Centrist* Keith Olbermann was indignant about Glenn Beck calling Rosie O’Donnell “a fat witch.” He accused Beck of having “weightphobia.”
I wanted to believe him. To believe in him. You can imagine my shock when I saw this interesting piece of video.
I guess there really are no heroes anymore.
* Sarcasm
Great blurb from the Dwinell Political Report about Katie Couric’s interview with John and Elizabeth Edwards.
WHERE IS EDWARD R. MURROW?
It appears that Katie Couric, the $14,000,000 question mark at CBS
News, is a water boy. In her interview Sunday with John and Elizabeth
Edwards, Couric was reported in Mullings to have questioned the Edwards using a third person suggestion, “There are those who would say…” or “How do you respond to people who might say…”How about preparing and asking your own questions? Or when asked, why did Edwards not ask, “Who are those folks you speak of?” Why did she ramble on for a half hour when an Edward R. Murrow would have finished up in minutes? Is it resume typing time at CBS? Her producer was just axed.
Here is a transcript of a debate on global warming (TM) involving two of the more vocal critics: Richard Lindzen and Michael Chrichton.
You can also listen to a podcast of the debate on Crichton’s website.
Absolutely one of the most enjoyable in-theatre experiences I’ve ever had. I’m not going to even attempt a review, but I can give some thoughts going in.
Grind House is a love letter to a lot of great things about cinema. Sadly, a lot of those things have been missing from the movies for a long time. Hopefully, seeing them again will make producers realize how great they were way back when and move to bring some of the old style back. Don’t hold your breath though. It is all about the money…so help make this movie a success.
I’ve only seen Sin City in bits and pieces. I am not fanatic of Frank Miller. The only other work I’d witnessed from writer/director Zack Snyder was his remake of Dawn of the Dead. I emerged from the theatre angry with a throbbing headache. Naturally I couldn’t wait to see 300.
I had occasion to see an extended trailer of 300 way back in the summer of ‘06 at Comicon in San Diego. It was unlike anything I had ever seen before. Its photography was brilliant, the presentation was bewitching. I was going to have to wait nearly a year to see the movie though. The studio was just wetting the appetite of young geek hordes.
Finally the time came to see the movie and I was lucky enough to catch it on an IMAX screen. I had seen reports leading up to release that certain members of the international (surprise!) press were convinced that Xerxes — the overbearing, imperialistic warmonger — was a surrogate for George W. Bush. That idea bears out…to an extent.
** Spoilers of course **
Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) sends a messenger to confront King Leonidas of Sparta (played by Gerard Butler.) The messenger is obnoxiously arrogant, waving the skulls of dead kings around town to intimidate little ‘ole Sparta. All that is asked of the King is to admit defeat preemptively. Bow to the great Xerxes and he can keep his command. He can still rule Sparta, if only as a puppet of the larger conglomeration. No doubt this is a thinly veiled reference to the United States and their Middle East policy. Be our friend, do what we say, and you may live. Defy us, and face the consequences.
Xerxes commands an army of seemingly endless numbers with the very latest and greatest in technology. They trample all who refuse to kneel and submit to his mighty rule. This bloodshed can all be avoided if the King would merely swallow his pride and get on his knees.
For the record, Snyder claims to have not intended any political reference in the film, and any that you find is merely coincidental. But you can surely view the film this way. There is one problem though. Leonidas and his crew are clearly the heroes of this story. They fight with honor, for family, for God and for freedom. If George Bush is Xerxes, who is Leonidas? Saddam Hussein? Abu Musab al-Zarqawi maybe? Hard to believe. Those would by dicey “heroes” even by Hollywood standards. I believe the view of the press is a case of seeing what you want to see. I think you will find the pieces fit together more completely if you turn the situation around completely. The fact is, this film could be a defense of George W. Bush and the United States, if only subconsciously.
King Leonidas is a ruler of a free country. A democracy. The safety of his people are threatened on his own land by men from the middle east. But Xerxes commands the huge army? That must be a representation of the United States! Maybe so, maybe not. Xerxes demands that Leonidas bow to him. Submit to him. Convert even. The Persian army is really a unification of fighters from many nations. Much like the Muslim threat we face today. Yes the United States has a large army, but we are also reminded, with some regularity when preaching restraint, that Islam’s followers number between one and two BILLION. Sparta may be powerful, but it is increasingly isolated and left to defend freedom on its own. So is the United States.
Leonidas decides he isn’t the type to take this sort of thing lying down. He climbs a mountain to visit an ancient and revered council. No leader of Sparta may march into war without the consent of the council. Despite their positions of power, these are not good people. Deformed, stuck in their ways, ignorant to the responsibility they have to defend their people, the council rejects the King’s battle plans and sends him back down the mountain steaming. We latter find the council has been bribed heavily by the Persian Empire. Oil-for-food anyone? And just who would be the council on the side of Islam if that were the way Snyder meant to portray it? Who was the voice stopping extremist Muslims from fighting? That is a square peg for members of the international press.
Leonidas decides to defy the wishes of the council and defend his country and people, repercussions be damned. Much of his talk to his soldiers is peppered with “stay the course” type language. He announces he is going for a walk to the coast (where Xerxes and clan will start their attack) with his soldiers as his body guards. In this way he is technically not going to war. The Senate is outraged but what can they do?
Once the battle gets going things are bloody and the superior fighting technique of the Spartans is winning handily over the faceless waves of devotees to God-King Xerxes. It is almost as if these followers are sacrificing themselves to a God, trying to defeat Sparta with overwhelming numbers alone.
Over time things begin to look more and more grim for our heroes. They have fought valiantly and defied the odds. There are just too many Persians though, and only 300 Spartans. They had support for another tribe but it has since called it quits. They don’t have the guts to stick it out when times get tough. They call the Spartans madmen for staying the course. Better to live in slavery that to die in battle. Not only this, but a trader has revealed valuable secrets to Xerxes. This information is enough to cripple the defense of Sparta. Imagine, people living among you, betraying you, responsible for thousands of deaths.
Where is the rest of the Spartan army? Why only 300? Well, the Spartan Senate has refused to escalate the war, accusing the King of being an anarchist. Only later do we find out that they have their own reasons for being obstructionist, and the good of the people doesn’t rank high on their list. In fact, when the Chuck Schumer-ish Senator is finally stabbed on the Senate floor, the Hollywood liberal crowd in the theatre cheers with approval each time I’ve seen it. Certainly a justifiable reaction, but oh the irony!
Xerxes? Leonidas? Go ask the press, they know everything.
By the end of the film a Spartan gives a rousing speech, he pumps up the Spartan warriors with rationale on why they fight. God, family, freedom…a brighter future than anyone could ever imagine. That last one is telling. I don’t think you’d ever hear Osama Bin Laden include the hope for a bright future in one of his speeches. Love for status quo, a return to the dark ages, these are what these extremists dream about.
I don’t think either comparison to current events fits perfectly, nor do I think they were intended. I just want to show that there is certainly another side of the coin when people in the press compare Xerxes to GWB. Regardless, if you need the subtext in a movie to affirm your position in political issues, then you have bigger issues to deal with then politics. Sadly, this is all the rage in Hollywood these days.
In the end, the movie is a tad short on story, but not so short that it ruins the film. Snyder gets to the point rather quickly and spends the rest of the movie hammering it home. Stay home if you can’t handle violence, there is plenty.
Buter’s portrayal of Leonidas conjures up memories of Russell Crowe in Gladiator but can you blame him? Crowe set the bar for this type of film, 300 might have just raised it.
Just because I shop at Whole Foods does not mean I am interested in signing your manifesto.
I came for the avocados, not the revolution.
Finding time between juvenile half-baked insults, a poster named “Billy Smith” had occasion to pontificate on this humble blog. Taking time out of his busy schedule of “being close to the case,” Billy set the facts straight and attempted to somehow correct my opinion.
His input was welcome, and the debate was enjoyable, but like all good things — it ended. Billy Smith faded away and so did the Tennie Pierce scandal that brought him here…to a blog…even though he hates them. LA County and the villainous John and Ken moved on to more pressing matters and so did I. Until this week.
On March 14th, Christine Pelisek of The LA Weekly published a piece titled What Really Happened At Fire Station 5? Nobody can accuse the LA Weekly of being a tool of the John and Ken show — a part of the vast right wing conspiracy. No. Much like Seven Days in my native Vermont, LA Weekly is an artsy type of local freebie. It is a paper from which you can always depend on a gratuitous attack on George W. Bush if you need cheering up.
So what does the article say? What did Pelisek learn in her months of research on the subject?
Los Angeles Fire Department engineer Clinton Arrigoni was getting ready for bed at the old Fire Station 5 in Westchester when he was cornered by four of his fellow crew members, including 49-year-old veteran African-American firefighter Tennie Pierce. Arrigoni wasn’t surprised. He was soon being promoted to captain, and per tradition, he was a tempting target for a “chairing.”
The four firefighters gave him two choices: walk to the hose tower, located behind the station, or be carried. Arrigoni walked. Once there, his hands were tied to a chair with duct tape, then he was showered for 10 minutes with mustard, ketchup, salad dressing and barbecue sauce…
Of course supporters of Pierce claimed that photos published with Tennie at the forefront of pranks on other firefighters were old and not really relevant. This incident happened two days before Tennie was served dog food. Naturally, that argument didn’t hold water from the start anyway. There is no statute of limitations on pranks pulled when they are relevant to a case such as this. This is especially the case when the pranks performed by Pierce were plainly more insensitive than the one pulled on him (The “Oy Vey! I’m Gay!” prank for example.)
Pierce was boisterous and well liked, and, at a towering and broad-shouldered 6 feet 5 inches and 280 pounds, he also excelled in sports like volleyball, where his spiking prowess was legendary. One colleague from Station 61, where Pierce worked from 1991 to 2003, says, “He was always the big horse at the trough: ‘If you serve me, I will spike the ball back, because I am a Big Dog.’ ”Two days after Pierce and the others showered engineer Arrigoni with ketchup — an incident never before reported publicly — the Station 5 crew decided to grab an early-morning volleyball game at nearby Dockweiler State Beach. Pierce began loudly bragging about being the “Big Dog,” his longtime nickname, and avidly taunting a fellow crew member, Latino paramedic George Arevalo — at 5 feet 7 inches nearly a foot shorter than Pierce. One player, firefighter Glen Phillips, tells the L.A. Weekly Pierce was shouting, “I take craps bigger than you!” at the much smaller Arevalo.Pierce’s laughter and gross taunts seemed like no big deal — at the time. But within hours, Arevalo, a quiet type who was studying to become a helicopter pilot, would feed dog food to Tennie Pierce in the Station 5 kitchen…
This story had been reported before but largely ignored by the main stream media. It puts the dog food into context and gives motivation to the prankster who had been taunted by Pierce. It leads one to believe that neither the selection of the pranked nor the mode of prank were selected on a racial basis.
In a three-month investigation, the Weekly has learned that the crew present when Pierce ate dog food was not “nine white members,” as Pierce claimed in an emotional plea to a packed City Council chamber on November 28; that a taunting incident cited by Pierce as proof of harassment and retaliation was actually led by a black firefighter; that leaders of a respected black firefighters’ organization refuse to call what happened to Pierce race-based; and that Pierce called it “water under the bridge” — before hiring an attorney.
“Vance Burnes, in particular, was persistent with his harassment of Pierce and even when Pierce was speaking with a captain, Burnes kept barking like a dog and asking how dog food tastes,” his claim alleges. After confronting Burnes, Pierce says, he then found a can of dog food in his truck.
However, again lending some credence to the criticism that Pierce is not a victim of racial harassment, the Weekly has learned that the key firefighter Pierce named for taunting him that day at Hotchkin training center, Vance Burnes, is black. (Burnes refused to talk to the Weekly.)
Billy liked to claim that the lawsuit was not about the prank or its alleged racial nature – is was about the harassment he received after filing the complaint. This is not true. Only after the explosion of attention in the media did Genie Harrison change her tactics. She knew she was fighting a losing battle. They were on to her.
Even if this claim were true, there is no doubt that Pierce’s complaint of harassment was heavily laced with the belief that his harassment was also based on his race. LA Weekly has effectively blown holes in this idea as well. Pierce’s teasing was lead by a black firefighter.
A few hours later, Arevalo went to Ralphs grocery store with Captain John Tohill and two other firefighters. It was Arevalo’s turn to cook, and he had planned spaghetti and meat sauce...Tohill bought the dog food with the idea of placing the can on Pierce’s plate as a lighthearted trophy for recent “Big Dog” volleyball and handball victories.The dinner bell rang around 6 p.m., almost 10 hours after Pierce had taunted Arevalo. After Pierce’s highly charged appearance with his lawyer, Genie Harrison, before the Los Angeles City Council in November, incorrect media stories nationwide repeated Pierce’s blatantly false description of the firefighters gathered at or near the community table that night as “nine white members.” In fact, the eyewitnesses, who actually numbered eight, were a racial and ethnic mix: Two are Latinos — George Arevalo and Mike Perea — and Kelly Niles is Asian-American. Glen Phillips and Mike Pagliuso are white, as are captains Tohill and Burton, and rookie David Flynn.
Station 5’s racial diversity was also reflected in the shift’s workers not present in the kitchen: Battalion Chief Steve Coleman, staff assistant Oscar Scott and paramedic Mark Flot are black; engineer Mike Telles — one of Pierce’s friends — is Latino; paramedic Ron Lingo is white.
These paragraphs speak for themselves. Pierce and Harrison have shown they are not afraid to lie to get the money they want. Such evidence should be remembered when considering credibility.
Tennie Pierce being sensitive
To the crew, it was another absurd and over-the-top station prank without racial overtones. Both captains, Tohill and Burton, say they were unaware of Arevalo’s plan, and firefighter Phillips says he was watching TV when he was surprised by an eruption of laughter. But Pierce and his lawyer, Harrison, insist the incident was a conspiracy in which his crew set him up for a group humiliation.According to Niles, because Pierce was so clearly pissed off, Captain Burton told instigator Arevalo to go apologize. Niles and Pagliuso went along. Niles says Arevalo admitted to Pierce he had put the dog food in his spaghetti, and Pierce accepted his apology and called it “water under the bridge.”“He was like, ‘I know, man — it was a prank,’ ” Niles, the Asian-American firefighter, told the Weekly. “ ‘I know you guys were playing around.’ ”Captains Tohill and Burton also spoke to Pierce, and at 8 p.m. summoned the rest of the crew to a meeting to explain that Pierce had calmed down. In their reverse-discrimination lawsuit, the two captains say Pierce “emphatically requested that it [the incident] be kept quiet.”
This just goes to show you what happens when a love of money and a greedy lawyer get involved in something. Pierce’s natural immediate reaction was understandable and his forgiveness was the right thing to do. You can read a lot more into the truth of an incident by what happened immediately after than you can by testimony of someone coached by a lawyer to maximize earning potential.
While firefighters defy efforts to end hazing, they have their own internal unwritten rule: Don’t mess with a co-worker’s food, family or equipment. But they don’t always obey even that rule. Firefighters have eaten green napkins, served in salad like lettuce, and been tricked into downing bottles of Tabasco. One firefighter at Station 14 in South Los Angeles in the late 1970s made a lemon meringue pie out of sawdust and shaving cream, using empty Marie Callender’s boxes and tins for realism.
Dog food has also been slipped into firefighters’ food before. In the early 1970s, white firefighter Francis Brown was tricked into eating a dog-food meat loaf after he repeatedly hogged the leftovers — a no-no behavior known as “maggot messing.”“He was halfway through [his meat loaf] when the guys started barking,” says Schneider. “He found the [dog food] cans on the window. He then sat back down and finished eating the whole meat loaf.”A white captain, Doug Close, got tricked into eating dog food in the 1980s after he refused to chip in for daily meals, then got caught chowing down. “For the rest of the man’s career, they would buy a can of dog food and clean it out and would put all his pencils and pens in it,” says Schneider. “He would just shrug it off. It went on for 10 years… Most firemen know that the worst thing you can do is complain.”
This was a major talking point with the make-Tennie-rich crowd. They endlessly claimed that no firefighter had ever been fed dog food. Making a rather large leap in logic, they claimed that since the prank had no precedent, it must have been racially motivated. This would be a very weak argument even if it were true, alas, like so many of their claims — it wasn’t true.
Yet just before Thanksgiving of 2004, a little over a month after he ate dog food, Pierce told Station 5 Chief Coleman he wanted disciplinary actions against Burton, Tohill and Arevalo, the slight Latino whom he’d compared to the size of his craps. He asked to be transferred away from Station 5 — and to see a psychiatrist.He contacted the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, reported the incident to the city’s Office of Discrimination Complaint Resolution and hired an attorney, later switching to Genie Harrison. After the dog-food prank, Pierce rarely worked again — only about 40 days over the next two years.Employment attorney Lee T. Paterson, an author of a book on employee and labor law who is not involved in the case, says Pierce’s behavior fits a classic approach for building a case in court. Paterson says, “The more the person is injured or damaged, the more money you will make: Pierce gets sick from dog food, takes Tums, and he is back to his normal self and comes back to work. What is that worth? Not much. But if he is sick? His wife testifies he hasn’t had sex? He can’t go back to work? There is an advantage for the attorney and the plaintiff to have a lot of damage or at least to talk about a lot of damage. The second stop is the plaintiff’s lawyer’s office, the next stop is a psychiatrist.”
We didn’t really need an expert to tell us this did we? Please tell me that we are smarter than that!
It is a matter of some note that despite Harrison’s outreach to the president of the Stentorians, an association of African-American firefighters, that group’s leader has refused to depict the dog-food hazing as racist.President Armando Hogan recalls that he learned of the debacle from a member, and in turn contacted Pierce, who wasn’t a member at the time. “We reached out to Pierce when it first happened,” says Hogan, who is black. “Someone who worked in that battalion called me up, and I got in contact with Pierce. No members should be subjected to any inhumane treatment. We don’t want it to happen. We wanted him to know we were going to be a support system. What we don’t support is anybody’s behavior that is disrespectful in the work force.”
But after delving into it, Hogan tells the Weekly, “I can’t say he was fed dog food because he is black.”
I’ll leave you with a couple more gems.
“You got to give Harrison credit,” says Paterson. “Someone in the City Attorney’s Office got scared… If this firefighter used to go into burning buildings and was horribly damaged by two bites of dog food, I can see settling the case for $50,000 or $20,000; $2.7 million is a complete capitulation.”
And this one.
During her negotiations in the summer of 2006 with City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo, Harrison produced a sociology professor who claimed that eating dog food is connected to racism. David Wellman, a professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz, stated that the association of a black man and dog food was linked to slavery. In an article in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, Harrison said Wellman’s views were fundamental to her case. “He and I worked closely for many months developing strategy,” she said.Some civil rights advocates scoff at Harrison and Wellman’s dog-food-and-slavery argument. “I scratch my head,” says Joe Hicks, the black vice president of Community Advocates Inc., a human-relations organization. “I… have been in the trenches a long time around issues of racism. I just have not heard the connection with dog food or black people.”Well-known retired black civil rights attorney Leo Branton, who was approached by the NAACP to publicly support Pierce but declined, says, “Being fed dog food isn’t a big deal… Dog food doesn’t kill anybody, and it doesn’t make you sick. Back in the days of slavery, they didn’t have such a thing as dog food. That is a false statement.”
All this goes against “Billy Smith’s” argument that the lawsuit was about the harassment he received after complaining and NOT about the prank being racist. The basis for the lawsuit may or may not have changed, but it did not start that way. A change in strategy is reflective of a thoroughly debunked set of claims. Time to move the goal posts.
The article goes on to talk about the utter incompetence of the city attorney and city council. But that is a different issue for a different blog.
I originally intended to include quotes from “Billy” but to my surprise, when going back and looking at his comments…all I found was a dizzying mix of arrogance, weak personal insults and vague statements about the case. At the time I noticed that he never debated the facts, he always ignored ideas that I presented. In effect he did a very good job of not leaving himself open to analysis in the future, it was almost as if he didn’t know anything about the case. Funny.
I’ve been very busy but I plan a longer look at global warming in the next week or so (as well as other topics.) Until then…enjoy…
In the end, the result we are left with is the same…garbage. The case of border agents Ramos and Compean crystallizes — but is by no means exhaustive — the failure of the Bush Administration.
The details become more and more damning, the stonewalling and cavalier attitude towards real problems in real people’s lives become more and more infuriating. The symptoms in this story are not unique – a sense of apathy, procrastination, dismissal, misleading “facts” – in fact they can be found in any number of botched policy ideas or ignored issues over the past six years. Katrina, the war effort, Walter Reed Hospital, where does it end?
It seems, it is impossible to have a President who can be straight with his constituents or be 100% on the up-and-up, the job is just too big, with secrets too important to avoid getting your hands a little dirty. But following an atrocious eight years in this regard presided over by Bill Clinton, I would have preferred the President keep this silliness to a minimum.
Before we can answer the question, it would be nice to know what is really going on. Are we dealing with an incompetent leader who has surrounded himself with less competent staff who are slow to react to problems and unaware of issues that people care about? Or are we dealing with something much more sinister? Is this administration purposely covering up truth in order to achieve its own goals which may or may not be in line with the goals of the people who put him in office.
It is far too difficult to painstakingly analyze the sins of George W. Bush. I don’t have the time/patience/desire to make that kind of effort. Such comprehensive studies are pretty much unavoidable (some things more accurate than others) and a tidal wave of books will no doubt closely follow his departure from office.
He is tired, and so am I.
I didn’t vote for Bush in the Republican Primary leading up to the 2000 election. I voted for someone else. I dont’ plan on voting for his candidate of choice next time either. I plan on voting for someone else. I did vote for him in the general elections of 2000 and 2004. I supported him for several years, although he has never been a favorite of mine. I can’t exactly date when my support began to erode, or when it was gone altogether. All I know is I can’t wait until he is gone.
I do believe he is smarter than he appears. Public speaking is not necessarily indicative of intelligence. I believe on most issues he has his heart in the right place. I believe he has the high ground on many issues that he gets beat up over but he fails to adequately defend his positions, his reasons for doing what he does. This is not a good sign. It is another indication of a predisposition to failure. Why?
So which is it? I wish I knew. I think it is some of both. Does it matter? Our lives are affected the same either way, but it is important that we expose corruption if/when it exists. The more we cleanse the system of political jackasses who use public trust for their own means, the greater chance we have of frightening the next generation of hacks into finding something else to do or acting in accordance with the people’s wishes and best interest.
Of course, exaggerations, witch hunts, petty political grudge holding, dirty tricks, and the like should not be justified in the name of exposing corruption either. With the ‘08 elections already getting so much publicity, it would be important to remember this and try to keep things civil. Fat chance, I know.
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You Know What I’m Saying?
