Everybody's Linking for the Weekend

Yowza-that was a jam-packed week, wasn't it?  My cable is out right now, so I'm wandering like a nomad around my house right now, cleaning without the gentle hum of my television to comfort me (I like the noise).  First, though, we need to link it up for the weekend.  Let's get started!

On Entertainment...

-Probably the celebrity-related article of the week that everyone seems to be discussing is the recent Forbes article (she's also on the cover) about Jessica Alba's $1 billion Honest Company, and the enormous success that it has received as Alba created a line of goods that are eco-friendly and chemical-free.  As one of my coworkers pointed out, Alba is beautiful, award-nominated (Golden Globes, y'all!), and now insanely rich (Forbes estimated her net worth as $200 million), so it's hard not to be tapped by the green-eyed monster here.  However, while I have never been a huge fan of Alba's as an actress, I have always really enjoyed her as a celebrity so I'm 100% okay with this.  It's kind of fascinating as well how many female entertainers have transformed a relatively short career as an actress (Alba seems to rarely be in films or television lately) into a hugely successful career in business, as Alba is joined by the likes of Kathy Ireland (whom Forbes also profiled), Jaclyn Smith, and Jessica Simpson in this regard.

-I have to agree with Entertainment Weekly's Chris Lee, who discussed the recent controversy surrounding Emma Stone's casting as a biracial woman who is supposed to be both white and Asian.  I won't be seeing this movie more out of the reviews being abysmal than principle (plus Cameron Crowe gets dangerously too close to Ron Howard for my taste), but honestly-who didn't see this coming?  It's not like there aren't actresses that could take on the role (as Lee points out, Olivia Munn) or that anyone faults casting the Oscar-nominated Stone, but can we just have people play their own ethnicities?  It always ends badly and quite insultingly when this doesn't happen, and in 2015 we should know better.

-I'm aware that this story is a few months old, so it doesn't really belong in the news of the week, but I'm putting this out there in the world in hopes that I can get a comment from someone with a quandary.  I found out this past week that Louise Pentland (aka Sprinkle of Glitter) had separated from her husband in March.  This makes me so sad cause I love Louise and her cheeky ways, but also I am curious-is there a solid YouTuber gossip or news site that I should be following but am not?  This is the third such story that I've missed of this nature, and this isn't something that would have shown up in Louise's Twitter so I wouldn't have seen it there.  If you know, please share in the comments and I would be most grateful!

-Nick Davis over at Nick's Flick Picks finished up his countdown of the 1995 Cannes Film Festival twenty years later as a retrospective.  Nick is one of my favorite Twitterers and bloggers, so please check it out even if you don't know a thing about that slate of films, as he makes pretty much everything entertaining.

On Politics...

Gov. Sam Brownback (R-KS)

-Kansas Republicans are looking at raising taxes, which is surely a sentence you don't see every day.  The reason is that the Kansas Republicans have basically run the state into the ground, with massive tax cuts that did nothing to spur employment or spending (which is essentially the point of a tax cut from a pragmatic standpoint), and as a result they have a huge budget deficit that won't go away without cuts to popular spending programs, principally education.  I feel for Kansas teachers and students, I really do, but it's hard to feel bad for a state who knew all of this a year ago and yet reelected the governor (San Brownback) who initiated these cuts.  Blind partisan loyalty is always a bad thing, and if you have a governor who goes completely too far (I'd never elect Alan Grayson as governor, for example), you need to suck it up with the other guy for four years.  They didn't, and now they either have to have a raise in taxes (which is the right decision) or more state spending cuts for education and aid for low-income families (which is the wrong decision).

-The Supreme Court made what may be the biggest eyebrow-raise of the week in terms of the "one person, one vote" theory in terms of how House seats are appropriated.  Currently the House seats are given based on the census, not on how many eligible voters there are in a district, but this court case could change that.  As the article I linked from 538 points out, this probably wouldn't do much in terms of the race for the White House, but it would dramatically help the Republicans in the House.  It also makes little sense-the census makes more sense both because it is an actual representation of the populace (citizens should have representation in Congress, regardless of whether they're old enough to vote or not), and because you only appropriate House seats every ten years, which means that you're going to have a huge bottleneck of people that turn eighteen throughout that time in faster-growing districts, thus defeating the purpose of this exercise.  However, between this, and cases on redistricting, Obamacare, gay marriage, and immigration, the next two cycles for the Supreme Court will be deeply political, particularly in terms of Democrats' viability in Congress and President Obama's agenda.

-Perhaps the biggest must-read article of the week was the Politico magazine article (I love them) regarding Mike Pence and the bizarre protests in his state regarding HIV in Scott County.  Scott County, for those unfamiliar with the scandal is home to a huge HIV epidemic despite being a rural county that normally wouldn't see these sorts of statistics, an aberration that is a result of lower-income people abusing opiods and other intravenous drugs, resulting in shared needle usage.  The governor has put in place a needle-exchange program for the county, but this was under enormous public pressure, with the number of HIV cases in the state resulting from drug use tripling in the past year alone.  I truly don't get the politics of not doing something like this everywhere.  Yes, of course we should try to stem the abuse of prescription and illegal drugs, but HIV and Hepatitis C are deadly diseases, and needle exchange programs work (look at New York, for example, as great proof of their success as syringe-related HIV has dropped dramatically in the state in the past two decades as a result of these programs).  States like Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia have seen huge increases as a result of not championing these programs, and need to expand needle-exchange programs (which, it should be noted, were allowed under federal law until the Republicans reversed the program in 2011 after the Midterms).

Shameless Self-Promotion of the Week...

-What most first dates feel like.

YouTube Video of the Week...

-Chris Pratt has been everywhere promoting Jurassic World, and if you find him remotely sexy or funny, you will never want to stop watching the below clip:

Just One More...

-This week it was revealed the Saiga antelope, which are an endangered species housed primarily in Kazakhstan, have been dying off at an alarming rate.  The reasoning is still up for debate, but it's incredibly concerning as over 120,000 (more than one-third of the species total population) have died, likely due to a bacteria that is impacting their already reduced immune systems (which most attribute to unseasonal rainfall as a result of global warming).  Just another reason for climate change legislation...