Man of his Word

A friend of mine who worked for George Bush in 2000, turned against him but abstained in 2004, and worked for Obama in 2008 always used to say that he couldn't vote for any politician if he didn't know where he stood. Case in point was Hillary Clinton, who's famous "triangulation" meant that he was never sure if she meant what she said or would flip it around based on political winds. Same with John Kerry -- not enough definition.

Hence his staunch support for Barack Obama, and here's yet another case study from just a couple days of actual governance that our new President meant what he said:



And yet another:

Seems almost lost in the hub bub of all that is happening these past few days, but yesterday President Obama issued an order that eliminates one of George Bush and Alberto Gonzalez's first vile collaborations.

A nasty little executive order Bush issued to make secrecy the rule of his administration.

Executive Order 13233 limited access to the records of former United States Presidents. It was drafted by then White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and issued by President George W. Bush on November 1, 2001.

At the time it was issued in November of 2001, the Society of American Archivists and the American Library Association felt that the order

"violates both the spirit and letter of existing U.S. law on access to presidential papers..." and "potentially threatens to undermine one of the very foundations of our nation."

...Well yesterday when President Obama issued his Executive order to

...establish policies and procedures governing the assertion of executive privilege by incumbent and former Presidents in connection with the release of Presidential records by the National Archives...

Reading though that order I was struck by his assertion that outside of certain

"Presidential records (that) might impair national security (including the conduct of foreign relations), law enforcement, or the deliberative processes of the executive branch.

There is now established a specific way for these records to be released. There is also a bill H.R.35to codify "procedures for the consideration of claims of constitutionally based privilege against disclosure of Presidential records." But until this happens this is a good start and makes me feel all the more confident in our new President and his intention to act as a real agent of change.

I was just so heartened to get to the end of reading the Executive Order and reading the words...

Sec. 6. Revocation. Executive Order 13233 of November 1, 2001, is revoked.

When the history of Obama's transition and first 100 days is written, it will be as textbook.

This is how it is done.

Every Picture Tells a Story

Here's some interesting stories in pictures, starting with a phenomenal satellite view of the Inauguration here. You can see the crowds gathering by the Capitol and more of the ant-like collections around the various Jumbotron stations. Extraordinary.

And here's a collection of clickable newspaper covers from around the world.

Wow!

And as for governing, check out the man on the job in shirtsleeves. Getting it done.

Preparing to close down Gitmo.

At Last

This was certainly the day to get choked up. I was flying to Washington, D.C., watching the Inaugural ceremonies on the satellite TV, with lots of annoying freeze-frames due to Rocky Mountain signal interference. At the same time my kids were watching it on TV in their classrooms, with my 9-year-old seeing the whole speech by PRESIDENT Obama.

Tonight I enjoyed a drink on my new friends from South Carolina, Dale and Tom, drove up suddenly when Tom called Dale yesterday after lunch and said, "I'm going," and extended the invitation. Tom said he hadn't slept int 48 hours. Dale says he had waterworks when Obama spoke. They were in the white minority in their pocket of the crowd on The Mall and their first drink was from an African-American gentleman at the other end of the bar bought their drinks, a guy they had stood in line with to enjoy being a part of history along with 1,999,998 of their other attending fellow Americans.

There is a unity in this country that may not last forever, but I'd sure be pleased to see eight years or so. It should have been ours after 9/11/2001 but was squandered by the opportunists -- Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove. But it was slightly over a year ago, January 2, 2008, when I became a supporter of Barack Obama, the night of the Iowa caucuses, when he earned his first extraordinary victory on a chain of extraordinary victories, leading to the historical victory on November 4, 2008.

The electoral process produced the individual American most suited to the job of President at this particular time of crisis, a cool, calm, collected, strategic, book-smart and people-smart man who synthesizes ideas, nationalities and cultures in a uniquely American way. America's traditional friends and all those around the world who want to believe in the power of our American Dream seem to be celebrating as hardily as we are, and per the new PRESIDENT's very sober speech today, let our enemies be put on notice. Come to us in peace and we're all (big) ears.

Otherwise, I expect they will learn who they are up against now that the feeble ones are swept away.

God bless America.

Countdown to Ecstasy

The hour draws nigh. Tuesday, January 20, 2009, 12:00 noon EST.

Yes he will.

Some interesting items in the shuffle between yesterday's Lincoln Memorial celebration, today's MLK Day commemoration, and tomorrow's restoration of democracy jubilation:

• Many supporters of both John McCain and Hillary Clinton are getting Obamafied, at least willing to give him a solid chance, heartened by his transition and appointments.

• Obama held a bipartisan dinner with John McCain as guest of honor, calls to make such a pre-Inauguration dinner a tradition going forward.
  

• Vice President (the last time I'll write that w/out "Former") Richard Bruce Cheney injured his back during his move out of the VP residence and will show up for the Inauguration in a wheelchair. I don't quite have the perfect metaphor, but how about, "Don't let the door snap your back on the way out?"

• Final Bush protest: shoes thrown onto the White House lawn. Will this be his greeting wherever he goes -- any speech, public appearance, even if by infiltration?

• Obama Lego Inauguration:

• And finally, at the official Bush farewell party, El Presidente speaks to his peeps and gives a closing address, which closes with:

"It has been an awesome eight years," he went on. "The days are long, but the years are short. … If you ever want a nice meal, come and knock on our door in Dallas, Texas." He waved goodbye over the opening chords of "Don't Stop Believin'."

That's right, Bush goes out with the very same song made famous again by the closing moments of The Sopranos. This leaped out at me for two reasons.

For one, unauthorized Bush Family biographer Kitty Kelley compared El Presidente's family to that fictional organized crime clan.

And then there's the whole ending of The Sopranos thing, the blackout that by now is pretty much considered to be Tony's POV as his lights go out, offed by the man in the Members Only jacket.

Back in Semiotics class in college we used to discuss overdetermination in movies, books, other works of art. Overdetermination might be best translated as obviousness, when the metaphor is all too apt, as in all too pat. But the counterargument to this was also real-world examples where life itself, by coincidence or grand design, is itself overdetermined. You know, those "if they put it in a movie you'd never believe it" moments we've all read about or experienced ourselves on occasion.

Has there ever been a Presidency as overdetermined as the Bush/Cheney Administration?

Don't. Stop. Believin'.

George.

Big Sunday

Not just the games sending Arizona and Pittsburgh to the Super Bowl, but a remarkable collection of actors and musicians saluting the upcoming Inauguration, with Abraham Lincoln gazing down upon the proceedings, the incoming President and his family, the half million people gathered there.

Here's the end of what he said when he spoke at the end:

That is the belief with which we began this campaign, and that is how we will overcome what ails us now. There is no doubt that our road will be long. That our climb will be steep. But never forget that the true character of our nation is revealed not during times of comfort and ease, but by the right we do when the moment is hard. I ask you to help me reveal that character once more, and together, we can carry forward as one nation, and one people, the legacy of our forefathers that we celebrate today.

Here's how Pete Seeger and Bruce Springstein closed it out, with 500,000 singing along:



Hell, yes he can.

Waltz to Peace

Clearly anticipating the start of the Obama Era on Tuesday and maybe hoping that by cooling off now they keep him as a friend, Israel has declared a unilateral ceasefire while keeping their troops stationed in Gaza. While I commend the ceasefire and understand that it made more sense for them to do it themselves rather than as the result of negotiation with Hamas, I don't hold much hope of it lasting. Hamas or some Palestinian whose family has been killed by Israeli bombing or gunfire will strike, Israel with strike back...we've all seen this dance before.

I don't have the intestinal fortitude to get into a huge discussion of Israel re-occupation of Gaza, as I have my own conflicted feelings about it. On one hand, Hamas is an Iranian-backed terrorist/political organization dedicated to the destruction of Israel, and they clearly brought this response upon themselves by firing rockets at Israeli home in violation of the previous ceasefire or perhaps to take advantage of its end. Israel, on the other hand, attacks Hamas where they have embedded themselves with regular citizens already living in degraded conditions due to the control of the border by Israel, bringing holy hell down upon many innocent people along with the more guilty.

It is in this context that Waltz with Bashir arrives with so timely a release, a view from the Israeli side that is fraught with guilt, pain, and a clear plea for the end of violence against civilians. It is the story of a former Israeli soldier (service is, of course, mandatory for all Israeli citizens with some sometimes galling exceptions) who is trying to recover his memory of events two decades earlier, when he was stationed by the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps during the incident when Ariel Sharon allowed the Lebanese Christian Phalangists, blood-crazed from the murder of their leader, Bashir, into the camps to massacre Muslim civilians -- men, women, children.

While such a soul-searching by a nation still under siege is remarkable, what makes the film even more remarkable and even unmissable is it's form. Made over the course of four years, Waltz with Bashir is an entirely new genre of film, the animated documentary:



Filmmaker Ari Folman is telling his own story, filming and rotoscoping his fellow veterans, creating a graphic novel on film that's somewhere between the very moving comic book reportage of Joe Sacco and the experimental Waking Life. Folman's vision is at times magical or humorous, but most of all it is relateable. By using the ostensibly distancing format he ends up drawing us closer, and sets us up for the tragic punchline of real footage, the kind that the most repressed memories are made of.

Here's to the candor and artistry of Folman and those like him who would seek to beat swords into ploughshares. As we stand poised on the edge of what so many around the world hope and pray is a new era, may their voices be those that are triumphant.

And Hell Froze Over

About the off-the-record dinner Obama had on Wednesday night with Conservative columnists:

BAIER: It was at George Will's house, and I saw our friends at "The Politico" called it a dinner and said "The silence of the lamb chops" because no one is talking about it. But what can you say about it?

KRAUTHAMMER: What is interesting is the fact that he would want to do this. And you see that since his election he has kind of reached out to people that may not be ideological allies, to Rick Warren, the pastor who will be at his inaugural, to John McCain, whom he has treated with a lot of dignity and respect, and to a bunch of right wing columnists last night, in part, because I think he is a guy who is intellectually curious and wants to exchange ideas, but also in part he wants to co-opt the vast right wing conspiracy.

And I'm here to tell you that, speaking for myself, he has succeeded. I am brainwashed entirely. I'm in the tank, and I am a believer of hope and change and, above all, audacity.

I'm sorry, but Obama is smarter than we are. If he can get arch-rightwing headcase Charles Krauthammer to say something like this, even if maybe this was in jest?...well, I guess he deserves to be President.

Landings

There are hard landings and then there are soft ones. President Bush is trying to bring the plane down gently with a "farewell" address, but the only silence is everything he doesn't mention and his general lack of anyone listening.

That's what happens when you end a horrible flight with a reckless pilot with a huge crash.

On the other hand, a cool, capable, experienced pilot with sound judgment and high integrity appears appears capable of turning what should have been the all-but-guaranteed slaughter of 155 lives into a heroic communal experience with no lives lost.

Am I just a little too euphoric, or does this seem like the first of what we will come to call Obama Era moments?

Expect to see one Chesley Sullenberger ringside at a big event on Tuesday.

And Bush didn't even mention it in his speech tonight.

Your Government

Here's who's going to be working for you at the highest levels of the United States of America's Federal government starting at 12:00noon EST on Tuesday.

Here's their boss.

The Enfeebling

George W. Bush is the smallest President in the history of the United States. His tininess of character was settled once and for all with his final press conference yesterday, the last in a record few for any modern President. His entire sentiment was devoted to, of course, himself:

"In terms of the economy...look, I inherited a recession, I'm ending on a recession."

"Obviously, some of my rhetoric has been a mistake."

"You don't get to have information after you've made the decision, that's not the way it works."

"Not having weapons of mass destructive was a...significant disappointment."

"Why me? Oh the burdens and what not. Why did the financial collapse have to happen on my watch? It's just pathetic, isn't it. Self-pity."

This press conference is an historical document that will be studied throughout history, as fascinating as watching Richard Nixon for total human pathology. But unlike with Nixon, there's no real intellectual threat running under the procedings. It's just a freak show.

George Bush made very many bad decision, but the worst decision he made was his Vice Presidential choice. Richard Bruce Cheney may be the man most capable of running roughshod over the bureaucracy of democracy in modern U.S. history, but with this choice Bush essentially confined himself to the secondary role, not so much The Decider as The Approver. Like some fantasy notion of kings of yore, he believed that he did not have to worry about anything but the top-level choice itself, not how it might be carried out, not how the information brought to him by his ministers might be cooked, he was most certainly in charge but he didn't always have to be present.

In fact, better that he be less present -- less waking hours, less office hours, less working days. Less time answering questions from real journalists on the spot, less dialogue with the broader swathe of American people, less development of our foreign alliances. Less oversight over those who might rape our treasuries, less respect for the Constitution. Less concern about how his policies, both domestic and foreign, might affect the real lives of others. Less grammer.

Less popular.

Ultimately, less presence.

I've said before that the most damaging thing that the Cheney/Bush Administration did to America's perception by the world was that it showed the world our ass. By that I mean, it showed our limits, both moral (torture) and, simultaneously, militarily, completely shown up by the assymetrical war fought right after the Iraq War. Now countries know how to stop us. And if they get an A-bomb fast enough, they can stop us (Korea, now Iran?) before we even suit up.

Maybe Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rove were the power, but at some level America is defined for four to eight years by its President. This feeble one enfeebled out country.

Thank goodness that the one coming in is sportin' a six-pack.

Acceptance

There were a few entertaining moments in last night's Golden Globes telecast and some genuine over-emotion, but the most moving speech of the night was by The Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan in accepting the Best Supporting Actor award for the late Heath Ledger:



The way of looking at the loss, as significance to cinema. James Dean but with another forty years of sophistication behind it. Torn from cinema's side.

Nolan is the secret identity of the cinema man of the year. Think how pitch black Batman is, especially as informed by the real life tragedy that followed. It's vision of endless conflict leaving it the #1 Bush Era blockbuster, an anti-utopian vision of modern justice. And now think how many people have seen it, and continue to do over and over on DVD. This movie is going to be with us a long time, and Ledger's performance is the centerpiece that holds it all together.

At the Beverly Hills Hilton last night Christopher Nolan channeled real pain, real gravity, but in a disarmingly modest way where he put himself in the same position as the filmgoer in relation to the loss of Ledger.

Even as one imagines the future movies they would have made together.

Vigilance

So more on the Bush/Cheney sunset. It's leaving dangerous residue -- erroneous history:

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, an opponent of the Iraq war, is asking the Smithsonian to change some wording about the war that accompanies the newly installed portrait of President George W. Bush.

Sanders, an independent, objects to a portion of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery’s text that says Bush’s two terms in office were “marked by a series of catastrophic events” including “the attacks on September 11, 2001, that led to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

The senator said the notion that the attacks were linked in any way to Iraq has been widely debunked and shouldn’t be perpetuated in the museum exhibit.

“The 9/11 attacks did not lead to the war in Iraq,” Sanders said in an interview. “What President Bush was telling us (before the war) was that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that Iraq was somehow in collusion with Al Qaeda. Those were misstatements of fact, as even President Bush has since acknowledged.”

Per Thomas Jefferson, "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." There will be a battle fought over the history of the past eight years. There will be a huge tendency to want to whitewash the past, even from those who were most alert and informed during this period. To brush it off with comforting notions like, "they did what they sincerely believed was best for the country" or "things have changed so it could never have been that bad" or "maybe int twenty years we will be grateful for their vision."

The truth is that they knowingly lied to the American people, they subverted the Constitution and sought near-dictatorial powers, they drained the Treasury to line the coffers of their cronies, they viciously smeared their critics even if they had once been with them. They alienated our traditional international allies and made our name synonymous with torture in the world. They let a city drown and, it can be argued, their willful neglect allowed another to be burned.

The price of freedom is to remember.

And remind.

Buh-Bye Continued

I may run out of material, or I may continue to devote nightly blog posts for the next week to saying goodbye to all that. And by all that I mean, George W. Bush, Richard Bruce Cheney, and Republicanism.

Here's the opening paragraph from Jim Kunstler's "Farewell GWB" post:

A prankish fate put George W. Bush in the oval office to keep America stupid. The nation was far from ready to see where it was going in the 21st century, and he was just the figure to keep it that way, with his void of curiosity, his allergy to reading, and his panderings to wealth-worshipping, Ponzi-loving, science-hating Jesus cultists. He goes out of office broadly regarded as an object of horror and loathing while the nation, now facing wholesale bankruptcy, struggles to imagine a plausible future, like someone who has just awakened from a cheap red wine drunk into the grip of a vicious hangover.

Kunstler goes on to indict the entire nation for our own massive self-delusion, positing that Bush/Cheney didn't trick the country into the Iraq War, we tricked ourselves.

As for his own legacy efforts, the Administration is right on top of it:

The White House Web site features an extensive recitation of Mr. Bush’s “highlights and accomplishments,” including a document titled “100 Things Americans May Not Know About the Bush Administration Record.” (First on the list: “Kept America Safe.”)

I take issue with that first claim, of course, since it was the Bush/Cheney policy to do the opposite of whatever President Bill Clinton had done, including ignoring Richard Clarke and anybody not of their partisanship telling them about the threat that was 9/11. The proof of their having kept America far from same is the infamous skipping of the "Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S." memo. That supposed National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice kept her job after that is one for the ages.

Also from the NY Times article quoted above, on all the legacy talk by El Presidente and crew:

“They’re working hard to build their historical reputations,” said the presidential historian Robert Dallek. “Generally, presidents don’t spend the last days and weeks in office defending their record. They produce a memoir, they write a volume.

“To spend your waking hours on a defense of yourself speaks volumes about how, in a sense, defeated they’ve been.”

And, somehow, being in this particular White House might not be the same resume builder as with other administrations:

“Working on the White House staff is an honor and will always look good on a résumé,” said John Feehery, a Republican strategist, who said several Bush officials had sought his career advice. “It just doesn’t look that good right now.”

Since the causes of this horrific job market can arguably be laid at the feet of this Administration and the ideology that drove it, one might call it poetic justice.

Just for the record, here's David Letterman's Top Ten George Bush moments, with #4 always my favorite, the defining moment of eight years of tragic misrule:




Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

On second thought, let it.

Incomprehensible

We're coming out of a kind of dark age where what came out of the mouth of the leader of our country simply did not make sense:



The citizenry rejoice:



These guys rhyme "I'm taking my country back" with "Bye-bye you lying sack":



He's inspiring insanely well-edited monologuing:



Like they sang in front of the White House on Election Night:



Now the official theme song of the end to the incomprehensible Bush/Cheney Administration farewell:



You forget how bad it was. The body has no memory of pain for a reason. But does the number 7.2% mean anything to you?

The Chaos Administration.

Conversation

I just finished reading our President-Elect's autobiography, Dreams from My Father, his first and least political book, and it's an extremely engaging story of a young man's search for his identity, compounded not only by being of mixed race but of mixed nationality.

The book begins in New York, his walk-up in Spanish Harlem, a key moment in his life, and then the first of three major sections, his childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia, adolescence in Hawaii, Occidental College in SoCal, transfer to Columbia. The second section is Chicago, his start and growth as an organizer in pretty tough conditions. The third is his first visit to Kenya where he meets his whole family, including his step-grandmother, grand uncle, half-sibling. His father's absence informs the book, but it never kills his spirit.

What I find most interesting today about how frankly Obama speaks about the challenges facing our country is how natural it is, not just in style, but in substance. He's not giving speeches, he's in a steady conversation with us. He's been part of the conversation ever since he connected with his African sister, Auma. He's been part of the conversation ever since he went to college and made his first public political speech, against apartheid in South Africa. He's been part of the conversation ever since he tried to process the way his black friend on the high school basketball team referred to white as well as other black people. It's a conversation his/my generation has been having ever since we got deep into our teens in the 1970's and now, thirty years later, it's the mainstream conversation.

Barack then per the friend who named him.

Barack now:



Eleven more days.

The Ex-Presidents

It wasn't a Freudian slip per se, it was more like an entire Freudian press avail when El Presidente Bush welcomed President-Elect Obama to the Oval Office today:

"I want to thank the president-elect for joining the ex-presidents for lunch," Bush said, even though he's not quite a member of that club yet.

Sadly, he is not. El Presidente may be wrapping it up, but he still has the levers of government. However, the leadership of the people is all Obama, ever since legitimized on Election Day and he's been building on it since.

Promising new Obama change: Chief Performance Officer:

President-elect Barack Obama, who faces trillion-dollar government deficits stretching into coming years, named on Wednesday a former Treasury official as the first U.S. "chief performance officer" to oversee budget and spending reform.

Nancy Killefer, a director at McKinsey & Company and a former assistant Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, will work with economic officials to increase efficiencies and eliminate waste in government spending.

"We can no longer afford to sustain the old ways when we know there are new and more efficient ways of getting the job done," Obama told a news conference just hours after new official projections put the fiscal 2009 U.S. budget deficit at a record $1.186 trillion.

Amen.

Per Hope Reborn on DailyKos:

I'm floored by the move today that President Elect Obama made in creating an office Chief Performance Officer... I haven't seen much if anything mentioned anywhere about this, but consider for a moment what this means. Hopefully, gone are the day's of "bloated, wasteful" government because there is now an agent of direct oversight with Presidential level access & authority to ensure that programs are meeting metrics set by the President and that cabinet secretaries and key personnel are meeting goals laid out.

If we'd only had this when we went to war with Iraq.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Meatjoy

I've missed seeing The Fountain thus far, so I've missed director Darren Aronofsky's big budget picture which was reportedly big on metaphor, but I've seen his indie breakthrough, Pi, and his bold, super-strong adaptation of Hubert Selby Jr.'s Requiem for a Dream, and a few nights ago I saw his low budget/high power comeback hit The Wrestler, so I think I can say a few things about his work.

If you just want to hear how compelling it is to watch Mickey Rourke come roaring back, or about the meat metaphors or play with real vs. illusion both in the ring and on the screen, or the high-spirited camaraderie amongst elder statesman The Ram and his fellow wrestlers, this is not the post for you.

All that is true but what I'm interested in Aronofsky's vision, since he's pretty successfully staked out a decidedly off-Hollywood position with what appears to be total creative control over artfully assaultive, the only big-time purveyor of the Antonin Artaud Theatre O' Cruelty-style movies. Is there a more ambitious "New York" voice in the movies right now?

If you've ridden the trainwreck of lives in Requiem for a Dream, where Aronofsky honed his capacity to create both dread and imagery even more scarring than you thought you'd imagined, and now witnessed Randy "The Ram" Robinson's bad steroid habit, you know that Aronofsky creates Hell on Earth. Imagine "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" where instead of killing an albatross the protagonist is cursed by his youthful success in the ring, but he never had the smarts to plan for anything other than what happened in the ring, no future.

It's impossible to adequately analyze the new movie without talking about the ending, so here's the

SPOILER SPACE
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A LITTLE MORE
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ALMOST THERE
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The Wrestler has an open ending, but it's open in the way that the final scene of The Sopranos is open, i.e. it's implied that we're watching the final moments in the main character's life and that the next frame, the one a moment after the movie just ended, is that character's death.

It all started falling into place in the last act when Robinson screws up with his daughter. The rule of thumb is that whichever character goes through the biggest chance is your main character, but that if it's proven that a character ultimately can't change, then he or she dies, usually to end the movie. And, if nothing else, Ram's musical taste indicates that he hasn't changed one iota in twenty years.

This isn't an afterschool special about a man's redemption. It's about a guy who realizes there's no other place for him than in the ring, and that it makes sense to play there until he dies there. We're watching a pessimistic character study of a man's final days. He knows when he walks in, when he walks away from Marissa Tomei that he's not coming back to her world again. We know when he falters twice after dropping the Ayatollah.

And the final shot, projecting himself over our heads, is literally a swan dive. From his final monologue tribute to his audience it's a swan song.

So why go on this death trip? Does Aronofsky actually have something to say with it, and can we ask with the poledancing scenes as well?

The movie is a fable. It's a cautionary fable about how any of us can get caught short-sighted, but especially if we're all about the body, all about the adulation. If it's too late when we try to start thinking, chastised, beyond ourselves.

But it's particularly arresting at this moment of cascading unemployment, where the American Dream is turning into the American Hell-on-Earth for so many people. Which is interesting within the context of the patriotism of the wrestlers, from the American flag hung over Randy's trailer home bed to the wrestling ring righting of the 80's U.S. vs. Iraq conflict.

Whether or not Aronofsky is deliberately making a statement or just providing a credibly damning political context, it's a world where the simple may be physically powerful, but the simple have been duped. They've believed the hype, about what's valuable and about what's true. They willingly, joyfully, for profit participate in the denigration of the latter. It's entertaining. It's good for the ego as long as you can keep it going.

And it's the very end of the American Century.

Hail

The prodigal son returns, and ma is very, very happy:



Meanwhile Obama makes the brilliant choice of Leon Panetta, not a career intelligence guy, to head the CIA, is adding an almost Jacksonian, affordable Neighborhood Ball to the Inaugural festivities, makes cool unannounced appearances...and he's sending Joe Biden on a mission to Southwest Asia.

It's already a relief.

He's In

Obama travels to D.C.

The change has begun.

War

Israel has sent ground troops into Gaza. Two good pieces trying to explain what the hell is really going on in The New York Times and The Washington Post.

What it looks like.

Memories Can't Wait

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button says it's about the passage of time, but it's really about the passage of memory. The biggest change that screenwriter Eric Roth made to F. Scott Fitzgerald's original short story, written in 1921 and based on a Mark Twain quote about what a pity that the best things in life happened at the beginning and the worst at the end, is the addition of the love story plot and, in fact, build the whole movie around it.

Well, Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett sell that story. After all, they're not only excellent actors, they're also uncommonly great to look at. Their scenes once they're out of all the computer-generated make-up are a welcome heart of the story -- their ages meet, but the visual path director David Fincher surrounds them with is all Orson Welles meets Mark Twain -- elegance with a riverlike pulse, the story almost a corrective to Welles' own tale of unrequited love over many decades of societal change, The Magnificent Ambersons.

I'm not sure the ultimate significance of the film, but it's just lined with diorama time pieces, moments that play off the gentle loneliness of the age-flipped protagonist and, without too much pain, lull you into reflecting on your own journey, what moments are more poignant for being lost, but mainly what happens when all that you are slips away, and how do you slip out of history.

The answer, of course, is when everyone who ever knew you, who knew you well, passes on as well. We seek mates in large part because we seek witnesses. If we choose it constancy it may be for that reason alone, a desire for the line, a metaphor spoken by Blanchett in the dance studio, the dancer's neverending quest to be the perfect line.

Death, however, breaks a line every time, and maybe the movie is germane to our moment because it is the scope of the 20st Century, from WWI getting us out of the 19th Century, through Hurricane Katrina turning the page on that failed ideology and burying the 20th Century in her wake.

Has it been nine years? Just a memory.

Solid Gold

Here's the video with Josh Marshall announcing winners of Talking Points Memo's annual Golden Duke Awards for sleazy, scandalous behavior by politicians in 2008:



Text version here, with detailed breakdown of individual judges votes.

Here's to hoping the next President never even gets nominated.

Goodbye to All That

Turn the page.



Happy New Year to all!

GOP Values

It turns out that the teenage pregnancy of Gov. Sarah Palin's daughter is actually good family business:

According to one source, bidding for the baby photos began at $100,000. People won out in the end, but In Touch was the only other weekly to make serious bids, according to several sources involved in the process.

The price didn't soar immediately, according to the sources, because Sarah Palin stories just didn’t sell all that well for the weeklies on newsstands...

...The drug-related arrest of Johnston's mother, however, caused the price tag for the photos to go up.

“The bidding started well before the baby was born, but once Levi’s mom was arrested — well, then you had a story,” says one editor.

As for how much teen parents Bristol and Levi made from the deal — most estimates hover around the $300,000 range (none of the magazines would confirm the exact figure in the end, which is standard).

That'll keep daddy Levi Johnson's family in oxycontin for quite awhile. Or maybe the dough needs to go to Grandma Sarah's wardrobe, as her tastes grew rather expensive this past Fall. Seems almost like a welfare mother play -- will the Palin kids keep the babies coming?

So after Republican family values, how about their much-vaunted social/cultural values?

There's a little ditty in the news:

It's now becoming clear that there is a good-sized contingent of Republicans who are openly defending Chip Saltsman, the former Tennessee GOP chairman and candidate for RNC chair who sent out a CD to committee members that includes a parody song called "Barack The Magic Negro."

Rally 'round the racist, boys. The claim that this is simply a case of appropriate political satire based on a Los Angeles Times editorial doesn't seem to take into account the degrading impersonation of a black singer by Caucasian conservative satirist Paul Shanklin created for Rush Limbaugh. Feel free to listen for yourself, and if you like it maybe we can revive the touring minstrel shows of yore.

If nothing else, it'll remind you why the rightwing needs to keep away from satire.

Not as easy as, say, Jon Stewart makes it look.

Bad and Good

Out with the bad:

While Bush has been briefed on the situation by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, he has opted not to interrupt his final vacation as president to make a public statement on the crisis. For someone who has enjoyed the most vacation days as sitting president — including days spent relaxing in comfort during Hurricane Katrina and in the lead-up to 9/11 — it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that Bush prioritizes vacationing over crisis management. ABC News reports:

Even an emerging crisis in the Middle East, one he pledged to resolve just 13 months ago, has not drawn President George W. Bush from his final vacation before leaving office. Despite his personal pledge at Annapolis last year to broker a deal between Israel and the Palestinians before 2009, this weekend Bush sent his spokesmen to comment in his stead. […]

Since departing Washington for Crawford on Friday, President Bush has made no attempt to be seen in public. In fact, he has yet to leave his ranch.

And in with the good:

In Congress, Democrats from the Golden State are in key positions to write laws to mitigate global warming, promote "green" industries and alternative energy, and crack down on toxic chemicals. Down Pennsylvania Avenue, Californians in the new White House will shape environmental, energy and workplace safety policies...

...The current speaker, Nancy Pelosi, is the most prominent member of the California delegation and she was quietly supportive when a California colleague, Rep. Henry A. Waxman, pushed out Rep. John D. Dingell of Michigan to become chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

In a November caucus election, Waxman narrowly beat Dingell, who held the chair for 16 years and was seen by critics as too protective of the auto industry. Waxman, who has crafted an image as a champion of consumers, taxpayers and the environment, takes over next month. Energy and Commerce handles more than half of the legislation that flows through Congress. Its sprawling portfolio includes climate change, air quality and health matters -- issues that have consumed policymakers in California.

Waxman's counterpart in the Senate is Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who chairs the Environment and Public Works Committee.

I just wrote my Representative Waxman a letter of appreciation for slogging it out the first six dark years of this decade, and kicking ass since 2006.

2008: The curse of living in interesting times.

And an interesting 2009 ahead.

Jacked

So with less than a month to go before taking the reins of U.S. foreign policy, President-Elect Barack Obama gets some sudden fences, starting with the Israeli attack on Gaza, in retaliation for the recent resumption by Hamas of missile attacks on southern Israel. The upshot:

Part of what is going on today with Israel Defense Minister Ehud Barak's unleashing of massive Israeli airpower against Hamas offices in Gaza is a test of Obama's America. Hamas's decision to end its "lull", or temporary ceasefire with Israel, also has a lot to do with testing the U.S. and seeing what the outlines of Obama's policy will be.

Barack Obama cannot afford to allow his presidency and its foreign policy course to be hijacked by either side in this increasingly blurry dispute. Israel's actions today just created thousands of aggrieved and vengeful relatives committed to delivering some blowback against Israel.

Hamas, at the same time, overplayed its hand at a fragile time. Hamas will never play the role of supplicant or subordinate to Israel's interests -- but its resumption of violence before the Israeli elections and during a time of transition in US politics triggered a devastating response from Israel that significantly undermined its own interests as a potentially responsible steward of a Palestinian state.

The violence we are watching is just yet another installment in the blur of tit-for-tat violence from both sides of this chronic foreign affairs ulcer.

If I were Barack, I'd be reaching for the Pepto-Bismol. Especially when George was fencing me in with this:

Agence France-Presse reports that Georgian officials will sign a "strategic partnership" treaty on Jan. 4 in Washington. On Tuesday, the Department of State issued the first confirmation that the United States and Georgia would pursue a more formal security arrangement.

I suppose it beats a U.S. or Israeli attack on Iran, but the Cheney Administration still has four weeks to make it happen.

Impeachment articles would have slowed this.

"Accident"

Mysterious or maybe not so much:

At 3:31 PM Friday, December 19, Michael L. Connell, a top Internet consultant for the Republican National Committee and for the Bush and McCain presidential campaigns, left Washington from the small airport in College Park, Md. Alone at the helm of a single engine Piper Saratoga, Connell's flight plan anticipated arrival at his hometown Akron-Canton Airport in a little over two hours, at 5:43 PM.

Instead, about three miles short of the Akron-Canton Airport, Connell's plane crashed to the ground in an upscale section of Lake Township, killing Connell instantly. "I was standing in the kitchen and I looked out the window and all I saw was fire," Taylor Fano told The Akron Beacon Journal. "It took out the flagpole and the cement blocks surrounding the flagpole . . . . It skidded across the driveway and right in-between a line of pine trees and a small fence around an in-ground pool."

The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating the accident and has not yet filed a report, but there was no immediate evidence of wrong-doing or sabotage.

Many in the blogosphere have called for further investigation of the crash, suggesting that Connell was about to provide crucial information in the case of alleged vote fraud in the 2004 Ohio presidential contest, and that that information would implicate Karl Rove and others in the Bush administration.

Reminds me of all the "accidental" deaths surrounding the key witnesses in the GOP's last major scandal, Iran-Contra.

Bad Santa

Someone's been awfully naughty:

At least six people were killed when a man dressed as Santa Claus entered his former in-laws suburban Los Angeles house and opened fire on guests at a Christmas Eve party before setting the home on fire, police said on Thursday.

Let's hope you had a better Xmas.

Watchmen Watch

Here's the edge-of-seat thriller in Hollywood tonight:

In a surprise ruling, a federal judge in Los Angeles said he intended to grant 20th Century Fox’s claim that it owns a copyright interest in the “Watchmen,” a movie shot by Warner Brothers and Legendary Pictures and set for release in March...

...“Fox owns a copyright interest consisting of, at the very least, the right to distribute the ‘Watchmen’ motion picture,” the ruling said.

If you want to piss off a million militant fanboys, just try screwing with the release of this long-awaited adaptation of Alan Moore's epochal graphic novel, illustrated by Dave Gibbons. Messing up the story could be worse, and there's talk of director Zack "300" Snyder having to cut his film down to a potentially damaging running time (and saving the consolation version for DVD). But what's really interesting here is who's going to get what out of this final distribution arrangement, and if it'll be solved in time to hit the March 2009 release date.

For those who may not have seen the most recent trailer, YouTube doesn't do it justice like the infinitely superior Apple's Quicktime Trailer version, but here goes:




So will Warner Bros get their fair share for taking the risk of making the movie? Will Fox get what the judge says is their due?

Will the picture turn out to be worth it?

Constructive Criticism

A lost art? The Republican noise machine doesn't know how to undermine an elected Democratic official's character anymore:

Nearly two months after Barack Obama's election, Republicans are struggling to figure out how - or even whether - to challenge or criticize him as he prepares to assume the presidency.

The president-elect is proving to be an elusive and frustrating target. He has defied attempts to be framed ideologically. His cabinet picks have won wide praise. An effort by the Republican National Committee to link Obama to the unfolding scandal involving Governor Rod Blagojevich of Illinois and the accusations that he tried to sell Obama's Senate seat was dismissed by no less a figure than John McCain, the Republican whom Obama beat for the presidency.

The toughest criticism of Obama during this period has come not from the right but from the left, primarily over his selection of Rick Warren, a leading opponent of gay marriage, to deliver the invocation on Inauguration Day.

Wussbuckets.

And here's Foreign Policy magazine's "The 10 Worst Predictions for 2008" led so deservedly by Bill Kristol:

“If [Hillary Clinton] gets a race against John Edwards and Barack Obama, she’s going to be the nominee. Gore is the only threat to her, then. … Barack Obama is not going to beat Hillary Clinton in a single Democratic primary. I’ll predict that right now.” —William Kristol, Fox News Sunday, Dec. 17, 2006

Finally, Josh Marshall delivers the "2008 Golden Duke Award Nominees" which I believe is the only major political journalism award where the merit is based on earning the highest -- or most flamboyant -- score in corruption:



I think this is W.'s year.

Auf wiedersehen.

Classic Model

When you have Clint Eastwood, you don't need special effects.

Gran Torino is old school filmmaking telling a new and vital tale, and at the center of it is that face that from efforts both in front of and behind the camera has earned its place as the representation of cinema in our time. It's a face of a movie star in the sense of not being overexposed, much of that value due to how little it gives away. It isn't the face of a man reeking of neediness for our love, it's the face of the man who draws you in due to his reserve.

When we watch Clint, especially those of us who have been watching him since we first snuck into the R-rated Dirty Harry to get our fixin' of righteous body count, we're looking for any clue that might leak from that face, something to tell us what he's feeling and how to feel. He's the ultimate reaction shot, and one little growl or speck of a grimace can send a whole audience into the shared laughter of relief. But whereas the Harry Callahan Clint taught us that might makes right, Eastwood has been steering an increasingly clear course in another direction beginning with his 1992 masterpiece, Unforgiven. While that movie still had the pleasures of violent catharsis to go with the messier moral about killing another human being, Gran Torino, from a spec screenplay by non-Hollywood newcomer Nick Schenk (story by Dave Johannson & Schenk), takes Eastwood's late-career trajectory to a natural conclusion, and makes believable his claim that this will be his last onscreen role.

A friend just asked me if Clint Eastwood is the John Ford of today, and there are two answers to that question. On one hand, yes, Eastwood is carrying on some of the best aspects of the Ford tradition. He makes Westerns, and Gran Torino is nothing if not a "sunset Western" where the sheriff may be retired in a modern day suburban Detroit neighborhood, but he still keeps his rifle clean and ammo close by. Eastwood also shoots simply, like Ford, allowing the actors to fill the screen with life as opposed to overcutting to indicate emotion, the pictorial values being simple but satisfying, and adding some Boyz in the Hood-style slow drifts from passing gang boy cars and similarly sinuous reverses from Walt Kowalski's (Clint's) porch.

Most of all, like Ford, Clint is engaged in America (as Manohla Dargis points out in her perceptive NY Times review). Herein lies the deeper significance of this movie, what gives it such strong resonance through the Archie Bunker-esque comedy as well as Walt's own journey towards peace. What seems very much like the ultimate John McCain movie, with Walt the Korean War vet still carrying around scars for what he did in the name of saving the people he refers to with racial epithets, ends up fitting well into the radically inclusive Barack Obama era.

Without getting into deep spoilers, the picture opens with the funeral of Walt's wife, whom one surmises was the one thing that kept him tethered to humanity. He's eventually forced to connect with his Hmong neighbors, an agrarian hill people who, suitably, were persecuted by the Communists in Southeast Asia. When the local Hmong gang leans on the neighbor's sweet, uncertain son to steal Walt's vintage Gran Torino as his initiation, a mentoring relationship begins, festooned with the politically incorrect language and plenty of lessons on what it really means to be a man.

The ultimate theme is one of passage, a golden years coming of age, with resonance for a nation that will no longer have a white majority by 2060. It is the sacrifice of those stalwart white American, made under our idealistic, pioneering democratic system, that has created the possibility of a similar life for those of far-flung ethnic background. It is history being written as we're watching it.

And, because he understands cinema so well, Clint know that when one gang draws a gun, the other has to draw a bigger one, and that before the lights come up, those guns must be fired.

From beginning to end, the one emotion I felt towards the movie above all others:

Gratitude.

His

Had a quick conversation with a friend I hadn't seen since the election, a high school social studies teacher with a rather challenging student population over in the Valley. A natural liberal per his place of birth, development and habitation (Santa Monica/Pacific Palisades), in recent years he's gone against the grain in understandable reaction against some of the more kneejerk Westside liberalism, as well as disagreement on key issues with his fellow teachers and union.

Despite any of my reasonable arguments prior to the election, he went ahead and voted for John McCain.

But when he collared me in passing the other day he was actually ebullient over the Obama victory. He said that now that the election was over, he was thrilled -- now that Obama was "his President." Moreover, he said that the kids in his classes were completely activated by the election and gave one big example.

As they have every four years, the teachers at his school held a mock debate between the two candidates. Usually the students are beyond (or below?) apathetic. But, guess what, this time was different. The auditorium was packed. The students were attentive. This time really mattered.

So as our President-Elect enjoys something like an 80% approval rating prior to even taking office, I couldn't be happier, even if clear-eyed about the massive challenges he -- and we -- face ahead.

And he's won over at least one Westside skeptic.

< 1 Month

For your Sunday morning newsgathering pleasure, I once again present the President-Elect who may have had more press conferences since being elected than the current White House resident has in eight years:



By the way, I'm about halfway through his initial autobiography, Dreams from My Father, and am happy to report that my man-crush has only deepened, as he seems to have grappled with the same political and racial concerns my friends and I were constantly discussing at the same time (late 1970's through mid-1980's), and reaching most of the same conclusions. However, he was doing it as a community organizer, theory-into-action.

Props to the man.

This Year's Lay

Bernie Madoff is every bit as emblematic of this financial era as Enron CEO Kenneth Lay was of his. Is anyone really all that surprised that such a Ponzi scheme could exist in this era of electronic purchase and transfer of derivatives based on bullshit? Especially when Bernie was one of the inventors of electronic trading?

Paul Krugman hits the nail on the head:

Most of all, the vast riches being earned — or maybe that should be “earned” — in our bloated financial industry undermined our sense of reality and degraded our judgment.

Think of the way almost everyone important missed the warning signs of an impending crisis. How was that possible? How, for example, could Alan Greenspan have declared, just a few years ago, that “the financial system as a whole has become more resilient” — thanks to derivatives, no less? The answer, I believe, is that there’s an innate tendency on the part of even the elite to idolize men who are making a lot of money, and assume that they know what they’re doing.

So as we've always suspected, nobody knows anything, and with this debilitating crisis, they know even less.

If there's any lesson of intelligentsia on the Internet, it's that the experts so often aren't, that there's trumping intelligence outside of the career track. In the political Web, it really started with the 2000 Gore-Bush recount and developed over the course of the Bush Administration to fully bloom in this past year.

And now for the financial world.

NMS

Longtime readers know that I rarely write about my own life outside of my own reactions to politics or entertainment properties, but I do have to drop a shout-out to my new employers, New Media Strategies. The site linked to above will be dramatically improved in January, with literally hundreds of pages of great new material, an updated look and feel, and a company blog, but the overall gist is that NMS provides industry-leading intelligence, promotion and protection in the social media space, from blogs to videos, for corporations, entertainment companies, and on public affairs issues.

And it is the first job I've had where having a daily blog was a significant factor in securing the position.

I'll have more to say in upcoming days, but having just survived the excellent Xmas party, I do need to conserve my resources and get some rest. The take home message is that social media is now prime time media -- you may even be reading this blog between the hallowed hours of 8:00pm-11:00pm -- and a ten year-old company that has grown with the burgeoning medium can be a huge resource for the appropriate companies.

Peace out.

Memories

TPM has a snappy look back at the general election. It has some pretty unpleasant memories along the way, but a very happy ending:



By the way, Democratic-ish McCain supporter Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) has the lowest approval rating ever recorded in a Quinnipiac poll. Feel the Joementum!

Red-Handed

So President, I mean, Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney, the behind-the-scenes power behind the Iraq War, admits his guilt in our misbegotten torture policy:

Vice President Dick Cheney said Monday that he was directly involved in approving severe interrogation methods used by the CIA, and that the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, should remain open indefinitely.

Cheney's remarks on Guantanamo appear to put him at odds with President Bush, who has expressed a desire to close the prison, although the decision is expected to be left to the incoming administration of President-elect Barack Obama.

Cheney's comments also mark the first time that he has acknowledged playing a central role in clearing the CIA's use of an array of controversial interrogation tactics, including a simulated drowning method known as waterboarding.

"I was aware of the program, certainly, and involved in helping get the process cleared," Cheney said in an interview with ABC News.

Watch the evil yourself:



He's got his defenders as well, including rightwing ideologue Frank Gaffney, who's delighted:

MATTHEWS: You guys sold the war as a nuclear threat to the United States. You sold every trick you cold to get us into this war. And now you're backpedaling. And I do find it astounding....four thousand people are dead because of the way you feel and, Frank Gaffney, you're wrong about this.

GAFFNEY: It is regrettable that they had to die, but I believe they did have to die. The danger was inaction could have resulted in the death of a great many more Americans than 4,000. And that's the reason I'm still delighted that we did what we did.

Tell that to the families of the dead U.S. soldiers, the possibly hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqi citizens and the millions displaced, Frank.

So is there any hope in hell that Cheney and his henchmen will be brought to justice?

Oh, that's why.

So as anyone could have predicted, the shoe-throwing Iraqi journalist is now a hero across the Middle East:

Newspapers across the Arab world printed front-page photos of Bush ducking the flying shoes, and satellite TV stations repeatedly aired the incident, which was hailed by the president's many critics in the region.

Many are fed up with U.S. policy and still angry over Bush's decision to invade Iraq in 2003 to topple Saddam.

As many as 98,000 Iraqi civilians may have been killed since the war began, according to Iraq Body Count, an independent organization that tracks media reports as well as official figures. The war has cost nearly $576 billion so far, according to the National Priorities Project.

Wafa Khayat, 48, a doctor in the West Bank town of Nablus, called the attack "a message to Bush and all the U.S. policy makers that they have to stop killing and humiliating people."

In Jordan, a strong U.S. ally, a 42-year-old businessman, Samer Tabalat, praised al-Zeidi as "the man. ... He did what Arab leaders failed to do."

The web has delivered a load of shoe-throwing parodies as well, my favorite being the last one on this HuffPo page, featuring The Three Stooges.

My guess is that the incident will be repeated here in the U.S., possibly in mass fashion, once/if El Presidente gets in front of another crowd again soon. Maybe it'll spread even further, like the comical Yippie pie-throwing at public figures usually carried out by Aron Kay.

In case anyone has forgotten why El Presidente might deserve the shoe-pie treatment, he's still wrong, even admitting so, and not the least bit sorry about it:

May this be his political epigram and epitaph:

"Yeah, that’s right. So what?"

Taste the leather, baby.

Shoe 'nuff

I think Juan Cole has the most telling comparison:

If you search shoes and Iraq, here is how google shows two BBC stories on December 14, five years apart (they came up together like this at the top of my search):

BBC NEWS | World | Middle East | Iraqis celebrate Saddam capture
Dec 14, 2003 ... women ululated and crowds beat pictures of Saddam with shoes. ... where the Saddam statue was toppled at the end of the war, ...
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3317637.stm - 46k

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Shoes thrown at Bush on Iraq trip
Dec 14, 2008 ... President Bush's farewell visit to Iraq is marred by an incident in which two shoes are thrown at him during a news conference.
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7782422.stm - 8 hours ago

Yep, El Presidente Bush dodged a shoe aimed at his head by an Iraqi journalist, with the hurling of shoes considered the utmost expression of contempt in that country:



I guess free speech has finally come to Iraq -- the very reason we took down Saddam.

Mission Accomplished!

Holocaust

This afternoon I visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., which documents the Nazi genocide of the European Jewish population, along with some important documentation of the same treatment of homosexuals, the physically and mentally handicapped, some Slavic peoples (Russian, Polish), Roma (gypsies), Jenovah's Witnesses, Communists and other political dissidents.

The experience is, I believe for almost all who visit, a very emotional one, as it certainly was for me. The self-guided tour starts on the fourth floor and winds down to the first, in a building designed to replicate the look and feel of the concentration camp crematoriums. It begins with Hitler's assumption of power in 1933 (the party never received more than roughly 1/3 of the German electorate vote), with anti-Jewish action happening extremely quickly, the new Chancellor and his party consolidating power in "shock doctrine" fashion must more quickly than anyone imagined. The feeling moving through the fourth floor is somewhat claustrophobic, as the exhibits are mounted facing each other across a relatively narrow hall.

Without going into great detail, the generally feeling welling up inside of me was one of mounting, righteous anger, but as the history progresses down a floor and into the ghettoizing, internment, enslavement, and both mass and mechanized execution of innocent Jewish men, women and children, the anger gives way to horror. The museum wisely puts walls between the visitors and the most disturbing video exhibits so that only adults can look over them -- nightmarish Nazi "medical" experiments and the most graphic concentration camp liberation footage -- but you pass chillingly through a cattle car and Auschwitz barracks along the way.

The stuff that get my tear ducts going is always when, in the face of personal danger, someone who might just as easily look the other way or participate in the evil reaches out to help, and the latter portion of the museum devoted to such heroes as an oppositional Protestant church in the South of France that saved kids, the great people of Denmark who hid Jews in coastal towns and smuggled them to Sweden, the great but doomed Raoul Wallenberg, the brave Sophie and brother Hans Scholl, among a documented (and still added to) list of those who worked against the Nazi genocide, it had the same effect on me.

By the time we get to the liberation and Nuremberg Trials it's all a bit late, not quite enough relief and certainly not enough justice, considering all the declined trials and commuted sentences thanks to both German and American governmental bureaus. A section near the end on the child victims serves as a reminder that the young and old (and pregnant) were taken away and killed right off the cattle cars at most camps. Pure hell on earth.

As a Jew I get into a bit of mental role-playing whenever delving into Holocaust history, imagining if I would have grabbed my family and left at the first sign of trouble, or the second, of the tenth. The problem is that as the 1930's progressed, no matter your means, there was less and less opportunity to go anywhere. You had to pay increasing fees to the Nazi government to get out, you had less and less means as your business was restricted and then confiscated, and worst of all you had a dwindling (to zero) number of places to go. A big shame in our U.S. history is that our State Department was Anti-Semitic -- we didn't even allow our designated quota of Europeans into the country during some of these years. The "ship of fools" boat from Germany tried many ports including Havana and Miami, only to be turned back (more horror). And you would have needed to get far away, as Hitler took over the neighboring countries, none being safe.

My conclusion upon leaving this essential museum is two-fold.

For one, I believe America has taken a huge step towards avoiding a similar situation here with the election of Barack Obama as President. It is by no means a guarantee of backsliding, especially if we get hit with the kind of economic depression that powered such a development of inherent racism in Germany at the Nazi takeover, but it certainly speaks greatly of our nation's values as enshrined in our Constitution, especially after an unsettling consolidation of single party power from which we've just emerged.

The other notion is that we need more museums like this, for other holocausts, like the Turkish genocide against Armenians that Hitler uses to justify his belief that the world would ignore and forget whatever Germany did to the Jews, like the Serbian genocidal program of the 1990's, and the current genocide in Sudan.

The one that's still going on, as I write this.

President Gore

This just in from the U.S. Supreme Court:

WASHINGTON—In an unexpected judicial turnaround, the Supreme Court this week reversed its 2000 ruling in the landmark case of Bush v. Gore, stripping George W. Bush of his earlier political victory, and declaring Albert Arnold Gore the 43rd president of the United States of America.

The court, which called its original decision to halt manual recounts in Florida "a ruling made in haste," voted unanimously on Wednesday in favor of the 2000 Democratic nominee.

Gore will serve as commander in chief from Dec. 10 to Jan. 20.

Wow, that could just make me cry. Like chopping up an Onion.

Failout

So Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's $700,000,000,000 bailout of the finance industry is entirely without oversight. They don't even have office space for the Congressional oversight-ers. And now the Detroit auto bailout is running into major roadblocking from Senate Republicans because they want the auto workers to accept deep cuts in wages.

Yep...it still pays to be rich.

Frosted Dick

I heartily enjoyed Frost/Nixon on a number of levels. For one, it's set up and played like a boxing match, which plays into the second level of enjoyment, that Ron Howard has made a piece of not-very-visually-spectacular history into something that might actually reach people by making it clear and understandable, not unlike my personal favorite of his movies, Apollo 13 (ripped off for Oscars by Mel Gibson/Braveheart?). The third level is performance -- not only is Frank Langella terrific as Nixon, but Michael Sheen does a great David Frost, both reprising their performances from the play by Peter Morgan, who also did the screenplay.

But what I liked best about the movie, and something I felt slightly lacking in Oliver Stone's admirably ambitious W., is the success in capturing Richard Nixon's character. While the Stone movie missed a key element of El Presidente Bush, namely his cruel cunning (he knew how to win elections by undercutting like a preppy frat president might win over a room), Morgan, Howard and Langella caught that particularly needy ambition of Nixon's, where the very thing that made him admirable -- his intelligence pulling him up out of low circumstances of birth -- was his undoing in a way emblematic of the times in which he rose.

Let me explain.

As TV's Mad Men and James Ellroy's American Tabloid so accurately depict, there's a period in 20th Century American history where the difference between what was seen and what was hidden in society was rolling downhill to a tipping point. Even now there are differences between the public perception of how business is done -- and government and sex/romance -- and what really happens behind the scenes. I believe it was a hell of a lot worse back then, as the older, more brutal ways of society bumped up against the powerful image of The American Dream, reaching a tipping point with the lies of the Vietnam War that sent American youth into the streets and led to the first big call for transparency, climaxing with Nixon's Watergate scandal.

In the movie, Nixon asks about the price of things -- just between friends -- and looks for the hidden motives behind everyone's actions, with a predilection to ascribe actions of others to their ethnicity or religion. This fascination with how things really work, clear-eyed to him but cynical to others, was part-and-parcel of his ambition. As a bright young man who got into Harvard and Yale but couldn't attend because he lacked the financial means, Nixon always felt looked down upon by the swells, an inferiority complex that drove him to doing anything to win, hence the dirty tricks dating back to his college election days. He wouldn't really ever apologize for them because that was how the world worked -- to him President Lyndon Johnson installed the tape recorder, President John F. Kennedy got us into Vietnam, he took no real personal responsibility for his own actions extending both of those practices.

It is interesting how the revival of interest in the original interviews with the release of the feature has coincided with El President Bush's interview with Charlie Gibson, a similar attempt to rescue his legacy. While the lack of personal responsibility is similar, the intellectual curiosity level is monumental:





But the failing in Nixon's own intellectual curiosity, as so well depicted in Frost/Nixon, is that he always ended up drawing the same shrunken conclusions. That's how things really work. And I'm the smartest man in the room, so I know I'm right.

What a waste.

Crooked Gov

Nice to see the left side of the blogosphere dumping on disgraceful and felonious Illinois Governor Ron Blagojevich. Since I'm blogging from my Blackberry and it's tiresome to try and embed links, I won't be adding any tonight, but please note if you do surf around that there has been no circling of the wagons as is usual with GOP scandals. Bad is bad, and stupid-bad is just plain hilarious. What is that, 4 out of the 5 most recent Illinois Governors scandal-ridden? And they say the Midwest can get boring.

Also note that while this crook was looking for paydays for himself and his wife along with squeezing local journalists who didn't cover him favorably, it's small potatoes compared to giving away our U.S. Treasury to cronies, pillaging pension funds, or turning over a conquered country to private businesses like Exxon and Halliburton.

Or lying our way into an unnecessary war.