I haven’t been in much of a blogging mood this week, but something I caught on the CNN ticker this morning (and later on Calpudit ), has woken me up and made me realize “Maybe there is a God”

Don’t tell Jan Michelini that lightning doesn’t strike twice. Michelini, an assistant director on Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of Christ,” was nicknamed “Lightning Boy” after lightning struck his umbrella during filming on a hilltop in the town of Matera, Italy, reported VLife, a supplement to Variety publications, in its October issue.

He suffered light burns on the tips of his fingers.

A few months later, while the crew was on a remote location a few hours from Rome, a storm rolled in and Michelini, again carrying an umbrella, was standing beside star Jim Caviezel on top of a hill, the publication said.

“I’m about a hundred feet away from them,” producer Steve McEveety was quoted as saying, “when I glance over and see lightning coming out of Caviezel’s ears. Both Caviezel and Michelini got struck this time. The main bolt hit Caviezel and one of its forks hit Michelini’s umbrella.”

Maybe this is just God’s way of saying “Mel, Vatican II was a good thing”.

Speaking of Catholicism, as I was wandering around The Grotto the other day, I started thinking about how I’ve always felt like there was something weird about the Catholic Church. Now I know it’s just because I was raised among Protestants, but something has always seemed kinda odd about it all that I’ve never been able to put my finger on. Until now…

Y’know how there’s people out there who are so into Star Wars that they wrote their own sequels and spin-offs? It wasn’t enough for them to see the Death Star blown up, they wanted to know what kind of kids Han Solo would have, whether Chewbacca would ever get a girlfriend, etc. As someone with no background with Catholicism, things like the mysteries of the rosary, the seven sacraments, the stations of the cross, and the various saints feel the same way. In short, Catholicism feels like a fan-fiction version of Christianity.

Of course this is all negated by the fact that Catholicism was around for hundreds of years before the Protestant reformation. Perhaps a more fair way to put it is that Protestantism is a Cliff’s Notes version of Catholicism. But then again, the Catholics are the ones who are relying on holy tradition as well as the Bible.

To be honest, I really don’t know that much about Catholicism, but I just picked up a pretty good book about it that I’m reading now. It seems to have a pretty even-handed coverage of the Reformation, although it does refer to the Gnostics as “heretics” and compares them to hippies.

Okay, I’m just starting to ramble now…Did you hear about the guy who played Jesus who got struck by lightning?

Earnest Pettie, who’s a regular in the comments here as well as the voice behind Mellifluence, has some videos at lobudget.com that you should definitely check out. My favorites are the Arnold/alien video and the Britney Spears Directors’ Commentary. And while you’re in a video mood, check out these parodies of the old G.I. Joe “Knowing is half the battle” PSA’s by clicking here and here.

Well, they finally passed the “partial-birth” abortion bill.

President Bush said he would sign newly passed legislation to end the “abhorrent practice” known by critics as partial birth abortion, giving abortion foes a victory that had eluded them for close to a decade.

Abortion rights advocates said they would immediately go to court to stop what they said was a dangerous incursion against the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion.

The senate voted 64-34 Tuesday to ban a type of abortion, generally carried out in the second or third trimester, in which a fetus is partially delivered before being killed. The House approved the legislation this month, and Bush has urged Congress to get it to his desk.

I won’t bore you with my thoughts about why this sucks. If you’re interested, I wrote about the “partial-birth” myth back in June.

What I think is important to mention here is that we wouldn’t even be talking about this if the Democrats were in the White House or in control of congress. I don’t want to get into a “blame Nader” thing here, but this should serve as an example of what happens when you assume there’s no big differences between Republicans and Democrats. For all his faults, Bill Clinton vetoed this ban twice.

Another thing that’s worth keeping in mind is that the 1997 “partial-birth” ban passed with Dennis Kucinich voting “Yea” and Joe Lieberman voting “Nay”. It’s enough to make you think twice about the conventional wisdom that says Kucinich is the “most liberal” and Lieberman is the “most conservative”. To be fair, Kucinich says that he has changed his mind about abortion in the last year or so, but it doesn’t change the fact that Joe Lieberman has been a much, much stronger advocate for reproductive rights than Kucinich ever has.

Man, this post from Terry Ott’s Beatle Bits blog really pisses me off with the way it continues the near-deification of John Lennon :

The McCartneys are pressing for a worldwide ban on LMs, which given the nature of wars these days, is most likely highly unrealistic.

But their hearts are in the right places.

However, I couldn’t help but note that it took Paul just about 30 years to come out as really against war, something John Lennon made famous in 1969 with his bed-ins for peace as well as the immortal,”Give Peace A Chance,” mantra and song.

You have to know that Lennon was on to something when, 35 years later, the mere mention of “give peace a chance,” is met with howls of derision by the usual neo-con suspects.

No argument here that slogans — like “Give Peace a Chance” — are simplistic and are not themselves a solution.

But being simple sometimes is also the best thing to engage in, even with highly complex issues like war, or the lack thereof.

And I’m not suggesting that Sir Paul is any less sincere than John was in 1969, but somehow I don’t think Macca will come up with an anthem-like song like Lennon did with “Give Peace a Chance.”

And for sure we won’t see the McCartney’s taking to their bed in public for the abolition of landmines.

Yeah, we won’t be seeing the McCartney’s doing a bed-in, because they’re too busy actually doing something.

Landmines kill or maim over 10,000 innocent people every year. Outlawing landmines isn’t the pipe dream of an aging hippie, it’s an attempt to minimize civilian casualties that’s got the support of almost every industrialized country except the United States. Paul McCartney has raised millions of dollars to help anti-landmine charities, what has John Lennon done?

Let’s see…He sat in bed with his wife while reporters took pictures of him, he mailed a bunch of of acorns to world leaders, and he spent a bunch of money to put his bumper-sticker slogan (which was also in the chorus to one of his songs) on billboards and full page ads. This may be some interesting pseudo-performance art, but it’s half-assed activism at best. “War is Over (If You Want It)” may look good on a t-shirt, but it’s a lie. As this year’s war protests prove, a more appropriate slogan would be “War is Over (If They Want It)”.

And by the way, Paul McCartney has written an anti-war anthem. It’s called “Freedom” and, like “Give Peace a Chance”, it totally sucks.

I used to hate Ted Rall, but since Sept. 11th, I thought his column was uncharacteristically well-written and focused. Now he’s got a blog entry that reminds me why I didn’t like him in the first place :

People like me, who have no shortage of ideas but aren’t the best draughtsmen around, end up doing smart, wordy cartoons for alternative newspapers using styles that allow us to avoid having to do a lot of detailed rendering. In other words, we work around our drawing handicaps.
. . .
Pick up a copy of Ware’s “Quimby Mouse” in a bookstore near you–don’t buy it, you’ll just want to bring it back–and you’ll see what I mean. The damned thingn [sic] is beautiful. Unbelievably pretty. And there isn’t a single idea in the whole goddamned book. But people buy it, and pretend that they “get it” when there’s nothing to get, because they feel stupid admitting that they don’t get it. And also because they can’t imagine that such an accomplished artist could be so bereft of original–hell, any–thought.

I’m thinking that postmodernism/deconstructionism is essentially a plot by folks without ideas to convince the world that an absence of ideas is itself an idea. The emperor, no clothes, you know.

So a world divided between idea people and art people has become a world divvied up between smart people who can’t draw and dumb people who can. Bee-utiful.

Just like his now-infamous attacks on Art Spiegelman, Ted Rall primary concern seems to be that he’s not getting the praise that he thinks he deserves. And if he’s able to get that attention by attacking a sacred cow of the comics industry, then all the better for him. Rall even admitted that Spiegelman was “a guy with one great book in him”, but if Rall wants to throw hissy-fits about it, where’s his great book?

The fact that Ted Rall considers Art Spiegelman “the Quentin Tarantino of cartooning” is a funny comparison to me. Although he uses the comparison to say that Spiegelman is a “one-hit wonder”, in light of his blog entry I imagine that he’s also making the argument that Spiegelman is one of his “dumb artists” who, like Tarantino, fill his work with good visuals that have no substance. (Of course, I strongly disagree with this). Well, if Art Spiegelman is the Quentin Tarantino of comics, then Ted Rall is the Kevin Smith of comics.

Like Rall, Kevin Smith’s work is about the writing, not the visuals. Unlike Rall, however, Kevin Smith is more concerned with producing work that pleases his fans, than attacking his peers. A few years ago, I posted a question about this on Smith’s message board and his reply summed up his work pretty well :

It just seemed to make sense. I wanted to write, but I didn’t want someone else pooching the delivery of the dialogue. I wanted to tell stories, but I wasn’t a very visual person. I wanted a baby, but I didn’t want to give some man legal rights to my body (that made a ‘Sexual Suspect’). And when I saw what folks were doing in the indie field - making films that didn’t have to be visually stunning (Richard Linklater and ‘Slacker’), I wanted to be a part of that.

And while I’ll never… NEVER… be much better at crafting the images that convey the ideas and dialogue in whatever scripts I write, I can’t say I’m bothered by that notion. I’ve carved out a niche for myself in the cinematic landscape. It’s not a massive one, but it’s nothing to scoff at either. Folks that like what I do really like it. Folks that don’t like what I do never need watch another one of my efforts.

And at the end of the day, the films I make please me. They’re economic in means and presentation, but they’re packed full of ideas and humor. They’re somewhat easy watches that audiences mostly enjoy. And they’re smart investments. We do them fairly inexpensively, so we always profit (even ‘Mallrats’ eventually profited, thanks to the popularity it found on video). And since I don’t see my budgets ever climbing that much, I’ll probably be allowed to make movies for as long as I want.

So if I’m happy with what I do, the audience seems largely happy with what I do, and the financiers are happy with what I do…

Well, where’s the harm?

If Ted Rall was making movies, he’d be bitching that Hollywood always gives Oscars to movies about the holocaust. That may be true, but it doesn’t make Mallrats a better movie than Schindler’s List, and it sure as hell doesn’t mean that My War With Brian is better than Maus. If Ted Rall wants mainstream success, then he needs to make mainstream work. Otherwise, he should quit bitching and take a few lessons in humility from Kevin Smith.

So, I’ve been away from the blog for about a week and it looks like one of the big blogosphere-only stories that I missed was an anti-Semitic blog entry by Gregg Easterbrook over at the New Republic. Realizing that it might hurt their ability to take the moral high ground, TNR issued a correction a few days later :

We are sorry. Last week Gregg Easterbrook wrote an item in his blog for tnr.com about the moral culpability of Hollywood executives who profit handsomely from movies that glorify violence and depict it with pornographic vividness. In the course of his denunciation, Easterbrook referred to “Jewish executives [who] worship money above all else.” Many readers found the remark offensive. They were right. The phrase was right out of the classical vocabulary of modern anti-Semitism. We make no defense of these words and we are mortified that they appeared under the auspices of a magazine that has for many decades been in the forefront of the campaign against anti-Semitism and bigotry of all kinds. Easterbrook’s comment is false and ugly, and we do not wish in any way to make excuses for it. And neither does he, which is why he apologized for it, and made no extenuations for it. He candidly wrote on this Web site last Friday that “[w]hat I wrote here was simply wrong, and for being wrong, I apologize.”

Having looked at the post in question, it looks like he tried to make a retarded point that the Jews who run Hollywood (which in and of itself is a pretty lame stereotype) should be more sensitive about releasing violent movies because of the holocaust. Should I even bother mentioning how incredibly dumb this is?

Despite Easterbrook’s anti-Jew coda, the real meat of his post was the tired “Hollywood glorifies violence” argument. What’s so funny about his take on this theme is the fact that he’s playing movie critic while being a cinema illiterate :

Is Quentin Tarantino the single greatest phony in the history of Hollywood? I realize that’s saying a lot–about Hollywood, not him. But it’s the sole explanation I can think of to explain his bizarre prominence.

All of Tarantino’s work is pure junk. How can you be a renowned director without ever having made a film that’s even good, to say nothing of great?…Tarantino does nothing but churn out shabby depictions of slaughter as a form of pleasure–and that, for decades, has been what the least imaginative and least talented of Hollywood churn out.
. . .
Corporate sidelight: Kill Bill is distributed by Miramax, a Disney studio. Disney seeks profit by wallowing in gore–Kill Bill opens with an entire family being graphically slaughtered for the personal amusement of the killers–and by depicting violence and murder as pleasurable sport. Disney’s Miramax has been behind a significant share of Hollywood’s recent violence-glorifying junk, including Scream, whose thesis was that murdering your friends and teachers is a fun way for high-school kids to get back at anyone who teases them. Scream was the favorite movie of the Columbine killers

Why the hell is the New Republic allowing someone who doesn’t know about movies write about them? If the only think Gregg Easterbrook is getting out of Tarantino’s movies (or Scream) is that murder is “fun” then he should stop writing about movies and find other ways to channel the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Now I don’t think that Tarantino’s style-over-substance shtick is for everybody, but there’s clearly some substance beneath the surface of all of his films (even Kill Bill) that elevate them above the level of “violence-glorifying” crap which Hollywood does churn out with alarming frequency.

Sometimes I feel like sports fans are in their own little world.

I’ve been too busy giggling at the term “hillbilly heroin” to comment on the whole Rush Limbaugh drug scandal. Luckily, Bill Maher has made most of the points I wanted to :

The bottom line is, we all pick our poison and shouldn’t arbitrarily punish and shame some, and accept and coddle others. There’s nothing about preferring the high from oxycontin or liquor or speed (caffeine, ephedra, etc - speed, the drug America really loves) that makes you morally superior to people who like pot or mushrooms or even heroin for that matter, because that’s what Oxycontin is, heroin in a pill. Gee, no wonder it’s popular.

When it comes to Rush and pills, an analagous situation would be Reagan and guns. After Reagan got shot, what an opportunity to change that debate on guns! Who could argue about at least debating it while he lay in the hospital from a gunshot wound - like how JFK’s program got passed so easily after his assassination, or even Bush’s after 911.

But Reagan whiffed. Rush has the chance to change America for the better here. But it must involve his admitting the fundamental truths about drugs:
A: Almost all Americans do them, legal or otherwise; B: It’s wrong to inconsistently treat fact A.

And Rush, if you don’t see it that way yet, let me put it like this: When you’re furtively meeting people in parking lots and exchanging ANYTHING in cigar boxes through car windows - OK, that’s a drug addict. Issues of personal responsibility is where I often walked with Rush, and this is a classic. A true test of the man. If he comes out of rehab and says, ‘I was wrong about our approach to drugs,’ he could single handedly change the way America looks at this problem. If he admits that what separates him and Noelle Bush from crackheads is nothing. Nothing except money, race and lawyers. OK, well that is actually quite a lot. But nothing in the way that makes one of them a stronger or better human being.

It’s funny how addiction is only treated like a medical problem when it happens to rich, white people. For the rest of us, it’s just another sign of weakness.

The angel on my right shoulder is telling me that I should use this post to discuss that dangers of drug addiction and show empathy toward Rush and the position he’s in. But the devil on my left shoulder thinks I should talk about how conservatives have never given a shit about drug addicts unless they’re suburban pill-poppers, yuppie cokeheads, or the sons and daughters of rich and powerful people who are prone to “youthful indiscretions”.

Since the little devil is currently winning the argument, lemme just say that Rush has never shown any sympathy for drug addicts in the past, so as far as I’m concerned, he deserves every bit of criticism that he receives. And if he ends up rotting in jail, then he’s just sleeping in the bed he made for himself.

[Note : This entry was written by my friend Ross Lincoln.]

I’ve always been uncomfortable with the “states’ rights” position taken by many pro-medicinal marijuana, or legalization advocates. While I sympathize with the frustration caused by a wholly insensitive and unreasonable opposition to something so clearly reasonable as the elimination of the penalties associated with Marijuana’s illegal status, (marijuana laws are, for the most part, ill advised and based on shoddy information and for lack of a better word, superstitions), I am forced to accept that the government has the right to outlaw any damn chemical it chooses, including marijuana.(See supreme court decisions of the 1910’s, and the act that created the FDA, for more information on this.)

I support the effort to change the laws as they exist, because, as I said before, the laws against marijuana are stupid. But I am and have always been opposed to any attempts to change these laws on a state by state basis, and I’ve been deeply troubled by the efforts of marijuana advocates to frame the debate in state’s rights terms. Particularly because this position taken by liberals belies an of the utter lack of historical perspective.

The triumph of liberal ideals in the last 100 years would not be possible without the concept that one law rules the land, that it applies equally to all of us, and that law can be changed for the better, to suit the needs and wishes of the greatest number of people. Furthermore, this principle also challenges the idea of xenophobia, since it requires that we agree that we are all Americans, with the same laws, and not just Texans, Tulsans, Angelinos, Californians, or whatever.

Libertarians and conservatives might view the idea of a strong legal authority advocating for the general population as something to be undermined, avoided, and crushed, but liberals should recognize that it’s this central authority, grounded on the principle of civil discourse and the rule of law, that offers the greatest protections to society’s weakest members, as well as the potential for the greatest level of liberty and safety. I think we can all agree that in the last 30 years, we have seen that less government actually means less freedom, less protections, and less civil discourse.

We may not always get everything we want, and sometimes, the bad guys win big too, but overall, it’s a lot better system than the free for all that existed before the civil war, and before the great depression.

The position that the states should have the right to determine their own laws on hugely controversial, possibly constitutional issues, even if those laws overrule federal prohibitions, is identical in essence and in content to the arguments in favor of both slavery and segregation. Of course, I’m not suggesting that a states’ rights victory in favor of marijuana will result in the return of slavery, but I do feel exceptionally strong in my opinion that, if we liberals go around advocating a state’s rights position for the sorts of social changes that we (rightfully) desire and vocally advocate, we’ll soon find that conservatives will start doing it for issues we (rightfully) despise.

My friends who grew up in California, I have found, do not often understand the sheer magnitude of the conservatism of the rest of the country, particularly Texas. It isn’t difficult to see how a successful state’s rights’ position, taken in the issue of Marijuana, could leads to other states challenging other laws on the same basis. For instance, the issue of “religious freedom”, which as we all know is code for making Christianity the official religion of the US.

We’ve seen tremendous legal changes in the last few years, particularly regarding consensual sex between adults. Imagine then, if a state like, oh, Texas, decided to frame the issue of outlawing gay sex as a state’s rights issue., with the Medicinal marijuana as a legal precedent. It might sound far fetched, but check out the Texas Republican party platform and ask yourself if it doesn’t sound plausible.

Now, thanks to today’s Supreme Court decision to let stand a 9th circuit court of appeals decision regarding a doctor’s right to recommend medicinal marijuana as an option, we’re in a completely new legal universe. On the surface, this would seem to be the first time ever that marijuana laws have been substantially reinterpreted to allow for a national discussion, and I for one feel it’s about goddamned time. We can now, I hope, reasonably discuss this issue and perhaps actually get around to making substantial reforms. At the very least, we can start talking about Pot realistically, rather than in the same boring benign “wonder drug”/”evil corruptor” terms we’ve endured for a century.

On the other hand, we may never know precisely why the Most Conservative Supreme Court in the last century decided not to hear a case which would have given them a golden opportunity to rule in favor of the government’s right to interfere with drug consumption in America. I’m wondering if Scalia and Company aren’t thinking along the lines that I am, and have made a calculated decision to let the 9th Circuit decision stand as some sort of legal precedent. Sure, it can be argued that as the court gets more conservative, it will be unlikely to endorse any decision that favors the government over the states. In this legal universe, why should liberals keep trying for government enforced changes to the law?

Well, I think it’s arguable that a hundred years of legal precedent has forced even the most conservative court to pay lip service to the principle of national law superceding state law. However, all it will take is a few counter precedents (is that even a term? You get the idea, I hope), to allow the legal legroom to start pushing things in the opposite direction. After all, Scalia is on record as supporting “states’ rights”. While I hope we’re at the beginning of a new era in mature dialogue about the war on drugs, I fear instead that we’re only seeing the beginning of a massive conservative legal assault. Pardon the joke, but I hope I am only being paranoid.

Grocery store workers aren’t the only ones on strike here. As of this morning, MTA mechanics have joined the fray…

Metropolitan Transportation Authority mechanics went on strike early today, stranding many of the approximately 400,000 passengers served daily by the bus and rail system in Los Angeles County.
. . .
The walkout by mechanics promises to cripple MTA bus and train service, because the MTA’s other unions have said they would honor a mechanics picket line.
. . .
Negotiations ended without a settlement Sunday night, when a court-ordered 60-day injunction barring a strike or lockout expired. Both sides say they are far apart, largely on the issue of health care.

The MTA makes monthly contributions into the health-care funds of its unions. The unions are then responsible for administering insurance policies for their members.

The mechanics fund is receiving about $1.4 million a month from the transit agency. But the fund’s costs have risen to about $1.9 million over the last year. The union said costs have risen because health insurance premiums have soared, and that the fund is now insolvent. Silver said the union wants the MTA to contribute more to the fund.

…and LAPD deputies are also staging their own walkout

Officials opened an emergency operations center Monday and Los Angeles police prepared to back up Sheriff Lee Baca as another round of wildcat strikes by deputies loomed.

Hundreds of deputies have called in sick over the last three weeks, protesting stalled talks despite Baca’s threat to suspend deputies who participate and a judge’s order against the work slowdown.
. . .
“I have one deputy who said that because of increases in the payout for health benefits, he had to cancel his health insurance with the county and switch to his wife’s company because he wouldn’t be able to afford it otherwise,” Garces said.

Garces said health costs are a particular concern. Basic health coverage could cost deputies as much as $972 a year more, he said. For deputies who choose better health insurance coverage, health plan costs are slated to increase from $1,900 annually to more than $3,000, Garces said.

“Most cops live from paycheck to paycheck,” Garces added, “so if you take $3,000 a year out their pay, something has to give.”

Ahem…are you starting to sense a pattern here? The criminally-flawed health care system in this country is starting to reach critical mass. When the burden for providing health care falls squarely on the shoulders of consumers and employers, you end up getting this kind of tension about who should pay more. This is going to get worse and worse.

The only solution I can think of is a single-payer universal heath care plan, but even most of the senate candidates (except for Kucinich) oppose that. Unfortunately, there’s too many rich assholes in Washington for something like that to happen any time soon. Any attempts to have government-run heath care will be met with cries of “socialized medicine” (just like the Republicans did in 1993).

So what should be done? Well, I think the Dems need to use these strikes as a way to bring more attention to their short- and long-term goals for universal heath care. In the short term, I think a plan like Dean’s to get as many people covered as possible while working in the still-flawed system is best. This is a crisis and as such, the highest priority should be getting people covered. With that in mind, I still think everyone should keep their sights on a long-term goal of ending the stranglehold that insurance companies have on the health care needs of our citizens.

Also, whoever ends up getting the nomination should make sure to use this George Bush quote from the 2000 debates when contrasting their plan with the president’s :

GOV. BUSH: I’m absolutely opposed to a national health care
plan. I don’t want the federal government making decisions for
consumers or for providers.

I remember what the administration tried to do in 1993. They
tried to have a national health care plan, and fortunately it failed.

Despite the fact that this quote is slightly out-of-context, the message that this could send to voters is pretty clear : The Democrats want everyone to have access to heath care, the Republicans are not only opposed, but they’re happy to see that everyone isn’t covered.