Month: March 2008

The Manly Man’s Best Friend

by digby

It’s going to be a long campaign. The Washington Post is so in love with St John of Sedona that it features two different stories in the paper today about a bar-b-que he gave for the boyz on the bus at his “cabin” this week-end. Feel the love:

PAGE SPRINGS, Ariz., March 2 — If he loses the presidency, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) will have a career as a barbecue chef to fall back on. At his weekend cabin just outside Sedona on Sunday afternoon, McCain took a break from campaigning and grilled ribs and chicken for three dozen reporters, some staff members and a few Republican friends from the Senate. Dressed in jeans, an L.L. Bean baseball cap, sunglasses and a sweat shirt featuring a picture of his family, McCain held court the way he does almost daily aboard his “Straight Talk Express” bus. While the afternoon barbecue for the media was technically on the record, tape recorders were prohibited, as was taking pictures for publication, and McCain aides repeatedly urged reporters to put away the notebooks. The idea, McCain said, was to allow reporters to get to know him and his staff under less stressful circumstances. (The fact that the media spent the weekend at a resort called Enchantment probably contributed to that feeling.)

Oh baby.

But that one dispatch didn’t capture the full flyboy wonderfulness quite thoroughly enough. Another reporter filed essentially the same story but added some local color contrasting Sedona’s ridiculous, New Age, hippies (a cult perhaps?) with the straight talking, regular guy McCain:

SEDONA, Ariz., March 2 — Crawford, Kennebunkport, Rancho del Cielo: These spots have acquired mythic status as places where America’s presidents have chosen to vacation. The presidential retreat is heavy on symbolism, telling the nation how the commander in chief wants to be seen when not on the job — which may explain why a number of them have opted for dusty ranches where they might engage in such Marlboro Man activities as chopping wood and riding horses. Sedona’s symbolism is a little more confusing. There are chakras involved. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, has for years spent weekends at his cabin not far from Sedona, the New Age capital of the country. Sunday, he hosted an afternoon of socializing at his homey ranch. He grilled ribs for reporters (dry rub and lots of lemon juice — on the ribs, not the reporters) and briefly touched on the important issue of whether one can feel the “energy vortexes” of Sedona’s red rocks all the way out on his property. “I think we’re a little away from Sedona,” McCain said, grinning, and then playfully grumbled about the fact that “they” (the New Agers, presumably) chose to flock to one of the most beautiful places in the country instead of to, say, Brooklyn.

Personally, I can’t read enough about what an authentic all American fella John McCain is and I expect the papers will be dedicating at least three or four stories a day to exploring the full spectrum of McCain awesomeness. This is just the beginning.

Oh, and btw, one question I really would like to have answered. Does McCain go anywhere without his faithful hound by his side?

Wearing a pair of jeans and a sweat shirt with a family photo printed on it, McCain pointed out a hawk’s nest on the property he’s owned for 24 years, and explained how his bone-down slow-cook grilling technique virtually eliminates the fat from his ribs. (Several reporters, skeptical by trade, remained unconvinced.) McCain’s springer spaniel, Sam, hovered near the tong-wielding senator, gnawing on a rib McCain had taken off the grill. McCain’s friend Sen. Lindsay Graham also gnawed on a rib, albeit with more delicacy.

.

Saturday Night At The Movies

Sayles of August

By Dennis Hartley

“Lord, I’m goin’ to Rosedale, gon’ take my rider by my side
We can still barrelhouse baby, on the riverside.”
-Robert Johnson, Traveling Riverside Blues

In his latest film, director John Sayles transports us back to the deep south of the early 1950s, evoking the earthy poetry of the Delta, outfitting it in shades of August Wilson and transferring it to the screen. Essentially a languidly paced folktale, set in an Alabama backwater called Harmony, Honeydripper rolls along, slow and steady, like a glass bottle sliding up a steel string, and is easily his most engaging ensemble piece since Lone Star.

Surrounded by cotton fields, adjacent to a small military post and connected to the rest of the world by a lone train station and a few dusty country roads, the town of Harmony is classic Mythic South, all the way. This is a place where black and white residents each literally live on their respective “side of the tracks”. The “Honeydripper” is the name of a ramshackle music club on the edge of town (um, down by the crossroads) run by a barrelhouse piano player named Tyrone “Pine Top” Purvis (Danny Glover). As the film opens, Purvis and his business partner Maceo (Charles S. Dutton) are scrambling to stay one step ahead of the debt collectors. Purvis has been losing business to a neighboring juke joint, due to his curious aversion to hiring guitar acts or acquiescing to the jukebox.

Enter a young, wispy railroad tramp named Sonny (Gary Clark, Jr.) who blows into Harmony on the night train, with little more than the clothes on his back…and a guitar. The next morning, in search of a gig, he finds his way to the Honeydripper, where Purvis feeds him breakfast, then politely shows him the door, suggesting that he might have better luck finding a job at one of the local cotton plantations. Unfortunately, Sonny is soon intercepted by a corrupt county sheriff (a hammy Stacey Keach, veritably oozing Eau de Peckerwood) who runs a hustle “arresting” drifters for vagrancy and then indenturing them to local plantation owners for a kickback.

In the meantime, the reluctant Purvis is talked into booking a New Orleans guitar legend, Guitar Sam, for a “one night only” appearance, with the hope that the draw will bring in enough money to stave off the landlord’s threat to pull the plug on his lease. However, when Guitar Sam fails to show up at the train station on the morning of the heavily promoted show, the situation starts to look pretty grim. Then, Purvis remembers the young guitarist; a light bulb appears and….well, I think you know where this is going.

Honeydripper is rife with many of Sayles’ pet themes, such as family ties, culture clash, tests of faith, class warfare and local politics. Like all good folktales, Honeydripper has an elemental narrative structure (not to be confused with “simplistic”). When he is operating at full tilt, Sayles’ strengths as a screenwriter lie in his canny gift for perceptive, true-to-character dialog and in his ability for drawing rich characterizations. His penchant for pacing his films in a leisurely and unhurried way only occasionally backfires (Silver City and Sunshine Statewere uncharacteristically flat; and I literally dozed off during the interminable Men With Guns) but when he’s “on” (City of Hope, Passion Fish, Baby It’s You, Brother from Another Planet, Limbo, Lone Star) there are few of his American indie contemporaries that can touch him. You can add Honeydripper to the latter list.

Sayles captures the sultry southern atmosphere to a tee, thanks in no small part to the excellent DP work by British cinematographer Dick Pope (who has worked on most of Mike Leigh’s films). The director’s distinctive feel for regional Americana and sharp eye for period detail (evidenced previously in Matewan and Eight Men Out) is on form here as well.

In keeping with tradition, Sayles employs a sizeable cast, and every speaking part, large or small, is well written and fully fleshed out. Glover and Dutton are both wonderful actors, and do an excellent job; newcomer Clark makes a splash in an impressive film debut. Real life blues guitarist Keb’Mo’ does a memorable turn as a cryptic, somewhat spectral character who pulls double duty as a tangential narrator and Greek Chorus for the tale. In another bit of inspired stunt casting, singer Mable John appears in a brief role as the Honeydripper house act (she was a backup singer for Ray Charles and is the sister of blues great Little Willie John). There’s good support as well from Lisa Gay Hamilton, Mary Steenburgen and Vondie Curtis-Hall. Fans of blues, gospel and roots rock’n’roll will dig the music performances, and Sayles aficionados will not be disappointed.

Jumpin’ Jukes: Crossroads, Juke Joint (1947), Black Snake Moan, Ray , Idlewild , The Blues Brothers , Jammin’ The Blues (1944), Stormy Weather, The Color Purple , A Soldier’s Story, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Last of the Mississippi Jukes, Deep Blues: A Musical Pilgrimage to the Crossroads, Leadbelly, Can’t You Hear the Wind Howl? , Hellhounds on My Trail – The Afterlife of Robert Johnson, Bluesland – A Portrait in American Music, Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues

.

Only One Constituency

by dday

We really have to look at this FISA battle in a completely new way in the context of today’s New York Times story (emphasis mine).

The warnings from President Bush and his senior aides have grown more urgent over the last few weeks, now that Congress has let a temporary wiretapping law expire. But there is little sign of anxiety among many intelligence and phone industry officials.

At the Pentagon and the military’s Central Command, senior officials gave no indication of any heightened concern about the lapsing of the law. In Congress, staff members with access to updated briefings said they had not been given any specific information about lost intelligence that might endanger national security. And in the telecommunications industry, executives said it was largely business as usual.

Indeed, for all the heated rhetoric in Washington about the government’s wiretapping powers, the debate over what a new surveillance law should look like has little to do with the present or the future and almost everything to do with the past.

We all knew that the intelligence leadership was fudging the truth about how they needed unlimited surveillance powers or else we’d all be strangled by Al Qaeda and the Symbionese Liberation Army while walking through Central Park. The FISA law, which has been revised over 50 times since its inception in 1978, is prefectly capable to handle any intelligence gathering of overseas threats while at least building in some basic judicial review to ensure compliance and civil liberties protections under the Fourth Amendment. What’s been assumed is that the phone companies were demanding amnesty for going along with Bush Administration requests to circumvent FISA before and after 9/11. In the wake of this article, along with the news that Republicans are all grumbly that the telecoms aren’t showering them with cash for helping their cause, you can only conclude that the phone companies really don’t care whether they’re getting amnesty or not. And they really shouldn’t. The executive branch has proven pretty adept at shielding them from prosecution by invoking the state secrets privilege, and the courts have been extremely deferential in waiving cases due to lack of standing. Even if cases passed through the initial stages, it’s simply unlikely that the phone companies would ever be successfully sued, and even more remote that they would have to offer financial restitution. They’re simply not concerned about it.

So if the intelligence community doesn’t care about this, and the phone company executives don’t care about this, there’s only one constituency for which this legislation is designed. And that’s the Bush Administration itself. As Glenn Greenwald noted the other day, it’s not like this is even well hidden.

In his Press Conference yesterday, Commander-in-Chief George W. Bush candidly explained why he was so eager to have Congress grant amnesty to telecoms:

“Allowing the lawsuits to proceed could aid our enemies, because the litigation process could lead to the disclosure of information about how we conduct surveillance.” […]

Bush is finally being candid about the real reason the administration is so desperate to have these surveillance lawsuits dismissed. It’s because those lawsuits are the absolute last hope for ever learning what the administration did when they spied on Americans for years in violation of the law. Dismissal via amnesty would ensure that their spying behavior stays permanently concealed, buried forever, and as importantly, that no court ever rules on the legality of what they did. Isn’t it striking how that implication of telecom amnesty is never discussed, and how little interest it generates among journalists — whose role, theoretically, is to uncover secret government actions?

That’s all this is about. The telecoms don’t want the amnesty. The overriding goal is to shut down these lawsuits and, most important, eliminate the discovery phase so that the full extent of Administration lawbreaking is permanently hidden. This is about burying the evidence, as every single action by the White House since the Democratic takeover of Congress has been. Bush may have a soft spot in his heart for his corporate buddies, but he’s really not interested in indemnifying them. He’s interested in immunity for himself.

As the Democratic leadership in the Congress floats trial balloons about capitulating on this bill, it’s important to keep this end goal in mind. Official Washington really doesn’t want to reveal a lot of its secrets. Immunity has a certain pull for the Democrats as well, particularly those who were briefed about the program, even in part. They either made no objection or failed to ask the proper questions or in some way became complicit to this lawbreaking that has occurred for almost SEVEN YEARS now, and if the truth ever came out, my guess is that nobody would come out looking so noble.

I’m sure this is what’s being discussed in back channels all over Washington. There aren’t any lobbyists pushing for this, no citizens groups, no grassroots organizations. This is about the Village, mostly from inside the White House but really the entire structure of elites, trying to put up walls around itself. There is a powerful institutional urge to conceal.

.