I hate Wal Mart. Hate. I avoid Wal Mart like I avoid vegetarian restaurants.

Wal Mart is pure corporate evil. Bigoted: won't promote women. Stupid: won't promote women and then document that policy to later be used against them in court. Horrible to workers: there are probably too many examples here to mention -- locking employees in the store, sending workers home after they worked 39 hours to avoid paying health insurance and other benefits, exploiting undocumented aliens, busting attempts for workers to unionize, forcing workers to clock out but continue on the job to avoid paying overtime, the list goes on and on. Horrible ethics: the entire Wal Mart business principle was based around ravaging rural communities by invading small towns and driving the mom and pop general store and/or market out of business.

Today a worker was trampled to death at a Wal Mart on Long Island when people burst into the store on Black Friday. You've probably heard about this already. It sickens me on a lot of different levels.

First, look at what we have let Christmas become. Forget Bill-O the Clown and the alleged "war on Christmas." Who cares if somebody says "Happy Holidays?" God forbid we show some basic human decency to people who might not celebrate Christmas. In typical fashion, brain dead, intellectually shiftless right wing Christians actively participate in the whoring of the celebration of the birth of Christ, just don't say "Happy Holidays" to them. Have we learned nothing from the Grinch, who so ably and simply put it by saying, "Maybe Christmas doesn't come from a store?" The crass commercialism of Christmas has been going on for years but it seems like the in the last decade it has plunge over the edge into a capitalistic abyss. For example, we named the day after Thanksgiving. Stores open at 4 am. And then workers get trampled to death.

Second, we really have become a nation of bloated, grotesque consumers. We are like locusts now. I am really annoyed by right wing commentators blowing a gasket over anything that remotely criticizes American culture. This past summer, right wingers got their panties all in a bunch over Pixar's brilliant film Wall*E which depicts a future in which humans have evolved into morbidly obese blobs incapable of walking. Well, isn't that where we are going? Like I said, we are locusts. We consume. We eat. We rack up millions of dollars in credit card debt to buy things we can't afford and don't need. As it was sung in the musical Rent, "when you're living in America at the end of the millennium, you're what you own." Larson was a poet and a prophet.

We are getting no leadership. After 9/11, when the country was united as it hadn't been in decades, Bush had his chance to lead us into a new sense of a more perfect union. What did he do? Bush told us to go shopping. Go out to dinner. Guilliani told New Yorkers to see a Broadway show. That was it. Those were our marching orders. After suffering the worst attack since Pearl Harbor, we were asked to go out and consume.

Skip forward 7 years.

We have become so self-absorbed we trampled a man to death to get a really cheap Blu Ray player. We should be ashamed of ourselves.

I hope Obama actually leads us.

I remember seeing The Sting in a movie theater when I was very young, far too young to really follow what was going on. The first Newman picture I really remember seeing in a theater was one that really rattled me: The Color of Money. It's considered minor Scorsese (both Ebert and Siskel panned it), but I saw it at a time when I was first starting to notice what was going on in a movie behind the camera. On that level The Color of Money is a bravura piece by Scorsese and Newman is really fantastic in it -- it's a film close to my heart because of the exact time and place I saw it and it has some realy incredible shots in it.

Newman worked less frequently as I entered adulthood, but The Hudsucker Proxy and Road to Perdition were films I really admired. Especially Road to Perdition, which has kind of fallen off the face of the earth. It deserves to be seen more. I liked it a lot. Nobody's Fool is pretty kick ass, too.

A couple of weeks ago I caught The Verdict on HBO. It pairs Newman with Mamet and it's pretty spectacular.

Newman was a 10 time Oscar nominee, won Best Actor for The Color of Money and the life achievement award and the Academy humanitarian award.

In the past couple of days I have been reading a lot of tributes and obituaries and Paul Newman led a pretty amazing life:

*He was an artist at the top of his craft. He wasn't content to be a movie star.

*He was a guy who passionately followed his interests. Newman didn't just like racing, he was a professional driver and owner.

*He was a dedicated family man, married to Joanne Woodward for 50 years. He moved his family away from Hollywood for a more normal life. There are so many people here who want that vacuousness that is Hollywood, Newman rejected it wholesale.

*He was involved in community theater in Westport, CT. Wrap your brain around that. Ten time Oscar nominee doing community theater.

*He was a philanthropist of epic proportions. His Newman's Own food company gave all its profits away to charity. Right now that's about $250 million. Newman also gave away his ownership of the company, valued at well over $100 million. This says nothing of what he gave away from his own fortune, which is said to be considerable.

*He made Nixon's enemies list. This sort of boggles my mind, that Nixon had an enemies list. Well, not only did he have a list, he ranked the people on it. Newman was 19.

I am reading today about the House failing to pass the Wall Street bailout package, a crisis brought on by massive greed and selfishness. The average American is ensconced in some suburban hovel with little or no regard for anybody but themselves.

Paul Newman gave us an example of how to live life: pursue excellence and art and family and share in the success you have -- give back!! Leave the world a better place than you found it.

I want to be like Paul Newman.

About as surprising as Charles Manson announcing he's crazy.

So Sarah Palin is a creationist. Her nomination as McCain's VP candidate was at least in part aimed at exciting religious conservatives. Palin is Pentecostal. She doesn't believe in global warming. As a creationist, it is possible she believes that the earth was created in 6 literal days and that the earth is only 6,000 years old, science be damned. Literally. Science be damned.

The Palin nomination has made me think a lot lately about my roots in the midwest and how I was able to somehow escape with my intellectual curiosity intact. Missouri is a red state. Well, it's really a pretty flexible state. It was blue for Bill Clinton in 92 and 96, but went red for Bush in 00 and 04. The Palin nomination has shed light to me on the midwest and its many inhabitants who apparently want their leaders to be just like them. Apparently it's now a bad thing, an "elitist" thing, for a candidate to be smart or well educated. Just look at the candidates: Both Obamas went to Harvard Law School. They are labeled elitists despite both of them coming from working class families. Joe Biden went to law school at Syracuse and his wife Jill has a PhD in education. On the other side of the aisle, John McCain is pretty proud of graduating at the bottom of his class at the Naval Academy and Sarah Palin went through 5 colleges in 6 years (I would love to see those grades) before finally earning a degree in journalism (yes, the evil liberal media) from the University of Idaho. And her husband Todd is a champion snowmobile racer. Three prestigious law school grads and a PhD against a bottom rung Navy cadet, a beer heiress, a woman who presumably flunked out of 4 colleges and an Alaska secessionist. When did we stop wanting our elected leaders to be smarter than we are? Do these people follow this reasoning consistently? Do they want their doctors to be morons, too? Or their accountants? I know they want their church pastors to be dumb as posts but do they want a stupid divorce attorney?

I know that Bill Maher will think I'm daft, but I believe that God created the heavens and the Earth. Did it go down exactly as it does in the book of Genesis (which offers up two different accounts of the world's creation)? Did God create the world in six, 24 hour days as we know them today? I don't know; turns out I wasn't there. For that matter, neither was the writer of Genesis. I don't think it matters: The important part of all this to me is that God did His work. I read a quote from a Christian scientist who said he sees God in science every day. If you can have faith that an invisible and all-powerful God was able to create the entire universe from nothing (all this even before the invention of the Large Hadron Collider) why do you have to limit His methods?

By limiting God, these red state creationists have in essence done to God what they have done with their political candidates, they have lowered Him to their own deficient intellectual level. They can't fathom a creation process that may have spanned millions of years to arrive where we are today so they blindly ignore any reasonable scientific data. It makes things so much easier when scary things like facts or evidence get in the way. They don't have to think, which is just the way they seem to like it. All they want is a pastor who hasn't been to one of those awful, liberal seminaries to tell them what to believe and whom to vote for. They are intellectually lazy and won't put down the jumbo bag of Wavy Lays long enough to research of discover anything for themselves.

The thing that angers me about these people is they are holding the rest of us back. They are interfering with our educational system in a way that has got to be hilarious to other countries throughout the world. Sadly stupid people still seem to figure out how to fuck and they keep creating more and more goobers. The US is losing ground in science and technology and that is going to cripple us in the global economy much sooner than later. Our strength has always been our innovation but these pinheads seem bent on keeping us in the 20th century. Or the 19th century.

I am a practicing Christian. I go to church on Sundays (at a non-denominational church) and when I don't have to work I attend a Bible study on Wednesday nights. I believe in the resurrection of Jesus but I would hardly describe myself as a "Bible thumper." I like rock music and I see R rated movies. I read books and I sometimes question my own faith. I search for my own answers instead of allowing my pastor to tell me what to think. In terms of theology, I probably believe in a lot of the same basic tenants many evangelicals believe. Where I separate from them pretty forcefully is in the area of politics. My views there are much more in line with Tony Campolo's than Pat Robertson's.

I think what Christians should do is apply the teachings of Christ to their politics. This may make voting hard as it means people may not see eye to eye on every issue with one political party. It seems that most evangelicals today have got that idea backwards; they are applying their politics to the teachings of Jesus. Or in many cases they are ignoring the teachings of Jesus altogether as those ideas may conflict with their politics.

If you do go back and actually read the teachings of Jesus (Bono and I both recommend a new translation called The Message) you will find that abortion and gay marriage are not high on his agenda. In fact, Jesus never mentions either of these issues. He does, however, seem to be very interested in how we treat the poor. Jesus goes on the say that you will be able to tell who his real followers were by their spirit of kindness and generosity. Jesus never mentions bumperstickers or car emblems as the best ways for his followers to set themselves apart.

As the 2008 election rolls along, I am seeing right wing evangelicals twist themselves into greater fits of contortion in order to appease a political point of view that seems to me at odds with the teachings of Christ. One of the most glaring examples of this is James Dobson's Focus on the Family organization. I really believe that political power and influence have been very detrimental to this organization.

Friday morning, Sarah Palin was announced as the GOP candidate for vice president. Nobody had heard of her. John McCain had met her only once before. Immediately, right wing evangelicals and organizations like Focus on the Family praised her nomination because of her stance on gay marriage, abortion, and a host of other conservative positions.

Today we find out that Palin's 17 year old daughter is 5 months pregnant and will be getting married and having the baby. You know producers of Maury Povich's show are just dying to book the Palins for a paternity test show. And in an act truly worthy of Bizzaro World, these same evangelicals are still behind Palin. Conservative like Palin and Dobson oppose sex education in schools unless the only thing being taught is sexual abstinence. We know that approach doesn't work and Palin's daughter is our Exhibit A. Dobson today praised the Palin family because they did not abort the baby. At no point does he express any trepidation about the sexual activity of a minor child. In fact, Dobson makes it seem as if an unplanned pregnancy is standard operating procedure for every upper middle class American family, a minor little bump in the road. What about the abstinence? Doesn't an organization like Focus on the Family frown on kids being sexually active? Apparently they don't when the family in question agrees with them politically. Then kids can have as much unprotected, outside of marriage sex as they want just so long as nobody terminates a pregnancy. It's absolutely stunning to see this turn of events and see Dobson bend over backwards to justify the Palins just because they are political bedfellows.


Have we ever lived in a time when Christians were more unlikable or just flat out annoying?

So we found out today that the 17-year-old daughter of Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin is pregnant. This, of course, followed speculation over the weekend that Palin's infant son was not in fact her son but her grandson, the spawn of Palin's daughter (named "Bristol" -- honestly, who names their kids after cities in Connecticut?). So today the truth comes out: the 17-year-old is knocked up and marrying the baby's father; no word on who the father is or how old he might be.

In a move that is just about as bizarre as it could possibly be, evangelicals are all behind this. Never mind that an underage girl is pregnant and may have possibly been the victim of statutory rape. She's keeping the baby! A child will be raising a child! Doesn't all this go against the grain of what the right wing evangelicals believe about abstinence? Governor Pailin believes in abstinence-only education in public schools and we can see how well that worked in her own family. This is what happens when people of faith are seduced by political power. Right wing evangelicals are so power mad now they don't even notice their own hypocrisy.

I also understand that these sorts of things do happen, that teenagers do make some really stupid decisions. Yes, we should support them as much as we possibly can. So why don't we stress the adoption option more fervently than we do? A popular adage of the new millennium deals with age. "Fifty is the new 40," we like to say. "Forty is the new 30," is one I particularly like. If that math holds up then 25 must be the new 15 (I work with a bunch of twentysomethings and 25 is definitely the 15). And if logic follows, the 17 must be the new 7. There is no doubt in my mind following 10 years of teaching high school that teenagers in 2008 are absolutely, positively have no business raising kids. I think we could say that Bristol has about as much business being a mom as her mother has being Vice President.

But we don't really give teenage moms much of an option. We tell them they can either keep the baby (which is a horrendous idea in nearly every single instance) or get an abortion (an issue that has a lot of very serious moral and psychological baggage attached to it). Why don't we encourage teen moms to carry the baby to term and then give it up for adoption, to allow the baby to be raised by actual adults who are more qualified to be parents and my not have been able to conceive a child of their own. I have friends who have been unable to conceive and have gone the international adoption route. I am certain they are great parents. Isn't that ultimately the more moral and decent and right thing to do? At some point in this debate isn't the well being of the child the thing that should be the most important issue?

Is Governor Palin's doing the right thing be encouraging a child to get into a shotgun wedding when the baby could be raised by people far more qualified to do it? I guess the Palins aren't too worried about being unqualified...

The LA Times published an article earlier this week about polling data for the upcoming Presidential election. In the article, the Times reported their poll (conducted with Bloomberg, I think) stated that 9% of the public said they wouldn't vote for Obama because he is black.

This news astounds me on two levels. First, it's 2008. Are people still this backwards? I was watching Hairspray on HBO the other night and it occurred to me while I was watching it that stories about racial segregation may be past their usefulness as society has grown past slavery and Jim Crow. Then I read the Times article and realized how naive I really was. To be fair, most of that 9% must exist among older voters who have never let go of their own prejudices (Obama leads McCain by massive margins among younger voters aged 18-34, almost 2 to 1).

The second thing that blows me away about that data is those 9% have no social problems saying those things out loud, over the phone to the person taking the survey. At least some of the racists who won't vote for Obama are trying to conceal their bigotry in the form of that "he's secretly a Muslim" hooey. It's staggering for me to think people won't vote for him because he's black and even more so to realize people would so openly admit it.

I just got home from seeing Ben Stiller's new film Tropic Thunder. I liked it a lot. It's the best comedy I've seen in quite some time, probably since Hot Fuzz a year and a half ago. It's great to see Stiller in the writer/director chair again and this is a smart piece of satire from him. Robert Downey Jr. is as good as billed playing the "black" guy and Stiller also has great roles for Matthew McConaughey (I was shocked) and Tom Cruise. Cruise should do a full on broad comedy (didn't the Farrelly Brothers pursue him for Shallow Hal?).

So here's the interesting part to me. Controversy has swirled around the film not for a white actor essentially pulling a Jolson and playing a role in blackface but for Stiller's film within a film called Simple Jack. In the movie, Stiller plays Tug Speedman, a huge action movie star whose shot at actorly respectability is a horrendous movie called Simple Jack in which Speedman plays a mentally challenged farm hand who talks to animals. The Simple Jack stuff is uproarious and it's certainly edgy. But it doesn't make fun of developmentally disabled people and it is never meanspirited. The butt of the joke is actors and it pretty clearly makes fun of self-involved thesps playing disabled roles in order to court awards nominations.

This being America in the politically correct 21st Century, some people apparently don't have a sense of humor. Many organizations that support groups for the mentally challenged (including the Special Olympics) are protesting the film, mostly for its use of the word "retard."

First of all, yes, the word "retard" is used pretty liberally in the movie. But context is everything. The scene where it's used the most is between Stiller and Downey Jr's character, Kirk Lazarus, a 5 time Oscar winner. Lazarus tells Speedman that his mistake in doing Simple Jack was going "full on retard" as that never wins awards. Is this edgy? Yeah it is, it's also politically incorrect. But like all good satire, it's funny because it's true. This truth roughs up both actors and the Motion Picture Academy pretty much equally. Cuba Gooding's performance in Radio is way more offensive than anything in Tropic Thunder.

So again we see a misguided protest in modern day America completely predicated on intellectual laziness. The Special Olympics folks and their partners bent out of shape about Tropic Thunder have, of course, not seen the film, so they haven't seen the use of the "R word" in context. This would require cerebral activity on their parts, they would have to actual analyze the material in the film and derive a conclusion based on it. It's so much easier to have a knee jerk response to things. Being ignorant of that which pisses you off is practically an American tradition. Should people be more sensitive about their use of potentially hurtful words like "retard?" Of course they should -- that's basic Humanity 101. Will a certain segment of society see Tropic Thunder and feel it's a little bit more acceptable to use potentially hurtful language? It's possible. But that's the risk inherent in satire, the risk that somebody in the audience might not understand the joke and get the wrong idea. The movie is rated R (which, by the way stands for "restricted" and not "retard") which means it's intended for adults who should be more able to filter through the material to get at the actual heart of the matter.

In this case, the R word I am offended by is "reactionary."

Variety is reporting that the new James Bond picture "Quantum of Solace" will feature a theme song performed by Alicia Keys (meh) and Jack White (woo hoo!). I am not a big Alacia Keys fan (though apparently Bob Dylan is) but I love the White Stripes and the song may be a rarity: a Bond theme song that isn't completely horrible. The last good one was "Goldeneye" sung by Tina Turner and written by Bono and the Edge (Here's an idea: how about having U2 do a Bond song? They are uber-successful globally). The previous song was that instantly forgettable ditty Chris Cornell did for "Casino Royale." Before that was the horrible, horrible Madonna song "Die Another Day." Briefly scanning a list of Bond themes, it's hard to find a memorable one since the 60s. Paul Mac's "Live and Let Die" is a keeper, though.

I was watching this footage of the earthquake today during a taping of the Judge Judy show and I was sort of surprised she tapes the show here in LA. The show certainly makes it look like her courtroom is in New York.

Enjoy!