Okay, we're down to two different names, or rather four, if you're paying attention to me, which is who you should be listening to.

These are all kinda gay to some extent, but the final four are:

On Point

The Cutting Edge

The Bleeding Edge

Hack & Slash

Shock and Awe? (vetoed)

Hoist the Black Flag? (shockingly enough-- not vetoed)

Just want to know-- which of these lame names is the least worst?

Posted by: Ace at 03:42 PM | Comments (260)
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RCL sends:

MATTHEWS: You want the numbers? Sixty percent of American Catholics want women to become priests.'

MOLINARI: Right.

MATTHEWS: Allowed to become. Sixty-five percent want priests to marry; 65%. And everybody I know in my church where I go thinks that...

From an exchange between Chris Matthews and Susan Molinari

Matthews isn't doing so well in the ratings, either:

Matthews, a onetime aide to Jimmy Carter and Tip O'Neill, isn't sure why "Hardball" ratings -- the program is averaging 379,000 viewers -- are down by about two-thirds from their late-1990s peak...."You walk down Fifth Avenue, people come up and say they love me."

From a profile in Peace Corps Online. Man, Matthews will never let us forget he's a 1) good Catholic 2) former cop 3) former aide to Tip O'Neill 4) former Peace Corps draft dodger selfless volunteer 5) crusading liberal crapweasel.

Captain's Quarters makes the obvious, but necessary, point:

The quote regarding his confusion over his dismal ratings when everyone on NY's Fifth Avenue loves him was widely mocked, demonstrating his constricted, rarefied world view from the Upper East Side elitist cocoon (reminiscent "of the cluelessness of Pauline Kael, who exclaimed her disbelief about Nixon's landslide re-election: "No one I know voted for him!")

And finally, RCL offers his own take:

Could you imagine the blow to the Church if both [He Who Shall Not Be Named] AND Matthews were to act their conscience and leave the Faith? The Church would be rudderless, having nothing but millennial-old tradition and doctrine, and the beliefs of mere (slightly over) 1 billion faithful to sustain it.

Frightening times indeed.

Without doubt, a grave danger for the Church. I hope they realize the terrible, reckless gamble they're taking.

Politics makes whores of us all, it is said.

But it's worse than that. "Whores," well, that's understandable.

But politics makes blithering idiots out of a lot of us, and that's less forgivable.

Posted by: Ace at 09:45 AM | Comments (18)
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So says this guy, at least. I'm not the sort of guy to get pissed off at minor changes from source material; but this guy does seem to be much more of a stickler on that point, despite his assurances to the contrary.

He's mad that some jokes have been cut -- good jokes, to be sure, on the written page, but who knows if they'd play on the screen? I think this is just an overinsistence on perfect fidelity to the books:

That's why there are so many wonderfully quotable lines in Hitchhiker's Guide, most of which are notable by their absence from the film. There are, astoundingly, individual phrases and even words that have been removed. For example, in the Vogon poetry scene which, like Prosser's confrontation, is now so short as to be utterly pointless, ArthurÂ’s line "counterpoint the surrealism of the underlying metaphor", a brilliantly crafted piece of faux literary critique, has become "counterpoint the underlying metaphor." How is that justified? Did someone try to keep the film under two hours by crossing out some of the long words?

Well, yes, I guess the original is slightly better, but I can't see the great travesty in shortening it to the latter. It's the same joke, basically-- it doesn't matter what Arthur says, he's talking off-the-cuff po-mo gibberish in any case.

But this guy opines:

And this film, I'm very sorry to report, is bad.

Really bad. You just won't believe how vastly, staggeringly, jaw-droppingly bad it is. I mean, you might think that The Phantom Menace was a hopelessly misguided attempt to reinvent a much-loved franchise by people who, though well-intentioned, completely failed to understand what made the original popular - but that's just peanuts to the Hitchhiker's movie.

Worse than The Phantom Menace? Sounds like a difficult trick. But perhaps it's best to begin lowering expectations. Maybe if they're lowered enough, the film will seem pretty good.

Thanks to Knemon. He tipped me to the interview to point out that "gob-smacking" isn't just something He Who Will Not Be Named made up. But of course not, Knemon; HWWNBN isn't terribly creative. It's a fairly standard bit of British slang.

Posted by: Ace at 08:49 PM | Comments (42)
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And yet Bush, that coward, thought it prudent to stay away from DC until after all planes were grounded.

Where did this snivelling yella-belly ever get the idea that the White House might be on a list of terrorist targets?

And... A DHS agent says that actor James Woods' well-publicized air-scare wasn't just paranoia -- he was on a "dry run" with none other than Mohammad Atta.

Posted by: Ace at 08:31 PM | Comments (12)
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I was very late in seeing this story; gee, I really ought to try reading some blogs sometime, huh?

Rick Santorum wants do delay attempting the "nuclear option" to break filibusters, based on bad polling:

Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), a leading advocate of the “nuclear option” to end the Democrats’ filibuster of judicial nominees, is privately arguing for a delay in the face of adverse internal party polls.

Details of the polling numbers remain under wraps, but Santorum and other Senate sources concede that, while a majority of Americans oppose the filibuster, the figures show that most also accept the Democratic message that Republicans are trying to destroy the tradition of debate in the Senate.

The Republicans are keeping the “nuclear” poll numbers secret, whereas they have often in the past been keen to release internal survey results that favor the party. David Winston, head of the Winston Group, which conducts Senate GOP polls, did return phone calls seeking comment.

Confirming public disquiet over the “nuclear” or “constitutional” option, Santorum said, “Our polling shows that.” But, he added, public thinking had been muddied by what he called false Democratic arguments that checks and balances were being eroded.

...

SantorumÂ’s raising of reasons that Republicans should delay the constitutional option may surprise conservative activists who count him as one of the most passionate advocates for the tactic in the Senate.

“There is no doubt that Santorum was the backbone of this from the very beginning, and he continues to be,” said Manuel Miranda, head of the National Coalition to End Judicial Filibusters, an alliance of more than 200 conservative groups working on the judges issue.

Many Republicans and conservative activists had thought the Senate GOP leadership would trigger the tactic next week to end the judicial filibuster. The nominees considered most appropriate for such a historic procedural maneuver, Priscilla Owen and Janice Rogers Brown, are expected to be discharged from the Judiciary Committee later this week.

I never really thought they'd have the stones to do it.

The only reason I thought they might is because the current situation is simply intolerable, and they must realize there will be a mighty political price to be paid for inaction.

The Republican Party

Because if you're stupid enough to keep voting for us for no good reason, we're smart enough to continue providing you with no good reasons for doing so.

Outside the Beltway tries to be understanding about this.

Captain's Quarters doesn't.

Thanks again to The National Journal's Blogometer... sure wish I knew the URL.

Posted by: Ace at 10:49 AM | Comments (39)
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Well, not "fingered." But he has been identified, at least.

Powerline reports it's Teddy Kennedy's brother-in-law Raymond Reggie.

A Kennedy kin named Raymond Reggie? Hmmmm... doesn't sound like the sort of person to be mixed up in shady financial deals and then flip as an FBI informant.

Thanks to The National Journal's Blogometer, which I really would like to link, but the guy won't provide the URL of his site in his updates.

Posted by: Ace at 10:41 AM | Comments (4)
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There's no point in linking something Insty just did, except to provide a forum in which to express anger:

The Canadian company that Saddam Hussein invested a million dollars in belonged to the Prime Minister of Canada, canadafreepress.com has discovered.

Cordex Petroleum Inc., launched with SaddamÂ’s million by Prime Minister Paul MartinÂ’s mentor Maurice StrongÂ’s son Fred Strong, is listed among MartinÂ’s assets to the Federal Ethics committee on November 4, 2003.

...

Yesterday, Strong admitted that Tongsun Park, the Korean man accused by U.S. federal authorities of illegally acting as an Iraqi agent, invested in Cordex, the company he owned with his son, in 1997.

That's what Insty quoted. Wait, it gets a little bit worse:

According to the todayÂ’s New York Sun, "the next chapter in the United Nations crisis may erupt over U.N. investigator Paul VolckerÂ’s membership on the board of one of CanadaÂ’s biggest companies, Power Corporation, since a past president of the firm, Canadian tycoon Maurice Strong, is now tied to the oil-for-food scandal."

The missing facts are: Not only are Volcker and Strong hooked with the ties that bind to Power Corporation Inc., a company under investigation in the oil-for-food scandal, Prime Minister Paul Martin was launched into the business world with Canadian Steamship Lines by Paul DesmaraisÂ’s Power Corporation Inc. and his predecessor Jean ChretienÂ’s daughter, France is married to Paul DesmaraisÂ’ son, Andre Desmarais.

Now I just have to wait for VonKreedon to explain why Tom DeLay's everybody-does-it golf excursions (well, they *do* all do it!) are so much more important that world leaders taking what look an awful lot like million dollar bribes from Saddam Hussein.

Okay, let's not call them bribes. Let's call them "let's get to know each other and be friendly and have united interests together" payments-in-kind.

Posted by: Ace at 10:31 AM | Comments (9)
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Information, as they say, wants to be free. Another way of saying that is that information is a dirty dirty three-tooth whore whose idea of a fancy night out is a quick one in an alley containing fewer than forty rats.

I'll be the first to say it: Damn, those "patterns" look supsiciously like the large carvings at Lake Titicaca (giggle) near Nazca, Peru, which we all know were actually drawn by alien visitors, according to Erik Von Danekan's blockbuster Chariots of the Gods. This one looks like an alligator or a ship or... something.

Actually, I guess it doesn't really look like anything at all, which is simply further proof that aliens were involved in its design. If humans had designed it, it would look like something earthly, right? Makes sense to me.

Ergo: aliens, doodling something that only exists on some faraway planet. Perhaps it's intended as some numinous "pictogram" depicting a strange desert airbase complex on their homeworld.

I don't know. I don't do this for a living.

*Where? You guys are getting bad at this game.

By the way, the last one -- "I'm not making this stuff up" -- was from Apollo 13. An engineer says it in annoyance when he's questioned about how little power is available on the stricken spacecraft.

Posted by: Ace at 09:32 AM | Comments (32)
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What a shockingly novel theory of that Constitutional right, huh?

RedState says there is bipartisan support -- Harry Reid cosponsoring with Tom Coburn? -- to actually protect those who opine on the Internet from fines and maybe even jailtime.

Via Insty.

Posted by: Ace at 08:25 AM | Comments (1)
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Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-CA) Said She's Got "More Important Things To Ask About Than This Silly Social Security Thing."

"Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Calif.) managed to stir up some trouble last week at the Joint Economic Committee hearing chaired by Rep. Jim Saxton (R-N.J.). Testifying before the committee was Harvey Rosen, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. Sanchez was evidently fed up with the contents of the hearing. 'I've more important things to ask about than this silly Social Security thing,' she said." ("Capital Living," The Hill, 4/20/05)

Now, if I were a Democrat, or He Who Will Not Be Named (who is, I guess, a Democrat, noises to the contrary notwithstanding), I would react with outrage and possibly even feel heart-ache.

But I am not, in fact, an 80 year old proper lady in the antebellum South swooning upon seeing a fly in the sugar-jar, so I won't react with that sort of effeminate emotionalism. I'll just call her an unqualified jackass and be done with it.

From a partisan source I'm not supposed to be coordinating with.

But I'm not coordinating with them. I'm just lazy.

That's my defense.

Posted by: Ace at 07:49 AM | Comments (12)
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