2010

Happy New Year, everyone, from all of us here at The Reaction.

It's hard to believe it's 2010. But I hope it's a good one.

Ten years ago, I celebrated the arrival of the new millennium in a small village in England. Right now, I'm in suburban Toronto. A lot has changed, and I can't help but welcome in the new year, and the new decade, by looking back at what the last year, and the last decade, brought. It's a time of newness, of hope, and also of reflection.

But not in a bad way. I am, at times like this, reminded of the lyrics to Pink Floyd's "Time," including these:

Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain.
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today.
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you.
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.

Well, time really does fly, as they say, and we're all getting older, and, yes, maybe I missed a starting gun or two along the way, but, even as I reflect, even as a certain melancholy washes over me, I cannot help but look around me with great happiness and contentment.

It's 2010. Crazy. Let's try to make the most of it.

All my love to my loved ones, to all my friends and family.

To everyone, take care out there.

-- Michael

Doctor Syntax

By Capt. Fogg

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall
The vapors sweep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan

-Tennyson-


Every year at this time I let Doctor Syntax out of the Vicarage and let him raise hell with the way we've ruined the greatest language on Earth: spray painted it like an old abandoned subway car, put it up on blocks and stolen the wheels and made it all but impossible to have an intelligent conversation because, like one of those German Enigma machines, every word seems to change meaning every time it's used.

Every year brings the same references to "language police" because you know it's true and you know we're guilty of polluting the minds of millions with silly, balbative portmanteau words like Ginormous or Sexting, our relentless verbing of nouns like texting and friending and our instant acceptance of every cliche metaphor, metastatic Malapropism, stupid solecism and yes, with every pusillanimous political polemic we pass along.

No, if conservative, liberal, reactionary, fascist, anarchist, Marxist, royalist, and Fascist are all used interchangeably, we might as well stop talking, legislating, voting and adjudicating and take up arms. And we do.

Every year, as our vocabularies atrophy, we make up words or as our overuse of superlatives diminishes them, as our misuse erases them, we have to invent new ones. After all, when your skate board or your X-Box is awesome, you simply can't discuss how you felt when you saw that Hubble picture of some distant nebula, now can you? What happens to the real verb "to befriend" when it's more fashionably idiotic to "friend" someone or worse, toBFF them? It dies quickly of course and any real dictionary these days is a virtual Arlington of fallen words.

There's a college up in Michigan, Lake Superior State University, that's been putting out an annual list of words that need to die for 35 years. I'm afraid the school will die before they have any results to show. In fact if we still have universities in 35 years I have to wonder whether they'll be teaching in Standard English in the way medieval Universities taught in Latin, while business and popular pursuits are conducted in some 'consumerized' argot or vulgate designed to boost sales and befuddle customers while the general population can't read Hemingway, much less Tennyson any more.

No, I'm not the language police. The real language police are the people who tell you you're a racist if you call an Asian tiger or bear an Asiatic tiger or bear -- or that you may never end a sentence with a preposition. No, I just love English and as you know I love wordplay and the inventive use of words. In principle I don't object to such silliness as "chillaxin," the compound of two bits of dialect; chillin' and relaxin' but only in principle and never when used by some underage hipster with a two thousand word vocabulary. I even thought the short lived "not so much" routine was cute for a few moments, but that's the thing: with fish, house guests, metaphors and the Macarena; after three days one notices a smell. At least I do. Maybe it's time you did too.

Yes, I agree that "shovel-ready" is shovel ready for burial; I agree that it's time to stop calling every adviser a Czar. I am sick unto death at the "app app app app" that I hear quacked out at the phone store, butLSSU's 15 words are not enough nor does the list expose the inverted elitism behind our linguistic cacophony. We may have majored in English at the best schools, but in our HowdyDoody hearts we know it's bad to be grown up and embarrassing to sound educated and so we try ever so hard to sound like the baggy pants crowd who know just how the really cool kids talk in the penitentiaries and crack houses. We always fail at it of course, because those kids change their jargon faster than we can.

As I said, I only do this once a year and that's because it's useless, of course. It only lets me vent some excess steam pressure, to rant against the dying of the light. I know that "impact" will ever hence mean affect and effect and influence and inform and not be just a carrion metaphor. I know that those words are gone forever from popular parlance and that this little rant will be as hard for my grandchildren to read as Chaucer. Hell, animated video clips may have replaced the written word altogether by then and the University of Wii may be the new Harvard. I don't know. I do know that no one cares how much of value we lose every day or with what dross we replace it. I do know there are still people who can write well and I'm proud to appear here with them. I do also know It's New Year's Eve again and time for old Syntax and me to drown our sorrows -- metaphorically speaking, of course.

(Cross posted from Human Voices)

Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting

By J. Thomas Duffy

Oh boy, leave it to Tweety.

H/T to John Cole, over on Balloon Juice, for the catch;

This Chris Matthews quote is a Palinesque work of art:

MATTHEWS: And I think we have got to get serious about catching terrorists, not just catching weapons. I‘m waiting for the terrorist who knows kung fu or something that gets on an airplane without a weapon. God knows what that is going to be like.

Hey, Gerald, happy new year, even under this circumstance.

WTF!

We go from a kid, putting a bomb in his underwear, to sketching out a new Jackie Chan movie?

Steve Benen was also scratching his head;

Also note the context: Matthews is urging us to "get serious" about counterterrorism, and in the next sentence, warning us of the potentially deadly consequences of terrorists who know "kung fu or something."

Oh man ...

Was Tweety hitting the punch a little early this evening?

But, on another note, Tweety's wing-in-mouth solved our New Year's Eve music choice.

Everybody, get up and shake it!

Carl Douglas - Kung fu fighting(original)



Bonus Tweety Riffs

MSNBC's Matthews Uninjured Pulling Head Out Of Judy Miller's Ass ...Hardball Host Fawns Over Former White House Stenographer; Stays Away From Tough Questions

Clooney: Wouldn’t Cast Matthews In A Daydream ...When Pressed, Matthews Admits Miffed Not Cast in Clooney Film ...“Forget This Zelig Mishmash, I Could Have Played McCarthy … And Played Him Damn Good”

Was Tweety Covering Morning Jokes' Back?


(Cross Posted at The Garlic)

Rush Limbaugh deathwatch

By Carl

Damn it!

Early reports had him actually dead, which means he likely suffered a very serious attack before they were able to clamp him down with bungee cords to use the AED. I wonder what whaling vessel they called in?

But I digress.

Perhaps the time has come to pronounce Limbaugh " all but dead" and to determine what he will leave in his wake, besides a steaming trail of slug slime?

There's a small part of me, a very Christian, liberal part of me, that likes to think that deep down inside Rush is a scared little boy. You see, twenty, twenty-five years ago, this slug of a man, this Jabba The Nut, emerged with a shtick that saw him alter the reality of political talk in America, changed the direction of a major political party, and became a gravimetric force for evil.

Half-jokingly, so he could maintain the veneer of "comedian," Limbaugh launched anger as a weapon in the national political dialogue. Not that this hadn't happened before, Father Coughlin springs to mind, but the hatred that Coughlin spewed was not so much anti-American ideals as just random hatred.

Limbaugh, on the other hand, just hated that he was behind the times, and since he couldn't muster the effort to keep up, he set out to deliberately drag the nation back to him. It wasn't about advancing a political agenda. It was about self-promotion.

In that respect, Limbaugh had no qualms about stepping over boundaries that anyone who actually loved a nation would never set foot near, accusing anyone and everyone of being a Nazi or a commie, or an Islamofascist, or worse...a liberal!

"Liberals got women the right to vote. Liberals got African-Americans the right to vote. Liberals created Social Security and lifted millions of elderly people out of poverty. Liberals ended segregation. Liberals passed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act. Liberals created Medicare. Liberals passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act. What did Conservatives do? They opposed them on every one of those things...every one! So when you try to hurl that label at my feet, 'Liberal,' as if it were something to be ashamed of, something dirty, something to run away from, it won't work, Senator, because I will pick up that label and I will wear it as a badge of honor." -- Matt Santos, The West Wing

Rush conveniently forgets that, if not for liberals, Rush himself would be begging loose change in exchange for butt-fucks in the Kansas City railway station. Rush, you see, the bastion of conservative, up-by-the-boot-straps, rock-ribbed self-sufficiency, was on both welfare and unemployment insurance.

But now this hatred Limbaugh has spewed all over the land, this sludge of toxic waste, has morphed into something that, if it had been submitted to DC Comics, would have been laughed out of the office, and if it had been submitted to Mad Magazine, would have been met with stone-cold silence in its unbelievability.

Consider the birther movement. Consider the teabaggers. Consider the hatred spewing from the extreme right wing like an oil gusher that has not yet been capped.

I think Rush is terrified. I suspect it is this deep deep fear in him that forces him to marry every five years, to bloat up like a corpse in a cesspool, stopping only to blurt out what now sounds like almost moderate venom. He sees that the monster he has unleashed threatens to tear apart the very party he claims allegiance to, the party he claims he would like to see leading this nation. He sees that party slide into a cartoonish obscurity of obsolescence and obscenity. And with each passing election, he watches the internal strife of moderates versus radicals become more and more obvious, more and more spiteful, more and more divisive. And he watches his party become a footnote to history because of what he instigated.

He's lost the spotlight.

I don't give him much time.

(crossposted to Simply Left Behind)

Rush lives

By Capt. Fogg

Whatever the cause of Rush Limbaugh's chest pains, they haven't been as fatal as some have reported but whether or not angina is involved, we can be sure they weren't pangs of conscience. His web site thanks us for our prayers ( if only he could hear mine) and is, as always, jam packed and bloated with fear mongering, dire predictions and apocalyptic warnings that if we don't "fight like hell" our country will be changed forever.Let's hope.

I recently read that only about 5% of those admitted to hospitals with chest pains die within a year, so one important and very needed change is probably not going to happen -- all the more so since most billionaires can not only afford health insurance but can afford to do without it. If you or I had rendered ourselves uninsurable through a lifetime of belly bustin' burgers, cigars, uppers, downers, pain killers and beer we might have a rather different experience and a bit less cause for optimism.

Yes, we have to fight like hell to stop this "buffoonery" says Rush about Bob Menendez' call to set aside ideology, turn off Limbaugh and pass the legislation that most Americans want. But Congress is ignoring the will of the people -- or at least the minority of the people he represents, says Rush. Public health insurance will change America forever -- forever! Government will "take over" health care just the way it took over all those plans you made for retirement. ( huh?) Just the way Veteran's benefits took over - well whatever they took over and medicare helped keep exploding profits from eating up every last dime retired people have set aside.

It's a tenet of Buddhism, and a nice bit of wisdom, that change is constant and suffering is universal when we refuse to accept it. It's too bad in this case that Rush's refusal to let go of failed 19th century ideas will cause more suffering for everyone else than it will for him. We have been changing from the outset in terms of making the US a better place to live for more of its people and Rush has been a major clot in the artery of truth and justice and decency.

No, I'm not going to descend to his level and wish him an immediate death, in fact I hope he lives long enough to see that not one dire thing he has predicted has materialized and that he's been pretty much wrong about every thing he's said -- and until that happens, I hope those pains continue to hurt like hell.

(Cross posted from Human Voices)

I, for one, hope he lives a long, long life

By J. Thomas Duffy

There was much hub-bub on the World Wide Web last evening, with the news that the "Cheeseburger That Sweats" (h/t Barry Crimmins), aka Rush Limbaugh was rushed to the hospital, ironically, in Hawaii, after suffering chest pains.



No doubt, there are people out there, mumbling like Solazzo, from 'The Godfather' this morning with the news that Limbaugh is resting comfortably.

Some of the Flying Monkeys, of the Right Wing Freak Show, were, already, last night, sending out shots-across-the-bow, dare anyone start making death jokes about one of our grandfathered Ignorant Dolts.

I, for one, hope he lives a long, long, life.

• Long enough to see the despicable garbage schtick he promulgates, promotes (proudly, no less), and, otherwise revels in, becomes totally repudiated, and becomes a neon pariah for the rest of his life.
  
  
• That he lives long, so that he can see the country bounce back, become great again, under Democrat Leadership.
  
  
• That he lives long enough to see a woman, perhaps a black, gay woman, elected President.
  
  
• So that he can see the people he cheerleaded - The Commander Guy, The Shawdow President, and all the dwarfs, finks, phonies and frauds of The Bush Grindhouse - take their Perp Walk, if not in this country, than in the World Court, to pay for their War Crimes.
  
  
• So that he can see millions of Americans become healthy, with a broad, robust Healtcare Plan, brought about by the Democrats
  
  
• So that, hopefully, a cured Michael J. Fox, can spit in his face
  
  

Will Bunch, on Attytood, shares this;

So, get well, Rush Limbaugh. And get well quickly, because I want to make fun of you for vacationing in that "exotic" Barack Obama-producing state of Hawaii.

So does James Akers Jr., posting on Twitter, perhaps the best of well-wishes;

I hope Rush Limbaugh is saved by a black homosexual doctor with a questionable immigration status

Adrian Chen, over on Gawker, points out the Prayer Vigils taking place;

Our buddies over at the Free Republic know how to save Rush Limbaugh: Internet prayer vigil! There are like 150 prayers already! Do you realize what this means? Tonight could be the night we find out if God exists

Yeah, what if God was one of him...




(Cross Posted at The Garlic)

The right to primacy

By Carl

I have long believed, ever since Amy Carter, that the minor children of politicians should remain off-limits until they become of age. I didn't care much for the jokes about Jenna and Not-Jenna in the first Bush term, certainly I was disgusted when Rush Limbaugh called Chelsea Clinton "The White House Dog," and I'm pleased to see the right wing has kept hands off Sasha and Malia Obama.

Mostly. I'm not aware of any outright major blogging with respect to them and a quick Google search uncovers only the Beanie Babies controversy from February.

So it's with trepidation that I approach the news yesterday that Bristol Palin lost her fight to keep the records of her custody fight with Levi Johnston private.

See, Bristol Palin presents a problem: on the one hand, she was a minor when she was dragged out of the Arctic obscurity of Wassilla into the hot lights of the Minneapolis mayhem, and her private pain fully disclosed.

On the other, she presents prima facie evidence of at least Sarah Palin's inability to keep her own house in order, much less take over the White House.

My suspicion here is there's a reverse-discrimination issue at play, at least as far as the Chris Crocker wing of the GOP is concerned: after all, none of them had any problem when Al Gore's son was arrested for possession, calling that an example of the poor family values of the liberal Democratic party.

My instincts tell me that Bristol's name ought to be kept off the lawsuit. It's too late now, of course. Even if the ruling was reversed, it wouldn't take much to figure out which court docket was hers and to publish the details from it.

Which leads me to the dilemma. Legally, there is no question that the public's right to know is far smaller than the right to privacy that Tripp Palin is entitled to, and this is a nation of laws.

Right?

On the other hand, there's the whole nasty issue of Sarah Palin's exploitation of Tripp Palin. That cannot be ignored or denied, and that complicates the legal issue.

Part of Johnston's fight has been to protect his public image, which is his right to privacy such as he can maintain and the right to go about doing his business, whether it's being a public figure (which appears to be his destiny, however pathetic that career will be), from the smears and slanders of another public figure, Sarah Palin.

To privatize the records of these hearings is to shackle Johnston's hands from protecting himself. Indeed, his filings in this matter speak to that:

In an affidavit, he [Johnston] says he wants the case to be open to "public scrutiny as a check against anyone's need to be overly vindictive, aggressive or malicious." He adds that he's referring not to Bristol but to her mom.

Clearly, there are no winners here, only losers, especially Tripp. My suspicion is the testimony and evidence presented at the trial will speak to both sides of the family being rather...ugly...with perhaps Bristol the only one coming out of it with any chance of an improved public image.

Sarah Palin will be forced to spin, spin, spin mightily the testimony. That Johnston has already landed a few pre-emptive blows in his interviews with regards to how Palin behaved behind the scenes tells me that's about all he was allowed to say by his lawyers, and that there's more, much more, to come.

Which would be consistent with her harping image from the campaig trail, the "pitbull with lipstick" writ small.

For my part, I'll likely ignore the trial, except to note when there will be real damage to Palin's Presidential aspirations.

But she really only has herself to blame for that. She could have been a better parent.

(crossposted to Simply Left Behind)

Best Films of the '00s (zeros/aughts)

By Michael J.W. Stickings

What qualifies me to do a retrospective review of the best films of the decade? Well, I'd like to think that I know a lot about film, that I've seen a lot of movies, that I love movies, and that I have good taste.

Plus, I'm a blogger, so here you go, like it or not. (Oh, and I was a film critic way back when for The Tufts Daily.)

Seriously, it's been an interesting exercise looking back over the decade in film. These lists don't mean much -- and there are way too many of them already -- but wrapping up a year or a decade or whatever with "best of" lists allows one to reflect on what was, and on what was excellent, and to celebrate excellence, and, given that all this is subjective, to stimulate debate within oneself and more broadly within society, to contribute to a greater appreciation for film and to a broader discussion about film.

We live in a world that is all about the here and now, immediate and future-oriented. It is important to reflect, to look back, to consider the greatness that has come before, to celebrate the cinematic peaks of times past. This means Casablanca and Citizen Kane, Ozu and Kurosawa, and the towering peaks of film history. And it also means the best of more recent years.

I've spent the past several days going through the decade year by year. I was brought back to so many films that I'd either forgotten about or just don't think about much. What I offer here is my own personal look back at the best of the decade that is shortly to come to an end. These are all films that came out in North America from 2000 to 2009. (There are many wonderful films I've seen at the Toronto International Film Festival over the years, many of which sadly were never released commercially here, but I've restricted this to films that qualified for Oscar eligibility along with major foreign films that are generally available on video in North America.)

Enjoy. And feel free to disagree.

(I include links to Wikipedia pages so you can read more about specific films.)

**********

As I am not a professional critic, there are quite a few significant films I either didn't see or have not seen in full. Needless to say, I do not include them here. They include: Amores Perros, Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, Brokeback Mountain, City of God, Crash, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, House of Flying Daggers, Mystic River, Spirited Away, The Triplets of Belleville, Y Tu Mama Tambien, Yi Yi: A One and a Two.

Several of these, such as Eternal Sunshine, City of God, and 4/3/2, are sure to make it onto many "best of" lists.

I have also not yet seen some of the major releases of 2009, such as Up in the Air and The Hurt Locker.

As of right now, my four favourite films of this year are Adventureland, District 9, (500) Days of Summer, and Star Trek.

**********

Great Films by Year (Top 16)

2000: Almost Famous, Traffic

2001: Black Hawk Down, Gosford Park, Monsoon Wedding
2002: Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, The Pianist, The Twilight Samurai
2003: Lost in Translation
2004: Hotel Rwanda, The Village
2005: Syriana
2006: Letters from Iwo Jima, The Lives of Others
2007: No Country for Old Men
2008: WALL-E
2009: nothing yet (maybe)

Best Film of the Decade: Almost Famous

(More specifically, Untitled, the extended director's cut, which is even better than the theatrical version.)

The rest of the Top Ten:

-- Black Hawk Down

-- Hotel Rwanda

-- Gosford Park

-- Letters from Iwo Jima

-- The Lives of Others

-- The Pianist

-- Syriana

-- Traffic

-- The Twilight Samurai

The next ten (11-20)

-- Before Sunset

-- The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

-- Lost in Translation

-- Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

-- Milk

-- Monsoon Wedding

-- No Country for Old Men

-- Talk to Her

-- The Village

-- WALL-E

Milk is #20, but it's a toss-up. (Other possibilities include Adventureland, Amelie, The Bourne Ultimatum, District 9, Good Night, and Good Luck, The Queen, and Stranger Than Fiction.)

And beyond those 20, some worthy recognition:

Two films I can't quite figure out (either very good or amazing): Children of Men and Synecdoche, New York

Film that may very well be brilliant but that I need to see again: District 9

Two stand-out comedies: Best in Show and Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story

Comedies I really liked but aren't great films: Bad Santa, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, High Fidelity, Melinda and Melinda, Napoleon Dynomite, Osmosis Jones, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story

Films I have a real soft spot for: Adventureland, American Splendor, The Dish, (500) Days of Summer, Lady in the Water, Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist, Ocean's Eleven, A Prairie Home Companion, Stranger Than Fiction, Sunshine Cleaning

Along with WALL-E, Pixar films I really liked: The Incredibles, Monsters Inc. 

Other animated/non-live-action films I really liked: Persepolis, Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit

Other foreign films I really liked: Amelie, Good Morning, Night, The Hidden Blade, Kontroll, My Mother's Smile, Volver

Two impressive films by Zhang Yimou (one of the greatest directors of the '90s, with such films as Ju Dou, Raise the Red Lantern, and To Live) that looked fabulous but were otherwise deeply flawed: Hero and Curse of the Golden Flower

Superb action/adventure films: The Bourne Ultimatum and Star Trek.

Other action films I really liked: The Bourne Identity and The Bourne Supremacy.

Along with some of the above, other really good films in the next tier down after the Top 20: Blood Diamond, Catch Me If You Can, Charlie Wilson's War, Collateral, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, The Dark Knight, Erin Brockovich, Ghost World, Gone Baby Gone, Good Night, and Good Luck, Happy-Go-Lucky, The Illusionist, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Lord of War, The Queen, Requiem for a Dream, Sideways, Signs, Thirteen Days, Up, Whale Rider, The Wrestler, Zodiac

The next tier after that: Bend It Like Beckham, The Constant Gardener, The Contender, The Deal, Frost/Nixon, Funny People, Half Nelson, Inside Man, Jarhead, K-19: The Widowmaker, Lars and the Real Girl, The Matador, Minority Report, Munich, The Score, Smart People, Spy Game, Thank You For Smoking

I didn't include documentaries in my list, but here were some of the better ones: Bowling for Columbine, Encounters at the End of the World, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Fahrenheit 9/11, An Inconvenient Truth, Man on Wire

Movie not on the list but with some of the best scenes of the decade: Babel (anything with the Japanese girl -- if the film were just that part, it would easily be in my Top 20.)

 

**********

Notable exclusions include: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, The Departed, Finding Nemo, Gladiator, Match Point, Million Dollar Baby, Pan's Labyrinth, Ratatouille, Slumdog Millionaire, There Will Be Blood

Three of these I think are quite good: CT, HD, Finding Nemo, and Gladiator

One I think is deeply disappointing (and perhaps the most overrated Pixar film ever), if still pretty good: Ratatouille

One I think is quite fascinating but is overdone with an awful ending: There Will Be Blood

One I think is interesting and inventive but ultimately not nearly as good as its reputation: Pan's Labyrinth

One I think is one of Woody Allen's worst efforts at being serious (and yet critically accalimed -- I think he should stick to New York and to what he actually knows something about): Match Point

One I think is overblown, manipulative Scorsese: The Departed

One I think is overblown, manipulative Eastwood: Million Dollar Baby

One I think is one of the worst, most reprehensible films of the decade: Slumdog Millionaire

**********

Speaking of Woody Allen, one of my favourite directors ever, it was not his finest decade. After ending the '90s on a really good note (Sweet and Lowdown), his output this decade was weak. I liked Melinda and Melinda (highly underrated) and much of Vicky Cristina Barcelona, but not much else.

Many of his films would have been on my "best of" lists of the '70s and '80s and even '90s (Bullets Over Broadway, a fantastic film). Alas, he's not what he used to be.

**********

Who were the greatest directors of the decade? Here are some, with their better films:

-- Pedro Almodovar (Talk to Her, Volver)

-- Robert Altman (Gosford Park, A Prairie Home Companion)

-- George Clooney (Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Good Night, and Good Luck)

-- Alfonso Cuaron (Y Tu Mama Tambien, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (the best HP), Children of Men)

-- Peter Jackson (LOTR trilogy)

-- Ang Lee (CT, HD, Brokeback Mountain)

-- Ridley Scott (Gladiator, Black Hawk Down)

-- Steven Soderbergh (Erin Brockovich, Traffic, Ocean's Eleven)

-- M. Night Shyamalan (Signs, The Village, Lady in the Water)

-- Yoji Yamada (The Twilight Samurai, The Hidden Blade)

In comedy, of course, it was the decade, notably from 2004 on, of Judd Apatow (40-Year-Old Virgin, Funny People, along with so much else that he was behind in some way -- Superbad, Walk Hard, etc.).

It was also the decade of Pixar, which keeps turning out brilliant effort after brilliant effort. The peak, for me, was WALL-E, but so much was utterly fantastic, including the amazing relationship/marriage sequence at the beginning of Up.

It was a decade which saw a great deal from giants like Clint Eastwood and Martin Scorsese, but, with one notable exception (Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima), I was not terribly impressed.

Spielberg was fine, too -- Catch Me If You Can, Minority Report, Munich -- even if his much better work was well behind him.

**********

And the defining film of the decade -- this decade's Easy Rider or Wall Street? It's too early to tell, but I'd go with Syriana, a magnificent film about oil and terrorism, America and the Middle East, a bleak film for a bleak decade defined in many ways by what happened on 9/11 and its aftermath, by Osama bin Laden on one side and George W. Bush on the other, by the emergence of global terrorism as the new enemy, by America's two foreign wars, by the unravelling of the U.S. Constitution under Bush and Cheney, by new nuclear threats from Iran and North Korea, by an historic global economic crisis, by the fall of major banks and corporations, and by the hope of, and in, Barack Obama.

Black Hawk Down, a great war movie about an incident that took place in Somalia in the '90s -- an incident that points ahead to America's disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, two other Muslim countries -- is also a defining film.

So, too, is The Village. Though widely panned by critics, some of whom perhaps wanted Shyamalan to stick to shocking twist-endings like the one in The Sixth Sense, it is a beautiful, disturbing, moving political allegory about fear and community, about what binds us to our fellow human beings.

Up in the Air may define the decade, too, a film about rootlessness and the coldness of the market.

And then, of course, there's WALL-E, about which I cannot speak too highly, with its vision of our future that looks more and more like the nightmare we are inflicting upon ourselves.

**********

So why, then, did I pick Almost Famous as the Best Film of the Decade? Well, the line between "best" and "favourite" isn't always clear, and the best here aren't necessarily my favourite. I'm not even sure what criteria I've used to list these films.

Almost Famous certainly wasn't the most meaningful film of the decade, the one that said the most, the most important, the most defining, the most technically brilliant, the most significant, the most historically grand. But I loved it, and love it still, and it is deeply meaningful to me in a profoundly personal way.

I admire these great films, but I remain detached from some of them, like Traffic and Black Hawk Down. With Almost Famous, I feel a deep connection, an attachment that I can't really describe. It may not be politically relevant the way, say, Syriana is, and it may not have a resonating message about our times, but it has a universality to it that moves me: It's about growing up, and we all do that. It is such an important movie to me, personally, that I can't, and don't, watch it all that often. It is simply too much to take sometimes, and I often prefer to think about it, to let it linger within me. It is, in a way, my movie, even if it is Cameron Crowe's story, even if it wasn't made for me, even if I am hardly alone in loving it so much and taking so much from it, and that is why it is at the very top of this very personal list.

**********

So that is the decade in film. There was a lot not to like, with some terrible Oscar nominees and winners, and some awful box-office phenomena. Going over the annual lists, there weren't many gems.

But there were still some great films, perhaps even some historically great films that will survive the test of time and enter the pantheon of cinema.

And there were a lot that were just really, really good.

And for that, we can be extremely thankful.

I know why the sea lions have disappeared

By J. Thomas Duffy

There is a story sweeping across the media today on this incredible mystery, out in San Francisco, this headline greeting me upon firing up the computer this morning:

San Francisco’s sea lion horde evacuates its Pier 39 home

OMG!

Is it Climate Change, reaching down it's mighty fist, snatching up the slithery, yelping Sea Lions?

A new "Zodiac Killer" targeting the sea mammals?



Hardly.

From Daniel Stone at Newsweek:

At San Francisco’s famed Pier 39, tourists are treated to a perfectly fascinating scene of California Sea Lions sunning themselves on floating wooden platforms, yelping ferociously and diving over one another. But not anymore, according to an AP story published yesterday that highlights a strange exodus of virtually all sea lions from the area. The Washington Post gave the story top billing on its website, as did the LA Times and over 400 other news sources. The Huffington Post was the most sensational, accentuating the alarming (and misleading) headline: San Francisco’s Famous Sea Lions Have VANISHED.

[snip]

Sea lion visitation to Pier 39 fluctuates with the season. Numbers during the summer – at one point as high as 1,700 – usually drop to about 60 to 100 in the winter months of December and January due to weather and food accessibility in the Bay. This year has been a little more extreme, but it hasn’t hit zero. About a dozen sea lions have stuck around to entertain Embarcadero tourists. And the numbers that did stick around when the weather got cold in November were slightly higher than normal this time of year.

And, more, from Alexis Madrigal over at Wired:

The sea lions’ disappearance is as strange as their initial colonization of the pier about 20 years ago, in late 1989. They just started showing up one day and as their numbers increased, their traditional hang out, Seal Rocks, became less populated. There are all sorts of theories about why the pier became a favorite haul-out spot for the sea lions, but no one knows for sure why the animals’ behavior changed.

Stoudt averred that the officials at the Marine Mammal Center weren’t worried about the animals’ disappearance from their standard location. The sea lions are migratory animals, after all, and it’s natural for them to move around.

So, even though no one has found them, “there really isn’t a reason to be looking for them,” Stoudt said.

Just an enormously slow news day, in which an otherwise non-news-story would be totally overlooked, and dismissed, gets top billing with racing, forest-fire speed.

The sea lions' migratory habits, and follow-the-food-instincts not withstanding, there is a rather simple reason they all up and left.

They had to be getting the message late, but someone, or something, hipped them that they were hanging out at one of the culturally foulest, crudest, greediest tourist traps in all the lands, Pier 39.

It is a rank armpit of a place.

And that they built an "observation deck" to exploit the sea lions, to suck in more hapless tourists, well, it's poetic justice that the sea lions gave them a proverbial "up yours!" and got out of there.

Way to go Sea Lions, way to go ...




(Cross-posted at The Garlic.)

Dick B.S. Cheney and the Republican attacks on President Obama

By Michael J.W. Stickings

So I return from my brief hiatus from blogging this evening, and what's the first thing I see when I scan the news? More of the same old bullshit from Dick Cheney:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney accused President Barack Obama on Tuesday of "trying to pretend we are not at war" with terrorists, pointing to the White House response to the attempted sky bombing as reflecting a pattern that includes banishing the term "war on terror" and attempting to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center.

"[W]e are at war and when President Obama pretends we aren't, it makes us less safe," Cheney said in a statement to POLITICO. "Why doesn't he want to admit we're at war? It doesn't fit with the view of the world he brought with him to the Oval Office. It doesn't fit with what seems to be the goal of his presidency -- social transformation -- the restructuring of American society."

Some things never change.

Last time I checked, President Obama knows full well "we're at war." Why else would he have called, against the objections of many of his most ardent supporters, for an escalation of the Afghan War -- a surge, that is -- much like the one Dick 'n' Dubya launched, much too late, the war having been a failure, in Iraq?

Last time I checked, President Obama is hardly a pacifist.

But you get it, don't you? When Democrats criticized Bush, as some did even early on after 9/11 and certainly once the Iraq War got underway, they were being unpatriotic and even treasonous. But Republicans, oh, they can criticize Obama relentlessly, brandishing hypocrisy without a trace of irony. Why do they get to attack the Commander-in-Chief during a time of war while demonizing Democrats for doing far less? Because that's just the double standard they live by, and because Democrats, alas, don't always call them on it -- and admirably, I would add, don't take cheap, flag-waving shots like Republicans do.

But it's not just that Cheney et al. are criticizing, or rather viciously attacking, Obama in the hopes of scoring a political point or two, it's that they're just plain wrong. Here's Steve Benen with his usual dose of sanity:

Let's review a few pesky details. First, it was Cheney's administration that released some of the alleged terrorists who plotted the attack into an "art therapy rehabilitation program" in Saudi Arabia, only to see them become terrorist leaders in Yemen. It was also Cheney's administration that gave Abdulmutallab a visa to enter the United States in the first place.

Second, let's compare some "low-key responses." President Obama addressed a failed terrorist attack three days after it occurred. Eight years ago, when a terrorist tried to blow up an airplane under nearly identical circumstances, then-President Bush waited six days before making brief, cursory public remarks. Five days after the attempted terrorist attack, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld refused substantive comment altogether, telling reporters, "That's a matter that's in the hands of the law enforcement people." A White House spokesperson would only say at the time that officials were "continuing to monitor events."

Democrats, at the time, didn't launch an assault against the Bush administration, and we didn't see Al Gore condemning the White House. It simply didn't occur to Democrats in 2001 to use the attempted mass murder of hundreds of Americans to undermine the presidency.

Eight years later, Dick Cheney believes his principal responsibility is to destroy President Obama -- the man Americans chose to clean up the messes Cheney left as a parting gift after eight years of abject failure.

Very well put, I must say, and this is what we must do: counter Republican lies with the truth, and to do so as forcefully as we can.

As for Obama, what should he have done, and what should he be doing now? Should he be down at Reagan or Dulles personally checking the undergarments of passengers? Should he be freaking out on national TV, ratcheting up the public panic level the way Dick 'n' Dubya did with the help of Tom Ridge's colour-coded terror alerts?

Or should he not rather be dealing with what is a top national security priority away from the partisan glare, away from the cameras, away from sniping bullshitters like Dick Cheney?

What is needed now is leadership, and that's precisely what Obama is providing.

The devil in the details

By Carl

When you bargain with the devil, sometimes you win. Most times, he wins.

You may recall back in '06 when Howard Dean decided to revitalize the party by energizing the machinery in all 50 states, regardless of traditional voting patterns. Everyone thought it was brilliant, because hey, it was Howard Dean. I thought it was idiotic.

But the results of the 2006 and 2008 Congressional and Presidential elections proved me wrong. Sort of.

Unfortunately, it has brought front and center the very wing of the Democratic party that we need to continue to run the country and there's the rub:

Before 2009, most Americans never heard of Sens. Ben Nelson, Max Baucus or Kent Conrad. More have heard of the Independent Sen. Joe Lieberman as a result of his Democratic vice presidential bid in 2000.

Yet now they are the movers and shakers in the Senate. Anyone who follows politics knows exactly who they are. It could not be further from 2005 when Nicholas Confessore in The New York Times wrote that "centrist Democrats today struggle with an unfriendly environment."

Throughout the Senate debate over health care, the centrists repeatedly forced the president's hand by insisting on changes to the legislation that made Obama's liberal base furious and which will constrain the impact of this legislation. Health care was the second major victory for centrists this year. They also were able to cut down the size of the economic stimulus bill back in February 2008.

Despite the poutrage from the liberal community, this is a simple fact: we can't run a 50 state strategy if we're going to lose the Baucuses, Nelsons and Conrads of the nation. How easy would it be to say to a voter in, say, Colorado "See what them libs did to Lieberman" and scare off a potential vote?

Let's turn back to CNN for a moment:

Why is this small group of senators so influential and will this change? The first reason has to do with the nature of the Democratic Party. Democrats have never been as ideologically disciplined as the Republicans, and they have been less successful containing party differences.[...]

The second factor behind the new kings of the hill has to do with the sharpening of the partisan divide on Capitol Hill. The impact of growing party polarization since the 1970s has meant that winning votes from the other party is extraordinarily difficult. Except for rare moments, neither party can count on winning significant blocks of votes from the other side of the aisle.[...]

Finally, institutions matter. The U.S. now has a Senate that operates as a supermajority. The Senate now requires 60 votes on any piece of legislation given that senators are willing to use the filibuster on almost any bill. If the majority party needs 60 votes to pass a bill, and it can't win votes from the other side, a handful of moderates wield tremendous power.

Expanding a voter base is a lot like breaking ground in a garden. You have to work the soil, amend it, fertilize it, then you can seed. Once you can begin growing things, you can thin and weed out the garden, thus insuring a healthier crop.

The basic flaw in the strategy of Karl Rove's attempt at a permanent Republican majority was in underestimating the ground that was shifting underneath him. He believed it was more solid than it was, but in point of fact, the number of solidly blue or red districts (much less states) in the nation is very small. And as CNN points out, generally you can count on 45% of any district to go Democratic, 45% to go Republican, meaning you are scrambling for less than ten percent of the vote.

Unless you can alter your party's image sufficiently that you can peel off voters from the other party who are frustrated with the lack of response from their own party. This is how Obama won in 2008. It wasn't the liberals that got him elected, altho the youth vote was a large factor.

Instead, it was the perception that he was not a radical Muslim liberal hippie pinko commie Volvo driver. Why do you think the radical ight chose the ridiculous tropes they did, day in and day out, to stain the man?

And it's funny how our side missed that message completely, while the other voters got it almost from day one (and certainly the day after McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate).

So for now, we're stuck with these guys. If you read on in the linked article at CNN, you'll find the three options Obama and the party leadership have for dealing with them. If we as liberals are truly interested in helping this administration, we'll opt for Number Two:

The second option would be to use the power of the bully pulpit, as well as the famous but now forgotten campaign network from 2008, to go into the states of these senators and build grassroots pressure to vote with the party. Thus far, the president has been hesitant to take this path.

What if, rather than waiting for his instruction, we lifted the burden off his shoulders for him? You know, the man's a little busy and right now needs these guys but if we can get underneath their pins and start to push outward, they might decide they need to shift left a little in order to shore up their chances of winning re-election.

After all, ain't that what it all comes down to? It's all fine and dandy to have campaign money flowing in from corporations, but if you have no office, that tap gets shut off faster than beer in a Prohibition raid.

Ay, but then, the devil's in the details. How many of us really care that much?

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)