James Garner

It was natural for someone with his good looks and genial air to have been cast as heroes.

The image may not have been so different from reality. Garner does seem to have been humble enough to remember his past; according to the NYT, it included his leaving home home at 14 to escape abuse, then drifting for years before finding his way to acting.

And Garner was willing to step up as a citizen. As Soraya Nadia McDonald recounts—

When actor James Garner decided to help organize and attend the March on Washington in 1963, he wasn't just listening to his conscience. He and other actors who attended may have been embarking on Hollywood's first large-scale political act since the days of McCarthyism and Hollywood’s anti-Communist blacklist.

Garner's involvement was part of a long career of political activism. He told people he met his wife, Lois Clarke, at party for Adlai Stevenson, the liberal Democratic Party presidential candidate in 1952 and 1956. (Clarke gently corrected him in an appendix to his memoir, "The Garner Files" — they actually met at an earlier party, she said.)...

You have to admire a star who not only had the same wife for 58 years, but who wanted to say he had met her thanks to Adlai Stevenson!

Nelson continues—

...Though he believed in supporting causes political and environmental, Garner was staunchly against actors holding office for the most part. In "The Garner Files," the self-identified "bleeding-heart liberal" wrote:

Too many actors have run for office. There's one difference between me and them: I know I'm not qualified. In my opinion, Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn't qualified to be governor of California. Ronald Reagan wasn't qualified to be governor, let alone president. I was a vice president of the Screen Actors Guild when he was its president. My duties consisted of attending meetings and voting. The only thing I remember is that Ronnie never had an original thought and that we had to tell him what to say. That's no way to run a union, let along a state or a country.

This long Wiki page adds—

The "most explosive revelation" in his autobiography was that Garner smoked marijuana for much of his adult life. "I started smoking it in my late teens," Garner wrote. "I drank to get drunk but ultimately didn't like the effect. Not so with grass. It had the opposite effect from alcohol: it made me more tolerant and forgiving. I did a little bit of cocaine in the Eighties, courtesy of John Belushi, but fortunately I didn't like it. But I smoked marijuana for 50 years and I don't know where I'd be without it. It opened my mind and now it eases my arthritis. After decades of research I've concluded that marijuana should be legal and alcohol illegal."

I best remember Garner in the role he named his favorite. (Co-star Julie Andrews said the same of her part.) It's understandable that the actors felt that way about this one.

The News From Radio Rwanda

During a season that happens to mark the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer, the recently concocted media narrative is "crisis"—a rising number of unaccompanied Central American children turning themselves in at the border.

This is not about immigration, "illegal" or otherwise. And yes, there is a crisis, but a completely different one: a crisis of human rights. It's also a crisis many years in the making, and intimately tied to US Central American policies: support of repressive regimes, "free trade," drug war. By now, the escalating brutality of criminal gangs and absence of functional governments in the region has made the future so dire for these children that families risk sending them on this dangerous trip.

A different, and perpetual "crisis": the Right's need to get the crazies riled up and staying that way until November. A crisis decades in the making? All Obama's fault...

The usual opportunism and lack of human decency is on display, as in the "diseased immigrants" theme.

And—to carry on the tradition of Republican politicos who once took the Hippocratic Oath—the cynical conflation of this refugee crisis with the current outbreak of Ebola in west Africa.

Establishment pundits are eager as always for some imagined means of making the lunatics happy.

The rabble-rousing is effective: residents of a town—a suspiciously named town, at that—succeed at mob action, a la Bundy Ranch.

With rightwingers' eagerness to use these children's suffering for political gain, Edroso deems them "Borderline Personalities: Rightbloggers Vs. Huddled Masses Yearning to Breathe Free."

And, never forget: It's Obama's Fault! As Roy puts it—

As the Obama Administration has deported at least two million aliens, and on immigration matters is basically following a federal law signed by George W. Bush, that's pretty rich. But since Obama's a liberal and liberals are notorious bleeding hearts -- plus which he's not white, either! -- rightbloggers still accused the President of flooding the nation with dangerous brownskins for some nefarious purpose.