Celebrities And Politics

[Steph2]

LMAO Greg!!

[Greg]

With Voight and Damon on his side, maybe now Rudy can start beating Ron Paul.

[Steph2]

Damien, I'm disappointed too. I actually thought he was cute once! Blech.

[Damien]

Johnny Damon goes for Giuliani. And to think there was once a time (pre-Judas) when I thought he was cool.

From the NY Daily News:

DAMON HEART RUDY...AND MITT'S NOT BAD EITHER

Yankees star outfielder Johnny Damon joined up with Bronx Bombers loyalist Rudy Giuliani here today, introducing the ex-mayor at a rally at The Presidential Ballroom in Orlando.

Here’s a taste of what Damon, a registered Republican voting in Florida’s primary, had to say afterward:

Q. Why are you supporting Rudy?

A. “I’ve been a huge fan of Rudy’s. You know, I’ve played on many different teams, and I was with Oakland when 9/11 happened, and I remember how devastating it was, and I just remember seeing everything about Rudy, how he would go visit the firefighters. He did a lot of great things. He changed the way I looked at New York. New York changed for the better. And I get to see him quite a bit now, so, when he comes out to the ball games, and he’s always been a nice, genuine guy, so I think would do a great job as our president.”

Q. How political is the Yankee clubhouse? Are you going to get a lot of ribbing for this?

A. “I don’t think so. I think, you know, I think everybody likes Rudy, everyone has their opinions on who they’re going to vote for or whatnot but I’ve always been a fan of Rudy’s so that’s why I’m going to vote for him.”

Q. What about the other players? Are they supporting him?

A. “I’ll start bumping into a lot of them come next month so we’ll get to talk about it a little bit more.”

Q. You going to campaign for him in the clubhouse?

A. “You know what? I don’t think I would have to too much. I think everyone likes Rudy there, he comes around… Just the way people live in New York City now is, is amazing. It’s a very safe place and I think a lot of it’s because of Rudy.”

Q. Johnny, you used to play for Boston. Mitt Romney is the former governor of Massachusetts. You give him any thought?

A. “You know, I think he’s a great guy with great issues. I know it’s going to be a tough race, but I just have liked Rudy. Mitt Romney is a great guy, and we’ll just see what happens.”

After Giuliani and Damon did a little grip-and-grin with some of the hundred or so people who showed up for the event, the ex-mayor was back on his campaign bus and headed to Daytona Beach, with detractors outside – including retired FDNY firefighters unsatisfied with Giuliani’s handling of the aftermath of Sept. 11 – bidding him farewell with chants of “Shame on Rudy!”



Edited By Damien on 1200972527

[Akash]

That can't be helping his relationship with Angelina.

[Damien]

Insane Actor Jon Voight has been making campaign appearances with Rudy Giuliani in Florida. A perfect marriage.

[Akash]

"Wilford Brimley is our response to Chuck Norris," McCain said on his campaign bus. "He's huge in every way."

Eww. TMI, McCain.

[Big Magilla]

From the Primary Monitor:

According to Wilford Brimley, voting for John McCain is the right thing to do.

"Wilford Brimley is our response to Chuck Norris," McCain said on his campaign bus. "He's huge in every way."

Wilford Brimley? You mean they haven't embalmed him yet?

[Sonic Youth]

Joan of Arcadia and Ugly Betty join Hillary team
Posted by Foon Rhee
Political Intelligence
January 14, 2008 02:14 PM


Hunting for young voters, Hillary Clinton's campaign announced today that two young stars of "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants" has joined her sisterhood.

Actresses America Ferrera and Amber Tamblyn will serve as national co-chairs of "HillBlazers," the campaign's youth outreach program and are both expected to campaign in Las Vegas this week, in advance of Saturday's caucuses in Nevada.

"This election is too important to stand on the sidelines, especially for my generation. I look forward to rallying young people to use their voices and get involved. I believe that Hillary Clinton can turn this country around," Ferrera said in a statement issued by the Clinton campaign. "I am confident she will be a champion for young women and men across the country."

Ferrera is best known as Betty Suarez on the ABC series "Ugly Betty," while Tamblyn is perhaps best known for the title role in CBS's "Joan of Arcadia."

According to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, the youth voter turnout rate in New Hampshire last week set a record, rising to 43 percent from 18 percent in 2004 and 28 percent in 2000. But Clinton's main rival, Barack Obama, won the lion's share of those votes.

[Damien]

From the Primary Monitor:

According to Wilford Brimley, voting for John McCain is the right thing to do.

"Wilford Brimley is our response to Chuck Norris," McCain said on his campaign bus. "He's huge in every way."

[Damien]

From the New York Observer:

Madeleine Stowe Thinks John Edwards is in the Driver's Seat
by Choire Sicha | January 5, 2008

Mike Huckabee may have the Chuck Norris voter all locked up—but Madeleine Stowe is continuing her Iowa push for John Edwards here in New Hampshire. I talked to the actress (Twelve Monkies! Last of the Mohicans! Last year's NBC mid-season replacement show Raines, starring Jeff Goldbum and canceled after seven episodes!) this morning. She believes that John Edwards is driving the talking points of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

"Both Hillary and Barack had to move the direction they were heading because of him," she said. For instance, she said, his longstanding talk about "corporate America" has forced those other two to address those issues.

"He's been outspent 6 to 1 in Iowa," she said. And: "John is the only one of the Democratic guys who beats the Republicans in head to head matchups." Well, here's one Edwards voter that Clinton and Obama won't steal! Hi-o!

[Sonic Youth]

Romney targets Chuck Norris
Posted: 10:11 AM ET


(CNN) — Mike Huckabee and Chuck Norris may be the political odd couple of this campaign season, but now Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney is trying to use the action star to try to score points against the former Arkansas governor.

In a new Web video, "Roundhouse kick," the Romney campaign uses the format that's become familiar over several weeks of anti-Huckabee spots. "Two good men, both into fitness. Both love Chuck Norris," says the announcer.

"But where do they stand on crime? Chuck Norris: 'give a presidential pardon to no one, ever.' Norris subdues criminals with just an icy stare."

"And Mike Huckabee? He granted 1,033 pardons and commutations, including 12 convicted murderers. Huckabee granted more clemencies than the previous three governors combined. Chuck Norris, Mike Huckabee. Now who deserves the roundhouse kick?"

The ad comes just hours after a blogger at a Huckabee campaign event asked the martial arts star, "How much do you want to roundhouse kick Mitt Romney?"

Norris responded, laughing: "No, I don"t roundhouse kick. I choke," reminding reporters of an interview with CNN's Larry King where he'd criticized the Romney campaign and said he'd "just like to choke those guys out." He added later that "truthfully, I hate negative campaigning."

[Akash]

Michael Moore weighs in -- and with Moore, that's a lot of weight.

Published on Wednesday, January 2, 2008 by MichaelMoore.com
Who Do We Vote For This Time Around?
by Michael Moore

Friends,

A new year has begun. And before we’ve had a chance to break our New Year’s resolutions, we find ourselves with a little more than 24 hours before the good people of Iowa tell us whom they would like to replace the man who now occupies three countries and a white house.

Twice before, we have begun the process to stop this man, and twice we have failed. Eight years of our lives as Americans will have been lost, the world left in upheaval against us… and yet now, today, we hope against hope that our moment has finally arrived, that the amazingly powerful force of the Republican Party will somehow be halted. But we know that the Democrats are experts at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, and if there’s a way to blow this election, they will find it and do it with gusto.

Do you feel the same as me? That the Democratic front-runners are a less-than-stellar group of candidates, and that none of them are the “slam dunk” we wish they were? Of course, there are wonderful things about each of them. Any one of them would be infinitely better than what we have now. Personally, Congressman Kucinich, more than any other candidate, shares the same positions that I have on the issues (although the UFO that picked ME up would only take me as far as Kalamazoo). But let’s not waste time talking about Dennis. Even he is resigned to losing, with statements like the one he made yesterday to his supporters in Iowa to throw their support to Senator Obama as their “second choice.”

So, it’s Hillary, Obama, Edwards — now what do we do?

Two months ago, Rolling Stone magazine asked me to do a cover story where I would ask the hard questions that no one was asking in one-on-one interviews with Senators Clinton, Obama and Edwards. “The Top Democrats Face Off with Michael Moore.” The deal was that all three candidates had to agree to let me interview them or there was no story. Obama and Edwards agreed. Mrs. Clinton said no, and the cover story was thus killed.

Why would the love of my life, Hillary Clinton, not sit down to talk with me? What was she afraid of?

Those of you who are longtime readers of mine may remember that 11 years ago I wrote a chapter (in my first book) entitled, “My Forbidden Love for Hillary.” I was fed up with the treatment she was getting, most of it boringly sexist, and I thought somebody should stand up for her. I later met her and she thanked me for referring to her as “one hot s***kicking feminist babe.” I supported and contributed to her run for the U.S. Senate. I think she is a decent and smart person who loves this country, cares deeply about kids, and has put up with more crap than anyone I know of (other than me) from the Crazy Right. Her inauguration would be a thrilling sight, ending 218 years of white male rule in a country where 51% of its citizens are female and 64% are either female or people of color.

And yet, I am sad to say, nothing has disappointed me more than the disastrous, premeditated vote by Senator Hillary Clinton to send us to war in Iraq. I’m not only talking about her first vote that gave Mr. Bush his “authorization” to invade — I’m talking about every single OTHER vote she then cast for the next four years, backing and funding Bush’s illegal war, and doing so with verve. She never met a request from the White House for war authorization that she didn’t like. Unlike the Kerrys and the Bidens who initially voted for authorization but later came to realize the folly of their decision, Mrs. Clinton continued to cast numerous votes for the war until last March — four long years of pro-war votes, even after 70% of the American public had turned against the war. She has steadfastly refused to say that she was wrong about any of this, and she will not apologize for her culpability in America’s worst-ever foreign policy disaster. All she can bring herself to say is that she was “misled” by “faulty intelligence.”

Let’s assume that’s true. Do you want a President who is so easily misled? I wasn’t “misled,” and millions of others who took to the streets in February of 2003 weren’t “misled” either. It was simply amazing that we knew the war was wrong when none of us had been briefed by the CIA, none of us were national security experts, and none of us had gone on a weapons inspection tour of Iraq. And yet… we knew we were being lied to! Let me ask those of you reading this letter: Were YOU “misled” — or did you figure it out sometime between October of 2002 and March of 2007 that George W. Bush was up to something rotten? Twenty-three other senators were smart enough to figure it out and vote against the war from the get-go. Why wasn’t Senator Clinton?

I have a theory: Hillary knows the sexist country we still live in and that one of the reasons the public, in the past, would never consider a woman as president is because she would also be commander in chief. The majority of Americans were concerned that a woman would not be as likely to go to war as a man (horror of horrors!). So, in order to placate that mindset, perhaps she believed she had to be as “tough” as a man, she had to be willing to push The Button if necessary, and give the generals whatever they wanted. If this is, in fact, what has motivated her pro-war votes, then this would truly make her a scary first-term president. If the U.S. is faced with some unforeseen threat in her first years, she knows that in order to get re-elected she’d better be ready to go all Maggie Thatcher on whoever sneezes in our direction. Do we want to risk this, hoping the world makes it in one piece to her second term?

I have not even touched on her other numerous — and horrendous — votes in the Senate, especially those that have made the middle class suffer even more (she voted for Bush’s first bankruptcy bill, and she is now the leading recipient of payoff money — I mean campaign contributions — from the health care industry). I know a lot of you want to see her elected, and there is a very good chance that will happen. There will be plenty of time to vote for her in the general election if all the pollsters are correct. But in the primaries and caucuses, isn’t this the time to vote for the person who most reflects the values and politics you hold dear? Can you, in good conscience, vote for someone who so energetically voted over and over and over again for the war in Iraq? Please give this serious consideration.

Now, on to the two candidates who did agree to do the interview with me…

Barack Obama is a good and inspiring man. What a breath of fresh air! There’s no doubting his sincerity or his commitment to trying to straighten things out in this country. But who is he? I mean, other than a guy who gives a great speech? How much do any of us really know about him? I know he was against the war. How do I know that? He gave a speech before the war started. But since he joined the senate, he has voted for the funds for the war, while at the same time saying we should get out. He says he’s for the little guy, but then he votes for a corporate-backed bill to make it harder for the little guy to file a class action suit when his kid swallows lead paint from a Chinese-made toy. In fact, Obama doesn’t think Wall Street is a bad place. He wants the insurance companies to help us develop a new health care plan — the same companies who have created the mess in the first place. He’s such a feel-good kinda guy, I get the sense that, if elected, the Republicans will eat him for breakfast. He won’t even have time to make a good speech about it.

But this may be a bit harsh. Senator Obama has a big heart, and that heart is in the right place. Is he electable? Will more than 50% of America vote for him? We’d like to believe they would. We’d like to believe America has changed, wouldn’t we? Obama lets us feel better about ourselves — and as we look out the window at the guy snowplowing his driveway across the street, we want to believe he’s changed, too. But are we dreaming?

And then there’s John Edwards.

It’s hard to get past the hair, isn’t it? But once you do — and recently I have chosen to try — you find a man who is out to take on the wealthy and powerful who have made life so miserable for so many. A candidate who says things like this: “I absolutely believe to my soul that this corporate greed and corporate power has an ironclad hold on our democracy.” Whoa. We haven’t heard anyone talk like that in a while, at least not anyone who is near the top of the polls. I suspect this is why Edwards is doing so well in Iowa, even though he has nowhere near the stash of cash the other two have. He won’t take the big checks from the corporate PACs, and he is alone among the top three candidates in agreeing to limit his spending and be publicly funded. He has said, point-blank, that he’s going after the drug companies and the oil companies and anyone else who is messing with the American worker. The media clearly find him to be a threat, probably because he will go after their monopolistic power, too. This is Roosevelt/Truman kind of talk. That’s why it’s resonating with people in Iowa, even though he doesn’t get the attention Obama and Hillary get — and that lack of coverage may cost him the first place spot tomorrow night. After all, he is one of those white guys who’s been running things for far too long.

And he voted for the war. But unlike Senator Clinton, he has stated quite forcefully that he was wrong. And he has remorse. Should he be forgiven? Did he learn his lesson? Like Hillary and Obama, he refused to promise in a September debate that there will be no U.S. troops in Iraq by the end of his first term in 2013. But this week in Iowa, he changed his mind. He went further than Clinton and Obama and said he’d have all the troops home in less than a year.

Edwards is the only one of the three front-runners who has a universal health care plan that will lead to the single-payer kind all other civilized countries have. His plan doesn’t go as fast as I would like, but he is the only one who has correctly pointed out that the health insurance companies are the enemy and should not have a seat at the table.

I am not endorsing anyone at this point. This is simply how I feel in the first week of the process to replace George W. Bush. For months I’ve been wanting to ask the question, “Where are you, Al Gore?” You can only polish that Oscar for so long. And the Nobel was decided by Scandinavians! I don’t blame you for not wanting to enter the viper pit again after you already won. But getting us to change out our incandescent light bulbs for some irritating fluorescent ones isn’t going to save the world. All it’s going to do is make us more agitated and jumpy and feeling like once we get home we haven’t really left the office.

On second thought, would you even be willing to utter the words, “I absolutely believe to my soul that this corporate greed and corporate power has an ironclad hold on our democracy?” ‘Cause the candidate who understands that, and who sees it as the root of all evil — including the root of global warming — is the President who may lead us to a place of sanity, justice and peace.

Yours,

Michael Moore (not an Iowa voter, but appreciative of any state that has a town named after a sofa)
MMFlint@aol.com
MichaelMoore.com

[Sonic Youth]

Oliver Stone joins Chavez hostage rescue team

VILLAVICENCIO, Colombia (AP) -- With its fearsome record of kidnapping and violence, Colombia's largest guerrilla army might seem a nightmare group to encounter. But not to Oliver Stone.

The American filmmaker is jumping at a chance to meet with a group the United States classifies as a terrorist organization.

Leaving the glamour of Hollywood far behind, Stone arrived in the steamy Colombian city of Villavicencio on Saturday as part of a mission led by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to retrieve three hostages held for years by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

"I have no illusions about the FARC, but it looks like they are a peasant army fighting for a decent living," Stone said in an interview with The Associated Press at his hotel bar. "And here, if you fight, you fight to win."

Stone is part of an international delegation expected to fly by helicopter as early as Sunday into the country's eastern jungles, an area the size of France, to collect the captives: former congresswoman Consuelo Gonzalez, Clara Rojas and her young son Emmanuel, who was fathered by one of her guerrilla captors.

When asked if he's concerned the heavily armed guerrillas could turn on him, he joked: "Well, if they took us, they would be swapping three hostages for 10," referring to himself and observers from five Latin America countries, France and Switzerland, along to supervise the release. "If I were them, that would make sense.

"But seriously, no, I'm not worried. The FARC knows there would be universal condemnation if they did that," said Stone, whose arrival has ramped up the media circus that surrounds the pending handover.

More than 150 journalists have camped out in Villavicencio's airport since Thursday, waiting for the rescue operation to begin.

The mission seemed unlikely to be completed Sunday as originally promised by Venezuela, as rescuers were still awaiting word from the rebels on the exact location of the release. Meanwhile a rocket narrowly missed an air force cargo plane as it was landing in southern Colombia, underscoring the difficulties involved in crossing live battle lines.

The famous director's presence in this violent country, struggling through its fifth decade of civil conflict, is a worry to his Colombian and Venezuelan guides. They prohibited him from leaving his hotel in Villavicencio, a town rocked in recent years by turf battles between rival drug traffickers and far-right death squads.

Chavez personally invited Stone to join the rescue delegation after the pair, who say they are mutual admirers, met for the first time last week in Caracas.

Dispatching rescue helicopters from Venezuela on Friday, Chavez joked that Stone was President Bush's emissary to the operation, while Stone called Chavez "a great man."

The hostage release could improve prospects for hundreds of other rebel-held captives, Stone said, including three U.S. defense contractors whose four-year confinement he said he has closely followed.

"This release could be a new start, a break in the ice -- and the release has been well-propelled forward by Chavez," said Stone. "The important thing is that we build momentum so everyone can be released."

The mission also gives Stone a chance to get the lay of Colombia's political landscape for two upcoming movies.

Footage from the liberation will form part of a documentary on "North America, and that includes our relations with South America and people like Chavez and Castro," he said, without giving details.

He is also producing of one of two rival Hollywood biopics about Pablo Escobar, history's most infamous cocaine trafficker, who was gunned down in 1993 after a bloody war against the Colombian state.

The movie, which Stone hopes to film in Colombia, is based loosely on a book by Escobar's brother, Roberto.

"Escobar is still very controversial. Many people hate him, but many people love him," said Stone, who first rendered the drug-smuggling underworld as a screenwriter for "Midnight Express" and "Scarface." "To some, he was this Robin Hood figure, giving money to the poor

[Akash]

Amateur! You always post a link :p

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/20/opinion/20collins.html?th&emc=th

I got most of these right but I admit I thought the ferret answer was correct on both counts.