Senator McCain “hasn’t held executive responsibility.â€
FACT: McCain commanded, and revitalized, the largest squadron in the U.S. Navy.
Senator McCain’s military leadership doesn’t count, because it wasn’t a “wartime Squadron.â€
FACT: McCain volunteered to serve in Vietnam and upon his return, endured months of physical rehabilitation in order to continue his military career and command a squadron.
Senator McCain “hasn’t been there [war] and ordered the bombs to fallâ€
FACT: McCain flew twenty-three combat missions in Vietnam in order to drop bombs on the enemy. He was also “there†for 5 ½ years as a Prisoner of War.
“I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be President.â€
FACT: If serving your country, volunteering for combat, resisting the enemy, and receiving seventeen decorations for service does count for anything, then why are you on television, speaking as an “expert†on national security matters? Your personal attacks came not from a General with respect for the uniform, but from a political operative dispatched to attack the military background of a political adversary.
On behalf of Vets for Freedom—and thousands of veterans and troops still serving—we urge you to apologize to Sen. McCain for your comments. We also urge you to apologize to generations of veterans who served our country in uniform. Service matters—anytime, anywhere. We await and appreciate your response.
They’ll be waiting a long time, I predict. More at the link.
why I didn’t remember much of anything about the 2002 Time Machine remake. It’s forgettable. Or it’s better to forget it, if you’ve seen it.
Guy Pearce kind of stumbles through the film with a deer in the headlights expression on his face. Jeremy Irons should have been taken out back and shot for his performance. And a lot of it was annoying.
It seems to me that a “mad scientist” who devotes his life to developing a time machine doesn’t need an additional reason to, you know, use his time machine once he’s developed it, but the screenwriter obviously did, and added a really stupid reason: He tries to change the past and can’t, so he travels to the future to find out why he can’t.
There’s a Magic Negro, this time a Photonic Magic Negro, sort of a master word database of all human knowledge. That was annoying — and so was the actor.
The Eloi aren’t the childlike zombies of the George Pal movie, but sort of a big, lesbian collective kinda thing. They’re the cliff dwellers redux, living on the sides of cliffs in huts. They fish, and climb up the cliffs to their lesbian collective huts on rope ladders, which they pull up at night (boats too). Visually, those shots were pretty neat.
But it’s one of those movies you don’t want to think about, because as soon as you start, it falls apart. It reminded me of Menotti’s opera, The Telephone. The plot is so stupid and illogical that you have to literally turn off your brain. In Menotti’s opera, we have a couple in some Soviet bloc nation. The man gets papers from the underground and leaves. She knows all of the same people in the underground, but instead of also getting papers and getting out, she whimpers beside the telephone, waiting for him to call — and we’re supposed to feel sorry for this idiot.
Well, Time Machine is a lot like that. Let’s take the living on the sides of cliffs thing. The Morlock live in caverns, like the original. So do these caverns extend upward inside the cliffs, and if so, why didn’t the Morlock merely tunnel through and snatch their dinner out of the huts? If not, why live on the sides of the cliffs, why not on high ground above the cliffs, where the Morlock can’t easily get to you? And why would the Eloi ever go down at all and possibly get barbecued, instead of up, where they wouldn’t?
They weren’t childlike or zombies, like the original. They were just stupid.
Look, don’t bother, or you’ll spend several weeks trying to forget that you saw it, like I did.
I couldn’t do them yesterday, or at least yesterday morning, because Best Buy was here setting up the TV (I didn’t do them yesterday afternoon because I had better things to do — like play with the new toys).
BAGHDAD, June 27 (UPI) — Iraq plans to file suit in a U.S. court against the United Nations for alleged corruption in the oil-for-food program, Iraqi legal sources said Friday.
The United Nations established the program in 1995 to allow Iraq to sell oil to global markets in exchange for food and humanitarian supplies without generating revenue to rebuild the Iraqi military in the wake of the Persian Gulf War.
The program ended shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, when the Coalition Provisional Authority assumed responsibility for humanitarian functions. An investigation by the congressional investigative body the Government Accountability Office found loopholes in the program that allowed Saddam Hussein to receive various sources of revenue through the deal.
A source in the Iraqi Justice Ministry, speaking to Voices of Iraq on condition of anonymity, said a legal firm in the U.S. state of Texas would file the suit in New York state court.
I didn’t know there was a Robocop 3. Best scene so far: Guy walks into a restaurant full of cops and tries to hold it up, with the obvious result. Restaurant employee says, “What’s it like being a rocket scientist?”
Somehow, at some point while watching that re-make, my receiver lost all of the schedule info, so I rebooted it. It’s back, but it took me a few minutes to realize when it comes on, it looks like it comes on, then goes off again.
The schedule right now is a wasteland. I think I’ll put in a DVD.
The Time Machine remake. It’s on TNT now, just started at noon. I barely remember the Morlock guy, and that he talked, or something. Don’t really remember anything else, not even whether I liked it or not.
They’re gone, and the whole system is set up: Satellite, new DVD burner/player, and Laserdisc player. Until next Saturday, the only thing we can get close to 1080 on is the DVD, so Band Wagon is on right now. Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse, Nanette Fabray, and Oscar Levant.
I’m sorry to say that the Laserdisc isn’t nearly as sharp and clear on this TV as it was on the GE.
It’s a little more complicated than it was before, since we have two inputs on the TV, and before, only one (I switched everything from the receiver). But it’s set up so the DVD will burn whatever we’re watching.
That new desktop I have has a TV card, so I decided to hook the VCR/DVD-R unit up to the desktop, if I need it. It doesn’t upconvert, so the picture wouldn’t be great on this TV.
Ah, life is good. I did find out that the local channels don’t broadcast HD yet (supposed to start in September). Well, there’s nothing on network TV now except re-runs, anyway.
(An intentionally ironic title, given that I got the link from Glenn Reynolds.) On Volokh:
The Supreme Court’s decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, upholding the Second Amendment right of individuals to own firearms, should finally lay to rest the widespread myth that the defining difference between liberal and conservative justices is that the former support “individual rights” and “civil liberties,” while the latter routinely defer to government assertions of authority. The Heller dissent presents the remarkable spectacle of four liberal Supreme Court justices tying themselves into an intellectual knot to narrow the protections the Bill of Rights provides. Or perhaps it’s not as remarkable as we’ve been led to think.
And on that note, I think I’ll retire to the TV until tomorrow.
Quaker Steak and Lube is not closing. The sign refers to the lot in front, on the street (lots come with liquor licenses here?) I really need to remember that those onion rings are an inch thick, and six defeated me — along with a dozen chipotle wings.
I don’t know if you saw Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, but if you didn’t, you want to rent it. Now. Before the sequel, Dark Knight opens on July 18.
Don’t like comic book movies? Read on.
Tim Burton’s movies were excellent, but they were comic book movies for comic book fans — after all, they were Tim Burton movies. He had no intention of escaping the genre; he embraced it, and successfully, unlike most comic book movies (the first X-Men was pretty good, and the second was fine, but the third was just stupid, and Ironman was unexpectedly good — but all the rest have been pathetic, especially the Spiderman and Fantastic Four movies — and I devoured comic books when I was a kid).
Nolan broke free of the genre, and perhaps chose the only comic book hero with which he could have: Batman. In the 2005 movie, he goes back to Batman’s origins. The movie, like the comic, is dark and gritty, and most importantly, real. It’s a movie that non-comic fans can love, beautifully made, with pitch perfect performances, particularly from Christian Bale (as Bruce Wayne/Batman) and Michael Caine as Alfred. Nolan’s flick is an adult’s movie, with complex characterizations, and the first film that truly lets Bale show what an incredibly talented actor he is.
There is nothing of the television show in Nolan’s movie. It is as serious as a film gets, with no camp or humor. Nolan even manages to make bats scary, and I like bats.
If you missed this movie, you missed what was hands down the best movie of 2005, without question. I wouldn’t call it kid friendly; fine for adolescents, a bit dark for younger kids. Because the successors to Burton’s Batman films were so bad, I didn’t bother to see Nolan’s movie in the theater, and I will always regret that. Had I seen it in the theater, at the end I would have stood and applauded.
Me, I couldn’t care less about The Hulk. I didn’t like the comic, and I didn’t like the TV show (anyway, Bill Bixby to me was always My Favorite Martian). But on the day Nolan’s sequel opens, you won’t be able to keep me away from the theater.
Seriously. Even if you never go to the theater, don’t miss this. And don’t miss the chance to see the first movie, if you haven’t.
As a rule, I’m not a big fan of chain restaurants, but I’ll try anything, and I’m willing to make exceptions when warranted. So while I’m not a fan (at all) of Outback, Texas Roadhouse has great ribs (steaks aren’t too bad, but you have to order the thick cut).
Then, there’s Quaker Steak and Lube. Every chain has a gimmick. Theirs is classic cars and motorcycles. It’s kind of a cross between a restaurant and a classic car museum (and there’s one in Indiana, in Portage). Speaking of, Texas Roadhouse is a bit strange here, with the Texas flags alternating with Penn State and Steelers banners and signs. Anyway.
I’d never heard of the chain before we moved here. And while I love wings, I think barbecued chicken is weird (pork, dammit, pork), so I never got into the buffalo wings thing. But Quaker Steak and Lube specializes in wings, and does these chipotle dry rub wings that are amazingly good, and then there are the onion rings that come stacked on a car antenna (you order by the size of antenna). Anyway, there’s a rather disturbing sign in the lot in front of them here that would seem to indicate that they’re going out of business. Thing is, I can’t find anything on the web or in the local rag about their going out of business, and there are always cars parked there. So I think here in a few minutes I’ll head over there for some of those wings and onion rings and just ask. If they closed, well, that would be really sad. Really. Those onion rings can’t be beat. “Hellacious” is the word that comes to mind.
Here’s Bike Night at the local Quaker Steak and Lube, every Wednesday night during the summer here in State College.
We won’t get HD signals until July 5, so this is purely regular signals on the 1920×1080 HDTV.
When I first started watching, the picture was pretty terrible. Then I found the format button on the TV remote, and found I could change the resolution, as you would change the resolution on your monitor, and that I had been watching on something by 480 resolution.
I found “stretch” mode at something by 768, and while still a bit fuzzy, it’s perfectly watchable. Still, once we get the HD dish, we’ll be watching HD as much as possible. Stretch fills the whole screen, and even without HD, these people have some big heads, and lots of skin detail we never saw on our 1986 GE. Even if there were lots of bigger TVs, this is a big picture.
Anyone want to guess how much tax money Daley is going to spend attempting to fight what is already a lost battle? Someone really needs to explain what a US Supreme Court decision means to this alleged law school graduate.
You can’t call that ambiguous — although he really guts Daley like a fish in this other article:
Frightening? In what way? That people might be able to defend themselves in their own homes with perfectly legal firearms when the police are far away? And as to the fighting vigorously, on behalf of voters everywhere, stay the fuck away from deciding what’s good for us. You work for us and we’re telling you loud and clear to stay the hell away from our guns.
Out of 16 major American institutions, Congress ranks dead last in the eyes of the American people according to Gallup. Even HMOs are more revered. If Carrot Top and Joey Buttafuoco were elected to Congress, it would improve the legislative branch’s reputation.
I guess we do have two tuners. I set one program to record, then switched channels. This time, I did not get the prompt to stop recording. It’s possible that while we were going through the setup yesterday, there were problems with the second satellite signal that worked themselves out.
No DLB, though. That’s going to take getting used to.
It takes politicians, law professors (and, it turns out, four Supreme Court justices) to believe that a “right of the people” somehow actually doesn’t belong to the people at all.
Actually, this reminds me of my ultra leftist friend I spoke about in my insurance article, this woman:
I have a friend who was insured through her employer. The employer went belly-up, and while she was between jobs, she had no insurance healthcare plan, because hey, it’s the employer’s obligation to provide it, right? The thing is, she was diagnosed with a serious debilitating disease. Now, she says she can’t get insurance on a healthcare plan, but what she really means is she refuses to pay the higher premiums that must result from her pre-existing condition.
She’s my friend. I’m sympathetic. But however unfortunate her situation — and it truly is unfortunate — it’s her fault, and nobody else’s, that she wasn’t covered when she was diagnosed. She could easily have insured herself, rather than relying on an employer plan, and then, she wouldn’t have this problem.
On our last trip to Bloomington, we all had Thanksgiving dinner together. She has state insurance, because she didn’t insure herself, and was diagnosed with MS after her employer went under. At one point, we got on the topic of smoking deterrents, and she commented on how expensive they were. I said yes, but most healthcare (note I did not say insurance) plans cover it, usually with the condition that you sign up for some stop smoking clinic. She said, “Yes, but not mine, I have the cheap state insurance.”
I didn’t reply, because we’d been down this road before, and there was no point. She’s highly intelligent, but on this or any other liberal talking point, she has no ability to see reality. She has the state insurance, and she calls it cheap, and criticizes the things it does not cover — yet, she believes that federal insurance would cover these things?
Sometimes, you have to just let it drop. Liberals are impervious to reality.
(HARRISBURG) - The State House today unanimously approved legislation sponsored by Sen. Jake Corman (R-Benner Twp.) designating a portion of State Route 26 in Centre County as the Marine Sergeant David “DJ” Emery Highway.
Senator Jake Corman introduced Senate Bill 999 as a fitting tribute to a true American hero who was wounded February 7, 2007 during Operation Iraqi Freedom.
“We have the honor of naming a state highway after Marine Sergeant David “DJ” Emery, who served our Commonwealth, the United States of America and the United States Marine Corps with honor so that men, women and children abroad can live in a free society and enjoy the liberties of a democracy, free of tyranny and oppression,” Corman said.
David “DJ” Emery, Jr., was born August 23, 1985. He graduated from Bellefonte Area High School in 2003 and studied masonry at the Centre County Vocational-Technical School. He was always an active outdoorsman and has a love of motorcycles.
Emery enlisted in the United States Marine Corps in June 2003 and, following completion of basic training was deployed to Iraq in 2004 and then again in 2006.
Private First Class Emery served with distinction in the 4th Battalion, 2nd Marines, 2/4 Gulf Company until February 7, 2007, when he was seriously wounded in an attack by a suicide bomber. Emery was promoted to Sergeant on May 9, 2007.
Corman garnered the support of Spring and Marion Township officials, along with PennDOT officials, before introducing Senate Bill 999.
Corman’s Senate Bill 999 originally passed in the Senate on October 1, 2007. Because SB 999 was amended in the House, it must return to the Senate for the concurrence vote.
If I record a program while it’s playing, then try to change channels, it makes me stop recording to change channels. That, and the error on the second dish during setup, is why I assumed we only have one tuner operating. But I set up a program to record at 8:00 am today (before it started), then changed the channel. I’m still on the other channel, but the red record light is on, so it looks like I have two tuners.
It’s not just the TV that’s new. For the last six years, we had had DirecTiVO, a DirecTV and TiVO receiver in one box. DirecTV cut off their business partnership with TiVO, and now have their own DVR.
The DirecTV DVR interface isn’t nearly as simple to navigate as TiVO. TiVO makes everything accessible from the TiVO menu, accessed by pressing the (ta-da) TiVO button at the top of the peanut remote. The DirecTV DVR interface is nearly identical to the Dish TV DVR interface. Recordings and the TV guide are two separate menu systems, not accessible from a top menu (as far as I can tell, there is no top menu).
The TiVO menu is transparent. The first option is Now Showing (recorded shows), which might be ambiguous except that the next option is Watch Live TV. Everything is accessible from the top menu (each selection opens a sub menu). The DirecTV DVR is not transparent — and that’s okay, it’s just that I could immediately do everything on TiVO, but have to figure out what’s what with this DVR.
The TV guide (schedule) is just like Dish TV (I don’t much like it). With the TiVO guide, the screen is split in two. On the left are the channels, and on the right are the shows on the selected channel. You can scroll down to see what’s coming up on that channel, and you can see the current and next five (or so) shows on the right.
The Dish TV like guide is flat, and the times run from left to right, not up to down. So you have to scroll scroll scroll scroll to see what’s coming up on the channel, instead of being able to see the next five or so shows.
I’ve seen complaints that you can’t see as many options on screens, but that’s because the print is bigger. I like that.
I also like the remote. The buttons on the famous peanut remote were a pain in the *ss for somebody like me with big fingers. The buttons on this remote are bigger and easier to find. I’ve seen complaints about the mysterious colored buttons that do different things on different menus, but since on each menu, there’s a key at the bottom of the screen that tells you what they do, I don’t see anything to complain about.
However. And this is a great big however.
TiVO has DLB (dual live buffering), so even live TV is just like watching recorded TV. Let’s say there’s a show on A&E and one on Discovery. With TiVO, anything you watch on live TV is buffered, so when the show on A&E cuts to commercials, you can press the pause button to pause the playback, then press the down button to change to Discovery on the other tuner, press play to start the playback. Fast forward through the commercials, then watch the show on the Discovery channel until you get to the next commercial break and press the pause button. Press the down button to switch to the other tuner, and that A&E show is still paused. FF through the commercials, watch it, etc. So you can watch two shows simultaneously, without having to watch the commercials. The buffer is thirty minutes, or at least was for the box we had; live buffering uses hard disk space, but overwrites it, and the live TV shows do not show up in the Now Playing list unless you set them to record.
If you stumble on a show (within the first thirty minutes) you want to record, press the record button, and it records it from the beginning.
This is the way we watched live TV. It’s also the first thing I wanted to know how to do. I couldn’t find any way on the remote to change tuners, and didn’t see anything in the manual. So I looked online, and we’re going to have to change the way we watch TV.
The new DirecTV DVR has no DLB, so it only records what you tell it to record. So the only way you can simulate it is to record both programs. Problem is, each tuner is connected to a dish, and since one of our dishes won’t work, we only have one tuner. I may see if I can get a service guy out here before July 5 to fix that second tuner, or I may not. I set it up to record a whole bunch of things yesterday evening (I can watch recorded shows while the DVR is recording another).
I had always assumed all DVRs were more or less the same. I was wrong. TiVO is the king of DVRs. Had I known, we could have gotten a DirecTV HD receiver without a DVR and a TiVO box, but then, we would have had to pay a monthly TiVO fee. So we’re just going to have to adjust.
The only one tuner thing is driving me nuts, though.
So I was on the phone with a DirecTV service rep, who patiently walked me through the setup, and changed my access card number and updated my account. The minute I got off the phone, I tried to pull up the guide and got:
DirecTV is not activated on your account. Please call 1-800-DIRECTV to activate your account.
So now, I’m on the phone with another rep, and he had me boot the system. We’re still on Almost there, just a few more seconds please . . . I’m used to a receiver that takes forever to boot, but this is ridiculous.
Oh. And we couldn’t get it to see the second dish, so no local channels.
Ben Winograd - The Court has released the opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller (07-290), on whether the District’s firearms regulations – which bar the possession of handguns and require shotguns and rifles to be kept disassembled or under trigger lock – violate the Second Amendment. The ruling below, which struck down the provisions in question, is affirmed.
Justice Scalia wrote the opinion. Justice Breyer dissented, joined by Justices Stevens, Souter and Ginsburg. We will provide a link to the decision as soon as it is available.
Tom Goldstein - Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm.
Tom Goldstein - We’ll post the opinion as soon as it is available.
Whew! Now, I need to shower all the sweat off before Best Buy gets here.
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Right Wing Nation » Wowza: thunk? I mean, really. This is right up there in the same Twilight Zone episode category as the NRA ad beginning with “Hillary was
Right Wing Nation » See? Just Ask Me.: said Obama was too pompous and impressed with himself to apologize. And after Obama stuck his great big foot all the way down his gullet the other day,
Right Wing Nation » That's That: “Eh, not so much” becomes “Hell, no.” Although she is 60 and unlikely to have another shot at the White House, Clinton is apparently concerned that she would appear ungenerous to the Republicans’ first female vice-presidential candidate if she were to go after her.
