Among this morning’s bonus balls:

Was Haley Barbour, by pardoning 200+ mostly politically connected lowlifes, trying to obfuscate the pardoning of the convicts who worked at the governor’s mansion, convicts who perhaps saw some Mississippi mischief that the Gov doesn’t want going public?

Why the Prez and Ron Paul are currently sitting together in a corner of the schoolroom, backs facing the class, while wearing matching dunce caps.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close almost killed LK as he attempted not to break into full-blown blubbering in a crowded movie theater.  Its impact knocked him for a loop and probably influenced the show more than he’d like to admit.  The film was as powerful as The Descendants was limp. For reasons not easily explained, but LK takes a shot at it.

Why Leon Panetta couldn’t be Warren Buffet’s secretary, let alone the SecDef.

How Greece is being raped by the EuroZone (read “Germany”).

Dr. John weighs in with his timely and much needed observations on the proliferation of medz for kidz.

Enjoy the free game (see pinball references above):

Hour 1:

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Hour 2:

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LK’s controversial take on the Marines who urinated on the dead bodies in Afghanistan: punish the puppeteers, not the puppets.

Speculation on Haley Barbour’s real reasons for pardoning hundreds of prisoners, including convicted murderers.

Football, as only LK and Dr. John can play it.

Leaders who rise because, and only because, they have more nerve and less humility and shame than the rest of us.

Hour 2 may have gone to hard drive heaven, but if it returns from the brink, we’ll post it as soon as it’s out of the ICU.

Enjoy hour 1:

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Ding Dong, the son of a witch is dead.  Kim Jong Il has passed on to wherever twisted cognac loving despots with large video collections go.  LK is relieved to know that a kid who’s never seen 30 candles on a birthday cake is now the custodian of a nice little nuclear arsenal.  But the kid loves the NBA and Nike sneakers so all cities with franchises are in the clear.

The Iraqi veterans are getting the shortest end of the stick on record.  There’s a brat in Britain who threatened to kill Santa AND his reindeer if she doesn’t get what she wants because she’s psychotically entitled to every last item on her wish list.

Dr. John Palumbo is back, and relates his trip to the planet Apple.  He also fills LK in on “Who Do You Think You’re Foolin?’”, a new production of his that sticks it to the one per-centers, which can be found on the site here.

“Fungible” is the word of the day.  Crude oil and gold are fungible.  People are not, but governments and corporations haven’t gotten the word yet.  LK clues them in.

Here’s the show:

Part 1:

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Part 2:

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“As archbishop, Benedict expended more energy pursuing theological dissidents than sexual predators. Already in the early 1980s, one could catch a glimpse of a future pope preoccupied with combating any movement away from church tradition. Vatican experts say there is little evidence that Benedict spent much time investigating more than 200 cases of “problem priests” in the diocese, with issues including alcohol abuse, adultery and, now under the microscope, pedophilia.”

Getting to the core of the point, the teaser blurb on page 1, referring to the full article inside the paper, reads:

“As Munich Archbishop, Pope Benedict XVI was broadly described as a theologian more concerned with doctrinal debates tan problem priests”.

Let’s see now; we’ve got a powerful figure in the public eye who’s so busy being high minded that he can’t be bothered or inconvenienced by taking into consideration the oh so mundane social norms and expectations of the people around him.

Sounds remarkably like the “societal boundaries be damned, I’m above them” attitude displayed by that dynamic duo of  directors, the infamous pariahs, Roman Polanski and Woody Allen.

Roman figured that the notion of underage girls was a tedious, low brow, man-made standard that he wasn’t subject to.  Woody was so impervious to near universally  accepted standards of decency in the 20th century that he started carrying on with his stepdaughter.  His stepdaughter.

Oh, and by the way, that he ended up marrying her is inconsequential; it’s like the legal concept of “fruit of the forbidden tree”, which prohibits the use of evidence in a trial that came as a result of an illegal search.  Yes, he married her, but any decent guy  wouldn’t have gotten to the alter with her in the first place.

And joining their exclusive little club, or rather, surfacing as a long time member of it,  is the Pope himself, who was so wrapped up in his theories and interpretations of liturgical law and doctrine that he, in the words of the Times, “punished a priest for holding a Mass at a peace demonstration, leading the man to ultimately leave the priesthood”.

And all the while, priests he was responsible for were violating commandments, violating vows, and worst of all, violating young children.            

Taking it a step further, the Pope’s behavior is probably more profound and dangerous than that of the Hollywood Hellboys.   At least Roman and Woody, while having cultural platforms with which to reach people, weren’t afforded official leadership status within a structure like the Catholic Church, that’s got a billion plus souls to tend to.

I am here not to praise any of these men.  Rather, if anything, I’m here to condemn them all.  If Roman and Woody are to be damned, without the shield of their fortune, fame, and brilliance to deflect the arrows of criticism, the Pope is guilty as well, and possibly more so, since his job title calls for maintaining decorum, not to mention the mental health of the youngest, and most innocent of those he’s charged with protecting.

P.S.  Would love to hear what the Reverend Huckabee and Dr. Dobson have to say, if anything, about His Holiness.

                          

This from the trusty WSJ e-mail news alert service:

Walt Disney and Cablevision struck a deal late Sunday to end their financial feud, restoring Disney’s New York-area ABC station for millions of homes less than 15 minutes after the start of the Academy Awards broadcast.

In doing so, both companies missed a huge opportunity to, however inadvertently, teach millions of northeasterners that they could live without the Oscars.  An enlightening unintended consequence of their business spat was, alas, not to be.

The winner of this year’s Oscar for obsessive interest in things trivial and distracting from the myriad problems that we face…… is us.

                          

“Broadcasts of the New York ABC television station weren’t available early Sunday to customers of Cablevision, after Cablevision and ABC owner Walt Disney apparently failed to resolve a financial dispute over monthly subscription fees.”

This is wonderful news.  A small but important start; may the stand-off endure.  Considering how innocuous pop culture is, how downright destructive it’s been to our national intellect, and the otherwise productive people-hours we Americans waste watching two dimensional reality TV instead of living and enlarging our own three dimensional lives, the positive impact of removing a small but important fraction of the mind-numbing input that assaults us daily is cause for celebration.

And tonight, ABC is scheduled to broadcast the Oscars!

Risky strategic timing by both sides, and hopefully neither buckles under pressure.  No red carpets, no designer dresses, no crocodile tears on the podium.

No televised hypocrisy from the Hollywood political dilettantes, who narcissistically spend millions of dollars to pat themselves on the back while the leftover scraps from their post-award events could feed what’s left of the Haitian people for a week.  (And to the usual retort that points out the good works the stars’ charitable foundations are doing, one has to wonder whether they donate because their PR people see it as a necessary evil, and whether their donations are as big a percentage of their incomes as the working stiffs who either tithe on Sundays or are moved to send in a larger check to the Red Cross than they can comfortably afford.)

One down, around 500 more channels to go.

                          

LOS ANGELES: Batman blockbuster The Dark Knight won’t be screened in Chinese cinemas.

Warner Bros studios said in a statement yesterday that the acclaimed film — the second-highest-grossing movie in US box-office history — would be canned in China, with “cultural sensitivities” cited as one of the reasons for the no-show.

“Based on a number of pre-release conditions that are being attached to The Dark Knight, as well as cultural sensitivities to some elements of the film, we have opted to forgo a theatrical release of the film in China,” the statement said.

Explanations being bantered about include a character who’s a Chinese money launderer, and the presence of the late Heath Ledger, whose “Brokeback Mountain” was banned in China as well.

Both of those reasons are small minded diversions, and they’re wrong.

“The Dark Knight” portrays a society in chaos, disorder in the streets, and a lack of central authority that can restore whatever passed for normalcy.   With China’s economy experiencing a downturn as a result of the global swan dive, Chinese unemployment is rising, and workers who migrated to the cities are unhappily returning to their old peasant-farmer lives.

The keepers of the poorly named People’s Republic are concerned with the effect that the on screen chaos of “The Dark Knight” would have on a populace who have been kept in check over the past decade by the Chinese boom and the subsequent rise of the middle class along with the general standard of living.

There are already rumblings of social unrest; Party leaders fear that Eastern fascination and emulation of Western culture may include copycat riots.  They err on the side of caution.  I think we call it censorship here.

Readers of these pages know that “Batman: The Dark Knight” disgusted me, but one of the things I have to be thankful for this holiday season is that movies I’m disgusted by still have the right to do huge box office in this otherwise fraying nation.

                          

“That which is real to the person himself is all one is asked to accept of Scientology” (from their site), and perhaps Cruise took that a bit too literally.

There’s a lame attempt in the first 2 minutes to morph from German to English in order to convince the audience that the West Coast matinee idol is a German who’s looking to undermine the Fuhrer.

All it undermined was the film. The whole film.

And Hollywood spent hundreds of millions making and promoting this limp piece of celluloid, while schools are overcrowded, foreclosures are rising, and the resources for those real life tragedies are nowhere to be found.

Our values have gone seriously astray. Our values need to be re-evaluated.

I have no problem with an industry’s ability to run itself into the ground, whether it’s Hollywood or Detroit.

I have a problem when my tax dollars are used to save poor execution in a free market endeavor. And I see no problem with raising Tom Cruise’s tax rate in order to fund the needs of his fans, who go home and sweat the essential details.

                          

Take a look at the above video, which was recently brought to my attention. It’s a bit dated as it deals with the election, but it’s still getting some play on YouTube, and it disgusts me. Not to mention that it didn’t work.

As opposed to the expert skewerings delivered by the pros at SNL to both candidates as well as their rivals in the primaries, this piece uses lowest common denominator stereotypes and copy that doesn’t reach the threshold of effective humor, while degrading both the opposition candidate (Obama) as well as unwittingly belittling the amateur “artistes” themselves who aren’t perceptive enough to see that their work makes them look even more foolish than their target.

Perhaps worst of all, by being unclear as to whether their primary thrust is humor or political persuasion, they trivialized what, during these unprecedented times, should have been the most vital, urgent, and sincere debate we’ve ever had.

Take it from a major league wiseass and fan of the anything goes genre: there’s a time to pull the plug and get real. These clowns have some growing up to do.