- Either Michael Mukasey is actually less of a rat-faced, dishonest, evasive, misleading piece of crap than his predecessor, Alberto “I do not recall” Gonzales, or Mukasey is just trying to make a good first impression by reversing field on one of Gonzales’ more blatant and public mistakes. Either way, our nation’s new attorney general is reopening the Justice Department’s inquiry into the government’s warrantless wiretapping program. The department’s Office of Professional Responsibility was shut down last year after its investigators were denied the necessary security clearances. This led to one of Gonzales’ now-famous two-step, double-talk appearances before Congress in which he tried to pass the buck on who was responsible for denying the request for the security clearances, ultimately settling on W. as the real culprit. Personally I don’t care who was responsible because as far as I’m concerned, every last person who has served in the upper levels of this administration at any point in the last seven years is a Class A ass-hat and I don’t trust them at all. Regardless of the motivation, I’m glad that Mukasey is going to reopen this investigation because there is absolutely nothing more intrusive, wrong and overstepping bounds more than this warrantless wiretapping program. This is big brother sticking his nose in your business without restriction and it’s time someone did something to stop it.
- Is this Amadou Diallo all over again? Diallo, of course, is the young black man famously gunned down by New York City police officers in Brooklyn after they wrongly identified him as a suspect in an ongoing case and in a fatal split-second decision determined that he had a gun in his hand when confronted by police. Diallo’s death and the surrounding circumstances are analyzed in detail in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink, which I highly recommend reading. But a shooting Tuesday evening in Brooklyn is raising some of the same questions and for some reason the NYPD has been awfully quick to assert that its officers were beyond a shadow of a doubt correct in shooting and killing 18-year-old Khiel Coppin. Coppin, who was mentally ill, could be heard screaming, “I’ve got a gun!” in the background in the 911 call by his mother that led police to their Brooklyn home in the first place. The responding officers dropped Coppin with a 20-bullet barrage after he pointed what turned out to be a hairbrush at officers as if he were aiming a gun. He had also brandished two knives shortly after the officers arrived at the apartment and taunted the police by saying, “Come get me. I have a gun. Let’s do this.” His mother had informed officers that her son did not actually have a gun, but when he confronted them, they made the quick decision to use lethal force and it turned out to be wrong – fatally wrong. I’m no law enforcement officer, but can I ask why no one shot him in the arm to make him drop the gun, or maybe in the shoulder? Why was the first option shooting him in the chest to kill him? Also, why was the police department so quick to give the actions of their officers a stamp of approval? Coppin’s family is asking the same question, as well they should. This just doesn’t seem like a situation that needed to end this way, and the quick move to sweep it under the rug by the NYPD really makes you wonder…..
- Man, this is rich. Our un-esteemed leader W., who has consistently shown the vocabulary and mental acuity of a 4-year-old throughout his time in office, is accusing congressional Democrats of spending money “like a teenager with a new credit card.” Let’s stop and analyze that statement for a moment, W., you ignorant ass clown. You’re the one forcing this country to waste $10 billion (with a “b”) a month fighting a debacle of a war that never should have happened and wouldn’t stack up well in terms of progress and success even contrasted with a mess like the Vietnam War, you’re the one who’s wasted $455 billion and counting on the Mess O’Potamia in Iraq, you’re the one whose administration is secretly allowing torture of terrorism suspects, you’ve appointed some of the most incompetent officials ever to serve to your administration and you’re accusing congressional Democrats of acting like teenagers with a new credit card because they aren’t wasting money in a form that’s politically acceptable to you, like starting an unnecessary war? You don’t like the idea of higher taxes because you feel they would result in fewer economic opportunities for entrepreneurs and a possible economic slowdown? On a brief aside, whichever one of W.’s speech writers slipped “entrepreneurs” in there to make this knob look smarter, bad idea. We all know he has no idea what that word means and couldn’t spell it if you gave him a week and a dozen dictionaries. But I digress….as part of his little temper tantrum, W. vetoed a $606 billion measure financing federal education, health and labor programs for the fiscal year than began Oct. 1. The bill passed Congress with some Republican support, but not enough to override this veto, although Democrats have pledged to find enough votes to do just that. It’s merely the latest round in a pissing contest between president and Congress, between mentally-stunted Commander-in-Chief and legislative body of wealthy white guys in expensive suits and sticks up their butts. Man, I love this country!
- I absolutely love the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. March Madness is unequivocally the best time of the year in sports, bar none. It’s better than the Super Bowl, the World Series, Olympics or NBA Finals. It’s three weeks of madness, mayhem, excitement and surprises, with the first two days, when games run from noon to past midnight, being mind-blowingly great. However, the same cannot be said for March Madness’ illegitimate stepchild, the NIT. The NIT used to be college basketball’s tournament of choice, but it has been overtaken by the NCAA Tournament and now the NIT gets a 32-team field of leftovers once the NCAA Tournament has chosen its field. I say all of that to say this: There is a new postseason tournament for college basketball, one that will come after both the NCAA and NIT, thus ensuring that it will begin picking its field after 97 other teams have already been chosen for the postseason. Hmm, think this might be a bad idea? The College Basketball Invitational, to be staged by the Gazelle Group of Princeton, N.J., will take place this March and will feature 16 mediocre teams in four geographic brackets. The tournament will be single elimination for the first two rounds and the semifinals, with the championship being a best-of-three series with the higher-seeded team hosting games one and if necessary, three. The argument against this tournament is simple – no one cares about the NIT because it’s a second-rate event, so how can you expect anyone at all to care about a tournament that’s lower on the prestige totem pole than the NIT? Why not just gather up all of the teams who aren’t good enough to make the NCAA or NIT, slam them in a local high school gym in Topeka and bring some of their parents in as the refs and scorekeepers? You can even have them wear those reversible practice jerseys we all used to wear in youth basketball, maybe play the games going half-court from one side of the normal court to the other side on those crappy side baskets that are set up in every gym. Seriously, Gazelle Group, I appreciate the effort and I realize that every year, a couple of worthy teams get screwed out of the postseason, but your addition of a third tournament to try and correct the problems feels too politically correct, no-one-excluded, youth-sports-esque to be a good idea.
- This week’s episode of Smallville dropped some huge bombshells, and no I’m not just referring to my new favorite blonde bombshell, Ms. Ira Vandervoort, a.k.a. Kara Kent. It all starts with a bad decision by Clark, who hears Kara’s crystal, the one from her ship, calling out to him during the night. It’s emitting all sorts of light and also the voice of his dead mother, Lara. From the sounds of it, she’s in trouble and her voice instructs Clark to go to the Fortress of Solitude immediately. He obliges, but when he arrives, the voice of his father, Jor-El, warns him against inserting Kara’s crystal into the fortress. Clark ignores the order and puts the crystal in, which brings a replica version of his birth mother, Lara, to life. Clark doesn’t know it’s just a replica, nor does he know it’s a trap from his uncle, Kara’s father Zor-El. Back on the Kent farm, Clark, Lara and Kara talk about what happened and Lara warns Clark that his uncle is extremely dangerous. Zor-El proves her right when he attacks Lionel Luthor, who has been a vessel for Jor-El to help Clark in the past. Clark chases him off but they eventually meet again on the street outside Oliver Queen’s penthouse apartment, where Clark takes Lara for safe keeping (dude, I know Ollie is out saving the world with Aquaman, the Flash and Cyborg, but how is it he’s never come home once, yet his apartment is fully stocked with supplies and immaculately clean?). Lana comes to meet Clark’s mom and stay with her, in the process getting a startling warning from Lara not to let the darkness that is in her overcome her. Lana is actually supportive of Clark and what he does for his mom throughout the episode, and near the end she wonders if she’s as good of a person as Lara or if she’s too far gone to be good. Meanwhile, back on the street outside Ollie’s apartment, Clark takes the fight to Zor-El, who tries to convince him to join in on his scheme for world domination. What Clark doesn’t realize is that the blue ring his “mother” gave him is actually a trap, because the blue kryptonite in the ring takes his powers away from him. This allows Zor-El to beat the crap out of him, then escape. Clark tries to get rid of the ring and seeks help from Chloe, but nothing works. In the meantime, Zor-El is at the Fortress with Lara and Kara, who try to kill him with a dagger Jor-El hid in the structure. Before the plot, Zor-El puts a plan in motion that causes a total solar eclipse, which would rob everyone on earth of the effects of the sun that help keep the world running. The plan to kill Zor-El fails and when it does, Zor-El does the unthinkable and tries to kill his own daughter. Clark shows up on the scene (somehow, and this makes no sense because he doesn’t have his super speed and the Fortress is at the North Pole, a long way from Smallville, but oh well……) and takes Zor-El down with some of the original green kryptonite. That allows him to pull the crystal from the console in the Fortress and stop the eclipse, but Zor-El recovers and is about to kill Kara when Lara tells Clark to destroy the crystal, as that will kill Zor-El. He worries that since the crystal also brought him Lara, she’ll go away too, but she convinces him to destroy it anyhow. He does, with a massive explosion resulting and everyone disappearing from the Fortress, including Kara. She ends up lying in the middle of a rainy street…..in Detroit. She has no idea who she is or where she is when she stumbles into a café, cold, wet and scared. I’d have to agree with her there, because I’ve been in Detroit and it’s scary enough when you actually do know who you are and where you’re at. Clark doesn’t know where Kara is, and when he asks Jor-El for help finding her, he callously replies that what happened to her wasn’t his fault and that he won't help Clark find her. He then tells Clark that because of his disobedience, there will be serious repercussions, after which a white light engulfs the Fortress…..and end scene. That cliffhanger will have to wait for the next episode or beyond, as will developments in the sudden appearance of one Julian Luthor. As fans of the show know well, Julian is the younger brother of Lex who was supposed to be dead, with his death a major topic in earlier seasons when Lex struggled with the fallout of Julian’s death as an infant and even “saw” his baby brother when he had his psychological problems. As it turns out, Julian isn’t dead, and actually he hasn’t suddenly appeared on the show – he’s been around all season, only you know him as Gabriel Grant, the new editor at the Daily Planet. Somehow, he wasn’t killed as a baby, but rather given up for adoption and found somewhere along the line by Lex, who has helped him build a life and gotten him his job as editor. Big brother isn’t happy with what he’s seeing from little bro, though, because Julian has secretly been dating none other than Lois Lane. It’s a secret to everyone except Lex, who’s been bugging the apartment of and spying on Julian, and Chloe, who walks in on Gabriel and Lois getting busy in his office. Chloe advises Lois the same way Lex advises Julian/Gabriel, to end the relationship. Both Lois and Julian/Gabriel say they will and start to, but as you’d expect, they can’t bring themselves to do it and although they tell Chloe and Lex that they’ve ended things, they’re still seeing one another. Yeah, it was a big night for dropping (and seeing) bombshells, from Julian’s return to Clark losing his powers (again), getting them back, meeting his mother and then suffering some mysterious, to-be-seen punishment from Jor-El. The show is obviously off next week for the Thanksgiving holiday, so until next time…..
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