Huuussssssh! Open Thread

Hopelessly OT — but I’m laughing so hard, my tummy hurts, and that’s not a good thing:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ken-levine/the-2008-oscars-a-review_b_88298.html

Sample:

Owen Wilson looked good and is apparently over that pesky suicide deal. They should have had him intro the “In Memoriam” tribute. By the way, they forgot Brad Renfro.

Oh no! Jerry Seinfeld pimping that Goddamn bee movie AGAIN?! Make it stop!! At least in the “hilarious” montage they didn’t show My Girl where the lead character dies from a bee sting.

Daniel Day-Lewis finally won his Oscar for Gangs of New York. When he someday shuttles his mortal coil I’m sure the cause of death will be: choked on some scenery.

[...]

Penelope Cruz was smashing as usual but I’m not sure about furry black gown. She looked like Barney Rubble ‘s prom date.

Every year it’s the same thing. The five nominees for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Documentary are four war movies and one about dance.

(P.S. The male nurse who came here yesterday and changed all of my, um, stuff is a SADIST! Every breath I take hurts!)

Thanks for the link. It was great. (Don’t break your stitches laughing.)
Am I the only person who thinks it is strange that movie critics are overwhelmingly male? I once called into a local radio show that was interviewing all three guys who are critics in my city and asked if there were so few women because the physical requirements were too tough. They all laughed and said it was a good question.
I think the fact that movies are always filtered through a male worldview has a lot to do with what gets made/praised and what does not.
I always knew our culture had big problems with sexism, but this campaign has shown me it is even worse than I thought. It really permeates everything and most of us are clueless about it.

BECAUSE YOU NEEDED TO KNOW:

Sweet: Obama tells Ellen DeGeneres being president “is really cool.”

AUSTIN, TEXAS–Barack Obama told Ellen DeGeneres that his poll numbers went up after he danced on her show….Day One as president would be “really cool” and chewing on the stop-smoking Nicorette “tastes like you’re chewing on ground pepper – but it does help.”

COOL! I’m with that! Totally, dude.

As a big movie fan I am not always inpressed with so called “Chick Flicks”. But find ones like Steel Magnolias and Fried Green Tomatoes wonderful and have watched them many times.

I became bored with watching manly men fighting, and always winning in spite of overwhelming odds, back when Chuck Norris was big box office. How ever did we lose the war in Viet Nam with Norris on our side and taking out Viet Cong by the truck load? I found Arnie and his outsized muscles boring beyond my ability to tolerate.

Car chases, car crashes ditto.

Ralph Nadar’s running mate, Matt Gonzalez, has what I think is a rather devastating look at Obama’s US Senate voting record in an article floating around, “The Obama Craze”.

It is a record that doesn’t suggest making any kind of changes. It’s a record that concedes and accommodates Bush and the political powers virtually every step of the way. It’s a voting record of capitulation. It’s a voting record that is no different in any any material way than that of Clinton’s.

Obama wants Will Smith to play him in in ‘Obama; You’ve seen the Film, now see it again with an Even Better looking Guy Playing the Lead.” It’s already been reviewed, by Maureen Dowd. Immigrants can wait in the back of the line?

Meanwhile back at the ranch

New White House order bolsters intelligence chief’s power – MSNBC Wire Services- msnbc.com

By PAMELA HESS

updated 8:41 p.m. ET, Fri., Feb. 29, 2008
WASHINGTON – The White House on Friday gave the national intelligence director some of the powers of an advisory board created in 1976 to serve as the president’s watchdog for illegal intelligence activities, a move meant to bolster the role of the intelligence chief in relation to the 16 agencies he oversees.

A senior White House official said the shift is intended to force the intelligence agencies to report to McConnell (only?) in one more way. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak for the president.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23416177/

Single point of failure?
Might be interesting to get Larry’s take on this single point of failure design for intelligence funneling.
I wonder which mossad agent is McConnell’s secretary/admin assistant. Or with Bush’s good management which Savak agent or ISI or Turkish Intelligence agency agent.
Damn fools.

Does anyone know WHY Obama won’t talk about his Columbia years? This has my curiousity quotient way up. As big as Columbia is no one has anything to say about him good/bad/or indifferent? What’s up with that?

I want to know whether his Columbia years coincided with the year(s) William Ayers taught there. Anyone knows???

He has an arrest record? Or it more sorted than that.

He stated he went to school in So Cal? Sorry I missed when…What school?

What years did he attend Columbia?

After high school, Obama moved to Los Angeles, where he studied at Occidental College for two years.[22] He then transferred to Columbia University in New York City, where he majored in political science with a specialization in international relations.[23] Obama received his Bachelor of Arts in 1983, then worked at Business International Corporation and New York Public Interest Research Group before moving to Chicago to take a job as a community organizer.[24] As Director of the Developing Communities Project, he worked with low-income residents in Chicago’s Roseland community and the Altgeld Gardens public housing development.[25]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama

Q: Why do I get the impression that he knew Rezko before attending Harvard?

He tells of underheated sublets, a night spent in an alley, a dead neighbor on the landing. From their fire escape, he and an unnamed roommate watch “white people from the better neighborhoods” bring their dogs to defecate on the block. He takes a job in an unidentified “consulting house to multinational corporations,” where he is “a spy behind enemy lines,” startled to find himself with a secretary, a suit and money in the bank.

If Barack was promoted, his new job responsibilities were more of the same – rewriting other people’s copy. As far as I know, he always had a small office, and the idea that he had a secretary is laughable. Only the company president had a secretary. Barack never left the office, never wore a tie, and had neither reason nor opportunity to interview Japanese financiers or German bond traders

.http://www.analyzethis.net/blog/2005/07/09/barack-obama-embellishes-his-resume/

OT:
2am this morning Jordan called from Iraq. He is on R&R from Fallujah and is in great spirits. 30 more days in that hell hole then he starts moving back and processed out to kuwait and then home. We’ll meet him when he gets off the bus at camp pendleton.
We couldn’t be happier!!!
Have a nice weekend friends..

Over the last several weeks, I have been forced to steadily abandon all of my favorite sources of news- HuffingtonPost, Daily Kos, Air America, The Washington Post, Countdown with Keith Olbermann- because they have all become as dedicated to the takedown of Hillary Clinton as any right-wing radio host, FOX or the Washington Times. Other than this thread and Taylor Marsh, the media is now a vast wasteland of sexist attacks and praise for Saint Barack, the Chosen One.

It’s so sad. Every so often, I switch on XM Channel 167 (Air America and Ed Schultz) for a few seconds, only to turn it off, wincing. I try to read the editorial page of the Washington Post, but that’s become a virtual clearing house for Why We Hate Hillary screeds. Even the Post Style section includes Tom Shales telling us “of course Obama won the debate, it wasn’t close” and friendly profiles of Michelle Obama, Chris Matthews, etc.- all of which spend more time smearing Hillary than actually talking about the alleged subject of the piece.

Where are we to go? What are we to do?

Ditto…Same thing here. The only thing I can sort of stand to hear is NPR…(not always though)

A couple of videos (nbc/cnn) that could use some circulating:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOFT8jtuVpo&NR=1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXAQ3BHTbjs

Perhaps one of the Obamabots would like to reconcile their guy’s ever-changing stories on Rezko.

Awesome !! Thanks for the links Frostback: finally some questions being asked in the MSM…..

Suspicious isn’t it, particularly for someone who likes to talk/write about himself as much as Obama.

Perhaps the Columbia days – normally an important formative stage of adult life – were part of the drug years.

BTW, some Canadians are onto Obama. Apart from the very well-respected CBC Washington correspondent Neil Macdonald’s piece I linked to earlier, this week one of our comedy troupes, CBC’s “The Air Farce”, performed a scathing parody titled ‘Obama Speaks From Someone Else’s Heart’.

Here’s a Globe & Mail piece on Hillary:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080301.wfocusclinton0301/BNStory/International/?pageRequested=1

(apologies if it’s a repost…it’s hard to keep up with the action on the blogs these days!)

You should catalog the attrocities.

I hear he was a non entity.

Not active politically at all. Sorta like his Senate Career.

These are OLD reports, Andy…which begs the question, HOW has he gotten this far?

God speed to your Jordan and his band of brothers and sisters. I hear my 40 wind chimes doing their thing today…a welcome breeze.

And yet, Obamabots come onto sites like this one and bitch about Obama’s negatives being exposed/discussed!

I gave up on HuffPo entirely after seeing the regulars there on debate night completely trashing Clinton’s clothes and hair (oh, and even Taylor Marsh’s hair) as well as refer to the female bloggers as “hens blogging”, and to Hillary as “she must be on her period”…ALL of it unchecked by any other Obama supporter. It was disgusting, and more than disappointing.

What really freaks me out though, is this Obamabot meme that if you’re not on board with O, you’ll suffer the fate of being ostracized. WTF?

Obama’s explanation, as given to the Chicago Sun-Times in Nov of 2006 is:

Q: Senator, when did you first meet Tony Rezko? How did you become friends? How often would you meet with him, and when did you last speak with him?

A: I had attracted some media attention when I was elected the first black President of the Harvard Law Review. And while I was in law school, David Brint, who was a development partner with Tony Rezko contacted me and asked whether I would be interested in being a developer. Ultimately, after discussions in which I met Mr. Rezko, I said no.

Now, why would a developer call a law student to offer him a job as a developer?

I smelled BS the second I read that explanation.

link:

http://www.suntimes.com/news/politics/124171,CST-NWS-obama05.article

I’d also like to know why Obama either lied outrigiht or wasn’t aware of the total raised via Rezko. He says in this article it was $60,000, but it turned out to be more like $150,000 didn’t it? So, which is it?…is he a liar or just doesn’t have a clue what’s going on around him?

I’m also running out of places to go. Dkos, buzz flash, DU, america blog, a couple of MSN groups. I’ve been exhiled to the far reaches of the internet tubes.

But besides being annoyed and disapointed with people, I’m concerned about our country. This is mob politics, not democracy. If people aren’t willing to hold Obama accountable for things now, they surely won’t hold him accountable as president.

I used to say President Bush could eat babies and the media and his supporters would simply give it a good spin. The man could do no wrong in the eyes of some. We surely don’t want to repeat this mistake, the last thing we want is another messiah for people to worship in the white house. Nobody is perfect, nobody should be above the law. Everyone is accountable. Or so I thought.

Can you imagine trying to get Congress or the general public to put limits on a President Obama? No way, he’s The One. But see, that’s the same kind of hubris and arrogance that led our current administration to believe they had the right to out a CIA agent. Or fire all those attorneys. Or ignore subpeonas.

I always thought it was an American tradition to hold our leader’s feet to the fire. And to be irrevent. That’s a dangerous ideal for us to throw away.

Arianna Huffington, Mark Green of Air America were committed to take out John Edwards…they ignored him after his second place in Iowa. Even Amy Goodman of Democracy Now ignored Edwards most of the time…she ignored his second place win in Iowa.