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Month: July 2016

Citizens United is still a thing? by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on July 17, 2016

Citizens United is still a thing?
by Tom Sullivan

Secretary Hillary Clinton announced yesterday she would in her first 30 days as president propose a constitutional amendment to overturn the Citizens United Supreme Court decision. The announcement came in a video to the Netroots Nation 16 conference (St. Louis, #NN16):

“I will also appoint Supreme Court justices who understand that this decision was a disaster for our democracy, and I will fight for other progressive reforms, including small-dollar matching and disclosure requirements. I hope some of the brilliant minds in this room will seek out cases to challenge Citizens United in the courts.”

The Washington Post’s Dave Weigel tweeted:

However, a cluster of seven or eight people towards the back of the hall stood and turned their backs to the screen, a friend reports. One Twitter user asked if Netroots Nation is still a thing. It is. (But I missed the closing session.)

Weigel writes:

In a statement accompanying the announcement, Clinton pledges to promote Securities and Exchange Commission “rulemaking requiring publicly traded companies to disclose all political spending to their shareholders” and to sign an “executive order requiring federal government contractors to fully disclose all political spending.” She has discussed versions of those ideas on the campaign trail, but the forum of Netroots Nation — a conference in its 11th year that she visited in person only once — was a striking place to make the statement.

NetRoots Nation Executive Director Raven Brooks thinks the announcement is significant, and a further move towards positions rival Sen. Bernie Sanders championed. Brooks tells Politico:

“I don’t think there really was any thought or expectation that she would be carrying this issue forward,” Brooks said.

“She’s adopted some of his other stuff. Notably some of the college and student debt things, but I thought campaign finance was going to be left behind.”

The proposal may be merely symbolic. And no doubt some Sanders supporters will see the move as pandering. But it is doubtful that Sanders would have any greater chance of pushing such an amendment through what is still a Republican Congress. Clinton herself will find that problematic unless November proves a sweep year for Democrats. Regardless of the messenger, the message coming from such a high level is one to welcome. I look forward to when people can ask if Citizens United is still a thing.

Plus ca change: Criterion reissues Dr. Strangelove **** By Dennis Hartley

Published by digby on July 17, 2016

Saturday Night at the Movies

Plus ca change: Criterion reissues Dr. Strangelove ****


By Dennis Hartley

Now then, Dmitri, you know how we’ve always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the Bomb…The *Bomb*, Dmitri… The *hydrogen* bomb!…Well now, what happened is… ahm…one of our base commanders, he had a sort of…well, he went a little funny in the head… you know…just a little…funny. And, ah…he went and did a silly thing…Well, I’ll tell you what he did. He ordered his planes…to attack your country…

–from Dr. Strangelove (1964)

That’s POTUS Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers), making “the call” to the Russian premier from the War Room, regarding an unfortunate chain of events that may very well signal the end of civilization as we know it. It’s a nightmare scenario, precipitated by a perfect storm of political paranoia, bureaucratic bungling and ideological demagoguery that enables the actions of a lone nutcase to trigger global thermonuclear war. Sound familiar?

“Mein fuehrer! I can walk!” Although we have yet (knock on wood) to experience the global thermonuclear annihilation that ensues following the wheelchair-bound Dr. Strangelove’s joyous (if short-lived) epiphany, so many other depictions in Stanley Kubrick’s seriocomic 1964 masterpiece about the tendency for people in power to eventually rise to their own level of incompetence have since come to pass, that you wonder why Kubrick and company bothered to make it all up. In case you skipped the quote at the top of this piece, it’s the movie about an American military base commander who goes a little funny in the head (you know…”funny”) and sort of launches a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. Hilarity (and oblivion) ensues. You rarely see a cast like this: Peter Sellers (playing three characters), George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, Slim Pickens, Keenan Wynn, James Earl Jones and Peter Bull (who can be seen breaking character as the Russian ambassador and cracking up as Strangelove’s prosthetic arm seems to take on a mind of its own). There are so many great lines, that you might as well bracket the entire screenplay (by Kubrick, Terry Southern and Peter George) with quotation marks.


Vodka. That’s what they drink, isn’t it? Never water? On no account will a Commie ever drink water, and not without good reason. Water is the source of all life. Seven-tenths of this earth’s surface is water. Why, do you realize that 70 percent of you is water? And as human beings, you need fresh, pure water to replenish our precious bodily fluids. Are you beginning to understand? –Gen. Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden), from Dr. Strangelove

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (its full title) did not necessarily spring from a, you know, “funny” place. Indeed, Red Alert, ex-RAF officer Peter George’s 1958 source novel, was anything but; and did not even include the character of Dr. Strangelove, the ex-Nazi scientist who emerges from the shadows of the war room just in time to contextualize all that inspired madness of the film’s third act. “He” was the invention of Kubrick and screenwriter Terry Southern. In a 1994 Grand Street article called “Notes from the War Room”, Southern recounts Kubrick’s epiphany:

[Kubrick] told me he was going to make a film about “our failure to understand the dangers on nuclear war.” He said that he had thought of the story as a “straightforward melodrama” until this morning when he “woke up and realized that nuclear was too outrageous, too fantastic to be treated in any conventional manner.” He said he could only see it now as “some kind of hideous joke.”

Kubrick had approached Southern as a collaborator on the basis of having read his social satire The Magic Christian (which was itself adapted for the screen in 1969). You have to keep in mind that while Kubrick’s film was in production, the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis still fresh in the minds of a nervous public. This was the height of the Cold War; few people found nuclear annihilation to be, you, know, “funny”…least of all studio suits. When Sellers backed out of the role of Major Kong (much to Kubrick’s chagrin), it was first offered to Bonanza star Dan Blocker. Southern recalls (from the same article):

[Kubrick] made arrangements for a script to be delivered to Blocker that afternoon, but a cabled response from Blocker’s agent arrived in quick order: “Thanks a lot, but the material is too pinko for Dan. Or anyone else we know, for that matter. Regards, Leibman, CMA.”

As I recall, this was the first hint that this sort of political interpretation of our work in progress might exist. Stanley seemed genuinely surprised and disappointed.

But it worked out in the end. Could you imagine anyone but Slim Pickens as Maj. Kong?

Survival kit contents check. In them you’ll find: one forty-five caliber automatic; two boxes of ammunition; four days’ concentrated emergency rations; one drug issue containing antibiotics, morphine, vitamin pills, pep pills, sleeping pills, tranquilizer pills; one miniature combination Russian phrase book and Bible; one hundred dollars in rubles; one hundred dollars in gold; nine packs of chewing gum; one issue of prophylactics; three lipsticks; three pair of nylon stockings. Shoot, a fella’ could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff. –Major Kong prepping his B-52 crew

It was in the interest of possible “political interpretation” that a critical revision had to be made to that memorable monolog in post-production. In an eerie bit of kismet, Kubrick had scheduled the first test screening of Dr. Strangelove for November 22, 1963…the day of JFK’s assassination; in view of that zeitgeist-shattering event, the film’s originally slated December premiere was postponed until late January of 1964. But that wasn’t the spookiest part. Originally, the last line of the bit was: “Shoot, a fella’ could have a pretty good weekend in Dallas with all that stuff.” Pickens had to be recruited to re-loop the line as we now know it. If you listen carefully during the scene, you can pick up on the edit.

However it did manage to fall together is really moot; the final product stands the test of time as a satire that will never lose relevancy (one could say that about any Kubrick film, as each ultimately points to the absurdity of all these self-important hominids, scurrying about blissfully oblivious to their insignificance within a vast, randomly cruel cosmos).

Hell, Mr. President…I could do a 2,000 word dissertation on the Freudian subtext alone; from the opening montage of aircraft engaging in (decidedly coital) airborne re-fueling maneuvers, to General Ripper firing the .50 caliber machine gun from his crotch, not to mention his cigar and his monolog about why he denies women his “essence”, to the character’s names (Dr. Strangelove, President Muffley, Buck Turgidson, Mr. Staines), and of course all of that phallic weaponry, and montage of nuclear explosions at the end.

But I won’t.

“Oh…and uh, shug? Don’t forget to say your prayers!”

Fans of the film will be glad to hear that Dr. Strangelove has been given the Criterion treatment, with the release of their Blu-ray editionThe restored 4k transfer is gorgeous; the best print I’ve seen of the film on home video (this is the third digital version I’ve owned…it’s a sickness, I know). They’ve really piled on the extras; there’s a plethora of archival interviews, as well as featurettes produced exclusively for this edition, like audio essays by film scholars and interviews with Kubrick collaborators and archivists. So fans can immerse themselves in the Strangelovian universe…if that doesn’t seem redundant.

Oh, and when this November rolls around…don’t forget to say your prayers.
Previous posts with related themes:


More reviews at Den of Cinema

—Dennis Hartley

Trump’s Pence speech was all about how great Trump is #ofcourse

Published by digby on July 16, 2016

Trump’s Pence speech was all about how great Trump is

 by digby

I’m sure most of you missed the Trump-Pence extravaganza this morning. Why would anyone go out of their way to watch it if they didn’t have to? But some of us did watch it and it was …. something.

 Ezra Klein at Vox wrote it up:

I can tell you that he rambled, but that doesn’t do it justice. He spoke about Hillary Clinton, about himself, about his victories. He talked about crushing the Republican establishment in the primaries and talking to a buddy building plants in Mexico. He bragged about the beautiful hotel he is building in Washington, DC, and patted himself on the back for his foreign policy foresight over the years.

Every five minutes or so, he seemed to remember, just for a moment, like a man trying and failing to wake from a dream, that he was there to introduce Mike Pence, and so he would say something like, “now back to Mike Pence,” but then he would slip back again, and tell another anecdote about himself.

Even when he did mention Pence, he often managed to say exactly the wrong thing. “One of the big reasons I chose Mike is party unity, I have to be honest,” Trump admitted midway through his speech, at the moment another candidate would have said “I chose Mike because he’ll be a great president.” Trump then segued into a riff on how thoroughly he had humiliated the Republican establishment in state after state. Thus he managed to turn Pence from a peace offering into a head on a pike, a warning to all who might come after.

When Trump finally stuck to Pence, at the end of his lengthy speech, he seemed robotic, bored, restless. He recited Pence’s accomplishment like he was reading his Wikipedia page for the first time, inserting little snippets of meta-commentary and quick jabs as if to keep himself interested.

The final humiliation was yet to come: Trump introduced Pence and then immediately, unusually, walked off the stage, leaving Pence alone at the podium.

Trump is a great entertainer. But he’s not running for host of America: The Show

As with all things Trump, the speech was funny and magnetic. The guy is great TV. But it was also wrong. It was a blue stand-up set delivered at a board of directors meeting, a cruel roast offered at a child’s birthday party. Selecting and introducing a vice president is a heavy duty in American politics; it is the most power one person will ever have to potentially choose the leader of the free world. But Trump couldn’t see past himself to match the moment. The cameras turned on and he did the thing he always does, perhaps the only thing he can do: he put on a show, and made himself the star.

As I said earlier, Pence is perfect for him. There is no chance in hell he will ever overshadow the guy and I suspect, in the end, that was the deciding factor.

Here’s the speech:

Update:

What the hell? This little tid-bit from Crooks and Liars is amazing:

Tur explained that the room at The Hilton was not filled with the customary Trump supporters, but local GOP operatives and lookie loos …”and then just tourists who came in literally off the street, Brian. They heard about it, they asked if they could get in, the Secret Service swept them and they sat down, a little bit gobsmacked that they were able to get in so easily and that this wasn’t an event that had more invitees here. “

Host Brian Williams was very surprised by this an later in the segment came back to it and asked, “Katy, back up one quick second to something you said at the top. it was possible to be in NYC on summer vacation today on Avenue of the Americas and come in to this event as a tourist from the street?”

Tur replied, “Absolutely, only in New York, Brian.”

You just have to laugh …

“Honor” killing in Pakistan

Published by digby on July 16, 2016

“Honor” killing in Pakistan

by digby

This is horrible:

Pakistani social media star Qandeel Baloch, who was known for her daring posts, has been killed, allegedly by her brother.

Police on Saturday told Al Jazeera that Baloch’s father, Mohammed Azeem, had filed a case against his son Waseem Azeem. The father has also testified against another of his sons, who works in the army and reportedly encouraged his sibling to carry out the killing. Both sons have gone missing.

Waseem was in the family home in Multan when Baloch, whose real name was Fauzia Azeem, died.

Nabila Ghazzanfar, a Punjab Police spokeswoman said: “We are hopeful that the killer will be found soon, and will follow legal proceedings.”

Ghazzanfar added that the initial post-mortem showed that the 26-year-old’s nose and mouth had been pinned shut before she died, blocking off her airways. She had not, contrary to earlier reports, been strangled, Ghazzanfar added.

READ MORE: Pakistan’s laws fail to check violence against women

The celebrity often divided opinion in Pakistan, a largely conservative nation, as she appeared on television to speak about female empowerment, and often dressed in non-traditional, revealing, clothes.

She began her career auditioning on Pakistan Idol and soon after launched a social media enterprise, posting videos that quickly went viral.

On her final, July 4 post to her Facebook page, which has almost 800,000 fans, she wrote: “I am trying to change the typical orthodox mindset of people who don’t wanna come out of their shells of false beliefs and old practices.”

Her apparent “honour killing” has caused outrage.

Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy, who won an Oscar for a film about honour-based violence, told Al Jazeera that such attacks were an “epidemic”.

“I’m very shaken up today. Activists in Pakistan have been screaming hoarse about honour killings; it is an epidemic, it takes place not only in towns, but in major cities as well.

“What are we going to do as a nation?”

Chinoy added that an anti-honour killing bill should be passed.

“It’s upon the lawmakers to punish these people. We need to start making examples of people. It appears it is very easy to kill a woman in this country – and you can walk off scot free.”

During screenings of Chinoy’s recent documentary Girl in the River, in which a father tries to kill his daughter, she had heard people cheering for the father.

“It is a mindset we have to change,” she said.

Indeed it is. It may actually be the basis of our current wave of violence all over the world. This piece by Rebecca Traister is very illuminating. An excerpt:

Early reports suggest that Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, who drove a rented truck through a crowd of Bastille Day revelers on Thursday night, killing more than 80 including at least ten children, may not have been devout, but he did have a criminal record of domestic violence. A neighbor claimed he would “rant about his wife,” who left him two years ago.

This history of domestic violence puts Bouhlel in the horrific company of many mass murderers. Omar Mateen, who last month killed 49 people and wounded 53 others in a mass shooting at an Orlando gay club, had an extensive history of domestic abuse. His former wife has claimed that in addition to taking her paychecks and forbidding her from leaving the house, Mateen also beat her if she failed to live up to traditional wifely responsibilities.

And before anyone jumps to the conclusion that killers with Muslim backgrounds have uniquely bad histories with women, recall that Robert Lewis Dear, the devout Christian who killed three people and wounded nine at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood clinic in November, had a lengthy history of violence against women, including a 1992 arrest for rape and sexual violence. According to the Washington Post, two of his three ex-wives had accused him of domestic abuse.

When Elliot Rodger went on a shooting rampage in Southern California in 2014, killing seven, including himself, he left a video in which he detailed his fury, particularly at women who had rejected him. “I don’t know why you girls aren’t attracted to me but I will punish you all for it …You will finally see that I am, in truth, the superior one, the true alpha male.”

Dylann Roof’s racist massacre of nine churchgoers in Charleston last year was tinged with a sense of patriarchal control over women: “You rape our women and you’re taking over our country and you have to go,” he said to his African-American victims; Roof had been raised in a home in which his father had emotionally and physically abused his stepmother. After Adam Lanza killed 20 school children at Sandy Hook Elementary School, investigators found a Word document on his computer in which he had written about why women were inherently selfish. Even Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh had complained about being rejected by a woman.

Recent research done by Everytown for Gun Safety has found that of the mass shootings in the United States between 2009 and 2015, 57 percent included victims who were a family member, spouse, or former spouse of the shooter. Sixteen percent of attackers had been previously charged with domestic violence. A recent piece in the New York Times suggested that the impulse toward domestic, gendered violence may be the thing that draws a few terrorists toward the Islamic State, since ISIS’s practices include sexual slavery and a fidelity to traditional gender norms as recruiting tools for young men.

But that doesn’t make any religion — whether it’s Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel’s Islam or Robert Lewis Dear’s evangelical Christianity — the defining factor in mass shootings. Perhaps these disturbed men — and 98 percent of mass killers are men — are drawn to the patriarchal traditions upheld by some religions to make sense of or justify their anger and resentment toward women. But we might do better to examine the patterns of violence toward women themselves.

The empowerment of women may be the most momentous social upheaval in millenia of human history. Why would we think there wouldn’t be a reaction?

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Isn’t he supposed to be a branding expert?

Published by digby on July 16, 2016

Isn’t he supposed to be a branding expert?

by digby

How can a branding expert make a mistake like this? Didn’t Ivanka see the trainwreck?

I heard on TV that they’re not using the T-P part anymore. Shocking.

And then there’s his biggest decision so far — botched:

This is the kind of thing he’s supposed to be good at.

It turns out that all he’s really good at is saying obnoxious things to get attention from the media. He’s definitely good at that.

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Vacationing in Bizarroworld

Published by digby on July 16, 2016
Vacationing in Bizarroworld

by digby

They actually used this picture to illustrate their story

Just thought I’d share some info from the wingnut mailbag:

Senate Democrats have created a list of groups they intend to denounce (link is external) in floor speeches. These organizations’ crimes? They do not believe in the gospel of global warming: 

Nineteen Senate Democrats will attack specific organizations in what they are calling a “web of denial,” according to a schedule of floor speeches circulated by Emily Enderle, a top environmental policy adviser to Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D., R.I.), who is spearheading the effort. 

Internal emails about the effort obtained by the Free Beacon reveal a highly coordinated plan between members of Congress and environmental activist groups to fuel a public relations and legal offensive against fossil fuel companies and groups they support.
Enderle’s email also included graphics and suggested tweets to use “as guides as you craft digital content.” 

According to her email, Whitehouse and his allies, including Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.), have crafted a schedule for floor speeches on Monday and Tuesday that assigns each participating Senator at least one group to go after by name.
Most of the groups have already been targeted by state Democratic officials that have undertaken a coordinated legal campaign against oil giant ExxonMobil since last year. 

Many were named in subpoenas sent to the company by state attorneys general as part of that effort. 

Were Republicans doing this, the media would be apoplectic with cries of McCarthyism. They are, naturally, silent. 

This sort of behavior comes from a dark place. Democrats are conducting dime store, even Orwellian, show trials.

Pretty sure “Orwellian” doesn’t mean what they think it means…

This is the kind of information right wingers get in their email boxes every day. It contains links to all the far right publications. I don’t know how many of them read it, but it’s the kind of thing they’ve been passing around forever — and now they have Facebook.

Hilariously, at the end of the post, they provide a link to a list of the various companies being persecuted and request that people support them.  Yes, they are asking people to “support” Exxon-Mobile. I guess everyone should go out and fill up their gas tanks in solidarity or something. Or maybe send them a nice appreciation card thanking them for their service.

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QOTD: Paul Begala

Published by digby on July 16, 2016

QOTD: Paul Begala

by digby

If you missed Mike Pence’s speech, you missed nothing you haven’t seen before from every wingnut. Trump obviously picked him because he’s a doorstop with no personality and will not overshadow him. It’s probably the best he could do.

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Divider-in-chief by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on July 16, 2016

Divider-in-chief
by Tom Sullivan


President Barack Obama hugs Eliana Pinckney and her younger sister
Malana Pinckney, daughters of Reverend Clementa Pinckney who was
killed in the 2015 Charleston church shooting. White House photo.

Obama “divided the country” is one of those accusations tossed around so casually on the right that you almost ignore it. It is sweepingly vague, more an exclamation than a truth claim. Like many of the right’s articles of faith, it doesn’t need any substantiation. It is taken as given. No proof required. None offered.

A running gag a college friend used to respond to such blanket assertions was to push back with a stock challenge: “Oh yeah? Name five.” Seems to me Obama’s accusers should have to specify five actions he himself took to divide the U.S. and to explain specifically who he divided from whom. Likely, the challenge would be met with a dumb stare.

Jamelle Bouie takes on the claim that “Barack Obama has made the racial divide worse” at Slate:

The problem of race isn’t that blacks and whites (or other groups) don’t get along. The problem of race is that blacks and other nonwhites face unfair treatment and material disadvantage. The problem of race is that the descendants of enslaved people, and those in close social and economic proximity to them, have been marked for aggression, predation, and deprivation by the dominant socioeconomic group, and suffer as a result. When black Americans say they are pessimistic about “race relations,” what they mean is they are unhappy with that treatment. An America that euphemizes this grievance as a matter of “race relations,” and in the process consecrates race as a natural category, is an America that still isn’t confronting its reality.

The reality that for a black man any encounter with police might spell the last moments of his life is one white America refuses to acknowledge. Yet that plays out with regularity in the news. Cell phone and body cam video has finally made white America a witness to it. For those who wish to look, anyway.

Bouie continues:

To blame Obama for discord—rather than the actual abuses and inequalities that drive the reaction—is a classic example of anti-anti-racism, wherein efforts to address and combat racial bias are reckoned a larger problem than the bias itself. And in the same way, Obama’s willingness to speak to and for black Americans as a black American marks him as the real racist, maligned for acknowledging the reality of racism. It’s a bizarro view of American life where racial discord is caused by speaking out about discrimination, not by discrimination itself.

It’s rich that this argument has currency at the same time that Donald Trump is preparing for his coronation as the presidential nominee of the Republican Party. After years of accusing Obama of fostering racial hatred, of slamming basic empathy as some attack on white Americans, these conservatives—men like Chris Christie and Rudy Giuliani—are primed to nominate a man whose political persona is built on actual prejudice and bigotry. A man who casually spreads racist and anti-Semitic propaganda. A man who incites fear and racial hatred for political gain.

Wonder how many RNC regulars will have to throw up during Trump’s acceptance speech next week?