Nettertainment

Willard

2012-01-31T18:30:00.000-08:00

Willard Mitt Romney beat back Newt Gingrich in Florida by outspending him 5:1, hiring a new debate coach, repeating his "God Bless America" speech ad nauseum and, of course, by incessant bold-faced lying regarding the President.

Willard bought his Republican Presidential Primary win in Florida with $15,000,000 in ads (between his campaign and his SuperPAC). He spent, roughly, $21 per voter. What interesting is that 92% of all the ads for this race were negative -- and only 0.1% were pro-Romney:

The bulk of the ads were run by Mr. Romney and his PAC, Restore Our Future, which spent a combined $15.4 million on television and radio advertising in Florida. That compares with $3.7 million for Mr. Gingrich and his allies, according to an analysis by a Republican media strategist not working for either candidate.

The tone and content of the commercials were almost as lopsided. Of all the spots that ran in Florida for the last week, 68 percent were attacks on Mr. Gingrich, Kantar Media found. Only 9 percent were favorable toward him.

Ads assailing Mr. Romney accounted for 23 percent of the political commercials that were broadcast. Yet less than 0.1 percent were pro-Romney, Kantar found. That sliver of a figure was because of one ad the Romney campaign broadcast in Spanish, which featured Mr. Romney’s son praising his father’s leadership abilities.

That's right, the only pro-Romney ad wasn't even broadcast in the English language.

So what's Willard's "positive" vision for America?:

And I'm going to stand and defend capitalism across this country, throughout this campaign. I know we're going to get hit hard from President Obama, but we're going to stuff it down his throat and point out it is capitalism and freedom that makes America strong.

"Stuff it down his throat." You kiss your wife with those lips, Willard? I mean, unless you're a dyed-in-wool Obama hater, what's to like about this guy?:

When Romney ran for the presidential nomination and lost in 2008, the share of Americans who saw him positively never topped 30 percent. By last month, that number had dropped to 24 percent, according to The Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.

Romney took a beating last week in South Carolina over his business career at Bain Capital and his taxes -- and so did his image among voters. A Washington Post poll released Tuesday, three days after Romney lost the South Carolina primary, found a 17 percentage-point drop over two weeks among independent voters who viewed Romney favorably.

That's right, Willard Mitt Romney. The more you see him, the less you like him.

Game of Anticipation

2012-01-30T21:05:00.000-08:00

Now that I've read four and a half George RR Martin A Song of Ice & Fire books, being just about in the middle of the one that came out late last year, it's strange to look at the new HBO teaser trailer (#2, with a lot more imagery) for Game of Thrones Season Two.

On the one hand, I'm so incredibly super-psyched to see these characters made flesh again. Tyrion, Danys, Jon, Robb, even fucked-up Cersei (as played so well by Lena Headley), and now Melisandre (being played by Black Book's awesome Carice Van Houten) and fucked-up Stannis.

On the other hand, these characters are like ancient history to me now. When Season One ended after the 10th episode, I was so insanely eager to know what happened to next to these characters, I read A Clash of Kings which is the basis for this upcoming season, and it's a doozy. If they get all the plot in and pull off a huge mother of all battles, it could be the best season of TV since The Wire.

But then I read A Storm of Swords, which the series creators/showrunners, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss say is too big for one season and will be split in two. And A Feast for Crows, the slower one that opens up new character veins in entirely fresh locations, and pissed off some diehard fans by splitting in half the simultaneous chronological events with popular characters that Martin held for the fifth book, the one I'm currently reading, A Dance with Dragons.

So I'm 3,500 pages down the road in this epic saga from the events that will kick off this new season in March. Some of these characters...well, they're almost like ancient history.

I will say this: if you love Peter Dinklage as Tyrion Lannister, as the Emmy and Golden Globe voters did or maybe even more, this is the season for you. We left with his father making him Hand of the King - the job in which the last two holders have died while serving, Jon Arryn (who's suspected murder sets off the whole series and plots) and Ned Stark (who everybody thought was the series lead for the run). Thus far the only power Tyrion's had is as much of his family fortune as his father allowed. Now he has real power.

I'll also say that my favorite book, the third, A Storm of Swords, lives up to it's name. It's not just the violence, it's all about the costs of war, not just to the characters but to the land, the people. The ending is like, three corkscrew twists that blow your mind to pieces. And while I'm so glad they'll take two seasons to tell the whole story, it's painful to think that's maybe three more years away.

So here's to the return of the champion series. As excited as I am for the March return of Mad Men, the rich world of Sterling, Cooper, Draper & Pryce is not really a fair match for the massive tapestry of Westeros and lands beyond.

Winter is coming. Just in time for Spring.

Weird Cool 3D

2012-01-29T20:08:00.000-08:00

I've always been a fan of stereograms, those 3D photos from the 19th century where two similar but slightly different images are viewed through a set of lenses on a small handheld contraption, giving a stereo effect.

Now the New York Public Library Labs has created the online Stereogranimator, which turns these original stereograms into vibrating stills creating a 3D effect. For example:

Not perfect, but I do like how it gives body to the images for something of a "you are there" feel.

Weird and cool enough?

Mitty Mitt Mitt

2012-01-26T20:51:00.000-08:00

Ah, Mitt. Seems you may have removed Newt Gingrich's rationale for the GOP Presidential nomination tonight -- Newt is not the greatest debater since Lincoln-Douglas after all.

As for your own rationale, that somehow you have the phenomenal business acumen that will make you a better President than Barack Obama...not so much:

You claim you have not even seen the campaign ad with your own voice saying you approved it. Not exactly stellar detail-oriented CEO work -- it's impossible to imagine Steve Jobs, for instance, making that same mistake. Might even be a campaign finance law violation.

You finally release your taxes after claiming your campaign's personal finance disclosure form was enough...and it turns out you lied left accounts off of that form.

How bad is it?

A review by the Los Angeles Times/Tribune Washington Bureau found that at least 23 funds and partnerships listed in the couple's 2010 tax returns did not show up or were not listed in the same fashion on Romney's most recent financial disclosure, including 11 based in low-tax foreign countries such as Bermuda, the Cayman Islands and Luxembourg.
The campaign has stressed that Romney has paid all required U.S. taxes on his foreign funds.

Many of the funds are affiliated with Bain Capital, the Boston-based private equity firm Romney ran for 15 years. Several others are apparently unrelated offshore entities with mysterious names such as Babson 2006-1, which is based in the Cayman Islands, and Barracuda Investments, which has an address in Dublin, Ireland, but appears to be solely owned by Golden Gate Capital, a private equity firm based in San Francisco.

Again, is (a) lack of attention to major (not minor) details ill-becoming of a CEO and downright dangerous in a President, (b) an attempt to obfuscate for some yet-to-be-uncovered reason, meaning we'd have an untrustworthy President or, worse, (c) you're some kind of crook, and one who would immediately under investigation upon taking office.

So what's the great rationale for a Mitt Romney candidacy now, other than generic Republican Obama hate?

Anyone?

SOTU 2012

2012-01-25T16:32:00.000-08:00

President Obama's State of the Union address last week managed to make the Republicans seem very, very small. All they can do is squawk about "class warfare" where Obama says "fairness," what was always the Bill Clinton position - play by the rules, fair is fair. Here's the highlights as chosen by Talking Points Memo:

On the GOP side, wha???:

The nationwide survey of registered voters shows that only 26 percent of respondents believe Romney has strong principles, while 61 percent believe he will say anything.

From Rupert Murdoch's very own Twitter handle, it appears that Romney may be losing the biggest GOP Primary of all -- the Murdoch Primary:

Romney's tax returns might kill his chances. See Republican establishment panic now!

Maybe Rupert is realizing what I've been saying all along, that Romney is a terrible General Election candidate (and is doing more poorly that he should be with his own party) and is choosing to go with the most entertaining possibility, the one that will stir things up, get ratings for his outrageousness and fire up the viewing base all the way to his own destruction:

“By the end of my second term we will have the first permanent base on the moon and it will be American,” he said. According to Newt, the base would be used for “science, tourism, and manufacturing” and create a “robust industry” modeled on the airline business in the 20th century.

From there, Gingrich suggested moving towards a Mars mission by the end of the next decade. He proposed setting aside 10% of NASA’s budget in prize money for private research into interplanetary exploration.

“I accept the charge that I am grandiose,” he said. “Because Americans are instinctively grandiose.”

Obama last night was a relief after the antics of these nerve-wracking crazies.

Lastly, there was the moment where he embraced now Former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), who resigned from Congress in a very moving official ceremony today:

It's not that hard to make Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) cry, but this is one I felt with him.

Here's to a triumphal return, a few years down the line.

Catchy

2012-01-24T14:42:00.000-08:00

I'm liking the way Joseph Gordon-Leavitt is making his choices:

Go, Vermin!

Too Moving

2012-01-23T17:39:00.000-08:00

It isn't a huge surprise that Rep. Gabrielle Giffords is stepping down from her Congressional seat to focus on recovery from the gunshot wound that nearly took her life a year ago this week. It does seem like a shame, and it is difficult not to be moved by the video she created to announce her decision:

The nature of her recovery is on display for all to see. Lots of cuts, possibly due to aphasia. Gotta hope that her seat stays blue in the special election and again in the Fall, that she has a magnificent recovery however long it takes, and that we get her back in public work again no matter how far into the future.

More Popcorn, Please

2012-01-22T19:47:00.000-08:00

For those of us on the other side of the aisle, and for late-night comedians everywhere, Saturday's South Carolina Republican Presidential Primary results could not be better. Newton Leroy Gingrich, a race-baiting legend-in-his-own-mind, a man with whom his former colleagues have bad reviews, a serial adulterer and griftician, beat the supposedly "electable" Willard Mitt Romney. Across all income groups -- except voters earning more than $200,000/year. Not exactly a Man of the People. Along with Iowa now having moved from Romney to Rick Santorum's win column, more bad news for Mitt:

Just a week ago, Mitt Romney's lead over Newt Gingrich was 23 points. And now in the wake of the stunning South Carolina Newtmentum result (Romney didn't drop, but Newt surged), Gallup's Sunday national poll tracker puts Romney at 30 and Gingrich at 25.

Hell, his marginal tax rate is probably higher than his lead now. The key South Carolina takeaways, from Sean Trende at Real Clear Politics:

1) There is no good news buried in here for Mitt Romney.
2) This is worse than George W. Bush’s loss to John McCain in New Hampshire.
3) Analysts are kidding themselves if they say Romney is the inevitable nominee.

Fred Barnes, conservative columnist, says Romney needs a Big Idea. But unlike Barack Obama, who's big idea of One America began at least two years before he ran (with his national introduction speech at the Democratic National Convention), Romney is not coming into this campaign with any big ideas, just his now cracked aura of capability and electability. As Michael Walsh asks at The Corner, "What's the Rationale Now?"

With Newt’s big win tonight, the glaring weakness of Mitt Romney now stands revealed for all to see. Hopefully including Mitt. Because if this wasn’t a wake-up call for Team Romney, he’s a totally hopeless candidate.

All along, I’ve thought he was a pretty hopeless candidate, with too many weaknesses and very few political strengths. Stripped of his Iowa “win,” his record as a candidate is basically 2–4, with wins as Massachusetts governor and, this cycle, in the New Hampshire primary (as a semi-favorite son), but losses to Ted Kennedy, McCain, Rick Santorum, and now Mr. Newt.
This loss is a bad one. Not only did he blow a sizable (and, as it turns out, illusory) lead, he finds himself right back where he started this campaign, stuck at around a quarter of the vote. If that’s “electable,” the GOP is in serious trouble.

Now the Gingrich campaign is cocky and energized:

Kevin Kellems, one of Gingrich's top advisers, said that "Gov. Romney’s campaign is now showing real signs of being off-balance and nervous. There must be a reason for it."

When asked for specific signs of anxiety in the Romney campaign, Kellems responded by email, "among others, Gov. Romney's inability to answer basic questions about his taxes without bouncing around the podium like an overcaffeinated high-schooler being put on the spot by his parents."

And Romney is starting to "take the gloves off" on the way to the Florida Primary vote a week from Tuesday:

He called Gingrich a “failed leader” as Speaker who “had to resign in disgrace” and criticized his work as a highly paid consultant for Freddie Mac in his years out of office. “He said he was just a historian there,” Romney said. “I’d like him to release his records there.”

For frustrated Romney fans, the Newt attacks couldn’t come soon enough.

“Tell it it to him in the debates!” one person shouted as Romney began his attack monologue.
“Take the gloves off, Mitt!” another hollered.

Newt's crowd is a bit more...Confederate. At last night's victory speech:

Newt: ...Just think about how radical he would be in a second term.
Audience: No more years!
Newt: So I have a proposal (interrupted)
Audience: No more years!
Audience: String him up!

What's going on here is that Romney is a politician of a Republican mode that doesn't really exist anymore, trying to run as the type of Republican which has ascended ever since Reagan was elected - the Southern Convervative Republican. George W. Bush, with all his time in Texas, could play it; Romney cannot. On one hand, he really believes all the lies and trash he spew, in which case he's really no better than Newt. On the other, he's saying what he thinks he needs to say to win, which means he's untrustworthy and, in essence, following rather than leading.

My only word of caution to those on the Left who are gleeful at the prospect of a Gingrich nomination, be careful what you wish for because that does put him atop one of the two major U.S. political parties, meaning there's still a chance he could be our next President, i.e. in the case of a disaster.

On the other hand, as I don't see Romney having the same core integrity Obama has in 2008 during his long bout with Hillary Clinton for the nomination, I don't think the long Primary process benefits him. It keeps him from being able to pivot early enough to more centrist rhetoric and tarnishes him with working class Americans due to the nature of the attacks.

Aside from his fundamental problems as a candidate, Romney's side may have made a fatal error when their SuperPAC went hard after Gingrich in Iowa TV ads. Not only did Romney turn out not to win Iowa (when the dust cleared), it made Newt change his rhetoric from "speak no ill of a fellow Republican" a la Reagan's 11th Commandment to total attack.

And that's the one thing Newton Leroy knows how to do.

Choices, Choices

2012-01-19T21:16:00.001-08:00

The choice.

This guy:

Or this guy:

Music to my ears.

That Laugh

2012-01-18T16:22:00.000-08:00

I've written about Mitt's nervous laugh before, when he's under pressure or faced with antagonistic questioning, but it turns out he's a man of many laughs, as TPM has collected:

I'm expecting that nervous laugh on display with Bret Baier to come out when the Michael Scott candidate cracks in a debate against Obama.

Out of the Hunts

2012-01-17T17:49:00.000-08:00

I've read a number of predictable analyses of why former Utah Governor John Huntsman failed to connect with Republican voters in any way that could earn him enough votes to be a meaningful Primary challenger to former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney. I've read that his "words were conservative but his music was liberal."

I get that his belief in science, i.e. of Climate Change, is an anathema to his Party's electorate, as is his having served in China in the Obama Administration, even speaking Chinese in a GOP debate.

I understand that he never had the organization that Willard has. I've believed from the start that this was mainly his training for the 2016 campaign, assuming Willard fails to beat Barack.

I see that Stephen Colbert, not on the Primary ballot, was outpolling Huntsman in South Carolina. Colbert claims he scared Huntsman out of the race.

Here's why I think John Huntsman was such a dud as a candidate, at least this time around:

Intellectualized Voice: Yes, Barack Obama is a very smart guy, a book reader, a.k.a. an intellectual. But, to a lesser extent than Bill Clinton, he turns his intellectual notions into understandable, even moving ideas that can galvanize a crowd. From his underwhelming candidacy announcement on, Huntsman never seemed to have the common touch.

Lack of Leadership: I commend Huntsman for taking a firm stand against Willard's slam of his having served as a diplomat under Obama, his smart invocation of non-partisan service, but he had numerous opportunities to stake the moral high ground in a number of debates where the other candidates and the audience were out of line. Most notably, there was the debate where the gay soldier was booed by the audience. What a great moment that could have been for Huntsman to show moral leadership and distinguish himself from the rest of the candidates. Blown.
Weakie: He just doesn't seem all that virile. More Adlai Stevenson than Dwight D. Eisenhower. Americans want a certain masculine reassurance in their President. For example, what Hillary Clinton had that Huntsman does not.

It'll be interesting to see how Romney's 1950's-style masculinity compares to Obama's 21st Century version.

May the most manly man win.

The Case for Obama

2012-01-16T23:31:00.000-08:00

Exactly.

Split Decision

2012-01-15T21:21:00.000-08:00

The 69th Annual Golden Globes were held tonight in Los Angeles and in an odd year that's produced a number of very good films and great performances without producing an obvious frontrunner for the big Oscar crown (although The Artist has had that buzz for awhile), the Hollywood Foreign Press delivered a rather tantalizing split decision.

In my mind, the eventual Oscar for Best Picture could go to The Artist, The Help, The Descendants or Hugo. For awhile -- before it was released -- there was a general feeling that Steven Spielberg's The War Horse was built for the prize, but it's not had the reviews, word of mouth or box office needed to make that a reality, and recently was left off of some key guild award lists.

For the record, here's the top-tier award winners tonight:

Best Motion Picture — Drama: “The Descendants”
Best Motion Picture — Comedy or Musical: “The Artist”
Best Director — Motion Picture: Martin Scorsese, “Hugo”
Best Actress — Drama: Meryl Streep, “The Iron Lady”
Best Actor — Drama: George Clooney, “The Descendants”
Best Actress — Comedy or Musical: Michelle Williams, “My Week With Marilyn”
Best Actor — Comedy or musical: Jean Dujardin, “The Artist
Best Supporting Actress: Octavia Spencer, “The Help”
Best Supporting Actor: Christopher Plummer, “Beginners”
Best Screenplay: Woody Allen, “Midnight in Paris”

Is The Descendants the timeless classic its producer thought it was in his speech tonight? Is Harvey Weinstein unstoppable this year with The Artist, a crowd-pleaser, if not doing Descendants type box office? Can Martin Scorsese's Hugo, also with the weaker box office, sneak in there (it really feels like a classic) and take the prize?

Then there's The Help. Classic Hollywood middlebrow take on an important historical moment, filled with fine performances and a rare female-dominated cast for a picture this size. Could Viola Davis break past Meryl Streep and Michelle Williams in their pitch-perfect historical recreations and, with Octavia Spencer looking like a frontrunner now for Best Supporting, lead the team to victory, even without a Best Director nomination?

Which one is that most compelling combination of spectacle and sentiment that makes a "Most Picture?"

Mr. Entitled

2012-01-12T20:58:00.000-08:00

At what point does somebody disqualify himself from the Presidency of the United States by nature of his own sense of entitlement?

Evidently, anyone who criticizes predatory capitalistic practices that enrich the amoral few at the expense of the working many is simply envious:

The only times we can talk about income inequality, according to Mitt's very words in this video, is in "quiet rooms." Does he mean quiet backrooms where the real political deals are made, over cigars and cognac? Or quiet, padded rooms where dissenters disappear into?

Credit where credit is due: a SuperPAC supporting Newt Gingrich just released this devastating documentary, featuring real people who lost their jobs when Mitt Romney's Bain Capital took over the companies they worked for and made hundreds of millions in overburdening the companies with debt through to bankruptcy -- heartbreaking human tragedy by people who only envy the lives they had before Mitt:

Here's to hoping Mitt enjoys a quiet room in his La Jolla estate where he retreats after losing the General Election to the sitting President in a landslide.

All the Way

2012-01-11T22:56:00.000-08:00

Shame is the best art movie I've seen since Exit Through the Gift Shop, but a lot more minimalist. It's a film by director Steve McQueen, originally an installation artist in England, who's got a tremendous eye and a way with getting actors to commit. His first movie, which I did not see, similarly starred Irish/German actor Michael Fassbender (Magneto!) and had a one-word title, Hunger, with Fassbender as real life figure Bobby Sands, Irish nationalist who died on hunger strike in a British prison. That one looked too grueling to me. This one has a lot of nudity without the emaciation.

Brandon lives in NYC and has a super power: his gaze. Without seeming to do anything but focus his attention, his unwavering gaze, on a pretty young woman on the subway train, he can charge her erotically, to the point where her arousal turns into shame, and a chase, a predator and object of desire.

We see him, intercut with the subway as it all starts, getting out of bed and walking through his stark, stylish NYC apartment after having had sex, his shoulder's broad, penis flopping, long shot where we can see his bare feet to patterning hairline, shadowy figure emphasizing the feral. Sex is, after all, what we have in common with the beasts. Brandon the beast, as are all the other bodies he couples with, seen in beautiful silhouettes and appreciation for human form, in extended take foreplay-to-coitis, in fast-cut electroshock reaction to tortured moments of real human feeling.

Brandon is, as they're treating the movie in PR, a sex addict, and while the movie takes that seriously as a heart attack, this is no after school special. In fact, the question of whether Brandon has learned anything is open to the last frame, and I think it's meant for us to go deep in ourselves, what we believe is possible about our own capability to break out of those mechanisms we use to block feeling because, as the movie makes clear in both elliptical and visceral ways, feeling so often is about pain.

So this (incredibly well built and well-hung) sex addict (in a successful job) in Sexhattan is seducing or buying or onlining it every free moment, even in the stall at work. He seems to assume he's covering his tracks well enough, or maybe not being seen unless he so wills it, but when his sister, Sissy, comes to town, everything starts falling apart, and Brandon's addiction is exposed at work and to her.

McQueen's eye is brilliant, with surfaces reminiscent of Michael Mann's great L.A. version in Heat, but much more in mastershots, often one long Steadicam or static take with actors improvising dialogue, or sex, almost like a cinematic play, unfolding unbroken, in real time before us.

There's man times when it's reminiscent of Antonioni, where the architecture of the modern city traps the characters in defined spaces, or dwarfs them, trapped and alienated, from their own souls. There's a bravura tracking shot, something like ten blocks of jogging at night in the city, ending up at 32rd & Madison Square Garden and a broken sign that shows the lengths our addict is going to escape his shame. But as we all know, New York City is at all times the city of where fornication never sleeps.

James Badge Dale is very different than he's been in that I've seen before, playing Brandon's married hound dog boss, Nicole Beharie makes a huge impression as an office fling, as does Lucy Walters on the subway in a what's essentially a silent film performance. All the actors seem completely natural to the world, noir, distanced, darkly glamorous, almost sci-fi noir. And, yes, they're great to look at.

Fassbender carries every scene, so completely committed to every revealing inch of the role, running a slow burn gamut that leads him all the way down to hell. Several times in the movie he hangs his head (in shame, of course) so low that, shot from behind, he appears to be the headless man. Man lowered below the beast, because he knows of his sin.

But it's Carrie Mulligan who breaks out completely in this. As Sissy, the ne'er-do-well sister just looking for love and shelter but getting ditched and burned at every turn, nowhere in sight is that prim core that's even in her character in Drive, let alone An Education. She there's naked, flawed, the most human thing in the movie. She sings an almost unbearably slowed down version of "New York, New York," revealing a hell of a voice and holding an infinite close-up, her eyes breaking our hearts, and her brother's.

What is it they share? What has caused him to run away from even her, and her to run to everyone? It's only obliquely referenced, just enough of a hint, but you can use your imagination. There's an element of horror Shame, that thing that at times makes it closer to Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom than Last Tango in Paris, that the past hints at and the present dreads.

Because Shame equals loneliness, and loneliness is it's own shame. A cycle of love and pain. Shame, as my mother liked to say, one of the great twin gifts that a parent gives a child.

The other being guilt.

The Really Important Race

2012-01-11T00:04:00.000-08:00

New Hampshire was a foregone conclusion -- how about this year's Academy Award for Best Picture, as often predicted by the Director's Guild of America nominations? Announced today, this year's DGA nominees, per Sasha Stone:

WOODY ALLEN
Midnight in Paris
(Sony Pictures Classics)
DAVID FINCHER
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
(Columbia Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures)
MICHEL HAZANAVICIUS
The Artist
(The Weinstein Company)
ALEXANDER PAYNE
The Descendants
(Fox Searchlight Pictures)
MARTIN SCORSESE
Hugo
(Paramount Pictures)

The semi-surprise here is Woody Allen and the big surprise is David Fincher, with the first in a pulpy trilogy, and not the first version either. The other surprise is that Steven Spielberg's work on The War Horse didn't score a nomination, even though (far afar, admittedly) it appears built to win awards.

Can The Artist really win Best Picture? Wonderfully clever and evocative, I feel like it's a bit too much of a novelty film. Midnight in Paris and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo would be surprises to me as well.

Unless The Help can sneak in (a safe and respectable compromise candidate) my gut tells me it comes down to The Descendants vs. Hugo. The Descendants does not play as well with older audiences (i.e., a disproportionate segment of the AMPAS membership), but it's the most straightforward of the potential winners. A coming of age for director Alexander Payne. But is it too indy? Is it Billy Wilder enough?

It hasn't been a horrible year for pictures. There's some really good, entertaining, interesting work. My pick would be The Tree of Life, but the DGA snub for Terrence Malick means it's too esoteric to win the crowning prize. But it's not a year that's produced a clear Best Picture to fight about.

I've been saying for awhile that Hugo is the stealth candidate to win. It's big and moving and about movies even closer to the beginning than The Artist, a much deeper, richer historical value. And it could, justifiably, be the first 3D movie to win.

Don't be surprised if Georges Méliès (1861-1938) comes out on top.

Juice It Up

2012-01-09T16:21:00.000-08:00

Raw cannabis as miracle healing vegetable. Former skeptical doctors speak:

It's a juicing cure trend.

Early Counter

2012-01-08T22:57:00.000-08:00

Not only were Newt Gingrich and other GOP Presidential nomination rivals going after frontrunner Mitt Romney this morning, but the Dems are softening him up on the most important issue of all: trust. Per David Axelrod on ABC News “This Week with George Stephanopoulos":

STEPHANOPOULOS: It's clear you think that's going to be a vulnerability for Governor Romney. But coming out of Iowa, coming out of the debate last night, going into this primary here in New Hampshire, are you more convinced than ever that he's going to be the nominee?

AXELROD: Well, I don't know what the answer is to that. I mean, it's clear there are a majority of Republicans who are resistant to him. He only got a quarter of the vote in Iowa. This is essentially his home state. He has one of his homes here, and he was the governor of the neighboring state. So we'll see how this process goes.

But his fundamental problem is one of trust. I don't think conservatives trust him and I don't think moderates trust him. And you saw last night him shifting on a whole range of positions from abortion to China to taxes.

Interesting to hear Axelrod echoing Gingrich on the 25% for Romney as an Iowa Caucus "win.: There's a continued Democratic defining of expectations to Mitt as a way to show how little his own party supports him, as DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz told Talking Points Memo:

“He’s coming off what at some point probably wont even be defined as a win in Iowa where fewer voters came out for him than came out in 2008.” She added that anything less than 50% in New Hampshire should be interpreted as a sign of weakness given his close ties to the state.

She also had a memorable line regarding his "job creator" claim that I'm sure the DNC hopes becomes a new meme for Romney:

“Mitt Romney, I think, is more of a job cremator than a job creator,” Schultz said. She added: “He was a corporate buyout specialist at Bain Capital. He dismantled companies. He cut jobs. He forced companies into bankruptcy and he outsourced jobs and sent jobs overseas. That’s not a record to write home about, that’s not a record to be proud of, and it’s something voters need to know.”

Axelrod essentially said the same thing, but in a way that chips away at Romney's trustworthiness:

STEPHANOPOULOS: He also started to take some fire last night on his tenure at Bain Capital. And something you, Democrats, the Democratic National Committee, have really been hitting hard all through this campaign so far. He's not backing down at all. You saw him last night, Governor Romney saying his team at Bain Capital is responsible for creating 100,000 jobs. Do you have any qualm with that number?

AXELROD: Absolutely. Not me, forget about me -- every independent fact checker who's looked at it, including the Associated Press last night, after the debate, said he can't back up that number, and his campaign has conceded --

STEPHANOPOULOS: He says that net-net--

(CROSSTALK)

AXELROD: I know he says it's a net-net number, and he said I'm a numbers guy. The problem is that neither he nor his campaign can furnish any evidence to support that.

But let's talk about Bain and let's talk about what it was and what he did. His partner said in The L.A. Times, our job was not to create jobs, our job was to create wealth for our partners. And here's what they did. They closed down more than 1,000 plant stores and offices. They outsourced tens of thousands of jobs, and they took 12 companies to bankruptcy. And on those bankruptcies, he and his partners made hundreds of millions of dollars. He says this is the real economy, this is the model for the country. I don't think those are the values that people want to animate our economy. He's not a job creator, he's a corporate raider. Those aren't the values that we want to lead our economy.

Party support. Expectations. Trustworthiness. Values.

This serves the purpose of fighting back against Romney's constant attacks on Obama without dragging the President into the mud too early.

And if he really is the inevitable nominee, nice to soften him up early before his self-definition has taken root in the media -- or with the American people.

Live Free or Die Follies

2012-01-05T23:44:00.000-08:00

Fun continues in New Hampshire is Willard Mitt Romney is confronted by Occupy questions at his rally:

“It seems that the U.S. is a great place to be a corporation,’’ the man said, “but increasingly a desperate place to live and work.’’
“Where do you think corporations’ profits go?’’ Romney asked.
“It goes to the 1 percent of Americans who own the 90 percent of stocks,’’ the man responded and continued to press him.

...and college students boo anti-gay marriage bigot Rick Santorum from his stage:

A midday event in front of a gathering of college students here turned into a testy exchange in which Mr. Santorum compared allowing gay couples to marry to polygamy, apparently equating the two as equally undesirable.
“If you’re not happy unless you’re married to five other people, is that O.K.?” he asked.

Meanwhile, Mitt's tax plan gets checked and turns out to raise taxes on lower middle class Americans while giving huge windfalls to the rich:

The Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center crunched the numbers — part of a series of analyses the group has done of the GOP candidates’ tax proposals — and found that the plan constitutes a major tax cut for wealthy Americans. But compared to today’s rates, Romney proposes effective tax increases for people making less than $40,000.
Above that level, Romney’s plan cuts taxes at greater rates for wealthier people. The average millionaire would thus pay $145,568 less in taxes in 2015 than they do today. Taken altogether, that makes the plan a budget buster, meaning greater deficits or deep cuts to federal programs.

A new website called Romney the Liar is up, sure to be a fun one-stop fact check for journalists who care to start checking up on Wild Willard's wild claim.

Meanwhile, as the follies roll into N.H., the President is on the job helping young people get summer jobs themselves. Compare the President's record to Romney's role in job creation at Bain Capital, using Romney's own methodology of only counting companies that created jobs under Bain's management and not those he closed or outsourced:

No contest.

Now or next November.

Back on the Job

2012-01-04T22:37:00.001-08:00

Happy New Year, and while the GOP scramble themselves into three different constituencies in Iowa, President Barack Hussein Obama is back to work in Ohio with the latest mother of all Congressional recess appointments, hung up in the Senate by silent hold since June, Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray as head of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

This is the Bureau architected by Elizabeth Warren, the now highly popular Massachusetts Senate candidate -- made a star by the very Republican House members who treated her so rudely in committee hearings (karma kickback). Even current Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) is bucking his party in fear of Warren and coming out in favor of Obama's recess appointment, which has outraged Republicans by coming during their "pro forma" sessions that technically prevent recess appointments without fulfilling the intent of the law.

And that's not all -- Obama's adding recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board that have been held up by the same silent, unaccountable Senate hold. Romney calls all this "Chicago-style politics at its worst," which is a Conservative meme used whenever Obama is assertive, as opposed to when they call him weak or unfocused. But procedure is generally a losing argument against policy, especially a popular one, and the GOP can only win with it amongst their own. Who in this video is actually doing his job?:

Obama's 2012 was greeted with an initial up day in the stock market, and the day after he set the fall election stage by clearly declared the intractable GOP Congress as his foil. He's not even bothering with Mitt. The fly is batting his wings furiously in his web.

By the time the spider turns to him, the fly's buzzing will seem tiring.

Frothy

2012-01-03T20:59:00.000-08:00

Willard Mitt Romney may end up squeaking out a win in Iowa with the smallest winning percentage in GOP history (worse than Bob Dole's 26% in 1996), but it's going to be cold comfort. He's not feeling like a leader, more like a shill, who's has yet to be fully challenged over his bald-faced lies about his eventual opponent, a President who kills terrorists with efficiency and is presiding over a slow but clear recovery.

While I have no love for Rick Santorum's political views, he deserves credit for his late surge to second, almost first place in Iowa. Massively outspent, he did the retail politics right, visiting every single county in Iowa. Will the evangelicals nationwide coalesce around him as they did in Iowa? Or is Romney simply the next in line, which is always the GOP nominee? With the Bush political team behind him, the most professional organization and all the money in the world, including Mormon money, it's hard to imagine he won't be debating Obama next fall.

Bye-bye Rick Perry, who had tons of dough but screwed the pooch spectacularly. Michelle Bachmann says she'll go on but she won't have the money or organization -- then again, not much of what comes out of her mouth is ever true.

As for Newt, who a few weeks ago said it would be hard not to imagine him as the nominee, the fall has been swift and swiftboated by the Romney PACs, and I think it will be irreversible.

Ron Paul, of course, will keep going with the most committed volunteers and supporters of the bunch. If they GOP establishment doesn't treat him right, it could be all the way to a third party candidacy, giving Obama that landslide I've been predicting.

Any chance Mittens would make Ron his Veep?

A Coupla Flicks

2012-01-02T21:22:00.000-08:00

Happy 2012. I'll open the year by mentioning two movies I've seen over the past week that were both terrific experiences, for wildly different reasons: The Descendants and Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (a.k.a. MI:4).

The former was made for a fraction of the cost of the latter and features, to my eye, zero special effects. It's what should be a small movie by today's standards but it feels big, due to the Hawaii locale, some key shots of some very important (to the plot) land in Kauai, and the care with which the moments unfold. All that, and George Clooney.

It's interesting to me who loves and does not love the movie. Although it's the closest thing to a traditional drama (or maybe "dramady") amongst the movies I've seen this year, none of the senior citizens I've spoken with about it really cared for it. Also, it's not as impressive on a screener as it is in the theater, as it's all about small significant moments, detailed expressions, the communal theatrical experience pays off with different audience members picking up different touches at different times, laughter building, shared sympathy during the tougher moments.

I took my 12-year-old, who's growing more sophisticated in his movie tastes, and we both enjoyed it, and both had the same favorite character: Sid. He's a guy who tags along with Clooney and his daughters as they go to hunt down the man who Clooney's learned has been sleeping with his comatose wife prior to her life-threatening jet-ski accident. Sid is an iconic laid-back Hawaiian surfer dude, always smiling, always on his own stoner wavelength, with some of the best lines in the movie and a little secret of his own. Everyone seems to agree that it's great to see Beau Bridges again, as Cousin Hugh, a lynchpin of he plot/sub-plot convergence around a land deal that Clooney and family are being forced to make due to changes in Hawaiian property law.

As for Tom Cruise and company, SEE IT IN IMAX. There's nothing like climbing the side of the world's tallest building, in Dubai, with special agent Ethan Hunt and a gigantic floor-to-ceiling screen. The key stunt sequence was actually performed by Cruise in the location, no joke, and it feels different than a CGI greenscreen fest.

I've seen MI:1 (directed by Brian DePalma) and MI:2 (a rather neutered John Woo) but missed MI:3 (J.J. Abrams). I found the first one to have exciting moments and an interesting false-flashback twist, with the opening credits, a suspended Cruise scene and the climactic helicopter-in-Chunnel sequence being the best parts, but the second one did not even feel like a Mission: Impossible story -- there was virtually no teamwork, lynchpin of the weekly series. Aside from Thandie Newton, not much to recommend it. This one appears to be the big winner of the series.

What makes the new one work is the emphasis on teamwork (it's even underlined at the end), great casting of Simon Pegg and Jeremy Renner and, thank the cinema gods, the inspired choice of Brad Bird as director. This is Bird's first live-action feature, but he made my favorite (hands-down) Pixar movie, The Incredibles, which recalled and spoofed 1960's James Bond-style spy thrillers as much as superhero tropes. Unlike some action directors, Bird doesn't over-cut the exciting stuff. As I'd say for David Fincher, the camera is always in the right place. There are touches that seem to be his, like a fluttering glove stuck to the side of the Dubai building, Ethan tossing a tip on a table, little things that make it more fun and more real.

While I can't claim to be an expert in this movie series, what struck me was that, as in all good adventure movies, the best laid plans go awry and inspired improvisation has to save the day. What feels different about this one is the understanding that cutting edge technology will almost always have kinks -- it comes with the territory, no room for grousing, just try and move on. It starts with a Russian pay phone that delivers the mission message to Hunt but doesn't self-destruct on time until Hunt gives it a smack and includes loss of wireless signals, botched mask-making, trying to do a retinal scan on the side of a moving train.

This is essential the Silicon Valley experience, something Bird is close to due to his time up in NoCal at Pixar. As a colleague of mine once said, "It's not cutting edge software unless it crashes."

That spirit gives the movie it's moxie. And the IMAX chase through a desert sandstorm doesn't hurt either.

Here's to more good flicks -- along with more aggravating politics -- in 2012. Thanks for reading in 2011, and I hope you'll keep returning to Nettertainment to ride it out, as long as I'm posting.

PS: They finally caught Omar!

The 2,001st Post: What's Obama Done?

2011-12-29T17:01:00.000-08:00

I just checked by accident and found out yesterday's Nettertainment post was #2,000. Wow.

I'll celebrate by reprinting an email to a friend who's on the Left and skeptical of President Barack Obama. You know, the kind of leftwing skepticism (a.k.a. circular firing squad) that dogged Al Gore in the fateful 2000 election where some said there would be no difference between a President Gore and a President George W. Bush. And we all know how that turned out.

Leaving aside the massive, publicly stated Republican obstructionism and hard-right/Fox News demonization of President Obama, the massive attempt at de-legitimization by calling him Kenyan, anti-American Exceptionalist, Socialist, Hitlerist, etc, there's this:

Already arguably better than Bill Clinton – four sites, listed in my order of preference, tracking what he's accomplished so far:

Crowdsourced database – pretty great and current, but have to click to open categories: http://obamaachievements.org/list
Easy to read, not sure if up-to-date:http://pleasecutthecrap.typepad.com/main/what-has-obama-done-since-january-20-2009.html
List from this past May – not up to date: http://www.pasquinifamily.com/?p=857
Just promises kept – from this past February, not up to date: http://planetpov.com/2011/02/13/a-short-list-of-pres-obamas-accomplishments/

Hope to see what Prezbama can do with a second term, especially if Dems can hold the Senate and maybe even flip the House.

And the photo of the year:

Since I sent that email, as if by ESP, there's this video from TPM:

Watch this meme grow -- how much he's accomplished -- as Romney (now looking likely to be Obama's 2012 Republican opponent) amps up the name-calling, lies and smears. As George Clooney says:

And do we really need this guy mucking it up again?

Douchy

2011-12-28T23:12:00.000-08:00

Willard Mitt Romney was a bishop, a lay pastor in his church, something he brings up to discuss abortion on the campaign trail. For being a Mormon missionary, he received a deferment from military service during the Vietnam War.

So my question is, as a man of religious faith, is this his idea of morality? :

"Close them. Turn 'em off. Even some you like," he said. "You might say, 'I like the National Endowment for the Arts.' I do," Romney said. "I like PBS. We subsidize PBS. Look, I'm going to stop that. I'm going to say that PBS is going to have to have advertisement."

"We're not going to kill Big Bird," Romney said. "But Big Bird is going to have advertisements. Alright?"

Alright? Because we all agree that educating children always goes so much better with advertisements? Not alright, Willard.

Mitt's too old to have watched Sesame Street as a kid. In fact, electing him would turn back the leadership of our country a generation, to the Clinton/Bush generation. So maybe he just doesn't get it because, like so much else, he's above it by age and wealth.

Sometimes I wonder if Mitt is not just embarked upon the greatest single performance art piece of our times. If he can flip-flop so easily, if he is indeed the hollow man everyone believes he is, if he's say or do anything to get elected and we're not getting real principles, and if enough people understand that but vote for him anyway hoping the massive tea-pandering is with a wink, then he's doing a better act than Stephen Colbert or Sasha Baron Cohen.

If not, then he's just kind of douchy.

If you want to see his whole pander, here you go:

And watching this clip, as always with Willard, I find it difficult to believe American will vote to see this man representing America on TV for the next four years.

Tricky Dick

2011-12-28T00:02:00.000-08:00

Richard Nixon & Bebe Rebozo?

A new biography by Don Fulsom, a veteran Washington reporter who covered the Nixon years, suggests the 37th U.S. President had a serious drink problem, beat his wife and — by the time he was inaugurated in 1969 — had links going back two decades to the Mafia, including with New Orleans godfather Carlos Marcello, then America's most powerful mobster.
Yet the most extraordinary claim is that the homophobic Nixon may have been gay himself. If true, it would provide a fascinating insight into the motivation and behaviour of a notoriously secretive politician.
Fulsom argues that Nixon may have had an affair with his best friend and confidant, a Mafia‑connected Florida wheeler-dealer named Charles 'Bebe' Rebozo who was even more crooked than Nixon.

I remember my parents and their friends joking about how much Nixon hung with this mediocre ex-baseball player all the time, but they'd never really imagine this at the time. Was foul-mouthed, bigoted Dick Nixon the ultimate homosexual masochist in the age of fascistic repression of gay rights? It would explain so much. As President, Nixon was of course part of that repression.

The only and ultimate escape for RMN: resignation.

The Girl with the James Bond Tattoo

2011-12-26T23:43:00.000-08:00

It's movie season and I've seen a few over the past week, mainly good stuff. The one I was most itching to see was the adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, directed by David Fincher and screenwritten by Steven Zaillian. I've read the three books, I think about 1800pp. altogether, and saw the first of the Swedish film versions, so I've spent a whole lot of time with Lisbeth Salander (as well as Mikael Blomqvist) and have to admire the extreme high quality work in the new one. I have to admit to getting a wee bit emotional when Lisbeth first showed up and when Blomqvist finally learned of her existence -- having investigated him.

She's that powerful a character, a female James Bond for our 99% Century, the best new detective since Ian Fleming introduced Bond in 1953 (original, compelling, timely, slightly feral, attractive). The books are written in a similar style to Fleming's, third person but always very close to the characters' thoughts, with detail on the type of liquor/coffee they drink, how the meals effected them, and then of course the big action-fueling plots.

This is David Fincher's Bond movie, beautifully composed for the big screen while moving with stylish velocity, featuring a teaser followed by a main titles sequence that is just like those in the Bond series, just cranked to 11 (or 12) by Trent Reznor's supersonic cover of Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" and the speedy dark-side animation. He even has Daniel Craig starring in it, the best Bond since Sean Connery. It's the best Bond flick since Craig's Casino Royale, which is the best Bond flick since Thunderball.

Craig, Christopher Plummer, Stellen Skarsgard and the rest of the cast is great -- Robin Wright, in particular, seems to have come into her own lately, including her work in Moneyball and guest spot on Enlightened. And while I don't think Noomi Rapace will ever be effaced for how she originated the role, in actual Swedish, Rooney Mara successfully crosses the rubicon as a legit Lisbeth. Her chemistry with Craig works, and she certainly commits physically to the role. We need to be at least a little afraid of Lisbeth and she may be a little tougher than Rapace, if lacking the touch of Asiatic that seems to make Rapace one with the dragon up and down her back.

The six hundred pages are well-compressed, making some of the same decisions as the Swedish movie but really zipping through the exposition of solving the case as well as climaxing the set-up B plot. Per the structure of the book, unique in the series as the others have no Agatha Christie-type plot, but instead focus on Lisbeth's story, the movie runs about fifteen minutes longer than most due to the "prologue" plot that's needed to set up the main characters prior to tackling this particular murder mystery. The couple slight changes to the ending were fine, and one can only hope Fincher decides to do the next two.

Will he?

No Big Deal

2011-12-22T17:12:00.000-08:00

A welcome first (for such documentation and dissemination), certainly far from a last:

Welcome to America, sisters.

GOP Disarray

2011-12-21T13:22:00.000-08:00

The payroll tax holiday debacle in the House of Representatives is tearing the GOP apart and smashing to pieces their "anti-tax" brand. The meme is becoming clear: the Republican Party is only interested in political wins and protecting the wealthy.

Here's how they looked today on the House floor when Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-MD) tries to bring up a vote on the Senate compromise bill passed by nearly 90% of the Senate:

Embarrassing optics for the House leadership, where Speaker Boehner kowtows to the Teapublicans to try and keep his job. Per Dana Milbank, the GOP is now in damage control mode. And supposed "leader" of the GOP Presidential pack, Willard Mitt Romney, is too chicken to take a position on the payroll tax holiday at all. Nice leadership skills, Willard.

It's not just this issue -- the GOP are in trouble everywhere with their Teapublicans, like the Major of Troy, Michigan:

Janice Daniels, led a coalition of like-minded tea partiers to kill off a transit center project that was a decade in the making, kissing off $8.4 million in federal investment funds to help make the project happen.

Well, Troy is now going to pay the price for this type of mindless ideological dogma: investors are being advised to look elsewhere rather than Troy, Michigan.

As for the idea of taxing millionaires, an anathema to the GOP:

Six in ten Americans believe Congress should raise taxes on Americans earning more than $1 million per year, according to a new CBS News poll, while only 35 percent oppose such an increase.

A narrow majority of Republican primary voters say those making more than $1 million per year should not see an increase -- but they are nearly split on the question. Forty-three percent want to see taxes on millionaires increased, and 51 percent do not.

Most GOP primary voters - 55 percent - don't think such a tax increase would have a negative impact on job creation. Twenty-nine percent say such a tax hike would hurt job creation.

Yep, as The Wall Street Journal said today:

After a year of the tea party House, Mr. Obama and Senate Democrats have had to make no major policy concessions beyond extending the Bush tax rates for two years. Mr. Obama is in a stronger re-election position today than he was a year ago, and the chances of Mr. McConnell becoming Majority Leader in 2013 are declining.

Once again: Gobama.

It's That Time Again

2011-12-20T23:11:00.000-08:00

Yes:

Happy Holidays!

Vaclav Havel: Rock Star

2011-12-19T17:25:00.000-08:00

Buried in the news of the Kim Jong-Il's death yesterday and the immediacy of associated diplomacy was the passing of Czech playwright, national leader and savior/hero, Vaclav Havel, who gave the world the Velvet Revolution of 1989. After having been jailed numerous times by the Soviet puppet regime, he eventually became a great leader:

More so than any of the prominent figures from the period of anti-communist dissent, Havel used his position, voice and moral authority to advance present-day struggles for freedom. If he looked backward at all, it was only to find lessons from his own experience that might be useful for freedom-fighters today. Communicating those lessons, he once wrote to the Cuban dissident Oswaldo Paya, was a way of repaying a debt to those who helped him in his own time of need.
He found many ways to repay that debt. In 1991, at a moment when he himself might have received the Nobel Peace Prize for leading the Velvet Revolution, he campaigned successfully for it to be awarded to Burmese activist Aung San Suu Kyi and remained a steadfast supporter of the Burmese democracy movement. He termed Alexander Lukashenko’s regime in Belarus “the disgrace of Europe” and extended moral and practical solidarity to the opposition there. He developed a deep connection with Paya’s Varela Project,which pressed for free elections and other basic rights in Cuba; and he established the International Committee for Democracy in Cuba, recruiting to it ex-presidents, members of parliament and distinguished writers from throughout Latin America and Europe. He co-authored a report applying the “responsibility to protect” doctrine to the totalitarian system in North Korea, And he led the successful international campaign to give the Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo the Nobel Peace Prize, launching it with an open letter to Chinese President Hu Jintao demanding Liu’s release from prison. The letter was delivered on Jan. 6, 2010, the 33rd anniversary of the day Havel himself was arrested for delivering the democracy manifesto Charter 77 to the Prague Castle.

This is the opposite of Kim Jong-Il, selfless rather than selfish. While artists sometimes turn leader with disastrous results, i.e. painter Adolph Hitler, Havel proved to be the right artist to lead his country into freedom.

Best of all, he had awesome taste in popular music, starting with his favorite and friend, Frank Zappa:

Not to mention Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground (like the Velvet Revolution):

And then, of course:

A better leader to remember. Keep on rocking in the free world, Vaclav, wherever you are.

Like Father Like Grandson

2011-12-18T22:02:00.000-08:00

Here in America, when we think of Kim Il-Sung, we probably think of this:

The reality is that this sick son of bitch, now mercifully dead (for the people of North Korea), was the author of famine in his country and an oppressor of his people -- to serve his own pleasures:

From 1995 to 1997, famine raged in North Korea. According to a report by North Korea’s Public Security Ministry, up to 3 million lost their lives (source). As this isn’t the most neutral observer, real numbers are probably much higher. (See an older post here about not trusting governments with the job of human rights measurement). Still today, the country is in such a state that it won’t take much for famine to return.
It was Kim Il Sung who used to say, “Communism is rice,” meaning the system would succeed by giving the people enough to eat. The famine was caused by mismanagement and the inability to adapt to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the economic transformation of China.
All that said, Kim Jong Il acted with callous disregard to the suffering of his people. Rather than lose face, the North Koreans denied the food crisis for years and then kept humanitarian aid out of the places it was most needed. The regime executed people who tried to adapt by engaging in private business.
By the way, Kim Jong Il is famous for being one of the biggest foodies in Asia. Throughout the nineteen-eighties and well into the famine, he flew couriers around the world to procure delicacies for his own palate — fresh fish from Tokyo for his sushi, cheese from France, caviar from Uzbekistan and Iran, mangoes and papaya from Thailand.

Kim Jong-Il got the power by primogeniture from Kim Il-Sung and has passed it onto his 27-year old son, Kim Jong-Un, who is expected to be controlled by his uncle on his mother's side, Chang Sung-Taek.

Here's the three generations:

Grandfather

Father

Son

Grand Vizier (Chang Sang-Taek)

I'm sure they're expecting us to invade right now, and I'm sure Beijing is there to stop it, diplomatically at first.

This will be a very interesting week for President Obama. His Administration is saying it's taken out Al Quaeda, how about breaking down the walls into North Korea at this critical juncture. The top strategist in America against a regime that's been prepared to lose their dear leader for awhile, but probably hoped it would still not be so soon.

The question is, will someone from this crime family end up on a meathook and, if so, who will it be?

Filmography 2011

2011-12-15T13:24:00.000-08:00

An annual ritual now:

Congrats to Genrock for the edit and here's the list of what's in it.

A Solid Endorsement

2011-12-14T21:44:00.001-08:00

I have as many problems with Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) as Andrew Sullivan and am not with him on as many issues, but he was right on the Iraq War and the Patriot Act. He's not a liar, he's not a GOP/FOX grifter and he's not an authoritarian. I've said for a long time that he would be the smartest nomination the Republicans could make, a real statement that would crystallize issues.

It's a little scary that Sullivan has written his endorsement so well today, just as he did for Obama four years ago, the first such endorsement I saw and the piece of writing that influenced me to really look at Obama, take him seriously as a candidate. Hopefully, we stay the course for four more years. Obama's the best Republican President since Eisenhower, and I'm hoping since Theodore Roosevelt by the end of his second term.

Here's a few key paragraphs that I agree with:

And I see in Paul none of the resentment that burns in Gingrich or the fakeness that defines Romney or the fascistic strains in Perry's buffoonery. He has yet to show the Obama-derangement of his peers, even though he differs with him. He has now gone through two primary elections without compromising an inch of his character or his philosophy. This kind of rigidity has its flaws, but, in the context of the Newt Romney blur, it is refreshing. He would never take $1.8 million from Freddie Mac. He would never disown Reagan, as Romney once did. He would never speak of lynching Bernanke, as Perry threatened. When he answers a question, you can see that he is genuinely listening to it and responding - rather than searching, Bachmann-like, for the one-liner to rouse the base. He is, in other words, a decent fellow, and that's an adjective I don't use lightly. We need more decency among Republicans.

And on some core issues, he is right. He is right that spending - especially on entitlements and defense - is way out of control. Unlike his peers, he had the balls to say so when Bush and Cheney were wrecking the country's finances, and rendering us close to helpless when the Great Recession came bearing down. Alas, he lacks the kind of skills at compromise, moderation and restraint that once defined conservatism and now seems entirely reserved for liberals. But who else in this field would? Romney would have to prove his base cred for his entire presidency. Gingrich is a radical utopian and supremely nasty fantasist.

I don't believe Romney or Gingrich would cut entitlements as drastically as Paul. But most important, I don't believe that any of the other candidates, except perhaps Huntsman, would cut the military-industrial complex as deeply as it needs to be cut. What Paul understands - and it's why he has so much young support - is that the world has changed. Seeking global hegemony in a world of growing regional powers among developing nations is a fool's game, destined to provoke as much backlash as lash, and financially disastrous as every failed empire in history has shown.

I'm supremely grateful to Rep. Paul that he's not an Obama-hater. He's a gent, which is more than I can say for every other GOP Presidential candidate, other than Gov. Jon Huntsman (who should keep spending as little as possible in his training run in prep for 2016). Romney is establishment trash, with no vision for running a compelling campaign, let alone a Presidency. And Gingrich is anti-establishment trash, all for him, grifter class. His hypocrisy has more integrity than Romney's. It's like Tony Soprano -- this is what he does.

Obama-Paul. A tighter race than either Willard or Newton?

For the Win

2011-12-13T22:26:00.000-08:00

The endorsement that really counts:

Boston, MA - Mitt Romney today announced the support of conservative activist Christine O’Donnell.

“Christine has been a leader in the conservative movement for many years,” said Mitt Romney. “Christine recognizes that excessive government threatens us now and threatens future generations, and I am pleased to have her on my team.”

That's right, the one who says she's not a witch.

Meanwhile, Mitt lost a vote:

Either Romney really is so bigoted as to deny this gay ex-serviceman his rights, or he's such a soulless panderer that he no leader at all.

In any case, it all may be moot soon. Gingrich is more than the not-Romney flavor of the moment, he's the winner of the not-Romney sweepstakes. At least he'll make Richard Nixon look like a professional in the General Election.

Guess who's benefited most for the GOP debates -- and has the best organization in Iowa: BHO.

Remember this from four years ago?

Still gives me chills when he says, "They said this day would never come..."

Until April

2011-12-13T01:01:00.000-08:00

SPOILER ALERT

This has a been a generally terrific second season of Boardwalk Empire, with slow first episode (again) but picking up a lot faster than the first season did. The Sunday night season finale was gutsy in the sense that they ended the Jimmy Darmody story, but the really tripped out episode was the penultimate one, where Jimmy finally got his origin story and we got all the back story we could have ever wanted, and more. It's not just Game of Thrones, it's not TV; it's HBO: The Incest Channel.

It's a mistake to kill off Jimmy in the sense that Michael Pitt played the most riveting of the four main characters (Nucky, Margaret, Agent Van Alden being the other three top billed leads) to a large degree because he has been just so riveting to watch, so easily period, with a silent film star's profile, always lit beautifully. It'll be interesting to see if the show can recover. My bet is on Michael Shannon -- the little hint of things to come is his moving with au pair and infant to Cicero, IL, which is where Al Capone kept his home base. Maybe the disgraced agent uses that cover to infiltrate and take a shot at redemption as a Fed?

I diligently watched two other HBO shows, comedies, starting with Hung's third season. By the end of the first season the show had found its feet (and other body parts), a great conceit that showed America in recession, the growth of man who's just starting to find his feminine side, and a very smart, funny cast with Jane Adams possibly the funniest character on TV -- her Tanya always so needy, so ready to compromise morally to fulfill her needs, so transparent. Season two was peak Hung but this season, with Thomas Jane's Ray and Tanya finding some success (and still more farce), some terrific comic sex scenes, and a tender start to rapprochement with his wife, Jessica, a career highlight for Anne Heche. It wasn't quite as necessary overall as season two but always put a smile on my face from start to finish.

Then there's the Best Television Show of 2011 You Aren't Watching, Enlightened. Written by Mike White and Executive Produced by White and star Laura Dean. The story is of a female corporate exec who has a meltdown when she's fired essentially for having an affair with a married boss, then comes back from a meditation retreat in Hawaii all "enlightened" only to struggle as all those she returns to are not. Diane Ladd (her real life mother and the false Mrs. Mulwray in Chinatown) plays her uptight, loner mother, Luke Wilson does he own career highlight work as her drug-addicted ex-husband with whom she's also trying to connect, and Mike White plays her co-worker, a nebbish who's also trapped in the new basement division doing data entry on an ominous 1% vs. 99% computer program.

While often inducing cringes over Dern's character's innocence and spiritual/political activism in situations where her corporate colleagues and former friends think she's a freak, the highs of the story are huge, and Dern turns in yet another brilliant performance. She's David Lynch's muse, alright, and did a blowaway Katherine Harris also on HBO, and her level of commitment and specificity is wonderous.

Then there was this preview, and all the other shows, well, they just didn't seem quite so critical:

Let's hope Mad Men in January is enough to keep me happy until April. Otherwise it's just a wait.

Can I Get a Mitt-ness?

2011-12-11T22:03:00.000-08:00

Another week, another GOP Presidential Debate. And I use that term, "Presidential," loosely. The big news from the debate as well as the past week is the Romney campaign heading into freak-out mode as Newt Gingrich has taken virtually all the Herman Cain support and emerged as the frontrunner -- the last "Not Romney" standing and the one who looks like he's going to win unless something big happens quick.

The base doesn't love Mitt, and the more he panders the less attractive he seems overall. He not only sent out all the surrogates to bash Newt last week (not hard -- he was a disaster as Speaker of the House and those who served under him are all telling that tale), he's even stooped so low as to enlist the satanic Ann Coulter as a surrogate. Time to draw a pentagram on the floor, Mitt, light a candle in the middle and call forth Beelzebub.

The moment that sparked a million tweets in last night's debate was Mitt getting so fed up with Rick Perry quoting his book back to him that he offered a $10,000 bet to settle the matter. Because he's one with the American Middle Class, and we all put $10k on the table when someone says something we don't like. It went like this:

As one YouTube commenter notes:

fyi, a $10,000 bet amounts to .00005 of romney's net worth. so if you had a net worth of $400,000, that would amount to a 20 dollar bet.

So now Gingrich has landslide leads in GOP polls for two early Primary states, South Carolina and Florida, and is chipping away at Mitt's firewall, New Hampshire. And the upshot of all these debates, poll shifts and Republican exposure:

Turning to the general election, President Obama’s standing has improved in Florida, always a key presidential battleground state.
Forty-six percent of registered voters in the state approve of his job, which is up five points since October.
In hypothetical match-ups, the president leads Romney by seven points (48 to 41 percent) and Gingrich by 12 points (51 to 39 percent).
In South Carolina -- a reliable Republican state in presidential contests -- Obama’s approval rating stands at 44 percent, and he holds narrow leads over Romney (45 to 42 percent) and Gingrich (46 to 42 percent).

That's right: if the election were held today, President Barack Hussein Obama beats both Willard Mitt Romney and Newton Leroy Gingrich in that bastion of the Confederacy, South Carolina.

Maybe in his second term he'll really be able to hit the gas for this great country.

He Just Can't Quit It

2011-12-08T10:18:00.000-08:00

Hilarious responses to Republican Texas Governor Rick Perry's instant-classic gaybaiting ad, essentially a storm of "Dislikes" on YouTube (heading towards 300,000 Dislikes vs. 6,000 Likes as I write this) and also inspiring a bit of research that is too good to be believed:

I guess he may not want gay soldiers to serve openly and honestly in the military, but gets his fashion cues from Brokeback Mountain.

As Will Truman wrote this week, the 2012 GOP Presidential nomination process has entered an entirely new realm never seen before: satire. You couldn't write a clown show like this:

It occurred to me the other day as I was leaving a comment elsewhere: if someone had written a TV show and the plot followed the current Republican primary, I would have some serious problems with it. Namely, I would pan the show as unrealistic. A joke. Liberal Hollywood’s parody of what the Republican Party is. Herman Cain? Who the hell acts like that. There is no way that a party would seriously give a serial-adulturing, ideologically muddled, lobbying-compromised former House Leader a shot at the nomination. Hollywood couldn’t devise a more repugnant figure as the potential head of a party that they want noting to do with. The comparisons between Rick Perry and Rob Ritchie have, of course, frequently been made. But in some sense, Ritchie would seem downright normal compared to a lot of the candidates. And though the connection hasn’t been made, I see some similarities between Mitt Romney and Bob Russell, the simply unpalatable (to many) candidate who doesn’t belong there but is there because he’s there and his biography doesn’t entirely discount his presence.

Meanwhile, in the real world, a reporter who asks a stupid question echoing the GOP (especially Romney) canard that President Obama is somehow an appeaser of America's enemies, gotta love the smackdown from Mac Daddy Barack:

Yeah, ask Bin Laden. At the bottom of the deep blue sea. My prediction holds: the 2012 Obama landslide will best his 2008 win.

You read it here first.

Just the Facts, Ma'am

2011-12-07T22:04:00.000-08:00

It's like a piece of television history dying off like an old oak tree. R.I.P, Harry Morgan:

Harry Morgan, the prolific character actor best known for playing the acerbic but kindly Colonel Potter in the long-running television series “M*A*S*H,” died on Wednesday morning at his home in Los Angeles. He was 96.
...
In more than 100 movies, Mr. Morgan played Western bad guys, characters with names like Rocky and Shorty, loyal sidekicks, judges, sheriffs, soldiers, thugs and police chiefs.
On television, he played Officer Bill Gannon with a phlegmatic but light touch to Jack Webb’s always-by-the-book Sgt. Joe Friday in the updated “Dragnet,” from 1967 to 1970. He starred as Pete Porter, a harried husband, in the situation comedy “Pete and Gladys” (1960-62), reprising a role he had played on “December Bride” (1954-59). He was also a regular on “The Richard Boone Show” (1963-64), “Kentucky Jones” (1964-65), “The D.A.” (1971-72), “Hec Ramsey” (1972-74) and “Blacke’s Magic” (1986).
...
Mr. Morgan’s television credits were prodigious. He once estimated that in one show or another, he was seen in prime time for 35 straight years. Regarded as one of the busiest actors in the medium, he had continuing roles in at least 10 series, which, combined with his guest appearances, amounted to hundreds of episodes.

Wow, talk about a prolific career. It's a face and delivery a number of generations grew up with.

Another end-of-the-century moment, about a decade later than originally scheduled.

Rockin' Barack vs. the Philistines

2011-12-06T17:43:00.000-08:00

In Osawatomie, Kansas, today, his mother's home state and where Teddy Roosevelt called for "a square deal, President Barack Obama lay down the argument for now through the next election. Some meat:

But this isn’t just another political debate. This is the defining issue of our time. This is a make or break moment for the middle class, and all those who are fighting to get into the middle class. At stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, and secure their retirement.
Now, in the midst of this debate, there are some who seem to be suffering from a kind of collective amnesia. After all that’s happened, after the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, they want to return to the same practices that got us into this mess. In fact, they want to go back to the same policies that have stacked the deck against middle-class Americans for too many years. Their philosophy is simple: we are better off when everyone is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules.
Well, I’m here to say they are wrong. I’m here to reaffirm my deep conviction that we are greater together than we are on our own. I believe that this country succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot, when everyone does their fair share, and when everyone plays by the same rules. Those aren’t Democratic or Republican values; 1% values or 99% values. They’re American values, and we have to reclaim them.

Meanwhile, the GOP continues to openly take their orders from unelected tax-pledge king, Grover Norquist while a desperate Texas mom who's been denied food stamps for months shot herself and her children.

Choose your America, America.

World's Most Expensive Crash

2011-12-05T17:24:00.000-08:00

Gotta love it:

Eight Ferraris and a Lamborghini were part of a 14-car crash in Japan yesterday that wrecked more than $1 million of vehicles.

“The accident occurred when the driver of a red Ferrari was switching from the right lane to the left and skidded,” said Mitsuyoshi Isejima, executive officer for Yamaguchi Prefecture’s Expressway Traffic Police unit. “It was a gathering of narcissists.” The drivers were aged between 37 and 60 years old, he said.

A gathering of narcissists...isn't that a GOP Presidential debate?

And maybe a car crash as well.

Hugo Scorsese

2011-12-04T20:44:00.000-08:00

I went into the picture, Hugo, expecting it to be a lot softer than it was. No, this isn't a Taxi Driver or Goodfellas type toughness, it's the emotional side, particularly the based-on-reality story of how Georges Méliès , the pioneering father of the "cinema of the fantastic" with influence running all the way through Star Wars and Avatar, had been forgotten after WWI, his 531 films almost all lost, living a life of anonymity with a little shop in the Paris train station.

The pathos of this great man's situation, as told through the drama of the titular character, Hugo, is ultimately turned into a very emotional triumph, and a tremendous montage sequence capping a highly spectacular film experience throughout. From the very first shots of historic Paris recreated and thrown in to 3D relief, director Martin Scorsese rewards the viewing with a surfeit of visual riches, in what can only be described as a fairytale steampunk aesthetic.

Scorsese cleverly reminds us that trains, clocks and motion pictures (before digital) were all based on the same complex analog technology of circular gears, but with film it's all about the innate desire for mimesis, as represented by a robotic torso, the mystery of which drives the narrative for the first two thirds of the film.

My kids, ages 12 and 8 1/2, both loved the movie. I was struck that, for the first time, a Scorsese movie got me all choked up. I was also struck that, for the first time since Avatar, it made sense that the movie was made and exhibited in 3D. In fact, it is easily the best 3D movie I've ever seen. It just won the National Board of Review award for Best Picture 2011, and I would not be entirely surprised to see it score top Picture and Director awards at the Oscars. I think it's the type of film that will grow on viewers in memory and in reputation over time. Sure, it's a little long, but as is typical with Scorsese, there's a visual density to the material that makes it something new.

By using the most modern/futuristic of technologies to take us back to the dawn of film, Scorsese has won the conceptual award for use of 3D. With standout performances by Sir Ben Kingsley (perfecto casting) and Sacha Baron Cohen (naturally funny in any role? funny in spite of himself in this one?) and a look that isn't quite like anything you've ever seen before, yet hearkening back to the best fantasy films of the 40's, 30's, 20's and before, it's quite a pleasure to absorb for oneself on the biggest screen you can find.

Per Travis Bickle, yes, I'm talkin' to you.

Greatest Board Game Ever

2011-12-02T00:15:00.000-08:00

I'm loving how it's now a general knowledge meme that The Wire is the best television series of all time. I hear it every few weeks from random people, most of whom didn't catch it in its initial run, but later on DVD or Netflicks. Watching whole seasons over a single weekend, not three months like we did at the start. Getting it fast, injection.

This got posted today:

Best part:

All hail Michael Kenneth Williams.

Those Funny Candidates and the Convention

2011-11-30T21:36:00.000-08:00

Gotta love Michele Bachmann Turner Overdrive:

According to a tweet from NBC News’ Jamie Novogrod, Bachmann responded to the recent raiding of the British embassy in Iran, by saying that if she was President, she would close down the U.S. embassy there.
There’s just one problem: The U.S. has not had an embassy in Iran ever since the Iranian hostage crisis, when revolutionaries from the budding Islamic state held 52 Americans for 444 days.

But that was so long ago, how is she expected to remember??

How about Rick Perry White:

The Associated Press carried the following report on a speech he gave to a crowd at Saint Anselm college in New Hampshire:
[H]e appealed to students who will be at least 21 before Election Day to vote for him. As for those younger than 21, he merely asked them to work hard on his behalf. Doesn’t he want their votes, too? It turns out Perry didn’t know or had forgotten that the voting age in America is 18. The flub caused some whispers in the crowd.

No biggie. In Texas what really matters is the drinking age!

And, finally, Jon Stewart goes all out on Herman "Adam Raised A" Cain, who finally gets nailed on the consensual affair:

The Daily Show

Bachmann was never a serious contender, she just had her flash paper moment before confirming to the Republican electorate exactly what everyone else has known for years. She's not a reliable in the political sense. Or the honesty sense.

Cain was another flash, maybe on route to a Vice Presidential candidacy (take that, Barry Obama!) but that won't happen now. Oooh yeah.

And Perry is most interesting of them all, because he's a very successful politician in Texas, the second largest state in terms of both population and landmass, right near the end of the qualifying period he came riding high to save the day, and all leading up to this, earlier in the year, David Axelrod and the Obama Campaign was always very excited whenever anyone mentioned Perry, then not on the heavy radar, as a possible candidate.

It clear that the Obama Campaign was relishing the idea of running against Rick Perry. And maybe they knew something that wasn't general knowledge, like how much Rove and the Bush people hate Perry going back to when he was Lt. Governor under W. Because his implosion as like a series of Japanese nukes going off one after each other, the last revealingly stupid moment just getting to the dying embers before he did something else even more obviously not ready for any 3:00am calls.

We'll miss these clowns when they're gone for the race, but they'll be sure to pop back up again at the GOP Convention next summer, and if Newt does indeed win, or Ron Paul (which would be the smartest Republican choice, the apotheosis of Ayn Randianist), they'll get Administration positions. I always thought Herman Cain was running for Secretary of Commerce, anyway.

Newt will be funny in a different way -- he's got such a sure sense of self, he can instantly rationalize his way out of any of his shenanigans. I think Newt vs. President Barack would be a classic -- Newt as replay/last gasp of the 1990's vs. an Obama who looks all the more young and together because of the contrast. Newt shut down government and then failed to even make that work. Barack has been working his ass off to make government work, from healthcare to terror defense. His gotten a bill passed and taken out Bin Laden et al.

Could he possibly beat Newt by ten percentage points (55%/45%) or better? Could Newt make John McCain look like an Electoral College overachiever?

As for Mitt, don't worry about him:

As Mr. 1%, I now don't expect him to win the nomination -- unless he turns his trajectory around very, very quickly, and not just with the Bush wing of establishment old-school, but with the rank and file Republicans. Remember, if Mitt becomes President, the clock turns back a generation.

Then there's one other possibility. If the Tea Party is strong enough, and Newt manages to damage his electability profoundly (I say 70% chance) by the Convention, you could see a true political rarity, the brokered convention, most famously held by the 1924 Dems, torn apart by the rural/urban Prohibition conflict. In this case it's the Reagan deal with the Southern Religious Right, come home to roost in Tea Party garb, versus the money side, the hawks and the hardcore Libertarians. Aside from the hawks, the other two can get along on the Libertarian cry for smaller government.

Which is exactly what the Paulites a waiting to have happen.

OWS Changes the Conversation

2011-11-29T20:44:00.000-08:00

The payroll tax cut used to be a Republican idea, but now that President Obama is for it, they're against extending it. That is, until Occupy Wall Street made clear the division between the 1% and the 99%:

If Republicans block the measure, as expected, Democrats would paint them as the party of the rich.
Trying to get ahead of the game, McConnell proclaimed Republican support for the payroll tax cut extension and told reporters his party would soon propose its own ideas for covering the cost of the tax cut.
"The Democrats put them in a box," said Andrew Taylor, a North Carolina State University political science professor. "I think many Republicans realized this is a bad side of the argument to be on."

Thanks to the protesters, there's media buzz highlighting the GOP's behavior and allegiances. It's common knowledge now, nothing anyone can obfuscate with rhetoric. And you know #OWS matters when the new GOP frontrunner, Newt Gingrich, calls on President Obama to repudiate the movement and its message of wealth inequality.

As Robert Reich tells us, the Basic Bargain holding our society together and creating growth in the 20th Century has been torn apart by greed and must be restored:

For most of the last century, the basic bargain at the heart of the American economy was that employers paid their workers enough to buy what American employers were selling.
That basic bargain created a virtuous cycle of higher living standards, more jobs, and better wages.
...
The latest data on corporate profits and wages show we haven't learned the essential lesson of the two big economic crashes of the last 75 years: When the economy becomes too lopsided -- disproportionately benefiting corporate owners and top executives rather than average workers -- it tips over.
In other words, we're in trouble because the basic bargain has been broken.
...
Corporations don't need more money. They have so much money right now they don't even know what to do with all of it. They're even buying back their own shares of stock. This is a bonanza for CEOs whose pay is tied to stock prices and it increases the wealth of other shareholders. But it doesn't create a single new job and it doesn't raise the wages of a single employee.
Nor do the wealthiest Americans need more money. The top 1 percent is already taking in more than 20 percent of total income -- the highest since the 1920s.
American businesses, including small-business owners, have no incentive to create new jobs because consumers (whose spending accounts for about 70 percent of the American economy) aren't spending enough. Consumers' after-tax incomes dropped in the second and third quarters of the year, the first back-to-back drops since 2009.

The Dems are proposing to pay for the payroll tax cut with a surtax on millionaires -- affecting 0.2% of the U.S. population.

I hesitate to ask what 1%-favoring counterproposal GOP will come up with themselves.

Bunch of Endings

2011-11-28T23:34:00.000-08:00

Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) announced his retirement from Congress today -- he won't be running again next year -- at age 71. This is a huge bummer legislatively, but hopefully he'll turn up on news commentary a lot more, especially as he promising not to become a lobbyist. Consistently the smartest and wittiest guy in the House, Frank was no different today:

[Barney Frank] on the House under Republican rule: “It consists half of people who think like Michele Bachmann and half of people who are afraid of losing a primary to people who think like Michele Bachmann and that leaves very little room to work things out.”

Goodbye to Ken Russell, legendary British film director known for his combination or erudition and over-the-top visuals. Classics include: Women in Love (Oscar for star Glenda Jackson), Altered States, Tommy, The Lair of the White Worm, The Devils. Who can ever forget Tina Turner as the Acid Queen?

Goodbye to pre-IPO Facebook, between April and June 2012. The stock options will never mean the same thing again, the innocence lost, time for quarterly analyst calls and big annual reports. Guaranteed to have more investors than anyone imagines.

Goodbye to 2000's European prosperity. And maybe the Euro.

And, as much as we all hope not, we may be saying hello to a new global depression.

Art Pepper-Spray

2011-11-27T22:31:00.000-08:00

Gotta love the new meme of the U.C. Davis pepper-spraying cop making his way through art history. There's this article, this blog post and then then Tumblr. My personal faves:

and

Modern art masterpieces, one and all.

Mitt the Liar

2011-11-22T21:24:00.000-08:00

Is there anything that Mitt Romney will not lie about? Twice in one day, starting with his willful distortion in a campaign attack ad of a phrase spoken by President Barack Obama four years ago quoting John McCain's campaign, making it seem like Obama is speaking about his own current campaign:

Then, in tonight's GOP debate, he actually lied about his first name:

It's actually Willard.

Not to be trust. Certainly not with the Presidency of the United States of America.

Saul Bass

2011-11-21T20:26:00.000-08:00

The Title Design of Saul Bass from Ian Albinson on Vimeo.

Evidently in honor of a new book coming out about the work of Main Titles designer extraordinaire, Saul Bass.

What's striking is how modern his work seems -- still. With most of his work created pre-CGI, it's shocking how visionary and vivid so much of it is. Vertigo, of course, is a favorite, along with Psycho which I recently saw in the theater again -- the opening credits with the Bernard Herrmann music really set you on edge from the start, give the sense that something really twisted is already underway. And the work for Otto Preminger as well as Martin Scorsese is ingenious.

Enjoy.

Flashpoint: UC Davis

2011-11-20T18:53:00.000-08:00

Fascinating chain of events starting on Friday when a police officer blanketed a row of sitting protesters on the University of California Davis campus with military-grade pepper spray. This video has now been viewed over a million times -- the spraying is near the start:

It's not quite Kent State -- no students were shot to death -- but appalling in its own right. These were peaceful protesters, not throwing rocks or threatening anybody, and the now famous Officer John Pike chose to douse them like roaches. No doubt the students who endured this silently are heroes to their classmates now.

Even move compelling is this video from later the next night, when the Chancellor who is responsible for putting the police on this, Linda Katehi, does what is essentially a perp walk past silent students. She had been in the administrative building for a meeting, this after various faculty called for her resignation, and evidently claimed the students outside were preventing her from leaving. In response, the organizers promised her safe passage and, as you can see in this video, called upon the protesting students for peace:

The walk of shame. Katehi has put out a statement today that's rather different from the day before, acknowledging what she's learned of the atrocious police action and promising some sort of change.

I wonder if she'll be able to keep her job, but it will only be by showing total growth and bending to the will of the people. If so, I believe she may become a model for others.

If not, she stands condemned with the 1% and their enablers.

Happy Two Month Anniversary

2011-11-17T22:26:00.000-08:00

At two months in, Occupy Wall Street is now occupying the world, especially today, after being kicked out of Zuccotti Park but taking over NYC and parts of other cities as well. Some of the highlights include:

Journalists being arrested (nouveau fascism?) for reporting on police crackdowns on protesters
Retired police chief getting arrested for his protesting
Movie star Anne Hathaway showing up, smart and low-key
New Jersey voters now favoring a millionaire's tax
Huge message projections on the Verizon building by the Brooklyn Bridge:
A message to Mayor Bloomberg:

And, best of all perhaps, now to morph the movement into political demands - what Jesse LaGreca calls PHASE 2:

It is time to TAX THE RICH

It is time to END THE WARS

It is time to restore Glass-Steagal

It is time to repeal Citizens United

It is time to get the money OUT OF POLITICS

It is time to invest in infrastructure and education

It is time to STOP busting labor unions, whether private or public

It is time to defend Medicare and Social Security tooth and nail from phony reforms or baloney cuts

It is time to STOP the spending cuts and start investing in America, and if we have to raise taxes on the rich and corporations in order to force them to invest in America, then so be it.

It is time to make higher education affordable, to offer students debt relief, and to provide funding for education, and stop blaming honest teachers and educators and for the failures of an underfunded system.

It is time to STOP the racist and discriminatory practice of "Stop and Frisk" and other tactics of racial profiling

It is time for civil rights for ALL, and that means equal rights for LGBT Americans to serve our military and marry whom ever they will

It is time for ACCOUNTABILITY for the men who lied us into war and crashed our economy

It is time for immigration reform that does not punish workers, but provides a clear pathway to citizenship for everyone

It is time for investigations that lead to prosecutions on Wall Street in response to the crimes that have been committed in the last decade.

It is time for a serious discussion about the Federal Reserve and it's role in this economic disaster

It is time for universal health care that everyone can afford. It is time to talk about Single Payer Health Care.

It is time for alternative green energy instead of Oil and Coal.

It is time to protect our civil liberties and our constitution.

It is time for a discussion about free trade and how it has undermined the working class while enriching only the wealthiest among us.

It is time to end corporate personhood.

I'd say Mayor Bloomberg did the movement a favor. Time to move on from tents -- by moving it all on up to the legislative bodies.

Lies and the Lying Liars

2011-11-16T17:10:00.000-08:00

It seems that the GOP Presidential hopefuls are spreading more lies about something President Obama said -- again. For the record, the President did NOT call American workers "lazy." In reality:

But when you examine what Obama said on Saturday -- to business leaders at the APEC summit in Hawaii -- it's pretty clear that his critics are taking him out of context. He wasn't calling Americans lazy; rather, he was callingU.S. business practices to attract foreign investors lazy. In fact, you could interpret his full remarks as a call to arms to improve on that front.
MR. McNERNEY: I think one related question, looking at the world from the Chinese side, is what they would characterize as impediments to investment in the United States. And so that discussion I’m sure will be part of whatever dialogue you have. And so how are you thinking about that?
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, this is an issue, generally. I think it’s important to remember that the United States is still the largest recipient of foreign investment in the world. And there are a lot of things that make foreign investors see the U.S. as a great opportunity -- our stability, our openness, our innovative free market culture.
But we’ve been a little bit lazy, I think, over the last couple of decades. We’ve kind of taken for granted -- well, people will want to come here and we aren’t out there hungry, selling America and trying to attract new business into America. And so one of things that my administration has done is set up something called SelectUSA that organizes all the government agencies to work with state and local governments where they’re seeking assistance from us, to go out there and make it easier for foreign investors to build a plant in the United States and put outstanding U.S. workers back to work in the United States of America.

Meanwhile, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney has been lying about the difference between his healthcare plan enacted for that state and the one enacted by Congress under President Obama -- so says his own former advisor, not mincing words:

He credited Mitt Romney for not totally disavowing the Massachusetts bill during his presidential campaign, but said Romney's attempt to distinguish between Obama's bill and his own is disingenuous.
"The problem is there is no way to say that," Gruber said. "Because they're the same fucking bill. He just can't have his cake and eat it too. Basically, you know, it's the same bill. He can try to draw distinctions and stuff, but he's just lying. The only big difference is he didn't have to pay for his. Because the federal government paid for it. Where at the federal level, we have to pay for it, so we have to raise taxes."

The danger is that lies become memes and they harden into "truthies" in the minds of low or mid-information voters. Hard to battle, but it must be done.

Otherwise you end up on the swiftboat.

Occupy the Holidays

2011-11-15T23:06:00.000-08:00

I was hoping to take the kids to see Occupy Wall Street in NYC next week, but that tourist attraction is now undetermined. It turns out the Federal government colluded with over a dozen cities to set the movement of the parks today, most notably NYC where the 12th richest man in America, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, must be cleaning up in advance of the first wave of holiday tourism next week.

The good news is that it isn't working everywhere and, more importantly, the protesters have already changed the national conversation from the GOP deficit talking points. Deficit reduction is for the 1%; taxing the rich is for the 99%.

To top it off, the movement occupied the offices of the owners of NYC's Zuccotti Park tonight in Washington, DC:

The conversation continues.

Clowntime Still Ending

2011-11-14T22:51:00.000-08:00

Here's yesterday's GOP frontrunner attempting to recall U.S. foreign policy:

Herman, we hardly knew ye. Good luck on the rest of your book tour.

Just like every two weeks, there's a new GOP frontrunner. I kid you not.

Newt.

Mic Check: Eric Cantor

2011-11-13T23:05:00.000-08:00

I have disagreements about interrupting speakers, but if you're going to do it, this is the way, with an exit after you make your point. My God, the #OWS movement is public in a way the same kind of protest action never could be in the past, thanks to the wonder that is YouTube.

So to me, this is all kinds of awesome:

Eric Cantor put the full faith and credit of this nation at risk for his ideological goals and for his billionaire classmasters. As the protesters say, voting against the interests of the people. No one believes the job creator myth anymore, not when guys like Mitt Romney have a raw capitalist history of coming into a company and reaping monstrous profits before downsizing or offshoring it.

We've entered a new Robber Baron age and the economy can't support it. The people don't want the end of capitalism, they just want it to work properly, which ended under Bush. Labor has a different face now, white collar or flannel collar, but it's Labor rising up just as it did a hundred years ago when the rich went too far.

The biggest threat to Capitalism right now is not #OWS or Anonymous, it's Climate Change. That's the phrase Republican communications guru Frank Luntz invented to stave off Global Warming, and it's actually worse for the GOP because it's more accurate. Catastrophic early winter may not be quite as bad as a tsunami or a fracking-caused earthquakes, but it's all part of how our collective appetite for things and comfort is so ravenous and, currently, so critical to the economy, that unregulated Capitalism is essentially riding straight at a series of cliffs, and nobody really knows how far down's the fall.

Earth: Too big to fail?

Redemption through Recovery

2011-11-10T22:14:00.000-08:00

The story of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) is about to become as inspiring as possible. She will become a living memorial and reminder of those who did not survive the psycho assassin's bullets that day. She will become a powerful symbol for the Left of resilience and, ultimately, courage in the face of dark, reactionary forces that sometimes scare us out of our convictions.

However, as her mother so correctly notes in the upcoming Diane Sawyer piece with Giffords, her astronaut husband, family, doctors and therapists, she now has a message that rises above, that is larger than politics:

video platform video management video solutions video player

A special person made that much more special by the calamity visited upon her, and by her character as revealed in her recovery from it.

A living symbol and beacon.

Stupid Person

2011-11-09T19:44:00.000-08:00

Bye, bye, Rick:

Enjoy all the money you raised.

Oh, and Herman?

You're stupid, too.

Great Day for Sanity

2011-11-08T23:18:00.000-08:00

Wow, for an off-year election, Tuesday, November 8, 2011 turned out to be a doozy of a setback for the reactionary GOP forces that swept the elections one year ago. Sanity has prevailed like wildfire:

In Ohio, Republican Governor John Kasich's anti-union law was struct down forcefully by voters

Ditto the Mississippi anti-choice law defining personhood at conception - gone, gone, gone

Arizona State Senate President and architect of the absurdly strict immigration law, Republican Russell Pearce, was voted out in a recall election after spending crazy amounts of dough

Marriage equality is safe in Iowa thanks to a definitive Dem State Senator win that was supposed to be a squeaker with the Tea Party candidate

Maine now has same-day election registration after the GOP ran ads against that voting right

Even the Raleigh, NC school district went Dem majority...

...and Pittsburgh got referendum approval of a city library-supporting tax (.25/$1000 of property value)

It sure seems like proof that Republican overreach and partisanship has awakened the non-reactionary Americans from their electoral slumber. I'll be interested to see if they guys like Kasich "moderating" their positions or at least pretending to from here to the next election. Is this the beginning of the Obama "comeback?"

Because in non-Election Day news, Obama's healthcare reform just won a big court test (with conservative judges included), and the GOP's "front-runner" is making his own disaster much, much worse. Daily.

Is there a tide turning?

God bless democracy.

God bless these United States of America.

Moneygoodness

2011-11-07T23:18:00.000-08:00

Moneyball is the best kind of throwback movie, one that feels completely new because it's tackling a subject that hasn't been done by a big movie before and it doesn't bobble the ball. It's a 1970's movie in tone, the kind of high end Robert Altman-type picture with long lenses, a quasi-documentary feel, but looking at great, unvarnished performances.

It feels very, very honest, not just for the naturalistic shooting style, but also because it's a true baseball movie, one of the rare true baseball movies, because it isn't about winning. Baseball, as anyone who really knows the game will tell you, is really about losing and how you handle that, how you tackle that, how you come back from that, and how it happens over and over again. No team in baseball is World Champion forever, no manager has a perfect record, and if you're successful only 1/3 of the time you get up to bat, you're the best player in the game most years.

Brad Pitt carried this project, this adaptation of Michael Lewis' book, from when Steven Soderbergh was going to direct it with a Steve Zaillian script to the current version directed by Bennett Miller (building nicely on his debut feature, Capote) with the Aaron Sorkin rewrite, and he was smart to do so. His Billy Beane, the major league draft who turned down a full Stanford scholarship to underperform all expectations as a player and sought redemption moving up the scouting ranks to General Manager of the then-hapless Oakland A's, is a great, driven, relatable movie character. We're with Pitt the whole way, infusing the leading role with character touches, an easy, flawed guy to root for, especially when he picks up Jonah Hill's Peter Brand character, based on a real-life Ivy League Economics Major who taught Beane the Bill James way of looking at evaluating players, capsizing the entire value proposition of the player salary game.

I'm sure this movie will work fine on a big TV with your Pay-Per-View, HBO, Academy Screener, whatever. It's not spectacularly filled with special effects. It doesn't rely on a throbbing soundtrack or familiar pop tune. It's all about character, story, and how we battle big to make good on regrets.

And it's a pleasure to be in a theater with Beane, Brand, Coach Art Howe and rest of the players. It's actually about something.

Global 99%

2011-11-06T22:15:00.000-08:00

Noted economist and Columbia University professor Joseph Stiglitz had this to say about the Occupy Wall Street movement in an article in English language Al Jazeera this weekend:

The protest movement that began in Tunisia in January, subsequently spreading to Egypt and then to Spain, has now become global - with the protests engulfing Wall Street and cities across America. Globalisation and modern technology now enables social movements to transcend borders as rapidly as ideas can.
And social protest has found fertile ground everywhere: A sense that the "system" has failed, and the conviction that even in a democracy, the electoral process will not set things right - at least not without strong pressure from the street.

...
The rise in inequality is the product of a vicious spiral: The rich rent-seekers use their wealth to shape legislation in order to protect and increase their wealth - and their influence. The US Supreme Court, in its notorious Citizens United decision, has given corporations free rein to use their money to influence the direction of politics. But, while the wealthy can use their money to amplify their views, back on the street, police wouldn't allow me to address the OWS protesters through a megaphone.

The contrast between overregulated democracy and unregulated bankers did not go unnoticed. But the protesters are ingenious: They echoed what I said through the crowd, so that all could hear. And, to avoid interrupting the "dialogue" by clapping, they used forceful hand signals to express their agreement.
...
The protesters have been criticised for not having an agenda. But this misses the point of protest movements. They are an expression of frustration with the electoral process. They are an alarm.
...
On one level, today's protesters are asking for little: A chance to use their skills, the right to decent work at decent pay, a fairer economy and society. Their hope is evolutionary, not revolutionary. But, on another level, they are asking for a great deal: A democracy where people, not dollars, matter, and a market economy that delivers on what it is supposed to do.

The two are related: As we have seen, unfettered markets lead to economic and political crises. Markets work the way they should only when they operate within a framework of appropriate government regulations; and that framework can be erected only in a democracy that reflects the general interest - not the interests of the 1%. The best government that money can buy is no longer good enough.

Amen, brother. And how about Stephen King in Florida a few months back:

#OWS is about speaking truth to power. If markets are not regulated properly, if the disparity between rich and everybody else gets too great, if the wealthy seek only to protect their own capital and bleed the rest of us, we know historically that empires fall and revolutions arise. For example, the American Revolution.

So, leaving aside a noble sense of civics: will greed or self-preservation win out?

Tucking in for a Long Winter

2011-11-03T17:13:00.000-07:00

Here's how much I love the young activists at the core of making Occupy Wall Street work:

Winter Time Woes: Occupiers Solve Power Problem

I know there was violence in Oakland (subsequent to earlier police violence). My instinct is that the troublemakers are government or rightwing plants. We've seen as much before, going back to the 1960's in the U.S. and the 1930's in Germany.

In any case, it doesn't discredit the entire movement, it's goals or general innovations in democracy. And with guys like this one inventing their winter power source, I feel a glimmer of hope for this country politically down the line.

Most of all, I'm excited to see where this particular protest goes.

Brutal Coming Attractions

2011-11-02T17:24:00.000-07:00

Nice to see the Dems already hitting hard:

No use being namby-pamby anymore not after your leader has been called both Hitler and Mao as well as African, and lies spread like memes that he somehow hates America, apologizes for America or has made us weaker internationally.

No use waiting too late to brand the likely opponent after watching John Kerry take the high road to getting Swiftboated.

This is likely to be a brutal campaign...and you don't bring a knife to a gunfight.

Clowntime is (not quite) Over

2011-11-01T17:22:00.000-07:00

Herman Cain is executing a business plan, not running for President. Per Jonathan Chait:

The plan involves Cain raising his profile as a conservative personality, which he can monetize through motivational speaking, book sales, talk shows, and other media. Cain’s selling point is that he’s a black conservative who can capitalize on the sense of white racial victimization that has mushroomed during the Obama era. Accordingly, Cain assures conservatives that they are not racist, as proven by their support for him. Indeed, it is the liberals who are racist, as evidenced by their opposition to Cain.

If Cain were campaigning to be president, the scandal would hurt him. Since he is instead campaigning to boost his profile, it will help him.

Cain is exploiting a loophole which allows a person to declare their candidacy for president, and then attract free media coverage and participate in nationally televised debates simply because the media can’t prove that they’re not really trying to win.

And thus Herman Cain enters that special class of Republican, the Grifter class. He's out there in full-throated competition with Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Newt Gingrich and the rest competing for the Conservative dollar. And more power to him. Since, barring major catastrophe, the GOP are going to lose the 2012 Presidential Election to President Barack Hussein Obama, why not let the reality TV show run its course.

Just how clownish is Herman Cain? Here's a video covering the life, so far, of his sexual harassment scandal, which I agree will not harm him even if it hasn't ended yet:

As Elvis Costello once sang,

Clowntime is over
Time to take cover
While others just talk and talk
Somebody's watching where the others don't walk
Clowntime is over

Whatever that means, it seems to make particular sense for Mr. Cain...and perhaps the rest of his GOP Presidential wannabes.

Fascism Watch: Voter Suppression

2011-10-31T17:53:00.000-07:00

Finally, the mainstream media is starting to notice that the GOP is systematically suppressing voting rights. From today's LA Times:

Early voting was reduced from two weeks to one week. Voting on the Sunday before election day was eliminated. College students face new hurdles if they want to vote away from home. And those who register new voters face the threat of fines for procedural errors, prompting the nonpartisan League of Women Voters to suspend voter registration drives and accuse the Legislature of "reverting to Jim Crow-like tactics."

What is happening in Florida is part of a national trend, as election law has become a fierce partisan battleground. In states where Republicans have taken majority control, they have tightened rules for registering new voters, reduced the time for casting ballots and required voters to show photo identification at the polls. The new restrictions were usually adopted on party-line votes and signed by Republican governors.

During Florida's legislative debate on the new law, a Republican state senator argued that it should not be easy or convenient to vote. Voting "is a hard-fought privilege. This is something people died for," said Sen. Michael Bennett of Bradenton, the chamber's president pro tempore. "Why should we make it easier?"

This is their way of undermining democracy in the U.S. Perhaps they feel only landed gentry - male - should have that right...per the original rules in the Constitution? Back when a slave was only 3/5 of a vote?

Seven states — Alabama, Kansas, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin — voted to require registered voters to show photo identification at the polling place. Democratic governors vetoed such bills in five other states.

The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law estimated that new laws across the nation "could make it significantly harder for more than 5 million eligible voters to cast ballots in 2012." The new restrictions will "fall most heavily on young, minority and low-income voters," the group said.

The Jim Crow Republican Party, with the photo i.d. as poll tax.

If Obama wins this next election, it'll be an even greater victory thanks to these rigs.

Perry the Drunk

2011-10-30T20:20:00.000-07:00

Texas Governor Rick Perry was clearly in his cups when he made this speech to Republicans in his quest for their Presidential nomination this past Friday in Manchester, NH:

Yet another disqualification for the Presidency -- at least W had the good sense to be a dry drunk by the time he hit the Oval Office. Although, I'd say his crazy 20% optional Flat Tax plan that he just released and touted -- i.e., a 14% tax drop for the 1% on top of our economy -- is disqualification enough.

And there's a brilliant expose by Matt Taibbi in the new Rolling Stone, "The Best Little Whore in Texas." It turns out Rick Perry is all about favors -- he'll giveaway any government funds you want if you contribute enough money to his campaigns:

But it's an act that should have ended after just a few steps down the rope, when he slipped up in the Orlando debate and told the truth.
Among other attacks that night, Perry was taking criticism for his decision back in 2007 to order all sixth-grade girls in Texas to be inoculated against HPV – specifically, with three shots of Gardasil vaccine, a Merck product that sells for a tidy $120 a shot. Michele Bachmann, who not only hates the move as an intrusive use of state power but probably also because it interferes with God's ability to administer punitive cancers to dabblers in extramarital sex, blasted Perry for delivering such a blatant favor to his corporate buddies at Merck. "We cannot forget that in the midst of this executive order, there is a big drug company that made millions of dollars because of this mandate," she said, pointing out that Perry's former chief of staff was the chief lobbyist for Merck.

Perry's response was telling. "It was a $5,000 contribution that I had received from them," he said. "I raised about $30 million. And if you're saying that I can be bought for $5,000, I'm offended."

The Orlando crowd applauded nervously, not quite grasping what Perry had just said. Had the debate taken place in Austin, however, the crowd would have erupted in knowing laughter. Rick Perry, as any Texan knows, does not roll over for 5,000 measly dollars. He charges a hell of a lot more than that. The price tag varies, of course, depending on the favor. Based on the donations Perry has collected, it costs an average of $39,354 to buy a seat on the board of a state university. Landing a state road project runs about half a million, while creating an entire government commission specifically designed to protect your business interests will run you more than $13 million.

I'm looking forward to the eventual investigation(s). Texas law may somehow allow it, but it's still called graft.

Meow

2011-10-28T00:50:00.000-07:00

Looks like some GOoPers can't take the heat...of exposing their ideas in public. First, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor bagged out on a speech about "income inequality" because of admission was not restricted, and now Texas Governor Rick Perry may skip some of the admittedly endless Republican Presidential debates because...he sucks at it.

Mmm, "manly" Republicans...maybe want a little bowl of milk with your Meow Mix?

Warzone Oakland

2011-10-26T16:58:00.000-07:00

WTF, Oakland? WTF, Mayor Jean Quan? Last night in Oakland you unleashed the cops on Occupy Oakland and the resultant news is bad news for the powers that be -- as well as for the injured Iraq War vet:

An Iraq war veteran has a fractured skull and brain swelling after allegedly being hit by a police projectile.
Scott Olsen is in a "critical condition" in Highland hospital in Oakland, a hospital spokesman confirmed.
Olsen, 24, suffered the head injury during protests in Oakland on Tuesday evening. More than 15 people were arrested after a crowd gathered to demonstrate against the police operation to clear two Occupy Oakland camps in the early hours of Tuesday morning.
Jay Finneburgh, a photographer who was covering the protest, published pictures of Olsen lying on the ground.
"This poor guy was right behind me when he was hit in the head with a police projectile. He went down hard and did not get up," Finneburgh wrote.

Damning video here:

The irony:

"He survived two tours in Iraq," said Adele Carpenter, a friend of Olsen's and a member of the Civilian Soldier Alliance. "This struggle has high stakes, I really respect the fact that Scott was standing up for what he believes in. He's really passionate about social justice causes."
Olsen appears to be the first serious injury nationwide of the Occupy Wall Street movement that has spread to virtually every major American city -- and several smaller ones -- as millions of people continue to express their rage and disappointment with the country's banking, regulatory and health care systems.

Well, Mayor Quan, I guess the movement can give thanks that you've highlighted their cause with your own police overreaction. It worked to help publicize the movement when a cop pepper-sprayed some young women protesting in NYC, so this should do wonders. If Olsen dies, it's like Kent State May 4, 1970 revisited.

Let's see how you handle the return of the protest tonight.

Sensitive Skin

2011-10-25T17:42:00.000-07:00

This is a somewhat self-serving post, as I've been published twice now in my friend's online/print magazine, Sensitive Skin, but it still warrants writing about because the magazine is so damned good.

Described by publisher/editor Bernard "Buddy" Meisler as "Post-beat, pre-apocalyptic art, writing and what-not," the original incarnation was in NYC's Lower East Side beginning 1992, revived a little over a year ago from his current home in Marin County. With a reservoir of good will, contacts and eye for edgy, neo-bohemian literature, art, music and video, there's a wealth of great material in each issue, especially the one just released, Sensitive Skin issue #7.

Aside from an excerpt from my own screenplay, Little Punks, with an inspired-by-true-life story of meeting legendary New York Dolls guitarist/co-founder, Johnny Thunders, there's a brilliant piece on being a Bad Girl by my good friend, Erika Schickel, plus writing by Rob Roberge, Díre McCain, Marguerite Van Cook, Drew Hubner, John S. Hall and City of Strangers, a video by Flame Schon, art by Shalom Neuman and Janice Sloane and music by contemporary composer Mike Fink and Bay Area jazz combo LaMacchia/Myrner/Feiszli.

You can order print copies or just read it online. The magazine maintains an active Facebook page as well, which is a lot of fun. In 2011 there are so many more opportunities for the magazine to go viral than there were in 1992. One can only hope it continues to grow in readership, as I believe it will grow in stature.

And, if there's one piece not to your fancy, there's always another one a click -- or page turn -- away.

Disqualified by Birth

2011-10-24T22:58:00.000-07:00

Republican Texas Governor James Richard Perry just disqualified himself from the U.S. Presidency in this Sunday's Parade magazine:

Q. Governor, do you believe that President Barack Obama was born in the United States?
A. I have no reason to think otherwise.

Q. That’s not a definitive, “Yes, I believe he”—
A. Well, I don’t have a definitive answer, because he’s never seen my birth certificate.

Q. But you’ve seen his.
A. I don’t know. Have I?

Q. You don’t believe what’s been released?
A. I don’t know. I had dinner with Donald Trump the other night.

Q. And?
A. That came up.

Q. And he said?
A. He doesn’t think it’s real.

Q. And you said?
A. I don’t have any idea.

It's like a crazy one-act play by Harold Pinter.

So he visits Donald Trump to try and get his donation if not endorsement, hears the Birther nonsense from el topo and parrots it back to a family magazine reporter.

Du-oh!

When even Karl Rove says you're wrong to join the nutbags in trying to delegitimize Obama that way, you're in trouble.

When you bring up that canard within six months of the President presenting his birth certificate and then taking out Bin Laden later that week, you're disqualified for Commander-in-Chief.

It's a judgement thing, Rick.

Check, Please

2011-10-23T23:48:00.000-07:00

President Barack Hussein Obama keeps another promise and ends the Iraq War for good. Yes, while it does feel a bit like Groundhog's Day (didn't we already announce we were pulling out...although still leaving 50,000 troops) it's still ending Dick Cheney, George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld's war, nine years later.

He's actually keeping George Bush's promise but, sure enough, no Republican can let on that he's once again proving to be our most able Commander-in-Chief since George H.W. Bush (regardless of what you think of some of the wars he chose to fight, like Panama). Come to think of it, Bush the Senior left Iraq as well.

I'm sure President McCain would still have us there. For the next nine years.

The Ungracious

2011-10-20T22:52:00.000-07:00

As seemed inevitable with the rising fortunes of the NATO-backed Libyan rebels, Muammar Qaddafi has been found hiding in a drainage pipe and executed with the same response to his call for mercy that he gave so many others, both Libyans and Lockerbee victims, as well as others due to his support for terrorist activities around the world. The guy ruled for four decades, from the age of 27 when he was the good guy overthrowing the assholes, but he has long since been a bad man, who got what he deserved.

Good riddance and congrats to the Libyan people on their new opportunity for a just, democratic, inclusive society. Now don't screw it up.

The response by politicians in the U.S. has been predictable. Obama did not crow, but urged responsibility; politicians of both parties took the opportunity to pontificate at various lengths; some Dems thanked the President for his leadership, at 180 degree odds with the Cheney/Rumsfeld/Bush Administration way of doing things (only $2 billion not $3 trillion, lead from behind by making good partnership not taking over and huffing/puffing our way to alienating our allies, not a single U.S. soldier killed compared to 4,478 in Iraq alone); and almost no GOoPers had the graciousness to thank or congratulate or even acknowledge that Obama provided the right decisions to support this effort at the crucial moment when a massacre was about to happen. It's not right for every situation, but this was the time to "Lead from Behind."

Least gracious of all -- and, perhaps, damaging to his rosy political prospects -- was freshman Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), whose statement was so douchey he had to walk it back a few hours later:

“Today’s not a day to point fingers,” the right-wing Florida senator said. “I’m glad it’s all working out. Ultimately this is about the freedom and liberty of the Libyan people. But let’s give credit where credit is due: it’s the French and the British that led in this fight, and probably even led on the strike that led to Gadhafi’s capture, and, or, you know, to his death.
“So, that’s the first thing. The second thing is, you know, I criticize the president, for, he did the right things, he just took too long to do it and didn’t do enough of it.”

I would say in response, "So much for your Vice Presidential chances, assbag." The President won. Your approach wasn't even tested...because a better man than you made the right decision. A guy who understands gratitude.

Hilarious to see a GOoPer praising the French nine years after the entire Republican Party vilified them for not joining in on the Iraq debacle, even renaming french fries to "freedom fries" in the Capitol cafeteria. Doh.

Rubio picked a bad day for bad PR, because he got the double whammy, making both less likely to be forgotten. It seems he lied -- or was misinformed and spread that misinformation -- about when his parents came to the U.S. from Cuba. By 2 1/2 years. They weren't driven out by Castro...they left before he came to power.

Who's the one-termer now?

Debilitating Condescension

2011-10-19T23:35:00.001-07:00

This is why Texas Gov. Rick Perry is not going to win the 2012 GOP Presidential nomination:

The patrician doms the sheriff. CEO to SVP Sales, Western Division.

Perry not looking dumb so much as weak.

Checkmitt!

Send in the Clowns

2011-10-18T23:26:00.000-07:00

It's Mitt's to lose. Rick is shrinking next to him, the size difference, better hair (for the first time, Rick looks like he's wearing a toup), Herman Cain is entertaining and running for Secretary of Commerce, Michelle Bachmann is disappearing, Newt and Rick are hanging in by dint of experienced stubbornness, Ron Paul will always have a seat at the Primary table, who knows what speaking spot the Party Elders give him at the Convention.

The idea of Obama running against Mitt Romney for ten months is hilarious when you think about it. Presidential elections are, in large part, for who you want to see on TV for four years. The lead role in the biggest serial of all. I'll be shocked if Mitt doesn't wear out his welcome by May.

He holds his own here, but oh that smiling scold:

Astonishing how little John Huntsman has mattered. It's not that he's too left, it's that he was spectral, a ghost of a candidate, does not bode well for 2016 for him. He even disappeared tonight altogether, not at the debate. Goodbye.

Watch Perry flop so quickly, even with $17 million in his Q3 haul, is more gratifying than I ever expected. Lots of hat.

Steel Carnage

2011-10-18T00:23:00.000-07:00

A month or so ago I was very moved by the Senna documentary, which now seems like a too-timely release with the death of two-time Indy winner Dan Wheldon at the Las Vegas Speedway on Sunday. It's a spectacular tragedy from afar -- Real Steel, as it were, Twisted Metal. Fifteen cars and one championship driver killed.

One can only imagine the horror of being in this crash, whether you survived, were injured, or, for poor Dan, killed. It brings up all sort of questions, philosophical and regulatory. It's the thing that makes you remember that racing cars at high speeds is exceedingly dangerous, that's why there's a premium paid for those that are good at it. It's the thing you usually forget -- and want to forget -- when you're watching a race.

The crazy thing about this one is the footage captured during the event and played after, replaying it from so many different angles. Like a videogame, but real and deadly:

At times it looks like a 3D animated reconstruction. I'll bet it'll be studied for movement, to understand what happened and how to prevent these kinds of accidents in the future...and to for some sort of special effects extravaganza to come, someday not so far away, to a multiplex near you.

Mechanized death.

Occupy Goes Global

2011-10-17T10:09:00.000-07:00

Another great American export, from the people. All this past weekend, all over the world.

$9.99

2011-10-13T18:43:00.000-07:00

Herman Cain, self-made Godfather Pizza CEO, has never held national office but he is now leading in new GOP polls for their Presidential nomination. Is he just this week's Not-Mitt or a force to be, eventually, reckoned with?

His style is affable and he seems to believe what he says even when, as he's also said, he has no evidence to back it up. Key to his appeal is the simplicity of his message, something every good CEO learns to craft and repeat...endlessly.

He's the 9-9-9 guy. 9% income tax, 9% national sales tax, 9% corporate tax. Yep, flat and regressive. You make less than $120k/year, you pay more taxes.

He says he "didn't get it off a pizza box" when Jon Huntsman suggested that was the source. In fact, it may come from the videogame, Sim City.

He'd be a coup for the GOP, a black candidate to run against Obama, insulating them from charges of racism, maybe worth it if the economy picks up and Obama starts to look hard to beat. Take a look at the guy -- even when he's wrong, he's affable:

After all...who doesn't like pizza?

Good Week for iPhone

2011-10-12T18:54:00.001-07:00

Despite the loss of Steve Jobs, it's turning out to be a good week for the iPhone, with the 4s breaking sales records and bringing the magic:

Android phones seem to come out every Tuesday at 3:45 p.m. Apple updates iOS and the iPhone only once a year. So Apple had a lot of catching up to do, even some leapfrogging. There are some rough spots here and there; for example, every now and then the 4S’s camera app gets stuck on its startup screen. And while the battery still gets you through one full day, standby time is shorter than before (200 hours versus 300). But over all, Apple has done an excellent job.
The question isn’t what’s in a name — it’s what’s in a phone. And the answer is: “A lot of amazing technology. And some of it feels like magic.”

One could argue that Jobs' death adds to the marketing as well. In addition, it was an exceptionally bad day for the usually reliable, if not-so-magical Blackberry:

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion has been posting updates on its U.S. site since Monday, when service outages were reported in Europe, India, Africa, the Middle East and throughout Latin America — but not here in the States. Well, that’s changed as of today, when the “core switch failure within RIM’s infrastructure” has begun affecting U.S. customers, who are experiencing messaging and browsing delays owing to a massive backup in data.

What makes the iPhone the big winner? It's Siri:

The blind woman at the end seals the sell.

The future is here.

The Incredible Shrinking Rick Perry

2011-10-11T23:05:00.000-07:00

Not only has he been displaced as a leading candidate for the GOP Presidential nomination by Herman Cain, he's getting less than lackluster reviews for his debate performance and has topped it off post-debate by forgetting in which century we had our Revolutionary War.

Off by two.

BP

2011-10-10T22:56:00.000-07:00

“There’s no shrimp,” explained Grant Bundy, 38. The dock should smell like a place where 10,000 pounds of shrimp a day are bought off the boats. Not this year. In all of September, Bundy’s Seafood bought around 41,000 pounds.
White shrimp season began in late August, and two months in, the shrimpers here say it is a bad one, if not the worst in memory. It is bad not just in spots but all over southeastern Louisiana, said Jules Nunez, 78, calling it the worst season he had seen since he began shrimping in 1950. Some fishermen said their catches were off by 80 percent or more.
“A lot of people say it’s this, it’s that, it’s too hot, it’s too cold, it’s BP,” Mr. Nunez said. “We just don’t know.”

We all know.

BBQ'd

2011-10-09T20:55:00.000-07:00

It turns out Rick Perry's biggest problem in the upcoming North Carolina Republican Primary isn't Mitt Romney, Herman Cain or his educational support of the kids of illegal immigrants in Texas. It's that he's on record as having dissed North Carolina barbecue. In a big way:

Nineteen years ago, at the 1992 Republican National Convention, a barbecue taste-off pitted beef tenderloin from Joe Allen's Bar-B-Que of Abilene, Texas, against pulled pork from Kings Restaurant in Kinston, N.C. Perry, then the agriculture commissioner of Texas, sampled the Carolina barbecue and declared, "I've had road kill that tasted better than that."
...
Last month, a new generation of News & Observer reporters stumbled on the quote in the Reeds' book and thrust it back into the political limelight, announcing to the world that Perry was on record as saying that North Carolina barbecue tastes worse than road kill.

The reaction in North Carolina was swift. Newspaper columnists declared Perry unfit for office and demanded a retraction. A representative of the Smithfield's Chicken N' Bar-B-Q chain mailed Perry 2 pounds of pork barbecue and an open letter encouraging him to "revisit your experience with Eastern North Carolina Bar-B-Q and … rectify your statement."
...
So far, there has been no official response from the Perry campaign, and that doesn't bode well for his electoral prospects. Just ask Rufus Edmisten, who ran for governor of North Carolina in 1984. Late in the campaign, after eating barbecue at rallies three times a day for almost a year, he broke down at a public feed in Raleigh. "We haven't had any of the damnable barbecue," he proclaimed. "I've eaten enough barbecue. I am not going to eat any more!" The quote ran in local newspapers, and Edmisten lost by almost 200,000 votes.

When asked to comment on Perry's chance to recover from his similar gaffe, Edmisten told the Raleigh News & Observer: "He's had it. He's done. He's beef toast."

As a man who considers BBQ to be his "other woman," I'd have to agree with North Carolina. Surely in Austin Rick must take that half hour drive out to old Saltlick to eat in the big building -- feed, really, with all the barbecue brisket, ribs, chicken and pork that fills those long tables and hungry bellies.

Here in Los Angeles I recommend the incredible Memphis style of JR's Barbecue at 3055 S. La Cienaga, a freestanding one-story building on the West side of the road before you hit Target. It's the most fun -- like most BBQ places -- to go with a group of six or more. Then you can order either the Small Tray or Large Tray, and the small one is good for up to eight people:

Slab Pork Ribs

1/2 Slab Beef Ribs

1/2 Pound Sliced Beef

1/2 Pound Beef Links

1/2 Chicken

1 Pound (!) Rib Tips

Pint Baked Beans

Pint Salad or Cole Slaw

6 Rolls

Have it with a Tiger Woods and finish with either the Sock-It-To-Me Cake or the 7up Cake. Or one of the seven other delicious desserts.

I'm with North Carolina. Road kill? Really? But I'm not offended.

Unless Gov. Perry disses JR's.

More on the Good Guys

2011-10-06T23:49:00.000-07:00

Jimmy Breslin, 10 years into retirement, comes out to cover #occupywallstreet:

This was the start of a moving day that has not been seen in this city in a great many years, back when the unions were large and nasty to those who opposed the war in Vietnam back in the '60s and '70s.
Now yesterday, they joined hands with the young, and people were mostly orderly and all for the idea that the troops be pulled out of Afghanistan and that we need jobs for the young unemployed around here.
They were angry, and they shouted about the injustice of a tiny percentage of the rich getting richer, while the middle class endures foreclosures, dwindling savings and sudden losses in employment with the jobs going to places like China.

Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine, on people finally standing up after the banks destroyed the economy in 2008:

Naomi Klein: Occupy Wall Street Oct. 5th Demo from The New Significance on Vimeo.

Ever wonder why we got into this crisis?

Twenty golden years of consolidation and concentration of ownership.

The 1%.

The King is Dead

2011-10-06T01:26:00.000-07:00

Has there ever been a more beloved CEO than Steve Jobs? He earned it the hard way, by losing the wildly successful company he founded in his youth, watching it slide down into the depths, then getting bought back in and taking it to greater glories than it had ever achieved.

I learned about his death on one of his devices. I'm writing this on another, in his browser. My fingers have touched his products more than any other single company's products. Not even Toyota. And even the Prius looks like an iCar.

56, I mean, what a life. What a profound impact on human learning, on industrial design, on the consumption of media.

I think what remains to be seen is if Apple ever creates another revolutionary product. The Mac, the Mac notebook, the iPhone, the iPad. (Let alone Pixar.) Is the announcement of the iPhone 4S the day before his passing a harbinger of more evolution -- but no revolution -- to come?

I certainly hope not. And by the note on the Apple website (after you click on the photo of Steve in a layout I wonder if he approved), they will be working to make his spirit the permanent spirit of the company.

Per Max Weber, any organization with veer from its original purpose over time, sometimes in betrayal of its original goals and function. Apple will definitely be different after Steve Jobs, but what it becomes may be something new and what we need for the post-Steve Jobs times. If the apple has many seeds, and those seeds bear fruit.

From the one, many?

Who are the 99%?

2011-10-04T17:42:00.000-07:00

Great post by Ezra Klein on this movement, including:

These are not rants against the system. They’re not anarchist manifestos. They’re not calls for a revolution. They’re small stories of people who played by the rules, did what they were told, and now have nothing to show for it. Or, worse, they have tens of thousands in debt to show for it.
...
But this is why I’m taking Occupy Wall Street -- or, perhaps more specifically, the ‘We Are The 99 Percent’ movement -- seriously. There are a lot of people who are getting an unusually raw deal right now. There is a small group of people who are getting an unusually good deal right now. That doesn’t sound to me like a stable equilibrium.
The organizers of Occupy Wall Street are fighting to upend the system. But what gives their movement the potential for power and potency is the masses who just want the system to work the way they were promised it would work. It’s not that 99 percent of Americans are really struggling. It’s not that 99 percent of Americans want a revolution. It’s that 99 percent of Americans sense that the fundamental bargain of our economy -- work hard, play by the rules, get ahead -- has been broken, and they want to see it restored.

Here's a rapidly growing Tumblr with faces and messages from the 99%.

Of us.

Wild Monday Roundup

2011-10-03T21:56:00.001-07:00

Amanda Knox should never have been tried in the first place, and the prosecution's allegation of motive was Medieval and misogynistic, literally something out of a 14th Century witch trial. I'm sure it must be as hard to believe that she's finally free after nearly four years - 20% of her life -- but the relief must be epic as well. Great thanks to the Italian legal system, where the appeal is something more of a do-over than here in the U.S. Of course, in Rick Perry's Texas, she'd be executed already:

As one of the prosecutors in the case, Manuela Comodi, no friend of Knox, implied last week in his remarks: were Knox being tried in the United States, she might well be on her way to an execution. The case of Troy Davis, killed by the state of Georgia last month despite the fact that most of the witnesses in his case later recanted their testimony, should linger as the Knox saga is reviewed.

Speaking of Gov. Perry, I don't think the news about the name of the ranch leased by his family means that he's a racist. As our President would say, it's a distracting sideshow. But it does reinforce my prediction that an Obama-Perry duel would look very much like the aged battle for Abolition, and would expect to see rhetoric surrounding the candidates on all sides that mirrored that. I do like the discussion of language that's sprung up around this, like a rather unusual and admirably frank discussion today on The View.

What I do think is that he's a mindless corporatist who, like Bush from Texas before him, thinks the government treasuries are meant for the rich. Which takes us to Wall Street where a very articulate young man, Jesse LaGreca, makes the #occupywallstreet viral video of the day as he takes down Fox News to its face and lays out the real issues:

For example, the ultra-Right Koch Brothers seem to be getting away with having violated the Iran trading embargo. Because they can? Isn't that...treason?

And want to see the opposite of the guy in the above video? Isn't rich, aggrieved, entitled Hank Williams, Jr., born lucky like the Koch Bros albeit with less talent, just the Id of their rightwing Super-Ego:

Ha ha ha his theme song was cut from Monday Night Football tonight and hopefully forever.

Turn, tide, turn.

99%

2011-10-02T20:19:00.000-07:00

Gotta love #occupywallstreet as the anti-Tea Party protest with real truth behind it -- that an unbridled Wall Street serving the 1% at the top got us into the current financial mess and they have paid no real price for it, not one that counts. Not one that will keep them from doing this again.

This weekend it spread to other cities and also intensified in NYC, with 700 arrests at the Brooklyn Bridge. People of all ages are represented and one has to wonder if the cops really want to be doing this where there's real crime going on all the time in NYC, and not just in the those towers being protested. Not to mention that those cops are the ones who get hurt when those big money-backed Republicans like those in Wisconsin start taking away public union rights. And how come 700 people have been arrested for protesting, yet not one indictment has been handed down to the high finance crooks themselves.

In the age of online social media, there is a huge amount to look at, to learn from, to help connect with the organizing. The Facebook page, the Twitter handle, the Tumblr. Here's some great pics at The Atlantic showing the sweep of the protest. Help pay the movement's media costs here.

Most importantly, the grievances. Peaceful and damning. We have yet to see if it lasts or fizzles, if it leads to change or fractures, if the authorities start sending in undercover thugs to turn things violent as they did regularly in the 1960's and the repressive Middle East regimes have done during Arab Spring, to discredit the movement.

If nothing else, it does the heart good to see there are protesters in America who aren't carrying posters of President Obama with a black toothbrush mustache.

Healthy Connection

2011-09-30T00:31:00.000-07:00

So do you think there might be a connection between this:

The Obama administration’s pursuit of an expedited U.S. Supreme Court review of its health care law is a roll of the political dice with enormous implications for the president and the 2012 campaign.

While the signature issue of Obama’s presidency has already figured prominently in rhetoric on both sides, an expected ruling on its constitutionality by June guarantees a dramatic pre-election debate in which Obama may have the most to gain.

A victory for the Affordable Care Act in a high court dominated by conservatives could tame the most fiery criticism from the right, undermining charges popularized by the Tea Party that the administration usurped its constitutional authority.

A ruling against it, while a setback to the law itself, could serve to embolden the argument Obama has already been making that Republicans across all branches of government have become obstructionists without solutions.

And this?:

Democratic lawmakers on Thursday called for a federal investigation into Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' failure to report hundreds of thousands of dollars on annual financial disclosure forms.

Led by House Rules Committee ranking member Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.), 20 House Democrats sent a letter to the Judicial Conference of the United States -- the entity that frames guidelines for the administration of federal courts -- requesting that the conference refer the matter of Thomas' non-compliance with the Ethics in Government Act of 1978 to the Department of Justice.

The letter outlines how, throughout his 20-year tenure on the Supreme Court, Thomas routinely checked a box titled "none" on his annual financial disclosure forms, indicating that his wife had received no income. But in reality, the letter states, she earned nearly $700,000 from the Heritage Foundation from 2003 to 2007 alone.

Hmm.

My theory: Obama wouldn't get into a fight unless he had a long-range plan for winning it. Especially not now that he's pivoted from acting like Neville Chamberlain to Ronald Reagan.

If nothing else, he's certainly set up a huge hurdle. And he must have known the Affordable Care Act would come down to those eleven jurists before it would be settled law. Big questions if the GOP can force Justice Elena Kagan to recuse herself for being Solicitor General during the legislation of healthcare reform. If so, this is bench-one-of-ours, bench-one-of-yours ploy.

But if they can knock out Thomas, on possible felony charges, and keep Kagan (without any of the other left-leaning Justices getting sick or worse), then those are odds Obama would like to have.

Does he feel lucky?

Obama vs. MItt

2011-09-29T00:21:00.000-07:00

Willard Mitt Romney, born 1947, would be a generation shift as President from Barack Hussein Obama, who was born in 1961. From Gen-Between to Baby Boomer again, 64 years old to Obama's 50. And it is increasing looking like he'll be Obama's opponent next November.

The GOP always gives it to the next guy in line, and it's Mitt. He ran last time, is less robotic this time, seasoned, has the Bush establishment behind him that's run the Party for so long. He's making his own luck -- making more ludicrous candidates who keep popping up make fools of themselves by standing his ground letting them self-destruct.

The latest is Texas Governor Rick Perry, who's been arrogant in lack of debate preparation and made some odd mistakes with the base on immigration, where I'm actually in some agreement with the candidate. Now he's in apology mode, which could be his death spiral.

And out of nowhere, last weekend's Florida Straw Poll winner, Herman "Godfather Pizza" Cain, is saying that's why he can't support Perry if he does win the nomination. Now Mitt is suddenly up over Perry in Florida Republican Primary polling. It's starting to look a whole lot like McCain's >>grumble grumble base<< march to nomination victory.

I'm wondering if Perry could become damaged goods as even a VP choice for Mitt.

Real Patriot vs. No Leadership

2011-09-26T21:41:00.000-07:00

Gotta love this enlightened Silicon Valley millionaire:

Doing Obama's job for him.

Meanwhile, the DNC releases the greatest hits of the recent GOP debates. I'm not very happy about the ominous music -- it's out of a Rick Perry ad -- but the three points ring true:

Evidently the President was particularly pissed about the booing of an American soldier, as well he should be. The core issue: Leadership. Not one of those Republican candidates dares to stand up to their rabble.

Here's to hoping Obama keeps his tough tone going throughout the election. In the old days it was called "staunch."

Keep it up and see what happens next November.

NYC Police Brutality

2011-09-25T22:48:00.000-07:00

While clearly not indicative of all police even on the scene of the crackdown on the Wall Street protesters, this video shows one of their member, probably of rank due to his white shirt rather than patrolman blue, pepper spraying several unarmed female protesters in clear violation of NYC police rules:

Once again, I wonder why the ridiculous Tea Partiers aren't on the front lines protesting Wall Street but instead focus their anger on the President and Democratic Party. Just identity politics at its worst, I guess. As for these protesters:

Since Sept. 17, a few hundred protesters have occupied Zuccotti Park on Liberty Street and Broadway, seeking attention for what they say is a financial system that is unjust and flawed. They have embarked on a series of daily marches near Wall Street, but their march to Union Square on Saturday was their largest and most ambitious.
Returning to the financial district from Union Square, many protesters used University Place, and the demonstration spilled into the street with protesters walking against traffic. The police put up mesh nets to prevent them from going any farther down University Place, and many of the demonstrators ended up on East 12th Street.

Well, it's not the first time the NYC cops have started some trouble. They did created the Tompkins Square Park Riot of 1988.

And 1874.

Two Gay Soldiers

2011-09-22T23:14:00.000-07:00

This video's a YouTube hit, a moving real-life moment that feels like America at its best:

And then there's this milestone in Presidential debate history, the first time a U.S. soldier was booed by the audience:

A Republican Presidential debate milestone.

Elizabeth

2011-09-21T19:01:00.000-07:00

Candidate for Massachusetts Democratic Senatorial nomination, Elizabeth Warren:

I like how Obama and Warren are attacking the GOP "class warfare" smear head-on.

And lest we forget, she spoke so intelligently on the financial crisis and need for reform, she made Jon Stewart horny.

Of Course We Do

2011-09-20T23:39:00.000-07:00

The poll says:

Americans generally favor raising taxes on higher-income Americans and eliminating tax deductions for some corporations as ways of paying for President Obama's proposed jobs plan.

Two more interesting parts of the poll. When people are described the elements of the jobs plan, a plurity is for it:

By 45% to 32%, more Americans want their member of Congress to vote for rather than against a jobs bill similar to the one President Obama proposed last week, with the rest having no opinion.

Even more telling, those who are actually pay attention - heavily for it:

While fewer than half of all Americans favor passage of a jobs bill similar to Obama's, a solid majority of Americans who are following news of the bill very closely, 57%, want to see it passed.

If we can assume that includes the % of Americans who are being attentive to what's being said about the bill on Fox News, that's an even more impressive statistic.

Now it's all about the fight. No showdown yet on the horizon, but we're hankering for one.

Poster Boy

2011-09-20T01:14:00.000-07:00

Meet Rep. John Fleming (R-LA), who can't live on $600k/yr and who's shown up right on time for his Party's math lesson.

Gobama Now

2011-09-18T21:09:00.000-07:00

Loving this:

President Obama will announce a proposal on Monday to tame the nation’s rocketing federal debt, calling for $1.5 trillion in new revenue as part of a plan to find more than $3 trillion in budget savings over a decade, senior administration officials said.

The proposal draws a sharp contrast with Republicans and amounts more to an opening play in the fall debate over the economy than another attempt to find common ground with the opposing party.

Combined with his call this month for $450 billion in new stimulus, the proposal represents a more populist approach to confronting the nation’s economic travails than the compromises he advocated earlier this summer.
Obama will propose new taxes on the wealthy, a special new tax for millionaires, and eliminating or scaling back a variety of loopholes and deductions, officials say. About half of the tax savings would come from the expiration next year of the George W. Bush administration tax cuts for the wealthy.
But the president won’t call for any changes in Social Security, officials say, and is seeking less-aggressive changes to Medicare and Medicaid than previously considered. He will propose $320 billion in health-care savings but will not include raising the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67, officials said.
...
Obama will pledge to veto any cut in entitlements that does not also include increases in tax revenue.

If he doesn't start folding then this is perfect timing -- no one can say he hasn't tried to be bipartisan even when his own supporters recoiled from the deals he has made with the intransigent other Party -- and (again, if he sticks to it) about time.

To echo Chris Matthews, "Give 'em hell, Barry."

Stupid or Venal?

2011-09-15T23:35:00.000-07:00

I would make this my ongoing series, but since I usually come down on the side of venal, or perhaps venal stupidity that somehow feeds a huge part of the American psyche and all of the #1 cable news channel, thus shoving a crowbar in the gears of evolution.

For example, there's House Republicans criticizing a new regulation that restricts importing deadly snakes, including the Burmese Python, saying it's going to cost jobs and choke the economy in red tape. So why the regulation?

Politico reports that Florida officials, led by Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL), are pushing for the new rules because the Everglades are under attack by 100,000 gigantic Burmese pythons who have been accidentally introduced by negligent pet owners. The outside invaders have been on a rampage, devouring native birds and other creatures. One python grew so big that it managed to devour a six-foot alligator before exploding. No really. This actually happened. There's a photo.

Then there's this weird sick freak GOP puppethead with a diabolical look, Matthew Vadum:

"Section 261 of the bill provides $15 billion for 'Project Rebuild.' Grants would be given to 'qualified nonprofit organizations, businesses or consortia of eligible entities for the redevelopment of abandoned and foreclosed-upon properties and for the stabilization of affected neighborhoods,'" Vadum writes.

"Radical groups like ACORN won't get the whole $15 billion, though, because they will have to compete with state and local governments for the money," he continues.

This is all, of course, contingent upon the fact that ACORN exists. Which it doesn't.

Worst of all, the Super Congress contains an either very stupid or very venal, GOP Representative, Dave Camp (R-MI):

So did CBO Director Doug Elmendorf make any headway convincing Super Committee Republicans that a). the economy needs a short term boost of near term spending and tax cuts, and b). that the country shouldn't dive headlong, and unnecessarily, into austerity?

If Dave Camp is any indication, the answer is no.

...

Camp's back of the envelope math during Tuesday's hearing was based on the notion that the Super Committee will reduce deficits by one percent of this year's GDP every year for 10 years.

However, as noted here, IMF economists recently warned that an austerity package of precisely that size will significantly increase unemployment and reduce wages. That's why Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) is starting a drumroll to require the panel to ask CBO to estimate the jobs impact of any of their proposals.

The idea there is to make it difficult to pass deficit reduction legislation without pairing it with some near-term pro-growth spending and tax cuts. But that would mean an even larger medium term consolidation plan. And Camp says that's not looking very likely.

Of course it isn't. Dave's not here.

All-American Girl

2011-09-14T22:48:00.000-07:00

Yep, Sarah Palin appears to have snorted cocaine with her addict husband, cheated on him with his best friend business partner, and she had a spate of jungle fever -- which she consummated, prior to marriage.

If she ran on all that, even I might vote for her.

But, then again, she's a quitter.

The Exploitation Memorial

2011-09-14T00:46:00.000-07:00

Jon Stewart nails it oh so well, yet again, another topper:

The Daily Show
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

God bless America.

More from the Death Eaters

2011-09-13T00:42:00.000-07:00

It's like the evil characters in Harry Potter that work for Valdomort: they cheer death:

This was the CNN/Tea Party Debate. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that the teabaggers are the most bloodthirsty Republicans of all (is that possible?) but they do worship their own self-righteous anger.

A vote for a Republican is a vote to dismantle the Federal government's ability to help we the people. The only winners will be the mega corps, the mega churches and mega defense. It's a vote for more and earlier death for our aged and infirm, our sickened no matter how suddenly, our children through the environment and educational neglect.

And CNN decides to partner up with this staunch political group. The John Birch Society, mainstreamed by our media.

The Silence of 9/11

2011-09-11T22:06:00.000-07:00

Best tribute I've found yet, a New York City man filling that amazing monument and tying us together again in honest grief, with a song nearly 50 years old:

Unifying, as America was on that day and the first few weeks, months that followed. And then this.

Pass. This. Bill.

2011-09-08T23:02:00.001-07:00

He said is something like 22 times either verbatim or in related, close form. He's proven he's committed to bipartisanship and hasn't given up, but he's taken it hard to the other side to let them know where he stands now, after all the do-nothing and debt ceiling shenanigans. He's working on being the sheriff again.

Here he is, pts 1 and 2. My favorite section in this starts 5:55 and goes through 7:20. Notice the GOP side of Congress doesn't stand up and applaud improving public education to keep us competitive against China and the rest of the globe, and save the Republic:

The GOP sheep finally stand, dutifully, at 10:20 when Obama talks about the veterans. Because they have to pretend to appreciate the working military as well.

In this one I love him at 11:20 -- "We shouldn't be in a race to the bottom, we should be in a race to the top...":

From 12:30 to the end he gives the full-throated case for the common good through good government supporting the building and advancement of America, and not just be shirking responsibilities and leaving it all up to the Libertarians. Then he calls on Congress and himself to not shirk their responsibilities.

Towards the ending -- the shaming of the GOP Congress:

Every proposal I’ve laid out tonight is the kind that’s been supported by Democrats and Republicans in the past. Every proposal I’ve laid out tonight will be paid for. And every proposal is designed to meet the urgent needs of our people and our communities.
Now, I know there’s been a lot of skepticism about whether the politics of the moment will allow us to pass this jobs plan -- or any jobs plan. Already, we’re seeing the same old press releases and tweets flying back and forth. Already, the media has proclaimed that it’s impossible to bridge our differences. And maybe some of you have decided that those differences are so great that we can only resolve them at the ballot box.
But know this: The next election is 14 months away. And the people who sent us here -- the people who hired us to work for them -- they don’t have the luxury of waiting 14 months. (Applause.) Some of them are living week to week, paycheck to paycheck, even day to day. They need help, and they need it now.

They need it now.

Pass it, bitches.

Death Party

2011-09-07T23:04:00.000-07:00

The don't trust the government system to help them get the best possible health insurance, but they trust the system to kill 234 people:

They are the death party -- death & taxes, as it were, or maybe better said, death = taxes. They are the party that demonizes the poor and struggling classes for being poor and working class, with a sheen to religious capitalism in service to the corporate overlords.

Better said by E.D. Kain:

It was enough to remind me that the Republican Party boils down to three things: tax cuts, “What Would Reagan Do?” and violence. For every problem there is a tax cut that will fix it. For every dodged question, the ghost of Reagan looms like a smiling, beneficent prophet. All you need to do is rub his tummy and Republican boilerplate comes dribbling out to fill in whatever gaping crevice is left unfilled by any actual ideas. And when Perry is asked about the two-hundred and thirty some people he’s executed on death row during his governorship, the audience bursts into applause. Torture, war, and death, and this is the “pro-life” party.

I submit to you that this moment is perhaps the most telling since George W. Bush left office; that the modern Republican party is not only intellectually bankrupt, but morally bankrupt as well. The conservative movement and the Fox News and talk radio media empire it has built up around itself is not only ethically decrepit but morally atrophid. As Andrew Sullivan noted, “any crowd that instantly cheers the execution of 234 individuals is a crowd I want to flee, not join. This is the crowd that believes in torture and executions.”

Everything Rick Perry says in the above clip is gainsaid by the state murder of Cameron Todd Willingham. Yes, the baddest of the bad guys need to be punished the worst, but you can't solve the injustice of an execution by releasing a prisoner. If the system is flawed, as all human systems must be, it's not cool to cheer it for its slaughter.

A non-bloodlust Republican Party might sit in reverent silence or even stirred a noticeable murmur in respect of human life they seem so hellbent on protecting prior to viability. But cheering? As at a pep rally?

The evil party.