Contradictions and Hypocrisy Really Help To Fill The Tent

One understated problem of the current GOP "platform" is that it is fraught with contradiction or, in some cases, blatant hypocrisy. Of course, this could be viewed as just an elegant way of saying that they don't really stand for anything. But that would be missing the point. They do stand for some things. But their stances are often, well, at odds with one another.

The GOP is ostensibly "pro-life," but it also supports torture and the death penalty. They have a "message that can appeal to minorities," but not to Muslims or Mexicans, because they're no good. They're "tough on crime" but they're adamantly against prosecution of Bush-era war criminals. They're for small, less-intrusive government, but they want the government to ban gay marriage and regulate indecency on the airwaves. They want to bulk up terrorist-fighting forces in the Middle East, but they're also for lower taxes. They love strict interpretations of the Constitution, but really only when it applies to the Second Amendment.

Granted, similar hypocrisies within the Democratic Party do exist. (See: the Iraq War, FISA Amendments Act, Military Commissions Act, and the PATRIOT Act.) But not nearly to the same degree. And what's more, there are practically no litmus tests for the D's. Which means there's not as much of the narrow-mindedness that currently defines the Republicans. If you deviate even a bit from not only being rigidly anti-immigrant and unwaveringly pro-life, but thinking these issues should define the national political discourse, you are unworthy of the R next to your name. Which is not only a surefire electoral loser, but a dumb stance for any "political" party to take.

The Washington Post and Balance

Today, on The Washington Post's Editorial Page, 10 guest commenters were invited to air their thoughts on the Specter switch. WaPo always seeks to preserve a keen ideological balance in these discussions, so here was the line-up:

Newt Gingrich, former Republican Speaker of the House
Olympia Snowe, Republican Senator from Maine
William S. Cohen, former Republican Senator from Maine
Lincoln Chafee, former Republican Senator from Rhode Island
Kiki McLean, Democratic strategist
Tom Davis, former Republican congressman from Virginia
Doug Schoen, Democratic pollster
Ed Rogers, former Reagan/Bush I staffer
Jim Leach, former Republican congressman from Iowa
Mary Beth Cahill, former Kerry/Kennedy staffer

Ignoring the fact that Kiki McLean is just a blowhard of the highest order, and Doug Schoen is a professional concern troll with zero principles whatsoever, that's 7 "Republicans" and 3 "Democrats." And conveniently, no Democrats who ever, you know, held office were invited to comment.

Fair and motherfucking balanced. Go Fred Hiatt!

Idol, 4/28

The theme is Rat Pack "classics."

PICK: Allison.

Jamie Foxx as the "coach." Hahahahahahaha. "The perfect mentor."

Kris: "The Way You Look Tonight"... Isn't bad so far, but oh god, it's just music I hear when I'm trying on a suit. Awful arrangement. Kid looks good in a suit. He has zero range -- the Jason Castro of this year, if you will. Totally boring. Randy: "Dude... I personally think this is your best performance to date." What the Christ... Kara: "You have set the technical standard so incredibly high." God. "You are truly a dark horse." Do you know what a fucking dark horse is? Paula: "Impeccable." Simon: "I thought it was a little bit wet." Yeah, I'll pretend I know what that means.

Allison: "Someone to Watch Over Me"... This just isn't very good. I don't feel any need to keep listening, besides the fact that I am forcing myself to do so. Very dull and wtf. Randy: "You sing like Pink but like with like nine thousand more octaves." L.O.L. Kara: "I was starting to think you did need someone to watch over you... but..." Whatever. Paula: "Alluring and very tender." Simon: "Great performance... I have a horrible feeling you could be in trouble tonight." I love when Simon says that, acting like he's an independent actor with no influence. It's like if Obama met with Ahmadinejad and said "I have a horrible feeling you might get bombed tonight. Just a hunch."

Matt: "My Funny Valentine"... TAKE OFF THE FUCKING HAT. You look like a fool out of West Side Story or Dick Tracy. Jamie Foxx rules. Matt doesn't, at all. He could hit this out of the park and I will do my best to bag on him. Fuck this. Rat Pack Night blows. I hate this so much. I'd rather listen to "Fitter Happier" looped over Rick Astley. They'll probably pimp this out; I loathed it. Randy: "For me, it was just a little bit pitchy." Haha. Kara: "I didn't feel you were emotionally connected to it." Paula: "I love what you did." Simon: "The only believable, authentic song I've heard tonight."

Danny: "Come Rain Come Shine"... Rofl, Foxx throwing in Michael Mann references. Sick. Great song choice. He has a really weak range, and is fairly monotonous, performance-wise, but is still a sick Idol candidate. I did like the cumulative effect of the finale, though. Well done. Randy: "Check this out... this is a singing competition and you can sing!" Kara: "You had swag tonight." Paula: "Stellar." Simon: "That was outstanding." Sickkkkkk.

Adam: "Feeling Good"... Predictably Lambertish, very good. What a sickeningly long note at the end. A bit loud and gawdy at parts, but whatever. Good, good. Randy: "You are in the zone consistently." Kara: "My mouth drops open." Paula: "You're our Michael Phelps." Simon: "Winning is important... you want to win."

The Corner, The Corner, The Corner

Two gems today.

K-Lo implicitly concurs with a reader's, and Bill Whittle's, sentiments:

Mulling over the Notre Dame / Obama mess, something that Bill Whittle wrote (and that you published on NRO) seems apt:

"The Russians say a fish rots from the head down. They ought to know. It may not be factually true that Nero fiddled while Rome burned, the saying has passed into common usage because the image as the ring of truth to it: time and time again, the good and decent common people have manned the walls of the city, and have been ready to give their lives in its defense, only to discover too late that some silk-robed son of a bitch has snuck out of the palace at midnight and thrown open the gates to the barbarians outside."

Okay. Obama's pro-choice. Obama was invited to speak at Notre Dame. This means he's a "silk-robed son of a bitch" whose mission is so "throw open the gates to the barbarians [i.e., pro-choicers, i.e., most of the country]"? Nice.

And this from Jay Nordlinger:

There’s something I like about Arlen Specter’s party-switching statement. He begins with the nonsense about how the Republican party has moved too far to the right, blah, blah, blah. That’s not to be taken seriously. That’s just rationalization, and not very smart rationalization at that.

Keep chugging, fellas. Pro-war, pro-torture, pro-life, anti-gay-marriage, pro-white, anti-immigrant. Great set of positions.

Humpty Dumpty

• Joe Scarborough was just on MSNBC, discussing the Arlen Specter hubbaloo, and confessed to Andrea Mitchell that he thinks the root of the GOP's woes can be found in the fact that it has become a southern regional party. I'd say good for him, but I know that tomorrow he'll call for Janet Napolitano to be hanged or something.
• I still look forward to Ross Douthat, but, as Yglesias notes, this debut column for the NYT is kinda whatever.
• Sex and the City, the film, is totally underrated. A bit long, but it really has some snazzy dialogue. Just caught it again on HBO and ended up watching all of it. However, I also picked up on a bit of an interesting thing. It goes as such: Black people don't watch HBO. Ergo, there was no need for "Sex and the City," the show, to have any black characters. So it didn't. But black people do watch movies. So that's why they got Jennifer Hudson for the film. Pretty cynical.
  
• I'm not scared of heights, but this picture still freaks me the fuck out. That's two guys working on the tip of the antenna on the Empire State Building. Maybe that means I am scared of heights.
• I'm reading Dave Eggers' What is the What right now. Not that far in yet. It's great thus far. Really yanks you in and, while it is obviously the African dude's story being sifted and filtered through the voice of Eggers, it has a certain earnestness that is both revealing and refreshing.
  
• Good -- well, depends on your definition of "good" -- piece on OMB head Peter Orszag in The New Yorker by the Obama administration's favorite pet journalist, Ryan Lizza. Worth a read, albeit with a shaker of salt.
• Camera Obscura's "French Navy" is rolling around in my head like a pinball. I feel like skipping down the street while whistling it out loud, except not really, since it's 185 degrees outside and I feel like that kid with asthma in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.
  

• Apropos of this Times piece, I must predict that Avatar will be an abysmal fail. The thing is that, for me, predicting this is win-win. If it sucks, I win, because my prediction proves true. If it is great, I also win, because nobody will remember this prediction, and because it, well, will be an awesome movie. There really is no possible middle ground as far as I'm concerned. This is either Iron Man or Delgo. There's no possible in between here, given how ridiculously far-fetched and overwrought the whole production is.
  
• As for the news of Specter leaving the GOP, I must echo the point that everyone and their mother has made already: R-E-T-I-R-E. You are old. Just throw it in. Easier said than done, of course, and one can argue that its the voters' choice (in 2010), but it takes a massive fail to lose as an incumbent, let alone as an incumbent with Specter's tenure.
  
• One listen of Black Eyed Peas' new #1 hit, "Boom Boom Pow" (Jesus Christ) should make any person with any music taste start crying. BEP's early work was pretty much mainstream boilerplate, but it wasn't offensive. Even "London Bridge" had some comical and catchy attributes to it. This -- this everloving piece of dog shit -- is just a disgrace. Will.I.Am needs to wrap himself in an Obama campaign poster and swandive off the Golden Gate Bridge. Fergie looks like a quadruple-surgery transexual crossbred with a Schnauzer. One of the random dudes looks like a Last of the Mohicans reject. The other looks like a Michael Pena stunt double. None of them has a shred of talent. There is no fucking hook in this song. How is this #1? At least "Right Round" has some interesting shit going on. My God...
• This Vanity Fair piece from 2006, where Todd Purdum repeatedly strokes Karl Rove off, is worth a read for purposes of reflection.
• I caught Jurassic Park on HBO this past weekend. It's really amazing how well the special effects hold up. There are movies from 2002 that don't look half as good. The raptors in the kitchen is still one of the freakiest scenes ever. I wish I could time travel back to when I saw that in theaters as a 7-year-old. I must have been terrified. Maintenance Shed scene...
  

Chris Wallace's Underhanded Tricksterism

Oh, that Chris Wallace. Media Matters shows us a clip today where the Fox News headmaster poses the question that is on the forefront of everyone's minds: "I don't mean to see it in either a positive or negative way: is Obama a radical figure in American politics?"



Wallace, of course, of course meant no harm and no nefarious connotation with the choice of the word "radical." Only a pounce-on-every-word liberal firebreather would think his motives were even the slightest bit underhanded or conniving. So, since the people who watch "Fox News Sunday" are likely to be predominantly people who turn to Fox News for their, you know, news, let's get this one straight from the horse's mouth.

Fox News search returns for "radical":



Radical: Clearly a neutral term without any special meaning in the United States in 2009.

Sign O The Times

It does not exactly require the skill of a rocket scientist to unearth the notion that one of newspapers' greatest failings in the current era is that everything in it is yesterday's news. The stuff in the New York Times' front section today was available online yesterday night. With a restaurant review or a 4,000 word piece on an administration official, this isn't much of an issue. You don't need to be reading those in "real time." You can just read them at your leisure. With daily White House press reports or news of new Obama initiatives or a story on what John Boehner said today, you can read those as they come out. By tomorrow it'll be old news. And if you're reading them tomorrow, then it's like the country underwent Daylight Savings and you're stuck an hour behind.

However, this isn't just a problem with front page political reporting. It afflicts the Op-Ed pages as well. Paul Krugman's column today, on why we shouldn't let bygones be bygones, is quite illustrative of this:

[T]here are indeed immense challenges out there: an economic crisis, a health care crisis, an environmental crisis. Isn’t revisiting the abuses of the last eight years, no matter how bad they were, a luxury we can’t afford?

No, it isn’t, because America is more than a collection of policies. We are, or at least we used to be, a nation of moral ideals. In the past, our government has sometimes done an imperfect job of upholding those ideals. But never before have our leaders so utterly betrayed everything our nation stands for. “This government does not torture people,” declared former President Bush, but it did, and all the world knows it.

Now, if you're sixty-five years old, this might seem to be an enlightening take on things. And indeed, amidst the Times' columnist line-up (Frank Rich is the only other columnist at the Times whom I could see this critique coming from. Bob Herbert is obsessed with New Orleans; Gail Collins with dull observation; Maureen Dowd with yammering on about new hats and Blackberrys and gifts; Tom Friedman with becoming the personal stenographer for any person he's ever met whose name even slightly resembles "Ramesh Kapur"; David Brooks with David Brooks; and Roger Cohen with being the Times' default "anti-semitic" punching bag) this is actually a very nice, lucid assessment of things.

There's one problem: It's basically boilerplate by now. Glenn Greenwald has been harping on this for years. Obviously the issue is front-and-center now that Obama's DOJ is considering prosecutions and the "Torture Memos" have been released. But even that was over a week ago. Matt Yglesias, Andrew Sullivan, Ta-Nehisi Coates, everyone at Firedoglake and Kos, David Sirota and Chris Bowers, Josh Marshall, John Cole, and Atrios have all been writing the same thing multiple times a day for 10 days. And yet apparently, since a) Krugman felt this column needed to be written and b) Andrew Rosenthal felt this column needed to be published, there is an implicit understanding that this, a convincing argument in favor of prosecutions, will be new and fresh to many of its readers.

The only problem is that it's anything but fresh. It's incredibly stale.

It's one thing to be reading yesterday's news. It's a whole different ballgame when you're reading week/month-old arguments.

Megan McArdle's Big Glorious Glass of Win

I hadn't thought of this:

Most people who make this [anti-torture] argument do not, in fact, care whether torture works. They would still be every bit as much against it if waterboarding worked perfectly. Yet when they argue about whether torture works, they're conceding that torture's effectiveness is relevant to the question of whether or not we should engage in it. That implicitly means that if torture becomes nearly perfectly effective, they should change their minds--otherwise, it's not a relevant criteria. So if we get that lie detector, they have to explain why we still shouldn't use this very valuable interrogation method--or confess that they're basically opportunists who will say anything that might advance the case. This will make it somewhat harder to convince people to listen to their other, better arguments.

This seems basically correct. Rachel Maddow has been heavily beating the drum on the "torture doesn't even work" chant for a few weeks now. But as McArdle says, this is really of no relevance, and only serves to undermine the arguments of those (i.e., humans with morals) who believe that we shouldn't torture. McArdle packs on the exclamation point:

Thus I think it is much safer to keep arguments about torture on solid moral ground: we shouldn't torture because it's wrong.

Bingo.

If you're anti-torture because you think we shouldn't be torturing, then say that. Don't drift and grasp at whatever you can in order to drum up some sort of tangential winning argument.

It would be like (well, it wouldn't be like, as this is an argument that is actually made) if NORMLers and 4/20 soldiers started making the pot legalization debate focus on "dude, marijuana has so many subtle health benefits and it like, helps your eyesight and stuff." That's not the point. Even if pot were proven to be as unhealthy as cigarettes, you (and I) would still seek its legalization. So keep a level head and throw your money and words where the heart of the debate lies.

Same reasoning flies in this case.

Idol, 4/21

Two going home tonight. And it's Disco Night. Anoop's odds cannot be good.

PREDICTIONS: Anoop, Matt

Lil Rounds: "I'm Every Woman"... Oh my God, GET THE FUCK OUT. I hate her so so so much. There is no emotion at all in this performance. I need an Aleve. This is just overflowing with stupidity on all fronts. Overwrought and horrible. Randy: "I don't know." YES. SIT DOWN NOW. Kara: "I'm not sure it was worth the wait." Paula: "I applaud you." LOL. Simon: "I think this is gonna be the last week we're ever gonna see you." Hahahahahaha.

Kris: "She Works Hard For Money"... Meh to the max. Chorus is awful. Jesus, Kris. Not a good song to go acoustic-marimba on. This sounds like a muzak band covering a muzak song. That said, I guess he has no disco chops, so it's decent enough for him. Kara: "You took a real risk." Paula: "It showed your originality." Simon: "A complete polar opposite of the first performance." Randy: "You know who you are."

Danny: "September"... What the fuck. Awful. Wouldn't be surprised if he's still top in votes. Christianity for. The. Win. This is karaoke. Randy: "You turned this into something that really worked for you tonight." Kara: "You are an incredible vocalist." Paula: "You always take it up one step higher." Simon: "Can't fault the vocals."

Allison: "Hot Stuff"... LOL @ Allison being a sexually-appealing artist. Good arrangement, nice way to mix it up. And her vocals are solid. At least it's memorable. I think. In the end, she's just not very appealing, but that was a good performance. Randy: "Yo, hang on y'all... you one of the best singers in this competition!" Kara: "I have to agree with him." Paula: "The word 'compromise' does not even belong in your music vocabulary." Hmm. Simon: "That was a brilliant performance."

Adam: "If I Can't Have You"... At least it was emotional. Pretty weak for Lambert, but he obviously has a good voice. They are about to pimp the everloving shit out of this. Randy: "So dawg... you are ready right now!" Kara: "You're brilliant." Paula: "I never question my visceral response." Simon: "That's what so good about you."

Matt: "Stayin' Alive"... God, I hate Matt. He has negative style. And this line-up of back-up singers is atrocious. The fedora is awful. Jesus. Awful final note. Randy: "You can really sing." Kara: "You brought disco back." Paula: "Matt, Matt, Matt." Simon: "I didn't like that performance."

Anoop: "Gonna Dance The Night Away"... Horrible. Randy: "Rough last note." Kara: "Great song choice." Paula: "Anoop -- the look tonight, the growth, I gotta tell you, you look fantastic." Simon: "That was mediocre at best."

Manly Men and Their Many Manly Friends

This was an astute point from Sirota yesterday:

With lawmakers like Virigina Sen. Jim Webb (D) now starting to lead the fight on drug policy and criminal justice reform, it will be much harder for the GOP to use the "weakness" canard. Webb, thanks to his military background and gruff style, just doesn't fit that stereotype...at all. And while I'm uncomfortable with politics automatically ascribing extra credibility and "toughness" to anyone with military experience regardless of what they are pushing, I'm thrilled that that oversimplistic framing will actually help the cause of drug/criminal justice reform, thanks to Webb.

I basically agree. It's really fucking stupid and lame to do this, but it's almost a necessary evil. You can't have Obama (as Senator or President) taking the reins on this; somewhere, some idiot talking head will infer or flat-out say that he's just "helpin' his niggaz out." And then it becomes a racial debate and the thing goes down in flames. So instead you get Jim Webb, who's stout, gruff, tough, beer-swilling, and working-class (yes, Senators can still be working-class!), and this all makes for a good person to present a bill that, in shortened form, says: stop locking up all these fucking weed dealers.

It should be noted that Sirota is right on another point; namely, that this argument is made all the time. See Tom Friedman here, a few weeks ago, innocently making the same appeal to military authority:

The Obama administration’s carbon tax spokesman — the one who should sell this to the country — should be the president’s national security adviser, Gen. James Jones, not the environmentalists. The imposing former head of the Marine Corps could make a powerful case that a carbon tax is vitally necessary to stimulate investments in the clean technologies that would enable the U.S. to dominate E.T., while also shifting consumers to buy these new, more efficient and cleaner power systems, homes and cars.

Shorter Tom Friedman: Al Gore and his faggy vice-presidency, his gay Harvard education, and his pansy-ass Nobel Prize didn't help sell Americans on jackshit, so we're calling in somebody who's actually killed other people.

Outsourcing the White House to Whitehouse

I feel like this was a pretty smart assessment of things from Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) last night on Rachel Maddow. To be honest, after hearing it, I'm not sure why more Congressional Democrats haven't been voicing the same thing. The gist of what he's saying is that it's smart and likely necessary for Obama and White House officials to use the "we've got to move forward" line ad nauseam. It doesn't make sense politically for them to appear to be going after Bush and company; despite Greenwald's constant citing of polls showing Americans are in favor of prosecutions, it's my personal opinion that many would quickly pull an aboutface once the criminal proceedings grew ugly and lengthy. But aside from that -- obviously Obama has a lot on his plate. As Joe Klein said yesterday:

Actually, I will concede one thing to Greenwald: I've been opposed to prosecuting the Bush miscreants--for political reasons, mostly. The President has put an awful lot of important domestic and foreign business on the table and this whole issue of what went on under Bush, and is no longer happening now, is a diversion from getting the important stuff done.

The initial point is right: Obama has a lot to do, and it makes no sense on the political or policy fronts for his White House to be out on the frontlines with pitchforks over Bush and friends' war crimes. HOWEVER, Klein's conclusion -- that this should totally rule out prosecutions, and a "look forward not backward" approach should be a blanket one over the entire government -- is terrible. The Department of Justice and the Senate Judiciary Committee can still pick through this and present their findings to, like, the people that you typically present findings to.

I agree that Obama, and by extension, Gibbs, should be paying this scant heed in briefings and press conferences. In theory, I might personally wish he would lay down the fucking law one time; "We're going to treat Yoo with all the care afforded to William Wallace." Yet I think anyone can agree it just doesn't make sense for him to be leading on this.

But I still think there should be investigations and prosecutions. I don't think these two ideas should be unreconcilable.

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

"Reporting" When There's Nothing to Report

How on earth was this published on the front page of the Sunday Times?

It was inevitable that Mr. Obama’s lofty pledge to change the ways of Washington would crash into the realities of governing, including lawmakers anxious to protect their constituents and an army of special-interest lobbyists.

Okay, seems reasonable thus far, albeit boilerplate rightwing rhetoric by now.

Then we get this:

“The thing we still don’t know about him is what he is willing to fight for,” said Leonard Burman, an economist at the Urban Institute and a Treasury Department official in the Clinton administration. “The thing I worry about is that he likes giving good speeches, he likes the adulation and he likes to make people happy.”

So far, he said, “It’s hard to think of a place where he’s taken a really hard position.”

Uh, why do we care what this guy has to say? Oh, he hates Obama and fits the narrative we're trying to create. Gotcha. What an absolutely mindless quote.

But wait! They balanced it with a quote from Obama's own Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel!

“We’re not taking on a fight; we’re taking on a multiple-front fight because we’ve taken on a series of entrenched interests across the waterfront — from education to health care, and the defense industry, and the lobbying industry as a whole,” the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, said.

Fair and balanced, fair and balanced. Except not:

“If Obama is too timid, if the White House is too cautious,” said Robert Dallek, a presidential historian, “it is going to make him look too opportunistic. He made all these promises during the campaign, he talked so boldly, he stirred all our hopes, and now he is not following through.”

Disregarding the fact that there are few people more blowhardish than presidential historians, I have no idea why we're supposed to care about what Dallek has to say. "If Obama doesn't fix everything in Iraq and bring unemployment down to 3%, the Republicans might paint him as a failed president." See how easy that is?

There is a reason newspapers are dying.

State of Play

Ben Affleck as a committee-chairing congressman from Pennsylvania's 7th district. Check.

Ben Affleck as a committee-chairing congressman from Pennsylvania's 7th district. Check.

Ben Affleck as a committee-chairing congressman from Pennsylvania's 7th district. Check.

And yet it works! Well, that part doesn't. Ben Affleck is supposed to be powerful, authoritative, suave, and old enough to be Russell Crowe's former roommate. I guess he's suave.

Going through all the ins and outs of this would be too painful for me at this late hour. Suffice it to say the movie is good. It's what 24 is dying to be. It has excellent pacing, and it appropriately balances, in truly nonstandard Hollywood fashion, both entertainment and realism. Not realism realism. Just realism is the sense that maybe on someone's worst day ever this situation could possibly have a chance of happening. It's not like Ben Affleck is somersaulting off of the Capitol and karate-chopping Russell Crowe right as he's about to deliver his article for A1 the next day. I can at least say that much.

Russell Crowe is restrained and delivers. Rachel McAdams is hot, as always, and she adds some nice quirkiness to the mix (although the writers make sure not to have her go over-the-top into some sort of Lethal Weapon reincarnation, journo-style). Helen Mirren is overwrought, but still hilarious (deliberately). Ben Affleck is terrible, but still hilarious (inadvertently).

Early in the film, Russell Crowe (old-time newsroom shoeleather duder) voices his displeasure, numerous times, at the rise of the "new kids in town," a.k.a. bloggers, who are represented by Rachel McAdams. "Watergate wasn't broken open on a blog!" -- Stuff like that. Totally lame, but nevertheless an interesting plot device. (Naturally, McAdams finds her bearings as a professional reporter and eventually nabs the byline on "the story.") However, it was made even more lame by the fact that every single person in the theater other than me was over 90 years old. It's like this film was reviewed in The Daily Nursing Home and portrayed as some sort of revenge against technology, or a Luddite's dream or something of the sort. So all of these geriatrics got tons of laughs in. And then they rolled on home to catch "Amos 'n' Andy" reruns using their prized antique 1956 transistor radios.

In the end -- bien. Not much more I could've asked for. I'll also second A.O. Scott's heads-up that the credits are a must-see, albeit redundant if you've ever taken a tour of the New York Times building.

--

P.S. As for the previews, I was fairly impressed. Apatow has a new film called Funny People, and it's starring the whole lot of J.A. regulars, but it also features Eric Bana, Adam Sandler, and Jason Schwartzman. It looks very sappy, but that's predictable. Some of the jokes look great. Yet it is Public Enemies, a Michael Mann film about Depression-era criminals such as John Dillinger, and starring Christian Bale, Johnny Depp, and Billy Crudup, which looks fucking ridiculous. Johnny Depp is god. (Channing Tatum isn't, but whatever.)

Also, there's some movie where Abigail Breslin has a sister who has cancer so she offers to give up her kidney to help, and eventually her mom, Cameron Diaz, ends up shaving her head. Or something.

Rachel Getting Married

Real. Original. Fantastic.

Kym, played delightfully by Anne Hathaway, has a sister, Rachel, played almost equally well by Rosemarie DeWitt, who is getting married. Hence the title. Kym is a longtime druggie who accidentally killed her young brother in a car accident while she was high some years ago. She has just returned from rehab. Tensions and problems abound. The rest is history.




Having attended all of three weddings in my life, naturally I consider myself an expert on the subject. Rachel's wedding proves both utterly unrealistic (the lead singer of T.V. On The Radio doing a capella during the ceremony?) and exceedingly realistic (everything else). The family was seriously torn apart by the son's death, and although it was years ago, and they try their best to paper over the troubles, the issues manifest themselves every so often. All of this is exacerbated ten-fold by Kym's presence.

I haven't seen The Reader. And I really want to. And I really like Kate Winslet; she's great in nearly everything (yes, Titanic too). But I have a hard time believing that Anne Hathaway wasn't deserving of the Best Actress award. What makes her performance in Rachel Getting Married even more the better is the fact that I've seen her in The Devil Wears Prada, where she's all dolled up, prude, star-crazed, and very earnest. So calling this performance a 180 is the understatement of the year. Or last year, whatever. She has the ex-junkie/on-the-fritz/my-family-loves-me-but-I-interpret-that-to-mean-they-hate-me role down pat. Totally frenetic and really awkward. She makes Michael Scott's daily encounters look like a pleasant stroll through the park. Her toast had me cringing. Near pain, I tell you.

The real winner here, aside from all the actresses and actors, is Jonathan Demme. Philadelphia and The Silence of the Lambs are two of my favorite movies, but in this one, he just rips up his old playbook and fully heads down the cinema verite route, to tremendous effect. Everything about the wedding feels real. The dancing, the music, the tension, the things said, the things unsaid... A lot of it is purely the result of a deft cinematographer. But even more of it is the decision that "We're going to make a movie about a wedding. Then let's make the fucking thing feel like a wedding." And it does, it really does.

(But seriously: Rosemarie DeWitt is beautiful. In what alternate reality does a woman like her end up with Tunde Adebimpe?)

The GOP in Pennsylvania

It's interesting trying to ponder the GOP's broader strategy in the Pennsylvania 2010 Senate race. The following things are seemingly true:

-Arlen Specter will probably win if he is the nominee.
-Pat Toomey will probably lose if he is the nominee.

Obviously, the mere keeping of a Republican seat in the Senate isn't worth much to the GOP unless the keeper of that seat is actually voting with the GOP. And it's a weird spot for all involved. Specter knows that Toomey can beat him in the primary, but he also knows (and he knows that the state and national Republicans know) that Toomey can't beat a PA Democrat in the general election. So if this whole challenge of Specter is meant to push him to the right on the Employee Free Choice Act, and thus reinforce his partisan Republican bona fides, then it seems a bit weird. If Republican voters and partymen are willing to kamikaze this election (by going with Toomey) for the sake of principle, this makes sense, but only in a narrow sense of things. Because presumably, if Toomey ends up winning, then the seat goes to the Democrats. And -- looking to 2016 -- it's not easy to unseat a freshman incumbent.

Daniel Larison seems to think that this battle could be potentially very costly:

Specter cannot pursue his party’s nomination, lose and then continue to campaign. Unlike Connecticut Republicans, Pennsylvania’s Democrats are very strong and have a deep bench. Either Republican emerging from a bruising primary fight would be vulnerable, and the challenger would be more so. Regardless of who had come out of the Democratic primary with a win in Connecticut, the Democrats were sure to hold the seat because of Republican weakness. It is by no means certain that the GOP can hold Pennsylvania even if Specter did not have to face down a challenge. As things stand now, he will have to head off Toomey’s challenge, which makes his later re-election even less likely.

Infernal Affairs

• I knew that The Departed was based off of this. I did not know that The Departed was this. Sure, some scenes are out of order and Infernal Affairs is a lot shorter and the semi-hot love interest in The Departed has around 49 seconds of screen time in Infernal Affairs, but still.
• It is both good and bad that John Woo did not make this film. It's good because John Woo has the directorial sleight-of-hand of, well, someone with very little sleight-of-hand. All of his tropes and themes are lavished on with the delicacy of a retarded kid wielding a meat cleaver. This film isn't exactly going to be winning awards for subtlety, but let's just say that it didn't have any flying motorcycles or white doves. But it's bad that John Woo did not direct it because the action scenes totally suck. And J.W.'s action scenes do anything but totally suck.
  
• All Asian people look alike. It took me 25 minutes to nail down who was who, and even then, some random stereotypical Asian face would show up out of the blue and completely throw me off of my game. Since I knew the story cold thanks to the 28 times I've seen The Departed, this was less of an issue. But still annoying.
  
• They have fucking bagpipes at cops' funerals in Hong Kong?
• Music, music, music. Both the score and the soundtrack rocked. I mean, I wasn't dancing, but they fit the film really well. What I suppose is the climax -- when the dude who was played by Martin Sheen gets thrown off the building and lands near the dude who was played by Leonardo DiCaprio -- has just an amazing montage-y Wall of Sound thing going on. It's almost dreamlike, and it works excellently.
  
• In the end, this was awesome. It lacked Alec Baldwin's politically incorrect hilarity, DiCaprio's utter badassness, and Jack Nicholson's entertaining venture into the Boston underworld. It didn't have a constant loop of "Shipping Up To Boston." And it obviously was bereft of Scorseseisms. But it has a great story, a creative director, and tons of suspense -- even though I already knew exactly what was going to happen. In every scene. Definitely worth seeing.
  

Plus, it's a Hong King flick without those dreaded dubs. What more can you ask for?

The Thing About the BMW Counter-Ad...

What I love about this now-notorious BMW ad is that it is of no importance whether the M3 is actually "better" than the Audi A4. The entire crux of the ad is that BMW has a bigger fucking billboard. And that's the "checkmate." Which, when all is said and done, is pretty brilliant if you ask me.

Halperin's Priorities

As everyone and their mother repeatedly discusses Obama's release of the Bush "Torture Memos," Mark Halperin's pathetic site has a different take on the most important stories of the day:

Pudding is awesome, though.

The Machinist

This was really, really good. It's the first film in awhile where I toggled up Wikipedia immediately after viewing. Maybe that just means I'm dumb, but whatever. Really awesome. Like Fight Club without, you know, the fighting. A very cool and nuanced take on the double-personality genre, and, while not exactly filled with sudden twists, nevertheless a very creepy film.

Trevor Reznik (Trent Reznor? John Rzeznik? Gotta be playing off one of 'em...), played by Christian Bale, is a blue-collar factory worker who, for the past year, has been unable to sleep. So he's crazy thin. It's almost shocking, in a Tom-Hanks-in-Cast-Away type way. Where you sometimes get distracted from the actual acting and plot and are just like, "Jesus Christ, how did he drop so many pounds?" I just read that Bale ate 275 calories a day to look like that. My God. He must have felt like shit.

So he can't sleep and accidentally hits some machine-lever which lops his coworker's hand off. So that sucks, and that indirectly ends up getting him fired. But not before he's created a Tyler Durden-y alterego and a fictional relationship with a semi-hot waitress and her son. All throughout, he is constantly having sex with and seeking consultation from the chronically-topless Jennifer Jason Leigh. She has a decent bit part, but isn't really anything special in the grand scheme of the movie.

The brilliance of The Machinist is wrapped up in the score and the cinematography. I could easily see a very similar plot being totally botched with a bad outing by the director. But this was a truly well-rounded effort. Nothing in this movie is really scary, per se, but everything is really creepy. The mood and tone are both rife with suspense. And even though nothing really happens that makes you jump -- and you know nothing will happen that will make you jump -- you're on the edge of your seat anyway.

Although, a dude getting his arm conveyer-belted into a whirring drill is pretty fucking jumpworthy.

Look Ma! No Hands!

There are two things worth noting about riding a bike with no hands:

1. There is zero reason to do it other than to show off. If you want to scratch your head, you can use one hand. If you want a drink of water -- again, one hand. Even if the rider isn't actively waiting for hot girls to pass by until he starts his hands-free pedaling, he still very consciously wishes that someone would see him in all his glory. There's really no question about it.

2. I do it fairly often.

Hipster!

Hipster-bashing always seems a little weird, both because everyone who does it shamelessly engages in some of the practices they claim to decry as lame/queer/hipsterish and because nobody really acts like the caricatures that are created to portray hipsters. That said, this is a pretty funny riff:

It’s almost universally true that the more likely someone is to deny that D.C. has hipsters, the more hipsterish he or she is. It’s difficult, usually, to get anyone of a hipsterish bent to name someone who might actually qualify; if they do, it’s usually some unnamed fellow originally from New York who has already discovered and discarded out of boredom every band currently playing shows in the United States, and has just moved to a cabin somewhere outside of Portland in order to eat sprouts and make a series of records (vinyl only, dudes), each of which consist of a dozen singles that make use of only one note. “It’s going to be really pop, though. Or that’s what he says, anyway. I hear he’s working on B flat right now. I’m interested, I guess. But it probably won’t be as good as the third track on C Sharp.”

Idol, 4/14

Kris, Adam, Danny, Lil Rounds, Allison, Matt, Anoop. Unless Allison blows it, it's looking really bad for Anoop.

PICK: Anoop

Allison: "Don't Want To Miss A Thing"... Good so far. Nice arrangement. I confess that I don't like the raspy parts of her voice. Why the hell is her octave so low? She sounds like a tranny. The chorus is pretty bad. But it's a song everyone knows and stuff, so it's a good choice. She's really ugly. Paula: "Authentic." Simon: "I think you are the girls' only hope." Judges were clearly told that they cannot let Allison fail. Having only one girl remaining would be disastrous.

Anoop: "Everything I Do"... Taking vocal lessons from Tarantino = awesome. Why the fuck is Anoop wearing a varsity jacket? Jesus Christ, get out now. Please. This vocal isn't bad at all, he's just a terrible person. Randy: "You have definitely found your zone." Kara: "That's where you really stand out."

Adam: "Born To Be Wild"... Awesome. Lambert is fucking unbeatable. I look forward to him week in and week out. At the end of the day, this is just a great all-around performance. And his vocals are ridiculous. Paula: "Fortune rewards the brave." Simon: "Vocally, wonderful." Simon is winking at Adam.

Matt: "To Really Love A Woman"... On the piano. In technical terms, this guy is pretty good. Something about him is very unappealing. It might just be his face, which is hideous. Horrible song choice. God, why don't Idol contestants realize that picking songs people know is the way to go. Always. Nobody will remember this. If he gets fewer votes than Anoop, I will laugh. Randy: "Interesting." FAIL. Kara: "You took away some of the core melodies." Double fail.

Danny: "Endless Love"... Good song choice, at least thus far. Gokey is going to have a really tough time beating Lambert, if this gets to the finals. Technically this is kinda meh in the middle, but it feels emotional, since he has a dead wife and everything. What the hell happened at the end, I do not know. Maybe he will get bad reviews. Paula: "You slay us at the end." Okay. Simon: "I'm disappointed that we had... a very traditional version of the song." Boos abound.

Kris: "Falling Slowly"... Good song choice for him. Seems about as good as he is going to do. Not incredible, but he's not an incredible singer. Randy: "I don't know."

Lil Rounds: "The Rose"... STOP CHANGING YOUR FUCKING HAIR. This SUCKS. God, fuck Lil Rounds. Nobody wants to listen to this. Guarantee, guarantee that they pimp this out. They absolutely have to. Paula: "You could not have sung a more beautiful lyric." Not sure what this means. Simon: "You're getting this completely wrong." Yes. GET OUT. Simon: "No excuses... I'm getting frustrated."

The Midnight Meat Train

Eh. It's not like I had high hopes for this. Or really any hopes at all, since I had no idea what the hell it was. Turns out it's a slasher/zombie flick, with no real twists. I must say that I like Bradley Cooper (Sack Lodge from Wedding Crashers), and he was true to his form in this. Not stellar or anything, just pretty solid. On the flip side, I fucking hate Vinnie Jones. All the Italian Job and Guy Ritchie crap -- just go away. Stay overseas, British culture. We don't need you.

EDIT: Except Radiohead and The Beatles and stuff. Obviously.

Chris Bowers' Delicious Strawmen

Chris Bowers starts out this entry with a quote from Brendan Nyhan, who had a pretty pessimistic and cynical take on talking head shows:

The only way for a pundit to assemble a large enough audience to succeed in prime time is to pander to their audience's ideological sensibilities and to dumb down their content to the lowest common denominator.

Bowers then says:

The notion that popularity is earned through stupidity can't die a fast enough death. Not that the notion is actually dying, just that it is an idea that needs to go away. The implication of such sentiments is that people are generally pretty dumb, or at least dumber than the person doing the evaluating. It is fundamentally a statement of elitism over the masses. [...]

As someone who has spent several years studying avant-garde poetry in graduate school and trying to make a living, at least in part, by acquiring a large audience for my puny little independent websites, I can honestly say that a hell of a lot of brain power are required for both. I mean, if it was easy to get hundreds of thousands of people to listen to you, then why wouldn't just about everyone do it?

Alright, a few things.

1. People are generally dumb. How is this even arguable? Just look at our culture. Nobody reads. Everyone is fat. Nancy Grace is super popular. "Deal Or No Deal" is a sensation. Bush had 30% approval at the end of 2008.

2. The first and third bolded sections are total strawmen. Nobody's saying Rachel Maddow is dumb or that what she does is easy to do. The critique is that the substance of her show is very fluffy, which it needs to be in order to sustain a high viewership. Now, I happen to disagree a bit with the notion that we should be viewing all cable shows as one huge, dumbed-down circus. Maddow, more than nearly any other talking head, does legimitately attempt to have moments of worthwhile political debate and discourse. Contrast this with Hannity, who invites Tony Dungy on to talk about how awesome Jesus is, takes a commercial break, and then starts lamenting Obama's new haircut with John Bolton. But that brings me to my third point.

3. Cable talking head shows are universally retarded. I watch them fairly regularly, because I find Keith Olbermann jerking off into Richard Wolffe's mouth to be entertaining, but that does not mean I learn much of anything from them. Is Bowers really trying to make the argument that these shows aren't dumbed down to rake in 1M viewers per night? It doesn't even have to be a criticism of the audience, since I'm sure Rachel Maddow's audience overlaps heavily with the liberal blog readers who, while I would not deign to lavish the term "smart" on them, are obviously considerably more politically informed than your average person. But cable news, by its very format, is required to be dumbed-down. Or else people wouldn't watch it, because it's 9:00 P.M. on a Wednesday and nobody wants to be read a Greenwald diatribe. Or a Nate Silver exposition on approval ratings. Or a Tyler Cowen take on the economy. Instead, they want the condensed, easily-digestable, and unabashedly partisan take on things. And that's what they get from Maddow, Olbermann, and Matthews.

For future reference, here's a tip: If the economy is in the shitter, unemployment is about to be 9%, and we're ramping up our war in Afghanistan, and the show you are watching begins by spending 10 minutes talking about fucking pirates, then the show is probably dumbed-down.

EDIT: Look at Rush Limbaugh. I could obviously never do what he does in a million years. It takes considerable talent. But that doesn't mean that the content of his show is smart. That just means that he's good at what he does. Good to the tune of millions and millions of listeners.

EDIT: Define irony: This. A post by OpenLeft's very own Paul Rosenberg where he says the following:

But it's doubtful she had any idea what she was in for with these journalists, touted for explaining economics in terms "regular people" can understand--Gosh, and here I thought Paul Krugman, Dean Baker, and dozens, if not hundreds of other real economists already did that.

Now, obviously Rosenberg is going for a little reverse-snark with the "regular people" in quotes. But the fact remains that Krugman could not write his columns in econspeak and expect to hold his job. He needs to explain things in a short amount of words and in terms that normal Times readers can understand. A.k.a., he needs to dumb it down. I'm sure he's ignoring overly-complicated things and oversimplifying research and trends. His columns aren't going to be winning him any Nobel Prizes. But that's good for me! Because compared to Krugman, I'm the dumb one, and sometimes I need stuff to be explained to me like I'm a six-year-old.

And yet Krugman's readers are clearly square in the middle of the Ivy League, liberal elite, Starbucks-sippin', Amtrak corridor crowd. Does Bowers think that if you took the other 70% of this country and had them read Krugman's columns, they would understand a single word? I don't. Why? Because those people are dumb. And they need Krugman's already-dumbed-down article to be dumbed-down even further. And that's what cable news is.

Twilight

Things that are apparently morally superior to having sex:

• Living in a town which seems to moonlight as the set for an Evanescence music video.
• Attempting to act without formal acting instruction.
  
• Befriending a sexually repressed vampire.
• Having a father who is also a rapist.
• And the key one: Flying into the woods and ranting, ad nauseam, about why you are so superior to the sex-crazed plebeians that constitute, you know, normal society.
  

Movie sucked. Girl is hot. The rest is just child porn for Mormons who never go outside.

Yeasayer, "Tightrope"

Yeasayer's All Hour Cymbals was certainly one of the underrated records of 2007. It's truly awesome, both in how original it sounds and how refreshingly catchy it immediately is. Through some really rigorous gumshoe work on my part, and in part aided by the popular website Google, I believe I have found out that they have a new album coming out this year. Which is very good. In honor, I present a more recent and very good track by them -- "Tightrope":

Bolt

It's a good bet that I would have enjoyed this more if I were a four-year-old girl. However, with all the returns in, it was a pretty damn fun movie. Throughout a lot of it, I was thinking about Miley Cyrus and whether she would have ever banged John Travolta's now-dead son. Usually, this is a pretty damning thing to say about a movie, especially one that's only 90 minutes in length. But in this case... it's a good thing? I mean, you don't need a double Ph. D. to appreciate Bolt, so there was lots of free time for me to, while focusing on the movie, also focus on other things. Like how much of a gap there is between Pixar animation and Disney animation. And how awesome John Travolta's voice is on a dog. And how amazingly awful Miley Cyrus's voice is, period.

Miley Cyrus sounds like a retarded kid who spent eight years in Alabama. Her voice is obnoxious, dumb, grating, and utterly fake. I know it's fake because I deny the possibility that anyone actually sounds like that. Sure, I mean, she sounds like it now. But it's merely the byproduct of an aggressive stage mother, a rapist father, and zero education since kindergarten. Her voice is a lab creation, through and through. And it pisses me the fuck off.

Luckily, Miley Cyrus's character is merely a bit role in Bolt. The real star of Bolt is Bolt, who is really cute, kinda dumb, and very earnest. He and his feline friend (voiced by Susie Essman, noted CYE Jew) have a lot of great interplay, and are overall very well-written. I also need to tip my cap to the Truman Show-y plot. I think it's a tricky thing to pull off in a film like this, where you have to make it smart enough to not be retarded but retarded enough to make sense to toddlers. These guys did it pretty damn well.

Looking Up "Convenience" In The Jewish Dictionary

Today's Times had a delightful little piece entitled "Making Kosher a Little More Convenient." Going through all the kosher motions is a real bitch, and the writers thought they would offer some tips on how to make things a bit easier for America's practicing Jews. And so, as someone who enjoys heaps of Monterey Jack on his burgers, I eagerly delved into the article, expecting to be humored a bit as I ate breakfast.

It turns out that the editors of the Times have not inhabited reality in quite some time. Here is how they suggest that kosherites change up the kitchen to make things easier:

FEATURES The new appliances and stations include: 1. Meat microwave. 2. Dairy microwave. 3. Sub-Zero fridge with “Sabbath mode.” 4. Double wall oven, with separate units for meat and dairy. 5. Meat sink. 6. Meat dishwasher. 7. Dairy sink. 8. Double dishwasher, with separate drawers for meat and dairy. 9. Warming drawer

And the cost? JUST PENNIES, I TELL YOU:

The kitchen renovation cost about $100,000, including $25,000 for the appliances, said Mr. Alt, who is 51.

How To Paint Jews In a Good Light 101. Lesson 1: Don't write these articles.

Just Making Stuff Up

The Editors at NRO have a new bit on how Vermont's ruling in favor of gay marriage is going to ruin society and stuff. In it, they say this:

Contrary to common perception, however, the public is not becoming markedly more favorable toward same-sex marriage. Support for same-sex marriage rose during the 1990s but seems to have frozen in place (at least according to Gallup) since the high court of Massachusetts invented a right to same-sex marriage earlier this decade.

The Massachusetts ruling occurred in 2004. So let's look at the data:

In the 6/03 poll, 39% of respondents favored legalizing same-sex marriage. In the May 2006 poll, 39% respondents favored legalizing same-sex marriage. So public opinion went unchanged over the past many years. Right? Right? No. First, you must consider the high likelihood that the 2003 polling was an outlier. If you look at the surrounding numbers, you see the pro-gay marriage stance polling mostly in the low 30s. 39 is just an aberration. On the other hand, the last 3 polls taken all indicate marked increases in support for gay marriage and decreases in opposition to gay marriage. This much should be readily evident to even the most braindead, but apparently isn't.

However, the polling in this chart is cut-off nearly three years ago. What has happened in the last three years? Well, a lot of people have died. What types of people? Generally, older people. And what position on gay marriage are older people typically more disposed to?


Compared to the young crowd, older Americans are much more likely to oppose gay marriage. Look at those numbers! It is flying in the face of logic to declare that Americans are not becoming more receptive to gay marriage. The chart circled in red should be ample evidence of how poorly the current conservative position is going to fare in coming years.

But keep on chugging, Kathryn.

Aflghh... Eminem's "We Made You"

What to say, what to say. "Crack a Bottle" (while not an Em track) was seriously great, with a romping rhythm, a catchy-if-a-bit-wtf chorus, and a great set of verses from Dr. Dre and Eminem. So for the last few months, I've remained hopeful of Eminem's comeback prospects. Well, it seems that, over the past few days, Eminem has unleashed "We Made You" to the world.



After many listens, here are my thoughts:

The video, while already approaching tiring, is entertaining, albeit being pretty much standard fare for Eminem. Lots of costumes and a plethora of well-worn jokes. So while it will definitely get the talking heads talking, it's not really worth discussing. Now, as for the song, there are significant, um, lyrical problems. First -- Eminem seems to not be aware that today, way more so than in 1999-2003, the news cycle is really fast. A decade ago, you could make a song about Fred Durst and Christina Aguilera and it would still be funny and singalongable seven months later. These days, not so much. Ergo, stuff like Jessica Simpson's ass and... Kim Kardashian's ass are poor choices for lyrical material.

Second -- irrespective of the speed of the modern news cycle, you can't write a song about Lindsay Lohan's lesbian lover and expect it to be a quality track. Look at this crap:

Sorry Portia, but whats Ellen Degeneres
Have that I don't, are you telling me tenderness?
Well I can be as gentle and as smooth as a gentleman
Give me my ventolin inhaler and 2 zenedrin
And I'll invite Sarah Palin out to dinner then
Nail her,'Baby say hello to my little friend' Brit forget K Fed lets cut off the middle man

Eminem has rapped about a few different things: Kim, Kim, Hailey, drugging girls, not giving a fuck, still not giving a fuck, Kim, Insane Clown Posse, Moby, drugs, drugs, and just losing it. All of these topics have a very finite shelf life. While "Marshall Mathers" is a really awesome song, Eminem can't exactly put out "Marshall Mathers 2" and expect people to not have issues with it. He's rapping about homosexuals and vicodin. You can't sell that fucking record.

So now he starts tossing rocks at Sarah Palin, which is oh-so-lame. I don't know how Eminem can credibly reinsert himself into the music scene in 2009, but it surely isn't with lyrics like the aforementioned. Of course, "We Made You" will probably be at number 1 -- if it's not already -- so what the fuck do I know?

WITH ALL THAT SAID, this is a really, really catchy song. I can't stop listening to it. The beat is fully entrenched in my brain, and the chorus just rolls over and over on my tongue. And -- massive lyrical screw-ups aside -- Eminem is still an endearing rhymer.

So objectively, this song blows. But I like it. And I really want to hear his new album.

Idol, 4/7

PICK: SCOTT

Theme: Songs From the Year the Contestants Were Born

Was really hoping Scott would walk off the stage. No luck.

Danny: Gokey is still a bit too cheery for someone with a dead wife. "Stand By Me"... He looks mildly retarded. What a dumb version. Just atrocious, butchering the song. Gokey is doing good, I guess. Nothing incredible or even memorable. Or even good, really. Lots of cheers. Randy: "You're an amazing singer... you got some talent!" Kara: "What kind of arrangement is this?" Paula: "Brilliant." Simon: "Overall, great!" What...

Kris: Kris's dad looks like a stand-in. "All She Wants To Do Is Dance"... Kris essentially just has a good allure, a good total package. His voice out of someone else's mouth would be meh. But he looks like a Calvin Klein model, so he sails through the Idol gauntlet. This is just a catchy song; he's not really doing anything with it. There are a million girls around him. Kara: "Music class." Paula: "Uniquely your own." Simon: "Indulgent, boring." Randy: "I lost you."

Lil Rounds: "Lil Rounds" is apparently her real name. Excellent work, Mom. "What's Love Got To Do With It"... Lil Rounds looks like a different person every week. Atrocious stylist. I can hear it already -- "Why o why did you pick Tina Turner?" Not very good, in my opinion. Paula: "AWFUL." (In the way that she phrases it.) Simon: "Third-rate Tina Turner." Good, Simon makes the point that she changes every week. God, go away. Awful. Randy: "Tina is not you." Kara: "You're struggling right now."

Anoop: This needs to be his last week. There is no universe in which he could become a music star. "True Colors"... Haha, Cyndi Lauper. This isn't bad, actually. I will admit that he is becoming exceedingly difficult to hate. He does not really have any range. The soft, low thing is his beat, and he does it well. That was pretty decent. Randy: "Dude, you can actually sing." Kara: "You controlled the song." Jesus, Kara is a fucking idiot. Paula: "Flawless." Simon: "This week was very good." Anoop looks mildly speechless.

Blind Scott: He wanted to be a train engineer. "The Search Is Over"... What the fuck. He has a guitar, and he's standing up. Amazingly awful. His blindness only makes it worse. Kara: "I'm not sure I would have picked that song." Paula: "I give you credit for stepping away from the comfort zone of the piano." Simon: "Uh, I would suggest you go back to the piano next week." LOL. Jesus, Simon just raked him over the coals. Randy: "It was all okay."

Allison: It's reassuring to know that she was an ugly child as well. "I Can't Make You Love Me"... It's not bad, but it kinda feels as though she's just going through the motions. No real marked effort on her part. Atrocious outfit, as usual. Paula: "That's a gift that you can't put a price tag on." Simon: "That was very good." Randy: "[Kelly Clarkson] could sing her face off and so can you!" Kara: "Believable and young."

Matt: This guy is technically very good, he's just so unattractive and such a clumsy moron. "Part Time Lover"... He would be helped immensely if he could dance. At all. But he really can't. Good performance though. Randy: "Vocally, one of the best of the night." Kara: "Unbelievable." Paula: "Standing O." Simon: "Well done."

Adam: "Mad World"... Nice choice for him. This is really good so far. Great performance. Normally, I'd expect lavish, lavish praise, but they have to rush this because it's already 9:05. Simon: "Standing O."

Palin's Hypocrisy

Throwing barbs at Palin is pretty tedious at this point, but this release from her office, on the Ted Stevens case being thrown out for prosecutorial misconduct, is just hilarious:

I know the agony the senator has felt, and nothing can change what he has gone through or the loss of his Senate seat, which meant the world to him and virtually as much to Alaska. There's no way he can just ‘put this behind him’ as some have suggested he should. Senator Stevens is a resilient man and I hope that he will continue to make a contribution to Alaska and the nation.

Leaving aside the fact that she herself called for Stevens' resignation, you cannot read this statement without thinking about William Ayers. Palin seems to think that because Stevens' case was thrown out, that signifies that Stevens is innocent. But in fact, the charges were dropped because of prosecutorial misconduct. This is virtually the identical reason that the case against Bill Ayers was thrown out.

Long story short: I eagerly await a Palin press release apologizing for all the times she called Ayers a "terrorist." After all, he wasn't convicted; he's clearly not guilty of any wrongdoing!

Mark Steyn's Epic Freakout

NRO has simply been acting as Glenn Beck's Facebook feed since January 20th, so this should come as no surprise. And let's not forget that the 2009 edition of the Conservative Blogger's Codebook dictates that one must always be ready to criticize the manner in which Obama greets someone or waves his hand or walks up stairs. This is all very important.

Mark Steyn has a seizure today over Obama bowing down to King Abdullah:

So let me see if I understand American protocol in the age of Obama: The First Lady hugs Queen Elizabeth as if she's some granny at a seniors' center photo-op, but the President of this republic prostrates himself before King Abdullah as if he's a subject of the Saudi pseudo-Crown.

This is a very weird presidency.

Yes, this is a totally unacceptable breach of protocol. Obama paying respect to a foreign leader, in the foreign leader's country, using the customs that one typically uses in that country. Tantamount to cutting off America's balls, if you ask me.

Dear Mark Steyn,


GO FUCK YOURSELF.

Seven Pounds

Will Smith; tax collecting; bone marrow transplant surgery; car crashes; eggplant parmesan; organ transplants; running in the rain; Rosario Dawson; big dogs; unhelpful hospital workers; deadly jellyfish; jumping into a tub full of ice; sticking a deadly jellyfish into the tub full of ice that you just jumped into; fraud; identity theft; crack addict brothers; Woody Harrelson; rare blood types; MIT; dreams; crushed dreams; organ donation obsession...

At the end of it all, I'm somewhat not-so-proud to say I did enjoy Seven Pounds. It sports an interesting premise -- ultra-generous dude kills himself in order to donate his organs to seven people in need of them. "Seven" because earlier in his life, this dude (Smith) accidentally killed seven people in a car accident. So there's probably tons of redemptive religious allegorical BS wrapped up in this that I don't care about, but the basic idea is good.

It isn't executed perfectly, and, to be honest, I'm getting a wee bit sick of the Hancock, Pursuit, and now Seven Pounds-style Smith, what with the antisocial mannerisms and all. But in the end, it's motherfucking Will Smith, so who cares? He rules, and so does Rosario Dawson, who gives a pretty damn underrated performance as a chick in need of a heart transplant. The film totally yanks on the heartstrings, and has a pretty epic back half, featuring a nicely shot montage-y death by jellyfish. Overall -- I liked it, but I'm a sucker for crap.

Metric, "Gold Guns Girls"

Sorry to beat the hell out of this band, but man, this song is really good.

Joke of the Day

Q: What did Rahm Emanuel's secretary tell the man who called to ask him to do an interview on the role of morality in government?

White: "Emanuel can't."

Australia

This was like indescribable torture. Jesus fucking Christ -- Baz Luhrmann needs to throw himself off of something with a very significant elevation. Essentially, Australia is just two ostensibly attractive actors thrown in with a grab bag of period piece cliches and myriad horrible references to the land down under. However, there are, well, a few problems that arise:

-Nicole Kidman is no longer attractive. Granted, she's purposely made to look unattractive throughout most of this movie, but she's lost something and has aged like a peach that was left outside for a month.

-That. Goddamn. Kid. "Nullah." He will haunt my dreams forever. I really want to punch him in his left kidney, multiple times. I would say he singlehandedly ruins the film, but that presupposes a certain inherent goodness that Australia totally lacks. Regardless -- his cadence is horrible and Aborigines are annoying to begin with. If I hear either of the terms "walkabout" or "cheeky bull" again, ugh.

-HUGH JACKMAN CANNOT ACT. And yet he really really tries to in Australia. For most of it, he's blessed with a script that simply requires him to speak like a Crocodile Dundee stand-in. Still, there are romantic scenes and tearjerking dramabombs aplenty, all of which Jackman spectacularly sucks at. If you've seen him try and stifle tears as Wolverine, you get the picture.

-The subplot sucks. Herding cows across the Australian desert? Really?

-Apparently, someone made the decision that although this movie is not a LSD-tripper's dream like Moulin Rouge!, it should be photographed like one. That person is a mouthbreather. I know that all movies use blue screens, but usually they don't look like blue screens.

-Do you see this? In the movie, this guy is an aboriginal, rain-dancing wizard. In reality, he's a nutcase. He is basically the homeless guy that sits on the floor at Port Authority. I want to kick him in his arthritis-ridden knees. Second worst aspect of this movie behind Nullah (a.k.a. Rafael Nadal's Mini Me).

-One hundred and sixty-five minutes. You have got to be shitting me. Don't do that.

-This movie is like a 1939 rendition of Crash. It has many social commentaries; it's main one, however, is that -- surprise! -- white people didn't really treat brown-skinned aborigines with a lot of respect. Yet Australia decides to lay this point on so often and so thick that I feel like choking. It makes Ludacris's famous contrivance from Crash look like Shakespearean brilliance.

-Usually, movies make trade-offs, exchanging one thing for another. If it decides to be a really long movie, it makes that up by being really good. If it makes it clear from the outset what the ending will look like, it makes that up by having a compelling set of characters. If it decides to star an aboriginal brat with excessively sun-colored hair, it usually gets rid of the hideously ancient indigenuous native character. Australia did none of these things. And it sucked massively.