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POPSRape is never okay... unless you also happen to make Great Art More: Rape is a crime of violence. It doesn't matter who the rapist is. It doesn't matter who the victim is. It doesn't matter how hard she fought or what she was wearing or how much she had to drink. It doesn't matter whether she knew the rapist, whether she'd gone out with him, whether she kissed him or went back to his place or had sex with fifty thousand other men first. No one has the right to rape another person, and anyone who does must be held accountable, must receive the message that rape is not okay and will not be tolerated, each and every time, no exceptions. How else can we ever build a society in which a woman can move freely through her world without fearing for her physical and emotional safety at every turn? I can only hope and pray that our justice system takes this opportunity to declare loudly and without apology that no one has immunity from accountability for rape, not even Roman Polanski.
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POPSRoman Polanski Has a Lot of Friends Debra Winger, president of the Zurich Film Festival jury, wearing a red "Free Polanski" badge, called the Swiss authorities action "philistine collusion." Frederic Mitterand, the French cultural minister, said it showed "the scary side of America" and described Polanski as "thrown to the lions because of ancient history." French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner, co-founder of Doctors Without Borders, called the whole thing "sinister." Closer to home, Whoopi Goldberg explained on The View that his crime wasn't 'rape rape,' just, you know, rape. Oh, that! Conservative columnist Anne Applebaum minimized the crime in the Washington Post. First, she overlooks the true nature of the crime (drugs, forced anal sex, etc), and then claims "there is evidence Polanski did not know her real age." Talk about a desperate argument. Polanski, who went on to have an affair with 15-year old Nastassja Kinski, has spoken frankly of his taste for very young girls
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POPSHarvey Weinstein thinks being an artist makes raping a child okay, it seems More: I am reassured to know that people with this kind of power, and this kind of money, fully believe they have the right to use the connections that they have, to help a friend evade prosecution for this 'so called crime'. It makes me feel very positive about the world, that the drugging and raping, of a 13 year old child- is not rape, as long as it is a powerful celebrity that is raping her. It reassures me that women like Deborah Winger, and Whoopi Goldberg- are standing up to tell the world that this 'so called crime' is not really that bad, its not like its 'rape rape' after all. Well if a case where a undisputed facts are that a 13 year old was repeatedly fucked against her will, after being drugged, is not rape= then really, I would like to know what constitutes rape at all? Oh wait, I am not reassured. I am fucking angry. Disgusted. Horrified. Dumbfounded.
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POPSWhoppi Goldberg: Rape Apologist It wasn't "rape-rape" that Polanski committed, it was the other kind of rape. The less "rapey" kind that's more ok than the full-on "rape-rape" kind of rape.
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POPSsodomized to protect our freedoms this is from a report by physicians for human rights- "Broken Laws, Broken Lives" accounts of how US personal tortured men in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo
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POPSObama and the Right: Shadow Projection
Racism makes Obama the Other, but shadow projection is an even more powerful (if interrelated) force than simple racism, and it is very susceptible to the mob mentality – think Goldberg in Orwell’s 1984. This will not end well. Now that Obama is carrying their shadow, only a dramatic event from outside could change it. (Or, they could gain awareness of their disowned dark side, and tolerating the inevitable pain of that experience, integrate into a healthy whole. This would require white, middle-class, middle-aged Americans - the primary protesters - to acknowledge that white middle class Americans are not all goodness and light and start taking responsibility for white privilege, their environmental choices, effects of class on economic status, etc. Don’t hold your breath.) The more those on the right deny their own failings, the more their internal unease will increase, the more the hatred to Obama will grow, and the more the need to do something will increase. No wonder the far r
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POPSPatrick Swayze has passed away "If I leave this Earth, I want to leave this Earth just knowing I've tried to give something back and tried to do something worthwhile with myself," Swayze told Walters, when asked why he decided to do the show. "And that keeps me going, that gets me up in the morning. My work ... is my legacy."
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POPSStone Cold | stone cold movie stone cole, wwe, stone cold videos, jesse stone, brian bosworth, triple h, stone, Stone Cold, goldberg, jessie stone, stone sour, david baldacci, stone cold ice cream, stone cold movie, stone cold pictures, hulk hogan, kane, stone cold steve austin, the rock, undertaker, john cena
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POPSIt's time to embrace American royalty About this latest hiring by NBC, Atrios observed: "if only the Villager values of nepotism and torture could be combined somehow." The American Prospect's Adam Serwer quicky noted that they already have been: "Liz Cheney." Liz Cheney is really the perfect face of Washington's political culture, a perfect manifestation of all the rotting diseases that define it and a pure expression of what our country has become and the reasons for its virtual ruin. She should really be on every political TV show all day every day. It's almost as though things can't really be expressed thoroughly without including her. Jenna Bush as a new NBC "reporter" on The Today Show -- at a time when every media outlet is firing and laying off real reporters -- is a very nice addition though.
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POPS NOT N.I.C.E. (criticism of NICE has been ceaseless)
saw nothing wrong with running this unabashed love-letter to a health-care system, in effect, ruled by death panels (See my post on this last Friday, or Tom Maguire's Sunday item for more). Now, suddenly, to even suggest such a possibility is McCarthyism " now called Palinism " according to Richard Cohen. What drives me crazy about liberal complaints about conservative tactics these days is how selective they are. Obama, Barney Frank, Jacob Hacker, and others have said that they want these reforms " specifically the public option " to lead to single payer. But when conservatives take them at their word, suddenly it's outrageous misinformation and "fishy" stuff. When the wind is at their backs, liberals look way off to the horizon, like Obama at a podium, dreaming of a future of European-style statism. But when conservatives use this to their advantage, suddenly it is outrageous to even consider the possibility of a road to hell being paved with good intentions. . . .
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POPSPolls And Post-Mortems Howard Fineman tells us what went wrong, other than the predictable perfidy of Evil Republicans and their big business paymasters: Murky campaign promises ...The president is for “reform,” which says… nothing. Orszag’s fantasy Every president wants to reconcile frugality and generosity, and there is always an ambitious and clever aide willing to tell him it can be done. In Obama’s White House it is Budget Director Peter Orszag, who confidently told Obama that carefully administered universal health coverage would save the government money in the long run. ... Focusing on the have-nots ...the White House all along should have been focusing on the fears of the 85 percent who have insurance, not on the 15 percent who do not. Jonah Goldberg has his view - "if you actually wanted Obama-care to pass, casting a majority of Americans as being stooges of racist goons may not be the best way to go." He left out greedy and stupid.
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POPSTrial Lawyer Medicare Bonanza Averted — For Now a lawyer who formerly served on the staff of the House Judiciary Committee and describes himself as a “lifelong Democrat.” In a July 24 article in BNA’s Medicare Report, Goldberg wrote that the provision “would completely redefine healthcare litigation in this country by allowing freelance lawyers, without any checks and balances from Medicare, to sue anyone they could accuse of causing Medicare to spend money on its beneficiaries.” The measure would let lawyers file suits against whole classes of defendants based, not on the evidence in an individual case, but on ‘relevant statistical or epidemiological evidence.’ The good news is that the provision was removed during a mark-up session"thanks to the efforts of Republican Reps. Dave Camp of Michigan and Eric Cantor of Virginia and to some Democrats as well. The bad news is that it got into the bill in the first place"and that it could easily make a reappearance as the legislation moves through Congress.
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POPSCopy a Wii DVD Love your Nintendo Wii games? It's so easy to scratch or break a game disk, but so expensive to replace. Happily, it's also easy to make back up copies of your games. In you want to copy Wii games, in addition to a reliable computer that has high speed Internet, you will also need a CD/DVD combo drive and specialty software that can be downloaded from a website.
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POPSTorture is always wrong
"That's right; sodomy. Forcible anal penetration. The documentation of this and other forms of sexual humiliation is too extensive to be denied or pawned off on a couple of redneck privates. And we know now that sexual humiliation techniques were among those discussed and approved by the National Security Principals Committee, a White House group including Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, George Tenet and John "History will not judge this kindly" Ashcroft. I don't want to come off as minimizing the horror of controlled drowning. It's just that there's something about anal rape that brings the torture issue into sharp focus. Just once, I'd like to hear one of these American Enterprise Institute psychos, the ones that always trot out to defend the neocons' freakish obsessions, have to defend shoving a flashlight up a guy's ass. I want to hear Frank Gaffney or Jonah Goldberg tell me why I shouldn't be fucking mortified that raping prisoners was considere
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POPSObama's long six months
Obama sold the country a false prospectus of easy, obvious, and almost painless change. The usual six honeymoon months have elapsed, and the country is nearly through rejoicing at the consolation that they have a president whom foreigners are unlikely to throw shoes at, and who speaks in sentences. But his own Environmental Protection Agency director acknowledges that his cap-and-trade bill will have no effect on the climate, and it will neither raise revenue nor reduce carbon use. It must be replaced with a straight carbon tax of bearable impact coupled with sensible conservation, and alternate-energy-source and oil-exploration incentives. The bill that limped through the House of Representatives was a Rube Goldberg contraption of Al Gore myths and Congressional vote-buying boondoggles. Its adoption would be a disaster. The president’s claim of putting millions of Americans to work making wind-mills and solar panels is a fable that extends the frontiers of quixotry.
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