YES



OH, HELL YES.

I Love This Guy!



Some background on this CBS debacle here.

This ain't just any politician you are dealing with, Leslie.... this is SARKO!

*****

Administer verbal beatdowns just like the DPRK propaganda machine!

North Korean Insult Generator

or... for those who prefer the sanctimonious approach to confronting political foes:

The Outrage Generator

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A Glimpse into the profoundly undemocratic tendencies of some ideologues of the peace movement at SDA

...and the satisfying resolution,



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Days of Future Past: What did people think now would be like back then? Check out this Blog to see

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I'm thinking about seeing Sean Penn's hagiography of Chris McCandless. I was looking into the background on this story, and this dissenting opinion stopped me in my tracks. Evidently, not everyone romanticizes the young American's trek into the wilderness.

****
Sometimes, Wikipedia vandalism can be quite funny!

Although, of course, it isn't something I would advocate. From the wikipedia entry for Yann Martel, (vandalized in response to this publicity stunt ):

As an adult, Martel has travelled the globe, spending time in Iran, Turkey and India. After studying philosophy at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, Martel spent six months in India visiting mosques, temples, churches and zoos, and then an entire year reading religious texts and castaway stories. Winner of the 2007 Dofus award for attempting to embarrass Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Martel claimed to have sent Harper the Orwell book 'Animal Farm' suggesting Harper should read it hoping that Harper, a conservative would then funnel taxpayer's into an expanded state controlled arts world. What the flamboyantly leftist Martel failed to comprehend was that Orwell's book was a sharp criticism of state control/ funding, a rebuke of everything that the Stalinist Martel stands for.

John Ivison comments on this Harper/Martel business

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And to conclude today's festivities, two delights from different sides of the political spectrum:

Kinsellery

October 20, 2007 - The Mop and Pail asked Peter C. Newman to review Jean Chrétien's new book. As Calgary Grit Dan once memorably observed, that's like asking Jerry Falwell to prosecute Spongebob Squarepants.

Newman hates Jean Chrétien because Chrétien wisely resisted all of his sweet blandishments over the years. He refused to give Newman an interview.

Brian Mulroney, whose ego has its own weather system, succumbed. He is still attempting to remove Newman's cutlery from his back.

On the subject of Jean Chrétien, Peter "C" Newman isn't to be believed. He's past his due date. He's petty. He's Jan Wong in a silly hat.

You're welcome.

AND

Steynage

(...) Enjoyable as they are, pop-culture metaphors aren't really of much use, especially when you're up against cultures where life is still defined by how you live as opposed to what you experience via media. It seems to me, for example, that when anti-war types bemoan Iraq as this generation's Vietnam "quagmire," older folks are thinking of the real Vietnam — the Gulf of Tonkin resolution and whatnot — but most anybody under 50 is thinking of Vietnam movies: some vague video-store mélange of The Full Metal Deer Apocalypse. Take the Scott Thomas Beauchamp debacle at The New Republic, in which the magazine ran an atrocity-a-go-go Baghdad diary piece by a serving soldier about dehumanized troops desecrating graves, abusing disfigured women, etc. It smelled phony from the get-go — except to the professional media class from whose ranks The New Republic's editors are drawn: To them, it smelled great, because it aligned reality with the movie looping endlessly through the windmills of their mind, a non-stop Coppola-Stone retrospective in which ill-educated conscripts are the dupes of a nutso officer class. It's the same with all those guys driving around with "9/11 Was An Inside Job" bumper stickers. That aligns reality with every conspiracy movie from the last three decades: It's always the government who did it — sometimes it's some super-secret agency working deep within the bureaucracy from behind an unassuming nameplate on a Washington street; and sometimes it's the President himself — but when poor Joe Schmoe on the lam from the Feds eventually unravels it, the cunning conspiracy is always the work of a ruthlessly efficient all-powerful state. So Iraq is Vietnam. And 9/11 is the Kennedy assassination, with ever higher percentages of the American people gathering on the melted steely knoll.

There's a kind of decadence about all this: if 9/11 was really an inside job, you wouldn't be driving around with a bumper sticker bragging that you were on to it. Fantasy is a by-product of security: it's the difference between hanging upside down in your dominatrix's bondage parlor for half-an-hour after work on Friday and enduring the real thing for years on end in Saddam's prisons.

Beclownery:

Beclown: Verb. To make a complete idiot of oneself in public. To behave or speak in such a way, or to make a comment or express an opinion that is so profoundly witless, senseless and obtuse, that you have forever after defined yourself as a person of comical value only. Never to be taken seriously again. Of worth only as an object of ridicule and derision.

Exhibit A:



Funny: Robert Smigel

Not Funny: Some charisma-free wannabe comedian with a rabbit puppet

Exhibit B:

Bobby Caina Calvan thoroughly beclowns himself Uniting the blogosphere in scorn and disgust

Check out some of the comments at the bottom of the post!

Update: To his credit, Bobby is now facing the music

Calvina could learn a thing or two by looking up the Wartime Columns of Ernie Pyle

Definitely worth a read!

Pyle was killed by a machine-gun bullet while covering American operations on IE Shima, on April 18, 1945.

*****

From Guantanamo:

Khalid Sheikh Muhammad Hearing Transcript

A peek into the diseased mind of an islamist killer. The confession, which is all there, in stark black and white, starts on p. 17.

Truthers should have a jolly old time wrapping their heads around those few paragraphs!

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Ted Rall is Scum:

Meanwhile:

The high school graduation rate among recruits is higher than it is among the national youth population, and once they get in, most soldiers get even more educated:

" While the active-duty enlisted ranks have fewer college grad­uates than the comparable civilian population, DOD annual updates on population representation indicate that many who join the military are taking advantage of educational opportunities while serv­ing and that many others continue their education after completing their enlistment period."

And what's more, research would seem to indicate an overall rise in the quality of recruits, not a decline.

Also, current Iraq Honcho General David H. Petraeus, with his PhD from Princeton University, debates whether combat officers actually need PhDs, or can they make do with a "basic" Masters degree . Petraeus, being the egghead that he is, actually favours doctorates for field-grade officers!

I call Bullshit, Ted


*****
Hardest working drunk in showbiz:

48 for 24 star

I saw this a while back, but it occurs to me now that the bigger story here is that Sutherland is not only an unapologetic high-functioning alkie, but also a real team player.

How many other stars would fast-track their own case, forfeiting the right to plead down, so that they could get back to work with as little disruption as possible for the sake of their production team?

Keifer had to swallow this kind of time because this isn’t the first time the notorious partier has been tagged for DUI… and because he absolutely wanted to work his sentence into 24’s production schedule.

Bonus betcha-didn't-know 24 content:

Did you know that the actor who played Season One Baddie Ira Gaines is the guy who had the misfortune of firing the gun that killed Brandon Lee on the set of The Crow in 1993? Tragic.