Month: January 2011

Tea Party Priorities

by digby

In case you were wondering what the Tea Party is up to in the new year, here’s Judson Phillips of the Tea Party Nation:

Two years ago, the Tea Party movement exploded onto the political scene. It was like nothing modern politics had seen.

From coast to coast, rallies were held. These were not small rallies but rallies with thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of people attending.

A funny thing happened as 2009 ended, the rallies faded away. 2009 was the year of the rally. 2010 became the year of the election. Tea Party groups from across the country threw themselves into the electoral process.

The results were amazing.

But now, 2011 has come and the question is now, what is the Tea Party to do in 2011?

In 2011, there are no Federal elections. Three states will elect governors, four will vote on their legislatures and three will hold judicial elections.

Across the country, Tea Party groups are going to need to do a couple of things. First, we need to take over our local Republican Parties. Many county Republican parties have reorganizational conventions in 2011. These conventions are events where the officers of the county party are elected. In most places, it is a simple vote. Those who show up get to vote. In other words, an organized Tea Party group can get in and take over the GOP.

At Tea Party Nation, we have encouraged Tea Party activists to get involved in the local GOP for one very good reason. This is a two party system, whether we like it or not. There are only two parties and the socialists have absolute control over the other party. By taking over local parties, we can help promote Tea Party candidates at the local level. Conservatism begins at home and it may be good that we sweep liberals out of Washington, but it is something of a pyrrhic victory if we win Washington, yet lose at the state and local level.

The other thing taking over the local party will mean is the creation of a Tea Party farm team. The conservative who is going to win a congressional race five years from now is the conservative we are going to elect to the state legislature this year. RINOs continue to get elected because RINOs in many areas still control the party apparatus.

The second thing that must be a Tea Party priority is stopping voter fraud. Liberal hero and man voted most likely to be an ACLU board member, Joseph Stalin, once said, “it’s not who votes that counts, it is who counts the votes.”

In this past election, the left made a concerted effort at voter fraud. This fraud effected elections. Now, in many areas, for a conservative to win, not only do they have to have a majority, they have to have a fraud proof majority.

At Tea Party Nation we have received a lot of information about what happened and will be making some of the news public in the next few weeks. What is very disturbing was a pattern of “test marketing” certain types of fraud. Certain types of voter fraud that we saw in limited amounts in 2010, we will see across the country in 2012.

The Tea Party movement must united across the country and work to eliminate voter fraud. In some states it will be easy. In socialist states like California or corrupt, I mean Democrat controlled states, like Illinois, it will be very tough. If we are going to win, we must. If we do not eliminate liberal voter fraud, our votes won’t matter because they will not be counted.

Stopping voter fraud is going to be a major project for Tea Party Nation this year.

In Texas, there is a group that is doing an outstanding job of fighting voter fraud. The group is called True the Vote. What they do can be taken and duplicated in almost any state or locality. On January 15th, they are going to have a conference in Houston, TX. They are going to talk about what they did and how you can work in your community to prevent voter fraud. The cost is $50. If want more information, visit their website, Kingstreetpatriots.org.

Stopping voter fraud must be a top priority for us this year. The left knows it cannot win free and fair elections. They can only win by cheating. We must stop them now or Chicago style elections will become the norm for the United States. We must stop this fraud, while we still can.

I think this explains why Issa is ostentatiously announcing that he’s actually going forward with ACORN and New Black Panther investigations.

Far be in from me to suggest that this might have some sort of racial component. That would be very wrong because we know that Tea Partiers have absolutely no racial motivations. But it is worthwhile to recall that the conservative movement’s obsession with “Voter Fraud” has always been about race. If they can get the Tea partiers to do this dirty work, all the better. (And it will keep them occupied so the plutocrats can continue to loot the treasury.)

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Opening Bids

by digby

Here are David Gregory and Huckleberry Graham, everybody’s favorite “reasonable” Republican on this morning’s Meet the Press:

GREGORY: Let me break a few of those things down because it’s important, the level of detail. Let me start with this. You talk about the budget. You talk about spending. How will you vote on the debt ceiling? Will you vote to raise it which is a vote that will come up in relatively short order? GRAHAM: Well to not raise the debt ceiling could be a default of the United States on bond and treasury obligations. That would be very bad for the position of the United States in the world at large but this is an opportunity to make sure that government is changing its spending ways. I will not vote for the debt ceiling increase until I see a plan in place that will deal with our long term debt obligations starting with Social Security, a real bipartisan effort to make sure that Social Security stays solvent, adjusting the age, looking at means tests for benefits. On the spending side I’m not going to vote for a debt ceiling increase unless we go back to 2008 spending levels, cutting discretionary spending… GREGORY: Let me stop you right there Senator. That’s a big condition just on Social Security alone. Do you think Republicans are prepared to follow you in two things you said; raise the retirement age and means test benefits for older Americans? GRAHAM: I would suggest that if we’re serious about taking America in a new direction and you’re not putting entitlement reform on the table, you’ve missed a great opportunity to change the course of America’s future. And the last election was about change, change that really will make us something other than Greece. I think Pat Toomey, Rand Paul and the other candidates that are new to the Congress that said during the campaign, everything’s on the table when it comes to making America fiscally sound. Let’s see if we can find bipartisan reforms in Social Security before we raise the debt limit.

Let’s rewind back to two years ago at just about this time. Here’s the Wall Street Journal:

Odd as it sounds amid a wheezing economy, mounting bankruptcies and rising unemployment, President-elect Barack Obama and his aides realize they’ll actually be dealing with the easy part of their economic challenge when he takes office next week. After all, getting Congress to agree to spend billions of dollars and cut billions more in taxes to stimulate the economy right now is, politically speaking, relatively easy.

The harder part will be trying to follow that up by creating what is coming to be known in Obama circles as a Grand Bargain: getting everyone to agree to clean up the nation’s budget mess in a really big way, one that doesn’t just fix the problems being created now, but also addresses the frightening long-term problems America was going to face anyway to pay for Social Security and Medicare in coming decades.

For this Grand Bargain to work, all sides would agree to sacrifice some part of their agenda. The price they would agree to pay would be unhappiness — temporary, perhaps, but real — among their constituents and favorite special interests. Their reward would be a cure for problems everybody knows they’d have to deal with a few years down the road.

In other words, the Obama view is that the country has reached a momentous point in its economic history, like it or not. Why not try to see whether the nation can turn pain into an opportunity to make an equally momentous change in the way it conducts its affairs?

This is why the opening of the Obama era next week will be a time of both great peril and great opportunity. The risk of further economic meltdown and government overreach are both very real. But times of great problems also can be times of great clarity, when all see and agree that big problems simply can’t be avoided.

President George W. Bush, by comparison, could never get Congress or the nation to buy into his call to reform Social Security, noble though the effort might have been. To be blunt, the problem just didn’t seem all that pressing to enough people. Life was good; the problem could be pushed into a corner.

These times are different. The test of Mr. Obama’s presidential leadership is whether he can convince his own party, the Republican opposition and the public that pain also represents an opportunity to do more than muddle through.

I assume the administration hoped they could do this grand bargain in a better economic environment, but as this article states, the environment needs to be fairly bad for the “opportunity” to exist at all. When you look at things from that perspective, it would appear that Graham and Obama should be able to find “common ground” since their goals are not that far apart. One can be sure that there will be some jostling and some maneuvering, but the contours of the deal haven’t changed in the last two years.

The only new thing is that the Republicans have decided that their “temporary unhappiness” won’t be tax increases or cuts in defense spending, but an agreement to raise the debt ceiling (something which has always been taken for granted until now.) And in a neat trick, they’ve managed to convince the Village that GOP “capitulation” on this will be an act of great sacrifice in the name of mature, responsible leadership.

I think what’s most interesting about all this is that despite everything that’s happened, this goal remains virtually unchanged since it was first proposed by the incoming president. I suspect that if it gets done it will be hailed by Very Serious People everywhere as a perfect demonstration of a president keeping his promises and fulfilling his vow to bring people together to govern in a bipartisan fashion. And they will be right.

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El Pais On Western Failure

by digby

As I mentioned in the post below, the charge of Wikileaks being a terrorist organization seems to be gaining steam. Darrell Issa thinks that if the government assassinates Assange or imprisons him indefinitely as they legally can do under the terrorism laws, that the world will stop laughing at us. But I think the problem may extend a little bit beyond Wikileaks and shutting Wikileaks down isn’t going to fix it.

The world thinks that we are incompetent because we’ve been demonstrating it constantly for the past decade, first with our disastrous forays into neocon empire predicated on obvious lies, our apparent desire to outpace the Soviets for fecklessness in Afghanistan our financial leadership is actually a bunch of petulant Randian gamblers and our political leaders are either weak or crazy. Wikileaks just provided more evidence for what everyone already knows.

From Why EL PAÍS chose to publish the leaks

Cynics will argue that none of what we have learned from WikiLeaks differs from the usual way in which high-level international politics is conducted, and that without diplomatic secrets, the world would be even less manageable and more dangerous for everyone. Political classes on both sides of the Atlantic convey a simple message that is tailored to their advantage: trust us, don’t try to reveal our secrets; in exchange, we offer you security. But just how much security do they really offer in exchange for this moral blackmail? Little or none, since we face the sad paradox that this is the same political elite that was incapable of properly supervising the international financial system, whose implosion triggered the biggest crisis since 1929, ruining entire countries and condemning millions of workers to unemployment and poverty. These are the same people responsible for the deteriorating quality of life of their populations, the uncertain future of the euro, the lack of a viable European project and the global governance crisis that has gripped the world in recent years, and which elites in Washington and Brussels are not oblivious to. I doubt that keeping embassy secrets under wraps is any kind of guarantee of better diplomacy or that such an approach offers us better answers to the problems we face. The incompetence of Western governments, and their inability to deal with the economic crisis, climate change, corruption, or the illegal war in Iraq and other countries has been eloquently exposed in recent years. Now, thanks to WikiLeaks, we also know that our leaders are all too aware of their shameful fallibility, and that it is only thanks to the inertia of the machinery of power that they have been able to fulfill their democratic responsibility and answer to the electorate. The powerful machinery of state is designed to suppress the flow of truth and to keep secrets secret. We have seen in recent weeks how that machine has been put into action to try to limit the damage caused by the WikiLeaks revelations. Given the damage they have suffered at the hands of WikiLeaks, it is not hard to see why the United States and other Western governments have been unable to resist the temptation of focusing attention on Julian Assange. He seems an easy enough target, and so they have sought to question his motivation and the way that WikiLeaks works. They have also sought to question why five major news organizations with prestigious international reputations agreed to collaborate with Assange and his organization. These are reasonable questions, and they have all been answered satisfactorily over the last four weeks, despite the pressure put on us by government, and worse still, by many of our colleagues in the media.

You can shut down Wikileaks, jail Julian Assange and crack down on leakers all you want. But it won’t change the fact of massive elite failure on an epic scale.

“When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down.”
— Barbara W. Tuchman (A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century)

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The Overseer

by digby

The new congressional overseer was all over the TV this morning, with a message for the President:

Issa, the incoming chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, suggested the administration needs to move faster. [on Wikileaks]

The California Republican said Sunday that if President Obama is not treating the unauthorized disclosure as terrorism, then Holder needs to go after the leak as a criminal matter. “Otherwise the world is laughing at this paper tiger we’ve become,” he said.

Now that’s funny. If anyone is laughing at America it’s because it elects clowns like Issa to positions of great power:

Issa also criticized Holder for not doing more to investigate ACORN’s use of federal funding and punish members of the New Black Panther Party who were videotaped outside a Philadelphia polling station in 2008, one wielding a nightstick.

The latter case drew the attention of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which voted last month to approve a report criticizing the Justice Department for its handling of the matter. A voter intimidation case was dropped in 2009 against all but one of the defendants. The Justice Department has denied wrongdoing, saying the charges were dropped because the facts in the case did not support intimidation claims.

George Will later excitedly reported on This Week that Issa was going to hold 560 hearings:

This is because Republicans believe that such is the contempt for the electorate after the election that just passed as demonstrated in the lame duck session, that the Obama administration will try and do everything it can by regulation rather than legislation. You mentioned the Net Neutrality, the taking of more public lands into new classification by the Interior Department the EPA proceeding with carbon limits. All of these are challenging congress on the question of “who rules?”

Now that’s really funny. Everyone told me that the lame duck session was a model of bipartisan compromise and here I find out that Republicans view it as a result of contempt for the electorate and are going to do everything they can to impede the president on anything he tries to do going forward. Who could have predicted?

For some reason Will’s words reminded me of this from 2006:

The Eunuch Caucus

by digby

I’ve been digesting this morning’s hearings and I am dumbstruck by the totality of the Republicans’ abdication of their duty. These men who spent years running on Madisonian principles (“The essence of government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse”) now argue without any sense of irony or embarrassment that Republican Senators are nothing more than eunuchs in President Bush’s political harem. They have voluntarily rendered the congress of the United States impotent to his power.

I’ve watched this invertebrate GOP caucus since 2000 as they submitted themselves to this lawless administration again and again, shredding every bit of self respect, every figment of institutional pride, every duty to the constitution. The look in their eyes, which is somehow interpreted as strong and defiant by the equally servile media, is actually a window to empty little men who have given up their manhood to oblige their master. The only reward they seek is unfettered access to the taxpayers money for their own use.

We are looking at fifty-five of the most powerful people in the country. Collectively the Republican Senators represent almost a hundred and fifty million citizens. And they have allowed a callow little boy like George W. Bush along with his grey eminineces Karl Rove and Dick Cheney to strip them of their consciences, their principles and their constitutional obligations. What sad little creatures, cowardly and subservient, unctuously bowing and scraping before Karl Rove the man who holds their (purse) strings and dances them around the halls of congress singing tributes to their own irrelevance at the top of their lungs. How pathetic they are.

They were very clear about “who rules” back then — and it wasn’t them.

FYI: Will also said that the message of the election most definitely wasn’t bipartisanship. It was to stop Obama. I’m fairly sure that’s what most Republicans think. The president thinks it was “work together to get things done.” The only way that works out is if Obama agrees to pass the GOP agenda. On the other hand, even that won’t be good enough for the Republicans, will it?

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So Much Good News on The Times Front Page! If You’re Really, Really Rich.

by tristero

Page 1, top of Column 1:

Ever since Marie Corfield’s confrontation with Gov. Chris Christie this fall over the state’s education cuts became a YouTube classic, she has received a stream of vituperative e-mails and Facebook postings.

“People I don’t even know are calling me horrible names,” said Ms. Corfield, an art teacher who had pleaded the case of struggling teachers. “The mantra is that the problem is the unions, the unions, the unions.”

Across the nation, a rising irritation with public employee unions is palpable, as a wounded economy has blown gaping holes in state, city and town budgets, and revealed that some public pension funds dangle perilously close to bankruptcy. In California, New York, Michigan and New Jersey, states where public unions wield much power and the culture historically tends to be pro-labor, even longtime liberal political leaders have demanded concessions — wage freezes, benefit cuts and tougher work rules.

Page 1, Column 1, directly underneath the previous article:

…the truth is that there have been surprisingly few career fatalities among New York developers, even though they have lost billions of investor dollars on overpriced real estate and have littered the city with unfinished apartment buildings. While a homeowner who lost a house to foreclosure would find it difficult to borrow for years, developers who defaulted on enormous loans have still been able to attract money.

The reasons, experts say, are that there is still plenty of money floating around and that the market has a very short memory.

Now, an editorial board that was awake would put these two stories together and pen a fiery screed pointing out that the good citizens of these United States need, at the very least, to express the same amount of outrage at the disgraceful coddling of these Trumped up real estate scuzzballs as they do at the occasional excesses of public employee unions.

A responsible editorial board would also speculate as to the reasons why Marie Corfield is the object of such vituperation while the sleazy land moguls are wasting time, natural resources, taxpayer dollars, and valuable real estate without suffering many consequences, either publicly or financially. Especially financially.

So I’m taking bets. Do you think the Times will put it together and write such an editorial? Often, they have been extremely good in the past few years about mincing no words when it came to the criminal abuses of the Bush administration, the madness of the teabaggers, and similar issues.

My answer: No. Consciously or unconsciously, it is in the Times’ financial interest – at least at the executive level – to bust unions and stroke real estate developers. So I think the Times editorial board and all its op-ed commentators – with the possible exception of Paul Krugman, who has bigger things to worry about and bring to our attention – will ignore this striking juxtaposition of news stories.

By the way, the full stories are worth a read, especially for the striking differences in style. The one on the unions is standard he said/she said, with a carefully hedged sympathy for the union employees, at least in spots. The real estate article was almost entirely written from the standpoint of the moguls; one of these guys describes himself as a “victim” of the economy, the poor fellow. One question never gets asked or answered in the article: Where did all that “blind” capital come from that the banks, are lending to these creeps, following capitalism’s natural laws? My understanding is that, just a couple years ago, the banks had nary a cent to lend. Now they have oodles of dough to blow. Where’d it come from? Did someone, you, know, give the banks a zillion dollars or something with virtually no strings attached, or even public oversight?

Saturday Night At The Movies

Subjective as hell : Top 10 films of 2010

By Dennis Hartley

A bit like you and me: Aaron Johnson in Nowhere Boy

I now don my Kevlar vest once again, to offer up my picks for the best films that opened in 2010. I should qualify that. These are my picks for the “top ten” movies out of the 50+ first-run features I have selected to review on Hullabaloo since last January. Since I am (literally) a “weekend movie critic”, I don’t have the time (or the bucks, frankly, with admission prices these days) to screen every new release; especially with that soul-sucking 9 to 5 gig that takes up my weekdays (so I can eat and pay rent and junk). Unless, of course, you’d like to offer me a six-figure salary, and cover my expenses to attend Cannes, Toronto, Sundance and TriBeCa…no? Then I’m afraid this is as good as it gets, dear reader-presented in alphabetical order, as per usual. Oh- and Happy New Year!

Creation– Although Jon Amiel’s film (written by John Colee and Randal Keynes) leans more toward drawing-room costumer, focusing on Charles Darwin’s family life-as opposed to, say, an adventure of discovery recounting the 5-year mission of the HMS Beagle to boldly go where no God-fearing Christian had gone before to advance earth and animal science, it is ultimately an absorbing portrait of Darwin the human being, not the bible-burning God-killer (or however “intelligent” designers read him). Full review

Inside Job– I have good news and bad news about the documentary, Inside Job, director Charles Ferguson’s incisive parsing of what led to the crash of the global financial system in 2008. The good news is that I believe I finally grok what “derivatives” and “toxic loans” are. The bad news is…that doesn’t make me feel any better about how fucked we are. At any rate, this may very well be the most important film of 2010. Full review

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work–“Do you want to know what ‘fear’ looks like?” exclaims Joan Rivers, motioning for a close-up of her fingers, tamping impatiently on a blank page of a weekly planner, “THAT is what ‘fear’ looks like.” Later on, she laments “This (show) business is all about rejection.” Any aspiring comics should heed those words of wisdom (and I will back her up on this). Fear and rejection-that’s the reality of stand-up. That being said, one could also take away much inspiration from Ricki Stern and Anne Sundberg’s engaging “one year in the life” portrait of the plucky, riotously profane 75 year-old. But don’t try this at home-you won’t be able to keep up with her. Full review

Little Big Soldier– According to the Internet Movie Database, Jackie Chan has made 99 films; after a quick perusal, I’d say that I have seen approximately…four. So when I say that Sheng Ding’s Little Big Soldier is the best “Jackie Chan movie” I’ve ever seen, you can take that with a grain of salt. The story is set during China’s era of perpetual warring prior to unification under the Qin Dynasty. Chan (who also scripted and co-produced) is the “Big Soldier”, a world-weary Liang warrior who happens upon a wounded enemy Wei general (Lee-Hom Wang), after a battle. He takes him prisoner, hoping to collect a reward. Reportedly, Chan has been trying to get this film made for nearly two decades. It is a unique, splendidly acted and handsomely mounted comedy-adventure-fable, which also features my favorite line of 2010: “They are trustworthy, but truculent.” Full review

A Matter of Size– Yes, this is yet another romantic comedy about Israeli sumo wrestlers (ho-hum). It would have been easy for directors Sharon Maymon and Erez Tadmor to wring cheap laughs from their predominately corpulent cast, but much to their credit (and Danny Cohen-Solal, who co-scripted with Maymon) the characters (and the actors) emerge from trial and tribulation with dignity and humanity fully intact. Even the sight of four supersized Israeli gentlemen bounding through a grassy field, garbed in naught but their lipstick-red mawashis will make you stand up and cheer (as opposed to snickering). This is a lovely film about self-acceptance-and that is a good thing. Full review

My Dog Tulip-Paul and Sandra Fierlinger’s beautifully animated adaptation of the late British writer and literary magazine editor J.R. Ackerley’s memoir about life with his beloved “Alsatian bitch” is not for the Marley and Me crowd. There is much ado about loose poops and “double anal glands”. There’s lots of estrus fixation and doggie sex. But the film also contains something you won’t find in most Hollywood fare, and that’s heart and soul-sans the maudlin sentimentality. Because this is, at its heart, a love story. “Tulip offered me what I never found in my sexual life,” explains the narrator (Christopher Plummer), “…constant, single-hearted, incorruptible, uncritical devotion, which is in the nature of dogs to offer.” The film has a breezy jazz score by John Avarese. Full review

Nowhere Boy– A little gem from U.K. director Sam Taylor-Wood, which was one of my favorites at the Seattle International Film Festival this year. Aaron Johnson gives a terrific, James Dean-worthy performance as a teenaged John Lennon. The story zeroes in on a specific, crucially formative period of the musical icon’s life beginning just prior to his first meet-up with Paul McCartney, and ending on the eve of the “Hamburg period”. The story is not so much about the Fabs, however, as it is about the complex and mercurial dynamic of the relationship between John, his Aunt Mimi (Kirstin Scott Thomas) and his mother Julia (Anne-Marie Duff). The entire cast is uniformly excellent, but Scott Thomas (one of the best actresses currently strolling the planet) handily walks away with the film as the woman who raised John from childhood. It’s gear. Full Review

Oceans– In their magnificent nature documentary, directors Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud wisely avoid hitting us over the head with cautionary rhetoric about mankind’s tendency to poison the precious well of life that covers three-quarters of our planet with pollution, overfishing and unchecked oil exploration. Any viewer, who becomes immersed in this stunningly photographed portrait of the delicately balanced aquatic ecosystem, yet fails to feel a connectedness to the omniverse we cohabit with it (and a resulting sense of shared responsibility) has something missing in their soul. Full Review

The Runaways– Anyone who harbors a fond remembrance for the halcyon days of Bowie, T. Rex and Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco might find themselves getting a little misty-eyed while watching Floria Sigismondi’s The Runaways, a dramatization about how four young women (mentored by L.A. rock impresario Kim Fowley) high-kicked a breach in rock’n’roll’s glass ceiling with thier platform boots back in the mid-70s. Strong performances from Kristen Stewart (as Joan Jett), Dakota Fanning (as Cherie Currie) and Michael Shannon (as Fowley) help the film over a few humps. Full Review

Son of Babylon– A heartbreaking, tremendously moving “road movie” from Iraq. Set in 2003, weeks after the fall of Saddam, it follows the arduous journey of a Kurdish boy and his grandmother as they travel south to Nasiriyah, the last known location of the boy’s father, who disappeared during the first Gulf War. Director Mohamed Al Daradji and co-screenwriter Jennifer Norridge have delivered something here that has been conspicuously absent in the growing list of Iraq War(s) movies from Western directors-an honest and humanistic evaluation of the everyday people who inevitably get caught in the middle of such armed conflicts-not just in Iraq, but in any war, anywhere. Full Review

Honorable Mentions

As I always take great pains to point out in my introduction to the annual top ten post, I don’t have the time or circumstance to see and then write an in-depth review of every first run film. That being said, I inevitably do end up catching a few gems once they are available on DVD, that I would consider in hindsight to be among the best of the year; in order to retain the integrity of my own qualifying criteria, however, I cannot include them in the list. But I don’t believe there are any laws forbidding an honorable mention or two:

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo -Ingmar Bergman meets Kill Bill in this brooding, atmospheric Swedish thriller, directed by Niels Arden Oplev. The first installment of the three films based on Stieg Larsson’s posthumously published book trilogy, it’s an intriguing mash-up of serial killer mystery and political conspiracy yarn. An investigative journalist (Michael Nyqvist) is looking into the decades-old cold case of a young woman (possibly murdered) who disappeared under mysterious circumstances. The family involved has powerful political connections and a dubious history (something that frequently goes hand-in-hand). An elusive, enigmatic young computer hacker named Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) with her own tortured, secretive past (and a dragon tattoo) is also looking to investigate the family for personal reasons, and offers to help. Lisbeth’s mission to expose the evil and corruption of the rich and powerful, and consequential travails have gained an interesting real world parallel with the ongoing Julian Assange caper. Unfortunately, something went horribly wrong with the two sequels, and I suspect the fault lies with director Daniel Alfredson, who took over for The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. I found both films to be poorly paced and pedestrian in style. Normally, I abhor American remakes of European art house hits, but now I am intrigued to see David Fincher’s revamp (the first installment is due out later this year), because in this case, there is room for improvement.

Restrepo -Despite all the critical accolades, I avoided watching this film for the longest time, because I have developed a block against any documentary dealing with America’s current military involvement(s) in the Middle East (the mere mention of the subject tends to make me very, very, angry). But when it popped up unexpectedly on the National Geographic Channel recently, I thought I’d give it a go (especially since I was alone at home-where I wouldn’t make a public scene should I be compelled to yell at the screen). Guess what? There was no yelling. I was too riveted. Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington’s no-frills portrait of one year in the life of a platoon deployed in Afghanistan is the most gut-wrenching and uncompromising piece of combat journalism I’ve seen since The World of Charlie Company (if you’re old enough to remember that one). There are no politics or voiceover narration to distract; just day-to-day life for a bunch of guys who want to do their duty, serve their tour and not get their asses shot off along the way. Saving Private Ryan and Platoon pale by comparison-this is the real deal.

The Secret of Kells-This one seemed to live up to its title, slipping in and out of theatres like a thief in the night, and I’m sorry I missed it on the big screen-because it’s one of the most visually stunning animated films I’ve seen in quite some time (see it on Blu-Ray if possible). It’s a unique, family-friendly fantasy based on traditional Irish folk tales surrounding the origins of an illuminated manuscript from the 9th Century called The Book of Kells (an actual historical artifact, kept on permanent display at Dublin’s Trinity College). There are Tolkienesque touches (a diminutive hero, forest elves, marauding invaders), but this is one classic “quest” tale with a refreshing twist-the goal is not power or defeat of a villain, but rather the preservation of knowledge and illumination. For the amazingly vivid look of their film, Tomm Moore and Nora Twomey, through some kind of “secret” alchemy of their own, seem to have taken some of those marvelous medieval era woodcuts and paintings you see in museums and art books and brought them to life.

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Land Of The Free

by digby

You can’t see much in the video, but you can hear someone screaming in horrible pain:

Here’s what was happening:

John Harmon was coming off a late night at work when he left his downtown marketing firm for his Anderson Township home just after midnight in October 2009.

The 52-year-old longtime diabetic’s blood sugar levels had dipped to a dangerously low level causing him to weave into another lane.

A Hamilton County sheriff’s deputy spotted him on Clough Pike and suspected drunken driving.

What happened over the next two minutes and 20 seconds should never happen to anyone, Harmon said.

[…]

Deputy Wolf saw Harmon driving a 1998 Ford Expedition erratically near Wolfangel Road and pulled Harmon over.

Wolf, his gun drawn, and Wissel approached the SUV, the lawsuit said.

“The deputy’s face was extremely contorted, he was screaming,” Harmon said. “I remember being taken aback, recoiled and thought, ‘What’s going on?’ I was being presented with pure evil, it was a chilling experience.”

Wolf smashed the driver’s side window.

Wissel shocked Harmon with a Taser for the first time. Deputy Haynes responded to the deputies’ call for backup.

Harmon said the officers tried to yank him out of the SUV, but he was caught in his seat belt. He was stunned with a Taser again.

Wissel cut Harmon out of his seat belt. In his suit, Harmon said he was “violently dragged from the vehicle, thrown on the ground, kicked in the head by a boot, and stomped mercilessly while laying on his back.”

“It all happened so quick, I didn’t have time to think or react,” Harmon said. “I just remember being on the ground, the intense pain and being pummeled.”

The attack was so brutal Harmon said he thought it was a gang attack, not a traffic stop.

It was.

In fact, it took a Highway Patrol officer and state trooper randomly coming along to break it up. They charged him with resisting arrest even after they found out that he was having a medical emergency and all the officers involved are still working having suffered nothing more than a few days without pay.

Harmon said it’s disturbing the deputies weren’t fired. Even the ones not directly involved in the attack watched it happen and didn’t intervene, he said.

“I’m so thankful the state trooper got there,” Harmon said. “If not, I believe I may have been killed.”

Leis, during a settlement talk, apologized.

“I appreciated that,” Harmon said. “I thought there are people who realize the outrageousness of this and want to do the right thing.”

Two weeks after the traffic stop, prosecutors dismissed the charges against Harmon.

But, there are after effects – physical and mental.

Harmon has had three surgeries on his elbow and one on his thumb, which he couldn’t move for weeks. Doctors tell him he may eventually have to get a shoulder and elbow replacement. He has insurance, but his medical bills are nearing $100,000.

Panic attacks come when Harmon simply sees a deputy driving nearby.

“Be calm,” he has to caution himself. “Don’t look their way.”

A recent trip to Colerain Township – where the officers now work – prompted him to look over his shoulder the whole time.

“It’s disturbing that I have to live like this,” he said.

At that point, for the first time in the 90-minute interview, Harmon put his face in his hands and quietly cried.

Harmon is a middle aged African American man and president of his own marketing firm. He moved to this town for the schools.

I suppose the argument can be made that if these police officers hadn’t had tasers they would have beaten this man far worse with their batons or even shot him with their firearms. But I doubt it. Tasers unleash the sadist in people in ways that other instruments of pain don’t. The fact that it leaves no marks and releases no blood makes certain people feel liberated.

No nation can call itself free or civilized if it allows its authorities to treat innocent citizens like they treated that man. It happens every single day in America.

Here’s hoping that this will be the year that we come to realize that this isn’t a joke and that it isn’t “slapstick” humor. The Ninth Circuit opinion is a welcome beginning to a constitutional decision, however, I’m very concerned that this Supreme Court will find them perfectly legal. I think social and cultural sanctions are going to be necessary to end this.

We should start with Hollywood. As “funny” as these scenes are in films and TV shows, they are normalizing torture and we shouldn’t stand for it. Next time you see one think about how funny it would be if it happened to you — or a child or a sick person or any frightened citizen being shot through with 50,000 volts on the whim of a police officer, all of which happens all the time. Then picture how funny the scene would be if it was a billy club — and ask yourself if there’s really any difference.

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Expanding The Mission

by digby

What’s wrong with this picture?

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said on Saturday that her department planned to triple the number of its agents in Afghanistan, in part to curb the smuggling of cash out of the country.

The number of agents will increase to 77 by April, from the current 25, said Ms. Napolitano, who is in Afghanistan for a two-day visit to inspect border crossings and meet with President Hamid Karzai and the country’s commerce and interior ministers.

Ms. Napolitano said that bulk cash smuggling, in which billions of dollars have been taken out of Afghanistan in recent years, was one focus of her trip. The United States Embassy estimates that $10 million a day leaves Afghanistan bound for Dubai, much of it the proceeds from illicit activities and corruption. Millions more are believed to be smuggled through Pakistan and other border crossings.

According to a secret cable released by WikiLeaks, Ahmed Zia Massoud, a former Afghan vice president, visited the United Arab Emirates in 2009 carrying $52 million in cash. Mr. Massoud has denied the report.

The additional agents are to help with the transition from military to civilian control of border crossings and the training of Afghanistan’s fledgling customs service, which is charged with stopping the flow of illicit funds out of the country.

“Border protection will lead to customs revenues and legitimate trade,” she said. “Then Afghanistan will have money for social services and education.”

Am I the only one who thinks it’s extremely odd that we are sending “Homeland Security” agents to Afghanistan? Don’t we have a military that’s tasked with these sorts of chores? And if it’s just a “loan” of certain specialists, why is Janet Napolitano making the announcement instead of the proper foreign service or military spokesperson? Afghanistan isn’t in her portfolio — at least I didn’t think it was. I thought we were going to keep the new Homeland Security forces here in the … homeland.

That’s all rhetorical, of course, since it’s been obvious for decades that many of our allegedly “domestic” agencies like the DEA and the ATF are really para-military organizations which are deployed all over the world. But it looks as though we aren’t even going to pretend anymore that there’s a separation between the two. And that means that we have created yet another sacred police/military budget item that will be nearly impossible to scale back.

That doesn’t even count the state and local police agencies all over the country. We spend huge sums of money on this stuff, some of which is probably justified. But we aren’t even allowed to look at it or discuss what’s working and what isn’t. It just keeps getting bigger and bigger with virtually no accountability.

If they really cared about deficit reduction instead of gutting the social safety net, this would be a huge discussion right now. As you can see by that chart, the government has borrowed a lot of money to pay for the wars and the interest on that debt is growing in leaps and bounds.And yet there’s no discussion of raising taxes to pay for them. Unlike social security, which has been contributing more to the government than it takes out for decades now, the wars are getting more and more expensive. And yet we seem to be heading toward a huge debate about cutting social security with this huge expansion of police and military barely mentioned.

Maybe we should start calling the defense budget an entitlement and Homeland Security a stimulus.

Update: Check out this tale of life in the new police state over at Susie’s place. They don’t even have to wear a uniform anymore. I guess if any white guy tells you to stop doing something, you’d better assume he’s a cop and do as you’re told.

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Setting the table

by digby

We have nice words from both parties as we start the New Year.

Here are excerpts from theGOP weekly address:

In the Weekly Republican Address, Sen.-elect Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire explains the Republican agenda for the new year.

She says, “For Republicans, the start of the 112th Congress on Wednesday will mark the opening of a new chapter for our country and our Party. We’re keenly aware that the American people are relying on us to change business as usual in Washington — and we’re well-positioned to do just that.”

Sen.-elect Ayotte points out three areas in particular Republicans will be working to follow the clear message of voters: “Job one is to stop wasteful Washington spending. As the mother of two children, I’m like parents across the country who worry that our nearly $14 trillion debt threatens America’s economic future and our children’s future…. Creating the conditions necessary for businesses to add well-paying, sustainable jobs also tops our agenda. With millions of Americans unemployed or under-employed, we must work quickly to jumpstart our economy…. Finally, and most important, America must remain vigilant in the face of continuing threats from terrorists and rogue states…. My husband is an Iraq war veteran and a Lieutenant Colonel in the Air National Guard. As a military spouse, I personally understand the sacrifices that our servicemen and women make to keep us safe. In 2011, we resolve to stand firm with our troops as they continue the war against terrorist networks around the globe.

Excerpts from the President:

At the start of 2011, we’re still just emerging from a once-in-a-lifetime recession that’s taken a terrible toll on millions of families. We all have friends and neighbors trying to get their lives back on track.

We are, however, riding a few months of economic news that suggests our recovery is gaining traction. And our most important task now is to keep that recovery going. As President, that’s my commitment to you: to do everything I can to make sure our economy is growing, creating jobs, and strengthening our middle class. That’s my resolution for the coming year.

Still, even as we work to boost our economy in the short-term, it’s time to make some serious decisions about how to keep our economy strong, growing, and competitive in the long run. We have to look ahead – not just to this year, but to the next 10 years, and the next 20 years. Where will new innovations come from? How will we attract the companies of tomorrow to set up shop and create jobs in our communities? What will it take to get those jobs? What will it take to out-compete other countries around the world? What will it take to see the American Dream come true for our children and grandchildren?

Our parents and grandparents asked themselves those questions. And because they had the courage to answer them, we’ve had the good fortune to grow up in the greatest nation on Earth.

Now it’s our turn to think about the future. In a few days, a new Congress will form, with one house controlled by Democrats, and one house controlled by Republicans – who now have a shared responsibility to move this country forward. And here’s what I want you to know: I’m willing to work with anyone of either party who’s got a good idea and the commitment to see it through. And we should all expect you to hold us accountable for our progress or our failure to deliver.

The Republican agenda is cutting spending (I don’t say debt because they have already shown they are complete bullshit artists on that score by taking taxes off the table)jobs and war. The President’s agenda is jobs, “the future” and “innovation.” Oh, and working with the Republicans.

Let the games begin.

Oh, and by the way, there will be no stopping the Obama Hate Machine, so that has to be factored in to any electoral calculation. The good news for him is that the media isn’t blaming him for it, which will be very helpful. But whatever the MSM does, unless the GOP succumbs to their very worst instincts and nominates Palin, it’s probably going to be a close election in 2012. The country is still polarized.

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A Little Bono For Your Hangover

by digby7

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