Hollywood Stooges

So Hollywood is going to make a three stooges movie

Jim Carrey will shave his head and gain 50 pounds to play Curly. I'm having a hard time envisioning this, but Carrey is such a great comic actor I'm sure he'll have us rolling in the aisles.

In a stroke of genius, Sean Penn will play Larry. Penn has been a stooge his whole life, so he's a natural. I couldn't help recalling how the Stooges lampooned Hitler back in their heyday. I can't imagine Penn poking fun at terrorists, his hero Chavez, or the wonderful (we have no gays in Iran) President Ahmadinejad.

Finally, Benicio Del Toro will play Moe. Now that I'm looking, the facial resemblance is remarkable. This also works out well. I don't know if Del Toro is a stooge, but he just got done playing one in the 127 hour hagiography celebrating the life of campesino killer Ernesto "Che" Guevara.

This effort can only disrespect the memory of the real stooges, who in real life were not. I'm skipping it.

http://www.variety.com/VR1118001643.html

Somebody had to say it...

Charles Krauthammer on Fox News:

Europe has been sucking on America's tit for 60 years, parasitically.

It's paraphrase. See the video here.

Memo To The President:

Americans Do Not Bow Down Before Royalty

* I got kicked off of Democratic Underground for saying this in a forum. People using the F-word and slobbering out nasty comments against Presidents Reagan and Bush is highly encouraged, but intelligent discussion is not.

This just reinforces the idea that the hard left is very illiberal and living in an impenetrable fantasy Obamabubble.

Reminds me of when I got kicked off of another lefty site, Kooks and Cryers. Read my post about this wonderful experience here: Banned from a left wing kook site

You can get up off your knees now

Is it just me? Or did anyone else think our President came off as overly conciliatory?

The really scary part is the French coming into these negotiations with "non-negotiable" take-aways...and walking away saying "We would never have hoped to get so much"! It leaves one with somewhat of an uneasy feeling. Kind of like buying a car when the salesman immediately agrees to your offer and your left wondering "could I have gotten a better deal"?

I am also left wondering how our esteemed leader is going to reconcile "setting guidelines to cap bankers pay", one of the highlights of the G20 release, with the American Constitution. It is one thing to propose salary limitations on companies that accept government bailout money (as a condition of the bailout), and quite another to propose limiting the salaries of all, or any employees of a private institution.

One of the reporters called on in the press conference was Justin Webb, BBC's North American Editor, who is someone who's blog I follow:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/justinwebb/

Mr. Webb asked a very astute question:

In the spirit of openness with which you say you're going to run your administration, could you give us an insight into an area or areas where you came to London wanting something and didn't get it, where you compromised, where you gave something away to achieve the wider breakthrough agreement?

To which President Obama basically replied "no":

"I'd rather not specify what those precise items would be, because this is a collective document."

Also of note is Obama's failure to mention the above G20 citation regarding "capping bankers pay".

Well, as time goes by we shall learn more of the details of the G20 agreements, although for the time we shall have to content ourselves with press conferences. An on that subject it is interesting to compare the press conferences of various leaders:

http://uk.reuters.com/article/marketsNewsUS/idUKL267850520090402

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5ijp8uvmxCWmwPCjKiYpnb704-kiAD97AL5P80


If anyone has links to transcripts of either Sarkozy or Merkel's post summit press conferences or releases, please feel free to post them in comments.

Cheers!

~Finntann~

Let the eye of vigilence never be closed...

The Democratic party often claims to be "the party of Jefferson", tracing it's roots back to the 1824 split of the Democratic-Republican party... my you've come a long way baby!

Give some consideration to the following, penned by your self-claimed founding father:

"Our country is too large to have all its affairs directed by a single government. Public servants at such a distance, and from under the eye of their constituents, must, from the circumstance of distance, be unable to administer and overlook all the details necessary for the good government of the citizens; and the same circumstance, by rendering detection impossible to their constituents, will invite public agents to corruption, plunder and waste."

"The true theory of our Constitution is surely the wisest and best, that the States are independent as to everything within themselves, and united as to everything respecting foreign nations."

"I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground: That "all powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States or to the people. To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specifically drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition."

"With respect to our State and federal governments, I do not think their relations correctly understood by foreigners. They generally suppose the former subordinate to the latter. But this is not the case. They are co-ordinate departments of one simple and integral whole."

"When all government, domestic and foreign, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the center of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated."

"Our government is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction; to wit: by consolidation first and then corruption, its necessary consequence. The engine of consolidation will be the Federal judiciary; the two other branches the corrupting and corrupted instruments."

"There is no danger I apprehend so much as the consolidation of our government by the noiseless and therefore unalarming instrumentality of the Supreme Court."

"A most powerful objection always arises to propositions of [public works]. It is that public undertakings are carelessly managed and much money spent to little purpose."

"The suppression of unnecessary offices, of useless establishments and expenses enabled us to discontinue internal taxes. These covering our land with officers and opening our doors to their intrusions, had already begun that process of domiciliary vexation which, once entered, is scarcely to be restrained from reaching successively every article of produce and property."

"The government which steps out of the ranks of the ordinary articles of consumption to select and lay under disproportionate burdens a particular one because it is a comfort, pleasing to the taste or necessary to the health and will therefore be bought, is in that particular a tyranny."

"To reform the prodigalities of our predecessors is understood to be peculiarly our duty, and to bring the government to a simple and economical course."

"I... place economy among the first and most important of republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared."

"The conclusion then, is, that neither the representatives of a nation, nor the whole nation itself assembled, can validly engage debts beyond what they may pay in their own time."

"The spirit of 1776 is not dead. It has only been slumbering. The body of the American people is substantially republican. But their virtuous feelings have been played on by some fact with more fiction; they have been the dupes of artful maneuvers, and made for a moment to be willing instruments in forging chains for themselves."

WAKE UP!

Cheers!

~Finntann~

The Real April Fool's Day is April 15th

Tyranny -vs- Anarchy

Cleon Skousen, in his book The 5000 Year Leap, explains that the founders did not have the same view of right and left that we do. Here is how we commonly think of left and right today:

Left = Liberal/Socialist, Right = Conservative/fascist.

Conservatives at the time of the founders were supporters of royalty. Liberals of those bygone days would not recognize today's dictatorial, doctrinaire liberalism. Indeed, our founders were the classic free-thinking liberals. They were rebels against the crown after all.

We keep talking about right and left in this country, and that has it's place, but what we should really be talking about is the founders' left and right:

Left = Anarchy, Right = Tyranny

Look at the picture. That is how the founders saw right and left. The tyranny of an absolute ruler lay at one end, and stateless anarchy is found at the opposite extreme. The Constitution blazes a path between the two extremes. Modern-day left and right, Republicans and Democrats, Socialists and fascists, can both be found clawing and scratching for power at the Tyranny end of the arrow. Meanwhile, here we stand, trying to pull the thing back towards the middle.

Politics is about power and who gets to wield it. It doesn't matter if your party is in or out of power. If they are stacking law upon law, you are still powerless.