Previews
by digby
I’m tired already.
"what digby sez..."
Month: May 2013
Virginia GOP Treasurer: “I’m not a big fan of contraception, frankly”
by David Atkins
Rebranding, part LXXXVII:
Skip to 13:30 for the contraception quote. . After complaining about “morning-after pills being distributed to 12-year-olds” he then joked that they would be distributed to infants. Because, of course, there’s no difference, right?
But if you want to peer into the mind of the social conservative, just listen to the whole 20-interview. These people are really, really really freaked out by sex. Completely dysfunctional. But they desperately want to control public policy for the rest of us.
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Saturday Night at the Movies
SIFFting through cinema, pt. 2
By Dennis Hartley
The Seattle International Film Festival is in full swing, so I’m continuing to share highlights with you this week. SIFF is showing 272 films over 26 days. Navigating such an event is no easy task, even for a dedicated buff. Yet, I trudge on (cue the world’s tiniest violin). Hopefully, some of these films will be coming soon to a theater near you…
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Oi! Zombies!” This may be “damning with faint praise” but Matthias Hoene’s “splatter comedy”
Cockneys vs. Zombies pretty much delivers all that its title implies. In a setup reminiscent of the British sci-fi classic Quatermass and the Pit (although any similarities abruptly end there) London construction workers inadvertently stir up an ancient crypt best left undisturbed…sparking a zombie apocalypse in the East End. Although I enjoyed this much more when it was called Shaun of the Dead, it does have its moments. The funniest bit has an elderly gent with a walker handily outdistancing his zombie “pursuer”.
Adapting first-person narratives like Marlen Haushofer’s dystopian novel Die Wand (The Wall) for the screen can be a tricky affair. Consider Julian Roman Polsler’s film, wherein our heroine (Martina Gedeck) wakes up one morning and finds that an invisible, encircling “wall” has confined her within the perimeter of an Alpine lodge, with only a dog, a cow and woodland animals for company. As she adapts to her Robinson Crusoe lifestyle, she begins keeping a journal. Since she has no one to converse with, we get voice over narration. A lot of voice over narration. Gedeck (a skilled actress) is left with little to do but stare into space. There’s a lot of staring into space. Atmospheric, nicely shot, but ultimately it is little more than a picture postcard-festooned exercise in tedium.
I’ve always found dinner parties to be a fascinating microcosm of human behavior; ditto genre films like The Anniversary Party, The Boys in the Band, and my all-time favorite Don’s Party (my review). Mutual Friends (a SIFF World Premiere) is the feature film debut for director Matthew Watts. Sort of an indie take on Love, Actually, this no-budget charmer centers on a group of neurotic New Yorkers (is that redundant?) converging for a surprise party. In accordance with the Strict Rules of Dinner Party Narratives, logistics go awry, misunderstandings abound, unexpected romance ensues, and friendships are sorely tested. Despite formulaic trappings, the film is buoyed by clever writing, an engaging ensemble, and cheerful reassurance that your Soul Mate really is out there…somewhere…
When you think “road trip!” you usually don’t envision trekking through the nation formerly known as Yugoslavia while schlepping along the mummified remains of Marshal Tito (or a facsimile thereof). That is apparently what Swedish underground comic artists Max Andersson and Lars Sjunneesson did, to promote their book Bosnian Flat Dog at an alternative comic convention in Sarajevo. For his documentary Tito on Ice, Andersson and co-director Helena Ahonen mix Super8 footage from the trip with cardboard cutout stop-motion to create an offbeat (if occasionally scattershot) pastiche about art and politics that works best whenever focus shifts from the artists to the recollections of people who came of age in the midst of the Yugoslav Wars in the early 1990s. This aspect recalls the 2007 animated film Persepolis, which was based on Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel memoir about growing up during the Iranian Revolution.
Salma (from UK director Kim Longinotto) profiles a Tamil poet named Salma (now 45) who spent her first 25 years sequestered at home. Her family was adhering to a strict “unwritten law” forbidding pubescent girls from venturing outside the house (even to attend school) until they are married off. Longinotto documents Salma as she visits her family for the first time in years; she points out the tiny window that provided her sole portal to the outside world. She found ways to smuggle her early work out of the house, eventually becoming renowned throughout India. While its subject is compelling, it pains me to say that the film, while meant to inspire, is flat and dull, with no poetry in its soul.
Here’s a concept: In the Utopian future, cities will be designed at the behest of urban dwellers, as opposed to urban “planners”. In case you hadn’t noticed, most cities cramp our style with tightly-packed high-rises and dense noisy traffic, which doesn’t leave much space for the traditional “town square”. In his documentary The Human Scale, Danish director Andreas M. Dalsgaard examines the work of architect Jan Gehl, who posits that the fatal flaw of modern urban design lies in its ignorance of cultural anthropology. This results in cities blighted by social isolation and alienation. After conducting his own study over several decades, Gehl concluded that humans are happiest in a low-rise cityscape, enhanced with open public spaces (it’s rumored that we’re social creatures). Copenhagen is shown as one example of a city that has become more sustainable and people-centric. A fascinating, refreshingly optimistic look at creating a new paradigm.
This year’s revival presentation is a newly restored print of the classic silent 1923 Harold Lloyd vehicle, Safety Last! (a Criterion Blu-ray edition is slated for mid-June release) Yes, this is the one featuring Lloyd’s iconic “hanging off the clock” routine. He plays a bumpkin from Great Bend who moves to the big city, promising to send for his sweetheart and marry her once he has found his fortune. When she pops by for a surprise visit, Lloyd scrambles to cover up that he’s still making peanuts as a lowly clerk in a department store. When he learns that the manager will pay $1000 for a winning marketing idea to bring in more customers, Lloyd cooks up a “human fly” publicity stunt, sparking one of the most hilarious, inventive and thrilling daredevil sequences ever filmed. Even by modern filmmaking standards, it boggles the mind as to how they did it.
Previous posts with related themes:
They just openly influence peddling now
by digby
Oh here’s some good news. The nation’s CEOs have decide they need to be more engaged in government than they already are:
The high-profile examples run the gamut: from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg — who attached his name to immigration reform this year along with a slew of Silicon Valley execs — to JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, who’s had a high-profile, if on-again-off-again, relationship with Washington.
Others come to town with less fanfare. Goldman Sachs President and Chief Operating Officer Gary Cohn made the trek up to Capitol Hill in November to meet with House Financial Services Chairman Jeb Hensarling of Texas and other Republicans as the fight over debt and spending flared.
President Barack Obama, who has struggled to win over the business community, has hosted CEOs regularly in his second term. Yahoo’s Marissa Meyer and Goldman Sachs’ Lloyd Blankfein met with Obama in February to talk immigration and debt. In May, energy leaders, including Edison Electric Institute President Tom Kuhn, met with Obama privately to discuss the industry’s response to mega storms.
Executives say the reason for their change is simple: the stakes have gotten higher.
Just look at the range of big policy questions on Washington’s plate from debt and spending, to the tax code, to health care and immigration.Paul Stebbins, executive chairman of World Fuel Services, a Fortune 100 company, told POLITICO that the long-term debt outlook has been a key factor.
“I think this has changed the sensibility of how CEOs engage in the process,” said Stebbins, who is a member of the CEO-group Fix the Debt. “This goes far beyond my K Street lobbyist is going to help me get some tax thing. It’s a much deeper issue about the future of the country.”
“This isn’t a short-term, ‘we’ll be done by September.’ This is long term,” he said of how CEOs will continue to engage in Washington.
That’s not reassuring.
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Easy pickings
by digby
Here’s one way to get your arrest quotas up:
….they say they were “thrilled” when their son — who has Asperger’s and other disabilities and struggled to make friends — appeared to have instantly made a friend named Daniel.
“He suddenly had this friend who was texting him around the clock,” Doug Snodgrass told ABC News. His son had just recently enrolled at Chaparral High School.
“Daniel,” however, was an undercover cop with the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department who ” hounded” the teenager to sell him his prescription medication. When he refused, the undercover cop gave him $20 to buy him weed, and he complied — not realizing the guy he wanted to befriend wanted him behind bars.
In December, the unnamed senior was arrested along with 21 other students from three schools, all charged with crimes related to the two officers’ undercover drug operation at two public schools in Temecula, California (Chaparral and Temecula Valley High School). This March, Judge Marian H. Tully ruled that Temecula Valley Unified School District could not expel the student, and had in fact failed to provide him with proper services.
“Within three days of the officer’s requests, [the] student burned himself due to his anxiety,” Tully said. “Ultimately, the student was persuaded to buy marijuana for someone he thought was a friend who desperately needed this drug and brought it to school for him.”
[…]
“Sending police and informants to entrap high-school students is sick,” says Tony Newman, director of media relations at the Drug Policy Alliance. “We see cops seducing 18-year-olds to fall in love with them or befriending lonely kids and then tricking them into getting them small amounts of marijuana so they can stick them with felonies. We often hear that we need to fight the drug war to protect the kids. As these despicable examples show, more often the drug war is ruining young people’s lives and doing way more harm than good.”
Remember this when you hear tales of undermanned and underfunded police departments. It probably pays to look into their “priorities” first.
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There are scandals and then there are *scandals*
by digby
This Toronto Mayor scandal is a doozy:
This investigative report reveals that:
Doug Ford, Toronto Mayor Rob Ford’s brother, sold hashish for several years in the 1980s.
Another brother, Randy, was also involved in the drug trade and was once charged in relation to a drug-related kidnapping.
Their sister, Kathy, has been the victim of drug-related gun violence.Today, Mr. Ford is a member of Toronto’s city council – and no ordinary councillor. First elected in 2010 as his brother was swept into the mayor’s office, he has emerged as a truly powerful figure at City Hall –– trying to overhaul plans for Toronto’s waterfront less than a year after arriving. He also has higher aspirations, and has said he wants to follow in the footsteps of his father, Doug Ford Sr., by running in the next provincial election as a Conservative.
Meanwhile, he serves as his brother’s de facto spokesman. As Toronto is gripped by allegations that its mayor was captured on a homemade video smoking what appears to be crack cocaine and his office descends into disarray – his chief of staff was fired on Thursday – Doug Ford has been the only person to mount a spirited public defence of his largely silent sibling. On Friday, after the Mayor finally made a statement about the accusation, he was the one who fielded questions from the press.
Well before the events of the past week, The Globe and Mail began to research the Ford brothers in an effort to chronicle their lives before rising to prominence in Canada’s largest city. Over the past 18 months, it has sought out and interviewed dozens of people who knew them in their formative years.
What has emerged is a portrait of a family once deeply immersed in the illegal drug scene. All three of the mayor’s older siblings – brother Randy, 51, and sister Kathy, 52, as well as Doug, 48 – have had ties to drug traffickers.
Just … wow. It takes a very special kind of ego to run for office when you and yur whole family are drug dealers.
I’m quite sure Martin Scorcese is already working on the screenplay.
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Acceptance, change and wisdom
by digby
James Fallows has written the most fascinating political profile I’ve read in a long while — about none other than Governor Jerry Brown. I live in California but political journalism is so bad here that it’s very difficult to get a real sense of what’s going on in state government. This piece cleared up more questions about Brown’s overall approach than anything else I’ve read.
It would appear that he is one of political characters uniquely suited to the moment. But as Fallows notes, there may be some lessons about political skill, experience and talent that could be learned by all of us as we make decisions about who to represent us:
The truth is that a reliance on rules and a mistrust of mere politicians have come close to ruining public life in California. “When given a choice between human judgments and formulas, we’ve always chosen the formulas,” Joe Mathews says. He is critical of Brown in many ways, and yet he says, “I would rather let the Jerry Browns of the world make decisions for me than some crazy set of rules someone thought would help.”
California has once more led the way for the nation: through the past generation in showing the damage that disdain for politics can do, and in the past three years in its demonstration of the all-fronts embrace of politics needed to repair the damage. That California’s broken government is still functioning is largely because Jerry Brown has spent his life studying its machinery. In California, new governors are expected to propose detailed budgets within weeks of their election. Brown had the advantage of having already been through eight budget cycles. From his years as mayor, he knew the budget tricks that cities try to pull on the state, for instance the redevelopment-agency con. From the many campaigns he had won, and lost, he had learned the difference between fights that were tough but winnable, like the push to pass Proposition 30, and those that mean certain defeat, like challenging California’s direct-democracy system. With the perspective of 30 years, he has seen which of his early programs have proved to be farsighted and effective, notably his environmental and clean-energy initiatives; and which have gone nowhere, notably his fascination with colonizing space.
From his earliest days, the mother tongue Jerry Brown heard spoken around him was that of politics. California is an exceptional state, and his career in politics is not likely to be duplicated. But a country conditioned to dismiss the skills of deal making, persuasion, and sheer immersion in politics can learn a great deal from what he has achieved.
Maybe political experience matters after all.
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QOTD: Robert Borosage
by digby
There is an idiocy about our current national politics that is simply stupefying. We are sitting idly, watching, and suffering, as our nation disintegrates into a run-down backwater. Our airports are a global disgrace. Our railroads, broadband, energy grid are all outmoded by international standards. A bridge falls every other day. Our sewage systems are overwhelmed by normal use, and collapse in the extreme weather that has become the national norm. Sinkholes now are becoming a life-threatening peril.
At the same time, over 20 million people are in need of full-time work. The construction industry has still not recovered from the housing collapse. The federal government can borrow money at interest rates near zero. Yet instead of grabbing this opportunity to rebuild the country, Washington is focused on cutting budgets, an austerity that clearly costs jobs and impedes the recovery.
Any business leader with a wit of sense would say this is the perfect time to borrow money to rebuild the country, making investments now that will make us more competitive in the future. That’s why the head of the Business Roundtable, former Republican governor John Engler, says it. At the top of his wish list for the economy is borrowing money to invest in roads and infrastructure. The resulting growth will more than repay the virtually free money. We’ll end up with a more competitive economy, a healthier and modern infrastructure that will make lives easier and safer, more jobs, more income, more taxes and less debt.
We can’t. Because socialism.
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There’s a difference between “passing the Senate” and “clearing a Republican filibuster”
by David Atkins
Journalists need to stop saying that bills with at least 51 votes but not 60 votes “don’t have the votes to pass the Senate.” They do have the votes to pass the Senate. They just don’t have the votes to pass a Republican filibuster. Case in point: Immigration reform and The Hill:
Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) said Friday that the “Gang of Eight” immigration bill doesn’t have enough votes to pass the Senate.
The bill won approval from the Senate Judiciary Committee in a 13-5 vote, but Menendez said it lacks the 60 votes necessary to clear the Senate — despite the bill’s four Republican co-sponsors.
That is simply inaccurate reporting. Accurate reporting would say that immigration reform “lacks the votes to overcome a Republican filibuster in the Senate.” Accurate reporting would put the onus on the obstructionist party and on the arcane, anti-democratic rules that allow the obstructionist party to block every piece of legislation it wants to on a whim.
If a bill has 51 votes, it can pass the Senate. It’s just that the obstructionist minority is using what should be a desperation tactic as a run-of-the-mill procedure to stop anything positive from getting done. And they’re allowed to do it without even having to stand in the well and make speeches laying out their unpopular positions for all the world to see. Journalists covering D.C. shouldn’t let the fact that the extreme has become the habitual stop them from reporting the truth.
It’s 51 votes to pass. It’s 60 votes to clear an obstructionist filibuster.
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Big Mac Hero
by digby
I’m not a major McDonalds fan, but this is great
Life is good for this Ohio hero.
Just one day after a group of Cleveland restaurants announced plans to give local man Charles Ramsey free burgers for life, McDonald’s quietly confirmed that it will offer him free food for a year.
Ramsey’s quirky interviews detailing his efforts to help free kidnapping victims Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight earlier in May made the dishwasher famous — especially the part about him eating a McDonald’s Big Mac moments before the rescue.
The three women had been abducted, held in a squalid house and abused for roughly a decade, allegedly by homeowner Ariel Castro. On May 6, Ramsey heard Amanda Berry’s screams from his neighboring porch and helped break down Castro’s door.
As word of Ramsey’s heroics spread, the Internet inundated McDonald’s with suggestions to offer him a reward.
Ramsay was really just being a decent human being, but I guess it’s rare enough these days that it deserves a reward.
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