Hearing Meredith Vierra and her co-host talk about Pikachu (”He stores electrical energy in his cheeks which he can then use to make powerful attacks.”) in the same matter-of-fact way they’d discuss Johnny Depp’s or Jonathan Kellerman’s accomplishments and talents.
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Archive for November, 2008
Twilight—the Movie
November 26th, 2008, 8:40 pm by fshermanIf any of the fans who criticized my earlier post about the book series are reading this, how does the movie compare to the book? And why can’t Edward read Bella’s thoughts?
While I wouldn’t rate the movie as a deathless classic, I enjoyed it (though I thought Edgar was a weak actor). It would be worth giving up two-plus hours even if i wasn’t on vacation, and that’s probably a better measure than money.
Thanksgiving vacation so far.
November 25th, 2008, 1:14 pm by fshermanWatching old Mission Impossible episodes.
Reading.
Playing board games including Top Secret, Hands Down and Booby Trap (which is my favorite—I love it!).
Watching old Perry Mason’s.
Talking w/my brother, niece and sister in law.
Not very exciting but such a welcome break from my usual rushing around.
Mountains
November 22nd, 2008, 8:54 pm by fshermanFlying over them and looking down is just so cool.
Which is one of the fun thngs about Thanksgiving vacation in California.
Hurray!
November 21st, 2008, 12:21 pm by fshermanA federal court has ordered the release of five Algerian detainees the Bush administration has held locked up since 2002, without ever charging them. The judge ruled the evidence, which is classified, didn’t justify denying the men their right of habeas corpus.
This wouldn’t have happened without the Supreme Court decision last year granting detainees the right to have habeas corpus petitions heard in federal court (something Bush and McCain both opposed). Under the circumstances, it seems pathetic to say “the system works” — a working system doesn’t lock up innocent people on the Glorious Supreme Leader’s whim — but it’s not totally broken.
Thoughts:
•One more reason to be glad of an Obama victory. The Supreme Court decision was 5-4; a McCain appointee is something this country does not need.
•On the down side, Obama is reportedly considering putting George Tenet aide John Brennan in as CIA director or Director of National Intelligence. We do NOT need a pro-torture apologist who’s championed the Bush administration’s positions on this anywhere in an Obama government (or any other).
•Six journalists this week have received the International Press Freedom Award from the Committee to Protect Journalists: They include journalists persecuted, threatened or imprisoned by Cuba, Uganda, the Taliban … and Bilal Hussein, who was locked up by our government for two years without charges or due process.
That is the company in which the Bush administration finds itself.
The obligatory Ron Hart critique
November 21st, 2008, 12:13 pm by fshermanHart’s column this week: “I think we are the best country on the planet, and I regard the media-conjured hate of us by the rest of the world as what it is: envy.”
Umm, no. If anything, I think our lifestyle here is a plus, like the Al Jazeera executive in the documentary “Control Room” who, after a blistering critique of American policy, candidly admitted that “I would gladly trade the American dream for the Arab nightmare.”
Some people hate us because we’re a scary secularizing force that challenges their culture, tradition and faith.
Some people hate us because we blow up wedding parties, then claim that we were absolutely positively sure they were a bunch of murderous terrorists.
Some people hate us because we’ve locked up innocent foreigners for years in Gitmo and refuse to let them go.
Some people hate us because we’ve backed Saddam Hussein, Guatemala’s genocidal government, death squads in El Salvador and treated even legitimate democratic protest movements as subversive threats who should be murdered, if they have the temerity to question some of our allies.
Some people hate us because we threaten military action against countries we don’t like more than anyone on Earth. And occasionally carry them out.
It’s not that we’re a force for evil in the world, or that everything we do is wrong: We do a lot of good, too. But we do more than enough to justify people out there resenting us.
But I guess blaming it all on the media saves Mr. Hart from having to think through any tangled moral questions.
Here comes the War on Christmas whining again
November 21st, 2008, 12:04 pm by fshermanI have very little use for right-wingers whining about how — based on a few stores telling employees to say “Happy holidays” rather than “Merry Christmas” — there is some diabolical liberal secular conspiracy to wage a “war on Christmas.”
Unfortunately, conservatives are so used to playing the victim card that this has now become a seasonal fixture. So it’s not surprise that Wall Street Journal editor Daniel Henninger has devoted a column to explaining how the War On Christmas has brought about the economic meltdown.
Henninger’s theory is that “A nation whose people can’t say ‘Merry Christmas’ is a nation capable of ruining its own economy” because if we take away religion, we take away all the moral props that keep financiers behaving morally instead of greedily. As a result: “Banish Merry Christmas. Get ready for Mad Max.”
I hate having to take the time to argue with anything this dumb, but here goes:
•Christmas isn’t banished. If it was, we wouldn’t be seeing Christmas commercials before Thanksgiving.
•The Puritans hated Christmas and legally banned it (because it was tied to early pagan festival dates, and was in those days a time for wild partying and fun).
•We’ve had financial panics in 1797, 1819 and 1837, all back in the days when we were supposed to be a devout, god-fearing country, and certainly before the non-existent “war on Christmas.”
Has he thought this through?
November 20th, 2008, 8:44 am by fshermanA letter in today’s Daily News objects to expanding Medicare because “it doesn’t work … About half the funds expended are for administration and fraud. It’s bankrupting the nation.”
His other arguments — whether the federal government should run a program such as this or not — are reasonable ones to raise, but I don’t think the first point is. If a program is corrupted with fraud but worthwhile doing, wouldn’t a better solution be to clean up the fraud and keep the program?
If not, wouldn’t the military be subject to the same argument? Military spending is certainly a huge contribution to the deficit — and would be even without the billions Bush has squandered in his pointless, stupid invasion of Iraq; millions have been wasted in Iraq on fraud, kickbacks and phony bills from contractors (and there’s fraud and corruption even outside Iraq); and the military accounting system is such total crap the military can’t even account for all the money it receives.
Is the solution that we should phase out the military? Or that we should fix it?
The more things change …
November 19th, 2008, 2:11 pm by fshermanIn the 19th century, doctors explained that slaves ran away from their masters because of “drapetomania,” a completely irrational and uncaused urge to rebel.
In the fifties, one psychiatrist said that any woman who worked outside the home was sexually frustrated and probably a lesbian.
In 2004, several right-wing pundits, including John Podhoretz and Charles Krauthammer, announced that Al Gore was, literally, clinically insane (Krauthammer, who served as a psychiatric resident after graduating medical school, has made this charge about several liberals).
The latest in this line of bilge is Dr. Lyle Rossiter, who has announced in his new book that liberal positions can only be the result of a mental disorder: “A social scientist who understands human nature will not dismiss the vital roles of free choice, voluntary cooperation and moral integrity – as liberals do …A political leader who understands human nature will not ignore individual differences in talent, drive, personal appeal and work ethic, and then try to impose economic and social equality on the population – as liberals do.”
Rossiter goes on to say that part of the liberal agenda “and its associated madness” is “rejecting the sovereignty of the individual, subordinating him to the will of the government” (the latter quote may be the article on Newsmax synopsizing him, rather than a direct quote).
Yes, conservatives are soooo supportive of free choice, aren’t they? They just love it when women choose not to bear children, or to have sex without “consequences.” They support the free choice to read whatever we want, even if it’s x-rated, and to marry people of the same sex, and to worship where we choose and the free choice of women to work outside the home.
And obviously it’s insane for liberals to suggest that society grant everyone equal rights—I mean, come on, what were Martin Luther King and LBJ thinking back in the sixties?
And the right-wing has been sooo supportive of the “sovereignty of the individual,” championing individual Americans against a government that claimed the right to lock anyone up at the president’s discretion and hold them without charges, to use torture and to spy on Americans without warrants.
I’m touched by the doc’s concern for my sanity, but I think he should remove the beam from his own eye first.
Target—Obama?
November 18th, 2008, 11:37 am by fshermanJournalist David Neiwert who specializes in reporting on the extreme right wing has been keeping track of how the fringe has reacted to the election: A huge spike in death threats and a lot of new members at the neo-Nazi Stormfront site. Police have busted up two plots (or alleged plots) to kill Obama, one by some white supremacists in Colorado, one by skinheads in Tennessee.
Perhaps the creepiest is an account of Idaho third-graders allegedly chanting “assassinate Obama” on a school bus. At least some of them have no idea what the word “assassinate” meant, but still, who gave them the idea that was a good singalong?
Neiwert discusses this case and says that while that part of Idaho is extremely right wing, the people are pretty decent and seem to be genuinely shocked by this incident.
