The valuable lesson of the Meghan Markle interview

Money and fame do not protect one from racism and xenophobia.

Bonus Tweet of the Day

Tweet of the Day

Disney World Booked To Capacity For Spring Break

Spring Break is coming and Walt Disney World is already booked to capacity. A new report from Walt Disney World News Today shows that the calendar is all fun through next week and things aren’t much different at Disney’s Hollywood Studios. You would expect this kind of ramp up as people across the country get restless despite most areas being nowhere close to full vaccination rates. However, it has gone to enough people so far that there might not be the potential widespread issues that would have existed just a few months ago. Earlier this week, when word got out about the California theme parks like Disneyland, Disney’s California Adventure, and Universal Studios beginning reopening next month, it was easy to see the writing on the wall then. There was always going to be a rush of people clamoring to get their Disney visit in the moment that the gates were open to the public again.

If you’re an Annual Passholder, there is some good news if you act fast. Most of the parks are still available, but that won’t last long. Regarding masking guidelines, Disney has not adjusted their stance. When Disney Springs opened up last year, Disney Parks chairman Josh D’Amaro talked about the new normal on the ground with CNBC.

“We figured out a way to really push hard on technology, really accelerate some of the ideas that we’ve had for a long time,” he said. “So you think about things like reservation systems in the parks that we can manage capacity and therefore guest experience a little bit better. It’s working exceptionally well for us.”

“Things like mobile order, Roger. So you can walk up to a restaurant, have your meal ready for you when you arrive. Things like queue reservations systems that we’re executing in different ways,” Amaro added. “Or even how you might pay for merchandise but without transacting with a credit card. And this technology, it doesn’t only help us during a time of a pandemic, but I think it actually leads to a better cast and guest experience. And so, these are things that are helping us now, but I think they’re here to stay.”



https://comicbook.com/irl/news/disney-world-spring-break-booked-capacity/

U.S. administers 90.35 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines: CDC

Reuters) - The United States has administered 90,351,750 doses of COVID-19 vaccines as of Sunday morning and distributed 116,363,405 doses, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

The vaccine doses are for both Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines as of 9 a.m. ET (1400 GMT) on Sunday, the agency said.

According to the tally posted on March 6, the agency had administered 87,912,323 doses of the vaccines, and distributed 116,355,405 doses.

The agency said 58,873,710 people had received one or more doses while 30,686,881 people have received the second dose as of Sunday.

A total of 7,389,102 vaccine doses have been administered in long-term care facilities, the agency said.



https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-cdc-idUSKBN2AZ0MS

Bonus Tweet of the Day

Disney CEO Bob Chapek on traditional movie business model: "I'm Not Sure There's Going Back"

Disney CEO Bob Chapek suggested that the company will likely shrink the exclusive period when its films play only in theaters, though he didn’t offer any specifics.

“The consumer is probably more impatient than they’ve ever been before,” he said of the market shifts during Covid-19, “particularly since now they’ve had the luxury of an entire year of getting titles at home pretty much when they want them. So, I’m not sure there’s going back. But we certainly don’t want to do anything like cut the legs off a theatrical exhibition run.” Moviegoers, he added, won’t “have much of a tolerance for a title, say, being out of theatrical for months” and “just sort of sitting there, gathering dust” before migrating to streaming or other windows.

Chapek made the comments at a virtual investment conference hosted by Morgan Stanley. It was one of his few appearances outside of an official corporate function since becoming CEO about a year ago.

During that brutal year, of course, Hollywood has contended with an existential crisis in the form of Covid-19. The virus decimated the box office and has left only 45% of North American theaters able to function more than a year into the pandemic. Total domestic box office of $11.4 billion in 2019 won’t likely be equaled until 2022 or 2023, most analysts believe.

For Disney, which controls up to half the market and has released top blockbusters under the Marvel and Star Wars banners, it is not a casual decision about how long to play films in theaters. Chapek noted that a middle path — the “Premier Access” simultaneous deployment of streaming and theaters — would remain a distribution option for the foreseeable future. On Friday, animated feature Raya and the Last Dragon will go out via that method, costing $30 to subscribers to Disney+.




https://deadline.com/2021/03/disney-ceo-bob-chapek-shorter-theatrical-windows-streaming-marvel-star-wars-1234704357/

Oregon Governor Kate Brown gets her vaccine.

Governor Kate Brown
@OregonGovBrown
There have been rumors and misinformation about the Johnson & Johnson vaccine since its FDA approval, so I got the one-dose J&J vaccine today to show all Oregonians that it is an incredibly safe, effective, and convenient way to protect themselves and their loved ones.

Georgia's center of political gravity shifting toward Atlanta

The Southside Atlanta district of state Rep. David Dreyer splays out like a wobbly chair as it straddles both sides of the Downtown Connector. And somewhere among the tens of thousands of constituents the Democrat represents, two stand out: newly elected U.S. Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock.

The area has long been home to diverse working-class neighborhoods suffering from a lack of investment. Until a few years ago, some of them didn’t have easy access to a grocery store. And to Dreyer, the fact that Georgia’s two Jan. 5 runoff victors live in his district speaks loudly about the state of Georgia politics.

“Power no longer lies in homogeneous gated communities like Sea Island,” he said. “Power in Georgia now lies in diverse communities.”

No longer is the state’s political gravity squarely in sparsely populated South Georgia, as it was throughout decades of Democratic rule in the 20th century, or centered in the conservative bastions of North Georgia that dominated the state GOP through most of the 2010s.

Now, Atlanta and its suburbs have increasingly become the center of state politics, home to a burgeoning left-leaning electorate that fueled Democratic wins in November and January and the rise of homegrown politicians such as Stacey Abrams, Keisha Lance Bottoms and Jon Ossoff while also harboring a growing number of influential Republicans.




https://www.ajc.com/politics/georgias-center-of-political-gravity-shifting-toward-atlanta/QRMU7WXWKJBZTCQ5F6LDLPOK54/

Two decades in the making, Rosa DeLauro's plan to cut child poverty in half is on the brink of passi

She knew the president’s top advisers were drafting a sweeping plan to deliver the nation from historic economic depths, and there was no way, not after an 18-year-long battle to lift millions of children from poverty, that Rosa DeLauro was going to stay out of that.

The Democratic congresswoman from Connecticut called Jared Bernstein, President Joe Biden’s longtime economic advisor, and made it clear that the plan had better include an expansion of the child tax credit to benefit the nation’s poorest families.

“In language that I might describe as ‘somewhat juicy,’ she was very emphatic about her preferences,” Bernstein told The 19th. “One of the things I give Rep. DeLauro credit for is being a relentless champion of the policy — in tough times and in more politically favorable times. She’ll never give up on this idea.”

Since 2003, DeLauro has been pushing at every opportunity for the extension of the credit, an anti-poverty measure that, if expanded, could effectively cut child poverty in half. Created in 1997, the child tax credit leaves out a third of all children from accessing the maximum benefit. And for years, DeLauro was the lone voice on the topic, before it started getting the support of other Democrats, including Sens. Sherrod Brown and Michael Bennet and Rep. Suzan DelBene. More recently, pockets of Republican support have emerged, with the child tax credit expansion getting the attention of Sens. Mitt Romney, Marco Rubio and Mike Lee.

Biden endorsed DeLauro’s plan to grow the credit to cover America’s neediest families in his presidential campaign. But she needed to see it in his coronavirus plan.

About a day after DeLauro called Bernstein, a historic extension to the child tax credit was included in Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, and DeLauro was within striking distance of a decades-long goal.




https://19thnews.org/2021/02/delauro-child-tax-credit/