If you ever read Jim Treacher's highly entertaining blog, you may notice that he likes to link to a very funny celebrity site called Fametracker. It's well written and often hilarious, and I find myself nodding along with their judgements about 90% of the time. Here are a few gems:

On Jack Black:

It's disarmingly easy, though, to imagine a parallel universe in which Jack Black fills up his dance card playing likable guys in movies with titles like If At First and Twice Shy, in which he foolishly chases after a haughty ice queen before realizing, after a bout of amnesia or a serendipitous run-in with an alien played by George Carlin, that his best friend, Gina, is everything he always wanted in a woman - and she was right there next to him the whole time.

On Bridget Fonda:

When God was giving out lips, she was not at the place where God was giving out the lips.

On Guy Pearce:

ASSETS: In charming homage to olde-tyme acting, actually plays different "characters" in each movie.

On Leelee Sobieski:

A horrible miscarriage of cinema, Here on Earth is the type of puffy rich guy/poor girl love story that sputters under the weight of its own pretension and labors extra-hard to make sure a main character utters the title in conversation. And right after that, the cancer travels to Leelee's liver from her knee. To her liver. From her knee.

On Angelina Jolie:

Now, three years later, we must admit we are torn. Frankly, we're not sure whether Angelina has any acting chops. Admittedly, she's acted crazy/sexy/cool, and done a credible job, in a number of movies, but acting crazy...well, it's not the most demanding skillset in an actor's repertoire, and it's not exactly Meryl Streep donning a bizarre wig, accent, and personality for A Cry in the Dark, now, is it? Also, what with the whole Flowers in the Attic thing with her brother; her bizarre interviews with a series of magazines in which she, Billy Bob Thornton, and a wine glass appear to have coitus; and, frankly, our admittedly biased belief that she'd be someone who, after sex, would cut herself shallowly several times in front of her partner...any talent she might have is obscured by the behavior, the looks, and the bod.

On Mark Wahlberg:

When Williams or Hanks play "regular" people, they end up playing the Everyman-with-a-capital-E, and their performances carry a whiff of patronizing anthropology. Wahlberg, at his best (Boogie Nights, Three Kings, Rock Star), comes across like a guy who's won a radio contest and wound up with a part in a movie.

On Denzel Washington:

Chances of Hollywood ever letting him kiss a white female onscreen are about the same as the chances of his surgically transforming himself into a white female.*

On Vin Diesel:

DRAWBACKS:

• May be first man to star in romantic comedy with a mirror
• "Okay, guys, from now on my name is going to be Diesel. Vin Diesel. No, seriously."
• In painfully predictable turn of events, now rumoured to be dating Playboy model Summer Altice
• Seems vaguely like obnoxious guy in your high school who you secretly hated

On Alan Arkin: (this one, "13 Conversations about Alan Arkin", is a little bit brilliant)

1: You know, his bio says that he was one of only five actors to get a Best Actor Oscar nomination for his first screen role, for The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! in 1966.
2: Really?
1: But his first film role was actually in a movie called Calypso Heat Wave in 1957.
2: Which bio said that?
1: The Leonard Maltin one. From the film encyclopedia.
2: Is Leonard Maltin still doing stuff for Entertainment Tonight?
1: I think he's in semi-retirement or something. He doesn't look well.
2: Maybe he forget about Calypso Heat Wave.
1: Who?
2: Leonard Maltin.
1: How could he, since he got this tattoo? [Reveals Leonard Maltin's Calypso Heat Wave tattoo.]
Leonard Maltin: Hey! Hands off the merchandise!

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That's it from me. Enjoy your Memorial Day weekend. If you would like to take the opportunity to re-read the Gettysburg Address slowly, more power to you.

* Several people have made the comment that Denzel Washington himself has refused to kiss white women on-screen, to avoid a backlash from black women in particular. They're right; this article, allegedly from JET, backs them up, as does this article from MSNBC.

Next week: Long-delayed reply to Robert Musil, tales of a gun show, and I defend Andrew Sullivan's right to privacy, regardless of the dumbass things he said about Clinton.

Disease of the Week:

ICD-9 Code 788.35: Post-void dribbling

This is kind of juvenile, even for me, and I would normally try to avoid something like this. But when I looked up “post-void dribbling” online, I found this hypnotizing bit of free verse that I just had to pass on: .

Post-Void Dribbling

I've been diagnosed w/a spastci bladder neck.
I have also been diagnosed w/an elevated bladder neck.
Regardless, after voiding, my bladder remains half full.
I have a history of chronic prostate infections and post void dribbling.
I need help and I need it fast.
I was given the option of a "trans-urethral incision" but 1 out of 5 patients
become impotent from this procedure - "dry ejaculation.
I'd rather piss my pants than take that chance.
Certainly, there are other options.
In the meantime, I don't lose enough urine to require a diaper
(I don't think) but I need something more than waht I've been using to protect myself
from further humiliation. I NEED HELP!!!! Any all suggestions appreciated.

Spotty Scotty, 1998. All rights reserved.

Very bad day for blogging, so just one thought:

If you ever read "The Godfather", you may remember that the Mafiosi in the book never attacked each other's families. They knew that they were all too vulnerable to that kind of assault.

I bring this up because Matt Drudge published an anonymous report that David Brock checked into a psychiatric institution before the publication of "Blinded by the Right". American Spectator editor R. Emmett Tyrrell, Republican operative Barbara Ledeen, and lying scumbag David Horowitz all went on the record with various witty quotes chortling about the story. I haven't done my blog rounds today, but I'd be shocked if some of the more rabid right-wing blogs aren't delighted.

You may hate David Brock and what he stands for, but you should care about this. Many of the people who read this run their own weblog. How would you feel if people who disagreed with you sought to discredit your opinions with stories about your personal problems?

I'll bet that publishing the tax returns of Matt Drudge would really help us understand his choice of stories about tax issues. Do you think that a few juicy details about blogger X's messy divorce would help illuminate his opinions on campaign finance reform? Maybe if we knew about columnist Y's struggle with alcoholism, we would better understand her unwavering support of fellow reformed drinker George W. Bush? We don't give up our right to privacy when we open our mouths.

When Andrew Sullivan's privacy was compromised, I thought it was outrageous. There used to be a zone of privacy about the personal lives of politicians. In the past decade, it has been eroded, and I think that most reasonable people agree that the results have been shameful. When we see journalist's privacy dissolving for partisan advantage, we shouldn't cheer it on.

Finally, Tapped has a good question- if this book is so unreliable and so full of holes, then why do Brock's enemies have to resort to this in order to discredit it? Wouldn't grown-ups go after the errors, instead of the author?

Usually these were attacks of desparation. Now, we don't know who leaked this story to Drudge -- or if, as seems possible, he made it up entirely. But you can bet it was the result of a couple of people -- Lucianne Goldberg & Co., perhaps -- sitting around in a room figuring out how best to discredit Brock's book. (Especially after that whole Crossfire thing didn't work out.) Clearly this was the best they could come up with. And it seems to us that if a nice, thorough review-debunking of Brock's book in The National Review, The Weekly Standard, or even The American Spectator -- we know we know, but we can hope! -- couldn't do it, maybe there's more to Blinded than we thought.

Damian Penny watched the Daniel Pearl murder video, and he doesn't pull any punches about it.

I think I need a subscription to BusinessWeek.

As much as I like Eric Olsen and Tres Producers generally, I have to agree with Andrew Sullivan here:

But can I say a word about the notion of a "blogging community" to which we allegedly owe obligations, deference and respect? Phooey. The reason I'm a blogger is because I'm a pesky individualist who simply wants to write what I think and have a great interaction with readers in real time. Every time I hear the word "community," my bullshit detector goes off. And when I hear about "obligations to the community" blah blah blah, I wanna retch. I have nothing but respect for my fellow bloggers. I read them; I've encouraged others to blog; I link whenever I find something I find interesting; I believe in the genre; I've lost lucrative jobs for the medium. But please don't start creating some sort of community of bloggers, and calling us on our dues. This is the Wild Web, buddy, not a condo association. Don't tread on me.

Seriously. I wouldn't mind if part of every blogger template had a footer that said, "I don't owe you anything. You don't owe me anything."

UPDATE: Having said that, it sounds like Andrew Sullivan seriously misrepresented Eric Olsen in his blog. That's pretty rude.

Whoever said Dick Cheney was conservative?

Here's a big story that the press will probably drop, because it can't be explained in 10 words or less. Paul Krugman will write a column about it. Andrew Sullivan will say something witty and insubstantial (in which he will be called "Paul 'Enron' Krugman"). Matthew Hoy will make fun of him, and Instapundit will link him. The end. I'd love to be proven wrong.

From the business section of NY Times.

While Dick Cheney was CEO, Halliburton changed their accounting practices to improve their stated profits, without telling anyone they had made the change, for more than a year. Specifically, they changed their accounting rules to claim credit for more than $100 million in disputed claims. In the old accounting system, they would assume that cost overruns were a loss until their clients agreed to pay them. In the new system, they would just assume that their clients would pay them for

The new system of accounting, while less conservative, is not necessarily wrong. But they didn't tell anyone about it. It boosted their apparent revenues by more than $100 million, and analysts and investors had no way of knowing that the revenues were accounting gimmicks instead of actual revenue. This is not "genius of capitalism" stuff; there are rules against it, and Cheney was responsible for the integrity of the financial statements of his company.

From the story:

Much of Halliburton's business comes from big construction projects, like natural gas processing plants, which sometimes run over budget. With the policy change, Halliburton began to book revenue on the assumption that its customers would pay at least part of the cost overruns, although they remained in dispute. Before 1998, the company had been more conservative, reporting revenue from overruns only after settling with its customers...

Accounting specialists said that the change stretched and may have broken accounting rules.

"If they changed their accounting from recording claims when they were settled and collected to recording claims at an earlier point in time, then that would raise a red flag and would raise a question as to whether it's a permissible change," said Lynn Turner, a professor of accounting at Colorado State University and former chief accountant of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

A company that revises an accounting practice usually must show that its new method gives investors more accurate financial information than its old method. Halliburton's revision, Mr. Turner said, does not seem to meet that standard. In addition, such changes are supposed to be disclosed promptly, he said...

The change in policy enabled the company to book $89 million in unsettled claims as revenue in 1998, compared to a "de minimis" figure in previous years, Mr. Foshee said.

Exactly how much of that revenue turned into profits for the company is not stated in Halliburton's financial reports. But the impact would have been significant had the company taken the alternative route of writing the cost overruns off as losses, wiping out more than half of its $175 million in pretax operating profits for the fourth quarter, when the accounting change took effect.

My beautiful fiancee showed me the worldly weblog of New Yorker writer Peter Maass. Here's a good post:

Why can’t Thomas Friedman say "I was wrong"? His column on Sunday argues, rightly, that President Bush’s war on terrorism fails to embrace non-military strategies that would help ensure America’s security. "I blame him for squandering all the positive feeling in America after 9/11, particularly among young Americans who wanted to be drafted for a great project that would strengthen America in some lasting way--a Manhattan Project for energy independence," Friedman writes.

What’s strange about Friedman’s advice is that after 9/11 few journalists banged the bombing drum as strongly as he did. Why did President Bush not begin a peaceful Manhattan Project to complement the military campaign? In part, because influential voices like Friedman’s were doing little other than shouting about the military option. Belatedly, Friedman notes that turning America into a fortress state does not make us safe: "A war on terrorism that is fought only by sending soldiers to Afghanistan or by tightening our borders will ultimately be unsatisfying."

That's an exception; most of his posts are international stories that are well off the radar of the blogosphere. Check it out.

All hail Oliver Willis. Beautifully said.

Instapundit also links to this excellent column about another benefit of legalizing pot- help stamp out pot culture! Now there's a fight I could get behind.

This is in opposition to all the hateful things it has unleashed: Jam bands. Floppy knitted hats. Rusted-out Volkwagen vans. Scraggly beards. White men with dreadlocks. Hacky Sack. Multicolored vests from Guatemala. High Times magazine. Radio ads with vague references to "smokables." Synching up Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon with The Wizard of Oz. "I didn't inhale." Deadheads. Parrotheads. Phish-heads. The Spin Doctors. Cypress Hill. The Black Crowes. The HORDE Tours. Rap songs about blunts. Dude, Where's My Car? Cheech & Chong's The Corsican Brothers. Half Baked. Woody Harrelson. For God's sake, Woody friggin' Harrelson.

This is, incidentally, an argument not to legalize on the Dutch model, making it legal only in designated locations. I had a visceral negative reaction in Amsterdam when I first entered a coffeehouse. I explain it to people this way- I like blueberries, and I eat them every few weeks. However, if I had to go to a blueberry bar to get blueberries, where the walls are covered with blueberry-inspired murals, and listen to blueberry bands, and hang out with blueberryheads, and listen to arguments about why blueberry cultivation will save the rainforests and the water supply and George Washington grew blueberries and blah blah blah... I wouldn't eat very many blueberries.

Glenn Reynolds links to an article mocking something that's been bugging me: the defeatist attitude exemplified in the recent terror warnings.

* If Mueller had been elected president in 1932 instead of FDR: "We have nothing to fear . . . except this damned depression, which is probably going to destroy everything we hold near and dear."

* Mueller, if he was at the Battle of Mobile Bay instead of Adm. David Farragut: "Damn! Torpedoes! There's too many of them. I'm out of here."

* If Mueller were aboard the Chesapeake instead of Capt. James Lawrence: "Give up the ship!"

I'm thinking of the only exchange from Apollo 13 that stuck with me:

SCOWLING GUY: This could be the worst disaster NASA's ever experienced.

ED HARRIS: With all due respect, sir, I believe this is going to be our finest hour.

That would be leadership we could admire. This sulky "don't blame me" attitude is not.

I think that Microsoft executive Jim Allchin deserves an Ari Fleicher Award:

A senior Microsoft Corp. executive told a federal court last week that sharing information with competitors could damage national security and even threaten the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan. He later acknowledged that some Microsoft code was so flawed it could not be safely disclosed.

I think that the liberal blogosphere has done a pretty good job of refuting the common right-wing criticism that Clinton was more negligent toward terrorism than Bush was. Aaron Marr Page lays out a dang good argument here. I don't want to requote the same stories, but I do think that this widely cited Newsweek story is crucial (via Joshua Marshall):

...under Attorney General John Ashcroft, the department was being prodded back into its old law-and-order mind-set: violent crime, drugs, child porn. Counterterrorism, which had become a priority of the Clintonites (not that they did a better job of nailing bin Laden), seemed to be getting less attention. When FBI officials sought to add hundreds more counterintelligence agents, they got shot down even as Ashcroft began, quietly, to take a privately chartered jet for his own security reasons.
The attorney general was hardly alone in seeming to de-emphasize terror in the young Bush administration. Over at the Pentagon, new Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld elected not to relaunch a Predator drone that had been tracking bin Laden, among other actions. In self- absorbed Washington, the Phoenix memo, which never resulted in arrests, landed in two units at FBI headquarters but didn’t make it to senior levels. Nor did the memo get transmitted to the CIA, which has long had a difficult relationship with the FBI—and whose director, George Tenet, one of the few Clinton holdovers, was issuing so many warnings that bin Laden was “the most immediate” threat to Americans he was hardly heeded any longer...

By the end of the Clinton administration, the then national-security adviser Sandy Berger had become “totally preoccupied” with fears of a domestic terror attack, a colleague recalls. True, the Clintonites had failed to act decisively against Al Qaeda, but by the end they were certain of the danger it posed. When, in January 2001, Berger gave Rice her handover briefing, he covered the bin Laden threat in detail, and, sources say, warned her: “You will be spending more time on this issue than on any other.” Rice was alarmed by what she heard, and asked for a strategy review. But the effort was marginalized and scarcely mentioned in ensuing months as the administration committed itself to other priorities, like national missile defense (NMD) and Iraq...

It wasn’t that Ashcroft and others were unconcerned about these problems, or about terrorism. But the Bushies had an ideological agenda of their own. At the Treasury Department, Secretary Paul O’Neill’s team wanted to roll back almost all forms of government intervention, including laws against money laundering and tax havens of the kind used by terror groups. At the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld wanted to revamp the military and push his pet project, NMD. Rumsfeld vetoed a request to divert $800 million from missile defense into counterterrorism. The Pentagon chief also seemed uninterested in a tactic for observing bin Laden left over from the Clinton administration: the CIA’s Predator surveillance plane. Upon leaving office, the Clintonites left open the possibility of sending the Predator back up armed with Hellfire missiles, which were tested in February 2001. But through the spring and summer of 2001, when valuable intelligence could have been gathered, the Bush administration never launched even an unarmed Predator. Hill sources say DOD didn’t want the CIA treading on its turf...

To avoid a (further) massive rehash, I refer you to Atrios (who's watching this story like a hawk), Tapped, Tom Tomorrow here and here, The Looking Glass, Get Donkey, and Media Whores Online, among others.

MWO has a quote from Aaron Brown that segues to my next point.

The "Bush Knew" spin is not correct, fair, or helpful. In no meaningful way did he know. The President is not a cartoon supervillain, and (Cynthia McKinney aside) no one is suggesting he is. So the money sentence in Bush's statement is spectacularly unhelpful:

"Had I known that the enemy was going to use airplanes to kill on that fateful morning, I would have done everything in my power to protect the American people."

In fact, it's positively Clintonian. (Did I say that?) If any decent human being (1) knew that terrorists were going to (2) use airplanes to (3) kill on (4) that fateful morning, they would be obligated to do everything in their power.

Aaron Brown asks:

So let me see if I get this. Does anyone really believe the President of the United States, any President of the United States, knew about a real threat to two major cities and thousands of people and allowed it to happen? Was any serious person actually saying that? I heard the President denounce such a suggestion. I just never heard the suggestion itself, but then I was off last week.

So let's try a different question, maybe even a better one, who knows. Maybe what we knew and what we suspected came into conflict with who we are. We aren't a country that rounds us Muslims on a suspicion. We aren't a place where we look into people's computers on a whim. There are places like that. The President talked about one today, Cuba, but we aren't that, at least not yet.

But there is something else. We are a place that trusts citizens as much or more than we trust government, and in that regard as citizens, we deserve to know all of this, what was known, what was suspected, what was and wasn't done and why.

Let me also say that the President is not an FBI caseworker. I'm not really upset about the August 6 briefing; I agree that Bush couldn't have been expected to connect the dots personally. I am a little upset at the relative low priority of counter-terrorism in the Bush administration prior to September 11- only a little upset, because I know that that's just hindsight. I get angrier when I hear Republicans try to blame Clinton- I think the preponderance of evidence demonstrates that Clinton's administration placed a higher priority on counter-terrorism than Bush's did. (Again, read this.) At the end of the day, though, I understand that this is not an import issue. Assigning blame isn't going to make us any safer.

On the other hand, I am very, very upset that the Administration and their allies in the House are still blocking an independent comission to investigate intelligence failures, and I want to see Democrats and grown-up Republicans giving them hell about it. Even Sully, Bill Kristol, and Businessweek (among others*) think that this is a no-brainer. This is a real example the triumph of narrow political interests over national security and common sense, and it can't be allowed to succeed. Ass-covering scary PR, blasting about every possible threat, is no substitute. Paul Vitello writes:

It also doesn't help that the government has sounded like the Wizard of Oz in the last few days - "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!" they seem to be saying with all their warnings of imminent attacks; their scolding of the Democrats for "playing on the emotions" of the victims' families by daring to ask real questions; their implication that a real review of the record might divert FBI manpower from the job of counter-terrorism. These are scare tactics.

UPDATE: I noticed this morning columns from George Will, John McCain, and Tom Friedman supporting an independent investigation. I'm sure I'm missing more. George Will's column is especially good. This is a no-brainer.
-----------------

This has been a sort of a throat-clearing exercise, because I don't want to keep riding this hobby horse too much. I still want to get to Robert Musil's argument, but it's after midnight. I'll be back.

Mark Poyser writes:

In Bush's speech on Cuba, he demanded the following:

1. Opposition parties should have the freedom to organize, assemble and speak, with equal access to all airwaves.
2. All political prisoners must be released and allowed to participate in the election process.
3. Human rights organizations should be free to visit Cuba to ensure that the conditions for free elections are being created.
4. (the 2003) elections should be monitored by objective outside observers....
5. permit trade unions to exist outside of government control.
6. ...private employers ... able to negotiate with and pay workers of their own choosing, without the government telling who they can hire and who they must fire.
7. ... property rights must be respected....

Question #1: How many of these conditions exist in Saudi Arabia? Not many. Re Human Rights: there has been quite a fuss over the Saudi's implementation of sharia law, which mandates amputation for certain offenses.

Question #2: If you were a woman, which country would you want to live in, Cuba or Saudi Arabia?

testing

Today is looking like a bad day for blogging. But Robert Musil has posted a detailed rebuttal to my rebuttal, with examples and links. He's also posted an email address. Check it out. I'll try very hard to respond within a day or two.

Robert Musil, the Man Without Qualities, is really pissing me off with this post:

Liberal Democrats in Congress for many years resisted proposals that would encourage broad information sharing between the nation's domestic and international intelligence services. Their claimed concern was that such cooperation might endanger civil rights. They enjoyed the staunch, rock-ribbed support of the New York Times and other such media.They generally suppressed national intelligence gathering and funding.

(Democrats are bad....)

Just what did the Congressional Democrats and the Clinton Administration know and when did they know it? And let's not forget that the reason the President didn't have access to specific (or as Mr. Rumsfeld calls it, "granular") information that these were suicide hijackers rather than the old fashioned kind is now being laid by Mr. Daschle at the feet of a "broken system" - a system in which the intelligence services were underfunded, underencouraged and not allowed to cooperate with each other extensively. In other words, they were the intelligence services of the liberal Democrats dreams.

Robert Musil has no email address on his page and no comments section, so I can't ask him these questions directly. He provides no links, no quotes, and no evidence for these assertions. Maybe he doesn't know that President Clinton more than doubled the budgets for intelligence agencies, at the same time that the head of the FBI, Louis Freeh, openly worked to destroy him and his presidency. Given that, why does he think that liberal Democrats dream of a weak intelligence system? Can he give a link to one or two of the times when Democrats resisted proposals to encourage information sharing between intelligence agencies? Since such efforts apparently lasted for years, I'm sure he'd have no problem doing so.

Questions about what Congress knew are surely fair game. I'm sure that the independent commission that Bill Kristol and I want would look into this. If Mr. Musil is genuinely interested, rather than just trying to pass the muck around, he might be interested in reading what Sen. Diane Feinstein had to say about this issue, whether he believes it or not:

What I said last July on CNN was that I was deeply concerned as to whether our house was in order to prevent a terrorist attack. My work on the Intelligence Committee and as chair of the Technology and Terrorism Subcommittee had given me a sense of foreboding for some time. I had no specific data leading to a possible attack.

In fact, I was so concerned that I contacted Vice President Cheney's office that same month to urge that he restructure our counter-terrorism and homeland defense programs to ensure better accountability and prevent important intelligence information from slipping through the cracks.

Despite repeated efforts by myself and staff, the White House did not address my request. I followed this up last September 2001 before the attacks and was told by 'Scooter' Libby that it might be another six months before he would be able to review the material. I told him I did not believe we had six months to wait.

Nonetheless, questions about what Congress knew are probably not central to the issue, since the relevant executive powers rest with the Administration. I can only assume that Mr. Musil knows this.

I doubt that Mr. Musil reads this blog. (I only found his post because Instapundit considered his argument worth a link.) But I'd sure like to hear some answers to these questions.