'Best of TBH Politoons'
Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Thomas C Greene: Florida ballot terminals favor Republicans (theregister.co.uk)
Even when voters don't.
PAUL KRUGMAN: As Bechtel Goes (The New York Times)
Back in June, after a photo-op trip to Iraq, Mr. Bush said something I agree with. "You can measure progress in megawatts of electricity delivered," he declared. "You can measure progress in terms of oil sold on the market on behalf of the Iraqi people." But what those measures actually show is the absence of progress. By any material measure, Iraqis are worse off than they were under Saddam.
Britons wary of Bush more than Kim Jong-il: poll
LONDON (Reuters) - The United States is seen as a threat to world peace by its closest neighbors and allies, with Britons saying President George W. Bush poses a greater danger than North Korea's Kim Jong-il, a survey found on Friday.
Mrs. Betty Bowers' Words of Christian Concern for Ted Haggard's Delicious Disgrace
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Delighted Snickers: I suspect that this will be a rather uncomfortable weekend at the Ted Haggard tax-free mansion. You see, Reverend Haggard is a vociferous spokesperson against gay marriage and, until yesterday, his wife probably had no idea she was actually in one. (bettybowers.com)
Joel Stein: Watching us watch their movie (latimes.com)
Theater-hopping with the actors and director of a horror flick as they anonymously gauge audiences' reactions.
ROGER EBERT: 49 Up
Tony has a vacation home in Spain now, with a veranda and a swimming pool. He's seen some hard times, but at 49, he is basking in contentment. We see him in the pool, tanned, splashing with his family.
Jim Emerson: Borat: Patriot games (4 stars)
Very nice. I like "Borat" very much. I think it is, as everybody has been saying, the funniest movie in years. And not because it is dumb (although it's very dumb), but because it is smart (and it is very smart).
Damon's New Office (2 hours and 2,500 post-it notes)
Damon has been playing tricks on me for a few days now. So I came in on the weekend and did some "re-decorating" in his office. He didn't see it until Monday morning when he came in and walked into his office.
Commentoon: Nicaragua Abortion Ban (womensenews.org)
Live in Canyon Lake, Texas? Borrow Bruce's Books (Tye Preston Memorial Public Library)
Perform a KEYWORDS search for "Funniest People."
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Mostly sunny.
This week the tabloids (The Globe, National Enquirer, and Star) all slam Pigboy and express support for Michael J. Fox.
No new flags.
Challenging Detention Policies
Cyrus Kar
The U.S. government filed a motion Friday seeking to dismiss a lawsuit filed by an aspiring American filmmaker who spent two months in an Iraqi prison without being charged.
The American Civil Liberties Union of California filed the federal lawsuit in July on behalf of Cyrus Kar, 45, of Los Angeles. It alleges the filmmaker's detention violated his civil rights, the Geneva Convention and the law of nations. Defendants include Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other military officials.
In response to the lawsuit, U.S. attorneys cautioned the court to carefully consider getting entangled in military operations overseas and said Kar cannot challenge the government's policies without "a realistic threat that he will again be subject to detention in Iraq by the United States military officers."
The lawsuit is the first civil case challenging detention policies in Iraq, said ACLU legal director Mark Rosenbaum, who called the government's response to the lawsuit troubling.
Cyrus Kar
Somebody Got Something Wrong
Borat
With its relentless PR campaign and endless stream of positive reviews, "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan" finally opens in theaters today. Despite the good buzz, the film's box office take will be on the watch list.
The movie was originally slated to open on about 2,000 screens, but was scaled back to 837 -- low tracking numbers being the cause. In comparison, "Santa Clause 3" and "Flushed Away" are opening wide on 3,707 and 3,458 screens, respectively. Put the two together and "Borat" has virtually no chance of opening in the top slot.
Two of the leading box office tracking websites, The-Numbers.com and BoxOfficeMojo.com, are predicting less-than-stellar receipts; The-Numbers.com has "Borat" opening in sixth place with just $5 million. BoxOfficeMojo.com predicts a slightly more positive opening; fourth place and $10.5 million. The budget for the film was just $17 million.
Borat
Wants O'Really Probe
Dr. George Tiller
An abortion doctor plans to ask for an investigation of the state attorney general and Bill O'Reilly over comments by the Fox television host Republican propagandist that he got information from Kansas abortion records, the doctor's attorneys said Saturday.
Dr. George Tiller said he will ask the Kansas Supreme Court on Monday to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate and take possession of the records of 90 patients from two clinics.
Attorney General Phill Kline obtained the records recently after a two-year battle that prompted privacy concerns. He has said he sought the records to review them for evidence of possible crimes including rape and illegal abortions.
During a Friday night broadcast of "The O'Reilly Factor," the conservative host Republican propagandist said a "source inside" told the show that Tiller performs late-term abortions when a patient is depressed, which O'Reilly deemed "executing babies."
O'Reilly also said his show has evidence that Tiller's clinic and another unnamed clinic have broken Kansas law by failing to report potential rapes with victims ages 10 to 15.
Dr. George Tiller
New Edition Released
'Aeneid'
For the past decade, professor emeritus Robert Fagles has kept a Barrington's Atlas on the desk in his study, open to pages showing the Greek isles, the Italian coast and the surrounding Mediterranean, a region sailed in history by many and in legend by the Trojan warrior Aeneas.
You could fill a shelf with translations of "The Aeneid," from John Dryden's edition in the 17th century, to modern volumes by Robert Fitzgerald and Allen Mandelbaum. But if Fagles' long-awaited version sells like his editions of "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey," it will eventually be known to hundreds of thousands of readers, by choice and by assignment.
The 73-year-old Fagles, thin and slightly stooped in appearance, but rhythmic and precise in speech - the kind of scholar who calls a reporter to apologize for misquoting Tennyson - was interviewed recently on a rainy afternoon, in a winding, 1950s-era house he shares with his wife, Lynne.
'Aeneid'
Digital Touch To Vaults
Disney Records
There's no occasion like a gold anniversary to start polishing the family heirlooms, and the preservation team at Walt Disney Records has been working overtime to bring its vaunted catalog into the digital age.
The Music Behind the Magic exhibit, which opens Saturday (November 4) at Seattle's Experience Music Project, highlights the milestones that punctuate Walt Disney Records' 50-year, 15,000-recording catalog and the history of the Walt Disney Co. before the label's formation.
The complementary two-CD set "The Music Behind the Magic," which arrives November 7, is a chronological journey through Disney music beginning with 1933's "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf" from the classic short "The Three Little Pigs" through this year's Disney Channel movie "High School Musical."
Disney Records
Stripped Of Title
Miss Great Britain
Miss Great Britain Danielle Lloyd was stripped of her title after telling a magazine that she had been dating one of the judges before her victory.
Lloyd revealed that she had been in a relationship with English Premiership footballer Teddy Sheringham more than two months before the contest in February -- it had previously been claimed that the two had only started their romance on the night of the pageant.
Speaking to Eve magazine, in an interview reported in British newspapers on Friday, she commented about a pair of shoes that Sheringham bought her for Christmas, saying: "Teddy will never forget that sight. We were still in bed when I opened" the present, according to The Daily Mirror tabloid.
Miss Great Britain
Foresaw Problems In Iraq
1999 War Games
The U.S. government conducted a series of secret war games in 1999 that anticipated an invasion of Iraq would require 400,000 troops, and even then chaos might ensue.
In its "Desert Crossing" games, 70 military, diplomatic and intelligence officials assumed the high troop levels would be needed to keep order, seal borders and take care of other security needs.
The documents came to light Saturday through a Freedom of Information Act request by the George Washington University's National Security Archive, an independent research institute and library.
"The conventional wisdom is the U.S. mistake in Iraq was not enough troops," said Thomas Blanton, the archive's director. "But the Desert Crossing war game in 1999 suggests we would have ended up with a failed state even with 400,000 troops on the ground."
1999 War Games
Secret Nazi Program
Lebensborn Kinder
Folker Heinicke always had the feeling that something about his upbringing just wasn't right.
Raised in a German home full of wealth and privilege did not dull his notions that something was missing, but it would be decades before he would learn the full truth: he was the child of a Nazi program to strengthen the German race with Aryan blood.
He and other children - known as "Lebensborn Kinder" or "source of life" kids - were the product of parents chosen for their traits to breed Hitler's idealized blue-eyed, blonde-haired Aryan race.
For the last four years, Heinicke and about 40 other children raised in the Nazi program have met to support each other. On Saturday for the first time, they told their stories in public, swapping tales of aunts who turned out to be mothers, ice-cold adoptive parents who slid into alcoholism and the joy at finding a blood relative who embraced them as a member of their family.
Lebensborn Kinder
Tariff A Catch "22"
Canadian College Stations
Canadian college radio could be under threat, with a number of stations saying they will be forced to pull their online feeds if a tariff proposed by Canada's performing rights society comes into force next year.
Under Tariff 22, proposed by the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN), noncommercial radio stations would be required to pay a total of 7.5 percent of their gross annual revenue, or $200 Canadian ($177) per month, whichever is greater, for a license to broadcast online.
The Ottawa-based National Campus and Community Radio Assn. (NCRA) will argue at the hearing before the federal regulator that the proposed tariff will prevent its 100 campus and community radio station members -- about 80 percent of which are also online -- from broadcasting over the Internet. It will ask that the tariff be lowered or repealed.
Canadian College Stations
Professor's Research Criticized
Bigfoot
Jeffrey Meldrum holds a Ph.D. in anatomical sciences and is a tenured professor of anatomy at Idaho State University. He is also one of the world's foremost authorities on Bigfoot, the mythical smelly ape-man of the Northwest woods. And Meldrum firmly believes the lumbering, shaggy brute exists.
That makes him an outcast - a solitary, Sasquatch-like figure himself - on the 12,700-student campus, where many scientists are embarrassed by what they call Meldrum's "pseudo-academic" pursuits and have called on the university to review his work with an eye toward revoking his tenure. One physics professor, D.P. Wells, wonders whether Meldrum plans to research Santa Claus, too.
For the past 10 years, Meldrum, 48, has added his scholarly sounding research to a field full of sham videos and supermarket tabloid exposes. And he is convinced he has produced a body of evidence that proves there is a Bigfoot.
Bigfoot
Lifts And Separates
'Wonderjock'
Size really does count, just ask Australian underwear maker AussieBum which has just launched the "Wonderjock" for men who want to look bigger.
Since the launch seven days ago, AussieBum says it has sold 50,000 pairs of "Wonderjock", mostly on its Web site www.aussiebum.com and a handful of stores around the world.
"The design of the underwear, separates and lifts. The fabric cup protrudes everything out in front instead of down towards the ground," said "Wonderjock" designer Sean Ashby.
"There is no padding, rings or strings," said Ashby, a co-founder of the Internet-based AussieBum firm.
'Wonderjock'
In Memory
Paul Mauriat
French conductor Paul Mauriat, who enjoyed huge popularity in Japan and was famous for his 1968 hit "Love is Blue," has died at the age of 81 in the southern French city of Perpignan, friends and family said.
Mauriat, who died Friday, was born in Marseille but grew up in Paris and began conducting his own orchestra during the Second World War.
He wrote his first song with Andre Pascal with whom he won a major French prize in 1958. From 1967 to 1972 he wrote many songs for French singer Mireille Mathieu.
In 1968 his arrangement and orchestration of Andre Popp's "Love is Blue" brought him fame and topped the US hit parade. Another hit was Petula Clark's "I will follow him."
Mauriat also orchestrated songs for Charles Aznavour, Melina Mercouri, Leo Ferre and Leny Escudero.
He had a wide following in Japan, where his work was regarded as a benchmark of high quality.
Paul Mauriat
In Memory
Leonard Schrader
Leonard Schrader, who earned an Academy Award nomination for his adaptation of "Kiss of the Spider Woman" and co-wrote the critically praised "Mishima," has died. He was 62.
Schrader, who lived in Los Angeles, died Thursday of heart failure at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, his brother, "Taxi Driver" screenwriter Paul Schrader, said Saturday.
He was born in Grand Rapids, Mich., to a family of Dutch Calvinists who forbade the brothers to see any movies.
Schrader didn't see his first film until he was in college in the 1960s.
Schrader attended the local Calvin College and received a master's degree at the Iowa Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa, where according to his Web site he studied with Kurt Vonnegut and Jorge Luis Borges.
His first film was "The Yakuza," co-written in the 1970s with his brother and starring Robert Mitchum. Sydney Pollack directed.
Survivors include his wife Chieko and brother.
Leonard Schrader
Leonard Schrader also wrote the underrated classic Blue Collar (1978), starring Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel, and Yaphet Kotto.
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