It is undeniable that small businesses are the engine of our economy, and in these difficult times there is no better way to promote immediate growth than to facilitate their success and foster greater entrepreneurship. But small businesses often struggle to afford the cost of providing health benefits to their employees. Only 45 percent of small businesses can afford to provide health insurance and their costs keep skyrocketing - since 2000 costs have increased by 129 percent. Sixty percent of the nation's uninsured - 28 million people - are small business owners, workers, or their families.

Clearly small businesses need and deserve a break. The Affordable Care Act, our nation's health care reform law, provides just such relief. The law provides small businesses with $40 billion in new tax breaks known as the Small Business Health Care Tax Credit. The Small Business Health Care Tax Credit is available for the 2010 tax year and is aimed at leveling the playing field and making health insurance more affordable for small businesses. If a business has fewer than 25 employees, has average annual wages below $50,000, and pays at least 50 percent of the employees' health coverage, that business could receive a tax credit covering up to 35 percent of their health care costs. The tax credit would grow to 50 percent in 2014.

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Like many readers of Huffpost, I was deeply moved by the election of Barack Obama in 2008, but disappointed and surprised by some of what followed during his first two years in office. With little experience and no real record of achievement or identification with a particular case, Obama managed to present himself as a credible candidate in part by excellent management of a $750 million campaign, and by demonstrating impressive intelligence, sensitivity, humor and charisma in a series of campaign events and competitive primary and general election presidential debates. This all came together at a moment when the country was both ready and anxious to connect in a deeper way with the diversity of its own population, and toward the end of the campaign, was facing a chilling financial crisis.

When people look at the ledger of what they thought they were getting, and what has actually transpired, their results will vary, depending upon their own interests and values. For me, like many of my friends, there has been plenty to like and to not like, and much in between. Looking strictly forward, here are a few things I would like to see in the next two years, running up to the 2012 election.

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I recently criticized Jerry Coyne, standing in for the New Atheists, for having a simplistic view of religious people as people unable to abandon obsolete ideas and move into the modern world. The purpose of my piece was to defend religion -- particularly Christianity -- against such charges: "To insist that the authentically religious are defined by their inability to move out of the past is to create a straw man," was how I put it. In the writings of so many of the New Atheists, religious believers are reduced to a regiment of caricatured clones, marching in lock-step behind a pied piper from some previous century.

I acknowledged, of course, that there are indeed Christians who hold to ideas from the past, such as the long-disproved notion that the earth is just a few thousand years old. Many of them, in fact, do so with no understanding of why, oblivious to the progress of science on this or any other matter. Scientific illiteracy is no respecter of persons, though, as Chris Mooney has argued eloquently in Unscientific America, and even non-religious people have their own scientific disconnects.

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WASHINGTON -- House Republicans are preparing a series of changes to House rules aimed at reversing a long-running trend that has centralized power in the hands of the Speaker and concentrated activity on the House floor. By empowering rank-and-file members and the chairs of committees, GOP leadership hopes to avert an insurrection from its extreme wing and unite the party under a common banner of strict adherence to the Constitution and sharp reductions in spending. Key to the process will be a "Transition Committee" that will be announced on Wednesday if the GOP, as expected, seizes control of the House, according to sources close to House leadership.

The reform movement is designed to respond to perceived voter frustration with bills that run longer than a thousand pages and an opaque process run by leadership rather than through a transparent committee process. Republicans will also focus on cutting spending, likely requiring any new spending to be paired with cuts elsewhere, a response to deficit concerns that pop up in poll after poll. Those concerns, however, have much to do with the economy rather than a genuine concern about federal accounting. If the economy improves, concern about the deficit will dissipate.

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There is a new film coming out this fall that you shouldn't miss. It's called Casino Jack, starring the incomparable Kevin Spacey as disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. It is making its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 16th. If you don't know the story; Abramoff was a lobbyist who got a bit carried away with himself and began doing things that were shady, to put it mildly. He was tried and convicted of mail fraud for sending a phony money wire transfer, a felony, and spent the last 2 and 1/2 years in jail. He just got out about a month ago. As I write this he is living in a halfway house and working at Tov's Pizzeria, a kosher pizza joint, in Maryland where he is making between $7.50 and $10.00 per hour.

The George Hickenlooper film covers the ups and downs of this amazing character, brilliantly played by Kevin Spacey. We watch as Abramoff goes from egocentric, but decent, lobbyist; to egomaniacal crazy greed monger. He defrauds Indian tribes of millions, while pocketing amazing amounts of money for himself and his partner, Scanlon (played extremely well by Barry Pepper). He does business with a sleazy conman (Jon Lovitz) all in the interests of building his own empire.

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When I learned that Yankees owner George Steinbrenner passed away a few weeks ago, my mind instantly traveled back to the notorious summer of 1977 in New York City. I was only ten years old but "The Boss" was a most captivating -- and even intimidating -- figure to young Yankee fans like me. Inner city kids worshiped the ground that Reggie Jackson walked on. To us he was Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle rolled into a delicious eponymous chocolate bar that was layered in peanuts and caramel. With every bite we chanted, "Reg-GIE! Reg-GIE! Reg-GIE!" and danced around in blissful circles on the sandy shores of Rockaway Beach, Queens.

The memorable headlines from the Daily News and the New York Post took turns roping Jackson and Steinbrenner to the media's whipping post, but somehow true die-hard Yankee fans never came away despising either one of the larger than life sports figures. The press loved to hate Mr. October for allegedly saying he was the "the straw that stirs the drink." And they also lampooned Steinbrenner for his very public rows with manager Billy Martin. But, truthfully, as long as the Yankees delivered, which they did, I adored the famed ballclub -- warts and all.

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This week, Fortune published a list of the 50 smartest people in high-tech. This list encompasses amazing people with amazing accomplishments, and I am glad to see this kind of recognition for some of the greatest technologists around. The list rightfully acknowledges not only the usual suspects of entrepreneurs and executives, but also scientists and academics.

The focus on individual accomplishments, however, doesn't do justice to what technologists have to be the best at in order to be successful: creating innovation cultures wherein the brain power of a multitude of smart people can be brought to bear and channeled for success. As high as their IQs may be, none of the smartest people accomplished the listed successes alone. They did so by being good at creating environments where others could contribute, or they were fortunate enough to be a part of such an environment at the onset. As a VC once told me, it's easy to find smart people with great ideas- it's much harder to find people who can create high performing teams - rally others around a problem, inspire them to come up with the best solutions, and get them to work together to make it happen.

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One Lucky Elephant is more than the saga of a good-hearted St. Louis circus owner who would like to find greener pastures for his beloved pachyderm, Flora. It's an emotionally charged argument for reconsidering how we treat all animals. Director Lisa Leeman and co-producers Cristina Colissimo and Miriam Cutler labored over ten years to capture the "interspecies bonding" between the moody Flora and her doting guardian who struggles to redeem a decision he now regrets: Adopting the elephant in her youth and thereby isolating her from her own kind. The film is full of comic and poignant moments between human and beast, but it never stops working as a drama of conscience and consequence. Hear what Leeman and Colissimo have to say about their film by clicking here:



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It's been 81 years since Virginia Woolf published her famously-quoted essay, based on lectures she delivered at Cambridge a year prior. And it's been decades since I read it. It has taken me just about that long to finally follow her advice; " a woman must have a room of her own if she is to write." Only this time I'm not just writing. I'm also directing -- an ultra-low budget feature film that is personal, intimate, and absolutely from a woman's point of view. It still kinda stuns me. After decades nurturing the voice and vision of other filmmakers, first as a studio executive, then as an independent producer, I'm daring to claim to my own creativity.

So here I am, in the middle of my life, filling up my own room. What took me so long? I was raised as a feminist; my mother gave me a subscription to MS Magazinefor my 13th Birthday. I embraced an education, followed by a robust career as a studio executive. And I considered it an empowering choice, for which I was grateful, to step off the career track and onto the mommy track. How did I loose track of my own dreams in the process? Or did the dreams transform?

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I found Obama's Oval Office speech last night adequate but not nearly enough -- adequate in the sense that it got the message across to a broad audience that the president will be tough on BP and will pursue some sort of energy agenda, much needed in these troubling times, not nearly enough in the sense that it didn't contain nearly enough of a commitment from the president that he will actually pursue meaningful energy/climate legislation. I would have found it disappointing except that I wasn't expecting much and pretty much got what I expected.

At times, Obama was, as unfortunately he so often is, Bush-like. As The Atlantic's Joshua Green put it, "The no-nonsense tone, martial imagery ('battle plan'), the three-part plan, the identification of a bad guy (BP's CEO) who is going to be dealt with sternly, who was scolded for 'recklessness,' and whose company will be paying for the cleanup and damage -- not asked, but told to pay, evidently -- all of this was good theatrics, and moderately reassuring." Yes, moderately, to the generally uninformed, but hardly to those who get that what is needed is comprehensive, transformative reform.

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The results are in for the 54th Venice Biennale's award recipients. Germany won the Golden Lion for best national pavilion for its Christoph Schlingensief exhibition, which featured an architectural installation of the church where he served as an altar boy (his first "stage experience," as he called it), along with several of the experimental films that gained him international recognition as an artist and director. The selection of Schlingensief to represent Germany in the Biennale was rife with controversy, and Gerhard Richter publicly called it a "scandal" and a prime example of "the decline of painting." Furthermore, the pavilion's organization was nearly derailed by Schlingensief's untimely death in August 2010. Even though he had not yet finished his plans for the pavilion, curator Susanne Gaensheimer decided to forge ahead, and she created a display that is part homage, retrospective, and exposition of the overarching themes of his oeuvre. According to her, at the heart of Schlingensief's work lies "a contribution to discussions about the deterritorialization of the arts and to questions regarding the social relevance of art."

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As a committed Christian and a queer atheist who both work to advance interfaith and intercultural understanding, we've watched with heavy hearts as Sojourners and its evangelical founder Jim Wallis have been taken to task in the blogosphere this week for declining to run an advertisement sponsored by Believe Out Loud, an organization committed to full LGBTQ equality in Christian churches. The overwhelming reaction so far has mostly consisted of resounding condemnation, including from many people we both know and deeply respect.

The advertisement at the heart of this controversy links to a video featuring two lesbian women slowly walking their son down the center aisle of a church on Mother's Day, past the judgmental stares of parishioners barely disguising their discomfort and contempt. From the front of the church the pastor says, "Welcome. Everyone." simultaneously addressing the congregation's silent judgment and creating a safe place for two mothers and their child.

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Via Curbed LA: The Beachwood Canyon home once belonging to actor Bela Lugosi is now on the market for the first time in forty years. With five bedrooms and four bathrooms, the 5,000 square foot house is currently listed at $2.367 Million. Lugosi is perhaps best known for playing the title role in the 1931 film Dracula, but he also enjoyed a lengthy and prolific career in Hollywood. Lugosi often took on other roles within the horror film genre.

The home, which Curbed LA reports Lugosi lived in during the 1940s, was built in 1926. Referred to as "Castle La Paloma," it features a ballroom-sized living room, a dining room with bay windows, a library, and a service wing. There are also two master suites. Outside, the home boasts 12,000 square feet of flat and terraced grounds, and views of LA from the Hollywood sign to the coast. While the place may be in need of a little fixing up, it does come with some bona fide Hollywood history. Check out photos below.

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Seems like just a little while ago that the Washington Post's Dana Milbank was rightfully complaining about the rogering he was getting at the hands of the zombies at Citibank, and it spurred him to this flight of imagination that maybe other humans were experiencing the same sort of problem. One might have imagined that the experience would have lent Milbank some key insight into the reality that income disparity exists and that ordinary people are bearing the brunt of the bad economy. Only, when a bunch of Democratic lawmakers set out to try to ameliorate these problems, Milbank reverted back to a position of hyena-bray ridicule. Relief from the predations of Citibank for me, tiny American flags for everyone else!

It was the members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus that aggrieved Milbank so terribly, when they decided that they might as well sketch out a vision for budgetary reform, the way Paul Ryan did. Per Milbank:

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Ben Smith makes note of the fact that we are currently living through a pretty interesting time in our lives, as far as news coverage goes. You see, there's all kinds of very important stuff happening all over the world -- we're at war with Libya, for example. Also, Japan has suffered a terrible three-pronged disaster. And news organizations are "covering" these events, by sending reporters to write stories, and also pointing teevee cameras at things. But all of this is apparently "threaten[ing] to swamp Republican presidential candidates' early efforts to introduce themselves to the nation."

Tim Pawlenty's announcement yesterday of an exploratory committee -- traditionally a major campaign event and the subject of dutiful stories in print and television -- was drowned out yesterday by the news from elsewhere. It did not, as David Chalian noted, crack a single evening newscast -- places that traditionally take note of formal events like that one. He also didn't crack the front page of key papers from the Des Moines Register, Sioux City Journal, and Union Leader, to the New York Times, though he did get a mention in the Wall Street Journal's front-page news summary.

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Bullying is not just for playgrounds anymore. An alarm has been ringing across the cultures of an entire globe catching the attention of leaders and educators who desperately search for its cure in programs that teach sensitivity and empathy to youth. All of the educational materials define bullying and tell how to recognize its many forms -- verbal taunting, physical harm, racial and sexual prejudice, cyberbullying and more. Bullying is defined as "persistent unwelcome behavior." How do we know when a behavior is unwelcome? We feel it; it deeply rattles our sensibilities -- sometimes to the bone, or in a new discovery -- to the bones of an icon.

Bullying can intrude anywhere -- at home, at work, online, on the highway, on the playground... and now it appears to reach even into the afterlife. Bullying almost rose to new heights to take an even more sinister turn recently when Discovery Channel announced its plans to air Michael Jackson's Autopsy: What really killed Michael Jackson? There was such a backlash of outrage by the family, Jackson's estate, fans and the general public, that Discovery was forced to "postpone indefinitely" the crossing of that line. So for now, that human indignity was avoided and humanity is safe; or is it?

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Oh, right. Paul Weston isn't a real therapist. He's just a character on the HBO series In Treatment. So, I suppose it's rather silly when my wife and I -- both psychologists -- react to stuff he does with exclamations like "Good interpretation, Paul!" or "Christ! He keeps missing the boat." No sillier, I suppose, than when the American Psychoanalytic Association once held a panel discussion about film and television depictions of psychoanalysis and had the actress who played a psychiatrist on The Sopranos, Lorraine Bracco, on the panel -- the implication being that Bracco would have something especially interesting to say about Tony Soprano's psychology or treatment. Analyzing the vicissitudes of a fictional shrink's clinical technique is sort of like analyzing David Caruso's police work on CSI Miami.

Psychotherapy, however, seems to be an enterprise that most people have some opinion about, how it works or doesn't, whether shrinks are especially screwed up or just ordinarily so, or whether their kids suffer a special burden. And caricatures and scandals abound (not just in the New Yorker) about endless psychoanalyses, "old-fashioned" therapists who won't answer personal questions, therapists who sleep with their patients or who fail to predict their horrendous acts of violence.

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Future Speaker of the House John Boehner offered a rebuttal to Sarah Palin's earlier condemnation of the $858 billion tax cut legislation on Friday. The agreement is a "worthy" deal based on the balance of power, Boehner said, and one that accomplished the primary goal of preventing an expiration of the Bush tax cuts early next year.

"There are some of our colleagues last night and others who didn't think that the agreement on the tax bill was a good one. But I've got to tell you, from where I stand, our first goal was to stop the big tax hike that was coming on January the 1st," Boehner said, responding to a question about Palin's criticism. "I've made it clear going back over the summer that stopping all of the tax hikes was one of our main priorities for this lame-duck session. And while there was an agreement, considering that, you know, Democrats control the House, the Senate and the White House, I thought on balance it was worthy of my vote, and I voted for it."

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Via Curbed LA: In the early 1990s, Senior Curator Emeritus of LACMA Maurice Tuchman commissioned museum architect Brent Saville to design the perfect Hollywood Hills home. According to an interview with Luxury Culture, the architect then put Tuchman to work: "At the outset, Brent insisted that I take the time - two months, as I recall - to write an intricately detailed three-page memorandum to him with the precise way I anticipated, ideally, living in the house on a day to day basis... From this exacting program, the architect made his plans."

The result was a 5,582 square foot home that both showcased Tuchman's extensive contemporary art collection and was, in itself, a work of art. There are two bedrooms and four bathrooms, an office, a library, a fitness room and heated pool. The original listing boasts about the home's star quality as "the subject of the Discovery Channel documentary 'Dream Living, the Astral House' and filmed in Steven Soderbergh's movie 'The Limey.' " Rent at $14,000 a month comes with original furnishing, a contemporary art collection, and housekeeping twice a week.

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The release of a Bob Woodward book is something of a tradition in politics, and here's how it works: the week before its release, copies are obtained by reporters, who comb through the tome to find zazzy parts of the book to write about, baiting the hook for pundits to gnash their teeth over the odd quote or shiny detail. It's like your book club, if your book club were filled with sozzled megalomaniacs instead of normal people.

In this case, Woodward's new book is called "Obama's Wars" and it is about Obama's wars. But not just the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it's about the "wars" within the White House, which explains why it gets so much attention -- everyone in the media believes that "war" is something that primarily affects the relative fortunes of fascinating political insiders, not something that kills and maims soldiers and destroys the homes of children half a world away.

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You are a slave boy passing by the Athenian Agora when suddenly you are approached by a bald, bumpy-headed old man with a crooked nose and wild, excited eyes. Stooping at your feet, he scratches out a dusty square and begins pummeling you with a series of odd questions. Quite accidentally you have become a small but critical player in human intellectual history. You are about to help the old man settle a dispute with his friend Meno. The old man is Socrates and the dispute is about the Truth -- whether it really exists. You are about to show that it does.

In his dialogue Meno, Plato argues for the existence of a world of Forms -- a world of perfection. Socrates, the hero in most of Plato's dialogues, queries a slave boy about his knowledge of geometry. Unsurprisingly, he has none; or he thinks he has none. With careful questioning, Socrates shows that this simple, uneducated slave boy understands the Pythagorean theorem even though he has no experience of geometric formulas. Instead, his only experience has been with the imperfect shapes and measures abounding in the everyday world. But of the pure invariant mathematical relations that lie behind abstract geometry, he is utterly naïve.

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We all know by now that Mel Gibson is crazypants: A racist, sexist, anti-Semitic man with a god complex and a misunderestimation of the ability of people to turn on him. If you had any doubts about these claims, the two-minute tape posted by RadarOnline will not only push you over the line, but throw you there. In it Gibson tells his then-girlfriend, Oksana Grigorieva, that she's dressing like a whore and it will be her fault if she's raped by a bunch of black men (yep, he used the N-word) because her p--sy is hanging out everywhere. You have to give it to Mel, he has an amazing ability to unite whites, blacks, women, hispanics, and Jews by making them all hate him. What peace activists have tried to do for decades, Mel did with a couple of slurs and threats.

How, may you ask, does this terrible terrible story end up in the comedy section? With a remix of course! HalfDayToday.com took the tape and made it the world's scariest dance single. The only thing funnier about the situation is that his soon-to-be-released next film is called "Beaver."

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As HuffPost College's Frugal Intern, I've pledged to live on $100 a week. That does not cover the entire costs of sublet rentals, utilities, cell phone bills, Wi-Fi, health care coverage, daily travel fees, food and debt repayment. Not even close. For young careerists and interns already in the city, rent and utilities (electricity, Wi-Fi, cable, water, heat, etc.) as well as other monthly expenses (cell phone bills, student loan repayments, health care insurance) are expenses that I consider to be "givens." They often cannot be altered easily from week to week and therefore I will address them only occasionally, if at all.

I'm blogging for students and young adults who are experiencing (often for the first time) the perks and the pains of living on their own in this city of eight million people. I want to focus upon the weekly costs that can fluctuate for this crowd of young'uns, which include food (both groceries and dining out), transportation, entertainment, gym fees and other discretionary spending categories. These are the categories that form the bread and butter of most students' and interns' daily expenditures and remain the most malleable aspects of a young person's overall budget in the city.

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Within every human being exists a propensity for greatness. The gifts may vary, and the greatness may live out in a vast array of alternatives -- say from carpentry to rocket science --but the gift that gives one true self-respect and lifts the spirit from "same old, same old" resides within. It is our ability to do our very best with our talents in every thing we do. This potential resides within each one of us -- but if so, then why is it so often denied?

Every individual essentially has a self-representation that is rehearsed and eventually actualized. The process begins by fantasizing at a very early age. We fantasize a script, perhaps one of those from some Hollywood production. We begin rehearsing it, and we either abandon it to take up a new one or practice it until we role-play that script as who we are. Practicing the script sooner or later automates the behavior. Our imprinting environment plays a significant role in the alternative scripts available to us. If the parents are uncaring and abusive, so are the children, and so forth. If warmth and friendliness lead to embarrassment, then coldness and aloofness compensate. If honesty gets us into trouble, then deception becomes a defense strategy, and so forth.

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In 2009, I visited the Democratic Republic of Congo for the first time and I remember feeling utterly overwhelmed. It was a trip that really opened my eyes or, should I say, slapped me in the face with the realities of the country. I had heard so much about the violence, particularly against women, but nothing had prepared me. I listened to stories from women and girls about extreme horrors inflicted on them. I learned how families and villages have been torn apart through a plague of terror using sexual violence as a tool of destruction. It was a kind of devastation that I had never seen before.

I left the country questioning what we could do, when the organization V-Day offered a ray of hope with the City of Joy. The City of Joy is a place where survivors of sexual violence can go to heal physically and emotionally, and gain skills and leadership training through programming. The knowledge they gain here will allow them to return to their homes with tools to help rebuild their lives. The concept seemed innovative and I was particularly drawn to the fact that it was thought up completely by the women of the DRC themselves. Who better to decide how to address their real needs?

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When she enters Street, the restaurant she owns with Kajsa Alger, Susan Feniger immediately greets an employee with a smile and a hug. Later, she mentions that she has already been to Border Grill Santa Monica, the restaurant she owns with long-time business partner Mary Sue Milliken, and has to head to a meeting at Border Grill Downtown after lunch. But what's more impressive than Feniger's ability to bounce around LA in a single day while still engaging guests and offering encouragement to her staff, is her long list of accomplishments.

Feniger is a chef, restaurateur, Top Chef Masters contestant, author of multiple cookbooks and a TV and radio personality. Her achievements have helped solidify Los Angeles as a culinary capital as much as they have helped her leave her own mark on the city over the last thirty years. If there's anything you can learn from Susan Fenigar about how to make it in LA, it's that success comes from drive, passion and a desire to keep exploring what lies ahead. Put most simply in Feniger's own words, "life's too short to not do what you love and be passionate about it."

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NOTE: David Sirota's new book Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now is just out this week. This post draws on the research he did for his book about the deep connections between the Pentagon and the entertainment industry - connections that intensified in the 1980s and still shape our culture today.

All the buzz in the entertainment/tech world about the blockbuster new video game Homefront brings back memories of the 1984 film Red Dawn - and rightly so. The creator of Homefront is none other than John Milius, the writer/director of the 1984 film that later became the deliberate namesake of the most famous operation in today's Iraq War. But it should also bring back memories of the larger militarist themes that continue to define our entertainment culture - themes that ultimately bring up the direct but little-examined connections between the Pentagon and the entertainment industry. It is the legacy of those connections, first intensified in the 1980s, that continue to embed militarism in seemingly non-political products like video games and action movies.

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Via Curbed LA: This $5.5 million mansion in the Holmby Hills of Bel-Air is a real estate double-whammy. Not only was it designed by Wallace Neff, "the architect of California's Golden Age," but it has a celebrity-filled pedigree of past owners. Curbed LA reports that the Bel-Air home was commissioned by American darling Judy Garland in 1938 at the tender age of 16, "the year she was cast as Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz." Other celeb homeowners include music industry heavyweights Quincy Jones and Marvin Gaye.

Curbed LA points us to Bluetramontana Style, which has photos of Judy Garland posing in her Wallace Neff home. The Julie Garland Database also chronicles all the homes Garland has ever lived in, from her childhood home in Grand Rapids, Minnesota to her flat on Cadogan Lane in London, where she passed away at the age of 47.

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Once upon a time in Hollywood the black list was a very bad thing. If your name was on the black list (that supposedly never existed) you couldn't get a gig in Hollywood. It was a sucky time and should always be remembered and never repeated.

Enter the "new" black list created by Franklin Leonard in 2005 to bring attention to the best unproduced screenplays. Great idea...in theory. But the list has morphed over the years into a typical Hollywood list filled with guys with agents and managers whose films have been picked up by studios. Now lots of the film of the list are even in production (One Day is already done and has a release date and Margin Call will be at Sundance) or about to be in production. Films that have been on previous blacklists include Juno and Lars and the Real Girl and the 2009 list included The Social Network (like Aaron Sorkin ever needed the help) and Cedar Rapids which will premiere at Sundance in January. There was only one woman in the top 10 last year, Ellen Rapoport who wrote Desperados which from what I can tell is not close to being made.

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When Fox News host Glenn Beck held his Aug. 28 Restoring Honor rally on the National Mall, many observers noted that it seemed more religious than political, comparing it to a "revival" and saying Beck "sounded like Billy Graham." But a new poll finds that the vast majority of Americans aren't quite ready to walk into the church of Glenn Beck quite yet.

Fewer than one in five Americans (17 percent) say Beck is "the right person to lead a religious movement" according to the PRRI/RNS Religion News Poll, conducted Sept. 9-12. Even his biggest supporters are skeptical. "Among white evangelical Protestants, the religious group registering the highest favorability for Beck, only about 1-in-4 (26 percent) say Beck is the right person to lead a religious movement," notes the Public Religion Research Institute. "Among Republicans, the overall group registering the highest favorability for Beck, only 29 percent say he is the right person to lead a religious movement."

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