Hamas Victory

This sums up my entire thoughts on Hamas' takeover of Palestinian Authority

Let Alito Go

Yet another cold January day and I'm flat on my back with a low-grade fever with the remote and the laptop. Installing that wireless network was the best sloth-enabling investment I've made in quite a while.

Anyway, I'm surfing the lefty blogosphere and everyone trying to organize support for a filibuster against Alito's nomination.

People, give it up!

The Democrats dropped the ball during the hearings by not providing a clear message on why the highly-conservative justice shouldn't be nominated. There is NO way that the Democrats will get the necessary number of Republicans to crossthe asile on this one.

Everyone should just get use to the idea that the Supreme Court is about to take three running leaps to the right.

This Week in Writers

It's been a good and bad week of writers. Let's start with the good news.

This is one of the best magazine pieces I've read in ages. I not only wished I wrote it, but I could see how it could easily appear in The New Yorker with a few minor edits. Great stuff.

Nora Vincent, a lesbian neo-con, hasn't been around for a while and I've missed her. I even mentioned her as a possible replacement for the repititious Maureen "Men are dumb because no one will marry me" Dowd. Now, Vincent has a book about her adventures dressed as a guy, called Self-Made Man. It wasn't a walk in the park, she tells us. Listen to Instapundit and his wife interview her here.

It was a very bad week for shallow, dishonest writers. First, James Frey took his lumps from Oprah when he admits that his drug rehab memoir was mostly fiction. (Duh, says most of the publishing industry who declined to publish the book when it was pitched as a novel).

But the writer dressing-down of the week has to go to Hugh Hewitt grilling of LA Times columnist/snarky lisper Joel Stein. He wrote a some-what brave if embarassing column that claims that since he does not support the war he refuses to support the troops. He does not wish them ill but neither does he admire them or the job they are trying to perform in hellish circumstances.

You have to admire Stein's bravery and I bet there are a ton of anti-war Lefties who wish they could say what Stein wrote. (A while back, a neighbor almost came out and wished for another attack on US troop as we saw in Black Hawk Down right before the election. It would be horrible, she said, but maybe it could help things...)

Hewitt did his usual shtick, which is to show that reporters and media members are reliably liberal and therefore anti-war/freedom/Bush. Stein's shallow answers and the realization that he could have been more precise is truly embarassing. Back to the gossip pages, Joel.

Mullets in Aisle Three

Here are three things I will admit to in this blog and nowhere else:

1. I am not looking forward to the day that John Updike dies. I check the obits for his name and I miss the man already. That said, I hope there's a few unpublished books in his desk that will see the light of day after he passes. Can you define selfish anymore pathetic and sweatier than that?

2. I daydream about flying a fighter jet, playing drums in a power-pop band and directing a film. It's called Ships at Night, about a young, callow naval officer who makes a critical mistake and his communication ship is captured by the Nazis. The senior officers are kept in captivity and tortured while the crew and the young, disgraced officer are sent on a humiliating PR mission around pre-war Europe to promote the might of the Nazis. They escape their captors and rescue their commanding officers and the damned boat too. They pick up a few refugees -- a family with a precocious girl and a mute boy and a young Jewish computer (what they called female mathematicians in the 30s) -- along the way and escape to freedom.

3. The last CD I burned to my Dell DJ MP3 player is Flashback: The Best of .38 Special.

Hold on Loosely, y'all!

Smile for the Camera

The public is eager to feast its eyes on two unpublished pictures. In celebrity-obsessed America, the first is the ultrasound image of Angelina and Brad's baby. In Washington, which has been called Hollywood for ugly people, it's a picture of the President shaking hands with scumbag lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Like the picture and video clips of Bill Clinton embracing his favorite thong-snapping, pizza delivery gal, reporters and critics want to show W. within 25 yards of the worst briber in, oh, as many years.

Does this prove guilt by association? Doesn't matter. The Anti-Bush Left wants to imply that because the President took a few pictures with one spectacularly bad man, he and his administration is the worst in history. No matter that the Commander-in-Chief has his picture taken with hundreds if not thousands of people each year.

I mean, Jimmy Carter had his picture taken with Yassir Arafat and Michael Moore. It doesn't mean that he's an anti-American demagogue.

Wait, on second thought...

I've Got a File!

We'll I'm not sure if the government is monitoring my oversea phone calls, but my neighbors are keeping tabs on me. How do I know, well they told me so in an anonymous letter I found outside my apartment door.

Dated January 23, 2006 it reads:

Hello,

As a neighbor we have to as you to pleas be considerate of those living around you on ALL sides. We can respect the hours that you keep, however, we expect your respect in return. The walls, ceilings, and floors are very thin and during all hours of the nigh and early morning it sounds as though you are moving funrinture and dropping wieths on the floor. We were woken up at 7:30 on Saturday and Sunday mornings and kept up of an hour from the noise coming from your apartment. Just to offer a suggestion, area rugs help to cut don on the noise from footsepts and loud voices, howerve as fara s dropping things on the floor is concerned, please remember that you do in fact have neighbors and common coutesty shouldn't be too much to ask. We will keep a date copy of this letter in hopes that the nosie level will decrease without have to take this issue to the landloard.

Thank you.

Considering, I'm on first-name basis with my across-the-hall neighbor and my upstairs neighbor and that the note is printed on heavy bond resume paper. I'm guessing that this is my relatively new downstairs neighbor, who's about 23 or 24.

My first instinct is to set my alarm clock for 3:45 in the morning and drop a Mason Jar full on ball bearings on my kitchen floor. Then I vacillated for about three-minutes thinking I should be more considerate, but screw it. If you don't have the balls to sign your name, you aren't going to get a response.

Hillary Watch

I liked Sully's points and despite a few weird ideas, I thought it was a sound piece. No anti-war Dem is going to vote for Sen. Clinton and I think the anti-war faction of the democratic Party is going to be a full-blown wing that will not be ignored. Al Gore knows this and he's itching to unleash the "Bring The Home" message at full volume. Anyway, it doesn't matter: 2008 is John McCain's election to lose. Stay in the Senate Hillary -- you're adopted home state needs you there.

McCain-Rice '08, baby!

Arrrr, Matey

It's been a weekend of depressing news: Two miners found dead in West Virginia, a whale dies as rescuers try to remove it from the Thames in London, and the parents of a kidnapped US reporter plead for their daughter's life. The only highpoint was something that should be from a movie: Sailors from the cruise missile destroyer USS Winston Churchill capture a pirate boat off the coast of Somalia.

Avast, ye hearties.

(Oh, and the official first draft of my freelancing piece is done, thank you).

Freelance Chronicles Part XXIII

So far, my story clocks in at 1,152 words and two of those include "Raw version". Four hundred more words and we have an article that, once it's posted, will break the Internet in two.

In the meantime, I have returned some library books, ate some of the Chinese food that may have brought on the food poisoning, trimmed my fingernails and listened to some of The Onion's radio reports. Check them out!

Kill me.

Stop me before I goof off again!

I am late with a freelance writing assignment -- 50 cents a word! -- and this is the weekend I decide to get the stomach flu. Or food poisoning. Or liquid ... okay, I'll spare you the details.

So the wife goes to the city for a cousin's 50th birthday party and the babysitter watches the kids downstairs while I sleep and channel surf upstairs last night. Awful TV day, capped off by a lame Saturday Night Live. Peter Skaarsgaard? Great actor but he won't be reading too many comedy scripts after this hosting gig. The highlight was Drew Barrymore walking on during Weekend Update in her Golden Globes dress with huge fake breasts hanging down to her navel. Drew gets the joke. Nicely done.

Back to expensive media studios in a poor Poughkeepsie school district. This story won't be in the clip file, I assure you.

The Reverend Mr. Phelps

Sadly, we have to support this hellish idiot's right to free speech. I miss the old days when free speech meant being able to read Lady Chatterly's Lover or Ulysses or even see a good old dirty movie, but now it means we all have the right to test the limits of being a 100 percent butthead.

Score one for the Constitution, and to the families of any service men and women who had to put up with the Phelps clan, our condolences. I am sure there is a warm spot in Hell for Phelps right next to Pat Robertson's reserved spot and the guy who invented loud cell phone ring tones.

Indiana Takes on Westboro Baptist

There's a bill moving between the houses of Indiana statehouse that will make protests at funerals illegal in the state of Indiana. This is squarely aimed at stopping Rev. Fred Phelps and his followers from gate crashing funerals with their "God Hates Fags" demonstrations.

The bill passed the upper house by a 47-1 margin and will probably sale through the lower house with a similar margin, but I doubt it will come close to passing constitutional muster.

Phelps just is going to be a cross that we'll all have to bear.