Prompted by a comment from Decius about No Country and catch phrases ...

"The crime you see now, it's hard to even take its measure."

You can't talk about war with someone who has never been there, not because they are stupid or dimwitted, but because they don't have the senses to feel it with."

News reports in February revealed that officials at a West Texas youth prison had been accused of sexually abusing inmates. The revelations that followed included reports of youth beatings, lax medical care and a culture of retaliation against whistle-blowers.

"My name is Shinseki, and I am a soldier," he said, poking fun at his reputation for spartan public statements.

Legislation passed in May was supposed to address the problems. To some extent it did, according to one lawmaker.

"We probably don't have management raping kids now," said state Rep. Jerry Madden.

The studio distributing “The Kite Runner,” a tale of childhood betrayal, sexual predation and ethnic tension in Afghanistan, is delaying the film’s release to get its three schoolboy stars out of Kabul -- perhaps permanently -- in response to fears that they could be attacked by Afghans angered by the film's culturally inflammatory rape scene.

These were dark movies -- the feel-bad films of the year -- conjured up in what movie people seem to collectively sense as grave times, hatched in producers' offices and on writers' laptops not long after the 2004 election and amid increasing setbacks in the Iraq war and gloomy environmental warnings. Some of the filmmakers and actors wore orange ribbons or rubber bracelets to protest alleged incidents of torture by the United States at its prison in Guantanamo Bay, and in Afghanistan and Iraq -- the subject of "Taxi to the Dark Side," which won Best Documentary Feature.

When not offering a surfeit of death and gloom, Academy nominees this year focused, in at least some metaphorical way, on all the looming issues:

Lovers died in a time of war; the thirst for oil took precedence over humanity; greedy corporate types stooped lower than low; a killer roamed the desolate US-Mexican border... [ Read More (1.1k in body) ]