UPDATE: Apparently the so-called heart attack was “a bout of heartburn and gastroenteritis” that his publicist blames on too much spicy Caribbean food.
Leon star Jean Reno has been rushed to hospital after suffering a serious heart attack, according to reports.
While most Reno’s American films have been, dare I say, lame (The Da Vinci Code, Rollerball, Just Visiting, Godzilla), his performance in The Professional (aka, Leon) has always been greatly revered and I can make no comment on the parts he’s played in French cinema. I’m certainly concerned with characterization of his heart attack as “serious,” especially with recent loss of so many great entertainment names in the last few months.
So good luck, monsieur, I greatly hope that you survive to glower in many more films to come.
Painting the Democratic candidate (in any election) as the latte-drinking, arugula-eating, out of touch elitist is old hat for the GOP, so it’s no surprise that the McCain has been making those claims against Obama for a long time now. However, as with many issues in this campaign, the candidate has been bringing the hypocrisy of those claims to light quite a bit, especially in the last five days.
First there was his appearance at the Saddleback church this past weekend where he responded to a question about how he defined being rich in this country and his response was that rich begins at $5 million. I remember the good old days when being a millionaire meant you were rich, but apparently John McCain doesn’t think so.
However the real kicker was yesterday when Politico asked him how many houses he owned.
“I think — I’ll have my staff get to you,” McCain told Politico in Las Cruces, N.M. “It’s condominiums where — I’ll have them get to you.”
Seriously? I mean, I know McCain’s been doing a wonderful job of playing the old guy who doesn’t remember anything and has a hard time keeping things straight and thus can use that to avoid any responsibility for changing my positions or not knowing the facts about integral policy issues, but he doesn’t even know how many houses he owns! You’re trying to say that Obama is out of touch and elitist and you can’t even remember that you own 7 houses (that was the figure his campaign staff eventually submitted to the press).
The Obama campaign has been quick to jump on this little gem. The candidate himself mentioned it mere hours after McCain’s response to the question reported and they’ve already generated an ad that highlights the comment.
The McCain campaign has responded thus far by saying that because Obama owns one million dollar “mansion” (complete with a nice reference to Tony Rezko), made $4 million last year (a drop in the bucket compared to Cindy McCain’s fortune) and spent his vacation in Hawaii (because it’s not like that’s where he was raised or where his grandmother lives), that he has no place to talk about houses and elitism. But since the Obama campaign released the above ad after the McCain camp’s comments, their response on this issue seems to be, “Game on.”
I’m a HUGE Rachel Maddow fan. I’ve mentioned her several times on this blog because, frankly, while I follow a crazy number of news feeds, watch a little cable news and even have a friend working for a political campaign, I actually get most of my news from The Rachel Maddow Show on Air America Radio. I’ve been listening to various shows and formats she’s gone through the liberal radio network for the past four years. She is wonderful at mining the news for interesting, quirky and relevent stories and on weeks when one of us (meaning myself or Rachel) goes on vacation, I feel less clued into what’s going on in the world.
Rachel has been working her way up the TV food chain for some time now, guesting on various shows on CNN and MSNBC, but even before the New York Times saw fit to profile Maddow, it was clear that important people at MSNBC had taken a shine to her (not least of which was their star, Keith Olbermann). Rachel was a constant guest during MSNBC’s primary coverage, she became a regular guest on all of the primetime evening shows, she became the de facto guest host for Olbermann’s show Countdown and David Gregory’s Race to the White House and a few months ago, Air America began simulcasting Race during the first hour of Rachel’s show – which meant that she was a constant member of Gregory’s panel.
Today on Daily Kos and on his show, Keith Olbermann broke the news that, at long last, MSNBC will be gifting Rachel Maddow with her own cable news show. She will be filling the 8PM CST slot that follows Countdown with Keith Olbermann, taking the place of Dan Abram show The Verdict. In their dialogue on Countdown, Olbermann and Maddow hinted that the shows may bleed into each other, perhaps with the two (who are clearly friendly) bantering about the news of the day. At the current time, Maddow’s show does not have a name or a format. They’ll need to fix that quick, as she’s scheduled to premiere on September 9, after the party conventions wrap up.
It’s also worth noting that Rachel will continue to host her radio show on Air America. She’s long reassured her listening audience that she would intend to stay on the air if she got her own TV show, saying that if Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly can do it, so can she. She’ll just do it better.
Congratulations, Rachel. Cable news just got a lot more informed.
