Monday, October 26, 2015

Truest statement of the week

I'm glad that Mrs. Clinton had an Indian food, wine, and beer party. It's too bad my nephew [Sean Smith] and Ambassador [Chris] Stevens, you know, couldn't show up. 

 -- Michael Ingmire, quoted in Ian Hanchett's "Sean Smith's Uncle: Glad Hillary Had Party After Hearing, Too Bad My Nephew Couldn’t Make It, 'Embarassed' At Dems" (Breitbart News).








Truest statement of the week II

Hate to spoil the party, everyone. But Hillary did not make herself queen last week.
Conventional wisdom, like the above from last week, is like a traditional soufflé in a microwave. Instant, tasteless, likely to collapse any minute. Yes, Clinton can unite her party. Especially when the other options are an avowed socialist, a former Republican senator, a former Reagan official who smiles at the thought of killing on the battlefield, and a former Maryland governor who built a cops-and-incarceration résumé and ran in the exact year when those politics seem cruelly out of date.
But did last week change any of her problems?
Televised debate moments produce no prose worth reading. We're a democracy after all. Reagan's "There you go again" is considered the top of the genre. And Clinton's big moment came when Anderson Cooper asked if she wanted to respond to an implication by Lincoln Chafee that Clinton's decision to run a home-brew email setup showed a lack of ethics. "No," she replied. Other big moments came when she responded to Bernie Sanders: "But we are not Denmark," she said, "I love Denmark. We are the United States of America."
Owned! I guess. Hail the conquering Hillary.


-- Michael Brendan Dougherty "Hillary Clinton Is Still A Terrible Candidate" (The Week).















A note to our readers

Hey --


A Monday.  First, we thank all who participated this edition which includes Dallas and the following:





The Third Estate Sunday Review's Jim, Dona, Ty, Jess and Ava,
Rebecca of Sex and Politics and Screeds and Attitude,
Betty of Thomas Friedman Is a Great Man,
C.I. of The Common Ills and The Third Estate Sunday Review,
Kat of Kat's Korner (of The Common Ills),
Mike of Mikey Likes It!,
Elaine of Like Maria Said Paz),
Cedric of Cedric's Big Mix,
Ruth of Ruth's Report,
Wally of The Daily Jot,
Trina of Trina's Kitchen,
Marcia of SICKOFITRDLZ,
Stan of Oh Boy It Never Ends,
Isaiah of The World Today Just Nuts,
and Ann of Ann's Mega Dub.


And what did we come up with?


Sean Smith's uncle.
And a truest for Michael.
If there's no combat, how did the death happen?

Ava and C.I. take on the cesspool that is MSNBC.
Oh, Hillary.
12 films make our top ten -- and there were more and we almost did honorable mention.  Since I (Jim) am married to Dona I have to note her pick BOYS ON THE SIDE.

We pick the ten best Bond films.

What we listened to.
Mike and the gang wrote this and we thank them for it.



Peace.




-- Jim, Dona, Ty, Jess, Ava and C.I.

Editorial: No combat?






Thursday saw the death of yet another person in Iraq -- this time a US citizen.

A US service member, in fact.

He died from?

Combat.










  • B-b-b-but Barack Obama said no combat!!!!


    Barack says a lot of things?


    You really still believe all the s**t that comes out of his mouth?


    The Iraq War never ended.


    Barack never brought all the troops home.


    You may have been young and stupid in 2008 but what's your excuse seven years later?


    Old and stupid?


    Possibly.






    TV: The least trusted name in news

    MSNBC -- the toilet dweller of cable 'news' -- in terms of ratings and quality.

    That's the image it's earned.

    tv



    But they're changing, insists an MSNBC friend.

    Not enough.

    That was obvious in Thursday afternoon's live coverage of the Congressional Benghazi hearing.

    Or Thursday's cheerleading for Hillary Clinton.

    To be fair to MSNBC, Andrea Mitchell's lustful orgasm over Hillary playing tough guy?

    It's ingrained in certain elements of the press.

    They're suck ups and, honestly, they're masochists.

    So if someone acts the bully -- be it Hillary, Bully Boy Bush, or any other despot in their country -- they'll fall in line.

    Doubt it?

    January 23, 2013, Hillary appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to snarl her infamous "What difference at this point does it make!"  The press swallowed that down and insisted Hillary had come out a winner.  You can check The Common Ills' Iraq snapshot for that day to find a different perspective.

    Who was right?

    Not the media who had a passionate and hormonal response to Hillary.

    Turned out that 'proud' moment hailed by the media in real time has haunted Hillary ever since.


    Despite this, Thursday on MSNBC, they were masturbating yet again.


    Andrea was only one of many making an idiot of herself.


    There was the joke that is Brian Williams.


    In fact, the same day Brian was noted on THE NIGHTLY SHOW WITH LARRY WILMORE (Comedy Central):


    Larry Wilmore: Hey, guys, first of all, how about those Mets?  Pretty good. You know what? I got to tell you, though, I have to tell you the Mets going to the World Series is not what is amazing to me. You know what is amazing to me? I'll tell you. A friend of mine who's a huge Mets fan, he had a TV show. One could call it fake news, if you will. He suffered every year about those Mets on national television and as Americans, we shared his grief. Then a brother gets a TV show and he decides to move out of the television neighborhood. It's okay. Didn't hurt my feelings at all, alright?  But you left a little too soon, didn't you? Didn't you? Three months. Three months is all you had to wait and you could have been savoring this moment in front of everybody. Any how, good luck to your Mets in the World Series, Brian Williams.


    Fake news and Brian Williams are forever entwined like conjoined twins.


    All of his made up stories, he can't escape them.


    NBC News thought they could escape Brian Williams.

    They thought demoting him to MSNBC would result in his quitting.

    See, if they fired him, they had to buy out his contract.

    So they took the anchor of NBC NIGHTLY NEWS and sent him to the minors, MSNBC, hoping he'd be humiliated enough to say, "I quit."  If he walked, they didn't have to pay off his contract.

    What they didn't grasp was that Brian Williams, like the sub in a BDSM relationship, gets off on shame.

    So he now hosts on MSNBC and interacts with all sorts of scum.

    Did someone say John Dean?

    As leftists, we regularly decry the use of convicted felon G. Gordon Liddy as a 'reliable' voice by elements of the right-wing media.  We feel the same about the indicted Oliver North being used as a 'trusted' commentator.

    So why the hell would we tolerate convicted felon John Dean?

    Dean is a criminal.

    He's also a snitch.

    He turned on his Republican bosses in the Watergate scandal to save his own ass.

    That doesn't lessen his crimes -- which were crimes against the country, let's be very clear on that.


    But there Brian Williams was chatting up John Dean like he was a sage.


    Dean didn't feel like it rose to Watergate.

    He was brought on for that 'wisdom'?

    He offered nothing of value but trash rarely offers value, it just stinks up the room until you carry it to the curb.


    Andrea wasn't being carried anywhere -- she was rushing to prepare her report for NBC NIGHTLY NEWS WITH LESTER HOLT (though still smarting over the loss, Brian could only call it "NBC NIGHTLY NEWS").

    Which left us seriously confused.

    We'd watched her wax on for a good four minutes about how wonderful Hillary was, how great she was before the Committee, how she triumphed, etc, etc.

    All of those were opinions.


    Expressed over the airwaves.


    So how could she now offer an objective report on NBC NIGHTLY NEWS?

    And how could anyone believe a word she said?



    She was far from only in serving up disbelief on toast.

    "Older women are not going to like this."

    That statement came from the notorious sexist Chris Matthews.

    He's restyled himself as . . . heaven knows what.


    But beamed in live from San Francisco, he had this weird scoop to the top of his hair that puzzled us until Senator Claire McCaskill showed up and we realized that's where we'd seen that hairstyle before.


    In the meantime, we were treated to Chris raving over Hillary and choosing to speak for women.


    He last most notoriously spoke for women while praising Bully Boy Bush's 2003 MISSION ACCOMPLISHED photo op.  He and G. Gordon Liddy were marveling over the protrusion parachute straps created around Bully Boy Bush's crotch.  "Size matters," tiny Chris lustily insisted.


    Thursday, he was even more ridiculous with that side sweep of long bangs bobbing and weaving, distracting from whatever prattle he was espousing.


    Matthews was part of a never ending panoply of head shots, all insisting Hillary had triumphed.


    But she didn't.

    And that's why MSNBC is a cesspool.

    They offered one voice after another saying the exact same thing.

    They could brook no thought or opinion that strayed from the hymnal.

    For a brief moment, as the coverage was winding, down, Tom Brokaw appeared.

    He expressed the belief that nothing changed with the appearance.

    He offered that Hillary had pleased her supporters but done nothing to pull over her detractors.

    It was a fair and objective view.

    And it's what the entire coverage should have been.






























    Macho Hillary

    Macho, macho ma'am.
    She wants to be a macho ma'am.
    Macho, macho ma'am.
    She's going to be a macho ma'am.


    In 2008, when Hillary Clinton first ran for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination, she stressed being a woman far less.  These days, she's all but saying, "Vote for me, I'll give you two reasons!"

    But the increased talk of womanhood comes as she breaks further and further from what a feminist candidate would ideally look like.

    She's the most macho in the room.

    Worse, she's not going to let you forget it.

    As a site that has long called out pigheaded males, we're not seeing Hillary's aping that role as 'progress.'

    In her earlier run, she was more likely to talk about "we" whereas today it's "I" and "me."

    This thought pattern is most obvious in her desire to party -- you read that right -- to party following her Benghazi testimony last week.


    benghazilimboparty

    [Illustration is Isaiah's The World Today Just Nuts "Cranky Clinton: Benghazi Limbo Party."]

    To Congress, she insisted no one had thought about the four American deaths -- Glen Doherty, Tyrone Woods, Sean Smith and Chris Stevens -- than had she, no one was more tormented.


    Yet that same night, she throws a party to celebrate her 'victory.'


    The four deaths no longer matter, just the "I" triumph.


    There's far too much "I" and "me" in her non-inclusive statements.


    She's a braggart and a boaster.


    And while modesty isn't a feminist requirement, queen bee-ism is anti-feminist.


    Equally true, Hillary's not imploding any gender-stereotypes.


    She is taking the worst from male politicians but drag queens present exagerations of women and no one confuses those club acts with feminism.

    None of which is to say Hillary is not a feminist.


    She's a form of feminist -- a weak form.


    While her becoming president might be something good for women (or not), it will not be anything good for feminism.

    She's refused to run as a feminist.






    Feminist Classic Films of the 90s



    directed by




    1) SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE (directed by Nora Ephron).

    Nora's film had it all: friendship, social awareness, romance, comedy . . .

    Meg Ryan even references Susan Faludi's BACKLASH: THE UNDECLARED WAR AGAINST WOMEN. Meg and Rosie O'Donnell mine comic gold as best friends.  Tom Hanks, Rita Wilson, Victor Garber and Rob Reiner all do great work.  A screenplay by Nora Eprhon, David S. Ward and Jeff Arch.

    We're doing this list because the always sexist and ignorant Ms. website elected to ignore this film -- in their idiotic top ten.  If you look at their list, you'll quickly note how little attention they paid to women directors or women screenwriters.

    The trashy faux-feminist blog at Ms. has long trashed or ignored Nora (they didn't even note her passing, remember?).



    2) THELMA & LOUISE (directed by Ridley Scott, screenplay by Callie Khouri).


    3) GRACE OF MY HEART (directed by Allison Anders. screenplay by Anders).



    4) BOYS DON'T CRY (directed by Kimberly Peirce, written by Peirce and Andy Bienen).



    5) A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN (directed by Penny Marshall, screenplay by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel from a story by Kelly Candaele and Kim Wilson) (tie) LOSING ISAIAH (directed by Stephen Gyllenhaal, screenplay by Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal).



    6) THE FIRST WIVES CLUB (directed by Hugh Wilson, screenplay by Robert Harling and Paul Rudnick).



    7) A THOUSAND ACRES (directed by Jocelyn Moorehouse, screenplay by Laura Jones).



    8) PARTY GIRL (directed by Daisy von Scherler Mayer, screenplay by Harry Birckmayer, Sheila Gaffney and von Scherler Mayer).



    9) EVER AFTER (directed by Andy Tennant, screenplay by Susannah Grant, Andy Tennant and Rick Parks).



    10) I LIKE IT LIKE THAT (directed by Darnell Martin, screenplay by Martin) (tie) NOW AND THEN (directed by Lesli Linka Glatter, screenplay by I. Marlene King) (tie) .








    Bond: 10 Best

    spectre

    The latest James Bond film, SPECTRE, opens in North America on November 5th.  To n


    1) CASINO ROYALE (2006).


    2) YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE.


    3) SKYFALL.


    4) TOMORROW NEVER DIES.


    5) THE SPY WHO LOVED ME.


    6) DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER.


    7) DIE ANOTHER DAY.


    8) GOLDFINGER.


    9) OCTOPUSSY.


    10) GOLDENEYE.















    This edition's playlist





     

    janet




    1) Janet Jackson's UNBREAKABLE.


    2) Donna Summer's BAD GIRLS.


    3) Jeff Buckley's GRACE. 
    4)  Ben and Ellen Harper's CHILDHOOD HOME.



    5) Aretha Franklin's ARETHA SINGS THE GREAT DIVA CLASSICS.



    6) Carly Simon's HELLO BIG MAN.




    7) Steve Grand's ALL AMERICAN BOY.


    8) The Mamas & The Papas' DELIVER.


    9) Jefferson Airplane's CROWN OF CREATION.


    10) Sade's LOVERS ROCK.









    Highlights

    This piece is written by Rebecca of Sex and Politics and Screeds and Attitude, Cedric of Cedric's Big Mix, Kat of Kat's Korner, Betty of Thomas Friedman is a Great Man, Mike of Mikey Likes It!, Elaine of Like Maria Said Paz, Ruth of Ruth's Report, Marcia of SICKOFITRADLZ, Stan of Oh Boy It Never Ends, Ann of Ann's Mega Dub, Isaiah of The World Today Just Nuts and Wally of The Daily Jot. Unless otherwise noted, we picked all highlights.

    "Before you say 'things can't get worse' . . ." -- most requested highlight of the week.


    "Iraq snapshot" -- C.I. reports on a House Veterans Affairs Subcommittee hearing.



    "Marvel Agents of SHIELD," "Arrow (into the pit, the pit is no more)," "How To Pump Up Bad Ratings," "the yawn inducing scandal, heroes reborn shows a little life," "The Originals (Tracy Ifeacher)," "What show should get the axe?," "Minority Report," "One bit of good news" and "ab fab" -- Mike, Stan, Betty, Marcia and Rebecca cover TV.



    "Shrimp Dip in the Kitchen" -- Trina serves up a recipe.



    "Marital Aid" -- Isaiah dips into the archives.


    "Joni Mitchell For the Roses," "Janet belongs in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame" and "rihanna" -- Stan, Elaine and Rebecca talk music.


    "She is just an embarrassment," "Always the liar, Hillary Clinton," "THIS JUST IN! SHE DA MAN, SHE DA MAN!" and "Macho Cranky," "Hillary Clinton guilty of solicitation" "Liar Cranky Clinton finally tells some truth," "The ass Amy Goodman," "did you know about this?," "Liar Hillary exposed," "THIS JUST IN! SHE ROAMS THE PRAIRIE!" and "She lives to stalk another day,"




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