William Cork is keeping a very good blog on The Passion. I pretty much concur with his thoughts on the movie, which are summarized here (original). I still think Mel Gibson is a well-meaning individual, but until he takes a deep breath and acknowledges that his father is a lunatic and that his movie is going to inspire hatred, it really doesn’t matter what his motivations are. Take a look at some Hutton Gibson quotes from the link above (via Orcinus): ...
Roy Moore is thinking about running for President. That makes Bush’s decision to hold tight on a marriage amendment all the more risky. There’s no guarantee that the radical right will vote for Bush if there’s a more attractive fringe candidate out there. (Via Oliver Willis.)
Wednesday Weird #3 (original) asks us to weirdify the classic bar scenario. It’s 6 AM and I’ve been up since like 4 AM, so I think I’m good to go on this one. OK, so there’s a bar. I guess it’s a fantasy world, but it doesn’t really matter that much. Maybe it’s Shadowrun. It’s better if there’s not a lot of magical healing, though. The point is, there’s this bar, and you can’t die as long as you’re inside it. You also can’t get any better. It’s like you’re stuck at whatever age you were or with whatever wounds you had when you walked in. ...
George Bush, of course, got an honorable discharge from the National Guard, which should erase any question of wrongdoing while he was in the Guard. Sorta like John Muhammad (original), who was court-martialed twice (once for hitting a non-com), and later got an honorable discharge (original). The Fox News story says the honorable discharge can’t be confirmed, but the AP story and the ABC News story linked above both claim to have a source for that portion of the tale. ...
Saith Rex Hammock, upon meeting the President (original): He is definitely not a wonk, but he knows clearly what he believes needs to happen for the country and its eocnomy to prosper. I don’t think the circular arguments regarding “what ifs” and “what abouts” interest him. Rexblog (original) is kind of neat, actually — he’s a small business owner in the magazine industry. I like the focused special interest blogs that never get any attention most of the time. And I like publishing. ...
The Apprentice has been pretty much enh for a couple of weeks — one team was clearly better, and they were destroying the other team. There was some amusement value from watching Jessie stab Kristi, and then get fired the next week. (Kristi: “What should I do?” Jessie: “Oh, don’t say anything until Mr. Trump talks to you.” Kristi: “OK!” Later, Trump: “You’re not very assertive, Kristi. You’re fired.”) Oh, and the bit where Troy carefully manipulated the Fab Five into giving him a good item for a charity auction? That was great. He told the camera what he was gonna do and say, he did it, and it worked like a charm. But there weren’t a lot of good moments like that. ...
The media that has convinced many people that John Kerry is a dull and boring campaigner is the exact same media that convinced a lot of people that Dean was a dangerous scary angry man. Kerry did not win Iowa by accident; he won Iowa by having a kick-ass machine on the ground and by campaigning his heart out and by attracting people on his own merits. It wasn’t media. The media wrote him off as dead. The media storyline challenger for Dean was Clark. ...
The next BloggerCon is gonna be free. Big thumbs up. I’m pretty sure I’ll attend that.
I take no responsibility for the following list of eight names, other than that they’re in a notebook I own. His fault. Jack Dandy Man of Steam The Gurkha Ironclad The Boffin Bright Young Lad, his robotic sidekick/assistant Bulldog Jill Diamond Jubilee
Huh, my predictions weren’t too bad. Kerry took 40% of the votes in Wisconsin; Edwards took 34%, and Dean took 18%. I underestimated the Edwards surge again. The undecided voters went for Edwards in a big way. This is no doubt energizing for the Edwards campaign; he’ll be in at least until March 10th. Super Tuesday will tell us a lot. He’s not going to take on Dean as his Vice President, and if he does he’ll lose — you don’t want a VP who’s going to draw controversy and in some ways outshine you. Dean will also have more influence if he converts his campaign into a 527 and becomes a political center for grassroots populism, so I’m not sure Dean would bite on that either. ...