Month: February 2018

So what else is new?
by Tom Sullivan

I rag on friends for saying people who vote Republican are voting against … you know. But they usually mean that in terms of their bottom lines. In fact, they’re often voting for policies contrary to their own values. Policy after policy passed by conservative lawmakers undermines the very world they claim to be conserving. The stability of work. The stability of communities. The stability of families.

Case in point from Politico:

Lawyers are counseling couples considering divorce to do it this year — before a 76-year-old deduction for alimony payments is wiped out in 2019 under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

“Now’s not the time to wait,” said Mary Vidas, a lawyer in Philadelphia and former chair of the American Bar Association’s section on family law. “If you’re going to get a divorce, get it now.”

The law and order party proved this week they are just posers feigning commitment to the law. The family values party elected a pussy-grabbing, thrice-divorced, porn star-diddling man-child. And they’ve passed modifications to the tax code that will encourage divorce and leave broken families even more damaged than they might be:

Many divorce lawyers criticize Republicans’ decision to end the break, saying it will make divorces more acrimonious. People won’t be willing to pay as much, they say, which will disproportionately hurt women who tend to earn less and are more likely to be on the receiving end of alimony payments. (Child support payments are not deductible.)

“The repeal reduces the bargaining power of vulnerable spouses, mostly women, in achieving financial stability after a divorce,” said Brian Vertz, a family law attorney in Pittsburgh.

You were expecting GOP lawmakers would prioritize protecting women?

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American exilesby digby

Tragically, there are probably going to be a lot more of them. It’s shameful that the government is wasting time and money on this:

Standing outside his new home sloped on a bumpy street, Jorge Garcia turns his head and gazes down the block of a working-class city about an hour west of Mexico City.

Roving vendors hawk everything from tamales to gasoline, yelling out the names of their products. A few houses down, a rooster crows. His new neighbors glance at him warily.

“I feel like I’m lost,” Garcia says, his eyes taking in the valley and hills of the city of Nicolás Romero on a Friday morning in January. “I don’t fit in here, at all.”

Two weeks earlier, Garcia was deported from Michigan to Mexico after living in the U.S. for 30 years, forced to leave behind his family, friends, and a solid job in landscaping. Now, the married father of two finds himself alone in an unfamiliar country, with an uncertain future.

“Since I’ve got here, I haven’t had a good night’s sleep,” he explains, fingers fidgeting with each other as he speaks. “It’s like my body wants to rest, but I’m not able to with all this thought I’ve got on my mind and the stress. … During the night, out of nowhere in my sleep, I start thinking about the whole situation and I lose my sleep.”

Garcia recites a Hail Mary and the Lord’s Prayer every night before bed, but it’s not enough to calm him down.

“I just keep tossing and turning. Tossing and turning.”

After the Free Press reported on his deportation on Jan. 15, Garcia became a symbol for immigrant advocates who say his removal is an example of the government’s overzealous crackdown on illegal immigrants. He was only 10 years old when an aunt brought him to the U.S. without authorization. Now 39, he had lived his entire adult life in the U.S. before his removal.

Super low unemployment. This man has no criminal record. He’s got a family of Americans. What, other than plain old bigotry can possibly justify this?

2018 is going to be a real treatby digby

Here’s a GOP political ad from Illinois:

This guy doesn’t even try to hide it. I’m sure Trump loves it.

And then there’s this guy:

Arthur Jones — an outspoken Holocaust denier, activist anti-Semite and white supremacist — is poised to become the Republican nominee for an Illinois congressional seat representing parts of Chicago and nearby suburbs.

“Well first of all, I’m running for Congress not the chancellor of Germany. All right. To me the Holocaust is what I said it is: It’s an international extortion racket,” Jones told the Chicago Sun-Times.

Indeed, Jones’ website for his latest congressional run includes a section titled “The ‘Holocaust Racket’” where he calls the genocide carried out by the German Nazi regime and collaborators in other nations “the biggest blackest lie in history.”

Jones, 70, a retired insurance agent who lives in suburban Lyons, has unsuccessfully run for elected offices in the Chicago area and Milwaukee since the 1970s.

He ran for Milwaukee mayor in 1976 and 13th Ward alderman on Chicago’s Southwest Side in 1987.

Since the 1990s to 2016, Jones has jumped in the GOP 3rd Congressional District primary seven times, never even close to becoming a viable contender.

The outcome will be different for Jones in the Illinois primary on March 20, 2018.

To Jones’ own amazement, he is the only one on the Republican ballot.

The party is trying to distance themselves from him but the sad fact is that he’s actually pretty mainstream now.

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It’s white supremacy, people. It’s always been white supremacy.by digby

Ezra Klein has published an interesting overview of the new book “How Democracies Die” over at Vox. He talks about the book’s central thesis that nations in the modern era lose their democratic character by exploiting democratic processes rather than overthrow. (I wrote a little bit about it on Salon a couple of weeks ago.) The whole article is worth reading but this is the nub of it:

Where How Democracies Die makes its contribution is with an unusually clear analysis of why these norms are so embattled in America.

Levitsky and Ziblatt trace a troubling thread of American history: Our democracy was built atop racism and has been repeatedly shaken in eras of racial progress. The founding compromises that birthed the country included entrenching slavery and counting African Americans as three-fifths of a person. The bloodshed required to end slavery almost ended our democracy with it — habeas corpus was suspended, a third of American states sat out the 1864 election, and the South was under military occupation.

Then in the the Civil War’s aftermath, the pursuit of equality fell before the pursuit of stability — in Reconstruction and continuing up through the mid-20th century, the Democratic and Republican parties permitted the South to construct an apartheid state atop a foundation of legal discrimination and racial terrorism, and it was in this environment that American politics saw its so-called golden era, in which the two parties worked together smoothly and routinely. Levitsky and Ziblatt tell this story well:

The norms sustaining our political system rested, to a considerable degree, on racial exclusion. The stability of the period between the end of Reconstruction and the 1980s was rooted in an original sin: the Compromise of 1877 and its aftermath, which permitted the de-democratization of the South and the consolidation of Jim Crow. Racial exclusion contributed directly to the partisan civility and cooperation that came to characterize twentieth-century American politics. The “solid South” emerged as a powerful conservative force within the Democratic Party, simultaneously vetoing civil rights and serving as a bridge to Republicans. Southern Democrats’ ideological proximity to conservative Republicans reduced polarization and facilitated bipartisanship.

The tale doesn’t end in the mid-20th century. The racial progress of the civil rights era led to a series of political assassinations and, shortly thereafter, to the election of Richard Nixon — who quickly caused a democratic and constitutional crisis of his own. In the aftermath of that period, little was done — and much was undone — on civil rights, and American democracy stabilized.

That is, it stabilized until the election of President Barack Obama, which led to a hard turn toward confrontation in the Republican Party, and — perhaps predictably, given this history — to the election of Donald Trump, who pairs racial resentment with a deep skepticism of both democratic process and the legitimacy of his opponents.

Making our present moment yet more combustible is a deep transformation of our political coalitions:

The nonwhite share of the Democratic vote rose from 7 percent in the 1950s to 44 percent in 2012. Republican voters, by contrast, were still nearly 90 percent white into the 2000s. So as the Democrats have increasingly become a party of ethnic minorities, the Republican Party has remained almost entirely a party of whites.

And it doesn’t stop there:

As the political scientist Alan Abramowitz points out, in the 1950s, married white Christians were the overwhelming majority — nearly 80 percent — of American voters, divided more or less equally between the two parties. By the 2000s, married white Christians constituted barely 40 percent of the electorate, and they were now concentrated in the Republican Party.

“In other words,” write Levitsky and Ziblatt, “the two parties are now divided over race and religion — two deeply polarizing issues that tend to generate greater intolerance and hostility than traditional policy issues such as taxes and government spending.”

It’s these underlying trends, they argue, that are making it harder for Americans to tolerate each other, harder for partisans on both sides to accept each other. The parties have become more distant ideologically, racially, religiously. They look over the divide and see a coalition that doesn’t look like them or think like them, that doesn’t like them, that actively fears them — indeed, a recent Pew survey found that 49 percent of Republicans, and 55 percent of Democrats, say they are “afraid” of the other party. Keep that in mind as you read this paragraph:

If the definition of “real Americans” is restricted to those who are native-born, English-speaking, white, and Christian, then it is easy to see how “real Americans” may view themselves as declining. As Ann Coulter chillingly put it, “The American electorate isn’t moving to the left — it’s shrinking.” The perception among many Tea Party Republicans that their America is disappearing helps us understand the appeal of such slogans as “Take Our Country Back” or “Make America Great Again.” The danger of such appeals is that casting Democrats as not real Americans is a frontal assault on mutual toleration.

If that is your mindset, how can you compromise? How can you abide by the niceties of politics-as-usual?

Again, for the thousandth time, I quote Lincoln:

Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events…

The question recurs, what will satisfy them? Simply this: We must not only let them alone, but we must somehow, convince them that we do let them alone. This, we know by experience, is no easy task. We have been so trying to convince them from the very beginning of our organization, but with no success. In all our platforms and speeches we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone; but this has had no tendency to convince them. Alike unavailing to convince them, is the fact that they have never detected a man of us in any attempt to disturb them.

These natural, and apparently adequate means all failing, what will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly – done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated – we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Senator Douglas’ new sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our Free State constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us.

This is the fundamental contour of American politics. When the two parties take opposite positions on slavery, now racial equality, we are divided. It’s hard to believe that we are back to this place, but we are. And we can try to ascribe that to other motives all we want, it won’t change anything.

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Sunday Funniesby digby

11 year old Nate Ruttenberg posts his cartoons on Instagram @ anti.trump.cartoons and they are the best thing today… or any other day!

11 years old!

Via Daily Kos.

Not your grandfather’s McCarthyismby digby

Think Progress caught one of Trump’s big supporters, Steven Milloy,a Fox News columnist and coal executive who served on President Donald Trump’s EPA transition team, defending McCarthy and Nixon:

Milloy, a well known climate science denier and former tobacco lobbyist, thinks air pollution and cigarette smoking have gotten a bum rap, too, and that Pope Francis is a commie (“the Red Pope“).

This story began Thursday when former FBI director James Comey defended on Twitter the FBI’s pushback against the infamous Nunes memo, which tried and failed to show malfeasance by the FBI.

In his usual sanctimonious fashion, Comey wrote, “in the long run, weasels and liars never hold the field, so long as good people stand up. Not a lot of schools or streets named for Joe McCarthy,” which is true but whatever. Anyway:

The right wing sprang to the defense of the McCarthy on Twitter, lead by Milloy, who first tweeted, “There is no greater Left-wing invented slur than ‘McCarthyism.’” 

By Friday night, Milloy apparently concluded that Comey’s phrase “weasels and liars” was also referring to Richard Nixon, so he further tweeted: “Democrat dirty tricks were able to drive the heroic Joe McCarthy to an early grave. Democrat dirty tricks forced Nixon to resign.”
History, of course, takes a very different view. 

Even the Republican-controlled Senate, in its online history, slams McCarthy and his chief counsel, Roy Cohn (who would go on to be Donald Trump’s mentor). “In the spring of 1954, McCarthy picked a fight with the U.S. Army,” the U.S. Senate history explains, and the Army hired lawyer Joseph Welch to defend it. At a televised session on June 9, 1954, McCarthy asserted that one of Welch’s attorneys was linked to a Communist group.

(This is a reminder that Republicans have a history of going after their own sacred cows for political purposes, just FYI.)

The Republicans are confused. Very confused. They are now claiming that the Democrats are McCarthyites because they are concerned about Russian interference in the election and the campaign of Donald Trump. That would track with the original McCarthy charges if we believed that the Democrats were doing this based upon no credible evidence that Trump and his entourage had participated in what was clearly a campaign to affect the 2016 election. (The extent to which the Russian government was actually responsible for Trump’s victory is unknowable.) But the analogy breaks down at that point and shows that it only works as far as the fact that in both cases Russia was involved.

The analogy works better when you look at it from the other angle. McCarthy’s tactic was to darkly smear employees of the US Government, from the army to the State Department, and members of the media as communist sympathizers. He destroyed lives and reputations of political opponents and government bureaucrats alike for political gain.

It wasn’t really about the “Soviet threat” it was a right wing authoritarian move to shut down dissent and non-conformity. So, if you want to draw imperfect analogies to that time Nunes/Trump/Fox as the McCarthy figures fits a little bit better. This is also an authoritarian move on the part of Trump and his henchmen to subvert the rule of law and intimidate opposition.

However, the current assault on norms is unique to this time and place and where we are as a party. If Joseph Welch were to utter his words “at long last sir, have you no decency” today, there would be millions of twitter posters calling him a “libtard cuck” and the president would probably accuse him of being corrupt and that would be that. We live in a very different world in which a commonly held concept of “decency” is no longer operative.

If you want to understand who is the true avatar for our current cultural and political moment, it’s not McCarthy, it’s this person: (although to be fair, she actually wrote the book on defending McCarthy — it was called “Treason”, so they aren’t entirely unrelated.)

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Junior is schmaaht as a whipby digby

They really need to keep Don Jr out of politics and get him to concentrate on using his daddy’s position to enrich the family. He’s not helping:

You see the Democratic senators [saying] ‘This is McCarthyism.’ I’m like what? You have a guy screaming, ‘Russia, Russia, Russia’ with no evidence. All this shade for 18 months, screaming about McCarthyism. I mean the irony is ridiculous at this point.

The problem is rather than being reasonable and coming to the table, they forced themselves further, and further and further left. I mean, they are left of commie right now, and that’s a real problem for them and I don’t think that’s where America was.

And then he really screwed the pooch. Again:

There is a little bit of sweet revenge in it for me and certainly probably the family in a sense that if they wouldn’t have done this, this stuff would be going on. This would be going on at the highest levels of government. They’d be continuing doing it to my father, trying to undermine his actions.

Releasing the Nunes memo was an act of revenge by your family? Good to know.

.@DonaldJTrumpJr: "I think [@RepAdamSchiff] has got some soul searching to do." https://t.co/yb9zbeS8tq @WattersWorld pic.twitter.com/nN2EojLRTf— Fox News (@FoxNews) February 4, 2018

.@DonaldJTrumpJr on the memo: "Imagine how effective [@realDonaldTrump] can be, given the year he's had, without this cloud over his head." https://t.co/yb9zbeS8tq pic.twitter.com/jj5vvXn0Fm— Fox News (@FoxNews) February 4, 2018

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Fundamental imbalance
by Tom Sullivan

An abandoned factory in Milwaukee, Wis. (Seph Lawless).

Cable news news junkies may fixate on the daily cliffhangers of the Beltway soaps. Elsewhere in the country, life goes on. Or doesn’t.

Typical voters are not so much “low information” as, you know, busy. With jobs and kids and school and church and bills and after-school activities and numbing themselves for the next day of it with a few hours of mindless TV entertainment. A lot of voters have lives not centered in the Beltway. Democrats running in 2018 had best get in touch with that alternate reality. It may matter more to the fate of the country than what atrocities the Trump cult commits today.

While we in this business think we are in a fight for the country’s soul, many of our neighbors are simply fighting to get by. The boosterish rhetoric coming out of Washington is soon going to ring a hollow. Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky told Fox News last week, “2017 was the best year for conservatives in the 30 years that I’ve been here. The best year on all fronts.” After pausing for a sip of Kool-Aid, McConnell added, “And a lot of people were shocked because we didn’t know what we were getting with Donald Trump.” (I added the Kool-Aid part.)

But the effects of drinking the Trump Kool-Aid will last only so long. Already, the “best year for conservatives” is proving to have been an illusion outside Washington.

Paper products giant Kimberly-Clark announced January 23 it is using its tax cut to cushion the costs of closing facilities. The Dallas-based maker of Kleenex, Huggies, and other products plans to let go between 5,000 and 5,500 workers:

Chief Financial Officer Maria Henry said the company’s gains from the tax overhaul would help offset the cost of the restructuring plan. The company had an effective tax rate of 28.6 percent in 2017, and the rate would drop to between 23 and 26 percent in 2018 as a result of congressional action, boosting year-over-year earnings growth by 6 percentage points, she told analysts during a conference call to discuss recent financial results.

“We also anticipate ongoing annual cash flow benefits from tax reform,” Henry said. “That provides us flexibility to continue to allocate significant capital to shareholders while we also fund increased capital spending and our restructuring program over the next few years.”

“In other words,” explains the Arkansas Times, “it’s taking tax savings to its shareholders’ bottom line, not to workers.” People notice things like that, even in Little Rock.

Maria Henry added:

“We are moving to a global business services platform for our more transactional and standard work,” Henry said Tuesday. “And when you do that, when you think about it, we are removing a role that is in country, so we are paying the full severance on that position that we are taking out, and we are hiring that role in a different location in our shared services center.”

Rendered in English, Kimberly-Clark is offshoring U.S. office workers’ jobs. Just in time for Republican tax cuts to show up in the paychecks they’ll stop receiving.

Kimberly-Clark is not an outlier. Companies are doing what they always do after receiving a windfall: pocketing the extra profit and using it as a buffer for cutting costs and jobs. After all the hype over well-publicized bonuses, the kickbacks to workers barely moved the economy.

While Trump tweeted favorably about Fiat Chrysler moving production of the Ram Truck from Mexico to Michigan, the jobs don’t represent any auto industry renaissance, reports the Detroit Free Press:

Motor vehicle and parts manufacturing employment in the U.S. declined from 788,900 in December 2016 to 783,200 in November 2017, Dziczek said.

The president’s focus on job creation won support from industrial heartland voters during his campaign. And in March 2017, he praised General Motors when he flew to Detroit to highlight the importance of American manufacturing. That same day, GM announced plans for 900 new or retained jobs in Michigan within 12 months.

This week [Jan. 12], GM confirmed a net loss of 3,500 hourly manufacturing jobs in 2017.

Those are just two examples. One more. Unemployment among black workers so often touted as historically low by president Tump, is not. The L.A. Times Michael Hiltzik notes that unemployment figures among subgroups is typically volatile. Still, black unemployment “jumped to 7.7% in January, up from 6.8% in December and back nearly to its 7.8% level when President Trump took office.”

There is a “fundamental imbalance in the U.S. job market” we have not addressed, Hiltzik writes. “Blacks get laid off faster than whites when the economy turns south, and they get hired back more slowly. That should set off alarm bells about the recession yet to come.”

Furthermore, we have a crisis in the distribution of wealth that the economic policies of either party are failing to address. Henry Grabar writes at Slate, “By the numbers, America is splitting into two separate countries—a wealthy metropolitan country, and everywhere else—which poses challenges to everything from monetary policy to political consensus.” Any effort to address those differences will begin in Washington, Grabar believes, arguing for revitalizing small cities nationwide:

In any case, the triumph of the coastal cities, as well as the rapid expansion of the Sun Belt sprawl, was not accidental or, in fact, inevitable—they were the results of high-level choices. One of my favorite pieces on the subject is Brian Feldman’s 2016 Washington Monthly story on how mergers hastened the decline of St. Louis by stripping the city of company headquarters. The policies that enabled that process could be revised, or even reversed.

Feldman argued that predatory monopolies and the policies they purchase in Washington have helped hollow out the center and concentrate wealth in places efficiently for business and very inefficiently for the well being of many Americans:

These decisions quietly changed the rules of America’s economy to be more like the NFL’s, in which monopoly power isn’t fought but catered to, in which economic opportunity isn’t disbursed but consolidated, in which fewer cities—and fewer Americans—get a fair chance to compete.

That, more so than the occupant of the Oval Office, bears on the lives of people who will vote this fall. Democrats expecting to rise a wave in November should not miss their chance to build it rather than wait to ride it.

Update:

“Kimberly-Clark, maker of paper products like Kleenex, Viva paper towels, Cottonelle bathroom tissue and Huggies diapers, announced earlier this month it would use its tax cut windfall to pay the costs of closing 10 factories and dumping as many as 5,500 workers.”— Rep. Keith Ellison (@keithellison) February 4, 2018

I helped design Kimberly-Clark’s Jenks, OK recycled paper plant whose fate is unknown.

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Saturday Night at the MoviesGet your kicks: Top 10 sports films
By Dennis Hartley

With Super Bowl weekend upon us, I figured this would be as good a time as any to trot out my top 10 sports films. As usual, my list is alphabetical; and please, no wagering!
Bend it Like Beckham – Writer-director Gurinder Chadha whips up a cross-cultural masala that cleverly marries up “cheer the underdog” Rocky elements with Bollywood-style exuberance. The story centers on a headstrong young woman (Parminder Nagra) who is upsetting her traditional Sikh parents by following her “silly” dream to become an English soccer star. Chadha also weaves in subtext on the difficulties that South Asian immigrants face assimilating into British culture. Also with Keira Knightley and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers.

Breaking Away – This beautifully realized slice of middle-Americana (filmed in Bloomington, Indiana) from director Peter Yates and writer Steve Tesich (an Oscar-winning screenplay) is a perfect film on every level. More than just a sports movie, it’s an insightful coming of age story and a rumination about the social fabric of small town life. Dennis Christopher is outstanding as a 19 year-old obsessed with bicycle racing, a pretty coed and anything Italian. He and his pals (Dennis Quaid, Daniel Stern and Jackie Earle Haley) are all on the cusp of adulthood and trying to figure out what to do with their lives. Barbara Barrie and Paul Dooley give warm and funny performances as Christopher’s blue-collar parents.

Bull Durham– Writer-director Ron Shelton really knocked one out of the park with this very funny, well-written and splendidly acted rumination on life, love, and oh yeah-baseball. Kevin Costner gives one of his better performances as a seasoned, world-weary minor league catcher who reluctantly plays mentor to a somewhat dim hotshot rookie pitcher (Tim Robbins). Susan Sarandon is a poetry-spouting baseball groupie who selects one player every season to take under her wing and do some, er, special mentoring of her own. A complex love triangle ensues. It’s Jules and Jim meets The Natural.

Downhill Racer – This frequently overlooked 1969 gem from director Michael Ritchie examines the tightly knit and highly competitive world of Olympic downhill skiing. Robert Redford is cast against type, and consequently delivers one of his more interesting performances as a talented but arrogant athlete who joins up with the U.S. Olympic ski team. Gene Hackman is outstanding as the coach who finds himself at loggerheads with Redford’s contrariety. Ritchie’s film has a verite feel that lends the story a realistic edge.

Fat City – John Huston’s gritty, low-key character study was a surprise hit at Cannes in 1972. Adapted by Leonard Gardner from his own novel, it’s a tale of shattered dreams, desperate living and beautiful losers (Gardner seems to be the missing link between John Steinbeck and Charles Bukowski). Filmed on location in Stockton, California, the story centers on a boozy, low-rent boxer well past his prime (Stacey Keach), who becomes a mentor to a young up-and-comer (Jeff Bridges) and starts a relationship with a fellow barfly (Susan Tyrell). Granted, it’s one of the most depressing films you’ll ever see, but still well worth your time. Beautifully acted and masterfully directed, with “lived-in” natural light photography by DP Conrad Hall. You will be left haunted by Kris Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make it Through the Night”, which permeates the film.

Hoop Dreams – One of the most highly praised documentaries of all time, with good reason. Ostensibly “about” basketball, it is at its heart about perseverance, love, and family; which is probably why it struck such a chord with audiences as well as critics. Director Steve James follows the lives of two young men from the inner city for a five-year period, as they pursue their dreams of becoming professional basketball players. Just when you think you have the film pigeonholed, it takes off in unexpected directions, making for a much more riveting story than one might initially expect. A winner.

North Dallas Forty – Nick Nolte and Mac Davis lead a spirited ensemble cast in this locker room peek at pro football players and the political machinations of team owners. Some of the vignettes are allegedly based on the real-life hi-jinks of the Dallas Cowboys, replete with wild parties and other assorted off-field debaucheries. Charles Durning is perfect as the coach. Peter Gent adapted the screenplay from his original novel. This film is so entertaining that I can almost forgive director Ted Kotcheff for foisting Rambo: First Blood and Weekend at Bernie’s on us a bit later on in his career.

Personal Best – When this film was released, there was so much fuss over a couple brief love scenes between Mariel Hemingway and co-star Patrice Donnelly that many failed to notice that it was one of the most non-condescending portraits of female athletes to ever reach movie screens. Writer-director Robert Towne did his homework; he spent time observing Olympic track stars at work and at play. The women are shown to be every bit as tough and competitive as their male counterparts; Hemingway and (real-life pentathlete) Donnelly deserve credit for not sugar-coating their characterizations. Scott Glenn is excellent as a hard driving coach.

Slapshot – Paul Newman skates away with his role as the coach of a slumping minor league hockey team in this classic, directed by George Roy Hill. When Newman learns about a possible sale of the franchise, he decides to pull out all the stops and start playing dirty. The entire acting ensemble is wonderful, and screenwriter Nancy Dowd’s riotously profane locker room dialog will have you rolling. Newman’s Cool Hand Luke co-star Strother Martin (as the team’s manager) handily steals all of his scenes. Lindsey Crouse (in a rare comedic role) is memorable as a sexually frustrated “sports wife” . Michael Ontkean performs the funniest striptease bit in the history of film, and the endearingly sociopathic “Hanson Brothers” have to be seen to be believed. A puckish satire.

This Sporting Life – This early Lindsay Anderson effort from 1963 was one of the “angry young man” dramas that stormed out of the U.K. in the late 50s and early 60s, steeped in “kitchen sink” realism and working class angst. A young, Brando-like Richard Harris tears up the screen as a thuggish, egotistical rugby player with a natural gift for the game who becomes an overnight sports star.

Previous posts with related themes:

The top 10 most off-the-wall sports films
The Wrestler
Rush
Win Win
A Matter of Size
Big Fan

More reviews at Den of Cinema
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–Dennis Hartley

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Nobody knew Hillary Clinton was running for president in October 2016by digby

The Nunes memo suggests that the DOJ and the FBI did not disclose that the Steele Dossier had been partially financed by a law firm doing oppo research for Hillary Clinton.
Guess what?

New York Times:

Washington Post:

Wall Street Journal:

Apparently, the problem is that they didn’t use the exact words “that crooked, old, whore Hillary Clinton” and instead counted on the federal judge to know who Donald Trump’s opponent in the 2016 election campaign was. That means the whole Russia investigation is bullshit and everyone in the FBI and DOJ should be fired and replaced by Sean Hannity and out of work white guys from Ohio.

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