Monthly Archives: September 2009

A couple of conservative twenty year-olds playing Punk’d will eventually end up costing many poor people the opportunity to vote through the ACORN witch hunt. Here from Democracy Now:

Citing a university he could not remember, Glenn Beck claimed that over a million supporters turned out at his 9/12 D.C. march, despite every other official source and news outlet estimation of roughly 60,000. Here is some official-looking accreditation that shows that Glenn Beck’s figures are more official.

Michael Moore threatens to retire from documentaries while promoting his latest film Capitalism: A Love Story at the Toronto Film Festival.  Is he pulling a Jay-Z?

“I think people will be maybe somewhat disappointed because there’s so many things we need to deal with right now, and they wish I would make a film about it. But I want other people to make those films,” Moore said.

“I am tired of feeling like I’m doing this alone. All through the eight years of Bush, you Google `Bush’ and `nemesis’ and I’m the first name up. And there aren’t a whole lot of other names,” Moore said. “It doesn’t work with Michael Moore and Sean Penn and Ted Kennedy and a few others. The people have got to get involved in their democracy.”

He talks like he has gotten too big for documentaries, and wants to go back to narrative films, hopefully having learned a lot since Canadian Bacon.  I think myself, and all other social issue documentary filmmakers will get on, somehow, without him.  (Unless, of course, he wants to start giving money to other filmmakers to make the sprawling, informative films he doesn’t have to make?)

Here you’ll find a pretty nauseating gallery of the posters hoisted by the suckers (some would them “sheeple”) who indulged themselves at this last weekend’s hate-fest in DC

And, here is a plea from PFAW, urging people to demand that Congress take a stand against the madness, with a “resolution of disapproval” aimed at those congressional Republicans who will now cravenly (or with a lunatic sincerity) express their solidarity with Glenn Beck’s troops.

This is fine, but I wish that there were far more outrage, and a lot more critical attention, focused on the corporate forces that have brought this on, whether actively or passively, to benefit their own agenda. Would this still be happening if not for the gigantic players who stand to gain the most from it–the health insurance cartel, and Big Pharma, and News Corporation?  Read More »

A chance to get to meet the patriots behind Glenn Beck’s 9/12 DC Tea Party, adding sounds and words and clarifications to the free-thinkers in these photos. Smartly produced by New Left Media.

Doug Pray’s thoughtful doc Art & Copy is lyrical examination of the creative stories behind some of the biggest ad campaigns of our times. Sure to be acclaimed by industry vets, the film offers compelling personal connections through the stories of successful ideas that were risky and outrageous at the time. Plus, you get to see lots of their lush creative offices and lavish think tanks. Perhaps most intriguing to me was to see the ad maker behind Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” ads acknowledge that his acclaimed view of idealized America is based on not having his father around because he grew up poor.

Through the 9-12 D.C. March of Glenn Beck’s xenophobic zombies, Edward Kimmel, 58, of Takoma Park, MD, tempts fate by strolling through their sea of scary signs with a sign reading “PUBLIC OPTION NOW.” These people who suddenly believe that dissent is patriotic apparently don’t tolerate it in their presence, and the guy needs a dozen police escorting him to protect him from trying to get health care for the people jeering him. Oddly, his sign is actually bigger and better than any of theirs, and manages to ruin everything for the teabaggers by the end of this terrifying video.

This is why I love documentary and the Internet, because such simple images of video can speak volumes.  This thoughtful piece reflecting on the decline of visual patriotism since 9/11, entitled “MY LITTLE RANT…YUP, A FEW BEARS, TOO” by Sloop, is from a guy in Northern Ohio, an area I have come to know well in my travels making FREE FOR ALL! I also have come to know that truer than any political axiom, “As Ohio goes, so goes the nation.”  If this sad guy has no other way to measure how America is doing 8 years after 9/11 than how many flags are waving in his small town, unfortunately, other people are working off the same rudimentary criteria.  They, too, may be drunk and heavily mustached.

This is such a simple discussion that points to the misinformation, the fear, and the jingoism. Getting back to where our country was 100 years ago, as this organizer suggests, would include taking away women’s right to vote. But could Palin still run?? (Thanks Public Record)