Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Tape these political films tonight while you're watching Sarah Palin
http://www.tcm.com/video/videoPlayer/?cid=210059&titleId=23008
You can always tape Sarah Palin's speech later on C-SPAN, which'll repeat it a few times overnight.
One things about The Candidate always struck me as curious.
Even as a kid when I first saw it at the theater in North Miami Beach, and still later while in Bloomington at IU, I always wondered why people thought Redford's enigmatic character of Bill Mackay was appealing, since he often seems like the sort of person who, in a real-life city, would always be THE last neighborhood activist holdout in getting an agreement done, because he'd always insist that others make compromises before he'd consider it, and then would raise the posssibility of just walking away from a deal, on principle.
In other words, he has a very high opinion of himself and thinks you should as well.
The Last Hurrah was said to be based on the popular persona of former Boston mayor
James Michael Curley, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Michael_Curley
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8:00pm
The Last Hurrah (1958) A political boss faces changing times as he runs for re-election.Cast: Spencer Tracy, Jeffrey Hunter, Pat O'Brien. Dir: John Ford. BW-121 mins, TV-PG
10:15 pm
The Candidate (1972) A senate candidate's ideals weaken as his position in the polls gets stronger.Cast: Robert Redford, Peter Boyle, Melvyn Douglas. Dir: Michael Ritchie. C-110 mins, TV-14
(Original Trailer) http://www.tcm.com/mediaroom/index/?cid=210004&eref=newsletter
12:15 am
The Best Man (1964) Two presidential hopefuls get caught up in the dirty side of politics.
Cast: Henry Fonda, Cliff Robertson, Lee Tracy. Dir: Franklin J. Schaffner. BW-102 mins, TV-PG
(Original Trailer) http://www.tcm.com/mediaroom/index/?cid=207801&eref=newsletter
2:00 am
Nashville (1975) Country music stars get caught up in tangled affairs and an independent's political campaign.
Cast: Henry Gibson, Lily Tomlin, Ronee Blakley. Dir: Robert Altman. C-158 mins, TV-MA
Film clips at http://www.tcm.com/video/videoPlayer/?cid=138591&titleId=84580 and
http://www.tcm.com/video/videoPlayer/?cid=138592&titleId=84580
4:45 am
The Dark Horse (1932) A political machine backs a dimwitted candidate for governor.
Cast: Guy Kibbee, Bette Davis, Warren William. Dir: Alfred E. Green. BW-75 mins, TV-G
(Original Trailer) http://www.tcm.com/mediaroom/index/?cid=132404&eref=newsletter
Monday, August 25, 2008
Mitch Ceasar on C-SPAN this morning from DNC at Denver
Mitchell Ceasar, Member of the Democratic Nat'l Cmte. Executive Board and a Florida Delegate, discusses the DNC Credentials Cmte. decision to returne full voting rights to Florida's delegation.
Today : Washington, DC : 21 min.
http://www.c-span.com/search.aspx?For=Mitchell%20Ceasar
Monday, July 28, 2008
Dopey Gitmo "expert" and author Mahvish Rukhsana Khan
Instead, I'm just going to say it and leave it to a future post to pick up the conversation.
And then get some sleep.
After watching the series finale of the excellent ITV WWII series, Foyle's War, on PBS as part of their Masterpiece Mystery-about veteran Detective Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle and his colleagues batting crimes and mysteries in the seaside town of Hastings during the war- roughly about 12:30 a.m., I flipped over to C-SPAN's Book TV to see who was on.
(See http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/foyleswar/ , http://www.foyleswar.com/ and http://www.booktv.org/ )
The segment airing was After Words: Mahvish Rukhsana Khan author of "My Guantanamo Diary: The Detainees and the Stories They Told Me" interviewed by Nancy Snow, senior research fellow at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy which I'd seen parts of earlier in the day.
For purposes of information, while I was growing-up in the 1970's in North Miami Beach, I lived in a house next door to a wonderfully kind older Central European couple who loved gardening, both of whom were concentration camp survivors.
We had many, many conversations, the moral and philosophical points of which remain with me today.
Two of the undercurrents of the last episode of Foyle's War, "All Over," were the growing sense of anticipation that the war would be ending -V-E Day- and the growing anti-German sentiment and sense of revulsion following the news of the liberation of the Belsen concentration camp and what had transpired there.
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005224
So, half-asleep, I was not quite prepared to suddenly hear recent law school grad and newly minted author Mahvish Rukhsana Khan -whom you and I have never heard of for good reason- express her p.o.v. that, after roughly 30 visits to Cuba, she really thought the U.S. treated the Gitmo detainees just like the Nazis treated Jews.
Even more improbably, if possible, after admitting that -shocker!- she never met any of the high-risk detainees, she expressed her disappointment at finding out that a man she was to meet accused of being either an Al Qaeda/Taliban member/sympathizer(?), actually looked much more like a kindly old man, not one of the 9/11 hijackers.
As it turned out, the man apparently had been a pediatrician in Afghanistan after the Russians retreated, and Khan went on at some length to talk about how middle-class the doctor was in his personal views.
Yet Khan admitted that while she was in Gitmo, she really wanted, perhaps even secretly hoped for, was to see a detainee who more closely approximated the physical appearance of the popular image of what a 'terrorist" looked like, but she never did.
A few moments later, almost as if I'd written it for entirely comic purposes, like two ships passing in the night, moderator Nancy Snow, a Cal State-Fullerton prof, expressed the p.o.v. that the truth is always much more complicated than simple black and white.
Who could argue with that simple maxim?
Yet Snow said it in such a smug, condescending way that it was readily apparent to me that she intended the remark to stand as a chastisement to U.S. popular opinion.
As if we were all just rabble, rolling around like a marble in an old car's trunk, completely unaware of any of the the complexities of the matter that someone of Snow's station knew implicitly.
What made it funny from my perspective was the fact that it was author Khan, whom Snow had already been interviewing for over a half hour, who had expressed the un-sophisticated stereotypical B&W p.o.v. she'd criticized, not some imaginary straw man named USA or the viewers.
Snow was so insistent on playing the role of the moral scold that she didn't let the facts get in the way.
You almost have to admire her, even while you're glad you were never stuck in one of her classes, since it must be sheer torture.
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One more general criticism before I hit the sack:
Can I be the only person in the country who's noticed the steady decline of Book TV's interviewers and moderators?
They seem to be putting just about anyone on C-SPAN 2 these days, and that's not to even get at how bad the Book TV website has gotten, with LESS complete information available on the books there than ever before.
Nancy Snow is a senior research fellow at the University of Southern California Center on Public Diplomacy. She is also an associate communications professor at California State University, Fullerton and adjunct communications professor at the University of Southern California. Ms. Snow is the author of three books, including "Information War: American Propaganda, Free Speech & Opinion Control Since 9/11 public
Sunday, May 11, 2008
Back to the blog fray; race identity politics; Miami Herald Editorial Board
I've also spent some of that time working out the kinks and am finally at the point where I may yet have finally(!) mastered my new digital camera, a gift from my Memphis-born sister, Jennifer, up in Pembroke Pines, and no longer have to rely on my once-trusty Canon, or a disposable Kodak or Fuji.
I feel in Greenspan-speak, "exuberant optimism."
Finalmente, maรฎtre chez moi!
If you look around you, you should already be noticing some better quality photos on the two blogs, as I've replaced some photos taken with the Canon that have been on the sites for the first 15 months of their young and impressionable lives.
I now have roughly about a dozen and a half pretty well-written issue-oriented posts ready to hit the ground running tomorrow, and hope they make up for some of the time I've been away.
Not to get too far ahead of myself here, but I think some of you will be pretty surprised at some of the things I reveal in these posts, including about my own involvement in politics locally, statewide and nationally.
It's my hope that they'll serve to make a lot of the things I've already written in my blogs, seem more inherently logical and consistent.
For some folks in South Florida, especially in Hallandale Beach and environs, it will definitely feel like laser-guided cannon balls aimed squarely at their heads.
That's exactly my intent.
As Elvis Costello sang on his great album, "My Aim is True."
Whatever your plans are for the day, I strongly encourage you to tape a one-hour program Sunday at noon on C-SPAN 2's Book TV: Bruce Bartlett talks about his new book, Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party's Buried Past.
It's really quite interesting and is moderated by Clarence Page of the Chicago Sun-Times. I first watched it last week and it's quite a lively hour
http://inside.c-spanarchives.org:8080/cspan/cspan.csp?command=dprogram&record=562503144
In case you're not familiar with him, economist Bruce Bartlett is an anti-Bush 43 Republican.
How much does he dislike President Bush?
Well, his previous book, from 2006, was called "Impostor How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy"
'Nuff said.
Bartlett's first job in Washington was working for wacky West Texas Rep. Ron Paul, one of the most consistently un-popular members of Congress while I was in D.C. all those years, and whose staff was hardly less insufferable.
Think typical Harvard wonk attitudes, but from U-T or Texas A&M, instead.
They were sort of like the grand-kids of all the creepy conservative businessmen that '60's liberals always claimed were deeply involved in the JFK shooting as a result of the CIA, Cuba and Castro and...
(Both of my parents saw JFK and Jackie the day before Dallas, when they flew into Kelly AFB in San Antonio, and got shown around. At the time, my mother was the secretary for the Base Commander. Years later, we were living in Memphis when Dr. King was murdered.)
Years later, perhaps a little wiser, Barrett worked for a garrulous Republican some of you might've heard of, who's 180 degrees different than Paul's intensely grating personality:
former Buffalo Bill QB, 1988 G.O.P. Veep nominee and U.S. Rep. Jack Kemp.
For more on Barret, see his past writings at http://bartlett.blogs.nytimes.com/
and http://www.townhall.com/columnists/BruceBartlett/2007
On top of whatever you think you already know about the former Bush 41 HUD Secretary,
Kemp 'walked the walk and talked the talk,' famously threatening to strike the AFL All-Star game one year, along with other players, due to hotel segregation at the site of the game.
Like conservative icon Charlton Heston, Kemp was actually at the MLK "Dream" Speech in Washington.
In “Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past”, author Bruce Bartlett argues that the Democratic Party had a racist past and he says there’s an unfair perception of America’s two national parties. In his book, he contends that Democratic Presidents and congressmen of the past supported racial segregation and the “Jim Crow” laws that dominated the Confederate states. Mr. Bartlett discussed his book with Clarence Page, syndicated columnist at the Chicago Tribune.
Bruce Bartlett was a domestic policy adviser to President Ronald Reagan and a treasury official under President George H.W. Bush. He has had a nationally syndicated newspaper column for the last ten years, and has written for The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Commentary, The National Review, and Fortune.
Miami Herald
Magazine attacks Democrats for racist past
By Marc Caputo
May. 10, 2008
For a sign of Florida Republicans' all-out effort to attract black voters, look no farther than the glossy full-colored The Black Republican magazine that launches broadsides like these:
The KKK was the ''terrorist arm of the Democratic Party.'' Democrats, in addition to waging ''war on God,'' are still mired in sex and financial scandals.