Actors Going on Strike
[caption id="attachment_19707" align="alignright" width="225" caption="Actor and president of the Screen Actors Guild, Alan Rosenberg, poses for a portrait in this March 17, 2003, file photo taken in Los Angeles. The Screen Actors Guild said Saturday Nov. 22, 2008 that contract talks with Hollywood studios has failed despite the help of a federal mediator and it will now ask its members ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on November 22, 2008 07:41
Hollywood Sues Over RealDVD
The entertainment industry has once again gone to court in a futile attempt to prevent consumers from copying software for their own use. Hollywood's six major movie studios on Tuesday sued RealNetworks Inc. to prevent it from distributing DVD copying software that they said would allow consumers to "rent, rip and return" movies or even copy friends' DVD collections outright. The studios ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on October 1, 2008 11:15
Comic Book Foreign Policy (or the Batman Theory of Foreign Policy)
Readers may be familiar with the Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics (short version: the US can do whatever it wants if it just has even willpower). Now, it appears we can add another member of the Justice League to our understanding of foreign policy. On Friday, author Andrew Klavan had a piece in the WSJ comparing Batman ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on July 27, 2008 17:47
Why Rush Limbaugh is So Popular
Ezra Klein believes a recent NYT Magazine profile of Rush Limbaugh is a "puff piece." He lists, for example, Rush's "presidential platform" as published: 1. Open the continental shelf to drilling. Ditto the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. 2. Establish a 17 percent flat tax. 3. Privatize Social Security. 4. Give parents school vouchers to break the monopoly of public education. 5. Revoke Jimmy Carter’s ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on July 8, 2008 09:03
Blog Linking Less Important?
Louis Gray believes the importance of blog linkage is declining, noting that, "I've seen traffic from other blogs to be driving an ever-declining percentage of visits to my site, swamped by social media tools, aggregation sites, and of course, Google search." He offers three likely explanations: 1. People are relying on aggregators to find them new sources of information, including ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on July 8, 2008 08:17
McCain and Obama as Leading Men
As I was sorting through my Sunday Washington Post so that I could throw everything but the Parade and Washington Post Magazine my wife reads into the recycle bin, my attention was grabbed by this photo montage on the front of the Style section: For a second, I thought they had juxtaposed Barack Obama with Malcolm X (the newsprint version is ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on July 6, 2008 08:53
Giving ‘Stimulus Package’ a Whole New Meaning
An industry report claims that a non-trivial amount of the Bush tax relief checks were spent on adult web sites, with many sites reporting a 20-30 percent growth in membership during a normally slow period and claiming that "thirty two percent of respondents referenced the recent stimulus package as part of their decision to either become a new member, or ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on July 3, 2008 18:01
Life on the Internets
David Kurtz' mention that "until Wednesday, I had never met any of our staff in person, including Josh, even though I've worked at TPM in one capacity or another for approaching two years now, the last 10 months as managing editor" perfectly encapsulates, for Andrew Sullivan, the New Media world. Indeed, the same's true for me. I've never ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on June 23, 2008 13:46
Network News Ignoring Iraq, Afghanistan
Reporters covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are having an increasingly difficult time of getting stories onto the network news, Brian Stelter reports for the NYT. According to data compiled by Andrew Tyndall, a television consultant who monitors the three network evening newscasts, coverage of Iraq has been “massively scaled back this year.” Almost halfway into 2008, the three newscasts ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on June 23, 2008 08:06
George Carlin Dies at 71
George Carlin, a comedian known for his combination of raunchy language and intellectual humor, died of heart failure last evening. He was 71. Carlin was an interesting guy, combining brilliant observational humor with political activism. Like too many comics in the HBO era, though, it often seemed that he was vulgar and outrageous simply because he could rather than ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on June 23, 2008 07:16
