La Marseillaise was sung at today's D-Day commemoration, but at the dinner table tonight my whole family admitted we know the French national anthem from this wonderful scene in Casablanca. Open thread below....

NonnyMouse sent this article from The Motley Fool UK, and while this is focused on the UK banking system, it was still as disturbing to me as the thought of Madonna trying to make an updated version of Casablanca set in Iraq (which is to say, on so many levels). But it also occurred to me that given the hyper-partisan and crony-favored atmosphere fostered by the Bush administration, this wouldn't be a completely out-of-left-field thing to be happening here in the US too, if only tacitly:

You may have noticed that, for the past few years, this website has compared personal loans. Thousands of people have used the comparison tool.

As a writer, my involvement with it has largely been limited to looking through data to see patterns in the loans market. We survey users to find out how their applications went, so that we can identify patterns and provide better guidance in our articles. We've found that, of course, sometimes people don't get the loan they apply for, or that the lender offers them a worse rate than the typical APR that was shown.[..]

However, analysing the data we've collated, it's clear that who you vote for in elections affects whether you'll get a loan with a bank. If the bank supports one political party through donations or other means, and you vote for that party, you're more likely to get a loan. If you aren't a known supporter, you're less likely to get the loan. If you're a known supporter of a different party, you're even less likely.

Also, you're more likely to get the cheapest rates (the 'typical' APRs) if you support the same party as the bank!

This has serious implications about data protection, amongst other things.

I'd be curious to know how private banks in the UK would get voter information...but it should serve as a HUGE red flag on the dangers of the Voter/REAL ID cards here in the US.

"Casablanca" named greatest movie script

Casablanca is one of my favorite movies of all time. If you have the DVD, they have a "making of" documentary included and what's amazing is that they were writing the script as they were filming. The cast was just as brilliant.(here's some cool facts about the film) I really don't have a problem with any of the top ten that "The Writers Guild of America" came up with. I do have issues with some of the other selections. I'm a big Hitchcock fan and although I like "North By Northwest," I'd take "Rear Window" or "Psycho" over it any day of the week.

Here's the full list.

Where's Roberto Al-D'Aubuisson?
Billmon noted that Negroponte should head back to Iraq because it would be old home week. Like Billmon, I have little doubt that Negroponte helped set up this system, after all it was bragged about by the Pentagon some time ago:

According to human rights organisations in Baghdad, 'disappearances' - for long a feature of Iraq's dirty war - have reached epidemic proportions in recent months. Human rights workers, international and local, who asked not to be identified in order to protect their researchers in the city and their organisations' access to senior government officials, told The Observer last week that they have hundreds of cases on their books. They described the disappearances as the most pressing human rights issue in a country that is in the midst of a human rights disaster. The crisis was underlined by last week's uncovering of the secret Ministry of the Interior detention facility in the well-to-do neighbourhood of Jadriya. It led the US embassy in Baghdad to forcefully condemn the new Iraq's culture of torture and killing - a statement that many believe has been too long in coming. The emergence of a culture of pernicious violence at Iraq's interior ministry blossomed in the face of repeated warnings to US and UK officials over the past year and a half, under an apparently deliberate policy by London and Washington to avoid public criticism of the country's new institutions. It is a silence that persisted despite compelling evidence provided by human rights organisations, journalists and Iraqi officials that, from the very moment of the hand-over of sovereignty, violent abuses were being committed in the Ministry of the Interior building - the results of which have been witnessed by The Observer.

So "Freedom" has been on the march using the time-tested American model of encouraging torture and human rights abuse, looking the other way, and then being like Claude Rains in Casablanca expressing "Shock" that such abuses are occurring. The "Central America" method. Nevertheless, somewhere at this moment a right-wing blogger is furiously masturbating at news of torture going on somewhere. If you can, go read the rest of Billmon's post, he's at his usual thoughtful best. Posted by Attaturk