links for 2011-07-14

"She's a well-educated, successful woman from a blue-collar background who took a break from her successful career to basically raise their adorable children while her husband is president. She is not 'threatening' like Hillary Clinton, who actually wanted to be president herself. Or, at least, she's not 'threatening' unless you're just 'threatened' by… successful, powerful, black women. (I'm sorry, I meant to say 'uppity.')

"The clue that this is not related at all to anything Michelle Obama has actually done (or said), but rather who she is, is the legend of the old 'Whitey' tape, which various right-wingers promised to produce, and which I, for one, still cannot wait to hear."

"Yet the three million professional, long-term home caregivers today are faced with a rapidly aging Baby Boomer population and a lack of adequate support, compensation or respect. Yesterday in Washington, the National Domestic Workers Alliance held what they called a Care Congress, an event where they introduced a campaign to 'transform long-term care.' The campaign is designed to push legislative changes to Medicare and Medicaid—creating jobs by increasing the amount of money eligible people can spend on at-home care and allowing a rapidly aging population to avoid institutionalization.

"Labor Secretary Hilda Solis praised the work of home care workers—a group comprised primarily of immigrant women…"

To quote molecularshyness, "I have no words." >> "Taegan Goddard picked up on a disturbing comment from Republican Rep. Mo Brooks to a local television station in Alabama:

'As your congressman on the House floor, I will do anything short of shooting them. Anything that is lawful, it needs to be done because illegal aliens need to quit taking jobs from American citizens.'

"During the same brief interview, Brooks also said that so many [undocumented immigrants] were in an Alabama jail because they had 'victimized Americans.'"

"Hispanics, now the second-largest group in the U.S., are more likely to go to movies, the Motion Picture Association of America says. Last year, 43 million Hispanics purchased 351 million movie tickets, an MPAA report says, an uptick from the 37 million who bought 300 million tickets the previous year.

And in 2010, when Nielsen examined that coveted group of heavy moviegoers — people who see on average 16 movies a year and contribute to 63 percent of ticket sales — it found that Hispanics make up 26 percent of those frequenting theaters."

"The second study looked at romantic comedies. And race definitely played a role when it came time for on-screen kisses.

“'The higher the percentage of black actors in the movie, the less interested white participants were in seeing the movie,' Weaver wrote of the second group. 'Importantly, this effect occurred regardless of participants’ racial attitudes or actors’ relative celebrity … This finding would also seem to lend credence to producers’ concerns about casting black actors into these kinds of romantic roles.'”

Penn will reportedly be leaving his post of associate director in the office of public engagement at the White House later this month, and their 'HIMYM' source says he will play a new love interest for unlucky-in-love Robin Scherbatsky (played by Cobie Smulders).