Mitt Romney Claims Obama Is Supporting 9/11 Truthers

Mitt Romney, talking on the weekly GOP infomercial Fox News Sunday, accused Barack Obama of supporting 9/11 Truthers such as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Susceptibility to brainwashing must run in the Romney family. His father admitted he was brainwashed about Viet Nam. Unfortunately Mitt does not understand how he has been brainwashed by the far right.

SciFi Weekend: Dexter Spoilers; Matt Smith; Fringe; Sheldon With His Pants Down

The season finale for Dexter resulted in major changes for the show. One question I wondered about after the finale was whether they would pick up next season with Rita’s murder and deal with the immediate ramifications or jump ahead. Ausiello has some spoilers as to what will happen next season:

Season 5 will pick up right where season 4 left off.
“We have spent the last month sitting around, talking and really debating how best to deal with the aftermath of [Rita’s death]. We uniformly decided that we don’t want to jump ahead. We need to see Dexter go through the process that we’d all have to go through if such a horrible thing had happened to us. We need to see him doing everything from the big emotional things like grieving the loss, to the mundane things like arranging a funeral, getting the kids dressed, and all the other things that are usually done for men because their wives or mothers do them. They have no idea how to handle all of these things. As we saw, Rita was really the caretaker of their baby. It would be cheating the audience of their catharsis to not see Dexter go through that mourning period and see how it affects him or to not see him dealing with the blowback of what he essentially caused. So we will not jump to Harrison as a 5 year old yet.”

Season 5 may not feature a Trinity-esque villain.
“John Lithgow is a tough act to follow. If there was ever a year that we could take a step back from the Big Bad formula and go deeper into Dexter and his psychology, this would be that year. That said, Dexter has a dark passenger that won’t go away no matter how much he yearns to be normal. That rears up and needs to be dealt with. He may even dive deeper after this traumatic loss of Rita. We are working on a way that feels original and fresh and unique to what he has just gone through. It cannot be the way it has been before. In [Season 1], he was terrified of any kind of intimacy because intimacy equaled being discovered. Then he slowly realized he had a need to be known and he set up a family and tried the best he could to balance it all. And now, he sees what being known brings him and he had it ripped out from underneath him suddenly and that will have some affect on him.”

Dexter will remain single… for now.
“Anything is possible, but I don’t think Dexter will be in the mood for dating or love anytime soon. That’s not even on our radar right now. He very much loved Rita and they were in a good place right before she was killed so that wound will take quite some time to heal.”

Julie Benz has been doing well despite Rita’s fate. She is appearing on several episodes of Desperate Housewives as a stripper this season and has signed to play a fast woman in a pilot for next season. She will star in No Ordinary Family, a drama that about a family that suddenly develops special abilities. Her character will have super speed.

The Guardian interviewed Matt Smith about his staring role in Doctor Who:

He talks about how tough the work is, and the hours they have to put in. “By the end, we’ll be filming from 11pm till nine in the morning… then they need to shoot in the mornings because of the light. D’you know what? It is exhausting. We’ve been shooting for seven and a half months now, and the line-learning is quite immense for the Doctor because he’s in pretty much every scene, and he says the majority of stuff because his brain is the coolest and the biggest.” After filming, he does a couple of hours a night of revision, learning his lines. Is it worse than school? “No, because you’re the Doctor, so the payoff’s greater. It’s not like triple maths with Mr Humzinger. There’s not that much coffee breath.”

When he got the job, he had to keep it secret. He’d sit watching Doctor Who with his flatmate, desperate to tell him he was the new Time Lord and having to keep schtum. “It was a complete nightmare.” Eventually he told his father. “He was rather flabbergasted. When I told him, he laughed. He was excited, elated and very proud.”

It’s such a strange time in his life. A year ago, he was pretty much unknown – fans of the television series Party Animals, in which he played a parliamentary researcher, or those who had seen him at the Royal Court in That Face, playing the carer son of Lindsay Duncan’s alcoholic mother, might have been able to put a name to the face, but he hardly had a mass following. At Christmas, he made his first (and so far only) appearance as the Doctor, when David Tennant regenerated into him. Today, he can just about get away with walking around unbothered. In a few weeks, he will be a star, one of the most recognisable actors in the country. “There aren’t many jobs that change the fabric of your life in the same way – where you go from being a working actor who is pretty anonymous, to being thrust into what is one of the most popular shows, if not the most popular, in Britain.”

Is he nervous? Look, he says, it’s his job, he’s taking it all in his stride. Then he stops. Of course he’s nervous. “It’s unlike any job I’ll ever do because a) there’s so much that comes with it, b) there’s so much that is expected. I’d be lying if I said the first day I walked on the beach, where we filmed, and I saw the Tardis, and there were all these paparazzi there, and you’re going, what the hell is going on…?” In his rush to get the words out, he often forgets to finish sentences.

Has he sought the advice of former Doctors? He tells me he recently had lunch with Peter Davison, who told him simply to enjoy the ride. He also had a word with David Tennant. “I spoke briefly to David. He was just very lovely and gave me encouragement, but I think you have to cleave it out yourself. It’s your own journey.”

Surely it makes it that bit tougher when he’s following the most popular Doctor ever. “Yeah, yeah. I guess you’ve got to approach it with your own take or spin. No, spin is the wrong word. Identity. How can you not be aware of the rich heritage and legacy? Over Christmas it was everywhere. It was the big thing, David leaving the show. But it only intimidates you as much as you allow it to.”

Even before knowing if Fringe would be renewed, J.J. Abrams was promising that this season’s finale would top last season’s finale:

“I think the whole alternate-universe idea is at the core of what’s going to be happening,” Abrams said earlier this week. “Without giving anything away, I think that the ending of this second season is richer and better and deeper than what we did last year.”

Fringe returns on April 1 with seven consecutive episodes. He had this to say about the first of these episodes:

“It’s one of my favorite episodes that we’ve done,” he said. “It is particularly retro and weird. It’s a really cool episode.”

The news finally came yesterday that Fringe has been renewed for a third season.

I don’t know exactly what is going on in this picture from an upcoming episode of Big Bang Theory but it appears that Sheldon might have won an award and that he somehow lost his pants. I suspect alcohol might be involved. Even stranger, it appears that Penny took Sheldon out shopping for suit he is almost wearing:

The TV Addict has additional pictures.

Update: A glass ceiling has been broken at the Academy Awards. This was the first Oscar win for a Star Trek movie. Barney Burman, Mindy Hall and Joel Harlow have won the Academy Award for best make up.

There Are Crazier People In The World Than Glenn Beck

I’ve had many posts regarding the delusions and misinformation commonly spread by the right wing in the United States. Dealing with disputes involving domestic politics often ignores the fact that there are even crazier people in the world than Glenn Beck who we disagree with even more with regards to reality. For example, there is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:

Two days before his official trip to Afghanistan, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, a “big lie” intended to pave the way for the invasion of a war-torn nation, according to Iranian state media.

Ahmadinejad, known for his harsh rhetoric toward the West and Israel, said the attack on U.S. soil was a “scenario and a sophisticated intelligence measure,” Iran’s state-run Press TV reported Saturday.

The assault was a “big lie intended to serve as a pretext for fighting terrorism and setting the grounds for sending troops to Afghanistan,” Press TV reported Ahmadinejad as saying.

It’s not the first time Ahmadinejad has denied a historical tragedy. In the past, he has denied the existence of the Holocaust, which claimed the lives of some 6 million Jews during World War II, and suggested Israel should be “wiped off the map.”

“Today,” he said Saturday, “with blessings from the Almighty, the capitalist system, founded by the Zionists, has also reached an end,” Press TV quoted Ahmadinejad.

Obama’s First Year Problems

We have a president who has had many significant accomplishments during his first year in office, with the economy now in much better condition than we could have dreamed of in January 2009, but there is a feeling held by many that Obama is failing. Frank Rich’s column discusses a “leadership shortfall” on the part of the Obama administration and attempts to determine where the problems are:

Those who are unsympathetic or outright hostile to Obama frame his failures as an attempt to impose “socialism” on a conservative nation. The truth is that the Fox News right would believe this about any Democratic president no matter who he was and what his policies were. Obama, who has expanded the war in Afghanistan and proved reluctant to reverse extra-constitutional Bush-Cheney jurisprudence, is a radical mainly to those who believe a conservative Republican senator like Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas is a closet commie.

The more serious debate about Obama is being conducted by neutral or sympathetic observers. There are many hypotheses. In Newsweek, Jon Meacham has writtenabout an “inspiration gap.” He sees the professorial president as “sometimes seeming to be running the Brookings Institution, not the country.” In The New Yorker, Ken Auletta has raised the perilsof Obama’s overexposure in our fractionalized media. (As if to prove the point, the president was scheduled to appear on Fox’s “America’s Most Wanted” to celebrate its 1,000th episode this weekend.) In the Beltway, the hottest conversations center on the competence of Obama’s team. Washington Post columnists are now duelingover whether Rahm Emanuel is an underutilized genius whose political savvy the president has foolishly ignored — or a bull in the capital china shop who should be replaced before he brings Obama down.

But the buck stops with the president, not his chief of staff. And if there’s one note that runs through many of the theories as to why Obama has disappointed in Year One, it cuts to the heart of what had been his major strength: his ability to communicate a compelling narrative. In the campaign, that narrative, of change and hope, was powerful — both about his own youth, biography and talent, and about a country that had gone wildly off track during the failed presidency of his predecessor. In governing, Obama has yet to find a theme that is remotely as arresting to the majority of Americans who still like him and are desperate for him to succeed.

The problem is not necessarily that Obama is trying to do too much, but that there is no consistent, clear message to unite all that he is trying to do. He has variously argued that health care reform is a moral imperative to protect the uninsured, a long-term fiscal fix for the American economy and an attempt to curb insurers’ abuses. It may be all of these, but between the multitude of motives and the blurriness (until now) of Obama’s own specific must-have provisions, the bill became a mash-up that baffled or defeated those Americans on his side and was easily caricatured as a big-government catastrophe by his adversaries.

Obama prides himself on not being ideological or partisan — of following, as he put it in his first prime-time presidential press conference, a “pragmatic agenda.” But pragmatism is about process, not principle. Pragmatism is hardly a rallying cry for a nation in this much distress, and it’s not a credible or attainable goal in a Washington as dysfunctional as the one Americans watch in real time on cable. Yes, the Bush administration was incompetent, but we need more than a brilliant mediator, manager or technocrat to move us beyond the wreckage it left behind. To galvanize the nation, Obama needs to articulate a substantive belief system that’s built from his bedrock convictions. His presidency cannot be about the cool equanimity and intellectual command of his management style.

That he hasn’t done so can be attributed to his ingrained distrust of appearing partisan or, worse, a knee-jerk “liberal.” That is admirable in intellectual theory, but without a powerful vision to knit together his vision of America’s future, he comes off as a doctrinaire Democrat anyway. His domestic policies, whether on climate change or health care or regulatory reform, are reduced to items on a standard liberal wish list. If F.D.R. or Reagan could distill, coin and convey a credo “nonideological” enough to serve as an umbrella for all their goals and to attract lasting majority coalitions of disparate American constituencies, so can this gifted president.

Rich is correct that one problem is a failure to adequately utilize Obama’s strengths as a communicator. This may partially be due to a learning curve in taking over a position as difficult as the presidency, but we are still seeing a dramatic difference between the Obama campaign and the Obama administration.

This is partially because, despite all the false claims during the campaign that Obama is all talk, he has spent his first year primarily concerned with the difficult nuts and bolts of actually governing. This has resulted in many positive results but has also resulted in Obama not receiving as much credit as he deserves for his accomplishments. On the other hand, I bet that if Obama had spent more time giving speeches he would have been attacked for being all talk.

It is also easier to attack without regard for the facts, as is common the right, as opposed to presenting a fact-based defense of policy. For example, the right attacked the stimulus plan from the start despite the lack of any evidence either way. Personally I declared myself an agnostic on the issue, waiting to see the outcome. After one year we did receive the evidence that the stimulus was a success at preventing a possible depression and increasing private sector jobs. Unfortunately by this time many were already influenced by the false claims of the right. The right wing noise machine has also been successful in convincing many that Obama is to blame for the deficits created by Republicans.

The false claims coming from the right wing noise machine are responsible for many of Barack Obama’s public relations problems. As Rich pointed out, the right would portray any Democrat as a Socialist regardless of how absurd this argument is. However this should not come as a surprise. Obama should have been prepared for such attacks, and this is yet another reason why he needed to utilize his skills as a communicator better during his first year in office.

Presenting more of a unified philosophy would have been of value as Frank suggested, but this is not as simple as it sounds. What is now classified as “the left” actually consists of a variety of views. We agree on opposing the policies of the far right but do not necessarily agree on what should be done instead.  Still there are many common views held by a large percentage of Obama supporters which he could do a better job of vocalizing. The less he describes his own economic and political philosophy, the easier it is for the right to define him, falsely claiming he is a socialist and that he holds far-left views. This is also a problem which is common among Democrats and not limited to Obama.

Obama’s centrist views are far more consistent with the values upon which this nation was founded, and more consistent with the views of most Americans, than those of the extreme right wing which now dominate the Republican Party. It is necessary for Obama to do a better job of communicating this. He must do a better job of arguing how our liberal values of individual liberty, a market economy with adequate regulations to ensure it works fairly for those who participate rather than for the benefit of a few, and a sound foreign policy based upon international cooperation rather than preemptive warfare, differ from the opposing views promoted by the authoritarian right.