The most beautiful thing I’ve seen all year
by digby
Ballet dancer Sergei Polunin – dubbed the “bad boy of ballet” – dances to Hozier’s Grammy-nominated hit Take Me To Church in this powerful performance choreographed by Jade Hale-Christofi.
WTH was this about?
by digby
Nobody seems to care much about the stories over the past couple of weeks about the Saudi Arabian government being closely involved in terrorism despite the fact the New York Times published the stories on A1. The latest by James Risen discussed the history of the lawsuits against the Saudis by the families of 9/11. It’s mostly a recitation of legal errors and judicial findings with a focus on lead lawyer Ron Motley. But at the end it had this weird little story:
By far the most mysterious episode in the case revolves around some of the investigators Mr. Motley brought in to investigate Saudi Arabia. Working through a small investigative firm called Rosetta Research and Consulting, which was formed to work on the case, some of the investigators also became involved in operations with the F.B.I. and later the Drug Enforcement Administration. Most notably, they were involved in an operation to lure an Afghan drug lord to the United States. In 2005, they persuaded the Afghan, Haji Bashir Noorzai, to go to New York, where he was arrested by the Drug Enforcement Administration. He has since been convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
The role of the investigators from the Sept. 11 lawsuit in the Noorzai operation was baffling and embarrassing to many top officials in the government, and the connections between the investigators and the F.B.I. prompted an investigation by the Justice Department’s inspector general, which never made its findings public. Mr. Motley and his firm, Motley Rice, ultimately cut their ties, and Rosetta collapsed.
I don’t know what in the world to make of that and Risen doesn’t offer anything more.
This we do know — the GWOT has offered tremendous tremendous opportunities for government to work hand in glove with the private sector to the benefit of both. This weird little sideshow is probably just the tip of the iceberg.
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QOTD: A depressed maverick
by digby
I think McCain sees the dynamic correctly here. The public is not going to see this as an argument between the Republicans and the Democrats:
“The American people did not give us majority to have a fight between House and Senate Republicans,” McCain said, referring to Republicans taking control of both the House and Senate after November’s congressional elections. “They want things done. You cannot cut funding from the Department of Homeland Security. We need to sit down and work this thing out.”
Boehner’s holding fast. But as I wrote yesterday, this is a very dicey proposition for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is what McCain says above: Republicans cannot shutter the Department of Homeland Security and maintain one of their most cherished conceits as the manly defenders of all we hold dear. McCain knows that and so does Mitch McConnell who is so far unwilling to nuke the filibuster just so the House Tea Party can poke President Obama in the eye. These Senate Republicans understand that the GOP is widely understood to be the government shutdown artists and the public is not going to blame the Senate Democrats for doing it no matter how much they try to blame them for it. They have a well-deserved reputation for pulling this stunt.
Shutting down Homeland Security is taking it to a new level however, going after a big Republican constituency (national police personnel along with ex-military and flag waving patriots) at a time when foreign policy and national security are at the top of the agenda. Very risky business for them.
Watch the GOP presidential candidates over the next week or so and we’ll probably see whether the establishment is just doing a kabuki dance or if they’re really nervous.
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Jebbies little secret
by digby
I wrote a piece for Salon about Jeb Bush’s foreign policy. I recount the history of Poppy and Junior and their relationship to the “realists” vs the “neocons.” I recapped some of the familiar stuff about the Project for a New American Century and then this:
And what does all this have to do with Jeb? Well, he happens to be the only Bush who was a card-carrying member of the PNAC. He was a neocon long before neocons were cool. In fact, one must suspect that his early defiance of his father and brother in this regard signals the act of a True Believer. He didn’t need to do it. He was Governor of Florida, not head of the Senate Armed Services Committee. He must have really thought the cause was righteous.
Now he’s in the terrible position of having to distance himself from the reckless foreign policy mistakes of his brother — mistakes that were initiated by the neoconservative claque of which he is a charter member. He’s forced to pretend that he’s actually an adherent of his father’s foreign policy school when in fact he was among those who rejected it with disdain back in the 1990s, an act which led to his brother’s fateful decision to invade Iraq without good cause.
Trying to manage these various pulls of family loyalty and defiance with all these warring ideological constituencies would be a challenge to the most skilled politician who has been sharpening his game for years in anticipation of a presidential run. That politician is not Jeb Bush. Right now he’s being given a smooth ride because the press and the political establishment is afraid that the lunatic fringe might get a crack at the white house and they see Jeb as the only sane alternative. The problem is that Jeb’s one of the crazies too, always has been.
The bottom line is this: if you liked Dick Cheney, you’re going to love President Jeb Bush. It turns out that Jeb’s the guy W was pretending to be.
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Brat-worst
by
You remember Dave Brat, right? The kingslayer who (with the help of Laura Ingraham) took down Eric Cantor?
He’s everything the Tea Party could have ever hoped he’d be. Here’s a little something he said in support of cutting off education funding:
The greatest thinkers in Western civ were not products of education policy. Socrates trained Plato in on a rock and then Plato trained in Aristotle, roughly speaking, on a rock. So, huge funding is not necessary to achieve the greatest minds and the greatest intellects in history.
In other words, they were homeschooled.
And so with that said, we do face huge challenges, in our kids coming out of the high school system right now, if we ask them what a business is, we’d be challenged to get a good answer. We all talk about skills and all this kinds of things. So we have huge challenges; I want to work together on that. Our kids do compete against India and China, etc. right now in a global economy, and we’re not winning. And economics is a win-win; it’s not that India and China should lose, we can all trade together and get rich together and so it’s a win-win thing. […]
We can all do better; I think if we really want to do better, we need to get private sector folks into every single one of our schools, get the CEOs in the schools and move beyond this, this narrow policy debate, and really have a revolution … Our kids do not know what a business is when they graduate from high school. They need to know that. So we can talk skills and this, that, and the other thing, but we’re not going to have any success until we do work together at that much higher level and shoot for true success for our kids.
Wonkette added:
For one thing, the schools need to teach word salad skills a lot better. By the end of his three or so minutes, we were half ready for Rep. Brat to thank everyone for choosing him as Miss Teen South Carolina. For another, is he really sure about that business thing? We’ve personally seen, with our very own eyes, plenty of high school students who are capable of walking into a store and making a purchase without the least hesitation. Or who can sell us a taco with only minimal assistance. Can’t say we’ve ever seen a teenager confuse a business for a church, a gazebo, or a funicular station. But perhaps we’ve just seen a particularly gifted group of teens. In any case, if we merely fill our high schools with CEOs, we’ll soon have a whole bunch of budding Aristotles going around starting businesses, because if there’s anything the Greek philosophers are famous for, it’s for teaching on rocks and being entrepreneurs.
Oh, also, the Republicans on the committee Brat serves on want to change the way federal funding for students living in poverty is allocated, so that even less money goes to schools in poor communities and more to middle and upper-income districts. Rep. Brat is willing to provide each urban high school with a nice rock, however.
“We can talk skills and this and that and the other thing …” but what we need is to get rid of all the teachers (waaaay to many wimmin, which is undoubtedly a BIG part of the problem) and get CEOs in the schools teaching CEO-ship to children. I don’t know who will be CEOing their companies, but maybe they can ship those jobs overseas?
You have to wonder what Cantor’s thinking. He was a wingnut of wingnuts but he wasn’t a fool. The GOP prefers fools. But then he catered to the lowest common denominator for years for cynical political gain. What did he expect?
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Boo hoo
by digby
Megyn Kelly says Jon Stewart made her cry.
“They think he’s funny, they think he’s a force for good and everyone wants to celebrate him, and I’m here to tell you that he reduced some people to tears,” Kelly said.
She followed the comment with a good natured laugh, but left the impression that Stewart has made her cry at some point.In addition to questioning whether Stewart has been a force for good, Kelly spoke about his “nasty” demeanor.
“While I enjoy consuming his news product — his fake news product — at home and laughing at it, I don’t think overall he has been a force for good,” she said. “Because I think in his later years he got a little nasty, I think he got a little burnt out. And I can speak personally to a lot of the attacks that were levied on me had no foothold in the facts.”
I’m sure it’s hard being a Fox News anchor and having half the country thinks you’re a sell-out shill for conservatives and big business. But as Don Draper said to Peggy Olson: “That’s what the money’s for!”
As for his commentary having no “foothold in the facts” well he does use footage from her show and it’s true her show usually has no “foothold in the facts.” But that’s not his fault.
She also thinks it’s bad for Democratic candidates who go on his show regularly to be associated with his show. Apparently all the Republican politicians, pundits and authors he treats with much more respect and civility than any liberal would ever find on Fox News are fine with it.
Is it something in the water?
by Tom Sullivan
Is there something in London’s water? From the Not Gonna Happen Here Dept.:
The Conservative party needs to break its dependence on millionaires, the former Tory chancellor Ken Clarke has told the Observer, amid a growing furore over the tax affairs of the party’s donors.
After a week of some of the most intense fighting between the parties in recent years, Clarke said the Conservatives would be strengthened by loosening the hold of rich men on their financial survival.
He called on David Cameron to cap political donations and increase state funding of political parties to put an end to damaging scandals and rows. The Conservatives have been rocked in the past week by a potentially toxic combination of allegations of tax evasion by clients of the HSBC bank, whose chairman, Lord Green, became a Tory minister; tax avoidance by party donors; and leaked details of the secretive black and white fundraising ball.
Meanwhile here in the Colonies, The Man Who Would Be Bush III is looking to lock in Mitt Romney’s network of presidential campaign donors from the “private equity and investment worlds.” It’s a trick Jeb Bush learned from his no-accountability brother, George. Suck all the air out of the GOP candidates’ Green Room room along with the money:
“It’s absolutely a kind of aggressive shock-and-awe strategy to vacuum up as much of the fund-raising network as you possibly can,” said Dirk Van Dongen, the president of the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors and a prolific Romney fund-raiser now helping Bush. “And they’re having a large measure of success.”
On the other side of the pond, however, the conservative Ken Clarke has had the scales fall from his eyes:
“What happens is that the Conservatives attack the Labour party for being ever more dependent on rather unrepresentative leftwing trade union leaders, and the Labour party spends all its time attacking the Conservative party for being dependent on rather unrepresentative wealthy businessmen. In a way both criticisms are true. And the media sends both up.
“The solution is for the party leaders to get together to agree, put on their tin hats and move to a more sensible and ultimately more defensible system.”
As previously noted, Clarke wants to see a cap on political donations. And it’s not just Tories having attacks of common sense:
Announcing that a Labour government would launch an independent investigation into the culture and practices of HMRC [Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs service] with regard to tax avoidance, [Labour leader Ed] Miliband told a Welsh Labour conference in Swansea: “The government’s failure to tackle tax avoidance is no accident. It has turned a blind eye to tax avoidance because it thinks that so long as a few at the top do well, the country succeeds. It thinks that wealth and power fence people off from responsibility. It thinks the rules only apply to everybody else.”
Imagine that.
Could any of this be contagious? Maybe there’s a vaccine they’re not taking in London that Villagers can not take here.
Saturday Night at the Movies
Gidget goes submissive
By Dennis Hartley
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| Fifty Shades of Grey: Makes 2 hours feel like 9 1/2 Weeks |
Fifty Shades of Grey is either the most cleverly arch soft core porn parody of all time, or…they were trying to be serious. Hang on a sec (with apologies to John Stewart), I’m just receiving word that yes, they actually were trying to be serious. Oh…and I understand that it was apparently based on a novel, which I’m being told has done rather well in the sales department. I haven’t read the book, but if it is a virtually plotless, kinky sex fantasy that is curiously devoid of any real kinkiness or sexiness, then I’m here to tell you that this is one film that’s faithful to the book.
It’s really your typical tale of a virginal English Lit major named Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson) who meets cute with a hunky (and mysterious) Seattle-based 27 year-old bachelor billionaire businessman named Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan). And it’s like, you know, total kismet. Because, you see, Anastasia is a last-minute fill-in for her roommate Kate (Eloise Mumford), who was supposed to conduct an in-person interview with Mr. Grey at his corporate HQ for their college newspaper…but she got the flu (or something). So anyway, Anastasia’s all like, you know, rolling her eyes and junk about the whole shebang, but OK, she’ll do it, because she’s a good friend. After spending about 5 minutes in Mr. Grey’s lofty, spacious and impressively appointed executive office, rattling off probing questions like “Are you gay?” from her roommate’s notes (and faster than you can say “porn movie exposition”), Anastasia and Christian are exhibiting signs of Mutual Attraction. Mere days pass, and before she knows what hit her, Christian is handing her a contract for her to review and sign. You know, one of those contracts wherein the First Party (the Submissive) agrees to all the terms dictated by the Second Party (the Dominant), which are, to wit, Abandon all Hope, Ye Who Enter Here…and to cater to every sexual whim of her dominant male master. How many times have we heard that love story?
There are some intriguing avenues that crop up, but none of them are explored. For instance, there’s a glimmer of Hitchcock’s Marnie 
But alas, the film is neither comedy, nor is it drama. Nor is it particularly kinky (despite the lovingly fetishistic camera pans of the various accoutrements that adorn Christian’s “play room”). And perhaps most notably, it’s not in the least bit sexy. In fact, it barely qualifies as soft core; it’s about as erotic as a TV ad for Viagra. Despite the intrinsically provocative nature of its SM theme, the film comes off as a weirdly sanitized affair (it might as well be a remake of Beach Blanket Bingo
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for suspending my disbelief when I sit down to watch a narrative film (even a film that is somewhat devoid of a narrative…like this one, for example). But if you present me with a protagonist like Anastasia, who appears to be a literate, college-educated young woman with a strong sense of self, and then ask me to believe that she would miss so many red flags on the way to falling head over heels for a creepy sexual predator like Christian Grey? Not buying it for a second. Red flags, you ask? What about sweet talk like this: “I’d like to bite that lip. But I’m not touching you until I have written consent.” Or “I don’t do love.” Or “I don’t ‘make love’…I fuck.” (How dreamy! Betcha he says that to all the girls). Not to mention the stalking behavior. Or the fact that he recoils from any attempt by Anastasia to express affection. Maybe I shouldn’t get so worked up; after all, who’s going to buy this premise anyway, in our modern, feminism-enlightened society? Wait a sec…now I’m being told that millions of people (the majority of them women) have literally bought into it…with some 70 million copies of E.L. James’ books sold worldwide, and the record-breaking presales of nearly 3 million movie tickets.
So perhaps at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter whether this film is “good” or “bad”. Maybe it’s just one of those critic-proof “event” movies so hotly anticipated that it comes out of the box enrobed by a protective cocoon of cultish devotees who simply will not be swayed by the nattering nabobs of negativism like Yours Truly. After all, it’s only a movie. But it still begs the question: Why this film, with its weirdly draconian subtexts…and why now? Aren’t there enough stories on CNN about hostage-taking, torture and suffering (and lest we forget, the systemic suppression of women all around the world) to turn people off to the idea of hitching their star to an erotic fantasy about willingly signing up for this kind of shit? Or am I overthinking it again?
And one more thing…
Just wanted to take a moment to thank the readers who kindly took time out of your day to email me and inquire if I was still amongst the living. For those of you who care, the reason for my extended absence was knee replacement surgery. Recovery, which included an unexpected 3 weeks in an assisted nursing facility (the most sobering and dispiriting type of place you’d ever want to be stuck in, this side of a Turkish prison) has been painful and slow, but I’m getting my mojo back (God help me, now I have to consider getting the other one done…not so eager). But hey, enough of my yakkin’. I may not post every week, but essentially, I’m back, at your service.
Saturday Night at the Movies review archives
Spring is coming
by digby
I love everything about this. RT @BeschlossDC: Gehrig & DiMaggio in @Yankees spring training: #NBHF pic.twitter.com/go3SsNA7LL
— Meredith Frost (@MeredithFrost) February 14, 2015
Very Serious Spies
by digby
It looks as though the NSA hired a teen-ager to run its twitter feed:
#HappyValentinesDay from the #NSA. No, we don’t listen to your pillow talk. #vday2015
— NSA/CSS (@NSA_PAO) February 14, 2015
Every move they make, every step they take. We’ll be watching our foreign adversaries. #HappyValentinesDay from the #NSA #vday2015
— NSA/CSS (@NSA_PAO) February 14, 2015
Roses are red, violets are blue, #NSA loves privacy rights and you. Learn more from NSA’s #CLPO Director http://t.co/1RYnIeiMP1 #vday2015
— NSA/CSS (@NSA_PAO) February 14, 2015
I think people would be happy if the NSA just stopped collecting all their information without proper probable cause. Trying to be funny is just plain creepy.
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