Anyone else have this problem? JackM. and I were just google-mailing -- suddenly this site, MyPetJawa, Junkyardblog, Lucianne, Hot Air and Instapundit were off-line or hard to load.

Not sure what's going on.

Posted by: Ace at 11:37 AM | Comments (18)
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At least that's how Nikki Finke reads it. I've never watched the show so I wouldn't know. She's hopping mad-- so mad about a television show that I tend to distrust her judgment. Even I wasn't this pissed about the Senifeld finale.

What a ridiculously disappointing end lacking in creativity to The Sopranos saga....

And if it were done to segue into a motion picture sequel, then that kind of crass commercialism shouldn't be tolerated....

There's even buzz that the real ending will only be available on the series' final DVD. Either way, it was terrible. Apparently, my extreme reaction was typical of many series' fans: they crashed HBO's website for a time tonight trying to register their outrage....

Chase clearly didn't give a damn about his fans. Instead, he crapped in their faces. This is why America hates Hollywood. Unlike some network series that end abruptly because broadcasters pull the plug without warning, The Sopranos has been slated for years to go off the air tonight. But instead of carefully crafted, this finale looked like it had been concocted in a day or two.

Etc. I have no idea what she's talking about. Most likely most of you do.

Posted by: Ace at 11:29 AM | Comments (87)
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Today, Senator Reid will attempt to invoke cloture (sound familiar?) on the Democratic led effort to have a Senate "No Confidence" vote on the tenure of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

If the Republicans were smart (heh) they would vote in favor of cloture.

You read me correctly: The GOP should support the Democrat's cloture vote.

They won't, of course. With a few exceptions (such as Arlen Specter), they will vote against cloture and the issue won't be brought to the floor. The Senate will then, I assume, return to the Energy legislation that was called up after the Immigration/Amnesty bill was pulled.

It's easy to understand why the GOP will oppose the cloture vote. They will perceive it as a vote to protect the current Administration from further public embarrassment.

What they won't perceive is the opportunity that this presents.

What would happen if the Senate invoked cloture? The remainder of this week would be spent doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING OF SIGNIFICANCE.

Are the American people going to be shocked to hear the Democrats in the well of the Senate bashing Bush and Gonzales for a week? No. Will they give a fig about the firing of the US Attorneys? No. Will they care if the Democrats ultimately grant Chuck Schumer's wish and pass a meaningless (in terms of substance) resolution of "no confidence"? No.

The fact is that the only person whose "confidence" Gonzales needs is President Bush's. The Senate could vote 100-0 in favor of the resolution, and it wouldn't mean jack squat except as another PR tool with which to beat a dead horse of an administration.

So why should the Pubbies vote for cloture?

A week spent on the Gonzales no confidence vote is a week not spent on reviving the Amnesty bill. It is a week, instead, in which the tolerant and caring Democratic Amnesty supporters (who have spent the last 3 weeks calling opponents of their bill racists) will be singling out for a unique form of criticism the highest ranking Hispanic in the Executive Branch. That's an interesting juxtaposition, is it not?

For opponents of the Amnesty bill, time is the most important asset. Everyday the Senate spends on trifles like the Gonzales resolution makes it harder to find the time to bring the bill back to life.

If I were the Senate Minority Leader, I'd tell my colleagues to go ahead and vote in favor of the cloture vote and, if they wanted to, to vote in favor of the Democrats resolution. Hell, for some Republicans it might be politically good to distance themselves from this dying administration on something. Why not do it on something meaningless? Who cares if the New York Times runs a story about a meaningless "bi-partisan effort" to rebuke Alberto Gonzales? I don't.

But they won't see it this way. They think they'll get more traction saying Harry "19% Approval Rating" Reid can't get anything done as another cloture vote fails.

I say they are wrong.

Posted by: Jack M. at 10:51 AM | Comments (10)
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Wow. Elections have consequences, eh? The UMP beat the Socialists by 46% to 36% -- a drubbing, to be sure, but in America, we'd still expect the losing party to have, well, something like almost half of Congress.

In France -- nope. A split like that can result in a 500-70 split.

I'm not being snarky when I say gerrymandering has its benefits. We want elections to mean something, but it's a bit scary when an 10% margin of victory can result in that sort of lopsided result. I happen to like this particular lopsided result; I'm thinking more about what would happen if the results went the other way.

It's good to see that in some ways, France and America are not so very different:

How does the Left swallow this resounding defeat? You guessed it! They blame it on the calendar, on the newly elected president, on the media, on the unbearable sorrow of their voters who can’t get over the fact that Ségolène did not win. They blame it on the voters, who don’t realize the terrible mistake they made in May and repeated in June. Sarkozy fooled them, the legislative candidates fooled them, Sarkozy’s program fooled them, the media fooled them into thinking that their candidates would lose so why bother? The Left is still shaking its fingers at voters and warning them of the dire consequences just around the corner.

Posted by: Ace at 10:41 AM | Comments (8)
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He blasts the first Bush here for ignoring Iraq's extensive terrorism connections and unending drive to get an atomic bomb, I mean.

Unbelievable. Watch, and be delighted.

Thanks to Douglas.

Posted by: Ace at 10:06 AM | Comments (30)
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It's Monday, which sucks. So how about a little lunch hour humor to lighten the mood?

From the Jimmy Kimmel show, This Week in Unnecessary Censorship:

And Tom Wilson, "Biff" from Back to the Future, is tired of answering the same questions over and over again:

Found the embedding link.

Posted by: Slublog at 08:44 AM | Comments (14)
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Naked cyclists ride their bikes through downtown Vancouver, British Columbia during the World Naked Bike Ride Day June 9, 2007. About 50 cyclists rode through the streets trying to bring attention to pollution caused by cars.

Pic after the jump, not safe for work, bare butts. more...

Posted by: LauraW. at 08:32 AM | Comments (25)
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This month the cover features this photo.
The big cover headline is:

This is one of those mornings when it feels really, really good to be troglodytic racist retard scum.**

Here's the article. I held off the vomit until this sentence:

We infantilize undocumented workers by relegating them to second-class status, and then we chastise them for being dependent on the nanny state.

I have actual work to do so maybe you guys can suffer through it. Help each other sound out the big words if you get stuck.

**70% of the US population, according to Rasmussen

Posted by: LauraW. at 06:18 AM | Comments (51)
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"Rightist" being a relative term in France, of course. The "right" proposes tough new reforms to employment law, like, if you walk into work and piss all over your boss' desk and then rub your dirty ass on his hat while pantomiming tea-bagging his daughter, you're required to clean the mess up within 72 hours. Borderline fascist stuff like that.

Wasn't Bush's economic Darwinism and neocon belligerency supposed to so alienate the world as to push them in the opposite direction or something?

Gee, it's almost as if not every trend in the world can be blamed on/traced back to Bush or something. It's as if there are millions and millions of independent actors whose decisions have almost nothing at all to do with whatever Bush may say about Iran or Iraq any particular morning.

I mean -- it's as if 99% of the world does not share the reductivist, Trutheresque One Ring To Bind Them All obsessions of BDS sufferers, such as the NYT editorial board.

Via Instapundit, who notes that Gore is finally taking his own advice and going green. Or rather "going green" -- actually not reducing his ecovillain footprint at all but taking counterproductive steps to help his political authority rather than the actual environment.

To The Victor Goes The Public Inebriation: Some say Sarkozky seems drunk here -- Allah says "hammered."

I don't know. He might just have a lot of odd quirky tics.

As a commenter pointed out -- he really does look and act a lot like Adrian Monk. So who knows.

Posted by: Ace at 02:11 PM | Comments (28)
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Sean, Jake, and Boston Irish all write to tell me that Al Pacino's villainous character in Ocean's 13 quotes the infamous, hilariously profane Paul Anka rant not once but at least twice.

Boston Irish sends this review quoting Pacino's character:

“I move, I move quick and when I do, I slice like a hammer. ”

-- Willy Bank (Al Pacino)

Jake says later in the film...

Al Pacino [says] to an event organizer: "No, it happens at 12 exactly. Don't make a maniac out of me."

Incidentally, two of the guys who saw it offer basically the same review: Eh, but a decent enough distraction for two hours. Which pretty much is what the whole series aspires to and mostly achieves (although the two-cute-by-half and too-complicated-by-seven-eighths Oceans 12 didn't really manage to satisfy that low ambition).

I have to admit the plot seems halfway fun (rig a casino so that everyone wins, and thus the villianous owner loses tons of money) and it's pretty funny seeing Assclown #1 and Assclown #2 in their silly seventies gay-porno moustaches.

Gay Vibe: Not that these movies are bad -- well, the second one wasn't very good at all -- but does there seem to be this super-duper gay vibe running throughout them?

Maybe it's just me, but all the cutesy banter between the dudes sounds a lot like the flirtation between romantic leads in a light screwball comedy. Throwing Julia Roberts and Catherine Zeta-Jones into the mix seems to me a lot like adding in the "Aunt Harriet" character in Batman -- just tossing in a random female here or there to reassure you you're not just watching a chaste gay romantic fantasy between Danny and Rusty and... whatever Matt Damon's character is named. "Stinky Pete" or whatever they call him.

Posted by: Ace at 01:35 PM | Comments (23)
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