Conservatives and Wall-E

I don’t normally review movies here, but I’ve really had my hand forced here. I saw Wall-E opening night and fell in love. Really, if you’ve not seen it yet, go and check it out. It’s far and away Pixar’s most ambitious and mature movie. Gone are the cute animals of Finding Nemo and Ratatouille, no more bright colors and celebrity voices like Toy Story and Cars. We’re left with, instead, a rather dystopian epic that contains a center of humanity that few other movies have had.

However, all is not well. As soon as the plot arrived, I knew what was coming. The movie centers itself on a planet Earth that has been left a wasteland by humanity, where life is unable to survive. The only evidence that people were on the planet at all is mountains of trash and a swath of signs and electronic display from “Buy n Save” “Buy n Large” (thanks Rodney!),the generic representative of a Wal-Mart conglomerate that took over everything from groceries to gas stations to housing. Humans are now fat and lazy, riding around on little floating chairs in a spaceship until Earth is cleaned up, which is of course Wall-E’s job.

Once I realized where the plot was aimed, I knew the right was going to have a shit fit, and so they did. Just as a random example, the Washington Times railed the movie’s “anti-consumerist” message.

Actually, I’m being unfair. The New York Post adored the movie, getting the point far better than that moron at the Times did. So to say the right as a whole hated it is being ignorant. So I’ll say the blindly moronic “must hate anything vaguely liberal” sect of the right had a shit fit.

The movie is not anti-consumerist, it’s not anti-technology, it’s not radical or preachy. It’s a dystopian future story along the lines of Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World. We have a dark vision of a world that has seen the humans devoid of our humanity, letting robots “live” for us while we merely float along, eating and sleeping on schedule. The glimmering hope in the movie is Wall-E himself, and it is through him that our species finds itself again.

Any claims that this has anything to do with left vs right are made by people who honestly think “giving a shit about the planet” is a political issue. Maybe you don’t believe in global warming, that’s fine. The film only indirectly references it by the lack of vegetation and animals, never ascribing it to anything specific. The message of the film is one of responsibility, that we must take charge of both ourselves and our world.

And that’s ignoring the entire story of Wall-E and Eve. The above is not the majority of the film, most occurs between two robots. The amount of emotion Pixar managed to put into the interactions of robots incapable of speaking beyond saying their own names is nothing short of mindblowing. I won’t even lie, parts got me rather emotional. All done with nothing but the most basic “expressions” and no dialogue.

So ignore the hysterics claiming this is some preachy message movie. Yes, it’s a movie with a message, but if you think it’s partisan, you’ve got problems yourself. It’s surprisingly dark and heavy for a G-rated Pixar film, and might go down as their crowning achievement. To quote the Post’s review:

Some day, there will be college courses devoted to this movie.

Dobson v Obama and the role of religion

The latest little scuffle on the “evangelical voter” front is actually kinda nice, because it offers me a perfect opportunity to explain why everything’s all screwed up. James Dobson, he of Focus on the Family, got his panties in a knot in response to Barack Obama’s comments from two years ago about religion in politics, and now a nice big ol’ feud is a-broilin’.

Dobson paraphrased this as “unless everybody agrees, we have no right to fight for what we believe in.” But that’s not what Obama was saying at all. Rather, he was arguing that in a pluralistic nation like ours, politics depends on people of faith being able to persuade others based on common and accessible ground and appeals to reason — which sounds entirely reasonable. Christians who oppose abortion can make an effective case by talking about sonograms, fetal development and the moral imperative to protect the most vulnerable. That doesn’t mean one’s faith shouldn’t inform the question of abortion — or, for that matter, war, poverty and other issues. After all, President Lincoln’s argument against slavery was partly grounded in faith. But appeals to the Bible or church teaching aren’t sufficient in a pluralistic nation. That’s why Lincoln talked primarily about the Declaration of Independence.

Basically the argument came down to this: Obama says people’s beliefs based in faith must be defended on common grounds in a secular nation (which we nominally are), Dobson got a stick up his ass because he thinks we’re Jesusistan.

The problem is that so much of religion cannot be defended on grounds other than the holy text from which they came. There’s no empirical evidence that says gay marriage is bad for society, that abortion prior to the 2nd trimester is the destruction of anything other than a non-conscious lump of cells, or that Intelligent Design is a scientific theory of any sort.

What we’re dealing with is an angry reaction to a reality. The religious right knows in their hearts that none of the points they argue in the 21st century have any legitimate grounds. When they want creationism taught in schools or marriage defined as a man and a woman, their only basis is that of the Bible. And given that we are not a nation based on the Bible, it pains them to think that they may be unable to foist their worldviews on the rest of us.

Obama makes a great point that even those like me are loathe to admit: as our nation is based on our morality, and the vast majority of those in power based their moral codes on their religious beliefs, our laws are largely shaped by the religion of those who wrote them. It happens. Can’t avoid that.

That’s misleading, however. Many believe their ethical stances are based in their religion, but in reality it’s that their ethics have support from religion. That’s why so many pick and choose which parts to really put any stock in. We all have a similar moral compass, and tons of rules in the Bible/Koran/Torah can be expressed in secular terms.

Really, pick a law. Stealing, murder, rape, arson, assault, tax evasion, perjury, whatever. You can explain each of them in purely reasonable terms. It doesn’t matter if you have any religion at all, it’s easy to figure out why it’s probably not good to set someone’s house on fire or lie under oath. Have a bunch of aliens land on our planet and we can defend those laws.

Now try and imagine those Martians striking our surface and we have to defend a law against gay marriage or why evolution cannot be taught by itself in the science class. You’re going to have a tricky time defending that without resorting to “well there’s this book that says if we disobey it we get punished forever…” and that’s Obama’s point.

The religious need to accept, just as any of us do, that all beliefs and standpoints must have rational and logical defenses. You can’t trace it back to a mystical or ethereal belief and expect everyone else to come along for the ride. The Dobsons of the world are going to fade away and vanish unless they accept that. Of course, hopefully, they’ll vanish anyway.

Worst June for Dow since 1930

And they don’t give away those “worst June” prizes away liberally, either. You gotta really earn that, and believe you me the Dow Jones really busted its ass to have the worst June in nearly eighty years.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJI) tumbled 358.41 points, or 3%, to 11, 453.42, leaving it down nearly 1,200 points, or 9.4%, for the month, with two trading days yet to go. As things stand, the month is the worst June so far since 1930 when the index declined 17.72%.

“It was the middle of March that the Bear Stearns debacle became public, sending the Dow to a low of 11,731. That level was broken within the first minute of trading today,” wrote Kathy Lien, chief strategist of DailyFX.com.

All of the Dow’s 30 components closed in negative territory.

Crude for August delivery reached a high of $140.39 a barrel in electronic trading on Globex. The contract closed at a record $139.64 on the New York mercantile Exchange, up $5.09, or 3.8%, for the session after trading as high as $140. .

“One thing is for certain, if crude continues to rally, stocks are dead,” said Dale Doelling, chief market technician at Trends In Commodities.

“If stocks have another day like this tomorrow, then the fallout next week could include government intervention in the markets,” said Doelling.

Sha-zam. But remember, the economy’s done GREAT under Bush and the GOP rule, way better than it ever did under Clinton and the Democrats’ bullshit tax-and-spend policies.

Obama has more than half of Clinton’s supporters.

You know, there shouldn’t BE a rift in the Democratic party, and half of Clinton’s supporters isn’t an accomplishment. I don’t even blame Hillary, she’s stumping for Obama for all she’s worth. What I don’t get is why her damn supporters won’t follow.

Deal with NK over nuclear capabilities

One of these days, I swear I’ll find a way to reconcile the double standard we have vis a vis North Korea and Iran.

Anyway, Bush has agreed to take North Korea off of the list of state sponsors of terror in exchange for their transparency in their nuclear program. Additionally, they’ll get some trade sanctions lifted.

Bush said the declaration showed the effectiveness of diplomacy.

“Multilateral diplomacy is the best way to peacefully resolve the nuclear issue. North Korea should seize this moment of opportunity to restore its relationship with the international community,” Bush said at a news conference.

Hey, did you catch that? Hold on, let me make it a little bigger.

“Multilateral diplomacy is the best way to peacefully resolve the nuclear issue.”

That’s a direct quote from George W Bush.

Let me ask you a question. Pretend you’re Iran right now. We all know that the Iranians and others pay close attention to American politics. What do you think their response would be? Is that a motivation to stop pursuing nuclear technology, perhaps weapons? Or is it encouragement to get a small arsenal of nukes, and then use them as leverage to get some concessions from the Americans?

That seems to be the lesson. If we don’t like you and you’re nowhere near nuclear capabilities, we invade you. If we don’t like you and you’re well on the way, we use sanctions and the threat of military involvement. If we don’t like you and you HAVE nukes, we play nice and give you things.

Antonin Scalia is talented (re: handgun ban)

Sometimes I look at the right/left divide in the United States and wonder why we can’t find any common ground. There’s no way, if you were to make a list of 100 issues, that liberals would be categorically on one side and conservatives on the other.

That’s true, but as Antonin Scalia demonstrates in his statement regarding the handgun ban, even when I agree with these guys they manage to make it douchey enough that I want to smack them in the head. Yes, banning handguns is a bad idea. This?

“Undoubtedly some think that the Second Amendment is outmoded in a society where our standing army is the pride of our nation, where well-trained police forces provide personal security and where gun violence is a serious problem,” Scalia wrote. “That is perhaps debatable, but what is not debatable is that it is not the role of this court to pronounce the Second Amendment extinct.”

To semi-quote Jon Stewart, why you gotta end it kinda dickish? No one thinks the 2nd amendment is outmoded, at least no one away from the 0.5% fringe on the extreme extreme left. People have the right to keep and bear arms, it’s in the damn thing, whether we think it’s outmoded or not hardly matters anyway.

What drives me crazy is this argument that any, ANY, regulation or lawmaking concerning what weapons people are allowed to have is an infringement on our 2nd Amendment rights. I’m not even paying attention to the first part of it concerning militias, because my reading of it says that is the reason for the right, not the path through which we get it.

The “gimme an assault rifle and ten bazookas” crowd takes the interpretation that limiting the weaponry people can have in any way is unconstitutional. The problem is that if you interpret it that way, then all kinds of things would be unconstitutional. Censorship, public indecency laws, requiring people to get permission before protesting, all these things would violate the 1st amendment.

Don’t even get me started on the 4th. The same people who argue against a “liberal interpretation” of the 2nd amendment seem to love a liberal interpretation of the 4th, arguing that wiretapping isn’t really a search or seizure, amongst other things.

But back to the main point: I agree that a handgun ban is dumb, but dammit Scalia, why ya gotta be a dick about it?

You know, something bothers me about this FISA thing…

There’s been a lot of discussion about the dangers of the FISA non-compromise, and they’re pretty much all correct from what I can see. Pick your reason to hate the bill and you’ve got a good point. It’s an invasion of privacy, it’s dangerous expansion of presidential power, it covers up past crimes, it’s an admission OF past crimes, whatever. But there’s a little more to it and it’s been bothering me lately.

The FISA bill massively expands the executive’s ability to listen in on conversations and intercept communications. Domestic, foreign, whatever. We’re talking an absolutely immense amount of information that’s going to be flowing. Think about how much communicating you do in a day, and imagine if you and a million other people had all of that recorded and logged.

That’s where it starts to lose me. I spend quite a lot of my time online, I end up on the phone a good bit, and lord knows my text messaging bill is higher than it should be. If someone were to record all of my communications for a month and then were charged with the task of finding out if I was doing anything vaguely terrorist-like, it would take a while to sift through it all.

We already know that one of the problems with preventing 9/11 was that there was so much intercepted communication, along with a dearth of translators, that they could not pick out the important parts in time. Even in the archaic pre-9/11 days when the president actually adhered to the laws (as far as we know), not only could terrorists’ communications be found, but there was so much extra shit flying through the wires that pulling out just what they needed made it difficult.

To use an old analogy here, we’re trying to find needles in haystacks and the Bush Administration wants to add hay.

Motivation is important when looking at any decision anyone makes. You have to look at what they SAY is their reason, and what they stand to gain from it. In this case, what they say is obvious. They claim it’ll help them find, capture, and eliminate terrorists. That this is necessary to keep America safe. To protect us and our families.

What they gain is a little more difficult. Given the overabundance of information we’ve had so far, including the various victories Bush has claimed that, presumably, were done without the new provisions included in the FISA bill, it’s difficult to understand just what the benefit is. By their own accounts, they’ve prevented all the attacks that almost happened, and did so before this compromise came around, so either it’s a case of CYA or there’s more.

Most of those “preventions” turned out to be bunk, and they were all (we eventually learned) solved by normal policework. So we have to now add up some other facts: we’ve had no attacks that occurred thanks to a LACK of allowances the new bill covers, the prevented attacks touted before were stopped by normal means, and yet they both fight for these powers and have illegally used them anyway.

This is when that nice dark storm cloud starts to drift overhead. Remember, per the wording of the new bill, as long as the Attorney General says a given surveillance was needed to prevent terrorism, with nothing to double-check it, then it’s “legal”. So, if this bill passes, Bush can order a tap on anyone, at any time, for any reason, and simply tell his AG to verify that it was necessary and not only is it going to be allowed, but it will continue without anyone having to periodically pop up with a “hey, anything from that yet that we can see?”

While I’m worried about giant sweeps of communications, I can’t imagine that’s what they really want. It won’t do them any good to simply start putting entire cities through the filter; they’ll never be able to sift through it all. It’s a terrifying breach of privacy and a clear 4th amendment violation, but the problem there is just principle, not action.

No, what I’m concerned about is targeted surveillance. Yep, back to Watergate. I know, I’ve got my foil hat on pretty tight now, but hear me out. We can stop terrorism without it, swimming through that much information is damn near impossible, and Bush can spy on literally anyone without oversight as long as the AG backs him up.

Frankly, I don’t see what good this could possibly do to a president beyond letting him engage in targeted spying on specific people. I cannot imagine my text messages and emails ever drifting up and out of the terabytes of information collected in the vacuum that it will ever register as a blip on the radar, but if I was a political opponent, specifically someone leading a liberal organization such as Markos or Eli Pariser, well then I’d be a bit concerned.

The problem here isn’t that the government can put spy cameras outside and watch what the world is doing, much of a grievance as I have with that. The problem is that they can put a spy camera in your living room if they feel like it, and don’t have to have a reason to do so. It’s not how many are getting spied on, it’s who.

It’s conceivable, I suppose, that a staff of enough people could wade through AT&T’s entire customer base’s communications, but I doubt it. That strikes me as more of a red herring than anything. Even if they’re going to do it, I don’t see the administration putting much manpower into reading and listening to it all. AT&T alone has about 70 million customers. Assuming each one needs about 750 minutes a month (to pick a random number), that’s somewhere in the vicinity of 875 million hours per month of voice communications. Are we honestly expecting all of that to get listened to?

No, the issue is like what Nixon did, what happened to MLK and others. Activists who were just stamped “dangerous” and got spied on. That’s the only conceivable reason for this power grab, and that’s why it’s gotta be stopped. I wouldn’t trust any president with that ability, let alone George Walker Bush. Lord knows what he’d do with it in his lame duck phase.

Dual-Irony with Karl Rove

Buckle up, this one’s a two-fer! Karl Rove was on O’Reilly recently, and while that’s a pretty good two-fer on its own in terms of making me want to jam a paring knife into my face, the actual great deal came around when Rove started bitching about the New York Times “revealing” a CIA agent.

O’REILLY: Well, now, last week, The New York Times outed a CIA agent. I’m not going to mention his name, who interrogated Khalid Sheik Mohammed. Now the CIA asked The New York Times not to do that. It obviously puts the CIA agent in danger because al Qaeda knows who he is. And they say well, we’ll out anybody unless they’re undercover. Since you were involved with this, how could you respond to that?

ROVE: Well, look, The New York Times has a double standard. It is deeply concerned when Richard Armitage outed Valerie Plame. Of course, they were only concerned until the point that it became apparent that it was Richard Armitage, not Karl Rove. [...] I read their explanation. And basically, it sounded to me like they were saying we put his name out there because we decided we could. And I mean, they didn’t have a good explanation for it.

That “explanation” by the way, is that he was neither undercover nor was his identity even a secret.

After discussion with agency officials and a lawyer for Mr. Martinez, the newspaper declined the request, noting that Mr. Martinez had never worked under cover and that others involved in the campaign against Al Qaeda have been named in news stories and books. The editors judged that the name was necessary for the credibility and completeness of the article.

So let’s re-cap that. Karl Rove has a hand in the outing of a CIA agent who was undercover and whose identity was a secret, and that’s fine. The Times mentions the name of a CIA agent who is not undercover and who had been “revealed” before, Rove and O’Reilly go on a rampage.

That’s certainly bad enough. It’s on the level of hilarity that if it showed up in a movie the audience would complain that no politician could be THAT ham-fistedly evil. But Rove, always the overachiever, decided to gild the lily and make himself look like even more of a jackass.

The New York Times has a habit, they did this. They previously, against the objection of all of our intelligence agencies, revealed the existence of programs to monitor the electronic communications of known and suspected terrorists abroad.

You know, those programs that were perfectly legal. They were so legal that the Bush Administration had to propose rewrites of the laws so they could continue what they had already been doing legally; an action that (I believe) counts as admission of guilt. When you’re discovered doing something and then rewrite the law, it’s hard to claim you weren’t breaking the law before.

But that’s how twisted these guys’ values are. When they’re found doing something illegal, they think it’s okay because, hey, they’re the good guys. Even if it’s true that their actions were, oh, just a little south of the legal line, they were only doing it for a good cause! It’s the damn MEDIA who should be punished for screwing it all up for them!

Nader is a moron.

Ralph Nader has been a non-entity over the past, oh, eight years. Really he just seems to show up in order to get a few hyper-liberals motivated, then once in a while run for something and get obliterated, only to vanish from whence he came for a few years.

He’s apparently still desperate to be a heavy hitter, otherwise I can’t figure out his little diatribe about Obama and “white guilt”.

“There’s only one thing different about Barack Obama when it comes to being a Democratic presidential candidate. He’s half African-American,” Nader told the paper in comments published Tuesday.

“Whether that will make any difference, I don’t know. I haven’t heard him have a strong crackdown on economic exploitation in the ghettos. Payday loans, predatory lending, asbestos, lead. What’s keeping him from doing that? Is it because he wants to talk white? He doesn’t want to appear like Jesse Jackson? We’ll see all that play out in the next few months and if he gets elected afterwards,” Nader added.

I’m amazed that Nader, of all people, would dive onto the “Obama’s just a safe negro” bandwagon that the right has so effectively inhabited.

But the most disturbing thing is this little thing that kept popping up:

“I mean, first of all, the number one thing that a black American politician aspiring to the presidency should be is to candidly describe the plight of the poor, especially in the inner cities and the rural areas…”

Read that again. The number one thing a black politician should talk about is the poor. Because obviously that’s where the blacks are. They’re scraping for food stamps in the ghettos while us whites are the ones in nice houses with jobs. I’m honestly surprised he didn’t start saying Obama isn’t black enough because he isn’t talking about welfare for single moms and importation prices on watermelons.

The hilarious part is that this all comes out in an effort to prove that it’s Obama’s supporters that are racists, not jerkoffs like Nader and Rush.

Most Israelis and Arabs want co-existence

Something I both appreciate and am annoyed by is when I’m hit with something that completely alters my impression of a given issue.

I’m no expert on foreign relations, and the Israel/Palestine dynamic is no exception. I have my opinions and I believe them to be grounded, I’m definitely not speaking without doing my research. That said, I was quite surprised to find out just how many Israeli citizens, both Jews and Arabs, want an integrated country. Highlights:

• 77 percent of Israeli Arabs would rather live in Israel than in any other country in the world.
• 73 percent of the Jews and 94 percent of the Arabs want Israel to “be a society in which Arab and Jewish citizens have mutual respect and equal opportunities.”
• 68 percent of Jewish citizens support teaching conversational Arabic in Jewish schools to help bring Arab and Jewish citizens together.
• More than two-thirds of Israeli Jews (69 percent) said they believed that contributing to co-existence was a personal responsibility.

How’s that, then? I’d figured that most citizens didn’t want to fight and would prefer everyone just get along, but not to that extent. Our media outlets, just about all of them, paint the region as racked by conflict where no one gets along; the Arabs and Jews are at each other’s throats all day every day. But look at that. It’s 6% of the Israeli Arabs that want this fight to go on.

Again, that really alters my opinion of the situation.