Leftist Christian

Bootleg DVDs--they're not great, but they're not as bad as you'd think. My sister has quite a problem with them, though. A guy sits in a dark theater with a pretty good camera and cuts it off as soon as the lights go up (as a completist, I'm a bit annoyed that the credits always get chopped). I seldom go to the movies. I certainly wouldn't go to see "Friday Night Lights" or "Ladder 49," but sitting around on an odd evening, I might vegetate to them. Oddly, I probably won't even watch them when they come to cable. But I'm supposed to feel some guilt because some millworker got my five bucks instead of Joaquin Phoenix. For a dark image with distorted sound, where sometimes I can see the shadows of people getting up to use the restroom. It's a silly thing, bootleg DVDs, but its not the first thing that comes to my mind when I think of crime. I had the good fortune to use Napster briefly before it was dismantled (the first time), and the...

I am certainly glad that John Ashcroft is leaving. The question is whether his replacement will be an improvement. I'm not necessarily glad that Colin Powell is leaving. While it would appear that he did not have any positive influence himself on the Bush administration, rather, he did what he would not have chosen himself, Condoleeza Rice is certainly not going to be an improvement. We know that Powell had some good ideas and was at least ill at ease with supporting the Bush agenda. All I get from Rice is that she pleads ignorance to everything she should be quite on top of. The new John Ashcroft will likely not look like the old John Ashcroft. He apparently diverges from the Republican party on some issues, like abortion. But there's that whole denial of the Geneva convention thing. Like the old John Ashcroft, civil rights might not be at the top of his list. On a completely unrelated note, observe a moment of silence for ODB. It seemed like Dirt McGirt was poised to return...

Okay, so I didn't exactly trust George Bush's call for unity in his acceptance speech, but I did agree that it is sorely needed. It seemed sort of like a nice, if obligatory, gesture at the time. It took him exactly one day, though, to show how utterly disingenuous he was and how credulous any of us were to believe him. The smirk returned. He confidently proclaimed that his huge win shows the people support his policy ideas and that we can look forward to the disastrous privatization of Social Security and the certitude that corporations can expect huge tax cuts for the next ten years. Privatization being a good way for the government to shirk its responsibility to us and ensure, well, further tax cuts for corporations. I'm feeling nostalgic for Bush I, who could at least get us out of Iraq shortly after he took us there and raise taxes a bit when he saw that not to do so would be to imperil our country. Understand me clearly on this point--it seemed a bit odd to me that a...

I suspect it all came down to moralism. At a time when we are suffering a record deficit, when unemployment hasn’t recovered from the first couple of years of Bush’s presidency, when Bush sells himself on an education program he won’t fund, when he starts a war for dubious reasons with a military he underfunds, when he removes any environmental and employment standards from corporations, when he hands these corporations huge tax breaks to diminish their work forces or move elsewhere, when he spends so much of his time on vacation so that he misses warnings that the country will be attacked, when we lose more and more of our civil rights under the USA Patriot Act, Bush seems to have won reelection on the looming threat of consensual adult sexuality. Ann Richards could have told us this would happen. I spent the hours leading up to the election watching a few movies—Outfoxed (about Fox News), Unconstitutional (about the Patriot Act), Bush’s Brain (about Karl Rove), and Control Room (abo...