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Alyssa

The Academy Awards’ Restrictive New Documentary Qualifying Requirements

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Jan 9, 2012 at 5:22 pm

The requirement that after this year’s ceremonies, to qualify to be nominated for an Academy Award, documentaries must both screen in Los Angeles or New York and be reviewed by a theatrical reviewer by the Los Angeles Times or the New York Times are obviously wildly restricted. But this is downright puzzling:

According to Academy COO Ric Robertson, the new requirement is a further step in eliminating docs that have no real intention of gaining distribution or having a legitimate theatrical run. A common practice in recent years has been for faux theatrical docs (and even some animated feature and VOD entries) to attempt to skirt the rules by quietly ”four walling” a qualifying run on an obscure screen — often on the outskirts of the city. In some cases, it is the last movie screen these movies play on their way to TV. The new rule will confirm the credibility of a legitimate contender by requiring a movie (not TV) review, tied to the opening of the film, in one of those two major newspapers. Trade reviews out of a film festival would not meet the requirement.

Perhaps someone can enlighten me, but it seems pretty strange that someone would go to the work of making a documentary without hoping that it’ll find distribution and a home in theaters however brief the run and however long the shot. Is there some sort of epidemic of people making Bowfinger-like documentary productions, or fooling people into participating only to get their hopes up and crush them? That seems…strange. And the end result will be super-vindictive to movies that are struggling to find distribution that might well be worthy. The movie business is not precisely what I’d call a meritocracy. And increasing the link between awards and commercialism is a less-than-inspiring prospect.

Justice

About That Montana Supreme Court Decision And Citizens United

By Ian Millhiser on Jan 9, 2012 at 5:20 pm

The Montana Supreme Court

The Supreme Court’s egregious Citizens United decision was not just, as Justice Stevens wrote in dissent, “a rejection of the common sense of the American people,” it is also easily one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in American history. Its holding that corporations can spend unlimited funds to buy and sell elections belongs in the same dustbin as separate but equal and the entire corporations before people doctrine of the misguided Lochner Era in the early 20th Century.

As has now been widely reported, the Montana Supreme Court recently tried to consign Citizens United to its well deserved fate by essentially holding that the U.S. Supreme Court’s folly does not apply in Montana. I have genuinely struggled about what to say about this 5-2 decision — which is why ThinkProgress has not reported on it prior to this post. On the one hand, the Montana justices defied an obviously wrong decision that threatens to turn American democracy into an auction that sells essential government jobs to whichever special interest group happens to be the highest bidder. On the other hand, ThinkProgress has been unequivocal in condemning conservative officials who believe that they have the power to defy Supreme Court decisions they disagree with, or who think that states can simply ignore federal law or the Constitution.

We will not abandon this commitment to the rule of law today. It is wrong when Newt Gingrich plots a campaign of massive resistance against judges he disagrees with, and Montana’s justices act no less illegitimately when they fail to follow a binding Supreme Court precedent. There is no reason to doubt that every word of the Montana Supreme Court’s decision — which explains in great detail how corporate money corrupts a state’s politics — is accurate, except for the part when they say that Citizens United does not force them to allow corporations to corrupt Montana.

Yet, while the Montana justices erred, they erred far less than the five U.S. Supreme Court justices who ignored the Constitution and decades of precedent to strike down a 63 year old ban on corporate money in politics. The U.S. Supremes will doubtless decide they need to review the Montana decision. They should do so, and they should reverse their error in Citizens United as soon as possible to minimize its impact on the upcoming election.

Additionally, every judge in the country should read Montana Justice James Nelson’s dissent from the decision rejecting Citizens United. He devotes most of the last eight pages of this decision to explaining why, despite the fact that he is bound by Supreme Court precedent, the one that binds him today is disastrously wrong:

While, as a member of this Court, I am bound to follow Citizens United, I do not have to agree with the Supreme Court’s decision. And, to be absolutely clear, I do not agree with it. For starters, the notion that corporations are disadvantaged in the political realm is unbelievable. Indeed, it has astounded most Americans. The truth is that corporations wield inordinate power in Congress and in state legislatures. It is hard to tell where government ends and corporate America begins; the transition is seamless and overlapping. In my view, Citizens United has turned the First Amendment’s “open marketplace” of ideas into an auction house for Friedmanian corporatists. Freedom of speech is now synonymous with freedom to spend. Speech equals money; money equals democracy. This decidedly was not the view of the constitutional founders, who favored the preeminence of individual interests over those of big business. [...]

Lastly, I am compelled to say something about corporate “personhood.” While I recognize that this doctrine is firmly entrenched in the law, I find the entire concept offensive. Corporations are artificial creatures of law. As such, they should enjoy only those powers—not constitutional rights, but legislatively-conferred powers—that are concomitant with their legitimate function, that being limited-liability investment vehicles for business. Corporations are not persons. Human beings are persons, and it is an affront to the inviolable dignity of our species that courts have created a legal fiction which forces people—human beings—to share fundamental, natural rights with soulless creations of government. Worse still, while corporations and human beings share many of the same rights under the law, they clearly are not bound equally to the same codes of good conduct, decency, and morality, and they are not held equally accountable for their sins. Indeed, it is truly ironic that the death penalty and hell are reserved only to natural persons.

Even in an era when corporate interest groups dominate the U.S. Supreme Court, judges lack the authority to defy the high Court’s commands. What they can never lose, however, is their right to speak out in published opinions about how deeply misguided the nation’s highest Court has become. Justice Nelson’s opinion should be the model for every judge who fears the Supreme Court has forgotten to follow the very Constitution it is sworn to uphold.

Alyssa

ABC’s Ben Sherwood Pushes Back Against Charges of Soft News, Explains Amanpour Move

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Jan 9, 2012 at 5:17 pm

At a lively session at the Television Critics Association press tour this morning, ABC News President Ben Sherwood pushed back against charges that his network was airing more soft news, explained Christiane Amanpour’s departure from The Week, and drew distinctions between his programming and that of NBC News.

“I reject completely these distinctions and these labels, totally,” he said when asked whether the perception that ABC focusing on soft news, like interviewing kidnapping victim Jaycee Dugard, at the expense of reporting. “We believe our guiding philosophy is relevance…we believe that our mission as you saw is to give people the whole picture so they can change their futures…we have had exclusive interviews with Mubarak and Assad..our anchor Diane Sawyer was the only evening news anchor to go to Japan to cover the Biblical disaster here…We will cede no ground on investigative journalism, on hard-hitting news.” But he also suggested that it was no longer the role of news anchors to act as “priests of news [who] presented at the end of the day one menu of news that they had decided was the most important in the order of importance,” saying it was much more critical to look to the audience’s needs. He cited aggressive coverage of Bank of America’s proposed $5 debit card fee as the kind of story that was responsive to the economic concerns of viewers. And he argued that Christiane Amanpour’s interviews and coverage of the Arab Spring were proof that Nightline was not a lifestyle program.

Speaking of Amanpour, who had her last day on The Week yesterday, Sherwood said that the move was part a product of a desire to focus on American politics in an election year, recasting the charge that Amanpour couldn’t deliver domestic nes as a strength: “We thought her tremendous strengths, her world-beating strengths, are best deployed in her area of strength and also her personal passion.” He insisted that despite the decision to move Amanpour away from The Week, 2011 was “probably one of the greatest years of her career this year. If you look at her domination in terms of big interviews all across the Arab Spring, just an incredible year.” And Sherwood said the move would allow Amanpour to work with CNN in a “unique arrangement.”

And Sherwood set his sites on NBC. In response to one question about whether NBC was trying to imitate George Stephanopoulos by hiring the daughters of former presidents like Chelsea Clinton, saying Stephanopoulos “is a first-rate journalist. And he has, over the last 15 years, developed an incredible set of skills. He’s developed a whole new set of skills in the morning…I think that is an unfair question.” More substantively, Sherwood praised Good Morning America for cutting the Today Show’s lead by “30 to 40 percent.” He acknowledged that “the Today show is very mighty, and they’ve been very mighty for a very long time,” but said of Good Morning America that “It’s dynamic, it’s incredibly watchable, it’s surprising, it’s really fun.” Earlier in the week, NBC’s Bob Greenblatt said that he hoped and expected that Matt Lauer would remain on Today, so it’ll be fascinating to see that rivalry heat up in the year to come.

Health

Santorum Supported Individual Health Insurance Mandate In 1994 Republican Primary

By Igor Volsky on Jan 9, 2012 at 4:50 pm

Rick Santorum regularly highlights his conservative record on health care reform by touting his successful election against former Sen. Harris Wofford (D-PA), a Democratic champion of universal health care reform who campaigned on guaranteeing insurance for all Americans by encouraging employers and employees to share the cost of health benefits. “When I ran for the Senate in 1994, I ran against the man who was the author of Hillarycare in the United States Senate,” Santorum told Charles Krauthammer during an appearance on Fox News in October. “And I ran on a patient-driven, consumer-driven health healthcare system that is consistent with the philosophy of America, which is free markets, build it from the bottom up.” He expanded on the message following his surprising second-place finish in Iowa, “I’ve never been for government-run health care, never,” Santorum said to a crowd in Manchester, New Hampshire on Jan. 5. “Unlike the other two folks who are running here, who have supported individual mandates, who have supported top-down government health care, I never have.”

But as The French Revolution’s Nancy French discovers, Santorum did advocate for an individual requirement to purchase health insurance coverage — not in his general election challenge to Wofford, but in the Republican primary against businessman Joe Watkins. Watkins also backed the provision:

Allentown, PA’s Morning Call from April 7, 1994:

U.S. Rep. Rick Santorum, R-Pittsburgh area, and Joe Watkins, a Philadelphia businessman who worked in the Bush White House, are seeking the Republican Senate nomination, creating the only true Senate primary race….Santorum and Watkins both called for a “comprehensive restructuring” of health care. But they differed sharply on what elements should comprise a basic benefits package.

Watkins would include mental health services, long-term care, prescription drug coverage, dental services and preventive care such as immunizations. Santorum would not. Both reject abortion services. Santorum and Watkins both oppose having businesses provide health care for their employees. Instead, they would require individuals to purchase insurance. Both oppose higher taxes on alcohol or tobacco to help pay for care. They also oppose government-run health care and disagree with controls on doctor or hospital fees. They would cap malpractice awards.

Allentown, PA’s Morning Call from May 2, 1994:

Santorum and Watkins would require individuals to buy health insurance rather than forcing employers to pay for employee benefits. Both oppose abortion services and support limits on malpractice awards. Santorum says non-economic damages should not exceed $ 250,000, adjusted annually for inflation, and lawyers’ contingency fees should be capped at 25 percent. [...]

Santorum introduced the idea of a medical savings account, called Medisave, which has become part of the Gramm bill. Under it, workers would buy major medical insurance and could make tax-free contributions to a Medisave account, from which they would pay for preventive services.

Many Republicans who now argue that the Affordable Care Act’s individual requirement is unconstitutional supported a national mandate as an alternative to then-First Lady Hillary Clinton’s health care proposal. In that sense, Santorum is in very good company. He joins Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, Jon Huntsman, Chuck Grassley, and Orrin Hatch and a growing list of prominent Republicans who came out against the conservative principle of personal responsibility in health care as soon as President Obama endorsed it.

Climate Progress

Fear and Polluting on the Campaign Trail: Clean Energy Needs to Fight Back in 2012

By Stephen Lacey on Jan 9, 2012 at 4:37 pm

“Politics is the art of controlling your environment.” — Hunter S. Thompson

I’ve been writing for years about how renewable energy is “an issue we can all rally around” that shouldn’t involve partisan politics.

In an ideal world that would hold true. But after seeing the relentless campaign waged by a small-but-powerful group of belligerents determined to marginalize the industry, my opinion changed in 2011.

That shouldn’t stop us from trying to bring this issue above politics. But we’re in a fiercely partisan election year. And after witnessing the successful political campaign waged to raise doubts about climate science — thus creating an army of conservative presidential hopefuls who see talking about human-caused global warming as a political death sentence — we should all be on high alert.

Let’s face it: The clean energy industry isn’t going to match the tens of millions of dollars being poured into anti-clean energy propaganda by the Koch brothers or the latest fossil-fuel PR campaign from the American Petroleum Institute. By the time clean energy interests can actually match that level of spending, there probably won’t be the same need to guard against the constant barrage of baseball bats swinging for the knees of anyone who cares about moving this sector forward to address climate change.

To make push back more difficult, Washington-based advocacy organizations don’t have any interest in getting into fisticuffs. They risk losing support if they lash out too much, so they hang back and try to make friends with as many people possible. This is understandable for trying to craft policy. However, it also means they don’t have a very big dog in the political fight — a fight they’ve been reluctantly dragged into over the last six months.

A lot of people working in clean energy on the ground level feel the same way. Who wants to get dragged into a bar-room brawl started by a bunch of jabbering political drunkards who have no idea what they’re talking about? It’s best just to put their heads down, do their job, and hope they can ride through the bad vibes.

But that’s just not going to work in 2012.  Waiting for things to blow over isn’t going to be an adequate response. If you care about clean energy issues and actually want to make an impact on the dialogue in 2012, you’ve got to get involved.

Here’s what I mean.

Read more

Economy

Huntsman: ‘I Will Break Up The Big Banks’

By Pat Garofalo on Jan 9, 2012 at 4:30 pm

Across the board, the GOP’s 2012 presidential candidates have denounced the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, enacted to prevent a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis. However, none of them has come up with a plan to replace it, save one: former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, who is hanging his campaign on a strong showing tomorrow in the New Hampshire primary.

In a Fox News op-ed, Huntsman explicitly said that he would like to “break up the big banks” by imposing a fee on banks whose size hits a certain percentage of GDP:

As president, I will break up the big banks, end future taxpayer bailouts, and restore capitalist principles – competition and creative destruction – to our financial sector.

We will accomplish this by imposing a fee on banks whose size exceeds a certain percentage of GDP, proving them an incentive to slim down and localize.

This is akin to the “bank tax” that lived a short life during the financial reform debate. While it wouldn’t be as clean a break as reimposing the strict divide between investment banking and traditional commercial banking, if it were large enough, a fee like the one Huntsman proposed would provide an incentive for banks to shrink — or if not, could be used to build up a pot of money that could be tapped to dismantle a big bank that is going under, instead of resorting to ad hoc, taxpayer funded bailouts.

As Reuters’ Felix Salmon put it, Huntsman “goes where Obama dares not tread.” Indeed, Obama has never called for breaking up the biggest banks — or “right sizing” them, as Huntsman puts it — preferring instead to craft a regulatory framework in which big banks can exist without having one of their failures doom the wider economy.

But that fact is that the biggest banks are still big enough to pull down the financial system, and while Dodd-Frank went a long way to make it possible to dismantle those banks without taxpayer funds, it didn’t do much to reduce the dangerous co-mingling of investment and commercial banking (which even 90s deregulator Newt Gingrich now admits it was “a mistake” to permit in the first place).

NEWS FLASH

Turkish Court Rules ‘Perverts’ Insults Gay Community | Turkey’s High Court of Appeals has ruled that a columnist’s description of the gay community as “sexual perverts” does not fall within the “limits of [journalistic] criticism.” LGBT group KAOS GL sued the newspaper now known as Vakit for a piece by Serdar Arseven called “Üskül prefers perverts,” which criticized Zafer Üskül, a member of Parliament, for attending an “International Anti-Homophobism Meeting” KAOS GL had organized. The court sided with KAOS GL, ruling that “the freedom of the press does not encompass the freedom to insult the personal freedoms of individuals.”

NEWS FLASH

Senate Confirmations Are 18 Percentage Points Lower Now Then They Were Under Bush & A Democratic Senate | For the last two years of his presidency, when George W. Bush faced a Senate controlled by the opposite party, 740 of his 981 civilian nominees were confirmed, a success rate of 75 percent. During the current Congress, however, Senate Minority Leader has waged such a sweeping campaign of obstructionism against President Obama’s nominees that only 57 percent of the president’s civilian nominees have been confirmed — despite the fact that Obama’s own party ostensibly controls the Senate.

Alyssa

Building The Next Generation Of Great Television Women

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Jan 9, 2012 at 4:07 pm

Since I read it, I haven’t been able to stop thinking reading Amanda Marcotte’s excellent essay on why the television shows that are critically considered to be the best we’ve seen in the last decade all focus on men, almost all of whom are anti-heroes. There’s no question that some of this is a result of who’s creating these critically-lauded television shows: lots of Davids for the big three of Deadwood, The Wire, and The Sopranos, and lots of dudes generally. But it’s not that men are incapable of creating astonishingly good female characters, and in fact, many of the shows that occupy the second tier of great television programming feature innovative, emotionally compelling female characters. It’s not a question of creating great women. It’s a question of getting them at the center of the frame, and of getting their perspectives to be the dominant ones for a change.

To try to figure out how to do that, and what we can learn from some of the best female characters of the last 10 years, I’ve asked Amanda, Ryan McGee, and Rowan Kaiser to put some thoughts to paper about the fictional women who have touched them most. Amanda’s post on Community‘s Britta Perry will go up tomorrow, followed by Ryan on Buffy and Angel‘s Cordelia Chase, Rowan on Veronica Mars, and me on Gemma Teller Morrow on Friday. I’d be curious to know what some of your favorite women are, particularly if there’s someone you think I haven’t come across yet but who I might love.

NEWS FLASH

Boehner Promises To Continue GOP Fight For Expanded Oil Drilling | Today, Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) said to expect a House of Representatives vote on expanded oil drilling in coming months. The bill would allow new offshore leases and drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, to partly fund infrastructure projects. Although Boehner called these projects “high-priority,” last fall, House Republicans blocked $60 billion to finance needed infrastructure requested in President Obama’s jobs act.

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