The Disney Vault

I joined the Disney Movie Club a while back hoping to build up my collection of Disney animated movies. I already had a modest collection on VHS tape including:
Fantasia
Snow White
101 Dalmations
Aladdin
Mary Poppins
The Emperor's New Groove
Toy Story 1 & 2
and A Bug's Life

But I had very few on DVD at that point:
Lion King
Bambi
Monster's Inc.
Finding Nemo
The Incredibles
Lilo and Stitch
Treasure Planet
Home on the Range

By joining the club I was able to pick up
Robin Hood
The Adventures of Winnie the Pooh
The Aristocats
The Rescuers and
Alice in Wonderland

Then with the first of my three required purchases I picked up Cinderella which was just released from the Disney video vault and put on DVD for the first time ever. Next month I plan to make Lady and the Tramp my second selection and in the fall I understand they will finally be releasing The Little Mermaid on DVD.

I cannot find a schedule that shows when Disney will be releasing other films from its pantheon onto DVD, but I have at the top of my wish list Pinochio, Jungle Book and Peter Pan.
And that is not even getting into the live-action Disney movies that I wouldn't mind having.

Campaign for the National Popular Vote

I fully support this group’s efforts.

A coalition of former congressmen is launching a campaign to change how Americans select their president by reforming the Electoral College system, saying campaigns for the White House should be reliant on the nationwide popular vote rather than simply the outcome in a handful of swing states....

Previous attempts to change the Electoral College by amending the Constitution have failed in Congress, so proponents of reform are seeking to change laws through individual state legislatures. The initiative, called the Campaign for the National Popular Vote, does not seek to abolish the Electoral College, but rather award the electors from each state to the candidate who wins the country's popular vote.

Supporters of the plan say the last two elections illustrate the need - for Republicans and Democrats alike - to change the system of electing the president.

In 2000, Gore won the popular vote by about 500,000 ballots, but lost the election in the Electoral College after George W. Bush narrowly won the popular vote in Florida and all 25 of its electoral votes. In 2004, President Bush won the popular vote by 3 million ballots, but would have lost his re-election bid if Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., had simply carried Ohio.

The Bush Boom

Here’s more evidence of the booming economy under President Bush and the Republicans.

The average income of American families, after adjusting for inflation, declined by 2.3 percent in 2004 compared to 2001 while their net worth rose but at a slower pace....
The median, or midpoint for net worth rose by 1.5 percent to $93,100 from 2001 to 2004. That growth was far below the 10.3 percent gain in median net worth from 1998 to 2001...

Just to be clear, that’s a 1.5 percent increase in median net worth during the Bush years, compared to a 10.3 percent increase during the Clinton years.

Clueless George strikes again

I find it quite amazing that President Bush, who has staked his presidential legacy on the notion that he is keeping America safe from any future terrorist attacks, would be left out of the loop by his administration on a deal giving the United Arab Emirates control of six major U.S. ports.

President Bush was unaware of the pending sale of shipping operations at six major U.S. seaports to a state-owned business in the United Arab Emirates until the deal already had been approved by his administration, the White House said Wednesday.

It makes me wonder what things his handlers feel that he can be kept in the loop on. I thought this was supposed to be the new post-9/11 world, where average Americans are forced to live with all kinds of new and invasive restrictions on their personal freedoms.
And yet, allowing the UAE to step in and take control of our ports doesn’t even get the requisite investigation before it is approved without the knowledge of the President or the Congress.

Now, some people are making a reasonable case that this is really no big deal.
Kevin Drum raises the following points in defense of the decision:

• This isn't a matter of outsourcing a government operation to a private company. P&O has been operating ports in the United States (and the rest of the world) for a long time, and they do it under contract with the port authorities, not the federal government. What's more, there are plenty of port operators in the United States besides P&O that are foreign owned too.

• P&O doesn't "own" the ports, they just manage one or more terminals at each of their ports and try to make money by attracting shipping companies to their terminals.

• P&O was on the auction block no matter what. If Dubai Ports hadn't purchased them, PSA International of Singapore would have acquired them instead.

• Port workers would mostly (all?) be American union members regardless of who owns the management company. Security will continue to be provided by the Coast Guard and U.S. Customs.

Those are all good points, and it may be true that this will turn out to be much ado about nothing. But just because the UAE won’t be physically operating the ports doesn’t mean we can breathe easy. As the owners of the management company, they will have access to all the intelligence that would let anyone with half a brain skirt the system and enter the U.S. without detection. Do you suppose there are any members of the UAE who might have sympathies for al-Queada and might be tempted to leak that information to certain groups?
Is it really such a good thing in this post-9/11 world to be outsourcing the management of our ports in the first place?

Down the memory hole

I found this story to be particularly disturbing today.

WASHINGTON, Feb. 20 — In a seven-year-old secret program at the National Archives, intelligence agencies have been removing from public access thousands of historical documents that were available for years, including some already published by the State Department and others photocopied years ago by private historians.

Bush’s comittment to renewable energy

This is really funny.
President Bush, sitting on a 39 percent approval rating, is still traveling the country trying to promote initiatives from his long-forgotten State of the Union speech when his handlers decided to send him to a renewable energy lab in Colorado to highlight his new-found interest in promoting renewable energy sources.
Oops!
It turns out that lab just got hit with massive budget cuts recently thanks to Bush’s inept mishandling of the economy and 32 people, including 8 researchers, had to be laid off just two weeks ago.
So Karl Rove got on the phone to Energy Secretary Sam Bodman and had him funnel $5 million to the lab so that the jobs could be restored - at least temporarily - so as not to spoil Bush’s photo opportunity.
What a bunch of incompetent clowns we have running our government.

Party purge

Nacho Guarache is an excellent political cartoon by local artist Leo Garza. San Antonio readers of the E-N are fortunate to have it. But sometimes Garza can be such a Republican hack (some would call him a wanker) that it starts to detract from the quality of his stuff.

This past week, for example, he once again went after his favorite whipping boy, the local Democratic Party by lampooning them as being hardline party disciplinarians.

And while there may be a sliver of truth in his criticism (obviously geared toward to backlash against Rep. Henry Cuellar for playing kissy-face with President Bush prior to the SOTU speech), Garza completely overlooks the log in his own party’s eye in the form of multi-millionaire James Leininger who is financing an effort to purge the Texas Republican Party of so-called “liberals.”

A political action committee gave nearly $700,000 last month to the Republican primary opponents of five state House members who fought school voucher proposals during last year's legislative session.
James Leininger, a prominent supporter of school vouchers, was the only contributor during the latest reporting period to the Texas Republican Legislative Campaign Committee, according to reports to the Texas Ethics Commission....

Leininger, a San Antonio businessman, gave the political action committee $500,000 and pledged $250,000 more, The Dallas Morning News reported in its Wednesday editions. Leininger also made direct donations to some of the challengers.
The political action committee made in-kind contributions of advertising and mailings to primary opponents of Reps. Carter Casteel, R-New Braunfels; Tommy Merritt, R-Longview; Roy Blake Jr., R-Nacogdoches; Delwin Jones, R-Lubbock; and Charlie Geren, R-Fort Worth....

Bill Crocker of Austin, one of the state's two members of the Republican National Committee, said he founded the Texas Republican Legislative Campaign Committee in October to go after "liberal Republicans" in the Legislature.

So while Democrats are having a widely publicized cat fight in two local primary races this year - Cuellar vs. Rodriguez for a congressional seat and Madla vs. Uribe for a state senate seat - for which they are getting lampooned in the paper, Republicans have their own ideological cleansing program underway which is both larger in scale while also recieving less attention.

The lost post

That was odd. This post inexplicably vanished over the weekend, yet can still be found in my archives. Very strange. I guess it was a Blogger quirk.

Cuellar and E-N editors think alike

The Express-News is throwing its editorial support behind Henry Cuellar in the 28th District primary race.
This is not a surprise if you look at their editorial board's recent history. Cuellar is clearly their kind of "Democrat."
Cuellar supported Bush/Cheney for President in 2000 and 2004, just like the E-N.
Cuellar supported launching the invasion of Iraq over the bogus threat of WMDs, just like the E-N. And he continues to make excuses and apologize for that initial blunder, just like the E-N.
Cuellar supported CAFTA to the detriment of U.S. labor, just like the E-N.
And Cuellar promises to continue playing kissy-face with the Bush administration for as long as he is in office, just like the E-N.

Fortunately, there is a real Democrat in this race - former Rep. Ciro Rodriguez who has a good shot and regaining his seat. Let's just hope that Democratic voters can see through these faux endorsements by Republican groups like the Club for Growth and the E-N Editorial Board.

A lack of empathy

There was an interesting piece in the NYTimes today on Harry Whittington giving the backstory on his long ties to the Texas Republican Party.
What caught my attention was this graph describing one of Whittington’s ‘passions’ “that do not fit so squarely with his image as a Republican elder” - prison reform.

While serving on the board of the Texas Department of Corrections in the 1980's and after observing the conditions in many state prisons, he once claimed, "Prisons are to crime what greenhouses are to plants." He also led an effort to move mentally retarded inmates out of the general prison population and followed this with outspoken support of a bill to ban execution of retarded prisoners. (Although Gov. Rick Perry vetoed that bill in 2001, the United States Supreme Court later outlawed such executions.)

"A person who is born with a body that becomes an adult and a mind that remains a child needs special protection in our criminal justice system," Mr. Whittington, one of whose four daughters is retarded, wrote in a letter to The Dallas Morning News in 2001.

Is it just me, or is the only time I see conservative Republicans taking a liberal position on something like this is when it affects them personally?

Whittington, who has a daughter who is mentally retarded, is an advocate for changing the way the mentally retarded are treated in our prisons.

Dick Cheney, who has a daughter who is a lesbian, refuses to endorse Bush’s anti-gay marriage agenda. Ditto the late Barry Goldwater.

Nancy Reagan, whose late-husband suffered from Alzheimers, is an outspoken advocate for stem cell research.

And so on, and so on.

Why can’t more people have empathy for others when it does not affect them personally?

Taking blame, finally

Thanks to The Agonist for the graphic.

Dick Cheney finally comes clean.
On the grounds that it’s always better late than never, Cheney can be commended for finally coming forward and taking full responsibility for shooting his hunting partner in the face last Saturday.
However, the lengthy delay in doing so has left a bitter public impression that he was hoping to avoid taking responsibility by having his spokespeople point the finger of blame back at Whittington. That was inexcusable and should never have been tolerated.

No laughing matter

There has been a lot of joking and a lot of ducking and covering over this Cheney shooting incident, but now it appears that it could all become very unfunny very quickly.

The 78-year-old lawyer who Vice President Cheney accidentally shot in a hunting accident suffered a minor heart attack this morning after a piece of birdshot moved and lodged in his heart, doctors said.

Doctors treating Harry Whittington said the Republican lawyer was moved back into the intensive care unit and will need to remain hospitalized for at least a week.

This can’t be good for a 78-year-old to have a lead pellet lodged in his heart. What happens if he dies? Is Cheney still “cleared” because of the non-investigation by the local sheriff’s office which didn’t find out about the accident for several hours afterwards and was not allowed to come out to the ranch and interview Cheney until the next day?

Also, is the vice president’s office paying for this guy’s hospital bills and rehab? Does Cheney have insurance for this kind of thing?

This is so funny, it’s sad.

From The Daily Show:

“Rob Courdry: 'Jon, tonight the Vice President is standing by his decision to shoot Harry Whittington. Now according to the best intelligence available, there were quail hidden in the brush. Everyone believed at the time-there-were-quail in the brush. And while the quail turned out to be the 78 year old man. Even knowing that today, Mr. Cheney insists-he still would have shot Mr. Whittington in the face.”

Now I’m just waiting for Mr. Whittington, as a loyal Republican, to issue a statement accepting full responsibility for the accident and declaring that he was honored to have been shot in the face by Cheney.

UPDATE

Go here to see more coverage from last night's The Daily Show.

Trigger-happy Cheney

Trigger-happy Cheney nearly blows hunting partner’s head clean-off.

Harry Whittington, a 78-year-old hunting companion of Vice President Dick Cheney, was recovering in stable condition Monday after Cheney accidentally shot him during a weekend quail hunting trip...

I went to high school in a small town not too far from where this all happened. I know that hunting accidents like this are not uncommon. I even knew a kid in my high school class who was killed as a result of a hunting accident in the early 1980s.
What bugs me the most about this whole thing is the way the Vice President’s office has handled the aftermath. First, they didn’t bother to report it for 24 hours (shades of Chappaquiddick),...

The accident was not reported publicly by the vice president's office for nearly 24 hours, and then only after the Corpus Christi Caller-Times reported it Sunday.

... and then they left it all to the poor people who own the ranch to handle the torrent of media inquiries.

Katharine Armstrong, daughter of Republican Party stalwart Anne Armstrong, did her best to try and spin the story in a way that is favorable to the vice president, but ultimately I think she just made matters worse by making it appear that Cheney is trying to shirk responsiblity for the accident.

Whittington "came up from behind the vice president and the other hunter and didn't signal them or indicate to them or announce himself," said Armstrong.

Oh, so it’s Whittington’s fault that he got shot. I see.

"The vice president didn't see him," she said. "The covey flushed and the vice president picked out a bird and was following it and shot. And by god, Harry was in the line of fire and got peppered pretty good."

Let me just say that Cheney is damn lucky that he didn’t kill Whittington. We’re not talking about a BB gun here. This was a 28-gauge shotgun which can and does kill people at that distance. And he was damn careless to swing around and fire away without knowing where everybody in his hunting party was. So don’t try and blame Whittington for not jumping up and down and waving his arms. Cheney was the one with his finger on the trigger and he alone was responsible for that weapon when it was discharged.

UPDATE

I think fellow Texan Paul Begala sums things up nicely over at TPMCafe.

For the record

If this is true, Bush deserves to be impeached:

Ex-CIA Official Faults Use of Data on Iraq

The former CIA official who coordinated U.S. intelligence on the Middle East until last year has accused the Bush administration of "cherry-picking" intelligence on Iraq to justify a decision it had already reached to go to war, and of ignoring warnings that the country could easily fall into violence and chaos after an invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

Paul R. Pillar, who was the national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, acknowledges the U.S. intelligence agencies' mistakes in concluding that Hussein's government possessed weapons of mass destruction. But he said those misjudgments did not drive the administration's decision to invade.

"Official intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs was flawed, but even with its flaws, it was not what led to the war," Pillar wrote in the upcoming issue of the journal Foreign Affairs. Instead, he asserted, the administration "went to war without requesting -- and evidently without being influenced by -- any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq."

"It has become clear that official intelligence was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made, that damaging ill will developed between [Bush] policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community's own work was politicized," Pillar wrote.

Pillar's critique is one of the most severe indictments of White House actions by a former Bush official since Richard C. Clarke, a former National Security Council staff member, went public with his criticism of the administration's handling of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and its failure to deal with the terrorist threat beforehand.

Bush and company will, of course, deny these allegations and the Republican Congress is not about to investigate them, so I doubt anything will come of it. But if you want to know why Democrats are so angry (along with other people who are paying attention) then here it is in a nutshell.

DINO-MIGHT!!!

Democrats have a couple of interesting primary races this year, not least of which is the rematch between Former Congressman Ciro Rodriguez and current U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar.

Cuellar managed to boot Rodriguez out of his seat last time around thanks largely to Republican redistricting that took away familar San Antonio territory in exchange for a big chunk of Laredo. So the Laredo-based Cuellar was able to best the San Antonio-based Rodriguez in a race that came down to geographics. This time the race will be based on ideology and it will be interesting to see how many Laredo Democrats will stick by their man after he has practically shed his Democratic ties and donned a Republican cloak.

Recently, Ciro has become a regular celebrity over at Eschaton ever since President Bush gave Cuellar that curious face massage just before his SOTU speech. It has helped raise Ciro’s profile and contributed significantly to his campaign coffers.
There is good reason why Cuellar is Bush’s favorite “Democrat” as the folks at Burnt Orange Report detail.

Another interesting race here locally is state Sen. Frank Madla’s hotly contested re-election campaign against State Rep. Carlos Uresti. Like Cuellar, Madla is accused of being a DINO (Democrat in name only) who too often casts his lot with the Republicans. He has been especially hit hard on a vote to reduce funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program or CHIP.

The E-N had a story this morning that is apparently not online in which they note that Ciro is getting a lot of support from trial lawyers while Madla is getting lots of financial support from the traditionally Republican tort-reform groups. As I was driving in to work today I thought it was interesting that I would see clusters of Madla signs grouped together with Cuellar signs. How much you want to bet they are being put out by Republicans?

Look out Elmo

Look whose neck is on the budget chopping block again. Big Bird.

Bush wants to slash $150 million from Public Broadcasting, the sharpest cut yet. He just won’t let up on his ideological crusade to crush quality children’s television programming.

And here is more awful budget news:

In his $2.77 billion budget, Bush asks Congress to sharply cut or eliminate 141 government programs. Almost one-third of the targeted programs are in education, including ones that provide money to support the arts, vocational education, parent resource centers and drug-free schools.

Bush: The Anti-Education president. That will be just part of his legacy, along with the corruption, incompentence and the bloody quagmire in Iraq.

UPDATE

TxBubba of Southpaw notes that while Bush proposes saving $400 million by axing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, he is advocating that we spend $670 million for the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), the federal agency that supervises all US government non-military propaganda including the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, Radio Free Asia, and the Office of Cuba Broadcasting.

Bush’s awful, horrible budget

What a pathetic waste of paper this is. There is no chance that Bush’s sorry excuse for a budget will ever see the light of day. Nevertheless, I think it is important that everyone study the proposed budget to see just how screwed up and misguided our president’s policies really are. The Wall Street Journal has excellent coverage of all the atrocities contained within Bush’s recipe for disaster.

Much of the squeezing would be of programs aimed at low-income Americans - and wouldn't save all that much money in the aggregate.

The budget is cowardly in the way it fails to address entitlement spending; frivolous in the way it handles defense spending; and downright cruel in the way it slashes domestic programs for the poor that will result in little to no savings - Especially when you realize he is more than offsetting any of those savings with requests for even more tax cuts for the wealthy.

But as the WSJ points out, this budget will be DOA when it gets to the Congress.

Welcome Back!

Bill Crawford of All Things Conservative is back from his extended hiatus.

Also, I was delighted to find out today that two groups have opted to advertize on my humble little site. Wow! I’ll be raking in the big bucks in no time! WooHoo!!

Robin Hood

My little boy just loves Robin Hood.
I mean the Disney version, of course. At 2 1/2, I don’t think he’s quite ready for the live action versions of the story. (I have both the Errol Flynn and Kevin Costner versions on DVD) But the one where Robin is a fox, Little John is a bear and Prince John is a lion, that one is right up his alley.

I’m not exactly sure what it is about this movie that has such a hold on his fancy. He used to be all in to Winnie the Pooh, but from the first day I let him watch Robin Hood it has been his favorite. He’ll watch others things, but will request Robin Hood at every opportunity.
At first it seemed to be one of Disney’s lesser efforts with animation that was geared more toward Saturday morning cartoons than for a feature film. But now that I’ve seen the movie about 157 times and counting, I have developed a special appreciation for it.

The movie has a lot of the stock Disney vocal talents for that time including Phil Harris as Little John (he was also the voice of Balu the Bear in “Jungle Book” and Thomas O’Malley in “The Aristocats”); Pat Buttram as the Sheriff of Nottingham (he was Napoleon in “The Aristocats”; Luke in “The Rescuers”; and Chief in “The Fox and the Hound”) and Carole Shelley as Lady Cluck (she was the goose in the pink bonnet in “The Aristocats” and one of the Fates in “Hercules”).
Other notable voice talents include Andy Devine as Friar Tuck (recognizable because he had bit roles in just about every Western movie ever made) and country singer Roger Miller as the Rooster/Alan-a-Dale. Roger Miller also contributed most of the songs for the film.
But for my money, Peter Ustinov steals the show as the voice of Prince John, the vain, scheming, vindictive, cowardly, thumb-sucking lion who has it out for Robin Hood. One of the reasons I can make it through multiple viewings of the film without my head exploding is because he gives such an enjoyable and over-the-top performance.

I’m sure the reason my son likes the film is because it has all these animals running around doing funny and exciting things in a non-threatening way. But the Robin Hood story itself has an appeal that goes much deeper for everyone old enough to understand the political dynamics of the time.
When I was in college, a friend gave me a collectible action figure of Kevin Costner as Robin Hood in recognition of my then developing leftist political beliefs. Robbing the rich to feed the poor is the penultimate statement of leftist economic thought. A forced redistribution of wealth to right the wrongs of the oppressive capitalist overlords. But Robin Hood also has many traits that appeal to conservatives such as his loyalty to the crown and his devotion to his childhood sweetheart Maid Marian. And then there is the fact that the thing he is objecting to the most is the high taxation being imposed by the despicable Prince John.

My son will eventually outgrow his obsession with this particular movie, but hopefully he will retain a certain amount of pleasure in the timeless story that inspired it.