Today’s opining on the public discourse.

Yes, Dark Knight is just as good the second time around. But don’t take my word for it: ask the folks who made numbers like these possible (h/t LA Times):

SATURDAY AM: Well, look who’s laughing now! Warner Bros, because The Dark Knight’s Friday opening was even bigger than first thought, according to final numbers — $66.4M in North American gross from a record-setting wide release of 4,366 theaters. That includes the record- setting $18.5M in midnight-to-3AM shows from a smaller pool of 3,040 venues. Now Warner Bros has smashed the record for the biggest midnight show ever (better than the $16.9M set by 2005’s Star Wars Episode III: Revenge Of The Sith then playing in 2,915 venues), and the biggest single day gross ever (better than the $59.8M set by May 4, 2007’s Spider-Man 3 in 4,252 venues, including midnight shows). So what about the weekend total? “$153M to $160M — it all depends on Saturday results,” my Warner Bros insider just told me. That would be ANOTHER record-smasher!

[snip]

Meanwhile, MovieTickets.com reports that Dark Knight broke the record for tickets sold by a single film in a single day on Friday, surpassing the previous mark set by Spider-Man 3 on May 4, 2007. The site also set a record for the most tickets sold in a single day in the company’s eight-year history. So, yes, believe it or not, there were other movies opening and playing at the box office.

Yeah. It’s that good. Go see it.

I suppose that even with that, one has to care for pollyticks. So, on with the bashing of political morons.

John McCain probably isn’t out to intentionally get Obama killed, but he sure coulda fooled me:

For the last several years, anytime high-profile U.S. officials arrive in Iraq or Afghanistan, it’s described as a “surprise” visit. No matter how many times these officials go to the countries, or how long their stay, it’s always a “surprise.” There’s no real mystery here — if the arrival of VIPs were publicized, their lives might be in danger.

Journalists are almost always responsible with this information, and see no reason to create a potentially dangerous situation. When there are exceptions, it tends to spark outrage — John McCain, for example, was “furious when the press reported on his son serving in Iraq” because McCain “feared the coverage would make him a target.”

The point is obvious — to protect Americans’ lives, details on trips to Iraq and/or Afghanistan are kept under wraps. Everyone knows this, and everyone respects this.

It makes John McCain’s careless remarks yesterday all the more striking.

For weeks now, Barack Obama has closely guarded the details of his planned fact-finding trips to Afghanistan and Iraq, citing security concerns.

But Friday, the Democratic presidential hopeful’s Republican rival, John McCain, may have let the secret out of the bag – infuriating some Obama supporters and putting Camp McCain on the defensive.

“I believe that either today or tomorrow — and I’m not privy to his schedule — Sen. Obama will be landing in Iraq with some other senators” who make up a congressional delegation, McCain told a campaign fund-raising luncheon. “I am sure that Sen. Obama is going to arrive in Baghdad in a much, much safer and secure environment than the one that he would’ve encountered before we started the surge,” McCain added.

While refusing to confirm or deny anything about Obama’s schedule, his aides were furious with McCain’s comment. They noted every major news outlet has resisted speculating on the timing or location of Obama’s war-zone maneuvers out of safety concerns.

John Kerry said he was “surprised” by McCain’s apparent breach of protocol: “I’ve been around enough of these trips to know that I’m leery of saying anything for security reasons. End of story.”

And therein lies the point: John McCain has been around enough of these trips to know the same thing. Yesterday, for whatever reason, he ignored security concerns because he wanted to score a cheap political point.

This is the man that many of our fellow Americans, the dumb as a sack of dead woodchucks kind, could attempt to vote into office. If he’s this clueless about spilling secret travel details into a war zone, just how the fuck are we supposed to trust him with national security? What kind of “national security expert” is this fucking dense?

Or evil. Let’s not forget it could be a case of the evils, becuase if this fucker has his wits about him, that’s the only explanation left.

The Religious Right probably loves him all the more right now. Swallowing McCain probably goes down a lot sweeter when it’s chased with a shot of “try to get Barack Obama killed:”

I’ve been wondering what the Religious Right is going to do about John McCain. These groups are clearly not crazy about the guy. But I predicted months ago that the fear of a Democratic president would terrify them so much that they would come around. That’s what appears to be happening.

I’ve been monitoring e-mails from the Family Research Council (FRC) and other groups and have noticed a trend: They are coming after Barack Obama with guns blazing while finding reasons to forgive McCain every time he lets them down.

Morbo has the proof – the poor man subscribes to countless religious right emails so we don’t have to. He can tell you just how batshit insane these fuckers are, and how tightly they’ve had to hold their nose to swallow McCain, because even with his sprint to the right, he’s still not batshit insane enough to please them.

They’re probably going to be incandescent over the fact that Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki’s all but endorsed Obama. Let the screaming of “terrorist conspiracy” begin, because you know that’s what the right will do with this news:

Americans have a clear choice in the election. On the one hand, we have a candidate who wants a flexible, 16-month withdrawal policy from Iraq, shaped by conditions on the ground and in consultation with commanders
o
n the ground. On the other hand, we have a candidate who wants the status quo to continue indefinitely, waiting for a yet-to-be-defined “victory,” followed by an indefinite military presence in Iraq.

And while Americans consider their options, it seems Iraqi officials have already reached their own conclusion. Reuters has this stunning story.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki told a German magazine he supported prospective U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s proposal that U.S. troops should leave Iraq within 16 months.

In an interview with Der Spiegel released on Saturday, Maliki said he wanted U.S. troops to withdraw from Iraq as soon as
possible.

“U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes.”

Note to McCain: the Iraqis would like their country back ASAP. The majority of the American public would like their soldiers back home likewise. Even the democratically-elected PM of Iraq, heart’s desire of the Bush administration because they thought they could control him, thinks Barack Obama has the right idea. When are you going to wake up and smell the reality?

Oh, wait. You had those particular sense receptors burned out when you decided you needed to become Bush mark III in order to have a chance to plant your plump white ass in the same chair Bill Clinton used to get his blowjobs. So that would be never.

You know something? At this point, I’d rather see the Joker elected president. It’s just possible he’d be saner than John Fucking McCain.

Today’s opining on the public discourse.

Give devils their due: the Bush White House is nothing if not creative when it comes to misinterpreting the law:

“Scandal fatigue” can be common under the circumstances. After seven-and-a-half years of legal, moral, ethical, and political outrages, many of the scandals of the Bush/Cheney years start to blur together. Some are even forgotten, swept aside to make room for new, more offensive controversies.

It’s only natural, then, to shift the focus away from the White House and towards the campaign to pick the next president. I’m afraid, however, now isn’t a good time to stop watching the Bush gang — some of their bigger scandals are managing to look even worse.

The Bush administration today unveiled a set of novel and controversial legal arguments in refusing to disclose key details about Vice President Dick Cheney’s role in the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity.

In two letters released Wednesday, the Justice Department revealed that, upon the recommendation of Attorney General Michael Mukasey, President Bush had invoked executive privilege rather than turn over to Congress a never-released FBI report (known as a “302″) recounting a confidential 2004 interview with Cheney about his knowledge of the Plame affair.

[snip]

Just how “novel and controversial” were the new legal arguments? Let’s put it this way: the Justice Department created privilege claims, out of thin air, that no one’s ever heard of before.

The decision by the White House to refuse to honor the subpoena from Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman’s House Oversight and Government Reform Committee for Cheney’s interview was hardly unexpected, given the administration’s history of fiercely protecting presidential prerogatives. What was surprising to some legal scholars was the basis for shielding the FBI interview report. It was covered, Mukasey said, by what he called “the law-enforcement component of executive privilege.”

“As far as I know, this is an utterly unprecedented executive-privilege claim,” said Peter Shane, an Ohio State University law professor who is an expert on executive privilege and separation-of-powers issues. “I’ve never heard this claim before.”

Normally, claims of executive privilege are invoked to protect the disclosure of the president’s communications with his top advisers. But in this case, the White House invoked the claim to keep secret Cheney’s responses to FBI agents (hardly what anybody would call his advisers), who were grilling him as part of the now-closed criminal investigation headed by Fitzgerald.

The word “madness” keeps coming to my mind, but others chose less provocative adjectives.

I’m not one of those others. Let’s try this description: this is utterly fucking criminal obfuscation, making a mockery of our laws and political processes, and a new height of batshit insanity from a bunch of fuckwits who had already proven they have nothing but contempt for the Constitution, Congress, and their countrymen. These assclowns deserve to rot in prison for eternity. This entire era of American government is nothing more than a sick, sad joke, an endless parade of criminal fuckery. I hope future generations spit whenever they mention this Administration.

In other news, either these two are complete lying whackjobs or you really don’t want to go to the same hospitals they have:

Today, during a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) dismissed the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo and other U.S. detention facilities. According to Issa, “we treated our hospital patients worse” than we treat al Qaeda detainees. Former attorney general John Ashcroft chimed in, joking that doctors “were poking needles into
me”:

ISSA: It is sort of amazing that as a member of the permanent Select Intelligence Committee, I’ve never heard any allegation of any detainee being denied food or water for a week. It’s clear that we treated our hospital patients at times worse than al Qaeda.

ASCHROFT: What’s more, they were poking needles into me all the time time.

Hmm. I’m going to plump for “complete lying whackjobs with a heaping side of criminal insanity.” But of course, this is the Bush Administration, so maybe the treatment at VA hospitals was worse than “severe sleep deprivation, ‘forced nudity, sexual humiliation, religious humiliation, physical force, prolonged stress positions and prolonged sensory overstimulation, and threats with military dogs.'”

This, however, could go a long way toward explaining why some of these incredible fuckwits seem to have such a hard time with a little thing we like to call reality:

If this doesn’t set the tone for former Attorney General John Ashcroft’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on interrogation methods at Guantanamo, I don’t know what does.

In his opening statement, Ashcroft admitted that he had “limited recollection” of the events pertinent to the committee’s inquiry. Specifically, “it’s been difficult . . . to distinguish between what I in fact recall as a matter of my own experience, and what I remember from the accounts of others.”

Yep. This is John Ashcroft unable to separate fantasy from reality. Fucking brilliant. And people like this are in charge of the country.

Weep, America, weep.