Bush says John Kerry owes our troups an apology – he is probobly right this time about that – but – GW owes them an apology too – his administration owes the troups an apology too – they are the ones who lie/d and send our troups over to be maimed or killed. Both Kerry and Bush should just shut the hell up!!! It is very obvious they both suffer from the same Foot in Mouth Disease!
Archive for October, 2006
HeHeHeHeHe….. 
Three scary things you do not want to run into tomorrow night…
Scary
Scary-er
Scary
A documentary shows they won’t ‘Shut Up & Sing’
By Damon Smith, Globe Correspondent 29 October 2006
NEW YORK — Just weeks after 9/11, Ari Fleischer, then White House press secretary, warned Americans to “watch what they say.”
Beyond alarming civil-rights advocates, who recoiled from the ominous tone of his words, Fleischer’s admonition was a reminder that, in some quarters at least, any voice of dissent could be construed as anti patriotic, regardless of content or context. Just ask Bill Maher — or the Dixie Chicks, the fiery subjects of Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck’s rousing new behind-the-scenes portrait, “Shut Up & Sing,” which premiered last month at the Toronto Film Festival and opens in Boston Nov. 10.
In 2003, these massively talented Southern stars were the best-selling all-female group in North America, beloved by adoring fans and the image-conscious country-music establishment, which regarded them as their sunny, all-American ambassadors.
During a concert at Shepherd’s Bush Empire in London, however, on the eve of the Bush administration’s shock-and-awe campaign in Iraq, lead vocalist Natalie Maines remarked that she was “against this war, this violence,” then cheekily added she was “ashamed” that the president of the United States was from Texas, her home state. Within days her comment was circulated online, and a backlash was born.
“I think they thought that they could set an example with the Dixie Chicks, that they would crumble,” says Kopple, 60, a two-time Oscar-winning filmmaker, during a conversation in New York. “But I think they had no idea who they were dealing with.”
Fueled by the zeal of arch-conservative websites such as FreeRepublic.com , Maines’s remark (made “on foreign soil,” apoplectic fans and talking heads exclaimed, as if Great Britain were in cahoots with the Axis of Evil) quickly mushroomed into a major controversy, earning the group reams of hate mail, a nationwide radio boycott, CD burnings, even death threats. Willfully or not, the Dixie Chicks had stumbled into the ugly world of partisan politics. But instead of backing down, the makers of “Shut Up & Sing” discovered, the Chicks remained defiant.
“That’s why country music got so mad at them,” Kopple says of Maines and sisters Martie Maguire and Emily Robison, her musical cohorts. “They didn’t toe the line, in a sense. Country music probably thought of them as very conservative [people], and when they came out like this [against the war], I guess they felt betrayed.”
Cutting between then and now, “Shut Up & Sing” depicts the personal and artistic transformation this episode wreaked, for better and worse, on the lives of Maines, Maguire, and Robison. Instead of making nice with Nashville institutions like CMT and the Country Music Awards, the Chicks boldly pursued other avenues of self-expression.
Working with famed producer Rick Rubin and songwriter Dan Wilson in 2005, the Dixie Chicks ventured away from the traditional country sound — and its marketing apparatus — to make “Taking the Long Way Home,” a mature, even defiant album overshadowed by events of the previous year and a half.
Kopple and Peck have collaborated on numerous film projects, including a doc about Peck’s father, Gregory, star of “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Both mention that they had wanted to profile the Dixie Chicks even before the anti war brouhaha.
“We were always intrigued by them and how they had risen to that level of success,” says Peck, 48, on the phone from Austin, “and the very fiery, independent spirit that had shown up way before London.”
After hearing about “the comment,” Kopple recalls, they were even more keen to do a film, and immediately sent over a new proposal. A few months passed, and then Kopple and Peck met with the Chicks in Los Angeles and got the green light, beating out other interested parties, including Michael Moore and “Don’t Look Back” helmer D.A. Pennebaker.
“I think what we told them is that we were interested in their journey,” says Peck. “We didn’t have an agenda about how to portray it or a slant that we wanted to take [on the controversy]. We just wanted to experience and understand what they were going through, through their eyes.”
Glimpsed in early 2004, when filming began with a bare-bones, all-female crew, the Chicks reveal themselves to be savvy strategists and hard-driving businesswomen, negotiating with a rep from jittery world-tour sponsor Lipton, managing the stinging aftermath of the radio ban on ticket sales, and posing for a provocative cover of Entertainment Weekly, adorned with some of the more hateful nicknames (“Dixie Twits,” “Saddam’s Angels”) they’d recently acquired. Maines, in particular, is a spitfire, never hesitating to say exactly what she’s thinking. Simon Renshaw, their amiably effusive manager, is a sage adviser who makes things happen. But he’s no Colonel Parker: He clearly takes orders from Maines, Maguire, and Robison.
“They are women in control,” emphasizes Kopple, who says she was surprised and “totally fascinated” not only by the Chicks’ complete autonomy over their hard-won, often stressful careers and the richness of their family lives (all three are mothers to small children), but the intense bonds of friendship that unite them. “Sure, they argue and discuss, but when it comes down to it, they are there for each other.”
When Robison gives birth, for instance, her bandmates are there with her, jubilantly taking photos and making saucy jokes with her husband. And in their obligatory interview with Diane Sawyer in 2003, tough questions are asked. Yet rather than a teary-eyed confessional, the segment is an impressive show of group solidarity, and there are no apologies.
“They don’t flinch,” says Peck, with obvious admiration. “And that’s exactly how they feel and who they are. They don’t look back, they don’t have regrets.”
Like Peck, Kopple says she had no expectations at the outset — “The magic of documentary is that you don’t know. You go with life and what happens” — and that her crew had, at best, a negligible impact on the Chicks’ overall demeanor and decision-making process. “We tried to let them forget we were even there, because what they were doing in their lives and the things they were figuring out and the music they were writing and the relationships they were having with their families is what” they were focused on. “I don’t think we mattered.”
Kopple has had a long, distinguished career as a socially conscious documentarian. She was a member of the collective that produced the harrowing 1972 anti war film “Winter Soldier,” and in 1976, she won an Academy Award for “Harlan County, U.S.A.,” an incisive, unabashedly militant doc about beleaguered Kentucky coal miners. She won another Oscar in 1991 for “American Dream,” which trailed a group of Hormel meatpackers in their struggle for better working conditions. Other credits include “Fallen Champ: The Untold Story of Mike Tyson” and “Wild Man Blues,” a popular film about Woody Allen’s tour of Europe with his New Orleans-style jazz troupe.
“The majority of the films that I do are about people who are fighting for social justice, people who are standing up for what they believe in, and people who won’t be silenced,” says Kopple, who in 1998 was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival. “I’m sure many of the people who’ll see this Dixie Chicks film would never have thought they would be so complex, so bright, such great businesswomen and so alive.”
Still, Kopple believes the cost-of-free-speech aspect may have a positive political — and even personal — effect on viewers of any persuasion.
“I’m hoping the people who don’t agree with the Dixie Chicks, or with what they said, will see this film so they can understand where they’re coming from. Because it seems like in this country, there is a real cowboy mentality: ‘You’re either with us or against us.’ Dialogue has been lost, so we need people like this more than ever.”
Damon Smith can be reached at damon.g.smith@earthlink.net.
© Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
Shut Up and Sing – Dixie Chicks Documentary
HBO: Hacking Democracy
An Inconvenient Truth – Al Gore and Company
Santa Clause lll
More to come…
You get winded from knocking on the door.
You have to have another kid chew the candy for you.
You ask for high fiber candy only.
When someone drops a candy bar in your bag, you lose your balance and fall over.
People say, “Great Keith Richards mask!” and you’re not wearing a mask.
When the door opens you yell, “Trick or…” and can’t remember the rest.
By the end of the night, you have a bag full of restraining orders.
You have to carefully choose a costume that won’t dislodge your hairpiece.
You’re the only Power Ranger in the neighborhood with a walker.
You avoid going to houses where your ex-wives live.
Posted by rosie o’donnell on rosie.com – 25 October 2006 – 6:41 am
It is Pat’s birthday on November 6, and elections are the day after. It gets me thinking about a conversation I had with Pat before we joined the military. He spoke about the risks with signing the papers. How once we committed, we were at the mercy of the American leadership and the American people. How we could be thrown in a direction not of our volition. How fighting as a soldier would leave us without a voice… until we got out.
Much has happened since we handed over our voice:
Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the September 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created that can’t be called a civil war even though it is. Something like that.
Somehow America has become a country that projects everything that it is not and condemns everything that it is.
Somehow our elected leaders were subverting international law and humanity by setting up secret prisons around the world, secretly kidnapping people, secretly holding them indefinitely, secretly not charging them with anything, secretly torturing them. Somehow that overt policy of torture became the fault of a few “bad apples� in the military.
Somehow back at home, support for the soldiers meant having a five-year-old kindergartener scribble a picture with crayons and send it overseas, or slapping stickers on cars, or lobbying Congress for an extra pad in a helmet. It’s interesting that a soldier on his third or fourth tour should care about a drawing from a five-year-old; or a faded sticker on a car as his friends die around him; or an extra pad in a helmet, as if it will protect him when an IED throws his vehicle 50 feet into the air as his body comes apart and his skin melts to the seat.
Somehow the more soldiers that die, the more legitimate the illegal invasion becomes.
Somehow American leadership, whose only credit is lying to its people and illegally invading a nation, has been allowed to steal the courage, virtue and honor of its soldiers on the ground.
Somehow those afraid to fight an illegal invasion decades ago are allowed to send soldiers to die for an illegal invasion they started.
Somehow faking character, virtue and strength is tolerated.
Somehow profiting from tragedy and horror is tolerated.
Somehow the death of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people is tolerated.
Somehow subversion of the Bill of Rights and The Constitution is tolerated.
Somehow suspension of Habeas Corpus is supposed to keep this country safe.
Somehow torture is tolerated.
Somehow lying is tolerated.
Somehow reason is being discarded for faith, dogma, and nonsense.
Somehow American leadership managed to create a more dangerous world.
Somehow a narrative is more important than reality.
Somehow America has become a country that projects everything that it is not and condemns everything that it is.
Somehow the most reasonable, trusted and respected country in the world has become one of the most irrational, belligerent, feared, and distrusted countries in the world.
Somehow being politically informed, diligent, and skeptical has been replaced by apathy through active ignorance.
Somehow the same incompetent, narcissistic, virtueless, vacuous, malicious criminals are still in charge of this country.
Somehow this is tolerated.
Somehow nobody is accountable for this.
In a democracy, the policy of the leaders is the policy of the people. So don’t be shocked when our grandkids bury much of this generation as traitors to the nation, to the world and to humanity. Most likely, they will come to know that “somehow� was nurtured by fear, insecurity and indifference, leaving the country vulnerable to unchecked, unchallenged parasites.
Luckily this country is still a democracy. People still have a voice. People still can take action. It can start after Pat’s birthday.
Brother and Friend of Pat Tillman,
Kevin Tillman
OOPS!……give us peace…
October 22, 2006
by Thom Hartmann
http://www.opednews.com
Excerpted from Thom Hartmanns newest book, Screwed; The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class — And What We Can Do About It
What do you do when you want to screw only the working people of your nation with the largest tax increase in history and hand those trillions of dollars to your wealthy campaign contributors yet not have anybody realize you’ve done it? If you’re Ronald Reagan, you call in Alan Greenspan.
Taxing Retirement
Through the Golden Age of the middle class– from 1940 to 1980– the top income tax rate for the superrich had been between 70 and 90 percent. Ronald Reagan wanted to cut that rate dramatically, to help out his political patrons. He did this with a massive tax cut in the summer of 1981.
The only problem was that when Reagan took his meat ax to our tax code, he produced mind-boggling budget deficits. Voodoo economics didn’t work out as planned, and even after borrowing so much that this year we’ll pay more than $100 billion just in interest on the money Reagan borrowed to make the economy look good in the 1980s, Reagan couldn’t come up with the revenues he needed to run the government.
Coincidentally, the actuaries at the Social Security Administration were beginning to worry about the Baby Boomer generation, who would begin retiring in big numbers in fifty years or so. They were a “rabbit going through a python” bulge that would require a few trillion more dollars than Social Security could easily collect during the same twenty-year period of their retirement. We needed, the actuaries said, to tax more heavily those very persons who would eventually retire; so instead of using current workers’ money to pay for the Boomer’s Social Security payments in 2020, the Boomers themselves would prepay for their own retirement.
Reagan got Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Alan Greenspan together to form a commission on Social Security reform, along with a few other politicians and economists, and they recommend a near doubling of the Social Security tax on the then-working Boomers. That tax created– for the first time in history– a giant savings account that Social Security could use to pay for the Boomers’ retirement.
This was a huge change.
Prior to this, Social Security had always paid for today’s retirees with income from today’s workers. The Boomers were the first generation that would pay Social Security taxes to both fund current retirees and prepay for their own retirement.
And after the Boomers retired and the savings account– called the Social Security Trust Fund– was spent, the rabbit would have finished its journey through the python and Social Security could go back to a pay-as-you-go taxing system.
Thus within the period of a few short years, Reagan dramatically dropped the income tax on America’s most wealthy by more than half and roughly doubled the Social Security tax on people earning $30,000 or less. It was, simultaneously, the largest income tax cut in America’s history (almost entirely for the very wealthy) and the most massive tax increase in the history of the nation (which exclusively hit working-class people).
“You Can’t Pay Benefits with IOUs”
But Reagan still had a problem. His tax cuts for the wealthy– even when moderated by subsequent tax increases– weren’t generating enough money to invest properly in America’s infrastructure, schools, police and fire departments, and military. The country was facing bankruptcy.
No problem, suggested Greenspan. Just borrow from the Boomer’s savings account– the money in the Social Security Trust Fund– and, because you’re borrowing “government money” to fund “government expenditures,” you don’t have to list it as part of the deficit. Much of the deficit will magically seem to disappear, and nobody will know what you did until thirty years in the future when the Boomers begin to retire 2015.
Reagan jumped at the opportunity, as did George H. W. Bush, as did Bill Clinton (although Al Gore argued strongly that Social Security funds should not be raided but instead put in a “lock box”). And so did George W. Bush.
The result is that all that money– trillions of dollars– that has been taxed out of working Boomers (the ceiling has risen from the tax’s being on your first $30,000 of income to your first $90,000 today) has been borrowed and spent. Left behind are a form of IOUs– an unique form of Treasury debt instruments similar (but not identical) to the Treasury debt instruments our government normally uses to borrow money.
Paul O’Neill, former Bush Sr. Treasury secretary, recounts how Dick Cheney famously said, “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.” Cheney was either ignorant or being disingenuous. It would be more accurate to say, “Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter if you rip off the Social Security Trust Fund to pay for them and don’t report that borrowing from the Boomers as part of the deficit.”
As the Associated Press reported on April 6, 2005:
President Bush on Tuesday used a four-drawer filing cabinet stuffed with paper representing government IOUs the president said symbolized the Social Security Trust Fund’s bleak outlook for meeting Americans’ future retirement needs. . . .
“A lot of people in America think there is a trust– that we take your money in payroll taxes and then we hold it for you and then when you retire, we give it back to you,” Bush said in a speech at the University of West Virginia at Parkersburg.
“But that’s not the way it works,” Bush said. “There is no trust ‘fund’– just IOUs that I saw firsthand. . . .
“[Susan] Chapman [of the Office of Public Debt] opened the second drawer and pulled out a white notebook filled with pseudo Treasury securities– pieces of paper that offer physical evidence of $1.7 trillion in Treasury bonds that make up the trust fund.”
Later, Senator Rick Santorum made an odd admission for a Republican con: “You can’t pay benefits with IOUs,” he said on the Senate floor. “You have to pay it with cash.”
And where will that cash– now nearly $2 trillion– come from over the next decades as Boomers begin to retire?
A Con-made Crisis
Technically (and legally) it’s simple: the Social Security Trust Fund will give back its IOUs to the Treasury Department and in exchange for them get cash to pay the Boomers’ retirement checks. Practically, though, it’ll be a crisis of biblical proportions. For the Treasury to come up with that kind of cash will require either massive tax increases or increased massive borrowing– at a time when we’re already borrowing so heavily that China is propping up our economy with weekly loans.
Thus, Bush talks about a “crisis” in Social Security with some accuracy. But he doesn’t dare tell us what the real “crisis” is– or how Reagan and Greenspan set it up– because when it becomes widely known that Reagan set the course to steal the Boomers’ Social Security savings, it will destroy the reputation of both supply-side economics and the Republican Party for generations to come.
If the cons have their way, however, no one will ever know that they destroyed Social Security. That’s because the cons– who have largely taken over the Republican Party– have figured out a way to convince young Americans to gut Social Security before the financial crisis begins.
Progressives make the mistake of thinking that today’s Social Security debate is about Social Security. It’s not. It’s about creating single-party rule for a generation or more. To do that Republican cons believe that they need only to grab the hearts and minds of the generation currently under thirty– and they can do that, win or lose, by properly framing the Social Security debate.
According to exit poll data from the Associated Press, under-thirty voters were up more than 9 percent in voter participation in 2004, bringing 4.6 million new young people to the polls just since 2000.
And, as Martha Irvine of the Associated Press noted in an article in USA Today the week after the 2004 election, “This time, young voters were the only group that favored Democrat Kerry. The AP’s exit polls found that under-30s favored Kerry over Bush, 55% to 44%.”
This was not lost on the Republicans. As Irvine noted in her article, even safe-seat Republican U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa designed an entire ad campaign “targeting young people.”
And many among this young demographic– the first generation in more than 200 years raised in schools largely unable to teach civics and American history both because of budget cuts and fear of claims of “liberal bias” from conservative fanatics– are politically naive and ripe for the picking.
Those under thirty don’t remember– or, largely, don’t even know– that the leading causes of death among the elderly, the widowed, and the disabled after the stock market crash of 1929 included starvation and hypothermia. Before Franklin D. Roosevelt instituted Social Security in 1935, the majority of America’s elderly lived in poverty. Today it’s 11.9 percent, but take away Social Security and today’s elderly poverty rate would be 47.6 percent.
These are statistics that the Republican cons and their corporate media will not be sharing with people under thirty.
Thus, as David King of Harvard’s Institute of Politics told the AP’s Irvine of the young vote: “I think that young people are there for the taking.”
Joseph Stalin’s year for the final consolidation of single-party rule in Russia was 1927, and that rule lasted more than fifty years. American cons are planning for a similar fifty-year horizon and intend to use “age warfare” as a tool to bring young people along.
Have a quackin’ good Halloween…
You just quack me up… 
Men in Trees (not like Northern Exposure) and Ugly Betty…
What can I say? – I tried them a few times and I liked them – not in the least obnoxious like Desperate Housewives or Grey’s Anatomy… Majour soapy opera’s to me – and I don’t need another like that in my life.
