Your Bailout Tax Dollars At Work...

From today's Huffington Post:

Wall street lawyers, investment bankers, CEOs and media executives often used corporate credit cards to pay for $2,000 an hour prostitutes, according to the madam who ran one of New York's biggest and most expensive escort services until it was busted last year.

But prosecutors in the Manhattan District Attorney's office chose not to pursue any of the corporate titans, says Kristin Davis, who pleaded guilty last year to charges of running a prostitution business that used more than a hundred women...

"Some of these guys, I was invoicing on corporate credit cards," she said. "I was writing up monthly bills for computer consulting, construction expenses, all of these things, I was invoicing them monthly so they could get it by their accountants," Davis said.

Raccoons Invade White House!

The other night a raccoon opened the window on our third-floor bathroom to get out of the cold night weather--"thud." When I went up, the intruder scampered out, leaving an open window that he had managed to unlatch. The next day, I took myself to Strossnider's Hardware to buy a couple of sliding hook latches that were supposedly more raccoon resistant (can't say "proof" with raccoons).

So, it was reassuring to read in this morning's paper that the White House is facing its own version of our problem. Today's paper failed to note that it is against the law to kill a raccoon, which means that each time a trapper relocates a critter to Rock Creek Park for a fee of a couple of hundred bucks, the animal just needs to wander back to generate another service call, and another fee. Our friends from Chicago told us that when a neighbor of his once found a family of raccoons living in the attic, he killed them all with a baseball bat...another difference between Chicagoans and Washingtonians:

President Obama mocked the Washington area's Defcon 1 response to a few snowflakes last week. Let's see how the flinty Chicagoan does with the latest living-in-Washington challenge: critters.

With permission from the Secret Service, the National Park Service has been in hot pursuit of a pack of raccoons spotted roaming the manicured grounds near the White House, a spokesman said.

Masked bandits scurrying through Washington aren't news to the seasoned trappers who have made a handsome living relocating varmints from attics, crawl spaces and chimneys in homes.

"One time, in an apartment complex, I got called to look into something going up a crawl-space vent," said Karl Kaifes, who has been catching small beasts for 40 years. "I trapped two or three raccoons, a possum, a skunk and five cats. That's city living."

There is a joke at every turn here, and bipartisan humor abounds.

Live, from London: Classicaltv.com

I used to own this domain name, but unfortunately never was able to come up the financing to go with it in order to set up my own alternative to PBS--so a few months ago I sold it to a British entrepreneur who found me through an agent living a couple of blocks away, who had located me through a WHOIS search.

Presto!

A phone call yesterday called attention to the fact that Classicaltv.com is now on the air, webcasting La Boheme from the English National Opera, among other things...(you'll need Microsoft Silverlight to watch, btw).

Ruth Bader Ginsburg's Pancreatic Cancer

Not good news. Having just lost the aunt of someone I know, and not so long ago having lost an old friend, all I can say is that my thoughts and prayers are with the Ginsburg family. The only silver lining I can think of is that this may finally persuade Congress to pass the Pancreatic Cancer Research & Education Act (HR 745) and direct more funding to Pancreatic Cancer research. You can find out more about the disease at the PanCan website, here.

End Bergson Ban, Rabbis Petition Yad Vashem

According to the Jerusalem Post (ht Wyman Institute), some four hundred rabbis have asked Yad Vashem to include Peter Bergson (aka Hillel Kook) in exhibits devoted to rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust. Until now, mention of Bergson--protagonist of my film Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die--has been banned.

In a rare display of Jewish unity, more than 400 rabbis from every major stream of Judaism have signed a petition urging Yad Vashem to include a display about a World War II rescue organization known as the Bergson Group.

The rabbis' appeal to add information about the Bergson Group to Jerusalem's Holocaust museum came months after Yad Vashem rebuffed earlier requests to do so by a group of Holocaust scholars as well as by a cross-section of political and cultural figures.

The Bergson Group was a maverick activist group in the US in the 1940s that sought to raise public awareness of the Holocaust and campaigned for US action to save European Jews.

American Jewish leaders at the time viewed the organization - led by Hillel Kook, a nephew of Israel's first chief rabbi, who worked under the alias "Peter Bergson" - as too direct in its criticism of the Roosevelt administration's failure to rescue Jewish refugees. The group actively campaigned to save the doomed Jews of Europe through theatrical pageants, lobbying on Capitol Hill, newspapers advertisements and organizing a march in Washington by 400 Rabbis, which was the only rally for rescue held in the nation's capital during the Holocaust.

The Bergson Group is credited with helping to persuade Roosevelt in 1944 to establish the War Refugee Board, which ultimately saved 200,000 Jewish lives. For decades after the war, information about the Bergson Group was routinely left out of textbooks, encyclopedias, and museums, but in recent years most Jewish leaders and Holocaust scholars have come to recognize the group's crucial contribution to the infamously belated rescue effort.

Arianna: Make Wall Street Pay

From today's Huffington Post:

Capping executive pay at companies that are being bailed out is a good step. But Obama and Geithner can't stop there.

As Niall Ferguson writes on HuffPost: "Existing shareholders will have to face that they have lost their money. Too bad; they should have kept a more vigilant eye on the people running their banks... Financial history is, after all, an evolutionary process. When old banks die, new banks swiftly take their place."

That's called capitalism, Mark. I missed the chapter in Adam Smith -- or Ayn Rand for that matter -- where it says that equity holders in insolvent banks need to be paid taxpayer-funded dividends. Did you say "clueless"?

Capitalism comes with great rewards -- and commensurate risks.

Allowing stockholders to reap the benefits during the good times... and to keep reaping them in the very bad times -- at taxpayers' expense -- isn't capitalism. It's lunacy. And only people like Mark Haines, their vision limited by Wall Street blinders, can utter the nonsense he uttered this morning.

Protester Throws Shoe at Chinese Premier in Cambridge, England

The shoe-thrower was arrested by British police...

What I Saw at the Inauguration...

A friend emailed me to ask what I saw at the Inauguration.

We were waaaay in the back, behind the Washington Monument, so mostly saw the crowd. The ceremony was on a Jumbotron, but it wasn't very close, either. The sound went in and out, as the wind shifted, the loudspeakers were more like softspeakers. So we missed almost everything, including the Chief Justice's botched Oath of Office. But, on the other hand, we were there, with the crowd. It was a very nice, happy crowd. Some people, especially it seemed older African-American women, had tears running down their cheeks. The crowd was about 1/2 black and 1/2 white. Everyone was smiling and very friendly. Despite the obstacles placed by Department of Homeland Stupidity crowd control--concrete barriers in the middle of where the crowd needed to walk, cyclone fencing where the crowd needed to exit--people took it all in good humor...storming the barricades where necessary, but without any apparent irritation.



We saw the puffs of smoke from the 21-gun salute in the distance, which was exciting. Otherwise, just looked at the Capitol dome, and said, that's where it is happening.

While the new President had his lunch, we went to the National Press Club to get out of the cold (our friends were from Chicago, so we were warmly dressed in long johns, double wool socks, Thinsulate (R) hats, etc. which was fine at 19 degrees. The Press Club bar was packed, and they had installed new flat-screen TVs for the occasion, so we watched the coverage on a number of channels. It was a shock when Senator Kennedy collapsed, luckily he didn't die. When the parade started, we craned and peeked at an angle through the window towards Pennsylvania avenue, where we couldn't see very much, but did see all the security and the crowd. When Obama approached 14th street, I went downstairs with one of my Chicago friends, but we couldn't get near because of the riot fences and barriers.



We saw the top of Rosa Parks's bus, and heard some cheers as the President walked (or rode?) by--like a scene in a Fellini film. After Obama passed, things got easier. The barriers opened up, and the Cook County Sheriff's Police detailed to our street let everyone watch the Inaugural Parade.



The parade was the best part! It looked just like 19th-century engravings. There were American Indian chiefs wearing headdresses, carrying tomahawks, dressed in leggings, riding Palomino ponies. There was the Navy Band, the Marine Corps Band, a whole lot of high school and college bands from every state. There were Medal of Honor winners riding in carriages. There were baton-twirlers, and drummers, and floats from different states. We left as it grew dark, but the parade went on and on and on. A memory for a lifetime.

The night before the inauguration, we had attended (thanks to our Chicago friends) the "Big Shoulders Ball" (unofficial) at the Black Cat Nightclub, organized by and for Chicagoans from "The Hideout"--a Chicago nightspot. Lots of different acts, all from Chicago. Our favorite: Honeyboy Edwards, a 93-year old blues singer who told me he still tours to some 75 cities a year. Crowd was 30-ish, not too young, not too different from college rathskeller crowds of our youth. The times, they are NOT changing...at least not yet.



Following the inauguration, we went to two unofficial balls. One at the Louise-Dickson-Hurt home for the aged, where the district residents seemed happy. The other at the Bethesda Unitarian meeting house, a really big congregation, dancing the night away (I didn't know Unitarians danced) until the close--which featured the choir singing "America the Beautiful"...all the stanzas. It was very moving, being with descendants of Abolitionists from Boston at this moment. These words of Katherine Lee Bates' poem seemed particularly apt:

America! America!
God mend thy ev'ry flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law.

O beautiful for heroes prov'd
In liberating strife,
Who more than self their country loved,
And mercy more than life.

America! America!
May God thy gold refine
Till all success be nobleness,
And ev'ry gain divine...

Daniel Pearl's Dad v. Bill Moyers

In today's Wall Street Journal:

Some American pundits and TV anchors didn't seem much different from Al Jazeera in their analysis of the recent war in Gaza. Bill Moyers was quick to lend Hamas legitimacy as a "resistance" movement, together with honorary membership in PBS's imaginary "cycle of violence." In his Jan. 9 TV show, Mr. Moyers explained to his viewers that "each [side] greases the cycle of violence, as one man's terrorism becomes another's resistance to oppression." He then stated -- without blushing -- that for readers of the Hebrew Bible "God-soaked violence became genetically coded." The "cycle of violence" platitude allows analysts to empower terror with the guise of reciprocity, and, amazingly, indict terror's victims for violence as immutable as DNA.

Tom Hayden Condemns Human Rights Watch--Wrong on CIA Rendition

From today's Huffington Post:

It is confirmed that one of the loopholes in the president's anti-torture orders allows the continuance of rendition by the CIA, which consists of secretly snatching suspects off the street without any due process and "rendering" them to jails in other countries. Rendition is at the heart of the state secrecy apparatus, and should be of concern to any civil liberties, human rights, or democracy advocates.

But Human Rights Watch and, apparently, other human rights groups signed off on renditions in talks with the Obama administration, saying publicly that there is "a legitimate place" for the practice.

That's not a position that represents most human rights advocates, and deserves to be reconsidered in the months of drafting the new administration's rules. Human Rights Watch could have celebrated Obama's presidential order while vowing to close the rendition loophole. Instead, according to the LA Times, the proposal "did not draw major protests" among human rights groups because of "a sense that nations need certain tools to combat terrorism." [see LA Times, Feb. 1, 2009]

"You still have to go after the bad guys", says an Obama spokesman in defense of renditions, which have been condemned by the European parliament. A Human Rights Watch representative, Tom Malinowski, says he urged the administration to guarantee public hearings in the countries to which they are rendered, as a protection against torture and disappearances. That would be an important corrective, but leaves unanswered the purpose of the secret abductions in which the CIA is the judge, jury, and in certain cases the executioner.

Historic Lake City, Florida

In Lake City for a funeral last Friday, had lunch at Tucker's Restaurant in the historic Blanche Hotel (I recommend the fish fry with cheese grits). According to the Wikipedia entry, Al Capone and Johnny Cash were among the guests who stayed there in years gone by. We were told of its glory days as home-away-from-home to tobacco-buyers from up North. It's now an office building.

Earlier, we had enjoyed morning coffee and a cinnamon bun at Ruppert's Bakery and Cafe, a block away. It featured a photo of General Charles P. Summerall, an ancestor of football hero Pat Summerall (also of Lake City), as well as pictures of the original campus of the University of Florida (now a VA hospital), established in Lake City as Florida Agricultural College in 1853 (Lake City had once been known as Alligator City, hence Florida "Gators").

Toronto Globe & Mail: Israel Did Not Shell UN School

This article by Patrick Marting in January 29th's Toronto Globe & Mail about the Gaza crisis reminds us that in war, the first casualty is indeed truth:

JABALYA, GAZA STRIP — Most people remember the headlines: Massacre Of Innocents As UN School Is Shelled; Israeli Strike Kills Dozens At UN School [NOTE: The NY Times' headline read "Israeli Shells Kill 40 at Gaza UN School"].

They heralded the tragic news of Jan. 6, when mortar shells fired by advancing Israeli forces killed 43 civilians in the Jabalya refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. The victims, it was reported, had taken refuge inside the Ibn Rushd Preparatory School for Boys, a facility run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency.

The news shocked the world and was compared to the 1996 Israeli attack on a UN compound in Qana, Lebanon, in which more than 100 people seeking refuge were killed. It was certain to hasten the end of Israel's attack on Gaza, and would undoubtedly lead the list of allegations of war crimes committed by Israel.

There was just one problem: The story, as etched in people's minds, was not quite accurate.

Physical evidence and interviews with several eyewitnesses, including a teacher who was in the schoolyard at the time of the shelling, make it clear: While a few people were injured from shrapnel landing inside the white-and-blue-walled UNRWA compound, no one in the compound was killed. The 43 people who died in the incident were all outside, on the street, where all three mortar shells landed.

Michael Radu on the Gaza Crisis

Also found this interesting analysis on the Foreign Policy Research Institute website:

Certainly some women, and all infants, are innocent victims of the conflict. But Hamas successfully makes all women and all “children” victims, knowing that the sob sisters/brothers of the West accept this for their own reasons. Those reasons may vary, from cultural anti-Americanism, historic anti-Semitism, or the peculiar European adoration of everything Third World.

All this being said, and concentrated in the simple statement that Hamas is not deterrable and its supporters are seldom real “civilians,” why does anyone—especially the Israeli government, elected to protect its citizenry and territory—pretend otherwise?

The answer, and a disturbing one, is that Israel, or at least its elites, are more “Western” than is good for them or their people. The implicit message of the Israeli officials’ claim that “regime change” in Gaza is not an objective of Operation Cast Lead is problematic. If sincere, Tel Aviv is wasting lives—Jewish and Palestinian—for very short-term success. If not, the problem is worse, because it only creates confusion—in Israel, among Palestinians, and elsewhere.

Ultimately, the only solution—itself limited in time because of the permanency of dysfunctional Palestinian political culture—is the physical destruction of Hamas in Gaza, by killing most of its militants and leaders, be they “political” or “military” (is there a difference, outside Western artificial legalistic and emotional circles?)

As it is now, Israel’s claim that the goal is not Hamas’ removal from power in Gaza is either dishonest, a PR statement, or delusional. The destruction of Hamas’ military/terror capabilities would make it unattractive to Gazans, who like winners (if they kill Israelis). Anything else would convince most Gazans, who are always ready to be convinced, that Hamas is the way to go, electorally or practically.

Ultimately, the total physical destruction of Hamas in Gaza and the introduction of PA elements, even and especially if that means renewed intra-Palestinian conflict, is the only stable, if not permanent, solution. Since Hamas cannot be deterred, dealt or “negotiated” with it, a fact Hamas itself admits, is a lost cause—it simply has to be destroyed. Hence all Euro-pacifist demands or UN pseudo-solutions are inherently irrelevant.

The whole idea, or so-called principle, of total protection of undefined “civilians” promoted by leftists supporting Hamas without the courage to say so (the perennial Bianca Jagger, etc.), is not limited to Gaza’s conflict. That is just the latest pretext of a peculiarly irresponsible phenomenon. Thus the government and people of Sri Lanka are on the brink of finally winning their decades-long war against one of the world’s worst terrorist groups—the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the “inventors” of suicide bombings and responsible of some 70,000 fatalities since 1984. The reaction from Amnesty International and associates? “Too many civilians” are being killed or displaced—not the rational question of how many civilians, Tamil or others, would be saved by ending the war.

But no, self-proclaimed human rights or humanitarian NGOs, when not actively encouraging irregular forces by treating them equally with state actors, push for regulations on states, since they cannot do so on Hamas or similar non-state actors. The result is always that the conflict between state and non-state actors, whether in Gaza, Israel, Colombia, Sri Lanka, or elsewhere, is prolonged—with more “civilians” and innocents, whatever their definition, falling victim to violence.

It may appear cynical or brutal to say that in some circumstances—the Gaza conflict now being an obvious one—more violence, if correctly targeted, means fewer real civilian victims and better long-term chances of calm, if not peace. If Israel and those who truly seek calm in the Middle East in the long-term are serious, they should support the total military defeat of Hamas, rather than spill tears over the loss of “civilians.” This is a lesson that can be applied to conflicts far away from the Middle East. However, the prospects of this happening are not good, and the result is likely to be more and more “civilians” such as infants sleeping in their cribs being killed from Kyber to Mullaitivu to Gaza. Lack of clarity and reason truly kills.

James R. Kurth on Samuel Huntington

From the Foreign Policy Research Institute:

It is historically fitting that Samuel Huntington called upon Americans to conserve America. In the seventeenth century, the first Huntingtons arrived in America, as Puritans and as founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In the eighteenth century, Samuel Huntington of Connecticut was a signer of the Declaration of Independence. In the nineteenth century, Collis P. Huntington was a builder of the transcontinental railroad. In the twentieth century, Samuel P. Huntington was for half a century the most consistently brilliant and creative political scientist in the United States. Huntingtons had been present at the creation for most of the great events of American history, and Samuel Huntington knew intimately and believed intensely in what America was all about. His ideas about America and its role in the world were simultaneously original, conservative, and consequential. He was a splendid exemplar of American creative intelligence and intellectual courage.

Will Be Offline For A While...

Attending a family funeral in Florida...

I've Joined Facebook's "Dump Geithner - No Tax Cheat Treasury Secretaries Managing Bailouts"

68 members, so far...

Someone who didn't pay tens of thousands of dollars in taxes until audited, and didn't pay in full until approached about this position, can not be trusted to honestly administer billions of bailout dollars...

Doubt

IMHO Doubt deserves all the Oscars that Slumdog Millionaire is in line to receive. I just couldn't get over what a terrific job director John Patrick Shanley did in moving his stage play--which I saw in Los Angeles with Cherry Jones--to the screen. Meryl Streep is outstanding. She really has a Bronx (not Brooklyn, not Queens) accent. Phillip Seymour Hoffman also excellent. The sets are excellent, the costumes are excellent, the acting is excellent, the music is excellent. And the drama is likewise excellent. Thought-provoking, moving, and deep. The film is better than the play...best movie I've seen this year!

Happy Chinese New Year!

新年快樂

Today marks the start of the Year of the Ox in the Chinese Calendar...

I Walked Out On Slumdog Millionaire

Not that it will stop the manipulative roman-a-clef about English boarding school sadism from winning a bunch of Oscars. Danny Boyle's direction reeks of British Imperialist Condescension. Surprised it wasn't called "You're a Better Man Than I Am, Gunga Din." No wonder some people in Mumbai are mad...it is indeed insulting. Better to read Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance (Oprah's Book Club)to which this film pays homage--uncredited, of course...the British apparently are still good at stealing from Indians.

Frost/Nixon's Piano Concerto

Finally saw Ron Howard's film adaptation of Peter Morgan's play Frost/Nixon yesterday afternoon. I was struck by the scene where Frank Langella plays Nixon's Piano Concerto Number One--best thing in the picture, IMHO. Plus the "drunk dialing" scene was very well done, plus the follow up "checking" familiar to AA and Alanon veterans.

Otherwise, a little bit cardboard cutout, by the numbers, Peter Morgan strikes this blogger as a British author who only knows Americans from the outside. Frost/Nixon is definitely not The Queen.

The Frost=Nixon doppelganger angle was taught to us as an obvious gimmick in my first screenwriting class at You See LA film school. Hey, the hero and the villain are two sides of the same person divided in two! That's deep. Get me the Joseph Campbell coverage!

Guess what, Peter Morgan? As Lloyd Bentsen would say, I wrote about David Frost and Richard Nixon for my PhD dissertation, and David Frost was no Nixon. And, Frost was no lightweight--he founded London Weekend Television, hosted That Was the Week That Was on NBC as well as British TV, as well as the David Frost Show and was known as the wittiest and most intelligent man on TV. Nixon wasn't going downmarket from Mike Wallace--he was going upmarket. But how could a Britisher be expected to know that (on the other hand, Ron Howard should know better)?

IMHO, Nixon was an Anglophile as well as a keen student of the snobbery and pretentions of Ivy League dopes, who no doubt correctly concluded that a confession to a big-shot Briton would redeem him...which it did. Plus the money was good. And he enjoyed being with big shots, which the film did capture. The self-pitying aspect played true. Checkers, You Won't Have Dick Nixon to Kick Around Anymore, Resignation, Frost/Nixon. The same act worked time after time...not that Morgan noticed.

Nixon wasn't finished by his on-air confession, he was just beginning another act--senior statesman. Doesn't anyone remember Bill Clinton asking Nixon's advice? So the storyline rang false. The acting was good, though. And some of the blubbery Checkers speech characterization from Langella worked, too. I couldn't get past Michael Sheen's Tony Blair to see him as Frost, though he's a good actor and gave it a try. I don't know how they could have made Frost look more different, but maybe someone could have thought of something. And where were the Hollywood feminists at Universal and Imagine entertainment on this one? The women--Pat Nixon, Diane Sawyer, and Caroline Cushing--have nothing to say or do except stand around and look pretty! Yet Pat Nixon, who studied acting and worked in the movie industry; Diane Sawyer, who went on to co-star with Mike Wallace; and Cushing, who went on to set up a marketing and PR firm are mere eye-candy. Before feminism, they would have had parts like Barbara Stanwyck's, Bettye Davis's, and Lauren Bacall's. Does Peter Morgan hate women?

In any case, thanks to google and YouTube, I quickly found this video of Nixon performing his composition on the Jack Paar show in 1963...thought it worth sharing: