Point at it and laugh. Hard.



(via Orcinus, who nicely deconstructs the anti-Semitism, not to mention downright ignorance, which pervades Apocalypto)

During our Mixed Reviews days, ModFab and I would get together periodically to see a movie, and then discuss it over coffee. "Critics Over Coffee" was a popular feature, and we had every intention of continuing it after going our separate ways in the blogosphere. But Real Life got in the way, so a year has passed since our last deconstruction of a movie. But we were able to get together earlier this week to see the animated film Happy Feet.

We thought of podcasting our conversation, but because it took place in a crowded Panera Bread, there's just too much ambient noise, so here is a transcript of the discussion:



Jill: We are sitting at Panera Bread in beautiful Edgewater, New Jersey, where we have just endured two hours of Happy Feet.

Gabriel: Was it really that painful? You laughed a lot.

Jill: Yes, I did laugh a lot, but I'm not sure I laughed for the reasons they wanted us to laugh.

Gabriel: You know, when this movie was originally being developed, I think the original title was Transparent Diversity Lessons in the Animal Kingdom. But Happy Feet works a lot better. You know, as a person who has, "happy feet", and of course you have to realize that "happy" is in quotations. It's "happy"... which is a stand-in for other synonyms that mean the same thing...

Jill: ...imply a certain amount of joy and mirth and just generally making the world nicer for everybody around you.

Gabriel: And you know, for those people who haven't seen it, we should say up front that it's a tale of overcoming social ostracism, praising diversity through aquatic fish life and trips to the zoo...

Jill: It's about how parents of children with learning disabilities and other neurological disorders --

Gabriel: -- children who are...."happy" --

Jill: that all of their problems can be cured not through Ritalin or other medications, but through tap dancing.

Gabriel: Exactly. And you realize in the first 20 minutes that tap dancing penguins -- it's really a special needs kind of situation. And they're outcasts, because gosh darn it, they just can't stop dancing.

Jill: It's because penguins have natural rhythm, you know.

Gabriel: Well, that's true. But later, with the help of his five Latino short penguin buddies, who of course dance like jumping beans, and just can't control the rhythm inside them, the way all Latin "penguins" do -- they end up realizing that dancing is not mental retardation after all, but perhaps something that can be treated as an odd affliction; something you might have in a kooky bachelor uncle, let's say -- an odd eccentricity. But one to be cherished in sort of a wry way.

In the event my sarcasm isn't coming through on the recording, let me be clear: this movie is a walking cultural disaster. It's not that it isn't entertaining on some level...

Jill: It's a Robin Williams animated film. Which means that Robin Williams plays the Kooky Ethnic Sidekick. In this case, the kooky ethnic sidekicks are Latin and African-American. And it should be noted that the other three kooky Latino sidekicks are voiced by Latino actors. But it should be noted that there are no African-American actors voicing this film, other than Savion Glover, who provided the dancing.

Gabriel: But why would you need actual African-Americans, when you've got Robin Williams, who can fake it. You know, you sit there and watch it, and it's kind of witty, and the children around us are enjoying it, and you want to say that, but as you step away from the movie, and say OK, what is the message here; what is the moral here -- because really, children's films have become a morality lesson. What is this movie really trying to communicate, and I think what's upsetting to me about it is that under the guise of saying some important social lessons, it ends up reinforcing some bad social patterns. For instance, there's a lesson of tolerance of diversity of allowing difference and praising difference. But that's done in the context of saying, "If you're different, you're going to be ostracized and you must overcome that."

Jill: Right. That may be reality, but if you're trying to use that, but if you're trying to use --

Gabriel: -- but if your message is to celebrate diversity, that's a weird message to underscore. You should be celebrating it from the beginning, but it's a children's movie; how hard could it be? It doesn't seem that they know what they're doing. But as you noted during the movie, it's got this weird psychedelic 1960's component to some of the visuals.

Jill: Yeah. It's sort of like politically correct Fantasia. Some of the visuals are really beautiful and some of them are very exciting in that roller coaster theme park sort of way. There's a lot of running away from avalanches; the water is rendered really well. It's a beautifully-crafted animated film. Compare that to that movie Meet the Robinsons that we saw the trailer for. And what Pixar is doing now vs. what Disney studios are still struggling to do are like night and day. That trailer seems well behind what Monsters Inc. was, and that's already four or five years ago.

Gabriel: But the 60's thing that you were addressing. It kind of comes out of nowhere. It's kind of adult reference; it's a weird non sequitur. And there's a lot of those in the film. I'm not a prude, I mean, you read my site, you know that. But I thought there was some questionable animal behavior in this film -- some sliding around, some tucking of eggs, some weird beak interplay...

Jill: But the tucking of eggs and the beak interplay -- they might not have known when they planned out this film that kids would have already seen this, but everybody took their kids to see March of the Penguins. So they've already seen this behavior with real penguins.

Gabriel: OK.

Jill: Because the whole thing with tucking the egg is what they do. It's just that they made some off-color jokes. For example, when the baby penguin is going under the father to stay warm, he's told to watch the beak. It's the obligatory testicle joke.

Gabriel: That's what I'm talking about.

Jill: But that goes back to Aladdin, with the jokes that go over the kids' heads.

Gabriel: You're saying it all comes back to Robin Williams. He just can't keep the smut out?

Jill: Yes, it all comes down to Robin Williams. Because you have to have the jokes that the adults are going to like couched in the story that kids are going to like. And while we're on the subject of what kids are going to like, I may be overreacting here. But there are some scenes here that I think are really, really scary for young children -- the harp seals coming out of nowhere are very scary. The whales are very scary.

Gabriel: Let's talk about the pecking order of the movie. Because you represent a lot of endangered species in this movie -- harp seals, elephant seals, killer whales. And I think the point of demonizing those species -- I understand you have to have villains and heroes in children's stories. but to demonize those other species was kind of odd to me in a message that's supposedly about how life is precious.

Jill: Well, it's about how life is precious, but the fish the penguins eat are the only animals that aren't anthropomorphized -- because that's what the penguins eat. I mean, dead fish tell no tales.

Gabriel: Yes. And we see a fish that's kind of alive and kind of half-mutilated. Is it something that they went with a story that was not quite together; is it that they aren't quite sure what moral message they wanted to convey? They just had a good idea about a tapdancing penguin, and how cute that would be. And they fashioned this half-hearted story of diversity and tolerance around it.

Jill: I think that this half-hearted story of diversity and tolerance, as you call it, has become a stock part of children's movies. There has to be a moral. There's elements of this in Shrek. This sort of thing goes all the way back to Bambi -- Bambi's mother dies, and they burn down the forest...

Gabriel: Dumbo was the original fish out of water...

Jill: Yes, but Bambi was the first environmental Disney cartoon. So it's not that there's anything new here. What I find bothersome is that they wanted to put an environmental message in here, but the environmental message that they put in there isn't really the one you have to focus on. It really isn't overfishing that is the most serious problem.it's the ice blocks the size of Rhode Island that are breaking off of Antarctica every day that are the biggest problem.

Gabriel: Right. I was kind of intrigued that they didn't address global warming in any way. But also, part of this is, we're being very tough on this movie as a social construct. How much of it are we really -- it's always a question when dealing with material that is theoretically developed for children, how much responsibility do they have to these kinds of larger intellectual social issues and how much of it is a diversion for two hours for a person under the age of five.

Jill: Well, if the audience in the theatre today is any indication, this is not a movie that 8 to 12-year-olds are seeing. This is a movie being marketed to kids that are, let's say toddlers to around age 5...and they're not going to get the environmental message anyway. If they get anything, they're going to get the message that if they don't eat the fish sticks that mom puts in front of them, the ones they don't like anyway, it means they can save the penguins.

Gabriel:Right. If you don't eat the Gorton's fish sticks, you save a penguin. That's pretty good.

Jill: Yeah....every time you eat fish, a penguin cries.

Gabriel: (laughs)

Jill: God kills a penguin.

Gabriel: That's true. And if enough children can get together....I just don't know if it does much more than allow people an easy sort of emotional outlet for themselves. I made a crack in the movie about how Elijah Wood plays the main penguin -- what's his name?

Jill: Mumble. He's like Frodo on ice.

Gabriel:Exactly. Well, that's the thing. He's being played by Elijah Wood, and this is basically a hobbit dressed up as a penguin, so he can make this journey to the land of evil to save the shire. It's almost embarrassing at some point to watch Elijah Wood have to do exactly the same thing he did in the Lord of the Rings movies.

Jill: Which is basically stand there and open his beautiful blue eyes wide, and this animated penguin has Elijah Wood's beautiful blue eyes -- and he's the ONLY one with blue eyes, which is either attributable to the fact that he's Elijah Wood and he's really a hobbit, or it's because of his...."happy feet."

Gabriel: I think's really got a lot to do with his "happy feet." He's not very interested in girls; I mean there's this one that he kind of likes, but he'd rather hang out with the boy penguins, and, you know, he's just gotta dance -- like every chorus boy on Broadway. I'm not going to say that "happy feet" means anything other than happy, but I got a sense that "happy" was a bit of a double entendre.

Jill: Well, this is why Bill O'Reilly and his ilk are having fits about this movie...because it's sort of a double whammy. You have the environmental message, and you have, well, let's face it -- "happy" penguins. And given that they're already having apoplexy about this book about the two male penguins at the Bronx Zoo who are nurturing a baby, but then again, these are the people who said that Shark Tale was a plot against Christianity too, so I don't know that you can --

Gabriel:Well, you know, God bless happy penguins, is about where I want to leave that. Because if you go there with that....all right, let's talk about some of the performances. Because I think there are some odd performances in this film. First of all, there's not a lot of facial expressions in these computer-animated penguins. So most of the performance is vocal. We talked about Elijah -- let's talk about his parents, played with odd southern accents by Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman. I don't really understand.

Jill: I don't understand what that was about either. It's like....his father is an Elvis impersonator, and he calls his wife "mama."

Gabriel: And his father is embarrassed of the child.

Jill: Yes, because he has......"happy feet."

Gabriel:He has "happy feet", but also he dropped the child --

Jill: He dropped the egg -- "dropping him on his head when he was a baby", as it were.

Gabriel:So there's also shame about the child being maybe retarded...

Jill: ...and guilt...

Gabriel:...and guilt, that you drop the egg and now your child is retarded.

Jill: And because he's retarded, he has...."happy feet."

Gabriel: Right. That's a mess, in terms of a storyline. The mother is showing loving your child unconditionally, but really there's no character there, other than that.

Jill: And she's ineffectual. This is clearly a patriarchal penguin society, for all that the males nurture the eggs. Now this is where this is not as liberal a movie as they like to say it is, because this is true with penguins -- that the women go off and fish, and the men stay home and take care of the eggs. But they did this whole patriarchal, very sort of Christian if I may say so, society, led by some guy with a Scottish accent who's surrounded for some reason by penguins who are old Jews. Now I didn't understand what the point was --

Gabriel:Were they Jews? Because they were praying to "the great Guin".

Jill: But the accents were very clearly Yiddish, and their beaks were hooked.

Gabriel: That's true; they did have the "hooked Jewish nose."

Jill: And they were the only penguins who had hooked noses.

Gabriel: But I think they have a very sort of scary demeanor about their religiosity, which I think was clearly meant as a reference to Christian fundamentalism. So there's that mixed -- they're Jews, but they're --

Jill: -- they're disguised Jews. Part of the reason for this, I think, is -- if you've seen March of the Penguins, when they have the shots of these penguins shuffling off to their mating grounds, they do look like a line of elderly Jews going off to shul. So it's kind of natural for all that it's a broad ethnic stereotype. I'm just not sure where the Scottish accent comes from, because usually if you're going to put a Scottish accent into a cartoon, it's because it's an accent that's funny. See also, Shrek.

Gabriel: Right. But this was not really funny, and -- all the old Jews were Cockney, the midget penguins were Latin, the parents were American southern rednecks -- is it an attempt to show some ethnic diversity within the penguin community?

Jill: That may be, but as you said earlier, it's diversity through stereotype.

Gabriel: Right. True.

Jill: But at the end of this movie, and I don't think I'm spoiling anything for anybody by saying this, you have -- humanity is awakened to the plight of the penguins by one penguin's willingness --

Gabriel: -- to shuck and jive --

Jill: -- to be Stepin' Fetchit. And I don't know about you, but I was reminded in that Zoo scene of that scene in Goodfellas where Joe Pesci is shooting his gun at Michael Imperioli's feet to make him dance.

Gabriel: Well, it's definitely the year's greatest cinematic understatement to say that the storyline in the last 30 minutes is a bit implausible. Basically penguins start tap dancing, and children take notice, and that leads to the United Nations passing a global fishing law surrounding Antarctica. I think it's easy moralizing, it's easy emotionality -- I would have much preferred if Mumble had just gone to the fiery pits of Mordor, thrown the ring into the lava, and then gone back to the shire. That would have been more plausible than the storyline we have.

Jill: (laughs) Or gone into the west, which would have been even more plausible, if he had just died in captivity.

Gabriel: Well, I don't know how many animated movies you see each year.

Jill: Not a whole lot.

Gabriel: I don't see a lot either. But is this the gold standard? Is this where we are with family entertainment at this moment?

Jill: I certainly hope not.

Gabriel: This sort of troublesome, inconclusive, present-day messages of pseudo-liberal dogma?

Jill: LAZY messages of pseudo-liberal dogma, with enough snark by Robin Williams to get adults into the theater. It seems to be where we are. There's a reason why animated films aren't doing all that well now, and that's because they're all pretty much the same at this point. And when you think about even the good ones, there's always something that's not quite right about them. Like even in The Incredibles, which was a really terrific animated film, but you still have the daughter sort of deciding to conform to everybody else, and now she gets the boy because she's conforming, and -- there's always some not-great messages in these animated films, because there's only so subversive they can be.

Gabriel: Right.

Jill: The problem is that in trying not to piss anybody off -- they're sort of like Democrats in that they try so hard not to piss anybody off that they end of pissing people off anyway.

Gabriel: I'm not sure that they do. I don't hear a huge outcry against Happy Feet.

Jill: Oh.....you just haven't been looking in the right places.

Gabriel: I'll say this: I don't know that the middle American family has it out for Happy Feet. I think it's got easy messages that in an afternoon's entertainment and diversion for the kids is perfectly fine. I just think that in history, when we look at Dumbo and Bambi and -- I'm going to say movies like Beauty and the Beast, and The Incredibles, where there's some more sophisticated and better-managed, for lack of a better word, morals, pitched to children, I think we can expect more than this kind of weird, jarring, and --

Jill: incoherent....

Gabriel: ...incoherent and confused message. I asked you earlier as sort of a leading question, and I think I would answer it myself by saying that I think they wanted to make a movie about dancing penguins, and wrote a movie around that idea, rather than saying, "We want to say this to kids, what would be a way to say that." So what have we missed.

Jill: The music? The use of songs?

Gabriel: Well, I think it's interesting not to have one original song, to use baby boomer songs from the 70's and 80's --

Jill: That I thought was a bit strange because the music played very "old" when you consider what the audience for this movie was going to be. Because for all of the in vitro babies, most parents of five-year-olds are not baby boomers. If you say that the baby boom ended around 1960, the youngest ones are 46 years old, and for the most part, these people don't have 3, 4, and 5-year-olds. So I thought the musical selections skewed just a shade old.

Gabriel: What did you think about the brevity of the music. there wasn't one song that played in its entirety. And some of the songs, maybe got two or three lines before going to something else.

Jill: Well, either there were music rights issues and they didn't want to pay, or more likely, it's a short attention span thing. It's songs for people who download music and listen to a little bit, and then hit the button on the iPOD for the next one.

Gabriel: That may be true. But it felt odd to me, that we never had those standard production numbers. And maybe...the culture's moving faster, we're not going to sit still for a big number anymore....

Jill: Maybe it was too expensive?

Gabriel: But you know -- I was thinking about the elephant seal scene, where have a big view of all those elephant seals. It's a 2-3 minute scene, with a LOT of animation. And maybe they could have spent that on something else. Well...so the music's a little troubling to me, and I hope that most cartoons that have musical scores continue to hire original composers for those, but at least this one had music. The Incredibles didn't have any music; Shrek only has music during the curtain calls.

Jill: But The Incredibles had Edna Mode, and God knows Edna Mode had very, very happy feet.

Gabriel: God Bless Edna Mode. Edna Mode, I'd take her happy feet any day.

Jill: So have we finished?

Gabriel: It's good to have done one of these.

Jill: It's been a year. Let's make it not a year next time.

Gabriel: Let's make it not a year next time. I'm looking forward to hearing what your readers have to say about the politics of children's movies in general and the politics of Happy Feet in particular. I think there's a lot to talk about.

Jill: Well, we'll give it to them as an assignment.

Gabriel: There you go.

Jill: OK. All right, folks, you know what your homework is.

Back in the days when Ekaterina Gordeeva and Sergei Grinkov ruled the pairs figure skating event, I used to watch with a friend of mine and we'd both agree that while Gordeeva was truly magical, she really needed a better partner.

To say such things is heresy in the figure skating world, especially after Grinkov died suddenly from an undiagnosed heart ailment following a practice in 1995. No matter how overrated I might have thought he was, the idea of a well-trained 28-year-old athlete suddenly dropping dead, leaving his longtime on-ice partner and now-wife a preposterously young widow with a three-year-old was truly tragic.

It's an ill wind that blows no good, for while skating on her own with Scott Hamilton's Stars on Ice company, Gordeeva met 1998 Olympic Champion Ilia Kulik. They are now married with a five-year-old, and while they don't often skate as a pair, Gordeeva finally has a partner worthy of her talents.

Take a look at this program from the 1999-2000 Stars on Ice tour:

Quote of the day runner-up, Superstantial Truthiness Division:

It's a success that hasn't occurred yet. I don't know that I view that as a failure. -- Bush Administration Homeland Security Adviser Fran Townsend, referring to the as-yet-uncaptured Osama Bin Laden on The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, 12/28/06

(hat tip: Hoffmania)

Seen at MSNBC via The Daou Report:

"First it was weapons of mass destruction. Then when there were none, it was that we had to find Saddam. We did that, but then it was that we had to put him on trial. So now, what will be the next story they tell us to keep us over here?" -- Spc. Thomas Sheck, 25, who is on his second tour in Iraq.

WaPo:

President Bush's second-term agenda would expand not only the size of the federal government but also its influence over the lives of millions of Americans by imposing new national restrictions on high schools, court cases and marriages.

In a clear break from Republican campaigns of the 1990s to downsize government and devolve power to the states, Bush is fostering what amounts to an era of new federalism in which the national government shapes, not shrinks, programs and institutions to comport with various conservative ideals, according to Republicans inside and outside the White House.

Bush is calling for new federal accountability and testing requirements for all public high schools, after imposing similar mandates on grades three through eight during his first term. To limit lawsuits against businesses and professionals, he is proposing to put a federal cap on damage awards for medical malpractice, to force class-action cases into federal courts and to help create a national settlement of outstanding asbestos-related cases.

On social policy, the president is pushing a constitutional amendment to outlaw same-sex marriage in the states and continuing to define and expand the federal government's role in encouraging religious groups to help administer social programs such as community drug-rehabilitation efforts.

"We have moved from devolution, which was just pushing back as much power as possible to the states, back to where government is limited but active," said John Bridgeland, director of Bush's domestic policy council in the first term. Bridgeland and current White House officials see Bush's governing philosophy as a smart way to modernize the government, empower individuals and broaden the appeal of the GOP.

Bush maintains a stated desire to streamline the government. On Monday, he sent Congress a budget that would eliminate or consolidate 150 programs. But a growing number of conservatives are uneasy with what they deride as "big-government conservatism."

There are going to be two things to watch as Bush makes his push towards more Disciplinarian Daddy Government: 1) How much support he gets from Republicans; and 2) how much support he gets from moral scold Democrats (*cough* Lieberman *cough* Obama *cough* Clinton) who see this as an opportunity to reach around -- I mean across -- the aisle.

And the 2006 award for Completely Missing the Point of Brokeback Mountain While Simultaneously Playing Into Everything People Believe About Men's Figure Skating AND Being Completely Tasteless goes to.....

these guys:

And so little President Pencil-Dick has now proven that he can outdo daddy by executing Saddam Hussein.

Congratulations, Georgie. Now go back to the bottle of Wild Turkey and enjoy your day.

The timing of this execution is somewhat odd, occurring not before the election, when it's possible (though unlikely) that it would have done Bush some good; nor right before the State of the Union address, when he could have strutted up before Nancy Pelosi and what he perceives as the other Dickless Democrats and said "I have succeeded in killing the tyrant." Which would have made millions of Democrats wonder, if he'd suicided, why he was up talking in front of Congress, but no matter. (Note to Secret Service: No, this is NOT advocating violence or other criminal actions against the president.)

So here's the question: Was the execution of Saddam Hussein at the end of the "not just any Friday but a holiday-weekend" news dump the Iraqis' way of thumbing their noses at Bush, or were there rumblings that Saddam, knowing he had nothing to lose, might start singing like a canary about the good old days carousing with Rummy back in the days when we gave him the chemical weapons he needed to "gas his own people"?

I guess we'll never know.

Jurassicpork at Welcome to Pottersville notes:

The reason for which Saddam will be executed, his ordering the massacre of 148 Shi’ites in 1982, was never, to my knowledge, mentioned in the run-up to war. Perhaps the reason why it was never mentioned was because Saddam carried out these executions with a wink and a nod from Reagan and Poppy, his two bestest buddies. Rummy would soon join the club in December 1983 bearing gifts such as poison gas and satellite photos of the Iranian army’s position.

The moral relativism is what bothers me the most, the overtures that we’re executing Saddam and thereby striking a mighty blow against totalitarianism and human rights abuses the world over while turning an equally selectively blind eye to other tin pot dictators such as Musharraf and much of the Saudi royal family.

And for some reason, it still, nearly 25 years later, completely and utterly eludes the media that Saddam wouldn’t have been so empowered if Reagan had done his job and leaned on Saddam any way he could to get him to play nice. But Saddam was too useful in helping us rid the world of Iranians (Iranians that, wink, wink, had released our hostages on Reagan’s inauguration day in exchange for arms but that’s a story for another day) so we wouldn’t incur the wrath of the Muslim world.

Just like Osama bin Laden, our ultimate blow back, was somewhat useful in fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan during their own Iraq/Vietnam. Just like the Shah of Iran was quite useful, just like Noriega was useful, just as Pinochet was useful, just as… Well, I’m sure you get the message by now.

The moral compass of this administration may appear to be pointed true north but it’s so belated in coming that it’s audacious. How can it not make anyone morally nauseous, this easy morality that shifts as easily and as silently as the sand dunes in Iraq?

But let’s consider two things as we contemplate the impending (and televised) execution of Saddam Hussein: Consider how easy it was to convict and sentence to death a man who was never caught on video or audiotape ordering the deaths of those 148 Shias or any of the other people whose murders he’d ordered.

Two: Look at how difficult it will prove to even write up articles of impeachment against a traitorous, murderous little freak like George W. Bush even though we have ample evidence of him ordering the deaths of more than 200 times that many in American lives.

UPDATE: Yes, nothing has changed:

At least 46 Iraqis died in bombings Saturday, including one planted on a minibus that exploded in a fish market in a mostly Shiite town south of Baghdad.

The man blamed for parking the vehicle in Kufa, a Shiite town 100 miles south of the Iraqi capital, was cornered and killed by a mob as he walked away from the explosion, police and witnesses said.

Another explosion killed 15 civilians and wounded 25 in Hurriyah, a mixed neighborhood of the Iraqi capital, police said.

There was no indication the attacks were related to the execution of Saddam Hussein. They came on the eve Eid al-Adha for Iraqi Shiites, the most important holiday of the Islamic calendar, and shoppers crowded into markets to buy supplies for the four-day festival.

At least 58 people were wounded in the Kufa blast, said Issa Mohammed, director of the morgue in the neighboring town of Najaf.

Television footage showed hundreds of men in traditional Arab headdresses swarming around the vehicle's charred frame, toppled on its side in the street. Ambulances and fire trucks pulled up to the site, and a coffin could be seen being loaded onto the top of a car.

The U.S. military announced the deaths of three Marines and two soldiers, making December the year's deadliest month for U.S. troops in Iraq with the toll reaching 108.

Mission accomplished.

Jay Lassiter, at Blue Jersey explains:

A few months ago, a young Airman from New Jersey, Carl Ware Jr. was shot and killed in Iraq. Around the time of his funeral questions began to emerge about the exact nature of his death. A week ago, I was enjoying a rainy day off at home, drinking some Earl Grey and surfing the net. Out of the blue I get an instant message from "Justdunno." It was an unfamiliar screenname.
"You wrote about my brother."

Long, awkward, pregnant pause.

"Carl Ware."

Keep in mind, I recognized the name of course, but it had been a while since Airman Ware's death, so it wasn't exactly fresh in my mind what I wrote about him.

"I hope I didn't write anything that offended you," I typed.

"Not at all," she replied. She seemed grateful that we seemed willing to ask the tough questions, so she reached out.

I have one of those screennames that you can derive from my email address which you can find on this site. I'm not too hard to track down. But I was curious why did she reach out to me. Did she need a friend or was she just trying to keep her big brother's story alive?

"Both," she said.

Little sister told me -- as per the jag lawyer prosecuting this case -- that Carl died in Iraq because he was shot in the chest by a fellow American soldier, a guy who is now being detained in Kuwait awaiting trial. She pointed out that her brother's (alleged) killer had some mental issues and was admitted to the service at a time when recruiters were bending their standards and accepting just about anyone with a pulse. Anyway, the trial is coming in the spring, probably in March.

If you have a loved one in Iraq, or know someone who does, please think about this -- when you lower the standard to allow violent criminals and the mentally ill to become cannon fodder, what does that do to your loved one?

Mentally sound gay men and women with no criminal history are regarded as criminals by the military, but headcases and violent criminals are perfectly OK. What does that say about the greatest military in the world?

[/Spiidey]

Yes, folks, the President of the United States may just ejaculate in the Oval Office tonight, because his own personal bugagoo, Saddam Hussein, is expected to be hanged by midnight:

The official witnesses to Saddam Hussein's impending execution gathered Friday in Baghdad's fortified Green Zone in final preparation for his hanging, as state television broadcast footage of his regime's atrocities.

The Iraqi government readied all the necessary documents, including a "red card" — an execution order introduced during Saddam's dictatorship. As the hour of his death approached, Saddam received two of his half brothers in his cell on Thursday and was said to have given them his personal belongings and a copy of his will.

Najeeb al-Nueimi, a member of Saddam's legal team in Doha, Qatar, said he too requested a final meeting with the deposed Iraqi leader. "His daughter in Amman was crying, she said 'Take me with you,'" al-Nueimi said late Friday. But he said their request was rejected.

An adviser to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said Saddam would be executed before 6 a.m. Saturday, or 10 p.m. Friday EST. Also to be hanged at that time were Saddam's half-brother Barzan Ibrahim and Awad Hamed al-Bandar, the former chief justice of the Revolutionary Court, the adviser said.

[snip]

"Saddam will be handed over shortly before the execution," the official said. The physical transfer of Saddam from U.S. to Iraqi authorities was believed to be one of the last steps before he was to be hanged. Saddam has been in U.S. custody since he was captured in December 2003.

Al-Nueimi said U.S. authorities were maintaining physical custody of Saddam to prevent him from being humiliated before his execution. He said the Americans also want to prevent the mutilation of his corpse, as has happened to other deposed Iraqi leaders.

"The Americans want him to be hanged respectfully," al-Nueimi said. If Saddam is humiliated publicly or his corpse ill-treated "that could cause an uprising and the Americans would be blamed," he said.

Who else but a couple of sick fucks like Bush and Cheney could think of the concept of "being hanged respectfully." I don't know about you, but there's a big gaping hole in the back of my head where my cranium exploded. It does that when faced with this kind of laughable horseshit.

No one is claiming that Saddam Hussein doesn't deserve the death penalty, if you believe in it, for his crimes against humanity. But then, one could make a similar argument for a similar trial for crimes against humanity for the current occupant of the White House. (Note to Secret Service: No, I am not advocating that anyone commit violence against the president.) But does anyone honestly believe that this is going to make the situation one iota better in Iraq? Or does it just serve to make a man that most jihadists regarded as an infidel secularist into a martyr for the cause against the Hated Americans?

Oh, Bush and Cheney will get off on the inevitable video of the hanging, which I'm sure will be played for them over and over again as the sound of their moans of pleasure drown out Barney's barking. And I'm sure it'll be up on YouTube by morning. And President Thirty Percent will no doubt get a big round of applause at the State of the Union Address as a result (cut to footage of Obama and Clinton applauding and smiling). But regardless of whether you think Saddam deserves to die, this display of garish ghoulishness, coming right on the heels of Christmas, is pretty damn repulsive and does NOT reflect well on us as a people.


(hat tip: ShakesSis)

Yesterday I went to lunch and a movie with ModFab -- something we haven't done in a year, and which I've sorely missed. (Our conversation about Happy Feet will follow later today, so those of you -- all three of you -- who have missed the old Mixed Reviews "Critics Over Coffee" feature will get your fix.) We were discussing the state of blogdom, and why our traffic seems to be stuck at a certain point, with very little growth. As ModFab himself wrote yesterday:

2006 will be remembered as the year that blogs became legit. And as the year when blogs went to shit. Is that inflammatory? I hope so, because if the best we've got to offer the world is Perez Hilton, Michele Malkin, and Gawker, we're in trouble. The single greatest danger to this form of communication is codification...it's a medium built upon the premise that every person has value, and that an individual perspective can be more illuminative than a corporate entity.

But in a world of million-hit superblogs and media alpha dogs, it is becoming harder and harder for the individual voice to penetrate through the white noise. This best-of list was harder to write than any other this year, because I simply had trouble locating truly useful, engaging, well-written, information, essential blogs. Lots of detritus, few iconoclasts.

Sometimes it seems as if blogs are going the same route as movie review sites did in the late 1990's. A few of them get bought up by big conglomerates and altered beyond recognition or shuttered; a precious few become going concerns; and the rest of us toil around the edges, building a cult following and little else.

It seems that among culture-related blogs, niche blogs have the best growth potential, yet even among niche blogs, there are the Alpha Dogs -- Towleroad among gay bloggers, David Poland among movie bloggers, and the 800-pound gorilla of political blogging, Markos Moulitsas. There are millions of political bloggers, so it's ever more difficult for any of us to gain any headway, but it's not as if the alpha dogs do much to welcome us into the club.

I'm grateful to Mike Finnegan at Crooks and Liars, Tbogg, Peter Daou and his successor Steve Benen, Pam Spaulding, and the few other luminaries of blogtopia who deign to link to this here blog every now and then. Every time they do, I see a brief spike in traffic.

But while watching Blog Wars on the Sundance Channel last night, about the role bloggers played in the Connecticut Senate primary race this year, it struck me that some of the Big Players portrayed therein are perhaps just a wee tad disingenuous when they tout how people-powered the blogosphere is, and how easy it is to build traffic. Perhaps Markos Moulitsas needs to spout about the worth of the smaller bloggers in order to convince people that he's still just like everyone else, but I'll tell you this much: I met him at a book signing in Hoboken. And no matter how many times I explained that the name on the business card I handed him referred to a progressive political blog and not a bed and breakfast, all he saw was a short, pudgy, middle-aged Jewish woman who probably makes great omelettes in her little country inn.

Now I don't expect the King of All Blogtopia (despite his protestations to the contrary) to visit here, and I don't expect the well-connected Jane Hamsher, who managed, partially but probably not entirely, to become one of the biggest names in the world of progressive blogs because of her involvement in the Connecticut Senate Race, to visit here -- not in a world in which everyone and his cat has a blog. But don't tell me that it's easy to make a mark in this particular community.

There is clearly a hierarchy of blogger influence, and if I may say so, it's not always based on who's the best writer or even the most astute political analyst. For example, Driftglass, who's well-respected even among the big boys and is for my money one of the best writers on the web, doesn't seem to generate a whole lot of comments. Digby's blog Hullabaloo, is recognized by the big and small alike as a must-read resource even though much of it is now written by other bloggers. For my money, no one covers the War on Women in the U.S. like Amanda Mercotte. Apologies if I left anyone out. But sometimes when I compare these blogs, and the hundreds of others I read, some of them extraordinarily well-written, to some of the biggest alpha dogs, such as Atrios with his open threads and four-sentence posts that largely involve quotes from other people, I have to wonder what it's all based on, and whether the blogosphere really is about the writing and the insight, or if it's just a grayer, paunchier version of high school, in which the Chess Club guys are the heads of the Kool Kids Klub and everyone wants to hang with them.

This is the main reason why I chose the bloggers I did to cover while I was on vacation. I might not be a huge player, but there are other people who get even less traffic than I do, if such a thing is possible -- and they deserve to be read as well.

At times I think it would be a good idea to go to the Yearly Kos conference this year, and then I think: "Why, at age 52, which is what I'll be by then, would I want to attend a conference at which I'll be ignored because I'm not hot AND I'm a nobody? Do I need a few thousand people who make enough from Blogads that they don't have to hold down a full-time job looking down their noses at me because I don't get a million hits a month? Didn't I go through enough of that in high school?" And I think that's sad, that a medium so fraught with egalitarian possibility seems to be devolving into just another pecking order, with a few alpha dogs at the top and the rest of us scrambling for scraps -- a keyboard version of Republican America.

Hey, Connecticut -- aren't you glad you voted to send Holy Warrior Joe Lieberman back to Washington?

This op-ed in today's Washington Post could have been penned for The Decider, so slavishly does it adhere to C-Plus Caligula's script. Excerpt:

Because of the bravery of many Iraqi and coalition military personnel and the recent coming together of moderate political forces in Baghdad, the war is winnable. We and our Iraqi allies must do what is necessary to win it.

The American people are justifiably frustrated by the lack of progress, and the price paid by our heroic troops and their families has been heavy. But what is needed now, especially in Washington and Baghdad, is not despair but decisive action -- and soon.

The most pressing problem we face in Iraq is not an absence of Iraqi political will or American diplomatic initiative, both of which are increasing and improving; it is a lack of basic security. As long as insurgents and death squads terrorize Baghdad, Iraq's nascent democratic institutions cannot be expected to function, much less win the trust of the people. The fear created by gang murders and mass abductions ensures that power will continue to flow to the very thugs and extremists who have the least interest in peace and reconciliation.

This bloodshed, moreover, is not the inevitable product of ancient hatreds. It is the predictable consequence of a failure to ensure basic security and, equally important, of a conscious strategy by al-Qaeda and Iran, which have systematically aimed to undermine Iraq's fragile political center. By ruthlessly attacking the Shiites in particular over the past three years, al-Qaeda has sought to provoke precisely the dynamic of reciprocal violence that threatens to consume the country.

On this point, let there be no doubt: If Iraq descends into full-scale civil war, it will be a tremendous battlefield victory for al-Qaeda and Iran. Iraq is the central front in the global and regional war against Islamic extremism.

To turn around the crisis we need to send more American troops while we also train more Iraqi troops and strengthen the moderate political forces in the national government. After speaking with our military commanders and soldiers there, I strongly believe that additional U.S. troops must be deployed to Baghdad and Anbar province -- an increase that will at last allow us to establish security throughout the Iraqi capital, hold critical central neighborhoods in the city, clamp down on the insurgency and defeat al-Qaeda in that province.

FACT: Iraq has already descended into full-scale civil war. Back in July, Ken Silverstein reported in Harper's that John Negroponte was blocking production of a new National Intelligence Estimate that would refer to the situation in Iraq as civil war:

“What do you call the situation in Iraq right now?” asked one person familiar with the situation. “The analysts know that it's a civil war, but there's a feeling at the top that [using that term] will complicate matters.” Negroponte, said another source regarding the potential impact of a pessimistic assessment, “doesn't want the president to have to deal with that.”

Lieberman's Bush-like invocation of 9/11 and Al Qaeda are as disingenuous as they are when The Decider makes them. There may now be an Al Qaeda presence in Iraq, but if that is indeed the case, I'm not sure that allowing the very same U.S. president who created the power vacuum in Iraq by toppling Saddam with absolutely no thought as to what would come next is going to resolve the situation.

Juan Cole:

From the beginning of history until 2003 there had never been a suicide bombing in Iraq. There was no al-Qaeda in Baath-ruled Iraq. When Baath intelligence heard that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi might have entered Iraq, they grew alarmed at such an "al-Qaeda" presence and put out an APB on him! Zarqawi's so-called "al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia" was never "central" in Iraq and was never responsible for more than a fraction of the violent attacks. This assertion is supported by the outcome of a US-Jordanian operation that killed Zarqawi this year. His death had no impact whatsoever on the level of violence. There are probably only about 1,000 foreign fighters even in Iraq, and most of them are first-time volunteers, not old-time terrorists. The 50 major guerrilla cells in Sunni Arab Iraq are mostly made up of Iraqis, and are mainly: 1) Baathist or neo-Baathist, 2) Sunni revivalist or Salafi, 3) tribally-based, or 4) based in city quarters. Al-Qaeda is mainly a boogey man, invoked in Iraq on all sides, but possessing little real power or presence there. This is not to deny that radical Sunni Arab volunteers come to Iraq to blow things (and often themselves) up. They just are not more than an auxiliary to the big movements, which are Iraqi.

As for whether additional security in Baghdad will drive the insurgency out, Cole blows this delusion by Holy Joe right out of the water as well:

The US put an extra 15,000 men into Baghdad this past summer, aiming to crush the guerrillas and stop the violence in the capital, and the number of attacks actually increased. This result comes about in part because the guerrillas are not outsiders who come in and then are forced out. The Sunni Arabs of Ghazaliya and Dora districts in the capital are the "insurgents." The US military cannot defeat the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement or "insurgency" with less than 500,000 troops, based on what we have seen in the Balkans and other such conflict situations. The US destroyed Falluja, and even it and other cities of al-Anbar province are not now safe! The US military leaders on the ground have spoken of the desirability of just withdrawing from al-Anbar to Baghdad and giving up on it. In 2003, 14 percent of Sunni Arabs thought it legitimate to attack US personnel and facilities. In August, 2006, over 70 percent did. How long before it is 100%? Winning guerrilla wars requires two victories, a military victory over the guerrillas and a winning of the hearts and minds of the general public, thus denying the guerrillas support. The US has not and is unlikely to be able to repress the guerrillas, and it is losing hearts and minds at an increasing and alarming rate. They hate us, folks. They don't want us there.

And that, my friends, is the problem. We are an occupying army, and EVERYONE hates us there. Holy Joe may want to do his part to try and salvage his boyfriend Captain Codpiece's legacy, but throwing more American kids at the problem isn't going to do it. I just hope that everyone who voted for Lieberman because they didn't want to give up the committee posts that they figured he'd get even though he bolted the party after the primary finds their own sons drafted and sent to Iraq. Perhaps they need to know that sometimes your vote has consequences.

Hard to believe, but there are still some pundits out there who are trying to salvage the legacy of President Thirty Percent by preparing the public for some grand announcement to save Iraq that just isn't going to happen:

PUNDIT KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: LACK OF SOLUTIONS TO IRAQ QUAGMIRE HELPS...BUSH!

Sit down, everyone. I think I've found what is far and away the most perfect example of "no-matter-how-bad-it-gets-it's-helpful-to-Bush" punditry ever produced anywhere.

It comes courtesy of Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Jamieson appears to believe that the fact that the Iraq quagmire has gotten so bad offers hidden political benefits to the President in that it will make Americans more receptive to Bush's imminent solutions to it:

Even with that seemingly no-win set of expectations, the president does have room to succeed, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania...

What people want is to hear Bush explain a clear route to an honorable outcome — one in which it is clear that the war left Iraq and the U.S. better off, Jamieson said.

"There are times when a country roots for a leader. I think that's what happening with this," Jamieson said. "A lot of people who voted for Democrats want the president to succeed. I think he has some advantage coming in, because the public so desperately wants success."

Bush has an advantage "coming in"? Do we really believe that the American public is so dumb that it's forgotten that Bush created this problem?

This one really does capture punditry at its worst: It's completely, even laughably divorced from reality, and contains no discernible desire to root opinion in anything resembling empirical evidence. And it displays an all-too-typical refusal to acknowledge that there already is a course of action preferred by the American electorate.

(hat tip: Atrios)

In a last-ditch attempt to try to repair its battered brand image, Ford Motor Company is trying to appeal to what it calls "niche customers" -- ethnic and minority Americans:

The latest marketing campaign by Ford offers seats to a Beyonce Knowles concert in Mexico and sponsors a Web site where the R&B superstar belts love songs in Spanish. The face staring out from Ford print ads is Korean heartthrob Ahn Jae Wook, with the sales pitch written in Chinese.

Ford has also enlisted R&B singer Kelis and hip-hop car guru and deejay Funkmaster Flex to hype its new small sport-utility vehicle, the Edge. The company is putting up graffiti murals in Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago and New York. It has sponsored a whole evening's worth of shows on the CW television network, a cable channel that attracts a large African American audience.

[snip]

Ford will sponsor a sweepstakes on Spanish-language Univision.com where the winner will see Knowles perform live at a concert in Monterrey, Mexico, in July.

Ford's marketers also think they've got a strong shot with Korean, Chinese and Vietnamese customers and younger people who don't feel the built-up antipathy toward American brands. The ads featuring Wook, a wildly popular soap opera star and musician, are running in major Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese newspapers and magazines around the country.

Ford is using remixes of Wook's music in commercials for the Edge that will play on Korean, Chinese and Vietnamese cable stations that cater to those groups, mainly on the West Coast. Ford is also putting new music from Wook up on a company Web site.

Ford has a lot of mainstream marketing for the Edge, too. Leading up to New Year's Eve, it is sponsoring the 585-square-foot super-sign billboard in New York's Times Square -- the largest curved electronic billboard in the world. Still, the campaign is one of the company's largest efforts to target African American and Asian American customers

With the Edge, Ford is trying to break into a stronghold of Japan automakers, the market for lightweight, fuel-efficient sport-utility vehicles, called crossovers. The crossover market has grown from 7.2 percent of the U.S. market to 10.6 percent in 2006, according to Edmunds.com. Next year, the crossover segment is expected to grow to 12 percent.

The segment, ruled by Toyota Highlander and RAV4 and Honda Pilot and CR-V, is highly competitive. Mazda recently introduced the CX-9, and a smaller model, the CX-7, is due next year. Audi has the Q7 crossover, its first SUV. The Edge is priced from $25,000 to $30,000, in line with the RAV4 and CR-V.

The segment, once ignored by Detroit, is getting tougher. "These are products designed from the ground up to compete against the import crossovers," said Jesse Toprak, director of industry analysis at Edmunds. "That's why we see such strong marketing efforts behind the Edge."

Ford has a lot riding on the Edge as it tries to wean itself from large SUV profits. The automaker has leveraged virtually everything it owns, from car factories to the car logos, to borrow enough money to rebuild the company. Ford also wants to change the company's image as a proliferator of gas-guzzling SUVs.

Where does one even begin on this? First of all, the idea that Ford is going to revive itself by assuming that Black and Asian Americans are stupid enough to fall for targeted marketing pitches for crappy vehicles is one of the most insulting things I've seen coming out of a corporate America that never slouches in the insulting department. Second of all, whom does Ford have to blame for its problems but itself?

I remember the gas lines of the 1970's, and the pathetic, too-little, too-late attempts of American carmakers to produce fuel-efficient vehicles. The Chevrolet Nova. The Ford Pinto. And of course Chrysler's brilliant decision to shitcan the nearly immortally reliable Dodge Dart/Plymouth Valiant line with the joke-on-wheels that was the Dodge Aspen/Plymouth Reliant tinbox. But did Detroit learn a lesson? Hardly. Instead, during the 1990s, it took advantage of American prosperity to return to its gas-guzzling roots, and now has no one but itself to blame.

The notion of planned obsolescence has been around since the 1950's, but Detroit never seems to have learned that unless Americans are feeling flush enough that they can trade in their cars every three years, reliability is an issue. You can drape Beyoncé Knowles over the hood of a Ford Edge all you want to, but if a buyer knows that he can get ten relatively trouble-free years out of a Toyota Highlander, which do YOU think the buyer's going to pick?

...that he was the man who gave us Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney:

He chose Nelson Rockefeller as his vice president (over George H. W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, who both campaigned vigorously for the job), met with blacks and women, proposed partial amnesty for Vietnam-era draft resisters, and hewed to Mr. Nixon’s realism in foreign affairs. The press corps extended him the benefit of the doubt, finding him refreshingly open and honest after Mr. Nixon, and his approval ratings soared — literally, from nowhere — to 70 percent.

Then, one Sunday morning a month after moving into the Oval Office, he pardoned Mr. Nixon before the former president was indicted. With a pen stroke, a very different Ford presidency emerged. Though he said he was forgiving Mr. Nixon because the televised spectacle of a former president in the criminal dock would stir up “ugly passions,” the pardon instantly and inevitably looked like the last cynical act of the Watergate cover-up — Mr. Nixon’s hand-chosen successor giving him a free pass.

The pardon was a political disaster for President Ford. His approval ratings plummeted, inviting attacks from not only the Democrats, but also the Republican right, which rallied around Ronald Reagan.

President Ford spent the remainder of his presidency trying to stave off the intraparty challenge that had suddenly emerged. Two weeks after the pardon, he appointed Mr. Rumsfeld as White House chief of staff, and Mr. Rumsfeld chose Dick Cheney, then 33, as his deputy. A year later, President Ford fired Defense Secretary James Schlesinger and replaced him with Mr. Rumsfeld, put Mr. Bush in charge of the C.I.A., forced Nelson Rockefeller off the 1976 ticket, and promoted Mr. Cheney to chief of staff. In that role, Mr. Cheney instituted a more centralized, secretive, Nixonian approach to presidential power, as he and Mr. Rumsfeld moved to replace President Ford’s restraint and realism with a swaggering, messianic view of American might. If it all sounds familiar, it is.

It's astounding to think about it, really -- that Dick Cheney had been trying to turn this country into a centralized dictatorship for twenty-four years before being given the opportunity to decide that he, in fact, was the most qualified vice president for the inexperienced wastrel son of a former president. That's an awfully long time to bide waiting for the opportune moment.

Compared to what we have in the White House now, Gerald Ford looks like a great president by comparison. But then, I can think of few presidents short of Warren G. Harding who don't look great by comparison. And you could make a very valid argument that in the still-fresh aftermath of the Vietnam Police Action, healing the Watergate wounds by putting Watergate behind us was paramount over any other consideration. But when we realize that Dick Cheney was at work long before most of the soldiers fighting in Iraq today were born, and when we remember how Republicans have operated ever since according to a doctrine of getting revenge for Nixon, it becomes clear that modern-day conservatism, as embodied in the Republican Party, isn't conservative at all, and that so-called libertarians who have embraced it as the "less government" party have allowed themselves to be duped for a quarter-century.

All that said, I think it's interesting that Gerald Ford, having lived to the ripe old age of 93, decided that a world without James Brown was just not one in which he wanted to live. Bob Herbert has more.

The impending end of the holiday season means just one thing: televised figure skating! In the late 1980's through the 1990's, I was a skating nut. I mean, NUT. I knew who all the skaters were, what their strengths and weaknesses were, the difference between a lutz and an axel, and why footwork was just as hard as jumps. I even took lessons for a while, but just couldn't manage to master right-over-left crossovers.

But Jonny Weir notwithstanding, the crop of world-stage skaters in the post-Tonya Harding hangover years has been uninspired, to say the least. So over this weekend, thanks to YouTube, we're going to take a stroll down memory lane to some memorable performances from the good old days.

First, to honor James Brown, here's Scott Hamilton from 2001's Stars on Ice show:



And here's a still-young Kurt Browning's infamous Commodores "Brick House" program from 1995:



And the no-longer-so-young Kurt Browning's self-parody of that program in 2005:



Heh. Don't let him fool you. He's still got it at age 40 in 2006:



Note especially the footwook sequence around 2:50 in. Awesome. I can't do that. Can you?

And not just will it work, but will it actually change anything? And will the American people appreciate the effort?

Incoming Congressional Democrats are determined to change the way Congress has done business under Republican rule -- the "one true way and purge our enemies" tactics that gave Democrats absolutely no say in government, the secretive, unread, pork-laden bills passed without debate in the dead of night, the blatant selling of Congressional favors to lobbyists.

The question is whether this will mark a return to "government the way it oughta be" and be applauded by the American people, or if the Republicans will do what they can, aided and abetted by the gasbags of wingnut media, to cut Democrats off at the knees and convince Americans that one-party rule, furtiveness, and complete silence by the minority party is preferable.

After chafing for years under what they saw as flagrant Republican abuse of Congressional power and procedures, the incoming majority has promised to restore House and Senate practices to those more closely resembling the textbook version of how a bill becomes law: daylight debate, serious amendments and minority party participation.

Beyond the parliamentary issues, Democrats assuming control on Jan. 4 said they also wanted to revive collegiality and civility in an institution that has been poisoned by partisanship in recent years. In a gesture duly noted by Republicans, the incoming speaker of the House, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, offered Speaker J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois, who is remaining in Congress, the use of prime office space in the Capitol out of respect for his position.

Mrs. Pelosi has consulted with the new Republican leader, Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, in developing initiatives for the year, including a task force to explore independent enforcement of ethics rules. That was in sharp contrast to two years ago, when Republicans — who only grudgingly consulted Democrats — pushed through a set of diluted ethics rules that they were later forced to rescind. Democrats also supported a severance package for senior Republican aides, but the spending was blocked in the last hours of Congress by conservative Republicans.

A statement of principles by House Democrats calls for regular consultation between the Democratic and Republican leaders on the schedule and operations of the House and declares that the heads of House committees should do the same.

“We are going to give people an honest and contemplative body they can be proud of once more,” said Representative Louise Slaughter, Democrat of New York and the incoming chairwoman of the Rules Committee.

Veteran Democrats said they did not sense that their colleagues wanted to retaliate against Republicans for perceived slights over the last decade. “We know we won in part because they got so nasty and unlikable,” said Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts.

Mr. Frank and Representative Edward J. Markey, a fellow Massachusetts Democrat, pointed to another difference between incoming Democrats and the Republicans who took control in 1995 and saw their mission as one of purging Democrats and hobbling government.

“Democrats want government to work,” said Mr. Markey, who under the Republican majority was often frozen out despite his senior position on the Energy and Commerce Committee. “I have not had a conversation where Democrats sit around talking about who they want to get back at.”

Yet pledges to engage Republicans legislatively carry risks. If Democrats do not follow through or revert to practices they have spent recent years condemning, they are certain to come under attack from watchdog groups and Republicans. Republicans are already accusing Democrats of backsliding by not guaranteeing them hearings and amendments on legislation to be considered in an initial 100-hour legislative program that Democrats view as a showcase for their new majority.

But Republicans are hoping Democrats stick to their guns and allow the minority a stronger voice on legislation. The opposition leadership said it would take the opportunity to put forward initiatives that could be potentially troublesome for newly elected Democrats in Republican-leaning districts who within months will have to defend their hard-won seats.

That very attitude is not promising, at least not where any potential change in the way Republicans to government business is concerned. For Republicans, it's still all about the politics, all about regaining the seats of power. None of it is about government, none of it is about doing the people's work.

On the one hand, I applaud the Democrats' ambition to return government to the people. On the other hand, I have no confidence in the American people's ability to detect when the reptilian brain is being appealed to and to resist. I would hope that the minute the Republicans start with their customary strongarming, the Democrats change course and get tough.

The stakes are too high to allow the corruption and selling of government to the highest bidder to continue.

Today's New York Times has an article about Mara Vanderslice, who is working with Democratic candidates on outreach to religious voters in red states, and red areas in blue states.

I don't have a problem with reaching out to religious voters, nor do I have a problem with the idea that so-called Christian values ought to extend beyond hot-button issues like abortion and gay marriage. My problem is that this misguided effort by Democrats can only have one result if such outreach is to succeed -- complete capitulation to the "Christian nation" beliefs of such voters. It's not that we secular Democrats are intolerant of Christians. Our reticence about such outreach is based in the fact that prosletyzing and conversion, often forced conversion, are so much a part of Christian heritage, and are still at the heart of evangelical Christianity today.

No one, not even the most ardent secularists, is telling Christians that they can't worship at the church of their choice. No one is telling them that they can't believe abortion is a sin, or that homosexuality is an abomination. I think they're wrong, but unlike Christians, I'm not forcing anyone to believe anything. But their right to believe stops at the bodies of women other than their own, and at the door of the homes of gay couples. That they think abortion is a sin does not give them the right to make that decision for someone else; and that they think homosexuality is an abomination that they don't want to have to look at does not give them the right to have their delicate sensibilities codified into law.

The kind of Christian voters to whom this outreach is designed to appeal are not the kinds that Rev. Welton Gaddy tries mightily to promote on State of Belief, his weekly radio show on Air America Radio; the kind who believe that caring for the poor is a Christian value. It's designed to appeal to the kind of busybody moral scolds that have been the Republican base since the Reagan years.

Barack Obama, who is widely expected to make a presidential run, has already decided that Christians should be the arbiters of morality for the entire nation, as Digby pointed out last month:

Let me be clear about this. I do not dislike Obama nor do I think his conciliatory tone is necessarily incorrect. There is utility in showing the religious right's fundamental intolerance if nothing else. I do find his split-the-difference, triangulation tiresome, however, in the same way I find the news media's he said/she said analysis lazy. It does not clarify anything, it obscures reality and it makes it difficult for Democrats to take a stand on the social justice issues that might just inspire some people of faith. You will notice that in his statement above about absolutism he only calls out two groups by name --- Democrats and Muslims. Yet, there is no more intolerant group of people in this entire country than the religious right. By failing to "include" them by name in his call for conciliation he validates their phony argument that they are the victims of intolerance.

Democrats had better realize that the flavor of Christianity whose voters they covet is one of "My way or the highway." Are we going to throw all of our Democratic values out the window because a few voters who are unlikely to go Democratic anyway simply cannot handle anyone else having a different idea of what constitutes morality? There are worse ways to live than "Do what thou wilt, harm none", which is largely what Democrats have stood for.

There is a reason for separation of church and state. And if anyone doubted why such a wall is important, Virginia Rep. Virgil Goode's disgusting display of ignorant bigotry last week is Exhibit A. As soon as a particular religious tradition refuses to allow that there are many paths to enlightenment, intolerance of people who do not toe a particular religious line is sure to follow. We cannot prevent such intolerance from occurring within the churches of America, but we do not have to codify it into law.

Democrats can try to plow the furrows of evangelical voters if they want. But there are plenty of us out here who are watching, and the minute we see a Democratic candidate embrace theocrats, we will be more than happy to withdraw our own support.

Yes, it's official. The President of the United States, George W. Bush, is now responsible for the deaths of many Americans as Osama Bin Laden did on 9/11/01:

At least 36 Iraqis died Tuesday in bombings, officials said, including a coordinated strike that killed 25 in western Baghdad. Separately, the deaths of six U.S. soldiers pushed the American toll beyond the number of victims in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

[snip]

The U.S. military on Tuesday announced the deaths of six more American soldiers, pushing the U.S. military death toll since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003 to at least 2,978 — five more than the number killed in the Sept. 11 attacks in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

The milestone came with the deaths of the three soldiers Monday and three more Tuesday in roadside bomb attacks near Baghdad, the military said.

President Bush has said that the Iraq war is part of the United States' post-Sept. 11 approach to threats abroad. Going on offense against enemies before they could harm Americans meant removing the Taliban from power in Afghanistan, pursuing members of al-Qaida and seeking regime change in Iraq, Bush has said.

Democratic leaders have said the Bush administration has gotten the U.S. bogged down in Iraq when there was no evidence of links to the Sept. 11 attacks, detracting from efforts against al-Qaida and other terrorist groups.

The AP count of those killed includes at least seven military civilians. Prior to the deaths announced Tuesday, the AP count was 15 higher than the Defense Department's tally, last updated Friday. At least 2,377 died as a result of hostile action, according to the military's numbers.

Mission accomplished, eh, Georgie? Congratulations: you've fucked up yet again. The only question is why anyone ever expected anything different from you?

I never really appreciated James Brown until long after the "Motown Sound" had been relegated to oldies shows during harangue-a-thons on PBS. But there's something almost poetic about Brown's death on Christmas Eve, the day before Dreamgirls, which features Eddie Murphy as a James Brown-like singer in a role that for the first time has the terms "Oscar®" and "Eddie Murphy" being used in the same sentence. For who is more qualified to remind us of James Brown in theatres this weekend than Eddie Murphy? After all, this is the guy who brought us "James Brown's Celebrity Hot Tub" on SNL:



...and paid this tribute to Brown in 1983:



Here's James Brown at Live 8 last year:



...and a very preppie looking James Brown from 1968:



Hunh!

Unbelievable....check out this appalling New York Times article today trying to paint a pretty picture of our delusional president:

President Bush marched into his year-end news conference last week with the usual zip in his step. As always, he professed little worry about his legacy or the polls. As always, he said the United States would win in Iraq. The nation might despair, but not Mr. Bush; his presidential armor seemed firmly intact.

Yet a longtime friend of Mr. Bush’s recently spotted a tiny crack in that armor. “He looked tired, for the first time, which I hadn’t seen before,” this friend said.

Mr. Bush has never been one for introspection, in public or in private. But the questions of how the president is coping, and whether his public pronouncements match what he feels as he searches for a new strategy in Iraq, have been much on the minds of Bush-watchers these days.

Can the president really believe, as he said on Wednesday, that “victory in Iraq is achievable,” when a bipartisan commission led by his own father’s secretary of state calls the situation there “grave and deteriorating?” Is he truly content to ignore public opinion and let “the long march of history,” as he calls it, pass judgment on him after he is gone? Does he lie awake at night, as President Lyndon B. Johnson did during the Vietnam War, fretting over his decisions?

Mr. Bush addressed the sleep issue in a recent interview with People magazine, saying, “I’m sleeping a lot better than people would assume.”

Yet the president can never really escape the rigors of his job, Laura Bush, the first lady, said in an interview on Sunday on the CBS news program “Face the Nation.” “Sure, he lives with it, 24 hours a day,” Mrs. Bush said. “You don’t have his job and not live with it 24 hours a day.”

But as to whether he second-guesses himself, Mr. Bush gives little quarter, reducing such inquiries to the broad-brush question of whether it was correct to topple Saddam Hussein. Nor does the president seem to question his handling of the postwar period.

His friend, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Mr. Bush still believed that Donald H. Rumsfeld “did a great job over all” as the secretary of defense, despite the president’s decision to replace him after Democrats swept the November elections.

“I think he knows it’s bad over there,” this person said, “but I’m not quite sure he fully appreciates the incompetence of what’s gone on.”

Of course, it is politically perilous for any president to wallow in the nation’s troubles, or his own. The last modern president who did so was Jimmy Carter, in what came to be called his “malaise” speech, during the energy crisis of 1979. He was drummed out of office the following year, crushed during his election campaign by the optimism of Ronald Reagan. Yet at the same time, presidents can ill afford to appear overly upbeat when the public is down.

“The American public wants their chief executives strong, confident and optimistic, but you can’t look like you’re detached from reality,” said Representative Rahm Emanuel, Democrat of Illinois, who was President Bill Clinton’s political director and who engineered the Democratic majority victory in the House.

In Mr. Emanuel’s view, Mr. Bush’s talk of victory bumps the detachment boundary. “He doesn’t seem to be addressing the facts on the ground as the rest of us perceive them,” Mr. Emanuel said.

Some Republicans said much the same.

“The poll numbers that continue to come out show that the American people have turned against this war,” said Senator Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska. “The Republicans are no longer in charge of the Congress because of this war. Those are the realities, and I don’t think the administration has quite accepted those realities yet, nor the realities of how bad it is on the ground in Iraq.”

Yet the war is clearly very much on the president’s mind. When Mr. Bush met privately last week with a dozen rabbis and Jewish educators, they expected he might open the conversation by talking about Israel. Instead, the president greeted them in the Roosevelt Room of the White House with a discourse on Iraq, and why he still believes it can be a beacon for democracy in the Middle East.

“I got the sense of a man who feels very heavily the weight of history,” said Robert Wexler, president of the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, who attended the meeting, “but I didn’t get the sense of someone who feels he’s doing the wrong thing. He said, ‘I might change tactics, but I’m not going to change the way I feel about it.’ ”

That conviction may simply be a necessary part of the presidential armor, a kind of psychological protection against what Doris Kearns Goodwin, the historian and biographer of presidents, calls “the unbearable burden” a commander in chief would have to face if he came to the painful realization that he wrongly sent troops into combat.

Mr. Bush was asked last week if he had experienced any pain, given his own acknowledgment that things in Iraq had not gone according to plan. He spun the question toward the military families’ pain — “my heart breaks” for them, he said — before turning it back to his own: “The most painful aspect of the presidency is the fact that I know my decisions have caused young men and women to lose their lives.”

Being commander in chief means learning to cope with stress. Abraham Lincoln went to the theater to relax. Franklin D. Roosevelt, paralyzed from polio, lulled himself to sleep by imagining himself as a boy sledding down a snowy slope at Hyde Park.

Mr. Bush sweats out his stress on weekend mountain bike rides. On weeknights, the Bushes watch football or baseball on television, “to try not to worry a little bit,” Mrs. Bush told CBS.

Presidents in trouble often look to history for solace, and Mr. Bush is no exception. He has sometimes likened himself to Harry S. Truman — a president who struggled to explain the nation’s involvement in Korea, but whose reputation was redeemed after his death. Mr. Bush also seems to have Lincoln on his mind; he told People magazine that Ms. Goodwin’s recent book, about Lincoln and his cabinet, “Team of Rivals,” was his favorite this year.

Oh, the poor dear....his job is getting to him, it's SO stressful. I'm sure the American people want to know that this president, who led us into a war for absolutely no good reason, is getting his rest and relaxation.

Disgusting.

(And no, I'm not taking the day off just because it's Christmas. If the last six years have shown us anything, it's that this guy can do a heck of a lot of damage in 24 hours. We can't afford to drop our guard -- not even on Christmas.

I'm just speechless:

Pope Benedict XVI celebrated Christmas Midnight Mass in the splendor of St. Peter's Basilica early today with an appeal for abused children around the world, including child soldiers, beggars and others deprived of sustenance and love.

"The child of Bethlehem directs our gaze toward all children who suffer and are abused in the world, the born and the unborn," Benedict said in his homily, referring to the church's stand against abortion.

In celebrating Jesus' birth, he said people should direct their thoughts toward children forced to serve "as soldiers in a violent world, toward children who have to beg, toward children who suffer deprivation and hunger, toward children who are unloved."

"Let us pray this night that the brightness of God's love may enfold all these children," the pontiff said. "Let us ask God to help us do our part so that the dignity of children may be respected."

The Pontiff has conveniently forgotten this. And this. And this. And this. And this. And this.

Shall I go on?

The corpse has the floor:




...and my second favorite Christmas movie:

I'm actually quite lucky where Holiday Obligations are concerned. Having succeeded some time ago in decoupling Christmas and New Year's from the media hoopla and the Norman Rockwell imagery with which these holidays are identified, I'm free to enjoy them as days off from work.

Mr. Brilliant and I already exchanged gifts on the Solstice, so the remainder of our holiday observance is actually quite restful. This year we're changing our tradition of going out for Indian food on Christmas Eve, choosing instead a more seemingly subversive option -- a Turkish restaurant, in honor of Virginia Rep. Virgil Goode.

But this year the holiday season seems different. Perhaps it's that even Bill O'Reilly has largely given up the War on Christmas meme, or perhaps it's the fact that the weather is unusually warm in much of the country (Denver notwithstanding). But there's a hint of cynicism in the air that we don't usually see. I noticed last night that the premium cable channels offered a wide array of horror movies -- something one wouldn't expect to see two days before Christmas. And it seems that the television offerings for the entire week demonstrate a lot more cynicism, even nihilism, than in years past.

Heather Havrilesky at Salon has the lowdown:

Since you're not about to put down the chocolate-covered cherries or that bottle of red wine until sometime in the new year, the only way to avoid a teary-eyed, insult-hurling outburst that it'll take years of therapy to undo is to escape into an alternative reality that's almost as dark as your current one. So here it is, a holiday viewing guide for the whole dysfunctional family, one that gracefully sidesteps anything remotely wholesome or heartwarming, dodges any and all gratefulness and hand-holding, and veers recklessly into the realm of bad attitudes, heavy drinking, filthy sex, gratuitous violence and tragic endings, preferably peppered with a glib disdain for all that is sweet and lovely and joyful in the world. What could be more festive?

[Please note: Times listed below are Eastern Standard Time. On the cable channels in particular, times must be adjusted according to your time zone. You can check your local listings here or here.]

Sunday, Dec. 24

"Bad Santa," 9 p.m. on Comedy Central
Billy Bob Thornton's Santa Claus swears, smokes, farts, grumbles and drinks to excess. It's not a flawless movie, but it's just what the doctor ordered after a long day of shuffling through the mall behind large herds of dimwitted teenagers, listening to an unconscionably bad rendition of "Jingle Bell Rock."

"Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events," 8:30 p.m. on Showtime
Who wouldn't love a story for kids that starts right off the bat with the untimely death of their parents? Things get darker and more miserable from there, but somehow the kids I know treasure every tragic turn. (OK, I only know one kid, and he's kind of weird, but still...)

"Kath & Kim," 9:30 p.m. on Sundance
This very strange Australian sitcom offers a well-timed reminder that there are, indeed, human beings on the planet who are even more tedious, tacky and tactless than your family. Fetching!

Monday, Dec. 25

"Anthony Bourdain in Beirut," 8 p.m. on Travel Channel
What's darker than visiting a colorful, culturally dynamic city to sing its many praises, days before the bombs start raining down?

"One Punk Under God," 8:30 p.m. on Sundance
And you think you had a bad childhood! Ever wonder what it was like to be raised by Jim and Tammy Faye? Wonder no more: Son Jay Bakker is a true original, and despite his strange upbringing and his stubborn determination to make Christianity palatable to a hip, cynical generation, his charm and vulnerability throughout this incredibly revealing series is sure to surprise you. In this episode, Jay visits his mother, Tammy Faye, who's sick with cancer.

Tuesday, Dec. 26

"Tom Brokaw Reports: In the Shadow of the American Dream," 8 p.m. on NBC
Brokaw investigates the effects of illegal immigration in the Roaring Fork Valley of Colorado between Aspen and Vail, where, according to an NBC press release, "thousands of Hispanics, mostly from Mexico" have moved to find construction jobs among a "historically white population." The press release explains that this hourlong documentary explores "what happens to American culture and America's laws when hundreds of thousands of people enter the country illegally." Hmm, let's see. The tacos get tastier? Sounds like a heaping helping of post-holiday xenophobia for the lily-white folks at home, worried their pretty Norman Rockwell painting is about to get Diego Rivera'd.

"Boondocks" marathon, 10:30 p.m. to 6 a.m. on Cartoon Network
What better follow-up to all of those scared, angry white people than a "Boondocks" marathon? This animated show, based on Aaron McGruder's cartoon strip with the same name, follows the misadventures of Huey and Riley Freeman, two black kids who leave the south side of Chicago to live with their crazy grandfather in the predominantly white suburbs.

"Team America: World Police," 10 p.m. on Showtime
If you missed this shameless, absurd and hysterically funny puppet-populated romp through the twisted minds of post-9/11 America by "South Park" creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, well, there's no time like the post-holiday present. Just make sure any conservative, celebrity-obsessed, and/or easily offended relatives are within shouting distance, because nothing will solidify their notion of you as an irreverent, morally bereft, potty-mouthed whippersnapper like this insane film. A triumph! Four stars, eight (gay) lords a' leaping, and five opposable thumbs up!

Wednesday, Dec. 27

"Confessions of a Dangerous Mind," 3:15 p.m. on AMC
After a week at home, you're more sure than ever that your mother is bat-shit crazy. Well, this movie, based on Chuck Barris' "unauthorized autobiography," will remind you what bat-shit crazy really looks like.

"All in the Family," 6 p.m. TV Land
What better time to spend an hour with the grumbliest, screechiest, angriest family of them all, the Bunkers? In the first episode, Archie tries to escape footing the bill for his mooch cousin Oscar's funeral, and in the second, Archie considers purchasing a gun to defend his home. Those were the days!

"Poisonous Women," 7 p.m. on Discovery Times
An exploration of four different cases in which women poisoned their husbands and/or families. We can only guess that most of these crimes occurred during the holiday season.

"Big as Life: Obesity in America," 8 p.m. on Discovery Health Channel
Yes, you'll probably gain your usual 5-8 pounds from eating nothing but cookies and bread for two weeks straight, but can you technically be labeled obese? This special will either reassure you that you're in the clear, or disturb you enough to keep you away from the cookie jar for the rest of your vacation.

Thursday, Dec. 28

"100 Greatest One-Hit Wonders," 8 p.m. on VH1
Hey, Nikki, you're so fine! Gloria, I think they got your numb-ah! I like Candy! Oh, oh, Sheila, let me love you 'til the break of dawn! Watch this VH1 special and find out why using a woman's name in your bad song often ensures that you'll only have one hit during your entire musical career.

"Giant Squid: Caught on Camera," 10 p.m. on Discovery Channel
What could possibly appeal more to someone who's spent the entire week lazing about the house in soft pants than a show about a giant squid?

"Countdown to Doomsday," 11 p.m. on SciFi Channel
What will cause Earth's next mass extinction? A supervolcano? A giant solar flare? An alien invasion? An asteroid impact? A machine rebellion? Join bright-eyed, bushy-tailed host Matt Lauer for this delightfully upbeat look at the death of humankind. It's the end of the world as we know it, and Matt Lauer feels fine!

"Reno 911" marathon, 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. on Comedy Central
Let me guess: You've always wondered whether this show would make more sense to you if you saw more than part of one very strange episode. Well, here's your chance to find out!

Friday, Dec. 29

"That '70s Show" marathon, 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. on FX
Let me guess: You've always thought this show sucked, but you've never seen more than half of an episode. Well, it doesn't suck at all, and now you'll finally have a chance to find out why!

"I Shouldn't Be Alive," 7 p.m. on Discovery Channel
You probably shouldn't be alive, either, after all that eggnog, so you might be in just the right mood for this story of two fathers and their sons on a disastrous trip to Mexico. A storm sets in, and they're forced to ditch their plane at sea! And you thought just dragging a tree into the house with your dad was a challenge...

"Peep Show," 9:30 p.m. on BBC
When holiday fatigue sets in, nothing is quite as nice as a bunch of snippy young horndogs with British accents.

Saturday, Dec. 30

"Up Close and Dangerous: Orcas, Black Bears and Grey Reef Sharks," 8 p.m. on Animal PlanetWith the end of the holidays in sight, you may not be in the mood to exercise, eat green vegetables, or consider how much work you'll have when you get back to the office, but I know you're in the mood to watch "Killer Whales snatching Sea Lions from a beach in Patagonia."

"Saw," 10:15 p.m. on Showtime
Not a fan of disgusting horror movies? Well, then you'd better skip this indie gross-out slasher flick. But hey, it might keep that obnoxious teenage nephew of yours occupied long enough for you to borrow his Game Boy...

Sunday, Dec. 31

"Everest: Beyond the Limit," 5 p.m. to 11 p.m. on Discovery Channel
If you're exhausted from having spent the day standing in line behind a crowd of extremely slow, irritating humans at the local department store, trying to return a bunch of unwanted presents, just imagine standing in line behind a crowd of extremely slow, irritating humans on Mount Everest. Yes, as they fumble and stumble and amaze you with their ineptitude, your brain stops functioning and your toes freeze off! Watch this transfixing series and you'll see why a trip to Everest today has a lot in common with a trip to Disneyland.

"Shallow Grave," 9 p.m. on IFC
If sipping champagne makes your head hurt and New Year's Eve countdowns leave you cold now that Lawrence Welk and Guy Lombardo are no longer around, why not tune in for Danny Boyle's first film about a bunch of greedy, self-centered jerks whose narcissism leads them down the road to ruin? Populated by hateful characters and littered with gratuitous violence, this film is dark enough to wash away the holidays' sugary aftertaste indefinitely.

It's enough to make you glad about all those copyright issues surrounding It's a Wonderful Life that took it off of heavy rotation. But for those of you who want just a little old-fashioned sweetness with your snark, TNT is running A Christmas Story for 24 hours straight, starting at 8 PM Eastern time tonight.

Have yourself a snarky little Christmas.