David Andrews

"In your general direction!" -- Monty Python and the Holy Grail

We can't blame others for forgetting, if we forget ourselves. I nearly did.

We must remember that All the President's Men appeared before Nixon's resignation, and one of the publishing criteria was that it read as a slightly dangerous suspense story. To achieve that, and elide attribution of information to sources, Deep Throat was invented by the publisher's editor. If the Deep Throat figure appears as a source only in the book All The President's Men, and is not anonymously sourced or referred to in any of the Woodward-Bernstein Washington Post Watergate stories - as I believe is true, and despite its convolutions is borne out by the film of the book - then we're speaking of the book as a work of propaganda and not of journalism. See if John Dean agrees. FYI, a good couple of podcasts on Watergate are Midnight Writer News nos. 102 and 108, with Geoff Shepard of the Nixon White House; and nos. 003 and 053 with Len Colodny, author of Silent Coup.

Mazel tov, Mr. and Mrs. Groden.

What I'm saying, W., is that we're never going to find out. The private system is so entrenched in US medical culture and politics that we are not going to get single-payer and find out if it works better for all, under public scrutiny, than VA worked under a smaller group of bureaucrats on a population that is, unfortunately and unfairly, sidelined in our culture. Don't you think that if people want it, we should try single-payer? People who are ill or dying, or aging, or just worried about their future and their family's? Will medical costs go down under single-payer? If not, blame the medical establishment and the insurance industry we have suffered under all these decades. This same institutional culture is responsible for across-the-board inflationary rise in the cost of services, by example. Think about it: not only has the cost of healthcare driven up the cost of other services directly, but also indirectly, by the psychopathy of the culture. Now your car mechanic, your computer repairman, your contractor has "specialized knowledge" that is "worth more" than the services of other practitioners, "in the same way that a doctor's is." This is a cultural trend that has ruined American life in combination with other causes of inflation, such as the valuation of natural resources and their goods, and the arcane valuation of international debt.

You might want to go on YouTube and review selected topics in the "50 Reasons for 50 Years" video series by Len Osanic/Black Op Radio. Those can give you some example of how to cover a lot of material in a limited time.

Given that your title is "JFK and the Death of American Liberty," you might want to consider how many Kennedy policies were reversed, starting with his Vietnam policy, his anti-colonial stance, and his call for a national health care system (recently discussed on the forum). You can do this briefly, and still cover the assassination, albeit briefly as well. On either agenda, I'd be prepared for a long question period, so be prepared.

Two worthwhile articles on the failure of US health insurance, and the medical industry threat to Britain's NHS: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/14/health-insurance-medical-bankruptcy-debt https://www.theguardian.com/society/commentisfree/2019/nov/05/nhs-precious-ill-us-big-pharma-costs-healthcare Apparently the insurance and medical industries want us robbed and killed.

Midway through the piece, the writer was "interrupted" when "[a]n epiphany occurred." That shows poor impulse control, a watermark of bad style. Thank God I have only four free articles left.

On the nose. EDIT I meant that the Deep State promotes itself as bogeyman by furthering this theme and phrase in the press.

While Bush and Cheney skate... Well, the Roger Stone thing's like Hollywood, only with jail sentences: they give you the Oscar for the film following the one you deserved it for.

Obama's State of the Nation: A Dem V-P candidate but no POTUS in sight; Please Don't Tear Down the System https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/elections-2020/obama-says-average-american-doesnt-want-to-tear-down-system/ar-BBWPuau?li=BBnb7Kz And Obama suggests you're on the "extreme left wing" if you want single-payer healthcare.

Right, but first there were the pre-screening complaints about ethnic stereotyping...

Let me throw something at our audience. This is a great cold war spy drama, told entirely without words. If Stanley Kubrick had made this film (and at times it seems like he had), people would be falling all over themselves to praise and memorialize it. The Thief (1952), featuring swell period locations in DC, Georgetown, and NYC. Also demonstrates the Minox spy camera:

Just to say, I've been know to burst into tears watching La Strada. Steinbeck's name is on Zapata for its cachet, but there's no way that JS was the kind of movie-slick writer who could produce the draft we see on film. There was more than one set of uncredited hands at work, including Elia Kazan's. See this article for some background on Zapata, though perhaps not answering your blacklisting question directly: https://books.google.com/books?id=oyVBAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA130&lpg=PA130&dq=viva+zapata+blacklist&source=bl&ots=EWigm6EK9Q&sig=ACfU3U0NCJFIQlkyRT6BDVVlxSOQLhN74Q&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi_uNeQ3uzlAhWSjFkKHU7JCDMQ6AEwCnoECAoQAQ#v=onepage&q=viva zapata blacklist&f=false I doubt there was any studio or theater blacklisting of Zapata, though it was during post-production on the film that Kazan was subpoenaed by HUAC. Next, A Streetcar Named Desire won Oscars for Vivien Leigh, Kim Hunter and Karl Malden (plus Best Art Direction), but the lack of wins in the high categories made Kazan paranoid that the industry was shunning him. Kazan testified, naming names, and though Zapata lost money at the box office, it kicked around with regularity on TV-with-commercials throughout the 1960s and 1970s. (I didn't see it without commercials until it came out on VHS.) Man on a Tightrope, Kazan's following film, lost money also, though Kazan came slamming back with On the Waterfront in 1954, and the next several films after. You would have to do archival research to see if theater bookings for Zapata and Tightrope were limited or the length of run reduced - but it's possible that cold war xenophobia and isolationism made audiences cool toward films about politicized Mexican and Czech characters, respectively. As I posted before, this documentary, pts. 1 and 2, is a good look at Elia Kazan's political troubles, and not incidentally fills in the political involvements of Marilyn Monroe under Arthur Miller's influence:

THANKS "[Senator Yarborough] added that he had told us 99% of what occurred but did not elaborate beyond that point."

Don't make me quote all your Irishman coverage.

Delete, please

And when you factor in election theft, and no recognition of Congress...he's just Dubya with a bigger mouth, and the unwillingness to stoop to holding prior office to create a whiff of party loyalty. That last thing is probably Trump's original sin: a major party bought into him to get to the White House when they could have forced him to run as an independent and lose. They had no viable candidate, and now they have buyer's remorse. So blame it on the deep state, which includes the other party without a viable candidate. Cripes, the GOP doesn't even have a credible vice-president to replace him with.

If JFK is going to be used as poster boy for deep state animus, why doesn't Trump meet his legend halfway and give us socialized medicine? I mean, what has Trump done to anger the deep state except be a non-politician who won and then broke some rules about colluding with foreign governments? Skew the angle on that picture a little, and he's...George W. Bush.

My grandmother thought his first name was Don.

Brando hated first-time director Cornfeld and taunted him mercilessly, hollering that he was going to go back to the hotel and do Cornfeld's wife while the director was busy rewriting scenes on-set. Actually, The Night of the Following Day holds up in a "Don't-expect-much, folks" sort of way, despite the lack of confidence in the script visible in the performances. It's on my list of hot messes, along with The Counselor (2013), another case of auteurisme gone bad, this time in the hands of pros. In a fantasy world, Antonioni should have made this picture instead of Zabriskie Point, since Night looks a lot like a Blow-up knockoff, and Antonioni would have worked well with the confined interiors and the Euro exteriors.

1979 to 1983, but also on frequent visits to new York through the mid-1970s.

And here I was about to delete, on the grounds of misanthropy. Some of the happiest nights and weekend days of my life were spent at the Bleecker Street Cinema. What a waste that this kind of culture and sociality is gone.

It's a comment on American emotional necessities that nearly no one wants to go to a repertory cinema anymore to see classic or under-exposed films on the big screen. People used to want to get out of the house; now they want to hide in the house from the boss, from eventual failure, and order Thai food from Wheel Deliver. Hold the kiddies close on the couch, tell them Home Alone 2 (with the World Trade Center CGI-ed out) is Jules et Jim. Jules et Jim is for dirty people anyway, like the kids' transgender teacher. Film buff is likewise a disreputable occupation, since Netflix doesn't use the term in advertising.