Republicans hate Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez because they fear her. She's whip-smart, dedicated, passionate and knowledgeable. Watch this video and if you don't see that she's all of those things, you must have clicked on a different video.
And here's Democratic Representative Adam Schiff's response to the Republican Congressmen on his committee calling for his resignation after the Mueller report "summary" came out. You'll note that these same people tolerated YEARS of Republican investigations of Hilary Clinton's emails, Benghazi, Uranium One, and many more nothingburgers, NONE of which resulted in a single person being charged with any wrongdoing.
Times like this make me feel like things might work out eventually after all.
"As of the end of March 3, the 773rd day of his term in office, Trump accumulated 9,014 fishy claims, according to The Fact Checker's database" - Washington Post.
And of course, Adam Schiff did NOT knowingly and unlawfully lie. Trump is just projecting again.
As Republicans and Trump gloat, just remember. We have NOT seen the Mueller report. Not one sentence has been released. We have only heard a SUMMARY of the report from Trump's appointed Attorney General, a man who said the investigation was improper before he became AG. AG Barr himself said that Mueller's report DOES NOT EXONERATE TRUMP. As usual, Trump is lying about the report, as he does about everything.
We are the richest country the world has ever known. We have vast resources, a skilled, hard-working populace, a growing population (welcome, immigrants), fundamental freedoms, good infrastructure, and no existential threats. America could be a paradise.
But it isn't.
Why? Because too many of our people have bought into the lie that we have to work until just a few years before we drop dead. That we can't afford decent, inexpensive healthcare, or to house and feed the homeless. That rich people deserve every single penny of the billions of dollars they could never spend, while a single mom working two jobs is a slacker who deserves her poverty. That people who have lived their whole lives with a foot on their neck are the ones with all the advantages. That the only discrimination that exists is discrimination against the privileged.
Many countries in the world are objectively, empirically better places to live. Places where you won't go bankrupt if you get sick. You won't get shot going to school. You get lots of time off and help when you have a child. Where you can travel, enjoy your life, and not worry about catastrophe every damn day. And you have more freedoms than in the United States.
Basically, this:
I'll say it again. America could be a paradise on Earth. We have the money, the resources and the talent.
Going into Bride, I knew two things. One, Elsa Lanchester rocks an iconic look for the female version of Frankenstein's monster. And two, the ending. Yes, I had already seen the last minutes of the film multiple times. The movie's 83 years old, okay?
Premiering in 1935, two years after the original, Bride is generally considered the best of the Universal Monster movies. Weirdly, while the first one just started out telling the story, this one starts out with a framing device; Mary Shelley, played by Lanchester, telling the story of the sequel in a mansion around a fire on a stormy night. It's even more weird because she's telling the story AS IF she wrote the story of the first Frankenstein movie, which is really different from the book. Of course, the real Mary Shelley had nothing to do with any of this, so, as I said, weird.
That would be the Bride (on the left).
In any event, at the end of the first movie, the villagers with torches and pitchforks cornered the Monster at an old mill and burned it down with him in it. As this story starts, it turns out the Monster fell through the floor into water underneath the mill, thus not burning to death, and when the father from the first film climbs down to make sure the Monster is dead, he's killed for his trouble. As is his wife. So the Monster killed the entire family. Nice.
Meanwhile, as the Monster roams the countryside killing anyone he comes across, Dr. Frankenstein is approached by yet another mad scientist who has also been creating life. But rather than stitching together corpses, Dr. Pretorius grows his life from the ground up. Alas, his problem is that all his creations are only inches tall and he keeps them in glass jars. He also dresses them up as a ballerina, a king, a queen, etc. and what the hell is going on with that scene?!? Anyway, he wants to join with Dr. Frankenstein and together they'll combine their skills to create a normal-sized bride for the Monster. Because if the Monster gets laid he'll stop killing, I guess?
W-T-F? Seriously.
The Monster is briefly captured by the villagers who incompetently imprison him for about five seconds before he IMMEDIATELY escapes and kills some more. But then there's a really nice series of scenes where the Monster, hiding in the woods, is taken in by a blind man in a cozy woodland cottage. The kind, blind guy can't see that he's taken in a "Monster" and is absolutely delighted to have a friend. He starts teaching the Monster to talk and it's actually kind of heartwarming and nice. Unfortunately, some asshole hunters stumble on the two in the cottage and once again the monster is on the run. Eventually, Dr. Pretorius bumps into him, takes him in, and they set up the end of the movie where he meets his bride. That does NOT go well.
Boris Karloff appears once again as the Monster and is just great. When the Monster talks it's with just the right combination of menace, innocence and pathos. The Monster is not really a Monster, he's a child who doesn't want to hurt people but is incapable of dealing with the fear directed at him. Karloff plays it perfectly.
I'm fairly convinced that the weird scene with the little people in jars was solely done to show off the special effect of little people in jars and, to be fair, it's a pretty great effect. Plus, Dr. Pretorius seems to be jealous of Dr. Frankenstein for creating the Monster, but it seems to me that creating a whole bunch of intelligent, civilized, tiny people is a much more impressive accomplishment.
I should also note that the body count is much higher in this movie than in the original Frankenstein. I guess villagers trying to burn you alive in a mill might piss you off just a bit.
I liked The Bride of Frankenstein and appreciate how well it builds off the original, but I found the tone a little inconsistent.
Former FBI special agent Erroll G. Southers, in USA Today
We could certainly learn a lesson from New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who unflinchingly labeled the incident a terror attack in her first news conference. The Southern Poverty Law Center found that in 2018, there was a nearly 50 percent increase in the number of white nationalist groups in the United States. Last year, right-wing terrorists killed at least 40 people in the United States and Canada, a massive increase from the 17 who were killed by white supremacists in 2017.
Overall, between 2008 and 2017, right-wing and white supremacist terrorists accounted for 71 percent of fatalities from extremist violence in the United States, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
The attacks that make headlines and those that do not are all rooted in the same hateful ideology. None of the attackers embraced unique or isolated ideas; they didn’t need to. The white supremacist ideology already contains all of the components needed to propel a radicalized individual to violence. And we have hard data showing the threat is regularly materializing. So why is there so much controversy over whether right-wing racially motivated violent extremism is a growing threat?
Read that middle paragraph again.
You want to feel safe and fight violence in America? GO TO THE SOURCE.
Hint: It's not immigrants coming in from "brown" countries.
As a general rule, the path to the future (assuming we manage to not cook ourselves) is reasonably clear. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." Twenty years ago, who would have predicted we'd elect our first black President in 2008? Ten years ago, who would have predicted we'd have same sex marriage everywhere in the United States? And three years ago, who would have predicted that transgender people would have become as accepted as they have been by large swaths of Americans.
I'm not saying that we're done. OBVIOUSLY NOT. There's a LOT of work still to do, but it's undeniable that there has been progress in human rights in America. I may be too much of an optimist, but it's absolutely clear to me that full acceptance of others is where we're headed. Again, assuming we don't cook ourselves.
That's one of the reasons this is so goddamn awful.
On Tuesday, the Pentagon announced that Donald Trump's promised ban on transgender service members will be going into effect on April 12. The policy had previously been blocked by now-vacated court injunctions.
The language of the new policy has been watered down from the full ban originally demanded by Trump. Transgender troops are allowed to serve, and "[n]o person, solely on the basis of his or her gender identity," will be denied promotion or re-enlistment, or be involuntarily discharged.
But the policy requires transgender troops to serve as their sex that was assigned at birth, subject to military requirements for service members of that sex, including physical fitness and assigned "berthing, bathroom and shower facilities," regardless of gender dysphoria or other diagnosis; service members who cannot meet those requirements will be discharged. It bars all new recruits who are taking hormones or who have transitioned.
The move is expected to impact an estimated 14,700 service members. In testimony to Congress, military leaders denied that transgender service members were causing the morale or readiness problems the Trump White House had claimed; there appears to be no credible justification for the policy change other than as a sop to Trump's "social conservative" base.Link
Transgender troops are as worthy of our respect as ANY person serving this country and they're deserving of everything we can do for them. This policy is hateful and obviously regressive and wrongheaded. It strikes me as almost inconceivable that the people behind this policy and those who support it really think that transgender individuals should go back into the closet and remain there forever. I know that hate isn't rational and bigots really do want transgender people to vanish, but it's not going to happen. In the meantime, these assholes are causing a LOT of human misery.
You probably know I'm a huge fan of The Lego Movie from 2014. What could have been a feature length commercial geared towards kids turned out to be a clever, fun, action film with great characters and an emotional punch of a third act twist. I think it's the best animated movie since The Incredibles in 2004.
So now we (finally) have the Lego Movie 2. Carol and I were lucky that some friends won free preview tickets and took us, so we saw it a few days before it came out. Now, a couple weeks later, after seeing it again, I'm finally getting around to writing about it. There are very minor spoilers below, most of which you'd see from the trailer.
Lego 2 starts immediately after the end of the first Lego Movie, with Bricksburg being invaded by the Duplo alien invaders, so you get to see the immediate aftermath of the attack and Emmet's disastrous attempt to make peace. After a five year jump, Bricksburg has become Apocalypseburg and there's a lot of fun Mad Max style parody, but, you know, with Legos. Wyldstyle seems to revel in this new, grim environment, while Emmet is his usual cheerful self, causing some fun friction.
To its credit, the movie doesn't try to repeat the same trick as the first and makes it clear from the beginning that the drivers of the action are the boy from the first movie, Finn, and his younger sister, Bianca.
What follows is completely different from the first Lego movie, which is great. Did I mention that Lego 2 is also a musical? Yeah, they sing and the songs are fun. So, pretty ambitious. Shockingly I know, once again there's a twist, and it actually works! I also appreciated that all the characters are back, although a couple are back only very, very briefly. (I love how the Trump surrogate Lord/President Business excuses himself from the action).
Of course, it's not as good as the first Lego Movie. That movie took off and never stopped moving, continually adding fun, interesting characters with their own unique craziness and points of view, until the third act twist which brought it all together. Seriously, it's great.
The first time I saw Lego 2 I thought the pacing was slow for the first half of the movie, although I didn't have the same reaction on second viewing. I do think that the fun supporting characters (Unikitty, Metal Beard, and Benny) are underused, while Will Arnett's Batman, as great as this version of the character is, is overused. I really like the new character, Rex, a mashup of all of Chris Pratt's regular movie roles (space cowboy, raptor wrangler). Pratt voices him, in addition to Emmett, and he talks exactly like Kurt Russell in Big Trouble in Little China. I LOVED that.
And regardless of the concerns I had about the pacing, the movie absolutely sticks the landing, achieving a good emotional resolution. If you liked the first one, you should go see Lego 2. Do it soon because it probably won't be in theaters for too much longer.
One more thing.
Whatever the final verdict on its quality, Lego 2 very cleverly and movingly turns its ear-worm of a conformist song from the first movie, Everything is Awesome, into an anthem for the Resistance. A song of hope for these troubled days. I am not joking.
Listen to the words. I'll be listening to this song for a long time.
