Joshua Holland over at Alternet has written on the quiet, no silent, Oil For Food Scandal uncovered by the Volker Report. You know, the scandal popularized by conservative use in trying to undermine the credibility of the United Nations. Turns out that the actual scandal(you know, the facts) was that corporations (many of them US corporations) perpetrated the scandal, not the UN.
Real surprise there, huh?
Anyways, Holland gives a single page summary of the 630 page report and explores why we'll never get to the bottom of the scandal made popular by conservatives now that the real players have actually been fingered.

Note for politickos trolling for partisan red meat: Democrats and Republicans formed a bipartisan lawbreaking committee for this scandal.

Really! The NYTimes says so. And they never lie. They only distort. Which sort of, depending on how you look at it, on a certain level, isn't lying, right...is it?

Michael Bloomberg, newly re-elected Republican mayor of New York, won the city by a 20 point margin because blacks and hispanics don't like ethnic campaigns and prefer popular appeals from Republicans. We know this because the New York Times says that it is so. The "paper of record", to its credit does mention that Bloomberg spent "more than 70 million on his campaign". The Times, however, is polite enough to not mention the amount of money the challenger, Fernando Ferrer had to challenge Bloomberg. To the critical thinker that understands the power of money in political campaigns shouldn't that bear a question?
Isn't the NYTimes curious as to how much money the failed campaign had to work with?
Could be that the NYTimes tried but couldn't find out.
Could be that Sam Roberts, the author's article, didn't find the number pertinent to the telling of this story.
Or could it be that the author doesn't want me to know of that detail when considering the emphasized point of his article, that blacks and hispanics are tired of "ethnic" Democratic politics and prefer broad Republican platforms. An argument that isn't helped by an inconvenient fact like an 8 million vs an 80 million dollar campaign war chest.

Is thinking required or even allowed? When put in the context of the money available for thorough saturation of propaganda, the election results make perfect sense without the NYTimes' purposefully disingenuous interpretation, which when translated from the King's English just means lying.

None of this is to say anything, good or bad, about either of the mayoral candidates, Bloomberg or Ferrer. This is about the no-thinking-allowed propaganda of the NYTimes article.
8 million.
80 million.

The Times or our own common sense. Who do we trust?

Jarhead.

A US Marine. According to some, a reference to the high and tight haircut and squared chin. Also, a reference to a Marine utility covers supposed resemblance to a mason jar lid. The far less common connotation is to the mentality of a US Marine, a reference to the necessity of the Marine to not be an individual, thinking entity but instead a jar ready to be filled with an order, command and most importantly, an idea.

This is one of several enduring themes communicated in the recently released Sam Mendes movie, Jarhead. The movie claims to not be anti-war but one can't help but connect with the frustration, the loss of a sense of self and humanity, expressed by the leads. If this isn't an anti-war message, what is it? We also have the omnipresent and unmistakable glorification of war by virtue of the focus being on the warriors travelled from distant lands to rain destruction not on the civilians missing fingers, toes, ears, arms, legs, the children killed. In this way all war films are pro-war. Jarhead is different. Not in that it refuses this formula; subtly, Jarhead perfects it.
There is no fighting. Instead, there is the long, anxious, fearful wait building up to what is psychologically and rhetorically billed as the mother of all battles. Like apocalypes now, Deer Hunter, Full Metal Jacket and other anti-war films, Jarhead succeeds through typical cinematic glorification in romanticizing the would be killers and at worst, we sympathetize with them and their plight of wanting to kill an "Iraqi motherfucker" and not being given the chance.
I don't think an anti-war film can be made where the leads are of the aggressors. Jarhead is pro-war in as much as we are made to identify with the main characters. There is a reality of the psychological destruction waged on the soul and psyche of the warrior. But let's be honest, the horror of war is found where the victims lie. True anti-war films are about the victims, not the executioners.