The End of the Ring

A great review of Return of the King - don't read if you haven't seen the movie, but otherwise I'd recommend it. The only piece of my judgement it doesn't include is that I think the only thing that qualifies RotK for an oscar nomination is the story, which isn't enough to justify one. I feel that all three of these movies are great depictions of Tolkein's masterpieces, but without his story RotK would be merely a blockbuster of little value, in the ranks of, say, a Will Smith movie.

Candidates Criticize Bush on Beef Safety (washingtonpost.com): "Former Vermont governor Howard Dean said in Ames, Iowa, on Sunday that the discovery 'raises serious concerns about the ability of this administration to protect the safety of our nation's food supply and the health of our rural economies that depend on agriculture exports.' "

Oh come on. How much could Bush possibly have had to do with an animal that was born in April 1997 - while Bush was the governor of Texas? I'm not sure how to correct it, but there has developped in this country a tendency to blame everything on the President, and I don't like it. Bush (or any President) deserves only a tiny percentage of the credit he gets, and even less of the blame. It's silly to think that W could have done anything to prevent one cow from getting BSE, particularly when that cow is from Canada anyway.

OpinionJournal - Dorothy Rabinowitz's Media Log

Anyone else think this reads like an NPR piece?

CNN.com - Landers may resolve riddles of Mars life, water - Dec. 22, 2003: "Early Christmas morning, a small armada of exploratory spacecraft will reach the red planet"

This brings to mind the Simpsons episode where Homer accidentally changes the channel to a space launch just as the batteries fall out of the remote, and Bart has to dive across the room to pull the plug on the TV so that they don't have to watch "another boring space launch." According to dictionary.com, the primary definition of the word "armada" is "A fleet of warships." I think CNN is definitely going for this, particularly because on their homepage they link to this article with the tag-line "Armada of spacecraft approaching Mars."
Can we admit to ourselves already that, whatever ramifications it might have for the future, finding bacteria on another planet is really just boring as hell? It would be way cooler if we were actually sending a fleet of warships to mars... or, better yet, to Nuke the Moon.

For any who are interested, I can get you a Republicans for Dean button or bumper sticker.
I have a button on my bag, right next to a "No Left Turn" button and one that says "Republicans Kick Ass"
I just think, as Tom DeLay said on Meet the Press yesterday morning, we as Republicans can't ask for much more than a Dean nomination.

First this: Youths more conservative than their elders on issues involving religion and abortion, new UC Berkeley survey reveals

Now this: Teen Drug Use Falls, Federal Study Shows (washingtonpost.com)

Go us!

Bush Says Libya Will Allow Arms Inspections: "President Bush announced today that Libya, which for decades has been estranged from the United States, had agreed to forsake weapons of mass destruction and to allow weapons inspectors from international organizations into the country.
Mr. Bush, in a stunning late-afternoon appearance, said Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi had notified diplomats from both the United States and Britain of its decision. Libya has been talking with the United States and Britain quietly for some nine months, the president said."

Hmm. They announced this to the United States and Britain... not France and Germany? Not the UN? Maybe they've realized that we're serious about bringing stability to the Middle East by whatever means necessary?

Matt: Just thought I'd mention CNN's coverage of this story over the course of the day. Whereas most of the major outlets have been fairly positive about all this, CNN's website started out with "Libya to dismantle WMD program" then shifted to "Gadhafi's Son Says WMD Decision Not Related to Iraq Invasion" then to "Libya WMD Decision Criticized By Terror Victims" and now to "Anger of Pan Am 103 Bomb Victims". Does anyone else see a trend here? Hmmm... Why would anyone want to try and spin this as a less than positive story? What media bias?

CNN.com - Clark: Bush lacks will to find bin Laden - Dec. 17, 2003: "'If I'd been president, I would have had Osama bin Laden by this time,' Clark said at a news conference in Concord, New Hampshire, where he was campaigning for votes in the nation's first primary, January 27. "

Yes, Mr. Clark, but if you'd had complete control over NATO forces in Kosovo, you also would have started a war with the Russians. So, maybe we shouldn't play the "I would have" game.

OpinionJournal - Extra: "I would not have chosen Afghanistan and Iraq to start with; Syria, Iran, Sudan and Libya were much more culpable and militarily more important to neutralize as sponsors of terror. (They say that Libya and Sudan have changed their tune lately, but I have my doubts.)
But once we chose Afghanistan and Iraq, once we began a serious campaign, we must continue the war until we achieve our objective, which is to remove all the governments that sponsor terror, or convince the remaining sponsors of terror to absolutely, thoroughly, and completely reverse their policy and actively seek out and destroy all terrorists that once had safe harbor within their borders. Anything less, and all our effort--all those American lives--were wasted. "

Somebody linked to this Orson Scott Card column before OpinionJournal picked it up, but I felt the need to do so again. He really makes some incredible points here. You've got to respect the man's politics--even if he is a Dem.

CNN.com - Keiko buried in secret ceremony - Dec. 15, 2003

The whale, who was the start of the movie Free Willy, died of pneumonia while they were trying to reintroduce him to the wild. In other words, trying to free Free Willy killed him.

Yahoo! Top Stories - Women With Big Boobs Are Smarter: "The study of 1,200 women conducted by Chicago sociologists comes in the wake of a recently released report stating that blonde rocket scientists outnumber brunettes.
'Although I hate to admit it, we found that women with big busts average 10 IQ points higher than less well-endowed women,' reveals lead researcher Dr. Yvonne Rossdale, herself a meager 32A.
'The myth that women with voluptuous figures are not smart should now be shelved, along with the misconception that all blondes are dumb.' "

I'll bet they got government funding for this study, too...

OpinionJournal - Wonder Land

Henninger makes a really interesting comparison between the Dems and the Mafia of the Godfather movies.

New York Post Online Edition: news: "A stunning new poll shows President Bush would clobber Democratic front-runner Howard Dean by nearly 2-1 in politically potent New Hampshire - even though Dean has a giant lead over Democratic rivals in the state.
Bush gets 57 percent to Dean's 30 percent among registered voters in the American Research Group poll."

Bush only won by 51% to 34% against a "Democratic Party nominee." I haven't been able to find the rest of the details on this poll as yet, but I'd like to see if these are the only three questions asked, how big their sample and range of error were.

UPDATE: Best of the Web picked up this information from me... that makes 5.

OpinionJournal - Peggy Noonan

Let's all take a moment to celebrate: Peggy Noonan's column has returned as a weekly treat.

From today's Political Diary:"Wesley Clark, after a few cloddish attempts to tap his previously tested applause lines, gave a crunchy disquisition on Iraq. Finally we were able to draw a bead on him: He's not the shiny, warrior-scholar-superman his fans paint him to be. He's a technocrat -- a good, proficient technocrat, though one who needs a strong boss over him, his history indicates."

Interesting. He's a technocrat who needs a strong boss above him. Anyone else see a Dean-Clark ticket emerging?

WSJ.com - The March of Folly: "Justice Antonin Scalia dryly noted, for instance, that over the past four years the Court had disapproved of speech restrictions on virtual kiddy porn, tobacco advertising, illegally intercepted communications and sexually explicit cable programming, yet couldn't summon the nerve to allow citizens to criticize their own government."

It seems to me, after Lawrence v. Texas and this case, Scalia's dissents are quite logical. (In his Lawrence dissent, he said that the decision would lead to a flood of suits for gay marriage--it did.)I hear a lot from my liberal friends at school about how Scalia is the devil, and since I've never really followed the court closely before this year, I couldn't refute them. Now I'm beginning to see a pattern which I think I can use. Once again, I think here he hits the nail on the head: the current Court is more concerned with the rights of pornographers than with those of citizens and political organizations. I could probably have understood if the money restrictions weren't considered to abridge "speech," though I would have disagreed, but even after reading this 298 page decision I still don't think I'll understand how what we say about candidates and incumbents in the weeks before an election are not speech.
The Dems are right: even as we're giving freedoms to Iraq, we're taking them from ourselves--only it's not the Patriot Act we need to fear, it's Campaign Finance Reform.

Is there any way that we can edit the code on this site so that when you click a link it opens a new window instead of moving in the same window?

OpinionJournal - Panic and the Patriot Act

Great column defending the Patriot Act.

OK, the new blue is freaking me out. That is really bright. Why did we abandon the old blue?

Bartley Gets the Medal of Freedom

Short press-release regarding W's decision to grant Robert L. Bartley the "Predsidential Medal of Freedom, the Nation's highest civil honor."
I think all contributors to this blog can support that decision, and I offer my own congratulations to Mr. Bartley.

CNN.com - Boy punished for talking about gay mom - Dec. 1, 2003 (via IMAO)

Oh come on now! A student asked him about his parents, he said he has two mom's because his birth mom is gay. And he got punished for it. That's ridiculous.

OpinionJournal - The Western Front: "It's not enough to have a president who sees the world in moral terms and isn't fooling around with an intern in the Oval Office. "

This article focuses primarily on religious conservatives leaving Bush if he waffles on defining marriage, and operates from the assumption that fiscal conservatives have already deserted him. The fear expressed is that both groups may stay home in November. This puts me in quite a connundrum, as in many ways I belong to both groups. Does that mean I'm supposed to not vote?