The Lone Ranger may be returning to the big screen–with a female Tonto.

I’m sure those fussy, anti-cowboy Europeans will have a fit over this.

The Lone Ranger may be returning to the big screen–with a female Tonto.

I’m sure those fussy, anti-cowboy Europeans will have a fit over this.

The Lone Ranger may be returning to the big screen–with a female Tonto.

I’m sure those fussy, anti-cowboy Europeans will have a fit over this.

From ABC.

Drew Carey was forced to make changes in a script that poked fun at airport security. Apparently he was going to have the congenitally-incompetent Lewis and Oswald get jobs as security guards. Sounds like good casting to me. But I guess ABC isn’t into “reality TV.”

Note that the story is being reported by MSNBC…

Bob Novak provides some more interesting background on Riordan’s electoral slapdown.

I wasn’t previously aware of this, but apparently (and bizarrely), Riordan was actually proud of his RINO label. And for people who thought that he was a conservative Republican in 1992, check this out:

I first met Riordan, a fabulously rich businessman, after the 1992 Los Angeles riots. His suggestions for urban peace sounded sensible but not very conservative. In passing, he informed me he was about to run for mayor the next year. He indicated he would not stress his Republican affiliation in seeking the non-partisan mayoralty in an overwhelmingly Democratic city.

He was true to his word, even after entering the mayor’s office. Apart from flashing his RINO button, he fawned over President Bill Clinton, endorsed Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein for re-election and avoided Republican Party functions. He was so excessive in praising the way Federico Pena handled the 1994 Los Angeles earthquake as Clinton’s secretary of Transportation that he suggested Pena would make a good president.

Riordan has no one to blame for his loss but himself.

An eleven-year-old boy in Omaha, dressed as Jesus for a school function, got into a fight with another boy who called him “Little Bo Peep” and “Heidi.”

Guess he hadn’t gotten to the part of the book about turning the other cheek yet.

I haven’t said anything about the now-famous penned atrocity that Ted Rall had pulled from the Paper Formerly Known As The Paper of Record, but Protein Wisdom has been battering him pretty steadily, and hilariously for the past couple days. Today, they reprise the earlier Anne Coughman slicing and dicing of his monumentally stupid scribblings of a couple months ago.

Boy, I hope that I never get on her bad side…

But as long as we’re doing greatest hits, and using Teddy boy for target practice, here’s my take on him from my Media Casualties piece:

“For some, a lucky few, catatonia is a blessed escape. One poor wretch named Ted just sits up in his bed all day. His brow is furrowed, and his eyes are unfocused, or focused on some distant unreality, unseeable by the rest of us.

Old newsroom veterans call it the ‘thousand-word stare.’ They’ve all seen it–that look you get as you gaze intently at a blank computer screen, in a futile attempt to conjure up some words that will somehow spin an obvious and just victory into humiliating and immoral failure.

He had been leading a frontal assault on common sense, when he was cut down in a withering fire of logic and irony by a brigade of blogger sharpshooters and fact checkers. The hits were effective, but not always clean. He lived, but his syntax was badly mangled, and his credibility was shattered beyond any hope of salvaging it.”

But somehow, he keeps getting up, and coming back for more. Masochist.

There seems to be a subtle point missing in much of the discussion of Andrea Yates’ sanity.

Yes, she called the police because she knew that drowning her children like so many kittens in a sack was illegal. But if she (insanely, in my humble opinion) thought that the alternative was to consign them to hell, then she also thought that what she was doing was not wrong.

My opinion–she’s mad as a hatter (or at least she was on the day that she murdered her kids). She’s probably not a danger to society at this point, but she should get years of confined therapy, and never be allowed to bear any more children.

But the larger point is that all that is immoral is not necessarily illegal, nor should it be. And vice versa. Yes, we all know that killing your own children is wrong, but not simply because there’s a law against it. And not all things that are illegal (such as not reporting the location of Jews in Nazi Germany) are wrong.

And the point of this post is that, just because Andrea Yates reported her crime to the authorities, and was willing to accept the consequences, it does not mean that she properly understood the moral implications of her act.

I’ve been as hard on the EU as anyone in blogdom, but I want to extend my most profound sympathy to the families of the German and Danish (and any others of which I’m unaware) soldiers who were killed in Kabul, in defense of civilization.

This is pretty neat. After over twenty years, it’s still possible to communicate with Pioneer 10, even though it’s almost seven and a half billion miles away (twice the distance to Pluto, the most distant planet) and far outside our solar system. It took over twenty-two hours for the signal to be received and acknowledged. From there, the sun is just another bright star, and there is no heat for the spacecraft except what it can still generate from its depleting plutonium power generator.

This would not have been possible if it had had any other than a nuclear power source.

The numbers involved here are staggering. It’s so far away, and the signal so diffuse, that by the time it reaches the earth, it has a power of only ten to the minus 20th or so watts. That’s 0.00000000000000000001 (that’s nineteen zeros after the decimal point). But we can still pick up the signal, using the huge dishes in places like Goldstone in California.

And the data rate is probably excruciatingly low.

Given the ability to get just a few bits through, I wonder what the conversation was…

Ground: Hello, Pioneer. Are you out there?

Pioneer: Yes.

Ground: How are you doing?

Pioneer: How do you think I’m doing? I’M FREEZING IN THE DARK! What did you think you were doing, sending me all the way out here?! And why don’t you ever write?