Milton Friedman vs Phil Donahue on "greed"

Milton Friedman would be 100 years old today if he were still alive... here's one of his finer moments, taken from an interview he did many years ago with Phil Donahue:

Friedman slices Donahue's argument to pieces while Donahue can only just sit there and stammer.  No wonder the left still hates Friedman so much.

The Council Has Spoken!

This week's results for the Watcher's Council vote are in, they've been posted over at Watcher of Weasels.  The winning council entry for the week was "Mirra Eisenshtadt: the woman who leaked a Soviet state secret" by Simply Jews, and the winning non-council entry for the week was Daniel Greenfield's post "The United States of Guilt" over at Sultan Knish.   Congrats!

The Dark Knight Rises, WBC hits new low

James Holmes is a fucking lunatic.  He murdered 12 people and injured many more, all because they wanted to see the latest Batman movie... and he took the trouble to boobytrap his apartment with explosives in the hopes that he could also kill some of the police.  He's so out of his mind he thinks that the Joker's hair is supposed to be red, not green.  (It's easy to see how someone as crazy as him might be involved with OWS, but let's not go spreading around photoshops and bad info... all that does is make conservatives look bad.)

He's so batshit insane that he has the Westboro Baptist Church solidly in his corner... that's pretty bad.  They say he was sent by God to shoot all those people, so they plan to protest at all the victims' funerals.  Wow, I never knew that God hated Batman so much.

I'm really glad that the "Batman Killer" moniker doesn't seem to be catching on.  Apart from the horrendous movies that Joel Schumacher made, I've always been a huge fan of all things Batman... I've especially enjoyed the first two movies in this rebooted Batman trilogy, and I really look forward to seeing the third.  Red Letter Media gave a pretty positive review of The Dark Knight Rises:

The Council Has Spoken!

This week's results for the Watcher's Council vote are in, they've been posted over at Watcher of Weasels.  The winning council entry for the week was "Let’s do the time warp again — Progressives keep urging those failed economic policies" by Bookworm Room, and the winning non-council entry for the week was Victor Davis Hanson's post "Is the Country Unraveling?" over at Private Papers.  Congrats!

Obama's poll numbers are in the toilet

The Obama campaign has thrown everything at Mitt Romney but the kitchen sink.  For weeks on end we've heard nothing but constant bitching and moaning about Swiss bank accounts and Romney's time at Bain Capital.  Romney has even been called a felon by these lunatics.  (Naturally, the people promoting insane conspiracy theories about Romney's time at Bain seem to have no problem whatsoever with Obama taking campaign donations from Bain.)

And what does Obama have to show for this relentless campaign of dishonest attacks?  The latest CBS/NYT poll shows Romney in the lead for the first time... it's only a one point lead, but the internals of the poll look terrible for Obama.  And the latest Rasmussen poll has uncommitted voters giving Obama a paltry 29% job approval rating.

Please, give us more of your idiotic conspiracy theories, and keep telling small business owners that they didn't build anything... let's see if we can widen Romney's lead to double digits.  Then maybe Obama will start to tell us we should spread the poll numbers around because it's good for everybody.

The Council Has Spoken!

This week's results for the Watcher's Council vote are in, they've been posted over at Watcher of Weasels.  The winning council entry for the week was "Gettysburg -- A Fourth of July Long Ago" by Joshuapundit, and the winning non-council entry for the week was Just a Conservative Girl's post "A Tale of One Tragedy and Two Campaigns" over at Potluck.  Congrats!

My very late review of Spider-Man 3

I finally got around to watching Spider-Man 3 the other day... I avoided seeing it until now because it didn't look very good to me, and none of my friends had anything good to say about it.

I guess it was watchable, but I can't really recommend it.  There were too many villains and not enough time spent on any one of them to properly develop the characters or explain what was happening.  The three main villains were Sandman, Venom, and the New Goblin... yet I think Sandman is the only one of the three to ever get called Sandman by anyone, and that was only one time.  Peter Parker refers to Harry Osborn as Goblin Jr. at one point, but I don't think the name New Goblin appeared anywhere except in the credits.   And I never heard anyone refer to Venom by name either.

Sandman's origin is not explained very well, and the sudden attempt to include him in the murder of Peter's uncle came off feeling a little too contrived and clumsy... and the conversation about forgiveness he has with Peter at the end of the movie ends up feeling a little too anticlimactic.

Some alien goo became a new suit for Spider-Man for a while, until he decided it was making him a douchebag so he found a way to get rid of it... then the goo attached itself to another douchebag named Eddie Brock and became Venom.  They had a scene where Dr. Curt Connors tried to explain the nature of this goo to Peter, but the whole scene seemed to be played more for laughs than anything... it didn't come across as very believable.  Also, the goo's mind-reading abilities are only hinted at, never really addressed directly.

Harry Osborn was out for revenge from the get-go, which was to be expected given everything that happened in the first two films, but in this one they had him bouncing back and forth so many times from bad to good to very bad to very good... it got a bit tiresome.

Another problem was that Peter Parker himself becomes a bit of a villain for a while before he finally sheds the black suit... well, he actually started acting like a bit of a douchebag before he has the black suit.  I was really annoyed by the attempt to make "bad Peter" look cool by giving him a really stupid emo hairstyle.  I was also annoyed that he never said a word to Mary Jane about the black suit, he just let her think he suddenly became the world's biggest asshole for no reason... I know they were trying to make a point about forgiveness and owning up to mistakes, but come on.

I really wish the same writing team from Spider-Man 2 could have been brought back to write this movie too, I think it would have turned out much better.  Even after stumbling a bit with this movie, they still could have brought back that team to write a fourth movie, but for some reason they tried using some completely new writers... nobody could agree on a script, and the whole thing fell apart when Sam Raimi backed out.  So now we will have a stupid reboot instead of what could have been a decent sequel.  Oh well.

The Council Has Spoken!

This week's results for the Watcher's Council vote are in, they've been posted over at Watcher of Weasels.  The winning council entry for the week was "Don't Ken And Josephine Terry Have 'Absolute Moral Authority'?" by Rhymes With Right, and the winning non-council entry for the week was Natasha Smith's post "Please God. Please make it stop." over at her blog.    Congrats!

Happy Independence Day!

Hey, remember what is was like to hear a real speech from a real president?  Here's President Reagan addressing the nation on 7/4/86:

Doh!

What a bunch of nincompoops the Swedish royal family are: