But this involves a Democrat, so let's all keep it on the Q.T., savvy?

A Kentucky technology executive pleaded guilty Wednesday in federal court to bribing a congressman in charges stemming from an investigation of a Louisiana House member.

Vernon Jackson, 53, chief executive of Louisville-based iGate Inc., pleaded guilty to bribery of a public official and conspiracy to bribe a public official.

The congressman was not identified in court documents or during Wednesday's plea hearing, but documents make clear that the congressman whom Jackson admits bribing is Rep. William Jefferson, a Democrat who represents New Orleans.

Jackson faces a maximum of 20 years when he is sentenced July 27. The plea agreement calls for a sentencing guideline range not to exceed seven to nine years, but the judge is not bound by those guidelines.

Prosecutor Mark Lytle said Jackson paid roughly $360,000 over a four-year period to a company controlled by the congressman's wife in exchange for Jefferson's help promoting iGate technology in Africa. Jackson also gave the company a 24 percent stake in iGate and paid for $80,000 in travel expenses on the congressman's trips to Africa to promote iGate.

This is the same guy who demanded emergency-responders help him get into his NO residence to recover incriminating documents from his home, in order to avoid their recovery by feds investigating him for corruption.

Now, Duke Cunningham is a "scumbag," as the GOP acknowledges. This guy did the same thing -- with a bonus. He diverted critical emergency resources that could have been out saving human lives to help him avoid getting caught in a criminal investigation.

But notice the great din over Abramoff, Cunningham, DeLay, et al., and the relative media radio-silence on this one.

I guess the idea of a Congressman using emergency-rescuers to rid his house of incriminating evidence just isn't a juicy enough story to pique media interest.

Yeah, that must be it.

Thanks to Jack Straw. And thanks to KevinJ. for finding that previous story.

Posted by: Ace at 09:40 AM | Comments (10)
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At some point, you know, the prescription is overfilled.

Service, factory sectors accelerate again.

Activity in both the vast U.S. services sector and at factories accelerated more than expected, according to data on Wednesday that pointed to fresh economic vigor and the possibility of more interest rate hikes.

Most economists are expecting economic growth to slow from a torrid first-quarter pace of 4.8 percent, yet the latest figures showed no hints of slowing and appeared likely to keep the Federal Reserve leaning toward further hikes in interest rates. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said last week a pause in the rate-hike cycle was possible.

The Institute for Supply Management's services index rose to 63.0 in April from 60.5 in March as new orders jumped, confounding Wall Street estimates for a slowdown to 59.2.

In addition, the government reported new factory orders rose a stronger-than-expected 4.2 percent in March, beating estimates for a 3.5 percent gain, as demand for transportation equipment, computers and electronics proved robust.

Treasury debt prices fell and the dollar firmed against the euro after the data.

"It does suggest that the overall economy is improving and for the market it is part of the recent theme -- all the numbers are coming in on the stronger side of expectations," said Scott Brown, chief economist at Raymond James & Associates in St. Petersburg, Florida.

The headline is suprising: Data Show Economy Firing On All Cylinders.

There's a difference, though, between acknowledging a story and pushing it. They pushed the Clinton economic boom as Big Story Number One for three or four years; this, they grudgingly note, at most.

Posted by: Ace at 09:09 AM | Comments (6)
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A perennial bit of fun-- young people are stupid. And not just high school teenagers; we've come to expect them to be stupid, as we were stupid at that age ourselves.

A new study ups the ante a little bit and demonstrates that 18-to-24 year olds -- post-HS, post-college -- are dumb as stumps too.

After more than three years of combat and nearly 2,400 U.S. military deaths in Iraq, nearly two-thirds of Americans aged 18 to 24 still cannot find Iraq on a map, a study released Tuesday showed.

The study found that less than six months after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, 33 percent could not point out Louisiana on a U.S. map.

Some findings:

Fewer than three in 10 think it important to know the locations of countries in the news and just 14 percent believe speaking another language is a necessary skill.

Ummm... a "necessary" skill? For crying out loud; it's *not* "necessary" for most of us. It can be very *useful,* if you're in a business with foreign-speaking customers, whether here or in another country. But "necessary" just because we want to "experience other cultures"?

Typical stupidity that sort of makes one wonder about the rest of the poll. But let's assume it's not cooked.

Two-thirds didn't know that the earthquake that killed 70,000 people in October 2005 occurred in Pakistan.

Six in 10 could not find Iraq on a map of the Middle East.

That's pretty bad. If you see ten stories about Iraq, you see its basic shape and it sinks in. This means that six in ten 18 to 24 year olds haven't seen ten stories about Iraq.

Forty-seven percent could not find the Indian subcontinent on a map of Asia.

Well, it's not like it's a big country with a pretty obvious location or anything.

Seventy-five percent were unable to locate Israel on a map of the Middle East.

In fairness, Reuters reporters seem to have the same problem, though they are able to locate a nation called "that shitty little country."

Nearly three-quarters incorrectly named English as the most widely spoken native language.

Six in 10 did not know the border between North and South Korea is the most heavily fortified in the world.

Thirty percent thought the most heavily fortified border was between the United States and Mexico.

Hah. We wish.

Thanks to Darwin's Moustache.

Posted by: Ace at 08:48 AM | Comments (58)
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Uggghhh.

Whatever.

There's this thing they've been doing for years now. They keep giving M these silly lines that are supposed to indicate the movie is gritty or hard-edged or "dark" or somewhat realistic. They frequently play these lines in a trailer, to convince saps that this James Bond movie isn't going to be a cartoon.

The lines are always stupid and overdramatic and unrealistic. Would a covert agent's superior really say crap like "This job requires more than a blunt instrument" or "I want you to take your ego out of this"? One would imagine that a real exchange between agent and superior would be more matter-of-fact.

These unforgivably stupid M speeches have the effect opposite of that intended.

And the whole series can't figure out what it wants to be. Is is it a comic-action-adventure romp? Or some darker, more realistic spy series? The movies tend to start off with elements of a darker story and then, an hour in, James Bond is paragliding on an ice-floe as a laser-beam-induced tsunami is swelling up behind him.

Yeah. That's pure John Le Carre, that's what that is.

They should just pick a tone and stick to it. If you're going to be a whore, be a great whore. Don't put on airs.

James Bond's eye color has been variable (Sir Sean has brown eyes, of course) but his hair has always been dark brown or black. Now it's clearly blonde. Or light brown, tending towards blonde. They couldn't darken his hair up?

The only interesting thing in this trailer is the suggestion that this is supposed to be some kind of reboot of the series from James Bond's earliest days. There is a mention that Bond has been promoted; maybe they mean he was just promoted to double-0 status. Which would make sense, sort of, because Casino Royale was the first Bond book and, one presumes, his first big mission as a double-0.

Then again, this series is so creatively exhausted I doubt the film-makers would try something that even verges on interesting.

Apart from that, it's a lot of running around and shooting and generally stupid behavior.

Posted by: Ace at 08:12 AM | Comments (24)
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It looks good. It's Bryan Singer, so it will probably hit the right tone.

Couple of problems:

Kevin Spacey seems to be trying to recapture the magic of Gene Hackman's funny Lex Luthor, and I think that's a mistake. You just can't touch Hackman's Luthor, so it's not wise to try. Go the other way. Just making him chilly and megalomaniacal and evil. Not funny.

Superman looks like he's 15. Maybe I'm just getting old, but most people in this movie look like they're 15 to me. Including Frank Langella.

Hm. I guess I am getting old.

But it looks pretty good. Not really sure what the plot is -- Luthor has stolen some very advanced Kryptonian technology from the crystaline databanks at the Fortress of Solitude, but damned if I know what the technology does. If the trailer's any clue, it's a superadvanced... machine-gun.

Nah. Can't be that. But they do keep showing automatic gunfire as if it's the Big MacGuffin Machine.

We are definitely in the golden age of superhero movies. Batman Begins, the Spiderman films, Superman Returns, the incredible X-Man movie and the good if not great sequel... they're finally getting them right.

At least the big ones. And even the lesser superhero movies, while low-budget and often badly conceived, are at least attempts to make real superhero movies, not spoofs of them. Daredevil and Punisher were awful, but at least they were bad for understandable reasons (i.e., bad script, indifferent direction, low budget, Ben Affleck). They weren't bad because they just decided to become outright spoofs like the Burton-Schumacher Batmans and the last two (shudder!) Supermans.

Batman Begins, Superman Returns. Warner Bros. is getting all cute on us, huh?

They were seriously considering rebooting both series with a team-up at one point; I guess they realized that financially, that was kind of a dumb idea. (Why put out just one movie when you can put out two?) But who knows. Maybe one day.

Thanks to Dave at Garfield-Ridge.

Posted by: Ace at 06:11 PM | Comments (56)
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Why am I wasting your time telling you this?

Because I guess I'm just curious if anyone else remembers this movie. It's from 1982, with Scott Glenn, of all people, playing an American super-ninja (or something). It's got Seven Samurai favorite Toshiro Mifume in it, too. It seems that Mifume's evil brother stole his super-duper semi-magical samurai sword, and he needs a goofy-looking Scott Glenn to steal it back for him.

I remember seeing this as a kid, and thinking... "What the hell is this crap?"

Not a fondly remembered movie, but a dimly remembered one, and I guess that should count for something.

It's no Ostermann Weekend, though.

Update: A guy in the movie is playing a video game.. and it seems to be the arcade version of Spy Hunter.

Wow. What a nostalgia rush. If I just had a copy of Tomb of Horrors to browse through I'd almost be back in middle school.

Posted by: Ace at 04:51 PM | Comments (31)
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They now are partnering with MSNBC to promote Olbermann's show, with lefty bloggers linking a form to "sign up to watch Keith Olbermann" as if watching Keith Olbermann were a chore to be done each night like doing the dishes.

As if.

Doing the dishes only takes twenty minutes. And when you're done, hey, clean dishes.

Too bad the left didn't rally around Phil Donahue like this. They might have bumped his ratings up from an abysmal 0.3 to a merely dismal 0.5.

Watch Keith Olbermann

Like getting cornered in the showers in prison, it's only really painful the first time. After that, it's merely degrading and dehumanizing.

Thanks to Allah.

Posted by: Ace at 04:45 PM | Comments (20)
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You think this is all just silly. Well, of course it's silly. But the media actually give a shit about what Tim Robbins thinks. (And no, they don't care what YOU think.)

So this nonsense has had, is having, and will continue to have an effect on media behavior, pushing it even further to the left.

The left saw the media slipping from its control, and so they snapped back on its leash. And the media dutifully heeled.

Acclaimed American actor/director Tim Robbins blasted the US government's policy on terrorism -- and the US media's failure to examine it critically -- at a news conference in Athens promoting his stage version of George Orwell's "1984".

"We have right now a media that is willfully ignoring the high crimes and misdemeanours of the president of the United States," the star of Hollywood hits including "Mystic River" and "The Player" told reporters.

"Clinton lied about a blowjob, and got impeached by the media and Congress," Robbins said.

"(Bush) got us into (the Iraq) war based on lies that he knew were lies. ... His war has recruited more Al-Qaeda members than Osama bin Laden could ever have dreamed for ... yet no one in the media is calling for impeachment," he said.

That's Tim Robbins' notion of a truly fair-and-balanced media, one dedicated to the truth and facts only-- a media calling for the impeachment of a President. Not merely reporting on others' call for an impeachment; nor favorably treating those who are calling for such.

But openly agitating for it themselves.

So, when the hard left -- Morons Boehlert, Woolsey, Colbert, Maher, etc. -- claims the media is too "right wing," that's what they mean. "Too right wing" means "not actively lobbying for Bush's impeachment like the hardest-core of liberal poltical activists."

That's their idea of what an ideal media really should be, if it were brave and truthful enough.

Come to think of it, that's the media's idea of an ideal media, too. They just wish they could get away with that level of "truthiness" without being called nasty names by mean Republicans.

Thanks to Riehl World View, whose blog is, alas, down, or he'd have posted this himself.

Posted by: Ace at 04:09 PM | Comments (26)
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He's like Mike plus Larry the Urbanite raised to the power of a drooling Pinch Sulzberger multiplied by Jame Gumb.

It's like a train wreck. I didn't believe in space aliens before this, but "M.A." has convinced me. It is clear that this is his first week on planet Earth, and he's still getting the hang of "Earthspeak."

In the Colbert thread, of course. He's arguing that yeah, the media is super-duper right-wing, and that Phil Donahue's show was the HIGHEST RATED PROGRAM IN MSNBC HISTORY, but had to be taken off the air because of fear of offending the Bush Administration.

They've simply gone insane. They really have.

Yeaph-- Phil Donahue, RATINGS JUGGERNAUT!!!

Thanks to Jack Straw.

Posted by: Ace at 02:46 PM | Comments (72)
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Laddy writes to tell me the 3,000,000 rounds per minute Metalstorm gun will be featured on "Future Weapons" on the Discovery Channel tomorrow at 10.

So, check it out, if you care.

I always thought this gun, while cool, was kind of silly. I mean-- look, if you miss with the first bullet, what the hell good is 10 more rounds coming in on the exact same path? Yeah, I guess you can give it a super-fast rotation so that you can fill up a big swath of area with bullets, but ultimately does it really matter tha you've filled an area with bullets in .1 seconds versus 3 seconds?

I just don't know what the hell it's supposed to be used for. I think one video show it demolishing a wall quickly, but, um, don't we have much cheaper explosive shells for that purpose?

That said, still kinda cool. I want it in the same way I wanted a naked woman when I was seven-- no idea what the hell I could possibly do with such a thing, but I sure wanted to get my hands on it and give it a whirl.

Posted by: Ace at 02:20 PM | Comments (28)
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