All rumors that our would-be Emperor is drinking again aside, one truth has become crystal-clear: he isn't just ignorant or an ideologue, though he's both of those. Basically, he's stupid. He can't--or won't--learn any more. After Katrina he made some small noises that sounded like he might finally have noticed that not everybody in America is rich and white, but it turned out he was just clearing his throat. A few days later it was back to BAU. Now with the Miers nomination history and Scooter being indicted, his administration in disarray and his war imploding, with over 2000 dead in Iraq for no reason anybody can explain coherently and a massive deficit hanging over our heads, with the economy hanging by a thread while oil companies reap windfall profits of stratospheric proportions and his Publican Congress passes an 'energy bill' loaded with more pork for his buddies in the oil & gas bidness, Emperor Georgius sees no reason to change anything he's doing.

Washington -- Nine troubled months after taking the oath of office and in the wake of the indictment of a senior administration official, President Bush appears to see little need for a wholesale housecleaning and will try to give his second term a fresh start by naming a new nominee to the Supreme Court and intensifying his drive to cut government spending, White House officials and other Republicans said.

The administration's goal, they said, was to reassure its divided and demoralized conservative base, chalk up a few victories on Capitol Hill and set the stage for a more robust comeback next year after months of missteps.

Even after the indictment on Friday of Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Bush has no immediate plans to bring in fresh faces or fire any top aides, especially if his senior adviser and deputy chief of staff, Karl Rove, escapes being charged in the CIA leak case. The special counsel in the case, Patrick Fitzgerald, said the investigation was continuing; Libby is expected to be arraigned here this week.

Administration officials, outside advisers to the White House and Republican strategists said that although personnel changes were likely to occur eventually, regardless of Rove's fate, they would probably be gradual and draw primarily from a pool of people already in Bush's orbit.

"I don't think you want to send a signal that this is a crisis bigger than it is," said Vin Weber, a lobbyist and former Republican congressman who is a White House ally.

As far as the Empoeror is concerned, if Grand Vizier Karl escapes an orange jumpsuit and The Toad still rules K Street, everything's just dandy. What can you say about stupidity that breath-taking?

Well, one of the things you can say is that it explains a lot about the mess the country is in. Our president is a dolt. He lives--and has lived all his life--in a bubble, he sees what he wants to see, hears only what he wants to hear, ignores reality as if it were just a wart on his butt, and is manipulated by his corporate owners so easily they don't even have to work at it any more. One wonders if they bother to tell him what they're doing with his govt before they do it. He is incapable of learning any lesson contrary to his limited expectations, no matter how obvious it is. You can get a mule's attention, it is said, by hitting him over the head with a baseball bat. It would appear that the bat hasn't been made that can get Georgies' attention.

And yet people are wondering who he's going to pick instead of Miers. What we should be asking is 'Who does the National Association of Manufacturers want? Who will Billy Kristol and the rest of the RWNM accept?' The Emperor isn't capable of making a choice that isn't mind-numbingly bad from every conceivable direction and even his 'friends' know it. So he won't be allowed to make it.

With a leader as stupid as Bush, one prays his advisors are smart. Some of them are but unfortunately they have their own agendas and those agendas are are dumb--narrow and selfish. The neocon agenda got us into the Iraq mess, the corporate agenda has emptied the Treasury and threatens economic havoc in the not too distant future (though it has been very good for CEO salaries), and the fundamentalist agenda has split the country with its intolerance and single-minded theocratic zeal.

It isn't a pretty picture but there's one that's worse.

It's not at all clear that we have learned anything from our mistake. No one who voted for him is running around saying, 'Jeez, we never should have elected an idiot just because he looked good on tv.' No one is kicking themselves for abandoning their duty as citizens because buying the illusion was easier than doing the work a citizen is supposed to do. No one is promising to do better next time or looking into their hearts to try to understand why they goofed so they won't do it again. In fact, no one I know who voted for him is yet questioning that vote.

The assumption is that something went terribly wrong and he's making a lot of mistakes all of a sudden. As of this moment, there's no sense that he's been making those mistakes since the day he took office and hiding them, that the Scooter indictment and the out-of-control deficit and and the Miers nomination and the Katrina debacle are all direct results of the stupidity of the leader we elected and the venality of the party he belongs to. It wasn't just George W Bush we elected, remember. We also elected Tom DeLay and John Cornyn and Tom Coburn and Bill Frist and Jim DeMint and Man-on-Dog Santorum and Saxby Chambliss and Jim Sensenbrenner and a whole host of other brain-dead, intolerant, creepy right-wing rednecks who support torture, cultivate hatred. and pander to racists and wackos.

In other words, we have exactly the govt we voted for, and it's no use pretending otherwise. Even though the Emperor stole both 'elections', there's no proof that all those other idiots stole theirs. No, we voted for them, and the signs are that we will do so again.

If we do and they turn the United States into the fascist corporate dictatorship they envision for it, we will have no one to blame but ourselves.

From cul heath at ratboy's anvil:

01) Being gay is not natural. Real Americans always reject unnatural things like eyeglasses, polyester, and air conditioning.

02) Gay marriage will encourage people to be gay, in the same way that hanging around tall people will make you tall.

03) Legalizing gay marriage will open the door to all kinds of crazy behavior. People may even wish to marry their pets because a dog has legal standing and can sign a marriage contract.

04) Straight marriage has been around a long time and hasn't changed at all; women are still property, blacks still can't marry whites, and divorce is still illegal.

05) Straight marriage will be less meaningful if gay marriage were allowed; the sanctity of Britany Spears' 55-hour just-for-fun marriage would be destroyed.

06) Straight marriages are valid because they produce children. Gay couples, infertile couples, and old people shouldn't be allowed to marry because our orphanages aren't full yet, and the world needs more children.

07) Obviously gay parents will raise gay children, since straight parents only raise straight children.

08) Gay marriage is not supported by religion. In a theocracy like ours, the values of one religion are imposed on the entire country. That's why we have only one religion in America.

09) Children can never succeed without a male and a female role model at home. That's why we as a society expressly forbid single parents to raise children.

10) Gay marriage will change the foundation of society; we could never adapt to new social norms. Just like we haven't adapted to cars, the service-sector economy, or longer life spans.

Man, you can't argue with logic like that.

Jerry Kilgore, the Publican candidate for Governor of Virginia who's been running one of the dirtier campaigns of recent memory (right up there with the smearing of Max Cleland, it's been positively Rovian), just bailed out of meeting the Emperor in the middle of a tight race so he could meet with the NAACP, by all accounts a group he doesn't have a snowball's chance in Hell of being endorsed by.

Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate Jerry W. Kilgore has decided not to attend President Bush's appearance in Norfolk on Friday, saying it is not a campaign-related event and that he has other plans 11 days before the election.

Bush has scheduled a speech on terrorism in the Hampton Roads region, home to one of the largest concentrations of military personnel on the East Coast. But Kilgore, who is in a dead-heat battle with Democratic Lt. Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, said that Bush's address is a "policy" speech and that he has an important appearance at a luncheon for the state NAACP at the same time.

"I'm not ignoring the president," Kilgore said.

No, he's not. He's snubbing him. As an extremist, far right candidate, he doesn't want to piss off the extremist right wing that is pissed off about the Miers nomination or the moderates who are pissed off (finally) about the looming deficit or everybody else who is catching onto the con game that got us into a war we can't win but can only, like, NOT lose, and is increasingly pissed off about the waste of lives. So he's bailing out of a campaign appearance for fear of being tainted by the Bush Brush.

This may be a sign that the Personality Cult Rove and the AEI/HF crowd have gone to such trouble to build is breaking down. It could be that the newest Bush Scapegoat for all the failed neocon, ultracon policies Bush has pushed the last five years, especially the unnecessary and exceedingly dangerous war in the Middle East, could be...Bush!

Interesting, no?

I seem to know an awful lot of people--including me--who've been feeling...odd lately, as if they're waiting for the other shoe to drop, or as if there's some monstrous calamity just around the corner that they can feel but can't see. Maria at By Beauty Damned put it like this:

No one likes to admit when they're going through an emotionally difficult time in their life. There's always a sense of guilt in revealing these types of struggles, because there's always a million (or a hundred million) people out there who have it so much worse than my "mid-20s crisis." Crisis is such a strong word that it feels trite to use it in the context of feelings that are difficult to nail down and a nondescript sense of anxiety and fear. Does that even qualify as a crisis, when placed in perspective with the rest of the world's crises? But then, maybe the world in general is one of the greatest contributors to these feelings in me. I can't even find words to express the sadness that I feel. It's not my own life that leaves me with this feeling as much as the vast world outside, that I can't touch and can't see and can't begin to understand other than to be one more spectator to the media's coverage and interpretations of worldly events. Hurricanes, earthquakes, massacres, political injustice, human brutality. It all sits like a dark mass of discomfort that I don't know how to face or deal with.

I don't think most people have figured it out yet but George Bush's war in Iraq and his threatened wars in Iran and Syria, his love for torture as a weapon, his complete disregard for the poor and the sick, his determination to sell off the govt to corporations, his insane financial policies, and his patent disinterest in the core values that have guided the United States from its very beginning, have created a cloud of forboding and even fear in the hearts of sensitive folk similar to the one that fell over the world before WW II. Churchill called the book of his memoirs that dealt with that time The Gathering Storm because that's what it felt like. At the moment--subliminally, for the most part--a large part of the world is holding its breath, waiting to see if Bush's ignorant, arrogant gamble blows up in all our faces. Most of us are perfectly clear that it can't succeed; what we're not so sure of is whether or not it will end civilization as we know it--and don't kid yourself: it could.

Nobody can--or should--face a reality like that with never-ending equanimity. If you aren't scared, you must be stupid--or blind. It is inevitable that the intelligent and the sensitive feel it first and have the fewest defenses against it. I've been feeling it, too, and my reaction is very similar to hers. I am almost 60, so this is not a 'mid twenties crisis'. It's a perfectly understandable reaction to an unacceptable reality. This is what living in Germany in the mid-30's must have been like as the wackos took control and the nation of Goethe was slowly destroyed by vandals in brown shirts, its humanity replaced by bestiality, its forward-thinking optimism replaced by narrow chunks of its darkest past, and its enlightenment crushed under the weight of bitterness, hatred, and selfishness.

We are standing on the brink of the abyss waiting to find out if America will survive. We've never been closer to destruction than we are now. The forces of darkness are pushing us closer and closer to the edge and yet there seems to be little stomach for resistance in the majority of the population. How could a situation like that NOT give you the willy-womps?

I wish I were exaggerating. Unfortunately, I'm not. For the first time in our history, our position really is that bad. Most people don't know how bad, but some can feel it coming, advancing like an army of ogres on the other side of the hill; they may not yet be in sight but you can feel the ground trembling.

Of course, I could be wrong. Maybe we're all experiencing the effects of something personal in our own lives, or the result of that jalapeno, goose-liver, and tabasco sauce pizza we had last night. But if I'm right, it's going to be quite a while before many of us feel any better.

It happened a long time ago, so long ago that I was just a kid in the second grade. So long ago that people now entering middle-age weren't even born yet. So long ago it probably feels like it was another century.

Well, it was.

We live in a time when wearing a t-shirt critical of the Emperor can get you arrested. Rosa Parks lived in a time when sitting in the wrong seat on the bus could get you killed...if you were black. You were lucky if all you got was arrested.

Well, Rosa Parks sat down, and she was arrested, and that's how the civil rights movement began for real.

Her act of civil disobedience, what seems a simple gesture of defiance so many years later, was in fact a dangerous, even reckless move in 1950s Alabama. In refusing to move, she risked legal sanction and perhaps even physical harm, but she also set into motion something far beyond the control of the city authorities. Parks clarified for public consumption far beyond Montgomery the cruelty and humiliation inherent in the laws and customs of segregation.

---

Over the years, myth tended to obscure the truth about Parks. One legend had it that she was a cleaning woman with bad feet who was too tired to drag herself to the rear of the bus. The truth, as she later explained, was that she was tired of being humiliated, of having to adapt to the byzantine rules, some codified as law and others passed on as tradition, that reinforced the position of blacks as something less than full human beings.

"She was fed up," said Elaine Steele, a longtime friend and executive director of the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development. "She was in her 40s. She was not a child. There comes a point where you say, 'No, I'm a full citizen, too. This is not the way I should be treated.' "

Parks was active in the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP. She and her husband, Raymond, a barber, had taken part in voter registration drives.

At the urging of an employer, Virginia Durr, Parks had attended an interracial leadership conference at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tenn., in the summer of 1955. There, she later said, she "gained strength to persevere in my work for freedom, not just for blacks but for all oppressed people."

But as she rushed home from her job as a seamstress at a department store Dec. 1, 1955, the last thing on her mind was becoming "the mother of the civil rights movement," as many would later describe her. She had to send out notices of the NAACP's coming election of officers. And she had to prepare for the leadership workshop where she would be the host for teenagers that weekend.

"So it was not a time for me to be planning to get arrested," she said in 1988.

On Montgomery buses, the first four rows were reserved for whites. The rear was for blacks, who made up more than 75 percent of the bus system's riders. Blacks could sit in the middle rows until those seats were needed by whites. Then the blacks had to move to seats in the rear, stand, or, if there was no room, leave the bus. Even getting on the bus presented hurdles: If whites were already sitting in the front, blacks could board to pay the fare but then had to disembark and re-enter through the rear door.

For years blacks had complained, and Parks was no exception. "My resisting being mistreated on the bus did not begin with that particular arrest," she said. "I did a lot of walking in Montgomery."

Her arrest was the answer to the prayers of the Women's Political Council, which was set up in 1946 in response to the mistreatment of black bus riders, and for E.D. Nixon, a leading advocate of equality for blacks in Montgomery.

Blacks had been arrested, and even killed, for disobeying bus drivers. They had begun to build a case around a 15-year-old girl's arrest in March 1955 for refusing to give up her seat, and Parks had been among those raising money for the girl's defense. But when they learned that the teenager was pregnant, they decided that she was an unsuitable symbol for their cause.

While Nixon met with lawyers and preachers to plan an assault on the Jim Crow laws, the women's council distributed 35,000 copies of a handbill that urged blacks to boycott the buses on Monday, Dec. 5, the day of Parks' trial.

On Sunday, Dec. 4, the announcement was made from many black pulpits, and a front-page article in the Montgomery Advertiser further spread the word. Some blacks rode in carpools that Monday. Most black commuters -- 40,000 people -- walked, some more than 20 miles, to and from their jobs.

At a church rally that night, blacks agreed to continue the boycott.

The boycott lasted 381 days, and in that period many blacks were harassed and arrested on flimsy excuses. Churches and houses, including those of King and Nixon, were dynamited.

Finally, on Nov. 13, 1956, in the case of Browder vs. Gayle, the Supreme Court outlawed segregation on the city's buses. The court order arrived in Montgomery on Dec. 20; the boycott ended the next day. But the violence escalated: Snipers fired into buses as well as King's home; bombs were tossed into churches and into the homes of ministers, including the Rev. Ralph David Abernathy; some blacks were beaten by roving bands of whites.

Maybe it was a long time ago. That's no excuse for it to be forgotten, or for the courage of a fed-up woman to be ignored. A simple act was then, as it is now, a revolutionary act, and we honor it.

Most politicians who take money from corporations for junkets do so under the table. They don't want us to know that they're crooked. But the Governator is throwing all pretense aside: he's actively and publicly soliciting money from his many corporate donors for a trip to China with the excuse that it 'will save the taxpayers money'.

SACRAMENTO — To pay for a coming trade mission to China, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's political allies are raising tens of thousands of dollars from businesses whose names are largely being concealed.

In addition, at least two of the three public relations firms playing a role in the visit have political ties to Schwarzenegger. One has a West Coast affiliate co-owned by the governor's chief fundraiser.

Those arranging the weeklong trip, which will follow the special election next month, are crafting an itinerary that potentially offers the traveling business delegation exclusive access to Chinese officials and a private reception with Schwarzenegger. The list of companies joining him is not yet complete.

Schwarzenegger and his supporters want donations to two tax-exempt groups that have championed his interests, and to a government fund meant to boost overseas trade. The money will help cover expenses for the governor's tour of Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong.

The administration says the fundraising effort saves taxpayers money, but experts in public ethics question the governor's practice and the access it affords private interests.

All due respect to Peter Nicholas, the LAT reporter, we didn't used to need 'ethics experts' to tell us this sort of thing was WRONG. Before the Emperor and the party that made him, we understood corporations act on quid pro quos and pay for such things only when they expect to get something out of them that's worth more than they put in. Before the Emperor and his Publican corporate puppets took over and made such transactions as common as houseflies around a garbage can, we used to think such things weren't just unethical but illegal.

But that was in the old benighted days pre-Bush when there were rules about corruption in govt that people actually paid attention to. Now, in BushAmerica, anything goes. The GOP doesn't even feel it has to hide its corruption. In fact, it's bragging about it: if corporations pay for govt activities, the taxpayer doesn't have to and that's all that counts. That the corporations who donate are going to expect--demand--preferential treatment in return is unimportant. That that preferential treatment will cost taxpayers far more than the cost of the trip doesn't matter either. After all, that's what taxpayers are for--slipping corporations money on the side.

The Governator is worth watching because he's on the cutting edge of Publican planning, almost always one of the first--if not the first--to aggressively attack the next victims of the Publican agenda: unions, public employees, environmental groups, the educational system, and now the law itself. And he does it very simply: he ignores it.

If he gets away with it, we can expect the radicals running the GOP these days to jump on the bandwagon pretty quickly. His success will prove that all you have to do to make corruption acceptable is be open about it and claim it's on behalf of 'the taxpayer'. An Orwellian turnaround that simple is bound to prove absolutely irresistable, especially at a time when the biggest honchos in the Publican firmament are in deep legal trouble for doing more or less exactly the same thing.

This is a great loss, though not unexpected.

Shirley Horn, a smoky-voiced jazz balladeer and pianist who was resigned to being a musical fixture in her native Washington before emerging as a national presence in her fifties and winning a Grammy Award, died Thursday of complications from diabetes at Gladys Spellman Specialty Hospital and Nursing Center in Cheverly. She was 71.

With her slow, meditative ballads, Horn was one of the leading jazz singers of her generation and unquestionably was Washington's preeminent jazz musician. After reviving her dormant career in the 1980s, she made a series of triumphant concert appearances and strong-selling recordings that earned nine Grammy nominations. Her performances at the White House in 1994 and at New York's Lincoln Center in 1998 were broadcast nationally on PBS.

An uncompromising perfectionist, she worked hard to develop a personal, pensive sound. Her artistry had long depended on the interaction between voice and piano, but in 2001, Horn's right foot was amputated because of her diabetes. As a result, it was difficult for her to use the elegant pedal work that marked her piano style.

Later, she would sometimes remove the shoe from her prosthetic foot and manipulate the piano's sustain pedal with the force of her hip. In her final public appearance, in December at the Kennedy Center, she climbed from her wheelchair to the piano and performed what had become her signature song, "Here's to Life."

Shirley was an inspiration to all us Boomers. Though she was originally noticed by Miles in 1960, it was not until another 20 years had gone by that her career really began. Shirley may have started late but she shot to the top in record time (no pun intended). Her delivery was as original, as emotional, and as effective as Billie's or Bessie's or Betty's. I first heard her in the late 80's, and she knocked me out.

While her singing seemed as simple and as straightforward as Ella's, under the surface roiled an emotional complexity and even contradiction that lifted her interpretations into a territory so rich that you could hear the same song three times and interpret it differently each time. You Won't Forget Me, one of my favorites, manages to combine the longing and lingering love from a broken affair with the anger and disappointment of a jilted lover, and all in a slow, torchy tempo that made it sound--superficially--like a standard love song.

That was Shirley all over--the emotions we feel may be unambiguous (pain, anger, joy); their sources are anything but. She was the most emotionally mature jazz singer since Billie, and she will be greatly missed.

Though the NYT's Sam Dillon tries to put the best face possible on it, what comes through in his report today is that Bush's NCLB is an unqualified disaster. Math comprehension has improved only slightly and reading comprehension--wait for it--has actually gotten worse!

WASHINGTON, Oct. 19 - The first nationwide test to permit an appraisal of President Bush's signature education law rendered mixed results on Wednesday, with even some supporters of the law expressing disappointment.

Math scores were up slightly but eighth-grade reading showed a decline, and there was only modest progress toward closing the achievement gap between white and minority students, which is one of the Bush administration's primary goals. In many categories, the results indicated, the gap remains as wide as it was in the early 1990's.

This will come as no surprise to teachers and school administrators. Teachers have said from the very begining that eliminating anything in the curriculuim that doesn't apply to the test--'teaching to the test'--was a terrible idea and more likely to hurt learning than help it. School administrators have complained that dumping a massive unfunded mandate on the nation's educational system at a time when an irresponsible tax-cutting fever was running amok was a recipe for failure. After five years of this Republican educational voodoo, we now have the answer: they were both right.


On the left, scores before NCLB; on the right, scores after 4 years of NCLB

Margaret Spellings, Bush's hack Secretary of Education, followed the usual administration procedure by immediately declaring that black-is-white and the numbers proved the NCLB is a 'success'. The Emperor said he was 'pleased' and Spellings blamed the poor showing on immigrants.

Mr. Bush, meeting with Education Secretary Margaret Spellings at the White House, said he was pleased with the test. "It shows there's an achievement gap in America that is closing," Mr. Bush said.

In an interview, Ms. Spellings called attention to the improvement in math by fourth graders. She said the less robust increases and outright declines in some reading scores were understandable in part, because the nations schools are assimilating huge numbers of immigrants.

"We have more non-native speakers, there are lots of so-called at-risk, hard-to-educate students, and in spite of that, steady progress is being made," she said. "We're on the right track with No Child Left Behind."

The comparatively small number of immigrant kids in the school system is hardly large enough to skew the results of a national test, but it makes a convenient excuse that the administration's brain-dead right-wing supporters will accept without thinking, which is what they do best.

Unfortunately, Mr Dillon doesn't bother to break down any of the numbers by region, cherry-picks the results he deigns to report, and asks for comment only from people or groups who have backed the NCLB from the beginning, not its real critics. But that's standard for the NYT propaganda machine: take dismal results like these and pretty them up to make another Bush cock-up seem at least marginally successful.

The truth is that the NCLB is a trick, a snare and delusion designed to turn schools into outright corporate training factories where only information necessary to getting a job is considered relevant. The old idea of a well-rounded education is being thrown out the window in favor of rote learning and courses restricted to the corporate values embodied in the test. Arts? Citizenship? Forget it. The first has nothing to do with employment and the second could conceivably produce citizens who aren't sheep. Neither is acceptable. Kids who know how to think critically don't grow up to be Republicans.

The bad news here is that these catastrophic results don't mean the NCLB is in trouble. It isn't. Conservatives love tests. The NCLB is going to be with us for a long time and, like everything else the radcons in the administration are doing, will continue to inflict a lot of damage it will take years, maybe decades, to overcome once the voters come back to their senses.

If they ever do....

Byzantium's Shores has turned John Scalzi's list of the 50 sci-fi films you must see before you die into a meme (via archy) wherein one prints the list and then bolds the ones they've seen. Nobody asked me to do this (my understanding is that memes like this are by-invitation-only) but I'm going to do it anyway because I was struck by how many I've seen--worse, how many I own.

Now, I am NOT a geek, self-confessed or otherwise, as John is. It took me 40 years to learn how to do my own oil changes, a decade to get over my antipathy toward computers (which I still have problems with), and I have yet to master VCR programming. When I was a kid I read Sherlock Holmes, not Jules Verne; the Hardy Boys, not Tom Swift; Moby Dick and The Deerslayer, not War of the Worlds and Looking Backward. I didn't discover sci-fi lit until I was in high school when I read 1984 and Brave New World. I have never been a devotee, though over the years I've read most of the masters from Verne and Wells to Philp Dick and Rafferty (one of my faves), yet I have seen almost every one of the films on this list and own many of them. To whit (seen--bolded; own--*asterisked*):


*The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension!
Akira
Alien
Aliens
Alphaville
*Back to the Future
*Blade Runner
*Brazil
*Bride of Frankenstein
*Brother from Another Planet
*A Clockwork Orange
*Close Encounters of the Third Kind
*Contact
The Damned
Destination Moon
*The Day The Earth Stood Still
Delicatessen
*Escape From New York
*ET: The Extraterrestrial
Flash Gordon: Space Soldiers (serial)
The Fly (1985 version)
*Forbidden Planet
Ghost in the Shell
Gojira/Godzilla
The Incredibles
*Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956 version)
Jurassic Park
*Mad Max 2/The Road Warrior
*The Matrix
*Metropolis
*On the Beach
*Planet of the Apes (1968 version)
*Robocop
*Sleeper
Solaris (1972 version)
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
*Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope
Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back
*The Stepford Wives
Superman
*Terminator 2: Judgement Day
The Thing from Another World
Things to Come
Tron
*12 Monkeys
28 Days Later
*20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
*2001: A Space Odyssey
La Voyage Dans la Lune
*War of the Worlds (1953 version) (**I also own a transcription of Orson Welles' infamous 1938 radio version)

Some of this is explained by the fact that I'm a film buff and there are classics on this list that transcend their genre (Metropolis and A Clockwork Orange, for example) but for many of them there is no explanation whatsoever. Why, for instance, did I see, let alone buy, Terminator 2, a piece of boring, SFX-heavy eye-candy that isn't as good as the first Terminator and barely surpasses Vixens on Venus in quality? I can't say. I don't watch it. I've never even cracked the celophane it's wrapped in--and I've had it for almost 10 years.

It's a mystery. I went to see Khan, I don't remember why, thought it was silly and never went to another Star Trek movie even though I liked the tv series. I went to see the last two Matrix films and was heartily sorry I had wasted the money. I'm not a fan, I don't haunt second-hand bins hoping to find a clean copy of The Body Snatchers, I don't attend conventions, and I stopped waiting breathlessly for the latest Star Wars movie after the second one (which should NOT be on the list, imo). Yet still I own all these sci-fi flicks. Much to my shame, I even own Independence Day.

I can't explain this patent character flaw. Perhaps it's a glitch in my programming. Perhaps I surrendered to being surrounded by it all my life. Perhaps it's a weakness, like gambling or scarfing chocolate cream pies at a single sitting. I don't know. I suppose it must say something to me or I wouldn't have bothered, but for the life of me I can't imagine what. I am not by nature a fantasist, a geek, or any form of scientist. I've never read Popular Science and technology baffles me. I was reading The Brothers Karamazov when the other kids were reading Childhood's End. Nothing about sci-fi suits anything in my tastes or my emotional make-up, yet there they are: three dozen out of 50, most of which I own.

Go figure. Personally, I don't get it.

I was going to write a long post yesterday about Fair Judy's self-serving report in the NYT of her testimony in front of the grand jury but decided against it. It's such transparently self-congratulatory tripe pretending to be factual and objective confession, and there are so many holes in it, that I found I actually had very little to say about it except 'Bullshit'. Jeff Alworth at Low on the Hog, who has more patience for such things than I do and anyway is better at it, does a nice job of tearing it apart (here and here) if you're interested.

Let's deal first with Miller, whose story is fairly straightforward, if elusive. Miller uses language bordering on comic it's so neutral: "During my testimony on Sept. 30 and Oct. 12, the special counsel, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, asked me whether Mr. Libby had shared classified information with me during our several encounters before Mr. Novak's article." She's in just-the-facts-ma'am mode, posing as the courageous journalist who may be telling all, but not gossiping. Yet there's something decidedly evasive in the prose.

That about sums it up. Nothing in Miller's 'explanation' can be trusted, not because she's necessarily lying (although she does) so much as because she's leaving out or glossing over key questions, and what's left presents a false picture of high-minded journalistic ethics. As Jeff points out, you have to read between the lines to get at anything like overall accuracy.

Take for instance this little gem that Jeff doesn't mention, being concerned with weightier matters: she met Libby 4 years ago when he asked for her autograph. How she must have glowed with pride! The new Veep's right-hand man! Golly. I bet she blushed.

Want an asset to be loyal? Flatter them from a position higher than their own. There's nothing like the great bending a knee to the near-great for cementing obedience. And it must have worked because the very first note she took during their very first meeting relevant to the Plame Affair was a dutiful rehash of the administration line Libby had brought her there to feed her.

On the afternoon of June 23, 2003, I arrived at the Old Executive Office Building to interview Mr. Libby, who was known to be an avid consumer of prewar intelligence assessments, which were already coming under fierce criticism. The first entry in my reporter's notebook from this interview neatly captured the question foremost in my mind.

"Was the intell slanted?" I wrote, referring to the intelligence assessments of Iraq and underlining the word "slanted."

I recall that Mr. Libby was displeased with what he described as "selective leaking" by the C.I.A. He told me that the agency was engaged in a "hedging strategy" to protect itself in case no weapons were found in Iraq. "If we find it, fine, if not, we hedged," is how he described the strategy, my notes show

So Scooter, 'an avid consumer of prewar intelligence assessments', was supposedly unhappy with CIA 'intell' (she's the only one I've ever seen who spells intel with 2 ll's) that said Iraq was full of WMD's and might be 'slanted' that way for cover. Our Judy conscientiously writes this down as if it were important. Well, it was important: it was her mission.

This meeting has few of the earmarks of a reporter/source meeting. It does, however, have all the earmarks of a meeting wherein a covert control gives one of his joes her new assignment. Miller doesn't have anywhere in either her notes or her memory anything relating to questions she might have (should have) asked Libby about the administration's position. Serious questions had been raised for months about the accuracy of Scooter's boss' insistence than he knew where those WMD's were, yet she has just come back from the unsuccessful search for them and apparently doesn't question Libby for a second when he blames it all on the CIA. He tells her the intel was slanted and she writes it down. That's not a reporter probing, that's an agent/operative getting her marching orders.

We know now (and there were reports at the time) that Scooter's boss had spent much of the run-up to the invasion running back and forth to Langley trying to intimidate CIA analysts who were insisting there was no evidence of WMD's in Hussein's Iraq into reversing themselves and going along with the admin position that there were WMD's in abundance. Miller could NOT have been ignorant of that attempt to stack the deck, or at least of the reports, yet she never displayed the slightest doubt that Scooter's spin was legitimate. (For an almost-comprehensive list of lies, misdirections, and evasions in Judy's piece, see The Left Coaster.) Conclusion: Miller wasn't then and isn't now a 'reporter'. She went there to get the admin TP's from one of her controllers so she'd know what they wanted her to write.

What came across to me from reading between those lengthy lines was that at best Miller was a wide-eyed dupe breathless with awe about her inclusion in top govt circles, a rube so clueless that all they had to do was call her to the WH and she'd do anything they told her to do. The is the woman, remember, who once defined a journalist's job as 'reporting the administration's positions' as if a reporter's job was to be a govt stooge. A belief like that would make her a perfect and perfectly blind pawn, a self-consciously unconscious puppet they could use at will.

But I don't think so. I think her own report shows she was an op. I think she knew what she was doing and, like Armstrong Williams, did it quite consciously, quite deliberately, on orders. Jeff makes it pretty clear that her story doesn't hold water and her credibility is thin-to-anorexic. Seems to me that an innocent dupe would at this stage be trying to explain how she got caught in the web, not making up more lies to cover her ass, but that's just me. I'm such a pollyanna.