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The amount of bad news for Democrats today is overwhelming. Having this many negative stories come out in a month would be bad enough, but the cracks have turned to shatters in the liberal dream now that their risky strategy is falling apart. It’s the same thing the Republicans did and it happens every time a party tries to form a permanent majority.

The strategy was simple..and quite brilliant in a political sense. Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s right hand, won the first stage of power, the Congress, by choosing candidates who would win, not necessarily pure liberals. Obama’s second stage was to run on a platform of change, transparency, and stay vague. George W. was a sitting duck and the Republican chosen to run against him was indeed Bush II (err.. III).

And the final stage was once they had supermajorities and full control of the government, ram through all their real ideas and no one could stop them. Build a big government and bring everyone into it by handing out money to a desperate, recession ridden country. Once built, almost impossible to undo. And you control the power structure that watches the ballot boxes. Unfortunately his party is split now between those onboard and those needing to get reelected.

Here is today’s news. In my many years of keeping up extensively with current events, I’ve not seen anything like it honestly. All of this was published today.

* After President Obama had to apologize to handicapped kids for his description of his bowling “like the Special Olympics” on Leno, Rahm Emanuel called those in his own party who don’t go along “f***ng retarded.” And it wasn’t the f part that was offensive. He phoned in a call to the Special Olympics and they said nope. He then went in person to apologize and today they said “thanks, but apology not accepted.”

* When they weren’t hiding the global warming decline, they were cooking the books on just how bad unemployment and the recession is to save face since we did spend a trillion to fix that problem. Today it was revealed that the numbers will be slightly adjusted..to the tune of nearing a million more unemployed than they estimated. My theory on how that happened is just a conspiracy.

* Today Obama said the problem isn’t him, it’s that we spend too much time worrying about what they’re doing. We need to stop looking at blogs and watching the news. Seriously, he said that. Video of the remarks and oddly MSNBC cutting away after he tells people to stop watching them too. (Hot Air.)

* A new report on our national security shows that Obama’s new and fresh take on terrorism and hostile regimes is working as well as everyone but him thought it would. Should be seeing a terrorist attack in the US before summer.

* Super Bowl ads are pretty expensive, unless you’re the government. Using some of daddy’s (read China’s) allowance money, you’ll get to see a $2.5 million dollar ad about participating in the Census during the Super Bowl. If you think that’s a lot of money, you haven’t been paying attention.

* But now if YOU want to waste your money on something like Vegas, Obama has some words for you. This being the second time that recession-ridden Vegas has been slammed by Obama, the mayor finally said “screw you.” More specifically that Obama’s “not welcome here.” I’ve never seen an administration flat out scold people and tell them how to lives beyond all the laws that force you to. Except that wasn’t the end of it today…

* You have been instructed by the DOT Secretary not to drive your Toyota. Just kidding he misspoke. The government owns competitor General Motors. So General Motors just told you not to drive your Toyota until you get it repaired.

*5 or so stories on further fraud,lying and hiding on Global Warming at the highest levels that’s not news anymore, but having this former believer/alarmist say he’s defeated by all this corruption and manipulation is news.

* Why is the IRS buying Shotguns????? It’s April 15 kids, lock the doors.

And the fallout of all of this is..

* The Democrats blasting and questioning  Obama are oddly the ones who are teetering on defeat. But…wouldn’t they want the popular, articulate president on their side come election time?

* Now News.. Republicans lead by 12 points for a Senate seat. News.. it’s Obama’s seat in Illinois.

That’s just today’s news. No one has enough time to read even the past week’s news of everything else that has been happening. Hope and change is in the clouds, the rest of us will be stuck with the reality down here. Or as Obama puts it “to clean up the mess.”

From the same guy who did the 70-minute Phantom Menace movie review that took me 3 weeks to finish (but pretty worth it) now attacks Avatar in much less time. He’s a little weird, but for those who weren’t enthralled by the movie’s plot of message beating, it’s worth a watch. Maybe skim through part 1, part 2 is actually good on its own as well.

Strong Content Warning.

Part 1

Part 2

Though I don’t join Facebook groups, the “When I Was a Kid We Had to Blow on Video Games to Make Them Work” was pretty tempting. For those who grew up with Mario before he started fighting his friends or threw a Party, this will probably be quite enjoyable.

A Canadian Prime Minister is getting his heart surgery in the U.S. Socialized medicine sounds good in theory, it sounds good to save money by giving Grandma the pain pills instead of that advanced hip surgery, but when it comes to your own health, go USA.

We have to keep our health system around or the leaders of the world won’t have any place to get healthcare.

National Post – N.L. Pemier Williams Set to Have Heart Surgery in the U.S.

Shortly after the iPad announcement, Apple CEO Steve Jobs held a townhall with his employees as he does after many of the big product releases.  He addressed Adobe, Flash, Android and many other hot topics. I’ll skip past all the background to Jobs eye-opening spear aimed at Google.

This don’t be evil mantra: “It’s bulls***.”

Here are a few other interesting quotes from the meeting attributed to Jobs.

About Adobe:

They are lazy, Jobs says. They have all this potential to do interesting things but they just refuse to do it. They don’t do anything with the approaches that Apple is taking, like Carbon. Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy, he says. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it’s because of Flash. No one will be using Flash, he says. The world is moving to HTML5.

On Google:

We did not enter the search business, Jobs said. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake they want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them, he says.

Read the whole article over at Wired.com

(500) Days of Summer
Rated PG-13
Runtime: 95 minutes
Directed by Marc Webb
Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel
Nominated for 2010 Golden Globe Best Picture – Comedy or Musical

This semi-indie romantic comedy starts right off with the narrator saying “This is a story of boy meets girl. But you should know up front, this is not a love story.” An interesting beginning as we generally assume a romantic comedy is about the events leading to the characters getting together. This one seems to be about the events that lead them apart.

From my perspective you will either really like this movie, or be really bored by it. My opinion is that it depends on what types of relationships you have been in in the past and your feeling on love and fate. For those who have had pretty stable relationships or married their high school sweet heart, there’s a good chance this movie is just about two obnoxious main characters.

But for the rest of us, who never can seem to figure out exactly what it is that makes a relationship work (if anything), this movie was written to speak to you. But then again, with the characters being so different, it may speak to guys and girls differently. It spoke to me and I identified with much of it.

The movie is slightly indie in that it tells the plot out of order. Sometimes this doesn’t work for me, but it works fairly well here. It doesn’t seem to tell it completely backwards, so it gets a bit confusing at a few parts. It also mixes a few random artistic choices, like inserting a singing scene, some hand-drawn art on the screen, and a mini-documentary in the middle of the movie. Again, normally I’m not a big fan of total randomness, but it wasn’t too distracting here.

The film also features a great soundtrack. I couldn’t figure out where to talk about it so I just put it here.

There is no plot per se, but more a series of events telling a simple story. The two main characters do a good job, and the supporting cast was great. I found the lead male to be a well written character who I empathized with, but I found his love interest to be a bit stereotypical and I really didn’t like her as a person. But, again, that’s sometimes how love blinds us and we only see the good but ignore the bad things in people.

If you’ve ever met someone and after one conversation like “I love hiking too!” and thought you were destined to be together forever. Or if you are the opposite, and believe that fate and love doesn’t really exist, and you just do your best with what you’ve got – then there’s something in this movie you can relate to and something you’ll learn.

It’s a romance with little romance, a comedy with little comedy, and an indie that isn’t too indie. Sounds like an underwhelming effort, but for me, it was a pretty good film and got me thinking much more than any romantic comedy I’ve ever seen. The irony is that in the film it discusses how mainstream greeting cards, pop songs, and movies have shaped our perception of love.

Maybe not the best date flick, but then again since most relationships aren’t like the movies, maybe it is the best kind of date flick.

* * * stars out of 4

An interesting news update, the director of this movie was recently chosen to direct the new Spider-Man reboot.

What others are saying

You’re going to hear a lot about 500 Days of Summer over the next few months. All of the good stuff is true. Any bad stuff you hear is not. – Film Threat

Visually witty, flawlessly played romantic comedy. – Chicago Reader

Something seldom seen: an original romantic comedy. – LA Times

For all its rhetorical whimsy and hipster dressings, (500) Days of Summer is a thoroughly conservative affair, as culturally and romantically status quo as any Jennifer Aniston vehicle. – NPR

I haven’t heard of this prior, but the short clip from the mockumentary Four Lions by Chris Morris, is surprising in both its topic and level of humor. It will be premiering at the Sundance Film Festival.

We unfortunately live in a world where humor about terrorists/Islam can get you murdered, so it’s nice to see Sundance’s proclivity to make fun of religion turn it sights on one that truly takes courage.

Information on the film at Hey You Guys UK

The guy who did the smarmy iPhone vs. Stone is back, and finds — again — that in the battle between a stone and Apple’s latest technology feature to feature, it’s a draw.

In an odd statement sent today, Osama Bin Laden sent a message about a new evil of the United States – and the best way to bring us down. This time, though, it comes straight out of An Inconvenient Truth. Bin Laden is now on record as being very concerned about Global Warming.

I type as I sit here waiting for the blizzard of 2010 to hit the East.

Much like the Al Goracle, Bin Laden sees the United States as the cause of this weather chaos, and his plan to stop it is to bring down our industry a bit. The last time someone spoke with such boldness, they won a Nobel Peace Prize. And if you are concerned that the little terrorism side of him would hurt his chances, Yassar Arafat would disagree.

If he can’t win the peace prize, Senator Bin Laden could be in the future if he ran as a Democrat. Ok, ok….that’s a little extreme. Though he blames Bush and corporations for climate change, wants us to join Kyoto, sides with the Palestinians in the middle east, and is an avid fan of Noam Chomsky.

Bin Laden notes that ‘Noam Chomsky (the US academic and political commentator) was correct when he compared the US policies to those of the Mafia.”

The recording hasn’t been confirmed, so it may all be a hoax. But the irony is that the hoax is on us (if you’ve paid attention to the past few month’s ClimateGate, HimalayanGate, and uh..IPCCgate )… and even Osama’s alleged idea to bring the country to its knees isn’t too far off from Cap and Trade.

Other excerpts from An Inconvenient Beard

Talk about climate change is not an ideological luxury but a reality,’ he said.

‘All of the industrialised countries, especially the big ones, bear responsibility for the global warming crisis.’

He added that while wealthy nations had agreed to the Kyoto Protocol that binds them to emission targets, former U.S. President George W Bush had later rejected such limitations before Congress in deference to big business.

The United States never ratified the existing Kyoto Protocol, whose present commitments expire in 2012, and has said it will not sign up to an extended Kyoto Protocol, preferring a new agreement.

If it wasn’t already, the science is definitely now settled.