I don’t know if this movie is going to stay up on Google. I haven’t watched it yet, but I did watch an excerpt of it on YouTube a few months ago. Basically it is some small time movers and shakers that got schmoozed and later spurned by the Clintons. One of them is Spiderman creator Stan Lee. Since these are Hollywood types, they have one recourse that the Clintons may have failed to consider when they wrote them off. They made a movie.

I always thought Stan Lee was a little weird because he sometimes drew really bodacious tatas on Aunt May. Maybe I was a little weird for noticing. Maybe I am more than a little weird for remembering it for a couple of decades and then blogging about it. Anyway, the Clintons aren’t very nice.

edit: I have watched 26 minutes of the 90 minute movie. It is pretty unrelenting and illuminating. It paints a much broader picture than I had anticipated. One of the tarriest brushes is wielded by none other than Anne (shudder) Coulter, who benefits from a skillful editor in this movie. Someone who honestly believes that the enemy of their enemy is their friend cherry picked a number of reasonable and believable sounding quotes from the awful harpy. I had to stop watching after 26 minutes, if I can bring myself to watch more, I will update again.

2nd edit: I watched another few seconds of the movie, but I was asked to pause it. I went to Wikipedia to refresh my memory about a key Clinton basher known as Peter Paul. This man is a convicted criminal and has repeatedly committed fraud in various ways, shapes and forms. If he is the driving force behind this movie, I don’t think it deserves that much attention. Maybe the Clintons are guilty of carrying out character assassination on their enemies, but Paul’s character has been dead man walking since the 70s.

Human beings actually seem to seek out a certain level of risk. If you make the roads smoother and straighter and wider, they will drive faster. If you build a railing around the Grand Canyon they will lean on it. Hannah Montana and her Achy Brakey Dad are being criticized for being in a movie scene without any seatbelts. Disney made Lindsay Lohan wear her seatbelt all through the filming of Herbie Fully Loaded and we all know how things have been going ever since.

I’ll get the beards

Lincoln was the guy who ended slavery, even though he would have been okay with not doing so. He was America’s first Post-Gay President.

Dick Cheney had a personal interaction with a citizen in Colorado way back in 2006. The fallout from that interaction has been intermittently newsworthy ever since. The man was arrested. The charges were dropped. He filed a wrongful arrest suit. The secret servicemen told conflicting stories when deposed. One of them, the officer that is at odds with Cheney’s personal detail, has been transfered to Guam.

Yesterday, the news was that Cheney’s lawyers are seeking to block the public release of deposition videos on the unspoken grounds that they will go viral in remixed form on YouTube (watch for them). It’s quite a tangled mess and it is all the result of what some people say was just an insincere pat on the back. Oh, and a verbal indictment of the administration’s Iraq policy.

Steven Howards is like a much older and MUCH smarter version of that guy that got tasered. And in case Cheney or his security detail has any ideas, it is TOO LATE to taser Steven now. Actually, my comparison might be a little bit of a stretch. I don’t think he intended to make a scene. I can remember a moment in my own life where I was face to face with a politician with whom I strongly disagreed. I didn’t seize on the opportunity to speak my mind. I was still young and I probably didn’t have any nuanced criticism to voice. It was at the airport where I was working summers in my college days. Actually, I was doing my daily 2 hours of picking up garbage and I had a pointy tool and a bucket in my hands. The political leader of my Canadian province was standing outside the terminal having a smoke. Our personal interaction involved eye contact and nodding.

First off, I want to say that I like Barrack Obama and he would be my choice if I had any choice in the matter. I have expressed that sentiment on a few occasions and sometimes I hear or read people saying that he is full of hot air or all style and no substance. There are dozens of ways for people to say the same thing. I was reminded of the situation today when I ended up listening to The Cult of Personality on YouTube. I like to think of the criticism as a fall back position by stubbornly partisan people who would prefer to be able to pick apart what he says and instead have to be content with spouting off the mantra that he is all talk.

I am flabbergasted by the arguments that some people make about how he would not be able to DO various things. I have gotten to the point where I think that they imagine an elected President should go around increasing the GDP, improving health care and education and winning wars with his or her bare hands. In actuality, Presidents are supposed to make speeches and make policy decisions. This might be beside the point, but Obama has the biggest hands of all the candidates.

Karl Rove will be working for Fox News. His first big assignment will be contributing commentary to coverage of Super Tuesday.

The Daily Show writers are on strike and I can’t think of anything funny to say about this news. He will fit in. I think it may be part of a political tactic, not just a career move. Please, please comment on this story.

Edit: Rove was recently scheduled to give a commencement speech at a high school and there was enough vehement and creative opposition to cause him to reconsider. This is a good sign for the future of America.

My family is trying to reduce our plastic waste. I took this picture for plasticless.com, but it looks so good that I thought I would post it here as well.

When we we walking towards the market square this morning, we yielded the narrow sidewalk to a line of tourists. It was a bit surreal to see seven retirement aged people in a row all eating bananas and walking in lockstep.

It’s carnival week here and it is not uncommon to see medium sized groups of young boys in gorilla masks behaving badly. The anonymity makes it a bit scary even for a tough guy like me. I had to smile when I was driving back to my neighborhood and saw a gorilla tagging along with his mom, thus blowing his cover.

I like to think that I Google my full name less frequently than a lot of people. The various little efforts to boycott Google may have skewed the statistics to the point that I am above the median level of self absorption. Anyway, I was very surprised to find out that Martin Higgins was doing something very subversive and somewhat entertaining. He has apparently been infiltrating Fat Acceptance groups and directing them to protest against Anti-Gym a company that uses advertising that is designed to offend fat people. The catch is that he is working for Anti-Gym.

This kind of guerrilla marketing is an invention born of necessity to some degree because the face of Anti-Gym, Michael Karolchyk, is finding that many media outlets are responding to public outrage by pulling his commercials. It’s interesting to note that with the guerrilla marketing, the same media companies that shy away from selling him advertising space will probably give him free publicity by covering the protests. Michael Karolchyk regularly comes out of his gym and addresses the protesters using a bull horn.

Here is a short and very bizarre video, I think the older guy is Martin Higgins…

I was born 13 months after the death of Martin Luther King. Jr.

We did not walk this Earth together.

My first significant exposure to MLK happened when I was browsing books in the library at college and I found a collection of the speeches that he had made on CBC radio. The public radio system in Canada was accessible to millions of Americans, notably those living in Detroit, and the corporation provided Doctor King with a platform when various methods were being used to try to shut him up in his own country. It was the right thing to do, but it was also some very good content.

I sometimes like to say that I was named after him, but I don’t know how true that is.

A very much unexpected sighting of Martin Luther King, Jr. is on this Tragically Hip Video.

I do not know if Rob Wells considers MLK to be one of his idols, it could just be a wardrobe decision made by the director.