Rush Limbaugh : Reports say Chest Pains/Heart Attack; Press is Inexplicibly Silent

This came before the strange news blackout on what should be a big story even if this is a mild case of anxiety. Something is up when all of the major news outlets relegate the news of the possible heart attack of a major force on the dark side to the bottom of the pile. This is being mentioned as an afterthought, and I have been in a fugue state with this story all day, wondering if I made it up. But here it is, still fresh 24 hours later...




Rush Limbaugh has reportedly been rushed to a hospital in Honolulu Hawaii with chest pains. His site reports that he is resting comfortably, but various news outlet reports differ (and its been really hard to find anything that isn't a copy of the local paper with no real information,) with early reports being that he is in critical condition with a heart attack. There will supposedly be official news tomorrow morning so stay tuned.

I don't know what to say, folks...It seems that the liberal, politically correct way is to try not to sink to the level of the likes of a cretin like Limbaugh, but apparently that's not me. I have to wonder if there is a moment for a sociopath in this advanced stage of narcissistic self involvement, where he realizes that this may be the big "it," and start to bargain with his God. I wonder about the real fear beneath the "heaven" bravado, and if he felt much pain before they started pumping him with medicines.

Tomorrow he may walk waving from the hospital with a cigar clenched in his teeth, tanned and ready for another round of golf...but right now, maybe there is a modicum of payback going on for the hate and violence that he incites; a seed of insight in that view of an end of the construct that is Rush, which touches even a tiny amount on the pain and turmoil that he as caused for countless innocent victims in the name of freedom of speech and capitalism. Maybe there will be some moment where the bluster breaks and he sees that the end is lonely, the riches fall away, and there is nothing but truth, whether you are to be a recycled part of the circle of nature, or judged in heaven, there cannot be an easy and good ending for this man.
I just hope that at some point the realization comes upon him...and that his legacy will be solely that he made money on the destruction of the struggling American society and spirit.

I don't like to be this hateful, but I, like so much of American society, have become a little hardened by what has gone on... and Ive lost my patience for anyone who continues to deride those who are trying to chip away at the pile of rubble left by the Bush-Cheney regime.

So, say a prayer to whatever god you've got; a prayer that people who go through these things are, at the very least, faced with the truth of who they are and what they've done; after that hes on his own, and his record speaks for itself.

c/p RIP Coco

V Fucked Up on Rush Limbaugh

Because he's "resting comfortably" in a Honolulu hospital. If he's taking nitrates for his chest pains, he may want to take it easy on the Viagra.

Lord only knows why Limbaugh would want to vacation on Honolulu the same time as a President that he obviously hates as much as Obama. If he dies in Hawaii, will the GOP accept his death certificate as real?

Blogrolling in our time

As part of our blogroll retooling, say hello to our first new blogrollee, Jersey Pie. This one's under the Brilliant New Jersey Blogs category, though if there was a category for food, it would be there too. And since Mr. Brilliant and I are going to have a late New Year's Eve lunch at the Best Damn Friggin Diner in Bergen County today, one that defies all diner stereotypes, I think I may just try a piece of their cherry pie today.

UPDATE: I can concur with Jersey Pie, the Tom Sawyer does serve up some damn fine cherry pie. Their "actual food" (as opposed to the standard burgers-and-sandwiches we expect a good diner to dish up) is quite good too.

Why we hate Chris Matthews - in a nutshell

Yesterday Chris Matthews pointed out to Ron Christie [insert your own sound clip of closet door closing here], the toadying former aide to Dick Cheney the FACT, the double standard that Cheney and the entire Republican Party REALITY of the Bush Administration's lack of response to both the threats before the 9/11 attacks and to Richard Reid, the December 2001 shoe bomber. Of course he had to, given Joan Walsh's ferocious presentation of facts. But Tweety didn't stop there; he went on to point out that everyone on the right (and that includes Joe Lieberman) is using the attempted bombing on Christmas Day as an excuse to beat the drums for an expanded war in the Middle East.

Watch:

What's hilarious about this exchange is the Republicans regard the Democrats as the "Pussy Party", a bunch of overwrought, overly-emotional girly-men, not the real manly-man chest-beaters like Dick Cheney. Except who is it that's running around like a chicken without a head because a depressed, angry, alienated 23-year-old decided to get laid by 72 virgins in heaven? And yet here is Cheney's ventriloquist's dummy, complaining that Barack Obama isn't emotional enough.

So why is this an example of Why I Hate Chris Matthews? Because it shows that TWEETY KNOWS BETTER, even more often than what we saw last night, he does crap like this:

The press loves the boogeyman story because it makes them feel like crusaders for freedom and allows them to make common cause with macho right wingers. It's far more exciting than dull stories about losers who don't have jobs --- you can see the exhilaration coming off of them in waves. They love it.

Case in point, Chris Matthews, who is ready to force everyone to be cavity searched in the ticket line:

Matthews: You know what when we get on an airplane, we give up all kinds of checks we don't do by just walking down the street. I think we give up a certain amount of rights just getting on an airplane and I think you've got to recognize that your safety is tied up with everyone else on that plane's safety and anybody else that gets hit on that plane. You don't own the right to be on that plane because you're getting on an airplane so you do have to yield some civil rights...And by the way, Cliff, you know it and I know it, they're going to get smarter and smarter and sooner or later they're going to get all kinds of people to do their dirty work for them. They're the enemy. They're going to use any means they can to get us. They're out to kill us. Let's be as smart as they are because they are already smart.

Run fer yer lives!

Apparently, Matthews thinks that there is some Koranic law that requires all attacks against America to take place on an airplane. If some terrorist with imagination succeeds in a mall or on a bridge will we have to submit to profiliong and screening there too? Sounds like it.(And if he thinks these would-be terrorists like Richard Reid and Abdulmutallab are super criminals, no wonder he's petrified.)

And that's why we hate Chris Matthews -- because he's not stupid. He's not even a craven political opportunist like Pete Hoekstra, trying to pull in campaign cash from a bunch of unemployed people in Michigan who can no longer afford to fly anywhere but who can't see a connection between the money squandered by the Bush Administration on pointless and badly-conducted wars and the fact that they have no health care. He's a media opportunist, and that may be worse.

(cross-posted at Sweet Jesus I Hate Chris Matthews.)

2009: A Grab Your Fork digest

Where did the year go? It must be a sign of getting older when the year swoops by faster than a food blogger's camera over your main course.People often say to me "you seem to eat out a lot" to which I always reply "oh no, not really, just a few meals here and there". And yet reviewing a year's worth of posts seems to prove otherwise - so much food. How did I fit it all in?With ease, of course.In

What The CIA Didn't Find in Africa.

Just because Republicans helped lead the ban on better technology and opposed airport security spending doesn’t mean they’ll stop Cheneying the Democrats for subverting national security. - Maureen Dowd, NY Times, 12/29/09

There are so many lessons to be learned, so much information to digest, so much that needs to be said about the failed destruction of Fight 253 that one's mind is almost paralyzed with the facts. But one must start somewhere if one is to be heard so let me just say right here and now, Dick Cheney, go fuck yourself. Shut the fuck up, go back to your spider hole, clutch your .45 ACP, dress it with extra virgin olive oil, sprinkle some sea salt on it and then eat it because you, you bloated miscreant, are more responsible for this mess than most people know.

What am I talking about? Rep. Eric Massa (D-NY) is one of those rare Democrats who's taking point in this or any matter while the rest of the wet-legged Democrat Party are content to let the GOP vent (i.e. to, once again, frame, define and control the debate). This is what Massa had to say on the matter:

I would remind the American public that the apparent leaders of the al Qaeda cell in Yemen were 2 terrorists who were released by Vice President Cheney in secret. I think there's a level of accountability that has to be levied personally on the vice president. He is personally responsible for that.

If true, this would be pretty explosive stuff (no pun intended), no matter who's currently in the White House (or Hawaii). Yet, does it really matter on whose watch these men were released while the turnkeys blithely whistled and looked the other way? Looking to the past is what Republicans do whether they're moderates or neocons. Politicians pointing fingers will get us nowhere and will not make us safer. The people who ought to be pointing fingers are intelligence operatives, TSA officials and airline security people provided they point to the right people.

Now, thanks to this Nigerian Abdulmutallab, according to Dowd, we're looking at the prospect of showing up at the airport in hospital johnnies, with the open back ends flapping in the breeze (maybe now, though, the TSA will finally take away our 4 books of matches and two Bic lighters since we can't smoke or ignite our shoes on airliners, anymore).

But at least in the interests of credibility, the Democrats could at least take Massa's and DCCC chair Chris Van Hollen's lead and defend our President, to remind the American people that there was an eight year-long administration that ended less than a year ago, an administration that kept us vulnerable up until 9/11 and kept us more vulnerable still for over 7 years after 9/11, an administration that was so fixated on Iraq and vacations that it literally brushed aside like so many mosquitoes those nattering voices from our intelligence community or that of foreign governments that tried warning us of the impending threat.

It's already been said by cooler heads than Peter Hoekstra and Dick Cheney that the President did the right thing by waiting 72 hours to comment on the Flight 253 clusterfuck. President Obama wasn't merely being coy but was, instead, conscious that a rapid response would elevate the wouldbe terrorist's status. He was also still gathering information that, if his assertions are correct, the intelligence community should've gotten to him months ago and not days after the incident. This may be one time in which the White House actually can lay the blame for this latest SNAFU at Langley's doorstep.

Yet, like Dowd and John Aravosis have said, it just didn't look good that Obama went back to playing golf and to resurrect Fahrenheit 9/11 memories of Bush saying, "Now watch this drive..." after inveighing against terrorism. It also didn't look good when Obama blindly defended DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano's assertion that the system worked.

No, Madam Secretary, someone in our government fucked up. We can't blame the Dutch for all this. Let's take stock of the facts: Abdulmutallab's father, a Nigerian banker, went to the US embassy and warned us his son had been radicalized. The kid finds himself on a terrorist watch list but on a low priority and somehow escaped being put on a No Fly Watch list on which James Moore and Ted Kennedy had found themselves. He then pays for his ticket with $3000 in cash and doesn't check any baggage.

By Christmas Day while Bill O'Reilly was busy stalking elementary school principals or manger displays or whatever else is at war with Christmas, a real war reared its ugly head again. And everyone from the President of the United States on down is wondering how the largest, most sophisticated and well-funded intelligence machine in the world couldn't simply put the dots together.

The president isn't being detached like Bush was during Katrina. He's playing it smart, playing catchup like the rest of us. Things are humming along in Hawaii so quietly that it would be easy to think of Obama as doing nothing but playing golf. No, the President is being smart.

Still, he could've handled it better. Smart is not always what's called for.

Yet, to hear the GOP talk, Democrats have been in charge the whole time, as if Obama took over from Slick Willie with no bloodily incompetent eight year interregnum in between, as if the Democratic Party has had a generation or more to get a grip on al Qaeda (and even if that was the case, what does that say about the GOP?). But there was an eight year-long period of unparalleled brutality toward the innocent with hardly a dent made in al Qaeda's infrastructure, a period presided over by a so-called President who waited twice as much time to comment on Richard Reid than Obama did on Flight 253.

It was an administration that didn't seem to be at all concerned about al Qaeda's mastermind bin Laden barely six months after the attacks, an administration that so completely fucked up national security, the very launch pad Republicans are using now to attack our president, that the annual State Dept's terrorism report contained so much bad news it was then redacted for Congress and no longer released to the American public.

So the Republican Party, starting with Dick Cheney, can all go fuck themselves. How dare they? Yes, Janet Napolitano spoke out of turn and championed a system that plainly failed and would've literally crashed and burned were it not for a Dutch filmmaker. But what is that in comparison to a plainly clueless Michael Chertoff who didn't even know that thousands were cooped up inside the New Orleans Superdome and Convention Center for five days? No one died on Flight 253 and the president was kept in the dark. 1800 perished on the Gulf Coast while the Bush administration sat on the facts.

Could President Obama have handled the Flight 253 debacle differently? Sure, but he loses nothing more serious than style points. The GOP is resorting to 2002, 2003 and 2004 fear-mongering because they sense a political opportunity, to wean away an American majority they legitimately and understandably lost on a (snort) national security platform.

Wednesday Big Blue Smurf Blogging: What They Said

Today's honoree, Joan Walsh, who had the guts to articulate what I thought when I first saw the photographs, and then read about the web postings of the Christmas Day Liar Liar Pants on Fire would-be bomber:

Finally — and this is the sort of thing you're not allowed to say if you are, as Glenn Greenwald notes, a Serious Journalist — but every time I see Abdulmutallab's face I'm struck by how young and vulnerable he looks. His troubled Web writings left the same impression. I'm not sure what that means. He is, increasingly, the face of young militants — the product of a good home and education, even wealth, not of slums and deprivation (although the poverty and chaos of Yemen, Afghanistan and Somalia certainly contribute to al-Qaida's strength and appeal there). Abdulmutallab reminds me more of a troubled American school shooter than, say, Mohammed Atta. Al-Qaida's appeal to such lost souls may well be high, but it's a misery that crosses boundaries of religion and race.

The first thing I thought of when I read how depressed and confused this young man is was not "waterboarding", but "Paxil." There's a lot more of Eric Harris, or, let's face it, Timothy McVeigh, to this young man than there is of Osama Bin Laden. However horrific the results might have been had the bombing attempt succeeded, this is not a trained assassin, this is a fucked-up kid who was ripe for the picking by jihadists. I know the right would rather turn the entire Middle East into a sheet of glass than use the words "root causes", but it seems to me that perhaps we might want to look at why a 23-year-old with every advantage possible would prefer flaming aerial death to living in this world another day.

Honorable mention: White House spokesman Dan Pfeiffer, who finds enough nutsack to point out that Cheney talking about being ineffective against terrorism is like, if I may say, the pot calling the kettle black. Money quote:

Second, the former Vice President makes the clearly untrue claim that the President – who is this nation’s Commander-in-Chief – needs to realize we are at War. I don’t think anyone realizes this very hard reality more than President Obama. In his inaugural, the President said “our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred.” In a recent speech, Assistant to the President for Terrorism and Homeland Security John Brennan said “Instead, as the president has made clear, we are at war with al-Qaida, which attacked us on 9/11 and killed 3,000 people. We are at war with its violent extremist allies who seek to carry on al-Qaida’s murderous agenda. These are the terrorists we will destroy; these are the extremists we will defeat.” At West Point, the President told the nation why it was “in our vital national interest” to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to fight the war in Afghanistan, adding that as Commander in Chief, “I see firsthand the terrible wages of war.” And at Oslo, in accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, the President said, “We are at war, and I am responsible for the deployment of thousands of young Americans to battle in a distant land.”

There are numerous other such public statements that explicitly state we are at war. The difference is this: President Obama doesn’t need to beat his chest to prove it, and – unlike the last Administration – we are not at war with a tactic (“terrorism”), we at war with something that is tangible: al Qaeda and its violent extremist allies.

I think Dan Pfeiffer just called Dick Cheney a pencil-dick. More like this, please.

Assclown of the Day

Shorter Dick Cheney: I won't attack the Nigerian who tried to attack us but I will attack the other black guy.

I'm convinced that Cheney's going for laughs at this point. Has he forgotten the 8/6/01 PDB that Bush cavalierly ignored during his own vacation?

The News At a Furtive Glance

When news breaks, Pottersville Central makes sure it stays broken.

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According to ABC's Brian Ross, two of the four masterminds who'd allegedly plotted to blow up an American airliner on Christmas day were released from Gitmo by George W. Bush. It gets better: These two Saudi al Qaeda clowns were enrolled into an art rehabilitation program in Saudi Arabia. Yemen had a similar program but was 86'd when it was discovered that you can't turn a terrorist into Andrew Wyeth.

Says Megan Carpentier at Air America (aka the HuffPo 2.0), "Both the families of al-Awfi and Shari attribute their radicalization to their years in detention at Guantanamo Bay." So, bottom line, we jailed two normal guys, turned them into terrorists through torture and illegal detention then turned them out into the world to harm us. Heckuva job, Bushie. Give yourself a big ole thumbs up. There ya go. Asshole.

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You may have heard that about a month and a half ago, Barack Obama actually nominated Dana Perino, Bush's last press secretary, to head up the Broadcasting Board of Governors. You may have also heard that right after her inexplicable nomination, the former press secretary actually said to Sean Hannity, "We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush's term." I guess she was out of town on 9/11.

Well, seems that Mary Matalin is taking up Perino's whiteboarding of history by insisting that not only did Bush inherit a recession from Clinton but he even inherited 9/11 from him, too. (Hey, at least she's brave enough to admit that 9/11 actually happened.)

I guess Mary was also out of town when Richard Clarke and the outgoing Clinton administration officials tried to warn the apathetic incoming Bush administration about the danger represented by al Qaeda or when several foreign governments tried to warn Bush about an impending al Qaeda attack on US soil. I would find it very easy to hate Matalin were it not for the pathetic fact that every night she has to sleep with James Carville.

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Earlier this month, Eric Sprott and David Franklin of Sprott Asset Management LP published a report on the Treasury Securities that are being bought and sold like mad, especially in the third quarter of FY '09. The title of the article is not very reassuring but it seems to strengthen the suspicion we all have of the highly secretive Fed: "Is It All Just a Ponzi Scheme?"

After the federal gov't decided to issue $1.885 trillion of debt for FY 2009, it sold trillions in T-bills. But someone has to have the capital to finance all that public debt so who bought it? Well, "foreign and international buyers", who are supposed to be the target for this unimaginably large refinancing of our debt, bought a respectable $697.5 billion in Q3. The Fed itself bought $286 billion in Treasury holdings. So who or what was the third entity to push the sale of T-bills to over a trillion with a Q3 purchase of over $528 billion? Well, that's where it gets interesting. It was a group eponymously named "Other Investors." So who are they, exactly?

Well, Sprott and his people decided to investigate further by consulting the Federal Reserve Board of Governors Flow of Funds Data and this is what they found: Out of all the groups that make up "Other Investors", all but one nominally increased their purchase of Treasury Securities. These would be insurance companies, pension funds and depository institutions. That leaves another generically-named entity called the "Household Sector." Now, at first, this sounds as if American homeowners were able to somehow buy up over $510 billion of Treasury notes but how could that be when so many of us are out of work and facing foreclosure?

Well, it's not us or foreign governments or insurance companies or banks or the like but phantoms, to use Sprott's and Franklin's word. This mysterious entity that had bought up only $15 billion in treasury bills in all of FY 2008 bought a staggering $528+ billion in the third quarter of this year alone and all without a hiccup. In other words, this Household Sector purchased almost twice what the Fed itself had bought in Treasury bills, T-bills are that are being cranked out like economy-sized confetti to fool foreign investors and governments into thinking we're managing our public debt better than we actually are (shades of Enron). And that's why Sprott thinks the Fed is just a massive Ponzi scheme. Some day all this debt's going to have to be paid by somebody and the other Ponzi architect named Bernard is naively hoping it's going to be leery foreign governments. And don't think they're not watching the actions of powerful bond investor Bill Gross, who's selling his own Treasury notes like crazy.

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You got ten bucks to spare? If not, tough shit, because that's what it'll cost every man, woman and child in the US to bail out GMAC yet again. The government is expected to announce later today that it'll extend another $3.5 billion to the automaker's financial services arm.

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At long last, America's premier conservative is newly single, ladies. Karl "Turblossom" Rove is finally single and available. After a Texas court gave Karl his walking papers, the aforementioned Dana Perino, an official Rove spokesperson, had the gall to say,

“Karl Rove and his wife, Darby, were granted a divorce last week. The couple came to the decision mutually and amicably, and they maintain a close relationship and a strong friendship. There will be no further comment, and the family requests that its privacy be respected.”

Well, I think the still-married Wilsons would have a thing or two to say about respecting family privacy.

Why, when there is a threat of an attack, is the President not told?

What's wrong with this picture:

The president was told during a private briefing on Tuesday morning while vacationing here in Hawaii that the government had a variety of information in its possession before the thwarted bombing that would have been a clear warning sign had it been shared among agencies, a senior official said.

Two officials said the government had intelligence from Yemen before Friday that leaders of a branch of Al Qaeda there were talking about “a Nigerian” being prepared for a terrorist attack. While the information did not include a name, officials said it would have been evident had it been compared with information about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old Nigerian charged with trying to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight to Detroit on Christmas Day.

The government also had more information about where Mr. Abdulmutallab had been and what some of his plans were.

Would someone please explain to me why, when intelligence agencies have evidence that there is someone being prepared for a terrorist attack, that the President is not told until FOUR DAYS AFTER THE ATTEMPT? Hell, even George W. Bush was notified in August 2001 that something was being prepped to go down. That he chose to ignore it doesn't mean he wasn't told. But if Barack Obama is telling the truth, then there is something very strange going on within our intelligence agencies. These agencies are charged with gathering information to anticipate and stop people like Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab from getting on a plane armed with explosives. That they didn't manage to put the pieces together, even after there were plenty of pieces back in 2001 that they didn't put together, is disturbing enough. But that they had the pieces and didn't think the President needed to be informed is even worse. Perhaps they got so used to George W. Bush, who genuinely didn't give a shit. Or perhaps there are elements in the intelligence community who know that an attack on this country would justify the Republican meme of "Barack Obama is a wuss" -- and ensure a return to Republican governance in 2010. And what's worse is I don't know which is a scarier prospect. But something is very, very rotten in the bowels of Washington. And Americans are going to be the collateral damage.

Preserving the sanctity of "opposite marriage"

The guy who does my hair has been with his partner for over 30 years. They not only live together, but they also work together. I've been fortunate to watching these guys take care of each other since 1986, and that's just a fraction of the time they've been together.

If these guys are a threat to traditional marriage, it's only because a good portion of their clientele has become widowed during the decades they've been going to this salon. Of course their median customer age hovers around 78 at this point and one customer was widowed at the young age of 91 (and she's still coming to the salon every week at 94), but I'm sure there's a wingnut somewhere who would say, "See? They ARE a threat!"

Meanwhile, one of wingnuttia's foremost advocates of the sanctity of "opposite marriage", as that champion of monogamy, Carrie Prejean would say, has just ditched his SECOND wife, according to "family spokesperson" Dana Perino.

First of all, who the hell in private life has a "family spokesperson"? And what a comedown for Dana Perino, unless she's already the third Mrs. Rove by injection, which is kind of difficult to imagine, given the rumors that surrounded Mr. Rove and the ferocious attempts to keep secret prostitute/fake reporter's hundreds of visits to the White House during the Rove years.

At any rate, I eagerly await the explanation of how getting a quickie Texas divorce when you "plan to spend time together in the future" is consistent with the sanctity of one man, one woman marriage.

Nostalgia Blogging: See what you missed if you're not a baby boomer?

Stan Freberg and Ray Bradbury (yes, THAT Ray Bradbury) hawking Sunsweet Pitted Prunes:

And now, an extra-special treat; something I've been looking for on YouTube forever and IT'S FINALLY HERE!! Mom, this one's for you:

This is the infamous "Lemon Cream Pie" sketch from Great American Dream Machine. If you're a member of the Most Hated Generation, your mom probably bought those Banquet cream pies. Mine did, and I grew up in a house where cookies meant vanilla wafers and we dreamt of Twinkies because we weren't allowed to have them. After this sketch ran on TV, you could pick up these pies at the Finast for a quarter because no one wanted them anymore.

Around the Blogroll and Elsewhere: American Crackup Edition

Somewhere in a cave, Osama bin Laden is laughing his ass off.

Brad Friedman on the arrest of a wingnut who fatally shot a convenience store owner in Houston, Texas (it's always Texas, isn't it?), then gave himself up because the arresting officers were white. He had a Republican Party sticker on the back of his truck. I guess this is one of those "real Americans" Sarah Palin talks about.

Matt Taibbi eviscerates David Brooks. (Not that it's difficult to do, but still....)

Sherry on end of year lists, thus absolving me from having to do one, because frankly, once I get past Michael C. Hall and John Lithgow of Dexter, the Als Grayson and Franken, and Mr. Brilliant's near-miraculous ability to get rid of even the nastiest computer virus, I'm not sure what else would be on a Brilliant of the Year list.

For you gossip-hounds, AK Muckraker has a dispatch on the Palin/Johnston custody battle. Hey, it's a heck of a lot more interesting than Jon Gosselin staging a break-in of his own apartment.

SteveAudio sez, "Lie down with dogs, you'll wake up with fleas."

Jared Stancombe on intelligence information sharing.

Dave Johnson on how it really does look like corn syrup is a culprit in obesity. (In other news, I just found out this week that caffeine increases cortisol levels. So in addition to giving up my one can a day of Hansen's Diet Tangerine Lime soda, now I have to cut back on the coffee too. I've been drinking blueberry green tea instead, which probably isn't much better.)

Blue Texan with a reality check.


Six cups of coffee? Hey, Doghouse, you might want to read the link about caffeine, above.

A day without snark from Bustednuckles is like a day without sunshine.

It's not too late to enjoy some holiday recipes courtesy of The General.

And I thought I'd seen a lot of movies in my life.

The great Driftglass on the sudden ubiquity of Larry Johnson.

Sorry, but a Democratic President doesn't get a free pass. Between the "sharp-dressed man" and this, I want to know what the fuck is going on in this country.

The day I met the Luther Burger

Oh yes. They really are donuts.A meet-up with food bloggers is guaranteed to bring a few interesting dishes. We gathered at Richard's for a post-Christmas catch-up, but perhaps the star of the show was Suze's Luther Burgers.The Luther Burger, a bacon cheeseburgersandwiched with a Krispy Kreme donut by SuzeThe Luther Burger is named after Luther Vandross - some say it was his favourite snack,

Your Liberal Media at work

A quick flip through the morning gasbag shows found the following:

The Early Show, CBS. Its chosen "expert" today is Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Looneytunes), who on Sunday told Chris Wallace that it's legitimate to blame Barack Obama for the Christmas Day failed airliner attack.

The Today Show, NBC. Its chosen "expert" is Rep. Peter King (R-Idiocy), who said, and I quote: "All of the Islamic terrorists targeting us are Muslims."

I weep for our country.

What do increased efforts at security checkpoints matter when someone can just get on the plane at the gate?

This article to which I linked yesterday (and here's the link again) describes a witness who says that a "sharp-dressed man" accompanied Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab to the airport GATE, where he talked the GATE AGENT into letting Mutallab on the plane.

So my question is this: Did Mutallab even go through a security checkpoint at all? Did the "sharp-dressed man" have some kind of special clearance? With all the handwringing going on about airport security in the aftermath of the Christmas Day bombing attempt, is it possible that the checkpoint system didn't fall apart; but rather, that Mutallab somehow never even went through it; that he had some sort of "special dispensation"?

Dutch authorities are investigating:

American lawyer Kurt Haskell, who was standing in line with his wife Lori on Christmas morning at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport, said Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was with a man aged about 50 of Indian appearance in an expensive suit talking with a ticket agent.

Mr Haskell claims that the second man told the ticket agent Abdulmutallab was from Sudan and did not have a passport. The ticket agent then referred the men to her manager down the hall, and Mr Haskell did not see the suspect against until after the failed bombing attempt.

Michael Lind today asks what the hell we're paying the government for:

Whether under Republicans or Democrats, whether the threat is Hurricane Katrina or Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab, America seems to be facing a general crisis of state incapacity. Money can be found by Democratic and Republican administrations alike to bail out campaign contributors on Wall Street, but not to repair our crumbling infrastructure.

The U.S. fought and won World War II in less time than it took to adequately protect U.S. soldiers against primitive weapons in Iraq. We are told that we have to stay in Iraq and Afghanistan indefinitely, because withdrawing would be admitting failure. Translation: We haven't won and are unlikely to win in the foreseeable future, if ever.

And now the narrowly averted Christmas massacre in the skies above Detroit. I don't think I'm overreacting when I say that if ever overreaction on the part of a citizenry has been justified, it is now. We the people deserve to be angry. It's not as though Abdulmutallab came up with a clever new tactic while our national security agencies were focused on the last tactic. He used more or less the same tactic as the "shoe bomber," Richard Reid, and nevertheless got through every layer of international and national security.

It's almost as though Osama bin Laden had been allowed through screening at Boston Logan, used a box cutter to hijack a jet, and would have crashed it but for the heroic intervention of other passengers defending themselves after their government failed to defend them.

Forget Democrats and Republicans for a minute. Every American should be asking the same questions: Why are we paying these people?

Our elected leaders and public servants can't do the hard stuff, and they can't do the easy stuff either. They can't provide universal, affordable healthcare, of the kind that all other advanced industrial societies have. They can't give us a system of banking that channels money from depositors to productive enterprises in our country, without being channeled into gambling with obscene profits skimmed off for the gambler-bankers. They can't win wars or avoid unwinnable ones. They can't even repair bridges and keep levees in operating condition, tasks mastered by the relatively primitive ancient Romans and ancient Chinese.

And now, after two invasions justified in the name of the "war on terror," the creation of a cumbersome Homeland Security bureaucracy and a Patriot Act, and countless studies, reports and hearings, it turns out that we Americans may have to defend ourselves against jihadists. First we were told ad nauseam that it was our job to identify possible terrorists in airports and bus terminals and train stations. What next? "Passengers are advised to be prepared to throw themselves if necessary on the flaming traveler next to them in the aircraft, in order to prevent a bomb from detonating. Please watch the demonstration by the flight attendants."

The reality as well as the perception of government incapacity threatens liberalism more than conservatism. After all, if public safety deteriorates, antisocial plutocrats can retreat into doormanned buildings and gated communities and hire their own private security forces, and rural conservatives can amass home arsenals. And if the costs of personal security reduce the room for taxes for public goods, well, then, so much the better, from the perspective of certain strains of anti-government conservatism.

In contrast, America's modest and inadequate system of social democracy rests on economic growth made possible by effective government provision of basic public goods. Economic growth in turn rests on physical security — the protection of citizens against criminals in their midst and hostile or law-breaking foreigners. Libertarians to the contrary, the indispensable preconditions for the free society are effective armed forces and police forces, be they citizen militias or professionals.

It's all well and good to look at airport security checkpoints, but it's beginning to sound as if Mutallab had one heck of a lot of help getting on that plane; help that may not even have involved lapses in airport security. But Lind's article is interesting in that it posits a world in which government is ineffective and we end up with paramilitary forces and gun nuts -- exactly the kind of world that Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, the teabaggers, and Dick Cheney regard as their utopian vision.

As I said last night, my tinfoil is tingling. Stay tuned.

...every girl's crazy 'bout a sharp dressed man

What else can I title this entry, even if it forces me to post Z.Z. Top videos:

But all kidding aside, if the account we're being fed about Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab didn't already stink enough, what should we make of this:

Flight 253 passenger: Sharp-dressed man aided terror suspect Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab onto plane without passport (MLive.com exclusive)

A Michigan man who was aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253 says he witnessed Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab trying to board the plane in Amsterdam without a passport.

Kurt Haskell of Newport, Mich., who posted an earlier comment about his experience, talked exclusively with MLive.com and confirmed he was on the flight by sending a picture of his boarding pass. He and his wife, Lori, were returning from a safari in Uganda when they boarded the NWA flight on Friday.

Haskell said he and his wife were sitting on the ground near their boarding gate in Amsterdam, which is when they saw Mutallab approach the gate with an unidentified man.

Kurt and Lori Haskell are attorneys with Haskell Law Firm in Taylor. Their expertise includes bankruptcy, family law and estate planning.

While Mutallab was poorly dressed, his friend was dressed in an expensive suit, Haskell said. He says the suited man asked ticket agents whether Mutallab could board without a passport. “The guy said, 'He's from Sudan and we do this all the time.'”

Mutallab is Nigerian. Haskell believes the man may have been trying to garner sympathy for Mutallab's lack of documents by portraying him as a Sudanese refugee.

The ticket agent referred Mutallab and his companion to her manager down the hall, and Haskell didn't see Mutallab again until after he allegedly tried to detonate an explosive on the plane.

I don't know about you, but my tinfoil is tingling. And oh, yes, my little chickadees, it gets even better:

Two of the four leaders allegedly behind the al Qaeda plot to blow up a Northwest Airlines passenger jet over Detroit were released by the U.S. from the Guantanamo prison in November, 2007, according to American officials and Department of Defense documents. Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for the Northwest bombing in a Monday statement that vowed more attacks on Americans.

Oh, and by the way, whether Dana Perino and Mary Matalin want to believe it or not, Barack Obama was not the President in November 2007.

American officials agreed to send the two terrorists from Guantanamo to Saudi Arabia where they entered into an "art therapy rehabilitation program" and were set free, according to U.S. and Saudi officials.

Guantanamo prisoner #333, Muhamad Attik al-Harbi, and prisoner #372, Said Ali Shari, were sent to Saudi Arabia on Nov. 9, 2007, according to the Defense Department log of detainees who were released from American custody. Al-Harbi has since changed his name to Muhamad al-Awfi.

ART THERAPY REHABILITATION PROGRAM??? After all the tough talk we heard from the Dickster about "the worst of the worst", the Bushcheney Junta released these two guys into ART THERAPY REHABILITATION? Now I'm a strong believer in the redemptive power of art. I mean, look at Robert Downey Jr., who did a couple of years in prison and is now the King of Quality Popular Entertainment. But it's hard to believe that the phony tough Cheney bought this as being rehabilitative.

Everything that's happened regarding our relations with the Islamic world since September 11, 2001 stinks to high heaven. I don't know what's going on, but there's no way this is all a coincidence.

Chasing air terrorism tactics is closing the barn door after the horse escapes

Perhaps the most head-scratching legacy of the past decade is going to be how ragtag bands of misguided men, financed by shadowy figures but not part of any state entity, managed to bring a superpower to its emotional needs. It took nineteen men with boxcutters to do it at the start of the decade, but only one with an explosive taped to his nutsack at the end of it. Ever since the 9/11 attacks, we've been "tightening airport security" in ways that chase the most recently-used tactic, and don't take at all into account that there's no limit to the ingenuity that people who are not only willing, but eager to die are going to use. Richard Reid tries to ignite explosives in his shoes, and we have to take off our shoes. Someone tries to mix an explosive using toiletries, and we can't take anything larger than 3 ounces on a plane. Now there's indications of a coming ban on the use of ANY electronic device on international flights -- no CD players, no iPODs, no Gameboys, no laptops, nothing.

And while the TSA claims that it doesn't want to "tip off terrorists", the restrictions are leaking out:

The government was vague about the steps it was taking, saying that it wanted the security experience to be “unpredictable” and that passengers would not find the same measures at every airport — a prospect that may upset airlines and travelers alike.

But several airlines released detailed information about the restrictions, saying that passengers on international flights coming to the United States will apparently have to remain in their seats for the last hour of a flight without any personal items on their laps. It was not clear how often the rule would affect domestic flights.

Overseas passengers will be restricted to only one carry-on item, and domestic passengers will probably face longer security lines. That was already the case in some airports Saturday, in the United States and overseas.

So if your five-year-old has to pee during the last hour of the flight, too bad. If you want to carry a handbag and your laptop bag, too bad. And none of this is going to make one iota of difference, because those who would try to bring down jetliners have already come up with a new and different way to get explosives on planes. How much of checked baggage is really checked for explosives again? And are we going to start doing cavity searches? What makes the TSA think that a guy who seeks martyrdom is going to balk at carrying plastic explosives in his rectum? Is this where we're headed? Cavity searches for everyone? What is this, Beavis and Butthead Do America?

Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Looneytunes) is blaming Barack Obama for the failed terrorism attempt. I guess Obama should have flown to Nigeria and screened Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab himself. Perhaps he's also muttering into his breakfast mug of Wild Turkey that since Obama has a funny name too and African roots, they're in cahoots. But what no one seems to want to look at here is George Bush WAS half right about one thing: These people are very resourceful. They're looking at holes in our security, and there is absolutely no way to plug all of them.

And nobody does it better

If you've been reading this here little bloggie over the weekend, you know that I've been taking a bit of a stroll down memory lane, back to the days when I went to the movies every weekend and then often felt inspired enough to write about them for eight years. Long around 2005 it stopped being fun, and since I had already started B@B, it seemed a logical point at which to say farewell to movie reviewing. While I'm surprised that so many of my former peeps are still at it, I'm disappointed that so many have also given it up; like my longtime colleague ModFab and the great Film Snobs, particularly the Critic Formerly Known as Shimes, who when he drank enough, was in the league with some of the best writers in literary history.

But while there are the Jonathan Rosenbaum cinéastes, and the Armond White fans, for my money there is only one critic who is irreplaceable and that is Roger Ebert. No other critic seems able to evaluate a film's worth within its own genre, and I have a special place in my heart for someone who adores the brilliant Dark City. Aside from being occasionally blinded whenever Angelina Jolie's rack appears in a movie, usually if Ebert says it's worth seeing, it's worth seeing.

But even Ebert has joined the ranks of bloggers, and it's clear his gift isn't just for writing about movies. For perhaps no one really understands the zen, the craft of newspaper journalism quite the way Ebert does.

More Sunday Cute Blogging: Dispatch from Planet "Awwwwww....."

It seems as if it's only by great force of effort that Captain Chesley B. Sullenberger, he of the famous "Miracle on the Hudson", hasn't become a shill for everything from Carl's Jr. in a bikini to those fake buffalo coins being advertised on cable. But Sullenberger isn't the only story to come out of that fateful day, and as the mainstream media, the U.S. aviation industry, and wingnuttia, go reflexively nuts this weekend because some idiot with dreams of 72 virgins decided to strap explosives to his balls and then detonate it on an airplane, it's nice to take a break:

While waiting in La Guardia airport for his flight back home to Charlotte, North Carolina, on January 15, 2009, Ben Bostic happened to notice Laura Zych, a chic, pretty brunette. She ended up on the same plane, but not the same row. “I would have totally forgotten about it,” he said later, “if it weren’t for the things that happened.”

What happened, of course, was that Ben and Laura’s flight, US Airways 1549, collided with a flock of geese shortly after taking off and suffered engine failure. Forced to make quick decisions, Captain Chesley Sullenberger steered the rapidly descending plane onto the Hudson River. He made a spectacular, flawless landing. Within minutes, the passengers and crew had filed out on the wings, and ferryboats of all types were en route to rescue them. Everyone survived. It was, as Governor Paterson called it later that day, a Miracle on the Hudson.

Bostic and Zych were on separate rescue boats; they didn’t formally meet until 60 Minutes arranged a tearful reunion with many of the passengers, along with Sullenberger and the crew, down in Charlotte in February. At that time, many passengers were still suffering from symptoms of post-traumatic-stress disorder, but the gathering helped. Then, in July, Kristy Spears (seat 8A) hosted a reunion in her home outside Charlotte. Zych (seat 17B) met up with Amy Jolly (seat 14C), whom she had befriended through a survivors’ Facebook group. Bostic hung out with them, but had to leave early and drive out of town for another party. Late that night, they persuaded him to drive back, and Zych offered to let him crash at her place. “I didn’t think of it until the next day, but it was the second time I crashed with them,” says Bostic, who calls going back into town that night “one of the best decisions I’d ever made.” He and Zych ended up talking on her porch until six in the morning. “I had to work the next day. And I didn’t care! At that time, that’s exactly what I wanted to do.” The couple have been dating ever since.

Reality has been completely inverted

I'll let Charles Johnson explain.

The idea that before it's all over I may have to blogroll Little Green Footballs is just mind-boggling.

Stomach's Eleven: Christmas dinner

Chocolate with olive oil and saltI really am grateful. I'm grateful for a family, friends, good health and a bounty of amazing food. All too often it can be easy to get caught up in the trivial squabbles of life, and whilst there are many things you cannot change, there are many more you wouldn't want to - moments of good fortune you take for granted every day.I like to think that this is what

A rare bright spot in a year of Democratic sellouts

The Year of the Franken.

And yeah, this guy too.

Vic Chesnutt: A high-profile case of murder-by-spreadsheet

I hope guys like Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman, as well as the entire Republican Party, are happy now.

Sunday Cute Blogging

Because it doesn't get a whole lot cuter than this:

New Years Blogrolling

I know it's a bit early for Blogroll Amnesty Day, but I've noticed in recent weeks that my blogrolling has stagnated more than a bit. I'm missing a lot of worthy blogs, and giving primo real estate to blogs that haven't been updated in a long time.

I can't really blame people for giving up, or taking a break. It's a lot harder blogging after your team wins and still finds a way to blow it. It's kind of like this year's 2-27 New Jersey Nets, except that even the Nets have won two games and not just given them to the other team anyway just so they can stay completely unvictorious. So I understand just giving up in despair, as many bloggers, including our beloved Jon Swift, seem to have done. The problem is that it's hard to know who's given up, who's experiencing a real-life crisis, who just needs a break, and who just doesn't give a shit anymore.

So as we head into the new year, you'll see some changes in the blogroll. Anyone who hasn't posted in three months or more will be split off into a new archival blogroll. Because this blog uses a 3rd party template instead of one of Blogger's "plug and play" templates, I don't have access to Blogger's widgets, so I'll have to come up with another way to keep these blogs available but not taking up space that can be devoted to some of the other blogs I've missed. But stay tuned, changes are coming.

Gee, ya think?

Here's a dispatch from the "Figure that out all by yourself, Einstein?" file (I can't believe I missed this earlier this month):

The president's pursuit of a jobs bill that could cost close to $200 billion was never likely to attract bipartisan support. But the contentiousness of a meeting that was called expressly to foster cooperation and on Mr. Obama's home turf was unusual because members of Congress and the president typically mute their disagreements in face-to-face meetings.

One heated exchange came at the beginning of the meeting between the president and congressional leaders from both parties. Mr. Obama said the GOP was fixated on the unemployment rate as Congress enters a midterm-election season, saying Republicans "seem to be almost rooting against recovery," according to two aides briefed on the exchange.

Sometimes I wonder how such an intelligent man can be such a blockhead.

Oh. Never mind.

The funniest post you will ever read. But you have to read it CAREFULLY. It took ME a minute to get it.

(via)

So it's a day late. Who cares, with a voice like that

Those of you who are longtime readers know how we here at B@B loves us some Darlene Love. Christmas may be over, but you can enjoy it all over again listening to The Great Darlene this year in her annual rendition of "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" on Late Night with David Letterman:

Damn. This woman is sixty-eight years old and The Voice is better than ever.

Eating well?Don't forget to check out the round-up of Christmas pics on the Christmas feasting post. 32 pics of an Australian Christmas - thanks everyone for sharing!

The best year-end list you will ever read

Although our good friend jurassicpork graces these here pages sometimes, I wouldn't expect him to share a labor of love such as the Top 50 Assclowns of 2009. So you'll simply have to go over to Welcome Back to Pottersville to read it. It's about as comprehensive a list of worsts as you'll find anywhere, despite the absence of Carrie Prejean, William Kristol, and that guy who's on Bill Maher occasionally whose name escapes me at the moment. Read it and enjoy, and if you're so inclined, click that donate button in the right-hand sidebar. JP is one of the Great Curmudgeons of Blogtopia (™ Skippy) and deserves the support.

Back where it all began: The (one-shot) return of the prodigal critic

Hockey mom this, bitchez!

It hardly seems like twelve years since James Cameron last dropped an multi-thousand-ton movie on the Christmas season. Last time, he had the audacity to not just depart from the science fiction/adventure genre that had been his movie home, but to take a well-known historical event about a sinking ship, practically rebuild the damn vessel from scratch, put a love story in front of it, and create a phenomenon.

Titanic was the first movie I reviewed, which started me on an eight-year path of online movie reviewing, a regular discipline of writing that I'd always wanted to do, but had never found what I wanted to write about until then.

It's perhaps a bit easier to understand the hoopla, and the backlash, that accompanied Titanic back then, now that the pasty-faced, brooding Robert Pattinson in the Twilight franchise is the tween dreamboat of choice. But for years, those of us who were caught up in the story that Cameron, even with all his clunky screenwriting, put on screen, found ourselves thinking, "What the hell was THAT all about?" I can't speak for the screaming teens back then, many of whom are now quite possibly Twilight moms now, but for some of us, appalled by the number of teen girls who decided to take fingers to keyboard and write about how the heroine of Titanic pined for her lost cutie forever (thereby completely missing the obvious point of the patented Cameronian Sledgehammer), it was about telling the story of that woman in the photo montage at the end. And I was fortunate enough to meet up online with an extraordinary group of women, all of whom wanted to tell that story, if for no other reason than to teach something to all those teenage girls. For at least three years, or until jobs,kids, divorces, and other demands at life required our attention, we both separately and together immersed ourself in American social history in order to tell the story of the fictional rich girl who survived the sinking of the Titanic and how she went on to live a perfectly contented life. We were from New Jersey, from Massachusetts, from Michigan, from Chicago, and even from Slovenia, and daily we sent flurries of e-mails around with links to articles online about the bohemian scene in New York City in the mid-nineteen-teens, about the early film industry in Fort Lee, New Jersey, about clothes and money and employment and all the things they don't teach you in school about history because they're too busy teaching you about politics and war.

And then Your Humble Blogger, who had never understood how people can create characters out of whole cloth, found herself coming up with her own characters. They'd come to me while gardening or doing housework. My mind would wander, and it would reach out, and there would be a character, clamoring for his or her story to be told. These characters became so vivid to me that I thought of them as unincarnated souls that came to me and begged me to put their stories on paper. But the result is one unfinished family epic of my own creation and two more that have been in my head for nearly a decade.

So for all its flaws, the biggest one being that James Cameron can't write dialogue for shit, Titanic had a huge influence on my life and my creative processes. Cameron isn't really a genius, but he does have a way of tapping cultural architypes that would make Joseph Campbell proud, and with his ability to innovate technology to serve his moviemaking, there was no way I was going to go see Avatar in any way other than the whole enchilada -- IMAX 3-D.

Avatar is at once the most exhilaratingly original, and the most hackneyed film in recent memory. Cameron may only put out a movie every five to ten years, but when he does, it's always an experience rather than just a movie. He's a director who's clearly in love with his whiz-bang, but also deadly serious about the technology behind the whiz-bang, and in his own clunky, limited way, about the storytelling that accompanies the whiz-bang. He may not be a cinematic innovator, but he's sure an innovator in the tools he used to create his cinema, and if he'd only recognize his limitations in screenwriting, he could be the genius he believes he already is.

Recently I watched a 60 Minutes segment on Bob Ballard, the Woods Hole oceanographer who first discovered the Titanic wreck in 1986. He was showing Lara Logan footage of not just the Titanic wreck, but other wrecks he's found since, and I realized that behind the spectacularly clear footage of a sea world miles below the surface were cameras developed by James Cameron's brother for the movie at which everyone now pokes fun. That the man who discovered the Titanic wreck has found his work helped and made even more impressive by technology created by and for the man who slapped a hokey love story on top of an actual tragedy just shows the kind of -- dare I say it -- focus that Cameron has. This is a director who doesn't screw around, and every innovation, every gewgaw his feverish mind came up with (and every dollar it cost to implement them) is right there on the screen.

There's no reason to go see Avatar for the story, because you've seen it before, in every movie in which a white guy experiences an indigenous culture and decides he likes it better than in his world. Whether it's Daniel Day-Lewis in The Last of the Mohicans, Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves, Colin Farrell in The New World, Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai or even Dustin Hoffman in Little Big Man, you've seen Jake Sully (Sam Worthington, in the Bill Paxton role) a million times before. What you haven't seen before is a fully-realized indigenous culture on the planet of Pandora that exists nowhere in the world we inhabit.

I'm not even going to go into what the avatar concept is; I'll leave that up to the many fanboys and girls who are writing about this movie, for it requires a level of suspension of disbelief that I'm not sure I have. But whether you buy the idea of existing on two planes of reality at once or not, that's almost incidental to the spectacular and dangerous world occupied by the Na'vi, those ten-foot-tall blue striped ectomorphs who swing through the trees, leap catlike through their gorgeous tropical world, or ride hallucinogenic dragonlike creatures over waterfalls and seemingly bottomless canyons. Who wouldn't want to be Na'vi, with their lithe, slim bodies, their grace, their unfailing marksmanship, their long braids that literally mind-meld with other creatures and the spirits of their ancestors, their abs and buns of steel, their cheekbones so high and prominent you could grate cheese on them? Not to mention that their culture seems to be a matriarchal one, populated with Cameron's trademark kickass chicks and worshipping an obviously female deity. Combine that with their respect for ancestral homelands and their almost literal tree-hugging, and it's no wonder the wingnuts are having fits about this movie. Its too bad they can't see the recurring theme of bonding-for-life in Na'vi culture -- you bond for eternity with your ancestors and descendants. You bond for life with your flying dragon. You bond for life with your mate. Of course it's having sex which makes that mate-bond, not some hocus-pocus said over you by an authority figure, but you can't have everything. The Na'vi are a very family-values culture despite their paganism, and that's perhaps what drives people like the idiotic Ross Douthat to decide that Avatar is Cameron's apologia for pantheism, which he brands "Hollywood's religion of choice."

And that's even before we get to all the tough-guy cigar-chomping Evil Military and Corporate Guys. Nowhere does Cameron explicitly state that the military-industrial complex that seeks to plunder Pandora is American, but its squirrelly, greedy corporatista (a weaselly Giovanni Ribisi) and its R. Lee Ermey clone Military Guy™ (Stephen Lang, whose scenery-chewing could plunder Pandora all by itself) are right out of the American adventure movie genre. Yes, the bad guys are all white (and presumably Fox News viewers), but part of the archetype of the Noble Savage story, and Avatar doesn't stray from this, is that these beings who have lived here for thousands of years need a white guy who's only just learned their ways to lead them to battle. What could be more wingnutty than that? Afghanistan, anyone? Ex-Marine Cameron is clearly more comfortable writing dialogue for the toughies than he is for the softer Na'vi, and perhaps that's why Jake Sully as a character seems to live and breathe far more when he's making his video diaries than he does in a world that sometimes seems populated by descendants of Tinkerbell. It may in fact be Cameron's fatal flaw as a screenwriter that he has this manly-guy sensibility, but is plagued by also having this soft, gooey center that he's unable to express without making his romantic male leads sound like a HAL 9000 playing Heathcliff.

So much of the pleasure of Avatar is in the element of visual surprise -- the spiral flowers that collapse when touched, the swooping vistas and waterfalls, the cocoon hammocks in which the Na'vi sleep, the hallucinogenic beauty of the flying dragons. The visuals are so spectacular, and so perfectly wrought, that the 3-D almost seems superfluous. Avatar does more with 3-D than any other movie in history, and I may have kept wanting to brush away the little puffballs that so teasingly seem to fly right in front of your face, but the reality is that it's mostly in the "real world" parts of the movie where the 3-D has its biggest effect. The Na'vi world that has sprung from Cameron's imagination is so beautiful and so surprising that it doesn't even need 3-D to take your breath away. And that's why I'm not sure that Avatar is going to become the worldwide phenomenon that Titanic was, for all its female sensibility. That Titanic had an actual historical event as its backdrop and a female character whose real story took place, as Cameron showed us, AFTER the movie ended, helped ground it in reality and make the story relatable in the real world. We may all want to be Neytiri of Pandora, but we also know that she, and the world she inhabits, doesn't really exist, and so we NEED the element of surprise, the whiz-bang, the colors and sounds and the sheer beauty of this world. But like the Eden that Pandora represents, once you leave it, you can never really return.

Update: Other takes from some non-film-critic types (no disrespect to my erstwhile Cinemarati peeps, but I'm not really on your ranks anymore either)...

Skippy
Dennis Hartley

Christmas Video Blogging: Because nothing says "Christmas" like bhangra

Chak de Punjab Bhangra Dancers at a 2008 Christmas concert:

Christmas Video Blogging: A Very Maron Christmas

Christmas. Ur hearin it wrong:

Christmas Video Blogging: Yeah. What Sarah Said.

Yeah, Santa. What DO you have to do with Jesus anyway?

Christmas Video Blogging: And some of these people play a strong role in public life

As Lynn says, "And they say people who believe in astrology are crazy..."

What a bunch of death-centered lunatics these end-timesers are.

And yet, despite the insanity and longing for death that some of Christianity's practitioners exhibit, there's one thing I like about Christmas, especially Christmas Eve. It's when I remember what their religion was at one time supposed to be about. I wrote about it two years ago, and in a tradition that's right up there with the Brilliant Duo's annual Christmas Eve Indian dinner, I'm linking to it again.

Breaking News from the Holy Shit! desk

Wow...there isn't enough tinfoil in the world for this one:

The man who was arrested with two guns and hundreds of rounds of ammunition near the Capitol during President Barack Obama's health care speech in September had been an employee of the George W. Bush White House. The arrest of the man, Joshua Bowman, was widely reported at the time, but the news stories made no mention of his previous employment: For several years he worked in the Executive Office of the President, dealing with tech issues, including White House emails, his lawyer, George Braun, tells Mother Jones.

On the night of September 9, Bowman was on his way to meet Braun, a Bush administration political appointee, at the National Republican Club on First Street, SE when he was stopped by Capitol Police around 7:45 p.m.—minutes before Obama was scheduled to deliver a major address to Congress pushing his health care initiative. Bowman had driven up to a security checkpoint and told officers he wanted to park, but his lack of a permit for the area aroused their suspicions, and they asked to search his car.

The previous weekend, Bowman and Braun had gone duck-hunting, according to Braun. But Bowman forgot that he still had the guns in his car when he consented to a search of his vehicle, a Honda Civic with a bumper sticker proclaiming, "I'll keep my guns, freedom, and money.... you keep the change." The officers found a Beretta 12 gauge semi-automatic* shotgun, a .22 caliber long rifle, and over 400 rounds of ammunition in Bowman's trunk. The guns were unloaded and in their cases, according to court records. Braun says they were disassembled. The Capitol Police took Bowman into custody and charged him with two counts of possession of an unregistered firearm and one count of unlawful possession of ammunition. He faced up to $3,000 in fines and as much as three years in jail. (The case is still pending.)

When Braun—who was at the National Republican Club, hanging out with congressmen including Iowa's Tom Latham and Nebraska's Lee Terry—finally heard from Bowman, it was around 10 p.m. Bowman told Braun he needed Braun to get him out of jail, explaining that he had been stopped with guns in his car. "Don't you know that's illegal?" Braun asked. Both men were surprised when they heard the story on the radio as they left jail the next day. Braun thought the coverage was excessive. "They were making him sound like a terrorist," Braun said. "Does [Bowman] look like a terrorist? He has the élan to walk around with a bowtie."

So it would seem to be "a big misunderstanding", but with the history of the Bush family (see also: The Carlyle Group & 9/11, The Octopus, etc., it's hard to blame a person for being skeptical.

And if a bow tie demonstrates "élan", I wonder how you explain this and this.

Christmas feasting

EDIT 27/12/09: Latest food pics added at the end of this postRoast turkey or seafood?I love that despite the heat of an Australian summer, so many of us continue to indulge in the traditional English Christmas dinner of roast turkey, gravy, plum pudding and all the trimmings. Our family has always done leg ham and seafood - it's so much easier with minimal preparation, and besides, Mum always

So This is Health Care (Hope is Over)

(With apologies to John Lennon and thanks to Congress)

(Merry Christmas, Billy.
Merry Christmas, William.)

So this is health care
And what have you done?
Another year wasted
And a new one made of dung.

And so this is health care.
We haven't a prayer.
The near and the dear ones
Don't have single payer.

A very Merry Xmas!
The way I figger,
We've no public option,
Without any trigger.

There's actual health care...
For rich and for strong;
For weak and the poor ones
This bill is so wrong.

And so happy Xmas!
Thanks House and Senate.
The blue and red ones
Thanks for the mandate.

A very Merry Xmas!
But if you dissent,
We'll just raise your taxes
By 2.5 percent.

And so this is health care.
And what a cop out.
Thanks, Grand Old Party.
States can now opt out.

And so happy Xmas!
We hope you had fun.
For old and the young,
The struggle's just begun.

A very Merry Xmas
And a crappy New Year!
It won't be a good one
Without any cheer
Change is over
Before it's begun.

This HAS to be a joke

I realize that teabaggers can be so ridiculous it's funny, but this has performance art written all over it, as a C-Span caller asks Republican Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming if he prayed hard enough for Robert Byrd to die:

If it ISN'T a joke, but a serious caller, than we are in more trouble than we realized. And even if it is a joke, Barrasso's reaction, or rather, non-reaction, to the idea of praying for someone to die, means we are in more trouble than we realized.

Conflict avoiders

I've been fascinated by the psychological dynamics that seem to have been the driving factors behind our last three presidents. Until Bill Clinton, the last president who seemed to have been driven by something primal in his childhood was John F. Kennedy, with his arriviste father's drive to "belong" through the attainment of political power, his aristocratic wife, and his parade of women. Today TV therapists would call him a sex addict, but would still stay away from the far more interesting theme of "belonging" in mainstream (then read as WASP) society. I've spilled enough keystrokes on this blog already about George W. Bush's father issues.

But if Barack Obama sometimes seems in many ways to be an echo of Bill Clinton (only without Clinton's innate charm which buffered him against the slings and arrows of outrageous Republicans), there's a good reason for it. Obama's economic team are all graduates of the School of Robert Rubin (only without the 1990's result). Obama engenders the same blind, baseless hatred on the right that Bill Clinton, another centrist president did. Some of the hatred with Obama is based on race instead of the sense I had with Clinton that he's the guy who got all the girls in high school and the Republicans are the masturbators in the boy's room who are still angry about that perceived injustice. The sense I have from the right with Obama is that he's the focused black kid in the mostly white school who seems to be able to focus on a goal instead of being trapped by his background, whereas they go home to the alcoholic father and it defines who they are. The down side to that focus is that it's left him aloof, sometimes isolated, and intent on avoiding any sort of conflict, lest it interfere with his goals.

Bill Clinton was a conflict avoider too, only he came to it from the background of going home to the alcoholic father. We had the sense that all Bill Clinton wanted was quiet. I understand this mindset, I have it myself, coming from a family that experienced a fair amount of shouting fights and uproar in my childhood. When you grow up as a conflict avoider, you tend towards twisting yourself into a pretzel and jumping through hoops in a vain effort to just have some peace and quiet. It's a terrible way to live and it doesn't teach you that sometimes people will disagree and you have to learn that capitulation is not always the best way to resolve a conflict. You have to learn that your viewpoint is just as valid as anyone else's, and that you have a right to defend it.

Because of Bill Clinton, the gutlessness of Capitol Hill Democrats, and the increasing intransigence of Republicans over the last twenty years, we've come to expect conflict avoidance in the form of capitulation from Democrats. This is the main reason many of us decided not to support Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama as the primary race ran down last year. Some of it was about the war, but we also knew about the Clintons and triangulation. Yes, Hillary wasn't Bill, but in a marriage like theirs, we also knew that a certain amount of capitulation in the name of keeping the peace was part of Hillary's makeup too.

It doesn't completely surprise me that Barack Obama has turned out the way he has. I still remember the way he sat on his hands in 2004, as a new Senator, while the late, great Stephanie Tubbs Jones tried to get a Senator to stand against certifying Ohio's tainted vote tally after thousands of black voters were barred from voting after waiting up to 10 hours in the rain. I never bought him as the Great Progressive Savior, and so I'm somewhat less disappointed than some of my peers (though no less disgusted) as his timid mode of "leadership." You can make the excuse for him not wanting to rock the boat right out of the gate as a new Senator, what with that house's "protocols" and such, but that doesn't seem to bother Al Franken much.

Drew Westen wrote about this earlier this week, in a much-discussed piece at HuffPo:

Consider the president's leadership style, which has now become clear: deliver a moving speech, move on, and when push comes to shove, leave it to others to decide what to do if there's a conflict, because if there's a conflict, he doesn't want to be anywhere near it.

Health care is a paradigm case. When the president went to speak to the Democrats last week on Capitol Hill, he exhorted them to pass the bill. According to reports, though, he didn't mention the two issues in the way of doing that, the efforts of Senators like Ben Nelson to use this as an opportunity to turn back the clock on abortion by 25 years, and the efforts of conservative and industry-owned Democrats to eliminate any competition for the insurance companies that pay their campaign bills. He simply ignored both controversies and exhorted.

Leadership means heading into the eye of the storm and bringing the vessel of state home safely, not going as far inland as you can because it's uncomfortable on the high seas. This president has a particular aversion to battling back gusting winds from his starboard side (the right, for the nautically challenged) and tends to give in to them. He just can't tolerate conflict, and the result is that he refuses to lead.

[snip]

Like most Americans I talk to, when I see the president on television, I now change the channel the same way I did with Bush. With Bush, I couldn't stand his speeches because I knew he meant what he said. I knew he was going to follow through with one ignorant, dangerous, or misguided policy after another. With Obama, I can't stand them because I realize he doesn't mean what he says -- or if he does, he just doesn't have the fire in his belly to follow through. He can't seem to muster the passion to fight for any of what he believes in, whatever that is. He'd make a great queen -- his ceremonial addresses are magnificent -- but he prefers to fly Air Force One at 60,000 feet and "stay above the fray."

It's the job of the president to be in the fray. It's his job to lead us out of it, not to run from it. It's his job to make the tough decisions and draw lines in the sand. But Obama really doesn't seem to want to get involved in the contentious decisions. They're so, you know, contentious. He wants us all to get along. Better to leave the fights to the Democrats in Congress since they're so good at them. He's like an amateur boxer who got a coupon for a half day of training with Angelo Dundee after being inspired by the tapes of Mohammed Ali. He got "float like a butterfly" in the morning but never made it to "sting like a bee."

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with wanting everyone to get along. The problem is that everyone is not going to always get along, and capitulation is not the answer, not when millions of people voted for you to change the course from the Republican theocratic corporate agenda. And if your childhood baggage is just too strong to fight, then get help.

Keeping the Twit in Twitter

She's at it with the death panels again.

Big Rig Diner, Darlinghurst

I've always had a romanticised affection for diners.Blame it on a childhood brought up on American sitcoms, movies and teenage fiction, but alongside Twinkies, Kool Aid and Milk Duds, diners have always been that elusive promise of the quintessential American experience. The jingle of the bell as the door opens, the gum-chewing waitress with a pen tucked behind her ear, the cosy booths in which

Leave it to a pope who's an ex-brownshirt to decide that Pope Pius XII should be a saint

Sainthood just ain't what it used to be, now that they let just anyone in. Former Nazi brownshirt Pope Benedict has decided that the predecessor who looked the other way while six million Jews and millions of others were slaughtered by the Nazis should be elevated to sainthood:

Jewish leaders from around the world expressed their outrage today after the Pope opened the way for his controversial wartime predecessor to be made a saint, with some calling the possible beatification of Pius XII as "inopportune and premature".

Benedict signed a decree last Saturday on the virtues of Pius, who has been criticised for not doing enough to stop the Holocaust. The decree means he can be beatified once a miracle attributed to him has been recognised.

Beatification is the first major step towards sainthood. But Benedict, who has long admired Pius, continues to draw fire for ignoring concerns over the controversial pontiff.

Among those to criticise him was the World Jewish Congress, whose president, Ronald Lauder, said: "As long as the archives about the crucial period 1939 to 1945 remain closed, and until a consensus on his actions ‑ or inaction ‑ concerning the persecution of millions of Jews in the Holocaust is established, a beatification is inopportune and premature.

"While it is entirely a matter for the Catholic church to decide on whom religious honours are bestowed, there are strong concerns about Pius XII's political role during world war two which should not be ignored."

He called on the Vatican to immediately open the files on the controversial figure. "Given the importance of good relations between Catholics and the Jews, and following the difficult events of the past year, it would be appreciated if the Vatican showed more sensitivity on this matter," he added, referring to Benedict's rehabilitation of a Holocaust-denying cleric, Richard Williamson.

The incident sparked worldwide condemnation from prominent Jewish groups and individuals and placed an additional strain on interfaith relations, which were already under pressure after the pope issued an edict permitting a prayer that called for the conversion of Jews.

In France, the country's chief rabbi urged the Vatican to abandon its mission to beatify Pius. Gilles Bernheim said: "Given Pius XII's silence during and after the Shoah [Holocaust], I don't want to believe that Catholics see in Pius XII an example of morality for humankind. I hope that the church will renounce this beatification plan and will thus honour its message and its values."

This pope and Pat Buchanan ought to get together for a beer. They have a lot in common.(h/t)