Released in time for the election, Fish in a Barrel is an exposé of how the NRA’s history of alleged campaign violations have stymied popular efforts to make even modest reforms on access to firearms, despite hundreds of mass shootings in the United States over the past two decades. The NRA’s electoral enterprise ended up being gamed by Russian agents of influence in the 2016 election, as detailed in the 2019 U.S. Senate Finance Committee report: The NRA & Russia: How a Tax-Exempt Organization Became a Foreign Asset. 

“As mass shootings have continued, the NRA obstructs any effort at reform to prevent future massacres. It’s angering watching politicians tweet ‘Thoughts and prayers,’ then do nothing to stop it from happening again,” says director John Wellington Ennis. “But when I learned that the NRA had become a Russian asset while working to elect Trump, I knew I had to do something.”

I don’t have any use for PEP politicians (progressive except on the Pentagon), but there are going to be serious members of the U.S. Congress next year who aren’t afraid of flags and war songs. There are going to be a lot more than (AOC+3) four of them.

CORI BUSH

One is going to be Cori Bush from St. Louis who won her primary against a long-time incumbent. She’s recently tweeted the following:

“If you’re having a bad day, just think of all the social services we’re going to fund after we defund the Pentagon.”

“Militarization makes up 64% of our federal budget. Medicare & Health are 6%. Education is 5%. Social Security, Unemployment, and Labor together are 3%. Ignorance is thinking those priorities keep our families safe.”

“220K+ people, including 1,700 healthcare workers, have died from COVID-19 due to our government’s inability to protect its citizens & pass pandemic relief. Ignorance is Trump’s Pentagon taking $1 billion in funding designated for PPE production to make jet engine parts.”

The documentary Hopper/Welles, which screened at the 34th annual AFI Fest (https://fest.afi.com/), is to film history what 1989’s When Harry Met Sally… is to romcoms. It consists of a conversation/interview between two renegade actor/directors who made touchstone movies but were nevertheless Hollywood outcasts. Following a stunning career as a radio and Broadway wunderkind, Orson Welles starred in, co-wrote and directed his first Hollywood feature when he was only 25. That 1941 masterpiece Citizen Kane scored the Best Writing, Original Screenplay Oscar for Welles and Herman Mankiewicz and received eight more nominations, including in the Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor Academy Award categories. But as far as the Tinseltown studio system went, it was all downhill from there in terms of directing for RKO, et al, for poor Orson.

BANGKOK, Thailand -- Embattled Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha on
October 22 revoked his mostly ineffectual "serious state of emergency"
in Bangkok, one day after saying he "will do so promptly if there are
no violent incidents."

The Royal Thai Government Gazette published his order which took effect at noon.

Prayuth clamped Bangkok under a "serious state of emergency" on
October 15, extending an existing state of emergency declared in March
to fight the coronavirus.

The emergency edict banned gatherings in public of five or more
people, distributing or publishing data that the government perceived
to be instigating fear or distorting information, and forbid using
public transportation or buildings for dissent.

Tens of thousands of protesters however repeatedly defied the
emergency edict by continuing to gather at daily demonstrations which
began on October 13.

Security forces, enjoying immunity under the emergency edict, could
detain people for 30 days in military camps without access to a
lawyer.