March 31, 2006

New To The Blogroll

A mental health site whose contributors "lean" Conservative. Worth checking out.

Hey, a lot of you mental defectives might find some valuable advice.

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"24" Season One: The CTU Traitor Exposed

Just finished Season One of "24" on DVD.

RIVETING!!!!

Don't want to give spoilers but I did NOT see that one coming.

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Woman Calls Police On Porn-Addicted Hubby

A frustrated wife in Aachen, Germany is so fed up with her husband watching non-stop porn she called the cops to extract him from his barcalounger.

The 44-year-old woman, from Aachen, dialled the emergency police number and told the dispatcher in a weepy voice there was an emergency.

But when officers arrived at the scene they found her pacing the apartment while her husband, 46, sat in front of the TV watching a blue movie.

She told the police: "Nothing will move him, not even if I offer him the real thing, and he has the TV on so loud I'm sure the neighbours can hear it."

Has it not occured to this woman that her poor husband is merely trying "aversion therapy" to break himself of his addiction, a la "A Clockwork Orange"?

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Hey, it could happen.

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Obama Endorses Lieberman

Democrat Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois stopped by Hartford last night to endorse Sen. Joe Lieberman for his reelection bid this year. Giving the keynote speech at the party's Jefferson Jackson Bailey dinner, Obama publicly threw his support behind the Connecticut Senator who is facing a challenge from the moonbat Left.

"The fact of the matter is, I know some in the party have differences with Joe. I'm going to go ahead and say it," Obama told the 1,700-plus party members who gathered in a ballroom at the Connecticut Convention Center for the $175-per-head fundraiser.

"I am absolutely certain Connecticut is going to have the good sense to send Joe Lieberman back to the U.S. Senate so he can continue to serve on our behalf," he said.

Obama received widespread attention for his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, delivered while he was still a state senator.

Lieberman became Obama's mentor when Obama was sworn into the Senate in 2005. They stayed close at Thursday night's event, too, entering the room together and working the crowd in tandem.

Despite the camaraderie between the two, the crowd was clearly more receptive to Obama's remarks than Lieberman's speech about party unity and the potential for Democratic victories at the ballot box this fall.

In fact, scattered boos greeted Lieberman when he took the podium, and he had to stop three times during his remarks to shush the crowd so he could deliver key points.

Many CT Democrats are teaming up with organizations like MoveOn.org to defeat Lieberman in this year's Democrat primary which is scheduled for August 8. The last Quinnipiac poll, however, indicates that this will be a difficult task. The poll, released February 16th, shows that CT voters give Lieberman a 63% approval rating, up from 62% in January. But, of course, the only poll that matters at this point is the one among Democrat voters. Go figure. In a match-up against challenger Ned Lamont, Lieberman cleans his clock 68%-13%. And 61% of Democrats polled say Lieberman deserves reelection. Ouch. That's worse than even I expected.

Granted, Lamont has zero name recognition right now. It's a long way to August. And then there's the potential financial support of Left-wing 527's. But overcoming a 55 point deficit? Sometime over the next four months the CT Democrats in Hartford are going to have to officially endorse Lieberman. How long will they wait in order to try and appease the moonbats?

Now the big question is: How long will it take the Kos Kids to rip Obama a new one and start calling him a "traitor" and a "Bush butt-boy"? One website is already calling Obama "a serious disappointment to progressives" and that he "just thew away a lot of good will, if you ask me". Pretty darn polite, if you ask me. But as Lamont's quixotic quest becomes more and more unlikely, I wouldn't be surprised to hear the Left taking their vitriolic anger out on Obama.

UPDATE: 11:30am
Nope, didn't take long at all as Mark at Decision '08 notes.

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March 30, 2006

Disclaimer

For the record, I didn't create the current poll in the sidebar. Sadie of AgentBedHead.com is adding some poll script to my site.

Steve and Robbo are both equally beautiful in my eyes. :wink:

I have some plans for a post-March Madness competition among all the current 80's Crushes. Stay tuned!

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"BAM!...I Feel Like A Woman"

Oh man, this is something. A woman claims she accidentally shot her husband while doing a sexy dance for him to the music of Shania Twain. It seems, at first, Linda West did her little provacative show for her husband of two months with a broom to represent a gun. But the broom thing? It just wasn't good enough for the hubby.

"Mr West was found dead in an armchair by police after his wife made a hysterical 999 call. He had a single shotgun wound to his chest.

Giving evidence in her defence at Winchester Crown Court, Hants, West said they had shared a "lovely evening" at their Southampton home. They had drunk wine and she had run a bath for her husband.

When he came out of the bathroom she decided to put on a show and began dancing to the music of the country singer, which was playing on a stereo. The song contains erotically-charged lyrics.

She said Mr West then disappeared into the bedroom of their flat and reappeared with his BSA500 shotgun and asked her to dance with it.

West re-enacted her moves using the broom handle, telling the jury: "I'm holding the barrels of the gun and I'm dancing holding the gun. I was entertaining my husband."

She said that at the end of the song she put the shotgun on to the floor beside her. With tears streaming down her face she said: "It just went offÂ…it just went bang."

A weapons expert told the court that the safety catch, used to prevent the accidental firing of the gun, was faulty and it could have gone off without anyone touching the trigger. West told the court that she was unaware of the fault.

The prosecution claims the couple had argued after drinking and West had deliberately shot her husband, a marine engineer, in anger. Neighbours had reported hearing shouting coming from their flat."

Okay, so you're a marine engineer. BAM! That don't impress me much.

Or maybe those shouts were actually more along the lines of "Yee-ha, woman! Dance for me!" Plus Mrs. West tested twice the legal drunk-driving limit. Who knows? Would I love to be on that jury. But, there's a lesson to be learned here gentlemen: no matter how horny you are, never give your drunk wife a loaded shotgun. Er...or something like that.

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March 29, 2006

And Proud Of It





Take the Which Character Am I? Quiz

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Get "Lost" Tonight!

As exciting as the plot is getting, they just don't show enough Kate anymore...

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"If only they had one of these comfy couches in the hatch. Sigh."

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Dems Plan To "Eliminate" Bin Laden

I'm not making this up.

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Yeah, right. When winged monkeys fly out of Harry Reid's butt. They've just released a "position paper" on national security:

It covers party policy positions on homeland security, the war on terror, the military, Iraq and energy security, but it contains many of the same proposals Democrats have offered over the past year.

The platform also lacks specific details of how Democrats plan to capture bin Laden, the al-Qaida mastermind who has evaded U.S. forces in the more than four years since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

If at first you don't succeed, eh? Give 'em hell, Harry! Heh.

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Tax Cuts Are From Mars, Price Controls Are From Another Dimension

In recent years, I've become very interested in the workings of Economics. Having only taken a couple of graduate level courses in it, however, I must admit that often when the subject is discussed the eyes glaze over. This is why Thomas Sowell is one of my favorite Economists. Because he has a knack for explaining such complex concepts with real world examples.

Laws and theories of Economics are not that difficult to understand if you can move beyond the abstract to the concrete. So when I stumble upon something that even I can fathom, I like to share.

Tom at Libertarian Leanings has a great post about microeconomics and human behavior that explains "why price supports and price ceilings don't work and why the Kennedy, Reagan, and Bush tax cuts do work". People often see Free Market Capitalism as a "system" when in fact it really is nothing more than the natural state of an economy when market forces are allowed to play themselves out. It's with the systems of Socialism and Communism that you deal with controls that fly in the face of human behavior, the one variable that cannot be "controlled".

The laws of Economics are no less real than, say, the laws of Physics. You can try to influence them or change them or manipulate them. But when you do, you end up with so many unintended consequences. The laws of Economics and Physics are both constants in their particular equations. You can no more control economic forces than you can control the weather.

Anyway, go read Tom's post. He's the Economics guy and he at least knows what he's talking about.

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March 28, 2006

This Is Just Wrong

Some weirdo - in my own lovely "Blue State" of CT, no less - got here with the following search (see "search words"):

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Dude, you are one sick little monkey!!!!!

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3-Year Old Becomes Prisoner Of "The Claw"

Remember that scene in "Toy Story" where Buzz and Woody climb into the alien toy-filled "claw" machine at Pizza Planet? Well, check this out:

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Apparently, this 3-year old in Austin, MN managed to climb into one of these machines himself!

"The tot crawled through the toy discharge chute in the Toy Chest claw machine at a Godfather's Pizza in Austin and got stuck amid all the toys.

Fire Chief Dan Wilson said it was one of the funniest things he's ever seen. Wilson was one of three people to respond to the non-emergency call. He says the boy was inside the transparent container playing, smiling and laughing and people were taking his picture with digital cameras.

Firefighters pried the door open to get the boy out.

The child wasn't hurt."

Strange Days, indeed.

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Consumer Confidence Highest In Four Years

Hmm. Not a lot of buzz about this little factoid:

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The Conference Board said that its consumer index shot up 4.5 points to 107.2, the highest level since May 2002, when the reading was 110.3. Analysts had expected a reading of 102.

The latest measure was up from a revised 102.7 in February, which was down 4.1 points from January and broke a three-month rebound from last yearÂ’s Gulf hurricanes.

Even more interesting. The fine print in the chart registers the Consumer Confidence rating for 1985 as 100. So with the exception of a post-Katrina dip, Consumer Confidence was higher during most of the last year than it was during the heyday of the mid-1980's.

Yeah, sounds like the worst economy since Herbert Hoover to me.

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Immigration Legislation

Dafydd at Big Lizards makes a compelling case for the current Immigration Reform bill that just cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee as a "reasonable beginning" that still "needs work". I agree with his sentiments:

"I am both pro-immigration and also pro-border control. I have written about this many times before (for example, here and here). I truly and actually believe in the American ideal; but my ideological creed must be tempered by the forge of reality: we obviously cannot simply open the borders and let a firehose of immigration spray across. I try to keep at least two of my feet on the ground.

But those who insist we can just "seal the borders" and "deport all the illegals" are making the same ethereal, other-worldly mistake. It is not physically possible to round 'em up and ship 'em out; there are twelve million illegals here right now, for heaven's sake. Any immigration reform plan must come to grips with this 800-lb gorilla.

As odd as I feel saying it, the McCain-Kennedy bill is the only one to come out of either body that tries to find a solution to that King Kong of dilemmas, what to do with the 12,000,000. I don't particularly like Sen. John McCain (R-Gadfly) and I despise Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Margaritaville). But their bill at least makes an attempt to resolve that problem.

And strangely, it's also the closest to the bill President Bush proposed. At least the J-Com bill includes a guest-worker program with a path to citizenship -- and that is another huge point in its favor, since at the moment, there is no defined path to citizenship... and that is nine-tenths of the problem: since we don't make any provision to let even the most deserving come in the front door (it's entirely random -- when it isn't being race-based), those desperate for freedom come squirming in through the window.

What do you expect? Even the most decent people will take desperate measures to feed their families and let their children grow up in freedom, not tyranny. [author's emphasis]"

Six in ten Americans say they are against allowing illegal immigrants to stay in the U.S. That's a great hypothetical - crossing your arms, doing an "I Dream Of Jeannie" blink and making all the illegals disappear and reappear south of the border. But many of those same people would recoil in horror at the sight of people being rounded up and families torn apart because of a lack of paperwork. I understand the intensity of opposition from many on the Right but if we are ever going to make any progress in the way of immigration reform, any solution must be grounded in reality.

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March 27, 2006

RINO Sightings

This week's RINO Sightings hosted by Cold Hearted Truth.

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Half Of My Content Is Officially Safe...For Now

The FEC has just ruled that it won't regulate politics on the internet.

In a 6-0 vote, the commission decided to regulate only paid political ads placed on another person's Web site.

The decision means that bloggers and online publications will not be covered by provisions of the new election law. Internet bloggers and individuals will therefore be able to use the Internet to attack or support federal candidates without running afoul of campaign spending and contribution limits.

The first amendment has already taken a beating from McCain-Feingold and this is a step in the right direction towards preserving an individual's right to publicly express an opinion.

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Netflix Reviews

I'm stealing the idea of reviewing by weekly Netflix movies from Robbo the Llama Butcher. I signed up a couple of weeks ago and I've found that probably the best thing about this service is that because of its flexibility I end up watching a lot more DVDs that I have in a long time. Hey, when you have young kids, it's hard to motivate yourself to go out to Blockbuster or some other video store and wander up and down the display of new releases (a buddy of mine designates it as the "wall of shame") and find something - anything - worth taking a chance and wasting $5 and two hours on.

With the Netflix, you have plenty of time to browse, read reviews, discuss with the wife and throw a bunch of stuff in your queue.

First off, let be be upfront. My name is Gary and I'm a "24" addict. I'm most of the way through season one at this point and I'm kicking myself for not watching this first run. The biggest problem at this point are spoilers and I've come to accept the fact that no character is safe on this show. Any one of them can get killed off if future seasons and many are. So I'm just resigned to that fact. But this doesn't take away from the intensity of the show. I look forward to season two and beyond.

Next up, "Bend It Like Beckham". This was one my wife saw with friends at the theater a while back and she's been bugging me to see it. It's a bit more than your standard sports coming of age story. Yes, you have the teenage girl dealing with parental expectations thing. There's also the Indian v. British cultural clash aspect. But the main thrust of the story is about women who love to play football/soccer trying to make it in a "man's sport". One of things that struck me is that while Europe is often seen in this country as being so "progressive" and culturally "open-minded" the best these girls can aspire to is playing professionally in the U.S. Where are all the European women's sporting leagues? No where to be found, eh?

The United States has the WUSA, the WNBA, the LPGA...even a professional women's American Football league. Now, granted these leagues don't have anywhere near the popularity of the men's pro sports organizations but at least there's the opportunity for women athletes to compete in the sports they excel in, and get paid for it. I guess Europe has a long way to go in this respect.

Anyway, the film is funny and well-done. The lead character is Jess Bhamra, played by Parminder Nagra (who is currently starring in the series "ER"), whose talents with a soccer ball are noticed by Jules Paxton (Keira Knightly). Jules invites Jess to play on a amateur women's team she belongs to. Jess joins the team against the wishes of her parents, who would rather she follow her sister's example and find a nice Indian man to marry. The results are both comical and touching as Jess does her best to manage her family's desires and aspire to her own.

Lastly, I finally got around to seeing "Sideways" and was pleasantly surprised. Miles Raymond (Paul Giamatti) is a middle-aged English teacher and aspiring (but failing) writer who is really in his element when evaluating wines but is a guy who otherwise is not comfortable in his own skin. He heads up to Northern California on a week-long roadtrip with his buddy, Jack, who is getting married the following Saturday. Miles introduces his friend to the joys of wine and wine-tasting (though often a little too much tasting) but Jack is more interested in getting laid before he takes the big plunge.

The story is well-written and we gradually get to understand what makes these guys tick, especially Miles. Both men begin to reevaluate their lives at middle-age and ask the same questions that we all do - who are we and what do we really want out of life. Their exploration of wine-country leads to an exploration of themselves. There is a particularly well-written scene where Miles is discussing wine with Maya, the lead female character (Virginia Madsen), and the wine becomes a metaphor for life itself. I can see where some people might find the ending too ambiguous or open-ended but the key to the conclusion is Miles' personal growth. Where it goes from there, the viewer can fill in the blanks.

This is one of those films I think I'll probably watch again sometime - with a bottle or two of some good wine. Being a novice on the subject, I'm open to suggestions.

Posted by: Gary at 09:53 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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March 25, 2006

80's Crush Of The Week

This week's 80's Crush is: Molly Ringwald

Birth Name: Same
Birth Date: 2/18/68
Age Today: 38
Birthplace: Roseville, CA

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80's Crush Because: What would an 80's Crush feature be without Molly Ringwald, the Queen of the Brat Pack?. She was the forgotten sweet sixteen Samantha Baker in "Sixteen Candles", the archtypical "princess" Claire Standish in John Hughes ensemble, "The Breakfast Club" and Andie Walsh, the girl from the other side of the tracks in "Pretty In Pink" - three films that should be in every thirty-something's DVD library.

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Other Notable Roles: Molly's first break was on the first season of "The Facts Of Life", before they pared the cast down to four girls. She continued in a string of hits that included "The Pick-Up Artist" with Robert Downey, Jr., "For Keeps?" and "Betsy's Wedding". In the nineties, fame kind of waned for Molly and, other than a starring role in the miniseries "Stephen King's The Stand", her appearances have since been mostly relegated to made-for-TV movies.

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Most Recent Media Appearance: In late 2004, she starred in the play Modern Orthodox on Broadway, opposite Jason Biggs and Craig Bierko.

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Distinguishing features: Fire-red hair.

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Career Moment She'd Probably Like To Forget: Molly turned down three roles that could very well have revitalized her career. She opted not to be Amanda Jones in "Some Kind Of Wonderful" (which was played by fellow 80's Crush Lea Thompson) or Molly Jensen in "Ghost" (played by Demi Moore). And had she accepted the role of Vivian Ward in "Pretty Woman", who knows if we would have ever heard of Julia Roberts?

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Interesting Factoids: Molly is also fluent in French and she rank #1 on VH1's list of the "100 Greatest Teen Stars". She dated fellow Brat Packer Anthony Michael Hall in the mid-80's (who is a lot hunkier these days, if not a little more scary looking). In 1986, she made the cover of Time Magazine.

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Still Crushin'?: Not Crushin', but Molly deserves a bust in the 80's Crush Hall of Fame.

Crush Meter: 8 out of 10

For past entries, go to the 80's Crush Vault

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Ladies, don't forget to check out AgentBedhead for her male 80's crush up just for you.

Posted by: Gary at 07:57 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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March 24, 2006

Bored Of The Rings?

Seriously, who's bright idea was it to make "The Lord of the Rings" into a stage play with all three volumes crammed into one 3.5 hour, $23 million production?

It apparently premiered in Toronto yesterday and this critic was bored to tears:

The problems with this version of The Lord of the Rings are so basic that you wonder how those involved with it could watch it coming together and still not see what was wrong.

To begin with, it looks like no one ever decided what kind of show it was meant to be. “It’s not a musical,” the creators kept insisting, but Warchus gives us enough trappings of the form to make us think that it is.

ThereÂ’s a saccharine ballad between Arwen and Aragorn thatÂ’s repeated endlessly, a lengthy dance number at the Prancing Pony Inn which stops the action dead in every sense of the word and a meandering new-age anthem for Galadriel to warble while dressed in disco finery.

But when push comes to shove and the big emotional moments arrive, no one ever actually gets to sing. The music swells behind the cast and they often have to shout to be heard over it, but it doesnÂ’t help them soar.

Sigh.

Posted by: Gary at 03:30 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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No Clothing, Please. We're British.

A new survey finds that about 30% of Brit make telephone calls in their birthday suit on a regular basis (at least 30% of those polled who weren't offended by the question):

"Men are less reserved with over 40% admitting to making naked calls compared with 27% of women.

The study for Post Office HomePhone also revealed that many of us don't pay full attention to callers."

Let's see, their naked and not paying attention to the person on the other end of the line. Hmmmm. Talk about self-absorbed.

Posted by: Gary at 01:18 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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