Open Thread for Night Owls & Early Birds (Movie Edition)

While we ponder whether she really means it this time, whether her advisers and friends and colleagues and maybe even her daughter and husband have persuaded her that, yes, 2187 delegates is more than 2117, perhaps it's time to take a momentary breather from the politics of the past 16 months and go after each other tooth and nail on another subject, the movies. Or as some of my high-falutin' friends prefer to say: film.

In this arena, Harry Brighouse and other folks over at Crooked Timber have been having fun with a thread called: 101 Movies to avoid watching before you die.

Harry particularly hates The House of Sand and Fog, about which - in the most charitable section of his excoriation - he says:

I rarely dislike a movie enough to warn people against it, but this is one of the worst, and most unpleasant, movies I’ve watched. (I see that someone has vandalised the wikipedia entry on this one, saying, hilariously, that it and some of its actors were nominated for awards!)

In the past three days, more than 400 commenters have dropped in with their personal unfavorites, or, as a poster named Wilson labels them, decommendations, including: The Lake House, My Dinner with Andre, Boxing Helena, The Golden Compass, Eyes Wide Shut, Dogma, Star Wars (any of them), Van Helsing, Ghost Dog, Kingdom of Heaven, Leaving Las Vegas, E.T. - The Extraterrestrial, Dead Poets Society,
Wolf Creek ...

You get the idea.

Commenter ck dexter , who I suspect, says film, not movies, opines:

This is an embarrassing and disheartening thread. Like a first year undergrad discussion. "Plato sucks! He’s hard and boring!"

I note two surprising and particularly saddening trends:

1. The tendency to list arguably mediocre films that made an effort to be good, but that are thought by many knowledgeable people to be very good. And, at the same time, a tendency to defend choices (e.g., You’ve Got Mail) that are equally mediocre, but try not to be more.

2. To equate sad or depressing with "don’t watch it." Have I got a Disney library to sell you people.

At the very least, it’s a good argument in favor of respect for specialized expertise in knowledge, since clearly the high level of general intelligence doesn’t make its opinions about film any better than the average.

OK, specialists and movie fans alike, what do you decommend we avoid before we die?

My personal unfavorite: The Searchers.

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The Overnight News Digest has been posted.

McCain makes a grab for the mantle of 'change'

Yesterday evening John McCain gave a speech near New Orleans with the goal of seizing Barack Obama's limelight and grabbing some of the mantle of 'change' for himself.

The Republican nominee-in-waiting plans to draw contrasts with Obama on a range of issues and argue that the Democrat offers the wrong kind of change while he offers the right kind. An advertising campaign is expected to reinforce that message in the coming weeks.

Many have commented about the obnoxious message and the equally unpleasant manner in which McCain delivered that message. Some have also pointed out how the episode highlights McCain's lack of judgment; it was an act of hybris to ask voters to compare his own negative and ad hominem speech to Obama's gracious and positive one on the very day the latter clinched his party's nomination.

The cringe-worthy material is so abundant however that few have noted the stunning hypocrisy on McCain's part. John McCain has a stark record of ignoring NOLA and opposing substantive disaster-relief legislation for two and a half years after Hurricane Katrina - right up until the spring of this year. And yet it is New Orleans that he chooses to use as his backdrop when he wishes to portray himself as the true candidate of "change".

The fact that McCain is traveling to the Gulf Coast in an attempt to portray himself as an agent of change is a mark of how little he can actually point to in that regard. Where else could he possibly camp out to connect himself to 'change'? On the front lawn of one of the handful of his lobbyist/campaign staffers whom he dumped in haste when reporters started asking about illegal activities?

For the next half year, as Jonathan Stein documented, McCain was either absent from or in active opposition to substantive efforts to aid Katrina victims.

Though McCain issued a statement the next week calling on Congress to make sacrifices in order to fund recovery efforts, he was quoted in The New Leader on September 1 cautioning against over-spending in support of Katrina's victims. "We also have to be concerned about future generations of Americans," he said. "We're going to end up with the highest deficit, probably, in the history of this country."

That attitude was borne out in McCain's actions and votes. Forty Senators and 100 members of Congress visited New Orleans before he did; he finally got there in March 2006.

During that period McCain wasn't just failing to show leadership on the issue. Along with most other Republicans, he dug his heels in against spending serious money to help Americans in desperate need (contrast that with his free-spending ways on Iraq). McCain voted against extending unemployment benefits to Katrina victims up to 52 weeks, and against extending Medicaid benefits up to five months. He even voted twice against establishing an independent commission to examine the governmental response to Katrina. In May of 2006, little over a month after visiting NOLA for the first time, McCain also voted against the Emergency Supplemental Appropriations bill that had $28 billion for hurricane relief.

In July 2007, he ventured back to the Gulf Coast, but, while he held an open news conference, the purpose of the trip was officially a private fundraiser.

Finally, two years after he first toured New Orleans, McCain returned to the battered city. On April 25, 2008, the GOP frontrunner traveled to the lower ninth ward with the state's newly elected governor, Bobby Jindal. It was what the Times Picayune called "an effort to distance himself from a signature failure of the Bush administration."

Here is the message of change that McCain brought as he toured the Lower 9th Ward in April:

[McCain] also told reporters he was not sure if he would rebuild the lower 9th ward as president. "That is why we need to go back is to have a conversation about what to do rebuild it, tear it down, you know, whatever it is," he said.

And yesterday he returned, for the second time this spring, looking to use the suffering of NOLA as a photo-op to convey his "concern" over the inadequate government response to Katrina. Well, here's an even better visual for that purpose: the "Issues" page on John McCain's presidential website. It has no section on Katrina or the restoration of the Gulf Coast.

So much for the mantle of "change".

Open Thread and Diary Rescue

Tonight's Rescue Rangers are: Louisiana1976; watercarrier4diogenes; Got A Grip; dopper0189; YatPundit; and noddem. dadanation pretended to give driving lessons as dadanation drove the editmobile home safely without getting a traffic ticket.

Written 70 years ago, the poem Let America Be America Again, by Langston Hughes, has as much resonance today as it did in 1938:

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again!

from Let America be America Again (1938)
Langston Hughes [1902 - 67].

With that as backdrop, here are tonight's selections:

• File this one under Nothing the Bush Administration Does Anymore Should Surprise Us. With Prosyletization in Iraq: Assemblies involvement in Abu Ghraib & Gitmo, dogemperor explores the meddling of dominionist groups in the torture business. (noddem)
• iampunha explains why Hillary Clinton's run for the presidency would not have been possible without those valiant women who fought, and sometimes died, for the cause of women's right to vote in June 4, 1919: suffering for suffrage. (Got a Grip)
• Sen. Obama was born on Aug. 5, 1961 without a guaranteed right to vote. In People died so that last night could happen, attytood looks at the events of that day and how remarkable it is for Obama to be the presumptive democratic presidential nominee. (dopper0189)
• FishOutofWater brings us some disheartening news on the environmental front in Amazon Deforestation Explodes. (Got a Grip)
• Concerned about climate change and high energy costs? WattHead advocates switching to clean sources of energy in Igniting a Clean Energy Economy and Winning the Frame Game: Tackling Costs Head-on. While others have argued that such a change will be bad for the economy, the author says it will help the economy as well as the environment. (Louisiana 1976)
• BruinKid share the news, both happy and sad, regarding several Kossacks' run for office in the California primary races in A Kossack won the CA primary for Congress. (Got a Grip)
• JaciCee explains why she's ready to put her faith in the new Democratic presidential nominee in This is dedicated to the ones I love. (Got a Grip)

Please feel free to use this as an Open Thread and to rescue and talk up your favorite diaries of the day!

It's Over

Let us give thanks together:

Clinton to End Bid and Endorse Obama

By ADAM NAGOURNEY and JEFF ZELENY

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton will endorse Senator Barack Obama on Saturday, bringing a close to her 17-month campaign for the White House, aides said. Her decision came after Democrats urged her Wednesday to leave the race and allow the party to coalesce around Mr. Obama.

Howard Wolfson, one of Mrs. Clinton’s chief strategists, and other aides said she would express support for Mr. Obama and party unity at an event in Washington that day. One adviser said Mrs. Clinton would concede defeat, congratulate Mr. Obama and proclaim him the party’s nominee, while pledging to do what was needed to assure his victory in November.

Her decision came after a day of conversations with supporters on Capitol Hill about her future now that Mr. Obama had clinched the nomination. Mrs. Clinton had, in a speech after Tuesday night’s primaries, suggested she wanted to wait before deciding about her future, but in conversations Wednesday, her aides said, she was urged to step aside.

"We pledged to support her to the end," Representative Charles B. Rangel, a New York Democrat who has been a patron of Mrs. Clinton since she first ran for the Senate, said in an interview. "Our problem is not being able to determine when the hell the end is."

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