"someone" says I can't let this pass without linking this story.

AN Essex girl may be the first lady with a tongue stud to have set her sights on the White House. The wife of Dennis Kucinich, a left-wing Democratic congressman and 2008 presidential candidate, is a 29-year-old hippie chick from Upminster at the end of London UndergroundÂ’s District line.

...

A 6ft tall willowy redhead who has been compared to Arwen Evenstar, the Lord of the Rings character, she towers over her diminutive husband. “Who cares?” she said in an interview. “I like wearing high heels so I’m used to being taller than most men I stand next to.”

Nor is she bothered by their 31-year age difference. “I have never noticed it at all,” she said. “Dennis is a very mature but young-at-heart gentleman and we complement each other.”

Kucinich met her husband-to-be two years ago when she visited his office in the House of Representatives with her boss as a volunteer worker for the American Monetary Institute, an offbeat group dedicated to reforming the “unjust monetary system”.

It was love at first sight for both of them....

He was mesmerised to receive a business e-mail from Harper with her usual signature line from Kama Sutra....

From the Players Handbook, Chapter Three: Races
l to r: Halfling, Elf

I don't think she's all that like some guys do -- she's got that look I call "Bad Irish" -- but obviously she's a believer in the Ugly Guys Try Harder theory.

Or she's just a super left hippy.

If it weren't for super left hippy chicks giving it up to guys just for mouthing leftwing platitudes, I swear, this country would be 80% conservative.

Loose hippy chicks and leftwing rock and roll "rebels" are pretty much responsible for creating and sustaining 90% of the liberals in this country.

Posted by: Ace at 11:46 AM | Comments (59)
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Going all Dave Barry:

I. (7) (3.14) There shall be a fence stretching 356 miles. The fence shall be three feet high. Paper mache crocodiles shall reside on the other side, arrayed in a threatening manner ($400,000 shall be appropriated to determine the optimum angle of the opened jaw; the final crocodile shall represent a consensus among herpetologists, and reflect a crocodile who is defending his position but showing his teeth to warn off, and not necessarily threaten violence.) Every nine miles, there shall be a sign that reproduces the FBI warning that precedes all DVDs and videotapes and warns of criminal liability for breaking the copyright law. (It has worked so well thus far the language might as well be used intact.) The fence shall be raised to four feet in the event the population of any state becomes 51% undocumented Xenonationals. The fence shall be raised to five feet in the event GOP presence in the Senate drops below 4 seats. The fence shall be raised to ten feet after a nuclear device is smuggled in from Mexico, providing the yield of the bomb is at least 4 (four) kilotons. A bomb with a yield between 3 and 3.99 kilotons will be a sufficient trigger to raise the fence only if the attendant radiation is carried by prevailing winds a distance greater than 20 miles.

Look, it's the best compromise we can get, so why are you bitching?

Lilieks goes on to punch up an MSM dope who wants to see "credentials" of bloggers not reporting news or analyzing military strategy but merely... reviewing books and movies.

What a singularly inappropriate field in which to assert the privileges and prerorgatives of credentialism.

We need to see their credentials. And they need to prove, not merely assert, their right to an opinion.

Surely this sounds harsher than the author intends; surely he does not want the Reading Public to resemble a nestful of hungry hatchlings, throats wide and beaks open, trembling in anticipation as Mama Reviewer settles down to throw up a meal of expertly digested, credentialed worms into their gullets.

The lack of critical faculties asserts itself rather quickly, you know. No one tunes in daily to read fanboy raving, unless theyÂ’re also a fanboy, raving. If thatÂ’s the case, itÂ’s unlikely theyÂ’re in the market for finely-tuned ruminative lit-crit, anyway. They want someone else to shout how AWESOME book nine of the STELLAR FIRE: WARFIRE AT FIRE STAR series is, even though Commander Xhonuff dies at the end although heÂ’ll probably come back because he had the clone-chip upgrade at the end of book six, right?

Prove our right to an opinion? On books? On movies? On TV shows?

There's a fine line between stupid and clever, and there's an even finer line between stupid and pathetic defensiveness verging on self-parody, and I think he walked right over the border to do the job of reviewing shit that Americans just won't do.

You want to see my credentials, Mate? Okay, here's my goddamned credentials:

Little Miss Sunshine is a beautifully acted, wholly original and entirely unexpected treat that tugs at the hearstrings even as it tickles the funny-bone. Alan Arkin was so funny in playing the not-even-remotely-cliched Old Dude With Strangely Antisocial Habits that I swear if he were within arm's reach of me I'd grab him firmly by the cock and and begin masturbating him with the manic repetitive fury of a malfunctioning industrial robot.

There. That seems to satisfy the Minimum Entry Requirements for professional critics -- or, perhaps they'd like to give their rather mundane occupation a more impressive name, like Certified Public Aesthetician and Textual/Cinematic Engineering Consultant (CPATCEC).

Thanks to "someone."

BTW: Of course I'm a fan of Alan Arkin.

And of course I'm a fan of the Old Dude With Strangely Antisocial Habits type. It's often very funny.

But... um... given that this now-stock comic type has appeared in virtually every Adam Sandler movie, every Allen Covert movie, every David Spade movie, every Ben Stiller movie, and every, um, Dodgeball movie... can reviewers kind of, you know, stop pretending that the Alan Arkin character here was some kind of "refreshingly original" comic creation?

I think this character type is now pretty much played out (thought inventive comic minds can always come up with some new unexpectedly antisocial habits for the elderly, and make it work again -- Shirley Jones' claim in Grandma's Boy that she "invented the handjob" was a nice new addition to the trope).

But, um, Professional Movie Critics? This really hasn't been "refreshing" since Happy Gilmore, and it wasn't even original when Dana Carvey did his hilarious impersonation of Jimmy Stewart recounting the details of his unexpectedly criminal/murderous life ("I spent seven months in Tijuana shacking up with a thirteen-year-old whore in a haze of Tequilla and mesc, waking up in pools of my own sick and the blood of men I couldn't even remember killing" -- now just imagine that in an exaggerated old-dude Jimmy Stewart accent).

It often works, but that's not really the same as being original.

And the fact that you think a comedy staple is "original" kind of casts some degree of doubt on your claims of special expertise, doesn't it?

Oh... CAD Daddy notes that Jack Nicholson has been playing this stock character more or less exclusively for twenty years in all of his movies, and also, pretty much, in his actual life.

Posted by: Ace at 11:06 AM | Comments (31)
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JackStraw sends this good news. Maybe some of these women only interested in dating ugly, sexually incompetent men, too. The double-plus.

Some of you may benefit from this. Me? I'm still waiting on a truly egalitarian sexual market, where the Oppressive Gynarchy no longer forces impossible standards of male beauty and basic hygiene on my gender.

MEET the women who find rippling muscles and chiselled good looks a complete turn-off.

Slicking on another layer of lipgloss, Selena Maria slings her bag over her shoulder and struts into the bar.

A sea of dark, handsome heads turn to ogle her. Jaws drop and good-looking men raise their eyebrows or move in to offer her a drink.

But Selena walks on by. She only has eyes for one man. He’s waiting for her in a dark corner. He’s not one of the handsome guys in sharp suits. He’s not even ‘average’.

HeÂ’s bald and podgy, with a pock-marked face, and is easily the ugliest man in the room. She sidles into the chair next to him.

‘Hi, gorgeous,’ she purrs. The man’s gargoyle face breaks into a toothless smile.

The Mother Theresa of Pooter.

The good-looking men know they donÂ’t stand a chance.

Selena has dated her fair share of hunks, but has given up on gorgeous guys because they’re dull – both in and out of bed.

‘I can’t imagine anything more boring than classic handsome looks,’ she says. ‘I prefer no teeth, baldness and piercings to model looks. I like celebs such as Adrien Brody and Mackenzie Crook rather than Brad Pitt.

‘Ugly men try harder. They care more about you and treat you like a princess. Good-looking guys are self-obsessed. That’s not attractive.’

And Selena is not alone. In a recent study, sociologist Diane Felmee found only a third of women said looks were the first thing that attracted them to a man. Most preferred a sense of humour or financial and career success.

Researchers at Newcastle University also believe ugly men exist as a way of repairing our gene pool. Women would rather date men with good genes, who can fight disease easily, than a classically beautiful man.

"A sense of humor or financial and career success"?

I have a feeling that the latter just might be the driving criterion there.

Then again, this cat doesn't look like a white-shoed hedge-fund manager to me:

Must be the sense of humor working there. Combined with dosing chicks with near-lethal amounts of peyote.

Thanks to Slublog for the screen caps.

Posted by: Ace at 10:06 AM | Comments (51)
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Fuck you, I know everything there is to know!

Oh, wait, I didn't know that.

My bad.

Fuck you anyway, buddy! I served in 'Nam!

Kaus notes:

Even if they now stick the "back taxes" provision back in to avoid throwing what McCain calls "fuel on the fire," that's not the point. The point is that Bush has repeatedly used the "back taxes" argument to sell his plan, yet he took it out--in other words, you can't trust him to do anything he's promised to do when it comes to burdening illegal immigrants. As Krikorian says,

the president is opposed — morally and emotionally repelled — by the idea of enforcing the border with Mexico. It's just uncompassionate, in his view, and nothing's going to change that ...

Oh, be silly, you! Haven't you heard-- part of Bush's scary-effective "enforcement trigger" plan is to purchase four -- count 'em, four!!! -- unmanned aerial reconnaisance drones to patrol the entirety of the southern border.

Four! That's one whole UAV for each state bordering Mexico!

Suck on that, bigots!

Another Kaus tidbit: Don't think the lefties are going to take this bill for being not-quite-generous enough. One, they know that what little there is in the bill about enforcement, or being tough about chain-migration, will quickly be taken out.

Two, they know this is the last shot they'll ever get at this. They desperately don't want do this unilaterally, and they have -- for the last time in a long time -- a Republican President willing to give them a schmear of bipartisan cover.

They know they'll never again be in a position to force an unpopular plan down the throats of a hostile American public with the political mitigation of being able to say "Even the Republican President supported this."

In fact, if they push this through, they might never again be in a position where they even have to deal with a Republican President again....

Bonus! Increased Immigration Depresses Wages For Poorer Blacks, Results in Greater Rates of Crime and Incarceration: Well, gee, now I don't know how I feel about this.

On one hand, it will destroy the economy. On the other hand -- more blacks in poverty and/or jail!

...a 10 percent rise in immigrants in a particular skill group significantly trimmed the wages of black and white men alike.... Beyond that, however, the black-white experience differed markedly, especially for low-skilled workers. Take employment rates: from 1960 to 2000, black high school dropouts saw their employment rates drop 33 percentage points –– from 88.6 percent to 55.7 percent -- the authors found in their analysis of census data from 1960 to 2000. The decrease for white high school dropouts was only roughly half that –– from 94.1 percent to 76.0 percent.

One reason, the authors argue, is that black employment is more sensitive to an immigration influx than white employmentÂ….

That same immigration rise was also correlated with a rise in incarceration rates. For white men, a 10 percent rise in immigration appeared to cause a 0.1 percentage point increase in the incarceration rate for white men. But for black men, it meant a nearly 1 percentage-point rise.

Why would a boost in immigration effectively put more men, especially black men, behind bars? The authors put forward a straightforward theory: immigration causes wages and employment to fall for black workers. When this happens, some of those workers –– especially those with the lowest skills -- turn to crime to increase their income. …

The authors stress that immigration is only one factor in the worsening labor situation of low-skilled African-American men. "The 1980-2000 immigrant influx, therefore, generally ‘explains' about 20 to 60 percent of the decline in wages, 25 percent of the decline in employment, and about 10 percent of the rise in incarceration rates among blacks with a high school education or less," they write.

That's a damn hard call to make. I'm torn. I mean, I want to live in a lily-white country walled off from the Brown Peril, but I need to have all those additional black men in the slammer...

What a masterstroke -- adding thirty million new lower-wage workers in need of lifelong government assistance, while making life appreciably more difficult for those lower-wage workers we already have.

Posted by: Ace at 09:49 AM | Comments (41)
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The American Association of Retired Persons* is pretty much the most powerful lobbying group in the country. The infamous Zionist/Jew-banker lobby has learned less about manipulating the levers of government than AARP has forgotten.

Is the group actually nonpartisan? Or is it a lobbying arm of the Democratic Party? Given that the amnesty plan threatens to remove hundreds of billions of dollars from the Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid system that would otherwise go towards current Americans at retirement, you'd think they'd have something to say about this.

They definitely had something to say when Bush proposed a trillion-dollar reform to the system. And the amnesty plan is approximately at that level of impact.

As CBS News Correspondent Dan Rather reports, the group most responsible for opposing the President's social security reform plan is the AARP.

...

And that's a lot of people. The AARP has more than 35 million members, making it the largest organization in the United States after the Catholic Church. It is a three-quarters-of-a-billion-dollar-a-year business. And, it's one of the most powerful lobbying groups in Washington.

The AARP has become a remarkable marketing and political machine.

...

AARP is now waging a much bigger political battle, with much higher stakes: It is fighting Mr. Bush's plan to overhaul Social Security.

The president wants to let workers put some of their Social Security taxes into private retirement accounts. The theory is people will make more from investing in stocks and bonds than they would get in Social Security benefits.

The Washington buzzword for this kind of change is "privatization," and it's the ultimate taboo at AARP, where they believe Social Security should remain a guaranteed pension for all.

"We do not favor the idea of taking money out of Social Security to create private accounts," Novelli states flatly. Â… It would introduce all this risk into a system that doesn't need risk. Â…To introduce risk into the bedrock retirement system of the country is not a good idea."

So AARP strongly opposed the "risk" of shifting billions of dollars away from current retirees to younger workers to set up private accounts, and yet has nothing to say about shifting billions of dollars away from current American retirees to a large cohort of foreign nationals?

Why is that? Why is redirecting hundreds of bilions of dollars away from retired Americans towards younger Americans a cause for concern, and yet redirecting hundreds of billions from retired Americans towards non-Americans is apparently not worth commenting upon?

* Actually, they've dropped the name and just kept the acronym. But that's what it used to stand for.

Now, like KFC, it doesn't stand for anything. Supposedly.

Don't Expect Help From AARP: From a 2004 article:

AARP comes out against immigration measure [wait for it...]

The AARP is the latest group to come out against a contentious immigration question on the November [2004] ballot.

The Arizona arm of the influential seniors group announced Thursday it is coming out against Proposition 200.

Prop. 200/Protect Arizona Now seeks to deny state welfare benefits to undocumented immigrants. It also requires state agencies report illegals to the federal government and for prospective voters to show U.S. identification.

Business groups and now AARP oppose Prop. 200 arguing it will not stem illegal crossings because it is a federal matter and that state and local governments will have to dedicate money and resources to checking the immigration status of applicants for benefits and services.

So AARP frets about the scary-high costs of checking illegal immigrants' status, and yet doesn't mind actually paying big checks to illegal immigrants. Apparently the costs of the former may adversely impact retirees' benefits, and yet the costs of the latter are trivial, a pittance.

Sounds like AARP is guilty of a bit of ultra vires malfeasance (acting beyond or contrary to the stated goals and missions of the corporation).

The Bush Budget Blowout Bonanza: Although the deficit is growing smaller, just imagine what it would be/could be if all of Bush's proposals went through. Over ten years:

-- over a trillion in tax cuts

-- something like a trillion in additional non-military discretionary spending due to Bush's absolute refusal to veto a spending bill, resulting in rates of government growth three times as high as seen under the supposedly-more-liberal Clinton

-- something like a trillion in additional military spending

-- $1.3 trillion in transition costs due to setting up private accounts for younger workers (as Social Security payroll tax dollars can only be spent once -- the same dollar can't be spent on current retirement benefits, as it's being spent now, and also be spent to create individual retirement accounts)

-- $2.5 trillion in higher social spending for a very large new cohort of low-wage Americans requiring far more in government resources than they contribute in ttaxes

Add it up. That's a lot of jack.

Conservatives favor several of those items, of course. But no conservative can favor all of those massive spending/loss of tax collection provisions at the same time, at least not if he has any interest whatsoever in maintaining a close-to-balanced budget.

I thought the Social Security reform was a good idea myself. But I was always wondering where Bush expected that $1.3 trillion in transition costs to come from. Had he held the line on spending, it would have fairly unobjectionable to deficit-spend that amount. It would have strengthened the economy enough to almost pay for itself.

But given he was already deficit-spending due to a complete abdication on keeping government growth down... well, you've got to pick your shots, don't you?

Oh Really? Evan writes--

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but it seems like legalizing illegal immigrants would bring them into the system, allow them to pay their payroll taxes more than they do currently. And, I was under the impression that the vast majority of latin immigrants were of prime working age, since they're coming here mostly to do manual labor. More workers, paying more taxes, seems like a winning proposition for Social Security.

Winning? Well, first of all, no one pays more into Social Security than they ultimately get back. So, at best, it's revenue neutral. More people paying in, but more people now to whom Social Security obligations are owed.

But it's not even revenue-neutral. Family reunification -- which is permitted, and will continue to be permitted, don't kid yourselves -- insures that each low-wage worker will bring at least one or two (and maybe three or four) at-retirement-age or near-retirement-age parents and grandparents into the country, as citizens with the full rights and entitlements as any other.

Now, you don't get back more in straight Social Security or Medicare than you paid in. But there are social-safety-net programs that pay benefits to very poor Americans who have not paid much into the system, or anything at all. Means-tested payments (i.e., welfare for poor retirees) flow from the supplemental Social Security fund, and the poor can draw upon the means-tested Medicaid program (i.e., medical-cost welfare for poor folks).

Not only will most of the amnestied workers require money from those pools, drawing far more in government benefits that they ever paid in, but their elderly parents and grandparents, now also Americans citizens via chain-migration, will draw on those pools for ten or twenty years without every having paid a nickel into the system.

Anyone who thinks that bringing tens of millions of poor immigrant workers "into the system" will help Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid -- well, why not cure all of our problems and let a hundred million or so in? Really firm up our finances that way, huh?

In case anyone hasn't worked out the math, the rich are net tax contributors, the poor are net tax drainers, and somewhere in the middle class is the break-even point where someone is neither drawing on nor adding to the goverment's tax revenues.

Why on earth someone could imagine that adding millions upon millions of low-to-zero tax paying poor (often illiterate) immigrant workers to the nation's balance sheet would actually improve our deficit/Social Security situation is beyond me.

If you think that, you must get psyched when you hear that the "poor are getting poorer" or that low-income wages are stagnant.

Hey, more poor people -- a tax net-plus bonanza!

Correction: I overstated -- actually undermining my own argument via the overstatement.

I said no one could get back more in Social Security than they put in. That's wrong.

Laura beats me with the smart-stick:

Ace, you can definitely get more out of SS than you put in. Your monthly check is based on your lifetime earnings, and if you live long enough, you will certainly take out more than you personally put in, especially low income earners who are guaranteed a minimum benefit. It happens all the time.

Additionally, Social Security benefits are available to more than retirees. My daughter receives a small monthly benefit because my husband died. She's certainly received more than he put in, because he was only 22 and hadn't had time to put much in. People who are disabled also get benefits.

Yeah, I was wrong. The system was probably set up at one time to be revenue-neutral in terms of once-prevailing actuarial assumptions -- like dying only a few years after retirement -- but now people are living ten, fifteen, twenty or even thirty years post retirement, and yet the guaranteed benefit continues being paid to them, of course.

Plus, payments are goosed every year not just by the already-overstated cost-of-living-adjustment calculation, but by a little bit more than that, if I recall correctly.

Posted by: Ace at 08:40 AM | Comments (49)
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That's the nutroots' coming IAA, not mine.

The Left's Iraq Muddle

Yes, it is central to the fight against Islamic radicalism.

BY BOB KERREY

...

No matter how incompetent the Bush administration and no matter how poorly they chose their words to describe themselves and their political opponents, Iraq was a larger national security risk after Sept. 11 than it was before. And no matter how much we might want to turn the clock back and either avoid the invasion itself or the blunders that followed, we cannot. The war to overthrow Saddam Hussein is over. What remains is a war to overthrow the government of Iraq.

Some who have been critical of this effort from the beginning have consistently based their opposition on their preference for a dictator we can control or contain at a much lower cost. From the start they said the price tag for creating an environment where democracy could take root in Iraq would be high. Those critics can go to sleep at night knowing they were right.

The critics who bother me the most are those who ordinarily would not be on the side of supporting dictatorships, who are arguing today that only military intervention can prevent the genocide of Darfur, or who argued yesterday for military intervention in Bosnia, Somalia and Rwanda to ease the sectarian violence that was tearing those places apart.

Suppose we had not invaded Iraq and Hussein had been overthrown by Shiite and Kurdish insurgents. Suppose al Qaeda then undermined their new democracy and inflamed sectarian tensions to the same level of violence we are seeing today. Wouldn't you expect the same people who are urging a unilateral and immediate withdrawal to be urging military intervention to end this carnage? I would.

American liberals need to face these truth...

With these facts on the scales, what does your conscience tell you to do? If the answer is nothing, that it is not our responsibility or that this is all about oil, then no wonder today we Democrats are not trusted with the reins of power. American lawmakers who are watching public opinion tell them to move away from Iraq as quickly as possible should remember this: Concessions will not work with either al Qaeda or other foreign fighters who will not rest until they have killed or driven into exile the last remaining Iraqi who favors democracy.

The key question for Congress is whether or not Iraq has become the primary battleground against the same radical Islamists who declared war on the U.S. in the 1990s and who have carried out a series of terrorist operations including 9/11. The answer is emphatically "yes."

Wouldn't it be great if the American government had some sort of singular, national office from which a leader could make clear and convincing statements like this? Something like an analogue to the British Prime Minister.

That sounds a little foreign, a little parliamentary. What if we had some sort of national leader called a "Premier"? Well now that really sounds foreign, very Russian.

I don't know. I like the "Pr-" start though. If only we had some kind of high elected official like that capable of somehow communicating with the entire country.

Bonus: Hitchens on Jimmy Carter.

Leave aside Carter's newfound admiration for Ronald Reagan... and just concentrate for a moment on what he says about George Bush Sr. What did he say at the time? Many people in retrospect think Bush did a good job in assembling a large multinational coalition, under U.N. auspices, for the emancipation of Kuwait from Iraqi occupation. But Jimmy Carter used his prestige, at that uneasy moment, to make an open appeal to all governments not to join that coalition. He went public to oppose the settled policy of Congress and the declared resolutions of the United Nations and to denounce his own country as the warmonger. And, after all, why not? It was he who had created the conditions for the Gulf crisis in the first place—initially by fawning on the shah of Iran and then, when that option collapsed, by encouraging Saddam Hussein to invade Iran and by "tilting" American policy to his side. If I had done such a thing, I would take very good care to be modest when discussions of Middle Eastern crises came up. But here's the thing about self-righteous, born-again demagogues: Nothing they ever do, or did, can be attributed to anything but the very highest motives.

Posted by: Ace at 08:07 AM | Comments (21)
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Then again, I got it from someone who has no functioning sense of humor whatsoever (and no, I do not count "gibbering like a lunatic" evidence of humor).

Eh.

I saw a lot of interesting stuff on Hot Air and Instapundit. I would link it, but I'm tired. You know the URLs.

Posted by: Ace at 07:17 PM | Comments (31)
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His prepared remarks in testimony before Congress.

$2.5 trillion, baby.

Posted by: Ace at 07:13 PM | Comments (20)
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But you have to wear magic glasses to see the fine bold print.

There remain, however, some racists who will not be satisfied by anything less than the death penalty for illegals:

Thanks to steve_from_hb.

You know, that "No Independent Thought" one doesn't really make sense.

Posted by: Ace at 05:50 PM | Comments (51)
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I haven't known what the hell was coming on in the fall since I was a kid and -- I still feel shame about this -- would eagerly await the double-sized TVGuide Fall Preview issue and read up on just about every show, expecting almost all of them to be great.

Any action or adventure or cop or sci-fi show, I was convinced was going to be Star Wars. From 240 Robert to Supertrain -- yup, I was a little fat shut-in tv-watchin' dork paging through the TVGuide like it was glossy-paper porn.

The good stuff, I mean. Like Gent.

Anyway, here's a video preview of the shows. I can safely pronounce them all to be "teh suck."

The Cavemen (ABC, first tab) will be extinct in three weeks. They have failed to evolve and adapt to their changed environment of a sitcom, and they are doomed to be wiped out by more intelligent competitors, such as Flava Flav's new reality TV series, Pimp My Whore.

Pushing Daisies (ABC, first tab) will be pronounced dead on arrival. Apparently the networks are so starved for CSI knockoff forensic shows they've created a semi-comedy where the forensic scientist has the power to bring the dead back to life. So he can ask them how they died. Which seems to mean there won't be too many sexy gas-chromatography montages on this forensics-science show, or even much in the way of forensics science iof any sort. When you can just ask the dead girl who killed her, you really don't have to spend a lot of time fucking about with vials and centrifuges.

Not sure how they're gonna fill the remaining 42 minutes of the show. Maybe they'll just show costar Chi McBride washing his dick in the sink for a half hour or so. Appointment viewing, folks.

I'd've like to have heard the pitch for this show -- "It's like a cross between Six Feet Under and Bones!" Great, two fucking shows I refuse to watch in one. That means I gain an hour every time I don't watch this show. It's like Daylight Savings time coming every week, giving me an extra hour to sleep. Thanks, ABC!

CBS (second tab) has a show called The Big Bang Theory, which is about four dorky geniuses who have a super-hot blonde move in with them. You can tell they're geniuses because they have a giant double-helix DNA model standing in the corner like a frigging coatrack.

I liked this show better when it was on Showtime and it instead featured four super-genius hot chicks and one dorky guy who got to screw them all. Nymphobrainiacs, I think it was called. It was funnier, because they showed vag. Vag is always good for a chuckle.

Then they've got Jimmy Smits as a Cuban gangster who's really super big into sugar, pure cane. The show's actually called Cane, and no double-meaning is apparently intended. The clip tries to hook you with a riveting, passionate argument about (I'm not kidding) how sugar-based ethanol production is going to increase the value of their sugar holdings and thereby make the criminal enterprise rich.

Because, you know, all that fucking cocaine wasn't paying the bills.

I guess Jimmy Smits was willing to play a Hispanic gangster but didn't want to sully the reputation of Latinos by having anything to do with drugs. So instead his gangster family will be dealing with shady, dangerous buyers from the candy and soft-drink industries.

Oh yeah-- and ethanol industry, too.

For God's sake. I'm going to pitch fucking CBS my own series, all about an Irish crime family in NYC. It's called Spud. It's about the tensions between different generatons of criminals -- the wise grandfather, the neurotic father, the guns-a-blazing hothead son -- arguing with each other in their Hell's Kitchen walk-up while they stick tater tots up their asses.

Oh, PS, Jimmy Smits can't act. He's just tall. There's a difference, you know.

"The CW," or, as I call it, "that channel I skip over between QVC and the Knife Collector Network, from which I bought a set of six hundred tactical folders as well as a replica Triple-Bladed Sword from Sword & the Sorcerer (the first blade cuts the head off, the second blade pulls the neck-skin back taut, the third blade cuts across the suface of the truncated neck to insure the smoothest decapitation possibile)," has a Kevin Smith superhero show called Reaper which people will pretend is good but, as with most Kevin Smith stuff, actually sucks and isn't funny at all.

On NBC (fourth tab), we have a show "from the producers of the West Wing" (the down-home Emmy smell is baked right in), which seems to be about a San Fransisco reporter magically transported in time... back to 1987. Wow. Talk about high concept. 1987 was an era of magic and mystery, pirates and wizards....

They've been running this show for the past five years on VH1, where it's called Hey, Remember the Eighties? Really? So Do I, It Was Only Like Twenty Fucking Years Ago, Moron, starring Michael Ian Black and that the super-gay dude from Sex & the City. I imagine the new show will feature the same basic plot/structure, where the hero is confronted with artifacts from the remote past of 1987 and is compelled by mysterious government handlers to make not-funny-so-much-as-glib wisecracks about them.

A "comedic spy thriller" called "Chuck" has just about the lowest production values I've ever seen on a network TV show. It looks like an internet film. And it's about as good as the average YouTube lipsync video.

Finally, there's the Bionic Woman. Good news: Jamie Summer now has a bionic eye in addition to her bionic ear. Let's face it, that bionic ear was kind of lame.

The bad news? She also seems to have been outfitted with high-tech ultra-capacity bionic nostrils. Her first mission will be to track down her evil cyborg doppleganger, bratpack actor Judd Nelson.

Ugghh. I guess I'll have plenty of time for Warcraft and porn.

Thanks to Slublog.

In related news, Andy Richter of the cancelled NBC series Andy Barker, PI just emailed to say "Please kill me."

Update! Strangely enough, the ratings are in for all the new fall shows that haven't even aired yet. And the winnner is... The Courtship of Ron Paul, which earned a monster 19.4 rating and a thirty-share.

Proving once again that America has Ron Paul fever.

Posted by: Ace at 04:50 PM | Comments (67)
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