Walmart: America’s Largest Crime Scene

Here’s my Dealerscope Week in Electronics Retail Crime Black Friday edition, in which the same retailer comes up again and again…

Bye Bye Barney

Barney Frank is retiring from Congress; he’ll be missed:

Frank certainly deserves better than the right-wing caricature of him, which is that he is somehow singlehandedly to blame for the 2008 financial crisis. At any rate, I really hope he decides to launch a TV career.

The Kyle Orton Trade Tree

This is kind of awesome. Other than the smell of the grass, the crack of the bat, and all the father/son/”Field of Dreams” stuff, transaction mania has to be my favorite thing about sports. And here we go with the baseball Winter Meetings and NBA post-lockout chaos, both the same week!

Kermit Lives

My reviews of two of the year’s best movies, “Hugo” and “The Muppets,” are online at Patch.

Fire’s Cool

My review of the Amazon Kindle Fire is online at E-Gear.com.

Nothing More to Buy, Ever

The Boston Phoenix’s history of the recently shuttered Columbia House record club was a great read. I had a buddy in high school who signed up under probably dozens of assumed names and sold off the surplus disks at a huge profit.

Film Critic Quote of the Week

Dustin Rowles of Pajiba on “Jack and Jill”

I�ve seen Adam Sandler�s Jack and Jill. If there is a God, he might allow a fire whirl to kill 40,000 human beings in 15 minutes, but no God could be cruel and inhumane enough to allow this movie to exist, to be screened in front of millions of innocent people. It�s incomprehensible. No God would allow Adam Sandler to dress up as his own twin sister, to prance around in a dress and a wig and speak with a lisp that would haunt even demons, demons that couldn�t handle the emotional carnage that Female Sandler inflicts. It�s too much ugly… Jack and Jill is not a movie; it�s a weapon of mass destruction that not even Stalin would�ve been sick enough to use.
Jack and Jill will never be forgotten; the power of its awfulness is enough to break through the rift of space and time, to sear through the universe and destroy black holes.

Political Quote of the Week

Jonathan Chait on the Romney campaign:

Romney�s overarching national security theme is pure drivel stitched together from the fantasies of right-wing talk radio. In Romney�s world, President Obama jets around the globe apologizing for the United States when he is not expressing outright disdain for it and plotting to enable the rise of foreign countries to supplant American might. He offers no factual basis for any of these utterly counterfactual claims. And it�s the sort of theme that might work for an incumbent president against an untested challenger, but it�s hard to see how you paint a commander-in-chief with a strong record of wiping out terrorists as an America hater.

Chait also had a great piece last week about the biggest reason liberals are disappointed in Obama- namely, that they’re always disappointed in every Democratic president. David Frum’s piece in the same magazine about the general nuttiness of the Republicans was similarly great.

Quote of the Day

Charles Pierce, on Ann Coulterjoking about the Kent State shootings:

Note to cable television bookers. This is not humor. This is not commentary. This is eliminationist rhetoric from a career white-supremacist. This is not a fit person to bring into the public discussion of anything. This is a vicious evil woman who would sell her grayhaired granny to the Somali pirates for 15 minutes worth of airtime. This is someone who should be shunned, permanently, by anybody with a sense of human decency.

Coulter’s going about it all wrong- she should write a whole book about racial eliminationism. That’ll guarantee a decades-long career of regular punditry gigs- it’s worked for Pat Buchanan.

Hawaiian Punch

My review of “The Descendants,” one of the year’s better movies, is online at Patch. My review of another of the year’s best, “The Muppets,” will appear this week along with that of the not-yet-seen “Hugo.”