Do you wonder why only Harvey Weinstein is taking the fall? Was he too fat and ugly for us to imagine despoiling young actresses? I like to think it’s because he produced truly awful movies.
I am heartened to see that articles about the tolerance of Weinstein’s abuse of power do make the link to our Womanizer in Chief, but again, Trump is also low hanging fruit. Certainly the casting couch is still an active element of Hollywood. It pervades patriarch-dom.
Barack Obama, Justin Trudeau and Enrique Pena Nieto telling their despairing citizens not to fear free trade –Martin Short couldn’t get a bigger laugh! And I think we’ve got a litmus test for professional integrity. The free trade isn’t cut and dry, principly because it’s too big a lie. The TPP is today’s turbocharged shakedown model and up until just recently the media refused to talk about, and never critically. Trumpish isolationism is a buggaboo by which conservative supporters are being labeled racists protectionist xenophobes. The media can harp on these things and be half right, but the real litmus test for unmasking patronizing condescention is the BREXIT. When amigo leaders, pundits and now counter-culture gadflies on the Comedy Channel are mocking the movement that broke the EU, you can be certain their moral character is being laid bare for you, and it’s rubbish. Now Donald Trump is making statements that the facist media can only pretend are extreme. He wants to withdraw from the TPP and he wants to renegotiate NAFTA. The media have buried Trump’s seven point plan with the spin that he’s likened the TPP to “rape”. Apparently that’s hyperbole, though exactly how unlike rape is it? Don’t say it trivializes sexual violence if you won’t honestly report how free trade, debt, “austerity”, and corporate hegemony ravage democratic economies.
At best, murdered Member of Parliament Jo Cox was a humanitarian in the Hollywood celebrity mold. Syria, Darfur, etc. Her concerns for refugees or “pro-democracy” collateral ony promoted neoliberal interventionism. The British MP’s martyrdom while opposing the BREXIT was beautifully parlayed into a character assassination of its proponants. The corporate media was able to paint them as far right extremists, instead of a grassroots groundswell against continued subjugation to Europe’s banker class. MP Cox was a shill for the European Union mechanisms binding regional economies to unelected technocrats not representative governments. While the London establishment is morning the killing of their rising star, Jo Cox was no more than telegenic and young, a new face to sell their old same as the new world order.
I remember when you couldn’t throw a stick without hitting someone who didn’t want to SAVE DARFUR. And boy did they need hitting with a stick. All those high school and college students activated by OBAMA 08 lined up to add Darfur to their extracurriculars. Why? The usual manipulative pictures and imperialist propaganda. Sudanese refugees needed saving. Bleeding Hearts’ Burden. George Clooney was showered with activist laurels for playing Hollywood’s ambassador to Darfur. Soon enough pacifists were calling for military intervention, a “no-fly zone” but enforced with force. Denied, the US provided the military intervention covertly, and ultimately the southern fossil fuel rich portion of Sudan was lopped off for the multinational profiteers.
When the police show up at your door dressed like this, I assumed the ‘Protect” means for them not you. They have done a great job of selling America the “Protect and Serve” but do you really need it? In February 1955, the Los Angeles Police Department, through the pages of the internally produced BEAT magazine, conducted a contest for a motto for the police academy. The winning entry was the motto, “To Protect and to Serve” submitted by Officer Joseph S. Dorobek. In my seventy six years of life, I can count on one finger the times I’ve had to call the “Serve and Protect” guys. And that was only at the insistence of my Insurance agent who had refused to pay the claim until the police were notified.
It did not escape my attention, as I explained to my Insurance agent “Why call the police now? the burglars are already gone, along with my stuff. I’m sure most people fail to notice that the police only show up after a crime; Not before, so where then does the “Protect” come into the equation. It should also be noted; to this day, that the police have never caught the burglar or returned any of my stuff.
When I was ten years old, I and some of my friends went to the East-town theater, I saw my first Frankenstein move. That night when my mother told me to go upstairs and go to bed, I refused as I was sure Frankenstein was waiting up there under my bed to get me. I was so scared, I almost shit my pants. In my feverish state of mind, I even thought my mother was conspiring with Frankie so that he could get me. It took me a few years of growing up to figure out, Hollywood was about making movies and money, if they had to scare the shit out of a ten year boy, so be it.
The “Protest and Serve” police join a long list of groups and people who use the fear factors to promote their own agenda for their own benefit. And of course the police can protect you from most of them.
You might recall some of them; The black man is coming to rob you and take your white women, the brown man is coming to take your jobs, the government is coming to take your guns, the IRS is coming to get your money, the devil is coming to get you for sinning, but then of course you can purchase absolution from guess who?
And who among us could ever forget; “Reefer Madness” the propaganda film that was sure to send you out into the streets beginning a career of robbing and raping and those were only two of the milder things that could happen after just one puff. I’m sure the big pharmaceutical companies had much to do with this as they also had their fears of losing their addicted customers.
And of course the police were always there to protect you from all this mayhem and madness, all except the devil and IRS, these areas are covered by your local church and lawyers.
And then we come to the granddaddy of all fears; The “Terrorist” you might remember him? They were that group of rag tag guys we saw on Fox News, swinging on monkey bars somewhere over in Afghanistan. The “Terrorist” were primarily the responsibility of the US army and Geo Bush. But then we discovered some of those “Terrorist” hiding in something called a cell, here in America.
So now we would need to call in the local police departments to protect us. The Army was so appreciative of the police help, they gave much of their equipment to help protect us from this new threat. The police were always there to protect us no matter where that threat might come from.
As we saw on January 26th 2015, when this elite “Protect and Serve” police force, discover a 17 year old unarmed girl sitting in a car, in an alley on the east side of Denver, putting four bullets in her, resulting in her tragic death and suffering of all those who loved her.
It is heartbreaking to look into the eyes of this young woman, Jessica Hernandez and see her as a threat and to think she was murdered by the Denver Police Department with no repercussions to any of her killers. You might think I’m being too hard on the Denver Police Department. Well!
We have all seen those funeral processions as they wind their way to the graveyard escorted by the “Protect and Serve” police. Not quite sure why a deceased person needs protection or what the hurry is to get them in the ground but my question is; Did those same “Protect and Serve” police that murdered this young girl, also escort her hearse to the graveyard? This is just too difficult and emotional to think about.
APPARENTLY it is our own laggard CONSENT that drives the manufacturing process –haha. I’m sorry, no question, the chicken came before the rotten egg. Go ahead, blame the victim. Shame on the public for balking at what Hollywood feeds us. The public rejects a red carpet trendsetter and apparently we’re showing insufficient sensitivity to the vehicle, herself a trafficked victim of the process. Yeah, no. Yes, Renée Zellweger is a casualty of artificial esthetic standards set by our culture industry, but that’s not the fault of its primary targets.
By the same logic, should blockbusters be excused for being idiotic because test screening reflect moviegoers to be vacuous? Do you accept that an entertainment industry’s role is to perpetuate empty headedness? I don’t want teachers resigning themselves to graduating dummies.
Zellweger defenders point to the spiraling abuse of plastic surgery. The term they use is “popularity” of plastic surgery, how cheeky! And how convenient it is to stand up for Zellweger in the vulnerable moment of her reveal –to peddle the industry’s chosen trope– rather than accept her audience’s perfectly natural reaction to vanity jumping the shark. Actresses are paid handsomely to set beauty standards, Zellweger for example has been tasked with aging. Those expected to follow are the real victims. We’re told the audience sets the standards. Here we see the audience in full gag reflex of those unnatural, unfair, unobtainable standards -out of reach for Ms. Zellweger too it turns out. The audience is in full gag reflex as the industry apologists say “swallow”.
We are aghast and saddened for two perfectly honorable reasons. First, because Ms. Zellweger’s face belonged to a common pantheon of iconic personages. “Bridget Jones” was paid for in full. Zellweger’s celebrity status is compensation for her obligation to stand-in, yes in perpetuity, whether or not her career becomes a “whatever happened to.” If Ms. Zellweger wants to reassert sole proprietorship of that face, to despoil as she pleases, she reaps the displeasure of her ticketholders.
Second, because we’ve been down the plasticized celebrity rabbit hole before.
Despite the “trend” -we’re told- toward surgical enhancement, the vast majority of people elect not to disfigure themselves, even if they can afford it. Plastic surgery isn’t like a tattoo, it is short-sighted disfigurement plain and simple. I don’t know what kind of a feminist champions negligent mutilation as a right.
This is not about ugliness being subjective. If we are to equate aging with ugly. An actor’s elective surgery does not rebel against standards of beauty, it submits to them. Whether male or female, celebrities hoping to forestall aging do not alter themselves to be ugly. But plastic surgery without fail cements that fate. Inexplicably it’s a lesson yet to gain traction in Hollywood. That is what I think is at the heart of the public’s incredulity, as untactfully as it is being expressed.
My profound sympathies are with Ms. Zellweger but I’m happy that her public’s OMG reaction is upstaging her star power to impress. The public’s horrified gasp is a teaching moment for impressionable stargazers. What she did is not okay.
AT BEST “KILL THE MESSENGER” portrays suspiciously deceased journalist Gary Webb as a heroic sleuth who refused to compromise his principles. At best, the film re-reports the enormous crime which Webb exposed in his series DARK ALLIANCE, that the CIA’s support of the Nicaraguan CONTRAs in the 1980s involved facilitating the smuggling of drugs into the US, in such large quantities as to precipitate the crack cocaine epidemic, delivered to our major inner cities by the CIA. UNFORTUNATELY the film muddies the crack connection, as Webb’s detractors did back then. Two deliberate plot omissions suggest this is probably not a coincidence.
Conveniently the screenplay ends before the years when Gary Webb was able to elaborate on those links. By then he’d lost his audience. Unfortunately the film that might have given his life’s work a main stage reprise chose not to go that far. Does it matter anymore? These days the CIA and its covert cohorts are understood to have authored a litany of unimaginable evils. So it’s not too early to demonize the CIA. Evidently someone thinks the American public is not ready to be shown the racist stratagems of corportate class war.
Exposing the genesis of the crack attack on African American ghettos is clearly a missed opportunity for a film in 2014. Given Ferguson. Given the rising awareness of our government’s coordinated and premeditated containment and criminalization of dark-skinned populations. Let’s remember that while the US was fighting Nicaraguan rebels, it was also at war with the Black Liberation Army. Funding and arming drug warlords was the same strategy Brazil used to administrate the favelas, via proxy gangs. One might say that LA’s Bloods and Crips played domestic Contras set loose to destabilize community building efforts by militant Black Power.
UNPARDONABLE however are the film’s departures from the truth, which paint a curious fiction as if to indemnify the national press from its complicity with the intelligence community. Two lies will stand out to anyone who was there. (Did the filmmakers think their audience would be only millennials?)
First, the San Jose Mercury News was hardly a “local news outlet” unfamiliar with handling national stories and unknown to the average reader. The Mercury News was an award winning paper which competed with metropolitan mastheads. I can’t imagine its employees aren’t indignant by the film’s yokel characterization. The Los Angeles Times’ vindictive campaign to defame Gary Webb was hardly driven by professional embarassment over a missed scoop.
Second, the Contra-CIA drug smuggling link was suspected well before Gary Webb brought it to the mainstream. I remember during the Iran-Contra Hearings a decade earlier, the alternative media often lamented that the official investigation had been narrowed to exclude mention of the cocaine connection.
These amendments might be excused for simplifying the plot except that they minimize the breadth of the corporate identity of Webb’s censors. How very 90s of this narrative to pretend that Capitalist media outlets compete for news scoops like highschoolers at a science olympics. Newspapers and networks have always only ever peddled the themes their owners dictate. Media consolidation has only meant the manufacturing of public consent has become more uniform, perfectly illustrated by the collusion of the tag-team that hit Gary Webb.
AND AFTER HOLLYWOOD FAILED GARY WEBB, the film critics were waiting with daggers.
David Denby begins his New Yorker review by associating KTM with other crusading journalist thrillers, “some depicting real events, some not”, then pointing to director Michael Cuesta’s “paranoid” TV work, finally contriving that the film botches “many contraditory assertions.” Um, sorry, neither. But I do worry that giving all thumbs down will succeed in scaring away viewers. Denby finishes by making it all about actor Jeremy Renner, un-ironically aping the campaign waged on Gary Webb, overtly described in the film, shifting the focus from the story to all about the messenger.
The Washington Post dispatched one-time Webb adversary Jeff Leen to reprise the hatchet job begun when Gary Webb broke the story. Labeling Webb as “no journalism hero”, Leen’s rebuttal hangs on the technicality that no CIA “employees” were implicated, ignoring what everyone knows post-Blackwater, post-Wikileaks, that the US has long outsourced its crimes, from torture to food service. Dimwit.
President Barack Obama couldn’t deliver on the campaign inference he’d fill Abraham Lincoln’s shoes, so what do we do? Cut the Great Emancipator down to size. Portray America’s most lionized president as political operator, and distribute copies of the film to all the nation’s schools to cement the revisionist theme. Generations of visitors to DC’s monument will no longer recognize the seated giant, he’ll seem to big.
Tuning in to developments with fugitive cop-killer Chris Dorner in Big Bear on Tuesday, I half expected a televised denouement like Fahrenheit 451, where impatient viewers were given a contrived final scene, fitting the short arc of the average attention span for corporate media fodder. As I recall, that renegade fireman watched his pursuers stage his capture/demise, because authorities favored truncating a felon-on-the-lam narrative lest it generate a deviant hopeful following; it didn’t matter if the criminal really escaped. Could Ray Bradbury have envisioned the expectations which reality TV has created to satiate real blood lust?
No doubt Bradbury foresaw the ferocity with which a vengeful police state would immolate their one-man insurgent, with a compliant media averting their cameras so American viewers didn’t witness another Waco.
Americans should be attuned to these out of sight infernos, all our wars for example. Except that we know Dorner was set aflame with an paramilitary incendiary device dubbed “the burner”, this is what our extrajudicial executions look like via drones. Only last week news junkies were treated to the legal argument which the USG made to justify killing untried suspects, even US citizens. A if international law differentiated among infidels. One man’s infidel may be another’s exemplar, but he’s every government’s infidel.
So Chris Dorner had snapped. His manifesto, rambling only as much as those were his parting words, Dorner a Falling Down avenger who knew there would be no Hollywood ending. But Dorner had bought into the Rambo Army-of-One mythology. No disrespect intended toward Dorner’s feat, but elite military training proved more of a dud than a fighting machine, did it? What a laugh that American forces deign to train Afghan recruits. Any one mujahideen is likely the equivalent of a high-capacity magazine clip of US special forces in their underwear. But it’s likely authorities will never reveal Dorner’s actual superhuman achievement. He knew what he was up against, and now so do we. The crooked police machine has proven to be worse than Dorner’s complaints. Perhaps that was meant to be the audience takeaway. We didn’t get to see Chris Dorner burn at the stake, but we sure as hell felt the heat.
This movie is rated AYFKM– Film critics are unanimous in their praise of ARGO, Ben Affleck’s retelling of an Iran Hostage Crisis era escape caper. Either these reviews also reflect media agencies uniformly shrugging off Argo’s obvious anti-Iranian jingoism or these authors are inured to crude Islamophobic propaganda. Whatever the film’s highly praised period piece accuracies, the Angry Arab and bearded terrorist stereotype are pure post-9/11 refinements. The ill-fitting eyeglass frames, face-obstructing Prell hair, and presumed fitness-less sloop-shouldered physiques pretend to lampoon everyone of that era, but the character assassination is precision targeted at Iranians, all of them.
“Mockumentary” is meant to describe a mock documentary. Argo is not a documentary, although it asserts to be historical, but most assuredly it mocks.
Borat couldn’t have made this film more offensive. If the Muslim world wasn’t in an uproar about a fictional Hollywood video disparaging to Islam, Argo would do it. What a mockery to pretend that real Zionist movie moguls aren’t laughing about a story that depicts Jewish movie industryists pranking Iran with a fake production they called Ar-Go Fuck Yourself.
Let’s dispel right away the pretense of historical accuracy. The painstaking period details, and mimicked video footage is meant to lend a scent of authenticity to a CIA personnel expatriation that did happen, but much of the villain-at-their-heels tension was fabricated. Poetic license might excuse drama, were it not for the added perk of vilifying, parodying and humiliating a people.
I counted no insult spared. Angry Arabs (the Persians aren’t Arab — do they filmmakers know or care?) never attenuating their cacophonous accusatory gibberish. Death squads circulating house to house, Muslim-garbed women hypocritically enjoying Western fast food, every dark face a humorless compassionless fanatic, their soldiers hirsute menacing mongrels who do everything by force.
I’m off to research Argo’s fabrications which so flavor the Iran-bashing. For the time being I can surmise two. The film assert that the White House pulled the operation at the last minute, prompting ballsy improvisation when our hero agent went rogue. Later he was awarded the CIA’ highest honor. How likely was it that they gave a medal to an agent who really defied every link of his chain of command? Unless he didn’t. And second, the movie plot has Iran’s Revolutionary Guards so hot on their heels that the guards shoot their way through airport doors and mount pickup trucks to brandish guns as they chase a departing jumbo jet along the runway, providing Argo that Black Hawk Down, post-apocalypse Iraq, Libyan rebel stereotype sent up so well in Team America. The tarmac scene is witnessed only by the movie audience and the CIA extraction specialist as he looks out the airplane window. None of his charges sees it because they are of course real people who could do interviews and swiftly confirm the exaggeration.
It used to be the effusive “You love me. You really love me” but the Oscars post-Guy Fawkes have lifted Hollywood’s green curtain. Meryl Streep may have thought she was retweeting the audience when she pulled the Federer/Schumacher victor’s lament, but what was that really saying? A world audience appreciates genius in the performance arts, equal parts haughty, but Hollywood’s standard for a thinking-man’s actor is clearly not deep. Hollywood puts the silver shimmer on the corporate media pro-war propaganda, and when its spokes-glamor catch a whiff of discontent from the masses, their reaction is as genuine as Sally Fields, says the 1% to the 99%: “whatever.”
In 1973 Marlon Brando declined a best actor award for the Godfather in solidarity with the American Indian. Yada yada yada, only that much we remember. Something to do with Wounded Knee, but the average American might be excused for confusing the massacre of 300 Lakota in 1890, the contemporary deadly FBI-AIM confrontation, and Dee Brown’s bestseller. A new documentary Reel Injun, about Hollywood’s skewed portrayal of Native Americans, unearths Apache Sasheen Littlefeather’s incredibly poised delivery of Brando’s Oscar message.
Littlefeather was confined by time limits to present only this abbreviation, interrupted by audience booing and then simultaneous applause. Youtube has the clip, for which the transcript is below.
“Marlon Brando … has asked me to tell you, in a very long speech which I cannot share with you presently —because of time— but I will be glad to share with the press afterward, that he must… very regretfully cannot accept this very generous award.
And the reason for this being… are the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry… excuse me… and on television in movie re-runs, and also the recent happenings at Wounded Knee.
I beg at this time that I have not intruded upon this evening and that we will, in the future…our hearts and our understanding will meet with love and generosity. Thank you on behalf of Marlon Brando.”
Brando’s formal statement was released to reporters after the ceremonies.
For 200 years we have said to the Indian people who are fighting for their land, their life, their families and their right to be free: ”Lay down your arms, my friends, and then we will remain together. Only if you lay down your arms, my friends, can we then talk of peace and come to an agreement which will be good for you.”?
When they laid down their arms, we murdered them. We lied to them. We cheated them out of their lands. We starved them into signing fraudulent agreements that we called treaties which we never kept. We turned them into beggars on a continent that gave life for as long as life can remember. And by any interpretation of history, however twisted, we did not do right. We were not lawful nor were we just in what we did. For them, we do not have to restore these people, we do not have to live up to some agreements, because it is given to us by virtue of our power to attack the rights of others, to take their property, to take their lives when they are trying to defend their land and liberty, and to make their virtues a crime and our own vices virtues.?
? But there is one thing which is beyond the reach of this perversity and that is the tremendous verdict of history. And history will surely judge us. But do we care? What kind of moral schizophrenia is it that allows us to shout at the top of our national voice for all the world to hear that we live up to our commitment when every page of history and when all the thirsty, starving, humiliating days and nights of the last 100 years in the lives of the American Indian contradict that voice??
? It would seem that the respect for principle and the love of one’s neighbor have become dysfunctional in this country of ours, and that all we have done, all that we have succeeded in accomplishing with our power is simply annihilating the hopes of the newborn countries in this world, as well as friends and enemies alike, that we’re not humane, and that we do not live up to our agreements.?
? Perhaps at this moment you are saying to yourself what the hell has all this got to do with the Academy Awards? Why is this woman standing up here, ruining our evening, invading our lives with things that don’t concern us, and that we don’t care about? Wasting our time and money and intruding in our homes.?
? I think the answer to those unspoken questions is that the motion picture community has been as responsible as any for degrading the Indian and making a mockery of his character, describing his as savage, hostile and evil. It’s hard enough for children to grow up in this world. When Indian children watch television, and they watch films, and when they see their race depicted as they are in films, their minds become injured in ways we can never know.?
? Recently there have been a few faltering steps to correct this situation, but too faltering and too few, so I, as a member in this profession, do not feel that I can as a citizen of the United States accept an award here tonight. I think awards in this country at this time are inappropriate to be received or given until the condition of the American Indian is drastically altered. If we are not our brother’s keeper, at least let us not be his executioner.?
? I would have been here tonight to speak to you directly, but I felt that perhaps I could be of better use if I went to Wounded Knee to help forestall in whatever way I can the establishment of a peace which would be dishonorable as long as the rivers shall run and the grass shall grow.?
? I would hope that those who are listening would not look upon this as a rude intrusion, but as an earnest effort to focus attention on an issue that might very well determine whether or not this country has the right to say from this point forward we believe in the inalienable rights of all people to remain free and independent on lands that have supported their life beyond living memory.?
? Thank you for your kindness and your courtesy to Miss Littlefeather. Thank you and good night.
Crap. The Anti-Apartheid BDS campaign targeted Cannes because of it, Hollywood luminaries boycotted the Toronto Film Festival over the same principles in 2009, you’d think the Springs gay community might have paid heed. Instead the 2010 Pikes Peak Lavender Film Festival opted to screen the Israeli melodrama Eyes Wide Open, Zionists’ illegal appropriation of Jerusalem be damned. When Canadian gays made international news for allowing Queers Against Israeli Apartheid to march in their pride parade, in spite of Jewish philanthropists pressuring the City of Toronto to withdraw funding, I hoped that COS pride festivities might opt to climb aboard. Instead this weekend Colorado Springs gets a full-on endorsement of Israel’s ongoing illegal invasion of Palestine.
It was a false hope. The Pikes Peak area gay community has found itself so embattled since Amendment Two’s 1992 measure to legalize discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, that common social causes are easily crowded out by Gay Marriage, DADT and brand recognition for LGBT. So much so that social justice activists can only participate in the pride parade on the condition that it be about solidarity, not antiwar. With gay issues being so politicized, should gays and lesbians get a pass on staying apolitical about war or racism? Whatever excuses we make, it’s a perfectly flamboyant example of silence equals consent. I count apolitical queens every bit as complicit with US military criminality as the above-it-all new-agers and NASCAR jackasses.
Set in an Orthodox neighborhood of Jerusalem, Eyes Wide Open doesn’t address the Israeli-Palestinian troubles, it ignores them, effectively normalizing an ethnically-cleansed Palestine. The film tells the story of an extramarital gay affair between Jewish scholars, blablabla, minus the evictions of Palestinians in the path of encroachment by Israeli settlers, and the hijacking of Muslim holy sites . “Beverly Hills 90210” was fine without scenes of the LAPD repression of Watts or East LA, but 90210 wasn’t pretending to be taped on non-Jewish land.
Eyes Wide Open was the title of the 2005 American Friends Service Committee antiwar boot-counting exercise to open American eyes to the enormity of casualties of the Iraq War — before the Eyes Wide Open slogan was adopted by a 2008 Israeli PR project to encourage American Jews to pay more attention to their birthright offer of Israeli citizenship. The death count of US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan (now that the AFSC has been cleared to consider both wars illegal) has long since outgrown the AFSC budget for buying boots or lugging them around in rented trucks, and now EWO (Einaym Pkuhot) is a miserable tale about infidelity and sin.
Frankly, Trembling Before G-d was an incredible documentary about gay Orthodox men struggling with the DADT policy of Orthodox Judaism. I remember seeing it at the 2003 PPLFF, or so. I remember Rabbinical experts expounded on both sides of the argument with authority and humor. But that was before the BDS movement to curb Israel’s racist apartheid system. You either support the picket or you scab.
Objective reviews of EWO are scarce in the Zionist-dominated press, and increasing numbers are honoring the cultural and academic boycott of Israeli Apartheid. Refusing to see EWO is by no means concluding it is bad. For all I know the film may be using the ostracism of homosexuals within the Orthodox community to represent the growing alienation Israelis are feeling in the face of the open revulsion expressing itself by the rest of the world. Maybe it’s brilliant.
But I’m not deliberating about whether to see it. BDS means no to Israel, to its statesmen, artists, scholars and products. And the American companies which support Israel’s policy of Apartheid, several dozen, and now that includes our own PPLFF.
By all appearances, a traditional paparazzi scoop. Wanna bet Brand Travolta has calculated that being “unmasked as a cheating spouse” will be outweighed by positive inferences of the shifty Scientologist’s virility? The photo on the tabloid cover appears to have caught Travolta mid-tryst, half-toweled, before he could dress and flee. Except his hairpiece isn’t the least ruffled, and the headline implies that Travolta’s adulteress is a woman. Travolta being bald and gay must be taking a toll on the star’s billing. No doubt this product placement will play in Peoria where moviegoers haven’t read about Travolta’s refrigerated wig vault, or that Team Travolta has final approval over every photo shoot to certify that his fake hair passes muster, or his industry-celebrated status as alpha queen of the set. If Hollywood would stop behaving like there’s something wrong with that, there wouldn’t be anything wrong with that.
Chávez Ravine isn’t just the site of Dodger Stadium. Major League announcers mentioned it knowingly today during the Cubs game, looking over at its Hollywood-like “Think Blue” sign, but Chávez Ravine is no mere physical feature. It names the Hispanic community purged in the postwar years, three entire neighborhoods razed under the pretext of a planned housing project, a final holdout kept bulldozers at bay with a shotgun. When the ten-year Battle of Chávez Ravine was over, the land seized by eminent domain was delivered to a wealthy team-owner and the rest is baseball history under the bridge.
Poor wolf man, he’s the bastard of the horror big three. Dracula and Frankenstein have antecedents in folklore but bloomed on the quills of novelists. The werewolf traces back to the Greek, yet no one will pull him from the doghouse, not that Hollywood doesn’t keep trying. Whenever I see the cinematic transformation of man to beast, from An American Werewolf in London to the latest Wolfman offering, I can’t help but recall the terrifying hairification of Jerry Lewis in the Nutty Professor, 
itself a spoof of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, regarded as the most literary of inferences to lycanthropy. But Robert Louis Stevenson wrote another short story seldom cited as a werewolf tale. Curious, because I think it holds the key to the man- wolf allure, when it’s not gay teen cheese. In his 1887 Olalla, RLS described the entrancing menace and tormented fate of the lupine-afflicted without mentioning the word.
Of course Stevenson’s angle separated man less from beast.
…the sudden disclosure of her eyes disturbed me. They were unusually large, the iris golden like Felipe’s, but the pupil at that moment so distended that they seemed almost black; and what affected me was not so much their size as (what was perhaps its consequence) the singular insignificance of their regard. A look more blankly stupid I have never met. My eyes dropped before it even as I spoke, and I went on my way upstairs to my own room, at once baffled and embarrassed. Yet, when I came there and saw the face of the portrait, I was again reminded of the miracle of family descent. My hostess was, indeed, both older and fuller in person; her eyes were of a different colour; her face, besides, was not only free from the ill-significance that offended and attracted me in the painting; it was devoid of either good or bad – a moral blank expressing literally naught. And yet there was a likeness, not so much speaking as immanent, not so much in any particular feature as upon the whole. It should seem, I thought, as if when the master set his signature to that grave canvas, he had not only caught the image of one smiling and false-eyed woman, but stamped the essential quality of a race.
I’d like to contrast the high-profile critical receptions being given two Hollywood films about darker-skinned-ness. Precious is about an African-American girl so dark she absorbs the light, without being about race at all. The movie tells a story of poverty, incest and the cycle of abuse, while tipping the scales with gratuitous stereotypes of Hottentot welfare mamas attendant their usual good-for-trouble black males. Vilifying the subjects it pretends to rescue, Precious has the blessing of the media, a shameless Oprah included. James Cameron’s Avatar on the other hand, opened to depth-charges of faint praise calculated to dim the buzz, perhaps because it packs the most subversive black-is-beautiful message since Muhammad Ali.
Avatar evokes rudimentary indigenous spirituality, peppered with what even elementary-schooled audiences can associate as Native American themes, from which we can infer the concepts are eternal, but idealizes an athletic aesthetic more human than the movie’s live-action characters. The “blue cat people,” as the critics have chosen to describe its Na’vi tribe, are but fantasy-striped, tailed Spartans, computer iterations of the Williams sisters and NBA dream teams. The real humans of Avatar tower in prowess, dignity and luminescence over their modern mensch oppressors.
Where racial equality on film is plotted according to how black figures are granted access to the world of white priviledge, Avatar celebrates the sovereignty of dark skin in its environment, where it’s not a barbershop, rapper’s crib, or street corner in Harlem. And instead of prepping the more palatable light-skinned negro for easier assimilation to the welcome-diversity crowd.
Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire, is an ugly project by and for gentrified American, whose title character is White-America’s usual avatar into their mysterious conception of Black America. I can do it no better justice than this review excerpt published Counterpunch:
A fiction whose “policy message is that welfare recipients are black women who wish to avoid work, who use their time having sex with their daughters, watching television and dining on pig leavings.” Is this a film – or a crime?
A crock and defamation that reinforces white man’s supremist burden.
Under Iran’s culturally repressive Islamic Revolution, the artists have produced a golden age of film. The greatest of these films have had to disguise their social message in analogies surrounding the concerns of children. Avatar takes perhaps a similar tack. Behind diversions of fantasy and special effects, is a profound morality tale. Critics can attack James Cameron for his simplistic storytelling, it’s the price to pay to bring the simplest of viewers along. Perhaps the director can release a final cut for cineastes which omits the redundant exposition. I don’t mind that Cameron uses a highlighter for the Cliftnote set. A survey of online comments shows me that some fans applaud themselves for getting Avatar’s message where they are certain their fellow audience members might not.
Most certainly the alarm most critics are raising has to do with the unpatriotic attitude which Avatar takes toward Capitalist imperialism. In GWOT America where we still “Support Our Troops” and still refrain from labeling our military contractors as mercenaries, this film will rub flag wavers the wrong way. I’d hate to be an active duty US soldier, watching Avatar in my uniform, as the audience roots for good to vanquish evil. It will probably be some time before Americans will want to see Iraqi or Afghan freedom fighters depicted as heroes. We’ve yet to see sympathetic accounts for example of the Vietcong holding down the Ho Chi Min Trail, or for that matter, the real Germans or Japanese beyond the Allied propaganda. But by disguising his story in science fiction, James Cameron has rehabilitated the Vandal and Visigoth, from the shadow of the Roman Empire. The shadow of man’s civilizing drive which grows darker the more it is illuminated.
And best of all, Cameron’s pagans are not whites like the typical Anglo Semites of the Christian holy lands. Cameron’s indigenous humans have the beautiful noses, skin and haunches indigenous to the climates which cradled humankind.
If this year’s “Black Friday” fails to pull retailers out of their red ink, should the dubious protologism retire its presumption to speak for consumer confidence? I think it should. Wasn’t it really just an economist’s “for the Gipper” meme –putting the solvency of the market on the shoulders of Christmas shoppers, rallying them to pull the economy into the black, regardless if it meant spending themselves into the red? I hate it when emotion-charged phrases are usurped by pretenders. Hiroshima was “Ground Zero” before the WTC, the “Homeland” was Nazi Germany, and “Black Friday” was Robinson Crusoe’s, well, Man Friday.
“Black Friday” in general has represented whichever awful event befell that day of the week of recent memory. It may be a wonderful anti-racism step to appoint a rare positive attribution to the word “black,” but I object to its use here to exacerbate affluenza, targeted against the best efforts of sustainability educators to reframe the day-after-Thanksgiving as Buy Nothing Day. If you are a booster for consumerism, black is an accounting concept meaning profitability. But how disingenuous to expect that those outside the balance sheet should share the enthusiasm. For example, it’s not everyone’s Good Friday just because Notre Dame wins that day. Good Friday, by the way, is also called Black Friday, as is any Friday that falls on the 13th.
Below I will list history’s Black Fridays, lest nocturnal Wikipedia cobbler elves continue their PR visits to bolster the retailer claim to the term. According to “Wikipedia” the earliest citation for a shopper’s “Black Friday” is 1966. But in actuality, the expression came from Philadelphia bus drivers and policemen referring to the traffic congestion created at their city center on the busiest shopping day of the year. But Philadelphia retailers objected to the negative connotation. Perhaps as a result, the “black ink” angle surfaces, attributed to a store clerk, offering a more upbeat, chamber-of-commerce-friendly spin. Hmm.
Many people think Black Friday recalls the Stock Market Crash of 1929. It does, and they’re right to be confused about which day of the week it was in particular, because the first day of the crash became known as Black Thursday, followed by Black Friday, then the next trading days, Black Monday and Black Tuesday.
What other occasions in man’s history have warranted the dark coloration? Let’s begin with Black Sabbath:
Black Saturdays
Sept 10, 1547, disaster for Scottish defenders at Battle of Pinkie Cleugh, Scotland
Aug 6, 1621, Mass hysteria caused by dark stormy night confirming Armageddon arrived with Episcopacy, Scotland
Dec 28, 1929, Massacre of Mau demonstrators by NZ police, Samoa
June 13, 1942, Disastrous UK Battle of Gazala against German Afrika Korps
June 29, 1946, UK Operation Agatha against Zionist terrorists in Palestine
Oct 8, 1962, height of A-bomb scare, Cuban Missile Crisis
Dec 6, 1975, Beirut massacres which started Lebanese Civil War, Lebanon
July 31, 1982, worst road accident in French history, (on annual “Black Saturday” when entire of population takes to the road for vacation)
July 14, 1984, Honk Kong exchange rates fall to all time low
Aug 20, 1988, worst day of Yellowstone Fires
Jan 20, 1990, January Massacre of Azeri demonstrators by Soviet Army, Azerbaijan
Feb 7, 2009, brush fires, Victoria, Australia
Black Sundays
Feb 14, 1926, bush fires, Victoria, Australia
April 14, 1935, “Black Blizzard” over Dust Bowl, the Great Plains of US and Canada
Feb 6, 1938, fatal waves on Bondi Beach, Australia
Nov 8, 1942, Nazi extermination of Jews in Staszow, Poland
June 11, 1944, disastrous Canadian battle against German Panzers, Normandy, France
Sept 24, 1950, sunlight blocked by forest fires, Pennsylvania
Jan 2, 1955, brush fires in Southern Australia
May 2, 1982, Exxon canceled shale oil project in Parachute, Colorado
Nov 24, 1991, extreme right party ascension in Belgium
May 1, 1994, San Marino Grand Prix death of Ayrton Senna
April 26, 1998, DIA inter-terminal subway fails, Denver
Jan 21, 2001, Direct TV purged viewers who were pirating signals
Feb 18, 2001, Datona 500 death of Dale Earnhart
Dec 28, 2008, Detroit Lions finished 0-16
Black Mondays
Easter, 1209, English settlers massacred in Dublin, Ireland
April 14, 1360, Easter misfortune during Hundred Years War
Feb 8, 1886, Pall Mall Riot, London, UK
Dec 10, 1894, Newfoundland bank failure, Canada
Oct 28, 1929, Stock Market Crash, 3rd day of trading
May 27, 1935, US Supreme Court overturns National Recovery Act
Sept 19, 1977, Shutdown of Youngstown, Ohio steel mill
Nov 27, 1978, Assassination of Harvey Milk
Oct 19, 1987, global stock market crash
Oct 8, 1990, Temple Mount Massacre by Israeli IDF, Palestine
Black Tuesdays
Oct 29, 1929, Stock Market Crash
1967, brush fires in Tasmania, Australia
Oct 20, 1987, global stock market crash, because Monday is Tuesday in Australia
Black Wednesdays
Sept 16, 1992, when UK withdrew currency from European Exchange Rate Mechanism, suffering a devaluation of 3.4 billion pounds.
Nov 3, 2004, John Kerry concedes 2004 election immediately after promising to challenge polling irregularities.
Had not the US Stock Exchange been shut down on Tuesday, there would have been a Black Wednesday 1929 as well.
Black Thursdays
Feb 6, 1851, brush fires, Victoria, Australia
Oct 24, 1929, start of US Stock Market Crash
Oct 14, 1943, disastrous US-UK bombing raid over Schweinfurt, Germany
Dec 16, 1943, disastrous UK bombing raid over Berlin, Germany
Aug 24, 1995, Moscow Interbank credit market collapse, Russia
Feb 8, 1998, Black World Wide Web Protest
July 24, 2003, Guatemala City riots, Guatemala
Black Fridays
Sept 24, 1869, collapse of price of gold.
Oct 14, 1881, Eyemouth Disaster, Scotland
Nov 11, 1887, Haymarket hangings of innocent anarchists, Chicago
Nov 18, 1910, Police assault of suffragettes, London, UK
Jan 31, 1919, George Square Riot, during strike for 40hr work week, Glasgow, Scotland
Oct 25, 1929, second day of Stock Market Crash
Jan 13, 1939, bush fires in Victoria, Australia
1940 movie starring Boris Karloff
Sept 18, 1942, Bombing of Dartmouth, Devon, UK
Oct 13, 1944, Disastrous Canadian raid, Battle of the Scheldt, Belgium
Feb 9, 1945, Disastrous UK air raid, Battle of Sunnfjord, Norway
Oct 5, 1945, Hollywood Warner Brothers union riot, led to Taft-Hartley Act
May 5, 1950, Red River Flood, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
Oct 7, 1977, Phillies lost to Dodgers, game 3 of National League series
Sept 8, 1978, Massacre of protesters in Tehran, led to Iranian Revolution
May 31, 1985, US-Canadian Tornado outbreak
July 31, 1987, Edmonton Tornado, Alberta Canada
March 12, 1993 Bombay Bombings
Aug 12, 2004, suppression of protests, Male, Maldives
Sept 30, 2005, Students protesters killed in Meghalaya, India
Oct 3, 2008, EESA Wall Street Bailout
–AND–
Nov 28, 2009, the first day of the Christmas shopping season, when America’s retailers balance sheets are brought out of the red.
It fits right?
Michael Moore’s CAPITALISM: A LOVE STORY opens today in Colorado Springs, at Tinseltown, Cinemark Carefree and Hollywood Interquest. Showtimes and a note from Moore below.
Tinseltown at 1pm, 3:55pm, 6:50pm, and 9:45pm; Cinemark at 11:40am, 1:15pm, 2:50pm, 4:25pm, 6:00pm, 7:35pm, 9:10pm, and 10:30pm; and Interquest at 1:20pm, 4:10pm, 7pm, and 9:50pm.
Moore sent out this encouragement:
Friday, October 2nd, 2009
Friends,
For two months, we’ve sat and watched the rabid right achieve the unimaginable: Derail universal health care and send the Democrats in Congress running for cover. Many have asked, “How did this happen? How could a small minority of angry people control the public agenda? Where is the majority’s response? Why the silence?”I don’t have the answers to all these questions. But I do know this: I’ve had enough. As far as I’m concerned, Tea Bag Nation ends today — at noon to be precise. For that’s when I set loose, on a thousand screens across this great land, a movie I’ve made that’s so relentless, so dangerous, so damning in its humor, that it will — I can only hope — do what no movie has done before: Take them down, take them all down, once and for all.
The days of the majority of Americans being ignored and played for chumps are over as of right now. This weekend, consider your local cinema the REAL town hall meetings! Come and spend two hours with hundreds of other people who are fed up and in need of a bit of inspiration — and a good hearty laugh at the expense of all the S.O.B.s who’ve wrecked our economy and laid ruin to our democracy.
I’m personally inviting you to come see what many critics are saying is my best film yet: “Capitalism: A Love Story.” You will not be disappointed. I will show you things and tell you things about how the captains of corporate America have stolen our country from us. No one on the nightly news is bringing these truths to you. Beginning at noon today, I pull back the curtain and reveal who’s responsible for the calamity we’re in. That’s right — I name names and I explain why this economic system we have is nothing more than legalized greed, and Wall Street is nothing more than a crime syndicate in suits. You will be blown away by what you see, but you will not leave the theater in a pit of despair. I’m counting on your response to be one of exhilaration and determination. I’ve watched this movie in sneak previews with audiences from Pittsburgh to L.A. and I’ve never seen more hooting and hollering during a documentary in my life. There are actually standing O’s during the movie! Weird. Cool. Down in front!
Please see “Capitalism: A Love Story” this weekend. Take a bunch of friends and make it an event. Last weekend in New York and L.A. many shows sold out (making “Capitalism” the biggest per screen average at the box office for 2009), so get your tickets early. And if you get a chance, send me a photo of what opening night looks like in your city and I’ll post it on my website.
C’mon, friends — RISE UP! This is our moment. And it comes with popcorn! Not bad!
Thank you so very much for all your support and encouragement over the years.
Yours,
?Michael Moore
Are you a fan of the American Western? How do you think your taste might match a survey of French film critics? Though we mock their high regard for Jerry Lewis, let’s allow that France has a film history that predates ours, and a legacy of critical journals beyond the reach of our Hollywood shills. Besides which, the golden age of the movie western lies well between the brothers Lumiére and the Nouvelle Vague. Perusing John Cawelti’s The Six-Gun Mystique published in 1976, I found a list of the TOP TEN GREATEST WESTERNS. Think any of your favorites made the list?
Your odds improve because ties were listed as individual ranks, so the entire top ten comprises almost 100 titles. The survey excludes works made after the early seventies obviously.
TOP TEN WESTERNS
1. Johnny Guitar — Nicholas Ray
2. Rio Bravo — Howard Hawks
3. The Big Sky — Howard Hawks, w. AB Guthrie
4. (tie)
The Naked Spur — Anthony Mann
Rancho Notorious — Fritz Lang
Man Without a Star — King Vidor
5. (tie)
My Darling Clementine — John Ford
The Left-Handed Gun — Arthur Penn, w. Gore Vidal
The Searchers –John Ford
Ride the High County — Sam Peckenpah
6. (tie)
Silver Lode — Allan Dwan
Red River — Howard Hawks
Duel in the Sun — King Vidor
The Hanging Tree — Delmer Daves
Run of the Arrow — Sam Fuller
Seven Men From Now — Budd Boetticher
7. (tie)
The Last Hunt — Richard Brooks
The Far Country — Anthony Mann
Colorado Territory — Raoul Walsh
Wagonmaster –John Ford
The Unforgiven — John Huston
Man of the West — Anthony Mann
Heller in Pink Tights — George Cukor, w. Louis L’Amour
8. (tie)
Man From Laramie — Anthony Mann
The Plainsman — Cecil B. DeMille
Western Union — Fritz Lang
Winchester 73 — Anthony Mann
Warlock — Edward Dmytryk
They Died with their Boots On — Raoul Walsh
The Last Frontier — Anthony Mann
The Last Wagon — Delmer Daves
River of No Return — Otto Preminger
9. (tie)
Stagecoach — John Ford, w. Ernest Haycock
The Outlaw — Howard Hughes, w. Ben Hecht
Billy the Kid — King Vidor
Comanche Station — Budd Boetticher
The Wonderful Country — Robert Parrish, w. Tom Lea
Wichita — Jacques Tourneur
3:10 to Yuma — Delmer Daves, w. Elmore Leonard
The Magnificent Seven — John Sturges, w. Akira Kurosawa
Gunfight at the OK Corral — John Sturges, w. Leon Uris
Tennessee’s Partner — Allan Dwan, w. Bret Harte
10. (Another 45 titles, including)
Shane — George Stevens
The Misfits — John Huston, w. Arthur Miller
Major Dundee — Sam Peckinpah
One Eyed Jacks — Marlon Brando
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre — John Huston, w. B. Traven
The Gold Rush — Charlie Chaplin
Go West — Buster Keaton
Fort Bravo — John Sturges
Full text of Alaska Ex-Governor Sarah Palin‘s poetic address, 
wherein she explains that her contract with the voters of Alaska has a “lame duck” escape clause, stuff about a God-given right to despoil, some veiled threats to shoot gun-control revenuers, and the protections of both First Amendments.
Sarah Palin, July 26, 2009, Fairbanks AK:
“What an absolutely beautiful day it is,
and it is my honor to speak to all Alaskans,
to our Alaskan family
this last time as your governor.
And it is always great to be in Fairbanks.
The rugged rugged hardy people that live up here
and some of the most patriotic people
whom you will ever know live here,
and one thing that you are known for
is your steadfast support
of our military community up here
and I thank you for that
and thank you United States military
for protecting the greatest nation on Earth.
Together we stand.And getting up here
I say it is the best road trip in America
soaring through nature’s finest show.
Denali, the great one, soaring
under the midnight sun.And then the extremes.
In the winter time
it’s the frozen road that is competing
with the view of ice fogged frigid beauty,
the cold though, doesn’t it
split the Cheechakos
from the Sourdoughs?And then in the summertime
such extreme summertime
about a hundred and fifty degrees hotter
than just some months ago,
than just some months from now,
with fireweed blooming
along the frost heaves
and merciless rivers that are rushing
and carving and reminding us
that here, Mother Nature wins.
It is as throughout all Alaska
that big wild good life
teeming along the road
that is north to the future.That is what we get to see every day.
Now what the rest of America
gets to see along with us
is in this last frontier
there is hope and opportunity
and there is country pride.And it is our men and women in uniform securing it,
and we are facing tough challenges in America
with some seeming to just be Hell bent
maybe on tearing down our nation,
perpetuating some pessimism, and suggesting
American apologetics, suggesting perhaps
that our best days were yesterdays.But as other people have asked,
“How can that pessimism be,
when proof of our greatness, our pride today
is that we produce the great proud volunteers
who sacrifice everything for country?”
Now this week alone, Sean Parnell and I
were on the, um, on Ft. Rich
the base there, the army chapel,
and we heard the last roll call,
and the sounding of Taps
for three very brave, very young Alaskan soldiers
who just gave their all for all of us.
Together we do stand with gratitude
for our troops who protect all of our cherished freedoms,
including our freedom of speech
which, par for the course, I’m going to exercise.And first, some straight talk
for some, just some in the media
because another right protected for all of us
is freedom of the press,
and you all have such important jobs
reporting facts and informing the electorate,
and exerting power to influence.
You represent what could and should be
a respected honest profession
that could and should be
the cornerstone of our democracy.Democracy depends on you,
and that is why, that’s why
our troops are willing to die for you.
So, how ’bout in honor of the American soldier,
ya quite makin’ things up?
And don’t underestimate the wisdom of the people,
and one other thing for the media,
our new governor has a very nice family too,
so leave his kids alone.OK, today is a beautiful day
and today as we swear in Sean Parnell,
no one will be happier than I
to witness by God’s grace
Alaskans with strength of character
advancing our beloved state.
Sean has that.
Craig Campbell has that.
I remember on that December day,
we took the oath to uphold our state constitution,
and it was written right here in Fairbanks
by very wise pioneers.We shared the vision for government
that they ground in that document.
Our founders wrote “all political power is inherent in the people.
All government originates with the people.
It’s founded upon their will only
and it’s instituted for the good of the people as a whole.”
Their remarkably succinct words
guided us in all of our efforts
in serving you and putting you first,
and we have done our best to fulfill promises
that I made on Alaska Day, 2005,
when I first asked for the honor of serving you.Remember then, our state so desired
and so deserved ethics reform.
We promised it, and now it is the law.
Ironically, it needs additional reform
to stop blatant abuse from partisan operatives,
and I hope the lawmakers will continue that reform.
We promised that you would finally see
a fair return on your Alaskan owned natural resources
so we build a new oil and gas appraisal system,
an is an equitable formula to usher in
a new era of competition and transparency
and protection for Alaskans and the producers.ACES incentivizes new exploration
and it’s the exploration that is our future.
It opens up oil basins and it ensures
that the people will never be taken advantage of again.
Don’t forget Alaskans
you are the resource owners per our constitution
and that’s why for instance last year
when oil prices soared and state coffers swelled,
but you were smacked with high energy prices,
we sent you the energy rebate. See,
it’s your money and I’ve always believed
that you know how to better spend it
than government can spend it.I promised that we would protect this beautiful environment
while safely and ethically developing resources, and we did.
We built the Petroleum Oversight Office
and a sub-cabinet to study climate conditions.
And I promised I’d govern with fiscal restraint,
so to not immorally burden futre generations.
And we did…we slowed the rate of government growth
and I vetoed hundreds of millions of dollars of excess
and wtih lawmakers we saved billions for the future.I promsed that we’d lead the charge
to forward funding education,
and hold schools accountable,
and improve opportunities for special needs students
and elevate vo-tech training
and we paid down pension debt.I promised that we would manage our fish and wildlife for abundance,
and that we would defend the constitution, and we have,
though outside special interest groups
they still just don’t get it on this one.
Let me tell you, Alaskans really need to stick together on this
with new leadership in this area especially,
encouraging new leadership…
got to stiffen your spine to do what’s right
for Alaska when the pressure mounts,
because you’re going to see anti-hunting,
anti-second amendment circuses from Hollywood
and here’s how they do it.They use these delicate, tiny, very talented celebrity starlets,
they use Alaska as a fundraising tool
for their anti-second amendment causes.
Stand strong, and remind them
patriots will protect our guaranteed,
individual right to bear arms,
and by the way, Hollywood needs to know,
we eat, therefore we hunt.I promised energy solutions and we have,
we have a plan calling for 50% of our electricity
generated by renewable resources
and we can now insist that those who hold the leases
to develop our resources
that they do so now on Alaska’s terms.
So now finally after decades of just talk,
finally we’re seeing oil and gas drilling
up there at Point Thompson.And I promised that we would get
a natural gas pipeline underway and we did.
Since I was a little kid growing up here,
I remember the discussions,
especially the political discussions
just talking about and hoping for
and dreaming of commercializing
our clean, abundant, needed natural gas.Our gas line inducement act, AGIA,
that was the game-changer
and this is thanks to our outstanding gas line team,
and the legislature adopting this law, 58-1.
They knew, they know AGIA is the vehicle
to drive this monumental energy project
and bring everyone to the table,
this bipartisan victory,
it came from Alaskans working together
with free market private sector principles,
and now we are on the road
to the largest private-sector energy project
in the history of America.
It is for Alaska’s future,
it is for America’s energy independence
and it will make us a more peaceful,
prosperous and secure nation.What I promised, we accomplished.
“We” meaning state staff,
amazing commissioners,
great staff assisting them,
and conscientious Alaskans
outside the bureaucracy –
Tom Van Flein, and Meg Stapleton
and Kristan Cole, so many others,
many volunteers who just stepped up
to the challenge as good Alaskans,
but nothing, nothing could have succeeded
without my right-hand man Kris Perry.
She is the sharpest, boldest, hardest-working partner.
Kris is my right-hand man and much success is due to Kris.So much success, and Alaska
there is much good in store further down the road,
but to reach it we must value
and live the optimistic pioneering spirit
that made this state proud and free,
and we can resist enslavement to big central government
that crushes hope and opportunity.
Be wary of accepting government largess.
It doesn’t come free and often, accepting it
takes away everything that is free,
melting into Washington’s powerful “care-taking” arms
will just suck incentive to work hard
and chart our own course
right out of us,
and that not only contributes to an unstable economy
and dizzying national debt,
but it does make us less free.I resisted the stimulus package.
I resisted the stimulus package
and we have championed earmark reform,
slashing earmark requests by 85%
to break the cycle of dependency
on a stifling, unsustainable federal agenda,
and other states should follow this
for their and for America’s stability.
We don’t have to feel
that we must beg an allowance from Washington,
except to beg the allowance to be self-determined.
See, to be self-sufficient,
Alaska must be allowed to develop –
to drill and build and climb,
to fulfill statehood’s promise.
At statehood we knew this.At statehood we knew this,
that we are responsible for ourselves
and our families and our future,
and fifty years later,
please let’s not start believing
that government is the answer.
It can’t make you happy
or healthy or wealthy or wise.
What can? It is the wisdom of the people
and our families and our small businesses,
and industrious individuals,
and it is God’s grace,
helping those who help themselves,
and then this allows that very generous
voluntary hand up that we’re known for,
enthusiastically providing those who need it.Alaskans will remember that years ago,
remember we sported the old bumper sticker that said,
“Alaska. We Don’t Give a Darn How They Do It Outside?”
Do you remember that? I remember that,
and remember it was because we would be different.
We’d roll up our sleeves,
and we would diligently sow and reap,
and we can still do this
to carve wealth out of the wilderness
and make our living on the water,
with strong hands and innovative minds,
now with smarter technology.It is what our first people and our parents did.
It worked, because they worked.
We must be prudent and persistent
and press for the people’s right
to responsibly develop God-given resources
for the maximum benefit of the people.And we have come so far in just 50 years.
We’re no longer a frontier outpost
on the periphery of the world’s greatest nation.
Now, as a contributor and a securer of America,
we can attain our destiny
in the promise of our motto “North to the Future.”
See, the pressing issue of our time,
it’s energy independence,
because there is an inherent link
between energy and security,
and energy and prosperity.
Alaska will lead with energy,
we will prove you can be both
pro-development and pro-environment,
because no one loves their clean air
and their land and their wildlife
and their water more than an Alaskan.
We will protect it.Yes, America must look north to the future
for security, for energy independence,
for our strategic location on the globe.
Alaska is the gate-keeper of the continent.So, we are here today at a changing of the guard.
Now, people who know me,
and they know how much I love this state,
some still are choosing not to hear
why I made the decision
to chart a new course to advance the state.
And it should be so obvious to you. (indicating heckler)
It is because I love Alaska this much, sir (at heckler)
that I feel it is my duty to avoid
the unproductive, typical, politics as usual,
lame duck session in one’s last year in office.
How does that benefit you?
No, with this decision now,
I will be able to fight even harder for you,
for what is right, for truth.
And I have never felt
like you need a title to do that.So, as we all move forward together,
let’s vow to keep championing Alaska,
to advocate responsible development,
and smaller government, and freedom,
and when I took the oath to serve you,
I promised… remember I promised
to steadfastly and doggedly guard
the interests of this great state
like that grizzly guards her cubs,
as a mother naturally guards her own.And I will keep that vow
wherever the road may lead.
Todd and I, and Track, Bristol,
Tripp, Willow, Piper, Trig…I think I got ’em all.
We will forever be so grateful
for the honor of our lifetime to have served you.
Our whole big diverse full and fun family,
we all thank you and I am very very blessed
to have had their support all along,
for Todd’s support. I am thankful too.
I have been blessed
to have been raised in this last frontier.
Thank you for our home, Mom and Dad,
because in Alaska
it is not an easy living,
but it is a good living,
and here it is impossible to lose your way.
Wherever the road may lead you,
we have that steadying great north star to guide us home.So let’s all enjoy the ride, and I thank you Alaska,
and God bless Alaska and God bless America.”
Simple. They wouldn’t be able to Steal nearly as much.
From Bill Moyers documenting the Right Wing Hate-mongers almost successful game plan to discredit the TRUTH exposed by the film “Sicko”… Just painting anybody who believed it as a “lefty loon” wouldn’t be enough… Although our Friendly Right Wing Spokespersons use that attack method.
Mainly because aside from sending out one-man Terrorist Hit Squads to shoot up churches and Museums they don’t have anything else.
But seriously, our Libertarian friends would have us believe that people with lots of money, gotten from a couple hundred years of blatant THEFT, wouldn’t spend any of that ill-gotten gain as a buffer to protect the rest of it.
And some of the blatant and boastful confession of Theft and Anti-American activity.
Yeah, doing things, either for ideology or for profit, that KILL Americans, like, for instance, promoting the massive denial of health care, that’s pretty much Anti-American.
9/11 only killed 3,000.
More Americans die from inadequate health care every week. So, Right Wing For-Profit Terrorists,
Yes, I DID just conflate you with Osama bin Laden.
Whatcha gonna do about it?
BILL MOYERS: So what did you think when you saw that film?
WENDELL POTTER: I thought that he hit the nail on the head with his movie. But the industry, from the moment that the industry learned that Michael Moore was taking on the health care industry, it was really concerned.
BILL MOYERS: What were they afraid of?
WENDELL POTTER: They were afraid that people would believe Michael Moore.
BILL MOYERS: We obtained a copy of the game plan that was adopted by the industry’s trade association, AHIP. And it spells out the industry strategies in gold letters. It says, “Highlight horror stories of government-run systems.” What was that about?
WENDELL POTTER: The industry has always tried to make Americans think that government-run systems are the worst thing that could possibly happen to them, that if you even consider that, you’re heading down on the slippery slope towards socialism. So they have used scare tactics for years and years and years, to keep that from happening. If there were a broader program like our Medicare program, it could potentially reduce the profits of these big companies. So that is their biggest concern.
BILL MOYERS: And there was a political strategy. “Position Sicko as a threat to Democrats’ larger agenda.” What does that mean?
WENDELL POTTER: That means that part of the effort to discredit this film was to use lobbyists and their own staff to go onto Capitol Hill and say, “Look, you don’t want to believe this movie. You don’t want to talk about it. You don’t want to endorse it. And if you do, we can make things tough for you.”
BILL MOYERS: How?
WENDELL POTTER: By running ads, commercials in your home district when you’re running for reelection, not contributing to your campaigns again, or contributing to your competitor.
BILL MOYERS: This is fascinating. You know, “Build awareness among centrist Democratic policy organizations–”
WENDELL POTTER: Right.
BILL MOYERS: “–including the Democratic Leadership Council.”
WENDELL POTTER: Absolutely.
BILL MOYERS: Then it says, “Message to Democratic insiders. Embracing Moore is one-way ticket back to minority party status.”
WENDELL POTTER: Yeah.
BILL MOYERS: Now, that’s exactly what they did, didn’t they? They–
WENDELL POTTER: Absolutely.
BILL MOYERS: –radicalized Moore, so that his message was discredited because the messenger was seen to be radical.
WENDELL POTTER: Absolutely. In memos that would go back within the industry — he was never, by the way, mentioned by name in any memos, because we didn’t want to inadvertently write something that would wind up in his hands. So the memos would usually– the subject line would be– the emails would be, “Hollywood.” And as we would do the media training, we would always have someone refer to him as Hollywood entertainer or Hollywood moviemaker Michael Moore.
BILL MOYERS: Why?
WENDELL POTTER: Well, just to– Hollywood, I think people think that’s entertainment, that’s movie-making. That’s not real documentary. They don’t want you to think that it was a documentary that had some truth. They would want you to see this as just some fantasy that a Hollywood filmmaker had come up with. That’s part of the strategy.
BILL MOYERS: So you would actually hear politicians mouth the talking points that had been circulated by the industry to discredit Michael Moore.
WENDELL POTTER: Absolutely.
BILL MOYERS: You’d hear ordinary people talking that. And politicians as well, right?
WENDELL POTTER: Absolutely.
BILL MOYERS: So your plan worked.
WENDELL POTTER: It worked beautifully.
BILL MOYERS: The film was blunted, right?
WENDELL POTTER: The film was blunted.
But let’s look past the innuendo and unproven transgressions, to celebrate the man’s contribution to the cannon of Western popular music product. Please!
I hear celebrities dismiss the allegations of Michael Jackson’s pedophilia like too much water under the bridge, which would be true I suppose, if Jackson’s victims were more like John Wayne Gacy’s, buried under Neverland, instead of tucked into San Fernando Valley homes, divvying multimillion-dollar payoffs with their enterprising panderer parents. Will the confidentiality clauses stand between the public ever knowing which pederast was the more prolific? That innuended, I do concur those bottoms were small fry compared to Jackson’s true sick imprint on America.
The Michael Jackson TM projected a perversion of role models. Not even a cynical anti-hero, the self-crowned King of Pop was the nul-idol. Jackson rejected his skin color, his sexuality, even his place of belonging among mortals. Other than pathos for the sick dance-cyborg who never had a childhood, what humanity did Jackson share to communicate? To be fair, it wasn’t Jackson who kept the spotlight trained on his black/white Icarus act, foisting the unnatural deception that man can soar with a single glove.
Now dead, Jocko is heralded as among the greatest. But MJ was an internationally recognized poster child for enfeebled humanity, a glorified counter-renaissance man, resembling a human being like a drag queen pretends femininity. He may have channeled vinyl High Fructose Corn Syrup like no other, walking backward while dancing and such, but worth what legacy exactly? Jackson shares the ignobless of the Big Mac, the Lucky Strike cigarette, and DDT. Iconic and good riddance.
Michael Jackson did nothing for black emancipation, or acceptance of homosexuals, or the plight of the children of poverty. The vast majority of the world’s children are “robbed of their childhoods,” you narcissistic rich dumb-ass, and that didn’t stop you from amassing your vast fortune at their expense.
Jackson probably did more to amplify the phobia against pedophiles, the single minority he did incarnate, by denying the preponderance of indicators, by vilifying his accusers, instead of taking his riches to Dubai right from the start, to show the world into what true debauchers wet their willies.
He might even have championed sympathy for plastic surgery binge-purgers, but he lied about that worm-hole until his nose literally fell off. I remember when Jackson made public appearances in surgery masks, feeding the fiction that he was a germophobe. Meanwhile everyone in Hollywood knew from their own rhinoplasties about the actual face-saving purpose of those masks.
Perversely, it was Jackson’s least aberrant eccentricity that killed him. Drugs. Even as TV viewers watch Jackson’s body pass from helicopter to ambulance, over a red carpet no less, Big Pharma makes sure that the talking heads refer to Jackson’s narcotics as “pain-killers.” Jocko was in constant pain, apparently, like Rush Limbaugh and all overachievers etc, hence their susceptibility to addiction. You’d think the alibi would eventually defy credulity.
Prescription drugs circulate among the well-to-do, with the same ease with which the rich have access to good lawyers. The difference between street and medical drugs is that no one cares about the heroin or crack addict’s “pain.”
All the celebrities speaking in tribute to Michael Jackson want to minimize the ugliness Jacko paraded, even, and especially his drug habit. Some who profess to have been close friends express their utter shock at Jackson’s passing, at his frail condition and the magnitude of his drug use. How close could they have been?! Or how culpable are they still on Big Pharma’s not-yet-upped jig?
Jackson was the King of Sick Culture. His collaborator eulogizers are its second tier whores. What contemptible shills, who’ve got theirs, behind their Beverly Hills gates and their own golden narcotics tickets. Even at the premature passing of a unique creative soul, due without question to drug abuse, his peers don’t want to aggravate the corporate forces which continue to pervert the human social animal to beyond self-recognition.
It’s impossible to make this yuppie humanitarian interventionist lunacy up on our own, and since we at Not My Tribe have talked so much about Greg Mortenson and his Three Cups of Tea, why not take a quick look at Jay Leno’s wife’s new “cause celebre.” See: Jay and Mavis Leno turn serious about the plight of Afghan women.
Move over Darfur. Move over Tibet. There’s a new ‘In’ thing for yuppie America to focus its tears on. And the new team has on board CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, former National Organization for Women President Eleanor Smeal, knuckle chinned Jay Leno and wife, and wait!!! …where’s Madelyn Albright? It must just be a matter of time before she and the President’s wife come into the act, too! Whooppee! The Imperial Yuppie Feminist Brigade is now coming to life to save women in Afghanistan! Move over Greg Mortenson!
Humanitarian interventionism tied now to terrorist extermination by Pentagon drone! Isn’t this all so sweet? I know that the Muslim women of occupied Afghanistan must just be so happy about this ‘aid’.
Bombs away! Bombs away with NOW, Ms. Magazine, and the ‘Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission’ propaganda drops on dumb-founded America, too! Hollywood America appeals to Shopping Mall America to CARE!
WAL-MART wants to build a Virginia super-center on the edge of the memorial site of one of the most consequential battles of the Civil War. The Wilderness marked the first engagement between Generals Lee and Grant, ignited a forest fire which the soldiers fought through, and left 24,000 dead and wounded. Now 253 historians have joined in asking Wal-mart to reconsider.
Mr. Lee Scott, President and CEO
Walmart Stores, Inc.
702 SW 8th Street
Bentonville, Arkansas 72716-8611Dear Mr. Scott:
I urge you in the strongest possible terms to pursue alternate building locations for the Walmart Supercenter proposed in Orange County, Virginia. The site currently under consideration lies within the historic boundary of the Wilderness Battlefield and only one quarter mile from the current boundary of the Wilderness Battlefield unit of Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park.
The Battle of the Wilderness was among the most significant engagements of the Civil War. It marked the first time legendary generals Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant faced off against one another on the field of battle. During two days of desperate conflict in a harsh, unforgiving landscape tangled with underbrush, 4,000 Americans lost their lives and nearly 20,000 were wounded.
The proposed location will greatly increase traffic through the area and encourage further development to encroach upon and spoil the battlefield. This, in turn, will seriously degrade the experience for the many tens of thousands of heritage tourists who visit this National Park every year. The Wilderness Battlefield is easily the biggest tourist attraction in Orange County, with visitors coming from around the world to experience its serenity and contemplate its history and significance.
As a historian, I feel strongly that the Wilderness Battlefield is a unique historic and cultural treasure deserving careful stewardship. Currently only approximately 20 percent of the battlefield is protected by the National Park Service. If built, this Walmart would seriously undermine ongoing efforts to see more of this historic land preserved and deny future generations the opportunity to wander a landscape that has, until now, remained largely unchanged since 1864.
The Wilderness is an indelible part of our history, its very ground hallowed by the American blood spilled there, and it cannot be moved. Surely Walmart can identify a site that would meet its needs without changing the very character of the battlefield.
There are many places in central Virginia to build a commercial development, but there is only one Wilderness Battlefield. Please respect our great nation’s history and move your store farther away from this historic site and National Park.
Signed,
* Terrie Aamodt, Walla Walla University
* Edward D. Abrahams, Silver Spring, Md.
* Sean P. Adams, University of Florida
* Garry Adelman, History Associates, Inc.
* Nicholas Aieta, the Marlborough School, West Springfield, Mass.
* A.J. Aiseirithe, Washington, D.C.
* James Anderson, Ashburn, Va.
* Adam Arenson, University of Texas
* Jonathan M. Atkins, Berry College
* Arthur H. Auten, University of Hartford
* David Bard, Concord College
* Alwyn Barr, Texas Tech University
* Craig A. Bauer, Metairie, La.
* Erik Bauer, West Hollywood, Calif.
* Dale Baum, Texas A&M University
* Edwin C. Bearss, Historian emeritus, National Park Service
* Caryn Cosse Bell, University of Massachusetts at Lowell
* Jeffrey R. Bennett, Waterford, N.Y.
* Shannon Bennett, Ellettsville, Ind.
* Melvyn S. Berger, Newton, Mass.
* Arthur W. Bergeron, Shippensburg, Pa.
* Edward H. Bergerstrom, Port Richey, Fla.
* Eugene H. Berwanger, Colorado State University
* Fred W. Beuttler, Deputy Historian, U.S. House of Representatives
* Darrel Bigham, University of Southern Indiana
* John Bloom, Las Cruces, N.M.
* Frederick J. Blue, Youngstown State University
* Christopher Bobal, Lees Summit, Mo.
* Thomas Bockhorn, Huntsville, Ala.
* Keith Bohannon, University of West Georgia
* Phillip S. Bolger, San Diego, Calif.
* Patrick Boyd, the Pomfret School, Pomfret, Conn.
* Vernon S. Braswell, Corpus Christi, Tex.
* Roger D. Bridges, Bloomington, Ill.
* Ronald S. Brockway, Regis University
* Col. George M. Brooke, III, USMC (Ret.), Lexington, Va.
* Bruce A. Brown, Cypress, Calif.
* Norman D. Brown, University of Texas, Austen, Tex.
* David Brush, the Pomfret School, Pomfret, Conn.
* Jim Burgess, Manassas National Battlefield, Va.
* Ken Burns, Walpole, N.H.
* Brian Burton, Ferndale, Wash.
* Victoria Bynum, Texas State University-San Marcos
* Peter S. Carmichael, West Virginia University
* Marius M. Carriere, Christian Brothers University
* Katherine Cassioppi, National-Louis University
* Gary Casteel, Lexington, Va.
* Jane Turner Censer, George Mason University
* William Cheek, San Diego State University
* John Cimprich, Thomas More College
* Thomas G. Clemens, Hagerstown Community College
* Leon F. Cohn, Plantation, Fla.
* Thomas B. Colbert, Marshalltown Community College
* James R. Connor, Chancellor emeritus University of Wisconsin-Whitewater
* William J. Cooper, Jr., Louisiana State University
* Janet L. Coryell, Western Michigan University
* Charles E. Coulter, Yankton, S.D.
* Robert E. Curran, Richmond, Ky.
* Thomas F. Curran, Saint Louis, Mo.
* Gordon E. Dammann, National Museum of Civil War Medicine
* Guy Stephen Davis, Atlanta, Ga.
* William C. “Jack” Davis
* Joseph G. Dawson, III, Texas A&M University
* Mary DeCredico, United States Naval Academy
* James Lyle DeMarce, Arlington, Va.
* Charles B. Dew, Williams College
* Steven Deyle, University of Houston
* Richard DiNardo, Marine Corps Command and Staff College
* Luis-Alejandro Dinnella-Borrego, Warwick, N.Y.
* Richard R. Duncan, Alexandria, Va.
* Kenneth Durr, History Associates, Inc.
* David Dykstra, Poolesville, Md.
* Mark Elliott, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
* Robert F. Engs, University of Pennsylvania
* C. Wyatt Evans, Drew University
* Daniel Feller, University of Tennessee
* Rex H. Felton, Tiffin, Ohio
* Paul Finkelman, Albany Law School
* Jeff Fioravanti, Lynn, Mass.
* Joseph C. Fitzharris, University of Saint Thomas
* J.K. Folmarm California, Minn.
* George B. Forgie, University of Texas Austin
* Lee W. Formwalt, Organization of American Historians
* Janet B. Frazer, Narberth, Pa.
* Gary W. Gallagher, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Va.
* Jonathan Gantt, Columbia College
* Jason Gart, History Associates, Inc.
* Louis S. Gerteis, University of Missouri, St. Louis
* Kate C. Gillin, the Pomfret School, Pomfret, Conn.
* Mary Giunta, Edinburg, Va.
* Martin K. Gordon, Columbia, Md.
* Cathy Gorn, University of Maryland
* Thomas M. Grace, Amherst, N.Y.
* Susan W. Gray, Severna Park, Md.
* A. Wilson Greene, Pamplin Historical Park and National Museum of the Civil War Soldier
* Debra F. Greene, Jefferson City, Mo.
* Jim Griffin, Frisco, Tex.
* Linda J. Guy, Clearville, Pa.
* Edward J. Hagerty, American Military University
* Alfred W. Hahn, Midlothian, Va.
* Judith Lee Hallock, South Setauket, N.Y.
* Jerry Harlow, President, Trevilian Station Battlefield Foundation
* D. Scott Hartwig, Gettysburg National Military Park, Pa.
* David S. Heidler, Colorado State University
* Jeannie Heidler, United States Air Force Academy
* John S. Heiser, Gettysburg National Military Park, Pa.
* Earl J. Hess, Lincoln Memorial University
* Libra Hilde, San Jose State University
* T. John Hillmer, Jr., Wilson’s Creek National Battlefield, Mo.
* David Hochfelder, State University of New York – Albany
* Sylvia Hoffert, Texas A&M University
* Patrick Hotard, Philadelphia, Pa.
* Richard Houston, Harwich, Mass.
* Randal L. Hoyer, Madonna University
* Richard L. Hutchison, Fort Worth, Tex.
* Brian M. Ingrassia, Georgia State University
* Perry D. Jamieson, Crofton, Md.
* Jim Jobe, Fort Donelson National Battlefield, Tenn.
* Willie Ray Johnson, Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park, Ga.
* Vivian Lee Joyner, New Hill, N.C.
* Whitmel M. Joyner, New Hill, N.C.
* Walter D. Kamphoefner, Texas A&M University
* Amalie M. Kass, Harvard Medical School
* Philip M. Katz, Washington, D.C.
* Brad Keefer, Kent State University
* Brian J. Kenny, Denver, Co.
* Victoria A. Kin, San Antonio, Tex.
* George W. Knepper, University of Akron
* Christopher Kolakowski, National Museum of the U.S. Army Reserve
* Carl E. Kramer, Indiana University Southeast
* Arnold Krammer, Texas A&M University
* Robert K. Krick, Fredericksburg, Va.
* Michael E. Krivdo, Texas A&M University
* Benjamin Labaree, Saint Alban’s School, Washington, D.C.
* Dan Laney, Austin, Tex.
* Connie Langum, Wilson’s Creek National Battlefield, Mo.
* William P. Leeman, Coventry, R.I.
* Kevin Levin, Charlottesville, Va.
* Richard G. Lowe, University of North Texas
* Robert W. Lowery, Jr., Newport News, Va.
* M. Philip Lucas, Cornell College
* R. Wayne Mahood, Geneseo, N.Y.
* Daniel Martin, Lancaster, Pa.
* William Marvel, South Conway, N.H.
* Matthew Mason, Brigham Young University
* Dinah M. Mayo-Bobee, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
* George T. Mazuzan, Springfield, Va.
* Nathan McAlister, Hoyt, Kan.
* David McCullough
* Dennis K. McDaniel, Washington, D.C.
* James M. McPherson, Princeton University
* Kathleen G. McKesson, Eighty Four, Pa.
* James G. Mendez, Chicago, Ill.
* Brian Craig Miller, Emporia State University
* Roger E. Miller, Eagle River, Alaska.
* Wilbur R. Miller, State University of New York – Stony Brook
* Eric J. Mink, Fredericksburg, Va.
* Robert E. Mitchell, Brookline, Mass.
* John Moody, Orange Park, Fla.
* Richard Moore, Woodbridge, Va.
* Richard Morey, Kent Place School, Summit, N.J.
* Geoffrey Morrison, Saint Louis, Mo.
* Brenda Murray, North Pole, Alaska.
* Richard J. Myers, Doylestown, Pa.
* Eric Nedergaard, Mesa, Ariz.
* Robert D. Neuleib, Normal, Ill.
* Kenneth Noe, Auburn University
* Justin Oakley, Martinsville, Ind.
* Kristen Oertel, Millsaps College
* Marvin Olson, La Crescenta, Ca.
* Beverly Palmer, Claremont, Ca.
* John T. Payne, Lone Star College
* Graham Peck, Saint Xavier University
* William D. Pederson, Louisiana State University, Shreveport
* William E. Pellerin, Santa Barbara, Ca.
* Don Pfanz, Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park, Va.
* Michael Pierson, University of Massachusetts, Lowell
* Kermit J. Pike, Western Reserve Historical Society, Mentor, Ohio
* Ann Poe, Alexandria, Va.
* Kieth Ploakoff, Rossmoor, Ca.
* Lawrence N. Powell, Tulane University
* Adam J. Pratt. Baton Rouge, La.
* Gerald Prokopowicz, East Carolina University
* John Quist, Shippensburg University
* Steven J. Rauch, Evans, Ga.
* S. Waite Rawls, III, Museum of the Confederacy
* Carol Reardon, Pennsylvania State University
* Douglas Reasner, Durant, Iowa
* Michael Reis, History Associates, Inc.
* Robert V. Remini, Office of the Historian, U.S. House of Representatives
* James Renberg, Southern Pines, N.C.
* Gordon Rhea, Mount Pleasant, S.C.
* Jean Richardson, Buffalo State College
* Jeffrey Richman, Brooklyn, N.Y.
* Harris D. Riley, Jr., M.D., Nashville, Tenn.
* James I. Robertson, Jr., Virginia Tech
* Stephen I. Rockenbach, Virginia State University
* Sylvia Rodrigue, Baton Rouge, La.
* Rodney A. Ross, Center for Legislative Archives, Washington, D.C.
* Jennifer Ross-Nazzal, Johnson Space Center
* Jeffrey J. Safford, Montana State University
* Frank Scaturro, New Hyde Park, N.Y.
* Mark S. Schantz, Hendrix College
* Laurence D. Schiller, Deerfield, Ill.
* Christopher A. Schnell, Springfield, Ill.
* Glenna R. Schroeder-Lein, Springfield, Ill.
* Frederick Schult, Jr., New York University
* Donald L. Schupp, Warrenton, Va.
* Richard D. Schwartz, Morristown, N.J.
* Cynthia Seacord, Schenectady, N.Y.
* Tomas Seaver, Woonsocket, R.I.
* Diane Shalda, Chicago Military Academy
* Peter D. Sheridan, Torrance, Ca.
* Mark Snyder, Akron, Ohio
* John Sotak, O.S.A., New Lenox, Ill.
* Clay W. Stuckey, DDS, Bedford, Ind.
* Carlyn Swaim, History Associates, Inc.
* Andrew Talkov, Virginia Historical Society
* Robert A. Taylor, Florida Institute of Technology
* Paul H. Tedesco, Northeastern University
* James Thayer, Milford, Mass.
* Emory M. Thomas, University of Georgia
* JoAnne Thomas, Peoria, Ill.
* Joseph Trent, Worcester, Mass.
* Tony R. Trimble, Plainfield, Ind.
* I. Bruce Turner, University of Louisiana at Lafayette
* Edwin C. Ulmer, Jr., Feasterville, Pa.
* Charles W. Van Adder, Forked River, N.J.
* Charles Vincent, Baker, La.
* Joseph F. von Deck, Ashburnham, Ma.
* Brent Vosburg, Elizabethtown, N.J.
* Robert Voss, Lincoln, Neb.
* George N. Vourlojianis, Lorain County Community College
* Christopher R. Waldrep, San Francisco State University
* John Weaver, Tipp City, Ohio
* Robert Welch, Ames, Iowa
* Lowell E. Wenger, Cincinnati, Ohio
* Jeffrey Wert, Centre Hall, Pa.
* Bruce E. Wilburn, Glen Allen, Va.
* Diana I. Williams, Wellesley College
* Mary Williams, Fort Davis National Historic Site, Tex.
* Terry Winschel, Vicksburg National Military Park, Miss.
* Roger Winthrop, Lansing, Mich.
* Eric J. Wittenberg, Columbus, Ohio
* Ralph A. Wooster, Lamar University
* Donald Yacovone, Harvard University
* Shirley J. Yee, University of Washington
* Mitchell Yockelson, National Archives and Records Administration
* William D. Young, Maple Woods Community College
* Mary E. Younger, Dayton, Ohio
* Jack Zevin, Queens College, City University of New York