The Sundries Shack

This made me laugh.

I agree with Allah that it’s hokey but I also agree that they’ll hit the right tone quickly enough. It’s not like they don’t have plenty of material and a year or so to sharpen the humor before the next election.

But I did think it was funny. That bit about Rusty’s Backwater Saloon was very nice.

Next time, if they want to put John Boehner in the commercial, they need to toss out the overused slogans (”neither have the American people”, “runaway spending in Washington”) and loosen him up a bit. He could be very effective in ads like these, but he has to get used to speaking like he’s on the House floor or doing a standup on CNN.

UPDATE: Smitty isn’t such a fan.

Dear Movie Reviewers,

This is what a good movie review looks like (content warning: spoilers, bad language, and mental images of Michael Bay naked). Note how the reviewer smiles through the pain in a vain attempt to convince us all that he isn’t the least bit resentful that he paid twenty bucks for the theatrical equivalent of being hooked up to The Machine.

How is Sam Witwicky dragged back into the fight?
Well, he finds a fragment of the Allspark shard. You know, the Allspark that he spent all last movie being told he shouldn’t give to Megatron, but when he gave it to Megatron, it killed Megatron. That one. Anyways, the shard makes the Beef see symbols and act like more of an spaz than usual.

So the Decepticons want the shard? Why?
Uh… to bring Megatron back to life?

What?
That’s what they said.

But the Allspark killed Megatron in the first movie.
Yes.

…and now it can also bring him back to life.
It’s very powerful, this Allspark.

Uh-huh. So what’s their plan to get it?
They send a small R/C car who talks like Joe Pesci in Casino to get it.

Shouldn’t they have sent Starscream or somebody?
Look, there’s another Allspark shard and get that one anyways, so it doesn’t matter.

It only gets better from there. Seriously, if more reviews took themselves a lot less seriously, the movie business would be a better place, guys.

Thanks to Twitter friend stackiii for the link.

The real question I bet you’re asking yourself is whether, after reading that review, I’ll still go see the movie or not. Well, to be perfectly honest, I really don’t know.
Keep on reading…

Like Moe Lane, I’m no fan of bamboo. Unlike Moe Lane, I’ve never gone all Cato the Elder on it, but I can definitely understand why he would. Bamboo is nasty.

When I was a teenager, I spent one long, hot, scratchy, suffocating summer day in a canebreak of bamboo, cutting down stalks to use as fishing poles for a church youth function were were going to hold the following week. During that miserable day, I learned several important lessons.

1) There is a reason that folks who live around bamboo carry machetes and not hacksaws.
2) You would think that because the bamboo leaves block out the sun, it would be cool in a canebreak. You would be wrong. Think insulation, not leafy shade tree.
3) Dried bamboo leaves get everywhere.
4) Bamboo makes for one formidable primitive weapon.

*Sorry, the geek side of me took over for a moment. Ask the nearest Roman what that means. Or Linnaeus.

I hope Henry Waxman is feeling better very soon.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A powerful House committee chairman with a central role in President Barack Obama’s global warming and health care legislation has been hospitalized.

Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., was not feeling well Tuesday and was admitted to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles for “routine testing,” spokeswoman Karen Lightfoot said Wednesday.

Rumors that he suffered an acute attack of conscience were categorically denied.

You’ll see more of Waxman as we head farther into the health care debate, so keep a couple questions in mind. Perhaps some upstart Republican will actually ask them.

1) Under the plan he wants to force us into, could you check into one of the top hospitals in the nation for “routine testing”?
2) Could you do it on the very same day you weren’t “feeling well”?
3) Does he know how much his “routine tests” cost? If no, why not?
4) Does he think those costs should be obvious so that he could, if he chose, compare the prices to other hospitals to find the best deal? If no, why not?

I figure he’s healthy now. He can handle the stress of a few questions, right?

My new post is up at AIP. Wednesday is usually an energy/climate change day for me there, which is good because I’m getting a ton of mileage out of the Democrats’ cap-and-trade bill. Watching the horse-trading going on is like watching a piranha tank after you’ve thrown in a shank of lamb.

As always, I’d appreciate it greatly if you click over there and read it all. It’s a short read, I promise.

Culture of Corruption? Why, whatever on Earth could you be talking about?

Sen. Daniel K. Inouye’s staff contacted federal regulators last fall to ask about the bailout application of an ailing Hawaii bank that he had helped to establish and where he has invested the bulk of his personal wealth.

The bank, Central Pacific Financial, was an unlikely candidate for a program designed by the Treasury Department to bolster healthy banks. The firm’s losses were depleting its capital reserves. Its primary regulator, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., already had decided that it didn’t meet the criteria for receiving a favorable recommendation and had forwarded the application to a council that reviewed marginal cases, according to agency documents.

Two weeks after the inquiry from Inouye’s office, Central Pacific announced that the Treasury would inject $135 million.

Funny how that just worked out, isn’t it?

I’ll say there is no explicit sign that Inouye did anything untoward. It is possible (and in a government as big as the one in Washington, I’d say it’s even likely), that the Senator’s call and the bank’s approval were mostly coincidental.

Kind of.

I don’t believe that the Senator leaned on the officials who chose his bank for a bailout. I don’t think he did more than he said he did. However, I would be willing to bet that the Senator’s name and title appeared prominently on the bank’s paperwork, probably more than once, where the folks making the decisions couldn’t miss it. I’m not saying that he put it there, but I can’t believe someone else didn’t think to do it. It is a metaphysical certainty that a mention or two of the Senator’s name (and perhaps a note that he was a founder and is a major investor) would give the bank an immense advantage. What bureaucrat would be insane enough to refuse a request, even one that is secondhand and implied, from a United States Senator?

Even the Senator’s relatively-innocent call is weighted with expectations, whether the Senator actually has them or not. Daniel Inouye has been around enough to know that just expressing an interest provides plenty of impetus to get a piece of paper hand-ushered through the bureaucratic maze.

It’s not corruption, per se, but it looks like corruption, which is plenty bad enough.

John Hawkins has another blogger poll up at Right Wing News for which I was one of the respondents. Normally, John keeps his questions tightly focused around a particular topic or upcoming event (an election, a Congressional vote, etc) but this bunch of questions was kind of all over the place. I wonder where he’s headed with a couple of them, or if they were just things that were on his mind.

I’d like to expand on my answer to a couple of the questions. Here’s the first one:

4) What grade would you give Barack Obama on his handling of the crisis in Iran?

A-B: 3.2% (2 votes)
C: 16.1% (10 votes)
D-F: 80.6% (50 votes)

The only thing that saved him from an “F” in my book was that he eventually gave a kinda sorta condemnation of the Iranian government’s slaughter. That said, I think he could have easily earned a “B” (there’s no chance he would have given the sort of quick and ringing condemnation that would have gotten him an “A”). Given that there were only a few things he could have done, knocking down a couple of them — say a harsh condemnation of the government crackdown and a hint or two that he might not treat the Iranian’s as a legitimate government if they didn’t back down and treat the protesters with respect — would have more than satisfied me.

6) Would you vote for an atheist for President?

Yes: 67.2% (41 votes)
No: 32.8% (20 votes)

I have to admit, I don’t really know where this question comes from. I wouldn’t have a problem voting for an atheist so long as they honored the First Amendment and the important part religion has always placed in civic life. I suspect that many of those who voted “no” were concerned that an atheist President wouldn’t do either of those things much at all.

7) Do you believe, as a general rule, that conservatives are more moral than liberals?

Yes: 77% (47 votes)
No: 23% (14 votes)

It took me as long to answer this one question as it did all the rest combined. On the surface, it seems pretty easy. My kneejerk response was “Well, of course we are!” but then I thought about Mark Sanford and the various scandas in the Republican Party, many of which involve members of Congress who call themselves conservative and I had to stop. Maybe we really aren’t any more moral than progressives.

On the other hand, progressives have political beliefs that are, I believe, immoral from the ground up. I think it’s immoral to take someone’s money because you believe you can spend it better than they. I think it’s immoral to hold an entire group of people in poverty to prop up your own electoral power base. I think it’s immoral to use accusations of racism, misogyny, and hatred as your first weapon against a political opponent. These are all undeniable hallmarks of left-wing politics going back a very long way.

And I came back to the scandals, especially the sex scandals. It’s impossible to consider someone a hypocrite if they’ve never taken a moral stand on anything. That’s why John Edwards, Jesse Jackson, Bill Clinton, Eliot Spitzer, James McGreevy, and Kwame Kilpatrick, just to name a few Democratic adulterers, were unscathed by the “H” word. It’s why Barney Frank continues to be a leader of the Democratic Congress despite being deeply involved in a gay prostitution ring some years ago.

You can’t be accused of immorality if you don’t have morals to begin with. No one expects that out of left-wing politicians but they do out of those on the right. That point certainly helped my decision.