We have yet to have the first bank failure of the year, but we now have the first credit union failure, Clarkston Brandon Community Credit Union of Clarkston, MI.
I’m wondering if there was a change in policy over the past year tha might have credit unions failing at a faster rate than commercial banks.
As Ted Cruz tells it, the story of how he financed his upstart campaign for the United States Senate four years ago is an endearing example of loyalty and shared sacrifice between a married couple.“Sweetheart, I’d like us to liquidate our entire net worth, liquid net worth, and put it into the campaign,” he says he told his wife, Heidi, who readily agreed.
But the couple’s decision to pump more than $1 million into Mr. Cruz’s successful Tea Party-darling Senate bid in Texas was made easier by a large loan from Goldman Sachs, where Mrs. Cruz works. That loan was not disclosed in campaign finance reports.
Those reports show that in the critical weeks before the May 2012 Republican primary, Mr. Cruz — currently a leading contender for his party’s presidential nomination — put “personal funds” totaling $960,000 into his Senate campaign. Two months later, shortly before a scheduled runoff election, he added more, bringing the total to $1.2 million — “which is all we had saved,” as Mr. Cruz described it in an interview with The New York Times several years ago.
A review of personal financial disclosures that Mr. Cruz filed later with the Senate does not find a liquidation of assets that would have accounted for all the money he spent on his campaign. What it does show, however, is that in the first half of 2012, Ted and Heidi Cruz obtained the low-interest loan from Goldman Sachs, as well as another one from Citibank. The loans totaled as much as $750,000 and eventually increased to a maximum of $1 million before being paid down later that year. There is no explanation of their purpose.
Neither loan appears in reports the Ted Cruz for Senate Committee filed with the Federal Election Commission, in which candidates are required to disclose the source of money they borrow to finance their campaigns. Other campaigns have been investigated and fined for failing to make such disclosures, which are intended to inform voters and prevent candidates from receiving special treatment from lenders. There is no evidence that the Cruzes got a break on their loans.
He should take a hit for this, particularly because much of his personal story is about how he risked it all to run for the US Senate, but it won’t make a difference in the primaries, because the Republican Party base has drunk too much Flint municipal tap water.
Hillary Clinton has been going after Bernie Sanders’ single payer healthcare proposals, claiming that single payer would take their healthcare away, and she’s rolled out Chelsea on the campaign trail.
It is ludicrous and dishonest, and it has led to a huge spike in contributions to the Sanders campaign:
Hillary Clinton’s new barrage against Bernie Sanders, the Democratic presidential primary opponent she has all but ignored through most of her campaign, is having an effect — though probably not the one she intended.
Sanders’s underdog campaign said it is seeing a surge of contributions as a direct result of the new attention it is getting from the Democratic front-runner, with money coming in at a clip nearly four times the average daily rate reported in the last quarter of 2015.
………
The former secretary of state and her team have stepped up their criticism of Sanders on a variety of fronts in recent days as polls have begun to show him edging even with her in Iowa — and, for the first time, looking competitive in a national poll. But the Clinton strategy may be backfiring in some ways.
………
“As of now, we are at about $1.4 million raised since yesterday when the panic attacks by the Clinton campaign began,” Briggs said. “We’ve gotten 47,000 contributions. We’re projecting 60,000 donations. Even for our people-powered campaign, this is pretty darn impressive.”
………
Even her daughter, Chelsea Clinton, got into the act, bashing Sanders during her first campaign appearance on behalf of her mother this election season.
“Senator Sanders wants to dismantle Obamacare, dismantle the [Children’s Health Insurance Program], dismantle Medicare and dismantle private insurance,” Chelsea Clinton said at a stop in New Hampshire. “I worry if we give Republicans Democratic permission to do that, we’ll go back to an era — before we had the Affordable Care Act — that would strip millions and millions and millions of people off their health insurance.”
Ludicrous, and dishonest, and more significantly, desperate.
Hillary’s strength this cycle was her aura of inevitability, and that appears to be vanishing like the mist
As I recall, inevitability was her perceived strength in 2008 as well.
Normally, I pay little attention to the various awards, but I heard that Mad Max Fury Road was nominated for a best picture Oscar.
This not something I would expect from the Academy:
George Miller and Margaret Sixel were asleep in their Sydney home when, just before 1am, a torrent of text messages, emails and phone calls from well wishers lit up their phones.
The husband-and-wife filmmakers quickly discovered their film, Mad Max: Fury Road, had made Australian film history with 10 Oscar nominations.
Not only did Miller score directing and, as producer, best picture nods, but Sixel was nominated for her editing and 11 other Aussies crew members were among the nominees for their work on the post-apocalyptic action-adventure.
I gotta watch this now.
You know Peter King, the Congressman from New York.
This is the guy who raised funds for the terrorist organization the IRA, called for the assassination of Snowden, Greenwals, and Poitras, and pretty much accused every Muslim in America of being a part of a 5th column.
But credit where credit is due, he just told Ted Cruz to go back under the rock he crawled out of:
New York Republican Rep. Peter King has some harsh advice for Ted Cruz: “Go back under a rock.”
“Memo to Ted Cruz: New York Values are the heroes of 9/11; the cops who fight terror; and the people you ask for campaign donations. Go back under a rock,” King said in a statement mailed to POLITICO Thursday regarding Cruz’s comments about “New York values.”
The Texas senator, who had been avoiding going after Donald Trump for much of the campaign cycle, finally hit back after Trump questioned Cruz’s eligibility for the White House. Cruz suggested in an interview with “The Howie Carr Show” Tuesday that Trump “may shift in his new rallies to playing ‘New York, New York,’ because you know Donald comes from New York and he embodies New York values.”
I really hate agreeing with him, but he’s right, though incomplete.
When Ted Cruz talks about “New York values”, he’s really accusing Donald Trump of being in the thrall of the secret Jewish cabal that runs the world.
It’s how Cruz is trying to appeal to the Talibaptist wing of the Republican party.
I miss the Republican Party of Richard Milhous Nixon.
First David Bowie, and now Alan Rickman.
He was the only reason that Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves was even remotely watchable.
He was the best thing in almost every movie I ever saw him in.
On Fox News, he has stated thatthe reaction to Barack Obama’s presidency shows that the nation was not ready for a black man in the White House.
He further goes on to state that he believes that Obama shirked his duty to address these issues, which I also agree with:
Fox News’ Geraldo Rivera was Tuesday’s “One Lucky Guy” on the network’s “Outnumbered” midday hit and shared his unpopular opinion with the conservative female co-hosts ahead of President Obama’s seventh and final State of the Union address Tuesday evening.
………
But Rivera argued that despite substantive policy disagreements, the real divisions made clear during the Obama presidency fall along racial lines:When you strip away all of the gun rights and the, you know, terror all rest of it, what you have essentially is a nation divided between white people and everybody else in broad strokes. When you look at the groups that overwhelmingly favor the Democrats right now, the Asians, the Hispanics, the African-Americans, the Muslims, you see a nation where people have largely chosen up sides and if you strip away everything else, what you are going to find is a racial divide. It’s biggest, unaddressed issue.
………
Rivera finally relented and charged that Obama had failed to confront race relations head-on as the first African-American president. “If I was this president,” the Fox News personality offered, “I would have said ‘I’m going to deal with this race. I’m going to deal with the legacy of the Civil War. The Civil War is over. The North/South divide — I would have made that the central focus of my president were I him.”“He failed utterly,” Rivera concluded, and by “benign neglect made it worse.”
As I have noted many times before, Barack Obama’s public personae is all about avoiding to appear the “Angry Black Man”, and as such he has studiously attempted to avoid facing racial issues.
Still, agreeing with Geraldo?
I feel so dirty.
He was generally clueless as a Senator and as Secretary of Defense, but his statement that the US focus on deposing Bashar al Assad is crippling us diplomatically and militarily is spot on:
The US has backed itself into a corner by insisting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad be removed from power before the Obama administration will work with Russia and Iran to fight the Islamic State group, former Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel said.
“We have allowed ourselves to get caught and paralyzed on our Syrian policy by the statement that ‘Assad must go,’” Hagel said at a Wednesday event hosted by the Atlantic Council.
Russia and Iran have said they are willing to join with the US in fighting ISIS, but not at the expense of Assad, a longtime regional ally for both nations. The US continues to insist that no serious discussions on working with those two nations can occur until Assad is removed.
………
The focus on Assad, Hagel indicated, has clouded the situation.
“Assad was never our enemy. A brutal dictator? Yes. There are a lot of brutal dictators out there. I’m not for brutal dictators. But we should have learned from Saddam Hussein and Gadhafi, you can take a brutal dictator out but you better understand what you may get in return,” Hagel said. “Let’s get to this platform of stability.”
Our policy is incoherent.
Arguably it has been as incoherent under Obama as it was under Bush, notwithstanding their claims of having, “Don’t do stupid sh%$,” as a central tenet.
This is not a problem of any particular Presidential administration. It is a problem with the commonly accepted foreign policy beliefs, a sort of Council of Foreign Relations consensus, that is dysfunctional and delusional.
A left wing Israeli activist, Ezra Nawi, was caught on tape boasting that he turned information about Arabs who were looking to sell land to Jews over to the Palestinian security services, and boasted that these people were tortured and killed:
A prominent Israeli campaigner for Palestinian rights was recorded saying that he helps Palestinian authorities find and kill Palestinians who sell land to Jews.
The recording was aired Thursday by the television program Uvda of Israel’s Channel 2. In it, Ezra Nawi, a Jewish far-left activist from the Ta’ayush group, is heard speaking about four Palestinian real-estate sellers, whom Nawi said mistook him for a Jew interested in buying their property.
“Straight away I give their pictures and phone numbers to the Preventive Security Force,” Nawi is heard saying in reference to the Palestinian Authority’s counterintelligence arm. “The Palestinian Authority catches them and kills them. But before it kills them, they get beat up a lot.”
In the Palestinian Authority, the penal code reserves capital punishment for anyone convicted of selling land to Jews. This law, which Palestinian officials defended as designed to prevent takeovers by settlers, has not been implemented in Palestinian courts, where sellers of land to Jews are usually sentenced to several years in prison. However, in recent years several Palestinian have been murdered for selling land. Their murders have remained unsolved.
He has since been arrested on evidence that he was attempting to lure an Israeli Arab realtor to a village near Hebrone where he would be taken into custody by PA state security forces:
Many in Israel’s left have been trying to disassociate themselves from Ezra Nawi, the activist who was secretly taped on a Channel 2 news program Uvda bragging about sending Arab land brokers to certain torture if not death in the hands of the Palestinian Authority’s Preventive Security service (selling land to Jews is an act of treason under PA law). Those who defended him quickly became the new pariahs of Israel’s mass and social media. Then came a follow-up report Monday night showing Nawi was on the payroll of Breaking the Silence and Rabbis for Human Rights.
………
Meanwhile, right-wing journalist Shai Glick, who filed a police complaint regarding Ezra Nawi’s activities, reported a conversation with an investigating police officer who told him the Arab land broker Nawi was conspiring to hand over to the PA is an Israeli citizen. Nawi and several other activists were attempting to invite this Israeli citizen to the Arab village of Yatta, south of Hebron, where PA police would be waiting to arrest him.
This last revelation probably explains why Nawi hightailed it to Ben Gurion International, to catch a flight to anywhere else, when police caught him and took him in for questioning. It’s starting to sound like conspiracy to commit murder, which Israel frowns on, regardless of one’s political conviction.
Nawi’s lawyer is claiming that he was leaving the country to visit friends in Europe, and that he had checked with law enforcement before booking the flight, and given the sh%$ storm that has blown up around him, I could see he wants to get out.
I understand that Ezra Nawi he feels passionately about Palestinians and their demands for a homeland, but this is a classic case for quoting Freidrich Nietsche, “If you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
If you want to lead a consistently ethical life, it’s generally a good idea to avoid behavior that might invoke a Nietsche quote.
It’s pretty much an indicator that you have lost your way.
It’s been near the single digits in the morning and evening lately, and so the walk to and from the Metro station to work is less pleasant, so I need to cover my head.
I turned to the family expert on all things hat related, my daughter.
I sent her the following text:
Since you are the expert, I need advice.
It’s getting cold, and I need a hat to keep warm.
Clearly it must also be silly, because ……… Dad.
Suggestions?
So, now I throw this out to the internet: Hat, must be warm and thoroughly silly.
Photographs appreciated.
Withess this exchange with Mel Gibson at the Golden Globe Awards:
Ricky Gervais keeps pushing. Joking about what a loon Mel Gibson is hardly rare in Hollywood circles, but Gervais decided to do it just as he was introducing him.
“A few years ago I made a joke about Mel Gibson getting a bit drunk and saying a few unsavory things,” Gervais said. “We’ve all done it. I wasn’t judging him, but now I find myself in the awkward position to introduce him again. Listen I’m sure its embarrassing for both of us and I blame NBC for this terrible situation, Mel blames … well we know who Mel blames.” That’s right, Gervais was clearly calling out Gibson’s history of anti-semitism.
“Listen, I still feel bad about it,” Gervais continued. “Mel’s forgotten all about it. That’s what drinking does. I want to say something nice about Mel before he comes out: I’d rather have a drink with him in his hotel tonight than Bill Cosby.”
When Gibson came out, it wasn’t clear if the two were going to embrace or start throwing punches.
“I love seeing Ricky every three years because it reminds me to get a colonoscopy,” Gibson offered.
One reason I don’t watch awards shows is because 95% of the time they are boring as sh%$ to me.
The other 5% of the time, I see evidence of how they are wittier than I will ever be, and it’s depressing.
It appears that the Bernie Sanders campaign employs no fund raising staff, Hillary Clinton, in contrast, has over 30 dedicated full time staffers working this:
It’s no secret that Bernie Sanders is raising tons of money, but that fact that he’s doing it without a finance team is highly unusual.
Bernie Sanders loves to talk about the fact that he doesn’t have a super-PAC backing his campaign. But the true state of his fundraising strategy is even more astonishing than that: The Sanders campaign doesn’t have a finance team.
And that’s a big deal.
Every competitive presidential campaign in recent election cycles has had team of people exclusively dedicated to finances: figuring out how much money the campaign needs, putting together a plan to get that money, and then making it all come together.
It’s considered a fundamental part of a modern presidential campaign, right up there with having a team to deal with the press. But Sanders may be changing that.
Call it a reinvention of campaign funding, but the Vermont senator has shown so far that a campaign can operate just fine without a fleet of green-visors counting the cash.
“I’ve never heard of a presidential campaign, even a minor party presidential campaign, that didn’t have a fundraising team,” said one campaign finance attorney. “But, OK if it’s working.”
And, judging by Sanders’s latest fundraising numbers, it is.
This is a positive thing for a number of reasons. Not only does this reduce his burn rate, 30 staffers full time raising cash probably cost something north of 60 Grand a month, but also because the fundraising profession is an entry point for the most repulsive people in public service (See Emanuel, Rahm, and Wasserman-Schultz, Debbie).
I really like this guy.
I never bought any of his albums or singles, but my favorite song of his is Putting out a Fire from the 1982 movie Cat People.
I saw it, but was not particularly impressed. I preferred the original 1942 movie, which is widely viewed as a classic.
Most of my experiences with Bowie as an artist were as an actor.
I saw him in the 1976 film, The Man Who Fell to Earth, which was a his cinematic debut, and quite literally the worst cinematic experience in my life.
It was boring, pretentious, confusing, ponderous, and dull.
Looking back, I am left the question, “How the f%$# can you cast David Bowie as an alien, and completely f%$# it up?”
By the same token he was also in one of my favorite films, the Tony Scott’s criminally unappreciated The Hunger, a stylish film starring Bowie, Susan Sarandon, and Catherine Deneuve.
It is a stylish vampire film that eschews many of the cliches, and it is unbelievably hot. (Watch it)
Of Labyrinth, one of Jim Henson’s few fizzles, the less said the better.
I do see a parallel between his music career and his theatrical career, in that he never seemed to settle on a personae.
Both in music and in film, he was a sort of character actor, where he reveled in changing who he was in public.
Any of the music and cinema buffs out there, feel free to tell me that I am full of it.
Sometimes, I think that I make too many Monty Python references.
Then I realize that there is no such thing as too many Monty Python references.
It appears that pensioners have finally begun to realize private equity and its ilk are robbing their funds blind while underperforming the market, but I predict that their calls for an investigation of private equity and hedge fund practices will go largely unanswered:
Diane Bucci and her fellow retired Rhode Island schoolteachers were angry about a deal last year to cut their promised retirement benefits. For 28 years, the elementary school teacher devoted between 7 and 9 percent of her paycheck to the state’s pension system. In return, the 72-year-old had been promised a consistent cost-of-living increase to make sure her retirement stipend kept pace with inflation. Now, though, state officials were trimming her check in the name of replenishing the depleted pension fund.
There was, however, a sliver of hope — or so it seemed: If the pension system could generate better investment returns and amass 80 percent of the money needed to pay current and future retirees, the annual cost-of-living increases would return.
“There was a lot of unrest and anger among teachers, but at that point we buckled down and focused on how we could get to solvency,” said Bucci, who is on the board of the 700-member Rhode Island Retired Teachers Association. “So even though we aren’t Wall Street experts, we just started to ask questions about how the pension fund was managed, and what it was invested in. That’s when we realized the fees we’ve been paying to the investment companies were the problem.”
Those levies — which hit $79 million last year — were the product of the state’s recent investment strategy. Following a controversial national trend, Rhode Island pension officials led by then-General Treasurer Gina Raimondo shifted roughly a quarter of the state’s pension portfolio into high-fee hedge funds, private equity firms and other so-called “alternative investments.”
The shift by Raimondo, a Democrat who is now governor, has generated big revenues for Wall Street firms, but only middling returns for a $7.6 billion pension fund on which more than 58,000 current and future retirees rely.
When Bucci and the members of her organization began asking questions about those results, they learned of a federal review showing that roughly half of all private equity firms are charging hidden fees, and they saw a hedge fund industry whose returns have failed to keep pace with the stock market. When they dug deeper, they stumbled onto an even more disturbing revelation. What they found, they say, is evidence that some investors can obtain special rights that may let them secretly siphon money from the state pensioners’ retirement savings.
The retirees are now petitioning federal law enforcement officials to investigate whether the widely used provisions are violating laws designed to make sure all investors are treated fairly. In a letter sent last month to the Securities and Exchange Commission and the FBI, the retirees’ adviser — former SEC investigator Edward Siedle — pointed out that some of the firms managing Rhode Island pension money claim the right to offer different fee rates, inside information and cash-out rights to some investors but not to others.
Raimondo f%$#ed her pension fund, and she did so knowingly, both because they are “people like her” (Ivy league graduates) who are supposed to be “exceptional”, and because she knows that this behavior gets her a 7 figure payday at the end of the rainbow.
It’s corrupt tribalism, and it’s harming our country.
Barack Obama Obama will not endorse a Presidential candidate in the primaries.
This is not unexpected.
Attempting to influence the selection of their successor is generally a losing proposition for a sitting president.
Still, I imagine that Hillary Clinton is a bit disappointed.
Rather unsurprisingly, it’s the not-for-profit news organization ProPublica:
The so-called dark web, for all its notoriety as a haven for criminals and drug dealers, is slowly starting to look more and more like a more privacy-preserving mirror of the web as a whole. Now it’s gained one more upstanding member: the non-profit news organization ProPublica.
On Wednesday, ProPublica became the first known major media outlet to launch a version of its site that runs as a “hidden service” on the Tor network, the anonymity system that powers the thousands of untraceable websites that are sometimes known as the darknet or dark web. The move, ProPublica says, is designed to offer the best possible privacy protections for its visitors seeking to read the site’s news with their anonymity fully intact. Unlike mere SSL encryption, which hides the content of the site a web visitor is accessing, the Tor hidden service would ensure that even the fact that the reader visited ProPublica’s website would be hidden from an eavesdropper or Internet service provider.
“Everyone should have the ability to decide what types of metadata they leave behind,” says Mike Tigas, ProPublica’s developer who worked on the Tor hidden service. “We don’t want anyone to know that you came to us or what you read.”
Of course, any privacy-conscious user can achieve a very similar level of anonymity by simply visiting ProPublica’s regular site through their Tor Browser. But as Tigas points out, that approach does leave the reader open to the risk of a malicious “exit node,” the computer in Tor’s network of volunteer proxies that makes the final connection to the destination site. If the anonymous user connects to a part of ProPublica that isn’t SSL-encrypted—most of the site runs SSL, but not yet every page—then the malicious relay could read what the user is viewing. Or even on SSL-encrypted pages, the exit node could simply see that the user was visiting ProPublica. When a Tor user visits ProPublica’s Tor hidden service, by contrast—and the hidden service can only be accessed when the visitor runs Tor—the traffic stays under the cloak of Tor’s anonymity all the way to ProPublica’s server.
I don’t think that this is the start of a trend, as near as I can figure out, there is no way to monetize a Tor node through advertising, though I imagine that the classified ad section would be ……… different ……… and I am sure that the FBI would find this very interesting.
Following weeks of backbiting and sabotage from his front benchers, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn is cleaning house, and the whining has reached a crescendo:
Jeremy Corbyn has launched a strong defence of his controversial frontbench reshuffle, saying it has made Labour “stronger, more diverse and more coherent” as he insists he can lead the party to general election victory.
Writing in the Observer after a turbulent week, Corbyn says his election as leader in September reflected a “deep-seated desire for change and a new direction in our politics” which, unsurprisingly, some in the party are finding difficult to adjust to. In terms that may alarm some of his MPs, who fear he is trying to bypass the parliamentary party over issues such as the renewal of Trident, he makes it clear that he will shape new policies through the “democratic participation of our own hugely expanded party and supporters”.
In a call for loyalty, Corbyn says the Tories under David Cameron are engaged in a systematic attempt to undermine democracy and that this must be challenged by Labour. He argues that new rules on voter registration, attempts to cut the number of parliamentary seats and slash funding for Labour amount to an unprecedented attack on democratic rights and freedoms.
However, his attempts to impose unity will come under further strain on Sunday when an MP appointed to head a key policy review on tax credits and child poverty will resign on BBC TV, in protest at being branded by the leadership as part of a “rightwing clique”.
After three frontbenchers quit in protest at Corbyn’s reshuffle, Alison McGovern, MP for Wirral South, will launch a bitter attack on John McDonnell, Corbyn’s close ally and shadow chancellor, who said last week that the pressure group Progress, which she chairs, is full of people with “hard-right” conservative views.
Her appearance on the BBC’s Sunday Politics will also fuel a row that has erupted between Labour and the BBC over its coverage of the reshuffle, and comes as tensions over Corbyn’s attempts to change party policy on Trident reach new heights.
Oh you poor delicate flowers.
Corbyn fired back in The Guardian, noting just that Cameron is attempting to systematically dismantle all opposition in the UK, both on a political and a policy level.
It won’t matter for New Labour.
They honestly think that the Conservatives running the country is better than having a Labour Party that actually gives a sh%$ about ordinary people.
After all, they have to think about their post politics career working for the City of London, Britain’s financial industry.
The year in review was good, only 8 bank failures and 13 credit union failures, the final one being First Hawaiian Homes Federal Credit Union, of Hoolehua, HI.
That’s the fewest since I started keeping track in 2010.
It was also a weird, because it’s the first time that credit unions out failed banks, and they did so by over 50%.
It’s a small sample size, but it’s still weird.
The count for both remains at 0 so far for 2016.
George Lucas is not a fan of the latest Star Wars movie. In interviews, he has noted that they ignored his story treatments, and likened their treatment of the franchise to white slavery, though he has disavowed the whole “white slavery” bit.
Well, Disney just put the original theatrical releases of Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi out as a new Blu Ray release:
Every few months, rumors arise that the original Star Wars Original Trilogy – as in the one where Han Solo shoots Greedo, not the other way around – is finally coming to Blu-ray, remastered for your HD television. It’s the sort of thing that Star Wars fans the world over have been clamoring for since George Lucas released the Special Edition on DVD back in 2004. Those fans – and just, well, film purists with a general respect for the history of movies – don’t much care for the updated movies and their CGI Jabba the Hutts and CGI musical numbers and ghost Hayden Christensens. They want to see what these movies looked like when they were originally released, matte lines and all, only with a noticeable upgrade in the audio-visual quality. Not too much to ask for, right?
Unfortunately, Lucas has famously refused to release remastered versions of the unaltered originals. He’s pretty stuck on the idea that the most recent Special Edition – there’ve been three at this point – is the truest version, the most accurate representation of his vision, and that no other iteration need be released to the public ever again. There was some renewed hope that he might loosen his grip on the movies when he sold Lucasfilm to Disney, but some four years on and there’s been no movement on the matter. At least, not officially, not yet.
Star Wars Original Unaltered Trilogy Coming to Blu-Ray
But there is a new glimmer of hope. John Landis – who directed Animal House, An American Werewolf in London, Trading Places, and more – was recently at Universal Studios in Orlando to talk about the newly installed Halloween Horror Nights American Werewolf in London maze. When asked whether or not he’d ever considered updating American Werewolf with modern effects a la the Star Wars Special Edition (which is an insane thing to ask because those werewolf effects are amazing and horrifying to this day), he said:First of all, [the studio] wouldn’t let me. George owns his movies, so he can do what he wants … My personal opinion is George hurt his movies by doing what he did. However, George said to me, ‘But they’re my movies.’ I thought, ‘That’s fair.’
Did you know Disney, by the way, is putting out the original Star Wars the way it was? So Disney, they’re like, money on the floor.So you’re probably wondering: “Why would John Landis have any inside information on whether or not Disney was releasing the theatrical editions?” That’s a good question. Maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he just heard this rumor – like we’ve all heard this rumor, time and again – and passed it on as though it were fact. It’s worth noting, however, that Landis and Lucas are close friends. They came up together in the same group of filmmakers. Lucas offered Landis the directing job for Howard the Duck, which Landis wisely passed on. Landis put Lucas in Beverly Hills Cop III, a movie probably just as bad as Howard the Duck. Which means it’s entirely possible that he got his information from a very inside source – George Lucas himself.
I hope that this is true.
I have a tendency as an engineer to fiddle beyond when the design is done, to the detriment of the end product, budget and schedule.
I spend a lot of time fighting against this in my work.
I call it George Lucas syndrome, for obvious reasons.
I see nothing wrong with a creators original vision, and perhaps some commentary, back story, and deleted scenes in a DVD package, but the fact that Disney is prying this from his cold stiff fingers is a good thing.