Warning : I’ll be taking a cheap shot in 5…4…3…2…

The judge in Michael Jackson’s child sex trial on Thursday barred US talk-show host Larry King from taking the witness stand for the superstar, saying his testimony was irrelevant.

If you think his testimony is irrelevant, you should see his show. Not only is Larry King the world’s biggest ass kisser, but his choice of topics (like the five shows he’s done on psychics since Aug. 2000) does as much damage to the term “news” than anything on Fox.

Josh Marshall does a great job of explaining the severity of the Republican “constitutional” option :

Just to be crystal clear, what the senate is about to do is not changing their rules. They are about to find that their existing rules are unconstitutional, thus getting around the established procedures by which senate rules can be changed.
. . .
For that to be true stands not only the simple logic of the constitution, but two hundred years of our constitutional history, on its head. You don’t even need to go into the fact that other judicial nominations have been filibustered, or that many others have been prevented from coming to a vote by invocation of various other senate rules, both formal and informal, or that almost countless numbers of presidential nominees of all kinds have simply never made it out of committee. Indeed, the whole senate committee system probably cannot withstand this novel and outlandish interpretation of the constitution, since one of its main functions is to review presidential appointees before passing them on to the full senate.

Quite simply, the senate is empowered by the constitution to enact its own rules.

You can think the filibuster is a terrible idea. And you may think that it should be abolished, as indeed it can be through the rules of the senate. And there are decent arguments to made on that count. But to assert that it is unconstitutional because each judge does not get an up or down vote by the entire senate you have to hold that the United States senate has been in more or less constant violation of the constitution for more than two centuries.

I’m not usually one for slippery slope arguments, but this certainly looks like it would pour a can of oil on our proverbial slope. Would this abrupt decision to declare the senate rules unconstitutional undermine the entire committee system? That would pretty much grind the senate to a halt. What would this mean in regards to everything else the senate has accomplished over the last 200 years? What would this mean for the thousands of pieces of legislation that have been killed in committee over the last two centuries? Is there anything in this precedent that would compell the senate to reconsider bills that had previously been discarded under the “unconstitutional” rules? Are these few judges really worth opening up this can of worms for?

It hasn’t been a great couple of weeks for the people who are supposed to keep the President safe. First there was the potential terrorist attack that wasn’t as important as Bush’s bicycle ride :

The White House launched an investigation Thursday into the 47- minute delay in notifying President Bush about the intrusion of a single- engine aircraft into restricted airspace over the nation’s capital that provoked emergency evacuations.

The violation of the no-fly zone Wednesday led more than 30,000 people to quickly leave the White House complex, the Capitol and the Supreme Court and triggered an eight-minute-long “red alert” at the White House.

At the time, Bush was riding a bicycle at a wildlife center in suburban Maryland and wasn’t told of the alert until after he had completed his ride at 12:50 p.m. — 47 minutes after the “red alert” was issued and 36 minutes after an all-clear.
. . .
McClellan said Secret Service agents accompanying Bush to the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Beltsville, Md., and the uniformed military aide who accompanies the president with the nuclear warfare launch codes had been in touch with authorities at the White House during the scare.

And now we find out that the “dud” grenade in Georgia was an assassination attempt :

The FBI said on Wednesday a grenade thrown at President George W. Bush during a visit to Georgia last week had been a threat to the American leader and had only failed to explode because of a malfunction.

In a statement, a Federal Bureau of Investigation official at the U.S. embassy said the grenade, thrown while Bush made a keynote speech in Tbilisi’s Freedom Square on May 10, had been live and landed within 30 metres (100 feet) of the president.
. . .
The FBI’s statement contradicted an account by Georgian police at the time who said the grenade was a dud, left at the spot to sow panic among the tens of thousands who turned out to greet Bush.

A White House spokesman also said then that Bush, who had visited the ex-Soviet republic to show support for its pro-Western government, had never been in danger.

These security guys had better watch their backs. If they continue screwing up this bad they might end up getting nominated for an ambassadorship or something.

For the last week or so, I’ve been putting together an article about the new trilogy of Star Wars films that I’ve been shopping around based partially on this post. Ultimately I think it’s a little too political for the pop culture press and too geeky (or not hipster-ish enough) for the political mags. Either way, I’m really proud of how the latest draft turned out, so I’m going to include it in the extended entry. It’s still a little rough around the edges, but I hope you like it.
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George Galloway is destroying the senate comittee investegating the oil-for-food scandal live on CNN. I’ll post a transcript when I get a chance.

UPDATE : I’ve posted a transcript of the best parts over at This Modern World.

Not that you should be too surprised by the rigged outcome :

The mock trial of Darwin’s theory by Kansas’ Board of Education, which concluded on May 12, included testimonies and cross-examination of and by pro-evolution and pro-creationism experts.

The board’s trial voted 6 to 4 in favour of bringing the concept of “intelligent design” within the methods of teaching science in schools. Over two dozen scientists, teachers and lawyers said the state’s science standards be amended to incorporate alternative thinking.
. . .
At the centre of the trials is Steve Abrams, a veterinarian and Republican, who among other things believes that earth is only 5,000 years old, a view propagated by Christian conservatives, as opposed to 4.5 billion years as argued by scientists.

Abrams as the board chairman has challenged the validity of evolution as the only valid explanation of life. He has said evolutionary biology is inadequate in terms of evidence and there ought to be an intelligent designer at the helm.

Now let’s put aside the obvious fact that the folks pushing intelligent design are the same ones who think the Bible code is real, are looking for Noah’s ark, and think dinosaur bones were hidden underground by the devil. On its own merits, intelligent design is complete horseshit.

First of all, if you’re an ID advocate, stop using the word “theory”. You don’t get to use that word. What you’re trying to push is a hypothesis, which is always trumped by a theory. Just ask one of the kids whose science classes you’re trying to screw up. When scientists have an idea about how the world works, they come up with a hypothesis that they can test. If it stands up to repeated scrutiny, it eventually gets labeled a scientific “theory”. There’s a few decades of research and peer review to do before you earn the right to use that word.

Before that happens, you should also deal with the fact that intelligent design is a crappy hypothesis. It would be one thing if your “alternative thinking” was based on an observation of some sort, but it’s just a half-assed inferrence based on a lack of evidence. Looking at nature’s complexity and jumping to the conclusion that it must have been to the work of a “designer” holds about as much scientific merit and assuming that thunder is the sound god makes when she’s angry.

So if you’re serious about the “Gosh, the world sure is complicated. It must be god’s work.” hypothesis, go back to the drawing board. Stop concentrating on what you percieve to be evolution’s weaknesses and try working on ID’s strengths. Find a way to incorporate your beliefs with every bit of evidence that the scientific world has previously discovered and figure out how to test the damn thing. Submit your new hypothesis to some scientific journals and pray that the free marketplace of ideas favors your side.

It bears repeating that ID advocates already tried to get some respect for their hypotheis in the scientific community back when it was called “creationism”. They failed. This route isn’t about getting respect for intelligent design, it’s about trying to take a short cut (and in the process cripple the next generation of scientists) by appealing to the beliefs and exploiting the ignorance of school board members. As much as I want to religion out of public schools, my big concern here is protecting the integrity of our educational system from being slowly eroded by a flood of pseudoscience.

UPDATE : Reader Tony writes in to point out a mistake in the article I quoted above :

The “trial” was held before a subcommittee of three of the board’s most conservative members. They will supposedly take their findings to the rest of the board, which will vote sometime in the summer about which science standards to accept. The “minority” standards that they are likely to report won’t, as your post claimed, require Kansas teachers to instruct their students in intelligent design. The ID supporters are more subtle than that. Instead, they change the definition of science itself so that it will be open to “objective” approaches (i.e., allowing the role of miracles in the development of life).

Ummm…Islamic World, why do you get more worked up when your holy book gets thrown in the toilet than when it’s revealed that innocent people have been raped and murdered by some of the same soldiers? I agree that screwing with people’s religions isn’t cool, but I can think of a lot more riot-worthy scandals than this.

Arrested Development will be back next season! If you haven’t been watching it, you’re missing one of the funniest and smartest shows on TV.

The more astute among you will notice that the last 12 days worth of posts have disappeared. If I haven’t mentioned it already, OneWebHosting.com can kiss my ass. I’m through with them and will be moving the site soon. I’ll be digging through Google’s cache later today to save everything, but for now there will be a big hole in the archives.

In other news, I’m gonna be guest posting over at ThisModernWorld.com for a while in addition to my regular duties here. It’ll be an interesting experiment, so join me over there.

Get the Whizzinator while you still can!

A
life-like prosthetic penis called the Whizzinator and other products
promising to help illegal drug users pass urine tests provoked U.S.
lawmakers on Wednesday to take legal action with subpoenas of
manufacturers.

Lawmakers objected to attempts to circumvent drug tests with
products such as The Whizzinator, a fake penis that can provide a flow
of clean urine “again and again, anytime, anywhere you need it!”
according to the Web site www.whizzinator.com.

A congressional subcommittee voted to subpoena the owner of Puck
Technology of Signal Hill, California, the company that makes the
Whizzinator. The panel also voted to subpoena the owners of Health
Choice of New York City and Spectrum Labs of Cincinnati, two companies
that lawmakers said also were suspected of selling products aimed at
circumventing workplace drug tests.
. . .

Actor Tom Sizemore, who played a sergeant in the war movie “Saving
Private Ryan,” was caught using the Whizzinator to try and pass drug
tests, California prosecutors said in February. He was put in jail
after using a similar device and failing a drug test, prosecutors said.

Speaking
of drugs, the song “We Are All On Drugs” on Weezer’s new album is one
of the most vile lumps of shit I’ve ever heard in my life. And this is
coming from somebody who really likes Weezer.

Dennis Miller’s show was canceled from a cable channel that nobody watches. Whatever. He’s such a phony that his show won’t be missed a bit. Rather than pretend that he’s still the snarky, intelligent badass that people thought he was in the 80′s, the producers of his show should have recognized that he’s a robotic, pretentious bore and gone with it. The great tragedy of the Dennis Miller show isn’t that it totally sucked, but that it had the potential to be brilliant.

To make Miller’s show watchable, they should have taken a cue from Paddy Chayefsky and styled the show after Howard Beale-centered Network News Hour from the second half of Network. Imagine each episode of Miller’s show starting like this :

ANNOUNCER : Ladies and gentlemen, let’s hear it — how do you feel?

AUDIENCE : WE DON’T WANT TO GET OFF ON A RANT HERE!!

(cue “Bad to the Bone” or some other shitty song that “rocks”)

ANNOUNCER : It’s the Fox Evening News with…Sybil the Soothsayer, Pat Roberson in the “What God Wants You To Do” department, Miss Mata Hari, another installment of “Fuck the Jews with Pat Buchanan”, and starring…

(spotlight opens up on a darkened stage to show Miller standing alone with his arms outstretched in a Christ-like pose)

ANNOUNCER : …the mad genius himself, Dennis Miller!!!

Then again, that might not stoke his ego enough.

Anybody wanna guess how Sen. Voinovich is gonna go on the nuclear option?

Republican
Sen. George Voinovich of Ohio agreed on Thursday to let the contentious
nomination of John Bolton as United Nations ambassador go to the full
senate for a vote. But he issued a scathing attack on Bolton.

Voinovich portrayed Bolton, now the top arms-control diplomat at the State Department, as “arrogant” and “bullying.”

“John Bolton is the poster child of what someone in the diplomatic
corps should not be,” Voinovich said. He said Bolton would be fired if
he was in private business.

“That being said, Mr. Chairman, I am not so arrogant to think that I
should impose my judgment and perspective of the U.S. position in the
world community on the rest of my colleagues,” he added. “We owe it to
the president to give Mr. Bolton an up or down vote on the floor.”

If
Voinovich really thinks that the he “owes” the President the favor of
voting against his conscience, then why the hell does he think the
senate has commitees in the first place? His justification is such an
obvious nod to the filibuster fight, you’ve gotta wonder what Frist
offered him to flip.

Speaking of the nuclear option, you should really check out this Salon article. Not only does it cover everything you might have missed, but it’s funny too :

But
there must be something different in the way that the Democrats are
blocking Bush’s nominees, right? The Republicans say that what the
Democrats are doing is “unprecedented.”

Oh, yes they do. Just the other day on Fox News, Utah Sen. Orrin
Hatch, the former chairman of the senate Judiciary Committee,
proclaimed: “We’ve never had a filibuster of judges in the history of
this country.” In a myth vs. fact sheet, the Republican National
Committee says that “having to overcome a filibuster (or obtaining 60
votes) on judicial nominees is unprecedented.”

But that’s not a fact. In 1968, Republicans led a filibuster against
Lyndon Johnson’s nomination of Abe Fortas as chief justice. And that
isn’t the only Republican attempt to filibuster a judicial nominee in
recent history. During the Clinton years, the Congressional Research
Service says, Democrats were forced to bring cloture motions on six
judicial nominees. While the existence of a cloture motion doesn’t
always mean that a filibuster is in effect, in at least some instances
it has meant just that: In 2000, Frist himself voted to support a
filibuster against Richard Paez, Clinton’s nominee to the U.S. Court of
Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

What do Frist and the GOP say about that?

They’ve become more and more specific about what it is they’re
calling “unprecedented.” Now, instead of saying that filibusters are
unprecedented, Frist says that a judicial nominee “with majority
support” has “never been denied” an up-or-down vote. That formulation
is closer to accurate, but it’s still not quite there. Paez had
“majority support,” but Frist and other Republicans tried to filibuster
his confirmation anyway.

What gives? Frist would say that the Republicans didn’t succeed in
blocking the Paez nomination, so their efforts shouldn’t count against
them. It’s a sin to succeed in blocking a nomination by filibuster,
Republicans say. But trying to block a nomination by filibuster — as
Republicans did repeatedly during the Clinton years? That doesn’t
count, and to say otherwise would be, in the words of the conservative
Committee for Justice, “Orwellian.”

Isn’t that a little like an attempted murderer lording his morality over a murderer who actually succeeds?

You said it, not me.

If the GOP gets their wish of
declawing the judicial brancch to the point of completely undermining
our system of checks and balances, how long do you think it would take
to declare a new constitutional convention? Maybe they’ll finally get
to sneak the ten commandments in there somewhere.

Ross has a wonderful two-part rant against the evils of the pop art movement accompanied by this great photo of him flipping off Roy Lichtenstein :

That’s my assertive left hand, deftly explaining
to Roy Lichtenstein just what I think of his “work”. RL just happens to
be in my top 10 of most hated artists – he was nothing more than a
shallow elitist hack who robbed comics imagery, without respect or
consideration for the artistic value comics inherently posess.

(Seriously, do you realize just how annoying it is when some rich
twit with too much money and a trendy art collection find out that you
like/read/do comics, and they grab you sweatingly, shaking with
excitement as they inform you that “You must LOOOVE Lichtenstein!”. Um,
no art-tramp. And I hate Warhol too. Ugh, shudder, repeat.)

Instead of his ouevre, museums ought to feature Jack Kirby and Mike
Allred. Meanwhile, as you can see I’m fighting the good fight, in my
own immature way.
. . .
Lichtenstein and his cast of imitators didn’t swap issues of
Spider-Man, The Spirit, or Fritz the Cat. They didn’t consider the work
of geniuses like Charles Schultz or Al Capp worthy of consideration,
nor did they bother learning about the rich and diverse history of the
medium from which they pirated so callously. And yet, they claimed to
be transforming such disrespected art into fine culture?

No rapper or rock band would ever claim that their cover version, or
sample was somehow an elevation of a previously dull and uninspired
work, to the level of fine art. Eric B. and Rakim never claimed that I
Got Soul was somehow an improvement on the original James Brown. The
Sounds of Science, from Paul’s Boutique, isn’t ever held up as proof
that Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club band, from whence that song
samples, is a crushing bore given respect only because the Dust
brothers chose to spin it once or twice. In fact, the artists in
question would hold up their choice to cover or sample as proof of
their deep love or awe for the sampled or covered artist.

Not so in the so called Fine Arts world. As with the classical
world’s reaction to pop music in the 20th century, fine artists can’t
stand the idea that there are people in the world, posessing of
incredible talent and imagination, who choose not to flatter the
passions and tastes of isolated and effete bores who still care about
‘Finer things’.

Not only does the unattributed appropriation¹ completely disrespect the work of classic comics artists, but the result is often a sterilized version of the original :

?I
detest the arrogant notion that commercial work just happens to exist
and is therefore devoid of creativity or intellectual process,? says [Watchmen artist
Dave]Gibbons. ?There are huge demands made on one?s creativity. The
kind of straight-from-the-subconscious work which can result is often
fascinating and deeply involving. I?d draw a parallel with the work of
Charles Dickens, whose work was produced under relentless commercial
pressure.

?Many of the ?art? copies of commercial work lack even the basic
craftsmanship of the original,? continues Gibbons. At this point
Glenn?s spiritual forebear comes into view. ?Roy Lichtenstein?s copies
of the work of Irv Novick and Russ Heath are flat, uncomprehending
tracings of quite sophisticated images . . . the original artists have
translated reality into clear, effective compositions using economical
and spirited linework.?

Hover your mouse over this Lichtenstein painting for a good example of what Gibbons is talking about :

The whole shtick behind Roy Lichtenstein?s work is the irony of placing
“low-brow” children’s illustration in a gallery setting as if to say
“Aren’t I clever? I’m hanging crap in an art gallery².”
To push this point even further, though, his copies of the original art
are deliberately simplified to remove subtle details (like the original
airplane’s rivets), the colors are flat and devoid of shading, the
shadows are misplaced, and the linework is uniform and bland. If you’re
going to go this far to alter the original, why bother lifting lifting
somebody else’s work at all?

The reason, of course, is because creating comics art is hard work.
When Russ Heath created the original, he undoubtedly worked with little
more than a script that said “the airplane explodes”. What did the
airplane look like? How intense was the explosion? What’s the best way
to frame the shot of the explosion? All of these questions had to be
considered before he even picked up his pencil. And that’s just one frame. The original version of Lichtenstein’s masterpiece was one of 6-8 pictures on a single comics page³. A page that Russ Heath probably earned $25-$50 to create.

Because of their reputation as a low-brow artform, the creators of
comic books have always made shit for money. Some of the medium’s most
revered illustrators often struggled to keep their heads above the
poverty level. Even now, with comic book movies making hundreds of
millions of dollars, most “successful” comic book artists are forced to
do commercial work on the side or rely on a day job that has nothing to
do with the industry. All of this low pay and lower respect is because
these talented men and women love the comics medium.

This is who hacks like Roy Lichtenstein are mocking when they steal
the work of others. To Lichtenstein, Russ Heath wasn’t a fellow artist
to whom he was paying tribute, he was just some unnamed amateur that
made that kiddie shit picked up on the way to the studio.

^{1 : Or as I like to call it, “stealing”.}

^{2 : Then again, it’s not really hard to find crap
in most galleries. If you’ve got a good nose, you can usually smell the
shit-stained religious imagery from the parking lot.}

^{3 : I haven’t even mentioned the amount of work that
goes into creating the pages of the comic as a whole. Aside from the
details within the frames themselves, each panel has to work as part of
a sequence in order to establish the proper pacing for the story and
set the overall tone.}

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He’s been hiding in this lady’s tummy. As this ultrasound shows, a woman in Ohio is pregnant with Jesus (via Bob Harris) :

This really adds to the emotional strain of impending motherhood :

Not only is her husband not the father, but she’s been a virgin without even knowing it. I guess the Pope is right. God really does hate contraception.

Does this mean she has to give birth in a barn? It would have been nice to find out before blowing all that cash on the OB-GYN visits.

What is she gonna do with all that frankincense and myrhh?

I don’t care if he is humanity’s savior, that kid’s gonna look hideous with a full beard.

“Thanks folks. I’ll be here all week.”

Ahhh…what is there to say about the navel gazing, celebrity
worshipping, aimless montrosity that is The Huffington Post? Lemme
throw this at you Haper’s index style :

Posts since the site’s launch on Monday : 184

Posts by Robert Evans : 1

Number of rhetorical questions asked by Evans: 5

Number of references to screwing Ali McGraw : 0 (so far)

Posts that mention Social Security : 10

Posts that mention NASCAR : 2

Posts by David Mamet today : 1

Posts about David Mamet’s post : 3

Mentions of the word “God” by Quincy Jones in a post about why Michael Jackson is so screwed up : 4

Posts containing the term “lemon squares” : 2

Posts about making your van look like an ice cream truck : 1

Can you accuse something of jumping the shark if it was built over the tank?