Clearly, I've landed on Bizarro World. (It am square.) Bush called up and apologized to an Iraq war widow ... of the Wiccan faith? She had been excluded from a presidential meeting of war widows earlier in the week, and it certainly seemed to be an intentional slight, mostly because she had fought to have the Wiccan symbol allowed on government-issued grave markers.
But Dubya called her up and did the right thing. Who can figure? With Bush, he probably heard "Wiccan" and thought she made baskets.
End of Post
Friday, August 31, 2007
President Bush does something ... right?!?
Ranking the all-time best baseball flicks
In the spirit of the end of August and the beginning of the September pennant races, let's take a look at some of the greatest baseball films of all time with the Staten Island Advance's Steve Hart from SILive's Blog.
By Stephen Hart
Forgive me if I seem a little wired ... I’m still a bit jacked up after yesterday’s viewing of "The Bourne Ultimatum," which was two hours of non-stop action. Sure, you have to chuckle at times as Matt Damon’s identity-confused CIA assassin dusts himself off and walks away from some of the car wrecks he gets into, but it was as enjoyable a time as I’ve spent at the cineplex this year.
Speaking of movies, it got me thinking about my favorite sports films. There have been plenty of great ones, pictures I’d rank with any type of genre. And then there’s the flip side, like "Caddyshack II." Since it’s still baseball season, I’ll limit my list to my top 10 favorite baseball movies. In ascending order:
10. Little Big League (1994): Appearances by real-life Major Leaguers including Ken Griffey Jr. and Randy Johnson gives the film — about a baseball-loving teen who inherits the Minnesota Twins and becomes their GM/manager — some credibility. Actors and real-life players (Kevin Elster, Leon Durhman and former Reds reliever Brad "The Animal" Leslie) portray the Twins.
9. For Love of the Game (1999): The first of three appearances on this list for Kevin Costner, who has made a career playing sports characters (including the fun golf flick "Tin Cup" and yes, even "The Bodyguard," as his character was a former college football receiver before entering the Secret Service). Anyway, back to "For Love of the Game," where he plays a Jack Morris-type veteran hurler for the Detroit Tigers. His quest to pitch a perfect game in Yankee Stadium in what could be his final game is intercut with scenes from his rocky romance with a single mom played by Kelly Preston. Vin Scully’s play-by-play lends even more baseball cache to the movie.
8. The Bad News Bears (1976): Walter Matthau is hilarious as the oft-inebriated coach of a bunch of sad-sack Little Leaguers. You have to love that they’re sponsored by "Chico’s Bail Bonds."
7. Bang the Drum Slowly (1973): Michael Moriarity plays the star pitcher and Robert DeNiro (in one of his early breakthrough roles) is the dim-witted backup backstop who is Moriarity’s personal catcher ... who also happens to be dying. A great tale of camaraderie, cliques and relationships. Pop quiz: The name of their baseball team? Answer: The New York Mammoths, whose pinstriped uniforms look like the Yankees, though the game scenes were filmed at Shea Stadium.
6. The Pride of the Yankees (1942): A true guy’s tear-jerker, thanks to Gary Cooper’s terrific portrayal of the Bronx Bombers’ immortal Lou Gehrig. Sure, old-time Hollywood took some liberties with things, and Cooper didn’t come off as the best baseball-playing actor. But the presence of Gehrig’s actual teammates, including Babe Ruth and Bill Dickey, are huge. The film, which is as much a love story as a baseball tale, also features Irving Berlin’s classic song, "Always."
5. Eight Men Out (1988): The story of the 1919 "Black Sox" scandal is presented very fairly, and features a stellar ensemble cast led by John Cusack as Buck Weaver, David Strathhairn as Eddie Cicotte and D.B. Sweeney as Shoeless Joe Jackson. Look for writer/director John Sayles as legendary scribe Ring Lardner. Fine cinematography and costumes (including those old wool uniforms) really help the movie reflect the era.
4. Major League (1989): The list of great characters is endless, from Ricky "Wild Thing" Vaughn to Willie Mays Hayes to Pedro Cerrano ... who, somehow, would become president of the United States (sorry, just a "24" flashback). It was funny how this fictional rise of the Cleveland Indians was mirrored at the time of its release by the actual Tribe’s brief uprising (led by Joe Carter, Cory Snyder and Brook Jacoby). Those Indians didn’t beat the Yankees for the division title, but the celluloid ones did. The movie is also known for broadcaster Bob Uecker’s over-the-top calls, like "Just a bit outside." A fun film with plenty of memorable lines.
3. Field of Dreams (1989): Maybe the ultimate guy’s tear-jerker, a story about a past relationship between a father and a son (Costner) gone wrong, and baseball’s role in patching things up. I know, I know ... Shoeless Joe isn’t a righty batter, but that’s about the only thing this film gets wrong.
2. Bull Durham (1988): Costner strikes again in this funny/raunchy tribute to the trials and tribulations of minor-league life. It’s a film that appeals to both guys and gals, as veteran catcher Crash Davis goes about mentoring phenom hurler "Nuke" LaLoosh (Tim Robbins) while battling for the affections of a baseball lifer and hottie, played by Susan Sarandon. Costner won in the movie, Robbins won in real life.
1. The Natural (1984): From Barry Levinson’s direction to Randy Newman’s music to the overall look of this 1940-ish set story of how Roy Hobbs steps out of a shady past and lifts the cellar-dwelling New York Knights to the N.L. pennant with the help of his magical bat, "Wonder Boy." I get choked up every time a bed-ridden Hobbs (Robert Redford) stops in the middle of speaking to his childhood sweetheart (Glenn Close) and simply states, "God, I love baseball." A truly awesome supporting cast that includes Robert Duvall, Darren McGavin, Kim Basinger and Wilford Brimley as the grumpy manager — who should’ve been fired for letting Hobbs ride the bench for a month before giving him a shot!
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Bush to hit Congress up for another $50 billion
By Scott Cavanagh
With the price tag for the Iraq War fast approaching $500 billion, the Bush Administration plans to request an additional $50 billion from Congress next month, following Gen. David Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker's state of the war reports.
Despite continued assertions that the President would make no decisions regarding future war strategy before hearing from both men, the White House appears to have reached its own conclusions concerning the success of this year's "troop surge" -- it's working and we're staying.
This should come as no surprise to anyone following the most recent developments surrounding the appearance of W's new favorite General in front of his least favorite legislative body. Between last week's announcement that most of Petraeus' findings would be documented in a report pieced together by White House spin doctors, to the Pentagon's calls for many of the meetings to be closed to the public, it is clear that Mr. Bush and his advisers plan to paint a fairly rosy scenario for the American people concerning progress in Iraq.
That conclusion flies in the face of the soon-to-be-released report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which found the Iraq War effort failing in 15 of the 18 congressionally mandated "benchmark" goals for military and political progress.
END OF POST
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
President finally comes to conclusion on Vietnam -- we didn't stay long enough
By Scott Cavanagh
The year 1968 was one of the most tumultuous in the history of this country.
That year, which featured the rise of flower power and the protest movement, unrest in the streets and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, ended with the election of Richard Nixon and his promise to end the Vietnam War through “peace with honor”.
In his Inaugural Address of January, 20, 1969, our 37th president told a nation torn apart by the war that, “The greatest honor history can bestow is the title of peacemaker … after a period of confrontation, we are entering an era of negotiations.”
That era of negotiation would last nearly five more years, during which time over 21,000 American troops and nearly one million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians would lose their lives.
Through the later publication of “The Pentagon Papers” and countless memoirs of former cold warriors, we eventually came to realize that our government believed Vietnam to be a no-win proposition as far back as 1966. We would go on to lose 54,000 soldiers before Nixon finally ended the conflict in 1973, prompting returning veterans like John Kerry to ask members of Congress, “Who wants to be the last man to die for a mistake?”
In speeches planned for today and later this week, President George W. Bush plans to unveil his conclusions about what went wrong in South East Asia those many decades ago. Yes, the man who did his time not showing up for his Texas National Guard duty and whose hawkish vice-president utilized not one, but five different draft deferments to avoid fighting there, has finally learned the true lessons of Vietnam. His conclusion? We did not stay long enough.
In one of the most galling twists in his administration’s never-ending attempts to justify his disastrous misadventure in Iraq, the president is now deliberately invoking the specter of Vietnam -- not to point out the mistakes we might have made in sending hundreds of thousands of young Americans half-way around the world to fight and die in a country that posed us no threat whatsoever -- but rather to explain why 11 years in the jungle was just not enough time to get the job done.
Bush’s speech features some of the most twisted logic this side of this administration’s normal mantra of “keep us in power because we are protecting you from terrorists, but stay terrified because the terrorists are going to hit us any day now.”
“One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens, whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like 'boat people,' 're-education camps' and 'killing fields,' " the president will say. This of course avoids the fact that over two million Vietnamese perished during that war -- a war in which we dropped more explosive tonnage on that tiny country than all the bombs dropped on Europe in World War II combined. Of course, we no longer count the civilian death toll in Iraq. In Bush World, civilian casualties only seem to matter when caused by someone other than us.
The president goes on to draw the ridiculous conclusion that our withdrawal from Vietnam was somehow the unhealed chink in America’s credibility that 35 years later would embolden al Qaeda terrorists to attack us. Forget the fact that the Soviet war in Afghanistan served as bin Laden’s template for guerilla success -- success achieved with training, arms and cash provided by the U.S. government, or the fact that bin Laden’s most frequently cited instance of so-called American impotency was Ronald Reagan’s (correct) decision to withdraw troops from Lebanon after the 1983 truck bomb disaster that killed 220 Marines.
Bush and Cheney did not fight in the Vietnam War, nor did Richard Pearle, or Paul Wolfowitz, or Bill Kristol or Rush Limbaugh or any of the vast majority of right-wing cheerleaders of that particular age group that today have no problems sending a new generation of Americans to fight and die in Iraq.
In the song “We Didn’t Start the Fire”, Billy Joel penned the words “we didn’t light it, but we tried to fight it” in celebration of his generation’s participation in world events they had no control over -- including Vietnam. Iraq is Bush’s war. He started it despite the fact that not a single one of the 911 hijackers came from there and Saddam Hussein posed no credible threat to this country whatsoever, and despite all of his inane comparisons to Vietnam, Bush lacks one card in his deck that Nixon played until the end -- he doesn’t have Kennedy and Johnson to blame.
The wars in Vietnam and Iraq are similar in one sense -- we should never have fought either of them.
Monday, August 20, 2007
Bush fiddles while the United States burns
By Michael Hart
The historical search to assess whether Dubya is the all-time worst U.S president is fine, but I think we need to go much farther back to find an appropriate comparison, I’m thinking of the Emperor Nero fiddling away while Rome burned (and that is giving Dubya too much credit because Nero was much more accomplished as a ruler - read about his achievements).
Bush’s disasters just keep coming and we will be paying the price for his misadventures (if it was not so sad, maybe they could make a comedy show out of his tenure, “Lil’ Bush” on Comedy Central was on the right track) for years to come.
Bush/Cheney/Rove, etc. have presided over the worst attack ever on U.S soil, arguably the worst domestic disaster ever with Hurricane Katrina, possibly the most misguided war ever with the Iraq debacle and now - despite claims that our economy is in good shape - the stock markets are in bad shape and major underpinnings of our economy, including loan companies (such as American Mortgage, Countrywide Financial and KKR Financial) are failing.
Meanwhile, Dubya is on another of his extended summer vacations while he contemplates running out the clock on his presidency and returning to Texas.
The fighting to retain control of Afghanistan is as fierce as ever and troops and resources are needed there but the emphasis is still on “the surge” in Iraq. Despite administration claims of progress in many areas, truck bombs killed over 500 people in NW Iraq last week and that was in a primarily Kurdish area that we have had little trouble with before (remote villages of the ancient Yazidi sect near the Syrian border).
Read the whole story HERE.
White House interference calls validity of Petraeus/Crocker reports into question
By Scott Cavanagh
As the White House and Congress prepare for next month’s public assessment of the success of the Iraq “troop surge”, a review of military interviews and documents by the Associated Press has painted a picture of a U.S. Army on the brink of exhaustion.
With all 38 available combat units already deployed and no fresh replacements available, the Army is considering everything from extending the grueling 15-month tours of duty of those already deployed (already increased from the traditional max of 12 months) to balking on the commitment to providing soldiers a year at home before redeployment.
These developments make it all the more critical that Gen. David Petraeus’ highly touted progress report is presented as transparently and honestly as possible. Unfortunately, the chances of that happening decreased dramatically on Friday – when it was announced that the report would not be written by the General himself, but rather cobbled together piecemeal by members of the White House staff.
This decision flies in the face of President Bush’s repeated assertions that he would wait for Petraeus to return from Iraq and present the naked truth of his findings to Congress and the American people.
We’ve seen this game played out before. In July, the administration spun the results of the mid-term war assessment to show satisfactory performance in a number of questionable “benchmark” areas, despite the fact that the prior three months had produced the highest number of U.S. and Iraqi casualties in nearly two years.
To make matters worse, the White House has been trying to convince Congress that the report should not be made public in open hearings with Petraeus, but instead should be delivered in closed congressional meetings by the secretaries of defense and state. That's right, after months of touting the General's independence and candor, the President now believes that Petraeus' honesty and character can best be conveyed through the mouth of Condoleezza Rice.
On Friday, the President seemed to veer off course momentarily, announcing that Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker's testimony would be made available in "both" open and closed sessions.END OF POST
Read More......
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Rembering the Scooter...
Bark Back Sports
When New York Yankees legend Phil Rizzuto past away Monday, the sports world not only lost a Hall of Fame player and seven-time world champion, it lost one of the sports' most unique characters. An honest broker who called things like he saw them on the field, "The Scooter" was the voice of Summer to millions of Yankee fans, and even kids like me that grew up rooting for the Mets.
One of our favorite writers here at Bark Back, Steve Hart from the Staten Island Advance, had a great piece on Rizzuto yesterday on their blog:
Even Met Fans Appreciated Scooter
By Stephen Hart
You didn't have to be a Yankees fan to feel a little twinge of sorrow Tuesday with the news of the death of Phil Rizzuto. Regardless of whom you rooted for, you couldn't help but laugh when Rizzuto was at his peak calling the Bronx Bombers in the 1970s and '80s. It wasn't just that he was an unabashed "homer" -- although his overt cheering for the Pinstripes was never taken seriously by fans of the opposition, unlike many of today's home broadcasters who lack Rizzuto's charm.
Read the rest here.
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Rove's Departure...
Posted by Carter McCoy:
Rove's reputation as a "genius" is a creation of the media. The only thing this guy ever did right was to latch -on to a "Chauncey Gardner" tool, with unlimited fundraising abilities due to his family name. Yes, he won a few elections for the GOP, but the damage he and the neo-cons have done to the reputation and legacy of the proud Republican Party will take years to repair, particularly among young people that have lived with this war and Bush's corporate government for six of their formative years.
Joe Conason has a great piece on Rove's Twisted Legacy posted in The New York Observer.
END POST
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Departure of Bush's brain raises many questions
By Scott Cavanagh
Whitehouse adviser Karl Rove's sudden decision to step down at month's end raises some pretty interesting questions about the future of the Bush presidency and the strategy behind the timing of his departure.
On the surface, it appears nothing more than the beginnings of the dismantling of an administration with no legislative agenda for the rest of it's tenure, but with possible congressional subpoenas on the horizon, and the Dems chomping at the bit for '08, don't expect Rove to sit on the sidelines for very long. The question is, despite all of his political skill, will any GOP candidate dare associate himself with Rove?
-Check out the video of Keith Olbermann's piece on Rove's departure with the author of Bush's Brain.
-While his public persona might be less than stellar, there are a lot of things Rove can still do to help the GOP.
END OF POST
Wednesday, August 8, 2007
Dems Give Bush-Gonzo Even More Power
By Scott Cavanagh
When the Democrats took control of both houses of Congress last November, the general consensus of most political observers was that the days of warrantless wiretaps and unchecked surveillance would soon be coming to an end.
Believers in that pipe dream got a cold blast of reality Saturday night, when Congress did the unthinkable: giving President Bush and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales more unchecked power to spy on Americans without warrants.
With little more than a whimper in defiance, the Dems allowed a president with an approval rating in the 20's and an Attorney General on the verge of a perjury investigation to continue their unprecedented assault on our civil liberties virtually unchecked.
Here's what the WASHINGTON POST's editorial board thought of the legislation: Warrantless Surrender
END OF POST
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
Readers fire back at Murdoch
Posted by Michael Hart:
The Bancroft family that owns the Wall Street Journal finally relented to Murdoch's bid (doubling their shares from $30 to $60) and sold him the paper. Ugh!!!!!!! Now he will transform it into another vehicle for him to attack Dems; also he is starting a FOX Business Channel in a couple of weeks - another blow. Some editors, writers have now quit the WSJ. the Journal always swung to the right but also did good investigative pieces and was non-biased on business news. Now, as Rachel Maddow said on Olberman's show last night, with Murdoch there, look for news to be slanted or not covered. This is the real fear as she accurately put it: with FOX NEWS and now FOX Business and the Journal, Murdoch will be given more access to lie. Which is what his team argued in a court case the other day - and won! That journalists, under the First Amendment, are - in the name of free speech - allowed to print inaccurate facts, etc. Stuning and sad. Watch her report on the MSNBC site if it is there.
END OF POST
Saturday, August 4, 2007
Murdoch's acquisition of Dow Jones another blow to power balance in American journalism
By Scott Cavanagh
Right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch's acquisition of Dow Jones Inc., and by virtue The Wall Street Journal, serves as yet another blow to the already distorted balance of power in the American media.
In the more than a quarter century since the Reagan Administration's dissolution of The Fairness Doctrine, the concentration of available media outlets controlled by conservative power brokers has reached epidemic proportions and threatens our ability to maintain one of the Founding Fathers' necessities for a true and free republic -- an educated and well-informed populace.
END OF POST
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