Month: February 2022

Wanted: Local Political Contributors

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As the Primary and General Off-Year Elections creep up on us I’m interested in getting posts from readers about their local political scene.  Places like Texas, Colorado, Florida, Ohio, South Carolina, North Carolina, Illinois, Minnesota are represented by readers here.  Even Canada and Australia have local political stories that some of our readers might want to provide.  So if you are interested in sharing your perspective on your local politics, get in touch.  Either leave a comment or send an e-mail to orionscoldfire at charter dot net.  Anonymity is, of course, perfectly fine and if you prefer to discuss local cultural issues instead of or in addition to politics that also is encouraged.  I’ll add this want-ad to the footer of the posts for a while to see if I can entice any readers to write.

The Revolt Against Left Wing School Boards and Schools Continues

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Even in purple Colorado parents are fed up with COVID restrictions and with CRT being forced on their children.

“In November, four seats on Douglas County’s school board in Colorado were up for grabs in an election, and a quartet of conservative candidates raised hundreds of thousands of dollars more than their competition.  The four individuals — Mike Peterson, Becky Meyers, Christy Williams, and Kaylee Winegar — all now sit on the seven-person board.

The Douglas County Federation spokesperson told Insider that one particular grievance the union had with the new school board members was the decision made by the conservative-majority in late January to weaken the district’s educational equity policy.

The spokesperson also said that two new conservative school board members tried to fire the district’s superintendent Corey Wise, and they along with the two other new conservative members decided they would give Wise an ultimatum to either resign or be fired.

The school board also struck down a COVID-19 mask mandate late last year, the spokesperson said.

Fundraising for Douglas County’s 2021 elections shattered contributions made during the district’s 2017 elections.

In last year’s elections, the quartet was supported by the conservative 1776 Project PAC, a national group that launched in May that says it’s actively trying to stop critical race theory from being taught in classrooms.

All the Colorado school board candidates backed by the PAC swept their races in local elections in November.

The election in Douglas County came at the heels of a heated school board meeting that saw parents lash out against the board over COVID-19 safety policies and the supposed teaching of critical race theory.

It’s a microcosm of a general trend, where school boards and districts have become battlegrounds for culture war topics.”

The Verdict (1982) – A Movie Review

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The Verdict is a courtroom drama about a Boston lawyer, Frank Galvin (played by Paul Newman) who brings suit against the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston, one of its hospitals and a world-renowned doctor who botched the anesthesia on a woman who was there to give birth.  The woman went into cardiac arrest, the baby died and she ended up in a permanent coma.

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

Galvin is currently an ambulance chaser who spends most of his time drinking.  Years earlier he had a brilliant career and was married to the daughter of a senior partner at a prestigious law firm.  But when he threatened to expose witness tampering by one of his colleagues, he was indicted on trumped up charges and his career and marriage disappeared.  Now years later his former mentor Mickey Morrissey (played by Jack Ward) throws him one last chance to pull his life out of the gutter.  He gives him the above-mentioned malpractice suit knowing that the Archdiocese will pay handsomely to hush up the criminal negligence.  And he hopes this financial success will give Galvin a chance to revive his law practice.

But when Galvin goes to the nursing home to take photographs of the comatose patient, he has a moment of conscience and decides that instead of settling the case out of court he will prosecute the doctor for negligence to get justice for the destruction of this woman’s life.  The woman’s sister and brother-in-law are enraged thinking Galvin is only interested in the larger settlement that a court case might yield and Morrissey is shocked at what he sees as the foolishness of throwing away a guaranteed $70,000 fee for accepting the settlement.  But Morrissey agrees to help Galvin with his court case.  Likewise, the judge in the case and the defense attorney Ed Concannon (played by James Mason) are astonished that Galvin is determined to go to court.  But Concannon has enormous resources as the head of a powerful and unscrupulous law firm.  He sets to work to destroy Galvin’s case.  He coerces the expert witness on anesthesia not to testify for Galvin and even plants a spy in Galvin’s life by paying a woman, Laura Fischer, who wanted to work for Concannon, to insinuate herself into Galvin’s life and even sleep with him in order to provide the defense team with the details of Galvin’s case.

And Concannon’s tactics work brilliantly.  Galvin’s case is hopelessly inconclusive and it seems inevitable that the jury will come up with a verdict of not-guilty.  The only possible hope is an OR nurse who refuses to testify for Concannon.  But she also refuses to help Galvin.  Her angry defensiveness leads Galvin to suspect she is protecting someone else and upon reviewing the employment records he guesses that Kaitlin Costello, the admitting nurse on that day, is the one being shielded.  Costello resigned shortly after the incident.  By some underhanded tricks Galvin finds Costello and convinces her to testify.  What we learn from her testimony is that the patient had eaten an hour before coming to the hospital and should not have been given anesthesia.  The doctor had worked on five difficult surgeries in a row and had made the mistake due to fatigue.  After the catastrophic injury to the patient the doctor threatened Costello to change the note concerning her pre-op meal from 1 hour to 9 hours by doctoring the admission record.  Costello refused and made a photocopy of the form just in case someone else doctored it.  And that was exactly what happened.

After this riveting testimony, Concannon raises an objection to the photocopied document which is sustained by the judge and then raises an objection to the testimony based on its lack of credibility without the photocopy.  The judge sustains this also and advises the jury not to credit any of the testimony.  But obviously the jury cannot unhear such damning evidence and they find for the plaintiff.

The plot of this movie doesn’t sound very extraordinary when narrated as a synopsis as I have just done above.  But the acting by the principal cast is extremely well done.  I especially enjoyed James Mason’s work as Concannon.  The way he portrays the Boston Brahmin lawyer and his staff rings true.  But the whole cast is strong.  David Mamet wrote a very lively script.  I would say this is easily among Paul Newman’s best films, right up there with The Sting.  I highly recommend this film.

The Coalition of the Cancelled

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Charlie Rose, Mark Halperin, Matt Lauer, Andrew Cuomo, Chris Cuomo, Jeff Zucker, Whoopi Goldberg.  What do all these names have in common?  They’re all feel-good stories about the Left.  For all but the last name on that list there is a causal chain that has come to be known as the MeToo movement.  All of these men have been brought down because they were blindsided by the changes to what was considered acceptable and unacceptable male/female behavior among the corporate Left.  And since they are all progressives it means they had to be cast into the outer darkness where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth for being heretics to the narrative.  And one more case is waiting in the wings, Don Lemon.  CNN’s parent company is looking to change directions and they may use as an excuse to fire him that Lemon is facing criminal charges for a sexual assault charge based on his disgusting behavior.  With any luck he’ll be hung out to dry too and will have to join Jussie Smollett in the ranks of gay, black former celebrities.  But this is just the nature of the intersectional grievance culture.  It’s always looking for more heads for the chopping block of social justice outrage.  Cancelled and punished sinners are always in demand.

Whoopi Goldberg on the other hand is a special case.  She is the literal manna from heaven.  Along with the other harridans on “The View” she opines on everything from Roman Polanski’s rape of a thirteen-year-old girl, to Bill Cosby’s date rape trial, to the Holocaust.  And no matter what else she does she always manages to sound like an ignoramus.

The most memorable occasion was when she described what Polanski did to the thirteen-year-old as, “not rape, rape.”  Who could be more eloquent in her tone-deaf stupidity than that?  Her latest pronouncement was that the Holocaust couldn’t have been caused by racism because Germans and Jews are both “white.”  I’m guessing that didn’t go over big with her “View” co-host Joy Behar.

Actually, in a way it does speak to her sincerity.  Whoopi just doesn’t realize that there’s no place for honesty in the intricacies of the intersectional hierarchy.  She sees two groups of white people and all she thinks is, “how could there be racism if there ain’t no black folks around.”  And based on her experience with white people she assumes they will defer to her judgement on racism since she is black and they revere the opinions of black people with respect to the theory of racism.

Now you’d think since her name is Goldberg that she’d have done some research on the Holocaust exception.  Since World War II and especially in the entertainment industry the Holocaust has a very special dispensation.  For this special case only, ethnicity is considered equivalent to race and Hitler is defined as the racist par excellence.  By claiming that the Holocaust wasn’t a racist event she was absolving Hitler of racism.  This was indeed a bridge too far.  But Whoopi is black so she couldn’t be fired.  She was suspended which at least indicates the severity of the crime.  Luckily for her she cannot be cast into the outer darkness like all those white men.  All they could do was bring in the Anti-Defamation League to warn everyone about how dangerous this kind of talk is and how antisemites are lurking in the shadows around the set of “The View” waiting to begin the next pogrom.  And eventually Whoopi will recover a memory about how her blasphemy had been inspired by something Donald Trump must have said to her in a dream or something.

So that was about six hundred rambling words about Leftists devouring their own.  What’s the point?  Very simply, this is proof that there is no coalition of the aggrieved.  It’s every Leftist for himself out there and the fairy tale about the great circle of people who will live in harmony and peace once the straight white men are banished is just that, a fairy tale.  The cracks are there and have always been there.  When Jesse Jackson called New York City Hymietown that was his true feeling.  When lesbians speak honestly about “trans-women” they are horrified at the idea that they might be approached by them sexually.  Black men think of white feminists as “Karens.”  Asians fear inner city blacks as violent criminals.  And many black women react violently if a trans-woman shows up in the restroom they are using.

The brave new world that the woke tell us about is a product of the carefully curated social networks.  In the real world we have cities coming apart at the seams and crime engulfing the multicultural “paradises” of New York, Seattle and Chicago.  This coalition is a product of the college campuses and the imagination of the perpetual students who inhabit them.  As the economy stalls out and crime peels off white suburban women and other white-collar groups from the coalition it’s going to look a lot less robust.

My thought is it’s time to stop worrying so much about the unbeatable coalition of tomorrow and instead think more about the policy holes of today.  Republicans need to run on runaway crime and inflation.  Those are realities that force the middle class to listen.  Tomorrow will take care of tomorrow.

Enemy of the State (1998) – A Movie Review

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Back when this movie came out in 1998, before the 9-11 attack and the Patriot Act, the idea of the surveillance state having the wherewithal to use information from telephones, e-mail, surveillance cameras and satellites to choreograph a manhunt in real time seemed like a paranoid’s conspiracy theory nightmare.  Well, other than for the ineptitude of our intelligence agency doofuses it’s now a living breathing reality.

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

Jon Voight plays Thomas Reynolds, a mid-level NSA official who is trying to ensure the passage of a bill very close to the Patriot Act that will legalize the kind of surveillance of American citizens that back then was thought unthinkable.  In furtherance of this aim he corners the chairman of the congressional committee responsible for approving the bill at a lake where the congressman is walking his dog.  He tries persuasion then threats.  But when the congressman refuses to approve the bill and walks away from him Reynolds has an assassin assault him and inject him in the neck with a drug that will simulate a heart attack.  Then the congressman is thrown back in his car which is then sent rolling to the bottom of the lake.

Unfortunately for Reynolds, there was a surveillance camera in a wildlife blind that was being used for Canadian Geese wildlife research.  This motion activated camera captures the murder and the identity of the murderers.  A member of the cabal spots the researcher, Daniel Zavitz, replacing the memory on the camera and alerts Reynolds who has the NSA trace the researcher.  Zavitz discovers what he has and hides the video in a video game just in time to escape the NSA hit squad sent out by Reynolds.  What ensues is the squad being fed street location information on the fleeing researcher via satellite images.  Finally, Zavitz runs into a lingerie store and sees a man he knows named Robert Dean and hides the video in Dean’s shopping bag before running out of the store.  He is chased by the team into heavy city traffic where he is run over and killed by a speeding fire truck that happens by at that moment.

Will Smith plays Robert Dean, a labor lawyer that is using his friend, Rachel Banks’ connections to get damaging surveillance evidence against a mafia mob boss to help his client fight back against union breaking intimidation tactics.  Rachel has an ex-CIA agent named “Brill” who can get surveillance on anyone.  Dean brings the video to the mob boss and tells him to lay off or risk being exposed to prosecution for the evidence on the video.  The mob boss threatens Dean that if he does not reveal the identity of Brill, he will kill Dean.  Undeterred, Dean goes shopping for a Christmas present for his wife Carla in a lingerie store when Daniel Zavitz shows up.  Recognizing Zavitz he hands him his business card before his old acquaintance rushes out of the store.

Meanwhile the NSA team searches Zavitz’ body and fails to find the video but they find Dean’s business card.  Reynolds orders them to destroy Dean’s life to facilitate finding the video and also to discredit him in case he tries to expose the video to the public.

And very systematically that is exactly what they do.  They break into his home in order to place microphones and tracking devices into his home and his clothing.  They send evidence to the police, newspapers and to his courtroom adversaries that makes it appear that he is guilty of fraud, theft and malfeasance.  They send photos to his wife that make it appear he is having an affair with Rachel Banks.  He’s fired from his job, his credit cards are cancelled and his wife throws him out of the house.  Finally in desperation he goes to Rachel Banks’ house.  She had at one time been his mistress so he needed her help in clearing his name with his wife.  But when he gets there, he finds her murdered and his clothes and belongings staged in the house to make him the suspect.

Now with nowhere else to turn he uses Rachel’s secret signal to contact Brill.  Brill, played by Gene Hackman, tells Dean the bad news that the NSA is destroying his life for some information he must have received without knowing it.  He also warns him that his clothes must be bugged then he leaves Dean to his fate.  Finally, after a manhunt that chases Dean through streets and tunnels and down the side of a hi-rise hotel he sets fire to a building to summon police and rescue personnel to scare off the killers.  After he is inside an ambulance, he steals an officer’s gun and escapes.  He returns home and finds the video and then meets up with Brill.

We learn that Brill was an NSA agent who was disowned by the agency out of convenience when a mission went sour.  His partner was killed in the mission and the partner’s daughter was Rachel Banks.  Brill brings Dean to his secret hide out.  They decipher the video and discover what the fuss is about.  But unfortunately, right before reaching Brill’s base, Dean made a phone call to his wife and the NSA was able to find his location and using satellite data they followed them back to Brill’s base.  As the agents break in, Brill and Dean escape just as the building is pulverized by an enormous fireball of an explosion.  In the ensuing chase the video is destroyed and so Brill and Dean decide to entrap Reynolds into a confession.  But the plan backfires and Brill and Dean are captured by Reynolds and the team.  Reynolds threatens to kill Brill and Dean if they do not give up the video.  Brill refuses and Reynolds shoots him in the hand.  Dean agrees to get him the video and tells them to drive to the restaurant owned by the Mafia mob boss.

Dean goes into the restaurant with Reynolds and some of the agents and using confusion between the video that Dean had shown the mob boss previously and the video that Reynolds wants, he gets the two groups into an argument that turns into a full-on fire fight.  Reynolds, the mob boss and most of the gunmen on both sides are killed in the shootout.  But Dean had hit the floor and survived.  Brill escaped in the confusion and the FBI which had been monitoring the crime family shows up in time to collect the survivors and sort out the crimes involved.  Dean is cleared of all the crimes he had been accused of and reinstated in his job and restored to his family.  Brill escapes to an island paradise to leave behind the world of espionage.

This movie is one long frenetic chase.  But for the most part it’s entertaining.  Sure, there are some over the top sequences and some of the characters are a little thin on acting skill but the action sweeps you along and the predicament that Will Smith’s character endures keeps your attention through all the running, jumping, hiding and seeking.  And after what we’ve learned in the last five years about the capabilities and lack of ethics at our intelligence agencies it doesn’t seem far-fetched at all.  Will Smith and Gene Hackman provide just enough old guy-young guy chemistry to provide some interest in their espionage mission.  I’ll recommend this movie as a full tub of popcorn’s worth of thrills.