She is, she never was anything but boring.

Britney Spears feels old and boring

Britney Spears says her life is so dull under her father’s watchful eye that she feels old and boring.[snip]

I wonder if she ever stopped to think of how her father feels, watching her. He has to worry that she has an idiot sister following in her footsteps.

That’s enough to make one take the pipe; better yet, make them take the pipe and do the world a favor. Take Paris with you too Brits.

This is from the people who believe in a classless society, the annual self-adoration oeuvre. The degenerate Romans appear as a pack of homeless party heads by comparison.

Best To Expect The Worst Oscars ever…

A small taste of the excesses…

[snip]
Chef Wolfgang Puck will be serving an organic menu but was asked to scale down the lavish menu from previous years because of the strike woes. But Wolf’s idea of simple is a baked potato wrapped in gold leaf and topped with $89-an-ounce Tsar Nicoulai caviar, and mac ‘n’ cheese with black truffles. [snip]

Employment: Need a small group of heathens for some minor throat cutting at the Kodak Theater Sunday evening. Must have own tools. Dinner included. Apply at the door.

Myers fears Hollywood’s end is near

Publicist worried strike will hasten erosion of biz

Longtime Hollywood publicist Julian Myers will turn 90 soon. And he worries the end may be near … for Hollywood.Myers frets that the WGA stalemate — with all of its acrimony, vitriol and job losses — is a harbinger of ill things for the industry. [snip]

One may only hope. Remember, good things do take time.

If they filled the air with the CLU awards (Chartered Life Underwriters), the excitement monitor still flatlines. The divisional Nosebleed Contest rates high on my wanna see shows. Other award programs are available containing more unexpected choices and dark horse winners.

Tonight, from Dirtpoour, India and Raveledburka, Pakistan are the finalists in the International Martinizing Cleanoff. A jbella lot of fun for viewers and contestants alike, the loser gets a round to the head for causing loss of national pride

It’s official: No actors will show up

SAG president Alan Rosenberg has announced that not one of the more than 70 actors nominated for a Golden Globe will attend the Jan. 13 ceremonies because of the WGA’s plans to picket the event.
The Globes have been thrown into turmoil and uncertainty due to the WGA’s refusal to grant a strike waiver to struck Globes producer Dick Clark Prods., which offered to accept the same terms as David Letterman’s Worldwide Pants banner. Instead, the guild has said it will picket the Globes, skedded to air on NBC, which has become a prime target of the WGA’s strike campaign in the past few weeks. [snip]

This strike has improved TV viewing pleasure immensely. Everyone is now free to get some real friends.

Without a smidgen of concern, one can avoid wondering if the reruns sucked as horribly as when they first disgraced the screen. Here, given with professional authority, the show did, does and will until TV’s are forever declared an environmental hazard by Algore.

The writer’s strike has a periodic orbit ¼ of the time of Haley’s Comet. Any method of shortening this cycle to 10 years, brings hope of a respite from horrible programming, insipid sitcoms and tedious talk shows.

A 24/7 Dr. Phil show is representative of current fare.

Strike set to silence talk shows

Late-night TV chat shows seem likely to be the first victims of a strike by the US screenwriters’ union, which has been called over royalty payments. [snip]

The last such action, in 1988, disrupted the autumn television season. [snip]

Hollywood Set for Last-Ditch Labor Talks

LOS ANGELES (AP) - A federal mediator was scheduled to meet with Hollywood writers and studio representatives at an undisclosed neutral location Sunday in a last-ditch effort to prevent a strike. [snip]

The union said it would stage its first pickets in New York and Los Angeles. [snip]

Start with Peoria given they might exhibit greater fervor over the strike.

Daytime TV, including live talk shows such as “The View” and soap operas, which typically tape about a week’s worth of shows in advance, would be next to feel the impact.

The strike would not immediately affect production of movies or prime-time TV programs. Most studios have stockpiled dozens of movie scripts, and TV shows have enough scripts or completed shows in hand to last until early next year.

Daytime TV cannot die fast enough. Putting the soaps and the “View” out of misery will save the upcoming generation from intellectual and cultural cleansing.

If the strike lasts long enough, viewers might even get a “Clockwork Orange” cure of reality TV.

Put up a test pattern; some talking head will have a show arguing over whether it is art or trash.

McDonald’s employee who over salted burger jailed

UNION CITY, Ga. — A McDonald’s employee spent a night in jail and is facing criminal charges because a police officer’s burger was too salty, so salty that he says it made him sick.

Kendra Bull was arrested Friday, charged with misdemeanor reckless conduct and freed on $1,000 bail.

Bull, 20, said she accidentally spilled salt on hamburger meat and told her supervisor and a co-worker, who ”tried to thump the salt off.” [snip]

City public information officer George Louth said Bull was charged because she served the burger ”without regards to the well-being of anyone who might consume it.”

This cop needs a different occupation, one without any authority; Union City needs an expensive lawsuit to encourage the cop to leave.

The charge: Holding public office while an idiot.  Let the Mayor/City manager, the council and the cop be the respondents not the city’s insurance company. Keep these lawsuits off the back of the taxpayer.

Limits proposed on fast-food restaurants

As America gets fatter, policymakers are seeking creative approaches to legislating health. They may have entered the school cafeteria — and now they’re eyeing your neighborhood. [snip]

“The people don’t want them, but when they don’t have any other options, they may gravitate to what’s there,” said Councilwoman Jan Perry, who proposed the ordinance in June, and whose district includes portions of South L.A. that would be affected by the plan. [snip]

Merlan said it wasn’t likely that a limit on new restaurants would change peoples’ habits, even though he thinks it’s a good idea.

Like all types of prohibitions, this one won’t work either, BUT let’s try them anyway.

A Times analysis of the city’s roughly 8,200 restaurants found that South Los Angeles has the highest concentration of fast-food eateries. Per capita, the area has fewer eating establishments of any kind than the Westside, downtown or Hollywood, and about the same as the Valley. But a much higher percentage of those are fast-food chains. South L.A. also has far fewer grocery stores. [snip]

There is a reason for this and I think it is location-location-location. If location isn’t the answer, then it’s location.

“While limiting fast-food restaurants isn’t a solution in itself, it’s an important piece of the puzzle,” said Mark Vallianatos, director of the Center for Food and Justice at Occidental College.

Leave it to a Center for something and Justice to want controls. It’s wonderful that the government is there to save the people from themselves.

Hollywood Pork: $4 Billion for a park in Beverly Hills

The California elite met to eat at a big pig roast this past week. America’s veterans hosted the party; $4 billion worth of pork was on the platter, earmarked for Hollywood’s wealthy and well connected. You are right if you believed pigs attended.

A spending bill for veterans was Feinstein’s vehicle of choice. When Sen. J Demint (R-SC)…

offered an amendment to strike this wasteful earmark so the funds could be used for VA healthcare, only 25 senators had the courage stand up for America’s veterans and say no to pork for Hollywood’s wealthy and well connected. Here is how the Beverly Hills earmark was described by the Wall Street Journal:

 Rambo’s View
Dianne Feinstein’s $4 billion earmark for Beverly Hills comes at the expense of America’s veterans.

 By Kimberly Strassel  September 7, 2007

 …It takes hard work to come up with an earmark more egregious than that infamous Alaskan bridge, but California’s Dianne Feinstein is an industrious gal. Her latest pork — let’s call it Rambo’s View — deserves to be the poster child for everything wrong with today’s greedy earmark process. The senator’s $4 billion handout (yes, you read that right) to wealthy West L.A. (yes, you read that right, too) is the ultimate example of how powerful members use earmarks to put their own parochial interests above national ones — in this case the needs of veterans…

The pork here revolves around the West Los Angeles Medical Center… 387 sprawling, prime real-estate acres in the middle of tony West L.A. More than twice the size of the National Mall, it is surrounded by the mansions and playgrounds of the city’s elite, including the Bel Air Country Club and the Beverly Hills estates of Sylvester Stallone, Barry Bonds and Tim McGraw (to name a few). Huge portions of the facility are also a veritable ghost town… According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Los Angeles County also falls on the lowest end in terms of the percentage of veterans living in the area…

It turns out the well-to-do in West L.A. consider the veteran’s center grounds their own little rolling, personal park, and they want it to stay that way — thank you very much.

The indefatigable earmark warrior, South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint, offered an amendment this week to strip Ms. Feinstein’s earmark. California Sen. Barbara Boxer rose in righteous indignation on the Senate floor, and fizzed that she would never dream of leveling such a direct “attack” against South Carolina. The point of this speech was to remind her Senate colleagues that what’s hers is hers, and that the penalty for voting against her and Ms. Feinstein’s California pork would be the targeting of projects in their own states…[emphasis added]

Diverting $4 billion from the VA healthcare system to a park for the 90210 zip code is insulting to the sacrifices our courageous veterans have made for our country. Clearly, we have a long way to go in the battle to change the culture in Washington and close the earmark favor factory.

I will bet he’s glad he wasn’t dancing

Rough justice: 80 lashes for ‘immoral’ Iranian who abused alcohol and had sex

His face covered by a balaclava, an official brandishing a cane repeatedly lashes the back of a man found guilty of breaking Iran’s morality laws. Two police officers hold the legs of 25-year-old Saeed Ghanbari and another his arms to ensure there is no escape from the punishment of 80 lashes handed down by a religious court.

Traffic was brought to a halt in Qazvin, 90 miles west of the capital Tehran, as more than 1,000 men gathered behind barricades to watch the public flogging. [snip]

Lets ship the Hollywood self-important over there; they think Iran is superior to our country.

At least 120 executions have been recorded so far this year, according to Amnesty, with two youths under the age of 18 when they committed their crimes among those killed

The latest gruesome pictures have emerged three weeks after there was an outcry over a video of a flogging in a Malaysian jail was posted on the Internet.

The sickening images showed a man being lashed repeatedly on the buttocks until he bled from several wounds.

Wanna bet recidivism is quite low with the second offense fetching execution. Start public floggings with the gangbangers if you want to reduce gang membership. Let “Files-on-Parade” watch a fellow gang member receive something besides three hots and a cot, just for flying the colors.

Jack Bauer’s Next Mission: Fighting Global Warming

From “An Inconvenient Truth” to popularizing the Prius, Hollywood has helped lead the way on some environmental issues. [snip]

It may sound like a publicity stunt, but Fox spokesman Chris Anderson says the network isn’t after bigger ratings. “We are publicizing ’24’s’ commitment to climate change for two reasons and two reasons only: to inspire the public to take global warming seriously and hopefully to motivate other studios to make changes to their production practices as well,” he says. [snip]

Sounds like “24” jumps the shark. Bauer guns down the Carbon Critter and plants a tree for victory.

From the Free Press column My Turn

A new way to pay for education

The supreme courts of several states have ordered state legislators to try to find a way to equalize educational expenditures throughout their states. The reliance of local towns upon their property tax to fund schools was not acceptable. [snip]

So, many towns rebel at any increase in school budgets. Legislatures seek to establish ceilings on school expenditures. Federal monies for local schools are still negligible. Educational expenditures have been placed at this false ceiling for generations now as a consequence. [snip]

The consequences are clear in the social dysfunction caused by inadequate education. Over 2 million of our citizens are incarcerated. We have a do-nothing government. Our health system is a farce. Television is a wasteland. Our newspapers are disappearing. The military budget is monstrously swollen. Our foreign policy hurts many and inspires none. Our railroads are defunct while road traffic is gridlocked. These are a few of the proper benchmarks of the adequacy of school budgets. To solve these problems requires supplanting state and local funding for education entirely with federal monies. It is time for a domestic Marshall Plan.

Dick Rapacz of Essex Junction is professor emeritus of comparative education at Boston University.

I had no idea inadequate education causes such damage. Let us examine each point in order.

• 2 million jailed for not doing their homework seems excessive. Perhaps a look at destructive social engineering is more important. Prior to 1965, one didn’t find kids acting out in classes and getting away with it. If the school couldn’t control the student, their parents were brought in to rectify their darling’s aberrant behavior. They did or the school expelled the tyke.
• A do nothing government has no bearing on how the parents rear their kids except to totally erode parental responsibility. No one tells the “students” NO; everybody is a victim. Lay this directly to the disastrous social engineering of the “it takes a village” mentality. At one time the village delivered a hard lesson to the miscreant, then informed his parents so he received proper instruction.
• Whatever our health care system has to do with stupid kids is beyond understanding.
• Television is a wasteland. School kids are not producing, programming or buying up the airwaves. Observe how many of the programs such as “The Alcoa Theater” or “GE Playhouse” air today. Nothing is stopping any station from broadcasting shows of this type, except the parents will not watch them. No company is advertising on an unwatched show.
• Ibid newspapers. What passes for news is spun like a top or consists of Hollywood soft-core porn stories featuring execrable activities by the oh-so self-important.
• The military budget is leaner than ever before.
• Our foreign policy consists of much dithering and no substantive action.
• As for the railroads, more train sets puts the kiddies on the “right track.” If they knew what a train actually meant, perhaps more would consider being engineers. That’s called enjoyable employment. Or we can look to how the government subsidies to the airlines destroyed rail travel. If the airlines paid a per mile fee for the air passage rights, paid for their own security and make it work, paid for their own controllers and finally their airports, flying would have the proper cost attached like the railroads.
• Again the plaintive wail for more public funding for books, classrooms and computers fills the air. Most of this money goes into the pockets of teachers and union goons.

It has been proven conclusively that attentive parents make good students; not money tossed into the maw of public education.

It is easy to see why this gentlemen isn’t an economics professor.

The unintentionally funny and nearly defunct LA Times reported on July 15th that about “45% of all foreign militants in Iraq……are from Saudi Arabia”.  15% are from Syria and Lebanon, with 10% from North Africa.  The stats came from “US military figures, and were made available to the Times by the senior officer”.   Nearly half of the 135 detainees in US military custody are Saudis. 

What can we deduce from a sample of 135 cage-hangers?  Thousands of troublemakers are in Iraqi custody, many of whom might even lie about their names and country of origin. So the LA Times report is based on a sample of 135 guys, half of whom have Riyadh Planet Hollywood ID cards.  I have information from a reliable participant in the war that Chechens even fall out for morning terrorist formation, and stray Pakistanis, Westerners and lots of others.   Iranians, too, are a small but vocal minority shouting  “HERE!”.

The same enigmatic “US military figure” said that 50% of all  Saudi fighters in Iraq go there as suicide bombers.  An interesting statistic, to say the least. To derive it, one needs to poll all of the free-range “Saudi fighters” about their life plans, and whether they have round-trip tickets.   It’s fair to say they don’t show up for interviews.

But the Times  raised two worthy questions, probably intentionally.  We are “allied” with the Saudis in the inaptly-named War on Terror, and Bush Herbert Walker and Bush George Dubya are unashamedly friendly with figures in the disgusting monarchical House of Saud.  Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the royal’s “national security advisor” is a pal of the House of Bush, as is King Abdullah.   

Then there’s The Carlyle Group, in which Bush Herbert Walker is a  prospering partner.  Those interested can investigate it on their own.  It’s the most powerful ethical missile in the left’s arsenal of accusations about the Bush family’s relationship with the Saudis.   The Carlyle Group has wide access to Saud investment funds.  There’s also Herbie’s lecture tours in Arab lands, paid for by the Saudis, and generous gits to his Presidential Library for scholarships to Andover, Dubya’s prep school.

It is, at this point, obligatory to mention that 15 of 19 hijackers on 911 were Saudis. Bin Laden is a Saudi.  Saudi Arabia has lots of sand and oil (although the oil power might be shaky).  Saudi Arabia is profligate with walking-around money, and has a national strategy of buying off enemies and buying up friends.  There’s a lot more, none of which is particularly damning for the Bush family, but appearances are everything.   The Saudis are low, self-seeking, and devious; relationships are contaminated by their presence in them, and our leaders should know it.

True, the Saudis have been fighting Al Qaeda, but for reasons of personal survival.   The ethical issues associated with advancing Wahabbism by subversion and Madrassa remain.  True, also, that the Saudis are troubled by Dubya’s strategies, worred about their extensive Iraq border and Persian ambitions.  This is a convergence of interests, ours and theirs.   They are not our friends. 

The reality is this:  We are allied with a vicious, reactionary, repressive Arab regime in our pursuit of liberalization of the Middle East.  We should be troubled by the first proposition in that last sentence, because they Saudis are troubled by the second.  The two can’t come together, and Dubya appears not to know it.

Bush to cede power to VP

Cheney to rule during colonoscopy

WASHINGTON - President Bush will undergo a routine colonoscopy Saturday and temporarily hand presidential powers over to Vice President Dick Cheney, the White House said.[snip]

Cheney’s office issued the orders to shoot on sight all southern border crossers and cross dressers. “Permitting Kos/kids to join the Marcus Garvey trans-oceanic canoe race for world diversity is our first priority,” said a Cheney spokesperson off the record.

The New England Senatorial delegation and Hollywood elites are receiving a 6-month educational trip to Iran and Saudi Arabia courtesy of AA and the Alzheimer’s Meet Your Constituents program.

On 6/29/02, Bush underwent colorectal screening for severe pain and constipation. As reported at the time they removed two polyps, several democratic congressmen, and Al Gore’s brain.

Cheney assumed power at that time, but was unable to act due to time constraints.

Further news as it develops.

The recent uproar over the condition of Walter Reed building 18 is somewhat of a teapot-sized squall. True there are/were problems, some of them larger than others.

Let us not lose sight of the fact that the hospital is on the schedule to close, folding it into Bethesda Naval Hospital. Seems that other than minor repairs wastes money.

The biggest question I have is where is congress on this? I’m not talking about the paper shuffling hearings going on now. Constituents write letters, they send e-mails and they phone the offices of their congressmen. No one is going to tell me that the Walter Reed problem suddenly appeared like a fata morgana so congress will have something to do.

This makes one wish, at times, for a dictatorship just to solve this type of complicit inertia.

In the past 24 to 48 hours, the possible pool of GOP Prez candidates has two newnames: Congressman Ron Paul of Texas and former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson.

In 1988, Ron Paul ran as the Libertarian candidate for president. He is a tax cutter, pro-gun, right on the border and on the war, a cut and run kinda guy. What does that do for you?

Fred Thompson is a sharp alternative to the RINO’s populating the GOP pool. Go here for votes when in the Senate.

If he runs, this is the first clear separation in candidates, giving us a chance to see how the GOP voters line up. There is a draft Fred Thompson site.

“After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood.” –Fred Thompson

He seems to have both feet firmly on the ground.

This should provide us with the ultimate Gordon Geckko tale. Buckle your swashes and get the popcorn!

Leonardo DiCaprio will star in a new movie about the Enron scandal, Warner Bros. movie studio said Tuesday, according to CNNMoney. Three more horsemen, and we’ve got an apocalypse. STORY

A wave of the chuck’s tail to smartmoney.com.