The Hollywood Reporter notes that New Regency’s just signed a deal that lets it have first crack at content coming out of one of Israel’s biggest production companies. Israeli shows are never going to translate directly the way British ones do—you can’t just slap a Hebrew-language show on PBS or Hulu and expect that it’ll find a well-established audience like the one that’s willing to give almost any BBC content a shot. But Israeli shows have been the basis for programs like In Treatment, part of the second wave of well-regarded HBO shows, Homeland, which is helping Showtime steal a match on HBO, and Who’s Still Standing?, an NBC quiz show that’s helping the struggling network fill hours.

Obviously, this sampling of shows is a bit too small to use to draw conclusions about what American and Israeli audiences have in common, or why Israeli story templates work here. Americans have complicated relationships to and feelings about Israel, but none that translate into pop culture as easily as thinking that British people and their accents are inherently cool, that MI-6 makes for an excellent action setting, or generalized royalty and aristocracy nostalgia. An LA Times article from earlier this year offered some theories, both psychological and structural: “Some others: Israeli television’s gallows humor fits with post-9/11 American anxiety; Israelis are preoccupied by some of the same subjects as American network executives (‘the country has more psychologists per capita than anywhere else in the world, and that leads to psychologically complex stories,’ said David Nevins, Showtime’s president of entertainment); a U.S. business that has grown restless with traditional sources; Israeli shows are relatively cheap; and Israeli TV’s small budgets birth creative storytelling.”

In a sense, I regret that we’re really only going to be able to remake Israeli shows rather than rebroadcasting them directly. Our national conversation about Israel is bigger than this, but it might be healthy to keep the setting so audiences here can see the country the same way we see England: as an ally, a place of both great natural beauty and sometimes-prosaic urban design, where some people are involved in existential struggles against security threats and others are consumed with the prosaic business of everyday life and everyday jobs.

If the soundtrack to Barack Obama’s first campaign for the presidency was the kind of mixtape a guy uses to woo a smitten new girlfriend, the songs he’ll be using on the campaign trail the second time around are all about adding a little spice to an established relationship. He’s moved on, as Bloomberg points out, from songs like “Move On Up” and “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” to more contemplative songs about attachment and commitment.

There are songs for estranged lovers, like Zac Brown Band’s “Keep Me In Mind,” a reminder that non-Obama alternatives could be decidedly bleak. “We always go our separate ways, but no one can love you, baby, the way I do / Keep me in mind /Somewhere along the road you might find me,” the song goes. “The world can be real tough, find shelter in me / If there’s no one else to love, keep me in mind.” Whether in Aretha Franklin’s cover of “The Weight” with it’s offer to “Put the weight on me,” or REO Speedwagon’s “Roll With the Changes,” with its promise that “As soon as you are able, woman, I am willin’ / To make the break that we are on the brink of / My cup is on the table – my love is spillin’ / Waiting here for you to take and drink of,” these songs are about partnership, about sharing the load—they’re about marriage rather than dating. Sugarland’s “Everyday America” is a reminder to stick with it if you’ve got a “Good man but a bad year.”

Unsurprisingly, Bruce Springsteen’s “We Take Care of Our Own” is there in the mix, taking that sense of responsibility between two people national. Gwen Stefani connects individuals to a larger cause, reminding us that “You don’t have to be a famous person / Just to make your mark / A mother can be an inspiration / To her little son.” Montgomery Gentry’s “My Town” draws a direct line between the health of small towns and the hard work that goes into maintaining personal relationships—and insists that temporary dissatisfaction is a prelude to a life-long committment: “Where I ran off ‘cos I got mad, / An’ it came to blows with my old man. /Where I came back to settle down, /It’s where they’ll put me in the ground.”

Beyond the messages of the songs, it’s worth looking at how the playlist is calibrated to assert a cultural connection between the President and voters who might need a reminder of what they and Obama have in common when it comes to culture. The soundtrack’s heavily weighted to contemporary music: 17 of the 29 songs on it were released after 2000, and not surprisingly, given the president’s age, the 1970s are the second-most popular decade on the list. And to woo younger viewers, it’s available on Spotify. It’s similarly weighted towards male vocalists: 17 of the songs are by male solo artists or all-male groups, and another 8 are by groups that include both men and women—it’s men’s voices who will introduce Obama to his constituents.

There’s no remixing of the president’s speeches from the Black Eyed Peas Will.i.am, a major celebrity surrogate in the last campaign, this time around, and no “My President is Black” for those Young Jeezy fans in the audience. In fact, there’s no hip-hop on the list at all—black artists are represented by funk and soul instead, and I’d guess Ledisi will get a nice and deserved sales bump from her inclusion in this list. And I’m a bit surprised that Ricky Martin’s the only prominent Latino artist on the list. If Obama was willing to be a little downbeat, Los Lobos “One Time, One Night” could have been a good addition. Instead, the re-election campaign is going country, if not all the way chicken-fried.

Muslim-influenced fantasy can take us everywhere from re-imagined versions of Al Andalus to Mars. And this week, Matt Ruff arrives with a new novel, The Mirage, that takes us somewhere else entirely: a world where the United Arab States is the dominant superpower, the state of Israel is located in Central Europe, and a devastating attack by Christian terrorists on Baghdad led the UAS to invade America and try to bring democracy to a country torn between warlords like Donald Rumsfeld, David Koresh, and a mysterious man known as the Quail Hunter. But something strange is happening: as Homeland Security agent Mustafa al Baghdadi and his team interrogate terrorist suspects, they tell a story about a world where everything is reversed. A Baghdad gangster named Saddam Hussein is buying up odd artifacts, including a pack of playing cards where he and his henchmen appear as government officials. And Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Osama bin Laden keeps sending out agents of the Al Qaeda security forces to intervene with everyone else’s work.

In other words, The Mirage is a provocative, timely, fascinating intervention in the way we think about not just the post-September 11 world but about American power and popular culture. The novel is full of funhouse mirror details like a television show with the tagline: “Shafiq: he’s Sunni. Hassan: he’s Shia. They fight crime,” where “episodes typically offered one or more moral lessons, the most common of which was ‘Respect the other People of the Book—even if you don’t like them very much.’” It’s an incredibly effective way of both exposing our debates and politics as ridiculous, and of forcing us to put ourselves in Muslims’ shoes by letting them stand in the footwear of the mostly white, mostly Christian cops, politicians and criminals we see on American television. And the magic, when it comes, is wonderfully lovely and inventive, the result of Ruff having researched not just geopolitics but fantastical belief.

I spoke to Ruff yesterday about breaking out of stereotypical images of Muslims in popular culture, how we decide which terrorist attacks to excuse and which to condemn, and how our beliefs about our ability to change history can lead us astray. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

I’d be curious how you decided which cultural phenomena would survive—or develop naturally—in your alternate history. Personally, I’m glad to hear that Oded Fehr’s still a huge star in the world of The Mirage.

For me, it wasn’t so much a matter of what to include but what to leave out. I’m a huge pop culture fan, so I had tons of ideas that I could have included. It was more a matter of picking and choosing things that were either short and clever and wouldn’t disrupt the plot, or would support it in some way. One obvious case was the Invasion of the Body Snatchers in an alternate version…it was a way of introducing the fact that Samir [one of the Homeland Security agents who works with Mustafa] is fighting his homosexuality…Another idea I had come up with that I didn’t use was the infamous Star Trek mirror world episode. I had thought to have that on TV in the background, the difference being that the Evil Spock would be clean-shaven.

I was also wondering if you could talk a bit about the decision to set the novel in Baghdad instead of, say, Saudi Arabia, and to marginalize oil politics in the novel. Are those resources democratized in the UAS?

There were a lot of specific nuts and bolts questions like that that I left unanswered becuase they didn’t fit what I was doing. The very first incarnation of the book, I had thought to set it in Riyadh. Riyadh became the federal district, it became the alternate Washington, DC, and to have it serve as New York didn’t work. What I wanted to do was offer central roles to people who suffered the real brunt of the War on Terror, so it made sense to make Baghdad Ground Zero because that is Ground Zero of the U.S. response to the War on Terror. These were the folks who I wanted to be in the center of the novel and have their turn on the other side of the looking glass…you’ve go the South representing the more religious vision of what Arabia should be, and then you’ve got Egypt as an alternate, more secular vision but they have lost out on the competition for where the capital should be.
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Now that Mitt Romney’s finally given us his tax returns, we’re all out of luck on Republican document dumps for a while, right? Wrong! I was Nexising around yesterday, and found out this delightful tidbit. In 2007, the Pittsburgh Tribune Review reported that Rick Santorum, adjusting to his role as a former Senator, was in talks with Braveheart and The Passion of the Christ movie producer Stephen McEveety about working together on a movie project. And not just any movie project, but a look at three Iranian brothers, one of whom eventually becomes a terrorist.

This was, of course, just a couple of month after Santorum, who landed at the Ethics and Public Policy Center after he lost his Senate seat, gave a speech where he started spinning a theory about an alliance between “Islamacists,” lefitsts regimes in Latin and South America, and American liberals that makes for better paranoid action movie fodder than foreign policy. He told attendees at the Second National Academic Freedom Conference:

It was in a growing alliance between this radical group of Islamacists, particularly Iran, and people in Central and South America, Venezuela, Nicaragua now, Ecuador, Bolivia, and North Korea and other places—that these alliances were forming. And no one was talking about it. In fact, we were ignoring it. You saw the United Nations, when Hugo Chavez got up and called the President a devil. And the American left and the college campuses—they just loved that…They fight us on college campuses, and they fight us in the streets of Central and South American countries, in North Korea, in other places. You’re seeing an alliance grow. There was just an announcement this past week — there is now nonstop service, airplane service, between Karakus and Tehran. Interesting destination. You’re seeing Venezuela, under Hugo Chavez, sign a defense pact with Iran, start a $2 billion anti-American fund for Central and South America, spend more money on arms than any other country—foreign arms sales—than any other country in the world, create a million-person army, spending $30 billion to build forts, and [has] aligned country with Evo Morales in Bolivia to build forts—where? On the border of Chile, on the border of Peru, on the border of Brazil and Argentina and Colombia; facing toward those countries. And who is going to be in those forts? Yes, there’ll be Bolivian troops. But the officers in charge will be Cuban and Venezuelan.

Santorum’s movie doesn’t ever appear to have gotten off the ground, which is too bad—McEveety’s got a movie about the Virgin of Guadalupe, which seems to have less potential to be ridiculous and awesome, coming out. But clearly, Santorum should release the script or script treatment of the movie. How else will we get the critically important look we need at his evolving thinking on our foreign policy with Iran and how best to prevent young men from turning to terrorism?

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has an interesting new recruiting strategy for conservatives. “Conservatives are more simply more fun than liberals, and there is a reason for that,” he told the audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference this morning. “We’re always right.” Watch it:

Speaking in 2009 to CPAC, McConnell made the same argument, commenting, “Who wants to hang out with guys like Paul Krugman and Robert Reich when you can be with Rush Limbaugh?”

My plans for a rockin’ time out don’t generally include hanging out with my friends in conference rooms getting all self-congratulatory about our stances on policy, but to each his own. If McConnell wants to rebrand conservatism as America’s most entertaining ideological movement, he’s probably going to have to come up with a better reason people should believe him.

The bridge is yours.

-Crowdsourcing special effects: not just for space Nazis.

-It would be great if we could have more shorter shows on network television.

-30 Rock has reached the stage when it’s just throwing famous people at us.

-Earl Sweatshirt is back.

-I’m deeply torn between wishing we could have a new concept and my love of Jeremy Renner:

House creator David Shore, the show’s executive producer Katie Jacobs, and star Hugh Laurie announced late yesterday that House would be ending after running for eight seasons on Fox. And they set a high bar for what they think the show achieved:

After much deliberation, the producers of House M.D. have decided that this season of the show, the 8th, should be the last. By April this year they will have completed 177 episodes, which is about 175 more than anyone expected back in 2004.

The decision to end the show now, or ever, is a painful one, as it risks putting asunder hundreds of close friendships that have developed over the last eight years – but also because the show itself has been a source of great pride to everyone involved.

Since it began, House has aspired to offer a coherent and satisfying world in which everlasting human questions of ethics and emotion, logic and truth, could be examined, played out, and occasionally answered. This sounds like fancy talk, but it really isn’t. House has, in its time, intrigued audiences around the world in vast numbers, and has shown that there is a strong appetite for television drama that relies on more than prettiness or gun play.

Do folks actually think they fulfilled that mission? I enjoyed House, but it’s not as if the show was above theatrics that fall squarely in the category of theatrics and gunplay. If breaking up a marriage over one partner’s medicalized murder of an African dictator isn’t soapy, I’m not sure what is. And who now will give us our mistaken lupus diagnoses?

What would I do without Super Bowl ads to explain my own gender to me? Truly, I would be lost. Super Bowl 2012 actually seemed less egregiously sexist than previous years, even given the inevitable GoDaddy ad, so predictably gross that I don’t even include it here. But taken together, the ads form a pretty striking portrait of how American industry views American ladies. Let’s take a look, shall we?

1. Women don’t invent things (people of color don’t either), but they will sell you electronics:

2. When we’re superheroes, we get the cute little guns that can fit in a purse:

3. Seriously. Combat never stops us from looking hot:

4. That said, go up against a dude, and we’re super-defenseless:

5. You can make everything better by turning it into an unclothed woman who acts, quite literally, as an object for your use:

6. We live to seduce you so you will purchase motor vehicles:

7. Buy us flowers, and we will give you unreciprocated oral:

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In recent days, CBS News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson has come under criticism for an award she is due to accept later this week at the Conservative Political Action Conference, and yesterday, Media Matters for America called on the network “to reconsider [its] decision to legitimize a discredited, fringe organization by accepting AIM award at CPAC.” Everyone likes being recognized for their work. But Attkisson’s prize is a useful illustration of those cases when an award can bring an organization the wrong kind of recognition.

First, there’s the group conferring the prize. “Accuracy in Media” (AIM) peddles conspiracy theories ranging from assertions that President Obama is a socialist and a non-citizen to suggestions that mainstream media outlets encourage Occupy Wall Street protests to turn violent to boost ratings. The group has regularly criticized CBS and its affiliated networks for sins ranging from airing an episode of the legal drama The Good Wife that cast the Tea Party in a negative light to “tricking” Republican presidential candidates for agreeing with Obama administration policies in a primary debate. It’s not clear why CBS News wants Accuracy in Media’s approval or thinks it’s an organization that’s qualified to judge the network’s journalism.

Then, there’s the prize itself. As my colleague Brad Johnson noted, Attkisson is being honored for her work on a report that purported to reveal that the Obama administration had funded 11 other failed green energy projects like Solyndra, but the numbers that underly that report don’t support Attkisson’s claims. Rather than proving that the administration dumped money into failing projects, Attkisson is counting organizations that never got federal money at all or who haven’t gone bankrupt. That’s not the kind of work that most news organizations would be excited to get the in spotlight: it’s more invigorating to truly land the evidence that nails the case you’re trying to make than to repackage weak numbers under a flashy headline.

None of this is to say that big news outlets should never accept awards from small organizations, or from interest groups who are excited to see their issues be recognized. But CBS News should reconsider Accuracy in Media’s award because it’s not particularly clear that AIM and CBS News have the same standards for what constitutes strong reporting. If AIM is honoring CBS News for reporting that is politically biased or unlikely to stand up under serious scrutiny, CBS News shouldn’t risk validating standards that it wouldn’t use on a day-to-day basis in evaluating its own work.