'Best of TBH Politoons'
But Untrue
Strangely Believable
Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) has introduced a bill to declare the third Monday of January a national holiday honoring deceased President Ronald Reagan. Fully aware that this date is already dedicated to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Senator Inhofe’s bill calls for renaming the holiday “King-Reagan Day.”
~Jeff Crook
Jeff Crook is the Ceci Connolly of the Left. ~ J. Howard Tuft
Strangely Believable but Untrue is now available online at the Untrue Fact of the Day web calendar. Help spread disinformation and misunderstanding by sharing this with your friends and enemies.
Weekly Link
Sick Of This Crap!
MLKing Day! Time to take a day off, assess the progress of America living up to her ideals, while measuring the widening gap created by our backslide. At least it's not the same week as the Inaugural Ball... Whoops.
This week's issue includes:
* Inaugural Ballin' - Not One Damn Dime Day
* Torture is Over! - We caught the guy who did it and will soon have a new Attorney General to ensure it doesn't happen again.
* Armstrong Williams - Turd of the Week, just too easy some weeks.
* Frivolous Tort Reform - Good doctors, bad lawyers and please ignore the corporate interests in the shadows.
Join us won't you join us? We're just a click away....
Recommended Reading
from Bruce
ROGER LOWENSTEIN: A Question of Numbers (New York Time Magazine)
In 1938, the Social Security Act was only three years old, but its future was already very much in doubt. Conservatives claimed it would bankrupt the nation, and independent critics argued that the way it was financed amounted to ''financial hocus-pocus,'' as one editorial in The New York Times put it. President Franklin D. Roosevelt defended the program, said by a cabinet member to be his favorite, with some of his trademark oratory. ''Because it has become increasingly difficult for individuals to build their own security,'' the president told a national radio audience, ''government must now step in and help them lay the foundation stones.''
Jim Hightower: Ripping Off Veterans (AlterNet)
Sleazy financial coroporations prey on financially strapped vets who face some personal crisis and need quick cash. Only later do these desperate veterans realize that they've been robbed.
Annalee Newitz: Wear It, Bitch (AlterNet)
One of the highest courts in the land, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, has determined that it's legal for an employer to fire a female employee who refuses to wear makeup. Think this through slowly and carefully, girls: if you live in the 9th Circuit (which covers California, Washington, Oregon, Nevada, Arizona, Idaho and Montana), you could be fired tomorrow if your boss decides your "uniform" for work includes makeup. Supposedly this ruling doesn't run afoul of discrimination law because it doesn't impose an "unequal burden" on women. Do you want to know why, ladies and germs? Because a rule for women enforcing face paint is "equal" to a rule forbidding men from wearing it. Now there's some real smart logic. Presence is the same as absence! War is peace! Yup, it's the kind of analysis that's gotten very popular in the United States recently.
Christopher D. Cook: The Next Campaign: Ideas (In These Times)
While the Democratic Leadership Council and Democratic National Committee stubbornly retool their centrist Southern and Western strategy, the liberal/progressive wing of the party should pursue its own strategy: a long-term, non-electoral campaign of ideas. Democrats, Greens, labor unions, Nader-ites and others must unify around a set of core progressive ideas on which to educate and organize "Main Street" America.
Robert Fisk: How a Flying Carpet Took Me Back in Time - Until I Landed in Baghdad (The Independent U.K.)
I tried out the new Beirut-Baghdad air service this week. It's a sleek little 20-seater with two propellers, a Lebanese-Canadian pilot and a name to take you aback. It's called "Flying Carpet Airlines". As Commander Queeg said in The Caine Mutiny, "I kid thee not." It says "Flying Carpet" on the little blue boarding cards, below the captain's cabin and on the passenger headrest covers where the aircraft can be seen gliding through the sky on a high-pile carpet.
unitedforpeace.org: "Out Now!" Hits the Mainstream: Time to Up the Pressure
On January 12, sixteen Democrats in the House of Representatives sent a letter to President Bush calling on him to begin the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. (The letter and list of signers is included below.)
John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge: The Silent Disaster of World Poverty (LA Times Presents A Conservative View)
(John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge work for the Economist. They are the co-authors of "The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America" (Penguin, 2004).)
Could 2005 be the year in which mankind finally conquers extreme poverty?
With all this medical marijuana madness, it's time for a little more cannabis culture
Are You Better Off Now Than You Were Four Years Ago?
Van Gogh Museum
Vatican Museums Online
Purple Gene Reviews
'The Manchurian Candidate'
Purple Genes' review of the movie "The Manchurian Candidate" (2004) Directed by Jonathon Demme ("Crazy Mama" - "Caged Heat" - "Philadelphia" - "Silence of the Lambs"):
I've never been a fan of remakes, particularly when the original was close to perfect!!!! People have tried many times to either match or outdo classic movies and failed miserably! I remember seeing the original "Manchurian Candidate" (1962) starring Frank Sinatra and Laurence Harvey - and had a hard time imagining Denzel Washington and Liev Schreiber pulling off an updated version. Angela Landsbury won an Oscar for her role in the original movie so now we have Meryl Streep taking over in the latest version.
And of course the PLOT.."Evil Communists" are replaced by "Evil Corporations" in a convoluted conspiracy caper that became a bit comedic for me I remember the ending of the "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (1956) when Dr. Bennel is chasing trucks full of alien PODS and trying to convince everyone that there is a huge conspiracy and people are being "Brain washed".well we have a little bit of brainwashing occurring in the new "Manchurian Candidate".unlike the original where it was Korean Commiesnow we the "Manchurian Global" Corporation that together with an ambitious American Political family has managed to have an evil German Genetesist implant micro chips in some soldiers in Desert Stormone of the soldiers is the son of that American Political Family.the other is Our Hero.. Ben Marco.
Ben Marco (Denzel Washington "Malcolm X" - "Philadelphia" - "Training Day") keeps having recurring dreams about a battle in the Gulf War in Kuwait..Things don't seem to add up and he feels tormented by the confusion. Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber "Scream I, II and III" - "Hamlet" - "Hitler") was also in that same unit as Ben and he went on to win the Medal of Honor for saving his squad..Now he has become the Vice Presidential Candidate with the help of his supremely powerful mother Senator Eleanor Shaw (Meryl Streep "Holocaust" - "Heartburn" - "Silkwood" - "She-Devil") a mother who seems to have an unusually prurient interest her son's success
When Ben sees Raymonds face plastered all over the TV he has to go and talk to him and find out why he's having weird dreams about those lost nights in the battle in Kuwait. Things get crazy as Ben finds a small micro-chip implanted in his shoulder..He somehow gets through all the security and gets alone with Raymond and confronts him about the dreams and the Medal of Honor and 2 guys dying and jumps up and tears Raymonds shirt off and bites him in the shoulder..and bingo.gets a micro-chip stuck in his teeth!!!!!
Now things start to Roll.Raymond doesn't press charges but "Mommie Dearest"Senator Eleanor Shaw steps in and takes CONTROL of her son.It turns out that the Senator along with the Manchurian Global Corp had hired that mad German Genetecist back in 1991 to capture Raymonds' Army unitkill the expendable soldiers and put mind altering implants in the rest.and they programmed all the soldiers to say that Raymond Saved the Day and gets the medals..and is now under "Voice Control of his MOM.WOWIt makes me think that Karl Rove must have used the same micro-chip in George Bushs' Brain!!!!!!!!
Cut to the end..It's election nightthe jig is up because Mommy is going to have Ben shoot the Presidential Winner at the victory celebration and then her son can become leader of the Free World of Manchurian Global CorpTrouble is Ben still has a mind of his ownas he positions his rifle to cross hair on the president .everyone moves around and suddenly the cross hair is on Raymond..then the cross hair goes on MOM what will Ben Do..He Shoots !!!!!!!!!!!
Go see the Movie!
Purple Gene gives "The Manchurian Candidate" (2004) 6 brain washing micro-chips out of 10 for thinking it could be as good as the original!!!!!
Purple Gene
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Sunny and warm.
The Golden Globes were fairly disappointing. Nothing outrageous, nothing inappropriate.
Although I did wonder if there was a giant knot of flesh on the back of Clint Eastwood's head. Wow, was his face tight.
Character Dies in 'Star Wars'
Samuel L. Jackson
Samuel L. Jackson dies in his next huge film - but he does it in a really cool way.
Director George Lucas assured the actor that his Jedi knight character would go out in a blaze of glory in the forthcoming "Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith," and the director apparently made good on his promise.
"It's rousing," Jackson told the San Francisco Chronicle in Sunday's editions. "It's a great light-saber battle with 102 moves in three big rooms."
Samuel L. Jackson
Marks Martin Luther King Day
Harry Belafonte
When Harry Belafonte met the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1950s, he promised to always assist in his mission.
Thirty-seven years after King's death, the actor, singer and activist is still keeping his pledge.
Belafonte on Saturday met with a group of about 60 people, many of them children, during a celebration of King's life at a Boys and Girls Club. He said the 13 years he worked side-by-side with the civil rights leader were "the most important of my life."
Harry Belafonte
Fox Blurs Cartoon Rear End
'Family Guy'
Fox says it covered up the naked rear end of a cartoon character recently because of nervousness over what the Federal Communications Commission will find objectionable.
The latest example of TV network self-censorship because of FCC concerns came a few weeks ago during a rerun of a "Family Guy" cartoon. Fox electronically blurred a character's posterior, even though the image was seen five years ago when the episode originally aired.
'Family Guy'
Drug Dealers Took Tips From TV
'The Wire'
David Simon's HBO series "The Wire" - a fictional account of a police investigation of Baltimore drug dealers - allegedly had some real-life dealers taking notes.
While announcing a crackdown on Friday of a cocaine ring, police said their investigation was hampered by the suspects' habit of switching cell phones - a technique for evading electronic eavesdropping they picked up from TV.
"Believe it or not, these guys copied 'The Wire,'" one of the investigators, Sgt. Felipe Rodriguez, said at a news conference. "They were constantly dumping their phones. It made our job so much harder."
While doing business by cell phone, the suspects often spoke to each other about "The Wire" after it aired on Sunday nights, Rodriguez said. Some of the officers listening to them also were fans.
'The Wire'
Focus of New Opera
Moammar Gadhafi
A new opera based on the life of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, featuring a rapper as Gadhafi and a chorus of all-female bodyguards, highlights the new season of the English National Opera.
The Gadhafi opera, created by the dance-hip-hop collective Asian Dub Foundation, and an opera based on Rainier Werner Fassbinder's film "The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant," are among new works scheduled.
Also, film director Anthony Minghella will direct a production of "Madame Butterfly," marking his first foray into opera.
Moammar Gadhafi
Needs to Lay Off on Reality
Faux
The sagging Fox network's chief executive admitted Monday it had leaned too heavily on reality programming this TV season, including the disastrous "Who's Your Daddy?"
Fox has been caught on the wrong side of audience taste in the past few months. Scripted series like ABC's Golden Globe-winning "Desperate Housewives" and "Lost" are hot, while viewers seem to have little patience for new reality series.
Fox is averaging 5.9 million viewers in prime-time this season, down from 6.5 million at this point last year, Nielsen said. More importantly for the youth-obsessed Fox, it is solidly in fourth place among viewers aged 18-to-49. It finished last season second behind NBC in this demographic.
Faux
Fumes at US Lewdness Claims
Gianna Angelopoulos
Athens Olympics Games chief Gianna Angelopoulos warned the Federal Communications Commission watchdog, sensitive after a deluge of outrage when singer Janet Jackson's breast was exposed at a Super Bowl game, not to punish NBC television that aired the Games.
Angelopoulos, who said the handful of U.S. complaints were dwarfed by the 3.9 billion people who watched the ceremony, had a blunt message.
"As Americans surely are aware, there is great hostility in the world today to cultural domination in which a single value system created elsewhere diminishes and degrades local cultures," she said in her commentary.
"In this context, it is astonishingly unwise for an agency of the U.S. government to engage in an investigation that could label a presentation of the Greek origins of civilisation as unfit for television viewing."
Gianna Angelopoulos
ALA Awards Top Honors
Children's Books
A book about a Japanese-American girl growing up in the South and another about a kitten who mistakes the moon for her bowl of milk garnered top honors on Monday from the American Library Association.
"Kira-Kira," by Cynthia Kadohata, received the 2005 John Newbery Award at the ALA's annual meeting at Boston on Monday. The award honors outstanding writing in a book for young people. A 15-member committee of librarians and children's literature experts selected "Kira-Kira," said committee head Susan Faust.
Another committee gave the Randolph Caldecott Award for illustration to Kevin Henkes for "Kitten's First Full Moon," a book for children age 2 to 5 about a kitten who believes the moon is her bowl of milk.
Toni Morrison, author of "Remember: The Journey to School Integration," and Kadir Nelson, illustrator of "Ellington Was Not a Street," received the Coretta Scott King Award, which the ALA gives to African-American authors and illustrators,
Meg Rosoff won the Michael L. Printz Award for excellence in young adult literature for her book "How I Live Now," a novel about a young American girl who is living in England when it is suddenly occupied by terrorists.
Children's Books
Las Vegas Weatherman Fired for MLK Slur
Rob Blair
A television weatherman was fired after referring to slain civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. as "Martin Luther Coon King" on the air, station officials said.
Rob Blair, of KTNV-TV, was delivering the extended forecast Saturday morning when he said: "Martin Luther Coon King Jr. Day, gonna see some temperatures in the mid-60s."
Blair, who worked at the station for about three months, apologized during the station's 6 p.m. and 11 p.m. newscasts Saturday.
Rob Blair
In Memory
Ruth Warrick
Ruth Warrick, the darling of the daytime soap opera "All My Children" who launched her career in Orson Welles' all-time classic "Citizen Kane," has died, ABC-TV said Monday. She was 88.
Warrick died at her New York home Saturday of complications from pneumonia, said ABC.
In "All My Children," which debuted in 1970, Warrick played Phoebe Tyler Wallingford, the grande dame of the fictitious affluent town of Pine Valley. She portrayed the meddlesome and over-the-top personality so believably that her fans often had trouble distinguishing between the stylish actress and her fictitious, equally sophisticated character.
Warrick, born and raised in St. Joseph, Mo., left for New York after graduating from the University of Kansas City. Her interest in acting led her to the Mercury Theater troupe, headed by Welles.
She made her Hollywood debut in 1941 in "Citizen Kane" as Emily Norton Kane. Welles, who co-wrote, directed and starred in the film, hand-picked her for the role of his wife because he said there were no "ladies in Hollywood" who fit the bill.
Ruth Warrick
In Memory
Virginia Mayo
Virginia Mayo, a Hollywood movie queen who co-starred with the likes of Danny Kaye, Gregory Peck, Ronald Reagan and James Cagney in the 1940s and '50s, died today at a nursing facility in Thousand Oaks, her family said.
Mayo, 84, had been a resident of the Thousand Oaks Healthcare Center for about a year, said her daughter, Mary Johnston. The cause of death was pneumonia and heart failure.
Beginning in 1943 with the movie "Jack London," where she met her actor-husband Michael O'Shea, the hazel-eyed blonde appeared in more than 50 films.
Her roles included the object of Bob Hope's klutzy affection in "The Princess and the Pirate" (1944), the unfaithful wife opposite good guy Dana Andrews in "The Best Years of Our Lives" (1946) and four comedies with Kaye, of which "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" (1947) may have been the most popular.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Mayo's film appearances dwindled, and she acted on stage, including "George Washington Slept Here" with her husband. She also starred in "Cactus Flower" and the college musical "Good News." On television, she took many guest roles on such programs as "Wagon Train," "Murder She Wrote" and "Remington Steele."
Mary Walsh of Simi Valley described Mayo as "a lovely person, easy to get along with, very kind and loving." Walsh is the widow of Raoul Walsh, who directed Mayo in "White Heat," "Captain Horatio Hornblower" and the western "Colorado Territory."
Virginia Mayo was born Virginia Clara Jones to Luke and Martha Jones in St. Louis, Mo., on Nov. 30, 1920. Her father was a newspaper man who worked for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Virginia Mayo
In Memory
Jack Warne Carlton
Former newspaper editor Jack Warne Carlton, who inadvertently set off a staff revolt in support of a reporter who had spoken out against Richard Nixon, died Friday of heart failure. He was 71.
Carlton was the night editor at the Tribune-Review of Greensburg in 1973 when a young reporter announced that Vice President Spiro Agnew had resigned. The reporter then said, in reference to Nixon, "One down and one to go."
The Tribune-Review had been purchased four years earlier by Richard Mellon Scaife, an ardent Nixon supporter. Word of the comment eventually reached the publisher's office and the reporter was fired.
Carlton argued with the paper's owner and then quit. Within hours, nearly half the 24-person editorial staff followed him.
Carlton went on to work at The Pittsburgh Press before his retirement in 1990, but was forever linked to the newsroom revolt that was covered in publications from Rolling Stone to the Columbia Journalism Review.
Jack Warne Carlton
In Memory
Sal Pacino
Sal Pacino, a longtime Covina resident and father of Oscar-winner Al Pacino, has died of a heart attack. He was 82.
Pacino died Wednesday, the San Gabriel Valley Tribune reported. "He was the love of my life," his wife, Katherin Kovin-Pacino, told the newspaper. "He was charming, he was funny. He was just brilliant."
Salvatore Alfred Pacino was born in Manhattan on Feb. 16, 1922. He dropped out of school at age 15 after meeting Rose Gerard, 20, and falling in love, according to his Web site, www.salpacino.com.
They got married when Sal was 17, and a year later Rose gave birth to Alfred "Al" Pacino. But they separated, and the ensuing divorce split father and son for years, according to The Tribune.
Pacino is survived by his son and four daughters, Josette, Roberta, Paula and Desiree.
Sal Pacino
