Kick-Ass 2

The story of un-super-powered people who dress up as super-heroes and super-villains and then clobber each other, along with clobbering and getting clobbered by plenty of people who don't bother dressing up at all. Interestingly, the movie has the characters as much more sexually active than the comic does. It helps that the actors who play the characters are considerably older than the characters who appear in the comic. It's much easier to see that their hormones are raging.

There was a discussion recently about books versus their movie versions, how movies have to take 200 to 300 pages and squeeze the contents down into an hour and a half movie and how much gets lost in the translation. Kick-Ass 2 was written and drawn with the movie version in mind, but the similar, heavily visual language of the comics and the movies also helped to make the movie greatly resemble the comic.

And, of course, there's a Kick-Ass wikia.

Comics panel and demographics

I largely agree with the blogger and not really with the comics creators on this. The creators are represented pretty well by Len Wein's comment:

“I think every time you take a female character, a black character, a Hispanic character, a gay character, and make that the point of the character, you are minimalizing the character,” he said. “I have written anything you can possibly think of. I have created Storm who was the first black female superhero. I created a number of other characters, and it never matters to me what the color of their skin was. I was writing about who they were as human beings, and it wasn’t Black Storm. She was Storm.”

Essentially, the writers on this panel think that the writing takes precedence over the specific situations that the characters find themselves in, that storytelling involves presenting characters as being certain types that transcend certain characteristics, i.e., their ethnicity or gender or sexual preference.

I read a review of Supergirl in The Comics Journal back during the 1980s and the reviewer looked at possible new directions for the character to take in a new series. The reviewer's approach to thinking about a new series for her was to think of problems that she could be confronted with and ways that she could go about solving them.

Once, in the TV series Family Ties, Alex P. Keaton filled in his sister Mallory about an American president of the 1800s. He had a couple of seconds to get her to think about this president, not just as an old figure from musty, yellowing history book pages, but as a real and once-living person that she could immediately identify with and understand. He took the tack of describing the problems that the president faced, the decisions the president made in response to those problems and the reactions that various groups had to his decisions. Alex's approach worked and Mallory understood the president as a real person who faced understandable problems.

This, to me, is what drama is all about. Wein is right in that an author shouldn't just place characters in a limiting box and shouldn't just think of how an African-American or a gay Iranian would approach a problem, but I think that could be a good starting point for many interesting stories.

it's valuable to get other perspectives into the comics field. I think it's valuable to be aware of how other demographic groups see situations and to take an approach to comics that's not dependent on being a white, straight male. Writers can then increase the number of the kinds of problems that characters can face and increase the number of ways in which characters can go about solving problems.

Update: Do comic stories have to be violent? The superhero stories certainly are, even though they've had "day off" stories from way back when where the superheroes take their colored, skintight outfits off and just hang out and enjoy the day. They can also have scenes that are visually jazzed up, but where the main point is a dialogue between some of the characters, but yeah, there's not much point in having muscular men and tough-looking women in body-hugging outfits if the authors can't toss two or three fight scenes an issue in.

But do comics stories in general have to be violent? Not at all. Fantagraphics publishes a whole series of comics where the violence is either completely absent or is kept at a minimum and when it's used, is clearly relevant to the story. Love  & Rockets is one of their flagship titles. That has a bit of nudity here and there, but again, it's clearly relevant to the story when it's used. Hate is another cool series they published at one point.

Sirius XM Radio

When I purchased my present car about two years ago, I got a Sirius XM radio with it. A very cool feature is that I can get channels much, MUCH farther away from home than before. I managed to get my usual station, WXPN (88.5 FM), all the way up into central New Jersey. I would have preferred to have gotten the Sirius channel 741 – The Village, their only Folk music station, but that's only available on a home set, not on a car set. I settled for a near substitute, channel 31 – The Coffee House. It was okay. My sister was riding with me a few months ago and complained about hearing the same songs over and over. I agreed that the station was a bit repetitive.

Recently, my radio got re-set to the zero station, so I switched around and listed to a few different stations. Settled on channel 27 – Deep Tracks, a rock 'n' roll station. Naturally, they play all of the really big hits, but one thing I really like about it is that they play a lot of secondary songs too, songs where I could immediately identify the artist, but not the particular track they were playing. One doesn't usually hear those songs on the radio.

Artists like Madonna play songs that you either hear ALL the time or they play completely forgettable tunes that one dismisses immediately. Artists like The Bangles play lots of in-between songs, songs that are enjoyable, but you can see why they're not super-awesome mega-hits. And yes, naturally, I collected lots of Bangles albums, but no Madonna ones.

The Wolverine

I could tell from the previews that this movie would have a lot to do with the 1982 mini-series (Four issues and called just plain “Wolverine”). Is the movie based on the mini-series? Yes, but VERY loosely. Marvel does indeed have a page on their wikia about it, but they warn the reader that it contains spoilers, so I recommend checking that out after one has seen the film.

Reminds me a little bit of the film Hansel and Gretel, which I saw on DVD a little while ago. In both films, the hero takes lots and LOTS of physical punishment. The difference with Wolverine is that we know he can take it. Hansel doesn't take too much punishment, but Gretel sure did. She ends up being victorious and none the worse for wear, but her being non-super-powered means that I winced a lot more than I did with Wolverine.

Despicable Me 2

An amusing trifle. Completely unserious comedy. Good view on romance, that it's far more likely to occur when two people are focusing together on a mission of some sort than when they're deliberately seeking romance per se. The “minions” are lots and lots of fun. They're so popular, they're slated to get their own film in 2014, with Sandra Bullock doing the voice for the villain of the movie.

The Heat

Fascinating to see that the first real moment of female bonding in the picture comes when the Boston cop Mullins (Melissa McCarthy) shows off her weapons collection to New York Federal Agent Ashburn (Sandra Bullock). Lots and lots of laugh-out-load moments.

The Man of Steel

The Man of Steel reminds me of The Avengers in terms of the widespread destruction that the super-fights cause (Superman battles some fellow Kryptonians, so they have no trouble tearing up the city like tissue paper). I think The Avengers movie does a better job of alternating quiet moments with loud ones. Man of Steel is very, very loud, fast and destructive. In the Guardian, some people utilized an insurance program to look at The Avengers movie and to estimate the cost of the damage that Loki caused to New York City. Comparable real-life costs are “9/11 ($83bn), Hurricane Katrina ($90bn) or the Japanese tsunami ($122bn) to fix.” They estimate the damage from The Avengers fight to be around $160bn. The Man of Steel fight? Whoof. That's got to be in the neighborhood of $220bn at least, as several sections of New York, er that is, Metropolis, end up looking as though they've suffered a really heavy B-52 strike.

Interesting to see that the Clark Kent-Lois Lane relationship is carried out very differently from the usual one. It's a good deal more plausible than the usual one is.

Troubling to see two kinds of drone strikes

NBC News reports that US drones can launch a “personality” strike or a “signature” strike. The personality strike relies upon intel collected from the field and the target is very specifically identified. Drone operators know the name of the person being assassinated from a distance. That's troubling, but the signature strike is far more troubling. The signature strike depends on following behavior patterns in the person being observed. As a blog post of 2006 observed, our intel services have “been there, done that.” Person A might call Person B. B might call Person C's number. Person A might later call the number for Person C as well. Is this a small group of terrorists keeping in touch with each other? Actually, probably not. These connections actually got a nickname: “Pizza Hut connections.” Person A might indeed be calling Person B because B is a friend, but Person C often turned out to be a pizza delivery place or some similar business that both A and B used. Countless man-hours were wasted running down just such useless connections. Of course “According to President Bush, the NSA spy program was used only for gathering intelligence on citizens suspected of plotting with Al Qaida inside the United States,” and hey, we all know how reliable and truthful Bush was, eh? So, it's really far from clear that the targeting the US Government used was anywhere near as precise in reality as it was in theory.

It certainly sounds from the NBC piece that today's drone strikes are much better planned and that the intel is much more substantiated, but there is the past to consider.

How seriously should we take Politifact?

So, a sort-of, kind-of liberalish columnist publishes this. Gets lots and LOTS of comments. A liberal commenter (Comments are deleted after a few days, so these won't be up for the long term) stated the following:

Almost two and a half years ago, John Boehner and the flood of new Tea Party winners in the 2010 election promised that House Republicans would be the ‘jobs creators’, since President Obama and the Democrats were doing such a slow job at it.
So where are the jobs? Since then:

• Number of Republican-introduced jobs-creation bills in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives – ZERO.

• Number of Democrat-introduced jobs-creation bills allowed to come to a vote in the GOP controlled House of Representatives - ZERO.

And of course, not one of those GOP members mentions that they blocked an increase in funds for embassy security. But you'd never know if this if you watch Fox religiously.

A conservative commenter responded that Politifact had “ruled” that Republicans had indeed created lots of “jobs bills.” They get this assertion by counting up the number of bills that are labeled as having something to do with creating jobs. Politifact makes an extremely important observation near the end, though:

"Job creation" means different things to different parties.

Most conservatives today are dead-set against traditional forms of government-based economic stimulus known as Keynesian economics, primarily spending initiatives. So if "job creation" is defined to primarily include Keynesian initiatives, then Republicans aren’t going to be sponsoring any "job creation" bills. Instead, Republicans argue that tax cuts and budget cutting will help the economy prosper.

Frankly, if I were the editor of Politifact, I would have started with this undisputed fact (That the parties disagree on what constitutes “job creation”) and would have then explored just what Republicans mean by labeling bills as “jobs bills.” In 100% of the cases where I've seen the term “jobs bill,” it's referred to a bill that's specifically about Keynesian stimulus. I've never seen a bill referred to as a “jobs bill” when the creation of jobs is merely a by-product. Sure enough, the liberal digs into the data and spells out just what these alleged Republican “jobs bills” are all about:

18 of these so-called "jobs bills" reduce or eliminate government regulations in nearly every business sector, especially of energy and pollution


6 give more tax breaks to the same big businesses that are sitting on record profits and not hiring people right now.

One is an anti-union bill.

Another makes it even easier to bring foreign high tech workers into the country to replace American workers at lower wages.

One eliminates imaginary regulations against "farm dust".

And one is the Paul Ryan budget that lays out a 'Path to Prosperity' that includes massive layoffs and gutting social programs.

In other words - not a single job created, but plenty of reduced wages and lost jobs. 

In other words, Politifact's research doesn't go anywhere near deep enough to be meaningful. Labels are affixed to bills by political parties for all sorts of reasons, not merely to be factually descriptive. As a body that “rules” on the truth of political rhetoric, they don't put enough research into the questions they look at to have any serious credibility.

I “rule” that Politifact is a moderately useful source, to be cited when they agree with you, but otherwise to be ignored.

The Great Gatsby

My sister says that The Great Gatsby was a novel that had a real influence on her growing up, she and a buddy would observe a fancy house giving a wild, noisy party across the water and they'd feel like they were observing one of Gatsby's parties. And yes, the mix of 1920s music and modern hip-hop in the movie certainly makes the 2013 version timeless.

As to the philosophical question at the heart of the book, “Does wealth help you get the girl?” I had a serious crush, let's call her Brunhilde (She was of German descent), many years ago. She turned me down because she already had a boyfriend. He was wealthier, but that wasn't really the point. She felt that he was more mature than I was as I was still trying to get my degree whereas he was long out of college and progressing in his career. So I never saw Brunhilde or other women as gold-diggers or people who insisted on fancy dinners as the price of their company. They're looking for guys who are at least reasonably successful in material terms. Because of today's crappy economy, having a career or even just having money that's a bit beyond what I need just to get by on is a hard thing to have.

Do I pine after Brunhilde? Would I do as Gatsby did and go after her with money, however I obtained that money? Nah, her boyfriend was way ahead of me in maturity way back when and the two of them (Did they stay together? No idea) have probably only gotten more so over the years. I don't think my attraction to her was something that was irreproducible, I don't think it was a one-time thing. There aren't very many women that I'll develop a similarly strong attraction to, but they're out there. If I ever get to a comfortable level of wealth, I'll then proceed along Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs to the point where I'm ready to move up to romance.

TV Shows

My shows generally fall into three categories, news, historical-type fiction and outlandish fantasy. Jon Stewart and Rachel Maddow are news shows that I don't tape, I watch them in an “Appointment TV” style, that is, I get to the TV when the show starts, watch the program, often channel-jumping during commercials, then at the end of the show, I turn off the TV and go on to something else.

The Good Wife and The Client List are historical-fiction type shows. Good Wife covers various aspects of the legal profession from within a fictionalized context. The individual, specific actions, the details, are pretty trustworthy. We can be sure they're based on real institutions and events. It's the overall framework , the personal details about the characters and the context that's fictionalized. In one episode, our protagonist Alicia (Julianne Margulies) is sulking because she was appointed as a partner in her firm to fulfill a financial need on the part of the firm, not so much because she was an amazing lawyer. Her senior partner Diane (Christine Baranski) tells her to get over it because Diane was appointed as a partner for similar reasons. The lesson here is to take promotions for whatever reasons they're offered. Don't get so pure that you get in the way of your own career. Client List covers massage parlors that “give their customers a little extra” and cover all sorts of issues that arise from being a sex worker. A continuing, recurring problem is “What does one do with all of that money?” Obviously, that's problem a lot of us would like to have, but the show demonstrates that it can be a real logistical problem to deal with piles and piles of cash and to still maintain a cover. Our protagonist Riley (Jennifer Love Hewitt) is speaking with some policemen about her husband's legal problems and one of them loudly notes that the clothes she wears are not exactly of the standard for those of modest means. He notes that they're a bit more expensive than one would expect from an ordinary housewife. Riley gets through the encounter, but the point is made, that someone with a lot of extra, illicit money, has to be careful how she spends it. In both cases, the show are generally successful at being both informative about their subjects and good dramas.

Grimm, Merlin, Nikita, Beauty & The Beast, Vampire Diaries, Once Upon A Time, Lost Girl and Being Human are outlandish fantasies. They all have explicitly stated rules for what their characters can and can't do, but all of those rules go well beyond what regular people can do. Being Human is a show where a werewolf, a vampire and a ghost all share a house in the city. One of the premises is that if a vampire drinks werewolf blood, it gives him what essentially amounts to an immediate and really bad case of food poisoning, so a young werewolf (Lydia Doesburg) who was staying in the house decided to temporarily disable the vampire (Sam Huntington) by putting some of her blood into the vampire's usual refrigerated supply and to then attack him when he was weakened. Our vampire prevails, of course, but it's a real challenge for him to do so.

Now, I think I can be reasonably certain that this is a problem that will never occur to me. That's the fun of it. Someone once said the whole point of watching disaster movies is to compare the problems of the characters there with those of your own life and to comfort yourself that “Well, at least I don't have to hide my magical abilities from my king (Merlin) while trying to defend my kingdom from all manner of mystical foes.” The show Two Broke Girls doesn't interest me because I'm far too often actually broke myself, so it's far too real to me to be of any interest to me as a TV show. It's more amusing to follow storylines like those of Nikita's secret organization that undertakes covert missions in the manner of a superhero team or Vampire Diaries that examines the many problems of vampires, witches and werewolves that regular people aren't even aware of (A marvelous scene occurred when the werewolf (Michael Trevino) comes to the conclusion that a young woman he's sweet on is more than human “You're a werewolf, too!” She (Candice Accola) replies that, well, uh, sort of. She's actually a vampire, but yeah, he's right, she's not human). By the way, it seems to me that Grimm, Once Upon A Time and Lost Girl all more or less take off from the idea presented in the comic-book series Fables, which also freely pulls in characters and storylines from a wide variety of fables and legends near and far. Of course, that also borrows from a lengthy tradition of freely plundering the past to get stories, as Beauty & the Beast is a direct continuation of an old legend, just as the comic-book Thor is a direct continuation of old Norse legends.

Update: Very interesting! Grimm and Vampire Diaries both improved their ratings this past season.

Star Trek Into Darkness

Quite good! Lots and lots of close calls. Kirk succeeds in bringing everyone back alive time and again, but he has to cut a few corners and ignore a few orders to do so. Villain is quite formidable and takes quite a few really hard punches from 

Kirk (Played by Chris Pine) without much reaction. We immediately recognize him once he's named, of course. As with any other prequel, we know that certain things will end up a certain way, so my reaction at one point was “Oh, man, how are they gonna fix THIS one!?!?” Interestingly, Uhura (Zoe Saldana) and Spock (Zachary Quinn) appear to have a romantic relationship, a relationship that we know doesn't survive into the series, so that's a story we know we'll see in a  sequel.

The Independent blanches at the tacky capital city of the Federation. The reviewer remarks on the London of the film: “Our capital in the 23rd century now resembles Dubai on steroids – thank God we won’t be around to see it.” I always wondered, seeing the original series, how the citizens of the Federation related to the Enterprise and its crew. The movie doesn't add much to what very little we know.

Update: The Rachel Maddow blog compares Admiral Marcus to Dick Cheney. Has some mild spoilers.

The Benghazi situation

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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Jon Stewart's Daily Show covers the Benghazi "scandal" where no one has ever identified what was being covered up or what the Obama Administration ever hoped to achieve with it. As this piece reviews the three events, Watergate, Iran-Contra and yes, even Whitewater, all had some discernable motivation behind them. In each case, there was a good reason for the Nixon, Reagan and Clinton administrations to want to carry them out. In the case of Benghazi, the actions took place in early September of last year, here it is May and no one has yet defined exactly what the Obama Administration was attempting to achieve. Rachel Maddow covered the Benghazi hearings from the perspective of general Republican/right wing craziness (Her specific comments on Benghazi start at the 12:50 mark). She states straightforwardly that she can't "reverse-engineer" why and how Benghazi was supposedly a positive for Obama.

Daily Kos examines various questions: "Why wasn't the Special Forces unit sent to the scene of the fighting?"

...they weren't some fully outfitted Delta Force unit ready to obliterate the men who had dared attack American facilities. They were just four guys in all, no doubt brave and eager to go. But they weren't combat ready, being armed solely with 9mm sidearms.

"Why weren't jets sent?"

They couldn't have gotten there in time, something examined in full by the Accountability Review Board's independent report.

"There was a '40-man Special Operations CIF [Commander's in-Extremis Force] unit in Europe at the time of the attack,' why weren't they sent?"

     The nearest airfield where the 40-man team could have landed was 30 kilometers away from where the incident took place. Yes, they had a plane that could have carried vehicles that could have gotten them there on time, but it  takes time to load those appropriate vehicles onto a plane. By the time that could have been done, the fight would have long since been over. No, there was no realistic way that the team could have gotten to the fight in time to make a difference.

In short, there was really no conspiratorial explanation for why the personnel in the Benghazi diplomatic compound could not be saved. There simply wasn't time to do much. There were too few forces, too far away, to have made any difference.

Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) asked all three expert witnesses at the May 8th "whistleblowers" hearing if Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's name at the bottom of all of the relevant cables meant anything. All three witnesses replied that it is standard protocol to credit all cables to having been written by the SecState whether she had anything to do with them or not. So no, Clinton's name at the bottom of all the cables meant nothing. Did the House Oversight Committee chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) learn anything from the hearing? His own statements indicate that the hearings were a complete waste of time and that nothing was learned. Heck, even Fox News was cutting away from their own coverage because there was so little that was new and interesting coming out of it.

So what's the point? Why are Republicans putting so much time and effort into the story? Daily Kos figures it's "The GOP's Benghazi investigation, aka the Stop Hillary 2016 campaign." After all, President Obama was mentioned 29 times whereas Clinton was mentioned 71 times.

Update: And did anybody truly think that Republicans would be embarrassed into silence? Ha. Ha. Ha.  Not Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK)!

“Of all the great cover-ups in history — the Pentagon papers, the Iran-Contra, Watergate and all the rest of them — this … is going to go down as the most serious, the most egregious cover-up in American history,” Inhofe said during an appearance on The Rusty Humphries Show.

Obviously, Inhofe just speaks for himself, but it seems pretty clear that there will be some never-say-die fanatics on this. 

Iron Man 3

This is one of those stories that I wish I had read in a comics form so that I could flip back through and get a better sense of how all of the parts fit together. I finished up the story of Sif in Strange Tales and they ended up the story with a cool twist ending/revelation, so I was able to go back and read all of the issues in the story from start to finish and ended up with a much better understanding of what the authors were trying to convey.

It helped that I was able to get a detailed review of Iron Man 3, as the review went through many of the various threads and details that I wasn't fully able to recall from Saturday night. The “thinking/feeling drone” aspect is a very interesting one as that fantasy very clearly comes out of stories like this July 2002 piece on a bombing that allegedly had a ground observer in place to confirm that the plane was actually hitting a target that was really a hostile. It was a wedding party and it makes sense that it came to the attention of bombers because you had a large group of people and weddings in that region often involve shooting off guns into the air at certain points during the ceremony. 30 people in that party died. In Iron Man, James Rhodes as Iron Patriot/War Machine comes into a sweatshop where women in chadors are busy sewing garments. Had Iron Patriot not been a human in a metal suit, had he been an actual drone, the entire shop would simply have been blown to bits.

Tony Stark/Iron Man apparently suffers some PTSD from the Avengers movie, not a debilitating case of it, but it recalls his “Demon in a Bottle” storyline in his comic in the late 1970s. The studio nixed the idea of having this Iron Man battle alcoholism, but a bit of PTSD was apparently okay.

Nikita: Black Badge

Hmm, very interesting. A few intriguing similarities to the movie “Fair Game,” a movie I've referenced a few times, with the episode “Black Badge,” from the TV series Nikita. The show introduces an athletic, in-shape CIA agent with long blond hair who goes by the name of Naomi. Naomi Watts played an athletic, in-shape CIA agent with long blond hair, Valerie Plame Wilson, in “Fair Game.” Naomi Ceaver (Played by Amanda Schull) is a conspiracy theorist who can't quite locate the proof necessary to prove her cases in a satisfactory manner. Wilson's husband uncovered a dastardly plot by President G.W. Bush to blame Iraq for something it didn't do and the Wilsons were never able to follow up his whistle-blowing to get to the proper conclusion.

Astonishing Chechnya

Guest post by Deena Stryker.

RT is airing an incredible documentary on the Republic of Chechnya, known to the outside world for having been practically destroyed by repeated separatist wars with Russia.

According to Wikipedia, the Caucasus mini-state  is returning to sharia law and all its accoutrements, with some resistance to Russian rule still remaining in the mountains.

The RT documentary  presents a very different picture which does not necessarily contradict this information. It describes a Muslim society deter-mined to appear ‘modern’.  With the help of Qatar, which is the most visible of the Gulf monarchies (think Al-Jazeera), the capital Grozny, has been rebuilt to resemble Doha, with illuminated skyscrapers, shopping malls, fancy restaurants, glitzy spectacles and fireworks – Putin’s version of war benefitting construction investments. But the skaking rinks are sexually segregated.

A new fashion industry is dedicated to luxury wear for the head-scarfed woman and eager to attract wealthy clients from other Muslim countries with strict female dress codes. The models parading gracefully down the catwalk will soon marry, after which they will be expected to remain at home, according to Islamic custom.  Unmarried women cannot travel abroad.

If this all sounds terrible, note that the brand of Sunni Islam practiced in the Caucasus is Sufism, which is accompanied by much rhythmic singing and dancing.

However some families are still sending their sons to madrassas where they are taught the Koran, wrestling and boxing (sports in which it is prohibited to attach the adversary’s head under Islamic law), and Dubai made an exception by sending some of the Prophets personal items to the Russian Islamic republic that boasts the world’s largest mosque.

Putting these pieces together, what emerges is a picture entirely in keeping with what I described in a previous blog as Putin’s cultural policy.  (“March 18th: …the Russian leader appears to also hanker after an era when ‘fun’ was ‘clean’ and families were intact.  The Pussy Riot trial is less a defense of religion than the belief that all freedoms have limits, in contradiction to Washing-ton’s unqualified commitment to the First Amendment.”)

Putin’s cultural policy as practiced in the Russian Republic of Chechnya seems intended to assure Muslim populations that a) their religion is entirely respectful; b) while practicing it they can be part of the modern world; and c) that ‘clean’ modernity is better than vulgar modernity.

In centuries past, Chechen Sufi leaders were already dreaming of a vast califate. With the Kremlin’s help, their modern descendants are busy creating a ‘modern’ Islamic society. Putin is shrewdly betting that if the larger mainly Islamic states on its periphery (the ‘Stans’) bring ‘modernity’ to their masses, they will be less of a threat than if they maintain them in a feudal time warp. It will be interesting to see whether the young women of Chechnya and other Islamic societies will long be willing to sacrifice their independence for the sake of Western glitz.  In any case if Putin’s policies can displace dour Wahab-bism from Saudi Arabia, that will be a good thing.

Gun bill “fails” with 54 in favor and 46 against

There are two methods of fixing the Senate rules, there's the “Constitutional Option,” where the rules are changed at the beginning of the two-year session and then there's the “Nuclear Option,” where the rules are changed mid-session. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), opted for a really mild, watered-down Constitutional Option this last January in order to deal with the filibuster (Note: the filibuster is not in the Constitution and the first filibuster didn't occur until 1837). We saw today with a vote on an already weakened and watered-down gun safety bill that the Constitutional Option produced an insufficient safeguard against an out-of-control overuse of the filibuster, where a minority of the Senate opposes a measure supported by around 90% of the American people.

Wonkette replies to a disgruntled conservative with a scathing, NSFW (Not Safe For Work) commentary (The conservative whined and moaned about former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords “bullying” people), which expresses my mood about Harry Reid and the filibuster quite well.

Update: Excellent reaction by President Obama. Hear! Hear!

The CIA “Hollowed Out”

Bill Keller writes about the CIA and covert ops people versus intel people and the following passage jumped out at me:

"The C.I.A., having been hollowed out in the ’90s after the end of the cold war, failed to see the signs of what would be 9/11. Then the C.I.A. got the ostensible Iraqi weapons threat terribly wrong, drowning out more skeptical voices..."

There are three charges here: 1. That Bill Clinton permitted the CIA to be so underfunded and understaffed that it couldn't do its job while under George W. Bush, 2. that the CIA missed the signs that 9/11 was about to occur and 3. that the CIA thought there were WMD in Iraq when there weren't. The first charge is proven or disproven by the second and third charges. If those other two charges stand up, then we may presume that the first charge is true and vice-versa, if the two charges are not true, then the first is not true, either.

So how do the two charges stack up against the evidence? Not very well. Ron Suskind relates in his book “The One Percent Doctrine” that “Bush listened to the briefing, Suskind says, then told the CIA briefer: 'All right. You’ve covered your ass, now.'” And from The National Interest:

Kurt Eichenwald, former New York Times reporter and Vanity Fair contributing editor...”the administration’s reaction to what Mr. Bush was told in the weeks before that infamous briefing reflected significantly more negligence than has been disclosed.”

As to the third charge, that the CIA failed to see that there were no WMD in Iraq, the movie “Fair Game” tells the story of Joe and Valerie Plame Wilson, drawing heavily on the book by Valerie Wilson and shows that, yes indeed, the CIA did do its assigned job by presenting the President with all of the information that was available to them and that, in fact, there was significant doubt that Iraq had WMDs. The CIA and their buddies across the pond, MI6, were both informed that Tahir Habbush al-Tikriti, who was Iraq's head of intelligence, told them that Iraq had no WMD. Naji Sabri, Saddam Hussein's foreign minister, is also said to have claimed this, although Sabri has denied saying so.

Now these claims of Bill Keller's really bother me as Keller joined the NY Times in 1984 and was the Executive Editor from 2003 to 2011, so this is no amateur, wet-behind-the-ears, fresh-outta-J-school, eager beaver cub reporter. This guy's been around and knows full well what he's saying.

To be fair, there were indeed people in both MI6 and the CIA who credited claims of WMD “even after they were exposed as fabricated including claims, notably about alleged mobile biological warfare containers, made by Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, a German source codenamed Curveball,” so it's incorrect to say that the CIA was united in casting doubt upon the Bush Administration's justifications for going to war, but there's certainly no justification for claiming that the CIA as an agency failed either before 9/11 or before the Iraq War.

By the way, neither former President George W. Bush nor former Vice President Dick Cheney have any regrets or second thoughts about having plunged the nation into an unnecessary war.

[Bush] reflected on the “realities of the situation 10 years ago”: that the Iraq invasion had bipartisan support and that seeking regime change in Iraq had also been the policy under Clinton.

“It’s easy to forget what life was like when the decision was made,” Bush said.

Yes, the invasion had bipartisan support, but that was because Bush was manipulating the intel. And as I pointed out here, Clinton did indeed send Madelaine Albright to get a read on how motivated Americans were to fight a war against Iraq, but found that there simply wasn't anywhere near enough enthusiasm to even attempt to launch such a war.

As to Cheney, his old company Halliburton made $39.5 billion from the war, so he obviously has no regrets.

As to Keller's larger thesis, that the “cowboys” of the CIA were an undue influence on the “eggheads” (i.e., that the covert ops people had too much influence on the gathering-of-intel people), I doubt that. I read a few books on the CIA during the 1980s and got the impression that, despite the CIA being a single agency with a single Director, that the intel and ops people perform different tasks in different places and don't interact much.

Oz, the Great and Powerful

Saw the original 1939 Wizard of Oz many times as a youth as an annual event on TV. In the early 1990s, I read a really neat piece in the paper (Believe it was the Washington Post) about Glinda the Good Witch being the manipulative mastermind behind the events in Oz. Consider the ending. At the end, Glinda's rivals, the two evil witches and the Wizard, have all been dispatched or have left town due to that young woman who has that elusive x-factor, good luck combined with youthful initiative. Glinda is the “Last magician standing,” so she makes the Scarecrow into her Prime Minister, gives positions to the Tin Man and Lion and then proceeds to rule Oz as a benevolent monarch, with of course an iron fist, with her devious, manipulative cleverness being hidden behind a deceptively nice, well-mannered exterior.

Read the book “Wicked” a few years later. Pretty good, but the author clearly got all sentimental about his character halfway through and Elphaba (His name for the Wicked Witch of the West) ends up being just misunderstood as opposed to really evil.

Saw the original film during a cruise in 2002. Really cool to see it all in one sitting and without interruption so that I was able to fit it all together in my mind.

So saw “Oz, the Great and Powerful” last night. I explained to a store clerk that the story takes place before the 1939 film, so it's a prequel as opposed to a sequel. It introduces all three witches, Evanora, the one who dies very early on in the 1939 film (Played by the only actor in the 2013 film that I recognized, Rachel Weisz), Elphaba and Glinda. Elphaba again has a rationality behind her actions that makes her more misunderstood than evil and Glinda and the Wizard both have a bit of a harder edge than in the original film. There's a bit of Mark Twain's “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court” to the film as the Wizard has to make do with what he has and must battle a truly evil army of trained warriors and flying monkeys with farmers and shopkeepers.

AQ & AQI

Excellent piece from FireDogLake on a WaPo columnist who makes several serious errors in history right off the bat. Jackson Diehl claims that the "United States faced down al-Qaeda and eventually dealt it a decisive defeat” Uh, no, it didn't Al Qaeda proper (AQ) was not al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). AQI started as a separate organization under Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who populated it with members of his old group and with jihadists who started migrating to Iraq in mid-2003 to join the fight against the American invaders of that country. Right-wingers in the US claimed that the US was following the "Flypaper" strategy, the idea of attracting jihadists from all over the Mideast and then successfully killing them in Iraq.


Problem was, most of the jihadists who went to Iraq would most likely have just remained in their home countries and most probably would not have done much of anything had the US not presented them with such an inviting target. There was simply never any evidence that anybody, neither already-active jihadists, nor members of AQ proper, were drawn into the "flypaper." Did AQ suffer any sort of defeat in Iraq? No, because AQ stayed out of Iraq. Sure, okay, AQI was defeated, but had the Iraq War never occurred, AQI would never have existed to begin with.

Diehl mentions that the Balkans under Clinton and Libya under Obama were successful interventions. True, but in both cases, there was a strong consensus as to the need for action and the US had many allies going in. Neither condition exists in Syria today, so I would be very considerably warier than Diehl is about going into Syria.