A dispatch from the same shit, different day files. In 1976 Jon Voight’s great-uncle, a virulent anti-semitic far right propagandist named Joseph Kamp, wrote an article for The Spotlight (published by neo-Nazis) identifying Jimmy Carter as a puppet of radical left “globalists.”
That same 1976 newspaper (that was in the possession of Oregon's Walter Huss, a far right activist with neo-Nazi ties who became chair of the OR GOP in 1978) featured this story about how Carter was supposedly going to grab all of your guns.
The same 1976 newspaper quoted far right, Christian Reconstructionist theologian R.J. Rushdoony to "prove" that Carter, with his affinity for the Bilderbergers and other "globalists," was a strange (and wrong) kind of Christian.
The back page summed it up nicely. Carter is controlled by "a globalist clique" and his main advisor is a beta male who is dominated by his wife but who is also an all-powerful pinko brainwasher.
Wouldn't be a far right moral panic without drugs thrown in there somewhere…and as we all know, Carter was totally a cocaine runner who was just running a peanut farm as a front. Uh huh. s/
The Spotlight was a very widely read "conservative" periodical back in the 70s and 80s. It was a few clicks to the right of National Review, but almost certainly had a larger circulation. In 1980 it had about 310K subscribers. National Review was probably about 1/3 of that.
The Spotlight targeted racially resentful readers who worried Reagan was a squish, who had admired George Wallace back in '68 & would avidly cheer on Pat Robertson in '88 and then Pat Buchanan in '92. It was also for folks who didn't trust modern medicine.
There were very few elected officials or conservative intellectuals who took The Spotlight seriously. They would have regarded it as embarrassingly conspiratorial, racist, and antisemitic.
But the problem was that the populist version of "conservatism" that was developed in The Spotlight spoke to and for the emerging "conservative base" far more authentically than anything that spilled from William F. Buckley's erudite pen.
Coda: I received this fundraising email from the presumptive front runner for the GOP POTUS nomination today. He's asking people to give him money so he can "save America" from George Soros and his globalist efforts to destroy it.
So if you're wondering when large segments of the US Right became captured by an alternate media ecosystem that just spun out the wildest racist lies for a credulous audience willing to believe anything about "the radical left"…well, that story goes way back unfortunately.
The difference was that both the GOP as an institution and the media environment had guardrails in place to prevent the tinfoil wackiness of The Spotlight from coming to dominate the Republican Party or conservative institutions like National Review.
For example, when Walter Huss, the avid reader of The Spotlight who owned the copy I've used here, became OR GOP chair in 1978, Gerald Ford wrote to his Republican friends in OR to ask if they'd managed to oust "that nut" who'd been elected chair.
Oregon had two Republican Senators in 1978, Bob Packwood and Mark Hatfield. Both reviled Huss's far right extremism and took steps to get him removed from his position as party chair.
The kind of Alex Jones/Newsmax/OANN/Daily Wire/Mark Levin/Dinesh D'Souza/etc. empirically-challenged conspiracy/fear mongering we see today was present in the 1960s and 70s, but it rarely crossed over the blood/brain barrier into mainstream media or public awareness.
As revealed by the Fox/Dominion suit, the institution that passes for a "gatekeeper" on the right these days is terrified that if it doesn't provide sufficient batshit fan service for the residents of MAGAville, then they're doomed.
So it’s the same old stuff from the far right. Their tired old rap just never, ever ends. Even Trump, with his showman’s spin wasn’t really different. But unlike 50 years ago, the Republican Party is completely dominated by these people and the media that supports it is completely in thrall to their deluded audience. They are mainstream now.
Trump’s OMB guy, a rightwing maniac who got up to his ears in the Ukraine shakedown, and now cheerleads Republican culture wars, has written up a list of ransoms for the House GOP to demand in exchange for not forcing the country into default. https://t.co/gfuMQMv4h2
Each new iteration of wingnut budget “expert” is more extreme than the last. Meet the latest GOP budget guru Russ Vought who now works for a Trump think tank (an oxymoron if I’ve ever heard one) and is the guy who was behind the Freedom Caucus’ extortion of Kevin McCarthy:
Vought’s agenda represents a major departure from traditional conservative ideas about balancing the federal budget. Once, former house speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) pushed cuts to Social Security and Medicare, the main drivers of federal spending, as the answer. Vought argues for something different. A Trump acolyte, he echoes the former president’s insistence that the popular federal retirement programs — which go to the middle and upper classes as well as the poor — should be walled off from cuts. Instead, Vought has sold many Republicans on the untested premise that the GOP can push to obliterate almost all other major forms of federal spending, especially programs that benefit lower-income Americans, and dare Biden to stand in the way.
Vought’s budget proposal calls for cutting $9 trillion over the next decade from thousands of domestic programs — slashing funding for government agencies, student loans, and anti-poverty programs such as housing, health care and food assistance — while urging Republicans to attack the “woke bureaucracy.” Vought even advocates for freezing military spending, which is still anathema in many GOP circles.
“I’m tired of this focus on Social Security and Medicare, as if you’re climbing a mountain and can’t make any progress on that mountain until you go to the eagle’s nest on the top,” Vought told The Washington Post. “You take these cuts to the American people, and you win.”
In the 10-year budget proposal he has circulated on Capitol Hill, Vought characterizes this approach as part of an existential battle for the soul of the country. The plan includes $2 trillion in cuts to Medicaid, the health program for the poor; more than $600 billion in cuts to the Affordable Care Act; more than $400 billion in cuts to food stamps; hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to educational subsidies; and a halving of the State Department and the Labor Department, among other federal agencies. While congressional Republicans have yet to release a budget plan, House GOP lawmakers are weighing cuts to these programs as a way to reduce the debt without touching Medicare and Social Security.
“America cannot be saved unless the current grip of woke and weaponized government is broken. That is the central and immediate threat facing the country — the one that all our statesmen must rise tall to vanquish,” Vought writes in his budget proposal. “The battle cannot wait.”
Democrats note that Washington bureaucrats aren’t the only ones who would suffer under Vought’s spending plan.
“When you’re not willing to cut defense or entitlements, and you’re cutting everything else by 30 percent, you’ve created a huge opportunity for a strong political response from Democrats,” said former Kentucky congressman John Yarmuth, a Democrat who served as House Budget Committee chairman when Vought led the White House budget office. “The Republicans ought to be careful who they’re listening to.”
Vought was a polarizing figure long before the current debt limit fight. His tenure in the Trump administration was marked by controversy over his past incendiary comments about Muslims and a decision to implement a freeze on aid to Ukraine that put him at the center of the first Trump impeachment.
His new think tank advocates on hot-button culture war issues, such as “exposing critical race theory.” The group has not disclosed its funding sources, but its annual report says it took in $1.1 million in 2021. Vought recently told C-SPAN that the organization takes no corporate money and is supported by grass-roots donors across the country.
Most awkwardly for his current position: Vought oversaw enormous increases in the national debt as Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget. The debt ballooned by staggering sums on Vought’s watch: $1 trillion in his first year, and a whopping $4 trillion in his second, as Congress agreed on a bipartisan basis to spend trillions of dollars in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Trump repeatedly overruled fiscal hawks, like Vought, in approving the new spending.
Now, with a Democrat in the White House, Vought says he wants to use the leverage of the debt ceiling to force Democrats to rein in a federal bureaucracy that he views as abusing its power against American citizens. For example, he said, the government is spending money to detain people who participated in the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
“We view our role as almost acting like a shadow OMB on the outside,” Vought told The Post.
Even some Republicans who admire Vought’s expertise say his budget blueprint is based on unrealistic assumptions. To make it balance in 10 years, for example, Vought’s budget also projects that the number of working Americans will increase by 14.5 million people more than Congressional Budget Office predicts, which would allow the American economy to grow faster, reducing the deficit by another $3.8 trillion.
Vought argues that Americans will pour into the job market because of cuts to federal aid programs, but his figures are almost certainly unrealistic, particularly because of the GOP’s opposition to higher levels of immigration, said William Galston, a former domestic policy official in President Bill Clinton’s administration who is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a D.C.-based think tank.
“Russ is an expert. He knows the details; he knows the budget backwards and forwards,” said one former GOPofficial, speaking on the condition of anonymity to candidly describe a former colleague. “But he’s selling conservatives a fantasy, which is achieving a balanced budget without cutting anything popular.
“We’re going to balance the budget by ‘ending woke?’ Give me a break.”
They’re playing their usual games, pretending to care about debt when we know for a fact that they don’t since every time they have a Republican president they happily spend like drunken sailors. This whole exercise is designed to attack Democrats for spending on people who son’t deserve it — racial minorities, immigrants, city dwellers etc, who are taking the bread out of the mouths of Real Americans. Underlying this whole thing is a dedication to keeping taxes low for rich people by hoodwinking ignorant Republican voters into voting against their self-interest so they can express their racism and resentment.
Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) leads Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) and a series of other Republicans in potential match-ups for Arizona’s 2024 Senate race, according to a new poll.
The poll from OH Predictive Insights released Thursday showed Gallego leading in eight hypothetical match-ups, four of which against Sinema running independently and four with Gallego facing a Republican in a head-to-head race.
The four Republicans included in the poll was former Gov. Doug Ducey, former gubernatorial candidate Karrin Taylor Robson, former gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake and former Senate nominee Blake Masters.
In a three-person race, Gallego leads by as little as 5 points in a race with Ducey and as much as 9 points in a race with Masters. He leads by 7 points in the race with Taylor Robson and by 8 points in the race with Lake.
He also leads in the two-person match-ups, but the margin varies significantly based on who the Republican candidate is. He leads by 4 points against Ducey and Taylor Robson, but he leads by 10 points against Lake and 11 points against Masters.
But more than 20 percent of respondents said they were undecided in all match-ups.
Gallego announced his bid for Senate to replace Sinema last month, arguing that Sinema has prioritized wealthier individuals over Arizona families. He has repeatedly criticized Sinema from the left in recent months.
Sinema, who was first elected to the Senate in 2018 as a Democrat, announced in December that she was leaving the Democratic Party and registering as an Independent senator. She said at the time that the decision was about “being true to who I am and how I operate” and giving a sense of belonging to people from Arizona and across the country who are “tired” of partisanship.
“What I take away from this data is that the two key factors in this Senate race will be the ‘style’ of Republican nominated to run and whether Sinema is also on the ballot,” Mike Noble, the polling firm’s chief of research, said in the release. “But, there’s a long time between now and election day, which leaves plenty of opportunity for something to happen that can shift the dynamics of this race.”
Gallego was the only candidate in the poll who had more respondents say they viewed favorably than unfavorably. Taylor Robson and Sinema’s numbers were only slightly underwater, while Lake and Masters are viewed significantly more unfavorably than favorably.
Former Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake is inching closer to deciding to run for Senate, and her expected candidacy has frozen the Republican field in the state as other Senate hopefuls wait for her decision.
Lake, a former local television anchor who falsely claims that she won her 2022 race for Arizona governor, is consideredthe most formidable opponent in a Republican primary, and at least three Republican candidates also sizing up the race are waiting for her to make a decision before they decide to run, according to three people familiar with the situation who, like others in this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the race candidly.
Lakeis eyeing a June timeline for announcing her plans, a person familiar with her thinking told The Post last week.
She enjoys the highest favorability ratings among Republican primary voters of five potential GOP candidates, followed by former GOP Senate candidate Blake Masters, according to a private poll, portions of which were obtained by The Washington Post, that is viewed by Republican strategists as an accurate snapshot of the mood of the GOP electorate.Both candidates were endorsed by former president Donald Trump in their earlier bids.
Republicans here, reeling from a midterm election rout that many blamed on the influence of former president Donald Trump, respondedSaturdayby spurning the former president’s choice for state party chair — and choosing someone even more extreme.
Kristina Karamo, who refused to concede her 14-point loss for secretary of state in 2022, beat former attorney general candidate Matt DePerno, who had Trump’s endorsement, in three rounds of contentious voting. The chaotic 11-hour convention, featuring a rowdy standoff over voting procedures and 10 candidates who all ran under a pro-Trump banner, left no doubt that the bulk of the party’s activists in thiskey battleground state remain firmly committed to election denial and showed no interest in moderating their message to appeal to the political center.
“Conceding to a fraudulent person is agreeing with the fraud, which I will not do,” Karamo said to cheers in her campaign speech on Saturday.
She’s a real pip isn’t she? And it wasn’t just Trump who endorsed her rival, Kari Lake did too.
The Republican base does not listen to anyone but their own echo chamber and Trump doesn’t own that. He follows them, they don’t follow him.
From the founding, the loudest “believers” never did
Josh Marshall finds the Times framing on “fixing” the social safety net wanting:
2/ while evolving medical technology makes Medicare somewhat more complicated, it’s important to note that social security doesn’t need to be repaired. Some people think it shldnt exist. But it’s not broken or failing to function in any way. In about a dozen years it …
Social Security is not broken. Or bankrupt. Or whatever other doomsaying framing its longtime enemies deploy to trick the public into thinking so.
“In about a dozen years,” Marshall tweets, “it will likely require additional revenue – not even that much. When the pentagon needs more revenue we don’t know it’s broken. There are very straightforward ways to provide that revenue – mostly tied to raising or eliminating the cap on payroll taxes. Not complicated.”
3/ We published hour long interview w Paul Krugman last week and he explained the uncontroversial opinion that there are no macroeconomic problems with just adding the additional revenue. None. It’s just whether you think it matters or not or whether tax cuts are more important.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman concurs, Marshall continues. “There are no macroeconomic problems with just adding the additional revenue. None. It’s just whether you think it matters or not or whether tax cuts are more important.”
What’s the issue with raising (or eliminating) the cap on payroll taxes? Marshall adds, “It’s a significant hike on anyone who makes much over 250k a year. If you make 5 million in a year it’s a big deal. So some wealthy people aren’t excited about it.”
And we know which squeaky wheels get their policies passed while others go wanting.
Heather Cox Richardson is on a similar topic, that of the Joe Biden’s SOTU callout of the GOP’s targeting social safety net programs (In particular, Florida Sen. Rick Scott’s “Plan to Rescue America” that incudes sunsetting all federal laws automatically after five years. Plus, with the GOP refusing to issue its own budget, it’s not clear what Republicans affirmatively stand for rather than against, Richardson writes:
In place of using the federal government to regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, protect civil rights, and promote infrastructure, Reagan Republicans promised that cutting taxes and regulation would free up capital, which investors would then plow into new businesses, creating new jobs and moving everybody upward. Americans could have low taxes and services both, they promised, for “supply-side economics” would create such economic growth that lower tax rates would still produce high enough revenues to keep the debt low and maintain services.
But constructing an economy that favored the “supply side” rather than the “demand side”—those ordinary Americans who would spend more money in their daily lives—did not, in fact, produce great economic growth or produce tax revenues high enough to keep paying expenses. In January 1981, President Ronald Reagan called the federal deficit, then almost $74 billion, “out of control.” Within two years, he had increased it to $208 billion. The debt, too, nearly tripled during Reagan’s term, from $930 billion to $2.6 trillion. The Republican solution was to cut taxes and slash the government even further.
Whatever ails ya, tax cuts are their solution. And slashing the social safety net, a particularly unpopular stance Republicans sustain by gerrymandering themselves into congressional districts where Democrats are uncompetitve.
Since the 1990s, Republicans have had an ideological problem: voters don’t actually like their economic vision, which has cut services and neglected infrastructure even as it has dramatically moved wealth upward. So to keep voters behind them, Republicans hammered on social and cultural issues, portraying those who liked the active government as godless socialists who were catering to minorities and women. “There is a religious war going on in this country,” Republican Pat Buchanan told the Republican National Convention in 1992. “It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America.”
A generation later, that culture war has joined with the economic vision of the older party to create a new ideology. More than half of Republicans now reject the idea of a democracy based in the rule of law and instead support Christian nationalism, insisting that the United States is a Christian nation and that our society and our laws should be based in evangelical Christian values. Forty percent of the strongest adherents of Christian nationalism think “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country,” while 22% of sympathizers agree with that position.
Scott wants to “sell off all non-essential government assets, buildings and land, and use the proceeds to pay down our national debt.” Cut taxes, stop socialism, etc., ad nauseum.
But there is a factional struggle within the GOP between more mainstream Republicans (does that even apply?) such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and the Christian nationalist wing that wants to cut off aid to Ukraine even before demolishing our domestic safety net.
Their hatred of the liberal democracy that demands equality for all people has put those extremists on the side of authoritarians like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, both of whom have made attacking LGBTQ people a key feature of their championing of their “traditional values,” a cause the extremists like.
Perhaps like the contested value “freedom,” the left needs to take back some version of “traditional values.” Because the Christian nationalist view of what’s a tradtional American value bears very little resemblance to my “equality for all people” version. Why should their vision win? But it will if the left doesn’t show up to play.
Yes, Utah Sen. Mike Lee’s personal account is @BasedMikeLee.
Is there a single term for describing these people? Revanchist? Political Luddite? Social Darwinist? Misanthrope? None of those quite capture it.
Sen. Mike Lee (R) of Utah famously told a campaign-stop crowd in 2010, “It will be my objective to phase out Social Security, to pull it up from the roots and get rid of it … Medicare and Medicaid are of the same sort, they need to be pulled up.”
Last week, @BasedMikeLee (yes, it’s his personal account) asked, “Until the mid-1930s, the federal government’s footprint didn’t extend much beyond the departments of state, defense, treasury, justice, and interior, along with the postal system. Are we better off with everything we’ve added since then?”
His question is rhetorical. But Lee seems to think We collectively are not. We would be better off without Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and a host of other public services that make the United States a place of opportunity that people from around the world want to come to. That’s a problem?
Maybe making the U.S. a place where life is “poor, nasty, brutish, and short” is conservatives’ solution to inmigration by brown-skinned people. I don’t know.
But whatever-we-call-them is a peculiar pathology. A right-wing obsession.
I tweeted in reply: “Mike, I kinda like knowing hurricanes & tornadoes are coming my way & using GPS to find my way, that my hamburger won’t kill me & produce grown via New Deal aqueducts is trucked over Eisenhower interstates & my plane won’t crash into yours & I won’t get polio.”
Addle-headed liberal, I know. Better that we pull all that up by the roots too.
Another conservative wet dream for decades was to overturn Roe v. Wade, to make abortion — surgical and pharmaceutical — once again illegal everywhere, to return to the good old days of coathangers and uncontrolled bleeding in back offices at night.
When Deborah Dorbert of Florida learned her baby had a lethal diagnosis, she hoped to terminate the pregnancy. When that wasn’t possible, she decided to share her story with me as she waits to deliver Baby M, who is expected to suffocate soon after birth. https://t.co/OeMRxJUGH9
Well, last summer conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court delivered. They overturned Roe after a half century. Meaning more women like Deborah Dorbert will deliver dead and dying babies just as whatever-we-call-them intended (Washington Post):
Deborah and Lee Dorbert say the most painful decision of their lives was not honored by the physicians they trust. Even though medical experts expect their baby to survive only 20 minutes to a couple of hours, the Dorberts say their doctors told them that because of the new legislation, they could not terminate the pregnancy.
“That’s what we wanted,” Deborah said. “The doctors already told me, no matter what, at 24 weeks or full term, the outcome for the baby is going to be the same.”
Florida’s H.B. 5 — Reducing Fetal and Infant Mortality — went into effect last July, soon after the U.S. Supreme Court overturneda half-century constitutional right to abortion.
Deborah’s ultrasound on the day before Thanksgiving — Do those go too, Mike? — showed the fetus growing inside her suffering “a range of abnormalities, not only of the kidneys but also of the heart and stomach consistent with the diagnosis of “oligohydramnios,” or lack of amniotic fluid.” In fact, the fetus had no kidneys.
Diagnosis: Potter Syndrome. Fatal.
“Without working kidneys, newborns are unable to rid their bodies of deadly toxins and go into renal failure. Without amniotic fluid in the womb, they are born unable to breathe,” the Post’s Frances Stead Sellers explains.
Babies with Potter syndrome often die before they are born when their umbilical cords become trapped between their bodies and the wall of their mother’s uterus. Those that survive the birth process typically suffocate within minutes or a matter of hours.
The Dorberts feel financially unable to travel to another state where Deborah might receive an abortion to end her complicated pregnancy. They also worry about legal repercussions.
Deborah didn’t pay much attention to the laws when they were enacted, never believing she would want an abortion. But that has changed.
“It makes me angry, for politicians to decide what’s best for my health,” she said. “We would do anything to have this baby.”
They have resolved to wait in Lakeland, still confused by the law that is determining her care.
“We have never really understood,” Lee Dorbert said. “We were told there was an exception,”he said, recalling conversations with their doctors. “Obviously not enough of an exception in some cases.”
There is more to the sad story. And more health risk for Deborah the longer her doomed pregnancy continues.
I’m partway through the audio version of Michael Lewis’ “The Fifth Risk.” Lewis dives into what many of those agencies (and unsung mission-driven agents) of government that conservatives want gone actually do to make this country a more desirable place to live. The Department of Energy that Texas’ Rick Perry wanted eliminated (having no idea what it did before running it) devotes something like half its budget to securing the nuclear stockpile. It also secures loose fissionable materials floating around the world to keep them from becoming terrorist bombs.
The Department of Commerce contains the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Its decades of weather and satellite data make tornado and hurricane prediction possible as well as helping increase crop yields.
And there is no telling how much other taxpayer-funded research, including medical research into devices like ultrasound scanners, makes our lives better in ways we’ll never know.
But no, all that has to be torn up by the roots by whatever-we-call-them obsessives like Lee. It’s a particular brand of misanthropy that needs a name. “Probably there is a word in German, yet lamentably not in English,” James Fallows tweeted of Elon Musk whose Teslas and other tech ventures would not be possible without billions in federal grants.
Train in vein: Raquel Welch (September 5, 1940- February 15, 2023)
In the canyons of your mind I will wander through your brain To the ventricles of your heart, my dear I’m in love with you again
– from “Canyons of Your Mind,” by The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band
Earlier this week, I was mindlessly scrolling through Twitter (as one does) and noticed that Fantastic Voyage was trending. Initially, I was puzzled as to why that nearly 60 year-old film was on the radar. Then I saw “Raquel Welch” trending, and thought “Uh-oh…another pop culture icon of my youth has diminished and gone into the West.”
There’s a 65% chance that I couldn’t tell you where I left my goddam keys, but I have vivid memories of attending a Saturday matinee showing of Fantastic Voyage at Theater #1 (Fort Wainwright, Alaska) and becoming mesmerized by the sight of Raquel Welch cavorting about the movie screen in a skin-tight scuba outfit for 2 hours.
Being only 10 in 1966, I could not articulate exactly what it was about this vision that captured my imagination, any more than I could explain the similar fascination I had for watching Diana Rigg cavort about the TV screen in a skin-tight leather outfit (on the odd occasion my parents would let me stay up to watch The Avengers).
Of course, Raquel Welch starred in a number of memorable films; Hannie Caulder, Kansas City Bomber, The Three Musketeers, The Four Musketeers, The Last of Shelia, Lady in Cement, Bedazzled, The Magic Christian, and One Million Years B.C. round off my top 10. But Fantastic Voyage holds a special place in the ventricles of my heart.
So in memoriam to Ms. Welch (and our first encounter) I thought I’d take time out to thank all the little people-in alphabetical order:
The Borrower Arrietty – Based on Mary Norton’s 1952 novel, The Borrowers, Hiromasa Yonebayashi’s enchanting 2010 anime follows the travails of a family of 4-inch tall people who live under the floorboards of a country home. Teenager Arrietty (voiced by Mirai Shida) and her parents survive by “borrowing” items from the humans who live upstairs; items that they won’t necessarily miss (a cube of sugar yields a year’s worth of sweetener for their tea).
The tricky part, of course, is absconding with the provisions without attracting attention. Once Arrietty is spotted by the young boy who lives in the house, life for her family becomes complicated. This is a lovely film, beautifully animated. The screenplay was adapted by Studio Ghibli’s master director, Hayao Miyazaki, with Keiko Niwa.
Darby O’Gill and the Little People – Sean Connery…in a film about leprechauns?! Stranger things have happened. Albert Sharpe gives a delightful performance as lead character Darby O’Gill in this 1959 fantasy from perennially family-friendly director Robert Stevenson (Mary Poppins, The Love Bug, The Absent-Minded Professor, ThatDarn Cat!).
Darby is a crusty yet benign b.s. artist who finds himself embroiled in the kind of tale no one would believe if he told them it were true-matching wits with the King of the Leprechauns (Jimmy O’Dea), who has offered to play matchmaker between Darby’s daughter (Janet Munro) and the strapping pre-Bond Connery.
The special effects hold up well (considering the limitations of the time). The scenes between Sharpe and O’Dea are amusing (“Careful what you say…I speak Gaelic too!”). Stevenson later directed another “little people” movie, The Gnome-Mobile, in 1967.
Fantastic Planet – Lest you begin to think that every film on this list is “family-friendly”, think again. I wouldn’t show this one to the kids (unless they’re the kids from Village of the Damned).
Director Rene Laloux’s imaginative 1973 animated fantasy (originally released as La planete sauvage) is about a race of mini-humans called Oms, who live on a distant planet and have been enslaved (or viewed and treated as dangerous pests) for generations by big, brainy, blue aliens called the Draags. We follow the saga of Terr, an Om adopted as a house pet by a Draag youngster.
Equal parts Spartacus, Planet of the Apes, and that night in the dorm you took mushrooms, it’s at once unnerving and mind-blowing.
Fantastic Voyage – This Cold War thriller/sci-fi/action hybrid starring Raquel Welch (poured into a body suit), could only have been concocted in the 1960s. A scientist from behind the Iron Curtain sustains a serious head injury while being “brought in from the cold” by the CIA. Now it’s up to a team of scientists to operate on the life-threatening blood clot…from inside the man’s body (thanks to a top-secret government project that enables humans to be miniaturized to the size of a blood cell). The catch is that the team can only be miniaturized for one hour max (tick…tick…tick).
Welch is joined in the world’s tiniest lil’ submarine by Steven Boyd, Donald Pleasance, Arthur Kennedy and William Redfield. Richard Fleisher directed, and the film picked up Oscars (for art/set direction and special effects). The film undoubtedly inspired Joe Dante’s 1987 sci-fi comedy, Innerspace. BTW, director Fleischer’s Uncle Dick directed the next film on my list (OK, I’ll say it: Small world…).
Gulliver’s Travels (1939) – “There’s a giant on the beach!” Filmmakers have been trying to get this one right for over 100 years (the earliest version was made in 1902, the most recent was 2010), but for me, Dick Fleischer’s 1939 animated musical remains the definitive movie adaptation of Jonathan Swift’s classic novel.
Clocking in at just a little over an hour, it’s the breezy tale of a sailor named Gulliver, who washes up on the shores of the fantastical land of Lilliput. At first, the tiny Lilliputians aren’t sure how they should react to this mysterious “giant”, but he proves to be a valuable asset in helping to resolve brewing tensions between them and their neighbors in the equally diminutive kingdom of Blefiscu. A visual and musical delight (and you’ve gotta love a pacifist hero).
Help! – Compared to its predecessor A Hard Day’s Night, this film vehicle for The Beatles is more fluffy. Ringo is chased by a religious cult who wish to offer him up as a human sacrifice; hilarity ensues. But still, it’s a lot of fun, if you’re in the proper mood for it. Luckily, the Beatles themselves exude enough goofy energy and effervescent charm to make up for the wafer-thin plot line.
There are a few good zingers in Marc Behm and Charles Wood’s screenplay; but the biggest delights come from the Beatles’ music, and director Richard Lester’s flair for visual inventiveness. Which brings me to the reason I included this film on my list…a vignette entitled “The Exciting Adventure of Paul on the Floor”, wherein Paul accidentally receives an overdose of a mad scientist’s “shrinking” serum. It’s a small (*ahem*) section of the film, but it’s memorable.
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids –Rick Moranis stars as a suburban absent-minded professor-type who invents a shrinking device. Before he has a chance to work out the bugs, a freak accident reduces his two kids and the next-door neighbor’s two kids into spoon-sized humans. Hilarity (and unexpected poignancy) ensues, as the four shrunken victims encounter assorted microcosmic terrors in the backyard while Dad frantically brainstorms a solution.
Special effects are imaginative and well-done. While this is Disney (the original working title was The Teenie Weenies), it’s not as twee as one might expect. This was the directorial debut for Joe Johnston, who would later make the outstanding family drama October Sky.
The Incredible Shrinking Man – Always remember, never mix your drinks. And, as we learn from Jack Arnold’s 1957 sci-fi classic, you should never mix radiation exposure with insecticide…because that will make you shrink, little by little, day by day. That’s what happens to Everyman Grant Williams (Scott Carey), much to the horror of his wife (Randy Stuart) and his stymied doctors.
Unique for its time in that it deals primarily with the emotional, rather than fantastical aspects of the hapless protagonist’s transformation. To be sure, the film has memorable set-pieces (particularly Grant’s chilling encounters with a spider and his own house cat), but there is more emphasis on how the dynamics of the couple’s relationship changes as Grant becomes more diminutive. The denouement presages the existential finale of The Quiet Earth.
In the fullness of time, some have gleaned sociopolitical subtext in Richard Matheson’s screenplay; or at least a subtle thumb in the eye of 1950s conformity. Matheson adapted from his novel. He also wrote the popular I Am Legend (adapted for the screen as The Last Man on Earth , The Omega Man and the eponymous 2007 film).
The Indian in the Cupboard – Veteran Muppeteer Frank Oz teamed up with E.T. screenwriter Melissa Mathison for this light fantasy about a boy and a tiny Native American warrior who lives in his cupboard. Omri (Hal Scardino) receives a small antique cupboard as a birthday gift. A friends gives him a plastic Indian play figure, which he puts in the cupboard. His mother (Lindsay Crouse) digs up a family heirloom key, which enables Omri to secure his new toy.
There’s something about the combo of cupboard, key and figurine that results in the appearance of a living, breathing, toy-sized human named Little Bear (played by Native-American rapper Litefoot), who has time-traveled from 1761 (don’t ask). Soon he has two equally diminutive companions, a cowboy (David Keith), and a bumbling WW I English soldier (Steve Coogan). The film occasionally lags, but its sweet, gentle tone and positive message (promoting tolerance) isn’t the worst thing you could share with the kids.
The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb – This film, on the other hand, is probably about the worst “little people” fairy tale you could let the kids watch before bedtime. Closer to Eraserhead than, say, Pinocchio, this is one of those oddball films that nearly defies description.
English slum dwellers Ma and Pa Thumb (Deborah Collard and Nick Upton) are shocked when Ma gives birth to an infant you could fit in your pocket. Still, the proud parents soon find themselves showering their adorable (if freakish) little Tom with love and affection. Unfortunately, this happy family scenario is rudely interrupted when Tom is kidnapped by black-clad henchmen, who spirit him away to a truly creepy genetic lab. Tom’s secret adventures are only beginning.
Writer-director Dave Borthwick utilizes stop-motion techniques, combining actors with claymation to create an overall unsettling mood. It almost plays like a silent film; any “dialog” is unintelligible gibberish. All of the actors employ the same bizarrely mannered facial tics and line delivery, which are strangely reminiscent of Billy Bob Thornton’s character in Sling Blade. It’s weird, yet compelling.
Stuck for movie night ideas? Check out Den of Cinema (searchable by genre)
In April, Donald Trump’s lawyers are set to defend him in civil court against allegations from writer E. Jean Carroll that he raped her in a department store in the mid-’90s. When they do, they really, really want to ensure that jurors are not allowed to hear the infamous Access Hollywood tape in which Trump brags about grabbing women “by the pussy” without their consent. Why? Because they know how bad it makes him sound!
In court papers filed late Thursday, Trump attorneys Alina Habba and Michael Madaioargued that the 2005 tape, which emerged while Trump was running for president the first time, should be banned from the trial. (They want both the tape itself and any references to it blocked.) Calling the recording “irrelevant and highly prejudicial,” the attorneys claim, per the Associated Press, that it “might unjustly be used to suggest to jurors that Trump had a propensity for sexual assault and therefore must have raped Carroll.” Why might the tape give jurors that idea, you ask? As a reminder, Trump toldAccess Hollywood host Billy Bush: “I’m automatically attracted to beautiful [women]. I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”
Not surprisingly, Trump’s attorneys also reportedly want to block testimony from two women who have alleged sexual misconduct by the ex-president. (Trump has been accused of sexual misconduct by at least 26 women and has denied any and all allegations against him.)
During a deposition in October, Trump—who claimed in a 2019 interview with The Hill that Carroll was “totally lying” and not his “type”—mistook Carroll for his second ex-wife, Marla Maples. At other points in the under-oath deposition, Trump called Carroll a “nut job” and continued to insist that her allegations are a “hoax.”
In perhaps related news, Ivana Trump reportedly said during her 1990 divorce deposition that Trump had raped her the prior year, after ripping out handfuls of her hair. She later claimed she had not accused him in a “literal or criminal sense.”
Shortly after his victory last year, Donald J. Trump began revisiting one of his deepest public humiliations: the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape of him making vulgar comments about women.
Despite his public acknowledgment of the recording’s authenticity in the final days of the presidential campaign — and his hasty videotaped apology under pressure from his advisers — Mr. Trump as president-elect began raising the prospect with allies that it may not have been him on the tape after all.
Most of Mr. Trump’s aides ignored his changing story. But in January, shortly before his inauguration, Mr. Trump told a Republican senator that he wanted to investigate the recording that had him boasting about grabbing women’s genitals.
“We don’t think that was my voice,” Mr. Trump told the senator, according to a person familiar with the conversation. Since then, Mr. Trump has continued to suggest that the tape that nearly upended his campaign was not actually him, according to three people close to the president.
I guess we’ll find out if it’s going to be excluded. But who in the world hasn’t heard it already?
It was a peaceful Sunday afternoon at the Conscious Life Expo, and in a large, windowless ballroom, Del Bigtree was red-faced and triumphant in front of a captivated crowd.
“These people,” he told them, “need to go to prison!” There was a smattering of solemn applause. “For life!” someone in the audience cried out.
Bigtree is a TV producer turned big fish in the anti-vaccine world, and this talk was, more or less, part of his victory lap. In a lecture running nearly two hours, he accused government officials and pharmaceutical companies of fraud for promoting mRNA vaccine, and for downplaying the effectiveness of drugs like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. (Neither drug is effective as a cure, treatment, or preventative for COVID; the FDA warns against using hydroxychloroquine for COVID due to possible heart rhythm problems, and ivermectin because it can lead to problems ranging from hypotension to death. The use of both drugs has been heavily politicized, and a recent study found that conservative doctors are more likely to prescribe them, despite a large and growing body of research showing neither drug is effective for COVID.)
But Bigtree also had another, more optimistic agenda: to assure his audience that he and other anti-vaccine figures are now seeking their legal and political revenge.
Bigtree falsely claimed governments and health departments had killed people with overdoses of hydroxychloroquine “so they could say it doesn’t work,” and told the crowd, “I am going to take that to a court of law.” He also swore never to forgive the media for their role in the pandemic. “New York Times, CNN, MSNBC,” he cried, “The blood is on your hands! We will never forget that you did that.”
While the rhetoric was overheated, even for Bigtree, it’s also an indicator of the moment we’re in. As COVID cases continue to gradually decline, and with the U.S. government declaring it will end the formal public health emergency on May 11, the pandemic is, in the view of many people, receding into the rearview mirror. (This despite the fact that the disease continues to kill many people every day, especially endangering the elderly and becoming a leading cause of death for children.)
And major anti-vaccine figures are now seizing their chance to enact what they see as justice—and do a little fundraising and image-burnishing in the process. Besides Bigtree’s nonspecific legal threats, we have Children’s Health Defense, the most moneyed and influential anti-vaccine organization in the U.S., led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. CHD is often involved in strange and frequently doomed litigation, but recently, and with much fanfare, it launched a new one: an antitrust lawsuit against major news organizations and social media outlets, which they accused of conspiring to “collectively censor online news” about COVID. The defendants included frequent anti-vax targets like the Washington Post and the BBC, and the plaintiffs are a veritable who’s who of people making bogus health claims, including CHD itself; Ty and Charlene Bollinger, who run websites and sell products devoted to making bogus claims about cancer and vaccines; Jim Hoft, who founded right-wing news site Gateway Pundit, and Joseph Mercola, a longtime figure in the natural health world who’s also been a major funder of the anti-vax movement. The lawsuit made quite a bit of noise in conservative media and the anti-vaccine world—and it allowed CHD to continue asking for donations for its general litigation fund.
Besides the anti-trust lawsuit, Children’s Health Defense is also pledging to lobby the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs on behalf of what it calls “vaccine-injured” service members. The organization is calling on its audience to help it lobby the VA to get disability benefits for service members who claim they were injured by COVID vaccines. Again, the action serves several separate purposes: to help CHD raise its public profile, to align it with the cause of veterans’ rights, and to give it the appearance of demanding some sort of corrective action from an arm of the U.S. government.
These sorts of pseudo-legal legal threats and jumbled court filings aren’t confined to the United States. The anti-vaccine world has also been paying a great deal of attention to a self-described former Swiss investment banker named Pascal Najadi, who claimed recently that he filed criminal charges against the current Swiss President Alain Berset, who is also the country’s former minister of health, for promoting COVID vaccines and claiming, incorrectly, that they meant you could not spread the disease. This is, more or less, like saying you’ve sued the sky for creating rain clouds, but anti-vaccine figures have been enthralled; one of them, a woman named Dr. Jane Ruby, exulted on Telegram that Najadi “may have started a worldwide c19 bioweapon investigation!” (COVID vaccines are not “bioweapons.”)
The article reveals that this “movement” isn’t confined to the USA. Apparently anti-vaxxers are organized around the world and are bringing legal actions in places as disparate as Switzerland and Thailand. (Thanks internet!)
In all, this rash of grandiose legal threats, doomed lawsuits and excitable rumors of foreign prosecutions has a lot in common with the basic shape of QAnon beliefs. It promises that justice will be served, evildoers will be dragged into the light and prosecuted, and those who doubted “the COVID narrative” will be vindicated. (Elsewhere, the former light of QAnon’s hopes and dreams, Donald Trump, has declared he will bring back public executions if he’s elected president again.)
More than anything, the people making money in the anti-vaccine world need to keep their audience’s hope, and their attention, as long as they possibly can. The false promises are yet another way to keep them in their seats.
Under the guise of “just asking the questions,” Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin spread anti-vaccine misinformation on a right-wing radio show Thursday, questioning why efforts were being made to vaccinate the general US population, especially young people and those who had previously been infected with Covid-19.
Johnson, who tested positive for coronavirus last fall, said he was “sticking up for people who choose not to get vaccinated.” As of March, Johnson told CNN he had not yet been vaccinated because he previously had Covid-19.
In Thursday’s interview with conservative radio host Vicki McKenna, Johnson suggested there have been thousands of deaths connected to Covid-19 vaccinations and that receiving a vaccine could be particularly dangerous for those who had previously been infected.
He was spreading these lies as recently as his testimony before the House “weaponization” committee last week. Rand Paul is right there with him. And they are planning to grill Dr Fauci and try to take away his pension (which they can’t do…) It’s sick.
I mean…
There’s a new theory that’s been leaking out of the cracked pots of the people who will believe everything except the truth when it comes to the pandemic, which on Wednesday claimed its one-millionth American victim, a number that would have been unthinkable just two years ago. What is an anti-vaxxer believing these days? Let’s go to our old friend, Senator Ron (Shreds of Freedom) Johnson. If it’s a crazy idea in politics, then Ron Johnson has consumed it. He’s a great white shark in the sea of American crazy, gobbling whatever rancid intellectual chum floats into his path.
Johnson was asked about a theory—one that’s new to me, anyway—offered by a lawyer named Todd Callender that the COVID vaccines are giving people AIDS. Most people would respond with incredulity, and a demand that the person making such an assertion immediately undergo a CAT scan. However, Ron Johnson is not most people, for which we can be grateful because, were that the case, we’d all be eating oatmeal with our toes. From the Wisconsin State Journal:
“Let me challenge you there. That’s way down the road,” Johnson replied. “I mean, you gotta do one step at a time. Everything you say may be true, OK, but right now the public views the vaccines as largely safe and effective, that vaccine injuries are rare and mild. That’s the narrative, that’s what the vast majority of the public accepts. So until we get a larger percentage of the population with their eyes open to ‘woah, these vaccine injuries are real, why?’ You know, it’s gotta be step by step. You can’t leap to crimes against humanity. You can’t leap to another Nuremberg trial.”
He’s not saying he agrees with this lunacy, mind you. He’s just open to any and all speculation, no matter how firmly attached it is to planet Earth.
Johnson spokesperson Alexa Henning said in a statement, “To be clear, the Senator has never stated nor does believe that the vaccine causes HIV. Someone else brought it up on the call and the senator pushed back on his claim.”
Saying that it isn’t time for a Nuremberg trial yet over whether vaccines are giving people AIDS is not exactly “pushing back.” And it’s not like Johnson hasn’t been a professional traveling nut salesman before.
He is a professional travelling nut salesman and he’s still selling this QAnon ant-vax bullshit. From the US Senate. Who knows how many equally nutty judges are out there who are willing to push this same thing?
So, you'll enjoy this: we put what Fox hosts Carlson, Hannity, and Ingraham said, on air, side by side with what they were saying to each other on text, in private, when the cameras stopped rolling.
People keep saying, “well, duh, of course they were doing this.” I guess we all suspected they knew the truth and were lying and we certainly suspected they did much of what they did because their audience was pissed that they called Arizona. But these emails are far worse than just that. The top star of the network was worrying about the stock price and calling Trump a demonic figure in private. Others were trying to get reporters fired for telling the truth and following journalistic standards and validating people they personally believed were f-ing nuts. The chairman of the network was telling them not to report what they knew were the facts.
I mean, even I didn’t think they were quite that openly corrupt among themselves. It’s a full-blown profit-making, propaganda institution and they know exactly what they are doing.
It’s certainly fair to warn people about various substances being laced with fentanyl. But this approach never worked in the past and it won’t work now. I think politicians (who aren’t as dumb as Trump) know this but they do it thrill their voters with lurid imagery.
And preaching abstinence, as this one seems to do, is just a waste of breath. He should be talking about Naloxone and those fentanyl test strips. But he’ll never do that because this isn’t really about helping people struggling with substance use disorders or making a deadly mistake. It’s just pandering to conservatives. As usual.
As Gov. Ron DeSantis and Florida Republican leaders explore alternatives to the College Board’s AP classes and tests, top state officials have been meeting with the founder of an education testing company supporters say is focused on the “great classical and Christian tradition.”
The Classic Learning Test, founded in 2015, is used primarily by private schools and home-schooling families and is rooted in the classical education model, which focuses on the “centrality of the Western tradition.”
The founder of the company, Jeremy Tate, said the test is meant to be an alternative to the College Board-administered SAT exam, which he says has become “increasingly ideological” in part because it has “censored the entire Christian-Catholic intellectual tradition” and other “thinkers in the history of Western thought.”
As DeSantis’ feud with the College Board intensified this week, Tate had several meetings in Tallahassee with Ray Rodrigues, the state university system’s chancellor, and legislators to see if the state can more broadly offer the Classic Learning Test to college-bound Florida high school students.
“We’re thrilled they like what we’re doing,” Tate said. “We’re talking to people in the administration, again, really, almost every day right now.”
It sounds like Florida wants to secede from the modern world and literally create an alternate reality.
And DeSantis isn’t the only one. If you want to hear a really stomach churning right wing pander, listen to Nikki Haley’s rap in New Hampshire about the good old days (she actually uses that phrase) when kids learned reading, writing and arithmetic and that was it, and neighbors looked out for each other and everybody was happy and the world was perfect. I think she’s been binging the (all white) Andy Griffith Show again. And it gets worse:
“There was all this talk about the Florida bill — the ‘don’t say gay bill.’ Basically what it said was you shouldn’t be able to talk about gender before third grade. I’m sorry. I don’t think that goes far enough,” Haley said to applause from the crowd packed into the historic town hall in Exeter.
“When I was in school you didn’t have sex ed until 7th grade. And even then, your parents had to sign whether you could take the class,” Haley said. “That’s a decision for parents to make,” she added to more applause.
You expect it from Trump and DeSantis. But it looks like the race to demean gay parents and deprive kids and teachers of the ability to talk about the world in which they live is going to be joined by all the candidates.It’s going to be an ugly race to the bottom.
Here’s how it looks to Tim Miller who is gay and has a kindergarten age daughter:
Yesterday I was lectured that I am obligated to refrain from criticizing a person who apparently thinks the federal government should mandate that my child be in the closet about her family in school until well past the 3rd grade. Parents rights in action! https://t.co/ilJ9qhcUMZ
