President Bush is quoted today saying that the worldwide anti-war protests of the past weekend will not dissuade him on his plans for Iraq. He dismissed the millions of people who attended rallies around the globe by comparing them to a "focus group." Of course, the president is not going to let a "focus group" dictate how he will set U.S. foreign policy, and it is even commendable for a president to go against the tide of opinion to do what is right. But is waging war on Iraq really the right thing to do?

The last time we waged war in Iraq, it was relatively bloodless for our side. I'm one of the few people who actually knew someone who died during that conflict. The reason the battle was so bloodless is become for the most part we sat back and lobbed bombs and missiles at the enemy. When it was time to move in with the ground troops and engage in the house-to-house, type of urban warfare that would have been necessary to totally dislodge Saddam from power (something that would have sent the U.S. bodycount climbing dramatically), that is when Bush Sr. decided to declare victory and go home.
Now Bush Jr. is ready to pick up where his Dad left off and go forward with Part II. Saddam is weaker today than he was back in 1990, but that hasn't deterred the administration and the conservative media propagandists from hyping him into a monstrous beast of Hitlerian proportions. This is the part that most disturbs me. If the administration so desired, they could hype Mohamar Quadaffi in Libya as a threat to rival Saddam. But that does not suit their current purposes, so we hear nothing about him. Past administrations have hyped Fidel Castro as a threat to our well being, all to no avail.
I think the pattern that Bush Jr. is looking at for this conflict is not so much the first Persian Gulf War, as his Dad's incursion into Panama to capture Manuel Noriega. That would be quite a trophy to bring back. A quick raid by U.S. Special Forces surrounding Saddam's palace and blasting him with rock-n-roll music until he surrenders and we haul him back and put him in a jail cell somewhere in Florida. If only it was that simple.

Here is a quote from another president named George (Washington, that is.) Written in 1796, Washington warned future presidents against the dangers of ill-considered foreign entanglements.

"The nation which indulges toward another by habitual hatred, or habitual fondness, is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest. The nation, prompted by ill will and resentment, sometimes impels to war the government, contrary to the best calculations of policy."

The folks behind Blogger.com have just been bought out by Google. Read about it here.

Oh goody. The Washington Post today has this to say about the future of Reality TV:

"But there's no sign that reality is going away soon. ABC last week launched "Are You Hot?," a show in which men and women compete solely on the basis of sex appeal. It has scheduled 10 more reality series through the summer. NBC is planning to carry "Around the World in 80 Dates," in which a contestant has romantic escapades with partners from other countries. CBS is readying "Cupid," a series similar to "The Bachelor."

Fox, meanwhile, has bought "Spellbound," a reality show in which three attractive young women are hypnotized to believe that an unattractive man is their perfect mate (the show is produced by Elisabeth Murdoch, the daughter of Rupert Murdoch, who heads Fox's parent company). And Fox will replace "Joe Millionaire" next month with "Married by America," a series in which viewers vote to match-marry contestants.

In all, as many as a dozen reality series of one kind or another could be on the networks' schedules next fall."

Hypnotism!?! Do they really think people are that stupid? I may have to sell my TV due to lack of use...

This probably would have happened even if Spiderman had tanked at the Box Office, but the fact that it made more than $400 million domestically didn't help matters. According to the Wall Street Journal today, Hollywood is on a big-time superheroes kick with the release this weekend of Daredevil being just the tip of the iceberg. Coming later this summer is X-Men 2 followed by The Hulk. And then next year we will get Spiderman 2, The Punisher and Iron Fist, followed by Blade III and Iron Man in 2005. By that time, of course, we will probably also have Daredevil 2 and a spinoff movie for Jennifer Garner's Electra character (both already in the works). Plus there are rumored movie scripts and projects in development for Ghost Rider, the Fantastic Four, Silver Surfer and Sub-Mariner. And that doesn't even take into account the inevitable rebirth of the Superman and Batman franchises.
So what is left to do? Surely they will do movies for Capatin America, Green Lantern, Aqua-Man and The Flash. Superhero movies are bound to become as prolific in our generation as Westerns were during the previous generations.

Most of the time these days the national news just makes me angry and depressed and it seems the only response is to write angry and depressing posts about the state of the nation. But I found a web log today where this guy Adam Felber responds to the awful news with biting satire and humor. So that is my recommendation for today. Check him out at Fanatical Apathy.

The Oscar nominations are out and I guess I can't complain too much since The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers did get a Best Picture nod. But I'm still going to complain anyway.
Here are the Best Picture nominees:

Chicago
The Hours
Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
Gangs of New York
The Pianist

All the nominees are here 75th Annual Academy Awards

First, I'm upset about the snub to Peter Jackson in the Best Director category. They always make a point of not nominating one of the Best Pic directors each year and this time they skipped over Jackson after nominating him last year for Fellowship of the Ring. In his place, we have Pedro Almodar, the Spanish director of "Talk To Her," the highly praised Spanish-language film which did not get nominated in the Foreign Language category because the Academy only allows each country to submit one film each year and Spain chose a different picture. So apparently the Academy intelligentsia decided to "show" Spain how wrong they were by giving Almodar the director slot. And I guess they figure to make it up to Jackson next year by giving him the gold statue for "Return of the King."

I still want to go see Chicago and Gangs of New York. The other two, The Hours and The Pianist, will probably be rentals sometime down the road. I'll be interested to see if I think Gangs really deserves the Best Pic nod in place of say, Catch Me If You Can or Minority Report., the two Spielberg offerings this year.

I can't say too much about the acting categories since I haven't seen most of the films. I never really thought that Andy Serkis would get nominated for his groundbreaking performance as Gollum. Maybe next year. I notice that Golden Globe winner Richard Gere was shut out by the Academy for his performance in Chicago. Instead, it seems every other major character in that movie got a nomination, even Queen Latifah. I was also sad to see that Houston-native Dennis Quaid did not get the acting nomination that was expected for Far From Heaven. I liked Christopher Walken in Catch Me If You Can and I'm also a big fan of Paul Newman (Road To Perdition).

On the music side, Lord of the Rings was passed over for Musical Score, but at least Catch Me If You Can score by John Williams was nominated. I really loved the music in that movie with its jazzy, 1950s-60s era feel. On the Best Song category, we can also rejoice that Madonna did not get a nomination for her James Bond theme song. Instead, we have Eminem (the only one of the group that I've actually heard, and like) and U2 for music in Gangs of New York. But where did this "Wild Thornberries" song nomination come from? OK, I guess because it is a Paul Simon tune, but it should have gone to Lord of the Rings for "Gollum's Song."

The Academy wised up this year and nominated Michael Moore's Bowling For Columbine in the Documentary category. In the past, they have passed over films like Moore's "Roger and Me" and the anti-death penalty film "A Thin Blue Line" in favor of obscure pictures made by Academy friends and family members - a mini-scandal that now seems to have been corrected.

The only one of the animated nominees I have seen is "Ice Age" which I did not like. "Spirited Away" is supposedly the critical favorite while the inclusion of the critically panned "Treasure Planet" can only be a testament to Disney's marketing prowess.

One final happy note is the inclusion of "About A Boy" in the Best Screenplay category.

Got to see "Catch Me If You Can" this past weekend and thoroughly enjoyed it. Tom Hanks plays an FBI agent in the financial crimes section who becomes obsessed with catching a teenage mimic who has been cashing bad checks and passing himself off as everything from an airline pilot to a hospital administrator. The movie makes you side with Leonardo DiCaprio's character right from the beginning by drawing you into his shattered world at the point where his parents are breaking up. It takes longer, however, to feel empathy for the Tom Hanks character who comes across first like the police official in Victor Hugo's Les Miserables chasing after some poor guy who stole a crust of break to feed his starving family. Of course, DiCaprio's character is stealing a bit more than just bread. By the time the movie is well underway, he is driving around in Porsches and pretending to be like James Bond in Goldfinger.

The Oscar nominations will be announced tomorrow morning and I am hoping that The Two Towers will get a Best Picture nod, but I am worried it may get passed over this year. We shall see. My best guess on the Oscar best picture nods is Chicago, Gangs of New York, The Hours, Lord of the Rings - Two Towers, About Schmidt.

This small item is worth noting from today's New York Times:

"Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., who now chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, has hired a coal lobbyist to oversee clean air legislation."

Breathe in that fresh air while you still can. After having lived for several years in Connecticut and watching the smog roll in from New York City on a warm summer day, I gained a better appreciation for clean air laws.

Another interesting article in the Wall Street Journal today. That's the nice thing about the WSJ, the editorial page may be full of right-wing propaganda, but the news section is solid. Today's article on Page A4 talks about how the pharmaceutical firms got a big thank you from the Republicans in Congress after helping them take over the Senate during the mid-term elections with $50 million in campaign donations. In return, they got the U.S. to block an effort by the World Trade Organization to allow poor nations to have access to less costly generic drugs to tackle acute health problems.
At the insistence of mostly Republican lawmakers indebted to their pharmaceutical contributors, the U.S. Trade delegation stood alone among the 144 members of the WTO to block the proposal that would have distributed generic copies of patented drugs to less-developed nations. Now untold thousands of people in these desperate nations will continue to die as a result of easily treatable diseases, all thanks to Mr. Compassionate Conservative and his so-called Pro-Life Party.

On the same page is a story about the Bush administration threatening to veto the budget bill if lawmakers insist on slipping in a $3.1 billion disaster relief package for drought-stricken farmers. It's hard to feel sorry for the farmers I knew up in the Texas panhandle, all of whom vote straight-party Republican every chance they get. But they should know that it is much more important that Bush get his tax cut for the rich, before worrying about things like health care, education and disaster relief.

Oh, and the New York Times today had this on its front page: "Hiring in Nation Hits Worst Slump in Nearly 20 Years". So Bush Jr. is looking to best his father on several fronts. He has already proposed a budget with bigger deficits than his father, now he is overseeing the worst employment decline in years.

"The economy has lost more than 2 million jobs, a drop of 1.5 percent, since the most recent recession began in March 2001."

The decline was only 1.3 percent during Bush Sr. Congratulations!!!

Got to see The Bourne Identity last night and thoroughly enjoyed it. James Bond is great and all, and I still need to see the latest Bond flick, but this is what future Bond pictures should strive to be like. A hero who relies on his skills and instincts to survive, rather than charm and fancy gadgets. I'm looking forward to the next movie in the series The Bourne Supremacy which is now in the script stage according to several movie web sites.
In other movie news, The Lord of the Rings - The Two Towers has earned $316 million domestically so far, passing up Fellowship of the Ring for the No. 9 spot on the All-Time list. It should pass up the first Harry Potter film later this week.

Things were jumping around here today as news that Toyota has selected San Antonio for its next automotive plant finally was confirmed. It could very well reshape the southern portion of the city which has been in need of a healthy dose of economic development. The $800 million plant will employ about 2,000 people and have an annual payroll upwards of $80 million.

The Wall Street Journal has an excellent story on Bush's 2004 budget proposal today. They note that Bush Jr. is looking to top his Daddy's record deficits with his own record-breaking bid for $307 billion worth of red ink. The WSJ is remarkably blunt in its analysis of the Bush plan noting several areas where he is using slight of hand to make it look like he is increasing spending on popular programs when in reality he is not.

They note that Bush proposes a new "bioshield" initiative to blunt germ attacks, but then does not provide enough funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to keep up with inflation.
He touts $200 million in new spending to boost low-income home ownership, while at the same time eliminating $574 million in funds for refurbishing public housing units. Ah, I see! By letting the public housing projects deteriorate he will force the low-income tenants to move out and buy their own homes. A brilliant plan!
Bush proposes spending $450 million next year to fight AIDS in Africa, but would eliminate that same amount from other aid programs for poor nations.
Here is the key portion of the WSJ story:

"The budger crunch results partly from the bursting of the stock-market bubble, the recession and the increased need for homeland defense following Sept. 11. But it's also partly of the administration's own making. At the outset of his term, Mr. Bush engineered tax cuts of $1.3 trillion over 10 years. He refused to scale back that ambition as the budget picture darkened. He has, instead, proposed still more cuts, arguing that the best way to return the government to surplus is to spur economic growth - and thus higher tax collections - through tax cuts."

Ah, yes. Supply side economics, or "Voodoo economics" as Bush Sr. once termed it. That was how we ended up with the $4 trillion debt under Reagan. We finally managed to get back to budget surpluses under Clinton. How? The WSJ addresses that too...

"Mr. Bush's father and President Clinton were forced into similarly austere situations following Ronald Reagan's tax cuts. To restrain deficits, the first President Bush agreed to tax increases in exchange for handcuffs on federal speding. Mr. Clinton, too, raised taxes as one of his first acts.
The tax boosts, spending curbs and a booming economy combined to create the biggest surpluses in American history."

So there you have it. Today's history lesson. If you cut taxes and spend more than you have you end up with huge deficits and the economy suffers. If you raise taxes and eliminate the deficits, the economy turns around. It is called being fiscally responsible. Something that conservatives used to stand for.

But Bush is proving to be far more right-wing than his father and possibly even more so than Reagan or Nixon. His budget slashes funds for the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Health and Safety Administration. Oh, and it does not account for the cost of a war in Iraq or the cost of an extended military occupation of that country during the aftermath.

It's funny how even in today's hectic world you can still shut everything out for a day. On Saturday we kept the TV and radio off and just did odd jobs around the house while listening to CDs. I washed both cars and waxed my truck and remember thinking it was a little odd that my next door neighbor had decided to put his American flag out. Why on Feb. 1? But then I did not give it any more thought. That night we went to the symphony and the first inkling that something was up came after the intermission when the conducter said that a selection by Bach - Air from Suite No. 3 in D Major - was being dedicated to the crew of the Spaceshuttle Columbia. I thought that was odd, but maybe they knew somebody on the flight or had some other connection. It wasn't until the next morning when I picked up the Sunday papers that I finally learned of the terrible tragedy.
It wasn't like that 17 years ago when the Spaceshuttle Challenger blew up. At that time I was a junior in the Corps of Cadets at Texas A&M with a TV in my dorm room (a junior privilege). I remember just standing in my room with some of my buddies staring at the TV and watching the shuttle blow up again and again. It is disconcerting reading the names of the Challenger crew again - they had all become so familiar back then. Now we have seven new names to learn. I still have not turned on the TV. I know I will see it all soon enough.

The San Antonio Symphony was a nice treat. First we heard the full orchestra play Brahms Variations on a Theme by Joseph Haydn, Op. 56a. It was very good, but not very familiar and there were a few slow movements where I almost nodded off. But afterward they introduced a young trumpet prodigy (age 24) from Russia named Sergei Nakariakov and he accompanied the orchestra on Hummel's Concerto in E-flat major for trumpet and orchestra, the Bach piece and Arban's Variations on The Carnival of Venice. I have to say, I have been listening to a lot of jazz trumpet lately so I was not sure what I would think of the classical variety, but the kid really had his chops (as the hipsters in the jazz clubs would say). They made a point of having him be the only trumpet playing during the pieces just so you knew that all of those notes were coming out of just one horn. It was a bit like listening to an Eddie Van Halen guitar solo.
The orchestra finished the set with Haydn's Symphony No. 104 in D major "London".

Driving home from work the other day I had the misfortune of pulling onto the freeway just as the traffic suddenly slowed down to a crawl. After poking along for nearly 30 minutes, I finally saw up ahead where the traffic was starting to clear out, but there was no accident and no police cars with flashing lights - just a guy standing on the side of the road holding a sign.
So now I am ticked because the only reason it has taken me an extra half hour to get home and caused me to sit in traffic burning gas is because of people slowing down to gawk at the sign this guy was holding. And here is what it said:
"All Religions Are False Accept For Born-Again Christians"
As I was forced to creep along looking at this guy's sign before finally being allowed to speed up, I was struck by the audacity, the ignorance and the arrogance, not to mention the bigotry of this statement. What exactly was he trying to accomplish with this message? Does he really believe he is going to convert people to his belief system this way?
This pretty much sums up the problem I have with the right-wing fringe of the Christian evangelical movement. This holier-than-thou, simple-minded view of a black and white world where people who think exactly like them are going to heaven and everyone else will be condemned to hell. Sorry, but I don't buy it. The God that I believe in and worship would not send billions and billions of people to hell simply because they were born into families and cultures that did not adopt a specific, narrowly defined belief system. What makes these people believe that God would create such a vastly diverse and complex universe and then insist that everyone and everything adopt the same narrow belief system or risk enternal damnation?
I wish the guy had been holding up a sign that said "Jesus Loves You" and then I could have made it home just slightly annoyed and not so ticked off. Instead, he adopts the slogan that I first heard in the lyrics of a Folk Festival song "Jesus Loves Me, But He Can't Stand You."

I consider myself to be a Christian of the liberal variety which unfortunately seems to be losing ground these days to the fervent fundamentalists. I believe that everyone will one day be judged based on how they lived their lives and how they treated their fellow men and women. If they lived a life like Jesus did, loving their fellow humans here on Earth, then it won't matter whether they were Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists or atheists, they will pass on to the next level and be closer to God. If they do not, well, I'm really not sure what happens but I don't believe in eternal damnation. I think the idea of do-overs makes better sense for a loving and compassionate God - keep trying until you get it right kind of thing. But we shall see.

This is hilarious...

Not quite the way I remember the speech...

I've recently had the great pleasure of discovering a musical group called Nickle Creek. They were actually recommended to me by my brother-in-law and sister-in-law in Houston who saw the group perform last year at the Houston Rodeo. I checked out the group's latest CD from the library the other day and have been in awe ever since. This is one of those rare albums that I liked on the first listen and subsequent listens just compounds the first impression. Nickle Creek is a young bluegrass group very much in the mold of Alison Krauss and Union Station. I was shocked by how much the female singer sounds like Alison Krauss, and then I saw that Krauss is a producer on the album. But it is actually the male singer who dominates most of the recordings. I'm not sure if they write their own songs or not (I'll have to check), but they certainly have the first two parts of the musical trifecta down - that being the singing and playing their own instruments well. I was completely sold on the album after listening to just the first three cuts. The first is the Grammy nominated instrumental that takes your breath away using just a mandolin, guitar and violin. The first song is the wonderfully strange "Spit on a Stranger." I would never have thought that a song with that title could sound so beautiful. Seems more appropriate for a punk song. The third cut is just great songwriting, plain and simple.

It's not often that I find a new group that wins me over so completely right away. One other example would be the Foo Fighters (although they have been around a while but I just got one of their cds last year). But I have been disappointed by other groups that have been hyped up after sampling their music -- Blink 182, Coldplay are just two examples.

The best thing about Bush's speech the other night was that it was short. Only about an hour. It was almost like he was watching the clock and as soon as it hit one hour he said "Whew! God Bless America!" and that was it.
I was glad that he spared everyone the theatrics that had become common in so many State of the Union speeches going back to Reagan and extending through the Clinton years. By that I mean the planting of people in the audience who are then recognized and featured in heart-rending or patriotic stories. Of course, it could have been that Bush just couldn't find anyone who has been helped by his programs who he could highlight.
Probably most notable about the speech was all of the things he chose not to talk about. There was no long list of accomplishments to highlight, just a laundry list of initiatives that have yet to be passed, funded and/or show any results. As one commentator pointed out after the speech - Clinton was long-winded in part because he had so many good things to talk about. Bush had a long list of things he didn't want to mention, like rising unemployment, a blossoming budget deficit, a tanking stock market, and so forth.

I'm still waiting for the explanation on why we have to bomb Iraq right now, while it is just fine to "contain" and even appease North Korea. Who do we know for a fact has weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)? Who was caught recently exporting some of these weapons to a nation (Yemen) that harbors terrorists and Al-Quadea sympathizers? Why does containment work just fine for NK, but we can't even wait long enough for the U.N. inspectors to do their jobs before we start dropping bombs on Baghdad? Maybe the recently hawkish Colin Powell will enlighten us on Feb. 5.

Bush is giving his second State of the Union address this evening. News reports say he is going to try to "rally" the country in support of his war in Iraq. Short of showing secret reconnaissance photos of Saddam and Bin Laden together plotting new terror attacks, I'm not sure what he could do to persuade me that this is the best course of action right now. Even Stormin Norman Schwarzkopf isn't convinced.
It will be interesting to hear the list of cheery things he will come up with so that he can then declare that the State of the Union is very good or excellent or peachy keen or whatever he will call it.

Slate magazine's financially challenged competitor is Salon.com which has recently taken to asking its readers to actually pay for a subscription to have full access to their content. Fortunately, for us cash-strapped journalists trying to stay afloat during Bush Recession II: The Sequel, they have an alternative where you subject yourself to about 15 seconds of clicking through a lengthy online car ad and then you can read everything for free for the rest of the day.

Figuring out how to put web links in the text of my posts. This is a trial run.

MSN Slate Magazine

The above link takes you to one of the best of the online magazines which is fortunately still published for free thanks to the generosity of Bill Gates and Microsoft Corp.

Finally went to see the latest Star Trek movie this weekend - Nemesis. (George Lucas had already taken the name they really wanted - Attack of the Clone). I'm glad I went to see it before it left the theaters. I think I've managed to see every Star Trek flick in the theaters. It had some good moments and for the most part was a pretty good B-grade action movie. As someone who would just as soon watch a rerun of a Star Trek Next Generation episode as anything else on TV these days, I'd says it was worth going to see. However, it wasn't as good as say, First Contact - the Borg movie, and had some glaring inconsistencies. For instance, it would seem that Picard's young clone, who spent his entire childhood being tortured by Romulans, would first want to use his super-destructo ray (or whatever it was) on the Romulans before trekking across the galaxy in the usual bid to destroy Earth.
I was also very disappointed with the ending as it concerned the character of Data. I won't say anymore so as not to give away the movie, but it is just something that future Star Trek writers will just have to get Q or someother immortal being to fix up.

A much better movie that we caught on DVD this weekend was About A Boy starring Hugh Grant. Lots of thumbs up for that one. Definitely one to squeeze onto my Top 10 films of the year list.

The Super Bowl was kind of a bore this year. I was uninterested in either team at first but decided to root for the Buccaneers because they were supposed to be the underdogs. But after they started stomping all over the helpless Raiders (which made me wonder how the Raiders got there in the first place) I began pulling for the Raiders to make at least a feeble come back effort so as not to completely humiliate themselves - which is what they eventually did. The best thing about the game, of course, were the ads and I particularly wanted to see the movie ads for the upcoming summer blockbusters. The Matix sequels naturally look awesome and The Hulk movie looks pretty good too (although one reviewer noted that the computer-generated Hulk character looks too much like Shrek -- Yes, I miss Lou Ferrigno).
I also want to see The Dare Devil movie since it was one of my favorite comics as a kid.