On a week when millions of Americans watched in disgust as the Lockerbie bombing terrorist was released by the UK (can you smell the BNP Libyan oil contracts? I bet you can) and greeted with celebrations as if he had just won the World Cup instead of getting wrongfully released from jail for his part in the mass murder of innocent airline passengers, McCain had to go and tweet, “Late evening with Col. Qadhafi at his “ranch” in Libya - interesting meeting with an interesting man.” Now this happened a few days before the final decision on the case of Abdel Basset al-Megrahi was made, but the process had already begin, quietly coordinated with Libya to time Abdel Basset al-Megrahi’s release for the celebration of the Libyan revolution. McCain might have been ignorant of the details and on the 20th he did tweet, “I strongly oppose the decision to release Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, the only person ever convicted in the bombing of Pan Am flight 103.” But when McCain met with Qadhafi, he certainly wasn’t ignorant of his involvement in the Lockerbie bombing. It’s not out of line for McCain to meet with Qadhafi, but treating the meeting with the kind of Tweet that Kerry might have given after meeting with Castro, the sort of thing liberals are justly condemned for, is still disgusting.

The much talked about Moon landing anniversary is a chance for everyone to drag out memorabilia and parade around aged astronauts as a reminder of what we once used to be able to do, but can’t do anymore. Forget a moon landing, we can’t even seem buy F-22’s anymore. Buzz Aldrin is pushing for a trip to Mars, arguing with other astronauts who back a return moon landing. And sad to say they’re both wrong. Even if another administration gets into office that sees NASA as something more than a supporting argument for fighting greenhouse gas emissions, a one shot trip is just the giant waste of money that critics say it is. The moon landings were historic for their time, but we have the technological infrastructure to do more than spend 40 billion on a long and very expensive trip to Mars that can never be repeated without reinvesting that money all over again. As Arthur C. Clarke had repeatedly pointed out, we need a bridgehead to the stars. That means we need infrastructure to tackle the gravity well problem and making the trip from earth to orbit affordable. The best odds of that lie with a space elevator. If we could invest the kind of resources we do into making the latest flat screen TV’s an inch thick, or a microprocessor the size of a gnat, we could be masters of the solar system.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg is wildly unpopular with New Yorkers. He’s also a virtual lock to be New York City’s next Mayor, even though the only way he could even run, was to get a dirty city council to pass a special law on his behalf, even after claiming that he would respect term limits. The paradox here isn’t just resolved by pointing out that Mayor Bloomberg is rich. Not even by pointing out that he’s very rich. Very rich men have tried to run for office before. Ross Perot tried to buy the Presidency. Tom Golisano tried to get to be Governor of New York, instead he failed three times, and his coup in the Albany Senate didn’t succeed either.

No it’s not just about the money, but how you spend it. Bloomberg hasn’t simply been barraging the public with huge amounts of ads promoting himself long before the campaign even began, superseding the spending limits of just about every candidate out there. He’s also gone way beyond the kind of spending you saw from Ross Perot or Tom Golisiano. Of course unlike them he has the advantage of aiming at a smaller playing field, if you can describe one of the country’s largest cities as a small playing field.

But Bloomberg has been smarter about spending in another direction, buying up political support, using both the city’s money and his own, which the billionaire reformer candidates like Perot or Golisano avoid doing because it runs counter to their agenda, their instincts and because you have to already be in public office to spend public money buying support from everyone down to Lenora Fulani. Bloomberg’s political philosophy has been, “Don’t get mad, here have some funding.” It means that everyone from his paid campaign staff who live high on the hog, to anyone worth appeasing, has hard dollar and cent incentives to back Bloomberg, or at least to refrain from taking him on. Which makes him all but unstoppable.

Just when the air was filled with sneering and parodies of Twitter and the whole Twitter culture, the Iranian revolution or student uprisings or whatever the hell it all is, came along, complete with Iranian twitter updates and a Twitter war between Ahmadinejad loyalists and Mosavi supporters, not to mention bots and all sorts of random wackiness, to make sure that Twitter’s claim to relevance could no longer be denied. Is Twitter actually relevant? Not really. Any system that’s based around 140 character updates is going to be fundamentally silly, even if it isn’t fronted by a bluebird and Ashton Kutcher. But none of that really matters, because relevant people actually began making use of it for something relevant, and the silly tool proved useful for quick updates of a mini-war. Which now defacto makes it relevant.

It never fails, whenever the media seems to be short of a big story, we naturally get some sort of hysteria over an all encompassing crisis that’s certain to convince the average couch dweller that the end of civilization is nigh. Right now it’s Swine Flu, the killer epidemic that has already claimed the lives of millions if not billions, and will shortly own its own firm of Washington D.C. lobbyists. Swine Flu has come to America before, which resulted in the death of every single America between the years 1967 and 1972. Luckily new more efficiently made Americans were imported from Sweden and Japan, thus saving America.

So far a single baby from Mexico has died in America of Swine Flu. And apparently a minister who met with Obama. This hasn’t stopped the media from building up the same panic that they did for Avian Bird Flu, that killed every single American between 1992 and 2007, or the Y2K virus that caused nuclear weapons to launch prematurely and blow up the entire planet. So now the media is in full on shriek mode. The Vice Idiot in Chief has warned all Americans to stay out of planes, subways and crowded areas, because apparently he’s old enough to remember the Influenza epidemic. The media of course is only too happy to splash his hysterical nonsense right next to their own hysterical nonsense, sandwiched between photos of people in Mexico wearing generally useless surgical masks.

I can’t help but think that we’d have a much better behaved press if every business that lost revenue because of some media shrillfest could actually sue them for damages. It might breed less reports on THAI FLU VIRUS OF DOOM or WENGER’S TROJAN HORSE WILL EAT YOUR COMPUTER ON FEBRUARY 30 that the press seems positively addicted to. I know responsible journalism went extinct with the dodo and the honest election, but since the American public can’t collectively bitch slap CNN, except in the ratings, maybe it’s time to hold news organizations accountable for baseless hysteria.

Oh by the way Swine Flu killed every single American between 2009 and 2012. Luckily more efficient and weirder were quickly imported from the 8th Dimension.

The Day the Earth Stood Still is just the latest eco-catastrophe movie to flunk the box office, down in the bottom 5 in only its second week of release, following a trail of expensive big budget eco-catastrophe movies such as The Happening and Evan Almighty, the latter holding down a budget of 150 million dollars. The Day After Tomorrow is the closest thing to a success in this genre in recent years and its domestic take was only marginally higher than its budget. Eco-catastrophe movies are typically defined by big budget special effects and a focus on lecturing audiences about the dangers of global warming and general failure to take care of the environment.

So why are Eco-Catastrophe movies such audience repellents? For one thing they’re political. Political movies can do well with a controlled budget, but spending a 100 million+ to make a movie that automatically alienates half the potential audience is bad business. And then there’s the whole concept. People going to see a big budget movie want action and explosions, not lectures, and since there is no real villain, except the occasional evil rich white guy who somehow causes the whole thing, the interest level is naturally going to be low.

The Happening typifies the problem with grass killing people. Now if the grass had shot out of the ground and pierced people, that might have at least been entertaining. But we didn’t even get that. Movies about nuclear war barely worked, but at least the threat was undeniable and it could happen at any time. The environment can’t collapse at any time, and making a big budget movie about a long term problem is a no win situation. You either have to dumb it down ridiculously, the way The Day After Tomorrow did, or try to honestly depict the problem, which is going to bore the hell out of viewers. And either way you lose.

The Star Ledger putting out an issue minus the AP might be getting more press, no pun intended, than it deserves, but it does raise a pressing issue (pun intended this time) about the future of print media. The Star Ledger, which has made some dramatic cuts lately in a bid to stay profitable, cutting back on wire services makes sense because after all few Star Ledger readers, particularly under 40 are reading the paper for global or national coverage anyway.

The internet has dramatically changed the business model for print media and the outlets most likely to survive are either national name brand papers such as the New York Times which will have to cut and trim and sell a lot (NY1 has already been sold and their white elephant of a skyscraper may be next in a downward real estate market) while surviving on prestige and solid website offerings that can compete with non print media websites, and local papers that can survive by focusing on the local instead of trying to be an all around paper by providing national and world coverage its customers will get online anyway.

As the internet penetrates more and more homes, wire services such as the AP will find themselves out of place in the print media marketplace. National brand name papers such as the New York Times don’t need to rely on them with a wide base of correspondents all across the country and local papers are surviving by going more local, providing more community and less national and global courage. Reuters has been smart about its online strategy, the AP less so. UPI has been out of the game for a while. Wire services will still have a place online but in a tougher marketplace selling their services may not be as easy anymore (pun not intended, and so we come full circle).

What qualifies Caroline Kennedy to be a Senator? Well she wrote some books. Books such as A Family Christmas, featuring songs, poems and other things written by other people she liked, and got to publish as her own collection with a high advance because she’s a Kennedy. And then there’s A Family of Poems: My Favorite Poetry for Children, which is filled with, you guessed it, poems Caroline Kennedy liked that other people wrote and got to publish in a collection. And then there’s A Patriot’s Handbook: Songs, Poems, Stories, and Speeches Celebrating the Land We Love, I think you can guess what this one is. That’s right, songs, poems and stuff that Caroline Kennedy read and liked, and got to publish cause she’s a Kennedy.

Ah but you want her serious books, well there’s Profiles In Courage For Our Time, a collection of, yes, and in no way does that trade in on her father’s name. Not at all. His famous book by the same name doesn’t at all relate to that. But you want her Constitutional law books? There’s In Our Defense: The Bill of Rights In Action, which is long since out of print and was co-authored with an actual working lawyer. Finally there’s The Right to Privacy, high on the sensationalistic factor and low on actual legal cred, again co-authored with an actual working lawyer, Ellen Alderman. The particularly odd thing you notice is that Caroline Kennedy keeps co-authoring even law school journal articles with Ellen Alderman. Her own work shows that Ellen Alderman can author her own stuff, but on her own her material wouldn’t have the fame that comes from stamping Caroline Kennedy’s name on the cover. But if her books on Constitutional Law are what give Caroline Kennedy a claim to being a Senator, shouldn’t Ellen Alderman also be up for the job?

Oh wait, I forgot. Ellen Alderman may have written the books that Caroline Kennedy takes credit for (And I don’t mean A Family Christmas) but her last name isn’t Kennedy. Too bad.

Let’s face it, to politicians a crisis means a chance to pass a whole lot of pork. When 9/11 happened, we got a whole lot of pork to keep America safe. Right away came the bills to bailout the Airline industry, renovate the Smithsonian and study fisheries, all to protect America. So it’s no surprise to anyone faintly breathing that the economic fumble means politicians think it’s a good time to pass a whole boatload of pork. The bank bailouts were bipartisan pork, while the new stimulus pork bill will be purely Democratic pork, the only difference it makes is who the corporations and unions can send their checks too. Republicans getting all worked up about the pork are being ridiculously hypocritical. The last time there was a crisis on their watch, they pulled out the pork. Why be surprised when the Democrats do the same exact thing. Because it’s not about Republicans or Democrats, it’s about politicians and politicians get into office by pulling out the pork. If the recession manages to turn around before the next election, Obama will hang up a big Mission Accomplished sign and take credit for saving America, and everyone who sneered when Bush did it, will cheer for their lives. Of course it will be a much better designed Mission Accomplished sign, with tasteful fonts, and it won’t say Mission Accomplished, but something like Prosperity Positively Achieved, but it’s the same song, just a different record.

Torture has become a major focus of the debate about 24, so much so that Season 7 of 24 opens with Jack Bauer having to justify himself in front of a Senate committee hearing on torture, after a subpoena that chases him around half of Africa. The entire controversy is more than a little silly at a time in which Dexter, a show which brings new meaning to the word torture, is a critically praised darling. The real objections aren’t to torture on 24, but the perceived politics of torture, namely the idea that 24 supports the Bush Administration’s use of torture, which isn’t torture in the 24 sense and looks nothing like the sort of things Jack or CTU has done to terrorists.

That entire argument is painfully lame, particularly when 24 is then blamed for what goes on at Gitmo. And while Joel Surnow may be a Republican, the rest of the producers and writers certainly aren’t. Nor is Kiefer Sutherland of all people. And the series’ storylines are more Anti-Republican than they are anything else. Season after season has featured storylines that only Sean Penn or a 9/11 truther could love, with shadowy government forces and even the President, staging terrorist attacks in order to justify a war.

Putting that aside though, torture has become more of an issue on 24 itself for all the wrong reasons. In this season and the last, the show’s writers are clearly reacting to criticism of the series. But torture has become a larger factor on the show as the series has begun to run low on ideas.

Torture was always present on 24 as part of a larger background showing that Jack Bauer would break any and all the rules to stop the bad guys. From staging a convenience store robbery in order to delay a terrorist, going rogue, getting addicted to drugs, breaking out a terrorist kingpin, staging an assassination of a Presidential candidate, carjacking, shotgunning a guard dog, staging the killings of family members of a terrorist leader and shooting his own boss, and yes torturing suspects, the message was that Jack Bauer would do anything to get the job done. Torture was just one of the desperate and illegal things Jack Bauer would do while racing the clock. And then the series began to focus on the torture, as it ran out of clever ideas and things for Jack to do while beating the clock.

Torture on 24 isn’t a problem because it’s morally wrong. Or else what would we make of half of what’s on television. It’s a problem because it’s symptomatic of 24’s creative bankruptcy.

The Surgeon General is usually either an annoying figure who’s ignored or an embarrassment, picking a CNN TV medical correspondent for the job, as Obama did with Sanjay Gupta, is at least honest, because the practical side of the job involves getting on TV and annoying people as least as possible, but it also highlights how ridiculous the position is in the first place. The Department of Health and Human Services needs to be rethought, almost as badly as the Department of Homeland Security needs to be. And having a Surgeon General, like many of the Czars, is a bad cross between modern media platforms and old style do nothing bureaucracy, getting the worst of both worlds in the bargain. America does not need Czars and we don’t need Sanjay Gupta drawing a hefty government salary to annoy people on TV. If Daschle makes one useful contribution in that regard, it might almost help balance out all the big HMO’s he used to lobby for, who will be getting the white glove treatment from the new Cabinet member and former Senate leader. The deficit is bigger than ever and paying Sanjay Gupta a six figure salary to dress up in a uniform and basically do what CNN is already paying him to do is an unforgivable and senseless waste.

It’s ironic that it is Congressional Democrats, fresh from a nationwide victory march dedicated to change, that are using all that prestige and power to shove corporate welfare down America’s throat. Corporate welfare was supposed to be the naughty thing that Republicans did, the usual retort that vanilla welfare was just fine, because corporate welfare was the alternative. And now here we are spending more on corporate welfare than we did to invade and conquer two countries. If anything the Democrats in Congress just proved that it would have been cheaper to start a war and hand out a bunch of defense contracts, than to dump trillions on CEO’s. I realize corporate donations are a bitch and Wall Street is in a Democratic city and a Democratic state. So are the big automakers. But in only a few weeks the Democrats have managed to make themselves the party of corporate welfare, the one that’s willing to shell out gigantic sums of money just to bail out their corporate pals. And that will come back to bite them on the ass. But not before it bites us.

After making his rep with a commercial tying him to the iPod and Hillary Clinton to the IBM PC, Barack Obama stabs the Apple crowd in the back by choosing a Zune over an iPod. I have to say this one is reaaaaaly baffling. Even Bush knew enough to use an iPod. And I could sort of defend someone choosing a Zune a year and a half ago, when the Zune actually had something to offer, but when you’ve got tons of money, you can afford to spend the extra 20 bucks for an iPod Touch 16 gig. What exactly does Obama see in the Zune anyway? The WiFi song sharing? Somehow I don’t see him going around sending songs to the secret service. If he was going to go non-Apple, the Archos players are pretty hard core, and it’s not as if he can’t afford those. Of course the whole thing has upset Obama supporters who have a lot of demographic overlap with Steve Jobs supporters, and began harassing the reporter demanding that he recant and arguing that Obama was probably using an iPod that looked like a Zune. And so the black Zune cover conspiracy theory begins.

I’m not a fan of bigots or the intolerant, particularly in the name of religion, and that LDS and various other religious groups had to spend this much money for a gay marriage ban is decidedly creepy. But then again going after donors to a political cause individually is also ugly and a distinct attack on free speech. Gay rights activists have every right to feel bitter but targeting donors to a political cause can easily backfire, especially since the US has a lot more places where donors to gay friendly causes would be harassed than vice versa. And even if that weren’t the case, boycotts and naming and shaming donors provides bad PR mainly for gay rights. It smacks of intimidating people for supporting political causes which is the sort of thing that’s just bad for everyone, in the words of a Seinfeld episode. And going after opponents when you’ve lost a political referendum at the polls smacks of sour grapes. The efforts being used to go after LDS donors would be better employed educating voters in minority communities who came out solidly for the ban. Unfortunately that’s a less shiny use of time and resources than screaming at restaurant owners and getting a theatrical director fired from his job.

Sure why pick someone who’s actually qualified and has a background in diplomacy. Let’s pull another Colin Powell instead. Because diplomacy is something that absolutely anyone can do, as long as they’re traveled briefly across the world or had some involved in national politics. It’s not a serious profession and the head of the State Department should by no means whatsoever come out of the actual State Department. That’s a no brainer. I mean it’s not like we appoint Secretaries of Defense who have never served in the military or heads of the CIA who have never worked in Intelligence. Why is diplomacy so looked down on that we can hand out the Secretary of State Job as a consolation prize to Hillary Clinton? Seriously can someone please explain this one because I don’t get it. Is the Obama admin supposed to be amateur hour? It’s bad enough that the man at the top is a Junior Senator who ran on a lot of cheery slogans with no real life experience, but now we’re going to surround him with people who are just as unqualified? Agh, I’m starting to regret not voting.

Tech websites are trumpeting the announcement that Obama’s radio addresses will be available on YouTube. Now I have a rule that any political announcement which includes the words MySpace, Facebook, Twitter or YouTube is probably obnoxious and unnecessary. This one joins the list, since the big news is that Obama will video tape himself giving his address or rather his flunkies will and put it up on YouTube. I’m guessing that would matter if it wasn’t already so inevitable. Both Presidential candidates had their own YouTube channels already and you can find every speech anyone running for office in 2008 has made on YouTube. Pardon me if I don’t really care or have no interest in listening to Obama drone on about hope and change week after week, while our economy stays in the toilet. I can only take so much phony optimism and I suspect the same goes for even die hard Obama supporters. The first Obama YouTube address will be heavily hyped, the second one won’t, by the 6th no one will be watching.

The big Presidential election, really the contest over which corrupt Senator would get the chance to offer up huge bailouts for the corporations that supported him is over. And the winners are Wall Street and the Automobile industry, uh I mean Senator Obama and you know the corporations who funded his campaign. Now we can move on to 4 years of dealing with problems that can’t be solved by T-Shirts and Nike sound alike slogans. Meanwhile with a one sided congress, we can look forward to a porkfest, the likes of which have never been seen. For the Republicans, it’s the Clinton years all over again. For the Democrats it’s a huge feeding pot and we’ll be lucky if there’s anything left to fix the actual highways or keep the Air Force planes running by the time we’re done. The lookout will no doubt be darker on the NASA front with a focus on climate control and away from any planned interplanetary expeditions. I plan to just keep right on ignoring the news. The people who voted for Obama will shortly begin paying the price for it and next time around it’ll be the Republicans turn to wreck the country.

Once again Michael Bloomberg has managed to roll over a corrupt New York City city council which has proven all too easy for him to alternately bribe and intimidate to get himself a virtual lock for a third term, in the process betraying his own stated principles and making a wildly unpopular move that will no doubt come back to bite him in the ass. But underneath the Michael Corleone ability to get things his own way, Michael Bloomberg has increasingly shown us a Mario Cuomo side to himself underneath, first foolishly diving into national politics completely out of his depth and then flustered returning to city politics and promising to take charge of the city in the whole financial crisis emergency. But much as Bloomberg would like to look like a winner, he instead looks like a loser who’s had to knock a few heads to get himself an extension in his current job. Whatever ambitions Bloomberg had they now recede to running the city for a third term, a city that increasingly doesn’t like him or trust him and only tolerates him for lack of a better alternative.

Political informercials in prime time used to be the refuge of rich but crazy third party candidates like Ross Perot or Lyndon LaRouche, but now Obama has taken it mainstream. There’s something sad but inevitable about that, the loss of any dignity left in a Presidential campaign. Politics was never pretty but there was an effort to keep some class in the business of choosing a President. And then it became routine for Presidential candidates to stop by Oprah and Saturday Night Live. Now it’s routine for them to use viral videos and infomercials. We’ve taken the Presidential race right to the front pages of celebrity magazines and Paris Hilton releasing her Funny or Die comedy videos is now reported on as political news along with Obama girl and whether Joe the Plumber will get a country music contract. Things aren’t just bad, they’ve reached the point where issues aren’t an issue anymore. Not when the press would rather cover Palin’s wardrobe or Obama’s beach photos or where Michelle orders her clothes or how much Tina Fey looks like Sarah Palin. If there’s one reason I wish Obama and Palin would both vanish where they came from is that they’ve made our political culture as hopelessly retarded as our celebrity culture.

The one thing you can count on is that between the smug cult of personality on one side and the mudslinging on the other, anyone who isn’t a member of the faithful for Obama or McCain is either confused and turned off this election, probably both. There was no chance in hell this would be an issues oriented election, those only exist in Science Fiction anyway, but we’re in the last weeks of the election and we get more pompous speeches from Obama this time delivered as a Sermon from the Mount infomercial and more claims that Obama is a terrorist from the McCain people. Right now I want a serious third choice even if it’s leaving Bush there for a third term. At least it would avoid dealing with the consequences of this election. Or maybe aliens could hover over Washington D.C. and proclaim to both parties, you screwed the pooch royally, start over and try again. I’ve done my best to tune out the nonsense, which is hard what with every site feeling the need to either promote Obama so obnoxiously that it makes you want to vote for anyone but him, or smear Obama until you want to move to Mexico to get away from it all. I’m torn between being unable to wait for this election to be over and be afraid that one of them will win and I’m not sure which one scares me more.