Clueless

Wow. Just, wow. No wonder McCain wants to postpone the debates.

Part 1:




UPDATE(from Plisko):

This video best sums up what I heard when I saw Palin's explanation about why being able to see Russia gave her foreign policy experience.



The original answer can be found here:

Mr. McCain goes to Washington

So in the latest desperate move by Republican, Mr. Smith Mr. McCain goes to Washington, perhaps on a white horse, to save the day.

It doesn't matter that he hasn't been seen in the Senate chambers in over 6 months, or that he's not even a member of the Senate banking committee, or that he's "not an expert on the economy", yet, this latest P.R. stunt to grab some limelight from Obama's recent surge in the polls has Americans scratching their heads and looking with cynicism at the senior AZ. senator's attempt to maneuver out of the debates this coming Friday.

One could call the campaigns decision to do this as McDesperate.

McCain's Keating 5 connection:



McCain on economics:



And the best one of all, McCain admits he hasn't even read the Paulson Bailout Plan.



The hour grows nigh for the Republicans. This is a total move of desperation by McCain's advisers and nothing more than a media stunt.

2008 Light Up America and Canada Tour

25 years later, the comedy Duo of Cheech & Chong are back & touring doing their famous pot-smoking-infused comedy routines, updated for today's audience of course. It's nice to see Tommy Chong will get to make some decent bread after his legal problems the last few years.

As a teen during the Reagan years, I watched these funny drug comedies made famous by the duo get hatcheted when they were aired on regular cable in the 80's. Comedy Central, under the guidelines set by the drug free america/just say no witchhunts, removed all the drug references from these films and still aired them. I remember in one Cheech & Chong film, they substituted diamonds for the marijuana and ran with those edits the entire film. They did similar edits in other comedy movies like 9-to-5 to remove the liberation scene where they smoked pot. But I digress.

Coming soon to a city near you: CHEECH & CHONG

2008 Light Up America & Canada Tour

The Bush Doctrine - Who said it first?

I have revised this to include additional information sent to me in email and on my other blog. Go forth and multiply it in email.

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All of the conservative pundits are spinning Sarah Palin's Lack of knowledge concerning "The Bush Doctrine" by dismissing it as a term used by the media to describe the policies of George W. Bush, rather than a term the whitehouse used for describing said policies. Because Palin doesn't follow the "liberal media" asking her this was a trick question.

Now it might be true that on June 4, 2001, Charles Krauthammer coined the phrase "Bush Doctrine" in an issue of the Weekly Standard entitled, "The Bush Doctrine: ABM, Kyoto, and the New American Unilateralism." It's important to note that The Weekly Standard is a "neoconservative op-ed magazine", so they're preaching from the Bush choir. The magazine was founded by William Kristol and Fred Barnes, the literal godparents of modern neo-conservatism that Bush exudes. The point being, the term was born in the neocon media, not the liberal media, and was quickly adopted by the Bush Whitehouse.

But from whitehouse.gov we can see many uses of the term "Bush Doctrine" in the last 7 years, showing it's not a term used exclusively by the media:

October 23, 2001:

VICE-PRESIDENT CHENEY: Under the Bush Doctrine, a regime that harbors or supports terrorists will be regarded as hostile to the United States of America.

November 9, 2001:

Q: Ari, the President said this morning that he was going to, tomorrow at the United Nations, say that the time for condolences is over, it's a time for action. What action is he not seeing that he would like to see?

MR. FLEISCHER: Well, in the speech tomorrow at the United Nations, the President is going to thank the United Nations for its strong support, and he will praise the role played by the Secretary General of the United Nations and he will talk to rally the world on behalf of the cause of freedom. And I think what you can expect tomorrow is a fuller explanation of the Bush Doctrine in which those who harbor terrorists will also be held accountable for their actions, just as guilty as the terrorists.

June 26, 2002:

PRESIDENT BUSH: Under the Bush doctrine I said we'd use all resources, all available resources to fight off terror. And that includes working with our friends and allies to cut off money, to use diplomatic pressure, to convince -- to convince those that think they can traffick in terror that they're going to face a mighty coalition. And sometimes we use military force and sometimes we won't.

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These are all references from the whitehouse.gov website, so you can hardly call them biased, they come directly from the source.

But to act like this term existed in a vacuum only in the media, and that the whitehouse never used it or adopted it as a namesake is completely false. Krauthammer simply penned into words a descriptive term to name the policy put into place by Bush, another word for a "policy" is a "doctrine". It's been used numerous times by the oval office and in whtehouse press conferences to describe Bush's foreign policy.

So to all those pundits and their news watching followers who keep harping that this was some sort of a trick question to ask Palin, you can now sit down and move on to the next piece of fiction to get outraged about.

-zen

The Creation Adventure Team

With all the talk surrounding Sarah Palin's former church and their adherence to creationist "young Earth theory" that says "man walked with the dinosaurs" led to me re-watch Jesus Camp again this week.
Surprisingly, the Palin/McCain rally I attended last week was held in Lee's Summit, Mo. At the time I didn't realize that it was the same town where Rev. Becky Fischer ran her Children's Bible School in Jesus Camp.

Scanning through that video, I remembered a children's show/cartoon that a child named Levi is watching which was debunking evolution to kids, albeit with puppets and humor.

Well, some more searching this morning led to me finding that cartoon on YouTube. Sorry for the video quality (not my file), but it's fairly horrifying to think these videos are being produced and marketed to Creationist parents to brainwash their kids into their belief structure. Terrifying stuff.



After you watch the above video come by and see my interview with the two filmmakers in 2006 (Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing) to talk to them about their film.

Kuttner pwns Hannity

Multimillionaire Sean Hannity proved he's not just a loudmouthed blowhard but seriously out of touch with everyday Americans. Kudos to guest Robert Kuttner for refusing to be intimidated. From the 9/10/08 Hannity & Colmes.

How Television Works

This is some really great stuff here from UpdocFilms.

"Devon Grey's new trilogy, The Corporate Media Survival Guide introduces viewers to television's hidden technology and the unspoken corporate agenda that surrounds it.

Segmented into five informative and entertaining sections, 'How Television Works' is a must see for anyone curious about who controls television, why producers alter their programming to appease corporate sponsors, and what detrimental affects television has on human brain chemistry, attention span and behaviour."

The video to send to John McCain on Nov. 5th

Reidblog: If I had a 527. . .

This is a fantastic homegrown commercial in the spirit of the Media Crashers mission statement; from Reid Report. The titles are too fast to read in places but the message is there and they are basically footnotes anyway. You can pause it if you really want to know the source.

Brave New Films: John McCain's Ads are lies and here's proof

Once again, Robert Greenwald slams one out of the park.

The RNC in 90 seconds

Brilliant!

Sarah Palin on Charlie Gibson

Wow... I mean just... Wow.

Especially at 2:30, 4:30, 5:55, 7:55....

This candidate is running on fumes.

Bill O'Reilly Interviews Barack Obama

I got tired of searching for all 4 parts of the O'Reilly Factor interview with Barack Obama, so I created this 4-part playlist.



A remarkably restrained interview for O'Reilly, he almost seems to genuinely like Obama throughout the entire 30 minutes.

Everything changed since 9/11

I made this two years ago but nothing has changed. It makes just as much sense today, on the anniversary, of 9/11 as it did then.

Stump Speech Sarah

So I went down to the Lee's Summit McCain/Palin rally, and was stunned to see such a large multi-state turnout (people from as far as Ohio came). Palin, of course, gave the same stump speech with all of the same embellishments and distortions for the election game-show that she and McCain are now playing. Afterward, I took some Q&A with the Obama protesters, and McCain counter-protesters and whipped this little 3 minute video together.

The video runs like this: 90 seconds of Palin's speech all snipped up, and then the reaction outside. I posed a few questions to the audience, mostly "what does it mean to be (your party affiliation) to you today", and tried to get "are you better off now than you were 8 years ago" -- people were really reluctant to touch that question, but one did.

McCain Betrayed POW's

Vietnam Veterans Against John McCain put together this video explaining some of the lesser known aspects of McCain's past including his efforts to shut down the families of missing POW's.



This is video of the actual senate hearing where he berated one of the POW family members who represented families objecting to shutting down the hearing.

I (emoticon) Jon Stewart

Thursday Distraction

This is quite probably the greatest cola (soda) commerical ever made:



At the end of the video it says in German, "Much, much (more) caffeine"

HeartBeat

Sarah Palin is a heartbeat from the presidency.

I couldn't let plisko have all the fun editing his own political ads, now could I?



This was an interesting project artistically, in that it was the first edit I ever did with video I downloaded as FLV (flash) which was then converted to MPG, then edited.

It gives it an otherworldly look in parts and makes the footage look older than it really is, like it was edited 20 years ago. I also zoom in on some clips, making the faces more pronounced, or granier.

I remember an old technique in the 3/4 and VHS tape days was to make a copy of a copy of your footage over and over, this would degrade the image to the point of it being vaguely recognizable. Fun stuff. I might work on this some more.

Massive police raids on suspected RNC protesters in Minneapolis

Some great stuff in the OpEd section of SALON.com as the RNC gets into full swing:

Massive police raids on suspected RNC protesters in Minneapolis

Protesters in Minneapolis have been targeted by a series of highly intimidating, sweeping police raids across the city, involving teams of 25-30 officers in riot gear, with semi-automatic weapons drawn, entering homes of those suspected of planning protests, handcuffing and forcing them to lay on the floor, while law enforcement officers searched the homes, seizing computers, journals, and political pamphlets.

Bruce Nestor, the President of the Minnesota Lawyer's Guild, regarding these raids:

Palin: Set... Match... Point

IMHO, McCain made the best VP choice since Ross Perot chose Admiral James Stockdale. Comedically speaking.

The VP debates should be hilarious.