Disney has made a lot of great films. Of the non-children's ones, I'd cite DECEIVED, SISTER ACT, CAPTAIN RON, THE HAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE, OUTRAGEOUS FORTUNE and HOCUS POCUS.
And maybe HOCUS POCUS could count as a children's film but I think it's more of a general audience one.
So for this theme post on our favorite Disney children's film, I had to rule those out.
Which did not make my picking any easier.
I love TRON.
I have loved TRON all my life. It was one of the first films I saw on videotape when I was a little kid because all my brothers and one of my older sisters was into it.
I can quote TRON by heart and think it's a masterpiece.
Which would make it my pick except . . .
Robin Hood and Little John running through the forest, laughing back and forth at what the other one says . . .
I love ROBIN HOOD.
My grandma had the vinyl record of it so I didn't just grow up on the videotape but also on the vinyl record.
I'd sit in front of her big stereo and listen to the record over and over. She had a stereo that was about waist high for an adult. It had a wooden cover. You lifted it up and there was the turntable -- and an 8-track machine -- and you could play it. I was too small so she'd have to put it on for me.
I loved all the characters -- even the evil Sir Hiss. :D
So that's my pick?
No.
My pick?
I really love TANGLED.
But it's my pick for favorite and best because as much as I enjoy this Rapunzel-based movie, my daughter loves it even more and it's her favorite animated film.
Which means I've probably watched it with her at least a hundred times.
And I can make it through 101 without pulling my hair out. It's that good. :D
Here's C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"
The public discourse would be a lot better off if partisan whores would just sit their tired asses down and stop polluting the conversation with spin and misdirection.
Saritha Prabhu is intellectually dishonest or just a plain idiot. At The Tennessean she wants to whine and uses the Congressional Benghazi hearing to start her nonsense:
But listening to the above, one wondered if the Republicans
on this panel and in Congress had any sense of irony, or shame or any
sense of proportion.
What they said with utter
seriousness about ignored warnings and dead Americans and uninvestigated
truth seemed to many listeners to apply also on a much bigger scale to
the Iraq War.
The origins of the latter have, of course, never been investigated fully.
You care about the Iraq War, do you, Saritha?
No, you don't.
You just lie and lie again.
The reality of that is clear in the quoted passage above.
Saritha claims that Republicans lack a sense of proportion and more.
And they may or they may not, I'm not going down that rabbit hole.
But cheap little whores like Saritha need to be called out.
If you think the Republicans did the right thing or they went overboard or somewhere in between, the issue really isn't the Republicans, not when you bring up the Iraq War.
You should be asking where is the shame of the Congressional Democrats?
The failure to investigate the Iraq War?
The American people used the 2006 mid-term elections to repudiate the Iraq War.
Democrats -- including trashy Nancy Pelosi who needs to be wheeled into a nursing home and not remain leader of the House after she led the party in one losing election after another allowing the GOP to take control of the House?
They're the ones to be outraged at.
They had the permission of the American people to investigate.
They campaigned on this.
They said they'd end the Iraq War, they said control over one House -- just one -- would give them the power to hold hearings and launch investigations.
The American people responded to that by giving them control of not just one house of Congress but both houses of Congress.
Saritha's a two-bit whore whose stupidity or intellectual dishonesty should forbid her from writing her allegedly generic columns (one of which was truly hate speech -- her attack on Christians). But please note, she's castigating Congressional Republicans for not focusing on Iraq when she's got a column, her own space, to write whatever she wants and she doesn't write about Iraq.
She's a fake ass liar.
Ava and I took on MSNBC's 'coverage' of the Benghazi hearing in "TV: The least trusted name in news" and we noted:
And that's why MSNBC is a cesspool.
They offered one voice after another saying the exact same thing.
They could brook no thought or opinion that strayed from the hymnal.
For a brief moment, as the coverage was winding, down, Tom Brokaw appeared.
He expressed the belief that nothing changed with the appearance.
He offered that Hillary had pleased her supporters but done nothing to pull over her detractors.
It was a fair and objective view.
And it's what the entire coverage should have been.
I bring this up now because Brokaw made many outstanding points.
Ava and I could have gone into more of that but I know Tom and like Tom and didn't want to turn his brief moments in the coverage -- we watched two hours of MSNBC coverage and he was probably on for less than six minutes -- into the entire review.
But Tom's most important point may have been that a hearing on Benghazi does not preclude one on Iraq.
It's not an either/or.
And he's right.
And the point I'm making here is if you're upset that there's been no hearing on Iraq (as we've noted before, there have been Congressional hearings on Iraq) -- or upset that it wasn't the type that the Benghazi hearings have been (pointed and often harsh) -- why is that Republican issue?
Again, Democrats held control of no house of Congress in 2005 and 2006 and those two years found Democrats campaigning on the promise of ending the war and doing investigations if they got even one house of Congress -- control of one house.
The American people responded to the campaign promises and gave Democrats control of both houses.
So if you're upset that the Secretary of State (Condi Rice back then) was not immediately called before Congress or someone else to answer for the Iraq War, that's not a Republican issue.
You can lie and whore and be intellectually dishonest.
But the reality is that until the 2010 mid-terms, Democrats controlled both houses of Congess.
They didn't use that power to investigate Iraq any more than they used to end the illegal war.
In case you missed that, and Saritha appears to have missed it, the Iraq War never ended.
Democrats in Congress pretending to care?
That ended.
And that's why their embrace of Cindy Sheehan ended.
They were happy to promote Cindy when they pretended they were powerless.
But when they had the power and the Iraq War continued?
They turned on Cindy.
And instead of calling the politicians out, whores and spinners found distractions to focus on.
At CounterPunch on Friday, Andrew Stewart offered:
Or consider the Spielberg film LINCOLN, which featured both Williams and MUNICH screenwriter Tony Kushner. Besides being a breezy plagiarism of the Gore Vidal novel, it is essentially an analogy for the fight over the neoliberal Affordable Healthcare Act, a debacle loaded with huge gaps that is really a bail-out for the pharmaceutical and insurance companies. The film ends with the implication that Lincoln would have done more is he had lived, perhaps enacting the ideals of Thaddeus Stevens, suggesting in analogue that Obama would have preferred single-payer healthcare had he not been stopped by the GOP. Of course, that is total nonsense, Obama threw single-payer advocates under the bus as soon as possible and pulled in his major campaign donors from Big Pharma immediately. Likewise, Lincoln was not an abolitionist, his record towards Africans was reprehensible and he was in favor of repatriating freed slaves to Africa after the war.
I'm not remembering Andrew Stewart truth telling in real time but he may not have been given the opportunity or the space in real time.
But in real time, Black Agenda Report was one of the few calling out ObamaCare for what it was: a gift to the insurance companies. It wasn't about healthcare being improved or made affordable (a fact many more Americans will learn next year). We called it out here. And Trina, more than anyone else in this community, repeatedly called it out because she had lived through Mitt Romney bring 'universal' healthcare to her state (by forcing everyone to purchase it).
But what passes for the left -- and not just Democrats (a lot of Socialists and Communists should be ashamed) -- decided the people of America didn't matter, their health didn't matter,
Nothing will ever get better until people stop feeling their mission is to act as bodyguards for some politician.
Politicians are public servants.
The public's role in that is to demand action on this or that issue.
When the public makes no demands, nothing happens.
Look at the Iraq War.
Those of us on the left demanded an end to it and Democrats knew they could use it to campaign on with a lot of promises.
But the public failed to demand that these same politicians live up to their promises.
Which is why the US is still in Iraq.
And still in combat.
In case you missed it, the US Defense Dept announced Friday:
Strikes in Iraq
Attack, bomber, fighter and ground attack aircraft conducted 14 strikes in Iraq, coordinated with and in support of Iraq’s government:
-- Near Albu Hayat, one strike struck a large ISIL tactical unit and destroyed four ISIL heavy machine guns, seven ISIL fighting positions, and wounded ISIL fighters.
-- Near Fallujah, one strike struck an ISIL tactical unit and destroyed an ISIL tactical vehicle, an ISIL anti-air artillery piece, and an ISIL heavy machine gun.
-- Near Kisik, one strike suppressed an ISIL mortar position.
-- Near Ramadi, four strikes struck two separate ISIL tactical units and destroyed two ISIL sniper positions, four ISIL heavy machine guns, two ISIL bunkers, three ISIL fighting positions, an ISIL building, an ISIL weapons cache, and denied ISIL access to terrain.
-- Near Sinjar, six strikes struck two separate ISIL tactical units and destroyed six ISIL fighting positions, two ISIL bunkers, three ISIL assembly areas, and suppressed an ISIL mortar position.
-- Near Sultan Abdallah, one strike destroyed two ISIL fighting positions and suppressed an ISIL heavy machine gun position.
In other violence, Mu Xuequan (Xinhua) notes, "A total of 21 people were killed and 38 others wounded on Saturday in clashes with Islamic State (IS) militants in Iraq's provinces of Salahudin and Anbar, security sources said."
Meanwhile the refusal to provide for the people turns even rain pour into violence.
#IRAQ شمرية العراق
Press TV (via Al Bawaba) reports 60 are dead due to this week's flash floods and "The Iraqi Health Ministry said on Friday that most of the victims died due to electrocution caused by flood-related incidents." AFP adds, "The country's decrepit drainage system is unable to handle heavy rainfall, and parts of Baghdad too have suffered prolonged flooding."
The deaths were often preventable.
Had the government done its job and rebuilt the public infrastructure, the death toll would have been lower.
The flash floods fall under a natural event (or "act of God") but the natural event does not offer cover for the deaths.
This week, the Iraqi government was yet again trumpeting the arrival and/or impending arrival of weapons and war planes.
It's always purchased plenty of weapons -- under Nouri al-Maliki prior to Haider al-Abadi -- it's just failed to protect the citizens.
Unlike the Members of Parliament, the average Iraqi does not have a security team to provide protection.
Instead, they're left to count on the government that supposedly represents them to . . . represent them.
But instead the money officials haven't stolen have gone to buy this weapon and that.
None of which prevent suicide bombers or, for that matter, electrocution during flash floods.
Isabel Coles (Reuters) reports, "A cholera outbreak in Iraq has spread to neighboring Syria, Kuwait and Bahrain, and risks turning into a region-wide epidemic as millions of pilgrims prepare to visit the country, UNICEF's Iraq director said."
And when you think things can't get worse . . .
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Former VP Maliki reiterates, after PM Abadi insists that VP posts have been dissolved, that he's still the VP http://bit.ly/1kgY6tK
#Iraq
Hayder al-Khoei
iraq
xinhua
mu xuequan
