"Go away! I'm batin'!"

Watched Idiocracy last night. Good stuff, but then I've always been a sucker for Mike Judge's work - he pretty much had me with the George Eliot references in an old Beavis and Butt-Head episode: "Jean Gary Diablo in Silas Murder!" which was either the sequel or prequel to "Jean Gary Diablo in Murdermarch!" I was writing my undergrad honors thesis on George Eliot's novels at the time, so Jean Gary Diablo will always occupy a special place in my heart.

Idiocracy is a bit like a live-action version of Futurama, but even more critical of corporate America and the dumbing-down of modern civilization. Plus it's got lots of fart jokes...so there's really something for everyone. The fact that Fox basically buried the film for mocking both Fox and numerous sponsors only makes the movie more enjoyable.

Schadenfreude

Wolfowitz Apologizes for Role in Salary Scandal.

In hindsight, I wish I had trusted my original instincts and kept myself out of the negotiations," Wolfowitz declared. "I made a mistake, for which I am sorry."

That's funny, I thought trusting his original instincts was what got him into this mess in the first place.

Now if he would just apologize for that whole Iraq thing...

"Didn't you get that memo?"

Via Digby, it looks like somebody forgot to give National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell the memo about the 2006 mid-term results..."McConnell seeks to boost U.S. spy powers."

National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell has circulated a draft bill that would expand the government's powers under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, liberalizing how that law can be used.

Question: If the administration has been actively (and unapologetically) violating the FISA for years, why the hell would they care about re-writing it? So they have a brand-new law to ignore?

Sometimes Maureen Dowd Scares Me

Her latest [TimesDelete] is just weird (I guess that's no surprise). Seriously, um, I really don't know what to say about a column that starts with this premise:

It now seems that instead of desire leading to arousal, as researchers once believed, arousal may lead to desire.

And then connects the Republican party's current malaise among women voters to the fact that these women:

...have been deprived of the bristly excitement of hearing their men on the stump delivering great speeches for quite some time now.

Ummmm...is she saying that women are so hysterical (in the old-school sense of the word) that they decide whom to vote for based on how turned on they are by the candidates? Huh? What?
As Commodus (or at least Joaquin Phoenix) once said, "It vexes me. I'm terribly vexed."

Richard Cohen is an idiot

I'm not sure that this is even coherent enough to respond to...Richard Cohen has apparently decided that fear of perjuring yourself is an appropriate grounds for pleading the 5th Amendment. Wow.

Let's start here, shall we?

She knows that in Washington, free speech can cost you a fortune in legal fees.

Ummm, hate to break this to you, Richard, but she's paying those lawyers who told her to clam up plenty. You think Akin Gump drafts letters to Congressional Committees out of the goodness of their heart? Moving on:

More likely, Goodling's problem is probably not what she's done but what she might do. If she testifies before Congress, swears to tell the truth and all of that, she will produce a record -- a transcript -- that can be used against her. If a subsequent witness later on has a different memory of what transpired, then the bloodcurdling cry of "special prosecutor" will once again be heard in the land.

You know what? Cry me a freaking river all you want, but "fear of what she might do" simply is not an actual reason for pleading the 5th. "Oh, sorry, I can't testify because I might lie." What Irving Lewis Libby was convicted of was telling a bullshit story, telling it more than once, and persisting in it even though no one else was telling a similar story. He was convicted by a jury of his peers after a full and fair trial. Believe it or not, they actually took the "different memor[ies]" of "subsequent witnesses" into consideration, and decided that Irving was full of it. These were NOT minor inconsistencies that Irving was peddling under oath - the were bald-faced lies, and he was convicted of telling them. To repeat the lesson: fear of "what she might do" is not a valid reason not to testify. Moving on:

No lawyer is going to be thrilled about letting a client testify in today's political environment. Remember, please, that I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby was not convicted of the crime that the special prosecutor was appointed to find -- who leaked the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame -- but of lying to a grand jury. In fact, the compulsively compulsive Patrick Fitzgerald not only knew early on who the leaker was but also that no law had been violated. No matter.

Richard? Bubby? Lying to a grand jury IS a crime. All by its lonesome little self. And you know what? Federal investigators don't like being lied to. It pisses them off, and proving that someone lied to you is relatively easy to prove, especially if the lie is particularly blatant. You can't lie to a Federal investigator and expect them to just ignore it. News flash for you, pal: Martha Stewart faced zero liability for insider trading in imclone stock - she wasn't an insider...but then she went and lied to investigators...and maybe after her little visit to prison, she now realizes that lying wasn't such a good idea. I'm not even going to go into the whole Clinton impeachment thing...

The fact remains that ordinary politics -- leaking, sniping, lying, cheating, exaggerating and other forms of PG entertainment -- have been so thoroughly criminalized that only a fool would appear before Congress without attempting to bargain for immunity by first invoking the Fifth Amendment. After all, it is a permissible exaggeration to say that in recent years more senior federal officials have had sit-downs with prosecutors than have members of the Gambino family.

I'm gonna type this slow, so you can understand it, Richard: leaking, sniping, lying, cheating and exaggerating are not "PG entertainment" when the person you're lying to or cheating happens to have you under oath. Go ahead and leak lies to the press all you want - woo-hoo! Hours of harmless fun! Watch as we leak and lie the nation into a foolish, unnecessary war! No matter, it's all PG entertainment! - but lie to investigators, including Congress, at your own risk. And what sit-downs with prosecutors are you referring to? Because there's been precious little in the way of investigations and oversight these past six years or so. Remember, Dick, that the Valerie Plame investigation was triggered by the CIA itself (who clearly believed that Ms. Plame was covert enough that exposing her identity was an actual crime), not by some gung-ho committee chairman on the Hill.

Sadly, that's all the time I have for now...maybe I'll update this later...or maybe Dick Cohen will give me a whole new set of material...

Bienveniedo, or something.

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