Join the Movement to Boycott MSNBC NBC Russert Matthews Olbermann....

The unrelenting ranting, raving, spewing, hate-Hillary hysteria by so many in the press and the backroomers at the DNC/democrat national committee continues. At the very least we can take simple but concrete action which targets the main spewers of what one commenter called the unrelenting mysogynistic nightfest at MSNBC.

Take action against biased media, especially the knuckle-dragging slugs at MSNBC & NBC; join the boycott against Russert, Matthews, Olbermann, and their Obaminions.

It's time to make waves.

You can get the free code to post the banner above at WoMenBoycottMSNBC.com.

---

Related: Savage Politics had some very interesting and very provocative commentary, including:

This entire election has been a sham. An almost comical farce in which the Mainstream Media, along with the ideological Left fringes within the Democratic Party have decided AHEAD OF TIME, who should become President of the United States. In this manner, and with full knowledge and intent, they have decided to re-write history, dismiss entire demographics, and besmirch the reputation of countless individuals, for the sake of political power and the ‘almighty dollar’. .... this election is NOT about the Clintons’, it is about AMERICA. It is about SELF RESPECT.

ALL Americans must understand that the Media and the Democratic Party did not insult Hillary Clinton as a person, they insulted what she REPRESENTED to all of her supporters. They insulted her ‘CLASS’: White Women (and men) in particular, and Latinos in general. These two important groups were told by countless pundits that their power was minimal, that they did not matter in the “grand scheme of things”, that Latinos and Whites were being “racists” when they voted for a White woman by 60%, while they simultanously characterized other groups (AA) who voted for Obama by 90% as “informed and motivated by the issues”. Many democratic insiders (Brazile et al) wrote columns in which they made the ridiculous case that Latinos and Whites were not as important as young and Black voters, and that “they can stay home” in November if they wish. Unfortunately for them, they seem to have overplayed their hand too far.

Wow. I didn't hear or read the stay at home part anywhere, but this message from the DNC, the Obama campaign and Obama supporters has been loud and clear and continues to be that way: We don't need you, we don't care what you want/need/think. Go away. Stay away. Stay home. Whatever.

Better yet: write in Hillary in November.

Complete post at Savage Politics

Reminder: Some of the Lies of Conservatism, McCain, Republicans

I couldn't help but post this memorable quote from a Washington Post Politics online chat discussing working class voter issues (Who is the Working Class, Anyway?):

Misconceptions: Bush before he became president had less money budgeted for the military and military families than did either Gore or, subsequently, Kerry -- both of whom actually served in a combat zone. Yet military folks voted overwhelmingly for Bush. I bring this up because more and more we see that the reality of what the candidates do flies in the face of what people believe.

Hardly a day goes by that a conservative doesn't say "I'm here to show that the liberals are wrong about there being class warfare between the rich and the poor." Yet, through each Republican administration, the gap between those with wealth and those without widens.

Republicans use every bit of evidence of wealth on the liberal side to say: "They are wealthy. We're just like you, we're not the intellectually elitist. Wouldn't you rather sit down to a beer and barbecue with us?"

Having been born and raised in the country in both the public and private school system, I have been troubled by one question: Since when did stupidity become a virtue in the U.S.?

It pairs very well with this Prescott, Ariz. chatter's reminder of John McCain's actual history of lies, flip-flopping, hypocrisy and unethical behaviors instead of his mythological persona promulgated by the mainstream and right-wing press:

• Left his ill first wife after multiple affairs; [must have given advice to Newt 'scumbag' Gingrich]
• participated in the "Keating 5" scandal;
• gotten so friendly with a young and blonde lobbyist that his staffers felt they had to intervene;
• [does] legislative favors for the clients of said lobbyist;
• voted against the "Bush tax cuts" then later supported them;
• actively courted the support, and made campaign appearances of a man who calls the Catholic Church the "great whore" [personal note: it should actually be called One More Woman-Hating Church of Child Rapists and Pedophiles];
• constantly blurred the difference between Shia and Sunni Muslims even while claiming that foreign policy is his strong suit;
• admitted he didn't know much about economics.

Timothy Noah: You forgot, "Gave a speech this week about what he was going to do for the working class and then announced tax cuts that benefit almost exclusively the rich."

Here is the full transcript of chat with Timothy Noah of Slate's Chatterbox' and here's his online article .

Technorati Tags:
Church of Child Rapists and Pedophiles

The Deeply Racialized Psycho Sexual Schizophrenic Anxieties of White Media Types

Wouldn't it be a fascinating psycho-sexual study to peer into those not-so-hidden anxieties that seem to be repressed on the one hand and expressed on the other, but certainly not evenly distributed according to their true source?

As I've stated to friends and family: I don't have a problem supporting and voting for Barack Obama if he wins and it is indeed looking good for him. I also agree that the super delegates should not be used to 'award' the nomination to Clinton if the popular vote has gone for Obama.

However, I do have a big problem with the (mainly white male) broadcast media's disparate treatment and coverage of the campaign as evidenced by the condescending personal attacks and snide, not very disguised remarks about Senator Clinton based on qualities related to her gender, not her record, not her policies, not her skills.

Obama happens to be the beneficiary of unequal treatment which is not in his control. And yeah, of course, that's mainly MSNBC's undisguised favoritism of him and demonization of her, but includes a former Washington Post has-been schlub, Carl Bernstein on CNN.

I have a theory that most of these entitled, privileged, rich, very white guys actually DO have a lot of very deep anxieties about having a Black Male President (even though he's biracial and was raised by his white mom and white grandparents, he identifies himself as African-American, and the world does too, because we're a culture obsessed with racializing and sexualizing and categorizing and labeling 'others' — those who are 'not us').

So Tweety Matthews and Joe 'bully-boy' Scumbag and Smirking Fat-boy Russert and Living on Past Glories Bernstein and Chameleon Shuster and all those guys know vaguely on some level outwardly expressing their fears about Obama's Blackness and about having a Powerful Black Man in charge, installed in the most powerful office in the nation (and world) is obviously bigoted and stupid. (At least they know that it is forbidden to express publicly anyway — except for truly stupid bigots like Bill O'Reilly and Glen Beck who don't have the sense to understand that everyone doesn't think — and I use that word lightly — like they do).

But after the 'Imus affair', those same guys who snickered during all the Imus jokey jokes about people of color and Hillary and women in general, finally found out that: Racism is out. Finally. May it burn in hell never to return. (I can wish and hope, can't I?)

But remember Rutgers: the main public and media outrage (as presented by the media itself) was over the outrageous Imus/McGuirk racism finally going too far, not the sexism.

"

He strides or stumbles about ... bifurcations ... often mapped onto the suspect divides between desire and anxiety ... between the body and perception ... [alternating between being] privileged or repressed ... the other often erupts through regardless of well-placed lines of defense*

"

Sexism is still in — alack and alas — as so many of the constant barrage of movies, songs, videos, games, magazines, tv shows continually prove every minute of every day. Sexism, misogyny, sexual objectification, sexual violence toward all things female/feminine are still acceptable and sanctioned, in fact required by our culture .... including through trite political commentary which is irrelevant and pointless, superficial, cruel, mean, petty, unequal, unjust, but highly effective at demonizing Clinton who represents powerful women, women with ambition, women with plans and determination who don't 'match' the social strictures which require women to be quiet, attractive, young, sexually objectified, non-threatening and not empowered. It's still the whore/madonna syndrome with newer, more sinister twists.

These smug, bloviating, sputtering, spitting, cowardly pundits are so unconscious about their own fears and biases and they have no where else to 'put it' (all that double whammy castration anxiety about powerful women and black men — we really are a repressed, sadistic, puritanical nation) — so they act out other culturally and socially acceptable forms of psychological (and political) violence that mirrors the relationship and stranger violence which occurs every day in the sexual assaults, beatings, sexual enslavement, rapes, murders of women, pregnant women, children and girls every day throughout this nation and the world (just watch the most recent trials and news stories about murdered pregnant women, missing daughters, wives and mothers — most of which are also dismissed as just more media obsession with pretty women, which may be part of the story, but the unconsciousness of what is really happening to women and girls in our culture is what I'm more interested in). Women of color are and have also historically been the targets of all the rage of their own cultures in addition to white culture; white women do not have a great history of supporting their struggles nor the struggles of men of color. Women of privilege and power don't always have a very good history of solidarity with or supporting other women for that matter. Patriarchy is unrelenting. Kind of like the Terminator character in the films and the new, apparently soon-to-be-dead TV series which features a couple of strong, powerful, intellectually and physically superior and determined female characters, coincidentally.).

About that Acting Out, as Robin Morgan has pointed out, if you substitute racist or anti-semitic slurs, terms, attitudes and ridicule, it would easily be identified as such and the outrage would be so loud and vociferous that it would not take 10 minutes for action to be taken amongst the outpouring of righteous indignation and public ire.

Meanwhile, just as also happens everywhere that all these atrocities and indignities occur (large and small), women often willingly participate or act as after-the-fact accomplices (Dowd, Mitchell, O'Donnell — Norah, not Rosie — and to an extent Maddow — what a major disappointment) or are silent (almost everyone else).

Even when you think there are some good guys (Olbermann), they eventually capitulate in order to 'fit in' and put 'good ole boy' loyalty — wanting to be 'one of the guys' above any remaining layer thin integrity and with their jello-filled backbones quickly jump right in to the group activities. I've never seen it fail to occur on some level when in the company of their cohorts. Never.

So when Hillary and others point out that you can't always count on 'the guys' (including Bill himself) to stand up for us, there's a reason and it's called history (or reality, take your pick). We have to hope Obama is different‚ and if he's not — it's up to us to hold him accountable for his promises. The work never ends. Voting is not democracy; it is one expression of a life-long process and responsibility to participatory democracy, and to preserving and extending our constitutional rights to freedom, equality, and civil rights (with rights come responsibilities).

Deep? Yeah, sure. But I'll be interested to read some historical analysis of this extremely 'hysterical' time in our nation's schizophrenic history as we get some distance. It saddens me that we're still such an immature (uncivilized) nation when it comes to women in power (so few) and empowering girls, but encourages me that we may make some major inroads on one of our collective historical sins, racism.

The drama of it all also kinda reminds me of The Graduate, especially the final scene when the two star-crossed lovers (Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross) end up together on that bus hurtling down the road. It's one thing to see that film in your youth, another to see it after you've grown up and matured for a while.

As I've noted numerous times before, we've never expected any male candidate to be 'perfect' (and they've never let us down in that regard) — including Obama — why do we expect Hillary to be the exception?

..................................

When it's all over, who might be able to provide some honest, clear-headed analysis? Whose book about this history-making time in our democracy's history would you want to read?

*VIRILIO, WAR, CINEMA, BODIES

Technorati Tags:
2008 campaigns, msnbc, 2008 election, castration anxiety, pscho-sexual fears, racism, sexism, Terminator, Sarah Connor

Bob Herbert Agrees With Me!

It's Definitely (mostly, mainly, primarily) the Economy, Again, Dumkoffs!

Recently I wrote:

We need a new 'put america back to work' public-private initiative

Here's what I think we need with a new president starting on day one:

a new 'put america back to work' WPA type public-private initiative with a focus on including:

• repairing/updating/improving all aspects of the infrastructure; include job training and career-shift education which puts americans to work in good paying jobs (with benefits) created from public-private partnerships;

• a commitment to oil/gas-free energy independence/green technology/energy innovations (mostly avoid biofuels because it does more harm than good in the long run; see recent research/reports);

• a focus on fast-tracking science and technology education for public schools, community colleges, universities (includes job-training/ed for adults); create public private partnerships and feeder schools in urban, suburban, rural hubs -- those things focus on both items above.

Today Mr. Herbert wrote:

The essential question the candidates should be trying to answer — but that is not even being asked very often — is how to create good jobs in the 21st century. Thirty-seven million Americans are poor, and roughly 60 million others are near-poor. (These are people struggling to make it on incomes of $20,000 to $40,000 a year for a family of four.)

The middle class is hardly flourishing. In testimony before a House subcommittee last year, Harley Shaiken, a Berkeley professor who is an expert on labor and employment, remarked: “During a period of robust economic growth, record profits and the fastest sustained productivity increases since the 1950s, only a thin slice at the top of the economic heap is enjoying higher living standards.”

Now the country is faced with a possible recession and the likelihood of moving further backward rather than forward on employment.

“We’re building exit ramps from the middle class,” said Mr. Shaiken during an interview. “But what is the path to the middle class for most Americans now? We need to figure out how to resume building entrance ramps.”

The most direct route to the middle class has always been a good job. An obvious potential source of new jobs would be a broad campaign to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure — its roads, bridges, schools, levees, water treatment facilities and so forth.

Another area with big job creation potential is the absolutely vital quest to develop alternative sources of energy. That effort should carry the same high national priority that was accorded the Manhattan Project during World War II. I’d even call it Manhattan II.

There are moments in history that demand not just talent in a nation’s leadership, but greatness — men or women with the courage to dream bigger and the ability to convince others that those dreams can be realized.

He goes on to claim no presidential candidate has shown the required bold vision and leadership, but I have to disagree. Obama shows leadership qualities and Senator Clinton has shown a keen grasp of the dilemmas of the middle and working class and has consistently promoted her policies to rebuild the economy, stimulate green collar investments and jobs, and rebuild the infrastructure. She's not the beneficiary of the broadcast or print media lovefest. Shame on his colleagues (you know who you are). Shame on any voter who falls for hype over substance, fear-mongering and bullying over intellectual power, relevant experience and a history of political and moral commitment to families and workers.

Herbert barely mentions McCain or the republicans as part of this discussion: they will continue to decimate workers and the national infrastructure while enriching themselves and their oil/energy/overseas cronies and buddies.

Herbert may have missed the vision thing in the details of Clinton's policies -- not to mention the bloviating, Hillary haters, attackers, loudmouths and self-indulgent whiners getting so much air time, press and print space, including those at his own paper.

I'm just happy he's finally getting informed about the economic realities of working men, women, families in this nation and that he agrees with me about putting America back to work fixing and rebuilding our infrastructure. Roosevelt would have been proud!

Herbert's column is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/09/opinion/09herbert.html

Technorati Tags:
working class, working families, Bob Herbert, infrastructure, middle class, jobs, American workers, American jobs

Media Critique Worth Reading: Is CNN the Corrupt News Network?

Regarding Media / Tim Rutten of the Los Angeles Times

CNN: Corrupt News Network

A self-serving agenda was set for the Republican presidential debates.

Tim Rutten
Regarding Media

December 1, 2007

THE United States is at war in the Middle East and Central Asia, the economy is writhing like a snake with a broken back, oil prices are relentlessly climbing toward $100 a barrel and an increasing number of Americans just can't afford to be sick with anything that won't be treated with aspirin and bed rest.

So, when CNN brought the Republican presidential candidates together this week for what is loosely termed a "debate," what did the country get but a discussion of immigration, Biblical inerrancy and the propriety of flying the Confederate flag?

In fact, this most recent debacle masquerading as a presidential debate raises serious questions about whether CNN is ethically or professionally suitable to play the political role the Democratic and Republican parties recently have conceded it.

Selecting a president is, more than ever, a life and death business, and a news organization that consciously injects itself into the process, as CNN did by hosting Wednesday's debate, incurs a special responsibility to conduct itself in a dispassionate and, most of all, disinterested fashion. When one considers CNN's performance, however, the adjectives that leap to mind are corrupt and incompetent.

Corruption is a strong word. But consider these facts: The gimmick behind Wednesday's debate was that the questions would be selected from those that ordinary Americans submitted to the video sharing Internet website YouTube, which is owned by Google. According to CNN, its staff culled through 5,000 submissions to select the handful that were put to the candidates. That process essentially puts the lie to the vox populi aura the association with YouTube was meant to create. When producers exercise that level of selectivity, the questions -- whoever initially formulated and recorded them -- actually are theirs.

That's where things begin to get troubling, because CNN chose to devote the first 35 minutes of this critical debate to a single issue -- immigration. Now, if that leaves you scratching your head, it's probably because you're included in the 96% of Americans who do not think immigration is the most important issue confronting this country. We've got a pretty good fix concerning what's on the American mind right now, because the nonpartisan and highly reliable Pew Center has been regularly polling people since January on the issues that matter most to them. In fact, the center's most recent survey was conducted in the days leading up to Wednesday's debate.

HERE'S what Pew found: By an overwhelming margin, Americans think the war in Iraq is the most important issue facing the United States, followed by the economy, healthcare and energy prices. In fact, if you lump the war into a category with terrorism and other foreign policy issues, 40% of Americans say foreign affairs are their biggest concern in this election cycle. If you do something similar with all issues related to the economy, 31% list those questions as their most worrisome issue. As anybody who has looked at their 401(k) or visited a gas pump would expect, that aggregate figure has increased dramatically since Pew started polling in January. Back then, for example, concerns over the war outpaced economic anxieties by fully 8 to 1. By contrast, just 6% of the survey's national sample said that immigration was the most important electoral issue. Moreover, that number hasn't changed in a statistically meaningful way since the first of the year. In other words, more than nine out of 10 Americans think something matters more than immigration in this presidential election.

So, why did CNN make immigration the keystone of this debate? What standard dictated the decision to give that much time to an issue so remote from the majority of voters' concerns? The answer is that CNN's most popular news-oriented personality, Lou Dobbs, has made opposition to illegal immigration and free trade the centerpiece of his neonativist/neopopulist platform. In fact, Dobbs led into Wednesday's debate with a good solid dose of immigrant bashing. His network is in a desperate ratings battle with Fox News and, in a critical prime-time slot, with MSNBC's Keith Olbermann. So, what's good for Dobbs is good for CNN.

In other words, CNN intentionally directed the Republicans' debate to advance its own interests. Make immigration a bigger issue and you've made a bigger audience for Dobbs.

That's corruption, and it's why the Republican candidates had to spend more than half an hour "debating" an issue on which their differences are essentially marginal -- and, more important, why GOP voters had to sit and wait, mostly in vain, for the issues that really concern them to be discussed. That's particularly true because that same Pew poll reported findings of particular relevance to Republican voters, the vast majority of whom continue to support the war in Iraq.

According to this most recent poll, a substantial number of Americans believe the surge is working. As Pew summarized their findings, "While Iraq remains a deeply polarizing issue across party lines, there has been improvement in how both Democrats and Republicans view the war. At the lowest point in February, barely half of Republicans (51%) said things were going well. Today, 74% of Republicans say the same. And while Democrats remain far more skeptical than Republicans, the proportion of Democrats expressing a positive view of the Iraq effort has doubled since February (from 16% to 33%).

"Independents' assessments of how the military effort is going remain far closer to the views of Democrats than of Republicans. Currently, 41% of independents offer a positive assessment, while half say things are not going well. In February, 26% of independents expressed a positive view of the situation in Iraq."

Those are significant swings of opinion, yet the poll also found that more than half of Americans still favor withdrawing American troops. That disconnect is a real issue for the GOP candidates, all but one of whom support the war. Unless we're going to believe that the self-selecting YouTube questioners were utterly different from the rest of American voters, it seems pretty clear that CNN ignored these complex -- and highly relevant concerns -- for an issue that served its ratings interests -- immigration -- or ones that made for moments of conventional television conflict, like gun control, which doesn't even show up in surveys of voters' concerns.

THIS is intellectual venality, but it pales beside the wickedness of using some crackpot's query about the candidates' stand on Biblical inerrancy to do something that's anathema in our system -- to probe people's individual religious consciences. American journalists quite legitimately ask candidates about policy issues -- say, abortion -- that might be influenced by their religious or philosophical convictions. We do not and should not ask them about those convictions themselves. It's nobody's business whether a candidate believes in the virgin birth, whether God gave an oral Torah to Moses at Sinai, whether the Buddha escaped the round of birth and rebirth or whether an angel appeared to Joseph Smith.

The latter point is relevant because CNN's noxious laundering of this question through the goofy YouTube mechanism quite clearly was designed to embarrass Mitt Romney -- who happens to be a Mormon -- and, secondarily, to help Mike Huckabee -- who, as a Baptist minister, had a ready answer, and who happens to be television's campaign flavor of the month.

Beside considerations like these, CNN's incompetent failure to weed out Democratically connected questioners pales.

In any event, CNN has failed in its responsibilities to the political process and it's time for the leaders of both the Republican and Democratic parties to take the network out of our electoral affairs.

timothy.rutten@latimes.com

If this does not scare the crap out of you and prove we have lost our freedoms whenever "they" decide we have, I don't know what will.

The price of fear over freedom. We get the government we deserve.

Security, liberties clash in 'Strange Culture'

An artist's plight in the face of the War on Terror sounds the alarm for Americans to ponder the curtailment of freedom of expression.

By Carina Chocano Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

November 9, 2007

The conflict between policies that support national security and those that protect civil liberties are embodied in the bizarre, terrifying story of Steve Kurtz, an artist, activist and State University of New York at Buffalo professor for whom a personal tragedy led to a Kafkaesque nightmare courtesy of the War on Terror.

On May 11, 2004, Kurtz was days away from shipping his latest installation to the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art when his wife and collaborator, Hope, died in her sleep of heart failure at age 45. A distraught Kurtz called 911, but when police found petri dishes of bacteria in his apartment, they alerted the FBI, which had a field day with the tin foil on the windows (to block out the light for daytime sleeping) and an invitation to an art show that contained "Arabic writing."

Kurtz was removed from his home, his cat was locked in the attic for days without food or water, and agents in hazmat suits trashed the place like fraternity brothers on a bender. His wife's body was flown around the country and subjected to several autopsies, and although it was found that she died of natural causes unrelated to the harmless bacteria Kurtz had purchased on the Internet, Kurtz was labeled a "bio-terrorist" as the government strained to come up with criminal charges.

Eventually, Kurtz and his collaborator, Robert Ferrell, a genetics professor at the University of Pittsburgh, were charged with federal mail and wire fraud, civil charges that the government was able to pursue as criminal under the Justice Department's expanded powers over American citizens.

Lynn Hershman-Leeson made and released "Strange Culture" before Kurtz's case went to trial, and the film is as much a rally for attention to Kurtz's plight as it is a sounded alarm for Americans to ponder the severe curtailment of freedom of expression and information by the government in the name of security. Among the dangers the film warns us about are the ways in which the umbrella of national security can be used to promote other agendas, particularly corporate and government interests that are sometimes challenged by artists, activists and other citizens.

Kurtz, a founding member of a collective called the Critical Art Ensemble, had for years worked on exhibits aimed at educating Americans on the political, scientific and economic realities of the genetic modification of foods -- something that affects all Americans but that few of them know very much about -- and attempts by corporations to patent and control life forms. What's chilling about the case is that government officials persevered in the face of no evidence of criminal behavior because his work was inconvenient.

Because Kurtz's case has not yet gone to trial and he is forbidden to discuss the facts of the case, the part of Kurtz is played by an actor, Thomas Jay Ryan. Tilda Swinton plays Hope, Josh Kornbluth plays a colleague of Kurtz's who is denied tenure because of his political views and Peter Coyote speaks for Ferrell, who in the course of the case suffered a stroke. Swinton and Coyote also discuss their views, as themselves, regarding how the expansion of the Justice Department's powers under the Patriot Act threatens to gag American freedom of expression. In one chilling scene, Kurtz's students refuse to sign a petition supporting him for fear that they'll end up on a government list and see their careers thwarted. As sad as it is to realize that youth activism in this country is dead, it's sadder still to find yourself agreeing that they have a point. Just look at what happened to Kurtz.

carina.chocano@latimes.com

"Strange Culture." MPAA rating: Unrated. Running time: 1 hour, 15 minutes. In limited release.

The original review/article is here:http://www.calendarlive.com/movies/reviews/cl-et-et-strange9nov09,0,1989258.story

How to get involved: ARTIST FACES 20-YEAR CHARGES IN POLITICALLY MOTIVATED CASE
Critical Art Ensemble Defense Fund ...... http://www.caedefensefund.org/

And: Where oh where the fuck is the obnoxious, lazy, asshole mainstream media (especially broadcast) on this one? Those corporate ass-kissing, lazy, faux-journalist, dollar-fuckers. If you still aren't convinced, we are on the fascist speed boat to hell. It's our turn to rot there the same way we have condemned millions of others before us in our shameful history: (bye bye democracy in Iran, Burma, Pakistan, Russia, Chile ...) what a bunch of hypocrites we, the-police-states-of-america remain.

Technorati Tags:
film, cinema, LA Times, participatory democracy, voter responsibility, Strange Culture, Critical Art Ensemble, Steve Kurtz, War on Terror, War on Free Speech, War on Free Expression, Police-states-of-america

Stunning De Palma film about the rape and killing of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl by U.S. soldiers

From Reuters via the Los Angeles Times, August 31, 2007

'Redacted' stuns Venice

Brian De Palma's film about the rape and killing of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl by U.S. soldiers leaves festival-goers in tears.

VENICE — A new film about the real-life rape and killing of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl by U.S. soldiers who also murdered her family stunned the Venice festival, with shocking images that left some viewers in tears.

"Redacted", by U.S. director Brian De Palma, is one of at least eight American films on the war in Iraq due for release in the next few months and the first of two movies on the conflict screening in Venice's main competition.

Inspired by one of the most serious crimes committed by American soldiers in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, it is a harrowing indictment of the conflict and spares the audience no brutality to get its message across.

De Palma, 66, whose "Casualties of War" in 1989 told a similar tale of abuse by American soldiers in Vietnam, makes no secret of the goal he is hoping to achieve with the film's images, all based on real material he found on the Internet.

"The movie is an attempt to bring the reality of what is happening in Iraq to the American people," he told reporters after a press screening.

"The pictures are what will stop the war. One only hopes that these images will get the public incensed enough to motivate their Congressmen to vote against this war," he said.

Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi was gang raped, killed and burnt by American soldiers in Mahmudiya, south of Baghdad, in March 2006. Her parents and younger daughter were also killed.

Five soldiers have since been charged with the attack. Four of them have been given sentences of between 5 and 110 years.

"IT'S ALL ON THE INTERNET"

Halfway between documentary and fiction, "Redacted" draws on soldiers' home-made war videos, blogs and journals and footage posted on YouTube, reflecting changes in the way the media cover the war.

"In Vietnam, when we saw the images and the sorrow of the people we were traumatizing and killing, we saw the soldiers wounded and brought back in body bags. We see none of that in this war," De Palma said.

"It's all out there on the Internet, you can find it if you look for it, but it's not in the major media. The media is now really part of the corporate establishment," he said.

The film's title refers to how, according to De Palma, mainstream American newspapers and television channels are failing to tell the true story of the war by keeping the most graphic images of the conflict away from public opinion.

"When I went out to find the pictures, I said (to the media) give me the pictures you can't publish," he said, adding that because of legal dangers he too had to "edit" the material.

"Everything that is in the movie is based on something I found that actually happened. But once I had put it in the script I would get a note from a lawyer saying you can't use that because it's real and we may get sued," De Palma said.

"So I was forced to fictionalize things that were actually real."

The film, shot in Jordan with a little known cast, ends with a series of photographs of Iraqi civilians killed and their faces blacked out for legal reasons.

"I think that's terrible because now we have not even given the dignity of faces to this suffering people," De Palma said.

"The great irony about Redacted is that it was redacted."

Distributor Magnolia has planned a limited U.S. release for later this year, and the film may be easier to sell to European audiences rather than to the American public.

"This is a harrowing experience you put the audience through. It is not something you want to go to on a delightful Saturday evening but this message must be put forward and hopefully the public will respond," De Palma said.

source: LATimes

Technorati Tags: Brian DePalma, Redacted, Failure of the Media, film, cinema

Frank Rich: When Cheney the Vice Does It, It’s Not Illegal

When the Vice President Does It, That Means It’s Not Illegal

By FRANK RICH
July 1, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist, NYTimes.com


WHO knew that mocking the Constitution could be nearly as funny as shooting a hunting buddy in the face? Among other comic dividends, Dick Cheney’s legal theory that the vice president is not part of the executive branch yielded a priceless weeklong series on “The Daily Show” and an online “Doonesbury Poll,” conducted at Slate, to name Mr. Cheney’s indeterminate branch of government.

The ridicule was so widespread that finally even this White House had to blink. By midweek, it had abandoned that particularly ludicrous argument, if not its spurious larger claim that Mr. Cheney gets a free pass to ignore rules regulating federal officials’ handling of government secrets.

That retreat might allow us to mark the end of this installment of the Bush-Cheney Follies but for one nagging problem: Not for the first time in the history of this administration — or the hundredth — has the real story been lost amid the Washington kerfuffle. Once the laughter subsides and you look deeper into the narrative leading up to the punch line, you can unearth a buried White House plot that is more damning than the official scandal. This plot once again snakes back to the sinister origins of the Iraq war, to the Valerie Wilson leak case and to the press failures that enabled the administration to abuse truth and the law for too long.

One journalist who hasn’t failed is Mark Silva of The Chicago Tribune. He first reported more than a year ago, in May 2006, the essentials of the “news” at the heart of the recent Cheney ruckus. Mr. Silva found that the vice president was not filing required reports on his office’s use of classified documents because he asserted that his role in the legislative branch, as president of the Senate, gave him an exemption.

This scoop went unnoticed by nearly everybody. It would still be forgotten today had not Henry Waxman, the dogged House inquisitor, called out Mr. Cheney 10 days ago, detailing still more egregious examples of the vice president’s flouting of the law, including his effort to shut down an oversight agency in charge of policing him. The congressman’s brief set off the firestorm that launched a thousand late-night gags.

That’s all to the public good, but hiding in plain sight was the little-noted content of the Bush executive order that Mr. Cheney is accused of violating. On close examination, this obscure 2003 document, thrust into the light only because the vice president so blatantly defied it, turns out to be yet another piece of self-incriminating evidence illuminating the White House’s guilt in ginning up its false case for war.

The tale of the document begins in August 2001, when the Bush administration initiated a review of the previous executive order on classified materials signed by Bill Clinton in 1995. The Clinton order had been acclaimed in its day as a victory for transparency because it mandated the automatic declassification of most government files after 25 years.

It was predictable that the obsessively secretive Bush team would undermine the Clinton order. What was once a measure to make government more open would be redrawn to do the opposite. And sure enough, when the White House finally released its revised version, the scant news coverage focused on how the new rules postponed the Clinton deadline for automatic declassification and tightened secrecy so much that previously declassified documents could be reclassified.

But few noticed another change inserted five times in the revised text: every provision that gave powers to the president over classified documents was amended to give the identical powers to the vice president. This unprecedented increase in vice-presidential clout, though spelled out in black and white, went virtually unremarked in contemporary news accounts.

Given all the other unprecedented prerogatives that President Bush has handed his vice president, this one might seem to be just more of the same. But both the timing of the executive order and the subsequent use Mr. Cheney would make of it reveal its special importance in the games that the White House played with prewar intelligence.

The obvious juncture for Mr. Bush to bestow these new powers on his vice president, you might expect, would have been soon after 9/11, especially since the review process on the Clinton order started a month earlier and could be expedited, as so much other governmental machinery was, to meet the urgent national-security crisis. Yet the new executive order languished for another 18 months, only to be published and signed with no fanfare on March 25, 2003, a week after the invasion of Iraq began.

Why then? It was throughout March, both on the eve of the war and right after “Shock and Awe,” that the White House’s most urgent case for Iraq’s imminent threat began to unravel. That case had been built around the scariest of Saddam’s supposed W.M.D., the nuclear weapons that could engulf America in mushroom clouds, and the White House had pushed it relentlessly, despite a lack of evidence. On “Meet the Press” on March 16, Mr. Cheney pressed that doomsday button one more time: “We believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.” But even as the vice president spoke, such claims were at last being strenuously challenged in public.

Nine days earlier Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency had announced that documents supposedly attesting to Saddam’s attempt to secure uranium in Niger were “not authentic.” A then-obscure retired diplomat, Joseph Wilson, piped in on CNN, calling the case “outrageous.”

Soon both Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia and Congressman Waxman wrote letters (to the F.B.I. and the president, respectively) questioning whether we were going to war because of what Mr. Waxman labeled “a hoax.” And this wasn’t the only administration use of intelligence that was under increasing scrutiny. The newly formed 9/11 commission set its first open hearings for March 31 and requested some half-million documents, including those pertaining to what the White House knew about Al Qaeda’s threat during the summer of 2001.

The new executive order that Mr. Bush signed on March 25 was ingenious. By giving Mr. Cheney the same classification powers he had, Mr. Bush gave his vice president a free hand to wield a clandestine weapon: he could use leaks to punish administration critics.

That weapon would be employed less than four months later. Under Mr. Bush’s direction, Mr. Cheney deputized Scooter Libby to leak highly selective and misleading portions of a 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq to pet reporters as he tried to discredit Mr. Wilson. By then, Mr. Wilson had emerged as the most vocal former government official accusing the White House of not telling the truth before the war.

Because of the Patrick Fitzgerald investigation, we would learn three years later about the offensive conducted by Mr. Libby on behalf of Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush. That revelation prompted the vice president to acknowledge his enhanced powers in an unguarded moment in a February 2006 interview with Brit Hume of Fox News. Asked by Mr. Hume with some incredulity if “a vice president has the authority to declassify information,” Mr. Cheney replied, “There is an executive order to that effect.” He was referring to the order of March 2003.

Even now, few have made the connection between this month’s Cheney flap and the larger scandal. That larger scandal is to be found in what the vice president did legally under the executive order early on rather than in his more recent rejection of its oversight rules.

Timing really is everything. By March 2003, this White House knew its hype of Saddam’s nonexistent nuclear arsenal was in grave danger of being exposed. The order allowed Mr. Bush to keep his own fingerprints off the nitty-gritty of any jihad against whistle-blowers by giving Mr. Cheney the authority to pick his own shots and handle the specifics. The president could have plausible deniability and was free to deliver non-denial denials like “If there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is.” Mr. Cheney in turn could delegate the actual dirty work to Mr. Libby, who obstructed justice to help throw a smoke screen over the vice president’s own role in the effort to destroy Mr. Wilson.

Last week The Washington Post ran a first-rate investigative series on the entire Cheney vice presidency. Readers posting comments were largely enthusiastic, but a few griped. “Six and a half years too late,” said one. “Four years late and billions of dollars short,” said another. Such complaints reflect the bitter legacy of much of the Washington press’s failure to penetrate the hyping of prewar intelligence and, later, the import of the Fitzgerald investigation.

We’re still playing catch-up. In a week in which the C.I.A. belatedly released severely censored secrets about agency scandals dating back a half-century, you have to wonder what else was done behind the shield of an executive order signed just after the Ides of March four years ago. Another half-century could pass before Americans learn the full story of the secrets buried by Mr. Cheney and his boss to cover up their deceitful path to war.

www.buzzzed.com

Technorati Tags:
Chicago Tribune, Mark Silva, press, MSM, media, mainstream media, press failures

Valerie Plame Wilson Testifies Before Congress

American Hero: CIA Agent Deliberately Outed by Bush Cheney Rove Libby Republican White House Valerie Plame Wilson a former covert CIA agent working on intelligence about weapons of mass destruction was the target of a systematic outing by — not a foreign terrorist jihadist entity or Al Qaeda or a hostile foreign government — but by our very own United States Government, specificially the Bush-Cheney White House in collaboration with right-wing pundit and apologist Bob Novak. Why? Because the republican administration did not like being criticized by Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson for faking intelligence and lying about the reasons they misled the nation into the illegal Iraq War and invasion.


Proudly doing the devil's work:
Tom Davis of Virginia -- another republican right wing member of Congress working extremely hard to continue the White House and repugnacon smear of Valerie Plame -- protecting and covering for Rove, Bush, Cheney, Libby, Bob Novak and all those republicans and their hacks who outed covert, classified, undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson. Davis and the other republican members continue to distort the facts of this troubling crime despite the facts and reality.

Congressmember Sarbanes:

"Administration of Bullies"

"Arrogance of Power run amok"

"Petulant behavior on their part"

"Orchestrated effort" to out a covert CIA agent

Chairman Waxman:

"Did Bob Novak or Karl Rove or Mr. Cheney or President Bush or anyone from the administration call and apologize to you for the damage done to your career and the danger to you and your family?

Valerie Plame Wilson:

"No, Mr. Chairman"

Meanwhile on Spit(Hard)ball with the preferred and highly superior David Gregory, (substituting for the stupidly rude, loud, bully, blowhard and sycophant in residence), Ron Brownstein of the Los Angeles Times has finally and completely relinquished his 'official journalist press' card — he has shed any false or actual sense of responsibility as a fact-based journalist/analyst and has fervently donned his McCain-Republican Talking Points Toady Hat.

With a mostly straight face Brown-nose declared today's hearings in the House to not serve much purpose in scoring political points/advantage. He was concerned with crass political posturing versus history being corrected, facts being found and truth being told.

Thumbs Down, Jeers and Hall of Shame Award goes to Ron Brownstein; you can pretty much write him off and check the Right-wing Republican publicist column (in great cowardly company with Robert Novak) — he'll have to do something massively important to redeem himself if this is his new hack, no P.R, er wait .... writing/reporting path.

On the other hand, Matt Cooper, one of the journalists to whom Rove and the White House Traitors leaked Plame's identity/name seemed to understand the serious historical value of these hearings and to confirm the public's right to know about the smear tactics and mendacious antics of this Shrub-Loyalty-Above-the-Constitution White House/administration.