Good evening from the Nation's Capital. I'll be your humble guest host as TiaRachel has a thing this evening.
Tonight, Jon has historical biographer Stacey Schiff. Stephen will interview Reagan Budget Director David Stockman.
And I hear the kids love them some Conan. He has not one, not two, but three Kardashians as well as Kevin Nealon, who poops out more talent every morning than those three will see their entire lives. Deerhunter is the musical guest.
This actually sounds like a pretty cool guest author to end the week. Stacy Schiff is a Pulitzer Prize winning historical biographer and has tackled some interesting figures. I would assume she and Jon will be talking about her latest book, Cleopatra: A Life. It's available for the Kindle for $12.99.
From the Amazon description:
Famous long before she was notorious, Cleopatra has gone down in history for all the wrong reasons. Shakespeare and Shaw put words in her mouth. Michelangelo, Tiepolo, and Elizabeth Taylor put a face to her name. Along the way, Cleopatra's supple personality and the drama of her circumstances have been lost. In a masterly return to the classical sources, Stacy Schiff here boldly separates fact from fiction to rescue the magnetic queen whose death ushered in a new world order. Rich in detail, epic in scope, Schiff 's is a luminous, deeply original reconstruction of a dazzling life.
And her bio:
Schiff has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities and was a Director’s Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She was awarded a 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Schiff has written for The New Yorker, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe, among other publications. She lives in New York City.
Schiff has also written books about Benjamin Franklin, Vera (i.e. Mrs. Vladamir) Nabakov and Saint Exupéry.
Stephen has old-school Republican David Stockman. And before you groan about sitting through a Republican interview just before bedtime, check out this New York Times Op-Ed from the end of July:
Four Deformations of the Apocalypse
by David Stockman
IF there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians, the Republican push to extend the unaffordable Bush tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing. The nation’s public debt — if honestly reckoned to include municipal bonds and the $7 trillion of new deficits baked into the cake through 2015 — will soon reach $18 trillion. That’s a Greece-scale 120 percent of gross domestic product, and fairly screams out for austerity and sacrifice. It is therefore unseemly for the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, to insist that the nation’s wealthiest taxpayers be spared even a three-percentage-point rate increase.
More recently, he was on This Week With Christiane Amanpour and "ridiculed" the current crop of Republicans and their plan to destroy the economy while protecting their rich friends. Don't get me wrong, he's no Democrat -- he advocated both cutting entitlements and scaling back the American role of global policeman.
And considering that all but three Republicans (along with 20 Democrats) voted against extending the Bush tax cuts on the first $250,000 of income this afternoon, but still want the bonus tax cuts for the wealthy, I assume they will talk about that and not Stockman's $7.2 million settlement in a fraud lawsuit.
Have at it, godless heathens. I love it when we go over 100 comments.