Marilyn Monroe History: Marilyn Monroe- On The Jack Benny Show (1953)

Source:Marilyn Monroe History- Jack and Marilyn, on the Jack Benny Show, in 1953. 

Source:The New Democrat

"Marilyn Monroe On The Jack Benny Television Show 1953(full episode) Rare Television Appearance By Marilyn. September 1953." 

Source:Marilyn Monroe History- Jack and Marilyn on the Jack Benny Show, in 1953.

From Marilyn Monroe History 

There is no better way to kick off the Jack Benny Program than with Marilyn Monroe highlighting her excellent comedic abilities, which includes playing the dumb blonde but doing it intentionally for entertainment. Jack Benny is living out his fantasy with a goddess sent to his cruise ship.  He believes he has Marilyn all to himself, whereas he is just having a great dream as he lies in the sun next to a very large woman instead.

Jack did a similar show but with Jayne Mansfield instead of Marilyn. (Speaking of great comedians with a knack for playing the dumb blonde) And Marilyn had other abilities as an entertainer and could play drama well like in the movie Don't Bother To Knock where she plays an ex-mental patient who gets a job babysitting and becomes impatient with the girl she's supposed to be looking after and ends up locking the kid in a room. 

But like with Jayne Mansfield, I at least believe Marilyn was a natural comedian and someone who didn't need a script to be funny, because she was funny and and did funny things intentionally and was accustomed to making people laugh when she wanted them to laugh with her and not at her. 

She also had a habit of getting people to laugh at her with some of her irresponsible behavior. But she was a natural entertainer and a very good one, as well as a good actress.

One Minute News: Actor, Writer & Director Harold Ramis Dead At 69

Source:The Jerusalem Post- Actor, writer, director, and comedian Harold Ramis. 

Source:The New Democrat

Harold Ramis will be missed for his comic writing and acting because he comes from the old school, which is about being funny, but being funny in an intelligent way. Instead of being funny in a clumsy way, telling the fans to look at the klutz, Ramis brought intelligence to his humor that wasn't obvious.  You had to think to get it. To me, Harold Ramis was a master of dry wit and humor that wasn't obvious, but definitely noticeable if you paid attention and figured it out.

Harold Ramis's movies were about real people who tended to be bright but were underachievers or slackers who needed inspiration to reach their full potential. The movie Stripes is the perfect example of that, where two lazy wiseass guys sign up for the U.S. Army because they needed something constructive to do. Groundhog Day is another example, where an obnoxious fellow who considers himself superior to the Pittsburgh weathermen gets stuck repeatedly in Groundhog Day and discovers what is really important and how to deal with his colleagues responsibly.

The movie Vacation, perhaps one of the top five comedies of all time, with Chevy Chase, is a perfect example of a middle-class family man who aims to give his family the vacation of their lives. He drives his wife and children from Chicago to Los Angeles to an amusement park called Wally World. He is over his head, with the trip turning into a series of disasters. The dog incident is hilariously brilliant, although theoretically should be sad.  Enough said!

Harold Ramis's movies weren't based on klutzy people and his humor wasn't cookie cutter, borrowing lines and humor from other films because supposedly everyone laughs at the same thing. His humor was smart and off the cuff, with a great innovative wit. Harold Ramis would have been a great writer for Saturday Night Live and MASH because he had their type of humor.  That is what I'll miss most about him.
Source:One Minute News

Slate Magazine: Helen Bera: Against Solitary Confinement: States Finding it Impractical As Well As Immoral

Source:The New Democrat

The current use of the process of solitary confinement in U.S. prisons is deplorable.  There are no guidelines relating the length of confinement to severity of offense.  The process is used at the discretion of onsite officials.  This results in wide variations with some cruel and counterproductive results.  Indefinite solitary confinement is simply inhumane and can only intensify anti-social tendencies in inmates suffering any psychological disturbance.

Solitary confinement should be used as a punishment that is commensurate with the offense committed and the need to convince the inmate that objectionable behavior is unacceptable.  It may provide a needed cooling-off period when there is conflict in the prison population.  It should be managed by psychological professionals.

Inmates considered too disturbed to live in the prison population are sometimes subjected to  indefinite solitary confinement because the onsite authorities have no other strategy for managing them.  This experience only makes them worse and makes the job of dealing with them much more difficult for the prison staff whose professional training is often inadequate. These inmates need to be in prison hospitals where they can do their time and get the mental health care they need.  Rotting away in solitary confinement only makes them worse.  Cutting them off from the prison world and outside world all together just makes them meaner and angrier and more convinced that they have nothing left to lose.  They take that anger out on the first people they see.  The really hard to manage inmates, who have consistent records of violently acting out, should be in mental institutions where they can get the help that they need.

A lot of us when we were kids had the experience of being sent to the office for acting out in class and even doing an in-school suspension.  The penalty box in a hockey game is an example of what isolation units in prisons should be for the mentally healthy inmates, a place they go for short-term punishment but then they go back to their normal prison life. 

Film Society at Lincoln Center: Q&A With Raquel Welch On Myra Breckinridge

Source:The New Democrat

Myra Breckinridge is not the movie that made Raquel Welch a star. Myra Breckinridge was a loser at the box office no matter how funny it was.  It was one of the funniest movies I've ever seen.  It might of been an official loser but Raquel was great and hilarious in it and it was, in a several ways, a great movie.

Biography: Jayne Mansfield

Source:The New Democrat

To put it simply, Jayne Mansfield was the ultimate hot baby-face goddess who never grew up, and in all of her 34 years, I'm not sure she ever looked old enough to even drive. That is how I see her, as someone who never quite became an adult woman emotionally, and I believe she was never very happy even though she basically had it all and was a very good entertainer. She had a very quick comedic wit and the ability to sing and act as well.

She wasn't a dumb blonde, but someone with real talent. She was immature and never quite grew up or appreciate what she had, but if she had lived a normal, she would probably have won many awards with her comedic wit and versatility and ability to entertain people in multiple ways, but she never understood and was not able to appreciate any of that.

I haven't seen many Jayne Mansfield movies but Who Will Spoil Rock Hunter with the great comedic actor Tony Randall is the perfect example of a movie where you get to see all her talent, where she could purposely play the role of the dumb sexy blonde, which is how she wanted to be portrayed, when behind the scenes she was as smart and cunning as anyone and knew how to get what she wanted when she wanted it.

In Who Will Spoil Rock Hunter, Tony Randall plays a struggling advertising executive who needs a big client to make a lot of money for his company. And that is where the Jayne Mansfield character comes in as an incredible Hollywood bombshell who needs what Rock Hunter can give her, which is credibility and good publicity on Madison Avenue and to be taken seriously. And she and Rock make for good partners in that film

The Economist: Inequality in America: How to be a True Progressive

Source:The New Democrat

I've mentioned before that I do not qualify as a Progressive, at least from today's popular definition of it, someone who believes in using government to make society better and fairer with new government social programs that are generally run by the Federal Government, but I'm not sure that a lot of today's Progressives qualify as Progressive either with their constant assaults on corporate America and private enterprise and private power along with being so anti-military and law enforcement and not only in favor of the welfare state but also the nanny state, believing that Americans have too much freedom in how they manage their personal lives, with new prohibitionist ideas as they relate to what people eat, drink, smoke, as well as who and how we communicate with each other.

And these are just some of reasons why I call myself a Liberal.  I am a Liberal, at least as far as it is classically defined, but I don't like being associated with big government statists right and left, and today's so-called Progressives are really left-wing statists but not very liberal or progressive and not so much interested in progress.  True Progressives believe in moving forward and using government to make that happen as much as they are interested in growing the size and scope of the central state.

But I do view myself as a Progressive in the sense that I believe in progress and moving forward and even using government to help bring that about. But where I would differ with real Progressives, FDR or LBJ Progressive Democrats, is that I don't believe the Federal Government has all of the answers and therefore shouldn't have all the power.  As a true Liberal, I want to see that power go to the people who need it.  The income gap, as I prefer to call income inequality, is the perfect place to start.

I agree we need a new approach in how we deal with the income gap and having hundreds of programs that are really about subsidizing people in poverty, whether they are working or not, to meet their needs. This is not so much empowering them to meet their needs, which is not the right approach (this is where I agree with The Economist) but scrapping the minimum wage and replacing it with an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit is not the way to go, and this is where I agree with Progressive economist Jared Bernstein on who is an actual Progressive Democrat.

What would happen if this new conservative idea about the EITC were to ever happen is that you would end up transferring money from hard-working middle class Americans and, in a lot of cases, Americans who are just barely middle class, to the wealthy and to employers, because now they wouldn't have to pay the minimum wage and would be able to pay their low-skilled workers wages that are much lower, because these low-skilled workers would get that money back and perhaps more money from middle class tax payers instead of their employers in the form of an expanded EITC.

And this is where both the Earned Income Tax Credit and increasing the minimum wage are both critical and both needed because they would both increase wages for people at the bottom and increase their purchasing power. This is for people who spend all of their money, which drives economic and job growth, because they have no other choice because of how little money they make, but it also encourages people to work and not go on welfare or stay on welfare because they would know they could get more money working than not working.

But this alone doesn't solve the income gap because we need to not only be targeting Americans at the bottom when it comes to the income gap but also people in the struggling middle, who can see the bottom of the economic scale from where they sit, which is why unemployment insurance should be expanded to include back-to-work centers or programs that will help them pay their bills as they receive assistance to help find a good job through education and job training and assistance. Welfare insurance puts people to work and provides educational and job training assistance for workers who collect any form of public assistance.

A mid-term election, especially the one that will affect the last 2 years of the Obama Administration, is not the right time for President Obama to take on his far-left flank with all these new work and education-over-dependency ideas, because he needs these voters behind him and congressional Democrats as they run for reelection and for the House and Senate in 2014, but these are things he could propose in his budget this year, and put on the agenda for the next Congress, whoever is in power, or even if it is divided again.

Justin Sluss: The Seven Year Itch- The Piano Scene in the Apartment

Source:The New Democrat

Everything Marilyn Monroe did was adorable and I love this scene from The Seven Year Itch because it stars a married man whose wife and son are away for the summer at a lake in upstate New York. So this successful New York advertising man has this big apartment to himself for the whole summer in New York and if you don't think New York summers are hot enough, well first spend some time in Washington and Maryland.  For this guy, played by Tom Ewell, summer gets even hotter when Marilyn Monroe's character moves into his building.

This is a great innocent scene with two people spending quality time with each other. He has this hot babe all to himself and he plays the innocent. They eat potato chips with wine together and play the piano and just talk to each other as friends. He could have started an affair with her. The end is history.