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Politics : Bush Administration's Media Manipulation--MediaGate? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (5314)	9/29/2005 4:20:15 PM
From: Proud_Infidel	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9838

Studio sees no humor in 'Muslim' Albert Brooks seeks other distribution for new film Thursday, September 29, 2005; Posted: 1:05 p.m. EDT (17:05 GMT) LOS ANGELES, California (Reuters) -- Comedian Albert Brooks says a very unfunny thing happened on his way to making a new film called "Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World" -- the studio panicked over the title. Brooks says the studio -- Sony -- got so worried the comedy's title, with its use of the word Muslim, might bring reprisals that it decided not to release the picture. That forced the comedian to find a new distributor for a movie that pokes fun at American ignorance of the Muslim world. "Fear is playing a major part in Hollywood production," Brooks said in an interview, adding he started getting bad vibes when the studio "jokingly" asked him if the movie could be called "Looking for Comedy." He said the suggestion came after Newsweek triggered a storm in May by publishing a short item that a Koran was flushed down a toilet by guards at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The magazine later retracted the article, saying it could not substantiate the report. Sony said doubts about the title were only part of much larger problems. Sources close to the company said executives did not find the movie funny and passed on it. Sony, which is owned by Sony Corp., said in a statement, "To those looking for truth in this manufactured controversy, here it is: We made our decision to pass on Brooks' movie the same way we did to accept 'Fahrenheit 9/11' -- on the merits, with neither fear nor favor." Brooks is an old hand at making sweetly satiric comedies like "The Muse," "Modern Romance" and "Lost in America" that poke fun at himself, his anxieties and the narcissistic show-business world he inhabits. In "Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World," he plays a comedian sent by the State Department to India and Pakistan with a couple of minders to find out what makes Muslims laugh, so everyone can get along better in the post-9/11 world. He says he got the idea before U.S. President George W. Bush appointed close adviser Karen Hughes to be undersecretary of state for public diplomacy charged with countering the negative U.S. image among Muslims. Brooks says most of the jokes in the movie are aimed at Americans and there are no religious references at all, even though he was allowed to film in a mosque in India. "I steered clear of religion in this movie. There's no mention of the Koran -- the whole point of the movie is looking for comedy, not looking for God. I was allowed to film in the biggest mosque in India and when I told the imam the plot of the movie he started to laugh." Brooks added studio executives at Sony were not as supportive as the imam. "One told me that if a mullah in Iran saw a poster for the movie and took it the wrong way, I could be in deep trouble. I told him that I have trouble getting posters put up for my movies in Sherman Oaks," a Los Angeles suburb. The film will now be distributed by Warner Independent, the art-house unit of Warner Brothers, with a January release date. It says it likes the title because it tells the story of the film and is funny. Warner Bros. is a division of Time Warner, which is the parent company of CNN.

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (5314)	9/29/2005 6:21:14 PM
From: American Spirit	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9838

Whitewater really was a witch hunt, it was about nothing to begin with, nothing relevant, current or criminal anyway, then when Starr (a blatant partisan) failed to find anything wrong with Clinton's professional performance, he went straight into his personal private sex life. Delay on the other hand really has done something wrong, very wrong, many many times. He literally stole the 2002 congressional elections and financed it with corporate money. Even Bushie defenders admit this is so. The only question is whether his fingerprints are on the "gun" so to speak. So how about if we apply Ken Starr tactics? Let's investigate the personal; private sex lives of all the top Bushies. What would we find? Karl Rove and gay escort Jeff Gannon, also rumored to be "married" to Grover Norquist. The head of the RNC and #3 in congress gay. Condi has never dated a man in her life. KAren Hughes who knows? McClellan gay. Delay who knows what he does in the dark, but it's probably creepy, and maybe even GW not being faithful to Laura. There was after all a stripper named Tammi from Houston people talked about. But is the sex life of a leader really any business of a prosecutor? I think not. In fact, none of the above is relevant except if the Bushies attack gay rights, and are gay themselves. So double shame on the right wing.

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (5314)	9/30/2005 3:20:51 AM
From: tejek	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 9838

Pure class warfare. I am sorry you are not one of the super wealthy. If you don't like it, change that yourself. You do not have the right to use the government as a proxy for your frustration. LOL. I hope you're rich because if you are middle class or even upper middle class, how pathetic is it that you're defending the rich who are only screwing you along with everyone else? Really pitiful, Peter.......really!

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (5314)	9/30/2005 7:36:36 PM
From: Skywatcher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9838

Bin Laden's Little Helper by Sidney Blumenthal President Bush has no adviser more loyal and less self-serving than Karen Hughes. As governor of Texas, he trusted the former Dallas television reporter-turned-press secretary with the tending of his image and words. She was mother hen of his persona. In the White House, Hughes devoted heart and soul to Bush as his communications director until, suddenly, she returned home to Texas in 2002, citing her son's homesickness. There were reports that Karl Rove, jealous of power, had been sniping at her. From her exile, Hughes produced Ten Minutes from Normal, a deeply uninteresting and unrevealing memoir. Long stretches of uninformative banality are broken by unselfconscious expressions of religiosity - accounts of how she inserted Psalms 23 and 27 into Bush's speeches after 9/11, the entire sermon she delivered aboard Air Force One on Palm Sunday. Hughes quotes the then national security adviser Condoleezza Rice: "I think Karen missed her calling. She can preach." When two undersecretaries of state for public diplomacy resigned this year in frustration, in the face of the precipitous loss of US prestige around the globe, Bush found Hughes a new slot. She may be the most parochial person ever to hold a senior state department appointment, but the president has confidence she can rebrand the US. This week, Hughes embarked on her first trip as undersecretary. Her initial statement resembled an elementary school presentation: "You might want to know why the countries. Egypt is, of course, the most populous Arab country... Saudi Arabia is our second stop; it's obviously an important place in Islam and the keeper of its two holiest sites ... Turkey is also a country that encompasses people of many different backgrounds and beliefs, and yet is proud of the saying that 'All are Turks'." Hughes appeared as one of the pilgrims satirized by Mark Twain in his 1869 book Innocents Abroad, on his trip on the Grand Holy Land Pleasure Excursion. "None of us had ever been anywhere before; we all hailed from the interior; travel was a wild novelty... We always took care to make it understood that we were Americans - Americans!" Hughes's simple, sincere and unadorned language reveals the administration's inner mind. Her ideas on terrorism and its solution are straightforward. "Terrorists," she said, "their policies force young people, other people's daughters and sons, to strap on bombs and blow themselves up." That is: somehow, magically, these evil-doers coerce the young to commit suicide. If only they would understand us, the tensions would dissolve. "Many people around the world do not understand the important role that faith plays in Americans' lives," she said. When an Egyptian opposition leader inquired why Mr Bush mentions God in his speeches, Hughes asked him whether he was aware that "previous American presidents have also cited God, and that our constitution cites 'one nation under God'." "Well, never mind," he said. With these well-meaning arguments, Hughes has provided the exact proofs for Bin Laden's claims about American motives. "It is stunning to the extent Hughes is helping bin Laden," says Robert Pape, a University of Chicago political scientist who has conducted extensive research into the motives of suicide terrorists and is the author of Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism. "If you set out to help bin Laden," he says, "you could not have done it better than Hughes." Pape's research debunks the view that suicide terrorism is the natural byproduct of Islamic fundamentalism or some "Islamo-fascist" ideological strain, independent of certain highly specific circumstances. "Of the key conditions that lead to suicide terrorism in particular, there first must be the presence of foreign combat forces on the territory that the terrorists prize. The second condition is a religious difference between the combat forces and the local community. The religious difference matters in that it enables terrorist leaders to paint foreign forces as being driven by religious goals. "If you read Osama's speeches, they begin with descriptions of the US occupation of the Arabian peninsula driven by our religious goals and that it is our religious purpose that must be confronted. That argument is incredibly powerful, not only to religious Muslims but also secular Muslims. Everything Hughes says makes their case." The undersecretary's blundering tour of the Middle East might be the latest incarnation of Innocents Abroad. "The people stared at us everywhere, and we stared at them," Twain wrote. "We bore down on them with America's greatness until we crushed them." But the stakes are rather different from those on the Grand Holy Land Pleasure Excursion. "It would be a folly," says Pape, "were it not so dangerous." Sidney Blumenthal sidney_blumenthal@yahoo.com, a former senior adviser to President Clinton, is the author of The Clinton Wars. © 2005 Guardian Newspapers Limited