Time for a show...

Zen is a detective crime story set in Rome, Italy. The title character, Aurelio Zen, is an outsider. A Venetian, he has a reputation for honesty and integrity. This makes him the perfect fall guy, given the machinations of the corrupt Italian power structure. Zen, however, is not as straightforward as they take him to be. The series is based on a series of books by British crime writer Michael Dibdin. The character is played to perfection by Rufus Sewell. This is good stuff. Join us as we take a look into the life of Aurelio Zen.

Relief appears in the midst of drudgery

My favorite blogger, April Gavaza, has returned to internet commentary and has begun posting on her blog the Hyacinth Girl.

For those of you unfamiliar with her work, she is a very bright spitfire of a gal who writes on a broad base of subjects, from political commentary to fashion interests. Whose? Why, hers of course! And no matter how far off the subject is from my normal world of interests, it all comes out good. It's like reading Steyn when he is talking about show tunes of the 1950s. Even if not really my cup of tea, it's always a good read. Anyway, it is a ray of sunshine in an otherwise long, dark passage, and for however long it lasts I'm planning on enjoying it.

You should too!!

Law and Order: Assistant DA Competition

NBC's long running law drama series Law and Order has had a number of intriguing Assistant DAs backing the prosecution over the shows twenty years. Which of them did we like best? Let us ponder the possibilities:




Richard Brooks in the role of Paul Robinette.

This guy held no interest for me when I first watched the show. Well, in truth I did not watch the show when it was Moriarity, Brooks, Sorvino and Noth. Nothing personal, just didn't look all that interesting to me.  Going back now that I am a hooked Law and Order guy, I love Paul Robinette. This guy, whether in his acting or the way the part was written for him, or both, but this guy was one smart lawyer. Way quicker than Moriarity's Ben Stone. I loved the guy.



Jill Hennessy as Claire Kincaid

You gotta love Claire Kincaid.



Carey Lowell as Jamie Ross.

For quite some time those dull eyes and the flat delivery left me wondering why life sometimes seemed so unfair, but I eventually warmed up to her... some.



Angie Harmon as Assistant District Attorney Abbie Carmichael

Woah. Abbie Carmichael was amazing. Okay, this was when I first started watching the show, and you've got to admit, this was a pretty good reason. My lord, that hair, that sharp delivery, that rascally smile... I loved her.



Elisabeth Röhm as Assistant District Attorney Serena Southerlyn

Elizabeth Röhm played the very bright Serena Southerlyn, and brought a decidedly comic aspect to the role. I couldn't figure out if they wrote her this way or if it was just her delivery.  She consistently displayed no common feelings whatsoever with the characters she was interacting with. Gruff, tough, and dumb as a brick. Often times they would cut away to her when Jack was giving his super summary, just as they had for years before with Claire, Jamie and Abbie, but this time the consistent "Dear in the headlights" look about her just made me laugh. And yeah, I meant to spell it that way. Does she get what is going on?  This is a murder trial, isn't it?  Is she following the argument?  In a word... no.  Never liked her. And that last minute throw in: "Oh, by the way, my character is a homosexual, and has been for the past four years, just nobody ever noticed." Okay, well in that case, why tell me about it now? Forget it.



Annie Parisse as Assistant District Attorney Alexandra Borgia

I really liked this ADA. Don't know exactly why.



Alana de la Garza as Assistant District Attorney Connie Rubirosa

Yeah, well... naah.  She wasn't helped by that dingbat she was working with. That was a fair amount of water she was carrying for the bat wielding, moral compass lacking, trite Executive ADA Michael Cutter.  Even if she could have managed to cut loose from Cutter, she still would have needed a little something.

Okay, there they are. Which would you pick as the top ADA? And which do you think I picked? Get both answers right and you could win a gold star. I know, I've been away for a long time, and you don't think I will come through with the prize. Yeah, well, this little rodeo is up for grabs.   I'm pulling for ya!



Darrell's Gold Star bonus!

'Downton Abbey' at Movie Club

Now Showing at Movie Club

Obama, Fellow Gun Nuts Have No Care For A Free People

Bringing this point home is blog fav George Jonas:

Strictly speaking, no one "needs" anything but a breath of air, a cup of water and a bowl of rice. The rest are individual choices we make as free human beings, if that's what we are, instead of wards of the state. Liberty means not having to answer, explain, or justify, any of our choices to anyone.

Why does anyone need a military assault rifle? I've no idea. I certainly don't, but at one time I owned six motorcycles (and knew people who owned 20). I would have had no trouble explaining why I needed them, but would have highly resented having to do so. Just yesterday, I heard of a person who owns nine cats. She keeps them in her apartment, and doesn't have to justify to me why she needs them. And if city hall thinks she does, city hall is wrong.

Whether people collect cats, rifles, motorcycles, travel experiences or books, in a free country their "need" is fully justified by their "want." End of story.

But in fact guns are easier to justify than motorcycles or cats.

Guns protect. We buy them as taxpayers for our politicians' bodyguards. As long as we don't buy them for our own protection, few politicians object.

The basic hypocricy is Biden wants to be protected, and he has people around him with guns to protect him. The president wants to be protected. Even comedian and former celebrity Rosie O'Donnell wants to be protected. They all want guns for their own protection. I have no problem with that. They desire to be protected and they should be protected. But they don't trust you to protect yourself or your loved ones.

Well, this is about as eloquent as I can make it: To hell with those a-holes.

Hmmm.

Just spent fifteen minutes catching up on The Hyacinth Girl. That girl is good for my insides. Loved, loved, loved the post on her keyboard. That's right, a post was written entirely devoted to the arrival of a new keyboard... apparently one that is easily portable. She titled it "Ha!"

: )

That girl kills me! What would I do, what would I do, without the Hyacinth Girl? Anyway, check it all out.

Merry Christmas!!

Merry Christmas to all my friends!

Piers Morgan is a thickly Stupid Man

Hee - haw... hee - haw!

Being from across the sea and not having any historical experience of having to deal with a government that doesn't allow you representation when it decides what to do with you, it is understandable one would have no appreciation for the idea of leaving power in the hands of the people. Nevertheless, we do have friends from across the sea, and we know it is possible for them to at least sense that our cultural past is relevant to us today. Not so for this stupid little twit of a man, who not only is ignorant of the political issue, but deems himself justified in insulting the guests he invites onto his show, ostensibly to have this very discussion:

Mr. Pratt was making the argument that what America needed was more guns, not fewer...

Unable to demonstrate the patience to allow his guest to make his point, Mr. Morgan erupted:

“You’re an unbelievably stupid man, aren’t you?” Mr. Morgan said.

Jackass.

The Way of the Buffalo

The Hyacinth Girl has been writing some thoughtful pieces. Here's a touch of her latest:

“Man card” posturing and self-proclaimed beta male status may seem polar opposites, but they are two sides of the same coin. We (culturally speaking) have assimilated the often contradictory but ultimately damaging definition of masculinity proffered by the modern feminist movement, thereby relegating men to either second-class citizens (beta male) or senseless brutes ruled by their basest desires. I don’t think men as a whole fit into either category. I think they’re more interesting than that.

The "man card" is the humorous notion that there are certain activities that "qualify" one as a man, and if found lacking or in breach of conduct one's membership card in the club of manliness can be revoked. It's a young man's joshing and taunting exercise, and it underscores a certain shallowness to the perception of maleness. The combination of political correctness and the ever increasing efforts to marginalize masculine traits have been the tools used to diminish men in our society. This has been ostensibly done to elevate women, but the result is not quite what was intended: a twisted society that is detrimental to both the men and women living in it. April has written an excellent piece on it. Now stop wasting time. Get over there and read it!

Victor Davis Hanson Nails It

The left is in a tizzy over criticism of UN ambassador Susan Rice. "There is nothing wrong with what Rice did. She simply had wrong information. It happens." But of course that misses the point. She had good information, she just didn't share it with the American people. And with Barry the healer at the wheel, all of this plays out on racial lines. In fact, race is inserted into the question, with no small amount of help from the media, because it helps deflect criticism from the poor behavior of the Obama White House in general, and Susan Rice in particular. To that Victor Davis Hanson has written a prescient piece:

But in the era of Obama, almost everything can be connected to race. So it was not long before the Black Caucus, the Washington Post, and liberal columnists alleged that racism and sexism drove Rice’s neo-Confederate detractors. President Obama, in his now-accustomed Skip Gates/Trayvon Martin posturing mode, also did his best to inflame the tensions, as he dared critics to come after him instead, as if they were bullies out to pick on a vulnerable black woman — and as if the president himself had not hidden behind Rice, throwing her into the public arena in the first place and then refusing to offer any details of his own reaction to the attacks that might have fulfilled his taunt by redirecting scrutiny onto himself.

There is sexism and racism in l’affaire Rice — but sadly it is all originating from the Obama administration and its supporters.

Read the whole thing here.

'Chariots of Fire' at Movie Club

Now Showing:

Conrad Black on the Press

Conrad Black begins thus:

Rupert Murdoch and I have had our differences over many years, and especially during my recent legal travails, but I must join with him entirely in his recent tweeted complaint that most American media outlets that are controlled by Jews seem to be reflexively, or at least habitually, anti-Israel. For mentioning this notorious fact, Murdoch was lambasted by the usual suspects, led by the New York Times, upon whose franchise as the premier quality newspaper of the world’s greatest market Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal is steadily encroaching. My sometime colleagues at the Daily Beast, whose grievances against Murdoch are profound and not unreasonable, even suggested that there was room here for a regulatory intervention. I understand the temptation to attack Murdoch, but this was seriously uncalled for.

It is an excellent piece on the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the curiously consistent reaction of American jews in the press. Read the whole thing here.

Mark Steyn Holidays

Mark Steyn warms up the holiday season with a lively guest host appearance on the Rush Limbaugh show today!

If you missed that you still could enjoy Mark Steyn through his new release of a Christmas album. Mark is becoming the Bing Crosby of our days, and though the delivery might not be quite as smooth, his heart is in the right place. Check out all of Mark's holiday offerings here.

Liberty and Democracy

For a people to be free, they must be free of the tyranny of their neighbors. This was well understood by our founders, as pointed out in a recent piece by What the ...?! blog fav Walter Williams:

The founders of our nation held a deep abhorrence for democracy and majority rule. The word democracy appears in neither of our founding documents: our Declaration of Independence and Constitution. In Federalist Paper No. 10, James Madison wrote, "Measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority."

Excellent piece, with a sobering close. Read the whole thing here.

Cats and Dogs

Rain coming down in Oregon is common place October through June, utterly unremarkable.

But since as of late it has been coming down in buckets, causing through and through webfoots to be looking about for umbrellas (gasp), I thought I would comment on it today, if only to bring a smile to the face of my good friend Darrell.

Thank God

   April Gavaza came back.

'The Fly' at Movie Club

Now showing:

Romney looks to the future. Obama... just looks.

The state of the world and America's place explained.

The third presidential debate ended with Romney looking presidential.  Romney was consistently painting a large view of what we as a nation should do.  President Obama, meanwhile, nitpicked, contradicted and looked angry. For all that, Romney did not seem in the least bit put off his game.

In the face of Obama's planned military cutbacks, planned at a trillion dollars, Romney raised the concern that we will not be able to maintain our military capabilities. To that the president stated outright the sequster will not happen. Mr. Romney was concerned, and laid out his case:

"Our Navy is smaller now than at any time since 1917. The Navy said they needed 313 ships to carry out their mission. We’re now at 285. We're headed down to the low 200s if we go through a sequestration. That's unacceptable to me.”

“I will not cut our military budget by a trillion dollars, which is a combination of the budget cuts the president has, as well as the sequestration cuts. That, in my view, is making our future less certain and less secure.”

Staring... staring... and more staring. 

Yes, indeed. Excellent, practical point... to which we get some silly Obama repartee for an answer:

“I think Gov. Romney maybe has not spent enough time looking at how our military works. We also have fewer horses and bayonets because nature of our military has changed. “There are these things called aircraft carriers where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines."

“The question is not a game of Battleship, where we’re counting ships, it’s what are our capabilities,”

Battleship?!  What is he talking about?  And yet the Obamiacs thought that was a great moment for the great one. But lets look at it, perhaps more critically than the typical Obamiac would.

Sequestering is the term for mandatory budget reductions, which comes out in cuts:

The Defense Department makes up a disproportionate share of the cuts – $500 billion, at least $55 billion of which would go into effect immediately. It’s not clear yet how the Pentagon would put them in place

Obama claimed a sequster will not happen, but his White House was on the phone immediately afterwards walking the statements back:

White House senior adviser and 2008 campaign manager David Plouffe softened the Obama administration's language on the sequester after President Obama insisted that it would not happen.

"No one wants it to happen," Plouffe told reporters

Yes, well, that is not the same as saying it will not happen, and certainly the difference is very real to the people in the military whose equipment, supply and personnel end up on the wrong side of the contraction.

If the Navy says it needs 313 ships to complete its mission, it doesn't matter that Obama is aware we have things called nuclear submarines. The world is a scary place, with a lot of bad people out there. We face problems in the Far East. We face problems in the Middle East. We cannot project power in these areas with drone strikes, for cripe's sakes.

If the Navy says it needs 300 ships, the president cannot idly sit by while it is reduced to 200 ships - not and expect us to maintain our ability to protect ourselves and influence the world in which we live. The reality is the military will be required to reduce its size and capabilities if we do not fund it. There is no way around that. Mr. Obama had no answer except to suggest we don't need ships and planes and the like.

Weakness invites aggression Mr. President. After all your carrying on about what you've learned on the job, if there was one thing you should have learned while acting commander in chief, it was that.

- The President Goes for Cool Casual

President Obama has an odd way of going about the business of the presidency. Answering the questions of the press would require his holding a press conference, and that isn't really what he's all about. No, hangin' with David Lettermen, giving a shout out to Jay Z, and slow jamming the news with Jimmy Fallon are more his thing. Thus the president thought the best way to answer the increasing public dismay over his bungling of the Libyan consulate was a chat with fellow cool cat Jon Stewart of The Daily Show.

A statement by the president in the Rose Garden the day following the attack is now being stretched by the Obama campaign into a declaration by the president that our consulate suffered a terrorist attack, but the president gave no such statement. At the event he spoke of terrorism itself broadly, specifically declined to link the Benghazi attack to terrorism, declined to say whether or not the attack constituted an act of war and then left his White House and members of the State Department to spend the next two weeks trying to convince the people of America that the death of our ambassador was the result of an out of control mob that had been incensed by a little seen video critical of Islam. And it was the video that struck this White House as a terrible thing. The death of four Americans, not so much.

Following the Rose Garden briefing, the president, I am embarrassed to say, flew off to Las Vegas to start afresh on his fund raising tour. Vegas, Baby!

Two weeks later the president's fibbing came to national attention when CNNs Candy Crowley, who somehow conveniently had been provided a transcript of the president's Rose Garden statement of two weeks previously, managed to misinterpret the president's statement and the two weeks that followed to botch her best chance at notoriety on a national stage. That's kinda like a young singer forgetting the words to the national anthem during the opening ceremonies of the Superbowl. Not good.

Live feed footage watched by our State Department showed anyone that was interested that there was no protest and no mob outside the consulate. In fact, the ambassador had said goodnight to his Libyan guests at the very gate just an hour before the compound was hit by RPGs and mortar rounds. How could the president get it so far wrong... by accident?

Anyway, it was all far from the mind of the president on Comedy Central, as he warmed to his work with a self-deprecating reference to his first debate performance:

'I was well rested after the long nap I had in the first debate'

The president can tell a joke, I'll give him that. But sometimes humor isn't right coming from the mouth of the president.

"Is part of the investigation helping the communication between these divisions? Not just what happened in Benghazi, but what happened within. Because I would say, even you would admit, it was not the optimal response, at least to the American people, as far as all of us being on the same page."

'Here's what I’ll say. If four Americans get killed, it’s not optimal.'

Funny guy.  Sadly, even the safe confines of the comedy channel can not prevent a public view of the president's callous disregard for the people that work and die for him.

Fallen US citizens included Ambassador Chris Stevens, diplomat Sean Smith and security men and former U.S. Navy SEALs Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods. The men were killed by terrorists on the 11th anniversary of 9/11.

Well, the president assures us that no one is more interested in getting to the bottom of this than him.

Didn't come across that way on Comedy Central though.

Steyn Gets a Chuckle

We all love Mark Steyn around here, but his comments on the debate and subsequent scramble just nailed it:

A month ago, Clint Eastwood’s Obama empty-chair shtick was universally agreed by liberals to have been a disaster for Romney.

Now, it’s on the cover of The New Yorker.

Read his whole NR In The Corner post here.