interesting things
The “Fifty Shades” erotic trilogy is expected to hit the 20 million-sales mark in the U.S. this week, making it one of the fastest-selling book series in recent memory.
via WSJ.com: Today's Most Popular http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303684004577510902680342704.html?mod=rss_Today’s_Most_Popular
Texas will not expand Medicaid or establish a health insurance exchange, two major tenets of the federal health reform that the U.S. Supreme Court upheld last month, Gov. Rick Perry said in an early morning announcement.
“I stand proudly with the growing chorus of governors who reject the Obamacare power grab,” he said in a statement. “Neither a ‘state’ exchange nor the expansion of Medicaid under this program would result in better ‘patient protection’ or in more ‘affordable care.’ They would only make Texas a mere appendage of the federal government when it comes to health care.”
Perry’s office said he’s sending a letter to U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius this morning asserting his opposition, both to accepting more than a hundred million federal dollars to put more poor Texas adults onto Medicaid, and to creating an Orbitz-style online insurance marketplace for consumers.
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that states — even Texas, which has the country’s highest rate of the uninsured — may not be punished for opting out of the Medicaid. The insurance exchange is not optional; if Texas doesn’t devise its own, the feds will establish a one-size-fits-all program for the state.  Â
“If anyone was in doubt, we in Texas have no intention to implement so-called state exchanges or to expand Medicaid under Obamacare,” Perry said in a statement. “I will not be party to socializing healthcare and bankrupting my state in direct contradiction to our Constitution and our founding principles of limited government.”
The governor will appear on Fox News at 10:30 a.m. to talk more about his decision.Â
via The Texas Tribune: Main Feed http://www.texastribune.org/texas-health-resources/medicaid/perry-tx-wont-implement-key-elements-health-reform/?utm_source=texastribune.org&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=Tribune%20Feed:%20Main%20Feed
Mitt Romney’s campaign announced Monday that in addition to the stunning $106.1 million it raised with the Republican National Committee in June, it has approximately $160 million cash on hand.
About 537,000 donations were less than $250, according to the campaign, for a haul of $22.3 million from small donors.
via Homepage http://www.nationaljournal.com/2012-presidential-campaign/romney-reports-160-million-cash-on-hand-20120709
To hear Pandora founder Tim Westergren tell it, the last fight he had in Washington was for his very survival.
In 2007, the Internet radio company faced new royalty rates that would have amounted to about 70 percent of the company’s revenue, putting the fledgling start up out of business, said Westergren, Pandora’s chief strategy officer.
“It was a disastrous outcome,” he said.
So Pandora reached out to its users – for whom they conveniently have gathered names, zip codes and email addresses – and asked them to push their lawmakers to intervene. And then Pandora hit Washington to lobby. Congress eventually stepped in and passed the Webcaster Settlement Act, which gave Pandora and the recording industry a different royalty framework and time to negotiate a rate that would replace the government-imposed one. Pandora now pays royalties that equal about 50 percent of its revenue.
Since then, the Internet radio company has become ubiquitous. They have 150 million registered users in the U.S., according to company statistics. And, as of March, it was the second-most downloaded free iPhone app, following only Facebook. Eighteen car companies sell vehicles equipped with Pandora.
And they’ve grown up Washington-style, too. Pandora’s royalty rate won’t expire until 2015. But rather than wait around for another rate set under rules Westergren says are unfair, the Internet radio company is ramping-up its lobbying efforts. And it looks like they’re preparing to take the fight to the Hill.
via Homepage http://influencealley.nationaljournal.com/2012/07/pandora-all-grown-up.php
@KathaPollitt: More on the 22-yr-old woman executed for “adultery” by the Taliban http://t.co/QwvGotmI
@stevesilberman: I’m tellin ya, just don’t miss @FranklinFoer’s story of a deadly “social Ponzi scheme” among the DC elite. http://t.co/D7KCDfx3
Mary Norris writes about the gradual inclusion of profanity in The New Yorker in this short piece, exploring questions on how one properly quotes Earl Sweatshirt, and whether or not the term “star fucker†is hyphenated.
via The Rumpus.net http://therumpus.net/2012/07/the-f-word-the-new-yorker/
When Paul Gigot’s editorial page speaks, Republicans move. Today, the Wall Street Journal digs right into the Romney campaign and its refusual to issue unconvincing boilerplate about how the health care mandate penalty will be the biggest tax increase of all time. It’s brutal. Romney is “letting down” conservatives who trusted him to be electable. He’s looking a lot like “President John Kerry.” You read it and wonder why they didn’t just work in a Seamus reference. But this is the short version of the paper’s advice.
Mr. Romney should use the Supreme Court opinion as an opening to say that now that the mandate is defined as a tax for the purposes of the law, he will work to repeal it. This would let Mr. Romney show voters that Mr. Obama’s spending ambitions are so vast that they can’t be financed solely by the wealthy but will inevitably hit the middle class.
Democrats would point to the Massachusetts record, but Mr. Romney could reply that was before the Supreme Court had spoken, that he had promised Bay Staters not to raise taxes, and so now the right policy is to repeal the tax along with the rest of ObamaCare.
Accidentally, perhaps, Gigot et al point out that Romney has to struggle in a way that some modern Republican candidates haven’t. He can’t actually promise the middle class that much in the form of tax cuts.
What do I mean? In 1980, Ronald Reagan could run against Jimmy Carter and promise across-the-board cuts to the sixteen marginal tax rates. A married couple making a joint salary of $35,000, for example, had to pay a 37 percent tax on income. Reagan promised, and delivered, cuts that sent that couple into a lower bracket, paying only 21 percent. In 2000, George W. Bush promised lower marginal rates, and delivered them. Both candidates were able to promise baskets of new tax breaks and refunds, too.
Now, look back at Romney. If you’re a middle-class family, what can he promise you, specifically? Well, he has two plans. The first, explained at MittRomney.com, is a 20 percent across-the-board cut to marginal rates. The second is the Ryan plan, which Romney has endorsed. That would collapse the tax code into two lower rates — 10 and 25 percent — and pay for it by getting rid of some tax benefits. Some of those benefits result in lower middle-class tax bills. So which ones does Romney eliminate? Bob Schieffer tried to find out, three weeks ago.
SCHIEFFER: We– we know, Governor, you’ve told us, you haven’t been bashful about telling us where you want to cut taxes. When are you going to tell us where you’re going to get the revenue? Which of the deductions are you going to be willing to eliminate? Which of the tax credits are you going to– when will you going to be able to tell us that?
ROMNEY: Well, we’ll go through that process with Congress as to which of all the different deductions and exemptions are the ones–
SCHIEFFER (voice overlapping): But do you have any ideas now, like, the home mortgage interest deduction, you know, various ones?
ROMNEY: Well, Simpson-Bowles went through a process of saying how they would be able to reach a– a setting where they had actually, under their proposal even more revenue for the government with lower rates. So mathematically, it’s been proved to be possible.
Not very specific, right? Maybe, when we get to the convention, Romney will lay out how much various people would save from his new, low rates and deductions. When he does so, he’ll have to explain the cuts he makes elsewhere to pay for them. It’s just a much trickier, lower-reward game than the one Reagan and Bush could play. Tax rates are so artificially* low that you can’t run on them and still explain how you’ll pay for the welfare state that people like.
Ideally, if you’re a modern Republican presidential candidate, you get to run against a candidate who raised taxes. You can promise relief from those taxes. That’s why, from a WSJ perspective, Romney so badly needs to frame the Obamacare penalty as a Middle Class Tax Hike. There’s no other massive tax hike to run against!
*Unless we assume the payroll tax holiday will last forever
via Slate Blogs http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2012/07/05/the_wall_street_journal_and_mitt_romney_s_tax_trap.html
An Associated Press report says that a once-invisible offshore company has helped bolster Romney’s wealth even though it did not appear on his state or federal financial reports for 15 years.
President Obama’s reelection campaign seized on the report as raising further questions about their rival’s business background, prompting Romney’s campaign to seek to turn the focus back to Obama’s handling of the economy.
“The mystery surrounding Sankaty reinforces Romney’s history of keeping a tight rein on his public dealings, already documented by his use of private e-mail and computer purges as Massachusetts governor and his refusal to disclose his top fundraisers,†AP wrote. “The Bermuda company had almost no assets, according to Romney’s 2010 tax returns. But such partnership stakes could still provide significant income for years to come, said tax experts, who added that the lack of disclosure makes it impossible to know for certain.â€
Deadline Hollywood’s Nikke Finke reports that HBO has acquired the TV movie rights to Gabriel Sherman‘s upcoming book about Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, and the birth of Fox News Channel. Even crazier: among the producers of the (potential) project are MSNBC hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski.
So, if you are keeping track: HBO–sister network to CNN–has acquired the rights to a movie about Fox News, with two MSNBC hosts producing.
To be clear: Sherman’s book isn’t even finished yet, so this movie might never get made, but HBO does love to pick up book rights. Earlier this year it debuted “Game Change,†based on the book of the same name, and it acquired the rights to Bill Carter‘s The Late Shift back in the early 90′s, changing the TV movie game.
Writes Finke:
continued…
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
via TVNewser http://www.mediabistro.com/tvnewser/deadline-hbo-acquires-rights-to-fox-news-flick_b136285