November 14, 2017

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Entertainment November 14, 2017

Today in Movie Culture: What You Need to Know Before 'Justice League,' David Fincher's Use of Music and More

Here are a bunch of little bites to satisfy your hunger for movie culture:

Franchise Recap of the Day:

Get ready for Justice League with this funny redubbed recap of the events of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice:

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Movie Trivia of the Day:

Also in preparation for Justice League, CineFix shares a bunch of possibly obscure pieces of trivia about the superhero team:

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Casting Rendering of the Day:

Charlie Heaton is playing Cannonball in The New Mutants, so that’s the character he’s depicted as in BossLogic’s Stranger Things cast as X-Men series:

Stranger X-men – #charlieheaton Cannonball since he will be playing him, no chance of him looking like this since it’s more a horror movie.

I might just finish the cast for you guys if that’s what you want 🙂 #strangerthings@Stranger_Things@NewMutantsFilmpic.twitter.com/aVwHHMrKjA

— BossLogic (@Bosslogic) November 14, 2017

Fan Build of the Day:

Thor may have lost his hammer in Thor: Ragnarok, but this fan shows off his own flying Mjolnir drone in this video:

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Vintage Image of the Day:

Veronica Lake, who was born on this day in 1922, has a drink on the set of This Gun for Hire in 1941:

Actor in the Spotlight:

Fandor celebrates Jaws and The French Connection star Roy Scheider as an underrated action hero:

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Filmmaker in Focus:

Inspired by Mindhunter, The Discarded Image’s Julian Palmer looks at David Fincher’s use of pop music in his movies and TV shows:

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Movie Food of the Day:

The latest edition of Binging with Babish shows how to make a number of treats from the Harry Potter franchise:

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Cosplay of the Day:

Another Avengers cosplay the week of Justice League, here’s a great Agent Carter:

Peggy Carter (photography by HubsterPhotography; edit by @jennmarvel1 ) #AgentCarter#CaptainAmerica#cosplaypic.twitter.com/77nLLOUqfZ

— Dee Ellie (@DeeGuardia) November 13, 2017

Classic Trailer of the Day:

This week is the 60th anniversary of the release of Zero Hour!, the movie spoofed by Airplane! Watch the original trailer for the classic thriller below.

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and

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Health November 14, 2017

Republican Senators Add Repeal Of Individual Health Care Mandate To Tax Bill

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., at a news conference on Tuesday where they announced that the individual mandate to have health insurance would be repealed in the Senate GOP tax bill.

J. Scott Applewhite/AP

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J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Updated 5:56 p.m. ET

Senate Republicans now plan to try to repeal the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate as part of a tax overhaul bill.

Several Senate Republicans said Tuesday that including the repeal in tax legislation, currently making its way through a key Senate committee, would allow them to further reduce tax rates for individuals without adding more to the deficit.

The decision was a rapid change of direction for Republicans, who previously believed it would be politically dangerous to add any health care measure to the tax legislation.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters Tuesday that members of the Senate Finance Committee believe tacking on the repeal will ensure the bill has sufficient votes to pass when it comes up for a vote in the Senate.

“We’re optimistic that inserting the individual mandate repeal would be helpful,” McConnell said, “and that’s obviously the view of the Senate Finance Committee Republicans as well.”

The Congressional Budget Office said last week that such a repeal would reduce federal deficits by $338 billion over the next 10 years, which would help the GOP avoid exceeding a $1.5 trillion cap on how much the tax bill can add to the deficit over the same time period. The repeal would also increase the number of uninsured by 13 million by 2027, according to the CBO.

Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., a top McConnell deputy, said the savings from the repeal would give Republicans more room to cut taxes for the middle class.

“It will be distributed in the form of middle-income tax relief,” Thune said. “It will probably mean adjusting the rate structure as we have today. We’ll probably still have seven brackets, but they would be at different rates.”

Asked if he was confident such a bill could pass, Thune said yes, adding that leaders had already “whipped” the bill, meaning they already know how their colleagues will vote.

Not all Republicans agree with the decision. Moderate Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said she had not decided how she will vote on the tax bill, but she worries that ending the individual mandate could increase health care premiums.

“I personally think it complicates tax reform to put the repeal of the individual mandate in there,” Collins said. “I’m going to wait and see what the bill says.”

But adding it in could appeal to other skeptics of the legislation, including Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who supports the individual mandate repeal.

The Senate Finance Committee is expected to release an updated version of the legislation Tuesday evening. The committee plans to approve the bill later this week in hopes of holding a vote in the full Senate before Thanksgiving.

Republicans on the Finance Committee worked around the clock in recent days to try to bring down the long-term cost of their tax bill. Republicans want to take advantage of complicated Senate budget rules, known as reconciliation, that would allow them to pass the tax bill with 51 votes rather than the 60 needed for most other legislation. That would allow the 52 Senate Republicans to pass the bill without the help of any Democrats.

But those same budget rules require that the tax overhaul not add to the deficit after 10 years. The Senate bill appeared to violate those regulations as recently as Tuesday morning. Repealing the individual mandate could help ease the fiscal pressure.

Democrats, enraged over McConnell’s announcement, said adding the individual mandate to the legislation effectively ended any chance for bipartisan agreement on taxes. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., the top Democrat on the Finance Committee, said repealing the mandate would hurt the middle class.

“In their desperation to secure an ideological trophy, no matter the consequences,” Wyden said, “Republicans are choosing to pay for corporate tax cuts by raising premiums for middle class families and ripping away health care altogether from millions more.

“This is a con job on the American people.”

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Sports November 14, 2017

Italy Misses World Cup Qualifier For First Time Since 1958

After a loss to Sweden Monday night, Italy will miss the World Cup for the first time since 1958. Italian goalkeeper Gianluigi Buffon, who played in his last international game, was in tears and La Gazzetta Dello Sport said for “Italy, this is the Apocalypse.”

ELISE HU, HOST:

Italy lost a playoff to Sweden last night. La Gazzetta dello Sport wrote this about the loss – Italy, this is the apocalypse – because it means the Italian men’s national soccer team will miss the World Cup for the first time since 1958. Italian goalkeeper Gianluigi Buffon, who played in his last international game, was in tears.

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GIANLUIGI BUFFON: (Speaking Italian).

HU: He’s apologizing there and knows this loss was much bigger than him. The tears have been flowing all over Italy today. So what happened? Let’s ask Paolo Bandini. He’s a European soccer writer and joins us via Skype. Paolo, thanks for being with us.

PAOLO BANDINI: No problem.

HU: So what happened? This was obviously a historic loss. But was it a surprising one, too?

BANDINI: Yeah. I mean, I suppose because the game is played over two legs. Italy had lost the first leg. There was some anxiety that we’re in a tough spot now and that things could go wrong from here. But I think even despite that there was still a lot of expectation that Italy would go through. Italy are historically and traditionally a stronger soccer nation than Sweden. But there has been a sense of unease about this Italy side for a long time.

HU: How would you say Italy got to this point?

BANDINI: Well, I think the manager is a huge part of it. Gian Piero Ventura is an older manager – he’s now 69, he was 68 already when he took the job – who has never really managed at the top, top level of club soccer. He never competed in the Champions League. He never competed for trophies. And I think that the reality was he wasn’t up to this job.

HU: Now, when the U.S. team was eliminated from the World Cup last month, there was a lot of hair pulling over here and finger pointing. But we’re talking about Italy here. Italy, which has – what? – four World Cups. How are people in Italy dealing with this at this point?

BANDINI: Terribly, obviously. It’s – you know, it’s – this is – it’s a national crisis. You know, it’s something that generations and generations, including myself, of Italians have never experienced in our lifetime. You know, I think people looking from the outside sometimes imagine that Italians don’t love soccer like they used to because the crowds in the stadiums have gone down a little bit. There’d been some trouble with sort of violence in some of the stadiums.

But actually it’s just not true. I mean, soccer is still everything in Italy. And you see it in the streets everywhere you go. You feel it in the conversations you have with everybody. Every little bar you go into will have a copy of Gazzetta dello Sport on the table, which is the – you know, the national sports paper. It’s everything in Italy, soccer. And I think that it’s a huge blow to the national psyche to not be part of the World Cup, the one tournament that matters most.

HU: What about you? How are you doing?

BANDINI: It’s been a bit of a whirlwind today, to be honest with you. It’s one of those things – someone on a purely professional level had asked me earlier, oh, this is going to mean less work for you next summer, isn’t it? And I’m like, yeah, but today it seems to mean a lot more. But, yeah, it’s one of those things, I guess, being a journalist sometimes you slightly lose the sense in a moment. But last night I was pretty cut up about it, and today I’m just trying to get on with it.

HU: Paolo Bandini, we hope the shock wears off soon. Paolo writes about soccer for The Guardian, ESPN and other outlets. Paolo, thanks.

BANDINI: Any time.

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Business November 14, 2017

Grad Students Would Be Hit By Massive Tax Hike Under House GOP Plan

Students Kate Shulenberger (left) and Sarah Goodman on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Graduate Student Council plan a “call your congressman” event on campus.

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Chris Arnold/NPR

There are a lot of anxious graduate students at universities around the country right now.

That’s because to help pay for more than $1 trillion in tax cuts for U.S. corporations, the House Republican tax plan would raise taxes on grad students in a very big way. These students make very little money to begin with. And many would have to pay about half of their modest student stipends in taxes.

“The past week this is what I’ve been talking about with other graduate students and classmates. I think we’re all shocked,” says Tamar Oostrom. She’s in her third year of getting her Ph.D. in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

She and her classmates have been crunching the numbers. “This bill would increase our tax by 300 or 400 percent. I think it’s absolutely crazy,” Oostrom says.

In exchange for helping to teach courses or working with professors on research projects, MIT gives students such as Oostrom a modest $30,000 stipend. And as part of the deal she also doesn’t pay tuition. The arrangement is typical for many students at MIT and other universities.

That tuition price tag at MIT is technically about $50,000, even though students like Oostrom don’t have to pay it. Under the tax plan proposed by House Republicans, these students would have to report that tuition forgiveness as income.

Ryan Hill, a fourth-year Ph.D. student at MIT, already pays taxes on his $30,000 stipend. But, he says, adding in the value of his free tuition, he’d have to pay taxes as if he made $80,000 a year. And that’s a massive difference for Hill and his wife, who works part time on top of caring for their new baby.

“I wish we didn’t have to stress about money as much as we already do,” Hill says. “It’s already been very hard to just emotionally get through this time of life because we have to be so frugal.”

The couple already gave up dental insurance to save money. And Hill says his wife sews clothes for their baby so they don’t have to buy clothes.

About 145,000 grad students received a tuition reduction in 2011-12, the American Council on Education says.

Hill and other MIT students say the tax proposal is ill-conceived. So do economists, who say it would discourage Americans from seeking advanced degrees at a time when the country badly needs a better educated workforce.

Kim Rueben, a senior fellow in the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center at the Urban Institute, said the plan wouldn’t harm just grad students. If young people opt out of graduate education, the damage would be felt throughout the economy.

“Dollar for dollar, this might be the most misguided part of the plan,” she says. “What you’re doing is increasing the cost of going to graduate school … and ignoring the fact that the government makes much more money if people have more education.”

So, Rueben says, the relatively small amount of money taken from grad students to pay for other cuts would stymie the country’s growth in the future.

Larry Lyon, vice provost and dean of Baylor University’s graduate school, was blunt. “I’ve been promoting graduate education for over 20 years,” he said, and the plan is “probably the most serious threat to doctoral education we have ever experienced.”

Other university administrators across the country appear to be just as appalled as students — the American Council on Education sent a letter to Congress decrying the plan. The letter was signed by over 30 academic organizations, including the Association of American Universities, the Council for Advancement and Support of Education and the American Psychological Association.

The provision exists only in the House tax bill, not the Senate version. Many graduate students are hoping that the proposal doesn’t end up seeing the light of day.

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