"Hillary and I -- we’ve spent the last three and a half years cleaning up after other folks’ messes. (Applause.) And by the way, we’ve got them -- we’re starting to get them pretty cleaned up. (Applause.) The war in Iraq is over. (Applause.) We’re transitioning in Afghanistan. We’ve got the strongest allies we’ve ever seen. And al Qaeda is on the ropes. (Applause.) So we’ve done what we said we’d do."
Mr. Harvey Weinstein The Weinstein Company 345 Hudson Street New York, NY 10014
Dear Mr. Weinstein,
Congratulations on your recent Best Picture Oscar for The Artist. This makes the second year in a row that The Weinstein Company has won Best Picture! Not to mention sweeping the Best Actor and Actress awards as well. Along with Oscar nominations for Michelle Williams and Kenneth Branagh, this has been a banner year for The Weinstein Company. Why waste time making sequels to Shakespeare in Love, and Bridget Jones’ Diary not to mention Scream 5? It’s time The Weinstein Company add another classy production to hopefully add more Oscar Gold. I’m talking about making a biopic about Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning.
The 19th Century is totally hot right now, not to mention poets. John Cusack’s starring as Edgar Allen Poe in The Raven soon and did you see Bright Star? I’m telling you that The Barretts ofWimpole Street is even better than Bright Star because nobody dies! The love story of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning has all the hallmarks of a Weinstein production, British accents, gorgeous costumes, a tyrannical father, handsome young leading man, an invalid heroine, a secondary love story between Elizabeth’s sister Henrietta and her suitor, a dramatic elopement, and finally a happily ever after ending in Italy. There’s even an adorable cocker spaniel. But most important is the poetry. Robert fell in love with Elizabeth before he even met her because of her poetry.
The story has been filmed twice before, once in 1934 with Norma Shearer as Elizabeth and Frederic March as Robert (the film was nominated for Best Picture), and then in 1957 by the same director with Jennifer Jones, Bill Travers and Sir Ralph Richardson as Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett, Elizabeth’s father (there was also a TV version made in Britain in the 1970's) but don‘t let that deter you! I’m sure that in the hands of a strong director and writer, this story can inspire modern audiences as well.
Screenplay: A great film needs a great script. I suggest that you get Emma Thompson to write the screenplay. Remember she won an Academy Award for another 19th century adaptation, Sense and Sensibility. If she’s not available, then let Julian Fellowes have a shot at it but he‘s kind of hit and miss. I love Downton Abbey, Gosford Park and Vanity Fairbut his 4 hour production of The Titanic made me long for James Cameron’s version and I hated that movie.
Director: It would be awesome if Ang Lee could direct the film. He did such a great job with Sense and Sensibility. Sam Mendes would also be a good choice, it’s time he tried the 19th century on for size. Or how about Mira Nair? I really liked her direction of Vanity Fair. Another good choice would be Tom Hooper, Roger Michell (who directed Persuasion), or Stephen Daldry. Under no circumstances hire Joe Wright because he’ll completely cock-it-up, I can just see a donkey or a raccoon running through the parlor in the Barretts home or Robert showing up at all hours of the day and night.
Now here comes the important bit, casting the leads. Who plays Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning can make or break your film. I’ve given this a lot of thought.
Our Heroine: Elizabeth Barrett was 39 at the time she met Robert Browning in 1845. She’d been an invalid for at least 15 years, suffering from a variety of ailments for which she’d been taking laudanum and later morphine. According to Wikipedia, At about age 15 Barrett Browning began to battle with a lifelong illness, which the medical science of the time was unable to diagnose. All three sisters came down with the syndrome although it lasted only with Elizabeth. She had intense head and spinal pain with loss of mobility. She is described as having "a slight, delicate figure, with a shower of dark curls falling on each side of a most expressive face; large, tender eyes, richly fringed by dark eyelashes, and a smile like a sunbeam".
The role requires an actress who blossoms once she meets Robert, defying her father in order to marry the man she loves, even though she knows that not only will she be disinherited, but that she may never see her father again. My top choice for the role would be Sally Hawkins who was so fabulous in Mike Leigh’s Made in Dagenham, as well as Jane Austen’s Persuasion. Other good choices would be Emily Watson, Ann-Marie Duff (who has played both John Lennon’s mother, Margot Fonteyn and Elizabeth I), Helena Bonham Carter, Samantha Morton, Jennifer Ehle, or Kate Beckinsale (when was the last time she had a really great role and I‘m not talking Underworld or Underworld 3).
Emily Watson
Sally Hawkins
Ann-Marie Duff
Please don’t, whatever you do, cast Keira Knightly. I know she’s become the automatic go-to-girl for period films, whether she’s right for the role or not, but just say no! Other actresses to avoid Gwyneth Paltrow, Anne Hathaway, Julia Roberts, Hilary Swank, or Charlize Theron.
Robert Browning in his later years
Our Hero: Robert Browning, 33, was the son of a well-paid clerk for the Bank of England making £150 pounds a year. He was mainly educated at home, and left University after one year. He refused a formal career and ignored his parents' remonstrations, dedicating himself to poetry. He stayed at home until the age of 34, financially dependent on his family until his marriage. His father sponsored the publication of his son's poems. Browning traveled widely, joining a British diplomatic mission to Russia in 1834, later journeying to Italy 1838 and 1844. By the time Robert meets Elizabeth, he’s not only a published poet but also a man of theatre, having had several plays produced on the English stage.
I see Tom Hiddleston in the role of Robert Browning. He’s proved with his work in War Horse and The Deep Blue Sea, that he can handle both period pieces as well as serious dramatic roles. He also went to Eton has a double-first from Cambridge, so he definitely can handle the poetry. If Hiddleston is not available or interested, than another good choice might be James McAvoy (McAvoy is married to Ann-Marie Duff so if you cast them, you have the added publicity bonus of them playing two of the greatest poets of the 19th century who are also married).
The villain: Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett, 50’s. Every story, particularly has to have a villain (think of Billy Zane in Titanic) or a third person in the love triangle. In this film, it is Elizabeth’s father who vowed to disinherit his children if they married. I leave it up to the screenwriter to fill-in the psychological reasons for wanting to keep his children single forever. The original film suggested that Barrett liked Elizabeth a little too much. I don’t know about that but the Victorians were a strange bunch. My top choices for this role would be Alan Rickman or Jeremy Irons.
Jeremy Irons
Alan Rickman
Of course, I'm only a non-fiction author, what do I know about film? I do know what I like, and I think that if the Weinstein Company produces a film about Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, they will have a surefire Oscar contender!
Who do you think would be good casting for The Barretts of Wimpole Street?
The caption says: "The Fantasy Life of Working Women | Why Surrender is a Feminist Dream." . . . It's hard to tell what's more offensive. The haute couture style of the cover photo, which presents the blindfolding of a woman as elegant and refined. Or the accompanying article, which uses the popularity of the book "Fifty Shades of Gray" -- which Katie Roiphe describes as the "skinny-vanilla-latte version of sadomasochism" -- to speculate that women are not comfortable with power and might even find it boring.
Gov. Phil Bryant is proud of making major strides toward the goal of totally eradicating abortion rights in the good old boy state of Mississippi:
Days after he signed a law that would effectively shut down his state’s only remaining abortion-performing clinic, Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant accused Democrats of having one mission in life: “to abort children.” “The hypocrisy of the left that now tried to kill this bill, that says that I should have never signed it, the true hypocrisy is that their one mission in life is to abort children, is to kill children in the womb,” Bryant told conservative radio host Tony Perk ins on Tuesday...
The recently-signed bill to crack down on Mississippi abortion providers is one of the most stringent to be passed by a state. It requires all doctors who perform abortions to be certified in obstetrics and gynecology and have admitting privileges at a local hospital.
The Coercive and Web Cam Abortion Prevention Act, which was signed by Republican Governor Scott Walker earlier this month, imposes criminal penalties, including a possible prison sentence, for physicians who violate the law. . . "The added risks of felony penalties for physicians who provide medication abortion are unnecessary and intended to threaten a physician's ability to provide women with medication abortion," Huyck said in a statement from the family planning and reproductive health organization on Friday.LiberalPoliticsFeministNewsGender
Fired for his role in the prostitution scandal in Colombia, Secret Service Creep David Chaney guarded Sarah Palin back in 2008. On his Facebook page, the Creep bragged about leering at her:
In a photo posted on his public Facebook page in January 2009, Chaney is seen standing behind Palin, wearing dark glasses and what appears be a wedding ring. Under the photo, Chaney posted a comment that said, "I was really checking her out, if you know what I mean?"
That drew a strong response from Palin on Thursday night. "This agent who was kind of ridiculous there in posting pictures and comments about checking someone out," Palin said on Fox News. "Check this out, bodyguard. You're fired! And I hope his wife sends him to the doghouse."
Love makes strange bedfellows doesn’t it? How else to explain the relationship between a short, middle-aged mobster and the lead singer of a wholesome singing group singing songs in perfect harmony? Was it there shared Midwestern backgrounds (he was from Chicago, she was Middletown, OH)? Retired FBI agent William Roemer, who tracked Giancana for years could never figure out what the attraction was between the two. "It's amazing that it ever took place," says Roemer, in an interview with The Los Angeles Times in 1995 to promote the HBO film about the unlikely romance. "He was just as ugly as he can be and he wasn't a cultured, refined man. I saw no redeeming human qualities about the guy. We put microphones in his headquarters and listened to him talk all the time. She had everything. She had beauty. She had money. Yet, she fell in love with this gangster. I could never figure it out. I have talked to her several times and she's a lady. She's refined and cultured. She's intelligent and articulate. He was just the opposite." Whatever it was, it kept gossip columnists in a tizzy in the 1960’s as the lovebirds criss-crossed the country from Palm Springs to Atlantic City, and the capitols of Europe.
So how did these two crazy kids meet? Why in Sin City of course, Las Vegas, Nevada to be exact. Word is that Giancana first caught sight of McGuire during her engagement with her sisters at the Desert Inn. Giancana was 52 and a widower, Phyllis was not quite thirty. Like a many, Phyllis had succumbed to the lure of the tables, racking up a hefty marker. Giancana went to Moe Dalitz, who ran the Desert Inn and asked how much she owed. Moe supposedly told her that Phyllis owed $100,000 (Sam's daughter Antoinette Giancana in her autobiography MAFIA PRINCESS claims that it was more like $16,000, still a hefty debt). Giancana is said to told Moe to “eat it,” meaning to forgive the debt. The gesture, along with a hefty dose of expensive flowers, seems to have done the trick. Sam and Phyllis soon fell in love. Years after Sam’s death, Phyllis admitted to writer Dominick Dunne that the two greatest losses in her life were her father and Sam.
Sam Giancana (1908 - 1975) was one of the Mafia’s most notorious and high profile figures in the 1950‘s and 60‘s. Born in Chicago to Sicilian immigrants, he’d clawed his way from a juvenile street crew up to the top of the Mafia food chain. In the film and book The Godfather, Johnny Fontane asks Vito Corleone to get him out of his studio contract. That scene was supposedly based on Giancana who allegedly forced band leader TommyDorsey into letting Frank Sinatra out of his contract early, so that he could expand his career. By the 1960’s he’d already been involved with Judith Campbell Exner,using her as a go-between himself and JFK, and recruited by the CIA along with other mobsters to assassinate Cuban president Fidel Castro. Along the way, Giancana married and fathered three daughters.
While Giancana was going to the school of hard knocks and learning how to make license plates during a stint in prison, Phyllis McGuire (1931-) was growing up in Ohio along with her two older sisters, Christine and Dorothy. Their mother Lillian, a minister at the Miamisburg First Church of God, let them sing in church as kids. When Phyllis was 12, they signed a contract with Coral Records. That same year, they appeared on Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, where they performed for seven years. They made numerous TV appearances on all the popular variety shows of the period. Their recordings of "Sincerely," "Picnic," and “Sugartime" all sold more than one million copies.
At first Sam and Phyllis were able to keep their romance a secret, despite Giancana popping up wherever the sisters performed. The FBI knew about the affair but chose not to expose the relationship because they knew the publicity would be detrimental to Phyllis’s career. When Sam and Phyllis were photographed together at a nightclub in London in 1962, the picture was flashed around the world. The press, not to mention the public, were outraged that Phyllis could associate with a known mobster. Trying to do damage control, Phyllis gave a tearful interview to the powerful gossip columnist Dorothy Kilgallen swearing that she would never see Sam again which was a total lie. The publicity put a damper on her career for a time but there were other problems besides public opinion. While Giancana wasn’t faithful, he expected Phyllis to be. He suspected her of cheating on him with comedian Dan Rowan of TV’s Laugh-In. He even went so far as to try and get his CIA contact Robert Maheu to bug her hotel room to get proof.
There was also the Fed’s who’d been after Giancana for awhile. And now Bobby Kennedy was Attorney General of the United States, making it his mission to go after the mob, which was ironic since Giancana allegedly helped JFK get elected. The FBI trailed the couple were ever they went. ‘We lock-stepped him," Roemer recalls. "He was the only guy in the history of the FBI who we lock-stepped. I would stay half a step behind him and half a step to his left. No matter where he went, I would stay that distance from him. If he went to dinner I would go with him. If he went to the restroom, I would go right up to the next urinal. We got into some situations.” They bugged Giancana’s homes, listening in on the couple’s most intimate moments. In 1961, the FBI bugged their hotel room and knew that they would be stopping over in Chicago on their way to New York. At O'Hare airport, Giancana was kept at bay while the FBI talked to McGuire to see if she would cooperate with them instead of being subpoenaed to appear in front of a federal grand jury. Phyllis agreed to do what they asked, and they took the subpoena back, but she never kept her end of the bargain.
The mob wasn’t too happy about Sam’s relationship with Phyllis. Not only because they thought he wasn’t minding the store, but because it drew too much attention. In the end the relationship couldn’t last. Giancana was sentenced to jail for refusing to testify in front of a grand jury. As a result, Giancana was deposed as boss of the Chicago outfit. After his release, he fled to Mexico. After about seven years of exile, Giancana was arrested by Mexican authorities in 1974 and deported to the United States. After agreeing to be a witness in the prosecution of organized crime in Chicago, Giancana was murdered by an unknown assailant in his Chicago home while he was cooking dinner in 1975.
Phyllis McGuire, now in her eighties, lives in Las Vegas where she is said to be working on her memoirs. She and her sisters retired in 1968 but have done occasional public appearances since reuniting on stage 1986.
If passed, this bill would serve as a paid maternity leave act and go a long way toward raising this country's abysmal infant mortality rate. The USA is one of only 4 nations in the world too poor or too miserly to mandate paid maternity leave. Our unpaid Family Leave Act is simply a bad joke. For those who live paycheck to paycheck, TANF is and has always been the only Family Leave Act in town.
If raising children is ever to be regarded as critically important work in this family-unfriendly nation, the work must be compensated and that would certainly include social security credits for the women (and some men) willing to perform the vitally essential work:
WASHINGTON -- Today, Rep. Pete Stark (D-CA) introduced the Women's Option to Raise Kids Act (WORK Act), H.R. 4379, which would recognize that all parents who stay home to raise young children are, in fact, doing important and legitimate work. Original cosponsors of the WORK Act include Reps. John Lewis (D-GA), Gwen Moore (D-WI), Barbara Lee (D-CA), Jim McDermott (D-WA), Lynn Woolsey (D-CA), Janice Schakowsky (D-IL), Rosa DeLauro (D-CA), Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D-IL), Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC), and Laura Richardson (D-CA).
Rep. Stark: "Mitt Romney was for ObamaCare before he was against it. Then, he was for forcing low-income mothers into the workforce before he decided 'all moms are working moms'." "I think we should take Mr. Romney at his most recent word and change our federal laws to recognize the importance and legitimacy of raising young children. That's why I've introduced the WORK Act to provide low-income parents the option of staying home to raise young children without being pushed into poverty."
Why we need the WORK Act: Current law does not count low-income stay-at-home parents who are raising young children as meeting the necessary Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) work requirement. Current law also bans states from counting these individuals toward that state's work participation rate, which can result in financial penalties if not met. This effectively bars low-income parents who choose to stay home to raise their young children from access to the financial support of TANF.
As reported by the New York Times and others, the TANF program has been particularly unresponsive during the economic downturn (see this chart from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities). Today, TANF is only serving 27% of families living in poverty, compared to 68% when the program was enacted to great acclaim in 1996. The result is that more children are being pushed deeper into poverty and destitution. Congress needs to start fixing this problem to ensure that low-income families have access to needed assistance. The WORK Act is an important step in that direction.
What the WORK Act does: The WORK Act would amend TANF law to recognize the critical job of raising children age three or younger as work. Under the legislation, low-income parents could work, receive job training, search for work, or raise their children until they are school-aged without fear of losing TANF support and being pushed deeper into poverty. This is the same option that wealthy families, such as the Romneys, enjoy.
Phyllis Schlafly is as nutty as ever. Here she advises a captive audience of cadets not to date feminists because we are 'bad' and we want to abolish wifedom as we know it. (via Crooks and Liars)
Turns out Mitt Romney's definition of "work" varies according to the class status of a mom and the children she cares for. When Mitt Romney's wife stays home with the kids, she deserves praise for doing the hardest work in the world. When ordinary moms (who have no hope of snaring a multimillionaire husband) stay home with the kids, they are lazy slackards who need to get jobs so they can have a little "dignity of work". What a self-absorbed hypocrite:
While I was governor, 85% of the people on a form of welfare assistance in my state, had no work requirement. And I wanted to increase the work requirement. I said, for instance, that even if you have a child two years of age, you need to go to work. And people said, well that’s heartless. And I said no, no, I’m willing to spend more giving day care to allow those parents to go back to work. It will cost the state more, providing that day care. But I want the individuals to have the dignity of work.
Banning Valentine's Day is surely on the wannabe-tyrants' agenda. Leave it to these mostly old white male lawmakers to make the expression of sweet affection into something similar to illegal drugs.
Teachers caught holding hands can be sued. I know some freaking lawmakers who need to be sued for pushing their extreme negative right-wing worldview on a whole lot of people who are just trying to have a nice life. Good luck with that in a GOP wannabe-tyrant controlled state.
Just how many freaking stupid laws do we really need anyway? In the so-called land of the free?
Tennessee senators approved an update to the state's abstinence-based sex education law that includes warnings against "gateway sexual activity." In a new family life instructions bill, holding hands and kissing could be considered gateways to sex. . . The bill prohibits teachers from demonstrating gateway sexual activity. . If an instructor goes beyond the curriculum, the bill gives parents more legal rights, stating, "The parent or legal guardian shall have a cause of action against the instructor or organization for actual damages."
Truth Wins Out: Holding Hands Is Gateway Drug To Nookie, Tennessee Senate Warns-Just when you thought Tennessee lawmakers were taking a few weeks off from being the strangest, most sexually hung-up lawmakers in the land, they decided to come back with a vengeance..
We are a global network of culture jammers and creatives working to change the way information flows, the way corporations wield power, and the way meaning is produced in our society.
Commonly referred to as the “fetal pain bill” by Georgian Republicans and as the “women as livestock bill” by everyone else, HB 954 garnered national attention this month when state Rep. Terry England (R-Auburn) compared pregnant women carrying stillborn fetuses to the cows and pigs on his farm. According to Rep. England and his warped thought process, if farmers have to “deliver calves, dead or alive,” then a woman carrying a dead fetus, or one not expected to survive, should have to carry it to term.
The bill as first proposed outlawed all abortions after 20 weeks under all circumstances. After negotiations with the Senate, the House passed a revised HB 954 that makes an exemption for “medically futile” pregnancies or those in which the woman’s life or health is threatened.
The special prosecutor in the Trayvon Martin case will announce criminal charges against George Zimmerman about 6 p.m. ET Wednesday, a law enforcement official told NBC News.
That women are joining in the ongoing disassembling of my appearance is salient. Patriarchy is not men. Patriarchy is a system in which both women and men participate. It privileges, inter alia, the interests of boys and men over the bodily integrity, autonomy, and dignity of girls and women. It is subtle, insidious, and never more dangerous than when women passionately deny that they themselves are engaging in it. This abnormal obsession with women’s faces and bodies has become so normal that we (I include myself at times—I absolutely fall for it still) have internalized patriarchy almost seamlessly. We are unable at times to identify ourselves as our own denigrating abusers, or as abusing other girls and women.
Since today is Easter, there will be no broadcast of Scandalous Women radion next Sunday. The show will return next week at the usual time of 4:30 p.m.
Next Sunday marks the 100th anniverary of the sinking of RMS Titanic after colliding with an iceberg during her maiden voyage from Southampton, England to New York City. The disaster caused the deaths of 1,514 people in one of the deadliest peacetime maritime disasters in history. At the time of her maiden voyage, she was the largest ship afloat. To mark the occasion, Scandalous Women welcomes special guest Evangeline Holland of Edwardian Promenade to discuss one of the surviors of the Titanic, the fashion designer Lucile aka as Lucy, Lady Duff Gordon.
While poorer nations have welfare programs that actually lift families out of poverty, the U.S. can't or won't.
As the text of the nation's cavemanesque welfare laws attests, this cowboy nation excels at punishing women who bear or raise children without a man:
The poor people who were dropped from cash assistance here, mostly single mothers, talk with surprising openness about the desperate, and sometimes illegal, ways they make ends meet. They have sold food stamps, sold blood, skipped meals, shoplifted, doubled up with friends, scavenged trash bins for bottles and cans and returned to relationships with violent partners — all with children in tow...
“My take on it was the states would push people off and not let them back on, and that’s just what they did,” said Peter B. Edelman, a law professor at Georgetown University who resigned from the Clinton administration to protest the law. “It’s been even worse than I thought it would be.”
[T]he number of very poor families appears to be growing. Pamela Loprest and Austin Nichols, researchers at the Urban Institute, found that one in four low-income single mothers nationwide — about 1.5 million — are jobless and without cash aid. That is twice the rate the researchers found under the old welfare law. More than 40 percent remain that way for more than a year, and many have mental or physical disabilities, sick children or problems with domestic violence.
Secretary of State Clinton has won over her harshest critics and become so popular that some Democrats are envisioning a future in which she replaces Joe Biden as vice president on the 2012 ticket and then—dare they imagine it—takes the top job in 2016.
A Wisconsin law that made it easier for victims of wage discrimination to have their day in court was repealed on Thursday, after Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) quietly signed the bill.
Kristof is not the only one who is betting on the nuns:
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Love makes strange bedfellows doesn’t it? How else to explain the relationship between a short, middle-aged mobster and the lead singer of a wholesome singing group singing songs in perfect harmony? Was it there shared Midwestern backgrounds (he was from Chicago, she was Middletown, OH)? Retired FBI agent William Roemer, who tracked Giancana for years could never figure out what the attraction was between the two. "It's amazing that it ever took place," says Roemer, in an interview with The Los Angeles Times in 1995 to promote the HBO film about the unlikely romance. "He was just as ugly as he can be and he wasn't a cultured, refined man. I saw no redeeming human qualities about the guy. We put microphones in his headquarters and listened to him talk all the time. She had everything. She had beauty. She had money. Yet, she fell in love with this gangster. I could never figure it out. I have talked to her several times and she's a lady. She's refined and cultured. She's intelligent and articulate. He was just the opposite." Whatever it was, it kept gossip columnists in a tizzy in the 1960’s as the lovebirds criss-crossed the country from Palm Springs to Atlantic City, and the capitols of Europe.
Gawd. You read that right. Tennessee's idiot GOP wannabe-tyrant lawmakers are at it again. If lawmakers have their way, the state's children will soon be instructed that holding hands is, ahem, a dreadful "gateway sexual activity."
Margaret Atwood warned us in The Handmaid's Tale: 
Ashley Judd pushes back against the misogynistic assault on her and on all women: 
While poorer nations have welfare programs that actually lift families out of poverty, the U.S. can't or won't. 
People can't stop talking about Hillary 2016: 
