JUST CLICK HERE      THANKS      Joseph Horton  1/21/10 !

I was ready. I don’t mind a space epic being long. In fact it moved very well - nice pacing actuall…y. But the final 1/2 hour simply lost something for me. B+ — 4 stars, but so close to A or 5 if it just held the final frames without going to extremes of disbelief - even for Pandora.

Joseph Horton
http://josephhorton.com
http://namada.com

It feels almost liberating to say the words “Tiger Woods” and “outrage” in the same sentence, without referencing any of the sleaze of the past month. This particular outrage involves the Associated Press and their naming of Woods as “athlete of the decade.”

Even worse is their top four - which includes, in order, cyclist Lance Armstrong, tennis player Roger Federer and swimmer Michael Phelps. This list is so bizarre, so male and so near-Caucasian, it seems to have been conjured by Glenn Beck.

But let’s leave aside for a moment the country club pursuits and plethora of testicles defining the list. The fact that there is no soccer or basketball player immediately brands it a sham. And the thought that a golfer - any golfer - would be No. 1 is absurd. Golf is not a sport. It’s a game. It’s darts. It’s billiards. It’s the World Series of Poker with walking. I believe that anything that you can gain weight while performing, or anything you can do at a world-class level while smoking, just isn’t a true athletic competition. Otherwise the AP should’ve included people like the Great Takeru Kobayashi, who held the competitive hot dog eating record for six straight years. In 2001, he doubled the old mark, scarfing down 50 weenies in 12 minutes. Disgusting? Sure. But no more vile than the amount of acreage and water needed to maintain a golf course.
Even more obnoxious is the presence of Lance Armstrong and the absence of Barry Bonds in the top five. Armstrong won every Tour De France from 2000-2005. But it’s been rumored that the man has done more illegal pharmaceuticals than Keith Richards. Bonds didn’t receive a single vote despite becoming the all-time home run champion, and the first player to have 500 home runs and 500 steals. If an anabolic odor cost Bonds, it should cost Armstrong as well.

So who really deserves to be in the top five? Considering all mental and physical athletic variables, my No. 1 is soccer star Ronaldihno. By combining speed and an unholy stamina, the Brazilian has become the sport’s consensus player of the decade. He has achieved this while representing a country where soccer ranks somewhere above oxygen.

My No. 2 two choice is Serena Williams. Serena has won 10 majors this decade, which is impressive enough. But she’s also risen to the top as an African-American in the lily-white world of tennis, while also playing out from under the shadow of her sister Venus. And she rose to the top with a powerful and decidedly un-ladylike style that was as audacious as her infamous catsuit.

My third pick is Kobe Bryant. In addition to four championships, he may go down as the greatest scorer in the history of the sport not named Wilt Chamberlain. Consider Kobe’s decade. In addition to four titles, he scored 81 points in a game, had four straight 50-point games, and nailed 62 points in three quarters against Dallas, outscoring their entire team.

Fourth on the list for me is Roger Federer. Federer’s numbers overwhelm the senses. Fifteen Grand Slam titles, 22 consecutive Grand Slam semifinal appearances, and 237 consecutive weeks ranked No. 1. Yes, the AP got that one right.

For No. 5, I go with Ray Lewis, middle linebacker of the Baltimore Ravens - one of the great players in league history, as well as the epitome of controlled adrenaline. He belongs on this list.

That’s my top five. And to the AP: Thank you for offending us all with a Tiger Woods story that has nothing to do with his zipper.

[Dave Zirin is the author of “A People’s History of Sports in the United States” (The New Press) Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.]

The most telling response to Dick Cheney’s assertion on NBC’s Meet the Press that we’d be greeted in Iraq as liberators came from the man himself, in 2006 on CBS’s Face the Nation. When Bob Schieffer asked the vice president if his statement had increased skepticism of the war, Cheney responded, “No, I think it has less to do with the statements we’ve made, which I think were basically accurate and reflect reality, than it does the fact that there is a constant sort of perception, if you will, that’s created because what is newsworthy is the car bomb in Baghdad, it’s not all the work that went on that day in 15 other provinces in terms of making progress in rebuilding Iraq.” To recap: first Cheney says he was right (he wasn’t) and then he blames media distortion for the fact that people won’t believe him. It’s hard to fake being greeted as a liberator; to this day, though, Cheney continues to pretend as if it had been so.

Michael Moore: An Open Letter to President Obama on Afghanistan
By Michael Moore, MichaelMoore.com

Posted on December 1, 2009, Printed on December 1, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/144254/

Dear President Obama,

Do you really want to be the new “war president”? If you go to West Point tomorrow night (Tuesday, 8pm) and announce that you are increasing, rather than withdrawing, the troops in Afghanistan, you are the new war president. Pure and simple. And with that you will do the worst possible thing you could do — destroy the hopes and dreams so many millions have placed in you. With just one speech tomorrow night you will turn a multitude of young people who were the backbone of your campaign into disillusioned cynics. You will teach them what they’ve always heard is true — that all politicians are alike. I simply can’t believe you’re about to do what they say you are going to do. Please say it isn’t so.

It is not your job to do what the generals tell you to do. We are a civilian-run government. WE tell the Joint Chiefs what to do, not the other way around. That’s the way General Washington insisted it must be. That’s what President Truman told General MacArthur when MacArthur wanted to invade China. “You’re fired!,” said Truman, and that was that. And you should have fired Gen. McChrystal when he went to the press to preempt you, telling the press what YOU had to do. Let me be blunt: We love our kids in the armed services, but we f*#&in’ hate these generals, from Westmoreland in Vietnam to, yes, even Colin Powell for lying to the UN with his made-up drawings of WMD (he has since sought redemption).

So now you feel backed into a corner. 30 years ago this past Thursday (Thanksgiving) the Soviet generals had a cool idea — “Let’s invade Afghanistan!” Well, that turned out to be the final nail in the USSR coffin.

There’s a reason they don’t call Afghanistan the “Garden State” (though they probably should, seeing how the corrupt President Karzai, whom we back, has his brother in the heroin trade raising poppies). Afghanistan’s nickname is the “Graveyard of Empires.” If you don’t believe it, give the British a call. I’d have you call Genghis Khan but I lost his number. I do have Gorbachev’s number though. It’s + 41 22 789 1662. I’m sure he could give you an earful about the historic blunder you’re about to commit.

With our economic collapse still in full swing and our precious young men and women being sacrificed on the altar of arrogance and greed, the breakdown of this great civilization we call America will head, full throttle, into oblivion if you become the “war president.” Empires never think the end is near, until the end is here. Empires think that more evil will force the heathens to toe the line — and yet it never works. The heathens usually tear them to shreds.

Choose carefully, President Obama. You of all people know that it doesn’t have to be this way. You still have a few hours to listen to your heart, and your own clear thinking. You know that nothing good can come from sending more troops halfway around the world to a place neither you nor they understand, to achieve an objective that neither you nor they understand, in a country that does not want us there. You can feel it in your bones.

I know you know that there are LESS than a hundred al-Qaeda left in Afghanistan! A hundred thousand troops trying to crush a hundred guys living in caves? Are you serious? Have you drunk Bush’s Kool-Aid? I refuse to believe it.

Your potential decision to expand the war (while saying that you’re doing it so you can “end the war”) will do more to set your legacy in stone than any of the great things you’ve said and done in your first year. One more throwing a bone from you to the Republicans and the coalition of the hopeful and the hopeless may be gone — and this nation will be back in the hands of the haters quicker than you can shout “tea bag!”

Choose carefully, Mr. President. Your corporate backers are going to abandon you as soon as it is clear you are a one-term president and that the nation will be safely back in the hands of the usual idiots who do their bidding. That could be Wednesday morning.

We the people still love you. We the people still have a sliver of hope. But we the people can’t take it anymore. We can’t take your caving in, over and over, when we elected you by a big, wide margin of millions to get in there and get the job done. What part of “landslide victory” don’t you understand?

Don’t be deceived into thinking that sending a few more troops into Afghanistan will make a difference, or earn you the respect of the haters. They will not stop until this country is torn asunder and every last dollar is extracted from the poor and soon-to-be poor. You could send a million troops over there and the crazy Right still wouldn’t be happy. You would still be the victim of their incessant venom on hate radio and television because no matter what you do, you can’t change the one thing about yourself that sends them over the edge.

The haters were not the ones who elected you, and they can’t be won over by abandoning the rest of us.
President Obama, it’s time to come home. Ask your neighbors in Chicago and the parents of the young men and women doing the fighting and dying if they want more billions and more troops sent to Afghanistan. Do you think they will say, “No, we don’t need health care, we don’t need jobs, we don’t need homes. You go on ahead, Mr. President, and send our wealth and our sons and daughters overseas, ’cause we don’t need them, either.”

What would Martin Luther King, Jr. do? What would your grandmother do? Not send more poor people to kill other poor people who pose no threat to them, that’s what they’d do. Not spend billions and trillions to wage war while American children are sleeping on the streets and standing in bread lines.

All of us that voted and prayed for you and cried the night of your victory have endured an Orwellian hell of eight years of crimes committed in our name: torture, rendition, suspension of the bill of rights, invading nations who had not attacked us, blowing up neighborhoods that Saddam “might” be in (but never was), slaughtering wedding parties in Afghanistan. We watched as hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians were slaughtered and tens of thousands of our brave young men and women were killed, maimed, or endured mental anguish — the full terror of which we scarcely know.

When we elected you we didn’t expect miracles. We didn’t even expect much change. But we expected some. We thought you would stop the madness. Stop the killing. Stop the insane idea that men with guns can reorganize a nation that doesn’t even function as a nation and never, ever has.

Stop, stop, stop! For the sake of the lives of young Americans and Afghan civilians, stop. For the sake of your presidency, hope, and the future of our nation, stop. For God’s sake, stop.

Tonight we still have hope.

Tomorrow, we shall see. The ball is in your court. You DON’T have to do this. You can be a profile in courage. You can be your mother’s son.

We’re counting on you.

Michael Moore is an Academy Award-winning filmmaker and author. He directed and produced Roger & Me, Bowling for Columbine, Fahrenheit 9/11, and Sicko. He has also written seven books, most recently, Mike’s Election Guide 2008
© 2009 MichaelMoore.com All rights reserved.

View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/144254/

No, Obama is not Bush. More and more, he seems like a continuation of Bush by other means.

The report implies that it was the lack of American soldiers under the Bush administration that was responsible for, in the report’s words, “laying the foundation for today’s protracted Afghan insurgency and inflaming the internal strife now endangering Pakistan.” That was Bush’s policy, and since we all know Bush was evil, the opposite policy must be good. The aggressiveness that we associate with Bush is actually, in Obama’s hands, the righteous corrective to Bush’s aggressiveness.

Once again, Obama is using Bush’s counter-example as a lever to sway the public. Yet to an even greater extent than his predecessor, Obama is proving himself an expert manipulator of public opinion, capitalizing on the McChrystal and then the Eikenberry leaks to give the impression of anguished, many-sided deliberations over whether to increase troop levels in Afghanistan. The good cop/bad cop routine with Joe Biden, who dutifully argued against more troops, was breathtakingly cynical.

Like Bush, Obama wants to wage an escalating war without worrying about how to pay for it—though no doubt, on Tuesday, we will be subjected to the same ludicrous vows not to increase the deficit. And it is almost uncanny to hear, this time from the liberal Obama, the same bloodcurdling rhetoric about nation-building and creating democratic institutions, and so on, that led us into implacably undemocratic Iraq. Warlord-run Afghanistan is nothing like Iraq. It is more like Somalia. Remember Somalia?

You want to rub your eyes in disbelief. Six years since the distastrous invasion of Iraq, six years of media deconstructing, unmasking, eviscerating, ironizing the Bush regime’s justification of that foolish war, six years of the Daily Show—six years later, and the weasel-ish, evasive, dishonest patter remains the same.

The media still use the word “surge,” which brings to mind heartening images of a positive rise in electric power, when the truth is that what the administration calls a “surge” is just another name for “reinforcements,” which brings to mind less heartening images of a losing battle. Indeed, just as Obama’s people speak of providing “exit ramps” for our deepening entanglement in Afghanistan—as if it were all a rational question of simple engineering; of road-building—the media have totally bought into talking about the war as if it were all a rational question of simple electrical contracting, what with an “insurgency” here, and a “surge” there, and a “counterinsurgency” everywhere. But war is notoriously foggy. It is impervious to sudden illumination, let alone to the impressive timetables of armchair strategists who think they can control the future with a “plan.”

Obama will lead us deeper into yet another pointless conflict, in yet another unremittingly hostile and unassimilable place, but we will be asked to give him time. For the political writer Jacob Weisberg, opining in Slate, one of Obama’s great accomplishments this past year has actually been that “Next week, after a much-disparaged period of review, he will announce a new strategy in Afghanistan.” Winston Churchill, move over. But then, Weisberg praises Obama for the following presidential triumphs: “preventing a depression, remaking America’s global image, and winning universal health insurance.” Never mind that unemployment is the highest it’s been in decades, and going even higher, and that any Democratic president with a Democratic majority in Congress would have passed a similar stimulus package to Obama’s, and probably a larger one. As for remaking America’s global image—who cares? Anyway, images are made with actions, not words.

And winning universal health insurance? Under the current legislation, health care will be available to a “small slice” more of Americans, as The New York Times recently put it. The rest of us will have to suffer through soaring premiums, as the insurance companies exploit the restructuring. The lucky—and desperate—few who enroll in a weakened public plan will have to endure cost-saving cuts in preventive care, as Obama’s “best practices” panels prescribe fewer screenings and the like.

But Obama is not Bush, we are told, and the people who hate him are dreadful, and the opposition is fierce, and, well, he’s the only game in town, etc, etc. And he’s on Our Side.

No, Obama is not Bush. More and more, he seems like a continuation of Bush by other means. If anything, he is even more convinced than his divinely guided predecessor that he holds the truth in his hands. Unlike Bush, however, Obama seems to withdraw into a passive funk when he cannot convince his fellow Americans that his truth is also theirs.

At the same time, he seems unsure of his bona fides as commander in chief. He seems to have chosen West Point as the backdrop for his speech in order to demonstrate his devotion to the military side of patriotism. That might speak to the military, but it won’t be of much reassurance to us civilians. Bush was also insecure about his warrior’s image.

Fasten your seatbelts, everybody. Starting tomorrow night, President George W. Obama and his generals will be building an exit ramp to nowhere. The war will eat up economic relief and recovery, health-care reform, and just about every other initiative Obama was elected to begin and bring to fruition—just as Johnson’s attempt to build the Great Society and wage war in Vietnam at the same time eventually crushed the economy and gave us nearly 25 years of almost continuous Republican rule.

Lee Siegel has written about culture and politics and is the author of three books

BS Top - Miller Health Care Trigger

Health care’s public option “trigger” is great news for liberals and conservatives alike, writes former Clinton aide Matt Miller, because it gives both groups exactly what they want.

In my younger and more vulnerable years, as an aide in the last Democratic White House, President Clinton said something that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. It came during a health-care meeting in the Cabinet Room in 1994, during which Clinton shared a conversation he’d had with Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia. Then, as now, the question of how to “bend the curve” on health costs was the seminal issue in health reform, and Nunn had spent several days caucusing with assorted provider groups in his state in search of an answer. Nunn told Clinton the consensus among industry leaders was clear. “Just give us the number,” they’d told Nunn, meaning the slower growth rate of health costs the country could afford to spend. “We’ll figure out how to divvy it up so it works.”

Just give us the number. Unlike many advanced nations, which run health expenses through the government’s books, the United States doesn’t have a global budget for health care. This, and the fact that Americans pay directly for only a small portion of their own health spending (and thus have little incentive to be smart shoppers), helps explain why costs are out of control. Everyone agrees that U.S. health care is radically inefficient. We spend 17 percent of our GDP while other wealthy nations spend 10 to 11 percent. Yet we have no better health outcomes to show for this excess expense, and shamefully leave 50 million people uninsured. We also have huge regional swings in the utilization of various procedures and services that bear no relation to outcomes.

If we emerge from this year’s epic health legislation without having done anything to re-engineer the cost of health care delivery, today’s achievements will be short-lived.

Despite this proof of inefficiency, any proposal to slow the growth of health costs is met with doomsday cries from hospitals, doctors, insurers, medical device makers, drug companies, nursing homes, and more. The iron law of health-care politics holds: every dollar of health-care “waste” is somebody’s dollar of income. Reformers know that efforts to clamp down on costs this year have been largely gutted by the Medical Industrial Complex. The pilots of new payment systems and similar innovations in the emerging health bills may offer some promising directions in the decade ahead. But no one should pretend they’ll save real money anytime soon.

This presents a dilemma. If we emerge from this year’s epic health legislation without having done anything to re-engineer the cost of health care delivery, today’s achievements will be short-lived. Lawmakers already have to fudge the numbers to create the illusion of insurance affordability and deficit neutrality. As health costs continue to climb, we’ll either bust the budget in order to lift subsidies for health insurance ever higher, or the government will exempt more Americans from a mandate to buy coverage, destabilizing the risk pool and sending premiums through the roof.

The only way to avoid these grim scenarios is to get serious about costs. The most politically viable way to do this is what Nunn told Clinton 15 years ago: “Give them the number.” The device for doing this can be the so-called public option “trigger.”

How might that work? First, the government would define what affordable coverage means at differing levels of income. For example, families earning less than $25,000 might be expected to spend no more than three percent of their income on premiums for decent health coverage; those earning $50,000 no more than five percent; and so on. Each state or region would be required to offer several competing affordable options for citizens after the implementation of the new insurance exchanges. If a state or regional exchange failed to offer these affordable options, a new public program would be launched that meets these criteria.

The idea is to create, for the first time, a forcing device that compels the entire health sector to organize and compete around meeting newly defined metrics of affordability. The collective fear of an actual public option would lead the industry to rethink current practices in order to avoid the dreaded “trigger.”

Insurers, who until now have vowed to fight any version of a public option to the death, should in fact welcome this forcing device. Why? Because it’s the only way they can halt the industry’s descent from merely being demonized today to facing the regulatory equivalent of lynch mobs tomorrow. It is insurers, after all, who will be blamed as health premiums continue to soar. Yet this blame will largely be unfair. The dirty little secret of health care is that it is not the market power of insurers that fuels health costs, but the local market power of doctor groups, hospital chains, and other local provider oligopolies. Insurers today lack the clout to fight the terms offered by the big local provider organizations (if they want to serve a market, for example, there’s no choice but to include the big local doctor group in their network). And they’ll never persuade ambitious attorneys general to run the political risk of cracking down on overreaching doctors and hospitals—these “good guys” hold sway over elected officials in every district.

The public option trigger would thus give health plans the tool they’ve lacked to force an entirely new set of negotiations about cost-effective care delivery in every market. The fear of God—or, at least, of Uncle Sam—would finally give health plans a chance to contribute to society by boosting the value Americans get from every health-care dollar.

Liberals who prefer an immediate and national public option should be comfortable with a trigger in the end. After all, the goal is affordable health care for every American—the public option is merely a means to that end. If the trigger threat makes it happen, great; and if it doesn’t do the trick, the public option clicks in. Republicans who are serious about health costs should also cheer this approach because it sets a broad public goal and only adds new government action if the private sector can’t deliver. (Of course Republicans won’t support it because they won’t support anything that helps President Obama, but that doesn’t mean GOP ideas won’t have been included.)

With Nancy Pelosi lacking the votes for a full public option in the House, and Olympia Snowe pledging to withhold her vote if a full public option is added in the Senate, the policy and political logic of the public option trigger will soon be irresistible.

Matt Miller is a management consultant, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, and the host of public radio’s popular political week-in-review, Left, Right & Center. His new book is The Tyranny of Dead Ideas.