Russell Baker: Reconstructing Ronald Reagan (nybooks.com)
Of the seventeen presidents the United States has survived since Theodore Roosevelt declined his third term, none is so mystifying as Ronald Reagan. A New Deal Democrat until the age of fifty, he became the most revered Republican of his generation; a child of the working class, he inspired business to heightened resistance to labor. Admired for his belligerence toward the Soviet Union-"the evil empire"-he became the great peacemaker of his generation. Tirelessly denouncing big government, he made government bigger; a champion of fiscal conservatism, he inherited a deficit of $80 billion and in eight years increased it to $200 billion.
Roger Ebert: Oscar's in the driver's seat
In a year when the Academy Award nominations are more diverse and international than ever before, it's anyone's guess who will win best picture. "Dreamgirls" garnered more nominations than any other movie, but was passed over for both picture and director.
Sunny til late afternoon when the clouds rolled in.
Bit of rain tonight.
Tonight, Sunday:
CBS starts the night with '60 Minutes', followed by the LIVE on the East Coast (tape-delayed & edited on the left coast) 'Grammy Awards'.
NBC opens the night with a FRESH'Grease: You're The One That I Want', followed by a FRESH'Apprentice', then a FRESH'Crossing Jordan'.
ABC begins the night with a FRESH 2-hour 'Extreme Makeover: Home Edition', followed by a FRESH'Desperate Housewives', then a FRESH'Brothers & Sisters'.
The CW offers a RERUN'reba', followed by a FRESH'reba', then a FRESH'7th Heaven', followed by a RERUN'Beauty & The Geek'.
Faux has a RERUN'King Of The Hill', followed by a RERUN'Simpsons', then a FRESH'Simpsons', followed by a FRESH'King Of The Hill', then a FRESH'Family Guy', followed by a FRESH'American Dad'.
MY has the movie 'Hart's War', followed by the movie 'America's Sweethearts'.
A&E has 'Cold Case Files', 'The First 48', another 'The First 48', and 'Intervention'.
AMC offers the movie 'A Bronx Tale', followed by the movie 'Open Range'.
BBC -
[1:00 PM] Whose Line Is It Anyway? - Episode 7;
[1:30 PM] Calendar Girls - Calendar Girls;
[3:30 PM] Dead Again - Dead Again;
[5:30 PM] Hope and Glory - Hope and Glory;
[8:00 PM] The British Academy Film Awards (2007) - The British Academy Film Awards (2007);
[10:00 PM] Footballers Wive$: Overtime - Episode 5;
[11:00 PM] The British Academy Film Awards (2007) - British Academy Film Awards (2007);
[1:00 AM] Footballers Wive$: Overtime - Episode 5;
[1:30 AM] What Not To Wear - Red Carpet Special - What Not To Wear - Red Carpet Special;
[2:30 AM] What Not To Wear - Ep. 4 Jane Anderson;
[3:00 AM] Little Britain - Episode 1;
[3:40 AM] Little Britain - Episode 2;
[4:20 AM] Little Britain - Episode 3;
[5:00 AM] Spaced - Episode 1;
[5:30 AM] Spaced - Episode 2;
[6:00 AM] BBC World News - BBC World News. (ALL TIMES EST)
History has 'Modern Marvels', another 'Modern Marvels', and 'Alaska: Dangerous Territory'.
IFC -
[07:00 AM] Ed Wood;
[09:10 AM] Jet Lag;
[10:40 AM] Personal Velocity: Three Portraits;
[12:10 PM] Below;
[02:00 PM] In America;
[04:05 PM] Jet Lag;
[05:35 PM] Below;
[07:25 PM] My Son the Fanatic;
[09:00 PM] Y Tu Mama Tambien;
[10:50 PM] IFC News Special;
[11:00 PM] The Dreamers;
[01:00 AM] Female Trouble;
[02:45 AM] Y Tu Mama Tambien;
[04:45 AM] The Dreamers. (ALL TIMES EST)
SciFi has the movie 'Thirteen Ghosts', 'The Dresden Files', and 'Battlestar Galactica'.
Sundance -
[06:30 AM] Mademoiselle and the Doctor;
[08:00 AM] L'homme sans ombre;
[08:15 AM] Lucie Aubrac;
[10:15 AM] Interesting Times: The War of Love;
[11:00 AM] Iconoclasts Season 2: Episode 4: Isabella Rossellini + Dean Kamen;
[12:00 PM] The List of Adrian Messenger;
[01:45 PM] Being Bad;
[02:00 PM] One Punk Under God: Episode 3;
[02:30 PM] Wasp;
[03:00 PM] Slings & Arrows - Season 1: Episode 1 - Oliver's Dream;
[03:50 PM] Slings & Arrows - Season 1: Episode 2 - Geoffrey's Return;
[04:40 PM] Slings & Arrows - Season 1: Episode 3 - Madness in Great Ones;
[05:30 PM] Slings & Arrows - Season 1: Episode 4 - Outrageous Fortune;
[06:20 PM] Slings & Arrows - Season 1: Episode 5 - A Mirror Up to Nature;
[07:10 PM] Slings & Arrows - Season 1: Episode 6 - Playing the Swan;
[08:00 PM] A Man's Gotta Do;
[09:35 PM] Wasp;
[10:00 PM] Long Distance;
[11:35 PM] Sea Horses;
[12:00 AM] Acacia;
[01:45 AM] Jane Birkin - Mother of All Babes;
[02:45 AM] At Play In the Fields of the Lord. (ALL TIMES EST)
Members of 'The Dixie Chicks' (L-R) Emily Robinson, Natalie Maines and Martie Maguire pose as they arrive at the 2007 Musicares Person of the Year dinner honoring musician Don Henley in Los Angeles February 9, 2007. Musicares, a charitable foundation, provides musicians in need with financial and medical assistance.
Photo by Fred Prouser
John Mayer and the Dixie Chicks helped guide Don Henley on a trip through his musical memories that left the singer-songwriter feeling "very strange." They joined Henley's Eagles bandmate Timothy B. Schmit, Sam Moore, Keb Mo, Trisha Yearwood, Michael McDonald, Shawn Colvin and Seal in launching Grammy weekend by honoring the 59-year-old Henley as MusiCares Person of the Year on Friday night.
Surrounded by his wife, three daughters and son, Henley listened as the biggest hits of his career with the Eagles and as a solo artist were interpreted in the city where the band formed in the early 1970s.
Henley was honored for his achievements as a musician and for his philanthropic work benefiting environmental issues and musicians' rights and concerns.
Actor David Hasselhoff, left, and Mel Brooks share the stage at the grand opening of the musical comedy 'The Producers' at the Paris hotel-casino in Las Vegas on Friday, Feb. 9, 2007.
Photo by Jae C. Hong
Shaking hands with droves of cheering street children, Mia Farrow began a weeklong tour of the Central African Republic on Saturday to draw attention - and aid - to one of the world's forgotten crises.
The 62-year-old actress and U.N. goodwill ambassador will visit some of the 150,000 people displaced by the nation's simmering conflict and tour northern towns recently ravaged by fighting close to the borders with Chad and Sudan's troubled Darfur region.
"It's called a forgotten crisis, a forgotten humanitarian crisis, but forgotten implies that it was once remembered," Farrow told The Associated Press in an interview in the country's capital of dirt roads and tumbledown, tin-roofed buildings. "I'm not sure it was in anyone's consciousness ... it's undetected."
Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, his wife of more than 50 years, received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Friday for their respective careers.
Their children - actors Ben Stiller and Amy Stiller - and actor Jason Alexander joined the couple as they were presented with the 2,328th star.
Stiller and Meara were the fourth married couple to receive a joint star on the Walk of Fame, after Sonny and Cher, television's Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, and radio's Fibber McGee and Molly (Jim and Marian Jordan), according to the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, which oversees the Walk of Fame.
Talk show host and commentator Tavis Smiley has struck a deal with events giant AEG to develop a series of projects to focus on arts, culture, education and social advocacy. Separately, Smiley also has been hired by PBS to host two forums with presidential candidates this year.
The first venture of the Smiley-AEG partnership will be the TV special "Living the Dream: A Night at the Apollo" awards show and tribute to Martin Luther King Jr. Starting next year, the partnership will shepherd a touring museum exhibit examining "the African-American imprint on our country and culture."
Another project in the works is dubbed "Table of Free Voices USA" and will be staged in October in Philadelphia, with more than 100 leaders in "the world's largest social discourse" discussing a range of issues and topics with an audience in a Q&A-style setting that will have a Web simulcast.
Smiley, who hosts an eponymous talk show based out of PBS' Los Angeles affiliate KCET-TV, will host a forum with Democratic presidential candidates to air June 28 at Howard University in Washington. A similar session with Republican candidates will be held September 27 at Morgan State University in Baltimore.
Singers Jackson Browne (L) and Keb' Mo' pose as they arrive at the 2007 Musicares Person of the Year dinner honoring musician Don Henley in Los Angeles February 9, 2007. Musicares, a charitable foundation, provides musicians in need with financial and medical assistance.
Photo by Fred Prouser
A man who approached Nobel Peace laureate and Holocaust scholar Eli Wiesel seeking an interview at a San Francisco hotel last week later roughed him up, police said.
Police are investigating the incident in which they say a man, who may have been a Holocaust denier, approached Wiesel in an elevator at a peace forum at the Argent Hotel Feb. 1 and requested an interview.
When Wiesel consented to talk in the hotel's lobby, the man insisted it be done in a hotel room and dragged the 78-year-old off the elevator on the sixth floor, police Sgt. Neville Gittens said.
R&B singer Gerald Levert's death last fall was an accident caused by a fatal combination of prescription narcotics and over-the-counter drugs, a coroner said.
The drugs in his bloodstream included the narcotic pain relievers Vicodin, Percocet and Darvocet, along with anxiety medication Xanax and two over-the-counter antihistamines, Geauga County Coroner Kevin Chartrand said. The official cause of death was acute intoxication, and the death was ruled accidental.
Levert, 40, son of O'Jays singer Eddie Levert, died Nov. 10 in his suburban Cleveland home. He was a member of the R&B trio LeVert, whose hits included "(Pop, Pop, Pop, Pop) Goes My Mind" and "Casanova." He sold millions of albums and had numerous hits over his career.
A plaintiff in a federal lawsuit against Pat Robertson says the televangelist threatened his life and that of his family at a legal proceeding Wednesday in the Norfolk federal courthouse.
Phillip Busch is suing Robertson, alleging that the broadcaster used his image for a commercial purpose without compensating him, in the promotion of Robertson's protein diet shake.
According to a complaint Busch filed with the Norfolk police, in a courtroom Wednesday Robertson told Busch: "I am going to kill you and your family." Robertson's attorney, Glen Huff, denied the allegation Thursday, saying: "There was no such threat."
In this photo released by the Florida Keys News Bureau, marine life artist Robert Wyland paints a green moray eel on a four-story building Saturday, Feb. 10, 2007, in Key Largo, Fla. The entire mural, depicting a Florida Keys coral reef scene, is about 7,500 square feet and wraps around the four-sided building. This is the 95th in Wyland's planned series of 100 mammoth marine environmental murals and the final one he intends to paint in the United States.
Photo by Andy Newman
Russell Crowe says his rugby league club's cheerleading squad is being cut because skimpily clad cheerleaders detract from the game and make spectators uncomfortable.
The Oscar-winning actor, who is part-owner in the South Sydney Rabbitohs club, said the club had become concerned that the cheerleaders - whose uniform includes fishnet stockings and tasseled miniskirts in the white, green and red team colors - were inappropriate entertainment.
"It makes women uncomfortable and it makes blokes who take their son to the football also uncomfortable," Crowe was quoted as saying in News Ltd. newspapers Friday.
Ryuko Hoshino, an expert of Japanese art of "gyotaku" shows off a fish print made from a sea bream, top, and the fish during the International Fishing Show in Yokohama on the outskirts of Tokyo, Saturday, Feb. 10, 2007. Hoshino paints the paper-covered fish lying on foam plate for about an hour, to capture the details of its shape.
Photo by Koji Sasahara
A 66-year-old Brazilian man wrestled with a 15-foot (5-metre) anaconda for nearly half an hour to free his grandson from the snake's crushing death grip, local media reported on Friday.
Matheus Pereira de Araujo, 8, would likely be dead inside the belly of the 80 pound (35 kg) anaconda if his grandfather had not heard his screams for help, zoologists said.
When the snake struck Araujo, who lives in the world's third largest metropolis of Sao Paulo, he was playing with a cousin on Wednesday in a creek bed on his grandfather's farm 310 miles (500 km) from the city in a town called Cosmorama.
Joaquim Pereira killed the snake after a long struggle to free the boy, who needed 21 stitches on his chest where the snake bit him.
People wander through the stripe-patterned high and low pillar sculptures of French minimal artist Daniel Buren in the Palais Royal court, as photos of dancers from the company of French choreographer Maurice Bejart, performing on stage, are seen during a multimedia projection on the facade of the Palais Royal buildings, Saturday, Feb. 10, 2007 in Paris. The projection, conceived by Antoine Manichon, with photos by Colette Masson, and music by Pierre Henry, pays homage to Bejart and his 50-year-long career as a dancer and a choreographer. Bejart turned 80 on Jan. 1, 2007.
Photo by Laurent Emmanuel
Batman has been cruising the streets of South Florida, but he's not looking for the Joker. He's trying to sell the Batmobile.
Terry Lobzun donned the cape and cowl to generate publicity for an auction of the 1966 TV series replica. He spent Thursday afternoon driving up and down A1A in Fort Lauderdale, The Miami Herald reported.
This Batmobile will be offered up Saturday afternoon at the Florida Collector Car Auction at the Broward County Convention Center, where it's expected to sell for between $100,000 and $200,000. Other replicas in the past have sold in the $100,000 range.
Si Mao, a three-year-old orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus), practices standing while wearing clothes at a zoo in Nanning, capital of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous region in southern China, February 10, 2007.
Photo by /Jason Lee
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Just plain vile, filthy rumors?
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