Joining powerhouse Meghan McCain. Can failed TV personality Kathleen Parker be far behind?

I never watch them, but I have been in the room at times tonight while the wife watches, and I can’t imagine any show being worse than this.

It used to be that Billy Crystal was at least halfway funny sometimes.

[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.]

That’s the link between these two stories.  First, I meant to post this on Friday, but when Wisconsin Assembly passed the bill they have all been arguing about, the reaction was childish.  You can read about the controversy itself, here.

And here is video of the tantrum (thanks to Madawaskan):

And more, via Althouse:

But in my opinion, far more damning is this second issue.  Ann Althouse (and for those of you who have been living under a rock or, ahem, vacationing in Mexico, Ann has been all over this story) visits the protests in the capital building and finds them treating a war memorial with disrespect.  Her and her relatively newlywed husband Meade confront the protesters and really just can’t get over it.  It certainly makes my blood boil:

(more…)

The AP reports:

A Mexican official says police found the decapitated bodies and heads of four men in downtown Nuevo Laredo, a city across Laredo, Texas.

Yawn. Another report of decapitated bodies in Mexico, right?

Let me make two points that should explain the importance of this to you.

First, The Fulano Files — a great blog I just discovered which provided me several of the links for my post about the headless body dumped in Mazatlan — explains one aspect that should get your attention:

Here is an event that happened yesterday evening around 9PM in Neuvo Laredo, Tamaulipas. This scene is at the intersection of Paseo Colón and Leandro Valle, in Nuevo Laredo. This is one-mile from the United States. One mile. This is not some isolated event. This is happening every single day all over Mexico.

A group of heavily armed men arrived at the site where, according to witnesses, they took their own sweet time positioning the bodies and staging the scene.

The four men, who were decapitated and with their pants pulled down to their ankles, were seen by hundreds of people passing through the area before authorities arrived on the scene.

Second: I suspect it brings it home a little more to see such things, rather than merely read about them. So, below the fold, courtesy of The Fulano Files, I present to you a video of the four bodies. I warn you that it is not for the squeamish, for several reasons. Most obviously, the video is extremely gory. There are severed heads, at least two of which have fingers sticking out of their mouths. Moreover, the bodies are completely unclothed. I am hiding the video beneath the fold and warn you not to click on “more” (or, if you came to this post via a link, to watch the video) unless you are sure you can handle it.

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[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.]

No, not the Oscars, which I haven’t cared about for years.  The Razzies!

Not quite sweeping the ceremony, but still handily leading the pack among this year’s RAZZIE choices is RAZZIE Repeat Offender M. Night Shyamalan’s “re-imagining” of the faux-anime’ TV series THE LAST AIRBENDER into a jumbled, jump-cut mess of a movie that fans of the TV show hated even more than critics did (if that’s even possible!). In addition to Worst Director and Worst Picture, AIRBENDER also “won” Worst Screenplay, a brand-new RAZZIE category for 2010, Worst Eye-Gouging Mis-Use of 3-D, and Worst Supporting Actor Jackson Rathbone (who had the misfortune to appear in both AIRBENDER and 2010’s other most-RAZZIE-nominated title, TWILIGHT SAGA: ECLIPSE).

Actually, my wife dragged me to that one.  It wasn’t great but it wasn’t nearly as horrible as they said.  It was just “meh.”

On the other hand, I literally couldn’t finish the Russell Crowe version of Robin Hood when I got that recently on Netflix.  Ugh, that couldn’t have been more utterly ill-conceived.  For starters, Crowe was a terrible choice for the character.  Crowe just doesn’t have the grace, charm or agility of a proper Robin Hood.  He is a good actor, but he was all wrong for this role.  And there is a coincidence in the story that made me unable to take it anymore.

So do you think the Razzies got it right?  Well, check out their press release and site and then sound off on the comments.  The person who does the best job insulting a bad movie will get a very special prize…  respect.

H/t: Ign.

[Posted and authored by Aaron Worthing.]

As we will see, Brooks is wrong. It’s more like: more people own ferrets than read David Brooks.

The takeaway line:

[H]ere’s a fact from Morris Fiorina, Stanford political scientist: More people own ferrets than watch Fox News.

The thing is, he’s wrong. Not only does he feel compelled to use Fox News to make his smart-ass little point, but in the process he shows he can’t read a simple piece. Because that’s not what Morris Fiorina said. Fiorina actually compared ferret ownership to the number of people on Howard Dean’s mailing list:

To leave you with some perspective on activists, there are, in the last election, if you take out the non-citizens and felons and institutionalized people, there were 200 million eligible voters. About 80 million of these people weren’t even interested enough to vote. A survey released in the summer of 2004 caused a lot of flack because it reported that only 17-18 million people saw “Fahrenheit 9/11,” which was a surprise to many in the media. Now, if you assume that every single one of them was an eligible voter, agreed with Michael Moore, and voted for Kerry, that’s about 30% of his vote. If every single one of the people who listen to Rush Limbaugh was an eligible voter who agreed with him and voted for Bush, that’s about a quarter of Bush’s vote. Democrats and liberals are very paranoid about Fox TV. On a good day, Fox News gets about 3.5 million people tuning into the news. If every single one of them is an eligible, conservative voter who voted for Bush, that’s about 5% of his vote.

Finally, there’s the issue of Howard Dean’s vaunted e-mail list. Remember, the internet was going to revolutionize politics. The New York Times had a big article about how Joe Trippi was the guru of the new age of politics. But, in every campaign, there’s some dawn of a new age occurring. There were roughly ½ million people on this e-mail list. Now in absolute numbers, that’s a big number — 560,000 people. That happens to be the same number of Americans who own ferrets. And since ferrets are illegal in California and in New York City that number is clearly an underestimate. So, in other words, if you go out and pick out a random American voter, the odds are higher that that person owns a ferret than that that person was on Howard Dean’s e-mail list.

Now, I’m no math whiz . . . but last time I checked, 3.5 million was more than 560,000. (I’m not going to get into the weeds on ferret ownership; I’m content to go with Fiorina’s numbers. If you wish to dig deeper into the relevant statistics on ferret ownership — and why wouldn’t you?! — they are available here.)

In any event, I think we can all agree on one thing. The real question is: how do ferret ownership numbers compare to the readership of David Brooks?

In October, the New York Times had an average weekday circulation of 877,000. You think all those people read David Brooks? He’s lucky if 10% of them actually read his column. We’ll say 25% if we’re being really generous. That’s fewer than a quarter million people.

Which is less than half the number who own ferrets. Which means Brooks would have been more accurate to say: “twice as many Americans own ferrets as read me.”

Why do I bother writing about this? Because this is the kind of stupid soundbite that liberals will pick up on, and repeat ad nauseum. So it’s fun to have the facts at the ready to slap them down.

By the way, many of the above links were provided by commenters at Hot Air, who did an amazing job slapping around Brooks.