This is John McCain's favorite movie.

Obama has tried to improve helath care, as promised, but made the mistake of trusting congress to set the terms initially, which was a disastrous tactical error. He has made good foreign policy decisions and improved our standing with many of our allies, and not incited any new conflicts. The stimulus package created some new jobs, but unemployment rate still had to bottom out. I never expected him to work magic on the economy, doesn't have much to do with the economy.

I'd say his first 13 months have been mediocre. If anything, it's the same safeness and caution that led him to cite consensus classics as his favorites to play everything as diplomatically as possible in his first year. But I still have faith that he can be a good president, and I'd like to think he's grown through his early failures (none of which have been Bay of Pigs level disasters). I'm not giving up on the guy just yet.

But McCain, who could barely manage a campaign, let alone a country, would have been an awful president. I stand by that opinion, and my vote in '08.

Obama hated VIVA ZAPATA. "Sure," he said, "my Uncle Frank used to love this movie because he and his pals in the Party thought it left-wing, but if you glorify a bunch of rebels fighting for liberty, it could give the serfs the wrong idea."

Horse sh!t. The GOP is against government when it's helping poor people with social welfare programs. They have no problem with the government building the most gigantic military machine in world history, waging wars all over the planet to protect and expand the interests of the capitalist oligarchy that owns the government, spying on the population, oppressing women and LGBTs, torturing prisoners, and so on and so forth. In those cases, they love government, they want government, they want big, huge, massive government (the US does more military spending than the rest of the planet combined! Where are the Republicans calling out "big government" when it comes to that???). They only hate government if it's providing healthcare to the poor or raising the minimum wage or doing anything else that benefits the workers and the poor rather than the owners and the rich. They believe the one and only role of government is to serve the interests of the ruling class, which intrinsically clash with the interests of the vast majority of the world's people, the workers and farmers of the world. The Republicans oppose "big government" in the sense that they oppose the government restraining the ability of the exploiting classes to exercise maximum tyranny over the exploited classes.

There's nothing right-wing about Emiliano Zapata and his rebellion. He wasn't just fighting "the government" but the economic interests it represents. The propertied class, the exploiters, the big landowners who deprived the peasants of their land. The American political spectrum is so obscenely far to the right that most US-Americans cannot possibly understand Latin American revolutionaries like Emiliano Zapata, what they fought for and what they fought against. Zapata was fighting against exactly the same sort of economic interests that the Republicans represent, where a rich few own everything and leave the working people with nothing.

"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free."
- Goethe

No, it is a left-wing anarchist film. The Zapatistas are against the government favoring the rich and powerful. The GOP is against the government favoring the poor and oppressed.