Score One More

Yet another great evening.

I think I’m getting spoiled!

Here’s a fun picture.

McCain’s C-in-C Test

Fail.

Picture Fun – 28 July

Today was a little bit of a “down day,” so how about some picture fun?

You can find lots of “Motivational Posters” by clicking ••here••.
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Look carefully …

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Oliver Stone’s “W” Trailer

Picture Fun – 25 July

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Yet Another

Today was yet another fabulous day. Simply fabulous. I am old enough to know how few and far between they are.

Golden Girls Bloopers

Today

Today was a good day. There is a whole lot wrapped up in just those few words.

Great Apple Christmas Ad

A few years old, but I really like the score!

Brief Summer Movie Reviews

This is the first summer since I was 15 that I have not had to work. It is a strange and rather unsettling experience. I have thus spent much time going to the movie theater, and I have so far seen more movies in the theater in the last two months than I have in the last three years.

Here are my brief reviews (listed in no particular order):

1. WALL•E: Phenomenal.

2. The Dark Knight: Dark, intense, violent, outstanding in almost every respect.

3. Iron Man: Lots of fun.

4. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: Fun, but with a franchise-ruining ending, thanks to that a**hole George Lucas who can’t seem to touch anything these days without it turning into pure s***. I mean, seriously, WTF? Why does anyone listen to this jackass anymore? Isn’t there some sort of Hollywood agency that can force him to retire? Shouldn’t someone prevent this moron from stomping through my god-damned childhood memories and ruining them like some sort of real-life Freddy Kruger? Have you watched “Attack of the Clones” recently? Yeah, it was 100 times better than the first abortion, “The Phantom Menace,” but 100 times Zero is still ZERO. And I’m still pissed off about the whole “midichlorians” thing. George Lucas is so bad that he turned both Ewan MacGregor and Natalie Portman into terrible actors by his atrocious writing and abominable directing (only Samuel L. Jackson and Ian McDiarmid somehow managed to do all right; Hayden Christensen never had a chance). So thanks a lot, George, for turning your attention to Indiana Jones — a franchise that ended on a high note and should have been left alone, at least until you dropped dead and Spielberg could do it himself, which he should have. And by the way, what do you have on him, George? You must have blackmailed him into accepting your quote-unquote “story” for Crystal Skull. Tax evasion? Murder? What? Let him go, man, let him go, because you cause more destruction than President Bush.

5. Wanted: Very interesting film which defies easy characterization.

6. Journey to the Center of the Earth: Surprisingly, not all that bad, but better in 3D I’m sure (which I didn’t see; call ahead to find out if the theater you’re planning on has the 3D version, otherwise don’t bother).

7. Get Smart: Stupid, with only one or two good gags.

I hope this is helpful. If any of you happen to see any of these films, I would love to hear your own reviews! You can either comment or email me and I will add them to these posts. I would also be interested in any other films that are worth watching.

I Can’t Wait To See This!

Young Hillary Clinton

Right Now…

Right now I am extraordinarily and unaccountably happy. It might not last, but for this moment at least, the past has melted away and the future seems unlimited. Come what may, this moment shall sustain me, of that I am sure.

Sidestepping Constitutional Succession

From •Slate.com•:

DOES THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION HAVE A SECRET SUCCESSION ORDER THAT BYPASSES CONGRESS?
By Bruce Ackerman
Posted Tuesday, July 15, 2008, at 3:35 PM ET

Suppose the worst happens, and the next terrorist attack hits Washington hard, taking out the president and the vice president. What happens next?

New Yorker writer Jane Mayer’s new book, The Dark Side, opens with a shocker. Apparently sometime in the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan issued a “secret executive order” that in the event of the death of the president and the vice president “established a means of re-creating the executive branch.” Reagan’s order violated the express terms of the Constitution and governing statutes.

Does a similar order exist today? We aren’t told. But we do know that Dick Cheney participated in the secret “doomsday” exercises under the Reagan order, and given his central role at present, it is imperative for Congress to find out.

Congress last considered the problem of a dual vacancy in the presidency and the vice presidency when Harry Truman was in the White House. In the Presidential Succession Act of 1947, lawmakers stipulated that if both positions are empty, power passes first to the Speaker of the House or, if she, too, does not survive, to the president pro tem of the Senate. But relying on James Mann’s earlier book Rise of the Vulcans, Mayer reports that Reagan “amended the process for speed and clarity … without informing Congress that it had been sidestepped.” We don’t know how. But if the order bypasses the speaker and the Senate president pro tempore in favor of an official in the executive branch, we have a recipe for a constitutional crisis.

With al-Qaida back in business in Pakistan and terrorist incidents proliferating around the world, this is no time to ignore that grim risk. A coup by the executive branch would be especially devastating at a time at which Democrats control the House. In the scenario I’m envisioning, Nancy Pelosi would assert her claim as acting president under existing statutes while Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, or some other executive official, would simultaneously assert her competing authority under the executive order.

When confronting these competing claims, it would be the military that would call the shots. As the Washington Post reported three years ago, the Pentagon has “devised its first-ever war plans for guarding against and responding to terrorist attacks in the United States, envisioning 15 potential crisis scenarios and anticipating several simultaneous strikes around the country.”

In acting on these plans, would the Joint Chiefs choose to recognize the constitutional authority of Pelosi as commander in chief? Or would they respond to the commands of the executive official presiding over the “doomsday” crisis center at some “undisclosed location”? To ask the question is to answer it: The whole point of these “doomsday” exercises is to assure instant obedience to the will of the executive on the other side of the hot line. We are staring at a clear and present danger to the republic.

Where does the Bush administration figure into all of this? Since Sept. 11 , the question of presidential succession has been a preoccupation of some of the most responsible statesmen in Washington. Most notably, James Baker joined the late Lloyd Cutler to chair a bipartisan AEI-Brookings Institution commission on the subject. But their recommendations went nowhere in Congress, and I have always wondered why the Bush administration was content to remain on the sidelines. After all, the administration is certainly serious about terrorism. Why, then, didn’t it take energetic steps to make much-needed revisions to the law of presidential succession inherited from the days of Harry Truman?

Despite the administration’s repeated acts of lawlessness, I must confess to a certain naivete. It never occurred to me that Bush didn’t care how Congress responded to the problem because he had issued a secret executive order that took the law into his own hands. After all, when he issued a public directive on the matter on continuity in government in 2007, he explicitly pledged to act “consistent[ly]” with the Presidential Succession Act. At the same time, however, his directive refers to a secret appendix. And as Ron Rosenbaum pointed out in Slate, even members of the House Committee on Homeland Security have been denied access to the document.

The committee, and Congress, should not take “no” for an answer. But they should also move beyond the appendix and demand to know whether investigative reports of a secret succession order are well-founded. If Reagan did issue an illegal order, Congress should publicly determine how subsequent administrations dealt with it. Perhaps President George H. W. Bush or Bill Clinton expressly repudiated the order. Or perhaps they reaffirmed it, thereby laying the foundation for President Bush, with the encouragement of Vice President Cheney, to do the same—through a process entirely independent of the administration’s formal directives on the subject.

In any event, it is time for Congress to find out. Even if Reagan’s initial illegal order has been rescinded, Congress must deprive it of all value as a precedent. Lawmakers should pass legislation that expressly nullifies all secret orders, present and future, through which the president asserts the imperial privilege of naming his own successor. We must decisively repudiate these illegal moves before they explode in our faces.

Why am I not surprised?

Hilarious iPhone 3G Movie

Check this out:

•How to go broke buying the new iPhone!•