The Lay of the Land: Libya, Korea, Israel, Japan

US OIL $106/BARREL

EU/WORLD OIL $116/BARREL

LIBYA

US/NATO NAVAL BLOCKADE INITIATED (INCLUDING TURKISH NAVAL FORCES)

US/NATO NO FLY ZONE & COUNTERSTRIKE AGAINST LIBYA MILITARY EXPANDED

FRENCH AIRCRAFT CARRIER CHARLES DE GAULLE

USS KEARSARGE CARRIER EXPEDITIONARY STRIKE GROUP///26TH MARINE EXPEDITIONARY UNIT
B-2 STEALTH BOMBERS

UKSAS & US SPECIAL OPERATIONS
AIRCRASH: 1 X US F15 FIGHTER JET (2 X PILOTS EXTRACTED BY USMC 26TH MEU)

JAPAN

TOKYO: RADIATION CONTAMINATION

EUROPE: LOW RADIATION ARRIVAL

FUKUSHIMA REACTORS:

ONE: EXPLOSION/LOW RADIATION///TWO: EXPLOSION/LOW RADIATION
THREE: EXPLOSION/LOW RADIATION - ACTIVE SMOKE/EVACUATION
FOUR: DOUBLE EXPLOSION/LOW RADIATION
FIVE: STABLE///SIX: STABLE
USS WASHINGTON CARRIER STRIKE GROUP
USS ESSEX CARRIER EXPEDITIONARY STRIKE GROUP///31ST MARINE EXPEDITIONARY UNIT

ISRAEL

HAMAS EMPLACED 1 X IED ADJACENT JERUSALEM CONVENTION CENTER (1 X KIA, 30 X WIA)

GAZA LAUNCH OF GRAD (IRANIAN MADE) ROCKETS INTO 2 X BEERSHEBA, 1 X ASHDOD AND 1 X ASHKELON (5 X WIA)

GAZA LAUNCH OF MORTARS INTO 7 X ESHKOL KIBBUTZ FARMS AND 3 X SHAAR KIBBUTZ FARMS

KOREA/PERSIAN GULF

USS LINCOLN CARRIER STRIKE GROUP (KOREA)
USS ENTERPRISE CARRIER STRIKE GROUP ENROUTE (PERSIAN GULF)
USS VINSON CARRIER STRIKE GROUP (PERSIAN GULF)
USS BOXER EXPEDITIONARY CARRIER STRIKE GROUP (PERSIAN GULF)

The Lay of the Land: Libya, Korea, Afghanistan, Israel, Japan

LIBYA

MILITARY:

PERSONNEL - 120,000ACTIVE///200,000RESERVE, OTHER

AIR - SCUD MRBM, MIG25, SUKHOI, MIRAGE, S200, IGLA, STRELA, OTHER

LAND - T72, MLRS, SA9, SA13, OTHER

SEA - SUMARINES (FOXTROT CLASS), MISSILE FRIGATES (SS-N-2C)

========================

LIBYA

US FORCES:

B-2 STEALTH BOMBERS

KEARSARGE EXPEDITIONARY STRIKE GROUP///26TH MARINE EXPEDITIONARY UNIT

US SPECIAL OPERATIONS

(EN-ROUTE) BATAAN EXPEDITIONARY STRIKE GROUP

(EN-ROUTE) ENTERPRISE CARRIER STRIKE GROUP

[[[STIKE GROUPS COMPOSED OF MULTIPLE WARSHIPS, ATTACK SUBMARINES & FIGHTER AIRCRAFT]]]

JAPAN

REAGAN CARRIER STRIKE GROUP

WASHINGTON CARRIER STRIKE GROUP

ESSEX EXPEDITIONARY STRIKE GROUP///31ST MARINE EXPEDITIONARY UNIT

FUKUSHIMA REACTORS:

ONE: EXPLOSION/LOW RADIATION

TWO: EXPLOSION/LOW RADIATION

THREE: EXPLOSION/LOW RADIATION (SECOND EXPLOSION IMMINENT)

FOUR: DOUBLE EXPLOSION/LOW RADIATION

FIVE: STABLE

SIX: STABLE

TOKYO: LOW RADIATION ARRIVAL

KOREA/AFGHANISTAN

LINCOLN CARRIER STRIKE GROUP (KOREA)

VINSON CARRIER STRIKE GROUP (AFGHANISTAN)

BOXER EXPEDITIONARY STRIKE GROUP (AFGHANISTAN)

ISRAEL

(SATURDAY) 50 X MORTARS/ROCKETS FIRED FROM GAZA (HAMAS) INTO ISRAEL IN LESS THAN 15 MINUES

(THURSDAY) EGYPT MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD MEETING WITH HAMAS

Make yourself...

...heard, not herd.

The inherent clean energy opportunity in Japan

This is not meant as any kind of a cynical-jab at the Japanese people, looking at them as some tool for change. The earthquake and subsequent nuclear accidents that are unfolding are a horrific reminder of how tenuous modern life is: in a matter of just five minutes, everything on the Japanese mainland changed forever.

At this point, we have no idea how many people have died or will die as a result of what's been reported as an 8.4 to 8.9 scale earthquake, possibly the worst in their entire recorded history.

The most recent one on roughly the same scale occurred in 1923, killing as many as 140,000 people. But the Japanese were better prepared for a recurrence...except that you can never truly prepare for one when it comes to a nuclear power plant. Nuclear power will always be vulnerable to natural disasters, social upheavals, and most certainly, inevitable social collapse since all civilizations end one day.

The half-lives of most radioactive byproducts of nuclear power will far-exceed the lifespan of any civilization, reason enough to begin a general decommissioning of all existing plants, the neutralization of the waste ("byproducts," and to the best of our abilities), and a rapid conversion over to a constellation of clean or cleaner energy sources, mainly natural and renewable ones. This nuclear disaster hasn't even played-out yet, but I see very real opportunities that need to be grasped, and immediately, by the Japanese public as well as the world community, outside of the corridors of power.

As the Japanese people and their rescuers from their government and from around the world are exposed to radioactive contamination, we need to realize that we have yet another opening here: the outrage that's inevitably coming on the mainland--perhaps even from neighboring countries--is going to be profound. As always, there are cultural, and therefore, historical reasons for this.

For those with a short memory, it should be remembered that the Japanese are the only nation on earth to have atomic weapons directed upon them. They have not forgotten this by a long-shot, and the terrible irony of this catastrophe-upon-a-catastrophe will not be lost on them as it surely is on most Americans, willfully, since we're the ones who dropped two atomic bombs on them in 1945.

We tend to forget about our own war crimes here in the United States, our victims however, do not.

There will be a very loud cry indeed in Japan to decommission these nuclear plants because they have failed every test. The plants themselves were already strongly opposed, but as it usually happens, times were better and they public will was more neutral and the opposition's warnings were ignored. There was, after all, a lot of money to be made, and power demands were growing and still are. That's fine and well, but events have a way of changing things, and catastrophes borne out of both natural disaster and human incompetence and corruption lead to a perception of misrule. As often is the case, that perception is usually accurate.

Prediction: there will be a major groundswell coming against further development and operation of nuclear power on the Japanese mainland. A call for major, wide-scale investment in clean and renewable sources of energy will be heard throughout the island nation. If it reaches the level of mass-production, it will have a global impact since Japan is the third largest developed economy in the world, one of the world's skilled "workshops," like Germany.

Even with this disaster, Japan could be poised to lead the way towards a new and decisive direction, towards the real world implementation of alternative energy sources that are well outside of the box. With China in close-proximity, production in both nations could point to very affordable solar technologies, as just one example.

This is all a wait-and-see, to be sure, since we don't know how bad this nuclear disaster is going get. But I think there are great opportunities here for Japan and the world, coming out of their worst period since WWII, their (and our) greatest challenge. As fate would have it, Wikileaks has uncovered and released one of the cache of American State Department cables, and they purport to contain a passage of Japanese government officials discussing cover-ups of previous nuclear accidents. When-and-if the smokes clears soon, the Japanese people will learn of this; there will be a wide demand for explanations, with the predictable outrage, perhaps even riots.

All we lack is the will since an outraged citizenry that won't have it anymore is an irresistible social force that cannot be held back any longer.

He Jerks Hard for the Phonies

"I work hard!" he told a room of openly uninterested listeners, something he did a lot of the time, especially after he left work at his private firm, his minuscule fiefdom. OK: especially at work, since his employees never listened to what he had to say because they were immune to bullshit. He didn't care. He was better since he made more money than they did, thanks to ripping off all of them through creative accounting and delusions of adequacy, and legally too.

"Goddamned deadbeats--won't work, plenty of jobs out there, I know!!*#^!" As was always the case, nobody acted as though they were listening, and on a conscious level, they weren't. The man kept going on anyway, yammering away while seven people in rags were lined-up outside clutching signs with various inscriptions on them, but all of them essentially said "Will Work for Food" in one way or another. Most of them had been working weeks before, and very hard.

"Spoiling my view!" he muttered. He was only 35, but came off as a moldering 88.

"For the love of God, would you please shut the fuck up, sir, asshole--whateverthefuck your fuckin' name is? Jesus, fucker." asked and projectile-vomited a young lady in black leather, festooned with tattoos and piercings from head-to-toe.

"Why don't you go get a job, like me? I'm even self-employed, eh, top that, you loud-mouthed Goth-cooze!" he growled, drool flowing from both sides of his mouth, a vein throbbing on his forehead, and a visible erection showing through his dockers. Baboons have their own male species.

"I have a job, bitch," she shot back instantly, visibly smacking him in the face with the comment. "But...everyone fuckin' works, you crybaby asshole. What makes you so special, fuckface?" and she sat back down in the booth she was in and turned her back to him disrespectfully. There was a round of applause for a solid three minutes, but a few in the corner slunk out after paying their bill, looking suspiciously ignorant, even furtively so, as they went across the street to do business at the asshole's unimportant fiefdom.

The lay of the land: Oil - Iraq - Libya - North Korea

From our source in the Middle East (from raw-communiques):

OIL

US: +$100/barrel

EU: +$115/barrel

[[[Iraq's largest oil refinery in Baji - significant long term damage from al-qaeda cell sponsored by [I]ran revolutionary guard]]]

==========================================================

LIBYA

US CARRIER STRIKE GROUP ENTERPRISE

US EXPEDITIONARY ST[I]RKE GROUP KEARSARGE

UK MISSILE FRIGATE CUMBERLAND

SOUTH KOREAN DESTROYER CHOI YOUNG

US/NATO SPECIAL OPERATIONS FORCES

+/- 6,000 KIA

Libyan military & mercenaries (African & former Russian special forces) striking anti-government forces

Elements of Sudan and Zimbabwe National Armies assisting Qadaffi

Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov: We will veto any U.N. No Fly Zone resolution

Venezuela President Chavez proposes peace talks

==============================================

NORTH KOREA

Preparation for third nuclear test

Preparation for missile tests into Sea of Japan or over Japan into Pacific Ocean

North Korea/South Korea border: US Pacific Comma[n]d Key Resolve/Foal Eagle exercises

(((+10,500 US Forces from outside South Korea in addition to +/- 28,000 US Forces from South Korea)))

===============================================

DC Madam teaser: A big "fuck you" to DHS from the grave...

For the curious who really wanted to know what the DC Madam scandal was about: it was about illegal lobbying and appropriations practices, for starters.

From December 2007:

---- Original Message -----

From: Jeane Palfrey

To:

Cc: [...]

Sent: 12/26/2007 9:08:28 PM

Subject: RE: From Verizon records, a DHS member...

Matt… just gotta love it! -Jeane PS if Bil’s suggestion that I was being used as the “fall gal” in the hope, Representative Slaughter’s persistent questioning would stop; thus driving attention away from the likely panorama of corruption the bad actors surely must have been trying to keep hidden – why then would they assume such a strategy would work? Unless of course, they thought I quickly would capitulate and not fight as I have. [Bingo!] Nonetheless, I don’t understand why the ‘gift’ (Pamela Martin’s services) could be seen by Slaughter, as some sort of answer to her investigation into the shenanigans of K Street and the CIA and God only knows who else at this point. After all, I/we were not in c[a]hoots with Wilkes & Company. I was never part of any sort of influence peddling conspiracy. I absolutely had no knowledge whatsoever, of such happenings. And frankly, I suspect neither did any of the women in my employ. Was it perhaps proferred [sic] – by ??? - that I indeed was part of the conspiracy? -Jeane

If you think things have changed since Obama, I have a bridge to sell you...

What gives: Update on the blog and the DC Madam account

As you can tell, I'm not writing (or writhing as much, key here), I'm not posting as much here. The reasons are simple: I have a book to finish, I'm not getting paid for any of this, and I don't owe you anything, nothing whatsoever. There's this weird expectation on the Internet--borne of intellectual slovenliness and cynicism--that everything should be free, everything.

I shouldn't have to remind anyone of this, but what the hell: Nothing in life is really free.

I'll post occasionally on here when I feel like it--when something truly needs to be said--but I have no desire to react to every world and domestic event unless it's going to have some reasonable impact, if the observation could truly contribute to the dialog. For the most part, that's been the case on this blog, but you begin to realize that the beast just wants to be fed, giving nothing in-return, nada, zip. The question, "What's in it for me?" is perfectly reasonable under the circumstances.

Guess who the last person was who made sure I was paid? A clue: she was found hanged in a shed next to her mother's trailer three years ago in May, having been run to her death by the U.S. Courts and Bush loyalist prosecutors. How much help did I get from the "crowd" during all of that? None whatsoever, thanks. She was a criminal--no less--but I was apparently "useful" so she tapped the federal defender's office to pay me for research work on her case, and she hired me, in other words. That's right, a former whore and madam was paying me to help exonerate her, but she also showed more concern about the state of things than you, she put her money where he mouth was to some extent...easily more than you.

I know the economy is "bad," you don't have to tell me, I'm just down the road from Elkhart, Indiana, an epicenter of economic decline that's going unattended. People are just being left to rot there just as they are across the nation. Yet, there are some of you, some readers, who are sitting pretty and who don't really give a damn about the state of things--hollow platitudes aside. It's you creeps that I hate the most and you're in my sights, I'm gunning for frauds like you and will never stop pointing you out, along with the rest of the scum wrecking society, more through indifference than anything else.

They say that hiding your light under a bushel is a sin, but many of you folks make it happen, you make it real. You're the reason that most artists consider burning their work out of defiance, so that you can never enjoy their fruits. Why would someone who's not being facilitated want to assist in saving this shit-house when no one really cares? That's a question I've been asking myself for over two decades, but I don't give up just because of a coterie of jaded turds. Save it: Talk is cheap. Major indie news sites and blogs are suffering the same as I am, getting nothing in donations or any sort of assistance. Of course, this is part of the plan of elites, to starve and silence the progressive voice, but your apathy is far more deadly, more destructive.

The DC Madam account: It's nearing completion of the editing and revision process. You will have to pay for it to read it since I'm planning on a hard-copy edition first, you'll actually have to work to pirate it, little FYI. It should clock in at around 400+ pages (with an index, a species that's nearly extinct in publishing when it's easier than ever to do them), it will have no illustrations or photographs, kiddie illustrations and will be for serious readers only.

The book is an historical account, not a tell-all omnibus text you'd normally have from a kiss-ass mainstream publisher. This was a story for the Internet age, therefore, it took place in that realm in a lot of cases. No one player can know everything that occurred in the story since it played-out on multiple-levels: telecommunications, interpersonal interactions (yes, the sex, and more...), and in court filings, and so on. So, take note Hollywood: not conducive to a narrative rewrite, not a story that lends itself to the cinematic that much.

Hollywood would tell a false narrative anyway, as they tend to do with stories like this.

There are no shoot-outs in the text and it's not a Tom Clancy novel (phew!), but it does have elements of a real world sensation--it was what most of the hype claims to be, it was a profoundly bizarre and unprecedented case in our nation's legal, cultural and political history. The liars like Alex Jones will continue to claim that Palfrey was "murdered" by "shadowy government operatives," which is unsupported by any physical evidence. If Mr. Jones and his clown possess really knew something, they'd be in court, period, the same applying to the rest of the tinfoil hat crowd (like Alex Constantine).

There will be other sex scandals, but the DC Madam one was a line-in-the-sand. There will never be one like it anytime soon and these scandals can be expected to get uglier, the stakes have risen to the point that someone taking Palfrey's route can expect what she got, a legal pile-on by most of the government's judicial and law enforcement bureaucracy. The account is not a conspiracy theory text since it actually contains primary data, actual information pertinent to the case. There is speculation on my part--as a player in the event, something I'm more than entitled to based on what I experienced and witnessed where others--like the conspiracy nut crowd--haven't. That's it.

I told you so Part I : The American groundswell is here

If the events in Madison, Wisconsin, still unfolding as I write this, say anything, it's that you love being wrong. For years now, I've been saying that this was coming, that when the American middle-class really started feeling the love of shipping jobs overseas, the rollback of the right to collective bargaining, the obscene accumulation of wealth amidst growing poverty and millions of mortgage foreclosures, that people were going to rise up and protest.

This is the only thing that ever works in a democracy such as ours: to stand and be counted and to demand one's rights and better conditions. Nothing has been achieved for the average person in human history without demands, it's a law of politics, and therefore, part of the laws of nature. The last time I checked, the laws of physics were still holding.

The walkout of Democratic state representatives in Madison, Wisconsin, the state capital, wasn't the genuine beginning of all of this, it became real when the public came out in the tens-of-thousands. Politicians are rarely the solution in this nation and it has been the working-class who has saved the day more than a few times, even for the ones who did all the wrecking of civil society and the economy, again and again, until it was finally reined-in with the New Deal in the 1930s and the rise of labor.

No one knows where this train is heading, but the fact is, the groundswell has begun, some of its genesis is owed to Wikileaks, but more importantly, to misrule by both major political parties. Consider the walkout of the Democratic representatives in Wisconsin as, yes, an act (one-of -three, refer to your program) of political theater. When it comes down to it, they too will have to be forced by the public into pushing laws that allow for an expansion of collective bargaining and unions, generally.

I won't recount the lies emanating from the right, they're too wacky to even consider seriously.

What's been incredible about all of this is the stupidity of the Libertarian-leaning Republican Governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker. By following the GOP game-plan of going after state worker unions, he also set his sights on the Policeman's Union. He might have had the Wisconsin State Police in his pocket, using them as goons to physically force Democratic lawmakers to return to create a quorum (the minimum number of reps needed to proceed on a vote on a bill). This isn't just un-American, it's illegal and obviously unconstitutional under our system of law.

Governor Walker, then, is a criminal and should be told to resign. If he doesn't resign, he should be dragged before either a grand jury, or an investigating committee. This could be done at either the state or federal level. President Obama is expected to stay out of the battle altogether and cannot be counted on as a friend of labor, let alone the average person. And where is the First Lady?

Apparently, she's no Eleanor Roosevelt and more a Nancy Reagan or a Hillary Clinton, a ghost-bouffant bourgeois who might slip and tell us all to eat cake. Somehow, I think she's smarter than that and smarter than her husband.

There are people far less intelligent: the people who have been telling me for years that this day would never come. I told you so, I really did, and you wouldn't listen because you never will. You have sold your soul for so little that it's a mockery of human life--or even tube worms that swarm around the vents at the bottom of the Atlantic...

The Infernal GPS

"It never works, that contraption, damned it to hell! Let's just wing it." he said exhausted as they passed Grand Central Station. 49th Street couldn't be very far--noting all of the obvious landmarks--but the device was now telling them to go the wrong way down a one way street, somewhere off of Broadway.

"Beware the Ides of March, seizure!" said one of them, dejectedly, becoming more depressed when they came to realize that it was too far off, and also in the wrong direction. A tiny tear formed in their tear-duct and they began to laugh, being unable to stop for several minutes.

The accursed diode box kept mindlessly sputting out wrong directions: "Take a ninety degree angle up 56th, then right to..." and it continued to drone on in likewise manner.

Finally, he took it upon himself to right their course, to return home after the great war of navigating to the island of Manhattan: "Cover your ears...do not listen to the Sirens, for they shall dash us all upon the rocks!" and they all laughed. Next time, dramamine®. Definitely.

I really should post less since it gets more hits post number 1: Anderson Cooper to be joined soon in Cairo by comedienne Kathy Griffin

Testing, testing. Is this mic on? Yo, bitches, yo.

The time has come: erstwhile Cooper and his erstwhile career of erstwhile and ersatz reportage could really liven things up in Cairo and his own "undisclosed location" (either this was a sex joke by CNN or Andy's taken a shining to former VP Dick Cheney) by bringing in Kathy Griffin.

Griffin can pinch his ass, make jokes about what a bourgeois prig he really is, then do real reporting for him, hold his winkie for a little leakie, love.

Antijournalism has been born, that rough beast sloughing towards Bethlehem and Madison Avenue (though it's better to take the subway than cabs, gets you there faster, and be sure to avoid Broadway if you hate heavy traffic...).

Griffin loves to talk-talk-talk about Cooper and his mama--Gloria Vanderbilt--and really knows where to hit the Coop where he lives...the seat of his pants, naturally, and we know what's written on it, in blood.

My only request to Kathy: honey, we really don't want to see what's underneath those clothes, please! Cover! Happy New Year! And Cooper's looking eerily like Culkin-as-Alig these days. Just sayin'! Egypt?! Those cats love the military there! Democracy? They've probably killed it in the crib there already, like that assassination attempt on baby Moses, eh.

The next logical move: Rupert Murdoch pushes Cooper and Griffin into a pay-per-view live sex show at Times Square! Ok, bring in the Japanese pixilation, but who wouldn't want to see the look on his face? Or Kathy's? It would be worth another generation of traumatized children, admit it.

Aging Americans could relive their partying days: "Fuck him Kathy! Fuck him!!" while Cairo goes down in flames, sealing its own fate since the public there is also a Pentagon addict, but hey, they look photogenic, those crowd shots are going to determine fashion for the next ten years, face it.

Welcome to stand-up journalism.

Misspake

With so many unemployed and with so many politicians misspeaking these days, it's time that we considered the creation of a new national career-path: Misspeak Translators.

"What the slobbering, orally defecating ostensible senator from Mississippi meant to say was that he loves chiaroscuro, but won't be voting to save the marshlands or helping the homeless, so go die suckers," would perhaps be some of the words emanating under law from the lips of these "truth-employees" who could steer our very weak officeholders towards--well, the truth--and to serve this great nation's interests in a way that's traditionally been reserved for ten-year-olds and wise asses like me.

Finally, a paycheck! What a country (don't start)!

The lay of the land: Middle East, 01/12/2011

Ed.--From a source in the Middle East (not native to it) working in private security. Breaks and corrections have been added for readability.

=========================

ALERTS: USEUCOM & 6THFLEET///USCENTCOM & 5TH FLEET///NATO///U.N.

=========================

Enterprise Carrier Strike Group on location (Mediterranean Sea off coast of Lebanon)

________ Expeditionary Strike Group (classified)

Israeli Defense Forces pre-staging movement

NATO France naval fleet arrivals (Lebanon former French Colony)

Hezbollah has more SCUD & M600 short range ballistic missiles than most nations (capable of hitting all of Israel)

M600 faster set-up & launch version of SCUD

(((USEUCOM-Israel///USCENTCOM-Lebanon)))

2006 ISRAEL/LEBANON WAR

+/- 200 Israeli civilian & military KIA

+/- 1,000 Lebanon civilian & military KIA

USCENTCOM:

http://www.centcom.mil/en/lebanon/

Lebanese [SIC] Hezbollah continues to undermine security throughout the Levant by undermining the authority of the Lebanese government, threatening Israel, and providing training and support to extremist groups outside Lebanon. Syria and Iran continue to violate UN Security Council resolutions and provide support to Hezbollah - support which allowed Hezbollah to instigate and wage a war against Israel in 2006 and reconstitute its armaments afterward.

"Assassinated" Arizona congressional Rep. Gabrielle Giffords is UNDEAD

She has become Ligeia, every simultaneously living and dead character straight out of Poe's short stories. The press disagrees all over the place: She's alive, she's dead, she's in critical condition--no, no, wait, she's dead, really, we mean it this time, really.

Welcome to the (mis)information age. One story has it that she's alive one moment, the next, that she is dead. No one needs to be told to jump to conclusions when the press has already done it for them in this era of instant gratification.

Nothing is true, everything is permitted--under copyright law. Welcome to the 19th century, it's back, and everyone's an expert on anything you can name, regardless of whether they have any credentials or not.

Breaking News: Gabrielle Giffords is undead, undead, undead, undead...

http://news.google.com/news/story?hl=en&q=Arizona+congresswoman+dead&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ncl=dyWPwW5FGhNgspMMUxFOa5u4-U5_M&ei=vMkoTZ6OOISq8AahufT8AQ&sa=X&oi=news_result&ct=more-results&resnum=1&ved=0CBkQqgIwAA

Dan Zukovic's Dark Arc (2005) review

If anything is obvious about Dan Zukovic it's that he's a cultural enigma and that a violent personal sense of boredom with modern life pervades his work. Why would someone want to piss off their audience? Why not if it's art with a purpose? The man loves to provoke his audience, to piss them off, and to make them laugh again and think, which in turn makes them even more pissed off, a neat trick.

I can relate. In the embarrassing days of “grunge” he fronted the incident-provoking Northwestern Canadian band “the Gargoyles” whose recorded works must be somewhere next to impossible to find and could be described as incredibly obnoxious. Good luck in your search of his music outside of his films, he's shooting for obscurity on purpose.

Since that time, the raconteur’s been writing and playing his inimitable style of underground rock, writing and directing plays, and so far, one film each decade. His career in theater seems to stretch back to the late 1980s. Zukovic, then, has a solid background in stage, television (he was seen in two episodes of the X-Files) and screen and is mainly known for creating one of the great satiric cult hits of the 1990s: The Last Big Thing, which featured the then-unknown Mark Ruffalo (Shutter Island) in one of his first film performances. Call it myopic, but I have to love someone this determined in making their vision a reality, then hiding it under a bush for the thoughtful.

Zukovic dipped his own toes into the mainstream culture during that lame-ass decade of the 1990s and is found in a memorable character performance in the sci-fiction horror film, Disturbing Behavior; but that's about all he's done for the most part of over a decade as a freelance actor. At one point in the early 1990s he was making appearances in "Matlock" and several in "Days of Our Lives." He's a very elusive man. Just try finding much information on him, anywhere. Even in the age of the Internet, he's managed to remain mostly an enigma. Is he hiding from the “suits”? These are some of the other people he's interested in within his works, those people who took that other path he mostly rejected, the careerist. From what I took from both of his comedies he both admires and loathes them.

He saves some special hatred for corporate suits, but if the suit fits... ”Admires”? Yes, Zukovic admires them, though he sports a cravat more often than a conventional tie so the blood-flow to his brain is intact.

"Admires?" Yes, I wrote admire, so shut the fuck up already. First: he admires them for their nihilist discipline and even some of their accomplishments, but he also fears and hates them since they're probably some of the very same people he has to deal with in order to get a film financed and distributed, and his films are extremely low-budget as it is, he has to go begging for money. The fear is always going to be there that you're dealing with a flaky, ineffectual desk-bound asswipe with an ego (and bank account) big enough to poison your vision and kill the movie with the swipe of a pen, potentially ruining years of work and preparation. In other words, an executive producer—or worse—some asshole that they sent to represent their interests, a shill, a glorified gofer with an MBA and no imagination.

If your luck's really bad the shill will also secretly hate creative people, not simply the director, but anyone with a creative bone in their body working on the production and go after them.

There are other problems: you still need a competent and motivated crew--however small--and that's even before the costs of post-production editing and dubbing, the finishing of a movie, and promotion. This is the curse and the bane of all artists who have to work in expensive mediums like film, a century-old battle between art and commerce. I believe Zukovic keeps things small so that his chances of ever brushing-up against redundant bureaucratic asswipes is going to be a statistical error. I'd imagine that he witnessed his share of these kinds turds and their malignant influence working on the "X-Files" and its spin-off, "Millennium," as well as in his walk-on parts in other Hollywood fare. That's probably some of the key to his self-accusations, that he felt he'd sold-out at some point as an artist and was making-amends for being a hypocrite and a pretentious ass in public to average, naïve people who sincerely just wanted to have fun when they all collided some two decades ago.

Yes, it was artistic “frisson” at play to screw with ordinary people, and yes, he's clearly learned from his mistakes. That still doesn't stop him from pointing the finger at his audience and needling them, which he does expertly. His movies, then, can be seen as a form of penance and Zukovic should himself be admired for it. This is something that takes incredible courage--to put yourself out there like that. ridiculing oneself. The “war”--if there is one between the writer/director and the money people—often seeps into the narrative of his stories, and that's where some of the self-accusation comes into play. Many motion pictures, and even plays, have this “hidden” subtext in them (like later Peckinpah), but Dan just lets it all hang out, all over the place, so it's not so hard to understand why it takes a special group of backers to be attracted to his work. Like the suits, nothing stops this guy from doing his thing.

They say that the tough get tougher and the weird just get weirder, but who wants to hire a Private Detective just to experience someone's art? In the modern world, the weird is becoming commonplace and it's not necessarily entertaining, though art and entertainment are two different things. What's left when everything is the same urban sprawl? Don't people start to hallucinate in solitary confinement after awhile? Yes. The mind is eventually going to wander, create, and entertain itself when everything becomes the same empty routine. But when is something adapting to life through humor and when is it someone going nuts? When is it all of the above? Raging against an ocean of indifference and a vast cultural wasteland that was always there in some form or another has an implicit comic humor to it, but also all of the elements of profound tragedy.

Zukovic is so divinely twisted that he's capable of finding humor in a yawning spiritual abyss, an impressive feat for any artist. I've known about Dark Arc for over five years wondering how I was going to be able to see it outside of some stodgy, remote film festival. There's some implied strategy here, like that of his protagonists. Leave them wanting more, and so he does, a good rule of thumb for anyone wanting to make an impact and to preserve the power of their images.

Even being able to find a trailer or a clip of the The Last Big Thing online--until very recently--has been practically impossible and any biographical information on its author is scant at best. Does this guy ever do interviews? I'd imagine promotional appearances are a rarity for Zukovic and I can't blame him. The availability of his films still begs the question: “Does he attempt to promote his films at all?” Yes, apparently so, since they've made the rounds of various international film festivals without much luck in getting the attention and the interest of distributors--or at least ones who were willing to cut him and his investors a square deal (for readers who don't understand traditional movie distribution, just recall all the horror stories from the music industry and it should make sense).

Zukovic doesn't seem to be interested in some kind of hollow fame or anything beyond his ability to keep producing plays and his quirky comedies, which is enough effort in itself.

What's most interesting is that he's had more luck finding American investors for his low-budget comedies than native Canadian ones, but that's also a matter of the Great White North's legendary tax credit laws and his projects come cheap to foreign backers. Americans always love a deal. Being a fan of this guy's work is a daunting task, but I think like all great finds, the hunting was worth the effort. No matter: The Last Big Thing was picked up for cable in the late 1990s. It's been shown at film festivals and on IFC and Cinemax over the years and received the inevitable bootlegging treatment—my own copy was taped off of broadcast TV over a decade ago.

Cultural obsessives of the obscure will be happy to know that a DVD of it is slated for release for sometime in 2011, just shy of twenty years after its obscure initial release. Does the mainstream media shun this guy? Does he shun them? Both? It's a hard call in an era that demands answers to everything, and be fast about it, will ya? Zukovic's having none of that and I'd wager that had he wanted stardom he would've achieved it around the same time that Ruffalo did, within the last fifteen years. Did he ever want that fame? I believe he did, but rejected it and its trappings.

He's a strange bird--to put it mildly--and he has a screen presence that's unforgettable, looking like an emaciated John Saxon-on-Sartre with an obsession for high culture street fighting. There must have been some intellectual crisis for Zukovic by the mid-1990s since high culture and its failings was the main theme of his first film. Logically, he's also obsessed with criticizing cultural snobbery, namely his own, and opening oneself up like this can only be art; the humor of it all is obvious without being preachy. Like all of the greats of comedy, he understands comic timing and rarely ever misses a beat. To make great comedy takes incredible effort in such jaded and cynical times, but he manages to pierce the layers of defense in a way that's timeless, a rare gift in a world that doesn't care that it doesn't care.

The key to some humor is in being annoying which Zukovic excels at, right down to his hilarious fuzz-guitar stings which always come at the right emotional moment. To be sure, he's a good example of a Renaissance man working on several levels at once. You could literally ignore the high culture jargon in his two films and have no difficulty understanding what he's saying about the characters--just listen to and observe the comic interactions between them and it all makes natural comedic sense. There's also a great love/hate/ambivalence for the everyman at play, the “average fuck,” the “basic fucker,” in the Zukovic universe, a love of people who are simply unassuming and sincere in their basic ignorance. If you've ever been in a scene or an artistic milieu, these gasps for “normal” air can be refreshing.

There's a point where you have to admit to yourself that you wouldn't want to be, for example, in the same room as Picasso or Rimbaud, and certainly not with Jackson Pollock on a drunken tear. This love of ordinary people is something to be treasured and the director's finest moments are when his snobbish stand-ins for himself are confronted with their jaded assholism by people who aren't nearly as stupid and ignorant as they assumed. Too often, the life of the self-described Bohemian has been a refuge for emotional retards too afraid to embrace people and life, running to elitism, a manufactured classism that obscures their lowly-roots and what most of them really are: cowards.

Zukovic is no coward. Both of his films have some magic turning-points where these confrontations with "normals" happen, though I'm not going to give those moments away to the reader, they'll know them when they see them. The truth is, if we don't change and grow in this life, we ultimately die.

With its obvious use of theme-named characters Dark Arc could be a satirical story by Terry Southern. Zukovic casts himself once again as the protagonist of the tale, a Viscount Laris, a walking cultural anachronism out of Cervante's Don Quixote searching for...searching for what? Does he even know? Laris is the quintessential wannabe artiste since they have such an ill-defined place in a modern technological world, an almost soulless human society that has no appreciation of the divine, of the symbols or of art itself, only viewing it as a commodity to be sold. It's a world that devours meaning and that's ultimately what the characters of Zukovic's stories so desperately want in their colorless lives; their feeble attempts at finding that meaning is often their first mistake since they should stick with making it honestly and for the right reasons. Instead, most of them use it as an indirect form of communication that's bound to fail.

This is a lot like the dialogue of the equally damaged characters in Steven Soderbergh's very personal Schizopolis (1996) which not-so-ironically contained actual sentences taken directly from the incomprehensible notes of movie producers to the director from his early days navigating the completely batshit Hollywood system. Do they ever connect with each other? In Zukovic's universe, they do, and the writer/director offers a sense of redemption for his tortured creatures, albeit an utterly bizarre one in the case of Dark Arc. Zukovic offers us a very peculiar love triangle, because...well, just because, folks. Boy-meet-girl still packs-'em-in.

Without giving too much away, Laris takes his recently acquired aristocratic title to its logical conclusion in a way that would do Aaron Burr proud. Laris is looking for love, yes, but also the ultimate experience in a mind-deadening present, that great image he's been looking to recapture from his childhood, an ineffable archetype to heal something that's missing, something that's broken inside. Serendipity brings Lamia his way, but is it a good thing? It's tragicomic, but Zukovic is being very serious while at the same time prodding us into laughter; oftentimes, he makes both possible, as though he were some Peckinpah of art house cinema, making us confront ourselves for a laughter that he's coaxed us into, a mercurial touch. What's funniest is when his well drawn characters have their social masks fall--or are ripped-off violently--and the gloves are truly off.

Once the quasi-aristocratic facade slips, the North American working-class origins start coming out in full-bloom like a drunken sailor out on a mission for a prime piece of ass, and expressed in roughly the same terms.

Laris meets “Juxta/Lamia” (a role which is nailed to the floor by Sarah Strange who also appeared on the X-Files), his muse, a woman straight out of an image he first encountered in his childhood: a vintage photograph of a woman lying on a couch in a Berlin opium den, circa 1923. That's pretty specific, isn't it? The dryness of it all reminds me of the best of Bunuel, that sardonic laugh at the absurdity of the human condition and all of the pointless machinations people descend to on the Pilgrim's road to getting laid. To make things more absurd, Zukovic throws in a geeky, aged graphic designer (played subtly by Kurt Max Runte) with a dead-end life who suddenly comes to the attentions of Laris and Juxta. Laris has it in mind to cultivate the “basic fuck” through repeated exposure to “charged imagery,” frequently in the form of his muse, festooned as a “slash of pink.”

The sexual tension is everywhere in the storyline to the point that I felt compelled at one point to utter aloud, “For fuck's sake, just tell him to fuck you, goddamn it.” I was watching it alone, at home on my laptop. That's good filmmaking and a natural storytelling ability.

Dark Arc's obsessions are similar to the Last Big Thing's, but where writer/director Zukovic and company diverge is the greater focus--and I mean this literally--on imagery and the power of the image on people, so it has a greater visual beauty than his first feature. Intriguingly, there's an examination of both the male and female gaze, a visual-pun that the director handles well, if darkly. For fans of his first film, yes, Edvard Munch's “The Scream” makes a comic return more than once. The beauty of all this is that you don't have to know about the great artistic, intellectual and literary movements of the last two hundred years to get the humor of this very dry film. For all of its high flown language and imagery, the focus is still on what it always has to be in drama: people and their problems.

These are extremely weird ones, mind you, but people all the same. Suffice it to say that Zukovic is most obsessed with people who are unable to relate to or to communicate with each other conventionally anymore, which is the great tragedy of our time. These are people who are--to put it politely--profoundly neurotic, dysfunctional, and terminally middle-class. There's always a deep sadness about our eternal consumerist present underpinning all of this—that over-thought and desaturated bleakness of modern life, the unfulfilled promises of rock, religion, politics, art, philosophy and literature. The hipster sense of elitist solitude that was always a part of North America's counterculture is his clay to fashion as he will and damned if he isn't angry about it, and at himself, for once being that snobby social creature.

There's a lot to be angry about when unfulfilled promise is the rule of the day. This sense of an end of culture is echoed in the brilliant comebacks Zukovic nails a vapid scenester with in the third act of the story; it's a brilliant compression of the life-cycle of a hipster scene, going from superficial fun that in-turn almost as rapidly disintegrates into conformism and paranoid cliquishness, alienation and acrimony. You have to hand it to an artist who's accusing himself for laughs while kicking his own milieu squarely up the ass.

When everyone's a hipster and in on the joke, the ultimate irony of this era, what's left? A film like this is a rare event indeed, even in an age when most are going to view it for the first time on their laptops or in the privacy of their own homes. What's left after every conceivable form of cultural rebellion has been assimilated and drained of its power and purpose (originally intended to subvert a death loving dominant culture)? What's left? The individual. That's who made Dark Arc, for the rest of us sitting out there in the darkness, often alone, in a room full of people.

CNN reports dumb-assed Al Qaeda salad bar/buffet plot after GOP stalls Food Safety Act for months

Is there not a better sign of the end of an Empire and a nation in serious trouble? Just don't tell the Obama-holdouts, they might get upset. Who on God's gray earth would believe this horseshit but a Republican or a Libertarian, all of them with serious emotional and intellectual issues regarding reality? "Al-Qaeda plot threatens America's salad bars and buffets." You gotta be kidding, right?

It beggars the imagination that someone without the ability to imagine would believe something a ten year old could see through or do a better job of concocting.

Just as they did under Bush II, being a venerable asset of Empire and the GOP, CNN is selling a very lame-assed scare story to boost another war criminal's sagging popularity ratings as well as providing some cover for corrupt food growers and processors who wanted the Food Modernization Act. Apparently, high school never ended and life has now become Facebook. How is this different from all the times that George W. Bush cried "WOLF!" (not CNN's Blitzer, or even Donner) with the terror alert warnings to save his own ass, for political ends? It's not at all and it's not the only example, Obama's just less obvious about it than the last clown.

Seriously: President Barack Obama is the same as George W. Bush, wake up assholes, pull your heads out of your collective-ass and stop having this.

CNN's talking-neck was barely able to read the salad bar/buffet headline it was so stupid, so nebbish, so moronic and transparently unimportant pap that was probably lifted from a surveillance log of someone simply toying with the idea of joining a terror cell...after a few bong-hits or a lift from some meth. Get real, quit insulting our intelligence with your counterintelligence, your disinformation predicated on scaring the dummies that over-populate every nation so that we hand over even more of our rights to a predatorial establishment.

Great, someone was going to "poison" salad bars and buffets across America...and somehow they weren't American food growers and producers who routinely employ illegal immigrants, who then lobby the GOP all of the time for fewer regulations on food safety. Yes, it was a smart timing to run the bogus Al-Qaeda story just hours after the GOP had stalled the Food Safety Act for months, very wise, well-timed. How long did they stall its passage? Since March of this year, nine whole months, which is roundly un-American.

Besides the GOP's tail-dragging on to poison the public, or not to poison it, these were some of the major opponents of the very reasonable bill--unless some of us prefer a little e-coli with our spinach, watermelons and potatoes (take that Dan Quayle!), and TEA:

Freedomworks

Competitive Enterprise Institute

American Mushroom Institute

National Potato Council

National Watermelon Association

Produce Marketing Association

United Fresh Produce Association

The John Birch Society

National Cattleman's Beef Association

Western Growers

American Academy of Microbiology

Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund
(http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=s111-510)

Any familiar names here? It passed the Senate on November 30th of this year anyway, but there was more stalling from the GOP.

And you Democratic incumbents: You can stop with the good cop, bad cop act. We're on to you. We know this is all just political theater and we're about to call bullshit on this whole clown show. We're not having it anymore, you're done. For a moment, I thought they were saying that Jimmy Buffett was being targeted by terrorists, which makes just as much sense and is just as credible...

Wikileaks mirror: http://213.251.145.96/

WWW--Hit it, I am.

There are daily updates on the State Dept. cables at this point. This is much bigger than the Pentagon Papers. Regardless of what happens, no matter what foolhardy legislation gets passed to ban this whistle-blowing, Pandora's box has been opened and the lid cannot be closed, ever again.

For those of you out there who don't get how the dissemination of technology works--too bad--you cannot stop this, it's a done deal. The negative response from the mainstream media was to be expected. A healthy democracy requires that the public not be deceived. We have to know the machinations of power to remain free. Sad and pathetic then that so many Americans are knee-jerking right now on this and insisting as is their wont to remain ignorant, to remain in the dark about what their government is doing in the name of corporations.

That's how a slave that's been beaten into submission thinks...if you want to call it thinking. Seeing yet another Populist-opening, Ron Paul (in his role of "good cop" to his son Rand's dueling banjo "bad cop") has been advocating for such leaks and saying there need to be more groups like them. This is interesting since he must be anticipating the next round of leaks--if they actually make it out the gate--coming from Bank of America, and possibly even Goldman Sachs and other major corrupt financial players on Wall Street. I'm skeptical of his sincerity and view most of what he says and does publicly as political theater. Let's not make it a tragedy, shall we? In Paul's hands, it's likely to be tragicomic.

Paul can say such things because he knows he'll never have to follow through on them. Like Democratic representatives who constantly crow over sundry social-ills--knowing full well thhat the political context is wrong to expedite it and that they're not going to do anything about them of any substance--he's just sounding off as he usually does. Great, have fun with that one, but what about fixing our nation? That's called rhetoric, folks, demagoguery, and it makes one wonder where all the adults went.

Recall that Paul's not so far removed from Ayn Rand or Milton Friedman in his wackiness. Today he's talking about taking down the Federal Reserve with a parallel system of backing currency with gold when everyone should know there's not enough in the entire world to do it. As usual, he's trying to create a false impression. The reality is, he's no Robert M. Lafollette, one of the very few genuine progressive Republicans that ever was, the legendary Senator from Wisconsin.

If the GOP ever had a soul, it lost it when Lafollette died in 1925, giving into corporate interests over the role of government in American life, the very forces the senator at that time railed strenuously against. In case you didn't notice, he lost to people like Paul and the rest of them now occupying our government via the GOP's corporate-political nexus. Does that sound like a friendly crowd to you? Paul isn't exactly a friend of the working man and woman at all and doesn't believe in a social safety net, but neither do most Democrats these days since they report to the same bosses.

Where does the Wikileaks release of State Department cables covering 1966-2010 fit into to all of this? The warnings of Mark Twain, of Marine Corps General Smedley Butler that imperialism will be the ruination of the United States.

The State Department figures highly in all of this since they lobby relentlessly for American corporate interests overseas all of the time. It's their primary job besides formulating the policies to expedite this overall agenda and--this is key here--selling it to an American public that they do their best to keep in the dark. They have every reason to since most of us would reject that agenda outright if we were to know of it in real time. Yelling "national security" gets results and keeps the locals at bay. This abuse of secrecy is what makes the "sell" easier and why at least half of the public goes along with the dumbshow that's going to take the rest of us over the cliff.

Wikileaks is doing the work of an impaired corporate-owned press, and now the real scrambling begins. The battle for your mind has truly begun, to keep it ignorant so that their agenda can continue, one that's a direct threat to you and everyone you know. It began this summer when the State Department realized their post-9/11 sharing of information with military analysts had backfired, coming in the form of the whistle-blower PFC. Bradley Manning.

Make no mistake: Manning is a hero, this is a turning-point, an opening, and we had better start taking it. Read the cables and decide for yourself whether the State Department is acting in your best interests and why you don't want to know the facts contained within them.

Give them hell.

The deafening silence of the Tea Party demographic over yet another unfunded mandate

Where's all the outrage over the extension of Bush II tax-cuts for the rich? OK, we all saw this coming since Libertarians and the other red-headed stepchildren on the right ditched rational thought and a sense of social responsibility ages ago, but where is it? Where's that traditional conservative force and principle?

The fact is, the tax-cuts are one of the most massive unfunded mandates in our history. Cue the sound of crickets until another African-American makes it to the White House...

They shouldn't worry so much about this president, but being what they are, they're going to keep begging the question since they cannot cope emotionally since we have a Black one, and one I don't even like, trust, or support. Let me be crystal clear: I didn't vote for this asshole. I understand that the lawn jockey was recently stolen from the Bush dynasty's compounds, but no worries--the current president should be attending their next family reunion, so it's good, it's doss.

Meanwhile--back at the ranch--white closet racists will have to cling to what's left of their puerile fantasy while little has changed for the good in America, and that their irrational support for an empty-suit was just one more case of the mirror being held-up to them.

Once again, they failed the test. How are they so different from the Tea Baggers?

Happy holidays Bill Ayers!

On the Wikileaks State Dept. cable controversy

WWW--Make no mistake: The leaking of the State Department cables is--far-and-away--bigger than the release of the Pentagon Papers. Even that scandal's whistle-blower, Daniel Ellsberg, is giving this one a thumb's-up, and so am I and millions. Could we be wrong? I don't think so at all.

I wholeheartedly support their release because crimes are routinely committed in the name of the American public. This is about institutionalized corruption being hidden from the public and the world; the victims of American foreign policy are the first to know, the American public, the last, and for good reason. That's a systematic abuse of power and calls for things like this release to happen just as systematically if we wish to live in a free and open society. Such releases are the best defense we can possibly have since these clowns are risking our lives every single day in the service of anarchic and unregulated power.

These people in the State Department and the national security state are going to get us all killed if we're not careful; they're the great terrorists of our common era.

This last week has brought numerous attacks on Wikileaks, and coming from all kinds of nefarious corners, across the globe. It's coming from an international, criminal power structure that's bent on total domination of the rest of us, the salt of the earth, the average man and woman, everyone outside of the corridors of power. This is, in the words and observations of many of us on the true left in America, the first major information war, a war with incredible stakes: The survival of human civilization and possibly the species itself, not merely the freedom of the average man and woman.

Make no mistake that the mask is off and that this is a global phenomena. It's not just America's mask being ripped-off. Predictably, the shills and lackeys are coming out of the woodwork and exposing themselves to patch things and instate damage control. Amazon.com, Ebay/Paypal, Time Magazine, CBS, CNN, and much of the rest of the American mainstream media as well as corporations are running into the fray. The walls of their Castle system are quaking right now and it's time to take notes on who's part of the problem. It's now obvious who they are.

A national security issue? It is, just not the way it's being presented. We, the people of the world, have a right to know these things--we must know them for our own safety and the preservation of human rights and democracy itself, now under incredible and sustained attack. The stakes couldn't be any higher. Many Internet providers like Amazon are cutting the lines that feed Wikileaks into the United States.

This is mainly to keep the American public where it's usually at: In the dark, the last to know what is being done in their name, and what is being done is systematic crime, make no mistake about it. This is crucial for unaccountable power to succeed, which could mean the end of us all.

Links to Wikileaks mirrors and foreign-subsidiaries: http://czardonic.wordpress.com/

Movie star Mark Ruffalo is being harassed for his antiwar and progressive acts

Where's that change? I'm not seeing any with President Obama, just a continuation of the Bush II agenda, which means that of the super-rich. In May of this year, Mark Ruffalo (Zodiac, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Last Big Thing, Shutter Island, etc.) and about 1,800 other prominent American liberals (including linguist and intellectual Noam Chomsky) singed a petition that was published as a full-page ad in a very visible New York magazine accusing the new president of war crimes.

In some respects this is worse than Bush. First, because Obama has claimed the right to assassinate American citizens whom he suspects of ‘terrorism,’ merely on the grounds of his own suspicion or that of the CIA, something Bush never claimed publicly.

They're not only factually correct in their assertion, they have a constitutionally protected right to express it without recourse. The new president--like his predecessor--doesn't appear to believe this. Odd for a constitutional scholar.

Ruffalo is generally known as an "indie" actor, but his star has been in ascendancy over the last decade, and along with that, he's been vocal in recent years about his concerns that America is rapidly moving away from its most cherished ideals, away from democracy. With endless capitulations to the corporate sector by both major political parties, endless and pointless wars, very open political corruption, and a host of misdeeds that don't need to be recalled here since we don't have all day to recount simply the ones committed under the Bush II administration, (the one that the new president's resembles more all of the time), it's definitely time to speak your peace.

Indeed, Ruffalo has been doing just that: There was the aforementioned petition, but he's been on the path of several causes, and they're valid ones. His most recent has gotten him on a terror watch list via the Pennsylvania Department of Homeland Security, part of the DHS, a decidedly corrupt institution for a war on a pronoun, so you know it's a joke on the public, and one they approved of initially.

With the ending of the "terror alert" color-coded system that everyone began ignoring after it was abused for openly political reasons, they have good reason to be concerned when a likable guy like Ruffalo starts going around accusing the president and corporations of corruption, of criminal behavior. People are already all ears, and after the BP catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, it's even money that they're pissed-off. Into this latter fray enters Mr. Ruffalo who has been inviting members of the public to screenings of GasLand, a documentary that covers incredibly dangerous oil-drilling practices such as "fracking" that contaminate drinking water in the areas it's done in, one of them being Pennsylvania.

This was enough for the PDHS to place Ruffalo--a movie star actor--on a terror watch list. Ruffalo thinks "[it's] pretty fuckin' funny," and to some extent it is, but it also isn't. He was brushing-up against Big Oil, maybe even firms like Halliburton. What I want to know is who made the decision here. Were his other progressive activities taken into account? Was the White House a part of any of these decisions? What recourse would an average citizen have had in this case?

Hold-outs: He's not what you think he is. Actions speak louder than words.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/dailydish/detail?entry_id=77671

Information on the May 2010 petition accusing President Obama of war crimes: http://weaselzippers.us/2010/05/15/2000-us-actors-prominent-liberals-accuse-obama-of-war-crimes-says-hes-worse-than-bush-for-authorizing-assassination-of-anwar-al-awlaki/