Month: January 2021

This Is The Moment

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Donald Trump is a loose-cannon sociopath and goon provocateur who’s completely jettisoned any interest in respecting our democracy (if he ever had any) and who’s clearly divorced from any semblance of sanity or moderation, and has pretty much turned into a rabid authoritarian dog. Seriously.

This afternoon he tweeted more or less that today’s insurrection was some kind of glorious citizen’s revolt against an imagined tyranny (“Remember this day forever!”), and…well, Jesus H. Christ, if this isn’t a case of God grabbing us by the lapels and screaming “get rid of this guy immediately!” I don’t know what would or could be.

Trump, I believe, needs to be immediately re–impeached (seriously) so as to be prevented from running again in ‘24. The best scenario would be immediate removal from office by way of the 25th Amendment, but that won’t happen with Mike Pence’s subservient nature. At the very, very least a vote of censure should happen.

Trump has long been a thug, but today he crossed the line into dangerous and intolerable. Imagine what he might provoke tomorrow or next week. Or on January 19th or 20th.

Yes, I know — Pence is said to be more or less running the show now, or so I’ve been hearing. And yes, Twitter has locked Trump’s account, but only for 12 hours. They need to kick him off permanently.

The Confederate yokel terrorists who assaulted the Capitol today need to be ID’d, prosecuted and jailed; ditto the D.C. or Capitol Hill cops who were apparently in cahoots with the mob or who went easy on them because they were white.

I don’t completely agree with The Atlantic‘s David Frum but I agree about the urgency…Trump has become a very serious danger to our democracy.

Instigating Scumbag…”We Love You”?

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“I know your pain, I know you’re hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election and everyone knows it, especially the other side. But you have to go home now. We have to have peace. We have to have law and order. We have to respect our great people in law and order. We don’t want anyone hurt. It’s a very tough period of time. There’s never been a period of time like this, where they could take it away from all of us. From me, from you, from our country. This was a fraudulent election, but we can’t play into the hands of these people. We have to have peace.

“So go home. We love you, you’re very special. We’ve seen what happens, you see the way others are treated that are so bad and so evil. I know you how feel. But go home, and go home in peace.”

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Attempted Redhat Sedition

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With President Trump‘s enthusiastic support, rightwing insurrectionists have surrounded and penetrated the U.S. Capitol. Cheering, flash bangs, banners waving, marauders inside the building and flooding the rotunda. D.C. police have been overwhelmed. A 6pm curfew has been announced.

This feels like the 1989 Romanian revolution except that “Ceaucescu” is behind the protests.

CNN has just reported that VP Pence may have been evacuated from the Capitol building.

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What Was Meghan McCain Asking?

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It would have been impolite to subject Rev. Raphael Warnock to sharp contrarian questioning on the morning of his Georgia Senate run-off victory, but what was The View co-host Meghan McCain trying to ask him before a testy Whoopi Goldberg (“Hey, listen!”) cut her off?

On the other hand, what contrarian question could have had merit at this stage of the game? The Georgia runoff election is over, and it’s time for congratulations and looking forward. etc. Kelly Loeffler ran un ugly racist campaign…what could McCain’s pressing issue have been about?

A Good Day

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And Wednesday, 11.6 is only going to get better as the hours progress, even with the coming farcical Congressional challenges to Biden’s electoral victory plus the violent Trumpian goons in the streets of D.C., howling at the way it’s all turning out and quaking with rage.


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“And This Is One Such Occasion”

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David Simon‘s “Under The Influence” piece about Paths of Glory sppeared two and a half years ago, but I somehow missed it until tonight [Tuesday, 1.5].

What Simon says is so spare, eloquent and well-honed that it made me want to watch Stanley Kubrick‘s 1957 classic yet again, and I’ve seen it at least 15 or 20 times.

Simon: “[It’s been said] that every time you set out to make an anti-war film, it ends up being a war film. There are very few films that stay in the pocket of souring you on war. The suffering is so heroic, the characters are so vibrant, and everything matters…it’s so dramatic. All the Marines I knew from doing Generation Kill, they all loved to do the dialogue from Full Metal Jacket. There’s something about the camaraderie of war that undercuts every anti-war message.

“But not Paths of Glory. Maybe because it’s not strictly an anti-war film…it’s an anti-authority film.”

The more HE readers try to to goad me into watching all 60 episodes of The Wire, the more determined I am to resist. I’m even more determined right now. I’ve seen four or five episodes; I’ll see the other 55 at a time of my own choosing.

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Warnock Wins; Osoff Victory All But Certain

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6:30 am: Hark, the herald angels sing & dearest God almighty — Warnock and Osoff have both won, although official declarations on Osoff’s behalf won’t come until later today. Last night’s riveting, tension-fraught, at times unsettling tabulation was brilliantly reported by MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki — what a superstar that guy is! What a heroic workhorse! What a beautiful mind! I’ve never felt a greater allegiance and affection for a TV news reporter & vote analyzer in my life.

8:31 pm: Warnock has pulled ahead of Loeffler, and Osoff is inching (and I mean inching) his way to overtaking Perdue — the Osoff-Perdue vote is now 50-50, but right now [8:44 pm] Osoff is behind by only 450 votes and with more votes to come. I’m presuming that Osoff will finish in the lead, but the final count won’t be known until sometime tomorrow.

A vote almost entirely along racial lines — on one hand “great!”, but on the other hand what kind of venality drove the pro-Loeffler and pro-Perdue white vote? What kind of rotted souls do these people have? Nothing short of appalling. Or do I mean disgusting? Probably the latter.

7:05 pm: DeKalb, Cobb and Gwinnett counties will most likely save the day for Warnock and Osoff. But it’ll come in late-ish. I don’t know if I can stand the tension. Question: Why is Steve Kornacki pronouncing DeKalb as “DeCab”?

6:17 pm: Oh, dear God…Perdue is leading Osoff, 50.2% to 49.8%. And Loeffler-Warnock are at 50-50….no! But a projected (not yet tallied) 36% of the total outstanding vote will come from four Democratic counties — DeKalb, Gwinnett, Fulton, Cobb. Not to mention uncounted mail-in votes that could either be added tonight or tomorrow.

6 pm (Pacific) update: This is getting close. I’m a little worried about Osoff-Perdue. The Warnock-Loeffler race is moderately encouraging, but overall it’s really tight.

Earlier: This doesn’t look like a super-tight race to me. At the very least the vote is decisively leaning in Jon Osoff and Raphael Warnock’s favor. What’s the basis for pessimism? Tell me how this isn’t going to end with a double Democrat touchdown and the fall of Mitch McConnell?

Here We Go Again

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How Kenosha County district attorney prosecutor Michael D. Graveley could decide not to prosecute Rusten Sheskey, the cop who shot Jacob Blake seven times in the back outside an apartment building last August, is beyond me. But at least this decision represents an opportunity. If BLM demonstrators can mobilize and start trashing Kenosha storefronts quickly enough, they might be able to depress the pro-Warnock and Osoff vote in Georgia. It might be too late, I realize, but they could at least give it the old college try.

I’ll Be “There”

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Like everyone else I wish this could be an actual live event that everyone could attend, but of course it can’t be. This is but one more aspect of Hollywood life that used to be but no longer “is” in any kind of physical sense.

Finally Seeing This Week…

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From Peter Bradshaw’s 9.22 Guardian review: “Supernova at first reminded me uneasily of The Leisure Seeker, a syrupy picture in which Helen Mirren and Donald Sutherland play a squabbling old married couple taking a last Winnebago road-trip in the shadow of dementia and mortality.

“But that was hammy and sugary: Supernova, for all its occasional heartstring-plucking and button-pushing, is much more restrained, both in the relative calm of the performances and in the unadorned way the countryside is shot.

“Tucci and Firth have a sweet and gentle chemistry…they have an almost Eric-and-Ernie rapport. Elsewhere, Macqueen interestingly builds on the established personae of his leading men to show how their various mannerisms have been brought into play to deflect or neutralize difficult topics. Firth’s Sam is dry, reticent and pretty English; Tucci’s Tusker is quizzically amused and amusing in ways we have seen from him many times before — which makes a key scene, when his voice quivers on the verge of tears, even more affecting.

“The key issue, as with all movies about dementia, is the exit strategy: this was famously an agonis\zing moment in Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland’s Still Alice, with Julianne Moore, and even more agonis\zing in Michael Haneke’s Amour, with Emmanuelle Riva dwindling into immobility and silence after a stroke.”