2.29 “It’s scary,” South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who has endorsed Marco Rubio, said on ABC’sThis Week She added: “I think what Trump will do to the Republican Party is really make us question who we are and what we’re about. And that’s something we don’t want to see happen.”
2.28 George Kennedy dies
2.28 Chris Rock at the Oscars: “I counted at least 15 black people in that montage. Welcome to the White People’s Choice Awards. You realize that if they nominated hosts, I wouldn’t even get this job. Y’all’d be watching Neil Patrick Harris now. But this is the wildest, craziest Oscars to ever host because they’ve got all this controversy. No black nominees, you know, and people are like ‘Chris, you should boycott. Chris you should quit, you should quit.’ You know, how come it’s unemployed people who always tell you to quit something. You know. No one with a job ever tells you to quit. So I thought about quitting, I thought about it real hard. But I realized they’re gonna have the Oscars anyway. They’re not gonna cancel the Oscars because I quit. You know, and the last thing I need is to lose another job to Kevin Hart. Okay. I don’t need that. Kev, Kev right there (points at Hart), makes movies fast. Porno stars don’t make movies that fast. Now the thing is, why are we protesting … the big question, Why this Oscars, why this Oscars? It’s the 88th Academy Awards. The 88th Academy Awards. Which means this whole no black nominees thing has happened at least 71 other times. Okay, you gotta figure that it happened in the ‘50s, in the ‘60s. You know, in the ‘60s, one of those years Sidney [Poitier] didn’t put out a movie. I’m sure there were no black nominees those years. Say ‘62, ‘63. And black people did not protest. Why? Because we had real things to protest at the time. You know. We had real things to protest. We were too busy being raped and lynched to care about who won for best cinematographer. When you’re grandmother’s swinging from a tree, it’s really hard to care about best documentary foreign short. What happened this year? What happened? People went mad. Spike got mad. Sharpton got mad. Will got mad. Jada got mad. Jada’s said she’s not coming. She’s protesting. Isn’t she on a TV show. Jada’s gonna boycott the Oscars. Jada’s boycotting the Oscars is like me boycotting Rihanna’s panties. I wasn’t invited. Though that’s not an invitation I would turn down. But I understand. I’m not hating. I understand you’re mad. Jada’s mad. Her man, Will’s not nominated for “Concussion.” I get it. I get it. You get mad. You say it’s not fair that Will was this good and didn’t get nominated. You’re right. It’s also not fair that Will got paid $20 million for Wild, Wild West. Okay. Okay.This year the Oscars things are going to be a little different. Things are gonna be a little different at the Oscars. This year, in the In Memoriam package it’s just going to be black people that were shot by the cops on the way to the movies. Yes, I said it. All right. If you want black nominees every year, you need to just have black categories. That’s what you need. You need to have black categories. You already do it with men and women. Think about it. There’s no reason for there to be a man and a woman category in acting. Come on. There’s no reason. It’s not track and field. You don’t have to separate them. You know, Robert De Niro’s never said, ‘I’d better slow this acting down, so Meryl Streep can catch up.’ No. Not all all, man. If you want black people every year at the Oscars just have black categories. Like best black friend. That’s right. And the winner for the 18th year in a row is Wanda Sykes. This is Wanda’s 18th black Oscar. The real question everybody wants to know in the world is Is Hollywood racist? Is Hollywood racist? You know, that’s – you gotta go at that the right way. Is it burning cross racist? No. Is it fetch me some lemonade racist? No. It’s a different type of racist. Now, I remember one night I was at a fundraiser for President Obama, a lot of you were there. And you know it’s me and all of Hollywood. It’s all of us there and about four black people. Me. Let’s see. Quincy Jones. Russell Simmons. Questlove. You know, the usual suspects. You know and every black actor that wasn’t working. Needless to say Kev Hart was not there. So at some point you get to take a picture with the President. And they’re setting up the picture. You get like a little moment with the President. I’m like, ‘Mr. President, you see all these writers and producers, actors, they don’t hire black people. And they’re not nicest white people on earth. They’re liberals.’ Cheese. That’s right. Is Hollywood racist? You’re damn right Hollywood’s racist? But not the racist you’ve grown accustomed to. Hollywood is ‘sorority racist.’ It’s like, ‘We like you Rhonda, but you’re not a Kappa.’ That’s Hollywood.
2.26
Cuomo hires author, editor as senior speechwriter
By JIMMY VIELKIND 5:35 p.m. | Feb. 26, 2016follow this reporter
ALBANY — Gov. Andrew Cuomo has hired Jamie Malanowski, a veteran author and former editor at Esquire, Time and Playboy, to be a speechwriter, one of a series of promotions and moves announced Friday. Malanowski, whose credits include a novel called Mr. Stupid Goes to Washington, has been a writer and editor for over 30 years. He was national editor at Spy from 1986 to 1993, a senior editor at Esquire in 1994 and 1995 and held the same position at Time over the following three years, according to Cuomo’s announcement. The official biography from Cuomo’s office does not mention that Malanowski was managing editor at Playboy. But it is mentioned on Malanowski’s website. According to his LinkedIn profile, he worked there from 2004 to 2008. Malanowski will serve as “senior speechwriter for the executive chamber.” His appointment comes after Cuomo — who the Wall Street Journal once reported writes his own speeches — hired two other speechwriters last year: Camonghne Felix, a former contributing editor to Vogue, and Pam Widener, a freelance film and television producer.
2.26 Alex Rodriguez: “As far as advice, I would say focus on your job on the field, it starts there. Two, focus on building great relationships in the clubhouse and three, anytime any of us run into a challenging situation it gives you an opportunity to look in the mirror and make some changes.’’
2.24 Greg Popovich: “For us, it’s easy. We’re looking for character, but what the hell does that mean? We’re looking for people—and I’ve said it many times—[who] have gotten over themselves, and you can tell that pretty quickly. You can talk to somebody for four or five minutes, and you can tell if it’s about them, or if they understand that they’re just a piece of the puzzle. So we look for that. A sense of humor is a huge thing with us. You’ve got to be able to laugh. You’ve got to be able to take a dig, give a dig—that sort of thing. … We need people who can handle information and not take it personally because in most of these organizations, there’s a big divide. All of the sudden, the wall goes up between management and coaching and everybody is ready to blame back and forth and that’s the rule rather than the exception. It just happens. But that’s about people. It’s about finding people who have all of those qualities. So, we do our best to look for that and when somebody comes, they figure it out pretty quick.”
2.15 Lunch with David Yaffe
2.13 Antonin Scalia dies
2.9 Trump romps in the New Hampshire primary, beats Kasich 35% to 5%
2.9 David Brooks in the Times: “Take health care. Passing Obamacare was a mighty lift that led to two gigantic midterm election defeats. As Megan McArdle pointed out in her Bloomberg View column, Obamacare took coverage away from only a small minority of Americans. Sanderscare would take employer coverage away from tens of millions of satisfied customers, destroy the health insurance business and levy massive new tax hikes. This is epic social disruption. To think you could pass Sanderscare through a polarized Washington and in a country deeply suspicious of government is to live in intellectual fairyland. President Obama may have been too cautious, especially in the Middle East, but at least he’s able to grasp the reality of the situation.”
2.7 Super Bowl 50 Defense dominates as Denver beats Carolina. MVP Von Miller causes two fumbles the lead to scores.
2.3 John Podhoretz: “The polls showing Trump leading everywhere have been registering the results of his astounding command of the media — but have always been blurred somewhat by his undeniably high negatives.” Perhaps, in the Iowa results, we saw the first real effects of Trump’s unpopularity with Republicans — that he may be generating actual negative turnout of the sort pollsters find difficult to measure. People may not have crawled through glass to vote for him. They may have crawled through glass to tell Trump to take a well-deserved hike.
2.3 John Cleese: “I’ve been warned recently, don’t go to most university campuses because the political correctness has been taken . . . to the point where any kind of criticism of any individual or group can be labeled cruel . . . [But] all humor is critical. If we start saying, oh, we musn’t criticize or offend them, then humor is gone, and with humor goes a sense of proportion, and then, as far as I’m concerned, you’re living in ‘1984.’ ”
2.2 Rich Lowry in National Review: “Two of the most illuminating and alarming books of the past few years — Coming Apart by Charles Murray and Our Kids by Robert Putnam — described the struggles of working-class America. This is the year that the facts and figures in the pages of those books have made themselves palpably felt in our politics, both left and right. White working-class life in America has been in a slow-motion disintegration for decades, and it shows. The white working class is an archipelago of hopelessness. It is in a funk about the economy (almost 80 percent think we are still in a recession) and, more fundamentally, the American future. According to the American Values Survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute, only about 40 percent of the white working class say the country’s best days are ahead. This is not only lower than college-educated whites (53 percent), but much lower than blacks (60 percent) and Hispanics (56 percent). It is astonishing to think that the white working class has a dimmer view of the nation’s future than blacks, who have been historically discriminated against and still lag badly on almost every socio-economic indicator. As noted by the National Journal’s acute analyst Ronald Brownstein, a survey for The Pew Charitable Trusts picked up the same finding a few years ago. It asked people whether they expected to be better off in 10 years. Whereas two-thirds of blacks and Hispanics said “yes,” only 44 percent of whites without a college degree said the same.We are conditioned by the media to be obsessed with race, when class is an increasingly important divider. (No one ever earnestly says on a cable-TV show that we need to have “a conversation about class in America.”) The class divide among whites shows up again and again on questions about the fairness of the country. The American Values Survey finds that white working-class Americans distrust institutions like the government and business more than college-educated whites do; they are more likely to think that their vote doesn’t matter because of the influence of wealthy interests; they are more likely to think that hard work doesn’t necessarily lead to success. There is a sense among working-class whites that America has gone off the rails, and has been that way for a long time. Sixty-two percent of them say American culture has gotten worse since the 1950s, whereas only 49 percent of college-educated whites agree. (Similarly, the working class has a much more jaded view of immigration, which has been a defining feature of American life in recent decades.) If our politics has a coloration of anger and despair, it is only the dismaying trends written about by social scientists Charles Murray, Robert Putnam and Bradford Wilcox coming home to roost. Besides the economic battering that lower-skilled workers have taken in recent decades, the working class is increasingly disconnected from the institutions that lend meaning and hope to people’s lives: marriage, the workforce, churches and other institutions of civil society. They believe that the long-standing American promise of a country where children are better off than their parents has been betrayed, and they sense that their time is past — a sense reinforced by a pop culture that tends to consider them afterthoughts, or fitting subjects for mockery. Although smaller than it once was, the white working class remains about 40 percent of the electorate. Its travails can’t — and won’t — be ignored.
2.1 Iowa caucuses. Cruz takes 27.6 percent, beats Trump with 24.3 percent, and Rubio with 23.1 Huckabee
