Last night, Republican congressman Joe Wilson from South Carolina interrupted President Obama’s speech on Health Care by shouting out “You Lie!” while Obama was talking. Eerily, this exchange was predicted fairly accurately in Idiocracy three years earlier.

When the president in the film is giving a speech on the dire state of the nation, and says he has a solution and is immediately cut off by two members of the ” House of Representin’ ” from none other than the state of South Carolina who’s brilliant additions are:

South Carolina Representative # 1: That’s what you said last time, dipshit!
South Carolina Representative # 2: Yeah, I got a solution, you’re a dick! South Carolina, what’s up!

Apparently, no level of parody or exaggeration is too far off from the inappropriate & stupid behavior Republicans are capable of.

“The students with strong religious beliefs…exhibited less ACC activation [anxiety] than students with less fervent beliefs.” and that “Even after accounting for self-esteem, intelligence and other personality traits, Inzlicht’s team found that religious devotion predicted volunteers’ ACC activity [anxiety levels on the tests administered].” The article also notes that ” A previous study that used similar methods found that politically conservative Americans exhibit less ACC activation than liberals.”

None of that comes as any real surprise to me. I bet if you tested my 5-year-old cousin, she’d have incredibly low anxiety levels as well - because she doesn’t know any better. She has a limited understanding of the world around her, and she is incapable of really grasping the concepts that would lead to real concern on her part. To her, the world is a small, simple place where things either go her way or she pouts.

I know it sounds like I just described Rush Limbaugh and his army of ditto-heads, but that’s only because the parallels are so obvious. I’ve long maintained that religion is a mental crutch - people use it to stand when the strength of their ideas or beliefs aren’t strong enough to stand on their own - and contrary to what you might think, I don’t hate religious people.

I’ve always understood why people choose to be religious, because I’ve often wished that I could be. I would love to just “know” that everything is going to be alright in the end. I would love the sense of security that comes with “knowing” that some higher power was watching and caring about the outcome of my life. Unfortunately, I can’t lie to myself like that.

No one is watching over us, and no one cares, and it’s a terrifying thought. If you don’t know that, then you’re deluding yourself. I guess that’s why they say ignorance is bliss.

In reality, the Arclight ended up being more like the Cheesecake Factory of movie theaters - neither is as exclusive as they make themselves out to be. Sure, the Arclight is more expensive, but (much like the Cheesecake Factory) the cost isn’t prohibitive and (again, like the Cheesecake Factory) it’s generally worth the price increase to an average joe. For 7 years it’s been the top of the theatre food-chain and I’ve been more than satisfied. Enter Muvico.

Muvico is “…a growing chain of premium, megaplex motion picture theaters…” that have “…developed a reputation as true entertainment destinations.” When Muvico announced it was opening a new, state-of-the-art facility out in Thousand Oaks, I was interested to see what they were bringing to the table, but Mcpheezy, he was down-right happy. Thousand Oaks is a wealthy area, and it’s a suburb that’s far enough away from the rest of the city to prevent people from making the trip out there just to see a movie. Those two things combined will probably result in actual exclusivity, to the point where $21 tickets to a theatre that only seats 50 (in plush love-seats no less) might actually make sense.

So while I hadn’t been keeping close tabs on Muvico’s progress out here, I was aware that the theater just opened up this past weekend. Since I work nearby, it’ll actually be very convenient for me to catch movies there if the place turns out to be all it’s cracked up to be, and I’ll admit I’m very excited to see if there really is a noticeable improvement in video quality with Sony’s 4K digital projectors they’ve installed. However, having had my first experience with them yesterday, I already have my doubts.

First things first, Muvico’s site is a perfect example of why you should not have a complete flash site. It’s ugly, it’s gimmicky, and worst of all it’s slow. It seriously looks like some Winamp theme designed back in 2000 by a 13 year old who just learned how to use filters in photoshop (brushed metal and all). So, with my expectations low, I went to buy 10 tickets for me and some buddies to see Watchmen on Friday after work.

The site wouldn’t let me buy them. Despite the theater showing almost no seats as having already been reserved, whenever I tried to select my seat and make a purchase, I was told the seats I had selected were unavailable, but given no further explanation. No matter what showtime or theater I tried, I kept getting the same error. “Fine,” I said to myself “I’ll just call them.”

So I grab the number for the theater and call. The usual recorded greeting was to be expected, but the only option it provided for buying tickets was via the website. When I tried to reach an operator, I was told that no voicemailbox had been set-up for that user, and promptly disconnected.

At that point I was tempted to just reserve seat at the Arclight, since that would take all of about 5 minutes to complete, but a couple of the guys going were only in because of how close Muvico is to our office, so I decided I’d do alittle QA on the Muvico website and see if I could coax it into performing its intended function (to sell tickets).

After alot of fiddling around, I discovered that the site would sell me 1 ticket, or 2 tickets, and sometimes 3 tickets, but 10 was always a no go (despite it being the uppermost option in their own system), and the only time I got it to work with 9 tickets, I had simply been playing around with the site and the seats were nowhere near where I wanted to sit. That’s when my buddy Eric noticed I had selected the seats sequentially from left to right everytime it had worked.

A few more test confirmed Eric’s observation. I could choose seats J1, J2, J3, & J4 and then purchase said tickets, but if I selected seats J2, J3, J4, & J1 I was told the seats could not be purchased. Nevermind the fact that I ended up choosing the exact same seats in both circumstances, the fact that I had chosen them out of sequential order prevented the system from selling them to me, even though the seats were available.

So my method of choosing the center seat in the row I wanted to sit in, and then selecting it and the 4 seats to the right of it, followed by the 4 seats to the left of it was a deal-breaker for their site. I’m not sure how I can express how angry such a stupid mistake on the part of a big company like this makes me. I have to have software QA experience in order to use your site to buy the tickets I want? Fail.

What’s worse, is that the site in question doesn’t just support the new theater. All of the Muvico theaters, some of which have been operating for years use the same site so it’s not like this is a problem specific to the launch of the new theater (which would still qualify for a Fail tag, just not to the same extent). Seriously, no one has complained about this to them? Of course, I didn’t actually have much luck reaching anybody when I was having problems with it, so maybe not.

With their site’s poor performance fresh in my memory, I wasn’t surprised to find an article in the Miami Herald today detailing Muvico’s legal and financial trouble. How can I be surprised that a company which purports to offer ‘…an integrated entertainment experience that is not “just about the movie,”’ but can’t even maintain a website to sell me tickets, can’t even afford to pay their rent?

In this case, I actually agree with them. The story is clear - clearly intended to mislead the listener. It’s not just his warping of space-time either, Media Matters is reporting that there’s nothing specifying money for a train from Las Vegas to Los Angeles (let alone Disneyland), despite how cool that would actually be.

Now I’m not calling Jindal a liar, I’m just pointing out that he didn’t tell the truth.

In other news, the right sure does love themselves some porn.

What an incredible world of make believe the Republicans live in. I’ve often felt that the Republican party is the defacto choice for bigotry and xenophobia, but I always assumed it was a conscious choice. I figured the truly intelligent and capabale people in the party used fear and ignorance to manipulate the throngs of uneducated, racist masses that I feel make up the Republican base. It never really occured to me that someone of Jindal’s position in the party could just be delusional and therefore blind to the reality of what his constituants actually believe.

For most of the speech, Jindal tore into inefficient government, while using examples of government failures that occurred while his own party was in power. For instance, he pointed out that the government was no help during Katrina, and people had to save themselves. Really? You actually want to remind people that FEMA was being run by an idiot? That it was a Republican-run Federal government that couldn’t get water to people for 5 days? Just moments before that, Jindal had criticized the stimulus package for having funds allocated to ‘Volcano Monitoring’. Because obviously there are no volcanoes anywhere in the U.S. - we should cut off Hurricane monitoring as well then, cus who need to know when a Hurricane is coming, right?

It reminded me of something Bill Maher said - ‘Republicans spend alot of time telling us how government doesn’t work, and then when they get into office, they prove it.’

Other parts of the speech were less nonsensical, though no less old rhetoric. We want everyone to have access to affordable health care (but fail to mention that affordable is a relative term, and ‘having access to’ is not the same as ‘having’), we want our children to get a ‘proper’ education (read proper as ‘Christian’), we don’t want to cut military spending (even though Obama isn’t suggesting that), and that raising taxes is bad (even though most people aren’t going to see their taxes raised at all).

Chris Rock has a pretty funny routine in which he comically presents Robitusson as a cure-all for any medical problem. I’ve noticed that talking to Republicans about Government or Finance is pretty much the same routine, only their cure-all is Tax Cuts. Economy got you down? Tax Cuts! Lost your job? Tax Cuts! Largest deficit of all time? Tax Cuts! You get the idea.

So from the Bloomberg article we have:

Merrill had hired Thain … in late 2007 with a $15 million signing bonus. Replacing E. Stanley O’Neal as Merrill’s CEO, Thain pledged to live up to his reputation as “Mr. Fixit,” the sobriquet he earned while rescuing the NYSE.

And:

“There was a certain surprise that the Merrill losses were as steep as they were,” said James Post, a professor of corporate governance and business ethics at Boston University School of Management…

That seems like a rather ridiculous statement when the C.E.O. Merrill brought in to be their saviour spent $131,000 on area rugs. It doesn’t take much common sense to realize that if your company has $40 billion dollars tied up in failing sub-prime bonds, that your first priority should not be redecorating you private dinning room.

Then again, he is a Republican.

_

Update: The Bloomberg article has been edited to mention Thain’s spending $1.22 million. I think that makes the following quote, which was included in the original article and not changed in the update, rather amusing:

“On top of that, I think Lewis didn’t think Thain was doing as much as he could to control the expenses and minimize the losses.”

Ya think?

For those of you who haven’t seen it, Ann Coulter says that if she could be anyone in history, she would be F.D.R. so that she could prevent the New Deal. Al Franken, who is also at whatever event this was filmed at, responds that he would be Hitler, so he could prevent the Holocaust.

As is usual, the Republican has a ridiculously self-centered and biased view of the world, which, in this case, is that the worst thing that could possibly have happened in history is the New Deal, resulting in some small portion of her tax dollars going to feed someone without a job (gasp). On the other hand, you have a liberal thinker who immediately wishes he could prevent one of the greatest (if not the greatest) tragedies in human history.

In short, Ann Coulter is a stupid bitch, Al Franken is not.

“Scientists mapped the Milky Way in a more detailed, three-dimensional way and found that it’s 15 percent larger in breadth. More important, it’s denser, with 50 percent more mass, which is like weight.” Emphasis mine.

Like weight? Really? Now I know this may be nit-picking and is a small distinction but as anyone who has taken a basic high school science class knows, mass and weight are not the same thing. I understand that they are similar, and the units of measurement have the same names, but there is a major difference.  The point of journalism is to educate the populace, not misinform them. All it would take is a few more words, to not only give an accurate description of this amazing discovery but, to potentially enlighten a few people as to the difference between mass and weight.

”… mass, which is the amount of material in an object.”

Four more words, that’s all it would take. And I doubt anyone who can’t understand that would be reading an article on this subject.

Or, maybe our galaxy just needs to hit the gym.

150 years from now, historians may have more facts about Bush’s presidency (assuming Cheney doesn’t have everything shredded), but they will be no more qualified to evaluate Bush’s failures than I am right now - and I’m willing to say he’s failed monumentally.

An article titled 5 Presidents worse that George W. Bush made the front page of Digg today. I think the five presidents listed in the article can definitely be seen as failures, but I find it pretty ridiculous for them to say that any of them were worse than Bush. While their respective failures were, for lack of a better word, impressive, none of them can say that their disastrous economic policies led to a global recession that literally changed the face of the world political map (which is likely to be the outcome of what Bush has done).

Whenever a president dies, history seems to be re-written to show that person in the most favorable light possible. This is as it should be as being the President of the United States, in spite of the power and prestige, is a thankless job and and incredible sacrifice on the part of the President himself (and anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool). Even Nixon was kindly remembered as a master of Foriegn Policy who got us out of Vietnam and improved relations with China.

How will historians try to re-write Bush’s reign? Saddam was a cruel dictator who warranted removal and intervention in the Middle East was, at some point, an inevitability, so the Iraq war could very well turn out to be regarded as a success on some levels. Unfortunately I don’t see how it can ever be separated from the lies told to the American public in order to start it, or the incredible disregard for the need to supply our troops, or the crimes committed by immune contractors, or the unforgivable human-rights violations occurring in Guantanamo Bay.

A national disaster like 9/11 should be a shoe in for sympathy and support for a former president (and it certainly was for Bush during his first term). However, using it as a springboard for Iraq, as well as terrible mismanagement of other national disasters like Hurricane Katrina, not to mention a certain video of him reading a story about a goat, make it hard to imagine that an objective reviewer will be able to write anything entirely complimentary regarding his leadership during those troubled times.

So say what you will about hindsight being 20/20, or pull the old ‘Time will tell’ card if you’d like, but I have balls, and I’m not afraid to use them. I look at the Bush presidency, and I fail to find any lasting legacy other than failure.

Have I mentioned that I hate Republicans recently?