I can’t see why any poor or under-employed person should vote for the Republican Party. The American Tea Party hates the poor. Despises any program that gives one dollar to the poor. Yet wants to waste hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars in the Middle East.
I’m still trying to find a national American politician who’s a true fiscal conservative.
It is based on the 1965 Selma to Montgomery voting rights marches …
Selma has received universal acclaim from film critics. Praise has gone particularly to the film’s acting, cinematography, screenplay, and direction. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film currently holds a rating of 98% …
Martin Luther King Jr. emulated my personal hero Gandhi. Non-violent resistance. The best way for an oppressed minority to challenge a privileged majority.
It worked.
But as a film I found Selma average. Too preachy. The dialogue often not believable. The good guys too good, the bad guys too evil.
It might have been better as a documentary.
Instead it’s a Hollywood fiction based on a true story. I know not all the facts are exactly right. But John Lewis, being bludgeoned in this photo March 7, 1965, feels the film gets enough right. To him the film is true to the story.
Alabama Governor George Wallace was a prototype segregationist. During his final years, Wallace recanted his racist views and asked for forgiveness from African Americans.
I visited Alabama for the first time last year. Surprised and pleased to see no outward signs of overt racism.
Sooner or later the echos of American slavery will be entirely forgotten.
In the meantime, Selma is a reminder of how far we’ve come. And how far we have not come.
I guess I’ll be voting for the politician most likely to beat Harper.
There are many reasons why Harper has to go. But the last straw for me was when he sent a few planes and a few dozen men to bomb people. It’s a pitifully symbolic gesture. One that will accomplish nothing aside from inspiring terrorists to retaliate against Canadians.
The best thing Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chrétien ever did was to refuse George Bush’s “Coalition of the Willing”, a group of 49 countries that the U.S. said supported the mission despite the lack of authorization by the U.N. Security Council.
Let’s hope Trudeau is half as good as Chrétien. One quarter as good as his father.
The New Jersey Governor, normally a smart guy, bungled this one. It seemed to me he was pandering to the anti-Obama, lowest common denominator base of the Republican Party.
IN THE crowded field of Ebola alarmists, Rand Paul of Kentucky stands out. …
Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana says planes must be grounded “to protect our people”. …
Some leaders are more responsible. The Republican governor of Texas, Rick Perry, has tried to keep people calm. Few countries are better equipped than America to keep the public safe, he has assured Texans. He is right. It should not need saying. …
In the late ’90s, Smith & Wesson was facing a major lawsuit filed by cities and states that blamed the company for rampant gun violence. The company stood to lose millions.
So in 2000, under pressure from the Clinton administration, Smith & Wesson’s chief executive, Ed Schultz, made a fateful decision — and raised the ire of the powerful National Rifle Association and its supporters. …
On 11 May 2001, Saf-T-Hammer Corporation acquired Smith & Wesson Corp. from Tomkins plc for US$15 million, a fraction of the US$112 million originally paid by Tomkins. Saf-T-Hammer assumed US$30 million in debt, bringing the total purchase price to US$45 million …
In December 2014, Smith & Wesson Holding announced it was paying $130.5 million for Battenfeld Technologies, a Columbia, Missouri-based designer and distributor of hunting and shooting accessories. The company made the acquisition with the eventual intent to merge all its existing Smith & Wesson, M&P and Thompson Center Arms accessories into a single division
We know, in the world that surrounds us, there are terrorists and home invaders and drug cartels and car-jackers and knock-out gamers and rapers, haters, campus killers, airport killers, shopping-mall killers, road-rage killers, and killers who scheme to destroy our country with massive storms of violence against our power grids, or vicious waves of chemicals or disease that could collapse the society that sustains us all. …
He lies. He exaggerates.
He lies exaggerates I assume, to help increase sales of firearms. He exaggerates for money.
I can’t imagine any other reason to overstate the way he does.
LaPierre’s central message: Owning a gun is the solution. The world is a scary place. There are bad guys everywhere threatening you and your family, and the only thing they’re afraid of is a gun in your hands.
Tragically, a record number of Americans subscribe to some version of this mythology, with 63 percent (67 percent of men polled and 58 percent of women) believing that guns truly do make them safer. The public’s confidence in firearms, however, is woefully misguided: The evidence overwhelmingly shows that guns leave everybody less safe, including their owners. …
The NRA is wrong: Owning a gun is far more likely to harm you than protect you.
I agree with LaPierre on a couple of things. He supports:
• Increasing funds for a stricter and more efficient mental health system, and reform of civil commitment laws to facilitate institutionalization of the mentally ill when necessary.
• Creating a computerized universal mental health registry of those adjudicated to be incompetent to help limit gun sales to the mentally ill.
It’s deflection, I’m assuming. Taking those positions makes no sense relative to his other positions.
He’s totally against the government regulating firearms, even though they are dangerous. (More Americans American children and youth are now killed by weapons than motor vehicle accidents.) … But totally for the government regulating mental health. Because the mentally ill are dangerous. 🙂
Citizens United was a terrible ruling. Most people asked to think about the issue for 10 seconds conclude that it’s a bad idea.
An ABC–Washington Post poll conducted February 4–8, 2010, showed that 80% of those surveyed opposed (and 65% strongly opposed) the Citizens United ruling, which the poll described as saying “corporations and unions can spend as much money as they want to help political candidates win elections“.
It is based on Chris Kyle’s autobiography American Sniper …
The film stars Bradley Cooper and Sienna Miller …
I’ve enjoyed all the Clint Eastwood directed movies, so assumed I’d like this one.
I did. Most people do.
It wasn’t as good as Unforgiven (1992) or Million Dollar Baby (2004), but I’d recommend you see it. Unless you have an aversion to violent films.
American Sniper received positive response from critics. Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a “Certified Fresh” rating of 73%, based on 203 reviews from critics …
The highlight by far was Bradley Cooper. His performance is subtle and nuanced, unlike the movie which is very Eastwood. Too many cliche lines and story points.
It’s a Hollywood moviebased on a true story. Not a documentary.
I don’t find the criticism I’ve read at all valid.
(It is fair to point out that Kyle was inspired after terrorists from Yemen and Saudi Arabia attacked the USA. Yet he was sent instead to fight in Iraq. Saddam Hussein didn’t want anything to do with Bin Laden.)
War is Hell. I’m against war. I wish Kyle had stayed home. If he had been Canadian, he would have. Canada did not join in the coalition of the willing, one of the smartest decisions ever for my nation.
If you don’t like snipers. Don’t like war. Blame Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, not Chris Kyle. He was simply following the orders of his President.
American Sniper is as much an anti-war film as one glorifying war.
I did find it surprising that Eastwood included one scene: Kyle pointing an (unloaded) gun at his wife, in jest. And then setting the weapon carelessly on a ledge with his children in the room. To me it foreshadowed something was going to happen.
Perhaps that scene was in the script. But Eastwood didn’t change it. It seemed unlikely to me that a firearms expert like Chris Kyle would be so nonchalant with weapons in his family home.
__
I wasn’t surprised to learn that the real Chris Kyle suffered mentally. I wasn’t surprised to learn he had died from gun fire.
“Live by the sword, die by the sword.”
If you spend enough time around firearms, you stand a higher percentage chance of accident, suicide or murder than if you don’t.
Eddie Ray Routh, then 25, shot and killed Chris Kyle, 38, and his friend Chad Littlefield on Feb. 2, 2013, at a shooting range in Erath County, Texas. Kyle often took veterans, such as Routh, out on shooting ranges to work with them and help them cope with PTSD and related problems.
Rick McCharles 