Things go dramatically sideways on 24. LA gets a mushroom cloud.
** GASPING IN DAVOS. When a conservative Republican senator expressed doubt about the greenhouse effect and climate change at the just concluded annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, he got a poor reaction from much of the corporate crowd there. The CEO of the electronics giant Siemens credited former Vice President Al Gore and his documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth, as a “tipping point” in his own thinking.
** GENERAL WESLEY CLARK IN NEVADA, ON IRAN. New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson was joined last night in Nevada by General Wesley Clark, the former NATO Supreme Commander who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004 and might run again in 2008. Both men spoke at the annual Douglas County Democrats Turn Nevada Blue dinner. Clark said: “It’s amazing to me that the president doesn’t think he has enough leverage yet to deal with the Iranians.” He went on to say that he sees “a buildup to a strike on Iran – and I don’t believe we should ever go to war with a country unless it’s the absolutely, absolutely, absolutely last resort.
“When you want to initiate combat operations, when you won’t deign to speak to the country, what in the world is the matter with this leadership?”
** AS SEEN ON TELEVISION. It’s the most dramatic story of the era, to say the least, but the Terror War is virtually invisible in feature films. Only on television, principally in the now sixth season form of 24, where it is always front and center, is the drama visible in a major long-term Hollywood manifestation. (There is another new TV series, The Unit, about special forces operators out in the field and dealing with their families.)
24 won Emmy Awards last fall for its fifth season, for best drama and for best actor on television, Kiefer Sutherland, who plays the heroically tortured counter-terrorist agent, Jack Bauer. This season, the tension — always near a fever pitch with the show’s format of an extremely bad day, depicted in 24 one-hour episodes, hence the title — boils over with Islamic jihadist terrorists setting off a suitcase nuke in town outside the center of LA. It will be interesting to see if there’s a backlash against this ratcheting up of the stakes tonight, when the Screen Actors Guild Awards are presented. (I’ll let you know how my vote stacked up in the various categories tomorrow.) The series is up for best television ensemble, as well as best actor, which Sutherland has won a couple of times already.
As for the realism of the suitcase nuke scenario. There is a lot of missing nuclear material after the fall of the Soviet Union. Russia, a secular materialist society under Communism in which all but a few were unable to indulge in materialism, exploded into radical materialism after the Berlin Wall came down. Everything was “Chanel” in Moscow for quite awhile. Now it’s that, and everything else. Which is another way of saying that, given Al Qaeda’s known desire to attain nuclear weapons, of course it’s possible. Perhaps a better question is why it hasn’t happened yet.
** RICHARDSON IN NEVADA. New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson is campaigning this weekend in Nevada. The first major Latino candidate for president is a longshot candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, but he is also a highly capable figure with perhaps the best resume in the race.
Two-term governor of a swing state, re-elected with a record 69% of the vote, holder of two posts in former President Bill Clinton’s Cabinet, as US ambassador to the United Nations and US secretary of energy, he has what looks like an impressive record of trouble-shooting international crises, which he began as a veteran congressman, and has continued as New Mexico’s governor.
He’s doing some intensive retail campaigning in Nevada this weekend that could begin laying the groundwork for a strong showing in the second-in-the-nation Nevada presidential caucuses next January. As a Westerner, he knows the turf. He’s working the less populated Northern Nevada first, with two days of appearances and meetings in and around Reno. Richardson vows he will campaign in every one of Nevada’s 17 counties.
Meanwhile, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is campaigning a second day in Iowa. Her tour there started with a roar with yesterday’s standing room only town hall meeting at a Des Moines high school.
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Richardson might be a real comer in the race. He sounds like he knows what he’s talking about, not only rhetoric.
That Bauer family has some pretty intense sibling rivalry going on. If they ever decide to do the Thanksgiving thing again, that’s going to be awkward.
Yes, who knew that the head eBay-looking guy last season pulling the corrupt president’s strings was Jack Bauer’s brother?!
I don’t know if 24 is being sensationalist or the rest of Hollywood has its head in the sand.
That would be the $64,000 question …
One of them, that is.
Didn’t that used to be the $64 question? lol
Ka-boom!
That would be the effect of many decades of inflation …
>Ann :
Didn’t that used to be the $64 question? lol
The Bush-era underfunding of the Clinton era effort to recover Russian nuclear materials, and to give pensions or find university positions for former Russian nuclear scientists (trying to keep them comfortable enough that they wouldn’t have any particular need to go out looking for people who want to buy their expertise and access) is perhaps the single greatest error made in the War on Terror.
I’ve never gotten around to checking out 24. I heard good things about it, and tried to arrange to capture the first season when, shortly after it ended, Fox aired the entire thing on one Sunday. Unfortunately, one of the four people tasked with getting a six-hour segment on tape, so we could have a weekend-long veg-out party and watch the whole thing, screwed up. I haven’t since then, felt like paying for the DVDs.
And I still haven’t watched the first season of Battlestar Galactica, either, which has been sitting on my shelf for nearly a year. So much good entertainment, so little time.
Penny wise and pound foolish?
“24″ is a very entertaining show. I suspect there has been no follow-up here from al-Qaeda because it has Mr. Bush very approximately where it wants him.
Well Clark is right…however..the the Iranians have just made a move that is ever so smooth…the NYT’s is reporting, Iran is seeking to be our “partner” in rebuilding Iraq! I will say this, The Ayatollah is not only showing a great deal of “pragmatism” This is a realy clever move! The Ayatollah may yet prove to be cleverest guy in the region! Not bad for a dead man, or an almost dead man, or a man as good as dead…not bad at all…Now how is the Bush Admin going to respond?????!!!!!Very interesting…
Iran’s ambassador to Baghdad outlined an ambitious plan on Sunday to greatly expand its economic and military ties with Iraq — including an Iranian national bank branch in the heart of the capital — that will almost certainly bring Iran into further conflict with American forces who have detained a number of Iranian operatives here in recent weeks.
The ambassador, Hassan Kazemi Qumi, said Iran was prepared to offer Iraqi forces training, equipment and advisers for what he called “the security fight.” In the economic area, Mr. Qumi said, Iran was ready to assume major responsibility for the reconstruction of Iraq, an area of notable failure on the part of the United States since American-led forces overthrew Saddam Hussein in the invasion nearly four years ago.” NYT
It appears this year that Davos had some serious conversations at some of those parties! The Economist asserted the Russians were back at Davos after a hiatus…after reading the The Jerusalem Post (see: excert) I am glad they came back this year!
“Iran said Sunday it needed time to review a plan proposed by the head of the UN nuclear watchdog that calls for holding off on imposing UN Security Council sanctions if Teheran halts uranium enrichment.
International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei proposed the simultaneous time-out plan during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in an effort to end the standoff over between the West and Iran over the Islamic Republic’s disputed nuclear program.
“Time should be allocated to see if the plan has the capacity to solve the (nuclear) case,” Larijani told reporters during a joint news conference with Russia’s national security adviser, Igor Ivanov. He did not elaborate.” The Jerusalem Post 1/28
That’s a lot of inflation alright.
Oh, with regard to the Republican Senator at Davos…I have some questions
What the hell is that idiot like Saxby Chambliss doing at Davos anyway?
I know the man personally and he is far too f(*&)*(&ing stupid to be in that crowd. Trust me, I had to deal with the guy in a former life and he is as slimy a character as there is in politics.
Was he the comedy relief for the event? Kinda like the character of Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing — in effect a village idiot.
WHO THE HELL THOUGHT IT WAS A GOOD IDEA TO INVITE A TRULY IGNORANT HICK TO SUCH AN IMPORTANT EVENT. Saxby is well known for not having the sense God gave a donkey’s ass when it comes to anything substantive.
Seriously, this guy truly is an idiot — that ain’t just hyperbole. Republicans in Georgia often told me that they always cringed when Saxby speaks publicly.
Idiot or not, Senator Chambliss represents a large number of people on the right wing.
“Bill Bradley :
Idiot or not, Senator Chambliss represents a large number of people on the right wing.”
Sad, but very, very true…
However, I talked to some folks in Georgia this morning and Reeps locally aren’t too happy with him for (a.) being there and; (b.)for speaking about a subject for which he knows nothing. The folks I talked to said, with all the recent news reports and growing Fortune 500 companies coming on board, Saxby should simply have not said anything.
Penny wise and pound foolish?
For not wanting to pay for the 24 DVDs? *g*
Seriously, though — the obvious candidate for “worst blunder” is, of course, invading Iraq rather than listening to Blix and Duelfer and recognizing that there were no WMDs and we could afford to contain Saddam for another ~5 years while we sorted out Afghanistan.
But if somebody ever does nuke a US city, the issue of real, known nuclear materials and experts, left in circulation when we could’ve bottled them up, is suddenly going to look a tad more important.
Speaking of Blix, have you seen his statement on nuclear power? He figures that global warming is an even bigger threat than nuclear terrorism. Yikes.
Shoot, I just have no luck with links here; I’m not sure why that one broke. How about this?
http://tinyurl.com/2kou3y
That works, what is it?
TinyURL is a service that lets you create short, compact links, that won’t screw up set-width columns like NWN’s. You just go to TinyURL.com, fill in the URL you want to point to, and it gives you a short version, like what I pasted above. If I tried to paste the raw text of that link, it would be too wide; and when I tried to link to it using the usual “A HREF=…” method, it somehow got messed up…
In any case, I just wanted to point back to my source on Blix’s statement re: nuclear power. I’m glad the second attempt worked.