Category: Media

Rachael Maddow, Geek Goddess

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First we have her robot videos:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

And then we have her talking with the health reform bill. No seriously. She is talking with the animated bill from schoolhouse rock, you know, this guy:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

You know, If I hadn’t already found Sharon,* and she did not “bat for the other team,” I’d be sending her some seriously steamy fan mail.

*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.

Pay Per View Review

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Well, Verizon FIOS has some occasional specials, basically about 40$ off, $2.99 for a 24 hour rental, as versus $4.99, and so we went with one tonight, Race to Witch Mountain.

Dwayne Johnson … Jack Bruno
AnnaSophia Robb … Sara
Alexander Ludwig … Seth
Carla Gugino … Dr. Alex Friedman
Ciarán Hinds … Henry Burke
Tom Everett Scott … Matheson
Chris Marquette … Pope
Billy Brown … Carson
Garry Marshall … Dr. Donald Harlan
Cheech Marin … Eddie Cortez

The plot, what can I say that you don’t see in the trailer.

You have grizzled ex-con cab driver trying to lead a straight and narrow life, played by Dwayne Johnson, aka, the Rock, alien children with otherworldly powers, a beautiful scientist, evil government agents, and an alien assassin. You know where it goes from there.

The plot is basically a throw-away, there are no surprises.

One thing that is done well with the plot, is that they actually give a reason for children with extraordinary powers to need mere humans. I was pleasantly pleased to see that hole plugged in a way that flowed nicely.

Once again, Dwayne Johnson exceeds my expectations, as he did in Steve Carrel movie Get Smart.

Additionally, you have Garry Marshall, who is perhaps best known for his work on the other side of the camera, engaging in some very amusing scenery chewing.

The original children from the original “Escape to Witch Mountain” movies from the 1970s, Ike Eisenmann, Kim Richards have cameos, and the current child actors, AnnaSophia Robb and Alexander Ludwig, gave decent performances.

The special effects are certainly adequate, not surprising given the state of CGI these days.

The dialog is good, with a lot of very funny deadpan humor. I will say that science fiction/UFO convention held in Los Vegas figures prominently in the movie, as does Sin City itself, and that if you don’t like people making jokes about SF fans, you might be offended, but I was amused.

Additionally, as I went through IMDB, a lot of inside movie references.

It’s a thoroughly pleasant piece of child-friendly fluff, which is exactly what it promised.

Pictures below

Affirmative Action for White Folks

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Of course, for white people, you don’t call it affirmative action, you call it nepotism, and the poster child for nepotism, at least this week is Luke Russert, who upon having the opportunity to question Congressional heckler Joe Wilson in his first press statements following his heckling Barack Obama’s speech, chose to asks him about the Clemson/Georgia Tech game.

You know, it’s genetics. Tim Russert did this kind of sh&% all the time…If you were a republican on his show.

Glen Beck Wins Because Barack Obama Has No Balls

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Van Jones, formerly Obama’s “Special Adviser on Green Jobs, was fired resigned, because he founded a group, Color of Change, that has succeeded in getting a significant portion of Glen Beck’s sponsors to pull their ads, and because there is a Youtube of him calling Republicans “assholes”.

Mr. Jones is no longer a member of CoC, but Beck wanted his scalp, and he got it, because Barack Obama has no balls.

LBJ would have had J. Edgar Hoover strip search Beck’s sorry ass.

What’s worst is that this will only encourage the next faux right wing sh$# storm.

People Who Should Not Be Reporters

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Monica Hesse of the Washington Post, who went whining to their ombudsman.

You see, she wrote a puff piece about homophobic bigot Brian Brown, a major lobbyist against gay civil rights, and “The day before returning [from her vacation], she logged on to check e-mails — and wept.“

She wrote a puff piece, in the best tradition of Post writers being played by right wing blow-hards, and she crossed a line, and real people, as opposed to the right wing rent-a-crowd, took offense.

She was assigned the piece, and wrote it in order to ensure that she would not get irate email, and was crushed when she got irate email.

Notwithstanding her professed bisexuality, at least as related to the ombudsman, her problem is not her position on gay marriage, nor is it that she wrote a puff piece.

Her problem is that she clearly wrote this article to avoid confrontation, and when she got confrontation anyway, “she wept.”

She is in the wrong line of work. A journalist has to believe that irate letters are a mark of honor.

H/t Atrios.

Yes, This Photo Needs to be Published

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On the right is a photo of Lance Cpl. Joshua M. Bernard, 21, of New Portland, Maine, in happier times.

Below is a photo of him dying, after being struck by an RPG in Afghanistan.

Secretary of Defense of Robert Gates tried to strong arm the Associated press into not distributing the photograph.

It is Secretary Gates behavior, and not that of the Associated Press which is repulsive.

In Bob Gates world, or for that matter, in George W. Bush’s world, there must be no reporting of the realities of war.

Robert Capa War Photos

Following the Vietnam War, the defense establishment concluded that the only way to deal with bad press is to muzzle the press, hence the press restrictions in Grenada, the Gulf War, the invasions of Afghanistan, and Iraq.

In there world, there is no Bob Capa, documenting, and honoring soldiers at (top to bottom) Omaha Beach, or the Spanish civil War, of the invasion of France in 1940 (I think).

Far from being decision “appalling” and a breach of “common decency,” as secretary Gates suggests, these pictures reveal the sacrifices of our fighting men, and honor them.

People like Bob Gates want to bury this sacrifice, because in showing it for all to see, it will sometimes raise questions about whether that sacrifice is truly justified, and that is not acceptable in the minds of the old men who send the young men to die.

In addition to being a craven way to think, as it implies an unwillingness to support one’s own ideas, it is a slap in the face of the idea that it is civilians who decide when and where we fight, and when it is no longer worth it for us to fight.

This is about REMFs covering their own flabby, generally lily-white, asses.

Lance Corporal Bernard Doing Honor to Himself and the Corps

How Matt Taibbi Changed Goldman Sachs

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It’s clear that he’s got them rattled, because they are trying to claim that hostility toward them is motivated by antisemitism, and their marionette, Timothy “Eddie Haskell” Geithner, has felt it necessary to deny that Treasury has a tilt toward Goldman.

The idea that either GS or the Treasury would actually feel defensive about this would have been ludicrous just a few months ago, but now everyone has heard of That great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity.*

It appears that he has them scared.

*Alas, I cannot claim credit for this bon mot, it was coined by the great Matt Taibbi, in his article on the massive criminal conspiracy investment firm, The Great American Bubble Machine.

High Broderism

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Outsourced to Brad Delong, who notes that not only is David Broder a deeply immoral man, he suggests in that prosecution of crimes by his cocktail party friends is simply unAmerican, but that he is also lying through his teeth.

You see Broder says (not linking, friends don’t link friends to Broder) in the first substantive paragraph of his OP/ED (the first 2 ‘graphs are calling out Eugene Robinson for supporting the investigation):

First, let me stipulate that I agree on the importance of accountability for illegal acts and for serious breaches of trust by government officials — even at the highest levels. I had no problem with the impeachment proceedings against Richard Nixon, and I called for Bill Clinton to resign when he lied to his Cabinet colleagues and to the country during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Actually, this is a flat out lie. While he did call for Clinton to resign over a blowjob, he strongly argued against impeaching Nixon at the time, when he wrote, “that he hoped it would fail–and that Richard M. Nixon would have his revenge.”

In the world of sociopaths like David Broder, Bill Clinton gets a blow job, so he must therefore resign.

Richard Nixon, on the other hand, uses the IRS, and the FBI, to pursue his political opponents, authorizes crimes against them, including attempted blackmail and robbery, and then is actively involved in covering up those crimes, and it’s “no harm, no foul.”

I think that David Broder is angry with Democrats, because somehow or other, he missed all the “free love” in the 1960s, and he blames the Democrats, for reasons that are unclear to me.

Godwin’s Law Does not Apply*

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The reason that Godwin’s law does not apply here is because we are talking about Patrick Buchanan, and, on the 60th anniversary of the start of WWII, he’s writing about how the war really wasn’t Hitler’s fault at all, but the fault of those meddling English.

OK, we know that he is a pro-Nazi kook, and we know that his Dad was involved in the German American Bund, so we can only imagine what little Patty’s dinner table discussions were like, but why does this man have a soap box at MSNBC and other networks?

The issue is not that he is an anti-Semitic and racist kook, it is that mainstream media outlets still feel compelled to give him access?

To quote the late, great Molly Ivins, “The speech was so much better in the original German.”

[on edit] I did not link directly to Pat Buchanan’s article, though I read it, because I did not want to drive page views.

*Which states that, “As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1,” with a corollary that, “the thread is finished and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically “lost” whatever debate was in progress.”†
†It should be noted that this law has not been considered to apply exclusively to Usenet discussions for at least a decade, and is applied generally to all forms of electronic text based communications.

Te Stoopid, It Burns US!!!!!

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Maria Bartiromo asks 454 year old Congressman Anthony Weiner if why he is not on Medicare (1:37 in vid).

Umm…You have to be 65 to qualify.

Jeebus, is she anything but a life support system for a pair of tits.*

*Yes, legs too, she has nice gams. The point is that she is a profoundly stupid woman who has her job because she is eye candy.

Unethical Even by the Standards of the Public Relations Industry*

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It turns out that the discovery that Mark Penn’s use of his Wall Street Journal column to pimp for clients and to trawl for new clients is not an issue for their editorial page.

Not surprising, given that the WSJ has the most venal and dishonest editorial OP/ED section in the United States, though Fred Hiatt and the Washington Post offer some competition in that area.

*I cannot believe that I just said that.†
†That may be the first time that I’ve ever said this about a Democrat.‡
‡But it is Mark “The Human Stain” Penn, so it is not a surprise that he would have earned this distinction.