[Re-posted from earlier today with many questions added by readers]
Ken Mehlman is a businessman, attorney, and political figure who held several national posts in the Republican Party and Bush administration. He managed Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign and subsequently chaired the RNC from 2005 to 2007. After that, Mehlman worked for the law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, then became the Global Head of Public Affairs at Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, a multinational private equity firm. In 2010, Mehlman came out as gay, making him one of the most prominent openly gay figures in the Republican Party. Since coming out, he has been a major advocate for the recognition of same-sex marriage. He also serves on the board of the American Foundation for Equal Rights.
To submit a question for Ken, simply enter it into the Urtak survey after answering all of the existing questions (ignore the “YES or NO question” aspect and simply enter any open-ended question). To vote, click “Yes” if you have a strong interest in seeing him answer the question or “No” if you don’t particularly care.
After watching the first four episodes of The Newsroom’s second season, Marc Tracy concludes that creator Aaron Sorkin has become more self-aware:
[T]he most important change Sorkin has made is to the show’s structure, using its episodes to tell one ongoing story. And so the story—and the season—is told in flashback, as network lawyers interview various staffers at a gigantic conference-room table in preparation for a wrongful termination lawsuit surrounding a blockbuster story that the show-within-the-show, “News Night,” has had to retract. (The device would remind you of The Social Network even if you didn’t know Sorkin had written it.) The result is a cross between one of those six-hour BBC series—an association further suggested by the new, slicker opening credits—and a sitcom. The overarching storyline gradually unfolds, while the episode-specific subplots come fast and furious, and with a discipline that didn’t exist on the one actual sitcom Sorkin did, ABC’s “Sports Night.”
Making the season-long arc about a faked news story solves another of the haters’ complaints. It no longer seems so absurd to watch a show intimately tied to two-year-old current events when the dramatic weight is placed overwhelmingly on a fabrication and the actual news pegs are relegated to comedy or, at least, decidedly minor drama.
Nevertheless, Alyssa thinks the show remains flawed:
The problem with The Newsroom, I think, is that no one comes across as particularly competent, both by design and by accident. Women on the show tend to be dippy, impulsive, prone to attacks on their technology, rants on the street, or attacks of principle that are bad for ratings. But men can be high-handed, obsessive about conspiracy theories, stories without ratings draws, or their ex-girlfirends, or oddly naive, as is the case with Jim’s (or the show’s) lack of awareness that since outlets pay for seats on campaign buses, the Romney staff can’t actually kick him off. What the show identifies as moments of journalistic bravery are significantly driven by the fact that Will McAvoy is based on Keith Olbermann, and so a ranting answer to a question, or a special comment during a broadcast get more points than actual reporting, or driving new subjects into the news stream the way Rachel Maddow did with national security.
Alison Agosti hated the first season but feels compelled to see the show through:
In general, if a show starts to drag or if a character gets amnesia or something, I’m out. Yet Sorkin has created something perfectly infuriating, where I’m not sure that I’m enjoying it, but I am completely engrossed. I want to see what he going to do next, what new inanimate objects Maggie will trip over. Quite frankly, I’m really looking forward to rolling my eyes so hard I’m worried they’ll fall out of my head when Will and Mackenzie inevitably get back together.
Previous Dish coverage of The Newsroomhere, here, here and here.
David Pozen imagines what it would be like if the NSA leaker were brought to trial in the US:
Snowden would no doubt obtain high-powered lawyers. Protesters would ring the courthouse. Journalists would camp out inside. As proceedings dragged on for months, the spotlight would remain on the N.S.A.’s spying and the administration’s pursuit of leakers. Instead of fading into obscurity, the Snowden affair would continue to grab headlines, and thus to undermine the White House’s ability to shape political discourse.
A trial could turn out to be much more than a distraction: It could be a focal point for domestic and international outrage. From the executive branch’s institutional perspective, the greatest danger posed by the Snowden case is not to any particular program. It is to the credibility of the secrecy system, and at one remove the ideal of our government as a force for good.
Though catching Snowden would likely help the White House’s effort to discourage future leakers, it’s not at all clear that prosecuting him wouldn’t shine light on the environment in which the incident occurred, more than on the incident itself. According to this useful report from NPR, the Zimmerman case could result in a Constitutional challenge to Florida’s so-called “stand your ground” law, despite a jury’s belief that George Zimmerman didn’t murder Trayvon Martin. Similarly, Snowden could be found guilty of leaking classified information—which he’s already admitted publicly that he did. Letting him explain his reasons for doing so from a witness stand, however, might be worse for the NSA than the leaks themselves have been, Pozen suggests.
Scott Beggs is super-psyched about the upcoming documentary on the creator of Calvin and Hobbes:
To get an idea of how long Dear Mr. Watterson has been in the works, consider that its creator Joel Schroeder posted a teaser trailer for it three years ago. And that was years after he’d started working on it. Fortunately, it was the exact kind of thing that Kickstarter was built for, and after 2,083 backers representing over $120,000 chipped in, the film is finished. Now, according to Variety, the “Calvin & Hobbes” documentary will see theaters and VOD on November 15th.
As you can imagine, it chronicles Bill Watterson’s monumental creation and its influence — specifically by featuring conversations with the likes of Berkeley Breathed (“Bloom County”), Bill Amend (“Foxtrot”), Seth Green and more. … Awesome, awesome, awesome news. Times a million. I don’t even know what else to say.
A reader does:
Calvin & Hobbes is the best comic ever. There is such joy and adventure and heart and just enough mischief.
Bill Watterson’s complaints when he retired were that the newspapers wanted the comic in a set form and he hated when they shrunk the strip down too much. A website where he had complete creative control over how the subscribers saw his work would eliminate all of that. If Watterson ever wanted to create a site where one paid him directly for a weekly or even monthly strip, I’d sign up in an instant.
Your comments struck a chord with me, because it really does seem that a lot of older white folks are stuck in the ’80s. I’m a young white guy living in DC, and every time I go home for the holidays or a party with extended family, after the usual small talk it always comes up: “How do you deal with the crime?” It’s honestly a question that drives me crazy. I’ve lived here five years and all I’ve ever witnessed is someone stealing something from CVS. I do know of friends of friends who have been mugged and such, but still … it’s far from a war zone. When I commented that I had recently moved to nearby Arlington, they said, “Well, of course – I mean, you can’t live in DC, really.” It’s apparent to me that despite my denials, my aunts and uncles are convinced that DC and other urban areas of the US are something akin to Baghdad. They just don’t seem to believe me when I tell them that, yes, there are a lot of black men around (“sketchy people”, in their words), and, no, they do not bother me. They are convinced there is mortal danger around every corner, just like Richard Cohen is.
Another DC resident:
Just this morning I reflected on the Metro that I hardly notice race anymore. I am trying not to sound like Stephen Colbert as I type that, but what I mean is that I am far less race-conscious than I used to be.
I am white, and I moved to DC several years ago, after living in smaller cities. It isn’t like I never interacted with minorities in other cities, but in a big city like DC it is harder to segregate oneself. In other cities, I lived in mostly white neighborhoods and so I mostly interacted with other white people when not at work. The people of color I worked with were well-educated professionals. I rarely ran into young black men in hoodies, but in DC, I see all kinds of people just on my commute before I even get to work or to lunch or whatever.
I promise I wasn’t an overt racist before moving to DC, but I would be lying if I said I didn’t have some unconscious prejudice before (and still now, of course). If I had been alone on the street with a young black man in a hoodie, I might have been suspicious for no good reason other than I didn’t recognize the guy. I am not proud of that, but it’s true.
It is different now. The increased interaction with all kinds of different people here in DC makes me able to recognize when to steer clear of a person or group, and race is really not a factor. A black guy in a hoodie isn’t notable. A guy eyeing my phone? Maybe. A guy walking back from 7/11 talking on his phone? Probably not a problem. Very few people commit robberies while on the phone.
I point this out only because for people like George Zimmerman who lived in a gated suburban community (and possibly Richard Cohen – not sure we’re he lives), the lack of exposure to black men in hoodies is what leads to the fear of a black man in a hoodie. I know this because I used to be much closer to their thinking than I am now, and I get where they’re coming from, to a degree. But what it reveals is not some “reality” of an intelligently honed fear of young black men as Cohen suggests. It reveals that we are still a segregated country in many ways and that Cohen doesn’t often interact with young black men.
Aaron Carroll analyzed hospital records for 23,000 babies diagnosed with “failure to thrive” and found that those admitted on weekends stayed longer and at greater expense. Drum summarizes:
If your baby is admitted on a weekday, the average length of stay is five days and the average cost is about $9,000. But if your baby is admitted on a weekend, the average length of stay is seven days and the average cost is about $13,000. For all practical purposes, it looks like the babies just sit around over the weekend and then start getting treated on Monday.
Carroll saw it coming:
What irked me [as a pediatrician] was that so many [babies] seemed to be admitted over the weekend. Almost all of the tests, and all of the consults, that we’d order would be unavailable then. So it seemed like these babies would just sit. They’d have longer admissions, and they’d cause me a lot of effort and paperwork. At least, this was my theory. … I’ve often kidded on the square that most of my research is spite based. In other words, something pisses me off, and I go on a mission to prove it’s wrong.
Garance previews the upcoming Wikileaks movie, The Fifth Estate:
Based on Daniel Domscheit-Berg’s book Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website and David Leigh and Luke Harding’s WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy, the film covers the heady early days of the site and appears from the trailer, which was just released, to cast Assange as a heroic visionary who takes things too far. “You can’t change change the world without crashing the system,” the movie trailer says. It would seem an apt tagline for Snowden’s activities, too — and a reminder that it’s only a matter of time before he also becomes the ripped from the headlines personality at the center of a major film.
David Haglund considers Julian Assange’s own response to the film’s script:
Julian Assange has called The Fifth Estate, the upcoming movie in which he is played by Benedict Cumberbatch, “a serious propaganda attack on WikiLeaks.” (This was after reading an early version of the script.)
You certainly don’t get that impression from the first trailer, which—though it notes that some people deem Assange a “traitor”—has a decidedly pro-WikiLeaks vibe, presenting its story as one of the people against the powerful. (The title references citizen journalism, the “fourth estate” being a nickname for the professional press.) Then again, Assange is a guy who decided his own (ghostwritten) autobiography was not flattering enough, so perhaps no film would have been hagiographic enough for his taste.
Alex MacGillis partially blames Trayvon Martin’s death on Florida’s lax gun laws:
There is a reason why there are so many concealed-carry permits in Florida—the state makes it awfully easy to get one. Florida is a “shall-issue” state, meaning that there is little if no discretion left up to the authorities to withhold a permit if the applicant meets the minimum requirements. That the state leaves the awarding of permits up to its Department of Agriculture, and not to law enforcement, speaks volumes. There are some limits on the permits—you can’t be a fugitive from justice!—but nothing that kept George Zimmerman, who was arrested in 2005 for “resisting an officer with violence” and that same year had a restraining order taken out against him by his ex-fiance—from having the right to carry that night in 2012.
Wesley Morris was impressed by Pacific Rim‘s scale:
Del Toro is a dreamer. He’s a visionary. If you give him a pile of money to make enormous robots fight enormous monsters at the end of civilization, he will work to make Pacific Rim a movie that makes you feel all the enormousness. He will put you at the feet of the monsters and inside the bellies of the beasts. He will do what a movie about big reptiles and big machines is supposed to do: make you look up, make you feel as if the screen is grossly inadequate to contain what’s on it, even though, if you’re charmed — or strategic — you’re already watching the movie on the biggest screen you possibly can.
Tasha Robinson ponders the meaning of the massive monsters in the movie:
[Del Toro’s] discussions of the film suggest its overriding message is “Japanese monster movies were totally badass.” He seems more interested in enthusiastically paying homage to entertainment he loves—rubber-suit monsters and anime from Voltron to Neon Genesis Evangelion—than in tapping into current cultural or societal anxieties. Certainly returning to the nuclear panic of the 1960s, the heart of the kaiju boom, would feel dated at this point.
If you need a metaphor, though, I think you can dig one up: Pacific Rim’s kaiju are a devastating worldwide threat that can hit anywhere at any time, and dealing with them is expressly beyond the resources of any one country.
As del Toro said in his interview with Slashfilm, he wanted them to feel like “a charging force of nature.” So if there’s a metaphor at work, I’d say it’s global climate change, and the fear that it’s producing increasingly deadly events like the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the 2011 Japanese Pacific-coast tsunami, and the 2010 Haiti earthquake, not to mention disasters like Hurricane Katrina. The kaiju could well be symbols of these huge, unpredictable events, and the need for a unified global response.
Jeff Yang relates the monsters to Japanese culture:
In Shinto belief, all objects have spirits, and all spirits have the ability to become gods — or demons. “Japanese monsters, or yokai, were originally called ‘bakemono’ — literally, ‘transformed thing,’” says [Matt Alt]. In Japan, “robots are an anthropomophization of the power of technology, [and] the organic kaiju are an anthropomorphization of the power of nature, or of the effects of human technology on it.”
As a result, the titanic clashes of the kaiju and mecha genres aren’t just sequences of gleeful destruction for destruction’s sake — they’re metaphysical conflicts; wars of ideas as much as anything else.
Matt Singer focuses on another aspect of the film. He couldn’t stop wincing while listening to Pacific Rim star Charlie Hunnam, who is British, try to pull off an American accent:
[W]e keep getting these uncomfortable performances from hunky international heroes like Hunnam, Worthington, and Butler, who look great but sound terrible. Maybe that’s another manifestation of the rise of international box office as a driving force in Hollywood. Massive special effects travel; regional cultural nuances do not. Movies made for a global audience put spectacle at a premium over everything else. In most foreign markets, the dialogue is going to be subtitled or dubbed anyway, so the spoken word moves even lower on the film’s list of priorities. People come to see Charlie Hunnam fight the monsters, not talk them to death.
Forrest Wickman, on the other hand, thinks the increasing importance of foreign markets isn’t all bad. He notes that they “offer the incentive to make use of more diverse casts, and to tell more stories whose heroes aren’t exclusively American.”
