimates translate into job gains of roughly 117,000 to 135,000 in 2015, depending on whether one or both offsets to the job-depressing effects of price increases are used. … But what this reassessment does make clear is that it is near-inconceivable that adoption of the rule will cost any jobs at all in the near term. The effect will be unambiguously positive.

The study is hardly the first indication that the GOP’s “job-killing regulations” rhetoric is built on a myth. The EPA’s regulation of the coal industry helped boost industry employment to a 15-year high, and EPA regulations aimed at cleaning up Chesapeake Bay would create 35 times more jobs than the GOP’s favorite pet project, the Keystone XL pipeline. The GOP’s spiel has even fallen flat with business leaders large and small, with one CEO saying there was “no question” the new regulations would create jobs.

()