GOP Senator Gordon Smith Jumps On The Obama Bandwagon

This Gordon Smith political ad is pretty amazing. It features Obama's image and states: "Who says Gordon Smith helped lead the fight for better gas mileage and a cleaner environment? Barack Obama."

Do you think Gordon might be a bit worried about his reelection chances this Fall?

A Comedy About The Apocalypse and Other Entertainment News

This should be interesting. The folks who brought you Superbad are working on a comedy about the end of the world:

The end days are near for Seth Rogen and Jay Baruchel. The pair will star in the action comedy "Jay and Seth vs. the Apocalypse" for Mandate Pictures.

The film is based on a comedy short from "Superbad" scribes Rogen and Evan Goldberg, which in turn was based on a story by Goldberg and Jason Stone. Rogen and Goldberg will write and produce the feature.

Several production companies vied for the rights to the comedy, which revolves, as the title implies, around two guys dealing with the apocalypse. Last summer, the project caused a stir in the blogosphere when a trailer for the short appeared on YouTube.

And speaking of shows about the end of the world, I've got some good news and some bad news about "Battlestar Galactica." The bad news is that there will be no more new episodes until 2009. Here is the good news:

According to well-informed sources, it’s almost certain that at least one “Battlestar Galactica” TV movie will be made this year.

Here’s even better news: The last-ever episode of “Battlestar” will run three hours, which means that final part of Season 4 will be 11 hours long.

You heard that right: The last leg of the show’s final season will expand to 11 hours, instead of the originally planned 10 hours.

As he discussed here, the show’s executive producer, Ronald D. Moore, wrote "Battlestar's" final episode, which, as written, is three hours long (a wild guess here: Sci Fi probably wouldn’t air the whole thing in one night). Mary McDonnell described her reaction to the script this way: It filled her with "an incredible feeling of adrenaline,” she told Ain't It Cool News. “It made me understand the entire saga, and made me excited for all of you.”

A Sci Fi spokesman said Friday, "As written by Ron, the phenomenal finale script extends beyond the time alotted for the episode. We're exploring how to shoot the extra footage as Ron has envisioned and written it."

And here you go, Dan: The classic 60s British television series The Prisoner is getting an update. Ain't It Cool News is reporting that the new Prisoner miniseries is set to begin shooting this August in Africa and will star Ian McKellen (Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings trilogy) as Number Two and Jim Caviezel (Christ in Jesus Chainsaw Massacre) as Number Six.

The reason I mentioned Dan is because, a couple of years ago, I convinced him to watch the first few episodes of the old series, but he didn't really like it. He said it was "too dated" but he did appreciate how it explained an episode of The Simpsons. Maybe the updated version will be more to his liking.

Why Impeach Now?

This is from an Indiana newspaper editorial titled Never Too Late To Impeach:

In the face of the most lawless administration in U.S. history, what are we to make of a House that refuses its duty to impeach? Just a decade ago, fire-breathing Republicans impeached Bill Clinton for lying under oath about an affair. Now, manipulating intelligence to go to war and illegal surveillance of U.S. citizens rate not even the lift of an eyebrow in the House. Maybe that’s because the House is complicit in those crimes. * * *

Well, I used to want the Democrats to impeach Bush -- and maybe it isn't too late to impeach -- but I think it is the last thing the Democrats should do at this point.

George W. Bush is the most unpopular president in a generation, and is probably the worst president we've ever had. Why screw around with that now? All an impeachment would do at this point is (1) perhaps make people feel sorry for Bush, and (2) distract from the fact the John McCain wants to serve out a third Bush term.

I say let's just let Bush be Bush for the next five months or so. If Pelosi and company want to impeach that sonofabitch after November 4th, then I'm OK with that. But one of the best things the Democrats have going for them during the run-up to the General Election is the fact that George W. Bush is currently the President of the United States.

McMurdo Base, Antarctica: The Place To Be This Summer

From Reuters:

One of the last shipments to a U.S. research base in Antarctica before the onset of winter darkness was a year's supply of condoms, a New Zealand newspaper reported on Monday.

Bill Henriksen, the manager of the McMurdo base station, said nearly 16,500 condoms were delivered last month and would be made available, free of charge, to staff throughout the year to avoid the potential embarrassment of having to buy them.

The base only has a skeleton staff through the long winter.

"Since everybody knows everyone, it becomes a little bit uncomfortable," Henriksen told the Southland Times newspaper.

About 125 scientists and staff are stationed at McMurdo base, the largest community in Antarctica, during the winter months when there is constant darkness. * * *

Fish Photo

Danimal and I drove over to a southeastern Oregon lake last Saturday for some trout fishing and had a good day. We limited out on 14-18 inch rainbow, with the biggest fish weighing in at about 2 1/4 pounds.




At left is a picture of two of the biggest ones we landed (click photo to enlarge). We caught all of our fish off the bank.

Well, At Least One Country Had A Successful Iraq Policy

From McClatchy:

Defense Department counterintelligence investigators suspected that Iranian exiles who provided dubious intelligence on Iraq and Iran to a small group of Pentagon officials might have "been used as agents of a foreign intelligence service ... to reach into and influence the highest levels of the U.S. government," a Senate Intelligence Committee report said Thursday.

A top aide to then-secretary of defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, however, shut down the 2003 investigation into the Pentagon officials' activities after only a month, and the Defense Department's top brass never followed up on the investigators' recommendation for a more thorough investigation, the Senate report said.

The revelation raises questions about whether Iran may have used a small cabal of officials in the Pentagon and in Vice President Dick Cheney's office to feed bogus intelligence on Iraq and Iran to senior policymakers in the Bush administration who were eager to oust the Iraqi dictator.

Iran, which was a mortal enemy of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and fought a bloody eight-year war with Iraq during his reign, has been the primary beneficiary of U.S. policy in Iraq, where Iranian-backed groups now run much of the government and the security forces. * * *

So it turns out that Dick Cheney and the rest of the Bush Regime were Iranian pawns. I hope the Obama Camp is paying attention to this story.

Enough Already

God I hate these racist assholes:

"I came here for the vote of every American, and our Democratic Party threw us down the tubes," New Yorker Harriet Christian said after yesterday's meeting of the Democratic Party's Rules and Bylaws Committee.

Senator Clinton is the "best nominee possible" for President, said Ms. Christian, "and the Democrats are throwing the election away. For what? An inadequate black male who would not have been running had it not been a white woman that was running for President! And I'm not going to shut my mouth anymore!" * * *

"I'm tired of it," Floridian Sharon Clark said yesterday. "I want to go and vote and know my vote is going to count."

"The right thing to do is to seat all the delegates," added delegate Beverly Battelle Weeks. "Anything less is not democratic."

"I can be called white, but you can't be called black," Christian charged. "That's not my America. It's equality for all of us; it's about time we all stood up for it.

"I'm no second-class citizen. And God damn the Democrats!"

"And they think we won't turn and vote for McCain," Christian added. She closed: "Well, I've got news for all of you: McCain will be the next President of the United States!"

Where to begin: First of all, as Martin points out so well in this excellent post, "there is no right to vote for a party nominee" and "your vote [in a primary] counts for nothing more than a suggestion." The primary process is simply the method that the political parties decided upon to choose their candidates, and Florida and Michigan violated the rules laid out by the Democratic Party. Deal with it.

And what's all this crap about Hillary Clinton being the best nominee? Are you fucking kidding me? There is a reason Rush Limbaugh and the Extreme Right wanted Hillary to get the nomination, and that is because she is the most polarizing political figure in America right now. The neo-fascists know that their only hope to win in November would be if she secured the Democratic nomination because Republicans would come out in droves just to vote against her.

Does anyone out there really believe that John McCain is going to excite Republicans enough to get them to the polls? The only people who seem excited to vote for McCain right now are the aforementioned Harriet Christian, Sharon Clark, and all the other Hillary supporters who simply cannot accept that Ms. Clinton ran a shitty campaign and deserved to lose a nomination that everyone thought she had sewn up last year. Do folks like Ms. Clark and Ms. Christian really want such an incompetent campaigner to carry the Democrats' standard into the Fall campaign?

Obama, on the other hand, ran an excellent campaign and deserves the nomination. Indeed, Obama secured the nomination by basically running a clean, straight-forward campaign. Hillary ran a dirty, race-baiting, gimmicky campaign and got her backside handed to her down the stretch.

Hillary continues to claim that she is better able to confront McCain in the Fall. Well, maybe her point would have been better taken had she not voted for the Iraq Debacle in 2002, but she did, and she has yet to apologize for such a monumental act of political cowardice.

I know that a lot of people are claiming that Iraq won't be much of an issue in the Fall given how crappy the Bush/McCain economy is right now, but I think such a view is misguided because John McCain himself is apparently planning to make a big issue out of Iraq during the run-up to the General Election, and Obama -- who opposed the war from the start -- is simply going to have a field day against McCain on this issue, given that the decision to invade Iraq is probably the biggest foreign policy blunder in American history.

Hillary can be critical all she wants with regard to Iraq now, but the bottom line is that she voted to authorize the invasion. Last year, when it looked like Hillary was going to easily secure the nomination, I couldn't believe that the Democrats were actually going to nominate a candidate who voted for Bush's Folly in Iraq. Well, it looks like that isn't going to happen.

God Damn the Democrats you say? Well, I say God Bless the Democrats because it looks like they've actually managed to pull their heads out of their asses this time around.