After 5 television series, a gross of movies, a cartoon and more merchandizing than you can shake a stick at, one would think that Star Trek had been mined to exhaustion.

Apparently not.

Soon you'll be able download a new episode of the original Star Trek series, complete with cheesy costumes and the largely original set, on the internet.

Marshall first met 38-year-old Cawley - where else? - on the bridge of the Enterprise. (The two had been in phone contact about other Trek fan films.) For almost 20 years, Cawley has been assembling the Enterprise piece by piece, initially in his grandfather's barn. It's a perfect re-creation of the set used during the 1966 to 1969 run of Star Trek. When Marshall walked onto the set in upstate New York for the first time, he looked at Cawley, cast his arms wide, and exclaimed, "Brother!" Soon after, they decided to make New Voyages together. In addition to filmmaking chops, Marshall brought promotional skill and a crew of aspiring actors from a previous independent film project. Cawley provided funding, costumes, and the bridge. Still, Cawley would have been content to film himself and his friends playing dress-up for their own amusement. It was Marshall who wanted to put the finished product on the Internet - and maybe change the course of Star Trek history while they were at it.

This isn't kids with towels for capes. The current desktop video technology is light-years ahead (heh,heh) of what was used to make the original series. Episode 3 of season 4 is due own in the Spring, but don't look for it on the Sci-Fi channel (at least not yet). Instead you'll be able to download it on the internet. Hopefully by then Star Trek the New Voyages will have popped for more bandwidth (their site is abominably slow...).

Its apparently a serious enough venture for Walter Koenig (Chekhov) and George Takei (Sulu) to reprise their roles, which I hope means that its good.

GLAAD wants a summit meeting with the producers of American Idol after being offended by allegedly homophobic remarks by judges Simon Cowell and Randy Jackson.

I saw one of the incidents (yes, my whole family watches Idol..) and frankly the young man was not just gay, but odd-dysfunctional-gay. It helps to understand that thousands if not tens of thousands of people show up at these auditions and only a mere fraction ever get to warble in front of Simon, Randy and Paula. Its not that talent is scarce--I've been told by credible sources that really talented people get axed early on because they don't fit into the dynamic the producers envisioned. Its also clear that some dreadfully untalented people get moved up to be laughingstocks. The young man in question was there to be laughed at (he was very effeminate, wearing a baby-T and long hair parted in the middle in a page-boy type cut).

Unlike so many of the others, this guy was clearly not in on the joke. He wasn't there in a chicken suit trying to get on television, he was there to sing and "go to Hollywood". There is a distinct probability that he was passed up the line so we could all laugh at his flamboyant homosexuality.

GLAAD is right to pursue this, but there is a larger point--I am not sure I like what it says about this country that we would exploit people this way. This is far more than simply being uncomfortable with differences (perfectly natural really), but a matter of setting aside someone's humanity for a laugh. What's next? Throwing people to lions?

Telly Nelly Blog

Conservative Revolution

Those of you that saw the episode know that Randy needed to ask that question because the guy said, while dressed like a girl with makeup on, “I sometimes get confused for a girl”. If you saw this person on the street you would have thought it was a girl.:

I wasn't sure either, but should he be held up as an object of derision? For ratings? Maybe I'm wrong, but it doesn't feel right.

Res Ipsa Loquitor

Chris Penn was found dead at his home in Santa Monica by his housekeeper. He was 40 or 43 depending on who you believe.

No cause of death has been stated.

I always thought he was a very fine actor, although for whatever reason, he never achieved the fame and success of his brother Sean. Around Lehi, he was remembered for his role in footloose as the dancing-challenged friend of the Kevin Bacon character (Footloose was filmed in Lehi, Utah). Ironically, his latest film debuts at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah today.

Penn had made almost 60 films, a couple of which have yet to debut.

Police reports say "no foul play" is suspected and so far an autopsy has revealed no cause of death. Penn was not in ill health. That just piques my curiosity. Its strange enough to have a 40 year old man suddenly die for no apparent reason, but even stranger that an autopsy can't determine cause of death.

Somewhere in the confirmation of the Alito nomination, the State of the Union and various other major news events, they announced the Oscar nominations for this year.

"What all these films have in common is they're about the human condition," said Oscar-nominated "Crash" co-writer Bobby Moresco. "The pendulum has swung back to movies about politics. People want films that have something to say; they're tired of fluff."

Really?

Of the current crop of Oscar nominees, only Crash is clearly in the black. Brokeback Mountain is probably at even money now and will likely be in profit after the awards, although in objective terms it could only be considered to be a modest success. The rest are losers and some are major losers.

I recently explained film economics which explains why a film like Brokeback Mountain can have production cost of 14 million and only break even with 60 million in box office.

Notably, the more political the film, the worse it seems to do.

So how does the public really feel about fluff?

Fun with Dick and Jane has grossed 135 million

Big Momma's House 2 has made 30 million in its first weekend

King Kong 522 million

The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (Narnia) 634 million

Harry Potter: Goblet of Fire 879 million

Chicken Little 251 million

Flightplan 197 million

Seems to me that people would really prefer to watch fluff (financial information from box office mojo)

Ed Driscoll:

And note that with his line that "It's been an amazing year, very much like 1968, '69 and '70", Steve is yet another member of the left stuck in the late sixties/1970s mobius loop. All the more ironic and disappointing, since it was he and George Lucas, 30 years ago, who did the most to break Hollywood's cycle of dark, not-very-profitable political films during that period.

Whatever is a new blog for me and I like it:

Numbers: At this moment, the three highest-grossing Best Picture nominees (Crash, Brokeback Mountain, Munich) have done less business in aggregate than the single Adam Sandler film The Longest Yard, and only barely edge out the terrible Superhero film Fantastic Four. All five combined made less than Madagascar -- or the 2000 Best Picture, Gladiator. The average domestic gross of the Best Picture films this year at the time of their nomination is $37.1 million; adjusted for inflation, I suspect strongly this is the lowest-grossing class of Best Picture nominees in the entire eight-decade history of the Academy Awards. Whichever film eventually wins is very likely to be the first Best Picture in a decade not to crack the $100 million mark -- the last Best Picture to fail that was The English Patient.

Just how uncommercial is this crop of nominees? Consider this: a nominee for Best Documentary -- March of the Penguins -- has made more money than any of the Best Picture nominees. I guarantee you that has never happened before, ever. When Hollywood's best films can't compete with chilled, aquatic birds, there's something going on.

I've never watched 24, yet I've read four blogs today that make some reference to it. Would I get it even though I haven't been watching it from the beginning?

The Torino Olympics opening ceremony is almost unwatchable.

With the example of the very entertaining Salt Lake City opening and closing ceremonies, you think they would have a very good template on which to improve, but no.

The theme is "Peace". Yoko Ono is asking you to sing peace. If you ask for peace, you'll get it.

Makea you want to kill someone...

Andreas Katsulas was one of those actors whose face you recognize instantly without having a clue who they are. Its no exaggeration to call his cohort the backbone of Hollywood.

On the other hand, Katsulas was actually a face you might not recognize because his best known role required such extensive makeup. The voice though was unmistakable. While I liked him in "The Fugitive" and some of his other work, the reason I remark his passing was his role as Citizen G'Kar, the St. Paul-like figure of Babylon 5 who in counterpoint to Ambassador Londo Mollari, was one of the most remarkable characters ever seen on television. While Mollari was a weak man who found strength, G'Kar was a bad man (OK, Narn) who became good.

"Let me pass on to you the one thing I've learned about this place: No one here is exactly what he appears. Not Mollari, not Delenn, not Sinclair .. and not me." (G'Kar, Mind War)

Katsulas died on Monday after a long illness. He was not the only Babylon 5 alumnus to have died before his time--Richard Biggs, who played Dr. Stephen Franklin on the series, died in 2004 at the age of 43 of unspecified causes.

Lorie Byrd takes issue with the Oprah show's characterization of the gulf coast as a third world country.

I saw that show as well and found myself irritated at the blatant manipulation by good liberal-left journalists speaking "truth to power". Not that there is anything wrong with doing a Katrina story and the progress (or lack of it) at restore the gulf coast to its former "glory", but speaking truth to power always seems to really mean "fake, but accurate".

A few days ago, I wrote a post about this same show where the Oprah camera crew appears to have altered a search and rescue marking on a ruined house so that Lisa Ling could intone "somebody died in there". Shades of Killian!

Obvious Oprah doesn't have the journalistic stature of Dan Rather (lucky her...), but as a former journalist, she should know better, and as someone whose entire career is based on the trust she has with her audience, this is inexcusable.

George Lucas has pronounced the blockbuster dead

"The market forces that exist today make it unrealistic to spend $200 million on a movie," said Lucas, a near-billionaire from his feverishly franchised outer-space epics. "Those movies can't make their money back anymore. Look at what happened with 'King Kong.'"

On the other hand, look what happened with Lord of the Rings, or the Matrix. LOTR, in one of its episodes, gets played around my house at least every couple of weeks.

I suspect Lucas is projecting his personal frustration over the lackluster performance of the Star Wars prequels.

The bottom line is that if Hollywood stops producing the extravaganzas in favor of the small films, there simply won't be anymore film industry as we know it. Oh, there will still be some kind of film industry, but just like the big studios passed into history, the current model will be replaced--perhaps with a direct to DVD model.

As it stands, the cost of going to the movie theater is high enough that I don't go casually. When discussing current movies, the code phrase is "wait for the DVD"--another way of saying that its not worth the 8 bucks to see in the theater. What makes a movie worth the eight bucks is the visual spectacle afforded by a giant screen, an amazing sound system and a movie that takes full advantage of current visual effect technology--i.e. a 100-200 million dollar movie.

To watch a couple of cowboys in a pup tent, my home theater would be overkill.

I beg to differ with Mr. Lucas, but I suspect the movie business is going for a polarized model--15 million dollar movies and 200 million dollar movies and nothing in between. Its the 70 million dollar movies that are problematic (Syriana). Not enough pizzazz to get people out to the theaters like a block-buster would, but too expensive to make money on Brokeback Mountain ticket sales.

The exceptions are the star vehicles for Jim Carrey etal. People will go see a movie with Jim Carrey in it, so you better pay him what he wants and be grateful for the spillover.

I just watched the Battlestar Galactica finale.

(Pregant pause).

I am verklempt.

I don't think I've ever seen such a brilliantly engrossing finale and I think I'm going to have to get a presciption to make it through until July. I suppose that if you were going to watch it you already did, so I won't be too concerned about spoiling the surprises.

The remarkable aspect of this season finale was that it was entirely predictable, entirely realistic (with the possible exception of Roslyn and Adama NOT stealing the election--democracy is not a suicide pact), and yet surprising. I don't know exactly why I was surprised, but I simply didn't expect this kind of story arc.

I also watched the Star Gate finale and enjoyed that too, but it has that more traditional "Star Trek" optimism. The situation is dire, but you know that our heros will somehow pull through. With Galactica, you take nothing for granted.

Star Gate Atlantis? Just can't get too excited about that show.

Now tha Sci-fi Friday is in reruns, maybe I can get some work done around the house on the weekend...

Dean Esmay is apparently a big fan as well...

Annie Proulx, author of the story adapted to film as Brokeback Mountain skewers the academy.

'We should have known conservative heffalump academy voters would have rather different ideas of what was stirring contemporary culture,' Proulx wrote. 'Roughly 6,000 film industry voters, most in the Los Angeles area, many living cloistered lives behind wrought-iron gates or in deluxe rest-homes, out of touch not only with the shifting larger culture and the yeasty ferment that is America these days, but also out of touch with their own segregated city, decide which films are good.

'And rumor has it that (Lionsgate) inundated the academy voters with DVD copies of `Trash` -- excuse me -- `Crash` a few weeks before the ballot deadline. Next year we can look to the awards for controversial themes on the punishment of adulterers with a branding iron in the shape of the letter A, runaway slaves and the debate over free silver.'

Proulx concluded: 'For those who call this little piece a Sour Grapes Rant, play it as it lays.'

She thought she was a wit, and she was half right.

I haven't read Glenn Reynold's "Army of Davids", in part because--well frankly I could have written the book. That being said, I could never have gotten it published, lacking Reynold's celebrity. But Both professionally and otherwise, I am one of the David's--have wireless connection, will travel.

For this reason, I found myself--well not exactly annoyed, but nevertheless shaking my head at a review in the Weekly Standard by Andrew Keen, who I also thought was off-the-mark with a previous column on Web 2.0.

Both articles reflect a penchant for citing obscure French intellectuals and Hobbesian (obscure English intellectual?) dread of the modern empowerment of the individual. Chaos will ensure and anarchy will be the order of the day without the order imposed by the Leviathan.

In Web 2.0, Keen poses that notorious Luddite (obscure English paleoconservatives?) query on technology--yes we can, but should we? Keen wants us to consider the ethical implications of enabling technologies that thrust a lecturn, a canvas, a broadsheet, a camera or a microphone into the hands of any who wish to avail themselves.

Of course, what he is really saying is that we should consider the ethical implications of the Marxist, flower-child future he draws for us. A future where the artistic and cultural acheivements of the masters are lost or fall on the deaf ears of narcissistic cultural morons.

Total unmitigated crap.

I really should be more sympathetic to the argument as someone with an appreciation for the value of tradition and the continuity provided by society's institutions, but this isn't a cheer for the barbarians to conquer Rome. Its the simple recognition that Keen doesn't know what he is talking about.

To put it succinctly, the new enabling technologies aren't about pulling down the exceptional until its all just one uniform landscape of mediocrity--its about news ways to discover excellence.

Its not about Marxism, its about Americanism, about the possibility for self-realization by the individual without the limiting factors of class. In fact, every single on of the thinkers Keen cites came from a culture that more fully exploited the human resources at their disposal than any other of their day. I submit that Lenardo da Vinci wasn't the creation of renaissance Italy, but that renaissance Italy was the creation of da Vinci and thousands and hundreds of thousands of exceptional people like him.

Unfortunately, as the exceptional becomes institutionalized, it inevitably calcifies and unable to avail itself of the very genius that gave it birth, slips beneath the waves of time.

This process is writ large all over the world's history. At the beginning of the 19th century, sailing ship technology reigned supreme, and so did the companies the had mastered it. Yet by the end of the century, all those companies had disappeared, replaced by new companies featuring steam-drive technology. The real question isn't why those steamship entrepreneurs had no respect for their betters, but why sail ship companies, flush with capital, sittiing astride the traderoutes of the world--failed to make the transition to steam power.

Society progresses in direct relationship to how well it exploits its human resources and the significance of the new enabling technologies is the unprecedented granularity with which it extends opportunity to virtually all members of the society. In essence, its the logical end-point of the American experiment: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

But what of excellence?

In oh so many ways, this is the most bizarre of Keen's worries:

THE REVOLUTION, Glenn Reynolds promises in An Army of Davids might well be inevitable. Even shunting aside notions of exceptionalism and cultural excellence, the idea of personal empowerment wrapped up in Reynolds's man-without-walls worldview is certainly seductive. But it would do readers well to remember that revolutions have consequences.

Egads! The stunning cluelessness of his remark.

There are 30 million blogs according to Technorati's most recent count. 99.999% are never seen or read by anyone outside the author's immediate circle of friends. Those that are read are exceptional by virtue of market acceptance. No academic committee, no editorial board or any other political construct--just people voting with their eyeballs.

The simple reality of empowerment technologies is that they bypass the gatekeepers to allow the market to judge the product directly. Its not perfect, but even I am surprised at how well it actually does work. I strongly suspect that the new artistic, literary and cinematic elite will come from Web 2.0--it is in fact already happening.

Bloggers are all over cable news these days, and even this humble blog has been featured on three broadcasts that I know of (and I never even saw one of them myself...). Authors, both of fiction and non-fiction are also coming out of the blogging world. Increasingly, publishers are looking to promote candidates who already have proven themselves in the market and developed a following. Its a risk-management no-brainer.

Excellence was never in any danger--what is at peril are the power structures that used to arbitrarily dictate taste and popularity. I think we are through with designer pop stars, pointless remakes of King Kong and the Poseidon Adventure, Star Trek and Star Wars serialized novels (and movies)--we will simply regard the garden of a million flowers and pick the most breath-taking examples. Excellence will abound.

David Lee Roth, a replacement on CBS radio for Howard Stern, is now off the air.

Roth has dropped from 4th to 19th in the ratings as the initial good-will his rock-star status got him was dissipated by his poor performance as a talk-show host.

As Rush repeats frequently--don't try this at home folks. Broadcasting is not for amateurs.

Yo dog, I like you but that wasn't good dude...

Actresses of a certain age always complain about the dearth of parts for post-40 women. Sharon Stone demonstrates why. What was once da bomb, is now "da pathetic".

48 year old women should have masters degrees, not masturbation scenes.

Its seems that Ms Stone has failed to observe something important about entertainment celebrity--you get famous in your generation and your stay famous in your generation. Only in the most exceptional circumstances does an actor or rock star get a second chance with the rising generation. One of the funniest things I ever saw was a Van Halen concert about a year ago--these guys look well--older to say the least, but so does the audience. Its a trip down memory lane for everyone, but now you identify with the BNL standard "New Kid (On the Block)

I'm a New Kid on the Block, and 'though I may not be Johann Sebastian Back, there's no need to be afraid of us 'though it just might be your daughter on our bus.

Even Van Halen can't quite pull off the illusion--something about Eddie Van Halen puffing away on a cigarette looking for all the world like he should be playing nickle slots at the Frontier just doesn't fit the illusion of youth, sex, drugs and rock & roll.

Its even tougher for a woman, even a very well "perserved" woman like Sharon Stone. You can look great for 50, and many women do, but you can never recapture the dewiness of youth, and the attempt is disconcerting to say the least. From the perspective of a generational peer, what makes an older woman attractive is less about the sparkle in her skin and hair and more about the sparkle in her eyes.

Ms Stone should spend a little time with Diane Keaton.

Sandi Thom gave a live concert in her basement everyday for 21 days and 100,000 people came to see her.

Now she's signed a deal with RCA.

Its actually less remarkable that it would first appear. Local garage bands in my area have been marketing themselves using internet technologies for years already. You get you band together, get a website and make a CD. It is however the first time someone has been signed based on a purely virtual performance.

Nevertheless, it does highlight the free-market approach that the web affords individual artists. Its not a matter anymore of having the right agent notice you, but of developing enough of a following that you can't be ignored.

Are the travails of Commander-in-Chief reflective of the prospects of Hillary Clinton for gaining the presidency?

Both started out wth enormous buzz, with ratings falling precipitously as time has passed.. Privately, people are saying that both "Commander-in-Chief" and Hillary are doomed to cancellation/defeat.

I suppose the comparison is facile, but the premise of a female Commander-in-Chief seemed like a the newest way in which Democrats could get around campaign finance reform limitations. If CiC had in fact fulfilled its early promise, it would have been a weekly campaign ad for the next several years (not including reruns).

Unfortunately, after retooling the shown during hiatus, it garnered its lowest ratings ever--a 2.4 rating/7 share or 8.2 million viewers--less than half of its initial audience. The new time slot put it up against weaker competition, but "Without A Trace" kicked its butt, and it barely edged out the creaking ER.

Any number of reviewers have contemplated the reasons why the show is doing poorly, focusing on the show's rudderless quality. I must confess that I have never caught a single episode of CiC, and that ambivilence may indeed be a clue. I did watch a few episodes of the West Wing, but quickly tired of what was obviously a liberal wet dream. The very premise of CiC made the West Wing look "bipartisan" by comparison. The propaganda quality of CiC struck me as the worst kind of overreach and I suspect my feelings were widely shared.

A premise though, however untimely (or timely, depending on how you look at it), is not the same as a having a show. Once you have a woman as the President, what stories can you tell that would make the show compelling? The West Wing was a glimpse into a community that precious few people have first hand knowledge of, but CiC's only new territory was how it would be different for a woman in the White House. Add to this the problem that a fictional White House actually suffers by comparison with the real White House, where real crises don't need much help from imagination to be compelling and even fantastic.

The real irony is that Hollywood always seems to be a day late and a dollar short on social relevancy. The academy award winning movie was about racism, a topic that may have been controversial 40-50 years ago, but is pretty much a resolved issue at this point. Brokeback Mountain was "cutting edge", but considering that Conservatives shrug their shoulders at Cheney's lesbian daughter and roll their eyes at Democrat fascination over Ken Mehlman or Richard Dreier's alleged sexual preferences, homosexuality doesn't have the shock value they might have hoped for in the early 21st century.

The public considers the prospect of a female president to be well within their imagination, if not an inevitability, and so CiC is left to prosper on its entertainment value, which judging from its performance, is in short supply.

I read that Liz Taylor, 74, is close to death so I asked my kids if they knew who Liz Taylor was--not a one of them recognized the name.

She was huge in my parents generation and particularly famous for her many marriages, including one to Conrad Hilton Jr. and Senator John Warner. She was widely considered to be the most beautiful woman in the world in her youth, and then the world's best-paid actress for her work in Cleopatra.

Its a little strange to recognize that even someone as crazy-famous as Elizabeth Taylor can fade into relative obscurity in a couple of generations.

Its rather amusing to see the media contemplate the "failure" of Mission Impossible III after it made "only" 48 million in the opening weekend.

Just a few months ago, the media found every possible way to spin Brokeback Mountain's meager revenues as a triumph of homosexual chic "catching on" with the general public.

John Podhoretz, not exactly the first name in entertainment reporting, has some interesting political insights into the American Idol phenomenon and Chris Daughtry's departure specifically..

The number of votes seems to remain remarkably constant (this year, somewhere north of 40 million) week to week. This indicates the same people continue to vote each week. It also means that the people who voted for the contestant who was kicked off go ahead and just choose somebody new to vote for.

This is a direct parallel to the presidential primary process. In the early primaries, candidates who do poorly usually drop out of the race, leaving those who would have supported them in other states high and dry. Those supporters then have to pick somebody else among the surviving candidates to vote for.

This winnowing process allows the most appealing candidates to pick up steam by adding new voters to their cadre of supporters. And as they do so, the field continues to be winnowed, until finally there are only one or two candidates left standing. The single-issue candidate, the flash-in-the-pan, the guy who has one fantastic debate - they may all have their moments, but in the end, the candidate with the most broad-based appeal will usually win.

And this is what explains Chris Daughtry's stunning loss this week on "American Idol." He has a distinctive voice and distinctive appeal. The problem is that he never broadened his base very much. If you liked him from the start, you stayed with him - which is why he remained solidly among the top contenders through most of the show's run.

But if you didn't much like his sound when there were still 9 contestants remaining, you weren't suddenly going to decide you liked his sound when there were only 4 remaining.

I think Podhoretz is right on the money here.

From the Idol perspective, the question becomes, "where do Chris Daughtry's votes go?". Tough call since none of the remaining contestants are anywhere close to the persona and style of Daughtry.

There is also a more general application of this rule to virtually any social enterprise. Polarizing figures don't climb the corporate ladder either.

I just read Stephen Bainbridge's review of "The Da Vinci Code" (DVC) as both book and film. Bainbridge highlights the Catholic disenchantment with the film as heresy, a particularly old set of heresies, and notes that the film makers (not to mention the author) will nonetheless make a pile of money for denying the divinity of Christ.

Doesn't seem much to base a blog posting on, but what struck me was the rather chauvinistic definition of heresy--i.e. the Roman Catholic Christology is definitive. Well, not too surprising, since Bainbridge is a practicing Catholic, but let's recognize that the audience is a lot broader than Catholics, practicing or otherwise.

I understand that Catholics would resent being portrayed in such a negative light, but frankly anyone who takes the book at face value probably already had a fair bit of emnity for the church, as well as Christianity generally.

Yet there is also another, legitimate audience for the book, one that doesn't consider Catholic Christology the gold standard. Living in the intermountain west, when people say "the church", the mean the Mormon church, not the Roman Catholics. For Mormons, the idea that Jesus was married is old hat. While most Christian faiths rever marriage, Mormons actually consider it an essential element of soteriology (salvation theology). Jesus was married because "he had to be", just as he was baptized to fulfill all righteousness. You can imagine that DVC had an entirely different reception among Mormons than it would for Catholics--an affirmation rather than an assault on faith.

I am telling you this because DVC, much like the life of Jesus Christ himself, seems to have become a mirror for our contemporary political and religious diversity. Like the song says, "you're so vain, you probably think this song is about you..." At the end of the day, DVC isn't a Satanic attack on the Roman Catholic church or an affirmation of the Mormon new and everlasting covenant of marriage, its a beach novel, and the film is no more significant than "National Treasure" was as a guide to the Freemason "end game".

I tried to get tickets to "The Da Vinci Code" early this afternoon--all showings for the whole day (and there are a lot of them) were sold out at our local multiplex.

I'm pretty sure that Hollywood much prefers a critically panned movie that makes a ton of money, than one the critics love but nobody sees.

I've had private discussions trying to debunk the suitcase nuke myth--with mixed results. Richard Miniter gives it a shot.

With the obligatory observation that Hillary would be the first female president and First Lady to be elected to the presidency, the liberal media breathlessly announced Hillary's run for the presidency.

"After six years of George Bush, it is time to renew the promise of America," she said.

"I grew up in a middle-class family in the middle of America, and we believed in that promise," the 59-year-old Chicago native said.

"I still do. I've spent my entire life trying to make good on it, whether it was fighting for women's basic rights or children's basic health care, protecting our social security or protecting our soldiers."

With a statement like that, I'd say she's running--only your basic moonbat believes that the path to the presidency is paved with opposition to George Bush and protecting our poor child soldiers. Moonbats however, vote in primaries, so expect to hear a lot more of this kind of talk.

the only reason to write about this is to muse over her chances of winning the nomination. Can she? Will she?

Obviously she can win it--she's been an excellent Senator by all accounts, she can raise a lot of money and she has to-die-for name recognition. She's also married to Bill.

On the other hand, Hillary has the charisma of Madeline Albright and the fact that everyone knows her name also means that everyone already has an opinion about her. Oh, and she's married to Bill.

The historical reality of politics is that the longer you're in it, the more enemies you make. The fact that Bill Richardson also announced strongly suggests that her rivals know this.

Abraham Lincoln won the Republican nomination against demonstrably better-known rivals largely for that reason--they canceled each other other and left Lincoln the last man standing as the acceptable second choice. Much like the mid-19th century Republicans, modern-day Democrats are caught in a political environment where extremism is a sword wielded to obtain power or just as likely a self-inflicted wound. Hillary's fence-sitting on the Iraq war is precisely the kind of issue that has doomed may strong candidates before her.

Barack Obama is a little too well-known now to be a Lincoln-like darkhorse, but his popularity ironically illustrates the problem. With no record, he becomes a vessel for people's political fantasies. It should be obvious that it can't last. Hillary will obviously be the primary target, but Obama won't be able to hide in the trenches.

History can tell us about possible outcomes without dictating the future, but I take exception to the confident projections of a Clinton victory--it could happen, but the reality is that Hillary is in undiscovered country.

Speaking of Shrek3, the celeb voices showed up near my apartment this afternoon so an alter ego took some snaps.