Month: September 2014

Saturday Night at the Movies

The twee of life

by Dennis Hartley

I love Scottish pop: God Help the Girl

As far as plotless yet pleasingly pastoral Scottish musicals centering on mentally unstable young female protagonists yearning to become pop stars go, I suppose you could do worse than God Help the Girl. Sort of an oddball cross between Alan Moyle’s manic-depressive 1980 music biz drama Times Square and Gillian Armstrong’s kooky, sunny-side-up 1982 new wave musical, Starstruck, the film (written, directed and scored by Belle & Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch) stars Emily Browning as Eve, a clinically depressed young Glaswegian with musical inclinations…and the soul of a poet. Oh, and a cool beret.

When we first meet her, Eve is in hospital for psychiatric counseling and treatment for an eating disorder. She has a habit of sneaking out to hit the live music clubs when no one is looking. During one of these excursions, Eve Meets Cute with a bespectacled, nebbish-y singer-guitarist named James (Olly Alexander), but not before witnessing the onstage dissolution of his band (an argument over volume levels results in show-stopping fisticuffs with his drummer during their opening number). James quickly intuits that Eve has a decent voice, a unique charisma and a natural gift for songwriting. He introduces Eve to his friend Cassie (Hannah Murray), an aspiring singer. Guess what happens next…

There’s not much of a “story” to speak of, but Murdoch does sustain a kind of baroque mood throughout; an impressionistic rendering of a bittersweet, youthful summer idyll informed by Browning and Murray’s dreamy, airy, vocal performances and Murdoch’s lovely chamber pop-influenced melodies (and he’s not afraid to wear his influences on his sleeve…in one of the music sequences, he has Browning hold up a 45 RPM copy of “Pretty Ballerina” by the Left Banke). I found the baroque vibe pleasantly invocative of Paul McCartney’s Give My Regards to Broad Street (yes, I’m one of those contrarians who actually dug Sir Paul’s dreaded “vanity film”). While the jury is still out on whether this is a rock’n’roll fable aspiring to be a musical, or a musical aspiring to be a rock’n’roll fable, if you accept it as a collection of endearing music videos interstitially linked by a (very) loosely constructed narrative, you just might get away with calling it entertaining.

(In limited release and on PPV)

Previous posts with related themes:

We Are the Best
Top 10 Rock Musicals

Saturday Night at the Movies review archives 

P.S. No, seriously. I really do love Scottish pop:

Let’s drop some bombs

by digby

It’ll make us feel better:

Yep, this economy continues to suck. How can that be when we are the greatest country the world has ever known?

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And now a word from our isolationist libertarian Republican leadership

by digby

In case anyone was wondering if Rand Paul would be as consistent a libertarian on matters of national security and war as he is on denying health care to sick people and lowering taxes on the rich, I think you have your answer:

Rand Paul’s views on war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria continue to evolve. Speaking to reporters on the campaign trail Friday afternoon, the Kentucky senator didn’t rule out supporting the deployment of U.S. combat troops on the ground in Iraq.

“Senator Rubio this week said that combat troops on the ground–American combat troops–could be a possibility if the current strategy doesn’t work,” one reporter said after a campaign event featuring Paul and New Hampshire senatorial candidate Scott Brown. “Senator Paul, would you support such a move?”

“I think some of it depends on what the events are. So events do change over time,” Paul replied. “I’m a stickler for the Constitution, and the Constitution says Congress needs to determine these things.” Back in June, Paul wrote in the Wall Street Journal that “we should not put any U.S. troops on the ground in Iraq, unless it is to secure or evacuate U.S. personnel and diplomatic facilities.”

Yes, there’s the good old process dodge. We need a vote! Ok Senator, but how would you vote? Uhm. We need a vote! (Also ,I need to be able to properly calculate the politics and how it would impact my presidential chances …important stuff like that.)

Paul also told reporters that it would be legal for the U.S. military to target U.S. citizens with lethal force in Iraq and Syria if they are engaged in battle–a position consistent with his past statements. But Paul declined to say if it would be legal to kill a U.S. citizen and ISIS member who is only plotting a terrorist attack in Iraq and Syria.

“If you are engaged with battle against the United States, you really do not get due process on the battlefield. If you want to fight against the United States, you’re a target. Already, I think two Americans have been killed,” Paul said.

Did I miss the constitutionally required vote to declare war Rand? Some stickler …

Paul has been very critical of the Obama administration’s decision to kill U.S. citizen and al Qaeda operative Anwar Awlaki in Yemen with a drone strike. The issue prompted him to wage a 13-hour filibuster with the sole purpose of getting the president to promise not to kill Americans with a drone strike “in a cafe in San Francisco” or anywhere else on American soil.

Earlier this year, Paul objected to the nomination of a judge over the issue. Paul wrote in the New York Times that he couldn’t support a nominee without “fully understanding that person’s views concerning the extrajudicial killing of American citizens.”

“Under our Constitution, [Awlaki] should have been tried — in absentia, if necessary — and allowed a legal defense,” Paul wrote. “The Obama administration has established a legal justification that applies to every American citizen, whether in Yemen, Germany or Canada.”
I asked Paul twice if it would be legal to target a U.S. citizen in Iraq or Syria who was in a similar situation to Awlaki’s, but the senator didn’t directly answer the quest
I asked Paul again if he could answer the question, reminding him of his 13-hour filibuster on the issue, but he was escorted out of the room by his press aides without answering the question.

This was the second press conference that Paul had abruptly ended on Friday. Earlier that morning, following a New Hampshire GOP unity breakfast in Manchester, Paul acknowledged for the first time that his views about going to war with ISIS have changed. But the senator, apparently displeased with the questions, ended the media availability after just two minutes and six seconds.

“Five years ago, if you asked me about ISIS, I would have said well you don’t need to do anything. So I mean obviously, the events do change your opinion. And your opinion of when a vital interest is being threatened is influenced by, you know, the beheading of two Americans,” Paul said.

So there you have it. If anyone was counting on Paul to stand tall in the GOP and fight against their hawkish impulses, I think we can see how that’s going to go. No, he won’t be John McCain. But he won’t be Ron Paul either. He can’t be. Republicans are libertarian up to the point at which it requires Ameria to relinquish its status as a military empire. No modern Republican Senator, certainly not one from the South with its proud martial culture and heritage, can be an isolationist.

But then I suspect that most libertarians (the majority of whom are younger white males) are fine with that. Just don’t make any laws and regulations that curtail their personal freedom or require them to pay money for something they don’t immediately and directly benefit. That’s where the real line is drawn.

War? Well, let’s just say it’s very convenient that the warmongers always say they’re “protecting our freedom” regardless of whether our freedom is in any way at stake.

The good news for Republicans is that Senate hopeful Scott Brown was unequivocal:

“Let me jump in on that,” Scott Brown interjected. “When people are in ISIS, then they’ve left their citizenship at the door.”

“I agree with Senator Cruz,” said Brown, a former Massachusetts senator, who had just been endorsed that day by Rand Paul. “I’m glad [Senator Cruz] filed the bill that I filed twice already to strip them of that citizenship. They should not be able to hide behind the rights and privileges guaranteed by the Constitution, especially when they’re looking to hurt and kill our citizens.”

But what if these Americans are just planning attacks, not immediately fighting? “It doesn’t matter,” Brown said. “They’ve left their citizenship at the door.”

And we’ll “know” who they are and what they’re doing because … how? Whatever. We just will.

Interesting that someone running statewide in New Hampshire feels good about evoking the name of Ted Cruz. He’s quite the role model.

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So they aren’t more dangerous to us than al Qaeda after all? Why would they have said that?

by digby

Ok, wait a minute.  The last I heard ISIS was so uniquely evil that they were even worse than al-Qaeda. In fact, they were so bad that al-Qaeda kicked them out of the gang because of their brutality.

So, what do we make of this?

While the Islamic State group is getting the most attention now, another band of extremists in Syria — a mix of hardened jihadis from Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria and Europe — poses a more direct and imminent threat to the United States, working with Yemeni bomb-makers to target U.S. aviation, American officials say.

At the center is a cell known as the Khorasan group, a cadre of veteran al-Qaida fighters from Afghanistan and Pakistan who traveled to Syria to link up with the al-Qaida affiliate there, the Nusra Front.

But the Khorasan militants did not go to Syria principally to fight the government of President Bashar Assad, U.S. officials say. Instead, they were sent by al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri to recruit Europeans and Americans whose passports allow them to board a U.S.-bound airliner with less scrutiny from security officials.

In addition, according to classified U.S. intelligence assessments, the Khorasan militants have been working with bomb-makers from al-Qaida’s Yemen affiliate to test new ways to slip explosives past airport security. The fear is that the Khorasan militants will provide these sophisticated explosives to their Western recruits who could sneak them onto U.S.-bound flights.

The Obama administration has said that the Islamic State group, the target of more than 150 U.S. airstrikes in recent weeks, does not pose an imminent threat to the continental U.S. The Khorasan group, which has not been subject to American military action, is considered the more immediate threat.

So al Qaeda is actually the group that we must keep from killing us all in our beds, not ISIS? Just like we’ve been keeping them from killing us in our beds for 13 years?

Huh …

I’m being facetious and it’s probably inappropriate. But many of us have been pointing out for months the reason Al Qaeda split with ISIS was because it was being too brutal to fellow Muslims when al Qaeda’s mission was to take on the Great Satan — just as it has been for a decade and a half. In other words, little had changed for Americans in the threat department. Al Qaeda still wants to kill us but we’ve been pretty successful at keeping them from doing that. For some reason we needed a new boogeyman. I wonder why?

We’ve spent trillions on Homeland Security, outfitted every Barney Fife in the nation with robo-cop gear and allowed the government to spy on Americans at will.  I don’t know about you but I kind of expect that all of that should actually be worth something. If we’re going to run around tearing our hair out every time somebody puts out a scary video maybe it’s time to re-evaluate that strategy.

This is not to say that there isn’t a threat for the people in the Middle East and there is a legitimate argument to be made that it requires intervention from outside the region lest the whole place blows up even further. (I’m not sure we won’t make things worse — we usually do — but I understand the arguments for it.) What is galling is the fact that they continue to treat us like children and tell us spooky bedtime stories so they can scare us into supporting their commercial/geopolitical goals. Maybe those goals are worth pursuing but we’ll never know because we’re chasing evil Ninjas who are allegedly coming over the border to unleash mushroom clouds on American cities.

I’m serious. This is what Fox News reporter Todd Starnes said on Hannity last night:

RT @toddstarnes “what will O call it when there’s a mushroom cloud over an American city because terrorists came over the border to attack”
— Liberty Lives Here (@PJimmy18) September 13, 2014

And frankly, I’m almost as disgusted that the American people continue to be thrilled at the prospect of kicking ass over some trumped up threat — and yes, I do believe that a whole lot of us are anxious to get back to the business of ass-kicking. It’s much more exciting than thinking about the wealthy elites stealing more and more of your meager earnings. But it’s a dangerous and nasty way to entertain ourselves out of a nasty malaise.

Al Qaeda has a strategy to create dramatic terrorist attacks on the West.  We’ve known this for a long, long time. That has not changed.  ISIS is a different problem. The fact that the war hawks pimped this line about ISIS being worse than Al Qaeda should make everyone skeptical of what they are hearing about this whole thing — and skeptical of the motivations behind it.  How many times do we have to be lied to?

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HH:  … I want to ask you the Politico question. In today’s Politico, Robert C. O’Brien and I write an article called Romney 3.0, Third Time’s A Charm. What do you think? Is it possible he’s going to get in? 

CT: I think he only gets in if he’s drafted. I feel like that that’s the hint he’s been saying, and I’ve talked to some folks who know him very well. He is not going to go through a grueling primary campaign. He is not going to sit here and defend his conservative credentials again, go through schlepping around, allowing all these guys to take pot shots on him. I think he is open to this if it’s a draft movement, and if it’s sort of like everybody else doesn’t fit. 

Now here’s why I think Mitt Romney, it’s funny you bring this up, because I think the reason why Romney 3.0 has gotten traction is less about Romney, and more about the current issues of the day. I think the Republican 2016 field as we thought we knew it, think Scott Walker, think Chris Christie, think Marco Rubio, think Bobby Jindal, you know, throw those names in. I think if you have issues like national security front and center, that’s an incredibly shrinking, I feel like all of those guys are suddenly shrinking in stature. None of them, if the chief criticism of Barack Obama by a lot of people is you know what, he just wasn’t experienced enough, he just didn’t have a grasp of everything you needed to know to be able to be commander-in-chief, right?

HH: Yeah. 

CT: That’s among, particularly among the conservative criticisms. Well then, how does Scott Walker fit into that? How does Chris Christie? How does Bobby Jindal? How does Marco Rubio? You know, they don’t, and so suddenly, Mitt Romney, while not having a lot of experience on foreign policy, certainly running for president and certainly now he can go back and say hey, I made these points against the President, and I look a little more prescient today than maybe some people thought three years ago. 

So I think that’s why he seems to look larger right now in stature because of the issues of the day that are front and center, and if you look at the rest of this Republican field. They don’t seem as if they have the resume to reassure hawks in the party. 

HH: Prescient as always. Chuck Todd, we’ll be watching Sunday for Jim Baker. Thanks for joining us.

Todd’s absolutely correct. All of these ex-Governors with no foreign policy experience don’t look all that exciting when the focus is on foreign policy. That’s why Mitt Romney, the ex-Governor with no foreign policy experience, is such an intriguing prospect. He’s run for president twice and lost which is almost the same thing as being Commander in Chief.  Plus he can say I told you so, which is always a reassuring appeal.

Really, is there any other choice?

Prescient as always.

Inequality is bad for the economy

by digby

There are only so many dead painters these rich people can employ at a time so this seems like common sense to me, but waddo I know?

That’s the big take-away from a new report prepared for G20 labour and employment ministers by three global economic organizations: the United Nations’ International Labour Organization, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the World Bank.

“Extensive evidence shows that high levels of income inequality tend to reinforce themselves,” says the report. And this has a negative impact on “long-term growth protential.”

The report zeros in on “stagnating wage income” and a “deterioration in job quality” across advanced G20 economies, pointing to a “long-term decline” in the share of wealth in the pockets of workers:

Boy a war would sure be a nice distraction about now, amirite? Make us feel good about ourselves again. Like we aren’t losers.

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Are we holding the leash or wearing the collar?
by Tom Sullivan

Naomi Klein contemplates the struggle between climate change and the globalization juggernaut. It is a struggle she once left to environmentalists. But having struggled with infertility and having covered the Gulf oil spill, her perspective changed. “It’s not that I got in touch with my inner Earth Mother,” Klein writes, “it’s that I started to notice that if the Earth is indeed our mother, then she is a mother facing a great many fertility challenges of her own.”

That climate change is linked to our lifestyle and our economy – and our attempts to deal with planetary warming without changing either – is the crux of Klein’s long piece in the Guardian:

“What is wrong with us? I think the answer is far more simple than many have led us to believe: we have not done the things needed to cut emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism, the reigning ideology for the entire period we have struggled to find a way out of this crisis. We are stuck, because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe – and benefit the vast majority – are threatening to an elite minority with a stranglehold over our economy, political process and media.”

Read: Billionaires with good intentions, flashy pronouncements, and market-driven solutions have failed to curb emissions. Much of the piece focuses on Richard Branson’s failed, but much ballyhooed efforts to apply a the same business savvy that made him rich to save the planet.

The idea that only capitalism can save the world from a crisis it created is no longer an abstract theory; it’s a hypothesis that has been tested in the real world. We can now take a hard look at the results: at the green products shunted to the back of the supermarket shelves at the first signs of recession; at the venture capitalists who were meant to bankroll a parade of innovation but have come up far short; at the fraud-infested, boom-and-bust carbon market that has failed to cut emissions. And, most of all, at the billionaires who were going to invent a new form of enlightened capitalism but decided, on second thoughts, that the old one was just too profitable to surrender.

Post-Reagan, deregulated capitalism has long looked like something out of Mary Shelley or science-fiction films, a creature we created, but no longer control. Billionaires and their acolytes see only its benefits, but as Jeff Goldblum’s Dr. Ian Malcolm says in The Lost World: Jurassic Park, “Oh, yeah. Oooh, ahhh, that’s how it always starts. Then later there’s running, and then screaming.” Where once We the People held capitalism’s leash, now we wear the collar.

Whether it’s turning your child’s education from a shared public cost into a corporate profit center; or turning the principle of one-man, one-vote into one-dollar, one-vote; or carbon tax credits and accounting tricks for addressing rising sea levels; questioning the universal application of a business approach to any human need or problem prompts the challenge, “Do you have something against making a profit?” A more subtle form of red-baiting, this ploy is supposed to be a conversation stopper. Yes? You’re a commie. Game over.

Maybe it’s time our billionaire problem-solvers got over themselves.

Will The Tricks Used To Sell War in 2003 Work in 2014? 

by Spocko

“You can’t change the world with words Bill, unless you write those words in the evening news with blood.” – Tom Bowen, In the movie Non-Stop

Glenn Beck tried to cash in on the feeling of unity many had after 9/11. His 9/12 project in 2009 was BS. But he did understand there was unity after 9/11/2001. He wanted to capture and use the anger and bloodlust, the feeling, “Let’s all get the bastards who did this.”

He wasn’t the only one using the bodies of the dead to get what he wanted. The desire for vengeance was stoked and consciously used by the Bush/Cheney White House to get us into Iraq. But the sale of war in Iraq needed more than raw emotion from 2001, it needed mind-changing visuals, serious authority figures, big money support and clever catch phrases. Remember:

• Photos of mobile labs with anthrax vials?
• Ex-Pentagon generals vs. anti-war actresses and actors on TV?
• The media ignoring who was paying the retired generals?
• Slick word play the WH used to link 9/11 anger to Saddam? (BTW, that was linguistic evil genius.)

And who can forget this deadly visual word poem.

“Smoking gun in the shape of a mushroom cloud.” 

They won’t be able to do it again, right? We are smarter now. Many of us even spotted it all at the time. But it didn’t stop the war train. How do we use our knowledge this time?

Can they use our emotion like last time? After 13 years the confusion, sadness, anger and desire to act has diminished.  And now we have been lied to. And bilked. And emotionally manipulated by professionals.

If someone wants to evoke that 9/12 feeling again they need a fresh jolt to the system. Like beheadings.

Following 9/12/2001 the rage and anger was scaled up to include entire regions. The right wing wanted an entire religious faith to be punished. Any suggestion of trying to understand who did it and why it happened was mocked. Anything less than “glass parking lots” was “letting the terrorists win.”

But in 2014 you can start asking questions. Might there be another way to deal with this current atrocity? Can there be a direct police-type action for the crime?

We’ve learned from the 2003 run up to the Iraq War. Yes, a lot of us knew what was up at the time, but our protests were ignored. What will we do differently this time? New chants? Or can we use the tools and leverage we have now we didn’t have before?

The Fall War Launch Needs New Words, Images, People and Emotion

We know how they sold the Iraq War to us. Spot the tricks this time! Look for:

Words. Notice the words and phrases being used this time. “Boots on the ground.” It’s all about protecting our people. Drones aren’t “boots in the air” so they are fine. This shift in focus from people to machines should lead us to look at the cost, but will it?

Keep an eye on the word degrade, that’s an emotional word pawned off as a military and physical action. Degrade has that, “It happens over a long period of time” feeling to it. That’s intentional.


Images. The beheading videos are powerful, but they won’t be showing them over and over. That means the military will offer up successful bombing videos–from a distance. Look for what they don’t want us to see.
Closer in photos of the innocent dead.

Of course if these photos slip out they will be condemned as inciting violence toward us. The people who provide them (or retweet and publish them) will be labeled traitors for  helping the terrorists. Fox News will remind people of all the bad people we killed without loss of US lives. They will probably do a fair and balanced chart of it.

People. Keep an eye out for the retired Generals. Who pays them? Do they work for people selling drones?  Could someone please check them now? Call the TV producers and demand they mention their affiliations. Also, who is paying the think tank people? Foreign governments? Defense contractors?

The media already has brought on tired old “experts” to make the case for war, but who is new in the media opposing war? If our “boots on the ground” aren’t in danger, can we get some accountants on to talk about the cost of these drone strikes?  How about representatives of the innocent dead? Someone from a Big 8 Peace firm?  Who do you suggest?

Emotion. If they can’t get anger, they will go for fear. Any attack in the US or on US interests will be linked to ISIL faster than you can say, Al Qaeda in Iraq.

I’ve heard three experts say it would be very hard for ISIL to attack the US. They will find someone who says they can. He will be in heavy rotation on Fox.

How do you stop them from using emotion? You can’t, but you can offer other emotions. Like courage.

Denying Them Their War Propoganda

David Swanson wrote an interesting piece,  James Foley Is Not a War Ad

He makes the point, with video to back it up, that Foley would not have wanted the video of his death to be used this way.

What if people in the United States were to watch the video of Foley when he was alive and speaking and laughing, not the one when he was a prop in a piece of propaganda almost certainly aimed at provoking the violence that Obama has just obligingly announced?

I can’t speak for the dead, Foley was human and I understand the reaction of most, “Let’s get the bastards who did this.”  But who he was leads me to believe he wouldn’t want his death to be scaled up to a war.

We can’t control the actions of the group called ISIL, but we can control our response to them. Let’s not let the bastards who lied and manipulated us into the last war get away with it again.

Cue The Who.

Here, have some salad. It’s nice and crispy.

by digby

A nice reminder that this person might have been involved in making policy:

“They are so full of deception that America should be concerned with the policies that are going on. And, as I watched the speech last night, Sean, the thought going through my mind is ‘I owe America a global apology. Because John McCain, through all of this, John McCain should be our president.’ He had the advice, today, still giving it to Barack Obama, and he will not listen to it, about the residual forces that must be left behind in order to secure the peace in Iraq that we had fought so hard for.”

“That triangle, of course, the foundation in the region of their power, for it to be taken over by the bad guys, that could have been avoided had Barack Obama listened to the best military advice, and that was ‘Barack, you have to leave that residual force in order to continue what it is we are doing.’ We don’t have to have combat troops over there at that time, but that residual force in order to secure….but, no, and now here we are saying, uh, well, it’s going to take boots on the ground to win this thing, and yet, we’re not going to send boots on the ground? We’re going to contract this thing out when there is no mightier power than the red, white, and blue?”

No mightier power than the red, white and blue…

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If there’s one thing we should be worried about in this world it’s the “chickifying” of football

by digby

According to Rush everyone’s ruining the game of football by denouncing domestic violence:

“Folks, … this is crazy,” Rush Limbaugh said on the Friday edition of his successful radio talk show. “We’re feminizing this game, and it’s a man’s game, and if we keep feminizing this game, we’re going to ruin it; if we keep ‘chickifying’ this game, we’re going to ruin it. It’s going to become something that it was never intended to be.”

Limbaugh’s worry came in response to the growing demands for introspection being directed toward the NFL in the wake of the public release of video showing Ray Rice assaulting his partner. “So many men — executive in the league, and sports [media] — are in a race to see who can be the most politically correct, feminized guy,” Limbaugh said. “It’s comical.”

Seriously, what kind of a real man doesn’t knock out his girlfriend in an elevator once in a while, amirite? And the fact that he didn’t even seem to be slightly concerned about the fact that she was unconscious just further proves his manliness. He dragged her out of the elevator didn’t he? What more do these feminazis want?

I honestly don’t know what it will take for decent people to reject Rush LImbaugh, but you would think that any decent person would find these comments beyond the pale. It’s fair to assume that anyone who doesn’t isn’t a decent person.

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