Katie's blog

why do i only write sexual things about the debates? Am I that base?

Posted:

3 hours 30 minutes ago

Method:

Status update

Services:

 
 
 
 

Is Joe McCain's boyfriend? Crush? Or platonic imaginary friend? Or imaginary friends with benefits?

Posted:

3 hours 30 minutes ago

Method:

Status update

Services:

 
 
 
 

Canada and England are such cruel and terrible places. The horror

Posted:

3 hours 32 minutes ago

Method:

Status update

Services:

 
 
 
 

OK, McCain really does have a Joe the Plumber fetish!

Posted:

3 hours 33 minutes ago

Method:

Status update

Services:

 
 
 
 

McCain is suuuuuch a crotchety bitter old man. Pathetic. He dissed
Obama's "eloquence" and then dissed him for not having traveled south
of the border enough... In all fairness, Senator McCain, you kinda have
had more time and money to travel around. And Tijuana binging doesn't
count

Posted:

3 hours 37 minutes ago

Method:

Status update

Services:

 
 
 
 

 

 

THANK YOU OBAMA!!!! fore mentioning the whole like Colombia
assasinating union leaders! Oh, coincidentally, Colombia on Latin
American country besides Mexico who the U.S. is down with.

Posted:

3 hours 41 minutes ago

Method:

Status update

Services:

 
 
 
 

Why does McCain add a syllable to venezU-Ela?

Posted:

3 hours 47 minutes ago

Method:

Status update

Services:

 
 
 
 

 

Why does McCain add a syllable to venezU-Ela?

Posted:

just moments ago

Method:

Status update

Services:

 
 
 
 

Yeah, why d we need to spend money? Why can't special needs people just
cure themselves or pray? That's free! God helps those who help
themselves. Guess Trig Palin doesn't help himself

Posted:

just moments ago

Method:

Status update

Services:

 
 
 
 

Oh! I didn't realize that "united Iraqis" signifies Iraqi sectarian
violence. My bad, It must be my orientalist perspective which sees
sectarian violence as a sign of... you know... um... sectarian violence

Posted:

just moments ago

Method:

Status update

Services:

 
 
 
 

"out of touch" vs "paling around with terrorists" hmmmm. yeah those seem pretty comparable

Why is voting with the Republicans a good thing?

ugggh. Obama! Do you really need to remind us of how you suck on some
issues (tort, charter schools, liquid coal)

McCain pulled a Palin. Responded to a question with an unrelated answer

Most Americans have never heard of Section 60, let alone visited it. But tonight, thanks to filmmakers Jon Alpert and Matt O’Neill, you can get a glimpse of the area in Arlington National Cemetery where the men and women who have died fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq are buried. Section 60: Arlington National Cemetery is the third of a trilogy of collaborations between the filmmakers and HBO that capture the costs of the current wars. Section 60, in fact, picks up where Baghdad ER left off. The tragic death from shrapnel wounds of 21-year-old Lance Cpl. Robert T. Mininger comes at the unforgettable end of Baghdad ER. Their latest documentary opens with a mother visiting the grave of her son “Bobby.” Unlike like the action-packed Baghdad ER or the stylized Alive Day Memories: Home from Iraq, Section 60 offers an almost unmediated view into the lives of the men and women, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, husbands and wives, who, week after week, day after day, find solace, community, and a place to grieve visiting their lost loved ones in Section 60.

The Emmy Award-winning directors are based in NY out of DCTV. Yesterday they were in Washington D.C. to attend a special TAPS (Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors) screening of their film at the Navy Memorial. I caught up with Alpert and O’Neill over the phone as they got ready for the screening and talked to me about why Section 60 matters now, how making this film affected them in a way no other documentary has, and what it’s like feeling “trapped in Section 60.”

Check out Section 60 tonight, Monday October 13, on HBO at 9PM If you can’t watch the premiere, see the additional screening times.

Katie Halper: Why should Americans care about Section 60 and your film?

Matt O’Neill: The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have become the background noise in this presidential election. No one is paying attention right now in the mainstream media to the costs that the military and their families are paying day in and day out, whether it’s the 5,000 lives lost or the hundreds of thousands who have spent years away from their friends and families. That’s why we’re proud to be working with HBO and Sheila Nevins to make this film. They’ve consistently brought attention to these issues when the rest of the media is ignoring them. And it’s an important time right now in the context of the presidential elections. Americans need to be paying attention to the two wars that we’re fighting overseas right now and the hundreds of thousands of men women who are serving the county over there. No matter what you think politically, it’s essential that when you walk into the voting booth on November 4th, you remember that the person you’re voting for, whether it’s a congressional or the presidential election, will be deciding whether or not to send men and women to fight wars. We want the film to be watched by tens of millions of people because that’s the type of attention we want to bring to Section 60. And we told the families, “Let us into your world because we want people to pay attention to it.” We think Section 60 deserves it.

KH: Your war-related recent films were very different. Baghdad ER was more dynamic and action-packed. And Alive Day Memories was much more stylized. How did this compare to those two experiences?

MO: The reality in Baghdad ER is very different than the reality in Section 60. In Baghdad, we tried to show what it’s like being in an emergency room in a war zone, with tons of action. It’s terrifying…riveting, it reminds you of the costs of the war in a visceral way. Section 60 had a totally different energy. We’re trying to help the rest of the country enter the world that these families live in every day. The greatest praise that we received thus far was at a screening for a number of the families. Paula Zillinger, is one of the mothers in this film, she’s in the first real scene in the film and she goes to visit her son’s grave. Her son, Bobby, died in the end of Baghdad ER. At the screening she got up and faced the audience and said, “Welcome to our world.” I hope it brings an audience into the reality that these families are living.

KH: Was it eerie? Did you feel like you were intruding?

MO: Approaching these families was one of the most difficult things that I’ve ever had to do as a filmmaker because their expressions of grief, their visits to the graves of their lost loved ones, are the most intimate moments you could possibly imagine. And we’re standing there… waiting… with a camera. So the way that we operated was as human beings first, documentarians second. We spent lots of time in the cemetery not filming, talking about why we were doing what we were doing, how we wanted to capture the cemetery as experienced on a day-to-day basis. We wanted to capture their love. And sometimes the first time we spoke to a family they declined to be filmed. And maybe on the second time we spent a lot of time talking but didn’t film anything and then maybe on the third time or the fourth time they said, “You know, we would like to be part of this. We would like to be filmed.” And eventually we became part of the fabric of the cemetery. So many of these families are returning week after week or day after day, so we became part of their community.

KH: What was your schedule like?

Jon Alpert: Basically the schedule was we were in the cemetery from the opening of the gates to the closing of the gates every single day for almost four months.

KH: What kind of toll did that take on you?

JA: Every American should visit Arlington and visit Section 60. I hope it would have the same impact that it had on us…. When you stand there and see the rows and rows of tombstones stretching towards the horizon, you really realize what the price of war can be – not only these wars but what it has been for centuries. That really goes deep into your being. Section 60 is such an open wound in the families of the fallen. People say, “You’ll get over it. With time you’ll heal.” The loss and the sadness of these families is not healing. That’s another thing we hope America will pick up. Because maybe we’re paying a price for the war in the way it’s affecting our economy but it’s not something that has an impact… I mean people could watch a football game on Monday night instead of watching this documentary. But for these families, their lives have been altered and they will never, ever, ever be the same.

MO: I cried a lot in Section 60. I got the sense that a lot of these families were trapped by their loss and trapped by their love that couldn’t be requited and I felt trapped to a certain extent. Over the course of four months I became somewhat overwhelmed by the sense of loss and the sense that nobody is paying attention. The loss is so profound in Section 60, so tangible. You understand that each of those numbers discussed in the media, whether they were talking about 3,000, 4,000, 5,000, have left a profound sense of emptiness, and ripped a hole in the fabric of a community and the fabric of a family. And when I wasn’t there, I wanted to be there, paying respect and honoring the people who are buried there. Because a large swath of the country isn’t and isn’t even aware of it. It’s your responsibility as a citizen, an American, to know what’s happening with our service members overseas. So I became quite depressed at times.

KH: When you were running around doing Baghdad ER you must have had a lot of adrenaline. With this film, the grief is unmitigated with no action or suspense or chaos to distract you. It affected me, a viewer, in a way that Baghdad ER didn’t. How did it affect you as filmmakers differently? And how did affect the way you filmed it?

MO: There’s very little that distracts these families from their love and their loss. And when they’re in Arlington that’s a sacred time that they’re spending with their loved ones. There really isn’t anybody else there but the families, their memories, their efforts to celebrate lives lost too soon and, for four months in 2007, Jon and I and our cameras. There was a month where I was filming alone because of certain circumstances and at the end of that month I was feeling totally crushed. This stuff plays out in slow motion. When you see the same grief, the same wounds that will never heal, acted out day after day after day, you realize it’s a pain that’s never going to go away. Paula talks about going to a meeting of Gold Star mothers [who have lost a child in war] where a mother was talking about her son she lost in Vietnam. And Paula said, “Forty years. I realized that I was going to feel this loss…I was going to continue to love him for forty years. It’s something that never ends.”

In the film there are no subtitles, no music, no graphics. You’re just sort of placed in the cemetery as we were for four months and you begin to get a sense of what it might feel like to be trapped in Section 60.

KH: This film focuses as much if not more on the people who are left behind as it does on the people who they lose. You as documentary filmmakers often travel to dangerous places to capture important stories. Did seeing the way people reacted to the deaths of their loved ones, did being surrounded by the grief of those left behind make you think about your own loved ones who would be left behind if something were to happen to you? Did it make you reconsider the types of projects you’d want to embark on?

MO: One thing, universally, regardless of their political persuasion or feelings on the war, that parent after parent, husband after husband and wife after wife said was, “my loved one died serving the people that he loved and trying to do some good in the world.” I never want to leave any of the people that I love behind. But I also think it’s very important to try to have a positive effect on the world. I think the positive effect that we can have as filmmakers is helping other people understand the world and enter places they couldn’t otherwise enter. Not everyone can spend four months in Section 60. Watching this film and participating in this film is a way to begin to get a sense of what is going on. There are lots of places in the world that we as Americans need to understand a heck of a lot better than we do. I hope this helps inform the American public and helps us understand other people. The better we understand other people the more likely we are to all work together to build something useful and good.

JA: It compels you to go to the war zones. We’ve been lobbying to go to Afghanistan for 3 years. HBO is one of the few places that gives you the resources to tell these stories. And if we have a choice between going to Afghanistan and Alabama, we’ll go to Afghanistan. I certainly was left wondering what would happen if I died. What it really made me think about was what I would feel like if my daughter, who is the same age as these soldiers, died. And it haunted me because I saw that… it’s something that you can never be prepared for and something that you can never recover from

KH: Besides watching the film, what else can people do?

MO: We have almost 200,000 people serving overseas right now. Write a letter saying thank you, send a package. Since the draft ended only a small portion of American society is participating in war directly. And they’re participating in an enormous way. So many families have sent their sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, husbands, wives, mothers, fathers overseas not once, not twice, not three times, but even four different times. They’ve done four tours of duty in some combination in Iraq and Afghanistan years away from families and friends and loved ones. It’s important, no matter what your political persuasion, to say thank you.

There are so many families that shared stories with us who are not in the film. We wish we could have included them. We want the whole world to come to Section 60.

The other thing I think about all the time is in Section 60 we’ve lost 5,000 people. The loss that the Iraqi people have suffered in the last five years is horrific. The loss the Afghani people have suffered in the last five years is horrific, and each one of those holes is just as personal and just as deep as they are in Section 60.

The other thing I think about all the time is in Section 60 we’ve lost 5,000 people. The loss that the Iraqi people have suffered in the last five years is horrific. The loss the Afghani people have suffered in the last five years is horrific, and each one of those holes is just as personal and just as deep as they are in Section 60.

And I thought last week's debate was laden with homo-eroticism. Well, the sexual tension at the VP debate last night was so thick, you could drill it with a drill. Could Palin and Biden share a sordid side-- and a sexual history? Who could blame Sarah for falling for Biden's charms? He is, after all, the real VPILF. (See the Biden Bonability story I broke.) It may be an Obama/Biden versus McCain/Palin race. But last night we got served a steaming hot Biden/Palin sandwich, on the side. Here are the best sexually charged inappropriate moments of the debate.

1. Pre-Debate Foreplay starts with role play. Palin asks, "can I call you Joe?"
2. They've spiced up the dynamic with a butch/fem role reversal in which Sarah's lapel is ten times the size of Biden's. The Topsy Tail Palin rocks adds a high school girl je ne sais quois.
3. Palin tries to make Joe Biden jealous by blowing audience. She blows them a kiss and will engage in heavy winking throughout the night.
4. Biden flirts back hot and heavy "you can call me Joe"
5. Joe opens debate by alluding to their tried and true sexual compatibility and chemistry: "It is a pleasure to be with you"
6. Biden refers to the bi-curious tendencies he and Obama share, which include bipartisan "reach arounds." [Obama] "reached across the aisle to Dick...Lugar, a Republican."
7. Palin chastises Joe for being a bad boy and messing up her motto: "The chant is "drill, baby, drill" [not drill, drill, drill]
8. Palin tries to drive Biden crazy with desire and jealousy, describing how McCain "pushed hard" during "the surge."
9. Palin is bold in her preferences, and knows what she likes and does't like. She let's Joe know she's not a fan of early withdrawal: "We don't need early withdrawal"
10. Palin reveals an intimate familiarity with Biden by mentioning the way Joe "points backwards"
11. Joe brags about his stamina and virility: "You're very kind suggesting my only Achilles Heel is my lack of discipline. Others talk about my excessive passion."
12. Palin has exotic and eclectic tastes: "Look at Lieberman, and Giuliani, and Romney, and Lingle," [i.e. i like the Jews, Ay-talians, whoever those weird people who get married to lots of women and hate black people are, and lesbians]
13. Palin is not the only rainbow lover in town. Biden (and Obama) have a Jewish fetish: "No one in the United States Senate has been a better friend to Israel than Joe Biden. I would have never, ever joined this ticket were I not absolutely sure Barack Obama shared my passion."
14. Palin hints at a menage a trois with McCain and Kissinger: "I had a good conversation with him recently. And he shared with me his passion for diplomacy. And that's what John McCain and I would engage in also." [Unclear whether the "would" is conditional or preterit; so this has either already happened or is on the table. Though one would imagine that during their 35-year friendship McCain and Kissinger have shared  beaucoup menages.]
15. Palin announces that she and McCain have already initiated their relationship: "John McCain has already tapped me and said, that's where I want you, I want you to lead. I said, I can't wait to get and there [sic] go to work with you."

Tomorrow I'm blogging the VP Debate for 23/6! So go to 23/6 at 8:30 and read while you watch.

Palin Party: Liveblogging the VP Debate

Welcome to 23/6's Palin Party! Starting Thursday at 8:30p ET, 23/6 writers Stephen Sherrill, Bob Powers, Laurie Kilmartin; and 23/6 bloggers Jake Goldman, Lauren Kirchner, John Marshall, Katie Halper, Duncan Quirk, and Sean Carman will give you up-to-the-minute commentary as this site's 9/11 incarnate, Sarah Palin, debates Joe Biden.

Play the Palin drinking game. Every time Sarah modifies "United States" with "of America," drink a shot of Stoli, which is made in the country you can see from Alaska.

You Never Forget Your First Debate, but in case you do forget it, or like, never watched it in the first place, here are the undebatably top 10 best moments from Friday Night's debate.

1. Host Jim Lehrer tries to provoke a Presidential Man Love/Hate Cat Fight:  "talk to each other about it. We've got five minutes. We can negotiate a deal right here.... " Wow! That would be the first time ever presidential nominees "sealed the deal" live and on television.
2. Lehrer will not let up. Turns into that persistent fratboy intent on provoking catfight long after his fellow brohams are ready to go to the next bar: "Say it directly to him.... Say it directly to him..."
3. Video cameras and television screens clearly part of vast left conspiracy: show liberal bias towards Obama. McCain made to look pasty and nervous, Obama made to look glowing and dapper.
4. Obama outs himself as the true swinging liberal that he is by using word "orgy."
5. McCain outs himself opponent of ERs for Veterans. The senator is so opposed to  funding  ER's, that he refuses to pronounce the "er" in veterans, whom he insists on calling vetrans.
6. McCain pulls a Maverick and breaks with Bush by pronouncing nucular "nuclear"
7. Barack pulls a Borat. Obama vows to "crush Al Qaeda" just as Borat vows to "cruuuuuush" a  woman "if she cheat on me."
8. Lehrer gets his wish as nominees engage in a bllng-based cat fight. After McCain shows off his soldiers' bracelets Obama reminds the Senator: "I've got a bracelet, too..." Oh snap!
9. McCain proves patriotism by calling Guantanamo Guantaynamo. Refuses to jump on the PC, multicultural, polylinguistic bandwagon. (Ironically, pronounces Taliban with Spanish accent.)
10. McCain proves he's in touch by bragging about his  35 year old friendship with 85-year-old Henry Kissinger. A less in touch nominee would be embarrassed by an age incriminating and war crimes-criminal friendly admission.

doesn't mccain get that he should NOT show off that he's known Kissinger for 34 years? I mean forget the whole war crimes thing. I just mean its age incriminating

The liberals who complain about Bush never admitting to any (alleged) mistakes should be thrilled by McCain's campaign suspension campaign. McCain admitted that "the issue of economics is not something I've understood as well as I should," and now he's doing what he can to fix that. In all fairness, McCain has always had a plan: "I want to set up a committee headed by Alan Greenspan, whether he's alive or dead, it doesn't matter... If he's dead, we'll prop him up and put dark glasses on him, like in Weekend at Bernie's." With all due respect to Greenspan (who doesn't even look like Bernie Lomax, but whatever), what could be more educational and eye opening for McCain than spending a Friday night observing a real life financial crisis up close and personal? So, consider this McCain's crash course in economics. Or crash course in the crash of the U.S. economy. It's really amazing what you can learn by observing first hand. And I think that after his econ-immersion course, McCain's understanding of the economy will be as comprehensive, and as keen--if possible--as Sarah Palin's view of Russia on a clear Alaskan day.