Name Your Best Films/Documentaries/Books of 2007?

(And yes, if you have WORSTies, you can cite those, too.)

While Time Magazine and CNN and all the usual suspects rush to TELL US what films, books, and yes, even scandals were the best and worst of 2007, we're all thinking people here who don't need to be told what we can reason for ourselves.

With this in mind, what films/documentaries and books did YOU find to be the best of 2007?

Some of my big favorite books (and they would go on a big favorites list that spans more than just this year, btw) also happened to find their way onto my Christmas wish list, and I've already devoured two. These are:

* "Touch and Go" - Studs Terkel's excellent memoirs (he's a national treasure!)
* "The Omnivore's Dilemma" - Michael Pollan, an excellent follow-up to his mind-opening botany book that discusses how Americans really ARE what we eat
* "Deep Economy" - a must-read by Bill McKibben, a Vermont neighbor, that gives us a real eye-opener of an understanding of how the economy, much of which escapes our attention, drives our lives and politics and the future of this planet

But I can't fail to note the late, forever great Kurt Vonnegut's last book that I literally inhaled, "A Man Without A Country".

As for films and documentaries, I would rank "An Unreasonable Man" (about Ralph Nader), Michael Moore's "Sicko", and "The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib" among a slew of excellent works that I saw this year.

What about your favorites?

His and Hersh: How Bush And Rumsfeld Created The Horror of Abu Ghraib, Then Protected Themselves

I posted this at All Things Democrat in the wee hours of this morning, but it needs as much attention as possible (remember how Rummy dismissed abuses in Iraq prisons as the work of "a few bad apples" - I can agree with this if you say those bad apples are named Georgie Porgy and Donny Dumbsfeld):

While perhaps too many Americans have been closely following interviews with England’s two princes (Harry and William) and the unanswered questions of what happened on the night of their mother’s - Princess Diana’s - death a decade ago, there’s a much bigger issue that needs attention: what Bush and Rumsfeld allowed happen at the Iraq prison Abu Ghraib (and elsewhere).

Hardhitting journalist Seymour Hersh, one of the first to break the stories of abuse of prisoners - many of whom were arrested only for being Iraqis or Muslim or simply looking different from Americans - by American soldiers in 2004, is back in The New Yorker with fresh details that tell us both President Bush and then Pentagon Secretary Donald Rumsfeld LIED LIED LIED about not knowing of the torture and degradation and unnecessary deaths while they worked tirelessly to keep any official investigation into it from looking beyond grunt soldiers and low ranking generals.

Much of the punch packed in Hersh’s latest piece comes from Major General Antonio M. Taguba, the man charged with investigating the abuses at Abu Ghraib when the Bush Administration and Pentagon could no longer look blankly and say, “What’s Abu Ghraib?” Taguba says that Bush and Rummy knew WAY before they say they did about the claims of massive abuses, tortures and even deaths at the prison, that they specifically BLOCKED Taguba from looking any higher up the food chain than lowly GIs and minor generals, and THEN forced Taguba to retire as punishment for trying to investigate as fully and fairly as a decent inquiry should.

The highest “hit” there, of course, was Janis Karpinski, a one star general then titularly in charge of Abu Ghraib but - she says - forced by the Pentagon to allow psy ops and torture proponents run the prison and then busted down when she did as ordered by Rummy; the rest were the likes of Lindy England (the Abu Ghraib poster girl for torture and leash holding as well as frequent model for sex pictures in and around prisoners).

Frank Rich: "Iraq Is The Ultimate Aphrodesiac"

I don't happen to quite appreciate how Iraq could give types like John "Bomb, Bomb, Bomb - Bomb, Bomb Iran" McCain a big stiffy, but here's what Frank Rich noted in Sunday, April 22nd's OpEd in The Times.

President Bush has skipped the funerals of the troops he sent to Iraq. He took his sweet time to get to Katrina-devastated New Orleans. But last week he raced to Virginia Tech with an alacrity not seen since he hustled from Crawford to Washington to sign a bill interfering in Terri Schiavo's end-of-life medical care. Mr. Bush assumes the role of mourner in chief on a selective basis, and, as usual with the decider, the decisive factor is politics. Let Walter Reed erupt in scandal, and he'll take six weeks to show his face - and on a Friday at that, to hide the story in the Saturday papers. The heinous slaughter in Blacksburg, Va., by contrast, was a rare opportunity for him to ostentatiously feel the pain of families whose suffering cannot be blamed on the administration.

But he couldn't inspire the kind of public acclaim that followed his post-9/11 visit to ground zero or the political comeback that buoyed his predecessor after Oklahoma City. The cancer on the Bush White House, Iraq, is now spreading too fast. The president had barely returned to Washington when the empty hope of the "surge" was hideously mocked by a one-day Baghdad civilian death toll more than five times that of Blacksburg's. McClatchy Newspapers reported that the death rate for American troops over the past six months was at its all-time high for this war.

At home, the president is also hobbled by the Iraq cancer's metastasis - the twin implosions of Alberto Gonzales and Paul Wolfowitz. Technically, both men have been pilloried for sins unrelated to the war. The attorney general has repeatedly been caught changing his story about the extent of his involvement in purging eight federal prosecutors. The Financial Times caught the former deputy secretary of defense turned World Bank president privately dictating the extravagant terms of a State Department sinecure for a crony (a k a romantic partner) that showers her with more take-home pay than Condoleezza Rice.

Yet each man's latest infractions, however serious, are mere misdemeanors next to their roles in the Iraq war. What's being lost in the Beltway uproar is the extent to which the lying, cronyism and arrogance showcased by the current scandals are of a piece with the lying, cronyism and arrogance that led to all the military funerals that Mr. Bush dares not attend. Having slept through the fraudulent selling of the war, Washington is still having trouble confronting the big picture of the Bush White House. Its dense web of deceit is the deliberate product of its amoral culture, not a haphazard potpourri of individual blunders.

Mr. Gonzales's politicizing of the Justice Department is a mere bagatelle next to his role as White House counsel in 2002, when he helped shape the administration's legal argument to justify torture. That paved the way for Abu Ghraib, the episode that destroyed America's image and gave terrorists a moral victory. But his efforts to sabotage national security didn't end there. In a front-page exposé lost in the Imus avalanche two Sundays ago, The Washington Post uncovered Mr. Gonzales's reckless role in vetting the nomination of Bernard Kerik as secretary of homeland security in December 2004.

Mr. Kerik, you may recall, withdrew from consideration for that cabinet post after a week of embarrassing headlines. Back then, the White House ducked any culpability for the mess by attributing it to a single legal issue, a supposedly undocumented nanny, and by pinning it on a single, nonadministration scapegoat, Mr. Kerik's longtime patron, Rudy Giuliani. The president's spokesman at the time, Scott McClellan, told reporters that the White House had had "no reason to believe" that Mr. Kerik lied during his vetting process and that it would be inaccurate to say that process had been rushed.

Thanks to John Solomon and Peter Baker of The Post, we now know that Mr. McClellan's spin was no more accurate than his exoneration of Karl Rove and Scooter Libby in the Wilson leak case. The Kerik vetting process was indeed rushed - by Mr. Gonzales - and the administration had every reason to believe that it was turning over homeland security to a liar. Mr. Gonzales was privy from the get-go to a Kerik dossier ablaze with red flags pointing to "questionable financial deals, an ethics violation, allegations of mismanagement and a top deputy prosecuted for corruption," not to mention a "friendship with a businessman who was linked to organized crime." Yet Mr. Gonzales and the president persisted in shoving Mr. Kerik into the top job of an already troubled federal department encompassing 22 agencies, 180,000 employees and the very safety of America in the post-9/11 era.

Read the rest at Chez Rozius Unbound.

The Iranian-British Hostage Crisis And The "Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto You" Principle

Since yesterday, we've had a steady dose through the media of "How dare the Iranians treat the 15 British sailors as they did?" They were kept in isolation at times, not always fed the foods they would prefer, heard gunfire while they were blindfolded.

Mind you, what the Brit marines experienced sounds like a day in the fucking amusement park compared with what the Brits, and ESPECIALLY Bush's America does to people they call "enemy combatants" (yet few are ever charged with same) and hold in places like Guantanamo Bay/Gitmo and Abu Ghraib and countless secret prisons throughout the world, such as the one we operate in Syria where we "disappear" people off the streets and send them off for months or years of torture, terrible interrogation techniques, degradation, etc.

So before you cry extensively for these hostages who were released with gift bags and fresh clothes, think of what WE as American citizens, allow to happen in OUR names.

"The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib": We Must Watch To Know What Was Done In Our Names

Here's the review by Tom Shales of the HBO-broadcast documentary of the prison abuses and completely inhuman treatment the Pentagon conducted at Abu Ghraib, "The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib".

But there's more than a good review that should make you try to see it.

What was done at Abu Ghraib - as at Guantanamo Bay/Gitmo and countless "secret" prison locations and others under the Bushies - has been perpetrated in our names and with our tax dollars financing this. We must know. We must do all we can to be sure it will not happen so easily again.

We also must understand and prevent another case where only the lowliest of soldiers serving be pointed at by Bush and a Rumsfeld and the Pentagon as "a few bad apples" when it's damned well apparent the orders came from the very top. That's Bush, that's Cheney, and that's Rumsfeld. We can be shocked and sickened by a Lindy England, for example, but Lindy was there under orders ostensibly from us.

And anyone who thinks that their conduct will STOP terrorism - well, better see a doctor, because you're in serious fantasyland.

My only wish was that this was not being broadcast solely on one of the most premium of cable networks. Everyone should see this.

Janice Karpinski Calls Republican Senator Lindsay Graham a Coward, Donald Like Rumsfeld

Senator Lindsay Graham (R-Spineless, SC) shot off his mouth at a screening of HBO's upcoming, "The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib", including dumping on former General Janice Karpinski, whom the Bush Administration used as their favorite scapegoat in the prison abuse scandal, making her pay when Rummy and Rick Sanchez and company did not.

But unknown to Edwards, now Colonel Karpinski was in the audience, and she let him have it (and good!); from Crooks & Liars:

"Sen. Graham…I consider you as cowardly as Rumsfeld, as Sanchez, and Miller and all of them," said Karpinski, who has long claimed to be a scapegoat for superiors including former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez and Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller.