May 31, 2010. The last shuttle mission.
NASA has 10 missions remaining for the shuttle fleet, which President Bush ordered to retire by Sept. 30, 2010. The schedule announced Monday includes five flights this year, five in 2009 and three in 2010.
The space agency has already begun work on developing a new spacecraft to send astronauts back to the moon.
Thank you, shuttle. Thank you, Hubble.
I finally saw “Birdcage”, Mike Nichol’s remake of “La Cage aux Folles”.
That is a bad movie. Okay, maybe the movie isn’t bad, but the script was. It was set bound (a problem faced by many play transcriptions) and told more than showed (another problem typical of movies drawn from plays).
There was bad casting, e.g., 30 year olds trying to play 18 and 20. There was torturous exposition. But the thing in the script that seemed beyond comprehension was the first meeting between an 18 year old son and his birth mother. “Hi Mom.”
Done.
That was it. Whaaaaaa? Exactly how does that work?
Robin Williams was wonderfully understated, and Nathan Lane could have been better with a better script.
Who cares what Jonah Goldberg says and thinks? He tells the truth less often than a stopped clock, which gets credit for being right at least twice a day.
Think Progress and other sites jump on every thing this festering pus-filled pimple of a man says and does.
Jonah Goldberg compares Obama’s national service plan to slavery
Oh, really?
Jonah is a bomb-thrower. His bombs are filled with dead neutrophils and are of the same value.
The issue isn’t that he said it, but that the Los Angeles Times gave him a platform for saying it.
Forced servitude in America?
The U.S. already has high rates of volunteerism, but that’s apparently not good enough for our presidential candidates.
I started to deconstruct Jonah’s specious argument, but he isn’t worth my time. One of the methods of solving differential equations is ‘by inspection’ and there isn’t a lot of inspection required to take him apart.
Free speech doesn’t mean that all speech is equal or valid. The LA Times should give this guy or a NAMBLA inches of column space.
To admirers, Helms was a man of principle who stood for conservative values even when he stood alone. Supporters didn’t always agree with him. But they knew where he stood.
Critics knew, too.
To them, he was a cynical manipulator who oversimplified issues, supported right-wing dictators and built a half-century career on race-baiting, polarizing politics.
Many cemetery workers are black. I wonder if they are planning on getting some justice.
In other news, there appears to have been a run on wolfsbane and wooden stakes in the Raleigh, NC, area. A spokesman for the Jesse Helms family said that the incidents were not related.
The Dirty Harry movies have been repackaged as a boxed set. Mark Harris in Slate recapitulates the reaction to the movies. His is a traditional narrative about the movies. I think the traditional narrative about the movies ignores the context in which they were made.
Many of the films made in the years after World War II had a moral ambiguity to them. Yes, these were the years of the films of John Ford with his moral clarity, but these were also the years of film noir. “D.O.A.” featured Edmond O’Brien as a man who has been poisoned and will die but has enough time to find out who poisoned him. These movies tapped into the national air in which country had been living during the war. Who lives? Who dies? It is somewhat arbitrary. Good men died unjustly. Bad men survived unjustly.
During the Vietnam war, there were stories about atrocities committed by American soldiers. The national air favored survival: do what you have to do to survive and return home to us. Every family knew someone in Vietnam and we were okay with doing whatever it took to come home.
This was the environment in which the first movie was made. Dirty Harry does whatever is required to get the information to save the girl. Harry Callahan rebels at the invocation of rights in the absence of responsibility. He goads Scorpio, knowing that Scorpio will offer him an opportunity to administer a rational justice.
There was a huge critical backlash to the first movie. The ‘F’ word was thrown around a good deal and Clint Eastwood made the second movie where Dirty Harry took on a real fascist death squad. The other movies were just shaking the money tree.
Any discussion of these movies and the Dirty Harry character that ignores the context in which the movies were made and initially viewed is simply not valid. It would be equivalent to discussing “High Noon” without acknowledging the Cold War, reducing it to just another movie about a lawman and bad guys.
The Washington Post editorial board is peopled with a bunch of lying bastards.
No, Mr. Obama, or so he would have you believe, is forgoing the money because he is so committed to public financing. Really, it hurts him more than it hurts Fred Wertheimer.
Pardon the sarcasm.
No, we don’t pardon the sarcasm.
Mr. McCain played games with taking federal matching funds for the primaries until it turned out he didn’t need them
No, he committed fraud, and nothing will be done about it because there aren’t enough people on the Federal Elections Commission board to do anything about it, a condition fostered by President Bush.
The Republicans are laundering money through the Republican National Committee, bypassing the $2300 individual limit on contributions. Obama is raising his money in small money donations. The Federal Election Commission is broken and Obama shouldn’t fall on the sword so helpfully held by the Republicans to show that it is broken.
After McCain made a speech in front of a green backdrop, Stephen Colbert turned it into a green screen challenge. Here’s one of my faves:
Justice is a funny concept. Many times, people refer to justice, but what they want is revenge. If you read the Oresteia, you know that one of the fundamental transitions made by Western civil society was the adoption of the rule of law over the rule of revenge. Under the rule of revenge, children of privelege were often immune to calls for justice. Justice was meted out by those with power to those without.
But when I read about Roman Polanski, I have a hard time not wondering if there is something wrong with this whole rule of law thing. Like this:
In its coverage, the British Telegraph said “the legal shenanigans surrounding the case have continued in California,” citing the supposed requirement that the trial be televised. And the paper argued that Polanski, meanwhile, has “lived a blameless, hard-working life in exile in France.” Meanwhile, Polanki has expressed the view that he is innocent, that Americans are “prudish,” and that he has “suffered enough.”
Suffered enough? For what? Oh yeah, for drugging a 13 year old girl with quaaludes and sodomizing her. That is some kind of suffering.
I try to be a good pacifist. I try to turn the other cheek and follow the dictum that it is easier to catch bees with sugar than with vinegar. But Polanski has been saying that he has suffered enough for almost as long as he has been out of the country. We’re prudes? Really?
How about this? Polanski can come back to the States after he has been drugged and sodomized once for each time that he said that he has suffered enough. The whole episode will be filmed and then televised on pay-per-view cable. He would be surprised by the number of people who would tune in to watch it and the label of prudish with regard to the States would be put to bed for good. We may be hypocrites, but we’re no prudes, as any visit to a Craig’s List will demonstrate.
Noted from recent articles about the impending crush of gay marriages in California:
A UCLA study issued last week estimated that half of California’s more than 100,000 same-sex couples will get married over the next three years, and an additional 68,000 out-of-state couples will travel here to exchange vows. The study estimated that over that period, gay weddings will generate some 2,200 jobs and $64 million in badly needed tax revenue for the state, which is ailing financially.
Some of those states south of the Mason-Dixon line could have used the revenue. They missed the window of opportunity for it.
In this corner, weighing in two tons, the champion, the great ghost of Tim Russert.
In the challenger’s corner, weighing in at two ounces, who cares.
Enough already. He was a rich, well connected Washington insider, not Mother Teresa’s long lost brother.