Free For All: The Movie - One Dude’s Quest to Save Democracy!

Originally posted on Huffington Post

Everyone is a sucker for the year-end lists. Beyond re-hashing highlights of hoopla, I propose revisiting the topics herein with hindsight, rather than reflex. It is in the spirit of moving forward in 2009 with wisdom and renewed faith in other Americans that we (impatiently) approach this historic inauguration, and re-examine the issues we previously lost our shit over.

1. Hillary citing RFK’s assassination as a reason to stay in the primaries.
   I admit it, I flipped out over it, even though I remember her first making the comment months before. It just came at a point when her opportunism and goal-post hedging made the race seem like Obama vs. Omarosa. Now she’s, like, Secretary of State to-be, and everyone’s happy.

2. Gas Prices
   Now that gas has abruptly gone from over $4 a gallon to less than $2 a gallon, can we just call out these oil price regulators for their inflated greed and exploitation? Once the economy deflated like a souffle on a Seventies sitcom, they eased the reins at the pump to keep the beast breathing. Invading Iraq was supposed to stabilize the oil market — perhaps it has made it all the more controllable?

3. Rev. Jeremiah Wright
   If it was in a conservative white church…

4. ACORN
   That a community organization with a history of helping poor neighborhoods can be so broadly maligned for non-existent voting crimes by a major political party with a proven history of numerous voting crimes is testament to how far the media will carry water for the conservative agenda. Unlucky winner of The Golden Swift Boat for 2008.

5. Anything on "The View"
   The very premise that this tabloid tea party speaks for women is patently insulting.

6. Rev. Rick Warren’s Invocation at the Inauguration
   The outrage over Rick Warren is not really a real fight over anything real. There are lots of bigots, there always will be. Let’s fight the institutionalization of intolerance in the courts, at the polls, in the streets, and in the press. I myself will fight Rick Warren in the Thunderdome. (Two men enter…one man leaves.)

7. Sarah Palin, the new GOP Spokesmodel
   The alarming percentage of people who alienated us by blindly embracing Sarah Palin despite her inability to complete sentences or describe reality are actually the same percentage who still think Bush is doing a good job. She’ll give that base hope, because she has not personally fucked up everything yet. But she is so not a real threat, even the conservative pundits who sat nodding through the entire Bush Reign of Error had to do a spit-take at her arrival. (And maybe in 2009 we’ll finally see those Palin birth records Andrew Sullivan keeps demanding like he’s Nurse Ratchett.)

8. Miley Cyrus Bareback
   A non-revealing photo of an over-hyped teen star is not a sobering cultural watermark to examine the objectification of underage girls in modern society. American Apparel ads are.

9. Cable Network News
   It might seem that including the corporate media machine that actively over-hypes 24/7 would be redundant in a list of Most Overhyped, but the amount of concern over what these overpaid pinheads say has jumped sharks, whales, and that weird Montauk Monster. It’s tabloid TV, turning political faux-pas into a Brangelina catfight, utterly distracting us from real issues.

10. The 2008 Campaign
    In our desperation for hope at the end of the tunnel, the media and the public utterly abandoned oversight of our Problem Child-in-Chief. While we worried about American flag pins, American flags were adorning more coffins. While the pundits scoured Hillary’s inflated record of sniper fire, inflated prices of homes and Wall Street brokerage houses were about to shoot down our entire economy. In our historic race for the first female or black president, we neglected to check in on our first dyslexic president, except when he made a drunken cameo at the Beijing Olympics worthy of a Cannonball Run outtake.

Let us all make a concerted effort in 2009 to not chase shiny things in the news that distract us from the not-so-easily digested issues that demand attention and action, not outrage.

Originally posted on Huffington Post

Ken Blackwell, my personal muse, ex-Facebook friend, and endorsement for RNC Chair, defended rival candidate Chip Saltsman for distributing “Barack the Magic Negro” on his holiday mix CD.

BLACKWELL: “Unfortunately, there is hypersensitivity in the press regarding matters of race. This is in large measure due to President-Elect Obama being the first African-American elected president. I don’t think any of the concerns that have been expressed in the media about any of the other candidates for RNC chairman should disqualify them. When looked at in the proper context, these concerns are minimal. All of my competitors for this leadership post are fine people.”

How offensive is “Barack the Magic Negro”? A year or so ago, a student of mine in my documentary class decided to make his film about that song, playing a recording of Rush Limbaugh’s show to other black people like himself, and capturing their reactions. While many interviewees were speechless, their faces can be best described in three letters: WTF?

The defenses of the song’s context being funny, as if Al Sharpton were singing it, only illustrate the layers of insulting thought that went into it. It’s rudimentary racism, like blackface.

Obviously, different people have different reactions, and there can be no steadfast line in racial politics. Blackwell has been affectionately called “Buckwheat” by a Cincinnati blogger he knows, is that offensive? Or is it part of how someone like Blackwell ingratiates himself with far right whites, fitting in like no other black person they know?

Consider this thoughtful statement from Yvonne Davis, an African-American Republican, which she wrote here on the Huffington Post in response to Blackwell’s statement on the “Magic Negro” flap:

The truth is Blackwell or any black running for this post can’t have it both ways - on one hand support racist stupidity by being silent or playing it down, and on another hand try to leverage the fact that a Black man going into the White House is an opportunity for a black man to lead the Republican Party.

I respectfully, but vehemently, disagree with Ms. Davis. Trying to have it both ways is exactly what Blackwell intends to do.

In The Washington Times, Blackwell just wrote about how dated the 1965 Voting Rights Act is, which he calls “draconian” :

This country has clearly progressed beyond yesterday’s racism. And the law should not give one party an overwhelming advantage to invoke the mistakes of the past for partisan advantage.

When it comes to suppressing black voters, Blackwell’s career of abusing laws for partisan advantage rivals the record of any Southern Sheriff named Jim Crow. I made a feature documentary about Ken Blackwell’s election, FREE FOR ALL!, and still couldn’t fit in all of his outrageous illegal behavior. Ken Blackwell has been sued more times than Don King. Just some of Blackwell’s greatest hits on his African-American constituents while he was Secretary of State:

• Purging a quarter of Cleveland voters, one of the biggest Democratic counties in the country.

• Under-equipping African-American neighborhood voting precincts.

• Re-arranging voting locations and not making the information publicly available.

• Going to court to prevent people who voted in their old location from being counted provisionally.

• Pushing voter ID laws through Ohio, which overwhelmingly affect poor minorities access to vote.

• Allowing coordinated racial profiling voter misinformation to flourish: Fliers in black neighborhoods providing the wrong election day, phone calls threatening arrest if people voted.

• Threatened U.N. election monitors with arrest if they tried to observe the polls.

The Voting Rights Act is the only defense some people have. Without it, many would not be able to vote, with no recourse. Race is still very much an issue in elections, and Blackwell knows it. Voter disenfranchisement of minorities was widely documented throughout the country in 2008 by Video the Vote among other groups.

Blackwell is eager to get to be the guy who gets to declare, “If I say it’s not racist, it’s not.” The Republican Party is eager to have that plausible deniability, as they continue to target Democratic-voting minorities with unfounded attacks like the 2008 Swift Boat, ACORN.

The only other thing clear from Blackwell’s Op-Ed piece is that he is telling the conservative readers of The Washing Times that what he offers is not how he will win the party more supporters, but how he will preemptively control the vote-counting to edge out more minorities.

To further buttress his case for RNC Chairmanship, Blackwell just released a list of “conservative luminaries” who endorse him as RNC Chair. It reads like a list of guest-stars from The Love Boat, and their ideas were most relevant back when Gavin MacLeod was a pinup. Phyllis Schafly? Ed Meese? Is this the re-branding and forward thinking the GOP is looking for right now after losing Congress and the White House to a generation that doesn’t need landlines?

Of course Ken Blackwell will jump up when the old right is looking for a new shill. His opportunistic drive has driven him from activist to a chameleon politician to a multi-millionaire. He has changed positions like a porno queen.

Others have vied for that insider status that seems to require possessing, among other qualities, a white penis. And beyond the conventional qualifications, these people have gone to incredible, illegal lengths to help the Republican Party realize its power grabs without having to win “votes.” And these power plays come at the expense of other non-white-penis-having persons.

Where would the RNC be without Katherine Harris, the brazen Bush partisan who stretched the limits of her authority as Secretary of State to swipe Florida’s electoral votes? Back in 1999, she and Gov. Jeb had worked closely with Choice Point/Data Base Technology to kick off black voter registrations under the felon laws, knowing they were disenfranchising tens of thousands of legal voters. She stopped the Florida Recount when W. was up by a handful, and turned it over to the Bush Daddy’s court. And yet, when she sought to be Senator in 2006, she was openly rebuked by her old boss and fellow theocrat Jeb Bush. Poor Katherine Harris was so hard up in the waning months of her doomed campaign, she announced plans to tap into several million from her family’s trust fund.

And how far would the Republican Party and the Bush Administration have gotten if they did not have Alberto Gonzales as both Bush’s personal lawyer, then Attorney General? Who else was on hand to write torture memos, lie to Congress, and play “plausible deniability” as Federal Prosecutors under him were sacked for not bringing bogus voter fraud cases? Who got the job of justifying the treatment of foreigners and illegal immigrants as terrorists, while acknowledging that his own grandparents were probably illegal? His recent claim, “I consider myself a casualty, one of the many casualties of the war on terror,” indicates how well he feels he’s been taken care of since he helped buy time for the Bush Regime. Is he worse a casualty than David Iglesias?

Maybe Blackwell thinks he’s “magic” and is different. Blackwell magically reaped tens of millions from an investment he made as Ohio State Treasurer, through a loan he received from banks he was already conducting state business with. Maybe Blackwell thinks his sincere repetition of “family” issues, as if the term suggests policy in itself, will magically not seem like hackneyed bloviating considering his son was caught cheating on the bar exam two separate times and arrested for weed.

But since the untimely plane crash of Mike Connell, the GOP tech guru who appeared at suspect elections like Zelig, Blackwell might not be as “magic” anymore. Mike Connell built Blackwell’s campaign websites as well as secretary of state site, and in ways we may never know, Blackwell might not be as technically effective without his go-to guy.

If the RNC chooses Ken Blackwell as its Chair to lead the party forward, it will be a brazen acknowledgment that they have no ideas or policy to peddle other than the canned politics of an opportunistic reactionary as the Party’s face. And it will announce a cynical embrace of tired Republican strategy for exploiting voters along racial lines.

Originally posted on Huffington Post

I told myself I would hold back on this one. But everyone from Harvey Fierstein to Frank Rich have flogged the Rick Warren Inaugural Invocation Horse so bad, it makes the decapitated horse head in the Godfather look humane.

Getting outraged over Rick Warren speaking at the inauguration is like throwing down over the typesetting on the invitations. Rick Warren? This is nothing. It is so small, in such a long day of pageantry, on the first day of some long years of the fight ahead. In terms of the fish-frying before us, Rick Warren is a scallop, and Moby Dick, the elusive wedding-white whale, is circling us.

We’ll be facing much greater forces of homophobia as old-school baller ‘Man in the Middle Barry’ races to stay centered like a lumberjack in a log-rolling contest. In those slippery times, Obama will really need support to stand up to chest-beating theocrats proclaiming their inflated importance.

Before the back-lashers skip the rest of this column and just start posting irate comments below, let me air my record on gay rights: I’m a member of HRC. My wedding vows opened with Chief Justice Margaret H. Marshall’s first lines in the Massachusetts Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage. Our wedding ceremony was performed by my wife’s lesbian sister, who got ordained specifically to marry other gay friends. My gay brother was my groomsman. Hell, ten years ago at the Gay Pride Parade in New York, I performed gay marriages in the street at the intersection of Christopher St. and Gay St. and broadcast it on Manhattan public access.

Obama unwittingly created a culture clash at a prestigious event between traditional Christian symbolism and the Oscars audience. Personally, I presume any anti-gay demagogue, Christian or Republican, to be one tweeker-turning-tricks-away from being the next Ted Haggard. (I mean, doesn’t “Saddleback Ranch” sound a little Brokeback Mountain?) I could give a crap about Rick Warren, although I guess he actually has helped people in Africa, so props for that.

As such, the only thing I would even know of Rick Warren was that he was somehow empowered to host a debate between two presidential candidates, thereby legitimizing him more than Katie Couric. Asking Rick Warren to invocate or whatever was probably the most apolitical gesture in Obama’s mind that would help stop the religious right from shitting themselves when he finally says, “I, Barack Hussein Obama….” That Reverend Wright thing that jumped the shark back in March, it really scared a lot of white people.

While I have a hair-trigger to call out pandering, I really don’t see this as a cynical play for evangelicals or a ‘you’re likeable enough, gays’ diss like Frank Rich dishes about. (Note to Frank: When you’re so flip about how the state of New Hampshire votes, you make it easier for inexplicable polling results to go unchallenged.)

Rick Warren is going to talk for, what, five minutes? Is he going to gay bash in those highly anticipated couple of minutes? Is he instituting policy or swearing himself onto the Supreme Court? Rick was just around the corner from me, trying to smooth things over, at the West Hollywood Out of the Closet, all open arms at the gay charity. (Though if he’s checking out any of the clothes I just donated there, I have a hunch if they don’t fit me anymore, they won’t fit him either.)

I’d suggest those at the Inauguration that can’t tolerate his intolerance turn their backs while he talks. Or blow whistles. Or fully break into a Queen song, like “We Are the Champions” or “We Will Rock You.”

We don’t have to ruin the party because we don’t like one of the guests, especially when literally the entire country is invited. Inauguration Day will be a great day for celebration, though I am not sure if it will be more for the first black president or the official end of the Bush Reign of Error. One thing it won’t be like is this scene from Bush’s 2004 Inauguration. (However classic)

Remember that dreadful day of a disputed election credited to stoking anti-gay prejudice proficiently.

Obama may not be the first homosexual president, but he is the first metro-sexual president, and that itself is a significant step forward. Obama did not brave the establishment’s uproar over arugula for nothing. He’s as cut as the steam room at the West Hollywood 24 Hour Fitness. And in throwing 10 Inaugural Balls — almost assuredly in the hands of the top gay talent in DC–Barry has already proven he has more balls than Bush.

It sucks, but as we know well, America is a homophobic place. Actually, almost everywhere else is, too. Homophobia seems to blossom on its own, independently in every culture around the world, just like homosexuality does. I don’t get it either. There is a long history of religions condemning homosexuality (or people using religion to condemn homosexuality), but then, religions have been used to burn witches, too. Homophobia–as fundamental a defiance of basic human rights as it is–it just is.

The slippery slope, I believe, is in debating the oppression of gays and lesbians in a secular vs. religious context. The true believers will feel their beliefs are under attack, and there are some biases that only die with the people that cling to them. If anyone has proven adept at gracing taboo prejudices that defy reason, Hawaiian-born American native Barack H. Obama has been a spokesmodel of keeping cool.

You want to talk about being offended by outdated ideas persisting in this Inauguration? May I ask, as an apatheist, why the HELL we have religious leaders blessing or invoking or praying or chanting anything at a formal political ceremony? Why is touching the Bible required to finally be President? That there are so many religious trappings in a country founded on a separation of Church and State, endlessly prioritized in the ‘War on Christmas’ Media, that feels like a gut punch.

I know where this rage is coming from. Prop 8 here in California appears to have become the national rallying call of “ENOUGH.” It’s sad that it had come to this, but it’s a good time to show up. Make no mistake: This is the time to fight for gay marriage. So let’s get on it, instead of letting this rankle in the press for weeks on end like this really was Obama’s ‘first big blunder.’ (We’ll know when that happens, believe me.)

I am fortunate to have worked as a Director/Producer on a reality series alongside Dustin Lance Black, the critic’s darling who wrote Milk from scratch. The show was Faking It, wherein someone crammed for 30 days to pass themselves off as a professional. Lance happened to be documenting a sheep-shearer from the countryside studying to be a hairdresser. This hick kid did not like gays, a career hazard in that field. Lance smartly set up interactive counseling dialogues that would address this prejudice and open up the mind of this boy.

In Milk, a similar strategy is embraced when Harvey Milk stresses that the fight against homophobia comes from every gay person letting those around them know that gay people are not foreign deviants, but the people in your community, in your family. The new fight will be in the courts, at the polls, in the press, and on the streets. (Not so much at the bars anymore.)

You want to undo the damage wrought by Prop 8? Why don’t we take the time to actually confirm the legitimacy of the vote for Prop 8 in light of dubious exit polls, instead of assuming the best of our beleaguered electoral system here in California?

Why don’t we talk about the rampant misleading ads for Prop 8, which claimed that not passing it would allow homosexuality to be taught in school, and how we can stop false advertising in campaigns, especially fright tactics? Or investigate the millions from a religious group to wage the Prop 8 campaign?

It’s just possible that the majority of Californians do not actually want to amend our state constitution with bigotry. This poses the more specific challenge to gay activists to focus on campaign financing and election reform as gay issues.

Rick Warren seems like a wedding toast compared to all that. Accordingly, people have grumbled about his poor choice in the wedding party, but everybody will be too drunk and distracted to care whatever he said anyway. Not only does the drawn-out Rick Warren flap distract from the much bigger issues down the line, it provides fresh fodder for the divisive opportunists who literally have no other card to play except the Phantom Gay Menace card, feeding tabloid news a faux controversy at a slow time of year. Moreover, we have to get ready to party, and I haven’t even shopped yet.