Say what you want about the Star Wars prequels, they are excellent tools for teaching a six-year-old boy about the basics of democracy.

Yesterday I was in a post office with my son Sam (6) and he saw a big cardboard standup for the HBO John Adams bio-pic, and he said "Who is that guy? I'm seeing this poster everywhere!" So I started to explain to him who John Adams was and what he did and what his role was in the formation of the United States, and that necessitated an explanation of monarchy vs. democracy, and at that point Sam chimed in and said "Yeah, like in Episode III, Chancellor Palpatine is supposed to be the leader of the Senate, where people are supposed to get together and talk about what's best for everyone, but instead he's just making everyone fight each other and sitting back and laughing at them all because he's really controlling everything." Then I blinked a few times and decided Sam didn't need to know that much more about John Adams for a while.

Anyway, we were watching Revenge of the Sith the other day, and if you ever need to explain what is going on in this country right now to a six-year-old boy, you could certainly find worse teaching tools than this movie. All the players are there and the political delineations are as clear as could be. Palpatine is a corrupt, cynical politician scheming to become an emperor, starting a war to give himself expansive executive powers, controlling the Senate and the courts to make sure no one can oppose him, et cetera ad infinitum. This is not news, it's pretty obvious that the movie is intended as a criticism of the Bush/Cheney doctrine.

And then, about 2/3 of the way through the movie, Sam, apropos of nothing, says "I think Mace Windu should be elected Chancellor." Which kind of created a moment of clarity for me. Mace Windu (the "stoic" Jedi, according to starwars.com) is a wise, well-spoken, incorruptible warrior-priest, who sees (eventually) what Palpatine is and seeks to remove him from power. He fails, and dies, but Sam is correct -- none of this would have happened if Mace Windu had been Chancellor. Which inspired me to make this:


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Inspiration here.

UPDATE: Sam just walked in, saw this entry on my computer, and said "That guy with 'HOPE' on him?  Is either Mace Windu or God."

Oh, and honestly, I am going to do a post on 1941, and it honestly will be worth it.

Fascinating. One of the great living movie stars endorses Hillary Clinton, delving deep into his extensive filmography to find representative clips of himself showing support. "Who do you trust?" exhorts the psychopathic clown with the machine gun, backed up by the axe-wielding family-killer, "When you're right, you're right" sighs the sleazy private detective, and the deranged, autocratic army colonel explains the candidate's experience and sex appeal.  Just the kind of message Clinton needs to turn this thing around.

I wonder if Tim Russert will be moved to ask Clinton if she accepts or rejects Nicholson's endorsement.

Senator John McCain, in addition to being a liar, panderer, cheat and moral vacuum, apparently has a problem with eligibility.

Hailing, as he does, from the great state of Panama Canal Zone, there is some genuine concern as to whether or not McCain can legally run for president. The law, for reasons that apparently remain obscure, states that only "natural-born" citizens of the US may become president. To me, the phrase "natural-born" is vague in the extreme. Does it mean that only Americans born on US soil can become president, or does it mean that only citizens who have received a "natural birth" may become president? Is it foreigners who are being kept from achieving the highest office in the land, or babies delivered by caesarian section? Were the founding fathers concerned about Hessians taking over the white house, or McDuff, from his mother's womb untimely ripp'd?

The media likes McCain, for some reason, and I'm guessing he will be allowed to run for president because there's enough gray area in the law to make people say "well, the Panama Canal Zone, on a US military base, it's practically the same thing, why are you splitting hairs?"

My theory: the GOP has already wadded up this election and hung it out to dry, they know McCain doesn't stand a snowball's chance, and they're using his quasi-legal candidacy to create precedent for Schwarzeneggar to run in 2012. You read it here first.

ITEM! Bush has a 19% approval rating. Nineteen. That's a one and a nine. Richard Nixon, if memory serves, was at 23% percent on the day he resigned. But my favorite statistic is the one about the economy. Just about everyone seems to think it's not going well. How many people think it's going great? You'll never guess: 1%. This is because, of course, the economy is going great for 1% of the country, the same 1% who make more than several million dollars a year and get all the tax breaks.

ITEM! In Guantanamo, a bunch of probably innocent people, after years of incarceration, will be tried and executed, so that Bush can justify their illegal arrest and detention. The money quote: "I said to him that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process," Davis continued. "At which point, [Haynes's] eyes got wide and he said, 'Wait a minute, we can't have acquittals. If we've been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can't have acquittals, we've got to have convictions.'"

ITEM! Bush visits a museum in Africa and learns a valuable lesson. This is the man whose supporters are saying that Obama is unelectable because he has no foreign policy experience.

ITEM! Retailers, feeling the pinch of recession, decide to go ahead and simply extort money from innocent people. This is, of course, a great idea. You have lawyers, what are you paying them for? Make them earn their keep by sending them out to shake down customers! As far as I know, Best Buy has not yet resorted to sending armed thugs around to local fruit-stand owners to demand "protection" money, but I sense that is coming.

ITEM! Obama Smear of the DayTM: The National Review notes that, as Obama has mixed-race parents, they must certainly have been Communists. Communists! Note to my conservative brethren (and sistren): Communists have not been considered a national threat since 1953 (and were a big fake threat even then). The median age of a voter who is likely to be swayed by the smear that Obama was raised by Communists is Dead.

ITEM! Professional clown Bill O'Reilly shows his typical class when discussing Michelle Obama. Note that when he uses the term "lynching party" he's stressing that he doesn't want one -- unless, of course, there is enough evidence to demand one, then he's all for it. On a personal note, let me just add that I'm about the same age as Michelle Obama, and you know what, for the first time in my adult life, I'm proud of my country too. The first election I voted in was 1980 (my candidate, John Anderson, lost) and over the ensuing 25 years I've watched my country get shoved so far to the right that I don't recognize it any more. This primary season does show an electorate hungry for change, and it's only in the minds of the lizard-heads on the right that that is a lynchable offense.

ITEM! Telcom immunity! Here's how it works. You can't sue the phone company for spying on you unless you can prove they're spying on you. You can't prove they're spying on you because all the evidence of their spying is protected by the federal government. You can't get the information from the federal government because Bush owns the Supreme Court.

Someone named Taylor Marsh has been granted a spot at The Huffington Post (my favorite news site) to try to do her best to make Hillary Clinton the Democratic nominee for president. There's nothing wrong with that -- Marsh is pretty open about who she supports, she's not posing as an objective journalist in this regard.

Which means that if you, like me, are a citizen of the United States, there's a good chance that you live in a state with a presidential primary. If you, like me, are a patriot, I urge you to perform your civic duty and vote. If you, like me, are a registered Democrat, I urge you to vote for Barack Obama.

I don't spend a lot of time thinking about the campaign. I don't listen to the speeches, I don't watch the debates. I know from long experience that a candidate will say and do whatever it takes to be elected and that the various media outlets will spin all that to their own ends. I know it's all a big circus, so I don't pay it that much attention.

I'm voting for Obama tomorrow because, of everyone who has stepped forward to claim their place in the spotlight, he's the only one who doesn't make me sick to my stomach when I look at him.

McCain and Romney have given the United States their solemn oath to continue down the disastrous trail that George W. Bush forged, and Clinton, although more in my ideological arena, has run a brutal, vicious campaign that, to my mind, has shown her to be an oily, cynical political animal, willing to stoop to whatever level necessary to gain power. I think we've had enough of that.

Finally, if you, like me, can occasionally be influenced by a cheesy, sentimental music video, I urge you to watch this:

I am, of course, saddened by the loss of Mr. Ledger, whose work I have enjoyed many times, most recently in I'm Not There. I feel unqualified to honor the man's memory or reminisce about his affect on culture, so I offer these links instead.

Harry Knowles has a mature, sober appraisal...

Variety takes a more hard-headed, businesslike approach...

While I Can Has Cheezburger offers a touching tribute of their own.

Bush on the Plame affair:

"And if there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is. And if the person has violated law, the person will be taken care of. ... I don't know of anybody in my administration who leaked classified information. If somebody did leak classified information, I'd like to know it, and we'll take the appropriate action."

And yet, gosh, it turns out: Bush Authorized Plamegate Leak

Bush on the assassination of Benazir Bhutto:

"The United States strongly condemns this cowardly act by murderous extremists who are trying to undermine Pakistan's democracy. Those who committed this crime must be brought to justice."

And we have learned by now that the only possible way to discern truth from the mouth of Bush is to take what he says and state it in the exact opposite. 

(So the above quote could be translated as: "I strongly applaud this brave act by life-loving centrists who are trying to sustain Pakistan's brutal dictatorship.  Those who committed this great deed must be made exempt from the rule of law.")

Only possible conclusion: Bush ordered the assassination of Bhutto.

(Well, at least he got the "murderous extremists" part right -- that's the most succinct description of his administration I've read yet.)



 

Republicans have been getting a lot of stick lately for their so-called crimes. I mean, sure, they steal elections, gut the constitution they were sworn to uphold, start costly, unnecessary wars that throw nations into tumult, squander our nation's reputation and kill hundreds of thousands of people in order to enrich themselves, loot the treasury, place bonehead incompetents in high positions of power and influence, shoot men in the face then demand they apologize, cackle at the destruction of American cities, flout the Geneva Convention, politicize religion, children and anything else they think will benefit them, hypocritically pass anti-gay legislation while acting as closet gays, disregard the Bill of Rights in order to erode whatever civil liberties they think will gain them more power, but at least no one can say that a Republican would torture a stray dog, hang it by its neck over a tree limb, slit its throat and then stone it to death.

What's that you say?

Oh. Never mind.

...that President Cheney is, at this very moment, keeping a close eye on the situation in Pakistan...and taking notes?

$46 billion more dollars for a war that never should have been started and no one (besides President Cheney) ever wanted is a necessity. $35 billion dollars to provide health care to needy children is a dangerous step toward Communism. Accurately describing the president's actions is "despicable and beneath contempt." Questioning those actions is unbelievably irresponsible.

Cheering the deaths of Americans and the loss of their property is patrotic.

As no one in the current administration has thought to learn anything from History, History will now kindly repeat itself.

Meanwhile, everything gets worse for the bulk of Americans, but Democrats still quail before a president who is staggeringly unpopular.

There is, to put it mildly, a real leadership crisis in the US. The current administration has openly displayed utter contempt for the people whose lives they are supposed to be representing, yet no one seems willing or able to step up and fill the leadership void created by these monsters. Just as the rich in the US have gotten substantially more distanced from the (ever-increasing) poor, the leaders have gotten substantially more removed from their constituents. No one in Washington seems to know, understand or care about what's happening in the lives of the people who put them in office. With things in this state, who would be surprised if a generation of people gave up voting altogether, especially since the last two elections were clearly rigged?

Remember about a year and a half ago, when the story broke about the Bush administration using telecommunications companies to spy on Americans without warrants? And there was much great tumult about whether or not that was legal or constitutional.

Then, in the past few days, Bush (and by "Bush" I refer to whatever powers pull his chimp-puppet strings) has been trying to get immunity from prosecution for the telecommunications companies involved in this activity. Which, of course, indicates that Bush knew what he was doing was illegal all along. Why would a telecommunications company need to be immune from prosecution if they had never broken any laws?

Nobody could have predicted that oil companies and federal employees, placed in charge of billions of dollars in revenue, could have possibly become corrupt.

I think I like this Naomi Wolf person.
 

"What was it like to be Alex that last night in his cage? We’ll never know whether there really was a mind in there — slogging its way from the absence of a cork-nut to the absence of Alex, grasping at the zeroness of death."

To learn more about Alex, start here.

Can you guess how many American mercenaries are currently fighting in Iraq?

a) less than 1000
b) greater than 1000
c) greater than 10,000
d) greater than 100,000
e) greater than the entire US official army presence

If you guessed "e," you're correct!

This is a fascinating and enormous story that will, I'm sure, be told one day.

Just think -- while folks in Washington have been furiously debating whether to withdraw a few thousand troops in the next year or so or whatever, there is an army of mercenaries greater than the US army forces who have been there the whole time. These forces are, apparently, answerable to no one, accountable to no one, supervised by no one and can be tried by no national or military justice system for whatever they feel like doing on any given day. Hmmm, let's see -- hundreds of thousands of heavily armed men placed in a situation where they given untold funding and are answerable to no one -- there's no way that could go wrong, is there?

Hooray! Good news! The Iraqi Government throws Blackwater mercenaries out!

Oh. Wait. Never mind.

For the wiki-minded, here's a little background information.

As an almost-related side-note, one of the things that made watching Across the Universe worth watching last night was the way the movie drew the explicit parallels between Vietnam and Iraq. Every time there was a piece of Vietnam story, you could feel the whole audience (it was a sold-out show) become electrified. Suddenly the movie wasn't about a far-off time of wonder and thrills, it was right now and we're living in it. The difference this time being, where is the peace movement? Well, I would argue that there is a peace movement, but it's happening in people's houses -- on the internet, since TV has, for some reason, taken the side of the warmongers this time around. So there was this weird shock of recognition among the audience realizing first that the 60s are happening right now and second that they are the spiritual heirs to the peace movement depicted in the movie.

In response to yesterday's post, Anonymous writes --

"Why would Britney"... is already the wrong approach and question. Why do you see an individual reasoning? This is no play. "Britney", as one can see from Moore's film, is an idiot, in the real sense of the word. Really, nothing personal, she is. How many interviews and subsequent white-trashtastic failures does it take to show over the YEARS, the chances to prove after her mother-managed first years that she understood anything, are gone. We talk about a "poor" girl who is rumoured to make 700thou a MONTH without doing anything. Such is the sublime banality of the U.S. media culture.

This comment interests me. Anonymous's anger here is palpable, and reflects some of the strong feelings I've been hearing about Ms. Spears's attempted comeback (including another long piece in the New York Times today). Any artist who makes people this angry must be worthy of some kind of attention.

So let's examine this comment a little more closely.

Fred Thompson: good actor.

Look. I like Fred Thompson. I liked him in Marie, I liked him in Die Hard 2, I liked him in Cape Fear, I liked him on Law & Order. I know nothing about his political career, but all it takes is a sentence like this to allow me to completely write him off as any kind of serious candidate:

"Republican Fred Thompson said Friday that terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden is "more symbolism than anything else" as the presidential hopeful warned of possible greater al-Qaida threats within the United States."

Got that? Osama bin Laden is not a criminal, or a terrorist, or a person, or a freedom fighter, or a psychopath, or the leader of a terrorist organization, or the murderer of 3000 Americans on our own soil, or any other concrete appellation you could give him -- he's a symbol. He's a symbol instead of a person.

Why would Fred Thompson characterize him thus? Because you can fight a symbol forever and never win, while a person you could hunt down and capture and bring to trial. Which, by the way, Bush failed to do.

(Why did Bush fail to do this? Conventional wisdom says he could have captured bin Laden but "got distracted" by Iraq at a crucial moment and let him go. Personally, I don't think Bush ever wanted to capture bin Laden -- that would be accomplishing something, and would make a lot of his Arab friends angry. Better to attack a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 and is not a theocracy -- the better to create his world of endless war and profits.)

Now then, that's just the first part of the sentence. Bin Laden is "more symbolism than anything else," not a big deal, not worth going after, not worth thinking about, nothing to see here, move along, move along. But then, without even pausing for a breath, Thompson goes on to "warn of possible greater al-Qaida threats within the United States." Yes, exactly. No, we're not going to pursue bin Laden because frankly, who cares, he's not important, he's just a symbol, but for god's sake YOU MUST ELECT A REPUBLICAN, OTHERWISE AL- QAIDA WILL KILL YOU IN YOUR SLEEP!!

The fact that this blatantly deceptive, manipulative crap is reported without comment, of course, is another matter altogether.

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Bartholomew and the Oobleck, for the uninitiated, is about a king who gets bored with the weather and commands his creepy magicians to make something new come down from the sky. As I read the first part of this story to my kids tonight, my son Sam (6) interrupted me to ask "Is that really a good idea?"

Oobleck was published in 1949, a time when it seemed that the kings of the world did indeed seem to be bored with the weather of the world and, aided by creepy magicians like Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller, deemed it necessary, for reasons having to do with hubris and pride, to have something new fall from the sky.

The narrative tension of Oobleck is palpable as Bartholomew, the lowly page boy, tries first warn the king against his foolish whim, then waits with nameless dread for the coming apocalypse, then desperately races to warn the kingdom of the king's disastrous mistake.

It's hard to read this story without feeling a lot like Bartholomew. We all knew our current king's folly was a bad idea, everyone tried to tell him so, but kings will be kings and so the creepy magicians (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Halliburton, the Carlyle group, PNAC, etc etc etc) created an apocalypse for the boy tyrant.

(With plenty of little army men for him to throw around the floor of his throne room while he made exploding noises, but don't let me mix my metaphors.)

The effects of oobleck, it turns out, can be reversed with a simple act of humility on the part of the king. Our boy king, of course, we have learned is incapable of an act of humility, and even if he were, this particular oobleck is, alas, here to stay. Our boy king's plan, his stated plan, is to keep the war in Iraq going long enough to become someone else's problem, and, theoretically, never end at all.

(A canny commentator remarked recently that Bush is not, and never was, interested in being president. What he was interested in was winning the election. We've seen, indeed, over and over, that Bush's main objective has always been to win, no matter what he has to do, what laws he has to break or who he has to kill to do so. We've also seen that he does, in fact, have no interest in leading, making decisions or doing anything remotely presidential, like treating other leaders, or anyone really, even his own mindless supporters, with anything like dignity or respect.)