for a Chicago area hospital in 2006?

Barack Obama.

You know who that benefits?

Michelle Obama, that same hospital's VP of Community Affairs.

I told you jokers this guy would be cake in the general election. Never, in my adult life, have I been prouder of my primary vote for Barack Obama.

Posted by: Jack M. at 01:31 PM | Comments (75)
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Whatever you do, guys, don't let your daughters grow up to be high-class call girls.

I just saw this on the show that used to be the John Gibson sow.

Wow.

Plus Penthouse is offering her big money, and she had that $100,000 offer for story rights yesterday.

Yeahhhhp... I guess all the women out there who worked/went to school/raised a family are feeling pret-ty damn good about their career decisions right now.

I'm feeling pretty good about my own.

But, hypothetically: There are rich, closeted gay dudes, right? I mean really rich. Like, for example, $4300 wouldn't mean much to them, right?

Will Other Hookers Jump Ugly? Gotta think there are a lot of high-price call girls in LA, DC, and NY right now with very high-profile clients who are pondering how much money they could make by dropping dime.

Posted by: Ace at 01:16 PM | Comments (53)
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Yup.

I'm so glad the UN stepped up to the plate for once and hounded this madman out of power using nothing but moral persuasion and subpoenas from the International Criminal Court.

God Bless the UN:

Mr. Bush sent in a contingent of about 200 marines to join 100 American troops already in Liberia, enough to persuade Mr. Taylor to flee. On Thursday, Mrs. Johnson Sirleaf sounded grateful.

“We thank God that the guns of war are silenced,” she said. “Our reconciliation process is under way, our people are beginning to sleep more soundly at night.”

Wait, what? How could our Marines do that? Aren't they overtaxed with their occupation of Berkeley?

Posted by: Ace at 12:37 PM | Comments (37)
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Feeel the embrace of moral ambiguity:

Eh. I consider Gerry Spence something of a fringe figure.

You know he's not a sell-out, man, because, hey, look at the fringe.

He looks about as natural in that cowboy hat & western ridin' jacket as Imus.

Posted by: Ace at 12:28 PM | Comments (50)
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Is that... Eric Roberts?

Or is it this guy?

Thanks to CAD Daddy.

Posted by: Ace at 11:37 AM | Comments (47)
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So let me get this straight: I can "buy" the Rembrandt for $49 million -- a sweetheart deal, I'm assured -- contingent upon my gifting it back completely to the museum I "bought" it from, instantaneously?

As skh says, some would call this merely a "donation," and a rather large one at that. But in Sweden, now, I guess this passes for a property transfer. The government starts out with it, you give the government a huge chunk of money, the government keeps it.

I know: You'll get a nice plaque saying you donated the painting.

Well, yes. College campuses are littered with such plaques but no one ever says anyone "bought" anything from the college, now do they?

I guess it's not a big deal. Just some fund-raising ploy that I'm sure some idiot (an oil sheik, I'm guessing) will go along with.

Still, it's a metaphor. Or a parable. Or something. I don't know, it's far too morally ambiguous for me to even contemplate.

When's Die Hard on again? I like when the Asian terrorist gets killed, because he stole the Baby Ruth candy bar and deserves to pay.

And I need that kind of reassurance of a world in which moral justice is swift and rides on the wings of 9mm bullet.

Otherwise I'm headed right back into the toilet for another two years.

Posted by: Ace at 11:20 AM | Comments (44)
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It's not that leftists are stupid per se. They're self-stupid, so absurdly lacking in self-awareness, self-criticism, or a sense of ego-puncturing irony as to be diagnosable retards in this area of cognitive development.

As they say: A gallon of irony spilled and not a drop splashed on The Guardian.

So, Mamet, having drifted rightward, can no longer write "morally ambiguous" scripts like Glengarry Glen Ross.

He's lost the ability, you see, to craft highly nuanced films such as produced by Michael Moore, Al Gore, or Robert Redford.

And he's lost this ability, it is feared, because he... changed his political beliefs. Thus becoming Lawful Evil as opposed to the Guardian's preferred alignment of Chaotic Good.

Well, there's some rich moral ambiguity on display right there, huh?

Incidentally, Glengarry Glen Ross is not morally ambiguous. It is morally bleak. It is a moral wasteland swept clean of any life by constant storm and drought.

There is not a single appealing or noble character in the film. One can argue that Shelly Levine is somewhat selfless, but he's not, not entirely, and further he's as pathetic and morally cretinous as the rest of them. Ricky Roma at first seems to be, at least, a normal human being, but that's entirely because he's just making a lot of money at the moment and so can afford to seem, outwardly, human. When push comes to shove, he'll screw over anyone to make his commission, too.

This isn't a major point, but morally ambiguous has a meaning. Juno is morally ambiguous. Glengarry Gleln Ross is morally quite clear: we're all monsters, or at least are capable of becoming monsters when under stress or when offered some nice leads and a Cadillac. There is little "ambiguity" about the moral universe described by GGR.

I have trouble recalling a single action taken in GGR that was "morally ambiguous." I'm pretty sure almost every single action and word was bad. No one, as far as I know, ever asks himself "What Would Ed Moss Do?"

Shouldn't a highly-nuanced art-beat writer at a pretentious British paper know the proper words for things?

Or is that just the nit-picking of a stupid troglodytic right-winger who can't appreciate films more complex or morally dark than Larry the Cable Guy?

Wait... Did this moron think GGR was "morally ambiguous" because it had some revolutionary message in it? Robbing the real estate office was striking a blow against the capitalist oppressors?

I have a feeling he might have.

In which case: Dude. Talk about tainting every goddamned work of art with a kneejerk political reading. I'm fairly confident that GGR was not written as a metaphor for Marxist direct action.

What an imbecile. Feeeeeel the nuance, baby.

Posted by: Ace at 10:56 AM | Comments (44)
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Compare the rather anodyne precis the NYT reported previously with Brian Ross' fuller account.

What, NYT? Were Wright's comments not juicy nor interesting enough to be worthy of printing?

Gee, they seem sort of interesting to me. One might even say incendiary.

The NYT usually reports on-- or at least used to report on, before Jews were officially lowered in the Ethnic Grievance Pecking Order -- arguably anti-Jewish slurs, and I'd have to say that stating that "Zionism" (wink, fucking wink) is animated by "white racism" at least qualifies as, well, worthy of reportage.

So I'd really sorta like to know why the NYT skipped out on a nice juicy scoop.

Tell me, NYT: Were you all absent the day they taught journalism in journalism school?

Thanks to CJ.

Posted by: Ace at 10:41 AM | Comments (22)
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Stay with it. The pyrotechnics are at the end.

But let it build like one of those toe-curling orgasms the delightful Ms. Beckinsdale was just so affably describing to us.

It's like Anchorman with old dudes. The guy with the glasses was one second away from being called a Smelly Pirate Hooker.

More Video Funny: Allah has quotes from the two years on the toilet story; and if you're still into it, Keith Olbermann is in full-on Hulk transformation mode over racism in the Democratic Party.

I dunno. I always click on those wanting to savor the stupidity, but my mind (and browser) drifts after three seconds. So I have no idea if this is good. I just can't watch it. He's like unwatchably awful Showgirls bad, not delightfully awful First Knight bad.

Oh, and speaking of the Hulk: Edward Norton was somehow given script approval for the next Hulk movie and is threatening to not promote the film unless his ideas are present in the script.

Edward Norton? A prissy, bitchy diva who's hard to work with and overconcerned with his integrity as an actor and as a human being and as a human being actor?

Wow, could not have seen that one coming.

Smart move giving him power of the script. Smart. I'm sure this Hulk sequel will do so much better than the first film now that it has a name actor attached. That's so crucial for popcorn genre flicks. Especially those where the main character is played by a videogame 'toon for two thirds of the movie.

And, you know, of the fifteen hardcore Hulk fans that exist on the earth, four of them are also hardcore Edward Norton fans.

So: Box office gold.

The New Hulk Trailer: Okay, what-ev-er. It looks... kinda good.

It helps that the Abomination seems to be the villain -- who's the only Hulk villain I know, apart from some big-brained mastermind type idiot whose name I don't even know. He should have been the villain in the first one, rather than that "Absorbin' Man" stupidity.

Anyway, looks not awful. Got Tim Roth and the dick from Dawn of the Dead in it. Liv Tyler too, but who cares, and she's no Jennifer Connelly.

I find the goofy self-help subplot -- psychiatrists, Zen meditation -- a bit non-superhero-ish, but I guess if you had a two and a half ton nine-foot green maelstrom of rage inside you, you might actually pick up a John Bradshaw book too.

But only in that situation, and in no others, would that be excusable.

Thanks to Z Ryan.

Posted by: Ace at 09:15 AM | Comments (46)
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Is it just me, or did anyone else get a bad "Al Cowlings driving the White Ford Bronco" vibe about Fox's overhead shots of Elliot Spitzer's Gubernatorial SUV driving from his apartment to the press conference yesterday? I swear to God, they really flooded the zone covering that story yesterday. Other than commercials, it was "All Elliot, all the time."

Yeah, I realize that NYC is a major media city in America, and Fox's HQ is right there in the middle of the whole mess, but for Christ's sake, it's not as if Elliot Spitzer is a hot blonde teenager who's missing in some third world vacation destination. Give it a rest already!

Posted by: Russ from Winterset at 08:29 AM | Comments (15)
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