Month: June 2008

A Nice Day To Be A Californian

by dday

Today at 5:01pm, Mayor Gavin Newsom will officiate a private wedding ceremony between Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin. At 6:00, Mayor Ron Dellums (yeah, he’s back, for those of you who remember the longtime House member) will officiate marriage ceremonies in Alameda County, with Rep. (and new DNC member) Barbara Lee on hand, among others. All over the state, couples, regardless of gender, will engage in the basic civil right of marriage.

And all over the state, stories like this are appearing in the morning papers.

It’s 9 a.m. on a Thursday and Paul Waters and Kevin Voecks are paging through photos of cakes at the Vienna Bakery in Thousand Oaks.

“Would you want something like that?” Voecks asked, pausing briefly on one.

“Hmmm,” Waters replied.

It’s 12 days until their wedding.

Voecks, 51, pointed to another, a four-tiered cake, with icing studs running down its side. “This one reminds me of a tuxedo shirt, it’s not effeminate.”

“I think bow ties here,” Waters, 53, said. “And I like the wedding bells on it.”

“Bow ties would be awesome!” Voecks said.

His soon-to-be mother-in-law, Peggy Waters, 80, looked on as her only son and his groom finalized the order.

“Kevin’s a 10,” Peggy Waters said. “All the women Paul brought home, I never liked. This is still a dream come true.”

It’s pretty special to witness this, although my real hope is for the day when this is unexceptional. These are our neighbors, our mail carriers, our office workers, our waitstaff, our bosses, our dogwalkers, our friends. And they have their personal lives as do we. And starting tonight, there are no barriers between us.

There is an enormous political battle ahead. But today is simple and special.

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Good To Go

by digby

New York City is looking to expand it’s use of tasers. Lucky New Yorkers. Police commissioner Kelly is reluctant to implement their use, though because of this:

Stun guns were introduced in New York in the early 1980s, when officers were confronting a higher number of disturbed people because of the rapid and widespread deinstitutionalization of mental health patients. The devices were not seen as a success.

The technology had not been perfected and the devices were kept mostly in Emergency Service Unit officers’ trucks. Several high-ranking officers and sergeants were transferred from the 106th Precinct in Queens after officers were charged with using stun guns on drug suspects during interrogations. Mr. Kelly was assigned by Commissioner Benjamin Ward to clean things up.

Perhaps spurred by memories of that scandal, Mr. Kelly added a cautionary line to the new rules of engagement for the Taser. The order, published on June 4, said that putting a Taser directly against someone’s body should not be the primary method of use and that such cases of “touch-stun mode” would be investigated.

Using them from a distance, however, is quite all right. And I don’t see why using the taser should be out of bounds in questioning when police and security guards are allowed to use it indiscriminately in most places. After all, it’s no biggie:

The weapon uses a compressed-nitrogen cartridge to launch two probes that travel 15 to 35 feet. At the end of each probe is a wire that attaches to the skin and clothing. The Taser can work through about two cumulative inches of clothing, said Stephen D. Tuttle, a Taser spokesman. The probes deliver 3,000 volts of electrical current to the body, or 0.36 joules per pulse. (There are 19 pulses a second, and each trigger cycle lasts for 5 seconds).

By contrast, a cardiac defibrillator operates with 360 joules per pulse on average, Mr. Tuttle said. The Taser pulses stimulate the motor nerves, impairing communication between the brain and the muscles and essentially incapacitating the person, he said.

Kenneth S. McGuire, a sergeant with the Temple University police in Philadelphia, said his 110-member force does not use the Taser, but he would like to change that. In 2006, he became a certified trainer in the use of the Taser. To help him understand the device, he even took a Taser hit to his back.

“Basically, the only way I can explain it is if you’ve ever gotten a really bad leg cramp in your calf, if you’re swimming, imagine that in your whole body; that’s how it feels,” Sergeant McGuire said. “Your muscles freeze up, they call it the plywood effect.”

He added, “It lasts up to five seconds. And then you’re fine, you’re good to go.”

See? You get zapped and then you’re good to go. It’s almost fun!

If it’s so harmless, why not use it to loosen up suspects? Or keep kids in line> Make workers work faster? Deal with uncooperative customers.It’s not a big deal if your muscles freeze up and you drop instantly to the ground screaming in pain. It only last five seconds. Then you’re fine. Maybe we should all have one.

Obviously Commissioner Kelly knows that this is bad development. So does the ACLU which correctly frames the problem:

Christopher T. Dunn, the associate legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said the concern now is whether officers will use Tasers in situations where they traditionally had used much less force, and whether civilians will be unnecessarily and more frequently subjected to their use.

“Is it actually an alternative that leads to reduced use of firearms by the police?” Mr. Dunn said. “Or does it lead to increased use of force? The concern is we are going up the ladder of force, as opposed to coming down the ladder.”

Exactly. It’s true that this is an effective new way for the police to use less deadly force. But the other side is that by saying that it’s no big deal because it doesn’t cause lasting harm, the authorities get lazy and shoot people full of electricity whenever they want to make them conform. It’s increasing the use of force and acclimating citizens to the idea that the police have a right to inflict physical pain on you for coercive purposes. It’s un-American for authorities under color of law to use torture techniques unless the only alternative would be to use deadly force in self-defense.

And if this technology is scary, wait until you get a load of the next generation:

Coming soon, from the folks who brought you the microwave — Raytheon! After more than ten years in the making and at a cost of over 40 million dollars, ‘Silent Guardian’, or Active Denial System, (ADS, in it’s formal mood), is almost ready for public release!

[…]

For, Raytheon — the world’s largest producer of guided missiles, and fifth largest defense contractor in the world, provider of aircraft radar systems, weapons sights and targeting systems, communication and battle-management systems, and satellite components — has come up with a system which could scatter a crowd in a trice without a drop of blood being spilled.

Yes, folks, originally designed to protect military personnel against small-arms fire without the use of lethal force, Silent Guardian, ADS, the Pain Ray, call it what you will, (Raytheon would prefer you not to use the latter however), will finally soon be here!

Transmitted at the speed of light over a 700 yard distance, the Pain Ray is a millimeter-wave beam that penetrates 1/64th of an inch beneath the skin, causing the water molecules there to bubble, producing an intense burning sensation, said to feel like being burnt by molten lava or a hot iron. Its delivery system attached to a Humvee and aimed right, the Pain Ray makes people run away — fast.

[…]

The Defense Department want to use it for protecting Defense resources, peacekeeping, humanitarian missions and other situations in which the use of lethal force is undesirable, but already there have been inquiries from other institutes and wealthy individuals about using it to protect private property.

[…]

Raytheon congratulates itself on having developed a non-lethal weapon which has been described as “Holy Grail of crowd control,” but their Silent Guardian also has its critics. One, author Richard Hunter asks:

“But what happens if the people faced with such a weapon can’t just run away? What happens if they’re trapped in a crowd, and the crowd can’t move? How much pain must that crowd endure? How long can any member of the crowd be exposed to that weapon before his or her skin — or their eyes — simply cook off?

What happens if the devices are used deliberately in a manner designed to cause maximum harm — say, by training the device on prisoners trapped in prison cells until they literally go mad with pain?

What happens if the system operator turns up the power? A little bit works well, why not try a lot?”

I’m sure that’s overblown. They may be a bit uncomfortable for a time feeling that their skin is melting off their bodies, but they’ll soon be good to go. No harm, no foul. It would be an excellent way to keep people from protesting things they shouldn’t be protesting, and asking questions they shouldn’t be asking, that’s for sure. We’d all be much safer.

Battered Wives

by digby

The New Yorker is featuring an interesting profile of Keith Olbermann, which isn’t particularly revelatory. He’s a complicated guy. But there’s a quote from his producer MSNBC Senior VP Phil Griffin, that is truly unbelievable:

Just as Obama must work to win Clinton supporters for the fall campaign, Phil Griffin has to repair a fractured audience base, a portion of which saw sexism in his network’s Clinton coverage and vowed to boycott MSNBC. Griffin knows that some of that anger is aimed at his star anchor. “It was, like, you meet a guy and you fall in love with him, and he’s funny and he’s clever and he’s witty, and he’s all these great things,” Griffin said of the relationship between Olbermann and the Clinton supporters among his viewers. “And then you commit yourself to him, and he turns out to be a jerk and difficult and brutal. And that is how the Hillary viewers see him. It’s true. But I do think they’re going to come back. There’s nowhere else to go.”

Yikes. Stop digging.

As Joan Walsh pithily observed:

I have some advice for Phil Griffin, not that he asked me. Don’t tell your customers they have nowhere else to go. Also: Try to avoid comparing irritated female viewers with wives and girlfriends who have to stay with a “jerk” who is “difficult and brutal.” It’s insulting to Olbermann and his female critics alike.

It’s not as bad as that creepy McCain fundraiser who said “rape is like the weather. As long as it’s inevitable, you might as well lie back and enjoy it.” But it’s not good.

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Dishonorable Discharge

by digby

Andrew Cohen at CBS writes about McCain’s extremely aggressive response to the Boumediene decision and makes an observation that’s important for all of us to remember as we watch this man go into fear monger overdrive in the next few months.

A lot of it is pure ego and defensiveness because he sold his honor down the river in 2006 and will never be able to get it back:

Following the last Supreme Court ruling on this topic, which also struck down stubborn Administration detainee policies, the Senator (a Vietnam torture victim himself) invested no small amount of his own treasured (and well-earned) historical capital to try to broker a deal on the detainees.

And, in late 2006, he did.

It’s called the Military Commissions Act. It was a terrible idea from the very beginning, and it was one of two federal statutes undercut by the Justices last Thursday. It’s no wonder the nominee is taking the defeat personally.

After first insisting that federal law clearly and unambiguously outlaw “torture,” McCain suddenly caved to White House pressure on the MCA, allowing the Administration to insert into the law a clause that effectively allows (and, indeed, legally buttresses the efforts of) the executive branch to implement torture as a means of interrogation.

Without McCain’s pander, there would have been no bad law for the Court to strike down last week. Without McCain’s grandiloquent appeal to Democrats and moderates during that lame-duck session, there quite possibly might have been a better law that just might have passed its constitutional test this term.

McCain’s sell-out on the torture language is not the reason the Justices declared the MCA unconstitutional. It is not the reason why the detainees now have more access to federal courts than they did before. But it is emblematic of the larger and much more destructive, seven-year-long sell-out of the legislative branch in the legal fight against terrorism.

And that emblem, thanks to the Supreme Court, now has John McCain’s face on it just in time for the run-up to the general election.

You would think that would be a problem for him, but the Democrats foolishly trusted McCain to have some integrity on the issue of torture and habeas and they got punk’d. They’re going to have a hard time explaining why 12 Democrats crossed over to vote for the atrocity. (And they did it knowing full well that the other sponsor of the bill, Mccain’s faithful hound Huckleberry had already committed fraud on the Supreme Court in the Hamdan case.)

Here’s what Glenn Greenwald wrote on the day of the vote:

McCain is giving the closing argument for Republicans and Pat Leahy is doing so for Democrats. Numerous Senators (including, irritatingly, Carl Levin) all stood up to ooze reverent praise for John McCain, and then McCain himself proceeded to do the same thing, as he pompously strutted around pointing out all of the great protections he won for us in his hard-nosed negotiations with the President. His hard-nosed negotiations with the White House are about as effective as Arlen Specter’s.

McCain sold himself to the devil on this one and now he’s forced to defend it. If there is any justice in the world this should be the thing that takes him down. Sadly, it won’t be. It will be that the Republicans have been in power too long and failed too spectacularly. But, when he’s sitting in the seventh circle of hell, he’ll have a lot of time to contemplate whether it was worth it. Specter will be there with him.

Here’s the last line of Glenn’s post:

During the debate on his amendment, Arlen Specter said that the bill sends us back 900 years because it denies habeas corpus protections. Then he voted for it.

Update: Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings analyzes Mccain’s War College Thesis from 1974 which was featured in today’s NY Times. She notes the difference in what McCain clearly considered torture back then, and what he considers torture now. Indeed, it would seem that it was so uncontroversial that he didn’t even feel the need to “define” torture at all. I think it was pretty much universally understood that things like sleep deprivation and stress position and hypothermia etc — were torture. I guess his thinking has evolved on this. Or he is a political whore.

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Teachable Moments

by digby

This op-ed in the Boston Globe says that surveys show citizens today are more stupid about politics than their 6th grade educated grandparents were. How can that possibly be?

Many political scientists have tried to explain away such results ever since surveys in the 1940s began turning up evidence of Americans’ gross ignorance about politics. These apologists argue that Americans use shortcuts to compensate for their lack of knowledge. A voter, for example, who does not follow the daily news may nonetheless decide that he should vote for Candidate X because his local newspaper endorsed X and he generally agrees with the positions the paper takes.Unfortunately, what the polls show is that Americans cannot make up for their lack of basic knowledge even if they shrewdly employ shortcuts. The harsh truth is that ignorant voters are sitting ducks for wily politicians. This is why millions were so easily misled when the Bush administration dropped hints that Saddam Hussein played a role in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. One study by the University of Maryland found that nearly 60 percent of Americans were convinced that Hussein was helping Al Qaeda when we undertook our invasion. A majority based their support for the war on this flagrant misunderstanding.Why hasn’t education helped voters become smarter about politics? Television is a big part of the explanation. Once television replaced newspapers as the chief source of news, this happened around 1965, shallowness was inescapable as Americans began judging politicians by how they looked and acted. Another factor was the collapse of the traditional two-party system and unions. Once voters stopped taking their cues from party and labor bosses, they were largely on their own as they sorted through the complicated choices they face.

That may be true, but I think we can easily, and very specifically, determine (with at least one notable exception) what the central problem is:

The example he cites to make his point about public ignorance is a good one. Has anyone asked the media recently why they think a large majority of the public believed that Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda were in cahoots when those of us who were paying close attention (which includes, presumably, the press) could easily tell that the administration was using innuendo and clever phrasing to convince people of this? Have any of them explained where they went wrong?

While it was happening, there were some who were trying to sort it out. Here’s Bruce Morton of CNN in march of 2003:

Bottom line: U.S. officials claim there is evidence of an al Qaeda-Iraq connection — but there is no “smoking gun.”

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman said he thinks the TV networks’ news coverage has helped sell the Saddam-al Qaeda connection. “Suddenly, it was Osama, Osama, Osama … Saddam, Saddam, Saddam … and the networks — the broadcast media — simply picked that up [and] transferred our feelings of alarm and anger from one villain to another.”

In a February CNN-Time poll, 76 percent of those surveyed felt Saddam provides assistance to al Qaeda. Another poll released in February asked, “Was Saddam Hussein personally involved in the September 11 attacks?” Although it is a claim the Bush administration has never made and for which there is no evidence, 72 percent said it was either very or somewhat likely.

That seems pretty straightforward to me. But it doesn’t explain why the public believed what it believed.

Morton was certainly right that people easily transferred their fear and anger at one enemy onto another without a whole lot of reflection. That’s a fairly common occurrence. Free floating anger and fear looks for something tangible to latch on to. And then there was “the only good arab is a dead arab” concept, some version of which never seems to go out of style. There’s also little doubt that on some level a lot of people just wanted to have a “real war” to show that you can’t mess with Uncle Sam.

But there was something more to it than that. 72% believed that there was a connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam in March of 2003. And I would submit it was because people were watching a whole lot of gasbags — including, by the way a whole lot of bought and paid for ex-Generals — who gave them that impression. At the very least they failed to properly question the administration’s rhetoric or show the kind of skepticism that could have led people to question these assumptions. It was an intrinsic part of the administration’s plan for the invasion to imply that it was in retaliation for 9/11, even if they didn’t explicitly make that case. And the news media willingly helped them do it.

This is the best that “media critic” Howard Kurtz could do at the time:

“I think the administration has used the media very successfully to make the case against Saddam as the chief evildoer of the moment, but I still think there’s an awful lot of uneasiness in America over this war,” said Howard Kurtz, Washington Post media critic and co-host of CNN’s “Reliable Sources.”

There were a few exceptions, one extremely important one noted earlier in the Morton piece, who got it right from the beginning:

“They use essentially the kind of logos, martial music, and so on that we saw after Gulf War One had started,” Krugman said. “So, from the point of view of the American public, Iraq is already the enemy; we’re already at war.”

Needless to say, it was very, very shrill of him to point that out.

Update: I didn’t create the montage of the pundits and gasbags. It came from a story which named the top 50 pundits in America. This was 1-10, (starting with 10.) When I wrote “notable exception” I was, of course, referring to Jon Stewart.

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Chilling

by digby

I’ve been writing about this since 2004, when we first learned that the US was offering bounties for Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. It’s one of the most horrifying thing about Bush and Cheney’s torture and imprisonment regime: a good number of the people they did it to were innocent.

An eight-month McClatchy investigation in 11 countries on three continents has found that Akhtiar was one of dozens of men — and, according to several officials, perhaps hundreds — whom the U.S. has wrongfully imprisoned in Afghanistan, Cuba and elsewhere on the basis of flimsy or fabricated evidence, old personal scores or bounty payments.McClatchy interviewed 66 released detainees, more than a dozen local officials — primarily in Afghanistan — and U.S. officials with intimate knowledge of the detention program. The investigation also reviewed thousands of pages of U.S. military tribunal documents and other records.This unprecedented compilation shows that most of the 66 were low-level Taliban grunts, innocent Afghan villagers or ordinary criminals. At least seven had been working for the U.S.-backed Afghan government and had no ties to militants, according to Afghan local officials. In effect, many of the detainees posed no danger to the United States or its allies.The investigation also found that despite the uncertainty about whom they were holding, U.S. soldiers beat and abused many prisoners. Prisoner mistreatment became a regular feature in cellblocks and interrogation rooms at Bagram and Kandahar air bases, the two main way stations in Afghanistan en route to Guantanamo.While he was held at Afghanistan’s Bagram Air Base, Akhtiar said, “When I had a dispute with the interrogator, when I asked, ‘What is my crime?’ the soldiers who took me back to my cell would throw me down the stairs.”

Needless to say, doing this caused far more problems than it allegedly solved. Contrary to what puerile minds like Bush and Cheney believe, indiscriminately “showing muscle” doesn’t always result in the enemy dropping to their knees and capitulating. Indeed, the opposite often happens.

And the most frustrating thing about the torture and imprisonment of these innocent men is that it has left us with this dilemma of what to do with innocent people who we have tortured and radicalized by our barbaric behavior. The moral thing to do is to let them go free, of course. They did nothing wrong. But we created some enemies, no doubt about it. And many, many tens of thousands more around the world.

And the government was aware of all this almost from the beginning:

The McClatchy investigation found that top Bush administration officials knew within months of opening the Guantanamo detention center that many of the prisoners there weren’t “the worst of the worst.” From the moment that Guantanamo opened in early 2002, former Secretary of the Army Thomas White said, it was obvious that at least a third of the population didn’t belong there.

Of the 66 detainees whom McClatchy interviewed, the evidence indicates that 34 of them, about 52 percent, had connections with militant groups or activities. At least 23 of those 34, however, were Taliban foot soldiers, conscripts, low-level volunteers or adventure-seekers who knew nothing about global terrorism.

Only seven of the 66 were in positions to have had any ties to al Qaida’s leadership, and it isn’t clear that any of them knew any terrorists of consequence.

If the former detainees whom McClatchy interviewed are any indication — and several former high-ranking U.S. administration and defense officials said in interviews that they are — most of the prisoners at Guantanamo weren’t terrorist masterminds but men who were of no intelligence value in the war on terrorism.

But they did serve as guinea pigs for the new torture regime. And the administration liked pimping the specter of the concentration camp — thought it scared the wogs. So they just kept doing it. And if our next president is John McCain, they’ll find a way to keep doing it.

I recommend reading this whole article. They’ve pulled together all the disparate stories we’ve heard over the years about innocent men being rounded up and shipped off to hell. It’s a truly chilling story.

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The Supreme Court

by tristero

Vamping for a moment on Digby’s recent post, I’d like to focus on part of Digby’s excerpt from Jack Balkin:

No matter whether the Supreme Court is conservative or liberal ideologically, it tends to be conservative institutionally. That is, it does not get behind a proposed constitutional revolution unless it is quite clear that the country is also behind it and demonstrates this support over a sustained period of time. Until that proof is made, the Court tends to resist implementation, or temporize, or a bit of both.

This is largely what happened between 2004 and 2008.

Perhaps that is so. I’d certainly like to think it is so. But, in fact, the way I see 2004-2008 is as a holding action against the extremists nominated by Bush and other Republican presidents, including Bush’s father. Last weeks decision restoring habeas happened with the slimmest of margins.

In short, I have no doubt that regardless of where the country as a whole is in 2009, a President McCain would nominate Supreme Court judges who would be in every way, shape, and form the ideological and intellectual clones of Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and Roberts. Roe would go, of course. But so would much of what we consider settled American law towards free speech, separation of church and state, civil rights, labor rights, and the rights of citizens vs. corporations. Such a Supreme Court would hardly do the bidding of the country, only of their far right political cronies.

As much as I would like to believe the Bush revolution has failed, I really don’t think a 5-4 decision restoring the Magna Carta counts as evidence, or any of the other victories for America that occurred with the same or similar margins. Jack obviously knows more about the worldview of the Supreme Court than I ever will. But I wonder whether in this case his analysis may be missing the forest for the trees.

One final point. While I am optimistic about the chances for an Obama victory, and of a rollback of rightwing extremism in Congress, I am very worried about the upcoming 4 to 8 years. The damage Bush, et al, has done to what I remember America was like is more than incalculable: it simply defies one’s imagination in its breathtaking, and utterly catastrophic, comprehensiveness. Think of all the awful judges he’s appointed, and all the incompetent ideologues and religious fanatics now in the permanent government. Think of our standing in the world, which will continue to have enormous impact on our economy. Think of…well, you get the picture.

As I see it, at best, Bush’s revolution hasn’t yet failed. It has been slowed. Please don’t misunderstand. Of course, nearly all of Bush’s policies have failed .* But the revolution – the radical transformation of American government and society – lives on. It will be up to Obama (hopefully), the next Congress (hopefully), and the newer media (most assuredly) to work, first to halt the Bush revolution and then bring the country’s institutions back to their senses. Similarly with cultural priorities. To say that will take a lot of hard, difficult work is to utter quite an understatement.

The future for this country is not a yellow brick road strewn with roses, the failure of the Bush revolution behind us. Rather we are in a quagmire, not only in Iraq and Afghanistan, but politically, legally, and culturally. It will take a tremendous effort to get out of the ditch Bush (and Bush I, and Reagan, and Nixon) dug for us. It can be done, I think.

Step one: Elect Obama.

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*The “nearly” is just a pro forma hedge: I can’t think of one successful Bush policy, but there may be one somewhere.

Saturday Night At The Movies

SIFF-ting Through Celluloid 2: Half-Life & Blood Brothers

By Dennis Hartley

The 2008 Seattle International Film Festival is in full swing, so I thought that for the next few posts I would take you along to some of this year’s screenings.

Navigating a film festival is no easy task, even for a dedicated buff. This year’s SIFF is screening nearly 400 features and documentaries, over a period just shy of four weeks. It must be a wonderful opportunity for independently wealthy slackers, but for those of us who have to work for a living, it’s a little tough catching the North American premiere of that hot new documentary from Uzbekistan that is only screening once at 11:45am on a Tuesday. I’m lucky if I can catch a dozen films each year, but I do take consolation from my observation that the ratio of less-than-stellar (too many) to quality films (too few) at a film festival differs little from any Friday night crapshoot at the multiplex. The trick lies in developing a sixth sense for which titles “feel” like they would be up your alley (or, in my case, embracing your OCD and channeling it like a cinematic divining rod.)

Some of the films I will be reviewing will hopefully be “coming to a theatre near you” in the near future; on the other hand there may be a few that will only be accessible via DVD (the Netflix queue is our friend!). BTW, if you are lucky enough to go to Sundance, Toronto or Cannes, let’s get this out of the way now-Yes, I am quite aware that Seattle gets sloppy seconds from some of the more prestigious festivals; so go ahead, we’ll wait while you do your little “superior dance”. Okay, feel better? Good! Now let’s move on.

Half-Life: Global warming, family meltdown.

First up this week: Variety has already beat me to the punch (DAMME you, sirs!) and dubbed writer-director Jennifer Phang’s Half-Life as an “Asian-American Beauty”, so I’m going to describe this sometimes overreaching but consistently provocative suburban dramedy as The Ice Storm meets Donnie Darko. An audacious mélange of melodramatic soap opera, dark comedy, metaphysical conundrum and apocalyptic doom, the beautifully photographed Half-Life ambitiously poses a causality dilemma from the old “chicken-egg” school: Which came first, the dystopian society or the dysfunctional family?

The dystopia in question is our near “future”. Global warming has created worldwide coastal flooding, displacing millions of people. The sun (possibly dying) belches massive solar flares, which wreak havoc with technology and environment. Perky news mannequins chirp about a Tiananmen Square style massacre of environmental activists and tsk-tsk over a family murder-suicide conducted via chainsaw. A world gone mad!

Phang uses this sense of looming environmental and societal catastrophe as a metaphor for the emotional storms raging within the souls of her protagonists (much the same way that Ang Lee did in his dark suburban drama The Ice Storm) The global chaos serves as the backdrop for the travails of the single-parented Wu family, living in a Spielbergian California desert suburb and led by the exasperated Saura (Julia Nickson). Saura is the classic “mad housewife”; perpetually exasperated and dead on her feet from trying to juggle a full time job and still spend quality time attending to the needs of a live-in boyfriend (Ben Redgrave) and her two children. Saura, along with her introverted 8-year old son Timothy (Alexander Agate) and confused teenaged daughter Pam (Sanoe Lake) have all been dealing with abandonment issues since Dad took a hike some time back.

Young Timothy, who becomes the central character of the piece after a fashion, escapes from all the truly fucked-up adult behavior that surrounds him (and possibly averts years of therapy in the process) by losing himself in escapist reveries, triggered by his imaginative crayon doodles. These brief but visually arresting scenes are nicely interpreted with a colorful blend of CG effects and Waking Life style rotoscoping. There is a splash of Miyazaki’s Spirited Away in these sequences (a traumatized child finding solace and personal empowerment through unfettered fantasizing). Unfortunately, Phang makes an arguably fatal misstep by taking this concept to a more literal plane. Without giving too much away, I’ll just say the film weirdly veers off into Carrie territory.

Phang wrestles some nice performances from a mostly unknown cast, particularly from Nickson and Lake, who give an air of immediacy and authenticity to the mother-daughter dynamic. We could have another Haley Joel Osment in young Agate. Redgrave is quite effective playing a certain type of creepy suburban WASP character that has become a staple in twisty indie family angst dramas (e.g. Terry O’Quinn in The Stepfather, Dylan Baker in Happiness, Brad William Henke in Me and You and Everyone We Know).

Assessing Half-Life is one of those tough calls. I didn’t “hate” it- but I’m still vacillating as to whether or not I “liked” this film. I do think it is safe to say that Jennifer Phang shows great promise, and is definitely a director to keep an eye out for. This is one of those made-to-order-for-Sundance entries that diehard art-film enthusiasts delight in; so undoubtedly there are others who will detest it with the intensity of a thousand suns.

Blood Brothers: Woo me, baby.

No film festival would be complete without a fistful of entries from the Hong Kong action factory. One of the more visually stylish genre pics I’ve seen so far at this year’s SIFF is from first-time director Alexi Tan. Although the story is pure pulp and could have stood a little script doctoring, it’s shot with the rich tones of a Bertolucci film and plays like a 90-minute dance mix of Sergio Leone’s greatest hits. Produced by Hong Kong cinema legend John Woo, Blood Brothers is a noodle western posing as a gangster saga, with a narrative more than a tad reminiscent of Woo’s 1990 classic, Bullet in the Head.

It’s a story setup that you may have seen once or twice. Two brothers, Feng (Daniel Wu) and Hu (Tony Yang) make a pact with their lifelong buddy Kang (Liu Ye) to break out of their backwater hick village and head off to an exotic and sophisticated metropolis to find fame, fortune and, uh, exotic and sophisticated babes. Think HBO’s Entourage, substituting the race to the top of the criminal underworld of 1930s Shanghai for success in present day Hollywood as the brass ring of the tale. Handsome and charismatic Kang is the babe magnet of the trio (he would be the “movie star”, the Vincent Chase if you will). His younger brother Hu is the frequently overshadowed and more chronically underachieving of the two siblings (um-there’s your Johnny Drama). And last but not least, there is the physically intimidating, fiercely protective Kang, who is thuggish but cunningly “street smart” (sort of a morph between Eric and “Turtle”). Or, perhaps we could just refer to them as Michael, Fredo and Sonny Corleone? Naw…that’s too easy!

To carry the Entourage analogy further, the “Man” in Shanghai who can make or break the three friend’s fortunes happens to be (wait for it)…a movie producer. In actuality, Boss Hong (Sun Honglei) is more adept at producing piles of bullet-riddled corpses than he is at producing films; it’s a ruthless propensity that has made him one of Shanghai’s most successful and feared crime lords. Among his many enterprises is the Paradise Night Club, which is where Hu finds a job and brother Feng spots an object of instant desire: the lovely Lulu (Shu Qi), Boss Hong’s squeeze and the requisite femme fatale of the piece. Serendipity lands all three pals into Boss Hong’s employ, and eventually into his most trusted inner circle, where friendship and blood ties get sorely tested by the corruption of power (see Godfather II, Scarface, Once Upon a Time in America, etc).

Despite the fact that this is a somewhat cliché gangster tale, and has a lot of plot points that don’t bear up so well under closer scrutiny, I really enjoyed this film because it is done with such panache. I don’t know what it is about those Hong Kong directors, but they’ve got some kind of cinematic Kavorka that just oozes “cool”. Just watch any of John Woo’s pre-Hollywood era classics, and it’s easy to see why Tarantino and his contemporaries geek out so much over this genre and do their best to ape it in their own work (although the American imitators, try as they might, can never quite match the effortless vibe of their overseas inspirations; I liken it to comparing Kansas with Yes). Genre fans will want to watch for domestic distribution or perhaps a DVD down the road.

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Freakshow Redux

by digby

Jane Hamsher writes, “Save Us from The Freakshow” but I think we’re going to have to save ourselves. It’s obvious that this ridiculous Larry Sinclair nonsense is being ginned up by right wing bottom feeders, just as the Gennifer Flowers freak show was back in the 90s. We can ignore it and pretend it doesn’t matter. Maybe we’ll get lucky. But I would guess, based upon the natural proclivities of the modern media, that this stuff is going to be covered once they find a hook. If Sinclair doesn’t stick they’ll find something else. And even if the media ignores it, the right wing bloggers certainly won’t.

The canary in the coal mine is what we are seeing all over the supermarket tabloids. This is fairly typical, from The Globe:

THERE’s trouble brewing in the Oprah Winfrey camp – and it has the talk show titan seeing red! Friends, fans and business associates are telling her to dump the Democratic presidential candidate before she’s caught up in the anti-American scandals rocking his campaign. Only in GLOBE, the explosive story that’s must-reading for every American.

And then there’s this truly noxious stuff:

It’s true that Bush had a few covers over the years, usually about an alleged return to the bottle. But this is the kind of thing we’re seeing all over the tabloids about Obama — a man who far too many people are going to get to know for the first time on these pages or while standing in line to buy a gallon of milk. They aren’t just saying he’s cheating on his wife or had a wild youth (although they are saying that.)That’s old hat by now and unlikely to make anyone think twice about a politician. (Certainly since a large number of right wingers have been exposed as hypocrites, it’s not as easy a charge to make hay with these days.) But with Obama, they’ve upped the ante. They are saying he is a traitor.

This is something we should be concerned about. I don’t know if it will turn any votes, but it’s likely to stoke the kind of opposition that will go all out to hinder and discredit him — and turn a very tidy profit doing it. This makes governance difficult, to say the least.

We can pretend it doesn’t matter. But we do so at our peril.

Update: From Think Progress: it looks like the press club has responded to the pressure of 7,500 petitioners and, at least, changed the title of the event from “The Truth About Obama” to “Larry Sinclair on Obama.” It’s a step in the right direction.

Update II: Also, read this comment to the post below from blogsphere resident expert on pushing back slime, Spocko.

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The Worst Decision

by digby

If you wondered whether John McCain was a just a partial or a complete jackass before now, this will surely end all speculation:

Republican presidential candidate John McCain on Friday sharply denounced a Supreme Court decision that gave suspected terrorist detainees a right to seek their release in federal courts.

“I think it’s one of the worst decisions in history,” McCain said. “It opens up a whole new chapter and interpretation of our constitution.”

McCain is one of the authors of the 2006 Military Commissions Act which set up procedures for the handling of detainees. The act denied the detainees access to federal courts.

The Supreme Court on Thursday said that provision of the law violated the constitution.

McCain on Thursday said he had not read the ruling and reserved his criticism. But on Friday, speaking to about 1,500 people at a town hall meeting in Pemberton, N.J., he attacked the decision, saying the law he helped write “made it very clear that these are enemy combatants, they are not citizens, they do not have the rights of citizens.”

Yeah right, up is down and black is white as usual.

It’s clear they’re going to run on this. Faithful hound Huckleberry said:

“What happened yesterday was unprecedented,” Graham said. “Americans are going to be shocked to find that that mastermind of 9-11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, now has the same legal standing as an American citizen.”

Some will be shocked to find out that he wasn’t drawn and quartered, but that doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that all prisoners have basic human rights. The right to petition for habeas corpus is about as fundamental to our nation as it gets.

McCain is a bloodthirsty man, always has been. He’s not one of those guys who comes from military culture and learned the limits of war and came to suspect the military industrial complex, like Ike. He’s a hot tempered, flyboy type, unsuited to leadership and not known for thoughtful contemplation.

Reckless ambition for high office is a sad and tragic place for him to end up. His experience gives him tremendous credibility to be an historic leader on this issue. But he’s being a political whore, as he is so often, completely ignoring his duty to the constitution and the necessity of putting the United States on some sort of moral footing after these eight years of perfidious constitutional radicalism.

Jack Balkin wrote a great piece this week called This Is What A Failed Revolution Looks Like. The usurpation of the constitution that was first proposed during Reagan and then implemented more fully under Bush has been more or less successfully struck down by the Supreme Court with the four GWOT cases: Hamdi, Rasul, Hamdan, and now Boumediene. But Balkin points out something that is extremely important about how and why that happened:

No matter whether the Supreme Court is conservative or liberal ideologically, it tends to be conservative institutionally. That is, it does not get behind a proposed constitutional revolution unless it is quite clear that the country is also behind it and demonstrates this support over a sustained period of time. Until that proof is made, the Court tends to resist implementation, or temporize, or a bit of both.

This is largely what happened between 2004 and 2008. The Supreme Court resisted the most extreme features of the Administration’s proposals but did not completely reject what the Administration was attempting to do. Although Hamdi is often seen as a defeat for the Bush Administration, it actually legitimated preventive detention according to the laws of war, and offered only limited due process rights to detainees. Rasul and Hamdan were decided as statutory cases with decidedly constitutional overtones. Yet if the Republicans had continue to win victories in Congress and maintained strong public support for the war on terror and the war in Iraq, the Court would probably have eventually given way. However, that’s not what happened.

Bush’s proposed revolution lost steam for three reasons. First, to his credit, there was no successful terrorist attack on U.S. soil after 9/11. Initial public fear gave way to public distrust about the Administration’s heavy handed tactics and a native American libertarianism reemerged. (Ironically, the very distrust of government that movement conservatism responded to worked against Bush’s revolution.). Second, the public grew increasingly concerned about reports of torture and mistreatment at Abu Ghraib, at Gitmo, and at CIA black sites. All of these reports greatly damaged America’s image as a symbol of liberty around the world and distrubed Americans image of themselves as the good guys who were (or should be) morally superior to their enemies. Third, Bush’s adventure in Iraq, which he repeatedly claimed was intrinsically connected to the global war on terror, did not succeed, and while the surge has stabilized the situation temporarily, it has not led to the political solution that was its purpose. It’s also worth noting that the Supreme Court did not begin hearing these cases until 2004, when the initial ardor following 9/11 had cooled considerably, and when the President’s political standing had begun to slide. By the time Boumediene was decided, support for Bush and his unilateral vision of the Presidency was very weak indeed.

If things had turned out differently: if there had been more successful terror attacks on U.S. soil, or if the Iraq war had been a resounding success, the Republicans might have increased their numbers in Congress greatly, and they might well have been set for a sustained period as the majority party in the country, leading a successful constitutional revolution that fulfilled the hopes of the conservative movement. (The goals of that movement, however, would have been transformed by the focus on the war on terror, in the way described above.).

As it happened, this did not come to pass. Bush is now one of the most unpopular presidents in modern American history. The Republicans have lost control of both houses of Congress. Their party may lose even more seats in the next election, and the Democrats may return to the White House.

Elections have consequences beyond whether or not certain promised legislation was accomplished. Influencing public opinion has effects beyond winning a majority. These institutions are run by humans and the zeitgeist matters. (I would even go so far as to say that a lingering sense of discord from Bush vs Gore may have had an affect on these cases.)

The lesson for us is that civic involvement is important even if you feel like you are screaming into the void. Whatever you may think of them personally, people like Cindy Sheehan make a bigger difference than we think — her encampment at Crawford the summer of 2005 was a turning point in public opinion on the war. People who studied the issues on blogs and elsewhere and took that information into their workplaces and dinner tables also made a difference. Joining advocacy groups, getting out the vote, donating what you can spare — all of it. That’s what creates the political environment in which these people govern our country and they are acutely aware of what’s going on out there more than ever before. It matters.

I believe that John McCain will be defeated in November. But we can’t take anything for granted. There is no doubt now that there is nothing — nothing — that John McCain won’t do or say to get elected.

Update: This is also why we need more people like this in the congress.

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