Frank J. interviews Condoleeza Rice.

Frank: What do you think of today's military technology?

Rice: I think we have a huge technological advantage over our enemy. I mean they're a bunch of dumb turds with second hand AK-47's, and we have laser guided missiles that can fly through space. And, with our advance accuracy, we can avoid civilian casualties.

Frank: And it is the administration’s position to not kill children?

Rice: Yes, even the stupid smelly ones. That's why we have cruise missiles that can fly miles and miles and then accurately hit a target about the size of Michael Moore.

Frank: So why is Michael Moore still around.

Rice: He runs a lot faster than you'd think.

IMAO. Cutting edge blog journalism.

"From director Rob Zombie."

That's a sentence fragment that should only occur when monkeys are given typewriters.

Jon Stewart re-ups with Comedy Central.

It's the smart move. Laurence Simon at Amish Tech Support lays out the reasons why he'd be an idiot to move to broadcast, which covets him:

Jimmy Kimmel went from Comedy Central's Man Show to that piece of shit he's got on Disney's ABC that stinks up the airwaves after Koppel.
Bill Maher got away with a lot of lefty gaffes when he was on HBO, but Disney wiped him out in spades when he screwed up on Disney's ABC. He's back on HBO, I believe.
Dennis Miller tried to go from an HBO series to Monday Night Football on Disney's ABC, then got bumped for some burned-out fat old guy
Wait... I see a pattern here... hold on... wait... wait for it...

Nope. Lost it. Must have just had Post Disney Traumatic Disorder there or something. Sorry.

In the same post Laurence also notes that Colin Quinn may have found his niche on Politically Incorrect. Haven't seen it, but the commercials do make it look interesting.

Update: The spelling of Mr. Stewart's first name corrected at Emily's behest.

I am the consumer of worlds. Fear me.

As I have noted in comments elsewhere, humanity would require 9.6 planets if everybody lived like I do. Not that the quiz is biased, or anything. *cough*

DChix redux.

Drudge follows up the Dixie Chicks tempest in a teapot by excerpting bits of an interview they've done with Diane Sawyer that hasn't aired yet. [Link via Tainted Bill McCabe.] I don't have much in the way of commentary, except to note that they use the word "compassion" the way the Smurfs used "smurf" and its derivatives, and then there's this bit:

MAINES: …I ask questions. That's smart. That's intelligent. To find out facts not to just, 'Okay, we're going over here now.' I say, 'Why are we going over there?' And I don't mean to Iraq, I mean across the room. Since I was tiny, you've had to tell me why I have to do something…

Asking stupid questions isn't particularly smart, and certainly not when the answers to your questions have been spelled out, in detail, ad nauseam, for the prior several months. If you didn't know why we were going, it's not through any failure on the part of the president or his cabinet to spell it out for you so much as your failure to listen.

Cruel and funny.

My favorite combination. Via the essential Jim Treacher*, Fametracker's Ten Least Essential Summer Films. Note that I link to this list despite the fact that Pirates of the Caribbean comes in at number 6, higher than Bad Boys II (though I am not clear on whether that position means it's more or less likely to suck), and I am currently in serious denial about its potential hideosity because I really, really want to see a good pirate movie like Against All Flags, though I secretly suspect this may not be it. The involvement of Jerry Bruckheimer can't be a good thing.

*Judas Priest, is Blogspot ever going to fix the damn archive problem? First entry on 4/23/03.

Mickey Kaus on the museum looting.

Via David Nieporent's Jumping to Conclusions, though this passage wasn't his primary focus:

P.S.: I don't see why it gets the U.S. off the hook if the looting was an "inside job." You can protect against inside jobs too, by preventing things from leaving the building -- like priceless statues that take ten men to lift. The issue isn't who did the stealing, but whether or not we screwed up and failed to do what we could. To the extent that our forces were taking fire from the museum and unable to safely protect it, we obviously didn't screw up. To the extent our forces didn't even know for several days that there was a museum there to protect (but did know there was a bank), or to the extent they decided to protect water storage facilities and other infrastructure rather than art work, it was a screw-up. Islamic terrorists twenty years from now won't be wooing recruits with the story of how the evil Americans smashed a water storage facility. They will be telling them about how the Americans burned ancient copies of the Koran and destroyed the heritage of the Arab world. ...

They'll be lying, then, because it wasn't the Americans looting the museum, it was fellow Iraqis. I can't say it often enough: I do not give a shit about this because they robbed themselves, and if they were that concerned about preserving their cultural heritage, they could have done something about it themselves. Museums are not the US military's primary concern, nor should they be; those institutions that were protected by the military--yes, including the fucking oil ministry--are far more necessary to post-war efforts to rebuild the country's economic and political structure than the damn museum. The people who survived this war to bitch about the loss of their artifacts twenty years hence should count themselves lucky to be able to do so.

Gents, doff your caps.

Nina Simone has died in France at the age of 70. [Via Drudge.]

Feet to the fire.

Steve H. at Little Tiny Lies follows up on the pre-war utterances of several anti-war celebrities. Behold a sample of the carnage:

Hmm…George Clooney. Let me begin by saying, “Solaris.” Saying Solaris to George Clooney is like running into an MSNBC board meeting and yelling “Donahue.” With that irrelevant yet satisfying insult behind me, let me remind everyone that George Clooney said we couldn’t beat the Iraqis. “We can’t beat anyone,” said Furious George. No word from The Man in the Big Yellow Hat.

Maybe he was right. Maybe Saddam let us capture ten thousand soldiers and occupy all of his major cities as part of a master plan we’re just too dim to appreciate. Or maybe it was performance art. Or sarcasm. A huge practical joke…sort of like…conning a movie studio to give you millions of dollars to make a movie about the host of The Gong Show! We’re still waiting for the punchline on that one, George. I have a great title for the next movie you direct: O Audience, Where Art Thou? How about Attendance: Eleven?

George never did explain his reasoning. Our last two visits to Iraq were so easy, Bush considered training for this one by scheduling war games against the Girl Scouts. But Furious George thought it was only a matter of days before the Republican Guard occupied Bel Air, put all the chippies in burqas and confiscated his gigantic stockpile of exotic condoms and acyclovir. Relax, George. Thanks to Tommy Franks, you can get back to your life’s work.

That's just good stuff.

Vin Diesel.

Best single-sentence review of "A Man Apart": Even the fisticuffs make no sense.