I have to agree with the The Advocate’s assessment of MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, whom I think of as a modern-day Edward R. Murrow (pictured below).

Professional television network journalism in the United States of America died no later than in 2003, when the corporately owned and controlled television networks acted not as journalists, but as cheerleaders for the unelected Bush regime’s illegal, immoral, unjust and unprovoked invasion of Iraq. The “embedded” “reporters” indeed were in bed with the Bush regime.

It was that fiasco that induced me to stop watching television “news” — and television altogether — and to rely on the Internet for news and information instead.

So it’s refreshing to see that we have at least one practicing professional television journalist, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, whose clips I frequently watch via the Internet.

Maddow is one of the very few professional, critical and analytical individuals still left on what passes for television “news.”

Her recent takedown of newly minted Repugnican candidate for the U.S. Senate Rand Paul — and her masterful post-analysis of it – showcase her talent and her ability.

Rand Paul, the “libertarian” Repugnican candidate for a U.S. Senate seat for Kentucky — the “tea party’s” favorite who beat the Repugnican Party establishment’s candidate in this past week’s primary — believes that private businesses should be able to refuse anyone service based upon their race or ethnicity. He very apparently believes, from his statements, that at least the portion of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that makes such racial discrimination illegal should be overturned, but in the firestorm that has ensued he now claims that he fully supports the 1964 law.

But noooooo, the “tea party” isn’t racist and white supremacist!

As I have noted, Kentucky is around 90 percent white and went to Repugnican candidates in the 2000, 2004 and 2008 presidential elections. So the ascension of a racist and white supremacist like Ron Paul in Kentucky isn’t exactly shocking.

What plays well in Kentucky and in other red states, however — such as white supremacism — doesn’t play so well at the national level.

And Rand Paul is the poster boy for that fact. And he apparently is aware of this fact, because Maddow had to go around and around with him on Wednesday night in order to get him to state, with anything like clarity, his views on the matter of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

MSNBC describes the exchange between Maddow and Paul on Wednesday night thusly:

In his 15-minute interview with Maddow, Paul repeatedly declined or sidestepped opportunities to endorse the provisions of the 1964 [federal civil rights] law that require hotels, restaurants and other businesses to accept all customers without discriminating on the basis of race or ethnicity.

He repeated several times that he opposes racial discrimination. “I’m not in favor of any discrimination of any form; I would never belong to any club that excluded anybody for race,” he said.

At the end of the interview, Paul added, “I don’t believe that any private property (owner) should discriminate either.”

But he did not say whether he supported using federal law to enforce non-discrimination in privately owned businesses. He said “had I been around” in 1964 “I would have tried to modify that.”

He also said the debate over the civil rights law’s limits on rights of private property owners “is still a valid discussion.”

He explained, “When you blur the distinction between public and private ownership, there really is a problem.” He used the hypothetical example of a gun owner who takes his firearm into a restaurant whose owner objects to having weapons on the premises.

That’s a bullshit comparison, of course. A firearm could accidentally discharge and result in injury – or be used intentionally, of course. To assert that disallowing a person with a gun to enter a private business and disallowing a non-white person to enter a private business because he or she is non-white are equivalent is sheer stupidity or intentional intellectual dishonesty, and either such stupidity or intellectual dishonesty is not befitting a United States senator.

MSNBC also reports that in 2002 Rand Paul wrote a letter to the Kentucky Bowling Green Daily News that “decisions concerning private property and associations should in a free society be unhindered. As a consequence, some associations will discriminate,” and “A free society will abide unofficial, private discrimination — even when that means allowing hate-filled groups to exclude people based on the color of their skin.”

Gee, what else should we allow in a “free” society? Assault and battery? Rape? Murder? Is this what “freedom” means: the “freedom” to do wrong unto others? If so, then I suppose that our prisons are full of “libertarians.”

Rand Paul isn’t just about white supremacism, though; he’s about standing up for the corporations, which clearly are so powerless that they need his help.

Paul today called President Barack Obama’s criticism of British Petroleum — whose underwater oil well has been spewing crude into the Gulf of Mexico for a month now – “un-American.”

“What I don’t like from the president’s administration is this sort of, ‘I’ll put my boot heel on the throat of BP,’” Yahoo! News quotes Paul as having said today. “I think that sounds really un-American in his criticism of business.”

Yes, you see, to the wingnuts, it’s American — as American as apple pie — to have the corporations’ boot heels on the throats of the common American. (After all, that’s the way that Jesus Christ and the Founding Fathers wanted it!)

And businesses are so sacrosanct that in their relentless quest for obscene profits, we should let them make our entire fucking planet uninhabitable to every living thing. To suggest otherwise is “un-American” — and “un-Christian,” too!

That’s a wonderful “vision” there, Rand Paul.

Rand Paul and his ilk are dangerous, and light needs to be shed upon their actual agendas, agendas that even they themselves must have some idea are evil and wrong, as evidenced by the fact that they themselves hestitate to clearly articulate their actual agendas in the light of the national television spotlight.

Thank you, Rachel Maddow, for casting such light.

You’re the closest living person to Edward R. Murrow — the late broadcast journalist whose spotlight exposed the darkness of and thus took down Sen. Joseph McCarthy (who, with his un-American accusations of others that they were “un-American,” just might be one of Rand Paul’s heroes) – that we have.

Associated Press and Reuters photos

The 46-year-old Sarah Palin-Quayle pontificates in front of the National Rifle Association’s annual convention yesterday just before its cross-burning ceremony. Palin-Quayle’s juvenile, Valley-girl-like word choice, intonation and body language should come as no surprise, given that her main means of political communication is Twitter.

I would say that the 2008 presidential election never ended for Repugnican Sarah Palin-Quayle, who refuses to go the fuck away, but it’s more accurate, I think, to say that her 1984 beauty pageant never ended for her. Indeed, the former Miss Alaska pageant contestant (she lost that contest, too) reminds me of a former Miss California Carrie Prejean –

– who has gone on to become a right-wing politician two decades from now, replete with the cross pendants –

Associated Press photo

– that both Palin-Quayle and Prejean prominently publicly display as proof of their favor with God and Jesus.

Palin-Quayle is in the news yet again, telling the KKK-like National Rifle Association yesterday that surely President Barack Obama would ban guns if he could, and that it’s up to God’s warriors like she and the members of the NRA to prevent that God-awful scenario from happening.

Um, Jesus Christ probably would ban guns, but that’s another blog post…

Actually, Obama The Great Centrist never would ban guns* — he’s way too pussy to do anything radical — but the message that “President Sambo is a-gonna take away yer guns!” resonates well with the white-supremacist crowd that Grand Dragoness Palin-Quayle was addressing yesterday.

Probably even more ludicrous, though, than Palin-Quayle’s lie that the black president is after whitey’s arsenals is her assertion that she also made yesterday at another appearance that “mama grizzlies” — pissed-off Repugnican and other right-wing women, especially mothers, I’m guessing she means by “mama grizzlies” — are going to “rise up” and “take this country back.”

Aside from the fact that there aren’t enough far-right-wing women to hold a fucking Tupperware party, much less (much more?) take over the nation, I like the “mama grizzly” rhetoric, because this is what Palin-Quayle actually thinks should be done with grizzlies:

Yes, that is a photo of the wildlife-lovin’ Palin-Quayle in the governor’s office when she was governor of the Podunk State of the Great White North.

As Palin-Quayle is against women’s right to choose what to do with their own uteri, and supports the right wing’s subjugation of women in general, it is appropriate that she’s now blathering about her support of “mama grizzlies” when we have photographic evidence of the fact that she likes to pal around with grizzlies that have been slaughtered.

Indeed, like Cruella de Vil loved her Dalmation puppies, planning to make them into fur coats, Palin-Quayle thinks that mama grizzlies make great sofa covers.

You betcha.

P.S. Here’s a photo of Chatty Cathy Palin-Quayle at yet another event on Wednesday. I love the subtlety, don’t you?

Associated Press photo

*Indeed, The Associated Press notes:

Gun enthusiasts [that's a nice, "professional" way of saying "gun nuts"] have trumpeted fears that their rights would erode under a Democrat-led White House and Congress, but President Barack Obama has largely been silent on issues such as reviving an assault weapons ban or strengthening background checks at gun shows. Obama also signed a law allowing people to carry loaded guns in national parks.

This book sucks ass, as does its author. I did my best, but I was able to get only to page 18.

Trying to buck the criticism that those of us on the left never expose ourselves to views on the right (and vice-versa), I recently bought a copy of John Avlon’s Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe Is Hijacking America.

I like and I often use the term “wingnut” myself, and I bought Avlon’s book even though he (incorrectly) redefines the term “wingnut” to include those on either far side of the political ideology spectrum. (Actually, the commonly accepted meaning of the term “wingnut” is an individual who is to the far right, and the term “moonbat” would be applied to one on the far left.)

Despite the fact that I disagree with Avlon’s retooling of the vernacular to suit his own purposes, and despite the fact that his book puts Keith Olbermann on its cover with Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin — a strikingly false equivalency — I bought his fucking book at full cover price.

Can you say “buyer’s remorse”?

After several pages of reading Avlon’s false equivalencies — for instance, he implies that what he calls “Bush Derangement Syndrome” was/is anything like what he calls “Obama Derangement Syndrome,” which we have been witnessing for some time now* – I finally had to literally toss Avlon’s book aside when, on page 18, I read Avlon refer to the democratically elected Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez as “Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez.”

I mean, as U.S. Sen. Al Franken has put it, you are entitled to your own opinions, but not to your own facts.

Hugo Chavez has been elected and re-elected by a strong majority of Venezuela’s voters and he has the support of a strong majority of the people of Venezuela.

Chavez has been clamping down on his right-wing political opposition (who did, after all, illegally and treasonously attempt to overthrow him in 2002),  and Venezuela needs to be monitored for human rights abuses (just as every nation does, and nothing has gone on in Venezuela under Chavez’s watch that has even approached what happened at the Abu Ghraib House of Horrors or at the Guantanamo Bay Concentration Camp during the eight long nightmarish years of rule by the unelected Bush regime).

Chavez is far away from having earned the title of “dictator.” To call Chavez a “dictator” isn’t just against my belief that a nation’s government should work for the benefit of the most number of the nation’s people instead of for the benefit of the minority plutocrats and corporatocrats, as Chavez believes, but it is blatantly factually incorrect, and I can’t handle “non-fiction” books containing such glaring factual errors.

Nor does Avlon bother to explain why he uses the term “dictator” — he just throws it out there for no other apparent reason than that the members of the Bush regime – and George W. Bush, never having been legitimately elected, having started a bogus war that has cost thousands upon thousands of lives and billions upon billions of dollars, and having shit and pissed all over the U.S. Constitution, certainly comes closer to the dictionary definition of “dictator” than does Chavez – and their allies at FOX “News” falsely called Chavez a “dictator” for several years. (To the right wing you are a “dictator,” you see, if you refuse to kiss U.S. corporate ass and refuse to surrender your nation’s natural resources and other wealth to U.S. corporations; that you have been democratically elected by your people is irrelevant to the democracy-hating, election-stealing right wing.)

But Avlon already demonstrates, before he calls Hugo Chavez a “dictator,” that he’s no more than a smug pretty boy who is posing as an expert on politics.

About all that he points to, in the 18 pages that I was able to stomach, in order to exemplify the far left or the far right is to cite examples of some political figure, usually Bush or Obama, being compared to Adolf Hitler. Ooooo! Insightful!

However, while skimming through his book, I noted that apparently anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan is a “wingnut”** for having stood up against the Bush regime’s bogus Vietraq War that killed her son — a war that the majority of Americans now acknowledge, fucking finally, was a bogus war.

Hmmm… A woman’s young son is killed for non-existent weapons of mass destruction, Dick Cheney’s Halliburton profits obscenely in that bogus war (as do the BushCheneyCorp’s other oily subsidiaries), and because she has the gall to protest her son’s pointless death, that makes Sheehan a “wingnut,” according to Avlon, who, I take it, hasn’t had a close loved one killed in the Vietraq War or ever even been in harm’s way himself.

Overall, Avlon reminds me of a lazy, mediocre parent or teacher who witnesses two children fighting, and, because he doesn’t want to bother to try to figure out what they’re fighting about — and whether one child might actually be in the right and the other child might actually be in the wrong — he labels both fighting children as equally guilty. There. Done with it. Why bother to unravel the facts? And why take sides?

Except that the real world is so much more complex than that, and our crumbling democracy didn’t really need another book put out there to tell people that instead of closely examining the facts and taking a stand based upon the facts, they need to just join the mushy middle, because obviously there’s no difference between the impassioned right and the impassioned left (or, as Avlon calls everyone who isn’t a milquetoast, apolitical, apathetic sleepwalker, the “wingnuts”).

To give just one of many possible demonstrations of how Avlon shills a false equivalency between the right and the left, right now, as I type this sentence, a book incredibly titled The Manchurian President: Barack Obama’s Ties to Communists, Socialists and Other Anti-American Extremists incredibly is No. 13 — thirteen – on amazon.com’s top 100-selling books list.

When does a moonbat title like that ever get that far on any of the mainstream best-selling books lists?

Further, I know that many of us on the left had at least some fear of possible retribution for our outspokenness against the unelected, mass-murdering Bush regime — the Bush regime was, after all, engaging in the illegal surveillance of American citizens in the name of “national security,” and the Abu Ghraib House of Horrors and the Guantanamo Bay Concentration Camp certainly demonstrated for us where the Bush regime stood on human rights – yet here is a book out calling President Obama a “Manchurian president,” and I don’t sense that the wingnuts (the right-wing kind) have any real fear of retribution from the Obama administration for their publishing, promoting or purchasing a book thus titled.

And that’s because historically, dictators and tyrants — the kind who, unlike Hugo Chavez, actually steal elections, rule against the wishes of the majority of the ruled, and who actually torture and murder their political opponents — predominantly have been right-wingers, not left-wingers. (The right-wing Chilean Augusto Pinochet, for example, was a dictator.)

The wingnuts (my definition of the term, not Avlon’s) attack Obama unreservedly because they know that those on the left only rarely use what I might call, a la Dick Cheney, the “enhanced” tactics used by those on the right against their political opponents. Paradoxically, if Obama truly were the tyrant the wingnuts say he is, they probably wouldn’t be calling him a “tyrant” or a “Manchurian president” or the like — because if he truly were that, he might retaliate against them.

As far as “Obama Derangement Syndrome” is concerned, it’s far more virulent and widespread than “Bush Derangement Syndrome” ever was. Not only did anti-Bush books not sell nearly as well as anti-Obama books sell today, but there was no “tea-party”-like “movement” formed by the left in response to Bush. The closest thing to the left’s “tea party” that I can think of is MoveOn.org, which, compared to the nest of vipers that comprise the tea party, is a den of garter snakes.

And while the minimum that we factually can say about the 2000 presidential election is that George W. Bush was made president in late 2000 under circumstances that were shady at best, and that in November 2000 he captured only 47.9 percent of the popular vote to Democrat Al Gore’s 48.4 percent, and that he was “re”-elected by only 50.7 percent of the popular vote in 2004, Barack Obama won 52.9 percent of the popular vote in November 2008, a better showing at the polls than “President” Bush ever had, yet far more people have questioned Obama’s presidential legitimacy than questioned Bush’s, even though Bush’s presidential legitimacy was much, much more questionable than Obama’s ever has been.

If you are a right-wing white guy from an oily, rich family, you can “win” the White House without having won the most number of votes (by “winning” the pivotal state of which your brother conveniently is governor, with a little help from that state’s top elections official who also sat on that state’s committee to elect you, and with a lot of help from the recount-quashing U.S. Supreme Court). And that kind of shit is perfectly OK.

But if you’re a black guy, you’re considered illegitimate even if you did better in your presidential election than the last white guy did in his two presidential elections. (But nooooo, racism is dead in the United States of Amnesia!)

For Avlon to make the false equivalency between the far left and the far right isn’t only grossly inaccurate, but it’s dangerous to our already endangered, dumbed-down democracy.

If you want to read a real book that’s worth your money, read Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason, now available in paperback.

Pay close attention to her chapter on “junk thought,” a term that describes John Avlon’s book to a “T”.

*Avlon defines “Obama Derangement Syndrome” as “Pathological hatred of President Obama, posing as patriotism,” and “Bush Derangement Syndrome” more or less as a visceral aversion to George W. Bush, of which I myself have been afflicted.

**On page 189, Avlon quotes Sheehan as — gasp! — having called George W. Bush a “bigger terrorist than Osama bin Laden.” Actually, it’s a fucking fact that Bush is reponsible for the unnecessary deaths of tens of thousands of people, including tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians and more than 4,000 of our troops, in his bogus Vietraq War — which is far more people than Osama bin Laden is responsible for having slaughtered on September 11, 2001, which was fewer than 3,000 people. And if we can call bin Laden a terrorist for having masterminded the slaughter of so many innocents, why can’t we call Bush & Co. terrorists for having masterminded the slaughter of so many more innocents? Why the fucking double standard?

AFP photo

The oil slick caused by British Petroleum’s failed offshore drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico (pictured above) is now roughly the size of Puerto Rico, according to The Associated Press. Conventional American “wisdom,” however, has been that offshore drilling is a brilliant fucking idea.

It’s funny, because the wingnuts and I agree on one thing: these do indeed seem to be the end times.

Only the wingnuts and I have a very different view of the causes of the end times.

The wingnuts view President Barack Obama as something like the anti-Christ — if they don’t believe that he actually is the anti-Christ. (In all seriousness, a recent Harris poll shows that about one in four Repugnicans believes that Obama just might be Mr. 666. This is why I call them “wingnuts”; it’s not just that they disagree with me — it’s that they are stark, raving lunatics.)

Obama, in my view, would be instrumental in ushering in the end times not because he’s the anti-Christ. Certainly not because he’s half-black (as the white supremacists among us believe) and not even because he’s “not an American citizen” or because he’s a “socialist” or a “Muslim” or a “terrorist” or some combination of these — as the wingnuts believe — but because he fiddles while the American empire burns.

Now is the time to tackle the nation’s worst problems, not to pander and cater to the “centrists” who claim that the sky isn’t falling even though there are big blue chunks of sky littered at their – our – feet. Now is the time for swift, bold action to prevent total fucking national – and global – meltdown.

Just maintaining the status quo isn’t enough; just keeping our heads above water isn’t enough, because the polar ice caps are melting, you see, and the water is going to keep rising and rising.

It takes a fucking catastrophe for Barack Obama to do the right thing, unfortunately.

He was against offshore drilling (when he was sucking in millions and millions of liberals’ dollars in his campaign for the White House) before he was for it (after he got to the White House) – and now, as crude oil fills the Gulf Coast, he says that maybe offshore drilling is a bad idea after all.

How many global catastrophes will it take for Obama to deliver that “hope” and “change” that he promised?

Obama is a “socialist”?

Oh, I wish!

Socialists, you see, do what’s right for the most number of people and for the planet – not what’s right for the minority plutocrats and corporatocrats, and Obama and the Democratic Party still are very much in bed with the corporatocrats and plutocrats.

The only difference between the Democrats and the Repugnicans is that the Repugnicans love to be whores for the corporatocrats and plutocrats, while the Democrats don’t enjoy putting their legs up in the air for their corporate and plutocratic johns quite as much.

Again, the wingnuts and I seem to agree that these are the end times, but we wholly disagree on the causes.

It’s the wingnuts who would bring us to total ruination, with their love of perpetual war and global pollution and despoilation for corporate profits in the names of Jesus and God and freedom and democracy, and Obama’s role in the end times isn’t that he’s the anti-Christ, but that he’s allowing the wingnuts to make Armageddon their self-fulfilling prophecy; and he’s allowing them to take the rest of us with them.

I’m all for moderation and centrism when we can practice them, but these are desperate times. Our ability to bring about our total destruction has outstripped our willingness to stop our total destruction, it is clear, and therefore now is no time for centrism or moderation, but it is time for drastic measures, and the more we put off doing the right thing, the more drastic will be the measures that we will have to take as a result of our inaction against impending catastrophe.

And, as Ted Rall writes in his excellent current column, the predictable, typical American claims that We just couldn’t have known! are complete and utter bullshit.

We know.

We just don’t care.

Recently I rediscovered the 1970s song “Rock Me on the Water,” written by one of my long-time favorite artists, Jackson Browne. I downloaded and listened to Browne’s and to Linda Ronstadt’s renditions of the song, whose lyrics start off like this:

Oh, people, look around you;
the signs are everywhere.
You’ve left it for somebody other than you
to be the one to care.
You’re lost inside your houses;
there’s no time to find you now.
Your walls are burning and your towers are turning.
I’m going to leave you here and try to get down to the sea somehow…

Those lyrics are timely.

Except that now we cannot escape even to the sea – for it now is coated with oil, in no small part because a sizeable number of us believe in the philosophy of “Drill, baby, drill!”

Reuters and Associated Press photos

Fire boats battle the blazing offshore oil rig Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico off of the Lousiana coast on April 21. No one is sure how much crude oil the ruptured oil well, operated by British Petroleum and located about a mile underwater, continues to leak into the ocean. The resultant oil slick is expected to be the worst in U.S. history, surpassing 1989′s Exxon Valdez disaster.

As thick black crude oil continues to spew freely from a ruptured underwater oil well into the ocean waters of the Gulf Coast — and even threatens the Atlantic Coast — I remember the chanting of the almost-all-white crowd at the 2008 Repugnican National Convention (which, as always, was reminiscent of a KKK rally):

“Drill, baby, drill!”

Yeah, baby, we should fucking drill until the entire fucking ocean is black with oil.

Then maybe the wingnuts will be satisfied.

Maybe.

The wingnuts are fucking wrong about everything – the environment, the economy, energy policy, civil rights, immigration, foreign policy. You name it, they’re wrong about it.

And if we don’t disempower them, but allow their insanity to continue, they will destroy everything.

And we’ll deserve what we will get from our failure to act.

Film reviews

Wanting to get away from it all, I decided to see a couple of mindless movies — “Kick-Ass” and “Death at a Funeral” – this past week. Here’s how it turned out:

‘Kick-Ass’: ‘Batman’ meets ‘Kill Bill’

Chloe Grace Moretz portrays Hit Girl in “Kick-Ass.” Here she is about to hit the film’s big villain.

“Kick-Ass” is violent, the critics warned.

No problem. I’ve seen the “Kill Bill” duo several times.

“Kick-Ass” has a little of this, a little of that — “Batman,” “Watchmen,” “Spider-Man,” “Kill Bill,” etc.

And that’s OK. “Kick-Ass” works.

In “Kick-Ass,” the adorable Aaron Johnson (my Internet research shows that he was born in 1990, so I suppose that I’m not a pedophile after all…) plays a comic-book fanboy who decides to try the super-hero thing out for himself. He invents Kick-Ass, a very amateur, green (literally and figuratively), ninja-like “super-hero.”

He soon is joined by the father-and-daughter team of Big Daddy and Hit Girl, played by Nicolas Cage and Chloe Grace Moretz.

Most lethal of everyone in “Kick-Ass” is Hit Girl, which isn’t very believable but which is entertaining nonetheless. The violence that the purple-wigged Hit Girl visits upon her victims is so over the top that you can’t take it seriously. She’s like a little Beatrix Kiddo of “Kill Bill.”

The scene in which Hit Girl’s father teaches her how to endure bullets alone makes “Kick-Ass” worth watching, but the subplot in which Kick-Ass (who, like Spider-Man was, still is in high school) gets the girl he wants only because she thinks he’s gay (and that he thus is “safe”) also works.

Hit Girl and Big Daddy are way out of Kick-Ass’ league — after all, Big Daddy has had the resources and he and Hit Girl have had the time to polish their act, whereas Kick-Ass has had neither – but “Kick-Ass” still more or less works, even with the mismatched super-heroes (unlike “Watchmen,” which, with its grossly mismatched super-heroes, is a mess).

The “super-hero” of Red Mist, played by Christopher Mintz-Plasse, isn’t really a super-hero at all, but is a gangly, awkward rich boy playing super-hero. However, “Kick-Ass” ends on a note that indicates that there will be a sequel in which Red Mist plays a larger role — and perhaps actually becomes more of the super-hero that he wants to be.

“Kick-Ass” is pretty good for mostly mindless entertainment. Roger Ebert hated it — he gave it only one star, acknowledging the good performances by Johnson, Moretz and Cage but lambasting the movie’s use of such a lethal 11-year-old girl (who at one point in the film takes a pummeling herself by an adult male) – and while I usually agree with Ebert, I have to disagree with him on this one.

“Will I seem hopelessly square if I find ‘Kick-Ass’ morally reprehensible and will I appear to have missed the point?” Ebert asks in his review. The answer is that yes, Ebert is square, at least on this one, and that the creators of “Kick-Ass” fairly apparently don’t believe that the over-the-top character of Hit Girl should be taken any more seriously than should the over-the-top character of Beatrix Kiddo in “Kill Bill.”

Yes, “Kick-Ass” is violent. That’s why it’s rated R. And that’s why it is titled “Kick-Ass.” You are warned.

I can agree with Ebert on one of his criticisms of “Kick-Ass”; Ebert notes that apparently in the world of “Kick-Ass,” “you don’t need to be great at hand-to-hand combat if you can just shoot people dead.”

True, there is too much shooting by Big Daddy and Hit Girl in “Kick-Ass,” and shooting is rather unimaginative and just too easy, which is why the vast majority of super-heroes don’t go around shooting people, but at the most use blades, if they use any actual weapons at all. But given Big Daddy’s background as a former cop, it at least doesn’t violate the logic of the storyline, and it doesn’t ruin film.

If you liked “Kill Bill,” you’ll probably like “Kick-Ass.”

My grade: B+

‘Death at a Funeral’ is dead on arrival

Martin Lawrence, Tracy Morgan, Chris Rock and a gagged dwarf (Peter Dinklage) – so it must be funny, right? Wrong…

I had high hopes for “Death at a Funeral.” Roger Ebert liked it, giving it three and a half stars out of four. Good comedies are as rare as are good horror films, it seems to me, so when a comedy gets Ebert’s thumbs up to the degree that “Death at a Funeral” has, there’s a good chance that I’ll catch it.

I didn’t see the original “Death at a Funeral,” which came out only three years ago and was directed by Frank Oz, so I can’t compare it to this year’s “Death at a Funeral,” which was directed by the normally good Neil LaBute (whose “In the Company of Men,” “Nurse Betty” and “The Shape of Things” I liked) but is stillborn due to its (um, literally) shitty script.

The best director and the best actors can’t do much with material that isn’t that funny in the first place.

Not only are the “comic” set-ups in “Death at a Funeral” not that funny, but they’re used relentlessly repeatedly throughout the film.

The idea that the dead family patriarch had a down-low same-sex sexual affair with a blackmailing dwarf is beaten into the ground, even though Peter Dinklage, who plays the down-low dwarf, has been good in other films.

James Marsden, whom I know mostly as the character of Cyclops from the “X-Men” movies, probably should stick with drama. I certainly don’t mind seeing him mostly nude, as we do in “Death in a Funeral” (although I also hate him for having no apparent body fat whatsoever), but the shtick over his inadvertently having taken a hullucinogen instead of Valium grows tiresome quickly — yet it persists throughout the movie.

Loretta Devine as the matriarch and widow does the best that she can with the script that she was handed, but her character’s constantly hounding the character of her daughter-in-law about wanting to be a grandmother is trite and isn’t any funnier the 10th time than it is the first or second or third or…

Danny Glover is utterly wasted in “Death at a Funeral” as the wheelchair-bound codger Uncle Russell, who only hurls profanities and hits people with his cane. Har har!

Zoe Saldana (who played the blue-skinned, cat-nosed heroine of “Avatar”), as the wife of Chris Rock’s character, also is among the cavalcade of tragically wasted talent in “Death at a Funeral.”

The likeable and talented Rock also does the best that he can with the script that he was handed, as do Martin Lawrence and Tracy Morgan, but I had to ask myself several times throughout the movie why these stars agreed to appear in the movie, assuming that all of them had read the script.

A corpse falling out of its casket and Uncle Russell shitting all over another character’s hand while on the commode, and this shit-upon character having shit (diarrhea, to be exact) prominently visible on his shirt for the rest of the film — well, those things just don’t make me ROLF.

If I thought that those kinds of things were funny, I’d watch television, and that’s what “Death at a Funeral” feels like: a 30-minute sitcom episode — a mediocre one, at that — spread out over an hour an a half.

To be fair, I heard plenty of people in the audience laughing. But then again, most people love to watch TV… (I know that I’m a minority on that one.) I always hope that when people laugh at an unfunny movie, they’re just laughing because they paid to laugh, and God damn it, they’re going to laugh! But I have the sinking feeling that their laughter during “Death at a Funeral” was genuine, which seems to me yet another sign of the imminent collapse of the American empire.

I’m not alone in disliking “Death at a Funeral.” Yahoo! Movies has a critics’ roundup of the film in which Ebert is the only one of 10 critics who gives it an “A” (well, an “A-”). Only three of the 10 critics in the roundup give it a “B”, four give it a “C”, and two give it a “D” – with the average of the 10 critics’ ratings being a “C+”.

Ebert, who always has been one of my favorite film critics, if not my favorite film critic, seems to be losing it. He actually writes in his review of “Death at a Funeral”:

Consider the scene when Uncle Russell eats too much nut cake and is seized by diarrhea. And Norman [the character played by Tracy Morgan] wrestles him off his wheelchair and onto the potty, and gets his hand stuck underneath. Reader, I laughed. I’m not saying I’m proud of myself. That’s not the way I was raised. But I laughed.

Um, it wasn’t funny… Shitting, like farting, almost never is funny in a movie.

And while Ebert was aghast at the 11-year-old Hit Girl being pummeled by an adult male (whose pummeling of her is meant to demonstrate how evil he is and whose pummeling of her is in reaction to her own slaughter of several of his men), Ebert apparently found the treatment of the gay dwarf in “Death at a Funeral” to be hilarious (“They’re only human,” he says of the dwarf’s binders who try to conceal his accidental death. Um, but is the dwarf?)

I don’t know about Ebert as of late – Alzheimer’s?

Not only is Ebert out of synch with his cohorts in regards to “Death at a Funeral,” but in Yahoo! Movie’s critics’ roundup for “Kick-Ass,” Ebert is the only one of the 12 critics to give it a “D”. Only two of the 12 give it a “C”, five give it a “B”, and four give it an “A”, for an average of a “B”.

It might be time for Ebert to be put out to pasture.

And let’s make sure that, when he finally goes to that Big Movie Theater in the Sky, his body doesn’t fall out of the casket, or that we find out that he had a dwarf on the down low on the side all along.

Because that shit just isn’t funny.

My grade: D+

Finally, a brilliant move by the Dems

Apparently the Democrats are planning to make the Repugnicans’ refusal to go along with Wall Street reform a centerpiece of their November election strategy.

It’s a brilliant move.

Perhaps spurred on by the attention that Michael Moore brought to the subject in his documentary “Capitalism: A Love Story” (which I reviewed here and which I just watched again on DVD), the Democrats have seized upon the fact that the Repugnicans prefer unfettered financial fraud to any regulations on Wall Street whatsofuckingever.

With so many Americans struggling financially, for them to see, graphically, what the Repugnican Party stands f0r — the interests of the plutocrats, the true elites — around election time should put a significant dent in any gains the Repugnicans otherwise anticipated they’d make.

The Repugnican Party’s insistence on aiding the already filthy rich at the expense of the rest of us should do at the ballot box for the Democrats what the unelected Bush regime’s constant reminder of the “threat” of “terrorism” did for the Repugnicans at the ballot box in 2002 and in 2004.

I’m starting to feel some hope that we’re going to have some change…

—

Chuck Crist poised to pull a Benedict Lieberman

I remember the joke that Jon Stewart made when former Democratic U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman announced that he would run for re-election to the U.S. Senate as an independent candidate (under the newly formed “party” of “Connecticut for Lieberman”) after he had lost the Democratic primary to opponent Ned Lamont: Stewart joked that Lieberman had announced that if he lost the Senate election, then he would start his own Senate. (Unfortunately, Lieberman won the 2006 election as an “independent,” but fortunately, this meant that he didn’t have to start his own Senate…)

That’s pretty much what it has come to, with power-hungry, egomaniacal baby-boomer (I know, redundant…) politicians refusing to take no for an answer and wanting to hold on to their power at all costs.

Repugnican Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, who is featured in the excellent documentary “Outrage” as being a probable closet case, is considering running for the U.S. Senate as an independent because his Repugnican primary opponent, wingnut Marco Rubio, has overtaken him in the polls.

Under Florida law, Crist has until April 30 to decide whether to remain in the Repugnican primary or to run for the U.S. Senate as an independent, a la Lieberman. (Under Connecticut law, Benedict Lieberman still was able to run as an independent after he lost the Democratic primary, but Crist does not have that option. [I suppose that Florida can do some things right where the fairness of elections are concerned...].)

Crist has indicated that he’ll do what’s best for the people of Florida.

Oh, bullshit.

Crist will do what’s best for Crist.

Those who choose to participate in one of the two major parties should accept their fate if their political fortunes fall. Running as an “independent” because one can’t make it in his or her chosen party anymore is one of the refuges of the scoundrel.

—

It’s no different from phone-tapping

It is lamentable that those making the legal decisions regarding the privacy of employees’ electronic communications (e-mails, text-messages, etc.) are mostly baby boomers (or even older people) who barely fucking understand today’s electronic communications.*

I wholeheartedly disagree that an employer’s mere warning that its employees’ communications may be monitored makes it legal for it to monitor its employees’ communications any more than tapping their telephones is legal (except in certain circumstances, such as at call centers).

And if I give you warning that I might punch you in the face, does that make it legal for me to punch you in the face? Since when does a mere warning make a follow-up action legal?

New communications technology does not mean that the privacy laws that already apply to telephones, for example, don’t apply to that new technology.

The U.S. Supreme Court is deciding this issue now, with new Justice Sonia Sotomayor seeming to be leaning on the side of privacy protection and most of the other justices leaning on the side of Big Brother.

Fact is, as Sotomayor seemed to have indicated, most employers who snoop on their employees just get off on snooping.

Tell you what: When all of us can read the employers’ electronic communications, then maybe they can read ours.

Um, yeah.

*The Associated Press indicates that Chief “Justice” John Roberts and “Justice” Antonin Scalia apparently don’t even understand how text-messaging works, yet they are poised to rule on whether or not privacy law applies to text-messaging.

—

Bill Clinton: Can’t we all just get along?

Former President Bill Clinton is quoted by The Associated Press as having said that the United States has an image around the world of having too much political infighting.

God, I’m sick and fucking tired of hearing direct or indirect calls for a national singing of “Kumbaya.”

Much if not most of the opposition to President Barack Obama stems from the fact that he is presiding while black, for fuck’s sake.

I’m supposed to make nice with a bunch of fucking racists and white supremacists? Who hate me and who want to continue to oppress me because I’m gay?

I just don’t fucking think so!

The rest of the world can think what it wants to think.

And Bill Clinton can go kiss all of the wingnut ass that he likes.

I, for one, would rather die than to give the impression that I think that the likes of Sarah Palin-Quayle and Glenn Beck and their fascistic followers are anything less than satanic.

Associated Press photo

Former online auction eBay CEO Megalomaniac Whitman, a billionaire Repugnican, apparently thinks that everything in life goes to the highest bidder. Thus far she has bid $59 million on the governor’s seat of California.

Former California governor and current state Attorney General Jerry Brown yesterday challenged his top two Repugnican opponents for the governorship to participate in three prime-time debates with him before the state’s June 8 primary election.

Of course his No. 1 Repugnican opponent, billionaire former CEO Nutmeg Whitman, has refused the invitation.

Nutmeg can’t hold a candle to Brown; she apparently is relying on the minority of California voters who are registered as Repugnicans and on the state’s ”swing voters,” those who get their primary information about politics from television commercials and whose ballot decisions apparently are made by the Magic 8-Ball.

Brown can’t say it, but I can: Megalomaniac is relying on the dumbfuck vote to put her into the governor’s seat. That’s why she is spending tens of millions of her own dollars on ubiquitous TV commercials.

“Let’s hear the different ideas,” Brown said of his proposed pre-primary debates. “The key here: Is this a democracy?”

No, it’s not, not really; it’s a fucking auction, in which the highest bidder wins.

At least that’s what Team Nutmeg believes. Whether or not the majority of California’s voters also believe that in November will be interesting.

Megalomaniac Whitman apparently will avoid all substantive challenges during her campaign, just as her fellow Repugnican Arnold Schwarzenegger did during 2003’s too-short gubernatorial recall election campaign. She’ll try to run out the clock, just like Schwarzenegger did, and rely on image rather than on anything like substance.

The image that Nutmeg is trying to project? That she’s a successful leader because she became a billionaire. And that you, too, if you emulate her, can become a billionaire!

Except that you can’t.

And except that it’s the plutocrats like Nutmeg who have put the state’s and the nation’s economy into the fucking toilet. To turn to the plutocrats to fix the problems that the plutocrats created is like returning to the same incompetent surgeon who botched your surgery to fix it: Stupid.

But Schwarzenegger and George W. Bush are living proof of the state’s and the nation’s voters’ ability to be so incredibly fucking stupid as to vote against their own best interests.

The No. 2 Repugnican in the race for this year’s Repugnican gubernatorial nomination, Steve Poizner, California’s insurance commissioner, has accepted Brown’s invitation for pre-primary debates, but Poizner will win his party’s June 8 primary only if Megalomaniac dies or pulls out or if something really unflattering about her comes to light between now and the primary (one hopes).

Team Poizner apparently did the math and figured that accepting Brown’s challenge could only help Poizner in his David-vs.-Goliath battle against Megalomaniac, while Goliath herself apparently figured that she safely could blow off Brown’s challenge because hey, she’s a billionaire, and she can just buy the dumbfuck vote.

Brown should go ahead and have the pre-primary debates with Poizner.

Nutmeg’s conspicuous absence from the debates will prove to the state’s voters that she’s not ready for prime time — literally as well as figuratively.

Brown, however, is a pit bull (without the lipstick), and that’s what the nation’s most populous state needs.

The Sacramento Bee has quoted Brown as having said of Nutmeg that “millions and millions of dollars in an orgy of spending for TV commercials is not a substitute for an honest and open discussion,” and that he said of her refusal to debate him early:

Private corporations sometimes hide behind slick advertising campaigns, but it’s wrong for a serious political candidate to do the same.

I urge Meg Whitman to reconsider. Surely, if she believes she is good enough to be governor of California she must also consider herself competent enough to appear with her opponents.

A candidate for public office should not act like a used car salesperson who relies on misleading TV ads. Public service is a higher calling, one that demands integrity, openness and honesty.

I encourage Meg Whitman to join with Steve Poizner and me in three joint appearances. If she honestly believes what she says in her radio and TV ads, she should welcome the opportunity to answer questions, explain herself and then ask me whatever she’d like.

Our state is in serious trouble, and we need political candidates and public officials who are willing to face the voters, explain their ideas and give honest answers.

For a while there I was worried that Jerry Brown wasn’t being aggressive enough. For now, at least, I’m no longer worried.

Now, I’m only worried about whether or not a majority of the state’s voters will be smart enough to realize that putting a billionaire in the governor’s chair would be good only for the state’s billionaires.