Congratulation Sonia Sotomayor

This morning President Obama announced Sonia Sotomayor as his nominee for the Supreme Court. If appointed she'd be the first Hispanic on the court and only the third woman, which is kind of ridiculous when you think about it. It's almost certain she'll get enough votes in Congress to take the position, though conservatives will put up a fight. "ACTIVIST JUDGE! ACTIVIST JUDGE!" Though, I wonder if the Republicans would really want to attack her so strongly. The party already has issues with the Hispanic community from the debate over immigration, and seemingly ganging up on the first Hispanic nominee to the Supreme Court, even if their points are justified, might not go over so well.

It's Inauguration Day. Yay!

Election Day Is Here! Top 10 Political Films

Election day is finally here, and everyone should be voting today, hopefully for Obama, so I decided to do a brief posting on my Top 10 political films. Now with some of these I may be stretching the idea of what a political film is, but I do associate all of them with American politics. I did, however, decide not to include any documentaries.

1. Nashville (Robert Altman, 1975)
2. The Manchurian Candidate (John Frankenheimer, 1962)
3. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)
4. Dr. Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick, 1964)
5. Reds (Warren Beatty, 1981)
6. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Frank Capra, 1939)
7. Primary Colors (Mike Nichols, 1998)
8. Election (Alexander Payne, 1999)
9. All the President's Men (Alan J. Pakula, 1976)
10. Wag the Dog (Barry Levinson, 1997)

Remember to VOTE today!

Sarah Palin in 2012? Dear God Help Us All!

With the presidential election finally coming to close tomorrow, and Barack Obama seemingly on the verge of victory (crosses fingers), there is a ton of speculation that Sarah Palin will run for president in 2012. Now I don't doubt that if she loses this election (crosses fingers again) she will try for the Republican nomination in the next go around, but I highly doubt she will get it. The majority of her support comes from what is considered to be the base of the party, ultra-conservative, white, rural, evangelical Christians, but as evidenced in this past primary season, the Republican party is a fractious group trying to find its identity. McCain had won the nomination only by default. The media, being friends with McCain, essentially spun it as the party deciding it was now his time, that he paid his dues and now deserves their support. When he won the South Carolina primary, the media claimed the state's Republicans felt they owed McCain, after the vicious 2000 primary when they passed him over for Bush, but in reality he got about the same percentage of the vote this year as he did in 2000. McCain only won it because the rest of the vote was fractured between Huckabee and Romney, rather than coalesced behind one candidate. The party was essentially divided into two camps, a populist, grassroots evangelical christian group who supported Huckabee, and the traditional fiscal conservatives and party elders who grouped around Romney. Huckabees people wouldn't support Romney because he was Mormon, and Romney's people wouldn't support Huckabee because he was a populist who felt government should do more to help the poor. It was a fracture of the coalition Reagan assembled in the late 70s and early 80s which led to his presidency, and I'm actually surprised that it took this long for the fracture to occur, because from a historical perspective, these were two groups that were always in opposition to each other with two separate goals. The Republican party, however, managed to join them together by creating a social identity for themselves. They were the pro-America party, the small town values party, the Christian party - basically the party who would protect America from liberals and their causes. The party elders and fiscal conservatives would placate evangelical Christians by saying how they would bring God back into government, they would bring back school prayer, overturn Roe vs. Wade, and make schools teach Creationism/Intelligent Design, none of which they actually did, while convincing them that what they wanted was small government, i.e. tax cuts for corporations, the repeal of the estate tax, deregulation of banking and insurance institutions, which hey, they actually did. By merging these two groups and their separate values, I think the Republican party actually created another group, which serves as its actual base and its reason for winning multiple elections - AWMs, angry white males. These were men who were convinced they were somehow losing out. Even though they actually support a larger government, since they stilll want their Social Security and Medicaid once they get old, they want the federal government to fix their roads and bridges, and when a disaster happens they want aid from the government to rebuild, AWMs are dramatically opposed to big government, because what big government represents is hard-working middle class white people being overtaxed, in order for the government to give free money out to poor black people so they don't have to work. Republicans have convinced AWMs this is why they pay so much in taxes, and not because they are being screwed over by large corporations who get tax reductions and in turn still pay their workers minimally. So where was I going with this? AWMs who make up the base of the party aren't going to support Sarah Palin. Sure they supported her this go around, but that's only because she was for vice-president, and really it was more that she was running for first lady, since many in the party weren't too warm to Cindy McCain, who can come off as elitist. Palin can rally the base to support another candidate, she can be the attack dog, being a voice for the odd concerns and fears of the AWMs, but in the end, I really don't think they'd line up in support of a woman at the top of the ticket, which is why I believe she won't be the nominee, God willing.

Sarah Palin on SNL

Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live - Not so good. She seemed kind of uncomfortable, although I guess you would be after having been skewered so badly on the show. Amy Poehler's rap about her was hilarious though. The rest of the show kind of sucked, even with the ever watchable Josh Brolin and Adelle, whose album I must buy now.

V.P. Debate

I watched the vice-presidential debate last night, as did a good portion of the country, according to the ratings, and I made the mistake, again, of watching it on CNN. For some reason, they decided to put a graph at the bottom of the screen tracking an audience's approval or diapproval of the nominee's answers. During the first presidential debate last week, the audience was a collection of Democratics, Republicans, and Independents, with each group having an individual line representing it, which would go up or down. Last night the audience was composed of Ohio independents, divided into men and woman, with each gender having there own line. The graphs are incredibly distracting, as they affect your perception of the debate. I got so invested in watching the line and hoping that Biden would cause it to go up with each of his answers, and then I'd worry if started to drop and I'd just be thinking, "Joe come on say say something better." Any time Palin said something that caused a jump in the approval I'd just think, "No, no you can't believe her." As a result of all this I missed the overall view of the debate. It would be fine if CNN tracked an audience's approval of the debate without a live graph of it, and then discussed the results after the precedings were over. But, anyway, who do I think won the debate - um, I don't know. Personally I much preferred Biden. The whole "aww shucks" approach of Palin is just downright annoying, and she didn't really answer a good chunk of the questions. The polls taken after the debate show a larger group of people believe Biden won the debate over Palin, so at least there's that. I think the main importance of last night was that no one did any harm to their campaigns. Palin didn't stand their drooling, looking like a deer in head lights, and Biden didn't go after her, which the media and McCain campaign would have said was horribly sexist and offensive. I still wish the moderator, Gwen Ifill, had brought up issues like Roe v. Wade and the role of the Supreme Court and evolution. The belief in evolution, I think, is an important reflection of a person's decision making skills. On one hand you have the work of many scientists over the last three decades, fossil records, genetic research and other hard evidence that organisms evolved from other organisms over the course of millions of years, and then on the other hand, you have a book written a couple of thousand years ago, and no certainty of whether it was meant as the literal truth, a metaphor, or a moral tale. To shape your understanding of the world around a single tale, rather than a bunch of hard evidence, is a sign of poor judgment. That's why the current president believed we could invade Iraq, have everyone love us and quickly set up a prospering democracy, despite all the past history of fighting between different Muslim sects and Arab countries not wanting to have intervention by Western nations. You can't shape your view of the world just on faith.

Tina Fey is Sarah Palin

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/9/14/0645/19693/936/598087

Here's a link to the Daily Kos, where you can find the video for last night's opening of Saturday Nigh Live. Youtube will take it down soon, so I don't know how long it will work, but there is also a link at Daily Kos to a transcript of the scene. The sketch was absolutely hilarious, featuring Tina Fey as Sarah Palin and Amy Poehler as Hilary Clinton. The brilliance of it, was how it combined the hypocrasy of the media's and the right-wing's sudden concern for sexism, Clinton's desire for her to be president and not just any woman, Palin's "experience" and her beliefs in Creationism, Clinton's almost forced endorsement of Obama, Palin's pageantry past, the media's lack of a backbone in questioning Palin, the over-rehearsed and repeated lipstick joke, the idea that Palin understands foreign relations because Alaska is near Russia, and the ridiculous answers Palin gave in her interview with Charles Gibson, all into a five minute segment. I was laughing my ass off, as it was the funniest thing the show has done in years. The rest of the show pretty much stunk, as the boring, personalityless ogre-face hosted the show. Oy...get better hosts SNL.

Oh My God! Like, There's Stuff on TV!

With not much currently going on in my life, I tend to watch the TV at night during the week. Yeah yeah, it's sad....I really should be involved in another crappy relationship, instead. Of course it's the summer and there hasn't been much on television worth grabbing my attention. Swingtown was fun, though it didn't reach its potential, the Olympics and the Democratic Convention were entertaining spectacles, and Mad Men and Generation Kill made Sunday a great night for television, but other than that it was....zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz! Last night there was actually stuff to watch with a new episode of Project Runway, which continued this season's greatness (Diane von Furstenberg, I love you) and the season premiere of America's Next Top Model. Yeah I know ANTM is by no means the height of culture, but I find it thoroughly entertaining. Currently for me it's all about the trannie, Isis, and the French girl Marjorie. Also, Tyra continues to be batshit insane, and it's what makes her completely necessary for TV.

Oh yeah, there was also the Republican National Convention, but I had no interest in it. Watching a bunch of Republicans giving speaches to each other is like being in the Twilight Zone. There is no sense of reality. With the Democrats, yes there is the obvious partisanship, but through it all you can still grasp a sense of the real world, something relatable. You watch the Republicans and you're like, "Where do you live? What country are you talking about? Did you all have a lobotamy?" It makes you want to bang your head against the wall.