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Take two of Saturday Night Live’s funniest alumni and cast them in a drama. And no ordinary drama, but one permeated with so much despair that each of their characters attempts suicide within the first few minutes.

That’s not exactly a formula for box-office success, which helps to explain why The Skeleton Twins is opening at only two Columbus theaters this weekend. Nor is it a surefire formula for artistic success, but that’s where the flick fools us.

This second feature by director Craig Johnson (True Adolescents) is astoundingly good. So are stars Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader, who play siblings Maggie and Milo.

The troubled offspring of a father who killed himself and a mother who’s never there for them, the two been separated for the past 10 years due to an old grudge. They’ve spent that decade trying to build fulfilling lives—Milo as an aspiring actor in Los Angeles, Maggie as a dental technician and wife in their New York hometown—but both have failed to find happiness.

NEW YORK — The massive People’s Climate March, the most hopeful, diverse, photogenic, energizing, and often hilarious march I’ve joined in 52 years of activism — and one of the biggest, at 400,000 strong — has delivered a simple messag​e: we can and will rid the planet of fossil fuels and nuclear power, we will do it at the grassroots, it will be demanding and difficult to say the least, but it will also have its moments of great fun.

With our lives and planet on the line, our species has responded.
 

Ostensibly, this march was in part meant to influence policy makers. That just goes with the territory.

But in fact what it showed was an amazingly broad-based, diverse, savvy, imaginative, and very often off-beat movement with a deep devotion to persistence and cause, and a great flair for fun.

Because what must happen most of all is organizing from the grassroots against each and every polluting power plant, unwanted permit, errant funding scheme, stomach-turning bribe, planet-killing frack well, soon-to-melt reactor, and much much more.

Unrestrained corporate power is the Ebola virus of our global ecological crisis. Rooting it out will demand a whole new level of resistance.

The worldwide march for the climate this weekend is focussed on moving us to a Solartopian energy supply, a green-powered Earth.

But those who march must also focus on the real core problem: the nature of the modern corporation.

As currently structured, the corporation’s sole mandate is to make profit. Its insatiable need for more and more money, and its immunity from the consequences of its actions, are unsustainable in any sense.

Its fossil fuels heat our planet. Its atomic reactors threaten us all.

Scotland's long-awaited referendum on independence from the United Kingdom ended on Thursday night in a defeat for secessionists, when 55% of voters said 'no' to independence.   Now that Scotland has voted by a narrow margin to remain in the UK, establishment figures are relieved that they have dodged Britain's biggest constitutional crisis in centuries.  But even though the 307-year-old union remains intact (for now), the political landscape has seen a tectonic shift overnight as the conversation has changed: has the time finally come to remake Britain into a federal state?   Only a week before the referendum the Yes camp enjoyed a sharp surge in polls that pushed the pro-independence vote from a fairly consistent 35% up to 51%.  Most commentators agree that this was less a sudden surge in patriotic mettle and more a reaction against the patronising negative campaigning of the 'Better Together' camp, which throughout the campaign enjoyed the overwhelming support of elites in Westminster, the media and the financial sector.  

The U.S. House of Representatives has not just left town, but prior to leaving passed a rule preventing any member from using the War Powers Resolution to force Congress to return and vote on war.

Here's a video of Congressman Jim McGovern denouncing the rule (or read the transcript here)

If you watch the video, following Rep. McGovern's remarks two of his colleagues run their mouths. The first is Congressman Pete Sessions nonsensically replying to McGovern. The second is Congresswoman Virginia Foxx on an unrelated topic. If you jump ahead to 10:25 McGovern replies to Sessions. It's well worth watching.

In addition, Congressman McGovern and five other Democrats and six Republicans have asked Speaker John Boehner and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to hold a vote on war. Here's their letter: PDF.

 

 

 

 

Finally, somebody commenting on the state of Iraq thinks George W. Bush got something right. Turns out it's ISIS. In the new hour-long ISIS-produced film about how nice it is to die for ISIS -- Flames of War: Fighting Has Just Begun -- Bush is quoted: "You are with us or against us." Video shows him saying "Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists." A graphic in the upper corner of the screen reads: "Bush spoke the truth, although he's a liar."

What truth does ISIS think Bush spoke? The Manichean truth that there are two groups of people on earth with nothing in common between them and a shared dedication to annihilate each other. Of course, the notion that they have nothing in common is delusional. They have almost everything in common: their belief in violence, their monotheism, their stupidity, their desire for a U.S. war in the Middle East.

"In the face of the dark wave of the crusader force..." begins the ISIS movie.

"This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while," said Bush.

Two vans and a big bus filled with truly great people—the new Climate Riders—on their way to New York City for the People’s Climate March pulled up to the First Watch for breakfast this morning in Columbus, Ohio.

Twenty-four hours on the road each way to march for a few hours against the corporations that are killing our planet.

Kansas/Missouri Climate Riders stop for breakfast in central Ohio on their way to NYC. Local author Harvey Wasserman is kneeling in front in his “Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth” t-shirt. Photo credit: Samantha Allen

“I hate the Koch Brothers,” one of them tells me over pancakes. “They are wrecking the Earth for all of us.”

Another, Chris, borrows my bike to ride down the street to a bakery, then does it a second time to feed the drivers.


Bob Hart, Green Party Congressional candidate for twelfth district of Ohio came out in opposition to an expanded American military role in combating ISIS in Syria. The Press release read in part “President Obama and Congress have chosen to sacrifice additional U.S. troops, and further degrade our economy and constitution, by illegally broadening the ongoing wars in the Middle East to include Syria.”

Hart's statement referred to the recent announcement by President Obama that airstrikes targeting ISIS would be carried out in Syria. The President also has asked Congress to grant the military the authority to arm and train friendly militias inside Syria.

The friendly militias are on the short end of a three way struggle between themselves, ISIS and the Assad regime which is allied with Iran. Both Iran and the United States have special operations troops assisting Iraqi forces combating ISIS in Iraq.

Barack Obama’s central dilemma last week, when he tried to sell a new war to the American public on the eve of the thirteenth anniversary of 9/11, was to speak convincingly about the wisdom and effectiveness of U.S. foreign policy over the last decade-plus while at the same time, alas, dropping the bad news that it didn’t work.

Thus: “Thanks to our military and counterterrorism professionals, America is safer.”

Hurray! God bless drones and “mission accomplished” and a million Iraqi dead and birth defects in Fallujah. God bless torture. God bless the CIA. But guess what?

“Still we continue to face a terrorist threat. We cannot erase every trace of evil from the world, and small groups of killers have the capacity to do great harm.”

So it’s bombs away again, boys — another trace of evil has popped up in the Middle East — and I find myself at the edge of outrage, the edge of despair, groping for language to counter my own incredulity that the God of War is on the verge of another victory and Planet Earth and human evolution lose again.

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