Daily News Feed 11.05.2009/Vocab: maunder

Sykes ready to mix it up on talk show
On Fox’s new “Wanda Sykes Show,” the comedian at its center has a simple mandate: “I’m your wrap-up of what happened during the week, but from my point of view.” Sykes’ show replaces Fox’s long-running “Mad TV,” but it won’t follow that show’s rigid sketch format. Instead, Sykes’ show (11 p.m. Saturday, WPGH) will be closer to “Real Time with Bill Maher” on HBO with a few sketches thrown in. “We’re going to have panels,” explained executive producer John Ridley at a Fox press conference in August. “We want to have conversations. We want to have people mixing it up so it’s not just going from a publicist’s talking points but what do people really think.” (Continue Reading…)

What Obama has accomplished in one year
A blow-by-blow breakdown of the young president’s first year reveals that today’s frustration stems not from a lack of policy so much as a lack of common ground. The myth of the American center looms in this, the second part of a week-long series on our country since the 2008 election. I have figured out The Problem With America Today. My inspiration was the recent one-year-later cover of Newsweek, which encapsulates the current conventional wisdom about President Obama in a single headline: YES HE CAN (BUT HE SURE HASN’T YET). Or, as Saturday Night Live put it, President Obama’s two biggest accomplishments thus far are “Jack and Squat.” You can find other versions of this perspective from Matt Lauer and David Gregory on NBC, from thousands of obnoxious bloggers, even from the hapless governor of New York. (Continue Reading…)

Jennifer Hudson would like a daughter too
New mom Jennifer Hudson just welcomed her first child, son David, to the world, but she’s already talking about No. 2 and No. 3 – and next time, she’d like a girl. “Maybe one more. I’d like to have at least one more, a little girl,” Hudson, 27, tells Access Hollywood in an interview to be aired Wednesday night. “I want a girl and then maybe another one. You know, one baby at a time.” As for what town David will call home, there’s no question for the native of the Windy City. (Continue Reading…)