Everything about 'The Lego Movie' is awesome

'The Lego Movie'

"The Lego Movie" is a really good film. I would have recommended it on the strength of the creative animation alone. It's about a lot of things and at times it can really be funny. But believe it or not, it really is mythic in it's scope and ambitions. There is a scene in the film when Emmet, the hero, falls through the abyss. What happens next reminded me of the Hindu story of the holy man who falls out of the mouth of God. What you really need to know is that "The Lego Movie" is about a Father and Son, it is about a rebellious angel who redeems a creator who has forgotten how to play.

Marco, Rubio! Marco, Rubio!

10:44 May God bless the greatest nation in the history of earth. I'll get back to you when I figure out what nation that is.

10:40 Throw back a bottle of water.

10:39 I would never support a plan that would harm my mother. Which is why I support a plan that will harm yours.

Hail to the Chief baby

10:16 That's all folks.  Thank you very much. Be sure to tip the wait staff. I'm here all week.

10:15 Twelve bullet wounds! That's just the way he's made?  What the hell was he made of?

10:12 We weren't sent here to be perfect. That has to be the most honest assessment I've ever heard regarding Congress.

10:10 They deserve a vote. To bad the vote will be no.

Romney retires the side

1:01 a.m: "Thank you and God bless America."

1:01 a.m: "Job creators ... I believe in America. I believe in the people of America. ... We have given our all."

1 a.m: "Our leaders have to reach across the aisle to do the people's work." Right ...

12:59 p.m: Thank you, thank you, thank you.

12:58 p.m: The Ann / Ryan choice joke again.

12:57 p.m: Romney speaks to his supporters and offers his concession.

Live blogging the election

12:25 p.m: Still waiting for a Romney concession speech. Taking his time reminds me of that moment in the debates when Romney patronizingly said to the president "You'll get your turn." This is a study in dickishness.

12:12 p.m: Waiting for a concession by Gov. Mitt Romney. One is not coming right away. He probably didn't write a concession speech. They had FOUR recount teams ready to deploy!

Why I voted for Obama

The absolute turning point for me was Gov. Mitt Romney’s 47 percent address. There was something very demeaning and patronizing about it that grated on my nerves.

I was a productive member of the workforce until July of 2012. I was a veteran of the First Gulf War and now I was unemployed. Had it not been for the social services that my taxes help to support my new address would have been a cardboard box under the I-95 underpass.

On the passing of George McGovern

If memory serves, I met this man when he made a stop at Indiana University Northwest. I was nearing the end of my college career and it was an evening event. He was there during the turmoil of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

McGovern was probably a little to the left of me at that time in my life. I considered myself a left-leaning moderate: to the left on social issues, to the center on economic issues, and a deficit hawk. I remember him being an articulate, honorable and decent man who was spending his evening addressing us. Most of us in attendance had little idea who he was. He was a footnote – the unfortunate reason for Watergate.

Breezy books engage in career and workplace mythbusting

The challenge of any work is that it engages the reader. There is nothing so annoying as a book that takes itself too seriously. In the cases of two recent efforts, the authors have important things to say, but they are not afraid of speaking in an engaging style. “So Good They Can’t Ignore You” by Cal Newport and “Rework” by 37Signals founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson take aim at the myths and misconceptions that surround careers and the workplace.

How NASA seeks to travel the galaxy in 80 days

It’s fall and that means it’s time for the latest thing in NASA thinking: Warp drive. For the general informed reader, you know that warp drive is mostly magic. It is a Star Trek technology that allows Federation ships to cross the galaxy relatively quickly and allows the show to tell a story that would be different from one that hewed to science fact.

However for the more well-read reader, two words make up NASA’s more recent thinking on the subject: Alcubierre drive.

Senate Republicans tell veterans ‘fight for a job on your own’

Jobless veterans suffer some more as Senate Republicans offer a blatantly political election-year snub to President Obama. While five GOP senators sided with the Democrats on the bill, Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, who was a captain in the 1970s in the U.S. Army reserves, was key to blocking the vote. Sen. Tom ‘Dr. No’ Coburn, of Oklahoma, stayed true to his nickname, preferring to talk about the abstract idea of bringing down the debt rather than address the plight of jobless in the here and now.

Middle East violence requires a middle road approach

A story in the Washington Post does a fine job of explaining what the recent spate of Middle East violence against the West is really all about. It is a historical struggle within Islam to come to terms with its wounded pride in the face of modernity. It is about the struggle between the younger generation that sees what the West has to offer and wants it on their terms vs. the older generation that wants none of it.

In the face of all of this is the question that America in general and the American President in particular always faces: what should we do? The real question often is: what can we reasonably expect to accomplish even if we do nothing?

Ryan accepts Romney's offer of a bucket of warm piss

In Norfolk, Va., with the decommissioned battleship USS Wisconsin as his backdrop, GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney introduced America to the new president of the United States, Paul Ryan. It would seem that Ryan has some foreign policy positions, ones that may be less embarrassing than those of Romney (a foreign policy lightweight) who has both just finished an awful trip abroad but also succeeded in honking of the Japanese. Blunt force seems to be Ryan’s instrument of choice which is readily apparent in his budget. Ryan's budget also makes him a deeply polarizing figure: adorable to the base, repugnant to the left.

Romney's hope is likely that this will change the election season debate and take the heat off of his unreleased tax returns. It is also probably Romney's hope that he can shore up his campaign by picking a Midwesterner. With rare exception, the vice-presidency has never really amounted to much more than a chance at an election campaign photo op. Unless you were Ford, LBJ or Cheney, the post has rarely risen above John Nance Garner's famous observation that the vice presidency is "not worth a bucket of warm piss."

STOCK Act’s one little loophole

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While a measure that was designed to stop insider trading among Congresscritters drew bipartisan support and was signed into law by President Obama, it passed with a tiny, glaring flaw: it doesn’t apply to the congressional family members. The problem stems from a misinterpretation between the House and Senate.

Leader of the Foreign Policy Lightweight Brigade

GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, the former governor from Bain is set to visit Poland at the end of the month at the invitation of Lech Walesa. This may be in part because all the current vice presidential candidates are foreign policy lightweights. It will be part of a six-day overseas trip that will include stops in England and Israel.

Shooting sparks another round of debate about gun control

Here we go again. Whether it is a suspect who shoots a congresswoman or a suspect who fires his gun into a crowded theater, the perennial question about guns in our society is rejoined and it will likely come to the same sorry end.

With a presidential election in full swing and a congress held by the Republican party, don’t expect anything approximating a civil discussion on meaningful gun control.

Is this thing on? Really, is this thing on?

Wow! Has it really been a year since the last post? I guess it has. A lot has happened since then and some of it could be charitably characterized as problematic. It can now be said that there will be more time to tend to the blog than there has been in the last few months. And now that the hair-tugging contest between Viacom and DirectTV is over and done we can rebuild our lives together. I look forward to taking the opportunity to getting back to this blog and reconnecting with my audience.

Also, I would like to invite you to follow the adventures of an up and coming critic in Kharkov, Ukraine named Oksana. Yes, she's for real, she's very intelligent and she'll make a great event planner one day. You'll have to use Google Translate to read her blog but it is worth it.

Greek lightning won’t stay in the bottle

If the economic observers are right, the birthplace of Western civilization is a ticking financial timebomb that will mean the end of the Euro as we know it. This week Standard & Poor's downgraded Greece to "CCC", the lowest credit level possible, on fears of a default. And China’s not very happy about the situation. Two scenarios are likely. The first involves yet another bailout package that would keep Greece afloat. That has stalled. The second is a two-part default with part one by the end of 2013 and part two by the end of the following year. According to currency strategist David Mann, the market has placed the likelihood of a Greek default at 75 percent.

As usual, it’s governments versus bankers. For any second bailout to get the approval of Europe’s largest economy, Germany, public sector support is a must. The European bank is saying it will see any private sector participation in the plan as coercion and call it a selective default. So how the bailout will happen without obliterating the country’s credit score is anyone’s guess. But contagion looks like it’s in the offing. 

Moody’s is examining three top level French banks for their exposure to the probable Greek default.

The Greeks themselves are not taking the austerity measures required for a second bailout lying down. A phalanx worthy of their ancient forebears turned out in force armed with ‘petrol bombs’ turned out near the parliament building to vent their anger at lawmakers. This has led the Prime Minister of Greece to start doing the cabinet shuffle in order to maintain a semiworking government.

The reality is that government defaults are pretty common occurrences. It’s the sovereign equivalent of bankruptcy. The current crisis was also a result of creative practices involving cross-currency swaps by … wait for it … Goldman Sachs, which helped the Greek government paper over its debt so it could appear to be in line with its debt level obligations under its EU membership. Much of Greece’s current woes legitimately may be of its own making, but if default worked for Venezuela nine times during a 175 year period, the world is probably protesting too much over a possible Greek debt conflagration.

U.S. military evolving into the green war machine

It’s nice to know someone has finally realized that the America’s dependence on foreign oil might be a national security problem. The Pentagon is turning its eye to greater energy efficiency on the battlefield. The military spent $15 billion last year on energy. The Pentagon is expected to spend $1.8 billion in 2010 on renewable energy technology and that spending is expected to rise to $26.8 billion by 2030. In 2009, the Department of Defense rang up an energy bill of $13.3 billion. By comparison, the U.S. military uses as much energy as the African nation of Nigeria.

Of course the energy strategy was mandated by law in 2009. U.S. Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) also introduced a bill that would create a Joint Contingency Base Resource Security Project that would facilitate the efforts of the military services to pool their research efforts. With the Army developing hybrid vehicles and the DOD pushing renewable energy technologies, it’s quite possible it will have beneficial effects in the civilian market.

In the first six months of 2011, Americans spent more than $50 billion on fuel. With the economy still reeling from the shock of $4 a gallon of gasoline, the military’s campaign to develop renewable energy technologies may succeed in stemming the transfer of wealth to countries that don’t like the U.S. very much and reduce our carbon footprint. Only the Koch Brothers could argue with that.

A jobless prescription that fails to address the illness

Paul Krugman and Todd G. Buchholz. One of these men is a Nobel Prize-winning economist. The other is not. And the one is not has the temerity to not only cavalierly blow off the Nobel Prize-winner’s explanation of the economy’s present woes but suggests replacing unemployment benefits with vouchers … umm a ‘signing bonus.’

Buchholz’s disconnect comes as no surprise. According to the ID tag line, he was a White House economic adviser to George H.W. Bush and a former managing director of the Tiger hedge fund. It’s not just that elected officials in Congress have put the needs of a few bond-holders over the needs of the many, it’s also the fact that job seekers are experiencing a systemic bias against the unemployed. The problem isn’t that the unemployed want to live on government benefits. The problem is that employers won’t hire them. A point made quite baldly recently by Sony Ericsson when it told job-seekers in a job listing "No unemployed candidates will be considered at all." An ad for Beacon Hill Staffing Group in Boston told prospective paralegals that “to be considered, candidates must be currently employed."

Some lawmakers, such as New York State Sen. Andrea Stewart-Cousins, have grasped the enormity of the problem and are considering legislative remedies to the problem. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is also taking a look into the issue to see how extensive the problem is and who, exactly, is being hurt (most likely minorities).

But with the Republican Congress playing chicken with the debt ceiling (and risking default) and engaging in “right wing social engineering” the prospects for any meaningful fix to the economy that benefits Main Street remains dim.

Clearly it doesn't take Nobel Prize-winning economist to see that the economy in general, and American workers in particular, are both in trouble. But the causes of the trouble are beyond Buchholz’s grasp. It’s easy to offer a solution for unemployment when you have a job. In the current environment, having a job is the only way to get a job. One can only hope that if Buchholz’s remedy is adopted, he’ll get a first-hand taste of unemployment and have to swallow is prescription whole.

GOP engineering a bureau's stillbirth

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Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is set to begin its work on July 21. Despite Democratic support for Elizabeth Warren, Team Obama is considering naming a former banker, Raj Date, to head the bureau. But Congressional Republicans won’t have it. They are preparing to offer amendments designed to trap/spay/neuter the watchdog bureau before it can perform its mission: to protect consumers.

And while it may be a core tenant of conservatism that big government translates into lax morality, the irony seems lost on them that Wall Street bankers (whose morality was questionable at best) who played dice with the economy and got bailed out by the big government they decry will get a reprieve. Security and Exchange Commission rules that were supposed to go into effect June 16 as a result of the economic crisis will not go into effect. The bank lobby continues to fight against the bureau despite the fact that it might even help Wall Street long term interests. Of course this begs two questions: why is the GOP really fighting the bureau’s creation and whose interests are Congressional Republicans really serving?