Guardian at Brave New Films

People & Power - Slow food - 8 Jul 08

2008-07-16T04:45:14Z

People & Power looks at the work of Carlo Petrini, an Italian journalist and food activist, whose organisation, Slow Food, is considered the culinary wing of the anti-globalisation movement.

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Video emerges of Zimbabwe 'ballot rigging' - 5 Jul 08

2008-07-09T06:37:28Z

Zimbabwe's presidential ballot has been widely condemned as neither free nor fair.

Now there appears to be video to prove it.

Secret film obtained by Britain's Guardian Newspaper group shows vote-rigging and violence leading up to the run-off, a one-man ballot which returned Robert Mugabe to power unchallenged.

Dorsa Jabbari reports.

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Blast targets US embassy vehicle

2008-06-11T21:31:06Z

More at therealnews.com
An explosion targeting a US embassy vehicle in Lebanon leaves 4 dead and at least 16 wounded

Tuesday January 15th, 2008

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Karl Rove: A Self-Promoting Liar And Abject Failure

2008-06-14T09:32:02Z

Amazing to me, after Rove has taken part in treasonous/criminal behavior (they didn't get you for outing Plame, which we know you did, so now let's see about the Attorneys scandal, among other things) he won't just slink away but keeps opening his big, fat sebum-stained lips.

Rove is now denying that President Bush or he wanted to push for the Iraq Resolution before the 2002 election. That's right, the sociopath supposedly didn't want to "politicize the vote." Glad I had no liquid in my mouth when I read that.

So he's a liar. We know that. But not enough attention has been paid to the fact that he is not the "genius" he has so long been considered to be. But a vicious, polarizing, incompetent whose miscalculations and moral myopia not only cost his party numerous House, Senate and state legislative seats (not to mention governors' mansions and most likely the White House in 2008), but has destroyed his party's brand for most likely a generation.

So I got inspired and wrote a column about it for The Guardian. Here is an excerpt:

Yet, in the end, it may be Rove's guiding Bush into the most disastrous executive tenure since Nero or Bud Selig that really did in these Republicans. For moderate Republicans of the very sort that the party used to count on in suburban northern Virginia have been stating their displeasure at the ballot box over the party's hard-right positions on Iraq, torture, abortion rights and stem cell research recently. In fact, one of those moderate Republicans, a guy named Jim Webb - the former secretary of the navy under Ronald Reagan - switched parties and in 2006 was elected the new Democratic senator from Virginia.

As if all this weren't enough, Rove also was closely tied to Jack Abramoff (they even shared a secretary), whose bribery has landed numerous Republican congressman in hot water and has tarnished the reputation of the party across the land.

Go here for the whole thing.

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Giuliani's Dirty Record Finally Starting To Get The Scrutiny It Deserves

2008-07-09T19:59:20Z

A whole host of articles have come out taking a look into Mr. Wonderful lately. One can only hope our widely-viewed video on the Loveable Waterboarder of New York Mafiosas (in his mind anyhow) will have the never-ending parade of filth in his personal, political and financial lives fully vetted.

We have this great piece in In These Times by Lindsay Beyerstein, appropriately called Rudy Giuliani: Criminal Or Liar (ed. note: Are they mutually exclusive?):

Republican presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani raised serious questions about his record as a public servant when he announced on television that he had used "intensive questioning techniques" on New York mobsters and other criminals, and that his brand of intensive interrogation was difficult to differentiate from torture.
Giuliani put on his best tough-guy act in an interview with Al Hunt on "Political Capital with Al Hunt," which aired on Nov. 2.

You see, oh law giver Rudy, that would have been illegal. I am guessing it is just more of your bombastic bravado.

In, "What Regan Knows," Frank Rich gives us another glimpse into the Madness Of Rudy Giuliani:

Few know more about Rudy than his perennial boon companion, Mr. Kerik. Perhaps during his romance with Ms. Regan he talked only of the finer points of memoir writing or about his theories of crime prevention or about his ideas for training the police in the Muslim world (an assignment he later received in Iraq and botched). But it is also plausible that this couple discussed everything Mr. Kerik witnessed at Mr. Giuliani's side before, during and after 9/11. Perhaps he even explained to her why the mayor insisted, disastrously, that his city's $61 million emergency command center be located in the World Trade Center despite the terrorist attack on the towers in 1993.
Perhaps, too, they talked about the business ventures the mayor established after leaving office. Mr. Kerik worked at Giuliani Partners and used its address as a mail drop for some $75,000 that turns up in the tax-fraud charges in his federal indictment. That money was Mr. Kerik's pay for an 11-sentence introduction to another Regan-published book about 9/11, "In the Line of Duty." Though that project's profits were otherwise donated to the families of dead rescue workers, Mr. Kerik's royalties were mailed to Giuliani Partners in the name of a corporate entity Mr. Kerik set up in Delaware. He would later claim that he made comparable donations to charity, but the federal indictment charges that $80,000 he took in charitable deductions were bogus.

Uh oh, your pal from the family values party who was having that affair in the apartment set aside for Ground Zero rescue workers. Yeah, he may talk a bit too much between the sheets.

Next, Reuters takes aim at the scary Rudy:

Giuliani's critics take issue with his choice of foreign policy advisers that includes neoconservative Norman Podhoretz, who is outspoken on a need to bomb Iran, and Daniel Pipes, who advocates singling out Muslims at airport security points.
Worrisome to them too are Giuliani's calls for a larger U.S. military and his refusal to call waterboarding, which simulates drowning, a form of torture.
"This is one dangerous man: it's George Bush with brains," wrote Michael Tomasky, editor of the Guardian Online.
Online, the blogging community uses similar descriptions.
"There is a sense Rudy Giuliani isn't just wrong but is genuinely scary. Mitt Romney or Fred Thompson or John McCain are wrong, and they're perceived as putting the country on the wrong track, but Rudy Giuliani is genuinely scary," said Steve Benen, editor of The Carpetbagger Report.

Steve Benen, as always, is right on. And full disclosure, Mike Tomasky is the editor of my new weekly Guardian column. Which means, he edited this, a column by that very goofy guy named Cliff Schecter talking about this Giuliani person:

But I'll share with you a something even goofier - an industry term - than Rudy's Franco-paranoia: many Americans still think Rudy Giuliani is a 9/11 hero.
It's still an uphill battle to question Giuliani's Churchillian poses of that day; the majestic manner in which he carried himself while George Bush was preoccupied with reading mono-syllabic phrases to school children and using Air Force One as the largest hide-and-seek hiding spot in the world.
But even though Rudy hasn't yet donned his Top Gun flight suit, that doesn't change the fact that the serial-marrying former mayor of New York was in fact quite the opposite of a "hero" in the years before 9/11. In fact, his actions, or inaction, are responsible for getting firefighters killed.

Now wasn't that fun kids? Sorry Rudy, your sleazy past is going to get the light of day places squarely upon it. And that just can't be a good thing. At least for you.

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Inside the Surge documentary from the Guardian

2008-02-08T18:50:51Z

"The Guardian's award-winning photographer and filmmaker Sean Smith spent two months embedded with US troops in Baghdad and Anbar province. His harrowing documentary exposes the exhaustion and disillusionment of the soldiers."

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Interview with George Monbiot pt. 3

2008-06-08T09:30:11Z

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