Happy New Year-- And Now The Fight For Congress Starts For Real

If you've ever contributed to a candidate or signed a petition, you were probably inundated with desperate pleas for helping dozens of candidates beat their deadlines-- midnight yesterday-- for campaign fundraising. We'll have plenty more deadlines between now and the crucial 2012 elections in November. Many of the races pit a worthless corporate Democrat against an even more worthless corporate Republican. Blue America has endorsed, and will continue finding, progressive candidates who do not fit into that catastrophic mold. Our candidates are fighting for ordinary working families and defending them against the special interests that have virtually bought up both political establishments. That willingness by our political elites-- I should say "that eagerness"-- to sell themselves to corporate bidders is the real DC "bipartisanship" ... and the root of everything that's wrong in our political system today.

I want to share an e-mail one of our most dedicated blue-collar, New Deal candidates, John Waltz, sent to voters in his Kalamazoo-based district yesterday. He offered five reasons why people who can afford to should consider contributing to his campaign. It'll give you a better idea of the kind of men and women Blue America is backing:

1. I am an Iraq and Afghanistan veteran. As we wind down these wars, we need to have more members of Congress that have served so that the VA is properly funded and we do not repeat any of the mistakes we made post-Vietnam.

2. Fred Upton has been in Congress for over 20 years. He was a back-bencher until recently when he aligned himself with special interests in DC. He is the number 1 enemy of the Earth, according to the Los Angeles Times, and has taken more money from lobbyists than anyone else in Congress.

3. My dad worked at GM for 30 years; I'm a UAW baby. I am from Kalamazoo and I know the people. We are Democrats; Barack Obama won with 60 percent of the vote in 2008.

4. Fred can't get it done. In the limited time he has been in "leadership," he starred on the failed "super-committee," and Congressional approval has dropped below 10 percent to almost zero under his "leadership." Now he's taking another starring role on some sort of genius committee to decide whether or not to raise taxes on working people. Fred needs to go.

5. It's time we elect people to Congress that will go to Washington DC with the express purpose of passing legislation that will move our country beyond this self-imposed period of futility. It will take someone with a clean slate; someone that is not bought and paid for by special interests. I will make you proud.

So, Happy New Year! Be safe, be wise, eat some black-eyed peas, and help me beat Fred Upton. Please contribute whatever you can to make that happen! We are only $5,000 shy of meeting our quarterly goal with less than 24 hours to make it happen. With your help I know this goal will be easy to beat.

Blue America had a goal for John's campaign too-- and we were only $200 from it. Can you help us get beyond that one? And we don't really care about any arbitrary deadlines except the first Tuesday in November, 2012. Here's the place.

Reid picked Kerry for the Super Committee despite his great wealth. Boehner chose Upton because of it. Both had their tasks, and, thank God, both failed. The Super Committee was a super bad idea, another brick in the road our elites are using to pave a road to Austerity for us. As David Atkins pointed out on New Year's Eve, Austerity may be a terribly ineffective policy if you want to reduce deficits, "as it weakens the middle-class tax base and long-term economic growth. But as a way of raking more money out of the middle class and into the pockets of the super-wealthy parasitic brigands, it's fantastic policy." Fortunately for us, Kerry and Upton and the rest of the congressional cutthroats couldn't agree exactly how to screw the middle class, so the whole thing fell apart... this time.

The Center for Responsive Politics did an analysis of the personal wealth of the dozen appointed members, whose median net worth is $1.2 million-- nearly 13 times larger than the net worth of the average American family. They were charged with deciding which programs should be axed so that their own class-- and the even higher classes who finance their careers-- can continue to enjoy scandalously low tax rates and loopholes.

As a whole, the Democratic members of the supercommittee are less wealthy than their Republican counterparts, according to the Center's research-- with the exception of Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), who is the richest member of the U.S. Senate.

Kerry, who is married to philanthropist Theresa Heinz, had a minimum net worth of $183 million in 2009, the most recent year for which data is available. Lawmakers are only required to disclose their assets and liabilities in broad ranges, so he might be worth as much as $295 million.

The median American family, meanwhile, had a net worth of $96,000 in 2009, according to the Federal Reserve Board.

Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), who was the 25th richest member of the U.S. House of Representatives in 2009, ranks as the wealthiest GOP politician among those on the debt supercommittee. His minimum net worth in 2009 was $7 million and his maximum net worth was $26 million, according to the Center's research.

Upton's career has always focused on exactly one thing: special privileges for the very wealthiest in society, like his own family, the western Michigan plutocrats who inherited Whirlpool and offshored and outsourced almost all the jobs to low-wage countries, destroying much of the Midwest industrial base as they did so. That's who John Waltz is going to beat next November-- with our help.

Out of the mouths of Spooks: Sometimes fiction rings truer than "reality"

"Keep Wes safe. Promise me you will": The death of MI-5's Fiona Carter (Olga Sosnovska) in the arms of husband Adam (Rupert Penry-Jones) broke up TV's sexiest couple.

"There's no way international governments will collaborate in a way necessary for a unified battle [against global warming] to be fought. . . . You think America will ever agree to those cuts? Let alone China and India? And that's a fifth of what's required."

-- the British deputy prime minister, in the
Season 5 finale of MI-5 (known to Brits as Spooks)

by Ken

One of our metropolitan NYC public TV stations, Long Island's WLIW (channel 21), has for some time now been rerunning the nifty British spook series called, well, Spooks -- at least in the U.K. Here it's called MI-5, referring of course to the British domestic intelligence service that stands in a vaguely similar relationship to the British global intelligence service MI-6 that our FBI does to our CIA.

"MI-5" USAGE NOTE: It's extremely confusing knowing whether to refer to "MI5" or "MI-5." There doesn't seem much doubt that the standard British usage is "MI5" (and "MI6"), no hyphen, but if you watch the show, it's quite clearly, even defiantly, "MI-5," with hyphen. Of course this title is presumably the work of Americans who carried out the special-for-America retitling of the show -- and, it appears, confronted with a title comprising a mere three characters, couldn't get it spelled right. Ah, that fine American craftsmanship! However, since, as I just wrote, "here it's called MI-5," I feel kind of stuck with that.

Oh, the show disappears for one or two or three Mondays at a time. I seem to recall a period when it vanished for months. But even for those of us who had seen the earlier seasons when they were shown on A&E, it was great to see the shows without commercials and also uncut. (A&E had to trim episodes to squeeze in all those commercials it runs.) And in recent months patience has been rewarded with an entire series' worth of episodes that I for one had never seen.

UPDATE: On consulting the BBC Spooks website, I see that this "new" season is in fact Season 5 and that following it not one, not two, but three more seasons have come and gone in the U.K.! I don't think Seasons 6-8 been shown here yet, at least in the New York area, but am I ever feeling out of the loop! On the bright side, that leaves lots to look forward to.

The shows focuses on the intelligence heroics of the special team working directly under MI-5 head Harry Pearce, played by Peter Firth -- a long way from the days of his youth when he appeared stark nekkid onstage in London and on Broadway in Peter Shaffer's Equus, thereby becoming the only thing remotely worth looking at in that stupefyingly appalling play. However, in (partial) compensation, young Peter has developed into an excellent character actor. (The rarely appearing head of MI-6, by the bye, is none other than Dr. Gregory House. Oh wait, in England he's called Hugh Laurie.)


Peter Firth was still something to look at in Sidney Lumet's 1976 film version of Equus, with Richard Burton as the psychiatrist -- if not quite as young or as beautiful as when he did Peter Shaffer's godawful play onstage in London in 1973 and then in New York.

The rest of the MI-5 cast has turned over a lot, in many cases several times, though it seems to me that tech genius Malcolm (Hugh Simon) has been on the team from the outset, though perhaps not so conspicuously early on. He lost his later-introduced sidekick of several seasons, Colin (Rory MacGregor), at the start of Season 5:


If you go by YouTube clips, you would imagine that MI-5 is one long, mindless series of protracted chase scenes. By way of analogy, The Rockford Files took great pride in its car-chase scenes, which indeed were often quite brilliantly and ingeniously staged, but would you think the brilliance of that show would be reflected if they were yanked out of context and put on display?

One great strength of MI-5/Spooks is that the producers have managed, at least as of Season 5, to keep filling the gaps with watch-worthy characters played by really watchable actors. In this "new" season, Harry's right-hand man is still Adam Carter, played by the breathtakingly beautiful Rupert Penry-Jones, but it has been Adam With a Problem, namely PTSD from the killing-in-action of his spook wife Fiona (a too-brief but dazzling presence, in the person of the radiant Olga Sosnovska, as MI-5's "lead female" spook).

YOUTUBE ALERT: If you want to know more about MI-5/Spooks, I encourage you to stay away from YouTube. What you'll find there seems more or less evenly divided between "action" clips/collages, wildly unrepresentative of a show that is at heart extremely talky, and pointless collages of the posters' favorite characters, set to mind-numbingly hideous songs, made by fans of the show who apparently have way too much time on their hands.

Actually, the diagnosis of PTSD was rendered only in the episode shown this week, which I see from the website was the finale of Season 5. Up till now we've been seeing Adam having a Bad Time of It, with frequent nightmares (they've made abundant and emotional use of the clip of the dying Fiona asking Adam to promise to keep their son Wes, who as of Season 5 is eight, safe) and clearly increased stress. It was a dandy episode, this Season 5 finale, with a scene so tingle-producing that I have to try to share it in some fashion.

The plot revolves around a British government document called Aftermath, which a band of terrorists is trying to force the government to make public, while the government denies up and down that there is such a document. Of course there is, and Harry's team gets hold of it.

We pick up at Thames House, MI-5 headquarters, as Harry reads from the thick bound document to members of his team including Ros (Hermione Norris) and Zaf (Raza Jaffrey). Then the scene changes to the briefing room where Harry and other top officials are meeting with the deputy prime minister (Cheryl Campbell -- sorry I couldn't dig up a more recent photo than the one below), in the absence of the prime minister on a visit to Japan, and the government's chief scientific adviser, Janet Wheeler (Phoebe Nicholls -- remember her as Sebastian and Julia Flyte's youngest sibling, Cordelia, in the 1981 Brideshead Revisited?).

SCENE: Thames House

HARRY PEARCE [reading from a thick bound document\: "Aftermath, a bilateral U.S.-U.K. agreement agreeing to end the fight against global warming and to focus strategy on maximizing economic, military, and political influence in a world devastated by climate change."

ROS: We give up fighting climate change.

ZAF: And focus instead on being the first to take advantage of the consequences.


SCENE: Cabinet Office Briefing Room

HARRY [again reading from the Aftermath document, with occasional reaction shots from the deputy prime minister, who is not pleased]: "Aftermath advocates methodical U.S. and U.K. acquisition of global fossil fuels and other natural resources in the 21st century in anticipation of increasing resource scarcity, oil depletion, and spiraling prices. It advocates sustained military operations to secure natural resource networks. It anticipates a global population reduction of between 20 and 35 percent." This is described as not only an inevitability but a necessity. [Hurls the Aftermath document down the conference table, past the deputy prime minister, to science adviser Wheeler, then instructs her:] Read the final recommendation.

JANET WHEELER [puts on her glasses and reads from the document]: "The proposal recommends implementing a cosmetic series of environmental measures to neutralize green lobbies whilst establishing an international stranglehold on carbon resources in the next 100 years. This will involve the reintroduction of a full nuclear weapons program, to create effective deterrents in an unstable global climate."

HARRY PEARCE: In short, a Cold War scenario for the Environmental Age. [Snapping at the deputy prime minister.] Why did we not know about this?

DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER: That proposal is in the early consultation stage.

JANET WHEELER: Is that why you didn't consult your chief scientist?

HARRY PEARCE: Not to mention military chiefs, intelligence officials. You're making senior establishment figures look like schoolboys.

DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER: The necessity for discretion makes wide consultation impossible.

HARRY PEARCE: And who exactly are you consulting with?

DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER: Aftermath is a "light pencil" proposal that has been through no kind of consultation process. It must never be made public.

JANET WHEELER: Why not? If that's what you're really intending.

DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER: We publish that, and basically we're accepting the deaths of millions of people. If anyone even suspects we believe global warming will deliver this degree of change --

HARRY PEARCE: And you think it will?

DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER [dismissively]: Of course it will. Everything Janet's been telling us for the last five years tells us it will. [Reaction shot of a horrified JANET WHEELER.] The point is, you can't stop it without destroying our economies. There's no way international governments will collaborate in a way necessary for a unified battle to be fought.

JANET WHEELER: How do you know that?

DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER [again dismissively]: Oh, come on, Janet, you've been to Kyoto. You think America will ever agree to those cuts? Let alone China and India? And that's a fifth of what's required. If we go it alone, it will cripple us. We'll be the dinosaur of the global economy. We must hold our position.

JANET WHEELER: Then why not come clean, open up the debate?

DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER: And watch confidence shatter? There'd be a global crisis within days. That's when the wars begin.

HARRY PEARCE: It strikes me that if Aftermath is adopted, then the wars will begin anyway.

DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER: This is a direct order from Downing Street. It doesn't leave this room.

Pretty wild fantasy, eh? Especially the part about an American government taking drastic action based on belief in global warming! Ha ha!

Nevertheless, think about it:

"There's no way international governments will collaborate in a way necessary for a unified battle to be fought. . . . You think America will ever agree to those cuts? Let alone China and India? And that's a fifth of what's required."

I have no idea what the chase-scene aficionados do during scenes like this, which are the heart of the show. This episode -- written by David Farr, by the way (surely he deserves to be credited) -- has sure stuck with me!

#

Speaking of shows that work despite thin-sounding premises, how can you not love Nurse Jackie?

In this memorable scene, Jackie (Edie Falco) expresses her boundless admiration for the medical skills of Dr. "Call Me Coop" Cooper (Peter Facinelli).

by Ken

From the way Showtime sneaked Nurse Jackie into the schedule Monday nights at 10:30, you get the feeling the network doesn't think much of the comedy created by Liz Brixius, Evan Dunsky, and Linda Wallem, starring Edie Falco as a seen-it-all nurse surviving in an uneasy truce with the forces of chaos closing in on her both at work and at home.

It's a bad time for me, conflicting with TNT's Crossing the Bar (vastly improved over a first season so dreadful, I was startled to find that there is a second) and the Long Island PBS station's airing of reruns of MI-5 (aka Spooks in its native U.K.), only this time uncut, unlike the earlier A&E showings, which had to accommodate commercials. So the DVR has been even more indispensable than with HBO's Hung.

Jackie has what look like a standard array of sitcom accoutrements. At home she has her adorable and adoring if kind of dim husband, Kevin (Dominic Fumusa), and her two young daughters. At the hospital, she has her friendly pharmacist-and-more, Eddie (Paul Schulze), who's indispensable for the relief he provides what appears to be near-crippling back pain, as well as for certain other physical needs; her snooty doctor friend Eleanor (Eve Best), who behaves quite monstrously toward everone in Jackie's circle except Jackie herself (I'm no authority, but the very idea of a friendship-of-equals between a doctor and a nurse seems to me decidedly unusual, and intriguing); her stodgy, hovering, and distinctly strange supervisor, Mrs. Akalitis (Anna Deavere Smith); the always supportive and dependable young nurse Mo-Mo (Haaz Sleiman); and an awkward and intimidated (by everyone and everything) young trainee, Zoey (Merritt Wever), who dropped into Jackie's life in the first episode and began disrupting her routines.

Those routines are important to Jackie. She takes all the confusions and complications of her life more or less in stride, through a combination of structures in her life, those established routines, and when necessary a veteran's improvisations. Like most of us, she has made her accommodations to Life as We Know It, and to most observers probably utterly imperturbable.

Of course she's not, and sometimes one of the other characters, having failed to grasp that in her carefully laid-out life she has invisible lines it's dangerous to cross, sets off an outburst like the one we see in the above clip, prompted by the unnecessary death of a patient for whom she was powerless to get proper care. (It's for scenes like this that it's really useful to have an actress of Edie Falco's caliber rather than a network-favored "comedienne.")

For all the frustrations, improbabilities, and downright impossibilities (after all, there's an awful lot in a hospital that you can't control), she really does care about her job. As Dr. O'Hara points out, caring about patients is for nurses; she herself has no interest, except in so far as they present interesting medical challenges. (In a hilarious plot line, she found herself helpless in the face of undying gratitude from the mother and twin brother of a child whose life she saves.)

And then there are the curves thrown by life itself. Jackie and Kevin are thrown by the realization, thrust on them by their older daughter's teachers, that the otherwise confident and self-possessed Grace (Ruby Jerins) -- who's what, about 10? -- has an unremittingly bleak and terrified view of the world. Jackie has so far resisted making the obvious connection, probably because it's so scary. What may be bearable for an adult who's made her adjustments to whatever life throws her way is literally a nightmare for a child.

So far the show has been both funny, sometimes wildly so, and serious, all in all looking an awful lot like that Life as We Know It I was mentioning earlier. With really outstanding writing and acting, the show has me well hooked.

#