Oh, so that explains it. See, Bush isn’t ineptly bungling the relief effort in the Gulf Coast. He’s merely allowing his campaign contributors’ massive terraforming project to commence unimpeded.

Any other president would do the same, and you know it.

Of The Exorcism of Emily Rose, The New York Times writes:

The movie pretends to take the same tolerant, anything’s-possible position. While not especially good…it is still a fascinating cultural document in the age of intelligent design. Its point of view suggests an improbable alliance of postmodern relativism and absolute religious faith against the supposed tyranny of scientific empiricism, which is depicted as narrow and dogmatic.

The sincerity of a believer…is conflated with the plausibility of his beliefs. The doctors, meanwhile, seem so sure of themselves. But of course, the movie says, no one can ever be completely sure, and thus superstition becomes a matter of reasonable doubt. Meanwhile the clocks stop, the wind howls, and we are encouraged to believe – or at least not to disbelieve – our own eyes. Father Moore knows what he saw. So do I: propaganda disguised as entertainment.

As The Onion puts it, the movie “offers the dangerous proposition of hokum as an argument for faith.”

Well, at least it’ll play really well in Kansas then.

The Spam Reading Club continues. Today, it’s something different with Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Somebody has a very strange idea of what is and isn’t in the public domain. (Checking to make sure it was Volume 6 — I’m still only a couple hundred pages in myself — I discovered more than a few people have put the entire thing online in text files, which is really just a cease-and-desist letter waiting to happen.

More amusing, however, was the grammar of the spam above that:

To conclude that perfect representation, our time-jeewelry even engraved logos and serial numbers.

It’s not barely a wristwatch. It’s the legendary Rolexx.

Win the tiptop feature from our Omeega and Taag Heueer.

We locate the anti scratch extras of our extravagance timepiece.

Our excclusive feature time-jeweelry are reasonably priced to all.

Charmed your flair by having on our white gold with diamond rim.

It’s not barely a wristwatch. At this point, I think they’re relying on a target audience of complete and total idiots.

You know, looking back over Monday’s post about CBS and Moonves, it occurs to me that, when CBS first announced C.S.I. New York and I (along with, I’m sure, the vast majority of the audience) thought, “Oh great, another New York cop show?” — I started thinking about what other cities would be a better, more original choice. Cities with great character but that don’t appear too often on weekly television series. Cities like Seattle, or Austin, or Savannah…

Or New Orleans.

In hindsight, that would have been unfortunate.

“This is inarguably — inarguably — a failure of leadership from the top of the federal government.” – Jon Stewart

The sheer number of links I could put up to prove his point* is staggering. Honestly, it’s hard to read or watch the news without wanting to punch somebody.

* You all know where to look, I’m sure.