Month: May 2007

28% Approval After All That’s Happened?

by tristero

It blows my mind to think 28 percent of this country still thinks God’s Joke From Texas is doing a fine job. Ok, ok, I know it’s not entirely scientifically kosher, but that sort of means you go walking down a street – or go to a mall – and more than 1 out of every 4 people you pass is completely insane.

Now, let’s say you live on the Upper West Side in Manhattan, where it’s a safe bet that there are no more than 3 or 4 Bush supporters on a given block holding, I dunno. about 2500 people, perhaps. Y’know what that means, right? That means that somewhere in this strange country of ours there are entire neighborhoods that still think Bush is great.

The mind boggles.

[SPECIAL NOTE TO THE HUMOR-CHALLENGED: I’ve posted similar sentiments when Bush was at 50%, 40%, and so on and received perfectly serious comments to the effect of, “well, there’s always a base of support so what are you so worked up about?” And I’se like, “WTF? Joke, dude. Joke. Get it? No matter how low he goes, it can’t possibly be low enough.”

Sigh. I guess on the internet, not only does no one know you’re a dog, but no one knows you’re being a sarcastic dog.

Woof.]

Saturday Night At The Movies: Double Feature

He Sees Red People

By Dennis Hartley

L.A. filmmaker Michael Shea reacted like a lot of us did in the immediate aftermath of Junior’s 2004 reelection; he faced the East (i.e., toward the nearest “red state”), cast himself upon the ground, turned his gaze heavenward and uttered mankind’s most venerated and time-honored rhetorical question: “WTF?!” What he did next, however was a little different from the rest of us (which in my case was retreating to the couch and cradling a pint of Cherry Garcia while tearfully watching a “West Wing” marathon). He shaved his beard, cut his hair, grabbed a camera and hopped in his car, heading for the nearest red state to find out exactly what the hell those people actually WERE thinking. The result was a 2005 documentary called (appropriately enough) Red State

So what were they thinking? If you’re squeamish, leave the room now, because what Mr. Shea learned will scare the bejesus out of you. Shea is barely into the first leg of the journey that will take him through a whirlwind 22-state tour when he hits paydirt-an interview with a creepily smiling fundamentalist church leader who says that he prefers to think of the “red” in the red states as “the blood of Christ”. And he’s just warming up.

While a large chunk of Shea’s journey deep into America’s heartland of darkness amounts to a somewhat sobering reality check for a smug knee-jerk liberal like myself, there are a few moments of unintentional levity that shine a little light into the gloom. Perhaps the best example is an interview with a conservative Christian lobbyist named (ready for this?) Wendy Christian (you couldn’t make this shit up). When asked for her take on America’s polarized political climate, she likens it to an episode of “Leave It To Beaver”. Ms. Christian explains it thusly: Ward is the Law, June is the Government, Wally represents the typical God-fearing, law-abiding citizen, and the Beav…well, the Beav as we all know, is the Troublemaker. When pressed for more specifics on exactly who the Beav represents, Christian pauses a beat and says. “Well…he’s the Liberals.” Your first reaction is of course to laugh, but then it hits you-this is how many of these people actually perceive the state of our Union, and you become very, very frightened.

To his credit, Shea keeps a fairly objective tone throughout, although you can see that it eventually becomes a real struggle for him as the relentless rhetoric of right-wing Christian conservatism and rote Dittohead regurgitation he continually encounters begins to take its psychic toll. Shea’s generally low key and affable, self-effacing demeanor seems to put most of his subjects at ease and is probably what saves him from running screaming into the sunset. Parts of the film (especially a jag through Texas) began to remind me of David Byrne’s 1984 “mockumentary” True Stories, which in a strange way now seems like an oddly prescient future echo of Shea’s real life version of a “blue-stater” doing an anthropological dig into the “red-stater” psyche. See it if you dare.

Give yourself a real red scare: Where Are We?: Our Trip Through America,The Apostle , Jesus Camp, CSA: The Confederate States of America, and a forgotten gem just begging for a DVD release: WUSA.

And now for something completely different…

Divine Trash, Hidden Jewels-Part 1

This marks the debut of a series that I will post on occasion, which will put the spotlight on some films you may have missed, and that your humble reviewer thinks are worth the search and a peek on a slow night. Hope you enjoy!

This week I’m featuring two relatively recent “rockumentaries” of merit, both available on DVD. First up is “The Devil and Daniel Johnston”. Iconoclastic musician Daniel Johnston’s life story is a documentary filmmaker’s wet dream-a tragicomic Grimm’s fairy tale version of the American Success Story that plays like a cross between “DiG!” and “Grey Gardens”.

Throughout most of the 1980’s, Johnston’s prodigious output of homemade, self-distributed cassettes went largely unnoticed until they were famously championed by Kurt Cobain, who helped make the unsigned artist a “household name” of sorts in alt/underground music circles.

Johnston has waged an internal battle between inspired creativity and mental illness for most of his life (not unlike Brian Wilson, Syd Barrett, Roky Erikson and Joe Meek). The filmmakers recount a series of apocryphal stories about how Johnston, like Chance the Gardener in “Being There”, stumbles innocently and repeatedly into the right place at the right time, steadily amassing a sizeable grass roots following. Everything appears to be set in place for his Big Break, until an ill-advised tryst with hallucinogenic substances sends him (literally) spiraling into complete madness. While on a private plane flight with his pilot father, Johnston has a sudden epiphany that he is Casper the Friendly Ghost, and decides to wrest the controls, causing the plane to crash. Both men walk away relatively unscathed, but Daniel is soon afterwards committed to a mental hospital.

The story becomes even more surreal, as Johnston is finally “discovered” by the major labels, who engage in a bidding war while their potential client is still residing in the laughing house (only in America). The rest, as they say, is History.

The film also delves briefly into Johnston’s childlike, strangely compelling drawings and paintings, which, in my personal observation, oddly recall the work of the bizarre, posthumously discovered artist Henry Darger (the subject of an equally fascinating documentary called “In the Realms of the Unreal”). By turns disturbing, darkly humorous, sad, and inspiring, “The Devil and Daniel Johnston” is a must-see.

“Mayor of the Sunset Strip” is another worthwhile rock doc for your consideration. This alternately exhilarating/melancholy portrait of L.A. music scene fixture Rodney Bingenheimer was directed by George Hickenlooper, who most recently helmed the Edie Sedgwick biopic, “Factory Girl”.

The diminutive, skittish and soft-spoken Bingenheimer comes off like Andy Warhol’s west coast doppelganger, or perhaps the Forest Gump of rock and roll. Somehow, he has been able to plant himself squarely in the hurricane’s eye of every major music “scene” since the mid-60’s from Monkeemania (he worked a brief stint as Davy Jones’ double!) to present-day (becoming the first radio DJ to “break” current superstars Coldplay).

Although the film is ostensibly “about” Rodney, it is ultimately a whirlwind time trip through rock music’s evolution, filtered through a coked-out L.A. haze. The ongoing photo montages of Rodney posing with an A-Z roster of every major figure in rock’n’roll history recalls Woody Allen’s fictional Alfred Zelig, a nondescript milquetoast who could morph himself into complete simpatico with whomever he was with at the time.

Throughout the course of the film, Rodney himself remains a bit of a cipher; in one very telling scene he fidgets nervously and begs Hickenlooper to turn off the camera when the questions get too “close”. There is also a sad irony on display-despite his ability to attract the company of the rich and famous (and they all appear to adore the man), the fruits of fame and success evade Rodney himself. He drives a “beater” to his DJ gig at L.A.’s legendary KROQ; he lives alone in a cluttered little hovel, where treasured memorabilia like Elvis Presley’s first driver’s license (!) collects dust next to the ubiquitous empty pizza boxes. This begs the question: At the end of the day, is he a true “ rock impresario”, or just a glorified Rupert Pupkin?

The film is peppered with appearances and comments from the likes of music producer Kim Fowley (whose own whacked-out rock’n’roll career contains enough fodder for a whole other documentary), Pamela des Barres (legendary ex-super groupie and former member of Frank Zappa protégés The GTO’s) and her husband, actor-musician Michael des Barres (who steals the show with some priceless backstage tales). Brilliant!

DH

It’s Baaack

by digby

Via Dave Niewert at Orcinus I see that America’s ugly white underbelly is showing again:

Today CBSNews.com informed its staff via email that they should no longer enable comments on stories about presidential candidate Barack Obama. The reason for the new policy, according to the email, is that stories about Obama have been attracting too many racist comments.

“It’s very simple,” Mike Sims, director of News and Operations for CBSNews.com, told me. “We have our Rules of Engagement. They prohibit personal attacks, especially racist attacks. Stories about Obama have been problematic, and we won’t tolerate it.”

CBSNews.com does sometimes delete comments on an individual basis, but Sims said that was not sufficient in the case of Obama stories due to “the volume and the persistence” of the objectionable comments.

There has been a fierce debate about how news outlets should handle reader comments. Washingtonpost.com’s Jim Brady, whose site, like CBSNews.com, does not have the resources to filter comments in advance, told Howard Kurtz that he’d “rather figure out a way to do it better than not to do it at all.”

But Post reporter Darryl Fears told Kurtz that comments should be eliminated if they can’t be pre-screened for offensiveness.

“If you’re an African American and you read about someone being called a porch monkey, that overrides any positive thing that you would read in the comments,” he said.

Niewert’s work is very important at a time like this because he has documented how these racists and eliminationists are given permission by mainstream figures to let their bigot flag fly:

So far, we have been regaled with the oft-repeated “Hussein” note, the Fox smear of Obama’s Muslim background, followed by Limbaugh’s astonishing riff on “Barack the Magic Negro”. That these reflect a barely concealed racial animus mixed with general white xenophobia should be obvious, and notably, these are all occurring on a national scale, within ostensibly mainstream media sources.

For right-wing audiences, cues like this signal just how far they can take things themselves. So on the public level, the result of this kind of talk is a regular outpouring of old-fashioned racist bile, permission having been granted by leading right-wing voices.

[…]

This resurgent racism likes to cloak itself in the pretense of rebellious individualism standing up to the oppression of overbearing “political correctness,” or else in academic-sounding terms that fling about misinformation regarding the sciences and sociology to construct a pseudo-rationale for what they euphemistically like to call “race realism.”

But pull the cloak aside, and the same old, decrepit racism of a century ago is there, festering like a decaying zombie who refuses to die.

And as the summer goes on, and the presidential campaign picks up steam, and Obama solidifies his already formidable position as a front runner … well, expect to see a lot more of those zombies crawling the streets of our public discourse.

Before Katrina I was skeptical that it could happen. I knew it was there but I thought it was buried deeply enough that it couldn’t rise up in any meaningful way. I was disabused of that by the overt and thinly veiled racism we saw during those horrible days when it was assumed that the great black hordes were coming to kill everybody in their beds.

I heard some commentator on television say the other day after the Virginia Tech killings that gun right advocates had finally won the day when Katrina hit because so many people felt they needed guns to protect them. I won’t rehash why that was nonsense and bore my long time readers with the reasons why. (If you’re interested, you can look in the Spetember 2005 archives.) But apparently the NRA has made a huge deal out of that tragedy (Virginia tech not so much) even featuring it prominently in their “graphic novel.“

There are a lot of forces stoking racism in our society and Obama is probably going to be a focus for them on some level. He has been receiving death threats after all. It probably should not come as a surprise that stories about him lure the racists to the comment sections but it’s depressing nonetheless.

Update: David Ehrenstein call your office.

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We Need You More Than Ever, Frank

PZ Myers inflicts on his hapless readership this really ugly article about a rich creationist. Couldn’t we have more posts about slimy invertebrates instead, please? Esp. before breakfast?

Anyway, here’s some of what the aforementioned Roy Abraham Varghese – the creationist, not the slimy invertebrate, I wouldn’t want to insult the latter – sez:

Information precedes its manifestation in matter,” he writes. Matter and energy are merely vehicles of all information in the known universe. “The next breakthrough is realizing that the foundation of it all is intelligence,” writes Varghese. “Implicit in all its phases of discovery is the greatest insight of modern science: Everything is intelligence.”

Uh huh. I couldn’t help rembering something Frank Zappa once said:

Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe.

And extremely good evidence that Frank was right can be gleaned from the copious selection of Varghese’s and George Gilder’s nonsensical ideas in the article.

Survey Says!

by digby

I would greatly appreciate it if you would take the time to complete the Blog Survey so that I might become a highly compensated entrepreneur. It’s fun! It’s exciting! It’s … not a waste of time, I swear.

Thank you vedy much.

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Moon Over Houston

by digby

Can someone please explain to me why this is not a story the mainstream press ever bothers to pursue?

This revelation of money donated to a charity associated with the Bush family is just the latest in a string of donations and payments dating back more than ten years. George H. W. Bush has had a long association with Moon going back to just after he left office. In September 1995 Bush and his wife gave a number of speeches in Asia for the Women’s Federation for World Peace an organization headed by Moon’s wife Hak Ja Han Moon. In November 1996 Bush spoke in Buenos Aires at a banquet honoring the opening of Moon’s South American newspaper Tiempos del Mundo Bush refused to disclose how much he was paid for his Moon-sponsored speaking tour. In 2003 the Washington Times Foundation funneled a $1,000,000 donation to the Bush Presidential Library through the Greater Houston Community Foundation. In 2005 the Moon sponsored Interreligious and International Federation for World Peace made a donation of $1,000,000, it’s largest donation of the year, to the senior Bush’s Points of Light Foundation for Hurricane Katrina relief. The Bush 2005 Inaugural Committee received the maximum $250,000 donation from Moon’s Washington Television Center the entity that owns the large office building at 650 Massachusetts Avenue in the District of Columbia. In December 2005 the President’s younger brother, Neil, was spotted touring Taiwan and the Philippines with Moon. Less than a year later Business Week published an article titled “No Bush Left Behind” profiling Neil Bush’s company Ignite!, Inc. The company sells a high tech teaching aid called “Curriculum on Wheels” or COWs. The article states “A foundation linked to the controversial Reverend Sun Myung Moon has donated $1 million for a COWs research project in Washington ( D.C.)-area schools.” From non-profit tax returns and media reports we see that at least $3,335,000 has flowed from the Unification Movement to Bush family members or charities since George W. Bush has taken office.

I know that it is religiously incorrect to challenge any form of “faith” these days, but the Reverend Moon has an explicit crackpot agenda that seems to me should at least be worthy of examination seeing as he’s funnelling millions to the president of the United States’ family.

His haircut looks expensive to me. Maybe someone at the top papers could get on that — and then look into his odd expenditures to the Bushes while they’re at it. Evidently Moon’s followers are praying for a pardon for their leader. That might be a place to start.

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Character Flaws

by digby

If anyone thought that it would be possible to re-run the flip-flop campaign against the Massachusetts politician in the race this time, think again:

STODDARD: You know, I really think this is not a big deal. I think that he is entitled to his quirky tastes. I think that he is a habitual flip-flopper, and has religious conversions on everything that comes out of his mouth, and he changes his mind so much now that people don’t even notice. He is on campaign finance reform right now. He is after everyone in the Washington political back-scratching class that wrote McCain-Feingold.

If you look him up in the Massachusetts newspapers, he wanted to abolish political action committees and tax political contributions. He changes on everything. And so his bedside reading is no big deal to me.

That’s Mitt, of course, about whom I predict the CW will gell just that way. He flip-flops so much that people don’t even notice it! Why it’s not even an issue at all.

The reporter who made those comments, A.B.Stoddard, is often on MSNBC these days. My first introduction to her, however, was on The Daily Show. She may be a perfectly lovely person, but on TV she has a rather irritating supercilliousness about her and Stewart showed a series of clips on some issue or another ending with Stoddard making one of those patented DC insider comments about Democrats, leading with “they have to….” or “they need to get over….” to which Jon deadpanned, “well who the fuck are you?”

AB was featured in that fascinating article in the WSJ last fall about the “B” pundits:

A.B. Stoddard, 39
Day job: Associate editor of the Hill, a newspaper about Congress
Claim to Fame: Getting revelations from Capitol Hill insiders.
Maybe you’ve seen her: Telling MSNBC’s Chris Matthews that Rep. Mark Foley’s fixation on young pages was “a known fact” in the halls of Congress.
Punditry perspective: Appearing on the pundit circuit is “great for me with my sources. More people will talk to me if they see me on TV,” she says.

Call me crazy but this sounds like a person we can depend on to keep us apprised of all the latest beltway CW. Mitt’s flip-flopping is not going to be an issue.

But never fear that the political press is going to get carried away and stop with the tabloid, armchair psychoanalysis and character semiotics.

STODDARD: No, and I also think that this is just one of those stories that people remember. I don`t think that they are going to remember Battlefield Earth as much as you and Peter [Fenn] think. But I actually think that 400 dollar haircuts and having too many airplanes waiting for you on the tarmac and preferring one cabin configuration over the other is excessive, and people remember it. It’s really, really hard to explain.

Changing your position on the right to abortion and gay rights is easily understood, but a millionaire getting an expensive haircut and a constantly travelling politician having a preference of cabin is really hard to explain. I can only assume that’s because when Republicans prove themselves to be unprincipled whores it isn’t news while Democrats who don’t live like animals are hypocrites.

Those would be the Clinton Rules. It looks like the press corps is really intent upon partying like it’s 1999. Get out your glow sticks kids.

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Brodermania

by digby

David Broder just had an online chat in which he declined several times to reveal if he had any proof of his statement that Democratic senators were unhappy with Harry Reid performance. He dodged it like a champ though, so you have to give him credit. Never say he hasn’t learned anything in all his years covering politics.

But that wasn’t the highlight for me. This was:

Arlington, Va.: Hi David. Thanks for your column on the bipartisan outcome that nobody knows about. It’s nice when we cooperate. With globalization, “high-end” scientific jobs will be subject to the same lowest-bidder competition as “low-end” manufacturing jobs. About the only work that can’t go globally to the lowest bidder are jobs that must be performed locally, like babysitting and escort services. These may end up being the “high-end” jobs in the future.

David S. Broder: I hope you are wrong. But I realize I am in one of those rare jobs that cannot easily be exported, and that is why I pay particular attention to efforts to keep other good jobs in the United States.

Do you think he sees himself as a baby sitter or a call girl? An argument could be made for either, I would say. Or both.

And is he really sure that his job couldn’t be done somewhere else?

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He Ain’t Heavy

by digby

I normally don’t have anything against Dem TV pundit Flavia Colgan, but her talking points this morning on MSNBC were just wrong. She went on and on about how George W. Bush had failed to fulfil Ronald Reagan’s legacy which is why all the candidates were trying to assume Reagan’s mantle. Then she listed all the alleged betrayals of St Ronnie.

This may be true to the extent that the Republicans are avoiding the Bush legacy like the plague, but it is playing into their hands to present some sort of “real conservative” alternative in a positive light. The fact is that both Ronnie and Junior ran up the bills so high it effectively hamstrings anyone who comes behind them. And both of them have bloody foreign legacies that should never be defended. They are far more alike than they are different and Reagan could have suffered the same fate as Bush if he had decided to be as stubborn and defiant when his poll ratings sank during Iran Contra, As it turns out he was not precisely all there, wiser heads prevailed and he was able to leave office fairly popular. But no Democrat should ever use Reagan as an example of what a good Republican looks like. That’s exactly what the Republicans would like to happen now that they’ve conceived a hagiography that has Reagan somewhere between Alexander the Great, Gandhi and Harry Houdini. (“Remember, they looked in Ronald Reagan’s eyes, and in two minutes, they released the hostages.”)

More importantly, the Democrats should not ever EVER let even the tiniest bit of light between George W. Bush and his Republican enablers who now have the unenviable task of running against both him and the Democrats. This was an opportunity for the Democratic strategist pundit to place all these guys right in the laps of Junior and the Reagan Retreads where they belong and instead she gave them an out.

I hope that Dems are not going to make the foolish mistake of allowing this election to be framed as “going back to good Reagan conservatism,” because it’s nonsense. Conservatism is conservatism and it’s a miserable failure no matter who’s in charge.
They all operate on the same “principles.”

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The Reassuring Old-Line

by digby

Was everyone suitably impressed with all the manly, man’s-man, manliness of the Republican field? You should be.

OLBERMANN: Let’s just sit here a moment more as we watch this. And this touches on the idea of regal qualities that were not seen in South Carolina. This is the prosession, this is the parade, these are tonight’s debaters. The ten candidates, filing out, just in fact to our right. We can see them from where we are seated. There is a coronation quality that just was not present in South Carolina.

FINEMAN: Keith, if you look at that picture and took away all of the writing and all of the words, and just had the image, could the American people tell that those were Republicans? I think the answer is yes. There is a hierarchical, there is, dare I say it, male, there is an old-line quality to them that some voters, indeed a lot of voters, find reassuring. And this is something that the Democrats need to understand. The Democrats are the “we are family” party, which is great, but this is the other side of the conversation and this is their home here. We really are in Reagan country.

It’s true. Every last one of them had a penis while the Democrats produced at least one last week who failed to show up with one. Well, sort of. Here’s how Matthews phrased a question about Hillary Clinton to the mighty Republican sausage fest without ever mentioning her name:

“Let me ask you about something else that might be a negative in the upcoming campaign. Would it be good for America to have Bill Clinton back living in the white house?”

Whew, talk about making those Republicans sweat with the hard questions! His show’s not called Hardball for nothin’. But I’m not sure I really understand why this would be such a negative. I know the Democrats “need to understand” that this stupid “we are family” claptrap has got to go, but surely the public would actually feel “reassured” that there would be one very notable, and highly regarded, white male in the white house, right? On the other hand, it’s a fine way of turning Senator Clinton into an irrelevance in her own campaign. (Very deftly done, Tweety.)

But the “old guard” that so many people find reassuring isn’t just male, is it? The Democrats had a couple of other inappropriate people on that stage last week — a brown one and a black one. (Yet another example of that ridiculous “we are family” stuff.)

I think the Democrats know very well what “the other half of the conversation” is, don’t you?

I, for one, found it extremely “reassuring” that only three out of ten of the Republican candidates for president don’t believe in evolution. And only nine out of ten said it would be a good day if Roe v Wade were repealed. Hey, it could have been worse.

Oh, and what was all that crap about a national ID card being only for foreigners? Huh?

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