Thursday, February 13, 2020

He's Back ... Finally!

We've all been waiting with bated breath, on the edge of our seats, ready to explode with joy and the moment is finally upon us. After a 23-year self-imposed hiatus, the 80s-90s nerd star Rick Moranis is back! How did we do it without you, old friend. His return will be in the much anticipated - by someone, I imagine - reboot of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. It's ironic, because I was just thinking that that franchise, whose last film was a straight-to-video flop in 1997, really needed to come back into our collective consciousness.

It will be directed by Joe Johnston, the talented auteur who made the 1989 original film and went on to make other gems like Jumanji, Jurassic Park III and Captain America: The First Avenger. Thank god the franchise train goes on unabated by taste, talent or quality!

Tuesday, February 04, 2020

To the Clintons - Please Leave the Country Alone!

Everything the Clinton’s touch turns to shit. First we had the Bill Clinton Presidency, which started brightly but ultimately ended up as the spark for the far-right movement that has now mainstreamed. It is ironic, in retrospect, when you consider how aligned Clinton’s interests were with most of those arguing against him, but that is of little consequence. The Republicans knew triangulation could be the end of their hold on power and decided to ramp up the cultural wars to heretofore unseen levels that have only grown in magnitude over the past decade.

To solidify the disaster, Hillary Clinton decided, after losing the primary in 2008 to a relatively unknown, first-term Senator from Illinois, that 2016 was her year to shine. After making that decision, she forgot to stop listening to the idiots that had lost two elections to Bush (okay, maybe 1 and 1/2), forgot to actually run a full campaign, and assumed the presidency was hers by fiat alone. She ignored the most prophetic prognostications of astute pollsters, the de rigeur requirements of actually campaigning everywhere, fully bought into the mainstream media’s pre-election coronation and, worst of all, didn’t really stake out a claim to standing for anything beside not being Trump (which, one should point out, should have been enough). 

At that point, one assumed the Clintons would wither away into the background and out of the spotlight, having sent the country into the toilet and potentially put the final death knell in our collective future, given the current administrations dedication to billionaires and destroying the planet as quickly as they possibly can. 

But Hillary kept showing up, here and there, to intervene in the world she’s wrought, acting as if she had nothing to do with its creation. And then the Clinton clan decided they should get involved in improving the Iowa Caucus process with their particularly inept brand of politicking. The effect? An utter disaster that helps feed the Trump cynical worldview and again shows the party as utterly inept on the eve of the latest “most important election” in our lifetimes.  

Do they apologize? Do they say anything at all? Of course not. Lest us forget that the Clintons gave us welfare reform that increased poverty rates, telecommunications deregulation that saw the increased conglomeration of media into fewer and fewer hands, the dramatic increase in black men in prison for minor drug offenses (by instituting mandatory federal imprisonment guidelines), the turning away from the Democratic Party by many Christians because of a blowjob, and, the coup de gras, Wall Street deregulation that indirectly spurred the 2008 financial crisis. On top of that, Hillary Clinton was the Senator from New York who ignored the people and voted for the Iraq War.


To put it simply and with all due respect, please, please, I implore you, leave us alone!