"Who wants to eat at a place that bans complimentary soda refills on ethical grounds?"

My question exactly.

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Fearless and Fabulous in the French Quarter

Every day I'm thankful that Hurricane Katrina didn't destroy the city of New Orleans, mostly because I wouldn't want to face a world without news stories like this one. Why waste one's time with another tedious roundup of the legislation prospects for net neutrality amendments in the Senate when you could be reading articles that include sentences like this: "In the ensuing weeks, the gang of transvestites continued their reign of terror."

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Juliet Finds No Romeos on Capitol Hill

My favorite higher educator Jack Pitney reviews Washington Post reporter Juliet Eilperin's new book on partisan bitterness in NRO today. The surprising conclusion: inter-party sniping and bitterness didn't start with the Republican class of 1994.

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This I Believe...

Another great video from one of the many stars in the Bureaucrash galaxy:



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The Most Popular Unpopular Movie of All Time

The debate over whether anyone actually wants to see Al Gore's end-of-world scareumentary has wandered over to Wyoming territory, with comparisons to Brokeback Mountain.

Many a conservative reviewer complained at the time about all of the Brokeback hoopla, saying that it was an example of Hollywood people being fatally out of touch with mainstream America. Sure all the reviewers like it, but no one's actually going to go see it. A few people in New York and San Francisco will buy tickets, but it'll be a flop with the American public, went the argument.

Cue the Box Office Mojo numbers: Brokeback was made for $14 million. It has since made approximately $178,043,761. Hmmm...those handful of people must have seen it several thousand times each.

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Up with Various Sexual Situations, Down with the FCC

Few things make me so very unhappy as the government trying to bully television networks into cutting all the simulated orgy scenes out of their primetime programming. If we don't start loosening things up, Fox will never realize its true potential.

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The Decline of the Cyberbeg

Sure, website begging was cool when hot clothing-obsessed blond chicks were asking the world to save them from their credit card debt, but that only gave a million other talentless asshats an idea to run with. Now we're treated to a perfect storm of web themes: annoying former child TV star defaults on his mortgage because of bad credit and poor financial advice and is asking for online donations to save his endangered future, while trying to get a mortgage broker fired by informing Howard Stern's listeners about his dastardly conduct. And I though that I had heard the last of Screech after Saved By The Bell: Wedding in Las Vegas.

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"It's going to be massive ... the biggest ever."

Jacob Sullum calls out Barry McCaffrey on the "success" of opium eradication efforts in Afghanistan at Hit & Run.

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Crashtastic

There's a couple interesting items over at Bureaucrash this morning. First, XaqFixx has an ominous warning about the implications of a recent Supreme Court ruling allowing no-knock police raids.

On a more light-heated note, the random image window just brought up this re-imagined version of the James Montgomery Flagg classic:



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A Fine Day on the Health Beat

News for guys is looking pretty good today. We'll start with an unfortunate truth: if you have a prostate, it is possible you could get prostate cancer. That's bad. Recent research suggests, however, that an ingredient in beer can reduce your risk of that happening. That's good. But wait, it's present in such low amounts that you'd have to drink a whole lot of beer to acquire that benefit, which would have other, negative, health effects. That's bad. But wait, another study says that drinking four cups of coffee a day can reduce a person's risk of developing cirrhosis of the liver by 80%. That's good.

Given these findings, I'll have three beers and a cup of coffee with free refills. I've got a lot of conditioning work to do.

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The Godfather Meets Eliot Spitzer

And finally the video parody scene on which I worked for so long: if you look closely, you can see my arm handing the Bonasera character a half-empty bottle of Diet Coke. A brief cameo, I admit, but I'll take any part I can get:



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Every Racist Cracker Gets His Day

It's a love-fest for Robert Byrd. He's a "titan" and a "legend." Allow me to add "a Klansman" and "a stone-cold bigot." Yes, yes, I know he has apologized for certain youthful indiscretions ... like spending 14 hours filibustering the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

The full post is at Bureaucrash.

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Quote of the Day

From The Weekly Standard, an obituary for the late leader of al Qaeda in Iraq:

Compared with Osama bin Laden, with his elegant prose, his appreciation for redolent historical Muslim narrative, his seemingly conscious imitation of the Prophet Muhammad, and his refined, almost feminine movements, Zarqawi was Islamist trailer trash.

Emphasis added; link from Arts & Letters Daily.

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