jill gets down with mike rowe and bears. fast company cover ensues.

i know the following sounds strange to say, but jim cramer is talking sense. and he's not just talking sense--he has put together, in one monster rant (while a couple of incredulous hosts look on in horror) one of the great takedowns of late stage capitalism ever. marx would be proud.

hey everybody, poo monkey has met his match in Jonah Goldberg's intellect! poo monkey wrote a book called "liberalz is teh bad" but regnery passed, the bastards. the american enterprise institute awarded poo monkey with a 6 month internship, one that has sadly been cut short by poo monkey getting hired by the american coalition forces in iraq! he's going to be doing the plumbing for baghdad apparently.

oh, and this one goes out to jonah!

the 50 most loathsome people of 2008 from the buffalo beast.

many a bon mot dropped over there.

i'm not going to lie to you. when i think of you, this is how i picture you, wherever you come from, whoever you are.

happy new year, everyone!!!

a slight return, toe dip, whatever.

jill on coolhunting.

worth a view.

Another way to put it would be that Shrub has finally, at long last, completed the process of failing upwards.

billmon. getting it so precisely right it hurtz. doesn't even need a link, that one. on the leftblogosphere, we have billmon and glenn greenwald, two true geniuses, plus the excellence of josh marshall's reporting and kos's agitating and coordinating. on the right?

of course, there is always CEO of some world dominating Halliburton company as bush's next job, and he could fuck that up pretty badly if his past business history is anything to go by. and FSM help baseball if Bush becomes commissioner.

more aussie music that should have ruled the world. this one at least ruled australia.

hunnah's and collectah's, i'm told it's pronounced. a superb band.

here is what greatness used to sound like.



enjoy. what an incredible band--the celibate rifles.

give please. do it now.

James Webb (VA-Sen)	$
Darcy Burner (WA-08)	$
Victoria Wulsin (OH-02)	$
Joseph Sestak Jr (PA-07)	$
Al Weed (VA-05)	$

jill's monkey portraits highlighted on cool hunting, with various links to the book and her work.

read more | digg story

"I'm an optimist," he says. "I think that after the warming sets in and the survivors have settled in near the Arctic, they will find a way to adjust. It will be a tough life enlivened by excitement and fear."

and that is the optimistic view of our life 20 years or so from now, per James Lovelock, pre-eminent scientist in the UK.

time to buy a place north of the hudson bay, i think.

UPDATED:
Jill on Inside Edition and CBS local news.


not a bad piece, in the continuum from terrible to ok. however, local news/inside edition is still creepy and obsessed with stupid controversy. the lead in to this story featured lindsay lohan and her slightly damaged wrist.

it will all end in tears, as they say.

Amazon.com: Monkey Portraits: Books: Jill Greenberg,Paul Weitz

Jill's book!!!

on amazon.

and about me, this:

and a kerfuffle on dailykos

such mishegas, such excitement.

toronto is a nice city, and they throw a fine film festival.

globeandmail.com : From the shoes of Stephen Hegyes

hey, a journalist quoted me at the toronto film festival, for some reason.

as above.

I've produced or exec produced 12 TV movies this year, including Life is not a Fairytale and Firestorm. i thought, given some of the silliness i'm seeing in the diaries at daily kos that it might be useful to some here to understand the process that gets such movies made.

so here's a primer on how it works.

there aren't very many of these made any more--the heyday of the TV movie is long since behind us. when selling to the networks only an event is going to get their interest. 9/11 was always going to be a movie on one of the networks or on cable--it was just a question of where. when cyrus was pitching the story, he had insider info as a movement conservative, so he knew how to get the line on the commission report and so on.

what follows is speculation (a dramatic recreation, if you will, with some license taken, some composite character, and some fictionalizations. hell, maybe there's even some improv.)

at ABC, you have various lines of defense. someone in the middle ranks (a VP or slightly higher up) gets a call from cyrus's agents saying: "we have a great take on 9/11 as a mini-series". a pitch would be set immediately, because cyrus is considered a solid writer (he in fact IS a solid writer, with some decent credits and a few good scripts behind him). And given the profile of the pitch, Steve MacPherson would be in that first meeting, most likely. I doubt VERY much that Cyrus pitched a political slant--more likely he just pitched a "i know people on the inside" angle. as well, everyone wanted to tell john o'neill's story (that was oliver stone's original angle as well) and cyrus had a bunch of info from that end as well.

ABC probably bought this in the room, as they say--a good writer, a great story, a true event. kind of a no-brainer. with that deal done, cyrus commenced to writing, with some input from ABC but probably very limited at that point. once he finished his draft, then the network got involved. notes are written (by both VP types and probably higher ups) and those notes are both creative and now quite possibly political in nature. the highest-ups at ABC would be well aware of this project, and were i'm sure very keen to have this movie on for the fifth anniversary, putting everyone under the gun. that this coincided with the election coming up was most likely not on people's minds-i am reconsidering my intemperate remarks on digby's blog yesterday. airdates have their own logic--this one was too obvious to need to question.

now here's where things get murky: i'm sure cyrus did what he has promised to do--delivered a piece of right wing propaganda, albeit a well-written one. or maybe he figured he'd add the sneaky stuff in when the shooting draft was done with the director (david cunningham was attached early on in the process as well, so they were collaborating from the get-go) and kept it neutral. but given that the highest ups care and cared about this (though McPherson is the president of ABC believe me he has bosses as well, and those are the guys who make decisions about, for instance, where to donate political dollars) project, they may have given their own notes.

now they have a start date, and they go out to actors. actors are actors--their are some juicy roles in this project, and ABC was not afraid to pay actors well to be in it. so the actors do what they do--read for parts and hope to get cast.

what they don't do: have strong political opinions about major material that probably didn't read so tendentiously on the page. i can assure anyone reading of that. harvey keitel or patricia heaton (NB my company distributed her last TV movie) and their political views have nothing to do with it. that doesn't mean that cyrus might not know someone like patricia via political meetings--hell, i got my first job in hollywood because i was a member of Southern Californians against the Death Penalty--just that actors do what they do, not anything more, unless they are producers or writers on a project as well.

so, the scorecard on who most likely is and is not responsible for any political and polemical content in this movie:

ABC mid-level exec: not responsible, 90% chance a lefty like me.

ABC prexy: probably not responsible

ABC highest ups: possibly responsible

Writer/producer: definitely responsible

director: definitely responsible

actors: definitely not responsible

ABC affiliates: definitely not responsible

advertisers: definitely not responsible

tom kean: a total dickhead liar and most assuredly responsible

all in all, it's doubtful to me that there was a concerted effort to attack Democrats here by ABC in general, they were hoping to be more subtle than that. i think that too much autonomy was probably given to cyrus and david c. and those guys took that autonomy as license to unleash their own biases and prejudices, ones that might well dovetail with ABC (at the VERY TOP) execs own beliefs. someone else will have to check on policial donations at the top of the company, but i would be shocked if they didn't skew right wing.

then comes marketing. marketing took one look at this movie and said--hey, rush limbaugh will love this. so will hugh hewitt. remember, ABC owns lots of radio as well, and in paticular right wing talk radio. synergy! and their audience will watch our movie if they tell them to (they don't call them dittoheads for nothing.) so marketing took the ball and ran with it (probably with cyrus's "friend of limbaugh" help). that's all about generating ratings and buzz.

well, that's what i'm guessing is the case, with limited (but some) insider scoop. it's both better than some are positing here, but bad in result, i'm afraid.

jill on the bbc.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/3681938.stm

a note to john kay, who sort of works for the same company i do: are you totally useless, or just on this story? quoting 8 year olds? some random woman at some random "special needs" day care? who is she? what is her qualification to aver that taking a lollipop from a child will cause permanent damage? given that her opinion is so patently absurd, could you supply the evidence from a study that agrees with that opinion? no? there is no study to support that supposition? so you just literally pulled someone's opinion out of your/their collective ass? well, i thought the 8 year old who thought jill's work was "Cool" balanced this very well.

ass.

pathetic. and the bbc puts this tripe on uncritically. you should all be ashamed of yourselves. whatever.

but i do like the radiohead music! very portentous!

I'm having a hard time getting through this script--it's boring, it's a pass. thus too much procrastinating and posting. below is a link to a very worthy cause--getting a book published about the plame case via FDL books. please donate if you can.

Firedoglake - Firedoglake weblog » Announcing CIA Leak Investigation Book by Marcy Wheeler: We Need Your Help!

from an article in the st. louis dispatch:

Bush remains keenly interested in the game and watches often. His recall for
names and statistics is well known.

In greeting Bennett, Bush referred to the catcher's game-ending grand slam
against the Chicago Cubs on Aug. 27.

"He's one of the most powerful men in the world. He's got a lot more important
things on his mind," Bennett said. "To remember something relatively
meaningless in the grand scheme of things ... it's pretty impressive."

impressive is one word you could use. i might go towards the phrase "desperately horrifying and depressing".

what a waste to have this idiot running our country. sigh. double sigh.