Don't expect too much-- it's just an uninterrupted sequence of shots you've seen before in all the other trailers.

While I'm not as interested in this as I first was, there is at least some reassurance here that the hand-held camera won't be all that distracting. It's not as nauseatingly shaky as the camera in the Blair Witch Project.

Thanks to The Influence Peddler, swiped from AICN.

Opening tonight is I Am Legend, which is getting a lot of surprisingly good reviews (though also a lot of bad reviews; it's clocking in just barely under "Fresh" at Rotten Tomatoes). Here's a long trailer for that.

No "Ohhh, hell's no!" yet spotted, which means someone on this site loses a bet.

Stupid: Everyone's saying it's too dependent on CGI. For the backdrop I expected that. But just for the monsters, which are just vampires? Why do we need CGI for vampires?

These humanoids made by CGI and motion-capture technology are annoyingly fake creatures that add a risible element to an otherwise overly serious epic.

Why?

High Praise From NRO... Except For The CGI Monsters: What were they thinking?

If anything, it’s the action scenes that fail. In the middle of the shoot, Lawrence decided that his human zombies weren’t scary enough, and he got extra funds from the studio to beef them up with a hearty helping of monster-CGI. One almost wishes the studio had simply declines and used the money to throw some seven-figure birthday parties for their top execs. The difference in the creatures is marked, but not in a positive manner. Now, instead of merely seething and bearing their teeth, their faces contort and bubble as if every one of them is an undead Jim Carrey from The Mask. They move in packs and swarms that are suspiciously similar to those of the automatons that Smith fought off in I, Robot, as if the CGI artists simply recycled the same algorithm, but set for “zombie” rather than “robot.” Perhaps the original baddies weren’t terribly frightening, but these hardly provide the necessary menace. Every time the showed up on screen, I found myself wishing that Smith would simply go back to strolling around New York and talking to his dog.

Posted by: Ace at 10:14 AM | Comments (25)
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Rasmussen is out with their latest poll and Huckmentum is definitely spreading.

The latest Rasmussen Reports polling in the state of Florida suggests that Giuliani might need to work on a “Plan B.’ Mike Huckabee now leads in the Sunshine State Primary with 27% of the vote. He is trailed closely by Romney at 23% and Giuliani at 19%. Fred Thompson is at 9% in the poll, John McCain at 6%, and Ron Paul at 4%. Tom Tancredo and Duncan Hunter each attract 1% and 8% are undecided.

Those figures reflect a stunning change in the race since November when Rasmussen Reports polling found Giuliani on top with 27% followed by Romney at 19% and Thompson at 16%. Since then, Huckabee has gained 18 percentage points and Romney picked up four points. Giuliani is down eight, Thompson is down seven, and McCain is down four.

Huckabee has shaken up the race for the White House with an amazing surge over the past month. He now leads in Iowa and South Carolina. He is tied for the lead in Michigan and consistently near the top nationally in the Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll.

The only early state Huck doesn’t appear to be surging in is N.H. which is practically a home game for Romney.

Is anyone still comfortable writing Huck off as a bubble that will pop under it’s own weight? I think it’s time for one or more of the candidates to stick a pin in the guy by going negative on Huckabee. And by negative I mean point out his atrocious positions on everything from taxes and spending to his embrace of nannystatism. And don’t forget his naïve views on foreign policy and all the rest that’s been well chronicled here.

I hope Mitt’s got some harder shots in his pocket than his first ‘attack ad’ showed. My money is on Rudy. He’s too much of a brawler to go down quietly, especially to a snake oil salesman like Huckabee.

Posted by: DrewM. at 08:47 AM | Comments (156)
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Rasmussen is out with their latest poll and Huckmentum is definitely spreading.

The latest Rasmussen Reports polling in the state of Florida suggests that Giuliani might need to work on a “Plan B.’ Mike Huckabee now leads in the Sunshine State Primary with 27% of the vote. He is trailed closely by Romney at 23% and Giuliani at 19%. Fred Thompson is at 9% in the poll, John McCain at 6%, and Ron Paul at 4%. Tom Tancredo and Duncan Hunter each attract 1% and 8% are undecided.

Those figures reflect a stunning change in the race since November when Rasmussen Reports polling found Giuliani on top with 27% followed by Romney at 19% and Thompson at 16%. Since then, Huckabee has gained 18 percentage points and Romney picked up four points. Giuliani is down eight, Thompson is down seven, and McCain is down four.

Huckabee has shaken up the race for the White House with an amazing surge over the past month. He now leads in Iowa and South Carolina. He is tied for the lead in Michigan and consistently near the top nationally in the Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll.

The only early state Huck doesnÂ’t appear to be surging in is N.H. which is practically a home game for Romney.

Is anyone still comfortable writing Huck off as a bubble that will pop under it’s own weight? I think it’s time for one or more of the candidates to stick a pin in the guy by going negative on Huckabee. And by negative I mean point out his atrocious positions on everything from taxes and spending to his embrace of nannystatism. And don’t forget his naïve views on foreign policy and all the rest that’s been well chronicled here.

I hope Mitt’s got some harder shots in his pocket than his first ‘attack ad’ showed. My money is on Rudy. He’s too much of a brawler to go down quietly, especially to a snake oil salesman like Huckabee.

Posted by: DrewM at 08:47 AM | Comments (156)
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$112,000 in private gifts -- to Huckabee, from, um "friends" -- in a single year.

His defense? They never proved anything.

Bear in mind, this is the cat who piously ripped the tax-cutting Club for Growth as the "Club for Greed."

So while he's doing good works with the public's money, he's taking every hand-out offered to him by businessmen, lobbyists, advocates, and assorted other "friends." Hey, he's a charming guy, right?

I'm sure that in no way will the public associate the preacherman's love of donations to, say, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker's or anything. In no way whatsoever is he a stereotypical silver-tongued hypocrite grabbing all the gold and jewels he can with both hands.

Thanks to Lane.

Update (Slublog) - Culture of corruption?

But his career has also been colored by 14 ethics complaints and a volley of questions about his integrity, ranging from his management of campaign cash to his use of a nonprofit organization to subsidize his income to his destruction of state computer files on his way out of the governorÂ’s office.

Some of the ethics complaints deal with fairly penny ante stuff, and most were dismissed.

They did, however, yield five admonitions and $1,000 in fines from Arkansas' Ethics Commission and, perhaps more significantly, a pattern that strategists for two competing GOP campaigns privately predict could become fodder for attacks playing on the culture-of-corruption theme Democrats used to pound Republicans in the 2006 midterm elections.

More here.

I do not doubt the sincerity of Huckabee's faith, but I'm starting to have concerns about the discernment of those evangelical voters who continue to support him based largely on that faith while ignoring his record.

More - Rightwingsparkle: Huckapalooza!

Posted by: Ace at 12:14 AM | Comments (65)
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The US Military had a "temper tantrum," I guess ABCNews would say.

A wonderful temper tantrum. "Hundreds killed," not the 50 or so reported earlier.

As the only journalist to join NATO forces entering the town, I found it a ghost town abandoned by both the Taliban and its residents at the end of an eight-day coalition operation. The offensive was one of NATO's biggest in the country since Operation Anaconda in 2002.

Embedded with a team of British troops and a detachment/"A–team" of U.S. special forces, I watched the Taliban being pounded these last few days with overwhelming force -- vapor trails circled in the clear blue sky over the Helmand desert as B1 and B52 bombers backed by A10 tank busters, F16s, Apache helicopters and Specter gunships were used to kill hundreds of Taliban fighters.

...

Faced with a full brigade of NATO forces, a brigade of Afghan government fighters and the defection of a key Taliban commander, the Taliban chose not to flee at first but to fight a desperate battle.

I joined one feint attack of Afghan soldiers last Friday that came under fierce Taliban fire in a village on the outskirts of Musa Qala -- AK47s and heavy machine gun fire opened up on us as we advanced across open ground. The British and Afghans counterattacked backed by U.S. special forces who opened up with 50-caliber fire and by calling three F16 strikes and a B1 bomber strike.

On Sunday, as the 82nd Airborne advanced to take positions north, east and south of the town, I watched the sky being lit with large explosions from heavy ordnance dropped from the air to support the U.S. advance.

U.S. forces believe the Taliban were backed by a large strength of foreign fighters, including those linked to al Qaeda. Soldiers who I accompanied found one dead fighter whose notebook revealed he was from Pakistan.

While hundreds of Taliban are believed to have been killed, two British soldiers and one American soldier lost their lives. All the deaths, however, resulted from vehicles striking mines left not, it is believed, by the Taliban but by Soviet forces in the 1980s.

On Monday, after days of fierce fighting -- more ferocious than NATO commanders had expected -- the Taliban called it quits and fled the town.

Now you may wonder why a major victory in the, ahem, "Forgotten War" (the first forgotten war Afghanistan, and not Forgotten War II, Iraq) isn't being reported by the media.

It's because they're Patriots, buddy! They don't want to leak out the sensitive intelligence to the Taliban that they just got their asses kicked unholy. They might not know yet, so keep it on the QT, all right?

All hail the Patriotic MSM for its discretion. Huzzah, sirs!

Thanks to dri.

Posted by: Ace at 05:32 PM | Comments (35)
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People keep linking the live version, so here's the studio version. Which is less often heard, I guess.

The thing is, it's a fan-made video-- but it's a really good one. It makes me laugh at least.

Strong language warning.

UPDATE [Dave in Texas]: Bitches, know your limits more...

Posted by: Ace at 05:19 PM | Comments (16)
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According to the same criterion used by the Iowa paper which led to the Democratic ass-clowns Kucinich and Gravel being excluded.

So the debate was rigged to include a certified Republican Bozo, thus stealing time from, uhh, less florid candidates, while the Democratic version nicely excluded the non-entities to make sure the front-runners had all the face time they could possibly want.

Just an innocent mistake? Sure, probably. It's just something of a mystery to me how all these innocent mistakes consistently -- nay, uniformly -- favor the Democrats and disfavor the Republicans.

Posted by: Ace at 05:10 PM | Comments (14)
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Delicious.

What a bunch of... let's say "Nice Guys."

When Democrats took control of Congress in January, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) pledged to jointly push an ambitious agenda to counter 12 years of Republican control.

Now, as Congress struggles to adjourn for Christmas, relations between House Democrats and their colleagues in the Senate have devolved into finger-pointing.

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.) accuses Senate Democratic leaders of developing "Stockholm syndrome," showing sympathy to their Republican captors by caving in on legislation to provide middle-class tax cuts paid for with tax increases on the super-rich, tying war funding to troop withdrawal timelines, and mandating renewable energy quotas. If Republicans want to filibuster a bill, Rangel said, Reid should keep the bill on the Senate floor and force the Republicans to talk it to death.

Reid, in turn, has taken to the Senate floor to criticize what he called the speaker's "iron hand" style of governance.

Democrats in each chamber are now blaming their colleagues in the other for the mess in which they find themselves. The predicament caused the majority party yesterday surrender to President Bush on domestic spending levels, drop a cherished renewable-energy mandate and move toward leaving a raft of high-profile legislation, from addressing the mortgage crisis to providing middle-class tax relief, undone or incomplete.

...

Officially, House Democrats blame Senate Republicans, who have used parliamentary tactics to block even uncontroversial measures. But they are increasingly expressing public frustration with Reid and Senate Democrats for not putting up a better fight.

House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) called it a "hold and fold" strategy: Senate Republicans put a "hold" on Democratic bills, and Senate Democratic leaders promptly fold their tents.

Asked about his decision on government funding, House Appropriations Committee Chairman David R. Obey (D-Wis.) groused to the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call: "I'll tell you how soon I will make a decision when I know how soon the Senate sells us out." Senate Democrats have fired back, accusing Pelosi and her liberal allies of sending over legislation that they know cannot pass in the Senate, and of making demands that will not gain any GOP votes. Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) noted that, this summer, Reid employed just the kind of theatrics Rangel and other House Democrats are demanding, holding the Senate open all night, pulling out cots and forcing a dusk-till-dawn debate on an Iraq war withdrawal measure before a vote on war funding. Democrats gained not a single vote after the all-night antics.

"I understand the frustration; we're frustrated, too," Bayh said. "But holding a bunch of Kabuki theater doesn't get anything done."

Pelosi is of course perplexed.

"They like this war. They want this war to continue," Pelosi, D- Calif., told reporters. She expressed frustration over Republicans' ability to force majority Democrats to yield ground on taxes, spending, energy, war spending and other matters.

"We thought that they shared the view of so many people in our country that we needed a new direction in Iraq," Pelosi said at her weekly news conference in the Capitol. "But the Republicans have made it very clear that this is not just George Bush's war. This is the war of the Republicans in Congress."

Asked to clarify her remarks, Pelosi backed off a bit.

"I shouldn't say they like the war," she said. "They support the war, the course of action that the president is on."

"And that was a revelation to me," she said, "because I thought the American people's voices were so—and still are—so strong in this regard."

Nancy, dear, if you wanted a true popular mandate for surrender you should have actually run on that platform. Instead, you mealy-mouthed on it and, significantly, put forward many candidates in swing or red states or red districts who were significantly more hawkish that the netroots' Surrender Caucus.

And now you whine that the Republican minority isn't respecting the hypothetical mandate you refused to seek, seeking instead only power without any clear statement of your intentions as regards the war.

Posted by: Ace at 04:33 PM | Comments (47)
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Over in Dr. Helen's thread about Nice Guys, you can see me abjectly apologizing for a joke gone badly awry, if you care to.

Long story short: Matthew Yglesias and other lefties frequently say Instapundit gives "the Instapundit link of silent approval" to any and all posts he might link. And everything stated therein, and in fact everything else appearing on the blog. It's a silly charge they're always making, basically attempting to mau-mau him from linking anyone in the rightwing blogosphere. They don't want our dirty, hateful blogs linked by a high-profile blog, so they attempt to make an issue of the fact that he links this and other "hate blogs."

I mentioned that Dr. Helen had given "the Instapundit link of silent approval, which she learned from her husband" to the Nice Guy post, and apparently I did not make the ironic/joshing nature of this clear. I guess I assume everyone knows my reading habits as well as I do, and knows about this admittedly obscure bit of blog-baiting, which is a dumb thing to assume.

I guess it didn't help that I also accused her of aiding and abetting male pussy syndrome... though I meant this as comic overstatement about a low-stakes, just-for-fun sort of argument about sex and gender relations. Picking a fight, yeah, but in a silly way, over a pretty minor post.

Anyway, I really hate giving offense, especially when none was intended, so I'm apologizing profusely over there. Because I'm a Nice Guy Pussy.

No, seriously, because I hate the idea I've pissed someone off I didn't even mean to piss off.

Just clarifying, because I guess I was too deadpan and not obvious enough: I have not seriously declared a blogwar on Dr. Helen or anything. I guess I just relied upon the tongue in my cheek to be be visible on a computer screen.

I am, however, quite serious when I say that Hot Air "men" are 90% more pussy than AoSHQ readers.

(No, not really on that either.)

(Well, kinda.)

You may now all commence calling me a pussy.

I wear your scorn like badges of... well, scorn, pretty much.

She's Just Not That Into You, Dude: A lot of us guys made fun of girls for the huge success of this book, which delivered what should have been obvious news to many women mooning over uninterested men: He's Just Not That Into You.

Reading Dr. Helen's and Hot Air's thread, I'm wondering if the time isn't right for me to write She's Just Not That Into You, Either, Moron.

There are a lot of guys out there who still seem bitter that girls they liked didn't like them back... conveniently forgetting the likely significant number of women who liked them but whom they didn't particularly like.

Why blame women for the simple fact that pretty much everyone aims 10-50% outside of their baseline league?

Whining is a chick thing. Supposedly. We all know better -- guys whine like babies -- but still, let's all butch up here and just deal with it. Most of the girls we've mooned after the most were out of our league. And if we had been in their league, we would have spurned them, instead mooning after the next higher rung of female perfection.

It's the way it is for us, it's the way it is for them. It's life. It sucks. Deal with it.

Posted by: Ace at 03:54 PM | Comments (76)
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At first I considered this "too controversial" and "too political" to post on the blog, but after conferring with lawyers and advertisers I believe I can risk this.

The Gratitude Campaign Website.

Also, if this doesn't break federal campaign laws or put my blog license in jeopardy, you may wish to donate to wounded warriors returning home.

I apologize in advance to any readers horrified by these shrill, viciously partisan organizations.

Posted by: Ace at 02:26 PM | Comments (28)
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