He’s one of the country’s ten most fascinating people, according to Barbara Walters. Even better than that, his Farenheit 9/11 was nominated as one of the year’s best films by the People’s Choice Awards.
Well, if that just didn’t rile up the neocons enough, again, to try derail another electoral process by launching some of their usual heavy-handed threats and propaganda.
Modest Mr. Moore has this to say about his unexpected nomination and the response of this adversaries:
Now, normally I wouldn’t make a very big deal out of something like this. It’s nice and I’m honored, but it’s not exactly the number one priority on any of our minds these days. In fact, when we found out we were nominated over a week ago, I didn’t even think to tell you about it or put it up on our website.
But then a group of top Republicans took out a full page ad in USA Today (and placed a similar one in the Hollywood trade magazine, Variety) proclaiming that “An election is over, but a war of ideas continues.” The point of the ad was to say that while they, as right wing conservatives, were proud of getting rid of Kerry, there was still one more nuisance running around loose they had to deal with — me! They also issued a not-so-subtle threat to the Academy Awards voters that, in essence, said don’t even THINK about nominating “Fahrenheit 9/11” for Best Picture. And Bill O’Reilly recently bellowed that if the Oscars recognize my work this year, Middle America will boycott Hollywood.
Oops. I guess he spoke too soon. Because now along comes Middle America’s favorite awards show, the People’s Choice, and the People’s Choice this year, along with a Spiderman superhero and a lovable green ogre, is a film that apparently continues to resonate throughout the country. The truth about Iraq, Bush, terror and fear. The election has not altered or made irrelevant, unfortunately, a single one of these issues. That they (and the film that dealt with these issues) are still at the forefront of the majority of the public’s minds should give serious pause to Mr. Bush as he brags about a nonexistent “mandate” and begins to spend his “political capital.”
So, get out the vote and get over to this site and let’s see if we can make a little bit of democracy work a little better this time.

When my toddler grandson someday studies the political history of the first half of the twenty-first century, I’m sure that Howard Dean will be among the few cited as true catalysts for change, as a true hero of our American dreams — a scrappy, idealistic, evangelist for democracy in the best sense of all of those words.
The tone and the substance of his remarks on the Future of the Democratic Party, given at George Washington University yesterday, should set the Party’s message until the next election is won.
Among all of the stirring, call-to-action statements that Dean made in his speech, these are my favorites:
We need to embrace real political reform — because only real reform will pry government from the grasp of the special interests who have made a mockery of reform and progress for far too long.
It is time for the Democratic Party to start framing the debate.
We have to learn to punch our way off the ropes.
We have to set the agenda.
We should not hesitate to call for reform — reform in elections, reform in health care and education, reforms that promote ethical business practices. And, yes, we need to talk about some internal reform in the Democratic Party as well, and I’ll be discussing that more specifically in the days ahead.
Reform is the hallmark of a strong Democratic Party.
Those who stand in the way of reform cannot be the focus of our attention for only four months out of every four years.
Reform is a daily battle.
And the success of each daily battle depends so much on strong, vocal, and inspiring leadership to keep the image of the destination clear and compelling on all fronts.
Howard Dean.

This movie was made when I was four years old, and the world was still reeling from the effects of Hitler’s “Today, Germany. Tomorrow the World.”
As I putter around my apartment on this lazy, snow-showery afternoon, I put on the Turner Classic Movie channel for distraction.
Tomorrow the World.
A young boy who has grown up under the Nazi regime and is fully indoctrinated by the relentless propaganda is sent to the United States to live with his uncle. A firm believer in the rule of the Reich, the boy upsets his family and community as his uncle attempts to control and teach him the downfalls of bigotry and hatred.
I can’t help draw a parallel between the young Nazi-indoctrinated boy and so many of the anti-liberal-American fundamentalists. Same attitudes, same rigidity, same refusal to see any side but their own, same naive willingness to believe the simplistic propaganda they’ve been fed by their leader. The American community in which the boy moves into at first welcomes him with humor and tolerance. But his mean-spiritedness and manipulativeness make that welcome wear thin.
Of course, back in the mid-1940s, people like that boy were far outnumbered by Americans who truly believed in the spirit of the American Bill of Rights — believed that it was important to keep America as a country that welcomed all nationalities and religions.
Also, of course, except for one Chinese boy, there were no minorities in that 1944 movies. Times have, thankfully, changed in that aspect of American inclusion. But the basic idea of that movie is still important.
I have been told by neocons and fundamentalists to stick to facts and not make references to movies and novels as examples of what is true, because those things are fiction and not fact. I don’t agree. For truth to reach our heads, it often has to reach our hearts first. Art aims truths to the heart, the guts — insinuates new ideas into minds atrophied from missed use, blind beliefs.
“The Nazis are afraid of ideas,” Fredercik March states to the boy. Neocons and fundamentalists are afraid of ideas.
“Today, America,” they believe. “Tomorrow the world.”
Are we scared enough yet?

How about this for transforming energy?

As my Ex (b!X’s dad) and I were saying goodbye to our son at the train station. we both took photos. They all came out normally, except for the above (which is exactly how it came out — no pixel tinkering, no Photoshopping).
Of course, given my addiction to magic and metaphors, especially magical metaphors — I had to post this one of my last moments with b!X before he got on the train.
My heart-light was definitely beaming.

Got this link in an email from Dean Landsman — a future EPIC not to be missed.
It’s 2014, and Google and Microsoft have figured out how to be in charge of all the informational media available to us. They pay bloggers to be a part of their networks. Our news comes to us based on our topic preferences. The NY Times et al are defunct.
How does that happen? How does it work? Watch the short piece here.
It’s what we wanted. Isn’t it?

Got this from Jim Culleny of NoUtopia.
I NEVER EVER watch Fox News, and I didn’t think I have the option to take it off my cable list of channels. I never thought of writing Fox to express my disgust at their biased news coverage. But a friend of Jim’s sent him the following e-mail, which I share here in hopes of generating some direct dissent against Fox News Network:
Subject: Foxless in America:
This is such simple, brilliant, potentially effective idea, I wish I could say I thought of it. It was actually sent to me by a friend who is impatient for grass roots action against the right wing to begin. I’m doing this at once. I hope you’ll decide to do the same and circulate the idea to at least a hundred million of your closest friends.
LET’S SEE THE STOCKS PLUMMET- FEED YOUR STRENGTH
If you, too, have had enough with the FOX news channel, please read below. This action will make your voice heard while simply choosing not to watch the station can not.
I have decided to make a political statement. I called mySatellite TV provider and asked them to remove Fox News from my television. Since the election I have wanted to stick my head out of a window of a tall building and shout I can’t take it anymore but I soon came to realize that there is a better and easier way to send a message to Rupert Murdoch and his blathering bunch at Fox News and that was to simply make them disappear from my life.
I called my cable TV provider and had Fox News deleted from my television. It was simple I called the Repair Department at Comcast and said I wanted to be Foxless in America. I then wrote an email to the following: Reed Nolte VP Investor Relations for News Corporation (the parent company of Fox News) at rnolte@newscorp.com and Brian Lewis, Senior VP Corporate Communications for Fox News at brian.lewis@foxnews.com and to top it off I copied murdoch@newscorp.com. I told them that I cannot take the Fox distortion and biased presentation of the news any longer and that they ought to inform their sponsors that there are millions like me. I can’t tell you the immense satisfaction I gained from becoming Foxless in America.
I am asking you to follow me in this protest and let it be heard by all that want to control what we all see and hear. This could be a way to have your voice heard-Become Foxless in America. We can start a movement if each of you send this email to all the others you know who are fed up with Fox News.
The email ends with some quotes worth sharing here:

I remember when Thanksgiving was fun — noisy with relatives who all lived within a block of each other and nosey with relatives who drove in from the next county or the next state. Everyone ate too much, drank too much, and laughed enough to keep us going until Christmas, when we’d do it all over again, except on a larger scale and a different menu.
It was just me and my mother this year. I cooked the traditional fare (including Polish kapusta, which is traditional for my family), but I don’t know why I bothered. While my mom ate up (she’s too frail and forgetful to have helped prepare anything), I was full from all the tasting I did along the way from cutting board to table. After dinner, I went and watched the same tv programs that I usually watch on Thursday nights (at least the ones that were on despite the “holiday”) while my mother napped in her recliner.
My daughter and her family (a couple of hours’ drive away) went out to dinner with her in-law family. She’s still getting her recently purchased home set up, and no one else wanted to cook.
My brother, who’s a vegetarian and lives an hour and a half away, is working on his house, so he didn’t even bother acknowledging the holiday.
Back in my home town, it was my aunt (who’s about in the same shape as my mother), her daughter, and her sister-in-law. They usually have pork, anyway.
Rituals and holidays used to be celebratory. Now so many of them are just a chore. We do what we’ve always done. Except everything else is different. And so we go through the motions. Motions without the satisfying E-motions.
I think that next year, I’m going to tell my brother to take my mother down to my aunts’ for Thanksgiving, and I’m heading out to my daughter’s. By then, her home wil be more than ready for company, and she plans to really get into the process and the product.
I’ll volunteer to make the kapusta. Maybe some butternut squash with apples and brown sugar, too. But that’s it. And I’ll eat too much and drink too much and laugh a lot.
I will bask in the noises of families fraternizing while the turkey bastes and new memories emerge. And, again, I will feel the full flood of thanks.

In his widely read blog, New Media Musings, respected writer/blogger J.D. Lasica promotes the efforts of the Portland community to find funding for b!X’s Portland Communique.
Just before Thanksgiving, the Willamette Week newspaper in Portland came out with a Giving Guide, which — at the behest of many of b!X’s Portland fans — included a piece on the Portland Communique as a fitting recipient for charitable donations.
As Lasica states:
b!X’ has already announced that he may have to shut down his Portland Communique weblog at the end of December unless it begins to generate some revenue. The Communique