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Friday music blogging: Slumdog Millionaire

In honor of the Academy Awards, here's a song from the odds-on favorite to win Best Picture: Slumdog Millionaire.

I've had somewhat mixed feelings about the movie itself. I enjoyed it immensely while I was watching it (how could you not?). Later I read a bunch of grumpy backlash -- it's manipulative; it romanticizes poverty; the female character is inert; etc. -- and found myself revising my original assessment. And later still, I said to myself, you know what? Screw you grumpy backlashers. It was a fairy tale, an effort to marry the exuberance of Bollywood with independent American filmmaking; social realism wasn't the point. It was a celebration of life and transcendence amidst suffering, and I'm by-god going to trust my gut and love it.

(Yes, I'm extremely neurotic.)

One thing was never in doubt, though: the music is awesome. It is absolutely an essential character in the movie, as much a polyglot, life-affirming mess as the film itself. It's easily one of the best soundtracks of the last five years, and one of my favorite albums of the year. Incidentally, the producer, A.R. Rahman, is an enormous international celebrity -- but no one in America knows his name. Hopefully this album will change that.

While we're at it, we might as well use this thread for Oscar thoughts and predictions. Who are you rooting for/against? What are your predictions? Did you see any of the movies this year?

Washington Post is staffed with people who found no mistakes in George Will's denial

After my debunking of George Will's recent column collection of error-filled denier talking points [redundant], it became somewhat of a sport on the internet (see here). I had written:

I don't know whether it is more pathetic that Will believes this or that the Washington Post simply lets him publish this lie again and again.

Now we know it is the latter, thanks to Brad Johnson at WonkRoom, who got this jaw-dropping email from Post ombudsman Andy Alexander:

Basically, I was told that the Post has a multi-layer editing process and checks facts to the fullest extent possible. In this instance, George Will's column was checked by people he personally employs, as well as two editors at the Washington Post Writers Group, which syndicates Will; our op-ed page editor; and two copy editors.

Paging Woodward and Bernstein. [The CP fact checker notes that Woodward abandoned journalism based on facts, at least checkable facts, many years ago.]

Both of my parents were professional journalists, and I must say that response makes me want to cry. I could understand Will's people stooges signing off on his crap -- they drink from the same pitcher of Kool-Aid. And I could understand if the Post said that they don't fact-check opinion pieces.

But there is no clearer evidence of how far traditional journalism has sunk than that five different editors associated with the Washington Post signed off on a piece that brings to mind Mary McCarthy's famous quip about Lillian Hellman:

Every word she writes is a lie -- including 'and' and 'the.'

I am not going to redebunk Will here point-by-point, but I will excerpt the devastating response to the ombudsman's lazy defense of Will penned by Hilzoy of the Washington Monthly. After you read it, I'm sure you will want to give Andy Alexander (ombudsman@washpost.com) -- "the reader's advocate" -- a piece of your mind (and please do repost it in the comments).

Alexander's original email ends:

Chu creates team to distribute stimulus cash 'wisely but also quickly'

Greenwire ($ub. req'd) reports:

The Energy Department has created a "special organization" to distribute $40 billion contained in the economic stimulus package for energy projects, Secretary Steven Chu said today.

"It's a challenge and something we take very seriously: how to spend that money wisely but also quickly," Chu told reporters after speaking at DOE's National Electricity Delivery Forum in Washington. Chu said he has assembled a team to start streamlining ways of delivering the cash. "We are looking at everything," he said.

Leading the advisory team is Matt Rogers, director at McKinsey & Co.'s San Francisco office, Chu said. Rogers consults in many fields, including electric power, oil and gas, and private equity, as well as strategic transformations for industrial companies. Rogers is also a leader of McKinsey's North American Petroleum Practice.

This is a very encouraging sign that the administration takes this seriously, since they have a staggering amount of clean tech to deploy (see here). The story continues:

Me, in the L.A. Times on Los Angeles' Measure B

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power works hard to exempt itself from renewable energy legislation from Sacramento, and, not coincidentally, it's also the dirtiest utility in the state. About 50 percent of the electricity they sell their customers comes from coal.

So when the utility announced a huge new solar plan, that's all good news, right? The Los Angeles Times asked me for a review of Measure B, a ballot initiative that would enable the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power to install 400 MW of solar on land and rooftops within the city. I'm no Hamlet, so I dived into the messy politics, and you can find the piece here.

If you don't hear from me in the next few days, watch this for clues. Been nice knowing you.

Why is the FDA unwilling to study evidence of mercury in high-fructose corn syrup?

Paging Erin Brockovich! There’s mercury in our water soda pop! Courtesy Universal Pictures, Inc. High-fructose corn syrup doesn’t just deliver a jolt of sweetness to thousands of processed food items consumed by tens of millions of Americans each day. It also may add a touch of mercury, a powerful neurotoxin that may not be safe […]

Eric Pooley offers nine questions on climate legislation that the press ought to ask Obama

Eric Pooley continues his quest to single-handedly raise the intelligence of mainstream media climate coverage by a factor of ten: Thursday on the Nieman Watchdog site, he lays out "nine climate questions for President Obama" on the upcoming climate bill. I won't attempt to summarize them here. Suffice to say, a) he hits the most important issues, and b) the chances of anyone in the U.S. political press corps asking Obama questions this informed and nuanced are somewhere between slim and nil.

I was going to conclude this post by cleverly pointing out an important question Pooley missed, but I can't think of one. Go read.

From Orgasm to Oscar

Llama sutra Good: Making sex-toy deliveries by bike. Better: Promising to come within the hour. Best: Calling yourself the Kinky Llama. Oh you NASA boy Dear former Apollo astronaut/current climate-change denier, you remind us of that space cadet who chased her ex-lover around in a diaper. Must be something in the air up there, eh? […]

Urgent letter from Bo Webb on Coal River

Bo Webb, a Vietnam veteran and Coal River Mountain resident in West Virginia, just penned this urgent appeal to President Obama. His family's homeplace, dating back to the 1820s, is being rattled by explosives from mountaintop removal operators today. This letter bears witness to the terror of mountaintop removal on American citizens.

Every American should be forwarded this letter, and then they should go to ilovemountains.org, put in their zip code, and see if their coal-fired plant electricity comes from coal stripped from West Virginia. And then they should contact their member of Congress to support the Clean Water Protection Act.

-----

Dear Mr. President,

As I write this letter, I brace myself for another round of nerve-wracking explosives being detonated above my home in the mountains of West Virginia. Outside my door, pulverized rock dust laden with diesel fuel and ammonium nitrate explosives hovers in the air, along with the residual of heavy metals that once lay dormant underground. The mountain above me, once a thriving forest, has been blasted into a pile of rock and mud rubble. Two years ago, it was covered with rich black top soil and abounded with hardwood trees, rhododendrons, ferns and flowers. The under-story thrived with herbs such as ginseng, black cohosh, yellow root, and many other medicinal plants. Black bears, deer, wild turkey, hawks, owls, and thousands of birds lived here. The mountain contained sparkling streams teeming with aquatic life and fish.

Now it is all gone. It is all dead. I live at the bottom of a mountain top removal coal mining operation in the Peachtree community.

Mr. President Obama, I am writing you because we have simply run out of options. Last week, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court in Richmond, Va. overturned a federal court ruling for greater environmental restrictions on mountaintop removal permits. Dozens of permits now stand to be rushed through. As you know, last December, the EPA under George W. Bush allowed an 11th hour change to the stream buffer zone rule, further unleashing the coal companies to do as they please.

Washington's cap-and-trade legislation passes out of committee

Dear pollutey companies of Washington state, your days are numbered. House Bill 1819, backed by Gov. Chris Gregoire (D), has whizzed through committee and is on its way to a full vote.

The bill sets up a cap-and-trade system that would limit greenhouse-gas emissions and require companies to purchase the right to pollute further, while greener biz folk would profit by auctioning off their unused allowances. Hooray for rewarding the good guys!

The carbon trading market would extend to six other states and four Canadian provinces -- all part of the Western Climate Initiative -- once the bill is passed here and in the other jurisdictions.

Bush's former ag deputy slinks back from whence he came: a cush agribiz post

A few years back, I thought I was on to a Really Big Story: President Bush had plucked a man named Chuck Conner from his perch as president of the Corn Refiners Association -- a front group for Archer Daniels Midland, and the force behind those putrid high-fructose corn syrup ads -- and made him his "special assistant to the president for agriculture, trade and food assistance." Eventually, Conner became the USDA's deputy secretary -- widely seen as the agency's fixer, the guy who got things done.

In the corn bubble in which I then existed -- some say I'm still there -- this seemed like a really big deal. A man who had essentially worked as a lobbyist for Archer Daniels Midland -- the company that singlehandely rigged up both the corn ethanol program and the high-fructose corn syrup market, two massive travesties -- was now advising the president on ag policy.

And people ... yawned. Thinking back on it, of course they did. This was the Bush administration -- crony capitalism had been raised to the level of statecraft. These guys were handing billion-dollar no-bid contracts to the vice president's old company, to perform outsourcing functions in a war he himself had engineered. What was a bit of Oval Office bump-and-tickle with an industrial corn man?

Well, for those of you who care, here's a newsflash: Conner waltzed out of Bush's USDA and into another top job at a big agribiz trade group: the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives. Now, the group's name makes it sound a bit down-home, like a bunch of guys in overalls banding together to run a grain elevator.

Don't be fooled. The NCFC is made up mainly of "cooperatives" that have scaled up to corporate size; many of them work in concert with agribiz giants like ADM to squeeze small farmers and workers. One glaring example is the giant entity Dairy Farmers of America, an NCFC member that controls a third of the milk produced in the U.S. DFA has been accused of colluding with milk-processing giant Dean Foods to squeeze farmers on price.