A lot of critics will now praise Die Hard, as the film's critical reputation has grown over time to match what audiences knew from the start.

But don't believe critics on this point -- I remember reading critics knocking Die Hard as merely so-so, and knocking all the things you'd expect them to brainlessly knock (it's loud, it's shooty and splodey, Bruce Willis smirks, etc.)

Here's a specific memory I have -- Die Hard and Midnight Run came out not just in the same year but within days of each other. Die Hard came out July 15, 1988, and Midnight Run came out July 20, 1988, making mid-late July 1988 the greatest five day period in the history of big-budget action-comedy.

Anyway, I remember a reviewer reviewing the both in the same column, praising Midnight Run as a good spin on both the action movie and road trip movie genres, but knocking Die Hard as Just Another Big Explosive Actioner.

Absurd. I couldn't say which if these movies is better if you put a gun to my head, but to knock either one of them is to announce yourself as a tasteless idiot who doesn't judge the movies he sees, but only the genre. Midnight Run was acceptable, by this criterion, as it wasn't wholly an action movie, but was partly of a genre critics were permitted to like (the road movie); Die Hard must be inferior dreck, though, because action movies must be inferior dreck.

Point is, almost every critic is an idiot, and if they're now praising Die Hard, well, they didn't when it counted, when it opened. Yeah, now that they understand that the weight of opinion is decidedly against them they can rewrite their reviews to comport with Other People's Opinions; but aren't they selling their own opinions? If it takes them ten years of reflection to understand that Die Hard was an amazing piece of craft, what the hell are they even in the movie criticism business at all for?

At any rate, PJ media has a write-up noting that Die Hard just turned 25 last week. They've got a bit of trivia (it was based on a novel; did you know that? I've seen the movie 600 times and I don't remember a mention of a novel in the credits).

They don't seem to have remembered, then, that Midnight Run just turned 25 two days ago. Hopefully they'll rectify that.

Some sad news on the Midnight Run front: Former real-life cop turned scene-stealing actor Dennis Farina has died at age 69.

The mustachioed Farina was accustomed to playing characters on either side of the law, such Lt. Mike Torello on TV's Crime Story as well as mobsters like Jimmy Serrano in 1998's Midnight Run and Albert Lombard on Miami Vice. He had a fruitful partnership with that show's creator, Michael Mann, having also starred in his films Thief and Manhunter.

Sidney, get a sandwich, get a creme soda, do some f*ckin' thing or I'll stick this pencil through your heart.

Below, the original trailers and the films' signature themes.

more...

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At least 25 Iraqi security personnel killed in insurgent attacks aimed at liberating the terrorists.

Another prison, called Taji, was also attacked.

The prisons in Abu Ghraib and Taji house thousands of prisoners, including convicted al-Qaida militants. Exactly one year ago, al-Qaida’s Iraq arm launched a campaign called ‘‘Breaking the Walls’’ that made freeing its imprisoned members a top priority.

A surge of violence across Iraq has killed more than 3,000 people since the start of April, and the assaults on the prisons laid bare the degree to which security has eroded in the country in recent months. The spike in bloodshed is intensifying fears of a return to the widespread sectarian killing that pushed the country to the brink of civil war after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

Several officials, including lawmakers on parliamentÂ’s security and defense committee, said more than 500 inmates managed to escape from Abu Ghraib. There were no immediate reports of escapes from Taji.

Given the number of security forces killed, and mentions of gunfights lasting an hour, it seems that this is a bona fide jailbreak from the outside -- although, this being Iraq, you can bet there were confederates on the inside as well.

I don't understand why, in this sort of situation, the wardens just don't start immediately killing Al Qaeda prisoners.

Oh I know-- "But you're not supposed to." Well, you're not supposed to plot to bomb and shoot prison guards, either. So "Supposed To" is right out the window.

Posted by: Ace at 01:55 PM | Comments (178)
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A knock against the woman is that she's hired Gloria Alred to represent her, but hell, this guy is guilty as sin.

Via Politico:

Allred said that Filner had asked McCormack Jackson to “work without her panties on,” placed her in a headlock and told her that he wanted to consummate their relationship, among other incidents of harassment.

“Women were viewed by Mayor Filner as sexual objects or stupid idiots,” said McCormack Jackson, a former reporter who resigned from her position as communications director in June. “His behavior made me feel ashamed, frightened and violated.”

“For some of what we stated, there were witnesses,” added Allred, who called on Filner to resign.

Meanwhile, the San Diego Sheriff has set up a special hotline for victims of the mayor to report harassment/groping charges against him.

The hotline was set up Friday, and the sheriff said he already has some complaints, which he won't discuss.

I know exactly what you're thinking. You're thinking, "My goodness, the Field Marshal of the #WarOnWomen, General Nancy Pelosi, must be chompin' at the bit to weigh into this!"

Okay, prepare for shock -- she's not.

“I’m not here to make any judgments.”

She wants to leave it to the San Diego Democratic Party and California Democratic Party, the people to whom these allegations were reported two years ago but covered them up and, in fact, threatened one women with a blackballing if she didn't support Filner.

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Posted by: Ace at 02:57 PM | Comments (214)
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Feminist lunatic Amanda Marcotte is beside herself with joy:

But what about Feline AIDS?

Charles Cooke asks Marcotte if she has any self-awareness whatsoever.

At any rate, leaving politics out if this, Kate Middleton (why do we still call her 'Middleton"?) gave birth to a male heir to the throne. A name hasn't been announced yet.

Apparently there's some tradition of a town crier announcing such news. Here then the video, apparently of the John Pertwee-era Doctor Who disguising himself as a royal town crier.

Barack Obama graciously sent the newborn a signed copy of Dreams from My Father.

@benhowe caught the Marcotte tweet. Great catch. So perfect.

Thank you, Amanda, for providing your typical unhinged goofball stupidity. I've been looking at this stupid story for 40 minutes figuring "How the hell do I even cover this?" Well, you provided the answer.

Posted by: Ace at 12:45 PM | Comments (504)
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He met with Obama (though I don't know if it was for seven hours). The next day, former IRS head Douglas Schulman met with Obama.

And the day after that, the criteria for targeting Tea Party groups changed.

The Obama appointee implicated in congressional testimony in the IRS targeting scandal met with President Obama in the White House two days before offering his colleagues a new set of advice on how to scrutinize tea party and conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.

IRS chief counsel William Wilkins, who was named in House Oversight testimony by retiring IRS agent Carter Hull as one of his supervisors in the improper targeting of conservative groups, met with Obama in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on April 23, 2012. WilkinsÂ’ boss, then-IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman, visited the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on April 24, 2012, according to White House visitor logs.

On April 25, 2012, Wilkins’ office sent the exempt organizations determinations unit “additional comments on the draft guidance” for approving or denying tea party tax-exempt applications, according to the IRS inspector general’s report.

The Blaze adds a cautionary note: White House visitor logs are not reliable guides to who actually showed up at the White House. They're for Secret Service purposes as far as clearing people to visit; some people are cleared and never show up. Others actually show up but never appear on the logs, as personal visits are apparently recorded in a separate system.

Still, this merits some questions, and it merits a response. Which the White House has refused to give -- it refused to give comment upon the matter when contacted about it by the Daily Caller.

Dick Morris and his partner has a column on William Wilkins-- asking if he's the G. Gordon Liddy of the IRS scandal.

Wilkins claims to know nothing about the Tea Party targeting -- but that is a lie, according to Carter Hull.

Carter Hull, recently retired after 48 years of service at the IRS, was the tax analyst in D.C. in charge of the Tea Party applications. Hull indicated that he was told by the top assistant to Lois Lerner (remember her? In May, she refused to testify and invoked her Fifth Amendment right to remain silent) that Wilkins's office had to review all of the tax-exemption applications from Tea Party groups that Hull was overseeing.

Hull noted that the one application he had actually approved was immediately routed to Wilkins's office for review. When Hull disagreed with the counselÂ’s office and Lerner about how the Tea Party cases should be handled, the files were taken away from him and transferred to a woman with only several months experience at the IRS.

In addition, lawyers from Wilkins' offices met with Lerner to discuss the targeting.

Former IRS lawyer Carter Hull told the House Oversight Committee on Thursday that Lerner attended an August 2011 meeting where she, Hull, and lawyers from the agencyÂ’s chief counselÂ’s office, among others, discussed the test cases.

Interestingly, the meeting between Obama and Wlikins occurred (per the logs) in the Rooselvelt Room. According to Dick Morris, during the Clinton years, the Roosevelt Room was one of a small number of rooms designated as permitted for political, rather than non-political, use. He says he doesn't know if the Roosevelt Room's traditional role as a place for politicking has continued.

Posted by: Ace at 11:59 AM | Comments (252)
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But here are three factors that correlate highly with income mobility:

1. Coming from an intact, two-parent family

2. Good schools

3. Civic engagement with churches and other social organizations

Um... this study is obviously racist because it just recapitulates every racist Republican presidential platform since 1984.

There's also a fourth:

4. Living in neighborhoods containing a mix of higher-income people

I think that fourth one is about keeping the idea of aspiration and betterment alive in kids' minds-- you sort of need to see that people who play by the rules prosper by the rules.

This completely damns Blue State Welfarism. As if Detroit, where 47% of the population is functionally illiterate, didn't establish that case already. You will therefore not hear of this again.

Let me quote Mark Steyn on Detroit, given this suggestion by the study that "White Flight" -- or middle class flight -- does in fact hurt the poor.

With bankruptcy temporarily struck down, we’re told that “innovation hubs” and “enterprise zones” are the answer. Seriously? In my book After America, I observe that the physical decay of Detroit — the vacant and derelict lots for block after block after block — is as nothing compared to the decay of the city’s human capital. Forty-seven percent of adults are functionally illiterate, which is about the same rate as the Central African Republic, which at least has the excuse that it was ruled throughout the Seventies by a cannibal emperor. Why would any genuine innovator open a business in a Detroit “innovation hub”? Whom would you employ? The illiterates include a recent president of the school board, Otis Mathis, which doesn’t bode well for the potential work force a decade hence.

Given their respective starting points, one has to conclude that Detroit’s Democratic party makes a far more comprehensive wrecking crew than Emperor Bokassa ever did. No bombs, no invasions, no civil war, just “liberal” “progressive” politics day in, day out. Americans sigh and say, “Oh, well, Detroit’s an ‘outlier.’” It’s an outlier only in the sense that it happened here first. The same malign alliance between a corrupt political class, rapacious public-sector unions, and an ever more swollen army of welfare dependents has been adopted in the formally Golden State of California, and in large part by the Obama administration, whose priorities — “health” “care” “reform,” “immigration” “reform” — are determined by the same elite/union/dependency axis. As one droll tweeter put it, “If Obama had a city, it would look like Detroit.”

One of the strange excuses I hear for Detroit's downfall, and the downfall of many cities, is "White Flight." It is suggested, though I don't understand how this could possibly be suggested, that if whites decide that a city is becoming too expensive and too unlivable and remove their families to the suburbs in order to give their children a better and safer life, they have somehow committed a great social breach, bordering on a Hate Crime, for which they should be held responsible.

By, say, giving a central city the power to tax far-flung suburbs. After all, they committed a hate crime. The injured parties are entitled to recompense.

Of course this makes no sense -- no one "owes" anyone their physical presence. If you want to keep someone living in your city, do not constantly throw burdens upon them and attack their interests.

But it is interesting that this study found that the neighborhoods with a mixture of income levels had a positive impact on the income mobility of those of lesser means. It would suggest that "respectable" sort of people -- the strivers, the savers, those who keep their lawns neat and cars washed and one day visit their kids at college on Homecoming Day -- have a useful functioning of establishing a positive social norm throughout a community and, by doing so, send a virtuous ripple throughout the civic pool.

And so that would tend to suggest that "White Flight" -- or, again, Middle Class flight, as middle class minorities flee horrible cities like Detroit, too -- does tend to hurt the poor, not just as far as diminishing the tax base which funds welfare programs, but also as regards establishing a general environment of propriety and ambition which has powerful secondary effects on wealth creation.

And this, I think, should be borne in mind by city government: a government that is run purely for the government-paid civil servants and government-dependent welfare class will quickly drive out the middle class and with it a host of socially-useful norms that would otherwise help lower-class people attain middle-class status. Constantly beating on a city's productive classes, always seeking to tap the stone for another drop of blood, will simply drive them away and leave the city bankrupt not only as far as actual wealth but as far as intangible wealth like social capital, lawfulness, and work-habits as well.

Corrected: Detroit's population is 47% functionally illiterate, not 42% as I first wrote.

Posted by: Ace at 10:58 AM | Comments (451)
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Maybe Eric Holder should investigate whether Zimmerman violated the truck's right to smother its passengers.

Zimmerman was one of two men who came to the aid of a family of four -- two parents and two children -- trapped inside a blue Ford Explorer SUV that had rolled over after traveling off the highway in Sanford, Fla. at approximately 5:45 p.m. Thursday, the Seminole County Sheriff's Office said in a statement.

...

By the time police arrived, two people - including Zimmerman - had already helped the family get out of the overturned car, the sheriff's office said. No one was reported to be injured.

Chris Matthews immediate apologized on behalf of the White Hispanic race.

Posted by: Ace at 09:49 AM | Comments (540)
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Well, let's see. It would be a popular move, it would constitute a constitutional pushback against Obama's Soviet power grab (asserting the power to suspend the law at will), and it could be effective.

Ego, it won't happen.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) said heÂ’s recruited more than a dozen Senate Republicans willing to shut down the government to prevent President ObamaÂ’s healthcare law from going into effect.

Lee said the Republicans would block a continuing resolution to fund the government beyond Sept. 30 if it includes funding for ObamaCare.

“This is the last stop before ObamaCare fully kicks in on Jan. 1 of next year for us to refuse to fund it,” Lee said Monday on “Fox and Friends.”

“Congress of course has to pass a law to continue funding government — lately we’ve been doing that through a funding mechanism known as a continuing resolution," he added. "If Republicans in both houses simply refuse to vote for any continuing resolution that contains further funding for further enforcement of ObamaCare, we can stop it. We can stop the individual mandate from going into effect.”

Lee said he has “13 or 14” Senate Republicans on his side, and that the “number is growing.”

There's a parallel movement in the House, which seems more important to me, given that no Republican action in the House automatically equals a defeat of the continuing resolution, unlike the case in the Senate, where the Republicans would have to mount an unlikely filibuster.

Posted by: Ace at 08:53 AM | Comments (338)
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She wore tampon earrings on the air in a show of solidarity for Texas abortion law protesters who had had suspicious items removed from their purses-- such as jars filled with urine and feces.

I suppose her point is that tampons are non-threatening and that it was silly to confiscate those as well. But then, when these tampon-baggers come loaded with an arsenal of glitter and feces, one adopts a Confiscate First attitude. more...

Posted by: Ace at 08:23 AM | Comments (332)
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Major General H.R McMaster is widely recognized as one of the best and most thoughtful general officers in the US Army. On the battlefield he led the 3rd Armored Calvary Regiment in An Bar province and successfully implemented many of the tactics of the "Surge" before they were Army wide doctrine. Early in his career he wrote one of the definitive books on the lessons to be learned from Vietnam. In short, he's the Army's pre-eminent Warrior-Monk of his generation (and sometimes that bothers the people invested in the status-quo).

So when General McMaster takes to the pages of the New York Times to write about lessons to be learned from 12 years and counting of war, people take notice.

McMaster's first target is those who think war is easy or simple.

Our record of learning from previous experience is poor; one reason is that we apply history simplistically, or ignore it altogether, as a result of wishful thinking that makes the future appear easier and fundamentally different from the past.

We engaged in such thinking in the years before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001; many accepted the conceit that lightning victories could be achieved by small numbers of technologically sophisticated American forces capable of launching precision strikes against enemy targets from safe distances.

These defense theories, associated with the belief that new technology had ushered in a whole new era of war, were then applied to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; in both, they clouded our understanding of the conflicts and delayed the development of effective strategies.

Today, budget pressures and the desire to avoid new conflicts have resurrected arguments that emerging technologies — or geopolitical shifts — have ushered in a new era of warfare. Some defense theorists dismiss the difficulties we ran into in Afghanistan and Iraq as aberrations. But they were not aberrations. The best way to guard against a new version of wishful thinking is to understand three age-old truths about war and how our experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq validated their importance.

He then lays out three basic take aways:

1-"Be skeptical of concepts that divorce war from its political nature, particularly those that promise fast, cheap victory through technology."

2. "Defense concepts must consider social, economic and historical factors that constitute the human dimension of war."

3 "American forces must cope with the political and human dynamics of war in complex, uncertain environments. Wars like those in Afghanistan and Iraq cannot be waged remotely."

He goes into greater depth on each of these points in the piece which is obviously well worth reading.

Bryan McGrath (a retired Navy officer who you can follow on Twitter ) looks at the McMaster piece through a prism I hadn't considered (thus the true value and beauty of the internet). While acknowledging McMaster's pedigree, McGrath sees a political and budgetary argument in the piece.

Read closely in his NYT piece and you see the Army's argument clearly. That is, without even mentioning AirSea Battle, he has lumped it in with the Revolution in Military Affairs, Net Centricity, and Rumsfeld's reorganization ideas as fashionable passing fancies we must not follow again. Instead, we must keep in high readiness a large powerful Army capable of combined arms maneuver AND the ability to occupy large portions of the earth's surface.

If you think that I'm wrong, and that he's not arguing against AirSea Battle, then it is not worth your time to read on. If you think he is or might be, then consider moving forward.

...

Look for more of these kinds of articles in the months to come. Sequestration and declining budgets are actually beginning to threaten the cozy, least common denominator approach to strategy and budgeting that has dominated the Pentagon in the Goldwater Nichols era. The gloves will come off, and perhaps we will have the debate this country has needed for two decades. I for one welcome it, and I welcome the views of General McMaster.

Now, I didn't see that McMaster piece as an artillery barge against AirSea Battle (read all of McGrath's piece for the substantive argument) but I'm not a bureaucratic in-fighter steeped in the ways of Washington.

I certainly see McGrath's point (once he made it). The fight over defense dollars post-Iraq/Afghanistan will be one by whoever wins the fight over the definition of future threats.

What I took away from the McMaster piece was a warning about the here and now...Don't go crazy thinking we should be getting involved in Syria (which has a number of obvious similarities to Iraq).

Even liberal voices are rising for intervention and as always, John McCain is agitating for a fight. Last week he met with President Obama to push for a more active US role in Syria and then browbeat Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey about the level of planning being conducted for possible operations in Syria.

I'd love to see Assad toppled and the Iranians (along with their Hezbollah proxies) and Russians handed a strategic defeat but I don't want to hand al-Qaeda affiliated Islamistsa win.

McMaster's lessons learned seemed to provide a very relevant set of cautions to consider before we directly commit ourselves in Syria. Sure we can drop bombs on regime assets and give the rebels air cover but what happens if we and they win? We saw the chaos into which Iraq (with tens of thousands of US troops on the ground) and Libya devolved into. Are we sure that's an acceptable outcome in Syria? And if you want to avoid that kind of vacuum then that's going to mean "peace keeping" troops (which often becomes "peace making" and involves anything but peaceful means) on the ground and then you really do need to have considered McMaster's view of war from a strategic and tactical point of view and not a budgetary one.

I don't think we should apply post-war knowledge on the never ending debate about whether or not we should have invaded Iraq but to enter new conflicts in the same region without considering them? That's unconscionable.

H/T to the invaluable Robert Caruso for the heads up on the McMaster op-ed.

Posted by: DrewM at 05:38 AM | Comments (210)
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