Dumbass Billo' Fucking Fascist

Off topic but funny!

MPAA Rejects ‘Taxi To The Dark Side’ Movie Poster Because It Depicts A Hooded Detainee

Alex Gibney’s new critically-acclaimed documentary Taxi to the Dark Side follows the path of Afghan taxi driver Dilawar, who was innocent of any terrorist ties but still “tortured to death by interrogators in the U.S. prison at Bagram Air Base.” It also examines the Bush administration’s torture practices at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has rejected Taxi’s poster, displayed to the right, as being “not suitable for all audiences.” The poster for the film simply shows two soldiers walking away from the camera, holding a hooded detainee between them. Variety notes that the military has also tried to censor the photo on the poster:

The “Taxi” ad art is actually an amalgam of two pictures. The first, taken by Corbis photographer Shaun Schwarz, features the hooded prisoner and one soldier. Another military figure was added on the left. Ironically, the original Schwarz photo was censored by the military, which erased his camera’s memory. The photographer eventually retrieved the image from his hard drive.

According to ThinkFilm, which produced the documentary, the MPAA objected to the “image of the hood.” Last year, the MPAA also censored the poster for the documentary The Road to Guantanamo, because it showed a detainee “hanging by his handcuffed wrists, with a burlap sack over his head and a blindfold tied around the hood.”

As Gibney notes, Taxi is “not a horror film.” It is “a documentary and that image is a documentary image.” ThinkFilm plans to appeal the MPAA’s ruling.

More war, More war!

This idiot could only be on Faux Noise

Prager’s Hypocrisy: Romney’s Religion Shouldn’t Matter, Ellison’s Religion ‘Undermines America’

Last November, Keith Ellison became the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Congress. When he announced that he was going to take the oath of office with his hand on the Koran, right-wing talk show host Dennis Prager protested, arguing that Ellison would “embolden Islamic extremists“:

He [Ellison] should not be allowed to do so — not because of any American hostility to the Koran, but because the act undermines American civilization. […]

Insofar as a member of Congress taking an oath to serve America and uphold its values is concerned, America is interested in only one book, the Bible. If you are incapable of taking an oath on that book, don’t serve in Congress. […]

Ellison’s (taking the oath on the Koran) will embolden Islamic extremists and make new ones, as Islamists, rightly or wrongly, see the first sign of the realization of their greatest goal — the Islamicization of America.

Prager’s outrage was based on nothing but his own need to create controversy. What’s most interesting is that today — when a Republican candidate, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, is under attack for his Mormon beliefs — Prager seems suddenly concerned about the role religion plays in the political choices of some Americans:

(T)he theological beliefs of a public figure should matter only when one is choosing a theological leader, never a political leader — unless those beliefs form the basis of social and moral values that one abhors. It is very important to know the theological beliefs of one’s clergyman or the head of one’s seminary, but as far as the head of one’s country is concerned, only his moral and social values matter. I would much sooner vote for an agnostic whose values I shared than for a believing Christian or Jew whose values I did not share.

Ah, Dennis, but what if Romney wants to swear-in on The Book of Mormon?

Flip Flop Mitt hearts Bush

Right wing attacks CBS for ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ story.

On CBS’s 60 Minutes last night, correspondent Lesley Stahl reported that “discharges of gay soldiers” due to the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy “are dropping dramatically.” In the report, Stahl told the story of Army Sergeant Darren Manzella, who was “told to go back to work” after revealing to his battalion commander that he was gay. Speaking to CNSNews today, Matt Barber of Concerned Women for America attacked CBS for airing the story:

“If the bleeding-heart lefties over at CBS News and the SLDN really want to do something to support our troops and help the military, they should abandon their attempts to radically alter and undermine the armed forces, pipe down, put a cork in it and let our brave fighting men and women win this war on terror,” he added.

Andrew Sullivan notes how the 60 Minutes report “reveals that, in fact, wartime is the period when gay discharges routinely decline.”

McCain laughs off ‘bomb bomb Iran’ moment.

In April, a questioner asked Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) if an attack on Iran was in the works. “Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran,” McCain responded, to the tune of the Beach Boys’ Barbara Ann. (Watch it below). NBC’s First Read reports that, at an event in South Carolina on Saturday, a man reminded McCain of that moment and asked what he will do now in the wake of the NIE that says Iran has shut down its nuclear program:

McCain’s response: “No thanks for reminding me, you jerk. [Laughter]. I don’t know where the intelligence came from. But, if you are enriching the material then it doesn’t take long to make a nuclear weapon. Second, I don’t detect a change in Iranians behavior…they still pose a threat to our country.”

UPDATE: Back in September, when a high school student asked McCain whether he was too old and too conservative to be president, McCain responded, “Thanks for the question, you little jerk. You’re drafted.”