'Fifty Shades Of Grey' Producers Deny Emma Watson Rumours
Dana Brunetti and Mike De Luca say 'no one has been cast in any role'.
Speculation has been feverish over who will be cast in the movie adaptation of E.L. James' hit 'mummy porn' novel 'Fifty Shades Of Grey', and at last we have some solid news on exactly what's happening.The rumours have most recently centred around the idea that Emma Watson is set to be cast in the role of Anastasia Steele in the film, with the Harry Potter actress reportedly amongst the frontrunners for the role.
Yet the news is that Watson hasn't wrapped up the role yet, as the producers of the movie have however moved to quell the speculation by Tweeting that as yet, no one has been cast. Dana Brunetti tweeted: "All of the rumors on #FiftyShades are just that - rumors. No one has been cast in any role. We have to get a writer and director first."
His fellow producer Mike De Luca confirmed that speculation linking Ms Watson to the role was unfounded, also Tweeting: "no one's been cast or even approached yet, all just rumors."
This means that all the roles are still up for grabs, although no doubt the pair have a few actors and actresses in mind, believed to possibly include Watson, Kristen Stewart and Elizabeth Olsen for the role of Anastasia, and Ryan Gosling and Ian Somerhalder for the part of Christian Grey, a billionare fetish enthusiast who enters a Sado-Masochistic relationship with Anastasia.
However, whoever is chosen as director will no doubt want to have an input into the cast, so once we know who that is, it's likely that those who've worked with him or her before will emerge as strong favourites.
* Honestly people are jumping the gun again. There is no way the producers contacted Emma without drafting a rough outline of the script which to my knowledge is yet to be written at this point. They need to find a screen writer first. No established actress will entertained the idea of accepting a role without perusing the script. In case of Fifty Shades of Grey it will be a long and detailed consideration followed by discussions particularly when it comes to the sex and nudity segments. It will be the usual push-pull as you can see in the articles regarding nudity and how actresses approach the delicate situation. That’s why I believe (and at the same time hoping I’m wrong) the producers will go for a newcomer or approach performers still struggling to escape the B-list arena willing to compromise on the sex/nudity.
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screen-cap of Alicia Witt in Joint Body (2011)
(Don't get your hopes too high, guys. If you can't see the nips............)
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Alexa Vega Bra: Actress Shows Skin For Forthcoming 'Machete Kills'
Alexa Vega has certainly come a long way from "Spy Kids."The 23-year-old stunner -- who recently divorced 36-year-old film producer Sean Covel -- is currently filming the forthcoming action flick "Machete Kills," and from what we can tell, she won't be spending too much time in the wardrobe department.
Vega shared a photo of herself in costume -- which consists of heavy makeup and a bra.
"RR gave the ok for a sneak peek... @machetekills KillJoy," she tweeted.
Vega plays KillJoy in the 2013 film and will take the screen alongside Sofia Vergara, Amber Heard, Michelle Rodriguez and Jessica Alba.
Katrina Bowden......
Real Actresses of Hollywood
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Cynthia Addai-Robinson: Nude in New Zealand
Spartacus: Vengeance is known for its tiny gladiator uniforms as much as its strong characters and amazing battles. As an audience we can’t help but be curious about what it’s like to shoot a love scene or get naked in front of a bunch of strangers (or crew guys). Cynthia gives us a behind the scenes peek into what goes through an actor’s mind before, after and during those well documented Spartacus scenes.
Girl2Watch: Because the show is on STARZ and there’s been so much press about the nudity and the sex scenes were you wary going in?
Cynthia Addai-Robinson: They have to tell you in advance what you’re signing up for, so even from the audition process; they ask if you’re okay with nudity. I hadn’t seen the show, but I was well aware of the content and wasn’t naïve as far as nudity. It’s never something I’ve necessarily had a problem with, I also didn’t anticipate it. It’s one of those things where you don’t actually know how you feel about it until you’re presented with it.G2W: So you’re standing there in the robe…
CA: Yeah and then it’s like do I have a problem with this? Nudity is something I have no problem with but the world has changed and so you realize that if you’re going to be naked on a TV show or in a film, it’s also going to be on the internet for people to do with what they will. Now obviously it’s STARZ and they have a reputation so they’re going to push it a little bit, but for the most part, I can only speak for myself, the scenes that I do are tasteful and make sense for the storyline. I’m actually really proud of those scenes and I also tell people if you’re going to be naked on a TV show like this, this is the one you want to be naked on. It’s beautifully lit, everybody is in shape, so it looks nice.
G2W: What prep goes into doing a nude scene?
CA: It’s weird the conversations you find yourself having because we have to get into the details. Every time you do a scene it’s always thoroughly gone over. You meet with the director, you discuss what’s going to be shown, maybe you even rehearse it, block it, talk about whatever sort of things are going to be on the body or not on the body, and it’s just funny. It gets very technical and sort of separate from what the actual thing is, you know.
G2W: In a way it gives you something else to think about besides what you’re doing.
CA: Yeah, the only part that gets sort of nerve racking for me is the night before, just the anticipation of it, you just want to make sure it all goes smoothly, but like a lot of other things in life, sometimes the anticipation of an event is far worse than the event itself. It’s uncomfortable for everybody. It’s uncomfortable for the crew guys that you’re friends with, so it’s sort of like let’s just do this and get this over with.
G2W: Will you be doing Season 3 of Spartacus?
CA: I’m attached for the next season and we did get an official pickup, so that’s great. It’s a real vote of confidence from STARZ, so we’re officially set to go for season three.
G2W: So, back to New Zealand for you.
CA: Yeah, it’s exciting knowing that I get to go back. I actually met with Steven DeKnight who’s the creator of the show and some of the writers, because the writers are all based here in L.A. so as the actors don’t have much interaction with them. I saw their bat cave and saw the inner workings of what really goes down on an average work day. They were all really great and I’m excited and nervous to see what they have in store for me cause I think they’re going to have some really interesting stuff for next season.
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Awkward.’s Ashley Rickards on Latin Boys, Reverse Method Acting, and Idolizing Chris Colfer MTV’s Awkward. is a darn good coming-of-age comedy in which Ashley Rickards plays Jenna, a high school wallflower who captures the attention of two good-looking nice guys. Lots of teen angst ensues. Rickards, 20, didn’t go to high school for very long (she graduated when she was 15), preferring instead to pursue acting and screenwriting. She talked to Vulture about going to one very weird prom, why she considers herself a reverse Method actress, and where her dark streak comes from — and she means Gaspar Noé dark.
The first thing your publicist told me about you was that you are a card-carrying member of MENSA. What does that buy you?
I get their newsletters and MENSA Weekly Brainwaves, which is so dorky but so fun. I went to a school where you had to take an IQ test to attend. I think the deal with MENSA is you have to be in the top 2 percent, so I got in. Frankly, the reason I joined MENSA is because I was dating a guy at the time who spoke five languages and could solve a Rubik’s Cube literally with his eyes closed because it’s just an algorithm. Being with a person who was very intimidating, it was my way of saying, “You make me feel like an idiot, but maybe this makes me feel like less of one.”
I get their newsletters and MENSA Weekly Brainwaves, which is so dorky but so fun. I went to a school where you had to take an IQ test to attend. I think the deal with MENSA is you have to be in the top 2 percent, so I got in. Frankly, the reason I joined MENSA is because I was dating a guy at the time who spoke five languages and could solve a Rubik’s Cube literally with his eyes closed because it’s just an algorithm. Being with a person who was very intimidating, it was my way of saying, “You make me feel like an idiot, but maybe this makes me feel like less of one.”
Was he happy when you got into MENSA?
No, he didn’t care. But Latin guys are sort of my thing, and he was Latin. I was acting very much like Jenna in season one, honestly. I just think they’re so romantic and amazing. They’re just, I don’t know, chivalrous and very charming.
No, he didn’t care. But Latin guys are sort of my thing, and he was Latin. I was acting very much like Jenna in season one, honestly. I just think they’re so romantic and amazing. They’re just, I don’t know, chivalrous and very charming.
You graduated high school when you were 15 — did you do that so you could act full-time?
Yeah, the labor laws and work permits as a minor are pretty complicated. You can only work a certain number of hours. So I just started going through my curriculum at school and began handing in stuff early. I also always had a problem with the education system, in general, but that’s a whole other pickle.
Yeah, the labor laws and work permits as a minor are pretty complicated. You can only work a certain number of hours. So I just started going through my curriculum at school and began handing in stuff early. I also always had a problem with the education system, in general, but that’s a whole other pickle.
What kind of problem?
So much is standardized and value is put on these tests that don’t allow for each individual to learn as an individual. No two of us are alike in life; to me, it’s a no-brainer that no two people would learn the same way. I’m not saying standardized tests are the worst ever, but there’s an in-between and I don’t think we’re there yet. That’s what I mean when I say I have an issue with it. There’s no way a kid can learn in a class with 40 to 45 people. I had the power to get out of that system and pursue things that I wanted to do and I did that.
So much is standardized and value is put on these tests that don’t allow for each individual to learn as an individual. No two of us are alike in life; to me, it’s a no-brainer that no two people would learn the same way. I’m not saying standardized tests are the worst ever, but there’s an in-between and I don’t think we’re there yet. That’s what I mean when I say I have an issue with it. There’s no way a kid can learn in a class with 40 to 45 people. I had the power to get out of that system and pursue things that I wanted to do and I did that.
You’re on a show about the high school experience. Is there anything you now feel like you missed out on?
I mean, I have no idea what a high school party looks like. I was just with my friend, and we were walking down Venice and there was this gathering of people playing Bongo drums, and so after dinner we sat down with them and played Bongo drums for a while. That’s the closest thing I’ve gotten to a high school experience, meeting strangers and just hanging out with them.
I mean, I have no idea what a high school party looks like. I was just with my friend, and we were walking down Venice and there was this gathering of people playing Bongo drums, and so after dinner we sat down with them and played Bongo drums for a while. That’s the closest thing I’ve gotten to a high school experience, meeting strangers and just hanging out with them.
What about prom?
I did go to proms, just not my own. I went to one with this guy, he was 17, and at his school everyone got a newsletter about the rules of the prom and one of them was “no horizontal dancing.” They had little stick figure diagrams explaining what not to do. One stick figure was laying down on its stomach like a failed worm with a big red X through him. I had to sign it promising I wouldn’t horizontal dance. Strictly vertical.
I did go to proms, just not my own. I went to one with this guy, he was 17, and at his school everyone got a newsletter about the rules of the prom and one of them was “no horizontal dancing.” They had little stick figure diagrams explaining what not to do. One stick figure was laying down on its stomach like a failed worm with a big red X through him. I had to sign it promising I wouldn’t horizontal dance. Strictly vertical.
On Awkward., Jenna’s torn between two great guys. How would you tell her to resolve this non-problem?
Well, I’m 20 and she just turned 16. It took a long time and a lot of hurt to come to the conclusion that you never fall out of love with somebody. You just let go and move on. That first love is so intense, you feel like your feelings are just going to eat you up whole. There’s no perspective when you’re young. That’s the accurate thing about [Awkward. series creator Lauren Iungerich’s] writing. After my first boyfriend, I didn’t date for two years. The only advice I could give Jenna is to move on from Matty, but I mean, I’m only 20. I don’t even know if that’s right.
Well, I’m 20 and she just turned 16. It took a long time and a lot of hurt to come to the conclusion that you never fall out of love with somebody. You just let go and move on. That first love is so intense, you feel like your feelings are just going to eat you up whole. There’s no perspective when you’re young. That’s the accurate thing about [Awkward. series creator Lauren Iungerich’s] writing. After my first boyfriend, I didn’t date for two years. The only advice I could give Jenna is to move on from Matty, but I mean, I’m only 20. I don’t even know if that’s right.
How can Jenna move on when Matty’s been taking his shirt off all season? MTV really advertised the hell out of that.
The thing with him being shirtless, it’s not any formulaic teen thing we’re doing with that. Beau Mirchoff’s acting speaks for itself. It just so happens he is also very good-looking and is in great shape. It lightens the mood in a lot of episodes, actually, his being shirtless. It’s silly. In real life, I would love to have a Beau hologram to distract people while I think of how to get myself out of the awkward situations I put myself in every other day.
The thing with him being shirtless, it’s not any formulaic teen thing we’re doing with that. Beau Mirchoff’s acting speaks for itself. It just so happens he is also very good-looking and is in great shape. It lightens the mood in a lot of episodes, actually, his being shirtless. It’s silly. In real life, I would love to have a Beau hologram to distract people while I think of how to get myself out of the awkward situations I put myself in every other day.
What is your favorite word the show has made up?
I’m sort of a reverse Method actor. In my personal life, I become my characters. After One Tree Hill, I started dressing in Converse and ripped jeans and hoodies. On Awkward., it manifests in how I speak. I’m still getting out of it right now. I’ll say things like, “That computer is ‘jank,’ or the other day when I was giving someone relationship advice, I said, “You guys need to DTR,” which is “define the relationship.” I even use her words in the stage directions of the scripts I’m writing.
I’m sort of a reverse Method actor. In my personal life, I become my characters. After One Tree Hill, I started dressing in Converse and ripped jeans and hoodies. On Awkward., it manifests in how I speak. I’m still getting out of it right now. I’ll say things like, “That computer is ‘jank,’ or the other day when I was giving someone relationship advice, I said, “You guys need to DTR,” which is “define the relationship.” I even use her words in the stage directions of the scripts I’m writing.
What are your screenplays about?
I think I want to talk about them more when they come to fruition, but they’re both dark dramas — independent films, for sure. I’ve also got my poetry book. I hope at some point these things can all be shared or put in stockings. Maybe not for an 8-year-old’s stocking, though.
I think I want to talk about them more when they come to fruition, but they’re both dark dramas — independent films, for sure. I’ve also got my poetry book. I hope at some point these things can all be shared or put in stockings. Maybe not for an 8-year-old’s stocking, though.
Why do you think your work is dark?
Before Awkward., I was known for being a dramatic actress. It’s what I’d be pulled into auditions for to the extent that when I was reading for Awkward., my agents were calling MTV asking, “Is she funny? Does she need a funny coach? Because we can get her one.” But I write the type of material I’m most attracted to. My favorite movies are Natural Born Killers, Requiem for a Dream, Enter the Void. I mean, I’m not writing Gaspar Noé’s head-smashing scene in Irreversible or anything; I’m not there yet. But my stuff is completely different from Awkward., although even that show is a bit of a dark comedy.
Before Awkward., I was known for being a dramatic actress. It’s what I’d be pulled into auditions for to the extent that when I was reading for Awkward., my agents were calling MTV asking, “Is she funny? Does she need a funny coach? Because we can get her one.” But I write the type of material I’m most attracted to. My favorite movies are Natural Born Killers, Requiem for a Dream, Enter the Void. I mean, I’m not writing Gaspar Noé’s head-smashing scene in Irreversible or anything; I’m not there yet. But my stuff is completely different from Awkward., although even that show is a bit of a dark comedy.
Speaking of dark comedies, the next movie you’ve got coming out is Struck by Lightning, which stars and was written by Glee’s Chris Colfer. Did he give you any advice about getting a film made?
Not yet, but we talk. As an artist, he really takes control. I was texting him the other day to say, “Hey, what’s happening?” and he texts back this list and it’s everything I want to do. He’s on tour to promote his first novel; I have a book of poetry I want to publish. He got his first script made; I’d like to get my script made. He’s running all over the world; I wanna run all over the world. He’s just brilliant. I told him, “I’m not going to talk to you anymore because you’re everything I want to be and it’s annoying.”
Not yet, but we talk. As an artist, he really takes control. I was texting him the other day to say, “Hey, what’s happening?” and he texts back this list and it’s everything I want to do. He’s on tour to promote his first novel; I have a book of poetry I want to publish. He got his first script made; I’d like to get my script made. He’s running all over the world; I wanna run all over the world. He’s just brilliant. I told him, “I’m not going to talk to you anymore because you’re everything I want to be and it’s annoying.”
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Hunger Games may lose to Fifty Shades of Grey
You’ve got to be fairly tough to win in The Hunger Games, but the franchise may have to soon accept defeat, at least as a best-seller.
Granted, it’s difficult to compete with an erotic novel, and according to reports, Fifty Shades of Grey may soon pass the Games up.
Now for those who want to be authors themselves, please always remember that for books to come out of nowhere and transform themselves into a phenomenon is a very rare occurrence indeed.
As we’ve previously discussed, penning a book on the level of a Harry Potter is like winning the lottery twice. The Hunger Games was the big best-seller practically nobody had heard of before it became a huge cultural event, and before anyone even knew what Grey was, word of mouth spread like wildfire, and put its sales through the roof.
According to a report in Entertainment Weekly, author E.L. James is making $1.4 million a week on sales of Grey. Of course, most of us would probably be lucky to see earnings like that writing for a lifetime. And according to the Grey Wikipedia page, it’s also the fastest selling paperback in history.
The Hollywood Reporter now informs us that Grey is "neck-and-neck" with Games for best-seller of 2012. Scholastic, publisher of Games, has announced that the Games series of three books has hit fifty million copies, with twenty-three million copies of the first Games book in print, fourteen million copies of Catching Fire, and thirteen million copies of Mockingjay. (This also reportedly boosted Scholastic’s profit margins with sales up 109% from last year).
Meanwhile, Grey just hit twenty million copies, and there’s no signs of slowing down. In fact, with a film version currently in the works, it should only boost interest even more. Obviously, the Hunger Games will just keep building and building audiences with the upcoming DVD release on August 18, while Catching Fire wraps up casting before kicking off a planned September shoot.
Granted, it’s difficult to compete with an erotic novel, and according to reports, Fifty Shades of Grey may soon pass the Games up.
Now for those who want to be authors themselves, please always remember that for books to come out of nowhere and transform themselves into a phenomenon is a very rare occurrence indeed.
As we’ve previously discussed, penning a book on the level of a Harry Potter is like winning the lottery twice. The Hunger Games was the big best-seller practically nobody had heard of before it became a huge cultural event, and before anyone even knew what Grey was, word of mouth spread like wildfire, and put its sales through the roof.
According to a report in Entertainment Weekly, author E.L. James is making $1.4 million a week on sales of Grey. Of course, most of us would probably be lucky to see earnings like that writing for a lifetime. And according to the Grey Wikipedia page, it’s also the fastest selling paperback in history.
The Hollywood Reporter now informs us that Grey is "neck-and-neck" with Games for best-seller of 2012. Scholastic, publisher of Games, has announced that the Games series of three books has hit fifty million copies, with twenty-three million copies of the first Games book in print, fourteen million copies of Catching Fire, and thirteen million copies of Mockingjay. (This also reportedly boosted Scholastic’s profit margins with sales up 109% from last year).
Meanwhile, Grey just hit twenty million copies, and there’s no signs of slowing down. In fact, with a film version currently in the works, it should only boost interest even more. Obviously, the Hunger Games will just keep building and building audiences with the upcoming DVD release on August 18, while Catching Fire wraps up casting before kicking off a planned September shoot.
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From cutie to £50million beauty: How YouTube sensation Kate Upton became most in-demand supermodel
At the age of 20 she has burst out from nowhere to earning an estimated £2million as the world's No1 bikini model - and is expected to rake in £50million .
THE boys at Kate Upton's school say they never gave her a second look... They're looking now.
At the age of 20 she has burst out from nowhere to earning an estimated £2million as the world's No1 bikini model - and is expected to rake in £50million.
Kate's spectacular rise from a small town, flat-chested, geeky girl next door is a YOUTUBE phenomenon.
In record time the glamour world's new darling, with her 36DD chest, has leapt ahead of established names to become the most in-demand supermodel.
Celebrities are fighting to date her, top designers are lining up to sign her and she is being hailed as the sexiest ever US Sports Illustrated magazine cover girl.
Kate is seen as the first in a new generation of internet-spawned models.
She was ready to slog her way to the top with years of photoshoots, adverts and magazine assignments.
But she took a fame-game short cut by building up a fan base of millions through her fun YouTube dance videos.
Florida girl Kate was signed up at 16 by the Elite agency after going to an audition in 2008. She struggled initially to find work as a catalogue model.
Superstars such as Naomi Campbell, Gisele Bündchen and Heidi Klum had clawed their way up on the catwalks.
Kate's fast track to success came after she posted a video of herself at a Los Angeles Clippers basketball game doing the dougie, a dance popularised in a tune by Cali Swag District.
It became a YouTube sensation after going viral and attracting more than three million views plus winning her 170,000 Twitter followers. Another YouTube dance, this time to the Rej3ctz's song Cat Daddy, also gained massive interest.
The clip was even removed from YouTube for a few days because the site's regulators deemed it too sexual.
The buzz created gave 36-25-34 Kate huge marketing potential and she was signed to another top agency, IMG.
Modelling website publisher Wayne Sterling said: "We all know that social media now creates its own reality.
"If you become a YouTube star among teenagers you have even more recognisability than a TV star. Kate Upton is the perfect example of that."
Her agent Ivan Bart went so far as to say: "Kate is bigger than fashion. She's the Jane Mansfield of the internet."
Another industry insider said: "If she carries on like this, with endorsements and other deals, she will be worth £50million well before she hits 30."
Kate's generous curves recall 1950s film stars such as Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe rather than some of the stick-thin youngsters on today's catwalks.
Former school friends at the Holy Trinity Episcopal Academy in Melbourne, Florida, describe her as being an average B-grade student.
None of them can recall eye-catching cleavage or a sexy figure trying to peep out from her uniform of white oxford shirt and green plaid kilt. Instead they remember a flat-chested "nerdy looking" teen.
A former classmate stunned by her sudden rise to stardom said: "She definitely wasn't the prettiest girl in school.
"Kate was the bridge between the popular crowd and the losers.
"She wasn't really outgoing. She was very slim, flat chested and sort of nerdy looking.
"I'm not sure she ever had a boyfriend in school." One boy who was a pupil at the academy said: "I remember Kate being in and out of class a lot, travelling and trying to make it as a model. She was never overly confident or annoying about it.
"Then one day she just left school and never came back. It was almost like she blossomed overnight into this beautiful woman, never to be heard from again.
"Now talking to all the guys from our class back then we're all regretful that we never asked her out."
The schoolmates' memories tally with Kate's account of her meteoric success after a sudden blossoming.
In a recent US magazine interview she said: "I don't really know what the appeal is about boobs but I do know that when I was in junior high I used to be made fun of for being flat-chested.
Everyone would go, 'She's not pretty! She doesn't have boobs!'
"So I always had boob envy. And when finally I went through my growth spurt and they appeared I just loved them.
"So that's why I like boobs, because I didn't have them and then I got 'em."
That body has helped her amass a multi-million pound fortune in four years as a model - before her 21st birthday.
Kate, born in Michigan but brought up in the Sunshine State, is from a well to-do family. Her uncle Fred Upton, 59, is a long-standing Michigan congressman in the US House of Representatives.
She has four siblings and as a girl she was taken to church every day and was keen on horse riding - winning national titles at under-13 and under-14.
Standing 5ft 10ins, her breakthrough came when Elite Model Management signed her after a casting call in Miami.
The agency had discovered Cindy Crawford, Gisele and Lara Stone. Moving to Elite's New York base, Kate was soon getting noticed and raised a few eyebrows when she was spotted at a hotel with rapper Kanye West, then 33, when she was only 18.
She went on to date Mark Sanchez, 25, the quarterback for the New York Jets American football team.
In films she has made cameos in last year's Tower Heist and new release The Three Stooges.
Bizarrely, Kate's body has made her a hate figure on twisted pro-anorexia websites. And Sophia Neophitou, who casts Victoria's Secret shows, told the New York Times she thought Kate was "too obvious" looking for her.
Neophitou said: "She's like a Page 3 girl or a footballer's wife with the too blonde hair and that kind of face that anyone with enough money can buy."
But supermodel and author Carol Alt said: "Kate's laughing all the way to the bank. I would just say, 'Keep your head up and keep moving forward.' "
THE boys at Kate Upton's school say they never gave her a second look... They're looking now.
At the age of 20 she has burst out from nowhere to earning an estimated £2million as the world's No1 bikini model - and is expected to rake in £50million.
Kate's spectacular rise from a small town, flat-chested, geeky girl next door is a YOUTUBE phenomenon.
In record time the glamour world's new darling, with her 36DD chest, has leapt ahead of established names to become the most in-demand supermodel.
Celebrities are fighting to date her, top designers are lining up to sign her and she is being hailed as the sexiest ever US Sports Illustrated magazine cover girl.
Kate is seen as the first in a new generation of internet-spawned models.
She was ready to slog her way to the top with years of photoshoots, adverts and magazine assignments.
But she took a fame-game short cut by building up a fan base of millions through her fun YouTube dance videos.
Florida girl Kate was signed up at 16 by the Elite agency after going to an audition in 2008. She struggled initially to find work as a catalogue model.
Superstars such as Naomi Campbell, Gisele Bündchen and Heidi Klum had clawed their way up on the catwalks.
Kate's fast track to success came after she posted a video of herself at a Los Angeles Clippers basketball game doing the dougie, a dance popularised in a tune by Cali Swag District.
It became a YouTube sensation after going viral and attracting more than three million views plus winning her 170,000 Twitter followers. Another YouTube dance, this time to the Rej3ctz's song Cat Daddy, also gained massive interest.
The clip was even removed from YouTube for a few days because the site's regulators deemed it too sexual.
The buzz created gave 36-25-34 Kate huge marketing potential and she was signed to another top agency, IMG.
Modelling website publisher Wayne Sterling said: "We all know that social media now creates its own reality.
"If you become a YouTube star among teenagers you have even more recognisability than a TV star. Kate Upton is the perfect example of that."
Her agent Ivan Bart went so far as to say: "Kate is bigger than fashion. She's the Jane Mansfield of the internet."
Another industry insider said: "If she carries on like this, with endorsements and other deals, she will be worth £50million well before she hits 30."
Kate's generous curves recall 1950s film stars such as Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe rather than some of the stick-thin youngsters on today's catwalks.
Former school friends at the Holy Trinity Episcopal Academy in Melbourne, Florida, describe her as being an average B-grade student.
None of them can recall eye-catching cleavage or a sexy figure trying to peep out from her uniform of white oxford shirt and green plaid kilt. Instead they remember a flat-chested "nerdy looking" teen.
A former classmate stunned by her sudden rise to stardom said: "She definitely wasn't the prettiest girl in school.
"Kate was the bridge between the popular crowd and the losers.
"She wasn't really outgoing. She was very slim, flat chested and sort of nerdy looking.
"I'm not sure she ever had a boyfriend in school." One boy who was a pupil at the academy said: "I remember Kate being in and out of class a lot, travelling and trying to make it as a model. She was never overly confident or annoying about it.
"Then one day she just left school and never came back. It was almost like she blossomed overnight into this beautiful woman, never to be heard from again.
"Now talking to all the guys from our class back then we're all regretful that we never asked her out."
The schoolmates' memories tally with Kate's account of her meteoric success after a sudden blossoming.
In a recent US magazine interview she said: "I don't really know what the appeal is about boobs but I do know that when I was in junior high I used to be made fun of for being flat-chested.
Everyone would go, 'She's not pretty! She doesn't have boobs!'
"So I always had boob envy. And when finally I went through my growth spurt and they appeared I just loved them.
"So that's why I like boobs, because I didn't have them and then I got 'em."
That body has helped her amass a multi-million pound fortune in four years as a model - before her 21st birthday.
Kate, born in Michigan but brought up in the Sunshine State, is from a well to-do family. Her uncle Fred Upton, 59, is a long-standing Michigan congressman in the US House of Representatives.
She has four siblings and as a girl she was taken to church every day and was keen on horse riding - winning national titles at under-13 and under-14.
Standing 5ft 10ins, her breakthrough came when Elite Model Management signed her after a casting call in Miami.
The agency had discovered Cindy Crawford, Gisele and Lara Stone. Moving to Elite's New York base, Kate was soon getting noticed and raised a few eyebrows when she was spotted at a hotel with rapper Kanye West, then 33, when she was only 18.
She went on to date Mark Sanchez, 25, the quarterback for the New York Jets American football team.
In films she has made cameos in last year's Tower Heist and new release The Three Stooges.
Bizarrely, Kate's body has made her a hate figure on twisted pro-anorexia websites. And Sophia Neophitou, who casts Victoria's Secret shows, told the New York Times she thought Kate was "too obvious" looking for her.
Neophitou said: "She's like a Page 3 girl or a footballer's wife with the too blonde hair and that kind of face that anyone with enough money can buy."
But supermodel and author Carol Alt said: "Kate's laughing all the way to the bank. I would just say, 'Keep your head up and keep moving forward.' "
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DOMINIK GARCIA-LORIDO: MAGIC BEAUTY
July 25, 2012
When Dominik Garcia-Lorido walks into the room, time stands still. Its not the famous last name, instead it is her tall, elegant presence that lifts the space. The sun-kissed beauty is all woman; stepping out of her father’s illustrious shadow and carving a path all her own, starring as Mercedes Lazaro in Magic City. We settle in to dig deeper and find out what is behind those big brown eyes.
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| HER OWN WOMAN: HOLLYWOOD'S SECOND GENERATION BREAKS THE MOLD |
9AM: I’d be just getting out of Pilates. I’d make breakfast and sometimes go walk the
beach… I was living in Key Biscayne during the time and would walk the beach in the morning all the way to the lighthouse and back… During the week in the morning it was nice because the beach was empty so I could meditate in the really secluded areas.
NOON: It varies… Again on a non-filming day maybe sit outside and study my script
beach… I was living in Key Biscayne during the time and would walk the beach in the morning all the way to the lighthouse and back… During the week in the morning it was nice because the beach was empty so I could meditate in the really secluded areas.
NOON: It varies… Again on a non-filming day maybe sit outside and study my script
maybe a late brunch…
3PM: If this were a weekend I’d be out in the sun for sure. In the water… having a late
lunch maybe
lunch maybe
6PM: I like having dinner around this time. I like early dinners but on the weekends I
usually have it later or just play it by ear.
usually have it later or just play it by ear.
9PM: Weekdays getting ready for bed, weekends out with my local friends or cast mates for drinks… Always varied
MIDNIGHT: Weekdays I’d already be in my 5th dream because I’d either have work or an
early workout the next day. I was always passed out by 10 unless we were doing a night shoot.
early workout the next day. I was always passed out by 10 unless we were doing a night shoot.
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| ANDY GARCIA’S DAUGHTER DOMINIK IS HER OWN WOMAN, NAVIGATING THE ACTING BUSINESS ON HER OWN TERMS… |
DOMINIK GARCIA LORIDO: I grew up in LA, in the valley and I would visit Miami growing up
during the summer. Specifically Key Biscayne, which was great because it’s a small island that a
kid can have a lot of freedom to roam around and get to places on foot or rollerblades. That’s what
we did… we roamed around on our rollerblades, picked up a Cuban sandwich from The Oasis, played
basketball at the elementary school courts (or rather I would play with all the boys while my
girlfriends watched) and went swimming in the Yacht Club pool. As teenagers, my friends and I
worked as camp counselors for day camp and hung out on the boat in secret spots near the
mangroves that only “key rats” would know about. Key Rat is a term describing a kid that grew
up on the Key. My mom is a key rat… I was born a Key Rat and raised half Key Rat, half Valley Girl
– and proud of it!
HM: Your dad is Andy Garcia. Did that almost destine you for a career in acting?
DGL: It had absolutely nothing to do with it…This was my own discovery and my own path.
HM: Do you feel any pressure to live up to your last name or do you just dance to the beat of
HM: Your dad is Andy Garcia. Did that almost destine you for a career in acting?
DGL: It had absolutely nothing to do with it…This was my own discovery and my own path.
HM: Do you feel any pressure to live up to your last name or do you just dance to the beat of
your own drum?
DGL: I don’t feel pressure to live up to anything, I’m my own person. I’m not trying to emulate
DGL: I don’t feel pressure to live up to anything, I’m my own person. I’m not trying to emulate
anybody – even my own blood. My parents would only want me to be original. I definitely dance
to the beat of my own drum… I break dance to it!
HM: Tell me about working on City Island and The Lost City. What was the experience like
HM: Tell me about working on City Island and The Lost City. What was the experience like
working with your father?
DGL: In The Lost City, I really saw what a brilliant director my dad was and I saw him bring
DGL: In The Lost City, I really saw what a brilliant director my dad was and I saw him bring
performances out of people that in my opinion were their best. He’s an amazing director.
City Island was cool, we had fun… It’s cool to go head to head with dad like that. We both love
acting and we both work similarly in the way that we don’t bring any ego
to it. We had a blast playing. We are extremely professional and treat each other not like father
to it. We had a blast playing. We are extremely professional and treat each other not like father
and daughter, just as a fellow actors. We have to make that switch or else we’d never be able
to work together. Some of the crew members didn’t even know we were related. City Island
was proof for me that I can really work with him whenever, and I know I won’t be
self-conscious or that he won’t act differently. It was great.
HM: Who is Mercedes Lazaro, the character you play on Magic City?
DGL: Mercedes is a 21 year-old Cuban girl who grew up on Miami beach. She is the only child
HM: Who is Mercedes Lazaro, the character you play on Magic City?
DGL: Mercedes is a 21 year-old Cuban girl who grew up on Miami beach. She is the only child
of Victor (the general manager of the Miramar Playa hotel) and Maria (a South Beach housewife).
Mercy is very independent and focused on a very specific goal, which is to graduate from Pan Am
school to become a stewardess and get out and travel the world. During her time there, she’s
working part time as a maid in the hotel.
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| BRUNETTE BEAUTY: A STRONG, SMART AND DETERMINED DOMINIK GARCIA-LORIDO |
DGL: I didn’t have to do much digging… I knew her. I weirdly relate to her a lot. I’m older too,
so I’ve gained a lot of perspective on life that she hasn’t experienced yet. I had to tap into Young
Dom, when I was going through similar situations, and just being open and taking in what was
happening in the scene.
HM: You are a young actress in an industry that requires some toughness. How do you
deal with the pressure to look a certain way and the competitive nature of the industry?
deal with the pressure to look a certain way and the competitive nature of the industry?
DGL: It’s not always easy. I can assure you, I am my own worst critic. There’s nothing
that anyone else can say about me that I haven’t already said or thought to a worse degree.
that anyone else can say about me that I haven’t already said or thought to a worse degree.
So pressure’s off from them. I win.
HM:Let’s talk fashion! Who are some of your favorite designers?
DGL: Rag and Bone! I sometimes look like a walking advertisement for them. They are my
splurge. I love menswear for girls. Alexander Wang… Armani is classic and their new stuff
has an edge to it. I love Prabal Garung, Givenchy, Prada, Helmut Lang, The Row. I like
simple and clean.
HM: When you roll out of bed, what are you most comfortable throwing on, some of your
closet staples on a normal day?
DGL: Loose tee and some soft shorts or pants. I don’t like jeans, I like a more loose pant,
things that let you breathe. Keep it all simple and comfortable, add a pair of killer sunglasses
and you’re good to go. Also a great pair of flats. I’m 5’9″ so no need for heels unless I’m
going somewhere fancy. I have Chloe leather ballet slippers in black and rose and they feel
like you’re wearing socks and go with anything. Also I recently bought my staple pair of
great sandals for summer that can be both nice and causal: a pair of black leather Marni’s
that are so comfy and again go with anything.
HM: What are some of your beauty tricks?
DGL: I take about 15 vitamins a day, including ones for skin. I start my day off with a shot
of Noni juice and drink lots of water. I leave my eyebrows natural, I don’t like when you can
tell you just had them done and it’s a perfect shape. I think what’s beautiful is when people
look like what they are supposed to look like if nobody touched them. I like the imperfections.
The bushy eyebrows, a prominent nose, freckles… I sometimes wish I had freckles.
Embrace what makes you unique and that’s what’s beautiful. Keep it clean and natural…
And don’t smoke cigarettes!!!
HM:Away from acting, what are some of the things you love to do?
DGL: I love yoga, I love music, I love going to see live music. I’m low key… I like hanging
out at a friend’s house with a good group over going to a club – those days for me are pretty
much done. I like going to the movies, I love basketball…Watching it, playing it. Anything
to do with the Lakers. I love snowboarding and, well… eating. Eating really good food,
I’m good at that.
HM:What’s next up for you? Where would you like to see yourself in say 5 years?
DGL: Healthy and Happy
* She is certainly a daughter of a Hollywood celebrity
with slight self-esteem issues that comes with the
territory, good deal of self-conscious about her heritage
and how she looks compared to her friends (likely to be
whites considering she was growing up in the valley).
It’s just remarkable she has stayed free of any
dependencies issues.
Carly Rae Jepsen nude photos stolen from singer's computer
"Call Me Maybe" singer Carly Rae Jepsen may have successfully dodged nude photo rumors earlier this summer, but now TMZ reports that the singer herself has told police that a hacker stole nude pics from her computer and tried shopping them to media outlets. And we're not talking about the "200 percent NOT Carly" nude pics from July, which were actually 21-year old "Internet model" Destiny Benedict. In March, Jepsen's people reportedly received an anonymous tip about these real-deal pics, which haven't surfaced on the web yet, and the Vancouver Police Department is on the case.
The police tell TMZ an active investigation is underway "in regards to a theft of electronic property belonging to Jepsen." And they reportedly already have a potential suspect.
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"The Human Centipede" Glass Pipe
You know you're walking into a stoners house when they have a ton of glass pipes lying around. And, you know you're walking into a psychopaths house when they have this Human Centipede Glass Pipe on the table. Albeit more mellow than the rest, definitely still a psycho. Hit the thumbs for a detailed look at this glass pipe inspired by the most disturbing movie of 2009.
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Conservatives Complain Beauty Pageants Have Liberal Bias, Create “Miss Conservative” Event
Miss Conservative U.S. ContestantsDid you know that beauty pageants have a left-wing agenda?
That’s the claim of beauty pageant coach Ginny Meerman, who has created her own “Miss Conservative” beauty pageant in response to traditional pageants “being overtaken by the liberal movement and liberal-thinking people.”On her personal website, Meerman complains of “being blackballed for my outspoken and unapologetic conservative ideals.” She also brags about being “a descendant” of confederate General Robert E. Lee. Meerman uses the term “OhBlahBlah” to refer to President Obama, and says he is a “toad” that “must go.”
The website for Miss Conservative U.S. features the song “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue” by country singer Toby Keith and promotes itself as “Where the beautiful, accomplished and amazing American Conservative women are showcased on the pageant stage.”
A “press conference style” on stage interview, patriotic outfit, evening wear and photos are listed as the four major elements of the pageant. Bonus “conservapoints” can also be earned by contestants. One way to earn “conservapoints” is through a written essay explaining “Why I Am A Conservative.”
A promotional video for the Miss Conservative U.S. features a soundtrack with James Brown’s “Living in America.”
The first Miss Conservative U.S. was held in Dallas on July 7th, and featured the theme song “I Am America” by conservative singer Krista Branch. The same song was infamously featured in campaign ads for failed presidential candidate Herman Cain.
The show was co-hosted by Ann-Marie Murrell and Kevin Jackson.
Murrell is one of the co-hosts of “Politichicks” (along with former Saturday Night Live performer Victoria Jackson), which describes itself as a right-wing version of The View. Murrell’s online bio says she is “a former democrat who saw the light on 9/11.”
Jackson writes the conservative blog “The Black Sphere” and describes himself as “sworn to set the record straight on the destruction by Democrats to the black community.”
The following contestants won the Miss Conservative U.S. 2012 pageant:
Pebbles Zell, Miss Teen Conservative U.S. 2012
Cassidy Hufford, Miss Jr Teen Conservative U.S. 2012
Rachel Vonherbulis, Miss Conservative U.S. 2012
Lara Rhea, Ms. Conservative U.S. 2012
Lindsay Sangalli, Mrs. Conservative U.S. 2012
* Just wondering how many of these "Miss Conservatives" will end posing nude or getting hitched to a rich old geezer.
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Caleche Ranae Ramos, Former Miss Nevada, Sues Los Angles County Sheriff
Caleche Ranae Ramos, former Miss Nevada, is suing cops for allegedly busting into her home without a warrant. The allegations are spelled out in Caleche Ranae Ramos' lawsuit against Los Angeles County and its sheriff's office, obtained today by Courthouse News Service. Ramos charges that she was forced to get out of her bed while nude on the night of Nov. 15, 2011. One of the officers allegedly joked that she would, "have a story to tell others at Thanksgiving."
But the officers had the wrong apartment. Ramos -- Miss Nevada 2007 and a woman of many talents -- and her fiance, Eric Otto Ryder said that deputies had a search warrant for apartment "C" but entered their clearly marked apartment "A."
"At that time Ms. Manos was still in bed and was naked," the complaint stated, according to Business Insider. "The sheriff deputies, all of which were male and armed with guns, ordered Ms. Manos to get out of bed and then watched as she attempted to do so."
The officers reportedly spent a "significant amount of time" in the apartment before realizing their error.
Manos seeks damages for negligence, false imprisonment, civil rights and Constitution violations, and she's accusing the deputies of sexual harassment.
Her lawyer, Matthew Geragos, didn't immediately return calls to The Huffington Post.
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Lesbian Law Student’s Explicit Law Firm Sex Diary Goes Public
by Staci Zaretsky
Lawyers aren’t known for their attractiveness, nor are they supposed to have sex lives. Because really, how are they supposed to fit in time for getting it in when they’re supposed to be working 100 hours a week? Law students, however, are a completely different story. Law students have plenty of time to get down and dirty, and when they do, you can be sure that their sexual partners are at least moderately good-looking in the real world. Let’s face it: as a law student, it’s almost like you’re wearing beer goggles to gauge the overall attractiveness of your classmates. A law school “10″ is most assuredly a real world “7″ or “8″ — still hot, but not quite as appealing outside of hallowed halls of your law school.
But you know what will bump up the attractiveness quotient of any law student? Putting your sex life online, in graphic detail, where everyone can read about all of the hot lesbian action that you’ve been getting as a summer associate at a law firm.
This isn’t the first Sapphic summer story to grace our pages, and hopefully it won’t be the last. Avert your eyes if need be; reader discretion is advised….
This weekend, the Daily Intel blog of New York Magazine had a rather sexy piece that provided a behind-the-scenes look into the life of a 26-year-old summer intern at a law firm in New York City. This law student notes that “[b]eing a summer intern at a law firm is an exercise in gluttony and high-functioning alcoholism.” Based on her description of the firm, it sounds as if they’re still living in the heyday of summer associate glory. And from this graphic sex diary, we’ve been able to glean that this girl is single and ready to mingle.
We don’t know what this law student looks like, and we don’t know her name, but you can leave that stuff up to your imagination — it’s more provocative that way. For our own purposes, we’ll call her Veronica, because that’s a perfect name for a lipstick lesbian who goes through women faster than she changes her panties.
In just one week’s time, this alluring lesbian accomplished the following sexual feats:
One sweet goodnight kiss; one mostly self-induced orgasm; one co-worker hookup; one sexting session; one entirely self-induced orgasm; one heterosexual liking confession.A co-worker hookup? A summer sexcapade with an intern has got to be against the rules… but rules were meant to be broken, and that makes this story even hotter. Veronica tells us that her co-worker had recently “gotten entangled in her first lady-on-lady relationship,” and while on a happy hour bar tour, Veronica’s co-worker started “giving [her] eyes.” And those come-hither bedroom eyes can be a dangerous thing:
8:30 p.m. Co-worker convinces me to come back to Brooklyn with her to a friend’s party. She puts her arm around me in the cab. I put my hand between her legs and slide it up her skirt. I do it because she had been flirting with me, but I’m not really committed to hooking up with her.Later that night, we learn that Veronica works extremely quickly. Bored with the party, she informs her co-worker that she wants to leave, but her co-worker clearly wants some more of the cab-ride entertainment that she received earlier from her intern. In just 17 minutes, the time it took to take a cab to her co-worker’s apartment from the nearby party and step inside, this is what happened:
10:20 p.m. She is totally naked, and I’m still basically fully clothed. Her bedroom is not air-conditioned. I’m kissing her hard and running my hands up and down her thin and delicate frame. I slide two fingers in her, then three. I can tell that I could fist her, if she would let me. I keep my fingers moving in her, shimmy down and also start licking her clit. She doesn’t touch me; I wasn’t expecting her to, so I’m fine with that.Yes, Veronica, this kind of sexual encounter might make the rest of your days at the law firm a bit awkward, especially if your co-worker has any say in whether or not you’ll be given an offer at the end of the summer (as opposed to a fellow summer associate). But since it seems like this silver-tongued law student was able to give her co-worker a happy ending, Veronica may just receive her own, in the form of permanent employment in the future.
11:10 p.m. She wants me to stay the night. I know that will just make things more awkward later. She comes outside in just her underwear to kiss me good-bye on the stoop.
If not, we hope that she’ll consider an alternative career as a romance novelist. Reading about sex is hot — but reading about it in elegant prose, with correct usage of dashes and semi-colons, is even hotter.
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The major findings of the newly released 2011 WGA Screenwriter Survey (click here for full report) are that “screenwriters believe their status in the industry has significantly deteriorated over the past several years. The most flagrant studio practices contributing to this decline, ranked in order of frequency, are: free rewrites, sweepstakes pitching or bake-offs, late payment, free prewrites, and idea theft.” The Writers Guild findings included:
– One-in-four screenwriters reported leaving prepared materials behind as part of their pitch
– Three-quarters were asked to revise those pitch materials for the major studios, while requests at the smaller studios happened half of the time
– Producers were more likely to ask for revisions, but three-in-ten reported major studio representatives requested revisions to pitch materials
– A majority were asked by the major studios to work before being paid for commencement
– Most screenwriters received only 1 or 2 guaranteed steps in their deals from the studios
– Optional steps were common in these deals
– Nearly two-thirds say the major studios and over half say the smaller studios never exercised any optional steps in their deals
– Almost half were asked to do uncompensated rewrites at a major studio, with four-in-ten saying the studio representative made the request
– Smaller studios were somewhat less likely to ask for uncompensated rewrites, but a greater share of the requests came from studio representatives
– A majority of those working at major studios did the uncompensated rewrites because they felt it necessary to keep their current job or get hired in the future
– Nearly a quarter believe they were paid late by the major studios in 2011
According to a statement from WGAW Board Member David S. Goyer to me on the declining business conditions screenwriters face:
On the issue of one-step deals, WGA Board Member Bill Ray made this statement to me:“Less movies are being made and that means fewer jobs. This means more competition between writers and the pressures become enormous. In this type of environment screenwriters rightly feel like they are being exploited. I’ve had to do free rewrites, often been expected to start work before any type of payment is made, and I’ve frequently been paid late by major studios. I think those qualify as symptoms of business conditions in decline.”
Here is the email that went out today:“One-step deals are a danger on several fronts. First, they are a fairly blatant means of getting writers to do several steps for free. Second, they artificially empower producers who can now convince writers to do a ‘producer’s draft’ by claiming to be speaking for the studio when that producer may in fact have no idea what the studio wants. Third, one-step deals yield timid scripts. Writers aren’t going to be very likely to take chances with material if they’re writing with a sword hanging over their heads. Good scripts take time. They also require some experimentation – the drafts that help you find your story. Contracts ought to reflect that, just as they used to. Lastly, perhaps most practically: would you really want your project written by a writer who’s so anxious about being fired that he or she is spending all their time booking their next job instead of throwing themselves into the one you’ve hired them for?”
Dear WGAW Member,__________________________________________
Earlier this year, the WGAW, in conjunction with WGAE, undertook a survey of screenwriters in order to assess the current state of the theatrical business. The Guild has been increasingly concerned, based on anecdotal evidence from our members, about deteriorating conditions in screen employment and the rise of certain industry practices that harm both screenwriters and the overall quality of films produced. Screenwriters were invited to complete a series of questions that detailed their theatrical pitching and employment experiences during 2011. The respected independent research firm of Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin, Metz and Associates (FM3) conducted the survey.
The major findings of the survey are: Screenwriters believe their status in the industry has significantly deteriorated over the past several years. The most flagrant studio practices contributing to this decline, ranked in order of frequency, are: free rewrites, sweepstakes pitching, late payment, free prewrites, and idea theft.
Ultimately we want to change those behaviors. How we achieve that goal is the question, and your continued engagement will be needed to help find answers.
To view a summary of the report click here.
Thank you to the screenwriters who took the survey. If you have any questions about it or the results, please email screensurvey@wga.org.
Sincerely,
Chris Keyser, President
David Young, Executive Director
Sherman Hemsley, who starred in the iconic 1970s sitcom The Jeffersons, was found dead in his El Paso, TX home today, according to reports. He was 74. Hemsley was personally picked by All In The Family creator Norman Lear to play George Jefferson alongside Louise Jefferson (Isabel Sanford) as the newly arrived neighbors of Archie and Edith Bunker. Lear eventually spun off the characters in 1975 and created The Jeffersons, about a successful black family who lived in Manhattan. The show ran 10 years. Hemsley, who also starred on Broadway in the 1970s musical comedy Purlie, later starred on the sitcom Amen playing a church deacon.__________________________________________
Ben Dover Going After Nearly 3,000 Suspected Porn Pirates...With Court Concessions
More than 2,000 O2 customers will receive letters accusing them of illegally downloading porn films.
The firm behind the films - Ben Dover Productions - had originally applied to the High Court to pursue 9,000 cases on behalf of a range of copyright owners. The judge threw out all claims apart from those relating to Ben Dover and watered down the wording of letters.
Parent company Golden Eye did not rule out the possibility that it would be pursuing other ISPs in the future.
To date, it has only requested a court order to pursue alleged copyright infringers on O2's network but this may be extended to other ISPs.
"Golden Eye (Int) Ltd continues to monitor all ISPs for our titles and pursue online and physical forms of piracy of our content," managing director Julian Becker told the BBC.
Letters seeking recompense for alleged copyright offences will start going out to 2,845 O2 customers in August.
The Citizens Advice Bureau has agreed to help those who feel they have been wrongly accused.
Final letter
The judge who granted permission for the case to go ahead has put strict limitations on how letters are worded to avoid the "pay up or else" style letters sent by law firm ACS Law.
Golden Eye will not be able to demand a one-off £700 fine as it had originally wished, instead money owed will be determined on a case-by-case basis.
The letters also make people aware of the help available to them from Citizens Advice, with links to the website and telephone numbers.
And perhaps most crucially the letters cannot hold the bill payer liable if someone else used their internet connection to download illegal material.
The final letter, a copy of which has been obtained by the BBC, reads: "In the event that you were not responsible for the infringing acts outlined above, for example, another member of your household was the user of the computer, you should make full disclosure to us of the other parties at your residence using your internet connection."
he letter that accused O2 customers will receive[252KB]
It is not clear how the bill holder should respond if they think that material was downloaded by someone illegally accessing an unsecured home wi-fi connection.
Citizens' rights group Consumer Focus, which has followed the case closely, is pleased by the concessions.
'No option'
"We do not condone copyright infringement, but innocent people should not feel bullied into settling claims and they must be made aware of where to go for help," said Mike O'Connor, chief executive of Consumer Focus.
"That is why we are working with the Citizens Advice service to provide clear advice to consumers about what to do if they are accused of copyright infringement," he added.
The group has also written to the UK's major ISPs asking that they make sure that any application to hand over consumers' personal data is supported by appropriate an consistent evidence of possible wrongdoing.
O2 is believed to be in the process of handing over names and addresses to Golden Eye.
It told the BBC: "We have no option but to comply with this court order and will be co-operating fully."
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Soon after Steve Jobs returned to Apple as CEO in 1997, he decided that a shipping company wasn’t delivering spare parts fast enough. The shipper said it couldn’t do better, and it didn’t have to: Apple had signed a contract granting it the business at the current pace. As Walter Isaacson describes in his best-selling biography, Steve Jobs, the recently recrowned chief executive had a simple response: Break the contract. When an Apple manager warned him that this decision would probably mean a lawsuit, Jobs responded, “Just tell them if they fuck with us, they’ll never get another fucking dime from this company, ever.”The shipper did sue. The manager quit Apple. (Jobs “would have fired me anyway,” he later told Isaacson.) The legal imbroglio took a year and presumably a significant amount of money to resolve. But meanwhile, Apple hired a new shipper that met the expectations of the company’s uncompromising CEO.
What lesson should we draw from this anecdote? After all, we turn to the lives of successful people for inspiration and instruction. But the lesson here might make us uncomfortable: Violate any norm of social or business interaction that stands between you and what you want. Jobs routinely told subordinates that they were assholes, that they never did anything right. According to Isaacson, even Jonathan Ive, Apple’s incomparable design chief, came in for rough treatment on occasion. Once, after checking into a five-star London hotel handpicked for him by Ive, Jobs called it “a piece of shit” and stormed out. “The normal rules of social engagement, he feels, don’t apply to him,” Ive explained to the biographer. Jobs’ flouting of those rules extended outside the office, to a family that rarely got to spend much time with him as well as to strangers (police officers, retail workers), who experienced the CEO’s verbal wrath whenever they displeased him.
Jobs has been dead for nearly a year, but the biography about him is still a best seller. Indeed, his life story has emerged as an odd sort of holy scripture for entrepreneurs—a gospel and an antigospel at the same time. To some, Jobs’ life has revealed the importance of sticking firmly to one’s vision and goals, no matter the psychic toll on employees or business associates. To others, Jobs serves as a cautionary tale, a man who changed the world but at the price of alienating almost everyone around him. The divergence in these reactions is a testament to the two deep and often contradictory hungers that drive so many of us today: We want to succeed in the world of work, but we also want satisfaction in the realm of home and family. For those who, like Jobs, have pledged to “put a dent in the universe,” his thorny life story has forced a reckoning. Is it really worth being like Steve?
In one camp are what you might call the acolytes. They’re businesspeople who have taken the life of Steve Jobs as license to become more aggressive as visionaries, as competitors, and above all as bosses. They’re giving themselves over to the thrill of being a general—and, at times, a dictator. Work was already the center of their lives, but Jobs’ story has made them resolve to double down on that choice.
Steve Davis, CEO of TwoFour, a software company that caters to financial institutions, was eager to talk about Jobs’ influence on his own life and career. But first he had to find a free half hour. When he finally did steal a few moments to speak, he explained that he had consciously set aside certain aspects of his family life, since he believes that startups fail when those involved aren’t committed to being available 24 hours a day. Luckily, Davis told me, he was blessed with a wife who picked up the slack.
Davis detailed these choices matter-of-factly, but his voice rose with fervor when he described the intensity and uncertainty of entrepreneurship. He loved every minute of it. He didn’t operate with a corporate safety net. His lawyer was calling him at that very moment with a contract question, and Davis needed to pick a direction and just go with it. What should he decide? He admitted he didn’t know. The thrill came from the possibility that he might be wrong. “Guys who start companies are different from other people,” he said. “We’re willing to fail. Look at Jobs. He got knocked down, and he kept going. He’s totally unconventional, driving on his particular path, and either you join him or get out of the way.”
Join or get out of the way—it’s a phrase that sums up what Jobs’ life has taught his admirers today. Andrew Hargadon, a professor at UC Davis and author of How Breakthroughs Happen: The Surprising Truth About How Companies Innovate, points out that Jobs’ brashness has helped inspire a larger reaction to several decades of conventional wisdom about the importance of worker empowerment and consensus decision- making. “Jobs is showing us the value in the old-school, autocratic way. We’ve gone so far toward the other extreme, toward a bovine sociology in which happy cows are supposed to produce more milk.”
That is, it took a hippie-geek like Jobs to give other bosses permission to be aggressive and domineering again.
This isn’t aggression for its own sake but for the good of a company. Tristan O’Tierney, a Mac and iPhone software developer, helped Twitter creator Jack Dorsey found the credit-card-swiping startup Square three years ago. O’Tierney says that he now sees the value in bluntly telling people their work is crap. “You don’t make better products by saying everything is great,” he explains. “You make them better by forcing people to do work they didn’t know they had in them.” Aaron Levie, a self-described Jobs “wantrepreneur,” started Box, which allows cloud-based file-sharing, in his USC dorm room in 2005. To new hires, he quotes Jobs—”Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected”—to make clear to them that Box is just such an environment. “My lesson from Jobs,” Levie says, “is that I can push my employees further than they thought possible, and I won’t rush any product out the door without it being perfect.” He adds: “That approach comes with collateral damage on the people side.”
It’s true that Apple employees rarely quit when Jobs called them shitheads, or even when he took credit for their ideas. An early manager on the Mac team told Isaacson about the abuses Jobs heaped on employees. But she said, “I consider myself the absolute luckiest person in the world to have worked with him.” These sorts of testimonials are the proof, for many entrepreneurs and executives, that strong leadership and impressive results will lead employees to tolerate, even to embrace, unpleasant work conditions. Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s most profitable hedge fund, has been called the “Steve Jobs of investing,” in part because his firm practices a form of radical forthrightness. All Bridgewater employees are expected to clash with one another, to speak without filters or concerns about sensitivities. Dalio says he shares Jobs’ belief in the benefits of a tough, brutally candid office environment, though he requires his employees to dish it out to him just as much as they take it. He likens the mode of dialog he practices—not just at Bridgewater but in all his personal relationships—to twisting one’s limbs into a difficult yoga position or training as a Navy SEAL. “Pretty soon the pain becomes pleasure and you can’t live without it,” he says.
What acolytes want most of all is to possess the same certainty about their vision that Jobs felt about his. Neal Sales-Griffin, 25-year-old cofounder and CEO of Code Academy, a programming school in Chicago, says that after studying Jobs’ life, he doesn’t waste time anymore with the intricacies of etiquette. He openly denigrates projects that aren’t working, even if others have already invested countless hours in them. He recalls Apple’s inauspicious launch of MobileMe, the subscription service that was supposed to sync a user’s entire online existence in the cloud. From a stage in an Apple auditorium, Jobs berated the MobileMe employees for their inability to create a better product—”You should hate each other for having let each other down”—and then fired the team leader on the spot. “Jobs’ passionate approach has empowered me to be myself, with my flaws and difficulties and limitations,” Sales-Griffin says. “Look what came of it for him.”The second camp is what you might call the rejectors. These are entrepreneurs who, on reading about Jobs since his death, have recoiled from the total picture of the man—not just his treatment of employees but the dictatorial, uncompromising way that he approached life. Isaacson’s biography is full of stories of Jobs as an unpleasant individual—the fits he would throw over the most picayune-seeming details, like the type of flowers in his hotel room or the way an aging Whole Foods barista made his smoothie. He would park in handicap spaces; he refused to get a license plate for his car. And he abandoned his oldest daughter, applying his “reality distortion field” to the question of his own paternity.
Jeff Atwood was once an acolyte. He had subsumed the whole of his identity into the company he created: Stack Exchange, a network of online Q-and-A sites. “You gird for war,” he says about the ethos of running a startup. “You need a spiritual fervor, an almost religious belief in the mission, to throw yourself on the shores and attack.” So it came as a surprise to Atwood—and everyone else—when he realized that he had to leave behind Stack Exchange and the startup life. And the Isaacson biography was what prompted his epiphany, turning him into a devout rejector.
He already knew all the stories about Jobs the businessman and innovator. But what he found harrowing, almost too painful to read, were the details about Jobs’ family and personal life. Atwood was brought to tears by a passage in which Jobs showed drawings for the new Apple campus to his son at home one night, and it didn’t even occur to him to call over his daughter, who had expressed interest in becoming an architect. “He paid less attention to Erin,” Isaacson writes about Jobs and his daughter, “who was quiet, introspective, and seemed not to know exactly how to handle him, especially when he was emitting wounding barbs.” Atwood, 41, recently became a father to twin daughters, and he said what Jobs did was “the opposite of parenting. Parenting is being there, man. It’s showing up.” The biography forced him to see that he, like Jobs, had allowed work to dominate his life. Atwood groaned as he recalled how Jobs would respond directly and rudely to some random customer’s email in the middle of the night: “Here’s why you’re an idiot.” Atwood would do the exact same thing. He really didn’t want to quit, but he saw that nuclear option as the only way to disrupt the cycle. “If you’re going to fail at building something,” he says, “fail at building the fucking iPad. Don’t fail at building children.”
For some of these more repulsed readers, it’s the tales of managerial cruelty that have gotten under their skin. Verinder Syal—a former executive at Quaker Oats who bought a coffee franchise, sold it, and now runs a consulting firm and teaches business-school students—expected to adore the biography. He greatly admired Jobs’ ambitions, and he regularly extolled him to students as a paragon of leadership. The book saddened him, though: Syal couldn’t understand why Jobs felt the need to be right all the time and to blame others, why he had to claim other people’s ideas as his own. Syal says he went back to his classes and admitted that he was wrong. “Jobs was like dynamite,” Syal says. “Dynamite clears paths, but it also destroys everything around it.” Syal didn’t think much of Bill Gates before, but he does now. “Gates evolved from an asshole into a human being,” he says. “Jobs remained an ass.”
But most of the rejectors are, like Atwood, entrepreneurs who worry about their roles as fathers. A few of them single out one particular moment near the end of the book, when Jobs explains why he asked Isaacson to write it. “I wanted my kids to know me,” Jobs said. “I wasn’t always there for them, and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did.” Brad Wardell, CEO of the software and computer-game-design company Stardock, was shaken when he realized that the same powers of reality distortion that allowed Jobs to create the iPod also led him to deny the seriousness of the pancreatic cancer that killed him. (For nine months, Jobs delayed undergoing conventional treatment.) Wardell, 41, says his formative years corresponded to the rise of Jobs, and Jobs’ influence helped him “put every ounce of energy and focus into Stardock.” That translated into 80- and 90-hour workweeks, maniacally testing every version of every piece of software, reviewing all source code, writing notes nonstop. “But I realized that, like Jobs, I could die. Jobs missed out on his kids, and I’d have missed out on mine too.” Wardell now often works from home, and he has hired people to manage aspects of the business he previously handled himself.
Many of these former fanboys are reconsidering their allegiance to Jobs in part because they are no longer boys. Now in their forties, they’re confronting the end of their young-adult selves—they have children, and their own parents have become senior citizens or died. Matt Haughey, founder of the community weblog Metafilter, addresses this point directly in a presentation called “Lessons From a 40- Year-Old,” which he delivered last February at the web-design conference Webstock. Haughey remarked that he was grayer, his daughter was turning 7, he had recently put down a longtime pet, and he had experienced his own near-brush with cancer (a brain tumor that turned out to be benign). Haughey heard many in his cohort—most of them devoted Jobs followers—saying, “It is time not to end up like Steve.” So rather than trying to create the next Apple, he proposed building a “lifestyle business,” a smaller-scale enterprise that rejects venture capital and funds itself, leaving its owner time for pursuits outside of work. He displayed a graph of his mid-twenties existence, with the bar representing work towering over the one for personal life. Now that he’s 40, the bar heights are reversed.
It’s worth pointing out that these male rejectors have wound up where most female entrepreneurs have been all along. Women CEOs and managers didn’t need a biography of an absent father to start thinking about balancing work and family; unlike the fortysomething dudes, they’ve been having conversations about this trade-off most of their lives. Rashmi Sinha, CEO of the presentation-sharing service SlideShare, was pregnant with twins when she devoured the Isaacson book. She read it to understand how Jobs created great products, but the possibility of gleaning any personal lessons from his life didn’t even cross her mind. Similarly, Heidi Messer, cofounder of the affiliate-marketing firm LinkShare, has told her entire marketing staff to read the biography, but without any thought that they’d construe Jobs to be her own role model as a manager. She does suggest one personal lesson from Jobs’ life: “If he could do Apple and Pixar—two multibillion-dollar companies—then I should be able to handle one business and also my family.”
The rejectors all know that quelling their Jobs-like tendencies will be a struggle. They are by nature strivers, perfectionists. They also know that their retreat from the struggle—adopting a lifestyle-centric approach to business—means they will never accomplish as much as they would have otherwise, let alone as much as Jobs did. If they used to release six products a year, now they produce only two. If previously they sent out three dozen emails during the dinner hours, then now they make do with sending just a few. Rather than planning to take their startups public, they are shooting for enough profit to sustain their employees and themselves. To create the lifestyle they want, or need, these entrepreneurs are reining in their compulsions, imposing limits on themselves.
When he’s not writing best-selling biographies, Walter Isaacson runs the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, DC, that covers everything from business development to education and foreign policy. At his office there, Isaacson proves to be a gracious New Orleanian, easeful and attentive—in short, nothing like Steve Jobs. He says that readers of the biography have been seeking him out to discuss their uncanny similarities to Jobs or their desires to behave more like him. Two executives visited the writer separately just hours before me. One of them was Bridgewater’s Dalio, who came specifically to confer about people he called “shapers,” those who overcame tremendous opposition to transform vision into reality. Dalio hoped that he and Isaacson could suss out a few of the traits shared by such shapers as Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Margaret Thatcher, and perhaps also Dalio himself. When I asked Isaacson about the life lessons of Jobs, he ducked behind his desk and returned with articles that had recently been forwarded to him, each one about the merits and demerits of emulating Jobs’ jerkiness.
Isaacson himself has published what he deems a corrective, writing in Harvard Business Review that readers hoping to draw meaning from Jobs’ life should fixate less on his petulance as a boss and more on his remarkable achievements at Apple and Pixar. Isaacson distilled the real leadership lessons of Steve Jobs down to 14 business proverbs, such as “Bend reality,” “Push for perfection,” and “Tolerate only A players.” “Long after their personalities are forgotten,” he remarks of Jobs, along with the pantheon of Edison, Ford, and Disney—not one a saint—”history will remember how they applied imagination to technology and business.”
The author admits that he now tends to defend Jobs against personal attacks, since his book has provided much of the ammunition. Isaacson sees Jobs as being hardly more blameworthy, even in his worst moments, than other powerful people. Readers he knows personally claim to be shocked that Jobs would brazenly park in handicap spaces, but Isaacson says some of them are bankers who created the derivatives that screwed clients out of their life savings and helped lead to worldwide recession. When other readers express their contempt for the way Jobs treated his family, Isaacson asks them, “Then how come you’ve been married three times and this particular daughter doesn’t fucking speak to you?” Indeed, Isaacson rejects the premise that Jobs failed with his family. He points out that Jobs ended up with a strong marriage and four loving children, all of whom were at his side during his illness. A wooden table filled much of Jobs’ kitchen, and for the last two decades of his life he came home just about every night and sat down for dinner. “Jobs could have been a better father,” Isaacson concedes. “But I look at that family, and it’s perfectly wonderful. It couldn’t be a better family.”
Yet Isaacson understands how genius worship has led to multiple interpretations. “It’s like arguing the gospels with a fundamentalist,” he says about the futility of trying to rebut what he sees as misreadings of Jobs’ life. He tells me what he’s told lots of people who have sought him out to catechize about the book—that his biographies aren’t how-to manuals for the good life. He isn’t arguing that readers not look for guidance in the story of Jobs; he knows it is the nature of biography-reading to do so. But Isaacson stresses that Jobs’ life was complex, the lessons to be found myriad.
At least since Plutarch illuminated the moral character of famous Greeks and Romans, readers have looked to biographies for guidance and inspiration. My father still recites a corny Longfellow poem he learned as a kid back in the ’50s:
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;
Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.
Some intimate portraits are meant to debunk the iconic figure, their anecdotes served up as exposé. But usually the readers of biographies are supposed to recognize some aspect of themselves, or a wished-for better self, in the footprints of the eminent subjects. The genre is intensely individualistic, rebuffing sociology and collective history, and the reading experience winds up being no less personal.Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.
Ironically, in Jobs’ remarkable story of self-creation we can see why the rest of us are so hungry for a role model to light our own paths. Whether it was in the early days, when he manipulated Steve Wozniak into building products for him to sell, or later in his career, when he was struggling to shape NeXT from scratch, or even after returning to Apple, when he created entirely new products, Jobs had no one to tell him how to realize his vision. He made high-stakes decisions on his own, with little to rely on besides his well-honed intuition. And on a smaller scale, isn’t that true of us all? In life, as in business, there really aren’t any concrete answers or clear guides. We can’t help but see a biography like Steve Jobs as a rare road map to the uncharted world we awake to every morning.
So what, then, is Jobs’ real legacy as a human being? “It’s his passion,” Isaacson says, after some deliberation. “We all want to lead the passionate life. We want a life of emotional connections. If that’s what you get by saying, ‘I will be more like Steve Jobs,’ then that’s not bad.”
The gospel of Steve Jobs has spread far from Silicon Valley to touch people in every field of business. My cousin Jason is a yoga entrepreneur in Asheville, North Carolina; he makes foam accessories to help people stretch more ergonomically. When he came to visit not long ago, he brought his copy of Steve Jobs along with him. “I care about all these tiny design details no one else does,” he says, nodding at the book as it sat between us on my dining room table. “I get frustrated, catching myself telling people who work for me that their ideas are shit.” Our respective children in the next room celebrated their reunion by putting on a succession of princess and monster costumes. Motioning toward them, Jason said he now accepts that traveling constantly and spending less time with family is a necessary trade-off if he, too, wants to produce a great product. “When your karma and your lila meet, you find your dharma—your one true path,” he tells me, citing a precept that might have sat well with Jobs, a devotee of Eastern religions. “It’s a beautiful concept. You discover your way to contribute to the world. That’s what Jobs found. He contributed so much to humanity with his products.”
In the end, that remains the paradox in the life of Steve Jobs. He put his uncompromising and sometimes brutal personality into the creation of products that strike us as beautiful, even uplifting. But the historical moment that he helped to create—a magical intersection of technology and commerce and culture, as our computers and computerized gadgets matured from purely functional items to expressions of ourselves—is unique to his life story. Without his unyielding approach to design, we might never have had our iPods and MacBooks and iPads. But most of us don’t need, or want, to take such an unyielding approach. We don’t operate Apple-sized corporations and redefine industries. Our employees, if we have any, will quit or undermine the company if they are repeatedly called shitheads who suck. Family members will find ways to administer payback if persistently ignored or mistreated. Jobs operated on an entirely different plane from just about anyone else. For the rest of us, trying to behave like him will make us and everyone around us miserable.
As he was writing his 2007 book, The No Asshole Rule, Robert Sutton, a professor of management and engineering at Stanford, felt obligated to include a chapter on “the virtues of assholes,” as he puts it, in large part because of Jobs and his reputation even then as a highly effective bully. Sutton granted in this section that intimidation can be used strategically to gain power. But in most situations, the asshole simply does not get the best results. Psychological studies show that abusive bosses reduce productivity, stifle creativity, and cause high rates of absenteeism, company theft, and turnover—25 percent of bullied employees and 20 percent of those who witness the bullying will eventually quit because of it, according to one study.
When I asked Sutton about the divided response to Jobs’ character, he sent me an excerpt from the epilogue to the new paperback edition of his Good Boss, Bad Boss, written two months after Jobs’ death. In it he describes teaching an innovation seminar to a group of Chinese CEOs who seemed infatuated with Jobs. They began debating in high-volume Mandarin whether copying Jobs’ bad behavior would improve their ability to lead. After a half-hour break, Sutton returned to the classroom to find the CEOs still hollering at one another, many of them emphatic that Jobs succeeded because of—not in spite of—his cruel treatment of those around him.
Sutton now thinks that Jobs was too contradictory and contentious a man, too singular a figure, to offer many usable lessons. As the tale of those Chinese CEOs demonstrates, Jobs has become a Rorschach test, a screen onto which entrepreneurs and executives can project a justification of their own lives: choices they would have made anyway, difficult traits they already possess. “Everyone has their own private Steve Jobs,” Sutton says. “It usually tells you a lot about them—and little about Jobs.”
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Three reasons why America is in such a divisive crappy mess overtaken by douches and lunatics hiding behind the veil of religion just like those crazed Taliban motherfuckers they loathe so much. We can at least attribute the craziness of Talibans to lack of proper education and options available to them.....
Wes Harris, Arizona Tea Party Leader, Seeks To Recall John McCain Over Huma Abedin Defense
By Nick Wing
Conspiracy theories about Secretary of State Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin being linked to the Muslim Brotherhood publicly dribbled down to the lower echelons of conservative politics this week, with an Arizona Tea Party leader promising to launch a recall effort against Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) for his defense of Abedin.Last week, a group of Republican lawmakers led by Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) drew widespread condemnation from both sides of the aisle for the loosely sourced contention that Huma Abedin, the Muslim-American wife of former Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.), had ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.
McCain strongly pushed back against this charge, taking to the Senate floor to call the allegations "nothing less than an unwarranted and unfounded attack on an honorable woman."
Wes Harris, the founder and chairman of the Original North Phoenix Tea Party, now says McCain's words have given him grounds to mount an effort to unseat the longtime senator.
In an interview with the Arizona Capitol Times, Harris called McCain an "embarrassment," before laying out a variety of unapologetic anti-Islamic sentiments.
“Have you ever read the Quran? I suggest you do so, because anyone that is a Muslim is a threat to this country, and that’s a fact,” Harris told the Times. “There is no such thing as a moderate Muslim. If they are Muslim they have to follow the Quran. That’s their religion and that’s their doctrine.”
According to the Times, Harris believes Muslims are incapable of being loyal to the U.S., because he claims that their faith in Islam and the Quran trumps any other allegiance. He also apparently believes Muslims shouldn't be able to serve in the State Department at all.
“Is [Abedin] a Muslim? Is she an active Muslim?” Harris asked the Times. “I rest my case. That’s all she needs to be.”
In his email airing his grievances, Harris also linked to the Bare Naked Islam blog, an internet clearinghouse for Islamophobia that claims to have further proof of Abedin's supposed ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. One post touts a new report from the Center for Security Policy, the right-wing think tank behind the paper that led to Bachmann and her cohort's initial inquiry, that seeks to unveil the "Islamist" roots of Abedin's mother.
While other top Republicans, including House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), came out to reject Bachmann's accusation, Harris says McCain's defense of Abedin is just the latest in a string of actions that have warranted a recall effort.
“Go to hell, Senator, it’s time for you to take your final dirt nap,” Harris concludes.
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Bryan Fischer Blames 'Liberals' Way' For Aurora Mass Shooting (VIDEO)
Pundits across the political spectrum have been quick to use the weekend's tragic mass shooting at an Aurora, Colo., movie theater as a means of pushing various threads of partisan rhetoric.
Bryan Fischer, the oft-quoted mouthpiece of the American Family Association, was quick to jump on the bandwagon, tying the mass shooting first to a general breakdown in Judeo-Christian values, and most recently to the public school system's teaching of evolution.
The Raw Story published comments made Monday by Fischer, the director of issues analysis for the fundamentalist Christian organization, during his daily radio show, "Focal Point." In an impressive feat of extrapolation, Fischer linked the massacre to “the liberals’ way” of teaching the theory of evolution and preventing prayer in schools.
Fischer wondered aloud if bestselling author and California magachurch evangelical Reverend Rick Warren was referring to the alleged shooter, James Holmes, when he tweeted, “When students are taught they are no different from animals, they act like it."
"If this tweet was connected to the shooting, to this James Holmes, to the one that killed the 12 and wounded the 58 in this theater, it would be appropriate,” Fischer said.
Fischer went on to blame Holmes' murderous tendencies on Charles' Darwin's principle of survival of the fittest.
"[Holmes] sees himself as evolutionarily advanced just like he was taught in school about Darwin, that this is how natural selection works," Fischer said.
Fischer then moved on to also blame the killings on the end of organized prayer in schools. The Supreme Court prohibited state-sponsored prayer in schools in two landmark cases in the early 1960s: Engel v. Vitale in 1962 and Abington School District v. Schempp one year later.
"We have spent 60 years telling God to get lost,” Fischer said. "What if every single day in [James Holmes'] educational process, there had been readings from the word of God ... Who knows if things could have been different. But we’ve tried it the other way. The point of my column, we’ve tried it the liberals’ way for 60 years now. What do we got? We have massacres in Aurora.”
Fischer did not mention the fact that James Holmes' family belonged to the Penasquitos Lutheran Church for about ten years, as originally reported by the Associated Press. Holmes' mother still attends services there regularly.
The American Family Association is no stranger to controversy. In comments made during a segment of the AFA Journal program on Friday and reported by Right Wing Watch, AFA news director Fred Jackson, co-host Teddy James and guest Jerry Newcombe of the Truth in Action Ministries suggested that violent incidents in America, including in Aurora, were evidence of God's judgement.
"The AFA Journal has been dealing with denominations that no longer believe in the God of the Bible," Jackson said. "They no longer believe that Jesus is the only way of salvation, they teach that God is OK with homosexuality, this is just increasing more and more. It is mankind shaking its fist at the authority of God."
"And God will not be silent when he’s mocked, and we need to remember that," James said, to which Jackson replied, "We are seeing his judgment. You know, some people talk about ‘God’s judgment must be just around the corner,’ we are seeing it."
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WSJ Columnist Questions Chivalrous Acts Of Aurora Shootings, Is Probably A Horrible Boyfriend
Bryan Fischer, the oft-quoted mouthpiece of the American Family Association, was quick to jump on the bandwagon, tying the mass shooting first to a general breakdown in Judeo-Christian values, and most recently to the public school system's teaching of evolution.
The Raw Story published comments made Monday by Fischer, the director of issues analysis for the fundamentalist Christian organization, during his daily radio show, "Focal Point." In an impressive feat of extrapolation, Fischer linked the massacre to “the liberals’ way” of teaching the theory of evolution and preventing prayer in schools.
Fischer wondered aloud if bestselling author and California magachurch evangelical Reverend Rick Warren was referring to the alleged shooter, James Holmes, when he tweeted, “When students are taught they are no different from animals, they act like it."
"If this tweet was connected to the shooting, to this James Holmes, to the one that killed the 12 and wounded the 58 in this theater, it would be appropriate,” Fischer said.
Fischer went on to blame Holmes' murderous tendencies on Charles' Darwin's principle of survival of the fittest.
"[Holmes] sees himself as evolutionarily advanced just like he was taught in school about Darwin, that this is how natural selection works," Fischer said.
Fischer then moved on to also blame the killings on the end of organized prayer in schools. The Supreme Court prohibited state-sponsored prayer in schools in two landmark cases in the early 1960s: Engel v. Vitale in 1962 and Abington School District v. Schempp one year later.
"We have spent 60 years telling God to get lost,” Fischer said. "What if every single day in [James Holmes'] educational process, there had been readings from the word of God ... Who knows if things could have been different. But we’ve tried it the other way. The point of my column, we’ve tried it the liberals’ way for 60 years now. What do we got? We have massacres in Aurora.”
Fischer did not mention the fact that James Holmes' family belonged to the Penasquitos Lutheran Church for about ten years, as originally reported by the Associated Press. Holmes' mother still attends services there regularly.
The American Family Association is no stranger to controversy. In comments made during a segment of the AFA Journal program on Friday and reported by Right Wing Watch, AFA news director Fred Jackson, co-host Teddy James and guest Jerry Newcombe of the Truth in Action Ministries suggested that violent incidents in America, including in Aurora, were evidence of God's judgement.
"The AFA Journal has been dealing with denominations that no longer believe in the God of the Bible," Jackson said. "They no longer believe that Jesus is the only way of salvation, they teach that God is OK with homosexuality, this is just increasing more and more. It is mankind shaking its fist at the authority of God."
"And God will not be silent when he’s mocked, and we need to remember that," James said, to which Jackson replied, "We are seeing his judgment. You know, some people talk about ‘God’s judgment must be just around the corner,’ we are seeing it."
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WSJ Columnist Questions Chivalrous Acts Of Aurora Shootings, Is Probably A Horrible Boyfriend
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