- On last night’s 24, a key figure said goodbye, America said hello to a scary new bio-terror weapon and Jack Bauer shot some bad guys - shocker. When we left Jack last week, he was headed to meet up with Tony Almeida at the Port of Alexandria to intercept a weapon being shipped into the country for ginormous defense contractor Starkwood Industries. After making the link between Starkwood and renegade Sangalan Gen. Benjamin Juma, having a Starkwood hitman attack him and kill Sen. Blaine Mayer in Mayer’s own home last week, Jack began this week breaking into the shipyard at the port and along with Tony, interrogating the one security guard on duty, a man named Carl Gadsen. Gadsen claims not to know anything about the shipments that had arrived that day, but when Jack hacks into the yard’s manifest, he finds that two ships had picked up cargo from the Port of Noire, which is the nearest deep-water port to Sangala, before dropping their load at the Port of Alexandria. At that point, Gadsen admits that although he doesn’t know about the shipments, he does know that a team from Starkwood contacted him and bribed him to make sure he was the only guard on duty for the night and that he let them inside the yard when they arrived at 10:15. Jack and Tony lie in wait in the office trailer while the guard goes out to the gate to greet the Starkwood team when they arrive. The team leader, Stokes, asks Carl why he’s so nervous and Carl lies and tells him that it’s because Sotkes has brought a large, mutli-vehicle team with him. Stokes forces Carl into an SUV and off they go across the shipyard to the container where the bio-weapon is being stored. Jack and Tony hide behind a nearby stack of cargo containers, prepared to follow the flatbed truck carrying the weapon once it’s loaded and departs. Those plans take a twist when Stokes orders one of his men to take Carl off behind a stack of crates and kill him. Jack, feeling guilty for putting an innocent man in harm’s way, shoots the would-be killer even though he knows that when the man fails to return, Stokes will realize someone is inside the shipyard and has killed his man. That’s exactly what happens, but when the firefight breaks out Jack has snuck on top of a stack of containers and leaps onto the top of the truck carrying the weapon as is speeds toward the gate. Tony stays behind and tries to fight off the Starkwood team as long as he can. He’s eventually captured and taken when the bad guys leave, but his distraction allows Jack to hijack the truck and take control of the weapon. Once he hits the open road, Jack calls Larry Moss at the FBI and tells him the situation. He asks Larry to send a CDC (Centers for Disease Control) team to a weigh station nearby to diffuse the weapon, but when Jack stops the truck just prior to entering a commercial area to make sure that there are no problems with the truck or container, he finds a gash in the side of the hucontainer and a leak from a canister inside. Realizing it happened back at the shipyard when he shot the man operating Caterpillar that moved the container onto the truck, Jack springs into action to contain the leak. Fighthing through coughing and troubled breathing brought on by the fumes from whatever toxic gas is inside the weapon, he ventures insdie the container and shuts a valve feeding the leaky pipe. Disaster is averted, but at what price to Jack’s health? Of course, this being 24, things then get much worse for Jack. The Starkwood crew, having stolen a helicopter from the port, has tracked him down and opens fire from above as Jack scrambles for cover. Once he’s away from the truck, the helicopter swoops in, cables are attached to the weapon and it’s lifted right out of the trailer into the night air. Stokes and his men make off with the weapon, leaving Jack in their wake. Quite a day for Starkwood, which is also run by a megalomaniac in Jonas Hodges who has now decided that his company is done cooperating with the federal government in its investigation of Starkwood. Hodges announce this decision to the comnapy’s board of directors at an emergency meeting. Douglas Knowles, the board’s chairman, argues that fighting the Senate subcommittee is a losing battle, but Hodges will hear none of it. He proclaims Starkwood’s importance to the nation’s security in spite of the government’s persecution and then calmly strides from the room with Knowles in close pursuit. In the hallway outside the boardroom, Hodges informs Knowles that Sen. Mayer will no logner be a problem because he’s now dead. When accused of being complicit in the senator’s death, Hodges dances around the question with a non-answer answer and strides off as arrogantly as ever. Over at the White House, things are actually starting to look up a bit after the day’s tragic events. President Taylor’s husband Henry is out of surgery and expected to make a full recovery after being shot by Col. Ike Dubaku’s men a few episodes ago. First daughter Olivia Taylor is settling into her role as a presidential advisor too. However, chief advisor Ethan Kanin informs the president that based on the day’s events and after learning of Jack Bauer’s suspected killing of Sen. Mayer (later disproved when the FBI examines the crime scane and Larry Moss talks to Renee Walker to find out why Jack went to the senator’s home), he’s tendering his resignation. He explins that it’s for the best and that once word of Mayer’s death gets out, her administration will be blamed because Kanin himself sanctioned Bauer’s release. The president accepts his decision, but before Kanin can even type up his letter of resignation, Olivia runs right to White House reporter Ken Dellao, the man who broke the story on Jack’s release and the subsequent murder of Ryan Burnett last week, to feed him the story about Kanin resigning. In the phone call, we learn that she was indeed the one responsible for leaking that first strory even though she flat-out denied it to her mother and Kanin last week and claimed she had proof of her innocence. She goes on to throw Kanin under the bus again, asking that Dellao make it clear when he reports the story that it was Kanin and Kanin alone who sanctioned Bauer’s release, independent of the president’s knowledge. So Olivia is every bit as bitchy and duplicitous as she’s been alleged to be, but now the question is what her end game is. An excellent episode start to finish, lots of great action and drama and now Jack’s health is in question on top of everything. Tune in next week, the ride should keep getting better…….
- You all know how pissed off I get when authorities in any country pinch a suspected drug trafficker. It just makes it harder for me and my many drug-loving pals to get our hands on our beloved illegal narcotics. Plus, arresting one man isn’t going to stop anything; the drugs will still get to where they’re going, it’ll just take longer and cost more, which hurts John Q. Crackhead. So a big wag of the finger goes out to the Mexican military for arresting alleged drug trafficker Sigifredo Najera Talamantes, also known as El Canicon, late last week. I want to see the proof that Talamantes led an attack on a U.S. consulate and killed Mexican soldiers, because I never put it past The Man to fabricate evidence to help make His case. While you at it, Mexican President Felipe Calderon, how about some proof that El Canicon is responsible for attacks on a television station in Monterrey in the Mexican state of Nuevo Leon? You may call him a drug trafficker and murderer, but I call him a friend to all who loves them some good narcotic action. Let me ask you this: are you going to help supply the drugs to Talamantes’ customers now that he’s in prison? I didn’t think so. So what you’re doing is hurting those poor crackheads and doing nothing to address the problem, idiot. When are political leaders going to realize that making these arrests hurts as many people, if not more, than it helps…….
- Not that the football programs at the University of Flordia and University of Tennessee needed any additional reasons to hate each other, but new UT coach Lane Kiffin sure is fanning the flames of contempt between the two. Florida may be the defending BCS champion, but as the Gators open spring practice this week, the focus of their players seems to be on the rookie head coach of a rival school that went 5-7 last season. Kiffin has taken repeared verbal shots at Florida and specifically at UF head coach Urban Meyer, whom Kiffin accused of cheating in the recruiting process. Several Florida players have made it known that they have taken great offense to Kiffin’s act, posting pictures of him throughout their locker room for motivation. The two teams don’t meet on the field until Sept. 19, when Tennessee travels to Gainesville for Kiffin’s first game coaching in the Swamp. In the meantime, he seems content to continue taking pokes at his archrival. His first shot across the bow came in early February, during a post-signing day recruiting breakfast celebration in Knoxville, when Kiffin accused Meyer of violating NCAA rules by calling recruit Nu'Keese Richardson while Richardson was on his official visit to Tennessee. Whether Meyer did so or not, the fact is that such actions are not against NCAA rules. Kiffin was reprimanded by the Southeastern Conference for his comments, but players like UF junior safety Ahmad Black clearly haven’t moved on. "I couldn't believe what he said," Florida junior safety Ahmad Black said on Tuesday. "Not trying to be cocky or anything, but we've beaten them four years in a row ... by a lot, too. But taking shots at our coach is like taking shots at us. We're family. It's definitely personal now.” For his part, Kiffin doesn’t seem to regret stirring things up and I’m guessing that between now and Sept. 19, he does more to inflame this running feud than to calm it. “First, I think it's a neat thing that Tennessee's logo is all over Florida's locker room," Kiffin said this week. Of course, he may have to devote a little bit of time to pot-shotting other SEC schools, so his attacks on Tennessee won't be his only priorities. I say that because I’m going to keep belieivign that Kiffin did indeed tell recruit Alshon Jeffery, a wide receiver who ended up signing with South Carolina, that would end up pumping gas for the rest of his life like all the other players in the state of South Carolina if he signed with the Gamecocks. Kiffin may continue to deny those allegations, but from where I sit they’re just too awesome to not be true. Keep up the good work, Lane, because even though the SEC might have already been the best conference in college football before you arrived, your act is making it even better……
- If we can clone sheep, why can’t we clone cars? It sounds great - until you realize that cloning cars doesn’t mean creating brand-new duplicates of existing cars, but rather ripping off unsuspecting people who believe they are buying new cars and not stolen, slightly altered cars. The FBI announced this week that it has broken up one of the largest auto theft cases in the U.S., which seems like good news but isn’t - at least not for hundreds of people who have been duped by the scam. Through "Operation Dual Identity," arrest warrants for 17 people were executed in Tampa and Miami, Florida; Chicago, Illinois; and in Mexico City and Guadalajara, Mexico for "cloning" vehicles, which is making stolen cars look like legal ones. According to the FBI, the ring was operating in the U.S. for more than 20 years. In the state of Florida alone, more than 1,000 vehicles were stolen in Florida, with more than $25 million in losses to consumers and banks. The basic M.O. for these car cloners is taking license plates, vehicle identification numbers (VIN), and other tags and stickers from a legal car and put them on a stolen vehicle of similar make and model. The real losers are people who buy these “cloned” cars, because the cars are repossessed as stolen property but their new owners are still on the hook for any money they borrowed to pay for their new rides. Banks are under no obligation to forgive any debt because the borrower signed a contract with them to borrow that money, regardless of the state of their ownership of the vehicle. The only real target to go after for wronged car buyers is the dealership who sold them the vehicle, which many victims say they are considering. However, with the breath and depth of this scam - cloned vehicles were moved and sold to buyers in 20 states and several countries - this could drag on for some time. Of course, if the scammers had simply exchanged the vehicles for drugs, as they allegedly did in many cases, much of this headache could have been avoided…..
- Duuuuuuuude. What a terrible day for one stoner in San Diego. Dude was gone on a ski trip when some bogart neighbor dude gets totally drunk, crashes his truck into said stoner’s house and creates a gaping hole which allows the cops to see inside and find the stoner’s marijuana farm, dude. Yes, it truly is a sad day for the stoner(s) who own the home, because their entire operation and lives are now thrown into chaos because some ass hat decides to drive drunk and goes Billy Joel into the side of their house. I don’t know who this 63-year-old tool is, but I don’t need to know. He’s a certified piece of crap, no questions asked. These stoners weren’t hurting anyone, they were growing their own hippie lettuce, supplying their own pot needs and showing great entrepreneurial spirit and they can’t help it if their neighbor is a brain-dead a-hole who drives drunk and crashes into houses. Just leave the stoners alone, let them watch their Planet Earth DVDs in peace, munch on their Cheetos and Funjuns and play hackey sack while passing the bong and all will be fine. Quit exposing their home marijuana farms, dudes. Because of one thoughtless act, the cops confiscated 20 pot plants from this house and these poor potheads are probably headed to jail. All they were trying to do was bring peace, relaxation and mellowness to the world and what do they get for their troubles? Jail, that’s what. What the heck is this world coming to…….
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