Happy What's One More Dead Iraqi? Day!

What else do James Lileks and I have in common, other than being big windy blowhards oblivious to how much we annoy people with our clueless pop-culture vaporings and gasbag politics? We have both worked with Miss Minnesota.

***

If Town Hall can be used as a bellweather of the GOP mood with elections on the way, things look bleak for the Republican Party. The whole website has the stink of desperation to it, with barely an issue to call their own; nobody even dares to mention the Iraq mess, and the best they can do is lonely Donald "Who?" Lambro saying that if the Democrats win you can kiss off your upper-class tax cuts. OH NOES, says America, as they reach for the (D) button. Well, there's always John-Kerry-bashing, as a full six columns (Thomas Sowell, Nathan Tabor, Michael Barone, Suzanne Fields, Ruben Navarrette and Kevin McCullough) devoted to his stuck-in-Iraq speech just as if Kerry was running for something. (Barone helpfully points out his failure to grasp metaphor by saying "the statement is literally untrue: No one is 'stuck in Iraq' unless he or she volunteers".) But as usual, the prize peach is Doug Giles, who is always willing to go one step beyond and become a total right-wing cartoon, as he does when he rewrites John Lennon's 'Imagine' as an anti-Muslim ditty. Good on you, Doug! Others talk, you deliver.

***

When Town Hall lets you down, of course, there's always WENN entertainment news at imdb.com to get you through the day:

Hollywood hardman Russell Crowe has blasted the US legal system for making a big deal of his phone assault in a New York City hotel last year...he says, "Where I come from, a confrontation like that, as basic and simple as that, would have been satisfied with a handshake and an apology... Your (US) legal system is very open to be misused."

Yes, that's the problem with the American legal system, all right: it's open to flagrant abuses, to the point that if a famous celebrity beats a hotel employee with a phone, the celebrity could actually be arrested.

There's also this delightful headline, which proves that sometimes a guy can actually come around to the same opinion everyone else in the country has already held for the past 20 years:

George Lucas: "I Don't Want To Make Movies Anymore"